"All of Vlad's forces and all of Vlad's men, are out to put Humpty together again." (2 Viewers)

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Admiral Beez said:
I remain surprised that Russia has not yet destroyed the rail network linking Poland to eastern Ukraine. That should have been a target on day one, but even now Ukrainian trains are bringing tanks, artillery, APCs, etc.
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They do hit the rail network on the regular basis. Last week Odesa region, yesterday Lviv region, about an hour ago - Dnipro city. Usual targets are hubs, terminals, and rail bridges.
 
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Admiral Beez said:
IDK, I would expect the West to hit Russia's internet accessible systems pretty hard in response.
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Which is why Russia took the extraordinary step a few years ago to try and firewall the Russian internet off from the rest of the world. It won't be an impervious firewall but it shows Russia is aware of the risk and wants to limit the exposure.

One added side-effect of the firewall is that it makes it much easier to stop Western "propaganda" corrupting the noble, righteous Russian mind.
 
Admiral Beez said:

Russia's War Has Been Brutal, but Putin Has Shown Some Restraint. Why?

Western officials are debating the Kremlin's calculations in not trying harder to halt weapons shipments in Ukraine. Analysts wonder whether a bigger mobilization by Moscow is on the horizon.

Russia's war against Ukraine has leveled cities, killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions of others from their homes. But quietly, some military analysts and Western officials are asking why the onslaught has not been even worse. Russia could be going after Ukrainian railways, roads and bridges more aggressively to try to stanch the flow of Western weapons to the front line. It could have bombed more of the infrastructure around the capital, Kyiv, to make it harder for Western leaders to visit President Volodymyr Zelensky in shows of unity and resolve. And it could be doing far more to inflict pain on the West, whether by cyberattack, sabotage or more cutoffs of energy exports to Europe.

Part of the reason appears to be sheer incompetence: The opening weeks of the war demonstrated vividly that Russia's military was far less capable than believed before the invasion. But American and European officials also say that President Vladimir V. Putin's tactics in recent weeks have appeared to be remarkably cautious, marked by a slow-moving offensive in eastern Ukraine, a restrained approach to taking out Ukrainian infrastructure and an avoidance of actions that could escalate the conflict with NATO.
The apparent restraint on the ground stands in contrast to the bombast on Russian state television, where Moscow is described as being locked in an existential fight against the West and where the use of nuclear weapons is openly discussed. The issue is whether, as the war grinds on, Mr. Putin will change tack and intensify the war.

That is a particularly urgent question ahead of the Victory Day holiday in Russia next Monday, when Mr. Putin traditionally presides over a grandiose parade marking the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany and gives a militaristic speech. Ben Wallace, the British defense secretary, predicted last week that Mr. Putin would use the speech for an official declaration of war and a mass mobilization of the Russian people.

American and European officials say that they have not seen any on-the-ground movements that would show any much larger push with additional troops beginning on May 9 or soon after. Those officials now expect a slower, grinding campaign inside Ukraine. But they do not disagree that Mr. Putin could use the speech to declare a wider war and a deeper national effort to fight it.

For the moment, Mr. Putin appears to be in a military holding pattern, one that is allowing Ukraine to regroup and stock up on Western weaponry. On Monday, a senior Pentagon official called Russia's latest offensive in eastern Ukraine "very cautious, very tepid." In Russia, there is grumbling that the military is fighting with one hand tied behind its back, with the strategy and aims not understood by the public.

"This is a strange, special kind of war," Dmitri Trenin, until recently the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, said in a phone interview from outside Moscow. "Russia has set some rather strict limits for itself, and this is not being explained in any way — which raises a lot of questions, first of all, among Russian citizens."

Mr. Trenin is one of the few analysts from his think tank, shuttered last month by the Russian government, who chose to stay in Russia after the war began. He said that he was struggling to explain why the Kremlin was fighting at "less than half strength."

