TheVulture
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Posts posted by TheVulture
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2 minutes ago, keas66 said:
Is it wise to be sharing this intel ? ( I mean the UA not yourself )
It's from 11 days ago, so it's probably relatively safe. Although it might let the Russians know where some of their units are that they lost contact with
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Specially made medals for each city? Sounds like Russian war preparations and logistics were concentrating on the important stuff then.
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1 hour ago, kraze said:
Pretty sure any road in Ukraine can be checked out using Google maps.
The real issue for an invader is that Polissya region (of which Volyn is a part) is quite swampy - which again can be checked out using Google maps.
You can see how few roads there are and how much of the territory is a forested wetland.
My knowledge of Ukraine / Belarus is very poor, but is that that the famous Pripyat marches (Pripet?). I was under the impression from Bagration etc. in WW2 that those those marshes covered a fair bit of the border between the two countries. Is that about right?
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8 minutes ago, akd said:
Here is what the tweet was referencing:
Linda Thomas Greenfield: “Other Nato countries may decide that they want to put troops inside of Ukraine, that will be a decision that they have made. We don’t want to escalate this into a war with the United States but we will support our Nato allies.”
And as predicted the rhetoric of "things we're not going to do (honest) but are going to keep talking about" continues to push further and further to keep the line of "things we can actually do without Russia panicking/escalating in response" also moving slowly forward...
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7 minutes ago, Homo_Ferricus said:
Was this quote deleted or something? It's not loading in for me. All I see is:
Yes, it appears to have been deleted. I could see it before, but it's gone now.
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Al-Jazeera are reporting that Russian ships in the Caspian sea are now launching cruise missiles at Ukraine. Is that another sign that they've basically run out and the only socks left are those already deployed on ships in another theatre?
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39 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
I would note, though, that for all the terrible carnage, Russia essentially gave Ukraine the only conditions possible for UA to survive the first 3 days.
Let's not kid ourselves - RuAF was not doomed to fail at this invasion. It just had a really, really, really ****ty plan.
Before the invasion started, when all the discussion was of whether this was a bluff or not, I posted a quote I'd read (might not have been in this thread) that if Russia were planning on invading, they seemed to be doing everything they could to maximise their chance of failure. And they've largely continued in the same vein.
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Continuing the Belarussian mystery machine, military vehicles with identification markers on the move - away from the border with Ukraine and towards Brest on the Polish border. Plus 11 staff from the Belarussian embassy in Ukraine have left the country, including the ambassador.
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Three destroyed Russian tanks (plus one other vehicle) on the M-06 highway west of Kiev. Ukrainian losses appear to be two abandoned tractors, but hopefully they can be recovered.
https://t.me/dvish_alive/10496
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7 minutes ago, panzermartin said:Russian media states they used the Mach 10 missile for the first time in Ukraine. Looks like a very expensive weapon meant to counter NATO warships, why use against a warehouse
If it was a Soviet era nuclear storage facility then I'm imagining that it was more of an underground heavily strengthened stockpile than a warehouse l
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28 minutes ago, kraze said:
You seem to be missing the key point here.
Why would anyone be bothered by some country joining an exclusively defensive alliance - unless that anyone wants to attack said country?
I think it is because Putin its assuming that everyone is operating in the same world view that he has. Countries "applied to join" the Warsaw Pact because Russia had a strategic military use for them, combined with an ability to force them. I suspect he genuinely believes that e.g. the baltic states had pro-western governments put in and then instructed to ask to join NATO so that NATO could expand. In this world view the governments of 'minor' countries are chosen by the covert decisions of the 'major' ones, and the idea of being responsive to the wants and needs of the population doesn't come up.
In this world view, since the givens government of Ukraine wasn't chosen by Russia, then of course it was imposed and forcefully maintained by the west. And the west have no legitimate military strategic interests in Ukraine unless their goal is to be able to threaten Russia.
The Western view of course is that countries get to choose their own governments, and that countries can freely decide to join a security alliance (if they meet the entry conditions), and that this is a good thing because ultimately mutual defence reduces the chance of wars and leads to rising prosperity for all.
As an aside, Putin also has the "American disease" of assuming everything is about Russia, in the same way that Americans think that everything is about America ("why did Russia invade now? Let's look at what has changed in the USA recently to see what has caused this..." Ukraine might will view NATO membership as directly related to Russia, for obvious and entirely valid reasons, but for the west, Ukraine joining NATO isn't really about Russia. I'ts about extending the "peace bubble" to protect the lives and enhance the wellbeing of everyone inside it.
But that's not something Putin would do, so it's not something that he believes anyone else does either.
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Update on the mystery Croatian Tu-141 drone crash from the Wikipedia summary
QuoteOn 15 March 2022, a source close to the MoD of Croatia was cited as saying that the investigation had concluded that the crashed drone belonged to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and carried a bomb that was meant for striking Russia′s positions, but the drone had strayed off course and crashed after it ran out of fuel. Prime minister of Croatia, Andrej Plenković said to the media on March 17, that UAV flew all the way to Croatia because Romanian and Hungarian radars did not identify the incoming object as a real threat, due to the fact that there were several false alarms in days before the incident and thought that it was a glitch. Given the fact that neither Romanian or Hungarian radars reported the object, NATO in turn could not order the interception of the UAV.
