On day 600 of the three day special military operation, everything is going according to plan: RU air force affiliated fighterbomber telegram reports "One of the most serious strikes of all time in the SMO"
(losses they report tend to be real, though I wouldn't put much stock in the ATACMS claim without additional evidence)
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1714165868316299322
Also reportedly in Luhansk.
I kind of would have expected delivery of ATACMS to be announced at least very shortly before the first use, but possible the widely reported approval would be considered enough to manage escalation risks. Or some other system was used
"Vladimir Rogov, the Russian-appointed governor of the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia region, said air defence systems "successfully intercepted enemy rockets" over Berdyansk"
Stored ammunition and parked helicopters bravely intercepted cluster munitions on the ground! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67135163
AP reports
1) "Fewer than a dozen of the missiles got into Ukraine within the last few days"
2) "According to a U.S. official, the ones delivered to Ukraine have a maximum range of a bit more than 100 miles"
Now the Russian command gets to guess whether this is deception or indicative of future deliveries. If the US only delivers the ~160 km range M39, Sevastopol and most of the big air bases in Crimea are out of range
https://apnews.com/article/atacms-ukraine-longrange-missiles-5fd95f32449d14da22b82d57d6ccab22
The United States has quietly delivered the long-range ballistic missiles Ukraine said it urgently needed, and Ukraine has started using them on the battlefield against Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been pressing the U.S. to provide the Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS. Their delivery to the warfront gives Ukraine a critical ability to strike Russian targets that are farther away, allowing Ukrainian forces to stay safely out of range.
👀
"19.10.23. Avdiivka, Donetsk oblast, Ukraine. Remember this date and place.
It was the biggest Russian disaster. Bigger than Bilogorivka last year."
FT with a twist on the sidewinder mystery: “Those [AIM-9] missiles were out of operation,” said a senior Ukrainian official in reference to a batch of that type supplied to Ukraine. “We fixed them. We found a way of launching them from the ground. It’s a kind of self-made air defence”
That might explain the oddly low number initially delivered by Canada
https://www.ft.com/content/69cf1288-0156-4b8f-a770-cacb05988596?shareType=nongift
(possibly paywall free if linked from this tweet https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1716673933938737554)
NYT with various tidbits about the #Ukraine "FrankenSAM" effort, which is apparently now an umbrella term for various systems, including BUK + Sea Sparrow, AIM-9s paired with some unspecified radar, and "a Patriot missile and launching station that operates with Ukraine’s older, domestically made radar systems" 🤨
Ongoing antisemitic demonstrations in the Republic of Dagestan and elsewhere in the North Caucasus are highlighting heightened interethnic and interreligious tensions in Russia. Hundreds of demonstrators in Dagestan broke into Makhachkala airport,
Huh "the Territorial Defense Forces, reported accepting 100,000 new recruits in the first 10 days of all-out war. The mass mobilization was fueled in part by the optimistic predictions of some senior officials that the war would be won in months if not weeks"
Did people actually believe that in March 2022?! 🤨
I don't recall seeing any optimistic predictions like that at the time
https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview/
Ukraine said on Wednesday Russian warplanes had dropped "explosive objects" into the likely paths of civilian vessels in the Black Sea three times in the last 24 hours, but that its fledgling shipping corridor was still operating.
A Russian artist who replaced supermarket price tags with messages calling for an end to Moscow's war in Ukraine is expected to learn her fate in court on Thursday with a state prosecutor asking for her to be jailed for eight years.
A SIM card from the Ukrainian telecommunications operator Kyivstar was found inside a downed Shahed drone, which Russia used to attack Ukraine. Experts are investigating how the SIM card ended up in the drone and why it was needed, news outlet RBC Ukraine reports Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ignat as saying in a telethon.
RFE/RL with a deep dive into the the Redut "private military company" which turns out to be a very thin GRU front
https://www.rferl.org/a/redut-fake-russia-gru-pmc-ukraine/32708853.html
A new interactive investigation by RFE/RL reveals the inner workings of a secretive scheme by Russian military intelligence to recruit fighters for the Kremlin's war on Ukraine under the guise of a fictitious private military company.
Yeah, that's an ex-Ropucha (also one warehouse next to the quay has evaporated, several others are damaged, and the ship at bottom center is doing a submarine impression)
An AP investigation has found that Russian occupation authorities vastly and deliberately undercounted the dead in one of the most devastating chapters of the 22-month war in Ukraine — the flooding that followed the catastrophic explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in the southern Kherson region. Russia said 59 people drowned in the territory it controls. But The Associated Press determined the number is at least in the hundreds in the town of Oleshky alone. Health workers and others who were in Oleshky told the AP that Russian authorities hid the true number by taking control of the issuance of death certificates, immediately removing bodies not claimed by family, and preventing local health workers and volunteers from dealing with the dead.
"A second official said that the North Korean projectiles were short-range ballistic missiles that Moscow fired in late December and early January" 🤨
Presumably not Scuds or any of the other liquid fueled stuff, maybe KN-02? One of the big MLRS? Something newer like KN-23 or KN-24?
