Russian lawmakers authorize Putin to use military force outside the country, Part II

[robkelk]

-- Canada's Defence Minister says he wants to send "noncombat" troops to Ukraine

This is SOP for Canada -- we sent "noncombat" troops to Afghanistan, too. (I think Korea was the last time we gave anything more than the proverbial "all assistance short of actual help". But, apparently, we're getting good at training other people to fight...)

[classicdrogn]

I'm sure a few units of medical corpsmen would be welcomed as well; there's always more breaks and bullet holes than trained hands to bandage them. Likewise mechanics who are already familiar with the foreign equipment being supplied, along with mentoring locals to do the same on both counts.

[Labster]

-- In the heart of Moscow, a busy concert hall was attacked by terrorists, 130+ dead so far
-- Oddly the building has big English letters on it saying CROCUS CITY HALL, but it isn't a city hall, it's a concert hall.  Next time, use the word "Municipal" please.
-- Russia immediately blamed Ukraine
-- Ukraine immediately blamed Russian secret police doing a false flag on home soil
-- Daesh in Khorasan took credit for it
-- Russia still sure Ukraine did it
-- Ukraine thinks it might still be a deflection from Russia
-- Daesh releases bodycam footage from the attack, "no really, we killed you infidels!"
-- Russia pretty sure Ukraine is behind Daesh all along
-- Ukraine is notes that the enemy of the enemy is definitely not their friend
-- 0% approval rating worldwide for Daesh aka IS aka ISIS aka ISIL aka ISIS-K (which doesn't even make sense because the S=Syria and K=Khorasan)
-- US Congress passes a short-term budget, pats itself on the back (no Ukraine funding yet)
-- Immediately, Congresswoman/Russian asset Marjorie Traitor Greene introduces a resolution to bring down yet another Speaker
-- A couple of Republicans have put in their two-week notice (no, really), which brings the GOP majority down to +1 in a couple weeks
-- Democrats say they may save Russian asset and Speaker Mike Johnson if he agrees to put forward a Ukraine aid bill.
-- Black Sea Fleet keeps getting smaller


Meanwhile, in actual war targets land, Russian Refinery Bingo:



The red text on the images comes from the original Ukrainian meme, which translates to Bayraktar'ed.  Not that they're still using Bayraktar drones, since Russia has a minimally-functional functional air defense, just they have meme status due to the early war where Russia had zero air defense.

Finally, someone is doing something about global warming!  Reportedly 10% of Russian refining capacity is down, but that doesn't affect exports of crude oil.  Also there were some reports that America told Ukraine to stop bombing refineries, Ukrainian diplomats denied receiving such messages.  So much propaganda...

[classicdrogn]

I'll be honest, I still have the Bayraktar song (dance mix version) in my frequent-rotation playlist. As memes go it really struck gold.

[Dartz]

And here we see the end of the Black Sea Ropucha. Where once the Sea was filled with these grey landing craft, now they exist only in images and photographs. Their ultimate fate - that which awaits all creatures unable to meet the challenges of a changing environment - Extinction.

[Labster]

You know, with all the shit going on today in my world, I’m just stressed out. But how can I be anything other than elated today? Ukraine got billions in weapons from America, and there are already ATACMS in the hands of the UAF.

Light ‘em up, boys! Slava Ukraini!

[Dartz]

I never thought I'd find myself on the side of the Milicons, but strange times make for strange bedfollows.

That's a lot of weaponry.....

[Dartz]

So. Russia is now using motorcycle cavalry. They are, of course, achieving some pretty remarkable attrition rates. I find, this reminds me of something....

----

Half a klick, half a klick,
Half a klick onward,
Across the field of Death
Battalion two hundred.
"V' Pizdu," was the mobik's cry;
Their's not to reason why,
Their's not to make reply,
Their's but to go and die,
Across the field of Death
Battalion two hundred.

2.

Drones to right of them,
Drones to left of them,
Drones in front of them
Buzz'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Badly they rode and, well;
Fed to the jaws of Death,
Fed to the mouth of Hell,
Battalion two hundred.

3.

Rusted all their rifles were,
Fired only once in air,
Finished off by gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the burning-smoke
Up against the line they broke;
Strong was the sabre-stroke;
Making mobiks reel
Shaken and sunder'd.
Then they fled back, but not,
The Cargo two hundred.

4.

Drones to right of them,
Drones to left of them,
Drones above them
Buzz'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Slowly they strode and, well
Meat in the jaws of Death,
Half a klick back again,
Fodder to the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
A cube of two hundred.

5.

Deep in their grave and cold
Not shall their tale be told,
Yea, when our Ladas are sold—
How they rode onward.

