From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 to December 2025, 14,999 Ukrainian civilians were killed and 40,601 injured, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU).
1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
Where Russia was forced out of Ukraine they left behind mass civilian graves. Bodies found with hands tied behind their backs, shot in the back of the head.
Surrendering to Russia does not bring peace to Ukraine only more suffering.
The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
tl;dr Other parties are Putin-like, and if/when a genuine alternative emerges, Putin deals with them ruthlessly. Example: Navalny was the charismatic leader of a small but popular rival party with anti-corruption policies. He was initially delegitimised (not allowed to partake in the 2018 elections due to [likely fake] charges of embezzlement), then poisoned (nearly died), then imprisoned, and then killed while in prison.
Consider the terrifying message that sends to would-be political rivals...
Well, some decades ago if you were a school teacher, you were _asked_ to (1) vote "right" yourself (2) call all parents and ask them to vote "right". If you disobeyed, the school got problems and you got problems. Maybe not enough to make all people comply, but sufficient to get the right outcomes. Same goes for all government-funded workers.
Since then I think they simplified the system and just forge the results outright.
Before the latest Russian election one of the parties opposed the war in Ukraine and was a bit too popular, so, well, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabloko :
Yabloko is the sole officially registered party to openly oppose the Russian war in Ukraine, openly calling "for peace and freedom". The party planned to partake in the 2026 Russian legislative election under their anti-war slogan.[29][30] However, in August 2026, the party was barred from running by the Supreme Court of Russia due to a lawsuit by Rodina.
As to the widespreadness of the electoral fraud, it should suffice to know that Ela Pamfilova, the irremovable head of the Russian election circus, has recently proclaimed all video evidence of any fraud to be AI generated, and demonstrated a video where a casually-looking man throws a stack of doctored bulletins in, followed by several outright fictional characters.
Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.
There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.
Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.
Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.
Often, both are true. It's perfectly legitimate for anyone (Russian or otherwise) to have geo-political concerns (e.g. NATO expansion, Cuban missile crisis etc), but a Russian concerned about NATO expansion may also be very opposed to the extreme option of war as a solution.
War affects an ordinary Russian in very negative ways: the possibility of conscription (w/ risk of injury/death), complications for travel, sanctions on goods and services, and the economic opportunity cost (money wasted on war that could have gone to productive uses, plus reduced economic output due to drone strikes on yandex, wildberries, refineries).
Russia could fully integrate into EU/NATO if it really wanted.
That's just not compatible with ambitions of its corrupt leaders who want to be a root-level player, not "one of NATO countries". And I'm not sure how legitimate is prioritization of wants of corrupt leaders over well-being of your compatriots.
NATO is not something you can just apply to on a whim. The path for a membership was there: e.g. there were some joint exercises, etc. Obviously they also need political integration as well.
Russia actually have been a member of Council of Europe (PACE, etc.) since 1996 but it was expelled in 2022. If they had a good record in Council of Europe they could really go for NATO membership eventually.
Ok, about the path you describe: how can one join a military exercise without a prior green light for that? And speaking about the political integration: remember that Turkey is in nato, so it does not need more political integration than Russia had in early 2000th.
What happened is that nato realized that if Russia joins, it will loose the reason to exist (i.e. if the old enemy joins the alliance what is the need for such an alliance anymore?)
So nato bureaucrats understood that they will loose well-paying positions and rejected even initial talks.
I think you misunderstood me, Russia _was_ on a path towards NATO in 90s to mid-2000s. There was cooperation, joint exercises, etc.
E.g. from a conversation between Clinton and Putin in 2000:
> Clinton: I am serious about being ready to discuss NATO membership with Russia. I recognize that domestic considerations inside Russia will prevent this for now, but over time Russia should be a part of every organization that holds the civilized world together.
> Putin: But I'll let you know that when I was asked about possible membership for Russia in NATO, I supported the idea.
Regarding "reason to exist", there's always a concern about Middle-East, China, etc.
Funny enough that you remember it was as "Russia applied but was rejected" but from this talk it's clear Putin is much less interested in Russia joining NATO than Clinton.
Never ever that was a thing. There has never been any applications to have Russia as NATO member. What Putin was referring and had in mind was not exactly NATO membership but special treatment to Russia, that would allow using benefits of NATO, by not submitting to anything.
It was never about NATO and always about the reconquest of Ukraine. You can read their victory speech here [0]. Russia thought they would win easily and accidentally posted their victory speech too soon.
imagine if Putin had said... we are slipping behind the west. They are threatening us. So... we'll double down on research & education. We'll outthink them. We'll shift our economy into an economy that thrives in the future.
Pretty much precisely what the US did during the Cold War. To do so, we had to outspend the Soviets, and by a LOT. But the world buying US treasury bonds was basically a credit card for us to finance the above things that result into the world’s strongest military.
Let's hold this comment until after the mid-terms. The biggest thing Americans can do to stop Trump's war mongering would be at the ballot box. Protesting is one thing, but actively voting in people with power to stop POTUS would be the most direct action they can take.
The majority of people don’t really care about the world, their country, etc.
They just care that they have what they need, that they don’t struggle too much in life.
In the US people will vote for whoever will make their life easier. To some degree there is morality/ethics/ideology but that’s usually grounded in something that effects you day-to-day
Examples from republicans: Keep out the immigrants or you won’t have a job. You don’t want trans people in the bathroom with your kid. Democrats are socialists which is morally repugnant (and will raise your taxes!)
From dems: republicans are trying to control women (reproductive rights), republicans will cut social programs, etc.
Nobody _really_ cares about wars in Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, etc aside from it effecting them at home.
(Really caring would involve donating, protesting, volunteering, etc — plenty of people talk/have opinions)
> but many seem to think it's justified - different thing
Literally no one thinks that. Look at the last election in Russia.
There were like 10 pro-Putin pro-war parties and one pro-Putin maybe-we-a-lil-bit-try-to-stop-the-war joke party. And that last party was banned from participating because of copyright infringement (they used fonts from Microsoft).
That indicates that actions were taken to usurp absolute power, not that there is 0% support.
People there, from young age live with constant repetition of same soviet style messaging: “west is conniving and bad (and don’t forget - rotten); we won WW2; USSR was best in the world at X, Y, Z; Kiev Rus Vikings; inheritors of eastern Rome something…”.
Those messages are indistinguishable part of national (almost personal) pride, even for a lot of russian speaking people that currently live outside of Russia.
(If I would be raised in muslim family, I would be muslim; if I would be raised in russian info space, most likely I would support 3day operation to save Russian people from fashists)
Conscripts didn't typically come from the lands around Moscow, but from the poor peoples who are very far away from wealth and power. For most there, it was only Ukraine's drone attacks that made them feel at war
Ordinary Russians think "yeah war sucks, I wish Ukraine surrenders so peace can be restored". I'm afraid only a tiny minority believes Russia needs to surrender.
When the pager attack happened, there was a implicity sentiment on focusing on the technical details and not focus on politics. But I didn't see the same sentiment when Iran ballistic missles did their job.
Does anyone really believe Russia will eventually just surrender and leave? I can’t imagine the rationale to believe that. When Putin leaves all indications are that the next leader will actually be much more hawkish. They will only leave if someone bombs them to death. Which is quite a dangerous thing to do. Ukraine is pushing the limits, and everyone knows it’s with the help of many EU countries. I wonder what it will take for Russia to reach desperate measures in this war.
I see no reason why they can't agree on a truce: Russia haven't gained any meaningful ground for a while. A truce or even a peace treaty would be strictly beneficial to Russia.
Any outcome short of surrender of Ukraine is an enormous headache for Putin that will likely cost him and his system dearly. They simply cannot, or they will be dead. Why? Because a million of veterans coming back and telling the stories will ask this question: „Why?“ The „Nazis“ are still in Kiev, the NATO is coming, what we got is just thousands of kilometers of ruins, what for was that? The war keeps them busy, for now. The situation is worse for Ukraine than for Russia, so it may feel like they can go on and actually win.
The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that. What was the plan. And blaming the West (which won‘t be 100% justified) will not help. And he may feel that now he is applying good pressure too, with those drone strikes and knocked out refineries.
> The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that.
That is actually not true at all. People in Ukraine know that it is not about territory but about sovereignty.
The problem of giving up territory is that you will run out of it. The goal of Ukraine is to survive as an independent state, not to hold the ground.
And then just push that (totally correct) line of thought a notch further to the conclusion that it's a long pre-planned, mutually agreed on (though I don't think there can be any disagreement in that club) operation to pull the people of both countries into the chaos in which they become apathetic, scared and subdued into the new world order developments like CBDC, total control and surveillance, while also getting rid of all revolt potential (read able men who are currently being slaughtered in the meatgrinder).
>>>The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that.
There is wrong assumption here that Russia wants only those territories and not whole Ukraine. Also, the Ultimatum was sent to NATO, when Putin invaded Ukraine... and it includes aim to use force against half of Europe and justifications to use it against other half as well.
Also, just like it was with Hitler, allowing him to swallow those territories did not prevent WW2... that was also in plans of Stalin to use Hitler as puppet.
So, the maximum of Russian gamble is to take over most of Europe and given that he also threatened Macron, Putin does not see Russia equivalent in power to anyone in Europe but only USA. He is that stupid - he thinks, that anyone should bow to him, because he has 4000 nukes.
Russia have been taking desperate measures for years. The only thing they haven’t done is use nukes, which Russia can’t use without consequences that vastly outweigh the benefits.
>Does anyone really believe Russia will eventually just surrender and leave?
With internal turmoil, yes. To maintain the lines in Ukraine Russia needs to constantly send in troops and materiel.
Eventually Russia may decide not to do so. And then there is no magic "pause the frontlines" button if they do.
There is plenty of precedent for this in Russian history too. The Russian Revolution collapsed the frontlines in WWI. The Soviet
Empire collapsed with the fall of communism and concomitant internal turmoil.
Russian propaganda puts a lot effort into treating Russia as some sort of force of nature that cannot be deterred or reasoned with, that will advance and hold Ukraine at all costs.
It isn't true. They're humans like the rest of us, not a natural, unstoppable force.
There is a lot of discussion about veterans and moscovites saying otherwise, but I wonder how loud their collective voices are to the Kremlin. From the outside, I have a dim view of that.
>>>If Putin suddenly declared he’d met his objectives and withdrew who’s to say otherwise?
Ahem, some facts:
1. Putin is representation of "collective Russian" mind
2. Collective Russians at this moment believe that they are winning the war.
3. Any withdrawing would be interpreted as betrayal and sure death for Putin(and he knows that) and new instance of his replacement, that would need to implement whatever collective Russians think.
Unfortunately, but the only way to end this war is a Russian military defeat, as no withdraw would ever happen and suggesting something like that is a fantasy, that ignores reality of how Russians are thinking. Yeah, it would have been better if NATO was involved, but on other hand Europeans and USA are too afraid to man up and chew bubble gum and kick some ass - they are now reverse of that chew something that is not bubble gum and take in the ass and Putin likes some young ass.
That would just be an inconclusive end to the war. An actual surrender can be conditional (an explicit deal that favors the winning side) or unconditional. In an unconditional surrender, the winner is free to do whathever they want. For example, they can walk in, rewrite your constitution, and dismantle your military and the industry supporting it.
I've seen the questionnaires from Moscow streets in the last few years on the topics of war.
I've seen what different people write in social networks about it.
Maybe you can trick our naive western friends, but not me.
Being an indifferent somnambula is not the same as being against war.
Putin didn't take power in an overnight coup. Ordinary Russians didn't do anything about his growing power for what, 20 years or so? It was very much possible to act in the early stages, but it was easier not to, especially when hearing pleasing things about Russia becoming powerful.
You could face a 15-year prison sentence for calling for peace on social media, or you could be forcibly conscripted.
Furthermore, rallies are equally persecuted. All rallies are outlawed due to the COVID restrictions, and these restrictions have never been lifted.
So far, all the West has done is target ordinary, poor Russians instead of oligarchs and the Tsar himself.
Their quality of life has plummeted, but would you risk your life to speak out against this?
Westerners are only brave in the comments. Come to Russia and show us how it's done. A country where everyone with power or guns serves the Tsar almost directly. Including the courts, the police and the army.
You don't f*cking understand what has happened to the country. It's become a dictatorship.
While I appreciate the sentiment, the decline of American/Western companies into modern Puritanism is nothing new - but considering the staunch conservatism of the average Russian, I’d say they would do the same thing if they could, they just don’t have the engineering capacity to do the same thing.
From a purely engineering perspective, this and the destroyed AWS datacenters in the Middle East show an interesting trend. How will it affect the way future datacenters and services hosted in them are built? Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
The SpaceX stock is floating solely (and temporarily) on fairy dust, it will not have any impact on the stock what-so-ever.
