Better get those Patriots ASAP!

Russian tycoon, travel companion found dead in India, one after the other

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/russian-tycoon-travel-companion-found-dead-in-india-one-after-the-other/

 

Another oligarch just up and died. Happening a lot lately.

In order to save democracy, you have to Not-Z it up a little. 

 

4 hours ago, Abracadabra said:

In order to save democracy, you have to Not-Z it up a little. 

I don't like it, but if you think this is "not-z'ing up a little" then I imagine what's been going on in Russia for the last 20 years must be the 4th Reich.

 

3 minutes ago, JohnSnowsHair said:

I don't like it, but if you think this is "not-z'ing up a little" then I imagine what's been going on in Russia for the last 20 years must be the 4th Reich.

The press in Russia is more free than in the west. You don't get censored in Russia for expressing views contrary to the government approved narrative. Maybe you haven't kept up with what Musk has been revealing about government suppression of free speech with respect to Twitter and other media platforms. 

 

20 minutes ago, JohnSnowsHair said:

 

I doubt the Russians mind the Ruble weakening a bit. Most of their exports are now paid for in Rubles these days. Getting more Rubles for those commodities will keep their coffers flush with cash. At the end of the day, what the Ruble is worth inside Russia is what matters. 

BTW, after the most aggressive sanctions war in history waged against them, the Russian economy shrank by a whopping 2.7%. Their economy is likely to see growth next year. 

The west? Not so much.

16 minutes ago, Abracadabra said:

The press in Russia is more free than in the west. You don't get censored in Russia for expressing views contrary to the government approved narrative. Maybe you haven't kept up with what Musk has been revealing about government suppression of free speech with respect to Twitter and other media platforms. 

 

No you get suicided 😄

 

you truly are a moron

4 hours ago, Abracadabra said:

Maybe you haven't kept up with what Musk has been revealing about government suppression of free speech with respect to Twitter and other media platforms. 

 

Close. Not as many get suicided.

LINK

Quote

The US government is considering sending Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine as part of a further package of military support, according to people familiar with the matter.  A final decision hasn’t yet been made, one of the people said. When the vehicles would be operational is also unclear, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.  A White House spokesperson, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the US is in constant communications with Ukraine on the capabilities it needs to defend itself but had nothing to announce or preview.

Kyiv has been asking allies for tanks, longer-range missiles, armor and air defense systems, with Russia’s war now in its 11th month. Fighting continues on the ground in the east even as the onset of winter has slowed advances by either side, leaving Moscow resorting to missile strikes against the country’s energy and civilian infrastructure. Russia launched dozens of cruise missiles on Ukrainian cities on Thursday in one of its heaviest barrages of the war, though Ukraine said it shot down most of them.

"Bradleys would provide a major increase in ground combat capability because it is, in effect, a light tank,” said Mark Cancian, a former White House defense budget analyst who’s now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Unlike the previously provided M113s, the Bradley is heavily armed with a powerful 25mm gun and TOW anti-tank missiles. The United States has many Bradleys, though some are older and need upgrades, so inventories are not a problem.”  Cancian added it would be months before Ukraine could field them because crews and maintainers would need to be trained on the vehicles, which are built by BAE Systems Plc.

Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia might be gearing up for a fresh offensive in the spring. Equally, the warmer weather might allow Kyiv’s forces to again press the advantage, having pushed Russian forces back out of areas they occupied in the early days of the war.  Still, some of Ukraine’s allies have been reluctant to send Kyiv all of the more advanced weapons it has been asking for, out of concern it could prompt Moscow to escalate further, or potentially draw other countries into the conflict more directly.  The US also has announced plans to send a Patriot missile battery to Ukraine. But it’s also unlikely to be ready to use before the spring, due to the time it takes to train Ukrainian troops on the system, the people said.

