Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

SECOND

Wednesday, August 5, 2026 4:37 PM

Russia Labels Dead Troops "Missing" to Conceal Battlefield Losses

By Roman Kohanets | Aug 04, 2026 23:31

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russia-labels-dead-troops-mis
sing-to-conceal-battlefield-losses-21359

Russia's 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, known for its participation in the Butcha massacre, now deployed near Huliaipole in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, is systematically recording its killed soldiers as missing in action while intimidating their families into silence, according to the partisan movement ATESH

The claims were published on the movement's Telegram channel on August 4. https://t.me/atesh_ua/10952

ATESH stated that thousands of servicemen in the brigade, a formation designated military unit 51460, have been logged as missing. The movement alleged that its commander, Dmitry Shabaev, routinely ignores the appeals, inquiries, and protests of wives and mothers trying to learn the fate of their relatives.

Reclassifying the dead as missing is used to distort the true scale of the unit's losses, the group claimed.

Families who press for answers are threatened directly, ATESH added, with security and counterintelligence officers warning them of criminal cases for "discrediting" the army and the loss of all payments should they keep searching.

The movement summarized the message conveyed to relatives as a blunt threat: "If you keep searching, we will imprison you."

As a recent example, ATESH pointed to a Ukrainian strike on May 30, 2026, against the Primorskyi Posad training ground in the temporarily occupied part of Zaporizhzhia region, a site used by the brigade.

The movement claimed the strike killed at least 31 of the unit's personnel, 13 of whom the headquarters promptly logged as missing rather than dead.

According to ATESH, Shabaev took command in 2025 and has already burned through the full complements of several of his combat battalions. The Kremlin, it alleged, deliberately relies on hardline commanders of his kind.

The brigade also carries a documented past: early in the full-scale war, it operated in the Bucha district of Kyiv region, where it became one of the main formations named in war crimes investigations.

The movement noted that it continues to compile data on commanders it holds responsible for hiding losses and pressuring servicemen's relatives.

The concealment of Russian military losses has become a recurring pattern across the war. In one recent case, Ukraine recovered the remains of 501 people that Moscow claimed were Ukrainian soldiers, part of a practice widely seen as a way for Russia to obscure its own dead and avoid paying compensation to their families.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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SECOND

Wednesday, August 5, 2026 7:53 PM

The Kremlin Is Bullying More Russians Into Fighting in Ukraine

Measures increasingly include beatings and manipulation, fueling expectations of a second forced mobilization

By Thomas Grove and Daria Matviichuk | Aug. 2, 2026 10:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/the-kremlin-is-bullying-more-russians
-into-fighting-in-ukraine-3d1af6d7

Russia is strong-arming more fighting-age men into military service to boost the flagging ranks of its army as voluntary recruitment stalls and Moscow’s initiative on the front line in Ukraine falters.
In Russia’s smaller towns and cities, some military recruiters have resorted to detaining men on the street, outside their places of work or under the pretext of routine document checks, say lawyers, rights activists and eyewitnesses. Once in a military recruitment office, men might be threatened or beaten until they sign up, they say.

The pressure campaign carries echoes of the partial mobilization that President Vladimir Putin instituted in fall 2022 when Russia’s front-line positions were buckling amid a lack of manpower. It also has caused speculation among Russian analysts and the political class about whether it preludes another draft.

Russian authorities have offered life-changing sums of money—often more than an entire year’s salary—to those ready to fight. Recruitment, however, has become more difficult after tales of abuse inside the Russian military and Ukraine’s lethal capabilities, which have shortened the average soldier’s lifespan on the front to minutes, days or weeks.

“Authorities have switched to a method of violence, when they catch men and send them off,” said Artyom Klyga, a lawyer who tries to help those forced into service.

The tactics are a counterpoint to the forced enlistment Kyiv has carried out because of its own manpower shortage.

While Russia’s recruitment is still officially voluntary, law-enforcement officials are at times working with military recruiters to set a trap for the men and use violence or threats of arrest if they don’t yield to the pressure, the people say.

In the southwestern region of Penza, resident Vladislav Leonidov said he found an acquaintance at a military recruitment office after the man went missing for several hours in May. The man was called into the police station on the pretext of checking his personal data. When he arrived, two military recruiters carried him off to the recruitment office where he was beaten, Leonidov said. He intervened and forced the man’s release.

“If we had come two hours later, he would have already been taken away,” he said.
Raids in Penza by law-enforcement officials or recruiters have caught the attention of locals who have posted videos protesting the practice. One video outside a recruitment office shows men in civilian clothes sitting inside a military van barricaded by crying women.

