The S-300 ‘Ground Attack’ Capability: Fabricated by Ukraine, Amplified by Western Media, Totally Fictitious.

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Uncle Volodya says; “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

Well I’m accustomed to a smooth ride
Or maybe I’m a dog who’s lost it’s bite;
I don’t expect to be treated like a fool no more
I don’t expect to sleep through the night
Some people say a lie’s a lie’s a lie
But I say why deny the obvious child?
Why deny the obvious child?

Paul Simon, from “The Obvious Child“.

“That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”

Joseph Goebbels

Tell it like it is, Joe. I daresay we all remember examples of propaganda which, in retrospect, it is hard to believe a wide audience fell for. “We know where the weapons of mass destruction are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat”, how about that one? I remember reading a critical response to it in which the writer congratulated Donald Rumsfeld on having, with the vagueness of his description, eliminated only international waters and deep space from consideration, and laughing in delighted appreciation; good times, my, yes.

But that and other completely fabricated martial fairy-tales successfully convinced huge western audiences of the smoldering malevolence of Saddam Hussein and, by extension, of Iraqis in general, and by even further extension, of more or less all Muslims. To the extent that tens of thousands of Muslim men were forced by the Bush administration to register with the US Government – a policy which “broke up families by triggering a wave of mass deportations and instilled fear throughout Muslim communities across the country, all while proving itself wholly ineffective at accomplishing its primary task: catching terrorists.” The same reference helpfully highlights that such propaganda ‘successes’, once internalized, contribute to longstanding bias even after they are outed as propaganda – there was no shortage of support for Trump, more than a decade later, calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

At its simplest, propaganda is little more than consistently and repeatedly expressing an allegation, while claiming it is supported by evidence, and then shouting down any source which attempts to correct the record, deflecting their arguments with insults and rhetoric. In fact, I covered the methodology in some detail on the old blog back in the Spring of 2015; re-reading it now, I find we are offered a priceless lead-in quote, from none other than Anne ‘Poland Makes Me Wet’ Applebaum.

“…[o]nce upon a time, it seemed as if the Internet would be a place of civilized and open debate; now, unedited forums often deteriorate to insult exchanges. Like it or not, this matters: Multiple experiments have shown that perceptions of an article, its writer or its subject can be profoundly shaped by anonymous online commentary, especially if it is harsh. One group of researchers found that rude comments “not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.” A digital analyst at Atlantic Media also discovered that people who read negative comments were more likely to judge that an article was of low quality and, regardless of the content, to doubt the truth of what it stated. “

It’s hard to argue with the forthrightness and accuracy of that opinion – but Annie was complaining about commentary which criticizes western intervention and regime-change operations, and the low-lifes in those instances were – you guessed it – Russian trolls and ‘spreaders of disinformation’. The west prides itself on open forums, respect for a wide range of opinion and a willingness to entertain alternate points of view. It would never stoop to trolling as a means of silencing dissent.https://thenewkremlinstooge.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/04206-abe_lincoln_top_hat.jpg

Ha, ha. Perhaps that was true once, but that kind of integrity went out of fashion in the west at approximately the same time as the top hat. Anyway, we’ll be coming back to this post later; I want to show you something. But for now, we’re going to look at a contemporary phenomenon – the tremendous investment by the west, and most especially the western media, in breathing life into propaganda from Ukraine.  In the example I’d like to discuss, the underlying theme is Ukraine’s brash public-relations technique of spinning every single negative thing that happens as having been the fault of The Russians, from the pitiful murders of  ‘collaborators’ in Bucha to the damage to civilian apartment buildings by falling or uncontrolled air-defense missiles fired by panicky Ukrainian crews…and the west’s role in polishing those stories’ credibility.

Long before what looks to have been an S-300 air-defense missile – designed and built in The Country That Doesn’t Make Anything, according to Obama – landed in neighbouring Poland and caused a couple of fatalities, missiles said to have been S-300’s struck a couple of apartment buildings in Kuh-yiv, and caused some fatalities among Ukrainian non-combatants. But when life hands you lemons, the smart move is to make lemonade, they say, and Ukraine quickly spun the situation so that the diabolical Russians had re-engineered some of their S-300 air-defense missiles so they could be used to attack ground targets such as apartment buildings full of helpless, shivering civilians. A bonus of this trope was that it could be used to argue Russia is running out of precision weapons, and has to repurpose existing stocks to do a job they were never designed for; the S-300 is old now. But journalists have given it new and malevolent life, and ‘S-300’ is apparently the only weapon system they can remember. So they make up for it by writing lurid fan-fiction about it.

It is a hallmark of both Ukrainian spokesholes and Ukraine’s defenders that they will not give ground on any allegation, regardless how absurd it is, once it is out in the public domain, as if admission of having been wrong is worse than continuing to lie. When various towns in Ukraine, after the beginning of the Special Military Operation (SMO), were struck by what were assessed by the defenders to be S-300 missiles, of course Russia had to be responsible. Probably doubts were expressed, as well they might be; the S-300 is a purpose-built surface-to-air missile (SAM). The warhead is 145 kg. maximum, and earlier variants were between 70-100 kg; a warhead that size would not obliterate 3 floors of a steel-reinforced concrete building. As we have discussed previously, a surface-to-air missile does not plow through an aircraft  – or a building – like a harpoon. When the missile senses via its proximity fuse that it is at its closest point to the target, the warhead detonates and showers the target with pre-fragmented shrapnel. The missile body complete with rocket engine and any unexpended fuel falls back to earth. Which begs the question of who is firing S-300 air-defense weapons in Ukraine. The Russians? At what? Ukraine has virtually no air force left, and if Russia has S-300 air defense systems at its Ukrainian positions – which it might – it does not make much sense to fire one at a puttering drone built in someone’s garage. Ukraine might be using its Bayraktar drones it acquired from Turkey, but you would think those would be reconnoitering Russian positions rather than over downtown Kharkiv. While it remains possible that buildings were damaged and maybe even Ukrainian casualties caused by S-300 missiles, in all probability they were fired against incoming Russian cruise missiles by Ukrainians, and either crashed into buildings when they ran out of fuel or after reaching their target and the warhead exploding. But that option is unacceptable – it must have resulted from a Russian attack.

Enter the heretofore-secret S-300 ground-target capability.

This was proposed as far back as mid-summer, by – yes, you knew what was coming, didn’t you? – Mykolaiv regional Governor Vitaly Kim, who may have been the first to puzzle out Russia’s latest dirty trick against Ukrainians: using the S-300 air-defense missile in a ground-attack role, against Ukrainian cities. Fortunately for Ukraine and nuts to the dirty Russians, although the missiles are ‘fitted with GPS’, they are inaccurate. I’m not surprised; the SA-10 and variants up to SA-20 fly at above Mach 6. It would take quite a GPS system to update something going that speed. Cruise missiles are a lot slower, but they have the GPS coordinates of their target input before they are launched.

The proposed repurposing of the S-300 is defended by supposed admission from Belarusian news sites that the S-300 was tested against ground targets and found to have a reliable capability in that role. If you try to get to that site to read what the Belarusian military supposedly admitted, you will get a 404 message or a ‘service not available’. The report by TASS which was also claimed as a supporting reference made mention of the S-300 being used to “hit a simulated enemy’s ground air defense objects during drills in eastern Siberia’s Republic of Buryatia”. This seems very ambiguous and could refer to the S-300 being used to engage ground-to-air missiles launched by an enemy. If so, it would imply a fairly impressive crossing-target capability for an older missile.

At bottom, using an anti-air missile against a ground target is not impossible; very little that we can articulate is impossible. It just makes no sense. Fitting a different warhead and fuse, so as to achieve an impact blast or penetration followed by a blast would necessitate completely re-engineering the missile. The air-defense warhead is unsuitable; as I already said, it consists of pre-fragmented metal and the explosive charge is intended to distribute the fragments at high speed, like the blast of a shotgun. The fuse is a proximity sensor unsuitable for employment against a ground target. Any changes to weight or point of balance change the flight characteristics of the missile and imply altering and possibly relocation of the fins. The motor is probably the only major component which would not need to be changed, since it would be more than adequate to strike targets 75 miles away.

But why? The Kalibr is a purpose-built land-attack cruise missile, comparable in size to the S-300 – at least in length; the Kalibr is bigger around, and needs to be, it carries a 450 kg warhead and needs fuel to fly more than 2000 km. It has displayed excellent and discriminating accuracy against ground targets in Ukraine and as far away as Syria. There not only is no evidence Russia is running out of them, the reverse seems to be true, as wave after wave of country-wide air attacks attest and in complete disregard for the dour predictions of British ‘intelligence’ assessments. But those are expensive missiles engineered to attack targets which are trying their best to divert them through electronic jamming or to shoot them down – they would be kind of wasted on dopey targets like apartment blocks. For those, Russia has warehouses full of general-purpose bombs designed to flatten buildings; as demonstrated in Syria, Russia took a different approach to the USA, and rather than spend oodles of taxpayer dollars on individual ‘smart’ bombs with self-adjusting fins and possibly cup-holders, they designed and installed ‘smart’ bomb-aiming apparatus which is mounted on the aircraft, and achieves similar results using general-purpose bombs, which are dirt cheap. Russia has any number of options which would be far more logical than re-engineering an air-defense missile to attack buildings.

But those who are insistent that Russia has done just that are…well, I can give you an example of the loony rationalizations. Just recently I had several conversations with boosters of the S-300 ground-attack capability, in the comments section of posts at Moon of Alabama, beginning on November 17th.

It started out fairly polite, in this thread. I came in at comment # 170, detailing the basics of what I’ve discussed above – the S-300 is an anti-air missile, it is not suitable for attacking ground targets, and any damage to buildings in Ukraine which is attributed to Russian attack is likely to have been caused by Ukrainian S-300’s which fell back to earth after failing to find a target or running out of fuel. Nothing happened for a half-hour or so, and then a commenter who calls him/herself  ‘Outraged’ corrected me, claiming the alleged ground-attack capability – not an accident, mind, but a built-in option designed into the missile – “[is] designed for addition use in Ground attack if loading the correct missile. Max range depends on weather is USSR/RF model, or export only.”

I see. The Russians designed in a ground-attack capability and then sold all the missiles with that capability, since it was only on the export variants. Whether or not a given position has this capability depends on what missiles are on the launcher, and the range is weather-dependent although the missile is allegedly guided by GPS, which does not care if it passes through a 32-mile-high hologram of Ded Moroz on its way to the target. Well, suppose you don’t have the correct missile loaded – is it just a matter of “Anatoly!! Hand me that ground-attack missile! No, not that one, you dumb balalaika-strumming sack of shit and vodka fumes; the one with the green band above the tailfins.” I’m afraid not. As I alluded to earlier, the missile is more than 20 feet long, and is mated to the launcher by a loader crane like this one (photo courtesy of Air Power Australia). Switching it out would not be fast. Remind me again, which constitutes the greater threat to a stationary missile-launching position – a cruise missile or aircraft screaming in with next to no warning, or a half-empty apartment building miles away? How long would it take you to switch back to air-defense missiles? You’ve only got four. How many should be the ground-attack variant? Two? One? Cue Freddie Mercury in the background, singing “Who Wants to Live Forever?”

This is the most comprehensive reference on the S-300 system. Names are NATO-assigned codenames; all Soviet/Russian ground-launched air-defense missile types begin with ‘G’, and that is the only significance of the name “Grumble’ or ‘Growler’, just as all Soviet/Russian air-to-air type names begin with ‘A’. Despite exquisite detail on every modification and update to the system, somehow Dr. Kopp completely overlooked the development of a ground-attack capability!

As it happens, the S-300 system does have a GLONAS GPS feed. But it’s on the ground system, not the missile, and is used to give the system operators precise information on their own location and the immediate area, for ‘shoot and scoot’ missions where the threat of USAF Weasel aircraft or a comparable threat exists. In order to use the mystery ground-attack capability to strike an apartment building in Kharkiv, for example, the launching system would need to know the GPS location of the building it intended to hit, since there is no GPS capability in the missile. I suppose the position could be provided by a forward spotter who could see the building. But then he would know it was a completely non-threatening civilian target. Would you waste one of your four missiles destroying three floors worth of apartments? Why?

As provided in the table which appears near the bottom of the reference, the guidance of the missile is command link, provided by the engagement radar that is part of the complex. No mention of GPS guidance. The service life in storage of S-300 missiles, probably determined by the life of the solid-fuel propellant, is 10 years. Russia stopped producing them for its own forces in 2011. A detailed reading of the reference would also tell you the lower limit of the engagement envelope is 82 feet, although some references have as low as 30 feet. Both are considerably higher than a tractor, even in Poland, which is known for its tall tractors.

At comment #227 I pointed that out; how are you going to target an S-300 on a target at ground level when the system radars are all maximized for performance against air targets which are moving, and all subsequent modifications of the acquisition and guidance radars increased system performance against targets moving at higher speeds rather than non-moving targets down in the ground clutter? References which discuss system capabilities and specifications are quite unambiguous that the system is used only for air defense. For my efforts, I was recommended to this reference, which repeats the completely unfounded assertions of a Ukrainian regional governor and draws on alleged Belarusian assertions which are no longer available, still by the commenter “Outraged’. The Drive reference alleged the specially-modified S-300 could strike ground targets 75 miles away.  I used Omni Calculator’s Radar Horizon calculator, with a value of 127 feet for the radar system height (the height of the taller radar mast of the S-300 variants) and a target height of 100 feet, with radar refraction present. The calculated radar horizon is 25.645 km. Chances of seeing a ground target at 75 miles with a radar which has a low-level limit of somewhere between 30 and 82 feet at close range, nil. About the same probability as you being pulled over for exceeding the speed limit by a giant talking salamander in a police uniform.

However, interestingly, now the ground-attack capability is available only on non-export models, made for USSR/Russian Federation forces. Which is, you know, kind of the polar opposite of export-version only. Anyway, good to know just the same. Because all of Russia’s S-300’s expired in 2021, 10 years after they stopped producing them for their own forces.

“Only S300P family (NATO base designation SA-10 Grumble & subvariants) & subvariant derivatives have this functional capability re S300 class, and non-export models only. Very much a secondary capability, restricted to S300P derivatives and only ever available in USSR/RF militaries. Requires a subvariant missile model with a large or small Ground burst warhead.”

A large or small ground burst warhead; of course – why didn’t I think of that? Could somebody help me find that one in the S-300 missile table? Because I see ‘Blast Fragmentation” for every variant. A subsequent comment at # 240 informed me “derivative missile used for ground attack using inbuilt inertial guidance, etc. As previously stated, a secondary capability inbuilt from very first of S300p family models, onwards”, and encouraged me to read The Drive article in full. Well, you see, the inbuilt inertial guidance is used with the guidance radar, which can see both the outbound missile and the target. It can’t see buildings, which are down in the ground clutter on an air-defense radar. There’s no such thing as a ‘ground burst warhead’ except on a nuke, there would be a conventional-explosive warhead with an impact fuse. As I imagine you can quickly deduce, it would be on an air-defense launcher but completely useless against aircraft or enemy missiles, and how many do you have, again? That’s right: four.

But the next comment from Outraged at #247, made all former material read like a technical bulletin.

“Given it uses a custom derivative missile, with small or large ground burst warhead, rather that airborne target guidance & lockon with variant airburst warheads designed to hit thin skin aircraft/missiles.

Think much more modern generation of V1 buzzbomb.

Load on launcher, connect a data link to warhead, program target data, launch site data, for Glonass target co-ordinates with co-operative inertial guidance(internal to warhead). Or do it all in control pod and have a soldier connect the link, upload, disconnect. Launch. All other elements of S300 system platforms are redundant re this use. Really just an option for a short to moderate range light pseudo cruise missile. One advantage would be its very unusual launch & flight path profile, neither Air intercept nor true ballistic nor nominal cruise, which suspect would make it very difficult to Track/Engage and especially difficult to successfully intercept give ranges involved.”

Uh huh, sure – a custom-derivative missile built by the country that only built the ground-capable S-300 for itself and stopped producing them in 2021. Program target data….okay, got it….now…launch site data? What does the missile need that for? Considering it’s a ‘modern V1 Buzz Bomb’, which was a pure ballistic projectile with no guidance whatever. The stuff about launch and flight profile is just gibberish; the flight profile is a direct function of guidance and nothing else. A ballistic missile uses inertial guidance, and its flight path could not be more predictable – it’s hard to engage because its entire midcourse phase is out of range of pretty much everything. Your best opportunity to engage it will likely be in its terminal phase, when its speed is measured in kilometers per second. You don’t program anything into the warhead; it’s just a dumb inert lump whose duty is to explode on command, and fancy maneuvering orders come from the guidance section. All other elements are redundant? So the Russians specially engineered a highly-capable anti-air defense system, and then built a missile for it that uses nothing but the launch rails? Couldn’t they just fire it over the tailgate of a pickup truck? What do they need all those radars and a command vehicle and shiznit for?

I returned at the next comment and tried to explain that sometimes – yes, disappointing, I know – Ukrainian officials misrepresent themselves as knowing a great deal about something when actually they know nothing about it; that, moreover, sometimes these forays into loopiness are nothing more than trying to reverse-engineer a situation in which calamity befell innocent Ukrainians at the hands of the filthy Moskali. And with that, all pretense to politeness was done with.

The next day, the 18th, there was a new post up; “Ukraine – Switching the Lights Off”. At comment # 15, Petri Krohn echoes my concerns: “It is extremely unlikely that Russia would use S-300 missiles to attack ground targets. The missiles do not have the guidance system needed. Even if they had, Russia has other missiles and rockets far more suited for the purpose. This must be a Ukrainian lie regurgitated by Western warmongers. Civilian targets in Kiev have been destroyed by stray S-300 missiles. The Zelensky regime is lying to its people, that these are Russian missiles intentionally targeted at civilians.” 20 minutes later, at comment # 20, Peter AU1 pops up with the by-now-standard admonishment that ‘most Russian missiles are dual capability’. So there you have it – not just the S-300, but pretty much the entire Russian anti-air missile inventory also have a ground-attack capability. They repurposed the S-300 to add ground-attack to its repertoire way back in 2017, and liked it so much that they built the new versatility into their later designs. But the west did not discover it until March of this year.

Uh…I have a question. How much are we paying our defense intelligence agencies?

Petri Krohn reappears at comment # 49, to relay the information that the sources for the S-300’s alleged ground-attack capability are Euromaidan Press and the BBC, and the latter got it from social media. Which, depending on its origin, is gospel these days if it affirms a belief you want to gain acceptance for. A quote of the BBC article reports,

“Some of the pictures of wreckage posted online appear to show the debris of S-300 missiles on the ground in Ukraine.

These are weapons originally designed to attack targets in the air, not on the ground.

Posts on social media have claimed these S-300 missiles have been repurposed by Russia to hit land targets.

We’ve taken a close look at a series of images circulating online, and have verified three pictures of debris on the ground in Ukraine which are consistent with S-300 surface-to-air missiles.”

That’s actually pretty revealing. You can believe that whatever portion of an anti-air missile which is not destroyed in the explosion of its successful intercept just keeps on flying into the mystic forever…and still work for the BBC. Apparently if pieces of the S-300 end up on the ground, it naturally infers a ground-attack capability. Remarkable, I think you will agree. It certainly tells us something about the belief of many that the Ukrainians found the missile body of an SA-11 missile from a Buk system ‘in the wreckage of MH-17’ even though the actual explosion which crippled the plane took place some 13 km away from the crash site, and the missile body involved would have fallen back to earth there.

Now watch what happens. At comment # 71, a new voice in the Imaginary-Capability War appears: mo3. It might be a parody, it’s so silly, going on about the ‘sprinkler-head’ needing to be disabled and so forth, but interestingly, he claims to have been trained on the S-300 system between 1979 and 1984. So the S-300 had a ground-attack capability even then, but the numpties in the western intel services only found out about it in 2022!! However, the ‘secret’ capability was only on the S-300 PS!! Well, let’s look.

Uh oh – I see a problem for the narrative.

S-300PS (SA-10B Grumble): The oldest variant of S-300 still in service, the S-300PS is still used in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The S-300 typically consists of four 5P85S or 5P85D launchers mounted to the back of a Maz-543 truck. It can fire four 5V55K or 5V55R missiles up to 75 km, and can track one hundred targets simultaneously while engaging up to twelve. The Grumble is designed to destroy low-flying aircraft, but is also capable of destroying ballistic and cruise missiles.

No mention of a ground-attack capability, but of course there would not be – it was a secret. But more importantly, the S-300 PS is no longer in service except for ‘Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine’. Not in Russia.

Plenty of other entertainment, such as if the wrong missile is loaded, it will not launch. This is a function of the rocket motor and proper umbilical connections to the TEL; it has nothing to do with the theoretical warhead type. And the range could be 75 km, which – amazingly – is what articles quoted about the secret capability say. It varies, however, with ‘the ballistic trajectory in ground mode’. No kidding. A short-range ballistic missile goes further the higher the angle at which it is launched. But the S-300 is and has always been a vertical-launch missile. So this anti-air-ground-attack missile goes straight up, and then pitches over to the appropriate angle in accordance with instructions loaded into it from ‘the pod’, and flies into the city to hit some hapless apartment building based on coordinates somebody phoned in. Either that, or the Russian army maintains a list of the GPS coordinates of every apartment building in Ukraine, for an anti-air-ground-attack missile it doesn’t have any more.

I got back into the conversation at comment # 244, reiterating the absence of a guided ground-attack capability in the S-300 system, drawing some analogies and asking for an explanation of how such a capability would acquire and fly to the target, in the lack to that point of any credible reference cited by the ‘ground-attack’ flat-earthers which supports such a capability. The rebuttal was directed to Peter AU1, who put in his plug for S-300 ground-attack skilz a day earlier. But the first reply came from Outraged about an hour later, schooling me on how ground attack really works with an air-defense missile.

“Yet no AD missiles nor radar, nor detection, nor engagement, nor tracking, nor SAM missiles are used in the secondary ground attack role.”

Mmmm….yes; I see it now. No radar, no detection, no tracking. Likewise no SAM missiles, although what we are supposedly talking about is a ground-attack capability in a SAM missile, not a whole different missile. So we are back to talking about ballistic firing, presumably by uploading GPS information to the guidance system – I suppose that’s what he means by the ‘command and control module’ – and then you just blast away at your ground target. Except there is no – repeat, no – GPS capability in the S-300 system except to tell the command vehicle the precise location of the system. None of the missile variants used with the S-300 system features GPS input; that’s cruise missiles, like the Kalibr. You could not do hit spotting with ground-attack missiles; “Good, Mikhail!!! Now up 80 yards, and left one hundred!!” because you only have four missiles in total and hopefully you had the forethought to leave at least one SAM available in case you get bounced by a MiG. I’m afraid by this point I started to run out of patience a little, since I had repeatedly asked for a simple description of how it works and gotten back a bunch of self-contradictory pseudomilitary mumbo-jumbo. So I asked, one more time, at comment # 251. Spare me all the comic-book gobbledegook and just tell me, in simple terms, how it works.

Outraged replied right away, in only ten minutes, and it probably took him at least three to type his reply. Then Peter AU1 and I-am-an-actual-S-300-operator mo3, less than a minute apart. These are probably all the same individual, using different identities. Mo3 reports that the target is ‘calculated ballistically’ – remember, for a vertical-launch missile, where you can’t just crank an extra degree or two of elevation on to adjust your distance, because the missile fires straight up – and the subsequent accuracy is dependent on the IQ of the lead officer. I couldn’t have asked for a more comprehensive explanation than that.

Remember, in the article I cited earlier from the old blog, about the Trolls-R-Us legions working out of Savushkina St. in St Petersburg to bring the whole world under Putin’s iron hand? Marat Burkhard, the ‘former troll who went straight’, claimed the trolls of Savushkina St. worked in teams of three:

“According to him, one person provides the original comment, the second plays the “villain” and disagrees with him (ostensibly to provide the appearance of balanced opinion), while the third affirms the rightness of the first person’s opinion. He agrees all three sit together, agreeing on who is going to answer who, but then says they do not talk much because everyone is busy.”

I pointed out then, as I will again now, there is no reason one person could not represent as three or more – nobody can see you, and whether or not they can detect common elements in your speech or other suspicious ‘tells’ among your various personas depends on your skill. But there is really not much separating dorks who troll for fun and to make people lose it who were trying to be serious about a particular topic, and working disinformation operatives present to derail the conversation and drive contributors away, as Annie Applebaum lamented. And what did Goebbels teach us about propaganda? It is not the job of propaganda to be intelligent. It just has to be persuasive. Is it working? You tell me. Here’s Forbes, from just a couple of weeks ago, hammering on the S-300 ground-attack capability, and getting all his information from Ukraine. Take a look at the photo of the destroyed building featured about two-thirds of the way down. The whole midsection of the building is gone. Think that was a pre-fragmented SAM warhead? I realize the (Ukrainian) photographer claimed it was a multiple-missile strike, but how many? Ten? Which brings us to the question that begs to be asked – if the S-300 can be easily modified to a ground-attack role…and the Ukrainians have the S-300….why haven’t the Ukrainians done it? I mean, they’re always begging for more weapons. A thus-repurposed S-300 battery would slightly outrange the HIMARS that makes Ukrainians weak with lust, using the rockets the USA lets them have so far, because the State Department knows if they are given 300-mile rockets they will strike targets in Russia and escalate the conflict. So, what’s stopping them from lobbing S-300’s at Russian ground targets?

Why deny the obvious, child?

345 thoughts on “The S-300 ‘Ground Attack’ Capability: Fabricated by Ukraine, Amplified by Western Media, Totally Fictitious.

  1. Good morning from Mordor!

    Weather update:

    09:26 MSK — snowing, minus 13 °C [8.6 °F]; 08:26 Kiev (Western European time, see, because Kiev is in “Europe”), cloudy, minus 2 °C [28.4 °F].

    Have a nice day, Yukietards!

    Keep cool!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Damn!

      Again:

      We have experienced “diamond dust” in Moscow today.

      Forecaster Evgeny Tishkovets [. . .] at the VDNKh weather station at 06:00: “a rare phenomenon for Moscow has already been recorded — ‘diamond dust’. This is precipitation in the form of small ice crystals formed in frosty weather. It is typical of the continental regions of Siberia and the Far East. Last night in the capital it froze to -13.5 degrees”.

      source

      I don’t think it’s rare here: I’ve seen “diamond dust” many times.

      At 771 mmHg, the atmospheric pressure here now is much higher than the climatic norm.
      In fact, this is a record high pressure: previously, the highest pressure was recorded in 1954, but that record has been broken today. What this means in real terms is that heavy, cold air is squatting over Russia — European Russia, in fact, but to be “politically correct”, one does not consider “European” Russia to be in Europe: Banderastan is, however.

      I had to go shopping this afternoon and wore my “look-like-a-Russian” winter gear — ushanka, mits, boots, thermal underwear etc. I was out for a long time and I felt the cold. I seem to be feeling the cold more in my dotage.

      Much less cold, however, was that first December of my married life here: I married on 12 November 1997 and during the following month it was minus 32 ° [minus 25.6 °F] right through, which is most definitely “brass monkeys”!

      Not cold enough yet for diamond dust in Banderastan, though, but here’s hoping!

      Like

      1. That’s another Royal Naval traditional phrase – the ‘brass monkey’ is not the small chattering primate most imagine when they hear the expression, and the balls which are frozen off it are cannon balls of iron. The brass monkey was a kind of tapering pyramid-shaped rack of brass, with curved supports so cannon shot could be stacked efficiently beside each gun. Brass is more quickly affected by cold than iron, and as a consequence, when the rack became cold the balls tended to fall off it as it contracted, and to go rolling about.

        Like

  2. TASS

    MILITARY OPERATION IN UKRAINE2 DEC, 23:59
    UN admits that Donetsk is freezing but refrains from saying who is to blame
    UN Secretary General’s Spokesman Stephane Dujarric noted that combat operations continue near Donetsk but did not say who is shelling the city

    UNITED NATIONS, December 2. /TASS/. Donetsk residents cannot heat the[ir] homes amid[st] the winter [weather] because of ongoing combat operations, UN Secretary General’s Spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Friday.

    “As temperatures continue to drop in Ukraine, heating has, as mentioned, become a major issue in the Donetsk region,” he said. “On the Russian-controlled side, including the city of Donetsk itself, families cannot heat their homes as the centralized heating system is not operational. Piped water is also limited to a few days per week for a few hours. Our humanitarian colleagues note that on the Ukrainian-controlled side, most people who stayed in the front-line cities are elderly, mainly older women, people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups. Making sure they are protected and have access to heating during the winter can be a matter of survival for them.”

    He noted that combat operations continue near Donetsk but did not say who is shelling the city.

    According to earlier reports, Donetsk’s central districts have been shelled from Grad multiple rocket launchers throughout the day. Three civilians have been killed.

    What a cesspit of mendacity and hypocrisy is the “West”!

    Text adjusted above because TASS “English” in the linked article is not quite up to scratch like what mine is and I would of wrote different to what they wrote.

    [And before anyone dare take me to task about what I have written in the above sentence, the grammatical errors in it have been written tongue-in-cheek.]

    Like

  3. Thanks for this technical explanation, very useful to pinpoint trolls.
    As for me: I found that using the switcheroo substitution game works exceedingly well when glancing at the headlines relating to Ukrieland in Western MSM: anything proclaimed by any ukrie spokes(wo)man and by Mr ‘e is actually what the khokols themselves are and have been doing.
    It’s called ‘projection’ and is a much loved instrument used by editors and commentariats in western MSM.

    Like

    1. I remain curious why, if the S-300 has had a ground-attack capability built into the design for years if not decades, the Ukrainians are not using it in this role against Russia – but the S-300’s which are hitting Ukrainian civilian buildings and infrastructure other than utility providers are being fired in the air-defense role by Ukraine against incoming Russian missile attacks. Better a few apartments get flattened than the city not even make an effort to defend itself, and malfunctions are likely exacerbated by propellant failure as they go beyond the end of their service lives. The Ukies are just used to reaping a PR bonus by blaming damage caused by their own forces on Russians. And it should be clear by now that Ukraine could claim its Army Chief of Staff is a talking badger and the western media would print it and swear to believe it. Because missile parts near the impact sites indicate the missiles were S-300’s, it is necessary to invent circumstances whereby the missiles are being fired deliberately into apartment buildings by Ukraine’s enemies, with the vicious intent to murder helpless civilians, using some devilish role the west did not even know the weapon possessed.

      If the S-300 were to be fired ‘in the ground-attack mode’ with no input from the tracking radar, purely as a ballistic projectile, it would be like throwing a telephone pole. There would be no corrections to the missile’s direction at all, since those come from moving the fins under the direction of the guidance unit, which commands are coming from the tracking radar which can see both outbound missile and target. An S-300 fired ballistically would go straight up as it is designed to do as it exits the vertical-launch canister, and then what is anybody’s guess. You are being asked to believe it makes more sense to change the warhead and build in GPS fly-to capability which is input before launch to a missile which is at the end of its service life, rather than simply build a new evolved design like the Kalibr, which is a true cruise missile. If the Russians truly are desperate for computer chips, I could see them taking them out of the guidance systems of old missiles and repurposing them, but the rest of the missile is mostly useless, the warhead is just pot-metal. That’s if they could get the chips out without damaging them, which would be quite an enterprise on its own, and not a cost saving at all, really.

      Like

    2. I second your thanks. The exchange at MoA referred to by Mark was interesting since the person who was making the assertions about the ground-to-ground supposed version was very patient in establishing “credentials” as a “good guy” over the period of at least a couple of weeks. For those, like me, who have no technical knowledge, credibility is only created by consistent application of plausible arguments over an extended period. Certainly not as short as a fortnight. I tend to reserve judgement on “newbies” who appear and then find endless leisure to produce lengthy comments. Having been “spoofed” myself a few years ago, I’m also conscious of incidents of “ID theft” from time to time on MoA.

      Thanks again, Mark for a great article.

      Like

      1. I agree – it’s very difficult at MoA to discern between the clutch of real trolls and those who are more insidious. There have also been quite a few instances of identity theft. And some are of course extremely convinced that they know best, better than others.
        Ah well, more carful reading is indicated … and less trust in carefully worded, expertly expressed bovine excrement. I knew something was very off when I came across a sly and undeserved dig at Mark and this site, artfully slipped in at the bottom of an ‘expert’ reply.

        Like

      2. The person Peter AU 1 involved in Mark’s conversation on S300 missile defence capabilities at MoA surely had to be a troll. (I admit I missed seeing and reading that conversation.) The real Peter AU 1 and I (and several others as well) have been the targets of identity theft over at MoA recently.

        My impression is that the person trolling us at MoA is the same person who got thrown off MoA about this time last year over MoA’s coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. The trolling uses the same tactics repeatedly – insinuating oneself into the comments forums with comments that impress others with one’s knowledge, before launching into attacks on others with comments that increasingly become infantile and crude, and then flooding MoA with comment that include cut-n-pasting of entire article – in a fairly sophisticated way that I imagine not many can emulate unless they have enough patience or have someone telling them what to do.

        Mark’s old KS blog was subjected to this kind of trolling in the past in different ways, by the troll pretending to be a Venezuelan student, and then by another troll who started posting links to pornographic content once he got our attention with links to racist sites.

        Like

        1. There was another “expert” contributor who was actively engaged in promotion of the ground attack Buk theory: “Outraged”.

          Like

        2. I’d add that there’s a system of “tag-teaming” in which the trolls ra-ra each other to try to convey a sense of momentum.. Known in France as a “claque”.

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          1. Yes, as I’m sure I mentioned before, it was such a conflicted multiple-personality who dubbed me a ‘Kremlin Stooge’; a simpleminded Ukrainian at the La Russophobe blog, named Bohdan. I think that might have been his actual name, although he also went by Vorobey and Cactus, as well as a couple of others I can’t remember, it was years ago. He would advance a particular knobheaded idea or concept, and then have an affirmatory conversation with himself, occasionally complimenting himself – via another identity – for his perspicacity and cleverness. What follows is an actual example, it stuck in my memory.

            “Cactus, you are one hundred percent beautifully correct! I love you!!” I believe that was under the nick of Vorobey, although I couldn’t swear to it. He always referred to Russians as ‘Rashans’, and to the country as ‘RaSSha’ – get it? SS, like in the Nazi battalions? He was a piece of work.

            Like

      3. Thanks, Jen; yes, that was my impression as well, that both Peter AU1 and Outraged (if they are indeed different people) had expended considerable effort fitting in at the forum and establishing themselves/themself as one of the gang. It looked to me as if mo3 was just a made-up persona used to claim irrefutable local expertise – don’t waste your time talking about things you don’t know anything about, I operated it, and I know.

        Quite a bit like another visitor we used to have at the old blog, a long time ago when Forbes was still sponsoring its True/Slant site and featured such luminaries as Mark Adomanis and Julia Ioffe. The individual in question claimed local knowledge of pretty much anything we were discussing. At one juncture several of us were arguing that it was racist to suggest Mexicans are lazy. Of course that is not true of everyone, although I am sure some are – in any case, this individual claimed he lived in a ‘majority-Mexican town’, and was quite capable of observing for himself their general shiftlessness.

        A few days later he was busted when I saw the same individual commenting at True/Slant, in a different argument, claiming to know all about whatever they were discussing because he lived an hour outside Chicago. Of course you do not have to know very much about demographics to know there are no majority-Mexican towns within an hour of Chicago by any transport short of Concorde. So he was full of it.

        mo3 strikes me the same way – an invented personality who joined the conversation purely to shut down any technical arguments by claiming to have actually trained on/operated the S-300 system. All that stuff about the ‘sprinkler head’ and the IQ of the ‘lead officer’ was simply a pretense to English as a second language, although ‘disconnecting the sprinkler head’ seems to suggest there are two selectable warheads on the missile, one a ‘large or small ground burst’ warhead and the other the ‘sprinkler head’ pre-fragmented proximity-fused AA warhead. Because switching out warheads is not a job that can be done in the field, and the missile comes in a loadable canister which also serves as its launcher. Doubling the warheads on the missile would obviously alter its flight characteristics dramatically, the whole idea is preposterous.

