farmerm
Member
- Location
- Shropshire
The war in Ukraine...
- Thread starter Danllan
- Start date
What a good idea, so much easier to fright all that Agricultural produce across the EU by passing all those angry farmers, planting bird seed must be looking a better option by the day for some I would think.
NFRASTRUCTURE
66349.article
NFRASTRUCTURE
Ukraine begins construction of standard gauge European rail link
By Railway Gazette International16 April 202466349.article
Hindsight
Member
- Location
- Lincolnshire
I am confident you will be there by the side of the racks loosening the bolts to cause a derailment.
Nah won't cause me any grief as we use most of what we grow ourselves & I suspect plenty of others would have far more reason to holiday abroad first.
Have you actually read the article? where does it say it is for grain export, The grain production areas of Ukraine are further away by thousands of kilometres and this is a small link of 22km to the border,You really are a plank arent you.
RegioJet to launch night train to Ukraine
EUROPE: RegioJet has opened ticket sales for a night train service between Praha and the rail hub at Chop in western Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast. The operator says this will be the first 100% commercially operated service between the European Union and Ukraine. The daily service is ...
www.railwaygazette.com
You’ve got to start somewhere & you don’t think with all the farmers protests stopping transport by roads that it isn’t already started unless you think they are stupid.Have you actually read the article? where does it say it is for grain export, The grain production areas of Ukraine are further away by thousands of kilometres and this is a small link of 22km to the border,You really are a plank arent you.
RegioJet to launch night train to Ukraine
EUROPE: RegioJet has opened ticket sales for a night train service between Praha and the rail hub at Chop in western Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast. The operator says this will be the first 100% commercially operated service between the European Union and Ukraine. The daily service is ...
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renewablejohn
Member
- Location
- lancs
Grain trains already haul direct from Ukraine to EU as the wagons are dual guage similar to that used on the historic line between France and Spain in WW2.
ollie989898
Member
Only in the weird world of BrianV could you be against the free movement of goods from Ukraine? They've been a major player in agricultural commodities for years, this isn't some new thing they recently started doing? You've competed with them globally for decades only now you think they shouldn't be allowed to sell grain onto the world markets? 
Perhaps you should be telling it to the Poles & other EU farmers stopping grain exports they’ve obviously got it all wrong, if only they were as clever as you.Only in the weird world of BrianV could you be against the free movement of goods from Ukraine? They've been a major player in agricultural commodities for years, this isn't some new thing they recently started doing? You've competed with them globally for decades only now you think they shouldn't be allowed to sell grain onto the world markets?
farmerm
Member
- Location
- Shropshire
I imagine at this critical point in time the primary thought is about facilitating rapid arms imports rather than grain exports..
farmerm
Member
- Location
- Shropshire
It’s also another symbolic move away from soviet systems
- Location
- Limousin
"It is highly likely that Russia will try to run the scheme of farmer protests in Poland at the EU’s internal borders. At the same time, it is also highly likely that these operations will become further radicalized as Moscow will strive for inciting armed clashes between protesters and government forces. We have seen signs of Russians testing out transportation blockades in the EU in Spain, starting in 2019" (Robert Lancing Institute) March 2024.
Hindsight
Member
- Location
- Lincolnshire
French farmers burn UK lamb. A few weeks ago french farmers were destroying Spanish tomatoes. You really do have a downer on Ukraine Brian.
Danllan
Member
- Location
- Sir Gar / Carms
That written, and not disagreeing with you at all - it does seem that a decent study into the violent tendencies and fear of competition of French farmers is long overdue...
Not Ukraine you're thinking of the wrong country, inevitable consequences of stupid politicians both sides of the Atlantic thinking that they can control events to their advantage.