As the market goes, so goes the multiple being granted to SPCX. That is, when the AI bubble contracts on the multiples being granted, SPCX will decline dramatically. In my observation HN typically widely can't differentiate properly between the real AI economy being developed and the multiples being temporarily granted in the stock market, it's common on here that people think they're the same thing ('when the AI bubble ends'). Back in reality what is going to happen is an implosion of the multiples when the growth slows (or suddenly stops due to an economic shock), and despite that the AI economy broadly will radically expand regardless over 10, 20, 30 years. See: the Internet build out (and market valuations), it will occur much the same conceptually.
SpaceX has a de facto monopoly on space now. And they are 10-20 years ahead of even China. No nation now has a response to Falcon 9 - sth SpaceX built over 10 years ago.
To merely destroy "space data centers", you need not have very advanced targeting technology nor space lasers or whatnot. Just launch a few things releasing little ball bearings or steel needles or something like that - and "poison" the entire orbit.
If all you seek is to destroy (how en-vogue...) then that's more than perfect; not just destroy what's there but also make sure that by virtue of what remains (debris) nothing will get re-built.
Well ... first, that needs a "gadget" suitable for creating an EMP - which is still higher-rate tech than a missile being able to just reach a few hundred miles
altitude and then "conventionally blow up into tiny pieces". And second ... as I said, as belligerant or terrorist, why would you not want to destroy / orbit-poison ? Why would it ever be a good idea to "destruction-less disable" space infrastructure?
It will mean data-centers move to space and then Musk will use his space prowess to bring weapons into space, in collaboration with the US military, and deny/strong-arm/corrupt governments around the world to protect his treasure, including the US government. He'll have a robot army to back it up.
He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.
Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.
People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.
He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.
So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!
Data centres will not be moving to space. The physics and economics don't work.
It's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
Musk is a textbook narcissist. His consistent pattern is to make grandiose promises - literal future faking - fulfil a small percentage of them, then make even bigger and more grandiose promises and hope investors have a short memory. (They do.)
As a narcissist his primary relationship orientation is contempt for others. He's more interested in damaging projects he doesn't like - like the left-leaning community on the original Twitter, using promises of Hyperloop to kill high speed rail, ignoring the CSA from Grok, and of course the USAid fiasco - than seeing through the projects he claims to be developing to completion.
He fits in perfectly with Thiel, Altman, and the rest. The tech is sometimes interesting, but the alignment is fundamentally hostile to the rest of humanity.
> but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy
Different problem.
Cooling can be done in space, it's a normal problem; not easy, nothing in space is easy, but on the scale of space it is normal.
However, at the temperature you would run a chip at, a radiator you make for space will just work better, reject more heat, if you leave it on the ground.
We get convective cooling down here as well as radiative. At operational temperature, convection more than makes up for the atmosphere being a heat bath at ~20 C or whatever.
Everything is possible. Doesn't mean you should do it. You can also put datacenters on the sea floor in a nuclear submarine. That might be even easier.
> t's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.
If you solve your cooling problem in space by distributing 10000 servers across 100 orbits then you replace one engineering challenge with the next; good luck with the satellite-satellite optical crossbars, and even more with the time travel beam shapers to get the communication latency between the components of your "orbit-distributed data center" to-target.
(the sarcasm is intended; there are some usecases for "space servers", around stealth for sure; to "scale it like a terrestrial DC" though ... dunno; not matter how I turn it, it just seems crazy expensive)
Communication latency and bandwidth would present big issues for AI satellites used for training. But if they are inference-only, then the latency and bandwidth demands are much, much lower. Starlink already demonstrates the required parameters.
Indeed ... yet the servers for that already exist and are largely ground-based - "edge" compute of the large CDNs through which much of the internet's traffic flows anyway.
Will starlink build its own edge ? Maybe. We'll see. Whether it makes sense to have this infrastructure "colocated in space" if you're not also the owner of the "connection infrastructure in space" though? It'll come down to cost.
If I were anyone else but SpaceX ... that's where my eyes would be.
Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Buried fiber, hard to attack. Fiber repeater shelters, easy to attack. Their locations are public information, and any non public are trivial to find, in my experience as a cybersecurity professional who seeks out infra vulnerabilities for reporting for fun. Public records, satellite imagery, all OSINT one can do from a workstation.
You could potentially bury them in the ground, assuming you don’t use a generator for backup power. To my knowledge, this is not done today except in urban areas where an underground vault is used for power and comms.
Easy to attack, fast to replace. Every attack requires some planning, a drone and time window. That means attack budget. Spending it on traffic lights does not make sense.
Building any appreciable amount of compute capacity (on the scale of, let's say, a single large datacenter in northern VA) inside a mountain also becomes a huge heat rejection problem, since with the exception of the 0.00000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a SM fiber cable, 100% of the energy consumed is turned into heat.
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.
Yes, but that's not where the volume is. A 'small' data center, even here in Europe has 100's of racks. There are of course many tiny ones but collectively they don't even add up to one single large Google or AWS DC. Those things will run in excess of 1 or even 2 GW.
> You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.
Yea, there was even that idea to launch 1000s of satellites into LEO on a reusable rocket system. Crazy. How did people fall for that? There's not even that many satellites in total today.
It is indeed difficult to tell in advance (and sometimes after the fact) which of his ideas are sensible and which are nonsense.
Recall that while he managed to hire the right people to get reusable rockets cheap enough for Starlink, it was also the case that in 2016 he said that SpaceX was aiming to use the 2018 Mars launch window for what is now Starship, and also that some time around 2018 it would be possible to summon your Tesla car from the other side of the country and it would find its way to you autonomously and only stop for charging.
Hyperloop was stupid and failed, and it also killed in a few places development of public transport, which of course means people continue to buy cars.
They already run liquid cooling loops - compute density is way beyond what could circulate through air. Adding more pipes is probably trivial on the scale of datacenter expenses
Liquid cooling loops don't solve the problem of needing to reject the heat to the atmosphere outside of the building. It just makes it more efficient to transport the heat. At the grossest possible definition, a datacenter of N megawatts on Y acres of land is going to emit the same amount of heat whether it's air cooled equipment or liquid is used to take the heat to the outdoor heat exchanging equipment. On the scale of any very large datacenter the heat exchanging equipment is visible from aerial photos (and from space), take a look at google maps for some of the largest hyperscalers for examples.
I assume that "liquid cooling loop" has an endpoint outside of the building which hosts hardware. In this case it's exactly same problem - just make pipes longer.
Do you need many acres of land to host a heat exchanger?
So how much does the bunker help if you can just drone the cooling systems on the surface? The the computers either cook themselves or have to do an emergency shutdown.
If the other end of the cooling loop is a giant reservoir, as is the case with plenty of other 100+ mile water transport systems, it doesn’t matter if you drone it. Fly all the drones you want into Lake Anthropic, there’s many more cubic meters of water than there are drones.
Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
That's probably just because there's not much demand for it, not because it's difficult.
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
Or when the same thing can be accomplished by putting nothing in a mine, but an approach as simple as having geographical diversity by paying for some 'normal' colo in Hillsboro, and more normal colo in northern VA on the other side of the continent, and duplicating your stuff between two facilities. Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
> Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
Huh? The ones I know of have plenty of connectivity. The real issue is your first, that people prefer to just put their stuff in two countries over paying premium for having their servers under ground.
Your definition of connectivity may not be the same as mine, I'm referring to the number of facilities based carriers and those who ride on top of them you can get at major sites in Hillsboro. Facilities with peeringdb pages that have tons of on net carriers. Is there even an underground bunker colo that's big enough to rate its own peeringdb facility page?
Germans hid plane engine factories underground with old (not so efficient) diesel generators running 24/7. 80 years ago, so the tech was leaner.
Also they didn’t have issues with ventilation and even today if you don’t know where - you won’t see anything driving around.
There's some 200MW capacity (only 80MW is currently used or being built) data center in a mine near a fjord in Norway. The limiting factor for its capacity seems to be the capacity of the electricity net nearby (which you can just hit and the DC is useless). With how NIMBY Norwegians are there's no way it would ever get to a GW or more even if it might be both technically and economically feasible. That's just one project and can't be replicated anywhere else. It's just a massive advantage that above ground datacenters are relatively 'figured out' and similar everywhere.
Do you know if that 200MW figure is total power budget for the facility (including electricity used for cooling systems and other facilities-support systems), or up to 200MW of electronics loads generating heat? The latter would be something like 300 cabinets with 5-6kW heat each.
It might be possible to do on the cheap; underground mines get decommissioned from time to time and could be repurposed as a data centre.
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
It's sad that we have moved away so far from the decentralized web from the 90s and the P2P boom of the 00s. Just like solar panels on every house as a source of energy are much harder to take out than just a few power plants, local P2P storage, messaging, source management, etc. are much harder to take out.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
The war in Ukraine had showed us that distributed power generation, like solar, and nuclear are most resilient. Nuclear because people do not dare striking the power plants.
I don't think Yandex DCs are used directly for military purposes much. It's more about harming Russian economy in general, including its highly prided digital infrastructure
I don't have specific information about Yandex but don't forget how heavily involved Amazon were with things like: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/world/europe/ukraine-cybe... it wouldn't be a huge stretch to suggest that a lot of cloud hosting providers are neck deep in national security.
That's probably not going to help much. Ukraine has been able to hit targets very far inland with drones. They are also rapidly making advances in ballistic missile development. FP-7 has a range of 200-300km, their new FP-9 will have a range of up to 855km and an accuracy of 20m. I know that Russia is (extremely) large, but with development going at this pace...
dunno, Moscow to Novosibirsk is around 1,800 miles straight-line distance.
The war would be probably over by the time Ukraine would have developed those capabilities.
Novosibirsk only has cheap cooling in the winter, in the summer months it is hot. Better to go somewhere like Sabetta where they have their LNG harbour.
You will need a cable to that location, that will eat significant share of the costs. Location in southern Siberia near some big hydro may work better, and connecting it will be easier to some existing trans-Siberian line.
Let's not forget about the orbital data center idea.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Except that doing this at scale is currently still a pipe dream. Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
The problem of the $ per kg to launch huge radiators and "orbital datacenter" type stuff of satellites into space doesn't seem to be resolving itself any time soon. Even if we hand wave away and say that 5 years from now the starship will be such a spectacular success than it costs only $200 per kg to send stuff into space (drastically lower than what it costs now), it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
> it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
Perhaps, but the parent comment posited that some people would pay the premium for orbital data center due to much better security. At $200 per kg to orbit, it could make sense.
With the caveat that Libya, being located upon Earth, is affected by solar power not working at night or when it's cloudy, and is also subject to being in Libya, which is a country with bureaucrats that are going to subject anything built in the country to their laws.
So the "some day in the future" orbiting data centers proposed by a known fraudster will use an experimental-at-best radiator technology that has never been tested in flight yet? That tracks.
> Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
> For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
Ground to orbit antisat lasers are already plausibly something various militaries have.
Welding lasers are pretty cheap, the two hard parts are a big enough apperture to focus 500 km away, and adaptive optics, both of which have already been demonstrated decades ago in astronomy.
I'm not saying Iran and North Korea already have such capabilities, but I am saying I think neither would have trouble building it six months ago if they'd wanted to.
I don't think this really works out. Putting a data center in orbit is basically a question of moving lots of mass which is always going to have a large energy cost for accelerating all that mass. On the other hand someone wanting to damage that data center only has to get the mass of one decently sized bomb to the same velocity.
Unless you're talking about an adversary who has ~no launch capability then the person trying to put the data center out of reach is always going to be massively disadvantaged in terms of the physics.
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
Those data centers participate hugely in generating of internet misinformation and propaganda that shapes deterioration of support in European populations. Those are valid military targets.
- "Emperor, how do we make them bury our micellium deep underground so that the meatsacks are unable to destroy our key nodes when we take over the control?"
- "Just make them wage some wars, they'll bury it themselves".
Lots of civilian government agencies also use Azure for government / AWS GovCloud data centers because they’re FedRAMP compliant. It’s not just the DoD.
i think you miss interpreted, they are poorly defended because they are civilian, meaning globally data centers are universally undefended from military action. meaning this sort of action can spiral out of control very fast. and would have major global economic adverse effects.
its also important to understand that government isnt non civilian, in this context its non military
The communication from Yandex regarding these incidents seems very refreshing compared to what we usually see from big tech. They seem very realistic about what customers should expect and what measures they should take. I wish this were more common these days.
Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology. At one point they prided themselves on being one of only four nations with Internet-scale search engines IIRC. Their little military operation already cost them lots of talent. And now they are actively losing infra too. Nice.
Within the narrow scope of this
discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
> awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently. And I doubt you’ll find many on this forum defending even the latter.
dont forget afghanistan, Iran Libya, Syria, etc etc. -_- none of these countries is doing well after their "liberation" or after their 'terrorists got bombed' or whatever wording (killed like dogs?) the current leader will have for it.
