Mamoulian War

No need to be very successful if they ****up enough with Russian army. The Wagner media have also said, that they had orders in case of something like this happening. We’ll see in next few weeks, if they go against army, or get new jobs in new PMCs.

Russia has released list of passengers on the plane: Propustin Sergey Makaryan Evgeniy Totmin Aleksandr Chekalov Valeriy Utkin Dmitriy Matuseev Nikolay Prigozhin Evgeniy I am really curious, how this will affect the situation in Niger.

And Wagnerites already released the statement, that if Prigozhin was really in the plane, they will march on Moscow again

The plane crashed in Tver. The rumours are flying around in Russia, that the Prigozhin and Utkin were ordered to be assassinated. If they indeed were on board, we’ll see soon. But some RU pro-invasion Telegram personas are already getting very very angry, and are predicting very bad outcome for the person, who ordered the assassination, as the mood in the army is more in favour of these two ****.

After few day of break, I went for more Deep Sky Derelicts. The game has due to it's nature strange difficulty spikes. Sometimes after a lot of easy-peasy encounters, you get obliterated in few rounds in the next one. Especially when you encounter Soulmorphs. I got first two station defense encounters, and the second one was really problematic to win. Definitely needed more than 5 attempts to win it. Still having fun, still feeling sometimes repetition. I have unlocked 3rd tier of derelicts and spent 22 hours with it so far.

As one of the soldiers on the frontline said: The effectiveness of minefields, fortifications, anti-tank trenches, and similar engineering obstacles becomes significant only when they are adequately manned and remain under fire control.

Looking back at the info presented, it was not about all of the fires that broke up at industrial facilities, but about explosions and fires, which significantly impacted the function of sites affected by fire. I have no clue on what statistics was this information presented, I have presented it as it was shown here. I do not believe, that Russia has such transparent official statistics as New Zealand, which is available for anyone to look at, so that we or anyone else would be able to present it in the manner as in your link. IMHO also even if Russia has more population, that does not automatically mean, that they have more factories. As their economy is primarily producing raw mined/extracted materials for exports, and is falling back behind the rest of the world in the industrial production. In that regard would be More relevant comparison with Venezuela.

It is needed to be taken with grain of salt, but Prigozhin himself has stated few weeks before his mutiny, that more casualties for wagner has been on the side of his “elite” soldiers compared to convicts. and here is the summary by UK defense. Every 48cm of landgrab by wagner cost them 1 casualty (KIA or WIA)

@xzar_monty IIRC, you have been wondering about number of fires in Russia before and after the start of the SMO. Today I have read in local media, that before 02/22 the average was 20 fires at industrial sites per year. In 2022, the number of reported fires at industrial sites is more than 90.

I am slowly moving forward with Deep Sky Derelicts. I have cleared 7th derelict on Sunday, and it takes much longer to get through, than through the typical roguelite game. I spent almost 4 hours in the last derelict. Much longer than getting through full other roguelite game So far, I am having enough fun to continue further, but it sometimes feels little bit repetitive. Hopefully I will be able to finish the game, before I start to have that bad feeling which I do not appreciate in this type of games

A counterargument to the latest Kofman analysis about Bakhmut battle. TL;DW Ukraine might have lost a lot of quality solidiers, but as a result, they completely eliminated Wagner from UA battlefield, and have been the big spark of Wagner mutiny. And this result was worth all of the sacrifice. He laso talks about the timeline, that during the phase about which is Kofman talking, the all of the convicts were already dead or pardoned, so Wagner had to use their most experienced soldiers for last two months of meat assaults as well. And that there is ongoing academic feud between Kofman and O’Brien (spelling?), who both has opposite views and neither want to admint, that they might have been not correct about their previous predictions

An inside look on work of Russian political officers and their idea of life value. Audio included

Why do you think, that one of the very few items, that have been missing on the Lend Lease list provided to Stalin during the WW2, was demining equipment? Because Soviets found the quickest way how remove landmines: “Nas Mnogo!” Oh, if you have ever wondered, why Russia already destroyed 400% of HIMARS and “hundreds” of Bradleys. Wonder no more. Russian officer has shared on his Telegram some insights, how things work.

