[WonderMomma]

"Weapons and ammunition seized by security forces in Miami (USA) and transferred to the needs of the defense forces of Ukraine.

The Cobray CM-11/Nine 9mm carbine, AR-15 rifles (including the Smith & Wesson M&P 15), AK platform rifles and pistols (Glock, HS, Beretta 92FS and others) can be seen."

#smallarms








VIDEO:
"The WSJ did a good video visualization of the British Storm Shadow"

[WonderMomma]

Source: https://www.politico.eu/article/ukra...es-russia-war/

Ukraine’s plan if Russia assassinates Zelenskyy

A Russian assassination would deprive Ukraine’s war effort of one of its most valuable assets.

BY JAMIE DETTMER
AUGUST 1, 2023 4:01 AM CET


WASHINGTON — When Volodymyr Zelenskyy was asked whether he was worried by Russian attempts to kill him, he answered he couldn’t afford to be.

“If I were thinking about it constantly, I would just shut myself down, very much like Putin now who doesn’t leave his bunker,” the Ukrainian leader said in an interview with CNN last month. “Of course, my bodyguards should think how to prevent this from happening, and this is their task. I don’t think about it.”

While it’s a question Zelenskyy understandably isn’t eager to contemplate, it’s also one his supporters at home and abroad can’t afford to ignore. Ever since he rebuffed an evacuation offer by telling his would-be American rescuers “I need ammunition, not a ride,” the Ukrainian president has played a key role in mustering international support for the fight against Russia.

No wonder Russian lawmakers and ultra-nationalist military bloggers have formed a chorus demanding he be targeted. Zelenskyy’s status as a symbol of what the West sees as a righteous fight, his ability to beg and berate his allies until he gets his way, his willingness to brazen his way to frontline photo ops and parliamentary appearances — these have painted him with a bullseye.

A few weeks after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, a top Zelenskyy adviser, Mikhail Podolyak, disclosed there had been at least a dozen serious assassination attempts on his boss by Russian sabotage and intelligence teams, including Chechens and Wagner mercenaries attempting to breach Kyiv’s heavily guarded and monitored government quarter.

Zelenskyy himself reportedly opened a Zoom meeting with U.S. senators shortly after the invasion saying it might well be the last time they would see him alive.

Clearly, the risks now are less than they were in the first chaotic weeks of the war when Russian tanks were bearing down on the Ukrainian capital and few thought the embattled nation would survive. But no one in the Ukrainian government or the country’s parliament doubts the danger remains high.

In March, there were renewed calls for Zelenskyy to be killed after Ukrainian-backed, anti-Putin Russian saboteurs stormed over the border and invaded two Russian villages in Bryansk oblast. Lawmaker Mikhail Delyagin said the “only normal response” to the incident is the “immediate elimination of Zelenskyy.”

Because of the threat looming over his life, Zelenskyy’s overseas visits are planned with the greatest secrecy. Ukrainian officials were left fuming last February when a planned visit to Brussels was leaked three days before his expected arrival, jeopardizing his trip. Similarly, Bulgaria’s government fretted a trip could be canceled last month after details appeared in the press.

And, of course, the Kremlin has a terrifying track record in assassination operations. Think Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence officer who defected to the United Kingdom, and was poisoned with radiation in 2006, or the failed 2018 Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a British double agent in Salisbury, England.

Constitutional succession
Given the stakes, and the risk, it is little wonder Ukrainian officials tend to brush off requests to discuss what would happen were Russia to succeed — or they decline to go on the record, worrying the topic appears far too macabre.

And yet, despite the reluctance to publicly engage with the question, there is a plan in place, according to interviews with Ukrainian officials and lawmakers as well as analysts. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said as much: “The Ukrainians have plans in place — that I’m not going to talk about or get into any details on — to make sure that there is what we would call ‘continuity of government’ one way or another,” he told CBS news last year.



