Bohemians at the Gate? (inferencemagazine.substack.com)
30 points by surprisetalk 2d ago 30 comments
Cuss: Map of profane words to a rating of sureness (github.com)
39 points by tosh 2d ago 25 comments
Ukraine destroys more than 40 military aircraft in drone attack deep in Russia
339 consumer451 514 6/1/2025, 1:39:44 PM npr.org ↗
If they really decided to do it, they could make some kind on narrow-body bomber derivative of Il-96 in a few years.
> They also need to have control surfaces designed to take off with a full load and land empty. Airliners don't have to take that into consideration.
Is it the take off or the landing that would be the problem? If the take off could they use JATO?
Sure the resulting plane would not be optimized in a lot of aspects but they could do it.
Also, The Russian government relies on projection of an image of strength not just externally, but internally as well. If the Russian government is seen as weak internally they might be more likely to take drastic actions to stay in power.
Put all these together, and it seems like the world might just be a bit more dangerous today than it was yesterday. Maybe that is the Ukrainian strategy - make Russia do something monstrous to a western power to force western action.
If you want to try to impose some deeper strategic meaning onto this, a more plausible one would be the reverse: that the more "western powers" pull back from supporting Ukraine, the more Ukraine is are forced to establish they are capable of less conventional, less predictable, more aggressive means of deterrence to compensate for the absence of strong western partners.
Ukraine has very strong interests, but they have in fact restrained themselves from doing things that will provoke a war involving NATO. The US government has put many restrictions on Ukraine that Ukraine has abided by.
MAD isn't "abstract", if by abstract you mean somehow unreal. It has kept the humanity from being destroyed for generations, and the US and Russia invest a lot in maintaining it.
The only person I see saying that is some random Internet commenter. I've always heard the opposite from professionals in the field, especially that any threat to capability is a threat to stability.
Strategic bombers make little sense, that's why everyone (even russians) are pushing for ballistic missiles instead. Strategic bombers used by Russia manly for terror with stockpile of soviet missiles.
Given the economic/international stance of Russia for the past three decades and the maintenance level of their armed forces, their ability to execute a first-strike nuclear attack and succeeding is pretty low.
Neither of those two are obviously true, and so relying on the assumptions of MAD is dangerous.
I'm just speculating what, if any, geopolitical ramifications arise from this. Sometimes consequences happen even when you're 'the good guy'. Life is often not like the stories and things sometimes end up terribly even when you do everything right.
If you analyze from the US or Russian perspective, you presuppose/assert them as the entities with agency while denying Ukrainians theirs.
Any framing of an analysis that does not start from the frame of a Ukrainian with agency is suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNLP88aTg_8
> Author George Lakoff discusses his book "Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea" as a part of the Authors@Google series. This event took place Thursday, July 12, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saDHFomGW3A
> The Authors@Google program was pleased to welcome author and professor George Lakoff to Google's New York office to discuss his new book, "The Political Mind".
> George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute, a think tank in Berkeley, CA. He is author of "Don't Think of an Elephant!", "Moral Politics", "Whose Freedom?", and coauthor of "Thinking Points: A Progressive's Handbook", as well as many books and articles on cognitive science and linguistics. In this talk Professor Lakoff speaks about his latest work The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. In "What's the Matter with Kansas?", Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In "The Political Mind", George Lakoff explains why.
In my reply to the useful idiotsecant, my reference to "TACO", and coining of "PACO", "RACO", and the "BUK BUK BUK Missile System", are all playful allusions to chickens, which align with George Lakoff’s insights about metaphor and framing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44156888
I'm openly and purposefully deploying memorable, funny, to-the-point acronyms, strategically employing the essential strategy of Lakoff’s theories, consciously framing complex economic behaviors through simple, evocative metaphors.
Vastly funnier than the TACO acronym itself, is how Trump and Putin hate being at the receiving end of their one and only game. Lakoff has much to teach about this successful strategy!
Specifically, the ever popular "TACO" acronym ("Trump Always Chickens Out") metaphorically, undeniably invokes the idea of cowardice or retreat, effectively embedding a negative connotation into Trump's trade policies and Putin's nuclear threats. This approach embodies Lakoff's argument about the power of conceptual metaphors -- framing abstract policies through vivid, everyday imagery influences how people perceive political actions.
The chicken metaphor not only simplifies a complex economic behavior into a universally understandable narrative, but also reinforces the insightful notion of Trump and Putin as unreliable, hesitant, blustering cowards, much like Lakoff's discussions of political framing ("strict father" vs. "nurturant parent"). This strategy directly resonates with Lakoff’s emphasis on the importance of metaphor and framing in shaping public perception and political discourse.
Their only action would then be to use more nuclear weapons and they just aren’t going to do that because they don’t want to end the world.
Not necessarily, Russia's successful intelligence efforts for regime change in the US may have nullified US response.
Instead, find clear instances where the US is doing things like no longer sending Patriot missile launchers and missiles to Ukraine. [1]
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-working-allies-deliveries-patr...
Watch it, then try saying nothing has changed. You seem like someone with a strong world view that's strong because you reject anything that challenges it.
Oh, that's real brave, yeah. Did you even read that before you linked it?
These allies need agreement from the US government to transfer these systems to Ukraine. Some like Israel, probably transferred these to Ukraine in exchange for other US systems like THAAD
I do agree that there was a shift in US policy towards Ukraine with the new administration. However, Russia being Russia, it looks like it is all going back to the previous policy
The reason the United States is asking allies in Europe to relocate their Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine is because Ukraine has an immediate defensive need. The countries that are not the United States and not in the Pacific don't have an immediate need for these missile batteries. Either they get them from a US NATO ally (under the US security guarantee) or they don't get them at all - dealer's choice. If the US "abandoned Ukraine" or policy somehow fundamentally shifted, we wouldn't see things like this take place.
