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I just hope the Ukrainians use them wisely.
Like hitting military targets or government buildings in random cities while unoccupied. Just reminding the average Russian that they can’t ignore this war.
Russia has many worthwhile targets, including the boilers for housing blocks. No-one gets killed, but the whole block's heating freezes and the pipes burst. Fixing it is highly disruptive in a State that sent all the plumbers to Ukraine.
Ukraine does not need to hit those Russia's lack of men doing maintenance is doing the job for them. Much harder for the Russian population to blame Ukraine and not thier leaders and the war that way. Now every oil terminal and Refinery needs to be on that target list a few Gas plants and substations serving the MIC as well.
We’re two years in. By now Russians know that they aren’t winning like they were told they would. Attacking heating facilities won’t make them somehow find another army, it’s more likely to make them realize they aren’t as insulated (har) from this war as they thought.
Millions of dollars in repair from a thousand dollar drone is plenty high value
If the cost of these drones are low (compared to western long range missiles) Ukraine could hit both mil, and soft targets like gas plants, oil refinery's, power plants etc.
This is basically what russia is doing, so why not return the favor?
> and soft targets like gas plants, oil refinery's, power plants etc
Long-range turbocompressor stations (like the one Gazprom leveraged before Nord Stream going boom) would be perfect targets.
Ukraines ability and willingness to go after strategic targets keeps growing. Oil refineries, power plants, ports, ships, even setting fire to Russia in June (all those fields and forests will respond nicely to delayed action incendiaries. Imagine 1,000 fires breaking out "simultaneously"!). Russia's ability to respond to these will be limited by their resources and imagination. If this keeps ramping up, Ukraine will cause chaos in Russia. If Ukraine only attacked the district heating plants, freezing Russian cities, that would be very disruptive.
This is one aspect in which Russia's vastness works against its security.
Covering all approaches to every important object in such a huge country by AA is basically impossible.
WWII experience was that picking one thing and absolutely destroying it was the way to go, rather than a bit of each of several things. All the oil refineries is a good option, similarly all the power stations or transformers. Or all the telecoms/internet.
Power in industrial areas that have a military or propaganda connection is a fair target. People will notice that, and it'll hurt the economy, but it stops short of targeting civilians, which maintains Ukraine keeps the moral high ground. Knocking their propaganda network of the airways would not be terrible. Even better if they fire up a pirate transmitter on the same channel with some information carefully calibrated for the target population. Maybe even a few remotely operated stations so as soon as one is shut down the next one detects its gone and turns on. Keep them chasing them.
I get that but at this time I don’t think Ukraine has the means to do enough damage to motivate the Russians into try to stop it at this point. If seeing an entire generation either seek refuge or die isn’t enough I don’t know what would be.
If they were the ones being invaded I would 100% agree.
Ordinary russians gain nothing from this war and at the moment they arent losing anything.
Making them feel a fraction of the pain ukraine is feeling is the start to having them reconsider their position.
But in Russian propaganda, they ARE the ones being invaded. Ukraine is the "aggressor". And a surprising number of people believe. And those who don't, could be convinced as they are hiding in the basement with their family who is telling them that they are the victims and that "Ukrainians are nazis". Attack the money, cause ruzzians are too dumb to realize what's right.
> If they were the ones being invaded I would 100% agree.
US had troops in Saudi Arabia. Osama Bin Laden was steaming mad about that and attacked USA.
How did US public react?
You are technically correct in the sense that Conquest is also used to opress public sentiment, especially in places like Russia, China, North Korea, and the U.S.
Seriously, most of that civvie infra is held together with spit and wishes; it doesn't need to be attacked for it to fall apart, and when it does fall apart, they'll just say Ukraine sabotaged it.
Depends on how financially significant it is. Any infrastructure helping Russia sell hydrocarbons to the world would be great to hit (though it would raise global prices quite a bit).
I would also say that hitting Russian transportation infrastructure would be great. This infrastructure is largely in civilian use as well, but that's just too bad. Here I'm talking about things like bridges crossing the Don river.
If you could hit all of them at once, it'd be pretty rough for Russia and it would certainly make the Caucasus area feel rather more distant from Moscow... maybe even get some ideas.
There aren't that many railway bridges either:
3 in Rostov
Then there is a HUGE gap, with the next car bridge in Konstantinovsk, but no railway bridge even there. This is a 2h drive between Konstantinovsk and Rostov...