        At one point Outraged did accuse me of identity theft, that I was merely pretending to be the Kremlin Stooge, rather than address any of the points in my argument.

        Like

  4. Pope Pius XI warning the Germans not to be as brutal as the Buryats and Chechens are.

    I feel that I should add that the above really should read “warning the Nazis”.

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      1. It’s Papal Nuncio Vassallo di Torregrossa.

        Below: same top Roman Sky Pilot pictured at the same ceremony as pictured in the Russian meme above with the erroneous Russian comment —


        15 October 1933: Adolf Hitler greets Alberto Vassallo di Torregrossa, the Apostolic Nuncio to Bavaria on the occasion of the Day of German art in Munich

        The claims of Benedict XVI on his 2010 trip to Britain, that atheism helped the Nazis to power: actually, it was his own church that filled that role. It appears that already in 1933 Hitler and the pope were conspiring to send the Germans off to war to fight their common enemy, Communism.

        Two posters were printed for the Reichstag election of 12 November 1933, when voters were already being presented with a single list of candidates to be approved or rejected as a group: the “Hitler list”. And it worked. The German voters had no idea that their Führer and their Pope were conspiring to send them off to war. In referendum held at the same time as the election, 93% of the unspoiled ballots approved the Nazi decision to withdraw from the League of Nations and 92% endorsed the “Hitler list”. This election doomed the Reichstag to political insignificance…

        Contrary to Benedict XVI’s claims that the “Nazi tyranny […] wished to eradicate God from society”, Hitler was quite happy to use the Catholic Church to control the faithful. He embraced the classic strategy of colonialism: use the people’s “natural rulers” to keep them obedient to the new regime.

        It was a marriage of convenience: Pius got a favourable concordat and a German army to fight Communism, while Hitler got the “Catholic vote” to help bring him to power.

        source

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        1. Hitler himself came from a Roman Catholic background and I believe several of his most senior govt ministers were also of similar Bavarian / southern German / Austrian cultural backgrounds with Roman Catholicism as their religion.

          By contrast the people who tried to overthrow Hitler in 1944 tended to be of upper class Protestant Prussian backgrounds.

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        2. Oh, good lord! The usual drivel by someone who probably believes Richard Carrier is an historian and accepts John Cornwell as gospel.

          Everything I have read, recently, suggests that Pius XII despised Hitler and the Nazis. He had been the Papal Nuncio in Munich after WWI and likely saw enough of the fascists and the communists to say, “A plague on both your houses”.

          If I was interested enough I might try and track down Rabbi David Dalin’s book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis and see how it compares with the opposite view.

          Blast neither the public library or the university library has it. I did stumble over an interesting review of the book by Sir Martin Gilbert Martin Gilbert’s Review .

          @ Mark
          Apparently Hitler was nominally a Catholic whatever that meant in Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s—maybe there was an official list of people’s religions?—but he seems to have wandered off either into deism or some vaguely christian mysticism. From what I have read, we can be fairly sure he did not convert to paganism or Buddhism but that is about all.

          By contrast the people who tried to overthrow Hitler in 1944 tended to be of upper class Protestant Prussian backgrounds.

          True but from where did the Germany Army draw its officers? I have never looked into it but I doubt that there were a lot of Catholic Bavarian field-rank officers compared to Prussian officers .

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          1. The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis

            Yeah, Myth alright. I wonder if this Rabbi gets any donations for his “Myth” Theory from various conservative catholic Christian groups, maybe the Opus Dei?

            Just type in Google search: “Fluchthilfe fuer Juden der Katholische Kirche”…and you know, the first two pages all display material, articles, broadcast about the Ratline established and run by the Vatican,

            As an ex-pat German, I do not have to rely on anglo source material regarding the catholic supported ratline, or the concordat that was simply there to protect the ownership of the vast holdings of the catholic church in Germany. There is much more critical, well-founded and researched material available in German than that published by a Rabbi who for whatever reason wants to defend a clergy that in its majority, and especially the ruling elite of this criminal organization – yes, of course, there were exceptions, more so in the lower ranks than – had no problem to line up with dear Adolph with the Hitler Gruss.

            I don’t need no anglo apologist to tell me about the devastating history of the RCC right to today, with the idiot benedict uttering racist slurs against Russians.

            Disclosure: I was a catholic till age 14, when I first began to look into the sad history of the RCC and its dealing with the Nazis, its actions in South America, its actions against heretics, etc. etc. That turned me into a lifelong atheist, and I am close to 75 years old now.

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            1. PS, I forgot that the RCC regularily ex communicated:
              Apostates, heretics, and schismatics (can. 1364)
              Desecration of the Eucharist (can. 1367)
              A person who physically attacks the pope (can. 1370)
              A priest who in confession solicits another to violate the sixth commandment (can. 1378)
              A bishop who consecrates another bishop without papal mandate (can. 1382)
              A priest who violates the seal of the confessional (can. 1388)
              A person who procures an abortion (can. 1398)
              Accomplices who were needed to commit an action that has an automatic ex-communication penalty (can. 1329)

              YOU KNOW WHAT IS FUNNY, HILARIOUS IN A WAY I AM ROLLING ON THE FLOOR:
              There is no ex-communication for mass murderers, torturers, and war criminals? That is the reason why Hitler never was excommunicated. And remained a member of the RCC

              You are of course free to voice your pro catholic views (By the way, did you ever wonder why most countries that embraced fascism were catholic ones? Like Spain, Portugal, or Italy? and in Germany that was roughly 1/3 catholic, but the founder of the NSDAP hailed from a majority catholic country, Austria?

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              1. Right! And I recall the point in my life when I set forth upon the slippery slope to eternal damnation.

                I went to a Catholic grammar school — a “gymnasium” in both German and Russian [гимназия ] — where I was taught, after a fashion, by an RC teaching order of monks. One day, when a priest was indoctrinating us all about the “Holy Sacrament of Confession” and telling us the necessity of contrition in order to be shriven, I asked if were possible that Hitler to be in heaven if he had been absolutely sorry for the sins that he had committed.

                The priest, after a moment’s thought, said: “Yes”.

                So, being the smart-arse that I was, and knowing that Hitler had blown his brains out (allegedly), and that committing suicide is a big sin — “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” and all that crap — I promptly replied that unless Hitler had been capable of thinking something like: “Oh shit! I’m really sorry that I’ve just blown the back of my head out, brains included, and for all the other wicked things that I’ve done”, Hitler couldn’t possibly be in heaven. Whereupon, the priest told me to fuck off out of the class, but not exactly in those words. He was a Jesuit an’ all: a real hellfire-and-damnation bastard.

                I wonder where the souls of those who have taken their own lives go, according to the Holy Roman Catholic Church? They can’t go to heaven, and they don’t necessarily go to hell if they have otherwise led sinless lives.

                To Limbo, perhaps?

                No, it must be to Purgatory that they go: sort of like God’s remand-centre pending trial.

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                1. Goddamn typos!

                  I asked if it were possible that Hitler be in heaven if he had been absolutely sorry for the sins that he had committed.

                  Or maybe the spell checker is not happy with my use of the subjunctive mood.

                  Like

            2. And I’m a 73-year-old “Anglo-Saxon”, brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, and likewise, at about 14 years of age, I “saw the light” as it were. I just stopped going to mass on Sundays and “Holidays of Obligation”, of which latter there were then quite a few. Much to my surprise, my mother and father never said anything about my apostasy, and they both died “believing”. I like bugging believers by telling them I believe in the “old gods”: it just gets their dander up when I say Woden and Thor are more fun than Jesus.

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              1. Been trawling some Anglican sites and going to suggest a Da Vinci code conspiracy theory. Ukraine starts searching Orthodox monasteries 22nd Nov22 and continues with others on 30th Nov. This is same day that UK Archbishop of Canterbury arrives in Ukraine for 3 days, does lots of anti-Russian propaganda and leaves on 2nd Dec. So what did he get from those monasteries and smuggle out of the country? Haven’t managed to bring in illuminati yet though.

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                1. Perhaps Ukrainian over-the-top lustrations and loony behavior are responsible for the bizarre phenomenon of Ukrainian Embassies in various countries receiving boxes containing animal eyeballs. Oh, and the odd letter-bomb.

                  https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-12-02/ukrainian-embassies-receive-bloody-packages-containing-animal-eyes-kyiv

                  A shipmate clued me in to that one today – when I got home I looked it up, and lo and behold, it appears to be true.

                  What can this mean? What is the hidden message? We see what you’re doing, you fuckers? Or is it another sympathy play where they complain about persecution by the Godless Russians? Inquiring minds want to know.

                  This might be a good point at which to remind that before The Glorious Maidan And The Subsequent Revolution Of Dignity (and if the latter was not a Department-of-State moniker, I’ll eat a baseball), Ukraine was regarded by Washington and its tumbling NATO puppies as a slightly poorer and more shambolic enemy than Russia, but still a big country full of simpleminded Slavs and disgustingly-corrupt oligarchs which was mostly resistant to western attempts to carry out regime change For The Good Of The People. The escalation of Ukrainians to the rank of heroic but humble nobility is a direct result of Ukraine having ‘elected’ pro-western leaders and subsequently placing itself at America’s disposal in exchange for financial rewards and the opportunity to fight Russians with regular western resupply. In case anyone was wondering, Washington and Brussels do not care at all how many Ukrainians are killed or even if the entire nation is wiped out – those who remain after having escaped to other countries will be passionate Russia-haters for whatever years are left to them, and the world will have gotten rid of hundreds of thousands of its Slavs, while Russia will have to make good equipment destroyed in battle and will have run down its military capability somewhat. Totally worth it.

                  Liked by 1 person

              2. They imposed sanctions against the Moscow Patriarch a while back — because he “supports the Evil One” and the war.

                Ironically, my atheism notwithstanding, I agreed with my wife’s wishes that our children be christened as Russian Orthodox, as she was.

                After the christening of my eldest, I said to her: “Well that’s that then! I’ve just been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. I’ve gone the full monty and am now no longer simply a ‘lapsed Catholic””.

                I then explained to her that although my marriage to a heretic was begrudgingly accepted by the church into which I was christened, I was nevertheless obliged to bring up my children in the Roman Catholic faith, otherwise I’d be shown the door.

                Am I bothered? . . .

                Nah!

                Hail Woden!

                Like

              1. Anybody who defends the criminal organization called the Roman See and its sub orgs. is a sad sack apologist, a shill, or a stooge, similar to a Mafia defense lawyer, trying to defend the indifensible.

                Just nuke that place and forget about it. Plant some nice trees where this cesspit of iniquity, torture, sexual perversion, child abuse, and murderers once stood.

                And then dissolve the rest of the local organizationsns, the bishoprics, the parishes, turn the churches into museums as long as they are of some cultural or artistic value, sell the church properties and compensate those tens of thousands that have been abused.

                After that we can have a nice cultivated discussion of what the RCC meant and how bad it actually was.

                Like

  5. In the above text:

    It started out fairly polite, in this thread. I came in at comment # 170, detailing the basics of what I’ve discussed above – the S-300 is an anti-air missile, it is not suitable for attacking ground targets, and any damage to buildings in Ukraine which is attributed to Russian attack is likely to have been caused by Ukrainian S-300’s which fell back to earth after failing to find a target or running out of fuel. Nothing happened for a half-hour or so, and then a commenter who calls him/herself ‘Outraged’ corrected me, claiming the alleged ground-attack capability – not an accident, mind, but a built-in option designed into the missile – “[is] designed for addition use in Ground attack if loading the correct missile. Max range depends on weather is USSR/RF model, or export only.”

    The commenter who made comment # 170 is either an illiterate native speaker of English or a non-native speaker whose English is not quite as good as he might think it is, more than likely a Banderite, for surely that “weather” in the last quoted sentence should be: “Max range depends on wether is USSR/RF model, or export only”; furthermore, that sentence should read: “Max range depends on whether it is a USSR/RF model, or for export only”.

    I lay odds on that a Yukie wrote comment # 170.

    As regards non-native speakers of English, I have seen many comments about von der Leyen’s English when she apparently let the cat out of the bag as regards the numbers of Yukie dead in this conflict. Many have pointed out that she said; “over 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed so far”.spoke of dead “officers” and not “soldiers”. Some commenters wondered if she did indeed mean “officers”. Did she really mean both commissioned officers and NCOs? If she had meant “soldiers”, then, as a former German Minister of Defence, she should have known the difference between officers, NCOs and “other ranks”, especially as she speaks English, according to some commenters, at a native-speaker standard.

    Well, native English standard or not, I noticed von der Leyen’s curious pronunciation of “devastation”, which she pronounced as “deevastation”.

    Perhaps some native speakers somewhere indeed do say “deevastation”, but I’ve never heard such a pronunciation, even off Orcs, who have difficulties with several English phonemes. For example, I always double check whenever Russians say “Tuesday” or “Thursday” because both words seem to sound the same to Orcs.

    I believe that Italians have difficulties in distinguishing “chicken” from “kitchen” and vice-versa, which could cause, I imagine, such a crazy dialogue such as this:

    — Hey, where’s Luigi?

    — Ez een da chicken. Eez always een da chicken!

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    1. Funny, when the comedian Paul Hogan used to do his Luigi The Unbelievable act in several skits on his comedy show in the early 70s, I don’t recall him ever doing jokes about chickens and kitchens together.

      Luigi The Unbelievable was supposed to be a charlatan magician with a deliberately fake Italian accent.

      Like

    2. “as a former German Minister of Defence, she should have known the difference between officers, NCOs and “other ranks”

      Van der Luegen was an unmitigated disaster as German “Verteidigunsminister”, so, I have my doubts if this moron really knew the difference between an Officer and regular grunt.

      Like

  6. 2 Dec, 2022 18:23
    Russians are ‘like cockroaches,’ Ukrainian-born ‘expert’ tells French TV
    Alla Poedie has also called for the Russian Cultural Center in Paris to be dismantled


    For Moscow, the Ukraine is Russia.Ukrainian-born Alla Poedie on French TV. © LCI

    During an appearance on French television, Ukrainian-born analyst Alla Poedie compared Russian citizens to pests and urged France to crack down on them and their culture.

    Poedie, who describes herself as an expert on the former Soviet Union countries, made the controversial claims on the LCI news channel on Tuesday during a talk show dedicated to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

    “It’s necessary to make sure that Russia is held responsible [for its military operation in Ukraine] with all its citizens around the globe, who sometimes cause a lot of harm,” she said.

    The expert insisted that it was “shameful” that the Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Center remained open in the center of Paris. The complex, which also includes the Holy Trinity Cathedral, was “packed with [Russian] spies,” she said, without providing any proof for her claim.

    “And we accept them. We don’t kick them out. Why? This complex must be closed and completely destroyed. It has no right to exist,” Poedie said.

    She added that an investigation into how the Russian cultural center was even permitted to be built in the French capital is necessary.The complex was opened in 2016 under then-French President Francois Hollande, with Paris’ mayor and Russia’s culture minister both attending the ceremony.

    The show host also asked the expert whether she thought that those Russian men who’d fled the country during the partial mobilization between September and November of this year, should also be prosecuted and put behind bars.

    “Those are cockroaches. That’s it. They run away from the country like cockroaches because they don’t want to fight from the inside and depose the current regime,” Poedie replied.

    Judging by the footage, some of the guests in the studio felt really uncomfortable to hear such statements.

    According to the Russian media, Poedie was born in Kiev but immigrated to France after marrying a Frenchman. She’s been making frequent appearances on French TV during the conflict in Ukraine, taking a harsh anti-Russia stance. She used to be head of the French-Ukrainian business club and now reportedly makes money by receiving and accompanying VIP tourists in France.

    Instagram

    In July, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow has intensified its activities aimed at supporting Russian citizens abroad due to what she described as “an unprecedented barbaric surge of xenophobia, including in the form of Russophobia.” Russians in Europe and elsewhere were faced with “aggressive attacks and threats, discrimination… based on nationality, language, citizenship and stance,” she explained.

    Шлюха!

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    1. I think that when the war is over, a war Russia never wanted to fight, Alla and other ‘auld sod’ Ukies like her will be surprised at how little Russia cares about what remains of Ukraine. And that Europe will grow increasingly distressed with its helplessness and squalling for support.

      Like

  7. Telegram link:

    https://t.me/RVvoenkor/33150

    ‼️💥Fierce fighting arena – Artyomovsk: footage from Ukrainian quadrocopter
    Outskirts of the town turned into ruins.

    Western media calls these places “cities”.

    They are small towns at the largest.

    From 1924 to 2016, the town was called Artemivsk (Ukrainian: Артемівськ) or Artyomovsk (Russian: Артёмовск). On 4 February 2016 the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukraine confirmed the name change of the town by returning back to the original one.

    Bakhmut was the capital of Slavo-Serbia, which was established by Serbian migrants from Austria. In 1920–24, the city was an administrative center of Donets Governorate of the Ukrainian SSR.

    Population 2001: 81, 000

    Population at the outset of the SMO: 71, 000

    Like

    1. Western media calls these places “cities”.

      Not sure about usage overall but the US seems to call all sorts of towns “cities”. If you have 5,000 inhabitants you have a city.

      Like

  8. This afternoon, Revolution Square, Moscow, The Empire of Evil:

    I guess this is one of the many things that causes cognitive malfunction and eventual “burnout” of neural synapses in the frontal lobes of the brains of Russia observers and “experts'” in the West, for here is a bust of the infamous Karl Marx, and in the background, appearing much closer to the foreground than it really is, owing to the telephoto lens used for the shot, is the Monastery of the Holy Mandylion or Zaikonospassky Monastery (Заиконоспасский монастырь in Russian), an Orthodox monastery on Nikolskaya Street in Kitai-gorod, just one block away from the Kremlin, the epicentre of Evil within the Empire of Evil.

    It was founded in 1600 and gradually acquired its present quaint name which alludes to its location and means “the Saviour behind the icon shops”.

    The monastery was a seat of learning. In the late 17th century, the monastery’s learned administrators such as Symeon of Polotsk and Sylvester Medvedev had it transformed into a hotbed of enlightenment. Between 1687 and 1814, it was home to the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, Russia’s first higher education establishment. There is a memorial plaque there in honour of the academy’s most famous student, Mikhail Lomonosov, who founded Moscow University in 1755. Following the foundation of the university, the monastic academy declined in importance.

    After the October Revolution, those wicked, evil and godless Bolsheviks pulled down the distinctive bell tower of the monastery and the remaining buildings were given to the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives.

    The Russian Orthodox Church had the Zaikonospassky Monastery reopened in 1992. In 2014, the bell tower was rebuilt to the original design.

    People go to religious services in the monastery church and monks there talk to god or whatever and pray for us sinners or whatever so that we can, hopefully, go through them Pearly Gates when we croak, which is jolly decent of them, I must say, while not a cockstride away, other Orcs regularly assemble on Revolution Square on Lenin’s birthday, for example, and even on Stalin’s birthday. I have even seen there old codgers even more old codgery than I am, usually grannies of advanced age, holding large framed photographs of Stalin on Stalin’s birthday and on Great October Revolution Day.

    “A Riddle wrapped in a mystery” and the rest of that crap said by Churchill?

    Liked by 1 person

      1. “Mother, sometimes you make me f**cking sick! — Jesus, after he had said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” and a bloody great rock flew out of the crowd and smote the adulteress smack on her head.

        Serves he right an’ all, dirty fornicator!

        Like

    1. ‘Tis the very same Lomonosov whose name was bequeathed to the Lomonosov Ridge, which stretches from Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic to the New Siberian Islands in Russian territory, bisecting the Arctic Ocean into two relatively deep basins. From which end the ridge originates has tremendous implications for territorial rights, because it could be considered an extension of someone’s continental landmass, and territorial waters extend miles beyond that. The dispute goes on. The ridge was discovered by a drifting Soviet ice station, in the early 50’s if memory serves.

      Like

      1. Lomonosov was an amazing person, a polymath from quite common roots. He was born way up north in a village in the Arkhangelsk governorship. His father was a fisherman who had done well, ending up as a ship owner and trader. He was a Wunderkind and at 19 years of age, he walked from Arkhangelsk to Moscow, not to seek his fortune, but to seek knowledge. He conned his way into being accepted for study at the above-mentioned Slavic Greek Latin Academy — he told them he was the son of some minor aristocrat — and the rest is history.

        Like

  9. 2 December, 2022 19: 00
    The battle for the key border of Donbass has begun: the Ukrainian Armed Forces are throwing soldiers into the killing fields to stop the Russian offensive
    Military commander Dmitry Steshin: The situation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Artemivsk is close to critical

    According to a number of indicators, the position of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine near Artemivsk (Bakhmut ) is close to critical. At the same time, there have been a lot of pitiful reports in the Western press, rumours about the evacuation and withdrawal from Artemivsk, allegedly Zelensky’s order to hold the town at all costs … and all this against the background of a slow but steady advance of our troops. A Komsomolskaya Pravda war correspondent has tried to make some sense out of this mass of information.

    A Meat Grinder and Water
    The Donbass has a very painfully irritating area that has been under Ukrainian control since the summer of 2014. This is the conurbation of Konstantinovka-Druzhkovka-Kramatorsk-Slaviansk-Mykolaivka. If we occupy it, the territory of the DPR will in fact be completely liberated from the occupiers. There, on the outskirts of Slovyansk, the entire problem of the Donbass water supply is hidden.

    In February, the Ukraine blocked the supply of water from the Seversky Donets canal and stopped the pumping stations. Over the past summer, it became clear that alternative water pipelines, wells and boreholes would not supply the Donbass with water. There is only one way out of this dilemma — the capture of Sloviansk-Kramatorsk. But first Artemivsk and its surrounding villages will have to be taken. The enemy will be forced to retreat from the fields and overgrown wooded areas into the city, or he will have to be driven out. Yesterday our forces drove the AFU out of Kurdyumovka village. The settlement is on a high rise, and you can even see the outskirts of Kramatorsk from it — it’s just over 30 kilometres distant as the crow flies. And most importantly, now the road from Artemivsk to Chasov Yar, where the AFU reserves are concentrated, falls under our fire control.

    It is still far from an operational encirclement, but the situation of the group defending Artemivsk will immediately become more difficult. Moreover, the town of Soledar looms over Artemivsk from the north and fighting is also taking place there. If our forces take Soledar, Artemivsk will immediately find itself semi-surrounded. The Ukrainian Armed Forces and their Western advisers understand this very well and that is why the battles taking place in these places have already been called in the Ukraine the “Bakhmut meat grinder”.

    Complaints from the field
    Western colleagues [They are not your Western colleagues”, you blithering idiot! They are your sworn enemies! They think you are a lackey to an evil regime and its tyrant head of state — ME] were the first to arrive in Artemivsk. The most representative pool imaginable arrived: CNN, the New York Times, etc. Newsweek’s correspondent wrote: “… Ukrainian soldiers are squatting in the middle of a bleak landscape, reminiscent of the killing fields of World War I”.

    In vain, they started uploading videos: “A five-star hotel at the positions near Bakhmut (Artemivskoye). In these videos, the defenders are shown drowning up to their necks in impassable mud. Then, CNN posted a video report on the defence of Bakhmut (Artemivsk). Apart from the brave firing of an almost 100-year-old American machine gun, there were a few clips from the streets of the city that made it clear that it was under our incessant artillery fire. The defence commanders are sitting in a nice brick basement watching a picture from their copters on a big screens. There is nothing else for them to do.

    At Azovstal, too, they were watching to the very last minute what was going on outside. The Ukrainian soldiers themselves, sitting directly in the trenches, write on social media about the shortage of shells “for counter-battery fighting and our cover”. Existing stocks of shells were used up a few days ago during a failed counterattack by the AFU, and the supply of ammunition is hampered by Ukrainian electricity problems (the main fleet of locomotives is electrically-powered).

    At the same time, like in Debaltseve, for example, or during the storming of Mariupol, AFU officers have already openly begun to complain about their unbearable lives there. According to Svoboda battalion commander Petro Kuzik, a major in the National Guard, things are very bad near Artemivsk:

    “They (the Russian Armed Forces – ed.) have sensed a weakness in our defence, because there are units that are less motivated than ours. And yesterday they slightly pushed through our defence near Bakhmut. Some units could not withstand the artillery onslaught and retreated.

    According to a New York Times journalist working on the ground, fighting near Artemivsk has now turned into an artillery duel, with horrendous AFU losses — 250 people per day killed and wounded. Curiously, this information was confirmed by our radio intercepts: the losses are significant, so the AFU units started to be transferred from the Zaporozhye direction to Artemivsk. In battalion strength!

    Evacuation and the “wrong” civilians
    It can be assumed that the Ukraine is now considering for itself the possibility of abandoning Artemivsk (Bakhmut) and is gradually accustoming its population to this idea. The very idea of surrender has been voiced through the Western media. Most likely it was caused by a real operational necessity and western military advisers insisted on it. Ukrainian propagandist Arestovich instantly worked the agenda, saying that the loss of Bakhmut was an insignificant, unimportant success of the Russian army.

    Other Ukrainian politicians also spoke out about the loss of the town. In general, the word Kramatorsk has been heard more and more lately — there’s an airfield and a railway station there, and the town is conveniently situated to become an “indestructible stronghold”, unlike Artemivsk (Bakhmut). But, from all appearances, at the moment the final decision on Artemivsk (Bakhmut) has not been taken by the leadership of the Ukraine and it will depend only on the successful actions of our army. And successes, by all appearances, do exist.

    Numerous encirclement actions that the Armed Forces of the Ukraine have already experienced have developed in Ukrainian officers simply an animal-like awareness of their surroundings. Andrey Marochko, an officer of the People’s Militia of the LPR, said that in Artemovsk, the Ukrainian officers were already very tense in anticipation of an evacuation order, which has still not come. It is possible that the officers of the opposing forces will use the services of private “evacuators” [the Russian term for trucks that lift illegally parked vehicles in city centres and take them to a police pound: some are operated by the traffic police, others by private operators — ME].

    Yes, there are such people in Artemovsk — for an exorbitant fee they are ready to take people and goods out of town — from 100 kg. up to 22 tons. They are ready to evacuate businesses and production facilities, they make fantastic offers — registration of benefits, temporary residence, etc. In practice, however, after the evacuation, the last valuable possessions of the evacuees are bought off them: “Well, what are you going to do with this washing machine in rented huts?” and then they are left to fend for themselves. About 15,000 civilians still remain in Artemovsk (Bakhmut), and they refuse to leave. The Armed Forces of the Ukraine frankly do not like them, they call them “waiters” — this is a new word that has appeared in recent months.

    As usual, the Western press was not particularly interested in the fate of the Artemovsk civilians: for them, these are wrong kind of civilians. Their salvation lies only in a successful Russian offensive, and they know this well.

    Like

  10. Really good article Mark. I confess to having been a bit bamboozled by the ‘pseudomilitary mumbo-jumbo’ about the S300 – especially where mo3 claimed to have been trained on the complex (in the GDR IIRC). Your article is as clear as a clear thing by comparison. And makes perfect sense.

    ‘Outraged’ on MoA is odd, going back over many of his posts he comes over generally pro-Russian (as well as an impatient, short tempered know-all) so he behaved almost like it was insulting to Russian tech that the S300 (et al) _couldn’t, obviously, do this kind of task. Anyway.

    I agree that trolls come in triplicate. Not here though 😉

    ME often makes the good point that the trolls don’t have good English and fall back on ‘ha ha LOL’ a lot which is often a fine filter but sadly the top of the range trolls do better. Your blog and Yalensis’ ‘Awful Avalanche’ blog are my chief go to blogs these days. That’s a bit harsh on b at MoA who writes great articles but the comments there are just too tiring to go through these days.

    Keep up the great work!

    QK

    Like

    1. Thanks, QK! I still rely heavily on MoA for the great links often stumbled across by chance in the comments. There seem to be several Canadians who are regulars, and one of them posted a link the other day to a story about the Trudeau government entering into an agreement with the US Department of Defense which would see the latter invest heavily (read ‘gradually take over’) in mining rare earths in Canada in an attempt to compensate for the lost Chinese market. The same article had the Trudeau administration rewriting trade law so as to be able to invoke ‘national security’ as a reason to order Chinese firms to divest themselves from two Canadian projects.

      By the most remarkable coincidence, the papers announced today that the final indictment against Meng Wanzhou had been dropped by the USA after a US Judge had deemed the charge to be dismissed with prejudice. Doesn’t matter now – the affair served its purpose, all talk of a free-trade deal with China was dropped, and instead we hitched our wagon to America’s dying star, thanks to Troodles and his West-Ukrainian hatebag.

      Yalensis indeed has a top-notch blog going there, his sense of humour creases me up, as the English say, and he has a real talent for what he’s doing, attracting such notables in the comments as the one and only Russell ‘Texas’ Bentley. I was so jealous of that I kicked the dog every day for a week.

      For the animal lovers, I was only kidding – we didn’t even have a dog then, and I would sooner kick Trudeau than any dog I’ve ever met, including Jack the boxer who bit me in the face when I was 12.

      Like

  11. Today from Dreizin, who blew a fuse the other month, but still comes up with some interesting stuff. In the above-linked posting, his comments on Banderastan are at the end.

    A couple of teasers:

    Moving on, we can’t pass over the propaganda.

    It’s MUCH more than just the “Ghost of Kiev” and spoon rape / rape dungeon stories that were fed to retard consumers of MSM crap.

    Ukro-propaganda is the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard.

    You have no idea, let me school you.

    My babysitter (from that part of the world) believes the widespread fake Ukro-news story…..

    …..that some subhumanoid Asiatic (Buryat-Mongol or whatever) Russian soldier…..

    …..at an address not identified, in a town not identified…..

    …..looted an electric tea kettle…..

    …..but LEFT THE BASE (!!!), as he’d never seen an electric kettle before…..

    …..(and couldn’t figure it out, because Russians are so poor and ignorant.)

    Who loots a tea kettle?

    Russians drink tea all day, they have all the kettles they need.

    He couldn’t find a scented candle or an alarm clock radio?

    And there’s more! . . .

    And, Zelensky’s wife has made a new push (carried in the UK tabloids at least)…..

    …..to convince you that Russian wives and girlfriends, are asking their soldier men to rape Ukrainian women.

    Got nothing else, I guess.

    I covered this back in April, they are recycling it.

    From back then… Here’s a release from the Ukraine Security Service, in their long tradition of, “We hacked the enemy’s phone connection, recorded them talking, and put it on the Internet.”

    This is supposed to be an intercepted phone call between an unnamed (of course) Russian soldier and his unnamed (of course) lady friend.

    [audio clip]

    The entire length of the “excerpt”, translated by me, goes like this:

    Lady: “And so, you go ahead there, you rape the Ukrainian broads, and don’t say anything (to me), understood? (Giggle.)”

    (pause)

    Lady: “Today, I…”

    Soldier: “…(unclear)… You asked not to say anything to you.”

    Lady: “Yes. So I don’t know anything. (Giggle.) What of it?”

    Soldier: “I can, yes?”

    Lady: “Yes, I allow it. (Giggle.) Just use protection. (Giggle.)”

    Soldier: “OK.”

    Hooooookay. Yeah, my wife tells me this all the time.

    How does Dreizin know that the woman in the above dialogue is a “lady”?

    She doesn’t sound like one to me.

    Like

  12. Why does Nuland and others of her ilk think everyone is hoodwinked by their bullshit and predictable manoeuvrings?

    MOSCOW, December 3. /TASS/. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland’s words that Russia has not resorted to the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine because of Western ‘warnings’ are nothing but an attempt to shift blame, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her Telegram channel on Saturday, noting that Moscow [has] repeatedly stated that nuclear war was unacceptable.

    The diplomat drew attention to Nuland’s words in the Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper that Russian President Vladimir Putin [had] decided not to resort to the use of nuclear weapons allegedly because of “tough warnings” from other states, as well as the unacceptability of strikes on energy infrastructure.

    “Victoria Nuland has once again defeated herself: first, through her own controlled media and think tanks, she inflated the topic of the nuclear threat from Russia, and now she is trying to put the blame where it belongs: allegedly nuclear Armageddon did not happen because of ‘tough warnings’ (and not because no one on this side of the border was planning it),” Zakharova said. In this regard, the Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman recalled the ministry’s statement published on November 2 on the prevention of nuclear war.

    “As for the ‘unacceptability of strikes on the energy system,’ it is not up to Nuland to teach the world: take a look at how many electrical grids the US destroyed, or even better, how many electrical grids the United States and NATO destroyed together,” Zakharova added.

    Like

    1. I am afraid Zakharova must be clearer yet; America and North Americans will not ‘get it’ until she speaks plainly and less like a diplomat. Something like, “Russia does not fear the USA, does not respect the USA and places no value at all in either threat or promise from the USA”.

      Like

  13. 4 December 2022, 10:13
    The turning point has already come

    Yes, and it’s noticeable. First of all, this can be seen in the frankly Russophobic statements of Western politicians and attempts to create all kinds of ersatz tribunals, in which the collective West is going to judge Russia.

    Mantras are spoken that Russia is no longer capable of advancing, when in fact the situation is just the opposite. Yes, some retired US military in their interviews, of course, are wagging their fingers and predict an imminent Russian offensive, but in the West they try not to notice them.

    Sometimes skepticism about Ukraine’s victory over Russia is issued by some periodicals like Politico or the American Conservative, but the Western establishment also tries to at least ignore such publications, sometimes cautiously condemning them.

    The Kiev rabble-rousers from Bankova are panicking in general. Kuleba, at a joint speech with Stoltenberg, practically squealed, demanding from the leaders of NATO countries, primarily from the United States, that the Ukraine be provided with Patriot air defence systems and F-16 aircraft.

    Zelensky, by all appearances, overdid the “heavy stuff” and has already gone so far as to say that American taxpayers’ money does not belong to the American government, but to the people of the United States. And, traditionally rejecting shame, logic and common sense, he added that the money of the American people should be immediately handed over to the Kiev junta, i.e. to him.

    Another handful of Kiev lunatics, led by the failed vet Danilov, sputtering venomous saliva, call for the destruction of Russia.

    There is outright treachery — Ukrainian embassies in Europe are allegedly being threatened with bloody envelopes. And responsibility for the threats and the explosion at the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid was, understandably, blamed on Russia.

    The cherry on the cake was Olena Zelenska’s speech in Britain, where she said on camera that Russian women allegedly bless their husbands-in-arms to rape Ukrainian women and even in some cases ask them to do so.

    Here it is very clear: Ukrainian bloody vets, clowns and wedding photographers are trying their best to brutalize their population and dehumanise Russians and Russia in the eyes of the Western average.

    And some characters, particularly Scholz and the Pope, have verbally joined this Nazi coven.

    But what is the reality?

    The bravura pro-Ukrainian rhetoric of Western politicians, heralding an early victory for the Ukraine, is devoid of specifics. Excuse me, but this is already an indicator.

    Why? Because the current Western military refuses to deliver such speeches, full of military terminology, facts and figures. So as not to be embarrassed later when the Ukraine once again sits down in a puddle with a loud plop.

    That is why German, French and other Euro-Atlantic politicians have to sprinkle “water” with bravura slogans. Which look especially ridiculous against the refusal to provide the Ukraine with Patriot systems and coveted F-16s.

    Instead of Abrams and Strykers so eagerly awaited by Ukrainian officials, the delivery of which was savoured recently by the Ukrainian hand-picked under-experts of the Kiev regime, the arrival of Soviet infantry fighting vehicles scraped from the bottom of the barrel is again expected in the Ukraine..

