How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[dan/california]

 

Quote

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1bin5iy/some_quality_social_advertising_by_the_3rd_assault/

 

Contains some profanity, but absolutely hilarious.

 

[Battlefront.com]

7 hours ago, Holien said:

So they make more from the crude and Ukraine is not targeting that production.

Certainly Russia is going to see more fuel shortages for its internal market but it is not clear cut that the drone attacks will do enough to shut down the energy market for Russia.

Correct.  The point I was making, though, is that Russia's domestic economy relies upon Russian produced fuels.  This is not only an issue of "does Yuri have enough gas in his truck to get goods to market", but it is also about tax money and income for domestic companies tied into the processed fuels market.  I do not know how much of Russia's real GDP is based on domestic fuel production and sales, but with a country that big in size and population it has to be pretty significant. 

Russia's industrial base is too large and spread out to totally shut down, but that's not what needs to happen.  What is needed is for the Russian economy to take a hit at some basic level that has an outsized ripple effect throughout the larger economy. 

We need to be thinking about this like we would a shopping mall.  There might be 100 individual stores within it, but if they lose 2 or 3 of the "anchor stores" the whole mall may fall into ruin and collapse.  It doesn't matter that there are 97 functioning stores if the 3 that closed brought in 80% of the foot traffic

That sort of thing matters in the real world but it rarely makes headlines.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

4 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Ref economic grind:

 

 

Russia is quickly racking up cumulative problems for 3 out of 4 of the primary methods for moving people and goods around; air, road, and rail.  I don't think there's been a significant impact on its maritime capacity reported by anybody.

Nothing is in a vacuum.  Everything is cumulative.  Russia can not make it otherwise.

Steve

[dan/california]

14 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Correct.  The point I was making, though, is that Russia's domestic economy relies upon Russian produced fuels.  This is not only an issue of "does Yuri have enough gas in his truck to get goods to market", but it is also about tax money and income for domestic companies tied into the processed fuels market.  I do not know how much of Russia's real GDP is based on domestic fuel production and sales, but with a country that big in size and population it has to be pretty significant. 

Russia's industrial base is too large and spread out to totally shut down, but that's not what needs to happen.  What is needed is for the Russian economy to take a hit at some basic level that has an outsized ripple effect throughout the larger economy. 

We need to be thinking about this like we would a shopping mall.  There might be 100 individual stores within it, but if they lose 2 or 3 of the "anchor stores" the whole mall may fall into ruin and collapse.  It doesn't matter that there are 97 functioning stores if the 3 that closed brought in 80% of the foot traffic

That sort of thing matters in the real world but it rarely makes headlines.

Steve

There is also a large political question about the price of gas. In a truly free market even a ten or fifteen percent in supply would cause the price at the pump would go nuts to balance out supply and demand. Is Putin willing to let that happen? Or will he try to do it by Soviet style allocation to favored sectors and regions? 

[Kinophile]

23 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

  I don't think there's been a significant impact on its maritime capacity reported by anybody.

 

This is what I'm thinking about ref Seababies in the Black Sea.

UKR could start sinking RUS Maritime trade, starting with ships carrying stolen grain. 

[dan/california]

 

Quote

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1bie590/a_russian_attack_is_broken_up_by_accurate_mortar/

 

It is epically unpleasant to fight under the all seeing eye.

[dan/california]

Long but fascinating video on AI training. Not super specific to the war, except maybe it is...

[The_Capt]

1 minute ago, dan/california said:

 

 

It is epically unpleasant to fight under the all seeing eye.

“Why didn’t they just fly the Giant Eagles all the way to Mordor?”

”ISR Billy, ISR”.

[cesmonkey]

Quote

Germany's new package includes 10,000 artillery shells from the military stocks, as well as 100 armored vehicles for infantry and 100 logistical vehicles, Pistorius told reporters.

 

Edited March 19 by cesmonkey

[JonS]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

“Why didn’t they just fly the Giant Eagles all the way to Mordor?”

”ISR Billy, ISR”.

There were other issues too

https://www.oglaf.com/ornithology/

[Haiduk]

FPVs of 47th mech.brigade eliminate Russian assault group (about two squads)

 

[dan/california]

23 minutes ago, JonS said:

There were other issues too

https://www.oglaf.com/ornithology/

do not, under any circumstances go past the eagle cartoon. You have been warned. 

[Haiduk]

Free-Russia fighters of RVC in NE part of Kozinka village. Russian tank got projectille in side, but, alas, too close range, the HEAT hadn't time to activate.

Graivoron district of Belgorod oblast completely out of electricity - power substation was destroyed.

