[DrKGSmiff]

Originally Posted by WonderMomma ↗

I found this video posted yesterday. I almost can't deal with this guy mispronouncing reconnaissance. Cringe. Don't know if this shows the flir image of the camera but apparently their up to almost $200k each.

I’ll tell you why “he” does it, but I have to apologize in advance because, once you hear it, you can’t unhear it, and it’s happening more frequently every day.

It’s AI narrated.

The dead giveaway, and this is the cringe that I apologize for you not being able to unhear in the future, is how it handles math and symbols we use in prose.

For example, the first time it says the price, it read $195,000, but it said “dollar one hundred ninety five thousand”.

Later, when it’s describing its speed, it says “…it travels up to 23.4 kilometers slash H”.

[WonderMomma]

Yeah, I wondered if it was AI... but his voice didn't sound AI-ish. Scary.

[WonderMomma]

Related posts:
https://www.documentingreality.com/f...ml#post8015507
https://www.documentingreality.com/f...ml#post8015990

"Russian media reported that 8 people were missing after an explosion at a military plant in the Moscow region, while Russian channels reported that 10 people were found dead under the rubble.

The Baza telegram channel emphasizes that there is a "high probability that the death toll could rise to 15 or even more" as the rubble has not yet been fully dismantled.

The Zagorsk Optical-Mechanical Plant was involved in the development of a new generation stealth bomber, according to the Russian news outlet Agentstvo."

[WonderMomma]

from UA MoD:

#govtroll


A video made by on of my Ukrainian sources who lives in Kyiv.

What do Ukrainians think about western military aid? Recorded in Lviv on 8 August 2023. Corruption in Ukraine is a common theme.

Below is a chapter list with the occupations and ages of all the participants.

00:00 - Software tester, 59 y.o.
00:32 - Logistics manager, 40 y.o.
01:17 - Real estate agent, 23 y.o.
01:46 - Pensioner, 77 y.o.
02:05 - Entrepreneur, 42 y.o.
03:40 - Programmer, 33 y.o.
03:52 - Assistant manager in light industry, 22 y.o.
04:32 - Entrepreneur, 30 y.o.
05:33 - Student, 17 y.o.
05:49 - Philosopher, 23 y.o.
06:59 - Logistics manager, 40 y.o.
07:19 - Software tester, 59 y.o.
07:47 - Programmer, 33 y.o.
07:54 - Entrepreneur, 42 y.o.
08:43 - Assistant manager in light industry, 22 y.o.
09:08 - Entrepreneur, 30 y.o.
09:36 - Philosopher, 23 y.o.

[Guns N' Coffee]

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/what-did-russi...ary-manoeuvres

What did Russia learn about the West from its previous military manoeuvres?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reveals a change in the approach of the Russian armed forces, as well as an uncompromising political approach. This reflects lessons learnt from military operations over two decades and observing others.

The Kremlin has used its military power on a number of occasions since 1991 to achieve strategic and foreign policy goals. In the process it has achieved a number of firsts.

The 1994-1996 Chechen conflict was Russia’s first post-Soviet war. In 2008, Georgia was Russia’s first war of the era against a foreign state. And Syria was portrayed as Russia’s first western-style intervention, fought as much as possible at distance, either through the use of long-range precision strike or proxy forces.

One of President Vladimir Putin’s first priorities on taking power in 2000 was to halt the perceived decline of the Russian armed forces, which have undergone a comprehensive programme of reform and modernisation. There was a clear transformation between the 1994-96 Chechen conflict and Russia’s ongoing operations in Syria and Ukraine.

Lessons from Georgia
The 2008 war with Georgia saw the Russian armed forces fight a conventional war, after years of conflict against insurgents seeking independence from Russia in Chechnya and the north Caucasus. Despite overwhelming numerical superiority and the rapid expulsion of the Georgian armed forces from South Ossetia, Russia’s military performance in the 2008 war highlighted some continuing significant weaknesses.

These included a lack of precision-guided munitions and an inability to gain air superiority in the area of operations.

This led to the conclusion that Russia was still poorly prepared to fight a modern conflict, even against a weaker opponent.
– Professor Tracey German

In the wake of the war with Georgia, ambitious defence reform was initiated by former defence minister Anatoly Serdyukhov. There was considerable investment in modernisation and rearmament. The biggest reform was a ten-year weapons-modernisation programme launched in 2010. The aim was to go from only 10% of kit classed as “modern” to 70% by 2020.