    Yes, the Germans promised to deliver seven Gepard ZSU, already decommissioned by the Bundeswehr, but this is more of a zrada than a peremog.

    Yes, they promise some air defence systems from Sweden… From Sweden? Are you serious? Yes, probably as “effective” as the German one! Didn’t even get into what model they’re going to deliver, it’s so ridiculous.

    The Americans have also promised air defence, but the paramedical hooting of the Ukrainian expert community was interrupted by the specification, which indicated that the fulfillment of the contract will be prolonged till 28 November 2025.

    The transfer of Russian assets to the Ukraine is not going very smoothly: to be honest, it is not smooth at all.

    “European Union officials have said that the bloc cannot confiscate tens of billions of euros in frozen Russian Central Bank funds to pay for the econstruction of the Ukraine”, according to a piece in the US publication The Wall Street Journal. Russian readers, for their part, were made aware of the publication of this material by the Izvestiya newspaper.

    The authors of the article note that on 30 November, representatives of the European Commission stated that owing to the international principle of state immunity, they cannot confiscate the assets of the Central Bank. Now, instead of confiscating the assets of the Central Bank, the European Commission (EC) has proposed to establish a fund to manage liquid assets, and use the profits to pay the Ukraine. However, according to the authors of the publication, this will not be an easy task. Finding these liquid assets is proving to be a task that can take years to complete.

    Years, do you understand? Zelensky is probably running around the ceiling in anger now. Since March, he has been dancing on camera, demanding that he be given the Russian billions. One would think that nothing could be easier — but no . . .

    At the front, the Ukrainian junta is also not doing so well. Because of a banal lack of tanks, they can no longer attack in large formations: near Artyomovsk, and even along the entire line of contact in the DPR, the Russians are crushing them.

    And the Kiev regime needs a lot of tanks. If you analyze the loss of Ukrainian equipment over the entire period of the special operation, you will understand that the Ukraine needs about 300 tanks and armoured vehicles per month so as to maintain the same pace and pressure in daily breakthrough attempts that they showed in September and October. Judging by the reports, ten or more of them are disabled per day, and this is only the confirmed data.

    But the West can no longer provide such numbers, as some entire NATO defence ministers have been bluntly stating.

    Chinese and Indian military experts predict a crushing defeat for the Ukrainian grouping currently being ground down in the Donbass, and the start of a new stage of special operations, in which Ukrainian formations will retreat westwards at a pace more akin to fleeing.

    The Indian and Chinese expert communities also, by the way, believe that the tide has already turned. In particular, India Punchline has written about this. The authors of the publication believe that the arrival at the front of units formed of mobilized and trained Russians is the main factor in turning the situation around along the line of contact.

    Well, much is unclear about the retreat of Ukrainian formations. For example, how will they retreat through the Polish barrier troops?

    Things in the Ukrainian rear are even worse. Ukrainian civilians are living in unplanned, prolonged blackouts of electricity, gas and water. Ukrainian utility workers show their competence in some places and, admittedly, respond quickly and promptly, but only to the extent of availability of components, spare parts and equipment, which they admit they are running out of.

    But it is Ukrainian officials who have shown their utter incompetence in the face of the collapse of the Ukrainian energy system. I am convinced that, despite the confident faces they put on camera, they have no idea what the coming winter holds for them.

    Neither do most Ukrainian citizens, by the way. It was one thing to mouth it off on camera in October and November when the Ukrainian energy sector was still running at 70 per cent; it’s another to look at a frost-covered window in February, clutching a phone which went out four days ago in your frozen fingers.

    The turning point has arrived. Yes, not in the way and not at the time many, including yours truly, expected.

    But winter is not far off: it has already arrived. And contrary to the speculation of Ukrainian experts, a Russian winter offensive is inevitable. And this means that Arestovich has a lot of work ahead of him.
    Anatoliy Ursida

    Like

    1. Yesterday evening, 3 dECEMBER 2022, Moskva.

      I suppose they’ll be having fun of a sort in Kiev as well, as they wallow in their venom and bile about evil Moskaly and RaSSha

      Like

      1. That looks lovely! I bet the Moscow authorities don’t have to worry about someone stealing a big truck and driving it into the crowd …
        Still no snow here, and the Met Office ‘predicts’ rain for later. Since they get things wrong on a regular basis (I ‘predict’ the weather by stepping outside into my tiny back garden) I don’t believe that until I see it.

        Like

    2. A grim account indeed; once again I am sorry for ordinary Ukrainians who are just trying to keep their heads down and avoid notice, but cannot leave. And the sad fact is that NATO’s rah-rah cheering over an imagined reality is going to result in a completely failed state for which no money remains for recovery or reconstruction. Naturally that will all be the fault of Russia, and Europe and North America will acknowledge no responsibility. But those who sound such warnings are by now accustomed to not being listened to.

      I wonder if the author’s name is a pseudonym. ‘Ursus’, of course, is Latin for ‘the bear’.

      Like

      1. ‘Ursus’, of course, is Latin for ‘the bear’.

        The name Urs is common in Switzerland, and Ursula a common female name throughout Germany.
        Our son was christened “Ursus”. I call him Ursus horribilis…

        Like

        1. Yeah, such as Swiss actress Ursula Andress, one of the Sean Connery James Bond floozies.

          I and my smutty school friends used to call her “Ursula Undress”.

          Like

          1. Ah, but there’s that endearing diminutive form for Ursula: “Uschi” [pronounced uh-SHEE (Like “pushy” without the “p”.)].
            Sounds cosy, doesn’t it?
            So when vdL was Defence Minister, some German wags called her “Flinten-Uschi”, where ‘Flinte’ is a rifle, and where the historic connotation was ‘Flintenweiber’ (rifle women) which stood for the Soviet Army’s female soldiers in WWII … they were needed because the Soviet Union had run out of men … sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

            Like

    1. Great find, ME! I went and read it straightaway, here’s a quote which fits perfectly:

      “He [Zelensky] is banally psychopathic. A Little Eichmann who became a Big one. Some monsters are made not born, […]”

      ‘Made’, as Julian Macfarlane points out, by the ever so glorious Western MSM.

      Like

  14. Have you heard about this colliemum?

    4 Dec, 2022 06:57
    Wales tells Ukrainian refugees to pay for meals, laundry, and pets
    The government says it wants to increase the independence of asylum seekers

    Refugees received a letter detailing the new policy from First Minister Mark Drakeford on Thursday, according to the BBC, which said that as many as 1,500 people could be affected. Refugees currently staying in hotel rooms, holiday parks, and other temporary accommodation who have been there for five weeks or more must begin to pay their own way and are required to either accept the government’s offer of more permanent housing or face a £25 ($31) weekly fine – £37 ($46) per week for a family of four or larger.

    While the policy is allegedly not designed to save money, it cuts the offers of free laundry services, toiletries, sanitary products, and even pet food and vet bills. The new policy, the government says, will help refugees “integrate into the community” by encouraging them to arrange for their own clothes to be cleaned and to pay for at least one meal a day.

    The rules are set to take effect in January for most parts of Wales, though four councils (Wrexham, Monmouthshire, Conwy, and Blaenau Gwent) are already piloting the accommodation fines. It is meant to address the problems that arose from the UK’s ‘super sponsor visa’ scheme, in which many families were not moved from their initial landing places – or “welcome centers,” which officials warn are often “costly hotels” – into supported placements as fast as the government had hoped.

    According to UN data, around 8 million displaced Ukrainians have been recorded across Europe, and 4.8 millions of those are registered with various national protection schemes on the continent.

    We’ll keep a welcome in the hillsides
    We’ll keep a welcome in the Vales
    This land you knew will still be singing
    When you come home again to Wales

    🙂

    Like

    1. Thanks – no, I hadn’t! Well, the welsh tinpot dictator had to do something, seeing that the same good old Auntie Beeb had a report that ‘Teh Poor’ in Cardiff now have to eat pet food:
      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-63754846

      I’ll not grace that ‘report’ with a critique but will say that ‘pet food’ is not cheaper than ‘real’ food – and that we’ve not heard of that ‘charity’ nor were told by our own rag that Cardiffians were too poor to buy human food …

      If the Ukrie refugees start moaning about hardship they better shut up p.d.q. And anyhoo – how were they able to bring pets into the UK, never mind Wales? There’s a six-month quarantine if pets don’t have that ‘pet passport’ which is a) very costly and b) requires documentation from an approved vet before getting on a ferry, that they did have all those injections – which also are expensive …

      Like

      1. True! You can have baked beans on toast for cheaper than what you pay for a can of Pedigree Chum, and titter ye not, ye Doubting Toms! — Baked beans are very nutritious, though often rather noisy in their after effects.

        Like

        1. Baked beans & a baked potato. The 18th & early 19th C Irish peasantry managed pretty well on potatoes, laveer bread, and buttermilk. Sounds horrible but it was nutritious.

          Like

          1. In the Welsh version, laverbread is rolled in oatmeal and fried in bacon fat – so they must’ve had some pigs, unlike the Irish who only had cows for buttermilk and potatoes …

            Like

            1. The Irish had pigs! My grandmother came from a place in Co. Cork called Kanturk, which name comes from the Irish Ceann Toirc, meaning “boar’s head”.

              Not to mention the well known Irish ditty “O’Rafferty’s Pig”.

              Like

              1. There ye go then – I didn’t think the Irish would eat laverbread without frying it in bacon fat. And as we all know, without pigs there’s no bacon …

                Like

          2. I love buttermilk! They sell it in shops here with all the other dairy products. It’s called простокваша [prostokvasha].

            Like

    2. I’m sure the poor Ukie refugees will soon be whingeing about how they are being exploited now that they have to pay for their meals and toiletries.

      Like

  15. Posted on MoA>by: bevin | Dec 3 2022 21:19 utc, referring to a long essay by Indian economist Seshadri Kumar, who argues that:

    The war in Ukraine will see the most consequential changes since WW2. It will fundamentally alter power relationships in the world. Western dominance will be replaced by a multipolar world. Europe’s prosperity of the past few centuries is likely to end because of short-sighted and poorly-thought-out decisions … primarily the ill-considered economic sanctions Europe has unilaterally applied on Russia, and which have started to boomerang on Europe, with the high probability of things getting much worse in the coming months …

    See:

    Europe cannot win this economic war

    Like

  16. Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 7 November 2022

    It seems that some Fritzes are fed up!

    Just a few, mind you.

    Ami go home

    Intro:

    A real friend knows
    When it’s time to fuck off

    Chorus

    Amigo, amigo, Ami go home
    From Ramstein to Rome:
    Let’s sing:
    Ami go home!

    Been there umpteen times. Ironically, named after Tsar Alexander I, he who entered Paris with his Russian armies in 1814 — after they had helped liberate the Kingdom of Prussia from the Buonaparte “United Europe” racket (ruled by his clan, of course) and contributed, together with the allied armies of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdoms of Saxony and Sweden, to the 1813 allied victory at Leipzig (The Battle of Nations).

    Clearly, the Germans have forgotten about that, otherwise they would have renamed the vast square long ago to LGBT Square or summat like.

    PS Just noted what it says on the public announcement behind the performer at the beginning of the clip [0:12], to his left:

    Wer viel arbeitet,
    Verdient auch viel.

    Who works a lot
    Also earns a lot.

    Yeah, right!

    Like

  17. Blogger Anatoliy Ursida’s name in Cyrillic:

    Анатолий Урсида

    His Yandex Dzen site.

    Note his logo: a bear’s head wearing a hard hat against a Russian flag backdrop. He writes long blogs about Banderastan.

    Like

  18. WP

    Opinion | Biden can help Zelensky, and Ukraine, by pushing for peace
    December 2, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EST

    The Biden administration would like to make one thing clear: It won’t throw Ukraine under the bus. If President Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t want to pursue a peace deal that could leave Russia with some Ukrainian territory, America won’t use its leverage as Ukraine’s main arms supplier to push him into negotiations.

    “The United States is not pressuring Ukraine,” said national security adviser Jake Sullivan in early November, the day after NBC reported that he had broached the subject of negotiations with Zelensky. President Biden said, that same week, “We’re not going to tell them what they have to do.” And a week later, national security spokesman John Kirby asserted that “nobody from the United States is pushing or prodding or nudging [Zelensky] to the table.”

    Well, maybe somebody from the United States should be. If an enduring peace can be had through negotiation — and we won’t know if it can until we explore that prospect — then negotiations would be in America’s interest. That alone might be enough reason for Biden to steer Ukraine toward the table. But as it happens, such a peace would be in Ukraine’s interests — and most of the world’s — as well.

    To start with some of the more mundane virtues of near-term peace: The war is costing America lots of money. And this spending is inflationary at a time when inflation is a big global problem. The war also fuels inflation in other ways, notably by constricting the supply of energy to European allies. And, as those allies buy American natural gas as a substitute, some European officials are accusing the United States of profiteering, revealing tensions within the West that could grow as the winter proceeds.

    And get this:

    Samuel Charap, an expert on Ukraine at the Rand Corp., recently said, “Russia has already lost no matter where the line is. Russia’s strategic defeat … is already a thing. That’s done.” The reason, he said, is the “astonishing damage to (a) their military capabilities, (b) their international reputation, (c) their economy, their capacity to rearm. I mean, Russia has weakened itself in the last nine months more than any U.S. policy … could have done.”

    Yeah, right . . .

    Like

    1. Oh, fuck off, Jakey, there’s a good boy. The all-in-this-together west, continuing to sacrifice the living standard of its citizens so Americans can get richer and control more power, has apparently agreed on an oil price cap – yet another thing I said they would never, ever do because it seemed the height of stupidity. I mean, if someone has a commodity for sale which is in considerable demand, and knows its value, it is not going to sell it for below its value just because one bully has banded many buyers into a ‘cartel’ and ordered them to adopt a policy whereby it will pay at most $60.00 per barrel, when America’s own Brent is benchmarked at $85.00 or $87.00, something like that. It will say, as I predicted months ago when this completely stupid idea came up, go fuck yourselves. And so Yurrup will have no Russian oil at all, and Uncle Sam will have realized his dream of completely controlling the European oil supply, at whatever fantastic price he chooses to charge. And Europe meekly goes along with it. What took so long? Well, Zelensky and the Poles were trying to wrestle it down to $30.00 a barrel. No, I’m not kidding.

      So India and China will continue to buy Russian oil at fire-sale discounts, Europe will suffer grievously this winter while much of its wealth flows into Chevron-Texaco and Exxon-Mobil’s coffers – maybe it will do everyone a favour and just shoot itself in its misery – and buyers of Russian oil will probably resell it into the western markets at highly-satisfactory profits. And Russia will still not bend its knee, and so Biden and his happy band of global economy-wreckers will cast about for some other dirty trick which will make ordinary folk suffer and everything they buy even more expensive. And the rich will get ever richer and the poor ever poorer. No matter what happens now, Ukraine will be ruined, because it has largely emptied out of Ukrainians, most of whom will not come back to whatever rump state remains of it. So it will have a tiny tax base, and no means of raising revenue for its government to spend fixing the place up and maybe paying down a little of its soaring debt.

      Like

  19. Time

    More fantasy:

    Putin Must Not Win, But Zelensky Must Not Win Too Much
    DECEMBER 1, 2022 5:00 AM EST

    In the first phase of the War, the Russians made it to the outskirts of Kyiv, and Ukraine looked a goner. In phase two just four weeks later, the victim was on a roll, regaining some thousand settlements while decimating an outclassed foe slugging it out far from home. Now act three, which opened with a miraculous Ukrainian victory that drove the Russians from Kherson, a first-rate strategic prize in the south. But the stage may soon darken.

    Sure, the Ukrainians continue to dominate the battlefield thanks to superior motivation and massive injections of Western cash and arms. They are fighting for survival whereas Russians are bolting by the hundred-thousands to escape the draft.

    Ukraine’s jubilant President Volodymyr Zelensky now faces a threat that was always lurking in the background. It comes from his big-hearted friends in the West. In November, Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, met with his Russian counterpart for a “confidential conversation,” which the administration promptly leaked as a message to Kyiv.

    They probably discussed the “compromise” Joe Biden would broach after the fall of Kherson. Of course, the President was “not going to tell [the Ukrainians] what they have to do.” But the hint is hard to miss. Reining in a client is what great powers do to avoid entrapment in a deadly conflict, in this case with a wild-eyed Russian adversary backed by an overkill arsenal.

    An on and on . . . .

    Like

      1. Sounds just like how the US used to game the Iran-vs-Iraq war back in the 1980s: if one side seemed to be winning, the US would arm the other side, and if the other side looked as if it was winning, then the US would switch to arming the losing side … so that there would be neither a real “winner” nor a real “loser” and thus the war dragged on for eight years.

        Imagine if Ukraine appears to be winning too quickly, so that Russia is not “sufficiently” weakened enough, the US would probably direct NATO to hold back on supplying weapons and materiel to Kiev.

        Like

    1. Ha, ha!! Thanks for that, I needed a laugh, it’s been a long day. Kherson is a great strategic prize once the Ukrainians hold it again, but it was just another pissant Ukie town while Russia had it, although we were reminded daily that it was ‘the only regional capital’ they had managed to secure. How long will we have to listen to these masturbatory fantasies, where Ukraine is winning and in the driver’s seat, and the United States is a Great Power that calls the shots worldwide?

      Like

        1. In other news, General Custer’s forces continue to make steady progress against floundering Indian attempts to encircle them and cut them off from reinforcement, which is not needed in any case.

          I don’t pay any attention to anything official out of the PR mouth of the CF anymore; as I mentioned here some time ago, I burned my uniform complete without removing the decorations the day that vaccination against COVID-19 became mandatory in this province if you wanted to keep your job. I similarly destroyed all memorabilia from my military career and official documentary congratulations I received upon my retirement. Well, almost all; I kept the letter from that lying pup Trudeau, which I always intended to send back to him so that I could tell him I didn’t want anything bearing his signature in my house and what a profound disappointment he is as a leader. I haven’t yet gotten around to that, so I still have it, but everything else is gone. The Canadian military is of course an arm of the Canadian government, and the Canadian government takes its orders and even its cues from Washington, ever doing its best to execute and support its policies. It should tell the world something that the STU-3 (or whatever Mark they’re now using) ‘secure’ telephone units that Canadian government officials use to chat back and forth with one another on the most confidential affairs of state are made for Canada by the NSA. Who, naturally, do not listen in on allies. Right, Mutti?

          https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypwpgk/canada-bought-50-million-worth-of-secure-phone-systems-from-the-nsa-42514

          Like

    1. Published: 08 February 2019
      Divide and rule: ten lessons about Russian political influence activities in Europe

      This article is about the perceptions of Western secret services regarding Russian influence activities, and these will be summarized in ten lessons. In various ways all these findings have been covered by other academic works, and they also show a continuation of influence activities from the Cold War:

      1.
      Russia is the main threat.

      2.
      Russia conducts political influence activities, and the main purpose is to weaken the European Union (EU) and NATO.

      3.
      Russia is targeting populations; their approach is divide and rule.

      4.
      Russia uses minorities, refugees and extremists to further its divide and rule approach.

      5.
      Human intelligence is an important covert tool of influence.

      6.
      Cyber operations are another important covert tool of influence.

      7.
      The energy sector, business and corruption are used as venues for influence.

      8.
      There is an extensive use of allies and front organizations.

      9.
      Russia is reconstructing reality and rewriting history to legitimize itself and undermine others.

      10.
      Military force is the ultimate tool of influence.

      The first lessons describe the purpose and targets of Russian influence activities in Europe, while the subsequent ones describe the tools and techniques used by Russia. These tools and techniques are not stand-alone activities, they are employed together, sometimes depending on each other or reinforcing each other, to achieve the political objectives of the Russian government.

      Shocking!

      Civilization as we know and love it is under dire threat.

      Like

      1. They just want you to shut up. They don’t care what you think, just as long as you don’t say it or write it on a sign and picket in front of federal offices. Fear being regarded as a Putinbot enough to keep your opinions and thoughts to yourself, and that’s as good as overt support for western government. It’s already a given that Europeans will descend into poverty rather than ‘help Putin’.

        Like

    2. “The Liberal Democrats said it was “ludicrous and insulting to suggest Vladimir Putin is responsible for nurses going on strike”.

      Just sad – not a big-picture thinker in the lot. The more money they have to give the nurses, the less they’ll have to give to Zelensky, so he can defeat Putin. How much clearer does the connection between striking nurses and victory for Putin have to be before those cloth-heads grasp it?

      Like

    1. Doctorow on his visit to the Mariinsky:

      Not so in Russia. The old saying that Russian girls are born in high heels remains utterly true even in the midst of the present dull mood driven by the war in Ukraine. And during the break in the three hour twenty minute performance, our balcony cohort did not whip out home-made sandwiches and drink from concealed flasks. No, they stood in line to buy caviar sandwiches and éclairs together with flutes of Russian sparkling wine at very fancy prices, though matched by superb quality of the products themselves. This evening was an event, and Russians love to party.

      Brings back happy memories of the USSR!

      Yes, you read right — of the USSR!

      1989-1990, in fact.

      I quickly learnt then (more exactly: I was informed by a Komsomol member) that if I wanted to get a drink, then go to the theatre.

      In fact, I visited the light opera theatre in Moscow, and sure enough, there was Soviet Champagne there a-plenty, and well-dressed stunning Russian girls to feast one’s eyes upon during the interlude. And none were eating fast-food or drinking coffee from paper cups.

      This was when alcohol sales were severely restricted by the traitor Gorbachev.

      I am ashamed to confess, though, that I showed off my wealth by buying bottles of Sovyetskoe Shampanskoe during the interludes and guzzling it with my companions at a table.

      It costs 239,99 ₽ {$3.87/£3.93] a bottle now at our nearby Perekryostok supermarket.

      Not a bad gargle, really — for “starters”!

      Like

    2. His closing sentence in that section could be an epitaph.

      “It is tragic that Washington and Brussels confuse this restraint with incompetence, fear and other nonsense.”

      Literally every American-media story on the war contains the essential clause about the jaw-dropping clumsiness and ineffectiveness of the Russian army, usually coupled with the fiery courage of the Ukrainians; the obvious implication being that if Uncle Sam were running the Ukrainian defense, look out, because Zelensky would be sitting in Moscow in a week, accepting the professions of fealty of the Russian liberal elite.

      The west just scoffs at the idea that this is restraint, that even now in the face of savagery which suggests the helpless fury of the Ukrainian nationalists is making them something like animals, Russia could bear in mind that not everyone is like that. Once again the western example of Fallujah is relevant, because it was the relatively minor event in which a handful of American ‘contractors’ were ambushed near that city and killed, and their burnt bodies hung from a bridge in public display which inspired the shutting down of the city by the US military and its subsequent destruction until hardly a building in it remained undamaged. If Russia could crush Kiev in a week, the logic goes, why would it not do so? Because it hasn’t, that must mean it can’t. This leads to sporadic bursts of western enthusiasm, as well as gifting the Ukrainians with another big cache of weapons and money, on the assumption that ‘one more good push will do it’.

      One wonders what will be left of Ukraine by the time no further grounds for such hope can be found. As I mentioned yesterday as well, Europe has signed on to the oil price cap, so no more Russian oil at all for Europe and it is now more or less completely reliant on the USA for the running of its energy policy.

      Like

  20. From a commenter at Larry’s blog:

    Russian TYPICAL Supermarket After 8 Months of Sanctions

    Fake!!!

    The above was shot 1 month ago!

    The shelves are now empty and evidence of cannibalism in parts of Moscow.

    Like

    1. He says at the end that with the coming cold weather, ice cream is not really all that popular. now

      I don’t know . . . one of my first strange experiences here was seeing Muscovites standing at a tram stop and several of them were eating ice-cream. It was snowing heavily at the time.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I endorse that message!
        I had the same experience when I was with a student group visiting Moscow in 1970 or ’71, in November. Of course, we tried that ice cream, in icy November: it tasted glorious, the best ice cream I’d had.
        I was also introduced to a Moscow ‘coffee’, at a private visit to one of the dissidents (Lew Kopelew, since you ask …): a tiny cup of the darkest coffee (not espresso!) with a splash of vodka. That was excellent!

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The ice-cream eating Muscovites, whom I mentioned above, were eating пломбир [plombir], from the Froggish glace plombières, meaning “Plombières Ice-cream”.

          Ice-cream from the French town of Plombières-les-Bains is (more likely “was”) a creamy ice-cream made from whole milk or cream with an increased amount of milk fat, eggs, aromatic and flavouring additives (vanilla, almond essence; chocolate, nuts, fruit). Despite its French origin, “пломбир” ice cream was widely distributed in the Soviet Union and it is stll on sale here.

          And I still say that Soviet/Russian ice-cream is the tastiest that I have ever eaten.


          A Moscow ice-cream kiosk. It was from such a kiosk that the people whom I saw waiting for trams had bought their “plombir”.


          Orcesses eating ice-cream in sub-zero temperatures.

          Like

          1. Sorry, late to the cone, but Mmmm, мороженое. I was in the USSR in 1977 and I agree this was the best ice cream I’d ever tasted! I liked квас too (from the street tanker truck) as well as chewing on lumps of black bread… great days.

            QK

            Like

                1. The one we were given in the hotel was a bit coarser, but gawd, it was delicious! Perhaps it’s the genes of one of my slavic ancestors which makes me love that bread – and makes me constitutionally incapable of eating the white pap labelled ‘bread’ here in the UK …

                  Like

                2. Ingredients for “Borodinskiy Bread” according to pre-war GOST” [State Standard: ГОсударственный СТандарт standard — ME]:
                  Coriander (5 g ground, 5 g seeds) – 10 g
                  Rye flour (sifted 140 g + 580 g (80 g for the sourdough preparation, 100 g to add to the sourdough, 400 g for the dough)
                  Molasses — 50 g
                  Salt -10 g
                  Sugar — 60 g
                  Malt (dark, fermented) — 50 g
                  Water (130 g for sourdough, 400 g for fermenting, 125-200 g for dough) — 730 g
                  Sourdough (rye 100% moisture content) — 40 g
                  Yeast (dry) — 1 g

                  See linked site below for step by step instructions with graphics for making the sourdough etc.

                  Рецепт «Хлеб “Бородинский” по довоенному ГОСТу»

                  Recipe for Borodino Bread according to pre-war GOST

                  Приятного аппетита!

                  Like

                3. Yeah, English mass produced bread is bloody awful. I stopped eating it after having first lived in Germany and ate bread there, black bread, which I loved. And then I set off for Mordor and discovered Borodinskiy.

                  Like

        2. Before Starbucks came here (and went), together with other coffee houses, Orcs nearly always prepared coffee in the Turkish/Armenian way using a utensil like this:

          They just boil up the ground coffee in the thing.

          My wife much prefers to make coffee that way. In fact, for a good while now, I have been making coffee in a similar fashion, using a coffee-press or cafétière.

          I think that’s how the coffee that you enjoyed here might have been made: it’s “Turkish Espresso”, so to say.

          To tell you the truth, I always drank filter-coffee, using a Bosch percolator, but the cost of filter-papers went crazy following the imposition of sanctions. They were imported from Germany and I’ve not seen them on sale here for a long while now. So it was “Goodbye Bosch!” from me. And now I prefer coffee from the press.

          This is how they make Turkish/Armenian coffee in restaurants here. They put the containers in which they cook up the coffee into hot sand in a little sandpit.

          Coffee vendors used to use this method on the street here as well, but I think the incursion of coffee houses must have put the street vendors out of business. It was way back in the mid-’90s when I last saw coffee being made this way on the street.

          Like

          1. She may well have made the coffee that way – she did it in the kitchen while he and I were chatting in the living room. It was a tiny room, in a tiny, apartment in a modern building – off that big avenue where the houses all look like opened books, that’s all I remember … it was many decades ago.

            Like

              1. Yes! That’s it! That was the metro station I was told to get off and look out for those apartment buildings. Then it was down a side road, can’t recall which one, and another, smaller and older apartment building.
                Don’t ask how I managed, without Russian, just barley able to decipher the letters … people were incredibly kind and helpful, even when they learned that I was German.
                Our group stayed in the Hotel Berlin – it had a huge stuffed bear in the foyer. It was all ‘old soviet’, with a concierge on every floor. When we tried to have a little ‘party’ in one of the big bedrooms we were joined by two very friendly blokes in suits … yes, we did think they were KGB but hey, what secrets could we stupid West-Berlin students blurt out … I’m sure they enjoyed the company though, hard-drinking lot that we all were …

                Like

                1. Arbatskaya metro station you got off at, which is just off the lower photo, bottom left on the other side of that underpass that goes under Znamenka Street. Actually, there are two Arbatskaya stations there, each on a different line.

                  They drove Prospekt Kalinina through some very old and historical streets of the Arbat district — a typically Soviet town-planning scandal in my opinion: Prospekt Kalinina with its tall blocks standing like books on-end was intended to be a Soviet showpiece. For the first 3 years of my employment here, I worked in a school situated off the lower photo, bottom right, just beyond the trees. The Stalin tower, top left in th lower photo, is the Foreign Ministry. To eitther side of the Prospekt, though, there still remain old streets with some fine 19th century houses.

                  The building left middle-ground of the lower photo is the Praga restaurant and “Konditorei” — the best cakes in Moscow, they said. I think they were: there was always a line of customers at the cake shop entrance on Old Arbat, the street leading off to the left of the Praga. I recall they made there a fantastic Moscow version “Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte” with real cream, natürlich. Sadly, for some reason the cake shop closed down a few years ago. Not because of the sanctions, I may add: it was before 2014 when it closed.

                  Old Arbat was one of the approach roads along which the Corsican and his assorted Frogs, Eyeties, Polacks, Austrians, Hungarians, Croats Prussians, Saxons and Uncle Tom Cobley an’ all (except for King George III’s soldiers, who were at the time fighting the Frogs in the Peninsula and had 2 months previously given the Frogs a good hiding at Salamanca) entered Moscow.

                  About half a mile from the bottom left of the lower photo is situated the Kremlin barbican. The Kremlin garrison had buggered off by then and Moscow was an open city. But as the lead Frog column approached the barbican, some old, die-hard Kremlin garrison artillerymen let them have a taste of round shot as a token welcome to Moscow, rather than the traditional offer of bread and salt.

                  And then they scarpered, which is typical of duplicitous, sly Orcs, aint that so?

                  The Frenchies were rather annoyed about that.

                  Like

                2. Thanks – much of this I wasn’t aware of, it was late afternoon in November and I was more ‘interested’ in finding the proper address.
                  But the history lesson, that this was the way the Frogs invaded Moscow: wow! That Photo of the Barbican below is fantastic, and good for the old Kremlin soldiers to bugger off after giving the frogs a warm welcome!

                  The constitution of that Grande Armée is generally very much downplayed, so I’m glad you mentioned all those ‘allies’, some of which were forced rather than having joined enthusiastically – the Poles excepted, they were after a land grab on the back of Napoleon’s predicted victory. Plus ça change …
                  As for the Peninsular War: it not only bled Napoleon dry, Wellington also put the frighteners on all those fabulous Frog marshals. It was at Salamanca where Wellington outmanoeuvred and beat Marmont. Others who had to beat hasty retreats were e.g. Masséna, Ney, Soult, Jourdan … Napoleon, at their breakfast before Waterloo kicked off, accused them screaming that they ere all afraid of wellington excuse he’d beaten them, but he, Napoleon, would have dinner in Brussels that evening.
                  Well, we all know how this little encounter ended …

                  Sorry, as card-carrying fan-girlie of the 1st D of W I can’t help myself when he is mentioned …

                  Like

                3. And it would be well to remember that some of the most courageous and accomplished officers among the Russian forces in the same series of battles were German.

                  Like

                4. The Kremlin Barbican (Kutafya Tower), whence they said “Welcome to Moscow, Cheese-Eating Monkeys!”

                  Like

                5. And it would be well to remember that some of the most courageous and accomplished officers among the Russian forces in the same series of battles were German.

                  One of the most accomplished of them, in military theory at least, having been von Clausewitz. The Kingdom of Prussia fell under the yoke of the Corsican family scam (“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” my arse!) following the Prussian defeat at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, fought on the same day in 1806.

                  Unlike his illustrious forebear Frederick the Great, King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia was a weak character, in my opinion, who had always tried to adopt a neutral stance during the Napoleonic Wars and sit on the fence, but in the end, he was forced by a pro-war party in Berlin (his wife playing a leading role therein) and declared war against Buonaparte in 1806.

                  Buonaparte’s armies defeated the Prussians and the Corsican Bandit occupied Berlin. imposing severe peace terms on Prussia. Many of the Prussian officer class decamped to Russia. Prussia then became a reluctant ally of the “Emperor Napoleon”.

                  As regards ditching the alliance with the French, Friedrich Wilhelm kept on shilly-shallying even as late as 1813, when the Russians were driving the Buonaparte and his allies back to where they had come from. Finally, those Prussian officers still serving their king said enough was enough, most notably Prussian Generalfeldmarschall Johann David Ludwig Graf Yorck, who switched sides, and
                  on 17 March 1813, Yorck made his entry into Berlin in the midst of a huge upsurge of Prussian patriotism. On the same day the King Friedrich Wilhem declared war against Buonaparte and joined, though rather reluctantly, the War of the Sixth Coalition against the Corsican Tyrant.

                  In honour of Yorck, Ludwig van Beethoven composed the “Yorckscher Marsch”.

                  Like

                1. That picture above is historically wrong though, because although that’s a picture of Yorck in the foreground, the main picture is of the 1st Silesian Army under Blücher on the right bank of the River Rhine near Kaub on 1st January 1814. On that day, his army crossed the Rhein, marching West, of course, for France.

                  In those days, however, the cry in the West wasn’t: ‘The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!”, but “The Russians and Prussians are coming!” (And the Austrians and Saxons as well.)

                  Like

    2. I’m envious of the cat litter. My local hovel, err discount grocery store, ,was almost sold out yesterday. Nothing but a couple of wildly overpriced bags.

      Like

  21. A thieving Russkie squirrel in his winter coat nicking seed from a garden bird box today:

    There are lots of tits and finches here, just the same as in the UK and the rest of Western Europe, and the Orcs feed them.

    Like

    1. Good to see that the pretty orcish squizzes are as thieving a bunch of thieves as the horrid grey tree rats (a.k.a. ‘squizzes’) are which populate most of the UK. Do orcish dogs also go berserk when they see quizzes and try to climb trees to get them?

      Like

      1. Those grey ones are a NA import. As a Canuck (and ex-pat Kraut) I am very familiar with those, remembering one of the bunch stealing do-nuts from my wife’s bread bin. The bin contained the Sally Ann leftover bread for the goats, and you would see a grey squirrel running across the snow, with a donut, almost the size of the squirrel, in his jaws. Sometimes they tried to squeeze the donut and themselves into one of the tunnels they had dug into the snow. Never worked of course.

        One day I woke up to a sight never to be forgotten. The bin was stored close to the goat barn, a fence running along it. There were about 20 fence posts along the lawn, separating it from the pasture. On each of the posts was stacked a donut, cookie or croissant, waiting to be picked up by the squirrel living in the bushes across the road from our property, over 100m away. The buggers also used the attic space of the chicken coop for storing reserves. One day we cleaned that out, and removed something like 5 wheelbarrows full of bread, donuts, pine cones, dried fruit, etc., all in an excellent state of preservation.

