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This might be a little tougher than Putin thought...

lucas80 said:
The timing screams that this was on purpose. The G20 is meeting, and Vlad sent a message. One report said an energy hub, one said a grain storage facility which could also be a signal that Russia intends to utilize food insecurity as a weapon. The Russians aren’t exactly being cryptic.
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thats a helluva leap
 
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From a Pole in Lublin on the battlefront.com forum:

Well, to understand it was no false flag one need to look at mimic and voice of officials. If anybody knowing anything about PL politics observe reactions of Duda, Morawiecki, Spokesmen and chief of National Security Council I am 100% sure they will immediatelly realize they are scarred like s**t. They didn't expected that to happen, have no idea what to do with it politically so wait for "confirmations" while keeping people in the dark on PR front.

On totally personal note, our political class is divided more than US-one, one worst in Europe in fact; we lack any person of universal public trust and normal personal integrity like, for example, Finnish president Niinisto. Such person would be priceless now, to calm population down; but instead Morawiecki is talking like bored village post official, people are uncertain how to behave and within a week we will see a surge of national machismo by PiS that will be entirely for domestic use. While international repercussions will probably be symbolic. Unless, of course, it was indeed deliberate. Actually, judging by amount of fear by main officials may point to last conclusion...because what happen if RU indeed missile deliberatelly hit NATO country?

Forget about those memes with winged hussars, Poles saddling horses and joining war just like that. It's not realistic at all; people hates muscovites, but our political class does not play in the same league as Putin when comes to gravity of international responses. Cautious Art. 4 will probably be main response.
 
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dgordo said:

