Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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Ukraine Removes Hammer and Sickle from Soviet-era Statue
Aug 1, 2023
Workers remove a hammer and sickle from a giant statue in Kyiv, Ukraine, as part of a campaign to remove Soviet symbols that has ramped up since Russia invaded Ukraine last year.
The 62-meter-high steel figure of a woman holding a sword and shield bearing the USSR-linked symbols was unveiled in 1981 as a memorial to Soviet victory in World War II. But since Russia's invasion, Ukraine doubled down on the removal of references to Soviet history and Russian culture from geographical names, and a law on decolonization came into force this summer.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Russia Is Returning to Its Totalitarian Past
by Alexey Kovalev, August 1, 2023
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/08/01/russia-putin-wagner-repression-au
thoritarian-totalitarian-arrests-ukraine-war/
A month after Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny, Russia is well along the path from ordinary authoritarian control to full-on totalitarian repression. As in old Soviet times, Moscow is awash with rumors of purges among the top military brass. Elsewhere, the machine of state repression is churning at an accelerating rate as the Russian authorities cast an ever-wider net for purported enemies within.
With many of the most vocal anti-war activists already dead, imprisoned, or exiled, the security services are now targeting even mild whiffs of dissent. Last week, they arrested the Marxist academic Boris Kagarlitsky and charged him with “promoting extremism.” His supposed crime: In a Telegram post written after Ukraine’s first attack on the Kerch Strait bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea in October 2022, Kagarlitsky called the strike “understandable” from a purely military standpoint. Even a neutral, objective assessment is now a crime.
Russians of all walks of life now face kangaroo courts and long sentences to prison or hard labor for something as trivial as a social media post. Nikita Tushkanov, a history teacher in Mikun, a town in Russia’s northern Komi Republic, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in a labor camp for calling the bridge explosion “a birthday gift for Putler,” using a portmanteau of “Putin” and “Hitler” that has been popularized on social media. Private conversations are suspect, too, as former police officer Sergey Klokov found out when he was sentenced to seven years in prison for speaking to Ukrainian acquaintances on the phone about crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine.
Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has long been an authoritarian state. But the persecution was focused mainly on opposition politicians and activists, from murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov to imprisoned anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. Even after the adoption of strict new censorship laws at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, harsh prison sentences weren’t very common, and they were mostly used as exemplary punishments for high-profile dissenters. These included Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician who condemned the massacre committed by Russian soldiers in Bucha, Ukraine, in a series of social media posts. Meanwhile, ordinary Russians still had plenty of opportunities to speak their mind—among themselves, on social media, or with the occasional small-scale political protest.
But more recently, Russia’s totalitarian mask has come off, with less and less toleration for any kind of dissent. Not only is the persecution of dissenting opinions official now, with new laws explicitly banning any criticism of the so-called special military operation in Ukraine, but its scope has vastly widened. Victims include more and more ordinary Russians, and the infraction can be as small as posting an approving emoji on a social media post critical of the war. In another parallel to 20th-century European totalitarianism, children are now both snitches for the state and victims of repression: Some children have reported on their teachers and parents, while others have been denounced by their classmates or teachers. Some have been separated from parents arrested for their activism.
In another reversion to the communist past, Russian schools are being militarized. State media recently reported that children will soon begin basic military training, including piloting classes for unmanned aerial vehicles. There are even reports of forced labor at drone factories using press gangs of students from a local technical school in Alabuga, Tatarstan. State propaganda justifies and idealizes this kind of militarized childhood with references to World War II, when Soviet children aided the war effort by assembling artillery shells after school.
As in times of o
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Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s security council, told Ukrainian national television on Wednesday that Russian forces had ample time in months of occupation to prepare defences and lay extensive minefields. “The number of mines on the territory that our troops have retaken is utterly mad. On average, there are three, four, five mines per square metre,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/aug/03/russia-ukraine-war-
live-russia-deliberately-using-food-as-a-weapon-says-eu-massive-drone-attack-on-kyiv
What is the average of "three, four, five mines per square metre"? It is four!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Five Ways the Ukraine War could become a Nuclear Conflict
Eighteen months into a war between Russia and Ukraine, the conflict has become nearly invisible to many Americans. News from the front is frequently reduced to a few sentences, and each new day’s reporting sounds like yesterday’s.
