5081

About drones, something that someone should be looking into is quickly building loads of crude “kamikaze” drones with off the shelf “hobby” equipment in the style of those used by the Houthis to hit Saudi Arabia.
Those won’t point to any particular source country and might really help.

5082

I hope y’all like anecdata:

I find it hard to get a sense of the situation in Russia from an anti-war perspective, so I have to turn to what I can muster myself.

First, a few tweets from a small Russian YouTuber I like who is currently in Moscow (standard caveats that it’s twitter, this guy is not a journalist, though he is anti-war and anti-Putin and involved in activism):

Some anti-Putin graffiti:

On public sentiment toward the war:

About anti-war protests (though, remember, this is Moscow):

Of course, his read on the situation could be wrong (though, again, I imagine this guy’s circle is largely anti-Putin so it’s not as if he’s in a bubble) and the sanctions are just starting to hit, and he notes that opinion could well shift in the coming days.

Second, I asked an old grad school pal (moved from Russia with his mom as a kid after his parents split) about his father’s (who still lives in Moscow) take on the situation. His dad loves Hollywood movies and US/UK indie rock so is arguably somewhat ‘western’ in outlook so I figured he might be opposed to the war as well. However, the gist is that while his dad is not happy about the war and not crazy about Putin, he (the dad, not the pal) basically says that while the situation sucks ‘[Putin/Russian army] are doing what they have to.’

Keeping in mind this is a super small sample size, it sort of reminds me of the situation in the US in the buildup to Iraq in terms of how the populace view the war. Though I imagine this has the potential to shift much faster.

5083

I take it “Nyet Voynye” (pardon the transcription–please tell me if I got it wrong) means “no war”? The “backwards N with squiggly/tilde” is called “i krátkaye” IIRC and is pronounced like a y or closed i there, right?

Speaking of hackers (@Dan_Theman 's post after mine), but on the other side, I noticed that Wikipedia was down for a bit earlier today. Anyone else notice that?

5084

So… a hacker group apparently/allegedly (can’t confirm) just took over the Russian space agency’s systems, or at least some of them.

5085

Nice spy satellite, shame if it experienced rapid unplanned deorbiting

5086

I doubt they would. When we talk about a military drone we’re talking about a 1/2 scale jet that can carry actual warshots like Hellfires. A hobby drone could carry a kilo of C4, but that really doesn’t do anything to a vehicle besides a small truck, and actually rigging it to explode is another bridge entirely. It could be a kinda thing in an urban fight like a molotov, but probably no more effective and much harder to make work.

5087

They don’t need those to look at incoming nukes do they?

5088

Considering what oil companies are OK with doing, this is a surprise.

5089

You have to watch this interview with Zelensky.

this is frustrating, I saw the interview live and the video is not even 1/2 of the interview.

5090

Yeah. There is a sort of… concept issue there.

American: Drones are cute little things.
Military: Drones are are tank killers.

5091

Right, I can build a hobby drone that can absolutely lift even two kilos for $300 tops. They’re fantastically strong if short ranged and twitchy as hell. A Predator costs 40 Million, there’s probably a reason for the discrepancy.

5092

The US has already thoroughly crossed that line with the $350m of Javelins and Stingers announced 3 or 4 days ago.

I agree with your point about the difficulty of getting them trained in time on completely new weapons systems.

5093

I take your point, but did they, re: crossing the line? Give a man a bullet and it’s still up to that man to shoot the bullet at someone and reap the whirlwind of repercussions. Give a country a system that requires fifty trained people to maintain and suddenly shows up 10x more than it was in theater, you get to point more fingers.

5094

This is an excellent summary of where the war is at right now (link in tweet):

5095

The debris of a Javelin or Stinger can not be identified. The debris from an American drone can be identified.

5096

Of course they can, for heaven’s sake the launchers are designed to be dropped, and the warheads don’t always explode. Not to mention Ukraine take videos of them shooting the weapons.

5097

I think more to the point Javelins and Stingers are something that were already in the supply chain, so if they have more of them then so what? If their drone capability suddenly expands, that’s a much clearer indication of outside support at a strategic rather than tactical level. Projected to the extreme, we could roll a nuke across the border and let Ukraine set it off, but nobody is going to call that “non-interference.”

It’s such a stupid war that we literally can’t help that much out of fear of the aggressors being able to make a case that we resisted.

5098

While on the one hand we were overestimating the Russians going into this, I also think we were underestimating the Ukrainians. I thought they were going to collapse in the South when I saw the Russian advances early on, but they haven’t. Similarly around Kharkiv. And because the Russians have implemented their deep operations so ineptly they are left in an incredibly vulnerable position.

Which is a longwinded way of saying, why do you think the Russians have the slightest clue where the Ukrainian C+C elements are?

The red splotch moving up towards Dnipro is really worrying me.

5099

I said debris. Launchers are not the issue. We and others have sent them a shitload. Drones are different. They have certain markers. From the country that they are created in.

5100

They don’t need to identify any Javelin debris. The US military aid was announced in the media, so this isn’t a covert op!