Formally, under the constitution, the line of succession is clear. “When the president is unable to fulfill his duties, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine [the Ukrainian parliament] takes over his responsibilities,” said Mykola Knyazhytsky, an opposition lawmaker from the western city of Lviv. “Therefore, there would be no power vacuum.”

The chairman of the Verkhovna Rada — Ruslan Stefanchuk, a member of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party — doesn’t have an especially high trust rating in opinion polls. It is around 40 percent, less than half of Zelenskyy’s. And he’s not popular with opposition lawmakers.

“But I don’t think it matters,” said Adrian Karatnycky, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “There’s a strong leadership team and I think we would see collective government,” he added.

The governing council would most likely consist of Stefanchuk as the figurehead, along with Andrii Yermak, the former movie producer and lawyer who’s the head of the office of the president, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Valery Zaluzhny would remain as the country’s top general.

Karatnycky said he would hope to see a role for TV personality Serhiy Prytula, who now runs major charitable initiatives and has a sky-high public trust rating.

“The country has reached a point of very substantial solidarity and national unity, so if something terrible happened to Zelenskyy it would not be as decisive as you might think,” said Karatnycky, author of “Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the Russian War.”

He noted that Ukraine has created “a well-honed” administrative, military and diplomatic machine. “I don’t want to say that Zelenskyy is hardly irrelevant to this,” he added. “But I think the country’s unity is the indispensable thing.”

System shock
History offers some reassurance, too. Kremlin plotters would do well to read a data-driven paper written by academics Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken for America’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) on the effect on institutions and war of the 59 assassinations of national leaders that took place between 1875 and 2004. “Assassinations of autocrats produce substantial changes in the country’s institutions, while assassinations of democrats do not,” they concluded.

“Assassination has never changed the history of the world,” British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli confidently pronounced weeks after President Abraham Lincoln was shot dead while watching a play at Washington D.C.’s Ford’s Theater. The assassination indeed had little effect in reversing the reforms of his administration.

In the archetypal example probably at the forefront of Disraeli’s mind on assassination not diverting the course of history, Julius Caesar’s murderers failed in their goal of saving the doomed Roman Republic from dictatorship, but instead only triggered the civil wars that accelerated the seemingly inevitable transition to the imperial system of the Caesars. Admittedly, of course, half a century after Disraeli made his remark, the extraordinary impact of the assassination in June 1914 of the Hapsburg heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was felt across Europe for decades.

Ukraine’s situation is, naturally, particular. With its strengthening democratic institutions, it is far from the decaying Roman Republic, whose days were almost certainly numbered whether the Ides of March slaying was successful or not. And Europe is already at war.

Though Zelenskyy’s death would be a psychological shock, Karatnycky said to gauge the likely impact you need to consider how Ukraine has transformed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.



Putin’s assault inadvertently helped to forge a new strong sense of Ukrainian nationhood and shape “confident institutions,” he said. The public is united “in terms of its aims,” he added.

“It is important to remember that the key factors in Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression are the resilience of the armed forces, the skill of its command and victories on the front, said Knyazhytsky, the opposition lawmaker. “This is what matters most in terms of Ukraine’s political stability.”

Weakest link
If there’s a weak link in the scenario it’s probably not in Ukraine but among its allies.

Ukrainians have a more balanced view of Zelenskyy, seeing both strengths and weaknesses. While he has been praised for his fine wartime leadership, he has also been criticized for missteps — notably for failing to better prepare for an invasion he thought unlikely. His shutting out of opposition lawmakers now and his thin-skinned brusqueness with even constructive criticism have been noted, as has his tendency to blame others for mistakes.

The international media, by contrast, has been spellbound by Zelenskyy’s charismatic appeal and enthralled by the simple story of David versus Goliath. The Ukrainian president’s transformation from disappointing peacetime leader to — in the hyperbolic words of French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy — “a new, young and magnificent founding father” of the free world, has been startling.

