Today's Today

06-AUG-1945

Hashem Al-Ghaili

Drones

Here's one scary-as-fuck video from Simon Whistler.

And don't get too comfortable, thinking we're OK because we're such good buddies with those Ukrainian fellers - people are already marrying drones with AI, and tech does not stay in one place for long, so we can expect plenty of trouble from the assholes who will surely be jumping all over that shit for nefarious purposes.

Today's Reddit

BTW, I'm really glad to have been (like most everybody else) totally wrong about Ukraine's chances.

And I remember a couple of instances that made me believe Ukraine wouldn't just survive - they could win the fuckin' thing.

Less than 2 weeks into it, the story broke about somebody's Baba taking down a Russian drone with a jar of pickled tomatoes.

You don't fuck with Baba.

And you don't fuck with Baba's kin.

🇺🇦 soldier returning to ‘normal’ / civilian life bursts into tears after being at yhr front
byu/ibloodylovecider inukraine

Now hold on there - wait just a gosh darn minute.

You're tellin' me Ukraine is a place where people get together and - like - try to take care of each other? Huh - I wonder if we could get that to catch on here in USAmerica Inc. Sounds kinda nice.

Слава Україні

Героям слава

Свобода знаходить шлях

🇺🇸🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦

Today I Learned

• Russia's murder rate is up 900% in the last year
• The ruling clique is shrinking as Putin's helpers are valued for loyalty instead of competence
• Any succession plan that begins to gain inertia is disrupted or snuffed out
• Russia's ambitions have never been in line with its capabilities
• One fairly likely outcome is that Russia becomes a vassal state to China

Keep It Sane

Don't be fooled.

Putin's an asshole, but he's not a mad man and he's not stupid.

Слава Україні

Свобода знаходить шлях

War Sucks

And "holy wars" suck the worst.

If you say atrocities committed in the name of religion can't be blamed on religion because it's an individual person committing the acts, then you can't credit religion as being the reason for a person's moral acts done in the name of religion.

“Ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.”

--Sam Harris 

Hamas gang raped and beheaded women at rave massacre, fresh testimony reveals

Almost two months after the attack, the international community is beginning to act on reports of Palestinian sexual violence

Survivors of the Supernova massacre witnessed women being gang raped and beheaded, new testimony has revealed.

Yoni Saadon, who escaped execution by hiding underneath a stage, said: “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her.

“She was screaming, ‘Stop it—already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.

“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters. Or my sister—I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”

Speaking to The Sunday Times at Sitria, a support area set up for festival survivors southeast of Tel Aviv, Saadon said he also witnessed the brutal murder of women who resisted Hamas attackers.

“They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her,” he said.

“They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too.”

Discussing another woman who was killed in front of him, Saadon added: “She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too.

“I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.”

Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, which collects the remains of the dead, told The Sunday Times it was clear Hamas terrorists aimed to sexually assault women.

“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said.

“No one saw more than us. It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

In one field, he said, he found the bodies of two girls with their legs apart who had both been shot in the head. One had her shorts ripped and had been shot in the vagina, the other had her jeans pulled down and bruises on her legs.

Architect Shari, who has volunteered at the Shura military base to help identify and prepare corpses for burial, said she was horrified at the scale of the violence inflicted upon women by Hamas.

“Opening the body bags was scary as we didn’t know what we would see,” she told The Sunday Times.

“They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied particularly round their underwear and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them.

“Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in the crotch, in the breasts … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”

Israeli police investigating sexual violence committed on October 7 say they have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips documenting Hamas’s crimes.

Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the probe, said: “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.

The fresh revelations come as mounting evidence of brutal atrocities committed against women on October 7 has spurred the international community to react.

57 days after the massacres, UN Women have issued a statement condemning the "brutal attacks" launched by Hamas against Israel.

The international body said: “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core.”

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who spent 12 years as a committee member on the UN convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, told The Sunday Times: “This is the statement they should have issued two months ago. “It’s mindblowing.

“We were there for our sisters when terrible things happened across the ocean, when they took away abortion rights in US, the killing of women in Iran, the abduction of Yazidis … but with us they looked away and I can’t think of a reasonable answer.”

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has meanwhile spent the last two days in Israel meeting survivors and hostage families.

He says he will investigate crimes within his jurisdiction, which is expected to include sexual violence.

Leftovers

In France, 30 or 40 tons of unexploded ordnance are recovered every year - mostly WWI era.

At that rate, it's estimated that it'll take another 300 years to clear it all.

There's a 42,000-acre area near Verdun that the French government has designated Zone Rouge (Red Zone) where it's still too dangerous for people to go. In the 300 days of the Battle Of Verdun, millions of artillery rounds were fired, with about 25% of them didn't go off.

They're also still finding bombs and grenades and artillery shells from WWII.

Dozens of people are killed and injured every year - casualties of two world wars that were "over" 80-100 years ago.

The war in Ukraine is now in it's 2nd year, and it's already estimated that it could take 100 years to "de-mine" the place.

Ukraine is now the most mined country. It will take decades to make safe.

