Sauce Mane
Superstar
Drone warfare is insane 
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Drone footage shows Russians entering homes killing families and abducting children. Trump says he will support Ukraine. Putin threatens Poland
- Thread starter Mister Terrific
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Jonah
XBOT Suicide Prevention Squad
Drone warfare is insane
Drone combat makes me think of this old show I watched as a kid and how they framed Drone warfare back in the 90s
Mister Terrific
It’s in the name
Mister Terrific
It’s in the name
Mister Terrific
It’s in the name
Schadenfreude
All Star
Drone combat makes me think of this old show I watched as a kid and how they framed Drone warfare back in the 90s
Gundam Wing was a great anime
Ukraine now has its own weapons to strike deep into Russia without US approval, Zelenskyy says
Zelenskyy said Ukraine hadn't been discussing long-range attacks with the US, after a new report said the Pentagon had blocked some ATACMS strikes.
www.businessinsider.com
Ukraine’s Plan to Starve the Russian War Machine
Negotiations have stalled. Trump keeps changing his policies. Ukrainians, backed by Europeans, are taking matters into their own hands.
www.theatlantic.com
Ukraine’s Plan to Starve the Russian War Machine
Negotiations have stalled. Trump keeps changing his policies. Ukrainians, backed by Europeans, are taking matters into their own hands.
By Anne Applebaum
Ximena Borrazás / Getty
September 24, 2025, 3:25 PM ET
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In one section of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these electronic panels from scratch: This company wants to use as few imported parts as possible, avoiding anything American, anything Chinese. Jewelers, I was told, have turned out to be well suited for this kind of finicky manufacturing. Ukraine’s justly celebrated manicurists are good at it too.
They are not alone in being new to the job. Everyone in this factory had a different profession three years ago, because this factory did not exist three years ago. Nor did the Ukrainian drone industry, of which it forms part. Whatever their job description before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everyone at this production site is now part of a major shift in the politics and economics of the war, one that hasn’t been fully understood by all of Ukraine’s allies.
Once almost entirely dependent on imports of weapons from abroad, the Ukrainians are now producing millions of drones, large and small, as well as other kinds of weapons, every year. They are using them most famously on the front line, where they have prevented the Russians from making large-scale gains this year, despite dire headlines, and where they have ensured that any territory occupied by the Russians comes at a terrible price, in equipment and lives. The Ukrainians have also used sea drones to clear their Black Sea coast of Russian ships, an accomplishment that seemed impossible even to imagine at the start of the war.
Finally, they are using drones to hit distant targets, deep inside Russia, and lately they are hitting so many military objects, refineries, and pipelines that some Ukrainians believe they can do enough damage to force the Russians to end the war. On Monday, they once again struck Gazprom’s fuel-processing plant in Astrakhan, for example, one of the largest gas-chemical complexes in the world and an important source of both gasoline and diesel. Yesterday, they hit a key part of an oil pipeline in Bryansk. Presumably President Volodymyr Zelensky transmitted this optimism to President Donald Trump, who again upended his administration’s previous policies yesterday and declared that Ukraine is “in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”
The company that I visited, Fire Point, specializes in weaponry for these long-range attacks, producing large drones that can travel up to 1,400 kilometers and stay in the air for seven hours. Fire Point recently attracted attention for its newest product, the Flamingo cruise missile, which can hit targets at 3,000 kilometers, and the company is testing ballistic missiles, too. These capabilities have put Fire Point at the cutting edge of Ukraine’s most ambitious strategy: the campaign to damage Russian refineries, pipeline stations, and other economic assets, especially oil-related assets. Trump has still never applied any real pressure on Russia, and is slowly lifting the Biden administration’s sanctions by refusing to update them. By targeting Russia’s oil and gas industry, the Ukrainians have been applying “sanctions” on their own.
Read: Ukraine’s most lethal soldiers
This campaign is not new. I spoke with a Ukrainian officer responsible for helping coordinate the long-range-bombing campaign, and he told me that “sporadic” attempts to hit targets deep in Russia began immediately after the start of the invasion. After the Ukrainians received some American drones under the aegis of a program called Phoenix Ghost, their efforts became more serious. Made for different kinds of wars, the American drones were susceptible to Russian jamming, and the U.S. imposed restrictions on their use. One former soldier now involved in drone manufacturing told me that the Ukrainians weren’t necessarily prepared to use them either. He and some colleagues found boxes of drones in a warehouse along with some other U.S. equipment in the first year of the war, and figured out how to use them from videos they found on the internet. Only later did they receive real instruction. (I agreed not to identify the officer or the former soldier, who fear for their security.)
