The Invasion of Ukraine

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EACLucifer
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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Sun Mar 05, 2023 11:19 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Sun Mar 05, 2023 4:53 am
cut for brevity
https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/ ... -rcna73426

Seems to be a useful summary of some of the trade offs

How many pilots can Ukraine afford to be away from the battlefield while training?

What will Ukraine not get if instead the US allocates a large part of its aid to providing F-16s?
Indeed. A few thoughts on this.

Ukraine are requesting jets. They know how many pilots they have, how many they can spare. In addition, if the lead time's eighteen months, that's the sort of time it takes to take a proficient non-military pilot and turn them into a combat pilot, so the option of training more pilots not necessarily from scratch, but from outside the pool of existing combat jet pilots should be considered.

As for funding, if jet funding comes from the existing pool of presidential drawdown, as it would for jets currently in US military inventory, then it would conflict with other needs, and it is quite likely those other needs are more urgent. However, longer term acquisition includes the possibility of funding via other funding streams, as is (probably) happening with Abrams tanks. Additionally, jets are a symbolic and emotive issue that might persuade congress to release funding specifically.

The issues, as I see it, are what are the jets going to do, and how are they going to survive doing it? There's three main threats to Ukrainian jets. Firstly, there's Russia's long range SAM systems. These are dangerous and capable, and similar systems in Ukrainian hands have kept the areas held by Ukraine largely free of Russian jets. Flying high near the front line is not safe without an extremely competent and comitted SEAD campaign. Can we enable Ukraine to do that much SEAD? It's rather more than just supplying some anti-radiation missiles. That threat can be largely avoided by flying very low, below the radar horizon of such systems. That brings the second threat into play - MANPADS. These are extremely common, and dangerous to jets. They can be avoided by flying high - but that brings the long range SAMs back into play, or by staying behing the lines, as Ukraines helicopters and Su-25s currently do. The third thread is MiG-31s operaring the very long range R-37 air-to-air missile. These can be evaded sometimes, but evading them means abandoning the current mission, and sometimes they do reach their targets.

That leaves Ukraine's jets having to fly low and behind their own lines - though they can fly a bit higher when further behind the lines as the further they are from ground based radars, the higher the radar horizon is. What can they usefully do there? Well, several things, depending a great deal on what munitions are provided for use with the jets. The first is to counter cruise missiles well away from the frontlines. Cruise missiles fly very low, meaning ground based systems, regardless of the quality of their missiles, have very short ranges against them. Jets with decent look-down/shoot-down radars - as all US combat jets have - radically improve the chances of shooting down incoming cruise missiles. Secondly, jets can stay low and launch weapons across the lines from their own side. This requires appropriate weapons, though. Bombs aren't going to do much good. Glide bombs, like the ER-JDAM and the SDB, might stand a chance, especially if released from an upward climb. The real key though is to provide weapons that can be fired over the horizon without line of sight to the target. The best option for frontline support is the Brimstone, which can hunt for targets on its own, or have targets indicated to it by laser designator, and the designator doesn't necessarily have to be on the launching aircraft. At present, though, US aircraft don't carry Brimstone. The other option is to use longer range standoff missiles. There's been some talk of sending Storm Shadow, which would be relevant to Typhoon or Tornado provision, but not to US jets. The USA has an equivalent munition, the AGM-158 Joint Air To Surface Standoff Munition (JASSM). This is a lot like the Storm Shadow, in that it is an accurate low-radar cross section cruise missile with a warhead weighing roughly half a tonne. JASSM's range is a bit shorter than Storm Shadow, 370km vs 560, but 370km still covers all of occupied Ukraine when launched from safe launching locations well behind the lines. However, if the USA is too timid to provide ATACMS, will they provide the more modern and capable JASSM?

Then there's the MiG-31 with R-37 threat. There's three ways to reduce this threat, but the USA is very unlikely to support two of them. The one they might support is sending long range air to air missiles to shoot back at the MiG-31s to force them to abandon their attacks or just directly shoot them down. The USA's long range air-to-air missile is the AIM-120 AMRAAM. AIM-120C variants have a range of about 100km, which is rather inferior to the R-37, while the AIM-120D has a range somewhere in the region of 160km, but the D-variant AMRAAM is quite new, and America's selfish a..eh.le policy when it comes to exporting high end equipment may come into play. The best western air-to-air missile to supply would be the MBDA Meteor, which starts to rival the R-37 in range, but that isn't integrated onto any American jet, and would instead need to operate from Typhoons, Gripens or Rafales.

