Also, how long would it take to coordinate an extra SpaceX Dragon flight to retrieve our astronauts? I’m not sure I want them flying on Soyuz, even if it IS landing in Kazakhstan rather than Russia.
It’s apparently also the colors of the school they went to, and that’s the official story. It might even be the truth.
Although the cosmonauts say they had a lot of yellow fabric. 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/19/ukraine-russia-international-space-station-flag/
Russia’s space force also denied that the color was meant to reflect the Ukrainian flag. It said the uniform’s design reflected the colors of Bauman Moscow State Technical University, where the cosmonauts studied.
“Sometimes yellow is just yellow,” the force, Roscosmos, wrote on Telegram.
“It became our turn to pick a color. But in fact, we had accumulated a lot of yellow material so we needed to use it. So that’s why we had to wear yellow,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
And “months in advance” I’m sure it had never occurred to anyone that Russia would be invading Ukraine.
Like back in December any of us would have just scoffed at the notion, right???
Oh wait…
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Another astronaut (that went to the same school) also used the same jumpsuit in 2015.
The mission patch looks a lot like the school’s crest.
It is very unlikely it was meant as a protest. It’s cool that it can be seen as one though.
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Or the Russian space agency assumed that the war would be over by now and they would be welcoming Ukraine as Russia’s newest state.
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Honestly, i read those suits as “yellow”, not as “Ukrainian yellow and blue”.
To me, this is truly the weirdest part of the story. How does Roscosmos wind up with a surplus of yellow fabric?
Like… I do not have a glut of yellow fabric at home because I never order yellow fabric.
Why would Roscosmos have so much extra that they had to use it up on these suits? Do they not have the clout or funding within Russia to get fabric in whatever color they want? Is this like how most barns are painted red because red paint is cheapest?
It’s not like magic markers where you get one in every color so if all of your drawings are pink & purple you have a ton of gray & yellow markers with all of their coloring potential untapped while your pink & purple ones are dried up. At least, I don’t think it is???
I am intrigued at how that could possibly be anything other than the most obvious barefaced lie.
I’m pretty sure that was a joke, not meant to be taken seriously.
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Interesting, apparently it wasn’t even quite what we would now consider to be paint, but linseed oil and soil with iron oxide (which stopped moss from growing)
Why Are Barn Painted Red | Why Are Barn Red | The Urban Painter.
Oh, I didn’t get that. I still don’t. How is it funny?
The blue circles make them seem “yellow and blue”. And the fact that the Russian flag is completely obscured by the name tag.
But given that the Russian flag is clearly on there I’m more willing to believe it’s a wild coincidence. I notice the yellow & blue far more easily than the Russian flag though.
The wife in the family that lives next door is from Russia. I guess from somewhere near the border with Ukraine. Her mom was here for quite a while a few years ago when a baby was born. She was able to get out of Russia and back here this week. I think it is very much int the air how long she’ll be here.
Depends on which era you’re talking about
https://scitechdaily.com/why-are-barns-almost-always-painted-red/
Article also mentions the linseed oil & dirt from earlier days.
I think the reason it was cheaper in the Sears catalog is still largely the same reason: iron oxide gives it the red hue and is more plentiful and cheaper than what was used to give other paints their colors.
It’s a silly, ridiculous answer, as if the cosmonauts sewed their own suits a week before the mission.
I don’t really understand why Mariupol is so important. It looks like the sea that it’s on is surrounded by Russian territory. So can anything foreign that’s significant get in there anyways? It seems like a place that if Russia wanted to take, they could just take it.
Looks like a huge port facility, so strategically important
Mariupol completes a land bridge between Crimea and Russia. That’s the main reason it’s a Russian priority. As we have seen, their logistics are not great, and trying to coordinate supply routes via anything other than railroad is a big problem.
eta: This land bridge will source their push to Odesa, which is a military point of interest for reasons I don’t entirely understand (also a port…would be the last major one Ukraine has which I think is the big factor).
There’s a video out there somewhere about how they were so well able to mass troops prior to the invasion because of their rail network, but beyond that network everything was garbage. If I come across it again I’ll link it.
Yep. Ukraine is a big grain exporter. It’s best to do that by sea. Imagine if Ukraine ends up being divided.
Yeah, the obvious territorial goal to me would be for Russia to take everything east of the Dnieper river, but up to this point they seem to be more focused on Kyiv and the southern coast, which says they really are trying to take the whole country…which literally no one believes they can do and sustain.