The United States has to facilitate the movement of materials and equipment like this because the US is the country that actually has the power to defend NATO allies (France, UK, Poland, etc. can as well but they need the US) so it's up to the US to understand global security needs and make determinations of where assets can be moved or repurposed. In this sense, the US is sending the Patriot launchers to Ukraine.
The person responding to me was making baseless claims about the US withdrawing support. I don't think anything has fundamentally changed. You can read responses for yourself where people state things like the US stopped intelligence sharing which isn't true.
If you want to make a claim that my post is nonsense and my citation, which was just a simple example in a reply to someone who didn't provide any citations of their own, was "half-assed" why don't you bring your own original thoughts and citations and articles and we can discuss them instead of just pointlessly criticizing the character of what I wrote instead of what I actually wrote?
At a minimum, the US stopped giving targeting intel to Ukraine; that itself is a pretty fundamental change.
only done to maintain plausable deniability that USA is not an active party of a conflict
Russian doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons (look up 'escalate to de-escalate'), and Russia has threatened their use.
The US government and others have taken the risk very seriously and Ukraine has restrained itself from doing things that might provoke a Russia-NATO war.
You are also omitting the Russian perspective, which sees NATO in Ukraine as potentially existential.
I think it's more an excuse to try to restore their empire.
Russia huffed and puffed about Finland or Sweden joining NATO to be a red line and waving the nuke stick.
No comments yet
Do you have some basis for that? I've never heard it, I would be very surprised if either country allowed any part of their triad to be disabled, and both invest enormous resources in other parts of their triads.
Because technology was rapidly advancing, it was unclear whether any breakthrough (e.g. high altitude SAMs, etc.) might suddenly nullify one leg.
If that were the only leg, the game theory response would be for the nullifier to immediately launch a first strike, to take advantage of their no-doubt temporary superiority.
By comparison, Russia keeps bombing civilian targets in a futile attempt to terrorize Ukrainians into surrendering. Or maybe just out of sheer spite.
Either way, it seems Putin is not at all interested in peace, which means the only way to stop this war is to stop Russia's ability to wage this war. The claim that Putin might resort to nuclear strikes in response to Ukraine defending itself, is pure propaganda aimed at cowing defenders into compliance. If he actually wanted to launch nukes, he'd have done so already.
The reality is if they were nuked and no one reacted, in a matter of months they would be nuking Russia.
Blame Putin for being a vicious bully, not the kids he's brutalizing for provoking him by defending themself from the assault.
Offensive use of nukes, even implicitly threatening offensive use of nukes, is a step too far for everybody.
be careful whom you are advising to back down in fear.
It's a bit naive to think you should avoid escalation now to risk an even higher risk in 20 years.
Russia can stop this war at any moment. It's fully their decision if they want to shoot nukes or not. None of the consequences of military operations of Ukraine should be placed in their shoes. And you claim you are not blaming Ukraine, but on the other hand you actually are.
PACO Putin and his shills like you who spread their belligerent saber rattling propaganda are notorious for threatening nuclear war at the drop of a hat, exactly like TACO Trump and his shills' singular and predictable move is bluffing about nuclear tariffs, mass deportations, throwing political opponents in jail, annexing Canada, invading Greenland, filing frivolous lawsuits, building walls, getting Mexico to pay for it, canceling Obamacare, and rolling out a mythical health care plan any day now, and then every single time chickening out and never delivering, like clockwork.
Speaking of setting your watch by it, as I write this, Amsterdam is testing its air raid sirens at noon on the first weekday of the month, just like clockwork. And I am familiar enough with the pattern that I don't shit my pants and duck and cover.
Maybe there's a reason Russia named it the BUK BUK BUK Missile System, which they smuggled across Ukraine's border and shot down MH17 with -- a plane with 298 innocent civilians, the Netherland's 9/11: because it's a chicken's weapon they used for a cowardly attack against defenseless civilians, which they still deny responsibility for in the face of overwhelming hard evidence. If that doesn't prove you can't trust a word Putin says, how much more evidence do you need?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buk_missile_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
Even RACO Reagan's most ardent supporters admit that SDI was a bluff, and as someone who grew up within the blast radius of Washington DC during the 80's, I am sick and tired of listing to hyperbolic belligerent bullshit like "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes."
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/08/11/Flashback...
>"Reagan blurts out what he is thinking, that is, to outlaw Russia and to start bombing in five minutes. This is a joke. But this is also a secret dream which was allowed to escape. It is simple-mindedness, mildly speaking, which characterizes the view of the president on world problems."
Reagan's bluffs and blusters may have led to the downfall of the Soviet Union, but that's because they were gullible, totally fell for it hook line and sinker, and now that Putin's learned from that, it's the only trick he has in his book, because he realized how well it worked on him for Reagan. And Putin certainly knows he doesn't need to fear a cluck that comes out of his pet TACO's beak.
You're not only gullibly FALLING FOR IT, you're actually AMPLIFYING and perversely PERPETUATING it, the textbook definition of an unwitting useful idiot, putty in Putin's hands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_risk_during_the_Russia...
Russia repeatedly threatens nuclear escalation whenever things don't go their way, routinely rattling their nuclear sabers with aggressive rhetoric from Putin, Medvedev, and Lavrov. Despite these dire warnings and bold "red lines," each threat has ultimately fizzled out with Russia retreating quietly, making the entire ordeal seem more like theatrical posturing than genuine strategy. Every time they've hinted at nuclear strikes or global annihilation as retaliation, reality sets in, they chicken out, and the world moves on—until Russia inevitably tries the same bluff again.
2022 February 27: President Putin placed Russia's nuclear forces on high alert, warning of unprecedented consequences if the West intervened in Ukraine. Despite the escalation, no nuclear actions followed.
2022 April 24: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned of a "real" danger of nuclear war, cautioning the West against underestimating the risks. The threat was not acted upon.