Whatever their faults, these American donations did inspire the creation of long-range-drone units. Some are part of the military; others are connected to Ukrainian intelligence. As they grew to understand the technology, the commanders of these units, just like the teams deploying battlefield drones and sea drones, concluded that they needed their own drones, as well as their own drone research and development, with a constant feedback loop between the operators on the front lines and the industrial engineers. As the officer told me, “Everything interesting started a year ago, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine started to receive mass numbers of Ukrainian-made drones.” Once their own production lines were in place, they were not trapped by technology invented somewhere else, and they could continually update it to counter advances in Russian tactics and electronic-warfare technology: “What we had two years ago or a year ago,” the officer said, “it’s dramatically different from what we are operating right now.” A weapon that worked last winter might no longer have been useful over the summer.
As a result of both new technology and expanded capacity, the numbers of attacks inside Russia have increased. The officer told me that Ukraine’s long-range-drone units now launch several dozen strikes on Russia every night.
Until recently, the impact of the long-range-drone campaign was hard to measure. The Ukrainians do not always admit to hitting targets deep inside Russia, and many of the targets are in obscure places, where no one is around to record the strike on a cellphone. Russian authorities also make a major effort to hide these strikes and the damage they do, both from their own population and from the rest of the world. On one occasion, Ukrainians learned from satellite pictures that their drones had successfully struck a military airport. They could see debris, oil spills, and other evidence of a successful attack. Just three hours later, all of that evidence was gone: The Russians had cleared the airfield and cleaned the tarmac.
Sometimes evidence emerges anyway, usually via a home video, posted to Telegram, made by a Russian who happens to be near a burning factory or exploding refinery and is shouting for his wife to come and look. But even so, it can be hard to know whether these dramatic fires are caused by drones or by Ukraine’s even more clandestine sabotage campaign inside Russia, alleged to have both Russian and Ukrainian participants. The vacuum has left the field open for what the officer called “fake experts,” and sometimes false claims from those who want to steal credit.
But the Ukrainian military does keep careful track of the damage being done, and has thought carefully about how to prioritize certain targets. It has disrupted airports and hit weapons factories and depots. The Ukrainian officer told me that, early on in the war, his colleagues realized that the Russians are not deterred by the deaths of their soldiers: “Russia can sustain extremely high levels of casualties and losses in human lives. They don’t care about people’s lives.” However, “it is painful for them to lose money.” They need money to fund their oligarchy, as well as to bribe their soldiers to fight: “So naturally, we need to reduce the amount of money available for them.” Oil and oil products provide the majority of Russia’s state income. This is how the oil industry became the Ukrainians’ most important target.
The campaign against the oil industry has been helped by the degradation of Russian air defenses, which had been moved closer to the border of Ukraine and at the moment aren’t numerous enough to cover every possible economic target across a very large country. Since August, 16 of 38 Russian refineries have been hit, some multiple times. Among them are facilities in Samara, Krasnodar, Volgograd, Novokuibyshevsk, and Ryazan, among others, as well as oil depots in Sochi; an oil terminal at Primorsk, in the Baltic; and pumping stations along another pipeline that supplies crude oil in Ust-Luga, in the northern part of the Baltic. In August, the Ukrainians also hit the Unecha pumping station, a crucial part of the Druzhba pipeline that links Russia and Europe and still supplies oil to Hungary and Slovakia, the two European countries that have sought to block or undermine sanctions on Ukraine (and the only two European NATO states who, alongside Turkey, import Russian oil at all).
Read: Ukraine’s warning to the world’s other military forces
The result: Russian overall oil exports are now at their lowest point since the start of the war, and the Russians are running out of oil at home. The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces has said that more than a fifth of Russian refining capacity has been destroyed. The regime has banned the export of refined oil products, because there isn’t enough for the domestic market. Gas stations are closed or badly supplied in areas across the country, including the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Telegram accounts post videos of cars waiting in enormous lines. Earlier this month, Izvestiya, a state-owned newspaper, actually admitted to its readers that severe fuel shortages are spreading across central and eastern Russia, as well as in Crimea, a problem it attributed, laughably, to “the seasonal increase in fuel demand and the growth of tourism activity.”
Quietly, Europeans are backing Ukraine’s strategy. The Germans will invest $10.5 billion in support for Ukraine this year and next, a large chunk of which will be spent building drones. Sweden has pledged $7.4 billion. The European Union’s decision to invest $6 billion in a “Drone Alliance” with Ukraine is mostly designed to build anti-drone defenses along Europe’s eastern border, but that money will also accelerate production and benefit Ukraine as well.