His rhetoric and oratory have captured the hearts of audiences from Washington to London and Brussels to Warsaw. His elimination would likely leave many of those same people stunned and unsure of what to do next. It could add to pressure for negotiations and compromise.

Nonetheless, this isn’t a one-man war. And in Ukraine at least, few doubt that other leaders, just as worthy, would rise to the occasion as they have done since the invasion.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk, a Ukrainian entrepreneur, dismissed the possibility of a Russian assassination as in “the realm of alternative history.” But he said if it did happen, Ukraine wouldn’t miss a beat.

“Zelenskyy is doing his leadership role well in these challenging times,” he said. “However, the sentiment among the absolute majority of Ukrainians is that we will never give up, we will never submit to Russia.”

[WonderMomma]

"The Polish Ministry of Defense reported that on Tuesday evening two Belarusian helicopters conducting exercises near the border violated Polish airspace - Minsk had previously informed Warsaw about these exercises.

In response to the incident, the Polish Defense Minister ordered an increase in the number of soldiers on the border and the deployment of additional forces and means, including combat helicopters.

Poland also informed NATO about the incident and decided to summon the Charge d'Affaires of Belarus to the Foreign Ministry to explain the incident.

Local OSINT researchers analyzing open data found that the helicopters flew from Belarus to Poland near the village of Grudki, went about three kilometers into the country, turned around and flew over Belovezha."

[WonderMomma]

"Richard Moore, head of the British foreign intelligence service MI6, gave an interview (https://www.politico.eu/article/007-...told-politico/) to Politico.

He said that there were disputes and quarrels among Iranian leaders over the supply of drones to Russia.

Moore positively assessed the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine, noting that over the past month, Kyiv has regained more territory than the Russians captured in a year. He attributed the slow advance to the cautiousness of Ukrainian troops.

Moore acknowledged that Western countries do not want to "humiliate" Putin, but are confident that he must withdraw from Ukraine."



"If you have seen a photo of the alleged mercenary Wagner on the Polish border online, you should know that it is photoshopped

Russians are already spreading a new fake."

#confirmedfake

[Faust]

Ukrainian Troops Trained by the West Stumble in Battle

Ukraine’s army has for now set aside U.S. fighting methods and reverted to tactics it knows best.


The first several weeks of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive have not been kind to the Ukrainian troops who were trained and armed by the United States and its allies.

Equipped with advanced American weapons and heralded as the vanguard of a major assault, the troops became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships. Units got lost. One unit delayed a nighttime attack until dawn, losing its advantage. Another fared so badly that commanders yanked it off the battlefield altogether.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/u...-training.html

We all saw this through the various media that either got leaked or accidentally posted by Ukraine itself. It is just that nobody is allowed to say it. Well the NYT is protesting the narrative. We have the Ukrainian official woman (don’t know her function anymore) saying the counteroffensive is a miracle, I already identified this as obvious propaganda, but now we have the NYT confirm my assessment.

[WonderMomma]

"The aerial scout of the 93rd brigade , signed as Your friend Stus , publishes the remains of the Russian "Lancet" just found in one of the landings near Bakhmut.

Interestingly, the motor from him turned out to be of Czech production, namely by Model Motors . The Russians decided to "hide" the markings and simply covered the motor with a layer of reinforced tape."




VIDEO:
"Atmospheric video from large-scale exercises at the training ground ✌️ of the 58th brigade."

[Roosta]

Originally Posted by WonderMomma ↗

"Weapons and ammunition seized by security forces in Miami (USA) and transferred to the needs of the defense forces of Ukraine.

The Cobray CM-11/Nine 9mm carbine, AR-15 rifles (including the Smith & Wesson M&P 15), AK platform rifles and pistols (Glock, HS, Beretta 92FS and others) can be seen."

#smallarms

Attachment 1198953

Attachment 1198954

Attachment 1198955


VIDEO:
"The WSJ did a good video visualization of the British Storm Shadow"

Good Documentary.