As Western nations have gradually crossed every “red line” laid down by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Moscow’s repeated warnings about the possibility of nuclear weapons being used have ceased to elicit fear.
Thus, when Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev warned on June 30 that success of the current Ukrainian counter-offensive might provoke a “nuclear conflagration,” his comment was barely noticed. Some Western observers seem to have concluded such statements are a bluff, despite the frequency with which they are issued by senior Russian officials.
The Biden administration takes the warnings seriously, and has sought to find a middle ground between doing too little and doing too much in arming Kyiv. Nonetheless, there is inherent danger in supporting war on the doorstep of another nuclear power. Nobody in Washington can claim to understand with any precision what Putin’s inner circle is thinking, or how it might react to a variety of plausible developments.
Against that backdrop, here are five scenarios in which Moscow might decide to “go nuclear.” Since US planning scenarios typically anticipate that the nuclear threshold initially would be breached in a limited and local way, I will confine myself mainly to situations in which Russia employs tactical weapons—of which it has roughly 1,900.
1) Russian conventional forces falter on the battlefield. The performance of Russian forces in the war has been so poor that further battlefield reverses cannot be discounted. In addition to various disabilities noted to date, Moscow’s military now faces growing shortfalls in the availability of precision munitions, and the loss of Wagner Group mercenaries on the front line.
At some point, the limited use of lower-yield nuclear weapons might come to be viewed as the only available option for staving off defeat. Moscow has a variety of weapons stationed near Ukraine such as the Iskander missile that are capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear warheads, and failing in that it could fall back on its under-utilized air force.
Initial nuclear use would likely be confined to Ukraine, and designed mainly to shock Kyiv into submission. Putin has good reason to believe that any such application of force would result in a complete rethink of Western strategy for the conflict.
2) Ukraine threatens core Russian interests. Kyiv is gradually stepping up its attacks on targets inside Russia. If these operations were to begin having a significant impact on governmental or economic infrastructure, they could provoke a nuclear response pursuant to longstanding Russian nuclear doctrine.
The West does not have a fine understanding of how Putin & Co. define their nation’s core interests, and whatever views they currently harbor are subject to change as the fortunes of war shift. For instance, an invasion of the Crimean Peninsula might be deemed a threat to Russia’s core interests even though it was only annexed by Moscow nine years ago. The possibility of limited and local nuclear use is increased by the fact that Kyiv has no capacity to respond in kind.
3) Moscow misreads military signals. The worse the war goes for Moscow, the more Putin’s inner circle will retreat into a siege mentality where fear takes the place of calm deliberation. In such circumstances, it is plausible that ambiguous indications of military action rendered by a mediocre intelligence system could lead to a precipitous response.
It would not be the first time that Moscow misinterpreted intelligence. Anthony Barrett of the RAND Corporation reports that in 1983, a NATO military exercise called Able Archer was misconstrued by Russian leaders as cover for a nuclear attack.
That happened in the absence of an actual con
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And in REAL NEWS:
Kiev has tried three counteroffensives since June 5. Here we are, in August, andthey're still trying.
Counteroffensive #1, in the southern front, used the "combined arms" approach, with a lot of western tanks (mostly Leopard) and armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles (mostly Bradleys). What that got Kiev was appx 20% loss of armored vehicles and a lot of men killed and wounded as they got trapped in dense anti-tnak and anti-personnel minefields.
#2 was using smaller units (30-100 men) of light infantry backed by artillery. Once again, all it got was a lot of men killed and a lot of artillery pieces destroyed in counterbattery fire.
#3 ...Back to the "combined arms" approach so dearly beloved by DC State Dept neocons ... them being such military geniuses and all ... and once again, more armored vehicles and men lost.
Esimates are 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in July alone. And apparnetly Ukrainian soldiers have not even reached to first Russian defensiev line, called the Surovikin line.
#4 promises to be swarms of drones! But prolly not against Russian military targets but against Russian civilians, bc that it what Kiev is reduced to.
