Gurgeh

Allegedly comes after a Storm Shadow cruise missile strike on an ammunition depot

Both the Ukrainian and Russian pilots know exactly where the ground based AA systems are and steer well clear of them. The greatest danger comes from the opposing air force, but there the advantage lies entirely with the Russians, who have more modern jets that are armed with AA missiles with twice the range of the Ukrainian planes. It's a similar story with the helicopters, who are staying well out of range of Stingers and the like.

Going far back we have this example. Cynics at the time (and afterwards) believed the driving reason behind such rules was that leaders were concerned that battles would be so bloody they would run out of troops, so the creation of these rules allows armed conflicts to continue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_Declaration_of_1868 In 1863, the Russian Army had perfected a fulminating musketball that could explode when it hit a hard target and was designed to blow up powder magazines or ammunition wagons. At the same time several similar projectiles for the same purposes were developed in America, the best one known being the Gardiner's Explosive Bullet, and both sides used them in the US Civil War, inflicting horrible wounds when aimed at people, and that, in turn, caused a public backlash against the weapon. In 1867, Russians perfected an improved explosive musketball that would detonate on any impact after being fired, even soft targets like people or animals. Predicting the disastrous effect of such a discovery on diplomatic relations with their neighbors, Russia decided to negotiate a ban on the development, creation, and use of such weapons before a grisly arms race commenced ... The delegates affirmed that the only legitimate object of war should be to weaken the military force of the enemy, which could be sufficiently accomplished by the employment of highly destructive weapons. With that fact established, the delegates agreed to prohibit the use of less deadly explosives that might merely injure the combatants and thereby create prolonged suffering of such combatants. The Great Powers agreed to renounce, in case of war among themselves, the use "by their military or naval troops of any projectile of a weight below 400 grams (14 ounces avoirdupois), which is either explosive or charged with fulminating or inflammable substances." While the declaration bans the use of fragmenting, explosive, or incendiary small arms ammunition, it does not prohibit such ammunition for use in autocannon or artillery rounds.

In happier news: Elsewhere, the Ukrainians have advanced far enough to be able to safely recover the 7 Leopard tanks they lost in the early days of the offensive. Two were apparently destroyed and five damaged when they were caught by artillery fire while making their way through a minefield. The hope is the five can be repaired and returned to action.

With all the right equipment the Ukrainians could do it, but the chances of them getting what they need are slim: - they asked for 300 tanks, and were pledged around 100, of which around 60-70 have actually been delivered. - they asked for long range weaponry to match the Russians. Only the Brits have given them anything, and that's air launched which limits how often it can be used as the Ukraine air force can be struck anywhere in Ukraine by Russian AA missiles fired from outside Ukraine. - they asked for F16s to defend their airspace, and might get some maybe by the end of the year, well after the summer offensive will be over

They won't blow up the reactors themselves. Those things are very tough and the amount of explosives (and how to place those explosives to destroy them) couldn't be made to look like artillery fire. It would also lead to an extremely unpredictable and catastrophic event. The allegation is that the cooling pond and some of the roof have been mined. The IAEA inspectors have said that they do not have access to all of the cooling pond or all of the roof, but are trying to get that access. Bear in mind there are only four inspectors for a complex industrial facility that's a mile long and almost as wide, and they can't wander about where they please.

Ukrainian troops regain more territory along eastern and southern fronts | Ukraine | The Guardian In an initial report on Telegram on Monday, Maliar said the Ukrainian military took back 37.4 sq km (14.4 sq miles) of territory in heavy fighting in the past week. She said Russian forces were attacking near Lyman, in the northern Donetsk region and near Avdiivka and Mariinka, long-contested cities farther south – to the west of Bakhmut. In a later report, Maliar said fighting near Bakhmut had intensified and “a struggle is under way to seize the initiative. ... Moscow has spent months consolidating its defensive lines, some of which now run to a depth of 30km. “There’s a considerable number of Russians in Ukraine. There are considerable defensive obstacles,” Adm Rob Bauer, the chair of Nato’s military committee told journalists in Brussels on Monday. “The counteroffensive, it is difficult. People should never think that this is an easy walkover.” Ukrainian military chiefs were right to be “cautious” probing for weaknesses in the Russian lines, as they risk losing a lot of forces in full-on assaults, Bauer said.

