How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Haiduk]

Very grafic video of Russian squad eliminating near Avdiivka with FPVs of 47th mech.brigade.

Several days ago one Russian milblogger complained that a tactic to play dead in order enemy drone operator will skip you, mostly doesn't work anymore, because Ukrainians have so much FPVs, that they do not spare them to use even for single soldier

https://twitter.com/sternenko/status/1772159334543208863

Edited March 25 by Haiduk

[poesel]

Now that Putin has admitted that ISIS did it, and we axiomatically know that he lies when he speaks. That means, that we now know that it has been an inside job! No more proof needed!

Just kidding. Of course, it was Ukraine. Obviously, neo-Nazis work together with Islamists. The world is explained so easily.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Been a minute since i dipped my toes into this thread, but I have questions about the Moscow attack I cannot figure out.

 

So, according to one of the Tajiks confessing after a thorough beating, he was a rando contracted for the attack via Telegram two weeks ahead of time and subsequently armed for it by persons unknown to him.

But recalling the video of the attackers entering the hallway calmly and at a steady interval, I am somewhat dubious these are randos with a mere two weeks notice. The behaviour just doesn't line up with what I would expect from a bunch of untrained strangers roped into the attack. To me, it looks like trained fighters who know what to do and are familiar with each other.

And then, in a rare act of competence, Russian security services manage to identify and find the guys involved (who I remind you seem to have had no previous terrorism ties!)  and who aren't lying low or heading to the Stans but headed to a place they'll stand out more than in Moscow.

 

Now, Russia grabbing the first ethnically appropriate patsies to beat a confession out of is hardly unheard of, but that might become inconvenient if ISIS-K starts parading the actual perpetrators around. So that doesn't make sense.

My other line of thinking is that ISIS are not known for working directly but via middlemen. What if the middlemen were Russian? But then, what exactly is their play? Sowing chaos? They hardly needed terror attacks to get their security services more power to do whatever they want.

To blame Ukraine? Maybe, but then ISIS-K claims it and taints that scenario, even though clearly they are trying to play the Ukraine card anyway. But it seems a lot of trouble to go through for dubious payoff. Not that confusion isn't bread and butter of Russian PsyOps.

 

I don't know what to make of it all except that assuming the Russians are lying scumbags capable of any depravity has so far served me too well to start believing their official line.

[FancyCat]

Quote

Ukrainians put 8,000 cellphones connected to microphones on 6-foot poles around the country to detect incoming Russian drones. They detected 84/84 and shot down 80 of them with AA guns. Cost: $500ea --- Gen James B Hecker, Commander US Air Forces, Europe

 

 

[Beleg85]

1 hour ago, Haiduk said:

Cargo aviation increased activity on Rzeszow airfield. For last day 5 cargo planes arrived. This may be due to Pentagon agreed to allocate 4 billions USD of own reserves for ammunition for Ukriane, so because of this such increased activity. Russian media claimed about 300 tons of military cargo has delivered to Rzeszow in last two days.

Add that there were convoys with stuff from previous tranches crossing the border barely week or so ago; military trucks go both ways constantly, so it is sometimes difficult to say what is coming from new batches.

48 minutes ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

So, according to one of the Tajiks confessing after a thorough beating, he was a rando contracted for the attack via Telegram two weeks ahead of time and subsequently armed for it by persons unknown to him.

All their confessions are bollocks by this point. Russian security apparatus by default force everybody to admitt to old script: "mysterious smoking guy - phone- money". Money must be involved, since Russian public expect that evil guys will most likely be mercenaries, without motherland, ethics, convictions etc. This further strenghen need for patriotic narrations and vigilance of potentiall traitors; it's stupid, but it works that way there. Society believing in shadow actors behind every corner is easier to controll, and as strange as it sounds, regular jihadists are too banal for that- they are like force of nature, such mind cannot blame them seriously. Naturally from that point Kremlin may direct narration on desired villains (Ukraine, CIA, opposition).

Also, worth to add "X-files" was very popular there in its own time.

48 minutes ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

My other line of thinking is that ISIS are not known for working directly but via middlemen. What if the middlemen were Russian? But then, what exactly is their play? Sowing chaos? They hardly needed terror attacks to get their security services more power to do whatever they want.

To blame Ukraine? Maybe, but then ISIS-K claims it and taints that scenario, even though clearly they are trying to play the Ukraine card anyway. But it seems a lot of trouble to go through for dubious payoff. Not that confusion isn't bread and butter of Russian PsyOps.