Here is take on why it takes so long compared to his predictions, by Lt. Gen. Hodges in an interview with Times Radio. He speaks about what mistakes he’s done when predicting the Crimea situation improving for Ukraine in Summer, about peace talks in Jeddah and relations between Russia and China. Aboit Wagner Mutiny, situation in Niger and Belarus, how Russia is weaponizing hunger and plans to weaponize refugees by destabilizing Western Africa again. And that the West still does not have a clear goal in Ukraine, and does not provide everything, that UA needs to achieve victory by liberation of Crimea, which is the main reason behing slow offensive. He also compares what is going on with Operation Overlord, and mentions, that the Allies units were trained for two years for this specific operation, and there was still a two months long stalemate, before the Allies made a decisive breakthrough after they achieved air superiority.

Of course they said it. As it is true. They had to accommodate to the situation with minefields guarded by artillery, which they probably underestimated. Most likely culprit was probably overconfidence in Western gear and training. But reading all the stuff thrown around lately in some newspaper was pretty derogatory and looked a lot like Russian propaganda and not like describing the real issues on the front

Well, the goal of the satire was always to stir up a little bit of controversy to engage people in discussion. Which this guy achieves with his cartoon . The last two weeks like 80% of all news about Ukraine, was about some guy in western newspaper complaining, that the offensive is going to slow. A lot of people have talked about it on this boards as well. For a comparison, just look at the operation Overlord... Allies landed 2,052,299 men in Northern France, and it still took them almost three months to liberate Normandy and Brittany, a land area similar to occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. And they had air support UA has probably less than 200-300k men around the whole frontline, and scarce air support

Dmitri Glukhovsky, the author behind Metro 2033 and 2034 novels, has been sentenced in absence to 8 years prison time for "Discrediting of Russian Army" by court in Moscow. Thankfully he has fled Russia more than a year ago, so for now he is safe. Also, his novels are not allowed to sell in Russia, due to his criticism of "SMO".

I have started Deep Sky Derelicts today, which I got last time as a free game from GOG giveaway, and purchased both the DLCs. So far having fun, despite being asskicked once We'll see how this will go, as roguelites and card-based games are both not exactly my cup of tea

This UA guy is really perfect at depicting the current western and russian news buzz. Slow offensive.

WW3 is far away from what some scaremongers trying to portray https://www.eurointegration.com.ua/eng/news/2023/08/3/7166922/

Wasn’t Patrushev also one of the fathers of the idea, that Ukraine is an enemy of Russia as well? Well, maybe it’s time to reclaim the Karelia back to Finland as historically Finish territories Are fino-ugric languages still spoken at these territories or have the Russians completely assimilated these people with their colonial policies?

And this is what Russia fears most. Most of the Russians knew someone from Ukraine. Now let’s imagine, if Ukraine would be able to magically remove all corruption and join EU. That would mean, that all of these people, would sooner or later start to question their Tsar and his corrupt to the bone entourage.

Goal nr. 7/2023 After two years long break after my PC upgrade, I have finally found mood to try another attempt at the Zero Seed mission on Hard Difficulty in my GOG copy of Druidstone – The Secret of the Menhir Forest, which I was still missing for 100% completion of the game. To my surprise even after some moves, which I have messed up, I was able to finish it on first try, and defeated the final boss with one of her minions under Oiko's mind control .

BG3 goodies pack available for free on GOG. https://www.gog.com/game/baldurs_gate_3_goodie_pack

Hmm, seems to me, that Ubi wants to appease the BDSM crowd Man would say the endless grinding in the AC games by which they want to force you to use UbiShop, is big enough punishment, but yeah, some might really call it an QoL improvememt