https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1513587878177222661
Yeah I thought that post seemed a little weird. A ton of twitter accounts sure picked it up uncritically.
Why on earth would anyone defending Mariupol let the Russians know that they’re almost out of ammo?
neither could the average American
I guessed Konev but kind of looks like Jean Luc PIcard too
https://twitter.com/DarkaHirna/status/1513511795016839168
https://twitter.com/JonInMich/status/1513740435147079689
Apparently she’s still in Russia and able to do this. Looks like the Ukrainians were right. This is all an OP to make Russia look tolerant.
Russian media can still spout all the horrible things they want to their domestic audience. And abroad their trolls can hold up this woman as a sign that things aren’t so bad. Which will work perfectly for the crowd that need only a single counter-example to let them believe what they already wanted to believe.
Ukrainians are not fooled by Russian chicanery.
The screen capture might not be clear enough but it’s definitely Picard. (Ok, maybe they’re just dead ringers but I’d have bet the farm.) Here’s the video segment. About 3:20 in.
arestovich today said an interesting thing. VSU command sees the Donbass assault force as being somewhere around 16 BTG worth. that’s… insufficient. even against UA depleted ranks, each battalion is going to be vulnerable on multiple sides and will continue to take losses. ukraine fighting with western weapons would not be even close in terms of result. if this becomes war of attrition with a shortage of ammunition on both sides, ukraine will eventually just exhaust the russians. it’s really the easiest time there’s ever going to be to decimate what remains of the invasion.
how is this for an offramp to putin: nato enters the conflict, restores ukraine’s control of donbass. Putin retreats or doesn’t, but gets to write off the defeat on the west. sanctions are lifted 5 years after he dies and the hague speaks. take it or leave it.
It’s Picard, as people recognized in the first week of the war. 
I continue to be mystified at what Putin thought he was going to achieve here. Like as I’ve posted before, the bit they are currently fucking up is Phase 1, The Easy Part. It’s one thing to not understand how useless your army is and think you are going to march straight to Kyiv, and it seems clear the plan after that was leadership purges, just execute everyone in the pro-EU camp and install some sort of puppet government. But then what? Ukrainians just had a revolution in 2014. They’re experienced at this. How are you going to hold the country in the face of an urban insurgency covertly funded by the United States? What was the endgame supposed to be here? I don’t get it. I can only assume they fell for the old “we will be greeted as liberators” gambit and thought every Russian speaker in Ukraine would be a sleeper agent for Russian hegemony.
Like I guess this is a tale as old as time, when was the last time someone tried to invade and hold a whole country and it worked out well for them? Non-rhetorical question. Like I guess the Russo-Georgian war and the invasion of Crimea went unusually well for Russia and that’s why we got this. But if you look at the history in invasions of the last 50 years or so they are almost uniformly disasters.
One of his few resounding successes of the last ~15 years is the efficacy of the propaganda, but it seems he has been taking too much of his own product. A prevailing theory on the Russian activist/dissident toobz is that he really thought the Russian troops were going to be met with flowers.
Yep, pretty much this.
More reports coming out of Mariupol that say they are out of food and ammo. It was always a matter of time before the city falls and surrender seems to be imminent.
Yeah I feel like this is an underrated threat in authoritarian regimes. Like you think you’re perfectly able to keep your rational judgement, but you hear your own propaganda repeated back to you 20 times a day, and it’s just sort of hard wired into the human brain to start finding things more plausible if they’re repeated a lot. That’s when you start getting high on your own product.
It’d be hard to untangle, because seldom do you have a culture of corrupt yes men feeding you only what you want to hear outside of an environment where you’re also feeding things along those lines to the populace via state media, but I wonder if it’s more his advisers than his media per se. Like, we just saw that article about the unlimited Bribe the Ukrainians budget. If you’re in charge of that, are you going to risk the Graviest of Trains by telling Dear Leader that it’s not working? If you’re embezzling the tire maintenance money, are you going to actually say how under-maintained the truck tires are?
I mean, that can form a feedback loop where lies from the corrupt become the basis for propaganda for the public that relevant folks start buying into rather than being skeptical of the obviously corrupt, but it seems like the corrupt people at the top are needed to kick that into gear. If they’re telling Putin something different than the propaganda, he’d likely believe them (and maybe send them to the gulags).
I was thinking exactly this before I got to that point in your post.
I think this probably nails it, it’s a positive feedback loop. Like, when Trump says the sky is green, Tucker and Hannity spend half an hour each showing spectroscopy charts (did I get that right?) of the green sky, then Trump says it must be true because it’s “what many people are saying”. Lather, rinse, repeat. We saw plenty of that over 4 years.
Cliffs: anti-tank weapons, logistics, mud, morale
Well, this did offer some further clarity on the coping cages:
Earlier, here:
What even are those cages ostensibly supposed to protect against? Molotovs?
If the warhead of an anti tank missile detonates a couple of feet early it won’t kill the tank.
Article:
However, Javelins are fitted with two warheads. One blows away the reactive armour, and the second pierces the chassis underneath.
Gotta figure that NLAWs do something similar then.
Do you have a link? Is this all based on that one sketchy FB post?
This refers to the Facebook post but it was posted on their Twitter account 7h ago:
https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1513796486823354369?s=20
This is the account of someone who has been fighting in Mariupol:
https://twitter.com/cossackgundi/status/1513768135375077379?s=20
And tractors.
There’s some weird stuff going on with that COSSACKGUNDI account. At least a lot of official-ish sources seem to come out of the woodwork to refute his posts. I don’t think he’s on the Russian side, but he could think he’s helping by playing things up. Although it looks like he’s surrendered and his family is running the account now.
Waiting to see if Mariupol finally falls in the next two days.
Remember that post supposedly from a foreign fighter a few weeks ago that Kyiv was about to be overrun and it was only a matter of time? That didn’t happen.