P.S. Russian milbloggers are delivering their own “sobering” reports.
Americans are worried that the Ukrainians can’t break through Russian lines. Russians are worried that they will run out of reserves to shovel to the front to stop the Ukrainians breaking through.
Instead, Patriarch Kirill has indicated that the Russian Orthodox Church may even be willing to overlook such crimes. “The Church realizes that if someone, driven by a sense of duty and the need to honor his oath, stays loyal to his vocation and dies while carrying out his military duty, then he is without any doubt doing a deed that is equal to sacrifice. He sacrifices himself for others. And therefore, we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed,” Kirill stated in a September 2022 sermon.
Ukrainian forces have broken through Russian defences in attempt to cross Dnipro river, military bloggers claim
Daniel Boffey
Ukrainian forces have made an attempt to cross the Dnipro river dividing liberated and occupied Kherson potentially breaching what has for months served as the frontline in the south of Ukraine.
Russian military bloggers reported that up to seven boats, each carrying around six to seven people, landed near the settlement of Kozachi Laheri, east of Kherson city, and broke through Russian defensive lines.
It was claimed that the Ukrainian soldiers had advanced up to 800metres after getting to shore although it appeared that Russian forces had some success in fighting them back.
The Russian imposed head of the occupied part of the Kherson oblast, Vladimir Saldo, claimed the Ukrainian raid on Tuesday had been repelled.
The respected Institute of the Study War think tank in Washington said, however, that it appeared that a “limited raid” may have had more success than Saldo had acknowledged.
In the latest update, the Institute wrote: “The majority of prominent Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces managed to utilize tactical surprise and land on the east bank before engaging Russian forces in small arms exchanges, and Saldo was likely purposefully trying to refute claims of Ukrainian presence in this area to avoid creating panic in the already-delicate Russian information space.”
They added that there was satellite imagery to suggest there had been a major battle in the area.
“Hotspots on available NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) data from the past 24 hours in this area appear to confirm that there was significant combat, likely preceded or accompanied by artillery fire”, they write. “By the end of the day on August 8, many Russian sources had updated their claims to report that Russian forces retain control over Kozachi Laheri, having pushed Ukrainian forces back to the shoreline, and that small arms skirmishes are occurring in shoreline areas near Kozachi Laheri and other east bank settlements.”
There have been a number of attempts by Ukrainian forces to cross the Dnirpo river which has been established as the dividing line between the warring nations since Ukraine’s successful offensive in Kherson last autumn.
In June, a raid was executed by Ukraine’s elite 73rd Marine Special Operations unit but the latest landing appears to have been the most significant of recent months despite doubts over the sustainability of the Ukrainian positions.
Just the thing Russia needed to do to stop the Nazi comparisons in the west… threaten to take Paris.
It’s not immediately obvious why fireworks would be stored in an optics factory
With any luck, the factory’s production will be disrupted for a good long time.
@vermes82 , you guys have a weird sense of humor. But I guess if Putin was next door, I might get a little warped as well.
I mean, who among us hasn’t, at one time or another, . . . .?
… the world’s most feared welfare militia 
Russian officer “Colonel Shuvalov” described on Telegram how it is encouraged to fabricate reports about destroyed Ukrainian equipment by filming strikes on different days using various weapons and equipment. This is done to please the upper leadership since everyone benefits from positive reports and inflated numbers. It’s a long post but worth reading (source: Telegram: Contact @shouvalov)
"When civilians are surprised by Lancets and Krasnopols attacking enemy decoys, that’s normal. But when people who at least served conscript service are surprised by it (and even more so they ridicule it), then you should also be surprised.
The Soviet system of military service (which we have morally preserved) is very simple. The primary desire for a military man is to make something go boom, let’s be honest. The more modern and powerful the available weapons are, the greater the internal need to boom them. The category “expensive” in military psychology is not applicable if it is not coming from your salary.
The second point are the reports. You can know for sure that you are hitting a decoy, and not the enemy’s vehicle, you can suspect this, but if the decoy as a whole is not bad and suits you for a report, then you hit it and report about success to the top.
