Soviet Afghanistan war

I was very surprised to see there was no topic for this, so here it is, I guess anybody with pictures, videos, or articles relating to the Soviet-Afghan war can post them here  

hate to say it, but their was a really informative threat on militaryphotos started by hist2004 and a GRU operator from russia from the 24thObrSpN brigade . He was a veteran from the afghan war and also the 1st chechen war. You should probably search it. He was really informaitve and it was an absolutely amazing read. He was a reason i used to be overthere.I wish there were more users like him on this forum(there are quality posters here too) and others froums on the internet.When you read his post , get your popcorn out

Was 16th Obrn legit? There was the whole RomanS poser thing, and it always seemed weird to me, a Spetsnaz guy, with such good info, good English, posting on foreign board...idk maybe it is just me.


Also, some of his views on Chechens were absolutely retarded.

Just throwing that out there.

Yes, I was under the impression that it turned out that the spetsnaz guy was RomanS and as largely based on an amalgam of a few of his Russian friends that were in the military.

TR1 wrote:Was 16th Obrn legit? There was the whole RomanS poser thing, and it always seemed weird to me, a Spetsnaz guy, with such good info, good English, posting on foreign board...idk maybe it is just me.


Also, some of his views on Chechens were absolutely retarded.

Just throwing that out there.

There was a differece between the quality of RomanS posting to the 16thObrSpN. He seemed really informed!....I think hist2004 who was in real life if i recalled correctly a journalistor blogger :? actually interviewed the guy and posted the link. I have the link book marked some where, just to lazy to look at the moment. I actually think he is legit because his posting were consistent but then that said his english was excellent as the information he provided. Some of the stuff he posted were not found in those Survov books, so i highly doubt he is a mere poser....Roman was easy to figure out man

gloriousfatherland wrote:hate to say it, but their was a really informative threat on militaryphotos started by hist2004 and a GRU operator from russia from the 24thObrSpN brigade . He was a veteran from the afghan war and also the 1st chechen war. You should probably search it. He was really informaitve and it was an absolutely amazing read. He was a reason i used to be overthere.I wish there were more users like him on this forum(there are quality posters here too) and others froums on the internet.When you read his post , get your popcorn out

Yes I actually read that thread, but I was talking about this site. The Afghanistan war was a huge event in Russian/Soviet history and I just thought it deserved its own thread.

I agree it deserves its own thread too.

A website of interest is http://artofwar.ru/e/english/

Which has an Afghanistan section too, though not all the authors write in English, but an online translator should make things a bit easier...

GarryB wrote:I agree it deserves its own thread too.

A website of interest is http://artofwar.ru/e/english/

Which has an Afghanistan section too, though not all the authors write in English, but an online translator should make things a bit easier...

Yeah this is actually a little off topic, but I've been using google translate as standard and, well. . it sucks. Do you have any suggestions for a free online translation software that may do the job better?

I use a plug-in for Firefox, but AFAIK it uses Google to do the translations.

Pretty much when you open a page in a foreign language you right click and choose the translate page option and it opens a new tab and translates it. I think I have two versions of it installed because it always opens two tabs and does two translations... will be looking in to fixing that now.

GarryB wrote:I use a plug-in for Firefox, but AFAIK it uses Google to do the translations.

Pretty much when you open a page in a foreign language you right click and choose the translate page option and it opens a new tab and translates it. I think I have two versions of it installed because it always opens two tabs and does two translations... will be looking in to fixing that now.

You can get it to do it automatically, that's what it does for me though I have no idea how I did it.

gloriousfatherland wrote:

TR1 wrote:Was 16th Obrn legit? There was the whole RomanS poser thing, and it always seemed weird to me, a Spetsnaz guy, with such good info, good English, posting on foreign board...idk maybe it is just me.


Also, some of his views on Chechens were absolutely retarded.

Just throwing that out there.

There was a differece between the quality of RomanS posting to the 16thObrSpN. He seemed really informed!....I think hist2004 who was in real life if i recalled correctly a journalistor blogger :? actually interviewed the guy and posted the link. I have the link book marked some where, just to lazy to look at the moment. I actually think he is legit because his posting were consistent but then that said his english was excellent as the information he provided. Some of the stuff he posted were not found in those Survov books, so i highly doubt he is a mere poser....Roman was easy to figure out man

Hmm, yeah I tend to agree after re-reading some of his stuff. The threads with Hist2004 show he was at the least very well informed in the subject, and posers generally make a mistake+get exposed pretty easily when talking about so many specifics.

I certainly don't agree with some of his political/racial views, and he seemed a bit too enthusiastic for a Spetsnaz guy to share tales of them killing Chechens or whatnot, but that doesn't invalidate his info either.

Well fake or not it doesn't matter, his info seemed legit and that's all that matters to me.

GarryB wrote:I use a plug-in for Firefox, but AFAIK it uses Google to do the translations.

