Russia stole $5 million dollars worth of farming equipment from a Ukrainian Caterpillar dealer, so the dealer deactivated them.
It’s the Daily Mail, but they are claiming Putin is scheduled for cancer surgery and will hand over power for a few days to his security council chief, Nikolai Patrushev. Patrushev doesn’t sound like an upgrade, he is apparently the one who was telling Putin about all the neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
I wonder how power hungry Patrushev is. Surgery seems like a good way to have Putin die with some deniability and even have someone else to blame it on at the show trial afterwards.
If Patrushev is incompetent, this is a grand opportunity for Ukraine to press forward with an intense offensive while someone more inept is in charge in Russia.
Btw, what kind of abdominal cancer was it? Pancreas would have been very rapid. Colon? Stomach?
That’s bizarre. I pulled up the article and read a several minutes ago. Now when I click on it I get an error.
Did it say abdominal? I thought the speculation was thyroid cancer.
Yes, the Daily Mail article uses “abdominal.”
I would guess this cancer was a huge reason for Putin to launch the war to begin with. Not much to lose. Either he achieves his dream of restoring Soviet glory by recapturing Ukraine, or, well, he doesn’t but is going to die soon anyway.
I don’t know how many ‘F___ Cancer’ threads there are. I try not to wish death on anyone.
Let us pray for Vladimir Putin. ‘Dear God, please bless and keep Vladimir Putin… far away from Ukraine.’
The article about the surgery is still up in the NY Post site.
However the “source” they use is a Telegram chat channel run by someone claiming to be a former SVR officer.
So about par for the course for the Post and the Mail.
Interesting question: How many John Deere vehicles are there in Russia that can be disabled like that? Because if we want to bring the war home to the Russian people, I know a way…
Problem is monocracy — rule by one person.
Same in China — it was safer to have rule by the Politburo Stsnding Committee, rather than the current situation where Xi Jinping dominates.
Nikolai Patrushev, Putin’s number two, sounds like no improvement. It might even be that Putin would be better positioned the make compromises for peace.
We’re getting to a point where it’s in Ukraine’s interest to drag on the war longer - not permanently, but at least a few more months. Each passing month means the influx of more and better Western weaponry, the depletion of Russia’s military further, and tens of thousands more Russkies sent to their deaths.
Ukraine’s leading by 3 touchdowns and the game is entering the fourth quarter.
I would pay a substantial amount of money to guarantee never again being slapped in the face by a sports metaphor being grotesquely misapplied to the real-world horror of a brutal invasion.
I don’t think the situation is anywhere close to that. Even if it were, ultimately the big problem is that Putin can flip the board over (or whatever other game analogy you wish to use) with the push of a red button should he decide that he’s coming too close to losing.
Then it’s game over, everybody loses.
Except that Ukraine’s stadium has been utterly destroyed and its booster base decimated. If the war ends tomorrow with a total Ukrainian victory up to and including the Crimea back, they’re still going to be a generation or so from getting back to ante bellum.
TLDR: There is no happy ending to this useless, stupid war by Putin. He will deserve his place in the Hall of Shame for war criminals.
The articles on the stolen John Deere tractors that were remotely disabled mention “They can at least sell spare parts”. I know a farmer that couldn’t swap a GPS receiver for an identical one from a different tractor because the embedded serial number didn’t match the old one.
The problem isn’t the metaphor, but that every day Russia continues to lose is another day that more of Ukraine is destroyed. Finland handily beat the U.S.S.R. In the Winter War, but still had to give up territory to stop the destruction and death of victory.
And I do not like what I am reading about Putin’s illness and most likely successor.
Agreed. At this point it seems like a Pyrrhic victory in favor of Ukraine is the most likely outcome. Unfortunately the second most likely outcome seems to be nuclear annihilation.
After the SCOTUS leak, Putin is probably like, ‘Whew! They’re distracted now!’
On the subject of fires in Russia, from the NYT’s live blog:
A Russian company that tried to erase ‘Ukraine’ from its textbooks sees a warehouse go up in flames.
In another in a series of suspicious fires that have erupted in different parts of Russia, the giant warehouse of a textbook company whose chairman was a Kremlin ally went up in flames overnight on Tuesday.
The warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow belonged to a company called Prosveshcheniye, which means “Enlightenment” in Russian. Mediazona, an independent media outlet, reported after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that the company had initiated a renewed effort to expunge as many references as possible to “Ukraine” from its textbooks.
That one’s more difficult to chalk up to sloppy manufacturing methods or hurrying to meet martial quotas.
TIL that the Russian primary education system is a component of MiniTrue and that textbook warehouses function as outsized memory holes.