        Like

        1. Good grief! The UK squirrels are pathetic little thieves in comparison! Eating the flowers of a camellia, or a cornflower … stealing apples and stealing bird food is all they’re good for. And exercising every dog in the vicinity, I have to give them that. I once saw a border collie dropping the two tennis balls he always carried in his mouth and jumping about three times his body height up a tree to get one of those buggers. Still, on another occasion, one of them got his deserved end: he was stupid enough to try and out-run a retired greyhound. Didn’t end well – for the squizz. The greyhound was extremely pleased with himself and presented the body – not mangled – to his owner. She, cooly, took it out his mouth, said ‘thank you’ and dropped it in the nearest bin. No fuss, no screaming: well, she was a top obedience trainer after all and knew precisely what to do …

          Like

        1. When I first began living here, Muscovites had a fondness of owning huge breeds of dog, even if they lived in the tiniest of Soviet flats. Giant Schnauzers were a favourite, but I haven’t seen any galloping around these parts for many a year now. They liked German breeds it seems. I used to see a lot of Pinschers here being exercised in parks, but for the past 10 years at least, smaller breeds have become more popular. Yorkshire terriers are a favourite here now and border terriers.

          Like

          1. Yes, it’s odd how ‘fashions’ in dogs suddenly change. Here there are now a lot of poodle crossbreeds, from cockapoos – that’s spaniel * poodle – to labradoodles – yep, labrador * poodle. For small breeds there are a lot of shitzus around now.
            As for me – if I were younger, I’d get an Ovcharka. I love them but alas, they are now too big for me to handle. An Ovcharka would certainly be the best personal defence I could have … Mind you, I dunno if my furniture would stand up to his weight – and before you cry that dogs don’t belong on sofas: pfffttt! Every proper dog knows what furniture is for – my collies certainly did! – and why should they not share it with their ‘oomans! It’s all about the pack sharing comfy spaces …

            Like

            1. There’s no doggie beast here bigger than the Moscow Watchdog, which many think at first sight is a large St. Bernard. he isn’t: he’s a cross between a St. Bernard and Caucasian Sheepdog.

              Like

              1. If there’s a Bernie in that dog breed, it’ll drool and slobber. Just as Newfoundland’s drool, and sadly, Tibetan Mastiffs – one other breed I like. Drooling and slobbering is dreadful!
                Ovcharkas don’t drool …

                Like

            2. Our dog is a Beagle-Shiba Inu cross, a mix I had not seen before. She favours the beagle side, tri-coloured like a beagle and with a hound’s face and flop ears, but they are slightly smaller than a beagle’s and her face is narrower. She has kind of slitty eyes like the Shiba, which gives her a vaguely aloof appearance, and the Shiba tail which curves up over her back. But in a last nod to the beagle, it has a few white hairs at the tip.

              Like

              1. Sounds lovely – but: has she that wonderful, unique, Beagle barky-howl? I love hearing that when one of the local beagles is being walked past my window.

                Like

                1. She does; her voice is sort of unique and very expressive, she makes ‘speech’ sounds almost like a malamute. She is a very social animal and likes to be an active part of any activity, and gets bored easily if she is not included. Her efforts to attract attention to herself in such circumstances are as distracting as any child tugging at your sleeve while you are trying to get something done.

                  Like

                2. That’s wonderful! It seems that a BeagleXShiba Inu is a very successful crossing. Some crosses just don’t work out very well – the Labradoodles I knew all were less intelligent than either Lab or Poodle.
                  Some work, like your, or like the beloved Big Dog in my Av: he ha the greedy parts of a Labrador, the water-madness (any water, from puddle to the sea: he had to be in it) of a Welsh Springer Spaniel and the intelligence of the Border Collie, a.k.a. as ‘too clever by half’. And of course the pigheadedness for which Collies are well known.

                  Like

        2. Jack Russells are crazy indeed – but then. they recognise that squizzes are nought but rats running up trees. So a proper Jack Russell would of course have to chase it!

          Like

      2. Not where I live. We have so many squirrels that dogs and cats ignore them or, in the case of my neighbour’s cat, make friends.

        I had my back door open for the cat last summer. I walked out into the kitchen to find a young squirrel on the floor with my cat sitting about a metre away, looking at the squirrel a bit dubiously as if he was not sure the squirrel should be in the house.

        As an aside, down by the biosciences complex at the university we used to have a squirrel that was black from nose to “waist” and palomino from waist to tail. An experiment who got away?

        Like

        1. Perhaps your squirrels are bigger than the local tree rats here. There were reports of black squirrels somewhere in Kent, and the biologists said such variants do crop up. A friend of mine saw a white one, she let me have her photos of that animal because I’m known to use squirrels as lead image for my rants when the occasion – a truly huge piece of idiocy perpetrated by politicians and MSM – requires it.

          Like

          1. A friend of mine saw a white one…
            Local (recently invented) legend at the university is if you see the “mythic” white squirrel you will fail your year.

            No idea about size. They look the same size as all the ones I have seen in other parts of Ontario.

            Like

        2. Found this interesting article on the genetics of squirrel coat colours at Wildlife Online :
          Why are some squirrels of the same species different colours?

          The article even features photos of squirrels with body coat colours of one colour and other parts (head, tail) of other colours.

          All mammals including humans have inherited a basic mammalian genetic colour base of red (phaeomelanin) and black (eumelanin). So basically, we either have red or black coat (or hair) colours. Beyond that, in different species of mammals, stacks of other genes coding for colour overlay and affect the red or the black colour according to whether they are dominant or recessive genes.

          A complication is that dominant genes aren’t necessarily 100% dominant: in some mammal species, dominant genes can be incompletely dominant which means that if an individual has just one (and not two) of these genes, the colour the gene codes for doesn’t completely override the original red or black but modifies the colour instead. A classic example is the gene that codes for the cream colour in horses which is an incomplete-dominance gene: in chestnut (red) horses, just one cream-colour gene turns the horses into palominos; in bay horses (basically black, but affected by another colour gene that turns off the black in the coat but keeps it in the mane, tail and lower legs), one cream-colour gene turns the horses into buckskins (gold coat, red or brown manes, tails, lower legs).

          It’s possible that the squirrel that was black from the waist up and palomino from the waist down was not a Frankenstein chimaera created in a drunken overnight experiment but inherited a complicated set of colour genes, some of them expressing incomplete dominance, from its parents. A second possibility is that the squirrel really is a chimaera but a natural one: at a very early stage of development in the womb, the squirrel embryo absorbed its twin, inheriting the twin’s colour gene set. A third possibility (mosaicism) is that there has been a mutation in the colour genes the squirrel inherited from Mum and Dad but the mutation hasn’t affected all the cells so one half of the animal expresses the original colour gene set and the other half expresses the set with the mutation.

          Like

  22. Meine Damen und Herren!

    ENERGIEKONZERN
    RWE fordert von Gazprom Schadensersatz für Gasausfälle
    Nach Uniper leitet ein weiterer Energieversorger ein Schiedsverfahren gegen den russischen Staatskonzern ein. Bleibt Gazprom bei seiner Linie, könnte ein ungewöhnlicher Fall eintreten.
    05.12.2022 – 14:05

    RWE demands compensation from Gazprom for gas supply failures
    Following the initiation of arbitration proceedings by Uniper, another energy supplier, against the Russian state-owned company. If Gazprom sticks to its line, an unusual case could arise.

    Düsseldorf .The Russian gas company Gazprom is facing further claims for damages from Germany. The energy company RWE has initiated arbitration proceedings against Gazprom for its failure to deliver gas. A spokesperson for the company confirmed this to Handelsblatt.

    RWE is the second German energy company to ask Gazprom to pay. Last week, Germany’s largest gas importer Uniper announced that it would seek billions in damages from Gazprom.

    Both Uniper and RWE had fixed gas supply contracts with Gazprom. However, since the beginning of September, the Russian company has no longer supplied any gas to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Uniper and RWE therefore have to procure the gas expensively on the world market – and continue to supply it to municipal utilities and other customers at favourable conditions already agreed. The German companies want Gazprom to bear the losses incurred in this way. But what are their chances of success?

    Germany’s third-largest gas importer VNG also told Handelsblatt that it was examining all options to limit damage to the greatest extent possible. The Austrian gas importer OMV and the energy multinational Shell did not want to comment. But they too could theoretically make claims against Gazprom.

    For the companies, very different sums are at stake. At the large gas importer Uniper, the additional costs for gas replacement procurements amount to 11.6 billion euros so far, according to Uniper CEO Klaus-Dieter Maubach. And billions more are likely to be added in the coming months.

    At RWE, on the other hand, the gas volumes lost are comparatively small. While Uniper was supposed to receive around 200 terawatt hours of gas from Russia, RWE had only expected a delivery volume of 15 terawatt hours until 2023. The company still received part of this as planned. Analyst Guido Hoymann of Metzler Bank estimates that RWE has probably incurred costs of less than one billion euros because of the missing gas volumes. This is based on the assumption that ten terawatt hours were not delivered and RWE had to procure them on the market at additional costs of about 100 euros per megawatt hour.

    Jesus Christ on a bike!

    You just couldn’t make it up!

    Like

    1. In short: a German company blames a Russian company for the results of the stupid actions of its NATO allies and its own Government and demands compensation for the results of said stupid actions, including but not limited to sanctions, sabotage, price caps, etc.

      Shorter still: you fuck yourself royally and blame someone else for it? Sounds very German to me, I know my former fellow citizens well.

      Like

    2. Typo:

      Subheading of the Handelsblatt article should read:

      Following Uniper, another energy supplier is initiating arbitration proceedings against the Russian state-owned company. If Gazprom does not change its position, an unusual case could arise

      Like

    3. What are their chances of success, asks the writer. Well, what would you think might be the chances of success that a country which would cooperate with its fellow conspirators – countries all which avow themselves the deepest respecters of law – to steal $300 Billion from another country which was trusting and foolish enough to deposit it in those countries banks? I would say it would probably be a simple matter for German companies to put a number on their claims, and for an ‘international court’ to grant them relief in that amount from the monies ‘seized’ from Russia. The only way to prevent western thieving is to never let them have what they covet unless they have first paid for it, and for those funds to be secure out of their reach either directly or by proxy.

      Like

  23. Another returns to Banderastan:

    05 December 2022, 15: 25
    British mercenary Pinner, who was sentenced to death in the DPR, has returned to the Ukraine

    British mercenary Sean Pinner, who fought for the Ukrainian army and was sentenced to death by the authorities of the Donetsk People’s Republic, has returned to the Ukraine, The Sun newspaper reports.

    Sean, 49, has returned to Ukraine less than ten weeks after having been released in a prisoner exchange.

    The article does not specify whether Pinner is going to return to the location of Ukrainian troops and continue to fight. According to the publication, Pinner returned to his Ukrainian wife Larisa and promised her mother not to fight on the front line anymore.

    It is reported that Pinner joined the Armed Forces of the Ukraine in 2017 and was sent to Mariupol a few months before the start of the special operation of the Russian Federation. There he was captured by the Russian military, and in June the Supreme Court of the Donetsk People’s Republic sentenced him to death. In his native country, Pinner is recognized as a terrorist for participating in combat operations in Iraq and Syria.

    And get this from The Sun:

    The Sun met Shaun and Larysa at a secret location we agreed not to reveal for fear Russian agents might threaten their lives.

    Like

    1. There’s a lesson in there – don’t believe anything they promise in order to be let go. As soon as they’re out of reach, their friends and sponsors will fluff them up with what heroes they are, and before you know it they’re talking smack again and pawing the ground to show how ready they are to fight. Just keep them locked up, and if you sentence them to death, do it. Otherwise onlookers will say you couldn’t have had a very strong case for the death sentence.

      Like

      1. That bastard Aslin was whinging and whining when in captivity, saying how his attitude towards his former comrades in arms had changed after his captors had shown him photographs of what the Banderites had been doing against the citizens of the breakaway republics these past 8 years.

        Back in Merry England, during interviews there, he was fond of using the phrase “words cannot describe” when waxing lyrical on how horrendously the Orcs had treated him when he was their prisoner.

        Like

    1. Pinner and Aslin may be British military intel assets. Impossible to believe they would willingly and voluntarily return to Ukraine after what they’d just been through without having been offered huge amounts of money and a promise of a big material reward like a new house fully paid off. GIven what we already know of Aslin’s past history travelling to Rojava state in NE Syria, I suspect he and possibly Pinner are British govt pawns.

      Like

      1. Neither Pinner nor Aslin seem to be outstanding examples of martiality. Nor does the old geezer in a photo above who is giving a “thumbs up” gesture.

        Are they intelligent then, in that they work for “intelligence”?

        I think not.

        They seem to be complete thickos to me.

        Like

        1. They both seem unremarkable men upon whose efforts influence operations depend, because they love the press characterizations of themselves as history-making heroes so much and will take considerable risk to preserve the fantasy. So much of the press’s doing business relies on telling a story, and making that story come to life depends on ordinary people believing the nonsense enough to act it out, while other ordinary people look on and believe enough to support the narrative. So little of what we know as reality these days is not contrived or fabricated.

          Mind you, it doesn’t take a remarkable man to fire a gun and if you get enough unremarkable men firing in the same direction, objectives can be achieved about whose import the actors know nothing.

          Like

  24. A brain-dead Banderite coming in his pants on his Telegram channel over the “lustration” of “Moskal collaborators” in Kherson:

    A two-metre-tall SBU-shnik arrives with the fucking collaborators

    Like

  25. Off-topic, I’m afraid, but another allegation made by a shipmate which I have checked out. Dutch Member of European Parliament Rob Roos asks Pfizer’s Director of International Developed Markets, Janine Small, if the COVID ‘vaccine’ was tested for a capability to stop transmission of the virus before it was marketed. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla bowed out of hearings and sent Small in his stead.

    Small admits it was not, but used the excuse that the company was moving at the ‘speed of science’ and consequently did not have time to waste on testing. Roos does not mince words – this is criminal behavior.

    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/10/pfizer-director-admits-no-testing-of-stopping-covid-transmission-before-introduction.html

    Like

  26. KREMLIN PROPAGANDA!!!

    DON’T BELIEVE IT!

    It’s Ukrainian, so it’s different
    Dec. 7th, 2022 at 12:21 AM


    The Galician SS are going into battle!

    Symbols of the SS division “Galicia” are not Nazi — Ukraine Supreme Court

    The Ukraine Supreme Court has decided that the symbols of the SS division “Galicia” are not Nazi.

    This conclusion had been reached earlier at the Ukrainian “Institute of National Memory”. At first, the district court in Kiev declared this decision illegal, but after an appeal, this decision was overturned.

    During the Second World War, Ukrainian SS Galicia, in cooperation with German intelligence, participated in punitive operations and mass killings.

    Chevrons of this division are now worn by many nationalists in the ranks of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine, which the West tries not to pay attention to.


    Recruitment Commission for the SS Rifle Division “Galicia”

    STAND IN THE RANKS!
    SS-rifle
    GALICIA DIVISION
    to defend one’s countrymen in a brotherhood of arms with the best soldiers in the world.

    Like

    1. And now in Banderastan:

      These people are NOT NAZIS!

      Got it?

      If you don’t get it, you are either stupid or a Kremlin stooge or, more likely, both.

      And the Ukraine is winning!

      HA HA HA ROFL 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

      Like

  27. From a troll today on RT:

    I say in 20 years or so, Russia will be a western nation and well in it’s way to prosperity instead of so many freezing to death every winter, especially the elderly. Tourism will be boosted and so will technology.

    Clearly someone who has spent many winters in Mordor — I don’t think! No “technology” in the “Evil Empire”, of course.

    The troll is very likely a native English speaker (correct punctuation, polite usage of “elderly” instead of “old people”), possibly a US citizen. One of those who insists on spelling “borders” as “boarders” and writes “liers” and such grammatical garbage as: “Whomever does not know that NATO and all it’s members are party to this conflict, is fa-a-a-a-ast asleep.”

    The only people who speak English as a second language, not having a first language of their own.

    I say that because in recent years, more and more frequently young Russians ask me to decipher shitwit English that they read /hear on social networks, TikTok etc.

    The young Russians who ask me to decipher substandard English speak excellent English, by the way, often choosing to use the North American vernacular, as does my son.

    Like

    1. Mmmm…except the phrase ‘well in it’s way to prosperity’. The actual phrase is, of course ‘well on its way’, and ‘it’s’ is a contraction of ‘it is’ and does not imply possession or ownership. But the latter error is so common among even native speakers of English that the ‘deciderers’ will probably just write it into the language as an ‘alternate spelling’, like ‘snuck’ for the past tense of ‘sneak’. All bastardizations of language are couched in the pretense of acknowledging ‘folksy aphorisms’ which ‘make the language more rich and diverse’ because ‘normalizing ignorance’ might carry negative connotations, and it is now an offense to cause people to feel stupid. It’s ‘racist’, or something like that. Elitist at the very least.

      Like

      1. except the phrase ‘well in it’s way to prosperity’. The actual phrase is, of course ‘well on its way’, and ‘it’s’ is a contraction of ‘it is’ and does not imply possession or ownership.

        Now just fancy my missing that, perhaps one of the most common mistakes of the poorly educated: the “grocer’s ‘s’ “!

        I see it all the time now. e.g. The dog has not come back. The boy’s told me there was no news of it’s return”.

        Of course, if I would of noticed that mistake, I would of mentioned it.

        Prepositions are another matter. I have heard for many years now “on the weekend” and it has creeped over to the UK now. I say “at the weekend” — a period of time as in “at Christmas” and “at Easter”.

        But “on Saturday” and “on Sunday”, hence, I should imagine, some conclude that because a weekend consists of a Saturday and a Sunday, then “on the weekend”.

        Don’t get me started about “train station”!

        🙂

        Like

  28. New Year’s Eve 2013,

    Russian TV channel “Rossiya 1”.

    It’s an hour long, but you only need to watch it for a couple of minutes before reaching for the vomit bag .

    The one on the left is Maksim Galkin. He fled to Israel as soon as the SMO kicked off.

    You know who the other piece of shit is.

    And at 0:41 is Solovyov, who hosts a TV show which Doctorow often describes as a litmus paper for Kremlin opinion.

    Like

    1. Actually, I always enjoy those Russian New Years’ specials immensely, because there are so many gorgeous women, both as performers and in the audience. Gosh – who would have ever guessed then from his youthful look, his apparently-willing performance in glottal Orcish and his appearance of having tremendous fun that in such a short time he would emerge as the modern-day Churchill, leading his noble country to victory against overwhelming odds while never swerving from the path of humanity and compassion? Or that he would express such hatred – not, of course, at the prompting of his new friends in NATO – for those with whom he had so recently enjoyed such convivial times?

      Actually, if you look carefully you can tell that even though he appears to be grinning like a monkey and dancing and nodding like a marionette, inside he is reflecting, someday soon I shall burn all this down and lead the true Slavic people to greatness over these crude animals.

      Like

      1. I used to like the shows — well, I still do, really: they’re on non-stop from about 21:00 here in our hovel until everyone’s gone to bed. In recent years, however, my children have been going outside after midnight, so as to arse around with fireworks and visit their pals. They only come back home about 04:00. For my part, I usually slink off to bed before 01:00. Never been a New Year freak, and in any case, I’ve got no friends, me. No Orc friends. It’s tough being an Anglo-Saxon who has to live amongst Orcish fiends. It really is.

        Like

        1. I did comment once on one of John Helmer’s posts several years ago – it would have been in 2014 in connection with the Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash – and he allowed the comment to stay for a brief time.

          Like

          1. Same here, except he contacted me by email after the comment had gone and we discussed some expert opinions available on the downing of MH-17 and the weapons involved. But I don’t think comments are a big thing for him and there certainly is not a longstanding record of them you could go back and refer to.

            Like

    1. Yes, that’s a good piece, which is usual for Helmer. I had not thought of the medical angle, but doubtless hospitals are having a very tough time. However, as we’ve discussed before during incidents and events such as the truckers’ convoy here in Canada – if it doesn’t inconvenience anyone and can be safely ignored, it will be. If casualties were light and Ukraine could easily cope with the situation – more like the way things were before it attacked the Crimea bridge and raised the stakes – it could go on for years and years while the west scoured the cupboard corners for more support money in the hope of wearing Russia down over the long haul.

      And the hypocrisy on display staggers belief. This piece appeared in the paper the other day, my paper and many others, since it is an Associated Press piece for wide circulation; “UN aid chief: Ukrainians are suffering `colossal’ torment”.

      https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/UN-aid-chief-Ukrainians-are-suffering-colossal-17635676.php

      Here’s the original news release from the organization itself.

      https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/12/1131412

      You’ll notice the news story added the self-righteous jumping onboard of the United States, which “echoed” the weeping and gnashing of teeth by the UN – poor, poor Ukrainians! Where was all the breast-beating and agonized screaming when the United States was dismantling Iraq brick by brick and pushing out smug daily updates of the misery it was causing in its pursuit of ‘the evil dictator’? And Iraqis could stop it at any time: they only had to give up their leader and submit to American disposition of their country.

      And make no mistake – it was deliberate. According to footnoted and substantiated reporting at this source,

      https://aldeilis.net/english/physical-destruction-iraqs-infrastructure-gulf-war/

      “U.S. Secretary of State James Baker apparently warned Iraqi deputy prime-minister Tariq Aziz at their meeting of 9 January 1991 in Geneva, that is before the “Gulf war”, that Iraq would be brought back to the pre-industrial stage if it did not withdraw from Kuwait.” The wrecking of the power grid, civilian services and infrastructure and the medical sector was planned and purposeful, a conclusion having been reached that causing immense human suffering would shorten the conflict dramatically, while aiding the realization of American objectives with light losses for the western coalition. And it was tremendously successful, and so advertised in the most self-laudatory terms in the press at the time.

      The undercurrent in the AP piece is one of balked fury.

      Over 14 million people are now forcibly displaced from their homes, including 7.8 million living across Europe and 6.5 million still within the country, he said. A total of 17,023 civilians have been killed, including 419 children as of Dec. 1, according to the U.N. human rights office, though “the real toll is far greater,” and there have been at least 715 attacks on health care operations.

      If the figures supplied are valueless, why cite them? Just say, “A huge number that we cannot tell you right now”. That Russophobic twit Nicolas Eberstadt was always fond of the technique when discussing appalling figures for post-Soviet deaths from alcohol abuse: “Studies say X-hundred thousand, but the real figure is surely much greater”. The same logic allows AP and other press whores to pad the numbers of Russian casualties to a completely unbelievable extent, nearing a million dead and incapacitated, while papering over the near-complete wiping out of the Ukrainian army so that many of its numbers are now made up of foreign troops in Ukrainian uniforms. Sound familiar? It should.

      “It was during the brutal Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that the use of mercenaries reached one of its most notorious excesses. Huge mercenary bands laid waste to much of Europe with little regard for the suffering of the common peoples who were killed, mutilated and despoiled at the whim of marauding “soldiers of fortune”. These wars also exemplified a major objection to mercenary service – soldiers who fight only for pay have no interest in bringing war to an end. As Niccolò Machiavelli pointed out, they were greatly dedicated to their own preservation and also had an unsettling propensity to turn against their former master when funds ran out.

      Mercenaries produced, however, many practical advantages. They came ready-trained and could be deployed almost immediately. They were often highly skilled in the art and science of war. Their services could usually be dispensed with at the end of the conflict. A State could also distance itself from their brutality in a way that was not possible with a national army. Throughout history, mercenaries were found to be particularly useful for putting down rebellions since they had no common feeling for citizens. They were, therefore, often the tools of tyrants who used them to repress popular attempts to gain political freedom. The colonial powers from the dawn of the modern era through to the middle of the twentieth century made extensive use of mercenaries, often recruiting from one indigenous group to fight against another. Until recently, however, international law had no position on their legality per se and they were treated, for most purposes, simply as combatants.”

      https://legal.un.org/avl/ha/icruftm/icruftm.html

      As it has ever been, when the ‘establishment’ power structure is losing and its continued perception of legitimacy is threatened, it falls back on increasingly-ludicrous justifications for the behavior of itself and its allies, contradicting without remark or notice the idealized concepts it once developed on the assumption it would never need to break them.

      Like

  29. As regards the weather on the “Eastern Front”, as Helmer calls it, much to know-nothing-about-Russia/the Ukraine Western armchair generals’ surprise, so-called General Winter is a fantasy of theirs, especially in Banderastan. These people seem to think that the whole of Russia suffers polar temperatures in winter. The Ukraine and southern Russia certainly doesn’t, though cold spells certainly can occur there. as can be seen on Helmer’s table of expected Ukraine temperatures for this month and the beginning of January.

    The temperature here in Moskva right now is minus 10 °C [14 °F] at 17:41 MSK and will remain so throughout the night and all day tomorrow. Snow forecast to start later this evening and to continue throughout most of tomorrow.

    Like

    1. And weather warnings are coming in now: heavy snow here on Saturday, turning to a a 2-day blizzard Monday/Tuesday, snow continuing to the end of next week.

      Oh that it blow southwest to the heart of the borderlands!

      Like

  30. I mean, cast your minds back to those heady days of the “Revolution of Dignity” in February 2014 — How often do you recall seeing the Maidan bedecked with snow?

    Like


    1. Kiev

      As trolls love to do:

      ha ha ha ha ha ROFL :- ) 🙂 🙂 🙂

      Meanwhile, Yahoo News reports on Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 2:18 PM:

      • Russia’s military is still struggling with a number of problems on the frontlines in Ukraine.

      • As a result, some Russian cities have canceled or scaled down their New Year’s celebrations.

      • Moscow is still holding a New Year celebration — but it will not include fireworks, its mayor said.

      Several Russian cities are axing New Year celebrations to redirect funds to the Russian military as it continues to struggle in Ukraine, according to multiple reports.

      Officials in Saint Petersburg, Yaroslavl, Kaluga, Nizhny Novgorod, Siberia’s Tomsk region, and the Republic of Sakha have called off their celebrations, The Telegraph reported.

      Complaints in Russia are widespread that soldiers on the front lines lack proper equipment, compelling officials to avoid lavish displays at home.

      Dmitry Denisov, the mayor of Kaluga — a city in the western part of Russia — said on social media that he had cancelled all New Year’s Eve concerts, fireworks, and decorations.

      “We will direct all these freed-up funds to supporting the mobilized Kaluga residents,” he said, according to The Telegraph. “Our men must be adequately equipped, better than the standard provision demands.”

      Vladimir Mazur, the governor of Tomsk, said there should be no “corporate” New Year’s parties for officials, but that children “cannot be left without holidays and gifts,” the Evening Standard reported.

      In Russia, gifts are commonly given on January 1, several days before most Russians mark Christmas on January 6 in keeping with the Orthodox calendar.

      In Moscow, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said the capital would hold a toned-down celebration, forgoing the usual firework show and mass concert. There would still be events and celebrations, he said, with a portion of profits diverted to the military.

      Yeah, right — “The Telegraph” says so . . .

      By the way, Yahoo News, Christmas Day here falls on January 7, which is 25 December in the Julian Calendar that the Russian Orthodox Church uses.

      Now why didn’t you know that, seeing as you otherwise know so much about events here?

      Like

        1. Submitting oneself to sombre reflection rather than celebration creates an atmosphere in which one is more likely to send off a wad of money to the ‘less-fortunate’ (in Ukraine) rather than spend it in selfish revelry.

          Like

          1. Well they’re already getting psyched up here for New Year, firework displays or not. They call the displays here “salutes”, by the way, and there is not only one: several kick off simultaneously all over Moscow as the midnight hour strikes in the Kremlin Spassky Tower.

            I’ve just trudged back from the local supermarket and it’s snowmageddon outside now. and I’ve just checked the temperature in Kiev and it’s still plus bloody 3 Celsius there, the bastards! Its going to start snowing in Banderastan soon, though, on Tuesday, I think. Right now it’s a tropical + 6 °C in Donetsk, + 9 °C in Depropetrovsk, + 7 °C in Kherson, + 1 °C in Lvov and + 10 °C in Odessa. But like a said, the know-nothing Internet generals who love to talk about “General Winter” also know sweet FA about weather conditions in the “Former USSR”. For example in the deep south, in Shagger Nemtsov’s home town Sochi, it is now a balmy + 14 °C. But Sochi is almost in Turkey. In fact, it was situated in the Ottoman Empire until the Orcs took it off the “Terrible Turks” after having once again kicked their collective
            Ottoman arses in one of the numerous Russo-Turkish wars of the 18th and 19th centuries.

            Some of the this coming “toned down”, according to the UK “Telegraph”, New Year celebration attractions:

            Like

  31. FT shite [wall]:

    Military briefing: Ukraine drone strikes show Russia it has ‘no safe zones’
    Attacks show Kyiv can conduct long-range operations without western equipment
    John Paul Rathbone in London pub and Roman Olearchyk in bed with a Yukie whore in Kyiv 12 HOURS AGO

    Kyiv has for months urged its western allies to supply long-range missiles so it can hit Russian military bases far behind the front lines and puncture what Ukrainian military chief General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi has called the “sense of impunity that [Russia’s] physical remoteness provides”.

    This week Kyiv showed it could conduct long-range strikes without western equipment after it launched locally made drones that hit three military bases deep inside Russia — one only 160km from Moscow.

    Ukrainian defence officials and analysts said the attacks — which Russia said killed three people and “slightly damaged” two aircraft — are part of a new tactic that seeks to disrupt Russian military planning and rattle public opinion by showing that nowhere is safe.

    “The attacks are repeatable. We have no limitation on distance and soon we will be able to reach all targets inside Russia — including in Siberia,” said a Ukrainian government defence adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity. “In Ukraine, we know how hard it is to defend against these kinds of air attacks. Soon Russia will also have no safe zones.”

    Ukraine’s government has not publicly taken responsibility for the strikes and many of the details remain secret, as is typical with Kyiv’s other special operations, such as a combined air and marine drone attack on a Russian naval base at Sevastopol in October.

    But what sets Ukraine’s latest attacks apart is their range and that they penetrated Russian air defences to hit strategic military bases previously considered invulnerable.

    One of the bases, the Engels airfield near Saratov in southern Russia about 600km from the Ukraine border, is home to Russian long-range nuclear-capable bombers. According to Ukrainian officials, it is also a launching ground for cruise missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

    “These air bases handle strategic bombers . . . which Russia has used to not only strike Ukrainian civilian targets but also to threaten the entire world,” said Serhiy Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Security and Co-operation Centre think-tank in Kyiv. “But Ukraine’s strikes have destroyed the image of the Russian Federation . . . Even such sites are weakly protected.”

    Defence officials and analysts said one lasting result of the attacks could be Russia dispersing its armed forces inside the country, which would help safeguard them but complicate operations. In September, Russia’s Black Sea fleet moved some of its submarines over 300km east from their home port in Russian-annexed Crimea to Novorossisyk on mainland Russia amid fears they were vulnerable to Ukrainian strikes.

    “These attacks . . . will certainly make the Russians less confident . . . They will have to think about how they distribute military assets and keep them safe,” said a western defence official. “The Russians will be doubting their ability to defend their strategic assets in [the country].”

    Ukraine also hopes the attacks, if repeated on a sufficient scale, will help swing Russian public opinion against the conflict.

    Moscow has launched thousands of missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure that have left swaths of the country without electricity, heat and running water. However, all previous Ukrainian attacks inside Russia or in Russian occupied territory were on military bases near the border or in Crimea.

    “The drone attacks are not going to win the war for Ukraine. The best way to do that is to destroy Russian military assets inside Ukraine. But it does help our influencing operations inside Russia, which the west has not wanted to support,” the Ukrainian adviser said.

    The strikes have heightened anxiety in Russian border regions, which have faced artillery fire and drone attacks from Ukraine since the early months of the war. Their regularity and intensity made Russia’s initial attempts to explain them away as “loud bangs” futile and prompted a switch to rhetoric urging citizens to do their part for the war effort.

    In Belgorod, a region bordering Ukraine, officials have promoted an “I heart anti-aircraft defences” [???] campaign on social media, dug trenches along the frontier and created “self-defence battalions” of local civilians.

    While Kyiv’s tactics are clear, technical details of this week’s attacks remain murky.

    Kuzan suggested the drones may have been made by state arms producer Ukroboronprom, which recently said it was testing an attack drone with a 1,000km range. “This shows that Ukraine, even under such difficult conditions, is capable of developing sophisticated systems,” he said.

    According to Russia’s defence ministry, however, the drones were updated versions of Soviet-era unmanned TU-141 reconnaissance aircraft that date back to the 1970s.

    Based on those specifications, a Ukrainian engineer who builds drones to meet military requirements said those used in the latest attacks could have travelled at close to the speed of sound. Replacing the TU-141’s original camera would also have allowed “over 50kg of explosive, maybe as much as 100kg. Essentially it would be a cheap cruise missile,” he said.

    However, it takes time to produce such equipment from scratch and replenish stocks, said the engineer, speaking on condition of anonymity.

    “If it is the same kind of drones used in the Sevastopol [naval base] attacks, that was over a month ago. To change the course of the war, Ukraine needs deep-range attack drones that are cheap and quick to produce.”

    The defence adviser, meanwhile, said the drones were neither the Ukroboronprom models nor modified Soviet ones but rather a joint government-private sector initiative that could produce new ones “often”.

    He also suggested they had used inertial navigation systems to find their targets. Although less accurate than GPS, these do not require satellite connections so they cannot be jammed. This would make them harder to intercept and help explain how they managed to penetrate Russian air defences.

    “The technology is accurate enough to send men in rockets to the moon, and that is far harder than hitting a massive Russian air base 1,000km away.”

    Additional reporting by Max Seddon in Riga

    Yukie technology to the fore!

    Yukies are smarter than Orcs, naturally.

    And no help from their sponsor half a world away.

    Like

    1. Reminds me of the doodlebugs at the end of WWII, this final ‘Wunderwaffe’ by Hitler. Didn’t work then. Won’t work now. The end is truly nigh …

      Like

        1. Well, whichever NATO ‘support’ officer did it for them: these officers have to show their superiors back in the UK or USA that they’re doing something and aren’t just sitting around …

          Like

          1. 2 hours ago
            The White House has said that the United States had not encouraged the Ukraine to launch strikes against Russia.

            https://icdn.lenta.ru/images/2022/11/30/20/20221130200123101/detail_ed1bb125e0ee20bae5bc44f06be82ab0.jpg+
            We didn’t do nuttin’ no how!!!

            The United States had not encouraged the Ukraine to launch strikes on Russian territory and had not provide it with funds for this purpose. This was stated on Wednesday at an online briefing by the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council of the White House, John Kirby.

            “We certainly did not encourage or grant Ukraine the right to strike at Russia”. he said.

            Kirby argued that Washington is focused only on ensuring that Kiev “has the capabilities for self-defence, for the protection of Ukrainian territory”.

            “We provide them with information to help them defend themselves, and we certainly provide them with resources and weapons”, he added.

            According to Kirby, the United States is consulting with the Ukraine on the accountability of the sent weapons, but Kiev itself makes decisions about their use. “They make their own decisions [on the use of supplied weapons]”, he said. The representative of the State Department noted that the United States “had conversations [with the Ukrainians] about responsibility for [the use of] these weapons systems”, while Washington allegedly expressed “concern about the escalation” that the use of these weapons could lead to.

            Like

            1. Is it now at the exclusive pleasure of Washington that ‘the right’ to strike at Russia is bestowed or withheld? If so, then Ukraine is just a forward-based arm of the US military, and Russia need feel no qualms about removing it.

              Like

              1. An unfortunate slip of the tongue.

                I wonder if Ukraine really did do it off their own bat? Proxies do occasionally do and Ukraine is looking increasingly desperate.

                Like

    2. These drone strikes show nothing of the kind. What they do show is that Ukraine’s western backers are undiminished in their ardor to escalate the conflict. Why? Your guess is as good as mine regarding why they are trying to goad Russia into pounding Ukraine even harder. Is it so NATO will reach the threshold of human suffering it needs to step in? Maybe, but I frankly doubt it; if NATO was truly eager to take a more active military role, it has never needed much of an excuse before. But it certainly seems that every time Ukraine starts to drop out of the news, or that there is not much happening in the movement of the battle lines, ‘Ukraine’ (meaning its allies conspiring in its behalf) launches some stupid stunt calculated to provoke a harsh punishment. Then the press shrieks in agony for poor Ukraine when it happens.