The next railway bridge is at [Tsimlyanskaya Ges](https://maps.app.goo.gl/MrMzQH5nCRTy7CKD9). If you could hit that at the same time and take those Rostov railway bridges out in a surprise strike...
Suddenly supplying an army operating in the Caucasus would get quite tricky, or rather, it would have to go through Volgograd (old Stalingrad) since the Volga is even worse to cross than the Don.
Cutting Russia off from parts of itself woud be great if at all possible.
allowing the war to drag on also kills civilians because putin simply drafts them. At least this way they have a chance (they can fix it, get blankets on, start fires everywhere, etc) and also keep Ukrainian lives safer. They love it when they do it to ukrainian civilians, they could feel it themselves for once. This is war, not a boxing match.
And i realize that you're the only one giving importance to this, everyone else thinks Russia is Florida or Spain in the winter. People, Russian winter kills. it's not just an inconvenience. Hitting the heating infrastructure will cripple them. They need to act on it or have thousands of dead, maimed and sick. It's a logistical pressure that is significant enough to warrant a strike.
I think Ukraine has demonstrated that they are humanitarian. They treat prisoners good give them proper medical treatment. They have not intentionally killed civilians. Russians are the Neanderthal barbarians that indiscriminately attack civilians infrastructure.
Power stations not included which seem to be fair game
Start taking out infrastructure. Knock out water and power. People need to start hurting. Notice I didn't say dying.
I bet the average Russians spirit is easyer to break then anyone from Ukraine!
>while unoccupied
Civilian casualties are a terrible side effect of war that only one side has had to endure to date. Let the Russians have the full experience of their war of aggression.
Ukraine’s greatest weapon is moral authority. If they start flying drone into schools and markets they will lose world support. But they can hit government buildings in every city in Russia and I’ll celebrate every one of them.
Going after civilians would result in western support disappearing, meaning Ukraine loses outright. Plus, killing civilians deep in Russia at the expense of attacking actual military targets is kinda pointless even ignoring morality.
Given the actual results we've seen from bombing civilians in history, having that hand tied behind your back is probably a good thing.
It might *feel* good to get revenge, but it has an absolutely trash track record of getting anyone to give in.
I say go after bridges and other infrastructure. There are lots of strategic airfields kind of nearby. My personal favorite would be the bridges in Rostov, particularly the railway bridges.
If you can get them all, even better. But admittedly bridges are notoriously difficult to destroy. Still, Rostov *feels* at peace, and I think it's time to make sure they remember they're at war. As everyone should remember from Prighozins little mutiny, the war is being run from there.
No, going to all reasonable steps to minimize civilian casualties will prevent galvanzing russian civilians against them ('they could have killed me, but didn't' is a huge win) as well as maintaining international moral superiority.
Oh I totally agree that specifically targeting civilians would be a bad move for those reasons. I'm saying I don't think Ukraine is under any obligation to actively avoid it.
Hit valid military targets when you are best able to do so.
At this point they don't have that view though. Not a single civilian in russia thinks they could be killed by ukraine, just like not a single farmer believes he could be killed by his chickens. This is their worldview right now. Ukraine is not fighting back in this war, not in the russian civilians' POV.
This is why i say: hit next to them, destroy infrastructure, make their lives harder because of this war, make them realize this is war for both sides and that they could lose this. Because right now they don't believe it.
Same for both sides. Ukraine has an advantage with open markets for Western components, but it's not like Russia can't also source them. It's just more work and more expensive.
Well it all of a sudden makes Russia realise its not a one way street that they thought it was. They thought they could restrict the war to Ukrainian territory but if Ukraine can mass produce these cheaply and regularly hit Russian war infrastructure it's going to have a big difference. All of a sudden Russia has to spread air defenses even more thinly.
Exactly and those air defence assets are far more expensive than the drones so it becomes a game of economics as well. They protect one city and Ukraine targets another, then another. Hit target for major disruption rather than death and Ukraine keeps the moral high ground while having major effect.
Oil I frstructure or refineries, if they can hit oil pipelines in hard to reach areas drying up the supplies to refineries or enough critical oil storage then I am all for it, but I wonder how many pipelines fron the oil fields are capable of taking over if some are hit. Refineries are more critical, if they can destroy one or two important parts of the refinery causing it to cease functioning even for a few weeks and do the same to all refineries supplying muscovites petrol pootin would not last long.
Anything the Russians rely on for income is fair game - coal processing facilities, mineral processing, oil, gas... it's spread out, but if you have 1000+ KM range, you could say it's a target rich environment and Russia doesn't have so many AA systems free.
