I’m seeing the below report on twitter. Sounds like a good hit.
"Russian side reporting that “saboteurs” have blown up 2 planes and a helicopter at the ultra secure Chalovsky Airfield near Moscow.
Considered to be the most secure airfield in Russia, housing the Russian government “doomsday planes” that should act as the center of government in the event of nuclear war…"
Plus, the only way that Russia is going to sit down at the table in the first place will be once they’re so beaten down that they can’t fight any more. While they’ll doubtless start building back up immediately, it’ll take them time. And that’s time that Ukraine can also spend building back up.
Rendering 3 Russian brigades combat ineffective seems noteworthy. Any good news will help Ukrainian morale. The personal sacrifices they’re making is sobering
Link Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 18, 2023 | Institute for the Study of War
Yes. And they also have considerable trouble seeing the modern LED runway lights versus the old-fashioned incandescent ones because the LEDs simply don’t deliver enough energy in the frequency band(s) the FLIR can “see” to be discerned from the background of the runway itself.
Once a blob of metal the size of a dinner plate is buried 6-12" down and has sat there a couple days, the amount by which it heats & cools differently than the surrounding dirt may well be negligible versus the natural variation in the dirt itself, much less the limits of how small a difference is detectable by the sensor. When you crank the gain up enough, simple noise may overwhelms the signal. Or simple false alarms from random dirt will overwhelm the signal of mines in the dirt.
There is no natural guarantee that the actual signal a god-sensor could detect is distinguishable from random variation in the soil itself. The signal might stand out enough to be detectable, or it might not. We can’t say a priori. And even if it is detectable in principle, there’s going to be size and range and obscuration limits on what can actually be detected by any hunk of real hardware and real software.
I think we will see a 1980ies deja-vu “now that we won in Afghanistan - we will go back to Russia to celebrate” …
thats the only end that I can visualize … but that might take a lot of more bleeding (of everything) from the russians
Yes, that’s the thing. There probably will never be “Peace Talks”, or whatever you want to call them. Ukraine can defeat Russia in Ukraine, but they will never have the power to invade Russia, which is what it would take to bring Russia to the peace talks.
How this most likely ends is Russia just giving up, and retreating back to its own borders, and counting on the nuclear deterrent to keep Ukraine at bay.
At that point, sure, Ukraine could keep up its drone and missile attacks within Russia itself, but how many years of that would Ukraine’s supporters tolerate?
Once Russia’s within their own borders, couldn’t NATO let Ukraine in? Or does the language of the NATO treaty require a formal peace treaty?
Agree in general. But it’s important to distinguish between Russia the country, and Russia the current government of that country.
Ukraine cannot subdue the Russian country. Nor the current Russian government.
The current Russian government will never give up the fighting in UKR as long as they can muster a troop of a dozen Boy Scouts to go over there and piss in some unlucky village’s water well.
Some future Russian government may be able and willing to sign a peace deal to the effect: “Our predecessors screwed up. We’re going home and we won’t bother you again. And we mean it this time. Any claims against our country will be ignored; take that up with the prior management”.
IMO far more likely, as several folks have suggested upthread, is something more resembling the Korean armistice. The war is frozen, not ended. The central question of who did which bad thing and who should suffer as a consequence is simply tabled as untouchably difficult. Paint a line in the dirt, move all your forces to your side of the line and stand there. UFN.
The IMO most likely and worse outcome is akin to any of the other “frozen conflicts” around the Russian perimeter. Which amount to a de facto unwritten armistice at the high level, while criminality, terrorism, and covert ops flourish in the shadows with something between official support and funding down through official indifference all the way to official disapproval albeit with ineffective countermeasures against it.
What it won’t be is simple and clean like in 1944 and 1945. Those are very much anomalies in the long historical record of human organized conflict. No matter hw much we might think of them as archetypes, they aren’t; they were / are aberrations.
Zelenskiy’s speech at the UN was quite impressive. He challenged the UN to act. I’m not sure if anything will change.
Why hasn’t Russia been kicked out of the UN?
Wouldn’t they have veto power over any such resolution?
I believe that the UN was originally set up to protect the nations that were at the time powerful enough to demand it and also powerful enough that they needed to join if the setup was expected to work at all. It’s possible my memory of this history isn’t accurate.
Because it can’t be. It holds one of the five permanent seats and can veto pretty much anything. This is the fatal flaw in the United Nations, but it was the only way the superpowers at the time would agree to it when it was formed. Equality for all, but double-extra equality for us. The U.S. is as guilty as the rest in that bit of cynical realpolitik.
I don’t think Russia has made a formal declaration of war, so maybe one isn’t necessary? They can declare the special military operation complete (look! no Nazis in the Ukrainian government!) and Ukraine can let it go (since they aren’t likely to get any sort of reparations any way).
Kicking Russia out of the UN would make no sense, what is the UN for if not for talking with the other countries?
You cannot “kick” a nuclear armed, veto empowered, founding country of the UN and have the UN continue to exist in any meaningful way.
Furthermore, if attacking a sovereign country is grounds for being kicked out of the UN there would be very few members, at least in the Security Council.
< cough > Gulf War II < cough >
United States United Kingdom China Russia France
Sino-vietnamese war, Ukraine war, Suez Crisis…
United States United Kingdom China Russia France
Moderating:
And we have wandered off-topic for the Breaking News Thread. Please drop it or take it to a new thread. One on rebuilding the UN from scratch might be fun.
Germany announced a new package of military aid to 
Ukraine, which included:
— 30,000 155-mm shells;
— 3,800 155-mm DM125 smoke shells;
— 105,000 120-mm shells;
— 480 M26 (AT2) missiles; BIG NEWS, CLUSTER WARHEAD ON EXTENDED RANGE MLRS, has the improved fuzing.
— 200 MRAPs
— Demining systems;
— 2A1 Dachs; breaching vehicle.
— Bergepanzer 2 or 3; armored recovery vehicle based on Leopard 1 chassis.
— 50 Unmanned surface vessels;
— Winter clothes;
— Electricity and heat generators;
— Spare parts packages for already delivered systems
— Materials for disposal of explosive objects.
Spain announced a new package of military aid to Ukraine, which will include:
APC, Armored personnel carriers, M113s
RHIB (rigid-hulled inflatable boat)
anti-aircraft missile launchers, HAWK
AA missiles, HAWK
Military trucks
Ambulances
Yes, but that’s not the purpose of a FLIR system. If you can see the lights then you’re good to go. Finding the runway in fog is where the system really stands out.
Mines are certainly buried above the frost line so the ground they exist in is going to be subject to radiant energy. On top of that they will be buried in disturbed ground cover which means the dirt will be packed loosely and thus have a different heat absorption rate compared to the surrounding area. They might be able to find the mines based on the changes in the density of the dirt.
This isn’t a function of sending up a camera and hoping it finds something. It’s a matter of tweaking the digital signal it produces until the desired results are attained.
If anyone has ever watched a technician operate a medical ultrasound machine it makes more sense. While it’s a different technology the process is similar. They will constantly tweak the settings until they get the image they’re after.
I would imagine they will tether a drone over a field for a 24 hr period until they establish the best conditions of heat absorption and computer settings.
And I don’t think the idea is to find all the mines. I think they’re probably interested in the type of mines clustered in a field so they know what kind of equipment to send in to detonate them.