Russia Invades Ukraine

[RTH10260]

Russian general who may have known about Wagner mutiny goes missing
US intelligence claims Gen Sergei Surovikin, who has close ties to Yevgeny Prigozhin, had prior knowledge of uprising

Andrew Roth and Dan Sabbagh
Wed 28 Jun 2023 19.33 BST

A Russian general who previously led the invasion force in Ukraine has not been seen in public since Saturday, with US intelligence reportedly claiming he had prior knowledge of the uprising led by the Wagner chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Gen Sergei Surovikin is the head of the Russian aerospace forces and formerly Moscow’s supreme commander in Ukraine. Prigozhin had welcomed his appointment to that post in 2022, calling him a “legendary figure” and “born to serve his motherland”.

The well-publicised links between Surovikin and Prigozhin have fuelled rumours that Surovikin may be purged or put under investigation for supporting the mutiny. When Prigozhin launched his uprising, Surovikin made an unambiguous statement against it and in support of the Russian government late on Friday.

“We fought together with you, took risks, we won together,” Surovikin said. “We are of the same blood, we are warriors. I urge you to stop. The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to escalate in our country.”

However, the New York Times, citing western intelligence sources, reported on Wednesday that Surovikin had prior knowledge of Prigozhin’s armed mutiny, in which his Wagner mercenaries captured the city of Rostov and moved on Moscow before cutting an amnesty deal.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... es-missing

[RTH10260]

part of live reporting

7h ago 12.31 BST

Wagner mercenaries will no longer fight in Ukraine after chief refuses to sign contracts with Kremlin

Wagner fighters will no longer fight in Ukraine after the mercenary group’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, refused to sign any contracts with the Kremlin, according to the head of the Duma defence committee, Andrei Kartapolov.

Kartapolov said that a few days before the attempted rebellion, Russia’s ministry of defence announced that “all [groups] that perform combat missions must sign a contract” with the ministry, Tass news agency reported.

According to Kartapolov, Prigozhin did not sign the contracts and was informed that “Wagner would not take part in a special military operation.”

“That is, funding, material resources will not be allocated,” the deputy added.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/ ... -walkabout

[bob]

AP: Russian general is believed to be detained in aftermath of Wagner mutiny, AP sources say:

Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of the Russian group of forces fighting in Ukraine, is believed to have been detained days after mercenaries staged a revolt inside Russia, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Thursday, citing U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence assessments.

Other outlets are dropping the "believed" part, and are just reporting that he has been "detained."

Ob. prediction of an open-window in the general's future.

[Dr. Ken]

Is newsweek doing onion pieces now?

[sugar magnolia]

Is newsweek doing onion pieces now?

Seagal is crazy enough for it to be true.

[Ben-Prime]

Is newsweek doing onion pieces now?

Seagal is crazy enough for it to be true.

I grieve because the man used to be my favorite action star in the late 80s and early 90s. Above all others (which was not, I note, the name of one of his movies).

[John Thomas8]

Is newsweek doing onion pieces now?

Seagal is crazy enough for it to be true.

I grieve because the man used to be my favorite action star in the late 80s and early 90s. Above all others (which was not, I note, the name of one of his movies).

Ya, it is sad how Seagal and Norris went full MAGA. Sigh.

[RVInit]

I'm OK with Russia losing effective military leaders like Prigozhin and apparently that general. And replacing actual military leaders with someone like Seagal? That's weird. I guess it could increase motivation if they think just because he can act like a badass he must be a badass military mind. But I doubt that he's any kind of real military genius. I think I heard he worked in law enforcement at one time, but I don't think he has any background in the military. He once claimed to have sacrificed many years in "service" but I think he was alluding to his time as law enforcement and just allowing people to think he meant military but didn't actually "lie" by saying he served in the military.

[John Thomas8]

I'm OK with Russia losing effective military leaders like Prigozhin and apparently that general. And replacing actual military leaders with someone like Seagal? That's weird. I guess it could increase motivation if they think just because he can act like a badass he must be a badass military mind. But I doubt that he's any kind of real military genius. I think I heard he worked in law enforcement at one time, but I don't think he has any background in the military. He once claimed to have sacrificed many years in "service" but I think he was alluding to his time as law enforcement and just allowing people to think he meant military but didn't actually "lie" by saying he served in the military.

He'll do fine until the first AK74 round passes his head, then he'll fold like a toilet paper boat in a puddle.

