Egg Moron posted:

and in all honesty, I am not a tank spotting man, I don't know poo poo and I am wardumb

Ardennes posted:

I guess it never passed through their heads that the Russians may actually be getting all this artillery in reserve for something, and they may be you know...outfitting hundreds of thousands of troops.

DancingShade posted:

Same reason the Russian air power has barely been seen. You and I know why. They'll either figure it out or not. Doesn't matter.

fanfic insert posted:

put a rocket in me (rap sheet)

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

www.theguardian.com posted:

The Barents Sea port of Severomorsk is the base of the Russian navy’s Northern Fleet and, since 2014 – when Russia first invaded eastern Ukraine – it has become the main administrative hub for all of Russia’s Arctic military activities.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, Russia is not so quietly expanding its military activities in this region, too. In the past six years, Russia has built 475 military sites along its northern border. The Kola peninsula and the archipelagos of the Barents Sea have seen dozens of new airstrips, bunkers and bases.

But while the region has long been one of Russia’s most important commercial and military hubs, the deep waters of the Barents Sea are among the most biodiverse of any in the Arctic region, home to puffins, dolphins, seals, and rare bowhead whales, as well as being home to some of the world’s biggest fish populations. To its southern side, on the Kola peninsula, herds of wild reindeer can still be found and its eastern rivers, free from hydroelectric dams, are among the few remaining spawning grounds for Atlantic salmon.

The Barents Sea is one of the most biodiverse in the Arctic, with beluga whales among the species found there. Photograph: Andrey Nekrasov/Alamy“There are still villages without road systems, where they are maintaining a unique and traditional lifestyle,” says Tero Mustonen, a conservationist with Snowchange Cooperative, who has worked in the Kola region for 25 years.
The unprecedented new military buildup has experts concerned about devastating results for these delicate Arctic ecosystems. It is already among the most polluted places on Earth. Currents that carry warm water from the Atlantic Ocean into the Barents Sea make it one of the world’s great marine garbage patches, while decades of Soviet nuclear tests, the dumping of radioactive waste, and industrial pollution have left many waterways highly toxic, contributing to elevated rates of disease among local people.

The latest military buildup has already resulted in an increase in weapons testing and marine traffic, including from new and refurbished nuclear-powered icebreakers and submarines – with the attendant risk of nuclear accidents.

But that is not the only threat to the Barents Sea ecosystem spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As it finds itself increasingly alienated from the western economy, Russia has accelerated its efforts to open the region to commercial activity.
In April, after western nations suspended their participation in the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, which Russia chaired, it signed a cooperation agreement with the Chinese coast guard to conduct combined exercises to police its northern coastline. The move was widely viewed as an attempt to fulfil longstanding Chinese ambitions to assert itself as a “near-Arctic state”, gaining greater access to commercial activity and mineral resources in the region.

The Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker 50 Years of Victory in the Barents Sea. New and refurbished nuclear-powered icebreakers are part of the latest military buildup. Photograph: John Borthwick/Getty Images/Lonely Planet ImageBut Russia’s northern sea route, which halves the time it takes to ship goods between Europe and Asia, is still unreliable. Dozens of ships were stranded in early sea ice in 2021, while the longer route east to Asia is often far more ice-clogged and perilous than the alternative route westward.

Nonetheless, experts say, Russia’s increasing dependence on China is likely to increase traffic on the route. “More oil, more shipping, more resources will be transferred between those countries that are still trading … [including] more shipping with vessels that are not equipped for the Arctic Ocean,” says Mustonen. “The great concern there … is that the oil pollution from ships and tankers that are not equipped for the environment will greatly increase.”
More shipping also means increased concentrations of ozone and nitrate aerosol that are dangerous to human health, and nitrogen and sulphur deposits that could devastate marine ecosystems. In the Barents Sea that concern is particularly acute, as the region is already quite possibly the fastest-warming location on Earth.

It is not only the scale of shipping that is changing, but also the cargo being carried. Without access to Norwegian offshore technologies and investment, Russia has cooled on oil and gas projects in the Barents Sea – and turned instead to new open-pit mines in the Murmansk regionof the Kola peninsula to secure domestic supplies of minerals such as lithium that are crucial to electric-vehicle battery production.

