Current Affairs Ukraine

[Goat]

People questioning how Russia could have cut a pipe in the middle of an ocean that spans thousands of miles.

Needle in a haystack stuff.

 

[Dylan]

To be fair the submarines will be known. Not exact location but UK, US, France etc will know how many are deployed. Constant satellite images on all their bases watch their submarines leave port.

Obviously this is the same as us. They will have satellites watching our boats leaving faslane. One of Faslane’s main reasons for choice to be the port for nuclear warhead carrying boats was due to cloud cover lol.

Operatives and special forces will be harder to track and impossible to say how many but guessing pretty high.

Meh, AGI boats will always pick up our subs leaving port, its all well and good seeing them leave port, but as soon as a western boat submerges, its very difficult to track, unlike Russian boats that have a tail waiting and follows.

 

[john jako]

From what I am hearing from my old communities, much like many things out of Russia recently, massively overrated.

Potentially right mate. When I remember them they only just finished sea trials with limited data apart from very fast and quiet. Like with all boats, the more data you have on how they sound and operate, the worse they look.

 

[Spadge Vernacular]

If his nonsense was not so sad it would hilarious. Hopefully, one day soon the Russian people will hold these sorts to account.

 

[PKwalnuts]

Could it be us the UK that is driving this agenda?

IMO we went hardest with full support for Ukraine galvanising other's support. If there is any wobbling from allies, then cutting that pipe ends their dilemmas.

I like reading all of the different opinions in here and other threads, and there are some clued up people in here on all sides and perspectives... so really keen to hear people's thoughts either way on that perspective.

Could it be said, that we have most to gain from the ruin of Russia, and by highlighting of their fragile military capabilities?

In spite of their recent decades of fear mongering and mafia like handling of their international and business affairs, and their connections to their interferences in elections and referendums, this whole affair has shattered their reputation, and backed their regime into an unreturnable corner.

After Covid, Brexit, Energy Crisis and Global Warming and Change, was the timing just too good for us to exploit this geo politically??

If it wasn't so tragic for regular people it would be fascinating to understand who is pulling the strings and for what ends.

God help us all.

 

[Spadge Vernacular]

So as of three days ago we have the following.

A promise from Feb from both Biden and Neuland that Nord 2 would never be allowed to be switched on.

Nord one down and unable to supply gas until repair work was done (likely a bogus reason)

Rising pressure in Germany including protests calking for the switching on of Nord2, obviously as winter approaches those calls would have gotten louder and more widespread as the true cost starts to bite.

The Day the new pipeline from Norway to Poland starts operating, Nord1 and Nord2 blow up.

How is blowing them up in Russias interest?

Assuming Nord1 being down was to apply pressure on Germany to open Nord2, who would that serve best to no longer be an option that can happen?

You missed the first point - Russia invaded Ukraine.

 

[Dylan]

Potentially right mate. When I remember them they only just finished sea trials with limited data apart from very fast and quiet. Like with all boats, the more data you have on how they sound and operate, the worse they look.

I am sure when brand new it was quite capable, but as its been driven more, and maintenance has been neglected, lack of useful training, the true colours have shone through.

 

[bluestevon]

You missed the first point - Russia invaded Ukraine.

Sorry mate, didn't realise every post in the thread had to start by referencing the bleeding obvious. Even when the post is about the Nordstreams

 

[bluestevon]

Meh, AGI boats will always pick up our subs leaving port, its all well and good seeing them leave port, but as soon as a western boat submerges, its very difficult to track, unlike Russian boats that have a tail waiting and follows.

Tbf trying to detect a British sub is made more difficult by the fact there's pretty much only a half dozen of them

 

[PhilM]

All the gear no idea springs to mind sometimes with russia.

You can only train so much for genuine war. Good thing about being in nato and having the US as allies their is so many training exercises with lots of forces. Russia rely a lot on themselves to self train. They don’t seem to have learnt their lesson from Afghanistan.

Their under sea warfare capability of cutting cables etc is some of the most sophisticated and well trained in the world. I know for a fact we don’t train or have the capability to put mini subs in the middle of the ocean down to 600 metres deep to cut cables. The Russians do though. They have definitely overloaded resources into certain sections.

To some extent, you can understand this strategy, as there's no way that Russia could afford to produce a large combat force that could face NATO.

Their desire to do so during the Cold War was a significant contributing factor to the eventual collapse of their economy: they spent too much on the military.

Spending wisely on R&D and specific parts of their military would be seen as (well hoped to be) a force multiplier, but we can see now it's not been effective.

