Am I having a stroke or is this article translated?
I'm not a Russia defender but this is comically inept if true. Why commit such brazen sabotage with a spy ship?
Comically inept does sometimes seem to be the country's MO, due to corruption and miscommunication (the latter often deliberate to hide the former) between the various levels of control. People get away with it for quite some time, until a mistake/accident too big to successfully cover up occurs or there is other reason for an audit from above, at which point some are removed from their positions (often to particularly unpleasant penal arrangements, or perhaps being moved on via a defenestration "accident", as an example to others) and things improve for a while. This is often the case in other autocratic or anocratic countries too, but it seems particularly endemic in Russia (perhaps due to its wide geographic spread?).
> Why commit such brazen sabotage with a spy ship?
As others have said, other reasons of the article are that the ship has recently been used as a ship for spying, but equipment relating to that was not present at the time of the sabotage mission it was intercepted during.
It's obvious for a reason.
They want the world to know.
The obviousness isn't ineptness, it's a brazen display of power.
It's a brazen display of what they themselves consider power and the rest of the world consider stupidity.
It naturally forms in the wider system through layers of control with people at each point doing the minimum required (well, the minimum they think that they can get away with) and creaming off any remaining resources.
The obviousness of reactions from the near top when enacted, against those that are too close to failures or deliberately act against the system, while often difficult to directly link to the top, yes, is very deliberate, and generally not ineptly executed.
In fact the individuals further down are often not really inept: they are can very good at doing what must be done with what little resource filters down while benefiting from what they can cream off, passing actual responsibility downwards, and keeping apparent responsibility for themselves (and their circles) when things go well. The comical ineptness is an emergent behaviour of the overall system that results from these behaviours.
This is in stark contrast to some other regimes, for instance the UK under BoJo the Clown and his next couple of replacements where the ineptitude was at times frighteningly and obviously present at and near the top, or over the longer term things like the post office scandal & cover-up which has dragged on for so long through an apparent endemic immorality rather than localised manipulation at each level.
Given their vast and extensive advantages at the beginning of the invasion, if they were even vaguely competent they really would have been holding a parade in Kyiv within a few months.
A competent military wouldn’t have lost their flagship, or let Ukraine counter-invade taking thousands of square kilometres of Russian territory. A competent regime wouldn’t have dismissed US warnings of an imminent terrorist attack on a specific music venue in Moscow and just let it happen.
Loading up a tanker with power hungry kit it’s not able to properly support without discussing the idea with the crew, while threatening the crew if they don’t keep quiet, is par for the course.
There was 0 chance Ukraine was going to just flop over. Iraq and Afghanistan were humble villages by contrast - one which we lost to, and the other which our 'victory' amounted to bombing the government then hiding out in tiny little ultra fortified 'green zones' while waving a victory flag. In both cases with the wars dragged on for decades. Now imagine if Russia had decided to jump in one of those invasions and start shipping hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons to them, providing intelligence, and so on.
Russia obviously just thought they were ambushing Ukraine and could get some agreement for them to not join NATO without a real war. Then the West decided to get involved, similarly thinking they were ambushing Russia and that the first sight of HIMARS or a Panther tank would send the Russian army scattering.
Everybody was wrong, so we got a real war that nobody wanted.
That's a huge hindsight bias. Even the most optimistic scenarios from various secret services / think tanks predicted only weeks / few months of resistance at the most. If you read Ukrainian accounts, most weren't very optimistic either. You can also read up how many commanders in the south defected - having more such defectors could flip the war quite quickly. The question of whether to defect or not (or simply run) is something which many did on the spot based on their personal circumstances and outlook, it's extremely difficult to predict.
In fact there were even analysts outside Ukraine that did listen to Ukrainians and who also knew what was going on.
Here you can listen to Anders Puck Nielsen explain in jan 2022 what we all understand now, that it would be a large and terrible war: https://youtu.be/23JYPb_jHpg?si=6lMedJpEkeuPRuhv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krhmeUkfhu4
In the past you needed large armies standing in a line, and tanks to crush that line. When armies made enough progress the remaining soldiers either surrender or ran away. Today you can have a handful people operating a drone to sink a warship, or fire a missile against a plane, or just planting random explosives and mines. They get killed and a new group pop up elsewhere doing the exact same thing. The only method to actually win by eliminating resistance becomes burning down every building and killing every person who used to live there, which obviously is immoral and hurts military moral, takes a lot of time, a lot of resources and people, and diplomatic resources. For a country like Ukraine or Russia it would take decades or centuries.
