ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

Russian TV reporting that Grimace is a Nazi

"unpredictable operating environment" is the nub if the matter, while "humanitarian crisis" is mostly just fronting. sounds to me like mcdonald's doesn't want to be forced to hold rubles it can't convert or repatriate, so it's taking its loss and opting for the tax write off as the best deal going forward.

Yeah, that's probably accurate - the article also mentions that the Kremlin just nationalized Renaults's assets there; maybe McD wants to get out before the same thing happens to them

An interview with the grandmother who was turned into a Russian propaganda symbol after greeting Ukrainian soldiers with a Soviet flag:

http://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/05/16/maybe-the-lord-himself-sent-me

Extremely good thread here delving into the Ukrainian government's current plan for the next three months.

Really interesting speech given by Ukrainian defense minister @oleksiireznikov yesterday to EU Defense ministers. A vision of how Ukraine thinks the war will go this summer. Russia will continue quiet mobilisation and Ukraine will try and waste them away. https://t.co/XKkG9hQpvD

— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) May 18, 2022

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/23/a-ukrainian-city-under-a-violent-new-regime

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/05/bullets-and-blindfolds-in-a-ukrainian-city-under-siege

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/ukraine-jewish-community-russia-invasion-resistance-1351070/

Moscow 1991 / Moscow 2022 pic.twitter.com/jKey9oURWj

— Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) May 23, 2022

Currently, Russians aged 18-40 and foreigners aged 18-30 can enter into a first contract with the army. A draft bill on the agenda of the lower house State Duma for today would completely lift that upper age limit.

when you've run out of teenagers, get some Gen Xers in there instead

they might get a sitcom out of this:

Old Navy? No, Old Army!

“when you've run out of teenagers, get some Gen Xers in there instead”

ok doomer

haha

meanwhile, in Davos

🗣️Henry Kissinger has urged the West to stop trying to inflict a crushing defeat on Russian forces in Ukraine.

The veteran US statesman said that it would have disastrous consequences for the long term stability of Europe

Thread 🧵⤵️https://t.co/9jhNmOvxjI

— Telegraph World News (@TelegraphWorld) May 24, 2022

"the following is a paid presentation"

The Treasury Department on Tuesday took a major step toward pushing Russia into a government default, announcing it would no longer allow the Kremlin to make debt payments owed to American bondholders.

The move will make it much harder, if not impossible, for Russia to avoid a default — a breach of its national debt commitments — which Moscow has tried to avoid since launching the war in Ukraine.

The Biden administration imposed sanctions on Russia’s central bank shortly after the start of the war, but it issued a special license exempting bond payments, allowing Russia to continue to pay its loan obligations. But that license was set to expire this week, and Treasury is now saying it will not be renewed. That means American banks will not be able to process debt payments when Russia tries to make them. In total, the Russian government owes about $20 billion worth of bonds, mostly in dollars, and it owes about $500 million in interest payments over the next month, according to Gerard DiPippo, a senior fellow with the economics program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“This will make the likelihood of a default now significant,” said Adam Smith, a partner at Gibson Dunn and a former Obama administration sanctions official. “We’ve never done this to an economy like this before.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/05/24/treasury-russia-debt-default/

From WSJ newsletter, linked to paywall, but this is the gist:

The war in Ukraine is limiting supplies of a key baby-formula ingredient. Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports has curbed shipments of sunflower-seed oil, hampering efforts to boost production to alleviate the U.S. infant-formula shortage. Many formula manufacturers use sunflower-seed oil to add critical fats to products. Ukraine has been the No. 1 exporter of the oil, according to the USDA. Finding alternative sources or rewriting recipes to replace sunflower oil will take time, industry experts said.

The right-wing 'tan your balls' crowd will cite that as a benefit to the Russian invasion. Seed oils are poison, after all.

they might get a sitcom out of this:

Old Navy? No, Old Army!

― rare lipstick or mohawks that somehow make them more valuable (President Keyes), Wednesday, May 25, 2022 3:50 AM (four days ago)

can't imagine a sitcom with this premise and any even vaguely similar name ever being a success tbh

Wait for my elevator pitch

Oops...