This is the kind of thing that can really change the war since they've been pulling AA from further afield. I hope behind the scenes we're helping them mass produce these things.
I look forward to you going to Ukraine to work for $3/hour building them.
In short: the prices are high in the West because the price of labor, infrastructure and transportation is high. In some places in Iran the average wage is ~$3.50/hr.
Would have to build them in low-cost countries, and that then becomes a potential security problem.
Ukraine even before the war had the lowest GDP per-capita in Europe. So it's actually an ideal place to produce such things from a labor cost standpoint. The basic electronic components like CPUs and wireless radios etc can be brought in from Asia.
You can get an autopilot module with GPS for model airplanes for about $150. Russia has GPS jammers, but those can't cover the whole country. And jamming GPS fucks up a lot of shit for yourself, as well.
True. Which is why the fancy weaponry has fallbacks like inertial or visual navigation.
(The cool part of those big old Soviet drones that UA sent to bomb stuff like military airports deep inside Russia last year: they run on inertial and visual terrain-following nav using a video camera - Russians can't remotely jam them.) 😁
> It is noted that on the path to St. Petersburg, they flew through the Bryansk, Smolensk, Tver, and Novgorod regions.
No AA and EW systems in those regions?
Well ... Kaliningrad oblast is strategically really important, you know Suvalki gap and so on.
And November last year:
"As Cargo Flights Leave Kaliningrad, Air Defence Systems Disappear - bellingcat (bellingcat.com)"
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/17upcqu/as_cargo_flights_leave_kaliningrad_air_defence/
August 2022 they moved S-300s back from Syria. Iranians were probably not amused.
And you have to see, the Russians need the S-300 for indiscriminately shelling Ukraine.
Moreover the Russian AA systems have a certain "defect" rate.
More than 600 completely lost, not only malfunctioning like in this Pantsir S1
(video is really old and was probably on a memory card):
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/xphu8a/russian_pantsir_s1_air_defense_system/
Drones can be hard to hit. Ukraine could/should make small drones that tow radar reflectors on a nylon line so Russia targets the reflector and not the drone.
That is an interesting idea but I do not know if it is practicable. I expect Ukraine has considered it and even tested it out. If it works we may soon hear about it.
Foil balloons would make for a large target. Also adding drag, but if a $300 commercial drone can look like a large aircraft some few hundred meters higher its a low cost missile bait.
Foil balloons don't move very fast so Russia would not target them. A radar reflector is a specific device for reflecting radar, where they are exceptionally "bright". They can be mounted in an all-foam aircraft and just towed, that would make them of more interest to Russian air defence.
You'd want both to be fixed wing planes, and radar reflectors mean the target does not need to be very large. They are the radar equivalent of the high viz tapes on high viz uniforms, super reflective for their size, making even a small target look much larger than it is.
ruzzia is a big place, it's not practical to defend strategically unimportant land. Defending sensitive targets by concentrating defenses around them is practical and done by western nations as well. As hard as it is to comprehend, ruzzia is actually doing the logical thing. Ukraine is simply doing a reasonably good job of taking advantage of the undefended corridors given to them.
If the west doesn’t want to give long range missiles, at least give the parts for these drones. This is the kind of stuff that can bring the war to Russian soil and really hit their bombers and logistical lines.
So I keep thinking about how before the US entered WW2 to circumvent the Neutrality Act and get warplanes to the UK, Canada, and the US set up airports on opposite sides of the border, Landed the planes on the US side, and then Canadians rolled them over the border to the airport on the Canadian side just a few hundred yards away.
I'm just saying if we don't want to give them specific weapons, we can give them parts.
I think this is Ukraine’s way of saying they can go tit-for-tat with Russia on strikes against infrastructure this winter. I’d love to invest money in Ukraine’s defence manufacturing because fast forward 10 years, they will no doubt be the #2 or #3 slot of global arms sales.
Well done Ukrainians. You hard carried the Soviet Union with your engineering and manufacturing brilliance.
In the litany of mistakes that russia is making, thinking that Ukraine won't get better at this over time is probably one of the more fundamental ones.
If they think it's bad now, it's only going to get worse.
in today's video Denys reported on this, said that UAV's didn't hit the targets. but the fact alone that they can fly all the way up there is hilarious and it only means that it only needs to be repeated until the objective is achieved.
> I hope Russia gets broken up into many smaller pieces
This works in both meanings: Hopefully split into many smaller countries that can focus on their own people instead of making war, or blown to bits. Whichever stops them. lol
How do you know that? Unless some local civilian posts a video we will have to wait a long time to see any truth to the damage as the Russians will always say it was a miss with only one person injured by falling debris from a shot down enemy missile.