On 17 March 2022, Ukrainian Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov continued to insist that Ukrainians were "not the ones who launched that drone towards Croatia"; he also expressed incomprehension of NATO′s apparent failure to prevent the incident, saying, "The drone flew over several member states. How come you didn’t see it? Why didn’t you destroy it? Can you cover your own airspace?"
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2 hours ago, Cobetco said:
a very smart friend informed me that the TB2 moves slowly enough that enough Russian SAM systems have a hard time tracking it. now I have no way to verify this and I have my doubts, but considering he was dismantling a AIM9 (L?) on his webcam I give the information more weight that your average joe.
Low speed can be a problem for some systems. There is a real world anti-missile tactic of pilots called "going in to the notch" or "notching a missile", which basically involves turning to move at 90 degrees to the incoming missile and descending. This doesn't work against IR tracking missiles, but can be effective against radar tracked ones.
The reason this works (when it does) is because radar needs to filter out all of the crap in its field of view to decide which bit is the plane. One component of this is "Doppler filtering". This uses the Doppler effect, which is sensitive to the component of the objects speed along the line of sight. The idea is that all of the ground clutter (which is at a variety of distances, and so hard to filter on that basis) is all moving at the same speed relative to the plane (i.e. the ground is stationary). So everything that is moving at the same speed as the ground is filtered out, which in theory just leaves you the fast moving aircraft.
Except if the aircraft happens to be flying exactly across your line of sight, with no speed (relative to the ground) towards or away from you, when it also has the same Doppler speed as the background and gets filtered out, which makes it vanish as far as the tracking is concerned.
The reason to descend while doing this is so that the missile tracking you is above you, so that you are in front of the ground from its point of view. If you are above the missile, then the background to your aircraft is the sky, and that's not giving any Doppler return so the aircraft sticks out like a sore thumb. Obviously ground based radar isn't going to be too affected by this - all the aircraft are above it.
A lot of modern missiles use radar within the missile for the final approach to target - they may be guided by the launching aircraft or ground station for most of the flight, but often the missile's radar takes over for the last few seconds, during which Doppler filtering can cause it to lose its tracking.
So its certainly plausible that a slow moving drone could get itself lost in the Doppler filtering for radar tracked missiles, depending on the nature of the attacking missile system. Missiles that gain altitude to take advantage of the reduced drag to increase speed and range will end up above the drone and if the have terminal self-guidance they could lose the drone in the background. But its going to do depend a lot on the nature of the tracking and the missile flight profile.
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Ukraine say they've regained control of Posad-Pokrovske village halfway between Mikolaiv and Kherson
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Russian column in Belarus apparently moving east out of Gomel in the direction of Dobrush, which is back towards the Russian border
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8 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Hmmm... I don't remember that. What I remember was the Troopers going to a Skinny's city and "bouncing" around it blowing stuff up while trying to make a point. IIRC they Heinlein wrote it so the Troopers were actively avoiding causing an casualties, just trying to scare them into not going neutral and thus negatively effecting the war against the Bugs. That's the way I remember it anyway! I read it probably 30 years ago so there's that
That matches my memory of the opening scene of the book. They hit the Skinny city and basically rampage through it destroying infrastucture and strategic targets as a kind of punitive raid. I'm not sure they were trying to avoid casualties (IIRC Rico bounces in to a building full of skinnies, so he drops a tac nuke and gets out again before they can react). But the point was to make a lot of noise and visible damage, hitting high visibility targets for maximum psychological effect.
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I'm guessing the Russians have withdrawn from Kherson airport now. Maybe that was the traffic jam in downtown Kherson this morning.
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Russian convoy on Ushakova avenue in Kherson.
Picking a still from around 14 seconds, I've found where this is on google streetview to figure out that they are heading south-east, but it's not obvious from that what they are doing. I'd guess moving in to central Kherson - if they were advancing out of Kherson or moving back across the Dneipr, I don't think they'd be going down the avenue in that direction, but maybe someone more local knows better.
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33 minutes ago, kraze said:
Trostyanets is in Sumy oblast. NE.
Probably made an error with coords when putting that bomb symbol onto the map
That makes more sense. Thanks for the correction.
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Russian group destroyed near Trostyanets. The big question, if you look where that is on the map, is how the hell did they get there. I'm guessing coming out of Transnistria is plausible?
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2 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
To restate the obvious, All these rear area units like EW/SigInt, radar, arty and c&c assets are continually being lost by one side, to their opposition who use very similar/identical gear and are not losing theirs.
So...how long can an army fight that, with each loss, materially strengthens it's enemy?
Let's say...3-4 weeks...? >:)
Also, since this is part of a withdrawl of Russian units from Mykolaiv through Kerson, it tells you that this doesn't really look like an orderly, planned withdrawl to reorganise lines. If you are redeploying unit in good order to shorten lines, you don't leave your valuable EW assets behind, I'd imagine.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Anyone want to bet that after the war, some people in Russia will point to the absence of young men in LDNR as "evidence" that they were right about Ukraine committing genocide?