🐦‍⬛

context rules everything around me

@NotWoofers meanwhile if you're actually planning to take advantage of their foolishness, it seems wiser to not *say that* publicly and just be like "We see they are moving all their air defenses to Moscow... but will it be enough? 🤔"

It seems a bit foolish if the Russians are actually reinforcing air defenses around Moscow. Zelensky even called this out as being foolish. Remains to be seen if they actually are.

@kromark If I were them I'd make all kinds of threatening movements towards Moscow leading up to May 9, then on May 9, attack everywhere else that was left underdefended by the AD they felt compelled to relocate. (Bonus points if the smoke plumes would be visible from Moscow though.)

I’m starting to ask myself whether not targeting the center of Moscow is simply Ukraine’s goodwill, rather than a result of building all these 'Pantsir' towers around the city. It’s also a clear signal to Putin ahead of the May 9 V-Day parade. AD map: google.com/maps/d/edit?mi…

A Ukrainian drone hit a residential building in Moscow’s posh Mosfilm neighborhood (just 6 km from the Kremlin), which also hosts several foreign embassies, including Germany’s, successfully making its way through all the 'Pantsir' rings.

Three months later, this is my last @washingtonpost story — delayed because nearly everyone involved in it was laid off. I am very grateful to newsroom friends who made sure it published anyway, and to brave Roman Mongold and his family for their time. wapo.st/4cNY7Cm

@ConflictHurts @franfran2424 @3_bm15 The other plausible explanation is it's a dumb kind of retaliation for Tuapse and Perm to show the boss they're doing something. (If DJT were president of Russia this would *definitely* be the explanation, but maybe they have someone in the CoC who's like that.)

@ConflictHurts @franfran2424 @3_bm15 I mean there've been roughly 20-30 shaheds getting through almost every single day for months and years, it seems quite plausible to me they're running out of higher-value targets they can both identify and successfully hit

Gas station campaign 🤷‍♂️

@RyanO_ChosenCoy unfortunately he can't just start directly with step 2 without opening himself up to potent attacks from Fidesz and Mi Hazánk. (Of course, this also requires Ukraine to trust that he's *not* another Orbán who'll take it, turn around, and stab them in the back, so, it's delicate.)

@RyanO_ChosenCoy I can't speak to the substance of his claims, but politically it seems clear what he's going for: if he gets positive steps on minority rights, that'd give him political "permission" to orient in a more pro-Ukraine direction. Due to the effects of years of Orbánist propaganda,

I’ll rephrase this since people seem to not understand or don’t know (especially Hungarians who can literally drive across the border and check) The reason I don’t understand his requests/reasoning is in that region which I’ve been many times. #1 People freely speak Hungarian, Ukrainian or their form of Hungarian/ukrainian mix (hell they even speak russian) and no one cares. #2 there’s schools and a university where Hungarian is spoken #3 Hungarian minorities own businesses, work for the government, are in politics etc in their communities The only thing that isn’t done and it probably isn’t needed is government shit like land titles, court shit etc is in Ukrainian (atleast to my knowledge) because it’s the main language in Ukraine. He may get mad about conscription, but guess what if you have a Ukrainian passport and you’re a Ukrainian citizen. Then mobilization is part of it. It would be the same in Hungary, the US, Germany etc. just because you’re a dual citizen doesn’t mean your undraftable.

Announcing Talkie: a new, open-weight historical LLM! We trained and finetuned a 13B model on a newly-curated dataset of only pre-1930 data. Try it below! with @AlecRad and @status_effects 🧵

@shashj What if the captain is the one bereaved?

"For the sake of morale...it is inadvisable to share news of a bereavement with sailors cooped up for months in a steel can. Only the captain knows the bad news. On the last day of the voyage, he calls in those who have lost a loved one and breaks it to them."