Suddenly - Romanian volunteer unit "Getica" operates in Belgorod oblast (on the video you can hear Romanian language). Tank with LRL flag also has seen as well as Ukrainian tanks

Belgorod is gradually turning out into Kharkiv 2022. Deficite of food in supermarkets is beginning, people either hide in houses or flee from the city. Attack on Belgorod oblast is sensetive blow on Russian economy. Belgorod oblast is one of not many prospering regions of Russia. It gives to country many of meat (especially pork and chicken) - up to 11% of total production, milk, sunflower oil (up to 16 %), 39 % of iron ore, here concentraten many machine-building factories, so this turmoils and "uncertainity" (C) can undermine production, trade and taxes, which Belgorod gives to central budget

    

 

Interesting in Russia, which always was showing how "Kievan junta 8 years have been bombing Donbas" there is alsmost full censorship on what now happening in Belgorod oblast. Russian VKontakte social media started to block and delete posts and comments od Belgorod citizens about shelligs, destructions and hard life in the city. Hordes of bots actively deny any successes of free-Russia forces in border villages

[Haiduk]

Reporteldy UKR tried to attack Kursk or Kurchatov city (center of nuclear researches) with 5 drones and one S-200 upgraded missile. Russians claimed all targets were intercepted, but... hm... after this part of Kursk remained without electricity - something (or debris of something) hit power substation

 

[Haiduk]

Two Russian BREM-1 ACRVs tried to steal our abandoned Leo2 near Terny (Kreminna direction), but "Azov" FPVs didn't allow to do this

Later "fat FPV" of 1st National Guard brigade "Bureviy" finished off one BREM completely

 

[Kinophile]

Kosovo being smart. 

 

[Kinophile]

Ryan Hendrickson on demining 

 

 

[LongLeftFlank]

10 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

https://www.nzz.ch/english/energy-guru-daniel-yergin-im-sick-of-the-discussion-about-energy-transition-ld.1821620

I asked Vladimir Putin a question at the economic forum in St. Petersburg in 2013, in which I mentioned shale oil and gas from the U.S. He literally shouted at me and said that shale gas was barbaric – because he knew that it would compete with Russian gas.... 

It was a very rational calculation on his part to speak of an oil and gas weapon – except that it failed. And it failed because of the shale revolution in the United States. If it hadn’t been for shale oil and gas, Putin would have prevailed. But there is a cost: European industry doesn’t have access to cheap Russian gas anymore.

But Putin’s problem is what to do with this gas. You can't just store natural gas. He has to look east, he has to integrate his economy more deeply with China and reduce the historical tensions between Beijing and Moscow. But there are contradictory messages coming from China.

[dan/california]

3 hours ago, Haiduk said:

Two Russian BREM-1 ACRVs tried to steal our abandoned Leo2 near Terny (Kreminna direction), but "Azov" FPVs didn't allow to do this

Later "fat FPV" of 1st National Guard brigade "Bureviy" finished off one BREM completely

 

And those are valuable assets, Two recovery vehicles is one heck of a hole in some brigades TO&E.

46 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

https://www.nzz.ch/english/energy-guru-daniel-yergin-im-sick-of-the-discussion-about-energy-transition-ld.1821620

I asked Vladimir Putin a question at the economic forum in St. Petersburg in 2013, in which I mentioned shale oil and gas from the U.S. He literally shouted at me and said that shale gas was barbaric – because he knew that it would compete with Russian gas.... 

It was a very rational calculation on his part to speak of an oil and gas weapon – except that it failed. And it failed because of the shale revolution in the United States. If it hadn’t been for shale oil and gas, Putin would have prevailed. But there is a cost: European industry doesn’t have access to cheap Russian gas anymore.

But Putin’s problem is what to do with this gas. You can't just store natural gas. He has to look east, he has to integrate his economy more deeply with China and reduce the historical tensions between Beijing and Moscow. But there are contradictory messages coming from China.

Actually the very way Putin has failed points out how valuable it would be to push the transition harder. Think about what would happen to world oil markets if U.S. oil consumption went down by even 25%. The tech to make that happen EXISTS, all we have to is incentivize its adoption a little more. And when we do all of our enemies except China go broke spectacularly.

I am not saying shale has been a bad thing, the guy quoted above is right about what has happened in the last ten years. But a gallon/thousand BTUs you don't burn is just as much help as one drilled out of Texas. 

Edited March 20 by dan/california

[alison]

8 hours ago, chrisl said:

Not really a radio grog but I've taken a few E&M classes...

Back in the day, most of the internet wasn't encrypted, either.  It cost computing power to do that, and it's relatively recent that everything travels with TLS/SSL.

Most of the drones on both sides seem to be either consumer drones or built with consumer parts, and there has mostly not been a lot of incentive to make the video feeds encrypted.  Strong encryption requires computing power, and that takes energy from the battery that could be used to fly longer.  And at the start of the drone war it's likely that that neither side had a lot of people or equipment available to eavesdrop on drone transmissions.  March 2002 was like the beginnings of WWI aviation where enemies could just wave at each other, or maybe fire a pistol.  

