Slashdot Mirror
Kremlin Falls For Its Own Fake Satellite Imagery (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Turkish downing of the Russian SU-24 jet last November saw a predictable series of statements from each side claiming complete innocence and blaming the other entirely. Social media was a key battleground for both sides — the Turkish and Russian governments, along with their supporters — as each tried to establish a dominant narrative explanation for what had just happened. In the midst of the online competition, a little-observed, funhouse mirror of an online hoax was brilliantly perpetrated, one with consequences likely exceeding the expectation of the hoaxster. The Russian Ministry of Defense was duped by a fake image that Russian state media itself had circulated more than a year earlier, as a way to deny Moscow's involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
You should understand the seriousness of the situation. After the turkish downed that russian Su-24 plane, resulting in the death of one of the pilots and a an airborne assault trooper involved in the other's rescue mission, Russia's GRU provided sensitive HUMINT data to the marxist kurdish rebels. Based on that data, a kurdish workers' party kamikaze car bomb rammed an (otherwise unmarked) bus carrying turkish air force personnel. The explosion killed 20 pilots and maimed several others, who were flying F-16s for the Turkish AF. The KIA included the particular pilot who downed the Su-24. Two full fighter jet squadrons immediately lost their combat capability due to lack of personnel and no turkish pilot will dare to go anywhere red star marked planes for a long time... This is how things are done by Russia.
NATO is not willing to stand up for Turkey any more, because Erdogan behaves like a total lunatic and better replace him with a logically calculating general in a soon to happen coup d'etat. (Military dictatorship has always been the normal way of life in post-ottoman Turkey.)
But if Turkey still tries to play the role of a strong guy, their military airports will be pelted by russian Iskhander ballistic missiles (~ Pershing-2 on steroids). You may consider that Blackwater recently pulled out all of is mercenary troops from Saudi Arabia, after the houthi rebels of Yemen pelted them with smaller ballistic missiles made in Iran, copycats of the russian Tochka-M design, in total killing almost a thousand saudis and mercenaries in six precision strikes. There were many high ranking officers among the dead and large amount of vehicles destroyed, because the missiles impact at Mach 6 and can cause tremendous devastation with just half a ton of conventional warhead. It's like a man-made asteroid. many sources think the suprisingly successfull houthi rebels are actually a mixture of yemeni locals, iranian spec-ops troops and russian military advisors.