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UA drone terrorizing Russian squad:

Girkin with a real rant calling Gerasimov a cretin and saying they’ll be naked and barefoot by mid year without a Chinese lend-lease.

Ruskies try to shoot down a drone with AKs and end up eating the grenade. Ouch! Pretty much ruined their day.

Russian squad getting blown up by a rocket/ATGM. Boom /Denzel

Interesting video of a rocket that went three floors deep into a Russian outpost but didn’t explode. Narrator sounding like morale is low:

Any guesses as to what China’s “peace plan” might look like? It will be interesting to see them try to wade into brokering this thing and likely faceplant. No way Ukraine agrees to any territory concessions now when it looks like the tide is getting ready to turn and they’ve got a couple hundred NATO MBTs, IFVs, etc etc on the way.

34 countries want the IOC to ban Russia and Belarus athletes: “we do not agree that Russian and Belarusian athletes should be allowed back into competition”. The games are a big deal in Dictatorships, and we need to stick together on this. Many Ukrainian Olympic caliber athletes are likely dead now (I think I saw some obits for a few). Why in the fuck the IOC thinks letting the Russian and Belorussians compete in this scenario is unconscionable and the IOC needs their collective clock cleaned. I’m going to go ahead and say the quiet part out loud: Europe and the US are the only reason the games exist and are I’m sure the biggest revenue generators. The IOC needs to get that straight and stop catering to 3rd world countries and pissing us off. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/statement-on-russias-war-on-ukraine-and-international-sport/statement-on-russias-war-on-ukraine-and-international-sport

Illia has a good “how did we get here” summary article here, worth a click, the guy works hard: https://kyivindependent.com/national/one-year-later-how-russia-came-to-a-fail-in-ukraine-battle-after-battle

Definitely will knock your dick in the dirt.

23 hens around the house feeder Sunday morning My new apple trees are leafing out: Dad and I worked out butts off Sunday, got more tree cages built and installed, watered all the new trees, did some equip maintenance, and welded up a new gate. Got a lot done.

Speaking of raccoons, there is a “Combat Raccoon” Ukrainian military squad that has some good merch on Saint Javelin:

Long read but a good summary of Russia’s strategic mistakes to date and corrections: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/what-russia-got-wrong-moscow-failures-in-ukraine-dara-massicot

This is a good read: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/us-led-security-assistance-ukraine-working “Observing training and assistance first-hand, our view is that Ukrainian military success is a function of low-level ingenuity and creativity, as well as high motivation and morale.”

Dury’s in San Antonio

Good article from Meduzza: Russian prisoners less interested in signing with Wagner of late, and the wardens are not cool with Wagner taking the best inmate labor (ha!) https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/08/less-charismatic-than-prigozhin

He’s a nut, but until some governmental entity publishes any substantive findings and formal accusations, conspiracy theories will continue to circulate. Unless there is a reckoning in the Kremlin at some point, we may never know. In reading up on this stuff more, it seems like Russia has probably done this before: “two explosions on the Mozdok–Tbilisi natural gas pipeline in North Ossetia on January 22, 2006. The explosions suspended gas supply to Georgia at a time when the weather was particularly cold, leading to allegations of deliberate energy blackmail carried out by the Russian government The explosions took place with the backdrop of the 2006 Russia-Ukraine gas crisis that same month. They also coincided with sabotage on electricity lines just several miles from the pipeline, which descended large parts of Georgia into darkness. Due to these suspicious coincidences, Georgia accused Russia of conducting deliberate acts of sabotage with the aim of forcing the nation into surrendering its pipelines to Gazprom – the Russian state-owned monopoly.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_energy_crisis

The whole collection was sold to Dury’s in San Antonio before I posted it, sorry. I think they are opening up a bigger online sales operation via GB.

That’s probably the simplest/most likely explanation.

Hersh is definitely “out there” and his theory is questionable because he has only one anonymous source, etc. But it is interesting to me that: there is still no official word on who blew up the pipelines; it took skill that only a few actors could pull off; the winners and losers as a result of the action are pretty clear; whoever gave the “go-ahead” was either very confident they wouldn’t get caught / didn’t care / has very high risk tolerance. I think those are reasons a lot of folks (myself included) think it’s very unlikely the US did it: we’re bad at keeping secrets and it would probably get leaked; Russia (and Germany?) would demand and be owed compensation; political fallout very risky; etc. That’s why Russia was such a likely actor (its their infrastructure, they can keep secrets, Putin has no fear even if it does come out). Only problem is it’s a little hard to define how Russia benefitted from them being blown up.

Long article quoting anonymous sources saying the US placed and remote detonated bombs on the Nordstream pipelines. Kinda reads like fan fiction and Seymour Hersh may be a nut but I guess seemingly plausible: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream?utm_medium=android If true, impressive that our guys pulled it off but extremely risky politically.

Good listen here. Canadian sniper killed 18 Russians in two days, says it was kinda bothersome, too many human waves, just “too easy” shooting obviously non-professionals. Shots from around 500m to 1800m. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/the-decibel/article-a-canadian-sniper-on-the-battle-for-bakhmut-ukraine/

One of the replies in the thread was wondering if this is being released now to communicate something inside Russia. Like Wagner (maybe Russian Army?) conveying to Putin and the general public: “the US completely annihilated our superior attacking force with Reapers, Apaches, F-16s, and stationary/aerial artillery in Syria. A little US artillery is already in Ukraine (fucking us up daily) and they’re talking about Reapers and F-16s now, if you wait till those weapons, etc. are in theater to finish this thing up, we’re fucked”

If I’m Lockheed, I’m having 20 of these coolers done up for the Poles and the boys at the Pentagon.

Ukraine just helped Lockheed to I think literally execute this sales pitch: