One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour.
And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more.
This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.
Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task.
I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared. The poor two IT guys over there has no idea how to recover and the official help was pityful.
I also helped with a ransomware attack on a large company. The effort people had to do to remember why something was that way, or just remember whatever was colossal. Sure a lot of things were "documented" and "tested" but reality hit hard.
BLKNSLVR · 6h ago
I had to rebuild a significant percentage of my homelab after my house was raided by the police and they took about $10k-worth of my gear; desktop, laptop, NAS, hard drives.
However, because in a previous life I'd been responsible for backups and involved in disaster recovery planning I was already kind of prepared with:
- a mirrored on site copy of backups (that they either didn't find or chose to leave behind)
- older hardware that had once been performing the duties of the existing seized gear (I'm a bit of a hoarder, I like repurposing or keeping for just such an occasion)
- multiple off site backups
- pretty good documentation of my setup
I was back up and running within a day or two and had lost maybe a couple of days of data. And it's a home lab, so nothing super important anyway, but a (not really) nice resilience test.
It also gave me the experience to work out a few structural changes to further limit the impact of an event that takes out a bunch of processing and storage.
(After 8 months they told me to pick up all my gear, they found nothing, but thanks for traumatising my kids)
bapak · 6h ago
Why did they raid you?
BLKNSLVR · 5h ago
Short version:
Possibly the worst thing to be raided for: distribution of CSAM.
Apparently based purely on the 'evidence' of my IP address being on some list - that's the only explanation I ever got.
Funny thing is, they did so little background research they didn't even know to expect kids in the house when they raided at 6:30am.
It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.
The long version I haven't written yet and probably never will. I don't want to dwell on it, I want to get on with my life and have an even worse drama to deal with at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533637
I know I'm alive, that's for sure. I'm trying to make lemonade by the goddamn bucket load.
P.S. I have written prior HN comments referring to the raid if you care enough to go back that far.
biofox · 3h ago
That's absolutely horrifying! Glad to hear you've managed to move past it, as it would have absolutely broken me.
My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.
tastyfreeze · 5h ago
Where you actually charged and prosecuted for anything or did they just steal your gear without due process?
BLKNSLVR · 4h ago
They had a warrant for the raid. Or at least they showed me a piece of paper, but my mind was so thrown that I literally couldn't read it (I've never experienced such a thing before or since - I literally couldn't make out letters on the page, such was my state of shock at the time).
I wasn't arrested or charged, they found nothing of what they were looking for on the multi terabytes of disks they seized. No further action other than the raid.
FpUser · 4h ago
Did they eventually return your gear?
npongratz · 3h ago
> (After 8 months they told me to pick up all my gear, they found nothing, but thanks for traumatising my kids)
In the USA? Where you can be sued if someone slips on your sidewalk? Can't you sue the gvmt?
SJC_Hacker · 4h ago
> In the USA? Where you can be sued if someone slips on your sidewalk? Can't you sue the gvmt?
Sure you can sue anybody for anything. Whether your case actually gets heard or not is another consideration. And even if it gets heard, the judge can simply dismiss it for a variety of reasons before proceeding to trial.
Also, state and the federal governments have sovereign immunity and qualified immunity. Basically the government has to allow itself to be sued.
True this doesn't apply to counties or cities, however there is still a much higher bar for tort even for local police. Generally if they are operatikng within the law, like executing a valid search warrant, the standard is much higher than it would be for an average citizen.
BLKNSLVR · 4h ago
Australia.
We looked into anything that could be done to minimise the chances of such a thing happening to innocent parties, but the only option was to make a complaint about an individual officer. There's no (easy, obvious) way to question the system they use to determine "validity" of raids or due diligence prior to requesting a warrant, or evidence required to justify a warrant.
The whole thing just felt to me like it was blindly rubber stamped all the way through because "protect the children". Pity my daughter was a child and absorbs such experiences... My son was also a child, but he's less affected by such things.
behringer · 3h ago
It's good for children in the US to learn early that they can't trust the police.
codr7 · 2h ago
Same goes for almost any other country I've been to.
But the US does seem to be one of the worst places from what I see online.
rdtsc · 2h ago
In which country can the children trust the police?
toast0 · 5h ago
You can sue the government, but the grounds for winning are much narrower.
Meerly suffering harm from government action is not sufficient. Having property impounded as part of an investigation, pursuant to a warrant, is likely not actionable, unless there was malice involved. Using slim evidence isn't really actionable.
Muromec · 5h ago
Why would you be able to sue the government for conducting a search authorized by a judge? It's expected that result of some searches is "Oopsie doopsie nothing found".
TimorousBestie · 5h ago
It’s even worse than that, in the US police have broad latitude to destroy property, kill pets, seize any cash or assets (theoretically related to the crime, but very easy to abuse) and etc. while executing a search, with little to no recourse.
dylan604 · 4h ago
Not just kill pets, but kill people. Even if they raided the wrong home.
TimorousBestie · 3h ago
Yeah, it’s true.
ulrikrasmussen · 2h ago
I think it's fair to expect that the authorities must have a very good probable cause to perform a search of your home, and that any search that turned out to be unwarranted results in a big compensation and a public announcement stating that the specific police department and judge violated the right to privacy.
whycome · 1h ago
I'm guessing search should still happen in a way to limit damage (physical, psychological) to other parties (in this case, the kids present).
colechristensen · 4h ago
You could sue if they made some major mistakes or were fabricating evidence or some other significant malpractice. It's a pretty high bar.
behringer · 3h ago
You can but chances are you'll still lose.
sleepyguy · 4h ago
The government has endless resources; you would go bankrupt unless a law firm saw a huge payout in taking your case. The system is rigged in favor of the government. They could have burned down his house and the neighbor's house, and not been responsible. Land of the free, God Bless America......
DFHippie · 3h ago
Also, there is almost no deterrent effect. The people who authorized or perpetrated the abuse are not punished if you sue and win a settlement. They don't even have to hire and pay the lawyers. The payment comes out everyone's taxes, perhaps with interest if the government has to pay by issuing debt.
When the police abuse their power, it's the community that pays their salaries that feels the pain.
mulmen · 2h ago
This was in Australia but your point stands.
grokgrok · 3h ago
If your downspout is draining onto the sidewalk and turning it into an invisible ice rink...
hu3 · 8h ago
This is why documenting is so crucial. Even on a software architecture level.
A few months from now, I'd love to have written down decisions for my current project:
- Why did I decided to use Kysely over Drizzle, Knex, Prisma, TypeORM or other ORM/SQL tool?
- How am I going to do migrations?
- Why am I using one of Deno/Bun over sticking to nodejs?
- Why did I structure the project as a directory per feature over controllers/models/services directories?
- Why did I fork this library and what are the steps to keep this thing updated? Do I plan to upstream my changes? Is there a GitHub issue or PR about it?
- Why am I hosting in one of AWS/GCP/Azure? Why not lambda functions? Why docker?
- Why did I pick this specific distribution of kubernetes over the other also lightweight alternatives?
- Why did I even start this project and what do I aim to accomplish with it?
So I created a # Decisions section in README.md
This way I don't keep doubting my own decisions and wasting time opening 20 documentation tabs to compare solutions yet again.
simonw · 6h ago
I use GitHub Issues for this. It works so well - any time I make a decision I drop a comment on the relevant issue (often formatted as "Decision: ..."). Now they are archived, searchable, accessible via API and easy to navigate to from my source code because my commits all reference the issue number that relates to the change.
nchmy · 4h ago
Til Github deletes your account randomly! Happened to a friend of mine recently, and he didn't get any explanation or recourse.
Of course, you have a relatively high profile, so could probably avoid it/get it reversed.
Every project I work on has a technical-decisions.org file. Also a daily-notes.org file with every failed experiment, test, install command, etc. The top level headings are dates.
Technical decisions used to be in the daily-notes.org file, but keeping in a separate file makes it more accessible to LLMs. I actually started that practice before LLMs were in common use, I struggle to remember why.
sjs382 · 6h ago
> I struggle to remember why.
Should that "why" be in technical-decisions.org or daily-notes.org?
dotancohen · 5h ago
It should have been the first entry in some project's technical-decisions.org file!
qntmfred · 6h ago
this is why in 2023 i started livestreaming whenever I work at my PC. I also take these kinds of daily and project notes, but it's a bit tedious and can take you out of the flow. so I just let youtube capture everything I'm doing and if I need to go back and remind myself of something (or ask an LLM a question about my livestream history, in the not too distant future) it's all right there.
forinti · 3h ago
You also have to document alternative worlflows for your business while you don't get everything back to normal.
Lots of things can keep going with pen and paper or some cloud software.
At the very least, you have to communicate with your clients.
MrGilbert · 7h ago
We just recently started using ADRs (Architectural Decision Records). They are deliberately stored (in markdown) in the same repository as the source code for our SaaS business lives. If we can recover the source, chances are high that we can also recover the "why's". If we cannot do that, we are screwed anyways.
goopthink · 7h ago
This. I encouraged my team to use a templated (standardized) ADR for any big decisions that don’t have an obvious answer or complete consensus and it had reduced the second guessing and relitigation of decisions to nearly zero. It also gave is a good snapshot of where we were when we made that call so historic decisions weren’t disparaged.
Mossy9 · 6h ago
Could you share the template you're using?
No comments yet
bluGill · 4h ago
In the 1990s mainframes got so stable and redundant that some were not rebooted in over a decade - they could even upgrade the kernel without rebooting. Then one company had a power failure andthe backup generators failed. When the power came back it was months before they figured out everything it was doing and then how to start that service where the guy who started it originally quit years ago.
most companies started rebooting the mainframe every six months to ensure they could restart it.
stavros · 52m ago
That's why I delete all my company's data stores every quarter too!
BrandoElFollito · 4h ago
I was very supportive of the infrastructure IT team when they moved their datacenter. I also had popcorn when watching the switch being figuratively flipped on.
It went surprisingly well despite having stayed 15 years in the old DC without rebooting. They were super scared of exactly the case you described but except for some minor issues (and a lot of cussing) it was OK.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
The data center where I work self-tests this stuff unintentionally a couple of times a year. The typical case: UPS maintenance, room is put on bypass, load drops when switching back.
WhyNotHugo · 9h ago
Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all).
Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.
9dev · 8h ago
Actually I think this is hard to properly implement. If you're a small shop, really setting up backups with redundancies, writing the documentation, and testing disaster recovery, that's so much more work than people anticipate, and it has implications on all areas of the business, not just IT. So usually it's hard to justify to management why you would put in all that work and slow down operations—which leads to everyone postponing it.
Either that bites you sooner or later, or you're lucky and grow; suddenly, you're a larger organisation, and there are way too many moving parts to start from scratch. So you do a half-hearted attempt of creating a backup strategy held together by duct-tape and hope, that kinda-sorta should work in the worst case, write some LLM-assisted documentation that nobody ever reads, and carry on. You're understaffed and overworked anyway, people are engaging in shadow IT, your actual responsibilities demand attention, so that's the best you can do.
And then you've grown even bigger, you're a reputable company now, and then the consultants and auditors and customers with certification requirements come in. So that's when you actually have to put in the work, and it's going to be a long, gruesome, exhausting, and expensive project. Given, of course, that nobody fucks up in the mean time.
prmph · 3h ago
Indeed. Setting up infrastructure properly and documenting it properly is even more complex than coding, to me.
I can go back to code I wrote months or years ago, and assuming I architectured and documented it idiomatically, I takes me only a bit of time to start being able to reason about it effectively.
With infrastructure is it a whole different story. Within weeks of not touching it (which happens if it just works) I start to have trouble retaining a good mental model of it. if I have to dig into it, I'll have to spend a lot of time getting re-acquainted with how it all fits together again.
macintux · 1h ago
As much as Cloudformation and Terraform annoy me (thankfully I’ve never been burdened with k8s) there is something magical about having your infrastructure captured in code.
andrelaszlo · 9h ago
Just the other day one of my clients had a production critical server failing and we started restoring it from backups.
Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server.
It turns out that the company that made this important piece of software doesn't even exist anymore.
tialaramex · 8h ago
Virtualization really helps. We have a lot of weird software which requires hardware dongles, but they're all USB dongles and they're all virtualized, one of the DC racks has a few U worth of just USB socket -> dongle wired up so that if we spin up a VM it can say "Hey, give me a USB socket with a FooCorp OmniBloat dongle on it" and get one unless they're all used.
2YwaZHXV · 1h ago
would certainly be interested to learn more about this
15155 · 4h ago
> Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server.
This is around the time when you call that one guy on your team that can reverse engineer and patch out the license check.
BrandoElFollito · 7h ago
This is a nightmare kind of discovery. I had a similar one, but fortunately, it wasn't as impactful.
This is why I like docker, if you keep the sources, you recover no matter what (at least until the "no matter what" holds water)
znpy · 5h ago
> This is why I like docker,
my understanding is that docker would not have helped in that scenario
BrandoElFollito · 4h ago
it really depends on the scenario but if the application was dockerized and they had an image, it would be just starting it again, somewhere else.
Possibly with the same network settings if the licensing check was based on that.
But of course it can easily go south, though testing the recovery of a container based off an image and mounted volume is simple and quickly shows you if it works or not.
But of course it may work today but not tomorrow because the software was not ready for Y2K and according to it we are in the XX century or something and the license is 156 years ... young. Cannot allow this nonsense to proceed, call us at <defunct number>
IT is full of joy and happiness
znpy · 4h ago
> it really depends on the scenario
yeah and that scenario was clear:
> Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server.
BrandoElFollito · 4h ago
"hardware" does not mean "bare metal". It could be a MAC, a serial number or similar things that may be linked to a generic or clonable value in virtualization.
benterix · 9h ago
> Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all).
I think this is an outdated view. In modern enterprises DR is often one of the most crucial (and difficult) steps in building the whole infra. You select what is crucial for you, you allocate the budget, you test it, and you plan the date of the next test.
However, I'd say it's very rare to do DR of everything. It's terribly expensive and problematic. You need to choose what's really important to you based on defined budgets.
rimbo789 · 8h ago
Budgets - and lowering them - win every time. I do budgeting and forecasting for SaaS companies and this kind of work is always the first cut
edoceo · 7h ago
Is there a recurring theme for why? There is huge risk exposure.
supertrope · 7h ago
People round down small risk to zero risk. Meanwhile the cost to run a full DR drill is a certain and immediate cost to their budget.
jon-wood · 8h ago
That's a choice that companies make. I've certainly worked at places which don't test DR, while at my current job we do annual DR runs, where we'll bring up a complete production ready environment from scratch to prove that the backups work, and the runbook for doing a restore actually works.
amanaplanacanal · 3h ago
I'm retired now, but the last place I worked estimated it would take months to do a full restore from off site backups, assuming that the data center and hardware were intact. If the data center was destroyed... Longer.
madaxe_again · 8h ago
If you’re doing it right, the DR process is basically the deployment process, and gets tested every time you do a deployment. We used chef, docker, stored snapshot images, and every deploy basically spun up a new infrastructure from scratch, and once it had passed the automated tests, the load balancers would switch to the new instance. DBs were created from binary snapshots which would then slave off the live DB to catch up (never more than an hour of diff), which also ensured we had a continuously tested DB backup process. The previous instance would get torn down after 8 hours, which was long enough to allow any straggling processes to finish and to have somewhere to roll back to if needed.
This all got stored in the cloud, but also locally in our office, and also written onto a DVD-R, all automatically, all verified each time.
Our absolute worst case scenario would be less than an hour of downtime, less than an hour of data loss.
Similarly our dev environments were a watered down version of the live environment, and so if they were somehow lost, they could be restored in the same manner - and again, frequently tested, as any merge into the preprod branch would trigger a new dev environment to automatically spin up with that codebase.
It takes up-front engineering effort to get in place, but it ended up saving our bacon twice, and made our entire pipeline much easier and faster to manage.
readthenotes1 · 6h ago
I used to find it amusing how many people thought Backup was a requirement.
"No, Restore is" I would say to stunned faces...
jl6 · 7h ago
On the other hand, I’ve worked in places where the total destruction of IT (so as to start again from a clean slate) was within the Overton window of options for how to transform the business.
slightwinder · 6h ago
> Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task.
Half of the work is to know what you need, the other half is to know how you do it, while the third half is to cope with all the undocumented tinkering which happened along the way. So in that regard, starting from scratch can be acceptable, as long you are not starting from zero, and can build up on the knowledge and experience of the previous run(s). I mean, there is a whole gaming-genre about this, which is quite popular. And usually you have the benefit that you might be able to fix some fundamental failures which you had to ignore because nobody wanted to take the risk.
fragmede · 2h ago
wait, what games are in that genre?
ac29 · 35m ago
I think they are talking about roguelikes/roguelites
tmiku · 3h ago
> I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared.
I'm curious about how you got in the door here. Very cool, but isn't healthcare IT notoriously cagey about access? I've had to do PHI training and background checks before getting into the system at my (admittedly only 2) PHI-centered jobs.
Granted, if it was such an emergency, I could see them rushing you through a lite version of the HR onboarding process. Did you have a connection in the hospital through whom you offered your services?
freddealmeida · 3h ago
Chamath's new company 80/90 is targeting this pain. Large firms often have no idea what their software is trying to do. Rebuilding it is cheaper and leads to better software.
QuiCasseRien · 4h ago
- i'm scripting at best the full setup of my servers (mostly Nixos and some debian).
- daily backup locale + remote (blackbaze with 60 readonly retention strategy, separated bucket by service)
- monthly offline backup
- a preprod server where my users can restore entiere environment for testing purpose (CI)
in case of full house fire, i can be back online in an working day.
PS: i have only some TBs of data so quite easy to do.
eptcyka · 7h ago
Yeah, I had similar experiences, but now I use nix, which solves these problems.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
I don't really know nix, but have used Ansible to try to have all configuration version-controlled and automated. But if there's any possibility of making changes outside of that, you have to be very disciplined. As soon as someone makes a one-off manual change to a crontab or a systemd unit, you're screwed.
eptcyka · 1h ago
NixOS just doesn’t let you do that in the nominal case, most of /etc consists of symlinks to a read only partition that is managed by nix - it is actually more difficult to do one-off scripts or config changes via files than it is to do so via nix, at least nominally - there are of course software that has it’s own special config format or that keeps its config in a database - but those get snapshot(ed?) and backed up anyway.
