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Eastwood

By Eastwood
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Hook1997

Hook1997 5354

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32 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

If so important.  Worth so much.  Why deploy it in a conflict against an enemy with a minimal air force capability and material losses are an everyday event?  

It’s not worth billions with one setup and NATO and the US have their own version I’m pretty sure. It jams radar, GPS, Phones, ect, I think some have way overstated the find it is.   Sure we can compare and look at the tech but it’s not a huge drastic find that will set them back years….   They have given some to Iran, Algeria, Serbia, so that tells you how secret it actually is.

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AUS-97HORN
AUS-97HORN

For the love of Christ woman,  stop posting the same fucking thing every 20 mins just to make your neurotic self feel better.     Bring something useful to the thread other than your inane babbli

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InkaUtexas
InkaUtexas

I volunteered today. Log/Admin role to replace people for 30-60 days. The operation is in the west, or should the Orcs win will be pulled back behind the NATO wall. Either way the humanitarian effort

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BabaYaga

BabaYaga 15298

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12 minutes ago, Hook1997 said:

It’s not worth billions and NATO and the US have their own version I’m pretty sure. It jams radar, GPS, Phones, ect, I think some have way overstated the find it is.   Sure we can compare and look at the tech but it’s not a huge drastic find.  They have given some to Iran, Algeria, Serbia, so that tells you how secret it actually is.

When you think you're getting this

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And you realize you're only getting this....

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clapclapclap

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2 hours ago, BamaATL said:

No idea if this is real or not, but the fade to the fucking idiots in the elevator was a nice touch.

It's from several years ago.

And the only place in Ukraine with mountains like that is the far southwest corner.  Would be pretty bad for Ukraine if Russia was putting forces in halfway between Lviv and Romania.

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dimyh

dimyh 1874

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7 hours ago, BabaYaga said:

There are worse problems to have

 

May be wishful thinking but if UA can defeat these pockets in detail do they have enough time to reinforce Mariupol? That is my biggest concern at this point is if Russia can link up Crimea and Donbass then just sit back trying to get favorable peace terms. Assuming that they can slowly consolidate some logistical supply lines on that eastern front and continue with punitive artillery fire on Kyiv, Odessa, etc. Which seems most consistent with what's in Putin's playbook.

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Ag with kids

Ag with kids 581

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56 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

That would be a good way for them and their parent company to be completely banned/sanctioned in the US, Europe, Australia, etc. That would kill that company.

Well, they're persona non grata for a whole lot of federal government agencies already.

We won't purchase any DJI product specifically for that reason - because we work with a lot of fedgov folks and want to make sure we can can continue to do so.

But, I hope that if they pull that BS we'd put a full on ban/sanction against them.  But, they ARE the market leader in commercial UAS so it'll be interesting.

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89666

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After the Russians took control of some radio/TV stations (I think down on the coast or along the border - I know that at least one city had Russians taking over TV/radio and broadcasting propaganda) Ukraine government moved to consolidate the TV and radio stations, and tried to remove the broadcast equipment in various areas, so that if the Russians took those areas, they couldn't broadcast over those TV/radio stations, and Ukrainians would still be getting information from their government/local officials and not from Russians trying to fuck around.

Maybe paying off and kudos to whoever worked to make that happen, because the Russians are having a hard time getting their propaganda/orders out.

Probably wasn't hard to disable or remove key components (that the Russian comms people wouldn't be able to easily replace), but still.

 

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89666

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Take this with a grain of salt, but Putin had publicly pledged not to call up reserves or send in conscripts or extend the service of conscripts, etc.

But a former Russian MP is claiming that he's going to false flag an attack in Russia to try and get the Russian people behind such moves.  

