Ukraine - Russia Conflict
- Thread starter randomradio
- Start date
4/ The soldier fired 15 shots at them, hitting and wounding four people in the crowd. The police and FSB soon tracked him down and arrested the soldier and three of his friends, though the latter were not charged with any offences.
5/ The soldier was also charged with being absent without leave due to having twice failed to show up for duty without good reason. He has been sentenced by the court to 13 years in a 'strict regime' (maximum security) penal colony.
6/ The case illustrates two related problems for Russia. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been a steady leakage of weapons and ammunition across the border (which is still enforced by Russia, despite its purported annexations).
7/ In the war's first year, the number of crimes in Russia involving firearms and ammunition increased by 32%. Soldiers have smuggled weapons across the border for personal use or to sell to others, potentially to criminal gangs. Firearms are strictly controlled in Russia.
8/ At the same time, there has been a reported 900% increase in murders committed by soldiers – up from 13 in 2022 to 113 in 2023. The UK's Ministry of Defence has attributed this to "enduring war-related chronic poor mental health issues" and the use of convicts as soldiers.
9/ Soldiers returning home have been convicted of more than 2,500 crimes since 2022. Black-market weapons are contributing to a record crime wave. The Russian government has forecast that 152,000 serious crimes may be committed in 2024, the highest figure in over 15 years. /end
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Funny how the amount paid for 2023 is almost double of that of 2022. As for 2024, the year's not over yet...
Oh, and don't forget that the majority of orc corpses never get to a cemetery as they're left to rot on the ground, or there's no remains at all because the cause of death was "soviet engineering reacts to explosion" so they were vaporized entirely.
Oh, and don't forget that the majority of orc corpses never get to a cemetery as they're left to rot on the ground, or there's no remains at all because the cause of death was "soviet engineering reacts to explosion" so they were vaporized entirely.
The key is at the top. Blue line is 2019, green is 2020, gray is 2021, yellow is 2022, red is 2023, and purple is 2024. Chart represents the rolling average daily loading of the russian railways, by millions of tons. 2020 and the first half of 2021 are outliers due to covid-19, so we have to look at 2019 and the latter half of 2021 for the normal pre-war baseline. 2022 and 2023 are much lower than 2019, but they're at about the same level; and then 2024 is much, much lower. So much so that the highest point of 2024 is below the lowest point of 2022.
Things keep working just fine until they don't. And when they start to stop working, you get a cascading effect. Less locomotives means the remaining ones have more work to do, so they wear out faster, which leads to even less locomotives, and so on.
Meanwhile, all the money that's not going into poo-tin's palaces is going into buying chinese bikes to equip russia's yolo cavalry. There's no money to fix broken stuff in russia. So you should expect the curve for 2025 to be even lower than the curve for 2024, and the one for 2026 will be even worse.
And trains are the backbone of russian logistics. They don't have reliable highways for truck logistics. The country is just too large and too sparsely inhabited for road-based logistics to be viable; only railroads are cost-effective enough in these conditions, but russian railways is a poorly-managed monopoly that the russian regime is extracting money from, so there's no funds for maintenance of the infrastructure and rolling stock. This is another self-inflicted wound.
Ukraine's "Baba Yaga" Drones Now Appear Capable Of Launching Guided Munitions
Making Ukraine's large multi-rotor industrial drones capable of launching guided munitions at targets behind enemy lines would certainly be a major capability upgrade.
www.twz.com