35 minutes ago, Abracadabra said:

Ukraine will eventually reveal ‘horrible’ losses – ambassador

Already well over 300K dead.

Say uncle, Sam.

The always reliable RT.com 🤣 second only to the losers in the Russian government 

10 hours ago, Abracadabra said:

Despite this, where is the Russian air superiority?

That's right, it doesn't exist.

Russia Lost 1.3M Young Workers in 2022

The number of young workers in Russia fell by 1.33 million people between December 2021 and December 2022.

That is the second-largest decrease in recorded history behind the pandemic year of 2020, when 1.34 million young Russians left the job market.

...

Unlike younger workers, Russians of pre-retirement age have flooded the job market after highly controversial pension reforms in 2018 raised the country’s retirement age, RBC said. 

Russians aged 60-69 showed the biggest increase in workforce share from December 2021-December 2022 at 336,000 people. Those aged 50-54 added 202,000 people to the job market. 

 

Russia's working population is old and feeble. Anyone with a brain and marketable skills fled the country, correctly calculating they had no future. Idiots, Rashists, criminals, and in some cases fascists joined or were volunteered to support Putin's imperialist folly in the military - tampons not included.

After the invaders are repelled Russia will have a population even less capable of competing in a world that has passed them by.

Quote

How Russia killed its tech industry

The invasion of Ukraine supercharged the decline of the country’s already struggling tech sector—and undercut its biggest success story, Yandex.

 

Seven days after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Belugin packed up his and his family’s belongings, canceled the lease on his apartment in Moscow, withdrew his kids from kindergarten, and started a new life outside of Russia. Not long after that, he resigned from his position as chief commercial officer for small and medium businesses at Yandex, Russia’s equivalent to Google and the country’s largest technology company. The war meant that everything would change in Russia, both for him and for his company, Belugin said from his new home in Cyprus: "You have to accept the new rules of having no rules at all in Russia.” 

Belugin was far from the only tech worker to leave. In the months after the invasion began, Russia saw a mass exodus of IT workers. According to government figures, about 100,000 IT specialists left Russia in 2022, or some 10% of the tech workforce—a number that is likely an underestimate. Alongside those exits, more than 1,000 foreign firms curtailed their operations in the country, driven in part by the broadest sanctions ever to be imposed on a major economy. 

It has now been over a year since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, with more than 8,300 recorded civilian deaths and counting. The tech workers who left everything behind to flee Russia warn that the country is well on its way to becoming a village: cut off from the global tech industry, research, funding, scientific exchanges, and critical components. Meanwhile Yandex, one of its biggest tech successes, has begun fragmenting, selling off lucrative businesses to VKontakte (VK), a competitor controlled by state-owned companies.

"It felt like my country was stolen from me,” says Igor, an executive at VK who has family in Russia and asked that his name be changed so he could talk openly. When the war began, he says, he felt as if 20 years of Russia’s future had been taken away in a heartbeat.

In Russia, technology was one of the few sectors where people felt they could succeed on merit instead of connections. The industry also maintained a spirit of openness: Russian entrepreneurs won international funding and made deals all over the world. For a time, the Kremlin seemed to embrace this openness too, inviting international companies to invest in Russia. 

But cracks in Russia’s tech industry started appearing well before the war. For more than a decade, the government has attempted to put Russia’s internet and its most powerful tech companies in a tight grip, threatening an industry that once promised to bring the country into the future. Experts MIT Technology Review spoke with say Russia’s war against Ukraine only accelerated the damage that was already being done, further pushing the country’s biggest tech companies into isolation and chaos and corralling its citizens into its tightly controlled domestic internet, where news comes from official government sources and free speech is severely curtailed.

 

"The Russian leadership chose a completely different path of development for the country,” says Ruben Enikolopov, assistant professor at the Barcelona School of Economics and former rector of Russia’s New Economic School. Isolation became a strategic choice, he says.

The tech industry was not Russia’s biggest, but it was one of the main drivers of the economy, says Enikolopov. Between 2015 and 2021, the IT sector in Russia was responsible for more than a third of the growth in the country’s GDP, reaching 3.7 trillion rubles ($47.8 billion) in 2021. Even though that constituted just 3.2% of total GDP, Enikolopov says that as the tech industry falls behind, Russia’s economy will stagnate. "I think this is probably one of the biggest blows to future economic growth in Russia,” he says. 

The departures begin

The mood was tense in the red brick and glass-lined Yandex office in south Moscow on February 24, 2022, the day the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Anastasiia Diuzharden, then head of content marketing at Yandex Business, was there—as were a number of others—but she says she saw few people working. The building’s smoking area had five times more people than usual. Some employees left the country that same day.