2022 May 12: Dmitry Medvedev stated that NATO's military aid to Ukraine increased the risk of a full-scale nuclear war. No nuclear measures were taken.
2022 September 21: President Putin announced partial mobilization and threatened nuclear retaliation if Russia's territorial integrity was threatened. The nuclear threat did not materialize.
2023 March 25: President Putin declared plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, marking the first such deployment outside Russia since the Soviet era. The weapons were stationed but not used.
2023 July 30: Medvedev warned that a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive could compel Russia to use nuclear weapons to defend its territory. No nuclear action ensued.
2023 October 1: Medvedev threatened that British soldiers training Ukrainian troops would be legitimate targets, implying potential nuclear escalation. The threat was not acted upon.
2024 February 25: President Putin suspended Russia's participation in the New START treaty, citing U.S. and NATO actions as threats to Russian security. No nuclear deployments or tests followed.
2024 September 25: President Putin warned that any conventional attack on Russia could provoke a nuclear response, signaling a shift in nuclear doctrine. The warning did not lead to any nuclear action.
2025 June 1: Following Ukraine's drone strikes on Russian airbases, Russian officials, including Medvedev, issued renewed nuclear threats. No nuclear response occurred.
In exchange for security promises (Budapest Memorandum).
[1] https://www.wdmma.org/russian-air-force.php
Also, these are remote airbases where all the strategic bombers are stationed. Fighter jets would not be there in significant numbers if any since they are needed in other bases closer to the front-lines and also some at the borders.
In in of the videos you could see a Mi-8 which was ignored because of it's insignificance compared to the primary targets.
At the very end, you can even see how the bombers were hit: a drone strikes the right wing of a Tu-95, causing the internal fuel tanks to catch fire and spill burning fuel. The wing then breaks off and collapses.
I suspect the definition of front line has changed with drones.
kinda risky to be anywhere around them due to secondary explosion risk
Why were they loaded with fuel?
They also have a pattern of engaging in massive attacks right before major diplomatic events.
Russia and Ukraine have peace discussions scheduled for June 2 so Ukraine probably (and apparently correctly) anticipated Russia would be loading up for a bombing campaign the night before.
Could also just be fuel vapors in the tanks going off too. Do bears have rigid tanks? In WW2 there was a big difference in survival between planes that did vs ones with bladders that collapsed as fuel was consumed.
From another article (although maybe journalist is making shit up):
Also if they are part of Russia's strategic military assets, then wouldn't Russia wonder if the US was a secret puppetmaster?Here's a primer on how these things work in Russia.
You can be as careful as you want, if they decide they want confrontation with the US, they'll make up a reason.
If they don't feel confrontation is in their best interest, you can hit Moscow with a Tomahawk and, magically, no one will notice anything but a clapping sound.
That is true, but they also perceive interests that can result in confrontations, for very real reasons.
No, it's almost as if Ukraine has a good reason to blow up the planes that airstrike them.
In practice, Ukraine has significantly reduced Russia’s _capacity_ for such aggression with this move. Russia only has a limited number of working bombers, and they’re irreplaceable.
They were nuclear-capable bombers that have regularly been used to attack Ukraine with conventional weapons (mostly cruise missiles.)
> Also if they are part of Russia's strategic military assets, then wouldn't Russia wonder if the US was a secret puppetmaster?
Increasing distrust between Putin and the Trump Administration would also be a coup for Ukraine, but, no, I don't think that's a real threat here.
Sounds racist to me. Are you banderovets[0]?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banderite
Arrogance. My Diamond Star stays fuelled. But I’m not committing imbecilic war crimes.
Would assume that drones do not drop cumulative ammo, but the shrapnel ones. Those tires in theory should have protected from smaller pieces flying around causing a mess of a damage.
Russian media reports of 2-4 planes being destroyed while others are damaged. Think this dumb cheap hack actually helped a lot in minimizing the effectiveness of the strike.
Also, I don’t know why you would consider the reports in russian media. There’s more than 4 planes being destroyed on video.
The proven historical rule of thumb is take ukrainian reports, take russian reports, and the truth is in the middle. You'd have to question your own sanity to trust numbers from either side blindfoldingly
No it isn't. Russia's reports are complete fabrications.
Sure. But the solution isn't to interpolate Russian and Ukraininan claims, as the former have been proven time and again to be complete fabrications. Instead, a good M.O. is to take Ukraininan claims with a grain of salt until corroborated by either open-source or third-party analysis.
The real marker is immediate numbers. I bet even Russians yet to find out how many aircrafts have they irrecoverably lost, however we get numbers reported as if they are confirmed.
Cheap
Source? (Kyiv was agitating for Western aid in 2022. It would be odd for them to be downplaying the threat.)
[1] https://www-pravda-com-ua.translate.goog/articles/2022/12/19...
Ukraine doesn't have to fabricate about how Russia is killing its innocent civilians, or how Russia drove a Buk surface-to-air missile across their border and shot down a plane full of innocent civilians, which Russia 100% flat out denied. There is no "truth in the middle" there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
"Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky denied on Wednesday that his government had been involved in the explosion on the Crimean Bridge separating the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, from mainland Russia.
“We definitely did not order that, as far as I know,” Zelensky said during an interview with Canada’s CTV television network. " [0]
>how Russia is killing its innocent civilians
What does Kiev regime says about how Ukraine is killing innocent Russian civilians? Like blowing a bridge exactly when a passenger train was passing under it leading to deaths of civilians including children? [1]
[0] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-did-zelensky-deny...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/01/deaths-as-russ...
Probably not many if any, they weren't attacked with area munitions but with FPV drones they were attacking bomber bases, specifically aiming to reduce offensive capability, there's not a lot of reason to target non-bomber other aircraft.
Even in the extreme example of white Australians trying to pass as Malaysians, special forces have pulled of plenty of raids without the need for native language speakers.