Imo, nix is more finnicky but more of a complete solution than ansible.
bilekas · 7h ago
> but now I use nix, which solves these problems
Um, sorry but what do you mean ?
eptcyka · 7h ago
Everything is configured via nix, I can swap out the hardware and redeploy everything from 0 with a single command invocation.
throwawayffffas · 6h ago
What if something happens to where you keep your configuration?
eptcyka · 3h ago
It is in git, I have backups. The secrets are not backed up, but those I can recycle if need be.
feynmanalgo · 6h ago
> I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared.
How did they prevent threat actors presenting themselves as volunteers, were you vetted?
zulban · 6h ago
A real person showing up is a huge cost and risk. No threat actor will continue an attack on just a hospital like that. The economics make no sense and any money is already extracted. Ransomware shops are very happy to just shotgun the internet from afar.
A far bigger risk is accepting incompetent volunteers if anything.
feynmanalgo · 6h ago
I didn't say anything about original attacker continuing the attack.
stavros · 1h ago
The same answer still applies: That attack vector doesn't have a positive ROI.
BrandoElFollito · 6h ago
The nature of my work helped to quickly sort that out
froh · 6h ago
side remark: I like the ambiguity of titanic (giant) task and Titanic (1912) task :-)
kayge · 1h ago
Don't forget Titanic (1997)! :D
v3ss0n · 8h ago
Thats why Infra as Code is very very important.
bilekas · 7h ago
Not really, the OP was already using docker, but even with IAC on a small home lab like this you're going to modify one or two small things manually here and there over the years.
Sure it can help, but it's just not a one fix solution people thing. If you want a good test of your IAC, just provisioning a brand new environment first time using only your iac.
v3ss0n · 5h ago
If you hand modify the already IAC system , you are not doing IAC. IAC with CI/CD is what we do. We don't even use AWS Console , we do everything in terraform/opentofu code.
xyzzy_plugh · 5h ago
> you're going to modify one or two small things manually here and there over the years.
Huh? This is a strange assumption to make. Is your premise that IAC can't ever be truly reproducible?
If you are modifying things manually then you're not doing IAC.
v3ss0n · 5h ago
Yeah as soon as you start hand tweaking the system it breaks IAC.
lnsru · 11h ago
Working for a company in Germany which is planing production 3 months in advance using printed Excel sheets. The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it. Production management tries to hide this fact and does not talk to the engineering department. This will go for years, consultants will gather their fees for non functional system. Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing. It is just nice to have.
mrweasel · 10h ago
In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no faith in the launch of DeMars and wanted to ensure that stock would not run out. Everything was accounted for, if anyone believe that he as committing fraud, they where welcome to do a complete inventory.
DeMars launched, and procurement basically stopped for a year. Only the items my friend was in charge of remained in stock, through out the launch/roll-out process.
pjc50 · 7h ago
There's lots of pushes to add software to more of the military, but I don't think these kinds of resilience questions are really taken seriously. A system intended for wartime use will be running in non-optimal conditions while under constant attack. But many of these "enterprise" systems barely work better than paper to start with.
ChrisMarshallNY · 9h ago
When HP converted to SAP, I think their production basically stopped, for six months, and they lost $400 million.
Switching to a new system; even when it is for the better, is a painful, expensive process.
The company that I worked for, did a successful transition to SAP, but it took about two years, and a lot of butthurt.
mrweasel · 5h ago
I feel like a ton of SAP transitions only succeed because they have to.
cluckindan · 8h ago
Switching to SAP ERP was already an in-joke level of well-known catastrophe in IT consulting circles 20 years ago. I’m glad to see nothing has changed in that respect.
pradn · 3h ago
They say its easier to change your company to fit SAP than to mold SAP to fit your company.
mensetmanusman · 7h ago
Sap adds so much syrup to the gears of business that it kills some.
crinkly · 10h ago
In the late-90s I worked for a manufacturing company in a firmware dev capacity. They did everything on paper still. They migrated successfully to an in-house built ERP system sitting on top of Oracle. Big celebration, everyone happy. Six months later someone drove a forklift through the wall of the machine room into the UPS which caught fire and destroyed three racks of kit including the Oracle node. Turns out no one really trusted the system and was running paper on the side. When I left 6 years later they were still doing it on paper and reporting on Excel. It works and is considerably more forklift proof.
braggerxyz · 7h ago
Forklift-Proof ERP was not on my bingo card. Thanks for the laugh :D
worldsayshi · 9h ago
Excel has the benefit of being understandable and fixable by a lot of regular office workers.
It's a bit surprising that we don't have that feature as a requirement for most IT infrastructure. It would make it so much more usable.
mark-r · 7h ago
I know a manufacturing plant that used an Excel spreadsheet to do all its production planning. There was only one person who understood the spreadsheet and could modify it, a consultant who made more than the plant manager.
"Understandable and fixable" depends more on the complexity of the application rather than the fact it's in Excel.
Lutger · 3h ago
The fact that every office worker understands excel, does not mean that every office worker understands every excel sheet.
Most of the projects we did in consultancy dev, was turning that one critical excel sheet nobody but 'the excel guy' understands into a simple to use web application, so that everybody could use it and the business won't explode when mr. excel would leave the shop.
nitwit005 · 1h ago
Also just the problem of finding the Excel sheets in the first place.
Saved to someone's desktop, or some random directory no one knows about.
rubyfan · 9h ago
Agree. IT has forgotten that computing should enable more people to be producers instead of mere consumers. IT management cares about control, audit, permissions and expense - no focus on achieving productivity in the workplace and in many cases are anti-user.
ndsipa_pomu · 6h ago
If you try running a business where several workers get involved with fixing and extending information systems (e.g. spreadsheets), you'll soon understand why successful IT management cares about controls, audits and permissions.
jjani · 9h ago
Most of those office workers were not capable of fixing anything on the first day they used Excel. Many didn't understand it at all. The main difference isn't that Excel is super accessible and easy to use for non-technical people; it's its ubiquity, and especially that of training on its usage.
worldsayshi · 8h ago
Ubiquity is important but it's not the only important factor. An excel sheet can typically be downloaded and experimented with. You can't download an ERP system and try stuff with it.
morkalork · 6h ago
I would argue that excel being "fixable" by regular office workers is half the reason why these projects fail in the first place. I've worked on migrating people's reporting to BI platforms before and what looks like a simple spreadsheet produced monthly is often really 12 different sets of formulas, special cases, kluges, hard-coded data and long-gone sources etc. etc. Because instead of correcting the source of data used for the report, it's all "done in post" in the excel sheet itself by a regular office worker.
perlgeek · 9h ago
On the other hand, once you have a well-established IT automation around your production, and people aren't trained in pre-automation production, it's actually quite hard to go back to manual.
Probably also depends on the complexity of the orders and workflows.
cluckindan · 8h ago
Without software, drones are useless. I suppose they can still assemble manually operated quadcopters if they know their inventory by heart, but they will be unable to produce more parts by 3D printing or drones capable of stable flight, autonomous operations, surveillance or any more advanced use cases. Even remote control is probably out of the picture.
greelin · 8h ago
They can continue to run the same thing they had before.
As an old software engineer, I can say with certainty that software engineering is a very, VERY wasteful practice. We could all be running Windows 3 right now, DOS, or some old Unix. The overhead involved in making actual advancements shows our slow progress as a species, and that we’re in a thread discussing a drone manufacturing facility being blown up in a war and how much that matters.
I think the natives had it right to live off of the land peacefully, and if anything to devote full time on science to determining what we do to help life survive in the universe.
ordu · 7h ago
Ahh... Philosophy...
I can't agree with you. People have got their human mind as a result of ever increasing and self-inflicted costs driven by a competition among males. They developed minds to play politics and they came to a point when 20% of metabolism of human body was devoted to its brain.
The result of such a wasteful way to spend their energy resources? Humans colonized all the Earth, drove to the extinction almost all big animals, and now there are as much humans on the Earth as mosquitos. Looks like a win, doesn't it?
These things go off the rails sometimes. Just today I've found a new example to it:
highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.[1]
The waste of resources into useless things doesn't lead to good outcomes each time, but I believe that software engineering will lead to something. I'm not Jesus, I can't predict exactly what the beneficial results will be, but at least I can point to a growing ability of engineers of handling complexity. It lags behind their ability to create complexity, but still it grows.
> The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it.
I swear this is SAPs main business model
Just endless consulting bills to set it up then fix it when it's delivered in a broken state.
torginus · 3h ago
That and 'if you don't use SAP you're not compliant with EU regulation XYZ and we won't do business with you'
bearjaws · 1h ago
I worked for a company that was working on rolling out D365 for 2 years :)
I was acquired by a company that was working on Sales Force integration for 3 years, I left before it was fully functional.
They had 4 full time devs working on Sales Force, meanwhile we had built the entire company in a year with 4 devs.
HPsquared · 11h ago
It depends how resilient they are. People often put all their eggs in one basket.
skrebbel · 10h ago
Russia has shown to be plenty resilient across the board. I find it hard to assume anything different here.
andy_ppp · 10h ago
Russia is also behind in modern technology by over a decade. I'm pretty sure if the CIA wanted they could destroy a lot of Russian software infrastructure, but it suits them to be in and out of Russian systems collecting information instead.
sjw987 · 9h ago
This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally.
Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16).
In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now.
Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?
Ray20 · 5h ago
> I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
> Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing,
I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all.
In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
ajuc · 7h ago
> This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale.
Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users.
Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it.
> And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that.
USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML).
Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs.
Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
torginus · 2h ago
I have no love (or even reason) to support modern Russia, but this is just wrong.
Russia has multiple home-grown office suites. Besides MS Office, the market leader still is full of bugs that harken back decades.
They also have multiple commercial CAD programs (KOMPAS, T-FLEX) that scale up to everything including airliners.
As for those 'western' top programmers, especially good ones, you'd be surprised how many of them are from post-USSR countries, including Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.).
As for chips they are behind (for reasons beyond the scope of my post), but the post mainly extended to software, in which, many of the supposed crown jewels of the West (aka US) have been replicated quite successfully in other parts of the world including Russia.
ivan_gammel · 9h ago
What do you mean by modern technology? Surely not the software. Russian engineering culture is strong and their IT strategy is far ahead of what you can find in Europe. I doubt it’s easy to hack into their systems - this breach illustrates it quite well, actually (it’s rare and required focused effort).
joules77 · 10h ago
It's not called Resilience if you pick on someone weaker.
Fwiw I actually agree with you. My point is that early in the war, it was commonly thought that just the western sanctions alone would totally cripple the Russian economy. Or that they'd soon run out of arms, or anything like that. None of that happened. It's not pro-Russian to establish that they were more resilient than what many people anticipated/hoped. This doesn't take anything away from Ukraine's resilience in the face of years of obscene unwarranted aggression which is easily 10x more impressive to me.
praptak · 9h ago
You can help instead of waiting for politicians to "do something about it". It's not that hard to find a reputable organization that helps Ukraine and send it some money.
ceejayoz · 7h ago
Unless that’s Musk or Bezos’s alt account, that’s like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.
kbelder · 3h ago
In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.
The US is a rich and (despite all you may hear) generous country. If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
Interestingly, $35 billion of that went to 'International affairs'. I would assume Ukraine was a significant part of that, but I don't know for sure.
> In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.
That's a single-digit percentage of the US Federal budget.
Some of that goes to "family foundation" sinecures. Some of it goes to 10% church tithes. Quite a bit of it is spent on… raising funds. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-giving-to-charity-ask-wher... - "Of the more than $1.3 billion raised by charities in the [New York] in 2018, about $369 million — or 27% — went to pay professional fundraisers' fees")
> If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
I think that's wildly optimistic, but that'd be somewhere between $3-5B. The US alone has earmarked something like $200B thus far. The EU has given a similar amount.
Every bit undoubtedly counts, but a single Patriot battery costs $1B.
walterlw · 6h ago
you would be surprised how capable and resilient an army of squirt guns can be.
ndsipa_pomu · 6h ago
I would be surprised if they could manage to keep refilling their squirt guns and deal with all the logistics required to keep an army available to use them
Ray20 · 5h ago
To be fair, it is quite difficult to support a regime where random people are grabbed off the streets and sent to their deaths. Where for expressing oppositional opinions your male relatives will have their door kicked down and will be sent to an assault on enemy position with a 90% mortality rate. And if they survive that - to another one just like it. To support a regime that has no long-term plan and goals for waging a senseless war and which openly promises to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing in the reclaimed territories.
So the support from Western countries is enormous, considering all these aspects.
SJC_Hacker · 4h ago
I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, but let's be honest
People aren't being dragged off the streets in Russia. This was briefly true in mid-late 2022 when they flirted with a partial mobilization, but hasn't been true for a while.
This is (sadly) actually more true in Ukraine. But there's also some nuance there - they can stop and question but supposedly they technically can't use physical force anymore.
What Russia is doing is increasing the bonuses and salary for signing a contract. And they don't have manpower problems for the most part - Ukraine is the one having that problem.
Now the Russian military is doing alot of shady shit, like promising recruits they won't be sent to Ukraine or would serve only in rear areas (even the US military recruiters were frequently guilty of this tactic). Classifying certain infantry units as "disposable" (especially foreign recruits and those from less politically unimportant regions), basically to be used as bait in assaults. And I'm sure the pressure for the required conscripts every year to sign a regular contract so they can be deployed is quite great, but its nothing like what some would have us believe.
skrebbel · 4h ago
I think GP is talking about Ukraine, not Russia. (And also I think GP might be astroturfing, but not sure)
biblioteca · 9h ago
No, they’re right, manufacturing machines like these are independent. We’re so used to interconnected software systems for everything, but even though these things may run old versions of Windows in airgapped or isolated networks, that’s just to run the machines. You give it a thumbdrive, save a part file on it, and as long as it’s got power, materials, and whatever is necessary for basic safety like noble gas for sintering safety, you’re set.
Even accounting systems are able to usually run fairly independently.
It’s not that IT and business and manufacturing support software engineers don’t help, but they aren’t necessary, especially if they’re just making the same thing over and over.
frteger · 9h ago
Working for a manufacturing company, you may be making drone parts, and you don’t really know which side of the war you’re making them for, because they can buy individual parts through different reputable-looking companies.
You could also be making surgical parts that help save lives.
Overall though, I think I’d rather be making nice practical furniture that hopefully people would never throw away. While I support people that want to protect, war is horrible.
littlestymaar · 4h ago
Reminds me of the Louvois[1] disaster in the French armed forces, they fucked the payment system so bad they had to roll back to manual accounting for a moment. Yes, for the whole French Army, which was at the time involved in multiple foreign operations…
> Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing
Is this sarcasm?
Kapura · 4h ago
Cyber warfare is really reaching a new peak in Ukraine, and not just the more-traditional cyberattacks like this. The target is of note; the drones themselves are the thing that's setting this war apart from all of the primarily human powered wars of the past centuries.
Drones have revolutionized reconnaissance, sabotage, and munitions interception. Relative to their material cost, they can be terrifically destructive, and with the advances in image recognition in the past decade some are able to operate even when affected by electronic signal jamming. This is some very cyberpunk shit going on right now.
This was obviously a very high-value target, and Ukraine has shown themselves again to be masters of asymmetric warfare: taking out a sizable chunk of Russia's long range bombers using drones smuggled across Russia, and now impacting one of the centers of Russia's drone manufacturing. It is difficult to see how the war will end, but it is clear that Ukraine is not about to stop fighting.
thinkingtoilet · 2h ago
In the book Ministry of the Future, a near-future look at a world dealing with devastating climate change, wars become somewhat obsolete because drones get so good it's always possible to kill someone anywhere in the world. The smallest faction can easily kill the leader of any country. It's an interesting thought. I don't recommend the book, one of those thought experiments with lots of interesting ideas with not enough story.
Kapura · 1h ago
It's fallacious to assume that defenses stop evolving after new weapons come to the fore. Some drones are deployed in anti-drone capacities; the war economics becomes balancing how advanced to make the attack drones vs. how cheap the countermeasures are. In Ukraine we've already seen small drones that are able to damage the wings of much larger and more "technically advanced" platforms.
War didn't end the first time man invented the longer spear; defenses adapt.
thinkingtoilet · 1h ago
The book isn't real. I was just sharing an interesting thought from it. Lighten up.
panstromek · 1h ago
> some are able to operate even when affected by electronic signal jamming
Not even that. The new hotness are the fiber optic cable ones that don't even use radio signals, that's some scary stuff.
Theodores · 2h ago
Some assumptions here. First off, we only have one side of the story to go on. Often this can be embroidered, particularly if there is propaganda value from doing so.
They could be using version control for their software with every developer having all of the software they have developed for their products git-cloned to their development machines. Assuming a modest development team working with version control (who doesn't), then you do have to wonder if they have lost the crown jewels. I suspect not.
It is going to be a similar situation with everything else such as CAD files. People will have local copies because it is quicker to work that way.
As for the company emails and general office files, sure they might have lost lots of that, but that isn't going to be the end of the world.
The website is also part of the company and you would expect the elite hackers to have taken that down but no they have not, that works just fine.
Then there is the product itself. If you have been following the war closely then you will know what drones are in use at a given time. We might not get to know all of the drones as well as the heavy hitters, however, the name of this company is not something that the keenest watcher of the SMO will be familiar with. It is not as if they have shut down Geranium 2 production, is it?
As for yourself, and how you write, is that ChatGPT speaking?
The reason I ask is that we all know about things such as version control so I wonder if there is common sense or ChatGPT going on with your comment.
jncfhnb · 3h ago
Remains to be seen if the lessons of this war extend to other possible wars though.
