One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour.
And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more.
This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.
Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task.
I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared. The poor two IT guys over there has no idea how to recover and the official help was pityful.
I also helped with a ransomware attack on a large company. The effort people had to do to remember why something was that way, or just remember whatever was colossal. Sure a lot of things were "documented" and "tested" but reality hit hard.
I had to rebuild a significant percentage of my homelab after my house was raided by the police and they took about $10k-worth of my gear; desktop, laptop, NAS, hard drives.
However, because in a previous life I'd been responsible for backups and involved in disaster recovery planning I was already kind of prepared with:
- a mirrored on site copy of backups (that they either didn't find or chose to leave behind)
- older hardware that had once been performing the duties of the existing seized gear (I'm a bit of a hoarder, I like repurposing or keeping for just such an occasion)
- multiple off site backups
- pretty good documentation of my setup
I was back up and running within a day or two and had lost maybe a couple of days of data. And it's a home lab, so nothing super important anyway, but a (not really) nice resilience test.
It also gave me the experience to work out a few structural changes to further limit the impact of an event that takes out a bunch of processing and storage.
(After 8 months they told me to pick up all my gear, they found nothing, but thanks for traumatising my kids)
Possibly the worst thing to be raided for: distribution of CSAM.
Apparently based purely on the 'evidence' of my IP address being on some list - that's the only explanation I ever got.
Funny thing is, they did so little background research they didn't even know to expect kids in the house when they raided at 6:30am.
It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.
The long version I haven't written yet and probably never will. I don't want to dwell on it, I want to get on with my life and have an even worse drama to deal with at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533637
I know I'm alive, that's for sure. I'm trying to make lemonade by the goddamn bucket load.
P.S. I have written prior HN comments referring to the raid if you care enough to go back that far.
> It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.
As someone who was arrested in his PJs at 4am due to a false accusation that the police did not investigate and for which they did not have probable cause, I feel this in my bones.
$15k in legal fees, a day in jail, and three months later, the charges were dropped because, as per the DA, “we cannot in good conscience pursue this case”.
No consequences for the person who made the false accusation, or the officer that enacted an arrest without probable cause.
My heart still skips a beat whenever I think I hear a knock at the door or noises in the middle of the night. I’ll wake up from a dead sleep in a panic. In theory I could pursue a lawsuit against both the accuser and officer, but that feels overwhelming — I’ve just tried to move on.
It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system. The process is, in of itself, punishment.
I was fortunate enough to be able to afford good legal representation, and I now have a great deal of empathy for those who are railroaded by the system because they cannot.
I'm only postulating here, but I have a strong suspicion that my ability to get past it as well I have (not perfectly, but I don't have nightmares or break into a sweat when I hear police sirens - although it does remind me almost every time) is because I had to give the impression to my kids that there was nothing to worry about; this is not a big deal; this is not traumatic and will not change the course of your life.
> It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system. The process is, in of itself, punishment.
One million times this. Even if it's not completely true at it's base, it's true for those unfortunate enough to have experienced this.
One of the funny (?) things about it, is that most of the individual officers were nice enough people, personable (other than one inflammatory officer who should not be employed in a role that comes into contact with people), one even gave the cat a pat. It's the system / systems, and likely the perverse incentives for their monthly stats.
I'm glad I didn't end up needing legal representation.
The way I deal with it is to actively let it go, forgive the situation in my mind, treat it as one of those anomalous circumstances that happen every second on a global scale. Treat it as a reminder of the unpredictability of life and an opportunity to be thankful that it's not my 'normal'.
>It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system.
Well,hopefully it has also changeed the way you see society in general, it's terrifying how common people willingly ( even when they have options) defer to the govt./authorities. The system didn't get be this this way overnight. Covid was one example of the tyranny of the majority.
That's absolutely horrifying! Glad to hear you've managed to move past it, as it would have absolutely broken me.
My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.
It makes me crazy that police in the U.S. nowadays can get a search warrant permitting seizure of large amounts of valuable computer and networking gear along with digital devices certain to massively disrupt anyone's life - only from buying things which are completely legal to buy and possess. Apparently all it takes is "a suspicious pattern of behaviors" to get a judge to issue an expansive warrant. The "suspicious pattern" is often defined ad hoc by police under no objective standard and never detailed in the warrant request. Judges are really failing in their duties because there are too many cases like this happening.
Depriving people of their valuable property for 8 months or more is also abusively punitive. In warrants that grant seizures of all or most digital devices, judges should require police to return the items within 30 days if they don't either file charges or go back to the judge with good cause for an extension. If police can't get around to actually looking at the evidence they claimed was so crucial in 30 days maybe it's not a high-priority crime. And if having a reasonable time limit makes it too hard to look through so much stuff, they're free to more narrowly tailor their seizure requests so they don't have so much to troll through.
And my experience was in Australia, so the "decline of policing" has well and truly reached out shores as well.
To possibly make this even more frustrating, when I was told I could pick up my gear, the detective in charge said that a few things they found flagged as suspicious:
1. I had / used virtual machines
2. I had "Tor" on my computer(s)
3. I had downloaded stuff from Megaupload
Now I'm not entirely sure whether these comments were based on what they found on my seized gear, or whether these were actually sufficient 'red flags' to make them think the warrant was justified initially, but, my god, how completely out of their depth, and therefore totally unqualified, they are to make life-changing adjudications about these things - and that their access to metadata only makes it more likely that they'll make false positive mistakes (which is just terrible for society overall).
I'm literally not sure what they meant by saying "you have tor on your computer", whether there's evidence of my having visited the dark web, or just having a (way outdated) copy of the tor browser saved somewhere.
And I think the only things I'd ever downloaded from Megaupload were Android ROMs.
Regarding Virtual Machines: I can't even... they're obviously non-technical so couldn't possibly understand, and yet... gah, I can't even...
They had a warrant for the raid. Or at least they showed me a piece of paper, but my mind was so thrown that I literally couldn't read it (I've never experienced such a thing before or since - I literally couldn't make out letters on the page, such was my state of shock at the time).
I wasn't arrested or charged, they found nothing of what they were looking for on the multi terabytes of disks they seized. No further action other than the raid.
We looked into anything that could be done to minimise the chances of such a thing happening to innocent parties, but the only option was to make a complaint about an individual officer. There's no (easy, obvious) way to question the system they use to determine "validity" of raids or due diligence prior to requesting a warrant, or evidence required to justify a warrant.
The whole thing just felt to me like it was blindly rubber stamped all the way through because "protect the children". Pity my daughter was a child and absorbs such experiences... My son was also a child, but he's less affected by such things.
I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for looking like I'm shilling, but the UAE, ironically. They do not mess around with kids, and make sure they're not exposed to whatever issue the parents might be facing. In many cases, the police allow for lenient visitations for the mother and children. These instances are often not portrayed online because 1.) family guys tend to be less involved in open crime whatsoever, 2.) the UAE has a large singles population so whatever instances happen are very rare, and 3.) the surveillance state ensures that the police already know who's at fault and who isn't.
But God forbid if you're ever caught for any crime whatsoever. Or if you're detained for domestic violence. Especially if not in Dubai (which is miles more lenient than other emirates).
Do you have some specific examples? You present it as if it's a bad thing but I can imagine scenarios where it makes perfect sense. As an obvious example the person could be sharing CP on social media.
Germany and the UK seem to be the worst offenders in regards to this, but that may just be selection bias on what gets into English language media. I can pull more articles if you're actually interested.
In England the police arrests you for a tweet under hate speech laws and they threw the post office workers under the bus to protect the politicians and buggy SW of Fujitsu. Not the place where I'd trust the law enforcement at all.
And Japan, while being clean, safe and Kawai, its legal system has like a 90%+ conviction rate, so make of this what you will.
Can they? I've heard of police in Japan pinning murder cases on people they don't like. I believe there has been some reporting on this related to why thy have such high clearance rates. Don't the police in the UK still have a lot of sexual misconduct scandals?
> In the USA? Where you can be sued if someone slips on your sidewalk? Can't you sue the gvmt?
Sure you can sue anybody for anything. Whether your case actually gets heard or not is another consideration. And even if it gets heard, the judge can simply dismiss it for a variety of reasons before proceeding to trial.
Also, state and the federal governments have sovereign immunity and qualified immunity. Basically the government has to allow itself to be sued.
True this doesn't apply to counties or cities, however there is still a much higher bar for tort even for local police. Generally if they are operatikng within the law, like executing a valid search warrant, the standard is much higher than it would be for an average citizen.
You can sue the government, but the grounds for winning are much narrower.
Meerly suffering harm from government action is not sufficient. Having property impounded as part of an investigation, pursuant to a warrant, is likely not actionable, unless there was malice involved. Using slim evidence isn't really actionable.
The government has endless resources; you would go bankrupt unless a law firm saw a huge payout in taking your case. The system is rigged in favor of the government. They could have burned down his house and the neighbor's house, and not been responsible. Land of the free, God Bless America......
Also, there is almost no deterrent effect. The people who authorized or perpetrated the abuse are not punished if you sue and win a settlement. They don't even have to hire and pay the lawyers. The payment comes out everyone's taxes, perhaps with interest if the government has to pay by issuing debt.
When the police abuse their power, it's the community that pays their salaries that feels the pain.
Why would you be able to sue the government for conducting a search authorized by a judge? It's expected that result of some searches is "Oopsie doopsie nothing found".
It’s even worse than that, in the US police have broad latitude to destroy property, kill pets, seize any cash or assets (theoretically related to the crime, but very easy to abuse) and etc. while executing a search, with little to no recourse.
I think it's fair to expect that the authorities must have a very good probable cause to perform a search of your home, and that any search that turned out to be unwarranted results in a big compensation and a public announcement stating that the specific police department and judge violated the right to privacy.
Yeah, BLKNSLVR came from "Black and Silver" based on some crappy piece of art I did way long ago. It wasn't until using it as an in-game handle that a friend read it out to me as "Black Enslaver" that I even realised it could read another way.
I don't like that it can be interpreted that way, but I also refuse to stop using it since that's someone else's reading.
The only factor I use to treat one human different from another is whether they're a jerk or not, and I have to know them well enough to work that out. I've come across a few jerks in my time, and they take many and varied forms.
This is why documenting is so crucial. Even on a software architecture level.
A few months from now, I'd love to have written down decisions for my current project:
- Why did I decided to use Kysely over Drizzle, Knex, Prisma, TypeORM or other ORM/SQL tool?
- How am I going to do migrations?
- Why am I using one of Deno/Bun over sticking to nodejs?
- Why did I structure the project as a directory per feature over controllers/models/services directories?
- Why did I fork this library and what are the steps to keep this thing updated? Do I plan to upstream my changes? Is there a GitHub issue or PR about it?
- Why am I hosting in one of AWS/GCP/Azure? Why not lambda functions? Why docker?
- Why did I pick this specific distribution of kubernetes over the other also lightweight alternatives?
- Why did I even start this project and what do I aim to accomplish with it?
So I created a # Decisions section in README.md
This way I don't keep doubting my own decisions and wasting time opening 20 documentation tabs to compare solutions yet again.
I use GitHub Issues for this. It works so well - any time I make a decision I drop a comment on the relevant issue (often formatted as "Decision: ..."). Now they are archived, searchable, accessible via API and easy to navigate to from my source code because my commits all reference the issue number that relates to the change.
Every project I work on has a technical-decisions.org file. Also a daily-notes.org file with every failed experiment, test, install command, etc. The top level headings are dates.
Technical decisions used to be in the daily-notes.org file, but keeping in a separate file makes it more accessible to LLMs. I actually started that practice before LLMs were in common use, I struggle to remember why.
this is why in 2023 i started livestreaming whenever I work at my PC. I also take these kinds of daily and project notes, but it's a bit tedious and can take you out of the flow. so I just let youtube capture everything I'm doing and if I need to go back and remind myself of something (or ask an LLM a question about my livestream history, in the not too distant future) it's all right there.
We just recently started using ADRs (Architectural Decision Records). They are deliberately stored (in markdown) in the same repository as the source code for our SaaS business lives. If we can recover the source, chances are high that we can also recover the "why's". If we cannot do that, we are screwed anyways.
This. I encouraged my team to use a templated (standardized) ADR for any big decisions that don’t have an obvious answer or complete consensus and it had reduced the second guessing and relitigation of decisions to nearly zero. It also gave is a good snapshot of where we were when we made that call so historic decisions weren’t disparaged.
Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all).
Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.
Actually I think this is hard to properly implement. If you're a small shop, really setting up backups with redundancies, writing the documentation, and testing disaster recovery, that's so much more work than people anticipate, and it has implications on all areas of the business, not just IT. So usually it's hard to justify to management why you would put in all that work and slow down operations—which leads to everyone postponing it.
Either that bites you sooner or later, or you're lucky and grow; suddenly, you're a larger organisation, and there are way too many moving parts to start from scratch. So you do a half-hearted attempt of creating a backup strategy held together by duct-tape and hope, that kinda-sorta should work in the worst case, write some LLM-assisted documentation that nobody ever reads, and carry on. You're understaffed and overworked anyway, people are engaging in shadow IT, your actual responsibilities demand attention, so that's the best you can do.
And then you've grown even bigger, you're a reputable company now, and then the consultants and auditors and customers with certification requirements come in. So that's when you actually have to put in the work, and it's going to be a long, gruesome, exhausting, and expensive project. Given, of course, that nobody fucks up in the mean time.
Indeed. Setting up infrastructure properly and documenting it properly is even more complex than coding, to me.
I can go back to code I wrote months or years ago, and assuming I architectured and documented it idiomatically, I takes me only a bit of time to start being able to reason about it effectively.
With infrastructure is it a whole different story. Within weeks of not touching it (which happens if it just works) I start to have trouble retaining a good mental model of it. if I have to dig into it, I'll have to spend a lot of time getting re-acquainted with how it all fits together again.
As much as Cloudformation and Terraform annoy me (thankfully I’ve never been burdened with k8s) there is something magical about having your infrastructure captured in code.
Virtualization really helps. We have a lot of weird software which requires hardware dongles, but they're all USB dongles and they're all virtualized, one of the DC racks has a few U worth of just USB socket -> dongle wired up so that if we spin up a VM it can say "Hey, give me a USB socket with a FooCorp OmniBloat dongle on it" and get one unless they're all used.
Interoperability exception might allow this in exigent circumstances when you do have a valid license, but I wouldn’t do this without running it by the software vendor whose license you are using. In a recovery situation, you’ll probably need to be on the phone a lot, so I can see how you might think it’s quicker to bypass the license check, but that is one person giving some or all of their attention just to that. Disaster recovery isn’t a one person job unless that one person was the whole team anyway, so I think this idea needs to be calibrated somewhat to expectations.
it really depends on the scenario but if the application was dockerized and they had an image, it would be just starting it again, somewhere else.
Possibly with the same network settings if the licensing check was based on that.
But of course it can easily go south, though testing the recovery of a container based off an image and mounted volume is simple and quickly shows you if it works or not.
But of course it may work today but not tomorrow because the software was not ready for Y2K and according to it we are in the XX century or something and the license is 156 years ... young. Cannot allow this nonsense to proceed, call us at <defunct number>
"hardware" does not mean "bare metal". It could be a MAC, a serial number or similar things that may be linked to a generic or clonable value in virtualization.
To some extent, yes -- having developed apps that were dockerized, and having managed virtualization systems (ESXi and similar), as well as docker engines.
If you’re doing it right, the DR process is basically the deployment process, and gets tested every time you do a deployment. We used chef, docker, stored snapshot images, and every deploy basically spun up a new infrastructure from scratch, and once it had passed the automated tests, the load balancers would switch to the new instance. DBs were created from binary snapshots which would then slave off the live DB to catch up (never more than an hour of diff), which also ensured we had a continuously tested DB backup process. The previous instance would get torn down after 8 hours, which was long enough to allow any straggling processes to finish and to have somewhere to roll back to if needed.
This all got stored in the cloud, but also locally in our office, and also written onto a DVD-R, all automatically, all verified each time.
Our absolute worst case scenario would be less than an hour of downtime, less than an hour of data loss.
Similarly our dev environments were a watered down version of the live environment, and so if they were somehow lost, they could be restored in the same manner - and again, frequently tested, as any merge into the preprod branch would trigger a new dev environment to automatically spin up with that codebase.
It takes up-front engineering effort to get in place, but it ended up saving our bacon twice, and made our entire pipeline much easier and faster to manage.
> Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all).
I think this is an outdated view. In modern enterprises DR is often one of the most crucial (and difficult) steps in building the whole infra. You select what is crucial for you, you allocate the budget, you test it, and you plan the date of the next test.
However, I'd say it's very rare to do DR of everything. It's terribly expensive and problematic. You need to choose what's really important to you based on defined budgets.
That's a choice that companies make. I've certainly worked at places which don't test DR, while at my current job we do annual DR runs, where we'll bring up a complete production ready environment from scratch to prove that the backups work, and the runbook for doing a restore actually works.
I'm retired now, but the last place I worked estimated it would take months to do a full restore from off site backups, assuming that the data center and hardware were intact. If the data center was destroyed... Longer.
Say what you want about European financial organizations but they are legally obliged to practice their recovery strategies. So every other month production clusters with all user data get teared down in one cloud region and set up in another one over night. This works surprisingly well. I guess they would never do that without the legal requirements.
In the 1990s mainframes got so stable and redundant that some were not rebooted in over a decade - they could even upgrade the kernel without rebooting. Then one company had a power failure andthe backup generators failed. When the power came back it was months before they figured out everything it was doing and then how to start that service where the guy who started it originally quit years ago.
most companies started rebooting the mainframe every six months to ensure they could restart it.
I was very supportive of the infrastructure IT team when they moved their datacenter. I also had popcorn when watching the switch being figuratively flipped on.
It went surprisingly well despite having stayed 15 years in the old DC without rebooting. They were super scared of exactly the case you described but except for some minor issues (and a lot of cussing) it was OK.
The data center where I work self-tests this stuff unintentionally a couple of times a year. The typical case: UPS maintenance, room is put on bypass, load drops when switching back.
This is arguably better than not having any tests.
This is why I reboot my server from time to time after having applied patches or made more significant changes, despite the fact that "it should not change anything". This is a good moment to realize that it did change something and you have the opportunity to fix the issue while it I sfresh in your mind, and possibly with more time.
On the other hand, I’ve worked in places where the total destruction of IT (so as to start again from a clean slate) was within the Overton window of options for how to transform the business.
> I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared.
I'm curious about how you got in the door here. Very cool, but isn't healthcare IT notoriously cagey about access? I've had to do PHI training and background checks before getting into the system at my (admittedly only 2) PHI-centered jobs.
Granted, if it was such an emergency, I could see them rushing you through a lite version of the HR onboarding process. Did you have a connection in the hospital through whom you offered your services?
The nature and place of my work helped to quickly clear this.
I volunteered to help because I knew that even broadly planning the recovery, evidence preservation etc. would be completely beyond the capabilities of the two IT folks (they were extremely nice and helpful, and glad that there was someone to help).
I was there to draw things on the board and ask the questions that will help to recover. I would not have (nor want, not have the need) to access patient information. This is something I warned them about early in the process, as the chaos was growing.
You need to imagine a large hospital completely blocked, with patients during an operation being stabilized and driven away.
I am used to crisis situations and having someone who will anticipate things you do not think about (how to communicate, how to reach prople having planned procedures, who does what and who talks with whom) is a useful person to have before the authorities kick in.
My wife had a planned operation that morning and I was on site when the ransomware hit, it is just this. Nothing James Bond like, just sheer luck to have been around.
The hospital made a recovery but it took about a year IIRC
That's really cool. I was mostly envisioning hands-on admin stuff (because that's the work I'm most familiar with), but I hadn't thought about how much of a boon it would be to have someone with incident management experience arriving to help out. If you ever do a write-up about your experience, I'd love to read it.
In that case, doing just incident response would not have been enough to be frank. They needed guidance on what to do and what not to do, technically speaking, so that on the one hand, they have hope to start things up, but also to preserve evidence.
Even the sequencing (recover and secure the network, then the AD, then some Tier-2 apps etc.) was something they were not ready for. I cannot blame them - the way these things are managed is really messy, with no clear responsibilities beyond the everyday operations.
My hope is that the continuous attacks on the national infrastructure (such as hospitals) will build a more coordinated and homogenous approach. This would be a great lesson learned.
> Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task.
Half of the work is to know what you need, the other half is to know how you do it, while the third half is to cope with all the undocumented tinkering which happened along the way. So in that regard, starting from scratch can be acceptable, as long you are not starting from zero, and can build up on the knowledge and experience of the previous run(s). I mean, there is a whole gaming-genre about this, which is quite popular. And usually you have the benefit that you might be able to fix some fundamental failures which you had to ignore because nobody wanted to take the risk.
I've worked in tech all my life, and long ago learned how important it is to be impeccably diligent in documenting build processes whenever creating, deploying or adjusting new architecture.
Now it's simply become part of my engineering hygiene - as natural and effortless as brushing my teeth.
Actually drilling your DR is also crucial. If you never put it to the test, your documentation isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
In fact the last few years I've been thinking about ways for these systems to rebuild themselves on a continuous basis. Eg. I'd love a smartphone that competely restores itself from backup every night, even to brand new identical hardware, including secure element artifacts (either via private keys I securely control or reregistering everything in an automated fashion), with no user-noticeable impact.
I don't really know nix, but have used Ansible to try to have all configuration version-controlled and automated. But if there's any possibility of making changes outside of that, you have to be very disciplined. As soon as someone makes a one-off manual change to a crontab or a systemd unit, you're screwed.
NixOS just doesn’t let you do that in the nominal case, most of /etc consists of symlinks to a read only partition that is managed by nix - it is actually more difficult to do one-off scripts or config changes via files than it is to do so via nix, at least nominally - there are of course software that has it’s own special config format or that keeps its config in a database - but those get snapshot(ed?) and backed up anyway.
Imo, nix is more finnicky but more of a complete solution than ansible.
Chamath's new company 80/90 is targeting this pain. Large firms often have no idea what their software is trying to do. Rebuilding it is cheaper and leads to better software.
If you are professionally responsible for infrastructure, and you haven't thought very hard about the "how do we rebuild from scratch" case, you're committing professional malpractice.
The problem is environments like hospitals, who'll "cost center" their IT department to death, where even the most seasoned pro has no chance to ever do the right thing. There should be liability at the board level. There never will.
A real person showing up is a huge cost and risk. No threat actor will continue an attack on just a hospital like that. The economics make no sense and any money is already extracted. Ransomware shops are very happy to just shotgun the internet from afar.
A far bigger risk is accepting incompetent volunteers if anything.
>This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.
TBH your mistake was only running one layer of virtualization. What I do on my home setup is run a docker in a VM in a VM in a docker in a docker in a VM in a docker in a VM in a VM in a docker. This, I feel, ought to be the minimum level of indirection and virtualization in any technical configuration in perpetuity. Anything less is bush league and prone to errors.
Out of these 30 services, ~8 are useful on a daily basis, some from time to time,e and the rest is either forgotten or tests.
What I meant I that I do not have the kind of setup a lot of people show: a DC-grade self, with a U2 switch etc. I have an old server, my ISP box, a UPS, a switch and maybe something else I forgot. But since the server runs both Home Assistant and Pi-hole, it is critically important.
OTOH this criticality allows me not to invest too much in monitoring: I have family and friends yelling immediately when something is down :)
Not really, the OP was already using docker, but even with IAC on a small home lab like this you're going to modify one or two small things manually here and there over the years.
Sure it can help, but it's just not a one fix solution people thing. If you want a good test of your IAC, just provisioning a brand new environment first time using only your iac.
If you hand modify the already IAC system , you are not doing IAC. IAC with CI/CD is what we do. We don't even use AWS Console , we do everything in terraform/opentofu code.
Working for a company in Germany which is planing production 3 months in advance using printed Excel sheets. The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it. Production management tries to hide this fact and does not talk to the engineering department. This will go for years, consultants will gather their fees for non functional system. Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing. It is just nice to have.
In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no faith in the launch of DeMars and wanted to ensure that stock would not run out. Everything was accounted for, if anyone believe that he as committing fraud, they where welcome to do a complete inventory.
DeMars launched, and procurement basically stopped for a year. Only the items my friend was in charge of remained in stock, through out the launch/roll-out process.
There's lots of pushes to add software to more of the military, but I don't think these kinds of resilience questions are really taken seriously. A system intended for wartime use will be running in non-optimal conditions while under constant attack. But many of these "enterprise" systems barely work better than paper to start with.
I think that's changed a bit - witness how reluctant the US gov is to be locked into Anduril Lattice. I think we'll see this start to change but certainly a lot of bad past decisions to make up for.
Switching to SAP ERP was already an in-joke level of well-known catastrophe in IT consulting circles 20 years ago. I’m glad to see nothing has changed in that respect.
I remember reading an article about a hospital switching computerized medical record system and the CIO had a killer quote along the lines of "every extra day I take on this migration, people die"
(Disclosure: I work at SAP, though not on the ERP stuff or anything of that sort.)
From what I've been told, this is actually supposed to be a selling point of SAP: They have built tools to fit the processes of the industry leaders, so by buying into SAP, you're buying into the winning way of doing business.
I am not endorsing this opinion or making a claim regarding its veracity, just stating that that is what I have heard.
In the late-90s I worked for a manufacturing company in a firmware dev capacity. They did everything on paper still. They migrated successfully to an in-house built ERP system sitting on top of Oracle. Big celebration, everyone happy. Six months later someone drove a forklift through the wall of the machine room into the UPS which caught fire and destroyed three racks of kit including the Oracle node. Turns out no one really trusted the system and was running paper on the side. When I left 6 years later they were still doing it on paper and reporting on Excel. It works and is considerably more forklift proof.
I know a manufacturing plant that used an Excel spreadsheet to do all its production planning. There was only one person who understood the spreadsheet and could modify it, a consultant who made more than the plant manager.
"Understandable and fixable" depends more on the complexity of the application rather than the fact it's in Excel.
Agree. IT has forgotten that computing should enable more people to be producers instead of mere consumers. IT management cares about control, audit, permissions and expense - no focus on achieving productivity in the workplace and in many cases are anti-user.
If you try running a business where several workers get involved with fixing and extending information systems (e.g. spreadsheets), you'll soon understand why successful IT management cares about controls, audits and permissions.
I would argue that excel being "fixable" by regular office workers is half the reason why these projects fail in the first place. I've worked on migrating people's reporting to BI platforms before and what looks like a simple spreadsheet produced monthly is often really 12 different sets of formulas, special cases, kluges, hard-coded data and long-gone sources etc. etc. Because instead of correcting the source of data used for the report, it's all "done in post" in the excel sheet itself by a regular office worker.
Yes, important point. I wonder if a system could be made that made things properly fixable. As in, a regular office worker spots an error. Can fix it in post. But in doing so they will also create a change suggestion for the source data that can be approved and committed by master data admins.
The fact that every office worker understands excel, does not mean that every office worker understands every excel sheet.
Most of the projects we did in consultancy dev, was turning that one critical excel sheet nobody but 'the excel guy' understands into a simple to use web application, so that everybody could use it and the business won't explode when mr. excel would leave the shop.
Most of those office workers were not capable of fixing anything on the first day they used Excel. Many didn't understand it at all. The main difference isn't that Excel is super accessible and easy to use for non-technical people; it's its ubiquity, and especially that of training on its usage.
Ubiquity is important but it's not the only important factor. An excel sheet can typically be downloaded and experimented with. You can't download an ERP system and try stuff with it.
This is so huge in finance. Lots of smaller shops will hire data scientists or even SWEs hoping to up productivity and replace slow Excel sheets, and end up disilusioned when the team just glues together some Python scripts with no UI and no way for stakeholders to tinker without talking to someone else first.
On the other hand, once you have a well-established IT automation around your production, and people aren't trained in pre-automation production, it's actually quite hard to go back to manual.
Probably also depends on the complexity of the orders and workflows.
Without software, drones are useless. I suppose they can still assemble manually operated quadcopters if they know their inventory by heart, but they will be unable to produce more parts by 3D printing or drones capable of stable flight, autonomous operations, surveillance or any more advanced use cases. Even remote control is probably out of the picture.
They can continue to run the same thing they had before.
As an old software engineer, I can say with certainty that software engineering is a very, VERY wasteful practice. We could all be running Windows 3 right now, DOS, or some old Unix. The overhead involved in making actual advancements shows our slow progress as a species, and that we’re in a thread discussing a drone manufacturing facility being blown up in a war and how much that matters.
