Category: Saved Web Pages – Audio Posts

— Gov. Kim Reynolds (@IAGovernor) January 4, 2024

Ukrainian Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk said on Thursday that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) had carried out two missile strikes against Russian targets in Crimea; a command post, near Sevastopol, was hit at about 3 p.m. and a military unit, believed to be a radar station in Uyutne, near the city of Yevpatoria in the evening.

Oleshchuk thanked the pilots and “everyone who planned the operation for perfect combat work.” The wording of his Telegram post suggested the attacks had likely involved Anglo-French Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles.

A spokesperson for the Russian-appointed authorities in Crimea said its air defenses had intercepted ten missiles and 36 drones during the course of what they called a Ukrainian “terrorist attack” and that only fragments of destroyed projectile fell at the two locations.

However, within a couple of hours of the strike on the command post social media suggested that more than 20 soldiers and several senior Russian officers had been killed.

BREAKING:23 Russian soldiers killed in yesterday’s Ukrainian missile strike against the Russian airbase in Saky, Crimea.

9 of them special forces, 5 high-ranking commanders. pic.twitter.com/hdUiUmfmI6

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 5, 2024

This claim was expanded upon shortly thereafter with suggestions that one of those killed had been Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov who had been made overall commander of Russia’s “special military operation” last January. Firstly, this appeared on the X (formerly Twitter) account of a user called “WarVehicleTracker” quoting Russian Telegram channel “Ordinary Tsarism.”

Explosions and air raid sirens were heard in Crimea on Thursday afternoon, and again in the evening.

Gerasimov died?
(Please let it be true, The last competent Russian dying after Surovikin got canceled out🙏) pic.twitter.com/qHi3xlS2ue

— WarVehicleTracker (@WarVehicle) January 4, 2024

It was very quickly picked up by other Ukrainian and Russian social media sites and even the US main stream news outlet Newsweek ran the story, though it was at pains to point out that there was no concrete evidence to suggest that Gerasimov had been killed, or even that he was actually in Crimea at the time of the attack.

While the rumors of Gerasimov’s demise continued to circulate on Friday, the “Insider Ukraine” Telegram channel said in the early afternoon that “media information about the command post in Crimea being hit was true but that the death of the head of the General Staff is 99 percent fake.”

Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Volunteer Army South speaking during an interview with the “Espresso” TV channel on Friday seemed to endorse this view:

“Yesterday in Crimea, an enemy command post was hit” in which there were “several high-ranking officers or generals of the Russian occupation army.” He added “I even heard the famous name Gerasimov. It would be good news, but I think it is unlikely to be true.”

Bratchuk also confirmed the strike on the air defense communication site in Uyutne in south west Crimea, after which he asserted that many ambulances were called to deal with casualties.

The Russian news agency TASS, quoting the New York Times, said on Dec. 17 that Ukraine had allegedly made a failed attempt to assassinate Gerasimov during a visit to the front lines. It went on to say that the attempt had failed because it had been made against Washington’s wishes who in turn withheld the information on the Russian’s movements that were essential to a successful attack.

Steve Brown

After a career as a British Army Ammunition Specialist and Bomb Disposal Officer, Steve later worked in the fields of ammunition destruction, demining and explosive ordnance disposal with the UN and NATO. In 2017, after taking early retirement, he moved to Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife and two sons where he became a full-time writer. He now works as an English language editor with the Kyiv Post.

Photo: ELTA IAI.

As technology advances incessantly, so too do the deadly threats appearing on the multi-dimensional electronic battlefield. The challenges to forces on the ground, at sea, and in the air are daunting. Examples include sea skimming missiles, powerful imaging radars deployed from aircraft, and long-range air surveillance and defense radars. The list is virtually endless, and to make matters worse; some of these systems are finding their way into the hands of dangerous, rogue nations and non-state actors.

The stakes are high – the loss of highly trained personnel and costly, difficult to replace platforms and equipment may result in failure or even defeat – so it is imperative that forces be equipped with the tools needed to survive and successfully complete their objectives. To this end, Israel Aerospace Industries’ (IAI) Group and Subsidiary, ELTA Systems Ltd., has leveraged its five-decade rich technological heritage as the country’s radar and electronic warfare house, and its culture of innovation, to field the Scorpius family of cutting-edge Electronic Warfare (EW) systems. Offering unmatched protection on land, at sea, and in the air, the Scorpius family redefines the state of the art in EW and Electronic Attack system performance.