It is possible that FPV drones are showing up as so important because Russia is committed to a disgusting meat sluice of fodder to achieve its marginal territory gains.
Most countries don’t have the appetite for those kind of losses. Most countries, frankly, don’t have the audacity to set these kinds of war aims.
I predict they won’t matter too much to the war meta. At least not so much as cheap long range jet drones which are also becoming significant here.
kjkjadksj · 2h ago
Seems like drone warfare is just democratizing what e.g the US has in capabilities with their precision munitions already, in a perhaps less capable but far cheaper manner. Put it in other words if this was the US directy engaging russia, it would probably be tomahawk missiles or something along those lines just like we’ve seen last few decades, vs a sort of Air Hogs with a bomb.
rclkrtrzckr · 3h ago
I am working for a medium sized Swiss company. We're coding our own ERP, based on a nightmare of a stack. We call it "security by confusion". An attacker would maybe find its way in, but he'll never find the way out. If he destroys 90% of our code, we'll still be up and running, because 95% of the codebase is obsolete.
barbazoo · 3h ago
This sounds like the kind of resiliency that a process like evolution would create :)
akudha · 3h ago
lol, I don’t know if this is scary or impressive :)
praptak · 10h ago
Not many companies explicitly prepare for the scenario where every single data storage unit in the company is effectively wiped and you have to redeploy from zero.
If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems probably have cycles in their deployment dependencies. Your config pusher is deployed from Jenkins/Puppet/Ansible but 2 years ago someone made Jenkins dependent on the config pusher for its own config. Now you cannot just deploy these systems in order, you have to replay the history before that change.
thyristan · 9h ago
Almost everything will have cycles in IT. People want and security requires some kind of SSO. Now SSO is a dependency for almost everything, including the administration of underlying systems that run SSO. Same for the network. Same for a lot of things.
Bootstrapping from zero will never be easy and will always take some time. I don't think you can prepare your way out of this, short of preparing a fully redundant, fully separate secondary infrastructure.
pferde · 8h ago
This is called "break-glass procedure" in enterprise IT (as in "break glass in case of emergency"), and often consists of independent, normally unused, admin accounts on key systems, access info for which is locked in some safe location, e.g. physical safe in a secure location.
Testing this reliably is difficult, though, and often these procedures and their documentation is outdated.
praptak · 7h ago
I agree that fully redundant & separate infrastructure is unrealistic. I'm also not saying you can be 100% prepared. My point is that you can improve your posture.
What you can do is to have a sandbox environment where you periodically do a full setup exercise from a prepper disk. Conceptually it's not that different from testing backup recovery (ok, most companies neglect this too, so maybe you have a point :) ).
thyristan · 5h ago
Problem is, the value of proper recovery procedures and testing those in all aspects only becomes apparent to the bean-counters when things really break. But until they have been in that situation where nothing works for a month, it will always be too expensive, too cumbersome and too resource-hungry to do those preparations.
That happened to company I am familiar with a year ago. The main storage cluster,that everything depended on died. They recovered by deploying everything again from dev laptops.
datadrivenangel · 6h ago
black start is a hard problem. Even facebook apparently had to drill datacenter door locks open to get back up one time.
ptx · 9h ago
So how could a company handle this? Can they bootstrap from printed documentation or is that assumed to be wiped as well?
praptak · 7h ago
It's a model of a realistic scenario. Hackers (like in the article), long running ransomware that managed to corrupt lots of data, maybe a natural disaster. So by "wiping all data storage units" I meant the dynamic ones used in production. You can assume a static backup exists and contains a sensible set of sources and binaries, although obviously creating such a backup is part of the recovery plan.
hosh · 3h ago
The headline of the article called these people cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals. Which is it? It reminds me a bit with the situation with privateers during the age of sail. These were often people operating at the edge of the law, or even outright outlaws, given a letter of marque, a license to raid warships and commerce against a specific adversary. I'm sure out on the high seas, abuses happen.
The people who put together the doctrine on 4th Generation Warfare talked about the blurring of civilian and military. Rules of engagement gets fuzzier.
andrewflnr · 32m ago
It seems like it might be a translation issue. The site seems pretty overtly pro Ukraine, so they probably don't want to cast these hackers in a negative light. They might have just thought "cyber criminal" was a straight synonym for "hacker".
torlok · 3h ago
Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. I don't think this is some gray area hybrid warfare, it's just regular people not wanting drones to kill their neighbours.
catlikesshrimp · 1h ago
Kind of a Robin Hood situation: Hero for some, criminal to the others.
The article might be a collage of several other articles, and they didn't check for consistency.
I would love some other term for the aligned side people in cyberwarfare, sort of "cybersoldier" or "networkmilitia", not already somehow cliched in some film. "Cyberactivists" sounds like online protesters (in facebook and such)
We also call Greenpeace "activists", but they also employed violent direct-action in their efforts against whaling.
Carl Icahn calls himself a shareholder activist, and many people still consider him a vulture capitalist.
dopa42365 · 1h ago
>GASKAR INTEGRATION
Definitely one of the companies that everyone has heard of before. No need to mention any of their brand or product names, they're that famous.
$3 million revenue in 2024.
I'm sure we'll hear more about the epic defeat of this major military supplier in the future.
grishka · 9h ago
That's a very odd website. Blocked by the Russian government so you get a TLS error, once you get past that, you get the Cloudflare "you are blocked" page, and then you use a VPN and... get the option to read this article in Russian.
ivan_gammel · 8h ago
The linked page is in English, but speaking of the option - residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway. Contrary to some popular beliefs in Russia about language wars, many people still do speak Russian in Ukraine and media do publish articles in Russian.
orbital-decay · 7h ago
>residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway
Deliberately blocking the supposed enemy from hearing you does strike me as irrational, though. The mere fact they're doing Russian censors' job should probably make them recheck if they got anything wrong in their decision process, just in case.
herculity275 · 6h ago
At this stage in the war keeping your social spaces free of malicious users seems like a much higher priority than providing the other side's civilians with accurate information. Russians can access all the info in the world with a simple VPN setup, that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia.
orbital-decay · 6h ago
This likely keeps normal people from seeing this way better than it keeps away any hackers or bots, as Russian citizens are mostly using DPI circumvention tools. And this was a thing since the first days of the war, it's not something new.
>that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia
Giving up is the easiest thing to do. Last time some people did, it was blamed on stereotypes like their "learned helplessness" and "fatalism".
alephnerd · 5h ago
The reality is, civilians cannot change a country's domestic foreign policy - especially in a country like Russia.
Revolutions don't work without alignment from power centers like the police, military, judiciary, and a subset of legislators.
Hosni Mubarak wasn't overthrown because of protesters in Tahrir Square - he was overthrown because General Sisi decided to ignore shoot-on-sight orders.
There's no reason for Ukraine media to create a literal attack surface when most Russians already have a decent idea of what is happening in Ukraine (and vice versa) - most Russians and Ukrainians have blood relatives on both sides of the border.
orbital-decay · 5h ago
Claiming the exposure doesn't work is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. The reality is that awareness is a major factor, that was literally the main way of the power takeover in Russia (see e.g. Suponev, Ernst, Gusinsky, and Listyev). Russian government is really careful about doing things slowly and getting away with everything people let them get away with, and stopping dehumanization and letting people hearing voices is really important. Even if people right now disagree or think of it as propaganda (which it usually is, I hope nobody has any illusions about that), just existence of something in the background is enough to set up something else in the future. The time for the change will inevitably come like it always does, and the question then will become "what Ukrainian media did all this time, and where the hell they were". Turns out they may have not existed at all as well - out of sight, out of mind.
ivan_gammel · 2h ago
I agree with you, it’s irrational. It’s also something to be expected, because this war was irrational from the very beginning with both sides often driven by emotional triggers rather than cold-minded calculations or facts.
falcor84 · 7h ago
What makes you think that it's the Ukranians that are blocking Russian users from accessing it?
grishka · 6h ago
The Cloudflare "you have been blocked" page. Many Ukrainian websites do something like this, so in my mind it's just a common thing that happens.
Doesn't sound like it's the fault of the website, but of your government and maybe CloudFlare (although they could be blocking you because of the TLS error's underlying reason, not because you're in Russia).
grishka · 9h ago
No, that page is always a sign that the person who configured Cloudflare for their website has chosen to deliberately block Russian IPs.
frou_dh · 9h ago
I wonder to what extent either side is worried about the firmware on the drones. Somehow getting tampered-with firmware onto the drones that your enemy is using seems like it would be valuable.
benterix · 8h ago
Very interesting but risky (easy to discover and renders the whole operation ineffective). So I believe what they did was heavy-handed but the most reasonable.
trebligdivad · 8h ago
Yeh, it would seem in some ways more useful than shutting down the factory; if you gently made all the drones do something, like let them be remote controlled, or bomb the place they were launched from.
fennecbutt · 7h ago
But once that happened a handful of times it would be corrected.
I suppose it could be used sparingly but Ukraine would have no way of knowing when to use it. Perhaps a Bluetooth or whatever else the drone has on board "keep away" beacon for vips.
Faark · 34m ago
There are tones of non-obvious options. Eg make it appear like being shoot-downs. With a bunch of RNG / logic to make it non-obvious... random percentage, only when getting close to target, so many ways...
The real enemy is QA. Don't want it misbehaving during a virtual test flight.
jncfhnb · 3h ago
You say that, but Israel booby trapped the Hezbollah comm devices _twice_ with physical explosives.
morkalork · 6h ago
One funny tick that's supposedly appeared is installing viruses on the SD cards used in drones so if/when a drone is downed intact and picked up by a curious enemy, their computer is infected.
madebywelch · 1h ago
I'm curious if they ever practiced any sort of disaster recovery scenarios.
nicholast · 2h ago
The only tech that scales cheaper than drones are digital interventions. This is a better way to intercept.
v5v3 · 10h ago
>Ukrainian cyber activists, in cooperation with military intelligence...
So the foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia.
chii · 10h ago
> foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia
meanwhile, russian intelligence services have already directly attacked nato countries, with barely any real deniability.
mycall · 3h ago
The Shadow Brokers are a great example, very likely Russians.
They have been, in various ways, been attacking NATO countries for past 2 decades. Its simply puttin's modus operandi. Physical attacks on civilian and military infrastructure, murders, meddling with elections, cyber attacks, you name it.
amelius · 9h ago
I mean Putin will spin everything as "the West did it" anyway, so it really does not matter who pushes that button. I also seriously wonder why we don't have US/NATO air forces over Ukraine for this reason.
ajross · 6h ago
Because footage of a downed F-22 and it's captive pilot would be an unspeakable PR disaster relative to the comparatively mild military benefit. Wars aren't, and really never have been, won by blowing stuff up.
amelius · 4h ago
USAF has unmanned fighter jets, if that's what you are worried about.
> Wars aren't, and really never have been, won by blowing stuff up.
That's a huge simplification. Blowing stuff up in a strategic way can certainly help win a war.
ajross · 3h ago
> That's a huge simplification. Blowing stuff up in a strategic way can certainly help win a war.
And losing public support for an effort via an embarassing disaster can just as certainly lose it, which was my point.
Yes yes yes, blow stuff up. Take territory, shoot people, yada yada. At some point that has to happen for a "war" to be a "war". But at the end of the day the winner is essentially always predetermined by economics and politics. Making deployment decisions in the absence of those considerations is generally how one loses wars.
paganel · 9h ago
Which NATO countries would those be?
jannes · 9h ago
The German parliament in 2015 (including the chancellor's office)
Plus a million cyberattacks against all sorts of infrastructure.
paganel · 8h ago
So then how come hasn't Article 5 been activated yet? Does that mean that said Article 5 is not even worth the piece of paper it has been written on?
graeme · 7h ago
Your first comments suggests it isn't happening ("which nato countries")
Now, predictably upon being told that it happens you pivot to NATO is useless.
Which is it: a set of attacks so obscure no reasonable person would be aware, or a horrendous onslaught where Article 5 should have been invoked and a mass retaliation begun?
NATO countries historically didn't invoke Article 5 even for terrorist attacks killing their own citizens. It takes a certain level before it makes sense to invoke, normally something beyond the capacity of that country to handle.
willvarfar · 2h ago
> NATO countries historically didn't invoke Article 5 even for terrorist attacks killing their own citizens
The only time Article 5 has been invoked was when terrorists attacked America in 9/11.
I was trying to follow my respondents' reasoning, as in, if Russia had indeed attacked NATO countries, which they said it had indeed happen, then how come NATO, being a defensive alliance first and foremost, didn't do anything about it?
In other words, and following Eastern-European logic (which, trust me, helps in cases like this one, I'm from Eastern Europe myself), had Russia really attacked any NATO countries you and me both wouldn't be in here having this conversation over the internet.
klabb3 · 4h ago
> if Russia had indeed attacked NATO countries, which they said it had indeed happen, then how come NATO, being a defensive alliance first and foremost, didn't do anything about it?
This was already answered but to be clear: ”doing something” and ”invoking article 5” is like the difference between saying ”asshole” in traffic vs rallying your friends to murder the driver’s family.
One could argue NATO countries should respond stronger to hybrid and clandestine warfare. Right now, we see a lot of ”angry letters”. But, it’s not clear eye for an eye is a strategically sound response, partly because it legitimizes the methods, and partly because it escalates tensions towards a war that nobody wants. Israel for instance takes an entirely different stance, basically retaliating with maximum force to deter the enemy (similar to punching the ”school bully” so hard, just once, that he stops). I don’t claim to be a diplomatic expert, but it’s worth noting that Israel is currently engaged in several major wars and conflicts, and tensions have grown.
barbazoo · 5h ago
Thankfully they don’t think it’s worth invoking article 5 over that. It’s not an automatism obviously, we’re talking about WW3 here. Would you rather be “technically” right here?
paganel · 25m ago
> Thankfully they don’t think it’s worth invoking article 5 over that
Is there a threshold anywhere in the NATO treaty that I'm unaware of?
nkrisc · 5h ago
Because that would still be a disproportionate response and make NATO the aggressor, playing right into Russian hands.
The Russian military is already being destroyed in Ukraine (and even in Russia). The proportionate response is to give Ukraine everything they need to destroy Russia in a war that Russia chose to start. A war that they opened with a surprise invasion, no less. They are unambiguously the aggressor in their war in Ukraine and they should be defeated there, and we should give Ukraine everything they need to do that.
axus · 4h ago
NATO attacking Russia would definitely not be playing into Russia's hands. Very bad for Russia, very costly for NATO, long war would make the voters unhappy, and India and China would feel rightly threatened.
Russian and Ukrainian militaries are being destroyed, but it also matters how fast they are being rebuilt. As mentioned above, Russia and Ukraine are debugging all their outdated military doctrines. The survivors will have a lot of hard-won experience.
nkrisc · 3h ago
What I meant was any direct NATO aggression against Russia would validate Russia's current "victimhood" narrative, and provide after the fact justification for their invasion of Ukraine in the first place.
They are very intentionally doing things that would not justify a full military retaliation by NATO.
chii · 4h ago
> The survivors will have a lot of hard-won experience.
the west would not want russia to be that survivor.
torlok · 2h ago
There's no need to respond with force. Russia will lose in the long-term due to sanctions as long as Republicans don't cock everything up even more by making deals with Russians and slowing down trade in the global west. Russians are wasting money and gear in Ukraine and becoming weaker. It's just a matter of time before China starts making claims on land they lost to the Soviets. Russians will lose this war the same way they lost the cold war; by cutting themselves off from the maritime economy.
jncfhnb · 3h ago
Article 5 is an option. Not a game mechanic.
paganel · 24m ago
> Article 5 is an option. Not a game mechanic.
Tell that to the very pro-Western political leaders here in Eastern Europe, they won't take that well at all.
wiseowise · 7h ago
Article 5 over a couple of munitions depots?
johannes1234321 · 5h ago
Aside from political reasons stated in other answers: Since Article 5 doesn't apply. article 5 states: "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all [...]" Thist deliberately talks about "armed" attack. Cyber attacks and related aren't covered.
We’re talking about Ukraine and Russia, there has been a war going on for years now. Nobody needs or wants plausible deniability here.
irjustin · 10h ago
There are plenty of reasons to have plausibly deniability even this late into the war.
bilekas · 7h ago
Only if you're on the invading offensive side.
taway1a2b3c · 10h ago
I think the point being made is that Western agencies (5-eyes) would give Ukranian intelligence the button to push (indirect action) and not push it themselves (direct action).
victorbjorklund · 9h ago
Why would that be the case? Ukraine has a very large IT sector and they have a lot of good IT security specialists. To be honest, a lot of cybercriminals have been from Ukraine.
So I don't see why it would be the case that Ukraine could not have done this by themselves. They have done previous attacks by themselves. I don't see why that would be the case.
It would kind of be like saying, "Oh, if Russia does a cyberattack, it can't have been them acting alone. It must have been China that gave them the stuff to just press a button."
JSteph22 · 4m ago
>Why would that be the case?
It's not speculation that Ukraine is being assisted to a huge degree.
It's the usual westerner superiority speaking. When Ukraine wins something it's always due to NATO training, US weapons and all that. When Ukraine starts losing ground it's poor soviet-era training, wrong kind of tactics and decision making on Ukraine.
johnisgood · 8h ago
That is not how I read the parent comment. I read it as US making Ukraine do what US wanted to do.
oneshtein · 8h ago
It's tough to say that Ukraine and US are allies right now. US refuses to hold security assurance, as promised, and forbids Ukraine to restore nuclear arsenal, as before the promise. Bullies behave is such way, not allies.
johnisgood · 7h ago
It is irrelevant to my interpretation of the aforementioned parent comment.