[Slim Cognito]

Yeah, all of Him's Seagal DVDs went missing a few years ago. Go figure..

Hey, he still has Jean Claude Van Damme.

[Gregg]

Russian general who may have known about Wagner mutiny goes missing
US intelligence claims Gen Sergei Surovikin, who has close ties to Yevgeny Prigozhin, had prior knowledge of uprising

Andrew Roth and Dan Sabbagh
Wed 28 Jun 2023 19.33 BST

A Russian general who previously led the invasion force in Ukraine has not been seen in public since Saturday, with US intelligence reportedly claiming he had prior knowledge of the uprising led by the Wagner chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Gen Sergei Surovikin is the head of the Russian aerospace forces and formerly Moscow’s supreme commander in Ukraine. Prigozhin had welcomed his appointment to that post in 2022, calling him a “legendary figure” and “born to serve his motherland”.

The well-publicised links between Surovikin and Prigozhin have fuelled rumours that Surovikin may be purged or put under investigation for supporting the mutiny. When Prigozhin launched his uprising, Surovikin made an unambiguous statement against it and in support of the Russian government late on Friday.

“We fought together with you, took risks, we won together,” Surovikin said. “We are of the same blood, we are warriors. I urge you to stop. The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to escalate in our country.”

However, the New York Times, citing western intelligence sources, reported on Wednesday that Surovikin had prior knowledge of Prigozhin’s armed mutiny, in which his Wagner mercenaries captured the city of Rostov and moved on Moscow before cutting an amnesty deal.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... es-missing

Meanwhile, at a Moscow cocktail party...

He's not missing, I just saw him with a drink, over by the window...

[Gregg]

Is newsweek doing onion pieces now?

Seagal is crazy enough for it to be true.

That story, which has since been taken down, is all that is wrong with internet journalism, which I believe is largely written by machines for these little 3 minute reads.

They go with the big headline that makes it look legit, but four paragraphs in they open with "Western Kremlin watchers may have been fooled by a hoax in which...."

They could have made a stupid but legit story if they had reported it that way in the beginning. I remember when Time and Newsweek were my main sources of world info, long before the internet ruined civilization. At the time, Newsweek was owned by WaPo and it's reporting standards reflected that. Now they're just a tic better than if The Onion and OAN had a very unfortunate child.

[Gregg]

I'm OK with Russia losing effective military leaders like Prigozhin and apparently that general. And replacing actual military leaders with someone like Seagal? That's weird. I guess it could increase motivation if they think just because he can act like a badass he must be a badass military mind. But I doubt that he's any kind of real military genius. I think I heard he worked in law enforcement at one time, but I don't think he has any background in the military. He once claimed to have sacrificed many years in "service" but I think he was alluding to his time as law enforcement and just allowing people to think he meant military but didn't actually "lie" by saying he served in the military.

The story was a joke, but don't let Trump see it, he's very likely to appoint someone like that the next SecDef because he would, wouldn't he and no one competent will ever work for him again.

Krom help us if he ever returns to power just because of the idiots he'll have in his cabinet. Think BoBo the Clowgresswoman as head of the ATF, Seb Gorka SecState, Kari Lake as VP, sharing the job with EmptyGee...

[RTH10260]

‘Some never came back’: how Russians hunted down veterans of Donbas conflict
Exclusive: Ukrainians who fought against separatists tell of kidnap and torture by invaders; the fate of hundreds of others is a mystery

Lorenzo Tondo in Pisky-Radkivski and Alessio Mamo
Sun 2 Jul 2023 10.18 BST

Viktor Kushyn knew Russian soldiers were after him. He sensed it from the first day of Moscow’s full-scale war on Ukraine in February last year, when Russians occupied his village in the Kharkiv region.

So when two Russian service personnel stopped him in the street one morning in May 2022, he didn’t resist. He spent the next few days locked in a cellar with other men who, like him, had fought against Russian-backed separatists between 2014 and 2022 in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

“They beat us savagely for days,” Kushyn, 59, told the Guardian. “Then they took a hot branding iron, pressed it on our skin and branded us with the symbol of a triangle, as is done with cattle. They did it for revenge because they hated us.”

The invading Russians carried lists of people to hunt down. Veterans of the Donbas war, vilified by Kremlin propagandists for committing a nonexistent “genocide” in the conflict, were at the top. The Russian military knew exactly where they lived, survivors have said.

