Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Ukrainian Drone Strikes: Waging a New War" video.

Most of the development and manufacturing of critical systems for the R-77 Air-to-air missiles was done in Ukraine, which Russia sourced to fill large Foreign Military Sales contracts to India and China. 13 of the main Soviet naval yards were in Ukraine, where the Russian Navy was built. Kharkiv was a huge manufacturing center for armored vehicles. We could go on and on.
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@protorhinocerator142 After the Holodomor, the relationship between Russia and Ukraine could only enjoy temporary union when allied against a common enemy, or with Russian puppet rule in Kiev (exactly what Putin had with Yanukovych until March 2014).
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@low_vibration Stalin was Georgian. Brezhnev was born Ukrainian and rose to the rank of General over Ukrainian military regions during The Great Patriotic War. Andropov did a lot to construct his background, which includes a Finnish citizen of German Jewish descent who was an adoptive grandfather named Fleckenstein. Lenin was a mixed breed of Russian, German, Swedish, Jewish, and Mongol backgrounds, which isn't uncommon in Russia.
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@BW022 Ukraine knows Russian geography and critical nodes better than the US since they've been fighting with or part of Russia since the 1100s. Yuri Dolgoruki founded Moskva from Kiev as part of the Kievan Rus back then, expanding Kievan Rus territories for his father up into the steppe.
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@Flipflopflopper Much of the Soviet aerospace industry was in Ukraine, but they also dispersed their military industrial complex to several regions due to proximity to European invaders. They had multiple fighter plants, engine plants, Radar, missiles, small arms, tanks, APC, etc. They set up the manufacturing base as to not have all their eggs in one basket in case they were ever invaded like Hitler and Napoleon did.
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@matthewbaillie3380 The wars between Muscovite and Kievan Rus princes started during Yuri Dolgoruki's life and attempt to seize Kiev after his father and brother were killed. We're talking 1149-1157, not the 1700s. I've been studying Russian history since the 1970s.
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@bingcrosby1378 You check your history. Moscow was founded by Yuri Dolgoruki from Kiev. I've personally seen his statue in Moscow.
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Russian leadership never let warheads be staged with operational units out of fear of what someone might do with them. There is almost no trust of inferiors in Russia and the East, only varying levels of Boyars and their underlings who are given latitude for corruptsia within their lanes. It's nothing like in the US with nuclear forces on alert all over, having regularly undergone Operational Readiness Inspections and warhead delivery validation exercises as part of standard unit OPTEMPOs.
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Someone blew the Kerch Bridge with a giant truck bomb. Now they've delivered significant airborne payloads onto a Russian bomber base deep within Russia. Samara could be hit any number of ways.
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@ZeihanonGeopolitics Been following you since STRATFOR. After travel and deployments to 30 Countries, having lived all over the US, I thought I was well-informed until I started reading your forecasts and analyses. I've been studying Soviet Order of Battle since the 1970s, spent a lot of time in Europe and Asia. Your content has been extremely enlightening, since many of these places are familiar to me from having been there.
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When you study history to that level, you realize that he who doesn't study history repeats it. He who does study history gets to watch he who doesn't, repeat it.
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There was a beautiful bombshell of a woman working in a US drone factory during WWII. An Army Air Forces Motion Pictures unit commander discovered her and saw great potential in her for the silver screen. Her name was Norma Jean Mortenson, but the world knows her as....Marilyn Monroe. The officer in the Army Air Forces photography unit was Captain R. Wilson Reagan (future President of the United States). The US has been in this drone business for a long, long time.
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@SianaGearz Excellent post. COTS GPS receivers can be rigged to the drone FLCS to provide a very precise flight path, with continuous mid-course updates and refined terminal phase profile. They could also "guide-by-missile" for terminal phase with video if they wanted to. Imagine cellular or SAT phones with multi-channel video feed, along with a rigged GPS guidance system for most of the path. There are many ways to skin this cat.
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@Laotzu.Goldbug I've been in aerospace and defense since the 1970s. Some of the programs we worked on were the ALCM, SRAM, SRAM II, JDAM, and other guided weapons systems, so I'm quite familiar with what it takes to get a warhead on-target. Before JDAM, it was all INS-based. The launch aircraft would get an update for its INS with Radar ground-mapping off known reference points before weapon separation, then pass that data to the missile so it would start off with the best available position references. Degradation of INS was a real thing, especially with weather. GPS and other things take precision-guidance into a new generation since then. There are better off-the-shelf guidance systems nowadays available to civilians. You do have to take terrain into consideration though, including altitude and solve for that if you want to fly a Nap Of the Earth profile. With modern digital mapping from satellite-based programs, you could manually chart an NOE course into a corridor, or run a real-time terrain-following profile algorithm.
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@Laotzu.Goldbug Ukraine can just rent Satellite imaging service from the private sector, in coordination with their own HUMINT assets in Russia-something the US is atrocious at.
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There are only 2 nations with the Petroleum Engineers, Technicians, and industrial bases capable of designing, manufacturing, and operating permafrost drill rigs: US and Canada Russia never developed those capabilities, so when the permafrost drilling apparatuses stop, they're done.
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If you ever travel to Russia, you immediately realize how indefensible it is. They're an open door. See Mathias Rust, May 1987 for example.
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@eyewonder6448 I lived there from 2008-2009, which was only 8 years into Putin's Presidency. It's like traveling back in time, but I'm very grateful for the experiences I had there. It's very ancient-feeling and more Asiatic than I expected.
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@bingcrosby1378 Biden WH isn't going to give long range strike drones to Ukraine. Ukraine has more advanced minds and built much of Russia's war materials, including the Navy, thousands of armored vehicles, missiles, Radars, mobile SAM systems like S-300, Tupolev bombers and transports, R-77, RVV-AE, etc.
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@bighands69 Nukes are hot, meaning the warheads give off heat due to how radioactive they are. Russia would purposely distribute warheads under our satellite surveillance windows, instead of trying to hide them, but then take the warheads back to the point of origin and then repeat the process to another unit to make it look like they had more than they really did. It was a shell game to bolster their image as a huge nuclear power, when they didn't really have anywhere near as many warheads. Ask the question why Putin funneled $363 million into Clinton Global Initiative when Hillary was SECSTATE for the Uranium One deal, after he announced that Russia was revitalizing its nuclear forces.
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Chechnya is tiny compared to Ukraine, with no real infrastructure. Ukraine was at the heart of much of the Soviet Union's aerospace, naval, and defense industries.
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Their economy and military industry was in decline and embarrassment in parallel with their war in Afghanistan from the 1970s-1989. They had their fighters shot down for sport over Lebanon by Israelis in their new F-15s and F-16s in 1982, then later that year suffered a partial meltdown of a reactor at Chernobyl (kept secret), then suffered another giant nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 that exposed their incompetence to the world, then had a German kid fly a Cessna into Red Square in 1987, while Reagan uttered his order to Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall!" From 1982-forward was a rare time of chaos in Russian history, with precedents like Lenin and the Civil War of the 1920s and the Times of Trouble from 1597-1613 as the only comparable periods to reference.
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@protorhinocerator142 Putin planned to re-take the former Russian territories since he became President in 2000. Members of his foreign ministry were talking about it enthusiastically, after the chaos years of Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
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@bobwatson8754 Khrushchev was born just over the border in Russia, but spent most of his early years in Donbas working and later in the army as a Bolshevik commisar.
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In 2022, the means available to delivering PGMs are far more vast than 2002. The earth's surface is mapped in extreme detail. Tiny GPS units are available to anyone in the region. Russians use handheld US-made civilian GPS units in their fighters because they actually work.
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