Ukraine Watch...

[Ralphw2]

BBC is reporting that Trump administration is making encouraging noises over support for Ukraine, possibility of restarting military aid, based on Ukraine talks in Saudi Arabia. At the same time Trump is saying Ukraine may not continue to exist.

Trump really is the worst diplomat in the history of international relations.

Musk has denied any talk of turning off Ukrainian access to Starlink. The US has turned off Ukrainian access to targeting computer servers used by F15 jets given to Ukraine by other nations.

[clv101]

I'm reading Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff this week - it's not a brilliant book, but it does a good job of highlighting how much IT is working in the background of the modern military. Whilst from the outside, superficially, a modern fighter jet, battle ship and even a tank looks fairly similar to those of 30 years ago, in reality they now rely on vast amount of computer infrastructure working away in the background and without it they are little more than incredibly expensive sculptures.

[mr brightside]

Chinese drones that can swim.....
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zieglerr ... 9616-Spjm/

The Chinese can't make things waterproof, it will leak and malfunction. The seals will fail with time or depth pressure.

[clv101]

The chinese are capable of building absolutely state of the art equipment. They also build a lot of crap, because it's profitable to do so.

See this video from ~9:20. The battlefield is changing, fast.
https://youtu.be/pu5jdZ3GFvc?si=0RBfu8RUS_tuqnhZ

[Ralphw2]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nation ... rcna194420

This is just public speculation. A lot of talking will be going on over (hopefully) very secure channels.

[Potemkin Villager]

Chinese drones that can swim.....
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zieglerr ... 9616-Spjm/

The Chinese can't make things waterproof, it will leak and malfunction. The seals will fail with time or depth pressure.

and when the magnets get wet they will stop working!

[Ralphw2]

a distributed denial of service attack left Musk's X floundering yesterday. Musk has been suggesting this had pointers to Ukraine.

A cyber security expert on the BBC laughed at this suggestion, saying X had left some of its critical servers relatively exposed, by not putting them under the protection of the Cloudfair company which X employs and which has decades of experience of handling this relatively unsophisticated type of cyber attack.

The expert was a lot less polite than I am being here. He did not mention but it is widely known a major player in this kind of attack is Russia

[invalid]

Given that they are still advancing and the Russian defence is all over the place? Yes, obviously. Russia does not have the (willing and capable) manpower to defend its entire front line. That is the whole point.

You've really hit it out the park with all your predictions in this conflict.

Ah yes. Like I didn't spend 6 months before the US elections saying "If Trump wins then anything could happen."

My prediction was, in fact, spot on.

Dude how was it spot on? Ukraine had already lost a lot of land in Kursk before Trump was was even elected. Moving the goalposts as usual.

[Ralphw2]

Remember that the US suspended military aid for some months when the Republicans blocked it in congress. That was at the direction of Trump, and led to significant Russian gains.

[invalid]

Well, yes, but again, that's a different thing to what he said. Ukraine was never going to hold on to what they had taken in Kursk.

[UndercoverElephant]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c51ypekv9xwt

The United States "will immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine", a joint statement from the US and Ukraine, shared by the US state department, says.

[UndercoverElephant]

So the US has agreed a ceasefire deal with Ukraine, and now it is "up to the Americans to convince the Russians to agree."

This is not how it works. This is not how you negotiate a ceasefire. Russia will only agree to it if they think it will ultimately be in their interests regarding the outcome of the war, which makes it rather unlikely they will agree. Right?

[Ralphw2]

Reportedly Ukraine has agreed to a 30 day ceasefire. Will be interesting to see if this is matched by Putin, and what the details are.