Involve China positively by purchasing batteries and solar recharging kits to flood Ukraine with ???
Probably not sufficient for heating but enough for lighting & communications.
Foil blankets too, will save many lives.
These drone attacks represent the next phase of the war. If Ukraine infrastructure is seriously damaged the war will enter a new level, maybe with millions of refugees going to Europe. 44 million people could be without work, food, heating. Time for American to bomb Iran's drone factories. Things are going to get much more serious.
I suspect the goal here is to decimate their energy infrastructure with what little rockets/drones they have left. Once winter rolls in any surplus will be used to terrorise the population like they have done before, in an attempt to make a push back into Ukraine.
On the point of drones targeting infrastructure I wonder if placing trophy systems around key energy plants etc would be an effective measure against the drones. Maybe not since they loiter rather than follow a set trajectory like rockets.
Aaaa but how the tides do turn... 12 months ago it would have been unthinkable for anyone to stand up to Putin given his tendency to mock and humiliate people at will.
Putin listened uncomfortably. A video of the embittered speech surfaced at the weekend and was not part of the official coverage of the Oct. 14 summit, during which he urged his southern neighbours to build new logistics chains after Western sanctions over Ukraine disrupted much of Russia's trade.
Aviation News..
This is new. This is the first visible operation of RAF Eurofighter Typhoons on CAP in support of their accompanying RC-135 over the Black Sea.
Interestingly, and demonstrates why it's good to compare data, they are visible on FR24 and invisible on ADSB.
I was just looking though some of the coverage online elsewhere and one thing that’s really quite shocking is the sheer state of the Russian soldiers.
A lot of them seemed to be very, very drunk. Their equipment is extremely primitive looking, most of them looked really unhealthy, missing teeth, looked malnourished etc etc and then the videos of weird celebratory dances and ranting to their mobile cameras, set against even weirder hardcore techno music that seems to pervade through the social media they’re posting.
It’s just like some kind of dystopian zombie plague just rolling on. I don’t know, maybe I’m just not in a good mood today, but it sort of takes away whatever gloss if civilisation I might have assumed existed in Europe. It’s incredibly depressing.
Then you see the ranting of various Russian politicians, diplomats and media figures and you just have to wonder what is there even to engage with or negotiate with? There appears to be no logic or reason, just blind barbarism and nationalism.
There are times like this I’d sort of wonder about humans. We’re just not going to survive as a species, are we? It’ll all end in some wave of utter barbarism and stupidity led by some strong man idiot king/president with an ego the size of the moon, and it’ll probably involve nuclear weapons.
The infrastructure attacks will cause huge disruption to Ukraine's military cohesiveness and ability to function. It's a relatively cheap and effective way to corrode the enemy's ability to fight. The optics look horrendous, but they don't matter to Russia at this stage of the conflict (they've never really mattered) and Moscow doesn't have to keep up any pretense with it's original propaganda about liberating Ukraine from Nazi's or whatever nonsense they were previously peddling.
The Ukrainians could use long range HIMARS and other weapons to cause chaos on the Russian side, wrecking logistics, but they can't do that because Putin would use it as a pretext to claim Russia is "under attack" and use nuclear weapons.
No matter what successes the Ukrainians gain, everything is stacked against them.
What infrastructure attacks would be degrading military cohesiveness?
Russia destroyed 30% of Ukraine's power stations in a week: Zelensky
MO-Kill the power just in time for winter
What you're seeing there are the plebs, the dregs sent out to fight. You're not seeing the elite that control them and society. You have this to greater or lesser extent in every society. You have to take it, that even with the odd deluded madman, the elite are generally more calculating and measured. Even if a dictatorial leader goes rogue, there are those in the echelons just below who can restrict what is actually carried out. Human society has muddled along in times of war many times previously, generally it's the plebs, elderly and weak/ ill who suffer mostly.
The net result of this though is to increase the hatred that Ukrainian citizens feel towards their Russian neighbours. It's entirely counter productive.
Time for Article 5. Or destroy Iran's military (as punishment). Or both.
Logistics heavily.
For example when power is knocked out, it doesn't just impact civilians, it also impacts the Ukrainian military who are relying on that same power infrastructure for everything from communication to storing troop food supplies.