In a year and a half of conflict, land mines — along with unexploded bombs, artillery shells and other deadly byproducts of war — have contaminated a swath of Ukraine roughly the size of Florida or Uruguay. It has become the world’s most mined country.

The transformation of Ukraine’s heartland into patches of wasteland riddled with danger is a long-term calamity on a scale that ordnance experts say has rarely been seen, and that could take hundreds of years and billions of dollars to undo.

Efforts to clear the hazards, known as unexploded ordnance, along with those to measure the full extent of the problem, can only proceed so far given that the conflict is still underway. But data collected by Ukraine’s government and independent humanitarian mine clearance groups tells a stark story.

“The sheer quantity of ordnance in Ukraine is just unprecedented in the last 30 years. There’s nothing like it,” said Greg Crowther, the director of programs for the Mines Advisory Group, a British charity that works to clear mines and unexploded ordnance internationally.

Staggering scale

About 30 percent of Ukraine, more than 67,000 square miles, has been exposed to severe conflict and will require time-consuming, expensive and dangerous clearance operations, according to a recent report by GLOBSEC, a think tank based in Slovakia.

Though the ongoing combat renders precise surveys impossible, the scale and concentration of ordnance makes Ukraine’s contamination greater than that of other heavily mined countries such as Afghanistan and Syria.

HALO Trust, an international nonprofit that clears land mines, has tracked, using open-source information, more than 2,300 incidents in Ukraine in which ordnance requiring clearance was discovered. Though events are greatly underreported and the data does not include the results of on-the-ground surveys by HALO Trust or other organizations, it gives a harrowing outline of the problem.

This week’s deployment by Ukrainian forces of U.S.-made cluster munitions, which are known to scatter duds that fail to explode, can only add to the danger.

Human cost

The explosives have already taken a heavy toll. Between the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and July 2023, the United Nations has recorded 298 civilian deaths from explosive remnants of war, 22 of them children, and 632 civilian injuries.

Civilian deminers, who clear unexploded ordnance and mines from liberated territories, are highly trained and use safety gear. But they are not immune from catastrophic accidents.

Vladislav Sokolov, a deminer for Ukraine’s emergency service, told The Washington Post that one of his friends, a fellow deminer, lost a leg while working in a Kramatorsk minefield in 2022. Sokolov and his friend reunited at a meeting of ordnance disposal professionals after he received a prosthetic.

He was “trying to learn to walk” again, Sokolov said.

Dmytro Mialkovskyi, a Ukrainian military surgeon, has been operating on mine injuries since the beginning of the war. On Friday, at a hospital in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, he had to make a gut-wrenching call to save the life of a mine blast patient who was dying of his injuries.

“I realized that this leg is killing him and there is another leg with a tourniquet, too,” Mialkovskyi said. “So I had to do a quick amputation of both legs. In 10 minutes.”

“I still don’t know if he’ll survive,” he said.

Hidden killers

Both sides use mines. Russia heavily mined its front lines in anticipation of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive, and has made far more extensive use of widely banned antipersonnel mines.

Small, deadly antipersonnel mines, triggered by the weight of the human body, cannot discriminate between combatants and noncombatants.

Russian forces have used at least 13 types of antipersonnel mines, as well as victim-activated booby traps, Human Rights Watch investigations found. Evidence suggests Ukraine has also used at least one type of antipersonnel mine, a rocket-delivered PFM blast mine, around the Ukrainian city of Izyum in summer 2022.

Antitank mines, which usually require immense weight to detonate, are not internationally banned, though any explosive device that could be detonated unintentionally by a civilian can be considered an antipersonnel mine under the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, to which Ukraine, but not Russia or the United States, is a party.

Both Russian and Ukrainian forces have used anti-vehicle mines.

The United States included two types of mines in its aid packages to Ukraine: the Remote Anti-Armor Mine System, which uses 155-milimeter artillery rounds to create temporary minefields programmed to self-destruct, and M21 antitank mines, which require hundreds of pounds of force to detonate but do not self-destruct, leading to concerns about later removal.

Mines are not the only type of explosive that pose a threat. Mortars, bombs, artillery shells, cluster munitions and others also become hazards if they do not explode when deployed.

Undoing the damage

Russia’s heavily mined defenses, built up over months of stalemate along the front lines, are slowing down the Ukrainian counteroffensive that began last month, damaging Western-supplied battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

Though specialized mine-clearing vehicles are in use, front-line mines are so concentrated that specialized soldiers, called sappers, have had to resort to clearing paths by hand.

Humanitarian clearance operations, which return denied land to local populations after conflict, are extremely slow, tedious and expensive. They are underway across parts of Ukraine, including around Kyiv, the capital, and other areas West of the front lines, where the battle has receded.

Ukraine’s contaminated territory is so massive that some experts estimate humanitarian clearance would take the approximately 500 demining teams in current operation 757 years to complete.

Demining teams crawl inch by inch across the terrain, using metal detectors and sometimes explosive-sniffing dogs, excavating every signal, not knowing whether they will uncover a harmless nail or deadly mine.

GLOBSEC estimates that one deminer can only clear 49 to 82 square feet per day, depending on the terrain and concentration of explosives.