Many of those mines will be on the lands of the Indigenous Sami people, which have come under unprecedented pressure since the invasion of Ukraine. Aleksandr Slupachik, a Sami activist from Kola forced to flee to Norway from Russia, says two mines have already been developed on traditional reindeer herding pastures. “I think it will cause big ecological problems in the future,” he says.
Areas once set aside as nature reserves – such as the Lake Seidozero region, a sacred Sami site – are also being opened to industry, according to Andrei Danilov, another Russian Sami activist in exile. “There is no question of any observance of international law and coordination with Indigenous peoples,” he says. “Vulnerable northern nature is being destroyed – and it cannot be restored.”

Relations with the west, experts say, have been key to preventing these kinds of ecological abuses in the Russian Arctic, and not only in the mining sector. Russia had recently started to invest heavily in Atlantic salmon farming, near important spawning sites across the border in Norway. “The fear is that [with] Russia removing themselves from the international regulation on salmon farming … diseases and sea lice and salmon parasites will proliferate from the big bins of Atlantic salmon,” says Mustonen. Likewise, Norway was one of the only countries investing in cleaning up the sea’s nuclear waste, toxic remnants of the cold war.
Yet if there is environmental destruction, it will be harder than ever for the rest of the world to know about it. Environmental organisations, including Greenpeace and WWF, have been outlawed in Russia, and collaborations on Arctic climate monitoring have almost entirely stopped. “It’s a pity that the network we managed to establish has broken down,” says Lars-Otto Reiersen, who for decades led climate-monitoring projects for the Arctic Council. “I don’t think the Russians are spending money on this.”

“Western concern about the environment was critical,” says Florian Vidal, an expert in political ecology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. “The Russians used to show at least some goodwill.” But with investment now coming primarily from China, India and the Gulf states, “environmental protection … is not a priority”.

This article was amended on 24 July 2023 to remove an image of the Akademik Tryoshnikov polar ship, which is a research vessel, not a military vessel.

speng31b posted:

anyone wants some byetankie on their rap lmk. the form is now perfected

gradenko_2000 posted:

oh my god they really have completely forgotten the lessons of WWI

you get the idea

comedyblissoption posted:

what about the part where she's naked and straddling him but also firing guns and the blood covers her tits?

Al-Saqr posted:

looks like the russians have made a significant step forward in the last week

https://twitter.com/armchairw/status/1684054400309030912?s=46&t=kY7HKwmb1RBg9U186lxtbg

speng31b posted:

anyone wants some byetankie on their rap lmk. the form is now perfected

Ardennes posted:

Anyway, I guess there was a discussion about Oryx and Covert Cabal in the other thread, so might as well talk about it.

The biggest issue with the Oryx numbers probably isn't the destroyed numbers of certain tanks but the general flim flam of the entire way they count losses. Damaged doesn't mean destroyed, and doesn't mean a loss, and I don't know why you would count them as such. Also, abandoned/"captured" doesn't mean a loss unless it can be verified as taken by the other side, and a selfie doesn't count (if Russian soldiers can selfie with a Leo2, it doesn't count as a loss either). That is literally a little less than half the number right there.

Then you get into the actually destroyed tanks, and either you get something completely undefinable or large numbers of tanks that Ukraine only suspiciously uses and probably wouldn't be in general Russian service. Some may be old separatist weapons or whatever, but they are way too many of them, especially of T-64s/T-72a and the general "we don't know" category. There is a good chunk of these.

Then you finally have the "meat" which is destroyed tanks of identifiable Russian models, and yes, there are still hundreds of these. That said, there are still duplicates or only damaged tanks. In the end, I will give the most benefit of the doubt to this category because it is a war and things blow up. If you want to say that Russia probably lost at least 500-700 tanks (based on these identifiable numbers), that is fine, but the rest is just mostly on faith, and that dramatically changes the context of what is occurring.

Finally, Covert Cabal came out of a video that 5,000 SPGs/artillery pieces came out of Russian reserves, and he came to the conclusion that they destroyed (even Oryx claims only 700 got destroyed). I guess it never passed through their heads that the Russians may actually be getting all this artillery in reserve for something, and they may be you know...outfitting hundreds of thousands of troops.

It is a just a much of now unfunded hucksterism, but a fight was picked in the other thread, so might as well laid it out...again.