Any Soviet officer (whom many people f*p on today) would have done just that. Because the army is simple. Because your report about the hit target (especially a “fat” one) is a joy for you, and for the authorities, and for the authorities of the authorities.
But if you give an “All Clear” and write a dull report that “the detected target turned out to be false and it seemed inappropriate to hit it because of the need to save precision-guided ammunition,” then you will become an a*shole for both the authorities and fellow officers. And for all of them, you will be “not really military.”
How is this problem solved by the enemy? Their “Western specialists” got control over the targets. They did not try to break the established psychotype of the Soviet officer school (Ukrainian officers, especially the older ones, remained Soviet in their psychotype, there’s nowhere for anything else to come from), they simply took control, removing the motivation to create false reports. A kind of substitution of the military classics for a business approach.
But we’re not only hitting wooden models. Now I’ll say a vile and unpopular thing, but let at least one active officer point that out if I’m lying: before, and after the appearance of Western military equipment - in general, a very popular way to give a good result upwards is to beautifully fire at the enemy’s already destroyed equipment.
Bradley, that was ATGMed yesterday, today can be beautifully fired at from helicopters, and tomorrow you can hit it from self-propelled guns. With video recording, reports, and all the right angles. So this becomes not one, but three wrecked Bradleys. Since the political leadership is demanding a specific report, the General Staff will demand such a report too.
And the military will solve it the way they know how - in a military way. I won’t list specific examples, but everyone in the army knows perfectly well what I’m talking about. This is not exotic, this is already a mass practice.
Exotic is to make an order for a service of designing pictures a video of an objective control of a battle. You give an acquaintance a video and a photo of a wrecked MTLB, you give him a task, and he returns high-quality pictures to you, where instead of an MTLB there is a tank or self-propelled guns, next to which there are several wrecked infantry fighting vehicles.
But in the army itself, no one will ever try and fight this, and it is stupid to scold the General Staff or the minister. Some external solution is needed. Something similar to how the targets of the Ukrainians are controlled by Western instructors.
Because for the military, everything that I mentioned above is, as it were, not a crime, and not even a “Zalyot” [i.e. blunder]. “Zalyot” is when you were caught doing this, but caught in such a way that you could not get yourself out. Passing out the John Deere harvesters as Leopards was, of course, an oversight, but even then they got away. Although this should be punished three times, primarily those who were stupid enough to create this setup and get caught.
And the rest … The political leadership has its own universe, from which it gives orders and instructions to the military leadership. The military leadership already has its own universe, very different. And it gives instructions down and reports up, based on its vision of the situation. At the bottom - there is generally a harsh reality, but its adjusted for military perception. The necessary reports are required from you in the universe of military leadership, and if reality does not correspond to it, these are problems of reality. You’re an officer, you can do it."
Taken where it happened all I can say is Finlandssvenskar bättre folk.
Of course they might be part of the Finnish speaking minority.
Unrelated to that, I have a question regarding Finnish policies towards Russians.
I just talked to a former co-worker. They have family in St. Petersburg. They financed a trip of their daughter (who was visiting her grandparents at the time) with her Grandfather to Tallin, by bus. The bus had to cross Finland, and the grandfather was turned away then. He was given a formal letter of rejection, in Finnish only. The thing is: he holds a valid Schengen Visum, as part of the family. Part of the argument is that he was able to travel without assistance, and thus is not dependent on his daughter and granddaughter (even though they financed the trip).
Do you know if this is standard practice right now?
For them, it’s getting more and more complicated to visit each other. Mother and daughter are currently in Russia, on a visit to the (grand)parents. The father is not, since he holds no Russian passport, and used to travel on tourist visa which was much easier to obtain than family visa. By now applying for family visa is simply not possible any longer, since the Russian consulate and embassy in German seem to have shut down the online-only application process. (You need to book an appointment, and none are available. )
Sound like weird route I think there are still direct bus routes from St. Petersburg to Tallinn.
I have seen few high end Russian cars in Helsinki this summer. I wonder how they got in? I think one was a Lamborghini Urus…
