Ukraine’s security service blew up a railway connection linking Russia to China, in a clandestine strike carried out deep into enemy territory, with pro-Kremlin media reporting that investigators have opened a criminal case into a “terrorist attack.”
The SBU set off several explosions inside the Severomuysky tunnel of the Baikal-Amur highway in Buryatia, located some 6,000 kilometers east of Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the operation told POLITICO.
“This is the only serious railway connection between the Russian Federation and China. And currently, this route, which Russia uses, including for military supplies, is paralyzed,” the official said.
Four explosive devices went off while a cargo train was moving inside the tunnel. “Now the (Russian) Federal Security Service is working on the spot, the railway workers are unsuccessfully trying to minimize the consequences of the SBU special operation,” the Ukrainian official added.
Ukraine’s security service has not publicly confirmed the attack. Russia has also so far not confirmed the sabotage.
OP missed the fun bit after the tunnel bombing:
The first cargo train exploded directly in the Severomuysky tunnel.
To continue transportation, the Russians began to use the detour route through the so-called Devil’s Bridge — a 35-meter high viaduct structure, which is part of the Trans-Siberian Railway. At that point, SBU saboteurs struck again.
“When the train was passing over this 35-meter high bridge, the explosive devices embedded in it went off,” the same official added.
Damn impressive.
Sounds straight out of a WWII action/spy/war movie.
I think I played that mission in Commandos: Behind enemy Lines
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I’m sure plenty of similar things happened in every war ever.
Thanks for the details
Just to add, according to Denys Davidov’s report on ukraine, the first train was carrying jet fuel, which added to the whole explosion.
Jet fuel can’t blow up steel beams! Wake up sheeple!
Jet fuel can’t blow up steel beams! Wake up sheeple!
Wasn’t that the reason though that the Twin Towers in NY fell, because the jet fuel melted the steel beams infrastructure?
I had read/seen that the buildings were actually designed to handle a plane crashing into them, but the architects didn’t expect the metal beams to melt from the high-temperature burning jet fuel.
My understanding is that the beams were sprayed with a fire retardant foam that is designed to protect it in the event of a typical building fire. But the violent impact of the jets would have stripped most of it off, and the jet fuel did indeed weaken the beams. They wouldn’t have melted outright, but softening them after already being damaged by the impact was more than it could handle.
That’s my understanding as well.
And that the fire retardant foam was designed to be hit by an airplane and stay on, but it was just designed in those days for a smaller 737 impact, and not for a heavybody plane, so it got knocked off, exposing the beams.
Edit: Lol, ok, meant beams, not beans.
exposing the beans.
Lemmy moment.
Dammit put a NSFW warning on that post!!!
There could be children in here!!!
This lemming eatin beans!
You guys are all government sheeple! Everyone knows the Twin Towers never existed and 9/11 was a hologram!
It didn’t need to melt, raising the temperature of steel decreases it’s strength.
it’s strength
It is, is it?
It is strength that decreased
it’s its strenth that decreased
It’s a conspiracy theory, and not a particularly intelligent one. Us normies like to make jokes like this mocking people who believe it, but they do actually believe it and will come up with some batshit insane logic to support their theories.
I haven’t heard of anything to refute that, and have heard things to confirm that.
If you have any info you’d like to submit, please do so.
Edit: By refute that, I mean refuting that the jet fuel burning caused the metal to weaken onto collapse.
If you have any info you’d like to submit, please do so.
Well, here’s what 5 minutes of research yielded
For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fahrenheit-2777/
All materials weaken with increasing temperature and steel is no exception. Strength loss for steel is generally accepted to begin at about 300°C and increases rapidly after 400°C. By 550°C steel retains approximately 60% of its room temperature yield strength, and 45% of its stiffness.
Jet fuel burns at 1500f, which is 815c. At 800c steel retains less than 20% of the strength that it has at room temperature. There you go, fully debunked with minimal effort and extremely basic facts.