I think the natives had it right to live off of the land peacefully, and if anything to devote full time on science to determining what we do to help life survive in the universe.
I can't agree with you. People have got their human mind as a result of ever increasing and self-inflicted costs driven by a competition among males. They developed minds to play politics and they came to a point when 20% of metabolism of human body was devoted to its brain.
The result of such a wasteful way to spend their energy resources? Humans colonized all the Earth, drove to the extinction almost all big animals, and now there are as much humans on the Earth as mosquitos. Looks like a win, doesn't it?
These things go off the rails sometimes. Just today I've found a new example to it:
highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.[1]
The waste of resources into useless things doesn't lead to good outcomes each time, but I believe that software engineering will lead to something. I'm not Jesus, I can't predict exactly what the beneficial results will be, but at least I can point to a growing ability of engineers of handling complexity. It lags behind their ability to create complexity, but still it grows.
No, they’re right, manufacturing machines like these are independent. We’re so used to interconnected software systems for everything, but even though these things may run old versions of Windows in airgapped or isolated networks, that’s just to run the machines. You give it a thumbdrive, save a part file on it, and as long as it’s got power, materials, and whatever is necessary for basic safety like noble gas for sintering safety, you’re set.
Even accounting systems are able to usually run fairly independently.
It’s not that IT and business and manufacturing support software engineers don’t help, but they aren’t necessary, especially if they’re just making the same thing over and over.
Russia is also behind in modern technology by over a decade. I'm pretty sure if the CIA wanted they could destroy a lot of Russian software infrastructure, but it suits them to be in and out of Russian systems collecting information instead.
This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally.
Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16).
In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now.
Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?
> This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale.
Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users.
Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it.
> And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that.
USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML).
Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs.
Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
I have no love (or even reason) to support modern Russia, but this is just wrong.
Russia has multiple home-grown office suites. Besides MS Office, the market leader still is full of bugs that harken back decades.
They also have multiple commercial CAD programs (KOMPAS, T-FLEX) that scale up to everything including airliners.
As for those 'western' top programmers, especially good ones, you'd be surprised how many of them are from post-USSR countries, including Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.).
As for chips they are behind (for reasons beyond the scope of my post), but the post mainly extended to software, in which, many of the supposed crown jewels of the West (aka US) have been replicated quite successfully in other parts of the world including Russia.
> I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
> Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing,
I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all.
In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
>Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
Ah yes, the reason the US is years behind most other country's payments systems is because they have too much freedom.
What do you mean by modern technology? Surely not the software. Russian engineering culture is strong and their IT strategy is far ahead of what you can find in Europe. I doubt it’s easy to hack into their systems - this breach illustrates it quite well, actually (it’s rare and required focused effort).
Fwiw I actually agree with you. My point is that early in the war, it was commonly thought that just the western sanctions alone would totally cripple the Russian economy. Or that they'd soon run out of arms, or anything like that. None of that happened. It's not pro-Russian to establish that they were more resilient than what many people anticipated/hoped. This doesn't take anything away from Ukraine's resilience in the face of years of obscene unwarranted aggression which is easily 10x more impressive to me.
You can help instead of waiting for politicians to "do something about it". It's not that hard to find a reputable organization that helps Ukraine and send it some money.
> In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.
That's a single-digit percentage of the US Federal budget.
Some of that goes to "family foundation" sinecures. Some of it goes to 10% church tithes. Quite a bit of it is spent on… raising funds. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-giving-to-charity-ask-wher... - "Of the more than $1.3 billion raised by charities in the [New York] in 2018, about $369 million — or 27% — went to pay professional fundraisers' fees")
> If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
I think that's wildly optimistic, but that'd be somewhere between $3-5B. The US alone has earmarked something like $200B thus far. The EU has given a similar amount.
Every bit undoubtedly counts, but a single Patriot battery costs $1B.
I would be surprised if they could manage to keep refilling their squirt guns and deal with all the logistics required to keep an army available to use them
To be fair, it is quite difficult to support a regime where random people are grabbed off the streets and sent to their deaths. Where for expressing oppositional opinions your male relatives will have their door kicked down and will be sent to an assault on enemy position with a 90% mortality rate. And if they survive that - to another one just like it. To support a regime that has no long-term plan and goals for waging a senseless war and which openly promises to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing in the reclaimed territories.
So the support from Western countries is enormous, considering all these aspects.
I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, but let's be honest
People aren't being dragged off the streets in Russia. This was briefly true in mid-late 2022 when they flirted with a partial mobilization, but hasn't been true for a while.
This is (sadly) actually more true in Ukraine. But there's also some nuance there - they can stop and question but supposedly they technically can't use physical force anymore.
What Russia is doing is increasing the bonuses and salary for signing a contract. And they don't have manpower problems for the most part - Ukraine is the one having that problem.
Now the Russian military is doing alot of shady shit, like promising recruits they won't be sent to Ukraine or would serve only in rear areas (even the US military recruiters were frequently guilty of this tactic). Classifying certain infantry units as "disposable" (especially foreign recruits and those from less politically unimportant regions), basically to be used as bait in assaults. And I'm sure the pressure for the required conscripts every year to sign a regular contract so they can be deployed is quite great, but its nothing like what some would have us believe.
Reminds me of the Louvois[1] disaster in the French armed forces, they fucked the payment system so bad they had to roll back to manual accounting for a moment. Yes, for the whole French Army, which was at the time involved in multiple foreign operations…
Working for a manufacturing company, you may be making drone parts, and you don’t really know which side of the war you’re making them for, because they can buy individual parts through different reputable-looking companies.
You could also be making surgical parts that help save lives.
Overall though, I think I’d rather be making nice practical furniture that hopefully people would never throw away. While I support people that want to protect, war is horrible.
Cyber warfare is really reaching a new peak in Ukraine, and not just the more-traditional cyberattacks like this. The target is of note; the drones themselves are the thing that's setting this war apart from all of the primarily human powered wars of the past centuries.
Drones have revolutionized reconnaissance, sabotage, and munitions interception. Relative to their material cost, they can be terrifically destructive, and with the advances in image recognition in the past decade some are able to operate even when affected by electronic signal jamming. This is some very cyberpunk shit going on right now.
This was obviously a very high-value target, and Ukraine has shown themselves again to be masters of asymmetric warfare: taking out a sizable chunk of Russia's long range bombers using drones smuggled across Russia, and now impacting one of the centers of Russia's drone manufacturing. It is difficult to see how the war will end, but it is clear that Ukraine is not about to stop fighting.
In the book Ministry of the Future, a near-future look at a world dealing with devastating climate change, wars become somewhat obsolete because drones get so good it's always possible to kill someone anywhere in the world. The smallest faction can easily kill the leader of any country. It's an interesting thought. I don't recommend the book, one of those thought experiments with lots of interesting ideas with not enough story.
It's fallacious to assume that defenses stop evolving after new weapons come to the fore. Some drones are deployed in anti-drone capacities; the war economics becomes balancing how advanced to make the attack drones vs. how cheap the countermeasures are. In Ukraine we've already seen small drones that are able to damage the wings of much larger and more "technically advanced" platforms.
War didn't end the first time man invented the longer spear; defenses adapt.
Some assumptions here. First off, we only have one side of the story to go on. Often this can be embroidered, particularly if there is propaganda value from doing so.
They could be using version control for their software with every developer having all of the software they have developed for their products git-cloned to their development machines. Assuming a modest development team working with version control (who doesn't), then you do have to wonder if they have lost the crown jewels. I suspect not.
It is going to be a similar situation with everything else such as CAD files. People will have local copies because it is quicker to work that way.
As for the company emails and general office files, sure they might have lost lots of that, but that isn't going to be the end of the world.
The website is also part of the company and you would expect the elite hackers to have taken that down but no they have not, that works just fine.
Then there is the product itself. If you have been following the war closely then you will know what drones are in use at a given time. We might not get to know all of the drones as well as the heavy hitters, however, the name of this company is not something that the keenest watcher of the SMO will be familiar with. It is not as if they have shut down Geranium 2 production, is it?
As for yourself, and how you write, is that ChatGPT speaking?
The reason I ask is that we all know about things such as version control so I wonder if there is common sense or ChatGPT going on with your comment.
You're right about this being a one-sided story, but not to suspect ChatGPT - it has none of the hallmarks of AI slop, plus it brings up a couple of reasonable and relevant points. You're only addressing a tiny part of the comment, but the rest stands, in my opinion.
The whole Ukraine situation is an intelligence test. In wartime you never have complete information so it is not like a game of chess where you know what the board is, what the pieces are and the play so far. Some fog of war is expected.
With the hacks that Snowden, Assange and their ilk participated in, we had stuff uploaded somewhere for the world to see. In this way it was self evident that stuff had been exfiltrated.
In this instance we can assume the drone company are going to deny everything. However, if we had some of their trade secrets uploaded somewhere then a data breach could be considered plausible. Or a recorded screen cast of the hack.
However, the intended audience for this story doesn't care about hard evidence, they just need a morale boost, and belief trumps reason on these situations.
My school history teacher taught me how to look at evidence and it is not rocket science. Hence why Ukraine is like an intelligence test nobody thought they needed. If people can't do critical thinking about some war that has been on the news for more than three years, how are they supposed to do science or anything else that needs critical thinking?
Remains to be seen if the lessons of this war extend to other possible wars though.
It is possible that FPV drones are showing up as so important because Russia is committed to a disgusting meat sluice of fodder to achieve its marginal territory gains.
Most countries don’t have the appetite for those kind of losses. Most countries, frankly, don’t have the audacity to set these kinds of war aims.
I predict they won’t matter too much to the war meta. At least not so much as cheap long range jet drones which are also becoming significant here.
Oh my, one thing wars are good at is to get rid off or at least contain such thinking („Russia evil, thus no worry“) to the playgrounds (eg public commentariat): FPV drones are the defining weapon in this war, are used by both sides, and were the defining weapon in other recent conflicts as well (eg Nogorno-Karabach), they are already being picked up and used as weapons by Mexican-Cartels (all former military).
Seems like drone warfare is just democratizing what e.g the US has in capabilities with their precision munitions already, in a perhaps less capable but far cheaper manner. Put it in other words if this was the US directy engaging russia, it would probably be tomahawk missiles or something along those lines just like we’ve seen last few decades, vs a sort of Air Hogs with a bomb.
I am working for a medium sized Swiss company. We're coding our own ERP, based on a nightmare of a stack. We call it "security by confusion". An attacker would maybe find its way in, but he'll never find the way out. If he destroys 90% of our code, we'll still be up and running, because 95% of the codebase is obsolete.
There was an interview with some U.S. army rep. that was pretty famous a few years back. He said that even if hackers broke in to the U.S. systems they wouldn't achieve anything due to how old, convoluted and buggy the systems were - even we who have full access can barely get anything to work!!
Of course, that was said purposefully, and may not reflect the truth at all.
But still, the thought that that is security for some (and I am sure it is for someone, somewhere) is kind of an extension of security by obscurity that is scary.
Have coded a couple of full MRP systems for various large companies based on my own model and I would be intrigued to see how this will work. I usually include the default recommended security and DR practices and then add my own OTP-hash based layer for key authorisations. I thought I was paranoid, but your system sounds more like an end-of-the-world scenario rather than just keep the production-line going in the factory.
Not many companies explicitly prepare for the scenario where every single data storage unit in the company is effectively wiped and you have to redeploy from zero.
If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems probably have cycles in their deployment dependencies. Your config pusher is deployed from Jenkins/Puppet/Ansible but 2 years ago someone made Jenkins dependent on the config pusher for its own config. Now you cannot just deploy these systems in order, you have to replay the history before that change.
Almost everything will have cycles in IT. People want and security requires some kind of SSO. Now SSO is a dependency for almost everything, including the administration of underlying systems that run SSO. Same for the network. Same for a lot of things.
Bootstrapping from zero will never be easy and will always take some time. I don't think you can prepare your way out of this, short of preparing a fully redundant, fully separate secondary infrastructure.
This is called "break-glass procedure" in enterprise IT (as in "break glass in case of emergency"), and often consists of independent, normally unused, admin accounts on key systems, access info for which is locked in some safe location, e.g. physical safe in a secure location.
Testing this reliably is difficult, though, and often these procedures and their documentation is outdated.
I agree that fully redundant & separate infrastructure is unrealistic. I'm also not saying you can be 100% prepared. My point is that you can improve your posture.
What you can do is to have a sandbox environment where you periodically do a full setup exercise from a prepper disk. Conceptually it's not that different from testing backup recovery (ok, most companies neglect this too, so maybe you have a point :) ).
Problem is, the value of proper recovery procedures and testing those in all aspects only becomes apparent to the bean-counters when things really break. But until they have been in that situation where nothing works for a month, it will always be too expensive, too cumbersome and too resource-hungry to do those preparations.
Reminds me of compiler bootstrapping. If you only have the source code of, let's say, Rust and want to build it you first need to have a Rust compiler of a previous version. And for that you need another compiler. Then you reach times when rustc was written in OCaml. And know what? Now you need to build OCaml compiler!
This reminds me of troubles in a parallel universe.
Construction industry have products with typical lifetime of 50+, in some cases multiple hundreds. Computing and digitalization are hot topic now and for the past several decades with various buzzwords (probably 'digital twins' is the newest one) however when I am unable to open construction design files made in the beginning of my career less than 30 years ago due to obsolescence for various reasons then all those efforts seem for nothing eventually beyond immediate needs. Good old outdated 2D drawings seen as unfeasible practice might save the day in the future (... perhaps, assuming that current pdf files could still be opened some decades down the line, as that is a common 'digital paper' approach nowadays, actual physical world paper are used less and less).
That happened to company I am familiar with a year ago. The main storage cluster,that everything depended on died. They recovered by deploying everything again from dev laptops.
It's a model of a realistic scenario. Hackers (like in the article), long running ransomware that managed to corrupt lots of data, maybe a natural disaster. So by "wiping all data storage units" I meant the dynamic ones used in production. You can assume a static backup exists and contains a sensible set of sources and binaries, although obviously creating such a backup is part of the recovery plan.
That's a very odd website. Blocked by the Russian government so you get a TLS error, once you get past that, you get the Cloudflare "you are blocked" page, and then you use a VPN and... get the option to read this article in Russian.
The linked page is in English, but speaking of the option - residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway. Contrary to some popular beliefs in Russia about language wars, many people still do speak Russian in Ukraine and media do publish articles in Russian.
>residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway
Deliberately blocking the supposed enemy from hearing you does strike me as irrational, though. The mere fact they're doing Russian censors' job should probably make them recheck if they got anything wrong in their decision process, just in case.
At this stage in the war keeping your social spaces free of malicious users seems like a much higher priority than providing the other side's civilians with accurate information. Russians can access all the info in the world with a simple VPN setup, that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia.
This likely keeps normal people from seeing this way better than it keeps away any hackers or bots, as Russian citizens are mostly using DPI circumvention tools. And this was a thing since the first days of the war, it's not something new.
>that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia
Giving up is the easiest thing to do. Last time some people did, it was blamed on stereotypes like their "learned helplessness" and "fatalism".
The reality is, civilians cannot change a country's domestic foreign policy - especially in a country like Russia.
Revolutions don't work without alignment from power centers like the police, military, judiciary, and a subset of legislators.
Hosni Mubarak wasn't overthrown because of protesters in Tahrir Square - he was overthrown because General Sisi decided to ignore shoot-on-sight orders.
There's no reason for Ukraine media to create a literal attack surface when most Russians already have a decent idea of what is happening in Ukraine (and vice versa) - most Russians and Ukrainians have blood relatives on both sides of the border.
Claiming the exposure doesn't work is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. The reality is that awareness is a major factor, that was literally the main way of the power takeover in Russia (see e.g. Suponev, Ernst, Gusinsky, and Listyev). Russian government is really careful about doing things slowly and getting away with everything people let them get away with, and stopping dehumanization and letting people hearing voices is really important. Even if people right now disagree or think of it as propaganda (which it usually is, I hope nobody has any illusions about that), just existence of something in the background is enough to set up something else in the future. The time for the change will inevitably come like it always does, and the question then will become "what Ukrainian media did all this time, and where the hell they were". Turns out they may have not existed at all as well - out of sight, out of mind.
My point is there's nothing "cultural" about it, those suggesting it either have zero idea about it or have never lived through or at least analyzed 80s-90s-2000s in Russia. It's purely the artifact of manufactured consent, and media takeover that was creeping in since Listyev's times and went full speed in 2001 is a primary factor in it. Willingly going into an invisible mode for Russians while having a huge leverage (language+presence), leaving them in their bubble, is a colossal blunder.
Consciously or not, you're spreading Putin's propaganda and justify/validate his actions. "It's world vs Russia, always been and always will be, since Adam and Eve. Nothing can be done. Everybody supports the government, it's cultural. We've always been at war with Eastasia. Spread out, nothing to see here, people are powerless anyway." People like you might have a lot in common with many Russians without realizing it.
I agree with you, it’s irrational. It’s also something to be expected, because this war was irrational from the very beginning with both sides often driven by emotional triggers rather than cold-minded calculations or facts.
Doesn't sound like it's the fault of the website, but of your government and maybe CloudFlare (although they could be blocking you because of the TLS error's underlying reason, not because you're in Russia).
The headline of the article called these people cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals. Which is it? It reminds me a bit with the situation with privateers during the age of sail. These were often people operating at the edge of the law, or even outright outlaws, given a letter of marque, a license to raid warships and commerce against a specific adversary. I'm sure out on the high seas, abuses happen.
The people who put together the doctrine on 4th Generation Warfare talked about the blurring of civilian and military. Rules of engagement gets fuzzier.
Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. I don't think this is some gray area hybrid warfare, it's just regular people not wanting drones to kill their neighbours.
> Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day.
Same do Ukrainians, don't they? More over, long before they killed civilians and defenders in Iraq and Afghanistan on Americans invitation. Then left without even saying 'sorry'. Since 2014 they were shelling Donetsk just for fun, killing people at random. So, it's more complicated than you'll find in western mass media. Especially in EU where full picture is illegal.
> Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians
There news on Russian side daily of Ukrainians doing exactly this, deliberately targeting civilians. Also usually their own non-combatants who are trying to surrender. This is war crime.
There are dirty tactics in this war which western public will learn about later. For now it's given a rosy optimistic picture approved by Zelinsky office. That's how 'Support Ukraine' is pushed on them. In fact it's 'support the war', as Ukrainians are dying in big numbers. By the way, official number of civilians killed 3 years is lower that in Gaza in 3 months.
Whatever, that's doesn't justify shelling a city. BTW, it's considered Ukrainian territory and those civilians killed by Ukrainian military were Ukrainians. However it was supported by the government up to and including Zelinsky, and by the majority of 'true Ukrainians'. Nobody was prosecuted.
It seems like it might be a translation issue. The site seems pretty overtly pro Ukraine, so they probably don't want to cast these hackers in a negative light. They might have just thought "cyber criminal" was a straight synonym for "hacker".
Kind of a Robin Hood situation: Hero for some, criminal to the others.
The article might be a collage of several other articles, and they didn't check for consistency.
I would love some other term for the aligned side people in cyberwarfare, sort of "cybersoldier" or "networkmilitia", not already somehow cliched in some film. "Cyberactivists" sounds like online protesters (in facebook and such)
I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack, and it would be 'easily' attributed/mapped back to the USA causing (political) issues. Well, Ukraine doesn't have 'that' challenge.
On the other hand (and I'm not defending a drone company), anyone that has a business should know by now that ransomware (with our without deletion) is a real thing, and it's not an 'if' question, it's a 'when' question.
I have never worked with/for a Russian company, so it would be interesting to hear/read from someone who has, how 'well organized' are they? GRC-wise. Assuming that someone would run the COBIT framework on them (Russian companies), would the 'average' be 'ok' or it's a big mess (kinda like working for an EU company in early 00's)?
> I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack
This is not a real reason. This explanation hides the real reason: Russia is a valuable geopolitical partner for USA. Regarless who are in power in USA - all presidents tried to make deals/contacts with Russia.
There is no value for USA in getting Russia loose this war, have internal instability or split in 20-ish national states.
USA wins more from russia being as it is today with all it blood, suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the regime thrive for survival.
Actually USA are afraid to push too much to cause internal issues in Russia. And russian ruling class knows that.
I guess another reason is that there isn't too much IT infrastructure that Russian trains depend on.
There are ticket sales systems for people being transported, but much is freight trains, and if there was an easy way to disrupt that, you can be sure that Ukraine would've done it by now, because the Russian military heavily depends on rail-based supplies.
I did work for a Russian financial multinational just before COVID-19, as a native Russian speaker, and it was a free-for-all mess interally. The IT side had a load-bearing, old-school sysadmin type with a personality for heroics.
They have been, in various ways, been attacking NATO countries for past 2 decades. Its simply puttin's modus operandi. Physical attacks on civilian and military infrastructure, murders, meddling with elections, cyber attacks, you name it.
All countries do this. Only propoganda makes you believe its only the enemy doing it. The UK alone had a history of 300 years of enslaving, meddling and brutalizing other countries. I can name at least 50 events from western countries last 2 decades.
Whataboutism at its finest. I think we all forget how we should feel fiery hate towards all citizens of Mongolia, those conquests were beyond brutal.
Or lets start talk like adults and talk about current situation and how nations behave now. russia is the definition of evil of these days. I know US government focuses heavily on china for whatever reasons (I guess because its obvious they are #2 and moving up, russia is barely in top 10 in actual capabilities if we ignore nukes and and since they threatened to use them at least 100x in past few years we can safely ignore them for usual conflicts).
Don't hate the messenger, this is how they behave and have painted themselves consistently, heck they are even proud of it in typical russian redneck style if you follow their media a bit.
I mean Putin will spin everything as "the West did it" anyway, so it really does not matter who pushes that button. I also seriously wonder why we don't have US/NATO air forces over Ukraine for this reason.
Because footage of a downed F-22 and it's captive pilot would be an unspeakable PR disaster relative to the comparatively mild military benefit. Wars aren't, and really never have been, won by blowing stuff up.
> That's a huge simplification. Blowing stuff up in a strategic way can certainly help win a war.
And losing public support for an effort via an embarassing disaster can just as certainly lose it, which was my point.
Yes yes yes, blow stuff up. Take territory, shoot people, yada yada. At some point that has to happen for a "war" to be a "war". But at the end of the day the winner is essentially always predetermined by economics and politics. Making deployment decisions in the absence of those considerations is generally how one loses wars.
I don't know that the electorate that twice elected the man that said "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay?" would actually be all that bothered.
Your first comments suggests it isn't happening ("which nato countries")
Now, predictably upon being told that it happens you pivot to NATO is useless.
Which is it: a set of attacks so obscure no reasonable person would be aware, or a horrendous onslaught where Article 5 should have been invoked and a mass retaliation begun?
NATO countries historically didn't invoke Article 5 even for terrorist attacks killing their own citizens. It takes a certain level before it makes sense to invoke, normally something beyond the capacity of that country to handle.
I was trying to follow my respondents' reasoning, as in, if Russia had indeed attacked NATO countries, which they said it had indeed happen, then how come NATO, being a defensive alliance first and foremost, didn't do anything about it?
In other words, and following Eastern-European logic (which, trust me, helps in cases like this one, I'm from Eastern Europe myself), had Russia really attacked any NATO countries you and me both wouldn't be in here having this conversation over the internet.
> if Russia had indeed attacked NATO countries, which they said it had indeed happen, then how come NATO, being a defensive alliance first and foremost, didn't do anything about it?
This was already answered but to be clear: ”doing something” and ”invoking article 5” is like the difference between saying ”asshole” in traffic vs rallying your friends to murder the driver’s family.
One could argue NATO countries should respond stronger to hybrid and clandestine warfare. Right now, we see a lot of ”angry letters”. But, it’s not clear eye for an eye is a strategically sound response, partly because it legitimizes the methods, and partly because it escalates tensions towards a war that nobody wants. Israel for instance takes an entirely different stance, basically retaliating with maximum force to deter the enemy (similar to punching the ”school bully” so hard, just once, that he stops). I don’t claim to be a diplomatic expert, but it’s worth noting that Israel is currently engaged in several major wars and conflicts, and tensions have grown.
Thankfully they don’t think it’s worth invoking article 5 over that. It’s not an automatism obviously, we’re talking about WW3 here. Would you rather be “technically” right here?
Because that would still be a disproportionate response and make NATO the aggressor, playing right into Russian hands.
The Russian military is already being destroyed in Ukraine (and even in Russia). The proportionate response is to give Ukraine everything they need to destroy Russia in a war that Russia chose to start. A war that they opened with a surprise invasion, no less. They are unambiguously the aggressor in their war in Ukraine and they should be defeated there, and we should give Ukraine everything they need to do that.
NATO attacking Russia would definitely not be playing into Russia's hands. Very bad for Russia, very costly for NATO, long war would make the voters unhappy, and India and China would feel rightly threatened.
Russian and Ukrainian militaries are being destroyed, but it also matters how fast they are being rebuilt. As mentioned above, Russia and Ukraine are debugging all their outdated military doctrines. The survivors will have a lot of hard-won experience.
What I meant was any direct NATO aggression against Russia would validate Russia's current "victimhood" narrative, and provide after the fact justification for their invasion of Ukraine in the first place.
They are very intentionally doing things that would not justify a full military retaliation by NATO.
There's no need to respond with force. Russia will lose in the long-term due to sanctions as long as Republicans don't cock everything up even more by making deals with Russians and slowing down trade in the global west. Russians are wasting money and gear in Ukraine and becoming weaker. It's just a matter of time before China starts making claims on land they lost to the Soviets. Russians will lose this war the same way they lost the cold war; by cutting themselves off from the maritime economy.
China will never allow Russia to lose. They know they are next on the list. It seems more that the west in its decline will become less and less relevant. The west needs to understand that they are no longer the only dominant player.
Aside from political reasons stated in other answers: Since Article 5 doesn't apply. article 5 states: "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all [...]" Thist deliberately talks about "armed" attack. Cyber attacks and related aren't covered.
I think the point being made is that Western agencies (5-eyes) would give Ukranian intelligence the button to push (indirect action) and not push it themselves (direct action).
Why would that be the case? Ukraine has a very large IT sector and they have a lot of good IT security specialists. To be honest, a lot of cybercriminals have been from Ukraine.
So I don't see why it would be the case that Ukraine could not have done this by themselves. They have done previous attacks by themselves. I don't see why that would be the case.
It would kind of be like saying, "Oh, if Russia does a cyberattack, it can't have been them acting alone. It must have been China that gave them the stuff to just press a button."
It's the usual westerner superiority speaking. When Ukraine wins something it's always due to NATO training, US weapons and all that. When Ukraine starts losing ground it's poor soviet-era training, wrong kind of tactics and decision making on Ukraine.
That very article mentions that on a number of occasions Ukraine has gained intelligence or pulled off their own ops which the US was completely unaware of.
Just because they're being helped doesn't mean that literally everything they do can be appropriated to the US.
It's tough to say that Ukraine and US are allies right now. US refuses to hold security assurance, as promised, and forbids Ukraine to restore nuclear arsenal, as before the promise. Bullies behave is such way, not allies.
It is irrelevant to my interpretation of the aforementioned parent comment.
The point is that US made Ukraine do something that the US wanted to do but did not do because were it the US, then it would have had repercussions on US, so they made Ukraine do their dirty work.
By going to war with Ukraine Russia (very foolishly in my view) exposed itself to a number of possible "indirect actions" which weren't possible before as "direct actions". Like for example Ukrainian drone hitting one of the Russian strategic missile defense radars. Ukraine can potentially hit other strategic assets not that involved in the current war - say nuclear submarines for example.
Russia and all non-usa allies have been the winner.
China etc have seen the strategies used in sanctions. They know how to limit their impact now.
It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.
It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.
And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.
A disaster for the west, aside from their weapons companies/Ukrainian investments. And any NATO spend increases.
China has been a big winner, it can now get cheap energy and it gets to set Russia whatever conditions it pleases. Russia is now utterly dependent on China for many imports.
Russia itself has been the biggest loser. Massive budget deficits, massive inflation. 1M of its smartest people have moved abroad. 1M Russian casualties in the war. Demographics and economy are disastrous.
That and Russia is now a pariah state. No one is going to invest there for a very long time after what Russia did.
Russia is hedging that the "pariah state" label will wear off pretty quickly. The current US government has as recently as March floated the idea of normalising business ties, and constantly flip-flops it's position.
