Also, “I know, I know. It’s a Russian thing. When we’re about to do something stupid, we like to catalog the full extent of our stupidity for future reference.”
“If we lived two hundred years, we’d still be human. We’d still make the same mistakes.” “You’re a pessimist.” “I am Russian, Doctor. We understand these things.”
Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group that is notorious for executing prisoners with sledgehammers, visited Wagner troops and brought with him… a specially inscribed sledgehammer.
As far removed as could possibly be from the fascist fantasy wonderland going on in Moscow, this video shows the realities of life for Russian soldiers on the front line.
[spoiler]
Note: this is probably the most graphic video posted in the thread so far, and includes a close-up view of a dead Russian soldier, so viewer discretion is advised.
Contents, in chronological order:
A wounded Russian soldier, who will likely die due to lack of medical aid, contemplating his life choices.
Various corpses of Russian soldiers. “200” refers to “Cargo 200”, the Russian military’s codeword for dead/corpses. “половина” means “half”, so “половина 200” means “half dead”. removed bad link by What Exit?
French president announces that France will give AMX-10 RC to Ukraine. Those are armored wheeled vehicles, with a 105mm/L48 gun. They will be replaced by newer models in the French army. No indication on the number but we have 250 in service.
There’s an important difference. The 9/11 attack targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. So far, Ukraine’s attacks in Russia have been carefully targeted at their soldiers and military infrastructure.
Absolutely agree. I was responding to Magiver’s suggestion that Ukraine start attacking energy infrastructure, with the intent of making things unpleasant for Russian civilians. That wouldn’t work as planned.
Attacks on civilian infrastructure also go against the Geneva convention. If Ukraine wants to demoralize Russia without driving the international community away, they need to create as many casualties as possible within the Russian military, and destroy as much Russian military hardware/infrastructure as possible, while keeping Russian civilian collateral damage to a minimum.
Hold Ctl key, to open in new tab, and press link multiple times, if needed.
Summary
Might need to click more than four times.
It’s a Twitter mirror site that doesn’t require login to view age-restricted videos. Replace the nitter with twitter and it with com to view on Twitter, but will require log in. The site is also useful for translating whole pages of tweets in one go. Since around the time Elon Musk came to own Twitter, the site doesn’t work so well.
Russian ultranationalist Igor Girkin says that, on the battlefield, the Russian Federation is in complete “Zugswang” - a chess/gaming term denoting when any move a player makes will worsen their position. He also says that “the combat effectiveness and morale of the army [is] strongly reminiscent of that before the July offensive of Kerensky in 1917”. This is a reference to the last Russian offensive in World War I, with the unpopularity of that war contributing to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in October of that year.
The drone attacks are relatively cheap and effective. It costs Russia almost nothing to continue them for several years. Unless enough pressure is put on Iran’s supply chain to stop production.
All the while, the Russian soldiers will be suffering from defensive zugswang, as they sit in their muddy frozen trenches along hundreds of miles of front line, with Ukrainian artillery raining shells and drones dropping grenades on them. In military terms, they are, while in defensive mode, being daily attrited. On the offense, they get attrited even harder. With a July 1917 level of low morale, will there eventually come a breaking point?