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OddObserver posted:https://mobile.twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1504067534684921862 If they don't announce the shipments, Putin could interpret his planes/missiles getting downed by more advanced anti-air as direct western interference. When MH17 got shot down years ago, it was by a Buk system that was then driven back over the border to Russia. Was it a Russian guy pushing the buttons or a pro-Russian seperatist? Russia will never tell us. By openly saying you're delivering the systems, the Russians can't blame lossed on a third nation. They'll also hopefully stop or limit their own air campaign to prevent huge losses to increased anti-air. Ukraine wants to prevent civilian casualties, not maximize Russian deaths.
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Mar 16, 2022 15:01
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TulliusCicero posted:This part interests me the most: either Ukraine are horribly overconfident that the Russians are spent and they have the upper hand in a stalemated war that could swing either way, or Ukraine has enough data to indicate the Russians are effectively losing the war and the economic conditions mean Ukraine feels it can actually just reclaim its territory with the force it has. If the Russian frontline troops are undersupplied and have low morale, as has been shown to be at least somewhat true from all the stories that are coming out of Ukraine, then pushing back is definitely a good strategy even against a superior foe. They can take out a couple vehicles or a few dozen enemy soldiers for a much lower cost than if those opponents got resupplied and reinforced. The time to strike against an overstretched army is right now, before they can consolidate. The Ukrainian troops have a huge homefield advantage, literally by knowing the territory and figuratively by almost everyone in occupied territory wanting the Russians out. Any Ukrainian citizen could potentially send intel to the army about where the Russians are camping, because there's gently caress-all electronic warfare going on due to the Russians needing cellphone reception. They can make some gains and then fall back if needed.
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Mar 17, 2022 20:27
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KitConstantine posted:Russian-controlled airfield. At what point do we just start calling it a honeypot airport?
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Mar 18, 2022 18:22
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Mud season doesn't matter if you can fly your special forces into important locations and have your general army roll down highways while being greeted as liberators. Most Russian (and some NATO) planners expected Ukraine to fold pretty fast and the people in charge didn't want to upset Putin by presenting a pessimistic view, or Putin himself decided to follow the optimistic plan. Hell they may have even expected the mud season to play a role in their favour because there'd be no heavy armour striking their supply lines through the countryside.
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Mar 27, 2022 08:22
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dr_rat posted:Also we've all obviously seen a lot of Ukrainian drone stuff going on, this is actually some of the first stuff heard about Russian drone usage other than bombing stuff. I vaguely remember reading something about drones and electronic warfare during the 2014 incursion. About how Russian troops could hack Ukrainian drones and find out where they were controlled from, then launch artillery/missiles strikes at the controllers. So much seems to have deteriorated in Russian capabilities while Ukrainian forces got so much better during those 8 years, it'd be hard to believe if we didn't have the barrage of social media updates on how the Russian army is failing its goals.
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Apr 10, 2022 13:25
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Killer robot posted:I mean, given Russia's performance, not really to legitimize massive spending on huge militaries and next-generation weapon systems (vs just improving readiness from where some of Europe is now). Europe desperately needs to invest in some honeypot military airfields they can draw Russian attention to during a potential invasion.
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Apr 19, 2022 07:55
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Phlegmish posted:Wait, what the hell? Is this real? I totally missed the build-up to these statements. Is there any reason for Belarus to expect an attack from these three countries? Russia and Belarus had a huge build up of troops, vehicles and supplies in the run-up to the invasion. Belarus is currently seeing a big build up of troops, vehicles and supplies across its border (because Russia can't be trusted right now) and they're publicly jumping to some conclusion for internal propaganda use and because they like to distract international opinion away from the warcrimes in Ukraine. It could also be to signal to Putin just how threatened they feel and that this is the reason they couldn't go help take Kyiv by storm.
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Apr 19, 2022 13:21
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fatherboxx posted:Yesterday I have learned that when writing the word "unmanned aircraft" - беспилотник - Strelkov always writes it wrong - as безпилотник. Yet thats not out of problems with grammar but because weirdo monarchists like Strelkov actively avoid writing prefix бес- because "бес" means devil or imp. Just so you know the type of a guy he is. Next-gen discworld technology: the imp-manned aircraft. With the increasing utility of drones, are there any small arms drones? I would have guessed that by now there'd be small drones that infantry could deploy to scout/clear out buildings. Do bullets have too much kickback?
