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WarpedLichen posted:So is it normal to have a guy in high command have two prison stints? I guess it's stuff early in his career but it just seems so weird to have a a culture that glamorizes criminals. if you foresee the possibility of some serious domestic unrest, a guy who ran protestors over with an apc is a good bet that he's going to follow/issue orders to start shooting demonstrators if need be.
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Oct 12, 2022 06:59
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the straight line out in the open is a defensive ditch, not a trench. it's so you can't just blitz vehicles across fields. ditches were pretty much universally a part of warfare for nearly the entire history of warfare for the same reason that you're seeing russia employing them now
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Oct 12, 2022 20:32
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Perun's videos are great and I'd highly recommend people watch them. I heard people mentioning him early on and figured it was some clickbaity jerkoff youtube poo poo about 10 greatest military weapons of the war or w/e like 99% of the defense content on youtube, but no they're incredibly good, very dense videos that are more akin to professional presentations than anything else. Dude appears to be an Australian defense analyst specializing in defense economics or something similar.
Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Oct 12, 2022 |
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Oct 12, 2022 20:38
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cuz it's gross to look at some civilian dudes repairing a bridge and go 'i hope someone blows them up with a mk19 submersible antibridgepersonnel bomb''
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Oct 12, 2022 20:51
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Nenonen posted:Why is it okay to bomb the Antonovsky bridge and the crews that repair it, but not the Kerch bridge? Both are or were used by civilians. it's a piece of infrastructure supporting a war effort so yeah it's 100% a legitimate target. it's just weird to look at specifically the civilian repair crew and think about blowing them up.
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Oct 12, 2022 21:32
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UN Voted on condemning the annexation referenda https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1580295103088066560 against: Belarus, Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua, & Syria voted against
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Oct 12, 2022 21:35
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Plastic_Gargoyle posted:The others I get, but what bug has Nicaragua got up its rear end lately to think siding with the crazy people is a good idea? what do you mean lately? Other than the Chamorro years, Nicaragua has been on a pretty consistent trajectory both for internally-directed reasons and as a response to outward factors (like the US sponsored civil war that was basically just an atrocity showcase). Also China invests a poo poo ton of money in Nicaragua and they're still close to Russia, too. Ortega is just being Ortega, albeit with considerably more dictator for life vibes this time around.
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Oct 12, 2022 22:18
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Tomn posted:Worth noting I think that something around half or so of the abstentions come from Africa. There are of course also plenty of African countries voting for, but it's probably worth remembering that Russia is focusing a lot of messaging on former colonized countries and finding fertile ground for an anti-Western message. Many Indians are sympathetic to Russia because the Soviet Union backed India significantly back in the 50s and especially 60s, during the sino-india war, and in general the USSR gave India a lot of aid and did quite a bit to support Indian territorial claims and development. They've been close really ever since. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Oct 12, 2022 |
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Oct 12, 2022 22:27
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Discendo Vox posted:I recall that around March there was discussion of how a significant portion of Russia's foreign-facing propaganda apparatus was reoriented away from "Western" targets and toward potential ally populaces in Iran and India. That may also play a factor. factor maybe but iran and india being closely aligned with russia is nothing new whatsoever. Iran just spent the last decade fighting along side Russia to prop up Assad's regime (against western backed forces, sound familiar?) and India's affinity for Russia is the better part of a century old
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Oct 13, 2022 01:21
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Well yeah all the good russian porn editors fled after the international payment systems closed back in, what, april?
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Oct 13, 2022 02:51
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cinci zoo sniper posted:So, what’s the 5-year plan for staying stunlocked on a trivial bloodlusting probation? I think it's far and away most likely Ukraine who did it but with the huge caveat that there are major shortcomings in every potential account of the story and that the fsb version of events once again comes back to the apparently common Russian line 'it's either unfathomable incompetence or betrayal.' In the absence of clear (or even merely decent) evidence that Ukraine did it, it's worth noting just how many other parties have some interest in knocking Russia down a peg or perhaps responding to the destruction of vital European infrastructure or wanting to undermine the Russian war effort. There's also a bunch of different Russian factions that could have some interest in either subverting the war effort or in making Putin look incompetent or in giving an excuse to escalate the war. basically who tf knows until someone talks about how it was done who was actually involved.
