johndej said:Investing hit on the russian propagandist's daughter with rumors that it was assumed Putin may be traveling with her.
I've seen some compelling rationale that it could have been the government themselves doing it as a way of keeping the elites in line.
Heck, the girl's father wrote an essay to the effect of that it is useful to occasionally sacrifice prominent yet non critical political figures for this purpose. Some people are theorizing that he ordered the hit himself.
Mr_Asa said:I love the future.
These are 3D printed fins on RKG-3 anti-tank grenades; grenades that were first introduced in 1950 in Soviet Russia. Why are they on there? Because the Ukranians are strapping them to drones and dropping them. They need the fins for stabilization.
Small, cheap, near silent craft dropping small bombs on enemy positions.... Where have I heard of this tactic before?
Well this ought to produce some concern in the inner sanctums of the Kremlin. The Ukrainians are vocally disavowing involvement, which could be disinformation, but I'm inclined to think they have more to lose than to gain by crossing this particular line, whereas domestic Russian opposition - which has been fairly brutally silenced - has no remaining outlets for peaceful resistance, and elements may have decided that this sort of action is now the only remaining option.
This, plus the attacks in Crimea and the continuing economic decline, are bound to send a new wave of doubt through large swathes of the Russian population. What that means in practical terms, I have no idea at this point, but it's something to watch.
In reply to 02Pilot :
If Ukrainian operatives could set someone up the bomb in Moscow, there would be many better, juicier targets to go for than her.
Considering the heinous stuff that Putin did in his ascent to power, I'd say that there's a high likelihood that he or his close allies are behind this.
Edit: Of course most of the Russian talking heads are blaming it on Ukraine, but it's a Russian organisation claiming responsibility:
Russia can't recruit new combat units: not enough people willing to go to war – Ukrainian Intelligence
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/08/21/7364213/
Military authorities in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod Oblast have failed to form a tank battalion, though the procedure has been going on since the beginning of July.
Of the required 160 people, only about 30 signed a contract for service.
Apparently smoking is not the only dangerous activity going on behind the Russian lines:
Ammunition exploding near Timonovo village of Belgorod region due to hot weather, - authorities
That darn ammunition that is always exploding in hot weather! That is within Russia BTW (north east of Ukraine)
In reply to aircooled :
Wait... What?
In reply to Noddaz :
Noddaz said:In reply to aircooled :
Wait... What?
The Russians seem to come up with what are many time quite entertaining reasons why military related things keep blowing up behind their lines.
In reply to aircooled :
Kind of like the "detonation of aircraft ordinance in the storage facility" causing the explosions at the Russian air base in Crimea which took out a bunch of planes and stuff...
How they intended people to interpret that statement: Russian troops not following safety protocols accidentally set off bombs and/or missiles in the munitions depot.
How I interpret that statement: Ukrainian aircraft launched bombs and/or missiles that tore into munitions depot and blew their E36 M3 up.
I better move my Wolf brand ammo to the freezer, just in case... 
хранить патроны в сибири как условия
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/o...ine-putin.html
In early April I walked into Andriivka, a village about 40 miles from Kyiv, with my battalion in the Ukrainian territorial defense forces. We were among the first Ukrainian troops to enter the village after a Russian occupation that had lasted about a month. Shell casings and boxes of ammunition were scattered everywhere, and the houses were in various states of ruin. In one of the yards we passed there was an abandoned burned-out tank sitting on the grass.
The Russians killed civilians in Andriivka, and they ransacked and looted houses. The locals told us something else the Russians had done: One day they took mopeds and bicycles out of some of the yards and rode around on them in the street like children, filming one another with their phones and laughing with delight, as if they’d gotten some long-awaited birthday present.
A few days earlier we were in Bucha, a suburb northwest of Kyiv that was subjected to an infamously brutal occupation. The people there told us that when the first Russian convoy entered the town, the troops asked if they were in Kyiv; they could not believe that such idyllic parks and cottages could exist outside a capital. Then they looted the local houses thoroughly. They took money, cheap electronics, alcohol, clothes and watches. But, the locals said, they seemed perplexed by the robotic vacuum cleaners, and they always left those.
One resident, who told me that she was taken hostage by the Russian soldiers in her house, said they could not get over the fact that she had two bathrooms and kept insisting that she must have more people living with her.
This war is Vladimir Putin’s fatal mistake. Not because of economic sanctions and not because of the huge losses of troops and tanks but because Mr. Putin’s soldiers are from some of the poorest and most rural regions of Russia. Before this war, these men were encouraged to believe that Ukrainians lived in poverty and were culturally, economically and politically inferior.
Now the invaders have seen the reality: The Ukrainians live better than they do.
