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Ukraine and the Russian invasion, Feb 2022 - tangentially related crap

China seems to have taken Vladivostok back from Russia:

From now on, goods from the north of China to the south will be transported through Vladivostok without customs procedures.

The status of a transit port for domestic trade was granted to Vladivostok by the Main Customs Administration of the People's Republic of China.

Earlier this year, China began using traditional Chinese names on maps of Russia’s Far East.
 
Wasn't there talk of Vladivostok and the Far East breaking away and becoming a separate state some years back? When this is over I suspect Russia will be smaller than it is now.
 
This is pretty wild, the mines at Soledar full of thousands of crates of weapons, including what looks like boxes of WW2 lend lease era stuff still in immaculate condition.

 
This is pretty wild, the mines at Soledar full of thousands of crates of weapons, including what looks like boxes of WW2 lend lease era stuff still in immaculate condition.


strange that the barrett sniper rifle shown round 3:07 is rusty as fuck, when barrett was only founded in 1982
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Does that show signs of burning behind the trigger? Could have been damaged in a fire and then as you all know, rust happens very quickly.
 
given the price tag of a barrett sniper rifle, and the information on caching freely available online (eg special forces caching techniques [paladin reprint, pdf]) it's criminal to leave a weapon to rot like that

Might have been damaged reasonably recently and sent down there to see if it could be repaired and then abandoned when Soledar was taken maybe? From the video sounds like it was a workshop as well as a storage facility.
 
Might have been damaged reasonably recently and sent down there to see if it could be repaired and then abandoned when Soledar was taken maybe? From the video sounds like it was a workshop as well as a storage facility.
it's good of you to offer excuses, it shows a good spirit. makes you wonder what other caches of weapons might be lurking round the place. there's a blog piece about this one at Ukraine Weapons Cache – The Armourers Bench e2a yeh you're right, it was damaged recently
 
And I thought I'd had some shit jobs, but none were 150m underground in a saltmine surrounded by tonnes of explosives rigged to blow fixing old rusty weapons.
 
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I've posted videos before from 1402 - a Youtube that specialises in vox-pop interviews in Russia. This is one of their latest in which they ask, mostly young people if Russia is losing the war. There are quite a few people who don't seem to worry about speaking their minds and not giving the answers the Russian state would like to hear.


 
The demolition of Britain? The Conservative party acting under their own volition have nearly achieved it

As always in such debates you overlook the role of the Liberal Democrats as a catalyst for change, without their crucial assistance in the early years the last decade the Tories would still be stripping the lead from the roof of Castle Britannia not grubbing up the foundations as they currently are
 
I've posted videos before from 1402 - a Youtube that specialises in vox-pop interviews in Russia. This is one of their latest in which they ask, mostly young people if Russia is losing the war. There are quite a few people who don't seem to worry about speaking their minds and not giving the answers the Russian state would like to hear.




A couple of smart youngsters in there.
 
On a similar theme to the above video, I found this article from Meduza (an independent Russian media outlet with an anti-war editorial line) fascinating.

They asked their readers, who are generally on the more liberal and independently minded side of Russian society, why some of them still supported the war in Ukraine.

 


Journalists at Kyiv Independent discuss the level of corruption in Ukraine, the lack of independence in the judiciary and various initiatives looking to tackle this. Ends with an interesting Q&A asking what Ukraine needs to do to get in the EU and whether Zelensky is corrupt.
 
Very tangential. I love this guys channel. He tests out different countries MREs and he's insanely enthusiastic and likes to eat. Here he's trying the home teams Russian MRE.

I like trying different ones myself (handy for hiking/camping). They are expensive though if you get them on Ebay. I've tries British, Canadian, American, Italian (contains a shot of brandy like alcohol), French and Russian (the worst). You can get civilian ones some of which are almost identical to the military ones (they sometimes use these to feed people in disaster zones).



The British one's great.

 
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He might have a point...


'In an essay written before the Ukraine war, I argued that the conjunction of social media with high quality drone footage from the wars in Syria and Karabakh had created a fusion of online enthusiasts with technology, so that “Drone, camera and social media sharer thus become a single, integrated weapon system, a hybrid semi-autonomous proxy as useful and as cheap to operate as the expendable proxies fighting on the ground”. The Syrian war, like the Spanish Civil War before World War Two, can be considered an armed rehearsal for the Ukraine war, a rough draft of processes and technologies that would later reach their full, terrible potential. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the conjunction of brutal drone footage with social media, and of mass deaths with vigorous online fandoms.'


'Published just before the Ukraine War began, Radical War by the academics Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins warned that the fusion of smartphone technology and modern warfare meant that “war is principally about managing the attention of populations and different audiences” in a “media spectacle” where “it is not possible to locate these emergent forms of warfare within existing models of representation and ways of seeing the world”. The smartphone and the drone camera have changed war entirely, “replacing the rifle as the weapon of choice for those engaged in mass participation in war” and “collapsing the boundary between those who observe war and those who engage in it”.'
 
. The smartphone and the drone camera have changed war entirely, “replacing the rifle as the weapon of choice for those engaged in mass participation in war” and “collapsing the boundary between those who observe war and those who engage in it”.'

yet the war looks very much to be about trenches, artillary bombarments, atrocities, death and destruction very much in the style of mid 20th centuary conflicts. Not sure having the real time footage of the mud and blood and bullets on you tube and twitter makes any differance to what's happening on the ground - and im pretty sure the poor bastards at the sharp end are having a very different experience to those watching it several thousand miles away.
 
yet the war looks very much to be about trenches, artillary bombarments, atrocities, death and destruction very much in the style of mid 20th centuary conflicts. Not sure having the real time footage of the mud and blood and bullets on you tube and twitter makes any differance to what's happening on the ground - and im pretty sure the poor bastards at the sharp end are having a very different experience to those watching it several thousand miles away.
I'm not sure he was saying this isn't the case. He was talking about us, not them.
 
I'm not sure he was saying this isn't the case. He was talking about us, not them.
it was the "changed war entriely bit" which stood out- for a war which looks like a massive throwback to the days of mass armys furiously slogging it out over months and years. Even if he was talking about changing the reporting of war -"entirely" im not sure thats true either - vietnam and Gulf War 1 also saw significent changes (daily tv reporting and remote camera footage respectively)
 
it was the "changed war entriely bit" which stood out- for a war which looks like a massive throwback to the days of mass armys furiously slogging it out over months and years. Even if he was talking about changing the reporting of war -"entirely" im not sure thats true either - vietnam and Gulf War 1 also saw significent changes (daily tv reporting and remote camera footage respectively)
Could have been in those wars that it was transformed into a spectator sport for those at a safe distance, a phenomenon we've seen glimpses of on here more or less daily since the war began.

Was it the Vietnam war about which Gang of Four sang 'Watch new blood on the 18-inch screen, the corpse is a new personality'?
 
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