Russia invades Ukraine

[burn_this_city]

Canadian volunteer and his Spanish counterpart were killed in Chasiv Yar by Russian artillery. They were involved with evacuating civilians from frontline areas.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1700886417142956542

[Texas]

Worth the 6 minute watch

https://twitter.com/user/status/1701531957509882117

[Firebot]

MASSIVE attack on the fleet stationed at drydock at Sevastopol, with what appears to be missiles. ATACMS or Ukraine's newly claimed missile they recently announced?

https://twitter.com/user/status/1701818716533522866

Either way, massive destruction and the toll seems to be extreme, Russians were caught totally offguard.

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by Firebot

MASSIVE attack on the fleet stationed at drydock at Sevastopol, with what appears to be missiles. ATACMS or Ukraine's newly claimed missile they recently announced?

https://twitter.com/user/status/1701818716533522866

Either way, massive destruction and the toll seems to be extreme, Russians were caught totally offguard.

It appears that a Ropucha-class amphibious vessel and a Kilo-class submarine are among the ships in drydock on fire. This will be 4 major ships of the 30 Russian Black Sea fleet knocked out by Ukraine, which has no major navy assets at the moment aside from patrol boats.

[burn_this_city]

Elon said we'd be nuked and in WW3 if this happened.

[nik-]

This is just the Russians doing a Special Submarine Conversion Operation. Eventually their entire navy will be submarines.

[bizaro86]

Does Turkey still have the Black Sea closed to naval vessels? IE the Russians can't bring in more ships from elsewhere?

[burn_this_city]

Russia potentially lost a Kilo class submarine that was in the same dry dock as the landing ship. Obligatory:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1701917747825803297

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

Does Turkey still have the Black Sea closed to naval vessels? IE the Russians can't bring in more ships from elsewhere?

Yeah it is still closed. Though Russia can still get some ships from their Caspian fleet to the Black Sea just using rivers.

[Reggie28]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

Elon said we'd be nuked and in WW3 if this happened.

All of my company Starlinks were down for a few hours last night, some speculation it was a worldwide outage.

[Firebot]

So apparently the attack was done by Storm Shadows which can only be used on Su-24 which Ukraine is has in sparse numbers. The Storm Shadow range means that Ukraine jet fighters would have done the attack over the Black Sea. That Russia could not defend Sevastopol from a handful of cruise missiles shows the reality of the dire situation and severe lack of air defense or incompetence.

[opendoor]

Isn't the Storm Shadow range something like 500km? About 1/3rd of Ukraine is within that distance of Sevastapol, so I don't think it would have needed to have been launched from the Black Sea. Or are the ones they received shorter-range?

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by Reggie28

All of my company Starlinks were down for a few hours last night, some speculation it was a worldwide outage.

Maybe Musk is planning a rebrand of Starlink to Tsarlink.

Total coincidence that the service went down right before the attack, and outage ended right after it was over.

[chemgear]

Elon is basically an early warning system for Putin now?

[FlameOn]

Well the guy basically got a request from the Ukrainians last time for emergency Starlink access in Crimea before a planned naval drone attack on Sevastopol and shut it down, killing nav for all the drones, and got away with it. This time Ukrainians probably wised up, requested emergency access, then used drones/missiles that weren't Starlink dependent, someone told Musk that attack was still happening and the drones weren't dropping out of the sea/sky and Musk pulled the worldwide plug. Someone leaked that info to Musk for this attack and he fully admitted turning it off last year

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4...ssia-military/

[burn_this_city]

Submarine loss seems to be confirmed.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1702007588626309128

[driveway]

That's a very modern submarine. The Rostov-on-Don, built 2011-14 is one of 10 active Project 636.3 Kilo-Class submarines in the Russian fleet. Project 636.3 is the late 2010s improvement of the Kilo class which had originally been designed in the 1970s and launched in the 80s and 90s.

The Kilo-class is a Diesel-electric attack submarine, similar to the Victoria-class submarines that Canada operates. The Victorias in Canada's fleet are equivalent to the pre-project 636.3 Kilo subs.

