The Steppenwulf

Actually China has been kinda standoffish on this whole thing.  They talk “infinite friendship” but then back off on banking to avoid crossing the US too deeply. They are likely sending tech and even weapons but nowhere near levels they could.  And they are taking Russia to the cleaners on oil and gas…with friends like these….
I think China wants a protracted conflict because it puts Russia in a very poor bargaining position.  But at the same time they do not want Russia to collapse, or win really.  As to China pouring arms and ammo into Russia…well they haven’t yet.  Not sure if they see it really in their interest to bail Russia out.  They want a weak and vulnerable Russia, but not a complete dumpster fire they have to deal with.

Looks like the four they captured (and beat the hell out of) are from Tajikistan.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/four-men-charged-in-moscow-attack-showing-signs-of-beatings-at-hearing-court-says-two-accept-guilt-1.6820048
Wondering if this is a regional fracture point being exploited, right after the Russian election.  

What happens when ISIS gets mad that no one wants to believe it was them and keeps blaming Russia/Ukraine? 

Except this isn’t a grubby arms deal. The plan would have had to have set up a complex terrorist operation in Moscow which would have had to fool American intelligence in Syria and elsewhere. It’s just not credible and *there* *is* *no* *evidence* *that* *happened*. 

Let's look at this as simply as possible: what about the Russian government for the last 20 years suggests to you that they are capable of a finely tuned false flag that somehow managed to fool the US government's vast resources pointed at ISIS-K?

...with a colonial mindset.

As someone who has written, recorded and mixed music--Yes this is possible, particularly when inspired or driven to write and record. Mixing and mastering in particular (which used to be painstaking, depending on the level of quality you're looking for) are easier than ever with AI and algorithmic tools.
Yes I agree, you are writing like a mad conspiracy theorist.

Ok, so what?  In '99 Putin used terror as a mechanism to take power.  In 2024...he is already in power.  Major terror attacks in Moscow are now his problem because he is supposed to be the new czar and lead Russians to a glorious new empire.  Having a terror group poop all over that is not good news anyway he spins this...he is the state.  
Putin just sent 100k+ countrymen to die in a useless war he started.  No one is doubting his capacity to "do dirty".  What is in doubt is the utility and practicality of another staged terror attack in the current context.    

Yes, the idea that the four of them just got in the car they had at the scene, and then stayed together and drove down a major road until the got caught 500km away is... curious. I could kind of believe it if they were expecting it to be a suicide attack and didn't have an escape plan, but were so surprised that they could just get in the car and drive off that they thought they'd give it a go with no real plan.
If they had an escape plan prepared in advance, then this surely wasn't it.
Of course, do we believe what Russia says about how and where they were captured?

IS does not function as a monolithic group that way.

I am thinking that ISIL - who people really need to do some more reading on as we spent the better part of a decade fighting them in Iraq and Syria - or affiliate "ISIS-K," had some pretty obvious motives for the timing of this whole thing.  All terrorism is about demonstration.  And this is exactly what this was. ISIS-K is about creating a holy caliphate in the Stans (they are actually driving the Taliban nuts right now = zero sympathy and maybe there is a thing called karma).  They took the opportunity after the Russian election to demonstrate that Putin is not "all powerful" and that Russia needs to back off while they create whatever it is they are pushing for.  The entire action was more likely for their own regional support audience -"see we can strike at the heart of the Russian Empire".
More simply put, it may very well have had little or nothing to do with this war.  ISIS-K may be taking advantage of Russian security being overstretched because of the war but their motives/objectives have little to do with the war itself.
Russia appears to be spinning this to throw crap at Ukraine by labeling them as "supporters" without giving Ukraine credit for the actual attack.  This screams to me they are trying to salvage what they can from what is essentially a complete sh#tshow.  People giving Russia credit for some masterful false flag conspiracy are simply playing into Russian narratives - "Look at how cunning and complex is our planning!  You should re-think this entire war."  Even when it makes absolutely zero sense to even try such an action. 
It is a f#cking duck.

If I was Putin ( what an unpleasant thought) I would try to play down the radical Islamic angle of this attack right now.
I imagine that with the stresses that this war has already put on Russian society, increased tensions between Muslims and Christians in Russia are the last thing he wants or needs right now. Putin of all people should remember how dangerous that can be for Russia from his experiences in the 90s and early 2000s.
 

Putin had/has a very good opportunity to end the war in Ukraine by diverting national attention to a new threat. ISIS.
Too bad he will miss it.
 

Russians are already scared and irrational and mobilizing passively. Pretending this is some suave propaganda move doesn’t mean you have sussed it out…it means that you have been fooled by the previous rounds. 
To reiterate basis, real facts: 
A huge terrorist attack in your capital is…wait for it… bad for any government.
A huge terrorist attack your enemy tried to warn you about is bad for any government.
A huge terrorist attack you blew off because you found out about it from your enemy is bad for any government.
Incompetence and frantic efforts to concoct a story post fact is bad for any government.
Stop…please…from treating these people as anything but the ineffective, callous, incompetent geezers they are.

Yes…the idea that Russians are going to say to themselves “Oh ****! We are no longer safe in Moscow….so let’s sign up and go to Ukraine!” is obvious bunk. The is a state level failure from a failing state. There’s no need to pretend otherwise. 

Ive had this map of the Fullujah Jolan District on my hard drive for over a year working on it little by little. It's still being tweaked. I would like your thoughts on it. Ive tried to keep it reasonably accurate and still make it playable. It is 1376m wide and 1440m deep. It included the rail station and the large cemetery. To do the cemetery and not having the typical burial facilities that Iraq used, I had to improvise by creating the tombs with the smallest single story buildings in the editor and submerging them into the ground. Then make them all look the same. It's not perfect but hopefully will give the impression of a large cemetery.
Since I am planning on making a campaign of the battle I would like some thoughts. I can use the entire map and have the action at battalion level combat with a lot of moving pieces, or cut the map in sections for a smaller scale action. Or a combination of both. Obviously for those who are not fans of MOUT combat this will not appeal too. But for those that do it should be a urban slugfest.
Anyway here is the link to some quick screenies so take a look and let me know what some thoughts are. I am still tweaking it, height adjustments, terrain tweaks etc.
http://www.mediafire.com/folder/39mh26tih7w6r9n,cqj2oksu1mq0qto,240ri57s14p8idt,139ayqn99wft6nn,p7f3aw7h5lzgqlf,np1izv5e5cedjwl,mya8xyjqraeq2dh,pbfsj6hdbubak8j,au74m03ubwqa3un,5dxj0x9q4weg9df,naszyrf0rttzksr,ec8mc02hkckglbp/shared
Thanks
Michael

People on reddit are claiming it was fake:
 
 

I would strongly suggest anyone who thinks this level of push/pull between the US and Ukrainian liaisons is excessively disfunctional should go back look at what it was like in the Allied high commands in WWI and WWII. Alliances are hard. Hard questions have to be asked and long term possibilities must be hashed out. Making the sausage always looks ugly and in war triply so. It's a sign of Ukrainian strength, not weakness, that the US clearly *isn't* calling the shots and a sign of US trust in the Ukrainian government that it isn't trying harder to do so.

First, US support has not completely broken down. $3 billion is being disbursed now and another $300 million is shortly to follow. In addition, while there is a deadlock now doesn't mean it will continue as long as Biden is in the WH and the Senate remains non-crazy. At this very moment, a motion to vacate has been tendered on Johnson and it's quite likely that the price of Dem support to keep him in place is going to be a clean vote on Ukraine aid. To say the "US does nothing" isn't just extremely not factual...it actually hurts your argument in DC because the MAGA folks can point to that sort of talk and say "See? Whatever we do is never going to be enough". I feel and sympathize with your frustration but the old saw about babies and bathwater applies.  
And to the original point, a big spike in energy prices *would* make the job of Ukraine aid deniers *easier*. It would be strategic malpractice to pretend otherwise. 

This is a conversation I've had with my dad (he's a philosophy professor). When is it fair to blame someone for their actions, vs when do the circumstances around the action (mental health, broken home, etc...) add up to the point where it is no longer fair to blame someone? My father considers himself a pragmatist, so it should come as no surprise that his answer is that you should direct moral blame against someone when it works. His view is that the purpose of moral blame is to change a person's behavior. Humans are generally social creatures, so having a bunch of other humans telling them that they shouldn't do a thing should generally make them less likely to do that thing again in the future. Healthy humans are usually very uncomfortable with a bunch of other humans strongly disapproving of their actions.
He uses a thermostat as an example. If the room is too cold, you adjust the thermostat. If the thermostat is broken, then adjusting it won't work. So there is no point in trying to adjust it. If someone does something that we think they shouldn't do, we leverage moral blame to get them to stop doing it (and to deter other people from doing it in the first place). But if a person's brain is broken to the point that moral blame is no longer effective at getting them to stop doing the thing they shouldn't do, then there is no point in blaming them for doing that thing (I believe our discussion at the time was mainly about mental health).
So, when do the circumstances around an action add up to the point that it's no longer fair to blame a person for their actions? According to my father, it's when the circumstances around the action add up to the point that no amount of moral blame will be effective in deterring someone from doing that thing again under similar circumstances.
So, by this logic, can we blame the population of a country for their actions? Maybe? I think there is some precedent for aggressive ad campaigns saying "you shouldn't do the thing!" getting the population of a country to do a thing at lower rates. I doubt there's much we can do to change the behavior of the Russian population, simply because I don't think western media has enough penetration into Russian society. In any case, moral blame is certainly a much fuzzier concept for populations than it is for individual people.