The internet since 2001…? There’s reams of examples of people who believe this crap and have posted it. I wouldn’t be surprised if people have done PhDs where this conspiracy theory is featured heavily.
Just to make sure we are on the same page, are you saying that the jet fuel burning the metal beams of the building is true, or a conspiracy?
Yeah it’s a really dumb meme because obviously it can. The ancient Romans worked steel, so obviously it doesn’t have a particularly high melting temperature.
Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams. It doesn’t burn nearly hot enough.
However, for a structure to fail you don’t need to melt the beams, and getting them hot enough will also damage their structural integrity; they’ll fail long before they reach the melting point.
And this is what happened on 9/11.
Even wood alone is capable of getting steel red hot under the right condition. Given my experience was with metal floor grating in a burn barrel. The steel became easily malleable with just a metal rod.
The conspiracy goes SO much deeper… it’s rumored that even physics is involved.
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COLD FIRE! I’M FREEZING!!! ( said the steel beams)
Russia is shooting its own foot since the start of the war… an inside job sounds plausible at this point (kidding)
Of course Russia is shooting itsself. I bet if it could throw itsself out a window it would.
How dare Russia make Russia look so weak
If it had been an inside job the explosives wouldn’t have gone off.
So they got two of three and not one of three? How is every article writer flubbing the headlines?!
The magic of AI and staff cuts.
It must be very hard for Russia to detect Ukrainians that work under cover in Russia, this must be a major vulnerability for Russia. Unfortunately the same is probably true the other way.
Probably not so much the other way, most Ukrainians are fluent in Russian, I doubt many Russians are fluent in Ukranian
I wonder how many Ukrainians can only speak Russian. Languages can be hard for some people.
I thought I heard that zelensky himself only knew Russian until relatively recently
They are incredibly similar languages that are more mutually intelligible, similar to Swedish/Norwegian/Danish or Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian.
I heard it’s more like Spanish/Portuguese which share some similarities but not mutually intelligible
Mostly all. It’s because USSR only used russian as country’s language so every nation in the country was forced to learn this language and there were many nations in ussr.
Can anyone explain how different the languages are? Super different or “they kind of get eachother, just are noticably different”
They have similar alphabets, grammar and a lot of cognates. If you only spoke one you’d be able to recognize most of a sentence with these things, but sometimes words are totally different. They probably sound similar to someone unfamiliar with both, but they are quite distinct.
So like Spanish and Italian or closer?
It appears, lexically they are closer than Spanish and Italian, close to like Italian and Romanian, but a bit further. There are many ways to measure language distance though, so this is just a vague analogy
I thought they were mutually intelligible?
Similar enough for mutual intelligibility but different enough that Russian only speakers will probably run into a shiboleth
No need for people to even speak different languages to run into shibboleth, the pronunciation of Russian is very different in different regions, the Ukrainian is not homogeneous either.
Like Spanish from Mexico and Spanish from Spain?
Somebody once said to me that it’s rather like the difference between English and Dutch.
If you ever hear Dutch it rather sounds like English and you’ve just not quite heard them correctly. If you were in another room and just heard the ebb and flow of the language you’d probably not be able to tell the difference, but in person directly you can.
And as a non-speaker of both languages they sound basically the same to me so I think it is true
I’d say, Ukrainian have more brutal (deep throat) sounding than russian, but maybe it’s only local thing with Ukrainian guys i was talking with. So, usually it’s like 14 years old kid in Ukraine sounds like grown up Russian dude
There is a lexical tree that gives some insight. Lexicostatistical distance would have worked better, I think, but I cant seem to find the numbers for that kind of metric.
Here I’ve edited an excerpt from the table, that shows how far Russian and Ukrainian are and how that compares to some other European languages
I think it could be worst for russia even thinking about fluency: as I understand, russia reallocated thousands of Ukrainians in its far siberian territories as part of the ethnic cleansing of crimea and surroundings
Edit: this was done in the 30s
According to Wikipedia, there are 1.928 million ethnic Ukrainians currently living in Russia.
