Buddy of mine gave it to me a year ago along with one for the mech's.  I'll ask him where he got it.  





RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 29

“Russian forces made limited advances west of Severodonetsk on April 29 but remain stalled south of Izyum. Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine are likely successfully conducting a maneuver defense rather than holding static positions, redeploying mechanized reserves to resist attempted Russian advances. Concentrated Russian artillery is enabling minor Russian advances, but Ukrainian positions remain strong. Limited Ukrainian counterattacks around Kharkiv city may additionally force Russian forces to redeploy units intended for the Izyum axis to hold these positions.

Key Takeaways:

•Russian forces likely intend to leave a minimal force in Mariupol necessary to block Ukrainian positions in Azovstal and prevent partisan actions and are deploying as much combat power as possible to support offensive operations elsewhere.

•Ukrainian forces are successfully slowing Russian attacks in eastern Ukraine, which secured only minor advances west of Severodonetsk and did not advance on the Izyum front in the last 24 hours.

•Ukrainian counterattacks in Kharkiv are unlikely to develop into a major counteroffensive in the coming days but may force Russia to redeploy forces intended for the Izyum axis to hold their defensive positions around the city.

•Ukrainian intelligence continued to warn that Russian false flag attacks in Transnistria are intended to draw Transnistria into the war in some capacity and coerce Moldova to abandon pro-European policies.”


ISW Link

It’s ok bro I got you

Don't blame him, we'd probably all harbor some animosity towards Canada if one day they got a wild hair up their ass and decided to invade, murder, rape, loot, destroy our shit, rape, and act like the victim in all that.

Ukrainian 11129th Air Defense Missile Regiment Shoots Down Russian Su-35 aircraft

There may be more people here than speak up who think the pro-Russia sentiments are nonsense.  Life is complicated.  I get that.  But this issue frankly isn’t.  For whatever wrongs and corruption may have preceded in Ukraine, there is no credible excuse for Russia’s actions.  The invasion is morally reprehensible.  I don’t want to see needless loss of life and destruction, but Russia needs to suffer badly for this and be essentially incapacitated.  They are an affront to human decency and order.

ETA:  thank you to those who continue to post good info in this thread and tamp down the bullshit.  This continues to be a good resource regardless of the distractions.

Thats from weeks ago

Where can I get this?

Putin is just going to "love" this.


Tokayev announces referendum to reform Kazakh Constitution

Time for an update on the Battle for Donbas

A thread.

— Dr Mike Martin ?? (@ThreshedThought) April 29, 2022

Seems a lot of commentators are coming to the conclusion that ru messed up its chance in donbass.

I'm thinking the continued degradation of ru rail links and fuel storage for their logistics tail is likely making things even harder for ru to do much of anything.

Can anyone ID this tank?

https://youtube.com/shorts/ELqIhtrDGqw?feature=share

Says T-90M in the video

-edit-
The link is dead now but the 90M tanks started showing up about ten days ago. They were supposed to be a stopgap until they could figure out the T-14...
Judging from the flaming wreckage of several in recent days ... Can't say they are any better than the T-72s

NATO deployment to border with Russia -- Armored vehicles being deployed to Ukraine

It looks like they are ready for combat....against an enemy equipped with early-model M48s and M75 APCs

Does Ukraine want napalm?

I think we should ship them some

I'm working on it!!   With that said, this is game-changing for citizenry around the world (and not in a good way).  Truly capable thermal drones with heavy payloads are the tools of governments, and heavily regulated to prevent use by citizens.  The only thing that keeps governments from actively employing such technology against their own citizens is public opinion and backlash.  We've already seen how public opinion can be influenced with Russian Oligarchs' yachts and funds seized purely because we don't like them.  It wouldn't take much for public opinion to support such measures against those that don't toe the party line (ref: Jan 6).  

From there I turn to true civilian capability as a balance to government power.  It's fun to see a DJI Mavic drop a grenade using a 3d printer rack in a war zone that encourages civilian engagement, but that's not real in most AOs.  You'd be caught before your first trial run over US soil.  I think most people are underestimating the shift of power in the "drone wars."  We're watching tanks, ships and even aircraft become obsolete in real time.  We're seeing the Heinlein novels we read as kids become real.  While it's fun to watch this play out against the orcs, the problem is that our balance as civilians is that we're not keeping pace with the power the government is creating (and can't).  I had always assumed small arms development by the government (such as exploding shells and smart rounds) would be where the tide turned.  It appears it's the same idea but aerial.  It seems so obvious in hindsight, but I didn't see this coming and don't know how to respond.  The FAA ownership of the air above US soil was a genius move in hindsight.  Now we have to ask their permission (timidly) to use technology over our own homes.  That's not by accident.  

