johnh wrote:
Looking at FR24 right now, something odd. There’s a Rossiya IL96 on its way from Moscow to Copenhagen (flight RSD92), which I didn’t think was possible, Odder, it has flown all the way up to Murmansk and then down again over the north ATlantic, presumably to avoid EU airspace. Yet it’s planning to land in CPH, and certainly pointedin that direction. How can that be?
Picking up the expelled diplomats?
They can’t overfly the EU freely but they could get a permission to pick up diplomats from where they were working.
arj1 wrote:
Picking up the expelled diplomats?
They can’t overfly the EU freely but they could get a permission to pick up diplomats from where they were working.
Quite likely. Rossia picked out expelled “diplomats” from Brussels last week. They then had to fly north of Scandinavia and enter Russia from the Arctic Sea.
Looking at FR24 right now, something odd.
Thre is a lot of odd stuff on FR24. Saw this one not long ago
Does a lot of interesting trips and must be getting special permits. Maybe it is delivering the gold bullion to the US so the USSR can buy back Alaska?
The other day Russia ran some sort of emergency dispersal exercise, with bizjets. Apparently these are regular.
This is the Moskva ship which is subject to endless speculation and disinformation.
The front 1/3 has come right off.
The latest from the Kremlin:
Four countries have already expressed a desire to buy Neptune missiles 
It’s not sunk.
It’s on a special underwater operation!
Hilarious how the Russians say it wasn’t stuck by missiles but just suffered a fire, yet the say they are launching missiles at Kiev in retaliation! How do the think the Ukrianians started the fire?
Russia has always defined itself in terms of expansion, and war if necessary.
In the communist era the need for expansion was clear: in communism, most people want to escape, so you don’t have “security” until you have expanded your borders so far out there is nowhere left for them to escape.
Continued to present time, there is simply no concept of living in peace with your neighbours – because there never was. Russia always treated war and trade completely separately; a fact known since Lenin, and one which was completely lost on European govts which naively thought trade with Russia will dampen their expansionist attitude.
Then throw in decades of brainwashing and self entitlement. I might wonder why the bunch of local Russian women here (attractive and married to wealthy men, with £1200/year health club memberships and driving “T72 tanks”) are 100% pro-Putin. Now I can understand it. Well, almost… There is a strange inability to operate some sort of internal moral compass. Not to mention the inability to realise that if Ukraine falls, nothing will stop Russia carrying on, everywhere non-NATO, and this is what galvanised much of the West (not all of it by any means; Putin just has too much of it in his pocket, metaphorically and literally).
And, like Ukraine, all future invasions will be done under an explicit thread of “if you interfere, we will nuke you”. Putin miscalculated on that one; it changed everything.
Ukraine has seen this coming for many years (which is why they got organised) but nobody else did, while doing business deals with Putin 24/7.
Now Russia has thrown in everything they have, but they don’t appear to be getting anywhere. Their losses just keep clocking up, and at an accelerated rate:
As far as one can find out, Ukraine losses have tended to run at around 25% of Russia’s. They are smarter, better trained, strongly motivated, not wasting their time wiping out civilian targets, and war is in favour of the defender.
They are really dredging their aircraft resources. Just idly bopping around FR24 I found a TU134 flying! I had no idea there were any left. Seems to have been on its way to Rostov or maybe Sebastopol – it has landed now so FR24 has forgotten it.
Also bopping around FR24 I found an A350 at Toulouse with a temp tail number in Aeroflot livery! – and planned VP-B tail number. I guess that will be repainted before it enters service anywhere.
johnh wrote:
They are really dredging their aircraft resources. Just idly bopping around FR24 I found a TU134 flying!
RF-reg means a state aircraft; civil ones are RA-reg, and RF-65553 is not a plain TU-134 but rather a TU-134AK, a airborne command, control and communications centre. Even in the West, such platforms are often based on obsolete airframes. Finally, CKL is a military base in Chkalovsky, Moscow region.
I learned over the weekend that a friend’s small US business makes the landing gear for the Turkish TB2 drones. His orders aren’t dropping in volume, as you might imagine… And he’s happy that his product is being put to good use.
The rate of losses is unbelievable. They can be sustained only via nationwide brainwashing of a very gullible population back home. And Russia is still only “probing”; they have not done any large scale assault (they are getting ready for it).
Nobody has yet showed these numbers (from Ukraine military) to be fabricated in any respect. Compare with 1 day ago (above)
With intercepted phone calls ordering the execution of Ukrainian POWs, the Ukrainians are not going to be keen to surrender, either.
