Russian soldiers in a Horsell Common Zaporizhia treeline got a very unpleasant surprise when a new Ukrainian drone unleashed a rain of fiery thermite death on them.
Leave it to the Ukrainians to make yet another terrifying innovation in drone warfare. I’m sure the Russian soldiers were none too thrilled to be targeted by this drone-based Martian heat ray. Thermite is easy to come by, being just powdered aluminum and rust, and burns at an infernal 4,000°F. But I do wonder how they’ve rigged it so that it does its Sparkler Rain of Death trick without catching fire itself. I suspect some sort of pressurized nozzle with a separate igniter.
I suspect this will prove a very effective tool at clearing trenches.
Now for a Brucie Bonus (as Suchomimus likes to say, based on a British game show), here’s the post title reference.
Brucie Bonus #2:
Tags: drone, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Suchomimus, thermite, Ukraine, video, Zaporizhia
You can blame the appeaseniks in the Biden administration for this sort of essential inhumanity. Those are Russian soldiers that are getting thermite dripped upon them, and they wouldn’t be where they are without the Sullivans refusing to let Ukraine do what is necessary. All they’re doing is dragging this out so that an entire generation of Russian and Ukrainian youth die horribly to no real purpose.
Whether it’s your own war or someone else’s that you’re just supporting, restraint in warfare is utter madness. You cannot “ratchet” your way to victory; it’s a hell of a lot better to pull a Sherman on his way to Atlanta and just rip the bandage off as quickly as possible and get the whole thing over with before things like dripping thermite on the enemy become thinkable.
Imagine how much better off we’d be, had the Overton Window of “What is acceptable in war…” during WWI hadn’t gotten shifted as far as it did because of how long the horrors in the trenches went on. At the beginning of WWI, the aerial bombardment of civilians was considered a war crime; by the end? Setting the stage for WWII? It had become an accepted norm.
God knows what’s going to come out of this nasty little conflict, in years to come.
Oh, and let’s not consider what the effects will be of having all those experienced and trained guys coming out of this thing, who’re going to have nothing but war to go back to as a means of support. Nine-tenths of the horrors of the Thirty Years War came out of demobilized soldiers who knew no other life, and who had no other skills. Russia is going to be a horror show, in years to come. Ukraine? Maybe not so much.
“I suspect this will prove a very effective tool at clearing trenches.“
Based on US Marine Corps experience with flamethrowers in the Pacific Theater, heavily fortified entrenchments such as pillboxes became ready-made crematoriums for the defenders.
Even the highly disciplined Japanese were demoralized by this development. Imagine its terrifying effects when delivered against Russian mobniks.
This video does not show burning thermite. The aerosol combustion product of thermite is high purity aluminum oxide, which is fluffy white.
You are probably looking at a United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW or CCWC) Protocol III war crime.
10x25mm being 10x25mm, yet again… Commenting on crap he knows nothing about from actual, y’know… Experience.
Whatever formula that the Ukrainians are using, that scene is exactly what gets produced when you use a suspended steel plate as a demonstration target for an AN-M14 TH3.
https://www.military.com/video/ammunition-and-explosives/grenades/the-thermite-grenade/983538042001
Ain’t nothing “fluffy white” there, my friend. That’s a thermate reaction, which is a subset of the various and sundry thermite compounds. None of which I’ve ever seen producing anything like a “fluffy white” end product, but not having seen all of them at work, I can’t say if there is. The ones in use by the military, however? Just like the ones in the two videos.
After observing all the actual war crimes like deliberately targeting civilian facilities like schools and orphanages by the Russian Federation, I’m going to opine that anything the Ukrainians do is emphatically not a war crime; you want the protections of the law of land warfare, then you’d best be abiding by them yourself. Blowing the dams and attacking the purely civilian infrastructure features that the Russians have done removes any concern on my part for their well-being. As the phrase goes “F*ck with the bull, get the horns…”
Whenever Russian blood is in the water, it acts invariably like chum for Comrade Cartridge: “You are probably looking at a United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW or CCWC) Protocol III war crime.”
Which alleged war crime differs from the “willful killing” kind of war crimes that were documented by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission. Only here, the Russian invaders got their just desserts, whereas in Bucha and elsewhere, Russian invaders tortured, raped and murdered non-combatants.
