Butschi

As some of us might have noticed, a next step has unfolded in the investigation into the Nordstream sabotage.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2533281-waarom-duitsland-als-enige-land-wel-blijft-jagen-op-nord-stream-saboteurs
It is one of the few/only subjects I feel that this forum in majority stepped over information and arguments and believed what they wanted to believe.
The sponsors/beneficiaries behind the sabotage are still unknown, so fundamentally all is still up in the air. But some things people don't like to consider are now more in the open to consider again, if I may say so.
I for one think it is prudent to classify some of the original information about this attack, which hinted at a 'Ukrainian direction', as serious + trustworthy. Mind, there is zero proof or indication that Presidential level/Zelensky was involved. It could also still be something in which Russia has meddled. But it also could be something in which Russia didn't mettle.
Some might feel like just stepping over the whole thing and leave it be. But that would be similar to telling an American supporting Biden and having info that Ukrainian entities might somehow be involved in an assassination against Trump, to just step over it and leave it be; it's probably just internal kompromat.

I made no such assumption. The person Germany is now looking for with an arrest warrant is believed to be Ukrainian citizen. A possible involvement of the Ukrainian military is not a conspiracy theory but I referred to an article in "Die Zeit" (one of the news magazines involved in the investigation).
https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2024-07/nordstream-anschlag-ermittlungen-festnahme

It is in German, here a translation of the part I was referring to:
 
That's not really news and no where near conclusive (as the article itself says) but it can't be ruled out, either - which is why I said "possibly even with support from the Ukrainian military". It is certainly not a conspiracy theory.
True but stupid people do stupid things and sometimes even intelligent people do stupid things. Even if the Ukrainian military was actually involved in some way that doesn't mean this group of people were professionals. It was still relatively early on in the war and maybe they simply were patriots and/or wanted to show their support of Ukraine. Stupid? Maybe, unthinkable? No.
Look, we don't know that much more than we knew earlier, on the other hand, as I said before, I doubt our judiciary system would have gone ahead with that arrest warrant without solid evidence to back it. That is not a proof, either, but makes this version a candidate to at least seriously consider.
As you say yourself, "we don't have any good information to go on". Ukraine, like others, had the means, motivation and opportunity to do it and so like in any criminal case I suggest we simply keep an open mind and not exclude leads just because we don't like where they are going or want someone else to be behind this.

I made no such assumption. The person Germany is now looking for with an arrest warrant is believed to be Ukrainian citizen. A possible involvement of the Ukrainian military is not a conspiracy theory but I referred to an article in "Die Zeit" (one of the news magazines involved in the investigation).
https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2024-07/nordstream-anschlag-ermittlungen-festnahme

It is in German, here a translation of the part I was referring to:
 
That's not really news and no where near conclusive (as the article itself says) but it can't be ruled out, either - which is why I said "possibly even with support from the Ukrainian military". It is certainly not a conspiracy theory.
True but stupid people do stupid things and sometimes even intelligent people do stupid things. Even if the Ukrainian military was actually involved in some way that doesn't mean this group of people were professionals. It was still relatively early on in the war and maybe they simply were patriots and/or wanted to show their support of Ukraine. Stupid? Maybe, unthinkable? No.
Look, we don't know that much more than we knew earlier, on the other hand, as I said before, I doubt our judiciary system would have gone ahead with that arrest warrant without solid evidence to back it. That is not a proof, either, but makes this version a candidate to at least seriously consider.
As you say yourself, "we don't have any good information to go on". Ukraine, like others, had the means, motivation and opportunity to do it and so like in any criminal case I suggest we simply keep an open mind and not exclude leads just because we don't like where they are going or want someone else to be behind this.

Honestly, and no offense meant, it feels like you want it to be the Russians and so can't accept evidence that points in a different direction.
Re your point 1: At least one member of that team was a specialist in diving to these depths.
Thinking that so many people in the German judiciary system plus the journalists from at least three different news outlets are all on the Russian payroll is quite ridiculous. Try to see it from a different point of view: Evidence pointing towards Ukraine is really inconvenient for our government, especially with a bunch of elections coming up that sees the Putin supporters in front. I know, Scholzing and all but we did send a lot of money and equipment to Ukraine. Learning that Ukrainians blew up the pipelines - possibly even with support from the Ukrainian military - would put the government into a difficult position. Well, an even worse position than it is in now. In addition, aggravating the Polish government would have been kind of satisfying when it was still PiS, I guess, but we really don't want this to happen with the new government.
So, whatever the truth will turn out to be in the end, I think it is very unlikely that this arrest warrant would have been sent if there wasn't solid evidence to back it.