The Guardian has spoken to Donbas veterans who survived Russian torture in occupied villages, the families of forcibly disappeared former soldiers and Ukrainian investigators. Some of the veterans – including Kushyn – were eventually released or escaped captivity but others were killed. The fate of hundreds remains a mystery.

“At the moment, more than 1,000 people in the Kharkiv region are considered missing,” said Spartak Borysenko, the head of the war crimes department at the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office. “We can say there are probably hundreds of Joint Forces Operation veterans [from the Donbas conflict] among them, who were civilians. They were the first people who were detained when the Russians occupied their cities.”

A car marked with the letter Z, the symbol of the Russian invasion, in Pisky-Radkivski
A car marked with the letter Z, the symbol of the Russian invasion, in Pisky-Radkivski. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian
In April 2014, Russian-backed separatists seized government buildings in Donbas, sparking a reaction from the Ukrainian military, which launched an operation against them. More than 10,000 peopled died in the long conflict that ensued. A large part of Moscow’s justification for its full-scale intervention in Ukraine in 2022 was the claim – dismissed by the UN – that Ukrainian military action in the Donbas conflict amounted to genocide. Vladimir Putin, who financed and armed pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, has used the word on several occasions.

When Guardian reporters visited areas of Kharkiv and Kherson region newly liberated by Ukrainian forces in September, witnesses said collaborators had provided the Russians with the addresses of Donbas veterans, in addition to help with transportation, housing, fuel and food.





https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... ct-ukraine

[RTH10260]

Zelenskiy: Russia may be preparing to trigger nuclear plant explosion
President cites Ukraine intelligence that Moscow has mined Zaporizhzhia nuclear station and sent away staff

Lorenzo Tondo and Luke Harding in Kyiv
Sat 1 Jul 2023 16.55 BST

Russia could be ready to provoke a localised explosion at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy has said.

Zelenskiy cited Ukrainian intelligence as the source of his information and called for greater international attention to the situation at the facility, the largest nuclear plant in Europe. Since seizing it last year, Moscow has turned it into a military base from which it has bombarded Ukrainian towns across the Dnipro reservoir.

“There is a serious threat because Russia is technically ready to provoke a local explosion at the station, which could lead to a [radiation] release,” Zelenskiy told a joint news conference in Kyiv with the visiting Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez.

Earlier on Friday, Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate (GUR) claimed that Russian troops were reducing their presence at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, with staff told to relocate to Crimea and military patrols scaled back.

The agency’s chief, Kyrylo Budanov, has alleged that Moscow has approved a plan to blow up the station and has mined four of the six power units, as well as a cooling pond.

According to the GUR, several representatives of Russia’s state nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, have already left. Ukrainian employees who stayed at the plant and signed contracts with Rosatom had been told to evacuate by Monday, preferably to Crimea, it said.

On Thursday Ukraine conducted nuclear disaster response drills in the vicinity of the power station, regional officials said.

Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, replied saying that he had written to the UN security council and secretary general, António Guterres, to state: “We do not intend to blow up this NPP [nuclear power plant], we have no intention of doing so.”



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... -explosion

[RTH10260]

IHO Russia does not intend to blow up the reactor itself, but it will blow up all power generating hardware. I fear that the military personnel doing the mining up will not consider the fact that a reactor needs a minumum of continued cooling, and requires for that a minimum of electrical power to remain supplied. I believe this could get real messy.

[RTH10260]

‘Yevgeny Prigozhin will never be discussed again’: Russian media to erase all traces of mutinous warlord
The Wagner mercenary group boss who marched on Moscow has had his internet outlets blocked and troll factory closed down

Andrew Roth
Sat 1 Jul 2023 13.41 BST

Suddenly, Yevgeny Prigozhin is a phantom. Is he in Belarus or St Petersburg? In unconfirmed footage that makes him look like a Bond villain, he struts across a rooftop, shadowed by a muscled bodyguard, takes a seat in a helicopter, and vanishes into the skies of St Petersburg.

For nearly a decade, Prigozhin has sown scandal in Russia, creating a troll factory empire, leading Russia’s interference into foreign elections and bankrolling the Wagner mercenary group that fought in Ukraine and has propped up dictators in Africa.

In last weekend’s mutiny, he also called for upheaval, leading an armed rebellion that many fear could turn to score-settling or even looting in Moscow, including the upmarket homes of Moscow’s wealthy Rublyovka district.