Then you must have not been paying attention.
A summary of those failed predictions: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-invasion-predictions-...
It's a roughly equal part of underestimating Ukrainians and overestimating Russians.
> Those that did make any prediction about the length of the war pointed towards modern wars like those in the middle east, which demonstrated that modern wars do not end suddenly regardless of what progress either side makes.
You mean like Crimea where the resistance never died down and was an active battlefield with daily activity of partisan groups? /s
After that claim was demonstrated to be clearly less than brilliant, the propaganda machine then began subtly (and then not so subtly) suggesting it was actually Russia that was making such claims.
But that was always plainly absurd. The last normal war Russia had was against Chechnya, another country that was tiny and practically unequipped relative to Ukraine, yet that war lasted a decade and had tens of thousands of deaths with a huge culture of great music [2] perpetually reminding people how brutal that war truly was.
You won't find a single source from a Russian political/military leader saying it'd be short, because they all knew it wouldn't be if there wasn't a quick agreement reached. The one quote people were able to find was from some television personality in some segment. But I hope Russia(ns) aren't citing e.g. Rachel Maddow to get insight into American positions on issues !
[1] - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mark-milley-ukraine-war-pre...
But what Russians expected can be inferred from what they did - their initial Kyiv offensive, Hostomel landing, it's a clear attempt at a decapitation strike. It's actually a carbon copy of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia which fell without a fight which is apparently what Russians expected here as well.
But in this case I'd emphasize that even if that was successful they would have known it would be far from the end of the war. The 'nationalist units' and at least some regular forces would resist, the West would predictably back them endlessly (and probably bring in proxy forces) and the most likely scenario (absent a quick settlement) would be something like Afghanistan 2.0.
While a great talking point in Russian circles, nationalist units did not represent a significant chunk of Ukrainian forces in 2022. They played a role in the power vacuum of 2014, but not by 2022.
Regular forces were concentrated in the east. If Russia took Kyiv, they'd effectively cut off any supply routes from the West. The resistance would be futile. Remember again how forces in Crimea resisted forever?
> and probably bring in proxy forces
Could you expand on this? Where, who ... how?
> and the most likely scenario (absent a quick settlement) would be something like Afghanistan 2.0.
Most likely based on what? Where do all these fighters hide? Are the Ukrainian plains as good for hiding and launching covert attacks as Afghanistan caves?
They were looking to kill Zelensky and control the entire country.
In fact, they still are.
It was a war from the beginning.
I do this on my own sailboat with a solar power source and battery setup.
Note that generators need to run at constant rpm to provide the correct ac frequency. Your car has gears so that it can run at lower rpm at low loads and so you won't see the same effect.
Yes it was a tanker. The bigger the ship doesn’t mean it has more people or more power generation like a cruise ship. A tanker has a crew of 4 plus captain, maybe?
It does lead to questions about how backup and failover power work on large ships. Secondary generation? Central batteries? Per device battery failover?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_Y2VNS5TFFY (this one with a hydraulic hand pump)
https://marineengineeringonline.com/emergency-generator-on-s...
Perhaps it wasn't brazen sabotage, but incompetent attempts to attach something to the lines?
Or conflicting agendas trickling down to the same ship, where the left-hand of "go cause some mayhem" didn't know what the right-hand of "collect signals intelligence" was already doing with that asset.
About year ago Balticconnector gas pipe was already damaged by a Chinese ship, which had been dragging the anchor for long time in a very suspicious manner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balticconnector
And again in August several data cables were severed by a Chinese ship. According to one analysis, that time they may have dragged the anchor for 400 kilometers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB-vEp3wr-0
BTW, Russia seems to have for years spend time finding out the routes of sea cables and perhaps also spied them or prepared some kind of sabotage:
The global internet is powered by vast undersea cables. But they're vulnerable. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-ca...
Ukraine war: The Russian ships accused of North Sea sabotage https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65309687
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action...
The cable positions are public info, they don't need to spend time finding out where they are.
This theory, with glorious irony, supports the idea that the cable cut was accidental.
It’s a ship, that was used for spying. Not a special ship built for spying.
So it’s just an asset at sea that can be covertly used and disposed if discovered.
It’s a burner, something to use and discard when it’s no longer useful.
The spy gear is on another ship and the anchor trick can be played again
Ducktaping spy equipment onto barely operating merchant ships fits perfectly for this purpose. It is the peace time version of the merchant raider.
Russian fleet's second name is "comically inept".