The point is that US made Ukraine do something that the US wanted to do but did not do because were it the US, then it would have had repercussions on US, so they made Ukraine do their dirty work.
pjc50 · 7h ago
Curious use of "made" here when it's something that Ukraine would have very much wanted to do, this cyberattack.
johnisgood · 7h ago
Both benefit'd, then.
trhway · 10h ago
By going to war with Ukraine Russia (very foolishly in my view) exposed itself to a number of possible "indirect actions" which weren't possible before as "direct actions". Like for example Ukrainian drone hitting one of the Russian strategic missile defense radars. Ukraine can potentially hit other strategic assets not that involved in the current war - say nuclear submarines for example.
v5v3 · 9h ago
Russia and all non-usa allies have been the winner.
China etc have seen the strategies used in sanctions. They know how to limit their impact now.
It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.
It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.
And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.
A disaster for the west, aside from their weapons companies/Ukrainian investments. And any NATO spend increases.
vardump · 9h ago
China has been a big winner, it can now get cheap energy and it gets to set Russia whatever conditions it pleases. Russia is now utterly dependent on China for many imports.
Russia itself has been the biggest loser. Massive budget deficits, massive inflation. 1M of its smartest people have moved abroad. 1M Russian casualties in the war. Demographics and economy are disastrous.
That and Russia is now a pariah state. No one is going to invest there for a very long time after what Russia did.
sjw987 · 9h ago
I mostly agree, except the pariah state part.
Russia is hedging that the "pariah state" label will wear off pretty quickly. The current US government has as recently as March floated the idea of normalising business ties, and constantly flip-flops it's position.
However, the biggest loser has definitely been Europe (including Britain). High energy prices have cascaded the cost of living crisis, which in turn has led to a rightward shift in politics. As a continent, we are unprepared for any sort of defence, having used the US as a backstop for years and now the US constantly toys with the idea of dropping NATO support. Alone, we don't have enough manpower, ammunition, and we haven't been keeping up with the evolution of modern warfare (drones and related technology) taking place in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
libertine · 5h ago
If you think Europe is the biggest loser, you need to dig a bit deeper on the state of Russia... I might be wrong, but there's no recovery from this blunder for many, many years - if it manages to stay a Federation, that's yet to be seen, but my guess is China will take a chunk out of Russia eventually.
Remember Russia in 3 years had:
- 1 Military coup;
- Lost 50% of the Black Sea Fleet and it's now unusable;
- 1.000.000+ casualties (dead and severely wounded)
- Mass exodus of qualified young people;
- Lost Military allies from CSTO and rendered the alliance into a joke;
- Completely lost presence in the Middle East (I don't see how they will recover from it);
- Losing influence in neighboring countries;
The list goes on, like demographic collapse, etc
So, I find it hard to see Europe as the loser here; at worst, Europe is doing "ok".
sjw987 · 4h ago
Europe's entire future is on the line right now. Forget many years..
Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending (from a low starting point) to meet the new US governments requirements are exacerbating the cost of living crisis continent wide. Europe already wasn't innovating, and is now losing the small amount of industry it does have, to energy prices, to China's entry into EV production, and EU regulation. The demands to spend more on our own defence by the US administration comes from a US administration which has flirted with the idea of not even defending NATO.
The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum. In my country, the UK, Reform, a politically inept and untested party is currently leading in the polls for the next election. This party, as well as many like it in Europe, is even leading in the polls despite well known Russian political influence in them.
On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps. Immigration, which is lowering wages and in many peoples eyes, changing their cultural landscape for the worse, increasing their likelihood in voting for fringe political parties.
As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now. We hear constantly about ammunition and weapons shortages across Europe, failure to meet requirements for what Ukraine needs to fight back, and a general unwillingness from the population to even fight. Russia has oil, gas, and mineral wealth, which will always be of importance to Europe whenever this war does end. Europe is so reliant, that whatever words are spoken, the EU has spent more on Russian energy than it has sent in aid to Ukraine.
libertine · 4h ago
> Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending
Energy prices are going down, and have been going down consistently ( https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil ) and the new US Admin wants them even lower, and they're not alone. So that's settled. Defense spending will also be met with investment, jobs, etc.
But if you think Europe is having it bad in terms of using taxpayers money to fund wars... what do you think is happening to Russian taxpayers money, with a much smaller economy?
> The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum.
Inflation is affecting everyone. Not Europe in any particular way.
Again, if you think that's bad for Europe, you look at Russia is being completely destroyed with inflation. I don't even think they're reporting the fake numbers of how bad things are, every quarter they prohibit more data from coming out...
> On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps.
Again, if you think that's a problem in Europe... how does Russia compare with qualified people leaving, 1.000.000 young men casualties, low birth rates, aging population? Europe isn't speedrunning its demographic collapse like Russia is.
> As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now.
So, to sum it up, you highlighted a few points that are by many orders of magnitude worse in Russia. Even counting energy, since Ukraine has been taking out distribution and refining capacity (and my guess is that it will get worse) - somehow you still think Europe is in a worse shape and position.
And a lot of your claims don't make much logical sense: "Europe is in bad shape, they can't even properly help Ukraine", in a context of Russia with 1.000.000+ casualties, max military production capacity, using North Korean Army help, and failing to make any meaningful gains at heavy costs...
I'm not even stating the fact that Russia will inevitably have to surrender that territory back to Ukraine, in the future anyway, because no country will ever recognize their occupied territory as part of Russia.
So to sum up your "Europe is unable, and Russia is giving their max" scope doesn't help your case at all, just shows that Russia has massive unrecoverable problems, even trying with everything they have...
You ended up supporting what I said. Europe is OK, while Russia can collapse at any moment - that's being on the line.
Just to bring you back to reality: no European country had part of their military going on a straight line to its capital to take down the government, and that happened to Russia around 2 years ago - that's not a good sign.
v5v3 · 9h ago
Russians and foreigners travelling to Russia regularly blog live.
Everyone there is doing fine.
The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
Ray20 · 4h ago
>Everyone there is doing fine.
And if you say somebody doing badly, you will get 10 years in gulag.
sofixa · 9h ago
> Everyone there is doing fine.
As long as they don't say anything critical against the regime. Or have the misfortune of flying in/around Russia while morons are at the trigger of surface to air missiles (cf. MH17 and Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243). Or have the misfortune of getting conscripted to die in the meat grinder.
> The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
Yes, Russia, the known beacon of journalistic freedom. How many journalists have been murdered by the regime?
The fact that those Wikipedia sections / articles exist is very telling:
Anyone blindly lumping together all "western" media is not to be taken seriously. Especially when comparing with fucking Russia of all places. You can find plenty of disagreements in various "western" media (consider The Guardian vs Financial Times vs Le Figaro vs Le Monde vs NY Times vs Washington Post). Nobody dares contradict the official line in Russia, even calling the war a war, or they get tortured and murdered.
wiseowise · 7h ago
> Everyone there is doing fine
Lmao, food prices skyrocketed, quality plummeted, interest rates are at record highs, budget deficit. Totally doing fine, comrade.
andreygrehov · 6h ago
> No one is going to invest there for a very long time after what Russia did.
Many large businesses have returned to Russia. "No one is going to invest" is a naive childish thinking. They outperformed growth expectations in 2024, unemployment rate dropped from 5.8% in 2020 to 2.3% in 2025. GDP is surging, insane tech and energy investments from China. Plus Russia has a very low public debt. All in all, their economy is pretty resilient despite what they say in the mainstream media.
sofixa · 6h ago
> unemployment rate dropped from 5.8% in 2020 to 2.3% in 2025
Spending ~30% of the country's budget on military hardware that will get blown up might look good, GDP wise, but is utterly unproductive.
andreygrehov · 2h ago
> Because a massive amount of men were conscripted?
That's an emotional oversimplification. Unemployment fell not because of conscription, but due to massive import substitution and rising labor demand in construction, logistics and manufacturing.
Despite sanctions, Russia's ruble-adjusted budget deficit remains manageable, and the trade balance is strong due to record energy exports. Military spending has driven industrial revitalization. Factories reopened, supply chains revamped and domestic R&D expanded.
Whether you agree with the morality or not, economically it’s not just money burned. It has multiplier effects: jobs, tech development and regional growth. Dismissing that is lazy.
throwawayffffas · 5h ago
I think your assessment is only partially correct.
The Europeans are getting their act together and increasing their cooperation and defense spending.
Sweden and Finland joined NATO, placed large defense orders and started integrating with the British.
France has started talking about expanding its nuclear arsenal to cover the defense needs of the entire continent.
While the Russian military has gained tremendous military experience, they have lost huge amounts of top tier kit.
They are now essentially dependent on China.
No one came to aid Iran during the Israeli air campaign, the Russians were too busy and the Chinese didn't care enough.
The main winner has clearly been China, but the US and the EU have not really lost anything. If anything everyone that is not a party to the war is coming of a bit stronger.
fer · 6h ago
Russia has been a winner by basically no metric other than land and being a shit neighbor.
And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there; it's literally a special grave digging operation. Soviet stockpiles of armor are basically depleted; now it's the buggy and moped meta. They've completely failed to support their supposed allies (i.e. Assad, Iran, Armenia). A good chunk of their strategic aviation fleet is gone. Car bombings of generals continue all over Russia and occupied territories, which brings the question, will it even stop if they "win"? They've finally been demoted from being an aircraft carrier operating nation. Their frozen assets are literally killing Russian soldiers. National wealth fund has ~20-30% of the prewar assets. Something similar in gold reserves. Interest rates are beyond effed, and recruits are largely joining for the money needed in the terrible economy caused by Putin himself. Who annexed 4 oblasts only to legally deploy the 18 year olds Putin promised not to deploy in Ukraine (as it's no longer Ukraine in Russian law). Non-military industrial output is on a steady decline. Price capping on bread. Fossil fuel output at minimums, and with low prices.
So what is Russia winning at?
barrenko · 9h ago
If there was any real will left in EU people, Ukraine would wipe Russia off the map (at least the putinesque remnants), it will happen anyway, but we'd rather just expend vastly more money and vastly more humans and time in the process.
Considering the current rate of inflation, switching the EU economies to war production would save so much money and lives, and bring down prices.
pjc50 · 9h ago
War economies famously known for low inflation and wide availability of basic goods.
wltr · 7h ago
Keeping the war longer by a decade by not willing to hold your promise is vastly improves things, that’s for sure. Instead of showing the bully the force, be done with that pretty quickly and returning to your non-war economy pretty quickly. Ever considered that option, huh?
Ray20 · 4h ago
Russia has nuclear weapons and good means of delivering them all over the planet. That is a fact of reality that does not allow us to "be done with that pretty quickly".
pshirshov · 5h ago
Sure thing comerade, they even have a submarine missile cruiser.
firesteelrain · 9h ago
Yea, Russia has learned a lesson at a very high cost of human lives and materiel.
timeon · 9h ago
Hardly anyone is 'winner' here.
bbarnett · 9h ago
With more than 1.2M dead or out of service injured, Russia is spent. It's why North Korean troops had to be deployed.
All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense.
Sure they can bomb from afar. But even of they take the Ukraine now, they have no force to hold it with.
v5v3 · 9h ago
They were never going to achieve a full takeover of Ukraine though. Large mass size and the people wouldn't accept them.
pjc50 · 9h ago
They came extremely close with the decpaitation attack. It worked back when the USSR invaded Czechslovakia. What they weren't expecting was effective resistance, so now it's no longer possible.
SJC_Hacker · 2h ago
I don't think they anticipated a Nazi/Imperial Japan style completely takeover
I believe their plan was to capture Kyiv and install puppet government, and have the military collapse into factions and unable to coordinate effectively as a conventional force. Paramilitary groups would break out (such as the Azov units, etc.) Ukraine would then degrade into civil war, especially along an east-west line.
But at least, it would be dysfunctional and unable to join EU or NATO. And they would be able to control enough to extract some value out of the country (e.g. natural resources). But they never really care about establishing peace and prosperity there.
Right? Right? Putin totally only planned a multi-year stalemate where he lost his best troops on a dash to capture Kyiv. Totally!
trhway · 8h ago
Such familiar words there -
"Putin took upon himself the historic responsibility to solve the Ukrainian question"
CapricornNoble · 7h ago
> With more than 1.2M dead or out of service injured, Russia is spent
> All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense.
I'm genuinely curious what your information diet/sources looks like that would lead you to make such statements.
According to Ukrainian sources, Russian end strength in Ukraine continues to increase and they are maintaining a strategic reserve of personnel as well:
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-plans-to-increase-groupin...The Russian military plans to increase its grouping in Ukraine by 150,000 soldiers in 2025, equivalent to around 15 motorized infantry divisions, Presidential Office Deputy Head Pavlo Palisa said on April 3, Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne reported.
"Their formation is ongoing. The Russians have no problems with recruiting personnel now..."
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/syrskyi-warns-russia-stockpi..."Moreover, Russia maintains an additional 121,000 troops in its strategic reserve—comprising 13 divisions, as well as various regiments and brigades—that could be deployed to the battlefield if necessary."
"This means their army grows by an average of 8,000 to 9,000 soldiers every month," the Commander-in-Chief noted.
As for Russia only being able to defend, how do you square that with this Finnish analysis group's tracking of Russian territorial control rates increasing every month this year?
They had to withdraw from Syria, due to a loss of ability to project power. That's how desperate they are for troops. They removed troops, planes, closed bases. Almost immediately Syria fell.
Israel and the US's stance with Iran, was something not as plausible when Russian strength existed in the region. Russia complained and threatened, but naturally nothing has come of it. They have no capacity to do anything, or project power. There is no Russian strength in the Middle East any more. Why? They cannot extend their power beyond their borders.
This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).
Using reserve troops is what Russia could do if their back was to the wall. They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within. Remember, Russia is not a democracy, but a totalitarian state controlled by a dictator with an iron fist. If their 'reserves' are drawn down too far, there will be insurgency.
Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops. And it doesn't discount what I'm saying. They have lost their capacity to project power, and are now relying upon mercenaries to shore up their troop levels. They're spent.
CapricornNoble · 4h ago
> They removed troops, planes, closed bases. Almost immediately Syria fell.
This has more to do with the Syrian military being completely starved of resources, particularly money, due to the US occupying the most lucrative portions of sovereign Syrian territory for years. Not having Russian airpower on call absolutely contributed to the collapse but not being able to reliably pay/staff formerly-capable formations like the Tiger Forces or 4th Armored Division (in addition to not being able to afford reconstruction) is what really did the regime in. Watch this from 2019:
>This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).
The Russians have been domestically mass producing their versions of the Shahed-series drones for a while now. Interruptions in arms transfers due to Iran's own security problems are unlikely to significantly degrade Russia's drone salvos at this point.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55948The organization calculated that Russia produced an average of 60.5 Geran drones per day, or roughly 1,850 drones per month, between February and April 2025.
https://www.calibredefence.co.uk/shahed-and-geran-the-evolut...Over time, a separate version emerged which is known as the Geran-2, which is the name given to Shaheds made in Russia. Russia now makes hundreds of these drones every week, enabling it to increase its usage to 200 per week in September 2024, and then to 1,000 per week by March 2025.
> They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within.
Who do you think will stage a revolt, with both Navalny and Prigozhin dead? There's not really any charismatic opposition leadership left that I can think of.
> They have lost their capacity to project power
Ok, I will compromise and largely agree with this statement in broad strokes. Yes, Russia's power projection capacity has diminished. That's a very different position IMO compared to "Russia can only do defense" as you stated earlier....while Russia has ~600,000 men busy invading the largest country in Europe after Russia itself. Their global power projection capacity is degraded because so much of their attention is sucked into fighting the largest land war in Europe in 80 years, but that's not the same as only being able to defend.
> Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops.
Without going too far off on a tangent, this also applies to Ukraine (regarding loyalty...Colombians are definitely considered "seasoned" as far as international mercenaries go).
Russia has 1 million in casualties and has failed to capture Ukraine. You really think you can claim it was a "win" because now all their experienced soldiers are dead and their strategy has been reduced to "run towards the enemy and hopefully some of you won't be killed and thus we can capture another field"?
v5v3 · 9h ago
Russia has a population of 144m.
1m is not a lot
Edit: as per my comment below, casualties are not deaths. It's a wider definition.
Paul_S · 9h ago
That includes women, children and elderly. If you count fighting age men only, 1M becomes significant. If you count men actually available for draft, you're already at 10% loss.
wiseowise · 7h ago
It always surprises me when calculation is done on a basis of formula that goes something like this. Total population - Casualties = Number
1 million casualties is an absolutely massive number, regardless of your total population. How many of your fellow citizens would you be willing to throw into the meatgrinder until you say “that not ok”?
Ray20 · 4h ago
> How many of your fellow citizens would you be willing to throw into the meatgrinder until you say “that not ok”?
If you are Putin? All of them. So yes, Putin is winning, he hasn't even used up 10% of his army's acceptable losses yet.
SJC_Hacker · 3h ago
When you restrict it to fit men of military age (lets be generous here and say 18-55 , even though there is ample evidence of Russian men 60+ signing up), 1 million is quite alot. The Russian population skews older - median age is around 40. There is also a massive gap of of people their 20s-early 30s.
Imagine all the men of your entire high school / college graduating class being either killed or seriously wounded so Putin can grab a few thousand km of territory.
Now they could allow women in combat roles, but I severely doubt it for this conflict. It would be extraordinarily unpopular and go against the narrative they have been selling their populace for decades.
oneshtein · 8h ago
Name your number.
trhway · 9h ago
>1m is not a lot.
For anybody still questioning why the civilized word must stop Russia, i'd suggest to mediate a couple seconds over the parent comment (the commenter in the parent and in his other comments presents Russian position quite correctly)
>"A casualty, as a term in military usage, is a person in military service, combatant or non-combatant, who becomes unavailable for duty due to any of several circumstances, including death, injury, illness, missing, capture or desertion."
CapricornNoble · 7h ago
> their strategy has been reduced to "run towards the enemy and hopefully some of you won't be killed and thus we can capture another field"?