The Kalibir missiles the tweet referenced are cruise-missiles roughly equivalent to a Tomahawk, though the sub-launched version of the missile has less explosive (200 vs 450kg) and a range of 500-600 km.

[FlameOn]

Musk is now blaming US sanctions, and President Biden for not ordering him to turn on service, for turning off Starlink service in Crimea. This is of course total BS in a long list of changing stories on why he did it. If it were sanctions, all of Russia would apply to the Starlink blackout, including Königsberg.

If he had just said something like allowing Starlink service would have subjected arms export restrictions and COCOM export controls, that would have been understandable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordi...xport_Controls

U.S. sanctions on Russia meant that Starlink satellite connection near Crimea could not be turned on for a Ukrainian military operation without permission from the U.S. president, Elon Musk said at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Sept. 12.

"The sanctions include Crimea, and we are not allowed to turn on the connection to a sanctioned country without explicit government approval," the billionaire owner of SpaceX, which operates Starlink satellites, told the audience.

The Ukrainian government asked for the connection to be turned on "in the middle of the night," for what Musk said was "a Pearl Harbor type attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol."

Ukraine was "asking us to take part in a major act of war," he said, adding that "if I had received a presidential directive to turn it on, I would have done so," he added.

The businessman was responding to recent reports that he had secretly instructed his engineers to turn off Starlink satellite communications near Crimea in 2022 to prevent a Ukrainian submarine drone attack against Russian military ships.

As the drones loaded with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they "lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly," Walter Isaacson wrote in a newly published biography titled "Elon Musk."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKqJ5-kkUGk

[Firebot]

Originally Posted by opendoor

Isn't the Storm Shadow range something like 500km? About 1/3rd of Ukraine is within that distance of Sevastapol, so I don't think it would have needed to have been launched from the Black Sea. Or are the ones they received shorter-range?

You can't use Storm Shadows easily over land where they will be easily intercepted in areas where Russia has high levels of detection and anti-air systems. They are not invincible, and have been intercepted. Most of the Storm Shadow damage occurred early when Ukraine first received them, as Russia had not planned for the longer range missiles (similar to how HIMARS changed the game for an amount of time).

Ukraine recently took over oil platforms a couple of days ago, which were used by Russia as early detection systems against missiles and drones, preventing Ukraine from effective attacks on Crimea. It's speculated (Ukraine will not divulge directions of attack) the attack came from Snake Island and platforms direction now under Ukrainian control instead of behind the land based front lines. Let's not forget that most of Russia's Black Sea fleet is currently hiding at Sevastopol or relocated to other ports like Novorossiysk for fear of getting sunk.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/21513#...%20Black%20Sea.

The ministry underscored that these platforms not only “control valuable hydrocarbon resources” but, like Snake Island, also “serve as forward deployment bases, helipads, and potential sites for long-range missile systems.”

This picture provide a visual on why this matters when looking at Sevastopol (UA claims to have taken 4 of them).



It's no shock that as soon as the oil platforms were in Ukrainian control, that Crimean attacks expanded significantly and to great effect, using weaponry that does not depend on Starlink to function.

Not sure if I remember the video posted, but there was an insane drone footage of a Su-30 jet engaging patrol boats at sea, that's from this operation. Ukraine actually damaged the Su-30 using MANPADS and gunfire, yes literally gunfire. There's a POV video from the boat as well as it engaged the jet.

During the operation, a skirmish occurred between Ukrainian special forces on boats and a Russian Su-30 fighter jet.

There's reports of new fresh attacks on Sevastopol, and yesterday a S-400 anti air defense system got blown up after being baited by drones, only to be blown up by cruise missiles after it depleted its weaponry.

[FlameOn]

Responding to Musk blaming the US gov't and the WH for turning off Starlink in Crimea at the SpaceX All-In Summit, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall sharply criticizes Musk's "unilateral decision". This is a pretty strong rebuke to his BS from the government. I'm guessing there will be additional funding for SpaceX competitors or a reduction in defense contract spending heading to SpaceX if this keeps up.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/14/air-...-china-ai.html