Russia is sure to lose in Ukraine, reckons a Chinese expert on Russia https://www.economist.com/by-invita...in-ukraine-reckons-a-chinese-expert-on-russia
Russia is bombing Ukraine into darkness — and leaving Europe short of power
The EU planned to lean on Kyiv for energy help, but has failed to answer Ukraine’s pleas for air defense systems to protect its infrastructure.
www.politico.eu
- Location
- Beragh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland
Hindsight
Member
- Location
- Lincolnshire
How long can a Russian prisoner survive at the frontline in Ukraine? A BBC investigationBBC Russian's analysis suggests those recruited to defence ministry units are dying increasingly quickly.
“Good afternoon. My brother died on March 6th, 2023. He had been on the front line since November, after he left a prison colony. He phoned only once. We don't know anything about what happened to him since - not where he died, or how. No one has responded to any of my enquiries yet. It feels like there’s no one left alive.” “Hello. My condolences to you. We’ve got the exact same story. It didn’t matter how much I searched for information about my son, there was nothing, like he just vanished. They didn't even tell me he had died. I myself had to write to the group where they provide information about casualties. The first time I wrote to them was in January, and they told me he was not listed among the dead, so I calmed down. And then it turned out that my boy had been killed back in December. They brought me some sort of empty coffin. But told me not to open it, just bury it, saying there wouldn’t be anything more in any case.” You can see conversations like this every day in the chatrooms where relatives of prisoners who went to the war in Ukraine meet each other online. Hundreds of families are looking for information about those they love. From time to time, former prisoners who survived the front also show up in the chats: “Only a few are coming back alive now. And they are usually ‘300s’ [the military shorthand for wounded men],” writes Vladimir from Karelia in one such chatroom. He had fought for six months before being pardoned. “Many die, some get taken prisoner. Assault operations are very tough. The chances of surviving them are about 25%.” The casualty figures in this article are based on a list of confirmed dead Russian military personnel which the BBC has maintained since the start of the full-scale war together with the Mediazona publication and a group of volunteers. The database is compiled from open-source information. To try to work out how long a prisoner can actually survive the war, we analysed the obituaries of prisoner-soldiers who have been killed in Ukraine – 9,327 of them. 7,417 had fought with the ‘Wagner’ private military company, and 1,910 were soldiers in ‘Storm’ combat units. Representative of Wagner, including its late leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, recruited prison inmates from June 2022 to the end of January 2023. The deal was simple: two weeks of training, then five and a half months at the front in return for freedom, a clean criminal record and a monthly wage of around 100,000 roubles.
But how long can a recruited prisoner expect to survive at the front? We selected a group of 1,040 men from the almost 9,000 dead for whom we have both a contract starting date and a date of death. The information comes from published obituaries and information from relatives. Roughly half the group were Wagner members, the other half defence ministry ‘Storm’ unit fighters. Our analysis shows that deaths among Wagner fighters were evenly distributed while ‘Storm’ prisoners met their end more quickly after arriving at the front. Half of the Wagner men we identified had died within three months of signing a contract. For prisoners recruited by the MOD, half were killed in under eight weeks – a third less than their Wagner comrades. Our figures do not prove that half of all convicts sent to the front died in the conflict. Our dataset is incomplete because we do not know the exact number of war dead and how many of them set off to fight from prison colonies. The New York Times managed to get hold of a list of prisoners who were sent to Ukraine in October 2022 from Correctional Facility No. 6 in Chelyabinsk. Of the 196 individuals sent to war from that contingent, more than two-thirds survived. Many suffered serious injuries, however, including the loss of limbs. But we spoke to two sources in Wagner who were involved in recruiting prisoners, and they said those despatched to war in subsequent batches were more likely to be killed. Their assessment is borne out by the data we have gathered from open sources. From January to early March 2023, confirmed weekly losses of Wagner members never dropped below 300 men. The largest single-day losses suffered by Wagner occurred on March 24th-25th - 182 men were killed, of whom 141 were prisoners. These figures are merely what we can establish from open sources: the real numbers are likely far higher.
Meanwhile, human rights activists reckon the defence ministry may have despatched more than 60,000 convicts to the fighting by March this year. The survival rate among them is not known. But the prisoners themselves believe that between 50-70% of those serving in MOD units perish.
