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Русский корабль - иди нахуй


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19 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

@Brisketexan apparently some of their hunter/killer drones have shotguns on them for taking out other drones and...I think it could easily work, and depending on the shotgun and ammo used, may not be much recoil.  It's a pain to get it in sight (you can see the camera moving up and down) but once they get close to the Russian drone, well it's a shotgun and it doesn't have to be dead-accurate.

 

I bet a 410 with #8 tungsten shot would do the trick without undo recoil. 

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You know, the Russians had thousands of possible futures in 1991. They had a nascent democracy in the palms of their hands and chose dictatorship --- again.

I'm starting to wonder if George Kennan was right in 1946:

"At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it."


They are somehow psychologically incapable of being democratic, despite seeing the benefits on their televisions and in their daily media, at least for a while. Frustrating. Perhaps it's because they have to defend an area more than 22 times as large as Texas with a population roughly 3.5 times that of Texas.

Edited by Hornius Emeritus
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11 minutes ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

Perhaps it's because they have to defend an area more than 22 times as large as Texas with a population roughly 3.5 times that of Texas.

They have nukes and have had nukes for 70 years.  Nobody is going to invade them, and they need to get that through their thick skulls.

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16 minutes ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

You know, the Russians had thousands of possible futures in 1991. They had a nascent democracy in the palms of their hands and chose dictatorship --- again.

I'm starting to wonder if George Kennan was right in 1946:

"At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it."


They are somehow psychologically incapable of being democratic, despite seeing the benefits on their televisions and in their daily media, at least for a while. Frustrating. Perhaps it's because they have to defend an area more than 22 times as large as Texas with a population roughly 3.5 times that of Texas.

There is the issue of What is Russia. Is this one group of people or a mass of humans controlled (historically) from either St. Petersburg or Moscow?

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7 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

They have nukes and have had nukes for 70 years.  Nobody is going to invade them, and they need to get that through their thick skulls.

There are few motivators as powerful as those that don't exist but the entire media and social apparatus is geared to gaslight you into believing exist. It worked great here with the recent trans panic as a lever to motivate people to vote against fantasy absurdities litterboxes in classrooms and nurses doing sex change operations

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9 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

"At bottom of Aggie's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live in College Station. To this was added, as Aggie came into contact with economically advanced Texas, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Aggie college administrators as well as Aggie people; for Aggie administrators have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western cultures. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it."
 

I think I got the edits right?

All joking aside, Europeans have always viewed Russia as slavic, not European, and Russian rulers couldn't deal with that.  (The Russian people didn't care.  They were just trying to find enough cabbage to survive the winter.)  Russian rulers have litter pecker disease and are inclined to act out.

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2 hours ago, Parliament said:

Don’t encourage him.

I don’t think FDR micromanaged Pearl Harbor, but I do think he did everything possible to ensure the potential of Japanese military action against us to get us in to the war in Europe.  He sent US cruisers on what he called”Pop-up” cruises in territorial waters that had a high likelihood of something going wrong.   A sunken cruiser had about the same deaths as Pearl Harbor, so I think that was a hypothetical price he was willing to bear to get us involved in war.  But I see our failure to respond to Pearl Harbor as a long string of very foreseeable fuck ups that had nothing to do with intentional knowledge suppressed.  it had a lot to do with shutting off steel and oil exports.

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https://www.threads.net/@business_ukraine_magazine/post/DENj8GRto4O?xmt=AQGza5GnPRjr88zmnFHKrTFZVb38w9Rc6nE4DLNhoA1aZg

The Russian ruble is having another disastrous day and is ending 2024 as one of the world’s most unstable currencies

https://www.threads.net/@angelica.shalagina/post/DEPFNOCIlCS?xmt=AQGz27RsdLzYPn86Vdib2MzVRzt0pBwn1mq1PeFN6cmrNA

Wow!
A Magura V5 sea drone of the Main Intelligence Directorate shot down russian Mi-8 helicopter in the area of ​​Cape Tarkhankut last night with an R-73 missile.

Another Mi-8 was hit by fire and was able to reach its base airfield.
Ukrdiary

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1 hour ago, flatdawgs said:

Thoughts on my visit today to the Russian-Norwegian border at Kirkenes 

1) Rossiya, idi na khuy.

2) longcat follows, although for me 1 and 3 suffice.

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In this part of the world, things are not so simple. Trade has always occurred here between all four area nations (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia) and, of course, before them the borderless, nomadic Sami people. There is little care for the war one way or another - as they say in the far North on both sides of the border "Oslo is far, Moscow is far" meaning that what the governments thousands of km away in the south decide is of little import to them. Murmansk (213km from Kirkenes) is also relatively wealthy and as such probably somewhat immune (for now) to the Great Vatnik Drafts that have gone on since the beginning in places like Buryatia.