Why isn't Russia bombing more bridges and railway networks, he asked, when they are allowing Ukraine's military to receive more of the West's increasingly lethal weapons deliveries with every passing day? Why are Western leaders — like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday — still able to visit Kyiv safely?
"I find this strange, and I can't explain it," Mr. Trenin said.

To be sure, Russian missile strikes have targeted infrastructure across Ukraine, including an important bridge in the country's southwest on Monday and the runway of the Odesa airport on Saturday. But across the Atlantic, officials and analysts are asking themselves similar questions as Mr. Trenin.

For weeks, officials in Washington have discussed why the Russian military has not been more aggressive in trying to destroy the supply lines that send Western arms shipments into Ukraine. Part of the answer, officials say, is that Ukrainian air defense continues to threaten Russian aircraft, and the deeper Russian planes go into
Ukraine the greater the chance they are going to be shot down.
Russia has also struggled with its precision munitions — missiles or rockets with guidance systems. Many of those weapons have failed to work properly, and Russian supplies of the weapons are limited. Strikes on rail lines or moving convoys must be very precise to be effective.

Other officials have argued that Moscow is eager to avoid destroying Ukraine's infrastructure too severely, in the possibly misguided hope that it can still take control of the country. Russia would be stuck with a huge rebuilding job if it took over cities devastated by its own bombing.

A senior American defense official said that Mr. Putin may have avoided destroying Ukraine's rail network because he did not want to hurt his own ability to move equipment and troops around the country. The Russians have been more focused on destroying weapon storage areas than the rail network.

American officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private military and intelligence assessments.
Then there is the question of why Russia hasn't hit back harder against the West. The Kremlin narrative is of an existential war with NATO being fought on Ukrainian soil, but Russia is the one taking military losses while the West keeps a safe distance and supplies weapons that kill Russian soldiers.

"A lot of people in this town are asking why they haven't retaliated yet," said Samuel Charap, a former U.S. State Department official in Washington and a Russia analyst with the RAND Corporation. "It seems low probability that the U.S. and its allies will experience no blowback from having put this many Russian soldiers in their graves."

Russia has the tools to do widespread damage to the West. The gas shortages caused by the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline last year showed the disruption that Russian hacking can inflict on American infrastructure. Berlin has warned that a cutoff of Russian gas could throw the German economy into a recession.
And then there is Moscow's world-leading nuclear arsenal, with an estimated 5,977 warheads: Their catastrophic capability is being hyped in ever-shriller terms in the Russian media.
"You thought you could destroy us with other people's hands and observe from the sidelines from a safe distance?" Sergei Mironov, an outspoken hawk in Russia's Parliament, said on Saturday, claiming that his country's new intercontinental ballistic missilecould destroy Britain in a single strike. "It won't work, gentlemen — you'll have to pay for it all in full!" he added.

Mr. Putin has also warned of retaliation, but he values ambiguity, too. Last year, he said that those crossing a "red line" would face an "asymmetric, fast and tough" response — an indication that the response would come at a time and place of Moscow's choosing.

"Nobody really knows where the red line is," Mr. Charap, the analyst, said. "I don't even think the Russians know, because we are in such uncharted waters."

American and allied officials have debated why Mr. Putin hasn't tried widespread or more damaging cyberstrikes. Some say that Mr. Putin has been effectively deterred. The Russian military, struggling to make gains in Ukraine, cannot handle a wider war with NATO and does not want to give the alliance any excuse to enter the war more directly.

Others argue that a cyberstrike on a NATO country is one of the few cards Mr. Putin can play and that he may be waiting for a later stage in his campaign to do that. While Mr. Putin has been unafraid of escalating the rhetoric, his actions have suggested he does not want to do anything that could prompt a wider war.
"The general sense is that he wants to snatch some sort of victory out of this debacle of his," said the American defense official, suggesting that Mr. Putin was not interested in "borrowing more trouble."
Before the invasion on Feb. 24, Mr. Trenin, of the Carnegie center, predicted that the Ukrainian military would put up a fierce resistance and that Mr. Putin would discover a lack of political support for Russia in Ukraine. On that, Mr. Trenin turned out to be right.

