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War threat in Ukraine

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noirua said:
www.politico.com

Opinion | Why the Donbass is the Key to Putin’s Gambit in Ukraine

The disputed border regions are important to Putin only as a means to get what he really wants.
www.politico.com www.politico.com
Click to expand...
Russia’s stated objectives in its invasion of Ukraine remain regime change in Kyiv and the truncation of the sovereignty of any Ukrainian state that survives the Russian attack despite Russian military setbacks and rhetoric hinting at a reduction in war aims following those defeats.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev stated on 05 July that the Russian military operation in Ukraine will continue until Russia achieves its goals of protecting civilians from “genocide,” “denazifying” and demilitarizing Ukraine, and obliging Ukraine to be permanently neutral between Russia and NATO—almost exactly restating the goals Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in his February 24 speech justifying the war.

https://ria.ru/20220705/spetsoperatsiya-1800246996.html

.... which is unacceptable to Ukrainians
 
Dona Ferentes said:
the Russian military operation in Ukraine will continue until Russia achieves its goals of protecting civilians from “genocide,” “denazifying” and demilitarizing Ukraine, and obliging Ukraine to be permanently neutral between Russia and NATO—
Click to expand...

These all sound like perfectly reasonable demands, the west should support these aims instead of arming Ukraine's Nazis and supporting Ukraine's homophobic laws that deny the human rights of gay people.
 
waterbottle said:
oilprice.com

Germany Considers Allowing Bailouts For Energy Firms | OilPrice.com

Germany is considering amendments that would allow the government to bail out struggling energy firms
oilprice.com oilprice.com

Looks like it's crunch time for the Germans.
How much pain will they accept just to keep a futile war going?
Click to expand...

Well Germany has already had two unsuccessful attempts at total European domination dragging the entire world thru absolute hell on earth and completely decimating their own population and economy in the process.

Past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour.
 
3 hound said:
Past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour.
Click to expand...

Mass killings under communist regimes

Mass killings under communist regimes occurred during the 20th century through a variety of means, including executions, famine, and deaths through forced labour, deportation, and imprisonment. Some of these events have been classified as genocides or crimes against humanity. The mass killings have been the subject of study by authors and academics and several have postulated potential causes of and factors associated with the occurrences of these killings. The most common states and events which are included are the Soviet Union and
Click to expand...
 
Some sources are quoting the Chinese leadership as becoming tired of supporting Russia in it's incompetence in Ukraine.

As I have said before on this thread, now would be an ideal time for China to seize those lands north of Mongolia and the Amur River up to the Kurils in Sakhalin Oblast and thus appear on the doorstep of Alaska via Siberia.

This may be a once in a lifetime opportunity for China to quickly and with little cost extend it's borders against a crippled foe and unsettle another.

Starting a war can have unintended consequences as Putin is now discovering.

gg
 
incompetence or bloodlust?
(just doin' what Uncle Joe and the Tsars did, and Gengghis did to them in the formative years of national identity?)
 

July 19 2022 - Vladimir Putin visited Iran for his second foreign trip since the war broke out in Ukraine. The Russian president is expected to discuss the Syrian war, western sanctions and arms trade with the leaders of Iran and Turkey. Palki Sharma decodes Putin's objectives in West Asia.
 
noirua said:

July 19 2022 - Vladimir Putin visited Iran for his second foreign trip since the war broke out in Ukraine. The Russian president is expected to discuss the Syrian war, western sanctions and arms trade with the leaders of Iran and Turkey. Palki Sharma decodes Putin's objectives in West Asia.
Click to expand...

Can't see the vid:
Video unavailable
The uploader has not made this video available in your country
Click to expand...

Guess you're on a VPN or using Tor?
 
Craton said:
Can't see the vid:


Guess you're on a VPN or using Tor?
Click to expand...
I'm just using the Opera Browser free VPN set on 'the Americas'. This VPN is a bit slow and I have to use it to sign in to ASF from the UK. After signing in I switch the VPN off as I'm using low battery power on a lap top in a conservation area at the moment.
The video works using browser Maxthon6 without VPN.
 
3 hound said:
I bet all the personal data collected by the free VPN is not given away for free.
Click to expand...
OK I take your point on safety. There are reports of IP addresses being leaked and servers for 'The Americas' sometimes indicating Vietnam.
However, it can be used for access only and the VPN turned off immediately afterwards. The Vietnam server occasionally comes up but this is a redirection server.

