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Did I miss something?Daehawk wrote: Sun Dec 15, 2024 6:26 pm Just jumped in to say my motto of life....FUCK TRUMP!!! HHAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Trump's (Putin's) plan is likely just to declare a permanent ceasefire and let the current lines settle into de facto new borders. Russia is rewarded with territory for its aggression and Ukraine gets nothing but (also likely) a treaty stipulation that it can never join NATO.hepcat wrote: Sun Dec 15, 2024 9:25 pm I’m betting that the plans Trump has concepts of also involve Putin walking away with chunks of Ukraine. He may as well just build a wall in the region and establish East and West Ukraine.
Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, commander of the nuclear, biological and chemical forces of the Russian army, died in a blast as he was heading out of a residential block in Moscow, the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement.
An explosive device was hidden in an electric scooter parked nearby. Kirillov’s aide also died in the attack, the investigative committee said, announcing a criminal investigation. Video footage obtained by POLITICO corroborates that version of events.
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) claimed responsibility for Kirillov's murder, a Ukrainian law enforcement official told POLITICO after being granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.
"Kirillov was a war criminal and an absolutely legitimate target since he gave orders to use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military. Such an inglorious end awaits all who kill Ukrainians. Retribution for war crimes is inevitable," the official said.
A few hours before the attack, the SBU charged Kirillov in absentia for ordering the massive use of banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian army on the eastern and southern fronts of the battlefield.
Thoughts and prayers... that Russian generals continue to meet timely ends.Isgrimnur wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 11:35 am Ukraine assassinates Russian chemical weapons chief in Moscow bombing
Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, commander of the nuclear, biological and chemical forces of the Russian army, died in a blast as he was heading out of a residential block in Moscow, the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement.
An explosive device was hidden in an electric scooter parked nearby. Kirillov’s aide also died in the attack, the investigative committee said, announcing a criminal investigation. Video footage obtained by POLITICO corroborates that version of events.
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) claimed responsibility for Kirillov's murder, a Ukrainian law enforcement official told POLITICO after being granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.
"Kirillov was a war criminal and an absolutely legitimate target since he gave orders to use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military. Such an inglorious end awaits all who kill Ukrainians. Retribution for war crimes is inevitable," the official said.
A few hours before the attack, the SBU charged Kirillov in absentia for ordering the massive use of banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian army on the eastern and southern fronts of the battlefield.
NATO has taken over coordination of Western military aid to Ukraine from the U.S. as planned, a source said on Tuesday, in a move widely seen as aiming to safeguard the support mechanism against NATO sceptic U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
The step, coming after a delay of several months, gives NATO a more direct role in the war against Russia's invasion while stopping well short of committing its own forces.
Diplomats, however, acknowledge that the handover to NATO may have a limited effect given that the U.S. under Trump could still deal a major setback to Ukraine by slashing its support, as it is the alliance's dominant power and provides the majority of arms to Kyiv.
We like to say that targeted assassination is something different than regular warfare, presumably because the latter targets mass groups rather than individuals.Blackhawk wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 11:46 am The difference, I think, was whether it was part of a military field operation ("in battle") and if it was personally targeted.
If your unit commander dies in artillery shelling, they're a war casualty. If they get their throat slit by the enemy in the middle of the night because they're the commander, it's assassination.
In that case, I'd say 'assassination.' It goes back to 'personally targeted', that the intention was to kill a specific individual or individuals based on their own qualities/actions/etc. The whole point was to kill Yamamoto, and the rest were incidental.Holman wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 6:38 pm But there are plenty of examples of choosing individual targets in warfare. The 1943 killing of Yamamoto is the classic example: US intelligence decoded the route his transport would be flying and sent planes to intercept him and his escorts. Was this an assassination? Presumably it would not have been one if a random patrol had encountered the planes and shot them down without knowing who was onboard.
That's where it starts to get fuzzy. I suppose you might argue that premeditation comes into play (vs. a target of opportunity), but eventually it becomes nitpicky.On a smaller scale, is it assassination or regular warfare when a soldier with a scope chooses to target an officer rather than a regular grunt?
It's a pretty subtle difference to me because you can call it an assassination but the purpose behind it is regular warfare. I.e. you are killing an officer because it would affect the outcome of the warfare, so the reasons for targeting them are external (not because of something this officer specifically did as an individual but because of their role - with the person filling the role being interchangeable).Holman wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 6:38 pm On a smaller scale, is it assassination or regular warfare when a soldier with a scope chooses to target an officer rather than a regular grunt?
This is pretty close what really strikes me and I can't put in to words as well.Holman wrote: Wed Dec 18, 2024 2:52 pm I think the main reason this distinction is interesting at all is that we typically think there's a moral difference between assassination (secret, personal, unfair) and regular warfare (open, impersonal, fair)--even when the latter can cause so much more suffering and horror.
There is no information made public that can tell what exploded inside the military boundaries south of the headquarters of Russia’s Northern Fleet.