Two Britons, Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner are sentenced to death alongside Moroccan national Saaudun Brahim are sentenced to death, Russian media reports

, Jimmy Two Times reports

A long, disturbing thread about Russian propaganda novels:

THREAD Let's start a long thread about how Russian book market prepared Russians for a full-scale war against Ukraine, NATO, the West, and promoted stalinism and nazism, and how this was ignored by the West. Keep seat belts fasten, you will see a lot of nasty things here. pic.twitter.com/iPgl4OTU7C

— Sergej Sumlenny (@sumlenny) June 11, 2022

Sounds about right, sadly.

Reminds me of all the Mack Bolan: the Executioner books they used to sell at the supermarket in the 80s

I read that Sumlenny thing earlier. It kind of goes against the idea that Z IS a departure in that pre-Z the idea was to keep the population passive and apathetic with the Z move to mobilize and energize the population going against what went before

I suppose both ideas aren't necessarily entirely contradictory

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/06/13/wikimedia-foundation-appeals-russian-court-decision-on-removal-of-wikipedia-information-related-to-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine/

t.me/northern_friend in Mariupol

Near a heavily damaged nine-story building I met a guy with a girl of about thirty, their appearance resembled visitors to trendy bars, but they had not washed for a long time, they were collecting some kind of rubbish in the ruins.
-Wow, how dishevelled I wonder what they bombed! Are you local?
-We are locals, but are you not local?
- No, I came to visit relatives.
-Where from?
-Samara, Russia.
-Here, yours and bombed, poured hail and aeroballistic missiles on civilians! Your Russia will turn into North Korea in general!
-Yeah, and soon your Ukraine will not exist at all.
On that they parted.

On that they parted, I can't think why

Oops...

SMAT is crawling the “Russian Facebook”, VKontakte, to ID war criminals.

So far we found: 9/10 of the “Despicable 10”, the un-named Bucha truck driver, and 700 matches total.

Here we name names and share methods and findings. 🧵…..https://t.co/wbkoGyPRlG

— SMAT App (@SMAT_app) June 23, 2022

I rarely look at Aljazeera, but this caught my eye: claims that fall of Severodonetsk is no big deal---true?

The Kremlin is trumpeting the takeover of Severodonetsk because it remained one of the few Ukrainian-controlled towns in Luhansk, one of Ukraine’s smallest and poorest regions that was partially taken over by pro-Russian separatists in 2014.

...Two months of intense fighting also significantly decimated Russian forces in Severodonetsk, where the pre-war population was about 100,000.

“Ukraine has ground down a significant mass of Russian troops and retreated,” Pavel Luzin, a Russian-based expert with the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.

...t least two-fifths of Donetsk, a far larger and more populated province, is still controlled by Ukrainian forces.

They have built extensive defense installations there since rebels seized a third of Donetsk in 2014 – and taking them over will prove far more difficult than seizing Luhansk.

Meanwhile, the immediate economic consequences of losing all of Luhansk are minimal.

Pretty true, yeah. The stated goal of Ukraine's command has been to stall things as long as possible while they get in more arms and wear down Russian forces, with a general idea that if they can keep holding them until mid-July things will be where/how they want for the future. We'll see.

Over the past six or eight weeks many of the news stories about Ukraine make a point of saying that Zelenskyy has no political space to end the war on any terms but complete Russian withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian people won't accept less. Given the disparity in population and productive capacity between Ukraine and Russia, it's hard to see how a strategy of attrition could play out in Ukraine's favor on any time scale not counted in years and hundreds of thousands of casualties.

It seems like the Ukraine was has become a testing ground for all sorts of new-fangled military technologies from the West... all these defense contractors get to see how all their new gadgets play out in the field, with the U.S., UK, etc picking up the tab

The Russian army is massive but their tech is pretty old fashioned, as has been shown

However---Ukraine news agency seeming pretty candid about how bad this is:

n June 25 at night, the Russian army mounted a massive missile attack on several regions of Ukraine, Russia resumed attacks using Iskander missiles from the territory of Belarus, and for the first time used Tu-22M3 long-range bombers from the air space of Belarus, the Command of the Air Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has said.

"In general, more than 50 various missiles were fired from air, sea and ground locations. For the first time the enemy used Tu-22M3 long-range bombers to attack Ukraine from the territory of Belarus. Also, it has resumed the use of Iskander missile systems from the territory of this country," it said on Facebook.

The enemy launched Kalibr cruise missiles from the sea at the targets in the western regions of Ukraine.

In the northern direction, the enemy fired X-22 missiles from Tu-22M3 aircraft and used Iskander and Tochka-U missile systems located on the ground.

