That sounds kind of bizarre, but okay. Man, I thought that the Wildberries strikes alone would expose Russia’s private industry to tremendous influence from Ukraine—Ukraine hit Wildberries stating that said company had been providing stuff for military use in Ukraine. I thought that the Russian government might pay for the losses just to avoid that influence. Guess not. Guess what Russian companies are probably going to be falling all over themselves to avoid doing in the future?

And this latest from Putin just…makes all that worse, because it makes it even worse to be hit. Like, it’s not just like “the government isn’t protecting you or eating losses on your behalf, but now it’s actively going to prey on you if Ukraine chooses to attack you and does so successfully.”

I’ve got an economic plan for you, Zelenskyy.

“We have allocated 1,000 drones per month to a pool of non-critical-to-our-war-effort companies. We are now accepting payment of amount per month to not be targeted. If you are hit, your insurance policy will probably have a war exclusion from coverage, your facility may be destroyed by us, and your other assets may be seized by the Kremlin.”

EDIT: Eh, probably not Zelenskyy. Bad for Ukraine’s image to have the government doing that. Now, an enterprising private company with an interest in the growing field of extorting-Russian-industry, that might go far.

According to one of The Bell’s sources, VEB.RF head Igor Shuvalov dismissed Klepach following an order “from above.” A second source confirmed that the firing was connected to Klepach’s May remarks.

We are falling behind. We are losing both the technological and economic competition in the world. And, as I have already said, we are losing it not only to China and the United States — in some respects, we are losing it to Ukraine," Klepach said.

Two weeks later, the replacement guy rolls in and presumably announces that Russia is stomping China and the US economically and technologically, despite simultaneously waging a war against Ukraine. This new position, while establishing by example new limits on what it is politically-acceptable to say, does not improve matters in Russia.

“The big hole in VTB’s balance sheet is, I think, the number one troubling factor in the Russian banking sector right now.”

The more important story than even the direct material damage is the way the damage is dragging down VTB’s business, which is the real big beast. VTB is a big, important creditor and player. Nobody else compares to VTB in terms of aggressively financing a lot of adventuristic industrial and infrastructure projects in Putin’s new wartime economy.

I can believe that this is a problem for VTB, I don’t really understand how VTB getting into trouble is a particularly serious problem for the Russian economy in aggregate, though.

If I understand the article aright, VTB’s idea was that it would use Wildberries to get the lion’s share of the banking market. If Wildberries is literally going up in flames, that plan has fallen through. Okay. So…VTB doesn’t get that market share. Sucks to be VTB, no doubt, but VTB’s loss is the gain of other Russian banks whose marketshare they wanted to horn in on.

If the Russian government wants to bail out some portion of the banking sector, it can do that. I wouldn’t expect that the Russian government would care much which bank is doing badly and what bank isn’t. Who has more marketshare is just shuffling lines around on a board that the government controls.

A criminal case has been opened against the man for intentional destruction or damage to property.

Unless Russia has some sort of legal technicality that upgrades a crime to being intentional (like the murder felony rule in the US, where normally murder requires intent as an element, but there are cases where a killing can become upgraded to murder without that intent), I’d think that it’d be tough to prove. I mean, it sounds like the guy said that he severely dicked up and then just ran off. That sounds more plausible to me than that he planned to set his van on fire and then drove it, flaming, to somewhere that he wanted to do damage.

You could maybe get him with some crime that involved reckless disregard for whatever he destroyed, but unless Russian law works differently from the US, that’s a different bar from deliberate intent.

And a lot of that can absolutely be used for intelligence work.

I mean, probably, but by the same token, so can binoculars, a smartphone with a camera, a camera with a telephoto lens, a radio, and a ton of other stuff that lots of people will have.

And if you’re trying to spy, (a) you don’t need a large number of drones — that’s important if you’re using them as disposable weapons — and (b) my guess is that most of those tiny, short-range ones would be of pretty limited value in most cases.

