I wonder why there are all these tank wrecks ahead of us
i watched the video on mute, because i wanted to avoid feelings of glee at the benny hill soundtrack.
A RU radio recon A-50 plane was blown up in a diversion less than 15km from minsk. gotta admire the precision of attacking with no belarusian collateral casualties. at this point, lukashenko is doing his best to stay away and not to help russia, almost like an ally to ukraine.
gotta say, having to do so much fpv of loitering munitions in a conflict would give me nightmares for years.
an update on the A-50 destruction, it may have been a uav attack by belarusian partisans. not AFU special ops.
Onion.
this is just some dude playing armchair napoleon, right?
he’s former commander of US forces in europe, but probably just doing punditry for money now.
meanwhile more uav’s discovered at multiple locations in russia, including outside Moscow, airspace over StPetersburg. and a strike of an airfield in Yeysk, which has been used for logistics to crimea (on account of the kerch bridge being out of heavy service).
another report of leopards being around Bakhmut.
preparations for spring offensive have indeed begun.
Some Twitter stuff saying the fancy airplane didn’t actually get droned in Belarus based on satellite images? But there were significant emergency response at time of reported strike? Seems like lot of odd stuff going on these days
There was a tweet with Maxar satellite images that showed some black stains on the airplane what they couldn’t tell if they were caused by a fire or something else.
the rumor i’m currently noticing from a couple of telegram sources, it may have been two improvised kamikaze drones, so basically the equivalent of a couple of grenades. it’s not going to destroy a plane the size of a 737. the damage is described as two-fold, the radar antenna is damaged (probably damage or fire to the conduit of wires), and damage to the front of the fuselage that makes flying impossible (probably a breach around the cockpit). this is fixable, but for the sake of argument, i think it delays certain air missions around the north of ukraine for a week or two.
fwiw, russia has 6 other A-50s, but they are needed for signal intelligence in other parts of the country.
So is all this recent Moldova/Transnistria stuff strongly related to that massive weapon depot there or that kinda just a side story to the main issues?
for putin, escalations are a cheap tactic that is costly for the west. he thinks that having a pro-west govt of moldova deploy riot police is bad optics, and video of street agitators isn’t going to make a dent in the coverage. there are dozens instances of this every year. remember the koran burning in sweden? it’s the same thing.
otoh, the big weapons cache so close to ukraine is like a gun in a chekhov play. it’s going to go off one way or another. in fact it’s likely a target for afu much like chernobaevka was last summer. there could be secondary detonations for days. i would think they have plans for such a strike if russia tries to tap those shells/missiles. but until they do, the himars is better spent elsewhere.
ukraine isn’t going to attack transnistria until moldova asks them to intervene. which might mean that ukraine is able to capture the arsenal. maybe that’s also a consideration.
“repeating earlier mistakes” is a top-notch euphemism.
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