TheVulture
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Posts posted by TheVulture
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11 minutes ago, DesertFox said:
I guess you can't make this up, can you?
Is the bridge designed to do that? Judging by the road barriers either side of the bridge, and the fact that you can't just move a bridge on concrete pillars embedded in the river bed, and that this bridge is obviously a barrier to navigation by larger boats - it all makes me wonder if this is some kind of swing bridge that is designed to be opened to allow large boats to pass.
Edit: yes, just found a webcam of the bridge - it is back to normal again now and traffic moving across it: https://youwebcams.org/online/kolomna/mityaevskij-most/
and just as I look at the webcam (20 mins after the timestamp of the tweet image), there is a small military-looking convoy heading across the bridge with a police escort:
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Allegedly another helicopter shot down near Voronezh, but the video doesn't really show anything aside from smoke from the ground: https://t.me/Pravda_Gerashchenko/74049
Wagner continuing to move equipment (including T-72 tanks) out of Luhansk and in to Russia, as of an hour ago:
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Just now, Beleg85 said:
@Grigb thanks for reportng, btw. Do you happen to know if Wagner still controlled some of his own airforce?
(I'm not grigb but...) no idea on that, but Wagner has apparently taken control of three or more airfields (at Rostov, Voronezh and Millerovo), so they may well have an airforce now.
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17 minutes ago, FancyCat said:
That seems out of step with the rhetoric so far. Wagner say they are not interfering with the invasion of Ukraine, and have shot down aircraft that were targeting them. But an An-26 is a transport aircraft, so a) it is no immediate threat, and b) were they really that sure that it was carrying equipment or troops that were being deployed against Wagner?
Just seems to me that shooting down transport aircraft is, at first glance, at odds with what Prig says he is doing.
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4 minutes ago, billbindc said:
Rumor mill now is that two Wagner convoys heading towards Rostov and the Interior Ministry troops let them through. Wagner Telegram just post "It Begins". If that all checks, it's a bigger thing than we yet know and it has support in Moscow. The move to Rostov is intelligent too. Prigozhin likely thinks the units there will be swayed to his side. If he can get that ball rolling who knows where it stops.
It also could serve to put the maximum dislocation effect on the MoD in Ukraine - they are mostly focussed on the south, and if this is right then Wagner is going to be a) sitting on their supply lines and b) cut them off from getting back to places that matter in Russia in a timely manner - depending on how much support there is for Wagner here of course,
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3 minutes ago, Huba said:
"Big if true" kinda news:
If this is confirmed, the full blown civil war has started. Damn it's going to be difficult to sleep today!
Hard to take a '50km' convoy literally - it's about 50km from the border crossing to Rostov-on-Don. That sounds, at the very least, like a big exaggeration.
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5 minutes ago, danfrodo said:
Prig's gonna be shocked at how fast his fighters defect. Can't wait to see that. He can't pay them if RU stops the money. he can't feed them, he can't supply them. This is absurd. And RU MOD will just sweep all those men into the RU regular army. Gawd, now this is entertainment!!
While Wagner makes a lot of money from e.g. mining concessions in exchange for military support in some African countries, which is technically independent of the government, you've got to suspect that it is Russian government pressure that set up those deals in the first place. And in the absence of government support, the deals are perhaps likely to disappear.
It's really hard to see how Pirogzhin can think he is going to win this, unless he knows he's got men already in position and considerable support from some sections of the military and other people that matter.
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2 hours ago, Lethaface said:
The interesting bit imo is whether the replacement cost (which do actually need to be paid in full one would assume) had come out a specific budget 'jar' labeled 'Ukraine mil support' and now needs to be refilled from another jar outside the defense budget (creating a deficit somewhere else), or are these just labeled costs which are all credited against the overall US Defense budget.
In the latter case they can just 'change the label' retroactively, which will then also impact the fulfillment of the allowed balance sheet expenses for 'Ukraine mil support' for the difference (and thus open up the difference which seems to be 6.2 Bn).In other words, it might be just a simple balance sheet correction exercise. AFAIK the US Mil budget is a sort of current account backed by a large virtual $ printing machine where 6Bn is pocket change.
But indeed not a good impression on the accounting side of things for the Pentagon, one would expect these things to be checked by teams of controllers and accountants; if you cook the books cook m good :D.