These are some alternatives I have used occasionally that are all free and indicate as safe. Each has its plus points on speed, simplicity etc.,
www.top10vpn.com

The Best Free VPN Apps of 2022 | Fast, Safe & 100% Free

Trustworthy free VPNs are hard to find. We have rigorously tested hundreds of free VPNs to recommend the best ones available.
www.top10vpn.com www.top10vpn.com
 
noirua said:
I'm just using the Opera Browser free VPN set on 'the Americas'. This VPN is a bit slow and I have to use it to sign in to ASF from the UK. After signing in I switch the VPN off as I'm using low battery power on a lap top in a conservation area at the moment.
The video works using browser Maxthon6 without VPN.
Click to expand...
All Good. I opened the link in Tor and could view it without issue.
 
How a former Uber exec is helping Ukraine push back against Russia
At the start of the war, the world waited for Russia to shut Ukraine’s internet down. But Silicon Valley-trained engineers and global digital networks are giving the smaller country an edge.
Gillian Tett
Jul 27, 2022

Andrey Liscovich was at home in downtown San Francisco when he saw a tweet from the American politician Marco Rubio: “The #Russian invasion of #Ukraine is now underway.”
He felt sick. The 37-year-old Ukrainian had spent most of the previous decade working far from his native country, including as chief executive officer of Uber Works, a subsidiary of the ride-booking group, before creating his own tech start-up. But Liscovich was born in Zaporizhzhia, on the border of Southeast Donbas region now suffering intense Russian bombardments,

“When I saw the news, and that [president Volodymyr] Zelensky was staying, I knew I had to go back to fight,” he recalls. So, he boarded a plane to Poland and made his way across Ukraine to Zaporizhzhia, planning to enlist. He wrote his will on the flight.
But when he arrived at the Zaporizhzhia conscription station, the recruiters told him that they did not want him to fire bullets but asked him instead to use the tech skills he had developed at Uber to support military logistics. Liscovich obeyed: he tapped into his global networks to source military uniforms and hardware, raise donations and assemble engineers to solve problems such as how to detect Russian drones.

“Western partners trusted me to distribute stuff, give them actionable feedback and then adapt the product to Ukrainian conditions,” he explains during a trip back to San Francisco to harness help from local software engineers. He still spends part of his time in the fragments of the Donbas region that remain under Ukrainian control so that he can observe his “customers” – Ukrainian soldiers – in action, in order to develop products they can use.
“I like to say this is the world’s first open-source war,” says Oleg Rogynsky, 35, another Ukrainian who runs a Silicon Valley start-up. He is also helping the Ukrainian cause and exchanging ideas with other computing engineers on social media sites, message groups such as Signal, and GitHub, the platform where coders exchange ideas.

This might seem a mere footnote in the relentless battle, as the Russians try to crush Ukrainian resistance. In the first two months of the war, Ukraine’s nimbler forces often outwitted and outfought the Russians. But more recently the Russian army has been making grinding progress via relentless artillery barrage and aerial bombardment, taking more and more territory in the Donbas. When Zelensky pleads for western aid, he asks for items such as long-range missile launchers, which the Ukrainian army desperately needs to repel Russia’s advance.
But the digital networks being organised by Liscovich and others are vitally important. They help to explain why Ukraine has been able to resist the Russian invasion for so long; they also show how this conflict could reshape other states’ approach to war.
The issue at stake is how combatants organise themselves. The Russian military still appears to operate in a hierarchical manner – even though it has potent cyber-hacking and misinformation capabilities. The Ukrainian army, by contrast, gives decentralised teams considerable autonomy to make decisions and innovate, and soldiers communicate directly with their peers in different units.

So, one way to frame the war between Russia and Ukraine is as a contest between lateral networks and vertical hierarchies. Just as tiny Silicon Valley start-ups can disrupt legacy companies by using agility, speed and bottom-up innovation, the Ukrainian army is trying to compensate for its inferior size with an entrepreneurial spirit and engineers steeped in coding, hacking and video games.
“What the Ukrainians have done with networks is striking, but that approach is completely antithetical to how someone like Putin operates,” Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and Russian dissident, tells me. Or as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt observes: “Russia is playing a hierarchical war – top-down generals are planning the usual stuff. But Ukraine is playing a networked war.
“The real strategic question is: what is the limit of a networked war? We are going to find out.”

To understand why lateral networks matter so deeply to the war in Ukraine, some history is needed. In the days of the USSR, Ukraine’s economy was centred on agriculture and heavy industry. However, the country always had plenty of engineering talent, since it had a big military-industrial complex. When the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s, many of these engineers embraced the fast-emerging internet. “Russia has always had a large internal market, so Russian engineers were usually working for Russian companies,” says Rogynsky. “But Ukraine’s market was very small, so Ukrainian engineers were always working for western companies, in English.”
Ukrainian universities rushed to serve this demand, creating a homegrown ecosystem of IT talent. And as the 21st century wore on, a new generation of techies emerged, often well travelled, exposed to western values and wealthy by Ukrainian standards. “The engineers usually stayed in Ukraine instead of leaving because the tax position was preferable – a $US50,000 ($71,752) salary in Ukraine was like $US300,000 ($430,512) in San Francisco,” says Rogynsky.