The short window for clearance in the spring, after the ground thaws and before farmers plant, leaves little room for disasters like the Kakhovka dam breach in early June, which drastically disrupted clearance efforts.

Farmers in heavily contaminated regions such as Kherson have resorted to visual inspections and rigging tractors with armored plates while planting this year’s harvest.

There is a steady market for “dark deminers,” who offer hasty and often unreliable clearance without official certification, to clear some of the more than 19,000 square miles of unusable agricultural land.

Demining is not just slow, it’s also expensive. The World Bank estimates that demining Ukraine, which costs between $2 and $8 per square meter, will cost $37.4 billion over the next 10 years.

The United States has committed more than $95 million to Ukraine’s demining, according to a 2023 State Department report.

How Ukraine compares

Mines as a dark legacy of conflict all over the world, from Cambodia to Kosovo, hint at the challenges Ukraine could face as it rebuilds.

Cambodia, riddled with millions of land mines after decades of conflict, has been subject to ongoing clearance operations for 30 years. Crowther estimates there at least five years of work remains. Tens of thousands of people have been maimed by Cambodia’s mines.

Kosovo saw armed conflict in 1998 and 1999. “Kosovo was a six-month war that was a fraction of the scale of this conflict,” Crowther said of the war in Ukraine. “It’s taken decades.”

And don't start thinking anybody's immune to this shit.

(about 5 miles from my house)

Green Mountain will undergo full sweep for historic military munitions in 2024 after years of small searches

Signs near some of the trailheads warn visitors that "pieces of spent artillery shells from prior to World War II have been found in the park," including potentially "unexploded pieces of artillery."

LAKEWOOD, Colo. — More than a decade after historic military munitions were first found on Lakewood's Green Mountain, a comprehensive, in-depth sweep for any remaining items is planned for the spring of 2024.

Initial assessments have already been done to remove munitions, but a more thorough evaluation is planned for sometime in the spring of 2024, according to Lt. Col. Brian Hunsaker, branch chief for cleanup and restoration at the National Guard Bureau in Arlington in Virginia.

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That Middle East Shit

I'm not dismissing the very real problems that make life pretty fucking miserable in Israel and Gaza.

I am, however, going to mock the fuck out of the exhaustively stoopid politics it roils up here in USAmerica Inc.

Here's a fair example of what the big brained Republicans are yapping about:

That's not a plan, Kevin - that's part of a standup routine.

And BTW, on that whole 'secure our southern border' thing, here's something the Israelis found out it doesn't work for shit.

Show me a 20-foot wall, and I'll show you a guy selling 25-foot ladders.

How Hamas breached Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’

The massive, complex attack on Israel on Saturday by militants from Gaza Strip stunned Israelis, who watched in horror as fighters easily bypassed one of the world’s most advanced security systems.

At least 900 people have been killed in Israel and more than 2,600 wounded. More than 100 people have been taken captive. Israel has pounded Gaza with airstrikes, killing at least 680 people, according to Palestinian authorities.

The “smart fence” that separates Israel from Gaza is equipped with cutting-edge technology, designed to detect any security breach. This is how the militants got through.

An ‘iron wall’

In 2021 Israel announced the completion of its “smart fence,” a 40-mile-long barricade along the Gaza Strip that included an underground concrete barrier.

I don't suppose anyone would like to talk about concentration camps right about now, would they?

The project was publicly announced in 2016 after Hamas used underground tunnels to attack Israeli forces in the 2014 war. It required more than 140,000 tons of iron and steel, according to Reuters, and the installation of hundreds of cameras, radars and sensors. Access near the fence on the Gaza side was limited to farmers on foot. On the Israeli side, observation towers and sand dunes were put in place to monitor threats and slow intruders.

In 2021, then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz said the barrier placed an “iron wall” between Hamas and southern Israel.

But on Saturday, a surprise series of coordinated efforts enabled Hamas to get past the wall. The fence was breached at 29 points, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Though there were Israeli guard towers positioned every 500 feet along the perimeter of the wall at some points, the fighters appeared to encounter little resistance.

The border was minimally staffed, it soon became apparent, with much of Israel’s military diverted to focus on unrest in the West Bank.

“The most compelling parts of the system were the ones that provided indicators and warnings,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “But once you don’t see in advance that someone is massed at the fence, it’s still just a fence. A big fence, but just a fence.”

1. Drones dropped explosives

Using commercial drones, Hamas bombed Israeli observation towers, communications infrastructure and weapons systems along the border.

2. Coordinated rocket fire and man power

Israel said Hamas fired more than 3,000 rockets into the country, with some reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Militants on fan-powered hang gliders flew across the border.

3. Explosives along the fence

Militants also used explosives to blow up sections of the barrier. Men on motorbikes drove through the gaps.

4. Widening the gap

Bulldozers did the rest, allowing enough space for larger vehicles to drive through.

Experts said the attack would have required weeks, at least, of preparation and subterfuge.

“The key would be to move equipment into position over a period of weeks beforehand, and then put it into buildings or under tarps,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He noted that many of the vehicles could have been hidden in plain sight in parking lots or construction zones.

