How to hide from killer drones
economist.com
economist.com
The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.
The relative financial cost to the enemy is almost irrelevant if they are much wealthier than you are.
What matters most is the intangible military value of the item.
In too many situations people think simplistically about dollars, when what matters is invisible or intangible values. The hyperfocus on money is especially egregious among people that don't have much.
The cost is often proportional to the cost and complexity of making the item.
Yes I oversimplified, but it helps to put into context the cost delta of a patriot and a mini shahed.
Logistics, logistics logistics. Diversity of manufacturing location and suppliers.
Right now for example the US has 1-2 suppliers (and sometimes it's just another sub company) for critical weapon parts.
[1] https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/ukraine-s-drone-chief-reveal...
A military system is being launched at an area to destroy a target that is presumed to be trying to hide (hence AI).
Absolutely nothing stops a secondary, much simpler identifier system of "home on bright flickering lights".
Any system where you try to confuse an image recognition model by loudly doing something unexpected suffers from the fact that regular tracking systems have been good at finding those for a long time.
No AI model confusion tech is worthwhile if it otherwise makes something much more visible by other means - it's a scifi trope that people want something "obvious" to be invisible to the machine. It's not how reality works though.
"Counter-blinkenlights" are well-known as thermal flares, and more similar but as crude, [dazzlers] that blind the incoming rockets' sensors.
[dazzlers]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon)
"No target" by AI but "target" by the "engage light sources" recognizer is still successful targeting.
"No target" versus "aim at anything not green or blue" is as well.
It's also a question of the speeds involved: a dazzler on high speed jet versus a high speed missile might cause a near miss which means hundreds of meters of actual separation. Diving drone vs. truck? Not so much.
The Phalanx defense systems you see on naval vessels.
They need something in the realm of a big automatic shotgun.
Remember, in WWII Carrots were the secret weapon used to defeat the night fighters.
[Todo: Add link to Poe's Law]
Also can't use CIWS near troops and fpvs.
P1-SUN and equivalent are the answer there.
For @YurgenJurgensen above:
You're thinking on a ship, which is great, but these need to be able to provide front line coverage where I becomes an expensive target for cheap munitions. It is not a great solution. It's a fine layer against other threat classes.
Terrain clutter quickly becomes a problem on the battlefield.
Great on ships or for a base defense layer.
CIWS is just best for a different threat model.
We're moving into the "waves of drones with orchestration" phase and expensive directional systems won't survive that, and cost on the drone swarms is still drastically lower. Won't matter if you added ten ciws and ten fire-finding radars.
Again, great on a ship.
The Army did a bunch of different testing on this recently.
I do not actually suggest watching those videos, they are NSFL.
Incidentally, modern drone footage is actually not nearly as bad as stuff from earlier in the war. Increased lethality of the FPVs means much fewer conscripts deciding to take a 5.45mm retirement plan.
/s
They’re looking for camouflaged military trucks.
What they’re not looking for is a convoy of Zambonis painted in Toronto Maple Leafs white and blue.
"Ukraine to cover 4,000 km of roads with anti-drone nets by year-end, minister says" (Feb 2026) <https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-c...>
Anti-drone nets are the new anti-submarine nets:
The night time hunt using IR is widely practiced today in Ukraine and even was widely practiced by US and USSR in Afghanistan and Iraq as surroundings gets cooled down and cars, people and say donkeys used to transport weapons in mountains become highly contrast against the surroundings and thus easy to spot visually and to lock IR seeker of a weapon. Saddam used USSR anti-ship missiles, old even then, to attack Iran oil storage tanks at night as the missiles were easily able to lock on that large bright IR emission of the tanks still hot from the day against the cold night desert.
https://www.science.org/content/article/zebra-stripes-confus...
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...