It's possible that the destruction of the dam has dropped the water level in the nearby reservoir enough for Ukrainian troops to be able to cross it and potentially threaten the Russians. However, it's hard to conceive of anyone wanting to be involved in a firefight in a nuclear power station. Perhaps the Russians are pulling back because they could potentially get surrounded in there now. The Russians are reported to have mined the cooling pond for the station. Destroying the pond could have bad consequences for the reactors, not Chernobyl level but enough to radioactively contaminate the facility itself. However, if the vents were opened after destroying the pond, then radiation would be released into the atmosphere. There's also plenty of spent nuclear fuel stored there that could be tampered with. It all depends how crazy the Russians want to be.

Very true... but he also had this long term goal of establishing a new Russian empire (or in his mind, re-establishing it). If Ukraine had fallen quickly, he imagined the remaining eastern European states would fall in line with Russian demands because of the threat of Russian invasion. NATO would withdraw to it's Cold War borders rather than risk confrontation, and Vlad would be hailed as the new Peter the Great, He was, and is, delusional. Angela Merkel, who was closer to Putin than any other Western leader (probably too close), said that "he lived in another world" and that was years before he became ever more isolated.

Now the flood waters have subsided... Ukrainian troops reportedly reclaim territory in Kherson province | Ukraine | The Guardian Ukrainian forces have reportedly crossed the Dnipro River and retaken territory on the left bank of Kherson province, in a move that paves the way for a future possible advance towards Crimea. According to pro-Russian Telegram channels, Ukrainian troops have seized the village of Dachi, opposite the city of Kherson, and near the destroyed Antonivskyi Bridge. They have dug in and are seeking to establish a bridgehead, the channels said. ...Pro-Kremlin bloggers said Ukrainian troops had “complete control” of several summer houses near Oleskhy, the occupied left-bank riverside town that suffered severe flooding earlier this month. Other embankment areas were in a developing “grey zone”, they added... It is unclear if Ukrainian forces will be able to advance further. Beleaguered Russian troops were calling in artillery and aviation support, bloggers said.

A discussion about who really benefited from this farce (you'll need to switch to the English translation) https://charter97.org/ru/news/2023/6/25/553340/ "Two people were seen at the negotiations - Dyumin and Patrushev behind his back. [Aleksey Dyumin is the governor of Tula oblast where Prigozhin’s army stopped, and Nikolai Patrushev is the powerful head of the Russian security council]. ... it turns out that one person “won” Prigozhin's march - Patrushev... All "Putin's proteges" have shown themselves to be complete a**holes. Putin himself is exposed as a nonentity who cannot enlist the support of any of the CSTO member states. And Patrushev.. turns out to be the main factor in stabilizing the internal situation. Along the way, Patrushev exposes everyone who did not show loyalty to the regime, but turned out to be on the side of the rebels." Dyumin is being talked about as a possible successor to Putin; as his former chief bodyguard he's one of the few people Putin trusts, as much as he trusts anyone. And Patrushev emerges as a power behind the throne. In this version of events, Lukashenko and Belarus are bystanders who just did as they were told after the deal was made.

Prigozhin has ties with Russian special forces as they've worked closely together for years with the Wagner group. He's also what you might call "locally" popular around the city of Rostov because of Wagner's operations in Ukraine across the border there. The ordinary Russian soldiers probably like him as he tells more truth (or maybe less lies) about what's going on, but their Russian officers are not so keen for the same reasons. In Moscow the only person who liked him was Putin, but once Putin signed the decree that Wagner had to fall under the control of Shiogu, Prigozhin was finished and he knew it. If Wagner had reached Moscow there would have been a fight that Prigozhin could only lose, but the cost of that fight would have been catastrophic for Putin's war in Ukraine. So a deal was struck. It seems like Prigozhin has given up control of Wagner as part of the deal, although no-one would be surprised if some "new" mercenary force appeared, based in Belarus. Most Wagner units will however end up under the nominal control of the Russian military, but that can't be a happy relationship given the events of the last few days.

