It’s not necessarily some intentional conspiracy, but rather the question of care and communication, etc.
Everyone knows their IFF is dogshit. There’s a surprising regularity to airlines being shot down, even before the war.
A UAE-based airline’s planes are going to be less likely to fall through the cracks, so to speak, than an Azerbaijan-based airline’s
pretty sure it won’t be an emirates flight getting shot. The UAE are pretty strong supporters of Russia.
Conversely, Azerbaijan is rather friendly with Ukraine.
No they can’t. With the sanctions imposed there’s been a shortage.
All they got to smoke are tiny dicks.
I’ve got “US goes to war with NATO”, does that count?
Apparently I conflated a few things. In any case it’s a Space force base
With climate change opening up more routes through the arctic seas, it becomes a strategic place to set up shop and control all that traffic (read: tax.)
Incidentally we already have a base there. (I believe it’s for launching rockets into polar orbits. Don’t quote me on that.)
You know, I still say it’s incredibly depressing we didn’t loan them a couple A10 warthogs to hit that convoy that was pushing to Kyiv.
I mean, seriously.
all those tanks… all those fuel trucks and other supplies? all just lined up and stuck on a road? just waiting for an A10 driver to just… do their thing…
Part of it might also be that sometimes, military or intelligence flights might squawk ads-b with a spoofed signal to blend into the overall traffic.
It isn’t that they didn’t know they were there, it’s that they didn’t believe the ID. It’s not just the hardware that’s the problem. (The hardware is dogshit, but so are the people using it. People are part of the system, too, and they’re fairly poorly trained.)