Too many attacks on Russian civilians will prolly invite more attacks on NATO-staffed command centers (more like data fusion centers). I believe there are two remaining. The question is when will Russia unleash an offensive of its own?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Reuters) -A Russian warship was seriously damaged in an overnight Ukrainian naval drone attack on Russia's Black Sea navy base at Novorossiysk, two sources said on Friday, after Russia said it had fended off the attack.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-warship-damaged-in-ukrain
ian-attack-on-novorossiysk-naval-base-sources/ar-AA1eMo2a?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=289878ee0e0e4a3cad7db0a4029c3d47&ei=33
T
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Russian state-controlled media has long and repeatedly embraced the grim notion of releasing a nuclear doomsday upon the world. There are times, it seems, when Moscow’s motto for the war in Ukraine is “Armageddon or bust.”
It is no longer a policy of escalating to de-escalate. Rather, as the West becomes inured to Russia’s failures on the conventional battlefield, a nuclear war keeps coming up as Russia’s veiled threat each time a new battlefield capability is provided to Ukraine. The threat is so persistent as to merit a new title for the old fable: “The Bear who Cried Wolf.”
Indeed, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev did it again last Sunday, declaring that the Kremlin would unleash a “global nuclear fire” if Ukraine were to prevail in its ongoing NATO-backed counteroffensive.
So, what is the purpose behind Putin’s tacit approval of Russian state-controlled media raising the specter of nuclear war?
In late May of this year, as one example, Vladimir Solovyov, Putin’s best-known propagandist, invoked Armageddon yet again on his Russia One nightly evening television show. According to Julia Davis, a Russian media expert and columnist for The Daily Beast, one of his guests characterized winning or losing the war in Ukraine in stark apocalyptic terms and as “a question of our destruction.”
The why is simple enough. Putin has two audiences. First, his propaganda machine needs to reassure Russians, increasingly bewildered by Moscow’s military setbacks in Ukraine. For them, nuclear weapons are like a teddy bear, a comforting reminder that they cannot ever lose.
Conversely Putin needs to convince the world that Mother Russia just might be crazy enough to trigger Armageddon. Hence the nearly endless parade of Mad Hatters on Russian state-controlled television and radio singing the virtues of Armageddon as a last resort, just as Medvedev did on Sunday. The fearmongering also has a grassroots component, in the form of Russian disinformation on social media.
What goes unsaid is that, if Russia wants to win, Putin cannot use his nuclear arsenal. That would be game over not only for the West, but for him as well.
With that in mind, Medvedev’s comment is only unique because he may be the first Russian official to publicly acknowledge that Kyiv’s counteroffensive is succeeding, and that “Russian territory” will be lost.
Putin is indeed planning Armageddon. It is probably not a nuclear Armageddon, but an ideological one. His designs and hopes for victory in Ukraine are predicated upon the West caving to his doomsday threats, in the process destroying our own liberty just so we can survive in a totalitarian-controlled world.
If that happens, it be our own self-inflicted Armageddon.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4133192-putin-is-losing-
his-war-but-his-threats-of-armageddon-keep-working/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
THE UKRAINIAN ARMY IS BREAKING
A defeated army and a broken one are two different things. An army merely defeated in battle can often make successful withdrawals, reform itself, and reconstitute its strength—as Rome did after its humiliation at Cannae, eventually destroying its great rival, Carthage. But when whole armies break, when they lose their will to fight, the whole nation can likewise break. That is what happened to the great empires in World War I. It is also the fate awaiting the Ukrainian army.
How does a nation at war get to a place where its fighters refuse to fight?. . . .
The first negative-feedback bellow is when a war that began full of high hopes seems suddenly unwinnable. Early victories are now old memories. More battles are lost than won, and the costs of battle keep rising to the very threshold of human endurance—and then rise again. The second is when external support from friends and allies begins to evaporate. This is an especially acute negative factor if allied support is the emotional foundation of the army’s belief in ultimate victory. Third and finally, those who initiated the war, those who promised a road paved with victory, and who vowed that the world would support the army until victory was won—no matter how long it takes—are increasingly seen as liars and deceivers. The army—the entire nation—has been betrayed by its leaders.
...
All this has descended on Ukraine in the past six weeks.
...
There have been no victories—not even bloody and debilitating wins like in the Fourth Battle of Karkhov—for nearly a year. Western leaders still profess that their support will continue. Yet the Western Alliance now admits it didn’t give Ukrainians nearly enough good stuff for even modest tactical gains in their ongoing, sacrificial offensive—and knew it going in. And increasingly, Ukrainian unit-level commanders are accusing higher leaders of simply using them as cannon-fodder to satisfy NATO overlords. Not just platoons, but larger units are surrendering to Russian forces. Morale is cratering. . . .