Even if you need someone highly fluent who can pass as a native, most of the time there's a nearby country where they have some kind of grudge against the belligerent. I can think of a lot of potential theatres where finding an enemy of a belligerent who can pass as a "native" would not be difficult. North / South Korea, China / Taiwan, The Middle East ... conflicts often occur in places where there's a lot of conflict.
Also, in a war, often the military and civilian sector are stretched thin. Russia can't spare the troops to guard everything as well as they could in peacetime, and even if they could search every vehicle they can't afford to gum up their logistics.
As a Ukrainian soldier – ha ha ha
Nah, you don't need an 'NVidia chip' for this purpose, a reasonably modern mobile phone will do and has all the sensors you want. Just add a battery, 4 motors with propellers and something (other than the battery) which goes boom and voilà, an autonomous drone. Some [1] mobile [2] phones [3] even have their own thing-that-goes-boom [4] built in from the factory to make this project even easier to accomplish.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcoU2mXJJ3k
[2] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252212685
[3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/6281000/iphone-explosion-video...
[4] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250125537
There is no need to do so because they did employ a civilian drivers who never knew what 'cargo' they are hauling. Just like in the previous attack on the bridge.
You've described half of the Ukrainian population.
Maybe the drones were pre-programmed for a particular destination (given to the Ukrainians by the US and its reconnaissance satellites), i.e., no drone operators needed.
And you don't need to permablock it, few minutes would be enough.
Edit: https://x.com/jimmysecuk/status/1929164382061092952
I had a friend who was gaming on his phone that was tethered to his desktop about a decade ago and after he disabled some power saving stuff in the settings on android he was getting a reasonable 100ms ping that had negligible jitter.
They either used the trucks as a relay for the operators far away or the drones themselves were automated.
It would not be necessary, as you pointed out, plenty of Ukrainians still live in Russia and they are free to drive trucks. Best of my knowledge, there is nothing like interment of Japanese that happened in US during WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
„at least 13 Russian warplanes were destroyed and more were damaged.“
https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3999621-ukraine-updates...
Hard to know whether to be seriously impressed or seriously concerned - if Europe decided that enough was enough and started helping Ukraine with troops if they decided the Russian nuclear threat was a paper tiger we're in for some very interesting times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad
most importantly USA doesn't want putin dead, because his next successor could be smarter and more brutal
>because his next successor could be smarter and more brutal
Why would they? Putin's actions, imo, seemed to be able rebuilding the greatness of the ussr, he's former KGB.
Maybe the next person would just be happy with power over one of the largest countries in the world. Plus the end of the war would make him quite popular with the general public
of course not
How is having chaotic power vacuum in any way worse than having Putin?
It's ironic that while Ukrainian supporters like you dream about terrorist attacks, Putin himself doesn't order strikes against Kiev government.
And Putin has ordered multiple attempts to assassinate various presidents of Ukraine, including Zelensky. Putin as commander of this brutal war is absolutely a valid target.
You are hopelessly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Volo...
"In the early morning hours of 29 December 2023, Russia launched what was seen to be the largest wave of missiles and drones yet seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War, with hundreds of missiles and drones hitting the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other cities across the country."
You have to wonder how much of that time was inventing/creating the actual capability on top of planning/rehearsing. Would be an interesting story in the mold of the "Dam Busters".
The trucks used for the delivery were acquired (along with the mobile homes the drones were launched from that were on their beds) in Russia, as I understand it, not driven from Ukraine (of course, the drones still needed to be delivered from Ukraine for the attack packages to be assembled.)
The box has a machine inside that cuts the box open and opens up to release a drone that pops out and hits the target.
Bonus points if the box itself can fly away and self destruct so there's even less of a physical trail to figure out where the drone came from.
By all accounts the Ukrainian attack took a year to execute. It's the kind of planning that was behind the explosive pagers that Israel cooked up.
It's a new kind of automated terrorism - who knows what is planted around Russia now and when the Ukrainians will set it off.
By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia. The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
But this wasn't that. This was taking out bombers. If anything, it reduces the amount of terror.
> By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia.
By that definition, every war is terrorism. And maybe it is, but this war was started by Russia. Russia is still the only terrorist state in this war, no matter how you spin this.
Yeah, like the Blitz Terror bombing in WW2. But this isn't that. They attacked strategic enemy assets, so it's not terror bombing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
Imagine if every IoT appliance decided to burn down/self destruct and every phone with satellite connectivity decided to weaponize its battery pack. If every car with cell service connectivity decided to accelerate with brakes disabled at once. If every access point/router decided to make itself inoperable/turned into a bot net removing home internet all at once and likely shifting traffic to cell towers which could overload them resulting in zero communication. Imagine that as many devices as possible were programmed or constructed in a way to create failure on a specific date or period.
Sounds insane, but I would have said the pager thing sounds insane too. All those things definitely sounds possible to me.
At a certain point, you as a country can only be said to be capable of what you can do without external aid. The possibility that your Allies will always remain as such, either at their behest, or your own, is simply never zero.
Queue the Globalist's in the crowd going "The entire point was to maximize the amount of time before peace broke down through economic interdependence. Wrong. They optimized for that metric while maximizing the vulnerability to supply chain based attacks. They made individual countries less resilient and accepted the risk that if a much greater worldwide action potential was actually reached, everyone would be potentially fucked.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772262/
Also, why can't drones just infiltrate a country in little spurts from the borders, pausing near power lines to inductively power themselves.
A lot of this stuff is terrifying, and conflicts like the ukraine are basically funding/inventing nightmares.
No comments yet
Have you seen a footage of "fire dragon" drones?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6uLfermPU
Spring Surprise??!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARM_1_mine
Is it such an amazing idea? Imagine the shoe is on the other foot - would you normally be able to drive a truck full of drones into a country at war, say Israel? This puts a target on civilian vehicles.