------

If I was smarter or less drunk I could do something better....

[classicdrogn]

It doesn't seem like the situation where being less drunk will help you think about it more. Not with an even semi-functional sense of empathy, anyway.

[Dartz]

Best not to empathise with mobiks, I find. Their fate is not going to be pleasant. But it is made necessary both by their own actions, and the actions of a Russian government. Their deaths unironically make the world a better place because Russia and its goals being defeated.

[classicdrogn]

Thus the drink, yes. The grist never has a good time of it in the mill of history.

[Norgarth]

[Dartz]

Ukraine knocked out a Russian over-the-horizon radar. Normally only used for detecting ICBM's

Norway has the chance to do the funniest thing ever

[Labster]

I feel a bit bad about not updating this thread for a while, but I mean, it's a stalemate.  Oh right, there was that one sally from the north towards Kharkiv, which had been a pretty quiet border.  It was repulsed pretty quickly, but it's annoying because it's more border to guard.

Military:
* Biden finally allows Ukraine to strike inside Russia with US weapons, on the basis that Russia is using North Korean arms to strike inside Ukraine.
* Battle lines are still pretty static this year.
* Salient repulsed in the north, as I mentioned above.
* Russia appears to be taking 5-to-1 losses in manpower, which is sadly sustainable for Russia but not for Ukraine.  Ukraine is now trying to draft the draft dodgers
* Russia's equipment losses are not particularly sustainable, but it kind of doesn't matter.  It matters in the long term for economic/security/arms sales reasons, but if the strategy is "zerg rush kekeke" it only really matters if the attrition affects Ukraine more than it does Russia.

Political:
* There's currently a peace summit for Ukraine going on in Switzerland, which naturally doesn't include Russia
* Okay so basically that's a war summit, like the Yalta conference (once held in now occupied Crimea)
* Apparently they all told Orban to put up or shut up, threatening to withhold all of the NATO goodies, and he chose basically neither, but to go along with everyone else while complaining about it.
* We were a bit worried earlier that Hungary and Slovakia were going to team up to block EU aid to Ukraine, but Slovakia is still in a bit of disorder after the assassination attempt on Fico, and it turns out that non-great powers can still be ignored when they're being dumb.
* Russia offered Russian peace if Ukraine gets no allies and gives away land it currently controls, which is what you call a non-starter.
* Russia sends a frigate to Cuba to spook the Canadians; a decade ago they sent the Moskva.  It's like a repeat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, except with bottle rockets instead of nukes.  Possibly a fair fight for the US Coast Guard if they borrow a speedboat from the set of Miami Vice.
* It looks like America is going to "loan" confiscated Russian assets to Ukraine.

As time goes on I'm less confident that Ukraine will win this war.  I'm sticking with the early assessment that Russia has already lost, since the land gained is worth less than the industrial capacity and diplomatic reputation that they lost.

[Dartz]

Alleged video going around of an F-16 over Ukraine.

Alleged idiot attempts with GIMP

[Dartz]

It's been proven true... F-16's in ur Ukraine, shootin down your Russians.

In more amuzing news, the war came home for Ordinary Russian Citizens as the Ukrainians - bored of sitting in their trenches - decided to pay a visit to the DPRK. The Democratic Peoples Republic of Kursk is in the process of being liberated by the armed forces of Ukraine. The O.R.C's have been fleeing from towns and villages, while Ukraine has rolled up to little or no resistance.

Tellingly, one of the towns Ukraine has occupied is Sudzha - through which the majority of Russian gas heading to Europe is still flowing through. Russian mil-bloggers - who haven't been droned - expect Ukraine to reach Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in a few days at this rate.

(For added hilarity, tell strags that Kursk NPP is the same basic design as Chernobyl)

One suspects the whole objective of this is to both show that Ukraine can do something other than sit in trenches and mulch mobiks - show the world that investment in Ukraine results in action - and forces Russia to divert resources to scratch a very annoying itch. Which might let Ukraine take the initiative in all this.

A video of Putin getting told the news is - quiet possibly the funniest thing ever. There aren't enough windows in the Kremlin to throw these cretins out.

Apparently, Putin had to go to Biden like a rooster to get him to call off something big Ukraine had been planning. Exactly what that was must've been amusing.

[Labster]

I guess the Ukrainians are still moving forward with the operation to liberate Kursk from Russian oppression, and a good portion of the forces there are just surrendering because no one expected to see combat the Ukrainians were greeted as liberators.

So the thing about mine fields is that you can always just go around them.  If your plan was that the enemy will never be inside your territory, it may be a bad plan.  This is not exactly like bypassing the Maginot line, it's actually dumber, because it's literally Russia's own border with the enemy.  We are very lucky they are so fucking stupid.

