Ukraine Invasion 2: no more Black Sea fleet for you

Yeah it’s a little hard to see and I was confused by the video that was released a while ago. I think these are just screencaps from that but you can see a partial cross-section of the pipe. Nice neat cut. Idk if anyone really cares about this stuff but tomorrow I’ll look for some examples of steel cut by a linear shaped charge.

https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1636127574622347267?t=_UkCZqjP42OoZNVaIGaWaQ&s=19

Looks like the plane seemed to change direction to hit it. Which would be a weird thing to do, so obviously that’s not what happened.

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Rostov’s regional governor said a short circuit appeared to have caused the fire, which ignited fuel tanks.

It’s funny how the Russians always claim that it was some stupid accident,

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Sure the plane was trying to avoid the drone ;) Twice.

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FWIW, this video shows examples of commercially fabricated cylindrical and linear-shaped charges. For comparison with improvised charges, they also demonstrate cylindrical charges using C4 and a wine bottle. It might seem like these guys aren’t that serious but NM Tech is legit. If you don’t want to watch videos, there are screencaps in the summary below.

In this video, these guys show how you can mangle steel and concrete with C4. They also do an improvised C4 shaped charge.

Stills:

Linear shaped charge on steel armor plate, ~1.5" thick (guess). Notice the surface the charge was sitting on is hardly even marked except where the jet penetrated the plate.


C4/wine bottle. It didn’t completely penetrate the first plate. The entry hole isn’t sharply defined. Could be in part because it was sitting on the table (ETA: I don’t completely buy the explanation in the video, for reasons people describe in the comments.)


Finns with improvised C4 shaped charge. It only penetrates about 3 inches and chews up the surface of the steel cylinder. He says it’s because the charge was imperfect but they don’t show how they made it so :man_shrugging:

sc_improva0
sc_improva1

In the pipeline pics, it looks like it was cut completely through without doing much damage at all to the nearby concrete surface so more likely to have been done with something professionally made rather than improvised, in my non-expert opinion.

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The fighter jet definitely didn’t intend to hit the drone like that. Early in the war a Ukranian jet crashed after making contact with a drone like that as the drone propellers shattered and destroyed the jet engine. Would have been a terrible exchange for Russia to lose a plane worth ten times as much just to take out a drone. Looks like they tried to force it down with turbulence and fuel and the jet pilot messed up and got too close.

Why not just shoot it?

Because then you can’t claim it was an accident. Would make it an act of war. They want to stop these drones from providing intelligence to Ukraine without actually shooting them down.

It’s an old plane and the drone is supposedly $30 million.

Very expensive drone then. Thought their unit cost was millions not 10s of millions.

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https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1636756525044604928?t=bT-SysaD8jaINHreHM9VwA&s=19

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Got him!

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Must still be working on those indictments for Bush and Cheney for Iraq. To be fair there’s a lot of ground to cover but shit they’ve had twenty years.

Actually to be serious, that’s probably exactly why they’re not charging Putin with the most grave war crime of an unjustified war of aggression. Which, yes, Putin is surely guilty of but so are American presidents, most obviously Bush.

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He paints pictures of the people who his actions injured. It’s serial killer stuff!

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The ICC thing strikes me as a pretty major deal. Will certainly affect how policies toward Russia are discussed and viewed within India, South Africa, and even China, which seeks international legitimacy. And now Russia will have to argue that they are not only at war with NATO but also the rest of the world.

Kudos to the ICC. No squishy Robert Muller’s on their staff.

to be serious, that’s just a misunderstanding of where the ICC investigations can go. it’s role is intentionally limited to only a few articles, and war of aggression action would require major decisions in the UN sec council

While this Definition of Aggression has often been cited by opponents of conflicts such as the 1999 Kosovo War and the 2003 Iraq War, it has no binding force in international law. The doctrine of Nulla poena sine lege means that, in the absence of binding international law on the subject of aggression, no penalty exists for committing acts in contravention of the definition. It is only recently that heads of state have been indicted over acts committed in wartime, in the cases of Slobodan Milošević of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia. However, both were charged with war crimes, i.e., violations of the laws of war, rather than with the broader offence of “a crime against international peace” as envisaged by the Definition of Aggression.

Putin got pretty sloppy, and decided to advertise the fact that he was stealing children from occupied territories.

omg add crimes against art to the list of charges.