See it for yourselves: https://x.com/RALee85/status/2071537561059692956
Some object detection and (human triggered) terminal guidance. It's essentially there to solve latency and control issues for a fixed wing platform with a spotty data link.
the drones are used in groups. That is for example how we have a lot of footage of the drones hitting targets. The drone observers or especially the intelligence drone guiding the group would frequently carry much better camera than the actual kamikaze drones (especially when it comes to high-resolution IR cameras which are expensive). In the fully autonomous AI mode the drone is usually given small target area where to operate (in particular because they aren't yet smart enough to differentiate Ukranians from Russians, so you'd like to confine their operations to a limited area and not letting it into the totally free hunt) and regular 4K camera is sufficient there. Again, there is a lot of footage on YT an TG.
Most kamikaze drones are FPVs. They can not do anything autonomously because at $300 a pop in a totally GNSS denied environment, after 10 seconds past takeoff none of them have the faintest clue where they are. That's why you see all that footage, they just skip the part where for the first 20 minutes some guy with goggles is navigating them. The bigger fixed wing kamikaze drones like the Hornet above might have better onboard options like VO or triangulating radio beacons, but by all the evidence they are still guided by operators and triggered to dive manually. The biggest issue for all these systems is maintaining their video data link; if they were truly totally autonomous, nobody would bother.
Having seen some freaky good examples, I'm not sure how it wouldn't work? It might not matter, but it seems to work (and I can't see how it wouldn't matter)?
For example, you see a ship on the horizon, you can't tell the class - so whether it's likely to be in a group, or if it's a ship previously reported in this area - you can't tell the direction, etc ... you observe the ship, now you can plot the direction, speed. The ship fires on you, now you likely know the class.
EDIT: Also, IIRC, the most successful captains in the field didn't actually use the AOB method of determining the target's course. They would instead cross in front of the ship at a distance. When the ship's masts lined up they knew the ship was pointed directly at their current position and could calculate from their current bearing and the bearing to the target exactly what the target's course was.
In hindsight what the Brits should have done instead of odd paint jobs is offset their masts by a few degrees.
Now, a squad of soldiers, or even just one experienced rifleman, would prob. dispatch of such a threat quickly. But against (at most poorly armed) civilians it would be an all too effective terror/area denial weapon.
It does work at least sometimes. If it didn't work at all soldiers would not bother carrying the shotguns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_shotguns_against_drones https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-soldiers-best-chance...
The first one gets him because he's unfamiliar with their flight paths.
After that he does better but it clearly shows that you'd have to be an expert to take down a drone with a shotgun.
Also there's a lot of air inside a shotgun spread, so even an on target shot may fail to disable a drone.
Shotguns have very short range: if I'm expected to be taking down a drone with a shotgun things are really bad at that point my life is alread in danger. if I hit I may save my life.
Another interesting piece of fiction: Horizon Zero Dawn. AI robots armed to the teeth, fueled by biomass, capable of reproduction via onboard factories. They had to reset the planet.
You can't hide from drones. Attach quadrf to your drone and now you can see through walls.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-stunned-uk-military-...
If all this is clear and you go ahead, all the power to ya, fighting evil in this world is highly commendable.
Except more often than not it is fighting not evil but sleeping civilians who don't support this war, which is not even war in the strict sense of the word, but a deliberate meatgrinder set up to devour as much human beings on both sides as its orchestrators can get away with, for as long as possible.
And what 'orchestrators' exactly do you think benefit from sending their soldiers through a meat grinder? Yes, Russia (not Ukraine) has done a lot of that, but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
Don't you know that big bad Ukraine forced innocent little Russia into this war?! (Do I need to add the sarcasm mark?)
> but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
Actually, to some extent, that is the case. Russia has been conscripting violent criminals (generally murderers and rapists), who, unlike normal prisoners getting conscripted, don't have a way to "earn" their freedom and are instead sent into the proverbial meat grinder.
I don't have any hard evidence that drones that hit Russian civilian buildings are even launched from Ukraine. What is known for a fact, is that they often belong to the same waves of attacks that hit industrial and military facilities. And for a fact, certain remote operators are responsible for that.
See, most will find my POV heavily tinfoil-headed, but try to understand it: I don't consider Russians and Ukrainians as two sides of the conflict. The real sides are some third party in control of military forces and narratives of both sides vs the populace of both countries. This is a war of false flag operations that are always blamed by that 3rd party on either Russian or Ukrainian side. A war of psychological terror, resource and manpower exhaustion.
