1/ Russian strippers say that mobilisation has had an unexpected benefit for them – Moscow's 'inadequate' men have been sent to war, leaving them with a smaller but better-behaved clientele. ⬇️
2/ I've previously highlighted a report on how the war has impacted strip clubs in Moscow. It's been suggested before that the financial perfomance of strip clubs can be a leading indicator of imminent economic problems – so-called 'strippernomics'.
3/ The independent Russian SOTA media collective reports that the situation with Moscow's strip clubs is more complicated than earlier reports suggested. Customer numbers fell after the start of the war in February 2022 and partial mobilisation from September.
4/ However, this isn't all bad news, as strippers at a prestigious central Moscow strip club say that it's got rid of many of their unwanted poorly behaved customers. SOTA quotes one stripper:
5/ "We divide men into adequate and not so much. And to be honest, it's mostly the latter who are missing. They're probably at war right now.
6/ At the end of September and in October guys often came to us and said, 'That's it, tomorrow we have to fight, come on, dance for us.' But on the whole, it has become calmer to work. The most unpleasant customers now have no time for striptease."
7/ While revenues have fallen, SOTA reports, strip clubs have been able to make up the difference though a surge of customers arriving for their traditional pre-New Year strip club visit. /end
1/ Russian female convicts may soon be serving on the front lines in Ukraine, according to Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin. He has suggested that they could serve in sabotage units and as snipers, replicating their roles in World War II.
2/ Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Wegner, a member of the Sverdlovsk Region Legislative Assembly, has posted that he has been "approached by a group of women serving sentences in penal colony No. 6 [IK-6] in Nizhny Tagil, Sverdlovsk region.
3/ "They are ready to go to the zone of the special military operation as signallers, doctors, nurses in order to provide all possible assistance to our soldiers."
In response, Prigozhin has replied on the Telegram channel of his Concord Group: "I absolutely agree with you.
1/ Russia is attempting to substitute its own products in place of foreign-made specialist items, to which it has lost access to due to sanctions. However, a reported corruption scandal illustrates how hard this will likely be to achieve in practice. ⬇️
2/ The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reports that JSC Shvabe, a subsidiary of the state-owned defence conglomerate Rostec, was allocated funds to "develop, industrialise and bring to the market import-substituting medical products [made] from carbon composite materials".
3/ The funding was transferred to a subsidiary of JSC Shvabe, Shvabe-Karbon LLC (in which the founder of JSC Shvabe has a 51% share), which signed a contract with another contractor, Penza-based InCar-Spine LLC, to do research, development and technological work.
1/ The Russian Army is appealing to immigrants to join them to "fight Ukrainian Nazis" and "go down in history on the side of good ... with the opportunity to revive and remember the bonds between Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan." ⬇️
2/ The independent Russian media outlet SOTA reports that army recruiters have been seeking out migrants at Vykhino station in eastern Moscow, on the Moscow Metro's Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya line (7). They have been distributing leaflets encouraging migrants to join the army.
3/ The text of the leaflets being handed out to migrants who wish to volunteer for the war requires them to be aged between 18 and 40 years old, to be able to speak Russian and to meet certain fitness and educational criteria.
1/ The Wagner mercenary group has tightened up its physical fitness criteria for recruited convicts, according to the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel, after the rapid demise of the hundreds of "alcoholics and pensioners" it has recruited in the last few months. ⬇️
2/ VChK-OGPU, which appears to have good sources in the Russian security forces, has been reporting for some time on the recruitment activities of Wagner in Russian penal colonies. The channel reports:
3/ "In the last few days, representatives of Yevgeny Prigozhin have been touring the Saratov region penal colonies. Zeks [convicts] were also lined up on the parade ground, as in the first visit, where they were promised a pardon.
1/ A Ukrainian citizen mobilised into the Russian army has spoken of the extraordinarily high number of casualties among Wagner's mobilised convicts in eastern Ukraine. He says they are suffering three times as many dead as wounded. Many are infected with HIV and heptatitis. ⬇️
2/ The Ukrainian YouTuber Volodymyr Zoldin has interviewed a man named Vladimir Nikolaevich Saychuk, a Ukrainian citizen from Luhansk who has worked at a monastery in Crimea since 2010. He was taken prisoner by the Ukrainian army but agreed to be interviewed by Zoldin.
3/ Saychuk says he was forcibly mobilised after receiving a summons. 5 busloads of men were taken to Krasnodar in Russia on 3 November 2022 and then sent immediately to Luhansk in Ukraine on the following day. None were given a medical examination or any training.
1/ An organisation founded by the governor of Russia's Irkutsk region is urging citizens to root out Ukrainian spies by asking people to pronounce certain Russian placenames, on the assumption that only Russians can say them properly. ⬇️
2/ The 7x7 Horizontal Russia Telegram channel reports that billboards have appeared in Irkutsk with the slogan "Test for a spy: test a friend with one word" and a QR code.
3/ The code links to a post on the Telegram channel of the Zvezda Charitable Foundation, an initiative of the Governor of Irkutsk Oblast, Igor Kobzev. It describes how Ukrainians have identified Russians by asking them to say the word "palyanitsya".