It’s not really war news, but this does show Russia’s long reach. I’m surprised the family wasn’t set up with new identities.
Link Maksim Kuzminov, Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine, killed in Spain | Russia-Ukraine war News | Al Jazeera
Guardian feed
That’s why I started this thread; so people can comment on the wider situation, including such things as this.
Spain one of the lowest contributors to NATO by percentage of GDP. I think only Belgium is lower.
One of the ways Putin can hurt NATO is by doing something small to a NATO country and hoping to undermine the alliance when the rest of NATO rejects or responds weakly to the triggering of article 5. He will want to wait for a Trump presidency but why not lay the groundwork now?
I think Putin, as batcrap crazy as he is, would think long and hard before doing anything overt that could cause NATO to become involved in this conflict. Surely he knows that’s a long walk off a short pier, militarily speaking.
Another A-50 downed, probably (but hopefully not) in a friendly fire incident. Russia doesn’t have many of them, and can’t build new ones. Hopefully this enables Ukraine to sneak some things by Russia.
The “you’ve lost another submarine” gif from Hunt for Red October is getting a workout over on Twitter.
As near as I can tell, information on the A-50 loss is entirely from Russian channels at the moment, and the reports seem to be that the plane was hit either over the Sea of Azov or over Krasnodar Kai, which is the region of Russia to the southeast of the Sea of Azov. At least one of the pro-Ukrainian Twitter accounts reporting on the Russian reports has said that the specific location is beyond Patriot range from the front, which has not been the case either with the previous A-50 loss or with the recent rash of Su-34 and Su-35 shootdowns. This makes the Russian friendly fire claim more plausible (the Russians are saying that it was an AA missile launched from Mariupol.)
However, it remains pretty suspicious, coming as it does on the heels of those recent losses, and on the same general section of the front. Also, how the fuck does AA accidentally fire on their own bloody AWACS? So, it seems at least a possibility that the Ukrainians have some new capability that is yet to be identified. F-16’s with long range air-to-air missiles already in service without any announcement? New Patriot variant they’re testing out without the US mentioning that they’ve sent them out? The Ghost of Kyiv in a Mig-29 equipped with a Romulan cloaking device?
Any which way, the Russians have single digit numbers of A-50’s, and losing two of them is going to significantly dent their ability to maintain constant AWACS coverage of the entire front.
Or the darn thing crashed on its own and Russia is claiming it was shot down to avoid admitting they had an accident. Normally that’d be contrary to what you’d expect propaganda to be like: better to claim accident than to say the enemy downed one of our planes. But we’re not in a normal world any more.
Heck, it may be that the local command is the one claiming shoot-down entirely to cover up for their inability to maintain the things in safe flyable condition. The A-50s themselves have got to be pretty darn old and decrepit by now even if they haven’t been doing a lot of flying.
There’s video purporting to be of it shooting off a bunch of flares and then getting hit by a missile, so I think the crash caused by mechanical malfunction shouldn’t be the leading hypothesis.
Makes you wonder if Ukraine has hacked into the Russian air defense networks, or has a lot more spies and sympathizers burrowed into the ranks or what.
The latter seems easier, but considering what the Russians will do to you after you fire that missile, getting volunteers for that job seems rough. Which leads me in the direction of hacking. Or simply screaming levels of total incompetence in the Russian air defense troops. Who again are going to be facing a very unpleasant end once the authorities figure out whodunnit.
That seems to be a likely supposition given how this whole war has played out.
aint those A-50ies (awacs type) planes that stay airborne “24/7” (note the air-quotes)
I assume they have a tiered approach (donno 3x8hr shifts or so) … so can anybody guess how maintainance works in that context?
what would a war-time-long-run “ON duty / OFF duty” look like?
They may or may not plan to actually keep one airborne 24/7.