However, the biggest loser has definitely been Europe (including Britain). High energy prices have cascaded the cost of living crisis, which in turn has led to a rightward shift in politics. As a continent, we are unprepared for any sort of defence, having used the US as a backstop for years and now the US constantly toys with the idea of dropping NATO support. Alone, we don't have enough manpower, ammunition, and we haven't been keeping up with the evolution of modern warfare (drones and related technology) taking place in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
If you think Europe is the biggest loser, you need to dig a bit deeper on the state of Russia... I might be wrong, but there's no recovery from this blunder for many, many years - if it manages to stay a Federation, that's yet to be seen, but my guess is China will take a chunk out of Russia eventually.
Remember Russia in 3 years had:
- 1 Military coup;
- Lost 50% of the Black Sea Fleet and it's now unusable;
- 1.000.000+ casualties (dead and severely wounded)
- Mass exodus of qualified young people;
- Lost Military allies from CSTO and rendered the alliance into a joke;
- Completely lost presence in the Middle East (I don't see how they will recover from it);
- Losing influence in neighboring countries;
The list goes on, like demographic collapse, etc
So, I find it hard to see Europe as the loser here; at worst, Europe is doing "ok".
Europe's entire future is on the line right now. Forget many years..
Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending (from a low starting point) to meet the new US governments requirements are exacerbating the cost of living crisis continent wide. Europe already wasn't innovating, and is now losing the small amount of industry it does have, to energy prices, to China's entry into EV production, and EU regulation. The demands to spend more on our own defence by the US administration comes from a US administration which has flirted with the idea of not even defending NATO.
The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum. In my country, the UK, Reform, a politically inept and untested party is currently leading in the polls for the next election. This party, as well as many like it in Europe, is even leading in the polls despite well known Russian political influence in them.
On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps. Immigration, which is lowering wages and in many peoples eyes, changing their cultural landscape for the worse, increasing their likelihood in voting for fringe political parties.
As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now. We hear constantly about ammunition and weapons shortages across Europe, failure to meet requirements for what Ukraine needs to fight back, and a general unwillingness from the population to even fight. Russia has oil, gas, and mineral wealth, which will always be of importance to Europe whenever this war does end. Europe is so reliant, that whatever words are spoken, the EU has spent more on Russian energy than it has sent in aid to Ukraine.
> Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending
Energy prices are going down, and have been going down consistently ( https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil ) and the new US Admin wants them even lower, and they're not alone. So that's settled. Defense spending will also be met with investment, jobs, etc.
But if you think Europe is having it bad in terms of using taxpayers money to fund wars... what do you think is happening to Russian taxpayers money, with a much smaller economy?
> The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum.
Inflation is affecting everyone. Not Europe in any particular way.
Again, if you think that's bad for Europe, you look at Russia is being completely destroyed with inflation. I don't even think they're reporting the fake numbers of how bad things are, every quarter they prohibit more data from coming out...
> On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps.
Again, if you think that's a problem in Europe... how does Russia compare with qualified people leaving, 1.000.000 young men casualties, low birth rates, aging population? Europe isn't speedrunning its demographic collapse like Russia is.
> As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now.
So, to sum it up, you highlighted a few points that are by many orders of magnitude worse in Russia. Even counting energy, since Ukraine has been taking out distribution and refining capacity (and my guess is that it will get worse) - somehow you still think Europe is in a worse shape and position.
And a lot of your claims don't make much logical sense: "Europe is in bad shape, they can't even properly help Ukraine", in a context of Russia with 1.000.000+ casualties, max military production capacity, using North Korean Army help, and failing to make any meaningful gains at heavy costs...
I'm not even stating the fact that Russia will inevitably have to surrender that territory back to Ukraine, in the future anyway, because no country will ever recognize their occupied territory as part of Russia.
So to sum up your "Europe is unable, and Russia is giving their max" scope doesn't help your case at all, just shows that Russia has massive unrecoverable problems, even trying with everything they have...
You ended up supporting what I said. Europe is OK, while Russia can collapse at any moment - that's being on the line.
Just to bring you back to reality: no European country had part of their military going on a straight line to its capital to take down the government, and that happened to Russia around 2 years ago - that's not a good sign.
I think you are exaggerating Russian problems quite a bit. It’s certainly more stable than in 1990s or early 2000s. The peace deal will very likely force Ukraine and consequently its allies to recognize acquisitions at least de facto (Crimea may get formal recognition). Even if they won’t, there’s no plausible scenario in which Russia will lose this territory. Demographics — yes, but immigration may solve it for a while. 1 million people „brain drain“ wasn’t the right number anyway and there’s ongoing correction: many continued to work for Russian companies, some are returning back now disillusioned by the West,
> Even if they won’t, there’s no plausible scenario in which Russia will lose this territory.
Didn't the brightest minds in the Kremlin believe that the last time too?
There are many plausible scenarios, such as the worsening of socio-economic conditions, to the point where local governments stop following the central government and begin implementing their own policies shaped by local grassroots movements, leading to the total loss of control by Moscow. A repeat of 1989-1991. In that turmoil, nobody will care about Donbas or Crimea, as long as they can have food on their table.
We seem to be seeing the same recipe in action: extremely costly war for no clear purpose, economic stagnation, de facto bankruptcies of entire large sectors like mining and metallurgy.
Missing ingredients: low oil prices over extended time periods (6 years in the 1980s).
I'm not sure all of the previous posters points were thought out.
The 1,000,000 casualties thing keeps popping up, but nobody can confirm this. We have to take Ukrainian sources at their word. Regardless of who you support, during a conflict you have to take BOTH sides claims with a pinch of salt. They are both producing fanatical numbers right now, because those numbers have the dual purpose of inspiring morale amongst those still fighting.
The brain drain caused by the mass exodus of Russians fearing conscription isn't permanent. Already many of these people have returned.
The Wagner Coup didn't amount to much. It got half way before they worked out they didn't have the means, stopped, and the leader was killed and the group restructured within the Russian military.
They lost influence with neighbours, but honestly did they ever really have much in Europe anyway?
In my view Europe loses, because it's completely beholden to Russian energy interests. Now that those are gone, they are paying higher back-marked rates for the same oil and gas (via other routes), or more expensive American energy. This is exacerbating cost of living crises continent wide and is boosting fringe political parties who will cascade the damage (and who are also, in many cases, Russian influenced and funded).
I don't have any stake or real investment in this (although I don't think invading forces should get what they want), but I feel the other poster does.
Agree on most of that. However, I do not think energy is the European problem. It's painful, for sure, but migration is something bigger politically (and see recent Economist on that). Russia did play a role in that, but it's the flawed system with which nobody is happy that drives the fringe parties to success.
As for housing crisis, that's something that is defined by how markets work currently - where political influence buys squeeze in building permits and good profits from speculating on this market buy political influence. And of course, there's dual market structure in many cities with subsidized housing that reduces pressure for reform for significant number of voters. We need a big political reboot to overcome that and transition from old party structure practically everywhere, it is already happening, it is uncomfortable to see due to uncertainties in this process, but it is good. The war may have some effect on that, accelerating the process.
There will be one at some point. There is no plausible scenario in which it will be favorable for Ukraine: the West missed the moment to build up military production to match and surpass Russian capacity, so there is zero chance that there will be any military wins. And sanctions don’t work, that should have been pretty clear by now to anyone who sees the numbers. It is all about damage control and how many Ukrainians will have to die before Western politicians will accept inevitable.
Even if that's true, the content you assume will be in it (even before considering the probability of your predicted content being wrong) may have as much bearing for Russia (or any othe nation’s) near term prospects as the eventual content of the peace deals ending the Israeli-Palestinian war or the US-North Korea war have on any nation’s near-term prospects.
Russia can sustain this war for 4 years more politically (they probably have to finish by 2029, a year before elections), maybe 2-3 years more militarily and economically. I won’t be so sure that Ukraine can last that long, because Ukraine does have people problem and Russia does not. Ukraine even with Western supplies gets a fraction of what Russia currently produces in ammo, missiles, tanks etc. So there is no reason for Russia to accept shitty terms. They may pay 200-300B from the frozen money in „reconstruction support“, but that’s it.
If there was any significant difference in their combination of industrial supply and battlefield effectiveness, the front line wouldn't be so slow-moving.
> There is no plausible scenario in which it will be favorable for Ukraine
If this is true, we're doomed. Everyone will want to have nuclear weapons in order not to end up like Ukraine. After that point it's just a matter of time until something goes wrong.
It is unlikely that we will see new nuclear powers. It's not an easy job. We can be sure that Israel or North Korea won't give up, but that does not mean they are going to use the weapons or there will be a full-blown intercontinental war. Looking at current progress in space tech, in 30-40 years the ultimate WMD will be kinetic space weapons anyway.
North Korea and South Africa* getting nukes are both independent proofs that it's not hard for a nation to get nukes. I've seen credible commentators suggesting Ukraine itself is only months away, if it chooses that path.
Less credibly, because the Russian government says a lot that isn't really true, Medvedev has been quoted saying "a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads".
Once you've got a fission bomb, by all accounts it's not that hard to use it as a primary to power a fusion bomb.
A single 1 MT bomb detonating at low orbital altitude above central USA would likely cause enough physical damage to the power grid to kill 60-90% of the population within a year, even with no shockwave getting anywhere near the ground.
> North Korea and South Africa* getting nukes are both independent proofs that it's not hard for a nation to get nukes
Define „hard“ then. Both started early in 1960s, both had access to uranium (North Korea is actually mining it - not every country can do that), both used foreign support for their nuclear programs. Neither achieved ICBM range to deliver nuclear warheads to any location on this planet or had submarine component. Ukraine may have theoretical ability to design and produce nuclear weapons, but it is a technologically advanced nation far ahead of many developing countries and it is not going to have resources for a nuclear program any time soon being heavily dependent on foreign aid.
There was no military coup 2 years ago, just a failed mercenary raid in which the army was not even involved. Leaders of that raid are now dead. It was an interesting moment in history, but it actually demonstrated resilience of the regime.
>the regime can collapse at any moment
How exactly? What evidence do you have for it? All even marginally visible opposition is pushed out of the country and became irrelevant, some are dead, many convicted in absentia to decade-long prison sentences. Mass protests are rare and practically never challenge the order, mainly aiming at some local problems. From economic perspective there are some problems, but as a matter of fact inequality is now lower than before the war thanks to generous payouts to veterans and their families, who may have never seen that money in their life.
On the contrary, Europe (I mean EU, Britain is a different story) is probably the biggest and the only true winner.
Russia may get what it wants, but Europe already got something from it too.
1. Major influx of workforce - many Ukrainians do not intend to go home according to polls
2. Push to a stronger union less dependent on America for defense
3. Push to less dependency on Russian oil and gas (yes, gas could have helped with transition to cleaner energy, but we may be doing well even without it)
Eventually - soon enough - Russian gas will be back. But Europe will come from this war stronger both militarily and politically and more united.
America is clear loser: what a mess it has become. Not being able to do anything with this conflict, it demonstrated that nuclear non-proliferation is dead. Nobody will give up their nuclear weapons now as Ukraine did in 1990s in exchange for empty promises of security guarantees.
Ukraine may have won some political independence at a very high cost and with some strings attached, but it has lost one third of its population and significant part of its territory - forever. And it is likely that it’s not going to get NATO membership. Was all of it worth it?..
Russia is an interesting case here. It‘s going to win. Sanctions don’t work. Foreign reserves are all time high. The economy is suffering mainly from self-inflicted damage, not for external reasons: enormous military budget and insufficient workforce (not least because Central Asian workers are hesitant to work in Russia now and their number was bigger than war casualties). Western brands left the country temporarily and many will come back. It has acquired new territories and will be actively spending there on reconstruction — that’s going to add extra points to GDP. It is hard to say, if the combined economic outcome will be positive or negative. Was it worth it?… It depends who answers. Politically it’s more stable than ever with national-conservatives in power, which is very important, because by 2030s it will be busy with the transition of power (and certainly not attacking NATO in Baltics as some delusional hotheads think). When the war ends it will be able to shift spending to social topics, which + the victory will give the necessary political capital for the transition.
China is getting very long-term leases on large swaths of territory in the Far East. There is officially no exterritoriality, yet with increasing number of Chinese people there while Russian population there is minuscule (and even that is mostly not ethnically Russians, instead it is the local ethnicities whose history with China is much longer than with Russia), remoteness of Moscow and Russian bureaucrats' total corruption - there is no need for the official declaration. So, while today China still can't ask for Vladivostok and other "historically Chinese territories" (according to the modern Chinese official maps), tomorrow they wouldn't even have to.
Too much propoganda results in reactions like this. Reality is that Russia is fine and dealing with relatively minor issues. Also this war as big as it looks in the west, is nothing compared to ww2 where 10s of millions died in massive battles. They survived. Thats what we russians have always done. Survive.
Russians and foreigners travelling to Russia regularly blog live.
Everyone there is doing fine.
The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
As long as they don't say anything critical against the regime. Or have the misfortune of flying in/around Russia while morons are at the trigger of surface to air missiles (cf. MH17 and Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243). Or have the misfortune of getting conscripted to die in the meat grinder.
> The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
Yes, Russia, the known beacon of journalistic freedom. How many journalists have been murdered by the regime?
The fact that those Wikipedia sections / articles exist is very telling:
Anyone blindly lumping together all "western" media is not to be taken seriously. Especially when comparing with fucking Russia of all places. You can find plenty of disagreements in various "western" media (consider The Guardian vs Financial Times vs Le Figaro vs Le Monde vs NY Times vs Washington Post). Nobody dares contradict the official line in Russia, even calling the war a war, or they get tortured and murdered.
> Or have the misfortune of flying in/around Russia while morons are at the trigger of surface to air missiles (cf. MH17 and Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243)
Chances for a civilian to die from war causes and gun violence combined in Russia are currently significantly lower than chances for American to die from gun violence.
> Or have the misfortune of getting conscripted to die in the meat grinder.
Russia is currently recruiting contractors among conscripts and criminals. It’s not impossible to be sent to war illegally, but significant majority went there willingly (I have no idea why idiots arrested for drug possession choose to go to meat grinder, but they do it).
Overall, in most places there it’s safe enough to think about something else than how not to be killed. People are really doing fine (when internet works - it’s been shitty recently for air defense reasons).
> No one is going to invest there for a very long time after what Russia did.
Many large businesses have returned to Russia. "No one is going to invest" is a naive childish thinking. They outperformed growth expectations in 2024, unemployment rate dropped from 5.8% in 2020 to 2.3% in 2025. GDP is surging, insane tech and energy investments from China. Plus Russia has a very low public debt. All in all, their economy is pretty resilient despite what they say in the mainstream media.
> Because a massive amount of men were conscripted?
That's an emotional oversimplification. Unemployment fell not because of conscription, but due to massive import substitution and rising labor demand in construction, logistics and manufacturing.
Despite sanctions, Russia's ruble-adjusted budget deficit remains manageable, and the trade balance is strong due to record energy exports. Military spending has driven industrial revitalization. Factories reopened, supply chains revamped and domestic R&D expanded.
Whether you agree with the morality or not, economically it’s not just money burned. It has multiplier effects: jobs, tech development and regional growth. Dismissing that is lazy.
Russia has been a winner by basically no metric other than land and being a shit neighbor.
And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there; it's literally a special grave digging operation. Soviet stockpiles of armor are basically depleted; now it's the buggy and moped meta. They've completely failed to support their supposed allies (i.e. Assad, Iran, Armenia). A good chunk of their strategic aviation fleet is gone. Car bombings of generals continue all over Russia and occupied territories, which brings the question, will it even stop if they "win"? They've finally been demoted from being an aircraft carrier operating nation. Their frozen assets are literally killing Russian soldiers. National wealth fund has ~20-30% of the prewar assets. Something similar in gold reserves. Interest rates are beyond effed, and recruits are largely joining for the money needed in the terrible economy caused by Putin himself. Who annexed 4 oblasts only to legally deploy the 18 year olds Putin promised not to deploy in Ukraine (as it's no longer Ukraine in Russian law). Non-military industrial output is on a steady decline. Price capping on bread. Fossil fuel output at minimums, and with low prices.
Since the last big movements of the front that's absolutely been the case, though you're right it doesn't apply if you account for the early captures. Once you remove them (Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk), that's very easily verifiable.
Avdiivka had 30-32k pre-war population, estimated 40-47k Russian casualties.
Bakhmut had 71k pre-war, Russia suffered an estimated 75k casualties from Wagner alone.
Pokrovsk 61k pre-war, ongoing, 21k estimated casualties in January alone, and it's been ongoing for a year.
And beyond cities, the daily casualty rates at most obtain tiny settlements of a few dozen pre-war inhabitants. In the worst case you have the North Kharkiv front with 10s of thousands of casualties and basically a stalemate.
>It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.
"One thing is debatable so everything is debatable", I didn't expect this level on HN.
I think your assessment is only partially correct.
The Europeans are getting their act together and increasing their cooperation and defense spending.
Sweden and Finland joined NATO, placed large defense orders and started integrating with the British.
France has started talking about expanding its nuclear arsenal to cover the defense needs of the entire continent.
While the Russian military has gained tremendous military experience, they have lost huge amounts of top tier kit.
They are now essentially dependent on China.
No one came to aid Iran during the Israeli air campaign, the Russians were too busy and the Chinese didn't care enough.
The main winner has clearly been China, but the US and the EU have not really lost anything. If anything everyone that is not a party to the war is coming of a bit stronger.
If there was any real will left in EU people, Ukraine would wipe Russia off the map (at least the putinesque remnants), it will happen anyway, but we'd rather just expend vastly more money and vastly more humans and time in the process.
Considering the current rate of inflation, switching the EU economies to war production would save so much money and lives, and bring down prices.
Keeping the war longer by a decade by not willing to hold your promise is vastly improves things, that’s for sure. Instead of showing the bully the force, be done with that pretty quickly and returning to your non-war economy pretty quickly. Ever considered that option, huh?
Russia has nuclear weapons and good means of delivering them all over the planet. That is a fact of reality that does not allow us to "be done with that pretty quickly".
Maybe if Ruzzia where the logic is always reversed
Putin caused
1 NATO to get 2 new members, gg Putin
2 NATO to invest more in weapons, gg Putin
3 killed or wounded 1 million Russians while the population was already in decline and I would bet the birth rate is decreasing because of the war
4 economy is fucked, Gazprom reported first time ever no proffits, interests rates increased
5 the idiots managed to hit again a civilian airplane, and i read recently Azerbajan and Armenia are cooperating to get rid of Ruzzians on their lands
6 Ruzzian weapon exports are fucked
7 Ruzzian army is a joke asx strength now, and the people are seen as low life orcs, killing, raping, torturing creatures
8 Kremlin is a joke, from 3 day operation to 3+ years, people flying from windows, politicians unable to admit a drone hit happened and claiming is debbry,
9 Putin pulled his secret weapons the donkeys after 3 years of keeping them hidden and failed to ado any significant progress
10 Ruzzia advances in Ukraine slower then a snail, check the numbers. and there are more than 1000 Ruz casualties for square km
11 I can see this Zeds complaining about the West decadence while using iPHone, driving German cars and wearing expensive wtches (even Putin can't stand to put his ass on a Ruzzian car)
How is Ruzzia stronger?
The only way I could think a Zed would claim this is something like "Zed eats excrements daily for an year and after barely surviving this he claims he is stronger because someone in the West would die if he eat so much excrements, the Zed not realizing that the solution is to execute the tzar and stop eating excrements.
Any Russian (not Ruzzian) can be honest and admit that this is not going according to the plan, Putin tried to repeat the Crimean invasion, his KGB friends told him that Ukrainians will receive the Zeds with flowers , the informations were wrong and Putin seems to be incapable to stop the disaster and keep his throne so he is willing to sacrifice the people and the empire just to keep is throne.
>5 the idiots managed to hit again a civilian airplane, and i read recently Azerbajan and Armenia are cooperating to get rid of Ruzzians on their lands
That's one way to get nominated for Nobel peace prize.
> Ruzzia advances in Ukraine slower then a snail, check the numbers. and there are more than 1000 Ruz casualties for square km
Net Russian gains in June 2025 were 572 km^2.* In order for your statement to hold true, Russia would have suffered over half a million casualties in June alone. Where is your evidence to support such an assertion?
>Net Russian gains in June 2025 were 572 km^2.* In order for your statement to hold true, Russia would have suffered over half a million casualties in June alone. Where is your evidence to support such an assertion?
Or my average is not a daily or monthly, do it again for the last 1 year. 2 years.
Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?
> Or my average is not a daily or monthly, do it again for the last 1 year. 2 years.
That would make even less sense. The thread I linked has the appropriate data going back to April 2024. We can toss that into a spreadsheet or LLM to get the total Russian gains in the past year, as you requested.
ChatGPT calculates total Russian territorial control change at ~6000km^2. So are you now saying the Russians actually have 6 million casualties? Again, please support assertion. The only number that doesn't make sense here is your "Russians are taking 1000 casualties per square kilometer".
> Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?
It's been on my list of "Things to Do" for a while. I want to whip up a Rust library to run TNDM/QJM calculations on the Russo-Ukrainian War. For now, I will only state that rates of advance in warfare are non-linear. Past a certain point of weakness, collapse is rapid. I think Operation Bagration is a good case to examine in detail, as many of the frontline German divisions had REALLY thin manning. The Ukrainian frontline is manned at something like ~40% strength, and with a large number of old and infirm conscripts. They are relying heavily on drones to keep the Russians from locally massing combat power. I'm not sure where the breakpoint is in Ukrainian manpower past which their brigades will shatter.
But just pulling an estimate out of my butt: 2 years and an additional 500,000 Russian non-recoverable losses. shrug
The advances are not linear, the Ruzzian advanced a lot in first days (there were some traitors in the Ukrainian army),. since then they advance at snail speed, my stats were from my memory, probably during winter when they attacked massively and gained almost nothing. If you have good data and can export it as csv then would be nice too see some graphs, like gains per month/week ,casualties per week and km^2 , distance from Kyiv.
In war a country can give up on some territory and move the army and government if needed into a better defended region, Ukrainians only need the will to fight and the Ruzzians provide them plenty of reasons not to be Russified.
So my stats were outdated or wrong, it is 5x, 10 x then ? Let me know a better number to use in future.
> With more than 1.2M dead or out of service injured, Russia is spent
> All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense.
I'm genuinely curious what your information diet/sources looks like that would lead you to make such statements.
According to Ukrainian sources, Russian end strength in Ukraine continues to increase and they are maintaining a strategic reserve of personnel as well:
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-plans-to-increase-groupin...The Russian military plans to increase its grouping in Ukraine by 150,000 soldiers in 2025, equivalent to around 15 motorized infantry divisions, Presidential Office Deputy Head Pavlo Palisa said on April 3, Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne reported.
"Their formation is ongoing. The Russians have no problems with recruiting personnel now..."
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/syrskyi-warns-russia-stockpi..."Moreover, Russia maintains an additional 121,000 troops in its strategic reserve—comprising 13 divisions, as well as various regiments and brigades—that could be deployed to the battlefield if necessary."
"This means their army grows by an average of 8,000 to 9,000 soldiers every month," the Commander-in-Chief noted.
As for Russia only being able to defend, how do you square that with this Finnish analysis group's tracking of Russian territorial control rates increasing every month this year?
They had to withdraw from Syria, due to a loss of ability to project power. That's how desperate they are for troops. They removed troops, planes, closed bases. Almost immediately Syria fell.
Israel and the US's stance with Iran, was something not as plausible when Russian strength existed in the region. Russia complained and threatened, but naturally nothing has come of it. They have no capacity to do anything, or project power. There is no Russian strength in the Middle East any more. Why? They cannot extend their power beyond their borders.
This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).
Using reserve troops is what Russia could do if their back was to the wall. They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within. Remember, Russia is not a democracy, but a totalitarian state controlled by a dictator with an iron fist. If their 'reserves' are drawn down too far, there will be insurgency.
Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops. And it doesn't discount what I'm saying. They have lost their capacity to project power, and are now relying upon mercenaries to shore up their troop levels. They're spent.
> They removed troops, planes, closed bases. Almost immediately Syria fell.
This has more to do with the Syrian military being completely starved of resources, particularly money, due to the US occupying the most lucrative portions of sovereign Syrian territory for years. Not having Russian airpower on call absolutely contributed to the collapse but not being able to reliably pay/staff formerly-capable formations like the Tiger Forces or 4th Armored Division (in addition to not being able to afford reconstruction) is what really did the regime in. Watch this from 2019:
>This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).
The Russians have been domestically mass producing their versions of the Shahed-series drones for a while now. Interruptions in arms transfers due to Iran's own security problems are unlikely to significantly degrade Russia's drone salvos at this point.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55948The organization calculated that Russia produced an average of 60.5 Geran drones per day, or roughly 1,850 drones per month, between February and April 2025.
https://www.calibredefence.co.uk/shahed-and-geran-the-evolut...Over time, a separate version emerged which is known as the Geran-2, which is the name given to Shaheds made in Russia. Russia now makes hundreds of these drones every week, enabling it to increase its usage to 200 per week in September 2024, and then to 1,000 per week by March 2025.
> They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within.
Who do you think will stage a revolt, with both Navalny and Prigozhin dead? There's not really any charismatic opposition leadership left that I can think of.
> They have lost their capacity to project power
Ok, I will compromise and largely agree with this statement in broad strokes. Yes, Russia's power projection capacity has diminished. That's a very different position IMO compared to "Russia can only do defense" as you stated earlier....while Russia has ~600,000 men busy invading the largest country in Europe after Russia itself. Their global power projection capacity is degraded because so much of their attention is sucked into fighting the largest land war in Europe in 80 years, but that's not the same as only being able to defend.
> Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops.
Without going too far off on a tangent, this also applies to Ukraine (regarding loyalty...Colombians are definitely considered "seasoned" as far as international mercenaries go).
They came extremely close with the decpaitation attack. It worked back when the USSR invaded Czechslovakia. What they weren't expecting was effective resistance, so now it's no longer possible.
I don't think they anticipated a Nazi/Imperial Japan style completely takeover
I believe their plan was to capture Kyiv and install puppet government, and have the military collapse into factions and unable to coordinate effectively as a conventional force. Paramilitary groups would break out (such as the Azov units, etc.) Ukraine would then degrade into civil war, especially along an east-west line.
But at least, it would be dysfunctional and unable to join EU or NATO. And they would be able to control enough to extract some value out of the country (e.g. natural resources). But they never really care about establishing peace and prosperity there.
> And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.
Yes, on using human wave attacks, trenches, and cheap Iranian drones. Oh, and at the cost of almost all trained troops and modern equipment. Not a very good deal.
> It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.
Russia started the war, they are the ones who need to win it. The fact that they are stalled is a win for Ukraine, who are the ones trying to survive. The Russian economy is in shambles (cf. the Broken window fallacy), as are their army, navy and air force. It will take them decades to rearm back to the same level. Putin isn't stronger, really. He entered a quagmire of a war he cannot back out of (will appear weak) nor can he actually win in any way. He's stuck.
> It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.
Are you sure you understand what BRICS is? Everyone using Russia's predicament to get cheap natural resources doesn't mean that e.g. Brazil or India are closer to Russia...
>Yes, on using human wave attacks, trenches, and cheap Iranian drones.
This war is the most recorded in human history. Can you share some videos of these Russian human wave attacks? Can you describe the objective delineating criteria between a normal attack by an infantry battalion or regiment, and a "human wave" attack? Regarding trenches and "cheap" Iranian drones.....should the Russians NOT practice basic principles of force protection/use of fortifications? Should they NOT leverage novel cost-effective munitions to wage war and instead use massively-expensive gold-plated equipment? How is that working out for the US and allies, who can't produce more than ~600 Patriot missiles per year at a cost of ~$4M per missile.....meanwhile Russia is throwing 500 drones and missiles at Ukraine every few days....
Russia has 1 million in casualties and has failed to capture Ukraine. You really think you can claim it was a "win" because now all their experienced soldiers are dead and their strategy has been reduced to "run towards the enemy and hopefully some of you won't be killed and thus we can capture another field"?
> their strategy has been reduced to "run towards the enemy and hopefully some of you won't be killed and thus we can capture another field"?
Is this seriously the depth of your understanding of Russian tactics (what you described isn't a strategy to begin with...). I recommend watching every tactical analysis video on Mark Tacacs YT channel (he's a NATO military officer, not some pro-RU source):
That includes women, children and elderly. If you count fighting age men only, 1M becomes significant. If you count men actually available for draft, you're already at 10% loss.
It always surprises me when calculation is done on a basis of formula that goes something like this. Total population - Casualties = Number
1 million casualties is an absolutely massive number, regardless of your total population. How many of your fellow citizens would you be willing to throw into the meatgrinder until you say “that not ok”?