Wasn’t relocation a huge part of the Soviet system? As they took territory they would move people around so that there were more Russians in the territories, presumably less chance at ethnic uprisings?
Yes, but that was not the only reason.
The Soviets would send foreign intelligentsia and bourgeois (including slightly better off farmers) to die in Siberia in order to reduce the chances of uprising.
They would also mix populations in order to reduce national loyalties and would also encourage mixed ethnicity families to eventually absorb smaller nations into the Russian identity.
Yes that’s exactly what I meant, the similarity of the languages, but I didn’t know whether that is equal both ways. I sincerely hope you are right, that it’s more difficult for the Russians.
I noticed this in the beginning of the war, that it would be relatively easy for Ukraine to perform sabotage in Russia. I’m kind of surprised it’s not more wide spread?It’s quite easy to understand each other for both parties, but Ukrainians actually learn the Russian language in school, so they can speak good Russian. Russians can’t speak good Ukrainian as they don’t learn it. And speaking is very important for sabotage operations.
https://kbin.social/m/world@lemmy.world/t/670476/-/comment/3877961
It is not the only railway connection. And there is still the original route from before this tunnel was built. So not sure how big the impact is.
Source wikipedia
I know virtually nothing about the Russian train system. Are all the routes able to carry the same loads? Older lines may have narrower tunnels, weaker bridges, etc. that are unable to transport the larger/heavier loads that Russia hopes to bring from China…
Edit: Track gauge is another question. I did some quick Googling and it looks like Russia used to use 1,524 mm gauge while China uses 1,435 mm. If those other lines aren’t compatible with China then it means cargo would need to be unloaded from their trains at the border and then reloaded onto Russian trains. That would slow things down tremendously.
Generally yes your lines can carry the same loads and have the same gauge. You want your internal logistics to be straightforward.
Fun fact: Russia chose a different gauge to make it more difficult to invade them.
That is pretty clever
They have all sorts of interesting things. Their mortars are 1mm larger diameter. So if they capture enemy supplies, they can fire them (with a little less accuracy). If the west captures Russian mortars and tries to fire them (in western barrels) they run the risk of jamming and exploding.
N. Korea uses a smaller gauge.
Your point? Different countries choose for their own country.
His point was that NK was taking a note from the Russian playbook and made even smaller tracks so they couldn’t be invaded.
They’re also aided by the fact that nobody really wants to.
And their logistics runs off trains so they have a giant problem when invading others, only same gauge can be used reliably and rail stations are a huge target
Yeah but they’re more afraid of being invaded. See history.
Explosions hit both the tunnel and the bridge.
https://kbin.social/m/world@lemmy.world/t/670476/-/comment/3877961
I’m curious whether China will take this as a personal affront and feel the need to save face by escalating their participation. That would not be ideal.
China really has no reason to take this as an affront. China will continue milking Russia for money/oil and let them continue weaken themselves, but they have no reason to get involved or sell them weapons.
I’m no expert, please take this with a massive chunk of salt, but as far as I understand it China is trying to balance their relationship with Russia with their relationship with the US. I’d expect the reaction to a rail bombing like this to be muted and cautious.
Good point. It has seemed recently like they’re trying to make nice with the US again all of a sudden. Some of their comments after visiting San Francisco were very out of step with their rhetoric up until recently. At least as far as what I have gathered from news articles. I don’t really have a great grasp on the nuances of it myself. They’re a difficult government to understand sometimes.
I think their trying to get a pro China movement in the west. I also think it’s working.
They are going to have a hard time recovering from their dot balloons and the shot they pull in Taiwan, at least as far as public opinion goes. But democrats seem to be offering them some kind of economic deals that they seem to be happy about. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
Eh I am neutral on China at first blush, which is actually pretty shitty when you think about their anti democratic actions and ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs
China and Russia share similar ideologies but that’s about where the similarities ends.
