Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Friday, June 19, 2026 13:38
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VIEWED: 499739
PAGE 210 of 210

Thursday, June 18, 2026 2:15 PM

Now Zelensky is really a dead man.

Tick Tock

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 2:19 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

THGR:

Nope!

And... nope!

Jeez! You and your clickbait.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:13 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Russian opposition media source Meduza reported on June 18 that major Russian state media TV channels Perviy Kanal and NTV did not cover the Ukrainian strikes on Moscow City in their daytime broadcasts, that the Rossiya-1 channel only quoted official statements, and that none of the channels ran a separate strike report.[19] Meduza noted that Russian news channels instead primarily focused on the need to punish residents who film the strikes and their aftermath.

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive
-campaign-assessment-june-18-2026/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 19, 2026 8:23 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Macron: Trump thought Ukraine was losing but changed his mind after G7 summit

By Iryna Kutielieva, STANISLAV POHORILOV — 19 June, 14:10

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/06/19/8040144/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 19, 2026 10:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why do Russians shrug at the minor misfortune of Putin killing Russians?

History is why:

The Great Terror

On 1 December 1934, Stalin found a pretext for launching his second revolution from above. On this day, a slightly deranged gunman shot the Leningrad Party boss dead. Stalin immediately took charge of the investigation into his comrade’s murder and used it to ‘uncover’ all kinds of ‘enemies’ within the party ranks. Some of the victims of the emerging Great Purge were truly in opposition to Stalin. Many more were loyal Stalinists who had confessions beaten out of them. Each arrest triggered several others, as the accused were forced to point fingers at alleged co-conspirators. The purge began in the Party and the state apparatus but soon broadened to include the military, decapitating the Red Army. Three out of five Marshals did not survive the decade. More army-level commanders were shot between 1936 and 1941 than had been in these positions at the start of the period: the terror chewed up replacements, too. Many more experienced cadres saw their careers destroyed even if their lives were spared. Lower down the hierarchy the impact was less spectacular and reinstatements lowered the overall share of victims to about 8 per cent of the officer corps in 1937 and 4 per cent in 1938. But the purge truly only became the Great Terror after it spread to the population at large in a series of ‘mass operations’ in 1937 and 1938. Overall, in these two years, nearly 1.6 million people were arrested, and a staggering 681,692 of them shot. More died in detention, as a result of torture, malnutrition, overwork, disease or accidents, increasing the death toll of these two bloody years to maybe 1.5 million.10

To Stalin, this bloodletting was an essential part of war preparation. Wreckers were everywhere, he told the Central Committee in 1937. They were ready to ‘do their spoiling work . . . in the period immediately preceding war or during war itself’.11 The closer his police looked at personal networks within the party, the more conspiracies they thought they saw. The more he learned about the views of the population, relentlessly eavesdropped upon by party members and police agents, the more isolated he felt. A public debate about a new constitution, the promise for more open elections and a census of the population all revealed widespread hostility to his form of socialism. In the context of the looming threat of Japan from the east and a militarizing Nazi Germany from the west, it was clearly not enough to just purge state, party and army from hidden enemies. Formerly well-off peasants (‘kulaks’), whose property had been confiscated and who had been sent into exile as part of collectivization at the start of the decade, people who had fought with anti-Bolshevik armies in the Civil War, officers and civil servants of the old regime, members of competing socialist or non-socialist parties, clergymen, common criminals, ‘anti-Soviet elements’, Poles, Germans, Finns, Latvians, Chinese, Koreans and other diaspora nationalities all fell victim.12

from Stalinism at War The Soviet Union in World War II by Mark Edele, 2021

Free download from

https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Stalinism+at+War+Mark+Edele

https://z-lib.sk/s/Stalinism%20at%20War%20Mark%20Edele

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Vladimir Putin has actively overseen the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin's reputation, promoting him primarily as a victorious wartime leader and a strong, effective statesman rather than a mass-murdering dictator.

• De-emphasizing Terror: While the Kremlin has acknowledged that Stalin committed crimes, it emphasizes that these were necessary for industrialization and that his legacy should not overshadow the victory in World War II (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War).

• Monuments and Museums: State-sanctioned monuments to Stalin have been erected across the country, and restored Stalinist-era aesthetics and symbols have appeared in public spaces like the Moscow metro.

• Political Framing: Putin utilizes Stalin to justify his own "strongman" leadership style and stoke patriotic fervor, often drawing parallels between himself and the Soviet leader. State media and educational curricula frequently portray current conflicts as a continuation of Stalin's fight against global fascism.

• Societal Shift: This decades-long government-led effort to reframe history has contributed to a dramatic increase in Stalin's popularity, with public opinion polls showing that a majority of Russians now hold a favorable view of the Soviet dictator.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 19, 2026 11:10 AM

THG

Is also JJ. Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
THGR:

Nope!

And... nope!

Jeez! You and your clickbait.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

Who do you and Jack think you're Bullshiting. What you call clickbait is what's being reported globally. Here's a statistic for ya. 50% of Russians don't have toilets. The first thing they did when they found themselves in Ukraine was to start stealing them.

tick tock comrade, tick tock Putin.

T

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Friday, June 19, 2026 1:38 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Dozens Of FPVs Chip Away Support Columns To Bring Down Road Bridge In Ukraine

By David Hambling | Jun 18, 2026, 10:08 am EDT

A recent video shows 43 FPV drones collapsing a Ukrainian road bridge by repeatedly striking its five support columns. This marks a significant military first, demonstrating that small, inexpensive drones can destroy robust infrastructure from a distance, a task previously requiring costly missiles or airstrikes. The drones, equipped with RPG warheads, cumulatively chipped away concrete from the reinforced columns, compromising their structural integrity until the bridge failed. This method is efficient and cost-effective, using minimal munitions compared to traditional bombing campaigns. This development suggests FPVs could increasingly target larger structures, revolutionizing bridge destruction tactics and posing new challenges for defense.