"It should be noted that X-22, Onyx, and Iskander missiles are extremely difficult targets for the air defense systems used by the Ukrainian Air Forces. The speed of Onyx and X-22 missiles exceeds 3,000 kilometers per hour. While Iskander missiles move on a ballistic trajectory. Their elimination is a non-typical and difficult task for the air defense systems available in Ukraine," the command said.

A part of the missiles launched by the aggressor were shot down by the Ukrainian air defense system.

Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky district struck by missiles
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram that multiple explosions had taken place in the central Shevchenkivsky district at around 6:30 a.m. local time (0330 UTC) on Sunday.

The district is home to universities, restaurants, and galleries.

"Ambulance crews and rescuers dispatched to the scene. Residents are being rescued and evacuated from two buildings," he said.

At least five people were wounded when a missile hit a building, the head of Ukraine's police force Ihor Klymenko said in a television interview.

Klitschko said the Russian missile strike was intended to "intimidate Ukrainians," ahead of the NATO summit in Madrid from June 28-30.

Klitschko later said two people were hospitalized and rescue efforts were ongoing as people were trapped under the rubble. He said a seven-year-old girl had been rescued from the rubble, and her mother was currently being removed as well.

Emmanuelle Chaze, DW's correspondent in Kyiv, said one person was found dead after the shelling. She tweeted a video of a building in ruins, saying five had been injured.

Images of utter destruction in the heart of Kyiv - this residential building has been hit in the early hours of the morning by Russian rockets.

At least five people are injured, a 7 year old girl was rescued from the rubble, operations are still underway. pic.twitter.com/MaP9VH8l2A

— Emmanuelle Chaze (@EmmanuelleChaze) June 26, 2022

https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-multiple-missiles-hit-kyiv-district-live-updates/a-62263282

http://www.bbc.com/news/61790625

There's mounting evidence that Russian forces in occupied areas of Ukraine have been systematically stealing grain and other produce from local farmers. The BBC has talked to farmers and analysed satellite images and shipping data to track where the grain is going.

Oops...

⚡️Putin said that thanks to a good harvest, Russia will be able to supply a record amount of grain. pic.twitter.com/sMLiVM7m6U

— Flash (@Flash43191300) June 24, 2022

From a good BBC study, tracking some of the grain:

"They take grain to the annexed Crimea first, where they transport it to Kerch or Sevastopol [ports], then they load Ukrainian grain on Russian ships and go to the Kerch Strait," says Andrii Klymenko, an expert at the Institute for Black Sea Strategic Studies in Kyiv, who regularly monitors movements of ships around Crimea.

"There, in the Kerch Strait [between Crimea and Russia], they transfer Ukrainian grain from small ships on to bulk carriers, where it is mixed with grain from Russia - or in some cases, they sail to this area just to give the appearance they are loading up with Russian grain."

He adds this is then exported with Russian certificates, saying that it's Russian grain.
Ships have then often headed on to Syria or Turkey.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said they have investigated claims about Ukrainian grain being shipped to Turkey and so far not found any evidence.

"We saw that the ships' port of departure and the origin of the goods is Russia on the records," he said.

...The BBC has also obtained documents drawn up by the Russian occupying authorities listing farms where grain is to be transferred to them.

A separate investigation by BBC Russian and BBC Ukrainian has shown that in some cases, the Russians are forcing Ukrainian farmers to sell grain at prices well below market rates, and sign documents to prove it was purchased "legally".

While early reports were typically of outright theft by Russian forces, farmers suggest there has been a change in tactics as the Russians realise that if they pay nothing, future harvests could be sabotaged. The farmers say they have to accept the low prices as they have no alternative and need to buy fuel and pay workers.

Uh-oh, the same post you linked! Deservedly so, though.

Latest I've seen on this:

A Russian missile strike on a crowded mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk killed at least 16 people, the head of emergency services said early Tuesday, sparking international outrage.
“The Russian strike today on the shopping centre in Kremenchuk is one of the most brazen terrorist acts in European history,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening broadcast posted on Telegram.
Emergency services chief Sergiy Kruk said the main tasks were “rescue work, debris removal and the elimination of fires” following Monday’s strike on the shopping centre.
“As of now, we know of 16 dead and 59 wounded, 25 of them hospitalised. The information is being updated,” Kruk said on Telegram.