A particular focus has been on the development of long-range and high-precision weapons. Russia believes that such weapons play a decisive role in contemporary conflict, used to target an adversary’s critical national infrastructure. Russia demonstrated its new capabilities in precision strike in October 2015, when it fired Kalibr missile strikes from ships in the Caspian Sea to hit targets over 1,500km away in Syria.

The Kremlin has also drawn lessons about how to present its military interventions.

Putin has framed the invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation” to protect civilians from “genocide”. This is a cynical attempt to portray the invasion as a humanitarian intervention.
– Professor Tracey German

Moscow took a similar approach in 2008. It maintained that its invasion was intended to stop the alleged genocide of the Ossetian people by Georgian forces, and to protect Russian citizens resident in South Ossetia.

Nato’s air campaign against Serbia in 1999 appeared to set a precedent for military action. The alliance circumvented the UN, arguing that its campaign was necessary to halt crimes against humanity that were being conducted by a state within its own borders.

Critics argued that humanitarian intervention was a pretext for the use of force against a sovereign state. This emboldened others (including Russia) to follow suit and pursue their own interests under the guise of humanitarian intervention. Moscow did not hesitate to use associated arguments to defend its actions in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.

Learning from western responses
The Russian intervention in Georgia demonstrated the lengths Moscow was prepared to go to in order to prevent countries in what it considers to be its sphere of influence integrating more closely with the west. Russia’s invasion of Georgia also demonstrated the apparent weakness of the west, highlighting a lack of unity.

There was a very limited response to the invasion and subsequent recognition by Russia and a small group of allies of Georgia’s breakaway territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as independent states. Georgia continues to consider them under occupation. This action has clear parallels to that of the breakaway pro-Russian regions in Ukraine.

Moscow exploited the lack of consensus amongst western allies during its 2014 annexation of Crimea and subsequent support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
– Professor Tracey German

Russian involvement was deliberately ambiguous, such as the use of troops in unmarked military uniforms, in order to confuse and forestall any international response.

The 2008 crisis revealed the limits of western influence within Russia’s “zone of privileged interest”. It also drew attention to the lack of internal unity within organisations such as Nato over relations with Moscow and future engagement with the area. It could be argued that this emboldened Putin to take action in Ukraine.

Part of the problem is Europe’s over-reliance on Russia as a supplier of natural gas. This has been a long-running issue for European energy security and Europe has long been aware of the dangers.

Little progress has been made in reducing dependence on Russian gas since the wake-up call of the 2008 Russian-Georgian war. In 2020 Russian gas giant Gazprom exported 174.9 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas to Europe. This was down from the record highs of around 200bcm in 2018 and 2019, despite diplomatic tensions and the EU’s long-running objective to reduce its dependence on Russia.

Revenues from oil and gas exports have enabled Russia to continue investing in its military capabilities. These exports are also a critical vulnerability for a number of European states.

Unlike Russia, the west did not learn from 2008. Putin clearly considered western sanctions to be a price worth paying, and calculated that western support for Ukraine would not extend to direct military intervention. Because of this, western warnings about the consequences of a military invasion have not been taken seriously and failed to deter Putin from sending his troops into Ukraine.

[Guns N' Coffee]

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/...ens-in-ukraine

The real role of pro-Russian Chechens in Ukraine

Known as Kadyrovtsy after their leader Ramzan Kadyrov, the fighters are said to be brutal but delusional about their abilities.



Bucha, Ukraine – Most of the Russian servicemen sitting in and atop 34 armed personnel carriers that rolled into Bucha on February 27 were ethnic Chechens, according to Ukrainian military leaders and government officials.

Bearded and burly, clad in brand new, perfectly fitting uniforms and toting assault rifles, they hoped to whiz through the leafy suburb northwest of Kyiv to enter the Ukrainian capital on the war’s third day.

They are known as “Kadyrovtsy” or “Kadyrovites” after their leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin strongman, and their reputation preceded them.

Human rights groups, witnesses and survivors have for decades accused them of extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and the torture of Kadyrov’s rivals and critics, as well as targeting religious hardliners and LGBTQ Chechens.

And in the month before the war, Kadyrov underwent a public relations disaster.