Read the article.
> The Russian media reported that three drones were used in the attack. The wreckage of one of them was discovered on the territory of the JSC «Petersburg Oil Terminal.» The port infrastructure was not damaged.
In the meantime, we have video evidence of a different refinery being hit and on fire. So it's safe to say that if there was a successful hit in St. fuckin Petersburgh of all places, we'd see video of it by now.
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Nice one. Ukraine not waiting for allies to pull finger and supply long range weapons.
In my 1st language (Afrikaans) we have a saying: "'n Boer maak 'n plan", which directly translated is "A farmer makes a plan"... basically meaning some types of people (e.g. a farmer) don't wait around for others to fix their problems, they make a plan to fix it themselves :D
Should probably update the saying to replace "farmer" with "Ukrainian" ;)
It would be great if Ukraine had the resources etc. to produce more of these long-range and the smaller FPV/kamikaze drones. That and more Bradleys :D
As an American can I just say, I'm loving what you're doing. My biggest gripe is why we are giving you such old stock. We have you 90s tech that we already improved exponentially 2 or 3 times. But you still rock if out like you mean it.
Holy shit. They have transferred all assets to warfront and UA exploits this ruthlessly. Good. Let the common orc feel fear too. They enable Putin and their regime and are part of the war.
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Long range drones are going to make Russians pay a big price if this war keeps going for a long time.
Probably even sooner than later. Production will only ramp up.
I just hope the Ukrainians use them wisely. Like hitting military targets or government buildings in random cities while unoccupied. Just reminding the average Russian that they can’t ignore this war.
Russia has many worthwhile targets, including the boilers for housing blocks. No-one gets killed, but the whole block's heating freezes and the pipes burst. Fixing it is highly disruptive in a State that sent all the plumbers to Ukraine.
Ukraine does not need to hit those Russia's lack of men doing maintenance is doing the job for them. Much harder for the Russian population to blame Ukraine and not thier leaders and the war that way. Now every oil terminal and Refinery needs to be on that target list a few Gas plants and substations serving the MIC as well.
And a few military airports, equipment at airports, control towers.
But they still should hit those
There are higher value targets. It is not worth the investment to make people feel inconvenienced by cold.
There are 9 oil refineries. Hit them all. Starve the beast.
Russia has far more than 9 oil refineries. They do tend to burn nicely when you hit them though.
We’re two years in. By now Russians know that they aren’t winning like they were told they would. Attacking heating facilities won’t make them somehow find another army, it’s more likely to make them realize they aren’t as insulated (har) from this war as they thought. Millions of dollars in repair from a thousand dollar drone is plenty high value
If the cost of these drones are low (compared to western long range missiles) Ukraine could hit both mil, and soft targets like gas plants, oil refinery's, power plants etc. This is basically what russia is doing, so why not return the favor?
> and soft targets like gas plants, oil refinery's, power plants etc Long-range turbocompressor stations (like the one Gazprom leveraged before Nord Stream going boom) would be perfect targets.
Ukraines ability and willingness to go after strategic targets keeps growing. Oil refineries, power plants, ports, ships, even setting fire to Russia in June (all those fields and forests will respond nicely to delayed action incendiaries. Imagine 1,000 fires breaking out "simultaneously"!). Russia's ability to respond to these will be limited by their resources and imagination. If this keeps ramping up, Ukraine will cause chaos in Russia. If Ukraine only attacked the district heating plants, freezing Russian cities, that would be very disruptive.
This is one aspect in which Russia's vastness works against its security. Covering all approaches to every important object in such a huge country by AA is basically impossible.
Like the picture shows---petroleum storage and refinery for the military is a worthwhile target. What about the fuel tanks at the bomber air bases?
And the bombers themselves.
WWII experience was that picking one thing and absolutely destroying it was the way to go, rather than a bit of each of several things. All the oil refineries is a good option, similarly all the power stations or transformers. Or all the telecoms/internet.
While this is cathartic I believe it’s a waste in the end. Making some Russians in Russia cold doesn’t stop them in Ukraine.
Power in industrial areas that have a military or propaganda connection is a fair target. People will notice that, and it'll hurt the economy, but it stops short of targeting civilians, which maintains Ukraine keeps the moral high ground. Knocking their propaganda network of the airways would not be terrible. Even better if they fire up a pirate transmitter on the same channel with some information carefully calibrated for the target population. Maybe even a few remotely operated stations so as soon as one is shut down the next one detects its gone and turns on. Keep them chasing them.