And remember, we said they weren't allowed to use US weapons to attack Russia from Ukraine.  But there ain't no rule that says they can't be used to attack Russia from inside Russia.  You may call it a technicality, but I call it a salient point.

[Labster]

-- Russians say they repelled Ukraine's attack on Kursk Oblast yesterday
-- Today, Russians say they are still repelling the attack but from slightly further inside Kursk Oblast
-- Instead of trying to capture cities, they seem to be bypassing them with maneuver warfare
-- ... and heading towards Kursk Nuclear Power Plant on the Ruzzian side
-- Supposedly there's another salient happening in Poroz, Belgorod (brb let me get some popcorn)
-- Belgorod Oblast soon to be Bilhorod People's Republic?
-- Referendum shows people there want to be Ukrainian by a margin of 116% in favor to -16% against, it adds up to 100% so it must be true
-- HIMARS takes out a big Russian convoy in Kursk
-- The next day, Russian media has live coverage showing another convoy that was totally fine (and with the video easy to geolocate)
-- The rest of the previous front remains frustratingly stalemated
-- Poland calls on all sides to return to their 2014 borders (but especially you Russians, cyka blyat)

[Dartz]

I see some people concerned about the thoughts of fighting in the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant

Kursk is an RBMK-type plant, similar to Ignalina in Lithuania or Smolensk.

As it is, the RBMK-type reactor is quite capable of looking after itself in the event of a loss of outside power. This was tested on an RBMK similar to those in Kursk in 1986 and the concept was proven. (Subsequent occurrences being moot to the success of the test )

The station can either power itself using its own reactors at minimum controllable power, or start the emergency diesels and run happily off them until the fuel runs out. The RBMK reactor *may* be able to passively cool at that point once the decay heat drops after a few days but I've not read up on it in a while.

The reactor core itself is protected from three sides by concrete and machinery - and it would take a steep drop with a shell from the top to hit the reactor hall proper, with the reactor itself living beneath. It'd be some bullseye to hit the reactor with anything - and even then, the active-zone proper lives below a 2 meter thick steel and concrete lid - which itself is several meters below the floor deck of the reactor hall.

Even in the event of damage to the reactor steam lines, the auxiliary cooling pumps can pull fresh water up from the bubbler pools beneath the core and run it through the damaged water circuits - with any that doesn't boil off draining back down to the bubbler pools.

Cracking the core lid and opening it to atmosphere can only happen if the steam lines inside the reactor vessel proper rupture - you'd need a somewhere above ten of them to fail to overwhelm the reactor vessel venting system. When that happens it'll lift the lid and crack the remaining steamlines. With the core shut down and the control rods in the stack it'll just boil dry and slag itself into the pools in the basement. But this is unlikely.

An RBMK reactor can't explode. Again

[Labster]

So that means it can be safely removed from the Russian power grid? That's good news! Less war materiel coming out of the factories. And Ukraine could still rig it to explode in an "accident" if ZNPP has a similar "accident" first.

I really didn't think that the next nuclear war would be fought with nuclear power plants acting playing the role of fortresses, but here we are.

[Dartz]

Kursk is a very close mirror of Chernobyl - and even doubled as Chernobyl in some films because filming at actual Chernobyl would have been difficult.

Chernobyl is the glowing elephant in the room but - (And originally I thought it was funnier to leave it that way) the reality is, we know Kursk NPP is safe in part because of Chernobyl. The Chernobyl test was to determine if the coasting generator turbine could provide enough power to drive the emergency core cooling pumps in the event of a loss of offsite power, and with related damage to the reactor - like a steam line rupture.

They used the main cooling pumps as a dummy load to prove the concept, since starting the emergency pumps inadvertently would be *bad*.

There's also an emergency cooling circuit that'll bridge the gap where water is forced into the core with pressurized nitrogen.

Even if you tried to drive a reactor at Kursk specifically to replicate the events at Chernobyl - it wouldn't run up with the same dramatic effect. There've been modifications to the control rods, control rod drives and the scheduling of both AZ-5 and BAZ/FASS (Alternative fast shutdown methods) that make reactivity induced transients and unrequested fission surplus events incredibly unlikely.

The true alarm bell rung by Chernobyl was not that the reactor exploded - it was that it would've exploded sometime before it actually did without any violation if the operators hadn't disabled the automatic AZ-5 system.

