Letter from Prague

I can't believe the prisoners would go for that willingly - they of all people would know how Russia treats people. "Recruiting" probably means "forcing" here, except for some murderers and rapists looking for a fix I guess.

It is interesting how much stuff gets Bayraktar'd on the sea versus the land. Is the Russian land-based air defense much better? Is it because on the sea they have to use only the long range one which can't target drones? Or are the TB2 operators on land just not releasing videos?

I wonder if the new long-range arty systems can change the air force situation. Could the Ukrainians do SEAD with HIMARS+drones or something? Or is that not long enough range?

I get it. Apologies if I was too aggressive.

When people talk of "the Russians" saying "no agreement with the Russians is possible" and "the Russians are leaving the Snake island" and "the Russians are running a secret mobilisation", they are talking about Russian government, Russian state and Russian mainstream culture of nationalism and superiority and imperial mindset, not about every individual person with Russian citizenship or heritage. Pretending it is the other way around - that people are making statement about how all people of Russian heritage carry monstrous genes or something - is common manipulation tactic that is trying to make criticism or Russia sound racist or something. You could see it in use right in this thread, where some guy chose to interpret someone saying "Russian Federation falling apart into smaller states would likely be best scenario for both safety of Eastern Europe and people currently living in Russian Federation" as "everybody here is promoting genocide of Russians". We all know that there is not evil gene in Russian DNA (and my friend who is a biologist focusing on evolution would tell you that the idea of "Russian DNA" is by itself nonsense). Posting "not all Russians" is only useful for Russia because it causes infighting on our side.

Belarussian citizens have started receiving conscription notices, local news outlet Zerkalo reported on June 30. https://english.nv.ua/nation/belarus-sends-out-conscription-notices-en-masse-50253394.html Any idea how reliable this news outlet is? If it is true, it's going to be interesting.

This will for sure be challenging diplomatic situation for EU - I can imagine Germany, France and Italy screaming for peace, but I can hardly imagine Poland, Baltic states and hopefully my country going along with it, since they know they're next and will see this as a betrayal. This is probably going to be the biggest challenge for EU yet. EDIT: but according to latest statements from Scholz and Macron, they also seem to be along for a ride and sending significant weapons now. Actually, France was sending weapons at the same time Macron was doing his "we must not humiliate Putin" standup comedy act, so who knows if Macros in not really in control or he was just playing good cop? And Scholz seems to finally listen to his people, so maybe Russians overplayed their hand and the "but we all want peace, right? we all want this all to go away, right?" part might not work that well.

Now that's a good use for that veto.

Treachery from within EU that will give Russia huge international PR boost and great internal political victory is exactly what we needed.

Ukraine has been capable of making things blow up quite far inside Russia for a while now. It started with Belgorod, now Rostov and Kursk. And while they currently have other things to do, long-term Ukraine might be better at manufacturing and delivering cruise missiles than sanctioned and brain-drained Russia. This is another interesting escalation angle. In the beginning a lot of people were saying that Ukraine is disadvantaged because it can't strike back into Russia, but now it became new normal - including not just purely military targets like ammo dumps and airfields but also industry. And nobody bats an eye anymore. I can perfectly well imagine that if Russia retreats behind borders but keeps up its terror attacks, the world will collectively shrug whenever Russian factory or power plant or oil rig explodes.

I think that "fixing Russia" would be very difficult. I think for that you would need people who are at least somewhat patriots, but aren't crazy nationalists and imperialists. To help turn a country around, you need to believe that it is possible to fix it. And you need to believe that it is worth to fix it. Have some kind of patriotism where you actually truly think it can be turned into good place to live, to something to be proud of. That it can be improved. But Russian patriots, at least the ones you read online, seem more interested in how their country can destroy, conquer and subjugate, not in how their country could be made better. There are of course Russians who aren't crazy bloodthirsty nationalists, but from what I've seen, those have mostly given up on Russia and fled either long ago, or after this all started - at least the few ones I know personally, my employer contracts lot of IT work to EPAM and I've seen like ten pretty good IT dudes and ladies pack their things and move away in March. In short, it seems to me that the type of Russians who could turn Russia around have already given up on Russia and left. EDIT: you can't improve squat with "my neighbour has a cow, instead of wishing I also had a cow, I wish his cow dies" thinking. EDIT2: but I am in really dark mood today, so take my rambling with a grain of salt

Given his stance on Crimea and Donbas before 24th Feb, Navalny already is new Putin, he's just not in power yet. ... No, I'm sure Kraze is right - Ukraine and Yanukovich proves that a dictator will be overthrown when people don't like him enough. It immediately put into question any dictatorship around the world, past, present and future - showing if not proving, that dictators that don't get overthrown are actually doing what people want or at least are apathetic enough. It is pretty bleak view of humanity of course. ... Russia getting away with this by Putin dying and Russia continuing with new leader without really changing anything, would be a terrible result. Even if their army will be in tatters and economy destroyed, they would still have nukes and they will still shoot down airliners, fund despicable political parties and manipulate social media to destroy democracies worldwide, assassinate people abroad and everything else they are doing. I'm beginning to think that Russia falling apart as Galeev suggested in a bloody civil war might be the best case scenario for everyone except Russia. Which is pretty bleak thing to hope for.

This is such a good example of psychological projection that you get points for comedy value. Hyped up loser? Remind me who was supposed to be second strongest army in the world, and is now second strongest army in Ukraine? When you lose your job of online troll and get sent to war to die, be sure to tell your wife to bring her boyfriend to your funeral, okay? EDIT: I know I shouldn't feed the troll, sorry, couldn't resist.

New video from Perun addressing some of the fake news and also general situation.

He also had quite a few people put into gulags, tortured and murdered, and caused trouble for EU when his ****ery with immigrants served as advertising campaign for various far-right parties - who are in turn often on Putin's payroll. Oh and airplane piracy. He's definitely a good candidate for hanging from a lamppost.

I'm not sure the Russia has the strength to execute on that. They might have enough soldiers (or they might not!), but do they have the "leadership capacity" (for lack of better term) to fight Ukraine at the same time? Especially as that would probably make the various Belarusian Legions say "sorry guys, we're going home" and what would Ukraine do then, say "sure" or "sure, take some javelins with you"? Would Belarusian army join the Russians, or the Legions, or stand aside or all of the above, depending on each individual soldier? But I might be too optimistic as always.

But look at it from Russian point of view: Lithuania is obviously Russian territory. But it is full of uppity non-Russian serfs who should know their place, but instead they resist and pretend they have a country! The audacity! I'm curious how that would work. Lithuania is currently enforcing the EU sanctions. But as Steve said, they can also chose to close borders however they want - there are limits within the EU, but I'm pretty sure they don't owe Russia or Belarus access. They could actually turn it into a fully closed border and if Russia calls that blockade and wants to test Article 5, they can (we know they won't).

Now would be a really good time for a revolution in Belarus.

Yes. It is incredible what the Russians have gotten away with until now. No more. One thing I was thinking is that HIMARS would be a very good choice to deal with Russian air defense. Every blown up piece of air defense opens up new posiblities. I think the missiles are too small to be intercepted by air defense, but could ATACAMS be? It doesn't look that much smaller than Tochka. Also, my friend was claiming that even though the US gave Ukraine only the short range missiles for now, they can be turned into the longer range ones by "putting in more fuel". I assume that is nonsense, not only are the missiles too smart and would have to be recalibrated, etc, I would also expect them to use solid fuel. But I'd be glad for professional (or non-professional but expert, heh) opinion.

I think that's the fuel, not secondaries. It looks like it went towards the camera and hit a field, not the launcher.

Nice to see (formerly) our helicopters doing some work! (Unless I'm misunderstanding, my Polish isn't exactly good.)

I'm looking forward to the inevitable drone video of them impacting.

Yeah I'm curious as well.

Here it is: https://www.palba.cz/viewtopic.php?t=5971 https://www.palba.cz/viewtopic.php?t=5972 https://www.palba.cz/viewtopic.php?t=5974 It is called "podpraporshchik Argonantus in war that wasn't" and it's written by two guys - Argonantus who was conscript tank commander serving sometime in 1980 (made commander because he was conscripted after finishing college) and Pátrač or Neferit - logistics and I think formerly recon career officer of Czechoslovak People's Army. It might be sometimes confusingly written because there's sections that are written as "this is how it was" but sometimes this turns into a dialogue where one of them disagrees or describes different experience. I skimmed how it looks on google translate and it seems somewhat readable, but if you need a paragraph explained, let me know. (One thing I noticed is Google calls podpraporcik either lieutenant or lt. col., but of course he was neither). At least there's cute hand-drawn pictures of tank tactics. Hope it helps!

Yeah - those were career soldiers and officers of the pre-revolution military, so I assume they went through some kind of ideological selection - Soviet haters would probably not last there for long. The Czechoslovak People's Army had lot of oversight from Moscow directly. It felt they were more proud about their jobs rather than actual Soviet believers. The job was still to kill Germans and Austrians once the Moscow says so, though.