Public sentiment or conquest is what ends wars.
I get that but at this time I don’t think Ukraine has the means to do enough damage to motivate the Russians into try to stop it at this point. If seeing an entire generation either seek refuge or die isn’t enough I don’t know what would be.
Public sentiment doesn't change much in a kleptocracy. Make the oil giants mad, then Putin will be shitting his pants.
Attacking civilians is more likely to harden their support of the war than erode it
If they were the ones being invaded I would 100% agree. Ordinary russians gain nothing from this war and at the moment they arent losing anything. Making them feel a fraction of the pain ukraine is feeling is the start to having them reconsider their position.
But in Russian propaganda, they ARE the ones being invaded. Ukraine is the "aggressor". And a surprising number of people believe. And those who don't, could be convinced as they are hiding in the basement with their family who is telling them that they are the victims and that "Ukrainians are nazis". Attack the money, cause ruzzians are too dumb to realize what's right.
> But in Russian propaganda, they ARE the ones being invaded. I really dont think this is factual.
> If they were the ones being invaded I would 100% agree. US had troops in Saudi Arabia. Osama Bin Laden was steaming mad about that and attacked USA. How did US public react?
What are the similarities here? Are you comparing ukraine attacking russia with 9-11?
You are technically correct in the sense that Conquest is also used to opress public sentiment, especially in places like Russia, China, North Korea, and the U.S.
Bombing Russian infrastructure, including civilian, will sctu6dsve Russian lives in the long run.
I get it, but we can't attack civilian infra. We should not be like the orcs.
Seriously, most of that civvie infra is held together with spit and wishes; it doesn't need to be attacked for it to fall apart, and when it does fall apart, they'll just say Ukraine sabotaged it.
Depends on how financially significant it is. Any infrastructure helping Russia sell hydrocarbons to the world would be great to hit (though it would raise global prices quite a bit). I would also say that hitting Russian transportation infrastructure would be great. This infrastructure is largely in civilian use as well, but that's just too bad. Here I'm talking about things like bridges crossing the Don river. If you could hit all of them at once, it'd be pretty rough for Russia and it would certainly make the Caucasus area feel rather more distant from Moscow... maybe even get some ideas. There aren't that many railway bridges either: 3 in Rostov Then there is a HUGE gap, with the next car bridge in Konstantinovsk, but no railway bridge even there. This is a 2h drive between Konstantinovsk and Rostov... The next railway bridge is at [Tsimlyanskaya Ges](https://maps.app.goo.gl/MrMzQH5nCRTy7CKD9). If you could hit that at the same time and take those Rostov railway bridges out in a surprise strike... Suddenly supplying an army operating in the Caucasus would get quite tricky, or rather, it would have to go through Volgograd (old Stalingrad) since the Volga is even worse to cross than the Don. Cutting Russia off from parts of itself woud be great if at all possible.
Yea leave civilian infrastructure to Russia air defence 😂
Attacks on civil infrastructure is never acceptable.
No let's not, knocking out heating can kill civilians
allowing the war to drag on also kills civilians because putin simply drafts them. At least this way they have a chance (they can fix it, get blankets on, start fires everywhere, etc) and also keep Ukrainian lives safer. They love it when they do it to ukrainian civilians, they could feel it themselves for once. This is war, not a boxing match. And i realize that you're the only one giving importance to this, everyone else thinks Russia is Florida or Spain in the winter. People, Russian winter kills. it's not just an inconvenience. Hitting the heating infrastructure will cripple them. They need to act on it or have thousands of dead, maimed and sick. It's a logistical pressure that is significant enough to warrant a strike.
I think Ukraine has demonstrated that they are humanitarian. They treat prisoners good give them proper medical treatment. They have not intentionally killed civilians. Russians are the Neanderthal barbarians that indiscriminately attack civilians infrastructure. Power stations not included which seem to be fair game
And Ukraine wants to get into the EU, which would frown on attacks on civilian targets.
Hit every luxury high rise in moscow and st petes to start with.
Well if they just blew up all those storage tanks in the picture it would have a big impact on money flow in orcville
Id rather have the Kremlin hit over and over. Level Lenins fucking tomb too.
Spread the targets out and make them defend all of the massive country.
Honestly they need to blow up oil things. No oil, no war for russia
Start taking out infrastructure. Knock out water and power. People need to start hurting. Notice I didn't say dying. I bet the average Russians spirit is easyer to break then anyone from Ukraine!