An AZ-3 alarm which reduced the reactor from 100% to 50% (Such as a Turbogenerator fault) could cause the reactor to silently enter the exact same hair-trigger state over the course of a few hours, to the point where a subsequent AZ-5 alarm caused by a worsening situation would've blown the lid without anyone violating any operating procedures. This course of events could be expected to happen normally in the course of a nuclear reactor's lifetime and it seems to have only been luck that kept it from happening prior to 1986.

This is a little bit of a David Weber moment for the topic at hand but - the point is - Kursk NPP is fairly resilient to battle damage, in part because of the events of 1986, which were intended to test the resiliency of an RBMK reactor to a simultaneous coolant line rupture and loss of offsite power. This is the sort of thing that can happen to a nuclear reactor when people start shooting in the vicinity of it.

It'll be fine in the event of a loss of offsite power. It'll potentially be fine in the event of a loss of diesel generator fuel. It can take some damage and keep the hot rocks inside their tubes. And even if the worst happens - the worst case failure is that the reactor lid is lifted aside and the core boils dry, which, while incredibly distressing for those unfortunates in the reactor hall at that moment, would just be a steam release rather than anything truly dramatic.

[classicdrogn]

Bold to assume that the fuel for the emergency generators has not gone for a little walk, but there are still several other backup measures so... nichevo I guess.

[Dartz]

Well. We'll find out soon enough.

We're 900 days into a 3 day war. Ukraine has invaded Russia, and Russia is having a temper tantrum setting the cooling towers at Zaporizhizia nuclear power station on fire- while using guided missiles on a supermarket.

It won't bother the plant - it's well into cold shutdown at this point - but it'll make it difficult to use ever again

[Labster]

Ultimately the invasion into Kursk (which Ukraine does not want) and Belgorod (Ukraine kind of wants this, there are Ukrainian speakers here, but would prefer its own land) is a big problem for Putin.  The stability guy has seen two invasions in a year, one from Ukraine, and the other from Prigozhin.  It's a military failure, because the border was unprepared for people to cross it.  And it's an intelligence failure, because thousands of people managed to invade with the element of surprise -- in the era of satellite imagery. 

But most of all, it's a political failure.  It's a signal to people who oppose his government, both internal and external, that Putin's Russia is very weak right now. 

But the invasion into Kursk continues.  And as I write this, there have been some explosions near the Kerch bridge... here's hoping they did the funni!

-- For the most part, Russian conscripts are not being sent to the front lines in Ukraine, but those are "volunteers"
---- Including "volunteers" tricked into coming from other countries, Dubai-style
-- Conscripts, at least those who are well connected, are sent to the border regions, like Kursk and Belgorod
---- People who don't want to be there seem to be surrendering much faster
-- Yesterday the commanders of a division deserted, and 100 men surrendered to Ukraine at the same time.
-- If the invaders are Orcs, and Russia is Mordor, does that mean the F-16s are the eagles?
-- Just to Mordor things up, Russians start a literal tire fire in Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant tower (don't worry, it's turned off)
-- Ukrainians deploy hydrogen bomb against Russians, improvised from a Toyota Mirai.  Finally, a real life use case for fuel cell cars.
-- Russian military announces that there are no Ukrainians in Sudzha
-- Literally one minute later, livestream begins of soldiers taking down Russian flag from Sudzha city hall
-- Russians don't bother with medevac for wounded troops: the lightly wounded can walk out themselves, and the heavily wounded aren't worth saving.  This also allows them to amortize their losses over time by leaving the dead out in the field, which is what amortize definitely means.
-- Germany names the Ukrainian man who cut the Nord Stream pipeline, "Volodomir Z.", last name redacted for privacy.  Hmmm...
-- Russia sends 447 goats to North Korea in exchange for weapons
---- But also suspiciously lights are on a lot longer into the night now, almost as if Russians are giving the DPRK fuel instead of just livestock.
-- Russia is doing this war to defend itself against NATO
-- Russia also transferring troops away from Kaliningrad to the front lines, because NATO is not actually threatening them
-- Literally not one other country condemns Ukraine's invasion of Ruzzia.  But why?

CSTO, "Russia's NATO":
- Kazakhstan would like out, but exports everything through Russia, Black Sea pipeline threatened by Russian navy
- Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan actively want to kill each other
- Armenia has lost territory due to Russia ignoring the call to arms twice.
- A coalition of the unwilling.
- It's basically a power bloc, not an alliance: TL;DR everything Russia accuses NATO of being, CSTO actually is

[Mamorien]

-- If the invaders are Orcs, and Russia is Mordor, does that mean the F-16s are the eagles?

Maybe. I do know that, when news of the in-Kursk-ion first broke, I thought "One does not simply march into Russia. There is an evil there that does not sleep" and imagined Vodya replying "Yes you do! You totally do!"