• CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
    65·
    23 days ago

    I have to be misunderstanding this… Is this implying russia was using a western voip service to coordinate military activity? And now their government cut them off from it, impeding their operations?

    Assuming I got this right - How fucking dumb are these people? Wouldn’t they think the information could be fed straight back to Ukraine and allies?

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
      331·
      23 days ago

      I have to be misunderstanding this

      You’re not.

      How fucking dumb are these people?

      Yes it’s dumber than a bucket of hair but you have to reflect on how they ended up here. Russia started a 21st Century war with a 20th Century Soviet built military. Back then a field radio was the size of your damn chest and they weren’t even issued at the platoon level. That shit obviously isn’t going to work on the modern battlefield where they have to control drones, guided artillery, distribute real time high resolution satellite imagery, and the battle lines shift by the hour instead of monthly.

      The Soviet’s didn’t need these things and because they hadn’t been invented yet Russia showed up without them and promptly got cock-slapped by Western backed Ukrainian forces who were vastly more prepared because The West, including both military and private companies, spent literally Trillions of dollars investing in a robust and secure communications infrastructure.

      The Russian Army absolutely required this kind of communications infrastructure to function on a modern battlefield but it didn’t exist so they did what they always do and applied their “Ingenuity” to the problem. They came up with using things like private Discord rooms, piggybacking on Ukraine’s cellular infrastructure, and hijacking Starlink; basically using the same Western tech that Ukraine was using.

      So in the contest of not have anything at all and using tech that was subject to Western spying the Russian Military, at least at some level, chose the latter.

      It seems that perhaps the Russian MoD has decided that the Western spying has become to pervasive and is shutting down these cobble-together communication and control systems but that’s going to put the field level operations right back to where they were 2 years ago.

      You can’t win a 21st Century fight with 20th Century systems. It’s like playing a game of Civilization where you’ve got Aircraft Carriers and the other player is attacking you with Canoes.

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
        14·
        23 days ago

        Absolutely mindboggling considering with WebRTC and Websockets and whatever else in 2024, anyone can build secure, self hosted peer to peer VoIP/video services without too much issue… Ah well, fuck em.

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
      10·
      23 days ago

      The Russians couldn’t, or chose not too, afford to build their own and they’ve been paying for that mistake since they started this damn War.

      • AnomalousBit@programming.dev
        9·
        23 days ago

        They chose to fund troll farms instead of basic communications systems. We’ll never hear the end about how Russia didn’t need Discord anyway, it was all a 4D chess “ruse” 😂

  • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
    9·
    23 days ago

    “birds”?

    Either that’s a weird translation, or they were using Discord to monitor drone feeds.