Ukraine said it shot down a $36 million Su-34 bomber jet inside Russia

MicroWave@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 511 points – Ukraine said it shot down a $36 million Su-34 bomber jet inside Russia
businessinsider.com
  • Ukraine downed a Russian Su-34 fighter jet over Kursk amid an ongoing territorial push.
  • The Su-34, worth around $36 million, is Russia's most efficient fighter bomber with advanced tech.
  • Ukraine has previously held long kill streaks with Russian Su-34s.
92

Sure is nice of Ukraine to start shooting them down closer to the pilots' homes, rather than making them travel all the way back from Ukrainian territory.

Plus the jet parts don't end up on the "wrong hands"🤯. putin needs to know this! Such a simple trick!

Putin big brain work from home strategy

Ukraine is showing remarkable restraint by not razing the villages and not kidnapping Russian children. Slava Ukraini!

It requires no restraint if you're not a monster.

Yeah was gonna say... Russia has abducted and moved native populations as part of their imperialism, for most of their history. Ukraine presumably doesn't want to take over Russia so they have no need for such inhumane tricks.

Right on, this isn't about Ukraine's restraint, it's about Russia's psychopathy.

one of several reasons why looting is banned in all sensible armies is that looting slows advance

If you have a proper supply chain and logistics you don't need to rely on taking civilians stuff. The russian military and the members who loot the villages are just despicable

Ukrainian soldiers are leaving Google reviews on local shops as they travel through. I don't think they are looting, but they are definitely stopping for snacks.

not only that, they're delivering humanitarian aid to civilians https://news.sky.com/video/ukrainian-military-have-been-delivering-humanitarian-aid-to-those-who-were-reportedly-abandoned-in-the-kursk-region-13197067

if i've seen this headline two weeks ago i'd think that i've gone crazy

Why would you think you'd gone crazy? Ukraine's troops have conducted themselves very well throughout the whole thing haven't they?

"we're three years into three-day special operation. NATO equipped forces are distributing humanitarian aid in Russia" sounds like ncd shitpost if you had no idea that Ukrainians were able to pull off Kursk incursion. like, they lost so badly that they're taking aid from most probable adversary. this is desert storm levels of losing

you need proper supply chain anyway, the only thing civilians can provide you with is at most food, fuel, and maybe some vehicles. civilians don't have any ammo, radios or any practical communications equipment in general, firearms, mines, grenades, bulk explosives, fuzes, drones, medical supplies, spare parts, and fuckton of other things that you have to supply either way. this is not napoleonic era warfare

With proper supply chains you can loot more efficiently. Care packages sent back home from the front lines fit nicely on empty supply trucks heading back to restock.

Looting happens because people like to steal unusual or valuable stuff. For example, when wristwatches were popular, they were a common item to be looted, because they had a lot of value for their size and weight. It's not about being supplied with necessities.

looting happens when your army consists of undisciplined cavemen. it further strains logistics, that has to run both ways now; takes valuable time that could be used doing literally anything else; sets local civilians against you - maybe there are spotters or informants or insurgents now that weren't there before; makes unit in question vulnerable to some of these civilians' antics - there were multiple reports of poisoned food being served to russian soldiers by now and i think it could be over 50 fatalities total; not to mention that it's a war crime

It's all tied to the old military thinking.

Russian soldiers are not fighting for Russia. Russian soldiers are fighting for their generals. Similar to how Roman armies worked, or... well, really like any army worked until we got to the nationalism level that eventually lead to WWI. One of the most effective ways the generals got their troops to follow them was allowing them the "spoils of war". Good ol' raping and pillaging.

By comparison the Ukrainian army is unified in their fight for Ukraine. They're not fighting for a person, they're fighting for their people. All the fighting happening inside Russian borders isn't to secure loot, it's to end the war so they can go home.

If I were ukraine I'd take the children for the sole purpose of exchanging them for the ones Russia kidnapped.

russians are razing entire villages now because they can't advance in any other way (currently). they didn't do that in first days of the war, or in 2014. that's because they can't use maneuver effectively now for combination of reasons (loss of skilled personnel, armoured vehicles, constant surveillance, contested airspace) (unlike ukrainians now in kursk)

The Russian (and the Soviet) army was never great at maneuver warfare. That requires field autonomy from commanders. Autocrats can't keep a strong, smart, well-trained and somewhat autonomous army since they always fear coups.

That's why historically Russia has been victorious by obliterating cities via massed artillery and air bombardment. This doesn't work so well unless the enemy stays put or assaults your fortified lines.

I wonder what Ukraine's long-term game is with Kursk, taking territory this way they proved they can but keeping it is a whole other story. It certainly keeps their enemy off-balance and forces them to spread while making them look even weaker.

