Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09 View Post
CrowBat.....many thanks.......
You're welcome.

Would like to observe, that the point of the entire exercise was trying to find out, and then explaining how the Russians think - i.e. how are their top political and military leaders thinking in regards of their air force - and why they do things the way they do. Not to acuse anybody.

Anyway, this resulted in a write-up of about 30,000 words, then in a 1.800 words 'resume', from which a 1.000-words article was distilled.

So, sadly, few useful explanations are missing, as are all the references. In turn the latter is now used by an entire brigade of Russo-trolls to (literaly) bitch about it.

Particularly interesting is that nobody serious is actually complaining about the message and content of that article as such (on the contrary, several representatives of various NGOs active in Syria concluded that there's nothing good they can expect coming their way in the next few days, weeks etc.). The 'pearl' of an exception was Sergey Chernyshov, who's complaining,
I have stopped reading after the following sentence:
“This unit used to have four Kamov Ka-52 helicopter gunships, but these were all destroyed in an accident at Tiyas air base on May 14, 2016.”

We have all seen satellite images that shown 4 burned-down Mi-24 gunships on a base near Aleppo. All except the author, who doesn’t care about fact-checking before publishing.
Actually, the only one who didn't do any fact-checking is he, then Tiyas AB is half-way between Homs and Palmyra, but certainly nowhere near Aleppo.

Plus, not only that earliest reports cited destruction of Ka-52s, and that it's 'Mi-24s' only since publication of STRATFOR's article: ever since that accident (it was no attack) there are no Russian Ka-52s to be seen anywhere around Syria.

In another instance (Twitter) a well-known IRGC-troll (banned from several aviation forums after declaring himself a 'part of elite rulling over undereducated masses'), complained I've been paid by Qatari and Turkish think-tanks. ...until somebody from Turkey advised him there's not a single Turkish think-tank capable of running such studies... then the 'Messiah' deleted all of his related posts.

After such experiences, can't but admit: sometimes I find it really scarry to see in what sort of 'world' are we living nowadays.