For example, I don't see any plausible explanation how drones with a radar cross-section of a Cessna are able to fly from Ukraine 1500-2000 km deep into Russia, other than either being turned the blind eye to by the Russian air defense, or straight up launched and controlled by entities within the country.
That it is pretty possible, can be understood by in depth reading on 1999 explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk which inaugurated Putin's rule, and peculiar details like that slip when Zhirinovsky spoke about the Volgodonsk explosion before the event proper. Also, the prevented explosion in Ryazan (look up "Ryazan sugar"). And by mere living in Russia and noticing things around.
There is always an SMS warning in advance of every wave of attacks, but drones fly unimpeded and it is only in the vicinity of towns and cities that the air defense kicks in, often sending "the debris" neatly into residential buildings.
No attacks on key infrastructure were ever made that would cut war logistics on both sides, both sides never attempted to attack any key (like, really key, not some sacrifice rooks or bishops) figure of its "enemy" Khomeini or Maduro style, in fact, nothing is ever made that should have been made in a real war. Only slow, deliberate, controlled smoldering. Fighting over strategically meaningless villages and towns with losses in many tens of thousands, only to back down and then try to recapture with same losses multiple times.
All in all it takes living here and boiling in it, nothing I wrote could be obvious or even entertained as possible to a foreigner who doesn't follow the news daily and only sees the broadest strokes presented by foreign mass media.
As to what the orchestrators benefit - it's multifaceted, but goes along the lines of slaughtering the battle-worthy passionaries who would otherwise prove dangerous to the globalist plans for CBDC, total digital control and surveillance in slavic countries, displacing them with meek migrant workers, terrorizing the remaining populace into complete apathy and acceptance of whatever new normals those plans set, training military AI on real-world bloody datasets, limiting the freedom of movement by deliberately created fuel shortages, which makes well for 15-minute cities, etc, etc per WEF, IMF, World Bank, Blackrock and whatever scum there is still in the shadow.
> I don't consider Russians and Ukrainians as two sides of the conflict. The real sides are some third party in control of military forces and narratives of both sides vs the populace of both countries. This is a war of false flag operations that are always blamed by that 3rd party on either Russian or Ukrainian side. A war of psychological terror, resource and manpower exhaustion.
It's all staged, all coordinated internationally by a secret club (Luciferians) who control all "opposing sides", all world governments and religions. Everything happens according to a script, and everyone is controlled by the same script. The war is a big meat grinder designed to kill off as many worthy men and women as possible in a slow burn, just as trench warfare did in WW1.
All of this is leading to the next global war, in which they plan to crush the USA exactly as they did to Germany. I am the sort of person they plan to eliminate somewhere along the way, as are you. They won't be getting me; I hope they don't get you.
In your country are they trying to set the stage for a future fake "alien invasion", just like they have been doing here for a long time?
After the men and women of all powerful nations are destroyed and last vestiges of freedom are replaced by enslavement to a central world government and one world religion, that's when the perpetual "war against the aliens" begins, as their new form of population control.
They have hard time with pushing even the current stages of the agenda.
The launch of the wildly, and I mean wildly unpopular CBDC, ahem, digital rouble was postponed multiple times, but this time "the real deal" is scheduled by the Russian Central Bank for this autumn.
The selling narrative about convenience, modernity and helping fight corruption has failed miserably, and now they will force it using the fuel crisis at hand - which has all the potential to become a food crisis if (when) the autumn harvest gets disrupted.
They have already been rolling out QR codes for buying gas on odd/even days of week, by the first digit of the registration plate, etc, and the "government" messenger, also wildly unpopular but shoved down the throat to all kinds of civil servants, is on standby to become the only distribution channel for said QRs.
God bless you, my friend.
There was a mysterious "coin shortage" which suddenly arose during COVID for unexplained reasons, which was pushed by the big chain stores. Apparently locally owned stores, credit unions, etc didn't get that memo, as they never did mention any "coin shortage." Even at the big stores, there was no problem paying with cash and receiving change. It's clear what they're doing.