For anybody still questioning why the civilized word must stop Russia, i'd suggest to mediate a couple seconds over the parent comment (the commenter in the parent and in his other comments presents Russian position quite correctly)
>"A casualty, as a term in military usage, is a person in military service, combatant or non-combatant, who becomes unavailable for duty due to any of several circumstances, including death, injury, illness, missing, capture or desertion."
When you restrict it to fit men of military age (lets be generous here and say 18-55 , even though there is ample evidence of Russian men 60+ signing up), 1 million is quite alot. The Russian population skews older - median age is around 40. There is also a massive gap of of people their 20s-early 30s.
Imagine all the men of your entire high school / college graduating class being either killed or seriously wounded so Putin can grab a few thousand km of territory.
Now they could allow women in combat roles, but I severely doubt it for this conflict. It would be extraordinarily unpopular and go against the narrative they have been selling their populace for decades.
The Russian regime (and apparently a lot of Russians) deem Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group - they call them "little Russians".
Ukrainian authorship would mean:
- Ukrainians are competent people with agency (which they are of course, for lots of reasons) - this plays into ethnophobia;
- their government, military, etc, is competent, functional with agency - this plays into government legitimacy;
- Overall, in a lot of instances, the Russian government is incompetent, even more incompetent than the guys their propaganda has been trying to paint as corrupt, incompetent people who are being manipulated.
That's why a lot of time Russian propaganda trys to spin Ukrainian wins as "NATO/CIA/MI6/external agent did this".
For example, they tried really hard to bend reality to remove the credit for the Ukrainian drone operation that destroyed a lot of bomber jets, saying it was planned and executed by CIA, MI6, Israel, etc [0].
This is what we're dealing with here: massive ethnophobia and propaganda.
So in their propaganda, Ukraine can't be competent and stand on its merit, because that would mean they're not inferior people and that they have agency.
You should always be wary of someone making these claims without any evidence.
You don't need much of a historical deep dive to see how it's currently being used:
> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]
Ethnical slurs, or any other slurs, change over time. If you go back in time 100+ years in any context, and you use a modern ethnic or racial slur, it will most likely empty of meaning. Just like a lot of slurs from the past have lost their meaning over the years. But the "historical meaning" is constantly being used by Russian propaganda, where they claim one needs to go back to the 1200's, and their interpretation of history, to try to make sense of the current genocide attempt in Ukraine.
There's no logic behind that approach because current actions speak for themselves, including the context of recent history, and that's enough. You can get a pretty clear picture of this whole event starting in the 1990s.
Unless you still see that slur being used by Russian nationalists as an endearing term to address their "brotherly nation" which they support being erased from the map.
What does it mean in the current Russian political environment?
> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]
Just to make sure, according to you, this is completely false and detached?
But this is a small detail from my reply, why are people so focused on this? Even if I was wrong, which I don't see that I am, everything else still stands.
So "The Russian regime (and apparently a lot of Russians) deem Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group - they call them "little Russians"." it is? And this follows from the link? Have you read it? Really?
The term Малороссия now days is outdated indeed, as wiki says. This term was first introduced not even by Russia but by Byzantine Church and word "мало" ("little" as you "translate" here) means "original" "primordial" to distinct two church branches and then where used to denote parts of Rus' under Polish rule.
Note, the linked article does not say that Russians use this term to denote someone inferior. It says that some Ukrainians consider this word offensive which is not surprising taking into account active propaganda and lack of historical education in masses.
You still failed to address the question: "little russians", "kholkhols" are ethnic slurs being used by Russian nationalists as terms of endearment?
> It says that some Ukrainians consider this word offensive which is not surprising taking into account active propaganda and lack of historical education in masses.
So not because Russians are in their land trying to kill as many Ukrainians as possible, terrorizing them, and destroying their culture? It's all because of propaganda?
I addressed you phrase about Russians seen Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group and "proving" this by "they call them "little Russians", please don't shift topics. This is BS. There is no such phrase "little Russians" in Russian language.
Ethnic slurs exists of course. In any language. And "kholkhols" is one of them. As well as word "moskal'" in Ukranian. Do you know what it means? And ethnic slurs are not used in official language, you know. I mean Russian official language.
>So not because Russians are in their land trying to kill as many Ukrainians as >possible, terrorizing them, and destroying their culture? It's all because of >propaganda?
Yes, just because of propaganda targeted at low educated people. I mean you can hate Russia for starting the war and turn a blind eye to Ukrainians killing Donbass people but hating historical word referring to some lands that now are part of Ukraine? Just because it has "мало" in it? You need combination of propaganda and low intelligence here.
P.S. Not going to continue. This all conversation is just waist of my time.
I didn't say "Russians" I said the Regime and a lot of Russians (extreme nationalist ones), which are the ones running the propaganda machine.
It has been used has a derogatory term, like other ethnic slurs.
> And ethnic slurs are not used in official language, you know. I mean Russian official language.
If they are part of the Russian State propaganda language, then they're part of the official language. You, in particular, might not like it and feel uncomfortable with it, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. So you're misguided in your assessment, the problem isn't the new derogatory meaning of the word "little russian", it's the people using it while supporting the genocide in Ukraine.
> As well as word "moskal'" in Ukranian. Do you know what it means?
Oh I'm sure there are plenty of slurs from Ukrainians towards the people invading their land, killing and raping, destroying their livelyhood and culture in an attempt to erase them from the map! How do you expect people to react towards the people committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide?
> I mean you can hate Russia for starting the war and turn a blind eye to Ukrainians killing Donbass people
So your take is still the propaganda hook? Russia has killed more Ukrainians in the Donbass than anyone else since 2014 - they're the only ones to blame. They can try to spin it, but all the evidence points in their direction.
As for "hating an historical word" I don't even know what that means. Words in itself are not subject of being hated, its the people who use them with bad intentions that are the problem here.
Sure, it is always omnipotent Western agencies... while some Western governments are halting support in critical moments - which has bigger impact on the war.
I think Ukrainians (and Russians as well) aren't tech illiterate. They are (both) more than capable in this matter.
> So the foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia.
What foreign intelligence services ? Also if you think there isn't a constant barrage of attacks coming from everyone, you're not ready for the real world.
Tomato, tomato. There is a war according to one side so the reasoning is mute, i'd argue the reason is it is easier to recruit the correct people if they do not work directly for the military than this distinction.
It's Ukraine. Are you aware of the "banks' debt collectors"? They had thugs knocking on your door (and your face) for an overdue loan payment; they would _of course_ use violence/torture to extract information.
Fun fact, I was internal auditor in a bank (I will not specify the year(s) for safety/privacy). We did the due diligence and ended up buying a Ukrainian bank. Part of the 'collections' was really to smash people's faces. Believe it or not. But sure.. you know best.
Yup, I feel like Ukraine has been trying to break away from the society is a meat grinder culture of Russia for a while and the war has made if clear who's on what side locally.
My only qualm with them is their not so great support for gay people, but then during the war ofc the party line is now they love their gay soldiers. Would have been nice to see more action around that beforehand but I get it. Even other first world countries still have plenty of problems as a gay person, especially gay men.
I wonder to what extent either side is worried about the firmware on the drones. Somehow getting tampered-with firmware onto the drones that your enemy is using seems like it would be valuable.
Very interesting but risky (easy to discover and renders the whole operation ineffective). So I believe what they did was heavy-handed but the most reasonable.
One funny tick that's supposedly appeared is installing viruses on the SD cards used in drones so if/when a drone is downed intact and picked up by a curious enemy, their computer is infected.
Yeh, it would seem in some ways more useful than shutting down the factory; if you gently made all the drones do something, like let them be remote controlled, or bomb the place they were launched from.
But once that happened a handful of times it would be corrected.
I suppose it could be used sparingly but Ukraine would have no way of knowing when to use it. Perhaps a Bluetooth or whatever else the drone has on board "keep away" beacon for vips.
There are tones of non-obvious options. Eg make it appear like being shoot-downs. With a bunch of RNG / logic to make it non-obvious... random percentage, only when getting close to target, so many ways...
The real enemy is QA. Don't want it misbehaving during a virtual test flight.
I'd bet that their stickiest problem will be restoring and replacing all the weird IT-OT interface parts (e.g. some random Windows 98 box which is the only thing can run the CNC). No one ever thinks to document or back up those things.
AI translation (to English) is off in places. "Ukrainian cybercriminals" is not in the original and was picked as the translation of the closest sounding full word.
Here is a translated version of the telegram message posted by the hacking team:
> LLC “Gaskar Integration” (Gaskar Group)—one of the largest UAV manufacturers in Russia—has just been penetrated right down to the tonsils in the course of demilitarization and denazification.
> VO Team, together with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance (https://t.me/UCAgroup) and another very well‑known organization whose mere mention makes the vatniks’ bottle‑openings burst (https://gur.gov.ua/), carried out large‑scale operations: we seized all of Gaskar Group’s network and server infrastructure, gathered valuable data on their current and prospective UAVs, destroyed that data, and knocked the entire infrastructure offline.
> By the way, from the information we obtained, the PRC is helping Gaskar Group with production and staff training. China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands .
> VO Team focused on wiping out the production complex’s infrastructure. On‑site we erased more than 250 hosts (4 ESXi servers, 46 virtual servers, 200+ workstations) and bricked about 20 MikroTik devices. In total we destroyed 47 TB of valuable data at Gaskar Group—including 10 TB of backups—and disabled all production and auxiliary systems.
> The scum at Gaskar Group have the blood of hundreds of Ukrainian children, women, and elderly on their hands. That’s why we went after this target with special zeal. We now possess the lists of ALL employees, their home addresses, information about their family members, and much more… We’re in your home computers and phones—we’re everywhere . Not a single bastard from Gaskar Group will escape responsibility!
> The sword of Damocles already hangs by a thin thread over your heads. It’s too late to spew excuses like “we’re apolitical” or “we were just making money”….
> The whole world can see that the so‑called Russian Federation has strategically lost everything. Defeat and collapse of that unwashed entity are only a matter of time. VO Team is collecting data on everyone involved in Putin’s criminal war—the deaths of our children, mothers, and all Ukrainians. Retribution is inevitable and is drawing near!
When there's hundreds of drones raining down on your civilians every day, just disabling the production has a a higher priority than being cutesy with things that might work further away into the future.
In several cases during World War II, the Allies intentionally allowed German attacks to happen (or did not act to prevent them) to avoid revealing that they had cracked German codes, particularly the Enigma cipher.
Actually, I don't think that's known to have ever happened. The Allies protected Ultra intelligence by parallel construction--coming up with other means to 'discover' the same information (principally, sending a reconnaissance flight to the known location of wolf packs).
The main claim for this myth is the sacrifice of Coventry during the Battle of Britain, but as far as I'm aware, historians are in general agreement that Ultra was unable to ascertain that Coventry was the target before the raid took place.
"In his 1974 book The Ultra Secret, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham asserted that the British government had advance warning of the attack from Ultra; intercepted German radio messages encrypted with the Enigma cipher machine and decoded by British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. He further claimed that Winston Churchill ordered that no defensive measures should be taken to protect Coventry, lest the Germans suspect that their cipher had been broken."
And the Wikipedia article immediately goes on to detail refutations of that claim:
> Winterbotham's claim has been rejected by other Ultra participants and by historians. They state that while Churchill was indeed aware that a major bombing raid would take place, no one knew what the target would be.
[then follows three paragraphs of more detailed refutation]
I don't think that's comparable because the Allies hoped cracking Enigma would reveal other secrets in the future. Ukraine probably aren't worried that Russia are going to do something else more worth interrupting with their drones in the future.
You can reflash however you want for some bugs. The deal would be to make it a dormant attack not a destroy all in one go and expose the payload. There have been successful hacks where a buffer overflow was inserted in in a one off write, that was then targeted when needed. If employed carefully in special situations, this could be an important weapon. There are also deeper levels of compromise: why compromise the source code or a the firmware binary when you can permanently compromise the production in a subtle way. Working your penetration slowly so that the whole plant or even production system must be scrapped by the enemy. At the very least gather intel.
Look at successful cyber campaigns like stuxnet or an actual hardware sabotage from Israel. The attacks were dormant until they were ready for maximum effect.
Randomly disabling a production site, without a strategic context, is going to be an isolated win, or an operational victory.
I remember reading some articles about the pentagon being a bit upset at some of the strategic decisions of Ukraine's armed forces where they often push for morale boosting moments at big costs(i think 2 years ago they spent lots of resources to get a strategically irrelevant town). And honestly this is also what it looks like: You dont see a coordinated attack but spurious disconnected events. I think when you are gasping for air you hold on to anything you can, but still the goal is to win, not just look like winning.
I still think they'd work it out pretty fast. I'm sure sabotage is pretty high on the list of things the Russians would be thinking about.
It's a good idea, I just think if the goal is to stop the drones working, what better way to do that then to destroy the manufacturing capabilities as often as possible?
Even in the case you describe, you're allowing them to have drones and still do some damage.
Obviously if there was opportunity for a supply chain attack like that they would have done it in addition to wrecking the IT infrastructure. Regardless, I imagine this will impact day to day drone operation as the Russians might re-flash the firmware to a known good version whether there is a backdoor or not
The source of this news is the Ukrainian military which seems to exaggerate and spread propaganda (as does every other country of course). I don't know why we accept this information as reliable.
You don't have to. In fact, your best bet is to wait for Gaskar's response and/or the UA publishing trophies. But the lack of immediate corroboration for a clandestine cyber op doesn't somehow mean it probably didn't happen.
Ghost of Kyiv was recognized by Ukraine itself as a myth. Snake Island "go fuck yourself" was misrepresented (they were killed vs captured), plenty of others:
There's also just endless small stuff (shorts/tiktoks/cam footage) on social media (reddit) that really does not pass the sniff test.
I think what Russia is doing is terrible, I am not defending them at all. I am just allergic to bullshit, and there is plenty of smelly things happening on the Ukrainian side, though of course I recognize the Russians are especially bad in this regard.
The ghost of Kyiv was recognized as a myth at the time of it's spread. The Snake Island story is understandable. Every country makes mistakes about KIA vs. MIA.
I was not very clear, but I meant Ukrainian intelligence services claiming operational success where there was none. It's also interesting that this Wikipedia entry appears devoid of UA false propaganda after 2022. I wonder if they realized that this was not a good Wiki entry on which to appear.
it is worth something if it's recognized as a myth by official sources at the time, but it doesn't change that social media (reddit) was absolutely jammed full of stuff about it, presenting it as factual, and has led probably millions of people to believe it was real. and even beyond the posts that were explicitly about it, comment sections continued to refer to it in serious ways. my whole point is there is a concerted effort to spread it as an "us vs them" narrative, with ukraine being the "us" part (as an american).
what i ultimately care about is manipulation, because manipulation and disinformation erode democracy, and it's overwhelmingly done by the rich and powerful and at the expense of the working class. there are endless billions of dollars getting funneled into the military industrial complex around ukraine, and the more americans align with ukraine, and the more americans can feel invested and interested in the war in happy-feel-good-ways (like having heroes and "fuck russia" moments) the more americans are okay with their tax dollars getting spent this way. whatever machinery is at play here has very successfully captured the support of a massive part of the American left, and the same people you see protesting about the environment are the same people you see waiving ukraine flags and being manipulated into suddenly being pro-war despite being against things like the war in iraq.
billionaires continue to make their billions, people continue to believe what they read on reddit and watch on corporate news, and the narrative is always things that aren't class consciousness.
The billionaires appear to be more pro-Russia, as that is where more billions lay.
Look at the oligarch paper of record, the grey lady. Just last week, they claimed that the Western-most, and safest Ukraininian city, Lviv, was too unsafe. They instead chose to embed that reporter with russian troops, in Kursk, and described it as "A Landscape of Death: Where Ukraine invaded."
It is insane, and utterly disconnect from reality. Do you know who uses blanket artillery barrages on villages? Russia. Even if Ukraine wanted to do that, they don't have the shells to spare. Russia has a well known documented history of not giving a flying f about the lives of its own people. This was just another example, and NYT laid it on "Where Ukraine invaded."
I honestly have a hard time believing that this is a NYT headline, and story. This is "WMD in Iraq" levels of NYT journalistic malpractice. This is true manipulation. The aggressor is the victim. Up is down. Who cares about Reddit comments. Decision makers read this crap in the NYT!
billionaires are pro-USA because the billions of dollars we're "giving to ukraine" is actually billions of dollars going to private american companies that sell services and equipment to the US government that are then handed over to ukraine.
i agree that russia is definitely the bad guy here, and i agree russia is much worse about fake news
> The attack destroyed over 47 TB of critical data,
I'm very dubious that there would be such an amount of “critical” data pretty much anywhere, besides the banking and insurance sector. And particularly not at a drone manufacturer.
If you focus only on data with high-uptime requirements, no probably not 50 TB.
If you include low-uptime requirement but low-replaceability stuff like all the products' mechanical, electrical and software designs, documentation and artifacts? Easily 50 TB.
What's interesting is that this whole challenge is making Russia stronger. Russia has increased its military industry and its now running full steam. Every attack is giving them an opportunity to harden. All of that is meaningless if it makes Russia stronger and more resilient to embargos and cyber/physical attacks in the long run.
For all of this to have meaning it has to have a fall of USSR kind of impact at some point, otherwise we just strengthened one of the world's most dangerous state.
Of course but also Ukraine doesn't have the privilege to care about the long term right now. You can't lose the battle today to win the war that you may never live to fight.
Russia recently announced that they want to import millions of immigrants now, likely because they massacred a big chunk of their young workforce. Their economy and production capacity is slowly crumbling, political dissent is rising. I don't think they're getting stronger.
I think Russia would be able to project far much more power had they not attacked Ukraine and entered this long war. At this point the russian bear appears to be made of cardboard, low grade cheap cardboard. Not sure how long they'll be able to sustain this but the more they do the weaker they'll become. They've been losing a lot of ground in the Middle East and Asia as well.
Are they? They're running at full stream and yet they're still in a years-long stalemate in Ukraine?
Authoritarian governments always fail, because they get used to achieving everything by simply ordering it to be achieved, while the laws of physics don't obey orders.
Meanwhile they're murdering how many of their own soldiers per day?
I run a small home lab, about 30 services
One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour.
And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more.
This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.
Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task.
I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared. The poor two IT guys over there has no idea how to recover and the official help was pityful.
I also helped with a ransomware attack on a large company. The effort people had to do to remember why something was that way, or just remember whatever was colossal. Sure a lot of things were "documented" and "tested" but reality hit hard.
I had to rebuild a significant percentage of my homelab after my house was raided by the police and they took about $10k-worth of my gear; desktop, laptop, NAS, hard drives.
However, because in a previous life I'd been responsible for backups and involved in disaster recovery planning I was already kind of prepared with:
- a mirrored on site copy of backups (that they either didn't find or chose to leave behind)
- older hardware that had once been performing the duties of the existing seized gear (I'm a bit of a hoarder, I like repurposing or keeping for just such an occasion)
- multiple off site backups
- pretty good documentation of my setup
I was back up and running within a day or two and had lost maybe a couple of days of data. And it's a home lab, so nothing super important anyway, but a (not really) nice resilience test.
It also gave me the experience to work out a few structural changes to further limit the impact of an event that takes out a bunch of processing and storage.
(After 8 months they told me to pick up all my gear, they found nothing, but thanks for traumatising my kids)
Why did they raid you?
Short version:
Possibly the worst thing to be raided for: distribution of CSAM.
Apparently based purely on the 'evidence' of my IP address being on some list - that's the only explanation I ever got.
Funny thing is, they did so little background research they didn't even know to expect kids in the house when they raided at 6:30am.
It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.
The long version I haven't written yet and probably never will. I don't want to dwell on it, I want to get on with my life and have an even worse drama to deal with at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533637
I know I'm alive, that's for sure. I'm trying to make lemonade by the goddamn bucket load.
P.S. I have written prior HN comments referring to the raid if you care enough to go back that far.
> It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.
As someone who was arrested in his PJs at 4am due to a false accusation that the police did not investigate and for which they did not have probable cause, I feel this in my bones.
$15k in legal fees, a day in jail, and three months later, the charges were dropped because, as per the DA, “we cannot in good conscience pursue this case”.
No consequences for the person who made the false accusation, or the officer that enacted an arrest without probable cause.
My heart still skips a beat whenever I think I hear a knock at the door or noises in the middle of the night. I’ll wake up from a dead sleep in a panic. In theory I could pursue a lawsuit against both the accuser and officer, but that feels overwhelming — I’ve just tried to move on.
It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system. The process is, in of itself, punishment.
I was fortunate enough to be able to afford good legal representation, and I now have a great deal of empathy for those who are railroaded by the system because they cannot.
I'm only postulating here, but I have a strong suspicion that my ability to get past it as well I have (not perfectly, but I don't have nightmares or break into a sweat when I hear police sirens - although it does remind me almost every time) is because I had to give the impression to my kids that there was nothing to worry about; this is not a big deal; this is not traumatic and will not change the course of your life.
> It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system. The process is, in of itself, punishment.
One million times this. Even if it's not completely true at it's base, it's true for those unfortunate enough to have experienced this.
One of the funny (?) things about it, is that most of the individual officers were nice enough people, personable (other than one inflammatory officer who should not be employed in a role that comes into contact with people), one even gave the cat a pat. It's the system / systems, and likely the perverse incentives for their monthly stats.
I'm glad I didn't end up needing legal representation.
The way I deal with it is to actively let it go, forgive the situation in my mind, treat it as one of those anomalous circumstances that happen every second on a global scale. Treat it as a reminder of the unpredictability of life and an opportunity to be thankful that it's not my 'normal'.
>It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system.
Well,hopefully it has also changeed the way you see society in general, it's terrifying how common people willingly ( even when they have options) defer to the govt./authorities. The system didn't get be this this way overnight. Covid was one example of the tyranny of the majority.
That's absolutely horrifying! Glad to hear you've managed to move past it, as it would have absolutely broken me.
My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.
It makes me crazy that police in the U.S. nowadays can get a search warrant permitting seizure of large amounts of valuable computer and networking gear along with digital devices certain to massively disrupt anyone's life - only from buying things which are completely legal to buy and possess. Apparently all it takes is "a suspicious pattern of behaviors" to get a judge to issue an expansive warrant. The "suspicious pattern" is often defined ad hoc by police under no objective standard and never detailed in the warrant request. Judges are really failing in their duties because there are too many cases like this happening.
Depriving people of their valuable property for 8 months or more is also abusively punitive. In warrants that grant seizures of all or most digital devices, judges should require police to return the items within 30 days if they don't either file charges or go back to the judge with good cause for an extension. If police can't get around to actually looking at the evidence they claimed was so crucial in 30 days maybe it's not a high-priority crime. And if having a reasonable time limit makes it too hard to look through so much stuff, they're free to more narrowly tailor their seizure requests so they don't have so much to troll through.
And my experience was in Australia, so the "decline of policing" has well and truly reached out shores as well.
To possibly make this even more frustrating, when I was told I could pick up my gear, the detective in charge said that a few things they found flagged as suspicious:
1. I had / used virtual machines
2. I had "Tor" on my computer(s)
3. I had downloaded stuff from Megaupload
Now I'm not entirely sure whether these comments were based on what they found on my seized gear, or whether these were actually sufficient 'red flags' to make them think the warrant was justified initially, but, my god, how completely out of their depth, and therefore totally unqualified, they are to make life-changing adjudications about these things - and that their access to metadata only makes it more likely that they'll make false positive mistakes (which is just terrible for society overall).
I'm literally not sure what they meant by saying "you have tor on your computer", whether there's evidence of my having visited the dark web, or just having a (way outdated) copy of the tor browser saved somewhere.
And I think the only things I'd ever downloaded from Megaupload were Android ROMs.
Regarding Virtual Machines: I can't even... they're obviously non-technical so couldn't possibly understand, and yet... gah, I can't even...
Where you actually charged and prosecuted for anything or did they just steal your gear without due process?
They had a warrant for the raid. Or at least they showed me a piece of paper, but my mind was so thrown that I literally couldn't read it (I've never experienced such a thing before or since - I literally couldn't make out letters on the page, such was my state of shock at the time).
I wasn't arrested or charged, they found nothing of what they were looking for on the multi terabytes of disks they seized. No further action other than the raid.
Did they eventually return your gear?
> (After 8 months they told me to pick up all my gear, they found nothing, but thanks for traumatising my kids)
Don't forget yourself, the breadwinner of the household!
The latter wouldn't be unheard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
In the USA? Where you can be sued if someone slips on your sidewalk? Can't you sue the gvmt?
Australia.
We looked into anything that could be done to minimise the chances of such a thing happening to innocent parties, but the only option was to make a complaint about an individual officer. There's no (easy, obvious) way to question the system they use to determine "validity" of raids or due diligence prior to requesting a warrant, or evidence required to justify a warrant.
The whole thing just felt to me like it was blindly rubber stamped all the way through because "protect the children". Pity my daughter was a child and absorbs such experiences... My son was also a child, but he's less affected by such things.
It's good for children in the US to learn early that they can't trust the police.
Same goes for almost any other country I've been to. But the US does seem to be one of the worst places from what I see online.
In which country can the children trust the police?
I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for looking like I'm shilling, but the UAE, ironically. They do not mess around with kids, and make sure they're not exposed to whatever issue the parents might be facing. In many cases, the police allow for lenient visitations for the mother and children. These instances are often not portrayed online because 1.) family guys tend to be less involved in open crime whatsoever, 2.) the UAE has a large singles population so whatever instances happen are very rare, and 3.) the surveillance state ensures that the police already know who's at fault and who isn't.
But God forbid if you're ever caught for any crime whatsoever. Or if you're detained for domestic violence. Especially if not in Dubai (which is miles more lenient than other emirates).
In general, the most civilized part of the world, western & north europe.
So, Norway, Dennmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland
You can, and people have, get arrested and sentenced to prison in most of those countries for posts on social media.
Do you have some specific examples? You present it as if it's a bad thing but I can imagine scenarios where it makes perfect sense. As an obvious example the person could be sharing CP on social media.
So what exactly are you referring to?
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/06/german-police-mass-raids-h...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-woman-given-harsher-senten...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-inves...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/10/autistic-teenage...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
Germany and the UK seem to be the worst offenders in regards to this, but that may just be selection bias on what gets into English language media. I can pull more articles if you're actually interested.
China?
Japan, England
In England the police arrests you for a tweet under hate speech laws and they threw the post office workers under the bus to protect the politicians and buggy SW of Fujitsu. Not the place where I'd trust the law enforcement at all.
And Japan, while being clean, safe and Kawai, its legal system has like a 90%+ conviction rate, so make of this what you will.
Can they? I've heard of police in Japan pinning murder cases on people they don't like. I believe there has been some reporting on this related to why thy have such high clearance rates. Don't the police in the UK still have a lot of sexual misconduct scandals?
> In the USA? Where you can be sued if someone slips on your sidewalk? Can't you sue the gvmt?
Sure you can sue anybody for anything. Whether your case actually gets heard or not is another consideration. And even if it gets heard, the judge can simply dismiss it for a variety of reasons before proceeding to trial.
Also, state and the federal governments have sovereign immunity and qualified immunity. Basically the government has to allow itself to be sued.
True this doesn't apply to counties or cities, however there is still a much higher bar for tort even for local police. Generally if they are operatikng within the law, like executing a valid search warrant, the standard is much higher than it would be for an average citizen.
You can sue the government, but the grounds for winning are much narrower.
Meerly suffering harm from government action is not sufficient. Having property impounded as part of an investigation, pursuant to a warrant, is likely not actionable, unless there was malice involved. Using slim evidence isn't really actionable.
The government has endless resources; you would go bankrupt unless a law firm saw a huge payout in taking your case. The system is rigged in favor of the government. They could have burned down his house and the neighbor's house, and not been responsible. Land of the free, God Bless America......
Also, there is almost no deterrent effect. The people who authorized or perpetrated the abuse are not punished if you sue and win a settlement. They don't even have to hire and pay the lawyers. The payment comes out everyone's taxes, perhaps with interest if the government has to pay by issuing debt.
When the police abuse their power, it's the community that pays their salaries that feels the pain.
This was in Australia but your point stands.
Why would you be able to sue the government for conducting a search authorized by a judge? It's expected that result of some searches is "Oopsie doopsie nothing found".
It’s even worse than that, in the US police have broad latitude to destroy property, kill pets, seize any cash or assets (theoretically related to the crime, but very easy to abuse) and etc. while executing a search, with little to no recourse.
