Russia/Ukraine conflict

[SPadival]

Sketchy sources, smells of Russian propaganda to me.

Who’s the sketchy source?

Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the Vietnam My Lai massacre story AND the Iraq Abu Ghraib torture prison story? (IMHO, Hersh still has good sources at the highest levels in the CIA, US State Department & the US DoD)

or

the Azov Battalion commander interviewed on Ukrainian Army TV?

 

[Electroman]

Who’s the sketchy source?

Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the Vietnam My Lai massacre story AND the Iraq Abu Ghraib torture prison story? (IMHO, Hersh still has good sources at the highest levels in the CIA, US State Department & the US DoD)

or

the Azov Battalion commander interviewed on Ukrainian Army TV?

Wasn't he the same guy who exposed CIA operation on the Gazprom pipeline blast, which was blamed on the Russians?

 

[Crutonius]

Who’s the sketchy source?

Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the Vietnam My Lai massacre story AND the Iraq Abu Ghraib torture prison story? (IMHO, Hersh still has good sources at the highest levels in the CIA, US State Department & the US DoD)

or

the Azov Battalion commander interviewed on Ukrainian Army TV?

I don't have the link handy but I've seen an interview with this guy on the subject. Whatever good reporting he's done in the past he doesn't come off as very even tempered now.

 

[wdolson]

Who’s the sketchy source?

Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the Vietnam My Lai massacre story AND the Iraq Abu Ghraib torture prison story? (IMHO, Hersh still has good sources at the highest levels in the CIA, US State Department & the US DoD)

or

the Azov Battalion commander interviewed on Ukrainian Army TV?

His more recent reporting has been questionable
Seymour Hersh - Wikipedia

Fox News is also very dubious. They occasionally report things accurately, but they have a history of heavily slanting or trumpeting fake news stories. Some of their people repeat Kremlin talking points virtually verbatim. I would not believe anything they report without corroboration.

 

[BitJam]

Ben Hodges: Would Putin Use Nukes?

Hodges makes the distinction between strategic nukes and tactical nukes. We would have advanced warning of Russia preparing to use a nuke. Would the entire Russian chain of command go along with this escalation? Both the US and China have warned Putin not to use nuclear weapons. Hodges concludes:

There is no positive outcome for Russia if they use a nuclear weapon.​

 

[Unclepaul]

Seems like using Nuclear would be problematic as the prevaling winds would sweep atmospheric fallout into Russia.

 

[SwedishAdvocate]

Seems like using Nuclear would be problematic as the prevaling winds would sweep atmospheric fallout into Russia.

Haven't watched that video with Hodges yet.

It would also be 'problematic' because the US/NATO would not tolerate the use of Nuclear weapons, and they have communicated this VERY clearly to the Russian Dictator and his minions. If the Russian Dictator used a nuke in Ukraine, then the US/NATO would use conventional weapons to take out every Russian Dictator minion that they could find inside Ukraine. They would also use conventional weapons to sink every ship in the Russian Dictator's Black Sea fleet. So in other words: Game Over for the Russian Dictator.

See for example this video from 03:05:

 

[SwedishAdvocate]

This is some 12 days old, but I found this interview with former Russian MP Ilya Ponomarev interesting. I do think though that the interviewer interrupted too much – he should have just let the interview be like ~20-40 minutes longer instead.

And an(?) FYI: It does touch on a couple of topics that are out of bounds for this thread...

 

[SwedishAdvocate]

Seems like using Nuclear would be problematic as the prevaling winds would sweep atmospheric fallout into Russia.

Haven't watched that video with Hodges yet. [...

Correction:
I have watched that interview. That is a repost of a ~6 minute excerpt from the longer full interview that was posted on May 5.

 

[navguy12]

 

[madodel]

Seems like using Nuclear would be problematic as the prevaling winds would sweep atmospheric fallout into Russia.

That would only matter if Putin cared about the Russian people.

 

[heltok]

Scary how fast this became reality:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1804603834792042850

 

[SPadival]

His more recent reporting has been questionable
Seymour Hersh - Wikipedia

Which of the recent reporting is questionable and who is asking these “questions”?

If you are referring to his reporting on Syria, his reporting is backed by the highest level of US intelligence official possible, the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper

“Obama was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week [beginning 27 August 2013] from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who interrupted the President’s Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each morning from Clapper’s analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a “slam dunk.” He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a “slam dunk” in Iraq.”

This excerpt is from The Atlantic, hardly a pro-Russian propaganda outlet and is quoted in this article:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/red-lines-can-we-be-sure-that-assad-was-responsible/

 

[wdolson]

Which of the recent reporting is questionable and who is asking these “questions”?

If you are referring to his reporting on Syria, his reporting is backed by the highest level of US intelligence official possible, the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper



This excerpt is from The Atlantic, hardly a pro-Russian propaganda outlet and is quoted in this article:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/red-lines-can-we-be-sure-that-assad-was-responsible/

He claimed that the raid to kill Osama bin Laden was faked and the CIA blew up the Nordstream pipeline among other things.

 

[Electroman]

CIA blew up the Nordstream pipeline among other things.

Are you saying this is not true?

 

[Baumisch]

Scary how fast this became reality:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1804603834792042850

Agreed - but is it automated already or is this a remote operated FPV drone with a human on the deciding end?
(not saying it will stay that way)

 

[AudubonB]

Let me play this a different way and see how this rhymes with you:

If Cuba an independent sovereign nation decides they want to be a full blown communist country and moves towards a strong diplomatic and military alliance with Russia (or CPC) opening its borders to military bases, the western US frauds in the name of "democracy and freedom" and their minions gets no say whatsover about that. Simple as that.