      If they’re such engineering marvels, why didn’t they send over a flight of S-300’s in the ground-attack mode, using inertial guidance? They obviously know where the Russian bases are.

      Like

      1. using inertial guidance?

        Don’t be silly, they have been training homing pigeons as navigators. Fairly cheep and unneeded pigeons are quite tasty.

        The US navy, I heard, did experiment with pigeons as watchers for air-sea search operations. Apparently they did not get bored as rapidly as seamen.

        Like

  32. Although there are going to be no firework displays this New Year — which I think is a bad decision, one of Sobyanin’s wonderful ideas, I suspect, as it will just give rise to cries that Russia is having to economise because of the SMO — in November, VTsIOM had already presented research data on the attitude of residents of the country to New Year celebrations against the background of the SMO. In the survey, Russians were in favour of festive decoration of cities, provided that the authorities refuse to purchase new illuminations and decorations (70%).

    source

    Like

  33. Two-faced slag!

    12/08/2022 00:43
    The head of the European Commission has admitted that she loves Russian opera


    A night at the opera in Italy for the incompetent career politician, now turned even more incompetent career “diplomat” von der Leyen. I wonder if she is going to be cold and hungry this winter? — ME

    Moscow, December 8 – AIF-Moscow.
    European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has described Russian composers as “phenomenal”, saying it is necessary to study them, reports TASS.

    “I love a good opera. Mussorgsky is phenomenal, Tchaikovsky is also phenomenal. We must respect it”, von der Leyen said when asked about her attitude to Russian opera at the premiere of “Boris Godunov” at La Scala.

    Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov” opened the new season of La Scala in Milan on Wednesday, and the event was broadcast worldwide by RAI. [Radiotelevisione italiana]

    The theatre management refused to delete the works of Russian cultural figures from the repertoire, despite pressure and protests, first of all, Ukraine demanded to revise the programme of the new season.

    For the first time since 2011, President and Prime Minister of Italy Sergio Mattarella and Georgia Meloni visited the opening of the season together, and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen saw the Russian composer’s opera live.

    Milan’s La Scala Opera House previously considered unacceptable the appeal of the Consul General of Ukraine in Milan, Andriy Kartysh, to cancel the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov”.

    Earlier, the director of the La Scala theater in Milan, Dominique Meyer, commenting on the opening of the season with the opera “Boris Godunov” by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, called this work a great masterpiece, emphasizing that he “does not intend to hide” when he reads Dostoevsky or Pushkin.

    December 7, 20: 32,
    updated on December 7, 21: 49
    The head of the EC admitted that he loves Russian opera
    Ursula von der Leyen has said that Russian composers are “phenomenal”

    MILAN, December 7. /tass/. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called Russian composers “phenomenal” and said that culture should be respected.

    “I love a good opera. Mussorgsky is phenomenal, Tchaikovsky is also phenomenal. We must respect it”, von der Leyen said, answering a TASS reporter’s question about the attitude to Russian opera at the premiere of “Boris Godunov” at La Scala Theatre.

    For her part, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that she does not share the controversy over Russian culture. “I have a clear position on the Ukrainian issue, but it has nothing to do with Russian culture and the Russian people. There is a political choice, and these two issues need to be separated”, Meloni said.

    Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s comparison of the persecution of Russian culture in Europe with the actions of the Nazis who burned books correct. According to the head of state, sane people, including those in foreign countries, “of course understand the nonsense” that attempts to ban Russian culture carry.

    Shortly before the premiere of “Boris Godunov”, the Ukrainian consul appealed to remove the opera from its programme of events. However, the management of the Milan theater made it clear that it was not going to remove Russian works from the repertoire.

    The title role in “Boris Godunov” is performed by Russian singer Ildar Abdrazakov. Other roles include mostly Russian singers, including Mariinsky Theatre performers Anna Denisova and Alexey Markov, as well as guest Mariinsky soloist Dmitry Golovnin. Chief conductor of La Scala, Riccardo Chailly, is at the conductor’s desk.

    The vulgar, uncultured filth is found amongst members of the Yukietard government and Svidomite racial supremacists of Banderastan.

    Like

      1. Hail the Liar!

        I can’t believe my eyes!

        “Boris Godunov” opens at the “La Scala”:

        Is that the Queen Bitch von der Leyen in the “Royal Box”, front row left-centre?

        Like

          1. She does have some stamina – one day visiting her Ukrie Prince in Kiev, the next one attending a thoroughly Russian opera … in Italy. And she levees both! Yep, her stamina is awesome, as is her capacity of loving two utterly opposites at one and the same time … Why am I now thinking of the Red Queen from “Alice in Wonderland” …

            Like

            1. Despite Kiev’s calls to ban Modest Mussorgsky’s work, “Boris Godunov” has triumphantly opened the new season of Milan’s legendary La Scala Opera House. Italian President Sergio Mattarella, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gave a 13-minute standing ovation to the performance, which was attended by Russian artists. A trio of officials unanimously defended Russian culture.

              source

              Hard-faced and shameless.

              Like

      2. Uschi loves it, she says. But does she understand what they are singing, for they’re singing in that foul, debased Orcish patois. She speaks Froggish and English, and her mother tongue is German.

        Anyway, she’s certain to have recognized and understood the word “slava” above, because that word is also a mova one, one of those pure, East Slavic words in that pure, East Slavic tongue of those pure East Slavs who founded civilization like what we now know it. And mova is under no circumstances whatsoever to be confused with that Mongol-Tatar degenerate Orcish word, which looks like, sounds like and means the same as does the pure mova word slava.

        Uschi, I am sure, is fond of uttering whenever the chance arises, that unforgettable mova phrase Slava Ukraini!

        Like

  34. 08.12.2022 03:14
    Zelensky has admitted that the Ukrainian conflict will end next year


    Full of shit and talking shit!

    The president recorded a video message in which, speaking about the future of his country, he hinted that everything would change in 2023.

    “I believe Ukrainians will be most influential next year, and it will already be peacetime then”, the American edition of Politico quotes the politician as having said.

    Earlier, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced his forecast: the aggravation of the situation in the Ukraine may occur in the spring of 2023. Now the parties to the conflict want to take a break to recover their strength. And in the spring, a large offensive of the Russian Armed Forces is expected. At the same time, the head of the North Atlantic Alliance noted that it is difficult to predict the development of events when it comes to such an armed conflict.

    Meanwhile, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that ” wars end at the negotiating table.” And the current armed confrontation is no exception. Moscow and Kiev will have to solve the problem through diplomatic means, she said.

    How very observant of Merkel!

    And Stoltenberg making military predictions — how drole!

    Like

  35. 01: 08, 8 December 2022
    Zelensky has assessed the the electricity supply situation in the Ukraine
    Zelensky said it is now impossible to fully restore the energy system of the Ukraine


    What to do?

    [Do the right thing, mein Führer: fall on your sword. Better still — blow your brains out, as did your great precursor — ME]

    President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky commented on the situation with energy supply in the country. He stated this in a video message published in his official Telegram channel.

    Zelensky assessed the level of electricity supply in the Ukraine and spoke about the difficult situation with electricity in eight regions of the country.

    “As of this evening, most of the power outages are in Kiev and the [Kiev] region, the Lvov, Zhytomyr, Khmelnitsky, Poltava, Vinnytsia regions and Transcarpathia”, he stressed.

    The Ukrainian leader added that electricity continues to be cut off in most cities and districts of the Ukraine. He stressed that at the moment it is impossible to fully restore the country’s energy system.

    In late November, Zelensky stated how many Ukrainians were living without electricity. According to him, more than six million people remain without it.

    ZRADA!!!

    Like

  36. 08 December 2022, 02: 02
    Founder of the American PMC “Mozart” Milburn has spoken about the heavy losses of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine

    Kiev is closely monitoring data on the losses of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine (AFU), but its troops are severely “suffering” in the area of Artemivsk (Bakhmut). This was stated by retired Colonel of the US Marine Corps, founder of the American private military company (PMC) Mozart Andrew Milburn to “Newsweek”.

    “They [the Ukrainian Armed Forces] are suffering unusually high losses. The numbers that you see in the media that 70% of victims and above are commonplace are not exaggerated”, Milburn said.

    According to him, the Armed Forces of the Ukraine have an “acute” problem with regeneration”. We are talking about the rapid commissioning of “new recruits”. He noted that some Ukrainian military personnel have poor basic training.

    He also added that his organization, which is located in the Ukraine, has a large shortage of funds, because of which it may stop working by the beginning of 2023.

    According to Andrew Milburn, the Mozart organization is not a private military company, and its employees do not carry weapons.

    Earlier it was reported that Milburn called his main opponents during the fighting in the Ukraine the Russian PMC “Wagner”.

    An “an ‘acute’ problem with regeneration” he says?

    Does he think that the dead shall walk again?

    With such figures, there’s not going to be a Ukraine “nation” to talk of, not that there ever was one.

    Like

  37. I haven’t laughed like this in a long time. I wonder if this Svidomite patriot realized what he had written?

    The RF is running out of targets for missile strikes against the Ukraine — head of GUR Ukraine Budanov

    I can imagine such a conversation at the Ministry of Defence:

    Shoigu: Why have we stopped the missile strikes against the Ukraine?

    Gerasimov: I have everything ready, but Sergei Vladimirovich [Surovkin] has not requested any strikes.

    Surovikin: But you see, there aren’t any more targets for the missiles: they have all been bombed flat!

    Like

    1. GUR — Main Directorate of Intelligence (Ukraine)

      The Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of the Ukraine is the military intelligence service of the Ukrainian government, and its staff clearly not renowned for its intelligence.

      Like

    2. There’s a mad sort of “merely a flesh wound” attritional logic somewhere in that claim. Together with the implicit challenge: Whaddya gonna strike NOW, Orcs?

      Like

    3. The Russians will just have to bomb the areas where they bombed the targets, to bring them all back up again so they can be bombed a second time.

      Like

  38. Moscow, 8 December, 2022.

    Dark here now at 16:36. Sunset was at 15:57. It will soon be Yuletide. Temperature minus 10 °C [14 °F]. Snowing.

    Below: Moscow this morning.


    Cold? Come, I’ll give you a hug!

    A metro bridge across the Moscow river connecting the Smolenskaya and Kievskaya stations, which are underground. Surfaced metro trains use the bridges before going back underground again. All the other metro lines run below the river.


    Shayrma on sale, right background.


    Moscow girl who needs a hug ‘cos she’s feeling cold.


    The smallest of the “Stalin” towers int distance, now the Moscow Hilton Leningradskaya Hotel

    The Corinthian columns of the Leningradskiy Terminus station to the right, and across the huge square can be faintly seen in the fog the Kazanskiy railway terminus.

    The huge square between these termini is called Komsomolskaya Square, but everyone here calls it “Railway Terminus Square”, because off picture to the left and on the same side of the square where the photographer is standing, is yet another railway terminus, Yaroslavskiy terminus, whence the Trans-Siberian trains depart for Vladivostok.

    And I sincerely hope that this weather system that we are enduring here soon comes your way, Banderite filth!

    Like


  39. An icebreaker has been at work.

    The building beyond the bridge to the right and which has a radome on top is the British Embassy, adjacent to which in the same complex and further along the embankment is the Canadian Embassy.

    The embankment is to the right of the photograph, but it is the left bank of the river.

    I was greatly surprised a few weeks ago at how many people commenting on blogs were not acquainted with such geographical terminology and argued like hell about which bank of the Dnieper Kherson city is situated on.

    Two Russian women and a central Asian or Caucasus immigrant/student leaving a metro station.

    Much warmer below ground!

    Like

  40. Latest:

    Russia and US swap Brittney Griner for Victor Bout.
    8 Dec, 2022 13:14

    Russia and the US have conducted a high-level prisoner swap, involving businessman Viktor Bout and WNBA star Brittney Griner.

    On Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that the two individuals had been exchanged in Dubai. Bout had been in a US prison for 11 years serving a 25-year term, while Griner was sentenced to a penal colony in Russia on drug smuggling charges.

    Crazy!

    Bout can’t play basketball for shit!

    Like

    1. I am sure that the Pope is pleased with the attack on the Orthodox church by the Ukrainian/Nazi/Zionist government – another skirmish in the millennial war against Orthodoxy, And, US “Christians” approve.

      Like

  41. The horse’s ass has spoken:

    The former German leader [Merkle] admitted in an interview with Die Zeit on Wednesday that the actual purpose of the Minsk agreements was to give Ukraine time to prepare for a military confrontation with Russia.

    Agreement incapable. liar, war-monger, war criminal and fat.

    Like

  42. A long time ago, December 7 was recognized as a day that will live in infamy. Now, no one notices except for articles like this:

    https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/sacrifice-at-pearl-harbor-4/

    I sometimes wonder why the US had such a large navy going way back to the early 1900’s. Given that the US was a continental power, self-contained, no serious enemies and protected by thousands of miles of ocean, why did we need a deep water navy able to project power anywhere in the world? Wait, I got it. The US was always intent on dominating the world, back then and certainly today.

    Like

    1. I suppose the United States needed a large navy after acquiring the Philippines as a colony, though if you have been following Carlton Meyer’s ongoing “Tales of the American Empire” series on YouTube, you know the US under Douglas Macarthur did a terrible job of defending the Philippines from Japanese attacks in the early 1940s and you would conclude that, yes, the size of the navy and the technology it boasted in its ships and weapons were really more for PR.

      Like

      1. Third Cuban War of Independence 1895-1898 in its final stages becoming the Spanish-American War 1898, triggered off by the dubious explosion in and sinking of a USN warship anchored at Havana. (Some think it was coal dust explosion in the bunkers), which latter resulting in the USA beating shit out of the Spanish on Cuba — by the way, whither the bullshitting “Monroe Doctrine” when there was/is in the New World British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish island and mainland colonies and Canada? Oh right! Americans think Canada is “not a real country”. Together with their successes in Cuba, the USN and US Marines headed off for the Philippines, where they again at first did well against the Spics. But then, following their “liberation”, the Filipinos realized that they had become colonial subjects of the USA, and they fought back.

        Mark Twain famously opposed the war by using his influence in the press. He said the war betrayed the ideals of American democracy by not allowing the Filipino people to choose their own destiny.

        There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I’m sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.

        source

        Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

        Like

    2. Teddy Roosevelt, that’s why. Before the “Great White Fleet” was built and embarked on a world cruise to show the flag, the USN was smaller than the Brazilian navy. It was even smaller than the Italian navy.

      In other words, the USN was Roosevelt’s dick substitute — waving about for the use of.

      Like

      1. A book “The Imperial Cruise” explores the purpose behind the Great White Fleet’s globe trot. Here is a description of the book’s content.

        In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt’s glamorous twenty-one year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt’s name.

        In 2005, a century later, James Bradley traveled in the wake of Roosevelt’s mission and discovered what had transpired in Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila, Beijing and Seoul.

        In 1905, Roosevelt was bully-confident and made secret agreements that he though would secure America’s westward push into the Pacific. Instead, he lit the long fuse on the Asian firecrackers that would singe America’s hands for a century.

        Like

  43. Why the Global South Is Raising the Russian Flag

    The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda
    12.5K subscribers

    Dec 8, 2022

    The people of Africa and much of the rest of the Global South are increasingly raising high the Russian flag in protest as a symbol of defiance and resistance against US-led Western Global Hegemony and as a symbol of hope for a multi-polar world.
    – The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda

    Full transcript in article form on substack with hyperlinked sources and citations:

    Like

    1. But, but Borrell thinks that . . . .

      09.12.2022, 03:31
      Borrel does not believe in the sincerity of support for Russia by the people of Africa

      The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrel, said that he does not believe in the sincerity of Africans who support Russia. According to him, these people probably do not even know where the Donbass is located, and who Vladimir Putin is.

      Mr. Borrel spoke at a meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on combating foreign interference. He said that Russia “shifts the blame, distorts reality and finds its audience in certain parts of the world”.

      “I’m talking, for example, about young people on the streets of Bamako (the capital of Mali — “Kommersant”), which were shown by TV channels a poster, that read: “Putin, you saved the Donbass and now you will save us!” This is shocking! We can assume that these people do not know where the Donbass is located, maybe they don’t even know who Putin is”, the diplomat believes (quoted by RIA Novosti).

      German MEP Ozlene Demirel criticized his position, calling it arrogant and disrespectful. “This arrogant tone, as well as a lack of respect for Africa, has consequences. Therefore, we should not be surprised when Africans are disappointed, nervous and turn to Russia for assistance”, she added.

      Several African countries have expressed support for Russia amid its military operation in the Ukraine. At the end of July, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia, where he met leaders of the countries and diplomats. In September, the Ugandan President’s son, army commander Muhuzi Kainerugaba, said that “an attack on Russia is an attack on Africa”. In early November, Mr. Putin announced that Russia would supply grain to Africa free of charge.

      Like

      1. Most Americans can not find their country on a world map or globe. I do suspect that these African youth know where Russian and the Donbass are and what Russia is doing to free the world of econoic and cultural bondage.

        Like

      2. Perhaps a romance will spring up between Borrell and Yulia Latynina; their ideology is on the same wavelength – the poor should not be allowed to vote or to publicly express their opinions, because they will support whoever fills their bellies. Of course there is no provision in this worldview for the authority who fills the bellies of the poor going on to become their useful and reliable ally and the overall modernization and elevation of their living standard. Only those capable of and bent on exploitation can do that.

        Like

  44. Телеканал Россия 24 – “Нацизм под следствием”

    Следственный комитет Российской Федерации
    304K subscribers

    Subscribed

    Nov 30, 2022

    Like

  45. Newsweek

    OPINION
    Lessons From the U.S. Civil War Show Why Ukraine Can’t Win | Opinion
    MICHAEL GFOELLER AND DAVID H. RUNDELL
    ON 12/6/22 AT 9:30 AM EST

    Russia has now put its economy on a war footing, called up the reserves, and assembled hundreds of thousands of troops, including both conscripts and volunteers. This army is equipped with Russia’s most sophisticated weapons, and contrary to much Western reporting, is far from demoralized. Ukraine on the other hand has exhausted its armories and is totally dependent on Western military support to continue the war. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley noted last week, Ukraine has done about all it can.

    . . . called up the reserves, and assembled hundreds of thousands of troops, including both conscripts and volunteers.

    NOT TRUE!

    Called up a small part of the reserves.

    Assembled hundreds of conscripts?

    Yes — as happens every year: all men between 18 and 27 are liable for drafting for 1 year’s military service.

    Conscripts will not serve in active combat service. They have no experience, but reserve officers have it, and it is they who have been “called to the colours”. But the Western media persists in peddling the lie that conscripts are being assembled for active service in the SMO.

    Volunteers for active service in the SMO there are a-plenty. Whether their services are accepted is another question.

    One of my neighbours volunteered, in that he just set off for Donetsk and said he wanted to join the DPR militia. He went in 2014, shortly after he had got divorced. As far as I know, he is still alive. His 20-year-old son was drafted for military service last month. He comes home this weekend on his first leave. He’s doing his military service square bashing at some army camp in a Moscow district situated right on the city limits just inside of the outer Moscow Ring Road, the Moscow “beltway” so to speak. He might even end up just flying a desk at the War Ministry offices, so our neighbours think. He’s a good lad. He was called up and off he went: no scandal, no hysterics. He sent us some selfies that he took when boarding a bus, bound for the training camp.

    Like

    1. As I believe I mentioned a long time ago on the old blog, there was a restaurant we used to frequent whenever we had the opportunity, Scarlett’s, on the road to Dalnegorsk from Vladivostok and about halfway between the two. On one such occasion a bus pulled up and about 20 young men with freshly-shaven heads got off, accompanied by a big-bellied but otherwise tough-looking older man. A quite convivial atmosphere seemed to prevail, I didn’t see any nervousness or apprehension (although they all looked so young, shaving your hair off seems to have that effect on young men), and the older man referred to them jokingly as ‘my sons’ when he was ordering. I was told they were new conscripts heading off to do their training, which I suppose must have been in Vladivostok, although I didn’t notice which way they were heading. I don’t think there would have been much in the way of military facilities in the direction of Dalnegorsk, and the trip between them is a 10-hour bus ride I would not wish on anyone. It was quite a bit like a scene from ‘Kadyetsva’, although they didn’t have uniforms yet.

      Like

  46. Sobchak’s “ex” gets sent down for a long time!

    How sad!

    9 Dec, 2022 12:17
    Opposition figure gets jail time over ‘fakes’ about Russian Army
    Ilya Yashin had been charged with publicly disseminating false information about the operations of the country’s military


    Russian opposition activist and municipal deputy of the Krasnoselsky district Ilya Yashin (declared a foreign agent), accused of spreading false information about the Russian Armed Forces, attends a hearing at the Meshchansky District Court, in Moscow, Russia. © Sputnik / Vitaliy Belousov

    A Moscow court has sentenced elected council member and opposition figure, Ilya Yashin, to eight-and-a-half years in prison for spreading false information about Russian troops. He was charged with publicly disseminating “fakes” in April by claiming Russian forces had committed mass killings in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

    Prosecutors had demanded a nine-year sentence for Yashin, as well as a ban on him managing any websites for four years. His lawyers maintained the official’s innocence.

    Yashin made the statements that landed him behind bars during a broadcast on his YouTube channel in spring. He may appeal against the sentence in 10 days.

    Article 207.3, which deals with the spreading of falsehoods about the Russian Armed Forces, was added to the Criminal Code shortly after Russia launched its military operation in the Ukraine in late February.

    In April, Russian forces were accused by Kiev, along with Western governments and some human rights groups, of committing atrocities in the city of Bucha — a suburb from which the Russian Army had withdrawn in late March. Moscow has repeatedly denied these claims.

    Yashin was elected to the local government in Moscow’s Krasnoselsky District back in 2017, and led the council between 2017 and 2021.

    In July, another municipal council member in the Krasnoselsky District, Alexey Gorinov, was also sentenced to seven years in jail for spreading false information about the Russian military. He was charged following a controversial council meeting in mid-March, when he strongly opposed holding a children’s drawing contest, arguing it was inappropriate because “children are dying” in a “war” in the Ukraine.

    I hope he appeals.

    If he does, the judge can add on more time making a frivolous appeal.

    Like

    1. We haven’t heard anything from that dork Yashin for a long time, although I well remember when a police search of his and Sobchak’s apartment – while they were an item – uncovered wads of cash in envelopes, or so the police said. Perhaps that is simply their standard throw-down that they use to incriminate nuisances. But if so, strangely, the couple did not deny it, but presented it as simply a kind of banking that free people do, none of anyone’s business, why are you oppressing me?

      Like

  47. I see that on the news feeds they are already beginning to feel sorry for Yashin — “How could such a ‘bunny rabbit’ be given an 8.5-year prison sentence?”
    Dec. 9th, 2022 at 19:11

    Exactly the same sort of “bunny rabbits” in the ’90s with USA and EU money destroyed the USSR. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, and millions died early deaths. Military conflagrations flared up, some of which are now smouldering, whilst others are still blazing away.

    Such” Yashins”, “Navalnys” and other scum should not be imprisoned, but shot, according to the laws of wartime. And they should be buried in unmarked graves. Because traitors to their country and their people should have no other fate.

    When Yashin was destroying Russia from within for foreign loot , he wasn’t worried about you, your children, or your parents. He didn’t worry that with the collapse of the country, which the West dreams of, they would starve, that they might be killed and robbed. He was only interested in the rustle of greenbacks in his pocket and praise from his foreign curators.

    What is happening today is not even retribution: it is a cleansing of the country from geeks, traitors and plague virus.

    In the Russian original, the seemingly innocuous and gentle Yashin isn’t tenderly called a “pussy cat” but a “hare”, which for Russians is similar to calling him a “bunny rabbit” in English, or maybe “pussy cat”.

    Like

    1. Wicked, cruel Orcs!

      The West is so much kinder towards its perceived native traitors/propagandists who work for the enemy.

      They hanged Lord Haw Haw in the UK. Set him up good and proper.

      And so-called “Tokya Rose”, a California-Japanese US citizen who unfortunately found herself stuck in Japan after Pearl Harbor after she had gone to Nippon to visit an aunt. So when she got back to California in 1945, she was arrested, set up and did 11 years inside. She was pardoned in 1977.

      Like

    2. A laugh a minute it was off those three.

      No more laughs now off Shagger though.

      I wonder how his Kiev floozy is getting on — she who was strolling alongside him when he got shot several times in the back?

      Like

      1. Posted on a Libtard blog:

        Ilya Yashin has been sentenced to 8.5 years in a penal colony for streaming about Bucha
        Dec. 9th, 2022 at 5:58 PM

        The mad, sick, bloody, inhumane regime of the ghoul Putin continues to punish dissenters.

        Patience and strength to Ilya. I hope this mode won’t last that long.

        So what did he stream about Bucha, arsehole?

        Something like this:

        Bucha is a town in the Ukraine Kiev Province. Administratively, it serves as the administrative centre of Bucha Region. It hosts the administration of the Bucha urban municipality, one of the municipalities of he Ukraine. Its population is approximately 36,971. Bucha Day is celebrated in the town between 11 and 13 SeptemberWiki

        No?

        He wrote that Russian soldiers murdered many civilians in Bucha? And he made YouTube clips on the same topic, didn’t he?

        That right?

        Well, he has the right to express his point of view, hasn’t he — or he should have if he lived in a free and democratic country? About anything he wish to speak about — no supportive evidence needed.

        That right?

        Like

        1. Hey, Libtard! Do you think Yashin’s custodial sentence will finally be the straw that breaks the back of the long suffering though inert Orcish sheeple, who will at last arise and overthrow the vile Tyrant?

          Waddya think?

          Like

          1. And this bastard below should get 10 years:

            09 Dec, 19: 37 9 606
            The head of the anti-corruption department of the Federal Customs Service was arrested in the case of a bribe
            In Moscow, the head of the anti-corruption department of the Federal Customs Service was arrested in the case of a bribe

            Dmitry Muryshov, head of the Anti-Corruption Department of the Federal Customs Service, was remanded in custody until February 8, 2023. The amount of the bribe is not disclosed


            Dmitry Muryshov (Photo: Federal Customs Service)

            He is charged with Part 6 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code (receiving a bribe on a particularly large scale), Part 3 of the same article (receiving a bribe by an official for illegal actions (inaction), as well as Part 3 of Article 30 and Part 6 of Article 290.

            The defence counsel requested that the accused be granted house arrest, but his request was fucked off in the most polite way possible.

            Poor head of the anti-corruption department of the Federal Customs Service!

            He must have been finding it hard to make ends meet.

            Like

            1. Sadly, such excess once granted the freedom to paw through the public purse is not at all uncommon. ‘Elected’ (and often appointed) officials seem to understand that such an elevation to office means they no longer need to pay for anything themselves. I realize taking a bribe is on a whole ‘nother level, but the former CEO of the Canadian Royal Mint (a former Cabinet Minister in the Chretien government) David Dingwall achieved lasting political fame during testimony for waste of public funds on himself – for purchases of such politically-essential supplies as a pack of chewing gum – when he announced “I am entitled to my entitlements”.

              https://parli.ca/im-entitled-to-my-entitlements/

              Former Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski was another lightning rod in Canadian politics, frequently spending more than $200.00 for lunch for two and putting it on the taxpayers’ tab, and using the excuse that he found it hard to concentrate in his office and preferred to take a three-hour lunch and write his speeches in the convivial surroundings of a restaurant instead.

              https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/radwanski-expensed-444-dinner/article1163372/

              That’s not the stupid part – that would be when he was acquitted. The Crown’s finding was that “[Radwanski] was “less than meticulous” in keeping track of administrative affairs, but that the prosecution was not able to prove that what he was doing was out of line with other bureaucrats at the time.” He was actually accused of breach of trust for a loan he took and claiming of vacation expenses before he had served enough time to have earned them rather than for his lavish restaurant bills, but in circumstances other than in a society in which such grifting is commonplace the decision would be jaw-dropping.

              https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/former-privacy-czar-radwanski-acquitted-of-fraud-charges-1.824914

              It is routine for political figures and ‘diplomats’ to rack up absurd charges for travel and meals and expense them all to the taxpayer, often for travel to meetings which accomplished nothing whatever; an example I always liked to use was all the jet-setting to exotic locations in Europe for high-level meetings about the Nabucco pipeline, not a meter of which was ever built, although the aforementioned high-level meetings went on for years.

              https://archive.macleans.ca/article/2006/5/29/since-radwanski-ottawas-top-99-bureaucrats-have-spent-14000000-on-travel-and-hospitality-in-a-system

              A few Canadian politicians – such as Dr. Keith Martin, who used to be my MLA – divined early on that there was much more political capital to be reaped by flying coach class and paying out of pocket for travel, and then ensuring such thrift was well-advertised, but they were few and far between.

              But cases of Canadian officials taking bribes in exchange for ‘fixing’ do happen as well. Canada Immigration judge Yves Bourbonnais got six years for taking bribes, usually between $10,000 and $15,000, from prospective immigrants in order to ensure a favourable ruling, sometimes on appeal after their application had been rejected. I’m sure you have a good idea how much a citizenship judge makes in Canada, but if you didn’t it is something over $120,000 a year, and $10,000 bribes are both peanuts and unnecessary unless you are a crack addict or have an over-the-top gambling problem. I don’t think the judge in this instance had either, and taking kickbacks is more often for the feeling of power and of getting away with something clever.

              https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ex-judge-sentenced-to-six-years-for-taking-bribes/article711643/

              Like

    3. For comparison, here’s an example from the Metallicman blog of how another nation deals with bunny rabbits when the authorities discover which of the more lemming-like lagomorphs have been duped (apologies for mixing the rodent metaphors) into playing follow-my-leader and which rabbits have actually received carrots from abroad to encourage them to start protests.

      This is what happened to the CIA assets, the NED organizers and the participants in the Shanghai Covid protests

      Rabbit-hunting season is fast in China!

      Like

  48. I don’t keep up, so if this has been mentioned before, please delete it..
    One of the bloggers I follow wrote that Russian pundits were making a fuss about what may result from the recent visit to Saudi Arabia by Xi Jinping, so I had a look at the Global Times to see what the Chinese view was. The article is here ..
    https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202212/1281496.shtml
    The fuss being made is that if China and the Saudis agree to do business in their own currencies, it will be yet another nail in the US coffin.
    You can see how much business they do here ..
    https://tradingeconomics.com/saudi-arabia/imports-by-country
    And here
    https://tradingeconomics.com/saudi-arabia/exports-by-country
    This paragraph made me lookup what GCC is ..
    In 2021, the trade volume between China and GCC bucked the overall downward trend and rose by 44 percent….
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Cooperation_Council
    Big changes are afoot!

    Like

    1. Hi, Steve, nice to see you back. Some sources see ominous developments for Russia in this, that perhaps once the Chinese secure fraternal relations with the Saudis, they will dump Russia because they no longer need its resources. I don’t believe that at all; the way to global power is to control all resources that are both available and possible, and Russian supplies to China come by pipeline rather than by ship, which might be interdicted by an enemy and is riskier all around. Besides, China relies heavily on Russia for development of military equipment, a role the Saudis cannot play. For now, I see nothing foreboding for Russia in a Chinese partnership with the Gulf states, although I cannot say the same for the USA, as you have noted.

      You will know the Gulf states have embarked in a new direction in a serious way when they stop buying American weapons and start buying from Russia. Everyone in the region will know from the example of Iran that purchases of American weapons mean they can shut you down in less than a week if there’s something they don’t like about what you are doing, politically or otherwise, so switching out your weapons supplier implies serious commitment.

      I get a regular update from Seeking Alpha called “Wall Street Breakfast”, and this is their take; Saudi Arabia is ‘rolling out the red carpet’ for Xi Jinping.

      https://seekingalpha.com/news/3915178-us-watching-the-economics-of-xi-jinpings-trip-to-saudi-arabia?lctg=60c1e74e33909b2823290409&mailingid=29922570&messageid=wall_street_breakfast&serial=29922570.1030041&userid=53640308

      Anything which says the US is ‘watching’ rather than ‘steering’ or ‘controlling’ implies an overall helplessness to influence beyond the warning ‘don’t think we don’t see what you are doing, and we will adjust our own alliances accordingly’. If the Saudis don’t care, that sends a message of its own and implies increased independence to make foreign-policy decisions. Further;

      “Some $30B worth of agreements are expected to be signed, including energy and infrastructure deals, and sectors that could benefit from U.S.-blacklisted firms like telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies. The two sides are also expected to coordinate China’s Belt and Road Initiative with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 development plan, while talks on a free trade agreement between China and the Gulf Cooperation Council are entering their final stage.”

      $30 Billion is not chicken feed, and I’m sure it causes the United States great anguish, but that is as nothing compared with the perceived flouting of America’s attempt to ruin companies like Huawei by freezing them out of the market. Continued US dominance of commercial affairs relies on its ability to close doors in the faces of companies regardless how far they are from the USA. If that goes, they’re effectively done as a world power which rules by absolute decree. By no means does that suggest they would collapse, but they would have to dust off the ‘cooperation template’; they’re still kind of a big noise in global trade.

      Like

  49. Moscow, 9 December 2022

    This afternoon:

    This evening:

    Kiev evening, 8 December 2022:

    Send more money and weapons because Russia is losing!!!

    Like

  50. Under the headline “Pentagon gives Ukraine green light for drone strikes inside Russia” The Times has a nice little paywalled article with quotes from ‘US sources’. The article is paywalled. I spare you the waffle but present two quotes which truly illuminate the weaselly Pentagon ‘thinking’.
    Here’s the first one:
    ““We’re still using the same escalatory calculations but the fear of escalation has changed since the beginning,” a US defence source told The Times. “It’s different now. This is because the calculus of war has changed as a result of the suffering and brutality the Ukrainians are being subjected to by the Russians.”
    Crikey. That ‘fear of escalation’ means they don’t think Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons … Here’s the other one:
    “However, a US defence source said: “We’re not saying to Kyiv, ‘Don’t strike the Russians [in Russia or Crimea]’. We can’t tell them what to do. It’s up to them how they use their weapons. But when they use the weapons we have supplied, the only thing we insist on is that the Ukrainian military conform to the international laws of war and to the Geneva conventions. They are the only limitations but that includes no targeting of Russian families and no assassinations. As far as we’re concerned, Ukraine has been in compliance.”
    Aww – the concern of those ‘defence source’s for Russian families is heartwarming, innit like! Of course, the saintly Ukries will do just as the Pentagon tells them to. Russians dying in such attacks: well, it’s ‘only collateral damage’, something the US military is not squeamish about.

    Link, paywalled: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraine-drone-warfare-russia-732jsshpx

    Like

    1. Yes, the Pentagon is still adhering to that lauded code of honour that the USAAF followed when flattening and firestorming cities such as Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to name but a few. And they carried on by attempting to bomb the whole of North Korea “back to the stone age”, as they like to say.

      Like

    2. Washington is consistently and stubbornly pressuring Russia to hit Ukraine harder, to just go in heavy and roll the whole place up in a total-war scenario. My question is, why? It seldom does anything in the foreign-policy sphere without a plan, although the plan is sometimes harebrained. What is the motivation for prodding this way, when a response would almost certainly be a proportionally vicious counter-strike against Ukraine? As I posited before, is there some kind of suffering threshold where NATO considers itself duty-bound to take an active role? Because that would very likely lead to a nuclear exchange of some magnitude; Russia is certainly wise enough to know an escalation curve continuing beyond Ukraine could go nowhere else, and you don’t want to be still thinking about it after the enemy has launched his ICBM’s. Or is it just a shortsighted and self-centered effort to make Russia take over all of Ukraine and then get stuck with the ruinous costs of pacifying and restoring it? Certainly Europe does not want to take responsibility, after losing any prospect of having any of its ‘loans’ repaid, for having to shell out untold billions in humanitarian aid or else be crushed under a wave of panicked immigrants looking for someplace to settle. In either case, Washington would be sitting pretty, as the likely targets are Ukraine and Europe, and America has a missile-defense system on which it relies with considerable confidence.