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Apr 22, 2022 06:13
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Periphery posted:Instead of sending A10s just sell Ukraine some cruise missles. Given it would be slow to plane/train/truck them into Ukraine it's probably best to launch them and deliver them straight to their final destination. Slap a fedex sticker on the side of the missle and charge them extra for express delivery. Designate the launch sites as a Ukrainian embassy so they're not launched from NATO territory, but sovereign Ukraine territory. One weird trick, Putin hates it!
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Apr 22, 2022 08:04
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Mokotow posted:This is a random thought after two months of this horrible and unjust mess, but it seems so crazy and unlikely that poo poo kicked off with “russian warship go gently caress yourself” and a few weeks later that actual warship got hosed over. I don’t think Clancy would come up with this poo poo. After Russia retreats and peace returns to Ukraine, an uncountable number of sunflowers will spring up in the places of dead Russian soldiers. Everything any Ukrainian wished upon the invaders will come true like a monkey paw wish.
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Apr 23, 2022 17:41
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Dapper_Swindler posted:so these fucks are really just gonna invade Moldavia now after some bullshit false flags? how are they this dumb or is it desperation? poo poo like that really does make me think they might try poo poo with Finland. Some agency probably had false flags planned out for the entire "Make Russia USSR Again" campaign and they're sticking to their timetable because that's what the orders were. No backup plans or contingencies in case Ukraine resists, because the intel reports were clear this'd be a 3 day special operation. Give some time for public outcry to die down and move to the next target. Watch out for false flags around Finland in June!
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Apr 26, 2022 17:00
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Lol Russia lost two loving large naval vessels to Ukraine incouding a "''capital" cruiser what a joke of a Nazi war machine To be a eligible for Nazi war machine status you need to lose big warships. It's a tradition started with the Bismarck.
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May 7, 2022 09:56
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cinci zoo sniper posted:It will be 2 Armatas. One will break down, the other will tow away, and Putin will proudly declare “we don’t leave our own behind”. They'll parade a captured Ukrainian tractor, the Armata will break down and the tractor will be unable to resist it's natural instincts to tow it away.
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May 8, 2022 09:44
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Somaen posted:Ukrainians: the russian state hates Ukrainians and wants to genocide us In diplomatic negotiations you always start off at a more extreme position, so you can give concessions to get what you actually wanted. So when the Russians say they hate the Ukrainians and want to genocide them, that's not what they really mean. They will happily negotiate to drop the "hate" part of their statements.
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Jun 7, 2022 10:56
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Penal battalions ultimately are not too controversial in Eastern Europe. Ukraine did form theirs a few months ago. What feels on the nose to me personally here is “mine-clearing duty, no documents, no bodies returned”. Maybe their thinking goes along the lines of: "Everyone can clear a mine at least once." What % of the Russian army is actually Russian, and not an ethnic minority from the fringes?
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Jul 4, 2022 09:41
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The Lone Badger posted:Similar to how british AFVs all have kettles - if you can't have a brew-up without getting out then the crew are going to get out to have a brew-up and you can't stop them. So put a kettle on the inside so they can have tea without exposing themselves. Oh, so that's why US submarines had ice-cream makers on them. Makes me wonder what creature comforts the Russian tanks are equipped with. Patriotic USSR choir songs, I'm guessing.
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Jul 7, 2022 08:02
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NTRabbit posted:Looks like a wooden decoy built on top of a real automotive base, like some kind of cheap light truck In the WW2 days of decoy vehicles you only had to fool sporadic aerial reconnaissance. If your inflatable/cloth tank got moved around a bit every day, or the spy planes couldn't take clear pictures, it'd likely fool them. In the age of spy sats and high definition drone footage I'm guessing you're better off with a wooden fake that can actually drive around, to mimick a real vehicle moving into a firing position. This does explain why Russia keeps claiming to have destroyed X number of donated NATO artillery pieces, while Ukraine insists they're all actice. Russia sees a fake, falls for it and it gets obliterated, erroneously adding one to their tally.
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Aug 30, 2022 11:04
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I imagine they're following roads because they're a clear indicator of where you are flying without having to turn on any navigation equipment that could be jammed or somehow used to track you.
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Sep 5, 2022 13:59
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Mr. Sunshine posted:The idea that the sanctions will prove too painful or uncomfortable for regular europeans has absolutely no basis in reality. Apart from gas and oil Russia has almost nothing that Europe needs, and gas and oil can be found elsewhere with less bullshit attached. Even if european military support for Ukraine drops off, the sanctions are going nowhere. Just look at Iran, Cuba, North Korea. Once these sanctions have been in place a few years there's virtually no further cost in just keeping them in place indefinitely, and the average european won't even notice they're there. Most of Europe is still a liberal democracy that believes in a free market, and that market is being put under a lot of pressure by the huge increase in natural gas and electricity costs. Countries that have elections this fall/winter or next year are going to see an increase in power for populists that may be more pro-Russian than the current politicians. I don't think it's going to affect the war in Ukraine anytime soon, but it is a factor to consider.