“They beat you, they forced you!” one of the women says between tears.

Authorities have played down the incidents and threatened a crackdown on those circulating videos of them.

The head of Penza’s recruitment office, Andrey Surkov, told a government briefing that raids were targeting those avoiding service. The Penza branch of the Interior Ministry has denied that raids are sending men to the front, and has threatened legal consequences for those who post or publicize them.

“These video publications have no relation to sending people to the zone of the Special Military Operation,” a ministry statement said, using the official euphemism for the war in Ukraine.

Blogger Stanislav Morozov, who has worked to bring attention to the issue in a documentary, said he is the subject of an investigation by Russia’s feared Federal Security Service. “They haven’t forbidden me from continuing, but they’ve made it clear it’s in my best interests not to.”

Of the dozens of relatives he has spoken to, he said, most agreed to sign a contract when law-enforcement officials threatened to plant drugs on them and arrest them on the spot.

Part of the pressure stems from regional programs in

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SIGNYM

Thursday, August 6, 2026 2:05 AM

Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNY

Quote:

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The West is Winning the Information War While Russia Prevails on the Battlefield


https://sonar21.com/the-west-is-winning-the-information-war-while-russ
ia-prevails-on-the-battlefield/

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Posted by SECOND

Also, Russia is winning

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SIGNYM

Thursday, August 6, 2026 2:28 AM

Quote:

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Ukraine Shot Down Zero Missiles In Huge Russian Overnight Salvo That Killed At Least 21

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SECOND

Thursday, August 6, 2026 3:15 AM

Putin’s Human Safari Is the Dystopian Future of War

A grim new normal dawns in Ukraine.

By Anne Applebaum | August 5, 2026, 10:45 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/ukraine-russia-war-drones/68
8183/

Yuri is a 52-year-old Ukrainian who runs a market stall in Kherson, not far from the front line. Yesterday, he was sorting through vegetables when he heard the loud, distinctive buzz of a Russian drone. As he later told the journalist Zarina Zabrisky, he had nothing more than a couple of garlic bulbs in his hands, and no weapons. “Not even a phone.” He gestured at his tomatoes and peppers, so that the drone operator, whoever and wherever he might be, could see that he wasn’t a soldier.

The drone kept following him. Police footage shows it chasing Yuri around his truck. He hides under the umbrella that covers the stand, runs from one side to the other, gestures at the vegetables. Then the drone dives beside him and explodes. Miraculously, Yuri survived, with just cuts and a concussion. Zabrisky interviewed him in the hospital, where he was lucid, and surprisingly sane.

Sane might be the key word here, because the experience of being chased by a murderous kamikaze drone, a flying machine that behaves as if it were alive, is not one that humans are equipped to understand. Premodern fanatics used to hallucinate flying devils. But few modern civilians have been chased by mechanized flying objects. Unless they live in or around Kherson.

Today, many were shocked by yet another video of the drone “safari” Russians are carrying out against civilians in Kherson. A Russian drone deliberately hunted down a man selling vegetables and detonated right next to him. The Russians even admitted to the crime, showing zero… https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2084608193645146204
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy (@ZelenskyyUa) August 4, 2026

Since 2024, Russian drones have been conducting human safaris in Kherson and other parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, tracking Ukrainian civilians with the aim of killing them. When I reported in the city in 2023, no one went near the Dnipro River, because the Russians were on the other side. Rapidly changing technology has now put the whole city and surrounding countryside within range of Vladimir Putin’s forces.

A United Nations inquiry last year documented hundreds of drone attacks on individuals across eastern Ukraine that targeted people walking on sidewalks, working in gardens, driving ambulances, commuting to work. Sometimes drones hang over burning buildings, waiting for fire brigades to appear so that firemen can be murdered too. The motive can only be terror, and perhaps revenge. Russian troops occupied Kherson at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022; Ukrainian forces took the city back seven months later following what remains the most significant counter-offensive of the war.

Many people, myself included, have written about the incredible achievements of the Ukrainian drone industry. In Kyiv, I’ve visited warehouses where hundreds of different drones and robots, each with specialized properties, are on display. They can defend Ukrainians and surveil and attack enemies. They can deliver food and weapons. They can crawl along the ground and rescue people stranded in no-man’s-land. They can make intelligent decisions autonomously.