      Surely America cannot reason its proxy-army expenditures have ‘drawn down’ Russia’s strength to where NATO could whip it in a conventional battle. Can it?

      Like

  51. 12/10/2022 11:47
    Language terror. Ukrainian military fed up over calls not to speak Russian


    Shrieking maniacal russophobic slag Farion performing well

    The odious Russophobe and former Rada deputy, writer Iryna Faryon, has once again taken a swipe at the Russian language, which is spoken by half of the Ukraine. Her emotional statement with the thesis that Russian-speakers are fighting for the “Russian world” was this time even noticed at the front. A emotional video response was recorded by an AFU soldier.

    To the trenches – but only if you speak Ukrainian!
    Farion personally and all those who criticise Russian-speakers were addressed by a Ukrainian military officer presenting himself as Igas Kropov, “Sergeant Makhno”.

    “Irina Farion called Russian-speaking Ukrainians animals, saying that they don’t deserve the right to live in the Ukraine…”, he reminded people. “I shall tell you one thing: if my Russian-speaking brothers-in-arms; our wolfhound fighters and, volunteers leave our Ukraine, you will be speaking Ukrainian — only quietly in a kitchen or in basements. And you will live, most likely, in a [Russian] federation district”.

    So he made it clear that today the vast majority of fighters in the SMO zone are Russian-speaking from the East and South of the Ukraine. And he suggested that she “talk less”.

    This is not the first time AFUshniks have reacted in this way to reproaches for speaking in Russian. A few months ago, another fighter was outraged by Farion’s similar remarks and claims against Russian-speaking humanitarian aid recipients in western Ukraine. He said emotionally, using Russian obscenities, that he did not remember anyone telling him at the military registration and enlistment office, where he had gone to apply to serve, that only Ukrainian-speakers were needed in the trenches, so get out of here!”

    Officials have gone into denial
    Language battles are also taking place deep behind the lines. Kharkov mayor Igor Terekhov, who was fined for addressing citizens in Russian, said he would continue to talk to Kharkov residents in the same way. He is sure that “today there are most definitely other things to do”. “This is the language that 80% of Kharkov citizens speak today, and you have to be very careful and cautious over this language issue”, the official said. He recalled that as regards the language issue “we have always been divided” and one must remember that “we are all Ukrainians”.

    However, a little earlier, Anastasia, the wife of an adviser to the Office of the President, Oleksiy Arestovich, did not even begin to lay down some kind of ideological base and simply stated that she did not plan to switch completely to the Ukrainian language. She would still speak her native Russian.

    “Hey, Moskal! Ask in Ukrainian”.
    Ordinary citizens who have been displaced to western Ukraine find it much more difficult to stand up for their Russian language. We remember the endless clips of the spring and summer, when clashes over the “wrong vernacular” in shops, transport and even on the street occurred regularly. Then it seemed that everyone had got used to one another, had become involved with communal problems and had forgotten about the strife. But it has turned out that the language terror continues.

    Videos have again emerged from the western regions of the Ukraine, showing people speaking Ukrainian and humiliating citizens of their own country, refugees who speak Russian.

    Here’s a recent video, for example: a woman from Kharkov, who found herself on a Kiev-Budapest bus changing at Lvov, where she was stuck for several hours. She said that there was no coffee in the shop, no room on the bus even for a small child and no help or human feeling could be seen if you didn’t speak Ukrainian. “Hey you, Moskal woman! Ask in Ukrainian, then maybe someone will make room for you”, a young woman says to her.

    “They intensely hate Donbass, Kherson, Zaporozhye and Kharkov, but maintain with equal fervour that the Ukraine is indivisible, that this is their land. The funny thing is that the real pure Ukrainian language is in the Poltava region. They rub our surzhyk [a mix of Ukrainian/Russian dialects, having no standard and many regional variations — ME] in our faces, even if we try to speak Ukrainian”, another Kharkov resident, Natalia, who has temporarily moved to Lvov, told AiF. “And, by the way, in Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk is spoken a Polish dialect, and in Bukovina they speak with a Romanian accent, and with a Hungarian one in Transcarpathia. And when they’ve become tired of persecuting Russian speakers, they will then have to remember their own ‘native tongues’ themselves.”

    Meanwhile, Farion says it’s time for Ukrainians to join the “fierce wolves” movement and “sanitise” the state against Russians so as to display the “uniqueness of the nation”. Well, the language ombudsman has already received more than two thousand complaints about violations of the law on the functioning of the Ukrainian language. Kiev is in the lead, followed by Kharkov and Odessa regions.

    That’s what happens when a fictive nation-state with a fictive national language is created.

    Like

    1. It surely would be impossible for Ukrainian military personnel to avoid using Russian. The weapons and equipment used, and probably even the procedures and routines soldiers follow, if they date back to the Soviet period, must all be in Russian. How would soldiers and officers communicate otherwise unless there is a Ukrainian-language academy issuing yearly manuals and lists of new vocabulary specific to the military and other institutions with unique and specialised functions?

      Of course if one were to ask the likes of Farion and her cult of followers to fight for Ukraine, the first thing they would do is turn up en masse in western Europe or North America requesting asylum.

      Like

    2. These ridiculous pretenders to purity – do they imagine that if western Ukraine is absorbed by Poland, that all the Poles will attend language classes to learn to speak ‘pure’ Ukrainian? Do they imagine the populations of countries to which they flee as immigrants with nothing, dependent upon the kindness of strangers, will bend over backward to ensure all services are available in their mother tongue?

      Like

  52. Helmer on the June 29-July 1, 1934 “Night of the Long Knives” redux, with a translation of an article by Thomas Röper:

    THE NIGHT OF THE PEN KNIVES – THE OLAF SCHOLZ PLOT EXPOSED AS PUTZ, NOT PUTSCH

    No German currently employed by the country’s mainstream or internet media dares to disbelieve that dawn raids last Wednesday by 3,000 armed police and troops, capturing 130 premises and arresting 25 individuals – conducted in secret in front of dozens of press photographers and reporters – was a successful strike against the German state’s internal and external enemies. The official press release by the federal prosecutor adds that another 27 individuals have been targeted but not yet captured. “In addition, premises of non-suspects are searched,” the federal government statement said.

    The United States Bundesrepublik Deutschland colony performing well for its masters.

    No shame!

    Hey Scholtz! Anything to say about who destroyed NS2 and why?

    How about you, Baerbock? Nothing to say?

    And you, the unshaven one who looks like he sleeps on a park bench . . . Yes, Habeck! Anything to say?

    Below: the original Lowe cartoon from which the above is taken:

    And for Scholtz’s next trick . . . the burning of the Reichstag Bundestag and say “Putin done it!”

    Röper’s original text:

    Insider: Verfassungsschutz wahrscheinlich in angeblichen „Putschversuch“ involviert

    In case none of you Stooges know, the self-styled Heinrich XIII Prince of Reuss, was arrested along with 24 alleged far-right co-conspirators last Wednesday as part of the largest police counterterrorism operation in German history.

    Little is known of the terrorist group that, prosecutors have alleged, had access to weapons and training, had recruited from the armed forces and the police and had drawn up detailed plans on how to install a new government.

    The group, part of the Reichsbürger, or “Reich Citizens”, movement, rejects the legitimacy of the German state after Kaiser Wilhelm II had stood down in 1918, and was allegedly planning to install Heinrich as the new head of state, authorities say.

    Ach, die gute alte Zeit! Es lebe den Kaiser!

    Below: Friedrichstraße, Berlin, 1896.

    And below, 14 years later — again along Friedrichstraße, followed by Leipziger Straße, the Royal Palace, the Siegesallee, the Siegessäule with its golden angel on top . . . . all gone!

    Collateral damage, see.

    Why had it to end . . . ?

    Nostalgia plays tricks, though. I certainly wasn’t around when those above scenes were shot, but I have several books about Berlin, bought in Berlin, both “East” and “West”, all still in England, in which the abject poverty of very many Berliners at the turn of the 20th century is described.

    Like

    1. Well, the streets haven’t gone, nor has the Victory Column and its angel.

      That was the victory over the French in 1871, by the way, that the column celebrates, which victory resulted in the foundation of the Second (Bismarckian) Reich on 18 January of that year in the Palace of Versailles, France, thereby making Germany the mightiest power by far in Europe, something which Britain certainly would not tolerate.

      Britain has never tolerated an overwhelmingly dominant power in Europe, much like its present inheritor on the world stage is obsessed with its continuance as the world hegemon. England opposed Spanish domination of Europe (the same Hapsburg clan as the one that ran the k. u. k. business based in Vienna), and then for 200 years, England, then the United Kingdom of Great Britain, fought tooth and nail worldwide against the French and their empire. That struggle ended in 1815 at Waterloo. Ninety years later, Britain joined in with its erstwhile longstanding French enemy to take on the new big kid i
      on the European block.

      Hence the very foundation of the Reich at the same time sounded the death knell of the united German speaking states, German-Austria excluded, which latter sank with the long moribund Hapsburg dual monarchy. The Kaiserreich funeral was to take place in 1919. However, there was a delay in the burial, which eventually took place in 1945, “Year Zero” for Germany. And now Scholz and his gang and German USA lackeys have destroyed the almost miraculously resurrected Federal Republic of Germany. And if I were a German, I should be very angry. I am not German, albeit I am an Anglo-Saxon close relative, yet I am still very, very annoyed at what German moronic politicians have done to Germany.

      The Hohenzollern Palace in Berlin has also gone. It was destroyed collaterally by allied aerial bombardment during WWII and the ruins dynamited in the early 1950s. Or maybe the RAF and USAAF considered the Berlin palace to have been a military target?

      Like

    2. Strange! Beneath the video above of 1896 Berlin , I posted another video after having written this:

      And below, 14 years later — again along Friedrichstraße, followed by Leipziger Straße, the Royal Palace, the Siegesallee, the Siegessäule with its golden angel on top . . . . all gone!

      And now that second video of 1910 Berlin has gone!

      This has happened a couple of times of late: I have posted a comment, it has appeared, but later vanishes without trace.

      Like

      1. That is why I referred to the Berlin Royal Palace and the Victory column above in my post of December 10, 2022 at 8:10 am. But the video to which I refer in that post has now gone!

        Like

          1. Why had it all to end?

            I think that not all of the shots in the above clip were taken in Berlin, though. Some scenes look very much like Munich to me.

            Note the horse droppings on the street, which brings back memories of my early childhood. If one could go back in time to 1910, one of the first things that you would notice in the streets would be the smell and sight of horse droppings.

            The Germans have a term for horse droppings that used to amuse me: Pferdeäpfeln — horse apples.

            Like

            1. And they are still referred to in North American culture as ‘road apples’. Iconic Canadian band (iconic partly because the singer, Gordon Downie, elected to do a final tour although he knew he was dying of brain cancer, which tour became a film called “Long Time Running”) The Tragically Hip named one of their albums ‘Road Apples’.

              https://music.apple.com/us/album/road-apples-2021-remaster/1593179010

              It features a road-apple maker prominently on the cover.

              Like

            2. I did watch that second video of 1910-period Berlin.

              Even with the horse droppings, the streets look quite clean. My own past reading of what city streets were like before the advent of electric trams and motor vehicles is that they were horrifically filthy. Urban traffic was as dense as in the present and streets were full of horse manure. A complicating factor is that horses stress easily in noisy and crowded situations, and the usual stress reaction in such situations, common to many animal species (and humans as well), is to empty the bowels.

              Horse urine would be another smelly addition. The streets would have been slippery and dangerous to walk on with urine and faeces mixed together. I have read that falls were very common for both pedestrians and horses alike, and the most common accidents doctors and surgeons in hospitals had to deal with were those resulting from such falls. The risk of contracting tetanus must have been a huge worry.

              Horses working in large cities were often undernourished (they were fed cheap hay, and probably not much of it was fresh or free of disease-bearing spores) and were worked hard every day. Horses dropping dead from exhaustion were apparently common sights in very large cities (of the size of London and New York then) and their bodies were sometimes not collected and removed by city authorities for several days due to overcrowding in the streets. This of course would have made city streets even more hazardous.

              Like

              1. Yes, my old Irish grandma was born in 1870 and she used to tell my mother, who later recounted to me her tales, about what it was like in those days. My grandmother migrated with her family from Co. Cork to London when she was a girl. She left London for the north of England at the turn of the 20th century. She was nearly 90 when she died, so I remember her. She said that the hems of the long skirts that women then wore were always soaked with filth from the road crossings, which were areas swept of horseshit by urchins with brooms. When she was a Londoner — a London-Irish Londoner who lived in Kilburn, one of the several London “Irish Towns”, she saw Queen Victoria several times riding around in a landau. I remember how she described Queen Victoria: “Old and ugly!” she used to say laconically.

                Like

    3. Very likely a ‘let’s nip this in the bud’ warning to Germans that expressions of objection to official German government policy, ruinous and stupid though it may be, will be dealt with harshly.

      Like

  53. Friedrichstrasse Station was where I first alighted in “East Berlin” in 1988. I had travelled there on the U-Bahn from the “Free World”. Going from “West Germany” to “East Germany” or, as the case may be, from “West Berlin” to “East Berlin” back then was like going through a time warp — a 30 to 40 year time warp.

    Like

  54. Austrian “independent” news journal “Profil” has named the Kiev Clown “Person of the Year” because of his “influence on the fate of the Ukraine and the West”.

    This is the 4th publication to have named him so.

    The relevant article was published on Profil’s website, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

    The article “Volodymyr Zelensky: The man who shook up the free world”, says that Zelensky has managed to be seen worldwide not only as the representative of the Ukraine attacked by Russia, but as the man of the West.

    “Anyone who sees oneself as part of the West intellectually, ideologically and in real terms – and this applies to the Republic of Austria, as well as to Profil news magazine – comes to the unavoidable conclusion: Zelensky is our man. There is no lack of originality, when the British newspaper Financial Times, the US magazine Time, and now also Profil consider the same person to be the most important and influential person this year”. the article reads.

    No lack of originality? When all sing the same tune?

    Orchestrated “originality” in strict harmony?

    source

    From the above-linked Austrian news journal website:

    Then, on 24 February this year, Putin’s Russia invades the Ukraine, and suddenly the 44-year-old ex-comedian Zelensky is the centre of world attention. First, because despite seemingly overpowering Russian forces, he decides not to leave the country and not to surrender, but instead instructs his army to resist. With this act of bravery, he earns respect.

    The man condemned to be a warlord does not want to hang this respect uselessly on his wall. He uses it as an investment to gain the support of the ally he calls to his aid: the West. Zelensky presents the war as an existential endgame between an authoritarian power and a democratic state, and promises that he and his nation will make every conceivable sacrifice to beat back Putin’s onslaught if the Western allies support them. At first, Zelensky’s goal seems more than audacious, but at the same time there is no alternative. “Why the West must win” is the title of a Profil editorial one month after the war had begun.

    And always the lie that Banderastan is a democracy, all sweetness and light and “Western values”, whereas Russia is an evil autocracy, whose subhuman hordes are in thrall to its bestial criminal Führer leader.

    Like

    1. Mmmm…yes; I seem to recall that Tymoshenko was way up there in western recognition at one time. She was Person Of The Year in Korrespondent magazine twice, the only person to have been so honoured, and was third in Forbes’ list of The World’s 100 Most-Powerful Women for 2005. What do you hear of her now? Zip. Crickets. The most recent news item about her was from this past summer, a gratuitous interview with The Guardian, in which she claimed The War had united all the Ukrainian political spectrum, all friends together in the common bond of Ukrainianism. Tymoshenko routinely ridicules other government figures in order to gain advantage or cause a distraction, so if she claims deep kinship it is guaranteed to be a ploy to benefit from reflected attention. But now she is a nobody.

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/yulia-tymoshenko-on-war-in-ukraine-russia-putin

      And someday soon, Zelensky will be, too. That article is even more entertaining than featuring Tymoshenko makes it, as well, for that amusing aside from Micron that Putin ‘must not be humiliated’. Ah, yes, good times, back when Ukraine was kicking Russian ass left and right and a glorious victory in which Zelensky set his powerful right foot on Putin’s throat was only weeks away. Can you remember those glory days now, you French flake? I should think that ‘humiliating Putin’ to the degree that he might lash out in his balked fury is pretty far down the west’s list of potential accomplishments at the moment.

      Like

  55. Foreign Affairs
    The Global Zeitenwende*
    How to Avoid a New Cold War in a Multipolar Era
    By Olaf Scholz
    January/February 2023

    For its part, Germany is doing everything it can to defend and foster an international order based on the principles of the UN Charter. Its democracy, security, and prosperity depend on binding power to common rules. That is why Germans are intent on becoming the guarantor of European security that our allies expect us to be, a bridge builder within the European Union and an advocate for multilateral solutions to global problems. This is the only way for Germany to successfully navigate the geopolitical rifts of our time.

    Drang nach Osten, vielleicht?

    *Zeitenwende: Turning Point, Turn of the Times, Turn of the Tide.

    Swedish blog 8 dagar [8 days]:

    Give Scholz the Nobel prize!


    Vot I written haf, is enough, so as anyone to the laughing to bring!

    Kanzler Olaf Scholz article in Foreign Affairs “The Global Zeitenwende” clearly shows he is worthy of a Nobel Prize — in hypocrisy.

    He, who represents a state that only some 75 years ago devastated large parts of Europe and annihilated 27 million Soviet citizens, is now trying to pose as the leader of a “free Europe” with a fresh new 100 billion fund for rearming Germany.

    He portrays Russia as imperialist, although the old German plans to swallow up the Ukraine as a producer of grain and a cheap workforce are obvious — he already brags of German investments taking the lead in the carving up of the Ukraine. Even when he talks about immigration, he reveals his colonial reflexes. European gardeners should cherry-pick the ones with the best education so as to serve Germany’s millions of rich and retired, and the rest shall be taken care of in camps.

    Like

    1. It’s amazing anyone would even print anything written by Scholz, as if he was the leader of something, never mind suggest he should get a prize for it. The German economy has collapsed on his watch, and the entire world watches his desperate floundering with interest and amusement. He is looking like wresting the crown of downward-facing thumbs which marks the World’s Most Ineffective Leader from Justin Trudeau, which is a remarkable feat. But just now the west is led by such embarrassing fools that Scholz barely stands out – not a good climate in which to get noticed in the Fuckup Sweepstakes.

      Like

    1. It may seem cruel but Russia’s effort to demilitarize and denazify the Ukraine does require a meat grinder with the grindee being nazis and the incurably stupid and blind. Once the war is over, the Ukraine should be largely free of stay-behinds and the like that the West would otherwise use for widesprad terrorist operations.

      Like

  56. From Dreizin:

    I’ve got to follow up on some Ukraine stuff from last weekend.

    This is just too damn wild…..

    …..and can’t be ignored.

    The Zoo Is The Zoo Is The Zoo

    Remember, last time, I told you how Uncle Sam…..

    …..running out of “spare” GMLRS missiles for his HIMARS launchers…..

    …..told the Ukraine to start using the stuff more rationally…..

    …..like, shooting it at Russian military positions, not just government office buildings in Russian-controlled areas, that type of thing.

    Of course, it’s not a “moral” issue. It wasn’t an issue at all, until Uncle realized he was running out of missiles, LOL.

    Well, evidently…..

    …..the Ukrainian army didn’t internalize “the message.”

    Reportedly aiming to kill the Russian-installed, civilian head of largely Russian-controlled Zaporozhie province…..

    …..it shot six missiles at the restaurant / banquet hall building (located on the grounds of the Prival Okhotnika rural hotel complex, near Melitopol)…..

    …..where he was supposed to be celebrating his birthday.

    Some of the missiles (coming in almost exactly at their effective range limit)…..

    …..were shot down, but the ones that got through…..

    …..killed at least two civilians and injured at least eight more in the general area.

    Fortunately, per the couple in the below video (they either work at the site, or own it, not clear)…..

    …..the building was mostly empty at the time.

    It seems “the target” was not inside the building at the time.

    Even had he been, the guy has his own local security squad, it’s unlikely he’s followed everywhere by a Russian army bodyguard detail.

    Will Uncle Sam be pleased with this use of his resources?

    Probably not, but it looks like “the inmates” just couldn’t resist.

    No wonder Uncle Sam, still, after over nine months, has given them NOTHING that could hit deep within Russia…..

    …..(that is, beyond GMLRS/HIMARS range….. and even the GMLRS, they’ve been ordered not to fire into Russia’s pre-2014 borders.)

    Sure, Ukrainians are good enough to die against Russia, so “American boys” don’t have to…..

    …..(because after the Iraq clusterfuck, Americans just won’t accept any large number of casualties, it’s totally out of the question)…..

    But…..

    NOBODY TRUSTS THEM.

    LOL!!!

    [video insert]

    One more quick Ukraine hit…..

    This (below) 62-year old Afghanistan veteran is with Russia’s BARS-7 volunteer battalion.

    He lived in Russia while two sons from two different wives live in the Ukraine.

    One of his sons, he spoke with last in April, by phone.

    The son had just joined up (or was drafted, not clear) into the Ukrainian army, he told his dad something like…..

    “If we meet, I won’t spare you.”

    The other son is also in the Ukrainian army.

    He said he’d like to see both of his sons, but the nasty one, he will just hand the guy over as a prisoner to the military police, let them deal with him, LOL.

    [video insert]

    I wrote about this before.

    It is a common enough situation.

    Certainly AT LEAST TWO-THIRDS of those living in the Ukraine, have one or more known relatives living in Russia.

    (If you include Crimea and Russian-controlled areas of Donetsk and Lugansk as part of Russia, it’s probably more like three-quarters.)

    You never hear this in the MSM, it’s taboo.

    It’s like, this is “Hitler invaded Poland, and we must fight for Poland“… really dumb.

    These are two separate states…..

    .….but NOT two separate populations.

    Even if you think Russia is wrong, at least report the truth, give people some fucking context!!!

    Of course, by now, everyone knows the Ukraine thing is just an AGENDA….

    (1) to promote bureaucratic turf, prerogatives, careers, egos,

    (2) to VASTLY expand cashflows for a “certain industry” (which has much clout in Congress),

    …..and (3) to serve as a sort of “loyalty” test, censoring and shutting down any opposition as extreme and unacceptable…..

    …..just like with the vakk-seenz, (1) and (2) and (3), same thing.

    It’s the same thing.

    It’s even the same voting bloc in the USA, that has largely peeled away from the Narrative on this one.

    Almost no one really believes in it (or gets excited for it) anymore…..

    …..but it will go on, and on, and on…..

    …..like the vakk-seenz and the boossters…..

    …..because there’s just no lobby to end it.

    Like

    1. Were the Russian Afghan war veteran to meet his son who had threatened to kill him, he could respond to the disrespectful ingrate’s murderous threat with the immortal words of the fictitious Ukrainian hero Taras Bulba, spoken to his own treacherous offspring:

      Я тебя породил, я тебя и убью!

      I begat you and I will kill you!”

      And he did.

      Like

    2. Mostly believable, except I am not convinced it is the Ukrainians operating HIMARS. For one thing, it should be a completely new weapon system to them, and its guidance should be quite an advance on the Grad. For another, if it were under Ukrainian control they would not be able to resist shooting at towns in Russia they can reach, and there must be quite a few.

      However, this does not square with the odd agenda NATO seems to have of constantly provoking Russia, all the while its ‘analysts’ keep up jabber about how the hardliners are about to break with Putin because they want serious military action, both in an apparent attempt to make Russia hit Ukraine harder. So I’m not sure what is going on.

      Like

      1. If NATO’s aim is to find out how Russia’s hypersonic weapons and other military technologies perform in the field, it probably makes sense to provoke Moscow and at the same time have analysts constantly insinuate that hardliners are pressuring Putin to use them in some combination, in the hope that the weapons and technologies are brought out sooner than later. There may be defence budget deadlines that NATO members have to meet and these might be missed.

        On the other hand, it may be that even NATO does not really know what to do, and the provocations and the “analyst” talk represent two probes into what Moscow might be thinking or doing in the hope that one of these probes might discover a weakness that can be exploited, and the NATO agenda adapted to exploit it accordingly.

        Like

        1. The latter is certainly possible. As to the former, there has been a considerable number of star turns by precision weapons used against Ukraine’s utility providers. I imagine the USA has had plenty of opportunity to study the effect of these munitions, and if any have been shot down without exploding, they may have gotten a peep into the working electronics as well. As we learned from the example of the RD-180, understanding does not necessarily equal an ability to duplicate.

          I had a little bit of extra time – unusually – so I searched “What are the USA’s aims in Ukraine?” The top responses were all from the Washington Post, and this reference is from a couple of mostly-ignorant political-science eggheads.

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/11/ukraine-war-expansion-risks-nuclear/

          It seems very important for the United States that whatever outcome transpires, it be seen as having resulted from American will and influence. Unfortunately for the west, it took a position early on that Putin Must Not Win. Therefore, there is now a situation in which a Putin victory and The Triumph Of American Will present irreconcilable solutions. This should provide a valuable lesson for future conflicts – don’t take an extreme position early. Keep your public goals modest and deniable, or sufficiently ambiguous that you can claim to have reached them even if you haven’t.

          I’m kidding, of course – the west has not learned anything from any major conflict it has ever been seriously involved in, else subsequent ones would not have happened. America likes to fight like a Saturday-night drunk, and has a very strong investment in itself as a big noise that makes everyone jump to attention. Let’s look: bear in mind that these lofty pronouncements were made in May, by non-military academics far from the sound of battle.

          “Yet crippling Russia’s military or expelling Russia from Ukraine are significantly more dangerous aims than preventing the further loss of Ukrainian territory or, through limited offensive operations, gaining some of it back. Unfortunately, if Russian President Vladimir Putin begins to think that his back is against the wall, he may lash out by directly confronting NATO, intensifying the conventional war in the east, or even using nuclear weapons.”

          There was never a serious risk for Russia that Ukraine was going to put Putin’s back to the wall by itself, and the steadily-increasing likelihood of a nuclear war rests on the unwillingness of the west to concede that Ukraine is beaten – consider; nearly all its professional army and a significant percentage of its young conscripts are either dead or casualties who are unlikely to return to combat. An increasing role is being played by the Ukrainian foreign legion, mostly Poles, but they wear Ukrainian uniform to mischaracterize the extent of Ukraine’s losses. The west keeps propping Ukraine up so it can absorb another flurry of punches, and it could keep doing that for quite some time.

          “Keep in mind that while Russia’s campaign has been horrific, it can still get much, much worse. Russia has been fighting with one hand tied behind its back, largely for domestic political reasons. In Putin’s Russia, after all, the conflict has not been described as a war but rather as a “special military operation.” But the worse the battle goes for Putin, the more he will be tempted to mobilize his society to fight it as a full-blown war, despite the political risks of calling up reservists or expanding conscription. Russia has more than three times the population of Ukraine, giving it a hard-to-surmount advantage in any war of attrition, despite Ukraine’s skilled and motivated soldiers. Ukraine should try assiduously to avoid any further mobilization on Russia’s part, yet the West’s expanding war aims make it more likely.”

          The thing is, who decides when things are ‘going worse for Putin’? The western reporting on the progress of the battle is nearly all lies. For example;

          “And the reality is that neither total victory for Ukraine nor dismemberment of the Russian army is necessary for Western security. The Russian military is already beset by terrible logistics, a lack of tactical acumen, cratering morale and unreliable weapons. The senior officer corps and battalion tactical groups have suffered brutal attrition, and the coming battles in Ukraine’s east will only exacerbate these problems. Russia’s ground forces are not in a position to go on the offensive against NATO anytime soon.”

          Russia has no interest in ‘going on the offensive against NATO anytime soon’, because NATO has nothing much it wants or needs, certainly not enough to go to war over it. But the situation looks quite different when Russia is fighting a defensive battle for self-preservation. And the west insists on talking like it is spoiling for a fight, and casting Russia as reeling in its boots and just needing a push to make it fall over. It is nothing of the kind. It will be tragic if the west draws out the war for years only to learn that Russia is perfectly capable of replacing all its losses and producing munitions as fast as it can expend them. Tragic for Ukraine, which will become a blasted moonscape of shell craters, the very thing Putin sought to avoid.

          The major risk for Russia is that Putin will outsmart himself – outsmarting the west is not even challenging.

          Like

          1. I am beginning to question the meme that Ukrainian solders are “skilled and motivated”. They do a good job of dying which could be mostly due to a lack of skill and most especially incompetent leadership. Compare with how well the Vietnamese fought against the US despite the US having a far more lopsided advantage by ever military measure. The 10:1 kill ratio that the Russian forces have in Ukraine is likely equal if not better than the US had in Vietnam (about 55,000 KIA for the US). The Vietnamese civilian fared much worse that Ukrainian civilians given the US penchant for saturation bombings, massive poisonings and indiscriminate murder of civilians as documented in Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse.

            There is undoubtedly bravery in the Ukrainian army but bravery also includes rejecting your own leaders.

            Like

            1. Perhaps that was true at the beginning of the war – that they were fat for motivated and skilled troops – but it is certainly not true now. Most of the professional army has been wiped off the board and the battalion and regimental backbones now are foreign mercenaries. And whose assessment prevails in these articles? I well remember, as you likely do too, the pre-combat ratings of the Georgian troops by their own western trainers before the 2008 war; it is unlikely anyone knew them better. And therein lies an inherent flaw – westerners consistently underrate Russian troops, in terms of their morale, training, equipment and skill. At least partly for that reason, the American trainers claimed their Georgian soldiers were ‘real fire-eaters; fierce, can’t wait to get to grips with the Russkis’. And when battle was actually joined, the Georgian troops fled like girl scouts from a flasher with his pants around his ankles, all the way to I-can’t-remember-where, but I do remember it was far enough that the west began to scream in alarm that the pursuit had greatly exceeded the range needed to simply chase the Georgians out of contested territory, and that this looked more like an invasion of Georgia itself. And they were pretty much unopposed in that.

              There is no reason to question the bravery of the Georgian army. But it is not brave to stand fast in the face of certain death when running might save your life. It is a stupid and meaningless gesture unless retreat is not an option, in which case selling your life dearly might be inspirational. The Ukrainian conscripts are incredibly courageous even for showing up, never mind fighting, when they must have at least some idea of what the casualty rate is. But they have only the most rudimentary training, basically the operation of the weapon they are carrying, and no tactical experience, whereas they are up against an army that holds several force-wide exercises every year plus any number of snap drills to test its readiness, well-equipped and totally realistic about what failure would mean for the country. Because projection is a valid western military evaluation tool, the west tells itself and anyone who will listen that the Russians have lost nearly all their professional officers and are led by bus-drivers and bellhops, their morale is terrible and the only thing that keeps them on the line is the threat of being shot in the back by disciplinary thugs. None of that is true, and a large part of projection lies in simply reversing what you know to be true of someone else. In this case, the Ukrainians. Russia still has nearly all its professional military core leaders, and what the hell was that about logistics nightmares? They’re fighting an enemy on their doorstep and their logistics chain will never be simpler; there is a near-zero possibility that convoys of equipment and supplies will be attacked from the air by the enemy because they are in their own country right up to the last little bit, and the enemy’s air force is all but wiped out. They only have to be concerned for roadside bombs and other interdiction once they are inside Ukraine, and at that they should be traveling through guarded territory – you only leave your logistic resupply route unprotected when you can’t protect it. In a lengthy war of attrition, all the advantage is on Russia’s side and the west knows it.

              Here’s an interesting assessment from Brian Berletic, who ran the ‘Land Destroyer’ blog, on what it is costing the west to keep the Ukrainian guns firing; I think Jen or someone linked it earlier, but to save you looking it up.

              https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2022/12/brian-berletic-sitrepping.html

              Various people have pointed with alarm to the prodigious quantities of ammunition and weaponry the US is ordering from its military-industrial complex, suggesting the numbers mean they are going to front Ukraine so much ammunition the soldiers will be firing from behind piles of shell casings. But as Brian highlights, these numbers represent totals of multi-year production; the number of new HIMARS systems, for example, will take 7 years to complete.

              Like

  57. Мальчики в трусиках
    отто
    moroz2000
    12 декабря, 9:24

    Little Boys in their pants
    otto
    moroz2000
    12 December, 9:24 am.

    СЦКК — JCCC: Joint Control and Coordination Centre
    A body created at the initiative of the Contact Group for the Peaceful Settlement of the situation in Eastern Ukraine, consisting of Ukrainian and Russian military personnel, to implement the Minsk Protocol and observe the ceasefire regime. The JCCC began its activities in 2014Wiki

    Front page, of course, on NYT, WP, FT, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Telegraph, The Guardian etc., etc.

    Like

  58. Oh, I forgot to translate the posting above showing the JCCC man.

    It reads as follows:

    According to the latest data concerning the consequences of the shelling of a hotel building in Alchevsk by a HIMARS MLRS [Multiple Launch Rocket System], 10 civilians were killed and another 24 suffered injuries.

    Old news, of course, but neither out of the ordinary nor infrequent — not here, at least, but seemingly unheard of in the free and rules-based West.

    6 AUG, 22:2 0Updated at: 7 Aug, 00:46
    One killed, 13 injured in shelling of Alchevsk by Ukrainian army – mayor
    “One child is in intensive care,” Apshev said

    As a result of the shelling of Alchevsk by the Armed Forces of the Ukraine, a hotel building was destroyed
    10/31/2022, 9:51:12 AM

    In Alchevsk, militants of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine fired with HIMARS upon hostels with refugees and builders
    12/5/2022, 10:19:05 AM

    The mayor of Alchevsk, Albert Apshev, said that in the city, militants of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine, using HIMARS MLRS, had fired at dormitories with refugees.

    Whereas in the West, one constantly reads of “Putin’s brutal and unprovoked war” waged against civilians and civilian infrastructure.

    Those linked articles above are recent.

    The Ukrainian bastards have been doing this FOR 8 YEARS!

    And I mean “Ukrainian”.

    They, “Ukrainian Nationalists” [no such nation, no such state!] believe that defending their independence of their fictional state necessitates the killing of Russians.

    All Russians!

    Including women and children.

    Because they are subhuman, “the other”: not “Ukrainian”.

    Glory to the Ukraine! To the Heroes — Glory!

    The slogan adapted by Nazi-collaborating “Ukraine” nationalists 1941-1945 . . . and even later!

    That slogan more than likely inspired by:

    Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!

    Like

    1. And yet Americans, English, Swedes, Poles, Canadians and pretty much everyone else on earth other than Russians are welcome to mingle their blood with Ukrainians. Only the Moskals, who share a common haplogroup with Ukrainian DNA, are unwelcome mongrels.

      You remember – the country that loaned them $3 Billion (which they promptly stole) of a forecast $16 Billion when the Europeans wanted to buy them for $600 Million plus their undying gratitude. We’ll see how much cash Yurrup wants to put up to fix what remains of Ukraine once the rubble stops quivering. I suspect when that time comes, Ukraine will welcome investment from Russia. I hope Russia has the self-respect to close the door firmly in their faces.

      Like

  59. My son has just forwarded me this comment that he came across on the Telegram channel:

    • The borders of the Russian Federation have not been closed: the country is living almost the same as it did before February 24;

    • there was mobilization, but they muddled through it easily enough;

    • the Russian Federation has a sufficiently developed repressive apparatus so as to kettle thousands of people jumping up and down on a square, so a “Maidan” in Russia will have no effect whatsoever;

    • no curfews, car hi-jackings, and other wartime joys aimed at making life a nightmare for Russians.