Both the Ukrainians and their European allies are also looking harder at the so-called shadow fleet, the oil tankers now traveling around the world under flags of convenience, fraudulent flags, or no flags at all, carrying illicit Russian oil. Many are old, dangerous boats, with inexperienced crew and little or no insurance. Some have been involved in accidents already, and they could do real environmental damage in the Baltic Sea. Sweden, Germany, and Denmark have all announced that they will check the papers of these shadow tankers and sanction those that aren’t insured, adding them to a growing list of sanctioned ships. The point, for the moment, is not just to protect the environment but to raise the costs of Russian oil exports and thus to reduce the amount of money flowing into Russia and back up Ukraine’s air campaign. More extreme measures, including banning these unmarked, uninsured ships from the Baltic altogether, are under consideration too.
But that will take time, which no one in Ukraine wants to waste. No one wants to wait for Trump to impose new sanctions on Russia either. Drones, which can defend the front line and take the battle deep into Russia, can do more. In an address to the nation on September 14, Zelensky put it very clearly: “The most effective sanctions—the ones that work the fastest—are the fires at Russia’s oil refineries, its terminals, oil depots.” In the absence of an American policy that offers something other than rhetoric, the Ukrainians, backed by Europe, will pursue their own solution.
Mister Terrific
It’s in the name
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Mister Terrific
It’s in the name
Mister Terrific
It’s in the name
Mister Terrific
It’s in the name
Commented on Wed Sep 24 23:10:12 2025 UTC
No choice but war after 3.5 years of war, entirely by their choice.
No choice but war after 3.5 years of war, entirely by their choice.
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│ Commented on Wed Sep 24 23:51:31 2025 UTC
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│ I mean Putin has no choice, if he loses this war he is the loser and his Reputation in his country will take a huge hit. Dumb thing that he even started this. Even crazier how Ukraine still holds against Russia, Zelenskyj and ukrainian military made so many right moves it is insane, first they had 0 support by anyone. Germany send them only 5.000 helmets to "help them". Later on when he talked to so many politicians he was able to get weapons tanks etc from nearly every european/Western world nation.
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│ I mean Putin has no choice, if he loses this war he is the loser and his Reputation in his country will take a huge hit. Dumb thing that he even started this. Even crazier how Ukraine still holds against Russia, Zelenskyj and ukrainian military made so many right moves it is insane, first they had 0 support by anyone. Germany send them only 5.000 helmets to "help them". Later on when he talked to so many politicians he was able to get weapons tanks etc from nearly every european/Western world nation.
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│ │ Commented on Thu Sep 25 00:09:20 2025 UTC
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│ │ It really is wild how far we've come from the early days. The conventional wisdom in Moscow was that they'd take Ukraine in a few days and in Washington it was that Russia would take Ukraine in a few weeks. The weapons the US and UK were sending in the opening days were basically small scale weapons that would be useful in an insurgency instead of the heavy weapons needed to actually halt Russian advances. I remember the weeks in which Ukraine was begging for HIMARS and the US kept insisting Ukraine didn't need it and then once the HIMARS arrived the rapid Russian advances immediately stopped.
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│ │ If Ukraine can win this war it will honestly be one of the biggest military upsets in history. Russia's prewar military budget was 12 times as high as Ukraine and they had around 600 billion dollars saved up, no debt and tens of thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. They've also sent over 2 million troops into Ukraine. The fact that Ukraine is still standing and Russia hasn't even taken the Donbas is insane if you look at where things started in early February 2022.
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│ │ It really is wild how far we've come from the early days. The conventional wisdom in Moscow was that they'd take Ukraine in a few days and in Washington it was that Russia would take Ukraine in a few weeks. The weapons the US and UK were sending in the opening days were basically small scale weapons that would be useful in an insurgency instead of the heavy weapons needed to actually halt Russian advances. I remember the weeks in which Ukraine was begging for HIMARS and the US kept insisting Ukraine didn't need it and then once the HIMARS arrived the rapid Russian advances immediately stopped.
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│ │ If Ukraine can win this war it will honestly be one of the biggest military upsets in history. Russia's prewar military budget was 12 times as high as Ukraine and they had around 600 billion dollars saved up, no debt and tens of thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. They've also sent over 2 million troops into Ukraine. The fact that Ukraine is still standing and Russia hasn't even taken the Donbas is insane if you look at where things started in early February 2022.
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│ │ │ Commented on Thu Sep 25 00:46:29 2025 UTC
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│ │ │ I wonder how the war would have gone if Ukraine got the good stuff straight away, without any restrictions on where they can and can't use it.
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│ │ │ I wonder how the war would have gone if Ukraine got the good stuff straight away, without any restrictions on where they can and can't use it.
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│ │ │ │ Commented on Thu Sep 25 01:18:12 2025 UTC
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│ │ │ │ The war started in February 2022 and by April 2022 Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv. At that point there were less than 200,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, there were no strong defensive lines and it was clear the Ukrainian government was going to endure.
