(07-27-2024, 12:10 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote:

(07-26-2024, 04:59 AM)727Sky Wrote: An armed Russian cruise ship you can book to kill Somali Pirates...

Great family outing ?? Russian kinda fun !! Oh and 100 rounds of 762.39 plus and AK-47 will be an extra $20 a day.. come one come all !! 2:15 in the video

I think there was a movie about the rich using pirates for sport. Something along those lines. What an insane world we live in.

Quote:Russia has deployed a regiment of its Aerospace Forces to defend the Kursk region due to a manpower shortage amid Ukraine's ongoing incursion, according to an independent investigative Russian outlet.

President Vladimir Putin's so-called "space troops" have been tasked to push back Ukraine's forces after Kyiv launched a cross-border raid on August 6 in Kursk, seemingly catching Moscow off guard, Important Stories reported on Sunday.

Ukrainian forces have so far seized control of 1,150 square kilometers (444 square miles) of Russian territory and 82 settlements in Kursk, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, said on August 15.

The scale of the offensive is significant—Ukraine is now reported to have seized more territory in the Kursk region in days than Russia has captured in Ukraine since the beginning of the year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's troops are showing no signs of slowing down.

It also marks the first time that foreign troops have seized Russian territory since World War II.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's Defense Ministry for comment by email.

Citing a source familiar with the matter, Important Stories said a temporary motorized rifle regiment of Russia's Aerospace Forces has been deployed to Kursk, which borders Ukraine's Sumy region.

The unit, created between May and June, consists of personnel from security and logistics companies, engineers, mechanics, some officers, and servicemen from a Russian spaceport. There are also personnel from special warehouses of the Aerospace Forces and radar stations in Russia's Voronezh region, who were previously in charge of manning Russia's nuclear deterrent.

The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, said in its latest analysis of the conflict on Sunday that the Kursk incursion is also forcing Russia to redeploy its troops from the front line in Ukraine. The ISW added that "likely subsequent phases of fighting within Russia will require more Russian manpower and materiel commitments to the area."

The think tank cited an article published by The Wall Street Journal on August 17 that reported that some 5,000 personnel had already been redeployed from Ukraine to Kursk by August 13.

That report "partially coheres with a report that Russian forces had redeployed up to 11 battalions to the front line in Kursk Oblast as of August 11," the ISW said.

"Russian forces have redeployed additional forces to Kursk Oblast since the first week of the Ukrainian incursion and have likely redeployed more than 5,000 personnel to Kursk Oblast overall," the ISW added. The think tank said that exact amount of manpower and material Putin will need in Kursk will depend on how heavily Zelensky's troops defend the newly captured settlements.

Russia Deploying 'Space Troops' to Defend Kursk

(08-25-2024, 01:00 PM)sailorsam Wrote:

Quote:SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — A Pennsylvania ammunition plant that makes a key artillery shell in Ukraine’s fight against Russia has managed to boost production by 50% to meet surging demand, with more capacity set to come on line.

Government officials revealed the increase in production this week as they showcased the historic factory’s ongoing, $400 million modernization.

The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant cuts and forges 2,000-pound (907-kilogram) bars of steel into 155 mm howitzer rounds that are then shipped to Iowa to be packed with explosives and fitted with fuses. From there, many of them make their way to the fight in Ukraine, where they are highly sought.

The Scranton plant, along with two other ammunition plants in nearby Wilkes-Barre, recently increased production from 24,000 rounds per month to 36,000 rounds per month. Three new production lines are under development that will allow the Scranton facility to churn out even more of the critical munitions, the factory’s top official said.

“Right now we’re concentrating on 155. That’s pretty much all we’re concentrating on,” Richard Hansen, the Army commander’s representative at the plant, said Tuesday while giving news outlets a tour of the sprawling factory grounds near downtown Scranton. “We’re working really hard to ensure that we achieve the goal that the Pentagon has established.”