“KYIV (7 December 2022) – In the initial weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian armed forces summarily executed or carried out attacks on individuals leading to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, the Head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner said today. A UN Human Rights report based on the work of the Mission details how Russian troops killed civilians in Ukrainian towns and villages across the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine from 24 February until 6 April 2022.
Bogner said the summary executions examined in the report may constitute a war crime. ‘There are strong indications that the summary executions documented in this report may constitute the war crime of willful killing,’ she said.”
[…] You’re Gonna Burn. “Leave it to the Ukrainians to make yet another terrifying innovation in drone warfare. I’m […]
“Whatever formula that the Ukrainians are using, that scene is exactly what gets produced when you use a suspended steel plate as a demonstration target for an AN-M14 TH3.”
No steel plates in evidence along the treeline, but their iron becomes a molton puddle in a thermite reaction, not a cloud
While it would be fun to explore your expertise in the economics and chemistry of redox reactions, all you really need to know is incinerating anyone – even enemy combatants – is a war crime according to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW or CCWC) Protocol III. Regardless of the agent used.
We carried thermite grenades in Iraq, the sole purpose of which was to make abandoned equipment inoperable for the enemy. Fortunately, we never had occasion to use one.
It was made very clear to us that using them against enemy personnel would be a war crime.
The same went for the .50 cal., which, at the time, was only to be used to destroy enemy equipment. So the joke was, “Aim for their load-bearing equipment.” For clarity, an LBE is something an individual soldier wears on his person. Military humor runs on the dark side.
“incinerating anyone – even enemy combatants – is a war crime”
So… flamethrowers and incendiaries and FAEs are all banned weapons in your world?
“The same went for the .50 cal., which, at the time, was only to be used to destroy enemy equipment.”
I’d love to see the basis for that claim. As far as I know, it’s an old Soviet lie spread for the useful idiots in the west.
“a war crime according to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW or CCWC) Protocol III”
Might want to actually read the document. It says EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what you claim. It’s quite clear that incendiaries are lawful for use against military objectives, and it’s only when “concentrations of civilians” get into the mix that they’re not.
Is this 10x25mm guy usually this wrong?
Well it does seem like everyone is willing to battle this out to the last Ukrainian. We are nearing that point so we’ll see what happens. Fronts that lie static or with only mild changes reflect an inability or unwillingness to make a greater effort. I can understand why the Russians are content to stop but I don’t see why people think that Ukraine has to endure the meat grinder until it runs out of men. I mean, they ran out of weapons and ammo years ago which tends to end most conflicts. I don’t know what Ukraine has ever done to the West to merit this kind of hatred for them.
3/ Protocol III – Incendiary Weapons
Prohibits the use of weapons primarily designed to set fire to objects or cause burn injuries against civilians.
No civilians in that tree line,
lol… 10x25mm made a funny. UN conventions, war crimes… Russia. Quick, type something else funny again.
I acknowledge Curtis’ strong moral compass on the Ukrainians fate. Unfortunately, Realpolitik has no morals, and it is arguably in certain western states interests to bleed Russia and accelerate the current Russian regimes inevitable downfall.
Ukraine’s leaders were fools for believing US president Clinton’s promises sans an actual treaty. (and I know a treaty is mostly paper)
This conflict has always been a bad remake of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. With no one cast in the good role.
👉👃
So you’re saying that the Russians committed war crimes every time they used their thermobaric missiles?
“Is this 10x25mm guy usually this wrong?”
He is monomaniacally dedicated to defending Russian rectitude, which is a losing proposition.
It needs to make the War of the Worlds heat ray sound.
https://datacore.sciflicks.com/the_war_of_the_worlds/sounds/the_war_of_the_worlds_heat_ray_delayed.wav
This looks pretty impressive and frightening. But I suspect it’s more effective as a psychological attack, as opposed to doing damage / causing casualties.
Thermite is a handy compound. Especially for destroying equipment in place. Heating up a piece of expensive and complicated equipment to a thre or four thousand degrees and covering it with molten iron has a tendency to render said items unusable.
Now, setting off some thermite 50 or 60 feet overhead and sprinking it on the ground below… I suspect it makes for a VERY exciting show. And Smokey the Bear would be VERY upset with anybody doing such a thing. But you’ll more or less be dropping red hot BBs on your target. Unpleasant, sure. But unlikely to be fatal or crippling. Just about any kind of overhead cover would stop it cold.
