Russia closing arctic waters deploying radar jammers.

a reply to: bastion


Thank you Bastion!

I was able to read the article through your wayback link.




This is the harbor mine sweeper UK sold to ukraine, on an older version of the hull. I have zero issues with this, and no honest adversary would either. Unless they were planning to illegally mine someone's harbors of course.

The article also specified 8 unspecified 'missile boats' as part of the deal, but doesn't provide any details at all.

I found some 'insider' defense industry folks discussing the uk deal in more detail. Can't link to it so your choice whether to believe everything below or not.

These are similar to this craft supplied to Qatar:



Shallow water short range defensive boats.

We normally call these harbor patrol boats, and an ideal complement to the mine clearing boats.

Will probably be built using identical hulls & propulsion systems.

Much of the 8 total boats (2 mine sweepers & 6 harbor patrol) will be built in ukraine with UK assistance.

I see nothing at all even remotely controversial in what the UK is doing here.

Is anyone suggesting that Ukraine shouldn't be allowed to patrol it's own harbors and coast with these small craft?

I actually applaud what the UK is doing here for several reasons.

a reply to: Ghostsdogood

Agreed - it seems as usual Sky were talking a load of bollocks calling them warships (why I was appologising for using sky as a source earlier) - it's mainly dingies and small patrol boasts that are desperately needed to replace current boats and 10 years delay in Ukraine Navy ships due to old projects going bankrupt.

None of it can be used offensively and one Russian sub or ship could take the entire new fleet out in a couple of minutes if they wanted.

I've no reason not to believe the claim but out of interest do the places mention anything about the £2.2bn package being mostly bollocks and the real funding is around £1.5bn with a good portion of that money being spent renovating ports?

A simple yes or no will suffice - best not to copy/paste or quote any specific figured from the insider page to keep it's content ringfenced.

a reply to: Ghostsdogood

Why would you be shocked Javs are being proliferated, they already ended up in Libya and it took a few days to spin a story that threw the French under the bus as being responsible.

originally posted by: worldstarcountry
a reply to: Ghostsdogood

Why would you be shocked Javs are being proliferated, they already ended up in Libya and it took a few days to spin a story that threw the French under the bus as being responsible.

Do you recall the MASSIVE turmoil that happened when hillary tried to get the weapons back from Libya? And those weren't anywhere near the sophistication of Javs.

You obviously remember hillary trying to blame the French for her misdeeds.

It was a pretty big deal.

Until now most American presidents have been very careful about letting these weapons get into the hands of anyone except our closest allies.

To keep them from ever being used against us or our our closest allies.

With exceptions for obama & biden 'accidentally' giving them to muslim terrorists, and now ukraine.

a reply to: bastion

It 'appears' to me after careful reading, that the UK is intentionally being a little non-transparant about the total dollar value of the 'package', which has me a little suspicious, but I've seen no signs that the package will ever include anything not specified.

Maybe being deceptive for internal politics?

Or maybe they honestly don't know the total cost of the package yet since much of it is for repairing unknown damage to Ukrainian facilities?

Just guessing on this.