Russian invasion of Ukraine

[beefybake]

3 hours ago, ICTChris said:

I saw a report that the tank was disabled by a mine which destroyed it's fuel tank and then hit by a Lancet loitering munition.

 

All brain circuitries supplied by good ole US boys  Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Wikipedia    "....  Lancet utilizes the Jetson TX2 module by NVIDIA as its onboard control equipment and the Xilinx Zynq SoC module by Xilinx, an American company owned by AMD, for implementing programmable logic....."

[ICTChris]

More than thirty people killed, more injured in a Russian missile strike on a market in Kostyantynivka, a city in the Donetsk region.

Add it to the list of Russian strikes on civilians.

Edited September 6, 2023 by ICTChris
Updating death toll

[welshbairn]

[welshbairn]

Modern warfare..

 

[highlandmac]

6 hours ago, welshbairn said:

Modern warfare..

 

The crew survived a hand grenade through the top hatch?

[Cosmic Joe]

4 minutes ago, highlandmac said:

The crew survived a hand grenade through the top hatch?

Obscure porn categories thread for this pish

[welshbairn]

42 minutes ago, highlandmac said:

The crew survived a hand grenade through the top hatch?

I assume they'd already buggered off, given that they left the front door open.. 

[ICTChris]

Not sure how share links to Instagram but here are some social media highlights of the Russian helicopter pilot who defected, with his chopper to Ukraine.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cw5YpYjMkgM/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

[ICTChris]

Lots of media reports that ATACMS missiles are on their way to Ukraine.

These missiles have far greater range than any similar capabilities Ukraine currently has and really puts pretty much all Russian equipment and positions in Crimea at risk.

[Newbornbairn]

Quote

A British man who went to fight for the International Legion in Ukraine was found dead in a body of water with his hands bound behind his back.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-66758302

[LongTimeLurker]

8 hours ago, ICTChris said:

Lots of media reports that ATACMS missiles are on their way to Ukraine.

These missiles have far greater range than any similar capabilities Ukraine currently has and really puts pretty much all Russian equipment and positions in Crimea at risk....

....and every time this has been reported on before like this, and that has been several times now, Joe Biden has bottled it. Suspect it may be related to the Grain Deal negotiations in a renew it or we will start giving the Ukrainians missiles that can hit the Kerch bridge sort of way.

[TxRover]

Confirmed reports that the Russians are now emplacing S1 Pantsir batteries around Moscow due to Ukrainian drones. Given this is a normally forward deployed system, they are reducing their theatre capacities to defend their troops from drones in response to pinp***k Ukrainian attacks…quite irrational, but kind of expected. It also shows that the vaunted Soviet/Russian air defences were really never properly upgraded to deal with low and slow threats, even after Mathias Rust’s little trip.

[LongTimeLurker]

Apparently the Americans discovered they had more ATACMS than they realized in deep storage waiting for disposal that can be made operational again:

 

[TxRover]

4 hours ago, LongTimeLurker said:

Apparently the Americans discovered they had more ATACMS than they realized in deep storage waiting for disposal that can be made operational again:

 

It’s an interesting problem that Russia probably wishes it had. Some notes on the attempts by Russia to get ammunition from North Korea. It seems North Korea has been producing ammunition in the exact manner the Soviets did, with goals to be met or else. As we found after the fall of the Soviet Union, this resulted in impressive stocks on paper that as often as not did not exist in real life. This also produced a culture of graft and misreporting in the Soviet Armed Forces that carried into todays Russian forces. When the warehouse is listed as having 10,000,000 rifle rounds in it, but clearly only has 5,000,000, the unit commander withdrawing needing 100,000 rounds for an exercise can elect to accept 50,000 instead, allowing the warehouse manager to fudge the numbers a bit and give a “fee” to the commander.

Then the commander distributes half the necessary rounds to his units, who use various methods to cover up the shortage…like reducing exercises while reporting them all being done…which allows the soldiers to take it easy and earn some money on the side, because the unit is at half strength but the commander is being paid like it’s at full strength…the soldiers sell some of the unused rounds back to the warehouse for a little cash, helping balance the numbers some more, and only practice with a few rounds each.

It could well be that North Korea lacks a “sufficient” supply (by its standards) of some of the ammunition Russia desires, but only some military leaders and industrial leaders know that. It may be interesting to see how that plays out.

[beefybake]

12 hours ago, TxRover said:

It’s an interesting problem that Russia probably wishes it had. Some notes on the attempts by Russia to get ammunition from North Korea. It seems North Korea has been producing ammunition in the exact manner the Soviets did, with goals to be met or else. As we found after the fall of the Soviet Union, this resulted in impressive stocks on paper that as often as not did not exist in real life. This also produced a culture of graft and misreporting in the Soviet Armed Forces that carried into todays Russian forces. When the warehouse is listed as having 10,000,000 rifle rounds in it, but clearly only has 5,000,000, the unit commander withdrawing needing 100,000 rounds for an exercise can elect to accept 50,000 instead, allowing the warehouse manager to fudge the numbers a bit and give a “fee” to the commander.