“All response groups are working in intense mode,” he said. “The work will go on around the clock.”
“I would like to stress once again: do not neglect air alerts!”
Ukraine: ‘Help end the war by winter’, Zelensky urges leaders
27 Jun 2022

Earlier, Zelensky had said “over a thousand civilians” were in the mall when the missiles struck the city, which had a pre-war population of 220,000 people.
“The mall is on fire, rescuers are fighting the fire. The number of victims is impossible to imagine,” Zelensky wrote on Facebook.
...The Ukrainian defence ministry said the strike was deliberately timed to coincide with the mall’s busiest hours and cause the maximum number of casualties.
The Ukrainian air force said the mall was hit by Kh-22 anti-ship missiles fired from Tu-22 bombers in western Russia’s Kursk region.
...“The missile fire on Kremenchuk struck a very busy area which had no link to the hostilities,” the city’s mayor Vitali Maletsky wrote on Facebook.

update, more details:

he Russian Defence Ministry claimed a strike on an arms storage facility detonated ammunition which set the shopping centre on fire.

"Western-manufactured weapons and ammunition stockpiled in the warehouse to be sent to a Ukrainian military grouping in Donbas were hit with a high-precision strike," the ministry said.

Ukrainian officials have denied there was a weapons depot nearby.

CCTV footage captured near a pond roughly 600 metres north of the shopping centre, on the other side of a factory building, shows two missile strikes in the area.
Matching the exact spots where the two missiles land in the CCTV video with aerial images of the area, it appears one missile hit close to the eastern end of the shopping centre, while the other struck the northern end of the factory, near the southern edge of the pond. Satellite images of the area provide further evidence that these were the locations of the strikes.

The factory mentioned by the Russian defence ministry is located roughly 300 metres north of the shopping centre. The buildings are separated by a wall, vegetation and rail tracks, making the claim that "secondary explosions" caused a large fire with multiple casualties in the shopping centre unlikely.

According to the Ukrainian online publication Kyiv Independent, a press officer of the regional administration confirmed that the machinery plant had been hit, injuring two individuals.

Svitlana Rybalko, from the regional State Emergency Service, denied there were weapons stored at the facility."It's a place for making road equipment, machines for road construction," she told the BBC. "There's also a greenhouse nearby where workers grow cucumbers."

Meantime, Turkey got what it wanted out of Sweden/Finland for NATO accession and by all accounts Ukraine's been merrily blowing up ammo dumps well behind the lines, so.

I hope that the Russian oil price cap works and that Yellen gets credit. It seems very plausible and a good case for the things that seem to matter to economists (her peers).

Russian pundit perfectly sums up the SMO - “We failed to plan properly. Our goals turned out to be overestimated. Our calculations turned out to be incorrect. Our tactic turned out to be idiotic.” https://t.co/75m3vWisc1

— Dmitri 🇺🇦 (@mdmitri91) July 1, 2022

Oops...

And yet, as a despotic petrostate and charter member of the nuclear club, they can survive massive blunders that would destroy the governments of most nations.

Another good thread but this detail in particular, what in the world.

Even their soldiers are getting older. As Putin is terrified of bringing the realities of war to his people. The Duma just passed a bill raising the age for military service to 65! This is Volksturm WWII levels of desperation.https://t.co/bgosQ5STQw

— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) July 3, 2022

Good article on the new HIMARS rocket systems being deployed by Ukraine:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/europe/ukraine-western-weapons-russia-front-lines-intl-cmd/index.html

"900 civilian bodies had been discovered in the Kyiv region after the withdrawal of Russian forces (p. 38). According to the police, nearly 95 percent were “simply executed”

http://osce.usmission.gov/response-to-moscow-mechanism-report-on-ukraine/

In the prison offices, officials hung portraits of Stalin and two chiefs of his secret police, Genrikh Yagoda and Lavrenti P. Beria. In Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, the reputations of the men, who played major roles in purges of Stalin’s opponents, are being rehabilitated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/world/europe/ukraine-medic-russia-captive.html

Russian banks stand to benefit: VTB, VEB, Promsvyaz, Bank Rossiya, Sovcombank, Otkritie, among others. EU to soften sanctions on Russian banks to allow food and fertilizer trade https://t.co/R76eTMJS3s

— Elina Ribakova 🇺🇦 (@elinaribakova) July 19, 2022

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, export of grain and other cargo from seaports has been blocked by Russian troops. Exceptions have been three ports on the Danube River – Reni, Izmail, and Ust-Dunaisk.