Is this seriously the depth of your understanding of Russian tactics (what you described isn't a strategy to begin with...). I recommend watching every tactical analysis video on Mark Tacacs YT channel (he's a NATO military officer, not some pro-RU source):
Maybe if Ruzzia where the logic is always reversed
Putin caused
1 NATO to get 2 new members, gg Putin
2 NATO to invest more in weapons, gg Putin
3 killed or wounded 1 million Russians while the population was already in decline and I would bet the birth rate is decreasing because of the war
4 economy is fucked, Gazprom reported first time ever no proffits, interests rates increased
5 the idiots managed to hit again a civilian airplane, and i read recently Azerbajan and Armenia are cooperating to get rid of Ruzzians on their lands
6 Ruzzian weapon exports are fucked
7 Ruzzian army is a joke asx strength now, and the people are seen as low life orcs, killing, raping, torturing creatures
8 Kremlin is a joke, from 3 day operation to 3+ years, people flying from windows, politicians unable to admit a drone hit happened and claiming is debbry,
9 Putin pulled his secret weapons the donkeys after 3 years of keeping them hidden and failed to ado any significant progress
10 Ruzzia advances in Ukraine slower then a snail, check the numbers. and there are more than 1000 Ruz casualties for square km
11 I can see this Zeds complaining about the West decadence while using iPHone, driving German cars and wearing expensive wtches (even Putin can't stand to put his ass on a Ruzzian car)
How is Ruzzia stronger?
The only way I could think a Zed would claim this is something like "Zed eats excrements daily for an year and after barely surviving this he claims he is stronger because someone in the West would die if he eat so much excrements, the Zed not realizing that the solution is to execute the tzar and stop eating excrements.
Any Russian (not Ruzzian) can be honest and admit that this is not going according to the plan, Putin tried to repeat the Crimean invasion, his KGB friends told him that Ukrainians will receive the Zeds with flowers , the informations were wrong and Putin seems to be incapable to stop the disaster and keep his throne so he is willing to sacrifice the people and the empire just to keep is throne.
Muromec · 8h ago
>5 the idiots managed to hit again a civilian airplane, and i read recently Azerbajan and Armenia are cooperating to get rid of Ruzzians on their lands
That's one way to get nominated for Nobel peace prize.
CapricornNoble · 7h ago
> Ruzzia advances in Ukraine slower then a snail, check the numbers. and there are more than 1000 Ruz casualties for square km
Net Russian gains in June 2025 were 572 km^2.* In order for your statement to hold true, Russia would have suffered over half a million casualties in June alone. Where is your evidence to support such an assertion?
>Net Russian gains in June 2025 were 572 km^2.* In order for your statement to hold true, Russia would have suffered over half a million casualties in June alone. Where is your evidence to support such an assertion?
Or my average is not a daily or monthly, do it again for the last 1 year. 2 years.
Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?
CapricornNoble · 5h ago
> Or my average is not a daily or monthly, do it again for the last 1 year. 2 years.
That would make even less sense. The thread I linked has the appropriate data going back to April 2024. We can toss that into a spreadsheet or LLM to get the total Russian gains in the past year, as you requested.
ChatGPT calculates total Russian territorial control change at ~6000km^2. So are you now saying the Russians actually have 6 million casualties? Again, please support assertion. The only number that doesn't make sense here is your "Russians are taking 1000 casualties per square kilometer".
> Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?
It's been on my list of "Things to Do" for a while. I want to whip up a Rust library to run TNDM/QJM calculations on the Russo-Ukrainian War. For now, I will only state that rates of advance in warfare are non-linear. Past a certain point of weakness, collapse is rapid. I think Operation Bagration is a good case to examine in detail, as many of the frontline German divisions had REALLY thin manning. The Ukrainian frontline is manned at something like ~40% strength, and with a large number of old and infirm conscripts. They are relying heavily on drones to keep the Russians from locally massing combat power. I'm not sure where the breakpoint is in Ukrainian manpower past which their brigades will shatter.
But just pulling an estimate out of my butt: 2 years and an additional 500,000 Russian non-recoverable losses. shrug
simion314 · 3h ago
The advances are not linear, the Ruzzian advanced a lot in first days (there were some traitors in the Ukrainian army),. since then they advance at snail speed, my stats were from my memory, probably during winter when they attacked massively and gained almost nothing. If you have good data and can export it as csv then would be nice too see some graphs, like gains per month/week ,casualties per week and km^2 , distance from Kyiv.
In war a country can give up on some territory and move the army and government if needed into a better defended region, Ukrainians only need the will to fight and the Ruzzians provide them plenty of reasons not to be Russified.
So my stats were outdated or wrong, it is 5x, 10 x then ? Let me know a better number to use in future.
sofixa · 9h ago
> And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.
Yes, on using human wave attacks, trenches, and cheap Iranian drones. Oh, and at the cost of almost all trained troops and modern equipment. Not a very good deal.
> It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.
Russia started the war, they are the ones who need to win it. The fact that they are stalled is a win for Ukraine, who are the ones trying to survive. The Russian economy is in shambles (cf. the Broken window fallacy), as are their army, navy and air force. It will take them decades to rearm back to the same level. Putin isn't stronger, really. He entered a quagmire of a war he cannot back out of (will appear weak) nor can he actually win in any way. He's stuck.
> It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.
Are you sure you understand what BRICS is? Everyone using Russia's predicament to get cheap natural resources doesn't mean that e.g. Brazil or India are closer to Russia...
CapricornNoble · 7h ago
>Yes, on using human wave attacks, trenches, and cheap Iranian drones.
This war is the most recorded in human history. Can you share some videos of these Russian human wave attacks? Can you describe the objective delineating criteria between a normal attack by an infantry battalion or regiment, and a "human wave" attack? Regarding trenches and "cheap" Iranian drones.....should the Russians NOT practice basic principles of force protection/use of fortifications? Should they NOT leverage novel cost-effective munitions to wage war and instead use massively-expensive gold-plated equipment? How is that working out for the US and allies, who can't produce more than ~600 Patriot missiles per year at a cost of ~$4M per missile.....meanwhile Russia is throwing 500 drones and missiles at Ukraine every few days....
The point is trying to claim something without any evidence that supports it.
libertine · 7h ago
Not really, the point being made goes deeper.
The Russian regime (and apparently a lot of Russians) deem Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group - they call them "little Russians".
Ukrainian authorship would mean:
- Ukrainians are competent people with agency (which they are of course, for lots of reasons) - this plays into ethnophobia;
- their government, military, etc, is competent, functional with agency - this plays into government legitimacy;
- Overall, in a lot of instances, the Russian government is incompetent, even more incompetent than the guys their propaganda has been trying to paint as corrupt, incompetent people who are being manipulated.
That's why a lot of time Russian propaganda trys to spin Ukrainian wins as "NATO/CIA/MI6/external agent did this".
For example, they tried really hard to bend reality to remove the credit for the Ukrainian drone operation that destroyed a lot of bomber jets, saying it was planned and executed by CIA, MI6, Israel, etc [0].
This is what we're dealing with here: massive ethnophobia and propaganda.
So in their propaganda, Ukraine can't be competent and stand on its merit, because that would mean they're not inferior people and that they have agency.
You should always be wary of someone making these claims without any evidence.
That’s not the meaning behind “Little Russia”, please considering doing a historical deep dive.
libertine · 6h ago
You don't need much of a historical deep dive to see how it's currently being used:
> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]
Ethnical slurs, or any other slurs, change over time. If you go back in time 100+ years in any context, and you use a modern ethnic or racial slur, it will most likely empty of meaning. Just like a lot of slurs from the past have lost their meaning over the years. But the "historical meaning" is constantly being used by Russian propaganda, where they claim one needs to go back to the 1200's, and their interpretation of history, to try to make sense of the current genocide attempt in Ukraine.
There's no logic behind that approach because current actions speak for themselves, including the context of recent history, and that's enough. You can get a pretty clear picture of this whole event starting in the 1990s.
Unless you still see that slur being used by Russian nationalists as an endearing term to address their "brotherly nation" which they support being erased from the map.
Please stop spreading this BS. Малороссия ("little" Russia as you say) does not mean what you say.
libertine · 4h ago
What does it mean in the current Russian political environment?
> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]
Just to make sure, according to you, this is completely false and detached?
But this is a small detail from my reply, why are people so focused on this? Even if I was wrong, which I don't see that I am, everything else still stands.
yurish · 3h ago
So "The Russian regime (and apparently a lot of Russians) deem Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group - they call them "little Russians"." it is? And this follows from the link? Have you read it? Really?
The term Малороссия now days is outdated indeed, as wiki says. This term was first introduced not even by Russia but by Byzantine Church and word "мало" ("little" as you "translate" here) means "original" "primordial" to distinct two church branches and then where used to denote parts of Rus' under Polish rule.
Note, the linked article does not say that Russians use this term to denote someone inferior. It says that some Ukrainians consider this word offensive which is not surprising taking into account active propaganda and lack of historical education in masses.
timeon · 9h ago
Sure, it is always omnipotent Western agencies... while some Western governments are halting support in critical moments - which has bigger impact on the war.
I think Ukrainians (and Russians as well) aren't tech illiterate. They are (both) more than capable in this matter.
bilekas · 7h ago
> So the foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia.
What foreign intelligence services ? Also if you think there isn't a constant barrage of attacks coming from everyone, you're not ready for the real world.
oytis · 10h ago
It doesn't say anything about foreign intelligence services
v5v3 · 10h ago
It's reasonable to read it as implied
vardump · 10h ago
Are you suggesting Ukrainians don't have any agency? It's always someone else?
That position sounds very weird.
I think the most likely explanation is it's the Ukrainians defending Ukraine against Russia's unjustified invasion.
No comments yet
entropyneur · 6h ago
You are free to believe whatever you chose of course and state it here, but the sentence you cited does nothing to support your claim.
dorian-graph · 10h ago
Why?
philipwhiuk · 10h ago
Ukranian military intelligence.
throwawayffffas · 6h ago
No, Ukrainian cyber activists volunteered to work with the intelligence service to help the war effort.
consp · 10h ago
Tomato, tomato. There is a war according to one side so the reasoning is mute, i'd argue the reason is it is easier to recruit the correct people if they do not work directly for the military than this distinction.
OJFord · 6h ago
> Tomato, tomato.
This is a silly expression for written text, since I always read both tomatoes as 'tomato', before realising the intention. :)
gghffguhvc · 10h ago
Likely. But also could have been some thugs with a wrench in a basement and the sys admin giving up the ssh keys and 2fa etc.
HenryBemis · 10h ago
It's Ukraine. Are you aware of the "banks' debt collectors"? They had thugs knocking on your door (and your face) for an overdue loan payment; they would _of course_ use violence/torture to extract information.
HenryBemis · 9h ago
Whoah.. -4..
Fun fact, I was internal auditor in a bank (I will not specify the year(s) for safety/privacy). We did the due diligence and ended up buying a Ukrainian bank. Part of the 'collections' was really to smash people's faces. Believe it or not. But sure.. you know best.
wiseowise · 7h ago
Guess whose influence and where it comes from?
fennecbutt · 7h ago
Yup, I feel like Ukraine has been trying to break away from the society is a meat grinder culture of Russia for a while and the war has made if clear who's on what side locally.
My only qualm with them is their not so great support for gay people, but then during the war ofc the party line is now they love their gay soldiers. Would have been nice to see more action around that beforehand but I get it. Even other first world countries still have plenty of problems as a gay person, especially gay men.
libertine · 7h ago
No, it clearly says Ukraine.
Do you have any evidence that it was foreign intelligence services?
mattxxx · 3h ago
Weird thing: the timestamp on the upper right part of the camera is "01-02-1970" :thinking_face:
jug · 3h ago
Day 1 after the start of the Unix epoch. Looks like a clock with unset/reset date that has had one day pass.
mycall · 3h ago
One day or one month past UNIX Epoch
geoffbp · 3h ago
How many drones would they have destroyed? Couldn’t find that on the article
dmix · 4h ago
Here is a translated version of the telegram message posted by the hacking team:
> LLC “Gaskar Integration” (Gaskar Group)—one of the largest UAV manufacturers in Russia—has just been penetrated right down to the tonsils in the course of demilitarization and denazification.
> VO Team, together with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance (https://t.me/UCAgroup) and another very well‑known organization whose mere mention makes the vatniks’ bottle‑openings burst (https://gur.gov.ua/), carried out large‑scale operations: we seized all of Gaskar Group’s network and server infrastructure, gathered valuable data on their current and prospective UAVs, destroyed that data, and knocked the entire infrastructure offline.
> By the way, from the information we obtained, the PRC is helping Gaskar Group with production and staff training. China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands .
> VO Team focused on wiping out the production complex’s infrastructure. On‑site we erased more than 250 hosts (4 ESXi servers, 46 virtual servers, 200+ workstations) and bricked about 20 MikroTik devices. In total we destroyed 47 TB of valuable data at Gaskar Group—including 10 TB of backups—and disabled all production and auxiliary systems.
> The scum at Gaskar Group have the blood of hundreds of Ukrainian children, women, and elderly on their hands. That’s why we went after this target with special zeal. We now possess the lists of ALL employees, their home addresses, information about their family members, and much more… We’re in your home computers and phones—we’re everywhere . Not a single bastard from Gaskar Group will escape responsibility!
> The sword of Damocles already hangs by a thin thread over your heads. It’s too late to spew excuses like “we’re apolitical” or “we were just making money”….
> The whole world can see that the so‑called Russian Federation has strategically lost everything. Defeat and collapse of that unwashed entity are only a matter of time. VO Team is collecting data on everyone involved in Putin’s criminal war—the deaths of our children, mothers, and all Ukrainians. Retribution is inevitable and is drawing near!
consumer451 · 3h ago
> China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands
Well, this is quite the interesting tidbit. Thanks for posting the translation.
HenryBemis · 10h ago
I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack, and it would be 'easily' attributed/mapped back to the USA causing (political) issues. Well, Ukraine doesn't have 'that' challenge.
On the other hand (and I'm not defending a drone company), anyone that has a business should know by now that ransomware (with our without deletion) is a real thing, and it's not an 'if' question, it's a 'when' question.
I have never worked with/for a Russian company, so it would be interesting to hear/read from someone who has, how 'well organized' are they? GRC-wise. Assuming that someone would run the COBIT framework on them (Russian companies), would the 'average' be 'ok' or it's a big mess (kinda like working for an EU company in early 00's)?
podgorniy · 10h ago
> I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack
This is not a real reason. This explanation hides the real reason: Russia is a valuable geopolitical partner for USA. Regarless who are in power in USA - all presidents tried to make deals/contacts with Russia.
There is no value for USA in getting Russia loose this war, have internal instability or split in 20-ish national states.
USA wins more from russia being as it is today with all it blood, suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the regime thrive for survival.
Actually USA are afraid to push too much to cause internal issues in Russia. And russian ruling class knows that.
perlgeek · 9h ago
I guess another reason is that there isn't too much IT infrastructure that Russian trains depend on.
There are ticket sales systems for people being transported, but much is freight trains, and if there was an easy way to disrupt that, you can be sure that Ukraine would've done it by now, because the Russian military heavily depends on rail-based supplies.
nrvn · 9h ago
cybersecurity 101:
- know your threats
- assess your risks based on identified threats
- backup 3-2-1 strategy (3 copies of your data on 2 independent storage places with 1 copy offline and offsite)
- "build the world from scratch" plan with the assumption that all infra is completely and irreversibly destroyed.
- assume you have already been hacked but you don't yet know about it. Build your indicators of compromise based on that simple assumption.
Observing how some "groups of people" act in a totally ignorant fashion is amusing.
red-iron-pine · 5h ago
are the raw files available online?
alexandrutocar · 5h ago
i would not think so as it involves technology with a military application.
cyber1 · 6h ago
Glory to Ukraine! Slava Ukraini!
helge9210 · 9h ago
AI translation (to English) is off in places. "Ukrainian cybercriminals" is not in the original and was picked as the translation of the closest sounding full word.
raverbashing · 10h ago
While this is a move that will hinder production for a while I'd say maybe they should have been more creative
They should have checked the source codes and added some changes to make drones unpredictably unreliable
"Oh this totally innocent code change? Oh look it makes the gps act weird if longitude is between a certain range how weird"
WJW · 10h ago
When there's hundreds of drones raining down on your civilians every day, just disabling the production has a a higher priority than being cutesy with things that might work further away into the future.
myflash13 · 10h ago
In several cases during World War II, the Allies intentionally allowed German attacks to happen (or did not act to prevent them) to avoid revealing that they had cracked German codes, particularly the Enigma cipher.
jcranmer · 5h ago
Actually, I don't think that's known to have ever happened. The Allies protected Ultra intelligence by parallel construction--coming up with other means to 'discover' the same information (principally, sending a reconnaissance flight to the known location of wolf packs).
The main claim for this myth is the sacrifice of Coventry during the Battle of Britain, but as far as I'm aware, historians are in general agreement that Ultra was unable to ascertain that Coventry was the target before the raid took place.
chasil · 1h ago
"In his 1974 book The Ultra Secret, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham asserted that the British government had advance warning of the attack from Ultra; intercepted German radio messages encrypted with the Enigma cipher machine and decoded by British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. He further claimed that Winston Churchill ordered that no defensive measures should be taken to protect Coventry, lest the Germans suspect that their cipher had been broken."
I don't think that's comparable because the Allies hoped cracking Enigma would reveal other secrets in the future. Ukraine probably aren't worried that Russia are going to do something else more worth interrupting with their drones in the future.
mpeg · 7h ago
Obviously if there was opportunity for a supply chain attack like that they would have done it in addition to wrecking the IT infrastructure. Regardless, I imagine this will impact day to day drone operation as the Russians might re-flash the firmware to a known good version whether there is a backdoor or not
bamboozled · 10h ago
How long do you think it would've taken for them to realize that happened just and reflashed the drones?
ptsneves · 10h ago
You can reflash however you want for some bugs. The deal would be to make it a dormant attack not a destroy all in one go and expose the payload. There have been successful hacks where a buffer overflow was inserted in in a one off write, that was then targeted when needed. If employed carefully in special situations, this could be an important weapon. There are also deeper levels of compromise: why compromise the source code or a the firmware binary when you can permanently compromise the production in a subtle way. Working your penetration slowly so that the whole plant or even production system must be scrapped by the enemy. At the very least gather intel.