> In the process, manage to poke serious holes into Russia's nuclear deterrent.
Again, is it such an amazing idea? Do you want to make people in charge of nuclear weapons more jumpy and likely to make a rash decision?
It's amazing in how effective it was, and the asymmetry of the destruction compared to cold-war assumptions.
Also they didn't drive a truck into Russia. The trucks were acquired and modified in Russia. And according to Russia they are not in a war. They are in a "special military operation"...
“Amazing” is the correct word for it
[1] https://www.wdmma.org/russian-air-force.php
Define “we.” The defence community has been deeply engaged with what’s going on in Ukraine since ‘22. (And the supremacy of sensor fusion in India’s air battle with Pakistan.)
Alas it feels optimistic to hope that asymmetric confrontation would be downtrodden people of the earth against bad world damaging take-take-take pests. Merely a science fiction. The world having powerful forces working strongly for the world rather than self interest: hardly believable science fiction.
We’re in a strategic imbalance. Cold War air defences were trained on high-value targets, like strategic bombers and spy planes. So currently our air defences are overspecced for something like this.
Nothing about drones makes them inherently undetectable. You just need a different model. I suspect those should be commonplace within 20 years, potentially a decade.
> at least in some places private drone ownership will become illegal
I could see ownership being restricted in wartime. More likely is eager air defences shredding birds on perimeters.
Probably not. Most of the history of war is weapons getting stronger and stronger and defence getting harder and harder. E.g. in ancient times a shield or simple palisade could protect you, now even tanks and trenches are not safe. The days of being able to build a wall along a border and hold it against a peer adversary are long gone and not coming back.
The whole Ukraine war thing seems a bit anachronistic like something from the last century. I think it isn't coincidental that Putin spends a lot of time reading about past centuries (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares...)
But times have moved on.
Three years ago: "Oh stop nobody can do a decapitation strike. Russia's security concerns are bogus".
It's cheaper now, it's easier to pull off remotely, but most airports already were vulnerable to terrorist attacks. It feels like the primary mechanism that protected civilian airports is that the weapons you'd use aren't easy to get, and states didn't want to supply their sponsored terror groups with that kind of weaponry because it'd be dangerously close to an act of war and very hard to deny.
Individually, you were never safe by default. Your safety depends on not being an interesting target.
Hello, cyberpunk future. Imagine Luigi with Ukraine's strike capabilities. 10 years from now? 5?
Ukraine isn't wealthy, but it's still an entire country.
Which is why Ukraine spent the last year hitting softer targets like oil and factories.
Weight doesn't seem to imply effectiveness I guess.
I guess after today's attack, that treaty is dead.
Also going back to the time of slave trade and genocide of native Americans seems a bit rich…
> The obligation not to use concealment measures shall not apply to cover or concealment practices at ICBM bases or to the use of environmental shelters for strategic offensive arms.
Anti-drone nets or simple hangars won't violate it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_drone
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh7SYWl79no
I read one operator describe the forests as being like Mirkwood from the Hobbit. Eerie.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/1kzy817/field...
https://www.tiktok.com/@united24.na/video/748403971532320286...
https://www.tiktok.com/@united24.media/video/748912820925079...
Sparkling in the sky (they track and kill the men in this video after the 10 second mark so you might stop there) - https://x.com/ng_ukraine/status/1891534054811439380
High def footage, 60 fps until they hit.
They are definitely useful for civilians, but seem dangerous. If you hit them on a motorbike etc. If you google kites and banned Chinese lines and road accidents its quite gory, but before the illegal kite lines accidents didn't seem to happen. So something should work for optic fibers.
Run one to your mates house 10km away for the pay-per-view?
realistically speaking, this destroys NATO
We don't have much choice really. Western Europe + Turkey are not going to put up with Russia rolling into Western Europe or Turkey. We have nukes and more money, people and kit than Russia.
There is a pretty good argument here for at a minimum reforming NATO. Some major points include that the US appears to be bluffing about having useful support to offer Eastern Europe through the NATO structure, also appears to have different defence priorities than Europe does, NATO itself failed to preserve peace and Europe looks like it has militarily atrophied to a pretty significant extent under NATO.
It is not clear how the situation will ultimately be interpreted, but the US's involvement here is pushing Europe towards being the next middle east. That isn't a great outcome.
Also, WW2 happened despite the Empire, and the UK wasn't really in a good place to fight it when they did — as in "we don't have enough guns and uniforms for everyone" not ready, despite having ended the military cutbacks 5 years before the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rearmament_before_Worl..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Small_Arms_Company#..., https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/8-facts-about-clothes-rationi...
Please tell me what would happen if Putin states "Job well done in Ukraine, all Nazi's are killed", and then withdraws his troops. NATO is going to invade Russia?
Any article that offends the sensitivities of the wing-nut mode of the highly bi-modal community is immediately flagged. Such as the recent article by the resident of Sri Lanka during it's civil war.
https://indi.ca/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121939
But somehow, traditional warfare news seems totally fine, despite the fact that this has nothing to do with tech, or vulture capital.
There really needs to be an "unflag" link for posts, to allow both sides of the "flag vs don't flag" debate to be represented.
Come Back Alive ex. These guys delivered first deep-strike drones
https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation ex. Bought a famous spy satellite
https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation managed by UA tech community
https://www.koloua.com/en/
https://www.libertyukraine.org/
https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=EEYJZXS9SNG7G
There's some interesting stuff happening on the financial side as well with the Lindsey Graham bill - this thing https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/05/28/new-us-senate-...
I'll bet Russia is curious too.
These launches specifically seem to have also used on-board AI targeting models trained on photos of the plane models to hit, I assume as a fallback in case mobile connection isn't available inside the bases (and photos on some Telegram channels seem to show usage of the FOSS autopilot system ArduPilot (https://ardupilot.org))
The targets weren’t moving. As long as you have a cell connection in the trailer and up-to-date satellite imagery, you could send the coördinates and even flight path to the drones ahead of time and then have them deal with minor obstacles on their own.