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│ │ │ │ If the west would have collectively acted to arm Ukraine with heavy weapons and begin training/logistics programs for weapons that would be delivered in 2023 and 2024 then I think Ukraine would have driven Russia out of the entire country by now. Even in Fall 2022 Ukraine launched a massive counter offensive without tanks and retook a huge swath of territory. If they had the weapons they could have gone a lot farther since Russia effectively didn't have defenses.
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│ │ │ │ Obviously we can't change the past but one of the most persistant issues has been that people in the west either hold Ukraine back from striking certain targets or don't think far enough in advance. Training for the F-16 didn't start until a year after Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv and it took one year. If it had started early Ukraine could have gotten F-16s earlier. Right now the west needs to be planning on how they can equip Ukraine to fight in 2026 and even 2027 if necessary. Hell even just one more large US aid package when combined with the European aid would probably be enough to beat Russia.
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│ │ │ │ The war started in February 2022 and by April 2022 Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv. At that point there were less than 200,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, there were no strong defensive lines and it was clear the Ukrainian government was going to endure.
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│ │ │ │ If the west would have collectively acted to arm Ukraine with heavy weapons and begin training/logistics programs for weapons that would be delivered in 2023 and 2024 then I think Ukraine would have driven Russia out of the entire country by now. Even in Fall 2022 Ukraine launched a massive counter offensive without tanks and retook a huge swath of territory. If they had the weapons they could have gone a lot farther since Russia effectively didn't have defenses.
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│ │ │ │ Obviously we can't change the past but one of the most persistant issues has been that people in the west either hold Ukraine back from striking certain targets or don't think far enough in advance. Training for the F-16 didn't start until a year after Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv and it took one year. If it had started early Ukraine could have gotten F-16s earlier. Right now the west needs to be planning on how they can equip Ukraine to fight in 2026 and even 2027 if necessary. Hell even just one more large US aid package when combined with the European aid would probably be enough to beat Russia.
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│ │ │ │ │ Commented on Thu Sep 25 02:02:49 2025 UTC
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│ │ │ │ │ Personally, I think they should have gotten ALL the material support after Zelensky and the people of Ukraine proved their resolve during the first couple months, especially when the ruzzians were doing inhumane shyt to civilians. But the lack of support forced Ukraine to innovate strategies and improvise weaponry that will be studied for decades. The capabilities they developed with drones early on worked great as forward observers for traditional artillery. HIMARS I think would have been the biggest factor if they were given more with fewer/ no restrictions on their targets.
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│ │ │ │ │ Zelensky will be ranked among the greatest war time leaders and when its all over and historians have dissected all the information, we'll read stories about some truly heroic Ukrainians. Like the old lady telling the invaders to fill their pockets with sunflower seeds so their corpses will at least grow flowers after they all die there.
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│ │ │ │ │ Personally, I think they should have gotten ALL the material support after Zelensky and the people of Ukraine proved their resolve during the first couple months, especially when the ruzzians were doing inhumane shyt to civilians. But the lack of support forced Ukraine to innovate strategies and improvise weaponry that will be studied for decades. The capabilities they developed with drones early on worked great as forward observers for traditional artillery. HIMARS I think would have been the biggest factor if they were given more with fewer/ no restrictions on their targets.
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│ │ │ │ │ Zelensky will be ranked among the greatest war time leaders and when its all over and historians have dissected all the information, we'll read stories about some truly heroic Ukrainians. Like the old lady telling the invaders to fill their pockets with sunflower seeds so their corpses will at least grow flowers after they all die there.
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│ │ │ │ │ │ Commented on Thu Sep 25 03:24:45 2025 UTC
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│ │ │ │ │ │ But the lack of support forced Ukraine to innovate strategies and improvise weaponry that will be studied for decades.
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│ │ │ │ │ │ They would have innovated regardless of what weapons they got. Holding back weapons didn't make them stronger. When the west held back weapons it meant that Ukraine had to compensate with sheer manpower and blood. In the early days of the war Ukrainian casualties were VERY high and Russian casualties were comparatively small. That's flipped later on but the casualties Ukraine took early on because they lacked certain weapons has made it harder to go on the offensive or hold ground today.
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│ │ │ │ │ │ But the lack of support forced Ukraine to innovate strategies and improvise weaponry that will be studied for decades.
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │ They would have innovated regardless of what weapons they got. Holding back weapons didn't make them stronger. When the west held back weapons it meant that Ukraine had to compensate with sheer manpower and blood. In the early days of the war Ukrainian casualties were VERY high and Russian casualties were comparatively small. That's flipped later on but the casualties Ukraine took early on because they lacked certain weapons has made it harder to go on the offensive or hold ground today.
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Dorian Breh
Veteran
Coli Canadians in shambles rn