The missile attack on Przewodow has become a Rorschach test for how strong the West’s de-escalation faction’s "directed cognition" is in dealing with Reality in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
The “It was a Ukrainian missile” narrative doesn't match reality. This🧵will explain
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...why.
**Directed cognition, in rough layman terms, means making a quick & incorrect analysis from limited data and only picking more data to support that analysis.
The way to cure a directed cognition conclusion is to audit all the available data.
To do this I’m going to walk you through 5V55K missile design, fuzing, weapon effects, and some Ukrainian evidence. I'm going to leave radar & electronic warfare for another thread.
Below are infographics of the 5V55K & a data table. 3/
The 5V55K is a command link guided missile with a peak velocity of Mach 6.7 and a ~300lb warhead similar to the Buk warhead that downed the MH-17.
The 5V55K can be steered in any direction you want with the radio uplink from the 5N63 FLAP LID. ausairpower.net/APA-Grumble-Ga… 3/
The Ukrainian MoD video in this tweet & photo below shows a night time engagement and proper functioning of a S-300 missile proximity fuze and fragmentation warhead.
The spherical explosion/fragmentation was designed into the missile warhead for
Most current Western surface to air missiles have three fuze functions.
o Proximity
o Super quick impact
o Time
The proximity function is to set off a large fragmentation warhead so the fragments can destroy the target. The impact fuze
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... is for backup/secondary ground attack.
The time function is so the missile detonates when it misses as a safety measure.
Mid-to-late Cold War Era Soviet designed SAM's generally did not include this time feature, reasons.
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Below you see what fragments from a Buk warhead did to a MH-17 wing over Donbass and one of the "hour glass" shaped fragments looked after impact.
The wide dispersal between impacts was due to the missile/airliner closing velocities interacting w/the warhead fragment burst.
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These two photo clips show the 5V55K's "5Zh93" warhead in situ with a wartime shoot down on the left and a pre-war post launch accident Ukrainian police investigation.
The fuzes in both situations failed.
The shot down missile broke apart without the impact fuze being 8/
...initiated and in the pre-war photo it was never activated.
When you are firing the 5V55K in the ground to ground mode the proximity fuze function is deactivated, if only to prevent it being jammed & detonating before target impact.
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All of that previous data was to give you background to understand what you are going to see below, a July 2022 Russian land attack S-300 missile strike in Mykolaivska.
No 300lb fragmentation warhead built by mankind can dig a hole like that.
Almaz data and videos of the 5V55K show the 5V55K burn duration is around 8-10 seconds to reach Mach 6.7, roughly 2.1 kilometer per second
What you are seeing with the S-300 crater is mach 5(+) missiles dig deep holes and move a lot of dirt at near peak F = M*(V^2) impact.
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To calibrate your eyes to the "effective explosive power" of that impact, see this WW2 weapon effects diagrams.
Go back and look at the man in the Tweet 10/ photo clip versus what you see in the diagrams below.
The 5V55K doesn't carry 4K of explosives, just velocity.
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The "Przewodow Narrative" claims that it was an errant Ukrainian S-300 launcher fired a 5V55K missile from a nearby SAM base (see maps) that landed in a Przewodow Poland field.
Nearby 5V55K launches would be hypersonic into Poland.
The 5V55K's warhead was steel, not tungsten like the M31A1 AW, but massed 100-lbs more.
Even the decayed supersonic, very long range impact that caused that crater would have initiated the impact fuze train function.
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So that photo all but rules out the "nearby Ukrainian 5V55K missile launch" narrative.
The crater is too small and there is no fragmentation damage on the tractor and cart consistent with a "5Zh93" warhead in airburst or impact modes.
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Even the idea of a partial functioning solid rocket motor from a nearby Ukrainian 5V55K missile launcher is a nonstarter based on this thedrive -dot- com article.
There would have been burning defective solid rocket fuel all over the Przewodow crater. 19/ thedrive.com/the-war-zone/r…
Now some more Ukrainian Evidence via this Oleksii Hetman Facebook post that both details S-300 missile self-destruct & how the Russians modify 5V55K warheads for land attack use of same.
Everything about the Przewodow missile strike weapon effects is consistent with a 150km(+) flight Russian land attack modified 5V55K aimed at Ukraine's power interconnect with Poland fired from Belarus.
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Polish NSC says it was a Ukrainian missile. They claimed earlier to have NATO E-3 tracking data.
I call Bulls--t.
The idea that a 1977 vintage rotating radar antenna looking the wrong way 4.5 of every 6 seconds can track a mach 6.7, low RCS, crossing target is risible.
22/End
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Elon Musk’s plan for XAI satellite data centers, and all use of space for any purpose, faces inevitable collapse until a solution emerges for the problem of Kessler Syndrome (see Wikipedia). 🧵
This will occur when enough collisions of small orbital debris pieces from old dead satellites hits the steadily increasing number of new satellites until the whole thing spirals into mass collisions.
Kessler Syndrome computes that this will destroy all existing
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...communications, navigation, observation and research satellites in low/medium orbit, and prevent all further satellites launched, for 40+ years, until enough pieces fall out of orbit into the Earth’s atmosphere.
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Do you remember all the 2023 US Navalist accounts o X that screamed at @johnkonrad and I about pointing out the containerized anti-ship OWA drone threat to the US fleet.
Welcome to 2026 Ukrainian anti-ship OWA drone threat, you US Navalist yo-yo's. ⬇️
"Operation Spiderweb with Chinese characteristics" is coming for you all, and we have the receipts.
We need a whole lot of air defense guns everywhere to stop drones that you guys still refuse to fund.
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For fun and reference of guns versus missile air defense, this YouTube test scenario pits 100 Shahed-136 one-way attack drones against the historic US Navy Task Force 38.1 from 1944.
THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY
Bombing Accuracy, USAAF Heavy and Medium Bombers in the ETO
MILITARY ANALYSIS DIVISION
First Edition 3 November 1945
Second Edition January 1947
You find both mission failures & gross errors were "excluded data" 2/
And that both increased altitude and the number of combat boxes involved made CEP worse.
>>This is essentially a complete tactical bomber cell in a box, sized for a small mobile drone team operating at brigade level or below. It is not a strategic deep-strike weapon, and it is not pretending to be one.