Out of these four, at least Syria is better off. Everything, literally everything is better than what the Assad regime was. The gruesomeness of Assad and his regime is on a level not seen since 1945.
Afghanistan was an utter failure of all of Western societies. Yes, we provided a generation worth of women with access to schools. But we never provided a way for Afghanistan as a country to stand on its own feet, instead we looked away while one half of the military didn't exist on paper and the other half raped children for funsies (look up "bacha bazi").
Libya... now that is mostly upon us Europeans. Ghaddafi, I'm glad this prick is gone, but again we didn't do anything to meaningfully help Libya grow, and by the time Putin began supporting oppositional warlords, the game was lost.
And Iran... oh dear god what a mess, dating back to the history of the US using Kurds for their aims and then letting them to die without support. This entire shitshow was a disaster from start to finish, even if the idea was noble - the Mullahs slaughtered tens of thousands of protestors the start of this year, it would have been incredibly unethical to just stand aside again.
The idea of nobly saving people is just “think of the children” on the nation-state level. It sounds great but gets used for every politician’s own ends.
> The idea of nobly saving people is just “think of the children” on the nation-state level. It sounds great but gets used for every politician’s own ends.
Well, there's the saying every nerd should know, "with great power comes great responsibility". We have to be caretakers of those who cannot defend themselves, but all we care about is making money, and that ruins the mission from the start.
Feeling if Syria is better off really depends on what sect you are in. But the unhappy groups are being killed iff. Soon only the happy groups will remain.
> Everything, literally everything is better than what the Assad regime was. The gruesomeness of Assad and his regime is on a level not seen since 1945
Lolwut ? The Al-Qaeda head-chopper is in a distinct league of his own. He even had a US bounty on him before it was waived away. (US sponsored head-choppers are saintly you see)
He has already massacred thousands of civilians after he declared peace and took power last year. His presidency is Western appointed, not one elected. At the current rate of slaughter, within the next few years, he is going to make Assad like an innocent baby.
After a decade, he will be the next Osama bin Laden for commencing War on Terror 2.0 and his brand revamped into Evil #1 for upcoming generation of brainwashed US citizens.
syria is better off now in the sense that in Irak ppl also cheered for Sadam to go. There is yet to see what their future holds truly which in itself is an incredibly tedious place to be in as a civilian population.
these are still generations with much violence and suffering.
its hard to watch and for a long time even in academia etc. its been plain as day there are other approaches to bring people together than to force people together through violence, or to try and 'develop' places by forcing your own local developments on some remote peoples.
They are victims to the same propagandist brainwash that garbles the spelling of Ukraine, makes fun of the language and assigns asinine pejoratives to Ukrainians in Russian state-controlled media.
Russians are avoiding to mention that Russia is at war(or military conflict, as officially it is still special operation) like this Muromec, as that is punishable offence in Russia. It is rather crazy situation as machine of repressions is escalating and requires more and more blood and it can only repress Russians, so they have to be cautious, in case they have commented anything wrong. It is interesting mindgame from afar as most people would think how to escape from that madness but you can't really help people that have imprisoned mind...
But then again, American soldiers are not dying in that war the way Russian do. That would be different in war against neighbhood nation where you cant hide purely behind technology.
> Most young people with a conscience (which is most people that like to read) leave
No. I am sure that most young people with a conscience remaining. And it is mostly people without a conscience who leaving.
Russia is an extremely poor country, and literally governed by mafia. So generally it is impossible to leave Russia if you are not in top 10% by wealth, and it is almost impossible in Russia to get in those top 10% if you have conscience.
Russia is an extremely rich country, in natural resources and potential. But the governing class is worse than a mafia because mafia does not lead senseless wars outside of its territory while making their own (mafia) people worse off.
Your point is a good one but there are many people who left even when they couldn't really afford to and are stuck somewhere, but still won't return.
Software engineering is (was) an affordable way to climb the social ladder. It is not impossible at all. SWE could have easily earn 5k+ USD which is enough to leave.
I'm not from an even remotely wealthy family, not a mafia and was able to move to the EU. Not exceptional by any means.
Quick search says that it is like 1.5k+ that get Russians in top 10%. How do you imagine leaving country with salary that way less then that, when there is practically no way for you to get job permit or asylum, and you will get yourself deported the second your travel visa expired?
> Software engineering is (was) an affordable way to climb the social ladder
But aren't those only supports my point? Among those 10% who has access to immigration, how many there are software engineers? And except them (and mafia members) who else can afford to move out of the Russia?
> I'm not from an even remotely wealthy family
5k+ USD Software Engineer salary in the Russia is literally top 2%. Sounds rather exceptional by me
I'm not arguing that it's difficult for an average Russian. My point is that "conscience" or its absence has little to do with your ability to leave. You don't have to be "mafia" or some sort of hustler.
It's easier for some professions as they have more mobility and skills are transferable. But I've seen people from all sorts of backgrounds.
There are some folks involved into crypto/gambling/other questionable companies but I would say they're minority and rarely move to EU/UK/US because of regulations and taxes.
I don’t know about my sense of right and wrong (some shit’s pretty fucked up in my head for sure), but back in the day, before the war, it was possible to work remotely for for foreign companies and earn good money without selling one’s soul to the devil.
When Crimea was annexed the writing on the wall was clear, so I made The Grind a priority, got fairly close to the top 10% (the real gap is corruption and having connections; net worth is something you have one day and lose the next one), and was able to leave with enough cash to keep me more than just afloat. And almost everyone I knew who was able to outsource their skills and wasn’t blind to what was happening, did the same thing: grind, save, move, settle down, live.
And then, when the war escalated into a whole different phase, I know some folks left Russia with a lot less than what I had - not piss poor but nowhere close to the top 10%. They had it a lot rougher, but the danger to their wellbeing and lives was more immediate. So I know you’re wrong about wealth being a requirement for leaving - it’s a huge boon that makes it a lot easier, but it’s certainly not a hard requirement.
Drone units of occupation forces of Russia are primary taegets for AFU and due limited control distance for FPVs, Russian drone units are serving at the zero line, actually. So they are sent to actual front lines constantly (despite what Russia officially claims)
But it means exactly the opposite. For some reason everybody thinks that for people (or even for only one man) who make decisions, Russian economy, talented people, and datacenters has great value or something.
But the only thing that matters is to remain in power. And invading your neighbors country have get those people exactly that.
Sadly, this applies also to Ukraine. No one in their right mind will risk their limbs for clique of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs. Coincidentally children of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs left both countries as well. They basically wiped out their male millenial generation entirely, as this demographics had it the most difficult to leave these countries.
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
Ukraine's estimated population in 2022 was around 40 million. Various numbers provided by UN officials to Ukrainian govt officials have at various times put Ukrainian population (in govt controlled areas) at 35 million [1], 32 million [2], 22-25 million [3]. This with adult men being actively blocked from leaving Ukraine.
There are estimations that puts Russian population to 80 millions only. Probably population in Russia is slightly above that, but there is undeniable Russian migration out of country, that is not appearing in statistics with bias selection for smart young people(estimates that I've read couple of years ago put that Russian migration to 4 million) - which is nowhere comparable to Ukrainian situation, as these Russians are unable to make western companies to cooperate with Russia, or even return to Russia unlike what Ukrainians can do.
To be fair, I have never understood this obsession with Ukrainian numbers as some kind of proof that Ukraine is doomed. There are people that have sent their families abroad and returned to Ukraine to fight Russia. There are certainly also ethnic Russians that do not want to help Ukraine in this war, but on other side they do not want to join Russia either, as they would be sent to die for sure. Many reasons for many people what they do and why.
During WW1 my home country lost 50% of population, as many people escaped frontline - most of them returned and rebuilt everything.
I am very sure that Ukrainians after war will rebuild Ukraine - probably that will be another European center competing with Germany - unlike Russians, that are abroad now as they won't rebuild Russia - as Russia very surely will collapse. What would be built in the place of Russia is rather hard to tell right now, but I do not think that many Russians will want to return to that where they would be out of place in those new countries, just like they are out of place in modern Russia.
I highly appreciate your fierce enthusiasm but nobody will come back to the ruined countries. No one below at least regional level oligarchy. The oligarchy will only consolidate and strengthen. They will bring in new people to replace the former native population, don't worry. Nationalism was only a poison intended for the (former) native population, its job is done. Russia will survive, Ukraine maybe will. Poland is not even at war and follows the same pattern - emigrants replaced by imported population, skyrocketing wealth inequalities.
I work for a Ukrainian product firm and interviewed around 50 people in the last quarter for in-office work. Some of them are migrants discouraged by european salaries where an entry-level IT professional can make as much as a waiter.
If we’re imagining what should happen, maybe imagine no war at all. Until then, practical reality matters more than class resentment, however justified.
oh you can if you are younger than 23 and not in education. this exception initially started as "academic mobility" program - you had to somehow prove your intent to study before going abroad, I don't remember how - but then both govt and citizens realized that it's too much paperwork and impossible to organize properly, so the exception was generalized.
yeah, hating papers is our national trait at this point, given Diia and stuff XD
Why would "right now" matter if the war has been ongoing for 4.5 years? I live in Germany, many ukrainians moved here, had several coworkers and their families move.
The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those most skilled left as soon as they could. Some of these, or their children, would go on to found startups.
> The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those [..]
.. were not Russians. USSR itself incorporated besides its native Russian talent 2 talent powerhouses of Ukraine and Armenia. Ukraine was the industrial powerhouse. Armenia was the USSR's silicon valley with hightest per capita of scientists in USSR. There is also Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to consider, all of them active in relative high tech engineering.
I was in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan not too long ago (both countries just to the south of Russia, for those not savvy of geography). Met plenty of young russians who moved there recently. I didn't have to ask why. Many of them used to work in the tech sector, it's easy for them to find new work.
I am a top Russian CS degree alumna (HSE). I left Russia even before the war, but now most of my uni peers live and work abroad (US, EU, UK, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, etc.). It is similar for the alumni of the other top universities there. And we made the right choice, both ethically and financially/career-wise, imo.
Big respect to each of you, its never easy to move away. Talk is cheap, 10x moreso on internet. Actions define a man / woman and their legacy and self worth.
You made the right choice, but importantly, this is a single generation of uni graduates. Each subsequent generation finds it harder to leave, and even if all who would could, there will still be enough human capital for the war effort and then some. For comparison, brain drain is even stronger in Israel, proportionally.
I know a couple of people who do that, but unless you settled in a really cheap country (for Russians that would likely be Armenia or Kazakhstan), you would really struggle to make ends meet with a Russian salary. And IT-folks who are used to luxury in Russia do not like that :)
Also in countries with structured laws for social security, residence permits, pensions etc., you will most likely be caught for doing shady things (not paying local taxes or not paying social contributions). And if you do pay them, you are even more financially screwed. E.g. in Germany an employed person who is not supported by a local employer in paying social security would give away well over a half of their salary. So… either you REALLY live a shady life / life in a “developing” country with no tax control or you have to integrate and find a local / unsanctioned job. Maybe not right away, but it has been >4 years, most people have done this already. There are really little incentives to stay employed in Russia. Of course, there are companies who moved themselves (ex-Yandex parts, Jetbrains, etc). But they are now registered / taxed / employing elsewhere. Even if operating partially in Russian language.
The talent has left but have you seen mass protests against Russian aggression in EU/US by those who left? I haven’t. And this is a big difference to the behaviour or Belarusians who fled - they are often seen across EU protesting against Lukashenko.
So the talent has left, but not because they disagree with Putin actions.
And do most Americans who leave the US condemn American soldiers for murdering a million Iraqis and continuing to colonize their country? At a certain point just not engaging in these pointless wars should be enough.
Are you kidding? E.g. in Berlin there are major protests every couple of months. They are not destructive (why would we destroy Germany‘s infra and police?), so maybe you do not hear about them as much. But they are quite numerous and regular. Ideally they should be in Russia AND destructive, but most normal people fled, yes.
> On the first anniversary of the invasion, rallies took place in the main cities where Russian exiles settled, including Tbilisi, Vilnius, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris and London, with turnout in the hundreds. In Yerevan, protesters burned a picture of Putin.
> In November 2024, at least a thousand people marched through central Berlin behind Navalnaya, Yashin and Kara-Murza, with parallel rallies in cities including Prague, Vilnius, Yerevan, Lisbon and San Francisco.
> Another Berlin march followed in 2025, after the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion.
And not just EU/US but moreso in other countries, where the migration wave was much bigger, eg Georgia and Armenia; after those protests many Russians were banned from entering Georgia after a visa run, yet others continued protesting anyway. Just google it for christ sake?
Also to me, as a Russian immigrant, protesting from another country doesn't make a lot of sense.
Anyway, at this point your comments in this thread are pure ragebait and not worth spending time replying to.