Camera locking on to a parked plane, should be fairly easy to do the job.
[1] https://nitter.net/bayraktar_1love/status/192915556386414634...
Interesting that they claim the attack was shared with the Trump admin ahead of time. That seems very unnecessarily risky as well considering where Trump's loyalties lie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
Starlink is a joke here but "satellites" in general are not
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Like, if Ukraine lost the war today, folded up, surrendered, kaput. You'd still get organized splinter groups with funding from small nation-states or even motivated partisan groups. And they'd still be able to pull off things like this strike. Not much can stop them.
Yeah, the planning and patience here is unmatched. I don't think the US or even China could pull off this level of patience today. But the cost here, my god, this was just so cheap! And there is no telling about how many more of these Ukraine already has in RU too
And Ukraine and everyone else knows this. Maybe not mad Vlad, maybe not yet. But even is Vlad wins, he's going to have to deal with these kinds of strikes until Ukraine is free again. And that kind of paranoia is not cheap.
And every other nation also knows this now too. Small non-nation-state actors now have a playbook of how to cost you big time.
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Either way more countries will oppose russia after use of nukes.
Being a nuclear power also does not prevent war, as you can see what happens between India and Pakistan.
Russian media analysis believe that Ukraine's polity is now resigned to the fact that they can't really militarily defeat Russia alone. And so they've shifted their strategy to use Ukrainian military to create high impact media headlines, to please their western "financiers" and to psychologically demoralise the Russians. That does make sense as attacks like this while being demoralising doesn't really offer any real military breakthrough to the Ukrainians, nor is it likely to stop the Russian advances.
The Russians already occupy around 20% of Ukrainian territory which the Ukrainians have been unable to take back. Since last year, the Russians have reportedly captured nearly 2000+ kms more of territory from the Ukrainian forces (including the Russian regions that were under Ukrainian control). And the Ukrainians forces can't realistically launch another major counter-offensive as they are very wary of running out of manpower (Ukrainians have 1/4th the wartime population of the Russians, and thus can't replenish their military as much as the Russians can).
Thus, it is an undeniable fact that right now, the Russian military have the advantage and the Ukrainian military is losing the war.
What remains to be seen is how much longer is the Zelensky administration willing to gamble that Russian economy will soon collapse or Putin may be deposed or NATO or EU boots will soon join the Ukranian forces to fight the Russians?
this war is bankrupting Russia the longer it continues
Eh? These planes are regularly used to attack Ukraine, and they are irreplaceable (one odd dynamic of this war is that a lot of the Russian equipment is a legacy of the past; modern Russia simply does not have the industrial base to replace it, so unless they can somehow convince China to sell them bombers, every bomber lost is a permanent reduction in offensive capability.)
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I would see it as a reasonably sized box loaded with interceptor drones, they don't even have to explode. That's something we will see en masse shortly from the Russian side.
Actually nobody should take Russians as dumb and clumsy. They adapt fast. And they can benchmark fast too, thanks to ukrainians. The only open questions is whether the rest of the world accepts new situation, or will continue spending billions on less effective F35s
Standard kit on US military aircraft detect this and 5th gen platforms like the F-35 are designed to attack such systems.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the F-35 is that it is a combat aircraft, 1970s style but with better tech. In many regards, it is designed primarily as a state-of-the-art EW and AWACS-like system that can operate as part of a mesh. Yeah, it is still pretty good at the basic combat mission but the whole mesh EW/AWACS bit is its killer feature.
In the 20th century, you kill the AWACS/EW platforms, they are gone. A lot of effort went into both killing and protecting them. In the 21st century the AWACS/EW platform is a fluid organism comprising many stealthy cells because it is embedded into many platforms, and is much harder to kill because it isn’t a discrete target.
If you wanted to take out bombers regularly attacking you with F-35s, you don't have to reach the airfields, you just have to reach them somewhere between the airfields and where they release their weapons.
They reported it done in 2018 and 2 new aircrafts are promised to be brand new. I doubt anyone would be able to reliably prove they coming with old frame or not.
Or is it more about fail safety rather than distance?
It is the the most advanced flying weapons platform ever created, and the most misunderstood.
If the US had unleashed it's airforce, led by F35s the war probably would have been over in a week with Russia's air defences and invading army taken out.
This claim, that FPV UASs equipped with explosives are more effective than F-35s as a blank statement does not sound meaningful.
Besides that, I doubt the US would have ever sold a single F35 to Ukraine just because of revealing radio-emission and reflection patterns to russian air defense, basically drawing F35 useless for future usage against Russia.
That wasn't really the subject of discussion, though.
https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/new_domestic_30_km...
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1kwsum...
Robust RF communication for denied environments is tech that exists, it just doesn’t seem to be present on the Ukraine/Russia battlefield. This is likely because so much of the drone tech is derived from consumer platforms and both sides have limited access to sophisticated military-grade RF silicon.
And an autonomous supersonic attack aircraft would cost..about as much as the F-35 because the F-35 is not principally expensive because of the pilot.
They don't have to replace them. They just have to destroy them.
You shouldn't be launching a patriot missile to take down a drone, that's the point
But they are vulnerable both in the air and on the ground. Recent Iran attacks over Israel and everyday Russian attacks show that shakhed flying vespa-drones can overload any air defense and deliver ammo for real cheap
So any more future attacks of such nature would all depend on how successfully the Ukrainian operatives in Russia are able to evade Russian security services.
Almost a bonus to have Russia jam its own airbases and increase surveillance if a follow up isn't possible.
Bairktars? Gone. Sea drones? Haven't heard of them in a while. What else?
