How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

15 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Meteorite

Norse God

Baba Yaga's Hut

I'm pretty sure it was a truck bomb, but I'm willing to accept missile.  I'd like to see the top road surface to see if that big hole is in the righthand lane.  On the way home from getting groceries I came up with my own conspiracy theory: while the truck was parked for 6 hours someone could have put a homing target on it (or maybe they just shipped a homing target as freight) and once the truck was getting onto the bridge for sure, the missile could have been launched in the right direction to pick up the truck as a target at the right time. If the bridge has cell service you could do it with an iPhone and a missile that has the "Find my...[target]" app.

My problem with the truck theory is that Russia is saying that's what happened

Seriously, I'm really relying heavily upon Occam's Razor for my primary filter.  Without looking at any of the evidence, the most likely cause is the most probable one -> missile strike.

The number of things that Ukraine would have to do to pull off a successful truck bomb attack is huge, with each one risking complete mission failure.  They've never done such an attack.  However, they have done missile attacks deep into enemy territory hundreds of times.  It is nearly certain that they also used Hrim-2 four times already.  Infinitely easier to do a nearly routine missile attack vs. a novel truck bomb.

Plus, I keep coming back to how much easier it would be to blow up a fuel train vs. a truck bomb.  Many, many, many degrees easier.  In fact, of all the different theories of what Ukraine hit the bridge with, truck bomb is by far the most complex and rail car sabotage probably the easiest.

Rigging a couple of fuel cars to detonate would be sure to cause structural damage to the rail bridge, which is what Ukraine really wants to take out of action.  So if they didn't have the ability to hit the bridge with a missile, why not go with the easiest way to harm the bridge instead of one of the most difficult?

Of course, this is just reasoned logic and not fact.  Sometimes people do choose the most difficult and error prone path because of factors not taken into consideration with the alternative theories.  Obviously the most important of these for the missile theory is if they have something available to use.  If the answer is no, then that option gets crossed off the list.  We have good reason to suspect it is a "yes", but it's just speculation.  I still don't see what would make the truck bomb easier than a train bomb, but there could be something Ukraine knows about that we don't.

As for the evidence, it's consistent with the many hits we've seen to Dnepr bridges and nobody says those were truck bombs.

Steve

[sross112]

36 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Meteorite

Norse God

Baba Yaga's Hut

I'm pretty sure it was a truck bomb, but I'm willing to accept missile.  I'd like to see the top road surface to see if that big hole is in the righthand lane.  On the way home from getting groceries I came up with my own conspiracy theory: while the truck was parked for 6 hours someone could have put a homing target on it (or maybe they just shipped a homing target as freight) and once the truck was getting onto the bridge for sure, the missile could have been launched in the right direction to pick up the truck as a target at the right time. If the bridge has cell service you could do it with an iPhone and a missile that has the "Find my...[target]" app.

I have no idea if it is possible but thought of something after reading this. A few years back the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration passed a rule requiring the over the road trucks to have electronic logbooks. So almost 95% of the trucks you see running down the interstates over here have one. If you look at them they have a small plastic bubble usually on the rear of the sleeper somewhere. That allows them to use satellite communication back to their company dispatch centers logging all sorts of information (speed, location, hours of service, fuel usage, etc). 

Now again, not saying it is possible, don't know about being able to use it/hack it/etc. Just thinking that if someone could hack the system it would tell you exactly where whatever truck you wanted to track was all the time. If you had the ability to do that and put a remotely detonated bomb on a truck you would be very dangerous to infrastructure type targets. 

Not saying that is what happened here, just made me think of the electronic logs, satellite communications and truck bombs. Hopefully that sort of thing isn't possible as it would be a terrorist wet dream.

[chrisl]

A truck bomb is almost as easy as blowing up a fuel train if there's a war on.  Especially if one of the belligerents is Russia.

They're shipping tons of stuff across the bridge to support the war.  It wouldn't be that hard to either identify a shipment of explosive stuff, like HE shells, and stick a GPS trigger in with it, or just fabricate some paperwork that says there's *supposed* to be a truck bomb in the back.  It wouldn't say "Truck Bomb, Qty 1" but "200 rounds of 152 mm shells" or something like that.  Russia isn't very computerized - the IDs people use are largely typed or handwritten.  Shipping docs are likely all typed and handwritten.  There's probably not some easily accessed databased to check all shipments, or some kind of protocol for calling to check if a truck is full of good bombs or bad bombs (the evil bit isn't set in the data record).  Sometimes the easiest way to hide something is in broad daylight.  When the logistics system is already broken, it's even easier.