Wouldn't be the first time - Russia did it in 1999 with the apartment buildings that were bombed under a false flag.

https://www.facebook.com/iponomarev/posts/pfbid02uvNfc2YT4AcB1SSdvmDvqw2zbwvcy16Pyb2w62XSFTJ31QrcCuiSCj86Jy3o9npzl

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Source: FSB is preparing a terrorist attack in a large Russian city with hundreds of victims

Thus, the Putin's regime will try to justify the introduction of general mobilization

A source, close to Russian forces, reported the editorial office "Morning of February", that the Federal Security Service is preparing an explosion at a chemical or oil processing plant near Moscow or another major Russian city with what is the plan for the wind to bring poisonous substances to residential neighborhoods. As a result, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people must die. It is planned to blame Ukrainian dissidents.

More than twenty enterprises are considered as a subject for diversion, but the priority is the chemical combination "Easter Mineral Fertilizer" and the Moscow Oil Processing Plant in Kapotna. Explosions on these enterprises that are under residential development could lead to numerous casualties. In addition, both of these objects are located south-east of the center of the Russian capital, and in the southeastern wind, the whole city can be covered with poisonous clouds. Explosions are also possible in public places, in particular, in the metro. It is reported that there are various options in the work, and the victims of the planned terrorist attack are not necessarily Muscovites.

After the failure of the Blitzkrig in Ukraine, Moscow faced the problem of acute lack of personal composition to compensate for the losses suffered. At the same time, the leadership of the state has repeatedly stated that mobilization will not be introduced. In order to play back on this issue, we need a very heavy suggestion: the death of thousands of civilians, in which Ukraine can be blamed. Similarly, the FSB organized explosions in Russian houses in 1999 to give a reason for the beginning of the Second Chechen War.

If you live in a large Russian city or nearby potentially dangerous objects, and you have the opportunity to move from there, for example, to the village - we strongly recommend you to do the same. We also do not advise to use the subway at rush hour and not to visit places of mass gathering people. Remember, Putin and his surroundings will do everything to stay in power!

 

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105139

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1 minute ago, 686 said:

Western G20 members want to kick Russia out of the group, and Poland is interested in taking Russia’s spot. Poland has the 21st largest GDP. Poland feeling their Wheaties with NATO backing.

http:// https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-pushes-call-russia-be-excluded-g20-2022-03-22/

I'm thinking that another coupla months of sanctions, and the rankings will just work themselves out.  

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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Yep.  We won’t even need to use the AP Poll, the RPI will take care of that decision for us.  Kirk Bohls has chimed though and indicated no matter what the numbers say, Russia still passes the Eye Ball Test.  

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Deej

Deej 76791

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7 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Yep.  We won’t even need to use the AP Poll, the RPI will take care of that decision for us.  Kirk Bohls has chimed though and indicated no matter what the numbers say, Russia still passes the Eye Ball Test.  

I heard Kurt is voting for Putin for the Nobel over Zelenskyy.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32393

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-purges-in-putins-shrinking-inner-circle

The Purges in Putin’s Shrinking Inner Circle

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I recently spoke by phone with Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and an expert on the Russian state’s intelligence apparatus. Currently in London, Soldatov—along with Irina Borogan—has written “The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad”; the pair also founded and edits the Web site Agentura.ru, which reports on Russia’s security services. (On Sunday, the site was blocked in the Russian Federation.) I called him to discuss recent reports of purges within the security services after Russian diplomatic and military failures in Ukraine, but our chat ended up touching on a wide range of topics, including the possible reasons for Vladimir Putin’s turn against his intelligence agencies, the increasing power of the military in Russia, the changes and contractions within Putin’s inner circle over the past decade, how ordinary Russians view the current conflict, and why Soldatov himself left Russia in 2020. The conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

 

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What do we know about internal changes that have occurred in the Russian military and security services since the war in Ukraine began?

What we know is that, since the war began, Putin’s attacked the agencies already, as far as we know. So the war started at this now infamous meeting of the Russian Security Council, where Putin publicly berated the director of the S.V.R., the foreign-intelligence agency, which is a direct successor to the spy section of the K.G.B. Two and a half weeks later, we got news about the F.S.B. foreign-intelligence branch, because the F.S.B. also has a foreign-intelligence branch coming under attack. We now know about two people, two top-level officials at this department, being questioned and placed under house arrest.

