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.
SBU should keep an eye on US as US is selling weapons to Ukraine in the name of "defense " and raking billions of dollars putting Ukraine in severe debt.
I think they have more pressing concerns
Yes but always keep an eye on the US.
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.
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.
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.
I think part of the problem is that US media generally accepts the US state department’s interpretation of Chinese foreign policy. That makes it difficult to interpret China’s aims since it’s buried under pro US bias.
Personally, I think the Chinese government appears relatively predictable if you can parse various global sources including the actual statements China publishes. Granted that’s a bit more difficult since it means accounting for all the biases of each source.
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.
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.
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.
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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what’s SBU?
Sluzhba Bezpeki Ukraini = Security Service of Ukraine, SSU Basically, Ukrainian intelligence
Ukrainian intelligence.
One of 3 that exist between the two countries, I read elsewhere. If true, this is a BIG DEAL!
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.
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.
N. Korea uses a smaller gauge.
Your point? Different countries choose for their own country.
The tunnel will certainly be hit at some point and flooded.
Umm it was the tunnel that was hit.
They didn’t say it flooded.
Flooded with what?
Ignited jet fuel, apparently!
https://kbin.social/m/world@lemmy.world/t/670476/-/comment/3877961
Explosions hit both the tunnel and the bridge.
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m sure plenty of similar things happened in every war ever.
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.
I’m also uncomfortable with giving the SBU credit for an event that negatively impacts not only Russia but also China, which is not currently at war with Ukraine. SBU haven’t taken credit for this, a Ukrainian Official is making those claims.
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!
Russia is shooting its own foot since the start of the war… an inside job sounds plausible at this point (kidding)
If it had been an inside job the explosives wouldn’t have gone off.
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
COLD FIRE! I’M FREEZING!!! ( said the steel beams)
Don’t wake them!
I love how they drew the Sheeple in a completely different artstyle for emphasis.
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.
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.
It didn’t need to melt, raising the temperature of steel decreases it’s strength.
it’s strength
It is, is it?
At the temperature Jet Fuel burns at, Steel becomes as flexible as cooked noodles, but technically they have not “melted.”
Also: worked metal heats up. So an entire building collapsing on hot beams can get them even hotter.
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!
awesome! SBU ftw!
Technically SBU haven’t taken credit, a “ukrainian official” has made that claim.
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.
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Probably not so much the other way, most Ukrainians are fluent in Russian, I doubt many Russians are fluent in Ukranian
No, your imagination betrays you on this subject.
Most Ukrainians are fluent in Russian, but with southern accent, and plenty of them also bad at Ukrainian at the same time.
A lot of Russians speak it with the same southern accent and know some Ukrainian.
There’s no clear border in that sense. Also there are still plenty of people born in Ukraine living in Russia and vice versa, maybe millions.
For half of Ukraine and half the (Slavic) south of Russia the whole idea of choosing between being Ukrainian and Russian was preposterous not so long ago.
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.
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
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
Russian has too much Church Slavic influence, Ukrainian has a bit more Polish, German etc influence, and also the Church Slavic influence there is a bit different (say, the loanwords were adapted for East Slavic phonetics mostly).
In Russian the prestigious language was Church Slavic, in Ukrainian - a written East Slavic language, so Ukrainian is a bit more consistent.
If we hypothetically remove that, I’m not sure they’d be considered different languages (despite there being dialectal differences even in XII century).
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?
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 don’t have data, but feels wrong. Maybe if this is about historical, genetic distance, then yes, Belarusian is quite a lot closer to Russian.
But in reality Ukrainian and Belarusian have mostly the same West Russian lexicon, while Russian is different (say, more South Slavic, as in Church Slavic, loanwords), for historical reasons (in GDL West Russian written language was used for administration in its East Slavic parts ; in Muscovy Church Slavic was prestigious, so the official language was heavily influenced by that).
You can as well download the PDF and read the description, the thing is not based on historical reasons, it analyses a selected part of each language core using algorithm that is used to analyse DNA distance, as far as I understand.
To address what you’ve said, it sais:
Four factors influence lexical similarity registered in the tree: (1) genetic or genealogical relationship of languages, (2) diffusion (language borrowing), (3) universal tendencies for lexical similarity such as onomatopoeia, and (4) random variation (chance).
So the Ukrainian and Belarussian are likely different enough in everything else than the lexicon you’ve mentioned
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 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.
Russia/China is one of the longest border. So wonder how big of an impact this would be!? There can’t be just one or two runner in 4000km long border.
Dictatorships are only paper tigers inside.
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.
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