News & thoughts on Putin's invasion of Ukraine

[ehusmann]

But it won't, there will not be any nuclear weapon use in Ukraine. There is a clear strategic advantage to threatening with nuclear weapons, there is a clear strategic disadvantage to actually using them. It is like the energy war that he has been waging. Threatening to turn off the gas worked, blowing up Nordstream ended it. No more card to play.
The more nuclear weapons are mentioned by the Orcs, the closer they are to total collapse.

[Fishbed_9307]

But it won't, there will not be any nuclear weapon use in Ukraine. There is a clear strategic advantage to threatening with nuclear weapons, there is a clear strategic disadvantage to actually using them. It is like the energy war that he has been waging. Threatening to turn off the gas worked, blowing up Nordstream ended it. No more card to play.
The more nuclear weapons are mentioned by the Orcs, the closer they are to total collapse.

That is true Erwin but still, the numbers are irrelevant. All depends on that very first weapon they would use. That very first one would make all the difference.

And about the collapse; I am hearing this story for months now. Already in March the Russian army and Russia "was on the verge of collapse" but they still keep on going.

[ehusmann]

That is true Erwin but still, the numbers are irrelevant. All depends on that very first weapon they would use. That very first one would make all the difference.

And about the collapse; I am hearing this story for months now. Already in March the Russian army and Russia "was on the verge of collapse" but they still keep on going.

They have collapsed in the North, they have collapsed in the east and are right now collapsing in the south. They are currently using T62s (over 30 already confirmed lost) and WW2 era anti aircraft guns and howitzers. They have lost the war, the Russian Army is collapsing and it will not last very long anymore. Give it until the end of the year and it will be pretty much over (except perhaps Crimea). The only question is how much of his army herr Putin wants to loose.

And after Russian mobiks started shooting each other on a firing range yesterday, today a Russian jet decided to do the same. Rather dramatic picture right after impact, pilot watching from hist chute:
https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/sta ... 0927429634

[Fishbed_9307]

That is true Erwin but still, the numbers are irrelevant. All depends on that very first weapon they would use. That very first one would make all the difference.

And about the collapse; I am hearing this story for months now. Already in March the Russian army and Russia "was on the verge of collapse" but they still keep on going.

They have collapsed in the North, they have collapsed in the east and are right now collapsing in the south. They are currently using T62s (over 30 already confirmed lost) and WW2 era anti aircraft guns and howitzers. They have lost the war, the Russian Army is collapsing and it will not last very long anymore. Give it until the end of the year and it will be pretty much over (except perhaps Crimea). The only question is how much of his army herr Putin wants to loose.

And after Russian mobiks started shooting each other on a firing range yesterday, today a Russian jet decided to do the same. Rather dramatic picture right after impact, pilot watching from hist chute:
https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/sta ... 0927429634

Let's agree to disagree Erwin. I am too disgusted about the Russian crimes in Ukraine but if you know the history of Russia and fighting their wars, and I think you do, you know Russia is a tough nut to crack. The war will either escalate before the winter or there will be a lull in fighting during the winter but I do not believe this will be over very soon.

And by the way; it is pretty absurd to suggest that the pilot intentionally flew his aircraft in the apartment building. Accidents do happen, also during wartime.

[ehusmann]

I didn't say the pilot did it intentionally, I said the jet did. So take the sarcasm for what it is worth.

What I do know about the Russians, is that when they are about to get decisively defeated, they tend to pull back and implode, resulting in regime change. Has happened before, will happen again soon. Hopefully very soon.
The difference is that in earlier wars the Russians had the means to wage a long, costly, bloody war. They do not have that right now. They do not have the manpower (look at the joke of a mobilization), they don't have the weaponry (see my comment about ancient weapons currently on the battlefield) and they don't have the industrial might to build better weapons (they need to beg Iran and North Korea to help them for crying out loud). The fundamental problems in this Russia cannot be overcome within the timeframe of this war. Impossible.

We don't need to agree to disagree, it will play out however it plays out. I don't think either of us will have any influence over it. But just to pad myself on the back, when everyone was saying Russia would not invade, I expected them to do so within a few weeks (that was my expectation in early February). I also expected them to loose badly, due to the way too small amount of troops they had gathered (then estimated at 190K). And in March/April I first said they had lost already. Since then the Russians have been on the retreat (save for very small pyrrhus victories in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, and the almost victory in Bakhmut... which they have been saying for 4 months!).
But feel free to remind me of this by the end of the year.