Then, last week, we got news that the deputy head of the National Guard was forced to resign, and he will also probably face some sort of a criminal investigation. And he is not just National Guard. This guy is a former security-services person. He was with Putin’s personal security detail before he joined the National Guard, so he’s known personally to Putin.

 

 

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How did we, or you, come by this information? And what do we know about the reasons for the moves?

Well, we know about the director of the S.V.R., Sergey Naryshkin, being humiliated, because it was done publicly, and this meeting was broadcast. We know about the F.S.B. purges because I’ve been investigating this particular unit of the F.S.B. starting in 2002, when actually I learned that there was such a thing inside of the F.S.B., which is supposed to be purely a domestic agency. But it’s obtained new powers, and they were given authority to conduct operations abroad, specifically in the former Soviet Union, meaning in Ukraine.

Last week’s news about the deputy head of the National Guard was first broken on some Telegram channel, which we know is close to the F.S.B., and a few hours later it was confirmed by official sources. But, while the Telegram channel said that the guy was detained, the official version is that he was just asked to resign.

 

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How much do you feel comfortable speculating on the reasons for these moves? There’s some sense that the war is not going well for Russia, and so that’s what’s behind them. Do you have any sense, specifically, of why Putin might have gone after these people, and what that might suggest?

Yeah, I’ve been asking all my sources, and not only me but many Russian investigative journalists are now talking to their sources inside of Russian security and asking them, “What is going on?” It looks like Putin is getting really unhappy with the operation, but it looks like he still believes that the original plan was fine but that there were some problems with some elements. And that is why his attack on the foreign-intelligence branch of the F.S.B. is not just about bad intelligence but also about something else.

This unit is also in charge of conducting political warfare operations in Ukraine, meaning cultivating networks of agents and supporters of political groups that might be pro-Kremlin and that would support the Russian invasion. But that never happened, and, as far as I know from my sources, one of the investigations is also about how they used funds allocated to political groups in Ukraine. Maybe now it looks like Putin has gotten angry with the lack of popular support in Ukraine for the Russian troops.

But it looks like this story is developing really fast, and now we have news that it’s not only about the use of funds but also that military counterintelligence is looking into the activities of this particular department of the F.S.B. And that could mean that, finally, people in Moscow started asking themselves why the U.S. intelligence was so accurate. Military counterintelligence is mostly about mole-hunting, identifying the sources of leaks. So it looks like now Putin is getting angry, not only with bad intelligence and the bad performance in Ukraine but also about the sourcing of the U.S. intelligence about the invasion, and why U.S. intelligence was so good before the invasion, and why the Americans knew so many things about what was coming.

 

So Putin doesn’t think the over-all invasion plan, or the military dimensions of it, were necessarily wrong. But he’s upset with both how much intelligence America had and the political response within Ukraine to the invasion?

Yes, exactly.

There have been a lot of reports in the Western press that Putin is isolated now, whether this is because he’s been in power so long or because he doesn’t meet with many people owing to the pandemic. Do you have a sense of whether those types of reports are accurate? And do you have a sense of who Putin does talk to and what type of inner circle he has now? It feels like maybe people had a better idea of who was in his circle ten years ago.

Yeah. That’s true, and there is a reason for that. Ten years ago, Putin listened to at least several dozen different kinds of people. It might have been a very strange collection of characters: at one point, it was a film director with crazy ideas about the Russian imperial past. And, at another point, it was a journalist who was a big fan of Pinochet. There were some priests. So it was a multitude of people, but now it looks like, starting in 2016, 2017, this circle has been getting smaller and smaller. And what I’m getting from my sources is that, these days, Putin listens to only three or four people. There is Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu, whom he trusts, and that is why Shoigu has played the main role in this invasion. There is Nikolai Patrushev, his head of the Security Council, and one of his oldest friends, who’s still close to him and was his successor as the director of the F.S.B. And probably one or two other friends from St. Petersburg, but that’s about it.