The second way to deal with the R-37 threat would be to send F-35s. There's so many reasons why the F-35B would be the best plane for Ukraine, however, it's very unlikely it will be sent. The F-35 (and F-22, B2, F-117 and various planes in development) have a low enough radar cross section to stop the MiG-31s from being able to lock on and launch their R-37s.

The third approach would be to use long range missiles or suicide drones to destroy the MiG-31s on the ground, or at least force them to operate from bases far further from Ukraine's borders. The recent attack on a Beriev A-50 demonstrates that Russian planes are vulnerable on the ground in Belarus, but the US is unreasonably paranoid about cross border attacks, so if this is going to happen, Ukraine will have to figure it out on their own.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by jimbob » Wed Mar 08, 2023 1:39 pm

And a bad decision by the European General Court.

https://www.politico.eu/article/wagner- ... sanctions/
The General Court ruled that merely being a family member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ally Prigozhin wasn’t enough of a reason to be put on a sanctions list and annulled Violetta Prigozhina’s listing.
Other links between her and mercenary boss Prigozhin that the Council cited when sanctioning her included her ownership of Concord Management and Consulting LLC, founded by Prigozhin — but the court found that she had no longer been the owner since 2017.

The court case only rules on her first listing in February 2022, however. Her sanctions were renewed six months later, a decision that would have to be challenged in a separate court case. This means that she effectively remains banned from travel into the EU and her assets remain frozen.

Given that Prigozhin used her gas bill to get around UK money laundering regulations
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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by TopBadger » Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:10 pm

Power plant in a precarious state... can someone explain to me why a nuclear power plant, which generates power, needs external supply to run the cooling systems?
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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by shpalman » Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:19 pm

TopBadger wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:10 pm
Power plant in a precarious state... can someone explain to me why a nuclear power plant, which generates power, needs external supply to run the cooling systems?
Didn't they once try to see if the residual power during a shutdown would be enough to keep the cooling water going? Anyone remember how that went?
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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by TopBadger » Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:32 pm

Is the plant not running then? I get it needs external power to cover shutdown periods, but I thought it was still generating.
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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by shpalman » Thu Mar 09, 2023 1:00 pm

Zaporizhzhia not like Chernobyl - nuclear engineering expert
Prof Fitzpatrick said the Zaporizhzhia plant had been completely offline since September and activity at the site is limited to maintaining "a cold shutdown" which involves keeping the reactors and storage facilities safe.
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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:49 pm

Taking a few days mostly away from the internet and news for personal reasons, but not completely out of the loop. Looks like a Russian jet has deliberately caused the loss of a rather expensive US drone over international waters, including dangerous manoeuvres around it and fuel dumping around it.

If I were a US commander - I'm not, I hasten to mention - I'd be sorely tempted to fly a few F-22s with transponders off so next time a Sukhoi tries that sh.t it gets the "AMRAAM out of f.cking nowhere" treatment.

ETA: the actual response should be either pretty damn severe, not perhaps at the level I mention above, but then again Turkey downed a Russian jet and Russia weren't able to respond a few years back, or the response should be to downplay the incident. It's a deliberate escalation, designed to cause panic. Personally I think a response is better than not, as Putin has always responded to perceived weakness, but playing into his hands by talking up fears and doing nothing practical is worse than doing nothing at all. In all seriousness, US jets flying CAP over the Black Sea or responding to the presence of Russian missile carrying vessels would send a strong signal without actually firing on any Russian crewed assets, and if they had a crack at the missiles Russia's firing at Ukrainian citizens while up there, all the better.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by Imrael » Tue Mar 14, 2023 8:11 pm

Couple of tweets indicating Poland (and Slovakia) about to give 20+ Mig-29's to Ukraine.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Tue Mar 14, 2023 11:56 pm

Imrael wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 8:11 pm
Couple of tweets indicating Poland (and Slovakia) about to give 20+ Mig-29's to Ukraine.
Nothing solid at the moment, but talk of France training Ukrainian pilots on Mirage 2000s to enable their eventual transfer, but really, really not got a solid source here so don't take this as gospel.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by jimbob » Thu Mar 16, 2023 2:14 pm

https://time.com/6263308/war-on-fakes-m ... ropaganda/

Of all of Russia’s online propaganda campaigns in the early days of the war in Ukraine, none was more successful than the “War on Fakes.”

