Kraft

This news, though it was again from "anonymous source" summoned a huge wave of hate in Ukraine. Especially on background of today's heavy strike. 
Despite President's Office rejected US warned Ukraine to stop strikes we can see there are no strikes in about a week on Russian refineries. Also journalists of "Voice of America" Ukrainian branch officially asked White House to comment the article in FT. The answer was very blurred and contained the phrase "we don't encourage attacks inside the Russia" (well, I imagine 1941 and White House, which don't encourage Britain strikes inside Germany). 
I think, after today's disaster, we have to blow Russian refieries and energy infrastructure with double force. It's more and more opinions here that US doesn't want a victory of Ukraine. These limited weapon supply after the peak in December 2022 is just for "not allow Ukriane to lose", but not to "Ukrainian victory". Last speech of Sullivan, where he pointed out "victory conditions" for Ukraine - "if Ukriane keeps ittelsf as democracy state bla-bla-bla"... but without pointing out in what borders. 
What we can expect from the country which even can't do nothinbg with Huthi attacks and asking China to influence on them (!!!)

 
 

To add, there are now 50 videos from drones filming russians end themselfs, I think 4 new videos just the last 7 days. The frequency has been increasing steadily.
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Also first filmed instance of an african/cuban mercenary receiving his paycheck for early retirement♻️

And while this human garbage comes to kill for riches

Anastasia, a medical officer, gave her life trying to pull a wounded comrade from the 67th ombr to safety.

Not necessarily.  "False flag" doesn't have to mean "we did it ourselves"; it can equally be 'helping' a genuinely hostile group to carry out an attack by supplying funding,  gear and making sure the security apparatus remains ignorant and unprepared to respond.
But we don't even have enough information for speculation at the moment. 

the greatest nation in the world -- held hostage by lunatics due to the unbelievable cowardice of GOP congressmen & women and a GOP voter base-cult that's so brainwashed it doesn't even know where reality even begins anymore.  Disgraceful and sickening.  

With a complete breakdown in the promised US support and perceived unreliability as an ally, how much is a higher chance for Bidens protracted status quo war stance in office worth if MAGA hats keep their complete deadlock on the system?
The Trump base doesnt seem to mind at all if the US gov stays paralysed and I dont see them change their mind when another election is "stolen". The supposed bypassing of the speaker only now has a single republican supporter, meanwhile not even all Democrats have supported it.
MAGA blockade and resulting shell rationing has gone on for a quarter of the war now! 
Pressure on russia to end this has to come from somewhere and everyday the US does nothing because of a "minority" fraction causing touble is a day further in a future where it counts less as an ally and consequently will be listened to less.

To add, there are now 50 videos from drones filming russians end themselfs, I think 4 new videos just the last 7 days. The frequency has been increasing steadily.
----
Also first filmed instance of an african/cuban mercenary receiving his paycheck for early retirement♻️

And while this human garbage comes to kill for riches

Anastasia, a medical officer, gave her life trying to pull a wounded comrade from the 67th ombr to safety.

To add, there are now 50 videos from drones filming russians end themselfs, I think 4 new videos just the last 7 days. The frequency has been increasing steadily.
----
Also first filmed instance of an african/cuban mercenary receiving his paycheck for early retirement♻️

And while this human garbage comes to kill for riches

Anastasia, a medical officer, gave her life trying to pull a wounded comrade from the 67th ombr to safety.

Great news after another night of Russian bombardment...

Two russians armed with stick and shovel try their luck at air defense but the claymore airburst FPV does not need to get close, better luck next time🙂

Heh
 
 

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Here is a post of Aleksandr Nevzorov - famous Russian journalist of "perestroyka" and early Yeltsyn's time.
"Protestniks", demoralized by result continue liсe's movements. They poke arouns in "violation on polling stations", "ballots throwings", "rights violation". The squeaks about "not properly sealed ballot boxes" sound espacially funny. But it doesn't matter anymore. It's all acomplished. 
"Results" were announced brazely and categorically. The regime is confident in own full  impunity, in own right to draw any digits and wipe own feet on indignant faces. 
Сan we consider 87 % result as true? We can. It's no matter how "vote and count". It's only matter how the people accept announced digits. But they were accepted resignedly. 
Threre are neither barricades, nor tires. City halls don't burn. The regime buttons his pants. Sucked Russia gratefully swallows and licks her lips. 
The time is coming to get rid of last illusions. 18th of March 2024 is a wonderful day to sober up and dispel a beautiful haze about Russian "people" [in means "nation"]. Yes, there is pathetic million, who still sane. But it doesn't "makes a weather" and in nearest time either will reformate itself, or will die. Today we have unique opportunity to burry this stupid myth. Only on his grave we can think about "what next"
      