And so, in addition to the smaller circle, is your sense from people that his mindset has really changed in some way, or his character has changed in some way? I don’t want to go too far into psychoanalyzing him—

I’m not an expert on psychology. But I see, and everybody can see, that he’s still very quick at responding to people. Or, judging by his public performances, it looks like he is very quick at reacting to what people say. So it means that mentally or intellectually he’s still fine, but he might have developed some ideas from people’s adulation of him. Basically, when you are surrounded by people who just listen to you, you come to believe that you are the smartest guy in the room, and know better—and I think that was the biggest challenge for security and intelligence agencies reporting to him about what is going on in Ukraine, because everybody knows that Putin has his own strong opinions about Ukraine. He’s writing articles about the history of Ukraine, and he’s talking incessantly about Ukraine. How can you challenge him?

It’s not very clear how you can do that, especially due to this atmosphere of fear over the past seven years or so because of what I would say is selective repression against the élite. And it’s a big thing now in Russia. It’s not only that Putin tried to poisonNavalny and expelled political opposition from the country. It’s also about governors and ministers in jail. You have so many people now in jail, even people from the F.S.B. So if you think, from the point of view of a military general, is it really safe to say something to Putin that he would not like? I think it’s a big challenge for them.

It seems like you’re describing a problem with a lot of autocratic political systems where bad news doesn’t filter upward or honest news doesn’t filter upward.

Yes. And, actually, it’s even worse because, within the agencies, there is a huge problem of mistrust between, say, mid-level officers and the generals. So you have the middle-level officers who might understand what actually is going on in Ukraine, but they are quite unwilling to report this to the generals, and the generals obviously think twice about whether to channel this information to Putin.

 

When we read about Russia ten or so years ago, obviously Putin was the most powerful person. But it did feel like there were all these different power centers, whether it was friendly oligarchs or whether it was the security services. What are those other power centers that still exist, whose opinion will be important to keeping the war going and keeping Putin in power? Or do you think that basically there are almost no other power centers?

Things changed, especially after Western sanctions were introduced in 2014, and mostly because of money. Before 2014–2016, we had these oligarchs, and they were, at least to some extent, independent. They had their contracts in the West, they had their contracts in the country, so they’re quite powerful. And maybe back then they could say something to Putin. This option was there.

Now it’s completely changed because of the sanctions. What happened is that Russian oligarchs, many of them, lost their contracts in the West, and Putin was really smart about offering them financial help by providing military contracts. So you had some people who own huge enterprises producing metal, engines, this kind of thing, and they lost their contracts in the U.S. and in Europe. All of a sudden, now they had something of a problem, but because of the sanctions and because the military-industrial complex is getting bigger, they got this military contract. And that made many of the oligarchs much more dependent on the state funding.

And not just some state funding but the funding provided by the military. This is why the Army became so important recently, and it’s absolutely clear that the Army understands that really well. And the Army is getting more and more ambitious, and the Army has a say in Russian ideology, too. For instance, we have the Youth Army, a nationwide movement that is used to brainwash kids in schools. The Army recently built one of the biggest churches in the country. They built this enormous military park as a propaganda exercise. They interfere with the way history is taught. So, all of a sudden, the military became really ambitious, and I would say that now it’s not about oligarchs and siloviki, the current and former security-services people. Now you have the military and the military-industrial complex, and oligarchs are dependent on the military-industrial complex.

That’s really interesting, because it seems like the purges that you’ve talked about happening so far are not mainly from the military, despite what a lot of people perceive to be military failures having to do with Russian military strategy and Russian military performance.

Absolutely. Yeah, that’s right.

Do you see the military as an alternate power center to Putin that could develop?

That’s a good question, because, here, we are in some uncharted territory. On one hand, Shoigu, the Minister of Defense, is a very shrewd politician. He’s been around for thirty years. He became Minister of Emergencies and Disaster Relief back in the nineteen-nineties, and he’s still a minister. Now he has a much more powerful ministry, but nevertheless it’s still the same guy. And while we have had so many changes, so many political crises for thirty years, Shoigu always survived. But his thing was always to show his complete loyalty to Putin. It might be a game, but Putin believes him and trusts him and believes that Shoigu is absolutely loyal to him.