I can’t tell how big the drone was the the video. But I doubt it was carrying more than a few pounds of thermite. And sprinkling it over a long run, from a significant height. There’s a few spots of fire after it passes, where it probably set something dry and flammable alight. But a few bottles of gasoline would likely be more effective at starting a forest fire.
Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if conscripted Russian soldier, upon seeing the tree line next to then get the Sparkler of Doom treatment decided to reconsider their life choices and current employment…
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As low and slow as that thing was flying, I can see a 12 gauge waterfowl gun being a viable defense.
@Robert,
I think you underestimate the psychological effect of being under that thing on an attack run. Also, the video shows that it set off a lot of fires; if they were going after the usual haphazard ammo storage setup and trash pit/fighting position arrangement the Russians are prone to establishing…? Yeah, I can see that being an effective weapon.
The Russians have terrible field sanitation and horrendous ammo storage practices. This weapon takes advantage of both, and has the signal advantage of also cleaning up the mess the Russians have left in all those forest belts.
The likely compound that they’re using in those things will be one that they’ve experimented with, and which has worked for them in testing. I don’t think that that is some random one-off field improvisation; someone with some skills worked that all out, and there’s likely some little cottage-industry factory churning the munitions out.
Someone once told me that the two most innovative and effective ethnic groups in the Soviet forces during WWII had been the Georgians and the Ukrainians. Supposedly, whenever you went out and looked at “things that worked” when going against the Germans, you’d usually find one of those two groups involved. If you were looking for who committed the war crimes or criminal actions against Soviet civilians, it was usually ethnic Russians or the Caucasian Muslim groups like the Chechens…
Guy who told me this was an Estonian, so your mileage may vary. I’d think he had a healthy bit of bias built in to his work.
[…] wasn’t planning on doing another Ukraine drone piece so soon after my Martian war machine post, but these new Ukrainian ground drones are pretty […]
In my miss spent youth, I was an avid practioner of the pyrotechnic arts. This is nearly 60 years ago. Part of that miss behavior involved playing with thermite, which could be fairly easily purchased using my paltry earnings from mowing lawns and whatnot. The commercially available thermite mix was a blend of flake aluminum and flake iron oxide (magnitite if I recall correctly, not hemitite (Fe2O3, nor Fe3O4), black, not red iron oxide. To ignite thermite requires a fairly high ignition temperature. I seem to recall a barium nitrate starter blend ignited by a magnesium ribbon fuse was what it took. The reaction was quite vigorous, not terribly smokey and produced a liquid white hot iron and aluminum oxide fluid. Very drippy.
Among other uses, thermite is used to weld steel railroad rails in place. Special crucibles envelop the rail ends meant to be joined, the mix is ignited and the weld joint is made while the aluminum oxide slag floats to the top. Remove crucible, chip away the slag and grind to finish the joint.
Lots of room to develop for war, hats off to the Ukrainians. Hot steel on target is the goal.
If I remember my facts correctly, and without digging up the various military chemistry tomes I’ve got buried in storage, there are quite a few formulas out there for that which we term “Thermite”. They all have different characteristics, and the ones the military mostly played with produced signatures much like we see in these Ukrainian videos.
It’s a nasty thing to do to someone, but what the hell? They’re Russians on Ukrainian territory, and have been committing actual war crimes themselves since 2014. I rather doubt that the Ukrainians who came up with this did much more than giggle hysterically at the idea when it occurred to them, and that they likely implemented it with malicious glee. Having multi-million dollar missiles flung deliberately at civilian targets and dealing with things like Bucha tends to erode your fine human sensibilities and scruples. The Russians sowed, now they reap the harvest.
Smartest thing anyone could do right now is convince the Russian Federation to get the hell out before the Ukrainians really get to work on their infrastructure. One of the things that people tend to shy away from with regards to Russia is just how centralized everything is, around Moscow. If the Ukrainians manage to do sufficient damage to the Russian rail and energy infrastructure around Moscow, then there’s going to be a tipping point and the whole shoddy edifice will collapse into chaos. Which will take all of Russia’s resources off the market, worldwide. That’s going to have follow-on effects for everyone from the Third-Worlder who relies on affordable Russian fertilizer to the idiot Europeans that got themselves hooked on cheap Russian energy. You won’t see the follow-on second-, third-, and fourth-order effects, but they will be coming.
You get down to it, humoring Putin’s imperial ambitions to “put the gang back together” is going to cost us all an immense amount, in lives and everything else.
