Moderating:
Understanding it can be difficult, please remember that bringing politics into an MPSIMS thread is not allowed. Both, please don’t do this again.
No warnings issued.
Wow, those are both actually big fires, not just “someone burned popcorn in the microwave” fires. Huh. Interesting question as to whether that’s coincidence or not.
Yep, any or all of the above.
Schadenfreude for sure.
That’s not true eh. Sorry about that.
It appears America and NATO are determined to go for the slow bleed here. That will extract the maximum suffering on the Russian side, to be sure, but also maximize the misery of Ukraine as well. I’d rather they speed it up to help Ukraine, even if it cuts Russian suffering short.
‘Sorey aboat that.’ 
Everybody’s talking about the fires, but there is a more important issue: how much damage will those fires do to Russia?
The building has a scary name (“Aerospace Defense Forces’ Second Central Research Institute”)–but what actually goes on there?
And the chemical factory–what specific products did it make? Let’s assume that the products are fully-weaponized chemicals. What effect will the fire have?
I assume that Russia has plenty of stockpiles of chemical weapons ready for immediate use. So the sabotage (if that’s what it was) is a nice touch of success by somebody’s undercover special forces, but will it affect the war?
Never mind, fires already covered. Another good source is The War Zone for defense news worldwide.
Ukrainian and Russian are different languages.
What constitutes a language vs a dialect is always fuzzy (see Max Weinrich), but I expect plenty of ethnic Ukrainians living in Russia grew up speaking Russian like Russians.
Almost all of the ethnic Ukrainians living in Russia speak Russian, in fact most were born there.
I’m sure that’s true, but was just pointing out that what Ukrainians speak is not Russian with a different accent, like with Americans and Canadians. A Canadian brought up in America would likely have an American accent.
Hell, the current President of Ukraine’s original language was Russian - true bilingualism is very common in that part of the world.
I’m sure some Ukrainians speak Russian with a notable accent. From what I’ve been told, though, quite a few whose mother tongue is Russian don’t have a notable accent (but may speak Ukrainian with a Russian accent…)
Reports are that several of Russia’s long range missiles were designed there.
The fires make me happy, because they show a path for Ukraine to hurt Russia on Russian soil. Ukraine won’t send missiles into civilian populations, and the helicopter attack on the petro reserves (near the border) can’t be easily repeated. But sabotage of important factories and think-tanks is perfect tit-for-tat payback.
Factories can cost more than high level military equipment, and the losses can be more impactful.
So, the fires won’t immediately cripple Russia’s war machine, but could help Putin understand that cruelty can have consequences. And Russia might have to divert resources away from the Ukraine front — if the fires were thought to be sabotage,
Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant is the largest producer of butyl acetate and industrial solvents in Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as a supplier of a wide range of chemical and petrochemical products in Russia and in the world.
If nothing else, this is just not good for the Russian economy or industries that rely on butyl acetate and industrial solvents. I have no idea what the trickle down effects of this would be.
If this was sabotage, so far from the battlefield, I have to wonder if Russia’s internal security apparat is going to ratchet up the internal repression, as @Elmer_J.Fudd mentioned. I know that revolution is still wildly unlikely, but making your people actively despise your government is a necessary first step.
Indeed. 67% of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian as their primary language, while 30% speak Russian as their primary language.
Language is not national identity, though. For example, most Irish people speak English as a first language, instead of their traditional Gaelic language, for historical reasons, but they do not consider themselves English.
The 2001 Ukrainian census showed, for the country of Ukraine as a whole, a Ukrainian ethnicity for 77.8% of the population and a Russian ethnicity for 17.3%.
Maybe Putin got the idea that eastern Ukraine would welcome the Russians as liberators by looking at the proportion of the people of Ukraine speaking Russian as a first language. In the Donbas region, according to the 2001 census, Russian is the main language of 74.9% of residents in Donetsk Oblast and 68.8% in Luhansk Oblast. However, ethnic Russians form only 39% and 38.2% of the two oblasts respectively.
That they’re speaking Russian with a different accent or none at all is entirely the point.
He looks very bad.
In the video this screencap is from, he looks worse.
Yeah, I watched the video and that was the body language of a seriously distressed person. I wonder if it was just a reaction to being that close to another male he didn’t control, his paranoia levels have to be sky high.