Jump to content

Machor

Members
  • Posts

    618
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by Machor

  1. Russia's force projection in the Caucasus is down to nil:
  2. FancyCat already posted a tweet linking to this, but I think it's worth posting more detail: The Bellingcat report on the latest Russian torture/murder videos is out. I'll quote the introduction as a summary; TL;DR: 1. The primary suspect is a Siberian ethnic minority fighting alongside Chechens. 2. It looks like the Russians considered charging him, but changed their mind and claimed that it was Ukrainian soldiers who tortured and murdered the Ukrainian victim. Tracking the Faceless Killers who Mutilated and Executed a Ukrainian POW https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/05/tracking-the-faceless-killers-who-mutilated-and-executed-a-ukrainian-pow/ And a new atrocity:
  3. The BBC reporting from the heart of 'Mother Russia' (though actually very close to Estonia and Latvia) - don't hold your breath for a popular uprising, but mobilization is also not likely: Reality of Ukraine war hidden from Fortress Russia https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62331061
  4. Excellent reporting by the BBC's former Russia correspondent Sarah Rainsford, who was kicked out of Russia before the war; I will quote only the introduction, a part about possible crimes against humanity, and the conclusion, but highly recommend reading the whole article - it should be accessible to all without a paywall unless if you're in Russia: Ukraine's shadow army resisting Russian occupation https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62333795 "A resistance poster reads: Zaporizhzhia, land of death to the occupiers:"
  5. Everything has its time and place... You know what that move Russia made towards Kyiv in the beginning of the war was? Putin's Gambit - where you screw up, then say it's all part of the 'plan'.
  6. Posting this as a warning to those who may want to watch the videos: The video that Haiduk linked to shows the mutilated body of a Ukrainian soldier. I at least hope that he was already dead before this barbaric act was carried out. Before I ran into the castration video on Twitter, I had thankfully read warnings from people who had watched it about how traumatizing it was, and I stopped watching it after two seconds - it is extremely disturbing!
  7. @Aragorn2002 I would like to make a correction to the widespread misuse of chess as a metaphor, but not for pedantic reasons - I think it's something worth keeping in mind when playing CM or any other tactical wargame: Most chess games between grandmasters end in a draw. You do not win at chess by outsmarting your opponent; you win by waiting for him or her to make a mistake, and capitalizing on it. If neither player makes a mistake - and grandmasters rarely make mistakes - the game ends in a draw. From Wikipedia: "In chess games played at the top level, a draw is the most common outcome of a game: of around 22,000 games published in The Week in Chess played between 1999 and 2002 by players with a FIDE Elo rating of 2500 or above, 55 percent were draws. According to chess analyst Jeff Sonas, although an upward draw rate trend can be observed in general master-level play since the beginning of the 20th century, it is currently "holding pretty steady around 50%, and is only increasing at a very slow rate". Draw rate of elite grandmasters, rated more than 2750 Elo, is, however, significantly higher, surpassing 70% in 2017 and 2018. In top-level correspondence chess under ICCF, where computer assistance is allowed, the draw rate is much higher than in the over-the-board chess: of 1512 games played in the World Championship finals and the Candidates' sections between 2010 and 2013, 82.3% ended in a draw. Since that time, draw rate in top-level correspondence play has been rising steadily, reaching 97% in 2019."
  8. Good reporting from the front by the BBC - @Taranis will like this: Ukraine war: West's modern weapons halt Russia's advance in Donbas https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62317366 And support for my observation on the previous page of the thread that Ukraine is closing the 'artillery gap':
  9. Helpful infographics from Volodymyr Dacenko (https://twitter.com/Volodymyr_D_/status/1551964492606709767?cxt=HHwWjoC93ffe14krAAAA ) According to the current balance of power infographic, Ukraine seems to be closing the 'artillery gap' - but ATACMS should have been arriving yesterday; any number of crappy old APCs would also be appreciated: And another one on Ukraine's AFV numbers at the start, losses, and replacements:
  10. @dan/california @danfrodo @panzermartin The bearded 40+ guy yells "Allahu Akbar" before starting to shoot - I'm assuming they're Kadyrovites.