 

From what I could sort through last night, it does sound like control signals for many (most?) drones are encrypted. It's a lot less bandwidth, for sure. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't really true and that a lot of them are encoded so that drones and bases don't get crossed up, but not actually encrypted, and the marketing people don't know the difference.
And I agree that putting together a map of every drone in the sky is probably not that hard, even for hobbyists.  I have a cheap SDR mounted on my garage to pick up ADS-B, along with 50,000 of my closest friends around the country.  It all goes to a server and I can look anywhere and see a map of every aircraft in the sky over the US with a lag of a few seconds.  I know it's a few seconds because when there are brushfires I can watch the trains of planes coming and then know exactly when to walk into the backyard with binoculars and where to look to see some cool old aircraft that have been retrofitted for firefighting.  
And it doesn't matter if they're actually transmitting ADS-B data.  The ones that only send a hex code are accurately located by MLAT. And that's just a bunch of hobbyists with $30 SDR dongles and Raspberry Pis.  If you're a military, you know your opponent isn't going to be nice enough to transmit hex codes in the clear, but they will have some repetitive features of the signal that you can use to generate positions with MLAT.  And it's all done with small passive antennas that just need rough LOS to the area and computers that fit in the palm of your hand and only pull a few watts.
The endpoint is full or nearly full autonomy with minimal transmission.  Any high bandwidth transmission will be optical or relayed through a high altitude relay aircraft (or low satellite constellation) 

I think just being able to get a rough glimpse of the drones path can help discover the drone team, if they are stretching the range its likely a near straight line from team to target, especially if they are unaware they are being watched and havent adapted
The OSINT geolocators are already incredibly fast at finding even simple treeline locations from a few seconds cut drone footage 

I think just being able to get a rough glimpse of the drones path can help discover the drone team, if they are stretching the range its likely a near straight line from team to target, especially if they are unaware they are being watched and havent adapted
The OSINT geolocators are already incredibly fast at finding even simple treeline locations from a few seconds cut drone footage 

It seems to me that open video feeds are still a risk when going up against a high-tech adversary. Let's assume and hope that the telemetry like speed, heading and GPS is already fully encrypted and "uncrackable" so it's only the analog video feed that's "in the clear". If we can scan the standard frequencies and find some of those feeds, then pipe those into another system which already has the terrain visually mapped out from its own overflights, it might be possible to geolocate the incoming drone before it's picked up by other detection systems. I remember someone upthread talking about lasers or autocannon targeting the sound of rotors, and if that's the state of the art then intercepting radio signals containing meaningful data is going to give you a much longer lead time.
Of course I am just hypothesizing here, but thinking about scanning radio frequencies looking for audio signals... I am sure that right now hobbyists could set a USB-sized SDR to auto scan, then feed the audio hits into a language model to have it quickly detect what kind of stuff is being discussed on each channel (railroad, logging, weather etc). Video is much more complex but the building blocks are there. If these things travel 60km/h and you start to get signal 10km out, that's up to 10 minutes to figure out where it is and call in one of your anti-drone drones to take it out. Even better if your anti-drone mothership was already in the air taking live footage of the same area to feed back into the model. But as soon as their video feed is encrypted, it shuts down the whole (counter) attack vector.

Yeah DJI encrypts the data, but FPV racing drones don’t (lag), and most hobby drones don’t because it’s more complicated. Specifically, it’s really easy to send a control signal (and encrypt it), but for video it’s more work, and sending analog video is really easy in terms of hardware and software.
Pumping video over WiFi isn’t hugely hard, but it’s more work in terms of software, chips etc, and then your FPV goggles need a way to hook up to Wifi vs just receiving an analog signal etc.
 