The Russia have masses of military hardware, but the lack of focus on sustaining the quality of these and the training to use them has bitten them on the arse.

Look at their loses of aircraft such as the Su-27 and 35; consider the failures of their much proclaimed air-defences; look at how their armour's been turned over.

But that doesn't mean we should pretend they're not toothless, and particularly in some areas.

TBF those are issues that often arise in wartime - all the leaders focus on the most modern systems, the ones they've spent all the money on / used to get promoted and so on. Meanwhile no (or insufficient) attention is devoted to the boring stuff like logistics, stockpiling, exercising, testing etc.

An example would be the US Navy going into WW2; they had on paper the most technologically advanced submarine torpedo (the Mark 14) in the entire world and one of the best submarine designs (the Gato class) coming down the yards in numbers. Sub commanders had been well trained, as had the crews, and the enemy in the Pacific had very little in the way of stopping them from sinking any merchant vessel they saw.

The problem was that no-one had actually tested the torpedo properly - if they had, they'd have discovered that neither of the trigger mechanisms worked properly. The magnetic one went off too early, and the contact trigger was more likely to fail the closer to 90% the hit on an enemy ship was (as in the more accurate the captain was when firing the torpedo, the less likely it was to work). This cost the submariners multiple chances to inflict severe damage on the Japanese for at least a couple of years. When it was fixed, they dealt a blow many orders of magnitude greater than what the Kriegsmarine did to us in the Atlantic.

They were seen as too expensive a commodity to waste on training and true combat-ready exercises, hence the failings you mention.

Tbf trying to detect a British sub is made more difficult by the fact there's pretty much only a half dozen of them

I think they're relative quietness compared to their counterparts is the biggest factor.

 

[Spadge Vernacular]

Sorry mate, didn't realise every post in the thread had to start by referencing the bleeding obvious. Even when the post is about the Nordstreams

Just keeping you on point ?

 

[tsubaki]

Could it be us the UK that is driving this agenda?

IMO we went hardest with full support for Ukraine galvanising other's support. If there is any wobbling from allies, then cutting that pipe ends their dilemmas.

I like reading all of the different opinions in here and other threads, and there are some clued up people in here on all sides and perspectives... so really keen to hear people's thoughts either way on that perspective.

Could it be said, that we have most to gain from the ruin of Russia, and by highlighting of their fragile military capabilities?

In spite of their recent decades of fear mongering and mafia like handling of their international and business affairs, and their connections to their interferences in elections and referendums, this whole affair has shattered their reputation, and backed their regime into an unreturnable corner.

After Covid, Brexit, Energy Crisis and Global Warming and Change, was the timing just too good for us to exploit this geo politically??

If it wasn't so tragic for regular people it would be fascinating to understand who is pulling the strings and for what ends.

God help us all.

There were credible reports that Johnson did dissuade peace negotiations back in late March, but as for the rest I think that would require a grasp of strategy that this government (and its immediate predecessor) clearly did not possess. His actions then were probably his typical idiotic boosterism, added to a big dollop of self-interest (in that it was a useful distraction from what is going on at home).

I'd also question strongly whether this was ever going to lead to the ruin of Russia, at least based on how we have handled it so far.

 

[Taifi gorm]

Their newer yasen class are incredibly quiet. Like our astute class. Impressive machines.

Caterpillar drives everywhere.

 

[PKwalnuts]

There were credible reports that Johnson did dissuade peace negotiations back in late March, but as for the rest I think that would require a grasp of strategy that this government (and its immediate predecessor) clearly did not possess. His actions then were probably his typical idiotic boosterism, added to a big dollop of self-interest (in that it was a useful distraction from what is going on at home).

I'd also question strongly whether this was ever going to lead to the ruin of Russia, at least based on how we have handled it so far.

Thanks for your reply

Really good points to consider

 

[FrenchDarrenBent]

Their desire to do so during the Cold War was a significant contributing factor to the eventual collapse of their economy: they spent too much on the military.

It wasn't really. Widely debunked since the soviet archives were opened.

How Did the Cold War Really End? | Archie Brown

In retrospect everything about the cold war’s ending can appear deceptively simple. The Soviet economy could not keep up with that of the United States

www.nybooks.com

If you mean the actual economy of the nineties, the brutal privatisation and lack of a established legal system did the most damage. They barely invested in the military back in those days.

Also, on another note, why are we so sure the UK or any other European nation, would fare better than Russia in a similar conflict? If memory serves France ran out of bullets in Libya...

It might be convenient now but not investing in our military and assuming the Russians/somebody else will make the same mistake next time around is foolish.