In January, during a campaign to silence his critics through intimidation of their relatives, these Kadyrov loyalists abducted Zarema Musaeva, the mother of a judge who lambasted Kadyrov, forcibly taking her from the western Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod to Chechnya.



An online petition to dismiss Kadyrov, posted in September by the now-jailed opposition leader Ilya Yashin, was signed by hundreds of thousands of people – a rare thing in President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian Russia.

The ruler of Chechnya desperately needed to mend his tarnished image.

He deployed his troops, who are officially part of the National Guard of Russia, to spearhead a blitzkrieg of Ukraine, hoping to boast of their triumph in the Kremlin and on national television.

“Active participation in the assault in the first days of war was a public-relations need” for Kadyrov, Mykhailo Savva of Euromaidan-SOS, a Ukrainian rights group documenting Russian servicemen’s alleged atrocities, told Al Jazeera.

“Kadyrov wanted his people to seize Kyiv,” said Savva, who spent the first weeks of the war in the occupied suburbs along the strategic Zhytomyr highway that links Kyiv with central Ukraine.

Two days before the column entered Bucha, Kadyrov addressed 12,000 servicemen in Chechnya’s administrative capital, Grozny, ordering them to storm Kyiv. He also issued a vaguely worded warning to anyone else opposed to Putin.

“Now Kyiv, and then whoever is going to mess with our side,” he said.

At least 1,200 Kadyrovtsy entered Ukraine in late February, according to Ukrainian intelligence, and hundreds more are believed to have joined them later.

Defending Bucha
The Kadyrovtsy – and a few ethnic Russian servicemen, according to the identity cards retrieved from their bodies later – started moving towards Bucha in the morning of February 27.

They hoped to join a bigger column on the Zhytomyr highway and advance on Kyiv. Sitting on the vehicles, the Kadyrovtsy were so carefree that they were singing Sufi religious chants.

But their easy ride came to a screeching halt.

“I heard them. And I was killing them,” Bogdan Yavorsky told Al Jazeera.

The lanky 39-year-old, who has two degrees and owns a small transportation company, was one of 22 Ukrainian volunteers from Bucha, aided by war veterans from central Ukraine, who ambushed the column at an intersection in the suburb.

Eight volunteers had nothing but Molotov cocktails. The rest had AK-74 assault rifles, a grenade launcher and 10 smaller, disposable anti-tank grenade launchers they had just learned how to use.

They fired the rifles to distract the Kadyrovtsy, hit two armoured personnel carriers APCs with grenades immobilising the column – and showered them with Molotov cocktails.

The Chechens returned fire with their APCs’ cannons, machine guns and assault rifles making the air thick with bullets, Yavorsky recalled.

They killed one of the Ukrainians, a disabled war veteran who had lost two feet while fighting separatists in the southeastern Donbas region, and wounded several more.

But the Ukrainians, who almost ran out of bullets, managed to drag the wounded to their cars and sped away from the Kadyrovtsy, who pursued them on foot and in the APCs.

During the chase, Yavorsky called an air raid on the column, and two Ukrainian fighter jets bombed it, destroying 12 APCs.

“We showed this TikTok army who they are,” said Yavorsky, referring to the dozens of slick videos the Kadyrovtsy have posted on social media on their role in the war.

Observers say the videos are staged and aimed at a domestic audience and portray Kadyrov as a politician to be dreaded.

“He needs advertising to maintain his horrifying image, the image of ‘Putin’s foot soldier’ who is especially close [to Putin],” Pavel Luzin, a Russia-based defence analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.

Ukrainian media ridiculed the footage for months.

“Kadyrov’s TikTok forces posted a video of their real fight with a traffic light and an empty building,” one headline read.

Russian media, meanwhile, readily used the videos in their reporting, helping Kadyrov create the illusion that his troops played a key role in the invasion.

According to a former Russian mercenary who fought next to Chechen fighters in Syria, none of the videos shows any well-calculated military action and are mostly set up.

“Their success is definitely inflated, I think that they added very little to the military potential of invading forces,” said Marat Gabidullin, who commanded a squad of the Wagner private army that fought for President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

“They never were an active, formidable military force. They have never been used as assault groups,” Gabidullin, who has written about his experiences, told Al Jazeera.

He claimed that a squad of Kadyrovtsy joined the Wagner group in Syria at Kadyrov’s request, but was disbanded after they panicked during their first encounter with anti-Assad rebels.

