Ok, so the Russians make a move that they were forced into by the United States. Of course the USA knew what it was doing. Every American knows about the “Cuban Missile Crisis”.

To pretend that it doesn’t is ridiculous.

If you place, or threaten to place, nuclear weapons on the border of a major nation, you can expect CERTAINLY a series of responses.

This is exactly what happened, but of course, it’s not being reported this way in the American / British “news”. According to that “news”, the Russians are taking a beating by the proud and brave Ukranians.

Russia facing more resistance than it expected!
Putin's losses now stand at 2,800 troops...
Readies 'father of all bombs'...
Hero Ukrainian soldier blows himself up to destroy bridge...
Chernobyl radiation levels rising...
US intel predicted invasion plans. Did it matter?
More than 50,000 flee in 48 hours...
Jews seek refuge in synagogues...
Europe says it has 'financial nuclear weapon'. But uncertain if it wants to use it...
SKYNEWS LIVE...

And then we have these…

• Putin gets a fight (NY Post) Heh heh.
• Pilot credited with shooting down seven Russian Jets (Washington Examiner)

Seven, eh?

So, I go on LinkedIN, and other other mainstream media, and Lordy! It’s all about the brave Ukranians fighting the evil communists. Sheech! Talk about spinning a narrative! So here, we are going to put some perspectives in place and then resume business as usual.

This is a fine meandering article hosting a wide selection of rambling thoughts and interests. Remember, don’t look at one singular issue and study it. Look at the big picture, as that is how everything is actually connected.

First, a look at a map…

Did you know that the Ukraine is the fourth-largest recipient of American equipment and weapons in the world? Imagine that.

Why? Why in Good God’s name, why?

Now, we begin with a statement that The Domain Commander made; “We are striving for little bads, so we can avoid the Big Bads”…

Users must be given the option of verification. It will be up to the platforms what methods they use, but this could range from uploading a selfie to match their profile picture or providing proof of Government-issued ID like a passport.

Tools must be provided to enable individuals to block other users who choose to remain anonymous. These could include ticking a box within settings that allows direct messages or replies to posts to be sent only by verified accounts.

Users must also be given a way to block content that falls below the criminal threshold but still causes significant harm, such as racist abuse. Tools could include allowing users to alter settings so the site does not recommend certain topics or placing sensitivity screens over such content.

Gizmodo has found at least ten viral photos and videos currently being spread on social media that are completely fake. In some cases, the videos and photos are years old. In others, the images are clearly not from Ukraine. There are even two examples of videos on Twitter today that are actually from war-themed video games.

Then, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Neiman Labs has a list of resources for following the war.

But it hilariously lists Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council’s cut-out to the Intertubes, which is a lot like putting the American Council of Pork Producers in charge of censoring fact-checking information on swine fever.

Finally, some common sense suggestions:

Oh and yeah the @onthemedia user guides to breaking news. Read and obey. They're also more polite than I am. pic.twitter.com/KN0zXSKRAr

— Stilgherrian (@stilgherrian) February 24, 2022

Be careful out there.

Some context…

A Rufus is not a spectator

This is a community. If you are a Rufus, then you participate in it. You just cannot sit by and do nothing. We take action. For we are part of something greater. And for those who have volunteered to the Domain, know exactly what I am talking about.

video 7MB

MM video

I took this video from inside a DD (Chinese version of Uber). It depicts where I live in JiDa in Zhuhai, China. Sure it’s sideways, but well, not too much I can do about that now.

video 35MB

How to train your cat to walk on a leash

It’s crazy it seems, but necessary if you live in an urban area and want to take him / her out into nature. video 35MB

Moscow: War in Ukraine started 8 years ago, Russia is now ending it

RT from HERE

Russia’s Foreign Ministry says it wants to end the 8-year bloodbath in Donbass that both Ukraine and the West turned a blind eye to.

