Ukraine war mega thread

[sabang]

So watch more things fall, and revel in the fact how smart you are.

[Iceman123]

^^

If you had the sense to watch the battlefield assessment I posted above, you would realize that things are not going well for the Russians despite the fact they took a couple of small towns.

In fairness I tried to watch it, however a few minutes in, when it deteriorated into a full sales blown spiel for shaving clippers and underpants I had to give up.

Surely this presenter is not taken seriously!

Now tell us again about your guns.

How many times have you had to draw your pistol when your life was in danger.?

[bsnub]

I sure know who looks like the simpletons right now.

Being that you do not know much at all about this conflict that you bleated on and on about for months, swearing would never happen, I would say it is undoubtably you and the other Three Stooges. Without a doubt.

[bsnub]

Surely this presenter is not taken seriously!

You could have easily skipped over the ad because after it the battlefield analysis starts. These YouTubers have to pay the bills somehow. You missed the best part.

How many times have you had to draw your pistol when your life was in danger.?

Never and I do not carry a pistol around. Nice off-topic troll attempt though.

[David48atTD]

NOW ...

Germany to send IRIS-T air defence system to Ukraine — Scholz

Germany will supply Ukraine with the IRIS-T air defence system, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, following pleas from Kyiv and German opposition parties to step up heavy weapons deliveries.

Scholz said Germany had been “delivering continuously since the beginning of the war”, pointing to more than 15 million rounds of ammunition, 100,000 grenades and over 5,000 anti-tank mines sent to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24.

“Most recently, the government has decided that we will deliver the most modern air defence system that Germany has in the form of the IRIS-T,” Scholz told lawmakers in the Bundestag.

A security source told Reuters last month that Germany was considering supplying IRIS-T SLM medium-range surface-to-air defence systems to Ukraine.

[bsnub]

[David48atTD]

Still need more range ...

[bsnub]

July is the month.

[David48atTD]

July is the month.

Note to self.

Secret Santa to snubby is a calendar

[David48atTD]

Nice piece of propaganda or a factual recording

[bsnub]

Still need more range ...

They are getting it...

Joe Biden has announced the US will send advanced missile systems to Ukraine. The new weapon is the Himars multiple launch rocket system, or MLRS: a mobile unit that can simultaneously launch multiple precision-guided missiles.

Both Ukraine and Russia already operate MLRS, but Himars has superior range and precision.

What system will the US provide?

The M142 Himars system (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) is a modernised, lighter and more agile wheel-mounted version of the track-mounted M270 MLRS developed in the 1970s for US and allied forces.

The Himars that Washington is providing to Ukraine will have a range of about 50 miles (80km), a US official told reporters.

Himars units carry one preloaded pod of six 227mm guided missiles (the M270 carries two pods), or one large pod loaded with an Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) tactical missile. The US will not supply Ukraine with the ATACMS, which has a range of 300km.

With a small crew, the Himars can remove a spent pod and load a fresh one in minutes, without other vehicles helping. The crews will require some training.

The US military already has Himars units in Europe; and Nato allies Poland and Romania have acquired the systems.

Why are they valuable?

Himars will give Ukraine’s forces the ability to strike further behind Russian lines, and at distances better protected from Russia’s own long-range weaponry.

The GPS-guided missiles the Himars shoots have a range about double that of the M777 howitzers that the US recently supplied to Ukraine forces.

At roughly 80km it generally puts Himars out of range of Russia’s own artillery, while placing the Russian batteries at risk.

It also could threaten Russian supply depots, amid western belief that the Russian forces suffer logistical problems.

Some analysts have said Himars can be a “game-changer” in the war at a time when Ukraine forces appear to be struggling under Russian artillery fire.

But others say Himars will not suddenly turn the tables. “The Himars would even the playing field,” a senior US defence official said.

Why is Washington limiting the range?

The US president wrote in the New York Times that the advanced rockets will enable the Ukrainians “to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine”.

Yet the US plans to limit the range of the missiles it gives Ukraine to avoid them being used to hit targets deep inside Russia.

“We are not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that can strike into Russia,” Biden said.

Since Russia invaded on 24 February, the US has been sensitive about taking any action to support Kyiv that might provoke Moscow to take the war beyond Ukraine’s borders.

That has included not overtly backing Ukraine strikes inside Russian territory. Several times Ukraine has used its own rockets, drones and helicopters to hit nearby Russian targets in neighbouring Kursk and Belgorod oblasts.

