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I almost can't believe the Russian army is so... trashy. For the army of a state willing to be completely independent of the West to use an American web based

• boredumb 5y ago
  It could also be they are attempting to force google to remove the service entirely for Ukraine.
  • laurent92 5y ago
    Shouldn’t it be down already? It’s a US asset, it’s expected to be down in war zones. Was it available all along in Iraq? Locals know the directions, not having maps is a handicap for everybody but mostly the attacker. Besides, GMaps could require login for Ukraine, and only be allowed for people with a track record of being in Ukraine. Since Google follows you everywhere.
    • gruez 5y ago
      >Locals know the directions, not having maps is a handicap for everybody but mostly the attacker. I suspect the locals only know the directions for routes they commonly travel (eg. for work/groceries/school). If you're fleeing, you'll need it just as much the invaders does.
    • Nextgrid 5y ago
      This would be trivial to bypass with a VPN?
      • aembleton 5y ago
        Not if its blocked for the whole world.
    • hedora 5y ago
      It's a US asset that tips the balance of military power towards individuals. Someone can use Google Maps to plan a peaceful protest or a Molotov cocktail strike more easily than a missile strike. Why would you expect them to take that capability away from people they've publicly sided with?
• dathinab 5y ago
  It's more like: "Why not?" From their POV. I mean if the "sloppy" approach works (in this specific case) roughly as good as whatever military specific alternate approach they have(1), then it makes sense to use that, to not disclose the capabilities of alternate approaches to their enemy (the US). (1): That is assuming they have one, if not ... I would be both quite surprised and somehow not really surprised like both at once.
  • chitowneats 5y ago
    The point is that they should have one. The fact that they are using services like these indicate that they do not, or that it is poorly implemented and not accessible to the right people on the ground invading Ukraine. After seeing the relatively poor performance of the Russian military this past week I'm not surprised but I would have been surprised two weeks ago.
    • ignoramous 5y ago
      The Russian political apparatus really is digging a hole they won't be able to get out of, isn't it? Such an expensive mess, especially for the Ukrainians, who are paying it with their lives, for reasons outside their control.
  • ignoramous 5y ago
    Sloppy approach is, well, callously sloppy, because the stakes are that high.
    • namlem 5y ago
      Not to Putin. He doesn't care if his troops live or die.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        He likely cares about getting Mussolini'd if too many die.
• sbierwagen 5y ago
  Some units have also been communicating in the clear on civilian bands. There seems to be a severe shortage of military electronics on the Russian side. Or, just purely from a UX standpoint, you can use a military receiver with an interface like this https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0083836/800wm https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0083836/800wm and then look up the coordinates by hand on a twenty year old paper map. Or you can drop a pin on gmaps and text it to Sergey at the artillery battery. If you don't care about opsec, which is easier?
  • mzs 5y ago
    The raw audio is beginning to be released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30513438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30513438
• melling 5y ago
  All is fair in love and war” People need to be a little less naive and skip conversations like this. There’s a 40 mile (65km) convoy heading for the capital of Ukraine. A lot of Ukrainians are about to die. Rather than complaining about how Russia is using 21st century technology from the West, perhaps discussing real solutions would be more beneficial?
  • xxxtentachyon 5y ago
    What do you suggest people do? Get on the phone with their congressperson and have them send in a bomber squadron? As far as immediate impact, reporting this in the hopes that it gets taken down seems about as good as anything feasible at the moment.
    • melling 5y ago
      i already made my suggestion and it wasn’t “throw up your hands and say there’s nothing more we can do” “…perhaps discussing real solutions would be more beneficial?” Maybe we come up with nothing but tens of thousands of lives could be saved if we think of something. A week from now the world is going to wish it had done more.
      • rimunroe 5y ago
        "Discussing real solutions" sounds about as substantial a suggestion as "throw your hands up and say there's nothing more we can do". People are already talking. It's not suggesting anything more concrete than what's already being done in this conversation.
        • melling 5y ago
          we turned this into a childish discussion on the internet. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians will be dead within a week.
          • mynameisvlad 5y ago
• giantrobot 5y ago
  It seems more like field officers and quartermasters have had every incentive to lie about readiness and equipment. Audits of the same have the same incentive to lie. So on paper a unit has tons of equipment in working order. In reality maintenance hasn't been performed, spares have been sold off under the table, and in general most of the paperwork is faked.
• Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  I was calling russian army a paper tiger for a long time, citing immense corruption and deterioration of all public institutions in Russia under Putin. Military isn't public, but that's just more opportunities for corruption and theft. My opponents usually disagreed, pointing to a big military budget and some modern-ish new weapons shown here and there. No, they do look cool at a show or a parade, but does the personnel know how to use it? Are they built en masse? Is the quality good enough? (With all that corruption!) Turns out, things are even worse then I imagined, but in the hindsight it shouldn't be surprising: this is far from the first time in history when decaying russian institutions and imperial hubris had led Russia to a disastrous war, which was planned as a 'small victorious' one: Crimean War (1853), Japan war (1905), Winter war with Finland (1940), Afghanistan war (1980), Chechena war (1994). Now Putin has one of his own. I hope his regime will crumble in the fallout from a resounding defeat.