Gabidullin said that while some ethnic Chechens were “excellent warriors”, Kadyrovtsy are not that brave and battle-ready.

“There are no normal warriors next to [Kadyrov], only sycophants who calculated the strong side. Strong ones won’t follow a man of this kind,” he said.

The Kremlin has reportedly been far from enthusiastic about the way they fight.

“They didn’t coordinate their action with anybody, they moved chaotically citing orders from Kadyrov or his coterie,” a Kremlin official told the Kit online publication.

A separatist strongman fighting in the then-besieged southeastern city of Mariupol, lambasted the Kadyrovtsy as a “motley crew.”

“They are not prepared and not equipped in accordance with the [military] goals,” Alexander Khodakovsky wrote on the social messaging app Telegram in mid-March.

But after one of Kadyrov’s allies paid a visit to Khodakovsky, he apologised for his words and said on camera that the Kadyrovtsy “know what they’re doing.”

In the days after the war began, Kadyrov realised that seizing Kyiv was impossible – and did a U-turn on his troops’ strategy.

“They guarded the rear, purged occupied territories and played the role of ‘blocking detachments’” like the Soviet secret police that shot at the retreating infantry during World War II, Euromaidan-SOS’s Savva said.

“Our task is to chase back those lousy soldiers, when they start running away from artillery strikes,” a Chechen fighter told his wife, referring to Russian troops, according to a phone conversation intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence in late March.

They were also ordered to help evacuate wounded Russian soldiers – and, on at least one occasion, did the opposite, a Ukrainian intelligence official said.

On March 12, instead of evacuating 12 ethnic Russian servicemen, Kadyrovtsy reportedly shot them dead.

“This is the attitude of Chechens who treat Russians like second- or third-rate people,” Ukraine’s National Security Council chief Oleksiy Danilov said in televised remarks. “That’s all you need to know about Russia.”

War crimes and torture
The Kadyrovtsy have contributed to the killings of hundreds of civilians in Bucha, other Kyiv suburbs and occupied areas, according to survivors, police, officials and rights groups.

“My neighbour had his bike taken and went to the Russians to ask for it back. A bearded Chechen killed him on the spot just for opening his mouth,” a resident of one of the villages near Kyiv told Al Jazeera,.

In early March, the Kadyrovtsy fighters shot dead Yuri Prilipko, a community leader in the occupied town of Hostomel, while he was delivering bread to town residents, Hostomel’s authorities said on Facebook.

The Slidstvo.info investigative journalism website reported that the Kadyrovtsy planted a booby trap on Prilipko’s body.

Sometimes, the fighters capture alleged war crimes on video.

Apti Alaudinov, a top security official in Chechnya, posted a video in mid-June showing a badly beaten and bruised Ukrainian serviceman.

The apparently harrowing, unprovoked and erratic violence committed by them and other Russian servicemen directly stems from the two wars between Chechen separatists and federal forces.

Both sides have committed war crimes such as summary executions, mutilation, torture and rape.

Even after the Kremlin declared the end of the second Chechen war in 2009, thousands of police officers and servicemen from across Russia were deployed to the war-scarred province for two-month tours.

They took part in arbitrary killings and the torture of alleged religious hardliners – and eagerly used their new skills at home.

“The Chechen wars were not only a traumatic experience both for Russians and Chechens, they also brutalised Russian society,” Ivar Dale, a senior policy adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a rights watchdog, told Al Jazeera.

“Some of that violence and brutality that was normalised by this experience contributed to the horrific violence we are seeing in Ukraine today,” he said.

Kadyrovtsy transplanted the violence and brutality “in their most brutal form to the temporarily occupied areas of Ukraine,” the European Union’s Parliamentary Assembly said in a report in June.

Their role in the siege of Mariupol “is symptomatic for the brutalisation of the treatment of opponents that began in the two Chechen wars,” it said.

State within a state
Kadyrov calls himself Putin’s “foot soldier” and enjoys lavish funding from Moscow, which he reportedly spends with next-to-no control.

While one of the war’s most vocal proponents, he is sometimes shockingly ignorant about Ukraine’s history and current affairs.

In March, he ordered his men to kill Stepan Bandera, a fiercely anti-Russian nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator lionised in Ukraine.

Alas, Bandera had already been killed – by a KGB assassin, in Munich, in 1959.
(emphasis mine)

Kadyrov’s Chechnya is a Kuwait-sized mountainous province with a population of less than 1.5 million.