Power outages alone can paralyse an entire country. People can't work, offices go dark, factories halt, farming gets impacted, payment terminals and systems stop working, food starts to rot, supply chains get impacted, etc, etc. It's very serious and will absolutely hamper a national war effort.
Yes it is desperation and barbaric from the Russians, but it's also highly effective in the medium and long term.
We'll likely see an additional rush of anti-missile and anti-drone systems to Ukraine.
In a normal geopolitical relationship yes. But there's nothing neighbourly about Russia and they just want to wipe out Ukraine. If they can achieve that by sending 10 million refugees to Europe over winter, they won't car how much hatred of Russia they bring with them. Considering what Russia are already doing to Ukraine, the Ukrainian hatred levels must already be nearly maxed out.
I expect that the military heads in Ukraine/NATO are working on a strategy to counter the infrastructure attacks. The mopeds will be hard to counter as described above since they are cheap, plentiful, nearly invisible to radar and have a long range. However they are slow, easy to hear and shoot down, so I would expect that either crowd-sourced app data or old fashioned military observance will be able to plot their trajectory. There are many options for shooting them down as long as they are expected and defenders on the ground know from what direction they will be coming.
Generation stations should be protected from missile attack using state of the art Western defence systems such as Iron Dome. And I don't think Russia has as many functioning missiles as mopeds.
Russian government are such cnuts
Perhaps an upscale of a shot gun?
A simple cannon type barrel, firing "wide scatter shot" (ball bearings)
I'm expecting to see a lot of "disruption" of services in Russia now.
The Shaheds seem to be the 'game-changer' the ukrainian bots have been talking about on twitter for the last few months.
Absolute carnage - the Crimean bridge attack was a step too far.
It's not counter productive if the aim is to send millions more refugees to Europe in winter, putting a further burden on European budgets and further undermining goodwill among the populations (which is already shaky among large swathes) to the point where more and more people say "whatever the cost, these two sides have to sit down and negotiate an end to the war."
Whether the strategy will succeed I don't know, but I suspect it's a key aim of the Russian terror state - the media morons over there were gleefully discussing the prospect a week or two back
That look on Putins face is a very rear look . I would not like to be the person /country that caused it . P is a very vindictive little man and has an ability to have a very long strategy .
They seem to be burning though these drones at some rate, I wonder just how many they have left. Hopefully they are burning though them rapidly like everything else in one last final push.
I saw on twitter yesterday that the UKR are developing something similar with a slightly larger payload circa 75kg of explosive and 1000k range. I feel if they can indeed make those Moscow might feel some retribution eventually.
I think what Ukraine need are those Laser based anti aircraft systems: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-10682693
But better still would be if the US just drop a fuel-air warhead on the factory in Iran.
Imagine if ISIS or similar get their hands on these drones.
Hardly surprising people are interested.
A single Shahed 136 is supposed to cost $20k. Ukraine claim that Russia bought 2,400 of them. That's a total cost of $48M which is a fraction of the cost of the damage they've already done.
I was looking for a comparison of what other things would cost. A single F35 fighter plane with all-in costs included is $110M 😮 https://armscontrolcenter.org/f-35-joint-strike-fighter-costs-challenges/
First batch of drones arrived in Russia in August, the Crimea bridge was attacked in October. Do you really think Russia bought the drones back in August for **** and giggles? It was always their intention to use them in Ukraine.
Imagine a world without either Russia or Iran, two perpetual open sewers and thorns in the side of civilised nations. Iran are building a case to take care of two of the worlds terrorist nations in one go.
Don't celebrate too early. Long way to go yet.
First recorded use was September 25th. 24 days have passed, if we assume they have used 50 a day, that is 1,200 in total launched. Ukraine claim they originally purchased 2,400. If all the above assumptions are true, they're half was through the current batch.
I imagine given their success and low cost, they will be looking to purchase more. The only constraint I can think of is whether Iran is capable of producing 50 of these things a day? As I outlined above, the cost for a 2 month supply looks to be able $24m, a sum the Russians can easily afford.
The question is, where is the counter-strike intelligence that NATO should be providing to Ukraine in real time to obliterate the launch sites?
Its now past time that NATO handed over to Ukraine every possible ground based conventional offensive weapon in the arsenal. The Russian installations in the occupied territories, military and political, must now be mercilessly destroyed and whatever remaining proxy structures are there, decapitated.
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