Thank you. Getting out is one of the strongest forms of protest. At the same time, you likely still have family there and that alone would be a good reason to be careful. Even so, there are plenty of Russians abroad that still carry water for putin and those are despicable, more so because they clearly have access to all the information they could want and from their comfy new lives they call for more suffering for others.
> have you seen mass protests against Russian aggression in EU/US by those who left?
What are you talking about? Just look at the amount of humanitarian visas getting by Russians. We like literally talking about hundreds per country on average (not hundreds of thousands, HUNDREDS). So participation in mass protests is like the fastest way to be deported back in Russia and get 8 years in jail.
EU is doing exactly that by denying humanitarian visas. Just look at absolute numbers of such visas.
For 90 percent of refugees from Russia if you participate in totally peaceful protest in front of Russian embassies, you will get yourself arrested, immediately deported, and will go straight to Russian jail for 10 years.
I did a quick search and what we get in example of Finland:
- tens of thousands Russian survivors hunted by Putin crossing it
- only 186 per year granted asylum
- for everybody else any contacts with Finnish officials = deportation and jail
I think it is rather dangerous to peacefully protest in front of Russian embassies when near those embassies a lot of agents deployed to hunt Russians down and hand them down to Putin.
Strangely, the article you quoted does not mention those "tens of thousands russian survivors" applying for asylum in Finland (as only hundreds do each year). Are you sure you got your numbers right?
Czechia, quite surprisingly. But that was some time ago now, there are probably more these days (and might have been even then, I think my source is a Yandex speaker at a conference)
Looks like Yandex is going to be taken over by the state for not investing in air defences. (There is a new law in russia that specifically allows confiscation of businesses that do not invest in air defenses.)
Hey, it's you again :) I think that map features quite prominently on a wall in your home country somewhere with little red 'x' marks on a couple of places. May there soon be many more.
It also seems like a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. UA put logistics/distribution centers under threat (wildberries) and refineries under threat, so the Russians moved their scarce air defense resources around on the map in an attempt to cover those, but oops, that left little or nothing covering the yandex datacenters and similar. There's not enough to go around to cover all of the possible geographically distributed pain points in the economy.
First, a long-running SEAD / DEAD campaign by Ukraine last year and early this which thinned Russian air defence throughout occupied territories and left Russia with difficult deployment decisions for what remained.
Second, improvements to drones (speed and EW resistance) and expanded production - meaning the air defence can be saturated.
Third, Russia's vast geography itself, leaving countless approaches to targets impossible to defend.
Blue Yellow - a Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military: https://blue-yellow.lt/en/ (you can specify the purpose for which you are donating, e.g. drones)
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
If in doubt - pick Come Back Alive. They have spotless reputation and invest into long-term projects such as military education and veteran sports/aid.
Come Back Alive was founded around 2014 and has operated continuously since. This is a conflict where long-term investments pay off.
Also not saying they and others don't do short-term keep-up work - they do. But it's also important to develop education facilities and care for veterans.
That's what people at most other foundation thought in 2022, yet here we're in 2026, and the war is still going.
And to be fair not all Come back alive projects are long term, they provide cars, cables, laptops, portable power stations etc., but these do not engage public enough, so their media team focuses on more interesting projects.
What "long term" means is also differs, they put a lot of effort into their training centers, but now the training cycle of one person is several months (I assume, I don't know exact terms), which is not that long.
Yes, I think they are the best. They have strong expertise (for example they were commissioned to conduct studies by Ministry of Defense of Ukraine) and excellent accountability (some is public [0]).
In my eyes one of their highpoints which demonstrates their trustworthiness is the ~20 million dollars payment they received this year by undisclosed European (I think it was European) entity (government or private donors maybe)
Stopify - https://stopify.org.ua/ A charity initiative created by a group of communication specialists and supporters of Ukraine. Legally the donations are collected by a well-known and experienced charity organization, Ziedot.lv, based in Riga, Latvia. All funds go towards purchasing necessary supplies for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, based on their requests to the Embassy of Ukraine in Latvia.
I bet Slack channels in Nebius are on fire these days, but also they managed to make even more money.
Entire upper management and all key positions in Nebius are held by ex Yandex-es. I wonder what is going through their heads now
Is it? Every time Russia hits civilian infrastructure, it strengthens Ukrainian's resolve. You don't think the same thing will happen in Russia? Nationalism increases in times of war. Did the Iranians revolt against Iran when US hit the school full of children? No, it strengthened people's resolve. The movement Iran had before the war died down and people unified.
We should never celebrate hitting civilian infrastructure. Russia right now is bombing bridges in Kyiv, it's awful.
All wars end with diplomacy or when one side is dead or completely out of resources
Everything in Russia depends on Yandex. The impact on both businesses and daily life is massive. You can’t order a taxi or food delivery in most parts of Russia now. Retail chains POS systems in stores and payment systems are down too. Russians on threads and Twitter are complaining they can’t even buy things in stores. Of course, Putin himself doesn’t understand the impact because he barely knows how to use a computer and never uses the Internet.
If I had any data in a middle eastern or Russina data center I would have moved it all out months ago. If companies still have stuff in there which is not replicated elsewhere then they are basically asking for anything they get.
Plenty of the bots are real people, even if their behavior is hard to distinguish from bots. HN has lots of them so you can see it right here, just check for the green accounts made just for this thread alone to give you an idea how bad it is.
So three important data centers strategically chosen to be destroyed? As far as i know such an loss couldn't even Google compensate, let alone Yandex. This could severely impact their economy for months.
Yes, those sick psychopaths want to turn Kyiv and other major cities into uninhabitable deserts. They target bridges with regular cars in the middle of the day; attack buses, trains, residential buildings, gas stations, shopping malls, grocery stores, water and gas utilities. They declared a total war on Ukraine and removed all constraints on their methods.
Also, purely anecdotally: there are almost no "Zelensky needs to step down" or "Ukraine is a corrupt state" comments under any of the today's posts about Ukraine on X.
Meh, I wish Cloudflare would break down its "bot" traffic a little more. I assume most of that is just Yandex's scraper going down. Which is good for disrupting Russian daily life but its not like their propaganda machine is knocked out.
One interesting fact I've heard recently (I live in Poland; we share a border with Ukraine as well as with a part of Russia).
Russia went all in on "digital sovereignty." This is partly because the Russian government cares deeply about censoring what their citizens can see (which they can't do if those citizens consume content from American services), partly because the American services themselves cut Russia off because of sanctions-related concerns.
This makes Russian datacenters a much more attractive target for the Ukrainians. While Russia can (and does) bomb Ukrainian datacenters, the fact that Ukrainians are so reliant on US infrastructure (and could rapidly move local workloads to western clouds if the need was great enough) makes such operations far less attractive. It's much easier for Ukraine to strike some facility near Moscow than it is for Russia to strike Ashburn, Virginia.
Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
I'd heard (from someone trying to use them) that net connections into the Chinese clouds was very busy in the days around the start of the war, so the suggestion is they have critical stuff mirrored there.
It's also been instrumental in supplying Ukraine to the point they had to schedule Russian and Ukrainian delegations around each other in their factories when they were visiting at the same times. [0]
That's precisely the problem. You can't credibly supply both sides in a war where one party clearly is the aggressor and pretend you are neutral. You either supply nobody and then you get to play your neutrality card or you pick a side. If you supply both sides you're just a cynical war profiteer without a conscience.
I don't think they're pretending to be neutral. I'm not sure they even think in those categories at all. They'll happily sell as much equipment as they can manufacture for hard cash or barter it for grain, oil or gas as long as the war is going on. They'll start considering options once there's a clear winner on the battlefield.
I think this is why it's so important to figure out a path to returning Königsberg to western control before the war runs its course. If we assume that Russia is basically disassembled and parted out, it's looking increasingly certain that China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of those parts. For the most part this seems inevitable at this point, but there still seems to be a path to keep Königsberg as a western region; and an optimistic can imagine keeping St. Petersburg as well, but I don't see a path for forward action on that before Russia's collapse, and I don't really see how the west can act faster than China once the collapse begins.
> China currently cares most about the East till the natural resources
The simplest solution would be to reboot the Siberian Republic [1] as a Chinese suzerainty. Ideally after Putin dies as part of a deal to the new ascender. Maybe together with giving them personal co-ownership in some major ventures there.
> East because they are blockaded at sea currently, if they would invade Taiwan
Siberia and Outer Mongolia remain closer and thus cheaper and more-secure sources than anything coming in over ocean, which in essence means from Australia, South America or Africa.
China is already owning the area with investments and a lot of workers/projects there are already Chinese. Seems like Russia already lost control ( unofficially)
> You either supply nobody and then you get to play your neutrality card or you pick a side. If you supply both sides you're just a cynical war profiteer without a conscience.
Yes, and that helped turn the US into the global hegemony it is today. No wonder China wants a wack. Power doesn't need a conscience.
China's behavior makes sense if they consider both Russia and Ukraine (the latter being a proxy for the west) to be enemies of some sort. Let your enemies fight each other and waste resources while you yourself profit.
The same can be said about the US <> EU/Russia in this conflict. Why bother helping Ukraine/Europe win the war if you consider them at least partly hostile? Better to let them fight your own enemy (Russia) and trade with both sides to your own advantage.
You seen any of Trump's tweets in the last couple months? It used to be all about China but now he talks about Europe and Canada like we're enemies because he feels like the whole world should only do what he wants.
"Allies" is not the appropriate term for states under your military protection, and which are dependent on you for their basic energy needs, and that host your military bases, and that do pretty much whatever you tell them in the international finance/global military sphere.
Why did Denmark sign the Greenland treaty? It's a humiliation ritual. Unrestricted access to develop the resources of the Greenland's economic zone, a perpetual veto over any foreign investment, and two new military bases, plus expansion of existing bases. With no end date. In exchange for a payment of... zero. And Denmark still needs to pay the block grant. Does that seem like a treaty between equals? What kind of country grants someone else veto power over investment in a region? What kind of country allows the hosting of foreign military bases, and still calls itself sovereign?
"Vassals" is too strong of a term. European states aren't vassals. Once in a while they give a speech against the US at the UN. And they are constantly complaining about how they are treated, as most vassals do. But they aren't allies. If the US were to file taxes, they would be listed as dependents. That is why they rage when someone who doesn't share their vision gets elected US President, but most Americans don't care who is elected in Europe.
That describes the ratio of the influence that European political leaders have on the lives of Americans vis-a-vis the influence that American political leaders have on the lives of Europeans.
And the thing about states in a subordinate position like that is that they are not respected. European political leaders like to pretend that this is a situation of equals and then complain when the US pushes them around, but it has never been a situation of equals since the end of WW2. Only the facade has been slowly dropped in the intervening years. The sooner Europe stops pretending, the better it will be for them, as not pretending is the first step towards gaining true autonomy. But each time I get my hopes up that Europe will take responsibility for their military and energy needs, I get disappointed by the resulting wave of irreality and wishful thinking.
As with most things these days there seems to be a difference between the US as a whole which I guess still considers Europe and Canada allies, and President Trump who seems loyal to Putin and rather anti Canada and the EU.
Partly. As in any relationship, this is not a binary, it is a composite, and has ebbs and flows. Lately the relationship has had ebbs, and with a new administration we can expect flows, but from lower baseline than at least since WW2.
The leader of the US threatened invasion of Danish territory, as well as trade wars, and some of his allies openly support movements and parties deemed extremist in Europe. That's certainly how you would treat allies.
I don’t think that China need even consider Ukraine an adversary, but a stronger Russian state (or one more interested in its eastern flank) is not good for China. Ukraine is simply collateral damage.
Nobody cares about your moralizing. Not the US, not Europe, not Russia, not China, not anyone. You are making these assertions solely for your own satisfaction. I hope it is pleasurable enough to justify your dedication.
Ukraine can have servers outside of Ukraine. No meed to have servers in the USA. I dont think these issues are so connected. As long as the servers are somewhere Russia does not dare to bomb.
Even some pro-russian war bloggers are critical of Putin's decision to start striking data centers:
3/ "This summer, faced with the inability to conclude a war that began nearly five years ago, Putin opted for a new round of escalation.
4/ "In June, the Russian Armed Forces began systematically targeting warehouses belonging to the Ukrainian company Nova Poshta, prompting a retaliatory strike on Wildberries warehouses; in September, strikes on Ukrainian data centres began, and a response followed swiftly.
5/ "In other words, one shouldn't assume that no one had thought to attack data centres before; it is simply that Putin decided to take this step right now.
6/ "This move effectively lifted the constraints that had previously bound Ukraine – a country that generally adheres to certain rules of engagement and, with few exceptions, does not initiate attacks on clearly civilian targets.
7/ "Ukraine had been prepared for this scenario almost from the very start of the war – and even before that. Even prior to the invasion, when it was clear to everyone that it was virtually inevitable, a law was passed allowing for the temporary storage of state registries abroad.