The West spent eight years ignoring the “sea of blood” in Donbass while arming Ukraine, and now claims Moscow is the aggressor when it stepped in to end the conflict, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told RT on Thursday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a military operation in Ukraine in the early hours of Thursday, claiming it was necessary to “demilitarize and de-nazify” the neighbor. Kiev accused Russia of aggression, while the US, EU and NATO have called it an “unprovoked” invasion. Moscow insists this is not the case.

In announcing the operation, Putin said the “main objective is to stop the escalation of the war that’s been going on for eight years, and to stop the war,” Zakharova told RT in an exclusive interview.

“Russia did not commit aggression of any kind,” Zakharova insisted. “This did not start yesterday. There’s a sea of blood that’s appeared over the past 8 years,” she added, referring to the conflict in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which Russia on Monday recognized as independent states.

The main aim is to stop the escalation of the war that's been going on for eight years, to stop this war

Donetsk and Lugansk broke away from Ukraine in 2014, after the West-backed coup ousted the democratically elected government in Kiev. Zakharova noted that the two self-proclaimed republics held a referendum eight years ago, saying they did not want to remain in Ukraine, but both Moscow and the West rejected this and tried to put the “broken” country back together.

When asked about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement that Ukraine wanted peace, Zakharova wondered why Ukraine was arming itself and refusing to negotiate with the Donbass.

“If Ukraine wanted peace, why did they get all these weapons” from all over the world, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told RT, adding, “It was clear that these were offensive weapons.  Who were they fighting? Their own people in southeast Ukraine, and spoke often about seizing Crimea.”

The peninsula voted to rejoin Russia in March 2014, but Ukraine and its Western backers have refused to recognize this, calling it an “annexation.”

Zakharova also noted that the top Ukrainian officials have openly and publicly brought up the idea of obtaining nuclear weapons in recent weeks, pointing out this was a fact and not something claimed by Russian intelligence.

Divisions in Ukraine go beyond Donetsk and Lugansk, Zakharova added, accusing armed groups with Nazi-era symbols – such as the notorious Azov Battalion – of having influence over much of the country.

For years, she said, Western media so concerned over human rights in places like South Sudan and Myanmar kept silent on all this, ignoring that more than 13,000 people have died in the Donbass – many of them civilians. While Russia provided them with humanitarian aid, Kiev besieged them by cutting off trade, finance, and even utilities. Zakharova noted that the water canal towards Crimea is now once again operational after Ukraine “criminally” shut it off years ago.

Community

It’s not about individual “freedom” and allowing the sick, evil and malovent to hijack a forum. It’s about community. Community. You have a choice. you can sit behind your computer in a grey cubicle and shout your opinions anomously, or you can participate in a community as an accepted member. It your choice.

Community. Nonexistent in the USA.

video 3MB

THE BODY LANGUAGE OF THE SPEECH — PUTIN HAS REPUDIATED LENIN, STALIN, GORBACHEV, YELTSIN & MOBILIZED RUSSIA’S DEFENCE AGAINST US ATTACK AS NEVER BEFORE

From HERE.

by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

Not in his entire life has President Vladimir Putin made a speech like Monday’s Donbass address to the Russian people.

Nor has he ever named the Americans to be Russia’s national enemy in such unequivocal Russian terms – American promises worthless, American intentions deadly, American speeches lies, American actions intimidation, extortion, blackmail.

“So I want to ask”, Putin said: “why, why all this, for what? Okay, you don’t want to see us as a friend and ally, but why make us an enemy? There is only one answer: it’s not about our political regime, it’s not about anything else, they just don’t need such a large independent country as Russia. That’s the answer to all the questions. This is the source of traditional American policy towards Russia.”

“The pretext for another sanctions attack will always be found or simply fabricated, regardless of the situation in Ukraine. There is only one goal – to restrain the development of Russia. And they will do it as they did before, even without any formal pretext at all, just because we are and will never give up our sovereignty, national interests and our values.”