Anyways, they just launched this very potent sub yesterday as well as several other hypersonic carrying boats this year (4 subs, 7 surface ships - all fake according to Reddit):
- https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/russian-navy-receives-fif...
And it's not like the ships are badly designed. The Kuznetsov sister ship that was a casino for a while and now is Chinese works perfectly well. The problem with Russian navy is lack of maintenance, total disregard of safety and procedures, 0 fucks given about human life, uneducated, drunken crews and widespread corruption.
I recommend reading about K-429 - a nuclear submarine that sunk not once but twice. First time because it was ordered to do exercises while the hull was in maintenance. Despite protests of the crew. Second time in dock during repairs after it got recovered. Worker negligence apparently.
Fun fact - it's not the only Russian nuclear submarine that participated in 2 disasters.
For one simple statistic - USA has about 2 times the number of nuclear submarines Russia has. Despite that Russia/USSR has lost 7 nuclear submarines and USA have lost 2. You cannot dismiss accident rate higher by order of magnitude as propaganda or bias.
Russian fleet is good enough to launch missiles at a country without fleet from long range. It's not good enough to do it without significant loses. It's also not good enough to do it while keeping the sea in question under control.
There's a reason Russian Black Sea fleet left Crimea and rebased to a port in occupied Georgia.
Well, yes. If I can shoot you without your shooting me, that’d obviously better. Just because you have armor and defences doesn’t mean you want to always use them (or broadcast their capabilities and limitations).
We can make excuses all day long, some are even true, but the hard cold facts remain - russian navy sucks.
Otherwise these ships served as missile lunchers, but even then they had to widraw to ports far away from Ukraine, because of drone attacks.
Ukraine won the naval battle at tiny fraction of the Russian navy cost.
Perhaps it's a mistake in reporting, and the added equipment strained the local wiring/breakers of the bridge area it was installed into, causing "blackouts" that weren't ship-wide.
Is it operating an RF jammer or laser? Those things suck power.
"We are very lucky they're so fucking stupid" https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/tdj65n/were_very_l...
In the year of our lord 2024 russians are assaulting using Mad Max modified Ladas and push bikes, its no longer a meme! USSR stocks of armor are finally running out.
27 Oct 2024 'THE ARMOR RAN OUT - THEY WENT IN PICK-UPS. They reach the trenches and the assault ends.' - Combat group K-2 54th brigade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uy2KpKj0t8
A Russian Assault Group Riding In Pickup Trucks And Flying The Soviet Flag Got ‘Special Attention’ From Ukrainian Forces https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/12/21/a-russian-a...
Kinzhal and Zircon have been at least semi-reliably shot down. Iskander is very reliablly shot down. The main issue is that Ukraine just doesn't have enough Patriot batteries to defend the whole country, so the Russians stopped shooting where the air defense is.
They also use a bunch of S-300s as ballistic missiles (a secondary capability to their primary role as air defense) but primarily against cities that don't have air defense. But they're too inaccurate and inexpensive for the Ukrainians to bother attempting to intercept even if they had enough of the appropriate air defenses.
Keep lying lol
It's just a PR stunt. Notice how troll farms tried to hype doomsday scenarios, and how little traction such fears got in the actual national security circles.
All the weapons actually fielded in large numbers are either directly from the Soviet era, or endless upgrades of upgrades of obsolete designs - like their T-90 tank, which still has a fatal flaw that sends turret flying when the tank gets hit. Russian weapons industry has for more than three decades consistently shown total inability to produce anything new. I'd start worrying as soon as Russia finally produced a decent car; that would be an indication that something has fundamentally changed.
The transmitting and receiving devices were used to record all radio frequencies, and upon reaching Russia were offloaded for analysis.
...
They said no further equipment returned to the ship after it was offloaded for analysis, to their knowledge, but other devices were placed on another related tanker, Swiftsea Rider.
What seems implied is that the ship was previously used for spying back in June, then the spy equipment was offloaded from the ship and it was later repurposed to cut the cables.
That part seemed odd to me too.
Spy folks aren't the ones conducting sabotage? If one division has installed apy equipment then surely they don't want that fact plastered all over documents, so perhaps the sabotage guys just saw a suitable ship in the harbor and presuaded/replaced the crew?
Doesn't look good either way though.
> They said no further equipment returned to the ship after it was offloaded for analysis, to their knowledge
I mean it's the 1000+ day of the 3 day special military operation, we've seen Russians with ww2 era rifles and gear, ww2 era tanks, &c. Being inept is the only thing the Russian army seems to achieve consistently.