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Sep 6, 2022 09:42
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Does Russia even have the training capacity to handle a general mobilisation? A lot of their elite troops and officers in general have been getting picked off. What are they going to send, a wave of recruits they trained wrong, as a joke? Ukraine has a 6-month headstart on mobilisation, plus those recruits can get trained in NATO countries. Russia would have to deploy and supply a lot of troops incredibly fast to make a decisive difference at this point.
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Sep 9, 2022 16:48
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BattleMaster posted:I was kind of wondering if attrition of Russian manpower, morale, vehicles, and supplies was going to cause a sudden collapse but this is beyond even what I imagined They're occupying hostile territory, individual soldiers won't be incredibly willing to throw their lives away to defend it. If the troops come from a mishmash of fringe Russian federation populations, then there's also going to be a lot less loyalty between sections of the front to keep the line at all costs, or at least delay the enemy. I'm kinda wondering if the standard Russian army corruption is still happening, and upper command assumed the front was fully manned because it said so on paper. Meanwhile the commandersm in charge of defending the Izyum just pocketed a bunch of cash.
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Sep 10, 2022 17:12
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Ukraine is just playing into Russia's hand now. There's been a big intel gap, but now Russia knows exactly what kinds of vehicles and heavy equipment Ukraine has in Izium. Unless there's been no decent bookkeeping on the Russian side, which is more probable than them keeping track of their inventory.
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Sep 11, 2022 09:51
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Tomn posted:That does kinda depend on how many of them have any idea what's actually happening on a wider level, though. Accounts from earlier Russian soldiers (like the guy described here, his wartime experiences are like part 4 or something of the series) suggests that grunts tossed into battle are barely informed where they even are or what's happening just around them, let alone that an entire front somewhere else is collapsing. Apparently the guy in the thread was watching Ukrainian news on captured TV sets to get a basic idea of what was going on, and a lot of the guys around him didn't bother to check. I imagine Russian officers would probably like to keep this particular news from spreading more than they have to. It's so strange to me that they don't inform their fighting troops on the broad situation. Not everyone needs to know everything, and some details should only be known to the planners for security reasons, but keeping the frontline in the dark like that is just begging for major routs whenever the Ukrainians force a breakthrough like at Izyum/Kupyansk. How do other armies in the world do it? I'd have to guess American/NATO soldiers are being kept up to date a lot better through at least civilian news channels. Which I guess the Russians can't, because their news keeps being propaganda.
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Sep 15, 2022 10:00
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Moktaro posted:Ukraine Twitter flexing again: https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1570891498249670656 Why do half the shells look so rusty?
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Sep 17, 2022 09:14
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gay picnic defence posted:Seems like a bad idea to publicise which enemy weapons are causing you the most grief. Knowing how Ukraine communicates to the outside world, it's perfectly possible the drones are doing nothing, or even actively harm the Russian effort.
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Sep 18, 2022 09:55
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I imagine that if Ukraine keeps getting longer ranged artillery that can interdict supply routes, the only way a Russian mass mobilization could achieve anything is with a push over an incredibly wide front that would put too much stress on Ukraine's ability to actually interdict the supplies. So basically a repeat of the start of the war, but with more Russians on foot and more Ukrainians in the army.
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Sep 20, 2022 19:34
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Somaen posted:This feels like the beginning of the end. Mobilization with mass protests and shootings, no instructors or trainers, a school shooting today, hundreds of thousands fleeing abroad, mobilised troops largely drunk with rotten equipment, no body armour or warm clothes with the autumn starting and a month or two before sub-zero temperatures It wouldn't be the first time the resilience of Russia as a state has been underestimated, based on the sorry state of their army or general preparedness for war. This time they're the aggressor, so maybe it'll be different.
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Sep 26, 2022 10:48
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Charlz Guybon posted:I'm hearing about insane videos on Telegram. I don't have the stomach to go look for that stuff, but this is what's been described yo me WW2 had plenty of tactics and strategy. Having conscripts charge head-on is a WW1 situation.
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Sep 27, 2022 05:01
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Mister Facetious posted:Could someone please explain to me why "plausible deniability" just does not exist in the Russian Playbook? Because they haven't needed it in a long time. They do something, it's obvious it's them, they deny it for a while, then later make threats about how they'll do it again. What's the world going to do about it? If they catch flak for it, it's useful internal propaganda to continue the narrative that the West hate Russia. If they don't, it's useful propaganda that the West is weak, and only Russia is strong and willing to do what is required. They've undergone sanctions in some form or other before and have always skated through. If Russia's initial projection of a couple days of war before installing a puppet was correct, Europe and Russia would probably be approaching some form of business as usual when it comes to some parts of the economy.