Not just kill pets, but kill people. Even if they raided the wrong home.
Yeah, it’s true.
I think it's fair to expect that the authorities must have a very good probable cause to perform a search of your home, and that any search that turned out to be unwarranted results in a big compensation and a public announcement stating that the specific police department and judge violated the right to privacy.
I'm guessing search should still happen in a way to limit damage (physical, psychological) to other parties (in this case, the kids present).
You could sue if they made some major mistakes or were fabricating evidence or some other significant malpractice. It's a pretty high bar.
You can but chances are you'll still lose.
If your downspout is draining onto the sidewalk and turning it into an invisible ice rink...
I woulda just left it at "screen name checks out"
Yeah, BLKNSLVR came from "Black and Silver" based on some crappy piece of art I did way long ago. It wasn't until using it as an in-game handle that a friend read it out to me as "Black Enslaver" that I even realised it could read another way.
I don't like that it can be interpreted that way, but I also refuse to stop using it since that's someone else's reading.
The only factor I use to treat one human different from another is whether they're a jerk or not, and I have to know them well enough to work that out. I've come across a few jerks in my time, and they take many and varied forms.
This is why documenting is so crucial. Even on a software architecture level.
A few months from now, I'd love to have written down decisions for my current project:
- Why did I decided to use Kysely over Drizzle, Knex, Prisma, TypeORM or other ORM/SQL tool?
- How am I going to do migrations?
- Why am I using one of Deno/Bun over sticking to nodejs?
- Why did I structure the project as a directory per feature over controllers/models/services directories?
- Why did I fork this library and what are the steps to keep this thing updated? Do I plan to upstream my changes? Is there a GitHub issue or PR about it?
- Why am I hosting in one of AWS/GCP/Azure? Why not lambda functions? Why docker?
- Why did I pick this specific distribution of kubernetes over the other also lightweight alternatives?
- Why did I even start this project and what do I aim to accomplish with it?
So I created a # Decisions section in README.md
This way I don't keep doubting my own decisions and wasting time opening 20 documentation tabs to compare solutions yet again.
I use GitHub Issues for this. It works so well - any time I make a decision I drop a comment on the relevant issue (often formatted as "Decision: ..."). Now they are archived, searchable, accessible via API and easy to navigate to from my source code because my commits all reference the issue number that relates to the change.
Til Github deletes your account randomly! Happened to a friend of mine recently, and he didn't get any explanation or recourse.
Of course, you have a relatively high profile, so could probably avoid it/get it reversed.
What do you use for archiving github issues?
I've tried a couple of things. I wrote a tool for exporting them to SQLite: https://github.com/dogsheep/github-to-sqlite
I've also tried a mechanism where I have GitHub Actions write them out as JSON files in the repo itself, then I can git clone them in one go: https://gist.github.com/simonw/0f906759afd17af7ba39a0979027a... and https://github.com/simonw/fetch-github-issues
you could just call the github API
Every project I work on has a technical-decisions.org file. Also a daily-notes.org file with every failed experiment, test, install command, etc. The top level headings are dates.
Technical decisions used to be in the daily-notes.org file, but keeping in a separate file makes it more accessible to LLMs. I actually started that practice before LLMs were in common use, I struggle to remember why.
> I struggle to remember why.
Should that "why" be in technical-decisions.org or daily-notes.org?
It should have been the first entry in some project's technical-decisions.org file!
this is why in 2023 i started livestreaming whenever I work at my PC. I also take these kinds of daily and project notes, but it's a bit tedious and can take you out of the flow. so I just let youtube capture everything I'm doing and if I need to go back and remind myself of something (or ask an LLM a question about my livestream history, in the not too distant future) it's all right there.
We just recently started using ADRs (Architectural Decision Records). They are deliberately stored (in markdown) in the same repository as the source code for our SaaS business lives. If we can recover the source, chances are high that we can also recover the "why's". If we cannot do that, we are screwed anyways.
This. I encouraged my team to use a templated (standardized) ADR for any big decisions that don’t have an obvious answer or complete consensus and it had reduced the second guessing and relitigation of decisions to nearly zero. It also gave is a good snapshot of where we were when we made that call so historic decisions weren’t disparaged.
Could you share the template you're using?
There is an open community proposed standard template for ADRs, but I don't have the link
You also have to document alternative worlflows for your business while you don't get everything back to normal.
Lots of things can keep going with pen and paper or some cloud software.
At the very least, you have to communicate with your clients.
Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all).
Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.
Actually I think this is hard to properly implement. If you're a small shop, really setting up backups with redundancies, writing the documentation, and testing disaster recovery, that's so much more work than people anticipate, and it has implications on all areas of the business, not just IT. So usually it's hard to justify to management why you would put in all that work and slow down operations—which leads to everyone postponing it.
Either that bites you sooner or later, or you're lucky and grow; suddenly, you're a larger organisation, and there are way too many moving parts to start from scratch. So you do a half-hearted attempt of creating a backup strategy held together by duct-tape and hope, that kinda-sorta should work in the worst case, write some LLM-assisted documentation that nobody ever reads, and carry on. You're understaffed and overworked anyway, people are engaging in shadow IT, your actual responsibilities demand attention, so that's the best you can do.
And then you've grown even bigger, you're a reputable company now, and then the consultants and auditors and customers with certification requirements come in. So that's when you actually have to put in the work, and it's going to be a long, gruesome, exhausting, and expensive project. Given, of course, that nobody fucks up in the mean time.
Indeed. Setting up infrastructure properly and documenting it properly is even more complex than coding, to me.
I can go back to code I wrote months or years ago, and assuming I architectured and documented it idiomatically, I takes me only a bit of time to start being able to reason about it effectively.
With infrastructure is it a whole different story. Within weeks of not touching it (which happens if it just works) I start to have trouble retaining a good mental model of it. if I have to dig into it, I'll have to spend a lot of time getting re-acquainted with how it all fits together again.
As much as Cloudformation and Terraform annoy me (thankfully I’ve never been burdened with k8s) there is something magical about having your infrastructure captured in code.
Just the other day one of my clients had a production critical server failing and we started restoring it from backups.
Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server.
It turns out that the company that made this important piece of software doesn't even exist anymore.
Virtualization really helps. We have a lot of weird software which requires hardware dongles, but they're all USB dongles and they're all virtualized, one of the DC racks has a few U worth of just USB socket -> dongle wired up so that if we spin up a VM it can say "Hey, give me a USB socket with a FooCorp OmniBloat dongle on it" and get one unless they're all used.
would certainly be interested to learn more about this
> Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server.
This is around the time when you call that one guy on your team that can reverse engineer and patch out the license check.
Interoperability exception might allow this in exigent circumstances when you do have a valid license, but I wouldn’t do this without running it by the software vendor whose license you are using. In a recovery situation, you’ll probably need to be on the phone a lot, so I can see how you might think it’s quicker to bypass the license check, but that is one person giving some or all of their attention just to that. Disaster recovery isn’t a one person job unless that one person was the whole team anyway, so I think this idea needs to be calibrated somewhat to expectations.
This is a nightmare kind of discovery. I had a similar one, but fortunately, it wasn't as impactful.
This is why I like docker, if you keep the sources, you recover no matter what (at least until the "no matter what" holds water)
> This is why I like docker,
my understanding is that docker would not have helped in that scenario
it really depends on the scenario but if the application was dockerized and they had an image, it would be just starting it again, somewhere else.
Possibly with the same network settings if the licensing check was based on that.
But of course it can easily go south, though testing the recovery of a container based off an image and mounted volume is simple and quickly shows you if it works or not.
But of course it may work today but not tomorrow because the software was not ready for Y2K and according to it we are in the XX century or something and the license is 156 years ... young. Cannot allow this nonsense to proceed, call us at <defunct number>
IT is full of joy and happiness
> it really depends on the scenario
yeah and that scenario was clear:
> Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server.
"hardware" does not mean "bare metal". It could be a MAC, a serial number or similar things that may be linked to a generic or clonable value in virtualization.
but docker isn't virtualization, you understand this, right ?
To some extent, yes -- having developed apps that were dockerized, and having managed virtualization systems (ESXi and similar), as well as docker engines.
I am not sure I see your point, though.
If you’re doing it right, the DR process is basically the deployment process, and gets tested every time you do a deployment. We used chef, docker, stored snapshot images, and every deploy basically spun up a new infrastructure from scratch, and once it had passed the automated tests, the load balancers would switch to the new instance. DBs were created from binary snapshots which would then slave off the live DB to catch up (never more than an hour of diff), which also ensured we had a continuously tested DB backup process. The previous instance would get torn down after 8 hours, which was long enough to allow any straggling processes to finish and to have somewhere to roll back to if needed.
This all got stored in the cloud, but also locally in our office, and also written onto a DVD-R, all automatically, all verified each time.
Our absolute worst case scenario would be less than an hour of downtime, less than an hour of data loss.
Similarly our dev environments were a watered down version of the live environment, and so if they were somehow lost, they could be restored in the same manner - and again, frequently tested, as any merge into the preprod branch would trigger a new dev environment to automatically spin up with that codebase.
It takes up-front engineering effort to get in place, but it ended up saving our bacon twice, and made our entire pipeline much easier and faster to manage.
> Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all).
I think this is an outdated view. In modern enterprises DR is often one of the most crucial (and difficult) steps in building the whole infra. You select what is crucial for you, you allocate the budget, you test it, and you plan the date of the next test.
However, I'd say it's very rare to do DR of everything. It's terribly expensive and problematic. You need to choose what's really important to you based on defined budgets.
Budgets - and lowering them - win every time. I do budgeting and forecasting for SaaS companies and this kind of work is always the first cut
Is there a recurring theme for why? There is huge risk exposure.
People round down small risk to zero risk. Meanwhile the cost to run a full DR drill is a certain and immediate cost to their budget.
That's a choice that companies make. I've certainly worked at places which don't test DR, while at my current job we do annual DR runs, where we'll bring up a complete production ready environment from scratch to prove that the backups work, and the runbook for doing a restore actually works.
I'm retired now, but the last place I worked estimated it would take months to do a full restore from off site backups, assuming that the data center and hardware were intact. If the data center was destroyed... Longer.
Say what you want about European financial organizations but they are legally obliged to practice their recovery strategies. So every other month production clusters with all user data get teared down in one cloud region and set up in another one over night. This works surprisingly well. I guess they would never do that without the legal requirements.
I used to find it amusing how many people thought Backup was a requirement.
"No, Restore is" I would say to stunned faces...
In the 1990s mainframes got so stable and redundant that some were not rebooted in over a decade - they could even upgrade the kernel without rebooting. Then one company had a power failure andthe backup generators failed. When the power came back it was months before they figured out everything it was doing and then how to start that service where the guy who started it originally quit years ago.
most companies started rebooting the mainframe every six months to ensure they could restart it.
That's why I delete all my company's data stores every quarter too!
I was very supportive of the infrastructure IT team when they moved their datacenter. I also had popcorn when watching the switch being figuratively flipped on.
It went surprisingly well despite having stayed 15 years in the old DC without rebooting. They were super scared of exactly the case you described but except for some minor issues (and a lot of cussing) it was OK.
The data center where I work self-tests this stuff unintentionally a couple of times a year. The typical case: UPS maintenance, room is put on bypass, load drops when switching back.
This is arguably better than not having any tests.
This is why I reboot my server from time to time after having applied patches or made more significant changes, despite the fact that "it should not change anything". This is a good moment to realize that it did change something and you have the opportunity to fix the issue while it I sfresh in your mind, and possibly with more time.
On the other hand, I’ve worked in places where the total destruction of IT (so as to start again from a clean slate) was within the Overton window of options for how to transform the business.
> I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared.
I'm curious about how you got in the door here. Very cool, but isn't healthcare IT notoriously cagey about access? I've had to do PHI training and background checks before getting into the system at my (admittedly only 2) PHI-centered jobs.
Granted, if it was such an emergency, I could see them rushing you through a lite version of the HR onboarding process. Did you have a connection in the hospital through whom you offered your services?
The nature and place of my work helped to quickly clear this.
I volunteered to help because I knew that even broadly planning the recovery, evidence preservation etc. would be completely beyond the capabilities of the two IT folks (they were extremely nice and helpful, and glad that there was someone to help).
I was there to draw things on the board and ask the questions that will help to recover. I would not have (nor want, not have the need) to access patient information. This is something I warned them about early in the process, as the chaos was growing.
You need to imagine a large hospital completely blocked, with patients during an operation being stabilized and driven away.
I am used to crisis situations and having someone who will anticipate things you do not think about (how to communicate, how to reach prople having planned procedures, who does what and who talks with whom) is a useful person to have before the authorities kick in.
My wife had a planned operation that morning and I was on site when the ransomware hit, it is just this. Nothing James Bond like, just sheer luck to have been around.
The hospital made a recovery but it took about a year IIRC
That's really cool. I was mostly envisioning hands-on admin stuff (because that's the work I'm most familiar with), but I hadn't thought about how much of a boon it would be to have someone with incident management experience arriving to help out. If you ever do a write-up about your experience, I'd love to read it.
In that case, doing just incident response would not have been enough to be frank. They needed guidance on what to do and what not to do, technically speaking, so that on the one hand, they have hope to start things up, but also to preserve evidence.
Even the sequencing (recover and secure the network, then the AD, then some Tier-2 apps etc.) was something they were not ready for. I cannot blame them - the way these things are managed is really messy, with no clear responsibilities beyond the everyday operations.
My hope is that the continuous attacks on the national infrastructure (such as hospitals) will build a more coordinated and homogenous approach. This would be a great lesson learned.
> Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task.
Half of the work is to know what you need, the other half is to know how you do it, while the third half is to cope with all the undocumented tinkering which happened along the way. So in that regard, starting from scratch can be acceptable, as long you are not starting from zero, and can build up on the knowledge and experience of the previous run(s). I mean, there is a whole gaming-genre about this, which is quite popular. And usually you have the benefit that you might be able to fix some fundamental failures which you had to ignore because nobody wanted to take the risk.
wait, what games are in that genre?
I think they are talking about roguelikes/roguelites
I've worked in tech all my life, and long ago learned how important it is to be impeccably diligent in documenting build processes whenever creating, deploying or adjusting new architecture.
Now it's simply become part of my engineering hygiene - as natural and effortless as brushing my teeth.
Actually drilling your DR is also crucial. If you never put it to the test, your documentation isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
In fact the last few years I've been thinking about ways for these systems to rebuild themselves on a continuous basis. Eg. I'd love a smartphone that competely restores itself from backup every night, even to brand new identical hardware, including secure element artifacts (either via private keys I securely control or reregistering everything in an automated fashion), with no user-noticeable impact.
Yeah, I had similar experiences, but now I use nix, which solves these problems.
I don't really know nix, but have used Ansible to try to have all configuration version-controlled and automated. But if there's any possibility of making changes outside of that, you have to be very disciplined. As soon as someone makes a one-off manual change to a crontab or a systemd unit, you're screwed.
NixOS just doesn’t let you do that in the nominal case, most of /etc consists of symlinks to a read only partition that is managed by nix - it is actually more difficult to do one-off scripts or config changes via files than it is to do so via nix, at least nominally - there are of course software that has it’s own special config format or that keeps its config in a database - but those get snapshot(ed?) and backed up anyway.
Imo, nix is more finnicky but more of a complete solution than ansible.
> but now I use nix, which solves these problems
Um, sorry but what do you mean ?
Everything is configured via nix, I can swap out the hardware and redeploy everything from 0 with a single command invocation.
What if something happens to where you keep your configuration?
It is in git, I have backups. The secrets are not backed up, but those I can recycle if need be.
Chamath's new company 80/90 is targeting this pain. Large firms often have no idea what their software is trying to do. Rebuilding it is cheaper and leads to better software.
If you are professionally responsible for infrastructure, and you haven't thought very hard about the "how do we rebuild from scratch" case, you're committing professional malpractice.
The problem is environments like hospitals, who'll "cost center" their IT department to death, where even the most seasoned pro has no chance to ever do the right thing. There should be liability at the board level. There never will.
- i'm scripting at best the full setup of my servers (mostly Nixos and some debian).
- daily backup locale + remote (blackbaze with 60 readonly retention strategy, separated bucket by service)
- monthly offline backup
- a preprod server where my users can restore entiere environment for testing purpose (CI)
in case of full house fire, i can be back online in an working day.
PS: i have only some TBs of data so quite easy to do.
> I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared.
How did they prevent threat actors presenting themselves as volunteers, were you vetted?
A real person showing up is a huge cost and risk. No threat actor will continue an attack on just a hospital like that. The economics make no sense and any money is already extracted. Ransomware shops are very happy to just shotgun the internet from afar.
A far bigger risk is accepting incompetent volunteers if anything.
I didn't say anything about original attacker continuing the attack.
The same answer still applies: That attack vector doesn't have a positive ROI.
The nature of my work helped to quickly sort that out
I would hope that military facilities follow better standards and are capable of recovering more quickly than a hobbyist...
>This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.
TBH your mistake was only running one layer of virtualization. What I do on my home setup is run a docker in a VM in a VM in a docker in a docker in a VM in a docker in a VM in a VM in a docker. This, I feel, ought to be the minimum level of indirection and virtualization in any technical configuration in perpetuity. Anything less is bush league and prone to errors.
side remark: I like the ambiguity of titanic (giant) task and Titanic (1912) task :-)
Don't forget Titanic (1997)! :D
30 services is a small home lab?
Out of these 30 services, ~8 are useful on a daily basis, some from time to time,e and the rest is either forgotten or tests.
What I meant I that I do not have the kind of setup a lot of people show: a DC-grade self, with a U2 switch etc. I have an old server, my ISP box, a UPS, a switch and maybe something else I forgot. But since the server runs both Home Assistant and Pi-hole, it is critically important.
OTOH this criticality allows me not to invest too much in monitoring: I have family and friends yelling immediately when something is down :)
Thats why Infra as Code is very very important.
Not really, the OP was already using docker, but even with IAC on a small home lab like this you're going to modify one or two small things manually here and there over the years.
Sure it can help, but it's just not a one fix solution people thing. If you want a good test of your IAC, just provisioning a brand new environment first time using only your iac.
The first rule of IAC club is that you do not hand modify your infrastructure.
The second rule of IAC club is that you do not hand modify your infrastructure.
If you hand modify the already IAC system , you are not doing IAC. IAC with CI/CD is what we do. We don't even use AWS Console , we do everything in terraform/opentofu code.
> you're going to modify one or two small things manually here and there over the years.
Huh? This is a strange assumption to make. Is your premise that IAC can't ever be truly reproducible?
If you are modifying things manually then you're not doing IAC.
Yeah as soon as you start hand tweaking the system it breaks IAC.
Working for a company in Germany which is planing production 3 months in advance using printed Excel sheets. The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it. Production management tries to hide this fact and does not talk to the engineering department. This will go for years, consultants will gather their fees for non functional system. Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing. It is just nice to have.
In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no faith in the launch of DeMars and wanted to ensure that stock would not run out. Everything was accounted for, if anyone believe that he as committing fraud, they where welcome to do a complete inventory.
DeMars launched, and procurement basically stopped for a year. Only the items my friend was in charge of remained in stock, through out the launch/roll-out process.
There's lots of pushes to add software to more of the military, but I don't think these kinds of resilience questions are really taken seriously. A system intended for wartime use will be running in non-optimal conditions while under constant attack. But many of these "enterprise" systems barely work better than paper to start with.
I think that's changed a bit - witness how reluctant the US gov is to be locked into Anduril Lattice. I think we'll see this start to change but certainly a lot of bad past decisions to make up for.
When HP converted to SAP, I think their production basically stopped, for six months, and they lost $400 million.
Switching to a new system; even when it is for the better, is a painful, expensive process.
The company that I worked for, did a successful transition to SAP, but it took about two years, and a lot of butthurt.
Switching to SAP ERP was already an in-joke level of well-known catastrophe in IT consulting circles 20 years ago. I’m glad to see nothing has changed in that respect.
I feel like a ton of SAP transitions only succeed because they have to.
I remember reading an article about a hospital switching computerized medical record system and the CIO had a killer quote along the lines of "every extra day I take on this migration, people die"
Sap adds so much syrup to the gears of business that it kills some.
They say its easier to change your company to fit SAP than to mold SAP to fit your company.
(Disclosure: I work at SAP, though not on the ERP stuff or anything of that sort.)
From what I've been told, this is actually supposed to be a selling point of SAP: They have built tools to fit the processes of the industry leaders, so by buying into SAP, you're buying into the winning way of doing business.
I am not endorsing this opinion or making a claim regarding its veracity, just stating that that is what I have heard.
In the late-90s I worked for a manufacturing company in a firmware dev capacity. They did everything on paper still. They migrated successfully to an in-house built ERP system sitting on top of Oracle. Big celebration, everyone happy. Six months later someone drove a forklift through the wall of the machine room into the UPS which caught fire and destroyed three racks of kit including the Oracle node. Turns out no one really trusted the system and was running paper on the side. When I left 6 years later they were still doing it on paper and reporting on Excel. It works and is considerably more forklift proof.
Forklift-Proof ERP was not on my bingo card. Thanks for the laugh :D
Excel has the benefit of being understandable and fixable by a lot of regular office workers.
It's a bit surprising that we don't have that feature as a requirement for most IT infrastructure. It would make it so much more usable.
I know a manufacturing plant that used an Excel spreadsheet to do all its production planning. There was only one person who understood the spreadsheet and could modify it, a consultant who made more than the plant manager.
"Understandable and fixable" depends more on the complexity of the application rather than the fact it's in Excel.
Probably cheaper than SAP
Agree. IT has forgotten that computing should enable more people to be producers instead of mere consumers. IT management cares about control, audit, permissions and expense - no focus on achieving productivity in the workplace and in many cases are anti-user.
If you try running a business where several workers get involved with fixing and extending information systems (e.g. spreadsheets), you'll soon understand why successful IT management cares about controls, audits and permissions.
I would argue that excel being "fixable" by regular office workers is half the reason why these projects fail in the first place. I've worked on migrating people's reporting to BI platforms before and what looks like a simple spreadsheet produced monthly is often really 12 different sets of formulas, special cases, kluges, hard-coded data and long-gone sources etc. etc. Because instead of correcting the source of data used for the report, it's all "done in post" in the excel sheet itself by a regular office worker.
Yes, important point. I wonder if a system could be made that made things properly fixable. As in, a regular office worker spots an error. Can fix it in post. But in doing so they will also create a change suggestion for the source data that can be approved and committed by master data admins.
The fact that every office worker understands excel, does not mean that every office worker understands every excel sheet.
Most of the projects we did in consultancy dev, was turning that one critical excel sheet nobody but 'the excel guy' understands into a simple to use web application, so that everybody could use it and the business won't explode when mr. excel would leave the shop.
Also just the problem of finding the Excel sheets in the first place.
Saved to someone's desktop, or some random directory no one knows about.
Most of those office workers were not capable of fixing anything on the first day they used Excel. Many didn't understand it at all. The main difference isn't that Excel is super accessible and easy to use for non-technical people; it's its ubiquity, and especially that of training on its usage.
Ubiquity is important but it's not the only important factor. An excel sheet can typically be downloaded and experimented with. You can't download an ERP system and try stuff with it.
This is so huge in finance. Lots of smaller shops will hire data scientists or even SWEs hoping to up productivity and replace slow Excel sheets, and end up disilusioned when the team just glues together some Python scripts with no UI and no way for stakeholders to tinker without talking to someone else first.
On the other hand, once you have a well-established IT automation around your production, and people aren't trained in pre-automation production, it's actually quite hard to go back to manual.
Probably also depends on the complexity of the orders and workflows.
Without software, drones are useless. I suppose they can still assemble manually operated quadcopters if they know their inventory by heart, but they will be unable to produce more parts by 3D printing or drones capable of stable flight, autonomous operations, surveillance or any more advanced use cases. Even remote control is probably out of the picture.
They can continue to run the same thing they had before.
As an old software engineer, I can say with certainty that software engineering is a very, VERY wasteful practice. We could all be running Windows 3 right now, DOS, or some old Unix. The overhead involved in making actual advancements shows our slow progress as a species, and that we’re in a thread discussing a drone manufacturing facility being blown up in a war and how much that matters.
I think the natives had it right to live off of the land peacefully, and if anything to devote full time on science to determining what we do to help life survive in the universe.
Ahh... Philosophy...
I can't agree with you. People have got their human mind as a result of ever increasing and self-inflicted costs driven by a competition among males. They developed minds to play politics and they came to a point when 20% of metabolism of human body was devoted to its brain.
The result of such a wasteful way to spend their energy resources? Humans colonized all the Earth, drove to the extinction almost all big animals, and now there are as much humans on the Earth as mosquitos. Looks like a win, doesn't it?
These things go off the rails sometimes. Just today I've found a new example to it:
highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.[1]
The waste of resources into useless things doesn't lead to good outcomes each time, but I believe that software engineering will lead to something. I'm not Jesus, I can't predict exactly what the beneficial results will be, but at least I can point to a growing ability of engineers of handling complexity. It lags behind their ability to create complexity, but still it grows.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about...
> The migration of ERP system gone wrong and nobody knows how to fix it.
I swear this is SAPs main business model
Just endless consulting bills to set it up then fix it when it's delivered in a broken state.
That and 'if you don't use SAP you're not compliant with EU regulation XYZ and we won't do business with you'
It depends how resilient they are. People often put all their eggs in one basket.
No, they’re right, manufacturing machines like these are independent. We’re so used to interconnected software systems for everything, but even though these things may run old versions of Windows in airgapped or isolated networks, that’s just to run the machines. You give it a thumbdrive, save a part file on it, and as long as it’s got power, materials, and whatever is necessary for basic safety like noble gas for sintering safety, you’re set.
Even accounting systems are able to usually run fairly independently.
It’s not that IT and business and manufacturing support software engineers don’t help, but they aren’t necessary, especially if they’re just making the same thing over and over.
Russia has shown to be plenty resilient across the board. I find it hard to assume anything different here.
Russia is also behind in modern technology by over a decade. I'm pretty sure if the CIA wanted they could destroy a lot of Russian software infrastructure, but it suits them to be in and out of Russian systems collecting information instead.
This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally.
Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16).
In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now.
Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?
> This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale.
Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users.
Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it.
> And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that.
USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML).
Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs.
Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
I have no love (or even reason) to support modern Russia, but this is just wrong.
Russia has multiple home-grown office suites. Besides MS Office, the market leader still is full of bugs that harken back decades.
They also have multiple commercial CAD programs (KOMPAS, T-FLEX) that scale up to everything including airliners.
As for those 'western' top programmers, especially good ones, you'd be surprised how many of them are from post-USSR countries, including Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.).
As for chips they are behind (for reasons beyond the scope of my post), but the post mainly extended to software, in which, many of the supposed crown jewels of the West (aka US) have been replicated quite successfully in other parts of the world including Russia.
> I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
> Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing,
I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all.
In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
>Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
Ah yes, the reason the US is years behind most other country's payments systems is because they have too much freedom.
What do you mean by modern technology? Surely not the software. Russian engineering culture is strong and their IT strategy is far ahead of what you can find in Europe. I doubt it’s easy to hack into their systems - this breach illustrates it quite well, actually (it’s rare and required focused effort).
It's not called Resilience if you pick on someone weaker.
Western support to Ukraine has been a real joke - https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2025/0...
Fwiw I actually agree with you. My point is that early in the war, it was commonly thought that just the western sanctions alone would totally cripple the Russian economy. Or that they'd soon run out of arms, or anything like that. None of that happened. It's not pro-Russian to establish that they were more resilient than what many people anticipated/hoped. This doesn't take anything away from Ukraine's resilience in the face of years of obscene unwarranted aggression which is easily 10x more impressive to me.
You can help instead of waiting for politicians to "do something about it". It's not that hard to find a reputable organization that helps Ukraine and send it some money.
Unless that’s Musk or Bezos’s alt account, that’s like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.
In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.
The US is a rich and (despite all you may hear) generous country. If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
Interestingly, $35 billion of that went to 'International affairs'. I would assume Ukraine was a significant part of that, but I don't know for sure.
https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2025-u-s-charitable-giving-...
> In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.
That's a single-digit percentage of the US Federal budget.
Some of that goes to "family foundation" sinecures. Some of it goes to 10% church tithes. Quite a bit of it is spent on… raising funds. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-giving-to-charity-ask-wher... - "Of the more than $1.3 billion raised by charities in the [New York] in 2018, about $369 million — or 27% — went to pay professional fundraisers' fees")
> If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
I think that's wildly optimistic, but that'd be somewhere between $3-5B. The US alone has earmarked something like $200B thus far. The EU has given a similar amount.