...
47/ "The issue is therefore extremely serious — far more so than the strikes on Wildberries, which result in economic damage but do not threaten the functioning of the state itself.
48/ "I believe Putin may have committed his second-biggest blunder since the invasion of Ukraine. He has literally started throwing stones inside a glass house without realizing how fragile that house is. The very system he built prevents him from grasping this;…
49/ …he makes decisions without consulting or listening to anyone, living in his own cozy bubble.
> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
The argument is Europe can decide to move servers out of USA and Ukraine is fine because Ukraine does not need servers in USA. They need servers in other countries. That was the logic issue with OP.
Your post is completely unrelated to mine or the above. Maybe wrong thread
I don't think it's unrelated, the text I quoted says Ukraine mirrored some of its critical data abroad, something russia decided against.
I don't disagree with your post, I was just expanding a bit on it.
Look the post is interesting but one point out of 49 (elided) in a wall of text is only loosely related to the topic, not to my comment or the parent.
> the text I quoted says Ukraine mirrored some of its critical data abroad, something russia decided against
My only point was op was confusing Ukraine hosting abroad with hosting in the USA, and wrongly concluding this affects EU hosting in the USA from this. To this you contribute that Ukraine decided to host abroad and Russia did not.
So what? That is not bringing any new facts or argument to the conversation. But the bluesky account is interesting nonetheless.
Well, if one at least entertains the idea that the whole putin's rule is totally against the interests of the country and the people, there's absolutely nothing illogical, strange or unexpected in any of his actions.
> this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
Which was equating outside of Ukraine with USA, which is a logical error. Moving the goalposts does not invalidate the point. I have zero interest in discussing those probabilities (0 vs 0). The argument stands. This is hn
Russia will most likely migrate/mirror to asian data centers.
Is it bad or good for the west? I would say bad. China would become even stronger in a long term
This does not have to be an "either-or": you can be sovereign and still interoperate with others, while retaining your own infrastructre to fall back on or in parallel.
China and America also care about digital sovereignty. Its hardly a shock that each of the big three, want to be in complete control of the core platforms. Each is an extension of the government policy.
> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
I mean, if Russia is striking datacenters in London/Dublin/Frakfurt/Paris/Amsterdam, then we've got really big problems.
And is the US even allied to Europe, or is Europe going it on their own? They might do better to move to datacenters in China at that point.
Barring that kind of a situation, moving European data back to Europe makes the most sense.
Putting datacenters in the Baltic states might not make the most sense, tho.
Agreed. While Ukraine targets energy and technological/manufacturing enablers of war, Russia continues to indiscriminately bomb Ukrainian cities, apartment buildings being their favorite. Fck Russian Imperial asperations and their murderous invasion of Ukraine.
Anybody have an idea how this insanity can ever end? Seems Russia is willing to kill off a whole generation of young people. Will this just go on forever? Or will Ukraine run out of soldiers?
Eventually Putin will die. Maybe he'll keep power until his deathbed, maybe there will be a coup and he'll be removed and/or killed. But one way or another, eventually Putin will die. When he does, this insanity can end.
I don't know that it can end from anything short of that.
History does not support this, unfortunately. Russia has always been aggressive towards outside world and invaded its neighbors multiple times. Putin is just the latest in a long string of aggressive leaders.
Yandex is one of the most notoriously pro-western companies in Russia, actively supporting relocation attempts. They even removed Russian borders from their maps in 2022. Some people claim they do this day have intelligence sharing agreements with Ukraine.
Also, Yandex have a ban on any pro-russian ads and pro-military stuff (curiously so, not so much against drugs and crime).
Among other things, they actively lobbied for more internet censorship (because as major player they benefited from being white-listed and not affected by them).
People cheering in this thread do not realize that a lot of patriots in Russia will actually support full Yandex demolition.
I don’t think Russia can sustain, nor would the Putin regime tolerate any organization that cannot be controlled. Whatever Yandex does or doesn’t do, it’s by the will of the regime.
I like how the status reports are informative and rater detailed. I recently dealt with outages of my own German webhoster and they didn't even have a status page. I had to email their support to get some details (at least they replied very quickly :) )
KingOfCoders | 14 hours ago
nvtop | 13 hours ago
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
supriyo-biswas | 14 hours ago
[OP] defly | 11 hours ago
Muromec | 14 hours ago
usrnm | 14 hours ago
allywilson | 14 hours ago
usrnm | 13 hours ago
Muromec | 14 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
petre | 13 hours ago
arpinum | 11 hours ago
wombat-man | 10 hours ago
[OP] defly | 11 hours ago
elimgta | 14 hours ago
Maybe this would remind ordinary russians that killing innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good
KingOfCoders | 14 hours ago
Estimate range is big because lots of civilians died in cities that ended up occupied.
schleck8 | 14 hours ago
KingOfCoders | 14 hours ago
"innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good".
Estimations for how many civilians Russians killed in Chechnya range from 45,000 to 80,000.
debugnik | 13 hours ago
KingOfCoders | 13 hours ago
Does not sound like looking for a source, but I'm not a native speaker.
IshKebab | 13 hours ago
jazzyjackson | 13 hours ago
troupo | 13 hours ago
KingOfCoders | 13 hours ago
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
beernet | 13 hours ago
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
testaccount28 | 13 hours ago
masfuerte | 13 hours ago
KingOfCoders | 13 hours ago
cduzz | 5 hours ago
cluckindan | 13 hours ago
walterlw | 13 hours ago
Lio | 9 hours ago
Surrendering to Russia does not bring peace to Ukraine only more suffering.
They have to fight on, Russia does not.
Stitch4223 | 12 hours ago
Are we looking at the same thing? Was it deleted somewhere?
crabbone | 13 hours ago
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
squidbeak | 13 hours ago
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/10/06/i-m-used-to-walking-...
ferroman | 7 hours ago
raverbashing | 13 hours ago
enaaem | 13 hours ago
TheOtherHobbes | 12 hours ago
nomilk | 12 hours ago
Ordinary Russians think the war's bad too. Only difference is you and I can say that without getting 15 years in a (very harsh) prison.
rcMgD2BwE72F | 12 hours ago
nomilk | 11 hours ago
tl;dr Other parties are Putin-like, and if/when a genuine alternative emerges, Putin deals with them ruthlessly. Example: Navalny was the charismatic leader of a small but popular rival party with anti-corruption policies. He was initially delegitimised (not allowed to partake in the 2018 elections due to [likely fake] charges of embezzlement), then poisoned (nearly died), then imprisoned, and then killed while in prison.
Consider the terrifying message that sends to would-be political rivals...
RuslanL | 8 hours ago
Since then I think they simplified the system and just forge the results outright.
stratos123 | 8 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 4 hours ago
kpil | 11 hours ago
Maybe Russians outside Russia.
Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.
There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.
Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.
Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.
nomilk | 11 hours ago
War affects an ordinary Russian in very negative ways: the possibility of conscription (w/ risk of injury/death), complications for travel, sanctions on goods and services, and the economic opportunity cost (money wasted on war that could have gone to productive uses, plus reduced economic output due to drone strikes on yandex, wildberries, refineries).
killerstorm | 10 hours ago
That's just not compatible with ambitions of its corrupt leaders who want to be a root-level player, not "one of NATO countries". And I'm not sure how legitimate is prioritization of wants of corrupt leaders over well-being of your compatriots.
jacquesm | 9 hours ago
RuslanL | 8 hours ago
killerstorm | 8 hours ago
Russia actually have been a member of Council of Europe (PACE, etc.) since 1996 but it was expelled in 2022. If they had a good record in Council of Europe they could really go for NATO membership eventually.
RuslanL | 7 hours ago
What happened is that nato realized that if Russia joins, it will loose the reason to exist (i.e. if the old enemy joins the alliance what is the need for such an alliance anymore?)
So nato bureaucrats understood that they will loose well-paying positions and rejected even initial talks.
killerstorm | 5 hours ago
E.g. from a conversation between Clinton and Putin in 2000:
> Clinton: I am serious about being ready to discuss NATO membership with Russia. I recognize that domestic considerations inside Russia will prevent this for now, but over time Russia should be a part of every organization that holds the civilized world together.
> Putin: But I'll let you know that when I was asked about possible membership for Russia in NATO, I supported the idea.
Regarding "reason to exist", there's always a concern about Middle-East, China, etc.
Funny enough that you remember it was as "Russia applied but was rejected" but from this talk it's clear Putin is much less interested in Russia joining NATO than Clinton.
You can find full text here: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/33393-document-3-memorand...
453yuh46 | 3 hours ago
enaaem | 12 minutes ago
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...
formvoltron | 9 hours ago
SEJeff | 8 hours ago
xtracto | 8 hours ago
dylan604 | 7 hours ago
shepherdjerred | 5 hours ago
They just care that they have what they need, that they don’t struggle too much in life.
In the US people will vote for whoever will make their life easier. To some degree there is morality/ethics/ideology but that’s usually grounded in something that effects you day-to-day
Examples from republicans: Keep out the immigrants or you won’t have a job. You don’t want trans people in the bathroom with your kid. Democrats are socialists which is morally repugnant (and will raise your taxes!)
From dems: republicans are trying to control women (reproductive rights), republicans will cut social programs, etc.
Nobody _really_ cares about wars in Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, etc aside from it effecting them at home.
(Really caring would involve donating, protesting, volunteering, etc — plenty of people talk/have opinions)
MentalM | 6 hours ago
Literally no one thinks that. Look at the last election in Russia.
There were like 10 pro-Putin pro-war parties and one pro-Putin maybe-we-a-lil-bit-try-to-stop-the-war joke party. And that last party was banned from participating because of copyright infringement (they used fonts from Microsoft).
falserum | 55 minutes ago
People there, from young age live with constant repetition of same soviet style messaging: “west is conniving and bad (and don’t forget - rotten); we won WW2; USSR was best in the world at X, Y, Z; Kiev Rus Vikings; inheritors of eastern Rome something…”.
Those messages are indistinguishable part of national (almost personal) pride, even for a lot of russian speaking people that currently live outside of Russia.
(If I would be raised in muslim family, I would be muslim; if I would be raised in russian info space, most likely I would support 3day operation to save Russian people from fashists)
tim333 | 4 hours ago
SubiculumCode | 2 hours ago
_delibash_ | an hour ago
killerstorm | 11 hours ago
conmod278 | 10 hours ago
preisschild | 9 hours ago
brabel | 10 hours ago
killerstorm | 9 hours ago
ivan_gammel | 9 hours ago
The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that. What was the plan. And blaming the West (which won‘t be 100% justified) will not help. And he may feel that now he is applying good pressure too, with those drone strikes and knocked out refineries.
hkpack | 6 hours ago
That is actually not true at all. People in Ukraine know that it is not about territory but about sovereignty.
The problem of giving up territory is that you will run out of it. The goal of Ukraine is to survive as an independent state, not to hold the ground.
ivan_gammel | 2 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 4 hours ago
453yuh46 | 2 hours ago
There is wrong assumption here that Russia wants only those territories and not whole Ukraine. Also, the Ultimatum was sent to NATO, when Putin invaded Ukraine... and it includes aim to use force against half of Europe and justifications to use it against other half as well. Also, just like it was with Hitler, allowing him to swallow those territories did not prevent WW2... that was also in plans of Stalin to use Hitler as puppet.
So, the maximum of Russian gamble is to take over most of Europe and given that he also threatened Macron, Putin does not see Russia equivalent in power to anyone in Europe but only USA. He is that stupid - he thinks, that anyone should bow to him, because he has 4000 nukes.
kolinko | 9 hours ago
simondotau | 9 hours ago
graeme | 3 hours ago
With internal turmoil, yes. To maintain the lines in Ukraine Russia needs to constantly send in troops and materiel.
Eventually Russia may decide not to do so. And then there is no magic "pause the frontlines" button if they do.
There is plenty of precedent for this in Russian history too. The Russian Revolution collapsed the frontlines in WWI. The Soviet Empire collapsed with the fall of communism and concomitant internal turmoil.
Russian propaganda puts a lot effort into treating Russia as some sort of force of nature that cannot be deterred or reasoned with, that will advance and hold Ukraine at all costs.
It isn't true. They're humans like the rest of us, not a natural, unstoppable force.
453yuh46 | 2 hours ago
>>>I wonder what it will take for Russia to reach desperate measures in this war.
I think, that NATO countries for sure are allowing that to happen, but on other hand... I do want to have some changes.
Lio | 9 hours ago
That’s not surrender because Russia started this invasion without provocation. It wasn’t under attack and Ukraine hadn’t joined NATO.
Russia had no reason to invade except as a show of force.