    Russian are slaves who endure their sufferings: they are all to blame for the war. They should stand up and be counted and overthrow Putin. Wicked, terrible, totalitarian Russia that oppresses its people, where there are no freedoms at all! It’s like 1937 again!

    • The borders have been closed since February 25, and after a couple of months many were left with nothing, and had the choice either to die of hunger or go to serve in the Armed Forces;

    • the economy is artificial and tightly regulated by the government; all currency imports are exchanged at a fixed rate: the real rate is 15-50% higher;

    • Money and humanitarian aid from the West is pocketed on an unbelievable scale; corruption is 2-3 times higher than pre-war;

    • strictly regulated working hours, power cuts, passes necessary for every shopping centre.

    Ukrainians are a great people who fight for their freedom. The whole world is with them: they definitely do not tolerate such things as they do in Rashka. The Ukraine is a truly free country, in which the nation is both cared for and appreciated.

    And pay attention: do not confuse those who endure with those who are white Europeans.

    Like

    1. That’s my translation from Russian into English above, by the way.

      Vova didn’t give me a link to the posting that he forwarded to me, but he did add this:

      By the way this comment was written by a Ukrainian.

      He chats merrily away with Ukrainians — and I don’t mean “Ukrainians” living in “occupied Ukraine”.

      So “Telegram” is still operating between here and Banderastan — when there are no power cuts there, obviously.

      He chats away with Kievans and tells me he never gets any hassle off them.

      I tell him that’s because they must think he’s English. He says that is not the case. And his conversations with them are always in Russian.

      Like

      1. It must be the strangest thing in the world to be chatting to people on social media who truly believe you are living in Hell and tell you so to your face, and who are convinced they are living in Paradise, though you know the reality is the complete opposite as soon as you open the front door of your own home. At some point it must be hard not to feel pity for people who are deep in psychological denial and can’t stop lying to themselves and others.

        Like

        1. I think Vova believes that the Yukie who wrote what I translated above was being ironic

          After having posted me the comment , which is in Russian, not Ukrainian, Vova then wrote to me in English:

          Vladimir Exile: [12/12/2022 10:58]
          By the way this comment is written by a Ukrainian

          Vladimir Exile: [12/12/2022 10:58]
          Who is pissed off.

          Like

  60. The Ukraine has been sold in bulk
    Western investors as new “tenants”


    SOLD

    After the missile strike of 5 December, a number of Ukrainian cities began draining water from their heating systems. Following industry, the Ukrainian housing and utilities sector is also ceasing to exist. The former Ukraine is being decommunized at a rapid pace — liberated from much of the legacy of the “cursed past”, from everything that has kept it alive for all these thirty years.

    In light of this, the question arises: if the Nazi regime survives in the Ukraine for some time (and the Ze-team is seriously counting on this happening), how, in what way, at what expense does it intend to exist in a destroyed, plundered and sold out country?

    Not so long ago, Bankova [The street on which the Kiev Clown’s rat’s nest is situated: like saying “Downing Street” for the UK government — ME] announced a trillion dollars in future reparations from Russia, and now this figure is becoming the main narrative for Bankova. That is exactly the amount of money that Bankova hopes to receive in order to continue its vital activities.

    Recently Zelensky, when presenting Odessa’s bid to host Expo 2030, announced that more than $1 trillion is needed to rebuild the Ukraine after the war. But even Zelensky realizes that he will not get any reparations from Moscow. And one should not even count on the Central Bank assets frozen by the West. Not only do they fall far short of the amount indicated, but the Atlantic Council has also reported that two thirds of these funds (200 billion out of 300 billion) cannot be found.

    So Zelensky and his team have figured out how to get this money from the West. He has announced that a system is being developed at Bankova to allow partner countries to “take patronage” of regions, cities or businesses. This system, he said, “will allow advanced countries and companies from around the world to participate directly in the reconstruction of Ukrainian regions, cities, industries and enterprises”.

    The announced programme was once well known in the Ukraine. During Polish rule, this phenomenon was called “tenancy” and was the cause of numerous rebellions, which eventually led to the national liberation war of Bohdan Khmelnitsky. And now Zelensky is suggesting that transnational companies and Western countries should act as tenants (the image of one of them, Yankel, is immortalised in Nikolai Gogol’s “Taras Bulba”). [Yankel was a duplicitous sly Jew in Gogol’s “Taras Bulba”: a thoroughly bad egg! Most definitely non-PC now: sort of like Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’s Fagin. Surprised that they still allow “Taras Bulba” to be published in the West. Maybe it’s already been censored in the West? — ME]

    And these are not empty words. Work in this direction had begun even before Zelensky’s announcement So, on 10 November, in secret, the general public not having been informed, between the Ukraine Ministry of the Economy and the major investment company “BlackRock”, a “Memorandum of Understanding” was signed, in which the the two parties’ intention to create a platform for attracting private investment for the restoration of the Ukraine was indicated.

    “BlackRock” manages one of the largest assets in the world and is worth $10 trillion. The company has 22 investment centres, 70 offices in 30 countries and clients in 100 countries, including Google, New York Times, Time-Warner, Comcast, Disney and News Corp, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet Inc., and Coca- Cola.

    It may seem surprising that Kiev, having acquired such a grandiose partner, is silent about its luck. However, money, or rather, dirty manipulation with it, loves silence. It looks like the Ze-team is selling “Mother Ukraine” [ненька: “mummy”, from “ненька-Украина: “Mummy-Ukraine” — ME] to Black Rock” in bulk (barely for a trillion), the company to become the main tenant of the Ukraine and already subleasing it in parts to all other interested parties. Of course, there is no question of any restoration. The task of tenants, as always, is the same — to squeeze everything possible out of the Ukraine.

    And what will Yankel Zelensky’s cut be I wonder?

    Like

    1. Now, there’s cleverness for you – no wonder the United States is so protective of its little brother, Israel, who taught it so much. Now American capitalists will squeeze every drop of worth from Ukraine that can be extracted for the benefit of themselves and their shareholders, and European taxpayers will be on the hook for reconstruction and humanitarian aid! Mind you, when a corporation gets to be a certain size it no longer has any real nationality, so I suppose very wealthy European investors will pocket a cut as well.

      Like

    2. At some point soon all proper records are going to disappear in Kleptocracy Ukraine.

      If I were a betting man, I’d probably put money on the following presumptions being used within areas controlled by the Russian Federation

      1. All agricultural, commercial and industrial properties revert to pre1991 status pending investigation and reorganisation. And

      2. All residential properties belong to those occupants in situ as at the date of confirmed Russian control. Absentee ownership to be removed within, say, three months.

      3. A Land Court to be established in each Oblast to deal with disputes with fast-track procedures for residential properties and agricultural holdings of commercial and national importance.

      4. All purported records related to transfers of agricultural, commercial and industrial properties in Ukraine between 1991 and the date of establishment of Russian control to be declared null and void

      Like

      1. Similar to what they did in the RF after the USSR had folded up: where you lived or farmed or worked was yours to a greater or lesser degree. Muscovites ceased to become tenants. The Soviet apartment where Mrs. Exile was brought up became her parents’. When they died, it became hers. It still is hers. My son and his wife live there now and he pays a barleycorn rent. And all the Soviet enterprises were supposed to be divied out using “vouchers” (read “shares”), but gullible Ivans-in-the-street were tricked into selling them for cash-in-hand by wide-boys on the street, such as Abramovich. You used to see them everywhere with a sign hanging around their necks that read “I buy vouchers”.


        Voucher Privatization
        I buy voucher

        She’s standing in a connecting passageway between different metro lines in Moscow.

        Like

        1. My point really is that the Land Administration system in Ukraine is riddled with corruption. Administration officials are corrupt and many of the records of transfers since independence are merely turds rolled in glitter rather than evidence of honest transactions between willing parties. For proper consideration duly paid.

          To transition from the current kleptocracy to a society operating under law, the country needs a, what’s that term they love these days?

          Ah, yes, the country needs a Great Reset which undoes the schemes which have enriched the Poroshenkos, Kolomoiskys &c and immiserated everyone else. The oligarchs need to be expunged and their deals and the deals made on their behalf by their hirelings need to be treated as null.

          Like

  61. The cruel, heartless Orcish swine!

    Los Angeles Lakers NBA player Anthony Davis has spoken out about American basketball player Brittney Griner’s detention in a Russian prison.

    “She spent so much time in Russia, in inhumane conditions. When I first saw Brittney, I didn’t recognize her because she wasn’t wearing dreadlocks. I don’t even know if she did it voluntarily or not… It’s always great when one of your own people comes back.

    In “inhumane conditions”!

    And he thinks the Orcs might have made her cut her dreadlocks off!

    What inhumane barbarity!

    source

    Like

    1. I wondered about all the calls for ‘compassion’ upon her release; here’s why. A lot of Americans, and I mean a lot, are extremely unhappy about the exchange, one news anchor at One America News (OAN) described the swap as “A convicted Russian arms dealer a.k.a the merchant of death in exchange for an America hating lesbian pothead.” Mustn’t project a message of disunity – it is important that America celebrates Griner’s release as another American triumph.

      https://www.sportskeeda.com/basketball/news-why-brittney-griner-hates-america-trending-all-need-know

      Although I loathe the preciousness associated with playing the victim and the race card in order to bring about greater recognition and rights for your own special group, I am a little conflicted here, since I also loathe the politicization of sport. I kind of agree with Griner that playing the national anthem at the beginning of games is probably unnecessary, although for different reasons – for her, it’s because blacks were not free when the anthem was composed, and for me it’s because it ruins the impetus for sporting competition, making it about beating another country politically rather than about who has the best athletes and the better understanding of the game. Also, I admit to a grudging admiration for Griner’s conduct while a ward of the Russian system. Except for the waving of her status as a card-carrying lesbian, most of the screaming and histrionics was from her countryfolk rather than herself, she admitted to having broken the law and accepted her sentence with apparent calm and dignity rather than making a big show for politics.

      It is useful also to note here that if Russia had obeyed American orders to hand Griner back to the USA immediately after her arrest, Bout would still be in jail in the USA rather than back home. I can’t claim to be a huge Bout fan, to my mind he is as big a capitalist as any in the country in which he was so recently a guest. But it shows that the USA is perfectly willing to bargain when it cannot get its way by simply roaring and threatening.

      Like

    2. In some US states, prisons have rules regarding hairstyles that can amount to race or religious-based discrimination, especially if they are enforced in an inconsistent way that becomes a regular pattern eg the rule is enforced for black people who wear their hair in corn rows or long dreadlocks but not for non-black people who have equally long hair or complicated hairstyles.

      [Kentucky] State prison warden banned braids, cornrows and dreadlocks. A Black inmate is now suing.

      His hair is sacred. But to get out of solitary confinement, his jailers say he must cut it off.

      Like

  62. DECEMBER 12, 2022 11:35
    The US is terrified of the prospect of war with Russia: The Pentagon demands to stop supporting the Ukraine
    FP: The Pentagon demands to stop supplying weapons to the Ukraine, so that the United States not be disarmed

    Bad news for Zelensky: Washington is no longer confident that the Ukraine will be able to defeat Russia and protect the entire free world, so it is reducing the supply of certain types of weapons and ammunition to Kiev. The reason, as follows from the publication in the American edition of “Foreign Policy”, is simple — in the United States, they are increasingly inclined to believe that it is impossible to reduce the stocks of their weapons any more.

    The situation as portrayed by “Foreign Policy” draws is that most of the weapons that the United States transfers to the Ukraine, such as NATO-standard 155-mm artillery systems and multiple launch rocket systems, are designed for its own fight against Russia or North Korea.

    But Congressmen — and it is always easier for politicians to show determination than it is for the military — reject these arguments. What nonsense! Why be greedy and hold back on weapons for a hypothetical war, when we are already participating in a real conflict carried out by the Ukrainians? We must give the AFU everything they ask for, and let them continue to deal with these Russians. In addition, if the United States slows down with the supply of weapons to the Ukraine, and especially during such a difficult situation that they are experiencing now at the front, some military experts warn, then what example will they set to their Western allies? After all, they have much fewer opportunities for military assistance, and they will probably also begin to reduce the supply of their weapons to the Ukraine.

    In short: politicians on Capitol Hill believe that the existing arms standards for their army are not dogma and can be revised downwards, especially when the Ukraine is “on a roll”. The military is stalling: “We are working to replenish stocks in the US and replenish depleted stocks of allies and partners”. According to “Defense News”, the US army will almost triple its production of NATO-standard 155mm artillery shells over the next three years to 40,000 shells a month. But even with these plans, Washington believes that “the Ukraine is burning through missiles and shells too quickly”, believing it has access to “an endless supply of ammunition that simply is not there”.

    We shall soon see how this argument ends. But the uncertainty that has clearly arisen overseas has clearly been laid bare: with loud statements by the head of the White House about the” inevitable ” victory of Kiev over Moscow, they are still seriously thinking about what will happen if the Ukraine loses. And this is confirmed by the opinion of one of the congressional experts quoted by “Foreign Policy”: “The administration does not really want to accelerate events in the Ukraine. This is very clear to all of us”. Will Kiev understand this?

    Below:

    Linked in above KP article FP article:

    EXCLUSIVE
    U.S. Plans for a Hypothetical War Limit Aid to a Real One
    “We’re measuring against a reality that no longer exists”, one congressional aide said.

    DECEMBER 9, 2022, 2:39 PM
    The U.S. Defense Department is under pressure from Congress to revise munitions requirements for a hypothetical fight between NATO and Russia to allow more arms to flow to Ukraine, according to three people familiar with the debate.

    U.S. military and defense officials have repeatedly told lawmakers and aides in recent briefings that munition thresholds mandated by Pentagon war plans—such as for a possible U.S. and NATO fight with Russia that could include a military scenario in the sparsely populated Suwalki Gap near Moscow’s border with the Baltics—are preventing the United States from sending more munitions to Ukraine.

    The reasoning was first used to defer questions about why the Biden administration has not transferred the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System (known as ATACMS), an American-made guided missile that would allow the Ukrainian military to hit Russian targets up to 200 miles from the front lines. But congressional aides tracking the debate told Foreign Policy that defense and military officials have said stockpiling requirements mandated by U.S. war plans are behind the American military aid’s slower pace to Ukraine in recent months.

    “They’re applying it across the board to Stinger, Javelin, 155 [millimeter artillery], and GMLRS [munitions],” one congressional aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate. GMLRS stands for Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems. “It’s one of their driving rationales for going at the slow pace that they’re going at.”

    Frustration from Capitol Hill over the possible roadblock to assistance comes as the Biden administration announced on Friday plans to send $275 million more in U.S. military aid to Ukraine—one of the smallest weapons packages since the beginning of the war. Some in Congress are worried that recent U.S. aid packages—which have focused on providing artillery ammunition, air defense weapons, and winter gear—are increasingly divorced from the reality on the battlefield and aren’t enough to help Ukraine win the war. The administration has also faced withering criticism on Capitol Hill over fears that long-range systems, such as ATACMS, could be considered escalatory and provoke Russia.

    Under U.S. law, the Pentagon’s top military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, is required to regularly submit munitions requirements to Congress for each war plan on the agency’s books, known in Pentagon parlance as operational plans (or OPLANs). Most of the munitions that the United States is giving to Ukraine—such as NATO-standard 155mm artillery and multiple launch rockets, for instance—are earmarked for fighting Russia or North Korea.

    But the lack of changes to the plans since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February has frustrated lawmakers and aides, who have called for more of the weapons put aside for a hypothetical fight with Russia to be sent to Ukraine, which is actually fighting Russia now. As the pace of U.S. military aid to Ukraine has slipped since the summer, concern on Capitol Hill is that the United States is holding back weapons for a Europe-wide conflict that Russia may not be prepared to fight, when Ukrainian troops are already degrading the Russian military on the battlefield.

    “The OPLAN versus Russia is the same one it’s been for the last decade,” said a second congressional aide familiar with the debate, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe behind-the-scenes discussions. “We haven’t adjusted that based on the fact that the Ukrainians have essentially neutered the Russian army.So we have a plan in place to deal with the Russian army as we thought it was a year or two years ago.”

    In recent weeks, both sides have been running short on ammunition, with Ukraine complaining of acute shortages of artillery shells and air defense missiles and Russia going to Iran and North Korea to backfill dwindling supplies of artillery and missiles.

    But even as top U.S. defense and military officials have warned about dwindling U.S. military stockpiles, congressional aides insist that weapons are still being left on the shelf. The problem isn’t dwindling stockpiles, they said, but that the United States can’t build munitions fast enough to replace what’s being given to Ukraine.

    My stress.

    • The Ukraine armed forces are degrading the Russian military on the field.

    • The Ukrainians have essentially neutered the Russian army.

    Like

    1. Russian tactics are nothing like American tactics, which are not adjusted for who the US Army is fighting – if you’re important enough to fight, you’re important enough to overwhelm and crush. Russia continues, rightly or wrongly, to be concerned for the state of material damage and loss of non-combatant lives it causes in Ukraine, where America would not give a tin shit for those considerations. When you can advance, you advance – that’s it. Because the Russian Army is not advancing, that ipso-facto must indicate that it cannot, which in turn must mean the Ukrainians are preventing such an advance. While the ‘Russia could be in Kiev in 72 hours’ meme was minted in America, not Russia, I’m pretty confident Russia could roll the whole place up in not very much time if it chose – it has many more soldiers and it is not ‘running out of missiles’, nor is it really making them from chips taken out of dishwashers. But American planners do not share my view. If America could take the objective, it would – stalling and equivocating is for people who can’t take the objective. So two different groups are drawing completely different information from the same situation. Unfortunately, the American model keeps telling its backers that just a little more will result in a ‘Ukrainian’ breakthrough.

      US tactics were not always like that; in the beginning in Vietnam, and in Iraq as well, a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign was tentatively attempted. But as soon as it was blamed for mounting casualties in both cases (although the butcher’s bill was considerably higher in Vietnam), out the window it went.

      Like

    1. Have your fun while you can. Only in propaganda could ruling over a country that cannot feed or house or warm its people make you a winner. Oh, but that’s because that bad loser Putin and his cruel loser country are putting the screws to Ukraine and hurting it. Curiously, when the United States and its pack of poodles were concentrating together on ruining Russia, that was not cruel and Putin was not Man Of The Year.

      Like

  63. Now here’s a real loser . . .

    Rebecca died for the Nazis. A woman’s name has been added to the US losses in the Ukraine


    Rebecca Maciorowski

    Recently, there has been an interesting trend: in accordance with the growing number of US financial injections into the Kiev regime, the number of American citizens dying on the territory of the Ukraine has also been growing.

    Volunteer for military conflicts
    Now a woman’s name has appeared on the list. A 28-year-old resident of Tennessee Rebecca Maciorowski has been killed during the fighting in the Ukraine. The death of an American woman has been confirmed on social networks by her friends and acquaintances.

    A native of Colorado, she grew up in a religious family. Her parents gave her a home education, not trusting state schools. From 2014 to 2021, Maciorowski trained as a nurse and received a professional diploma with a specialization in general surgery.

    During her training, she interned in the ranks of volunteer organizations, acting in conditions of military conflicts in different countries of the world. According to other sources, Maciorowski gained experience as a military medic directly in the ranks of the US Army.

    [vKontakte page image]

    “Extreme tourism” with a fatal outcome
    In 2022, through structures recruiting mercenaries to participate in combat operations on the side of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine, Maciorowski got to the Ukraine, joining the foreign group of the Hospitallers medical battalion. This structure is part of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, formed on the basis of the Right Sector, recognized in Russia as a terrorist organization.

    Initially, Maciorowski, like other foreigners from the “Hospitallers”, tried to keep away from the front line, so, judging by the records and photos in social networks, the American woman treated what was happening as a form of extreme tourism.

    In early autumn, Maciorowski left for the United States, where she campaigned for her compatriots to help the Ukraine, and also called for them to go to the war zone.

    A month later, she again came to the “Independent” [Ukraine}, but this time the foreigners were thrown into the thick of it. According to some reports, Maciorowski could have died in the fighting in the area of Artemivsk.

    More and still more
    In April 2022, Washington acknowledged the death of Willie Joseph Kansel, 22, a former Marine working for a private military company in the Ukraine.

    In June, the US reported the death of Steven Zabelski, 52, who was killed in action near the Ukrainian village of Dorozhnyanka on 15 May.

    Grady Kurpasi, who served 20 years in the US Marines, a member of the Iraqi campaign and a medal-winning United States soldier, went missing in the Kharkov region in April 2022.

    Two other Americans, Luke Lucyshyn and Brian Young, were killed in July 2022. According to the Ukrainian side, the mercenaries were ambushed. Along with them, a Canadian, Emile-Antoine Roy-Sirois, and a Swede, Edward Selander Patrignani, were eliminated.

    In October, the deaths of former US Army soldier, Idaho-born Dane “Bird” Patridge became known. The mercenary, who had been fighting in the Ukraine since April, had suffered a shrapnel wound to the head and died in hospital.

    Losses of the “Ukrainian Foreign Legion”
    In the same month, as a result of an exchange, the body of US citizen Joshua Jones was transferred to the Ukrainian side. The mercenary nicknamed “Tactical Jesus” was eliminated back in August.

    Another mercenary, 28-year-old New Zealand citizen Donimik Abelen, also died with him. Interestingly, Abelin was a corporal in the New Zealand army and, according to the official version of the authorities of that country, he went to the Ukraine, taking unpaid leave.

    On November 8, 2022, 21-year-old US citizen Trent Davis was killed in the Kherson direction. The Kansas native served in the US Army as a chemical operations specialist and first came to the Ukraine in March 2022. But then he was sent home, because the American did not have any real combat experience. However, in the autumn he tried again, and on November 4 he was accepted into the “Ukrainian Foreign Legion”. In his first combat, Davis received mortal wounds, and died on the way to the hospital.

    [vK video clip]

    A Washington resident failed to heed the voice of reason
    Also at the end of November, it became known that 23-year-old Washington State resident Skyler James Gregg was killed in the Ukraine. The American went to the Ukraine in April without any combat experience. Nevertheless, he was included in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion. Two months later, Gregg was wounded during shelling near Kharkov. He was hospitalised, but returned to the ranks after his recovery. At the end of October, the American was again hit during shelling, and this time it ended fatally for Gregg. His relatives were only informed a month later that he was no longer alive.

    US officials have been extremely reluctant to comment on the deaths of their compatriots in the Ukraine. According to the Russian Defence Ministry, at least 89 Americans had already been killed in combat in the SMO combat zones by June 2022.

    What is certain, however, is that the list is growing steadily.

    To the Heroes — Glory!

    They died in defence of Banderastan freedom and democracy!

    Their name liveth for evermore!

    What were their names again?

    Like

  64. EXCLUSIVE KP.RU
    December 12, 2022 17: 00
    Russia has broken the enemy in the “Bakhmut Meat Grinder”: the horrors of “Little Stalingrad” and the repetition of the feat of Gastello
    Military commander Steshin has assessed the probability of a retreat of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and reported the latest news about the battles near Bakhmut


    During the last months of the battle of Artemivsk (Bakhmut), the Ukrainian military carefully concealed the difficult situation of its troops in this sector of the front. But, over the weekend, the dam of silence broke. Photo: REUTERS

    During the last months of the battle of Artemivsk (Bakhmut), the Ukrainian military carefully concealed the difficult situation of its troops in this sector of the front. But, over the weekend, the dam of silence broke.

    Has a retreat begun?

    “KP” military correspondent tries to analyze the available information.

    THE BRIDGE OF NO DESTINY
    At all times, the main sign of a retreat is the mining of bridges in the enemy’s path. On Sunday, on the outskirts of Bakhmut, the Ukrainian side blew up a bridge on the highway going to Slavyansk. According to local residents, our troops came to a village with the telling name of Podgorodnoye [“Town Outskirts” — ME] ” — the outskirts of Bakhmut — and the AFU seems to have decided to delay the progress of their enemy..

    It is clear that a blown-up bridge will not stop the attackers: at best, this will only complicate their task. The AFU likes to blow bridges to bits — not its own, which is a shame: Artemivsk [Bakhmut in mova — ME] is on the territory of the DPR, even if only for the time being on part of it occupied by the Ukraine.


    On Sunday, on the outskirts of Bakhmut, the Ukrainian side blew up a bridge on the highway going to Slavyansk

    During the rapid spring offensive of our army in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, ALL bridges on the land corridor to the Crimea were blown up. However, this did not help the AFU much, and the bridges themselves were repaired a long time ago. The KP special correspondent was convinced of this in October, having travelled the land corridor from Chongar to Novoazovsk.

    Local residents who still remain in Bakhmut are horrified to see how their land is being ravaged by “defenders”. Someone commented to Alexander [KP correspondent — ME] about a demolition explosion:

    “Near this bridge, on the right, an apricot tree grew near the lamp post, and it was so large and sweet, I used to sit under it and eat these apricots as a child, looking at the cars that passed by the traffic police post in Rostov, it was so calm and warm! I want these times to come and bring peace and tranquility. And I will come and plant an apricot tree personally, so that my grandchildren can enjoy the world!”

    [Apricots grow in abundance down there. I well recall travelling through that region by train from Moscow to the the Cimea, and at every scheduled stop, the platforms were swarming with impoverished locals, flogging off big bags of apricots, which for us Muscovites were dirt cheap. They really were juicy and delicious — ME]

    HOW MUCH DOES A PHOTO WITH ZELENSKY COST?
    But, according to the civilians, their ordeal has not ended there. They believe that the focus of the bloody battles will shift from Bakhmut to the neighbouring town of Chasov Yar:

    “They will hold on to it with their teeth. There are two roads there — to Konstantinovka and Kramatorsk. Moreover, Chas Yar is one of the highest points in the Donbass. In a straight line to the Kramatorsk airfield it is less than 30 kms.”

    One question remains: who will be holding this Chasov Yar? On Monday morning, one of the officers of the 93rd brigade of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine reported, as it seemed to me, with relief [text in Ukrainian — ME]:

    “The Bakhmut campaign is over for us. What is there to say? Long 4 months have passed by in heavy fighting. The 93rd has been standing here for a long time”. Further, the “defender” admits that the brigade has suffered “heavy losses”. It is clear without translation that the losses are critical. The brigade has been left without its horns and legs; the unit is not combat-ready; there is no point in replenishing it right at the front. Moreover, the 93rd brigade commander himself was blown up by a mine near Bakhmut. He lost both his legs, but was photographed with Zelensky. Zelensky was standing, the brigade commander was sitting in a wheelchair.


    Zelensky awarded the commander of the 93rd Motorized Rifle Brigade Dmytro Bukhal, who was seriously wounded whilst defending Bakhmut

    UKRAINIAN LOSSES HERE — 10 THOUSAND SOLDIERS
    According to reports from Ukrainian volunteers, locals and AFUshniks, the morgue in Artemivsk has long been overfilled with the dead. In recent weeks, they are not even taken away from the front line, they are left in dugouts and craters because winter has begun. Ukrainian doctors complain that owing to the lack of equipment for evacuation, mud and broken roads, the wounded do not have time to be taken to hospitals. And there are even more wounded than dead: those who are lucky are sent to Kramatorsk, Slavyansk, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkov. And the hospitals are full. Social networks are constantly calling for blood donations for the wounded.

    Everyone is aware that keeping Bakhmut has been a purely political decision by Vladimir Zelensky. But, few people knew until the last days how much this policy cost the AFU. The figures given were again voiced by the Western press. According to a British journalist, on some days the losses of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine near Bakhmut reached 500 people, the average daily loss was 200 soldiers.

    Quote from a “Daily Telegraph” report:

    “For Zelensky’s political calls not to surrender Bakhmut (Artemivsk), the Ukraine is paying with thousands of destroyed AFU fighters. The number of irrecoverable losses of the AFU in the ‘Bakhmut meat grinder’ clearly exceeds 10,000 fighters”.

    In all wars, casualty figures are kept secret, and there is no need to explain why. Why have they been made public by the British, the main stakeholders in the conflict in Ukraine? There are two simple and comprehensible explanations.

    The first is the so-called acceptable threshold of losses for the army and the home front. There is an opinion that in the “Bakhmut Meat Grinder”, the Ukraine has approached this threshold. The only thing that will follow is confusion at the home front and the army’s refusal to fight. And the West is going to fight to the last Ukrainian, it does not need a quick defeat of the whole of the Ukraine.


    Locals still remaining in Bakhmut watch in horror as “defenders” ravage their region. Photo: REUTERS

    100 TANKS BURNT
    The second reason is the irretrievable loss of equipment, which cannot be quickly restored, which the enemy will definitely take advantage of. The fact that the AFU has practically no artillery support in the battles near Bakhmut was mentioned by the Ukrainian military and Kiev politicians. The reasons given were a shortage of shells and the impossibility of bringing them in, in part owing to problems with the electrical energy supply system and also the destruction of Ukrainian artillery by our counter-battery artillery.

    Logically, the same deplorable situation should have developed with armoured vehicles. The authoritative Telegram channel “Voennaya chronika” [“Military Chronicle” — ME} was the first to report specific figures the other day. No one denied this information, not even the Ukrainian propagandists, because apparently there is nothing to refute:

    “Between late August and early December, the 54th and 59th AFU brigades may have lost about six to eight tank companies in Bakhmut (Artemivsk), ranging from 84 to 112 vehicles. The Ukraine’s remaining equipment in Bakhmut is on the verge of breakdown”.

    “Military Chronicle” explains why the remaining armour is “on its last legs”. Electricity outages and a lack of spare parts are preventing the equipment from being repaired. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have already emptied their warehouses and the arsenals of the “Young Europeans”[A term coined by Peskov: “Young European countries are doing everything possible to bring American troops closer to the borders of Russia””, namely recently joined EU member states — ME]. The deterioration of tank barrels is such that ammunition is tearing the breech casing because of micro-fissures in them. But the most problematic matter is that of engine wear. Tanks already have a severely limited engine because of the weight of the vehicle and the strain on the engine. And now because of the cold weather tank drivers have to warm up their engines all the time. But working (hot) tanks are either detected by drones with thermal imaging devices, or by our surveillance devices with the funny name “Irony”, which can spot at a range as far as 5-7 kilometres, after which our artillery is called in and works safely on a target. And there is practically no retaliation. There is no need to “roll over” after the second or third volley, changing one’s firing position, which greatly affects the accuracy of fire.

    BATTLE OF THE “COMPOSERS”
    As practice shows, in war, the more one boasts at the beginning, the more one whines at the end. This is exactly what has happened with the American PMC Mozart, which stopped by Bakhmut in mid-November. This military company operates only in the Ukraine and was created for it. The head of Mozart, former U.S. Marine Colonel Andrew Milburn, began his “Drang nach Osten” with bragging statements and promised to show the Russian PMC fighters from Wagner how to fight. Within a week at the front, Andrew’s offensive fervour had somehow disappeared and Mozart went into a silent defence, continuing to give interviews to the Western press. And the colonel suddenly told Newsweek that the AFU had big problems, literally, with “regeneration of units”, the reinforcements were not trained, and the information about 70% of AFU losses at Bakhmut was true. The colonel also complained about his own losses, it turns out that the militant “Mozart” had had enough of those who had never fired. They accounted for 80% of the losses in the American PMC. According to the colonel, a real hunt for “Mozart” had been declared. Well, that’s understandable: there was no need to brag and to threaten. At the end of the interview Andrew Milburn asked the Americans and the British for money for Mozart. And hinted that he was going to leave the Ukraine before it is too late.

    In fact, the new PMC got a lot of PR and completed another important task — reconnaissance. It collected and transmitted to the West objective information about the state of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine. And the Russian Wagner PMC…

    “MEET DADDY, YOU BITCHES…”
    “Wagner” has stayed on to fight, and in a way that Western mercenaries never dreamt of. On December 2, during an attack on an armoUred column of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine, an Su-24M aircraft was shot down. The crew consisted of “musicians”[PMC, so called because of their names “Mozart” and “Wagner” — ME} — Commander Alexander Antonov, navigator Vladimir Nikishin. This was one of the last attempts of the AFUshniks to knock out the “musicians” from their positions near Bakhmut with an armoured strike, and the pilots had to stop the breakthrough.

    When turning into an attack approach, the aircraft was seriously damaged: it was hit by a MANPADS (man-portable air defence system). What commander Alexander Antonov said went on air: “Meet daddy, you bitches …” The aircraft then crashed into a cluster of armoured vehicles. The Wagner fliers had actually repeated the feat of the legendary Nikolai Gastello, who in 1941 flew his burning aircraft into an enemy column of armoured vehicles. I shall not be surprised that it was after this feat (at the front near Bakhmut, of course, they knew about it in the Armed Forces of Ukraine) when “Mozart” realized that they had nothing more to do in this war and needed to get their feet across the ocean while they were still alive.

    Like

    1. According to some sources, the battle for Bakhmut has ended in yet another stunning Ukrainian victory. How will Putin deal with the embarrassment of the Ukrainians cunningly fleeing the city, when his intent was to kill them all?

      https://defensepoliticsasia.com/bakhmut-front-ukraine-lines-collapse-south-of-bakhmut-as-russia-forces-captured-4-vital-towns/

      Instead, Ukraine handed the Moskals two surprises: one, only the Russians were shooting, and the Ukrainians did not even waste any ammunition before carrying out a brilliant withdrawal. See? Hero Of The World Volodymyr Zelensky said so himself: “The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, another Donbas city that the Russian army turned into burnt ruins.”

      Two, Bakhmut was not even that important. Well, it was when Ukraine was grimly holding onto it. But when they decided it would be far more clever to simply let the Moskali have it, the west was quick to express puzzlement over how Russia ever thought it was worth taking in the first place – outfoxed by Ukraine again!

      “The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around #Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the #Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, posted on its Twitter feed on Thursday. “

      But Hero Man Of The Year Zelensky and his western hand-holders are agreed that Bakhmut is destroyed, a ruin. Look at the photos in the article – the authors grudgingly admit ‘some buildings are still standing’ – and then look at what a place looks like that is destroyed by professionals. Once again, the Russians are shown up as the amateurs they are.

      Like

    1. How come the above commenter is still alive and well in Kharkov, where he has been a longtime resident, whence he has continuously being transmitting vlogs criticizing the Kiev regime, his transmissions only once ceasing when he was arrested by the Banderite SBU, interrogated and then released from arrest after several days, whereafter he has continued to publish his anti-regime vlogs?

      Something not right there.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Is there a backroom agreement where he can continue his vblog in exchange for similar consideration by pro-Ukrainian propagandists? Something like that?

        Like

  65. FT

    “Hell. Just hell”: Ukraine and Russia’s war of attrition over Bakhmut.
    Soldiers say fighting in and around eastern Donetsk city is reminiscent of first world war-style trench conflict
    Christopher Miller in Bakhmut, Ukraine DECEMBER 9 2022

    Rockets and mortar rounds rained down on Ukrainian military positions on the eastern edge of the city of Bakhmut, spraying shrapnel and sending troops diving for cover.

    Then came the Russian infantry, charging in a first world war-style attack across a no man’s land of shredded trees and artillery craters. The Ukrainians popped up and mowed down many of them with machine guns and grenade launchers.

    Moments later, the scenes were repeated — although this time the Russian fighters had to navigate their comrades’ bodies. Again many were cut down by Ukrainian bullets.

    “It’s like a conveyor belt,” Kostyantyn, an exhausted Ukrainian machine-gunner who described the scene to the Financial Times, said of the Russian tactics. “For what? A fucking metre of our land.”

    The scene on Sunday in the frontline city of Donetsk province is one that troops say has played out repeatedly in recent days as Russia, desperate for a battlefield victory after humiliating defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson this autumn, refocuses its offensive in an area Russian president Vladimir Putin first invaded in 2014 and claimed to have annexed in September.

