Ukraine’s new light aircraft drone, the one they used to hit the drone factory in Yelabuga, Tatarstan, can evidently carry a payload of 350kg of explosive up to 3,000 kilometers. (While I prefer Freedom Units, I’m going to use metric for this post because that’s what both the video and the Deep State point-to-point mapping too use.)
Suchomimus mentions that this is long enough range to hit the large oil refinery in Omsk. Which is true, but if it can reach that far, there are a lot of logistic choke-points now in range that have the potential to put a world of hurt on Russia:
This is hardly an exhaustive list, and was only what I came up with off the top of my head and with a little Google map work. Russia east of the Urals is has extremely poor infrastructure, is crossed by rivers with few bridges (some places where you think there has to be a bridge only has a ferry), and hitting the right parts of that would require Russia to expend a lot of time, effort and logistical difficulty to repair. (Russia’s military has an number of railroad repair units, with the 48th Separate Railway Brigade in Omsk being the most relevant to this discussion, but they have to be able to get there, and get the materials to repair the damage, and bridge repair presents a whole different level of difficulty, like finding a floating crane and getting it in place.) You hit a few Transiberian choke-points and it puts a serious crimp in Russia-China trade, including most heavy military equipment China is selling.
Caveats: The map is not the territory, and bridges can be hard to take out. But 350kg of a modern explosive is not a small charge, and there are a whole slew of logistical targets to be found within 3,000km of Ukrainian territory.
*And krals. And autonomous okrugs. Russian administrative divisions are weird…
Tags: drones, Irtysh, Irtysh river, logistics, Military, Nefteyugansk, Ob river, Omsk, Russo-Ukrainian War, Suchomimus, Surgut, Transiberian Railroad, Ukraine, video
The world is going to really, really regret letting this particular genie out of the bottle.
Failure to react strongly and positively to Russia’s violation of Ukrainian borders in contravention to the Budapest negotiations over disarming Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal will have repercussions going forward. Even if Moscow wins, guess what? Those drone operators and builders aren’t going anywhere. They’re still around, and just like the laid-off mercenaries that made the Thirty Years War such a delight in Central Europe, they’re going to have a really good outlet for their skills. Which will, I promise you, be put to use.
Just on the basis of keeping a lid on this technology and its proliferation, we done f*cked up by not preventing the current racheting of the state-of-the-art with regards to drones and autonomous weapons. I await the likely future wave of assassinations and other uses, when they start getting really desperate/creative. What do you want to bet that the Ukrainians are already making lists, and that the various parties in Western Europe that sold Russia all of its toys, and who are enabling all of this to continue have a good deal to be worried about.
Frankly, if I were a Ukrainian? I’d be working out a target list that included the heads of those Austrian banks and those assholes building the barrel lathes for the Russians. I honestly don’t see much moral difference between killing some feckless Russian draftee in the Donbas as opposed to nailing some Noricum executive on his balcony… And, if you think that sort of thing ain’t coming? This is me, laughing at you.
They should have kept the lid on. Right now, there’s some highly aggrieved Ukrainian veteran out there, and he or she is wondering why the enablers get to go home and live nice lives, while their families lie dead under the rubble that those assholes enabled the Russians to create. Given that the Ukrainians have a certain amount of espionage skill, and the subtlety to use it properly, I’m not going to be surprised at the sudden rash of violent death spreading westwards from the bloodlands…
Frankly, it is well overdue, and well-deserved. The assholes who sold Saddam all that nice dual-use machinery for making nerve agents…? Never brought to book, for that. It’ll be amusing to observe their profit-seeking heirs go down to karmic justice…
Frankly, if I were Ukraine? I think I’d kill just the one or two, likely in Austria, and then let the potential sink in for the rest of the assholes selling electronics and machine tools to the Russians.
The idea that we could be “preventing the current racheting [sic] of the state-of-the-art with regards to drones and autonomous weapons” is ludicrous. People have always used technological advances for warfare, going back to the first sharpened stick. The idea of “well, if they didn’t pull that genie out of the bottle, nobody would” is just plain nuts. The genie’s always there, it’s always a question of when, not if.
