1/ An exchange of fire in the occupied Ukrainian village of Urzuf, in which several Russian soldiers and bystanders were reportedly killed, is said to have been started by drunken Chechen soldiers fighting drunken convict soldiers.
2/ According to the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel, which quotes an apparently leaked report, "drunken criminals of the Ministry of Defence, assigned to a military unit based in Chechnya, and an equally drunken military policeman confronted each other with weapons."
3/ It reports that the incident took place in the morning of 12 August at the Miami Club in Urzuf, near Mariupol.
4/ "Soldiers from unit 71718 [70th Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment from Shali, Chechnya] were resting there, mostly former prisoners who had signed liberation contracts with the Ministry of Defence ...
5/ "Two companies sat next to each other. The first, natives of the southern regions. The second, fellow soldiers from the company attached to [the Chechen battalion] Akhmat. According to testimony, the latter drank a bottle of whiskey for three.
6/ "At the establishment's closing time (around 4 a.m.), a conflict broke out between the guests in uniform – Sergei Alikhanov, 25, a resident of the Kaliningrad region, who had been convicted of theft, and Sadrutdin Akayev, 30, a native of Dagestan, ...
7/ ... a military policeman (formerly of Buynaksk, military unit 63354 [136th Motorized Rifle Brigade]). In the fight the convicts were more convincing. But this was not the end of the conflict.
8/ "The denouement was a street scene during which Akayev opened fire with an AK-74. Alikhanov was killed on the spot. A fellow soldier from his company, fellow countryman and also convicted for theft, 26-year-old Vladimir Yevseenko (pictured), tried to stand up for Sergei.
9/ "He tried to kick the automatic rifle with his foot, but was wounded in the thigh, shin and arm. Akayev continued firing indiscriminately at everything he saw.
10/ "At the sound of the automatic rifle fire, the emergency response team of unit 71718 came running, and Akayev opened fire on the team as well. As a result, the shooter was killed.
11/ "Two medical teams travelled to the scene and found two men dead and one wounded man was taken to a local hospital in a state of alcoholic intoxication." /end
1/ Why do Russian soldiers so often try to freeze or play dead when a drone approaches, in the apparent hope that it won't notice them? Russian warbloggers explain that instructors teach them to do so, based on outdated and incorrect assumptions. ⬇️
2/ As Svyatoslav Golikov puts it, the tactic reflects "the instructor sect of witnesses of freezing, which gave birth to the heresy of the pillars of salt, [which] is now also churning out dead possums...
3/ "If soldiers have been frozen like statues on a postcard time after time for months, it means they were fed a single instruction: freeze if you see or hear a kamikaze. Regardless of any circumstances whatsoever. Just freeze.
1/ In fact, not even North Korea does this. The last country to name a warship after a living leader was the Soviet Union with the 1982 Kiev-class aircraft carrier Leonid Brezhnev. This was during the final phase of the Brezhnev cult of personality.
2/ Even for authoritarian states and dictatorships, this is highly unusual. The Kriegsmarine never named a major ship after Adolf Hitler. Imperial Japan had a major taboo against naming ships after living people. No Soviet warship was named after Stalin.
3/ As far as I'm aware no country has *ever* named an entire class of warships after a living leader - not Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, North Korea, Communist China, or the Soviet Union. So this would be genuinely new ground in terms of state-sponsored sycophancy.
1/ A Russian soldier says that only the "marginalised" – drug addicts, the homeless and the destitute – are joining the Russian army these days . He says that the war continues because people in Russia profit from it and that its aim is to "dominate and humiliate" Ukraine. ⬇️
2/ Former Wagner soldier Ruslan from Dagestan, who is now serving under contract to the Russian Ministry of Defence, tells a friend that many soldiers lack motivation because the goals and reasons for what's happening are unclear to them.
3/ "You ask questions that I don’t have answers to, because even when you ask yourself these questions, you ask yourself: why the fuck am I here? You're trying to find an answer in your head, but there's no answer."
1/ A shadow war is being fought over the Russian army's access to Starlink. The Russians face a constant battle with Starlink itself and Ukrainian hackers deactivating their terminals, and obstruction from the Russian customs service holding up grey imports of Starlink devices.⬇️
2/ Starlink is banned from being exported to Russia, but can be obtained unofficially through grey imports from Central Asia and China. Most Starlink terminals used by Russian forces are obtained by volunteers and shipped across Russia's southern land borders.
3/ However, they are vulnerable to disruption by Starlink itself, which periodically disables terminals located in Russian-held territory, they are targeted by hackers, and the very slow and cumbersome Russian customs process holds up imports for long periods.
1/ When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the town of Irpin, just west of Kyiv, was the closest that Russia reached to the capital. Its soldiers targeted Christian facilities in the town, destroying buildings and burning Ukrainian-language Bibles in the street. ⬇️
2/ One of the buildings targeted by the Russians was the Field Ministries Training Centre of @MissionEurasia, an international Christian organisation based in Wheaton, Illinois. The group trains missionaries throughout the former Soviet Union and provides humanitarian aid.
3/ After the Russian army reached Irpin on 6 March 2022, the Mission Eurasia training centre was reportedly taken over by Russian special forces, who used it as a barracks and stacked Bibles to barricade windows.
1/ 790 Russian soldiers from a single unit have died at Pokrovsk, according to a Russian combat medic, with another 900 having deserted according to leaked figures. Another soldier from the same unit says that losses are running at 80-90%. ⬇️
2/ The unnamed medic says that she is serving with the 39th Separate Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade (military unit 35390) at Pokrovsk. She describes how she was on the front line with "young guys" aged 19 or 20:
3/ "They were running around, and we had dugouts, I think. And I say No, no, fuck that. They ran, in short, into a Ukrainian minefield and it just tore them apart. Well, it's not like they were 200, dead, none of them died. Well, they were just blown up really badly.