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Oct 13, 2022 08:41
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Kraftwerk posted:I wonder if Korea’s defence industry is having a rally in their stock and financial performance with all these defence contracts being thrown around. Could they potentially become a major arms producing country to backfill the gaps left by Russia? they already are MikeC posted:The most commonly suggested and hintrd response to a Russian WMD attack would be full scale participation of NATO forces on Ukrainian soil. This likely means a massive wave of conventional missile strikes on Russian logistical units and infrastructure in Ukraine and the full deployment of NATO aircraft to strike Russian troops and facilitate Ukrainian offensives to fully eject Russian troops from Ukraine. It is also suggested that what remains of the Black Sea Fleet will also be sent to the bottom in the event it tries to exit port. Small addendum here of 'also if they stay in port' but yeah that's the gist of it. The unambiguous central message is 'you will get completely hosed if you go through with this' and for the last ~two months American and NATO generals have been cold calling Russian generals to explain to them precisely what will happen. I guess they're trying to avoid the tendency for military signaling to either be missed or misinterpreted. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Oct 14, 2022 |
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Oct 14, 2022 00:46
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Koos Group posted:I would say it's not as relevant as the later referendum, since it was decades earlier and not about the same issue. But that referendum as a whole would certainly serve as one of many bases for how wrong what Russia's doing currently is. u know that crimea voted along with the rest of ukraine for independence from the soviet union, right. and by a significant margin, too
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Oct 15, 2022 01:59
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like they already had a referenda on being part of russia, and they decided not to be. now that russia has spent a decade forcibly occupying them, hunting down and disappearing even mildly pro-Ukraine folks and driving out the people who lived there, the suggestion is that the first referenda doesn't count and they need a new one?
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Oct 15, 2022 02:07
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forcibly invading an area and disappearing a significant amount of the original population is not normally how you signal to an area that you care about its self determination it's how you signal that your intention is to forcibly annex them regardless of what they want
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Oct 15, 2022 02:40
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There doesn't appear to be any uncertainty about who did the pipeline attack and the messaging for the last 7-10 days has switched around to reflecting that even though I don't believe that any conclusion has been publicly announced.
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Oct 15, 2022 10:59
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Phlegmish posted:Thanks! I think Def Mon has a bit of a pro-Ukrainian bias, but his reports have been reliable in the past. I certainly hope the Ukrainians are indeed about to launch a successful offensive. impressive that he manages a pro-ukraine bias while using almost entirely russian information/postings
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Oct 15, 2022 20:37
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Sucrose posted:What? Do they mean he had a heart attack and was found slumped over a fence, or that this guy had hanged himself or was hanged? he died of his heart stopping is sort of a euphemism for 'don't know, don't care, don't ask'
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Oct 15, 2022 23:20
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Israel really, really cares where Iranian weapons go, particularly missiles. To the extent that they'll fly into other country's airspace to blow up shipments, which they've done a number of times in the last decade.
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Oct 16, 2022 14:27
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spankmeister posted:Pretty incredible how OSINT Twitter is managing to adhere to media blackouts The responsible osint accounts are pretty much all working with primarily russian reporting/social media posts and to a lesser extent third party tools and data. most don't really touch Ukraine-posted information until it's decidedly after the fact (eg soldiers raising a flag over an area). ukraine has been very effectively blacked out for months and months now. It's pretty extraordinary just how little footage and poo poo gets out. Yes I know that that is despite what it seems like. The vast majority of what is coming out comes out via official channels and what doesn't for some curious reason almost always comes out 3-10 days after the fact. You hear people say a lot that 'this is the first livestreamed war' or whatever, which is patently false. If anything, this is the first war in the digital age that has had extremely effective information control. It's wild to see. Even saying that is a bit of hyperbole as it isn't the first time we've seen extremely good information control, it's just by far the largest conflict that's been demonstrated in.
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Oct 16, 2022 21:39
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yeah the blackout is unquestionably intended at every levelFishBulbia posted:A minority of OSINT accounts are doing OSINT. no one is really embargoing information that russians are posting, once russian bloggers are posting about it, it's out there. You know that osint folks aren't sitting in russian telegram so they can tell americans about what they're saying lol Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Oct 16, 2022 |
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Oct 16, 2022 21:57
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the concern isn't that pro-ukraine osint will geolocate ukrainian stuff, it's that russians will geolocate poo poo ukrainians post...