Looting, Sabotage Marked Last Days of Russia’s Occupation of Kherson​

Ian Lovett
Nov. 15, 2022 at 8:20 am ET
KHERSON, Ukraine—Earlier this month, Russian soldiers ripped down power lines, knocked down cellphone towers and looted homes and businesses throughout Kherson, the Ukrainian city they had occupied since the early days of the war.
On Nov. 10, the Russian forces were gone.
Knocking out the electricity—along with the heat, water and cell reception—was among the last steps in the Russians’ slow, secret withdrawal from west of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine.
“They were ripping down the power lines,” said Ludmila Chechekova, a local resident who saw a soldier driving a tractor down a street pulling the wires down in her neighborhood several days before the Russian withdrawal.
After Ukrainian troops routed the Russians in the country’s northeast in September—when whole battalions were forced to flee suddenly, leaving behind injured troops, sensitive documents and millions of dollars of equipment—Moscow took pains to avoid a similar mess here.
Beginning in late October, the Kremlin slowly drew down the number of troops in the Kherson region and began moving out heavy equipment. To cover the retreat, they pressed civilians to leave the city as well, saying that it would be dangerous to stay as Ukrainian troops fought to retake the city.
Even as troops filled trucks with all the looted goods they could find and drove them away, Russian officials told residents they were preparing to fight for the city.
Then, they knocked out communications and mined the roads. By Nov. 10, they had left.
“It was an organized retreat,” said one Ukrainian soldier in the 49th individual rifle battalion who fought in the region in the last three weeks before the withdrawal. As the unit reclaimed one village after another last week in the Bashtanka area, north of Kherson, they found only a handful of Russian soldiers to take captive. Each village was reclaimed without firing a shot. The Russians left weapons behind in one position, a stark contrast to the huge amount of munitions they abandoned during their September retreat from Kharkiv, in the northeast.
“They’d packed up everything,” the soldier said, adding that the mines on the roads slowed their efforts to chase down the retreating Russians. “They placed stones around the mines so we couldn’t remove them with vehicles. We had to extract them by hand.”
In Kherson, the retreat began with a buildup of troops. In mid-October, thousands of soldiers who had been called up as part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fall mobilizationbegan arriving in the city. Residents said they were easy to pick out: They were so poorly equipped that they were buying boots and other equipment for themselves in local stores, so they wouldn’t have to fight in sneakers. They would show up at the regional hospital, asking doctors to sign paperwork saying they weren’t healthy enough to fight, according to Viktor Shuleshko, a doctor there.
On Oct. 18, the Russian-installed administration here said it was relocating to the east of the river, claiming that Ukraine would soon start pummeling the city with artillery and that it was no longer safe to remain. Civilians were bombarded with messages urging them to follow: “Emergency evacuation! Ukrainian forces will shell the residential districts!” Though, in fact, little artillery was falling inside the city, tens of thousands, many of them elderly, lined up to board ferries across the river.
Over the next few days, banks and pension offices were closed. Hundreds of prisoners were released from Kherson’s jails. Those who weren’t released were brought across the river, and police stations where they had been held were abandoned by the end of October. Markets began to run out of basic supplies such as bread and milk. Residents wanted to wait for Ukrainian forces to arrive but worried they might have to endure a siege.
“There was panic,” said Serhii Gorbanyov, 28. “People ran to the markets to buy supplies. No one knew how long it would take or what would happen.”
By that time, Ukrainian forces had been hitting Moscow’s supply lines for months. They had disabled bridges, destroyed ammunition dumps and logistics centers, rendering troops west of the river isolated. Holding that territory was becoming untenable, according to military analysts.
“They’re trading bodies for time,” Ben Hodges, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, said at the time of the Kremlin’s plan to flood the southern front with recently mobilized soldiers.
But as residents lined up to leave Kherson, troops also began disappearing from the city’s streets. The older ones, who appeared to be officers, were the first to leave, residents said. By early November, younger troops—including some who had been mobilized recently—were less present. Many left with anything they could carry.
“The last two weeks, they were focused on taking as much as they possibly could,” said Oksana Bugayova, 38, a nurse in a hospital in the central part of the city. Through early November, she said, she watched as Russian troops removed everything from an administrative building next door to the hospital. “They packed tables, chairs, sofas, fans. They took a whole truck full of documents.”
Though the looting was nothing new—since the first days of the occupation, residents said, Russians had moved into empty houses, broken into garages, and taken anything of value—it reached new levels in November.
Troops took art from museums. They dug up the bones of 18th-century Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin and hauled them east across the river.
Electronics stores, garages and storage lockers were emptied of anything valuable.
Yaroslav Yanushevych, the governor of the Kherson region, said the Russians cut more than a mile of power lines before leaving the west side of the river. They also took all of the fire trucks from Kherson, leaving the city without equipment to respond in case of a fire in a high rise.
“I saw them taking a column of tractors, ambulances, utility trucks, cranes” toward a pontoon bridge during the first week of November, said Andriy Curdibanov, a local.
Still, until last week, residents said they weren’t sure if the Russians would leave. Even as the Russian flag disappeared from the regional administration building and ferries stopped running across the river, Russian officials continued to say they would fight to hold the city. Even some military analysts said it didn’t look like the Kremlin was retreating.
Viktoria Kozhemyak, 53, said that Dnipro market, where she works selling food and other goods, was suddenly all but devoid of soldiers by last Monday.
“I thought, either Ukraine will enter the city or something worse will happen,” Ms. Kozhemyak said.
On Nov. 9, Mr. Gorbanyov said, he saw soldiers steal two cars, telling the drivers to get out and then stepping in and speeding away. The Russians had already broken into and robbed his garage, and he went to hide his van, so they didn’t try to take it.
The next morning, almost every soldier was gone. Roadblocks that had been manned since March were abandoned. Locals wandered through administrative buildings that were now empty, finding no Russians inside.
Anya and Ruslan Babich said they saw guards around midday on Nov. 10 at the roadblock near the Antonivsky Bridge, the city’s main bridge across the river. That night, from their house nearby, they heard a series of explosions. The largest, around 5 a.m. on Nov. 11, shook their house.
“When we heard it, we realized the Russians had probably blown the bridge,” Ms. Babich said. “In the morning, we saw it with our own eyes.”
A large slab of the bridge was completely gone. The Russians had also sunk boats in the harbor, hoping to make it more difficult for Ukrainian forces to pursue them across the river.
Later that day, Karina Vanikovna was scrolling through channels on her radio. For months, all the channels had been in Russian, but at 1 p.m. she heard Ukrainian language crackling faintly.
“I realized it was happening,” she said. She ran to tell her neighbors, who gathered in the courtyard of their apartment complex with champagne and Ukrainian flags they had hidden in their apartments.
Ukrainian troops entered the city later that day.
Nikita Nikolaienko contributed to this article.
Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com
Appeared in the November 16, 2022, print edition as 'Looting, Sabotage Mark Russian Pullout'.
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Yeah....I 'member when we left Iraq and Afghanistan, we looted both places and destroyed as much infrastructure as we possibly could...