In addition to serving as a lightly armored transport for soldiers, a US Army website says the Bradley’s capabilities include "reconnaissance, fire and maneuver, and ‘hunter-killer”’ engagements.  "The Bradley would be a significant improvement over current Ukrainian fighting vehicles,” said David Perkins, a retired four-star general who as a brigade commander sent tanks into downtown Baghdad during the US invasion of Iraq and later headed the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. He said in his experience the Bradley is "more than a match” for Russia’s infantry fighting vehicles and its T—72 tanks.

Michael Allen, who held national security policy roles during the presidency of George W. Bush, said providing Ukraine with the fighting vehicles would be "significant because most experts are forecasting that the war will be more like Kherson than Kharkiv, that is to say more grinding and incremental than a break through a weak line and recapturing hundreds of square miles.”  "Bradley is fast and maneuverable and suits our political objectives to give the Ukrainians weapons to hasten the end of the war,” according to Allen, who is now managing director of Beacon Global Strategies, an advisory firm. "Also, Ukraine is desperate for armor generally.”

 

In the 2014 conflict, the Russians were heads and shoulders above the Ukrainians in EW.

Quote

The Russian military’s failures in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine almost are too numerous to list.  Too many attacks along too many sectors, which thinned out Russia’s best battalions. Too few infantry to screen the tanks. Inflexible air support. Artillery batteries that bombarded too many empty grid squares. And perhaps most importantly: inadequate logistics for what would become a long, grinding war.  But it’s important to note where the Russians succeeded. If only to understand where Ukraine might need to improve its own forces. For a rare picture of Russian military competence, consider the Kremlin’s battlefield electronic-warfare troops.

Amid the chaos of the Russian army’s initial push into Ukraine starting in late February, it took a few weeks for the Russians to deploy their extensive jamming infrastructure. But once they did, they began deafening and confusing the Ukrainians’ most sophisticated systems—in particular, their drones—in numbers that surely startled Ukrainian commanders.  The electronic suppression of Ukraine’s unmanned aerial vehicles blunted one of Kyiv’s biggest advantages in the early months of the war. The Ukrainians counted on superior intelligence—largely provided by UAVs—to make their smaller artillery arsenal more precise than Russia’s own, larger arsenal of big guns and rocket-launchers.  But the Russians’ electronic warfare prevented those drones from navigating and communicating—and deprived the Ukrainians of the precision they were counting on. "The defeat of precision was critical to unit survival” for the Russians, analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Analysts anticipated the Russians’ jamming operations. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitored the Moscow’s military buildup ahead of the February invasion, noted the deployment of a large number of electronic-warfare systems in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.  They included TORN and SB-636 Svet-KU signals-intelligence systems that can pinpoint Ukrainian units by tracing their radio signals, RB-341V Leer-3s that combine Orlan-10 drones carrying cellular-jamming payloads with a command post on a KamAZ-5350 truck, R-934B Sinitsa radio-jammers and R-330Zh Zhitels that block satellite links.  The Russian electronic-warfare force had become so potent that OSCE was struggling to keep its own drones in the air. The organization reported a sharp increase in jamming in 2021. OSCE’s UAVs experienced signal-interference on 16 percent of flights in February that year, 28 percent in March and 58 percent in April.

Russia’s E.W. systems work best when their operators have plenty of time to set up and coordinate different functions. Which is why Russian E.W. was so fearsome in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Russian and separatist forces held roughly the same positions for much of the seven years between 2015 and the current, wider war.  That also is why Russian jamming didn’t work very well in the first few weeks after the Russians attacked in February. Russian battalions attacked, and retreated, too quickly for the E.W. troops to keep up.

That finally began to change in March and April, as battered Russian forces finished pulling back from Kyiv Oblast in central Ukraine and repositioning in the east.  The Ukrainian air force’s fighter pilots were the first to feel the effects of escalating Russian jamming. "As Russian E.W. complexes began to be deployed systematically, Ukrainian pilots found that they often had their air-to-ground and air-to-air communications jammed, their navigation equipment suppressed and their radar knocked out,” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds wrote.  Russian jammers soon were thick on the ground in the east. "With the concentration of effort on Donbas, Russia set up E.W. complexes with up to 10 complexes per [13 miles] of frontage,” the RUSI analysts noted. "Collectively, these complexes effectively disrupted navigation along the front and conducted direction finding to direct artillery and electronic attack against Ukrainian aircraft and UAVs.”