AESA and GaN – Game Changing Technologies

The Scorpius product range is based on ELTA’s Active Electronic Scanning Array (AESA) technology. AESA, built with a staring array of wide-band solid state transceivers, provides a dramatic increase both in receiver sensitivity and in Effective Radiated Power (ERP) – far exceeding legacy EW solutions. Furthermore, AESA technology allows narrow multi-beam operation for reception and transmission, enabling the system to detect and target multiple threats simultaneously, across the entire field of regard.

The Scorpius family also incorporates the latest Gallium Nitrate (GaN) technology, which provides much higher power density and efficiency than previous generation Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) transistors, maximizing power and reducing energy consumption.

Leveraging AESA’s exceptional sensitivity, the Scorpius family is able to detect and track advanced threats such as low probability-of-intercept (LPI) radars and long-range targets. Furthermore, with its superior ERP, Scorpius disrupts and degrades enemy radars with unparalleled effect. Scorpius effectively protects assets against modern airborne, shipborne and land-based threats, including fire-control radars, search radars, active missile seekers, and imaging radars.

Meet the Family

Scorpius-G (ELL-8256SB) Scorpius-G (ELL-8256SB) is a powerful ground-based, state-of-the-art, long-distance RF Electronic Support Measures (ESM) and Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) system. Scorpius-G effectively intercepts, analyzes, locates, tracks and jams a wide variety of airborne and land-based systems including fire control radars, search radars, AEW sensors, and SAR. The system is based on advanced and innovative technology featuring Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) with Gallium-Nitride (GaN) Solid State Amplifiers (SSA). The novel design provides exceptional receiver sensitivity and Effective Radiated Power (ERP) transmission, far exceeding those of legacy EW solutions. The enhanced sensitivity and ERP enable Scorpius-G to detect, distort and degrade enemy radars even through their side lobes, greatly increasing the system’s jamming effectiveness.

Photo: ELTA IAI.

The AESA technology allows for narrow, simultaneous multi-beam operation. Digital multibeam forming provides unprecedented sensitivity and the ability to target multiple threats individually. The system can detect very low signals, simultaneously jam numerous emitters over its entire frequency range while covering a wide geographic sector and displays an Electronic Order of Battle (EOB). The system is driven by a pre-programmed Mission Data File (MDF) and can operate automatically.

Scorpius-T (ELL-8257SB) Scorpius-T is a multi-threat Electronic Warfare (EW) emulator for aircrew training and system testing and evaluation, creating unprecedented diverse and effective training scenario – including advanced training scenarios for fourth and fifth-generation fighter aircraft. Scorpius-T trains aircrews and EW operators in handling realistic, signal-dense, multi-threat environments.

The system emulates a wide range of emitters, including modern long-range threats. Using a programmable and updatable threat database, current and future threats are supported – including surface-to-air missile systems, radar systems, and communication links.

With AESA multi-beam capability, the system can simultaneously engage multiple trainee aircraft with different threat patterns.

Scorpius-N (ELL-8256SB) is ELTA’s powerful shipborne EW suite combining advanced Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) and Electronic Support Measures (ESM) capabilities. It comprises four conformal antenna array panels, each housing transceiver arrays that cover a wide frequency range, a control unit for processing and managing operations, and an operator console that includes maintenance and training functions.

Photo: ELTA IAI.

Scorpius Escort Jammer (EJ) is designed to suppress all types of air surveillance and fire control radars, creating a safe corridor along a mission flight path. This flexible system can be installed as a pod on the centerline station of a fighter aircraft. Transport and support aircraft can accommodate the pod on an external mount and a version configured for internal installation is also available.

Scorpius-SP (ELL-8222SB) is designed to provide advanced protection to individual aircraft. Mounted within ELTA’s proven, compact, lightweight, low drag pod configuration, which is similar in contour to an air-to-air missile, the system can be installed on all wing stations.

ELTA offers an extensive portfolio of high-performance and field-proven payloads and systems on a wide range of platforms. System solutions cover integrated EW (ESM/ECM), Radar, EO/IR, IMINT, Launch Detection Systems (LDS), SAR/GMTI, SIGINT, and cyber. This ability to deliver game changing solutions such as the Scorpius EW family, at the strategic and tactical levels to customers worldwide, is a key factor in ELTA’s ability to maintain its position as a trailblazer in advanced defense electronics.

Israel has recently unveiled a new electronic warfare system called Scorpius that its manufacturer, Israel Aerospace Industries, says has capabilities that will revolutionize electronic warfare.

