Yesterday’s Europa Conference League match between Shakhtar Donetsk (currently based in Lwów) and Legia Warsaw ended in a serious scandal.

Shakhtar’s nominal home game took place in Kraków. Naturally, a large group of fans came from Warsaw. But the Legia supporters ran into trouble right at the entrance to the stadium — Shakhtar’s head of security refused to allow them to bring in a banner reading “We Remember Volhynia” The situation, in which Ukrainians appeared to be enforcing their own rules at a stadium in Kraków, greatly angered the Polish fans. At first, the Legia supporters refused to enter their section at all and stayed outside the stadium, chanting anti-UPA and anti-Bandera slogans.

By the start of the match, however, the away section had filled up. And by the end of the first half, the controversial banner had appeared on the fence. Reportedly, the Legia fans were helped in this by the president of Wisła Kraków. After that, the Warsaw supporters continued chanting their slogans inside the stadium.

Incidentally, the situation with the commemorative banner provoked outrage even among Poles who are far removed from football.

#info #meta
#nationalism
#Poland #ultras

Post-apocalyptic BMP-1 and MT-LB of the Russian army, covered with grills and makeshift additional armor to enhance protection against FPV drones.

#info
#BMP1 #IFV #APC
#MTLB
#FPV #EW #SAM

❗️⚡️Ukrainian military analysts online report that a strategically important chemical plant in Russia’s Tula region is preparing to deploy an anti-drone defence that revives a concept more than 70 years old: tethered balloons carrying mesh nets to block long-range kamikaze UAVs.

The new “BARRIER PAK” (“БАРЬЕР ПАК”) anti-drone system uses this WWII-era idea: nets are hoisted by balloons to create an aerial trap. When a threat is detected, the balloons and their nets are raised to roughly 1,000 m; an attacking drone that hits the barrier becomes entangled and cannot reach its target.

These balloon arrays are reportedly intended to be supported from the ground by Pantsir-S1 systems and mobile anti-aircraft machine-gun platforms with thermal aiming gear. Those ground systems would protect the balloons themselves from the first wave of kamikaze drones tasked with destroying the nets, and would also defend the facility from UAVs such as ARTEMIS, LUCAS and T150 — which can perform a lofted trajectory to an apogee of about 3.5–5 km and then dive between netted barriers. The analysts argue that only an integrated solution including SAMs can approach 90–100% protection, noting that heavy cruise missiles like the FP-5 Flamingo and stealthy Storm Shadow cruise missiles could not be stopped by mesh barriers alone.

#info
#SAM #EW
#UAV