It’s not a matter of the damage inflicted on the returning soldiers. It’s the damage the soldiers might due to Putin’s approved narrative if they tell the truth on their return.
Did these bastards leave any BTG’s to guard the homeland?
Talk about overwhelming force. Donbas is a fairly small area. I remember a 100 BTG’s were sent to invade Ukraine. That was a much bigger front.
Guardian Blog
And I’m saying the damage to public opinion would be worse if they weren’t allowed to return to their loved ones, many of whom will stop at nothing to find out what really happened to them, including (gasp!) accessing western media which Putin will never be able to 100% restrict access to.
Putin has already passed a law that can get you 15 years in prison for refusing to adhere to the party line, he probably thinks he can suppress the relatives. After all, it’s only a few hundred people, right? Maybe he’d arrange for them to be reunited with their loved ones in Siberia or something. Putin is ruthless.
Huh? You’re talking about the relatives of tens of thousands of soldiers.
I was thinking of the crew of the Moskva, mostly, when I made that comment. But between the numbers of people who seem to accept the deaths of their loved ones as serving Russia or whatever, another slice of them being already from far out east… yeah, that’s still a lot of people but Putin hasn’t seem to be bothered by slaughtering thousands, whether they’re his own or not.
Google denies unblurring Russian military sites. Or rather the sites were already uncensored even before the war.
Wait, what?
Malcolm Nance joined the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine.
I’m ashamed to say that I don’t believe he’s really there. I’m too cynical and perhaps I’m too cowardly to accept that someone would do it.
Maybe Ukraine needs some Russian codes broken? Nance would be working behind the lines. Still some risk, but he’s not fighting tanks.
He’s managed to keep it under the radar, as one would expect with his intelligence skills. I’ve been reading some of his tweets over the course of this war and his presence in Ukraine’s foreign legion has only been revealed today.
He’s there. They just showed footage of him being interviewed by a correspondent in Lviv.
dont think so … spare wings lying around but no tools/machinery/lifts/etc…?
you don’t just undo 5meters worth of wings with a 3/4" nut set …and set it on the ground … there are tanks, cannons and assorted tubing/electrónics in there… to my eye, that surely looks like a decoy … like the inflatable tanks in WWII … also I see no holes in the airframe and it seems awfully lego-like 
if you poke around there, you see all kinds of rockets lying on the ground as well … I believe not even the russians are so reckless to have high-explosives and ordinance lying on the ground…(can you even set a 3meter long (donno 500kg?) missile on the ground without damaging the fins???
the planes also look also very “sterile” if you get my drift … no cockpit, no ID-markings … just like foam-models …
if you look to the left and up you see real planes, with their bubble up (easily seen on the shadows), proper markings, etc…
I don’t know we can draw much inference from those images. Compare to these at Davis-Monathan AFB in Arizona:
Fighters, A-10’s there, B-52s to the northeast. Aircraft with wings cut off and laid on the ground. That Russian airfield could be the same sort of boneyard.
From a post earlier in the thread, Russia was using inflatable decoy tanks, missile launchers and fighter jets only last year. The inflatable fighter jets are visible in the linked video.
You don’t see any inflatable tanks with inflatable parts laying around.
This is what a junk yard looks like. You pull stuff off to get to the parts you want. There are no points awarded for neatness.
I’d imagine inflatable decoys would be good for short-term deception. For longer-term dupery, I’d think one would need a more durable material to survive the harsh Siberian winters. Plus, given what we know of Russian maintenance, all the inflatable decoys would be deflated by now.
I’m on the fence.
What about the missiles?
This. If you look at the B1 Bombers they’re all missing the tails. That’s in indication that was a major fail point with the plane. Having worked for an airline using older planes it was interesting that as they aged there would be a rash of specific failures within each model that occurred close together.
That is part boneyard and part museum. Many of the cut off wings are there for display so people can look at the inside.
There is another part that is just moldering planes and they don’t have anything falling off. Driving by them always makes me think of some sort of Stephen King novel. Or the Heavy Metal plane graveyard, it depends on my mood.
So, one explanation I heard over 20 years ago (I was in the boy scouts, on a tour of…I believe it was Sheppard Air Force Base, which operated B-52s) was that some of these aircraft–particularly those that might have been engaged in delivering nuclear weapons to targets in Russia in the event of war–would have been intentionally made inoperable to comply with a nuclear arms reduction treaty. They were put in such a condition specifically because it would be easy to verify via satellite that the aircraft had been decommissioned.
And, for support of this proposition (so it’s not just me relating something I heard 20+ years ago) I will offer the following:
But I realize not all of those aircraft are B-52s.