PS I'm neither an accountant, although did learn a couple of things about it.I think that the reality is that the 'cost' either way is more of less fictional. These are items from deep reserve storage that were never going to be used short of a major land invasion of the United States (which, obviously, isn't on the cards). They don't need to be replaced. They are just stuff that has been obsoleted out of service or withdrawn due to changing budget allocations, and they get 'replaced' naturally over the course of time as new procurement programs update and replace currently in-service equipment and it gets moved into permanent storage.
All that it means is that the US equipment stores in deep reserve are slightly smaller, but in practice there is no reasonable scenario where that matters. And if it ever does matter, it is probably in a scenario of total all-out superpower world war in which case a few $Billion of bookkeeping games isn't going to matter in the slightest.
I real terms, much of the dollar value assigned to aid for Ukraine is fictional - no-one is actually spending $6B on this equipment, or on replacing it (except in so far as they were spending that anyway). What it might be is 'foot in the door' spending, where "we approved spending of X, but now accounting changes mean that it only cost Y, so we can still spend (X-Y) on additional aid for Ukraine without anyone complaining". Or having to get approval from the relevant oversight bodies
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1 hour ago, sburke said:
Perhaps I'm being excessively cynical, but 3 days ago youtube channel War Archive did a video on the opening of the battle for Kyiv (linked a few pages back, and I'll link it again below), which included a lot of information on the Ukrainian air force actions in the opening days, most of which I'd never seen before (and certainly not gathered in one place). Sounds to me like someone watched the video, took notes and called that "research" for their article, when War Archive was the one who put in the hours of the actual research .
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30 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
Hmmm....
IF that's accurate, then that's an order of magnitude bigger than anything we've seen so far in the offensive, and some thrusts have already reached halfway to Tokmak. That would be pretty big news. Any thoughts on how reliable it is Haiduk, or might there be an element of optimistic interpretation of reports mixed in here?
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4 hours ago, cesmonkey said:
Another Russian telegram update:
https://t.me/Sladkov_plus/7968I'd be surprised if this was a full-blown attempt to attempt a pontoon crossing. Given the uncertain stability of land either side of the river (and the newly exposed land in the reservoir), I'd imagine it was more likely to be a 'proof of concept' attack - make some plans, give it a go, see what unexpected complications and problems the troops run across, and gauge the Russian response .
More of a feasibility study to determine what would be required to seriously attempt a crossing.
That's my uneducated guess anyway.
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5 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:
So this is Moscow stating it is ok for Ukrainian planes to operate out of NATO airfields?
Even Moscow is trying to get the West to realize it has absolute escalation dominance
Sounds like it.
Moscow has backed down on every single "red line" that it has drawn when NATO has pushed the issue. The only strategy they have left that is even slightly plausible is to de-escalate, drag things out for as long as possible, and hope that NATO countries get tired of supporting Ukraine (obviously coupled with stirring up the western tankie contingent to go on about Russia being willing to talk about peace, and Ukraine being belligerent).
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1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:
Maybe this has been discussed before, but I can't help but be reminded of the battle of Kursk... The Germans postponed their offensive in order to wait for more, newer, and better tanks, while the Soviets used the time to dig in and construct heavily mined defensive belts.
If I recall correctly, the best equipped German spearhead divisions at Kursk, after waiting for those reinforcements, were still so depleted that by early war German metrics they would have been categorised as "unfit for combat duty"
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4 minutes ago, riptides said:
Oblast.
Is there a Tokmak oblast? I thought Tokmak was just a town in Zaporizhzhia oblast.
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4 minutes ago, billbindc said:
Don't mistake what Simonyan is doing. She is as plugged in as it is possible to be with Putin's circle and clearly that circle has decided that the offensive that's starting and the resources Russia has to stop it a status quo result would be a pretty good outcome for Russia. Her job is to make that outcome seem reasonable in the domestic Russian propaganda space. Thus, the trial balloon.
So I expect we are can look forward to all the "totally not pro-Russian" mouthpieces in the western media to start up the line of "Russia is willing to have a cease fire and negotiate. Why are we supporting Ukrainian warmongers who want to keep the war going rather than have peace?"
I wonder how long it will take for similar sounding comments to start turning up all over the Web.
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7 minutes ago, kraze said:
Crimea is an occupied Ukrainian territory. Why would russians suddenly care if local population has drinking water?
