1/ Citizens of the puppet 'Donetsk People's Republic' (DNR) are complaining en masse that they are not being paid their promised compensation for deaths and injuries caused to local residents by the war. The DNR itself admits that it owes more than 38 billion rubles ($467m). ⬇️
2/ Relatives and soldiers of the DNR's armed forces – which have been decimated due to being used as so-called 'meat waves' against Ukrainian positions – have been posting numerous videos complaining about the lack of compensation payments and appealing to Putin for help.
3/ In one video, a wife says: "Starting from September 2022, funding for lump-sum compensation for wounded and killed DNR servicemen for 2022 was terminated. We submitted documents to the commission of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy of the DNR.
4/ "There are a lot of us. We applied to all authorities. From the presidential administration to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation.
5/ "All our appeals are forwarded to the government of the DNR, which redirects them to the Ministry of Labour, and the answers come from there that there is no funding. We write to the deputies and there are no results."
6/ According to the wife of one wounded soldier, his unit "collected all the necessary documents promptly, the medical examiner issued a conclusion of a severe injury.
7/ "In November we submitted all the documents for payment, and for seven months there have been no payments, the allowance during treatment is 30,000 rubles ($371). The answer is the same, there is no funding."
8/ People seeking compensation have complained to the DNR state prosecutor's office, which admitted that an audit had "established the fact of lack of funding for this type of payment, which requires an amount of more than 38 billion rubles."
9/ It's very unlikely that the DNR will be able to pay the sums it owes, as its finances are precarious, its economy is a mess and it's kept afloat only by Russian government funding.
10/ The Russian government has shown little concern previously for the welfare of DNR soldiers and their families, so there seems to be little likelihood that the relatives' video appeals will achieve much. /end
1/ Ukraine's systematic destruction of Wildberries warehouses across Russia should be understood as an act of psychological warfare intended to remind Russians of the ruinous 1990s, argues RIA Novosti correspondent Sergei Shilov in a lengthy commentary. ⬇️
2/ Writing on the 'Witnesses of Bayraktar' Telegram channel that Shilov co-manages with RT correspondent Alexander Karchenko, Shilov says that Ukraine aims "to "flood" Russia with chaos" by striking at "a more vulnerable target: the public psyche."
3/ "The operation’s primary objective is not merely to manufacture a crisis—though that is certainly part of their aim. Above all, they seek to shape the perception of the civilian population.
1/ Does the Russian soldier in your life need something to entertain him? A Russian entrepreneur has come up with the perfect answer: a board game called Silapoly which features 'Uncle Vova', the Oreshnik missile, the FSB, and anything else needed to control Russia. ⬇️
2/ Silapoly is an adaptation of the classic board game Monopoly that relocates the action and game mechanics for a (satirical?) depiction of modern Russia. The player must "build an empire, manage money, and fight for power."
3/ According to the product description, the game "combines strategy, economic mechanics, politics, history, and the atmosphere of modern Russia". Like in Monopoly, players are dealt cards and purchase assets to gain the upper hand.
1/ It's time for another purge of the Russian army, along the lines of Stalin's Great Purge of 1937, says Russian warblogger 'Two Majors'. He castigates the army's culture of shifting responsibility and performative work for its systematic failures in Ukraine. ⬇️
2/ The Russian army's bureaucratic culture has created a "system of reports, legal squabbles, and endless shifting of responsibility in military affairs". However, he says, it "has outlived its usefulness and is directly damaging the military sphere of the Russian Federation."
3/ "You can fulfill all the demands of senior staff and immediate superiors, receive awards, and be in good standing, while being an outright scoundrel when it comes to defending the country.
1/ Following political pressure, Wildberries' CEO Tatyana Kim – Russia's richest woman – says that the company will compensate its sellers for their losses despite a recent change of its terms and conditions that absolved it of liability. ⬇️
2/ Colossal quantities of goods – likely hundreds of millions of items – have been destroyed in Ukraine's recent drone strikes on several Wildberries warehouses. Forbes Russia estimates the total damage so far to be as much as 283–303 billion rubles ($3.60–3.86 billion).
3/ Some individual traders have sustained huge losses. One company alone, Russian clothing brand Finn Flare, says it has lost goods worth over 100 million rubles ($1.28 million) in the fire caused by the attack on the Wildberries warehouse in Elektrostal.
1/ The sight of more burning warehouses has prompted angry denunciations from Russian warbloggers of the "bureaucratic pimples" who are allegedly sabotaging air defences. Anti-drone mobile fire teams, in particular, are said to be in disarray. ⬇️
"Today, the enemy attacked the Wildberries warehouses again. Successfully—for the enemy, that is. It appears we’ve lost two major logistics terminals at once: in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk."
3/ "There are plenty of photos, but I won’t be posting them. Things are just as bad for the enemy: our side didn’t take it lying down and, judging by the information available, have wiped out two similarly large terminals in Odesa and Mykolaiv.
1/ Ukraine's increasingly devastating attacks on Wildberries warehouses in Russia are intended to dismantle Russia's e-commerce economy, disrupt logistics, and drive up prices even further, say Russian bloggers. They are calling for urgent action. ⬇️
2/ Roman Alekhin sees the writing on the wall for Wildberries:
"1. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have already inflicted extreme damage and will most likely continue to do so.
3/ "2. The platform economy will not perish with the collapse of Wildberries. The platform economy is not about mega-warehouses, but about mega-management.