My concern is not people with such technology, but government entities with no balancing civilian force.  Our founding fathers knew that the Republic relied upon the power resting with the people.  I think we're quickly slipping off that slope, and that's the key message I get from this conflict.  Sorry if this derails this otherwise great thread.

It looks like they were picking through a pallet of russkie MREs that we’re dropped like garbage by the side of the road. I like how they all ran off and left the wounded guys to bandage themselves. Fucking Orcs. They died like they lived picking garbage in a stolen car.

You'd swear it was from the 1950's, people discussing it on Reddit are laughing as much as we are.   Those guys aren't going to last long against Ukraine if they try to pull any funny stuff.

Insight on why China is terrified of possible US sanctions.


China in 'deep crisis', says Hong Kong private equity chief

Importing high level spies now?

Operation Trapper Keeper.  

(Paperclip was already taken).

Now I am not saying I don't believe that videos title. But I don't believe that videos title.

I drove 1800 miles R/T to Salina/Schilling AFB to rescue a Scottie doggie for my Mom.

It's getting to the point where we need to just blast the orcs to hell.....

Pretty lady. She looks like she was a kind and beautiful soul.  So was she a Russian speaker that was “saved’ by the bare chested bear riding savior of Christianity or was she a puppy raising Nazi that need de nazifying and liquidation?

I’m beyond pissed at these fucking Orcs. Fuck Putin and fuck his fans here.

Well played...

Russia’s Casual Savagery Is Seared Into Its Soul

The absence of a historical reckoning with the evils of Stalinism has spawned a people who believe brutality works

David Aaronovitch, The Times

It was all western propaganda that Russia was about to invade Ukraine. It was all western propaganda, once the invasion had begun, to call it an “invasion”. It was all western propaganda that the ebbing Russian tide revealed the summary killing and torture of civilians and looting.

Yet for all our “propaganda” no one has been more surprised than the West. “Terrible things happen in war”, of course. We have only to think of the family in Kabul obliterated last summer by an American drone strike because they had been mistaken for terrorists planning an attack on the airport. But even so there has been a particular quality to the behaviour of Russian troops in Ukraine. And also, as far as we can tell from recordings of intercepted conversations between some of them and their relatives back home, a casual brutality towards all Ukrainians. It’s a callousness that has extended to the treatment of their own casualties, with little effort made to rescue the wounded or recover the dead. All this has shocked us, and the question that begs to be answered is: why are they like this?

One answer is that they are reacting to the continuous depiction in Russia of Ukrainians as being mostly “Nazis” — that is, (since this is not an analytical term) folk devils. Another is that the Russian army is poorly NCOed, badly led, ill-disciplined, resentful and made up of recruits many of whom were subjected to violent “hazing” after joining. They arrive on the battlefield already brutalised.

But there is something so cynical about this brutality, whether it’s the actions of the soldiers, the language of the vox pops on Russian streets or the threats from pundits on state-sponsored current affairs shows. It’s almost as if it comes from a place where such actions are seen as somehow inevitable, that always man will be wolf to man.

I’m not arguing that such a belief is intrinsic to Russians as people. They want the same things as we do: to be happy, for their children to thrive, to become grandparents, to have some say over their own lives, to watch a good serial on TV and go to Disneyland. But as Marx said, we are weighed down and hemmed in by our collective pasts, or rather, what we imagine our pasts to be. And the Russian past is centuries of brutality often dressed up for its citizens as glory, as millions of eggs necessarily broken to attain victory.

It is hard for us to imagine the psychological impact of this, but the background is that the Bolshevik era was marked by an appalling level of official murder and catastrophic policies right up to the mid-Fifties, for which no one was held to account. Between 1930 and 1953 the ruling elite of the Soviet Union presided over the deportation of several million kulaks, a famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed up to four million, the summary killing of up to 760,000 people, with 1.7 million more sent to the gulags where many perished.