No petty middlemen would do such an act, there are 1000s of things that could go wrong, including quite probable that some policeman accidently arrived on the scene or somebody in vicinity being armed and simply playing sheriff (that was btw. reason why Beslan became such a slaughter- neighbours took matters in their own hands and started uncontrolled firefight with terrorists). All jhadi acts are conducted by jihadis, usually they die in the process, this is very much a given.

Kremlin had little initiative to procure false flag this way, we discussed it quite extensively last several pages. I could out of hand imagine 20 scenarios that would make more sense from their perspective.

Edited March 25 by Beleg85

[Haiduk]

7 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

 

 

This is very simplified describing of this system ) I wrote several months ago about this. The system is not completed yet to be set around all country and cover all directions. Developers told they spent many time to teach AI to identify a sound of missile or drone among other sounds to avoid false alarms. 

Edited March 25 by Haiduk

[Kinophile]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Hitting something in Kharkiv is going to be easier than hitting something in Lviv.  At least that's what the logic of deviation would indicate.

For sure Russia is able to hit some critical infrastructure, but the success rate is still extremely small.  How many transformers and LUCH type successes have they had for the thousands of missile/drones launched over the last 2 years?  By comparison it seems Ukraine has hit more critical Russian infrastructure in the last month than Russia has in this whole war.

Probably one reason Kharkiv was vulnerable to such an attack is the cumulative loss of infrastructure to attacks over the past two years.  Redundancy is never great in public infrastructure due to costs, so it's not like they have to knock out much to have an impact.  Yet when Russia tried to do a country wide shutdown of the grid it didn't work.

Steve

To be clear, Im not in the Russia Is Now Unbeatable camp. Just need that to be understood up front. 

I'm saying their strike capability has improved, slowly and patchily, but they have improved. They have had a string of strike successes in the last six months and while It's abysmal compared to what they should have, it's still improving.

Critically, there's no counter-pressure on that. The success rate will trend inevitably up as experience is gained, systems improved and tactics honed. 

Often in this war whatever Rus starts to improve on, UKR finds a counter to, either organically with what they have or ekse provided by allies. 

But as a data point on a slowly improving line that's curving steadily up, not down, the concerted, concentrated and rapid destruction of a large city's electrical network is not small. Its repeatable and Improvable. 

Edited March 25 by Kinophile

[Elmar Bijlsma]

7 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:

*snip*

Oh, I agree it doesn't make sense. But none of it does.

False flag is too messy for too little pay-off.

Real ISIS attack seems to be most likely, as indeed seems consensus here, but I'd be amazed if the currently nabbed guys are it. Which doesn't make sense either.

[The_Capt]

47 minutes ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

Been a minute since i dipped my toes into this thread, but I have questions about the Moscow attack I cannot figure out.

 

So, according to one of the Tajiks confessing after a thorough beating, he was a rando contracted for the attack via Telegram two weeks ahead of time and subsequently armed for it by persons unknown to him.

But recalling the video of the attackers entering the hallway calmly and at a steady interval, I am somewhat dubious these are randos with a mere two weeks notice. The behaviour just doesn't line up with what I would expect from a bunch of untrained strangers roped into the attack. To me, it looks like trained fighters who know what to do and are familiar with each other.

And then, in a rare act of competence, Russian security services manage to identify and find the guys involved (who I remind you seem to have had no previous terrorism ties!)  and who aren't lying low or heading to the Stans but headed to a place they'll stand out more than in Moscow.

 

Now, Russia grabbing the first ethnically appropriate patsies to beat a confession out of is hardly unheard of, but that might become inconvenient if ISIS-K starts parading the actual perpetrators around. So that doesn't make sense.

My other line of thinking is that ISIS are not known for working directly but via middlemen. What if the middlemen were Russian? But then, what exactly is their play? Sowing chaos? They hardly needed terror attacks to get their security services more power to do whatever they want.

To blame Ukraine? Maybe, but then ISIS-K claims it and taints that scenario, even though clearly they are trying to play the Ukraine card anyway. But it seems a lot of trouble to go through for dubious payoff. Not that confusion isn't bread and butter of Russian PsyOps.

 

I don't know what to make of it all except that assuming the Russians are lying scumbags capable of any depravity has so far served me too well to start believing their official line.

I wouldn’t look much farther than - guys look close enough, beat confession and quickly close cases so Russian security does not look totally useless.  The operators on this sort of mission are normally martyrs-in-waiting.  They are not the best-of-the-best, quite the opposite, but they are hard believers and know they are very likely going to die.  Being “contracted two weeks out” does not track at all for these sorts of attacks (see Bataclan etc).  Small cells of radicalized locals or people who travelled to Moscow under the radar. 

So the confusion is not an IO/Psy-Op, it is just normal and very real confusion.  Whether these guys actually did it will remain a question.  But the whole thing was clearly an old school ISIL terror attack.