  11. I don't want to take the thread OT either, so leaving this here without comment - as factual as it gets: F1 driver says 'what happens in Alberta is a crime,' feels responsibility to speak about climate change https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/sebastian-vettel-oilsands-alberta-climate-change-1.6493309 "Sebastian Vettel arrived at the Montreal Grand Prix wearing his thoughts about climate change on his T-shirt. The Formula One star from Germany arrived at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in a T-shirt with "Stop Mining Tar Sands," and "Canada's Climate Crime" under the picture of a pipeline. He's wearing a helmet with the same slogan this weekend. "I think what happens in Alberta is a crime because you chop down a lot of trees and you basically destroy the place just to extract oil and the manner of doing it with the tarsands, oilsands mining, is horrible for nature," Vettel said, when asked about the T-shirt at a news conference Friday. ... His team Aston Martin is sponsored by Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil giant Aramco."
  12. I guess it had become unavoidable at this point: Russia to pull out of International Space Station https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62308069 "Russia says it will withdraw from the International Space Station (ISS) after 2024 and build its own station instead."
  13. The Czechs are learning lessons from the Ukrainians: Czech police add Ferrari taken from criminals to fleet https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62295674 "Police in the Czech Republic have unveiled the latest addition to their fleet of cars - a Ferrari capable of speeds up to 326km/h (202mph). Police said the car had been confiscated from criminals."
  14. What is your take on the video that is in my second past post that I linked to? - Those Ukrainian Mi-8s seem to be firing almost vertically for a reason. (A less interesting explanation would be that they were loitering too close to their target when they were called in.)
  15. Judge for yourself - I think, yes, and that seemed to be the consensus here when I posted this, as well as with the comments on Twitter: There's also this unique advantage that you can fire the rockets at a very high angle, to overcome deep trenches:
  16. Ukrainians doing flying MLRS with Czech Mi-24V. When they're flying this low, I feel the need to think in terms of a medium other than 'air' and 'ground' (like 'Eskimos have 50 words for snow' blah blah); reminds me of the special 'nap-of-the-earth' rules in Avalon Hill's MBT and IDF: And an interesting find: It turns out this 'flying MLRS' was discussed in an NVA Mi-24 manual, so it's not an exotic maneuver that Russians came up with in Syria and Ukrainians copied from them in this war - by extension, former WP Mi-24 pilots should know about it:
  17. This was precisely what Panzerkrautswerfer argued at length on this forum several years ago - and against a VDV veteran; I feel privileged to have followed their debate back then.
  18. Dropping by with Coke & Stripper news: Ukraine war: Russian investigator says 92 Ukrainians charged https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62287502
  19. Shevchuk's "Умирали пацаны" - "The boys were dying" was the first song that I thought about when this war started, and one would understand why by looking at the lyrics; but first, the song itself: Shevchuk wrote this song after visiting the front during the First Chechen War, and here he's singing it to footage he himself shot in Chechnya: My attempt at a translation:
  20. @panzermartin Anything that Erdoğan does or doesn't do from now on leads back to this: He can no longer win an election without going full Lukashenko. If he loses, he goes to jail.
  21. Let's not take this to the toxic depths of US domestic politics, but focus on the article's argument: Ukraine's strategy, like that of Russia, is also constrained by politics, in this case the dynamics of US domestic politics [I have no idea why acronyms haven't been capitalized.]: Is America growing weary of the long war in Ukraine? https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/07/17/is-america-growing-weary-of-the-long-war-in-ukraine
  22. RE: Mini and Micro UAV Defence Turkey is fielding a native system named 'Şahin' (falcon) based on the Mk 19 - while they're too broke to field other systems they've advertised in numbers, I do expect this one will be prioritized for Syria and Northern Iraq: It fires airburst grenades: Aselsan develops Atom 40 mm high-velocity air bursting munition (HV ABM) I remember @LongLeftFlank asking about using 40mm against drones.
  23. I can chime in with something interesting I learned from the History Channel's 75th Anniversary of Hiroshima documentary: At the time, there were physicists who thought that nuclear weapons were a pipe dream, and Japan's top physicist was among them. The day after Hiroshima, he was flown there to observe the aftermath from the air, and his immediate reaction was something like: "So, they made it." Of course, this need not have been deduced from analyzing the blast damage; it would have been the only explanation for how a single bomb could cause so much damage be it through the blast or fires.
  24. Grigb posted about this three pages ago, and now it's official: Russia's McDonald's replacement runs low on fries https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62103506
×
×
  • Create New...