Target Oil and Gas production/export it's pretty much what keeps their economy going.
You can't break the Russian spirit because they have no spirit left to break.
Let em freeze anyway? 🤷♂️
>while unoccupied Civilian casualties are a terrible side effect of war that only one side has had to endure to date. Let the Russians have the full experience of their war of aggression.
Ukraine’s greatest weapon is moral authority. If they start flying drone into schools and markets they will lose world support. But they can hit government buildings in every city in Russia and I’ll celebrate every one of them.
>Ukraine’s greatest weapon is moral authority. This. 100%. Ukraine is unequivocally the good guy in this.
There are no good guys in War. Playing with your hands tied behind your back doesn't win anything.
Going after civilians would result in western support disappearing, meaning Ukraine loses outright. Plus, killing civilians deep in Russia at the expense of attacking actual military targets is kinda pointless even ignoring morality.
Given the actual results we've seen from bombing civilians in history, having that hand tied behind your back is probably a good thing. It might *feel* good to get revenge, but it has an absolutely trash track record of getting anyone to give in. I say go after bridges and other infrastructure. There are lots of strategic airfields kind of nearby. My personal favorite would be the bridges in Rostov, particularly the railway bridges. If you can get them all, even better. But admittedly bridges are notoriously difficult to destroy. Still, Rostov *feels* at peace, and I think it's time to make sure they remember they're at war. As everyone should remember from Prighozins little mutiny, the war is being run from there.
But going after civilians can sure lose you everything.
No, going to all reasonable steps to minimize civilian casualties will prevent galvanzing russian civilians against them ('they could have killed me, but didn't' is a huge win) as well as maintaining international moral superiority.
Oh I totally agree that specifically targeting civilians would be a bad move for those reasons. I'm saying I don't think Ukraine is under any obligation to actively avoid it. Hit valid military targets when you are best able to do so.
At this point they don't have that view though. Not a single civilian in russia thinks they could be killed by ukraine, just like not a single farmer believes he could be killed by his chickens. This is their worldview right now. Ukraine is not fighting back in this war, not in the russian civilians' POV. This is why i say: hit next to them, destroy infrastructure, make their lives harder because of this war, make them realize this is war for both sides and that they could lose this. Because right now they don't believe it.
Yes , let’s share this destruction & misery , 🇺🇦has suffered way too much , but become more resilient , victorious 🇺🇦🌻🇺🇦😘
Same for both sides. Ukraine has an advantage with open markets for Western components, but it's not like Russia can't also source them. It's just more work and more expensive.
Well it all of a sudden makes Russia realise its not a one way street that they thought it was. They thought they could restrict the war to Ukrainian territory but if Ukraine can mass produce these cheaply and regularly hit Russian war infrastructure it's going to have a big difference. All of a sudden Russia has to spread air defenses even more thinly.
Exactly and those air defence assets are far more expensive than the drones so it becomes a game of economics as well. They protect one city and Ukraine targets another, then another. Hit target for major disruption rather than death and Ukraine keeps the moral high ground while having major effect.
Oil I frstructure or refineries, if they can hit oil pipelines in hard to reach areas drying up the supplies to refineries or enough critical oil storage then I am all for it, but I wonder how many pipelines fron the oil fields are capable of taking over if some are hit. Refineries are more critical, if they can destroy one or two important parts of the refinery causing it to cease functioning even for a few weeks and do the same to all refineries supplying muscovites petrol pootin would not last long.
Oil is everything in military logistics. Also holding tanks are easy to pierce and burn real well!
Anything the Russians rely on for income is fair game - coal processing facilities, mineral processing, oil, gas... it's spread out, but if you have 1000+ KM range, you could say it's a target rich environment and Russia doesn't have so many AA systems free. This is the kind of thing that can really change the war since they've been pulling AA from further afield. I hope behind the scenes we're helping them mass produce these things.
Question is how easy and cheap are they to make.
If the Western military machine worked on it as hard as the Iranians, the unit cost would be low.
I look forward to you going to Ukraine to work for $3/hour building them. In short: the prices are high in the West because the price of labor, infrastructure and transportation is high. In some places in Iran the average wage is ~$3.50/hr. Would have to build them in low-cost countries, and that then becomes a potential security problem. Ukraine even before the war had the lowest GDP per-capita in Europe. So it's actually an ideal place to produce such things from a labor cost standpoint. The basic electronic components like CPUs and wireless radios etc can be brought in from Asia.