Russians in comparison are great at scaling. Rockets flying daily, vespa-drones - daily, FAB bombs got wings and flying daily. That's the consistency what wins wars, not the greatest talent.
You haven't heard as much about sea drones because Russia was forced to stop naval operations close to Ukraine by them, after losing 1/3 of the Black Sea Fleet.
Though they still occasionally manage to make headlines doing other things, https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukrainian-naval-drones-shoo...
They shot down an Su-30 with a naval drone around a month ago: https://www.newsweek.com/drone-naval-sukhoi-jet-2067633
Or is conventional radar so noisy / limited that close range and object size is a real problem?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)
The engineers that design these things seem to have more imagination than their critics.
Covering an airbase will be expensive, and there's the problem of false positives; say you deploy 4 Skynex systems around an air base. Drones attack, you down them but the fratricide ends up damaging aircraft anyways. C-RAM has been around protecting bases in the Middle East for years, and those 30mm rounds have to land somewhere...
You are pretending that things that have proven solutions don’t actually have solutions.
I’m not saying the current set of solutions implementations is perfect but you are not making a credible argument that they don’t exist. Local battle-space sensing is very fast and very effective as a matter of record, at least in the US arsenal. That tech may not exist in the Ukraine/Russia theater but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Yes the technology exists to mitigate some of the risk. It's not deployed currently, and is very expensive. There are significant limitations to these systems, and most haven't seen combat.
You're trivializing a complex problem by pointing out that it's technically feasible, when it's more than just "we have the technology."
Show me a "proven system" in the US arsenal that can protect a large airbase from this type of attack. Not similar technology that the DoD has talked about converting to address this threat, but purchased, deployed systems.
Airplanes are so relatively fragile, that it's common for airbases and aircraft carriers to conduct FOD walks to make sure their runways are free of small pieces of metal debris that could be ingested by their engines. It doesn't take a lot to put an airplane out of commission.
These aren't A-10s with titanium bathtubs protecting their pilots. They're large, slow, aluminum skinned craft that have limited maneuverability, and are the quintessential "bomb trucks" for Russia.
For example, say we deploy an Arena/Trophy type system around an airbase? What are the ROE for its use? Do we keep it operating 24/7 or only when the threat level seems high enough? Most airbases in the US have small security detachments, and they have ROE that tell them not to blow up semi trucks that might have stalled on a road near the fence. So how do they counter an attack like Ukraine just pulled off?
Ukraine destroys small plane drones and loitering munition with drones with the help of radar guidance.
Also I’ve heard about the case when training on an FPV drone and accidentally leaving designated area in the city triggered an air raid alert.
I apologize because my experience with corporate culture has resulted in a strong and decisive conclusion that corporate leaders such as Musk and Cook, et al., could not fight their way out of a paper bag. Really. What they can do is order other people to fight their way out of paper bags. If I were somehow ever in an overloaded life boat, the first people I would push over the side would be the Musks and Cooks. Musk's "send me an email" just does not work in a life boat in a storm. sigh.
I realize that in our cultist society this is blasphemy, but really - if you are able to think any original thought, go for it. And for those of you who do not get it. Well, the best I can say is good luck.
The U.S. has traditionally been a high trust society. But not everyone in the U.S. is a person who can trust others. The recent political machinations in the U.S. represent the low trust segment of American society. The key to undoing it is to re-inculcate trust at a personal level, and at societal level. How that is actually done is a difficult problem with no readily obvious solution.
https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1929166249348476968
video of the self-destruct: https://bsky.app/profile/militarynewsua.bsky.social/post/3lq...
https://nitter.poast.org/Osinttechnical/status/1929149970566...
its after the attack and drones gone. Those idiots were lucky, there is another video from a truck that malfunctioned and caught fire on side of the road. russian forces the door, enters and boom. Appeared booby trapped.
“Everywhere” meaning undefended airspace into which one masses a significant fraction of one type of strategic armament.
This was the savvy exploitation by Kyiv, once again, of Russian operational incompetence.
> there isn't anyone who will stop you from pre-positioning weapons adjacent to American strategic assets
You want to try driving a truck up to a USAF base? (EDIT: Where strategic arms, e.g. B-2s, live.)
This is a novel threat vector. It needs to be protected against with vigilance. That to requires active effort to counter doesn’t mean it’s OP. Just that defensive perimeters need to be expanded, units not needlessly amassed, air defences kept in check and those perimeters constantly (and completely) monitored.
The air mobility command in the Bay Area is similarly totally surrounded by urban civilization.
I think it would be reasonable to assume that almost everything except for explosives were commercial off-the-shelf parts and trivial to acquire.
Isn’t Tinker mostly logistics, intelligence and AWACS? Don’t get me wrong, that’s important. But you’re not taking out a significant fraction of any U.S. armament hitting Tinker with drones.
>Anduril has clinched a $642-million contract to supply counter-drone technology for the US Marine Corps (USMC).
https://www.anduril.com/capability/counter-uas/
but if all aerial refueling fleet is damaged, like KC-135 Stratotankers then it will be over very quickly.
or blowing up Navy's ice cream supply depots and it will be over as well
One can compensate for the loss of AWACS with satellites and low-flying drones in the way one can compensate for a sprained ankle with crutches. See the recent Pakistan-India skirmish, which Pakistan appears to have won on account of sensor fusion powered by its AWACS.
They sent the planes for suicide mission without suppressing enemy air defense. Indians planes flew too close to the border without suppressing AD.
Pakistani planes flew from highland valley which was invisible from radio perspective
And that's ignoring all the other functions the 25k+ people working there serve.
This drone attack worked because small explosives detonated close to an airframe can do catastrophic damage. That simply isn’t true for most equipment, civil or military. (The exception at Tinker being the AWACS.)
Tinker being nuked would be a strategic disaster. Dozens of drones causing small-arms damage around the base would be embarrassing, but nothing on the order of America losing a third of anything in its possession.