  • chmod600 5y ago
    To be clear, are you saying the 65km convoy is going to fail to take Kyiv? I just don't understand how that could happen unless they literally run out of fuel on the way, or if some serious airforce intervenes.
    • yks 5y ago
      Length of this convoy is different every hour and it's been out there "ready to take Kyiv" for days now. If the soldiers are already out of food, it's as good as a heap of scrap. If you fancy thinking about "3D-chess mastermind military tactics", then how about the fact that Ukraine seemingly does not even bother to deal with the convoy, and they have working ballistic rockets, think about that.
      • jessaustin 5y ago
        Indeed, this convoy has made a variety of seemingly contradictory impressions on those reporting. The strongest possibility may be that the reports we're receiving aren't very accurate.
• gherkinnn 5y ago
  Of course it's trashy. Everything is. Many readers of HN are well aware that most of software is shit. It's not surprising that this extends to military equipment too. As an example from the other side, the British BOWMAN comms system used to be understood as Better Off With Maps And Nokia. https://immortaltoday.com/battlefield-digitisation/ https://immortaltoday.com/battlefield-digitisation/
  • ddalex 5y ago
    This is a pattern I've been seeing again and again ... from the outside everything looks neat and nice, but under closer inspection, it's trash and wired together with duct tape and hopes... from software to military to medical to... you name it I believe the name for this thing is "the devil in the details" - reality has a surprising level of detail, and the more you go into detail, more murky and shitty things appear to be. In fact I am amazed that complex things, like, say, the internet, work at all !
    • alliao 5y ago
      you have no idea how much my job have scarred me, I'm in love with all things mechanical.
    • mcguire 5y ago
      The internet itself is really, stupidly simple. There is a fair amount of complexity in managing it, and that bites back fairly frequently, but the vast majority of the complexity and crazy stuff is above the level of basic connectivity.
      • fragmede 5y ago
        As we saw with the Facebook outage on October 4th, there's an insane amount of hidden complexity at the lower levels that end users never ever see. For home consumer uses its simple enough, but those methods aren't good enough for industry usage? AWS isn't buying off the shelf gear and plugging in cat-5 ( or 6) cables like a consumer-level user would.
• bobthechef 5y ago
• jklinger410 5y ago
  Russia has roughly the same GDP as Texas. I feel like the US military would have to be completely incompetent to not be able to easily dismantle them at this point considering the size of their budget. I can't help but think they are planned opposition at this point, whether willing or unwilling.
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    > I feel like the US military would have to be completely incompetent to not be able to easily dismantle them at this point considering the size of their budget. Or, you know, unwilling to start a nuclear war. Which dismantling the 50%+ of Russia's conventional military committed to Ukraine would very possibly lead to.
    • akimball 5y ago
      If defensive operations create too much risk of near, then Putin can slow walk all the way to Portugal without resistance. Appeasement will only insure larger conflict
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        I don't think what the EU and US are doing in Ukraine can be termed appeasement. Punishing sanctions, rumblings of NATO and EU expansions, open and extensive weapons transfers, and full-throated support of the Ukrainian government is hardly what we did in Czechoslovakia. The "we will go to open war with you" line is the borders of NATO and the EU, which haven't currently been violated. It's not an unreasonable line to draw, given the potential consequences of nuclear armed states doing battle.
  • mandelken 5y ago
    Russia has 6000 nuclear warheads and enough capabilities to deliver them wherever they want in the world. That will keep the US military far away from their battlefield.
    • 5y ago
• dole 5y ago
  "...never attribute to malice..."
  • svnt 5y ago
    Maybe you’re joking? Your quote is generally intended for biasing in favor of preserving relationships, but is less relevant when someone is sending missiles and armor columns to blow up your country. You can assume malice here — no problem if you’re wrong.
• napalmall 5y ago
  They even register domains with Soviet Union extension ".su" and actively and openly publish their propaganda on these websites. https://www.idyllum.com/explore/?query=tld%3A%22.su%22 https://www.idyllum.com/explore/?query=tld%3A%22.su%22 These people actually think they are freedom fighters and want to restore "good" empire.
  • thriftwy 5y ago
    The first web site from that link is some beauty salon.
    • napalmall 5y ago
      Could be but this is even worse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union Why would anyone register a domain with such extension is beyond me unless they are completely brainwashed by the regime. Here is example of a typical "news" site from that list: sevastopol.su You can use Google Translate to understand the skewed picture that is being tried to shown to the local people.
      • samesamebutsame 5y ago
        > Why would anyone register a domain with such extension is beyond me Plenty of anti-Russian Ukrainians use .su
        • napalmall 5y ago
          I find it hard to believe, proof?
      • f1refly 5y ago
        > Why would anyone register a domain with such extension is beyond me Because it's fun? Most sites where probably registered before the war and aren't necessary serious. You can have a good time with a soviet styled website or even community, all with matching url and flags and stuff.