More and more self-checkout registers are card-only now, with only one cash machine. Eventually that will be gone when the timing is right.
It's nice to hear that the agenda has been unpopular in your area vs. the masses of clueless sheep walking into the slaughterhouse here, but unfortunately they will get their way in the end regardless. Here all NWO goals will be achieved by complete destruction of the country and government and crushing of all resistance afterward. In Russia however, who are planned to be victors in the war, in some ways it will be worse.
One of my great grandfathers knew that WW2 was a lie and that everything was propaganda, so he decided to "opt out" of the draft. He pretended to be sick, but they didn't believe him and put him in a brig where he sat out the war. Otherwise he would have fought in the Pacific theater and would have likely died in agony in some island battle, as they had planned for him. Instead he came back home in disgrace to a victorious nation, and was branded a coward and loser for the rest of his life.
When Russia is victorious it will likewise be bad luck to have opposed the government or avoided the war, for decades to come. Be warned. It may be best to escape to Siberia and disappear into the forest for years, emerging decades later all surprised like you didn't even know there was a war, lol.
For my part, I saw all this coming many years ago and am well off grid at this point. So they won't be drafting me into this one either, and there won't be anyone left alive to shame me about it later.
God bless you too, friend!
I’m so fucking embarrassed to be Polish and hear this populism bullshit from Nawrocki and any other compromised russian shill.
You know who killed our people? The fucking russians. Remember when the bad guys came from Berlin? The other bad guys came from Moscow. Don’t forget that.
———
For anyone unsure what this throwaway account is talking about: when he says “not too long ago” in a discussion about a war that is happening literally today, he’s talking about 1943. If this isn’t a bad faith argument from an antagonist, then I don’t know what is.
<< when he says “not too long ago” in a discussion about a war that is happening literally today, he’s talking about 1943. If this isn’t a bad faith argument from an antagonist, then I don’t know what is.
Sigh, it is not bad faith. If anything, it is bad faith to pretend past did not happen.
In this case, I believe I am substantially more up to date with both Ukrainian and Polish politics than you are. From your comments, it appears your knowledge on the topic is superficial at best.
Also don't forget russians executed 22k Polish prisoners of war in 1940 and lied about it for decades.
Germans killed millions of Polish citizens - but they are good people now, not like Ukrainians who are holding back russians? Russians who are casually invade neighbors once in a while and committing atrocities
Now, Ukraine is absorbing Russia's onslaught ( and that is something Poles benefit from even if they don't admit it ), but lets be clear. They ( Ukraine ) are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Germans condemn what they did, the Ukrainians are making Pantheon[0][1] of their war criminals who committed genocide[2].
[0] https://kyivindependent.com/pantheon-of-ukrainian-heroes-to-...
[1] https://tvpworld.com/94337029/polands-divided-right-puts-ukr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia...
Here is one of the top Ukrainian propagandists posting in his personal channel a video from Belgorod (Russia) that shows wounded Russian women screaming and thrashing in agony (the text reads "Happy New Year, bitches") after Ukrainian MLRS strike at the city: https://t.me/dmytrogordon_official/39688
Here is the Ukraine targeting the same high-rise apartment building in Kazan with multiple drones: https://t.me/readovkanews/91042
Here is the Ukraine blowing a bridge in Russia exactly when a passenger train was passing under it leading to deaths of civilians including children: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/01/deaths-as-russ...
Here is Ukrainian regime striking a college with multiple drones and killing 21 students: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Starobilsk_strike#Casualt...
We’ve seen you here before, and we’ve called out your bullshit before.
Go to the front Ivan. Put seeds in your pockets.
Anyone can look at your comment history and see that you are here to antagonise, and to spread disinformation in service of the russian regime and its leading war criminal.
This forum is meant to be for substantive discussion primarily about the intersection of technology and things that people in STEM would be intellectually curious about.
This forum is not for spreading lies as you have been doing for so long.
I'm sure you'll find an excuse for Ukrainian nationalists in each case I linked to - that's fine, it fits your beliefs about current Ukrainian regime.