[RedactedKaos]

Has anything materialized from the Polish border violation?

[WonderMomma]

Originally Posted by RedactedKaos ↗

Has anything materialized from the Polish border violation?

This is the only thing I've seen about it. But I haven't sifted through everything yet. Still catching up.

"The Polish Ministry of Defense reported that on Tuesday evening two Belarusian helicopters conducting exercises near the border violated Polish airspace - Minsk had previously informed Warsaw about these exercises.

In response to the incident, the Polish Defense Minister ordered an increase in the number of soldiers on the border and the deployment of additional forces and means, including combat helicopters.

Poland also informed NATO about the incident and decided to summon the Charge d'Affaires of Belarus to the Foreign Ministry to explain the incident.

Local OSINT researchers analyzing open data found that the helicopters flew from Belarus to Poland near the village of Grudki, went about three kilometers into the country, turned around and flew over Belovezha."


And just some analysis.

"Vadym Denysenko, the executive director of the UIF @ Future_ui, shares his thoughts on:

What do Niger and Belarusian helicopters over Poland have in common?

Russia is trying to create two new points of tension in the world: one on the Polish-Belarusian border and the other in Niger.

The goal is the same: to distract the West from Ukraine, reduce weapons supplies and try to force the West and Ukraine to negotiate.

As for Belarus:

Russians might launch provocations from a foreign country (Belarus) without a serious military conflict. There could be border provocations, without raising the stakes, and the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons.

Lukashenko's logic is probably as follows:
1. The expectation that there will be no "great war";
2. This situation is a chance for him to try to mediate, to "help" the West, in order to get some security guarantees for himself.

The statement of a US Senator that Wagner's appearance in Poland is tantamount to activating NATO Article 5 is very important in this context.

So far, it looks like we are at the very beginning of this conflict and it seems the conflict could escalate over the next few months.

The probability of serious military confrontation is low, but the threat of nuclear weapons is high. At the same time, Ukraine will have to keep quite large reserves in the north and northwest.

Niger produces almost a third of the EU's uranium consumption (primarily for France). The junta's announcement that it is stopping uranium exports to Europe and France's preparation of a ground operation (there is a French military base in the country, after all) creates a rather difficult situation, especially for the French. For France, getting involved in the war in Niger, against the backdrop of neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso stating that they view the ground operation as an invasion of their territory, could mean getting involved in a serious conflict in a large part of Africa.

As for Russia, only Wagner's forces will probably be able to fight there, which is an advantage for us. Putin's logic in such conflicts is likely very simple: he provides some military assistance and urges the leader to hold on to till the end(the logic worked with Maduro and Assad). Ultimately, he needs to win time and create a field for raising stakes, so he is shaking up the situation. Now, a lot will depend on the French army and its readiness to resolve the conflict quickly.

To summarise: we can assume that Russia has added two more points to the hunger games - the nuclear power plant and nuclear blackmail to try to raise the stakes. Indirectly, this suggests that the autumn window for negotiations is almost closed. One of the important moments will be the announcement or non-announcement of mobilisation under the guise of aid to Belarus. True, a mirror gesture should be made by Lukashenko.

However, in any case, we need to prepare for at least a few very important things:

〰 A major information war will probably begin in the West. The essence of this war comes down to the formula: "why should we give so much to Ukraine, we need to think about our own security", especially against the backdrop of the elections in Poland;

〰 Ukraine needs to prepare more actively for a hard winter now.

Ukraine needs to be prepared for Russia's announcement of a new wave of mobilization now (Putin has time until October, then he will be busy with elections)."

[WonderMomma]

I called this shit!
"Apparently, Evgeny Prigozhin is running for president in Russia 2024

His commercial says, "He prevented the deaths of thousands" (Referring to his failed coup)"


VIDEO:
"Ukrainians of the 110th Brigade operating the RM-70 Vampire MLRS provided by the Czech allies."

English subs

#mlrs