Every bit undoubtedly counts, but a single Patriot battery costs $1B.
you would be surprised how capable and resilient an army of squirt guns can be.
I would be surprised if they could manage to keep refilling their squirt guns and deal with all the logistics required to keep an army available to use them
To be fair, it is quite difficult to support a regime where random people are grabbed off the streets and sent to their deaths. Where for expressing oppositional opinions your male relatives will have their door kicked down and will be sent to an assault on enemy position with a 90% mortality rate. And if they survive that - to another one just like it. To support a regime that has no long-term plan and goals for waging a senseless war and which openly promises to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing in the reclaimed territories.
So the support from Western countries is enormous, considering all these aspects.
I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, but let's be honest
People aren't being dragged off the streets in Russia. This was briefly true in mid-late 2022 when they flirted with a partial mobilization, but hasn't been true for a while.
This is (sadly) actually more true in Ukraine. But there's also some nuance there - they can stop and question but supposedly they technically can't use physical force anymore.
What Russia is doing is increasing the bonuses and salary for signing a contract. And they don't have manpower problems for the most part - Ukraine is the one having that problem.
Now the Russian military is doing alot of shady shit, like promising recruits they won't be sent to Ukraine or would serve only in rear areas (even the US military recruiters were frequently guilty of this tactic). Classifying certain infantry units as "disposable" (especially foreign recruits and those from less politically unimportant regions), basically to be used as bait in assaults. And I'm sure the pressure for the required conscripts every year to sign a regular contract so they can be deployed is quite great, but its nothing like what some would have us believe.
I think GP is talking about Ukraine, not Russia. (And also I think GP might be astroturfing, but not sure)
Reminds me of the Louvois[1] disaster in the French armed forces, they fucked the payment system so bad they had to roll back to manual accounting for a moment. Yes, for the whole French Army, which was at the time involved in multiple foreign operations…
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logiciel_unique_%C3%A0_vocatio...
Working for a manufacturing company, you may be making drone parts, and you don’t really know which side of the war you’re making them for, because they can buy individual parts through different reputable-looking companies.
You could also be making surgical parts that help save lives.
Overall though, I think I’d rather be making nice practical furniture that hopefully people would never throw away. While I support people that want to protect, war is horrible.
I worked for a company that was working on rolling out D365 for 2 years :)
I was acquired by a company that was working on Sales Force integration for 3 years, I left before it was fully functional.
They had 4 full time devs working on Sales Force, meanwhile we had built the entire company in a year with 4 devs.
> Obviously IT infrastructure is not needed for manufacturing
Is this sarcasm?
Cyber warfare is really reaching a new peak in Ukraine, and not just the more-traditional cyberattacks like this. The target is of note; the drones themselves are the thing that's setting this war apart from all of the primarily human powered wars of the past centuries.
Drones have revolutionized reconnaissance, sabotage, and munitions interception. Relative to their material cost, they can be terrifically destructive, and with the advances in image recognition in the past decade some are able to operate even when affected by electronic signal jamming. This is some very cyberpunk shit going on right now.
This was obviously a very high-value target, and Ukraine has shown themselves again to be masters of asymmetric warfare: taking out a sizable chunk of Russia's long range bombers using drones smuggled across Russia, and now impacting one of the centers of Russia's drone manufacturing. It is difficult to see how the war will end, but it is clear that Ukraine is not about to stop fighting.
In the book Ministry of the Future, a near-future look at a world dealing with devastating climate change, wars become somewhat obsolete because drones get so good it's always possible to kill someone anywhere in the world. The smallest faction can easily kill the leader of any country. It's an interesting thought. I don't recommend the book, one of those thought experiments with lots of interesting ideas with not enough story.
It's fallacious to assume that defenses stop evolving after new weapons come to the fore. Some drones are deployed in anti-drone capacities; the war economics becomes balancing how advanced to make the attack drones vs. how cheap the countermeasures are. In Ukraine we've already seen small drones that are able to damage the wings of much larger and more "technically advanced" platforms.
War didn't end the first time man invented the longer spear; defenses adapt.
The book isn't real. I was just sharing an interesting thought from it. Lighten up.
> some are able to operate even when affected by electronic signal jamming
Not even that. The new hotness are the fiber optic cable ones that don't even use radio signals, that's some scary stuff.
Some assumptions here. First off, we only have one side of the story to go on. Often this can be embroidered, particularly if there is propaganda value from doing so.
They could be using version control for their software with every developer having all of the software they have developed for their products git-cloned to their development machines. Assuming a modest development team working with version control (who doesn't), then you do have to wonder if they have lost the crown jewels. I suspect not.
It is going to be a similar situation with everything else such as CAD files. People will have local copies because it is quicker to work that way.
As for the company emails and general office files, sure they might have lost lots of that, but that isn't going to be the end of the world.
The website is also part of the company and you would expect the elite hackers to have taken that down but no they have not, that works just fine.
Then there is the product itself. If you have been following the war closely then you will know what drones are in use at a given time. We might not get to know all of the drones as well as the heavy hitters, however, the name of this company is not something that the keenest watcher of the SMO will be familiar with. It is not as if they have shut down Geranium 2 production, is it?
As for yourself, and how you write, is that ChatGPT speaking?
The reason I ask is that we all know about things such as version control so I wonder if there is common sense or ChatGPT going on with your comment.
You're right about this being a one-sided story, but not to suspect ChatGPT - it has none of the hallmarks of AI slop, plus it brings up a couple of reasonable and relevant points. You're only addressing a tiny part of the comment, but the rest stands, in my opinion.
The whole Ukraine situation is an intelligence test. In wartime you never have complete information so it is not like a game of chess where you know what the board is, what the pieces are and the play so far. Some fog of war is expected.
With the hacks that Snowden, Assange and their ilk participated in, we had stuff uploaded somewhere for the world to see. In this way it was self evident that stuff had been exfiltrated.
In this instance we can assume the drone company are going to deny everything. However, if we had some of their trade secrets uploaded somewhere then a data breach could be considered plausible. Or a recorded screen cast of the hack.
However, the intended audience for this story doesn't care about hard evidence, they just need a morale boost, and belief trumps reason on these situations.
My school history teacher taught me how to look at evidence and it is not rocket science. Hence why Ukraine is like an intelligence test nobody thought they needed. If people can't do critical thinking about some war that has been on the news for more than three years, how are they supposed to do science or anything else that needs critical thinking?
Remains to be seen if the lessons of this war extend to other possible wars though.
It is possible that FPV drones are showing up as so important because Russia is committed to a disgusting meat sluice of fodder to achieve its marginal territory gains.
Most countries don’t have the appetite for those kind of losses. Most countries, frankly, don’t have the audacity to set these kinds of war aims.
I predict they won’t matter too much to the war meta. At least not so much as cheap long range jet drones which are also becoming significant here.
Oh my, one thing wars are good at is to get rid off or at least contain such thinking („Russia evil, thus no worry“) to the playgrounds (eg public commentariat): FPV drones are the defining weapon in this war, are used by both sides, and were the defining weapon in other recent conflicts as well (eg Nogorno-Karabach), they are already being picked up and used as weapons by Mexican-Cartels (all former military).
Seems like drone warfare is just democratizing what e.g the US has in capabilities with their precision munitions already, in a perhaps less capable but far cheaper manner. Put it in other words if this was the US directy engaging russia, it would probably be tomahawk missiles or something along those lines just like we’ve seen last few decades, vs a sort of Air Hogs with a bomb.
Nah it would still be FPV drones
The question is how useful would these things be if your opponent wasn’t blindly rushing forward?
The role of this tech is effectively a dynamic minefield more or less
I am working for a medium sized Swiss company. We're coding our own ERP, based on a nightmare of a stack. We call it "security by confusion". An attacker would maybe find its way in, but he'll never find the way out. If he destroys 90% of our code, we'll still be up and running, because 95% of the codebase is obsolete.
This sounds like the kind of resiliency that a process like evolution would create :)
There was an interview with some U.S. army rep. that was pretty famous a few years back. He said that even if hackers broke in to the U.S. systems they wouldn't achieve anything due to how old, convoluted and buggy the systems were - even we who have full access can barely get anything to work!!
Of course, that was said purposefully, and may not reflect the truth at all.
But still, the thought that that is security for some (and I am sure it is for someone, somewhere) is kind of an extension of security by obscurity that is scary.
Have coded a couple of full MRP systems for various large companies based on my own model and I would be intrigued to see how this will work. I usually include the default recommended security and DR practices and then add my own OTP-hash based layer for key authorisations. I thought I was paranoid, but your system sounds more like an end-of-the-world scenario rather than just keep the production-line going in the factory.
Real world ICE barier! :D
lol, I don’t know if this is scary or impressive :)
Not many companies explicitly prepare for the scenario where every single data storage unit in the company is effectively wiped and you have to redeploy from zero.
If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems probably have cycles in their deployment dependencies. Your config pusher is deployed from Jenkins/Puppet/Ansible but 2 years ago someone made Jenkins dependent on the config pusher for its own config. Now you cannot just deploy these systems in order, you have to replay the history before that change.
Almost everything will have cycles in IT. People want and security requires some kind of SSO. Now SSO is a dependency for almost everything, including the administration of underlying systems that run SSO. Same for the network. Same for a lot of things.
Bootstrapping from zero will never be easy and will always take some time. I don't think you can prepare your way out of this, short of preparing a fully redundant, fully separate secondary infrastructure.
This is called "break-glass procedure" in enterprise IT (as in "break glass in case of emergency"), and often consists of independent, normally unused, admin accounts on key systems, access info for which is locked in some safe location, e.g. physical safe in a secure location.
Testing this reliably is difficult, though, and often these procedures and their documentation is outdated.
I agree that fully redundant & separate infrastructure is unrealistic. I'm also not saying you can be 100% prepared. My point is that you can improve your posture.
What you can do is to have a sandbox environment where you periodically do a full setup exercise from a prepper disk. Conceptually it's not that different from testing backup recovery (ok, most companies neglect this too, so maybe you have a point :) ).
Problem is, the value of proper recovery procedures and testing those in all aspects only becomes apparent to the bean-counters when things really break. But until they have been in that situation where nothing works for a month, it will always be too expensive, too cumbersome and too resource-hungry to do those preparations.
Which gives me an idea for an "Ask HN"... Edit: submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44582994
Reminds me of compiler bootstrapping. If you only have the source code of, let's say, Rust and want to build it you first need to have a Rust compiler of a previous version. And for that you need another compiler. Then you reach times when rustc was written in OCaml. And know what? Now you need to build OCaml compiler!
Other way is to build a stripped down version of rustc only capable of compiling latest rustc, e.g. using https://github.com/dtolnay/bootstrap
Great post on bootstrapping and its problems: https://bootstrappable.org/
Actual project capable of bootstrapping Linux system from scratch: https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap
This reminds me of troubles in a parallel universe.
Construction industry have products with typical lifetime of 50+, in some cases multiple hundreds. Computing and digitalization are hot topic now and for the past several decades with various buzzwords (probably 'digital twins' is the newest one) however when I am unable to open construction design files made in the beginning of my career less than 30 years ago due to obsolescence for various reasons then all those efforts seem for nothing eventually beyond immediate needs. Good old outdated 2D drawings seen as unfeasible practice might save the day in the future (... perhaps, assuming that current pdf files could still be opened some decades down the line, as that is a common 'digital paper' approach nowadays, actual physical world paper are used less and less).
That happened to company I am familiar with a year ago. The main storage cluster,that everything depended on died. They recovered by deploying everything again from dev laptops.
black start is a hard problem. Even facebook apparently had to drill datacenter door locks open to get back up one time.
So how could a company handle this? Can they bootstrap from printed documentation or is that assumed to be wiped as well?
It's a model of a realistic scenario. Hackers (like in the article), long running ransomware that managed to corrupt lots of data, maybe a natural disaster. So by "wiping all data storage units" I meant the dynamic ones used in production. You can assume a static backup exists and contains a sensible set of sources and binaries, although obviously creating such a backup is part of the recovery plan.
That's a very odd website. Blocked by the Russian government so you get a TLS error, once you get past that, you get the Cloudflare "you are blocked" page, and then you use a VPN and... get the option to read this article in Russian.
The linked page is in English, but speaking of the option - residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway. Contrary to some popular beliefs in Russia about language wars, many people still do speak Russian in Ukraine and media do publish articles in Russian.
>residents of Russian Federation probably were not a target audience of Russian version of this website anyway
Deliberately blocking the supposed enemy from hearing you does strike me as irrational, though. The mere fact they're doing Russian censors' job should probably make them recheck if they got anything wrong in their decision process, just in case.
At this stage in the war keeping your social spaces free of malicious users seems like a much higher priority than providing the other side's civilians with accurate information. Russians can access all the info in the world with a simple VPN setup, that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia.
This likely keeps normal people from seeing this way better than it keeps away any hackers or bots, as Russian citizens are mostly using DPI circumvention tools. And this was a thing since the first days of the war, it's not something new.
>that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia
Giving up is the easiest thing to do. Last time some people did, it was blamed on stereotypes like their "learned helplessness" and "fatalism".
The reality is, civilians cannot change a country's domestic foreign policy - especially in a country like Russia.
Revolutions don't work without alignment from power centers like the police, military, judiciary, and a subset of legislators.
Hosni Mubarak wasn't overthrown because of protesters in Tahrir Square - he was overthrown because General Sisi decided to ignore shoot-on-sight orders.
There's no reason for Ukraine media to create a literal attack surface when most Russians already have a decent idea of what is happening in Ukraine (and vice versa) - most Russians and Ukrainians have blood relatives on both sides of the border.
Claiming the exposure doesn't work is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. The reality is that awareness is a major factor, that was literally the main way of the power takeover in Russia (see e.g. Suponev, Ernst, Gusinsky, and Listyev). Russian government is really careful about doing things slowly and getting away with everything people let them get away with, and stopping dehumanization and letting people hearing voices is really important. Even if people right now disagree or think of it as propaganda (which it usually is, I hope nobody has any illusions about that), just existence of something in the background is enough to set up something else in the future. The time for the change will inevitably come like it always does, and the question then will become "what Ukrainian media did all this time, and where the hell they were". Turns out they may have not existed at all as well - out of sight, out of mind.
> Claiming the exposure doesn't work is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
It doesn’t in a culture like the Russian one of extreme deference to government.
My point is there's nothing "cultural" about it, those suggesting it either have zero idea about it or have never lived through or at least analyzed 80s-90s-2000s in Russia. It's purely the artifact of manufactured consent, and media takeover that was creeping in since Listyev's times and went full speed in 2001 is a primary factor in it. Willingly going into an invisible mode for Russians while having a huge leverage (language+presence), leaving them in their bubble, is a colossal blunder.
Consciously or not, you're spreading Putin's propaganda and justify/validate his actions. "It's world vs Russia, always been and always will be, since Adam and Eve. Nothing can be done. Everybody supports the government, it's cultural. We've always been at war with Eastasia. Spread out, nothing to see here, people are powerless anyway." People like you might have a lot in common with many Russians without realizing it.
I agree with you, it’s irrational. It’s also something to be expected, because this war was irrational from the very beginning with both sides often driven by emotional triggers rather than cold-minded calculations or facts.
What makes you think that it's the Ukranians that are blocking Russian users from accessing it?
The Cloudflare "you have been blocked" page. Many Ukrainian websites do something like this, so in my mind it's just a common thing that happens.
Some non-Ukrainian do as well, seemingly with no rhyme or reason, I run into this so routinely that I have an entire thread: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/111934602844613193
Always try archive.today and the internet archive (archive.org), just in case.
https://archive.ph/jg9Mg
Somebody saved it four hours ago.
Doesn't sound like it's the fault of the website, but of your government and maybe CloudFlare (although they could be blocking you because of the TLS error's underlying reason, not because you're in Russia).
No, that page is always a sign that the person who configured Cloudflare for their website has chosen to deliberately block Russian IPs.
The headline of the article called these people cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals. Which is it? It reminds me a bit with the situation with privateers during the age of sail. These were often people operating at the edge of the law, or even outright outlaws, given a letter of marque, a license to raid warships and commerce against a specific adversary. I'm sure out on the high seas, abuses happen.
The people who put together the doctrine on 4th Generation Warfare talked about the blurring of civilian and military. Rules of engagement gets fuzzier.
Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. I don't think this is some gray area hybrid warfare, it's just regular people not wanting drones to kill their neighbours.
> Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day.
Same do Ukrainians, don't they? More over, long before they killed civilians and defenders in Iraq and Afghanistan on Americans invitation. Then left without even saying 'sorry'. Since 2014 they were shelling Donetsk just for fun, killing people at random. So, it's more complicated than you'll find in western mass media. Especially in EU where full picture is illegal.
No, they do not. Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians in their war of self-defense against the invading russian army.
Russia consistently and deliberately targets civilians. There is no "both sides" here.
> Ukrainians have not and do not deliberately target civilians
There news on Russian side daily of Ukrainians doing exactly this, deliberately targeting civilians. Also usually their own non-combatants who are trying to surrender. This is war crime.
There are dirty tactics in this war which western public will learn about later. For now it's given a rosy optimistic picture approved by Zelinsky office. That's how 'Support Ukraine' is pushed on them. In fact it's 'support the war', as Ukrainians are dying in big numbers. By the way, official number of civilians killed 3 years is lower that in Gaza in 3 months.
in 2014 russia invaded.
Whatever, that's doesn't justify shelling a city. BTW, it's considered Ukrainian territory and those civilians killed by Ukrainian military were Ukrainians. However it was supported by the government up to and including Zelinsky, and by the majority of 'true Ukrainians'. Nobody was prosecuted.
There was no shelling of civilians.
It seems like it might be a translation issue. The site seems pretty overtly pro Ukraine, so they probably don't want to cast these hackers in a negative light. They might have just thought "cyber criminal" was a straight synonym for "hacker".
Kind of a Robin Hood situation: Hero for some, criminal to the others.
The article might be a collage of several other articles, and they didn't check for consistency.
I would love some other term for the aligned side people in cyberwarfare, sort of "cybersoldier" or "networkmilitia", not already somehow cliched in some film. "Cyberactivists" sounds like online protesters (in facebook and such)
Wikipedia has an entry for "hacktivism".
The people who illegally obtained classified information to leak to WikiLeaks have made a political impact: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/26/wikilea... as well as reprisals in the form of arrests and prosecutions.
We also call Greenpeace "activists", but they also employed violent direct-action in their efforts against whaling.
Carl Icahn calls himself a shareholder activist, and many people still consider him a vulture capitalist.
Most likely they are being organized by the UKR military. So, not criminals, for sure.
> cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals
depends who's side you are on
Change the language then use GTranslate
It just says "Хакеры" (hackery, hackers)
I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack, and it would be 'easily' attributed/mapped back to the USA causing (political) issues. Well, Ukraine doesn't have 'that' challenge.
On the other hand (and I'm not defending a drone company), anyone that has a business should know by now that ransomware (with our without deletion) is a real thing, and it's not an 'if' question, it's a 'when' question.
I have never worked with/for a Russian company, so it would be interesting to hear/read from someone who has, how 'well organized' are they? GRC-wise. Assuming that someone would run the COBIT framework on them (Russian companies), would the 'average' be 'ok' or it's a big mess (kinda like working for an EU company in early 00's)?
> I remember Steve Gibson saying some years back that the only reason USA doesn't (cyber-)'attack' Russia's train infra is the inability to 'hide the traces' of the attack
This is not a real reason. This explanation hides the real reason: Russia is a valuable geopolitical partner for USA. Regarless who are in power in USA - all presidents tried to make deals/contacts with Russia.
There is no value for USA in getting Russia loose this war, have internal instability or split in 20-ish national states.
USA wins more from russia being as it is today with all it blood, suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the regime thrive for survival.
Actually USA are afraid to push too much to cause internal issues in Russia. And russian ruling class knows that.
I guess another reason is that there isn't too much IT infrastructure that Russian trains depend on.
There are ticket sales systems for people being transported, but much is freight trains, and if there was an easy way to disrupt that, you can be sure that Ukraine would've done it by now, because the Russian military heavily depends on rail-based supplies.
I did work for a Russian financial multinational just before COVID-19, as a native Russian speaker, and it was a free-for-all mess interally. The IT side had a load-bearing, old-school sysadmin type with a personality for heroics.
>Ukrainian cyber activists, in cooperation with military intelligence...
So the foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia.
> foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia
meanwhile, russian intelligence services have already directly attacked nato countries, with barely any real deniability.
They have been, in various ways, been attacking NATO countries for past 2 decades. Its simply puttin's modus operandi. Physical attacks on civilian and military infrastructure, murders, meddling with elections, cyber attacks, you name it.
All countries do this. Only propoganda makes you believe its only the enemy doing it. The UK alone had a history of 300 years of enslaving, meddling and brutalizing other countries. I can name at least 50 events from western countries last 2 decades.
Whataboutism at its finest. I think we all forget how we should feel fiery hate towards all citizens of Mongolia, those conquests were beyond brutal.
Or lets start talk like adults and talk about current situation and how nations behave now. russia is the definition of evil of these days. I know US government focuses heavily on china for whatever reasons (I guess because its obvious they are #2 and moving up, russia is barely in top 10 in actual capabilities if we ignore nukes and and since they threatened to use them at least 100x in past few years we can safely ignore them for usual conflicts).
Don't hate the messenger, this is how they behave and have painted themselves consistently, heck they are even proud of it in typical russian redneck style if you follow their media a bit.
The Shadow Brokers are a great example, very likely Russians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxqcwK5OMag
I mean Putin will spin everything as "the West did it" anyway, so it really does not matter who pushes that button. I also seriously wonder why we don't have US/NATO air forces over Ukraine for this reason.
Because footage of a downed F-22 and it's captive pilot would be an unspeakable PR disaster relative to the comparatively mild military benefit. Wars aren't, and really never have been, won by blowing stuff up.
USAF has unmanned fighter jets, if that's what you are worried about.
> Wars aren't, and really never have been, won by blowing stuff up.
That's a huge simplification. Blowing stuff up in a strategic way can certainly help win a war.
> That's a huge simplification. Blowing stuff up in a strategic way can certainly help win a war.
And losing public support for an effort via an embarassing disaster can just as certainly lose it, which was my point.
Yes yes yes, blow stuff up. Take territory, shoot people, yada yada. At some point that has to happen for a "war" to be a "war". But at the end of the day the winner is essentially always predetermined by economics and politics. Making deployment decisions in the absence of those considerations is generally how one loses wars.
I don't know that the electorate that twice elected the man that said "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay?" would actually be all that bothered.
Which NATO countries would those be?
The German parliament in 2015 (including the chancellor's office)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerangriffe_auf_den_Deutsch...
Czechia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
Bulgaria: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/01/arms-dealer-10...
Poland: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/12/poland-to-clos...
And UK.
Plus a million cyberattacks against all sorts of infrastructure.
So then how come hasn't Article 5 been activated yet? Does that mean that said Article 5 is not even worth the piece of paper it has been written on?
Your first comments suggests it isn't happening ("which nato countries")
Now, predictably upon being told that it happens you pivot to NATO is useless.
Which is it: a set of attacks so obscure no reasonable person would be aware, or a horrendous onslaught where Article 5 should have been invoked and a mass retaliation begun?
NATO countries historically didn't invoke Article 5 even for terrorist attacks killing their own citizens. It takes a certain level before it makes sense to invoke, normally something beyond the capacity of that country to handle.
> NATO countries historically didn't invoke Article 5 even for terrorist attacks killing their own citizens
The only time Article 5 has been invoked was when terrorists attacked America in 9/11.
And a lot of non-NATO countries offered support too, including Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participants_in_Operation_Endu...
I was trying to follow my respondents' reasoning, as in, if Russia had indeed attacked NATO countries, which they said it had indeed happen, then how come NATO, being a defensive alliance first and foremost, didn't do anything about it?
In other words, and following Eastern-European logic (which, trust me, helps in cases like this one, I'm from Eastern Europe myself), had Russia really attacked any NATO countries you and me both wouldn't be in here having this conversation over the internet.
> if Russia had indeed attacked NATO countries, which they said it had indeed happen, then how come NATO, being a defensive alliance first and foremost, didn't do anything about it?
This was already answered but to be clear: ”doing something” and ”invoking article 5” is like the difference between saying ”asshole” in traffic vs rallying your friends to murder the driver’s family.
One could argue NATO countries should respond stronger to hybrid and clandestine warfare. Right now, we see a lot of ”angry letters”. But, it’s not clear eye for an eye is a strategically sound response, partly because it legitimizes the methods, and partly because it escalates tensions towards a war that nobody wants. Israel for instance takes an entirely different stance, basically retaliating with maximum force to deter the enemy (similar to punching the ”school bully” so hard, just once, that he stops). I don’t claim to be a diplomatic expert, but it’s worth noting that Israel is currently engaged in several major wars and conflicts, and tensions have grown.
Thankfully they don’t think it’s worth invoking article 5 over that. It’s not an automatism obviously, we’re talking about WW3 here. Would you rather be “technically” right here?
> Thankfully they don’t think it’s worth invoking article 5 over that
Is there a threshold anywhere in the NATO treaty that I'm unaware of?
If there wasn't, wouldn't we had WW3 already?
You're arguing with a Romanian russia sympathizer, it is pretty much pointless.
Because that would still be a disproportionate response and make NATO the aggressor, playing right into Russian hands.
The Russian military is already being destroyed in Ukraine (and even in Russia). The proportionate response is to give Ukraine everything they need to destroy Russia in a war that Russia chose to start. A war that they opened with a surprise invasion, no less. They are unambiguously the aggressor in their war in Ukraine and they should be defeated there, and we should give Ukraine everything they need to do that.
NATO attacking Russia would definitely not be playing into Russia's hands. Very bad for Russia, very costly for NATO, long war would make the voters unhappy, and India and China would feel rightly threatened.
Russian and Ukrainian militaries are being destroyed, but it also matters how fast they are being rebuilt. As mentioned above, Russia and Ukraine are debugging all their outdated military doctrines. The survivors will have a lot of hard-won experience.
What I meant was any direct NATO aggression against Russia would validate Russia's current "victimhood" narrative, and provide after the fact justification for their invasion of Ukraine in the first place.
They are very intentionally doing things that would not justify a full military retaliation by NATO.
> The survivors will have a lot of hard-won experience.
the west would not want russia to be that survivor.
There's no need to respond with force. Russia will lose in the long-term due to sanctions as long as Republicans don't cock everything up even more by making deals with Russians and slowing down trade in the global west. Russians are wasting money and gear in Ukraine and becoming weaker. It's just a matter of time before China starts making claims on land they lost to the Soviets. Russians will lose this war the same way they lost the cold war; by cutting themselves off from the maritime economy.
China will never allow Russia to lose. They know they are next on the list. It seems more that the west in its decline will become less and less relevant. The west needs to understand that they are no longer the only dominant player.
Article 5 is an option. Not a game mechanic.
> Article 5 is an option. Not a game mechanic.
Tell that to the very pro-Western political leaders here in Eastern Europe, they won't take that well at all.
Article 5 over a couple of munitions depots?
Aside from political reasons stated in other answers: Since Article 5 doesn't apply. article 5 states: "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all [...]" Thist deliberately talks about "armed" attack. Cyber attacks and related aren't covered.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm
The UK at least https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yuli...
Or Czechia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_... https://praguemorning.cz/russian-terrorist-plot-czech-republ...
We’re talking about Ukraine and Russia, there has been a war going on for years now. Nobody needs or wants plausible deniability here.
There are plenty of reasons to have plausibly deniability even this late into the war.
Only if you're on the invading offensive side.
I think the point being made is that Western agencies (5-eyes) would give Ukranian intelligence the button to push (indirect action) and not push it themselves (direct action).
Why would that be the case? Ukraine has a very large IT sector and they have a lot of good IT security specialists. To be honest, a lot of cybercriminals have been from Ukraine.
So I don't see why it would be the case that Ukraine could not have done this by themselves. They have done previous attacks by themselves. I don't see why that would be the case.
It would kind of be like saying, "Oh, if Russia does a cyberattack, it can't have been them acting alone. It must have been China that gave them the stuff to just press a button."
It's the usual westerner superiority speaking. When Ukraine wins something it's always due to NATO training, US weapons and all that. When Ukraine starts losing ground it's poor soviet-era training, wrong kind of tactics and decision making on Ukraine.
>Why would that be the case?
It's not speculation that Ukraine is being assisted to a huge degree.
One angle of that assistance: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-...