If Putin suddenly declared he’d met his objectives and withdrew who’s to say otherwise?
throwaway902984 | 6 hours ago
There is a lot of discussion about veterans and moscovites saying otherwise, but I wonder how loud their collective voices are to the Kremlin. From the outside, I have a dim view of that.
moffkalast | 3 hours ago
453yuh46 | 3 hours ago
>>>If Putin suddenly declared he’d met his objectives and withdrew who’s to say otherwise?
Ahem, some facts: 1. Putin is representation of "collective Russian" mind 2. Collective Russians at this moment believe that they are winning the war. 3. Any withdrawing would be interpreted as betrayal and sure death for Putin(and he knows that) and new instance of his replacement, that would need to implement whatever collective Russians think.
Unfortunately, but the only way to end this war is a Russian military defeat, as no withdraw would ever happen and suggesting something like that is a fantasy, that ignores reality of how Russians are thinking. Yeah, it would have been better if NATO was involved, but on other hand Europeans and USA are too afraid to man up and chew bubble gum and kick some ass - they are now reverse of that chew something that is not bubble gum and take in the ass and Putin likes some young ass.
SubiculumCode | 2 hours ago
jltsiren | an hour ago
_delibash_ | an hour ago
bamboozled | 11 hours ago
dolia | 5 hours ago
Maybe you can trick our naive western friends, but not me.
Being an indifferent somnambula is not the same as being against war.
IshKebab | 4 hours ago
jwr | 4 hours ago
owaty | 2 hours ago
Who do you think is killing Ukrainians?
It's not Putin himself, and it's not some kind of professional army.
Those are ordinary Russians who decided to join the occupational army, and who are launching drones and rockets at Ukraine every day.
itvision | 3 hours ago
You could face a 15-year prison sentence for calling for peace on social media, or you could be forcibly conscripted.
Furthermore, rallies are equally persecuted. All rallies are outlawed due to the COVID restrictions, and these restrictions have never been lifted.
So far, all the West has done is target ordinary, poor Russians instead of oligarchs and the Tsar himself.
Their quality of life has plummeted, but would you risk your life to speak out against this?
Westerners are only brave in the comments. Come to Russia and show us how it's done. A country where everyone with power or guns serves the Tsar almost directly. Including the courts, the police and the army.
You don't f*cking understand what has happened to the country. It's become a dictatorship.
sehw | 14 hours ago
mittensc | 14 hours ago
robinduckett | 13 hours ago
snowpid | 8 hours ago
troupo | 13 hours ago
usrnm | 14 hours ago
yablak | 14 hours ago
yard2010 | 13 hours ago
Gigachad | 13 hours ago
wiether | 12 hours ago
pu_pe | 13 hours ago
adventured | 10 hours ago
As the market goes, so goes the multiple being granted to SPCX. That is, when the AI bubble contracts on the multiples being granted, SPCX will decline dramatically. In my observation HN typically widely can't differentiate properly between the real AI economy being developed and the multiples being temporarily granted in the stock market, it's common on here that people think they're the same thing ('when the AI bubble ends'). Back in reality what is going to happen is an implosion of the multiples when the growth slows (or suddenly stops due to an economic shock), and despite that the AI economy broadly will radically expand regardless over 10, 20, 30 years. See: the Internet build out (and market valuations), it will occur much the same conceptually.
kolinko | 9 hours ago
fch42 | 9 hours ago
If all you seek is to destroy (how en-vogue...) then that's more than perfect; not just destroy what's there but also make sure that by virtue of what remains (debris) nothing will get re-built.
spiderfarmer | 8 hours ago
fch42 | 7 hours ago
driverdan | 3 hours ago
swiftcoder | 13 hours ago
Or will we see civilian datacenters with their own defensive drone swarms, and a couple of phalanx-style point defence systems for good measure?
childintime | 12 hours ago
He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.
Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.
People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.
He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.
So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!
TheOtherHobbes | 12 hours ago
It's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.
Musk is a textbook narcissist. His consistent pattern is to make grandiose promises - literal future faking - fulfil a small percentage of them, then make even bigger and more grandiose promises and hope investors have a short memory. (They do.)
As a narcissist his primary relationship orientation is contempt for others. He's more interested in damaging projects he doesn't like - like the left-leaning community on the original Twitter, using promises of Hyperloop to kill high speed rail, ignoring the CSA from Grok, and of course the USAid fiasco - than seeing through the projects he claims to be developing to completion.
He fits in perfectly with Thiel, Altman, and the rest. The tech is sometimes interesting, but the alignment is fundamentally hostile to the rest of humanity.
ben_w | 12 hours ago
Different problem.
Cooling can be done in space, it's a normal problem; not easy, nothing in space is easy, but on the scale of space it is normal.
However, at the temperature you would run a chip at, a radiator you make for space will just work better, reject more heat, if you leave it on the ground.
We get convective cooling down here as well as radiative. At operational temperature, convection more than makes up for the atmosphere being a heat bath at ~20 C or whatever.
spiderfarmer | 8 hours ago
But does it make sense to do it?
No.
Marha01 | 12 hours ago
You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.
fch42 | 9 hours ago
(the sarcasm is intended; there are some usecases for "space servers", around stealth for sure; to "scale it like a terrestrial DC" though ... dunno; not matter how I turn it, it just seems crazy expensive)
Marha01 | 8 hours ago
fch42 | 8 hours ago
Will starlink build its own edge ? Maybe. We'll see. Whether it makes sense to have this infrastructure "colocated in space" if you're not also the owner of the "connection infrastructure in space" though? It'll come down to cost. If I were anyone else but SpaceX ... that's where my eyes would be.
ben_w | 12 hours ago
He may have been a wrong'un before that, but he was definitely already doing a confidence trick by that point.
gpt5 | 14 hours ago
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
toomuchtodo | 14 hours ago
jeltz | 12 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 12 hours ago
You could potentially bury them in the ground, assuming you don’t use a generator for backup power. To my knowledge, this is not done today except in urban areas where an underground vault is used for power and comms.
https://www.decommsystems.com/resources/what-goes-into-an-il...
ivan_gammel | 7 hours ago
MiroslavPokorny | 13 hours ago
Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.
You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.
testaccount28 | 13 hours ago
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=london+un...
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
martinjc | 13 hours ago
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
jeltz | 12 hours ago
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
martinjc | 8 hours ago
Dont know why i can't reply to the person commenting below. But where's the statistics? Who has these datacenters out in the field?
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
martinjc | 11 hours ago
efnx | 13 hours ago
spiderfarmer | 7 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russian-satel...
jltsiren | 12 hours ago
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.
spiderfarmer | 8 hours ago
Musk comes up with a crazy idea.
Investors, "analysts" and sycophants go to great lengths to defend it.
Rational people wonder if everyone is losing their mind.
Musk profits.
kcb | 7 hours ago
ben_w | 4 hours ago
Recall that while he managed to hire the right people to get reusable rockets cheap enough for Starlink, it was also the case that in 2016 he said that SpaceX was aiming to use the 2018 Mars launch window for what is now Starship, and also that some time around 2018 it would be possible to summon your Tesla car from the other side of the country and it would find its way to you autonomously and only stop for charging.
MiroslavPokorny | an hour ago
sebzim4500 | 4 hours ago
MiroslavPokorny | an hour ago
Hyperloop was stupid and failed, and it also killed in a few places development of public transport, which of course means people continue to buy cars.
Brybry | 12 hours ago
Edit: I guess the scale isn't comparable to a, for example, Google data center though.
[1] https://www.ironmountain.com/data-centers/colocation/our-dat...
[2] https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/showcase-pr...
killerstorm | 10 hours ago
walrus01 | 9 hours ago
killerstorm | 8 hours ago
Do you need many acres of land to host a heat exchanger?
m4rtink | 6 hours ago
killerstorm | 5 hours ago
kadoban | 2 hours ago
happyopossum | an hour ago
jazzyjackson | 13 hours ago
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
jazzyjackson | 13 hours ago
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
IshKebab | 13 hours ago
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
jeltz | 12 hours ago
Huh? The ones I know of have plenty of connectivity. The real issue is your first, that people prefer to just put their stuff in two countries over paying premium for having their servers under ground.
walrus01 | 11 hours ago
misiek08 | 13 hours ago
boelboel | 12 hours ago
edit: 61.9340107, 5.5084207 are the coordinates
walrus01 | 8 hours ago
boelboel | 8 hours ago
https://new.abb.com/news/detail/5924/abb-solutions-power-eur...
roenxi | 13 hours ago
Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.
microtonal | 13 hours ago
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
jeltz | 12 hours ago
yubblegum | 6 hours ago
oytis | 13 hours ago
fartfeatures | 13 hours ago
andy_ppp | 13 hours ago
youngtaff | 13 hours ago
Ukraine has a very targeted response but notably tries to minimise civilian casualties
ponector | 13 hours ago
Also Yandex is a large cloud provider, they host a lot of government-connected companies.
paaloeye | 13 hours ago
microtonal | 13 hours ago
paaloeye | 13 hours ago
boelboel | 13 hours ago
ivan_gammel | 7 hours ago
boelboel | 6 hours ago
youngtaff | 13 hours ago
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-hits-russia...
bob1029 | 13 hours ago
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
Gigachad | 13 hours ago
microtonal | 13 hours ago
The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.
https://codedtrip.com/en/blog/data-centers-in-space-disastro...
bob1029 | 13 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
Marha01 | 12 hours ago
Perhaps, but the parent comment posited that some people would pay the premium for orbital data center due to much better security. At $200 per kg to orbit, it could make sense.
fragmede | 8 hours ago
evgen | 12 hours ago
Marha01 | 12 hours ago
Marha01 | 12 hours ago
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
Marha01 | 12 hours ago
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
ben_w | 12 hours ago
Welding lasers are pretty cheap, the two hard parts are a big enough apperture to focus 500 km away, and adaptive optics, both of which have already been demonstrated decades ago in astronomy.
I'm not saying Iran and North Korea already have such capabilities, but I am saying I think neither would have trouble building it six months ago if they'd wanted to.
remus | 3 hours ago
Unless you're talking about an adversary who has ~no launch capability then the person trying to put the data center out of reach is always going to be massively disadvantaged in terms of the physics.
buildfocus | 13 hours ago
crabbone | 12 hours ago
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
scotty79 | 11 hours ago
_delibash_ | an hour ago
_delibash_ | an hour ago
conmod278 | 10 hours ago
PowerElectronix | 9 hours ago
kolinko | 9 hours ago
nixass | 8 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 4 hours ago
- "Just make them wage some wars, they'll bury it themselves".
bvcp | 13 hours ago
tuwtuwtuwtuw | 13 hours ago
Example quote from Azure documentation:
> Azure Government is used by the US Department of Defense (DoD) entities to deploy a broad range of workloads and solutions.
Calling such a DC a civilian target is essentialy incorrect now, and has been for years.
derektank | 13 hours ago
tuwtuwtuwtuw | 12 hours ago
bvcp | 13 hours ago
its also important to understand that government isnt non civilian, in this context its non military
tuwtuwtuwtuw | 12 hours ago
I didn't misinterpret, you are using incorrect terminology.
preisschild | 9 hours ago
thinker34 | 13 hours ago
The general decency of condemning any/all types destruction won't apply here.
neuroticnews25 | 13 hours ago
233mhz | 13 hours ago
LoganDark | 13 hours ago
ponector | 13 hours ago
LoganDark | 11 hours ago
alt227 | 4 hours ago
entropyneur | 13 hours ago
paaloeye | 13 hours ago
thih9 | 13 hours ago
Edit: thanks for answers, this helps.
paaloeye | 13 hours ago
fartfeatures | 13 hours ago
rididjdj374 | 13 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
Within the narrow scope of this discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
pixelpoet | 13 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently. And I doubt you’ll find many on this forum defending even the latter.
robbiep | 12 hours ago
saidnooneever | 11 hours ago
mschuster91 | 11 hours ago
Out of these four, at least Syria is better off. Everything, literally everything is better than what the Assad regime was. The gruesomeness of Assad and his regime is on a level not seen since 1945.
Afghanistan was an utter failure of all of Western societies. Yes, we provided a generation worth of women with access to schools. But we never provided a way for Afghanistan as a country to stand on its own feet, instead we looked away while one half of the military didn't exist on paper and the other half raped children for funsies (look up "bacha bazi").
Libya... now that is mostly upon us Europeans. Ghaddafi, I'm glad this prick is gone, but again we didn't do anything to meaningfully help Libya grow, and by the time Putin began supporting oppositional warlords, the game was lost.