If the US provided ATACMS, they would theoretically have the ability to strike major Russian urban centres and military bases, including airfields from where attacks on Ukraine are launched.

“[The] Ukrainians have given assurances they will not use these systems against Russian territory,” a US official said.

Himars: what are the advanced rockets US is sending Ukraine? | Ukraine | The Guardian

[bsnub]

This is an excellent video. It is an interview with an American who was fighting in Ukraine in the early months of the war. A long video, but it gets better and better as it goes on...

[Neverna]

Some analysts have said Himars can be a “game-changer”

Yet another "game changer". Yawn.

Are they better than the last game changers?

What happened to the earlier ones?

[panama hat]

Shit prediction?

Yes. Remember yours re. Russian not invading Ukraine? The mother of all shit predictions.

I sure know who looks like the simpletons right now.

Indeed, your reflection in the mirror must be blinding you

[David48atTD]

What system will the US provide?

The M142 Himars system (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) is a modernised, lighter and more agile wheel-mounted version of the track-mounted M270 MLRS developed in the 1970s for US and allied forces.

The Himars that Washington is providing to Ukraine will have a range of about 50 miles (80km), a US official told reporters.

Himars units carry one preloaded pod of six 227mm guided missiles (the M270 carries two pods), or one large pod loaded with an Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) tactical missile. The US will not supply Ukraine with the ATACMS, which has a range of 300km.

With a small crew, the Himars can remove a spent pod and load a fresh one in minutes, without other vehicles helping. The crews will require some training.

The US military already has Himars units in Europe; and Nato allies Poland and Romania have acquired the systems.

Why are they valuable?

Himars will give Ukraine’s forces the ability to strike further behind Russian lines, and at distances better protected from Russia’s own long-range weaponry.

The GPS-guided missiles the Himars shoots have a range about double that of the M777 howitzers that the US recently supplied to Ukraine forces.

At roughly 80km it generally puts Himars out of range of Russia’s own artillery, while placing the Russian batteries at risk.

It also could threaten Russian supply depots, amid western belief that the Russian forces suffer logistical problems.

[David48atTD]

[Norton]

“[The] Ukrainians have given assurances they will not use these systems against Russian territory,” a US official said.

.....

[David48atTD]

Norts ... oh ye of little faith.

It was a 'pinkie promise' ... can't break them

[david44]

Not shooting the messengers but seems to me very very few Europeans will gain, bar traffickers in arms , refugees, kids or body bags.

Ukrainian and Russian boy conscripts slaughtered , Donbas separatist and Ukrainian civilians dead , EU taxpayers to fund millions of refugees and no doubt replacing the weapons the Eastern Block gave old Soviet kit.

New kit training and debt great for Boris Blojo as a dead cat to divert flack for his many failings.

China laughing for now, cheap oil, Putin muzzled, USA, divide and weaken EU bleed them all and let Euro-pups pay , its almost as if ever since Obama/Langley/Nuland's Maidan fruition .
As well as impoverish all ordinary Russians may achieve regime change or least so weaken Russian military it ends up like here all brass and no punch, a sub with no engine etc.

Also a tough message to all commie khvntz from Xi and fatboy down that US will help 5 eyes and flippas ASEAN die in huge numbers to protect homeland, preserve US hegemony and possible lend lots of money at interest to reconstruct.

The belt and road has met Uncle Sam's inexhaustable printing and the superhighway.

For those who dislike or distrust the great Republic, that paid in blood and cash and MArshall aid, debt forgiveness, to fix the last few fuck ups Euro civil wars.WW1 WW2, Yugoslav imbroglio, and bring a virtual ceasefire to Ireland.

Kinda policing naughty kids who are slow learners as our beloved Mods do between Bum Modomy and the stash.What people in Mongolia call American Syndrome.

Doncha wonder why a larger EU still needs a US umbrella so German 2% NATO sub dodgers can wank safely in their cocoons, Swedes Turnips and assorted veg like Wops, Dagos , Austrians Swiss and louche Latins can surf freely and Japs don't ever have to face the wrath of the dragon's last comfort women or witnesses of Nanjing.

Who would you prefer of today's scum at top Putin, Albanese, Boris , Macron, good shirker Scholz?

God help us all be it Biden, if nods off Kamala or god forfend the Donald returns in just 2 years .