Fending off cyber hacks​

Then the government got involved. In the immediate years after independence, Kyiv was wary of the tech kids. But when Zelenskyy swept to power in 2019, he brought some of them into government. One was Mykhailo Fedorov, an entrepreneur who was put in charge of the digital ministry, at the age of 28. He previously ran a digital communications company that helped Zelensky’s campaign. He is passionate about product development and obsessed with what Silicon Valley calls “UX” – user experience research.
Fedorov recruited two dozen other homegrown tech experts and set about trying to digitise the Ukrainian government. They did this partly to make public services cheaper and more efficient. Fedorov tried, say, to conduct a census by counting SIM cards instead of doing door-to-door surveys, and unveiled a plan to hand out free mobile phones to all the country’s pensioners to enable them to use telemedicine. But the other reason he raced to embrace digitisation was to beat corruption, which has plagued post-Soviet Ukraine. “Corruption occurs when there are silos,” he says, speaking by phone from a government office in Kyiv. “We want to break them down.”

The most tangible result of this policy is a smartphone app called Diia — meaning “state and me” in Ukrainian — which was launched in February 2020. This app can perform payment services, store driving licences and passports and distribute welfare. Since the war began, Fedorov’s team have added a suite of new features that enable citizens to report property damaged by bombing and apply for compensation, keep crucial documents close to hand in refugee camps and log the movements of Russian troops. The latter feature worries some western observers since it blurs the line between civilians and combatants, but it has been widely used. And, more generally, some 18 million people — about 40 per cent of the population — are using the app, according to Fedorov.
When the Russians invaded, they tried to disable the digital links that Fedorov had built. Many in Ukraine feared they would succeed. “I hardly slept [before the invasion] because we had lots of cyberattacks on Diia and other portals,” Fedorov recalls. “The Russians knew how important the internet was for us and wanted to bring it down.”
The Russians launched cyberattacks and physical missiles at data servers and cell towers. The Ukrainians frantically fended off the cyber hacks, drawing on the experience they had gained from earlier attacks and aid from western allies. They were helped by the fact that Diia is a smartphone app, distributed across millions of phones, making it harder to break than a centralised database. “Everyone was impressed by how well the Ukrainians did [in defending themselves],” says Chris Krebs, former White House cybersecurity head.

To make the system more resilient, Fedorov’s team also raced — under fire — to remove data servers from Kyiv, and uploaded as much data as they could into the cloud to create back-ups. Then they looked for ways to keep the internet safe from missile strikes, which led them to Elon Musk.
Ukrainian engineers knew that Musk had developed so-called Starlink devices, mobile internet terminals that connect to a satellite. Starlinks only have a range of 90 metres from the satellite dish via cable or Wi-Fi. But the beauty of them is that they create a fragmented communications network: when they are spread across a region, they cannot be knocked out or jammed as easily as a single node, such as a cell tower.
The Ukrainians knew Musk wanted to display the powers of Starlink. So Fedorov sent a public tweet to him, appealing for help, and Ukrainian entrepreneurs privately used their contacts in venture capital to reinforce the plea. It worked: within hours, Musk dispatched several hundred Starlink terminals to Poland, and Ukraine’s digital ministry then ferried them into hospitals, government buildings, railways terminals and critical infrastructure.

Two old computers and a half-dead printer​

Roman Perimov was one Ukrainian engineer in this chain. Having studied nuclear engineering, he has worked over the past two decades as an IT project manager for large western enterprises. In early 2022, just before the war started, he was about to move to Philadelphia with his family to run a global program for a big international company. “I can’t name them,” he says, speaking to me by video during an overnight military shift. Western companies, he notes, are more media-shy than the Ukrainian army.
When Russia invaded in February, Perimov moved his family to Poland before he returned to Ukraine to enlist. He was dispatched to a motorised brigade, with orders to create a tech hub with a 30-strong team. “When I came to the unit, there was almost nothing to do with IT – just two old computers and a half-dead printer,” as well as unreliable internet. But Perimov’s team quickly assembled donations of computing hardware from engineering friends, and his wife drove across the Polish-Ukrainian border with some of the all-important Starlink terminals in her car.