I agree with much of this which is why I disagree with the way in which the 'election' has been framed both as the thing itself and the interpretation of the result. As Anne Applebaum pointed out in the last day or so, much of Western media actually pretended that it was a plebiscite in the way we understand voting to mean. It clearly was not but rather a propaganda exercise in both legitimizing Putin at home and to a lesser extent delegitimizing voting abroad. To my mind, that's virtually the only real conclusion one can take from the event. 
What we do know about Russia is that it is an autocracy that suffers from the crisis of legitimacy that all autocracies labor beneath which is both why the war began and why, so far, it hasn't ended. But we also know that every Russian revolution has been the child of an unsuccessful war. If we are going to look at deep rooted cultural mores, I think I'd start there.

Ref economic grind:
 
 

Ok as we are talking about Elections PR Stunts this popped up and worth a read...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2014/05/05/putins-human-rights-council-accidentally-posts-real-crimean-election-results-only-15-voted-for-annexation/amp/
The article is from May 2014. I know I know going back a bit but when did the war start...
So for those thinking there was mass support for the annexation the actual figures don't back that up...
 
 
 
Anyway all a moot point as any Russian election is just a PR attempt to dupe the world...
 

This struck me at the start of the article..
 
So they make more from the crude and Ukraine is not targeting that production.
Certainly Russia is going to see more fuel shortages for its internal market but it is not clear cut that the drone attacks will do enough to shut down the energy market for Russia.
As the author says (he wrote article I guess before the 26th Jan) we will have to see how effective the repairs are.
 
I am hoping they are not as effective as Ukraine was in recovering from the attacks on their power grid.
It could be the smartest use of drones by Ukraine so far and perhaps have the biggest payback. (And Ukraine is already at genius level for use with the ships sunk...)
Fingers Crossed...

I read an interesting discussion with a Russian guy who had grown up in the USSR, with him being unable to understand how anyone would ever vote against whoever was in power. His thinking was that the president could order people to vote for him, and not doing so would be insubordination and get punished. And this worked all the way down the chain: officials at various levels, police, judiciary, election organisers, all follow their orders because not doing so would lead to punishment from above.
People tried to explain that in an established democracy it doesn't work like that. The fundamental difference is that (almost) everyone believes in the the rule of law. There are laws around how to hold fair elections, and anyone violating the laws to try and fix the result is very likely to face punishment. His counter was always "but why wouldn't the authorities just order people not to punish the rule breaking and punish the people trying to do things 'fairly'".  He couldn't seem to wrap his head around the idea that once there is a critical mass of people who follow the rule of law, anyone trying to break the law to fix an election is very much taking a big risk and on their own Anyone who might shield them from consequences becomes liable to consequences from higher up, up to an including the supreme court (or equivalent) and police who aren't under the power of politicians and protected from the consequences of following the law rather than the whims of the head of state.
So in an established democracy, enough people believe in the rule of law, following the law shields you from punishment, and anyone trying to subvert that is knowingly taking a risk that might well get them punished - even the people tyring to subvert the rule of law work on the assumption that the rule of law holds sway and that they are violating societal norms.
In Russia, from what this guy is saying, enough people believe that following orders from above  is what shields you from punishment, and following what the law says rather than what you are told to do is going to get you punished. Trying to follow the law and disobey the wishes of the president is what is violating societal norms, and is the same kind of conspiratorial risk-taking in Russia that trying to steal an election would be in an established democracy.
It was an interesting insight into his mindset that he just couldn't make the mental leap to understand how a society might function where everyone (or close enough to everyone to count) valued following the law more than following orders, and that was what protected people. He always fell back on "but what if someone punished them for that".
So yeah, democracy does kind of require a society built on the foundation  that democracy works and the rule of law reigns, and it is a self-sustaining system that functions very differently to the culture that the USSR and Russia had (and probably had before the USSR as well form what I gather)