Even adding some relatively weak encryption (that maybe requires less compute) would probably be sufficient for tactical security as long as the keys are unique and random for every flight - it only has to be secure against being broken in an hour or so to keep eavesdroppers from seeing what it's doing in realtime.  A reasonably capable attacker could record all the encrypted signals and break them later to look for patterns, but that doesn't help them dodge any FPV right now.

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

 

 

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-19-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin presented the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) as a key guarantor of Russian security and sovereignty following his victory in the Russian presidential election, likely signaling that Russian security services and siloviki will continue to represent his core constituency in his fifth presidential term.
• Russia continues efforts to build a coalition to counterbalance the West by pursuing bilateral relationships with Iran, North Korea, and China.
• Armenia's Central Bank will reportedly ban the use of Russia’s “Mir” national payment system to prevent Armenia from falling under secondary US sanctions.
• Pro-Russian actors in Moldova are continuing efforts to support wider Kremlin hybrid efforts to destabilize Moldova.
• Ukraine’s European partners continue efforts to stand up significant initiatives to provide military support to Ukraine.
• The Russian military confirmed that Northern Fleet Commander Admiral Alexander Moiseev replaced Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov as acting Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy.
• Russian forces recently made a confirmed advance near Avdiivka on March 19.
• Russian State Duma Defense Committee Chairman Andrei Kartapolov stated on March 19 that the Russian military will not increase the number of conscripts summoned during the upcoming semi-annual spring conscription cycle in comparison to the previous fall 2023 conscription cycle.
• Kremlin officials continue to implicate themselves directly in the illegal removal of Ukrainian children to other Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine and the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

 

• I think Putin is ever more determined to make Moldova a problem that has to be dealt with. Someone might want to have a plan for that. For Starters NATO and the Eu need to figure out if they can live with Romania just annexing it, or not.

[kimbosbread]

2 hours ago, alison said:

While it is a fair point to make that SSL/TLS…

…but they imply that the DJI protocol back then was already encrypted: https://mavicpilots.com/threads/how-secure-is-ocusync.363/

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.

 

[chrisl]

40 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

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.

 

And it sounds like DJI is also backdoored so that anybody who has their Aeroscope system can spy on them.  Ukraine has disabled some of that access because they knew at the start that the DJI systems were backdoored.

Encrypting also consumes more energy than not encrypting. So if you're in an environment where you know Pvt. Conscriptovich doesn't have an aeroscope and probably doesn't even have a radio to hear from someone who has one, then you can eke out a little extra range without encryption.  It also simplifies your conops if you're working with all ad hoc equipment so you don't have to worry about the handshaking of the controller/drone pair to sort out keys.  A lot of what Ukraine is using are drones that are literally homebuilt by people who have boxes of various COTS parts.  And after a bit of poking around (certainly not comprehensive) it seems like hobbyists have mostly not cared about encryption.

Some commercial drones, mostly for gov't, law enforcement, and big corporate clients who can afford to spend a lot of money for a small number of drones with data security seem to have it, but it's not widespread beyond that.

I'm sure we'll start seeing at least moderate encryption of the video feeds in Ukraine. It's not a hard thing to do, but it's not the default for hobbyist drone kits.

This video has some recent discussion on how widespread data security is for drones (it's not), and commercially available ones are expensive and not what you want to use for FPV bombs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5-wF63lCXw

 

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, dan/california said:

 

• I think Putin is ever more determined to make Moldova a problem that has to be dealt with. Someone might want to have a plan for that. For Starters NATO and the Eu need to figure out if they can live with Romania just annexing it, or not.

Another interesting bit in that report was this:

Quote

Armenia's Central Bank will reportedly ban the use of Russia’s “Mir” national payment system to prevent Armenia from falling under secondary US sanctions.[13] Kremlin newswire TASS reported on March 19 that a high-ranking source in the Armenian banking sector stated that Armenia’s Central Bank will ban local Armenian banks from using the “Mir” system starting on March 29.[14] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Armenian service Radio Azatutyun reported that 17 of 18 Armenian commercial banks will stop using the ”Mir” national payment system on March 30 and that only VTB-Armenia, a subsidiary of the Russian VTB Bank, will continue to use the system.[15] Turkey and Uzbekistan stopped using the “Mir” system in 2022, likely to avoid secondary sanctions.[16] The United States imposed sanctions against VTB Bank in February 2022 and against ”Mir” national payment system’s operator the National Payment Card System Joint Stock Company in February 2024.[17]

It's slower than anybody would like, but shutting down easy conduits for Russians to move money around outside of the country has been happening for 2 years now and continues to improve.

As always, keep in mind the cumulative impact.

Steve

[Carolus]

Some surveying of Russians who voted outside of Russia. Putin below 20% in many cases.