More likely Russia just didn't have the troops in place to stop some elements of Wagner from reaching Moscow. They appealed to the mercs to hand over Prigozhin, or just ignore him, and failed. Putin took a plane out the city to the north. Lorries were parked across bridges to try and slow the mercs from simply driving up the main road into the capital. Wagner took over the whole base of the southern command of the Russian army with very little resistance and were a day away from the city's outskirts. The Russians simply lost control of the situation. Given time, Moscow could assemble enough troops to crush Wagner, but that time would be catastrophic for them in Ukraine. Exiling Prigozhin is the least worst solution. However, I wouldn't give much for Prigozhin's chances of survival in Belarus in the long term. He was never popular among the military top brass or state security services in Russia, and after this embarrassment he'll be higher on their hit list than Zelensky. There'll be a window with his name on it somewhere.

The writing has been on the wall for Prigohzen since last week, when Putin backed Shoigu and decreed all mercenary companies had to sign a contract with the ministry of defence. Prigohzen signing that contract would likely mean he ends up dead or in prison, given how much bad blood there is between him and Shoigu. So perhaps in typical Prigohzen fashion he's decided to go out with a bang.

An update this morning said that the Russians have changed tactics and stationed their helicopters about 100 miles from the front line and have switched them to using longer range missiles for ground attack, keeping the copters out of reach of Stingers and the like. A couple of days ago various NATO countries pledged to send more short to medium range AA systems which will hopefully redress the balance.

Focus of war shifting south towards Mariupol, Ukrainian minister says | Ukraine | The Guardian Hanna Maliar, a deputy defence minister, said the most active fighting was no longer around Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region, but in the south, and specifically in the direction of the two coastal cities of Berdiansk and Mariupol. “If in the first week the epicentre was the east, now we see that the fighting is moving to the south and now we see the most active areas are Berdiansk and Mariupol,” Maliar said. “In the east, the enemy has turned on all the forces to stop our offensive. And they are massing forces there to stop us. In the south they are not very successful.” ... Russia’s president claimed that Ukraine would soon be out of home-manufactured hardware and that he remained focused on his aim of “denazifying” Ukraine, adding, in a bizarre aside, that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was “not a real Jew”. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin told an annual economic forum in St Petersburg. “They say that Zelenskiy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people. I’m not joking.”

It's way too early, and it's not like Kharkhiv last year where the Russians were caught by surprise and had nothing prepared. The Russians have built multiple lines of defences and everything is heavily mined. This forces the Ukrainians to clear narrow paths through the mines for their tanks and APCs, which the Russians shell with artillery the minute they spot them. This is how most of the Ukrainian vehicle losses have occurred, they are unable to manoeuvre until they clear the minefields. It's why they are holding back most of their Western armor, but without the better tanks it's very tough going. They also don't have air superiority. The edge in the air is clearly with the Russians simply because they have more aircraft they can afford to lose. The one clear advantage the Ukrainians do have is in night vision. They are making most of their progress in the dark, but come daylight the Russians hit back.

Teaser | Hitchhikers | Fandom Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them, meaning that they find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one's going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.

Putting the tinfoil hat on... If crossing interstellar distances is phenomenally difficult and expensive, you'd have to ask why the aliens would be here. I would guess because intelligent life is so rare that any they come across are worth studying. "They" might not even be here, perhaps it's just their AIs who are reporting back what they find, as machines would survive the travel times better than living creatures. So in short, we might be witnessing the robot camera team of an alien David Attenborough.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jun/09/russia-ukraine-war-live-zelenskiy-hails-results-amid-heavy-fighting-in-donetsk-biden-and-sunak-reaffirm-commitment-to-ukraine#top-of-blog Transcript of conversation Ukraine claims proves Russia blew up Nova Kakhovka dam Ukraine’s domestic security service (SBU) said earlier on Friday it had intercepted a telephone call proving a Russian “sabotage group” blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and dam in southern Ukraine. A one-and-a-half minute audio clip on its Telegram channel of the alleged conversation featured two unidentified men who appeared to be discussing the fallout from the disaster in Russian. Speaker one: Yeah. The main problem is that the hydropower plant cools their nuclear reactor. Speaker two: That’s fine. They did it to themselves. It’ll blow up and that’s it. Speaker one: So our guys did it. It’s not them, it’s ours. Speaker two: Really, it was ours? They said that the Khokhols [derogatory term for Ukrainians] blew it up. Speaker one: They didn’t blow it up. Our saboteur group is there. They wanted to cause fear with this dam. It did not go according to the plan. More than they planned. Speaker two: Yeah, well, naturally. It’s gonna be like Chornobyl, right? Speaker one: Built in the 1950s. It went down fast, it went down.