I saw a quote from you where you suggested that opposition to Putin among average Russians was likely to gather steam on social-media and Internet platforms, and that Internet companies pulling out of Russia for reasons of wanting to punish Putin or the Russian state could have negative effects. Is that still how you feel?

Right now, it’s not about resistance. It’s more about an ability to talk and to get uncensored information about Ukraine. It’s about an ability to talk with your friends about what is going on. And, unfortunately, social media is basically the only place we actually can do that in the country. Given how strong Russian censorship is, where you cannot call the war a war and all that, social media is the only means to get access to this information.

In the past, yes, it was a tool to mobilize people to go to the streets. But, right now, maybe it’s not the right moment for that, because Russian restrictions on public gatherings are so horribly strict. You can face prison time for putting a Ukrainian flag up in your window. But it’s still relevant. Social-media access is still of the utmost importance for Russians.

 

Do you have any sense of what public opinion is about the conflict within Russia?

The big propaganda win for Putin is that he and his media are still capable of convincing people that the fighting takes place only in Lugansk and Donetsk. So they think nothing is going on in Kharkiv or Kyiv, and it’s a big, big win for Putin. Lots of ordinary Russians actually believe that the Russian army is there only to defend these two popular republics, and that’s all.

I have lots of friends and relatives in Moscow, and I’ve been asking them constantly about this. And it looks like ordinary Russians still believe this picture. They also think that all the civilian casualties are caused by nationalist gangs, so this propaganda line is also quite successful. So that’s how it is.

There are some cracks, but it’s not about more sympathy toward Ukrainians. It’s more killed soldiers, because it looks like the casualties are really big in the Russian military. I know from my relatives in the Volga region, quite far from Moscow, that now in small towns they have people who have had their kids killed in Ukraine. So society started talking about it because there are so many deaths. But, unfortunately, I don’t see any sympathy for Ukraine, which is a very hard thing to say.

Why did you leave Russia?

I’ve been writing about Russian security services, starting in the late nineties, for more than twenty-three years now, and it’s been my topic. But in 2020 the Russian government made it absolutely illegal to report on Russian security services. And because I wanted to keep going, because I think it’s an important topic, I thought I needed to leave the country. Then the Russian government sent me some signals that it would be better for me to leave the country. I have a Web site, which my partner and I established back in 2000. It’s a Web site that monitors the activity of the Russian security services. And it used to have a media license, because in Russia you need to have a license to be in media. So, in the beginning of 2020, our Web site was stripped of its license. But the reason provided by the Russian censorship agency, which is in charge of these media licenses, was the death of [Agentura.ru’s] editor. And, because I’m the editor, I took it as a kind of perverse humor by the Russian censors. I got several signals of the same sort, enough that, in September of 2020, we decided to leave the country.

And the remaining journalists who are doing great work in Moscow—what have you heard from them?

Every day, I hear from my friends that they just left, so journalists are leaving the country right now. And I have friends now in Yerevan, in Vilnius, in Montenegro, and Prague and Berlin, but mostly in countries like Armenia and Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, because they didn’t have time to get European visas and they needed to leave the country really quickly.

I have friends who live in a garage in Yerevan because it’s really desperate for them. So I would say that most of my friends have already left the country, but there’s still some people there. But we have only one independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, which is sort of capable of writing something—at least something—about the war. And they had at least one correspondent who wasn’t Ukrainian reporting from Ukraine, but that’s about it. And this newspaper is under enormous pressure.

For instance, maybe you’ll remember this story that, during a state-TV newscast, there was a woman who held up a sign against the war. It went viral, but nevertheless Novaya Gazeta was forced to blanket the sign in published photos because it had these antiwar words. It’s horrible.

What are you hoping to happen here? I mean, obviously, I’m sure, for the war to end, but is there an off-ramp you see for Putin and Russia? How is Russia going to reconstitute itself?