[ehusmann]

Some other results of the Putin's invasion. The railroads are starting to stop. Due to the unavailability of spare parts, 10.000 freight cars have already been taken out of service. 100.000 more might follow that before the end of the year. For a country that is huge and almost fully dependent on the railroads for internal distribution, that's going to be devastating. Just one more example of how this war is destroying Russia more than Ukraine in the long term.
https://www.railway.supply/en/russian-r ... -collapse/

[ehusmann]

Ok, I have no idea about what the h*ll this is. It comes from a very respectable guy on Twitter, who has been translating many posts and videos from Russian to English. I am sure his translation is accurate. I am also sure these two clowns are the Minister of Defence of Russia and the Chief Idiot in command of the Russian forces. But what the f*ck, what is this? Do they seriously think that the world will believe this is how they take decisions? I mean... if you want people to completely loose faith in you, this is probably the way to go.

Anyway, Kherson is going to be abandoned, thousands of Russians in that area have now started a mad dash to the other side of the Dniepr. I wonder about the Ukrainian claims of Russian losses the coming days. These were already going sky high lately, now even more I reckon...

https://twitter.com/wartranslated/statu ... 3727424512

[Stratofreighter]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2 ... es-drones/

Russia’s Electronic-Warfare Troops Knocked Out 90 Percent Of Ukraine’s Drones

Dec 24, 2022,05:52pm EST

The Russian military’s failures in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine almost are too numerous to list.

Too many attacks along too many sectors, which thinned out Russia’s best battalions.
Too few infantry to screen the tanks.
Inflexible air support.
Artillery batteries that bombarded too many empty grid squares. And perhaps most importantly:
inadequate logistics for what would become a long, grinding war.

But it’s important to note where the Russians succeeded.
If only to understand where Ukraine might need to improve its own forces.
For a rare picture of Russian military competence,
consider the Kremlin’s battlefield electronic-warfare troops.

Amid the chaos of the Russian army’s initial push into Ukraine starting in late February,
it took a few weeks for the Russians to deploy their extensive jamming infrastructure.

But once they did, they began deafening and confusing the Ukrainians’ most sophisticated systems
—in particular, their drones—
in numbers that surely startled Ukrainian commanders.

The electronic suppression of Ukraine’s unmanned aerial vehicles
blunted one of Kyiv’s biggest advantages in the early months of the war.
The Ukrainians counted on superior intelligence—largely provided by UAVs
—to make their smaller artillery arsenal more precise than Russia’s own, larger arsenal of big guns and rocket-launchers.


But the Russians’ electronic warfare prevented those drones from navigating and communicating
—and deprived the Ukrainians of the precision they were counting on.

“The defeat of precision was critical to unit survival” for the Russians,
analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Analysts anticipated the Russians’ jamming operations. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitored the Moscow’s military buildup ahead of the February invasion, noted the deployment of a large number of electronic-warfare systems in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2 ... dc66be575c

Ukrainian brigades and batteries depended on two broad drone types to find Russian forces and walk in artillery:
small, hovering quadcopters and octocopters;
and larger, fixed-wing UAVs such as the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2.

As Russian jamming confused GPS and severed radio links, these drones started dropping like flies.

“The average life-expectancy of a quadcopter remained around three flights,” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds wrote.

“The average life-expectancy of a fixed-wing UAV was around six flights”
and, “in aggregate, only around a third of UAV missions can be said to have been successful.”

Of the thousands of drones the Ukrainians possessed in February,
90 percent were shot or crashed by summer, according to the RUSI analysts.

This compelled authorities in Kyiv to plead with Ukraine’s foreign allies for replacements.

If anything, the E.W. troops were too successful.
They actually jammed more than a few Russian drones, too.
“The Russians suffered extensively from these systems having an equally noticeable effect on its own troops,” the RUSI team noted.

[Stratofreighter]

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/28/7391359/

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/0 ... on-en-news

https://www.thedailybeast.com/drones-at ... -all-sides

Drones Attack Russia From All Sides

Fighter jets were deployed near St. Petersburg and an oil depot was set ablaze as authorities reported drones striking multiple regions.

Updated Feb. 28, 2023
6:48AM ET
/ Published Feb. 28, 2023
6:45AM ET

Chaos erupted in Russia overnight as drones swarmed multiple regions,
sparking an explosion at an oil depot
and the deployment of fighter jets near St. Petersburg,
according to local reports.

One strike at around 2 a.m. in the Krasnodar region was less than 100 feet from a Russian Defense Ministry barracks,
the independent Agentstvo News reports.

Two drones filled with explosives landed at a nearby Rosneft oil depot in Tuapse,
sparking a blaze that was “quickly extinguished,”
according to the Russian outlet Baza.

Hours later, St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport came to a standstill
as authorities shut down the surrounding airspace,
reportedly in response to an “unidentified flying object” spotted in the area.

Local authorities confirmed to RIA Novosti that incoming and outgoing flights were temporarily halted,
though they gave no reason for the move.
Meanwhile, Baza reported, fighter jets were deployed to take down the “object.”

Drones were also reported overnight in the Bryansk and Belgorod regions,
as well as the Republic of Adygea.

Another drone reportedly landed in the Moscow region, near a Gazprom gas compressor station.