Honestly, and no offense meant, it feels like you want it to be the Russians and so can't accept evidence that points in a different direction.
Re your point 1: At least one member of that team was a specialist in diving to these depths.
Thinking that so many people in the German judiciary system plus the journalists from at least three different news outlets are all on the Russian payroll is quite ridiculous. Try to see it from a different point of view: Evidence pointing towards Ukraine is really inconvenient for our government, especially with a bunch of elections coming up that sees the Putin supporters in front. I know, Scholzing and all but we did send a lot of money and equipment to Ukraine. Learning that Ukrainians blew up the pipelines - possibly even with support from the Ukrainian military - would put the government into a difficult position. Well, an even worse position than it is in now. In addition, aggravating the Polish government would have been kind of satisfying when it was still PiS, I guess, but we really don't want this to happen with the new government.
So, whatever the truth will turn out to be in the end, I think it is very unlikely that this arrest warrant would have been sent if there wasn't solid evidence to back it.

Honestly, and no offense meant, it feels like you want it to be the Russians and so can't accept evidence that points in a different direction.
Re your point 1: At least one member of that team was a specialist in diving to these depths.
Thinking that so many people in the German judiciary system plus the journalists from at least three different news outlets are all on the Russian payroll is quite ridiculous. Try to see it from a different point of view: Evidence pointing towards Ukraine is really inconvenient for our government, especially with a bunch of elections coming up that sees the Putin supporters in front. I know, Scholzing and all but we did send a lot of money and equipment to Ukraine. Learning that Ukrainians blew up the pipelines - possibly even with support from the Ukrainian military - would put the government into a difficult position. Well, an even worse position than it is in now. In addition, aggravating the Polish government would have been kind of satisfying when it was still PiS, I guess, but we really don't want this to happen with the new government.
So, whatever the truth will turn out to be in the end, I think it is very unlikely that this arrest warrant would have been sent if there wasn't solid evidence to back it.

Honestly, and no offense meant, it feels like you want it to be the Russians and so can't accept evidence that points in a different direction.
Re your point 1: At least one member of that team was a specialist in diving to these depths.
Thinking that so many people in the German judiciary system plus the journalists from at least three different news outlets are all on the Russian payroll is quite ridiculous. Try to see it from a different point of view: Evidence pointing towards Ukraine is really inconvenient for our government, especially with a bunch of elections coming up that sees the Putin supporters in front. I know, Scholzing and all but we did send a lot of money and equipment to Ukraine. Learning that Ukrainians blew up the pipelines - possibly even with support from the Ukrainian military - would put the government into a difficult position. Well, an even worse position than it is in now. In addition, aggravating the Polish government would have been kind of satisfying when it was still PiS, I guess, but we really don't want this to happen with the new government.
So, whatever the truth will turn out to be in the end, I think it is very unlikely that this arrest warrant would have been sent if there wasn't solid evidence to back it.

Honestly, and no offense meant, it feels like you want it to be the Russians and so can't accept evidence that points in a different direction.
Re your point 1: At least one member of that team was a specialist in diving to these depths.
Thinking that so many people in the German judiciary system plus the journalists from at least three different news outlets are all on the Russian payroll is quite ridiculous. Try to see it from a different point of view: Evidence pointing towards Ukraine is really inconvenient for our government, especially with a bunch of elections coming up that sees the Putin supporters in front. I know, Scholzing and all but we did send a lot of money and equipment to Ukraine. Learning that Ukrainians blew up the pipelines - possibly even with support from the Ukrainian military - would put the government into a difficult position. Well, an even worse position than it is in now. In addition, aggravating the Polish government would have been kind of satisfying when it was still PiS, I guess, but we really don't want this to happen with the new government.
So, whatever the truth will turn out to be in the end, I think it is very unlikely that this arrest warrant would have been sent if there wasn't solid evidence to back it.

