TheVulture

And Wagner is sitting on top of all of their main logistics hubs, so good luck getting them the fuel, ammo and transportation they'd need.

Is the bridge designed to do that? Judging by the road barriers either side of the bridge, and the fact that you can't just move a bridge on concrete pillars embedded in the river bed, and that this bridge is obviously a barrier to navigation by larger boats - it all makes me wonder if this is some kind of swing bridge that is designed to be opened to allow large boats to pass. Edit: yes, just found a webcam of the bridge - it is back to normal again now and traffic moving across it: https://youwebcams.org/online/kolomna/mityaevskij-most/ and just as I look at the webcam (20 mins after the timestamp of the tweet image), there is a small military-looking convoy heading across the bridge with a police escort:

Allegedly another helicopter shot down near Voronezh, but the video doesn't really show anything aside from smoke from the ground: https://t.me/Pravda_Gerashchenko/74049 Wagner continuing to move equipment (including T-72 tanks) out of Luhansk and in to Russia, as of an hour ago: https://t.me/milinfolive/102645

(I'm not grigb but...) no idea on that, but Wagner has apparently taken control of three or more airfields (at Rostov, Voronezh and Millerovo), so they may well have an airforce now.

That seems out of step with the rhetoric so far. Wagner say they are not interfering with the invasion of Ukraine, and have shot down aircraft that were targeting them. But an An-26 is a transport aircraft, so a) it is no immediate threat, and b) were they really that sure that it was carrying equipment or troops that were being deployed against Wagner? Just seems to me that shooting down transport aircraft is, at first glance, at odds with what Prig says he is doing.

It also could serve to put the maximum dislocation effect on the MoD in Ukraine - they are mostly focussed on the south, and if this is right then Wagner is going to be a) sitting on their supply lines and b) cut them off from getting back to places that matter in Russia in a timely manner - depending on how much support there is for Wagner here of course,

Hard to take a '50km' convoy literally - it's about 50km from the border crossing to Rostov-on-Don. That sounds, at the very least, like a big exaggeration.

While Wagner makes a lot of money from e.g. mining concessions in exchange for military support in some African countries, which is technically independent of the government, you've got to suspect that it is Russian government pressure that set up those deals in the first place. And in the absence of government support, the deals are perhaps likely to disappear. It's really hard to see how Pirogzhin can think he is going to win this, unless he knows he's got men already in position and considerable support from some sections of the military and other people that matter.

I think that the reality is that the 'cost' either way is more of less fictional. These are items from deep reserve storage that were never going to be used short of a major land invasion of the United States (which, obviously, isn't on the cards). They don't need to be replaced. They are just stuff that has been obsoleted out of service or withdrawn due to changing budget allocations, and they get 'replaced' naturally over the course of time as new procurement programs update and replace currently in-service equipment and it gets moved into permanent storage. All that it means is that the US equipment stores in deep reserve are slightly smaller, but in practice there is no reasonable scenario where that matters. And if it ever does matter, it is probably in a scenario of total all-out superpower world war in which case a few $Billion of bookkeeping games isn't going to matter in the slightest. I real terms, much of the dollar value assigned to aid for Ukraine is fictional - no-one is actually spending $6B on this equipment, or on replacing it (except in so far as they were spending that anyway). What it might be is 'foot in the door' spending, where "we approved spending of X, but now accounting changes mean that it only cost Y, so we can still spend (X-Y) on additional aid for Ukraine without anyone complaining". Or having to get approval from the relevant oversight bodies

Perhaps I'm being excessively cynical, but 3 days ago youtube channel War Archive did a video on the opening of the battle for Kyiv (linked a few pages back, and I'll link it again below), which included a lot of information on the Ukrainian air force actions in the opening days, most of which I'd never seen before (and certainly not gathered in one place). Sounds to me like someone watched the video, took notes and called that "research" for their article, when War Archive was the one who put in the hours of the actual research .

IF that's accurate, then that's an order of magnitude bigger than anything we've seen so far in the offensive, and some thrusts have already reached halfway to Tokmak. That would be pretty big news. Any thoughts on how reliable it is Haiduk, or might there be an element of optimistic interpretation of reports mixed in here?

I'd be surprised if this was a full-blown attempt to attempt a pontoon crossing. Given the uncertain stability of land either side of the river (and the newly exposed land in the reservoir), I'd imagine it was more likely to be a 'proof of concept' attack - make some plans, give it a go, see what unexpected complications and problems the troops run across, and gauge the Russian response . More of a feasibility study to determine what would be required to seriously attempt a crossing. That's my uneducated guess anyway.