V. Illych L. posted:

right, with the invasion the state has been going hard at joining the western economic order (and has been empowered to do so; things which would previously be unheard of even in a state like ukraine have become routine since the invasion) and that is a deep threat to the oligarch class. what i'm talking about is more the "anticorruption"/westernisation angle from the maidan project

the rules are selectively enforced against inconvenient members of the power elite; what makes the post-soviet model so weird is that the most powerful local bigwigs could effectively make themselves invulnerable, acting on the state with relative impunity. to put it this way: elon musk works for the US-led system, and is rewarded for it. post-soviet oligarchs wield their states directly, they are able to exert individual agency over the local economy through a combination of political clout, underworld connections and clever positioning. none of that helps when the state has another direction and you could genuinely be jailed or killed for protesting too loudly. this kind of selective enforcement is also quite common in other systems - in china, for instance, bo xilai is imo a good example of something like this; the guy got out of line, and so he no longer got away with it.

putin's biggest achievement in russia was dethroning the oligarch class and establishing some ground rules for the russian elites; effectively, he offered them silver or lead and made some very clear examples out of oligarchs who refused to fall in line. the deal was, essentially, that they could keep their status as political capitalists connected to the regime, but that they would be politically loyal within certain limits - and that once putin said "stop", they loving stopped. he has been able to navigate this position fairly well through the years, though the prigozhin fiasco was imo a case of him making a fairly serious blunder. i suspect that he's past his prime, which is a concern; it is not clear who else could take up his mantle as power broker and elite umpire.

Ardent Communist posted:

Some many wonderful posters lost....like tears in rain. Time to die.

(I wasn't going to take the bye tankie on the rap sheet, but if all the other posters are walking off a cliff, i'll be damned if i'm not going to join them)

Slavvy posted:

Not so much off a cliff, more into well prepared layered defenses with no support or surprise

genericnick posted:

Also quite independent from any particular issue with the Oryx methodology it seems unlikely to give correct results should there be a concerted effort to juice the numbers. And how could there not be? Ukraine absolutely needs to tell the story of how they are a good investment and a lot of our indisputable observations point to this being an important factor in their decision making, e.g. starting the offensive in time for the NATO summit, throwing enormous amounts of resources into Bakhmut after it became important for the narrative. Russia doesn't have to go to that much effort to convince anyone of anything since the people they'd need to convince are in comfortable police baton reach.

Regarde Aduck posted:

there's a strange lack of a firm origin for all the data because of this osint poo poo. When the leaks came out we found out that the US military is using Oryx data as their primary source of intel on Russian losses. Which is weird to me because i would think they'd do this stuff themselves? But instead everyone is using data from just some guys? And they're not getting it from a military source, because they're 'osint' so they just look at photos and guess. And then all the other OSINT's all use each others data in one giant ouroborus of bullshit. At no point is anyone questioning the quality of the intel which is weird when its just a bunch civilians.

Ardennes posted:

Yeah, Oryx themselves wear their bias on their sleeve, they don't give additional information (which is a real issue considering a lot of their stats are based on faith, and they clearly at least had a background with other OSINT/INT groups. It doesn't help that they are also walking away in a few months.

There could potentially be some useful info in there, the Russians have some losses, as one would expect in a peer to peer (ish) war. Not all of the videos are fake (although there is plenty of chicanery as well), and it is a real war. You do get some weird assumptions, like the Covert Cabal thinking anything taken out of storage is a loss, but yeah the bits of information out there to help create a picture of what is going on.

That said...I don't think the Russian people are being kept in line with police batons, it is just the war isn't affecting them that much, and in all honesty, it is making people some money. Arguably, the Russian government has been using more carrots than sticks.

genericnick posted:

I mean, they are in the general sense. Unless you're very sure that the state will collapse tomorrow you'll have to go to your job, no matter how you feel about that or the war. Ukraine has a much less direct claim on the productive capacity its war effort depends on.
Edit: Basically what I'm saying is that it's not a reasonable assumption to treat oryx numbers as a floor for losses, there's considerable uncertainty on both sides.

Comrade Koba posted:

speng31b posted:

anyone wants some byetankie on their rap lmk. the form is now perfected

Comrade Koba posted:

speng31b posted:

anyone wants some byetankie on their rap lmk. the form is now perfected

comedyblissoption posted:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1683959906137698305

Egg Moron posted:

Glenn’s right

Regarde Aduck posted:

there's a strange lack of a firm origin for all the data because of this osint poo poo. When the leaks came out we found out that the US military is using Oryx data as their primary source of intel on Russian losses. Which is weird to me because i would think they'd do this stuff themselves? But instead everyone is using data from just some guys? And they're not getting it from a military source, because they're 'osint' so they just look at photos and guess. And then all the other OSINT's all use each others data in one giant ouroborus of bullshit. At no point is anyone questioning the quality of the intel which is weird when its just a bunch civilians.

Comrade Koba posted: