five shell casings and four Makarov pistols
And several thousand suspects.
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Initial reports claimed suicide as the most likely cause of death
and
Boyko reportedly entered his office as usual after arriving at work and soon afterwards, five gunshots were heard.
That’s determination.
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Or inadequate marksmanship training.
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The fascist mindset is inimical to humour.
That said, the Russians do sometimes do a passable attempt at impersonating the Keystone Cops. 
If Zelensky keeps insisting it WAS Russia / could not have been a Ukrainian missile, he may find it does have an impact. He may have mis-stepped there.
NATO is ready to give him a pass on this - he needs to take it, quickly, and move on.
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I wonder if Macron will have to fire another senior intelligence official when this renewed bout of likely-unfounded optimism also falls through?
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Let’s play “Guess who will be thrown out an window”.
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Not the dude with dark hair and glasses. He’s wisely using strategically deployed cowardice and staying silent while the others yell.
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This is pretty spectacular footage if true.
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A human rights group that works closely with Russian inmates and investigates abuses by the security services has reportedly received a flood of calls from members of those same security services desperately trying to flee.
Gulagu.net, founded by Vladimir Osechkin, reports that the final straw appears to have been the brutal sledgehammer-execution video released by Russia’s private army last week—a stomach-churning extrajudicial killing that the Kremlin politely averted its eyes from while the Putin-linked businessman thought to be behind it uses it for his own PR campaign.
“The reprisal with the use of a sledgehammer and the cruelty of [Wagner Group founder Yevgeny] Prigozhin, with the tacit consent of Putin, had an unexpected effect: for the third day, there is a steady stream of messages to the Gulagu.net hotline from employees of the Interior Ministry, the [Investigative Committee], the FSB and the [Federal Protective Service], the Federal Bailiff Service, etc., who want to leave the territory of lawlessness and cruelty,” Gulagu.net reported.
Why all of a sudden a sledgehammer execution moves the needle? Henchmen fearing henchmen? A depraved senseless war getting too depraved and senseless for some?
Perhaps in a sign of things to come, Putin on Thursday seemed to signal he has no plans to listen to any of the more moderate figures who might caution him against escalation. Instead, he purged the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council of all the experts who raised questions about the war and the public execution of defector Yevgeny Nuzhin, replacing them with a hardliner war reporter and other Kremlin loyalists.
Evil has no bottom floor.
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Generally speaking, winter weather favors the defenders in a war. Rain, snow and mud make it harder to move large vehicles, tanks and heavy artillery — and the invaders are typically the ones who depend more on such movements. The invading Russian forces experienced this last February, with numerous reports of expensive equipment being abandoned in the mud and tanks sticking to roadways where they were easy targets for Ukrainian drones.
Now, however, the momentum of the war has shifted and the Ukrainians are essentially “on offense” while the Russians dig in to defend their positions. This is what Milley was referring to when he predicted the pace of operations to slow in the coming months.
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Yeah, and though Russian morale may be sinking, it’s better to just keep needling them, rain artillery on their sorry asses to make morale even worse, but hold off on actually attacking.
The Ukrainian military has been giving us a textbook lesson this summer and autumn about how to fight combined arms in the modern era, how to incorporate drones and so on. We talk about logistics being the actual recipe for success or failure, but I think the other big, big factor is that the Ukrainian chain of command actually respects their soldiers.
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