2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (Part 1)

Presumably you mean gasoline. Referring to liquid fuels as “gas” is going to cause a lot of confusion.

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Those can’t be real landmines. Can they? Why would you kick them around like that when they could be removed by attaching something to the front of a vehicle and sweeping them off?

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I got nothing.

Hmm…do they have April Fools over there?

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Just speculatin’

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Thyroid cancer is relatively easy, in that cutting out the thyroid is the standard. If it has metastasized, on the other hand, that could explain a lot.

What are the odds that it’s from some radiation exposure (either in poisoning others, or getting too close to someone who was, or macho bravado in visiting nuclear sites)?

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“ Sergei Shoigu, currently Russia’s defence minister, introduced Mr Putin to antler baths in the early 2000s. The extract is taken from the antlers of red deer, removed with a saw in springtime, when the antlers are full of fresh blood.”

Monsieur Bathory?

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Maybe we in “the West” only think the war is going badly for Russia because that’s what we’ve been told?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/01/politics/western-spy-agencies-intelligence-putin-ukraine-war/index.html

The United States and its allies are painting a picture of a bogged down, demoralized and dysfunctional Russian military taking disastrous losses on the battlefield, and are simultaneously conjuring a vision of growing political tension inside the Kremlin. They claim the Russian leader is isolated, poorly advised and lacking real intelligence on just how badly the war is going.
Western governments are preventing Putin from defining the narrative of the war. . . .

Outsiders have no way of independently assessing the full accuracy of the information being pushed into the public view by their leaders. So we don’t know where it’s all coming from or from whom. But of course, that’s the point, and it’s keeping the Russians guessing too. The attempt to portray the war in Ukraine as a disaster for Russia is coming at a moment when Western officials are discounting Moscow’s claims that it is deescalating the conflict in Kyiv and elsewhere.

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I was just thinking the same… potentially confusing when there are so many stories about Germany et al being reliant on Russian gas. I trust everyone here knows that what Europe buys from Russia is not ‘gas’ (petroleum) gas but natural gas gas. :wink:

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They sure can be real!

There’s varying degrees of mines, from very simple pressure mines such as these, to buried variants with tilt rods, magnetic fuses and booby traps.

Minefields are typically protected with anti personnel mines. Not in this case.

This looks like a hasty employment to deny usage of the bridge, but i’d expect that someone with a machine gun had the area under watch to take out anyone trying to remove the mines (but clearly not here).

ETA: may be an abandoned road block.

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I don’t think so. I thought that Russians would take Kyiv in something like two days, and they have been unable to do so even a month later. I’d definitely qualify it as war going badly for Russia.

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It’s going badly unless the casualty figures have been entirely made up. And no, I don’t believe losing thousands of men without any immediate reserves to replace them is any kind of good thing for Russia, even if they can try to sell it that way. See above about imagining that a violent thug like Putin couldn’t possibly have screwed this up.

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Heh, yes. I understand that landmines are real. I’m suggesting that maybe those particular ones are not.

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There are other depots in nearby towns, and there is an oil pipeline running some 100 km outside Belgorod. I’m not saying that the loss of the depot won’t hurt Russian efforts, but it is a manageable loss. Whereas attack helicopters are irreplaceable for Ukraine. So the risk-reward balance of the attack only makes sense if the Ukrainians were pretty damn sure they would be able to get away with it. Hence the idea that it was probably more about making use of a good piece of intel, rather than the inherent value of the depot as a target.

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And you do also understand that birds are not?

:dodo:

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Well we can’t rule out that russian mines are really filled with jelly beans, given the state of corruption.

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They are. These are antitank mines and usually you bury them. They are set for a high pressure so gently kicking them won’t make them explode.

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Here’s their original source (in English).

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Not an experiment I’d agree to run!

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