I kind of feel like that extra word isn’t really necessary.
I’m amazed at the blackout of news from Kherson.
Sure, I understand that it’s a war zone and both sides want to keep secrets about where specific platoons are located, etc.
But when it comes to the civilian stuff—isn’t anybody in Kherson using social media? Why are we all left guessing about, say , who is evacuating?
If you are fleeing from your home with your family, surely you would notify your relatives back in Moscow. For example, maybe ask grandma if she wants you to try and save a certain piece of jewelry, because you can’t carry it all with you. Or warn your cousin in St. Petersburg that you are desperate, and need a couch to sleep on, for you and 2 small kids, so please, please,please, let us in for a few days.
This kind of personal messaging must be going on. If it’s on social media, it’s half public. If it’s through emails and cell-phone calls, than only a few experienced hackers will be able to intercept it. But still, I would expect some leaks, and some trustworthy news agency to report on it, so we would have some general indication of the number of people involved.
But so far, I haven’t seen anything except blind speculation.
Really, it’s just amazing. Everyone in the officer corps must have been stealing their share. Makes one wonder if anyone ever complained and how high the window they fell out of was.
Good grief. Too late to edit. Should be “when they get there”, obviously.
I fixed it for you.
Thanks!
The Russians have been in control of Kherson for seven+ months: at this point, you could expect a barely competent operation to have clamped down on the communication network, hard. People getting messages out are people asking to be killed.
From AP News “In the Kherson region, which is covered by the martial law order, Ukrainian forces have rolled back Russian positions on the west bank of the Dnieper River. By pulling civilians out of the region’s main city, which backs onto the river, and fortifying positions there, Russian forces appear to be hoping that the wide, deep waters will serve as natural barrier against the Ukrainian advance.”
It seems the evacuation is speeding up to the point where “It looks more like a panic rather than an organized evacuation. People are buying the last remaining groceries in grocery shops and are running to the Kherson river port, where thousands of people are already waiting,” according to an AP source who is a resident.
What I don’t quite follow is the idea of the river slowing the advance of the UA. The UA is not attacking across the river. At least, not yet. The river is a barrier to the retreat of the Russians. I feel for the residents who don’t want to flee but may end up as human shields or innocents caught in the crossfire. I guess the best scenario might be cutting off Kherson completely from resupply and convincing the remaining Russians to surrender. Otherwise, its going to be a long, bloody battle in an urban environment.
Even if true, the tactical value is questionable. the rifle would only have a ~30-round magazine, which you’d run dry pretty quickly trying to hit something from any decent altitude. So unless you’re shooting at something that’s relatively close to your launch point, you’d have a long flight, a short time firing rounds, and a long return flight to swap the magazine and batteries. If you want to add more rounds, you’ll need belt-feed with a heavy box full of ammo - at which point your drone starts to be something you can’t schlep around by hand.
Lots of news about drones lately. What I haven’t heard about since the beginning of the war is how successful or unsuccessful the thousand or so Switchblade 300s we sent them were. Anyone hear anything?
Doom and gloom about Kherson on Russian state TV:
The Russian commander talked about concerns that the Ukrainians would use chemical weapons or would destroy the Nova Kakhovka dam, which could cause catastrophic flooding to the city of Kherson. I think the chances of Ukraine doing these things are close to zero, but I wouldn’t say the same about the Russians.
Yes. I think the projection is pretty clear here. The chance of Russia blowing dams and/or using chemical weapons just went up.
Host Olga Skabeeva bitterly questions why Russia was so wrong in the beginning, believing that Zelensky would run & NATO wouldn’t help.
Because, Dear Olga, your government made two big mistakes:
- They listened to their own propaganda
- They really did believe that the Ukrainians were as venal and corrupt as the Russians.
This might have been the killer and it is nothing unique to the Russians, sadly enough. The Bush administration (or at least important segments thereof) went all in on snake-in-the-grass Ahmed Chalabi during the WMD debacle in Iraq only to end up with egg on their faces.
I think to some degree the Russians really believed Ukrainian resistance would crumble because at the end of the day a large segment of Ukraine’s population would welcome a Russian takeover and the return of corrupt old Viktor Yanukovych. Ground-level intelligence was hinting otherwise, but that wasn’t making it up the chain. Just like the cynical career CIA analysts that distrusted Chalabi’s many claims and promises were ignored.
You’re only as smart as the information provided, but ALSO only as smart as you parse and utilize that information correctly.
The thing that kind of makes me crazy is: they’d been fighting a low-level war with Ukraine for eight years. I hadn’t seen any real movement in Ukraine to negotiate a settlement to that war. If that doesn’t make an obvious enough indication that they don’t want to be governed by Putin, I don’t know what intelligence he would believe.
That was just the filthy Neo-Nazi government! The people, the mighty proletariat, were surely in solidarity with their Russian brethren in opposing that dumb comedian’s regime. Remove him and all would by Russian honey cakes and flavored vodka!
The video quality is better at the source.
Seems real to me. Similar drones have been rigged up to carry a bomb rack of several large mortar bombs, so the weight of a gun seems feasible. Whether it’s actually effective at shooting things without losing control is another matter. In the video of drone vs drone combat I posted previously, the Ukrainian drone sneaked up behind the Russian drone and struck it. Something like a shotgun might work, with the area effect of its scattered pellets, delivered in a single shot.
Here’s the sound of Iranian drones in the Ukrainian sky:
https://twitter.com/PaulSzoldra/status/1582863719905734657
It makes me think of the German V-1 “doodlebug” missiles launched at England and the French and Dutch coasts in 1944-45. The terrifying part was when the engine sound stopped, as that would mean the missile was now falling to earth.
It also sounds like the Stuka dive-bombers:
The deputy head of the collaborationist administration in Kherson reads nutty poetry. It turns out the poem is partially plagiarised from a poem that a Ukrainian poet wrote in 1967 when he was seventeen, although this interpretation does not appear to be satirical. It was presumably recorded before the same guy appeared on TV yesterday telling people to evacuate Kherson.