Someone mad about striking their ship...why so mad if it was "accidental" & not a missile from Ukraine?
That has to embarrass Russia that it managed to have the flagship of its Black Sea fleet sunk by a country that hasn’t had an operational navy in basically decades. Also likely a huge loss of life with that sinking. Crew of that ship was more than 500 people, and Twitter is claiming that the cutter that sailed into Sevastopol today only had 14 crew members from the ship on it. I doubt all the rest of the 500+ are dead, but a lot quite likely are.
Apparently its more eco-friendly to support your local dictators. You should always try to be responsible, after all.
Reportedly hit by 2 Neptune anti-ship missiles. Those missiles can be fired from more than 175mi away though less distance inland. Unlike a camera equipped drone, it relies on internal navigation. To hit a target at a considerable range would take some precise guidance data. I wonder what country might be helping Ukraine with that? It seems possible, at the least, that some US special operators may be nearby. Meet the Neptune: Ukraine's Homemade Cruise Missile That Struck the Moskva
As more high tech (operational) Western Hardware is utilized the Russian Military will suffer. This is an incredible victory for Ukraine. URSIDMAN is probably correct too. Russian assholes will pucker
Gotta hold the line in the East now then go on the offensive in the summer, watch Putin cringe as a Ukrainian pincer movement obliterates a ski army group.
Best guess would be that the targeting came from some combination of the ship sailing the same route everyday, and the fairly substantial airborne surveillance and c&c assets NATO has been flying over the Black Sea (AWACs, a Rivet Joint, and a Global Hawk drone at least on most days).
I know a few retired career officers that work at SOCOM here in Tampa. When discussed, they gave me the standard answer of "I cannot confirm or deny."
Their army committing awful atrocities, not a big deal. But don’t turn off Russians access to Netflix Netflix subscribers in Russia launch class action for loss of service | Netflix | The Guardian
Fake news. That dude from the other day (who totally wasn’t, like, a Russian plant who joined one month before the war started) declared that Russia’s Air Force and integrated air defense would give us a — what was it? — “a good whipping” if we tried to impose a no-fly zone. So there’s no way a third-rate power like Ukraine is knocking down Russia’s top fighters. Next you’ll try to tell me that Ukraine is sinking Russian ships in the Black Sea. When pigs fly …
Tom Friedman's most recent column from the NY Times: Opinion | Free Advice for Putin: ‘Make Peace, You Fool’ As Vladimir Putin embarks on his Plan B — a massive military operation to try to grab at least a small bite of eastern Ukraine to justify his misbegotten war — I thought: Who could give him the best advice right now? I settled on one of America’s premier teachers of grand strategy, John Arquilla, who recently retired as a distinguished professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. When I called Arquilla and asked him what he’d tell Putin today, he didn’t hesitate: “I would say, ‘Make peace, you fool.’” Arquilla did not pluck his phrasing from thin air. After the D-Day landings on Normandy on June 6, 1944, it became quickly obvious that the Germans could not contain the Allies’ beachhead. So after a German counterattack near Caen failed on July 1, the top German commander on that front, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, phoned Berlin to report the debacle to the army chief of staff, Wilhelm Keitel, who then asked him, “What shall we do?” — to which von Rundstedt famously replied: “Make peace, you fools! What else can you do?” The next day von Rundstedt was removed — not unlike what Putin has just done, bringing in a new senior general, one who helped crush the opposition movement in Syria with unrestrained brutality — to run Phase 2 of his war. This did not work for the Germans, and without making any predictions, Arquilla explained why he believed that Putin’s army, too, could meet very stiff resistance from the undermanned and underarmed Ukrainians in this new phase. Arquilla recently published a book on next-gen warfare, “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare.” “In that book, I outlined the three new rules of war, all of which I am seeing being employed by the Ukrainians,” he explained. “The first is that many and small beats large and heavy. The Ukrainians are operating in squad-level units armed with smart weapons, and these are able to disrupt far larger formations and attack slow-moving, loud helicopters and such. So even though they’re outnumbered by the Russians, the Ukrainians have many, many more units of action — usually between eight and 10 soldiers in size.” Arquilla said that these small Ukrainian units armed with precision-guided smart weapons like killer drones, antiaircraft weapons and light anti-tank weapons “can take out the Russians’ much larger and more heavily armed tank units.”
Don't always agree with Friedman but his columns are always thought provoking. I think Putin is not going to survive this invasion. I just hope he doesn't take the rest of us with him.