I will tell you what US would do. In a blink of an eye, missiles will be raining down on Havana and ground troops will be entering Cuban shores, long before the ink is dry.

Replace Cuba-Russia against US, with Taiwan-US against China, or with Sri Lanka-China against India - you would get the same reaction from the closest big neighbor. The bigger neighbor is not going to be twiddling their thumbs as their immediate vicinity is being gobbled up by enemy forces through coercion and diplomacy.

As someone whose family lost many thousands of acres in Cuba after 1959, and has been in…and met with you-know-who, in Havana…(I still own that shirt, if not that handsome head of hair. Can’t remember what happened to that treasured white linen “plantation owners” suit I wore just to tweak him), I’ll claim standing here and say you truly don’t know what you’re talking about. Your telling “what the US would do” is utter malarkey.

 

[stopcrazypp]

Are you saying this is not true?

We still don't have concrete evidence who blew it up, but his story was based fully on anonymous sources in the intelligence community. He also claims Norway cooperated. Anonymous sources in the intelligence community was basically how the Iraq war that you criticized upthread started. Because his theory was based on 3 month remote control explosive devices, practically anyone could have planted it (there is no way to prove who did under this theory). There were many nation's ships, both commercial and military, that passed through that region in that time period.

So far the strongest evidence is the yacht Andromeda was at 2 of 3 explosion sites in the days before it occurred, and explosive residue was found that matched that of found on the pipeline. It was supposedly rented by a Ukrainian national that went back to Ukraine. However, there were also reports Andromeda "had been rented by a company owned by a named woman originally from Uzbekistan, who holds a Russian and a Ukrainian passport, who is registered to an address in Kerch on the Russia annexed peninsula Crimea and who in June 2023 was posting to social media from Krasnodar in Russia." That would suggest a Russian false flag operation (especially given according to naval experts the yacht would not be enough to support an operation to plant the explosives; they suggest it was just a decoy).
2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage - Wikipedia

 

[SPadival]

He claimed that the raid to kill Osama bin Laden was faked

He didn’t claim that at all. You have been fed some misinformation. His central claim from the wiki that you referenced:

Hersh reported that bin Laden had been captured and held as a prisoner of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since 2006, that his location was revealed to the CIA by a former Pakistani intelligence officer in 2010, that top Pakistani military officials knew about the operation, and that bin Laden had been assassinated.

.. corroborated by multiple “mainstream” media accounts from multiple sources.

Some details in Hersh's article were corroborated by Carlotta Gall of The New York Times, who reported that she had previously been told by a "high-level member" of the ISI that Pakistan had been hiding bin Laden and that an ISI brigadier had informed the CIA of his location;[89] NBC News also corroborated the claim of a retired ISI officer who had tipped off the CIA.[90] Pakistani news outlets alleged the tipster was Brigadier Usman Khalid, who died in 2014.[91]

It’s a little more believable than the official version because people on the ground liveblogged the whole thing and somehow Pakistan Army with its training academy just a few miles away from the scene didn’t arrive at the scene until it was all over?

The official account was that bin Laden had been located through interrogation of detainees and surveillance of his courier, that Pakistan was unaware of the operation, and that he was killed only when he did not surrender;

https://twitter.com/x/status/64912440353234944

 

[heltok]

Agreed - but is it automated already or is this a remote operated FPV drone with a human on the deciding end?
(not saying it will stay that way)

Imo very likely FPV with a human nearby. But soon there will be enough training data and enough embedded compute to do it autonomously.

Future warfare will be scary... It's all about mass production and cost effective solutions and small drones with explosives are very cost effective... I guess all that's needed to take out most of the population/infrastructure of a country is getting a few million drones there. So how to get them there without getting shot down easily? Submarines could be one way, but I wonder if SpaceX could just launch a few starships filled with a few million drones and a few thousand heat shields and parachutes and let them fall down over the major cities.

Spoiler: Math

To determine how many DJI drones could fit in a SpaceX Starship, we'll need the dimensions and volume of both the Starship and a DJI drone. Let's use the DJI Mavic 2 Pro as a representative drone, given its popularity and typical size.

Dimensions and Volume​

SpaceX Starship:

• Diameter: 9 meters
• Height: 50 meters
• Usable volume (payload bay): approximately 1,000 cubic meters

DJI Mavic 2 Pro:

• Dimensions (folded): 214 x 91 x 84 mm (0.214 x 0.091 x 0.084 meters)
• Volume (folded): 0.214 * 0.091 * 0.084 = 0.001637244 cubic meters

Calculation​

First, we need to convert the dimensions to the same units and then calculate how many DJI Mavic 2 Pro drones can fit into the payload bay of the Starship by volume.

Volume of Starship payload bay:

• Volume: 1,000 cubic meters

Volume of one DJI Mavic 2 Pro:

• Volume: 0.001637244 cubic meters

Number of DJI Mavic 2 Pro drones: Number of drones=Volume of StarshipVolume of one DJI Mavic 2 ProNumber of drones=Volume of one DJI Mavic 2 ProVolume of Starship Number of drones=1,000 cubic meters0.001637244 cubic metersNumber of drones=0.001637244 cubic meters1,000 cubic meters Number of drones≈610,800Number of drones≈610,800

So, approximately 610,800 DJI Mavic 2 Pro drones could fit into the payload bay of a SpaceX Starship, assuming perfect packing efficiency and no space lost to structural or other components.