Look at successful cyber campaigns like stuxnet or an actual hardware sabotage from Israel. The attacks were dormant until they were ready for maximum effect.
Randomly disabling a production site, without a strategic context, is going to be an isolated win, or an operational victory.
I remember reading some articles about the pentagon being a bit upset at some of the strategic decisions of Ukraine's armed forces where they often push for morale boosting moments at big costs(i think 2 years ago they spent lots of resources to get a strategically irrelevant town). And honestly this is also what it looks like: You dont see a coordinated attack but spurious disconnected events. I think when you are gasping for air you hold on to anything you can, but still the goal is to win, not just look like winning.
littlestymaar · 9h ago
> The attack destroyed over 47 TB of critical data,
I'm very dubious that there would be such an amount of “critical” data pretty much anywhere, besides the banking and insurance sector. And particularly not at a drone manufacturer.
dogleash · 5h ago
Depends on how you slice it.
If you focus only on data with high-uptime requirements, no probably not 50 TB.
If you include low-uptime requirement but low-replaceability stuff like all the products' mechanical, electrical and software designs, documentation and artifacts? Easily 50 TB.
zulban · 6h ago
Training data like audio, pictures, and video perhaps.
Mashimo · 6h ago
Probably added all raw disk sizes together. Or all the data, including duplicates.
93po · 5h ago
The source of this news is the Ukrainian military which seems to exaggerate and spread propaganda (as does every other country of course). I don't know why we accept this information as reliable.
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
You don't have to. In fact, your best bet is to wait for Gaskar's response and/or the UA publishing trophies. But the lack of immediate corroboration for a clandestine cyber op doesn't somehow mean it probably didn't happen.
consumer451 · 4h ago
I am genuinely curious, what are the known examples of them exaggerating and spreading propaganda, regarding operations like this?
93po · 43m ago
Ghost of Kyiv was recognized by Ukraine itself as a myth. Snake Island "go fuck yourself" was misrepresented (they were killed vs captured), plenty of others:
There's also just endless small stuff (shorts/tiktoks/cam footage) on social media (reddit) that really does not pass the sniff test.
I think what Russia is doing is terrible, I am not defending them at all. I am just allergic to bullshit, and there is plenty of smelly things happening on the Ukrainian side, though of course I recognize the Russians are especially bad in this regard.
consumer451 · 38m ago
The ghost of Kyiv was recognized as a myth at the time of it's spread. The Snake Island story is understandable. Every country makes mistakes about KIA vs. MIA.
I was not very clear, but I meant Ukrainian intelligence services claiming operational success where there was none. It's also interesting that this Wikipedia entry appears devoid of UA false propaganda after 2022. I wonder if they realized that this was not a good Wiki entry on which to appear.
roody15 · 5h ago
Ukrainian hackers ….? Hmm
drweevil · 6h ago
And we believe this why? A Ukrainian web site, no independent corroboration. All righty then.
giingyui · 5h ago
Why not? It paints Ukrainians as ingenious, and makes it look like they will win the war with their suave cleverness, so this is a great candidate for an upvote.
baby · 2h ago
What's interesting is that this whole challenge is making Russia stronger. Russia has increased its military industry and its now running full steam. Every attack is giving them an opportunity to harden. All of that is meaningless if it makes Russia stronger and more resilient to embargos and cyber/physical attacks in the long run.
For all of this to have meaning it has to have a fall of USSR kind of impact at some point, otherwise we just strengthened one of the world's most dangerous state.
brentm · 2h ago
Of course but also Ukraine doesn't have the privilege to care about the long term right now. You can't lose the battle today to win the war that you may never live to fight.
zaptheimpaler · 1h ago
Russia recently announced that they want to import millions of immigrants now, likely because they massacred a big chunk of their young workforce. Their economy and production capacity is slowly crumbling, political dissent is rising. I don't think they're getting stronger.
tim333 · 1h ago
It's just a feature of long running wars that both sides boost their military. Russia is stronger in some ways but weaker in others.
immibis · 2h ago
Are they? They're running at full stream and yet they're still in a years-long stalemate in Ukraine?
Authoritarian governments always fail, because they get used to achieving everything by simply ordering it to be achieved, while the laws of physics don't obey orders.
Meanwhile they're murdering how many of their own soldiers per day?
One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour.
And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more.
This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.
Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task.
I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared. The poor two IT guys over there has no idea how to recover and the official help was pityful.
I also helped with a ransomware attack on a large company. The effort people had to do to remember why something was that way, or just remember whatever was colossal. Sure a lot of things were "documented" and "tested" but reality hit hard.
However, because in a previous life I'd been responsible for backups and involved in disaster recovery planning I was already kind of prepared with:
- a mirrored on site copy of backups (that they either didn't find or chose to leave behind)
- older hardware that had once been performing the duties of the existing seized gear (I'm a bit of a hoarder, I like repurposing or keeping for just such an occasion)
- multiple off site backups
- pretty good documentation of my setup
I was back up and running within a day or two and had lost maybe a couple of days of data. And it's a home lab, so nothing super important anyway, but a (not really) nice resilience test.
It also gave me the experience to work out a few structural changes to further limit the impact of an event that takes out a bunch of processing and storage.
(After 8 months they told me to pick up all my gear, they found nothing, but thanks for traumatising my kids)
Possibly the worst thing to be raided for: distribution of CSAM.
Apparently based purely on the 'evidence' of my IP address being on some list - that's the only explanation I ever got.
Funny thing is, they did so little background research they didn't even know to expect kids in the house when they raided at 6:30am.
It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.
The long version I haven't written yet and probably never will. I don't want to dwell on it, I want to get on with my life and have an even worse drama to deal with at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533637
I know I'm alive, that's for sure. I'm trying to make lemonade by the goddamn bucket load.
P.S. I have written prior HN comments referring to the raid if you care enough to go back that far.
My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.
I wasn't arrested or charged, they found nothing of what they were looking for on the multi terabytes of disks they seized. No further action other than the raid.
Sure you can sue anybody for anything. Whether your case actually gets heard or not is another consideration. And even if it gets heard, the judge can simply dismiss it for a variety of reasons before proceeding to trial.
Also, state and the federal governments have sovereign immunity and qualified immunity. Basically the government has to allow itself to be sued.
True this doesn't apply to counties or cities, however there is still a much higher bar for tort even for local police. Generally if they are operatikng within the law, like executing a valid search warrant, the standard is much higher than it would be for an average citizen.
We looked into anything that could be done to minimise the chances of such a thing happening to innocent parties, but the only option was to make a complaint about an individual officer. There's no (easy, obvious) way to question the system they use to determine "validity" of raids or due diligence prior to requesting a warrant, or evidence required to justify a warrant.
The whole thing just felt to me like it was blindly rubber stamped all the way through because "protect the children". Pity my daughter was a child and absorbs such experiences... My son was also a child, but he's less affected by such things.
Meerly suffering harm from government action is not sufficient. Having property impounded as part of an investigation, pursuant to a warrant, is likely not actionable, unless there was malice involved. Using slim evidence isn't really actionable.
When the police abuse their power, it's the community that pays their salaries that feels the pain.
A few months from now, I'd love to have written down decisions for my current project:
- Why did I decided to use Kysely over Drizzle, Knex, Prisma, TypeORM or other ORM/SQL tool?
- How am I going to do migrations?
- Why am I using one of Deno/Bun over sticking to nodejs?
- Why did I structure the project as a directory per feature over controllers/models/services directories?
- Why did I fork this library and what are the steps to keep this thing updated? Do I plan to upstream my changes? Is there a GitHub issue or PR about it?
- Why am I hosting in one of AWS/GCP/Azure? Why not lambda functions? Why docker?
- Why did I pick this specific distribution of kubernetes over the other also lightweight alternatives?
- Why did I even start this project and what do I aim to accomplish with it?
So I created a # Decisions section in README.md
This way I don't keep doubting my own decisions and wasting time opening 20 documentation tabs to compare solutions yet again.
Of course, you have a relatively high profile, so could probably avoid it/get it reversed.
I've also tried a mechanism where I have GitHub Actions write them out as JSON files in the repo itself, then I can git clone them in one go: https://gist.github.com/simonw/0f906759afd17af7ba39a0979027a... and https://github.com/simonw/fetch-github-issues
Technical decisions used to be in the daily-notes.org file, but keeping in a separate file makes it more accessible to LLMs. I actually started that practice before LLMs were in common use, I struggle to remember why.
Should that "why" be in technical-decisions.org or daily-notes.org?
Lots of things can keep going with pen and paper or some cloud software.
At the very least, you have to communicate with your clients.
No comments yet
most companies started rebooting the mainframe every six months to ensure they could restart it.
It went surprisingly well despite having stayed 15 years in the old DC without rebooting. They were super scared of exactly the case you described but except for some minor issues (and a lot of cussing) it was OK.
Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.
Either that bites you sooner or later, or you're lucky and grow; suddenly, you're a larger organisation, and there are way too many moving parts to start from scratch. So you do a half-hearted attempt of creating a backup strategy held together by duct-tape and hope, that kinda-sorta should work in the worst case, write some LLM-assisted documentation that nobody ever reads, and carry on. You're understaffed and overworked anyway, people are engaging in shadow IT, your actual responsibilities demand attention, so that's the best you can do.
And then you've grown even bigger, you're a reputable company now, and then the consultants and auditors and customers with certification requirements come in. So that's when you actually have to put in the work, and it's going to be a long, gruesome, exhausting, and expensive project. Given, of course, that nobody fucks up in the mean time.
I can go back to code I wrote months or years ago, and assuming I architectured and documented it idiomatically, I takes me only a bit of time to start being able to reason about it effectively.
With infrastructure is it a whole different story. Within weeks of not touching it (which happens if it just works) I start to have trouble retaining a good mental model of it. if I have to dig into it, I'll have to spend a lot of time getting re-acquainted with how it all fits together again.
Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server.
It turns out that the company that made this important piece of software doesn't even exist anymore.
This is around the time when you call that one guy on your team that can reverse engineer and patch out the license check.
This is why I like docker, if you keep the sources, you recover no matter what (at least until the "no matter what" holds water)
my understanding is that docker would not have helped in that scenario
Possibly with the same network settings if the licensing check was based on that.
But of course it can easily go south, though testing the recovery of a container based off an image and mounted volume is simple and quickly shows you if it works or not.
But of course it may work today but not tomorrow because the software was not ready for Y2K and according to it we are in the XX century or something and the license is 156 years ... young. Cannot allow this nonsense to proceed, call us at <defunct number>
IT is full of joy and happiness
yeah and that scenario was clear:
> Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server.
I think this is an outdated view. In modern enterprises DR is often one of the most crucial (and difficult) steps in building the whole infra. You select what is crucial for you, you allocate the budget, you test it, and you plan the date of the next test.
However, I'd say it's very rare to do DR of everything. It's terribly expensive and problematic. You need to choose what's really important to you based on defined budgets.
This all got stored in the cloud, but also locally in our office, and also written onto a DVD-R, all automatically, all verified each time.
Our absolute worst case scenario would be less than an hour of downtime, less than an hour of data loss.
Similarly our dev environments were a watered down version of the live environment, and so if they were somehow lost, they could be restored in the same manner - and again, frequently tested, as any merge into the preprod branch would trigger a new dev environment to automatically spin up with that codebase.
It takes up-front engineering effort to get in place, but it ended up saving our bacon twice, and made our entire pipeline much easier and faster to manage.
"No, Restore is" I would say to stunned faces...
Half of the work is to know what you need, the other half is to know how you do it, while the third half is to cope with all the undocumented tinkering which happened along the way. So in that regard, starting from scratch can be acceptable, as long you are not starting from zero, and can build up on the knowledge and experience of the previous run(s). I mean, there is a whole gaming-genre about this, which is quite popular. And usually you have the benefit that you might be able to fix some fundamental failures which you had to ignore because nobody wanted to take the risk.
I'm curious about how you got in the door here. Very cool, but isn't healthcare IT notoriously cagey about access? I've had to do PHI training and background checks before getting into the system at my (admittedly only 2) PHI-centered jobs.
Granted, if it was such an emergency, I could see them rushing you through a lite version of the HR onboarding process. Did you have a connection in the hospital through whom you offered your services?
- daily backup locale + remote (blackbaze with 60 readonly retention strategy, separated bucket by service)
- monthly offline backup
- a preprod server where my users can restore entiere environment for testing purpose (CI)
in case of full house fire, i can be back online in an working day.
PS: i have only some TBs of data so quite easy to do.
Imo, nix is more finnicky but more of a complete solution than ansible.
Um, sorry but what do you mean ?
How did they prevent threat actors presenting themselves as volunteers, were you vetted?
A far bigger risk is accepting incompetent volunteers if anything.
Sure it can help, but it's just not a one fix solution people thing. If you want a good test of your IAC, just provisioning a brand new environment first time using only your iac.
Huh? This is a strange assumption to make. Is your premise that IAC can't ever be truly reproducible?
If you are modifying things manually then you're not doing IAC.
DeMars launched, and procurement basically stopped for a year. Only the items my friend was in charge of remained in stock, through out the launch/roll-out process.
Switching to a new system; even when it is for the better, is a painful, expensive process.
The company that I worked for, did a successful transition to SAP, but it took about two years, and a lot of butthurt.
It's a bit surprising that we don't have that feature as a requirement for most IT infrastructure. It would make it so much more usable.
"Understandable and fixable" depends more on the complexity of the application rather than the fact it's in Excel.
Most of the projects we did in consultancy dev, was turning that one critical excel sheet nobody but 'the excel guy' understands into a simple to use web application, so that everybody could use it and the business won't explode when mr. excel would leave the shop.
Saved to someone's desktop, or some random directory no one knows about.
Probably also depends on the complexity of the orders and workflows.
As an old software engineer, I can say with certainty that software engineering is a very, VERY wasteful practice. We could all be running Windows 3 right now, DOS, or some old Unix. The overhead involved in making actual advancements shows our slow progress as a species, and that we’re in a thread discussing a drone manufacturing facility being blown up in a war and how much that matters.
I think the natives had it right to live off of the land peacefully, and if anything to devote full time on science to determining what we do to help life survive in the universe.
I can't agree with you. People have got their human mind as a result of ever increasing and self-inflicted costs driven by a competition among males. They developed minds to play politics and they came to a point when 20% of metabolism of human body was devoted to its brain.
The result of such a wasteful way to spend their energy resources? Humans colonized all the Earth, drove to the extinction almost all big animals, and now there are as much humans on the Earth as mosquitos. Looks like a win, doesn't it?
These things go off the rails sometimes. Just today I've found a new example to it:
highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.[1]
The waste of resources into useless things doesn't lead to good outcomes each time, but I believe that software engineering will lead to something. I'm not Jesus, I can't predict exactly what the beneficial results will be, but at least I can point to a growing ability of engineers of handling complexity. It lags behind their ability to create complexity, but still it grows.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about...
I swear this is SAPs main business model
Just endless consulting bills to set it up then fix it when it's delivered in a broken state.
I was acquired by a company that was working on Sales Force integration for 3 years, I left before it was fully functional.
They had 4 full time devs working on Sales Force, meanwhile we had built the entire company in a year with 4 devs.
I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally.
Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16).
In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now.
Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?
Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
> Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing,
I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all.
In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale.
Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users.
Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it.
> And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that.
USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML).
Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs.
Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
Russia has multiple home-grown office suites. Besides MS Office, the market leader still is full of bugs that harken back decades.
They also have multiple commercial CAD programs (KOMPAS, T-FLEX) that scale up to everything including airliners.
As for those 'western' top programmers, especially good ones, you'd be surprised how many of them are from post-USSR countries, including Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.).
As for chips they are behind (for reasons beyond the scope of my post), but the post mainly extended to software, in which, many of the supposed crown jewels of the West (aka US) have been replicated quite successfully in other parts of the world including Russia.
Western support to Ukraine has been a real joke - https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2025/0...
The US is a rich and (despite all you may hear) generous country. If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
Interestingly, $35 billion of that went to 'International affairs'. I would assume Ukraine was a significant part of that, but I don't know for sure.
https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2025-u-s-charitable-giving-...
That's a single-digit percentage of the US Federal budget.
Some of that goes to "family foundation" sinecures. Some of it goes to 10% church tithes. Quite a bit of it is spent on… raising funds. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-giving-to-charity-ask-wher... - "Of the more than $1.3 billion raised by charities in the [New York] in 2018, about $369 million — or 27% — went to pay professional fundraisers' fees")
> If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
I think that's wildly optimistic, but that'd be somewhere between $3-5B. The US alone has earmarked something like $200B thus far. The EU has given a similar amount.
Every bit undoubtedly counts, but a single Patriot battery costs $1B.
So the support from Western countries is enormous, considering all these aspects.
People aren't being dragged off the streets in Russia. This was briefly true in mid-late 2022 when they flirted with a partial mobilization, but hasn't been true for a while.
This is (sadly) actually more true in Ukraine. But there's also some nuance there - they can stop and question but supposedly they technically can't use physical force anymore.
What Russia is doing is increasing the bonuses and salary for signing a contract. And they don't have manpower problems for the most part - Ukraine is the one having that problem.
Now the Russian military is doing alot of shady shit, like promising recruits they won't be sent to Ukraine or would serve only in rear areas (even the US military recruiters were frequently guilty of this tactic). Classifying certain infantry units as "disposable" (especially foreign recruits and those from less politically unimportant regions), basically to be used as bait in assaults. And I'm sure the pressure for the required conscripts every year to sign a regular contract so they can be deployed is quite great, but its nothing like what some would have us believe.
Even accounting systems are able to usually run fairly independently.
It’s not that IT and business and manufacturing support software engineers don’t help, but they aren’t necessary, especially if they’re just making the same thing over and over.
You could also be making surgical parts that help save lives.