That very article mentions that on a number of occasions Ukraine has gained intelligence or pulled off their own ops which the US was completely unaware of.
Just because they're being helped doesn't mean that literally everything they do can be appropriated to the US.
That is not how I read the parent comment. I read it as US making Ukraine do what US wanted to do.
It's tough to say that Ukraine and US are allies right now. US refuses to hold security assurance, as promised, and forbids Ukraine to restore nuclear arsenal, as before the promise. Bullies behave is such way, not allies.
It is irrelevant to my interpretation of the aforementioned parent comment.
The point is that US made Ukraine do something that the US wanted to do but did not do because were it the US, then it would have had repercussions on US, so they made Ukraine do their dirty work.
Curious use of "made" here when it's something that Ukraine would have very much wanted to do, this cyberattack.
Both benefit'd, then.
According to the down-votes... wait, so they did not both benefit, then?
By going to war with Ukraine Russia (very foolishly in my view) exposed itself to a number of possible "indirect actions" which weren't possible before as "direct actions". Like for example Ukrainian drone hitting one of the Russian strategic missile defense radars. Ukraine can potentially hit other strategic assets not that involved in the current war - say nuclear submarines for example.
Russia and all non-usa allies have been the winner.
China etc have seen the strategies used in sanctions. They know how to limit their impact now.
It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.
It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.
And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.
A disaster for the west, aside from their weapons companies/Ukrainian investments. And any NATO spend increases.
China has been a big winner, it can now get cheap energy and it gets to set Russia whatever conditions it pleases. Russia is now utterly dependent on China for many imports.
Russia itself has been the biggest loser. Massive budget deficits, massive inflation. 1M of its smartest people have moved abroad. 1M Russian casualties in the war. Demographics and economy are disastrous.
That and Russia is now a pariah state. No one is going to invest there for a very long time after what Russia did.
I mostly agree, except the pariah state part.
Russia is hedging that the "pariah state" label will wear off pretty quickly. The current US government has as recently as March floated the idea of normalising business ties, and constantly flip-flops it's position.
However, the biggest loser has definitely been Europe (including Britain). High energy prices have cascaded the cost of living crisis, which in turn has led to a rightward shift in politics. As a continent, we are unprepared for any sort of defence, having used the US as a backstop for years and now the US constantly toys with the idea of dropping NATO support. Alone, we don't have enough manpower, ammunition, and we haven't been keeping up with the evolution of modern warfare (drones and related technology) taking place in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
If you think Europe is the biggest loser, you need to dig a bit deeper on the state of Russia... I might be wrong, but there's no recovery from this blunder for many, many years - if it manages to stay a Federation, that's yet to be seen, but my guess is China will take a chunk out of Russia eventually.
Remember Russia in 3 years had: - 1 Military coup;
- Lost 50% of the Black Sea Fleet and it's now unusable;
- 1.000.000+ casualties (dead and severely wounded)
- Mass exodus of qualified young people;
- Lost Military allies from CSTO and rendered the alliance into a joke;
- Completely lost presence in the Middle East (I don't see how they will recover from it);
- Losing influence in neighboring countries;
The list goes on, like demographic collapse, etc
So, I find it hard to see Europe as the loser here; at worst, Europe is doing "ok".
Europe's entire future is on the line right now. Forget many years..
Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending (from a low starting point) to meet the new US governments requirements are exacerbating the cost of living crisis continent wide. Europe already wasn't innovating, and is now losing the small amount of industry it does have, to energy prices, to China's entry into EV production, and EU regulation. The demands to spend more on our own defence by the US administration comes from a US administration which has flirted with the idea of not even defending NATO.
The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum. In my country, the UK, Reform, a politically inept and untested party is currently leading in the polls for the next election. This party, as well as many like it in Europe, is even leading in the polls despite well known Russian political influence in them.
On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps. Immigration, which is lowering wages and in many peoples eyes, changing their cultural landscape for the worse, increasing their likelihood in voting for fringe political parties.
As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now. We hear constantly about ammunition and weapons shortages across Europe, failure to meet requirements for what Ukraine needs to fight back, and a general unwillingness from the population to even fight. Russia has oil, gas, and mineral wealth, which will always be of importance to Europe whenever this war does end. Europe is so reliant, that whatever words are spoken, the EU has spent more on Russian energy than it has sent in aid to Ukraine.
> Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending
Energy prices are going down, and have been going down consistently ( https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil ) and the new US Admin wants them even lower, and they're not alone. So that's settled. Defense spending will also be met with investment, jobs, etc.
But if you think Europe is having it bad in terms of using taxpayers money to fund wars... what do you think is happening to Russian taxpayers money, with a much smaller economy?
> The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum.
Inflation is affecting everyone. Not Europe in any particular way.
Again, if you think that's bad for Europe, you look at Russia is being completely destroyed with inflation. I don't even think they're reporting the fake numbers of how bad things are, every quarter they prohibit more data from coming out...
> On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps.
Again, if you think that's a problem in Europe... how does Russia compare with qualified people leaving, 1.000.000 young men casualties, low birth rates, aging population? Europe isn't speedrunning its demographic collapse like Russia is.
> As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now.
So, to sum it up, you highlighted a few points that are by many orders of magnitude worse in Russia. Even counting energy, since Ukraine has been taking out distribution and refining capacity (and my guess is that it will get worse) - somehow you still think Europe is in a worse shape and position.
And a lot of your claims don't make much logical sense: "Europe is in bad shape, they can't even properly help Ukraine", in a context of Russia with 1.000.000+ casualties, max military production capacity, using North Korean Army help, and failing to make any meaningful gains at heavy costs...
I'm not even stating the fact that Russia will inevitably have to surrender that territory back to Ukraine, in the future anyway, because no country will ever recognize their occupied territory as part of Russia.
So to sum up your "Europe is unable, and Russia is giving their max" scope doesn't help your case at all, just shows that Russia has massive unrecoverable problems, even trying with everything they have...
You ended up supporting what I said. Europe is OK, while Russia can collapse at any moment - that's being on the line.
Just to bring you back to reality: no European country had part of their military going on a straight line to its capital to take down the government, and that happened to Russia around 2 years ago - that's not a good sign.
I think you are exaggerating Russian problems quite a bit. It’s certainly more stable than in 1990s or early 2000s. The peace deal will very likely force Ukraine and consequently its allies to recognize acquisitions at least de facto (Crimea may get formal recognition). Even if they won’t, there’s no plausible scenario in which Russia will lose this territory. Demographics — yes, but immigration may solve it for a while. 1 million people „brain drain“ wasn’t the right number anyway and there’s ongoing correction: many continued to work for Russian companies, some are returning back now disillusioned by the West,
> Even if they won’t, there’s no plausible scenario in which Russia will lose this territory.
Didn't the brightest minds in the Kremlin believe that the last time too?
There are many plausible scenarios, such as the worsening of socio-economic conditions, to the point where local governments stop following the central government and begin implementing their own policies shaped by local grassroots movements, leading to the total loss of control by Moscow. A repeat of 1989-1991. In that turmoil, nobody will care about Donbas or Crimea, as long as they can have food on their table.
We seem to be seeing the same recipe in action: extremely costly war for no clear purpose, economic stagnation, de facto bankruptcies of entire large sectors like mining and metallurgy.
Missing ingredients: low oil prices over extended time periods (6 years in the 1980s).
I'm not sure all of the previous posters points were thought out.
The 1,000,000 casualties thing keeps popping up, but nobody can confirm this. We have to take Ukrainian sources at their word. Regardless of who you support, during a conflict you have to take BOTH sides claims with a pinch of salt. They are both producing fanatical numbers right now, because those numbers have the dual purpose of inspiring morale amongst those still fighting.
The brain drain caused by the mass exodus of Russians fearing conscription isn't permanent. Already many of these people have returned.
The Wagner Coup didn't amount to much. It got half way before they worked out they didn't have the means, stopped, and the leader was killed and the group restructured within the Russian military.
They lost influence with neighbours, but honestly did they ever really have much in Europe anyway?
In my view Europe loses, because it's completely beholden to Russian energy interests. Now that those are gone, they are paying higher back-marked rates for the same oil and gas (via other routes), or more expensive American energy. This is exacerbating cost of living crises continent wide and is boosting fringe political parties who will cascade the damage (and who are also, in many cases, Russian influenced and funded).
I don't have any stake or real investment in this (although I don't think invading forces should get what they want), but I feel the other poster does.
Agree on most of that. However, I do not think energy is the European problem. It's painful, for sure, but migration is something bigger politically (and see recent Economist on that). Russia did play a role in that, but it's the flawed system with which nobody is happy that drives the fringe parties to success.
As for housing crisis, that's something that is defined by how markets work currently - where political influence buys squeeze in building permits and good profits from speculating on this market buy political influence. And of course, there's dual market structure in many cities with subsidized housing that reduces pressure for reform for significant number of voters. We need a big political reboot to overcome that and transition from old party structure practically everywhere, it is already happening, it is uncomfortable to see due to uncertainties in this process, but it is good. The war may have some effect on that, accelerating the process.
> The peace deal will very likely force Ukraine and consequently its allies to recognize acquisitions at least de facto
What peace deal?
There will be one at some point. There is no plausible scenario in which it will be favorable for Ukraine: the West missed the moment to build up military production to match and surpass Russian capacity, so there is zero chance that there will be any military wins. And sanctions don’t work, that should have been pretty clear by now to anyone who sees the numbers. It is all about damage control and how many Ukrainians will have to die before Western politicians will accept inevitable.
> There will be one at some point.
Even if that's true, the content you assume will be in it (even before considering the probability of your predicted content being wrong) may have as much bearing for Russia (or any othe nation’s) near term prospects as the eventual content of the peace deals ending the Israeli-Palestinian war or the US-North Korea war have on any nation’s near-term prospects.
Russia can sustain this war for 4 years more politically (they probably have to finish by 2029, a year before elections), maybe 2-3 years more militarily and economically. I won’t be so sure that Ukraine can last that long, because Ukraine does have people problem and Russia does not. Ukraine even with Western supplies gets a fraction of what Russia currently produces in ammo, missiles, tanks etc. So there is no reason for Russia to accept shitty terms. They may pay 200-300B from the frozen money in „reconstruction support“, but that’s it.
If there was any significant difference in their combination of industrial supply and battlefield effectiveness, the front line wouldn't be so slow-moving.
> There is no plausible scenario in which it will be favorable for Ukraine
If this is true, we're doomed. Everyone will want to have nuclear weapons in order not to end up like Ukraine. After that point it's just a matter of time until something goes wrong.
Russia must not win to avoid a nuclear war.
It is unlikely that we will see new nuclear powers. It's not an easy job. We can be sure that Israel or North Korea won't give up, but that does not mean they are going to use the weapons or there will be a full-blown intercontinental war. Looking at current progress in space tech, in 30-40 years the ultimate WMD will be kinetic space weapons anyway.
North Korea and South Africa* getting nukes are both independent proofs that it's not hard for a nation to get nukes. I've seen credible commentators suggesting Ukraine itself is only months away, if it chooses that path.
Less credibly, because the Russian government says a lot that isn't really true, Medvedev has been quoted saying "a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads".
Once you've got a fission bomb, by all accounts it's not that hard to use it as a primary to power a fusion bomb.
A single 1 MT bomb detonating at low orbital altitude above central USA would likely cause enough physical damage to the power grid to kill 60-90% of the population within a year, even with no shockwave getting anywhere near the ground.
* people often forget they got nukes, they were very quiet about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...
> North Korea and South Africa* getting nukes are both independent proofs that it's not hard for a nation to get nukes
Define „hard“ then. Both started early in 1960s, both had access to uranium (North Korea is actually mining it - not every country can do that), both used foreign support for their nuclear programs. Neither achieved ICBM range to deliver nuclear warheads to any location on this planet or had submarine component. Ukraine may have theoretical ability to design and produce nuclear weapons, but it is a technologically advanced nation far ahead of many developing countries and it is not going to have resources for a nuclear program any time soon being heavily dependent on foreign aid.
They were challenging 70 years ago, but in 2025 nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles are trivial for an industrialized nation.
> The peace deal will very likely force Ukraine and consequently its allies to recognize acquisitions at least de facto
Who is forcing it, Russia? lmao
There’s no one else to force anything in that deal.
Russia had a military coup 2 years ago, the regime can collapse at any moment, they're in no position to force anything on anyone.
There was no military coup 2 years ago, just a failed mercenary raid in which the army was not even involved. Leaders of that raid are now dead. It was an interesting moment in history, but it actually demonstrated resilience of the regime.
>the regime can collapse at any moment
How exactly? What evidence do you have for it? All even marginally visible opposition is pushed out of the country and became irrelevant, some are dead, many convicted in absentia to decade-long prison sentences. Mass protests are rare and practically never challenge the order, mainly aiming at some local problems. From economic perspective there are some problems, but as a matter of fact inequality is now lower than before the war thanks to generous payouts to veterans and their families, who may have never seen that money in their life.
On the contrary, Europe (I mean EU, Britain is a different story) is probably the biggest and the only true winner.
Russia may get what it wants, but Europe already got something from it too. 1. Major influx of workforce - many Ukrainians do not intend to go home according to polls 2. Push to a stronger union less dependent on America for defense 3. Push to less dependency on Russian oil and gas (yes, gas could have helped with transition to cleaner energy, but we may be doing well even without it)
Eventually - soon enough - Russian gas will be back. But Europe will come from this war stronger both militarily and politically and more united.
America is clear loser: what a mess it has become. Not being able to do anything with this conflict, it demonstrated that nuclear non-proliferation is dead. Nobody will give up their nuclear weapons now as Ukraine did in 1990s in exchange for empty promises of security guarantees.
Ukraine may have won some political independence at a very high cost and with some strings attached, but it has lost one third of its population and significant part of its territory - forever. And it is likely that it’s not going to get NATO membership. Was all of it worth it?..
Russia is an interesting case here. It‘s going to win. Sanctions don’t work. Foreign reserves are all time high. The economy is suffering mainly from self-inflicted damage, not for external reasons: enormous military budget and insufficient workforce (not least because Central Asian workers are hesitant to work in Russia now and their number was bigger than war casualties). Western brands left the country temporarily and many will come back. It has acquired new territories and will be actively spending there on reconstruction — that’s going to add extra points to GDP. It is hard to say, if the combined economic outcome will be positive or negative. Was it worth it?… It depends who answers. Politically it’s more stable than ever with national-conservatives in power, which is very important, because by 2030s it will be busy with the transition of power (and certainly not attacking NATO in Baltics as some delusional hotheads think). When the war ends it will be able to shift spending to social topics, which + the victory will give the necessary political capital for the transition.
I think before the invasion of Ukraine the chance of China regaining Vladivostok would have been almost zero.
Completely unthinkable.
Now Russia is so dependant on China that they could just ask nicely for it back and Russia would have to hand it over without China firing a shot.
China is getting very long-term leases on large swaths of territory in the Far East. There is officially no exterritoriality, yet with increasing number of Chinese people there while Russian population there is minuscule (and even that is mostly not ethnically Russians, instead it is the local ethnicities whose history with China is much longer than with Russia), remoteness of Moscow and Russian bureaucrats' total corruption - there is no need for the official declaration. So, while today China still can't ask for Vladivostok and other "historically Chinese territories" (according to the modern Chinese official maps), tomorrow they wouldn't even have to.
Too much propoganda results in reactions like this. Reality is that Russia is fine and dealing with relatively minor issues. Also this war as big as it looks in the west, is nothing compared to ww2 where 10s of millions died in massive battles. They survived. Thats what we russians have always done. Survive.
Russians and foreigners travelling to Russia regularly blog live.
Everyone there is doing fine.
The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
> Everyone there is doing fine.
As long as they don't say anything critical against the regime. Or have the misfortune of flying in/around Russia while morons are at the trigger of surface to air missiles (cf. MH17 and Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243). Or have the misfortune of getting conscripted to die in the meat grinder.
> The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
Yes, Russia, the known beacon of journalistic freedom. How many journalists have been murdered by the regime?
The fact that those Wikipedia sections / articles exist is very telling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Gazeta#Deaths_and_attac...
> media control there by western media brands.
Anyone blindly lumping together all "western" media is not to be taken seriously. Especially when comparing with fucking Russia of all places. You can find plenty of disagreements in various "western" media (consider The Guardian vs Financial Times vs Le Figaro vs Le Monde vs NY Times vs Washington Post). Nobody dares contradict the official line in Russia, even calling the war a war, or they get tortured and murdered.
> Or have the misfortune of flying in/around Russia while morons are at the trigger of surface to air missiles (cf. MH17 and Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243)
Chances for a civilian to die from war causes and gun violence combined in Russia are currently significantly lower than chances for American to die from gun violence.
> Or have the misfortune of getting conscripted to die in the meat grinder.
Russia is currently recruiting contractors among conscripts and criminals. It’s not impossible to be sent to war illegally, but significant majority went there willingly (I have no idea why idiots arrested for drug possession choose to go to meat grinder, but they do it).
Overall, in most places there it’s safe enough to think about something else than how not to be killed. People are really doing fine (when internet works - it’s been shitty recently for air defense reasons).
>Everyone there is doing fine.
And if you say somebody doing badly, you will get 10 years in gulag.
> Everyone there is doing fine
Lmao, food prices skyrocketed, quality plummeted, interest rates are at record highs, budget deficit. Totally doing fine, comrade.
> No one is going to invest there for a very long time after what Russia did.
Many large businesses have returned to Russia. "No one is going to invest" is a naive childish thinking. They outperformed growth expectations in 2024, unemployment rate dropped from 5.8% in 2020 to 2.3% in 2025. GDP is surging, insane tech and energy investments from China. Plus Russia has a very low public debt. All in all, their economy is pretty resilient despite what they say in the mainstream media.
> unemployment rate dropped from 5.8% in 2020 to 2.3% in 2025
Because a massive amount of men were conscripted?
> GDP is surging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Spending ~30% of the country's budget on military hardware that will get blown up might look good, GDP wise, but is utterly unproductive.
> Because a massive amount of men were conscripted?
That's an emotional oversimplification. Unemployment fell not because of conscription, but due to massive import substitution and rising labor demand in construction, logistics and manufacturing.
Despite sanctions, Russia's ruble-adjusted budget deficit remains manageable, and the trade balance is strong due to record energy exports. Military spending has driven industrial revitalization. Factories reopened, supply chains revamped and domestic R&D expanded.
Whether you agree with the morality or not, economically it’s not just money burned. It has multiplier effects: jobs, tech development and regional growth. Dismissing that is lazy.
Russia has been a winner by basically no metric other than land and being a shit neighbor.
And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there; it's literally a special grave digging operation. Soviet stockpiles of armor are basically depleted; now it's the buggy and moped meta. They've completely failed to support their supposed allies (i.e. Assad, Iran, Armenia). A good chunk of their strategic aviation fleet is gone. Car bombings of generals continue all over Russia and occupied territories, which brings the question, will it even stop if they "win"? They've finally been demoted from being an aircraft carrier operating nation. Their frozen assets are literally killing Russian soldiers. National wealth fund has ~20-30% of the prewar assets. Something similar in gold reserves. Interest rates are beyond effed, and recruits are largely joining for the money needed in the terrible economy caused by Putin himself. Who annexed 4 oblasts only to legally deploy the 18 year olds Putin promised not to deploy in Ukraine (as it's no longer Ukraine in Russian law). Non-military industrial output is on a steady decline. Price capping on bread. Fossil fuel output at minimums, and with low prices.
So what is Russia winning at?
>And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there
This is very easily verified as false. It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.
Since the last big movements of the front that's absolutely been the case, though you're right it doesn't apply if you account for the early captures. Once you remove them (Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk), that's very easily verifiable.
Avdiivka had 30-32k pre-war population, estimated 40-47k Russian casualties. Bakhmut had 71k pre-war, Russia suffered an estimated 75k casualties from Wagner alone. Pokrovsk 61k pre-war, ongoing, 21k estimated casualties in January alone, and it's been ongoing for a year.
And beyond cities, the daily casualty rates at most obtain tiny settlements of a few dozen pre-war inhabitants. In the worst case you have the North Kharkiv front with 10s of thousands of casualties and basically a stalemate.
>It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.
"One thing is debatable so everything is debatable", I didn't expect this level on HN.
I think your assessment is only partially correct.
The Europeans are getting their act together and increasing their cooperation and defense spending.
Sweden and Finland joined NATO, placed large defense orders and started integrating with the British.
France has started talking about expanding its nuclear arsenal to cover the defense needs of the entire continent.
While the Russian military has gained tremendous military experience, they have lost huge amounts of top tier kit.
They are now essentially dependent on China.
No one came to aid Iran during the Israeli air campaign, the Russians were too busy and the Chinese didn't care enough.
The main winner has clearly been China, but the US and the EU have not really lost anything. If anything everyone that is not a party to the war is coming of a bit stronger.
If there was any real will left in EU people, Ukraine would wipe Russia off the map (at least the putinesque remnants), it will happen anyway, but we'd rather just expend vastly more money and vastly more humans and time in the process.
Considering the current rate of inflation, switching the EU economies to war production would save so much money and lives, and bring down prices.
War economies famously known for low inflation and wide availability of basic goods.
Keeping the war longer by a decade by not willing to hold your promise is vastly improves things, that’s for sure. Instead of showing the bully the force, be done with that pretty quickly and returning to your non-war economy pretty quickly. Ever considered that option, huh?
Russia has nuclear weapons and good means of delivering them all over the planet. That is a fact of reality that does not allow us to "be done with that pretty quickly".
There is not much evidence that Russia currently has working nuclear weapons, but we'd rather not find out the hard way.
Yeah, let these pesky Ukrainians to find out. This memorandum thing was a fake security promise anyway.
Good means are being …?
Maybe if Ruzzia where the logic is always reversed
Putin caused
1 NATO to get 2 new members, gg Putin
2 NATO to invest more in weapons, gg Putin
3 killed or wounded 1 million Russians while the population was already in decline and I would bet the birth rate is decreasing because of the war
4 economy is fucked, Gazprom reported first time ever no proffits, interests rates increased
5 the idiots managed to hit again a civilian airplane, and i read recently Azerbajan and Armenia are cooperating to get rid of Ruzzians on their lands
6 Ruzzian weapon exports are fucked
7 Ruzzian army is a joke asx strength now, and the people are seen as low life orcs, killing, raping, torturing creatures
8 Kremlin is a joke, from 3 day operation to 3+ years, people flying from windows, politicians unable to admit a drone hit happened and claiming is debbry,
9 Putin pulled his secret weapons the donkeys after 3 years of keeping them hidden and failed to ado any significant progress
10 Ruzzia advances in Ukraine slower then a snail, check the numbers. and there are more than 1000 Ruz casualties for square km
11 I can see this Zeds complaining about the West decadence while using iPHone, driving German cars and wearing expensive wtches (even Putin can't stand to put his ass on a Ruzzian car)
How is Ruzzia stronger? The only way I could think a Zed would claim this is something like "Zed eats excrements daily for an year and after barely surviving this he claims he is stronger because someone in the West would die if he eat so much excrements, the Zed not realizing that the solution is to execute the tzar and stop eating excrements.
Any Russian (not Ruzzian) can be honest and admit that this is not going according to the plan, Putin tried to repeat the Crimean invasion, his KGB friends told him that Ukrainians will receive the Zeds with flowers , the informations were wrong and Putin seems to be incapable to stop the disaster and keep his throne so he is willing to sacrifice the people and the empire just to keep is throne.
>5 the idiots managed to hit again a civilian airplane, and i read recently Azerbajan and Armenia are cooperating to get rid of Ruzzians on their lands
That's one way to get nominated for Nobel peace prize.
> Ruzzia advances in Ukraine slower then a snail, check the numbers. and there are more than 1000 Ruz casualties for square km
Net Russian gains in June 2025 were 572 km^2.* In order for your statement to hold true, Russia would have suffered over half a million casualties in June alone. Where is your evidence to support such an assertion?
* https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1lpspn...
>Net Russian gains in June 2025 were 572 km^2.* In order for your statement to hold true, Russia would have suffered over half a million casualties in June alone. Where is your evidence to support such an assertion?
Or my average is not a daily or monthly, do it again for the last 1 year. 2 years.
Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?
> Or my average is not a daily or monthly, do it again for the last 1 year. 2 years.
That would make even less sense. The thread I linked has the appropriate data going back to April 2024. We can toss that into a spreadsheet or LLM to get the total Russian gains in the past year, as you requested.
ChatGPT calculates total Russian territorial control change at ~6000km^2. So are you now saying the Russians actually have 6 million casualties? Again, please support assertion. The only number that doesn't make sense here is your "Russians are taking 1000 casualties per square kilometer".
> Can you also calculare for us how many years until Ruzzia reaches Kyiv and how many casualties ?
It's been on my list of "Things to Do" for a while. I want to whip up a Rust library to run TNDM/QJM calculations on the Russo-Ukrainian War. For now, I will only state that rates of advance in warfare are non-linear. Past a certain point of weakness, collapse is rapid. I think Operation Bagration is a good case to examine in detail, as many of the frontline German divisions had REALLY thin manning. The Ukrainian frontline is manned at something like ~40% strength, and with a large number of old and infirm conscripts. They are relying heavily on drones to keep the Russians from locally massing combat power. I'm not sure where the breakpoint is in Ukrainian manpower past which their brigades will shatter.
But just pulling an estimate out of my butt: 2 years and an additional 500,000 Russian non-recoverable losses. shrug
The advances are not linear, the Ruzzian advanced a lot in first days (there were some traitors in the Ukrainian army),. since then they advance at snail speed, my stats were from my memory, probably during winter when they attacked massively and gained almost nothing. If you have good data and can export it as csv then would be nice too see some graphs, like gains per month/week ,casualties per week and km^2 , distance from Kyiv.
In war a country can give up on some territory and move the army and government if needed into a better defended region, Ukrainians only need the will to fight and the Ruzzians provide them plenty of reasons not to be Russified.
So my stats were outdated or wrong, it is 5x, 10 x then ? Let me know a better number to use in future.
With more than 1.2M dead or out of service injured, Russia is spent. It's why North Korean troops had to be deployed.
All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense.
Sure they can bomb from afar. But even of they take the Ukraine now, they have no force to hold it with.
> With more than 1.2M dead or out of service injured, Russia is spent
> All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense.
I'm genuinely curious what your information diet/sources looks like that would lead you to make such statements.
According to Ukrainian sources, Russian end strength in Ukraine continues to increase and they are maintaining a strategic reserve of personnel as well:
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-plans-to-increase-groupin... The Russian military plans to increase its grouping in Ukraine by 150,000 soldiers in 2025, equivalent to around 15 motorized infantry divisions, Presidential Office Deputy Head Pavlo Palisa said on April 3, Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne reported.
"Their formation is ongoing. The Russians have no problems with recruiting personnel now..."
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/syrskyi-warns-russia-stockpi... "Moreover, Russia maintains an additional 121,000 troops in its strategic reserve—comprising 13 divisions, as well as various regiments and brigades—that could be deployed to the battlefield if necessary."
"This means their army grows by an average of 8,000 to 9,000 soldiers every month," the Commander-in-Chief noted.
As for Russia only being able to defend, how do you square that with this Finnish analysis group's tracking of Russian territorial control rates increasing every month this year?
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1l30kb...
That data roughly matches one of Reddit's most prolific meta-analysts, who mostly uses Suriyak data (the most reputable Russian mapper):
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1lpspn...
They had to withdraw from Syria, due to a loss of ability to project power. That's how desperate they are for troops. They removed troops, planes, closed bases. Almost immediately Syria fell.
Israel and the US's stance with Iran, was something not as plausible when Russian strength existed in the region. Russia complained and threatened, but naturally nothing has come of it. They have no capacity to do anything, or project power. There is no Russian strength in the Middle East any more. Why? They cannot extend their power beyond their borders.
This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).
Using reserve troops is what Russia could do if their back was to the wall. They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within. Remember, Russia is not a democracy, but a totalitarian state controlled by a dictator with an iron fist. If their 'reserves' are drawn down too far, there will be insurgency.
Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops. And it doesn't discount what I'm saying. They have lost their capacity to project power, and are now relying upon mercenaries to shore up their troop levels. They're spent.
> They removed troops, planes, closed bases. Almost immediately Syria fell.
This has more to do with the Syrian military being completely starved of resources, particularly money, due to the US occupying the most lucrative portions of sovereign Syrian territory for years. Not having Russian airpower on call absolutely contributed to the collapse but not being able to reliably pay/staff formerly-capable formations like the Tiger Forces or 4th Armored Division (in addition to not being able to afford reconstruction) is what really did the regime in. Watch this from 2019:
https://www.youtube.com/live/MFsFOS5Odno?si=xry8-a2_cKLIRKW-...
