Russia - threadbanned users in OP

That misses the continual and ongoing wars against the independent press, opposition politicians, democracy, and all forms of protest and dissent, and of course, the truth.

Russia has claimed to have shot down a ukrainain transport aircraft heading into Odessa ,and in another report they claimed it was a Nato aircraft delivering weapons

Russia really pushing the NATO angle - reads to me this is gonna take a nasty turn

I just don't see how or why they would be sending a transport plane to Odessa of all places. In fact I'd be amazed if transport planes are operating in Ukraine at all since the war began; they're sitting ducks.

The Russian MoDs briefings are utter horseshit anyway:

The other day they claimed 800+ military facilities were hit. I mean; do Ukraine even have 800 "military facilities" in the entire country? Or is "military facility" codename for a civilian dwelling? That would make more sense...

Putin won't back off this means that the West can prepare for escalation.

The quote I read was that they have a "large modern army" but the part that is modern (e.g. cruise missiles) is not large and the part that is large is not modern.

Yeah but the TB2s are a good bit smaller than the Predator and significantly smaller than the Reaper. Also in case you hadn't noticed they can't use the TB2s offensively anymore since Russia have tightened up their air defences and collapsed to the south and east of the country.

The only TB2 footage we have seen lately is of them being used in a surveillance role from significant distance: you only do that if you can't get close enough to fire your short-range missiles.

And no the Global Hawks have not been flying over Ukraine or Mariupol; they have been conducting surveillance flights from significant distances outside of Ukrainian airspace along with all the other NATO air assets as shown below:

I would doubt nato aircraft would be landing directly into ukraine if it was and it was shot down things would kick off id say it was ukrainian

The main damage might not be the physical / military effect it will have ( and I'm pretty sure that it will have a negative effect there too) but the demoralizing psychological / prestige damage will be massive. And will not do anything to quell the rumblings of discontent, because despite the silence in that department, you can be sure that there are rumblings of discontent.

Only Russia could spin a loss into a glorious win.

NATO poked and proded us, but, we were the bigger nation, we are the heros who saved the world.

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Does anyone here know the capability of the various classes of tactical nuclear weapons? Think I read before that they dont have (or some dont anyway) a warhead that leaves radioactive fallout in the atmosphere so they are nowhere as near destructive as full nuclear weapons where the surviving population later dies from cancer from the radioactivity. But that they can obliterate everything in a specific space, as small as 1km2 for the smallest of warheads. They seem like the type of weapon that can take out a specific facility or location without causing as much death as a full scale nuclear weapon.

Id wonder would Putin use them, either as a way of finishing off the Azov resistance in the aluminium plant in Mariupol or hitting Kiev in an effort to kill Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian leadership. Like he allowed chemical weapons to be used in Syria and that wasnt a red line, could he do similar with a small tactical nuke without any US or NATO reaction? If it only kills a limited amount of people in a small area would there even be a response? That seems to be the way he got away with using chemical weapons in Syria, the deaths from them werent all that high. It might have been a different story has they been used to poison the residents of a whole city with mass scale casualties in the tens of thousands. There seems to be degrees with these things in how far he is allowed to go before intervention happens.