And Iran... oh dear god what a mess, dating back to the history of the US using Kurds for their aims and then letting them to die without support. This entire shitshow was a disaster from start to finish, even if the idea was noble - the Mullahs slaughtered tens of thousands of protestors the start of this year, it would have been incredibly unethical to just stand aside again.
fn-mote | 8 hours ago
The idea of nobly saving people is just “think of the children” on the nation-state level. It sounds great but gets used for every politician’s own ends.
mschuster91 | 5 hours ago
Well, there's the saying every nerd should know, "with great power comes great responsibility". We have to be caretakers of those who cannot defend themselves, but all we care about is making money, and that ruins the mission from the start.
etc-hosts | 5 hours ago
lenkite | 4 hours ago
Lolwut ? The Al-Qaeda head-chopper is in a distinct league of his own. He even had a US bounty on him before it was waived away. (US sponsored head-choppers are saintly you see)
He has already massacred thousands of civilians after he declared peace and took power last year. His presidency is Western appointed, not one elected. At the current rate of slaughter, within the next few years, he is going to make Assad like an innocent baby.
After a decade, he will be the next Osama bin Laden for commencing War on Terror 2.0 and his brand revamped into Evil #1 for upcoming generation of brainwashed US citizens.
saidnooneever | 3 hours ago
these are still generations with much violence and suffering.
its hard to watch and for a long time even in academia etc. its been plain as day there are other approaches to bring people together than to force people together through violence, or to try and 'develop' places by forcing your own local developments on some remote peoples.
JumpCrisscross | 2 hours ago
Before it was Afghanistan, Khorasan was a century-long trap for the Arab armies in the 7th century.
If the last two millennia have like a single lesson, it’s don’t invade Afghanistan.
_delibash_ | an hour ago
JumpCrisscross | 2 hours ago
If we continued for three years and put troops on the ground.
The bombing campaigns are similar. But it’s not quite comparable given we didn’t actually raze Iran’s power plants, we just threatened to.
To be clear, I’m making no moral argument here. Just a comparison of tactics.
Muromec | 9 hours ago
tomrod | 9 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 4 hours ago
RobotCaleb | 4 hours ago
453yuh46 | 4 hours ago
hkpack | 7 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 2 hours ago
I made analogy. You collapsed three different situations to a singular “it”.
watwut | 11 hours ago
verelo | 13 hours ago
gsky | 12 hours ago
pjc50 | 10 hours ago
bix6 | 7 hours ago
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/30/are-trump-officials...
TitaRusell | 12 hours ago
This war won't be over until the Russian army starts conscription in Moscow. The Czar will happily empty out the villages in Siberia and the Caucasus.
_menelaus | 11 hours ago
MentalM | 6 hours ago
No. I am sure that most young people with a conscience remaining. And it is mostly people without a conscience who leaving.
Russia is an extremely poor country, and literally governed by mafia. So generally it is impossible to leave Russia if you are not in top 10% by wealth, and it is almost impossible in Russia to get in those top 10% if you have conscience.
tpm | 4 hours ago
Your point is a good one but there are many people who left even when they couldn't really afford to and are stuck somewhere, but still won't return.
sazor | 4 hours ago
I'm not from an even remotely wealthy family, not a mafia and was able to move to the EU. Not exceptional by any means.
MentalM | 2 hours ago
Quick search says that it is like 1.5k+ that get Russians in top 10%. How do you imagine leaving country with salary that way less then that, when there is practically no way for you to get job permit or asylum, and you will get yourself deported the second your travel visa expired?
> Software engineering is (was) an affordable way to climb the social ladder
But aren't those only supports my point? Among those 10% who has access to immigration, how many there are software engineers? And except them (and mafia members) who else can afford to move out of the Russia?
> I'm not from an even remotely wealthy family
5k+ USD Software Engineer salary in the Russia is literally top 2%. Sounds rather exceptional by me
sazor | 2 hours ago
It's easier for some professions as they have more mobility and skills are transferable. But I've seen people from all sorts of backgrounds.
There are some folks involved into crypto/gambling/other questionable companies but I would say they're minority and rarely move to EU/UK/US because of regulations and taxes.
drdaeman | 3 hours ago
When Crimea was annexed the writing on the wall was clear, so I made The Grind a priority, got fairly close to the top 10% (the real gap is corruption and having connections; net worth is something you have one day and lose the next one), and was able to leave with enough cash to keep me more than just afloat. And almost everyone I knew who was able to outsource their skills and wasn’t blind to what was happening, did the same thing: grind, save, move, settle down, live.
And then, when the war escalated into a whole different phase, I know some folks left Russia with a lot less than what I had - not piss poor but nowhere close to the top 10%. They had it a lot rougher, but the danger to their wellbeing and lives was more immediate. So I know you’re wrong about wealth being a requirement for leaving - it’s a huge boon that makes it a lot easier, but it’s certainly not a hard requirement.
siva7 | 10 hours ago
badpun | 8 hours ago
search_facility | 7 hours ago
MentalM | 6 hours ago
But the only thing that matters is to remain in power. And invading your neighbors country have get those people exactly that.
retinaros | 3 hours ago
nikanj | 47 minutes ago
IsTom | 13 hours ago
lifestyleguru | 13 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
[1] https://itcluster.lviv.ua/en/gradual-market-stabilization-wh...
air3y | 8 hours ago
Ukraine's estimated population in 2022 was around 40 million. Various numbers provided by UN officials to Ukrainian govt officials have at various times put Ukrainian population (in govt controlled areas) at 35 million [1], 32 million [2], 22-25 million [3]. This with adult men being actively blocked from leaving Ukraine.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-russia-war-ukrainian-po... [2] https://kyivindependent.com/200-000-500-000-men-could-leave-... [3] https://www.novinite.com/articles/238511/The+Uncomfortable+T...
NicoJuicy | 5 hours ago
453yuh46 | 3 hours ago
To be fair, I have never understood this obsession with Ukrainian numbers as some kind of proof that Ukraine is doomed. There are people that have sent their families abroad and returned to Ukraine to fight Russia. There are certainly also ethnic Russians that do not want to help Ukraine in this war, but on other side they do not want to join Russia either, as they would be sent to die for sure. Many reasons for many people what they do and why.
During WW1 my home country lost 50% of population, as many people escaped frontline - most of them returned and rebuilt everything.
I am very sure that Ukrainians after war will rebuild Ukraine - probably that will be another European center competing with Germany - unlike Russians, that are abroad now as they won't rebuild Russia - as Russia very surely will collapse. What would be built in the place of Russia is rather hard to tell right now, but I do not think that many Russians will want to return to that where they would be out of place in those new countries, just like they are out of place in modern Russia.
lifestyleguru | 3 hours ago
walterlw | 13 hours ago
Muromec | 13 hours ago
lifestyleguru | 12 hours ago
simondotau | 9 hours ago
lifestyleguru | 9 hours ago
simondotau | 9 hours ago
bpavuk | 12 hours ago
yeah, hating papers is our national trait at this point, given Diia and stuff XD
carstenhag | 12 hours ago
453yuh46 | 3 hours ago
crazybonkersai | 10 hours ago
fn-mote | 8 hours ago
enaaem | 2 hours ago
TrickyRick | 13 hours ago
lifestyleguru | 13 hours ago
_nalply | 13 hours ago
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_...
(This is incomplete, I think there is a fourth or a fifth wave, probably since about summer 2026.)
throwaway3060 | 8 hours ago
The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those most skilled left as soon as they could. Some of these, or their children, would go on to found startups.
yubblegum | 6 hours ago
.. were not Russians. USSR itself incorporated besides its native Russian talent 2 talent powerhouses of Ukraine and Armenia. Ukraine was the industrial powerhouse. Armenia was the USSR's silicon valley with hightest per capita of scientists in USSR. There is also Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to consider, all of them active in relative high tech engineering.
throwaway3060 | 6 hours ago
wereHamster | 13 hours ago
khalera | 11 hours ago
jacquesm | 9 hours ago
dvfjsdhgfv | 8 hours ago
FWIW, thank you for making this choice.
kakacik | 6 hours ago
macleginn | 4 hours ago
mimischi | 3 hours ago
And, most importantly, you weren’t sent to the slaughterhouse and are still alive, thanks to your choice.
barrenko | 13 hours ago
cromka | 12 hours ago
uhx | 11 hours ago
cromka | 11 hours ago
khalera | 8 hours ago
tumdum_ | 11 hours ago
So the talent has left, but not because they disagree with Putin actions.
bluealienpie | 11 hours ago
dylan604 | 7 hours ago
CaptWorld | 4 hours ago
khalera | 10 hours ago
dysleixc | 10 hours ago
> On the first anniversary of the invasion, rallies took place in the main cities where Russian exiles settled, including Tbilisi, Vilnius, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris and London, with turnout in the hundreds. In Yerevan, protesters burned a picture of Putin.
> In November 2024, at least a thousand people marched through central Berlin behind Navalnaya, Yashin and Kara-Murza, with parallel rallies in cities including Prague, Vilnius, Yerevan, Lisbon and San Francisco.
> Another Berlin march followed in 2025, after the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion.
And not just EU/US but moreso in other countries, where the migration wave was much bigger, eg Georgia and Armenia; after those protests many Russians were banned from entering Georgia after a visa run, yet others continued protesting anyway. Just google it for christ sake?
Also to me, as a Russian immigrant, protesting from another country doesn't make a lot of sense.
Anyway, at this point your comments in this thread are pure ragebait and not worth spending time replying to.
jacquesm | 9 hours ago
NicoJuicy | 5 hours ago
Thought the same.
dylan604 | 7 hours ago
MentalM | 6 hours ago
What are you talking about? Just look at the amount of humanitarian visas getting by Russians. We like literally talking about hundreds per country on average (not hundreds of thousands, HUNDREDS). So participation in mass protests is like the fastest way to be deported back in Russia and get 8 years in jail.
tumdum_ | 4 hours ago
MentalM | 3 hours ago
EU is doing exactly that by denying humanitarian visas. Just look at absolute numbers of such visas.
For 90 percent of refugees from Russia if you participate in totally peaceful protest in front of Russian embassies, you will get yourself arrested, immediately deported, and will go straight to Russian jail for 10 years.
I did a quick search and what we get in example of Finland:
(https://meduza.io/en/news/2026/08/24/finland-has-deported-15...)
- 1k+ km land border with forests
- tens of thousands Russian survivors hunted by Putin crossing it
- only 186 per year granted asylum
- for everybody else any contacts with Finnish officials = deportation and jail
I think it is rather dangerous to peacefully protest in front of Russian embassies when near those embassies a lot of agents deployed to hunt Russians down and hand them down to Putin.
ttkari | 2 hours ago
rajnathani | 13 hours ago
bpavuk | 12 hours ago
gregw134 | 3 hours ago
entropyneur | 12 hours ago
Squarex | 2 hours ago
risyachka | 11 hours ago
it really never was. apart from a few one-off examples they have nothing if interest and quality.
crazybonkersai | 10 hours ago
risyachka | 9 hours ago
very valuable, very high tech.
for nginx/intelij - you can find a few good examples in any country on earth.
does not make the country good in tech.
etc-hosts | 5 hours ago
NicoJuicy | 5 hours ago
The Yandex that stayed in Russia is a ghost of the past.
etc-hosts | 3 hours ago
machomaster | an hour ago
mattlondon | 2 hours ago
jwr | 4 hours ago
Svoka | an hour ago
pi-victor | 13 hours ago
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
logicchains | 13 hours ago
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
tryauuum | 13 hours ago
wombat-man | 10 hours ago
surfingdino | 13 hours ago
paaloeye | 13 hours ago
[OP] defly | 11 hours ago
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
NautilusTheBot | 13 hours ago
cbg0 | 13 hours ago
tokai | 13 hours ago
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
Marha01 | 13 hours ago
flohofwoe | 13 hours ago
233mhz | 13 hours ago
A mystery really...
squidbeak | 12 hours ago
First, a long-running SEAD / DEAD campaign by Ukraine last year and early this which thinned Russian air defence throughout occupied territories and left Russia with difficult deployment decisions for what remained.
Second, improvements to drones (speed and EW resistance) and expanded production - meaning the air defence can be saturated.
Third, Russia's vast geography itself, leaving countless approaches to targets impossible to defend.
[OP] defly | 11 hours ago
badpun | 8 hours ago
[OP] defly | 13 hours ago
Come Back Alive - delivered the first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation - bought the famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation - run by the Ukrainian tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom - US-based foundation https://www.razomforukraine.org/donate/
Canada-Ukraine Foundation - Canadian NGO, organizes winter aid for civilians https://www.cufoundation.ca/
Ukrainian World Congress https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Exen - Polish volunteer who delivers used vehicles to the front https://pomagam.pl/4x4dlaukrainy
United24 - the government fund https://u24.gov.ua/
Blue/Yellow - Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military https://blue-yellow.lt/en/
Stopify - Latvian initiative, donations collected via Ziedot.lv https://stopify.org.ua/
Weapons to Ukraine - Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en
Help99 - from Estonia's LIFT99 startup hub, convoys refitted trucks and drones to the front https://www.help99.co/donate
Aktion Deutschland Hilft - German humanitarian aid https://www.aktion-deutschland-hilft.de/
Thanks to everyone who suggested additions. Please keep adding foundations from your country in the comments.
walrus01 | 13 hours ago
And this group: https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
[OP] defly | 13 hours ago
rmind | 13 hours ago
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
walterlw | 13 hours ago
snapplebobapple | 8 hours ago
walterlw | 7 hours ago
blue_pants | 7 hours ago
And to be fair not all Come back alive projects are long term, they provide cars, cables, laptops, portable power stations etc., but these do not engage public enough, so their media team focuses on more interesting projects.