What he was wrong about, Mr. Trenin said, was the information that aides and commanders would provide to Mr. Putin about Russia's capabilities, which turned out to be flawed. Mr. Trenin says he still sees Mr. Putin as fundamentally rational, rather than someone willing to engage in a nuclear war, with a "maniacal determination to destroy mankind.""That would not be a mistake — that would be a total departure from rationality," Mr. Trenin said. "I hope that now I am not wrong."
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Mr.Trenin was a Kremlin's mouthpiece for many years, disguised as an "independent expert". He ruined his reputation a long time ago.
The premise about "restraint" is complete BS. Restraint - as in Kharkiv, Mariupol, Bucha, Borodyanka, in numerous (10-30 cruise missiles at once) raids all over the territory, up to the NATO border?
Trenin says: "Why isn't Russia bombing more bridges and railway networks". Damned lies. Such bombings never stopped.
But damaged rail lines are being restored quickly.
"He said that he was struggling to explain why the Kremlin was fighting at "less than half strength."" Another BS.
It's a typical propaganda trick - to spread the message about "fighting with one hand tied" as an explanation of own failures. Some Russian "military experts" now talk about the Vietnam war and US self imposed restrictions. So typical as well. The hatred of the USA mixed with envy and with an eternal desire to copy at least something from those damned Americans.
About alleged "restraint", very good video from Perun:
 
GrauGeist said:
Well, I have a question:
Just how many Nazis has Putin managed to catch/kill so far, during this fiasco?

Is the world safe yet?
Click to expand...
Hope this answers your question.

FR0lbgTXEAIA4zr.jpg
 
Thumpalumpacus said:
This may well be the case, but it makes me wonder why Russia didn't launch cyberwarfare not only against Ukraine but against the US given their doctrine of hybrid warfare.
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Against Ukraine - they did. The number of cyberattacks was on the rise in 2021 and during last winter. But the defence was more robust than during the not-Petya attack, Cooperation with NSA and with major software players such as Microsoft helped.
 
RogerdeLluria said:
Hope this answers your question.

View attachment 666909
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The map is not complete yet.
Foreign minister Molotoff Ribbentrop Lavrov discovered Nazi supporters in Israel and spoke about the Jewish origins of Adolf Hitler.
www.bbc.com

Israel outrage at Sergei Lavrov's claim that Hitler was part Jewish

The Russian foreign minister's claim that Hitler "had Jewish blood" is denounced as unforgiveable.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
www.haaretz.com

Russia doubles down, says Israel 'supports neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine'

***
www.haaretz.com www.haaretz.com
 
Admiral Beez said:
Why do the Russians think they can do cyberwar better?
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Because they tend to do just that. Also, remember that not all cyberwar is about hacking. Disinformation campaigns and getting people to turn against their own side or believe fake news is part of it too. In this respect, Russia (and China) have been conducting cyberwar activities for many years, at least back to 2015.
 
Dimlee said:
They do hit the rail network on the regular basis. Last week Odesa region, yesterday Lviv region, about an hour ago - Dnipro city. Usual targets are hubs, terminals, and rail bridges.
Click to expand...
Hopefully the Ukrainians were warned or expected this and have prepared to repair the tracks and reroute as needed. I would not be surprised if volunteer civilian railway crews from Poland and elsewhere are helping to put things to rights.
 