The analog would have to be us putting e.g. most of one class of unit at Tinker simultaneously for maintenance.
I count over 60 aircraft on the Google Maps image of Tinker, not all of them AWACS (there are less than 20 AWACS total so most of these planes aren't AWACS). And that's not counting what may be in hangars which could also be a target of this hypothetical attack. USAF has about 5500 aircraft, so this accounts for over 1% of the current USAF air fleet. It's not as critical an attack as what's happened in Russia, but it's still very damaging.
It's an operational airfield so it has large fuel tanks which would be targeted and are hardly immune to small explosives themselves. Attacking those and the ensuing fires would be costly to repair and recover from. That alone, ignoring any attacks on aircraft, could lead to months of downtime for the airfield and various disruptions as you relocate your operational units to an airfield that still has fuel tanks (if the aircraft survived the attack).
They’re slow to make, critical to modern war and we don’t even have two dozen of them. (I think at least a quarter of our AWACS are at Tinker. Hence the analogy to Russia concentrating its bombers.) For everything else we have redundancy in droves.
> not all of them AWACS
Yup, refuelling, logistics, cyberwar. Nice to have. But not critical and few among many.
> months of downtime for the airfield and various disruptions as you relocate your operational units to an airfield that still has fuel tanks
You’re not detonating fuel tanks at Tinker with drones. (Not unless they’re storing munitions within blast range of the tanks.)
I’m not arguing such a strike wouldn’t be damaging. It just would not be disabling to scale of this attack. It would also be unusual for the highways around bases to be unrestricted during major wartime. (Or drones to remain uncontrolled, for that matter.)
Why are you so certain of this? IIUC (I am far from an expert) the insurgents in Iraq regularly utilized improvised shaped charge devices to attack armored vehicles. I don't understand those to have been particularly large or heavy. Consider that fiber FPV drones are carrying upwards of 2 kg of fiber (IIUC) in addition to the payload. Fuel tanks are stationary so you can dispense with the fiber.
Anyway, I invite you to visit America some day. I think it's obvious to Americans that anyone can drive a truck to within a mile or two of every military installation, usually much closer.
One type of a retiring aircraft. Not comparable to a third of Russia’s entire bomber fleet.
> it's obvious to Americans that anyone can drive a truck to within a mile or two of every military installation
Fair enough, in peacetime. Russia is at war.
This attack, potentially, might spell the end of that treaty.
START has long since been a dead treaty, replaced by New START. New START has two verification methods, none of which rely on overflight by satellites; instead, verification is performed by onsite inspections of nuclear facilities.
The best way to protect them is maybe not invading and trying to commit genocide on a neighboring country.
It's like developing a good relationship with Ukraine wasn't a possibility, it had to be through corruption and now war.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/01/europe/ukraine-drones-russia-...
All of this can end tomorrow. Pull out of Ukraine, get rid of Putin, they’d probably even get most of the sanctions eased.
well current actions certainly aren't helping
That being said all you really need to do is install defensive netting at bases. You don’t even need hangers so relatively inexpensive retrofit. That will probably cause drones to shift to dropped minions but at least those are less accurate.
Now compare that to a country with no navy sinking a missile cruiser or downing an AWACS jet. Or, in this case, sending trucks thousands of miles into enemy territory to destroy strategic bombers. It's simply more interesting news despite how it makes you feel.
A long protracted war complete with the destruction of their strategic airforce and Black Sea Fleet was not something they would have even conceived of being the outcome back in January 2022.
That doesn't mean Ukraine "won". But barring any kind of black swan event in their favor, Russia definitely "lost".
Here's CNN three days into the war for example https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/russia-ukraine-mil...
It's not like he needed this bypass on a check on his power. He has done it to insult the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undeclared_war
We get to destroy an enemy by proxy and another country will take the punishment and blame for it.
It's perfect, as long as our ally doesn't run out of blood.
This was previously true, but I thought this policy changed as of last week?
May 26 2025: US, UK and allies to lift all range restrictions on weapons in Ukraine
Ukraine’s western allies, including the UK and the US, have agreed to lift all remaining range restrictions on the use of their weapons after President Trump issued his strongest criticism of President Putin yet.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/uk...
I don't see Ukraine winning this conflict in the long run, though, and if it goes on for too long, we'll see bitterness on the Ukrainian side directed at those they felt should have helped. Fighting to the last Ukrainian will eventually make an enemy of them imo.
It is advantageous for the US to keep the war going to a point, but the real focus for the US is the Pacific and the US would prefer to not have to worry about Europe and Russia and instead focus on China. But the US isn’t able to end this war one way or another. Only Russia can end the war (aside from Ukraine no longer willingly defending their country) either willingly or by some sort of internal event, barring some miscalculation where they attack NATO forces. Some theorize Putin will do that to get defeated so he can save face but I don’t think that is likely.
It is very short-sighted view. It is definitely not advantageous. USA has reaped the benefits of law-based world order in the last 70 years and which was the reason it has its wealth now.
The longer the war is going on, the more unstable the world becomes and the less it is there for USA to benefit from.
The whole strategy of the USA after WW2 was to keep world and especially Europe safe.
The problem is that letting Russia win will only accelerate the demise of the US, so it cannot just walk away even if everyone in White House really wants that.
Well that's why I wrote it's advantageous to a point. The one really clear advantageous thing for the United States is that Russia's military has been degraded, and their economy is obviously not doing quite as well as it otherwise might be either. And it caused Sweden and Finland to join NATO, Germany to decouple (to an extent) from Russian gas, and more.
> The problem is that letting Russia win will only accelerate the demise of the US, so it cannot just walk away even if everyone in White House really wants that.
Even if Russia won this wouldn't really result in a demise of the United States by any means - just a stronger Russia and a buffet full of other undesirable repercussions for our enemies to pick and choose from.
It was one and a half years in the making.