    “They are just meat to Putin,” Kostyantyn added, referring to the Russian soldiers, “and Bakhmut is a meat grinder.”

    “I’ll pray for you,” another soldier, manning a checkpoint on the city’s outskirts, told the FT after warning that the road ahead had been shelled moments before. “And you should pray for yourself.”

    Until 2016, when Ukraine began a period of decommunisation, Bakhmut was named Artemivsk in honour of the Bolshevik revolutionary Fyodor “Artem” Sergeyev, a friend of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. It has endured repeated military onslaughts: the Nazis seized it during the second world war before the Red Army retook it, and Russia’s proxy separatist forces briefly controlled it in 2014.

    But with the fighting reminiscent of trench warfare, the city is experiencing an unparalleled level of death and destruction. Ukrainian fighters say it is a ghost town on its way to becoming a wasteland like nearby Izyum and the southern port city of Mariupol before it.

    Once boasting a population of more than 70,000 and famous for its salt mines and sparkling wine factory, much of the city has been reduced to rubble after six months of air strikes and heavy artillery attacks. Fewer than 7,000 residents remain and they subsist mostly on humanitarian assistance. There is no power, water, gas or heating.

    The city centre, which once bustled with a large outdoor market and cafés, is a fortress, with “hedgehog” angled metal bars and other anti-tank defences blocking the main avenues. 

    The only traffic is ambulances racing the wounded to medical points and tanks and other military vehicles trundling along chewed-up roads and through tangles of fallen electric tram lines.

    Over the course of Monday morning when the FT visited, there was rarely more than five seconds between artillery explosions — on both sides of the frontline. The ground shook and the otherwise clear winter sky was hazy from the smoke. Russian drones could be heard buzzing overhead, apparently looking for targets.

    Kyiv and Moscow have been tight-lipped about their casualties around Bakhmut but both are clearly suffering heavy losses. Each side has estimated they are killing dozens, if not hundreds, of enemy fighters every day but the true figures are impossible to verify.

    Lidiya Vasylenko, a Ukrainian military press officer, said Russian forces had entered the city’s eastern outskirts in recent days. But she stressed that Ukrainian resistance and the harsh winter, which she said favoured her troops, were likely to minimise further gains. 

    “The ground is cold and hard, so even when they [Russian forces] take new forward positions, they have difficulty digging in deep enough to shelter themselves from our counter-attacks and they have to fall back,” she said.

    Elite Ukrainian units, such as the 58th Motorised Infantry Brigade and 93rd Mechanised Brigade, have borne the brunt of the fighting, Vasylenko said. But reinforcements had been brought in over the past two weeks, including from Kherson, various special forces units, territorial defence outfits, and international legion troops, Vasylenko said.

    Russia has done the same, moving forces from the Kharkiv and Kherson regions to Bakhmut.

    British intelligence has said that members of the Wagner Group, founded by close Putin ally Evgeny Prigozhin, were leading the Russian charge in Bakhmut. Prigozhin has recruited fighters on visits to prison colonies in far-flung Russian regions.

    Moscow’s autumn mobilisation campaign has also put more bodies on the ground. Putin said on Wednesday that 150,000 mobilised Russian troops were now in Ukraine, with half involved in active combat. 

    Some Ukrainian soldiers likened Russia’s strategy in Bakhmut to that in Luhansk province farther east earlier this year, where constant artillery barrages wore down Ukrainian forces and pulverised buildings, making their defence impossible.

    Others said there seemed to be neither strategy nor logic to the Russian offensive beyond symbolism. 

    “Putin’s current fixation with continuing offensive operations around Bakhmut and elsewhere is contributing to Ukraine’s ability to maintain the military initiative in other parts of the theatre,” said the Institute for the Study of War.

    Konrad Muzyka, director of Rochan Consulting, a Poland-based group that tracks the war, said Russian forces were “probably seeking to cut off a ground line of communication between Bakhmut and Kostyantynivka” — a town 25km to the west.

    Signs of Russia’s attempted encirclement were evident on Monday, with fresh attacks north of Bakhmut towards the town of Soledar; south of the city at Opytne, where Russian forces managed to gain ground last weekend; and behind the front lines in the village of Ivanivske that sits along one of two key arteries leading to the city.

    The FT witnessed the artillery barrage in Ivanivske, which struck several cottages and a farm building, causing fires to break out. 

    But Kostyantyn and Vasylenko both said they were confident Bakhmut would remain under Kyiv’s control through the winter.

    That is of little consolation to the residents cowering in the remnants of their homes. Their nerves frayed, some wore fear on their faces, recoiling with each explosion. Others, hardened by months of fighting, barely flinched as they wandered the streets in a state of shock. 

    Vitaliy, a man in his 50s, said he was no longer afraid of dying. As a series of blasts rocked the city, he sat still on a bench in a square, sifting through a bag of food handed out at an aid centre.

    He did not want to go home, he said, because it had been struck three times by artillery shells and was missing some of its walls. He blamed Ukrainian forces for the damage, saying they had moved into his neighbourhood and thus made it a target by bringing the war to his doorstep.

    Kostyantyn, who had fought in Bucha near Kyiv in March where Ukrainian liberators had been greeted as heroes, said such an attitude was common.

    “If they want to go to Russia, I’ll take them to the frontline and show them the way,” he said, gesturing to the battlefield.

    Golly!

    Give that “reporter” a Pulitzer Prize!

    Footnote
    The Yukies are fucking off out of Bakhmut. Millions of dead Russians all over the show. The surviving Russians are now busy raping grannies and/or lifting shithouses to send to the folks back home,

    Special operation: Bakhmut will fall from day to day
    Vladimir Furtsev 12.12.2022

    The special operation continues and we can say that today is a turning point. Western media write that this happened thanks to General Surovikin. He changed his approach to the special operation and now the front has moved West again. Extremely fierce fighting is taking place today in the Bakhmut direction and directly in Bakhmut, also known as Artemovsk.

    Even the Ukrainian media, thoroughly imbued with Russophobia and Nazism, write about the huge losses of the AFU in Bakhmut. Of course, they write that they will stop the Russians at any cost, etc. But the price is so high that soon Kiev will have nothing to pay for it. The President of the Ukraine himself has already realized this.

    In his latest statements, he has begun to gently prepare the ground for the apparent surrender of Bakhmut. Zelensky spoke about the huge losses incurred by the “defenders of the Ukraine”. And also that there is not even a living place left in Bakhmut and so there’s nothing left to hold on to. The special operation is again taking on an offensive character.

    We have already said that owing to the terrible situation of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine in the Bakhmut direction, Kiev is pulling all available reserves there. Therefore, very little news comes from the southern front, of course there is movement there, but there is no talk of the former intensity. Even for American mercenaries, Russia’s special operation has seemed too scary. We have received information that PMC Mozart, which arrived to counter PMC Wagner, is already going home. Their commander said that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are suffering huge losses in Bakhmut and there is no one to make up for them.

    Special operation: Bakhmut today
    Ukrainian media reports that the fiercest fighting in addition to that for the town itself is taking place from Kurdyumovka and above. Here, Russian troops are not delivering pinpoint strikes, but are pressing down on the entire flank at once. The author of the article writes that the AFU may lose several villages, but they are not very important, of course. But then the Russian army and the entire special operation will come to a standstill on the Seversky Donets — Donbass canal. Allegedly, the Russian Armed Forces will have problems here and we will not be able to pass.

    The article also says that Russia is still superior to the AFU in artillery, especially in the Bakhmut direction. Interestingly, ukroSMI uses the words “bye”. Kiev decided to open an urgent production of artillery installations? I don’t think so.

    What the West will bring there is of course help, but until new supplies are sent there, these are units that have been restored after having been out of action for a very long time. And Russia has already set up military railways. MLRS, artillery, and tank units have already been fully deployed. The media also writes that Russia, again “for now” , has superiority in manpower and ammunition.

    The author of the article also complains that many soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine leave their trenches on their own and refuse to fight. Well, put the mercenaries there, the national battalions. What is the problem? And the problem is that mercenaries and national battalions are not foolish enough to climb into the front line trenches, where there is a high probability of flying away to meet Bandera. But the AFU grunts in the trenches no longer understand what they are fighting for.

    For while they are “protecting their homeland”, their native government is introducing a new CO2 tax for those who have generators. How do you like that? And from January 2023, electricity prices will rise by 107%. These are not our speculations — these are draft laws in the Verkhovna Rada. Surovikin here, of course, will help, because you will not have to pay for electricity. But deal with the CO2 yourself. This special operation will still show the Ukrainians on whose side they are really fighting.

    We’ll shove and we’ll push
    At the moment, the situation on the ground is as follows: Kiev is forced to transfer doctors, mainly surgeons, from the western part of the Ukraine. There are simply not enough doctors. All hospitals, polyclinics, etc. in the Bakhmut area are packed with Ukrainian wounded and dead.

    It has also become known about the appearance of “black transplantologists” in the Bakhmut area. I think it is unnecessary to explain who they are. Kiev has been practicing such things since 2014. There is so much information about the huge losses of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine that it is already bursting even from Ukrainian media resources, since there is simply no way to hide it.

    During two weeks of fighting in a company of one of the units defending the southern borders of the Bakhmut direction, 7 out of 93 combat-ready soldiers have remained. And so on in the whole direction.

    Our forces are increasingly drawn into urban warfare. Units of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine, trying to contain the onslaught of the Wagner assault detachments, blew up a railway bridge in the northern part of the city. Passing over the M-03 highway. The damaged structure collapsed on the highway, blocking the road to Slavyansk and turning into a kind of barricade. Meanwhile, the “musicians” appeared in Podgorny. There are fights going on there.

    By the way, the supply of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine at the front is extremely poor. Don’t confuse them with national soldiers and mercenaries. Those are all so precious. However, cannon fodder does not need all the benefits of civilization. Soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine recorded a video, which clearly showed the conditions in which they have to exist.

    In addition to the traditional indignation, we note a new trend — the militants are directly threatening Zelensky with a military coup! And do not forget about the war that has begun in Kiev with Orthodoxy inside the country — this is also extremely disliked by ordinary soldiers.

    Like

  66. I forgot about this.

    It happened last April, in beautiful, free, democratic Europe:

    Political scientist Florence Gaub is accused of having made racist remarks about people in Russia on the ZDF programme “Markus Lanz” on Tuesday evening. There is now a veritable shitstorm against the expert on Twitter.

    “I think we must not forget that even if Russians look European, they are not Europeans — in the cultural sense.”

    Gaub is not only a political scientist, but also deputy director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies. Specifically, the accusations are about her comparisons between “Russians” on the one hand and “Europeans” on the other — and both’s allegedly different relationship to death.

    Gaub said during the programme:

    “I think we must not forget that even if Russians look European, they are not Europeans — in the cultural sense”. Russians have a different relationship to violence and death.

    “There is not (among Russians) this liberal and postmodern approach to life. Life as a project that everyone shapes individually. Instead, life can simply end quite early with death.”

    She went on to say that Russians deal differently with people dying.

    source

    Pon my word! Frau Gaub almost describes Russians as being . . . . how can I best put it? . . . . dare I say untermenschlich?

    As a matter of fact, Frau Gaub is also Madame Gaub, she being a Franco-German.

    Cannot find out where she was born and her nationality when born and that of her parents, but she studied political science (Welche Überraschung! / Quelle surprise!) at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (MA, 1997-2002) and part of these studies were at Paris Sorbonne University.

    She then obtained a PhD in International Politics from Humboldt University, Berlin, in 2009 with a dissertation on “Multiethnic armies and civil war: the cases of Nigeria, Lebanon and Bosnia-Herzegovina”, for which she spent considerable time in the field and which was later also published as a book for Routledge in 2010.

    Yep, another fucking layabout, scrounging, scribbling away, grant-grabbing “intellectual” who knows fuck all.

    Like

      1. But nothing about where she was born. She seems to have studied in Germany, in Munich and Berlin — her Sorbonne studies were part of her Munich uni studies. Nothing about her parentage, but in Wiki she is described as being Franco-German.

        Whatever, she’s landed “top” consultant jobs and is an “expert” now.

        AndsShe’s defo German.

        An interview with Fra Gaub on WDR,

        Putin’s Strategy – Florence Gaub
        09/28/2022
        Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening to use nuclear weapons and wants to use mock referenda to annex the occupied Ukrainian territories to the Russian Federation. How dangerous is Putin’s strategy? What does it mean for the further course of the war? Questions for military expert and political scientist Florence Gaub.

        She’s a military expert as well!

        When has Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons, by the way?

        Like

        1. All she’s an expert in is shooting off her Gaub.

          Many western ‘analysts’ have characterized Putin’s pronouncements that if the Russian Federation is directly threatened, it will defend itself with all weapons at its disposal as ‘a threat to use nuclear weapons’. And it is true he has specifically and pointedly reminded all listeners in the west that Russia is a nuclear-capable power. Good thing, too – I’m convinced NATO would already have gone all-in, probably flashing its R2P credentials in favour of ‘saving’ Ukraine, were it not for the implied threat to turn Europe to glass.

          I have speculated myself in the past that the Russians are different from Europeans, and that while they look European, their philosophies owe more to Oriental outlook. However, I meant it in the most positive and complimentary way rather than an insult. Instead of maudlin sentimentality on the emotional bonds of family ties only during holidays like Christmas, Russian families I have known value those relationships all year round. Instead of obsessing about that American Eagle hoodie in the trendy-clothing boutique, Russian girls are less focused on materialism. However, having said that, there are plenty of Russian children in orphanages and Russian girls are as fashion-conscious as any others and better-dressed than most in the best they can afford, so perhaps it’s just indulgence on my part. But to my mind it is no insult to suggest a people’s outlook is savage or barbarian if it is similar to that of Asians – quite the reverse, given the embarrassing money-grubbing and one-upmanship that characterizes many westerners.

          Like

          1. Right! And it’s been mentioned here several times before that if Russians are indeed not “us”, or “not quite us”, then what is “wrong” with that? There is always that subliminal suggestion that they are somehow “tainted”, in that they are, if only slightly, “Asiatic”. Those Banderastan nasties go heavily on that tack: that Moskals are Slavic impostors; evil, barbaric, shithouse stealing, grandma-raping Tatar slitty-eyed wolves in Slav clothing. And it was (almost) ever thus. The Frogs, who are, on their own admittance, the most civilized nation in Europe, and also that nation whence sprang “scientific racial theory” (check out Joseph Arthur de Gobineau), are, to my knowledge, the first to come up with that “scratch-a-Russian-and-you’ll-find-a-Tatar” crap. The cute and dated English expression similar in meaning was “a touch of the tar brush”. However, I have it on good authority, but I can’t be arsed right now to search for references, that according to DNA analysis, the amount of “Tatar” genetic material swishing around in your average Ivan’s veins are minimal and that genetically, the closest to Moskals are Polacks! Furthermore, your “pure-blooded” Yukie has a lot of Turkic genetic stuff inside of him/her, which is hardly surprising, considering that a good half of the territory that was the UkSSR was part of the Ottoman Empire and/or “The Wild Fields”, whither every year the Crimea Tatars ventured forth every year for about 400 years about their business, namely bringing in their harvest — of slaves.

            Like


  67. Zelenskyy wants to remain president until the Ukraine triumphs over Russia.
    (Photo: picture alliance/dpa/Planet Pix via ZUMA Press Wire)

    “Institutions come to a standstill”
    Zelensky: Putin’s death could quickly end the war
    12/12/2022, 19:47

    Russia’s President Putin has warned of the increasing “danger of nuclear war”. However, his Ukrainian counterpart sees the risk as rather low. Zelensky says Putin is too attached to his life. Should he die suddenly, it could lead to a Russian defeat in the war.

    President of the Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken about his plans for the post-war period with Russia. “I just want to go to the seaside and have a beer”, the 44-year-old said in a previously published interview with US show host David Letterman, according to Ukrainian media. However, that will only be possible after a Ukraine victory. “But I will be president until we win”, confidently said the head of state, who was elected in 2019.

    At the same time, Zelensky believes that a quick end to the war is possible if Russian President Vladimir Putin suddenly dies. Authoritarian regimes are tailored to one person. “When that person leaves, the institutions come to a standstill. Such a time came in the Soviet Union. Everything stopped”, Zelensky claimed. With the death of 70-year-old Putin, Russia would first be preoccupied with itself.

    Zelensky therefore does not believe that Putin could use nuclear weapons. “He is aware that if he uses them, there will be personal consequences for him”, emphasized the Ukrainian. Putin loves life too much to take that step.

    The Kremlin does not want to change its nuclear doctrine

    According to its own statements, Russia does not intend to rapidly change its nuclear doctrine on the use of weapons of mass destruction. “There is no talk of any quick action in this regard”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, according to the Interfax agency. In the past week, Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that Russia’s doctrine calls for the use of nuclear weapons in response to such an attack.

    At the same time, he pointed out that according to its doctrine, the USA could allegedly carry out first strikes. He made it clear that against this background, Russia must think about its own security. Putin’s spokesman Peskov now explained that there is a constant process of reflection on the situation in the world and analysis at an expert level.

    According to the Russian 2020 nuclear doctrine, the use of nuclear weapons is only possible if the adversary first uses these or other weapons of mass destruction against Russia or its allies. The use of nuclear weapons is therefore also possible if Russian existence is threatened by conventional weapons. Putin said last week that the “danger of nuclear war” was increasing.

    In Russia, nuclear weapons have served to protect the country and its allies, and as a deterrent. In the course of his war of aggression against the Ukraine, Putin had Russia’s nuclear weapons put on increased readiness. This was seen as a threat to the US and NATO countries to stay out of the conflict. In view of the global outrage, Russia had recently significantly reduced its nuclear threats.

    See the double-talk?

    The article goes at length to say that, according to Russian nuclear weapon policy, nuclear threats from from Russia do not exist: Russia says that it will only retaliate,/b> with nuclear weapons if attacked with nuclear first strikes by an enemy OR if Russia be under existential threat as the result of an attack by conventional weapons. In either case, Russia categorically states that it will only use nuclear weapons in RETALIATION to an attack.

    Is that a threat?

    Is a statement of intention to retaliate when attacked a threat?

    The above article ends thus:

    Putin had Russia’s nuclear weapons put on increased readiness. This was seen as a threat to the US and NATO countries to stay out of the conflict.

    In other words, by increasing Russian readiness to RETALIATE if attacked first, Russia is threatening the West, albeit the West should have to attack first so as to trigger off a Russian retaliation, which intention to retaliate is, of course, a “threat” to the “free world”.

    And by the way, when the USSR ended, everything did not stop.

    At that time, Zelensky was a 13-year-old, coming on 14-year-old Russian-speaking Ukrainian Jew in Krivoi Rog, in the former UkSSR.

    And I have no qualms in describing him as a Jew, for that was what would have been stamped in his parent’s international Soviet passports if they had them, and I’m sure they did. They certainly have international Ukraine passports now, which they used to emigrate to Israel as soon as their runt of a son became president of the Ukraine.

    Everything did not stop in 1991, when the Soviet Flag was hauled down over the Kremlin, nor did it stop in the former UkSSR, whence Zelensky emigrated to the RF to seek his fortune on stage as a funny man.

    Like

    1. The whole romanticizing of Zelensky and his simple life in this piece is geared to highlight how young he is compared with Putin, how dynamic his youthful agenda compared with Putin’s iron fist. An unfortunate choice if it is extended to the rest of the world, where the nation which claims itself the preeminent power is controlled by an octogenarian whose approval rating among business is 34%, and that’s a record high for his presidency.

      https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/biden-approval-rating-on-main-street-rises-for-first-time-in-presidency/ar-AA155B66

      I’m sure the western leaders collectively fantasize about a sudden death of Putin, and you never know: he’s human like the rest of us and could pop off at any moment. But there is no evidence – unless you want to count fevered tabloid scribbling that he is afflicted with everything from brain cancer to leprosy – that there is anything wrong with his health and he appears to be a model of fitness and moderation for a man his age.

      And Zelensky would be wise to avoid any semblance of yearning for an assassination – he is more likely a target for that himself, from his own countrymen. It’s also worth remembering that when he mentioned his prosaic yearning for having a beer at the seaside, he was talking about in Crimea, after Ukraine and its western backers have returned it to Ukrainian control. Loss of that peninsula seems to have really hurt, considering they got it free from Russia in the first place; it also highlights that no law was really broken in taking it back, either, since the west is committed to returning it to Ukraine by violence. It has evidently despaired that Russia will be intimidated by all its lofty blabbering about international law.

      Like

      1. As regards the much bandied about in the West statement that the Crimea vote to join Russia was carried out “at the point of a Kalashnikov” and was therefore “illegal” came up yet again the other day in something I read, namely some US “politician”, in countering the argument that under no duress whatsoever did a huge majority of Crimeans democratically vote that the peninsula rejoin Russia, stated that “by definition” the vote was made under threat because the vote had taken place on territory occupied by Russian armed forces,

        The corollary to that argument would that the vote would have gone the other way if the ever so-friendly Yukie military had been present in the Crimea when the referendum took place, and in such circumstances, those participating in the vote would not have been under threat to vote for remaining part of Banderastan.

        Like

          1. The corollary to that argument would be the vaunted purple-finger testament to freedom and democracy, held at the point of an M-16 in Iraq.

            https://www.chron.com/opinion/editorials/article/Purple-fingers-Iraqi-ink-stained-fingers-great-1509308.php

            At least two national elections were carried out in Iraq during American military occupation. Far from being scorned as suborned playacting at democracy, they were touted in the western media as a triumph of the human will. Always the same, innit? Our innate goodness prevents us from acting in our own interests, even when it looks as if that’s what we are doing. Don’t be fooled. We’re not like them Russkis.

            Like

  68. Latest FT propaganda

    Military briefing: escalating air war depletes Ukraine’s weapons stockpile
    Both sides are running low on resources as Kyiv seeks to thwart Moscow’s attacks on its infrastructure

    Roman Olearchyk in Kyiv and Ben Hall in London 13 HOURS AGO

    For two months Russian forces have been pounding Ukraine’s power network with the aim of plunging the country into darkness and breaking its resolve during winter. But in its latest bombardment, on December 5, only 10 out of 70 Russian missiles made it past Ukrainian air defences, according to Kyiv.

    The claimed 87 per cent interception rate is a testament to the increasing effectiveness of Ukraine’s air defence systems, mainly Soviet-era but recently augmented by modern western equipment and improved techniques.

    However, Kyiv is burning through its ammunition at an alarming rate as it faces down Moscow in a battle of dwindling stockpiles — of Russian precision-guided missiles on one hand and Ukrainian interceptors on the other.

    Kyiv is therefore urging western backers to provide more modern Nato-standard surface-to-air systems.

    “If hundreds of rockets are fired at us, we knock down 70 to 80 per cent. Do they run out or not? Of course [they do],” said Colonel Yuriy Ignat, the Ukrainian air force’s chief spokesperson, referring to his side’s munitions.

    Major General Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said last week that Russia was also depleting its stockpile of precision cruise missiles — an assessment shared by many western analysts.

    “They have enough for several more massive attacks,” Budanov said, adding that the production of replacements was a slow process.

    Russia began what have become almost weekly aerial strikes against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure on October 10. On that day, Ukraine said it shot down only 54 per cent of incoming missiles and drones, resulting in widespread damage to electricity installations.

    On November 23, 76 per cent of Russian missiles were shot down, but the damage to a fragile power network was extensive enough to cause nationwide blackouts. In last week’s attack, Ukraine escaped further national outages, although there are still rolling power cuts as technicians race to repair damaged equipment.

    Kyiv’s improving air defence capabilities demonstrate the contribution of western military technology to Ukraine’s war effort and its ability to defy Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war plans.

    Ukraine denied Russia air supremacy in the wake of the February invasion thanks to its Soviet-era arsenal of S300 and Buk surface-to-air missiles together with thousands of western-supplied Manpads.

    It has also adjusted its tactics, using mobile units in jeeps to chase down drones and cruise missiles with shoulder-launched Stinger missiles and UK-provided Starstreaks.

    Ignat described cat-and-mouse games, where Ukraine moves and hides its air defence units while Russia seeks to find the weak spots.

    “The positions of our air defence equipment are constantly changing so that the enemy cannot identify which zone is covered. We are trying to outwit them.”

    But ammunition and spares for the S300 and Buk systems, the mainstay of Ukraine’s air defences, are dwindling. Ukrainian officials have confirmed a claim by British military intelligence that Russia has been firing X-55 nuclear missiles — with the nuclear warhead replaced by an inert one — simply to exhaust Ukrainian air defences.

    Ignat revealed its units typically fire two S300s or Buks at every Russian missile to improve the chances of interception by what is ageing kit.

    Purchasing additional S300 or Buk missiles from Russia, where they are produced, is impossible. Finding further available stock on the global market has proved difficult, apart from a batch obtained from Slovakia earlier in the war.

    Britain’s Royal United Services Institute warned in a report last month against “western complacency about the need to urgently bolster Ukrainian air-defence capacity”. It said that if Ukrainian surface-to-air systems ran out of ammunition, it could open the skies to Russian heavy bombers operating at medium and high altitudes with devastating consequences.

    Recently deployed western equipment has already demonstrated its value.

    Germany’s Gepard mobile anti-aircraft guns, of which Ukraine has received 30 so far, have proved highly effective in taking down drones and low-flying missiles. However, the Swiss government has refused to authorise exports of Gepard’s Swiss-made ammunition to a war zone and there is no ready alternative.

    Kyiv has also taken delivery of modern medium-range air defence systems from its allies, including a state of the art Iris-T system from Germany — with three more expected in near future — and two batteries of Norwegian-US Nasams, another medium-range system.

    But Ignat said Kyiv would need “hundreds” of these and other systems as it sheds its older arsenal.

    “We have no other choice but to switch to these types of weapons since the Soviet weapons of the [19]70s and [19]80s are both [ . . . ] obsolete and the enemy is exhausting them every day.”

    G7 leaders promised on Monday to “continue to co-ordinate efforts to meet Ukraine’s urgent requirements for military and defence equipment with an immediate focus on providing Ukraine with air defence systems and capabilities”.

    What Kyiv has been most keen to acquire from Washington is the longer-range Patriot system, which can intercept Russian ballistic missiles, but the administration of President Joe Biden has so far withheld approval.

    “Certainly I would like it to move at the speed of an airplane, but it is moving at the speed of a tank, so it takes time,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said of the approval process.

    In the meantime, Kyiv has had to settle for deliveries of the decades-old Hawk anti-aircraft batteries, including six from Spain.

    Even if Moscow’s cruise missile stocks are dwindling, it still possesses a vast arsenal of ballistic missiles. It also appears to have taken a new delivery of Iranian-supplied loitering munitions. They are noisy, slow and can be easily shot down. But they are hard to counter fully when launched in swarms. Above all, they are cheaper to purchase than the missiles used to intercept them.

    Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 10 of 15 Iranian Shahed kamikaze drones fired on Saturday evening, but those that evaded air defence systems temporarily knocked out most electricity supplies in the strategic Black Sea port city of Odesa, which in turn affected grain exports.

    Oleksiy Melnyk, a former Ukraine air force lieutenant colonel and now co-director of the Razumkov Centre think-tank in Kyiv, said Ukrainian air defences had made huge strides since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February.

    But he added: “Trying to predict that Russia will one day run out of missiles is probably not a good strategy.”

    Roman Olearchyk in Kiev feeding Banderastan SBU info to Ben Hall in London, who adds MI6 spin.

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    1. Never mind little Sam’s Christmas stocking – give that money to Ukraine! After all, air-defense missiles don’t grow on trees, you know! But there’s light at the end of the tunnel; at the rate our kill ratio is improving, we will soon be able to shoot down 110% of the incoming wave, so that missiles not even produced yet will be destroyed!

      Brian Berletic did a good wrap-up of that issue and others at Andrei Martyanov’s blog, I posted a link here earlier and I think someone else did, too, when the post was new. In short, he said that if you look at satellite coverage over Ukraine at night, it’s still nearly all dark, so if they are having such phenomenal success with air defense, remaining possibilities are (1) they are disinterested in or unable to repair out-of-service utility facilities, or (2) even if only one or two Russian missiles get through, it has the destructive effect of many. But it is curious that simultaneously with rousing tales of AFU mad skillz at knocking incoming raids out of the sky, the UN publishes tear-jerking stories of the agony and torment Ukrainians are suffering. Doesn’t sound like the basis for a winter counteroffensive – terminating in the cheering recapture of Crimea – to me.

      On the one hand, if Russia were to move decisively and apply steadily-increasing pressure, it could likely wrap this up before NATO makes a decision to increase its presence, perhaps all the way to a full-on European land war. On the other, keeping the war going is providing at least as much of a draining effect on NATO and Europe as it is on Russia, and it looks likely Europe will break first.

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  69. A senior British general finally admits that British Royal Marines – and therefore NATO troops – have been participating in covert operations in Ukraine for several months and were present in the country as early as January 2022, supposedly to help evacuate the British embassy in Kiev:
    The revelation of a British general: “Royal Marines engaged in covert operations in Ukraine”

    That revelation has surely edged London closer to the crosshairs of Russian fire.

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    1. For those of us who’ve been interested in the Royal Marine Corps this doesn’t really come as a surprise. I’ve long thought that units of the RMC were involved. it’s what they train or, after all. Shades of ‘Legion Condor’ and all that.
      What is surprising is that the LtGen of the RMC acknowledges this in public. Perhaps he knew the Top Brass couldn’t keep the lid on this much longer – and perhaps he also hoped that this would be buried under the news of the strikes hitting the UK today and in the next days.

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  70. “Poisoned by Russian propaganda.” Kiev wants to get rid of the Donbass inhabitants

    “They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”, said Admiral de Panat in 1796 about the supporters of the French monarchy in a letter to the journalist Malle du Pan. This phrase became popular when appeals were being made for the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France in 1814.

    “The main problem is people”
    But it is more widely used in relation to any rigid political course in which no adjustments are made, even though the mistakes that have been are obvious.

    Post-Maidan Ukraine had many opportunities to move away from those postulates, according to which part of the country’s population has turned into outcasts. However, the Kiev regime is not going to do anything of the kind. Moreover, it dreams of new large-scale punitive actions.

    The head of the Ukraine National Police of Ukraine, Igor Klimenko, in an interview with RBC-Ukraine, spoke about how Kiev planned to act in the territories of the DPR and LPR in the event of their complete capture: “Children born in 20 14-2015 have already entered second grade. The people there have been poisoned by Russian propaganda. There are large areas there, in which the Ukrainian language has not been heard for 8.5 years, in which hatred for everything Ukrainian, for the Ukraine, has been brought up and promoted. So the main problem there is the people”.

    The main national policeman sees the way out of the problem to be the expulsion of the population of the Donbass: “Many people will go to look for the Russian world on the territory of the Russian Federation”.

    Different presidents —the same hatred
    There is nothing new in this concept. In the annexation of the Donbass, it has actually been operating since 2014. Having seized power in the country, the new regime set itself the task of bringing the inhabitants of the Donbass to their knees. And those who do not obey are simply destroyed.

    Ukrainian poet and prose writer Oleksandr Brigynets announced in September 2014: “If the Donbass is not Ukrainian, it will die, just as the Crimea is dying right now”.

    Fortunately, the brutalized Ukrainian Nazis have not succeeded in killing the Crimea, but this principle of their attitude towards the Donbass has never been in doubt.

    “We will have work – they won’t. We will have pensions – they won’t. We will have support for children and pensioners – they won’t. Our children will go to schools and kindergartens – their children will sit in basements. Because they can’t do anything. And this . . . this is how we will win this war”, said Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

    His successor Volodymyr Zelenski announced in the summer of 2021: “That part of the population people now living in the territory of the occupied Donbass and Crimea should understand exactly [that] I believe that if you live today on the territory of temporarily the occupied Donbass and you believe that your cause is right, that you are Russians, that we join Russia, then it is a big mistake for you to stay living in the Donbass … For the future of your children and grandchildren… you should already go and look for a place in Russia. This is the right thing to do. Because without the Ukraine, there will be no civilization on this territory. The Ukraine will develop and the Donbass will not be going anywhere under occupation. There will be no happiness for these people.

    “We need to create a ghetto for them”
    Throughout the years that have passed since the “Euromaidan”, the Kiev leaders have intended to “re-educate” the Donbass. The former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukraine, Arsen Avakov, made detailed plans, intending to filter the population, thereby determining the degree of guilt of each and establishing various options for their loss of rights.

    And Oleg Skrypka, the frontman of the “Vopli Vidoplyasova” [rock] group, said: “People who cannot learn Ukrainian have a low IQ: they are medically diagnosable as being “morons”. We need to separate them, because they are socially dangerous; we need to create a ghetto for them. And we will help them, as we help people with problems: on a volunteer basis we will sing “Vladimir Central” [a song about the biggest high-security prison in Russia, situated in the city of Vladimir] to them. If people do not speak Ukrainian, they have every right to look for work in other regions”. [Thus spake a Ukrainian intellectual giant, a leader of a rock band! Why do degenerate art-form entertainers believe they are sagacious? — ME]

    The extermination of the population of Donbass in Kiev has not been considered as something shameful: they just wish to kill those who are “wrong”, those who are harmful to the Ukraine and do not want to change.

    “Separatists who are the genuine article”
    With the start of the special military operation, the regime has not changed its point of view at all. Moreover, Kiev actively uses Western types of weapons to destroy the Donbass cities and kill their civilians. Knowing that the West, solving its own interests, will write off any genocide, if it is carried out against people who speak Russian.

    Moreover, representatives of Kiev do not even try to seek the loyalty of those who are now under their control.

    In her video, Volunteer of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine Olga Zaitseva, for example, assessed the residents of the villages around Artemovsk, where fierce battles are now taking place: “Zabahmutka, Orytne … there are people there, separatists who are the genuine article. Therefore, I beg you, do not concern yourselves about your evacuation: either you yourselves choose to go over to the Russian side, but please don’t have us dragged over there under shelling in order to find out under harassment the answer to the vexing question concerning who is for which side.

    An existential struggle
    Kiev’s attitude is yielding corresponding results, and not only in the Donbass. For example, foreign journalists are complaining that it has proven difficult to produce happy stories about the occupation of Kherson by the AFU. Local residents are either silent at or claim that with the arrival of the Ukrainians it had become “worse”. And such statements are being heard even against the background of the SBU’s hunt for “collaborators”.

    The inhabitants of Donbass understand perfectly well what they are fighting for. They are fighting for the right to remain themselves on their own land. A right that today the Kiev regime is trying with all its might to take away with Western arms and multibillion-dollar infusions.

    Washington and the EU are now generously paying for their genocide, and monsters like Klimenko are continuing their dirty work.

    And the only way to prevent this is to defeat Ukrainian Nazism, after which its new resurgence will no longer be possible.

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    1. “Because without the Ukraine, there will be no civilization on this territory. The Ukraine will develop and the Donbass will not be going anywhere under occupation. There will be no happiness for these people.”

      When Zelensky said that, he was flushed with the assurance of western support not for war, but for reconstruction, and imagined untold billions pouring into his country to make it a European monument to the Ukrainian culture – Kiev would be like Paris or London or Vienna. He was far off the mark. Billions did pour in, but they were for ‘defense’ after Washington successfully manipulated Ukraine into triggering a Russian attack by maneuvering for a military operation against the Donbas – Zelensky’s presidential order predates the Russian operation by days. Since then, the money coming into Ukraine has been dedicated to keeping its military fighting in an effort to wear down the Russian military. When it ends in the only way it can, Ukraine will be a broken and plowed and devastated ruin, and the money to rebuild it will just not be there because the amounts it would take would stagger the imagination. Billions would be required simply to make it safe for construction, the place is stiff with mines and unexploded ordnance.

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