Nice thing here we n=know they are cowards and only in it for the cash like the cheap hoors that service the unfuckbale old expats who eek out their declining erections between TEFL Leo and a weekly spanking, works for me...off to the message parlour straight afte rteh "happy Hour"


Have lovely Jubbly folks nice the IRISH guards start the pomp.




Turkey whose cheapo drones have proved themselves great value and Turdish Kurks in Kirkuk and Kurdish Turks in exile will have the collywobbles, now a drone can be re directed after launch were into Robocop.

[bsnub]

God help us all be it Biden, if nods off Kamala or god forfend the Donald returns in just 2 years .

He won't.

[bsnub]

Some Russian troops are refusing to return to fight in Ukraine because of their experiences on the front line at the start of the invasion, according to Russian human rights lawyers and activists. The BBC has been speaking to one such soldier.

"I don't want to go [back to Ukraine] to kill and be killed," says Sergey - not his real name - who spent five weeks fighting in Ukraine earlier this year.

He is now home in Russia, having taken legal advice to avoid being sent back to the front line. Sergey is just one of hundreds of Russian soldiers understood to have been seeking such advice.

Sergey says he is traumatised by his experience in Ukraine.

"I had thought that we were the Russian army, the most super-duper in the world," says the young man bitterly. Instead they were expected to operate without even basic equipment, such as night vision devices, he says.

"We were like blind kittens. I'm shocked by our army. It wouldn't cost much to equip us. Why wasn't it done?"

Sergey joined the army as a conscript - most Russian men between the ages of 18-27 must complete one year of compulsory military service. But, after a few months, he made the decision to sign a two-year professional contract which would also give him a salary.

In January, Sergey was sent near the border with Ukraine for what he was told would be military drills. A month later - 24 February, the day Russia launched its invasion - he was told to cross the border. Almost immediately his unit found itself under attack.

As they stopped for the evening in an abandoned farm, their commander said: "Well, as you will have worked out by now, this is not a joke."

Sergey says he was completely shocked.

"My first thoughts were 'Is this really happening to me?'"

They were continually shelled, he says, both when moving and when parked overnight. In his unit of 50 people, 10 were killed and 10 others wounded. Almost all his comrades were under the age of 25.

He heard of Russian servicemen so inexperienced that they "did not know how to shoot and couldn't tell one end of a mortar from another".

He says his convoy - travelling through northern Ukraine - broke up after just four days when a bridge they were about to cross exploded, killing comrades ahead of them.

In another incident, Sergey says he had to overtake comrades trapped inside a burning vehicle in front of him.

"It was blown up from a grenade launcher or something else. It caught fire and there were [Russian] soldiers inside. We drove around it and on, firing as we went. I didn't look back."

His unit moved on through the Ukrainian countryside, but there was a clear lack of strategy, he says. Reinforcements failed to arrive and soldiers were poorly equipped for the task of taking a large city.

"We went without helicopters - just in a column, as though we were heading to a parade."

He believes his commanders had planned to capture strongholds and key cities very quickly - and had calculated that the Ukrainians would simply surrender.

"We rushed forward with short overnight stays, without trenches, without reconnaissance. We didn't leave anyone in the rear, so if someone decided to come in from behind and hit us there was no protection.

"I think that [so many of] our guys died largely because of this. If we had moved gradually, if we had checked the roads for mines many losses could have been avoided."

Sergey's complaints about lack of equipment have also emerged in phone conversations alleged to be between Russian soldiers and their families, intercepted and posted online by the Ukrainian security services.

At the beginning of April, Sergey was sent back over the border to a camp on the Russian side. Troops had been withdrawn from northern Ukraine and appeared to be regrouping for an assault in the east. Later that month he received an order to return to Ukraine - but told his commander that he was not prepared to go.

"He said it was my choice. They didn't even [try to] dissuade us, because we weren't the first," Sergey told the BBC. But, he had been sufficiently worried about his unit's reaction to his refusal that he decided to seek legal advice.

A lawyer told Sergey and two like-minded colleagues to return their arms and go back to their unit's headquarters - where they should file a letter explaining that they were "morally and psychologically exhausted" and could not continue fighting in Ukraine.

Sergey was told that returning to the unit was important because simply leaving could be interpreted as desertion, which can result in a two-year sentence in a disciplinary battalion.

Army commanders try to intimidate contract soldiers into staying with their units, according to Russian human rights lawyer Alexei Tabalov. But he stresses that Russian military law does include clauses which allow soldiers to refuse to fight if they don't want to.

