War

Mater Real

Chill Clowns, War

Hargraves: I want you to think about who has the most macho army in the world—or at least the image of it. Russia, right? They pride themselves on this macho bullshit. But they invaded Ukraine, and guess what? Russia is losing 5-6 soldiers for every one Ukrainian… ego doesn’t mean anything.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) January 16, 2025 at 12:15 PM

Effective intelligence, control, coordination and communication are the factors that matter. And having enough materiel of all sorts, too, of course. But even with all the materiel in the world, without those first four things I mentioned you’re gonna do nothing but lose.

As the Russians are discovering.

Done Dirty

Chill Evil, Prediction, War

We’ve really done Ukraine dirty. And by “we,” I mean the US, NATO and the EU. We allowed them to absorb all the Russian aggression and revanchism while providing just barely enough support to survive.

And we’ll pay for that. More specifically, the Baltics, Poland and Germany will. At least they’ll get it the worst.

Wait and see.

Dore

Chill War, WTF

Ian Welsh: This is what winning looks like! Total victory for my most-adored Putin!

Everyone else: What the actual goddamn fuck?

(Warning: people definitely do die in the above video. Which somehow fucktard Welsh will also see as a victory.)

Scholzing

Chill Clowns, War, WTF

I guess that clown is fine with fighting Russia in Germany in 3-5 years. Well, he’s gonna get his wish. It’s interesting how when given a clear and obvious choice, Germany and much of the rest of Europe of their own free will just shoots themselves in the foot repeatedly. I guess they are really into self-harm.

Engage

Chill Clowns, War, WTF

It amazes me too. That should have been the “Time to quit fucking around” moment and it just was not. NATO should’ve full engaged then and evicted North Korea and Russia from Ukraine.

And we did nothing. Nothing at all.

Crime Against

Chill War

There’s a lot of people who scream “war crimes” about combat footage who don’t seem to actually realize that people get killed in combat.

Yes, it’s horrifying. But it is what happens. It’s a crime against how the world should be, but it is not a war crime.

Old as ’62

Chill War, WTF

Huh. Those T-62s are old. Shows the Russians really are near to running out of anything useful. Those tanks were last produced by Russia in 1975 — 50 years ago now.

Heliflopter

Chill War

Nice. Ukrainian expertise and experience will be much needed in the likely war with China.

Airfare Refunded

Chill Evil, War

Probably a Russian Pantsir-S1 AA system with the 57E6 missile did this. Most likely, it was tuned for a smaller target so it exploded far away enough from the plane that it didn’t immediately bring it down, but damaged it significantly with shrapnel1. If it’d been the missiles from the S-300/S-400s the plane would’ve broken apart mid-air due to the far larger warhead even if the detonation was distant.

We really need to evict Russia from Ukraine and prevent WWIII. It’s not too late. Soon it will be, but it’s not now.

There’s no way to know exactly how damaged the avionics systems and flight controls were, but not sure why the pilot put it down like this as they obviously had some control.

Why was the landing gear extended? I think the procedure if you’re not sure you’re going to make a runway is only try to put the gear down at the last moment as if you have to land on a non-runway it’s more survivable. It might’ve just run out of fuel (tanks pierced by shrapnel) is why the nose-down like that at the end.

Still, though, it got hit by a damn missile. Hard to criticize without knowing more details.

  1. The missile fired was tuned to take down a drone, not an airliner.