It’s a very hard question, to be fair. We are always trying to make these comparisons with the late nineteen-eighties, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then we got perestroika and all of that. So maybe is it possible to repeat the same thing? I was fifteen years old, but still I remember that back then there was this cheerful mood that people were good, and it was just the system that was bad. So back then maybe I was naïve, maybe my parents were naïve and my friends were naïve, but we had this idea that it was only because of the Communist Party and the K.G.B., and if you could get rid of them everything was going to be fine. People are good. Even the people, say, in the military and in the security services. They were just pressured to be bad and to serve the system.

These days, unfortunately, we don’t have this excuse. We do have lots of people who support the war, unfortunately. Yes, I understand that it’s about propaganda, and it’s about fear, and people are really fearful. They understand what is at stake, and these select repressions were quite successful at freezing society. But, nonetheless, there’s so many people who support the war, and, to be honest, I just don’t know the answer. I don’t know how to get them back as humans.

You are talking about average citizens and people within the state itself who believe in the war in a way that they did in the Soviet system?

You have ordinary people, and people in the security services, and people in the military, and they are supportive of this war. And I don’t quite understand how we can humanize them back. I just don’t see a way. That’s my problem.

And not just the war, but you see them as supportive of Putin and Putinism in some way, too?

Well, yeah. The war is a function of Putinism because it’s so aggressive. Putin is famous for having no sympathy, actually. So, if I remember what struck me when I was with Novaya Gazeta in 2006, when Anna Politkovskaya was killed and some journalists finally asked Putin this question, like, “You had a journalist killed in your country.” And he was absolutely horrible, because he expressed no sympathy at all. Like, “Well, yeah. Blah, blah, blah.” He said that she was absolutely insignificant, and you think, Wow, you can’t find some words to express sympathy. Just maybe you feel sorry. And I think that’s what we have here with Ukraine. It’s just a manifestation of his complete lack of sympathy for other people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rimbo

Rimbo 25934

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How Ukraine’s Outgunned Air Force Is Fighting Back Against Russian Jets

 

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How Ukraine’s Outgunned Air Force Is Fighting Back Against Russian Jets

t_logo_291_black.png
March 22, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ETMarch 22, 2022
March 22, 2022

Maria Varenikova and Andrew E. Kramer

 
 
 

A Ukrainian SU-27 flying over Ozerne air base in northern Ukraine in 2018.

 

A Ukrainian SU-27 flying over Ozerne air base in northern Ukraine in 2018.A Ukrainian SU-27 flying over Ozerne air base in northern Ukraine in 2018.Credit...Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

LVIV, Ukraine — Each night, Ukrainian pilots like Andriy loiter in an undisclosed aircraft hangar, waiting, waiting, until the tension is broken with a shouted, one-word command: “Air!”

Andriy hustles into his Su-27 supersonic jet and hastily taxis toward the runway, getting airborne as quickly as possible. He takes off so fast that he doesn’t yet know his mission for the night, though the big picture is always the same — to bring the fight to a Russian Air Force that is vastly superior in numbers but has so far failed to win control of the skies above Ukraine.

“I don’t do any checks,” said Andriy, a Ukrainian Air Force pilot who as a condition of granting an interview was not permitted to give his surname or rank. “I just take off.”

Nearly a month into the fighting, one of the biggest surprises of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s failure to defeat the Ukrainian Air Force. Military analysts had expected Russian forces to quickly destroy or paralyze Ukraine’s air defenses and military aircraft, yet neither have happened. Instead, Top Gun-style aerial dogfights, rare in modern warfare, are now raging above the country.

 

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“Every time when I fly, it’s for a real fight,” said Andriy, who is 25 and has flown 10 missions in the war. “In every fight with Russian jets, there is no equality. They always have five times more” planes in the air.

The success of Ukrainian pilots has helped protect Ukrainian soldiers on the ground and prevented wider bombing in cities, since pilots have intercepted some Russian cruise missiles. Ukrainian officials also say the country’s military has shot down 97 fixed-wing Russian aircraft. That number could not be verified but the crumpled remnants of Russian fighter jets have crashed into rivers, fields and houses.