It would certainly be easier to blow up an oil tank car.  You could even put charges with GPS triggers on a bunch of tank cars in random places east of the bridge this week and just make sure they have a couple weeks worth of battery. Some of them are likely to end up burning on the bridge. Put them all in different locations on the cars, because once one goes up they'll start searching that spot on all the cars.

[chrisl]

8 minutes ago, sross112 said:

I have no idea if it is possible but thought of something after reading this. A few years back the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration passed a rule requiring the over the road trucks to have electronic logbooks. So almost 95% of the trucks you see running down the interstates over here have one. If you look at them they have a small plastic bubble usually on the rear of the sleeper somewhere. That allows them to use satellite communication back to their company dispatch centers logging all sorts of information (speed, location, hours of service, fuel usage, etc). 

Now again, not saying it is possible, don't know about being able to use it/hack it/etc. Just thinking that if someone could hack the system it would tell you exactly where whatever truck you wanted to track was all the time. If you had the ability to do that and put a remotely detonated bomb on a truck you would be very dangerous to infrastructure type targets. 

Not saying that is what happened here, just made me think of the electronic logs, satellite communications and truck bombs. Hopefully that sort of thing isn't possible as it would be a terrorist wet dream.

You posted while I was typing... 

The truck driver's route was apparently mapped by the truck's appearance on security cameras around the region.

Russia doesn't have the kind of "GPS in every device in the country" that the US does. The Russian military barely seems to have any kind of GNSS receivers, and they few they have seem to be mostly commercial consumer units.  It seems unlikely that many Russian freight trucks have SPOT trackers in them.  But that doesn't mean some SBU agents couldn't have gotten a box full of GPS trackers and/or triggers somewhere. 

[danfrodo]

I'm open to whatever truth comes out, if any, about the Kerch bomb.  RIght now mostly looks like truck bomb.  but that's not conclusive, so internet is going nuts.  What Steve said does carry some weight -- if RU says it's truck bomb, there's good chance it's not truck bomb.

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, danfrodo said:

I'm open to whatever truth comes out, if any, about the Kerch bomb.  RIght now mostly looks like truck bomb.  but that's not conclusive, so internet is going nuts.  What Steve said does carry some weight -- if RU says it's truck bomb, there's good chance it's not truck bomb.

And that's the main reason I'm still open to the idea that it's a missile.  Missiles that could do that certainly exist, and there's no reason that Ukraine and friends have to advertise everything that's slipped across the polish border.  And the way the road was assembled might let a missile do outsized damage relative to its warhead.  

But it sure looks like it was that truck.  Especially from the video camera that was under the rail side - the contracting fireball really seems centered in the right spot. 

I'd really love to see video from the security cams exported digitally instead of recorded on a phone watching it play back on a screen.  It would be easier to sort out times (frame rates and shutter speeds) and how fast an incoming missile would have to be going to not show up at all (probably not all that fast).

[billbindc]

I’m in the missile camp for two reasons: 

1. Russia wouldn’t want to admit that Ukraine has a heavy long range missile. 

2. Ukraine wouldn’t want to admit it has a heavy long range missile.

Thus, every other explanation under the sun will be posited, claimed, hinted at and asserted.

[chrisl]

Has anybody verified that Ted Kaczynski is still actually in prison?

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, akd said:

There is no missile guidance system that works like that I know of, and the timing necessary would be extraordinary if not impossible. 
 

Anyways, here is a whole thread on why the truck we saw explode was probably an exploding truck:

 

As stated in my previous post, all of the evidence supports:

• a very large surface explosion in one spot on the outside lane
• guardrails were peeled back away from the point of detonation
• most of the light posts were also stripped off for several bridge segments
• the force of the explosion was sufficient to crack the span's supports and drop it into the water
• when the span dropped it caused a sympathetic failure of the next span by bouncing or sliding off
• 6? rail cars, most of them several spans ahead of the explosion, were hit with enough force that they ruptured and were set alight

All of this is consistent with either a missile or a truck bomb.