Still, “The idea of a bull dozer getting that close to the fence at all just boggles the mind,” Levitt said.

These idiots never watched Patton?

"Fixed fortifications 

are monuments 

to the stupidity of man."

Today's Jake

Reality is that of course the Kremlin fully funds the Wagner Group.

Wagner is not independent and self-sustaining, the way Putin has needed us to believe.

So we've got Pregozhin running around in Africa and Syria, et al, committing atrocities we'll find hard to believe could ever be carried out by honest-to-god humans. And those will be the atrocities that the investigators and their bosses will allow us to be aware of because some of them are bound to be so horrendous, nobody wants to know about them. Ever.

The point that needs to be hammered on is that this shit is not simply being done by rogue actors who are unaffiliated with Moscow.

Putin sponsors Wagner, Wagner is acting on behalf of Putin, Putin is largely responsible for Wagner's behavior. The Russian government is committing war crimes everywhere it goes.

Putin will not survive this war.

79 Years Ago

On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France was destroyed when 643 civilians, including non-combatant women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company as collective punishment for resistance activity in the area.

The Germans essentially murdered all people they found in the village at the time, as well as people brought in from surroundings. The death toll includes people who were merely passing by in the village at the time of the SS company's arrival. Men were brought into barns and sheds where they were shot in the legs and doused with gasoline before the barns were set on fire. Women and children were herded into a church that was set on fire; those who tried to escape through the windows were machine gunned. Extensive looting took place.

All in all, 643 individuals are recorded to have been murdered. The death toll includes 17 Spanish citizens, 8 Italians, and 3 Poles.

36 people escaped the massacre. The last living survivor, Robert Hébras, known for his activism for reconciliation between France, Germany, and Austria, died on 11 February 2023, aged 97. He was 18 years old at the time of the massacre.

The village was never rebuilt. A new village was built from scratch nearby after the war. President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of the old village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.

 - snip -

As reported by USAAF navigator Raymond Murphy - shot down 2 months before the massacre, and hidden by French resistance:

About 3 weeks ago, I saw a town within 4 hours bicycle ride up [sic] the Gerbeau farm [of Resistance leader Camille Gerbeau] where some 500 men, women, and children had been murdered by the Germans. I saw one baby who had been crucified.

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Sending Messages

It's a time-honored tradition that dates back as far as 2,500 years - just an extra little touch that prob'ly means nothing to the guy on the receiving end, but could mean quite a lot to the sender.

And why not make a buck on it while we're at it?

All in a good cause, right?

Ukrainians Send a Message With Their Bombs. On Them, Too.

Ukrainians have a lot to say to Russia, and many have chosen to say it in ink on the sides of rockets, mortar shells and even exploding drones.

The Ukrainian artilleryman was all set to slide the explosive shell into a launcher and send it on its way toward Russian positions — but first he had to take care of one last thing on his checklist.

“For Uman,” he scrawled on the side of the projectile with a felt-tip marker.

Then he ducked away as it roared off on a fiery trajectory to the front line.

Uman is the Ukrainian city where more than two dozen civilians were killed last month in a Russian rocket attack. But it is hardly the only city Russia has attacked, and the message on the shell was also only one of many.

After more than a year of war, Ukrainians have a lot to say to Russia, and many have chosen to say it on the sides of rockets, mortar shells and even exploding drones. Thousands of messages have been sent, ranging from the sardonic to the bitter, among them one from Valentyna Vikhorieva, whose 33-year-old son died in the war.

“For Yura, from Mom,” Ms. Vikhorieva asked an artillery unit to write on a shell. “Burn in hell for our children.”

Ms. Vikhorieva said her son, a Ukrainian soldier, was killed last spring by a Russian artillery shell.

“I will never forget,” she said in an interview. “And he will always be my boy.”

It is more than just venting.

Charity groups and even the military have seized on the desire of Ukrainians to voice their anger as a mechanism to raise funds — never mind that however well-crafted the messages, the Russians are unlikely ever to read them. The shell cases, of course, generally explode into smithereens. And if they hit their target, their intended recipients may be in no condition to appreciate them.

But for some Ukrainians, it still feels like justice, if only symbolically, said Victoria Semko, a psychologist, who works with people who endured the brutal Russian occupation of Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv.

“People are in pain because of the loss, personal and national,” Ms. Semko said. “It is normal when aggression is directed at the guilty parties.”

It is not just Ukrainians who have paid for messages. The groups behind the campaign say people from Eastern Europe still angry over the long years of Soviet rule have also written in. Oleksandr Arhat, a co-founder of one group raising money for the military through the messages, Militarny, offered some examples.

There was the writer from Israel who wanted to avenge the torture death of a grandfather by Soviet Internal Affairs. There was the Czech who wanted to commemorate the Prague Spring of 1968, when the Soviet Army put down protests. “Russians Go Home” wrote a Hungarian denouncing the Soviet invasion of his country in 1956.

One retiree, Yuriy Medynsky, 84, said he had drawn on his meager benefits to send a message not once but repeatedly to honor his grandson, who was 33 when he was killed fighting in the Kharkiv region in the spring of 2022.