Unlike the most famous of English and American mobilization speeches against French, German and Confederate enemies – King Henry’s Agincourt, Winston Churchill’s Dunkirk, and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speeches – Putin didn’t wave his arms or move significantly his head, neck, shoulders, or right hand.  Putin’s right hand is the operational one.

Watch and listen. The stillness of the body language, the pauses for breathing, the speech pitch, pace and modulation – these mean to all Russians: Do or die — now we do for ourselves or else the Americans will kill us.

Putin spoke for 55 minutes, 48 seconds – Shakespeare’s Henry V spoke for just over two minutes; Lincoln for less than that; Churchill for 20 minutes.

The Pentagon has been using body language and voice techniques to spy on Putin for years. Timothy Colton, the US Naval War College agent doubling as a Harvard professor, was exposed in 2015 after several years of paid secret work; read the details here.

Colton has also been the biographer of Boris Yeltsin, a work celebrated as a “masterpiece”  by the US officials who once controlled Yeltsin. Yeltsin was unnamed in Putin’s speech, but all Russian listeners understand that he was meant in Putin’s accusations of “historic, strategic mistakes”, “pandering to the ambitions of the nationalist elites”; “injustices, lies and outright pillage.”

“Against the backdrop of the superficial and populist rhetoric about democracy and a bright future based either on a market or a planned economy, but amid a true impoverishment of people and widespread shortages, no one among the powers that be was thinking about the inevitable tragic consequences for the country… The collapse of the historical Russia known as the USSR is on their conscience.” For “market” Putin means the Yeltsin group, the two ranking officials who belong to it – Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin — are still alive, along with the oligarchs they created. For “planned economy” Putin refers to Mikhail Gorbachev whom he has condemned as well. For “conscience” Putin means hypocrisy.

The qualifier: “Of course, we cannot change past events, but we must at least admit them openly and honestly, without any reservations or politicking. Personally, I can add that no political factors, however impressive or profitable they may seem at any given moment, can or may be used as the fundamental principles of statehood. I am not trying to put the blame on anyone.”

Analysis of Putin’s body language and verbal cues on behalf of the secret services by Colton and his colleagues has not discouraged the hospitality which has been shown to Colton by the Valdai Club, the Kremlin-financed platform.  The reason Putin has just announced openly. For the traditional American reason the Russian command believes Colton’s capacity to threaten is limited by his incapacity to comprehend.

Count Putin’s head, neck, and shoulder movements and measure them against the vertical and horizontal axes. Head movements left and right are restricted within 5 degrees of the vertical;  there is almost no kinesis of the head forward or back; no neck rotation;  and apart from a couple of left shrugs, Putin’s shoulders remain immobile and at rest on the horizontal for all 55 minutes. This is an unusually long time.

Movement psychologists diagnose these features as indicating on the one hand a combination of internal control and confidence in what is being said; on the other hand, the commitment to reassure the listener.

Putin does not stumble in speech, mispronounce or misread his teleprompter lines. Speaking without a glass of water for an hour, he clears his throat very rarely. His breathing intakes are short, regular, and without the diaphragmatic discipline of the Stanislavsky stage method; in short, natural. The pitch and modulation of his voice remain steady without many peaks of emphasis or emotion. But the president does something he has exhibited very rarely — he breathes out in audible sighs. This is a display of regret, sadness. For the Russian audience this is attractive because it is human.

For his emphases Putin employs as few of his moving parts as he can. This signifies a high degree of self-control without nervousness. Instead, he uses his hands, the right more than the left, to anchor his body. When he wants to underline a verbal point, there is no agitation of the arms nor tension in the fingers on the table. His gestures – either single-handed or double-handed – illustrate the military threats Putin is discussing from the US, the NATO alliance, and from Ukrainian territory.

The last time the United States faced an enemy as calm, unmoving, disciplined, and confident was in the Vietnam War. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and deputy Victoria Nuland were less than eight years old at the time; National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had not been born.