🙄
 
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h-hawk said:
View embedded media


View embedded media


"Scholz stressed it was important to "make clear that this would not have happened without the Russian war against Ukraine, without the rockets which are constantly, in large numbers fired at Ukrainian infrastructure".

https://www.barrons.com/news/scholz...nclusion-on-poland-missile-strike-01668588908
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Weird.....kinda like when some perp engages in a shootout with the police, and an innocent bystander is killed by a police bullet.

And that perp is charged with the killing, anyway. Pretty much the same principle here. This is 100% on Russia. Because no Ukrainian defense missile would have been in the air if Russia hadn't shot one at them.
 
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Do not see specifics yet but Sweden has a version of the Iris-T as well as this one.

"The RBS 23, designated BAMSE (Bofors Advanced Missile System Evaluation), is a Swedish medium range, all-weather capable air defense system developed by Bofors and Ericsson Microwave Systems (now both in the Saab group). BAMSE is designed for protection of military facilities, ground forces and high value infrastructures. It is intended to operate against very small and fast targets such as attack missiles, anti-radiation missiles, UAVs and cruise missiles. It can also engage high altitude flying targets. On their web site,[1] Saab mention ground coverage of more than 1,500 km², altitude coverage of 15,000 m and range out to 20 km.WIKI"
 
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"NATO’s top official called on members of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group to provide the country with more air defence systems in a video meeting, the alliance said on Wednesday. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg “underscored the need to provide Ukraine with more air defence systems” during the meeting, a press release said. Stoltenberg also told the meeting that the wave of deadly missile attacks across Ukraine “is a stark reminder of the brutality of Russia’s illegal war.” The US-led Ukraine Defence Contact Group is charged with coordinating arms deliveries to Ukraine."
 
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Croatia is considering donating its Soviet-made Mil MI-8 helicopters to bolster Ukrainian Armed Forces, local media reported on Tuesday.

According to some reports, like one from the Jutarnji list, the Ukrainian army may receive 14 Mi-8 and Mi-8MTV helicopters if such a decision is approved by the Croatian government.

The Croatian Ministry of Defense considers the transfer of Mi-8 and Mi-8MTV helicopters a reasonable and rational decision. At the same time, the service life of helicopters ends next year. Defense Minister Mario Banozic says they will no longer be usable in a few months.

https://defence-blog.com/croatia-plans-to-donate-mi-8-helicopters-to-ukraine/
 
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h-hawk said:
View embedded media



Croatia is considering donating its Soviet-made Mil MI-8 helicopters to bolster Ukrainian Armed Forces, local media reported on Tuesday.

According to some reports, like one from the Jutarnji list, the Ukrainian army may receive 14 Mi-8 and Mi-8MTV helicopters if such a decision is approved by the Croatian government.

The Croatian Ministry of Defense considers the transfer of Mi-8 and Mi-8MTV helicopters a reasonable and rational decision. At the same time, the service life of helicopters ends next year. Defense Minister Mario Banozic says they will no longer be usable in a few months.

https://defence-blog.com/croatia-plans-to-donate-mi-8-helicopters-to-ukraine/
Click to expand...


Sounds like Ukraine's getting the good stuff from Croatia.
 
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