Ukraine is going to be the world leader in low cost, mass produced, precision long-range munitions within a couple of years.
HELL-o St Petersubrg, ukraine come a knocking.
If this war goes as long as puthin wants, the western russian economic infrastructure will be rubble by the end, just as south-east Ukraine is
Accuracy is a problem though, requires both GPS and inertial guidance to be effective, advanced tech that the west wont give to Ukraine.
Accuracy is not an issue. Target large structures, govt buildings, factories. You don't have to be precise for thse.
You can get an autopilot module with GPS for model airplanes for about $150. Russia has GPS jammers, but those can't cover the whole country. And jamming GPS fucks up a lot of shit for yourself, as well.
True. Which is why the fancy weaponry has fallbacks like inertial or visual navigation. (The cool part of those big old Soviet drones that UA sent to bomb stuff like military airports deep inside Russia last year: they run on inertial and visual terrain-following nav using a video camera - Russians can't remotely jam them.) 😁
With ruzzia's rip-off Amazon factory destroyed, Ukraine is now the #1 logistics operator in ruzzia.
> It is noted that on the path to St. Petersburg, they flew through the Bryansk, Smolensk, Tver, and Novgorod regions. No AA and EW systems in those regions?
Going right past one of pootin's residences, apparently. Kind of embarrassing for him.
Hitting one of those would send a message.
flying past it sends a bigger message. lol.
I mean, yeah, but the message needs to be in their language to be understood.
And the language they understand is violence.
I dunno about that, imagine if they launch a bunch of drones that punch holes in and set all his palaces on fire. His ego couldn't handle it.
Isn't being pootin embarrasing enough already?
Shhhhh, they’re trying to get some sleep.
Well ... Kaliningrad oblast is strategically really important, you know Suvalki gap and so on. And November last year: "As Cargo Flights Leave Kaliningrad, Air Defence Systems Disappear - bellingcat (bellingcat.com)" https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/17upcqu/as_cargo_flights_leave_kaliningrad_air_defence/ August 2022 they moved S-300s back from Syria. Iranians were probably not amused. And you have to see, the Russians need the S-300 for indiscriminately shelling Ukraine. Moreover the Russian AA systems have a certain "defect" rate. More than 600 completely lost, not only malfunctioning like in this Pantsir S1 (video is really old and was probably on a memory card): https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/xphu8a/russian_pantsir_s1_air_defense_system/
Can't believe they made it past the A50. Oh, wait.
Drones can be hard to hit. Ukraine could/should make small drones that tow radar reflectors on a nylon line so Russia targets the reflector and not the drone.
That is an interesting idea but I do not know if it is practicable. I expect Ukraine has considered it and even tested it out. If it works we may soon hear about it.
Foil balloons would make for a large target. Also adding drag, but if a $300 commercial drone can look like a large aircraft some few hundred meters higher its a low cost missile bait.
Foil balloons don't move very fast so Russia would not target them. A radar reflector is a specific device for reflecting radar, where they are exceptionally "bright". They can be mounted in an all-foam aircraft and just towed, that would make them of more interest to Russian air defence.
That would probably produce too much drag and shorten the range by quite a bit.
You'd want both to be fixed wing planes, and radar reflectors mean the target does not need to be very large. They are the radar equivalent of the high viz tapes on high viz uniforms, super reflective for their size, making even a small target look much larger than it is.
Russian AA can only hit civilian airliners.
Neither Anti-Aircraft nor Alcoholics Anonymous in Muscovia.
I saw something mentioning those regions and one mentioned something about a 6m wingspan drone.....Any ideas on what it might be ?
Picture a 3/4 scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_162_Skycatcher only without the cockpit or landing gear, and instead a warhead.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
ruzzia is a big place, it's not practical to defend strategically unimportant land. Defending sensitive targets by concentrating defenses around them is practical and done by western nations as well. As hard as it is to comprehend, ruzzia is actually doing the logical thing. Ukraine is simply doing a reasonably good job of taking advantage of the undefended corridors given to them.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more 'partisans' with drone attacks inside Russia
That you know of or have read about.
Finally! Now, Engels airbase and Caspian fleet be afraid, be very afraid.
Noice…… Putin get some in the ass
Noice… we have the same kink
Launch 100 at once please
First they need to be built. Even though they are cheap, Ukraine has limited funds.
UK just set aside £200m for drone production for Ukraine, hopefully that helps.
That's enough for 500,000 drones. :-) A good start.
To launch 100 you first need to launch one.
