When the press is the government's lapdog, liberty and freedom can't really exist.

And you wind up with people distrusting both the press and the government. Why? Paraphrasing the title of a book on this theme ... Nothing is true, everything is true, and you get CTs and mis/disinformation flowing like the Mississippi during a 1000 year flood. Sic transit patriae eorum libertas. (I like the ambiguity of the placement of "their" ... "Thus passes their country's freedom" and "Thus passes the country of their freedom." Slightly tweak sentence-level stress and how the meaning changes.)

The liberty of freedom of speech and press is foundational to democracy. Impugn one, you impugn all. Putin's a past-master, with his press bootlickers. Centralized power always produces both sycophants and corruption. Putin's reign, in short.

This strike will be used as agitprop to show how horribly fascist the gay/Jew-loving Ukrainians, ever fascist for opposing the Good Rule of the Sainted Russian narod, is. (The '40s usage was two-way ambiguous between fashist = "fascist" and fashist = "anti-Soviet/Russian". And it continued that way for decades. That the Russian word looks and sounds like "fascist" has been a horrible translator's nightmare, like when Stalin said he was "deepening democracy." Just WTFH!? Orwell nailed it, contrary to his fellow Brit Socialists. But you manipulate language and you get crap salad sans the ideological blinders ... Or the "precedent" of decades of screwed translation ... [iTrados ] traditore.)

My point is that the "Vanya 100-gram" (instead of "Joe Six-pack" ... not quite "Joe with the six-pack&quot in the street will hear the government spin. "Bad people hurt the good people, people like you." This will be used to outrage commoners against the Ukrainians, not make them feel the pain.

Kursk was a bit different. "Don't panic. It's all under control." Whatever. I'm keeping a towel close by. (Yeah, a Hitchhiker's reference.)

You live in a bell jar, and the oxygen of liberty is in short supply.

September 8, 2024:
A Ukrainian intelligence operation carried out a surprise attack on a Russian air base near the Arctic Circle. This is 1,800 kilometers from Ukraine and was apparently carried out by Ukrainian operatives who, pretending to be Russian truck drivers, transported the drones to northwest Russia. This is a heavily forested area that is sparsely populated. It is also where several Russian naval and air bases are located. The Ukrainians attacked the air bases and the long-range Russian bombers that operated out of these bases for attacks on Ukraine. Russia believed these bases were safe because they were so far from Ukraine and had about a dozen Tu-95MS, Tu-22M3, and Tu-160 long-range bombers. These bombers fly to the Ukraine border, launch air-to-ground missiles and return to their base in the north.

The Ukrainian attack put several Russian bombers out of action. The Russians were mystified and the Ukrainians would only say that they did it without supplying any details. Given the geography of the situation, it was deduced that the Ukrainians transported the attack drones to northwest Russia and launched them from there. Because the Ukrainian and Russian languages are so similar, it is easy for Ukrainian intelligence to recruit Russian speaking Ukrainians to carry out this mission. Western economic sanctions and the usual lousy Russian maintenance practices have caused the Russian railroads to fall into such disrepair that they are no longer able to move much cargo. That means more work for commercial truckers and their vehicles, which can be smuggled in from China and Central Asia. Russian security forces have much else to do and don’t spend much time monitoring who is doing what with trucks.


https://strategypage.com/htmw/htsf/articles/202409080354.aspx#gsc.tab=0

I hope that the homes that were destroyed, and any/all civilians killed/wounded were from debris caused by Russia shooting down the drones, or better yet, by Russia’s own AAA ammunition, and not deliberately targeted. Deliberately hitting civilians could cause Ukraine to lose Western support. That would be disastrous for Ukraine.

Ukraine is fighting a true existential threat. Civilian casualties in Russia, while regrettable, still have to be a secondary consideration. And it may degrade support for their invasion.

Smart munitions generally are equipped with both inertial navigation systems (INS) and with GPS for navigation. INS based navigation is imperfect, with small measurement errors compounding over time. When GPS signals get jammed, the missile or drone can no longer measure and correct for those errors in the INS end up striking something several hundred meters or several kilometers from its intended target.

Is impotent. Nuke, even small tactical ones, Ukraine, and with the prevailing winds a lot of Putinland will get a dose of toxic radioactive waste. I think this calculation was ignored as "pushover" Ukraine wouldn't require nuk'n.

At some point the Russian people will remember their history from from 1917.