Without personally knowing either of those shitheels, I think I still feel somewhat confidant that the odds that Dugin convinced Putin to invade Ukraine were less than 0.001%. Putin had his own reasons and his shit intelligence service reports.
Dugin is a cheerleader and propagandist for authoritarianism, jingoism and cultural genocide. His views are odious and he is guilty of promulgating ideas that shore up Putin’s public support for his warmongering. But Putin is a de facto tyrant. At the end of the day all of Dugin’s agitation for war probably didn’t amount to a hill of beans placed next to Putin’s own calculations.
Not that I’m an expert but if I were to list the most likely candidates for this assassination attempt it would be: 1. Putin, 2. Putin, 3. Putin, 4. Putin, 5. FSB without Putin’s knowledge.
if this russian war blogger is right, the russians seem to be in really hot water in the near future:
tl;dr … russsia stopped producing 122mm shells in 2013 and is running low on stocks, possible rendering 4500 artillery pieces useless
details from here - good debate going on
from the thread: But if it IS true that they are running low on 122mm shells and that production stopped in 2013 plus factories for them no longer exist in russia then that is at least great news. Means 4.500+ russian 122mm artillery guns (D-30 etc) will be out of commission all by themselves once the last of these shells have been fired.
THIS might be the reason why Ukr. is fiercely targeting those ammunition depots - reminds me of the allieds targeting the mayor ball-bearing factory in nazi-germany, once they detected the inherent “weakness” that went with it.
Yeah, but remember that the Schweinfurt raids were a bust. They didn’t do shit except get a very large number of bomber crews shot down. Ammo dumps, OTOH, might just be the weak spot needed.
The attempted Dugin assassination makes me wonder how stable things are in Russia at the moment. I had assumed that there was enough of a culture of fear instilled that things like this were unlikely to happen. Now, I’m not so sure an attempt on Putin’s life isn’t in the cards.
Russia’s Interfax news agency quotes the FSB as saying that they have “solved” the killing of Darya Dugina, saying it was Ukraine special forces, who then fled to Estonia.
Seems like a genuine mystery at this point. Been tying my brain in knots trying to figure out a reasonable collection of explanations but there are too many possibilities.
I don’t remember who it was that posted the anecdote, but they might be right about the analogy about a fight in a bar parking lot where a dude is getting his butt kicked by someone with one arm but the dude insists on picking a fight with a gang because there is more honor in that kind of expected defeat.
The effective loss of 4500 Russian artillery pieces would be HUGE and would completely change the dynamics of the conflict. That said, unless there is some sort of production bottleneck I’m unaware of, I can’t imagine it would be that difficult for the Russians to put them back into production around the clock if their war depends on it.
Don’t know a lot about making artillery shells, but production…you’d need to have the machine tools ready and performing as specified, the tools to make the tools if they have been in storage a long time, the trained men to operate the tools, and the supervision/quality assurance to make sure that what get produced is usable (won’t blow up in the gun).
Nothing about Russian conduct of this conflict to date indicates that this is likely to happen, at least not in the near future.
Just back to that assassination attempt once more: the prevailing view seems to be that Putin/FSB are getting rid of Russian high-profile ultra-nationalists who criticise Putin for not being Fascist enough and are generally critical of the way things are playing out in Ukraine.
If these voices are silenced it might make it easier for Putin to deescalate.
I looked at the context within the sentence and then Googled to confirm.