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   John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Apr-2026 16:22:22 JST John Carlos Baez

   Wow! While I was driving to New Mexico to visit archaeological sites, Ukraine was hammering oil refineries in Russia with drones! How come none of you told me? 😜

   Urkaine sent drones over 1000 kilometers to destroy oil storage tanks and shipping infrastructure at the ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk on the Gulf of Finland. These ports were rendered unable to ship any cargo. Reuters estimated that Russia lost about 40% percent of its oil export capacity while Bloomberg put the figure at 43%.

   As you know, Putin had been enjoying the oil price spike due to the Iran war. Not so much now. He'll try to rebuild the ports and/or reroute the oil. But until he gets an effective defense against these drones, the Ukrainians can just repeat what they've done.

   (1/2)

   https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/4/6/smell-of-war-comes-to-st-petersburg-as-ukraine-hammers-russian-refineries

   • Embed this notice
     Sheldon (sysop408@sfba.social)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Apr-2026 16:22:17 JST Sheldon

     in reply to

     • Prof Lutz

     @johncarlosbaez @pr_ret_lutz also the US isn’t targeting Russian oil production. Ukraine is and they’ve likely had this capability for at least a year, but held back on using it because they didn’t want to strain their international relationships.

     Now with Trump lifting sanctions on Russia and not providing any help to Ukraine and failing to deliver on missiles defense, they have no choice especially not after Russia spent the entire winter targeting power plants all across Ukraine.

   • Embed this notice
     John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Apr-2026 16:22:19 JST John Carlos Baez

     in reply to

     • Prof Lutz

     @pr_ret_lutz - who is rejoicing about that?

     Steve's Place repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Prof Lutz (pr_ret_lutz@jasette.facil.services)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Apr-2026 16:22:20 JST Prof Lutz

     in reply to

     @johncarlosbaez I don't think we should rejoice seeing USA destroying global oil capacity and controlling hydrocarbon fluxes.

     https://youtu.be/0nt1CgQsgpI

   • Embed this notice
     John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Apr-2026 16:22:21 JST John Carlos Baez

     in reply to

     In case like me you hadn't been keeping up on the Ukraine war, you might like to watch Anders Puck Nielsen analyze the current situation and prognosticate here.

     He and the host agree that Ukraine is now killing off Russian soldiers faster than Russia can recruit them. I never know if I can trust these numbers, but Ukraine claims to have killed ~35,000 last month and has a plan to kill 50,000/month - mainly by increasing its production and use of drones, I guess. Anders and the host say that Putin will be driven to conscript troops, which so far he's avoided doing - and that this will force him to increase various repressive measures. But they think this will only *slow* the decline of Russian military power: the only way out for Putin will be to stop the EU from supporting Ukraine financially. The defeat of Orbán makes that harder for him. So, they expect Putin will eventually threaten the Baltic states with war unless the EU stops supporting Ukraine. He's already threatened Estonia, Finland and Latvia for letting Ukrainian drones fly over their territory.

     In short, they think Putin is losing but he'll become more dangerous as he becomes more desperate.

     (2/2)

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqkWf12Wcxo