“To Katsap hermits for Maksym Medynsky. Grandpa,” he wrote, using an epithet for the Russians.

“I put in my message all the hate I feel for Muscovites,” Mr. Medynsky said. He paid about $13 for each message.

His daughter-in-law, Tetyana Medynska, Maksym’s widow, has also sent repeated messages.

“Personally for me it’s a tiny bit of revenge,” she said. “I do not imagine killing someone particular, as they are all guilty, all Russians who came to Ukraine. They have no faces for me. When I send money for the message on the bombs, I feel some kind of psychological relief.”

Some have struck a tone of irony.

“When my friend got married, she asked to write her maiden name on the mortar, to say farewell to it,” said Private Vladyslav, a soldier at a mortar position outside the town of Toretsk, in eastern Ukraine.

He himself once sent a message: “I congratulated my mom on her birthday this way,” Private Vladyslav said.

At that moment, he was preparing an 82-mm mortar with a message from a comrade, Private Borys Khodorkovsky, who was celebrating his 50th birthday at the front.

“I want those devils to know that I am here, and want them to feel bad,” Private Khodorkovsky said. “Psychologically, I know that this mortar will hit something and fewer of my brothers in arms will die, and fewer Russians will shoot at us.”

But most messages seethe with unvarnished fury.

“For the destroyed childhood,” wrote Dmytro Yakovenko, 38, a pharmacist. He has two daughters, 11 and 14. The family lived through a harrowing bombardment and then evacuation of their hometown, Lozova, in the Kharkiv region.

“My daughters’ childhood is destroyed,” he said. “I want Russians to know why this mortar is flying their way.”

The unit that fired the mortar with a message for Ms. Vikhorieva, whose son was killed fighting, is a small one. Its members say that they have used the money raised by selling messages to repair vehicles, and that they have fired more than 200 personalized mortar shells to date.

“I feel uneasy when a person orders a message for the loss of a loved one, and I know that nothing will change,” said Ihor Slaiko, the commander. “But I still sign them.”

His men dutifully inscribe the words onto the shell — and then send them toward Russian lines with a boom.

Glimmers

War is for losers.

I'm not talking about it the way Trump did. He took a giant dump on anybody who answered the call and served honorably in uniform. He actually called the dead and the wounded suckers and losers.

And while I'll continue to make the argument that the warriors are in fact ultimately responsible for the war (ie: you don't have much of a war if nobody shows up to fight), that's not my point.

When you're responsible for your own actions no matter the circumstances, we all need to be very careful, and not get fooled by the cynical manipulations of asshole politicians who'll never have to do any of the fighting and the bleeding and the dying in the name of some noble cause their PR team came up with.

When I say 'war is for losers', I mean it at the base level. Nobody wins a war. When the killing stops and the smoke clears, the "winner" is the side that lost the least, or was able to stand losing more than the other guys.

Nobody wins. Everybody loses. War is about loss. War is for losers.

There's no better example of that than what's going on in Ukraine, and the "good news" - for lack of a better way to say it - is that it kinda looks like the example of Putin getting his dick knocked in the dirt is making the Chinese a little more reasonable.

Opinion In Vienna, the U.S.-China relationship shows signs of hope

As the United States and China veered toward confrontation in recent years, both sides gave lip service to the idea that they seek cooperation on issues of mutual interest. Little came from that rhetoric until last week in Vienna, when top Chinese and U.S. officials actually seemed to be creating a framework for constructive engagement.

After two days of intense meetings Wednesday and Thursday between national security adviser Jake Sullivan and top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi, the two nations used identical language to describe the meetings: candid, substantive, constructive. For diplomats, that amounts to a rave review.

Talking about resets in foreign policy is always risky, and that’s especially true with Washington and Beijing. These two superpowers might be “destined for war,” as Harvard professor Graham Allison warned in a book with that title. What they’ve lacked, in their increasingly combative relationship, has been common ground. But some shared space seems to have emerged during the long, detailed discussions between Sullivan and Wang.

The U.S. and Chinese officials are said to have talked for hours about how to resolve the war in Ukraine short of a catastrophe that would be harmful for both countries. They discussed how each side perceives and misunderstands the other’s global ambitions. They spoke in detail about the supremely contentious issue of Taiwan.

The frank discussion in Vienna was important because both sides have been running hard in the opposite direction in recent years. The Biden administration has concentrated on rebuilding U.S. military alliances and partnerships but has had little constructive engagement with Beijing. China has proclaimed a “no limits” partnership with Russia and has fostered an alliance of the aggrieved but, in the process, has rebuffed the superpower that matters most to its future.

What was different in Vienna? From accounts that have emerged, it was partly a matter of chemistry. Sullivan and Wang are both confident enough to talk off script. Over nearly a dozen hours of discussion, they threw schedules aside. They have the confidence of their bosses, Presidents Biden and Xi Jinping, to engage in detailed discussion about sensitive issues. They appear to have found a language for superpower discussion, like what once existed between the United States and both Russia and China but has been lost.