As the news of the invasion circulated around the office, Diuzharden and her colleagues were called into a "khural,” a weekly meeting. There, she says, Tigran Khudaverdyan, Yandex’s executive director and deputy CEO, reassured them that the company would continue working. 

Yandex was a company that inspired pride in Russia. It operated globally, with one part of the company registered in the Netherlands. Its engineers successfully competed with American companies: Yandex had nabbed a bigger share of the Russian search market than Google and offered a suite of 90 services that dominate much of Russia’s digital world. Among them were its lucrative content platform Zen and news aggregation platform Yandex News, where many Russians start the day online. But these information streams were also the source of its troubles.

In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, a record 14 million people a day headed to Yandex News. But instead of reading about civilian deaths and destruction, they were told that Russian liberators were "denazifying” Ukraine. Some 70% of the information on Yandex News was coming from state-controlled media sources pushing propaganda—the result of a decade-long state crackdown on Russian independent media, including new post-invasion laws on permissible media sources. 

Diuzharden knew that the company would have to tread lightly to survive. "If Yandex made any [antiwar] statements, it could mean the end of this company,” she says.

But Yandex’s compliance had a cost. Three weeks after the invasion, Khudaverdyan was sanctioned by the EU for hiding information about the war from the public and stepped down from his role. Four days later, Yandex shares were stopped from trading on Nasdaq. 

In June, Arkady Volozh, the company’s Israel-based CEO, was also sanctioned and stepped down, but not before reassuring staff that the company had prepared emergency funds for them: "We always knew in which country we live,” Diuzharden recalls him saying.

Former employees estimate that as many as a third left the country in just the first two months after the invasion (many continue to work for the company remotely). Diuzharden, who has family in Ukraine, left Russia in June. On her last day at work in the country, at the office overlooking the Moskva River, she estimated that only around 10% of the usual staff was there. 

In the wake of these changes, Yandex hatched a plan to distance itself from its news and content platforms by selling them to VK. In return, Yandex acquired VK’s food delivery service. The deal was completed in September.

Then, nine months after the invasion began, Yandex announced it would cease to exist in its original form. By this summer, the company will be split into two parts: a Russian component and another owned by its former parent company, headquartered in the Netherlands. The Russian portion, which maintains control of the company’s core businesses, is set to be taken over by a special management partnership composed of three Yandex leaders and the Putin-aligned economist Alexei Kudrin.

Yandex’s long-term prospects are now bleak, say former employees. Within Russia, the once progressive company will have to continue cooperating with the government. Outside the country, it has struggled to build its business. "I think there is no future,” says Belugin.

Yandex did not comment on those sentiments. The company told MIT Technology Review that it has increased its headcount despite the challenging year and has beat its revenue targets for 2022. The company also stated that it’s working on expanding its international business.

The government’s expanding grasp 

Yandex is just the latest example in the Kremlin’s long history of trying to take control of Russia’s tech companies, fearing what might result from the population’s unfettered access to information online. These efforts date to 2011, when Facebook and Twitter helped spark the largest antigovernment protests in the country since the 1990s. 

Some in the tech industry joined the protests, hoping to help put Russia on a more liberal, democratic path. Igor says he was one of them. But he gave up on protests after a few years. "It felt hopeless,” he says. 

 

In the ensuing years, Russia imposed increasingly restrictive laws, arresting social media users over posts, demanding access to user data, and introducing content filtering. This put pressure on both Western social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (which has been blocked in Russia since 2016) and their domestic counterparts.

VKontakte, often described as Russia’s Facebook, was "de facto nationalized” after its founder, Pavel Durov, was squeezed out of the company in 2014 and Kremlin-aligned oligarchs assumed control, says Enikolopov. After fleeing the country, Durov, who would later go on to create the messaging app Telegram, described Russia as "incompatible with Internet business.” According to a study from the National Research University Higher School of Economics, more founders of "unicorn” startups leave Russia than any other country.

The Russian government thought it should control everything, says Enikolopov: "Tech companies could not be left alone.”

The dawn of RuNet

After international sanctions were imposed on Russia following its annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russian government started promoting the idea of its own sovereign internet, the RuNet. 

The war with Ukraine and the consequent sanctions have given new life to the concept. In March 2022, the Kremlin blocked access to foreign social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, a move that helped keep Russians in an information-controlled bubble. 

The country has worked to replace such popular international sites with domestic versions. To take the place of Google Play and the Apple AppStore, VK, together with the Ministry of Digital Development, launched a domestic app store called RuStore. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have homemade analogues such as Yappy, Rossgram, and RuTube. 