This is one of the two open border crossings left between Russia and Europe; the other is way down in Turkey. It is a bit surreal to see a small amount of traffic going each way. It used to be a ton more; 65% of Kirkenes' economy was from Russian shoppers before the border closed for Covid; it never fully reopened due to the war. It is extremely difficult to cross now, from either side.

The border, from 1918-1944, was actually between Norway and Finland, before the Soviets confiscated the Petsamo region following the Continuation War. I did say Simo Häyhä's name loudly enough that any Russian listening might have some fear of white-clad sniper ghosts, just a wee bit. It's his country's land after all. We know Russians are all about revanchist border changes.

What struck me as odd - or better yet, what I didn't really know - is that these centuries-long ties between Russia and northern Norway have left more than a little ambivalence towards the war and Russia here, certainly compared to in most of the rest of Europe. Major street signs are still in both Norwegian and Cyrillic, as are some signs at shops and other places. The current mayor of Kirkenes a couple of months ago wanted to have the street signs removed but that was taken poorly by the citizens and it was not done. 

Kirkenes was, as was the rest of Norway, occupied by the Nazis in 1940 and there was a northern front here wherein 100,000 Germans tried to take Murmansk and failed. Kirkenes was badly damaged during the war, and towards the end the Germans razed it and the other towns of the north to the ground. The Red Army was - and are - seen as liberators ever since their arrival in 1944. There is a memorial to the Soviet soldier overlooking the town and until this year the Norwegians and Russians celebrated Liberation Day together there - this year they did so two hours apart. Although the people I've spoken to here remain extremely neutral in their outlook, this does show a bit of anti-war sentiment. Mostly, however, the feeling in this remotest corner of the NATO world is the hope that the war will end, the cross-border ties going back forever will resume, and - perhaps crassly - the shoppers from Murmansk will return. I think it will be quite some time until then.

3) Putin khuylo.

Thanks for reading (or ignoring - TL;DR certainly applies) - after two+ years of reading this thread and following the war, it was more than a little surreal to stand a meter or two from Russia and to also understand the complexity that the war has engendered in this small part of a close ally.

Please tell us you farted in Russia's direction.

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18 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

They might as well at this point. Between Russia and Israel, it's become fashionable again to take your neighbor's land based on historic territorial claims.

Edit: We, too, could be getting into that game between talk of taking back the Panama Canal, buying Greenland, calling Canada our 51st state, and discussing an invasion of Mexico. It's a might-makes-right world now.

Edited by bolverk
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4 hours ago, bolverk said:

They might as well at this point. Between Russia and Israel, it's become fashionable again to take your neighbor's land based on historic territorial claims.

Edit: We, too, could be getting into that game between talk of taking back the Panama Canal, buying Greenland, calling Canada our 51st state, and discussing an invasion of Mexico. It's a might-makes-right world now.

When was it not?

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18 hours ago, KYHorn said:

 

 

Ukraine Forces a Halt to Flow of Natural Gas From Russia to Europe
A transnational pipeline was shut down on Wednesday after Kyiv refused to renew an agreement that allowed for the transit of Russian gas through its territory.

The flow of natural gas through a major pipeline from Russia to Europe was cut off early Wednesday after Ukraine refused to renew an agreement that allowed for the transit of Russian gas through its territory, according to officials in both countries.

The move to suspend the flow of gas through a pipeline that had carried Soviet and then Russian gas to Europe for decades is part of a broader campaign by Ukraine and its Western allies to undermine Moscow’s ability to fund its war effort and to limit the Kremlin’s ability to use energy as leverage in Europe.“This is a historic event,” Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Galushchenko, said in a statement. “Russia is losing markets, it will suffer financial losses.”

Quote

 

The pipeline through Ukraine, built in the Soviet era to carry Siberian gas to European markets, is Russia’s last major gas corridor to Europe following the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany, possibly by Ukraine, and the closure of a route through Belarus to Poland.

While the move could substantially reduce Russia’s revenue from gas sales, it also carries risks for Ukraine. Military analysts said that Moscow could choose to bomb Ukraine’s vast network of pipelines, which it has largely spared from attack over the past three years, now that it has little incentive to leave them unharmed.

Slovakia, one of the European countries that most depends on Russian gas, had also threatened retaliation against Ukraine after Mr. Zelensky had announced plans on Dec. 19 to shut the pipeline.

Because the expiration of the gas transit deal was anticipated and prepared for by European countries, it was not expected to have an immediate effect on prices, analysts said.

The Russian energy giant, Gazprom, issued a statement early on Wednesday confirming that it was no longer sending gas from Siberia through the pipeline.

Even before the move, Europe had sharply reduced its consumption of Russian gas in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. Volumes through the Ukrainian transit pipeline had fallen to around a quarter of their prewar levels.

Besides Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and several Balkan countries had still used Russian gas delivered through Ukraine, but experts say gas in storage facilities and alternative supplies should prevent any immediate disruptions to electricity and heating in these countries.