Oh, and don’t forget to thank Western politicians who hollowed out our own ability to provide these things, along with their partners in crime out in the industrial world. Autarky is looking pretty damn good, right about now, ain’t it?
Has everyone forgotten all of the videos from cities like Mariupol where Russians simply dropped a blizzard of thermite all over the place?
Nope. Which is why I’m entirely on the side of Ukraine in this: Ya wanna act like Russia has been, for the last decade? Don’t expect me to either empathize or pity you when the people you did it to turn around and do it to you, in turn.
Which is why I find it laughable when the various jackasses claim that Dresden was a “war crime” and that Churchill was worse than Hitler. Churchill wouldn’t have gotten into power without Hitler doing what he did, and Dresden wouldn’t have been bombed absent the Germans doing things to Rotterdam and other cities that were quite the equivalent.
If you had family that got incinerated in Dresden or Hiroshima? Too f*cking bad; they supported the regimes that committed the war crimes that led directly to those cities burning. Japan could have treated Nanking in a civilized manner, not bombed Pearl Harbor, and refrained from doing things like turning Manila into a hellscape. They didn’t, so they burned. Harsh? Absolutely, but that’s the only way you deal with these people. Barbarians do not see civilized responses to their excesses as anything other than tacit approval and weakness, which is precisely why Israel has been a failure dealing with the Gazan and West Bank Arabs. Frankly, you want to put an end to the killing in that region? You’re going to have to do to the Arabs about what we did to Germany and Japan, and probably more. I suspect that the only lasting peace in that region will come when someone gets tired of the bullshit and implements the solution that the Mongols used at Alamut.
You’ll note that the survivors of that Assassin’s cult are enthusiastic and careful pacifists that mostly dance their way through things, these days. There’s really only one way to deal with fanaticism, and that’s eradicate it down to bedrock. Unpleasant, “uncivilized”, but unfortunately… Also very true.
Several points:
1) The fireworks community has extensively catalogued the flame and smoke colors of redox reactions. You can use their catalogues to identify and/or exclude the chemistries of visible combustions. What you see in this video is not thermite, but likely a pulverized solid rocket fuel (potassium perchlorate) constituent in a petroleum carrier.
2) Aluminum powder is used exclusively as the fuel in military thermites due to the staggering cost of creating active, finely divided powders from other feasible fuel metals. Finely divided aluminum powders with active surfaces can be had for less than $ 10 per pound. Other redox fuels cost several orders of magnitude more. Just about any elemental metal will , but making active, finely divided powders from those that produce a high heat of combustion is extremely difficult.
3) USAR demilled all their flamethrowers at Anniston after we signed the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW or CCWC) Protocol III. My fougasse-based perimeter defense project was shut down cold by DoD lawyers who informed me in no uncertain terms that it was henceforth illegal to incinerate enemy combatants.
4) The only American use of incendiary weapons upon enemy combatants since United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW or CCWC) Protocol III was the use of 30 Mark 77 bombs in the opening stages of Fallujah. It was not only ineffective militarily, it enraged the insurgents into staging a grisly last man, last bullet defense against our Marines. Several Marine and Navy officers were reprimanded over this incident, which was originally covered up.
5) Thermobarics primarily kill by pressure wave, not heat. They are often called vacuum bombs because they convert the oxygen and nitrogen in the air to solid compounds. This creates a deadly vacuum pressure wave. The Russians use solid reactants in their thermobarics, we use fuel-air-explosives (FAE) based on petroleum distillates in ours.
I think you have that last part backwards. USAF EBWs use solid powders mixed into a bomb’s HE fill. These were called “thermobarics” as a fancy new marketing name. Russia promptly started calling their FAEs “thermobarics” in order to further legitimize them.
“I think you have that last part backwards. USAF EBWs use solid powders mixed into a bomb’s HE fill. These were called “thermobarics” as a fancy new marketing name. Russia promptly started calling their FAEs “thermobarics” in order to further legitimize them.”
No.
The Mark 77 is a 750 pound air-dropped incendiary bomb containing 75 to 110 gallons of petroleum distillates as its fuel, depending upon the guidance and fusing package.
The Russian TOS-1x Buratino rocket projected vacuum bombs use solid fuels which react with both oxygen and nitrogen. The Russians have never disclosed exactly which elemental metallic fuels they use, but we are certain that they are not liquid-filled because TOS-1x Buratino systems are never seen to be accompanied by tankers.