Yandex News will play a part in consolidating state control over the content Russian users can read, eventually merging with other VK news products, according to Igor. 

"The main focus of VK is spreading propaganda,” Igor says, adding that this goal will be achieved by focusing the attention of Russian users on Russian services. VK did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Controlling online content is not the only way Russia wants to exercise digital sovereignty. After sanctions were introduced last year, the state started urgently promoting the goal of building up an entire self-contained tech ecosystem, encompassing everything from services and financing to hardware and supply chains. 

The Russian government has promised "unprecedented financing” for its electronics industry, potentially amounting to more than 3.19 trillion rubles ($41.2 billion) by 2030. But building that sector will be a challenging game of catch-up: even the government’s own estimates place Russia’s chip industry 10 to 15 years behind the rest of the world. Before the sanctions, Russia imported some $19 billion worth of high-tech goods annually, with the largest share of those imports (66%) coming from the EU and US, according to the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. Experts such as Heli Simola, a senior economist at the Bank of Finland, estimate that imports of technology goods have dropped 30% since last year.

"Russia is not a terribly sophisticated economy in many ways, meaning that they don’t have a lot of high-tech industries,” says Niclas Poitiers, a research fellow at Bruegel. "In many sectors, industrial production has plummeted.”

Because of trade restrictions, Russia has also lost access to products from a range of leading companies, including Cisco, SAP, Oracle, IBM, TSMC, Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung. 

 

Quote

The Russians Aren’t Just Running Out Of Tanks—They’re Running Out Of Tank Crews, Too. And It’s Going To Get Worse.

Having lost at least 2,000 tanks in its 14-month wider war on Ukraine, and struggling to source the high-tech components its needs to build new tanks, Russia has been pulling out of long-term storage hundreds of 60-year-old T-62s and 70-year-old T-55s. Tanks that were obsolete decades ago.

 

A 41-ton T-62 with its 115-millimeter smoothbore gun, or a 40-ton T-55 with its 100-millimeter rifled gun, isn’t just easier for Russian industry to restore than a newer T-90 or T-72 is—after all, the T-62 or T-55 requires fewer ball bearings and electronic components. The older tank also is easier for its crew to operate.

 

That has training implications. "The crews prepare for them [the T-55s and T-62s] in a shorter timeframe," Ukrainian commentator Oleksandr Kovalenko said.

 

The T-55 and T-62 are from a generation of Soviet tanks before the introduction of automatic gun-loaders, sophisticated fire-controls and crew layouts that allow a gunner and commander independently to search for targets.

 

The upside is that a four-person crew could learn to operate its old tank fast—as in, after just a few weeks of training. The downside, of course, is that the crew still is riding in an obsolete tank. A T-55 or T-62 is easier to use because it’s old, crude tech.

Old, crude tech that might not last long in combat—and which might end up getting new tankers killed faster.

Still, the Russians seem to appreciate the old tanks’ less demanding training requirement. After all, many of those 2,000 tanks they’ve lost in Ukraine took their crews with them when they blew up. It’s possible thousands of experienced Russian tankers have died in the wider war; replacing them might be as difficult as replacing their tanks is.

Kovalenko noted Russia’s growing shortage of good tank crews when he tracked a batch of a dozen restored T-72s, T-80s and T-90s reaching a Russian army motorized unit near Svatove in eastern Ukraine. "The most interesting thing is that there are no crews in the unit who can operate these tanks," Kovalenko said.

Assigning new crews to old tanks might seem like a solution to this problem. In reality, it’s a short-term expedient—and a self-defeating one, at that.

It’s possible to upgrade the optics in a T-55 or T-62 by swapping out the 70-year-old TSh 2-22 gunner’s sight for a 1PN96MT-02 analog sight that, while not as sophisticated as the state-of-the-art Sosna-U digital sight is, at least is new and reliable. It also is possible to boost an older tank’s protection by bolting reactive armor blocks onto the hull and turret.

But there’s very little Russian industry can do to improve a T-55 or T-62’s main gun, internal layout or turret-hull integration. And all are problematic.

"The T-62's most significant weakness is its slow rate of fire,” the U.S. Army explained in a 1979 bulletin. Where the crew of a Ukrainian T-64, Leopard 2 or M-1 can fire 10 or even 12 rounds a minute, a T-55 or T-62 crew might manage three or four rounds a minute.

The reasons are myriad. "The ammunition is inconveniently stored for rapid loading,” according to the U.S. Army bulletin. "Under certain conditions, the gun must be elevated before the loader can place a new round in the breech. The automatic ejection system requires six seconds to complete a cycle.”