More vulnerable is Moldova. In December it declared a state of emergency amid fears that an end to supplies of Russian gas through Ukraine would endanger its main source of electricity, a gas-fueled power plant in the breakaway Russian-speaking region of Transnistria.

Gazprom warned Moldova this week that it would halt all gas deliveries on Jan. 1 even if the pipeline through Ukraine kept working, citing a long-running dispute over unpaid bills. Immediately hit by the shutdown was Transnistria, a sliver of Moldovan territory next to Ukraine that, with support from Moscow, declared itself an independent microstate after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

The energy company in the breakaway region told its customers on Wednesday that it would stop supplying gas for heating to private houses in cities, villages and towns. The company will provide gas for cooking “until the pressure in the network drops to a critical level,” it said in a statement on Telegram.

That Russia would risk hurting its own proxies in Transnistria, which has been occupied by Russian troops for more than three decades, is a measure of how the war in Ukraine has altered Moscow’s priorities.

Ukraine, too, has faced difficult choices. Struggling to withstand relentless Russian assaults both on the front and directed at its energy grid, Kyiv appears to have decided that an opportunity to deliver an economic blow to the Kremlin by reducing its earnings from gas exports outweighed the potential risks.

“We won’t allow them to earn additional billions off our blood,” Mr. Zelensky said when he announced the decision earlier this month to shut down the pipeline.

Stopping the flow of Russian gas through Ukraine is part of a broader battle being waged over global energy supplies as Kyiv and its allies seek ways to cut into the oil and gas profits at the heart of the Russian economy.

It “underscores just how much the European political and energy landscape has changed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” Bota Iliyas, a senior analyst at PRISM, a strategic intelligence firm, said before the shutdown.

Russia spent more than half a century expanding its share of the European market, and the main conduit was the Soviet-era Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline from Siberia to Ukraine’s border with Slovakia. It brings the Siberian gas via the town of Sudzha — which is now under control of Ukrainian military forces — in Russia’s Kursk region.

At its peak, Russia supplied nearly 40 percent of imported gas consumed in Europe.

While most E.U. nations stopped importing natural gas that arrived by pipeline from Russia immediately after the full-scale invasion, it was only in June that Brussels put in place sanctions aimed at squeezing Russia’s profits from the sale of liquefied natural gas, which is mostly transported by ship.

As of December, the pipeline through Ukraine accounted for only about 5 percent of the European Union’s gas imports, analysts said.

An analysis by the E.U. executive arm, the European Commission, first reported by Bloomberg last month, found that there were alternative supplies available, and forecasts suggested the impact on prices would be minimal.

Targeting Russian energy sales has obvious geopolitical implications as well as economic costs.

As Ukraine prepared to stop the flow of gas, Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia traveled to Moscow in December to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin.

The trip was a blow to European unity in keeping the Kremlin isolated and a clear signal that Moscow would use any avenue available to stay connected to the European market.

As soon as Mr. Fico returned to Bratislava, he threatened to cut Ukraine off from vital energy supplies it needs to sustain its battered power grid, which relies on power imported from the European Union to function after years of Russian bombardment.

About 19 percent of the electricity Ukraine imports from the Europe Union flows through Slovakia, according to Ukrainian officials.

Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Fico was doing Moscow’s bidding by opening a “second energy front” in the war. “We are fighting for lives, Fico is fighting for money,” Mr. Zelensky said, in perhaps his harshest rebuke of a European leader since the start of the war.

Mr. Galushchenko, Ukraine’s energy minister, said that halting electricity supplies to Ukraine would violate European regulations, and Kyiv has issued an appeal to Brussels to block the move.

At the same time, Ukraine is negotiating with other European allies, including Poland, to import more power and offset any action Slovakia might take.

Ukraine’s refusal to renew the agreement that allowed for the transit of Russia gas is not expected to have much economic impact on Kyiv, which did not make a significant profit from the transit fees, analysts said.

But it was likely to deal another blow to Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy giant that recorded a net loss of $7 billion in 2023, its first annual loss since 1999, largely a result of being driven out of E.U. gas markets.

“Clearly, from a Russian perspective, the major argument in favor of sustaining the Ukrainian transit route is that this will permit Gazprom to obtain $6.5 billion in revenues,” Alan Riley, a specialist in energy law and competition, wrote in an analysis for the Estonian Centre for Defense and Strategy, a research institution.

Ukraine has been working to decrease its own dependence on Russia to meet its energy needs and recently announced that it had imported liquefied natural gas from the United States, via Greece, for the first time.

“Cargoes like this are not only providing the region with a flexible and secure source of power, but are further eroding Russia’s influence over our energy system,” Maxim Timchenko, the head of Ukraine’s largest private utility, DTEK, said in a statement.

 

 

Edited by bolverk
pasting error
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On 12/31/2024 at 8:46 PM, Bevo said:

 

We definitely have to watch out for China. There are 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the US—more than all of the McDonald's, Burger Kings, Wendy's, and Kentucky Fried Chickens combined.

That's a lot of pee pee in a lot of cokes. 

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