They were part of what local media described as a “mass drone attack” that appears to have intensified in the last 24 hours.

[Stratofreighter]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65077687
/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... in-belarus

Sat 25 Mar 2023 18.23 GMT

ussia has struck a deal with Belarus to station tactical nuclear weapons on its territory but will not violate non-proliferation agreements, Vladimir Putin has said.

The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, had long raised the issue of stationing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which borders Poland, Putin told state television.

“There is nothing unusual here either: firstly, the United States has been doing this for decades,” he said. “They have long deployed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of their allied countries.

Russia will have completed the construction of a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by 1 July 2023, Putin said, adding that Moscow would not actually be transferring control of the arms to Minsk.

Russia has stationed 10 aircraft in Belarus capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons, he said, adding that Moscow had already transferred to Belarus a number of Iskander tactical missile systems that can be used to launch nuclear weapons.

[Stratofreighter]

Washington Post:

Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says

THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post

April 12, 2023 at 9:36 p.m. EDT

The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies,
revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House
is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast
who shared highly classified documents
with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic.


United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God,
the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord,
an online platform popular with gamers.

But they paid little attention last year when the man some
call “OG”
posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon.

The words were unfamiliar,
and few people read the long note, one of the members explained.

But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people.

The young member read OG’s message closely,
and the hundreds more that he said followed on a regular basis for months.

They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents
that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a “military base,”
which the member declined to identify.

OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices,
which could be used
to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers.

This account of how detailed intelligence documents
intended for an exclusive circle of military leaders and government decision-makers
found their way into and then out of OG’s closed community
is based in part on several lengthy interviews with the Discord group member,
who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity.

His account was corroborated by a second member
who read many of the same classified documents shared by OG,
and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Both members said they know OG’s real name
as well as the state where he lives and works
but declined to share that information while the FBI is hunting for the source of the leaks.

The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public;

“He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them,
I’m going to stop sending them.”

That’s when OG changed tactics.
Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard,
he took photographs of the genuine articles
and dropped them in the server.

These were more vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings.
Some featured detailed charts of battlefield conditions in Ukraine
and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities.

OG shared several documents a week, beginning late last year.
Posting pictures to the server took less time.
But it also exposed OG to greater risk.
In the background of some images,
they could see items and furniture that they recognized from the room
where OG spoke to them via video on the Discord channel —
the kind of clues that could prove useful for federal investigators.

In a sense, OG had created a virtual mirror image of the secretive facility where he spent his working hours.

...see more at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... documents/

[Stratofreighter]

English
https://www-vprogids-nl.translate.goog/ ... r_pto=wapp

Putin's Shadow War Shows Russian Secret Activities in Europe

Three-part documentary series Putin's shadow war can be seen on NPO 2 and NPO Start/Plus
JUNE 3, 2023

https://www.vprogids.nl/documentaires/l ... eiten.html

Poetins schaduwoorlog toont Russische geheime activiteiten in Europa
Driedelige documentaireserie Poetins schaduwoorlog is te zien op NPO 2 en NPO Start/Plus

3 JUNI 2023

In 2022 beginnen journalisten van de Deense, Noorse, Zweedse en Finse publieke omroepen samen
een onderzoeksproject gericht op verdachte Russische activiteiten.

De driedelige documentaireserie Poetins schaduwoorlog is een verslag van hun bevindingen.

Niels Fastrup: ‘Je kunt wel degelijk zeggen dat we al in oorlog zijn.’

De beelden gingen onlangs de wereld over:
een onrustige zee, een speedboot met aan boord een cameraploeg vaart met hoge snelheid richting een groot schip.

‘Een spookschip in het Kattegat’ heeft de cameraploeg doorgekregen.
‘Spookschip’, want het vaartuig heeft zijn transponder uit gezet,
een instrument waarmee onder meer informatie over de positie wordt doorgegeven,
een verplichting voor schepen vanaf een bepaalde grootte.

De Admiraal Vladimirsky, zoals de naam van het Russische schip luidt, is officieel een oceanografisch onderzoekvaartuig,
maar als de journalisten het schip naderen zien ze hoe zwaarbewapende, gemaskerde mannen plotseling aan dek verschijnen, grote geweren in de aanslag. Wegwezen!

[Daniel Ravenswaay]

So, if this article (see below) is correct, then Russia has achieved most of their objectives in Ukraine. I believe the Special Military Operation is (at least partially) connected to the supposed 46 biolabs in Ukraine (see video, from 37:45).

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ ... henko-says?

https://rumble.com/v37mub6-ep.-16-rfk-j ... uncle.html
(an interesting episode overall)

[michel N]

Ah Tucker Carlson. If he’s involved, you can’t take anything serious . And those biolabs, do they also produce bionic soldiers with superpower?

[pluggie]

if
I believe
supposed

Hoe vind je zelf dat het gaat?