The U.S. has sent more than 3 million 155 mm artillery rounds to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country in 2022, according to government figures. Earlier this month, the White House announced another $125 million in weapons to assist Ukraine in its military operations against Russia, including 155 mm shells.

The Scranton factory began life as a locomotive repair shop at the beginning of the 20th century before the Army bought it and converted it into a production facility for large-caliber artillery for the Korean War. It’s been operated by General Dynamics since 2006 under contract with the U.S. government, which owns the plant.

Officials are about halfway through one of the biggest modernization projects in plant history, with about 20 projects underway. Tuesday’s tour included a new production line with a sleek new machine that will do the job of three, helping maximize use of space at the 500,000-square-foot (46,452-square-meter) factory.

The plant employs about 300 people, according to a General Dynamics spokesperson. Some of them have been there for decades running the equipment that cuts the steel, heats it to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius), and forges, machines, washes and paints the finished shells. Each round is manually inspected at each step to ensure it meets specifications.

“We want it go where we point it,” Hansen said. “We want it to go as far as we need it to go to do its job. Lives depend on it — the lives of the gun crew, the lives of innocent civilians depend on this round doing exactly what we want it to do out in the field.”

Pennsylvania ammo plant boosts production of key artillery shell in Ukraine’s fight against Russia

Quote:Russian state news agency TASS reported that a drone attack had been launched on the city of Toropets overnight causing a fire “due to the fall of debris,” without specifically mentioning any targeting of a weapons facility.  CNN

(07-27-2024, 02:00 AM)727Sky Wrote:

(07-27-2024, 12:10 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote:

(07-26-2024, 04:59 AM)727Sky Wrote: An armed Russian cruise ship you can book to kill Somali Pirates...

Quote:Moscow is once again using the Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSDs), bodies the Soviet Union set up in World War II to supervise the Islamic community, for the primary purpose for which they were established: to mobilize Muslims to fight against a foreign enemy. If anything, the role of the MSDs is even more important now in Moscow’s war against Ukraine than it was against Nazi Germany. The Kremlin has chosen to rely on non-Russian areas and poorer Russian populations for recruitment to maintain the perception of normalcy among residents of major cities (see EDM, July 14, 2022). The MSDs’ roles have also expanded to encompass more tasks than during World War II. These roles now include recruiting young Muslims, sending aid and ammunition to the front, limiting internal clashes between Muslim and non-Muslim soldiers in the field, and suppressing anger among Muslims concerning the rising number of their combat deaths (12-kanal.ru, August 18, 2023). Opinions on the success of the MSDs in meeting these tasks have been mixed, but Moscow’s decision to rely on them both reflects the Russian government’s own administrative weakness and the importance of these directorates.

MSDs in the Russian Federation trace their origins to three earlier events. First, the tsarist era saw attempts to create an administrative hierarchy for a faith that lacks such hierarchies canonically. Second, the All-Russian Muslim Congress in 1917 called for the creation of bodies that could represent the faithful in their dealings with the Russian state. Third, having previously suppressed these institutions, former leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin restored them during World War II  to help mobilize Muslims to fight against the German invasion (Millard Tatar, November 16, 2023). Since the end of Soviet times, these groups have exploded in number, with nearly 100 regional MSDs and half a dozen “super” MSDs—an MSD that subordinates to itself MSDs in the regions—currently in existence (Window on Eurasia, April 24, 2020). As they have increased in number, however, the MSDs have decreased in importance. This is because the Russian state has been able to dismiss them as irrelevant or play the groups off against one another. At the same time, individual parishes have often chosen to go their own way. Now, due to Russia’s war in Ukraine and how Russian President Vladimir Putin has chosen to fight it, the MSDs are recovering the purpose for which Stalin created them and quite possibly gaining the importance that some have hoped for as a Muslim version of the Moscow Patriarchate’s hierarchy. If that happens, Putin’s use of MSDs could backfire and allow them to emerge as a significant challenge to the Russian state.