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Sep 27, 2022 21:39
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downout posted:How much would it cost to buy out huge parts of the russian economy? They throw around numbers and the sum is less than the entire US MIC. For a year. You can buy up whatever you want, but if you don't do what Putin and his cronies require you to do you'll find your assets nationalised or yourself having fallen out of a window.
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Sep 30, 2022 04:39
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FishBulbia posted:I thought Russia didn't want more land, why would they? I thought they just wanted to federalize Ukraine so they could have a say in politics, bad sure, but hardly very different than just everyday imperialism. The stated objective was a puppet Ukraine. But Putin'd pre-war speech put a lot of emphasis on how Ukraine wasn't a real nation and that granting it independence was a historic mistake. If their decapitation strike attempt wasn't so shambolic I'm sure it wouldn't have taken too long for Ukraine as a whole to join the Russian federation following a sham referendum. Putin has had to accept reality and scale down the objective to whatever they could realistically hold, and even now he's overestimating his army.
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Oct 1, 2022 00:10
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Do trains on the rail bridge have a low speed limit? Or do the trains drive over them mostly empty? The train seems to be stopped almost directly next to the damaged section of road bridge. Even with a missile strike or an explosive planted on the rails/train somewhere, that makes little sense to me, do Russian trains not have inertia? Not trying to be a train-truther or whatever, I just don't understand the claim of how Ukraine caught a passing train and it immediately stopped without derailing.
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Oct 8, 2022 07:26
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ShadowHawk posted:Would a bomb that big have the effect we saw, or something larger? It really depends on what explosive got used and how it explodes. Ukraine has gotten their hands on all sorts of explosives through donations from the west and capturing stuff from the Russians. There's probably still widespread corruption in the Russian ranks so perhaps they did not even need to smuggle it into Russia, just steal/buy whatever was locally available. I imagine that the FSB should be able to determine exactly what explosive(s) got used, but any info they put out is going to be untrustworthy and an independent international investigate is not going to happen in time to be accurate.
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Oct 8, 2022 22:32
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Henrik Zetterberg posted:So if Russia can hit the center of Kyiv, why aren’t they just lobbing a billion missiles there hoping for a lucky hit on Zelenskyy? Terror bombing doesn't work unless it is heavy enough to matter, and as evidenced by ww2 that'd probably have to be a nuke. The Nazis blitz on London didn't push the UK out of the war, the allied campaigns on Germany only had an effect because it tried to target their industry, and the Japanese suffered near complete destruction of several cities yet only surrendered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Terror bombing will demoralise the people suffering through it, but it motivates everyone else through outrage. If Russia takes out Zelenskyy, all they'll have done is create a symbol.
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Oct 10, 2022 08:01
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Kikas posted:drat, what a shot. Kalibr is basically a Tomahawk, Igła should be enough to catch it, but you have to be in the right place. I know Ukraine has a way to coordinate artillery through some sort of app networking, do they have the same for air defence? "Ivan Petro near Izyum, we're tracking a cruise missile that will pass within 100 meters of your position in 5 minutes, get ready."
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Oct 10, 2022 13:34
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Chalks posted:From the footage of the strike itself (cctv showing the explosion, a guy is present in the footage but he's about 30 meters from the blast and is unharmed) it's just that they missed the target, hitting the grass underneath. It's not surprising, the thing is only 6 or 7 feet across, maybe 20 feet above the ground. There's very little chance Russia could land a hit on it so I have no idea why they'd humiliate themselves trying. It could be a symbolic target and they were dumb enough to think that the glass would shatter from a nearby explosion, without doing any of the calculations to show the actual result.
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Oct 10, 2022 17:01
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Chalks posted:Is it possible that Ukraine timed the bridge attack to come just before an expected Russian escalation to hide in its shadow to some extent? If it really is true that this attack was coming to matter what, Ukraine seems to have timed the bridge strike to avoid retaliation entirely. The Kerch bridge attack required a bit of timing of multiple parts. The train needs to be slowed down or stopped and the truck needs to be loaded and driving across the bridge while the train is still on there. If that were easy to arrange in a week, I'd expect the security bureau to have done it sooner. If they're as ruthless as the FSB, they may even have calculated the expected retaliatory missile strikes as being a benefit to the Ukrainian war effort.
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Oct 10, 2022 19:09
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