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[Maximum Spin]

Or if you prefer the term "ladybug", then they coleoptera (beetles), not hemiptera (the 'true bug').

I mean, if you want to look at it from that perspective, a "bug" originally meant a scary monster or goblin, and the concept of hemiptera was invented a long time afterward...

[Strongpoint]

I love the official story. A female war correspondent joined the Russian military unit without authorization from Russian officials and was hanging around filming whatever she wanted to make an "anti-war" movie

I also like this part: "This film shows the increasing disillusionment of Russian soldiers as their experience at the front doesn’t jive with the media lies their families are being told at home."

I am so sad and sympathetic that Russian invaders became disillusioned and that their hope for a quick and easy conquest never came true.

[martinuzz]

Haha the Ukrainians have managed to equip drones with thermite, they're burning the Russian troops alive now.

[Sirus]

Setting the ghoulish humor aside, would thermite even be effective at that? I mean sure it burns hot, but I thought it also burned very quickly and in a relatively small area. Better for melting through specific pieces of metal than as an area incendiary weapon.

[Lord Shonus]

Thermite isn't quite as good a fire weapon as WP or napalm, but it works well enough - the fires that destroyed Coventry and Tokyo were set with thermite-filled bombs. In this specific application the main advantage is that it is very light, and weight is the big limiter for drone payloads. It is basically being used as a flying flamethrower.

[Strongpoint]

Burning alive is an exaggeration. 

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1833596444865081547

Here is a video of such a system in action (I am too lazy to search for a non-twitter source)

Can this kill? Unlikely. Can it leave nasty wounds, damage all kinds of equipment, and set dry grass\trees on fire destroying cover? Absolutely.

[King Zultan]

I figured they were using thermite because it was cheap and relatively easy to make.

[Jopax]

That looks more like a terror weapon meant to flush out any potential ambushes or even detonate booby traps that might've been left in an abandoned trench.

Also quite fascinated as to how they manage to keep the drone alive for that long with that amount of heat cooking off directly under it.

[Eric Blank]

Maybe an air gap or insulator protecting the drone.

[anewaname]

Besides the Ukrainian use of thermite, the Russians have been using a drone that trails a fiber optic line so the communications cannot be jammed by wireless spam.

From a Forbes article about unknown hardware on a captured Russian drone,  "... device was a spool of fiber optic cable attached to a commercial Chinese-made optical transceiver used for high-speed communications. The markings on the spool showed it held 10,813 metres (6.7 miles) of cable."

There are probably all sorts of interesting tools in use that the public gets no info about.

[lemon10]

Besides the Ukrainian use of thermite, the Russians have been using a drone that trails a fiber optic line so the communications cannot be jammed by wireless spam.

From a Forbes article about unknown hardware on a captured Russian drone,  "... device was a spool of fiber optic cable attached to a commercial Chinese-made optical transceiver used for high-speed communications. The markings on the spool showed it held 10,813 metres (6.7 miles) of cable."

There are probably all sorts of interesting tools in use that the public gets no info about.

Nah, that's not stuff "the russians" are using, its almost certainly stuff that a few individual russia soldiers kludged together in the exact same vein as turtle tanks.
Since there are some very obvious downsides to using a drone like that (eg. ukrainians can literally stumble across the multi KM long cable and send their own drone down the line to kill the people that sent it) I can't imagine its a very common mod.

The Russian military started using World War II-era M-30 howitzers in the war against Ukraine.

One of the Russian military published a video of the damaged howitzer.

The howitzer in the video is the 122-mm M-30, developed in the 1930s and actively used by the Soviet army in the war against Nazi Germany.

But speaking of official Russian equipment, Russia is now using old WWII artillery in the war, which isn't a great sign for how much artillery they have left in their stockpiles.

[Lord Shonus]

Wire-guided munitions are an extremely old technology, specifcially because it is immune to jamming. The Tube launched Optical tracking Wire-guided (TOW) missile used extensively by US forces (and now the Ukranians) is a blatant example because it is right in the name. Wire-guided drones are an obvious extension of that in an extremely EW-heavy environment.



As for using WWII artillery, they're still extremely good guns. They're not as light and mobile as modern towed guns, and lack the fancy electronics for aiming, but they're still quite accurate and powerful. Digging them out of storage likely does indicate that the artillery stockpile is running low, but they're still effective weapons. This is a war where both sides have pulled out 19th-century machine guns, after all.

[EuchreJack]

But only the best 19th-century machine guns!

[Lord Shonus]

That's true. In terms of Being A Machine Gun, you can't really beat a Maxim. The only downside to the thing is that the water cooling system and especially the water makes it very very heavy, which is mitigated by a lot of the ones we've seen imagery of being vehicle mounted. If it is old but it still works, it still works.

[Sirus]

Whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun, and they
also have it.