Human rights activist Sergei Krivenko says he is not aware of any prosecutions of those refusing to return to the front.

That is not to say that prosecutions are not being attempted.

One commander in northern Russia requested a criminal case be brought against his subordinate who would not return to Ukraine, but a military prosecutor refused to proceed, according to documents seen by the BBC. Such an action would be "premature" without having assessed the harm to the military service he was involved in, the prosecutor said.

And there is no guarantee that more prosecutions might not emerge in the future.

Soldiers like Sergey - reluctant to return to the front line - are not unusual, according to Ruslan Leviev, the editor of Conflict Intelligence Team, a media project investigating the experiences of the Russian military in Ukraine through confidential interviews and open source material.

Leviev says his team estimates a sizeable minority of the Russian contract soldiers sent to Ukraine to fight in the initial invasion refused to go back again.

Independent Russian media have also been reporting hundreds of cases of soldiers refusing repeat deployments to Ukraine since the beginning of April.

Several lawyers and human rights activists the BBC spoke to said they had been regularly offering advice to men trying to avoid returning to Ukraine. Each of our interviewees had dealt with dozens of cases and believed those soldiers were also sharing advice with their colleagues.

Although Sergey does not want to return to the front line, he does want to complete his outstanding military service in Russia to avoid any unforeseen consequences. But that means that - while his letter of refusal to fight was accepted - there are no guarantees he won't be sent back to Ukraine during his service period.

"I can see that the war continues, it is not going away," he told the BBC. "In these months [of compulsory military service] that I have left, anything - including the worst - could happen."

The Russian soldiers refusing to fight in Ukraine - BBC News

[sabang]

A Ukrainian government official frequently cited as a source by western news media for her allegations of atrocities committed by Russian troops has been fired by the Ukrainian parliament, in part because of the unevidenced nature of those claims.
Newsweek reports:

A Ukrainian official has been relieved of her duties over her handling of reports detailing sexual assault allegations made against Russians in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, removed Lyudmila Denisova, the parliament's commissioner for human rights, from her post, according to Ukrainska Pravda. No new appointment has been made to fill the role.

The move to dismiss Denisova came after outrage about the wording used in public reports about alleged sexual assaults committed by Russians, as well as the alleged dissemination in those reports of unverified information. Despite accusations from Ukraine, the Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes or sexual assaults during the invasion.

As it happens, Newsweek is one of the many western outlets who have uncritically cited Denisova's unevidenced claims in their reporting of events in Ukraine. She was the "Ukraine official" in Newsweek's incendiary April headline "Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official," an article whose entire first half featured unevidenced claims by Denisova.

Denisova's name featured just the other day in my own critique of the western media's blind-faith regurgitation of Ukrainian government assertions when multiple western media outlets parroted her unevidenced claims about two Russians raping a one year-old baby to death.

Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail, The Sun, Metro, The Daily Mirror and Yahoo News all published reports on the same story, and the one and only source for all of them was a post made by Denisova on a Ukrainian government website which contained no evidence and concluded with a call for more weapons and sanctions against Russia from the western world.
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ @caitoz
Western Media Run Blatant Atrocity Propaganda For The Ukrainian Government"The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death."





Moon of Alabama has compiled other western news media reports which have been uncritically regurgitating claims made by Denisova and disguising those claims as news stories, like Business Insider's "Ukraine says it received more than 400 reports of sexual violence, including rape, by Russian soldiers within 2 weeks" and Time's "Ukrainians Are Speaking Up About Rape as a War Crime to Ensure the World Holds Russia Accountable."

This is not just brazen journalistic malpractice, this is actual atrocity propaganda. This latest development shows that even the Ukrainian government is more skeptical of Ukrainian government claims than the western mainstream press.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.co...19ubzUVAT0&s=r

[bsnub]

More utter shit from one of your favorite Russian shills. Beyond reprehensible.

[sabang]

Beyond reprehensible the kind of shit that is being thrown around by our western media. Thoroughly contemptible.

[bsnub]

Beyond reprehensible the kind of shit that is being thrown around by our western media.

The crimes are all documented, and the evidence is real. There are videos interviewing victims which I will not post here. The fact that shills like her and yourself are so willing to disregard the suffering of civilians and women and children to push your false narrative and slurp Putin's man goo is a testament of your true character.

Disgustingly pathetic.