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Oct 16, 2022 22:02
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FishBulbia posted:As far as I understand it, the whole niche with the switchblade is that it was a small drone that could be launched by a single soldier from a backpack and then be used as a well directed mortar shell. A useful thing if you're on patrol in Afghanistan and get into a firefight, not a big game changer in a war of artillery. also controls sucked enough that it was imprecise and the warhead was nowhere near big enough to make a miss a hit. Also the versatility and accuracy and effectiveness of drone dropped dual purpose anti-tank 40mm grenades was just much, much higher. Also zero supply issues ever with those, apparently. reading between the lines a bit: there's a reason why there was a big pile of them that the military was itching to get rid of asap Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Oct 16, 2022 |
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Oct 16, 2022 23:21
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Dick Ripple posted:It is probably safe to assume that Ukraine has most if not all of their short ranged AA positioned with/around their conventional forces and not defending cities. given that they're shooting a lot of missiles and drones down far away from the front lines, idk if that's safe to assume at all
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Oct 18, 2022 11:47
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Enjoy posted:I tried to translate using Google and it made no sense google lens works on images
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Oct 19, 2022 20:25
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nn
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Oct 20, 2022 00:44
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Paladinus posted:Nah, he'll be fine. More likely is he'll get invited to more shows now to parrot the official line. The official stance, by the way, is if UN tries to investigate the drones, Russia stops paying UN fees, because how dare you not to trust us the drones are Russian, they even have Cyrillic letters on them, they can't be Iranian! 'it has cyrillic letters it belongs to russia' is, come to think of it, one of the only very consistent russian positions
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Oct 20, 2022 21:09
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Djarum posted:They have been making missions over the Black Sea and Poland basically since the war started, both River Joint and Combat Sent platforms. probably just wanted it to gently caress off while they conducted their withdrawal from kherson and whatever other poo poo they were up to with the dam and... elsewhere
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Oct 20, 2022 21:11
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Barriers aren't meant to be impenetrable or immovable, they just have to reduce freedom of movement. Their utility is in discouraging advances or, if that fails, forcing people to stop out in the middle of a field to do whatever manhandling is necessary, at which point the defenders watching the line fire atgms and call in artillery on them (you do have people watching the defenses, right?). They also limits the ability of Ukrainian lighter vehicles to just zip around russian positions at will. idk how effective it'll be, particularly at the rather slow rate at which they're placing them, but conceptually that kind of barrier is effective enough so long as it's integrated into a greater defensive plan. Ditches are similarly effective (particularly if you're worried about rampaging light mechanized units flanking and encircling you at will on Ukraine's steppes). Tbh I'm surprised that we don't see far more use of ditches, albeit in anywhere remotely close to the front line you'd be exceptionally exposed while out digging one. On a related note, you see surprisingly few berms around Russian positions. You also see very, very few armored/military bulldozers, which is unusual for modern conflicts. In spite of that, it seems like the real reason you see so few prominently fortified positions is the threat of artillery and drones and air-strikes against anything that is visible from above or otherwise prominent in the local landscape. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Oct 22, 2022 |
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Oct 22, 2022 01:40
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Comstar posted:The line is currently 1.6km long, so a 20 minute walk will bypass it. they're building it at a brisk pace of about a kilometer a week
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Oct 22, 2022 02:02
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Ohtori Akio posted:Discussion on this topic appears to assume that the Wagner line's threat model is an armor offensive. Why is this believed to be the case? I was under the impression that Ukraine is more likely to field artillery-backed infantry with armor in a supportive role. Comparisons to WW2-era massed armor offensives, and the defensive preparations against such, do not seem appropriate to me. tanks to break through a line and then they try to rampage through russian back lines with more tanks and mechanized infantry literally driving through fields and roads with headlights off
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Oct 22, 2022 10:39
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Ynglaur posted:KIA and tanks get the most attention, but the Oryx list of confirmed destroyed and captured vehicles has a lot of engineering vehicles. Even the US only has a couple hundred armored excavators. I don't think that list remotely counts as a lot and I'd also point out that just on a visual level there's clearly very little defensive earth moving happening on the Russian side, for whatever reason, other than just digging down. idk why entirely (although I can certainly speculate a dozen reasons why) but it's conspicuously absent on almost every level. You do see Russians digging tanks in and obviously soldiers are digging fighting positions and dugouts, but there's very rarely any sign of anything beyond what can be done with a shovel outside of like airbases or major regional command posts. The contrast just jumps out to me compared to like Syria where you'd see bulldozers as a part of basically every single fight and the first thing people would do to hold a position is get a bulldozer in to start pushing up a berm around an area,, often starting while still actively under fire. This is something all sides in the conflict were doing. You'd also see comparatively small units operating bulldozers and if they'd opportunistically steal/buy them at the first opportunity. I bring up the contrast to Syria particularly because Russia has otherwise not diverged a ton from how they did things in Syria. Aside from just not having many as a point of doctrine, they seem to be assets allocated to comparatively much larger units vs something that even small units are operating at least one of. it's strange and, outside of speculation and loosely pointing at russian doctrine and organization, idk what to make of it. You can make a case that there's an interest in being less visible to the people targeting artillery, but also a lot of artillery losses would be negated by better defensive works. Sure it's not saving you if a gmlrs comes down right on your head, but the vast majority of Ukrainian artillery is still unguided stuff. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Oct 22, 2022 |
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Oct 22, 2022 22:24
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Russian telegram cope posting about losing Kherson is rapidly accelerating E: https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1583946355868696576 I recommend reading the Grey Zone (wagner official channel) post in full, note that they're quoting the neonazi group Rusich
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Oct 23, 2022 02:50
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Vox Nihili posted:Somehow I don't think the obvious contradictions their previous obvious lies create are going to bother them a whole lot. They will simply make up new lies and continue with their day. There is just no regard for the truth at all, and no real additional consequences beyond what they've already incurred, either. Putin is not invincible and the sheer audacity of annexing a region and then losing it less than a month later is how you become a laughing stock. Especially if you donate a shitload of materiel to Ukraine in the process. You don't get to gently caress up that badly very many times before we get president Prigozhin. On that note, Wagner is now building a defensive line by Belgorod, too.