EDIT: I’d also add that my guess is that one thing that Ukraine is probably not terribly short of is abovehead intelligence. As Mike Kofman pointed out repeatedly, the military value of the intelligence that the US provided to Ukraine is probably greater than the weapons. They’ve got satellites and a bunch of other sensor platforms. And the US isn’t the only one providing intelligence. And Ukraine can already fly drones — albeit perhaps more-expensive, longer-range ones — over Crimea out of unoccupied territory. That’s not to say that there isn’t still utility to drones — I mean, maybe flying one into a warehouse with an open door is safer than going in person. But by-and-large, my bet is that the most useful intelligence Ukraine gets from people behind the lines isn’t aerial photography.

Ah, fair enough — didn’t know what the prize was.

I’m not sure that this is a good idea. Futures markets on things like assassinations have always run the risk of incentivizing people to do things that they shouldn’t, and this is similar.

Ukraine probably has a military plan in place to hit specific targets. You want people to target the targets judged to be optimal. If someone in the Ukrainian military can make money by making such a bet and then targeting the target that they have bet on, there is now an incentive separating their interests from that of the state.

Additionally, depending upon whether the betting information is made public (and whether that information, even if not made public, is properly secured), if someone bets using insider information, it may leak target information ahead of time, which may be detrimental to the Ukrainian state. Russia will have nation-state intelligence agency levels of capability in going after things in the war like strategic air targets.

The Power of Siberia pipeline reached its designed capacity, allowing Gazprom to supply more natural gas to China … – 38.8 billion cubic meters. The compensation, however, is far from equivalent. Prices for gas sold to China are linked to a basket of petroleum products and are subject to a substantial discount, while the lack of alternative export routes leaves Moscow with little bargaining power.

The lack of alternative export routes leaves Moscow with little bargaining power in selling oil to China.

Yeah, from the various articles that have been coming up in the news on the long-term oil and gas deals that China has been cutting with Russia, I’m actually surprised that China is using said leverage as hard as it is. Whatever negotiator they have on it is extracting as much wealth from Russia as he can.

https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/russia-faces-major-setback-power-siberia-2-over-chinese-price-demands

Negotiations between Russia and China over the proposed “Power of Siberia-2” natural gas pipeline have hit a complete deadlock following Beijing’s demands for steep price discounts, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Sources familiar with the talks said the Russian negotiating team “hit a wall” after Beijing demanded that Moscow price the gas at its heavily subsidized domestic rate of about $50 per thousand cubic meters.

The pricing demand comes despite China already receiving substantial concessions. This year, Beijing pays $258.8 per thousand cubic meters—a 39% discount compared to the $420.2 average paid by Gazprom’s other international clients.

Internal Russian economic forecasts show China’s price is slated to drop further to $223.9 next year. Still, Beijing is pushing for a rate eight times cheaper than what Russia’s remaining global customers pay.

The natural resources may be inside Russian territory, but Russia’s just going to be doing the work of extracting them and then handing most of the benefits off to China.

If Russia is forced to take said deals, China is going to be doing very well off it until Russia manages to climb out of the international relations hole that it’s in. But the concern that I’d have from China’s standpoint is that at those prices, Russia is going to do whatever it possibly can to figure out a way to cut the deal off as soon as it’s able.

In effect, Russia’s wealthiest state linked companies are being allowed to finance, equip, and direct their own armed formations to defend private industrial assets. This fundamentally shifts the balance of power between the Kremlin and Russia’s oligarchs by giving major corporations armed personnel under their effective control.

I mean, it’s been a good three years since the last time a wealthy, politically-connected Russian tried doing an armored push on Moscow.

If it comes to a contest between production capacity for weaponized drones between Taiwan and China, I think that Taiwan is going to be in trouble. China overwhelmingly dominates global drone production capacity.

If it came to a contest of that sort between the US and China, the US isn’t, in 2026, going to be able to compete in mass either.

searches

https://www.auvsi.org/advocacy/advocacy-initiatives/partnership-for-drone-competitiveness/at-a-glance/

The drone market is unlike any other advanced technology sector. Companies based in China and subsidized by the Chinese government control 90% of the consumer drone market, 70% or more of the enterprise market, and 92% of the state and local first responder market. Chinese company DJI holds the vast majority of that market share.