 
 
 
 

Andriy, a Ukrainian Air Force pilot.“Every time when I fly, it’s for a real fight,” he said.

Image
 

Andriy, a Ukrainian Air Force pilot.“Every time when I fly, it’s for a real fight,” he said.Andriy, a Ukrainian Air Force pilot.“Every time when I fly, it’s for a real fight,” he said.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

The Ukrainian Air Force is operating in near total secrecy. Its fighter jets can fly from air strips in western Ukraine, airports that have been bombed yet retain enough runway for takeoffs or landings — or even from highways, analysts say. They are vastly outnumbered: Russia is believed to fly some 200 sorties per day while Ukraine flies five to 10.

Ukrainian pilots do have one advantage. In most of the country, Russian planes fly over territory controlled by the Ukrainian military, which can move anti-aircraft missiles to harass — and shoot down — planes.

 

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“Ukraine has been effective in the sky because we operate on our own land,” Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force said. “The enemy flying into our airspace is flying into the zone of our air defense systems.” He described the strategy as luring Russian planes into air defense traps.

Dave Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and the principal attack planner for the Desert Storm air campaign in Iraq, said the impressive performance of the Ukrainian pilots had helped counter their disadvantages in numbers. He said Ukraine now has roughly 55 operational fighter jets, a number that is dwindling from shoot-downs and mechanical failures, as Ukrainian pilots are “stressing them to max performance.”

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has appealed repeatedly to Western governments to replenish the Ukrainian Air Force and has asked NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over the country, a step Western leaders have so far refused to take. Slovakia and Poland have considered sending MiG-29 fighter jets, which Ukrainian pilots could fly with minimal additional training, but as yet no transfers have been made.

“Russian troops have already fired nearly 1,000 missiles at Ukraine, countless bombs,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video address to Congress on March 16, appealing for more planes. “And you know that they exist, and you have them, but they are on earth, not in Ukraine — in the Ukrainian sky.”

Mr. Deptula said transferring these jets into Ukraine is critical. “Without resupply,” he said, “they will run out of airplanes before they run out of pilots.”

Pilotless drones are also a tool in the Ukrainian military’s arsenal, but not in the battle for control of the airspace. Ukraine flies a Turkish-made armed drone, the Bayraktar TB-2, a plodding, propeller aircraft that is lethally effective in destroying tanks or artillery pieces on the ground but cannot hit targets in the air. If Ukraine’s air defenses fail, Russian jets could easily pick them off.

 
 
 

The Bayraktar TB2 drone was on display during a rehearsal for a military parade for Ukraine’s Independence Day last year in Kyiv.

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The Bayraktar TB2 drone was on display during a rehearsal for a military parade for Ukraine’s Independence Day last year in Kyiv.The Bayraktar TB2 drone was on display during a rehearsal for a military parade for Ukraine’s Independence Day last year in Kyiv.Credit...Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

As in other aspects of Ukraine’s war effort, volunteers play a role in the air battles. A volunteer network watches and listens for Russian jets, calling in coordinates and estimated speed and altitude. Other private Ukrainian pilots have removed up-to-date civilian navigation equipment from their planes and handed it over to the air force, in case it can be helpful.

 

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Air-to-air combat has been rare in modern war, with only isolated examples in recent decades. U.S. pilots, for example, have not flown extensive aerial dogfights since the first Iraq War in 1991. Since then, U.S. fighter jets have engaged in air-to-air combat on just a few occasions, shooting down 10 planes in the Balkan wars and one plane in Syria, according to Mr. Deptula.

In the night sky, Andriy said he relies on instruments to discern the positions of enemy planes, which he says are always present. He has shot down Russian jets but was not permitted to say how many, or of which type. He said his targeting system can fire at planes a few dozen miles away.

Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments

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Russia’s shrinking force. The Pentagon said that Russia’s “combat power” in Ukraine has dipped below 90 percent of its original force. The assessment reflects the significant losses that Russian troops have suffered at the hands of Ukrainian soldiers.