Lets be honest - the Russian's would cheerfully do this to any actual Russians inside Russia too (except maybe in Moscow).
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54 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:
With Nuclear PP out of order, Ukraine will loose what...15% of entire energetical grid? Catastrophy.
The plant in question is already shut down and not producing any electricity for Ukraine's grid, so no major change
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3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Ok, so this is really starting to look like a strategic shaping op. The Russians are clearly rattled. Guess we are calling BS on the whole nuclear threshold line.
For those who've not seen it yet, this weeks Perun video was all about escalation and Russia's 'red lines'. A lot of theoretical discussion, but he notes the same thing that I think has been said here: Russia produces a lot of noise about how providing Ukraine with X is an unacceptable escalation that will provoke a severe response, but when X is provided, Russia generates a lot of bravado (about how X is actually worthless and has already been destroyed by Russia) as cover for essentially backing down, because the one thing Russia can't afford is to risk escalating to more active NATO involvement.
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13 minutes ago, Seedorf81 said:
Have you ever tried to catch a very fit mouse in a big house with a lot of furniture and other stuff where it can hide under? It's ridiculously difficult. That is why the Russians struggle against the "invaders".
And it is almost as funny as "Tom and Jerry"..
Actually yes. We had an old house with very large rooms lots of nooks and crannies, ans way too much furniture and other stuff. And two cats who seemed to operate a "catch and release" policy re mice. We never had mice in the house until we had cats...
It was often a day or two before the mice made a mistake that let us catch and evict them. We usually got them before the cats managed to though.
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My suspicion would be that the Belgorod situation is a direct consequence of Russia's initial reaction to the first Grayvoron incursion. That was a raid in force that hung around to force a Russian response (plus whatever morale, psyops, distraction etc. benefits it produced). Now that Russian response has been noted and studied, and either it was weak enough that they thought there was a genuine chance of gaining and holding some Russian territory, or that a more significant incursion was needed to force Russia to divert forces to defend Belgorod and secure other thinly held areas of the border - not letting Russia assume it can continue defending the border with token forces and hoping that just the escalation of moving in to Russian territory would be enough deterrent.
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Explosions reported in Sevastopol, possible in the port area. https://t.me/chp_sevastopol/15854
QuoteЧто за звуки непонятные в районе корабелки? как что-то взрывается либо как ПВО работает. Непонятно
(google translate is pretty incoherent on this one, so if anyone can do a better job....)
Maybe it's like a horror movie, and one of those unmanned explosive boats has caught up with the Ivan Khurs again just when it thought it was safe
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Interrupting the economics debate for a moment...
Looking over all the open source data on the Ivan Khurs:
- Multiple videos and photos from various angles of it returning to Sevastopol with no visible damage
- US satellite images of it being back in its usual berth in Sevastopol
- No claims or evidence from Ukraine or NATO of it being anywhere else
- No video or photos existing of any damage to the ship
I think it is reasonable to conclude at the moment that it didn't suffer any serious externally visible damage and returned to Sevastopol under its own power at a pretty normal speed.
Possibly it suffered some less obvious equipment damage, but there's no evidence for that. Russia is saying it will return to sea once it has completed its resupply, which is the reason it returned to port, so I guess the real test so be how long it says docked in Sevastopol. If it's heading back to the Bosphorus area within a few days, it's probably mostly fine. If it stays docked for several weeks, it's probably having some kind of repairs carried out.
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Still confusing info on the state of the Ivan Khurs. There was a video of Telegram yesterday supposedly of it returning to port unharmed, and one this morning on twitter of it allegedly in Sevastopol. As the comments in the thread note however, the weather is totally overcast, while todays whether satellite pictures over Crimea show completely clear skies around Sevastopol (at least at 15:00). Looking back at cloud movement over the last 3 hours, I'd guesstimate that it is possible that Sevastopol was overcast until around 09:00-10:00 (local time), so possibly this is from early morning?
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Makes a change from the usual "nuke everyone" rhetoric we are used to from Russian TV:
QuoteRussia has no plans to use nuclear weapons in connection with the situation around Ukraine, there have been no changes in doctrinal approaches to this issue, said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
And Wagner is sitting on top of all of their main logistics hubs, so good luck getting them the fuel, ammo and transportation they'd need.