Sometimes unlikely doesn't mean that the inverse must be true.
I have posted enough about it, but I think it will get more attention.
Ps If you think RU controls the German court system at such a level that it can steer this by a Stasi agent in 2024, is more likely in this story, I don't know what to say really 😉
 

Indeed it is (and insane as Haidruk desribed it), just watched it entirely. I was wondering what exactly was happening at 5:55, seemed a bit like the two guys hiding in the shellcrater tried to get away from the dismounts like they were some 'encourage' type of unit right when the vehicle is struck. Then a bit later they all seem to advance to the rear, or at least where the vehicle came from.
So many lonely vehicles carrying meat getting hit on the road to nowhere, with the occupants later reliving the same story but then on foot. 
 
Let's see if we can have that Odessa beach party and put those genes to work! 😜
But indeed there is risk and certainly it's not casualty free. Modern war can produce a lot of casualties very fast by just being a tad unlucky.
At the same time, doing any combat mission with those carefully harboured brigades is going to bring risks. Keeping them stationed far away from the front is relatively risk free but also doesn't bring anything to the table. Sending them into the grind in Donbass etc is probably a more 'safe' decision to sell, but does not necessarily harbour less risk to exhaust their combat power for little to none 'return on investment'. 
I don't want to give too much attention to the subject, it's a side issue but an interesting open question imo. So yes part of it is still in the speculation ballpark (but much of what we discuss lives near there 😉 ), but some deductions can be made. 
The Russian ship in the area can certainly not be ruled out to be involved (in this and other pipeline/cable mishaps), but (apparently) the traces of explosives aboard the rental ship do actually match traces of the explosives used.
There is various other evidence, one of which was an intelligence source about such an attack being planned by Ukrainian individuals. 
Anyway without summing the whole thing up again, that rental boat with linked/now wanted Ukrainian individuals was either involved in some deception/cover activities, or more directly involved, seems to be a safe conclusion.
One explanation for only hearing from one side is that there might be only one side interested in finding out who was behind it. That's also the title for that article I posted. Which is an interesting observation in itself, imo.
For the connection of those individuals and or who directed them / orchestrated the sabotage, there are only rumors published so far afaik. 
Concluding with, Germany certainly took their time investigating stuff and coming to the conclusion that this issue isn't ripe to be put to bed. Let's see if that individual can be found in the near future and how/where.

Ok, we are not going to go down this road again.  There really is no point trying to outshout each other and neither of us can really prove or disprove anything here on a wargame forum in the outer rim of the internet.  We have both been exposed to information and have come up with deductions and conclusions.  You have your opinions which you have presented, and I have mine.  We both have sources we have cited and the veracity of those sources is really up to the reader to decide for themselves.
Now the one missing piece in all this is background credibility.  I do not really know your background but clearly you have got some good sources in the RUSINT sphere, and you speak the language which is a very big plus.  Where you got your expertise in translating what you are seeing in that sphere, you have never shared but it is obvious to me that you are familiar with military operations.
Ok, now as to me.  Funny thing, I just released from the military so I can be more open about what I did at work.  So the reader can take my opinions at face value but they should understand where they are coming from.  Most here know I served at our staff college as DS/Instructor, but I have never made public here what my day job in fact was.  For the last ten years I have been a strategic advisor to three commanders of Canadian SOF.  I will not go into details as to what that means but readers can perhaps get a better understanding of where I am coming from when I say "fully illuminated battlefield" is a reality, and a reality in Ukraine.  Again, I will not go into details but it is no great secret that the architectures I am talking about have been operationalized in this war, before it actually, and on both sides though to a more limited extent for Russia.  There is plenty of open source evidence and indicators of this so I encourage people to go out and find answers for themselves.
So while your viewpoint is no doubt valid, from your point of view, I can say with authority that there are pieces of the larger picture you are not seeing.  Pieces that soldiers on the ground on either side of this war are not seeing.  Modern militaries are very large systems within larger systems. The character of those systems has evolved significantly in the last twenty years as we went into CT operations world wide.
No point yelling back and forth at each other, we in fact likely agree on more than we disagree.  I can tell you that the C4ISR reality I describe exists, and there is plenty of evidence if one looks around a bit - not everything in this war occurs on Telegram.  It is not available to social media at all.  The impacts of these systems are in fact consistent with the phenomenon we have seen in this war, pretty much from the first day.  What was surprising was just how broad and impactful these new systems were, no one really expected this.
So there it is.  I will let the reader decide on these issues for themselves.  Both sides can be presented without us trying to tear the other down. That is a BS Reddit trap that I already fell for once but frankly it just stifles discussion and gets really tedious.