On the ground. Amid Russia’s stalled invasion, Ukrainians continued to mount a spirited defense of Kyiv and said they had recaptured Makariv, a town about 40 miles away from the capital. In Kherson, videos and photographs showed Russian soldiers opening fire on protesters.

Cracking down on dissent. A Russian court sentenced the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, already serving a two-and-a-half-year prison term for violating parole, to an additional nine years on fraud charges. Russia also amended a draconian censorship law to expand the scope of government bodies off-limits to criticism.

Biden’s diplomatic push. President Biden will press allies for even more aggressive economic sanctions against Russia during a series of global summits in Europe this week, seeking to maintain unity of purpose as Russian forces continue to rain destruction on cities in Ukraine.

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“I mostly have tasks of hitting airborne targets, of intercepting enemy jets,” he said. “I wait for the missile to lock on my target. After that I press fire.”

When he shoots down a Russian jet, he said, “I am happy that this plane will no longer bomb my peaceful towns. And as we see in practice, that is exactly what Russian jets do.”

Most of the aerial combat in Ukraine has been nocturnal, as Russian aircraft attack in the dark when they are less vulnerable to air defenses. In the dogfights over Ukraine, Andriy said, the Russians have been flying an array of modern Sukhoi jets, such as the Su-30, Su-34 and Su-35.

 
 
 
 

A satellite image of destroyed Russian helicopters on the tarmac at an airfield in Kherson, Ukraine, last week.

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A satellite image of destroyed Russian helicopters on the tarmac at an airfield in Kherson, Ukraine, last week.A satellite image of destroyed Russian helicopters on the tarmac at an airfield in Kherson, Ukraine, last week.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Associated Press

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“I had situations when I was approaching a Russian plane to a close enough distance to target and fire,” he said. “I could already detect it but was waiting for my missile to lock on while at the same time from the ground they tell me that a missile was fired at me already.”

He said he maneuvered his jet through a series of extreme banks, dives and climbs in order to exhaust the fuel supplies of the missiles coming after him. “The time I have to save myself depends on how far away the missile was fired at me and what kind of missile,” he said.

Still, he said in an interview on a clear, sunny day, “I can still feel a huge rush of adrenaline in my body because every flight is a fight.”

Andriy graduated from the Kharkiv Air Force School after deciding to become a pilot as a teenager. “Neither me nor my friends ever thought we would have to face a real war,” he said. “But that’s not how it turned out.”

Andriy has moved his wife to a safer part of Ukraine, but she has not left the country, he said. She spends her days weaving homemade camouflage nets for the Ukrainian army. He never tells family members when he is going on duty, he said, calling only after returning from a night flight.

“I only have to use my skills to win,” said Andriy. “My skills are better than the Russians. But on the other hand, many of my friends, and even those more experienced than me, are already dead.”

 
 
 
 

Tracers are seen in the night sky during a fight above Kyiv last week.

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Tracers are seen in the night sky during a fight above Kyiv last week.Tracers are seen in the night sky during a fight above Kyiv last week.Credit...Gleb Garanich/Reuters

 
 
 
 

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tx 3 putt

tx 3 putt 76957

Posted
Posted
11 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

These are huge fucking losses to the Russians, because I doubt they have officers who are ready to step in and fill their shoes - these are battalion commanders and deputy battalion commanders.

 

 


Fucking pussies !!!!!!!

I hope their bodies are rotting forever in Ukraine wheat fields 

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Sbbruin

Sbbruin 21853

Posted
Posted
19 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

These are huge fucking losses to the Russians, because I doubt they have officers who are ready to step in and fill their shoes - these are battalion commanders and deputy battalion commanders.

 

 

It was stated earlier, but the standard Russian m.o. is for leadership to stay back from the front lines and direct from a command center.  But due to low morale and poor communications, they are forced to the front lines.  And then they found out.

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dimyh

dimyh 1874

Posted
Posted
21 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

These are huge fucking losses to the Russians, because I doubt they have officers who are ready to step in and fill their shoes - these are battalion commanders and deputy battalion commanders.

 

 

I think this young lady approves

 

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