Then the commander distributes half the necessary rounds to his units, who use various methods to cover up the shortage…like reducing exercises while reporting them all being done…which allows the soldiers to take it easy and earn some money on the side, because the unit is at half strength but the commander is being paid like it’s at full strength…the soldiers sell some of the unused rounds back to the warehouse for a little cash, helping balance the numbers some more, and only practice with a few rounds each.

It could well be that North Korea lacks a “sufficient” supply (by its standards) of some of the ammunition Russia desires, but only some military leaders and industrial leaders know that. It may be interesting to see how that plays out.

Hhm.   I'd rather got the impression over the years that In North Korea, the only people who did well were those 'in' with whichever Kim Jong was running the place.

And anyone else trying to circumvent the system was liable to end up being shot.    In Russia, it seems to me,  being corrupt is so endemic that the punishments are not remotely so terminal. 

[TxRover]

3 hours ago, beefybake said:

Hhm.   I'd rather got the impression over the years that In North Korea, the only people who did well were those 'in' with whichever Kim Jong was running the place.

And anyone else trying to circumvent the system was liable to end up being shot.    In Russia, it seems to me,  being corrupt is so endemic that the punishments are not remotely so terminal. 

Under the Soviet system, the process was similar. In North Korea there is very much a “landed gentry”, who exist at the whim of the Supreme Leader. The military is his too, and the leaders there have some of the same powers and abilities, but they all know and fear that one day the Supreme Leader can turn on them. His “family” is all he can truly rely upon (kinda like Trump), and are his source of information. As such, they control the narrative and wield outsized power, unless they misstep, in which case they die (see Jong-nam, Kim).

Until recently the system was made to operate via micro transactions by the “normal” people, that is an effective secondary market and a data market. That system is being strangled in the aftermath of COVID, and is being remoulded into who know what. The simple point remains, if you are willing, the system inherently allows you to fiddle the numbers. Note, however, the consequence of this is inevitably fatal if someone else doesn’t die and get blamed. Also notice the number of high ranking military officers that suddenly “disappear” or are publicly executed for disloyalty. Some portion of those are getting the chop due to skimming some cream for themselves.

[alta-pete]

I think @beefybake makes a good point. Russia is overtly corrupt and you can own ‘stuff’ both there and overseas. 

The pitfalls in getting caught in Russia are, I would suggest, not quite as deep in NK - if you’re all at it, someone dobbing you in probably lands them in trouble too. So all skim as big as they can - an internal arms race if you will - before they can accumulate enough to piss off to their retirement in Dubai. 

In NK, where do you spend the skimmings? The consequences are fatal so no point skimming small; but skimming big, apart from stuffing it under the bed, surely you’re going to look kinda conspicuous.

Or does NK have a functioning market in hookers n ching? (Also likely conspicuous I’d have thought). 

[TxRover]

1 minute ago, alta-pete said:

I think @beefybake makes a good point. Russia is overtly corrupt and you can own ‘stuff’ both there and overseas. 

The pitfalls in getting caught in Russia are, I would suggest, not quite as deep in NK - if you’re all at it, someone dobbing you in probably lands them in trouble too. So all skim as big as they can - an internal arms race if you will - before they can accumulate enough to piss off to their retirement in Dubai. 

In NK, where do you spend the skimmings? The consequences are fatal so no point skimming small; but skimming big, apart from stuffing it under the bed, surely you’re going to look kinda conspicuous.

Or does NK have a functioning market in hookers n ching? (Also likely conspicuous I’d have thought). 

Oh, absolutely the point is valid due to the closed nature of NK, but as history teaches, these sorts of regimes provide perverse incentives to lie when you don’t produce your 100 widget requirement, which becomes an institutionalised system of lying about basic facts and data to the top leadership.

The Great Leader says “give my friend 1,000,000 155mm shells”, the military leaders realise they can’t do that without endangering the regime because instead of 2,000,000 shells in the warehouse there are only 1,100,000. This the military leaders create a crisis that reduces what they can “afford” to divert.

[LongTimeLurker]

Think you would be taking a big chance in a system like North Korea's to have fewer shells in your warehouse than you are supposed to in a several generations of your family out to cousins of the nth degree could wind up with a one way ticket to a labour camp sort of way. They are still in Stalinist purges mode by all accounts rather than something like the Brezhnev era of stagnation when the Soviet system started to become corrupt. From what I have read the knock against what NK can supply appears to be more its poor quality than anything else. Bizarrely though this was coming from the Ukrainian side:

 

[alta-pete]

This is the bit that also surprises me - and is probably a shooty-in for @TxRover - but is artillery all built to a universal standard?

I get .22 and .303 bullets but when you get to bigger more specialised guns, you can just drop your US/German/NK missile into the chamber and it’ll fire?