They’re clocking up oil refineries and store hits.

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That does not look very comfortable.

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lol they are offering Moscow a trade for one of their villages.

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More refinery hits

We should take in account that replacing one distillation column unit is sort of doable, but imagine Russia would need to produce 30 of them, transport, hire and assign workers, and assemble on site. Frankly, they don't have such capacity.

It seems that refineries are not properly defended and attempt to do so can overstretch Russian resources beyond breaking point, yet somebody will issue such order anyway. The next logical move would be F-16s arriving to the battlefield equipped with HARM missiles to make Russian front line PVO blind, especially when A-50s were hunted down recently too. Interesting game of chess here.

Only if they have a spare sitting around. These are pretty much unreplaceable atm. Yes they could possibly get some made in china but its a multiple year lead time and then with sanctions means they have to hide it

Another ship burns, this time in the Sea of Japan.

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Good on them, they can try to keep a lid on it, but Russia will never win.

Remember that Forbes Ukraine article from last year that found Russia had spent $25.6 billion on compensation to families of deceased soldiers and $21 billion on compensation to the wounded.

Putin has previously signed a decree earlier in 2023 ordering the payout of $68,800 to the families of deceased and $41,300 to soldiers that are wounded. Using this we can get a glance at potential Russian casualties ASSUMING zero corruption/money laundering and that all funds allocated where properly paid out…..

According to Russian expenditures, Russian casualties in the past 18 months are as follows.
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KIA: 372,093
WIA: 507,000…

A Russian commander captured in Belgorod.

the quote link doesn't work, inbed seems to

To get back to the "military aviation" topic I really wonder what "drones" are doing those precision strikes 1200 km from Ukraine.
Sounds very much like cruise missiles to me. Interestingly the topic is completely suppressed for the moment.

Mainstream news channels are definitely playing down the refinery strikes, but social media is very rattled. They don't seem to have any answer except to plead with locals to dig out the AAA system in their basement and defend their local refinery...

More drones and long range weaponry to Ukraine please!

Judging by the flyover videos from the refinery attacks I think this is the type...

Why would a long range kamikaze drone be fitted with a fixed u/c? That makes no sense.

Funnily enough I was thinking the same in the early hours of yesterday.
Perhaps its because they can launch them from any road or hardened surface quite close to the front giving them more range, without the need of a specialist launch vehicle.
The launch vehicle needs time to set up, load the unit, dispatch and bug out.
These drones can be assembled in a barn wheeled out and probably only need a short takeoff run with the high aspect ratio wing.
Having a droppable undercarriage would add complexity for little gain.

I find that a curiously naiive statement, as are the oft-heard claims that a hit on a cracking tower has "destroyed" a refinery. While it may be pleasant to wallow in congratulatory dreamland over small UKR victories it is necessary to put these events into some sort of perspective. A large oil refinery may have up to 70 - yes - seventy - cracking columns, a smaller one perhaps 30 according to a brief internet search. So whacking one or two will be no more than a brief inconvenience, and anyone who imagines Ruzzia "doesn't have the capacity" to build enough towers to equip one single small refinery is, imho, living in dreamland. They're only big steel tubes with a bit of plumbig attached after all. Long lead-timeto replace maybe, but even so. There's nothing very technical about them and the loss of two or three out of 30 is hardly going to make a vast difference to output. OK, that just cuts 10% (ie decimates) the output of a small refinery, and half that of a large one. Big deal unless you can keep hitting them all every week for six months or more.

Perhaps it is more to do with letting the local populace know they are in a two-way war and getting them to pass on the message?

Interesting.
Do you suggest this airframe is capable of 1200km range and 20m accuracy (obviously very hard to infer capabilities out of a single picture but one can try .
If so it is truly remarkable.

We don't know that it's just distillation columns that are being hit. There's plenty of other critical items of plant whose destruction is guaranteed to close down a refinery for many months.I am not going to name them, it's stupid to do so. Most Russian refineries are, I understand, clustered in the west of the RF and within Ukrainian range.The exquisite agony is that the Ukrainians knock it out for a few weeks, you throw your resources into fixing it, spend 10 days in a controlled start up with all the discoveries of leaks, software discrepancies, purging, and bad workmanship that crept in (one leak and serious fire from one 25mm pipe weld shut us down for more days) and then another drone with a 75kg weapon aboard takes you out again. Soul destroying.