The war has brought that reality home to me, too. When Ukraine and Russia left the Soviet Union about 30 years ago, we had the same resource-based economies, the same endemic corruption and poverty. Foreigners would often think Ukraine was part of Russia, and even Ukrainians did not always understand the fundamental differences between Russians and us. But at some point, our paths diverged.
I grew up in Avdiivka, in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine. When I fell ill as a child and had a high temperature, my grandmother called an ambulance. When it didn’t arrive, we called again, and they told us they did not have enough gas to reach us. I remember that hospital, with its floor covered in tattered and bristling Soviet linoleum. People had to bring their own cotton wool. And I remember our neighbors, who worked at a chicken factory. When the business didn’t have cash, it gave them a salary of chickens. Numberless chickens ran all over the yard.
I left Avdiivka in 2014 when Russian-backed separatists declared east of my city to be the Donetsk People’s Republic. The roads I left on were covered with deep holes that nobody had ever come to fix, so people filled them with the remnants of the coal they burned on their stoves at home. You could lose your car in those holes. But this spring, when I left Kyiv to head back east to Avdiivka and the front line, I drove about 460 miles of perfect roads in less than 10 hours.
When I saw the hospital again, I felt as if I were in a hospital in a small Western European town. The building had been completely renovated, and lots of the equipment looked new. I got a similar feeling when I visited a local school that was damaged by shelling in 2015. It, too, had been renovated and equipped with modern computers. (Both the school and the hospital were recently almost completely destroyed by the Russians.)
Ukraine has learned how to build roads, schools and hospitals. Ukrainians have been able to travel to the European Union without a visa since 2017. And when Volodymyr Zelensky, a political outsider, was elected president in 2019 on an anticorruption, pro-European platform, the incumbent president, Petro O. Poroshenko, conceded immediately.
Of course, Ukraine still has its problems. There is still corruption. We cannot say that we are satisfied with our justice system: Our courts are not independent. Before the war, large numbers of Ukrainians left to work in Poland and other countries every year. We still have a long list of work that needs to be completed.
But these problems are not the same as those in Russia, where Mr. Putin has been more or less in charge for more than 20 years and elections are basically meaningless, where badly maintained roads crisscross the country — except when they just end — and where a person can be sentenced to prison for merely expressing an opinion, like Aleksei Gorinov, a member of a local council who was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.
Ten years ago Ukrainians could drink beer with Russians after the European Championship soccer matches, but we didn’t realize then that Ukraine was moving forward and Russia was moving in the opposite direction. Ukraine was trying to build a path to freedom, and Russia was building a path back to the Soviet Union with Kremlin TV and petrodollars. Eventually we grew too far apart, and something snapped.
Every day for months, I have been carrying Ukrainians who have been wounded in the fight to protect what we’ve built. Now the invaders have seen what we’ve built, too. That’s a truth that they can take home with them.
In reply to Kreb (Forum Supporter) :
In the early 2000's I used to rent and sell construction equipment. Some of my customers were from Ukraine. They paid their bills on time and built up good enough credit that Ivwas able to turn the contract into a lease for them so after renting it for a couple of years we'd apply the rent towards the purchase price and they would own it. Many were able to sell that same equipment when the recession of 2008 came along and construction ended. Leaving with $30-40,000. Plus what they earned from using it.
In Fact Ukrainian and Hispanic were some of my best customers and always paid on time.
frenchyd said:In reply to Kreb (Forum Supporter) :
In the early 2000's I used to rent and sell construction equipment. Some of my customers were from Ukraine. They paid their bills on time and built up good enough credit that Ivwas able to turn the contract into a lease for them so after renting it for a couple of years we'd apply the rent towards the purchase price and they would own it. Many were able to sell that same equipment when the recession of 2008 came along and construction ended. Leaving with $30-40,000. Plus what they earned from using it.
In Fact Ukrainian and Hispanic were some of my best customers and always paid on time.
Thanks. An interesting tidbit - I was listening to a replay of a radiolab podcast made 3-5 years ago. The topic was what cultures are more prone to follow orders from authority versus which ones are more independent and resist authority. As you'd guess, on the compliant end were countries like Singapore. In the top 3 of most independent spirit was Ukraine.