But then will you be able to find any case where Ukrainian civilians died that couldn't be excused in exactly the same way?
Can you be consistent in your judgement?
I see it with my own eyes.
Your attacks on the people I care about dearly are routine. Every fucking day, you scum try and kill us.
Seeds in your pocket. Go to the front.
I’ll tell you what. Give me your address and I’ll send you a postcard from the Ukrainian city of Odesa, where the Ukrainian flag flies proudly on every street, and where your terrorists will never reach. Because Odesa is Ukraine forever. Kherson is Ukraine. Kharkiv is Ukraine. Kyiv is Ukraine. Donbas is Ukraine. Crimea is Ukraine.
Go to the front.
It's Odessa, the city founded by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in 1794 on the land taken by the Russian Army from the Ottoman Empire.[0]
The only thing Odessa is known for under the Ukrainian rule is burning 42 pro-Russian Ukrainian citizens[1] by Ukrainian nationalists. After that a Ukrainian president, billionaire Poroshenko, praised the city for being truly banderite[2] city. Yes, that is considered a praise by the Kiev regime.
"The European Court of Human Rights Court held, unanimously, that there had been: violations of Article 2 (right to life/investigation) of the European Convention on Human Rights, on account of the relevant authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odesa on 2 May 2014, to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events" [3]
>Because Odesa is Ukraine forever.
It's not for a Polish expat to decide. The Kiev regime is not hunting you when you walk the streets of Odessa.[4] They won't grab you and send to the frontline. When men are desperately calling bystanders for help, you walk by, look away and keep supporting the regime that does that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Jassy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odesa_clashes#Casualties
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banderite
[3] https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/app/conversion/pdf/?library=ECHR&...
Another complete lie, constantly perpetuated by Z-patriot zombies. And if you actually read the source you linked to, you would see that most of the antagonists of the clashes on this day were russians. They came from russia, or from russian-occupied Moldova, specifically to try to destabilise southern Ukraine.
---
Here, I have something for you.
This is the first medal I received from the Ukrainian military for volunteering and supporting them as they destroy the terrorists that you support.
This is the second medal I received from the Ukrainian military for volunteering and supporting them as they destroy the terrorists that you support.
This is the third medal I received from the Ukrainian military for volunteering and supporting them as they destroy the terrorists that you support.
The lies you continue to spread on this website are the best inspiration for me to go for my fourth medal. So, in a way, thank you. Thank you for encouraging myself and others to continue helping russian invaders to meet their fate, blown to pieces, left rotting on a Ukrainian field under the harsh sun, their corpses feasted on by wild dogs. Surely you've seen enough videos of exactly this happening. Ah, the miracle of modern technology.
---
Rest assured — as I do — that nothing you say here actually changes the trajectory of this war that your country launched against Ukraine. You will never reach the Ukrainian city of Odesa. And you will be forcibly removed from Crimea.
You are not making sense. The article debunks what you are saying:
"Rumors and conspiracy theories
Nationality of the victims
... Later reports showed that none of the identified victims was from Russia or Transnistria. Out of the 48 people killed, 46 were from Odesa or Odesa region, one from Mykolaiv Oblast and one from Vinnytsia."[0]
>Here, I have something for you.
The thing is that you are receiving medals from the Kiev regime for staying far from the front line and Ukrainian men are forcibly taken to the front line to die.
Among my Ukrainian acquaintances and their acquaintances two were grabbed on the street, one of them was dead in a month and another one was taken just recently.
People like you who support Kiev regime and its Western puppeteers are the reason that man is dead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odesa_clashes#Nationality...
I sincerely hope you'll be able to, thus proving that the people of the West are not as asleep at the wheel as Russians.
So that would mean fighting against Ukrainian regime.
Watch the thousands of videos where men are grabbed on the streets of Ukrainian cities to be thrown into meatgrinder after two weeks of training[0]. Hearing the terror and desperation in their screams "People, help me, I want to live" is heartbreaking.
These [1][2] are the websites for Ukraine's military.
[1] - https://mod.gov.ua/en
It's a Ukrainian site with English selected. You couldn't figure that out?
