He thought he would be safe in the windowless undersea environment.
Well, he failed to let Putin know about the Kursk invasion. That’s a whale of an intelligence failure for such a big spy. It couldn’t go unpunished.
Nah, it was a fluke.
Stop carping about it!
Today Russian patriotic fever is exploding after foreign minister Lavrov’s speech:
“Do not joke with our red lines. Americans know where they lie.”
This kind of speech feels like a mockery nowadays. A lot of gallows humor in reactions, like “do Kursk people know where they lie?”
And this night there were drones over Gomel, second biggest city in Belarus, located near Ukrainian and Russian borders. Some were taken down, there’s some damage to the buildings. No official statesments on the matter except for arresting those who filmed the event.
There was talk about attacking Belarus earlier here and I wouldn’t expect a full-fledged attack. But gestures like this - humiliating attacks without any real damage - are certainly a possibility. Note that it’s not really clear whose drones were there. Plenty of reports saying these were Russian ones, and this is most likely. But Belarusian airforce tried to took them down so they probably expect something like this from Ukraine.
That’s the thing with drones, isn’t it? Until you down one, it’s hard to tell whose they are, especially now that “drones” encompasses such a wide range of vehicles from the DIY types to ultra-sophisticated robotic warcraft.
Just call 'em UFOs!
That applies equally to aircraft. Typically you intercept and put eyes on before making any decisions regarding engagement.
True, though in the past it was a little easier perhaps to tell with manned aircraft, as there wasn’t quite the same variety as with drones. Though with drones, just getting a visual may not be as informative as with manned aircraft, either–some of those drones look a lot like each other!
Modern military aircraft have built in IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) to protect them from friendly fire incidents. Cheap ass drones aren’t going to have something like that built in.
That’s an oversimplification. IFF can report whether a target is friendly if the transponder is turned on, but there are plenty of reasons for the transponder to not be turned on. It also only works with radar systems - which for plenty of reasons you may choose not to use.
There’s still a metric ton of reasons to get eyeballs on an unidentified aircraft operating over your territory before you unleash your air defenses.
It’s “an” explanation. But is it a believable one considering that the Russians were so clearly unprepared? Sure didn’t seem like their “best” troops were in Kursk!
It’s not the quality of the troops sometimes. Those troops may have been training, not fully supplied, not entirely organized into units, etc. They also might have been simply surprised.
Another factor is that there has been a lot of talk about how also the Russians had poor command and control in that region in general. Essentially, some of the open source intel suggests there was open arguing who was in charge of the defense. Partly because who wants to be responsible for a failure like that and partly because there were overlapping authorities and they simply hadn’t worked it out.
You know who else attacked Russians first and discovered they were unprepared?
The Mongols? The Japanese?
He’s definitely not talking about an imminent invasion. There was no one there. That doesn’t mean the Russians weren’t planning something down the line.
Engaging their reserves preemptively in a defensive fight would throw a wrench in that.
Sadly, I have no clue what he’s saying!