In USAF practice how the rotation works depends greatly on how far the orbit is from the home base. But for a situation where the orbit is close to base, running 3 shifts of 8 hours on station is typical. With maybe an hour’s flying to & from, plus ground time. So the crew & jet flies a 10 or 11 hour mission, and has a 12 or 13 hour workday. Yo can still run that with just 3 jets working per day, but you need to have 4 or 5 jets dedicated to that orbit so you can deal with both unplanned failures and routine plannable maintenance.
If the orbit is a long way from the base, which often happens to USAF, you may need 5 airplanes flying 6 sorties to run a single 24/7 orbit. Launch, fly 5 hours to the orbit, orbit for 4 hours, fly 5 hours back. Meanwhile your replacement has taken off before you even get there to start orbiting. And at that rate you probably need 6 crews who only work every other day, or who roll shifts so they work say, mission 1 on Monday, mission 3 on Tuesday, mission 5 on Wed, then mission 1 again on Fri after 18 luxurious hours off on Thu to reset.
Now you’ll also need tanker support, which may mean 2 tanker flights per AWACS flight for the short flights, and 3 tankers for the long ones.
It gets real resource intensive real quick.
What have the Russians actually been doing with their few A-50s? I have no clue.
Which is fine if you’re the USAF. Russian Air Force? I’m thinking not so much.
Yeah, exactly. The Russians simply can’t do the job 24/7/365, and certainly not in multiple locations. At least not now.
The same discussion is going on right now at the tail of the breaking news thread.
caused by explosion of missile warhead
I’ve since seen another video taken from another location that matches the first but from another angle, so we can be confident it was taken out with a missile. What sort of missile, fired by what from where? That’s a lot less clear.
Possibilities:
One Ukrainian news outlet reports sources in the Ukrainian air force claiming it was a S200 anti-aircraft missiles. These are an old model, relatively slow and unmaneuverable, but long enough range to strike the A-50 from Ukrainian territory, and it’s not like the A-50 can engage in violent evasive maneuvers itself. Ukraine definitely has some - they’ve used a few that have been modified for surface-to-surface use.
Russian S-300 or S-400 from somewhere along the north coast of the Sea of Azov. But why the heck would even poorly trained AA crew target a big, slow-moving target away off to the south over Russia proper?
Patriot has more range than the US has previously admitted.
Unannounced F-16s seem exceedingly unlikely, because even with the longest-ranged AIM-120 variant they’d have to have been deep in Russian-held territory to carry out the strike.
Unannounced drone with air-to-air missiles also seems unlikely, though less so since the loss wouldn’t matter like losing a secret F-16 would. But something that can penetrate that deep, acquire a target, and take it out seems somewhat unlikely.
Thing is, the Russians have also lost 5 fighter jets in the last week. Either Russian AA has gotten suddenly and dramatically more fratricidal, or the Ukrainians have gotten lucky with Patriots against the Su-34s and Su-35s and the A-50 is an anomaly, or the Ukrainians have recently obtained a heretofore unknown anti-air capability. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s been a shitty, shitty week for the Russian air force.
Somehow Russia allegedly gained possession of and leaked secret discussions by German military officers about missiles they’d like to send to Ukraine. This would make me very paranoid about discussing the Ukraine war with anyone in a top-level job-as is no doubt the intent. Who can you trust?
yep … I have the feelings that the russians are way more of the mindset: Let the crew fly a few hours longer instead of throwing a lot of hard- and orgware at the problem.
(of course there are limits to that (fuel capacity, etc…)) … but it would not surprise me if its the humans that have to “flex” to those realities rather than to have a sustainable programme going…
The four officers apparently used Webex 
for this conference mentioning secret data about the capabilities of the Taurus system, with one of them participating from a hotel in Singapore, possibly dialing in via a regular telephone line 
- circumstantial evidence in the recording indicates that the tap was at his end of the conference.
That’s not only a major security breach; as they discussed the hypothetical of hitting the Kertsch bridge (definitely a hypothetical as German government policy is not to give Taurus to Ukraine) Russia is milking this for all it’s worth in the propaganda angle of “see, NATO countries are in fact planning to attack Russia”.
Heads should roll.