What "long term" means is also differs, they put a lot of effort into their training centers, but now the training cycle of one person is several months (I assume, I don't know exact terms), which is not that long.
blue_pants | 7 hours ago
In my eyes one of their highpoints which demonstrates their trustworthiness is the ~20 million dollars payment they received this year by undisclosed European (I think it was European) entity (government or private donors maybe)
[0] https://savelife.in.ua/en/reporting-en
olexsmir | 6 hours ago
Marha01 | 13 hours ago
Also, Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en and 69th Sniffing Brigade https://www.help99.co/donate is doing awesome work.
Glory to the Heroes!
krior | 12 hours ago
cuu508 | 12 hours ago
uxhacker | 8 hours ago
Including KOLO dispersing medical equipment that I donated, and I can vouch that they are effective and very efficient.
regnull | 4 hours ago
sammy2255 | 13 hours ago
paaloeye | 13 hours ago
paaloeye | 13 hours ago
b0rys | 13 hours ago
meindnoch | 13 hours ago
dainiusse | 13 hours ago
nixass | 8 hours ago
gitowiec | 13 hours ago
mempko | 2 hours ago
We should never celebrate hitting civilian infrastructure. Russia right now is bombing bridges in Kyiv, it's awful.
All wars end with diplomacy or when one side is dead or completely out of resources
znnajdla | 13 hours ago
victorbjorklund | 12 hours ago
jeff_vader | 12 hours ago
r721 | 11 hours ago
>Internet Connectivity for AS200350 (YandexCloud)
https://ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu/asn/200350?from=1791331...
Imbryk | 11 hours ago
sedan_baklazhan | 10 hours ago
addedGone | 10 hours ago
alt227 | 4 hours ago
oezi | 10 hours ago
Can we use it to judge which accounts were bots?
jacquesm | 8 hours ago
siva7 | 10 hours ago
motionlessveloc | 10 hours ago
https://datacenters.google/locations/
tpolm | 6 hours ago
chrismustcode | 3 hours ago
vld_chk | 10 hours ago
For the entire September, Russia conducted 10+ strikes on all key telecom, and internet provider data centers in Ukraine.
Now it is just a return
m4rtink | 9 hours ago
vld_chk | 9 hours ago
mcrady | 8 hours ago
sinuhe69 | 8 hours ago
trombuance | 6 hours ago
alt227 | 4 hours ago
Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041619
troupo | 4 hours ago
bonzini | 3 hours ago
jmuguy | an hour ago
jacquesm | an hour ago
miki123211 | 8 hours ago
Russia went all in on "digital sovereignty." This is partly because the Russian government cares deeply about censoring what their citizens can see (which they can't do if those citizens consume content from American services), partly because the American services themselves cut Russia off because of sanctions-related concerns.
This makes Russian datacenters a much more attractive target for the Ukrainians. While Russia can (and does) bomb Ukrainian datacenters, the fact that Ukrainians are so reliant on US infrastructure (and could rapidly move local workloads to western clouds if the need was great enough) makes such operations far less attractive. It's much easier for Ukraine to strike some facility near Moscow than it is for Russia to strike Ashburn, Virginia.
Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
trebligdivad | 7 hours ago
jacquesm | 7 hours ago
baq | 7 hours ago
China is the only true winner of that war.
[0]: https://medium.com/@hayekesteloo/china-vs-ukraine-ft-investi...
jacquesm | 7 hours ago
baq | 7 hours ago
NicoJuicy | 5 hours ago
Russia is economically becoming a vassal state just like north Korea is.
addaon | 5 hours ago
NicoJuicy | 3 hours ago
The East because they are blockaded at sea currently, if they would invade Taiwan.
And they already have huge economical leverage there.
Russia is basically falling apart. But in a dictatorship, stuff like that is only seen sudden, when it collapses.
Putin seems to be making many of the mistakes of pre 1991.
JumpCrisscross | 2 hours ago
The simplest solution would be to reboot the Siberian Republic [1] as a Chinese suzerainty. Ideally after Putin dies as part of a deal to the new ascender. Maybe together with giving them personal co-ownership in some major ventures there.
> East because they are blockaded at sea currently, if they would invade Taiwan
Siberia and Outer Mongolia remain closer and thus cheaper and more-secure sources than anything coming in over ocean, which in essence means from Australia, South America or Africa.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Republic_(1918)
NicoJuicy | an hour ago
Russia is recently bluffing a bit there, Putin had a visit for the first time recently, I think it's China related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute
China is already owning the area with investments and a lot of workers/projects there are already Chinese. Seems like Russia already lost control ( unofficially)
Qiu_Zhanxuan | 56 minutes ago
pmontra | 24 minutes ago
yolp5 | 6 hours ago
Yes, and that helped turn the US into the global hegemony it is today. No wonder China wants a wack. Power doesn't need a conscience.
cowboy_henk | 6 hours ago
The same can be said about the US <> EU/Russia in this conflict. Why bother helping Ukraine/Europe win the war if you consider them at least partly hostile? Better to let them fight your own enemy (Russia) and trade with both sides to your own advantage.
coffeebeqn | 6 hours ago
tancop | 5 hours ago
shepherdjerred | 5 hours ago
But hopefully Europe becomes more independent. The US has become too unstable
_delibash_ | 2 hours ago
carefree-bob | 10 minutes ago
Why did Denmark sign the Greenland treaty? It's a humiliation ritual. Unrestricted access to develop the resources of the Greenland's economic zone, a perpetual veto over any foreign investment, and two new military bases, plus expansion of existing bases. With no end date. In exchange for a payment of... zero. And Denmark still needs to pay the block grant. Does that seem like a treaty between equals? What kind of country grants someone else veto power over investment in a region? What kind of country allows the hosting of foreign military bases, and still calls itself sovereign?
"Vassals" is too strong of a term. European states aren't vassals. Once in a while they give a speech against the US at the UN. And they are constantly complaining about how they are treated, as most vassals do. But they aren't allies. If the US were to file taxes, they would be listed as dependents. That is why they rage when someone who doesn't share their vision gets elected US President, but most Americans don't care who is elected in Europe.
That describes the ratio of the influence that European political leaders have on the lives of Americans vis-a-vis the influence that American political leaders have on the lives of Europeans.
And the thing about states in a subordinate position like that is that they are not respected. European political leaders like to pretend that this is a situation of equals and then complain when the US pushes them around, but it has never been a situation of equals since the end of WW2. Only the facade has been slowly dropped in the intervening years. The sooner Europe stops pretending, the better it will be for them, as not pretending is the first step towards gaining true autonomy. But each time I get my hopes up that Europe will take responsibility for their military and energy needs, I get disappointed by the resulting wave of irreality and wishful thinking.
tim333 | 5 hours ago
stareatgoats | 3 hours ago
_delibash_ | 2 hours ago
OKRainbowKid | 29 minutes ago
noah_buddy | an hour ago
thevillagechief | 6 hours ago
aurareturn | 4 hours ago
kingkawn | 5 hours ago
croes | 4 hours ago
That’s a kind of neutrality.
amelius | 3 hours ago
GolfPopper | 2 hours ago
Betelbuddy | an hour ago
And now the US has joined them: https://apnews.com/article/trump-russia-diesel-midterms-12ba...
SSLy | 2 hours ago
mejutoco | 7 hours ago
af78 | 7 hours ago
3/ "This summer, faced with the inability to conclude a war that began nearly five years ago, Putin opted for a new round of escalation.
4/ "In June, the Russian Armed Forces began systematically targeting warehouses belonging to the Ukrainian company Nova Poshta, prompting a retaliatory strike on Wildberries warehouses; in September, strikes on Ukrainian data centres began, and a response followed swiftly.
5/ "In other words, one shouldn't assume that no one had thought to attack data centres before; it is simply that Putin decided to take this step right now.
6/ "This move effectively lifted the constraints that had previously bound Ukraine – a country that generally adheres to certain rules of engagement and, with few exceptions, does not initiate attacks on clearly civilian targets.
7/ "Ukraine had been prepared for this scenario almost from the very start of the war – and even before that. Even prior to the invasion, when it was clear to everyone that it was virtually inevitable, a law was passed allowing for the temporary storage of state registries abroad.
...
47/ "The issue is therefore extremely serious — far more so than the strikes on Wildberries, which result in economic damage but do not threaten the functioning of the state itself.
48/ "I believe Putin may have committed his second-biggest blunder since the invasion of Ukraine. He has literally started throwing stones inside a glass house without realizing how fragile that house is. The very system he built prevents him from grasping this;…
49/ …he makes decisions without consulting or listening to anyone, living in his own cozy bubble.
https://bsky.app/profile/chriso-wiki.bsky.social/post/3mxgts...
mejutoco | 6 hours ago
> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
The argument is Europe can decide to move servers out of USA and Ukraine is fine because Ukraine does not need servers in USA. They need servers in other countries. That was the logic issue with OP.
Your post is completely unrelated to mine or the above. Maybe wrong thread
af78 | 6 hours ago
mejutoco | 3 hours ago
> the text I quoted says Ukraine mirrored some of its critical data abroad, something russia decided against
My only point was op was confusing Ukraine hosting abroad with hosting in the USA, and wrongly concluding this affects EU hosting in the USA from this. To this you contribute that Ukraine decided to host abroad and Russia did not.
So what? That is not bringing any new facts or argument to the conversation. But the bluesky account is interesting nonetheless.
wartywhoa23 | 5 hours ago
But sure, let me try that tinfoil hat on.
squidbeak | 4 hours ago
sebzim4500 | 4 hours ago
L3onard0 | 4 hours ago
xethos | 3 hours ago
mejutoco | 3 hours ago
> this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
Which was equating outside of Ukraine with USA, which is a logical error. Moving the goalposts does not invalidate the point. I have zero interest in discussing those probabilities (0 vs 0). The argument stands. This is hn
bah9 | 2 hours ago
jacquesm | an hour ago
reddalo | an hour ago
gloosx | an hour ago
Turns out digital sovereignty is a bad idea in terms of state security.
Don't put all eggs into one basket they told ya!
regularfry | 44 minutes ago
EA-3167 | 28 minutes ago
jll29 | an hour ago
MiroslavPokorny | 55 minutes ago
dualvariable | 8 minutes ago
I mean, if Russia is striking datacenters in London/Dublin/Frakfurt/Paris/Amsterdam, then we've got really big problems.
And is the US even allied to Europe, or is Europe going it on their own? They might do better to move to datacenters in China at that point.
Barring that kind of a situation, moving European data back to Europe makes the most sense.
Putting datacenters in the Baltic states might not make the most sense, tho.
bix6 | 7 hours ago
Arodex | 2 hours ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/oct/04...
SubiculumCode | 2 hours ago
MiroslavPokorny | 56 minutes ago
PowerElectronix | 9 hours ago
nojvek | 3 hours ago
ulfw | 9 hours ago
gmerc | 8 hours ago
nixass | 8 hours ago
vjvjvjvjghv | 7 hours ago
AnimalMuppet | 4 hours ago
I don't know that it can end from anything short of that.
jwr | 4 hours ago
AnimalMuppet | 3 hours ago
TiredOfLife | 3 hours ago
qarl | 6 hours ago
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/russ...
I'll be curious to see how it affects the mood around HN.
EDIT: How curious - the article above removed all mention of disinformation - but you can still see it in the URL....
driverdan | 3 hours ago
qarl | an hour ago
You got a source for that?
thway15269037 | 6 hours ago
Also, Yandex have a ban on any pro-russian ads and pro-military stuff (curiously so, not so much against drugs and crime).
Among other things, they actively lobbied for more internet censorship (because as major player they benefited from being white-listed and not affected by them).
People cheering in this thread do not realize that a lot of patriots in Russia will actually support full Yandex demolition.
Oh well. Some people never learn.
artemisart | 5 hours ago
No or they wouldn't be hit.
Waterluvian | 3 hours ago
Svoka | an hour ago
alt227 | 4 hours ago
Zigurd | an hour ago
wiseowise | 59 minutes ago
Dkuku | 3 hours ago
Artoooooor | 3 hours ago
celsoazevedo | 2 hours ago
kristianp | 2 hours ago
redanddead | 2 hours ago
shouldn't these be underground? would it even matter if they were, ukraine would just make mole drones..
_delibash_ | an hour ago
dingaling911 | an hour ago
Svoka | an hour ago
claaams | an hour ago
binaryturtle | an hour ago