Who is that? What is their official page under gov.ua?
Listed as official website. As a Ukrainian I can also confirm this is the website used on recruitment ads outside and it is legit. Why does it have to be under gov.ua?
That is just a wikipedia page. Russia could have easily set that up. But now that we discussed it people can choose what to verify and what to believe. You know what they say, "Chem men'she znaesh,' tem loocheh"
/r/CombatFootage (NSFL)
> It's important to note that the risk of misuse is significantly lower for individuals who have never had typical speech patterns
How to Hide from Killer Drones:
It's important to note that that the risk of being riddled with drone bullets is significantly lower for individuals who have never had human physical characteristics.
[0] https://research.google/blog/restoring-speaker-voices-with-z...
What depresses me at a human level is seeing various UA drone films where Russian soldiers don't try to dodge, move, or shoot at an incoming drone. They mostly just freeze still in the open and wait for death with the saddest look of dread and sadness on their faces. Some may throw their weapons away and stumble a few steps, but the outcome is the same. I haven't seen many surrender to FPV drone videos.
I saw this ridiculous Russian training video of some soldier doing a tuck and roll with an ak-47 against a drone.
I guess things like fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles led the way. The future is Skynet.
This film predated the Ukraine war, and it felt like fiction six years ago.
This is absolutely coming.
The government is concerned about who might print a 3D gun, but this is the real danger.
Except the Ukraine kind of went out and built it.
People in this thread keep talking about DJI, and off the shelf US drones.
Ukraine has move so far beyond commercial products (but still in use) that it's laughable.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ukraines-drones-can-n...
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/60152
A drone isnt terribly hard, or costly. It is a solved problem. The interesting bits are the software and even those are "easy" -- more so with "ai" in the aid of development. Ukraine isn't paying for "testing" either, they just send things to the front and try them against Russians.
FPV drones are a thing. In, fact, I suspect most drones in the NATO-Russia war are FPV rather than fully autonomous.
You can call it NATO-Iran, or NATO-NKorea war as well.
Ukraine-Nkorea war? At least there were direct contacts between their forces.
* It supplies most ammunition and arms and much of the equipment.
* It funds most of the war effort, including arms & ammunition, salaries, covering some of the civilian budget etc. Total expenditure by "Western" countries in the period 2014-2026 is 380 Billion USD [1] and the vast majority of that is by NATO; some by other US allies.
* Its members train Ukrainian forces.
* It imposes wide sanctions against Russia (along with a few other US allies).
* Ukraine has already signed off half of all of its material resources to the US, the lead state of NATO [2].
* A negotiations process in Istanbul, having reached a draft agreement which would have concluded the war, in early 2022, was vetoed by NATO, or at least the US and the UK. [3]
And this is in the context of NATO's long-standing strategy of expanding eastwards towards Russia, which includes introducing Ukraine into its sphere of influence and possibly inducting it as a member at some point.
----
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_financial_aid_to_Ukrai...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93United_States_...
[3] - https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/02/diplomacy-watch...
For accuracy, replace "NATO" with "countries united in condemnation of Russia's invasion".
The iron curtain pushed west on tanks; it's being pushed back by choice. Russia inoculated citizens against its own propaganda by disappearing their friends and loved ones. Read Solzhenitsyn.
NATO is an offensive alliance, and its activities in this century have demonstrated this. Unless you mean "defensive" as in the now-renamed US "Department of Defense".
> of independent nations
Also, many of its members are only partially independent, when it comes to global strategic matters. And that's not getting into whether EU member nations are in fact independent; I can introduce you to many greek people who would say otherwise... Many Brittons also consider their state to be somewhat subservient to the US on such matters.
> annexation of sovereign nations by military force.
Hey, that consideration didn't bother Ukraine in taking control of Crimea when the USSR broke up...
To be less facetious though: Ukraine's sovereignty after the 2014 coup, and certainly by 2022, was also imperfect. To the level of Biden as US VP exercising veto power over who serves as their attorney general.