I've looked at the first CCTV video that was uploaded (camera appears to be underside rail bridge) and corrected the some key frames to account for hand held phone camera shift and CCTV shift (it apparently moved due to explosion) and the truck is on the span that exploded.  Another truck was just behind it and one on the other side had passed it a few seconds before.  Some other vehicle is visible on the raised span on the other side coming towards the collapsed area.  Odds aren't terrible that the truck was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when a missile struck.

Steve

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

As stated in my previous post, all of the evidence supports:

• a very large surface explosion in one spot on the outside lane
• guardrails were peeled back away from the point of detonation
• the force of the explosion was sufficient to crack the span's supports and drop it into the water
• when the span dropped it caused a sympathetic failure of the next span by bouncing or sliding off
• 6? rail cars, most of them several spans ahead of the explosion, were hit with enough force that they ruptured and were set alight

All of this is consistent with either a missile or a truck bomb.

Looking at all the evidence I'm not convinced the truck was where the explosion happened.  It's not possible to precisely place the truck at the time of the explosion, however my eyes say the suspect truck was not on the span where the explosion was but was instead on the one that sympathetically fell intact.

Steve

If you watch the video from under the rail side a few times and step back and forth through the frames it looks like the truck is on the correct span and also likely over the spot where the hole is.  It's super annoying to do, because the guy didn't hold his phone steady and you can't just put your finger over the truck on your screen and then shuttle forward - the location of the phone moves in that time.  And just to make it more annoying, Russians seem to be just as bad about inappropriate use of portrait mode as the Ukrainians. 

[Battlefront.com]

51 minutes ago, chrisl said:

A truck bomb is almost as easy as blowing up a fuel train if there's a war on.  

 Not even in the same ballpark.  The fuel train is a bomb all on its own sitting around in poorly guarded areas and going walking speed at multiple locations along the way.  Plenty of places to intercept without anybody being the wiser.  SOF could place a few charges and it's all set to go.  Bombs are not going to be easily detected by security as it goes over the bridge.

Truck bomb?  You have to get a massive amount of explosives into a truck, you have to get a driver (unwitting, most likely) to transport it, the driver has to not check the load at any time for any reason, and then it has to get through multiple security systems designed to detect suspicious cargo.

Sorry, not even close to each other in terms of complexity.

51 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Especially if one of the belligerents is Russia.

I absolutely and thoroughly reject the notion that this was a false flag attack by Russia or a Russian faction with its own agenda.  There's absolutely no evidence or even logic to support it, so unless something turns up this is in the "tinfoil hat" arena as far as I'm concerned.

51 minutes ago, chrisl said:

It would certainly be easier to blow up an oil tank car.  You could even put charges with GPS triggers on a bunch of tank cars in random places east of the bridge this week and just make sure they have a couple weeks worth of battery. Some of them are likely to end up burning on the bridge. Put them all in different locations on the cars, because once one goes up they'll start searching that spot on all the cars.

This I agree with, even though you are confusing the heck out of me by conflicting your opening statement

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, chrisl said:

If you watch the video from under the rail side a few times and step back and forth through the frames it looks like the truck is on the correct span and also likely over the spot where the hole is.  It's super annoying to do, because the guy didn't hold his phone steady and you can't just put your finger over the truck on your screen and then shuttle forward - the location of the phone moves in that time.  And just to make it more annoying, Russians seem to be just as bad about inappropriate use of portrait mode as the Ukrainians. 

Heh... OK, looks like I accidentally put up an earlier draft before I did a multi-layer corrected image analysis.  Definitely annoying, but absolutely it checks out.

 Here's the corrected text (I'm editing my above post too):

(additional point) most of the light posts were also stripped off for several bridge segments

I've looked at the first CCTV video that was uploaded (camera appears to be underside rail bridge) and corrected the some key frames to account for hand held phone camera shift and CCTV shift (it apparently moved due to explosion) and the truck is on the span that exploded.  Another truck was just behind it and one on the other side had passed it a few seconds before.  Some other vehicle is visible on the raised span on the other side coming towards the collapsed area.  Odds aren't terrible that the truck was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when a missile struck.