[sburke]

1 hour ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

I don't know what to make of it all except that assuming the Russians are lying scumbags capable of any depravity has so far served me too well to start believing their official line.

Just remember the SIMS video game the "Ukrainian Saboteurs" had.  Pretty much all one needs to know about how Russian security operates.

Russia Bizarrely Includes Sims 3 Among Evidence of 'Staged' Assassination Plot (vice.com)

[Beleg85]

30 minutes ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

Oh, I agree it doesn't make sense. But none of it does.

False flag is too messy for too little pay-off.

Real ISIS attack seems to be most likely, as indeed seems consensus here, but I'd be amazed if the currently nabbed guys are it. Which doesn't make sense either.

Almost feel bad for those jihadists; simpletons don't even comprehend in what swamp of contradictory realities they packed themselves in with their terror message directed at Kremlin.

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, Beleg85 said:

Almost feel bad for those jihadists; simpletons don't even comprehend in what swamp of contradictory realities they packed themselves in with their terror message directed at Kremlin.

If the guys they are parading around with missing bits, broken bones, and worse are in fact the guys that did it? Then my only question what were they thinking letting themselves be taken alive? The scary thought is that the guys they are more or less publicly torturing to death are four random guys they grabbed off the streets who had the misfortune o resemble the guys in the video. That would be uhm...BAD.

That said the treatment these guys are getting in Russian detention is no different than what they have done to tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of of thousands of others in both Ukraine and Russia. They are just posting video of it in real time. That of course is the reason why Russia is going to get to pay a thousand casualties for every square kilometer of Ukraine they even temporarily occupy. Because the Russians have demonstrated beyond clearly that giving up is just not an option.

Edited: for clarity

 

Edited March 26 by dan/california

[Letter from Prague]

2 hours ago, FancyCat said:

 

 

Is that not a Batman movie plot point?

Man, life does imitate art.

[Kinophile]

I've noted before my intimation that the full reform of the Ukrainian military is where its true strategic victory lies - and not into the standard Western /NATO model but true reform that keeps what works from the old, Soviet model combined and transformed into a unique hybrid. I suspect that a military which reflects the the nature of and enables the latent power of the transformed society it springs from will be finally secure from Russia. 

As an inveterate autocracy, with the particular geography it contains, Russia will only ever have the type of military it's ever had - mass and power. 

Ukraine, being a society that is something more and different, has a generational opportunity to create a unique defence force. 

 

 

[Letter from Prague]

I'm just thinking. It seems that Russia started the info-op of trying to blame Ukraine for the attack in full.

It might be interesting to watch Western media to see which are co-opted by Russia - just like we've seen who is a puppet when we say various German newspapers come with the nonsense about Ukraine blowing up Nordstream. Who will be the first to offer "investigative journalism" on how Ukraine might have been involved I wonder.

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://www.threads.net/@nickmelnick.osint/post/C48Z7UwoNWC

The Ukrainian FPV drone intercepts a Russian UAV in the Kherson region. I'm eagerly awaiting the moment when the FPV intercepts a Russian helicopter.

 

There is video in the link

 

[Kraft]

1 hour ago, dan/california said:

I'm eagerly awaiting the moment when the FPV intercepts a Russian helicopter.

Almost happened last year, FPV targeted missile dumping chopper but missed helicopter by ~100 meters as it couldnt catch up with the speed. 

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, Kinophile said:

To be clear, Im not in the Russia Is Now Unbeatable camp. Just need that to be understood up front. 

I'm saying their strike capability has improved, slowly and patchily, but they have improved. They have had a string of strike successes in the last six months and while It's abysmal compared to what they should have, it's still improving.

Critically, there's no counter-pressure on that. The success rate will trend inevitably up as experience is gained, systems improved and tactics honed. 

Often in this war whatever Rus starts to improve on, UKR finds a counter to, either organically with what they have or ekse provided by allies. 

But as a data point on a slowly improving line that's curving steadily up, not down, the concerted, concentrated and rapid destruction of a large city's electrical network is not small. Its repeatable and Improvable. 

No doubt Russia is getting better, or at least putting themselves in a position to get luckier.  Either way, I don't see evidence that their capabilities have fundamentally improved (e.g. a new guidence systems).  The most I've seen presented here, at least, is that their ISR has gotten better.  Perhaps by purchasing stat images from western companies. 

I think the most likely explanation for their recent strategic strike successes is a combination of finding a more effective combo of stuff, better predicting where Ukraine's defenses are weakest, and so forth.  Couple that with Ukraine's resourced perhaps being constrained and enough rolls of the dice to come up with a winner simply by brute probability.