Ukrainian brigades and batteries depended on two broad drone types to find Russian forces and walk in artillery: small, hovering quadcopters and octocopters; and larger, fixed-wing UAVs such as the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2. As Russian jamming confused GPS and severed radio links, these drones started dropping like flies.  "The average life-expectancy of a quadcopter remained around three flights,” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds wrote. "The average life-expectancy of a fixed-wing UAV was around six flights” and, "in aggregate, only around a third of UAV missions can be said to have been successful.”  Of the thousands of drones the Ukrainians possessed in February, 90 percent were shot down or crashed by summer, according to the RUSI analysts. This compelled authorities in Kyiv to plead with Ukraine’s foreign allies for replacements.  The drone-massacre complicated Ukrainian fire-control, making Ukraine’s artillery batteries less accurate—and therefore buying time for Russian troops to reconsolidate in the east and prepare for the summer’s fighting.

That the summer campaign ended badly for Russian army doesn’t change the fact that the E.W. troops did what the army asked of them: filled the air with electronic noise. "In the early phases of the fighting in Donbas when the [Ukrainian armed forces] had few precision systems, Russian E.W. reduced the effectiveness of these systems,” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds concluded.  If anything, the E.W. troops were too successful. They actually jammed more than a few Russian drones, too. "The Russians suffered extensively from these systems having an equally noticeable effect on its own troops,” the RUSI team noted.

 

 

14 hours ago, Mlodj said:

LINK

 

Honestly I think the BFV is a much bigger upgrade over the BMP than a M1 is over a T72. More survivability, plus they come with the TOW.

13 hours ago, Mlodj said:

In the 2014 conflict, the Russians were heads and shoulders above the Ukrainians in EW.

 

Now, not so much. Around Kyiv they tried their EW but the Russians ended up jamming their own radios to the point where they had to stop using them.

Electrical bills for Dec in Sweden due out the end of next week. I think we will see a rate of about 4x the normal from the last several years. The difference vs last Dec won’t be as much though as last Dec was crazy high. Probably about 50% higher. I’m expecting my bill to go down slightly vs last Dec due to the energy saving measures we are taking in the family.

A lot of people who live on the cash flow edge are going to have trouble but looks like Dec won’t result in a disaster in any case. Jan could be another story. Some new sanctions hit tomorrow. Weather is also a key factor. Dec was close to normal overall. 

21 minutes ago, DrPhilly said:

Electrical bills for Dec in Sweden due out the end of next week. I think we will see a rate of about 4x the normal from the last several years. The difference vs last Dec won’t be as much though as last Dec was crazy high. Probably about 50% higher. I’m expecting my bill to go down slightly vs last Dec due to the energy saving measures we are taking in the family.

A lot of people who live on the cash flow edge are going to have trouble but looks like Dec won’t result in a disaster in any case. Jan could be another story. Some new sanctions hit tomorrow. Weather is also a key factor. Dec was close to normal overall. 

What's the ratio of what fuels you guys were using to produce power before and after?

Were you guys importing a lot from Orcistan before?

5 hours ago, Bill said:

Honestly I think the BFV is a much bigger upgrade over the BMP than a M1 is over a T72. More survivability, plus they come with the TOW.

Agreed, there was even a case in Desert Storm where a Bradley killed a T-72 using the 25mm.

1 hour ago, Bill said:

What's the ratio of what fuels you guys were using to produce power before and after?

Were you guys importing a lot from Orcistan before?

No, we don’t import their stuff. We are also a net exporter generally though that gets complicated with import needs for peaks, etc. The biggest problem is the prices of energy on the general EU market are all tied together both for source of material and type of material.  So what Germany does directly affects us from a price perspective.  We also have some domestic issues in that we can't move the energy from the north where we generate most of it to the south where the vast majority is consumed.