The only thing worse than the idea of thinking technology could be bottled up is failing to learn from others’ uses of it.
You don’t get it.
The capability would have always been there. The will and the desire to use them…? Not. Not until the idiot Russians did what they did to Ukraine, and everyone stood by and just… Watched.
Every technical innovation has to be accompanied by the corresponding social one, before it becomes acceptable and commonplace. How long did the European empires have the machinegun, before they got past the sticking point of “Yeah, this is gonna kill millions of our fellow imperialists…”?
How long did it take for them to choke down on the implications that resulted in the Somme? More than a bit…
The capability for drone warfare has been there since about the early 2000s, when I saw my first “toy” drone demonstrated for me at a friend’s house with his Christmas toys. I watched him put that thing into operation for his kid, and I’m like “Fuuuuuuck… This is a big deal, and if anyone has half a brain, there will be a war where they recap David and Goliath… And, I’ll bet we’re on the trailing edge of it all…”
Turns out, I was more right than I really want to be on the issue.
Every weapon innovation has a lag before it becomes socially acceptable and a part of standard conduct in war. You see that with the crossbow, the Puckle Gun, and a host of other examples. It was A-OK to use the various Nordenfeldt and Maxim guns on troublesome natives out in the colonies, but the idea of blasting away at other white folk was anathema until WWI really got going. The Germans condemned use of the earlier MG systems during the Boer War by the British, because they were shooting not at primitive black people, but other Europeans. I’ve seen the background papers on that, and we’d have seen a similar lag on adoption and use before the idiot Russians started something they can’t finish.
The reality here is that the Ukrainians have to stay on the bleeding edge of the technology curve, or they’re going to lose. That concentrates the mind, wonderfully. Note the sudden use of all these larger drones that they didn’t have, before this war: Those are a bigger deal than you realize, and the other part of this is that they’re losing their inhibitions about targeting the longer this goes on. I doubt that the FPV drone operators would have been so gleeful about going after individual Russians the way they are, were it not for things like Bucha, and the bombardment of their cities. Russia started this idiocy with the idea that they were immune to anything that the Ukrainians could do to them, in return… Much like the Germans bombed the snot out of Rotterdam and Warsaw, thinking that German cities would never face the same treatment.
Didn’t work out that way, did it? Likewise, this won’t work out so well for them, either. Just as the British commanders caviled at bombing German cities at the beginning of the war, because that would have meant destroying private property…? The mood changed, under the impact of the Blitz in British cities.
Bombing cities was possible well before WWII; the willingness to do so was not there, until the idiot Germans decided to do what Russia has done in Ukraine, and go all-out for expediency.
Wartime exigencies have a way of reaching out and touching you on the shoulder, and suggesting that you really ought not be a moralizing prig, if you want to survive. Sad truism, that, but a truism nonetheless…
Somewhere, Mathias Rust is doing the Leo DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme…
Is the Kremlin within 3000 km? Just wondering…
1. Drone tech was always going to go into quick evolve mode when things hit the fan. It’s too cheap and easy to build with off-the-shelf parts (“Fast, cheap and out of control.”). We’re lucky it happened in a war we’re not directly involved in.
2. Moscow is well within range, and was already hit by shorter range drones earlier in the war.
The detailed information on the (not yet operational) Geron drone factory in Alabuga released to the press by the CIA back in June could only have come from Iran, via Israel. The exposure of Israel’s involvement in this leak explains Russia’s recent hostility to Israel and the double game the Biden Administration is playing with Israel.
The Russians have dramatically tightened disclosures about their critical OPK manufacturing sites since last June.
Last month, four men equipped with Kalashnikov rifles attacked theater goers at the Crocus City Hall concert. They killed 139 people, wounding another182 while conducting the assault within walking distance of a Moscow police precinct.