But apart from ruling Chechnya like his personal fief, Kadyrov punches way above his political weight.

He boasts personal friendship with Putin, reprimands federal ministers and top officials – often forcing them to apologise on camera, and has an opinion about almost anything related to Islam in Russia.

The son of a Sufi Muslim cleric who sided with Chechen separatists in the 1990s and declared a “jihad” on Moscow, he reportedly boasted of killing his first Russian soldier at age 16.

But then his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, switched sides and allied with Russia during the second Chechen war that began in 1999 and propelled then-newly appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to the presidency.

After an explosion killed Akhmad Kadyrov in 2004, Ramzan replaced him – and destroyed the traditional system of checks and balances among Chechen clans.

Human rights groups claimed Kadyrov’s paramilitary forces terrorised, abducted and killed innocent civilians, claiming they were Muslim rebels.

Almost a dozen of his political enemies and critics, including two women, have been brutally killed but Kadyrov denied any role in their death.

Under him, Chechnya became “a totalitarian part of Russia,” human rights advocate Lev Ponomaryov told Al Jazeera in 2015.

Kadyrov has praised so-called “honour” killings and polygamy, banned the sale of alcohol in Chechnya and enforced a dress code on Chechen women.

“All the human rights you can imagine are being violated, laws are not being enacted, and if some things run according to the Russian legislation it’s just because Kadyrov said so,” Ponomaryov said.

Third Chechen war?
Looking ahead, many in Ukraine believe that Kadyrov wants Chechnya to secede from Russia after Putin’s death – and therefore wants his troops to get first-hand battlefield experience.

“He wants to get his personal army ready for a war in Russia. He wants to fight after Putin is gone,” SOS-Maidan’s Savva said.

In 2008, during Russia’s war with Georgia, this reporter saw Chechen servicemen fighting.

They crossed the Greater Caucasus Range into the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia with dozens of APCs.

An ethnic Chechen photographer addressed one of the officers sitting on one of the APCs.

“Hey, child of Noah [a respectful sobriquet among Chechens], who are you fighting for?” the photographer asked.

“For Russians. For now,” the officer replied, and his subordinates started laughing.


(emphasis mine)

[Roosta]

Cheers for all the work you've been doing lately G & C !

[WonderMomma]

Originally Posted by Roosta ↗

Cheers for all the work you've been doing lately G & C !

I second that. A huge help, thank you!

[RedactedKaos]

Originally Posted by Guns N' Coffee ↗

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/...ens-in-ukraine

The real role of pro-Russian Chechens in Ukraine

]

I don't know much about the current chechen leader and how much of an actual buddy buddy he is with Putin or maybe it's some higher up underlying beneath the catching president but I've heard a couple people talk about the possibility of chechnya doing a 180 on Russia and take advantage alongside Ukraine if things are looking to Bleak for Russia I'm sure there is still bad blood... But I don't know how fringe that scenario is but I think that would be hey pretty crazy situation

I guess the leader of the exiled government doesn't wield any kind of power that I know of but I found a couple of people that are cirrnely active

Zelimkhan Ibragimov: Ibragimov is a Chechen military commander

Isa Khamukhayev: Khamukhayev is a Chechen politician and businessman. He is the leader of the Chechen National Movement, a pro-independence political party. He has said that he supports Ukraine's fight for independence, and he has called on Chechens to join the fight against Russia.

Muratov Akhmadov: Akhmadov is the leader of the Chechen National Congress, a pro-independence political party. He has said that he supports Ukraine's fight for independence, and he has called on Chechens to join the fight against Russia.

Who knows there is another unit that just recently joined up with Ukraine

Abu Umar, the leader of the Separate Special Purpose Battalion,. The Separate Special Purpose Battalion is the newest Chechen battalion to join the fight in Ukraine.

[WonderMomma]

"Reznikov welcomes the arrival of a batch of Canadian Roshel Senator armored vehicles.

It is known that the manufacturing company Roshel has already delivered more than 550 Senator armored vehicles to the Armed Forces, and by the end of the year it should deliver the same number ( Source )."

2nd video:
"WELT story about the Swiss-German GCS-200 demining complex .

In general, it is known that this year the manufacturing company will deliver/supplied us at least 30 GCS-200 and GCS-100 complexes + 2 more machines were donated by Canada."