Asked about the namesake of this system, Gideon Fustick, Marketing VP EW Group at IAI, said it intends to convey “the sense of an innocuous thing that actually has a very powerful sting.” 

“We call it ‘soft protection.’ It’s an offensive weapon that doesn’t send out missiles. It’s not a hard-kill system,” Fustick told me. “And yet it is very effective in engaging and disabling enemy systems.” 

Here’s why IAI thinks this new system is in a league of its own. 

“More and more of the activity in warfare is going into the electromagnetic domain,” Fustick said. “Planes, missiles, UAVs are all using electromagnetic magnetic means, to sense the environment, to navigate, and to communicate.”

Illustration of the training version of Israel’s Scorpius electronic warfare system, the Scorpius T, … [+] developed by Israel Aerospace Industries.

Courtesy of Israel Aerospace Industries.

“The enemy is trying to use the electromagnetic domain for all these activities,” he said. “We are also trying to use them. And we’re each trying to deny the other side from the use of the electromagnetic domain.” 

He added that this domain is quickly becoming a battlefield in its own right.

Effective modern electromagnetic warfare requires the know-how to detect and counter various threats coming from all directions. 

Unlike previous systems, which Fustick says are “inherently limited,” the Scorpius uses active electronically scanned array (AESA) technology to scan the entire sky and can send narrowly targeted beams – “at any wavelength, any frequency, any direction against specific targets without interfering with anybody else” – that disrupt enemy electronic sensors, data communications, navigation and radar.

“It’s the first system that can really detect anything in the sky and address multiple targets in different directions and different frequencies simultaneously,” he said. 

‘A revolution in electronic warfare.’

While prior EW systems can neutralize specific targets, or perhaps a couple of targets, the Scorpius can take out anything in the sky and engage multiple targets simultaneously.

“That is a revolution in electronic warfare,” Fustick said. 

Before the innovation of such narrow beams, operators of EW systems only had two options. They could either aim a single narrow beam around the sky in search of a target, which is very difficult to do, or use a wider beam. 

“If you’re using the wider beam, then you’re definitely catching your target, but you’re also catching a whole lot of other stuff, including friendly forces in the same beam,” Fustick said. 

Scorpius’ combined use of a wide beam, to scan for potential threats in all directions, and narrow beams, to target such threats, gives its operator “wide effect with minimum collateral interference.” 

“We believe this is the revolution. It’s the future of electronic warfare,” Fustick said. 

Illustration of the land-based Scorpius G electronic warfare system built by Israel Aerospace … [+] Industries.

Courtesy of Israel Aerospace Industries

The ground version of the system, the Scorpius G, is designed to defend a battle arena against a variety of threats with complete 360-degree coverage. As a result, Fustick said, the system “becomes not only a tool for taking out a specific target, but it creates an electronic umbrella of defense over a whole region.”

“That’s something that was simply not possible with previous electronic warfare technology,” he added. “So, it’s not only new capabilities. It’s a new product category.” 

Zero price per activation

There are obvious advantages for operators of such a system. The Scorpius’ capability to neutralize targets such as drones by simply targeting them with narrow beams reduces the need to use missiles or other munitions, which can be quite expensive. 

“One of the advantages about electronic or soft defense systems is that the price per activation is virtually zero,” Fustick said. “You don’t run out of ammunition, and there is no question of ‘do I or do I not engage that particular threat.'” 

The training model of the new system, the Scorpius-T, was recently showcased by the Israeli Air Force in the recent multinational Blue Flag exercise in the country, the largest such exercise in Israel’s history. The Scorpius T can simulate newer threats that are relevant for fifth-generation aircraft. 

“It is the only training system that can engage fifth-generation aircraft and was very publicly in view and successful operation during the Blue Flag exercise,” Fustick said. 

Scorpius systems have already been exported to “several prominent customers.” 

Fustick concluded by noting that this new technology has “an extremely broad range of applications.” 

Scorpius SP (self-protection) electronic warfare pod built for combat aircraft built by Israel … [+] Aerospace Industries.

Courtesy of Israel Aerospace Industries.

These include a self-protection pod for combat aircraft, the Scorpius SP, and a standoff jammer, the Scorpius SJ.

The naval version, the Scorpius N, is optimized for defending ships against threats such as drones and over-the-horizon anti-ship cruise missiles and, like its land-based counterpart, can generate huge amounts of very powerful beams.

