Posted on 10/25/2016 1:06:43 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Russia’s great flotilla of eight naval ships to the eastern Mediterranean hasn’t been the public diplomacy coup Moscow hoped for.
NATO calls the flotilla “the largest surface deployment since the end of the Cold War,” but most people in Russia or in the West who know anything about it have probably only seen the photos of the Admiral Kuznetsov — Russia’s only aircraft carrier — billowing smoke on the open water.
You might be surprised to learn that the Kuznetsov hasn’t broken down: the smoke is normal for the 30-year-old ship, which runs on diesel fuel. That ominous plume of black smoke rising up from the flight control tower? The Russian military expected you to see that.
What Moscow apparently failed to anticipate is the ridicule such ancient-seeming technology would invite in cyberspace, where the Kremlin’s opponents and nervous foreign observers have seized the images as proof of Russian military decline, despite the ongoing intervention in Syria.
On Twitter some of Vladimir Putin's most popular critics have had a field day with the publicity backlash. With a touch of photoshop, for instance, Ilya Repin's classic painting “Barge Haulers on the Volga” was transformed into a joke about the Kuznetsov. The caption below reads, “Russia in one picture.”
Anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who nearly forced a runoff mayoral election in Moscow in 2013, pointed out that some Russian news media were sharing photographs of U.S. naval vessels, while tweeting stories about the Russian flotilla. “The Putin regime spends a third of the federal budget on defense,” Navalny wrote, “but showing just a single photo of our own aircraft carrier is so embarrassing that we take photos from the U.S. Navy.”
The pro-Ukrainian political cartoonist “Night Separator” mixed the iconic image of Vladimir Putin's breaststroke with the Kuznetsov's plume of smoke. “The smoke is coming from right where you think it is,” he clarified in a follow-up tweet.
Rhetoric about the Admiral Kuznetsov's trail of smoke has taken on such epic proportions that some of the most popular jokes about the ship compare its engine exhaust to the stuff of natural disasters. “The Admiral Kuznetsov pictured off the coast of Iceland in 1987,” claims one spoof tweet, accompanied by a photograph of Iceland's Katla volcano.
Other Twitter accounts left followers wondering if the image before them was real or edited. “Photo-fact!” wrote one popular anti-Kremlin parody account. “The Admiral Kuznetsov depicted from a passing passenger plane. It's sailing to Syria completely unnoticed!” In fact, the image is actually a modified photo of the Deepwater Horizon cleanup effort in the Gulf of Mexico.
Another popular joke, recycled dozens of times by different Twitter users, claimed that NASA had published a photo from an orbiting satellite, showing the smoke trail of the Kuznetsov as it crossed the English Channel. (In reality, the edited photo below was taken originally in 2002 from the International Space Station over Italy's Mount Etna, one of the most active volcanoes in the world.)
Others are already looking ahead to Syria, which Russia's flotilla will reach eventually. “Seeing signs that the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov approaches, militants abandon their positions in terror,” jokes the tweet below.
The mockery of Russia's flagship naval vessel has apparently become so irksome to some in Moscow that the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper even commissioned blogger Sergei Leleka to pen a column titled “Why the Admiral Kuznetsov Blackens Europe's Sky.” In the text, Leleka claims that the ship only produces black smoke “as a tradition,” arguing that there's nothing wrong or outdated about the engine exhaust. “This is a signal,” he says, “as if to tell everyone, ‘I've arrived, hello!’ or ‘I am leaving, goodbye!’ or ‘I'm on my way!’”
Leleka says the smoke can be used as a friendly signal to allies, communicating that help is on the way, or as a menacing gesture to foes, warning that Russia's naval might is en route.
In his column, before the newspaper quickly redacted the text, Leleka also unleashed a savage anti-Semitic attack against prominent Russian liberal intellectuals Anton Nossik and Sergei Parkhomenko, who have publicly ridiculed the Admiral Kuznetsov. In an awkward and angry reference to the Holocaust, Leleka wrote that Nossik and Parkhomenko could only be cured of their sudden military expertise “in the gas chamber.”
The remark resembles a similar anti-Semitic comment published in the same newspaper in 2013, when another columnist lamented that the Nazis failed to “make lampshades” of the grandfathers of today's anti-Kremlin oppositionists.
I admit, I read a bit of this hogwash but let me tell you, it is the Russians who are taking the fight to the bad guys. At this time, I’m not sure what side we are on. Do you
Not with the current administration.
And people are laughing at the Russian effort?
unfortunately, Hillary backed Isis and armed them through Benghazi, so now we back enemies ..and attack our friends, obamma is the liar in chief, pure evil..
The Kusnetsov produces smoke.
This is because the Russians not only don’t believe in the bizarre fantasy of ‘moderate jihadists’ - they also don’t believe in the equally bizarre fantasy of Global Warming.
In any case their planes are modern enough.
What a pathetic little brony this guy is.
On the other hand, we've spent untold billions on a carrier that can't launch aircraft, littoral combat ships that are headed to the scrapyard after a single deployment, and a fighter aircraft that is outmatched by everything except cost.
But we've got transgender troops! Ivan is definitely lagging behind us in this category.
Pics of the carrier show 4 fixed wing aircraft on the flight deck. Nonetheless, Russia is becoming a player as we continue to be the world’s drunken abuser.
In the good old Soviet days, they had to man their capital ships (such as they are) with officers when they did foreign port visits. Couldn’t depend on the enlisted to 1. Look sharp, 2. Stay on the ship.
ping
“the smoke is normal for a 30 year old ship, that runs on diesel fuel”. BS, was snipe on a 30 year old tin can, we make smoke like that was f**k up. Fuel/air ration wrong, Captain starts chewing ass. Only smoke that should be visible from her stack is a slight brown wisp, we called an economy haze. She uses pressure fired boiler, with super chargers, sort like our Garcia class in the 60s/70s. Super chargers were constant source of problems for us then and I suspect that is source of the Ruskies problems now.
Laugh all they want. Russia is all in for her allies. Americans haven’t been all in for theirs since they found out they were massacring Christians.
This election doesn’t decide *if* there will be war, it decides which side we are on.
Things like this illustrate how American leaders have betrayed us for the sake of get-a-long globalism. Literally all we had to do to maintain ourselves as the sole superpower of the world was keep our own 30+-year-old tech and not screw it up. Our carriers from the 70s would eat this thing for breakfast. Our tanks from the 80s still eat the world’s armor all day long. Our planes from the 80s and 90s, properly updated, are still cock of the roost. However, we’ve sunk countless trillions into military boondogles (both ops and equipment) that did nothing for us, and our diplomacy has been lacking since forever. Now it is the Russians flexing muscle while we trace construction blueprints for more expensive planes and ships. And SOME in America are happy that we’ve lost our supremacy in the world. Frankly it is easier not being the leader...so mission accomplished. We are now leading from behind, eating the smoke of this antiquated ship.
amen
Yeah...2 points for Russia:
1. Flat 13% income tax
2. Bigly against radical islamic terrorism.
The method of propulsion does not matter. It could be coal and still be an effective warship.
I disagree. I doubt it could be effective. Engineering does matter, particularly in naval operations and warfare where critical functions like damage control make the difference between dead in the water taking on water, or continuing the mission.
There are some things the Soviets/Russians are good at, but naval aviation is not one of them. If propulsion is a flaw in this vessel, it is a gigantic flaw.
And if that major, most important aspect is flawed, how many other things, like firefighting infrastructure, ventilation, or just plain quality of work are critically flawed, just waiting to rear their heads at an inopportune time?
My guess is a lot. Doesn’t mean the US vessels are perfect, but they do work.
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