Chaos on frontlines as Ukraine war threatens to come home for Russia | Russia | The Guardian If Vladimir Saldo was trying to project a sense of calm among the deluged frontline towns and villages of Russian-occupied Kherson region, he was failing miserably. The Kremlin-installed “governor”, dressed in camouflage and helmet and sitting in front of the flooded remains of the town centre of Nova Kakhovka, claimed that the city was “alive”. “People are calmly walking around the streets,” said Saldo, as the flood waters rose up the walls of the city hall behind him... The Russian Volunteer Corps, an anti-Kremlin militia, claimed it had captured Novaya Tavolzhanka, one of the largest villages in the region. It had even taken prisoners, including a 23-year-old chef from the Pskov region who said he was a mobilised soldier. Vyacheslav Gladkov, the regional governor, admitted on Monday that Russian troops “cannot reach the village”, effectively confirming that they had temporarily lost control over a Russian town. In many ways, the border area appears largely unprotected.

And they also blew up an earlier dam across the Dnipro to slow down the Germans in WW2: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/02/second-world-war-dnieper-dam-blown-up-by-russians-1941 As far as fighting over worthless land, the Russians have already levelled many towns and cities in the process of taking control of them. It's how they won in Chechnya and Syria, and how they've been fighting in Ukraine once their ham-fisted attempts at more modern tactics came unstuck in the early stages of the war, Just destroy everything in the path of the army so there's literally nothing left to defend. Putin would happily erase every settlement in Ukraine if it meant he could conquer all of it. Remember that any areas they control after this is over will be rebuilt, and given the level of corruption in Russia, Putin and his friends will make bank from all the "government" construction contracts. Just look at the construction bills for the Winter Olympics: The New, 28-Mile Road in Sochi Could Have Been Paved with Caviar — And It Would Have Been Cheaper (esquire.com) Vladimir Putin pledged to spend $12 billion on the Olympic games in Sochi. Over time, it was discovered somewhere around $6.8 billion of that proposed money was going to go to one road: the Adler–Krasnaya Polyana... Two no-bid contracts were awarded to companies that are run by alleged friends of the Putin administration.

Russian bloggers fill in counteroffensive blanks as Kyiv’s troops probe frontline | Ukraine | The Guardian The Kremlin was quick to declare the attack repulsed, but several in Russia’s community of ultra-nationalist military bloggers were more sceptical. Relying on their own sources, they suggested Ukraine had made some initial gains. Igor Girkin, perhaps the best known, said the Russian MoD’s statements were “not quite true”, that “the enemy managed to cut into our position”, and argued that it looked likely the counteroffensive had finally begun. War Gonzo, run by the war correspondent Semyon Pegov, was more specific. The blog suggested Ukraine had penetrated 2km into Russian-held positions before Novodonetske, between Velyka Novosilka and Vuhledar. Kyiv’s forces were using western mechanised vehicles to bring up reserves, the blog added. Individual reports should be viewed sceptically but taken together they can build up a picture. What is clear is that there is not an all-out assault, but also that the level of forces being committed are non-trivial. These are not exploratory raids, but most likely probing attacks, searching for local Russian weaknesses.

If they did, then yes. The problem is there's no way of knowing what they were targetting, because the drones were shot down before they got wherever they were heading. There's also the issue of scale. This was 8 small drones. The Russians on the other hand have fired hundreds of ballistic and cruise missiles that have deliberately targetted hospitals, fire stations and apartment blocks. So the level of any condemnation should match the scale of the violations.