Peter wrote:
That’s what I would have done
Of course. But if they shot down MH17 knowing that it was a civilian aircraft, why make the post about shooting down a Ukrainian military aircraft in the first place?
To make it look like an accident.
pro-russian separatists
Anyone who believes that such military formations exist is a proof of successful Russian propaganda. The only military formation on Russian side is Russian army. Military formations of self-proclaimed republics are just invention of propaganda – these formations are from 2014 formed by Russia, trained by Russia, supplied by Russia, staffed by Russian military personnel (some of them used to live in the area before war, some not) and under control and command of Russia. We had the opportunity to see exactly same in wars in Croatia and Bosnia with Serbian military formations.
I am not on twitter but someone sent me this, from their national TV
https://twitter.com/i/status/1592898787575357440
These people better keep away from any windows. Not many months ago these people would have been shot. Now it is an open debate.
It’s only taken them 100 years for the penny to drop.
According to Swedish media who are quoting the Institute for the Study of War, Russia yesterday launched about 100 cruise missiles worth up to one billion. (USD or EUR, take your pick.) I wonder how long they can keep this up?
The cost isn’t really the issue as they have them in stock, already paid for.
The cost only comes into play when they attempt to replace them, which they can’t do due to technology sanctions at present.
So the real question is how many have they have left in stock. The media has being saying they are running low for quite some time now, but yet the still come.
If anyone ever had any plans on taking some land from Russia, when this war is over might be a good time to try. There won’t be much of the Russian military left to defend the motherland after this.
It’s been a while since I used to design cruise missiles 
but I don’t think one needs anything beyond common chips to build something that flies (you can build a complete autopilot with a Z80 running at 4MHz) and navigates to a GPS location.
This board I am programming right now
has a CPU (look up STM 32F417) with roughly the power of a Cray 1 “core”, 168 megaflops, parts cost maybe 30 quid, it could run a whole GA cockpit (with suitable coprocessors for graphics) and definitely a cruise missile. One of the add-ons is a 10 quid U-BLOX jam resistant GPS which can track ~30 satellites, WAAS/EGNOS, is limited to ~mach 1 and 60000ft but that’s fine for a jet powered cruise missile.
Apart from the current chip shortages (caused by hoarding) all these parts are available, non-ITAR.
More tricky would be image processing, radar processing, terrain following, IR vision sensors, but these missiles are mostly not doing that. Image processing tends to be done with graphics card chips (Nvidia and such) and those are also non-ITAR.
Estimated stocks are going down fast but they still have plenty. They will also be getting more from Iran, in exchange for nuclear materials.
And Russia is still selling plenty of gas. 1 billion € a day? This is why the “Russia topic” can’t be discussed in quite a few places…
In that link I posted it was alleged only 40% of Russians have a toilet (a normal flushing type like we have). So their wonderful socialist society doesn’t waste money on unneccesary luxuries 
dublinpilot wrote:
If anyone ever had any plans on taking some land from Russia, when this war is over might be a good time to try. There won’t be much of the Russian military left to defend the motherland after this.
Would be a good time to reconquer Königsberg. The strategic value of robbing the Russians of their only ice-free baltic sea port is enormous.
However, the west is much too afraid of
a) Russias nuclear weapons
b) looking like an aggressor
Airborne_Again wrote:
Immediately after the shooting pro-russian separatists posted on social media that they had shot down a Ukrainian military transport aircraft. After they realised it was actually MH17 the posts were erased.
Not the only thing that points in that direction. What was said at the time is that the launch vehicles lacked proper targeting infrastructure, so once the missile was fired, it becomes autonomous and locks on the most likely target. There was intercepted communication where unit commanders queried who had fired this missile and were pointed to “some Cossaks”, so there was no real command chain, but rather they had improperly equipped launchers they were not supposed to use and took potshots. Also it was said at the time that this missile had a max altitude of effectiveness of around 25000 ft, which was the altitude those Antonovs were operating at, but it turned out it can climb much higher.
None of this excuses anything nor does it take Russia out of any responsibility. They provided that stuff, it was their personnel, whether regular troops or some soldier of fortune units is not relevant, they were acting with at least the consent but rather under orders from Russia.
Graham wrote:
‘Pro-Russian separatists’ is code for Russian troops operating in a country where they’re not officially supposed to be.
Looking at the data from at the time, it was not that straightforward who these guys were and under whose command structure they acted. They were not regular Russian Army, that much is sure, as much as even today in a war waged by Russia, there are units which are not part of the Russian Army, such as the Wagner troops. I think this was part of the distinction used at the time calling them whatever. Fact is, that there was discontent in Donbass and there were political separatist movements afoot there prior to the escalation, but the latter was 100% fuelled, financed and organized by Russia. A lot of people who felt discriminated and who wanted their status improved there have since realized that their grievances (e.g. the banning of the use of the Russian language e.t.c.) were little in comparison for what they got, which is a now close to 10 year conflict in which their whole homeland was totally destroyed. I know people out of Donetsk, Russian speakers, who initially felt sympathetic to the movement there, but who had to flee once fighting started there and who were displaced now once again with the war.
Graham wrote:
But I don’t think anyone in the countries neighbouring Russia wakes up one morning and without outside influence decides they’d prefer to live under Putin’s boot and are willing to fight for it.
That was not what the original intent was at all. Ukraine has a Russian speaking minority, which felt they were treated injustly, particularly in those regions. It is not impossible that there were people at the time who felt they’d rather be under Russian rule than being discriminated by the Ukrainians, but I would think the majority simply wanted a stop to the suppression of their language and culture. Russia on the other hand took this as a pretext to trigger a civil war there.
Apart, at the time, Putin was not by any measure regarded as the villan he is now, even by the West. This only changed after he annexed Crimea. And the separatist movement in Donbass predates that significantly.
Graham wrote:
But you certainly seem to give the impression that you feel Russia is entitled to the benefit of the doubt in some of these cases.
That imho is the wrong approach. You have an incident, people are killed. It is vital to establish the FACTS first before assigning any blame on anyone. Falsely accusing the Russians plays into their hands. And by now it is pretty sure that the missile was indeed Ukrainian, fired at incoming air raids.
Which does not pull Russia’s head out of the noose, they are responsible for the whole violence. However, the significant element here was, that when those missiles landed in Poland, they could be a reason to trigger Article 5 if they were fired into Poland intentionally and particularly if they were fired by a hostile nation, for which Russia qualifies but Ukraine doesn’t. So it is very important to establish the facts before bouncing off the walls.
Ukraine does also not do themselves a favour denying it’s theirs if it is and insisting it was Russian against better knowledge or despite the lack of knowledge. There are a growing number of people who get impatient with Selensky’s efforts to get NATO more and more pulled into this conflict, which is not in the interest or intention of NATO.
Airborne_Again wrote:
According to Swedish media who are quoting the Institute for the Study of War, Russia yesterday launched about 100 cruise missiles worth up to one billion. (USD or EUR, take your pick.) I wonder how long they can keep this up?
I raised this point earlier but no-one commented on it – the pictures we see of damage to Ukrainian buildings don’t look like the result of anything one could describe as a ‘cruise missile’.
Perhaps I misunderstand, but I always assumed a cruise missile was a big, expensive object with a big, destructive payload. The kind of thing that reduces whole buildings to rubble. Some of the pictures show buildings that look like they’ve been hit by an artillery shell, a small rocket or even a mortar.