A video recording was posted Wednesday evening on social media in Murmansk of what appears to be a massive explosion in the horizon. The Barents Observer has geolocated the filming position from Skalnaya street No. 9, which is on the top of the hill in Oktyabrskiy District. The explosion, which lasts only a few seconds, can be seen in a distance of several kilometers to the north.
Here are dozens of military objects, including the Severomorsk-1 naval airbase and weapons’ storages and bunkers.
Severomorsk-1 is 13 km from the location of the video-recording. The airbase is the second largest on the Kola Peninsula and accommodates both fighter jets, bombers and maritime surveillance aircraft. A squadron of Ka-27 helicopters is also located at the airfield.
At a distance of 11 km from the video recording is a outdoor weapons storage. This is some 2 km southwest from the end of the runway. To the northwest of Severomorsk-1 is several installations with mobile anti-aircraft missiles and antennas for electronic warfare.
Locals in Murmansk are debating on Vkontakte about what could have caused the massive explosions that shakes windows and walls in the district. One writes that the two explosions happened at 17.24 and 17.27 local time (15.24 and 15.27 CET).
“There were two explosions. I live in the Starostina Street, at the 8th floor.
The house was shaking. It was terrible,” a woman writes in a comment on a local social media channel.
The video on social media, however, show only one explosion.
There are no official reports about any plane crash or accidental explosions of weapons in the area.
Neither Ukraine, nor Russia, have posted any information about a possible drone attack, or downing of a drone in the area of Severomorsk. That said, Murmansk officials kept silent about several of Ukrainian drones that flew into the Kola Peninsula in July, August and September this year.
Severomorsk is nearly 1,900 km north of Russia’s border with Ukraine.
Finnish authorities said they boarded and took control of an oil tanker traveling from Russia on Thursday, on suspicion it had caused the outage of an undersea power cable and three internet lines connecting Finland and Estonia a day earlier.
The Cook Islands-registered ship, named by authorities as the Eagle S, was boarded by a Finnish coast guard crew which took command in the Baltic Sea and sailed the vessel to Finnish waters, a coast guard official told a press conference.
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The Finnish customs service said it had seized the vessel’s cargo and that the Eagle S was believed to belong to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of aging tankers that seek to evade sanctions on the sale of Russian oil.
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Baltic Sea nations are on high alert for potential acts of sabotage following a string of outages of power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines since 2022, although subsea equipment is also subject to technical malfunction and accidents.
Repairing the 170 km (106 miles) Estlink 2 interconnector will take months, and the outage could cause a tense power supply situation during winter, operator Fingrid said in a statement.
A Russian cargo ship, Ursa Major, has sunk in the Mediterranean between Spain and Algeria after an explosion in the engine room, Russia's foreign ministry has confirmed.
It said 14 members of the crew had been rescued and taken to the Spanish port of Cartagena but that two others were missing.
Ursa Major left port in St Petersburg 12 days ago, according to Russian news agency Interfax.
The ship's owner said it was on its way to Vladivostok in Russia's Far East carrying two cranes for the port weighing 380 tonnes apiece, although the destination could not be confirmed independently.
Before Ursa Major sank, Spain's Salvamento Marítimo maritime rescue agency said 14 people were found on a lifeboat and taken safely to Spain and a Russian warship then arrived in the area to take charge of the rescue operation.
Ursa Major was in the same area of the Med as another sanctioned Russian ship, Sparta, when it ran into trouble and the two ships had been spotted heading through the English Channel last week, reportedly under escort.
On Monday, the HUR reported that the Sparta had broken down off Portugal, but the problem had been fixed. Ursa Major was originally known as Sparta III, so it was not clear which ship the Ukrainians were referring to.
However, the Sparta also got into difficulty a week ago, in rough seas off Brittany in the north-west of France. Radio France Inter reported that the Russian cargo ship initially did not respond to French communications on Tuesday 17 December, until acknowledging it had a problem.
"I'm in trouble. My engines are currently down, the tiller isn't responding. We're going to try to repair it in the coming minutes," RFI reported the ship's radio as saying.
After drifting for 61 minutes, the Sparta said it was back on course.
https://bsky.app/profile/specialkherson ... 5esxjgbs26Azerbaijan Airlines says the preliminary results of an investigation into the crash of its plane in Kazakhstan on 25 December have blamed "physical and technical external interference".
Thirty-eight people died when the Embraer jet came down at high speed, bursting into flames 3km (1.9 miles) short of the runway at Aktau airport.
The plane had originally tried to land at Grozny airport in southern Russia, but witnesses have spoken of an explosion before it was diverted across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan.
The head of Russia's civil aviation agency said on Friday that the situation in the Chechen capital was "very complicated" and that a closed-skies protocol had been put in place.
"Ukrainian combat drones were launching terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure in the cities of Grozny and Vladikavkaz," said Dmitry Yadrov, head of Rosaviatsia, in a video statement posted on Russia's Tass news agency.
"Because of this a 'Carpet plan' was introduced in the area of Grozny airport, providing for the immediate departure of all aircraft from the specified area," he said. "In addition, there was dense fog in the area of Grozny airport."