View the video https://twitter.com/i/status/2065470545802477724

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2026/06/17/dozens-of-fpvs-c
hip-away-support-columns-to-bring-down-road-bridge/

Bridge Dropping 101

Bridges are natural chokepoints, making them obvious targets for military action. But they are robustly built and most weapons have little effect. Blast and shrapnel effects that are lethal to personnel and soft-skinned vehicles barely scratch stone and concrete, and direct hits with large amounts of explosive are needed. Even heavy artillery generally fails to do the job, which usually requires 250 pounds or more of explosive in one hit.

During World War II, the U.S. military carried out extensive research on bombing road and rail bridges. They found it took an average of 190 sorties by medium bombers dropping a phenomenal 350 tons of bombs to take out a bridge. These were a mix of 500-pound and 1,000-pound weapons.

The number of bombs needed decreased sharply with bombing accuracy, the report stating, “It is worth noting that if bombing accuracy could be improved to something approaching training school accuracy….The number of sorties required would be reduced from 190 to 33.”

These days, the USAF uses precision-guided 2,000-pound bombs to destroy bridges, as these have sufficient explosive weight and are accurate enough that only one or two weapons are needed.

FPV drones typically carry repurposed RPG anti-tank warheads

FPV drones provide even better accuracy with a much smaller payload, typically a repurposed warhead from an RPG anti-tank rocket launcher weighing around five pounds. This warhead is a shaped charge which produces a narrow jet of high-speed metal capable of punching through a foot of steel armor or more than three feet of concrete.

This is not an obvious choice of munition for attacking bridge supports. The columns are reinforced concrete, and the warhead is unlikely to damage the steel rebar. But the Russian drone operators knew what they were doing.

Termite Tactics

The video reportedly shows an attack by the Kontora group of the Zapad unit, posted on the Telegram channel "Military correspondents of the Russian spring." The bridge is described as crossing the Nitrus River near the village of Andriivka in the Kherson region. Several successive FPVs strike each of the bridge’s five supporting columns. They claim that 43 FPVs were used, but the video shows about 37 of them.

The first couple of strikes on each bridge support only remove small amounts of concrete

The first couple of hits on each column just chip the concrete, but after that the column cracks up and larger fragments break off. After multiple hits a section of concrete is stripped away, exposing the bare skeleton of steel reinforcing bars.

The key to the attack is how reinforced concrete works. Adding steel bars to concrete makes it less brittle and greatly improves the tensile strength. Unlike plain concrete, a reinforced concrete beam can withstand lateral forces as well as compression without breaking. This makes a bridge resilient to lateral movement from earthquakes or other forces. But the compressive strength is still provided by the concrete. Blast that brittle material away, and the beam loses perhaps 80% of its load-bearing capacity. The actual proportion depends very much on the exact design.

After several strikes, all the concrete has been blasted away, leaving just the steel rebar beams to support the weight of the bridge

Bridges are designed with a huge safety margin, and a reinforced concrete bridge can generally take at least twice what it is ever expected to carry. However, without the concrete in those support beams, the bridge cannot carry its own weight and will slump. As we see in the final few frames of the video, the rebar starts to crumple and the bridge slumps.

It turns out you do not need to cut through the rebar if you chip away enough concrete. The entire two-lane road bridge, carrying the highway for something like 100 feet over a 15-foot drop, has been brought down by small quadcopters.

Future Bridge Busters

This tactic may already have been used widely by both sides, but not shared for reasons of operational security. The way the drones head unerringly for aim points suggests well-drilled operators who may have done this before. It is unlikely to come as any surprise to the Ukrainians. But it does suggest that, at the very least, protective netting may be needed on vulnerable bridges.

Precision makes this an extremely efficient type of attack: under 250 pounds of munitions, compared to the 350 tons of bombs dropped on each bridge in WWII.

It is also a remarkably low-cost operation. 43 FPVs probably cost less than $25,000, or perhaps half as much as a single U.S. precision-guided bomb, and without needing a jet aircraft to deliver it. You could carry out forty such attacks for the cost of one ATACMS missile.

The attack seems to have used standard FPVs. We know Ukraine has FPV warheads with linear shaped charges, which can cut through rebar and other structural materials, because these were used against Russian aircraft in Operation Spiderweb. Such weapons would destroy bridge supports with far fewer hits.

The changing daylight in the video suggests that the FPVs attacked over a period of hours. Systems like Ukraine’s Pasika, which allows a single operator to control a large number of FPVs, keeping a number orbiting nearby and calling them down in succession, would allow such an attack to be completed in minutes.

The bridge supports are static targets and easy to pick out visually. This would make programming a machine vision system to attack them relatively straightforward, removing the need for an operator to control the drones.

FPVs are sometimes seen as short-range weapons. But with add-on wings, they can hit targets some 60 miles away. And FPVs transported by carrier drones can hit targets hundreds of miles away, a tactic which is used increasingly by both sides.

Previously, FPVs have destroyed bridges already mined for demolition by setting off the explosive charges; there have been several examples of this. But we now know that it only takes a few dozen drones to take down even a seemingly sturdy structure.

The next question is just how large a structure FPVs could bring down. There is no obvious theoretical limit; it is more a question of how long it takes to marshal and direct the required number of drones. Certainly, larger road and rail bridges start to look like targets. FPVs can also attack traffic on the bridge, lay mines on it, and disrupt repair operations. Skyscrapers and other large buildings may also be at risk.

Small weapons can have big effects. We just do not know how big yet.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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