Most of those seem like they'd require significant crew training, unless DPRK is providing operators too
AP reports #DPRK missiles #Russia used to attack #Ukraine "have a range of about 550 miles", which seems to make KN-23 the closest fit
The White House says U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russia has acquired ballistic missiles from North Korea and is seeking close-range ballistic missiles from Iran as Moscow struggles to replenish arms for its war with Ukraine. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday that recently declassified intelligence found that North Korea has provided Russia with ballistic missile launchers and several ballistic missiles. Kirby said a Russia-Iran deal had not been completed. But, he said, the U.S. “is concerned that Russia's negotiations to acquire close range ballistic missiles from Iran are actively advancing.”
I think graphic (via https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/1742976043307131292) from Kirby's briefing (CSPAN clip here https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1742980763887272314) shows both KN-23 and KN-24, but probably just illustrative examples. Launch site seems to be south of Voronezh, maybe in the vicinity of Korotoyak (unclear how specific graphic is supposed to be). Kirby stated one launch on Dec 30 landed in a field near Zaporizhzhia, additional launches on Jan 2 being evaluated
On Thursday, White House spokesman John Kirby unveiled a map showing where Russia launched the North Korean missiles into Ukraine (near Zaporizhzhia). "We anticipate that Russia will use additional North Korean missiles to target Ukraine civilian infrastructure," Kirby said
China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735, en route from Kunming to Guangzhou, lost contact and crashed over Wuzhou city of South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region at 14:38 on March 21. The PLA Southern Theater Command launched the emergency response mechanism at the news.
Also quite close to the Petropavlovka Russia accidentally hit on Jan 3 https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-accidentally-bombs-own-village-vows-rebuild-homes-2024-01-03/
(there are several, but from street view I think it's this one https://www.google.com/maps/place/Petropavlovka,+Voronezh+Oblast,+Russia,+397814/@51.0035644,39.1879327,5884m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x41249c3e14d95049:0xdaf0ce26fbd4d0e8!8m2!3d51.0056017!4d39.1989549!16s%2Fg%2F11bbt0vjhg?entry=ttu)
Jeffrey Lewis makes a strong case missile debris from a Jan 2 strike on Kharkiv was North Korean, though unclear whether KN-23 or KN-24 (Hwasong-11A or 11B)
https://nitter.net/ArmsControlWonk/status/1743401762151657822#m
Two interesting things about this recent #Ukraine strike on #Crimea:
1) Claimed "ammunition warehouses" but no major secondary damage
2) Hits seem extremely precise, 2 munitions per warehouse (except one, miss/dud?). Target is ~130km from front line. Ukraine wouldn't burn 7+ Storm shadows on this, and holes seem small for that. Not consistent with ATACMS either
Has #GLSDB finally arrived?
https://kyivindependent.com/military-intelligence-satellite-images-confirm-strike/
3 января, после пятимесячного перерыва, Россия и Украина вновь обменялись пленными. Домой уехало больше, чем обычно — 230 и 248 человек. На этот раз Украина не смогла вернуть никого из защитников Мариуполя из числа бойцов полка «Азов», но впервые вернула шестерых, задержанных на оккупированных территориях, «гражданских» украинцев. Россия, по словам омбудсмена РФ Татьяны Москальковой, смогла получить 75 человек «без обмена» — в счет старых долгов за освобождение командиров «Азова».
Rumors today a Russian A-50 AWACS and an IL-22M command & control plane was shot down by #Ukraine, or possibly friendly fire. Seems pretty clear something significant happened, but not exactly what
Russian losses reported on FighterBomber almost always check out, though notably they didn't go into the specifics
Stop, AASM HAMMER time. (It's basically a sparkling JDAM but the additional guidance options and rocket assist should be welcome)
According to an official from the Russian Interior Ministry "since the beginning of the war, there have been 220 attempts to set fire to draft offices and 184 attempts to carry out sabotage on the railways across 58 regions of Russia" - while the practical impact is negligible, that's a non-trivial number of people risking (and frequently receiving) long prison terms
An Il-76 military transport aircraft crashed in the Korochansky District of Russia’s Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border on Wednesday at around noon local time, according to multiple Telegram channels. According to the channel 112, there were 63 people on board. Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov confirmed that all of the passengers were killed in the crash.
A Russian Il-76 military transport aircraft crashed in Belgorod Oblast, Russia, on January 24. Geolocated footage posted by various Russian sources shows the Il-76 crashing in Yablonovo, Belgorod Oblast (about 50km northeast of Belgorod City). The
Despite sanctions, Russia imported advanced chips valued at more than $1 billion from U.S. and European companies during the initial nine months of 2023, according to classified data from the Russian customs service obtained by Bloomberg.
"The best way to stop the strikes, he said, would be to use [HIMARS] to hit the launch sites in Russia. But Washington, which provided the systems, has barred Ukraine from using them to hit targets within Russia — a limitation Strilok called “absurd.”" - Gotta agree, prohibiting counter battery fire is pretty absurd
Reed Mideke
Spiritech