And no one was tried. No one imprisoned. The victims had no redress and at best could expect “rehabilitation”, very often posthumously. Unlike the Nazi leadership or its European collaborators, there were no Nurembergs, no cyanide suicides, no long stretches in jail. Whereas mad old Rudolf Hess ended his days in Spandau prison in Berlin in 1987 aged 93, his Soviet counterpart, 96-year-old Vyacheslav Molotov, succumbed to pneumonia in a Moscow hospital a year earlier. And his terrible colleague, the “Iron Commissar” Lazar Kaganovich, who in his declining years liked to sit on a bench in the park to chat to people, lasted till 1991.

Both had been intimately involved in all of Stalin’s greatest acts of mass murder. Both had helped shape and administer the policies that caused the Ukrainian famine. Molotov had been in charge of the mass deportation of kulaks, and both had signed off on the murder of people during the Great Terror.

One of the most chilling books I have read is the 1993 translation of Molotov Remembers, the edited transcripts of 140 conversations he had with a biographer, Felix Chuev, in the 17 years before his death. It is wrong to call the tone “unrepentant”. Molotov did not feel he had anything but inevitable “mistakes” to be repentant for. What he had done had been for the best and, generally, had worked out well. Chuev taxed him with the murders of so many old comrades. Men like Jan Rudzutak. “He never confessed to anything about himself,” said Molotov. “He was executed by firing squad. A politburo member. I don’t think he was a conscious member of any faction but he was too easy-going about the opposition. That was unforgivable.”

Chuev asked Molotov about a case where, sent a list of women prisoners’ sentences for approval, he had altered one of 10 years in prison to being shot. “I was authorised to have access to this list and to amend it,” he told Chuev, “and so I did.” What was the charge against her, who was she, he was asked. “It’s of no importance,” replied Molotov.

DeStalinisation led to no reckoning. Only during the brief period of perestroika and then after the fall of the Berlin Wall did it look as though there was a concerted attempt to get Russians to come to terms with their history. The archives were opened, books were published, museums established. But as the historian Irina Sherbakova, a founding member of the human rights organisation Memorial recalled in 2019, the early reformers leading Russia “lacked interest in history; they were in a rush to build a market economy. They didn’t see the link between successful economic reforms and the need for a vibrant civil society.”

So when things got tough and folk became nostalgic even for the bad old days, Vladimir Putin was able, gradually at first and then more completely, to end any attempt at a mass understanding of Stalinism and its brutalities. Stalin, meanwhile, was being psychologically rehabilitated. In December last year Sherbakova’s Memorial organisation was shut down by the Russian courts, but by then polls were showing 71 per cent of Russians saying they had a “positive attitude” towards Stalin’s role in their history. The head of the polling organisation Levada wrote that Stalin was seen as a severe leader “who could create order in the country”. Maybe a bit like you-know-who.

The young soldier sent to Ukraine was never taught in school about the Great Terror. It’s not on the curriculum. But what he has almost certainly absorbed, even if subliminally, is the great national lesson that brutality is simply inevitable and that it works.

That is not NATO deployment to the Russian border.

I disagree.  China needed Russia to continue to be a thorn in the West’s side to divert resources and political bandwidth from asia.  Normally you might think that US vs Russia was to China’s benefit, but Russia played their hand so catastrophically poorly that there is a very good chance they are finished as a world power contender at very little cost to the West.
Even if it ends up in all-out nuclear war, there is an extremely good chance that the West nukes China too.  There is little reason not to, so the idea that China emerges undamaged to rule a world of ashes is just not going to happen.
Furthermore, let’s say that Russia is dealt with without too much damage outside Ukraine, and the West pivots to Asia.  Japan and South Korea will almost certainly go nuclear.  The West overall has awakened politically to the need to actively protect its strategic interests and frustrate it’s enemies’ strategic interests, ergo there will be a laser focus on Taiwan.  After that there will be literally zero chance China can successfully invade Taiwan.  China’s best interests would probably be best served by picking up Russian territory/energy resources in the far east and playing the long game.
Xi probably has a Putin voodoo doll to stick pins in for the way Russia fucked China’s strategic planning.

Is it in Latvia or Estonia, they both border Russia and have Nato troops there.

Mmm...FAA control of airspace has been a thing long before the advent of drones.

Also:


Or thumbs on joysticks, as it were.