That did not happen by accident. In 2015, China launched “Made in China 2025,” a ten-year, whole-of-society effort to invest in key industries, including drones, to ensure China’s world leadership and market dominance.

The US does have various projects to aim to counter that, but does not yet, as of 2026, have that sort of capability. If China started maximum production of weaponized drones right now, using existing civilian and military infrastructure, I don’t think that we’d presently have a defensive-type counter. We’d probably have to go on offense, try to destroy their industrial capacity.

One project I recall some discussion about is Replicator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(United_States_military)

Replicator is the name of a United States Department of Defense program intended to pioneer ways to cheaply produce large amounts of weapons or systems for the U.S. military.

It was announced on Aug. 23, 2023, by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks as a means of quickly producing weapons to deter and counter China. In her announcement, Hicks said the first type of weapons to be produced under Replicator were to be autonomous systems; she did not specify whether these would be, for example, aerial drones or unmanned vessels.[1]

The Replicator program announced its first batch of contracts on May 6, 2024; they included purchases of uncrewed watercraft, aerial drones, and anti-drone defenses “of various sizes and payloads from several traditional and non-traditional vendors.” Some other contracts “remain classified, including others in the maritime domain and some in the counter-UAS portfolio”, a Defense Department release said.[2]

On September 30, 2024, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III announced a new phase of the program, dubbed Replicator 2, that would focus on anti-drone defensive systems.[3]

One aspect of insurance is that it doesn’t typically cover damages from war. Insurance normally tries to deal with uncorrelated risk — like, one person in an area has their car stolen, and spreads the large amount of harm to one person to be a small amount of harm over many people in an area. It doesn’t really scale up to widespread destruction in an area where everyone is massively wiped out. War is one of the things that can cause correlated risk, so outside of exotic policies written specifically to deal with war, insurance policies normally won’t cover damage resulting from war.

So if property damage occurs, it’s generally going to be a loss to the owner even if they have fire insurance or such.

The company operates 27 gas carriers, a significant portion of which are specialized Arc7-class icebreaking tankers. Such vessels are used for operations in the Arctic and to serve the Russian Yamal LNG project.

According to Financial Times estimates, since the beginning of 2025, Dynagas has transported over 10 million metric tons of Russian liquefied natural gas across 11 vessels, completing 144 voyages.

The Greek side claims that it is virtually impossible to redeploy Arc7-class specialized vessels to other routes. If sanctions are imposed, the company may be forced to sell them to buyers outside the West. The cost of a single such tanker is estimated at approximately $300 million.

If the gas infrastructure that they service gets hit the way the oil infrastructure has and the ships have nothing to transport, Dynagas might regret not having sold the ships off prior to that evaporation of demand.

Prior sanctions will have allowed a (relatively) ordered exit for European consumers, before Russia stopped exporting gasoline and diesel due to infrastructure damage, prioritizing what remained for itself.

If you own an expensive ship that can’t be used on any other route, you may not want to be sitting on it if that route becomes non-viable.

I don’t know enough to do informed commentary as to the domestic political side or merits one way or another, but I do have to say that I think that United24 is probably a factor in Ukraine’s war effort and that it is not fantastic from the standpoint of the war to have them not publishing. I mean, it’s not a missile factory, no, but…

Maybe on the AH-1Z the AN/APG radar might have a blindspot like this

Yeah, I was wondering about a rear blind spot, but it lools like a clear line of sight to the drone avoiding the tail rotor on the Mi-28NM, so I’d think that they could deal with it.

And I imagine that they may also be able to filter out the effect of the blades.

Plus, I don’t know what doctrine is on this, but on a helicopter, which can fly sideways, I’d imagine that you could do the aerial equivalent of what submarines do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baffles_(submarine)

The baffles is the area in the water directly behind a submarine or ship through which a hull-mounted sonar cannot hear. This blind spot is caused by the need to insulate the sonar array, commonly mounted near the bow, from the noise of the vessel’s machinery.