Sullivan and Wang are said to have discussed the Ukraine war at length. China insists it won’t abandon Russia, its longtime partner. China seems to understand that this conflict won’t be resolved on the battlefield but through diplomacy. As Ukraine prepares a counteroffensive that could push back the Russian invasion, China fears a cascading series of Russian losses could destabilize President Vladimir Putin.

China has proposed a peace plan for Ukraine and is sending a special envoy this week to Kyiv, Moscow and other key capitals. U.S. officials expect that China’s role won’t be as a mediator but a check on Russia’s actions. If Xi decides it’s time for this war to end, Putin has few alternatives. That’s why the Kremlin is said to have viewed last week’s Sino-American engagement with dread.

In the background of the Vienna discussions were two ruthlessly pragmatic questions for China. These issues form the context for a new stage in the relationship in which, as China’s foreign ministry spokesman put it, “China-U.S. relations should not be a zero-sum game where one side outcompetes or thrives at the expense of the other.”

The first baseline issue might be described as the “inevitability” question. Is the United States in inevitable decline while China is moving toward inevitable ascendancy? Xi’s policies have been premised on both outcomes, but the past several years have raised questions in Beijing. The U.S. economy and social framework have shown surprising resilience, and its technology remains supreme.

China might have imagined that it was dominant in artificial intelligence, for example, until the explosive impact of GPT-4. China, meanwhile, has faced economic and political head winds. Its global dominance is far from certain.

The Chinese leadership appears to be debating, behind the scenes, this question of America’s staying power. U.S. officials noted a blog post this month by Fu Ying, a prominent Chinese former diplomat, questioning in veiled terms whether one country should question another’s power. The post was removed from the website of the university where she teaches, and U.S. officials say they believe Fu was reprimanded. What’s evident is that the issue is being debated.

A second essential question for China is whether prolongation of the Ukraine war is in Beijing’s interest. Some Chinese officials are said to have argued that a long war is good for China, because the United States is bogged down in the conflict and Russia’s ties to China are reinforced. But there’s apparently a growing counterargument that the war strengthens America’s alliances in Europe and Asia and creates long-term trouble for China. U.S. officials say they believe the latter argument is gaining force in Beijing.

For the Biden administration, the fundamental question has been whether it is in America’s interest to accept China’s growing global role and work with Chinese leaders to accomplish mutual goals. Sino-American engagement had been focused on “soft” issues such as health, food and climate change. But Biden encouraged Sullivan to engage on core security issues such as Ukraine.

The U.S. message in Vienna is said to have been an emphatic “yes” on engagement. Sullivan praised Wang’s mediation of the bitter rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example, explaining that the United States could not have played a similar role because of its mutual antipathy with Iran but welcoming China’s effort to de-escalate conflict in the region.

Biden’s opening to China has been motivated by one simple idea: The United States doesn’t want to start a new Cold War. Biden took too long to implement this insight, bowing to the new conventional wisdom in Washington that the more strident the confrontation with China, the better. But he seems to have found his voice.

A few green sprouts don’t guarantee blossoms in spring, let alone a ripe summer. But based on Chinese and American accounts, what happened last week in Vienna was the beginning of a process of regular, direct engagement that will benefit both sides.

Then throw in the stories coming out now about Prigozhin trying to make a deal with Kyiv to help him pull his own fat out of the fire, while fucking over Putin, and the picture gets pretty sharp.

"I don't care who wins or what it costs, I just don't wanna be the loser."

Wagner chief offered to give Russian troop locations to Ukraine, leak says

THE DISCORD LEAKS
Secret documents reveal that Yevgeniy Prigozhin said he would tell Ukraine where to attack Russian positions if it pulled back from Bakhmut, where Wagner mercenaries were taking heavy losses.

In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer.

Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord.

Prigozhin has publicly feuded with Russian military commanders, who he furiously claims have failed to equip and resupply his forces, which have provided vital support to Moscow’s war effort. But he is also an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who might well regard Prigozhin’s offer to trade the lives of Wagner fighters for Russian soldiers as a treasonous betrayal.

The leaked document does not make clear which Russian troop positions Prigozhin offered to disclose.

Two Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate, known as HUR. One official said that Prigozhin extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once, but that Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin and thought his proposals could have been disingenuous.

A U.S. official also cautioned that there are similar doubts in Washington about Prigozhin’s intentions. The Ukrainian and U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

- more -

So in the midst of the madness, there can still be little rays of hope that we're nearing the part where assholes like Putin and Prigozhin end up as corpses smoldering in a ditch somewhere.

Couldn't happen to a nicer coupla guys.

Today's Reddit

Brain lock - please reboot 

A severely shell shocked soldier is frozen until being revived by his Ukrainian comrade 🇺🇦
by u/floatjoy in ThatsInsane

Translation:

"Brother, what is it, brother?!" - as the guy on the ground is frantically gasping for air.

"What happened to you, brother? I'm here, it's OK"

"Ukraine?!" The shocked soldier asks?

"Ukraine!" The other answers. "Come on brother, let's go! Don't shoot at anyone!"

"Where's the enemy?", he asks

"Enemy? It's all our guys out there. Follow me brother. It's all good. Don't shoot at anyone! Let's go!"