Specific to Kharkiv, that city has been hammered for 2 years.  My guess is there's so much cumulative damage to that redundancy and backup options have been worn down enough that pretty much any successful hit on just about anything will have an outsized effect.  Again, that's just a guess, but I'd be very surprised if this isn't part of why the last attack shut off so much of the city's power and heat.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

So the confusion is not an IO/Psy-Op, it is just normal and very real confusion

Added to this that Russia is almost certainly lying about something, but doing so inconsistently because of internal communications deficiencies, revising the narrative for one or more reasons (often seeing what flung poop stuck to which walls), or simply not caring if anybody outside of Russia believes what they are saying.

Back to the old assumptions about Putin playing 4D chess.  Just like Forrest Gump, people sometimes see what they want to see from someone who is really a simpleton with uncanny timing.

Steve

 

[dan/california]

19 minutes ago, Kraft said:

Almost happened last year, FPV targeted missile dumping chopper but missed helicopter by ~100 meters as it couldnt catch up with the speed. 

Yeah I remember that vid. Looking out five years, drone with specific functionality to go after helicopters are going to make helicopters not a thing. All the pieces are out there, they just haven't been put in a nice package yet.

5 hours ago, FancyCat said:

 

 

This set up for hunting tracking drone for instance should be able to flag low flying helicopters instantly. I see no reason that you couldn't scatter sensors to do the same basic thing well into the bad guys guys rear areas by either MLRS, or Baba Yaga type drones type drones. They would be passive sensors so they would not have emit a single peep until they heard one of the audio/vibration signatures they had been programmed for.

[chrisl]

4 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:

Is that not a Batman movie plot point?

Man, life does imitate art.

It's a pretty obvious solution.  I suggested it as an app that people can run on their phones way back in Fall 2022.  It's the same as locating a radio transmitter with multiple receivers, but using sound waves instead of radio waves.  Sound has a lot shorter range and detectors aren't nearly as sensitive as for radio, so you need a whole lot more of them.

[chrisl]

1 hour ago, Kraft said:

Almost happened last year, FPV targeted missile dumping chopper but missed helicopter by ~100 meters as it couldnt catch up with the speed. 

And for FPVs to take out a helicopter you don't need a lot of bang.  If you can get ingested into a turbine or hit the rotor hub you can make their day a lot less pleasant.

[Aragorn2002]

6 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:

I'm just thinking. It seems that Russia started the info-op of trying to blame Ukraine for the attack in full.

It might be interesting to watch Western media to see which are co-opted by Russia - just like we've seen who is a puppet when we say various German newspapers come with the nonsense about Ukraine blowing up Nordstream. Who will be the first to offer "investigative journalism" on how Ukraine might have been involved I wonder.

One detail that hit me is that the Russian tv showed a AK 47, painted in phosforus green. That same AK 47 was shown in the released ISIS video. Not sure what to make of that. Perhaps ISIS expected Putin to blame Ukraine for this terror attack, or is this a 'normal' thing to do by ISIS?

[TheVulture]

36 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:

One detail that hit me is that the Russian tv showed a AK 47, painted in phosforus green. That same AK 47 was shown in the released ISIS video. Not sure what to make of that. Perhaps ISIS expected Putin to blame Ukraine for this terror attack, or is this a 'normal' thing to do by ISIS?

It's because they are all familiar with the default Combat Mission UI and think that rifles should be green. They are probably wondering if it turns yellow when the owner is injured.

[Tenses]

12 hours ago, Haiduk said:

This is very simplified describing of this system ) I wrote several months ago about this. The system is not completed yet to be set around all country and cover all directions. Developers told they spent many time to teach AI to identify a sound of missile or drone among other sounds to avoid false alarms. 

My friend had a master thesis on sound indentification of different types of vehicles and it was more than 10 years ago. You don't need AI for that, but it will certainly help, especially to quickly populate database with new types of targets.

Generally systems like that is a great example of how much you can achieve with almost no material investment. If algorithms are there, you can cover entire country with such systems and get cheap and precise alternative of radar coverage. Every country should have something like that. In time additional network of thermal imagers and seismic sensors should also accompany the radar, which is not always available and is not easily replaced. For current system I would put as a priority different information transport medium as cell network is not reliable. Optical infrastructure is a life saver in war as it is the fastest and immune to all types of interferences.

Next step is to put automatic HMGs on critical locations and you can start to sleep better at least in regard to danger presented by Shahed class drones. For something bigger(and faster - recent "Zircon") you need big stuff but it is even more important to achieve faster response times. I hope that at the end of this war Ukraine will have nearly impenetrable air defenses(for a sane size of attack) thanks to your own developments and innovations.