• spenczar5 5y ago
  Maybe this sort of thing will convince people that "military grade" probably shouldn't be considered a selling point :)
• aivisol 5y ago
  Seeing the videos of destroyed Russian equipment I am a bit surprised how familiar it looks to what it was when I was forcefully drafted into soviet military some 30+ years ago. There are maybe few new types of personnel carrier vehicles which I do not recognize but everything else is decades old, and even back then in 80s it was not any high tech (except for T-80 maybe). As an example, to coordinate artillery fire we used paper maps and mechanical rulers to convert target coordinates into azimuth and elevation angles. Officers would carry secret reference table books with them which were used to apply a ton of corrections: ambient temperature, wind direction, mass of the charge and the projectile and drift due to rotation of the projectile etc. All that was manual, calculated on paper, slow and error prone. I remember myself back then wondering why we couldn't use simple calculators to do this math quickly. The dead reckoning equipment (which was based on mechanical gyroscope) had such high error that after few tries we decided to never turn it on again - after few kilometers of drive it would place us some 500m off the actual position. Sure, maybe some electronics are upgraded nowadays, it is hard to tell from those videos. But the stories of Russians being lost on their way, it rather looks that nothing much has changed.
  • Krasnol 5y ago
    Maybe they're prepared for post-EMP warfare? ;)
    • TMWNN 5y ago
      You are more right than you know. Western observers mocked Soviet fighters using vacuum tubes, until it was pointed out that they are immune to EMP.
  • rixed 5y ago
    To be fair, I believe being able to compute ballistic parameters with pen and paper give you an advantage in a total war where every communication is jammed, network is hacked and energy supply is sparse.
    • franga2000 5y ago
• Animats 5y ago
  "Quantity has a quality all its own" - Stalin. Russian armies historically do very badly at first, then improve markedly after being banged around a bit. That's normal for armies of conscripts who don't undergo expensive, realistic training. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII, about half soldiers. 13% of the population. The US lost only about 400,000, about 0.13% of the population. France and UK, about 1%. The USSR still won.
  • fuoqi 5y ago
    The Russian army does not use conscripts in forces used in Ukraine.
    • Animats 5y ago
      U.S. News and World Report says they do.[1] [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s-sees-evidence-of-morale-problems-among-russian-troops-in-ukraine/ar-AAUu5hA https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s-sees-evidence-of-mo...
      • fuoqi 5y ago
        Of course they say so, it's the same people who talk about "fairly slow and stodgy progress": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30516996#30522179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30516996#30522179 I haven't seen a single reliable message in Russian social media from conscript's mothers and, believe me, they would not have been quite. And no, you can not hide use of conscripts from relatives on such scale.
        • Animats 5y ago
          "‘I’m panicking — where is my child?’ Conscript soldiers are being sent to fight against Ukraine, their relatives say. Here’s what their families told Meduza."[1] That's a Latvian source. May be propaganda. Other sources saying the same thing track back to that one. The Russian army has "contract soldiers", who signed up, and "conscripts", who are drafted to serve for one year. I've been looking for good counts. Most conscripts are in the army; The navy, air force, and strategic rocket force are mostly (entirely?) contract soldiers. [1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/02/26/i-m-panicking-where-is-my-child https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/02/26/i-m-panicking-where-...
• booleandilemma 5y ago
  Eh, it’s only trashy because they’re not on our side. If it was our allies doing it, it would be considered scrappy, ingenious, clever, resourceful, etc. Some positive adjective that denotes using a resource in a way no one expected.
• fuoqi 5y ago
  Do you have such opinion because in less than a week the Russian army with the directive to minimize civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure has not occupied the second largest country in Europe with difficult terrain (a lot of cities, rivers, and forests) and huge army generously supplied for 8 years with modern western weapons? Do you remember how much time it took the US to win the Iraq War? And Iraq is a smaller country, with much denser distribution of population centers, simpler terrain, and smaller technically outdated army. Also the US clearly used air bombardment much more frivolously, which has resulted in a huge number of civilian deaths. But my guess is that you simply get your information from clearly biased media.
  • hedora 5y ago
    Well, the US didn't run out of gas and food (or water), and laid the pipelines for its armor convoy a heck of a lot faster than 20 miles a day!
  • sofixa 5y ago
    > Do you have such opinion because in less than a week the Russian army with the directive to minimize civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure You've got to be kidding me. Maybe you've missed the indiscriminate artillery and rocket attacks on population centers such as Kharkiv? And the Russian army hasn't failed at occupation. It's miserably failing at capturing anything of note, properly conducting sieges ( Kharkiv was resupplied multiple times), basic logistics, basic air operations.
  • wheelinsupial 5y ago
    > But my guess is that you simply get your information from clearly biased media. If you're going to accuse people of using biased sources, it would be good for you to include some examples of clearly unbiased media, so that they can compare and learn.
  • throwuxiytayq 5y ago
    > Do you remember how much time it took the US to win the Iraq War? Russia already lost more soldiers in this war than the US in the entire Iraq War.