I wasn't able to follow this as closely as I should have, so excuse me for repeating what everyone else has probably already said.
This incursion into Russian territory, as great and surprising as it is, how meaningful is it from a purely military point of view? I mean, we are talking about a salient of what? 1000 km2? To make yet another flawed WW2 comparison (we really didn't have enough of those of late), that is a fraction of the size of the bulge in the Battle of Bulge, if I'm not mistaken. Yet people sound like the Wehrnacht was already threatening Antwerpes and the allies close to retreating back to the UK.
As my ancestors, like many before them, discovered, taking a few thousand square kilometers of Russian territory means nothing by itself. (Things are different if, of course, if LOCs are severed, important  infrastructure seized/deatroyed, etc.)
So, the point of this - as Steve calls it - raid, is it really for military gains directly? In the long run, the units comitted there are missing elsewhere (just like for Russia) and I simply don't believe this time really, really, the Russian army is on the verge of collapse. Or is it more like signalling that a) Ukraine is still in the game, an important message, both for a domestic audience and for Western supporters and b) Russia is vulnerable, for the same reasons as a) plus embarrassing Putin? c) regaining the initiative, I guess?

Well China certainly *can* provide all those basics. I can't 'prove' they are, but I certainly wouldn't assume they aren't (or that Western sanctions have much impact on their decisions).
The world we all live in right now is that the only way the Chinese can dig themselves out of their 20 year building binge (empty hi rise cities are just the tip of that iceberg) is by putting their massive industrial overcapacity to work, selling whatever to whomever, for whatever price moves product and keeps underutilised proletarians off Zhi's streets.
Anecdata: my industry is arse deep in cut rate Chinese solar panels being dumped on the markets so cheaply right now that people are using them as ersatz fencing. Yay planet, I guess....
I am telling friends to hold off buying cars if they can for a couple of years; even where BYDs etc. are banned or tariffed, the supply chain scale benefits are already flowing through to all makers.

Yes, I think we are overthinking it and trying to apply our western viewpoint.
Normally, when there is a war, citizens will rally around the flag and support the government even though they may not fully support the decision. For an individual, there are serious consequences if you actively go against the govt, i.e. becoming a social outcast, being branded a traitor, losing your job, prison, execution, etc.
Normally a govt gets a free ride for 2-3 years until citizens start asking hard questions about how well the war is going, where is it going and and when will it end. That is when you start to see political opposition start to firm up to put pressure on the Govt. That is what happened in the USA in the Korean War, Vietnam War and Iraq War.
As to soldiers actually stopping to fight and turning against the govt, they are very few historical examples of that: i.e. French Army mutinies in 1917, German Army mutinies in 1918, but if you dig into it, you will usually see they were extreme circumstances.
On the other side, you can also see many examples of soldiers fighting on even when they were taking horrible losses and losing the war, i .e. : Russia 41-42, Germany 43-45, Japan 43-45.

Hence the role of sports.  Orwell, once again, was spot-on: "Serious sport is ... war minus the shooting".  
So give people enough bread and circuses and perhaps we can avoid subversive civil war.  Perhaps the Romans were on to something.
 

I know it's off-topic but I cannot let this pass. 
Clearly neither of you have been to Germany, Austria, Belgium or other European countries where taste and flavour is a real thing. Personally I would back Kaiser Doppelmalz ( Austrian) against any beer in the world, but each to their own tastebuds - there may be contenders in the countries mentioned that I don't know.

1. Does 'other means' include immob kills by prior drone strikes (sure, there are a lot of flubs and misses as the FPS signal goes wonky at low level)?
2. 'Vast majority'. If I may, it's (unfootnotable) declarations like this that keep getting you in trouble here. You seem to be pretending to a qualitative authority you just don't have (none of us do). 
Andrew Perpetua has tried root causing, but I suspect that effort would elude even the Ukrainian Army itself.

Doesn’t need to do it in seconds, and doesn’t even really need to hit the tanks.  Armor and mech have long and heavy lines of logistics support in order to function.  We cannot protect those lines from ISR and about 1/2 dozen types of over the horizon fires.  The NATO 120mm only works if you can get it to within 3 kms of the target and as we have seen in this war, 3kms is point blank range.
Fully autonomous UAS are demonstrated now and will likely be on the battlefield in the next few years in numbers.  There is no proven c-UAS technology against these systems.  We have seen FPV flights destroy mechanized and armored attacks.  What we do not know is how far this whole thing goes.
No one can really predict where this is going, no definitive answers are verifiable with the evidence at hand.  End of story.

