Nukes already?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., news, nukes, politics, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 202022
 

Seems unlikely, but…

Deranged Putin has ALREADY tried to detonate nuclear bomb but was scuppered in last-minute ‘sabotage’, insider claims

The article seems distinctly lean on actual details and evidence. Claim is made that *two* attempts to test nuclear weapons – including an underwater test in the Barents Sea –  were aborted due to emergencies of some kind, actually caused by people somewhere in the chain realizing that the whole idea was nuts. How the quoted “expert” would know this is unclear.

I can see Putin deciding to set off nukes as a show of force. I can see his own people sabotaging the effort, because they don’t want their families to be evaporated. But while such events are plausible, I’d need evidence before I believed they actually happened. And the thing is, incidents like this will almost certainly never have adequate evidence… until an actual bomb actually goes off.

In any event, I’m glad that some time back I got me a functional radiation detector.

 Posted by at 12:59 pm

Cops vs robots

 aircraft, Hmm..., news, politics, russian empire, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Oct 182022
 

Ukrainian police use AK-47s (or maybe AK-74s, I can’t tell) to try to take out Russian anti-civilian buzz bombs. The *claim* is that they shot one down, but that’s hard to determine form the footage… it could well be that the thing just crashed where it did because that’s where it was aimed. They really need to get Tom Selleck on the case.

The Ukrainians, as unlucky as they’ve been, are lucky that they didn’t defund the police and replace them with social workers. I’m not sure that clipboards and unearned moral smugness would de-escalate an incoming raid of kamikaze drones.

 Posted by at 8:39 pm

Russia lost another SU-34

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, news, politics, russian empire  No Responses »
Oct 182022
 

Russian losses are expanding beyond Ukraine…

13 dead as Russian warplane crashes into apartment building near Ukraine border

Russian news agencies have reported that at least 13 people died when a warplane crashed on Monday into a residential area in the Russian port city of Yeysk after suffering engine failure.

Gotta admit, this is a hell  of a shot (I assume it’s from some sort of security camera):

That pilot who saved himself and doomed an apartment building has some splainin’ to do.

The Russians have received 140 SU-34s, and have apparently lost 14 of them so far in the war. Maybe they shouldn’t go tossing them all willy-nilly into apartment blocks.

 Posted by at 12:08 am

Irrecoverable Losses

 Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, politics, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 122022
 

Russia’s ‘irrecoverable losses’ in Ukraine: more than 90,000 troops dead, disabled, or AWOL

This estimate appears to come from the FSB. Normally you’d expect them to underestimate the losses in order to try to make things look not quite so bad. So… is this an underestimate? Is it reasonably accurate? Or is it in the FSB’s interests to try to make things look *worse?* If the latter… one might think they’re doing it to make Ukraine look like enough of a threat to retroactively justify the invasion. or maybe they’re doing it to make the invasion look like enough of an unmitigated disaster to help spur on some home-grown regime change. Shrug.

In any event: good job, Vlad.

 Posted by at 8:29 pm

Man-portable anti-missile systems

 aircraft, awesomeness, news, rockets, russian empire, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Oct 112022
 

Assuming the video is accurate (these days, who knows), it appears that a Ukrainian soldier swatted a Russian cruise missile on its way to a war crime using a standard shoulder-launched short range missile.

It’s unclear to me what system was used, as the video is pretty potato in quality. Doesn’t look to me like a Stinger; not enough stuff on the front of the launcher. Maybe a Grail, Gremlin or Piorun.

A MANPAD vs a cruise missile makes sense: cruise missiles fly low, generally subsonic, have no countermeasures such as flares and do not try to maneuver to avoid getting hit. On the other hand their engines are small and do not put out nearly as much thermal energy as the turbojets of a fighter; but on the gripping hand, they are also not as IR shielded as the exhausts of a stealthy airplane or a battlefield helicopter. So the trick with using a MANPAD to take out a cruise missile is to be in the right place at the right time, and to be on the ball. It’s impossible to know what apartment building or orphanarium or kitten hospital the Russian cruise missile was targeted to obliterate, but it’s safe to say that the missileer here just saved a fair number of civilians a lot of grief.

 Posted by at 8:53 pm

Someone attempt to explain this

 Crazy, Hmm..., news, politics, religion, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 092022
 

I have been astonished since the Russian invasion of Ukraine by support for Putin by many on the Right in the US. They support him for a few main reasons, seemingly:

1) Ukraine was well known as being corrupt (witness Hunter Biden).

2) Putin has been standing up against a lot of the things the Right stands up against… in particular, leftist lunacy.

3) Putin is “pro-Christian.”

Yeah, about #3…

Putin ally threatens to turn Chechens loose on Russian dissidents

Putin is apparently contemplating unleashing foreign Muslims onto Russian Christians. Is… is this “defending Christianity?”

 Posted by at 12:13 am

Bridge Goes BOOM

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, politics, russian empire, weapons, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 082022
 

The Kerch Bridge that connects Russia to Crimea partially collapsed after an explosion – possibly a car bomb – went off overnight. A parallel span with a rail line had a fuel train at the time; several of the tanker cars caught fire. All in all, quite an impressive mess.

 

In related matters, it seems that the deeper strategy behind the Wagner Group recruiting Russian criminals has become clear:

 

The prisoners, it seems, were never meant to be useful as any sort of fighting force, and barely even as cannon fodder: instead, they are being simply dumped into Ukrainian hands. This empties out Russian prisons, saving them some money, and are now Ukraines problem. Ukrainian military forces have to deal with the POWs on the battlefield; then the tattered Ukrainian economy has to deal with housing them. The Russians, it seems, views them as deserters and won’t trade them for Ukrainian POWs.

Genius. Evil genius, but genius nonetheless. It’s largely the same strategy that Turkey and such have used against Europe with floods of “migrants.”

 Posted by at 8:15 am
 Older Entries  Newer Entries