Drones with capabilities like the ones that hit Yuri originally offered a humanitarian advantage, allowing their operators to avoid civilian casualties. Because they have cameras, the remote operator can see whether the target is really a soldier or military object, and call off the drone if it is not. But as with all technologies, the purpose can be radically altered by the users. Instead of avoiding civilians, Russian operators can now target them, as if playing a video game.

They will not be the last drone operators to do so. Although not all Pentagon procurement officers (or indeed Pentagon leaders) know it yet, nobody is prepared, technically or psychologically, for a new era of intelligent, deadly machines. Warf

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SECOND

Thursday, August 6, 2026 5:18 AM

Russians captured more territory in July than Ukraine's defence forces liberated

By Kateryna Tyshchenko — 2 August, 21:58

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/08/02/8046947/

Russian forces occupied more Ukrainian territory in July than Ukraine's defence forces managed to liberate, with the net increase in occupied territory amounting to 36 sq km.

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July 2026 Monthly Russian Casualty Overview

https://kyivindependent.com/russia-records-highest-monthly-losses-of-2
026/

• Total losses: 42,860 personnel (killed, wounded, captured, or missing).

• Trend: This is the highest monthly total recorded for 2026, crossing the 40,000 threshold for the first time in the year.

• Previous high: June 2026 saw approximately 39,290 personnel losses.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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SECOND

Thursday, August 6, 2026 7:16 AM

Putin’s Neighbors Are Preparing for Total War: Europe Take Note

By Juliette Bretan | Aug 03, 2026 at 08:23 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-russia-europe-nato-war-12276230

At the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, all members committed to a 5 percent defense spending target to protect against threats to the bloc, and to make sure the Allies were sharing the burden. Of the nations close to this target, it is those on or near the border with Russia—Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and Latvia especially—who are leading the charge.

Spending, however, only tells part of the story. These nations' war-readiness is about budgets, but also whether the entire state is able to resist attack. States which offer NATO a new model of defense are not necessarily those spending the most, but those that have spent decades assuming they might be next.

Despite, or perhaps because of their size, and proximity to Vladimir Putin's Russia, this total war defense is what Eastern European countries have been building. These are the states ready for conflict.

Estimates from 2025 place Poland’s defense spending at 4.3 percent of its GDP, Lithuania at 4 percent, Latvia at 3.7 percent, Estonia at 3.4 percent, and then Denmark at 3.3 percent. Barring Poland, these are relatively small countries—Estonia on the Baltic has a population of only 1.34 million.

Their plans, as well as years of resistance to Russia, in contrast to Western apathy, offer a far broader understanding of defense, and are putting the rest of Europe to shame.

This is partly because the Baltics and Poland learned harsh lessons from history.

These states stand out in terms of defense because of their suffering under past Russian invasions. All three Baltic states and Poland were occupied by the Soviet Union; the Baltics in 1940, Poland in 1939.

The Baltic states endured Soviet occupation until 1991. This was brutal and repressive, with deportations, exile, and the Russification of society.

After 1945, Poland was coerced into the Soviet-led communist bloc until 1989.

Eastern Europe understands the costs of imperial Russian politics, and realized early that the threat from Russia had not disappeared.

They also realized it might have changed in form. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and national independence in 1991, these nations sensed their vulnerability to Russia.

In 2007, for example, Estonia was hit with a large-scale cyberattack at a time when the country disagreed with Russia over the controversial Bronze Soldier of Tallinn war memorial commemorating Soviet soldiers. After Estonia relocated the memorial, a series of cyberattacks—from Russian IP addresses—devastated Estonian governmental websites, media sites, and banking sites.

The Baltics and Poland also saw more militaristic Russian repression elsewhere, including in Georgia in 2008, and Crimea in 2014, as part of a pattern of historical Russian aggression.

For Western Europe, though, the Russian threat had been apparently eliminated. With the end of the Cold War, Russia was seen as a new trade partner and energy supplier: Germany received 52 percent of its gas from Russia in 2021, the year before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

There were also hopes in the West that the end of tensions would precipitate an optimism and peace in Europe—with the concomitant effect of military capabilities reducing, as the West played down any threat.

Germany’s troops fell from 585,000 in 1990 to 177,000 in 2016, while the UK’s army has fallen by 30 percent since 2000 to 2024. Many European states also ended conscription. Meanwhile, the focus of security turned to NATO and the U.S.

The Baltic states and Poland never accepted those assumptions. Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the Baltics in 2004, and started modernizing their armies and reinvesting in defense after Russian aggression elsewhere. Latvia and Lithuania reinstated conscription in the 2010s and 2020s; recently Lithuania reported a record number of