While it is a fair point to make that SSL/TLS everywhere is relatively "new", things in tech do move quickly and the days of chunky crypto accelerator daughter boards - at least for networking - are 20+ years in the rear-view window. Nowadays everyone is carrying around a device in their pocket that can comfortably process E2EE real-time video and audio, so it seems absurd to me that much more expensive FPV drones can't manage the same performance.
I get that in an EW environment that's heavily saturated with other signals every little piece helps - if you've ever tried to get Steam Remote Play going over wi-fi in a densely-populated urban area you know the pain - but surely it's cheaper to downgrade the video quality than skip encryption? Especially given H.264 and H.265 compression can be done in consumer-level hardware too nowadays.
Perhaps I am missing something obvious because my experience in the tech industry is more server rooms than IoT, but it still seems wacky to me that in 2024 someone could trivially "tap into" the video feed of an FPV drone flying overhead. Somehow more believable to me would be oldskool war driving with a Pringles can and brute-force guessing the enemy wi-fi password.
To try to add a bit of independent research here... This is the only reference I can find online on the topic, and it's 8 years old, but they imply that the DJI protocol back then was already encrypted: https://mavicpilots.com/threads/how-secure-is-ocusync.363/
DJI's wonderful webpage localization tech means I can only access the Taiwan version of the page here in the beautiful isle, but from their own page: https://enterprise.dji.com/zh-tw/data-security

 
 

Just to clarify, I do not believe these losses to be sustainable, I have repeatedly said otherwise. Russia has about 1.5-2 years at high intensity left in its storage, before it is down to production numbers only. I quoted the lowest estimation from a western intelligence group.
The issue is that in the short and medium term these losses are replaceable for russia only. After that, they are irreplacable for both but my guess is that by then drones will be so dominant that neither can do anything but dig down and try to get into the earth.

If anyone here has knowledge and is interested in technical info on Radio, EW, missile, and drones, frequencies, developments in the FPV arms race, etc, I have this channel to share. Sadly its content surpasses my knowledge on the matter.

If anyone here has knowledge and is interested in technical info on Radio, EW, missile, and drones, frequencies, developments in the FPV arms race, etc, I have this channel to share. Sadly its content surpasses my knowledge on the matter.

If anyone here has knowledge and is interested in technical info on Radio, EW, missile, and drones, frequencies, developments in the FPV arms race, etc, I have this channel to share. Sadly its content surpasses my knowledge on the matter.

Attrition in my mind is the constant cost of war, where as casulties from offensive operations are seperate. The naming here is pretty irrelevant though because as I said, the ZSU is not suffering more absolute casulties*
This is not because the average drone pilot is 10 times better or has 10 times more drones and thus somehow offsets the total lack of shells.
Its just a result that attacking in an environment where units can be reliably spotted kilometers away before they even assembled for a large scale attack, and can be killed more easily with the cheap-o FPV PGM, is near suicidal as russian meatwaves prove day in day out.
Even if they make it past no mans land, a focused drone effort wipes most of the exposed and often EW-unprotected / unentrenched survivors out before much of any momentum can be gained. 
Its the same for both sides in this way but as Ukraine is not attacking, its not subject to this exposure as much, just the daily bombing and artillery shelling
Yes, I agree with this. Beyond 2025-2026, this war will reach non sustainability for putin and keeping a stalemate will just help get there safer. But this does not refute the idea that the disparity in casualties is caused by offensive actions, which compensate for the firepower difference.
 
*although, when it comes to relative losses I think the picture depends on the weapon system. I made the case for the Avdiivka losses, where russia ended up basically at a zero change with the captured, refurbished and produced vehicles in that timeframe, while the losses to Ukraine are permanent and lowered the capabilities of the armed forces, since there is close to no heavy gear still being supplied in quantity. 

I don't think your argument really addresses the point here. Russia does not have to be as effective pound for pound as Ukraine, they can use more resources sustainably. So in a static situation they can use more shells than Ukraine so even if they are more wasteful the number of casualties may end up being the same. 
That is obviously not ideal for Ukraine - if both sides are just sitting in trenches taking 500 casualties a day then the war is not going to end any time soon.