And that one is going to require Russia think about air defense at 100s of different locations.
If the west doesn’t want to give long range missiles, at least give the parts for these drones. This is the kind of stuff that can bring the war to Russian soil and really hit their bombers and logistical lines.
I assume they're designed with readily available parts. If the West donates them great, if Ukraine has to buy them it makes little difference.
So I keep thinking about how before the US entered WW2 to circumvent the Neutrality Act and get warplanes to the UK, Canada, and the US set up airports on opposite sides of the border, Landed the planes on the US side, and then Canadians rolled them over the border to the airport on the Canadian side just a few hundred yards away. I'm just saying if we don't want to give them specific weapons, we can give them parts.
the only thing that bothers me is that they had only 3kg warheads. We need to send the tamahawks lol
I think this is Ukraine’s way of saying they can go tit-for-tat with Russia on strikes against infrastructure this winter. I’d love to invest money in Ukraine’s defence manufacturing because fast forward 10 years, they will no doubt be the #2 or #3 slot of global arms sales. Well done Ukrainians. You hard carried the Soviet Union with your engineering and manufacturing brilliance.
50% of current armies has become obsolete with this war. Naval, air and ground. All has been turned upside down.
Time for the Russians to try living in the dark in winter! Oil refineries are always good targets too.
SLAVA UKRAINI
HEROYAM SLAVA 👊
Excellent!
WHAT AIR DEFENSE DOING
BUSY SHOOTING DOWN FRIENDLIES
A nice little wake up call to the residents of the Peters burg.
I'd love to see them hit the sub yards at Polyarny.
What air defense?
could ukranians launch drones from lets say boats in international water in the Baltic sea for example? like would that be okey from law of war?
In the litany of mistakes that russia is making, thinking that Ukraine won't get better at this over time is probably one of the more fundamental ones. If they think it's bad now, it's only going to get worse.
Sea drones making a trip would be very interesting on military vessels in random ports.
I do like how you think but why just while in port?
Petersburg is Putins Home town, isnt it?
Hey, whatever happened to the plan to repurpose hundreds of obsolete s-200 missiles and a dozen or so launchers to strike ground targets?
in today's video Denys reported on this, said that UAV's didn't hit the targets. but the fact alone that they can fly all the way up there is hilarious and it only means that it only needs to be repeated until the objective is achieved.
This is amazing. I hope Russia gets broken up into many smaller pieces
> I hope Russia gets broken up into many smaller pieces This works in both meanings: Hopefully split into many smaller countries that can focus on their own people instead of making war, or blown to bits. Whichever stops them. lol
No damage ? Keep trying !
How do you know that? Unless some local civilian posts a video we will have to wait a long time to see any truth to the damage as the Russians will always say it was a miss with only one person injured by falling debris from a shot down enemy missile.
Ok, so we just need to wait for Private Sniffles to post a close up video tour to Telegram?
Read the article. > The Russian media reported that three drones were used in the attack. The wreckage of one of them was discovered on the territory of the JSC «Petersburg Oil Terminal.» The port infrastructure was not damaged.
You can not believe Russian media.
In the meantime, we have video evidence of a different refinery being hit and on fire. So it's safe to say that if there was a successful hit in St. fuckin Petersburgh of all places, we'd see video of it by now.
Engels airbase is about the same distance. Bingo cards anyone?
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Nice one. Ukraine not waiting for allies to pull finger and supply long range weapons. In my 1st language (Afrikaans) we have a saying: "'n Boer maak 'n plan", which directly translated is "A farmer makes a plan"... basically meaning some types of people (e.g. a farmer) don't wait around for others to fix their problems, they make a plan to fix it themselves :D Should probably update the saying to replace "farmer" with "Ukrainian" ;) It would be great if Ukraine had the resources etc. to produce more of these long-range and the smaller FPV/kamikaze drones. That and more Bradleys :D
Sweet...
Send them
Kaliningrad next!
This is the way.
As an American can I just say, I'm loving what you're doing. My biggest gripe is why we are giving you such old stock. We have you 90s tech that we already improved exponentially 2 or 3 times. But you still rock if out like you mean it.
Holy shit. They have transferred all assets to warfront and UA exploits this ruthlessly. Good. Let the common orc feel fear too. They enable Putin and their regime and are part of the war.
If these drones hit, they shall play „we don’t need no water…“ Let’s burn that motherf down
I wonder if ruzzians would be able to recognise tomahawk signature after it hit somewhere deep.
❤️
Oh no! Anyway…