But certainly, the annexation of the Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts is such an annexation from a technically sovereign state. With Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia did not annex; those areas seceded from Ukraine, declared independence and fought a protracted war against the Ukrainian Army for some years. They also faced quite a bit of regular shelling targeting the civilian population, from their presumptive sovereign. Eventually, albeit under Russian influence, they asceded into the Russian Federation.
Be that as it may - like I said, NATO is involved to the extent that it should rightly be seen as a proxy war of NATO against Russia.
> With Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia did not annex; those areas seceded from Ukraine, declared independence and fought a protracted war against the Ukrainian Army for some years.
The verdict: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/?i=001-244292
Key part:
The reality of the relationship between the separatists on the one hand and the respondent State [Russia] on the other was such that, whatever their legal status, the separatists were completely dependent on military, political and economic support from the respondent State to carry out their activities and were, ultimately, a mere instrument of that State. It is for these reasons that the Court was persuaded that, from 11 May 2014, the relationship of the separatists to the Russian Federation was so much one of dependence on the one side and control on the other that it would be right to equate the separatists in the “DPR” and the “LPR” with de facto organs of the Russian Federation, within the meaning of Article 4 ARSIWA. Any other solution would allow States to avoid their Convention obligations by choosing to act through entities whose supposed independence is purely fictitious.
At this point, it's such a common Russian strategy that in several European countries children learn about in the middle school, from the times when it was used against their own countries.
Why do you see that institute as the authority on the secession of Donetsk and Lugansk? Both in principle, and considering how the legal procedure you refer to was purely ex-parte, by an institute of an entity belligerent to Russia, so that both the court and the parts involved were all hostile to it.
> Russians did the same in the 1940s*
So, going back to the cold war is insufficient, you want to make analogies to Stalin's USSR in the 1940s? That's almost all the way to Godwin's law.
Still, you are making my point, in that the war in Ukraine is perceived as NATO's war, or the US-and-EU's war, to fend off the evil Russians like in the old days.
> Why do you see that institute as the authority on the secession of Donetsk and Lugansk?
Nothing described there is meaningfully contested by anyone other than talking heads on the Russian state TV and the cheap whores who parrot their talking points in the west. The commander of the 2014 invasion force is a public figure and used to hold multi-hour livestreams where he talked about the same things; namely, that his forces were directly responsible for the war, and that there was no groundroots support for them among the locals in Ukraine. He often complained that the 2014 invasion stalled because Moscow did not allocate him enough soldiers, tanks and artillery to work with.
> So, going back to the cold war is insufficient, you want to make analogies to Stalin's USSR in the 1940s? That's almost all the way to Godwin's law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhazia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia
Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are just some of the oldest examples of this. At this point, you have to be intentionally trolling to take these "people's republics" propped up by Russian military with any credibility. Russians have been abusing the concept of peoples' right to self-determination for about as long as the concept has existed, to justify territorial expansion.
> Still, you are making my point, in that the war in Ukraine is perceived as NATO's war, or the US-and-EU's war, to fend off the evil Russians like in the old days.
This phrasing, referring to the Maidan in 2014 as a "coup" is reliable indicator of pro-Russia crankery.
> With Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia did not annex; those areas seceded from Ukraine, declared independence
Yep, here is more of it.
> NATO is certainly participating:
> * It supplies most ammunition and arms and much of the equipment.
Instead, the most important decision-making platform has been the so-called Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which consists of 57 countries, of which only 32 are members of NATO.
> * A negotiations process in Istanbul, having reached a draft agreement which would have concluded the war, in early 2022, was vetoed by NATO, or at least the US and the UK.
> And this is in the context of NATO's long-standing strategy of expanding eastwards towards Russia
>> Ukraine has already signed off half of all of its material resources to the US, the lead state of NATO
That is not what signed document is about, you should try to read the content instead of what russia today said about it.
>> A negotiations process in Istanbul, having reached a draft agreement which would have concluded the war, in early 2022, was vetoed by NATO, or at least the US and the UK.
No agreement was reached as russia wanted a surrender. putin should have taken a deal back then and keep control of the occupied lands.
ps: I hope you are paid well for spreading russian narratives.