Prigozhin Goes Hard

It's impossible to tell what's real when somebody like Yevgeniy Prigozhin seems to go Full Karen.

Prigozhin showed fresh losses of Wagner PMC and blamed Shoigu and Gerasimov for them.

He says the ammunition shortage has reached 70% and seems to be on the verge himself. pic.twitter.com/lRiGjApC5n

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) May 5, 2023

• Is he worried that his influence is waning?
• Is he laying down the pretext to save face as he turns tail and runs?
• Is it meant to bluff Ukraine into getting cocky and tipping their hand?
• Is he facing a revolt - possibly outright mutiny - within the Wagner PMC?
• Is he well-enough versed in Sun Tzu to be handing Putin a dilemma?

If that last bit is the case, we could be seeing both the beginning of a potentially rapid collapse of the Russian effort in Ukraine, and the end of Mr Putin.

Of course, we may never learn the truth here, but something's happening that is definitely not according to the original plan.

Wagner boss threatens to pull out of Bakhmut, slams Russian military

In a sharp escalation of the rivalry between Russia’s disparate military forces fighting in Ukraine, the head of the Wagner mercenary group announced Friday that he would withdraw his forces from the still raging battle for Bakhmut because of insufficient ammunition.

Yevgeniy Prigozhin published a statement and video on his Telegram channel, demanding that the Ministry of Defense sign an order indicating when they would replace Wagner forces in Bakhmut. He said he would withdraw May 10, the day after Russia’s hallowed Victory Day celebrations.

“I am withdrawing the Wagner PMC units from Bakhmut, because in the absence of ammunition they are doomed to senseless death,” Prigozhin said, wearing camouflage and a helmet, with an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder. He stood with a group of dozens masked Wagner fighters, some wearing full face skull masks.

Spike in Russian combat deaths fuels fears of worse carnage to come

Prigozhin said his forces had no choice but to withdraw to rear bases to “lick the wounds.” It remains to be seen if he will indeed withdraw his forces — a move that would be catastrophic for Russia’s long and bloody military campaign to take control of Bakhmut and would likely leave the influential oligarch tarnished politically.

“Of course, I foresee criticism. After a while there will be some smart guys who will say that it was necessary to stay in Bakhmut even longer. Whoever has criticisms, you’re welcome to come to Bakhmut and stand with weapons in your hands instead of our killed comrades,” he said.

Pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei Markov, however, said Prigozhin was so popular in Russia and irritation at political and military officials over the mistakes and inertia of the “special military operation” in Ukraine was so pronounced that it was “political suicide” to criticize him.

“It seems to society, the bureaucracy is afraid to defeat the West in Ukraine, afraid to fight for real … many are afraid to criticize the Ministry of Defense. But no one has yet dared to seriously criticize Wagner,” he said.

Overnight, an extraordinary video was posted on Telegram, in which Prigozhin displayed dozens of corpses of Wagner fighters killed in Bakhmut on Thursday, before launching a furious, obscenity-laden tirade, blaming Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, for supplying Wagner with only 30 percent of the ammunition it needed.

Prigozhin’s main accusation was that military officials, jealous of Wagner’s battlefield successes, were intentionally depriving it of ammunition to prevent it from conquering the city before the symbolically important Victory Day on May 9.

His letter on Friday went further, asserting that Wagner was only getting 10 percent of required ammunition, not 30 percent.

The bitter public recriminations over ammunition appear to be a new sign of Russia’s difficulties in increasing its military production to match the challenges on the battlefield, as it braces for an expected new Ukrainian counteroffensive in coming weeks.

Prigozhin’s outburst may also be an effort to shift the blame for Wagner’s failure to seize Bakhmut before Victory Day, which would have given President Vladimir Putin something to celebrate in his speech in Red Square.

Wagner has been battling to seize Bakhmut since last summer with massive losses, and Prigozhin’s open struggle with Russia’s military leaders has continued most of this year.

Russia needs more troops but is wary of public anger, leaked documents say

His letter also painted a picture of chaos and miscommunication on the battlefield, claiming that Russian military forces that were supposed to support Wagner’s flanks in Bakhmut were ineffective and deployed in lower numbers than officially claimed.

“Instead of tens of thousands there are tens and seldom hundreds of fighters,” he said.

According to Western intelligence estimates, Wagner deployed some 50,000 fighters in Ukraine, many of them prisoners who were offered pardons in return for fighting.

U.S. National Security spokesman John Kirby said Monday that nearly half of the 20,000 Russian soldiers killed since December were Wagner fighters pitted in the brutal struggle to take Bakhmut.

Prigozhin has frequently clashed with Russia’s Ministry of Defense over supplies to Wagner, and he renewed his pressure for more ammunition on Monday, saying his forces needed 300 tons of artillery shells to complete the assault on Bakhmut.

Prigozhin has shared videos of dead Wagner fighters before on Telegram, but his open rage, publicly confronting Russian military officials in the graphic video posted overnight, was highly unusual. The video of the bloodied corpses was crammed with bleeped-out obscenities directed at Shoigu and Gerasimov.