Overall though, I think I’d rather be making nice practical furniture that hopefully people would never throw away. While I support people that want to protect, war is horrible.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logiciel_unique_%C3%A0_vocatio...
Is this sarcasm?
Drones have revolutionized reconnaissance, sabotage, and munitions interception. Relative to their material cost, they can be terrifically destructive, and with the advances in image recognition in the past decade some are able to operate even when affected by electronic signal jamming. This is some very cyberpunk shit going on right now.
This was obviously a very high-value target, and Ukraine has shown themselves again to be masters of asymmetric warfare: taking out a sizable chunk of Russia's long range bombers using drones smuggled across Russia, and now impacting one of the centers of Russia's drone manufacturing. It is difficult to see how the war will end, but it is clear that Ukraine is not about to stop fighting.
War didn't end the first time man invented the longer spear; defenses adapt.
Not even that. The new hotness are the fiber optic cable ones that don't even use radio signals, that's some scary stuff.
They could be using version control for their software with every developer having all of the software they have developed for their products git-cloned to their development machines. Assuming a modest development team working with version control (who doesn't), then you do have to wonder if they have lost the crown jewels. I suspect not.
It is going to be a similar situation with everything else such as CAD files. People will have local copies because it is quicker to work that way.
As for the company emails and general office files, sure they might have lost lots of that, but that isn't going to be the end of the world.
The website is also part of the company and you would expect the elite hackers to have taken that down but no they have not, that works just fine.
Then there is the product itself. If you have been following the war closely then you will know what drones are in use at a given time. We might not get to know all of the drones as well as the heavy hitters, however, the name of this company is not something that the keenest watcher of the SMO will be familiar with. It is not as if they have shut down Geranium 2 production, is it?
As for yourself, and how you write, is that ChatGPT speaking?
The reason I ask is that we all know about things such as version control so I wonder if there is common sense or ChatGPT going on with your comment.
It is possible that FPV drones are showing up as so important because Russia is committed to a disgusting meat sluice of fodder to achieve its marginal territory gains.
Most countries don’t have the appetite for those kind of losses. Most countries, frankly, don’t have the audacity to set these kinds of war aims.
I predict they won’t matter too much to the war meta. At least not so much as cheap long range jet drones which are also becoming significant here.
If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems probably have cycles in their deployment dependencies. Your config pusher is deployed from Jenkins/Puppet/Ansible but 2 years ago someone made Jenkins dependent on the config pusher for its own config. Now you cannot just deploy these systems in order, you have to replay the history before that change.
Bootstrapping from zero will never be easy and will always take some time. I don't think you can prepare your way out of this, short of preparing a fully redundant, fully separate secondary infrastructure.
Testing this reliably is difficult, though, and often these procedures and their documentation is outdated.
What you can do is to have a sandbox environment where you periodically do a full setup exercise from a prepper disk. Conceptually it's not that different from testing backup recovery (ok, most companies neglect this too, so maybe you have a point :) ).
Which gives me an idea for an "Ask HN"... Edit: submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44582994
The people who put together the doctrine on 4th Generation Warfare talked about the blurring of civilian and military. Rules of engagement gets fuzzier.
The article might be a collage of several other articles, and they didn't check for consistency.
I would love some other term for the aligned side people in cyberwarfare, sort of "cybersoldier" or "networkmilitia", not already somehow cliched in some film. "Cyberactivists" sounds like online protesters (in facebook and such)
The people who illegally obtained classified information to leak to WikiLeaks have made a political impact: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/26/wikilea... as well as reprisals in the form of arrests and prosecutions.
We also call Greenpeace "activists", but they also employed violent direct-action in their efforts against whaling.
Carl Icahn calls himself a shareholder activist, and many people still consider him a vulture capitalist.
Definitely one of the companies that everyone has heard of before. No need to mention any of their brand or product names, they're that famous.
$3 million revenue in 2024.
I'm sure we'll hear more about the epic defeat of this major military supplier in the future.
Deliberately blocking the supposed enemy from hearing you does strike me as irrational, though. The mere fact they're doing Russian censors' job should probably make them recheck if they got anything wrong in their decision process, just in case.
>that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia
Giving up is the easiest thing to do. Last time some people did, it was blamed on stereotypes like their "learned helplessness" and "fatalism".
Revolutions don't work without alignment from power centers like the police, military, judiciary, and a subset of legislators.
Hosni Mubarak wasn't overthrown because of protesters in Tahrir Square - he was overthrown because General Sisi decided to ignore shoot-on-sight orders.
There's no reason for Ukraine media to create a literal attack surface when most Russians already have a decent idea of what is happening in Ukraine (and vice versa) - most Russians and Ukrainians have blood relatives on both sides of the border.
Some non-Ukrainian do as well, seemingly with no rhyme or reason, I run into this so routinely that I have an entire thread: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/111934602844613193
https://archive.ph/jg9Mg
Somebody saved it four hours ago.
I suppose it could be used sparingly but Ukraine would have no way of knowing when to use it. Perhaps a Bluetooth or whatever else the drone has on board "keep away" beacon for vips.
The real enemy is QA. Don't want it misbehaving during a virtual test flight.
So the foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia.
meanwhile, russian intelligence services have already directly attacked nato countries, with barely any real deniability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxqcwK5OMag
> Wars aren't, and really never have been, won by blowing stuff up.
That's a huge simplification. Blowing stuff up in a strategic way can certainly help win a war.
And losing public support for an effort via an embarassing disaster can just as certainly lose it, which was my point.
Yes yes yes, blow stuff up. Take territory, shoot people, yada yada. At some point that has to happen for a "war" to be a "war". But at the end of the day the winner is essentially always predetermined by economics and politics. Making deployment decisions in the absence of those considerations is generally how one loses wars.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerangriffe_auf_den_Deutsch...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_... https://praguemorning.cz/russian-terrorist-plot-czech-republ...
Bulgaria: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/01/arms-dealer-10...
Poland: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/12/poland-to-clos...
And UK.
Plus a million cyberattacks against all sorts of infrastructure.
Now, predictably upon being told that it happens you pivot to NATO is useless.
Which is it: a set of attacks so obscure no reasonable person would be aware, or a horrendous onslaught where Article 5 should have been invoked and a mass retaliation begun?
NATO countries historically didn't invoke Article 5 even for terrorist attacks killing their own citizens. It takes a certain level before it makes sense to invoke, normally something beyond the capacity of that country to handle.
The only time Article 5 has been invoked was when terrorists attacked America in 9/11.
And a lot of non-NATO countries offered support too, including Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participants_in_Operation_Endu...
In other words, and following Eastern-European logic (which, trust me, helps in cases like this one, I'm from Eastern Europe myself), had Russia really attacked any NATO countries you and me both wouldn't be in here having this conversation over the internet.
This was already answered but to be clear: ”doing something” and ”invoking article 5” is like the difference between saying ”asshole” in traffic vs rallying your friends to murder the driver’s family.
One could argue NATO countries should respond stronger to hybrid and clandestine warfare. Right now, we see a lot of ”angry letters”. But, it’s not clear eye for an eye is a strategically sound response, partly because it legitimizes the methods, and partly because it escalates tensions towards a war that nobody wants. Israel for instance takes an entirely different stance, basically retaliating with maximum force to deter the enemy (similar to punching the ”school bully” so hard, just once, that he stops). I don’t claim to be a diplomatic expert, but it’s worth noting that Israel is currently engaged in several major wars and conflicts, and tensions have grown.
Is there a threshold anywhere in the NATO treaty that I'm unaware of?
The Russian military is already being destroyed in Ukraine (and even in Russia). The proportionate response is to give Ukraine everything they need to destroy Russia in a war that Russia chose to start. A war that they opened with a surprise invasion, no less. They are unambiguously the aggressor in their war in Ukraine and they should be defeated there, and we should give Ukraine everything they need to do that.
Russian and Ukrainian militaries are being destroyed, but it also matters how fast they are being rebuilt. As mentioned above, Russia and Ukraine are debugging all their outdated military doctrines. The survivors will have a lot of hard-won experience.
They are very intentionally doing things that would not justify a full military retaliation by NATO.
the west would not want russia to be that survivor.
Tell that to the very pro-Western political leaders here in Eastern Europe, they won't take that well at all.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm
So I don't see why it would be the case that Ukraine could not have done this by themselves. They have done previous attacks by themselves. I don't see why that would be the case.
It would kind of be like saying, "Oh, if Russia does a cyberattack, it can't have been them acting alone. It must have been China that gave them the stuff to just press a button."
It's not speculation that Ukraine is being assisted to a huge degree.
One angle of that assistance: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-...
The point is that US made Ukraine do something that the US wanted to do but did not do because were it the US, then it would have had repercussions on US, so they made Ukraine do their dirty work.
China etc have seen the strategies used in sanctions. They know how to limit their impact now.
It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.
It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.
And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.
A disaster for the west, aside from their weapons companies/Ukrainian investments. And any NATO spend increases.
Russia itself has been the biggest loser. Massive budget deficits, massive inflation. 1M of its smartest people have moved abroad. 1M Russian casualties in the war. Demographics and economy are disastrous.
That and Russia is now a pariah state. No one is going to invest there for a very long time after what Russia did.
Russia is hedging that the "pariah state" label will wear off pretty quickly. The current US government has as recently as March floated the idea of normalising business ties, and constantly flip-flops it's position.
However, the biggest loser has definitely been Europe (including Britain). High energy prices have cascaded the cost of living crisis, which in turn has led to a rightward shift in politics. As a continent, we are unprepared for any sort of defence, having used the US as a backstop for years and now the US constantly toys with the idea of dropping NATO support. Alone, we don't have enough manpower, ammunition, and we haven't been keeping up with the evolution of modern warfare (drones and related technology) taking place in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Remember Russia in 3 years had: - 1 Military coup;
- Lost 50% of the Black Sea Fleet and it's now unusable;
- 1.000.000+ casualties (dead and severely wounded)
- Mass exodus of qualified young people;
- Lost Military allies from CSTO and rendered the alliance into a joke;
- Completely lost presence in the Middle East (I don't see how they will recover from it);
- Losing influence in neighboring countries;
The list goes on, like demographic collapse, etc
So, I find it hard to see Europe as the loser here; at worst, Europe is doing "ok".
Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending (from a low starting point) to meet the new US governments requirements are exacerbating the cost of living crisis continent wide. Europe already wasn't innovating, and is now losing the small amount of industry it does have, to energy prices, to China's entry into EV production, and EU regulation. The demands to spend more on our own defence by the US administration comes from a US administration which has flirted with the idea of not even defending NATO.
The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum. In my country, the UK, Reform, a politically inept and untested party is currently leading in the polls for the next election. This party, as well as many like it in Europe, is even leading in the polls despite well known Russian political influence in them.
On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps. Immigration, which is lowering wages and in many peoples eyes, changing their cultural landscape for the worse, increasing their likelihood in voting for fringe political parties.
As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now. We hear constantly about ammunition and weapons shortages across Europe, failure to meet requirements for what Ukraine needs to fight back, and a general unwillingness from the population to even fight. Russia has oil, gas, and mineral wealth, which will always be of importance to Europe whenever this war does end. Europe is so reliant, that whatever words are spoken, the EU has spent more on Russian energy than it has sent in aid to Ukraine.
Energy prices are going down, and have been going down consistently ( https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil ) and the new US Admin wants them even lower, and they're not alone. So that's settled. Defense spending will also be met with investment, jobs, etc.
But if you think Europe is having it bad in terms of using taxpayers money to fund wars... what do you think is happening to Russian taxpayers money, with a much smaller economy?
> The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum.
Inflation is affecting everyone. Not Europe in any particular way.
Again, if you think that's bad for Europe, you look at Russia is being completely destroyed with inflation. I don't even think they're reporting the fake numbers of how bad things are, every quarter they prohibit more data from coming out...
> On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps.
Again, if you think that's a problem in Europe... how does Russia compare with qualified people leaving, 1.000.000 young men casualties, low birth rates, aging population? Europe isn't speedrunning its demographic collapse like Russia is.
> As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now.
So, to sum it up, you highlighted a few points that are by many orders of magnitude worse in Russia. Even counting energy, since Ukraine has been taking out distribution and refining capacity (and my guess is that it will get worse) - somehow you still think Europe is in a worse shape and position.
And a lot of your claims don't make much logical sense: "Europe is in bad shape, they can't even properly help Ukraine", in a context of Russia with 1.000.000+ casualties, max military production capacity, using North Korean Army help, and failing to make any meaningful gains at heavy costs...
I'm not even stating the fact that Russia will inevitably have to surrender that territory back to Ukraine, in the future anyway, because no country will ever recognize their occupied territory as part of Russia.
So to sum up your "Europe is unable, and Russia is giving their max" scope doesn't help your case at all, just shows that Russia has massive unrecoverable problems, even trying with everything they have...
You ended up supporting what I said. Europe is OK, while Russia can collapse at any moment - that's being on the line.
Just to bring you back to reality: no European country had part of their military going on a straight line to its capital to take down the government, and that happened to Russia around 2 years ago - that's not a good sign.
Everyone there is doing fine.
The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
And if you say somebody doing badly, you will get 10 years in gulag.
As long as they don't say anything critical against the regime. Or have the misfortune of flying in/around Russia while morons are at the trigger of surface to air missiles (cf. MH17 and Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243). Or have the misfortune of getting conscripted to die in the meat grinder.
> The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
Yes, Russia, the known beacon of journalistic freedom. How many journalists have been murdered by the regime?
The fact that those Wikipedia sections / articles exist is very telling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Gazeta#Deaths_and_attac...
> media control there by western media brands.
Anyone blindly lumping together all "western" media is not to be taken seriously. Especially when comparing with fucking Russia of all places. You can find plenty of disagreements in various "western" media (consider The Guardian vs Financial Times vs Le Figaro vs Le Monde vs NY Times vs Washington Post). Nobody dares contradict the official line in Russia, even calling the war a war, or they get tortured and murdered.
Lmao, food prices skyrocketed, quality plummeted, interest rates are at record highs, budget deficit. Totally doing fine, comrade.
Many large businesses have returned to Russia. "No one is going to invest" is a naive childish thinking. They outperformed growth expectations in 2024, unemployment rate dropped from 5.8% in 2020 to 2.3% in 2025. GDP is surging, insane tech and energy investments from China. Plus Russia has a very low public debt. All in all, their economy is pretty resilient despite what they say in the mainstream media.
Because a massive amount of men were conscripted?
> GDP is surging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Spending ~30% of the country's budget on military hardware that will get blown up might look good, GDP wise, but is utterly unproductive.
That's an emotional oversimplification. Unemployment fell not because of conscription, but due to massive import substitution and rising labor demand in construction, logistics and manufacturing.
Despite sanctions, Russia's ruble-adjusted budget deficit remains manageable, and the trade balance is strong due to record energy exports. Military spending has driven industrial revitalization. Factories reopened, supply chains revamped and domestic R&D expanded.
Whether you agree with the morality or not, economically it’s not just money burned. It has multiplier effects: jobs, tech development and regional growth. Dismissing that is lazy.
The Europeans are getting their act together and increasing their cooperation and defense spending.
Sweden and Finland joined NATO, placed large defense orders and started integrating with the British.
France has started talking about expanding its nuclear arsenal to cover the defense needs of the entire continent.
While the Russian military has gained tremendous military experience, they have lost huge amounts of top tier kit.
They are now essentially dependent on China.
No one came to aid Iran during the Israeli air campaign, the Russians were too busy and the Chinese didn't care enough.
The main winner has clearly been China, but the US and the EU have not really lost anything. If anything everyone that is not a party to the war is coming of a bit stronger.
And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there; it's literally a special grave digging operation. Soviet stockpiles of armor are basically depleted; now it's the buggy and moped meta. They've completely failed to support their supposed allies (i.e. Assad, Iran, Armenia). A good chunk of their strategic aviation fleet is gone. Car bombings of generals continue all over Russia and occupied territories, which brings the question, will it even stop if they "win"? They've finally been demoted from being an aircraft carrier operating nation. Their frozen assets are literally killing Russian soldiers. National wealth fund has ~20-30% of the prewar assets. Something similar in gold reserves. Interest rates are beyond effed, and recruits are largely joining for the money needed in the terrible economy caused by Putin himself. Who annexed 4 oblasts only to legally deploy the 18 year olds Putin promised not to deploy in Ukraine (as it's no longer Ukraine in Russian law). Non-military industrial output is on a steady decline. Price capping on bread. Fossil fuel output at minimums, and with low prices.
So what is Russia winning at?
Considering the current rate of inflation, switching the EU economies to war production would save so much money and lives, and bring down prices.
All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense.
Sure they can bomb from afar. But even of they take the Ukraine now, they have no force to hold it with.
I believe their plan was to capture Kyiv and install puppet government, and have the military collapse into factions and unable to coordinate effectively as a conventional force. Paramilitary groups would break out (such as the Azov units, etc.) Ukraine would then degrade into civil war, especially along an east-west line.
But at least, it would be dysfunctional and unable to join EU or NATO. And they would be able to control enough to extract some value out of the country (e.g. natural resources). But they never really care about establishing peace and prosperity there.
Right? Right? Putin totally only planned a multi-year stalemate where he lost his best troops on a dash to capture Kyiv. Totally!
> All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense.
I'm genuinely curious what your information diet/sources looks like that would lead you to make such statements.
According to Ukrainian sources, Russian end strength in Ukraine continues to increase and they are maintaining a strategic reserve of personnel as well:
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-plans-to-increase-groupin... The Russian military plans to increase its grouping in Ukraine by 150,000 soldiers in 2025, equivalent to around 15 motorized infantry divisions, Presidential Office Deputy Head Pavlo Palisa said on April 3, Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne reported.
"Their formation is ongoing. The Russians have no problems with recruiting personnel now..."
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/syrskyi-warns-russia-stockpi... "Moreover, Russia maintains an additional 121,000 troops in its strategic reserve—comprising 13 divisions, as well as various regiments and brigades—that could be deployed to the battlefield if necessary."