If four jihadi can lay waste to the city center, what hope does the Kremlin have of defending it’s sparsely populated and weakly defended outlying areas from a much better armed organization?
Russia invaded Ukraine with the expectation of an easy victory, based on a belief that they had the world’s second most capable military and Ukrainians would greet them as liberators.
To their dismay, they discovered that they had laid hold of the “tiger’s tail” and are now unable to disengage from the conflict on favorable terms. As the war progressed, Ukraine found ways to counter Russia’s numerical advantages.
From the early days using Javelin missiles to blunt armored advances to recently developed long-range heavy drones targeting production and logistics facilities deep within enemy territory, Ukraine has managed to keep Russian war planners off balance and scrambling to regain the initiative.
The sclerotic Russian neo-imperialist adventure has exposed a deep rot at the heart of Russian society. Much like The British loss to Japan at Singapore, whatever the outcome of this war, the loss to Russian prestige will prove to be irremediable.
Sounds like a good way to get tactically nuked.
There is no “good way to get nuked”.
Also, there are few ways for Russia to amend its pariah status but an unconditional withdrawal from Ukraine would help to burnish it’s “good will” credentials. Secondly, they could offer to repay Ukraine for damages to its infrastructure. Thirdly, they could surrender the Bucharest criminals for trial in a Ukrainian court.
Ultimately, Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov could be sentenced to internal exile after being stripped of all their financial assets which would then be used to ameliorate the injuries of war orphans.
Alternatively, Putinbots could threaten an escalation of violence.
Most are framing this wrong.
Russia is not a normal country. It’s more a criminal conspiracy cosplaying as one. Think of it along those lines, and you’ll get closer to “right” than by thinking of it as a normal nation-state.
The FSB is not an institution belonging to a nation, at this point: The trappings of a nation, all the national bits and pieces normal countries have, actually exist only as stage dressing for the FSB and other “intelligence organizations” within that which was Russia. This has been an unfortunate truth since about the time of Stalin’s death. Beria didn’t survive, but his office certainly did. And, because the Central Committee relied on the KGB and GRU to keep a lid on things, well… It grew like a cancer, until they put their guy Putin in charge of it all.
Stop thinking of Russia as a normal country, and start thinking of it as the final expression of the Communist state security apparatus. You’ll find it easier to understand the irrational decisions made… A sane national leader who was looking out for his nation would have done the calculus in the summer of 2022, realized they weren’t going to ever achieve victory conditions in Ukraine, and then done their best to wrest something out of the situation. They would not have continued to pour money and manpower into the lost cause. They’d have recognized it for what it is. But, that logic only applies if you think of Putin and his crew as rational leaders; think of them as criminal co-conspirators, intent on looting Russia, and it all makes a lot more sense. All those yachts? All the foreign bank accounts and investments? They’ve stripped Russia bare, and when the resources ran out, they wanted to move on to Ukraine. They simply do not care about what they’re expending in Ukraine; they’ve already written off Russia and Russians, they can’t get any more off of them. At least, not as easily as before.
This is very much the same thing that drove WWII: Hitler ran out of internal resources to bribe the public with; war became a profit-seeking imperative for him, and that drove the timing more than anything else. The German state was out of money in 1939; they had to take Poland. Soviet resources enabled the French campaigns, along with everything else he took in that year. It was all looting, all the time.
Putin is in a similar bind, and that is what explains his seemingly irrational decisions. They’re not irrational; you just have to look at them and it all becomes clear. Russia is not a nation; it’s a victim of a criminal conspiracy operated by the former intelligence organizations of the Communist party. They’re doing a bust-out, stripping the place of value. When they’re done, I presume the idea is that they’ll go into exile in their apartments and yachts around the West, or at least, their kids will. Much like the former Imperial Russian aristocracy did…
For Nazi Germany, I think you’re confusing cause and effect. Hitler’s goal was always seeking Lebensraum for the volk, as he made clear in writings and statements long before coming to power. To that end, they needed to rearm and industrialize, and that was why Schacht was carrying out so many different currency manipulations, to keep the plates spinning until Hitler could launch the war.
