Kyiv’s saboteurs strike deep in enemy territory, with Russian media reporting that authorities are investigating it as a terror attack.

Ukraine’s security service blew up a railway connection linking Russia to China, in a clandestine strike carried out deep into enemy territory, with pro-Kremlin media reporting that investigators have opened a criminal case into a “terrorist attack.”

The SBU set off several explosions inside the Severomuysky tunnel of the Baikal-Amur highway in Buryatia, located some 6,000 kilometers east of Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the operation told POLITICO.

“This is the only serious railway connection between the Russian Federation and China. And currently, this route, which Russia uses, including for military supplies, is paralyzed,” the official said.

Four explosive devices went off while a cargo train was moving inside the tunnel. “Now the (Russian) Federal Security Service is working on the spot, the railway workers are unsuccessfully trying to minimize the consequences of the SBU special operation,” the Ukrainian official added.

Ukraine’s security service has not publicly confirmed the attack. Russia has also so far not confirmed the sabotage.

  • lad@programming.devEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    There is a lexical tree that gives some insight. Lexicostatistical distance would have worked better, I think, but I cant seem to find the numbers for that kind of metric.

    Here I’ve edited an excerpt from the table, that shows how far Russian and Ukrainian are and how that compares to some other European languages

    lexic distance comparison between some European languages

    • rottingleafEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I don’t have data, but feels wrong. Maybe if this is about historical, genetic distance, then yes, Belarusian is quite a lot closer to Russian.

      But in reality Ukrainian and Belarusian have mostly the same West Russian lexicon, while Russian is different (say, more South Slavic, as in Church Slavic, loanwords), for historical reasons (in GDL West Russian written language was used for administration in its East Slavic parts ; in Muscovy Church Slavic was prestigious, so the official language was heavily influenced by that).

      • lad@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        You can as well download the PDF and read the description, the thing is not based on historical reasons, it analyses a selected part of each language core using algorithm that is used to analyse DNA distance, as far as I understand.

        To address what you’ve said, it sais:

        Four factors influence lexical similarity registered in the tree: (1) genetic or genealogical relationship of languages, (2) diffusion (language borrowing), (3) universal tendencies for lexical similarity such as onomatopoeia, and (4) random variation (chance).

        So the Ukrainian and Belarussian are likely different enough in everything else than the lexicon you’ve mentioned

        • rottingleafEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          So the Ukrainian and Belarussian are likely different enough in everything else than the lexicon you’ve mentioned

          They are similar in lexicon and grammar, but phonetically very different, almost as if they were in the opposite directions from Russian.