After that date, image will need to be licensed from the website.) Ukrainian military operate a Punisher drone, a small fixed-wing reusable aircraft used by frontline infantry to strike military targets, on November 7, 2023 near Vuhledar, Ukraine. (Photo by Kostya Liberov/ Libkos via Getty Images)

AOC 2023 — The visible front line has hardly moved in months, but above the trenches and minefields dividing Ukraine, an invisible battle rages back and forth in the airwaves.

Both sides are constantly updating their drones and their anti-drone tactics, which depend above all else on the radio connections used to control the unmanned aircraft and to relay the vital intelligence they collect to commanders, artillery batteries and missile launchers. Both sides have invested heavily in radio-frequency jamming and deception — electronic warfare — to misdirect missiles and bring down drones, with Ukraine alone losing an estimated five to ten thousand every month. And this cat-and-mouse game moves so rapidly, Ukrainian and NATO experts said at the Association of Old Crows’ annual electronic warfare conference, that tech needs to be upgraded about every eight weeks.

RELATED: Amid Ukraine and Israel conflicts, Pentagon acquisition chief sees counter-drone ‘crisis’

“The electromagnetic environment in the eastern Donbas is the most complex in the world,” said Air Commodore Blythe Crawford, commandant of the Royal Air Force’s Air & Space Warfare Centre (ASWC). “If you’re turning out version 1.1, you’ve got eight weeks before you churn out version 1.2.”

A Ukrainian reserve officer and tech entrepreneur, Capt. Iaroslav Kalinin, made the same point more bluntly as he whipped through a presentation of different drone types the two sides had fielded one after another. “Whatever I show you becomes obsolete in the next two months,” Kalinin told the AOC conference.

Big, purpose-built military drones like the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 that were stars at the start of the war have given way to hobbyist mini-drones and, increasingly, racing drones controlled by operators using VR goggles to get a drone’s-eye-view — what’s called “First Person View” (FPV) control.

Both sides have turned the agile, speedy FPV drones into ad hoc smart bombs and, Kalinin said, the Ukrainians are now even using them as interceptors to bring down larger Russian drones. Meanwhile, operators are constantly adjusting control frequencies to bypass jamming, changing how they hide from retaliatory strikes — which prioritize drone operators — and extending range by such tricks as relaying the control signal through a secondary drone.

“The side that prevails will be the side that innovates the quickest,” said Crawford.

But which side is that? While the Russians have a well-earned reputation for rigidity, “they’re also learning,” said Maj. Gen. Borys Kremenetskyi, a Ukrainian air force officer currently serving as defense attaché to the US. “They’re adapting [their] tactics.”

When the war began, Kremenetskyi said, Ukraine was fighting “the big Soviet Army”: long columns of tanks, troop carriers and trucks surged into Ukrainian territory — and often got stuck when resistance proved greater than planned, like the infamous 40-mile “traffic jam” north of Kyiv. As the war ground on, Cold War-era mechanized echelons increasingly gave way to human wave attacks of poorly supported foot troops, straight out of the darkest days of the “Great Patriotic War” against the Nazis. But the Russians also launched relentless missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities, and, Kremenetskyi said, there they were careful to vary their flight paths from strike to strike and use recon drones to scout for weak points in Ukraine’s hard-pressed air defenses.

In the cyber/electronic warfare domain, the Russians began the war with a knockout blow against the ViaSat communications network on which Ukrainian troops depended, only for Elon Musk’s Starlink to save the day. Starlink has proved remarkably resilient against hacking and jamming. But, Kremenetskyi warned, the Russians learned to look for areas of “mass internet access” and other signs that Starlink terminals were online, then target them.

Nevertheless, Kremenetskyi expressed confidence that Ukraine’s more Westernized society and military could adapt faster than the authoritarian Russians. “Innovation is one of our advantages,” he said. In particular, since the devastating losses in Crimea and eastern Donbass during the Russian invasion of 2014, Ukraine has reformed its armed forces to allow more initiative among junior frontline troops — the soldiers are actually storming trenches and reconfiguring drones.

“We transferred a lot of authorities to junior officers,” the general said. “We created a very powerful non-commissioned officers corps, which allows us to make decisions in trenches. Our soldiers do not wait for a general somewhere in headquarters. …They can use their own initiative on the battlefield. That is one of our advantages.”

Those tactical and technical reforms made a particular difference in electronic warfare: Russian jamming paralyzed Ukrainian command systems in 2014, but failed to bring them down in 2022.

“The biggest boogeyman in the world was Russian EW,” said Jeff Fischer, a former US Air Force electronic warfare officer. “[People said] ‘they’re light years ahead of us.’ No, they’re not.”