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Oct 23, 2022 05:11
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Buckwheat Sings posted:At this rate they might be using a box of tacks. They've certainly been setting records for losing materiel particularly (and to a lesser extent, manpower) in modern times. I get the impression that both of these defensive lines are largely for domestic PR reasons, but idk maybe we're legitimately at the point where Russians are worried about Ukraine rampaging through border regions
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Oct 23, 2022 05:37
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Vox Nihili posted:Losing or winning the war is what actually matters at that level. None of the accompanying rhetoric or proclamations have any substance or value, it's all varying degrees of propaganda, smoke screens, and chaff. If he continues to lose territory it will continue to hurt him whether or not that territory was formally "annexed" because he will be viewed as a loser. His core of support consists of nationalists, i.e., people who care about strength, not liberals, i.e., people who care about norms and rules. losing is losing, but also losing territory that you made a massive 'mission accomplished' celebration in Moscow a month earlier over is a particularly pathetic kind of losing. If you want to argue that Russian nationalists care about that distinction less, sure I don't really disagree, but also I challenge you to find me a Russian nationalist who is currently enthusiastic about how the war is going.
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Oct 23, 2022 07:09
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yeah they've lost at least one or two su-24s to 'maintenance issues' or something in the last week or two. Without diving that far into speculation, Russia has lost between a quarter and a half of its main ground attack air power (losses of su-24s and ka-52s have each been exceptionally high). Idk if anyone knows how many they had operational pre-war, but they're already down a quarter or more from the total number they had period and that's going purely off of counts based on burning wrecks on the ground. If they've had that many shot down, how much of their fleet has been shot to poo poo? No wonder they keep falling out the the air.
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Oct 23, 2022 12:34
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key words there 'for the moment'
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Oct 23, 2022 23:26
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cinci zoo sniper posted:If you go into comments on her Telegram post announcing the firing, you’ll see that the consensus there is that being gay is what made the guy say that, i.e., it’s being swept under as a quote-unquote mental illness, which is not a novel turn of “thought” for bigotry in Eastern Europe on one hand, but on the other it shows that they’re *really* keen on backpedaling away from this one. The same Simonyan quote that Paladinus cites above does read decidedly more barbed in its original, than the translation could lead one to believe. I've seen a few historians and political science types pointing out how actually weird it is to see a war launched under openly stated genocidal pretexts. Plenty of wars have a genocidal component, sure, but actually publicly declaring those before hand is very much unusual and it's one of the big reasons why Russia hosed its messaging efforts up so badly. To some extent they've definitely become more aware of this, but what he said is the kind of thing that takes on a life of its own and becomes the most memorable Russian statement on the war for months. It's the kind of thing that undoes months of messaging efforts. It's a huge fuckup as far as Russian efforts to control the narrative go.
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Oct 24, 2022 00:47
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OddObserver posted:... How many bad jokes are gonna be made and names badly mispronounced because someone could not figure out where to fit ё on a typewriter so the phonetically inane substitution with e still exists and even more inexplicably manages to work its way into Latin transliteration...? No one cares enough about him to want to correct the mistake, imo. It's just an occupational hazard of being a Russian propagandist that your name gets the most unfavorable transliteration
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Oct 24, 2022 02:38
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