what on earth is firing at those tanks?
Russian invasion of Ukraine | Fewer tweets, more discussion
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
Must be some new toys from NATO/US. Most of the anti-tank weapon videos I've seen so far were the javalin(?) type that shoot straight up and then down on top of the targets. I also know almost nothing about weaponry though
EDIT: And I wasn't even close to being right
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Apparently a BTR-4 with its 30mm cannon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTR-4
Developed in Ukraine and we already have seen several occasions where they take on Russian T-72s, if they can get around their front armour and attack the sides or rear (as seen here). There the small 30mm has a chance to penetrate the armour and do some damage.
Makes sense now when you see the speed and regularity that tracer rounds are used here. It's definitely an autocannon from a BTR with quite a strong caliber.
I was transfixed watching that. It’s like its being fired from a spaceship or something. No way would I feel safe in one of those tanks.
What’s mesmerizing is the rounds that ricochet. One or two looked like they came off of the tanks themselves.
American and French war crimes being the important part there (each will view this as a proxy war and not want to vote in American/French/Western interest, which you can understand).Pintu said:
Unable to pay membership fees and so can't take their seat at vote or various other functions, in part due to US sanctions. But they would have voted in favour of Russia or abstained at best (from American perspective).
Very surprised some journalists seemed so clueless about Venezuela's position in particular.
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The BBC reports:
"On the white, damp wall of the Yahidne school basement is a crude calendar, drawn in red crayon. It marks a period of unimaginable trauma - from 5 March to 2 April - for the people of this village.
Yahidne, 140km (80 miles) north-west of Kyiv, which is close to the borders with Belarus and Russia, was occupied by Russian soldiers for nearly a month.
They took men, women and children from their homes at gunpoint and held them in the basement of the local school for four weeks - around 130 people cramped into a room roughly 65 sq m (700 sq ft) in size.
Sixty-year-old Mykola Klymchuk was one of them. He offered to show us the basement.
"This was my half a metre of space. I was sleeping standing up," he said. His voice choked up and he started crying. "I tied myself to the railing here with my scarf so I wouldn't fall over. I spent 25 nights like this."
Mykola said you couldn't move for fear of stepping on people. About 40 or 50 children were among those held captive. The youngest was just two months old.
"During my time here, 12 people died," Mykola said. Most were elderly people. It's unclear what they died of, but Mykola believes some suffocated to death.
When people died, the bodies couldn't immediately be removed.
This meant that people, including children, lived amidst corpses for hours, and sometimes days, until they could be taken outside.
Read the report in full: Ukraine war: Sharing space with the dead - horror outside Chernihiv
"On the white, damp wall of the Yahidne school basement is a crude calendar, drawn in red crayon. It marks a period of unimaginable trauma - from 5 March to 2 April - for the people of this village.
Yahidne, 140km (80 miles) north-west of Kyiv, which is close to the borders with Belarus and Russia, was occupied by Russian soldiers for nearly a month.
They took men, women and children from their homes at gunpoint and held them in the basement of the local school for four weeks - around 130 people cramped into a room roughly 65 sq m (700 sq ft) in size.
Sixty-year-old Mykola Klymchuk was one of them. He offered to show us the basement.
"This was my half a metre of space. I was sleeping standing up," he said. His voice choked up and he started crying. "I tied myself to the railing here with my scarf so I wouldn't fall over. I spent 25 nights like this."
Mykola said you couldn't move for fear of stepping on people. About 40 or 50 children were among those held captive. The youngest was just two months old.
"During my time here, 12 people died," Mykola said. Most were elderly people. It's unclear what they died of, but Mykola believes some suffocated to death.
When people died, the bodies couldn't immediately be removed.
This meant that people, including children, lived amidst corpses for hours, and sometimes days, until they could be taken outside.
Read the report in full: Ukraine war: Sharing space with the dead - horror outside Chernihiv
Brazil abstained.
Looks like Georgian war crimes from reading that article.
But I have no love lost for any Russian soldier. If they are shot dead while invading someone else's land, tough shit.
Yeah a lot of things are wrong in this war. You know what will stop it? Russian soldiers getting the F out of Ukrainian territory. If there are not there, then they can't be tied up and shot.
A war crime is a war crime. We also don't know that these particular soldiers have committed any war crimes, and even if we did then they're supposed to be tried. It's an incredibly dangerous slippery slope to start approving of prisoners of war getting shot. Well, I guess the slippery slope is shooting prisoners of war, I doubt your approval or otherwise will make much of a difference.
Yeah I get that this is an invasion but still. Cold blooded murder isn't something I can get on board with.
Ukrainians have form for this against the Chechens in the past.
Sure, but try to have the same energy for every single war crime we have evidence for on both sides. If so, we’d discuss the Russian ones from midnight to 23:58 then spend two minutes on the ones from the Ukrainian side.
People are placing a disproportionate focus on the odd pieces of evidence on war crimes from the Ukrainian side, whereas most of the individual Russian ones get swept up into broad brushstrokes.
And what's going to happen when Russia starts spinning this to their soldiers as the Ukrainians committing war crimes? How many more war crimes is it going to inspire? There are already enough to go around.
Don't think anyone is defending the Russians or brushing aside their atrocities.
The whole thread has been about the Russians being cnuts.
This however isn't justifiable for me. And as someone says will lead to more unjustifiable violence potentially.n even from those Russians reported to have been apologetic and surrendering.