"This means their army grows by an average of 8,000 to 9,000 soldiers every month," the Commander-in-Chief noted.
As for Russia only being able to defend, how do you square that with this Finnish analysis group's tracking of Russian territorial control rates increasing every month this year?
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1l30kb...
That data roughly matches one of Reddit's most prolific meta-analysts, who mostly uses Suriyak data (the most reputable Russian mapper):
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1lpspn...
Israel and the US's stance with Iran, was something not as plausible when Russian strength existed in the region. Russia complained and threatened, but naturally nothing has come of it. They have no capacity to do anything, or project power. There is no Russian strength in the Middle East any more. Why? They cannot extend their power beyond their borders.
This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).
Using reserve troops is what Russia could do if their back was to the wall. They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within. Remember, Russia is not a democracy, but a totalitarian state controlled by a dictator with an iron fist. If their 'reserves' are drawn down too far, there will be insurgency.
Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops. And it doesn't discount what I'm saying. They have lost their capacity to project power, and are now relying upon mercenaries to shore up their troop levels. They're spent.
This has more to do with the Syrian military being completely starved of resources, particularly money, due to the US occupying the most lucrative portions of sovereign Syrian territory for years. Not having Russian airpower on call absolutely contributed to the collapse but not being able to reliably pay/staff formerly-capable formations like the Tiger Forces or 4th Armored Division (in addition to not being able to afford reconstruction) is what really did the regime in. Watch this from 2019:
https://www.youtube.com/live/MFsFOS5Odno?si=xry8-a2_cKLIRKW-...
>This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).
The Russians have been domestically mass producing their versions of the Shahed-series drones for a while now. Interruptions in arms transfers due to Iran's own security problems are unlikely to significantly degrade Russia's drone salvos at this point.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55948 The organization calculated that Russia produced an average of 60.5 Geran drones per day, or roughly 1,850 drones per month, between February and April 2025.
https://www.calibredefence.co.uk/shahed-and-geran-the-evolut... Over time, a separate version emerged which is known as the Geran-2, which is the name given to Shaheds made in Russia. Russia now makes hundreds of these drones every week, enabling it to increase its usage to 200 per week in September 2024, and then to 1,000 per week by March 2025.
> They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within.
Who do you think will stage a revolt, with both Navalny and Prigozhin dead? There's not really any charismatic opposition leadership left that I can think of.
> They have lost their capacity to project power
Ok, I will compromise and largely agree with this statement in broad strokes. Yes, Russia's power projection capacity has diminished. That's a very different position IMO compared to "Russia can only do defense" as you stated earlier....while Russia has ~600,000 men busy invading the largest country in Europe after Russia itself. Their global power projection capacity is degraded because so much of their attention is sucked into fighting the largest land war in Europe in 80 years, but that's not the same as only being able to defend.
> Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops.
Without going too far off on a tangent, this also applies to Ukraine (regarding loyalty...Colombians are definitely considered "seasoned" as far as international mercenaries go).
https://www.nzz.ch/english/discharged-by-their-own-countrys-...
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2025/06/04/iowa...
1m is not a lot
Edit: as per my comment below, casualties are not deaths. It's a wider definition.
1 million casualties is an absolutely massive number, regardless of your total population. How many of your fellow citizens would you be willing to throw into the meatgrinder until you say “that not ok”?
If you are Putin? All of them. So yes, Putin is winning, he hasn't even used up 10% of his army's acceptable losses yet.
1 million is basically an entire birth year of men ages 30-45, or two entire birth years of their male population from ages 20-30, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/...
Imagine all the men of your entire high school / college graduating class being either killed or seriously wounded so Putin can grab a few thousand km of territory.
Now they could allow women in combat roles, but I severely doubt it for this conflict. It would be extraordinarily unpopular and go against the narrative they have been selling their populace for decades.
For anybody still questioning why the civilized word must stop Russia, i'd suggest to mediate a couple seconds over the parent comment (the commenter in the parent and in his other comments presents Russian position quite correctly)
The definition of which is quite wide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualty_(person)
>"A casualty, as a term in military usage, is a person in military service, combatant or non-combatant, who becomes unavailable for duty due to any of several circumstances, including death, injury, illness, missing, capture or desertion."
Is this seriously the depth of your understanding of Russian tactics (what you described isn't a strategy to begin with...). I recommend watching every tactical analysis video on Mark Tacacs YT channel (he's a NATO military officer, not some pro-RU source):
https://www.youtube.com/@MarkTakacs-u1w
Putin caused
1 NATO to get 2 new members, gg Putin
2 NATO to invest more in weapons, gg Putin
3 killed or wounded 1 million Russians while the population was already in decline and I would bet the birth rate is decreasing because of the war
4 economy is fucked, Gazprom reported first time ever no proffits, interests rates increased
5 the idiots managed to hit again a civilian airplane, and i read recently Azerbajan and Armenia are cooperating to get rid of Ruzzians on their lands
6 Ruzzian weapon exports are fucked
7 Ruzzian army is a joke asx strength now, and the people are seen as low life orcs, killing, raping, torturing creatures
8 Kremlin is a joke, from 3 day operation to 3+ years, people flying from windows, politicians unable to admit a drone hit happened and claiming is debbry,
9 Putin pulled his secret weapons the donkeys after 3 years of keeping them hidden and failed to ado any significant progress
10 Ruzzia advances in Ukraine slower then a snail, check the numbers. and there are more than 1000 Ruz casualties for square km
11 I can see this Zeds complaining about the West decadence while using iPHone, driving German cars and wearing expensive wtches (even Putin can't stand to put his ass on a Ruzzian car)
How is Ruzzia stronger? The only way I could think a Zed would claim this is something like "Zed eats excrements daily for an year and after barely surviving this he claims he is stronger because someone in the West would die if he eat so much excrements, the Zed not realizing that the solution is to execute the tzar and stop eating excrements.
Any Russian (not Ruzzian) can be honest and admit that this is not going according to the plan, Putin tried to repeat the Crimean invasion, his KGB friends told him that Ukrainians will receive the Zeds with flowers , the informations were wrong and Putin seems to be incapable to stop the disaster and keep his throne so he is willing to sacrifice the people and the empire just to keep is throne.
That's one way to get nominated for Nobel peace prize.
Net Russian gains in June 2025 were 572 km^2.* In order for your statement to hold true, Russia would have suffered over half a million casualties in June alone. Where is your evidence to support such an assertion?
* https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1lpspn...
Or my average is not a daily or monthly, do it again for the last 1 year. 2 years.
Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?
That would make even less sense. The thread I linked has the appropriate data going back to April 2024. We can toss that into a spreadsheet or LLM to get the total Russian gains in the past year, as you requested.
ChatGPT calculates total Russian territorial control change at ~6000km^2. So are you now saying the Russians actually have 6 million casualties? Again, please support assertion. The only number that doesn't make sense here is your "Russians are taking 1000 casualties per square kilometer".
> Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?
It's been on my list of "Things to Do" for a while. I want to whip up a Rust library to run TNDM/QJM calculations on the Russo-Ukrainian War. For now, I will only state that rates of advance in warfare are non-linear. Past a certain point of weakness, collapse is rapid. I think Operation Bagration is a good case to examine in detail, as many of the frontline German divisions had REALLY thin manning. The Ukrainian frontline is manned at something like ~40% strength, and with a large number of old and infirm conscripts. They are relying heavily on drones to keep the Russians from locally massing combat power. I'm not sure where the breakpoint is in Ukrainian manpower past which their brigades will shatter.
But just pulling an estimate out of my butt: 2 years and an additional 500,000 Russian non-recoverable losses. shrug
In war a country can give up on some territory and move the army and government if needed into a better defended region, Ukrainians only need the will to fight and the Ruzzians provide them plenty of reasons not to be Russified.
So my stats were outdated or wrong, it is 5x, 10 x then ? Let me know a better number to use in future.
Yes, on using human wave attacks, trenches, and cheap Iranian drones. Oh, and at the cost of almost all trained troops and modern equipment. Not a very good deal.
> It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.
Russia started the war, they are the ones who need to win it. The fact that they are stalled is a win for Ukraine, who are the ones trying to survive. The Russian economy is in shambles (cf. the Broken window fallacy), as are their army, navy and air force. It will take them decades to rearm back to the same level. Putin isn't stronger, really. He entered a quagmire of a war he cannot back out of (will appear weak) nor can he actually win in any way. He's stuck.
> It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.
Are you sure you understand what BRICS is? Everyone using Russia's predicament to get cheap natural resources doesn't mean that e.g. Brazil or India are closer to Russia...
This war is the most recorded in human history. Can you share some videos of these Russian human wave attacks? Can you describe the objective delineating criteria between a normal attack by an infantry battalion or regiment, and a "human wave" attack? Regarding trenches and "cheap" Iranian drones.....should the Russians NOT practice basic principles of force protection/use of fortifications? Should they NOT leverage novel cost-effective munitions to wage war and instead use massively-expensive gold-plated equipment? How is that working out for the US and allies, who can't produce more than ~600 Patriot missiles per year at a cost of ~$4M per missile.....meanwhile Russia is throwing 500 drones and missiles at Ukraine every few days....
BTW, I recommend these vids about "human waves":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBdASPCBHIw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F4akL1AS5w
The Russian regime (and apparently a lot of Russians) deem Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group - they call them "little Russians".
Ukrainian authorship would mean:
- Ukrainians are competent people with agency (which they are of course, for lots of reasons) - this plays into ethnophobia;
- their government, military, etc, is competent, functional with agency - this plays into government legitimacy;
- Overall, in a lot of instances, the Russian government is incompetent, even more incompetent than the guys their propaganda has been trying to paint as corrupt, incompetent people who are being manipulated.
That's why a lot of time Russian propaganda trys to spin Ukrainian wins as "NATO/CIA/MI6/external agent did this".
For example, they tried really hard to bend reality to remove the credit for the Ukrainian drone operation that destroyed a lot of bomber jets, saying it was planned and executed by CIA, MI6, Israel, etc [0].
This is what we're dealing with here: massive ethnophobia and propaganda.
So in their propaganda, Ukraine can't be competent and stand on its merit, because that would mean they're not inferior people and that they have agency.
You should always be wary of someone making these claims without any evidence.
[0]https://uacrisis.org/en/rospropaganda-zaplutalas-v-pavutyni
> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]
Ethnical slurs, or any other slurs, change over time. If you go back in time 100+ years in any context, and you use a modern ethnic or racial slur, it will most likely empty of meaning. Just like a lot of slurs from the past have lost their meaning over the years. But the "historical meaning" is constantly being used by Russian propaganda, where they claim one needs to go back to the 1200's, and their interpretation of history, to try to make sense of the current genocide attempt in Ukraine.
There's no logic behind that approach because current actions speak for themselves, including the context of recent history, and that's enough. You can get a pretty clear picture of this whole event starting in the 1990s.
Unless you still see that slur being used by Russian nationalists as an endearing term to address their "brotherly nation" which they support being erased from the map.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia#Modern_usage
> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]
Just to make sure, according to you, this is completely false and detached?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia#Modern_usage
But this is a small detail from my reply, why are people so focused on this? Even if I was wrong, which I don't see that I am, everything else still stands.
The term Малороссия now days is outdated indeed, as wiki says. This term was first introduced not even by Russia but by Byzantine Church and word "мало" ("little" as you "translate" here) means "original" "primordial" to distinct two church branches and then where used to denote parts of Rus' under Polish rule.
Note, the linked article does not say that Russians use this term to denote someone inferior. It says that some Ukrainians consider this word offensive which is not surprising taking into account active propaganda and lack of historical education in masses.
I think Ukrainians (and Russians as well) aren't tech illiterate. They are (both) more than capable in this matter.
What foreign intelligence services ? Also if you think there isn't a constant barrage of attacks coming from everyone, you're not ready for the real world.
That position sounds very weird.
I think the most likely explanation is it's the Ukrainians defending Ukraine against Russia's unjustified invasion.
No comments yet
This is a silly expression for written text, since I always read both tomatoes as 'tomato', before realising the intention. :)
Fun fact, I was internal auditor in a bank (I will not specify the year(s) for safety/privacy). We did the due diligence and ended up buying a Ukrainian bank. Part of the 'collections' was really to smash people's faces. Believe it or not. But sure.. you know best.
My only qualm with them is their not so great support for gay people, but then during the war ofc the party line is now they love their gay soldiers. Would have been nice to see more action around that beforehand but I get it. Even other first world countries still have plenty of problems as a gay person, especially gay men.
Do you have any evidence that it was foreign intelligence services?
> LLC “Gaskar Integration” (Gaskar Group)—one of the largest UAV manufacturers in Russia—has just been penetrated right down to the tonsils in the course of demilitarization and denazification.
> VO Team, together with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance (https://t.me/UCAgroup) and another very well‑known organization whose mere mention makes the vatniks’ bottle‑openings burst (https://gur.gov.ua/), carried out large‑scale operations: we seized all of Gaskar Group’s network and server infrastructure, gathered valuable data on their current and prospective UAVs, destroyed that data, and knocked the entire infrastructure offline.
> By the way, from the information we obtained, the PRC is helping Gaskar Group with production and staff training. China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands .
> VO Team focused on wiping out the production complex’s infrastructure. On‑site we erased more than 250 hosts (4 ESXi servers, 46 virtual servers, 200+ workstations) and bricked about 20 MikroTik devices. In total we destroyed 47 TB of valuable data at Gaskar Group—including 10 TB of backups—and disabled all production and auxiliary systems.
> The scum at Gaskar Group have the blood of hundreds of Ukrainian children, women, and elderly on their hands. That’s why we went after this target with special zeal. We now possess the lists of ALL employees, their home addresses, information about their family members, and much more… We’re in your home computers and phones—we’re everywhere . Not a single bastard from Gaskar Group will escape responsibility!
> The sword of Damocles already hangs by a thin thread over your heads. It’s too late to spew excuses like “we’re apolitical” or “we were just making money”….
> The whole world can see that the so‑called Russian Federation has strategically lost everything. Defeat and collapse of that unwashed entity are only a matter of time. VO Team is collecting data on everyone involved in Putin’s criminal war—the deaths of our children, mothers, and all Ukrainians. Retribution is inevitable and is drawing near!
Well, this is quite the interesting tidbit. Thanks for posting the translation.
On the other hand (and I'm not defending a drone company), anyone that has a business should know by now that ransomware (with our without deletion) is a real thing, and it's not an 'if' question, it's a 'when' question.
I have never worked with/for a Russian company, so it would be interesting to hear/read from someone who has, how 'well organized' are they? GRC-wise. Assuming that someone would run the COBIT framework on them (Russian companies), would the 'average' be 'ok' or it's a big mess (kinda like working for an EU company in early 00's)?
This is not a real reason. This explanation hides the real reason: Russia is a valuable geopolitical partner for USA. Regarless who are in power in USA - all presidents tried to make deals/contacts with Russia.
There is no value for USA in getting Russia loose this war, have internal instability or split in 20-ish national states.
USA wins more from russia being as it is today with all it blood, suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the regime thrive for survival.
Actually USA are afraid to push too much to cause internal issues in Russia. And russian ruling class knows that.
There are ticket sales systems for people being transported, but much is freight trains, and if there was an easy way to disrupt that, you can be sure that Ukraine would've done it by now, because the Russian military heavily depends on rail-based supplies.
- know your threats
- assess your risks based on identified threats
- backup 3-2-1 strategy (3 copies of your data on 2 independent storage places with 1 copy offline and offsite)
- "build the world from scratch" plan with the assumption that all infra is completely and irreversibly destroyed.
- assume you have already been hacked but you don't yet know about it. Build your indicators of compromise based on that simple assumption.
Observing how some "groups of people" act in a totally ignorant fashion is amusing.
They should have checked the source codes and added some changes to make drones unpredictably unreliable
"Oh this totally innocent code change? Oh look it makes the gps act weird if longitude is between a certain range how weird"
The main claim for this myth is the sacrifice of Coventry during the Battle of Britain, but as far as I'm aware, historians are in general agreement that Ultra was unable to ascertain that Coventry was the target before the raid took place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz#Coventry_and_Ul...
Look at successful cyber campaigns like stuxnet or an actual hardware sabotage from Israel. The attacks were dormant until they were ready for maximum effect. Randomly disabling a production site, without a strategic context, is going to be an isolated win, or an operational victory.
I remember reading some articles about the pentagon being a bit upset at some of the strategic decisions of Ukraine's armed forces where they often push for morale boosting moments at big costs(i think 2 years ago they spent lots of resources to get a strategically irrelevant town). And honestly this is also what it looks like: You dont see a coordinated attack but spurious disconnected events. I think when you are gasping for air you hold on to anything you can, but still the goal is to win, not just look like winning.
I'm very dubious that there would be such an amount of “critical” data pretty much anywhere, besides the banking and insurance sector. And particularly not at a drone manufacturer.
If you focus only on data with high-uptime requirements, no probably not 50 TB.
If you include low-uptime requirement but low-replaceability stuff like all the products' mechanical, electrical and software designs, documentation and artifacts? Easily 50 TB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...
There's also just endless small stuff (shorts/tiktoks/cam footage) on social media (reddit) that really does not pass the sniff test.
I think what Russia is doing is terrible, I am not defending them at all. I am just allergic to bullshit, and there is plenty of smelly things happening on the Ukrainian side, though of course I recognize the Russians are especially bad in this regard.
I was not very clear, but I meant Ukrainian intelligence services claiming operational success where there was none. It's also interesting that this Wikipedia entry appears devoid of UA false propaganda after 2022. I wonder if they realized that this was not a good Wiki entry on which to appear.
For all of this to have meaning it has to have a fall of USSR kind of impact at some point, otherwise we just strengthened one of the world's most dangerous state.
Authoritarian governments always fail, because they get used to achieving everything by simply ordering it to be achieved, while the laws of physics don't obey orders.
Meanwhile they're murdering how many of their own soldiers per day?