Autocrats can’t keep a strong, smart, well-trained and somewhat autonomous army since they always fear coups.

that's only half of the problem. the other half is that maneuver warfare requires encrypted radios, EW equipment, spotter drones, night vision, good sensors on tanks/APCs/helis, everything has to be mechanized or portable, in other words - lots of expensive kit, and importantly it also requires thorough training to use that kit effectively. russians don't have that. saudis have the kit but no training and their army is crippled by extremely limited agency of field commanders resulting from coup-proofing and petty office politics

russians were able to move freely using deception and surprise against the 2014 ukrainian army. all that training ukrainians have undergone now pays off

I wonder what Ukraine’s long-term game is with Kursk

that's a good question that only maybe 30 people in the world know answer to. kursk oblast has several interesting things, all of which can be used as bargaining chips by ukrainians:

  • gas metering station in sudzha. gas is still flowing, but as ukrainians control ground there, their engineers can undo this at ten milisecond notice
  • rail lines go from north to belgorod and from there to donetsk. ukrainians now have cut off one of these and if they reach lgov they'll get another one. this is important as russians rely on rail for their logistics backbone https://xcancel.com/Schizointel/status/1823737718582526037#m
  • potential of ukrainians capturing kursk npp gets russians paranoid. getting that would be a massive bargaining chip, maybe they'll be able to exchange this for zaporizhian npp
  • the captured territory itself would be also useful in negotiations
  • ukrainians attacked there because they knew that that part of border is staffed with untrained conscripts. unlike meatgrinder material in donetsk consisting of prisoners and minorities kursk border was staffed with a bit richer, white euro-russians. unlike poor minorities (buryatia republic, for example, had disproportionate number of military deaths, they're also heavily in debt in that region. many tried to get out of debt quickly by signing a contract) these euro-russians have some resources to protest in moscow. ukrainians already captured what could be low thousands of POWs (i've seen number of 2000 few days ago), but all these numbers come from russian telegram channels so take them with a heap of salt. although just yesterday something like 170 were captured, with 130 on video
  • then there are psychological and diplomacy effects. ukrainians are the first to occupy territory of nuclear power. incursion like this lifts morale among army, brings war to "i'm not interested in politics" russians at home, and calls bluff on all russian red lines. this already caused germans to pledge more tanks and americans to consider sending JSOW and brits to lift some restrictions on their weapons
  • ukrainians maybe decided that that incursion will cause russians to shift some units from east and south to kursk, which would take pressure off of these regions making advance easier, or maybe trigger mobilization which would be a political catastrophe for putin. it looks like hole in kursk is for now just plugged with more of untrained conscripts, but it's unsure if they're ran out of more capable infantry or they don't want to send them there, or maybe logistics haven't caught up by now. at any rate troops in transit are not troops fighting and there were artillery ambushes on entire convoys, in one case destroying 14 trucks and several hundred soldiers (anywhere from 200 to 490) in a minute (in oktabirskiye, on second or third day). there's been another that night. there are also of course smaller ambushes that nobody hears about, because targets are dead and ukrainians don't say anything
  • ukrainians are not done, they run in circles around russian units that have no idea what is going on because of their lack of training and effective ukrainian jamming. russians get defeated in detail with arty and air support from across border in sumy region, and it might be that they'll get encircled in south of glushkovsky district, which would bring even more POWs and accomplish something that russians weren't able to do since day one, that is large scale encirclement

all of this comes with a massive caveat that everything we know comes from russian telegram channels, because ukrainians maintain very tight opsec and let out only very little specifically cleared information

Oh yeah, I forgot about the coms gear. Unlike Russian troops relying on cell phone towers during the invasion (while simultaneously knocking the towers down). The EW gear would make it even harder for an already ill-equipped and disorganized defense force to coordinate.

And I bet Ukraine is getting some nice up-to-date intel from NATO assets (satellites, SIGINT, HUMINT...) which helps them decide where to attack and when to evade.

ukrainians have their own capable humint. remember, lots of ukrainians can speak russian at native speaker level. russians can't do the same

after capture of sudzha train station, and maybe before that, ukrainians have all the frequencies used by russian trains. i bet they can make good use of their EW capabilities there

Listen-in and cause confusion. So many possible hijinks.

Bucha masacre happened in March 2022. The war started on the 24th of February.

News of civilians shot, raped started flowing in since the start of the war.

russians were doing this while swaths of them were indoctrinated into thinking they will be welcomed with open arms. As saviors.

Stop whitewashing russia.

this is not what i'm talking about. these cases of wholesale destruction and ethnic cleansing happened after russians controlled territory, not as a prerequisite to advance. it's also quite possible that these units were explicitly ordered to do that, and it's not a result of poor discipline or anything like this

Good, there will hopefully be more where that came from. I hope Russia is scared to fly over their own country.

Russia is, after all, the second best air force in Russia.

AIM-120Cs on F-16s, baby. Something to counter the R-77s and R-37s of the VVS.

Terms I recognize from your comment:

  • F-16
  • baby