@Cyrusontherun would be interesting to do a version of this graph with the red bars on the bottom (+likewise yellow and red for the next one)

Update on Ru🇷🇺 #Shahed-type UAV attack. Interception very high but also increasing UAV numbers. x.com/Cyrusontherun/…

there will this brief era where we can watch our AIs bumble around on the computer clicking things, failing sometimes, taking a ~human amount of time to write code. in the blink of an eye they’ll be manipulating computers far too quickly to monitor

@bayraktar_1love Wait, what? Do they simultaneously pilot the plane and the drones?

The crew of the legendary An-28 pose in FPV goggles.

@Archer83Able Good answer!

REPORTER: Sir, would you use a nuclear weapon against Iran? US PRESIDENT TRUMP: No. We don't need it. Why do I need it? Why would a stupid question like that be asked... A nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anybody.

@higherfreak73 @airuyi @glcarlstrom True, but if you just replace "Iran" and "the country" in the preceding tweet with "the regime", does it change the underlying point?

@airuyi @glcarlstrom Iran is not fighting for its life. The regime is, and that’s a big distinction. There’s no love lost between most of the Iranian population and the regime. That’s fundamentally different from Ukraine’s situation.

I don't think Iran is about to cave, but oil revenue / total GDP is not at all a useful metric for assessing the impact of a blockade The loss of export revenue would have all sorts of ripple effects: significantly less money to pay for imports and fund the government budget, a trigger for further inflation and currency debasement, etc. A blockade that managed to "sever all Iranian oil exports" would also presumably curtail a lot of seaborne imports, which would spread further pain across the economy Also the Ukraine comparison is quite flawed: Ukraine has been able to lean on vast sums of Western aid that are simply unavailable to Iran

@NotWoofers To what extent is this "allows spending levels to be increased" vs. "allows them to be maintained"?

€60 billion of this goes directly into military spending. It is a major boost for Ukraine.

@NotWoofers It's a weird situation with there being a major supply crunch but the market also expecting it to somehow end soon. If it weren't for the last part there could be an unpleasant dynamic where kinetic sanctions further restricting supply just cause the price to rise and negate it.

It has simultaneously been an excellent and horrible past two months for the Russian oil industry.

@David_Hambling The number that get through (20-30-ish) at times seems more consistent than the percentage

236 drones launched, 203 downed = 86%

@justincbzz is radar guidance on land-attack missiles even a thing? 🤨

Not really. Inertial guidance is simply not accurate enough even if you have the best in the world, which Russia does not. Radar guidance is weak on land, especially since Ukraine has been using radar reflectors since 2022 basically. Which leaves us with two things, optical guidance and GNSS guidance. On the topic of optical guidance, this is mostly a thing for cruise missiles, i haven't see any evidence of any of Russia's ballistic missiles using it in Ukraine. We know they upgraded optical guidance on at least X-101, unclear what difference is made, we also know they almost always use them during day or when dusk/dawn arrives, indicating they have problems with nighttime scenes. Which leaves us to the last, GNSS. We know what the russians use can be very accurate because you can see their glide bombs often hit a tree line accurately with all 4 bombs. So that leaves the introduction of ukrainian EW. So the conclusion is that either russians have problems maintaining quality of these assemblies due to sanctions and strikes, or that ukrainian EW, very likely Lima, has gained such an upper hand it simply overwhelmes these systems. We see Ukraine struggle with Flamingo missile accuracy and similarly we saw american weapons that rely heavily on GPS struggle greatly when encountering russian EW, so this isn't like a novel concept.

@centaurblossom @NOELreports I hope to God it's not actually because they burn more impressively in videos

@NOELreports Are the tanks a lot easier to hit than things like distillation units or loading infrastructure? Wondering why they hit the tanks vs the more rare and valuable equipment that would cause bottlenecks

The fire in the port of Tuapse has reportedly spread to nearby tanks. #Russia

@NOELreports Hm, weren't Kalibrs launched today? Misreported and actually 101s?

Ukraine's Air Force with a late night report on a Russian combined missile and drone attack. Shot down: 19/20 Kh-101 cruise missiles 1/1 Iskander-K cruise missile 349/361 Shahed and other type drones One missile and 12 strike UAVs were detected at 6 locations, and the debris of downed targets were found at 12 locations. #Ukraine