J_P_C said:
clearly you have very limited clue about security of nuclear installations. All of its critical systems are designed to be be completly separated from internet and immune to the cyberattacks untill you will drive your tank to the control room and hook up to the powerplant's computers from there. Even so it will take you weeks to communicate with control nodes not mentioning breaching firewalls. I can assure you that dropping FAB1500 on the reactor cooling system building is much easier way to "organize" catastrphy.
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In addition there are contingency plans. I don't know about other countries but the UK have a number of plans to protect and / or limit the damage that can be done to the power grid. For instance if all the power stations in the UK were some how to be turned off, there are plans and equipment in place for all the power stations to be on line within 48 hours. They do this by nominating a number of stations as 'self starter stations'. These are equipped with gas turbine engines (Olympus engines at the station my son worked at). These can start the home station and these can then be linked to other power stations and so on until they are all up and running. Some self starter stations are Hydro but the principle is the same, they start themselves and then power the rest.
The grid itself can be split into areas to limit damage and then re-joined to make a complete system. Critical systems for infrastructure such as as banks, other big business's, defence, government, departments, police etc have back up sites for the data, which can be cold start or hot start sites. On the one I worked on, the site was linked to another site. Both sites had twice the power needed to run the site and could run the other site if needed. In addition to this both sites had power stations that were switched off and could be switched on if the main power network was down and again each site could run both sites if needed. As a final back up both sites could run for 48 hours using battery power and all the systems and data needed for the smooth running of the organisations was held at both sites.

Does this mean that a cyber attack couldn't do damage, clearly no, only a fool would give that guarantee. But when you consider the above plus the difficulty in knocking out Gas, Solar, Wind, Coal, and Nuclear sites all at the same time, its as safe as you are likely to get.

Its also worth pointing out that there have been a few days in the UK where all the power was generated by renewables, which give an extra layer of protection should some stations be knocked out.
 
Jagdflieger said:
Off course access is the key-word, and this seems to be possible in many way's, e.g was done IIRC in 2017 at a German nuclear plant via virus infected/corrupted USB sticks.
Also the new trend regarding the use of interconnected smart phones and blue-tooth poses additional new threats.
According to paper regulations things are pretty tight - but reality seems to be at various different levels in many countries in contra to the theoretical security measures.

I for myself "unintentionally" and also intentionally have brought my Mobil into highly restricted areas into the MoD's of several countries.
As for actually observed safety protocols in many countries - I wouldn't be willing to place my hand into the fire.

I can't open the following link, so I wouldn't know about the articles relevant date.
www.securityweek.com

Belgium's Nuclear Plants Face Threat of Cyber-attack: EU Counter-terror Chief

Belgium's network of nuclear power plants and other major infrastructure face the threat of a cyber-attack over the next five years, the European Union's counter-terror chief said.
www.securityweek.com www.securityweek.com
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Until your post i've wondered why German government is so pushy with closing it's nuclear power plants... but now it become quite clear. I have some doubts in relation to your professional level - you have intentionally breached security regulations and you are announcing this publicly - well... don't you think something is wrong here?
 
Dimlee said:
The map is not complete yet.
Foreign minister Molotoff Ribbentrop Lavrov discovered Nazi supporters in Israel and spoke about the Jewish origins of Adolf Hitler.
www.bbc.com

Israel outrage at Sergei Lavrov's claim that Hitler was part Jewish

The Russian foreign minister's claim that Hitler "had Jewish blood" is denounced as unforgiveable.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
www.haaretz.com

Russia doubles down, says Israel 'supports neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine'

***
www.haaretz.com www.haaretz.com
Click to expand...
Yep, Kremlin making friends all over the world. Seems that Israel is a bit pissed off and has changed its stance vs Ukraine.
 
GTX said:
Not quite:
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True. Africa is notably out. Too bad, as there must be hundreds of T-72 tanks in Africa. And South Africa has some very suitable, low tech yet effective kit. That aside, when your actions can unite an otherwise squabbling NATO and bring the likes of China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Vietnam, Argentina, Japan and even the Kiwis onto your enemy's side, well you might have overstepped.

Aid to Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

id_to_Ukraine_during_the_2022_Russian_invasion.svg.png
 
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GTX said:
Because they tend to do just that. Also, remember that not all cyberwar is about hacking. Disinformation campaigns and getting people to turn against their own side or believe fake news is part of it too. In this respect, Russia (and China) have been conducting cyberwar activities for many years, at least back to 2015.
Click to expand...

Hybrid warfare is in my opinion a useful concept. I'm just surprised that Russia, which pretty much codified the ideas of it, has done so poorly in execution.
 
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