Pretty much when you open a page in a foreign language you right click and choose the translate page option and it opens a new tab and translates it. I think I have two versions of it installed because it always opens two tabs and does two translations... will be looking in to fixing that now.

name of plugin please... I am tired of going to translit and translate ru. Of course I am Russian so I can read it, but I can't translate alot of stuff for you guys...

Here is a screen shot of my add ons page (in mozilla firefox just press the shift key and the control key and the letter a and a tab will open showing add ons).

As you can see the translation add on is called My-Translator 0.3. To use it basically right click somewhere on a page and select translate page, or translate frame, and it will open a new tab with the page translated.

If you are interested the top addon called Fast Video Download (with search menu) 4.1.6 is a useful add on too, if you look at the bottom right of the firefox page the small icon farthest to the right will let you download videos.

So if you go to a new channels page and there is a video if you play the video the icon at the bottom right will start flashing orange and if you click on it it will open a small menu with the filename of any video running on that page. If you click on it it will open a dialog box to save it... usually as an MP4 file.

Sometimes it will show lots of files when a page has lots of flash videos (ie for adverts etc) but you can usually tell by size as it downloads.

Hope this is helpful...

BTW I learned about the translater addon from coolieno99, so thanks again for that... it has been very useful.

BTW I should add that that Freecorder addon is amazing if you like to download Youtube files.

It has a toolbar with a youtube button so you go to the youtube site and find a video you want and click on the button on the toolbar and a splash screen opens up and lists a variety of file formats and sizes you can choose from. Pick a format (flv, mp4, mkv and others depending on the video you pick) and a screen size including HD sizes depending on the video, and then click save.

It has a few other buttons I hardly ever use but there is one button to automatically convert a video file to an MP3.

I use it to download music videos and then convert to MP3 to play on my music player.

Wow, that is not at all what I thought you were talking about. I'll give it a try later, thanks

Μassoud at 03.11, the legendary leader of afghan resistance that was killed by Taliban at 9/9/2001

Main Soviet equipment used:
1.Mi-24 Hind
2.T-62, T-55
3.BMP-2

Gromov was the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, crossing on foot the Friendship Bridge spanning the Amu-Daria river on 15 February 1989, the day the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan was completed. At 06.11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBVE-rNM90

documentary from the convoy

Incredible footage Pyrrus, thank you for sharing.

you're welcome Kalishnikov, I'm glad you enjoyed this

I'd like to recommend you documentary 'Ohota na Osu' ('Hunt for Stinger'). This is the film in Russian language, and it is against rules to put such thing here. But anyway this is quite interesting documentary. Here you have basic description about it given by authors:
Afghanistan, in the mid 80's. Americans share their top and secret weapon – anti aircraft rocket launcher 'Stinger', in Russian 'Osa'. It's deadly for aircrafts and helicopters. The USA hope, with help of this 'insect', to force Russians back from Afghanistan. The Soviet air forces start incur visible losses. Urgently, they had to get at least one specimen of 'Stinger' to let ingineers find an antidote against the Stinger's bite. All hands on the board to find it. Spetznaz's units are organizing ambushes for weeks, dozens of enemie's convoys with weapons intercepted, military counterintelligence checks almost every Mudhahedins' group. But Stinger stays unreachable!..
At first the audience will see the participants of the dramatic hunt – pilots., fighters of Spetznaz GRU and KGB associates who , after three months of inhuman tension and incredible risk, managed to capture the Stinger.

I made an effort to translate at least narrations picturing the doing. This is an example:

That day 25th of September 30 fighters of the most harsh field commander Gulbudin Hekmatiar's group take positions on the rocky slope of the hills surrounding the airport. There are long pipes in their hands. Ingineer Gaffar is in charge of the group, one of few high educated amongst mujahideens. His men secretly got there from Pakistan. They are supposed to carry the special task. In the dusk eight soviet helicopters are landing. Ingineer gives a signal to fighters. In seconds three rockets start from pipes, after several seconds two more. Three helicopters, all in flames, fall on the ground. The new phase is introduced for the war in Afghanistan.

The headquarters of the 40th Army didn't realise what happened at once. The intelligence reported about the appearance of the newest portable anti-aircraft device amongst mujahideens BEFORE their usage. But proves were being demanded, which appeared a bit later.

if you are interesed in carrying on I may keep translating. Anyway, the original film you may find here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yVP5N9-33w

After getting their hands on the Stinger they found it wasn't that much better than their own SA-14, and was no even as good as the simple downgraded SA-16 they were selling to their Warpac allies. The SA-18 was superior in every way to the Stinger.

Of course that was largely irrelevant, what was actually important was defences against such weapons and the introduction of the Stinger led to a change in tactics where they tended to use artillery rather more than air mobile troops.

This reduced their effectiveness, but also resulted in a larger number of civilian casualties as the artillery tended to be fairly indiscriminate and heavy handed.

If any russophobe would see this he would emmidiately say that this is faulty soviet propaganda that doesnt deserve even a closer look