Oh, and speaking about Taiwan…

Chicken a la King took the United States by storm in the middle of the 20th century. But if you try to find it on a dinner menu these days, you probably won’t have much luck.

By embracing this dish, featuring cubed chicken with a cream sauce served over your favorite grain (rice, noodles or bread), you’ll get to taste what made this chicken recipe such a classic and maybe even discover your next favorite meal.

Get the recipe from Taste and Tell.

This girl is so very comfortable

In her own skin, don’t you know. LOL. She does need to smile. I am not overly fond of the “pouty, spoiled teenager” look.

video

Pick a side

I have recounted how various “experts” are advising Washington DC to sanction China along with Russia. They argue that since the USA controls the money supply and debt that countries would “of course” choose America over China. I argue otherwise. Where are people going to get things?

And concerning China…

1. LDNR – the positional nature of the fighting remains, with attempts by the LDNR armies to advance to the borders of the territories occupied by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

2. The southern direction – the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation retained control over the bridge over the Dnieper at Kherson, repulsing attempts of counterattacks by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.. Fighting in the Antonovsky Bridge area continues.

A New Kakhovka is also being held. Melitopol was taken this morning and the advance towards Berdyansk began.

3. Kharkiv direction – fighting continues on the near approaches to Kharkov. Both sides are suffering losses in people and equipment.

4. Sumy direction – the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation took Putivl and passing through Sumy (the battle at the airport continued there today), advanced to Konotop, surrounding the city. Today, attempts to take Akhtyrka continued in order to reach Kharkov from the west. There are Russian roadblocks on the Sumy-Kiev highway. There is an advance to Kiev and Chernihiv. (The APU repelled the attack of the Russian Armed Forces in the Chernihiv direction).

5. Kiev – Gostomel airfield is held by paratroopers. The APU could not dislodge them from there. This morning, tank columns of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation broke through to the near approaches to Kiev and are close to establishing direct communication with the landing. The AFU is preparing a counterattack, stating that another landing will be thrown out in the Gostomel area today. The Pentagon says that Kiev will fall in the coming days. After 10 o’clock shooting was heard in the city. Also, according to the statement of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the landing was thrown to the west of Zhytomyr. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are actively undermining bridges on the approaches, trying to slow down the advance of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,

6. In the morning, strikes continued on military facilities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine throughout the territory of Ukraine. A Su-27 of the Ukrainian Air Force was shot down over Kiev – according to one version by the Russian air defense system, according to another – by the Ukrainian ones. The downed “Caliber” fell on a residential building in Kiev, but there were no casualties. During the shelling of Gorlovka, a school was hit – 2 teachers were killed.

7. The AFU launched a missile attack on the Millerovo airfield on the territory of the Russian Federation. Damage is reported at the airfield, but there are no losses in aircraft.

What a Chinese home is like

Yeah. It’s pretty much like this. Only, her house is not nearly as messy and cluttered up as mine. You know, having young kids is a real way to “decorate” your home. Video

And in Taiwan, a lesson for everyone

Ukraine’s crisis comic: note the flags, the texts, and the last picture : how US, UK, and EU farewell the stupid Ukraine president after giving him the weapons.

Chinese Experts Uncover Details of NSAs Equation Group’s Bvp47 Covert Hacking Tool

It’s a tad too technical, on my side. You all can skim over the article if you want. Essentially, China’s AI systems detected the behavior of the USA’s NSA hacking tool. It mapped it out, and then algorithims figured it all out. The part that is NOT reported in this article is that the Chinese were able to do so as the enire system is transparent. It’s like trying to find a glass stature submerged in ice cube water.

• February 23, 2022
• Ravie Lakshmanan

Researchers from China’s Pangu Lab have disclosed details of a “top-tier” backdoor put to use by the Equation Group, an advanced persistent threat (APT) with alleged ties to the cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Dubbed “Bvp47” owing to numerous references to the string “Bvp” and the numerical value “0x47” used in the encryption algorithm, the backdoor was extracted from Linux systems “during an in-depth forensic investigation of a host in a key domestic department” in 2013.

