Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Officially yes, but there have been historic instances of them clearing out during times of war. They cleared out completly when Napoleon invaded (He took the city itself, but was very pissed to find out that taking Moscow didn't result in an overall win -as was the tradition of the time) and when Nazi Germany seemed poised to take the city themselves the Soviets evaculated a good bit of the government East and away from the fighting.

Unless Moscow becomes Ground-Zero in civil war fighting I don't think they'll do it yet...but if they are thinking about it at all, it is interesting.

Boyd Barrett on telly last night again talking about the hypocrisy of opposing the Russian invasion but not Israeli aggression toward Palestine or the American invasion of Iraq. Although I take the point that aggressor nations should generally be opposed, I'm not sure what his conclusion is. Is it that because European countries did not do enough to prevent the USA invading Iraq, they should stand back and let Russia have at Ukraine in order to maintain moral consistency?

His thing was that the governments still didn't do enough.

I wish they could get some western air power, that is a lot of territory.

I put BB in with the other clowns like Daly, Murphy and Wallace. I've zero respect for any of them...

Great annimation of the development in the situation in Bakhmut. The Orc forces seem to be just so much deeper. Kingdom of the ants/Orcs.

Well you'd assume from that the pilot(s) were told to go out and fly very close to the drone + harass it.

May not have intended to bring it down (I suppose they could just as easily have damaged their own aircraft and endangered themsleves with what they were doing), but it was obviously a risk they + people giving them their mission were willing to take.

Quite reckless from Russia, the NATO surveillance and help it gives to Ukraine must be really píssing them off!

Supposedly there are reports on social media coming from Crimea where the SU-27s landed, that one of them is damaged. That second pass looks to me like the SU-27 didn't just clip the propeller but impacted the drone significantly. The video feed going out would tend to suggest that the drone fuselage was impacted.

As an aside, they keep posting images from a Video Game for this (re)announcement of Polish MiGs. Crazy how believable games look these days.

Nate

I've been trying to figure out where the drone went down, taking into account marine activity on the Black Sea today.

The US mention that it went down 75 miles southwest of Crimea.

Here is this rough area:

But here is where I've noticed some unusual activity on Marine Traffic:

It's quite a distance away. If you zoom into the highlighted area, you can see a cluster of marine vessels, positioned by satellite around a half hour ago, away from shipping lanes and designated as " tugs".

Someone is looking for something in this region!

Could be nothing, seems odd though.