Clearing the baffle area

A submarine tracking another submarine can take advantage of its target’s baffles to follow at a close distance without being detected. Periodically, a submarine will perform a maneuver called clearing the baffles, in which the boat will turn left or right far enough to listen with the forward array sonar for a few minutes in the area that was previously blocked by the baffles. Good tactics require a submarine to clear baffles at irregular intervals and in different directions so that a pursuing submarine cannot predict when and how the next baffle-clearing maneuver will be made. When a submarine clears its baffles, a pursuing submarine must take measures to avoid detection by, or worse, collision with, the submarine ahead.

Speaking of submarine tactics, it’s possible that they normally operate with active sensors like radar off, to not make it obvious that there’s a helicopter coming to Ukraine. No idea what the norm is there.

Honestly these russian heli pilots seem clueless.

If it’s like a lot of fighter jets, the radar unit is on the front, and even if the radar can pick a drone up, the radar only works in the forward direction.

searches

Ah. Apparently they have a variant (Mi-28 NM) with a mast-mounted radar, and while that image is fuzzy, it looks like it does have such a radar. Carry on.

No fuel, no food. No Food, no war.

I dunno, man.

Russia’s harvest being disrupted would maybe disrupt their ability to produce food, and it might produce cascading economic losses, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they lose the ability to obtain food. Like, food is a global market. So to cut Russia off from that, you need to either:

1. Kill their ability to afford food on the global market (including discouraging anyone who might provide it for non-financial reasons).

2. Blockade Russia.

I doubt that (2), blockading Russia is practical. Russia’s got a ton of overland routes that would be hard to disable, and in any shortage of fuel, the government is going to prioritize food transport.

(1) basically requires that everyone poorer than Russia in her wartime state starve too, and while I can certainly believe that Russia is poorer for being in a war with Ukraine, I don’t think that it’s poorer-than-all-the-countries-out-there-not-having-a-famine poor. The world isn’t in a situation where it can’t feed the global population.

Like, I will very much buy that fuel unavailability has a lot of potential to cause cascading economic problems for Russia due to logistics issues. That’d cause more economic pressure than just the loss of production in the oil and gas industry. But I’m dubious that there’s a direct fuel shortage->famine line.

It’d be to a fuel terminal. Logistics inside Crimea might be an issue — not saying that that’d be a solution — and I’d have some questions about timeline and vulnerability. A subsea tunnel might be harder to hit, but I’d bet that it’s lot faster and cheaper to disable than to build.

But if one takes what he’s saying at face value about being harder to reach, I don’t see what else he could be doing. High speed transports or submarine transports are harder to hit, maybe, but not that much more, and are gonna have serious capacity limitations. For a narrow strait like the Kerch Strait, if you want bulk transport, it’s either gonna be a bridge or a tunnel, and he’s already got a bridge (which has been repeatedly hit, and clearly can be reached by Ukraine). Well, or a submarine pipeline, but I think that it’s been pretty established that those can be hit.

I’m not saying that that’s a winning solution. I think that in practice, his only way out of this, short of Kyiv coming to terms, is an air defense solution, because he can’t have energy targets in Russia being hit the way they are, either. Just saying that if one goes off his phrasing and takes it at face value, I don’t think that he’s talking about air defense improvements, and it does sound like whatever is being talked about would be specific to Crimea, whereas air defense improvements would be a general solution.

I guess they’re on summer vacation right now. Maybe Krasnodar has some authority to call them in to work during summer or something. Like, an immediately-available source of state employees that aren’t currently tied up with their primary job.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has said that Russia is working on creating a new system for supplying petroleum products to temporarily occupied Crimea, which, as he said, will be “very difficult for the enemy to reach”.

Sounds like he’s thinking about boring a tunnel.

I tried posting about it on !technology@lemmy.world, but a mod apparently deleted it. We probably need a “network” community, if the technology community guys don’t like it.

Thanks regarding the domain information. That was actually the next thing I was going to ask about, whether there was also a long-form domain.

DownDetector shows a spike in reports starting about three hours ago as of this writing (so about 7:00 PM UTC July 13).

https://downdetector.com/status/telegram/

EDIT: Not a human mod, but an automod script. No idea what tripped it.

EDIT2: Both A (IPv4) and AAAA (IPv6) DNS queries fail (returning NXDOMAIN, which is “domain does not exist” in DNS parlance).

EDIT3: Looks like it’s been changed back and is working now.