The defense research group codenamed the attacks involving the deployment of Bvp47 “Operation Telescreen,” with the implant featuring an “advanced covert channel behavior based on TCP SYN packets, code obfuscation, system hiding, and self-destruction design.”

Bvp47 is said to have been used on more than 287 targets in the academia, economic development, military, science, and telecom sectors located in 45 countries, mainly in China, Korea, Japan, Germany, Spain, India, and Mexico, all the while going largely undetected for over a decade.

The elusive backdoor is also equipped with a remote control function that’s protected using an encryption algorithm, activating which requires the attacker’s private key – something the researchers said they found in the leaks published by the Shadow Brokers hacker group in 2016.

Pangu Lab is a research project of Pangu Team, which has a history of jailbreaking Apple iPhones dating all the way back to 2014. At the Tianfu Cup hacking contest last year, the white hat hacking team demonstrated several security flaws that allowed for remotely jailbreaking a fully patched iPhone 13 Pro running iOS 15.

The Shadow Brokers leaks

Equation Group, designated as the “crown creator of cyber espionage” by Russian security firm Kaspersky, is the name assigned to a sophisticated adversary that’s been active since at least 2001 and has used previously undisclosed zero-day exploits to “infect victims, retrieve data and hide activity in an outstandingly professional way,” some of which were later incorporated into Stuxnet.

The attacks have targeted a variety of sectors in no less than 42 countries, counting governments, telecom, aerospace, energy, nuclear research, oil and gas, military, nanotechnology, Islamic activists and scholars, media, transportation, financial institutions, and companies developing encryption technologies.

The group is believed to be linked to the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit, while intrusion activities pertaining to a second collective known as Longhorn (aka The Lamberts) have been attributed to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Equation Group’s malware toolset became public knowledge in 2016 when a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers leaked the entire tranche of exploits used by the elite hacking team, with Kaspersky uncovering code-level similarities between the stolen files and that of samples identified as used by the threat actor.

Bvp47 as a covert backdoor

The incident analyzed by Pangu Lab comprises two internally compromised servers, an email and an enterprise server named V1 and V2 respectively, and an external domain (identified as A), sporting a novel two-way communication mechanism to exfiltrate sensitive data from the systems.

“There is abnormal communication between external host A and the V1 server,” the researchers said. “Specifically, A first sends a SYN packet with a 264-byte payload to port 80 of the V1 server, and then the V1 server immediately initiates an external connection to the high-end port of the A machine and maintains a large amount of exchange data.”

Simultaneously, V1 connects to V2 via the SMB service to perform a number of operations, including logging in to the latter with an administrator account, trying to open terminal services, enumerating directories, and executing PowerShell scripts through scheduled tasks.

V2, for its part, also connects to V1 to retrieve a PowerShell script and an encrypted second-stage payload, the encrypted execution results of which are sent back to V1, which, according to the researchers, “acts as a data transfer between the A machine and the V2 server.”

The Bvp47 backdoor installed on the servers consists of two parts, a loader which is responsible for decoding and loading the actual payload into memory. “Bvp47 generally lives in the Linux operating system in the demilitarized zone that communicates with the Internet,” the researchers said. “It mainly assumes the core control bridge communication role in the overall attack.”

Links to the Equation Group

Pangu Lab’s attribution to Equation Group stems from overlaps with exploits contained in a GPG-encrypted archive file published by the Shadow Brokers – “eqgrp-auction-file.tar.xz.gpg” – as part of a failed auction of the cyber weapons in August 2016.

“In the process of analyzing the ‘eqgrp-auction-file.tar.xz.gpg’ file, it was found that Bvp47 and the attacking tools in the compressed package were technically deterministic, mainly including ‘dewdrops,’ ‘suctionchar_agents,’ ‘tipoffs,’ ‘StoicSurgeon,’ ‘incision’ and other directories,” the researchers explained.