Sounds like it. Moscow has backed down on every single "red line" that it has drawn when NATO has pushed the issue. The only strategy they have left that is even slightly plausible is to de-escalate, drag things out for as long as possible, and hope that NATO countries get tired of supporting Ukraine (obviously coupled with stirring up the western tankie contingent to go on about Russia being willing to talk about peace, and Ukraine being belligerent).

If I recall correctly, the best equipped German spearhead divisions at Kursk, after waiting for those reinforcements, were still so depleted that by early war German metrics they would have been categorised as "unfit for combat duty"

Is there a Tokmak oblast? I thought Tokmak was just a town in Zaporizhzhia oblast.

So I expect we are can look forward to all the "totally not pro-Russian" mouthpieces in the western media to start up the line of "Russia is willing to have a cease fire and negotiate. Why are we supporting Ukrainian warmongers who want to keep the war going rather than have peace?" I wonder how long it will take for similar sounding comments to start turning up all over the Web.

Lets be honest - the Russian's would cheerfully do this to any actual Russians inside Russia too (except maybe in Moscow).

The plant in question is already shut down and not producing any electricity for Ukraine's grid, so no major change

For those who've not seen it yet, this weeks Perun video was all about escalation and Russia's 'red lines'. A lot of theoretical discussion, but he notes the same thing that I think has been said here: Russia produces a lot of noise about how providing Ukraine with X is an unacceptable escalation that will provoke a severe response, but when X is provided, Russia generates a lot of bravado (about how X is actually worthless and has already been destroyed by Russia) as cover for essentially backing down, because the one thing Russia can't afford is to risk escalating to more active NATO involvement.

Actually yes. We had an old house with very large rooms lots of nooks and crannies, ans way too much furniture and other stuff. And two cats who seemed to operate a "catch and release" policy re mice. We never had mice in the house until we had cats... It was often a day or two before the mice made a mistake that let us catch and evict them. We usually got them before the cats managed to though.

My suspicion would be that the Belgorod situation is a direct consequence of Russia's initial reaction to the first Grayvoron incursion. That was a raid in force that hung around to force a Russian response (plus whatever morale, psyops, distraction etc. benefits it produced). Now that Russian response has been noted and studied, and either it was weak enough that they thought there was a genuine chance of gaining and holding some Russian territory, or that a more significant incursion was needed to force Russia to divert forces to defend Belgorod and secure other thinly held areas of the border - not letting Russia assume it can continue defending the border with token forces and hoping that just the escalation of moving in to Russian territory would be enough deterrent.

Explosions reported in Sevastopol, possible in the port area. https://t.me/chp_sevastopol/15854 (google translate is pretty incoherent on this one, so if anyone can do a better job....) Maybe it's like a horror movie, and one of those unmanned explosive boats has caught up with the Ivan Khurs again just when it thought it was safe

Interrupting the economics debate for a moment... Looking over all the open source data on the Ivan Khurs: Multiple videos and photos from various angles of it returning to Sevastopol with no visible damage US satellite images of it being back in its usual berth in Sevastopol No claims or evidence from Ukraine or NATO of it being anywhere else No video or photos existing of any damage to the ship I think it is reasonable to conclude at the moment that it didn't suffer any serious externally visible damage and returned to Sevastopol under its own power at a pretty normal speed. Possibly it suffered some less obvious equipment damage, but there's no evidence for that. Russia is saying it will return to sea once it has completed its resupply, which is the reason it returned to port, so I guess the real test so be how long it says docked in Sevastopol. If it's heading back to the Bosphorus area within a few days, it's probably mostly fine. If it stays docked for several weeks, it's probably having some kind of repairs carried out.

Still confusing info on the state of the Ivan Khurs. There was a video of Telegram yesterday supposedly of it returning to port unharmed, and one this morning on twitter of it allegedly in Sevastopol. As the comments in the thread note however, the weather is totally overcast, while todays whether satellite pictures over Crimea show completely clear skies around Sevastopol (at least at 15:00). Looking back at cloud movement over the last 3 hours, I'd guesstimate that it is possible that Sevastopol was overcast until around 09:00-10:00 (local time), so possibly this is from early morning?

Makes a change from the usual "nuke everyone" rhetoric we are used to from Russian TV: https://t.me/bbbreaking/156368