But the target was always Lebensraum in “lands to the east,” not looting for the sake of looting.
Lawrence, you need to read Adam Tooze, specifically The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Pay attention to his sources and verify what he says there; despite his leftwards leanings, the man has done a decent job of scholarship. WWII began when it did not because of military considerations, but the financial ones. If it had been purely military, they’d have waited until the mid- to late-1940s, the way the military had expected Hitler to do, because that’s what he told them. Unfortunately, the looted cash from the Jews ran out, and they were going to have to start tightening up on the rest of the German population for economic reasons.
People fail to analyze WWII on economic terms; this leads to little errors like failing to hold Stalin responsible for what happened in the 1940 campaigns in the West, which he basically enabled with all the resources he sent to Hitler. What the hell he had in mind? No idea; I suspect that he thought the French would hold, notwithstanding the COMINTERN sabotage he ordered, and that there’d be a replay of WWI in the West… After which, he could sweep in and take over all the exhausted combatants with ease. Didn’t work out that way, and I think he was still trying to figure out what to do about it when Barbarossa lit off.
The German economy survived by looting; it was a criminal enterprise that got started with the looting of Jews within the Reich. They ran out of Jews, then they had to take Czechoslovakia and Poland, then the rest of Western Europe. They looted, mostly… The amount of foodstuffs taken up by the Germans and shipped back to Germany were incredible. The German Army had special trains set up such that the troops could send packages home, usually with luxury goods and food they bought with artificially inflated Marks. The whole thing was an elegant fraud, and when you look at it including all the other data, like the utter and complete failure to integrate French industry into real wartime production…? You rapidly conclude that purely military matters took second priority to the economic ones. What sense did it make to loot French factory machinery, ship it to Germany, and then import French slave labor a few years later…? None. Hitler wasn’t even smart enough to emulate Napoleon’s attempt at economic autarky for the continent.
Another good book on the German economy is When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson, it doesn’t cover the war just right up to it. Interesting to see that even as bad as the current economy is going we are still far from Weimar Republic levels.
WWI and Versailles were two remarkable “own goals” by the victors. Not only did they not ensure an unequivocal and unquestionable victory over Germany, they then made things a thousand times worse with the bait-and-switch peace negotiations. The Germans had been led into believing that there would be some fairness to the terms, and got screwed.
The rest of the demands led directly to WWII, and enabled Hitler’s takeover.
And, frankly? Looking back on it all, given what Russia did in the East, I honestly can’t really fault the Germans for what they did. A lot of the conventional wisdom lays the responsibility for the war at German feet, but I find that disingenuous at best; Russia was the one playing games in the Balkans, and Russia was the one that really got the ball rolling with their mobilization. Short of that mobilization, things could still have damped out, but with it? War became inevitable.
WWI ended in a horrible peace that all but guaranteed a future war. The people behind that peace, mostly one Woodrow Wilson and the French? They deserve to be remembered with far less leniency than they typically get.
@kirk
Here’s another “Fuuuuuuck… ” moment for you: look up videos of SpinLaunch. Now imagine someone yeeting a 2nd stage past the Karman line, without a flame trail for our early warning satellites to see, with a MIRV payload.
Maaaaybe there’ll be an infrared signature simply from the thing moving up through the atmosphere so bleeding fast. I wouldn’t count on it, though.
I did a stint doing contract work for NOV, but jobs in Houston don’t do me any good unless they’re in Austin or can be worked remotely.
There’s a whole lot of doubt that Spinlaunch will work anywhere nearly as smoothly as their CGI depicts the process.
Tunnel vision or myopia… Can’t decide.
“The Uke’s can drone the shit out of the Ruskies” Ruskies bad, Ukes good YEAHHHH!
It’s a global capability.
You and Kirk enjoy your high-five party. I’ll check back in a year.