So there is this. And yes, this is the modern world, not the 1700's:
Russian government sources confirmed that Russia is bringing Ukrainian children to Russia and having Russian families adopt them. Russian federal subject (region) Krasnodar Krai’s Family and Childhood Administration posted about a program under which Russian authorities transferred over 1,000 children from Mariupol to Tyumen, Irkutsk, Kemerov, and Altay Krai where Russian families have adopted them.[1] The Administration stated that over 300 children are still waiting to “meet their new families” and that citizens who decide to adopt these children will be provided with a one-time bonus by the state.[2] Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) additionally reported that Russian officials transferred 30 Ukrainian children from Khartsyzk, Ilovaysk, and Zuhres in occupied Donetsk Oblast to Nizhny Novgorod under the guise of having the children participate in youth educational-training programs.[3] The forcible transfer of children of one group to another “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group“ is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[4]
And general update:
- Russian government sources confirmed that Russian authorities are bringing Ukrainian children to Russia and having Russian families adopt them. The forcible transfer of children from one group to another “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
- Russian authorities are deploying security forces to Luhansk Oblast likely in response to waning support for the war and growing unwillingness to fight among Luhansk residents. This deployment diverts these forces from operations elsewhere in Ukraine, likely contributing to the broader Russian failure to translate limited tactical gains into operational successes.
- Russian officials may have conducted a false flag event in Donetsk City to justify attacks against Ukrainian government buildings on Ukrainian Independence Day.
- Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northeast and south of Bakhmut, on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City, and southwest of Donetsk City.
- Russian forces made limited gains east of Mykolaiv City and in northwestern Kherson Oblast.
- Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian military assets and ground lines of communication (GLOCs) in Kherson Oblast.
- Russian federal subjects (regions) are continuing to increase one-time enlistment bonuses for recruits, and are likely recruiting personnel with no prior military experience for specialist positions.
- Ukrainian partisan activity continues to disrupt Russian occupation activities.
aircooled said:So there is this. And yes, this is the modern world, not the 1700's:
The forcible transfer of children of one group to another “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group“ is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[4]
Sad to say that this is not outside of "the modern world." The U.S. did not get around to prohibiting this until 1978, in regards to Native American children. Look up ICWA, if you are curious. That was only 44 years ago.
Gotta love the Ukrainians "marketing" department:
Ukraine holds victory 'parade' of captured Russian tanks to mock Putin who 'dreamt of capturing Kyiv in 3 days'
https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-holds-victory-parade-captured-154641587.html
Russia is pulling all its fighter jets out of Crimea after a series of strikes on its military outposts there, secret NATO report says
Not surprising. It will certainly make it more difficult to provide air support for the troops in western Ukraine and will likely stop most of the cruise missile attacks on Odessa.
On a similar line, after the attack on the airbase, the innocent Russian civilians, vacationing while their fellow countryman machine gun Ukrainians and dropping missiles on civilian cities in there noble ongoing quest to rid Ukraine of their Nazi problems, where fleeing Crimea in mass creating huge traffic jams.
Perhaps, they should "find" Nazi's in some other vacation spot to give the weary (and certainly only the most wealthy) Russians somewhere to relax.
Along those lines:
Russian military continue to deploy additional resources to guard Crimean bridge
(the bridge above) It looks like the Russians are realizing that if the Ukrainians make a significant push north of Crimea, this bridge is the only real way in and out of Crimea (other than by sea but there appear to be NO ports on that side of Crimea). The bridge can be seen near Kerch and is clearly a very juicy target:
Kerch looks to be a port. They shut down ferry service after the bridge was built, however.
Based on Twitter and Signal feed excitement it appears the long awaited southern push has started. Apparently, this is a move to retake Kherson. Guessing it will be 24-48hrs before we see verifiable info. Slava Ukraine!
Armed forces of Ukraine have launched offensive on several directions in southern Ukraine - spokesperson
In Russian-occupied Nova Kakhovka, Kherson region, evacuations from workplaces has been announced, people are leaving for shelters - RIA Novosti
Ukrainian forces have begun "shaping" operations in South Ukraine to prepare the battlefield for a significant Ukrainian counteroffensive, two senior US officials briefed on the intel tell. US believes the long-anticipated counteroffensive will include air and ground ops
Hard to say what exactly is going on, but in the original theme of this thread, it's probably pretty apparent to the Russians where the force concentrations are. No info I see yet on any significant Ukrainian air or missiles attacks, (that are reported of course). We probably will not see a lot that the Ukrainians / US doesn't want us to see, at least initially.
This could even be a general distraction.
Question:
It is easy to sit in the Ukrainian bleachers and cheer on their team. No lack of YouTube coverage to guide emotions and opinions.
I am looking for media that covers this event from the perspective of what Russian citizens see and hear both in country and abroad. Is there a Russian equivalent to Fox news or other sources for pushing Russia's side of the war? What little I find is being presented second hand by the Ukrainian supporters and is out of context.
Not that I am pro Russia in this whole thing, just that as someone who has lived in a lot of countries, I realize that the fish inside the fishbowl see a very different world than those looking in from the outside.
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