China isn’t insane and actually understands restraint unlike Russia they’re not going to go charging into something without examining the consequences. China really doesn’t want to get involved in this if they can help it, as I’ve looked at it and it’s only downsized as far as they can see.
If Russia does attack NATO and NATO gets involved, and the Chinese still send them resources after that point, then it’s possible NATO will consider China to be involved and therefore a legitimate target. This will mean that China will have to go toe-to-toe with the US military, and they really don’t want to.
Of course all of those are big if’s, and to be honest are very unlikely but it’s not an impossibility and the risk they’ve decided isn’t worth the very little reward.
China will just get to charge higher delivery fees with the planes, trucks and boats that will have to ship all the goods.
Good news for China, Russia need the stuff either way, it just gonna cost them more now and take longer to arrive.
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Their reaction will depend on how this impacts their strategic use for Russia, which is soley as a source for raw materials (oil, minerals, etc.)
Selling goods into Russia, while critical for Russia, is barely a rounding error for China. The natural resources from Russia, however are critical inputs for the Chinese economy.
I think China is more concerned about being included in the next set of sanctions. If this railroad was the only rail that connected China directly to Russia, then I expect the export of arms to slowdown a bit just for caution sake.
One of 3 that exist between the two countries, I read elsewhere. If true, this is a BIG DEAL!
Can’t imagine this is a great idea since it’s gonna piss off China
Fuck China
awesome! SBU ftw!
Dictatorships are only paper tigers inside.
what’s SBU?
Ukrainian intelligence.
Sluzhba Bezpeki Ukraini = Security Service of Ukraine, SSU Basically, Ukrainian intelligence
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ukraine’s security service blew up a railway connection linking Russia to China, in a clandestine strike carried out deep into enemy territory, with pro-Kremlin media reporting that investigators have opened a criminal case into a “terrorist attack.”
The SBU set off several explosions inside the Severomuysky tunnel of the Baikal-Amur highway in Buryatia, located some 6,000 kilometers east of Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the operation told POLITICO.
And currently, this route, which Russia uses, including for military supplies, is paralyzed,” the official said.
“Now the (Russian) Federal Security Service is working on the spot, the railway workers are unsuccessfully trying to minimize the consequences of the SBU special operation,” the Ukrainian official added.
“On the Itikit — Okusykan stretch in Buryatia, while driving through the tunnel, the locomotive crew of the cargo train noticed smoke from one of the diesel fuel tanks.
The movement of trains was not interrupted, it was organized along a bypass section with a slight increase in travel time,” Russia’s state railroad company RZHD said in a statement on Thursday.
The original article contains 247 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 28%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Why is it a “terrorist attack” lol this meets all the definitions for a terrorist attack.
You can’t just start adding quote marks when our guys do it.
It’s a war.
They are at war therefore it is an attack not a “terrorist attack”. I am sure you can debate whether or not an attack during war time could be terrorist.
A terrorist attack is usually designed to cause psychological trauma and involves injuring civilian population. This was clearly an attack on the economy and I don’t agree with the Russian media that this is a terrorist attack. So I think the quotations make sense as it is a sign of sarcasm poking fun at Russia’s reporting.
sabotage noun
The deliberate destruction of property or obstruction of normal operations, as by civilians or enemy agents in a time of war. The deliberate attempt to damage, destroy, or hinder a cause or activity. Scamped work.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik
A terrorist attack is political violence by a non-recognized state/non-government agency
Ukraine is recognized so it can’t be terrorism
It absolutely does not meet the definition of a terror attack and we did not use the term that way in options within the GWOT either. Even in the context of September 11th the Pentagon was not considered a terror target while the hijacking of civilian planes and world trade center was.
Words matter.
