So a Reaper drone, fighting in the Ukrainian theatre, would have to somehow position itself outside of MANPAD range, avoid SHORAD systems such as the Pantsir/Osa, avoid medium/long range systems like the Buk/S300/S400 entirely, avoid all Russian Ka-52 helicopters and fighter-bombers; and still would only be able to attack targets a few km away from its current position.
That's what I mean when I say it has to be "on top of" a target to hit it.
By the way here's an illustration of the size difference between the TB2 (which has been unable to operate since Russia consolidated its air defences) and the Predator/Reaper. Note that the larger an aircraft the easier it is to detect both visually and via radar:
This is getting off topic; but it's my considered (and by no means expert) opinion that Predator and Reaper drones are not going to help Ukraine to fight Russia; and will only be a liability if they were to be fielded as offensive weapons in particular. If used purely for surveillance purposes that might be a different story.
No
Sorry but you keep arguing this point and despite requests for proof you just avoid providing such
To be fair, no in this regard is probably correct because those intelligence satellites are in various locations between 500 km and about 36000 km above in the low, medium and high orbits rather than 100 km above 😏
What's a few miles between friends
Add a carriage return after twitter links and remove the mobile part of the url so they show up
At this rate Russia is almost self imploding with arresting their own war leaders
You could actually be right, The RQ-180 or 170 stealth drones could easily be operating over Ukraine without anyone being the wiser. They didn't go to all that trouble making stealth variants for the fun of it.
The Hellfire is not the only munition a Reaper is regularly tasked to carry. A Reaper can also deploy stand-off munitions, like the JDAM glide bomb that costs a third what a hellfire missile costs and which has a range of up to 26km from it's release point. These cheaper munitions would generally be preferable for many missions due to their lower cost.
Sadly, in Kharkiv, 3 ordnance clearing technicians were killed and 4 others were seriously wounded.
https://liveuamap.com/en/2022/16-april-3-explosive-ordnance-clearance-engineers-killed
"It can survey as much as 40,000 square miles (100,000 km2) of terrain per day, an area the size of South Korea or Iceland."
Its a 'high altitude long endurance drone' with horizontal scanning. So I suspect it can see a fair bit into Ukraine from the border flights.
Obviously doesnt exclude the possibility of internal flights but between this and satellites I suspect they may not need to directly risk nuclear war to aid Ukraine.
Stop posting nonsense Gatling ... If there are American drones inside Ukraine we will be kept unaware. All available flight data from global hawks in Ukraine s airspace is from before the conflict.
Could it have been done by the equivalent crowd that blew up the railway in Belaruse
I haven't seen any public acknowledgement, but there is some data that has appeared on tracking forums over the last month which suggest some surveillance assets have entered Ukrainian airspace... given the amount of diplomatic visits, I'd say there was plenty.... Boris Johnsen isn't going anywhere without surveillance and an extraction team...
Ukrainian airspace is only closed for civil traffic, and it is not a no fly zone, so any military traffic being in there is not doing anything wrong, other than being a possible target to the other side.... Id be very surprised if there was no surveillance traffic in there...
edit: satellite isn't the be all and end all... there are GEO sats which basically show you what they're looking at, and LEO sats need to be positioned and have "blink" times... that's why you still have a mission for the likes of drones and U-2's which have high loiter times.
Russians in Spain…. A horrible people, shouldn’t be allowed out of their own country
A nation of scumbags. I wish NATO would go in there and teach these **** a fuckin lesson.
And we were supposed to believe ordinary Russians were against this war.
We can now see even the ones living outside Ruusia with access to western media are just as dumb and brainwashed as those living at home!
This appears to be a followup: https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2022/04/15/russians-probed-over-vicious-beating-of-ukrainian-man-inside-costa-blanca-bar-in-spain/
The bar owner is actually just as bad as the Russian scum. Not only didn't they call the police they didn't call an ambulance. WTF? That unfortunate Ukrainian employee should look for another employer.
They are a horrible nation and people with the odd exception. It’s bred into them. No point pretending otherwise.
Immediate cancellation of all Russian visas to the EU. They’re all a national security threat as far as I’m concerned and have no place here.
Spain has a serious problem with Russian mobsters(note the scum involved had "existing criminal records including violence") and minor oligarchs calling it home. Mostly on the Costas and the Canaries. Of all places in Europe for something like this to happen I'm least shocked it happened in Spain.
The article doesn’t say either of those things. It only states that a complaint was subsequently filed. With the little information provided in the article the police may have been called but no complaint lodged. It doesn’t say that they weren’t called.
It makes no mention of ambulance or hospital either. The bar man may have said that he was ok, and didn’t realise the extent of his injuries until the following morning. It’s like people having an accident run on adrenaline one don’t know how badly they are injured. For all we know, the owner may have wanted to call an ambulance but the barman said not to.
Basically the follow up says very little, and no conclusions can be drawn from it.
They should all be sent packing, visas cancelled and permanently banned.
We can clearly see they are pro-Putin and pro-war scum.
Just an anecdote in response to this.
I play a lot of online chess, and was playing with a Russian guy last night. He was, at time he was playing me, in an Irish pub in St. Petersburg, drinking Kilkenny, according to him at least.
We were chatting away in the chatbox and he was saying that he doesn't support this war at all, and very few people he knows do. Now, they keep their mouths shut about it in public, but he said he'd be confident that lots more people don't support it than do, and that everybody has access to foreign media and they know what's really going on and how it contrasts with what state media is telling them.
Purely anecdotal I know, but it's a bit sweeping to describe whole swathes of a population as dumb or brainwashed or whatever. The average Russian has no more power to do anything about this than I do.
People are people. Intense propaganda can be used to convince the majority of any population to believe pretty much anything. Look at the Catholic Church propaganda here a few decades ago.
Your last paragraph is giving Russians a cop out.
Let say if only 5% of the population of Moscow came on the streets to protest - 500k would overwhelm the police and might start to turn public opinion against the war.
But yet we see no such action in any of the Russian cities apart from a few dozen protesters here and there.
I would say at best most Russians are indifferent to the war that doesn't say they are 100% against it.
People don't act in 500 thousands. They act in a lot smaller groups. Putin clamped down very hard on individuals very quickly. Even holding blank piece of paper got you arrested.
Acting could get you and your family in trouble.
Most of us would act similarly.
So Russia gave those in Mariupol until 4am (our time) to surrender, or else....
How many Russian bluffs is that now of this type (especially in relation to Mariupol) which have passed?
You don't have to go that far back or abroad to see it Jackboy. Look at this thread, with it's talk of "orcs" and "Russians are scum", drive them out etc. From a goodly chunk of people with it carried along in this new distraction, the majority of whom I'd bet couldn't have pointed to Ukraine on a map just this Christmas gone. Not unlike those who pre covid demanded an antibiotic from their GP for a headcold were suddenly waking lyrical about "cohorts". People can be turned into a dumb mob with remarkable ease and they'll trot along so cock sure in their cause without a trace of self or wider awareness or the sheer fúcking irony of it all as they paint The Other as following their herd.
The article doesn't say three pink lions entered the bar shortly afterwards and took photographs, so by your weird logic it should be considered entirely possible they did.
When reading accounts like this written by journalists, the logical assumption would be that events happened as reported and that the most important and relevant were included.
Since the article didn't state that the police were called, which would be highly relevant to an incident of this nature, i'ts logical to assume they weren't.
And so, the monster starts to devour itself.......☺️
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