Sure, he told the AOC conference, the technical specifications of Russian systems were impressive, and specimens acquired by intelligence agencies performed magnificently in field tests on US ranges — where they were operated by US-trained crews with top-notch technical support. In the mud and chaos of actual conflict, however, with patchy maintenance and tired, under-trained crews, their combat performance was much worse.

That said, Fischer warned, the brutal natural selection of ongoing combat is forcing even the Russians to get better. “I will say, even though Russia wasn’t great at the beginning, fighting is training, so they might be losing guys but they’re learning,” he said. “Russia’s getting actually relatively good, only because they’re being forced to do so.”

What Russia lacks in bottom-up initiative, it might be able to make up its ability to ruthlessly mobilize all available resources to serve the autocrat’s objectives, argued Crawford.

“Rather than being a question of, ‘are we ahead or are we behind’ … it is a battle of innovation models,” he said. “You have Ukraine, which is slightly more Western in its approach, a bottom-up innovation model … versus a top-down autocratic model … where they have mobilized the nation’s industrial base to support that top-down innovation.”

As the war grinds on and Western resolve wavers, it’s hard to say whether the free world or the autocrats will prevail in the end.

Rumors are circulating that Russia’s top general, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, was killed in an attack on annexed Crimea by Ukrainian forces on Thursday.

Social media users began questioning the whereabouts of the Russian general after Ukraine said it had struck a Russian military command post near Sevastopol and a military unit near the city of Yevpatoria, in separate strikes on the Black Sea peninsula, which was annexed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov (R) attend an expanded meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry Board in Moscow, on December 21, 2022. Rumors are swirling that Gerasimov was killed in an attack on annexed Crimea by Ukrainian forces.
MIKHAIL KIREYEV/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images

Ukrainian Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk thanked the pilots and “everyone who planned the operation for perfect combat work” in a message on Telegram.

Russia said its air defenses shot down 10 guided missiles over Crimea, and that it had prevented an attempt by Ukraine’s forces to carry out a “terrorist attack.” Russia’s defense ministry said it also intercepted 36 Ukrainian drones over the peninsula.

The unverified rumor of Gerasimov’s death appears to have begun circulating after X (formerly Twitter) user WarVehicleTracker, which tracks vehicles and losses in Ukraine, shared an image purporting to show a message published by a Russian Telegram channel called “Ordinary Tsarism,” which has more than 34,000 subscribers.

“Gerasimov died?” wrote WarVehicleTracker.

The message in the image read: “According to preliminary data, Valrey Gerasimov, who was in a command post near Sevastopol at the time of the attack, was killed in the attack on Crimea.”

WarVehicleTracker’s post has been viewed more than 60,000 times at the time of writing, and prompted hundreds of social media users to question whether Gerasimov had been killed in Crimea.

A Newsweek search found that the message purportedly published by the “Ordinary Tsarism” channel didn’t exist at the time of writing. It isn’t clear if the message was deleted, or if it was fabricated by social media users. Newsweek has emailed the author behind the channel for further clarification.

The X user WarVehicleTracker told Newsweek they first saw the image and message on social platform Discord.

Questions asked by X users as rumors swirled include: “Is Gerasimov dead?”; “What happened to Gerasimov?”; “Did they off Gerasimov?”; “Gerasimov died?”; “Did Ukraine really kill Gerasimov?”; and “Gerasimov, where are you?”.

“Until Russia proves that Gerasimov is alive, we should just assume he is dead,” one X user wrote.

Another added: “Not holding my breath but if Gerasimov got iced in the Crimea swarm, that would be… eventful.”

Gerasimov’s Wikipedia page was also temporarily edited to state that he had died on January 4, the day of the Crimea attack.

There is no concrete evidence to suggest that Gerasimov has been killed, nor is there evidence that Gerasimov was in Crimea at the time of the attack. The Kremlin hasn’t commented on the rumors, and Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Defense Ministry via email for comment.

The New York Times reported in December 2022 that Ukrainian authorities attempted to assassinate Gerasimov as he visited the front lines in Ukraine.

Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the Russia-Ukraine war? Let us know via worldnews@newsweek.com.

The case of Charles McGonigal is bigger than one corrupt FBI agent.

In fact, it’s bigger than the entire FBI.

The legal case against Charles McGonigal, the FBI’s former New York counterintelligence chief — a scandal that launched a thousand conspiracy theories — is beginning to wind down. Last week, a judge in the Southern District of New York sentenced McGonigal to 50 months in prison; a second judge in Washington, DC, is expected to sentence McGonigal on a different set of charges in February.