During the temporary occupation of Snake Island, ships could not pass through the mouth of the Bystre by sailing along the Danube-Black Sea channel, so all ships used the Romanian Sulina Channel.

http://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/liberation-of-snake-island-partially-unlocks-grain-exports.html

Danube's delta right now. Ships loading grain at Izmail, Ukraine's port on the Danube. Taking Snake Island has made a difference. H/t Danail Glishev pic.twitter.com/3hkEBgPR1X

— Dimitar Bechev (@DimitarBechev) July 12, 2022

Ukraine says with new offensive, it can reclaim territory lost to Russia — but is that realistic?

For the last six weeks, piecemeal Ukrainian assaults have chipped away at Russian-held territory in the country's south, allowing its soldiers to get within 20 kilometres of Kherson.

"Forty-four settlements have already been liberated in Kherson Oblast," Dmytro Butriy, the acting head of the region's military administration, told an online news conference in Kyiv on Thursday.

"The situation there is difficult," he continued, claiming the destruction from Russian shelling is "massive" and that homes, schools and many other buildings have been damaged.
But whether that's as far as the counter-offensive gets and how much force Ukraine's military can muster after weeks of bruising fighting in the southeastern Donbas region remains unclear.

Retired Ukrainian colonel Serhiy Grabsky argues that the fate of Russian President Vladimir Putin's war hinges on his military holding Kherson — and of Ukraine being able to pry it away.

"That location will open the door for the liberation of all of the country and the termination of all of Russia's strategic goals," said Grabsky, who served in several international roles over a 28-year career, including as a military adviser to the Iraqi government.

He said pushing Russia out of Kherson would end any threat to Ukrainian cities, such as Mykolaiv and Odesa, and put Russian military installations in the Crimean Peninsula within reach of Ukraine's new Western weaponry — including long-range American HIMARS rocket launchers.

One of my favourite reddit subreddits is r/noncredibledefence. Not just because it has anime portraits of military leaders from history, such as Curtis LeMay, Bernard Montgomery, Karl Doenitz etc, drawn as if they were sexy anime ladies. And also fighter jets and guided missiles drawn as if they were also sexy anime ladies. It's really quite disconcerting to be attracted to a busty Norman Schwarzkopf or an AIM-9L Sidewinder and its "intense growling". Not just that, but also the subreddit has a surprisingly nuanced sense of dark comedy, which has been supercharged by the war in Ukraine.

On the positive side the war has lit a fuse under r/ncd and r/combatfootage and so forth, partially because it's an extraordinary conflict and partially because LiveLeak is defunct, so if you want to see people crawling out of burning tanks and plopping to the ground dead there aren't many places that collect that kind of footage. Syria produced a tonne of footage of exploding tanks, burning tanks, people with their legs shot off, close-up first-person kill shots, but they were fairly rare and the video quality was low. The war in Ukraine however has been fought in full HD, with Gopros and drones etc. On the negative side there's a tonne of spam, and because a lot of the videos are hosted by TikTok they are apparently required to have music (I'm not an expert on TikTok), and they all have masses of wobbly logos on them to stop people reusing the footage.

That was a mistake made by the "side view of Russian helicopter shot down with MANPAD" video that did the rounds a while back. There was no logo. A lot of the content is repetitive, because war is often boring, but this will stick with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/va4z8v/warfare_2022_ukrainian_troops_launch_a_drone_from/

It's a bunch of kids on the back of a moving armoured personnel carrier launching a drone, while wearing a first-person headset, using what looks like a gamepad, only it's actually happening. It's a real-life cartoon. This is the first war where all the participants were aware of anime and prepared to work together to make anime stereotypes real. Teenage kids fighting metal war machines with high technology.

Obviously drones have been a thing since at least Vietnam, and during Afghanistan and Iraq the narrative was that they were impersonal killing machines that left NATO pilots traumatised, but this war is being fought with spider-like backpack drones launched from the next trench along, operated by 18-year-olds who are on TikTok and can upload footage immediately, because Ukraine still has mobile phone reception. It's also the first war where people can track NATO AWACS aircraft doing circuits of the black sea with FlightRadar.

It will be used as material for war college studies and university dissertations ("in this post I will cover the intersectionality of TikTok and modern infantry combat") forever.