Russia - threadbanned users in OP

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

strategic bombers starting runs the last 2 days, sign they are going to carpet bomb the place like they did in Syria...

Be interesting if Ukraine and get anti assets close, although I think that would just be an excuse for Putin to hit the nuke button.

The fact that protesting could lead to you doing 15 years in prison has a large part to do with that.

If not for the police clampdown on protesters I wouldn't be surprised if it had reached massive numbers. But right from the early days of protest, a very high percentage were getting arrested, and inevitably that was massive factor putting others off of joining in.

It's not the same as someone protesting in Dublin, it comes with very serious consequences for yourself to do so.

Meanwhile in the real world...

I wouldn't call it a"bluff". More to have as an excuse or justification for the aftermath - "Well we gave them the chance to surrender and they wouldn't that is why we ended up having to kill them all in fighting" .... like the lads on the bikes or the people in civilian clothes shot in the back of the head with their hands tied behind their backs.

I think that the effectiveness of social media protests was greatly diminished when youtube removed the "thumbs down" count. If that hadn't been done, Putin would have left ages ago.

Somethings going down in the neighborhood.

I believe the DNR 'seperatist' leader was arrested yesterday by the fsb. Might be related or simply conscripts trying to fight back.