“The ‘tipoffs’ directory contains the RSA asymmetric algorithm private key used in the Bvp47 covert channel [for] command execution and other operations. On this basis, it can be confirmed that Bvp47 is from [the] Equation group.”

The findings mark the second time hitherto undocumented malware developed by the Equation Group has come to light in as many months. In late December 2021, Check Point Research disclosed details of a diagnostic utility called “DoubleFeature” that’s used in conjunction with the DanderSpritz malware framework.

“Judging from the attack tools related to the organization, including Bvp47, Equation group is indeed a first-class hacking group,” the researchers concluded.

“The tool is well-designed, powerful, and widely adapted. Its network attack capability equipped by zero-day vulnerabilities was unstoppable, and its data acquisition under covert control was with little effort. The Equation Group is in a dominant position in national-level cyberspace confrontation.”

A most outstanding Interview

It truly is. Man, oh man. No holding back. This is THE Scott Ritter that was sent to Iraq to find WMD’s and got in all sorts of trouble by the Bush Administration when he couldn’t find any. Man, he lets loose!

This link with Scott Ritter just popped up on moa a little while ago.
I’ve had to listen twice — highly recommended.

I think he is correct — NATO is dead and gone, bar for the funeral.
The European defence process will need to rebuild a less costly, more effective framework for peaceful co-existance with the Slavic world.

And this is a key point about re-alignments at a higher level than simply nation state.
It is at Chinese; Slavic; European; Anglo-American scales — everything else is just “loose ends” from the 20th century past.

Time to wake up, folks, and smell the roses (or the rubbish in the streets) and blame our local political representitives — after all, they ARE our ‘leaders’ (so they keep saying).
Accountability is a bitch ….Lol.

“NATO Too Weak to Face Russia: Scott Ritter on Russian Offensive
17,097 views • Feb 25, 2022 ” [38min]

https://youtu.be/3GkmdCaBECs

Scott Ritter. Video on You-Tube.

KTV scene

This kind of scene is fairly common when you go to a Business KTV. The girls will dance, and feed your food like grapes, strawberries, and drinks. They will hold your arm and be playful with you. video

Be the Rufus

Or be nothing; selfish and alone. video 5MB

Archdukes across Europe hiring extra security details

Better safe than sorry.

By Cobré Commandreé

BRUSSELS — Archdukes across Europe are beefing up their security details following a full-scale Russian attack on Ukraine.

“We’ve seen this picture show before, ahem,” claimed Archduke Peter Von Fishburn-Waldrop III, of County Hampshire, as he took snuff.  “Whenever a world war is about to break out, one of us is inevitably assassinated, ahem.”

Archdukes are contracting mercenaries, hirelings, sell-swords, adventurers-about-town, and various other soldiers of fortune to round out their security details.

“Aye, it be good for business, make no mistake.  Surely none of us wish to see an Archduke what with his life-force pourin’ out of his noggin, but we got bills to pay too, mind you,” said Captain John Ninefingers, leader of the famed Free Company.

Students of history will remember that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand precipitated World War I, called The Great War at the time, fought by various European powers. Archdukes fear that with the Ukrainian crisis, it’s only a matter of time before history repeats itself.

“One day you’re collecting rent from peasants, ahem, or getting promoted in the military despite no accomplishments, and the next day, ahem, you get assassinated by a young upstart who wants freedom from your imperial empire,” muttered Archduke Yannis Belagrovstad, of the Gutenberg Province. “What nerve!  What cheek!”

The motley collection of heirs-apparent is leaving nothing to chance. The finest technologies have been employed to ensure the safety of the Archduke corps throughout Europe.

“We attempted to develop a motorcar that was consistently surrounded by a moat as it traveled, ahem, but the peasants complained that it was too much digging,” mused Archduke Johannes Reberg, of the Kaiserschoten Kaserne.  “And isn’t that just like a peasant?”

