Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Strongpoint on July 21, 2023, 08:47:17 am

Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov) was arrested today for "extremism". He had a great option of fleeing to Hague and getting a comfortable prison cell... Instead, he'll get a cell in a Russian prison or worse.

The war became 20% more boring... What will I do without his legendary shitposts ? The man who very publicly told Putin to "Shut up, just shut up" will be missed after his unforseen prison suicide.

Don't worry bros Putin is stepping up to fill the shitpost void by claiming Poland will invade Belarus and Ukraine to revive the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

“It is well known that they also dream of the Belarusian lands,” he said, also without providing any evidence.

Source: i made it the fuck up

Russia announced it will consider all ships sailing in the Black Sea to Ukrainian ports will as carriers of military cargo from July 20th onwards.

Will Russia dare to attack non-Ukrainian civilian ships? I think it will. 
Will the world swallow what is essentially an act of piracy? Yeah, it will. I am 99.9% sure of that.

Anyone flying over or sailing nearby a warzone should take heed that objects on radar may look like wartime targets; it's more unusual to keep commercial shipping open between two belligerents and their trading partners than it is to just keep this blockade. If this was like China trying to claim the SCS and establish illegal control over open waters during peacetime there might be more point in complaining, but as it is the illegality of Russian actions is moot when this is all in the context of an already illegal war. Despite the Russian government maintaining that this isn't a war, this is fairly standard stuff for a war. It may not be in Russia's strategic interest as like you say, shooting a 3rd party nation's ship is politically disastrous, but look at the Falklands war - another one of those wars that never was openly declared, where the UK warned any ship within a certain radius of the Falklands would potentially be considered a combatant vessel. Noticeabley, even Ukraine is now suggesting they will retaliate with the same measures:

The defence ministry in Kyiv issued a statement saying that from midnight on Thursday, all shipping plying Russian-held ports “may be considered by Ukraine as such carrying military cargo with all the associated risks”. The announcement mirrored a threat from Moscow on Wednesday against all ships using Ukrainian ports.

“The fate of the cruiser Moskva proves that the defence forces of Ukraine have the necessary means to repel Russian aggression at sea,” the ministry said, in a reference to the sinking of the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet last year.
“Ukrainian-made maritime drones are capable of destroying stationary and moving targets anywhere in the Black Sea,” a Ukrainian interior ministry adviser, Anton Gerashchenko, said on Twitter.

While we haven't seen a war involving commerce raiding since WWII, we have seen three blockades in modern times. UK-Argentina, Falklands war and Iran-Iraq Gulf War, as well as the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar in 2017. In the former two both wars never saw an official declaration of any blockade, but did see this declaration of an "exclusion zone" where civilian ships were warned they could be mistaken for military ships, but it is in practice the same as a blockade. In terms of precedence, the Russians and Ukrainians are in the clear here

A friend of mine went on a diet once and gave one of his workmates a chocolate bar on the proviso he could watch him eat it.

have a bar

eat it now

Does the Crimean Bridge just provide a link from Crimea to Russia, or are there other major ways in and out of Crimea?  Presumably those just link to Ukrainian territory?

I'm trying to understand the strategic value in destroying the bridge.  It presumably would prevent reinforcements from arriving that way from Russia, but Crimea isn't really close to the front lines from what I can see.  I guess it might serve as one of the main routes from the south?

I'm also curious about the impact on potentially trapping civilians.  I can only assume a ton of Russians moved to Crimea after it was annexed, so I wonder what will even happen if Ukraine reclaims it.

Not really about reinforcements, more important for disrupting Russian ability to resupply its own forces with ammunition/shells/barrels/water/food/fuel and all the other usual gubbins needed to sustain military action. The Crimean bridge is vitally important to disrupt as much as possible because trucks carrying supplies to the Crimean peninsula can then offload their supplies to Crimean supply depots. These depots can then transport supplies to Melitopol/Zaporozhia/Mariupol through the railway bridge on the Syvash (a vast shallow-water area which is a logistic nightmare to traverse) which the Ukrainians have also been sabotaging with missiles and saboteurs.

This forces Russia to use railway lines on the Rostov-Donetsk axis (which are in range of Ukrainian artillery), roads (which have lower transport volumes or have to take wide detours to avoid artillery/drone fire) or transport by port in Mariupol or Berdyansk (vulnerable adverse weather conditions and to port strikes, which the Ukrainians have also been conducting). All of which results in lower volumes of war materiel front line russians can use to shoot at Ukrainians, which greatly increases Russian attrition and makes the chance of forcing Russian withdrawal much greater. This is similar to what the Ukrainian army did in Kherson. They continually attacked despite heavy casualties, forcing the Russians to use up their stockpiles of ammunition. They destroyed the bridges behind them, so they could not restock on ammunition. Eventually their shortages became too dangerous to sustain and were forced to withdraw

Hi Me I am Yu

Yeah, time to start examining options to escape should the worst come to pass

Quote from: Starver on July 15, 2023, 04:30:30 pm

Quote from: Starver on July 15, 2023, 04:30:30 pm

I think it's all explained in this post...

Yo dimension hopper please return to your dimension containment zone