ETA Why do I have a nagging feeling that we will see a radioactive mushroom cloud before this is all over?
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Russia threatens Ukraine’s ‘decision-making centres’ if Kyiv uses western…
Then Moscow is certainly on a target chart.
About time Putin gets a cruise missile up his ass.
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From March:
Wagner chief accuses Moscow of ‘misleading Russians’ over Ukraine offensive
The chief of mercenary group Wagner accused Moscow’s defence ministry of deceiving Russians about the course of Ukraine’s offensive and pointed to Kyiv’s progress on the battlefield, AFP reports.
Early this month Kyiv’s military launched its counteroffensive in the east and south of the country in an effort to claw back territory lost since last year. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that Ukraine’s offensive is failing.
But Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose forces had for months led an assault for towns in eastern Ukraine including Bakhmut, accused the defence ministry of not telling the truth and losing territory to Ukrainian troops.
“They are misleading the Russian people,” he said in an audio message released by his spokespeople.
A number of villages, including Piatykhatky has been lost, Prigozhin said, pointing to a lack of arms and ammunition.
“Huge chunks have been handed over to the enemy,” he said, adding: “All of this is being totally hidden from everyone,”
“One day Russia will wake up to discover that Crimea too has been handed over to Ukraine,” he said.
Kyiv has reported modest gains, retaking eight settlements in the first cautious steps of a fightback against entrenched Russian positions.
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Another mysterious death…
Karshkov, a founder of the Cyprus-based online bookmaker 1xBet, was born in Ukraine’s Kyiv region in 1980 and later moved to Bryansk in Russia, where he headed the department for combating cybercrime in the regional department of Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Russia’s Investigative Committee placed Karshkov on a wanted list in 2020 for the illegal organization and conduct of gambling, independent Latvia-based Russian news outlet Meduza reported.
Cyprus = 
lots of .
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Russian military blogger explains the importance of the Chongar bridge: it was best suited for the Russian military and civilian supply in Kherson region, it carried 70% of the traffic. While it can be repaired, Russia does not have reliable means to prevent cruise missile strikes in the area.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/22/politics/ukraine-counteroffensive-western-assessment
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That reporters are being blocked is simply good operations security. Keep all intel locked down so that the Russians can’t read about what’s really going on.
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Those critical of the limitations imposed on journalists argue that they have less to do with operational security than with an effort to control the narrative. Authorities have retaliated against journalists who have offered a more honest, if unflattering, view of the impact of the war on troops, and against at least one military commander who shared a frank but pessimistic view of the war effort, even as some Ukrainian officials have argued that such authentic assessments are needed to pressure allies into providing the aid the country desperately needs.
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I think it is no secret any more that one of the primary objectives of the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been the strategic decimation of Russian supply bases and vital intersections. You just have to look at the map. All major targets are along the primary supply lines and many of them are only dust now.
The Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblast are getting methodically isolated and degraded, similar to how Kherson has been engaged and eventually liberated. The difference, however, is the magnitude which is several times bigger than back in November 2022.
This is exactly how you would pummel an enemy on a strategic scale before sending in the heavy cavalry.
In order to illustrate the impact of the (de facto) destruction of the Chonhar bridge we see the original path of a supply truck coming from the Dzhankoi to Melitopol in red and the remaining two alternatives in blue and yellow going through Armiansk. The supply lines have been almost doubled and they lead now through less useful roads then the main artery before.
Double the time or half the supply in the same time equals to strategic degradation, not mentioning Ukrainian partisans having now their chances doubled to interfere.
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Well, duh. Who doesn’t want to control the narrative, especially when you know the opponent’s forces and their families might be reading your news? Things like this also affect the morale on the other side.
This war is also a war of information. The Russians desperately need any negative straws they can grasp. This is just the age-old battle between journalism and intel. Sure, it sucks that we armchair generals aren’t getting the fix we want right away, but the lives of soldiers are on the line. I can live with the Ukrainian military applying overly strict information hygiene.
I keep wanting to say Ukraine is emulating Apple, but that seems a little macabre.
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Today is day 17 of Ukraine’s Offensive.
In the First Gulf War it took 1,700+ US Air Force & coalition fighter & bomber aircraft 37 (!) days to attrition Iraq’s military enough to trigger the ground campaign.
Ukraine has 0 of that airpower. All attrition has to be done by
Wagner chief accuses military of ‘deceiving’ Russian society over reasons for invasion
Pjotr Sauer
Wagner group head Yevgeny Prigozhin on Friday questioned Russia’s justifications for invading Ukraine, criticising the country’s military top brass for “deceiving” Russian society.
In a 30-minute video posted on his Telegram channel, Prigozhin dismissed Moscow’s claims that Kyiv was planning to launch an offensive on the Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine in February 2022.
“There was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24,” Prigozhin said.
“The ministry of defence is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there was insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole Nato block,” the Wagner head said.
“The special operation was started for a completely different reason.”
Prigozhin also said Russia’s leadership could have avoided the war by negotiating with Ukraine’s president, Volodomyr Zelenskiy.
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Obviously I don’t expect mainstream media sources to be as pro-Ukraine as the pro-Ukrainian sources on Telegram and Twitter, but CNN sure seems to be going out of its way to find anonymous “senior military officials” that are negative about Ukraine’s chances of success in the war. I think it’s also interesting that they use these “sources” to write the headlines (the only bits most people will read) when their named sources almost overwhelmingly say the opposite to the anonymous briefers.
I thought they might start being less actively shitheaded now that Licht is out, but I guess that kind of top-down attitude change takes a while to seep through any organisation…
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Isn’t this the plot of Secret Invasion?
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