Set up on the day Russian soldiers invaded last February, the popular Telegram channel, which claims to offer “objective” and “unbiased” fact-checking of news about the war, ballooned to half a million followers in just one week, and soon was averaging 20 million views a day. For the past year, its barrage of “verified” allegations that support pro-Kremlin narratives, defend the Russian military’s actions, and deflect responsibility for atrocities against civilians have been widely cited by Russian government accounts and Kremlin boosters. But the person behind the popular pro-Kremlin channel has been unknown.
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by Imrael » Fri Mar 17, 2023 11:18 am

Slovak government confirming transfer of 13 Mig-29's to Ukraine (Tweet from Slovak Pm's office via Elliot Higgins, so I think its real)

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by WFJ » Fri Mar 17, 2023 7:27 pm

It would be a good time for the US, Turkey, Israel and other countries that claim to value international law to ratify the Rome Statute.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by dyqik » Fri Mar 17, 2023 8:54 pm

WFJ wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 7:27 pm
It would be a good time for the US, Turkey, Israel and other countries that claim to value international law to ratify the Rome Statute.
It won't happen in the US, with a Republican House.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by bolo » Fri Mar 17, 2023 10:02 pm

dyqik wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 8:54 pm
WFJ wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 7:27 pm
It would be a good time for the US, Turkey, Israel and other countries that claim to value international law to ratify the Rome Statute.
It won't happen in the US, with a Republican House.
Treaties only have to pass the Senate, but they have to get a 2/3 vote, so it won't happen anyway.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Sat Mar 18, 2023 3:10 am

Imrael wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 11:18 am
Slovak government confirming transfer of 13 Mig-29's to Ukraine (Tweet from Slovak Pm's office via Elliot Higgins, so I think its real)
Poland also transferring a few at last, and apparently more to follow when ready. Some of these have apparently been upgraded. I've not got the time to chase up the details at the moment, but I saw during discussion of the difficulty of attaching JDAMs to Ukraine's MiG-29s that modifications had apparently been done on the Polish ones but similar modifications would take too long, which might mean the Polish Mig-29s have NATO-style bomb rails. Also mentions of glass cockpits re: the Slovakian ones. A bit of practise on these would further speed the transition of Ukraine's fighter pilots to modern western jets, which are all glass cockpit and HOTAS - it's also worth noting when people talk about western jets being more sophisticated that doesn't necessarily mean harder to operate, some features, like glass cockpits and Hands On Throttle And Stick controls make them easier, at least for the pilots.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Sat Mar 18, 2023 4:13 am

Regarding the Su-27 "Flanker and MQ-9 "Reaper" incident over the Black Sea, now there is footage out, Geoconfirmed have been able to evaluate the respective claims.

The drone was over international waters, and the land it was nearest to was Crimea, which is Ukrainian anyway. The USA's claim that the jet wasn't trying to create a collision but was reckless and unskilled appears to be true. The Sukhoi was dumping fuel, so it was trying to damage or destroy the drone in a way that didn't involve shooting at it.

Russia accused the USA of attacking one of their planes with a drone (specifically dropped a mention of them being a nuclear power blah blah yawn etc), which, aside from being flagrant b.llsh.t as the evidence shows, gives a clue as to their motive - creating fear of an escalation that in reality they simply cannot afford. There is a pretty serious concern they may try it on with crewed aircraft. They've behaved like dangerous tw.ts in the vicinity of such before, and likewise with surface ships. My own response, where I in charge, would be to use jets to escort surveillance assets, as it is vital that surveillance continues; it is necessary to warn Ukrainians of Russian missile attacks, and to assist the Ukrainians more generally.

It's also worth having a plan in place as to what to do in terms of communications, media responses etc if one of the idiotic bellends manages to achieve what the idiotic bellend Wang Wei managed in 2001, also in an Su-27, specifically the destruction of the aggressive idiots own plane.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by TopBadger » Mon Mar 20, 2023 11:02 am

Honestly I'm not convinced at the distinction between the methods employed here to down the drone. Not sure why dumping fuel is considered "less hostile" than shooting at it. The intent is hostile and the means are irrelevant.

I would expect the the US have since made the Russian's aware that hostile actions towards it's aircraft in international airspace will be answered in kind.
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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Mon Mar 20, 2023 11:30 am

TopBadger wrote:
Mon Mar 20, 2023 11:02 am
Honestly I'm not convinced at the distinction between the methods employed here to down the drone. Not sure why dumping fuel is considered "less hostile" than shooting at it. The intent is hostile and the means are irrelevant.

I would expect the the US have since made the Russian's aware that hostile actions towards it's aircraft in international airspace will be answered in kind.
I think the goal is to try and get some plausible deniability. They tried it on with a Bayraktar TB-2, as well. That's a Ukrainian drone, but I suspect they weren't confident of that.