1 hour ago, Mlodj said:

Agreed, there was even a case in Desert Storm where a Bradley killed a T-72 using the 25mm.

Was that during 73 Easting?

1 hour ago, DrPhilly said:

No, we don’t import their stuff. We are also a net exporter generally though that gets complicated with import needs for peaks, etc. The biggest problem is the prices of energy on the general EU market are all tied together both for source of material and type of material.  So what Germany does directly affects us from a price perspective.  We also have some domestic issues in that we can't move the energy from the north where we generate most of it to the south where the vast majority is consumed.

I'm assuming it goes from the north to pipelines/shipping directly out from there?

11 minutes ago, Bill said:

Was that during 73 Easting?

I'm assuming it goes from the north to pipelines/shipping directly out from there?

Energy here in the north is wind and water. Long time historical water energy area. We can’t get it south due to lack of infrastructure. Nuclear in the south used to be the compensating factor but half of that is shutdown. When the south needs energy it is imported from Norway and other places. Very little of that is natural gas which is not that common here but no matter. As I explained, the price of nat gas directly affects the price of other energy types in the EU. They have just put in some new regulations to separate those but hasn’t really come into play yet. 

2 hours ago, Bill said:

Was that during 73 Easting?

I'm assuming it goes from the north to pipelines/shipping directly out from there?

Probably.  The speculation was that one of the 25mm rounds hit at the base of the turret, where it rests on the hull, and penetrated, resulting in a catastrophic kill.

Quote

Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov warned Russian citizens in a video address on Dec. 30 that Russia's leadership is preparing a new wave of mobilization and plans to close the border within a week.  "I know for a fact that you have about one week left before you still have any choice. In early January, the Russian authorities will close the borders to men, declare martial law, and begin another wave of mobilization. Borders will also be closed in Belarus," Reznikov said, speaking in Russian.  Earlier on Dec. 30, Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's Intelligence Directorate, said in an interview with the BBC that Russia is planning a new wave of mobilization starting Jan. 5 due to a lack of manpower.

Russia has lost over 100,000 soldiers in its war against Ukraine, according to the latest figures by the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces. Suffering defeats on the battlefield, Russia has also had to rely on the Kremlin-backed private mercenary Wager Group to bolster its forces, who are known to recruit from among Russian prisons to fill ranks. Reznikov also made a point to say this latest wave of conscription "concerns residents of large Russian cities." Moscow and St. Petersburg have largely been shielded from the Kremlin's mobilization drives, while ethnic minorities in other Russian regions have been found to be disproportionately called up.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on Sept. 21 declared a "partial mobilization," aiming to draw nearly 300,000 new soldiers into the Russian army.  At the time, Putin said that only those up to the age of 35 with military experience or a military-related background would be drafted. Partial mobilization implied that only certain reservists could be called up to serve.  However, after the announcement, older men with no military experience, students, and disabled people started receiving draft notices. Over 700,000 people fled Russia following the announcement and ensuing chaos.  Putin later claimed that this partial mobilization had concluded in October, but reports said covert mobilization in Russia had continued.

LINK

1 hour ago, DrPhilly said:

Energy here in the north is wind and water. Long time historical water energy area. We can’t get it south due to lack of infrastructure. Nuclear in the south used to be the compensating factor but half of that is shutdown. When the south needs energy it is imported from Norway and other places. Very little of that is natural gas which is not that common here but no matter. As I explained, the price of nat gas directly affects the price of other energy types in the EU. They have just put in some new regulations to separate those but hasn’t really come into play yet. 

Regulate to get less of your money?? As if

So who in russia would be willing to

go after putin? And could anyone get close enough?

3 minutes ago, ToastJenkins said:

So who in russia would be willing to

go after putin? And could anyone get close enough?

Putin has pretty much eliminated anybody with the balls to do that and based on all the oligarch "accidents" lately he's doubling down on the message just in case.  Even if Putin was disposed of, whoever replaces him will almost certainly have the same mindset about the Ukraine War,