Once online, Perimov’s military team started problem-solving, using the same type of techniques that Silicon Valley engineers might use in a hackathon: rapid-fire experiments, with a mix of online collaboration and competition, conducted on GitHub and Signal. “We pretty much work by ourselves, decide what to do and come up with solutions,” says Perimov.
One of the first problems the engineers “hacked” was how to protect the Starlink terminals from Russian attacks: they tested ways of hiding the terminals under camouflage blankets or piles of rubbish. They discussed how to ensure that the routers would not be detected by Russian planes or radar. Engineers brainstormed ways of creating protective cases for the terminals on a Facebook chatroom, and Rogynsky and Liscovich did procurement tests with West Coast manufacturers.
The engineers also hacked different communications systems, tested ways of flying drones and posted artillery targets for each other on shared coding platforms and specially designed apps. “It’s networked,” observes Schmidt. “[One unit] posts the open-source co-ordinates of a tank, say, and then another group unknown to the first goes [to the co-ordinates] and deals with the tank.”
Now Perimov is engaged on a new project: trying to incapacitate a small Russian drone called Orlan, which cannot easily be attacked with conventional arms. “The problem with Orlan drones is that they can’t usually be hit by standard rifles [if they fly higher than 500 metres]. Neither can they 100 per cent be hit by Stinger-like missiles because they are so small and do not radiate enough heat to be detected by infrared,” he explains. “If you google for solutions, you won’t find any – I have looked and looked. So, we are experimenting.” Rogynsky and others have now connected Perimov with a San Francisco company called Dedrone which, he tells me, is donating a system for testing.

‘I have a job to do’​

However, this iterative innovation process goes well beyond drones. As soon as western governments offer military hardware, the network of Ukrainian engineers hack it to make it easy for them to operate. “What is critically needed now is modern software-enabled weapons like Himars [long-range missiles],” Perimov explains. “If we get it, we have more than enough specialists who can tackle and adopt it fast.”
As evidence of this, he points out a post that recently appeared on the LinkedIn platform, advertising an engineer job for “a result-orientated and self-directed person” who wants to work with Himars. It claims to pay a salary of $US7600 and $US10,000 a month. “Maybe it is a joke,” chuckles Perimov. “But maybe not – we [engineers] are all used to using LinkedIn anyway.”
In late June, when Liscovich was in San Francisco, I asked him how he was feeling about the war, and the destruction unfolding around his childhood home.
“Working in Silicon Valley taught me that when you are engaged in a start-up you cannot let yourself have emotional swings or it hurts your business. So, I am doing the same now. I have a job to do.”
However, Liscovich knows the battle is getting tougher. He has created a so-called 501(c)(3) – an American tax-deductible venture – called Ukraine Defence Fund for donations. Rogynsky has done the same to raise money to send more Starlinks. “But donations are slowing down,” says Liscovich. And although the US government is sending badly needed shipments of military goods, the systems for dispersing this tend to be achingly slow. What makes matters worse is that Ukraine’s history of corruption means its government typically insists on extensive paperwork before releasing any goods. There are reports of Starlinks piling up in warehouses as a result.

The other big problems are physical fatigue, and scale. After months of gruelling battles, the Russians have made advances in the east of the country, and thus far it is not clear how much the Ukrainians can hold them back. As military experts point out, while networks are effective for resistance campaigns, it is less clear whether they can be used for attack. “I am not complacent about what is going on – I do not underestimate the Russians,” says Liscovich, who spent years studying in Russia; some of his former friends there “are probably working on the other side”.

However, what drives people such as Liscovich, Rogynsky, Perimov and countless others is a passionate belief that entrepreneurial digital innovation is the key to winning both the war and peace. “I am confident we will win the war. Israel is the model,” says Perimov.
Liscovich is now back in his hometown of Zaporizhzhia, looking for permanent offices for the Ukraine Defence Fund. The town is “functioning normally on the surface”, he says, but business activity is “severely depressed” – not least because the city is being hit by missiles. “You can get a room in a tower facing the central square of the city for just $US150 a month.” Like any entrepreneur, he is digging in for the long term. “This is the biggest start-up experiment of my life, of all our lives.”

— Financial Times
 
Garpal Gumnut said:
Some sources are quoting the Chinese leadership as becoming tired of supporting Russia in it's incompetence in Ukraine.

As I have said before on this thread, now would be an ideal time for China to seize those lands north of Mongolia and the Amur River up to the Kurils in Sakhalin Oblast and thus appear on the doorstep of Alaska via Siberia.

This may be a once in a lifetime opportunity for China to quickly and with little cost extend it's borders against a crippled foe and unsettle another.

Starting a war can have unintended consequences as Putin is now discovering.

gg
Click to expand...
They tried in 1969 along the border near Khabarovsk and failed to achieve anything. My wife's parents lived near there...
China has enough of its own developing civil unrest problems to deal with now. Failing real estate bubble and now bank concerns.
 
Among the main reasons for the Hellfire's repeated use is its precision.
When a missile is launched from a drone, a weapons operator - sometimes sitting in an air-conditioned control room as far away as the continental US - sees a live video stream of the target, which the drone's camera sensors feed back via satellite.
Using a set of "targeting brackets" on the screen, the camera operator is then able to "lock up" the target and point a laser at it. Once the missile is fired, it follows the path of that laser until striking the target.

1659533278810.png
 

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