While the T-55 and T-62 suffer other limitations—slow turret-traverse mechanisms, for instance—the lethargic rate of fire is one constraint that’s bound to get a lot of Russian tankers killed in direct clashes with the Ukrainians.

During the pivotal battle around Chernihiv in north-central Ukraine in the spring of 2022, the Ukrainian 1st Tank Brigade hid its T-64s in the forests around the city. When Russian tanks rolled past, the T-64 crews opened fire.

"Better crew training combined with short-ranged engagements where their armament was competitive, and the faster autoloader on the T-64, allowed Ukrainian tank crews to achieve significant damage against surprised Russian units,” analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

As T-55s and T-62s replace T-72s in Russian formations, the Ukrainians’ gunnery advantage only will grow.

But comparing an old Russian tank to a newer Ukrainian tank really is missing the point. The Kremlin’s tank-crew crisis is a reminder that, in warfare, people matter more than machines do. Rushing new tankers through a short training course in order to squeeze them into old T-55s and T-62s and speed those tanks to the front line might create an impression of Russian strength. But it won’t win battles.

Because those crews—tank commanders, or TCs, especially—will lack experience. "It is ... important that deciders in crews and platoons (TCs and platoon leaders) have the necessary experience to allow them to react to rapidly changing future battlefields,” Billy Burnside noted in a 1979 study for the U.S. Army.

In ‘solving’ their tanker-shortage by equipping crews with obsolete tanks, the Russians might end up creating an even deeper tanker shortage—by getting a bunch of four-man T-55 and T-62 crews killed in lopsided fights with better-equipped, better-trained Ukrainian forces.

 

 

 

 

Pfft.  You say ethnic cleansing as if they arn't removing NDSAPs

 

2 minutes ago, paco said:

Pfft.  You say ethnic cleansing as if they arn't removing NDSAPs

 

everyone knows ukraine is the 4th reich. 

 

But one lady arrested for publicly defacing a building with criticism of Macron is basically the same thing. The west is just as bad. 🤣

10 hours ago, Toastrel said:

Despite this, where is the Russian air superiority?

That's right, it doesn't exist.

140,000 sorties in the SMO is the definition of air superiority. 

2 hours ago, Abracadabra said:

140,000 sorties in the SMO is the definition of air superiority. 

remove short flights over temporarily occupied Ukraine and that number drops significantly. 

Russia is getting embarrassed. 

Yeah I recently watched a video of Russian Su-25’s (the Soviet equivalent of an A-10) doing a run at the front. The tactics on both sides with unguided rockets from rotor or fixed wing platforms has been to essentially lob them into opposing territory. So anyway this Su-25, from within its own area, was flying low and then went into a climb to get altitude. As soon as it popped up it’s radar warning receiver went bananas. And bananas meaning it was getting locked on by radar, not guys with man pads (those are IR, and you won’t get notification on your RWR about them.) Literally as soon as it started popping up, getting locked on. 
 

so yeah no way in hell they have anything close to air superiority.  Nobody does. 

 

Your people @Abracadabra. The people you make excuses for daily.

 

3 hours ago, JohnSnowsHair said:

 

Your people @Abracadabra. The people you make excuses for daily.

 

If it's legit, it's a straight up war crime and should be punished to the fullest extent.

Misinformation or real ?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11964323/More-60-American-British-special-forces-inside-Ukraine-leaked-documents-claim.html

2 hours ago, Abracadabra said:

If it's legit, it's a straight up war crime and should be punished to the fullest extent.

it's been shared gleefully on pro-war Russian telegram channels. they're cheering for it.

allegedly it happened last summer. who knows how many atrocities they've committed on and off video that haven't been shared, this is just the one they decided to spread ahead of the expected Ukrainian offensive.

this video shouldn't surprise anyone who has been paying attention.

Rusich is a Russian neo-Notzee group that has been operating in Ukraine since 2014. They really put the not-zee in Wagner. 

1 minute ago, JohnSnowsHair said:

this video shouldn't surprise anyone who has been paying attention.

Rusich is a Russian neo-Notzee group that has been operating in Ukraine since 2014. They really put the not-zee in Wagner. 

So you admit there are NDSAP's in Ukraine!!!

1 minute ago, paco said:

So you admit there are NDSAP's in Ukraine!!!

In temporarily occupied Ukraine... 🤣

Scouring the world to scrape together ammo and weapons for an offensive which kicks off in a few weeks is pathetic. NATO's Not-zzz went slumming to tiny little Cyprus, of all places, to beg for whatever meager supplies the island nation could afford- nothing obviously. 

The last throw in the ignominious decline of a vassal state.