Azerbaijan Airlines did not detail the physical and technical interference, and the government in Baku has avoided directly accusing Russia, possibly to avoid antagonising President Vladimir Putin.
However, aviation experts and pro-government media in Azerbaijan believe the plane was damaged by shrapnel from Russian air-defence missile explosion.
"These are missile fragments that damaged the hydraulic system. The plane's controls operate based on hydraulics," veteran Azerbaijani pilot veteran pilot Tahir Agaguliev told Azerbaijani media.
Flight attendant Zulfuqar Asadov who was among 29 survivors on the crashed plane told local media that the plane was "hit by some kind of external strike".
"The impact of it caused panic inside. We tried to calm them down, to get them seated. At that moment, there was another strike, and my arm was injured."
I'm not going to quote the entire thread, but it does include video of the crash, images of the wreckage and video/images of the interior of the aircraft after the purported missile attack that shows shrapnel damage to the passenger compartment./1. Russian air defense most likely caused the crash of an Embraer 190 passenger plane during UAV attack on Chechnya:
An Embraer 190 passenger plane belonging to Azerbaijan Airlines crashed this morning. 67 passengers of which 5 crew members were on board. 32 people survived the crash.
Yeah, that was amazing to see people come out of it at all.Alefroth wrote: Fri Dec 27, 2024 1:18 pm Pretty heroic effort by the pilots to get that thing down with survivors.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologized to his Azerbaijani counterpart for what he called a “tragic incident” following the crash of an Azerbaijani airliner in Kazakhstan that killed 38 people, but stopped short of acknowledging that Moscow was responsible.
Putin’s apology came as allegations mounted that the plane had been shot down by Russian air defenses attempting to deflect a Ukrainian drone strike near Grozny, the regional capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya.
An official Kremlin statement issued Saturday said that air defense systems were firing near Grozny airport as the airliner “repeatedly” attempted to land there on Wednesday. It did not explicitly say one of these hit the plane.
The statement said Putin apologized to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev “for the fact that the tragic incident occurred in Russian airspace.”
The readout said Russia has launched a criminal probe into the incident, and Azerbaijani state prosecutors have arrived in Grozny to participate. The Kremlin also said that “relevant services” from Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are jointly investigating the crash site near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan.
Panama's Maritime Authority said on Wednesday it has begun a process to cancel flag registrations on four LNG vessels sanctioned by the United States over their links with Russian gas producer Novatek (NVTK.MM), opens new tab.
The vessels - North Air, North Mountain, North Way and North Sky - are managed by UAE-registered White Fox Ship Management.
The four switched to Panama's flag registry earlier this year from Singapore, according to maritime database Equasis.
The targeted vessels transferred LNG from Russia's Yamal and Arctic LNG 2 projects as part of a lease agreement with Novatek and its UAE-based affiliate New Transshipment FZE, the State Department said.
White Fox Ship Management was sanctioned by Washington in August.
The State Department said last week that Russian firms had sought to obtain secondhand LNG tankers through third-country front companies like White Fox to circumvent U.S. sanctions and revitalize Russia's Arctic LNG 2 project.
Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev has called on Russia to accept blame for a plane crash on Christmas Day that killed 38 people.
The plane is thought to have come under fire from Russian air defence systems as it tried to land in Chechnya before being diverted to Kazakhstan, where it crashed.
On Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin apologised to the Azerbaijani president over the downing of the plane in Russian airspace - but stopped short of taking responsibility.
Aliyev accused Moscow of an initial "cover up" over its involvement in the crash. While accepting Putin's apology, he said Russia "must admit its guilt" and pay compensation.
Aviation experts and others believe the plane's GPS was affected by electronic jamming and it was then damaged by shrapnel from Russian air-defence missile blasts.
But Aliyev said that, in the days following the incident, "Russian agencies put forward versions [of events] about the explosion of some gas cylinder" which "clearly showed that the Russian side wants to cover up the issue", according to a transcript of an interview with state media.
He also said that some in Russia had latched on to a theory that the plane had been hit by birds. Aliyev described both theories as "foolish and dishonest".
The Azerbaijani president accepted that the plane had been shot down accidentally, but said that in the first three days following the crash, "we heard only absurd versions from Russia".
Baku made a series of demands to Moscow on Friday over the incident, he said, only one of which - an apology - had so far been met.
There goes my Beluga caviar budget.Holman wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 9:22 pm Trump promised throughout his campaign that he would have a Day One solution to end the war in Ukraine.
Here on Day Three, his only action has been to tweet/truth that he loves the Russian people and that both Ukraine and Russia should settle their conflict unless they want to face (yes, here it is again) *tariffs* from the US.
Pure foreign-policy genius.
(No mention of loving the Ukrainian people, incidentally.)
US President Donald Trump has claimed that the war in Ukraine could be brought to an end by a fall in the price of oil.
Speaking via video link at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Trump said he would ask the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to lower the price of oil, saying it would end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine “immediately”.
“Right now the price is high enough that that war will continue, you gotta bring down the oil price and end the war,” he added.
/1. Russian air defense most likely caused the crash of an Embraer 190 passenger plane during UAV attack on Chechnya: