Crime Against

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

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

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

Airfare Refunded

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.

Korea See Ya

It’s been pretty clear for a while that Russia is starting to run out of equipment. That’s the whole reason they’d use unarmed and unarmored civilian vehicles in assaults, even with as careless with human life as Russia tends to be.

A Wash

Insanity. There are dozens of thousands of Russians dying a month, and for what? So they can rape women and steal washing machines? The ones who survive, that is.

Disdain

To be somewhat fair, they were likely under fire. That said, the Russians do this sort of shit all the time. They do not care about the other soldiers’ lives they serve with in a way that’s hard for me to understand, having served as a paratrooper for five years. We just did not, would never have, treated each other that way.

There is something very diseased in that culture.