And the big concern is that they'll try and drive important recon assets out of the Black Sea with this behaviour, so if they do try it on, they should indeed be schwacked.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Mon Mar 20, 2023 11:32 am

Imrael wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 8:11 pm
Couple of tweets indicating Poland (and Slovakia) about to give 20+ Mig-29's to Ukraine.
There's reporting that North Macedonia's sent Su-25s. This relates to transfers of planes that were I think basically sent as spares or repair parts kits last summer, but North Macedonia's confirmed it now. That suggests people are more relaxed about such transfers. Talk of North Macedonia sending Mi-24 helicopter gunships too.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Tue Mar 21, 2023 3:33 am

Per The Times, Ukraine's pilots would take less than six months to train on F-16s.

Also, existing runways would be fine, which also answers that one for Typhoons, with their much better short field performance than F-16s. This is hardly a surprise - F-16s flew from Ukrainian airfields in an exercise back in the day and coped fine.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by jimbob » Tue Mar 21, 2023 10:39 am

EACLucifer wrote:
Sat Mar 18, 2023 4:13 am
Regarding the Su-27 "Flanker and MQ-9 "Reaper" incident over the Black Sea, now there is footage out, Geoconfirmed have been able to evaluate the respective claims.

The drone was over international waters, and the land it was nearest to was Crimea, which is Ukrainian anyway. The USA's claim that the jet wasn't trying to create a collision but was reckless and unskilled appears to be true. The Sukhoi was dumping fuel, so it was trying to damage or destroy the drone in a way that didn't involve shooting at it.

Russia accused the USA of attacking one of their planes with a drone (specifically dropped a mention of them being a nuclear power blah blah yawn etc), which, aside from being flagrant b.llsh.t as the evidence shows, gives a clue as to their motive - creating fear of an escalation that in reality they simply cannot afford. There is a pretty serious concern they may try it on with crewed aircraft. They've behaved like dangerous tw.ts in the vicinity of such before, and likewise with surface ships. My own response, where I in charge, would be to use jets to escort surveillance assets, as it is vital that surveillance continues; it is necessary to warn Ukrainians of Russian missile attacks, and to assist the Ukrainians more generally.

It's also worth having a plan in place as to what to do in terms of communications, media responses etc if one of the idiotic bellends manages to achieve what the idiotic bellend Wang Wei managed in 2001, also in an Su-27, specifically the destruction of the aggressive idiots own plane.
The "sharp manouvers" was quite a special claim.

It's almost as though the useful idiots simply count up the number of claims and decide that half of both sides are lies. So that "uses up" one of the Russian lies.
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Mar 23, 2023 9:39 am

Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton is on an 11 country tour to boost ammunition production, and is impressed with a plant in Slovakia.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politi ... -slovakia/

The old analogy of the supertanker comes to mind. It takes a long time to change EU policy, but when it does the results can be significant and long-lasting. Hopefully that will be the case here.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by EACLucifer » Fri Mar 24, 2023 1:27 pm

I remember when people were confident MiG-29s couldn't be flown directly to Ukraine and this meant they couldn't be given as military aid.

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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by jimbob » Fri Mar 24, 2023 5:03 pm

Interesting story in the Daily Beast

https://www.thedailybeast.com/witnesses ... n-republic
A fallout with China as a result of the Chimbolo killings is something Putin is desperate to avoid. While Russia flounders in a military and economic quagmire over the war in Ukraine, China has emerged as Russia’s biggest diplomatic, financial, and technological supporter.

The allegation that Wagner is involved in the attack is likely to put a strain on the relationship between Russia and China, which has continued to provide “non-lethal” aid to Moscow throughout the war, stopping short of delivering weapons—so far.
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Re: The Invasion of Ukraine

Post by Woodchopper » Sat Mar 25, 2023 5:52 pm

Russia has struck a deal with neighbouring Belarus to station tactical nuclear weapons on its territory, Tass news agency quoted President Vladimir Putin as saying on Saturday.

Such a move would not violate nuclear nonproliferation agreements, Putin said, adding that the United States had stationed nuclear weapons on the territory of European allies.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has long raised the issue of stationing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which borders Poland, Putin said.

"We agreed with Lukashenko that we would place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus without violating the nonproliferation regime," Tass quoted Putin as saying.

Russia will have completed the construction of a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by July 1, Putin said, adding that Russia would not actually be transferring control of the arms to Minsk.

Russia has already stationed 10 aircraft in Belarus capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons, he said.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/pu ... 023-03-25/

Probably in part a consequence of Russia having moved its conventional forces to Ukraine. It’ll now need to rely more on nuclear weapons.

I’ll wait for the legal experts to weigh in on the implications for the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

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