“These are the guys of the PMC Wagner. They were killed today. Their blood is still fresh,” he said. “Film them all,” he told an assistant, who panned across the dozens of bloodied bodies laid out in rows. If Wagner was given enough ammunition, its losses would be 80 percent lower, he said.

“Shoigu, Gerasimov,” he shouted. “These are these are somebody’s [expletive] fathers and somebody’s sons. And those [expletive] who don’t give us ammunition will be in hell eating their guts.”

Ukrainian soldiers fire a cannon near Bakhmut, where fierce battles against Russian forces have been taking place, Wednesday. (Libkos/AP)
Accusing the officials of sitting in expensive clubs, he continued, “your kids are enjoying life and making YouTube videos.” Pointing at the corpses, he said “you think that you are the masters of this life, and that you have the right to rule over their lives.

“They came here as volunteers and are dying for you so that you can have a wealthy life and sit in your redwood offices. Keep that in mind,” he said glaring furiously into the camera.

Ukraine defended Bakhmut despite U.S. warnings in leaked documents

Prigozhin, the most visible Russian battlefield leader, frequently posts videos showing himself clad in military gear, traveling in vehicles through the war zone, meeting his fighters like a general, or standing on the battlefield making announcements amid background explosions.

His willingness to take personal and political risks to support his fighters likely inspires loyalty among members of a force who see themselves as the most competent elite unit in the war on Ukraine. It also contrasts vividly with Shoigu, Gerasimov and Putin, who are rarely seen in the combat zone.

Prigozhin’s letter bluntly pointed at Russian military failures, and claimed credit for saving Russia’s military operation.

He said “a series of failures of the Russian Ministry of Defense in various parts of the front” last year led to an October decision for Wagner to conduct “operation Bakhmut meat grinder” to divert Ukrainian forces, claiming this was “extremely effective” because it allowed the Russian army “to take advantageous defensive positions and continue the offensive.”

“After these events the Wagner PMC units fell out of favor with envious military bureaucrats. An artificial ammunition starvation began. An attempt was made to create an artificial shortage of personnel,” he said, referring to moves to prevent Wagner from recruiting prisoners as volunteers.

One prominent nationalist military blogger with the handle Zapiski Veterana posted on Telegram that if Wagner did withdraw it would one of the “cases in history when Russian troops are forced to leave earlier the cities occupied by them due to stupidity, sabotage, and possibly open betrayal on the part of Russian officials.”

The Kremlin has played down reports of the conflict between Prigozhin and defense officials in the past, even as the Wagner leader’s criticisms have become increasingly strident.

In January, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said reports of a conflict were “the product of information manipulation” that was “organized by our enemies in the information sphere.”

But he appeared to take a subtle dig at Prigozhin adding, “But sometimes our friends behave in such a way that we don’t need enemies.”

On Friday, Peskov said that the Kremlin was aware of Prigozhin’s statement but declined to comment on it.

It's A War, Dummy

I don't like thinking a guy is justified in punching a guy for disrespecting a flag. And I don't like thinking that the Russian guy has no call to look all shocked and shit when he gets punched for disrespecting the Ukrainian guy's flag.

But there's something very symbolic about the Russian guy's action (provoked as it was by the Ukrainian guy's video-bombing), and the Ukrainian guy's reaction, and then the Russian guy's reaction to the Ukrainian guy's reaction.

It's a fucking war, the Ukrainians didn't start it, and we can't expect them to behave in a particularly nice way as they fight for their lives - no matter where that fight occurs.

Because it's a war - a total loss of control - a madness. And once it starts, nobody's calling the shots, and nobody can claim to know much of anything about what happens next, or where we go from whatever fucked up place we're at right now.

It's a fucking war.

Scuffles have broken out between Russian and Ukrainian delegates to a conference in Turkey this week, according to videos and state media reports.

Two separate altercations over Ukrainian flags occurred at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation in Ankara, Turkey, on Thursday.

In one video, a woman in a blue suit is capturing herself on a cellphone camera when a Ukrainian lawmaker holds up a Ukrainian flag behind her. A second man, identified by Russia’s Tass state news agency as the secretary of the Russian delegation, then walks up and rips the flag out of the Ukrainian man’s hands.

As he walks away with the yellow and blue flag, the Ukrainian lawmaker follows him, then slaps at him and tears it out of his hands.

“What are you doing with the Ukrainian flag?” shouts the lawmaker, Oleksandr Marikovski. “This is our flag.”

Video of the tussle was posted on Mr. Marikovski’s Facebook page and also circulated widely on social media.

Russian news reports named the woman in the video as Olga Timofeeva, a member of the Russian delegation, and said she was filming a broadcast interview at the time of the incident.

Tass identified the man who grabbed the Ukrainian flag as Valery Stavitsky, the Russian delegation’s secretary, and said that he was taken to a hospital for medical attention after being attacked.

Earlier on Thursday, Tass reported, Ukrainian lawmakers tried to “disrupt” a speech by a Russian official by unfurling a Ukrainian flag. That incident also resulted in a physical altercation, according to video posted by Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency.

Слава Україні

🇺🇸 ❤️ 🇺🇦