When asked for comment, Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen, the current leader of the European Commission, said, “The safety of the Archdukes remains our number one priority.  That’s why we’ve diverted troops from Ukraine to stand guard around their four-post beds throughout the night.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a press release Tuesday morning regarding the safety of the Archdukes.

“When it comes to the assassination of Archdukes, it appalls me to think that anyone could be considering such an action,” said Putin, “without me having first ordered it”.

Checkered sweater for the tropics

Here, in the tropics, it’s HOT. Then there’s the “rainy season” which is HOT and STEAMY. So how do these Chinese girls get around wearing sweaters? Is it becuase they stay inside the air conditioning all day? Well, maybe so, but also the clothes in China are designed for the environment. Here is a sweater for the tropics. Cool, eh?

video

MoA – Disarming Ukraine – Day 2

The Russian operations in the Ukraine continue at a moderate pace. Some more troops were committed today. In all the Russian military may have now introduced some 20-40% of its prepared forces.

The Ukrainian military is not so much holding a line but concentrating in and around its bigger cities. It has destroyed some bridges north of Kiev to make an approach more difficult. That will slow down the Russian moves but will not prevent them. Russia’s military is famously good at setting up combat bridges.

So far the Russians have used their artillery sparsely. An exception was last night near Kharkiv in the northeast of Ukraine where a strike by multiple launcher artillery systems (MLRS) hit some area target with yet unknown results.

A 13 minutes long video from a highway drive near Kherson, a city north of Crimea, shows nearly 100 destroyed Ukrainian trucks and tanks. These are likely victims of air attacks.

If this map from a Turkish think tank source is correct the Russian troops did not attempt much deeper strikes today but mostly consolidated their frontline.

This map from Janes shows less progress. But it also has not marked the Donbas area in the southeast which is held by pro-Russian forces.

Russia’s President has called on the Ukrainian military to overthrow its government. I do not think he believes that will happen but it is a possibility so why not call for it.

Facebook now allows to praise Ukrainian Nazi groups like the Azov battalion. This was prohibited with Azov previously being in the same category as ISIS. Now these are ‘our guys’.

There are a lot of discussions of sanctions against Russia and every western country is trying to get as much exemptions for its industries as possible . The U.S. has for example exempted everything that has to do with hydrocarbons from its own sanction package. It will still buy Russian oil and will continue to sell drilling equipment to Russia.

The EU countries are still negotiating with themselves. They should be careful with what they do.

Britain has had the stupidity of sanctioning the Russian air carrier Aeroflot. In a counter move Russia prohibited British Airways from flying over Russian territory. Normally all flights from Britain to the Far East cross Russian airspace. These will now have to be redirected to other routes which will significantly increase their flight time and fuel burn.

Russia has threatened ‘inconvenient’ counter-sanctions to those who sanction it. Overflight rights are only one of the tools it can use.

NATO has said it will continue to deliver weapons, including air defenses, to the Ukraine. NATO does not have any weapons but some NATO countries seem to strive for a larger war. The U.S. seem willing to sacrifice the Ukraine to create a quagmire for Russia.

Syria was also supposed to become a quagmire for Russia when Russia came to its help. It didn’t turn out that way.

Finally, this is how we handle Trolls here on MM

"Once you cut through the bullshit and understand what's going on, it's easy to predict what will happen.

These people and countries acting as attack dogs for the empire must therefore be taught an unforgettable lesson. If you don't put down the rabid dogs, they will get up and bite you again. 

Therefore, Russia will not take half measures. 

They will not stop unless the surrender is total, and punishment for the miscreants dealt out accordingly. Otherwise, this operation will be for naught."

If you don’t understand this video, you must have a mental illness. Truth this.

Video 4MB

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

.

Articles & Links

.

• You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
• You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
• You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
• You can find out more about the author HERE.
• If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
• If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

.