Steve

[chrisl]

15 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

 Not even in the same ballpark.  The fuel train is a bomb all on its own sitting around in poorly guarded areas and going walking speed at multiple locations along the way.  Plenty of places to intercept without anybody being the wiser.  SOF could place a few charges and it's all set to go.  Bombs are not going to be easily detected by security as it goes over the bridge.

Truck bomb?  You have to get a massive amount of explosives into a truck, you have to get a driver (unwitting, most likely) to transport it, the driver has to not check the load at any time for any reason, and then it has to get through multiple security systems designed to detect suspicious cargo.

Sorry, not even close to each other in terms of complexity.

I absolutely and thoroughly reject the notion that this was a false flag attack by Russia or a Russian faction with its own agenda.  There's absolutely no evidence or even logic to support it, so unless something turns up this is in the "tinfoil hat" arena as far as I'm concerned.

This I agree with, even though you are confusing the heck out of me by conflicting your opening statement

Steve

I'm not saying its false flag - I'm saying that Russia is probably already shipping tons of HE across the bridge on trucks anyway.  All Ukraine has to do is add a small charge with a trigger.  It makes the inspection even more cursory - "Are you carrying explosives?".  "Da,  152 mm shells". If the Kerch bridge is critical for supplying Crimea and the southern front, there's already tons and tons of HE going over the bridge for Russia's military purposes.

edit: This isn't the George Washington bridge on 9/12/2001, it's a key military supply bridge, and Russia hasn't shown the greatest care in their logistics.

Edited October 10, 2022 by chrisl

[Battlefront.com]

Here are three images that show before without truck, with truck just before flash, and damage.  Red line represents the clean break of the intact span, the blue is the mid point, and green is the start of the broken span where the explosion happened.

In my opinion the very rear of the trailer might have been too far forward to have made the whole in the span, but we can't see a good portion of the two severed ends to know for sure.

 

[chrisl]

3 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Here are three images that show before without truck, with truck just before flash, and damage.  Red line represents the clean break of the intact span, the blue is the mid point, and green is the start of the broken span where the explosion happened.

In my opinion the very rear of the trailer might have been too far forward to have made the whole in the span, but we can't see a good portion of the two severed ends to know for sure.

 

I had just done the same thing with a piece of paper that I traced and slid around.  Harder to post that  

If you trace the truck body the last time you see it, it should be in the right spot that the front part of the trailer is around-ish where the hole is.

Either a truck bomb or a really, really, really unlucky driver (which does happen).

Edited October 10, 2022 by chrisl

[Battlefront.com]

1 minute ago, chrisl said:

I'm not saying its false flag -

Good   I still see people (out there, not necessarily here) talking about the possibility without any reason to.

1 minute ago, chrisl said:

I'm saying that Russia is probably already shipping tons of HE across the bridge on trucks anyway.  All Ukraine has to do is add a small charge with a trigger.  It makes the inspection even more cursory - "Are you carrying explosives?".  "Da,  152 mm shells". If the Kerch bridge is critical for supplying Crimea and the southern front, there's already tons and tons of HE going over the bridge for Russia's military purposes.

Of course it is possible, but this requires sourcing the materials or intercepting an unmarked truckload.  Compare this to the very obvious fuel cars following a fixed route over the bridge every day.  Way easier to intercept one of those, rig it to explode, and not have to worry about interception.

Steve

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

Good   I still see people (out there, not necessarily here) talking about the possibility without any reason to.

Of course it is possible, but this requires sourcing the materials or intercepting an unmarked truckload.  Compare this to the very obvious fuel cars following a fixed route over the bridge every day.  Way easier to intercept one of those, rig it to explode, and not have to worry about interception.

Steve

Yeah - that's why I agree a fuel car is easier.  Maybe a little harder to hide the bomb than a semi-trailer, but it doesn't have to be all that big.  Maybe two-stage, to create a leak and ignite it.  You can't count on the same rail cars all the time, but you can count on every tank car eventually going, which makes it easier to hide something many days in advance because you can count on the car going over some time in the next week (though not necessarily on Vlad's birthday).

