When you’re flying an A10 and you see an enemy vehicle…

scooter technical

You’re cleared to engage!

anything else

Turn back, you’re outmatched.

What about the lower-profile Warsaw Pact tanks? Are they safer to drive around small children?

Even Master Chief’s Mjolnir armor from Halo wouldn’t pass. (It would stop one bullet but not three in a row without time to recharge the shield.)

There are also anti-materiel rifles (generally bolt-action) which use that ammunition.

The soldier has a blank shoulder patch even in the original photo. Odd.

The railing in the photo has blue and yellow stripes, which is unlikely in Russia, but I don’t see anything about the soldier himself that makes him obviously Ukrainian. (Maybe experts can distinguish by camo patterns?) The comments in Russian on that Reddit thread are ridiculing the use of this photo on a Russian poster but provide no further information.

3 point blank shots from 14.5×114mm rounds

How is that something a person could wear? Those bullets penetrate light vehicle armor.

I can’t find the source of the photo although I did find artistic interpretations of it from both the Ukrainian and Russian sides, with the corresponding patches on the soldier’s shoulder.

But note that the image on the billboard has the patch on the soldier’s shoulder replaced with a gray rectangle. (It’s easier to see in the full-size image.) Someone didn’t like the soldier’s nationality…

Hold out until the quad-mounted 50 cal is brought back.

They managed to fit something into the trunk of a BMW coupe? I thought that was impossible.

always chooses the cheapest option

quality isn’t great

Capitalism is to blame!

It took them years of intense warfare to run out. NATO stockpiles would last a few months. That’s not indefensible because NATO doesn’t intend to fight an artillery war, but the limited industrial capacity is still concerning. I suppose that many other factories would be refitted for the production of weapons if a major war actually broke out, but I do worry that Western Europe has gone soft after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Again, that’s not indefensible because spending vast amounts of money on weapons in the absence of any enemies that would pose a serious threat is not prudent, but rearming now seems like the wise course of action.

(Not noncredible enough? Too noncredible? I’m only qualified to comment because I played StarCraft a lot.)

You make a good point. He does seem to get genuinely upset relatively often rather than just laughing as he trolls the world.

I must be out of touch. What’s RGB in this context?

What are you talking about? I think he’s a lunatic, but he does seem to be having a lot of fun.

It’s the sort of thing I might do if I were so rich that I could burn tens of billions of dollars to run a major corporation just for fun. I mean, saying “get lost” to the government of a country of over 200 million people must be quite a rush.

Note that this article is from three days ago. There’s still only one F-16 destroyed.

That’s how many 21st century Americans think, but not how I expected Ukrainians to think. I was raised to eat what I was given, and when I became a vegetarian my family thought I was being ridiculous and even mildly offensive. My grandfather would tell me how people could only have moral objections to food because they had never been hungry. I’m sure he would have said “pragmatism” meant that a soldier eats whatever is edible.

When I said “Soviet culture” I was referring to the way people behave in their daily lives, not to their political beliefs (although my impression is that even the few communist true-believers left at the end were still culturally much more similar to other Soviet immigrants than to Americans).

Wow, that’s surprising. I’m an immigrant in NYC, where my own family isn’t happy that I’m even vegetarian and some restaurants in Brighton Beach (a neighborhood primarily of Soviet immigrants) have nothing vegetarian on the menu. I have heard that the immigrant community in New York is frozen in time, maintaining the culture of the Soviet Union while the countries of their birth have changed significantly. I wonder if that’s true in this context.

Well, at least under capitalism a few people do get to live well…