Since the start of his expanded war in Ukraine, Putin has chosen to raise an army first and foremost in non-Russian republics and poorer Russian regions (see EDM, March 1, 2020, April 4, 9, 16, July 16). These regions far from Moscow allow him to maintain the fiction to the cities where three-quarters of the population lives that everything remains as it was before the conflict. The existing MSDs, almost without exception, are similar to the other bodies of the so-called four traditional religions of the Russian Federation—Russian Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism—that have issued statements in support of the war. Russian religious organizations, except for the Russian Orthodox Church, however, have done relatively little in supporting the war effort until recently (Window on Eurasia, June 3, 2022). Russia’s Buddhist population, however, is one of the few organizations in Russia that has even condemned the war (see Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 3, 2022). This is beginning to change, first of all among the Muslim hierarchies, where recruitment and combat deaths are the highest per capita, leading to shifts in public opinion.

Tatarstan and the North Caucasus have seen the most important moves in this regard. In Tatarstan, the dominant republic in the Middle Volga, the mufti, who heads the MSD there, has created a new deputy to supervise the institution’s multifarious activities related to “the special military operation” (Novyye Izvestiya, October 8). In the North Caucasus, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who has been playing a major military role in Ukraine, has installed his man as head of the region’s MSD, the Coordinating Center of Muslims of the North Caucasus. From this position, Supreme Mufti of Chechnya Salah Mezhiev can be expected to push for an expanded role in Ukraine by other parts of that region as well (Window on Eurasia, October 5;  Nezavisimaya Gazeta, October 1;  KavkasUzel.eu, October 1).

The new arrangement in Tatarstan is the more critical of the two because the region’s actions generally serve as a precedent for MSDs elsewhere. Novyye Izvestiya points out that “the [MSD] of Tatarstan has been involved with the support of Russian Muslims fighting in Ukraine from the very beginning of the special military operation. Tatarstan Mufti Kamil Samigullin has visited the front seven times. His new deputy … will assume responsibility for supporting the families and the soldiers themselves, sending supplies to the front, and supervising ammunition production” (Novyye Izvestiya, October 8). These are no small things given Moscow’s priorities as Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine approaches its third anniversary. This public listing, however, obscures the tasks set before the newly invigorated MSD in Tatarstan.

As with other federal subjects far from Moscow, Tatarstan is under enormous pressure to recruit more men to send to the front. The region’s MSD will help, but will also deal with two other problems that may be even more fateful. The deputy head of the MSD will work closely with Tatarstan citizens fighting in Ukraine to limit clashes between them and soldiers of other ethnicities that have undercut unit effectiveness (Window on Eurasia, July 30, 2022). The new deputy mufti and his staff will also deal with the rising tide of combat deaths among Tatarstan residents in Ukraine. Those deaths, now at unprecedented levels, have sparked growing anger about the war that could eventually trigger anti-war protests (Idelreal.org, September 30, October 3).

Due to Moscow’s immediate needs, it clearly hopes that the MSDs will be able to meet all the assigned tasks, but it also has reason to fear any successes on the part of the MSDs that could help power the rise of a new Muslim movement in the country. Moscow would likely then resort to its traditional divide-and-rule strategy, but in doing so may find that it will lose more in the short-term than it can afford. This is especially likely given the short time horizons Putin and his team have adopted on Ukraine and so many other issues.

(04-08-2025, 06:49 PM)gortex Wrote: Ukrainian troops have captured 2 Chinese nationals from a group of 6 who were fighting in the Donetsk region of Ukraine , it's unknown how many other Chinese nationals are fighting for Russia or if they were there with the knowledge of China or are mercenaries , either way their capture raises serious questions for China.
 



While Ukraine fights Russia with one hand tied behind its back Putin is free to do as he pleases , I await Trump's response to this.