[Battlefront.com]

39 minutes ago, billbindc said:

I’m in the missile camp for two reasons: 

1. Russia wouldn’t want to admit that Ukraine has a heavy long range missile. 

2. Ukraine wouldn’t want to admit it has a heavy long range missile.

Thus, every other explanation under the sun will be posited, claimed, hinted at and asserted.

Correct.  Russia has a LOT more to lose by admitting that a missile struck the bridge because it shows their air defenses and other precautions are useless.  This shows the Russian people that there is NOTHING that Russia can do to protect them.  A truck bomb?  Well, that's easy... "we found two guys asleep and have dutifully shot them for dereliction of duty.  It won't happen again, we promise". 

Which is EXACTLY why the Kremlin told this exact bedtime story after the Saki attacks.  Russia said it was saboteurs, Ukraine agreed, and both moved on.  So it's already happened this way once, so why not lie about it a second time?

Telling the Russian people that there was a flaw in their defenses that is fixable is way better than admitting there is no fixing the flaw.  The Kremlin doesn't want Russians to know dangerous Ukraine really is.

As I jokingly said a bunch of posts ago, one reason to doubt it was a truck bomb is because Russia said it is a truck bomb.  Their history of telling the truth is damned close to zero, so I'm reluctant to take their assertion at face value.

Steve

[chrisl]

And still nobody has posted a picture of the front side of the hole.

If it's a truck bomb we should see the trailer frame imprinted in the asphalt around the hole (if not embedded).

If it's a clean hole it's a missile.

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

As I jokingly said a bunch of posts ago, one reason to doubt it was a truck bomb is because Russia said it is a truck bomb.  Their history of telling the truth is damned close to zero, so I'm reluctant to take their assertion at face value.

 

And I still accept that as a valid argument, given that there's tons of evidence and history to support it.

The lack of pics of the front of the hole is helping with the missile argument, too. If it were a missle and I wanted people to think it's a truck bomb, I'd intercept pics of that.

[Battlefront.com]

1 minute ago, chrisl said:

And I still accept that as a valid argument, given that there's tons of evidence and history to support it.

I give the Russian mil bloggers way more credibility than I do the Russian government.  Hell, even the Russian mil bloggers don't think the Russian government says anything that's true.

1 minute ago, chrisl said:

The lack of pics of the front of the hole is helping with the missile argument, too. If it were a missle and I wanted people to think it's a truck bomb, I'd intercept pics of that.

Under water at the moment.  I doubt Russia will provide us with any good shots to look at.  Though they have been known to do dumber things, so maybe they will!

Steve

[chrisl]

Just now, Battlefront.com said:

I give the Russian mil bloggers way more credibility than I do the Russian government.  Hell, even the Russian mil bloggers don't think the Russian government says anything that's true.

Under water at the moment.  I doubt Russia will provide us with any good shots to look at.  Though they have been known to do dumber things, so maybe they will!

Steve

But the part we need to see isn't!  A good bit of the hole is visible from the the back, and it includes the back half of the trailer.  That part of the deck should be quite visible.

[LukeFF]

28 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Either a truck bomb or a really, really, really unlucky driver (which does happen).

 

[Fenris]

As there was a clip of the "almighty will be better than anything ever seen before or since (amen)"  T-14 the other day I'll quietly slip this one in here for any that are interested.

AbramsX Technology Demonstrator

Says it's a hybrid, I wonder if it can do pure electric for little bits - would certainly be quieter than the howling T-14 if what we saw the other day was real.

[Battlefront.com]

BTW, there is a third span that got damaged.  I noticed it earlier today and forgot to add it to my list of known facts about the damage.  The span appears to be two BEFORE the one that the explosion happened.  Look to the far left of the first picture and you can see another separation.  It's also visible in the second picture as well as seeing a dip in the section in the third picture.

Not sure what happened there.  Looks similar to the one ahead of the explosion, but I can't see what allowed it to separate.  The one ahead of the explosion separated because the other end slipped laterally off its pier.  That didn't happen to the span in question.   Looks like the lamp posts were stripped off as well.  Yet we saw two vehicles survive the blast and they should have been marooned between the blast span and the one I'm pointing to, yet they aren't seen in the pictures.  How'd they recover them so quickly?  A bit of a head scratcher!

Whatever caused the failure, this was quite a ways away from the explosion.tcher.