Yet in casualties-to-population terms, Ukrainian military losses, after more than 500 days of war, are approaching those sustained by Germany in World War I over more than 1,500 days. This is a catastrophic attrition rate, compounded by all three negative feedback loops that can break an army and a nation. Throughout the spring and summer, Ukrainian forces were thrown into battle and ground down. By autumn, the fighting army will have been spent—the tragic fate of Ukraine’s Best in 2023. By September, what is left will be twisting, and bending toward breaking, in the remorseless winds of war.
MORE AT https://compactmag.com/article/the-ukrainian-army-is-breaking
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Cross posted from the "Russian losses" thread
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It's war.
It would be impossible for Russia not to have any losses at all. So, hooray for the occasional successful Ukraine strike!
And now for some real news: A 2-month summary of The Great Counteroffensive, from someone who is pro-Ukrainian, lives near Ukraine, and obsessively follows every video, geo-located video, report, and social media post on the war.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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How Memory Survives in Putin’s Russia
Russia’s dictator controls its past. But can history that avoids politics live on?
AUGUST 5, 2023, 7:00 AM
By Tanya Paperny, a writer, translator, and editor in Washington, D.C.
My great-grandmother has no headstone, no grave, not even a clear burial place. Tatiana Ivanovna Shatalova-Rabinovich was a socialist activist in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, but Joseph Stalin’s ruthless regime labeled her a “counterrevolutionary” and sentenced her to death. In March 1938, Soviet police officers at a secret site just outside Moscow shot Tatiana and dumped her body into a trench with thousands of others.
Files about these mass graves were only declassified after the fall of the Soviet Union, so from the time of Tatiana’s wrongful arrest in 1938 until the 1990s, my family didn’t know where and when she was killed.
But at 37 Pokrovka St. in the heart of central Moscow, a metal plaque installed in 2016 reads:
HERE LIVED
TATIANA IVANOVNA
SHATALOVA-RABINOVICH
MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF
POLITICAL PRISONERS
BORN IN 1891
ARRESTED 1/29/1938
SHOT 3/7/1938
REHABILITATED IN 1956
This postcard-sized memorial affixed to Tatiana’s final residence, now a nondescript apartment building, is the only acknowledgment of my great-grandmother’s life and death.
The Last Address project (Posledniy Adres in Russian https://www.poslednyadres.ru/ ) memorializes victims of Soviet-era political repression through archival research and the installation of small plaques at the person’s last known residence. Over a thousand hang in cities and towns across Russia. There are even some in Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, France and Germany.
The signs are an achievement in the way they restore histories that have been erased, suppressed, or revised. But, especially in Putin’s Russia, they are also a political achievement—a unique object lesson in how violence can be commemorated in totalitarian societies.
Last Address gets permission to install their modest memorials by speaking directly to commercial landlords, cooperative apartment boards, or private tenants. No one ever asks permission from government officials. In the case of my great-grandmother’s building, which also has signs for six other victims, a volunteer went door to door to secure approval from a majority of residents. It took V.L. (who requested anonymity for her safety) over a week to knock on all 101 apartments and almost a year to get permission from the building’s board members. (She has a personal connection to the project: Her grandfather was friends with activists in Tatiana’s building and was also arrested and shot during the purges.) Now the memory of these lives are enshrined publicly, embedded into the patchwork of daily city life.
Incredibly, the nearly 10-year-old organization and the vast majority of its signs have survived Putin’s near-total suppression of civil society. Parkhomenko told me over video chat: “We don’t get permission from the mayor, the minister, or the president. And this principle turned out to be correct—it explains why we exist thus far.” Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the vast majority of independent human rights organizations and media outlets have been liquidated, and yet Last Address persists. Other than Parkhomenko, who fled the country in April 2021 after the radio station where he worked was taken off the air, a team of about 15 people still work daily out of Last Address’s Moscow office. In June, Last Address had managed to install four new signs and host a Moscow walking tour.
But the approach of sidestepping the government has its consequences. As Elena Vinsens, who drafted the story about my great-grandmother, pointed out in an interview: “Without official permission, [signs] can always be taken down.” For the first eight or so years of the project, only a small number went missing, no more than 20 total. After all, they’re held in place by only four small screws. But the situation has worsened since the start of the occupation and the increa
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