Why are prisoners killed so quickly?One reason why defence ministry recruits die faster than Wagner-contracted prisoners might be a lack of preparation. All newly-contracted prisoners are supposed to be trained away from hostilities for a two-week period. Given that we did not find anyone who was killed in two weeks or less among the Wagner contingent, the procedure appears to have been observed. But we found more than a dozen convicts killed in that timespan from the ‘Storm’ units – in other words, at a time when they had been told they would be at a training ground. Relatives of prisoners confirm such cases:“My husband just had signed his contract on April 8th and was in a stormtrooper unit by the 11th already. That is, at war,” says the wife of a ‘Storm-Z’ convict. “At the time, I was calm, because I was sure there would be the two weeks of training they talk about, and there’d be nothing to be scared of till the end of April. I waited for him to call me. And on April 21st, he died! And there had been none of it, no training at all.” Men who have fought in ‘Storm’ units say defence ministry-recruited convicts are usually taken for training and combat unit allocation to the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk ‘people’s republics’ in occupied Ukraine. On arrival from prison camps, they often find they are refused the basic items for soldiering: shovels for digging trenches, first aid kits, and even serviceable rifles. “Many soldiers got guns that were unfit for battle, and completely broken – for example, with a mechanically damaged barrel, or lacking sights,” wrote the pro-war blogger Vladimir Grubnik, who was involved in supporting ‘Storm’ units. “When the commanding officer found out that Ivanov or Petrov’s rifle was unsuited to combat and needed replacement, he would say it was impossible: the weapon had already been assigned to someone, and the strict military bureaucracy can do nothing about it. What a soldier is supposed to do on the frontline without a first aid kit or shovel, and with a busted rifle, remains a mystery!” Ukrainian intelligence officers wrote a report on Wagner tactics that noted “assault groups never retreat without orders... Unauthorised departure of the unit or a retreat without sustaining injuries is punishable by on-the-spot execution.” This also leads to additional personnel losses. Insubordination or an apparent attempt at escape can also result in immediate execution by shooting, followed by burial in a cemetery in Luhansk region. The relatives of five dead Wagner members told the BBC that in such cases salaries were not paid and the bodies not returned. They had had to go to Luhansk at their own expense to retrieve their deceased loved ones. The most infamous case of punishment within Wagner was a video of a man being murdered with a sledgehammer. Yevgeny Nuzhin had surrendered to Ukrainian forces, saying he wanted to fight on their side, but was returned to the Russians in a prisoner exchange. The gruesome killing took place shortly afterwards. How effective are combat prisoner units?More and more, the Russian army is organising waves of attacks with small assault groups, just as the Wagner group did during the storming of Bahmut.Prisoner units are used to attack fortified Ukrainian army positions, forcing the Ukrainians to open fire and reveal the locations of their artillery and gunners. The Russians then shell the positions or attack them with drones. The tactic is moderately effective, experts say, but leads to high personnel losses. “One characteristic feature of this war is the huge number of drone strikes and artillery attacks,” notes Samuel Cranny-Evans of the Royal United Services Institute. “To survive in such conditions, it is necessary to constantly maintain high manoeuvrability of combat units, and good coordination with neighbouring ones. However, poorly trained soldiers - primarily prisoner units – are incapable of this."
For as long as the frontline remains unstable, prisoner unit operations will be relatively effective, however. Ukrainian soldiers say they are increasingly short of ammunition, and in such circumstances they will be less ready to expend it on small, scattered targets. Compared to the first months of the war, Russia has significantly altered its operational tactics. Complex airborne assaults or sabotage operations have been abandoned in favour of ‘meat storms’. “It eventually works to the advantage of the Russian army,” says Cranny-Evans. “They gain small territorial acquisitions, but at the expense of significant human losses.” Every time a Ukrainian village is captured, the military commanders responsible get the glory. With manpower reserves made up of convicts, they can well afford the price of such incremental advances at the front. BBC is blocked in Russia. We’ve attached the story in Russian as a pdf file for readers there.
English version edited by Chris Booth.
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