>This is doubly unfortunate for Russia, as Iran was, I repeat was sending massive amounts of shells, drones, and more to Russia. For some odd reason, they've stopped (sarcasm).
The Russians have been domestically mass producing their versions of the Shahed-series drones for a while now. Interruptions in arms transfers due to Iran's own security problems are unlikely to significantly degrade Russia's drone salvos at this point.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55948 The organization calculated that Russia produced an average of 60.5 Geran drones per day, or roughly 1,850 drones per month, between February and April 2025.
https://www.calibredefence.co.uk/shahed-and-geran-the-evolut... Over time, a separate version emerged which is known as the Geran-2, which is the name given to Shaheds made in Russia. Russia now makes hundreds of these drones every week, enabling it to increase its usage to 200 per week in September 2024, and then to 1,000 per week by March 2025.
> They need troops in country, or there will be a revolt within.
Who do you think will stage a revolt, with both Navalny and Prigozhin dead? There's not really any charismatic opposition leadership left that I can think of.
> They have lost their capacity to project power
Ok, I will compromise and largely agree with this statement in broad strokes. Yes, Russia's power projection capacity has diminished. That's a very different position IMO compared to "Russia can only do defense" as you stated earlier....while Russia has ~600,000 men busy invading the largest country in Europe after Russia itself. Their global power projection capacity is degraded because so much of their attention is sucked into fighting the largest land war in Europe in 80 years, but that's not the same as only being able to defend.
> Hiring mercenaries (in the article aka contract soldiers) from anywhere including China, isn't the same as getting seasoned, loyal troops.
Without going too far off on a tangent, this also applies to Ukraine (regarding loyalty...Colombians are definitely considered "seasoned" as far as international mercenaries go).
https://www.nzz.ch/english/discharged-by-their-own-countrys-...
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2025/06/04/iowa...
See my info page
They were never going to achieve a full takeover of Ukraine though. Large mass size and the people wouldn't accept them.
They came extremely close with the decpaitation attack. It worked back when the USSR invaded Czechslovakia. What they weren't expecting was effective resistance, so now it's no longer possible.
That's why RIA had an article announcing the successful taking of Ukraine ready and published it by mistake, right: https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20...
Right? Right? Putin totally only planned a multi-year stalemate where he lost his best troops on a dash to capture Kyiv. Totally!
Such familiar words there - "Putin took upon himself the historic responsibility to solve the Ukrainian question"
I don't think they anticipated a Nazi/Imperial Japan style completely takeover
I believe their plan was to capture Kyiv and install puppet government, and have the military collapse into factions and unable to coordinate effectively as a conventional force. Paramilitary groups would break out (such as the Azov units, etc.) Ukraine would then degrade into civil war, especially along an east-west line.
But at least, it would be dysfunctional and unable to join EU or NATO. And they would be able to control enough to extract some value out of the country (e.g. natural resources). But they never really care about establishing peace and prosperity there.
Hardly anyone is 'winner' here.
> And the Russian military has gained real battle tested knowledge.
Yes, on using human wave attacks, trenches, and cheap Iranian drones. Oh, and at the cost of almost all trained troops and modern equipment. Not a very good deal.
> It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger.
Russia started the war, they are the ones who need to win it. The fact that they are stalled is a win for Ukraine, who are the ones trying to survive. The Russian economy is in shambles (cf. the Broken window fallacy), as are their army, navy and air force. It will take them decades to rearm back to the same level. Putin isn't stronger, really. He entered a quagmire of a war he cannot back out of (will appear weak) nor can he actually win in any way. He's stuck.
> It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together.
Are you sure you understand what BRICS is? Everyone using Russia's predicament to get cheap natural resources doesn't mean that e.g. Brazil or India are closer to Russia...
>Yes, on using human wave attacks, trenches, and cheap Iranian drones.
This war is the most recorded in human history. Can you share some videos of these Russian human wave attacks? Can you describe the objective delineating criteria between a normal attack by an infantry battalion or regiment, and a "human wave" attack? Regarding trenches and "cheap" Iranian drones.....should the Russians NOT practice basic principles of force protection/use of fortifications? Should they NOT leverage novel cost-effective munitions to wage war and instead use massively-expensive gold-plated equipment? How is that working out for the US and allies, who can't produce more than ~600 Patriot missiles per year at a cost of ~$4M per missile.....meanwhile Russia is throwing 500 drones and missiles at Ukraine every few days....
BTW, I recommend these vids about "human waves":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBdASPCBHIw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F4akL1AS5w
>cheap Iranian drones
You say "cheap" like it's a bad thing.
Yea, Russia has learned a lesson at a very high cost of human lives and materiel.
Sure thing comerade, they even have a submarine missile cruiser.
Russia has 1 million in casualties and has failed to capture Ukraine. You really think you can claim it was a "win" because now all their experienced soldiers are dead and their strategy has been reduced to "run towards the enemy and hopefully some of you won't be killed and thus we can capture another field"?
> their strategy has been reduced to "run towards the enemy and hopefully some of you won't be killed and thus we can capture another field"?
Is this seriously the depth of your understanding of Russian tactics (what you described isn't a strategy to begin with...). I recommend watching every tactical analysis video on Mark Tacacs YT channel (he's a NATO military officer, not some pro-RU source):
https://www.youtube.com/@MarkTakacs-u1w
Russia has a population of 144m.
1m is not a lot
Edit: as per my comment below, casualties are not deaths. It's a wider definition.
That includes women, children and elderly. If you count fighting age men only, 1M becomes significant. If you count men actually available for draft, you're already at 10% loss.
It always surprises me when calculation is done on a basis of formula that goes something like this. Total population - Casualties = Number
1 million casualties is an absolutely massive number, regardless of your total population. How many of your fellow citizens would you be willing to throw into the meatgrinder until you say “that not ok”?
> How many of your fellow citizens would you be willing to throw into the meatgrinder until you say “that not ok”?
If you are Putin? All of them. So yes, Putin is winning, he hasn't even used up 10% of his army's acceptable losses yet.
>1m is not a lot.
For anybody still questioning why the civilized word must stop Russia, i'd suggest to mediate a couple seconds over the parent comment (the commenter in the parent and in his other comments presents Russian position quite correctly)
It's 1m Casualties. Not deaths.
The definition of which is quite wide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualty_(person)
>"A casualty, as a term in military usage, is a person in military service, combatant or non-combatant, who becomes unavailable for duty due to any of several circumstances, including death, injury, illness, missing, capture or desertion."
When you restrict it to fit men of military age (lets be generous here and say 18-55 , even though there is ample evidence of Russian men 60+ signing up), 1 million is quite alot. The Russian population skews older - median age is around 40. There is also a massive gap of of people their 20s-early 30s.
1 million is basically an entire birth year of men ages 30-45, or two entire birth years of their male population from ages 20-30, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/...
Imagine all the men of your entire high school / college graduating class being either killed or seriously wounded so Putin can grab a few thousand km of territory.
Now they could allow women in combat roles, but I severely doubt it for this conflict. It would be extraordinarily unpopular and go against the narrative they have been selling their populace for decades.
Name your number.
Not really, the point being made goes deeper.
The Russian regime (and apparently a lot of Russians) deem Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group - they call them "little Russians".
Ukrainian authorship would mean:
- Ukrainians are competent people with agency (which they are of course, for lots of reasons) - this plays into ethnophobia;
- their government, military, etc, is competent, functional with agency - this plays into government legitimacy;
- Overall, in a lot of instances, the Russian government is incompetent, even more incompetent than the guys their propaganda has been trying to paint as corrupt, incompetent people who are being manipulated.
That's why a lot of time Russian propaganda trys to spin Ukrainian wins as "NATO/CIA/MI6/external agent did this".
For example, they tried really hard to bend reality to remove the credit for the Ukrainian drone operation that destroyed a lot of bomber jets, saying it was planned and executed by CIA, MI6, Israel, etc [0].
This is what we're dealing with here: massive ethnophobia and propaganda.
So in their propaganda, Ukraine can't be competent and stand on its merit, because that would mean they're not inferior people and that they have agency.
You should always be wary of someone making these claims without any evidence.
[0]https://uacrisis.org/en/rospropaganda-zaplutalas-v-pavutyni
That’s not the meaning behind “Little Russia”, please considering doing a historical deep dive.
You don't need much of a historical deep dive to see how it's currently being used:
> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]
Ethnical slurs, or any other slurs, change over time. If you go back in time 100+ years in any context, and you use a modern ethnic or racial slur, it will most likely empty of meaning. Just like a lot of slurs from the past have lost their meaning over the years. But the "historical meaning" is constantly being used by Russian propaganda, where they claim one needs to go back to the 1200's, and their interpretation of history, to try to make sense of the current genocide attempt in Ukraine.
There's no logic behind that approach because current actions speak for themselves, including the context of recent history, and that's enough. You can get a pretty clear picture of this whole event starting in the 1990s.
Unless you still see that slur being used by Russian nationalists as an endearing term to address their "brotherly nation" which they support being erased from the map.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia#Modern_usage
Please stop spreading this BS. Малороссия ("little" Russia as you say) does not mean what you say.
What does it mean in the current Russian political environment?
> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]
Just to make sure, according to you, this is completely false and detached?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia#Modern_usage
But this is a small detail from my reply, why are people so focused on this? Even if I was wrong, which I don't see that I am, everything else still stands.
So "The Russian regime (and apparently a lot of Russians) deem Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group - they call them "little Russians"." it is? And this follows from the link? Have you read it? Really?
The term Малороссия now days is outdated indeed, as wiki says. This term was first introduced not even by Russia but by Byzantine Church and word "мало" ("little" as you "translate" here) means "original" "primordial" to distinct two church branches and then where used to denote parts of Rus' under Polish rule.
Note, the linked article does not say that Russians use this term to denote someone inferior. It says that some Ukrainians consider this word offensive which is not surprising taking into account active propaganda and lack of historical education in masses.
You still failed to address the question: "little russians", "kholkhols" are ethnic slurs being used by Russian nationalists as terms of endearment?
> It says that some Ukrainians consider this word offensive which is not surprising taking into account active propaganda and lack of historical education in masses.
So not because Russians are in their land trying to kill as many Ukrainians as possible, terrorizing them, and destroying their culture? It's all because of propaganda?
I addressed you phrase about Russians seen Ukrainians as an inferior ethnic group and "proving" this by "they call them "little Russians", please don't shift topics. This is BS. There is no such phrase "little Russians" in Russian language.
Ethnic slurs exists of course. In any language. And "kholkhols" is one of them. As well as word "moskal'" in Ukranian. Do you know what it means? And ethnic slurs are not used in official language, you know. I mean Russian official language.
>So not because Russians are in their land trying to kill as many Ukrainians as >possible, terrorizing them, and destroying their culture? It's all because of >propaganda? Yes, just because of propaganda targeted at low educated people. I mean you can hate Russia for starting the war and turn a blind eye to Ukrainians killing Donbass people but hating historical word referring to some lands that now are part of Ukraine? Just because it has "мало" in it? You need combination of propaganda and low intelligence here.
P.S. Not going to continue. This all conversation is just waist of my time.
I didn't say "Russians" I said the Regime and a lot of Russians (extreme nationalist ones), which are the ones running the propaganda machine.
It has been used has a derogatory term, like other ethnic slurs.
> And ethnic slurs are not used in official language, you know. I mean Russian official language.
If they are part of the Russian State propaganda language, then they're part of the official language. You, in particular, might not like it and feel uncomfortable with it, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. So you're misguided in your assessment, the problem isn't the new derogatory meaning of the word "little russian", it's the people using it while supporting the genocide in Ukraine.
> As well as word "moskal'" in Ukranian. Do you know what it means?
Oh I'm sure there are plenty of slurs from Ukrainians towards the people invading their land, killing and raping, destroying their livelyhood and culture in an attempt to erase them from the map! How do you expect people to react towards the people committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide?
> I mean you can hate Russia for starting the war and turn a blind eye to Ukrainians killing Donbass people
So your take is still the propaganda hook? Russia has killed more Ukrainians in the Donbass than anyone else since 2014 - they're the only ones to blame. They can try to spin it, but all the evidence points in their direction.
As for "hating an historical word" I don't even know what that means. Words in itself are not subject of being hated, its the people who use them with bad intentions that are the problem here.
The point is trying to claim something without any evidence that supports it.
Sure, it is always omnipotent Western agencies... while some Western governments are halting support in critical moments - which has bigger impact on the war.
I think Ukrainians (and Russians as well) aren't tech illiterate. They are (both) more than capable in this matter.
> So the foreign intelligence services gave them a button push so it's not a direct cyber war on Russia.
What foreign intelligence services ? Also if you think there isn't a constant barrage of attacks coming from everyone, you're not ready for the real world.
It doesn't say anything about foreign intelligence services
It's reasonable to read it as implied
Are you suggesting Ukrainians don't have any agency? It's always someone else?
That position sounds very weird.
I think the most likely explanation is it's the Ukrainians defending Ukraine against Russia's unjustified invasion.
You are free to believe whatever you chose of course and state it here, but the sentence you cited does nothing to support your claim.
Why?
Tomato, tomato. There is a war according to one side so the reasoning is mute, i'd argue the reason is it is easier to recruit the correct people if they do not work directly for the military than this distinction.
> Tomato, tomato.
This is a silly expression for written text, since I always read both tomatoes as 'tomato', before realising the intention. :)
Ukranian military intelligence.
Likely. But also could have been some thugs with a wrench in a basement and the sys admin giving up the ssh keys and 2fa etc.
It's Ukraine. Are you aware of the "banks' debt collectors"? They had thugs knocking on your door (and your face) for an overdue loan payment; they would _of course_ use violence/torture to extract information.
Whoah.. -4..
Fun fact, I was internal auditor in a bank (I will not specify the year(s) for safety/privacy). We did the due diligence and ended up buying a Ukrainian bank. Part of the 'collections' was really to smash people's faces. Believe it or not. But sure.. you know best.
Guess whose influence and where it comes from?
Yup, I feel like Ukraine has been trying to break away from the society is a meat grinder culture of Russia for a while and the war has made if clear who's on what side locally.
My only qualm with them is their not so great support for gay people, but then during the war ofc the party line is now they love their gay soldiers. Would have been nice to see more action around that beforehand but I get it. Even other first world countries still have plenty of problems as a gay person, especially gay men.
This goes for all of Eastern Europe though.
And guess what is common in Eastern Europe and why it lags behind Western one!
No, Ukrainian cyber activists volunteered to work with the intelligence service to help the war effort.
No, it clearly says Ukraine.
Do you have any evidence that it was foreign intelligence services?
I wonder to what extent either side is worried about the firmware on the drones. Somehow getting tampered-with firmware onto the drones that your enemy is using seems like it would be valuable.
Very interesting but risky (easy to discover and renders the whole operation ineffective). So I believe what they did was heavy-handed but the most reasonable.
One funny tick that's supposedly appeared is installing viruses on the SD cards used in drones so if/when a drone is downed intact and picked up by a curious enemy, their computer is infected.
Yeh, it would seem in some ways more useful than shutting down the factory; if you gently made all the drones do something, like let them be remote controlled, or bomb the place they were launched from.
But once that happened a handful of times it would be corrected.
I suppose it could be used sparingly but Ukraine would have no way of knowing when to use it. Perhaps a Bluetooth or whatever else the drone has on board "keep away" beacon for vips.
You say that, but Israel booby trapped the Hezbollah comm devices _twice_ with physical explosives.
There are tones of non-obvious options. Eg make it appear like being shoot-downs. With a bunch of RNG / logic to make it non-obvious... random percentage, only when getting close to target, so many ways...
The real enemy is QA. Don't want it misbehaving during a virtual test flight.
Drones are typically flashed minutes before the mission.
The only tech that scales cheaper than drones are digital interventions. This is a better way to intercept.
The world's civilized countries should unite to wipe out Russia's IT infrastructure.
Anyone else amused by the date on the picture being 1 day from the beginning of the Unix epoch?
I'd bet that their stickiest problem will be restoring and replacing all the weird IT-OT interface parts (e.g. some random Windows 98 box which is the only thing can run the CNC). No one ever thinks to document or back up those things.
Glory to Ukraine! Slava Ukraini!
I'm curious if they ever practiced any sort of disaster recovery scenarios.
AI translation (to English) is off in places. "Ukrainian cybercriminals" is not in the original and was picked as the translation of the closest sounding full word.
Here is a translated version of the telegram message posted by the hacking team:
> LLC “Gaskar Integration” (Gaskar Group)—one of the largest UAV manufacturers in Russia—has just been penetrated right down to the tonsils in the course of demilitarization and denazification.
> VO Team, together with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance (https://t.me/UCAgroup) and another very well‑known organization whose mere mention makes the vatniks’ bottle‑openings burst (https://gur.gov.ua/), carried out large‑scale operations: we seized all of Gaskar Group’s network and server infrastructure, gathered valuable data on their current and prospective UAVs, destroyed that data, and knocked the entire infrastructure offline.
> By the way, from the information we obtained, the PRC is helping Gaskar Group with production and staff training. China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands .
> VO Team focused on wiping out the production complex’s infrastructure. On‑site we erased more than 250 hosts (4 ESXi servers, 46 virtual servers, 200+ workstations) and bricked about 20 MikroTik devices. In total we destroyed 47 TB of valuable data at Gaskar Group—including 10 TB of backups—and disabled all production and auxiliary systems.
> The scum at Gaskar Group have the blood of hundreds of Ukrainian children, women, and elderly on their hands. That’s why we went after this target with special zeal. We now possess the lists of ALL employees, their home addresses, information about their family members, and much more… We’re in your home computers and phones—we’re everywhere . Not a single bastard from Gaskar Group will escape responsibility!
> The sword of Damocles already hangs by a thin thread over your heads. It’s too late to spew excuses like “we’re apolitical” or “we were just making money”….
> The whole world can see that the so‑called Russian Federation has strategically lost everything. Defeat and collapse of that unwashed entity are only a matter of time. VO Team is collecting data on everyone involved in Putin’s criminal war—the deaths of our children, mothers, and all Ukrainians. Retribution is inevitable and is drawing near!
> China transferred technology for the newest UAVs—technology that is now in our hands
Well, this is quite the interesting tidbit. Thanks for posting the translation.
Weird thing: the timestamp on the upper right part of the camera is "01-02-1970" :thinking_face:
Day 1 after the start of the Unix epoch. Looks like a clock with unset/reset date that has had one day pass.
One day or one month past UNIX Epoch
While this is a move that will hinder production for a while I'd say maybe they should have been more creative
They should have checked the source codes and added some changes to make drones unpredictably unreliable
"Oh this totally innocent code change? Oh look it makes the gps act weird if longitude is between a certain range how weird"
When there's hundreds of drones raining down on your civilians every day, just disabling the production has a a higher priority than being cutesy with things that might work further away into the future.
In several cases during World War II, the Allies intentionally allowed German attacks to happen (or did not act to prevent them) to avoid revealing that they had cracked German codes, particularly the Enigma cipher.
Actually, I don't think that's known to have ever happened. The Allies protected Ultra intelligence by parallel construction--coming up with other means to 'discover' the same information (principally, sending a reconnaissance flight to the known location of wolf packs).
The main claim for this myth is the sacrifice of Coventry during the Battle of Britain, but as far as I'm aware, historians are in general agreement that Ultra was unable to ascertain that Coventry was the target before the raid took place.
"In his 1974 book The Ultra Secret, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham asserted that the British government had advance warning of the attack from Ultra; intercepted German radio messages encrypted with the Enigma cipher machine and decoded by British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. He further claimed that Winston Churchill ordered that no defensive measures should be taken to protect Coventry, lest the Germans suspect that their cipher had been broken."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz#Coventry_and_Ul...
And the Wikipedia article immediately goes on to detail refutations of that claim:
> Winterbotham's claim has been rejected by other Ultra participants and by historians. They state that while Churchill was indeed aware that a major bombing raid would take place, no one knew what the target would be.
[then follows three paragraphs of more detailed refutation]
I don't think that's comparable because the Allies hoped cracking Enigma would reveal other secrets in the future. Ukraine probably aren't worried that Russia are going to do something else more worth interrupting with their drones in the future.
How long do you think it would've taken for them to realize that happened just and reflashed the drones?
You can reflash however you want for some bugs. The deal would be to make it a dormant attack not a destroy all in one go and expose the payload. There have been successful hacks where a buffer overflow was inserted in in a one off write, that was then targeted when needed. If employed carefully in special situations, this could be an important weapon. There are also deeper levels of compromise: why compromise the source code or a the firmware binary when you can permanently compromise the production in a subtle way. Working your penetration slowly so that the whole plant or even production system must be scrapped by the enemy. At the very least gather intel.
Look at successful cyber campaigns like stuxnet or an actual hardware sabotage from Israel. The attacks were dormant until they were ready for maximum effect. Randomly disabling a production site, without a strategic context, is going to be an isolated win, or an operational victory.
I remember reading some articles about the pentagon being a bit upset at some of the strategic decisions of Ukraine's armed forces where they often push for morale boosting moments at big costs(i think 2 years ago they spent lots of resources to get a strategically irrelevant town). And honestly this is also what it looks like: You dont see a coordinated attack but spurious disconnected events. I think when you are gasping for air you hold on to anything you can, but still the goal is to win, not just look like winning.
I still think they'd work it out pretty fast. I'm sure sabotage is pretty high on the list of things the Russians would be thinking about.
It's a good idea, I just think if the goal is to stop the drones working, what better way to do that then to destroy the manufacturing capabilities as often as possible?
Even in the case you describe, you're allowing them to have drones and still do some damage.
Obviously if there was opportunity for a supply chain attack like that they would have done it in addition to wrecking the IT infrastructure. Regardless, I imagine this will impact day to day drone operation as the Russians might re-flash the firmware to a known good version whether there is a backdoor or not
How many drones would they have destroyed? Couldn’t find that on the article
cybersecurity 101:
- know your threats
- assess your risks based on identified threats
- backup 3-2-1 strategy (3 copies of your data on 2 independent storage places with 1 copy offline and offsite)
- "build the world from scratch" plan with the assumption that all infra is completely and irreversibly destroyed.
- assume you have already been hacked but you don't yet know about it. Build your indicators of compromise based on that simple assumption.
Observing how some "groups of people" act in a totally ignorant fashion is amusing.
are the raw files available online?
i would not think so as it involves technology with a military application.
"Additionally, all doors at the drone production plant have been locked, forcing employees to use fire exits."
Ukraine winning again! lol
Ukrainian hackers ….? Hmm
The source of this news is the Ukrainian military which seems to exaggerate and spread propaganda (as does every other country of course). I don't know why we accept this information as reliable.
You don't have to. In fact, your best bet is to wait for Gaskar's response and/or the UA publishing trophies. But the lack of immediate corroboration for a clandestine cyber op doesn't somehow mean it probably didn't happen.
I am genuinely curious, what are the known examples of them exaggerating and spreading propaganda, regarding operations like this?
Ghost of Kyiv was recognized by Ukraine itself as a myth. Snake Island "go fuck yourself" was misrepresented (they were killed vs captured), plenty of others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...
There's also just endless small stuff (shorts/tiktoks/cam footage) on social media (reddit) that really does not pass the sniff test.
I think what Russia is doing is terrible, I am not defending them at all. I am just allergic to bullshit, and there is plenty of smelly things happening on the Ukrainian side, though of course I recognize the Russians are especially bad in this regard.
The ghost of Kyiv was recognized as a myth at the time of it's spread. The Snake Island story is understandable. Every country makes mistakes about KIA vs. MIA.
I was not very clear, but I meant Ukrainian intelligence services claiming operational success where there was none. It's also interesting that this Wikipedia entry appears devoid of UA false propaganda after 2022. I wonder if they realized that this was not a good Wiki entry on which to appear.
it is worth something if it's recognized as a myth by official sources at the time, but it doesn't change that social media (reddit) was absolutely jammed full of stuff about it, presenting it as factual, and has led probably millions of people to believe it was real. and even beyond the posts that were explicitly about it, comment sections continued to refer to it in serious ways. my whole point is there is a concerted effort to spread it as an "us vs them" narrative, with ukraine being the "us" part (as an american).
what i ultimately care about is manipulation, because manipulation and disinformation erode democracy, and it's overwhelmingly done by the rich and powerful and at the expense of the working class. there are endless billions of dollars getting funneled into the military industrial complex around ukraine, and the more americans align with ukraine, and the more americans can feel invested and interested in the war in happy-feel-good-ways (like having heroes and "fuck russia" moments) the more americans are okay with their tax dollars getting spent this way. whatever machinery is at play here has very successfully captured the support of a massive part of the American left, and the same people you see protesting about the environment are the same people you see waiving ukraine flags and being manipulated into suddenly being pro-war despite being against things like the war in iraq.
billionaires continue to make their billions, people continue to believe what they read on reddit and watch on corporate news, and the narrative is always things that aren't class consciousness.
The billionaires appear to be more pro-Russia, as that is where more billions lay.
Look at the oligarch paper of record, the grey lady. Just last week, they claimed that the Western-most, and safest Ukraininian city, Lviv, was too unsafe. They instead chose to embed that reporter with russian troops, in Kursk, and described it as "A Landscape of Death: Where Ukraine invaded."
Look at the comments on this story. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/world/europe/ukraine-russ...
It is insane, and utterly disconnect from reality. Do you know who uses blanket artillery barrages on villages? Russia. Even if Ukraine wanted to do that, they don't have the shells to spare. Russia has a well known documented history of not giving a flying f about the lives of its own people. This was just another example, and NYT laid it on "Where Ukraine invaded."
I honestly have a hard time believing that this is a NYT headline, and story. This is "WMD in Iraq" levels of NYT journalistic malpractice. This is true manipulation. The aggressor is the victim. Up is down. Who cares about Reddit comments. Decision makers read this crap in the NYT!
billionaires are pro-USA because the billions of dollars we're "giving to ukraine" is actually billions of dollars going to private american companies that sell services and equipment to the US government that are then handed over to ukraine.
i agree that russia is definitely the bad guy here, and i agree russia is much worse about fake news
> The attack destroyed over 47 TB of critical data,
I'm very dubious that there would be such an amount of “critical” data pretty much anywhere, besides the banking and insurance sector. And particularly not at a drone manufacturer.
Depends on how you slice it.
If you focus only on data with high-uptime requirements, no probably not 50 TB.
If you include low-uptime requirement but low-replaceability stuff like all the products' mechanical, electrical and software designs, documentation and artifacts? Easily 50 TB.
Training data like audio, pictures, and video perhaps.
Probably added all raw disk sizes together. Or all the data, including duplicates.
Exactly.
And we believe this why? A Ukrainian web site, no independent corroboration. All righty then.
What's interesting is that this whole challenge is making Russia stronger. Russia has increased its military industry and its now running full steam. Every attack is giving them an opportunity to harden. All of that is meaningless if it makes Russia stronger and more resilient to embargos and cyber/physical attacks in the long run.
For all of this to have meaning it has to have a fall of USSR kind of impact at some point, otherwise we just strengthened one of the world's most dangerous state.
Of course but also Ukraine doesn't have the privilege to care about the long term right now. You can't lose the battle today to win the war that you may never live to fight.
I agree, I just think we should do more than just helping Ukraine
Russia recently announced that they want to import millions of immigrants now, likely because they massacred a big chunk of their young workforce. Their economy and production capacity is slowly crumbling, political dissent is rising. I don't think they're getting stronger.
I think Russia would be able to project far much more power had they not attacked Ukraine and entered this long war. At this point the russian bear appears to be made of cardboard, low grade cheap cardboard. Not sure how long they'll be able to sustain this but the more they do the weaker they'll become. They've been losing a lot of ground in the Middle East and Asia as well.
Are they? They're running at full stream and yet they're still in a years-long stalemate in Ukraine?
Authoritarian governments always fail, because they get used to achieving everything by simply ordering it to be achieved, while the laws of physics don't obey orders.
Meanwhile they're murdering how many of their own soldiers per day?
It's just a feature of long running wars that both sides boost their military. Russia is stronger in some ways but weaker in others.
>GASKAR INTEGRATION
Definitely one of the companies that everyone has heard of before. No need to mention any of their brand or product names, they're that famous.
$3 million revenue in 2024.
I'm sure we'll hear more about the epic defeat of this major military supplier in the future.
Cynical sarcasm so thick, one could spread it with a spoon. What do you get from trying to devalue the successful outcome?