It's a war. Soldiers killing each other happens. For me, it matters not whether they are tied up or not because 5 minutes ago these bastards were shooting at you with live rounds. I dunno, maybe it's because I'm an ex-soldier, I've been trained to think very differently about military deaths in a war situation.
If you get caught as a POW, you hope to survive but the odds are really stacked against you. Being shot straight off is probably more merciful than being tortured for intel, and then shot anyway.
Russia already are spinning it to their soldiers and their public, whether its true or not.
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I’m not trying to justify it. It’s terrible, albeit I’m not sure I can swear that if I were a Ukrainian solider I wouldn’t react to what this invading force have done in my peaceful country.
What I am suggesting though is that people in general, and much of the media, are blowing it out of proportion. You can make a list of every single possible war crime that has photographic, audio or video evidence from this war, and 99% of them will be from the Russian side.
Where is this naivety coming from to expect the Ukrainians to win this war whilst having their armed forces committing zero possibly documented war crimes? People are setting them an impossible standard that they will inevitably fail to meet.
The Ukrainian leadership is tackling the PR side of it as well as they possibly can. They are acknowledging the evidence, insisting that their troops follow the rules of war, and promising to investigate.
The ruble is now even stronger than it was pre-invasionFair play, Russia's economic defenses are as strong as Ukraine's military defenses.
Luckily for us, we can hold our sanctions indefinitely while the physical war has to end at some time.
Would you buy rubles since you think that "the ruble is strong"? Do you think that any of the people you know would buy rubles as a good investment? Do you think that bankers are buying rubles because it is a good investment?
Sometimes, a numerical value means nothing. In 1980, based on ruble-to-dollar exchange rates you could also say that "the ruble is strong". In reality, nobody wanted to have any rubles in his hands! It was a completely worthless currency.
The ruble is strong but I know it is utterly manufactured.
I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole because you can't fecking sell it, even at a good rate!
Yes, but I'd like to see this compared on a per capita basis to what other countries have provided. I don't know, but I suspect that on this basis many European nations have provided far more.
$1.7 billion is not that much - is actually tiny - when a bipartisan agreement has already been reached on a $782 billion U.S. defence budget for 2022.
If nobody wants rubles, how can it be that "the ruble is strong"? I can invent my own currency, and set it to 1frostcur=1trillion dollars. Is this a strong currency?
I'd invest.
Of course, but it's not a binary. Real grievances are always easier to spin, and there's no doubt something like this could inspire retaliation (or if that's too weak a phrasing, renewed intensity in committing war crimes).
I'd only expect these events to increase in frequency over the coming days and weeks.
It's for sure wrong. But at the same time, some "revenge" war crimes are sadly inevitable. It always happens, to a small degree, but it does happen. It's understandable even. You witness your family and friends and neighbors being bombed, raped, murdered, and genocide committed. It's hard not to want revenge at some point. And when you are part of an army who is "killing soldiers in combat" anyway, it's not a big slip to go into killing the prisoners either. Even looking back to the Bosnian War. There were of course some war crimes committed by the bosnian side against the Serbs, after the countless committed atrocities that happened the other way. They got their trials and served their time, and while it's not "acceptable", I do feel it is inevitable unfortunately. Expecting one side to remain perfectly pure when they see everyone they know and love tortured and killed is just unrealistic, IMO.
You shouldn't do it of course. POWs should be treated with respect and this will be taught in all advanced military doctrines around the world (except Russia clearly). But I'm afraid on the warground the emotions run high and the reality is different. I'm not condoning their acts, but I can understand it. Likewise, I also don't expect a lot of Ukrainian POWs to survive for this same reason.
As far as motivation for retaliation goes, I'm fairly sure the Russian soldiers wouldn't really be too 'energised' by it because they have already done or seen far, far worse things. Shooting tied up soldiers is probably considered a mercy for the Russian pirates. What they did to civilians in Bucha is already worse than this. I can't imagine what they do to captured Ukrainian soldiers and, god and jesus forbid, Azov soldiers.
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Is that a bad thing. At the end of the day, it's a European conflict, Europeans should be donating more on a per capita basis. It's the lack of seriousness devoted towards defense spending by European countries amongst other factors that has contributed to the current situation.
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Would you like Europe to remember this attitude if China engages the US in a war over Taiwan?
At the end of the day it's a conflict between freedom and democracy vs tyranny and oppression. This struggle is global.
I don't know how it is strong mate, but it is by valuation. Even if it is clearly manufactured and probably not sustainable for too much longer.
What I'm curious about is: Can this strategy be used by other countries in the world whenever their currency takes a shock? We'd just end up with whole bunch of fake valued currencies around the world.
European countries are not going to get involved in a war with China over Taiwan regardless (in fact, almost none of them, if not none of them at all, could do anything about it anyway).
I wouldn't really say this struggle is global to be honest, as much as the media has tried to portray it as such.
The swing in top downloads in Russia in February/March.
Then I'd suggest you wake up and smell the coffee, China supports Russia. Authoritarian leaders around the world - in Brazil, North Korea, Cuba, Byelorussia, Syria and elsewhere - support Russia.
Moreover, if China were to invade Taiwan then of course European nations will get involved - in defence of freedom and democracy. The UK, France, Italy and Spain have a combined 6 aircraft carriers for starters - that's 3 times more than what China has.