@poesel only pointed out that neither Trump nor Biden will change their stance on Ukraine because of the attempt so it is doubtful that it will have any significant impact on the war. So it adds no new information in addition to what was discussed as nauseam already.

Could I ask everyone to please NOT comment on the Trump shooting?
Media outlets will run this story 24/7 for the next week, and I don't think anyone here can add any new information.
Although this may or may not have an impact on the election, I don't think this event will have any influence on the stance of the winner wrt to Ukraine.
This thread is about the war in Ukraine, so please keep it there.

Since you assume the attackers to be networked, I do the same for the defenders. So the defenders know where their own are. Easier for the vehicles than for the squishies of course. But when I doubt, shoot it. The explosives on the drone will do more damage.
For any numbers of defenders, there is always an 'inside' and an 'outside'. Unless the drone can pop up 'inside', you shoot outwards. There are of course any number of circumstances where this is not true or at least debatable. But in most cases it will.
You know I'm critical about lasers. I just used them wrt the video, because I doubt this PhD would be allowed to use more than a laser pointer in his experiment.
Laser are simply too expensive to use them on a 'PD-for_everyone' solution.
Why? Drones emit a very distinctive sound. They are hot. They may emit radio signals. And last but not least, they are fast moving objects in front of a mostly static background.
Sound will be reduced in the future, as well as the IR signal. Fully autonomous drones will not emit radio, but swarms will need to communicate somehow and that may be detectable. But they will never be invisible.
AI (I say AI and mean ML...) advances in image recognition and pattern detection are simply insane. If you can see it, the AI has seen it 10x and with good optics even better. Optical detection of stuff has been a hard problem in the past and has recently shifted to easy. That will find its way into military sensors.
That is your interpretation of what I wrote, and I think you are wrong.
 
Some ballpark calculations about drone evasion:
Assuming a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s for the PD, that is 1 s time of flight at 1000 m range. Let's assume the drone can pull 6 g perpendicular to the PD (I haven't found any data about angular velocity of racing drones, so this is just half of the 12 g we had). For 1 s that is 3 m of movement. That sounds survivable for the drone.
At 500 m that is 0,5 s TOF for the bullet and only 0,75 m for the drone.
Half that again to 250 m and 0,25 s and the drone moves just 0,19 m. And that puts it already inside a buckshot circle.
Although the zigzagging of drones looks insane to humans, it is not that fast wrt to bullet speeds.
 

Considering our crumbling infrastructure, thanks to decades of neoliberalism, you don't need some James Bondovich to destroy anything... If any Russian military people are reading this: Want to lock down Germany for a week? All you need are 4 civilian trucks with white wax, then spill that stuff at 4 strategic points on the autobahn.

Do they?  Have we not seen reports of problems getting enough Ukrainian volunteers?  Western nations can only support training if people show up to fight.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-faces-an-acute-manpower-shortage-with-young-men-dodging-the-draft/
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-draft-b2ca1d0ecd72019be2217a653989fbc2

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/25/europe/ukraine-draft-law-conscription-intl/index.html
https://theconversation.com/ukraines-draft-woes-leave-the-west-facing-pressure-to-make-up-for-the-troop-shortfall-231348
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12150
To my mind this trend is the most concerning for Ukraine and the West of the entire war.  We often note that Putin is signalling and posturing that Russia can outlast the West in this war.  I am wondering if he does not have his sights set on Ukrainian endurance, not the West.  We do not have accurate numbers of Ukrainian force generation and recruitment but unless young men and woman keep signing up to fight it won’t matter how many training centres we setup.
 

Something to add is that folks should be quite clear on the reality that none of this happens without China acquiescing to it. The DPRK's banking, trade, food supplies all depend on China fairly abjectly. So..while Xi is refusing to directly provide official Chinese aid to Moscow in the Ukraine war it should be understood that he is willing to let proxies do so. This is not necessarily because he wants Russia to win but rather that he does not want it to lose either. 

Just wanted to say that BFC are not Matrix/Slitherine and vice versa.  From memory BFC decided not to release the Black Sea module in the current circumstances, and publisher Matrix/Slitherine agreed with them.  If Matrix/Slitherine proceed with other 'similar' titles, that's nothing to do with BFC.