Analysis Of A NATO/Ukraine Drone Attack On Crimea

Today Geroman provides an analysis of a drone attack on Crimea that appeared to target, unsuccessfully, Simferopol—the second largest city in Crimea. He reproduces a map from a Rybar report (I was unable to locate the original). It’s interesting to see how this attack was conducted, but more importantly there are indications that this could be a prelude to something bigger. That possibility is based on the very heavy NATO surveillance operation that occurred in coordination with the drone attack. I’m not in a position to say whether the amount of surveillance activity that Geroman describes is unusual, or if so how unusual it may be. Geroman believes it is—otherwise he probably wouldn’t have so I’ll defer to him. Here’s the post itself. My Russian is sketchy at best, but I’m able to decypher some of the captions on the map, which are in Cyrillic. If you refer to the map while reading, here’s a sort of key:

• The icons with a purplish background designate UK airplanes.

• Those with a deep blue background designate US airplanes and drones—if you look closely you can distinguish the the icons as either airplanes or drones.

• The lighter blue blackgrounds are for icons that designate Ukrainian drones.

• The largish red icon is the Russian air defense unit that shot down the Ukrainian drone that entered Crimean air space.

You have to squint a bit to see the actual small print designations of the aircraft in each area. I’ve also provided links where I think they’d be helpful.

It’s important to note that the large map has a mistake on it. It places Simferopol at the location of Sevastopol—the big Russian Black Sea Fleet base. The smaller inset map places Simferopol correctly. From that you can see that the drone that the Russians shot down was headed directly toward Simferopol.

NATO intelligence activity in the Black Sea and connection with UAV raids on Crimea

Last night there was unrest in Crimea again: six drones were launched from the territory of the Odessa airport in the direction of Crimea.

Having reached Crimea, five of them hovered in the air not far from the peninsula, sometimes approaching and sometimes moving away. And one flew in the Steregushchy area and was eventually shot down by a crew of the Pantsir air defense missile system over Gvardeyskoye . Other drones were overwhelmed by the crews and fell into the water.

The path of the drone that was shot down is designated by the blue arrow. By comparing that to the inset map, you can see its path was toward Simferopol. In the next paragraph we see that the purpose of the 5 hovering drones was to probe Russian air defenses to find an access path for the strike drone.

But the essence of this sortie is simple: what was needed was not damage, but an assessment of the reaction of air defense systems and checking the most acceptable route for the UAV. One UAV reached Simferopol , indicating the presence of small gaps.

Next is the description of the NATO presence per se. As you can see, this is quite a deployment of high tech and expensive flying hardware.

In anticipation of this, NATO aircraft and drones carried out a comprehensive reconnaissance operation. In the air were American U-2S , MQ-9A , P-8A and even a British RC-135 , escorted by two Typhoon fighters.

And today the activity did not subside : the standard MQ-9A drones and the R-8A [= P-8A; P =R in Cyrillic] anti-submarine aircraft were joined by the RQ-4B UAV, flying south of the Crimean Peninsula.

Geroman/Rybar’s assessment:

Let's see what such intensity will lead to, but, as the practice of past months has shown, nothing good should be expected from this.

@rybar_force

The suspicion expressed above is that the attack was actually primarily designed to update NATO information regarding Russian air defense configurations in Crimea—possibly for larger scale, more serious attacks to come in the near future. All of which shows that NATO is actively waging war against Russia. Some day, at a time of their own choosing, Russia is likely to react.

For anyone interested in a very informative discussion of the US strike on Baghdad last night—what it means, who the targets were, who the players are, what the politics in Iraq are these days—I highly recommend the linked video (about 42 minutes). This seems to me to be a major development and I would particularly point to Mike Dimino’s role in this discussion—very enlightening. Oh, here’s another tidbit: Turkey is said to have attacked Kurdish forces in Syria. That’s right. Our Kurdish “allies”. Complicated. Will the US strike at Turkey next? What’s Turkey’s game? Regional war coming up?

US Mid-East Strikes are FAILING! Now What? w/fmr Green Beret Jason Beardsley fmr CIA Mike Dimino