“This call to go get those thieves in Rublyovka was revolutionary,” said Konstantin Remchukov, editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, who saw Vladimir Putin last week at a closed-door meeting for top editors. “[The elite] truly fear Prigozhin as a possible alternative to Putin. There would be no guarantees, no protection, no rules to the game.”

Instead, it is Prigozhin’s empire that will now crumble, ending a decade of his schemes and tricks doing some of the Kremlin’s dirtiest work.

On Friday, Russia blocked the websites of the Ria Fan, Politics Today, Economy Today, Neva News and People’s News online media outlets, part of a constellation of online sites that pushed out fake news in support of Prigozhin’s agenda.

The St Petersburg-based outlet Rotunda also reported that Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency, a troll factory where low-paid interns would try to sow anger and distrust by writing aggressive comments under news and social media posts, had also been closed down.

Prigozhin had for years denied that he was the founder of the organisation until earlier this year. “I’ve never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency,” he said. “I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time. It was founded to protect the Russian information space from boorish aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian narrative from the west.”

In an extraordinary appearance, an editor from his Patriot media group defended the troll factory from its founding in 2009, saying that it “was strategically important to discredit the work of opposition journalists who were trying … to destroy our country”.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... ner-moscow

[RTH10260]

beware those windows ....

Wagner boss Prigozhin has returned to Russia, Lukashenko says
Belarus president says head of mercenary group behind failed mutiny is in St Petersburg

Pjotr Sauer
Thu 6 Jul 2023 09.34 BST

Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has returned to Russia, the Belarusian president has said, despite a peace deal with the Kremlin under which he had agreed to relocate to Belarus.

“As for Prigozhin, he’s in St Petersburg. He is not on the territory of Belarus,” the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko told reporters on Thursday. “Where is Prigozhin this morning? Maybe he left for Moscow.”

Lukashenko said Wagner fighters were stationed at their camps in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, adding that his offer to host them in Belarus remained.

Under a deal brokered by Lukashenko, Prigozhin abandoned what he called a “march for justice” by thousands of his recruits on Moscow, in exchange for safe passage to exile in Belarus. Criminal charges against Prigozhin were dropped last week as part of the agreement.

Lukashenko also said that Putin would not “wipe out” Prigozhin because the Russian president was not “malevolent and vindictive,” suggesting that the mercenary head was safe from the country’s security services.

The Belarusian dictator added that he planned to discuss the future of Wagner during an upcoming meeting with Putin.

Prigozhin, a 62-year-old former convict who rose to become Russia’s most powerful mercenary, was last seen in public when he left Rostov-on-Don, a city in southern Russia that his troops occupied briefly.

There were already questions about whether Prigozhin was sticking to the terms of the deal.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... ko-belarus

[Slim Cognito]

I don't see him lasting six months before he meets an inhospitable window.

[p0rtia]

I don't see him lasting six months before he meets an inhospitable window.

We need a Prigozhin Head of Lettuce.

I'm betting on the lettuce.

[Gregg]

I don't see him lasting six months before he meets an inhospitable window.

Unless Putin gets a fatal Kalishna-cough first. I can imagine a possible behind the scenes chess match of them gathering supporters ahead of some showdown, violent of bloodless, that finally resolves this and ends up with one of them dead and/or some regime change.

Putin has relied on keeping the oligarchs fat, happy and stupid to stay in power. When he invaded Ukraine he has burned a lot of those people and they might be talking among themselves about how much they need him, and if there is someone brave enough to go at him.

[RTH10260]

a High Noon shoot-out Western style between the two on the Red Square in Moscow

[keith]

a High Noon shoot-out Western style between the two on the Red Square in Moscow

Negative. Too much chance fthat at least one of them will survive.

[RTH10260]

a High Noon shoot-out Western style between the two on the Red Square in Moscow

Negative. Too much chance fthat at least one of them will survive.

You can modernize the scene and give each a tactical battlefield backpack nuke

[Mr brolin]

a High Noon shoot-out Western style between the two on the Red Square in Moscow

Negative. Too much chance fthat at least one of them will survive.

You can modernize the scene and give each a tactical battlefield backpack nuke

Officially retired for a couple of decades (1989) SADM's were in fact JUST about backpackable at 70 pounds, when you add in the fact that you still have to carry all of the rest of our kit along with it.

They were quite cumbersome and better used as nuclear mines against tanks or we trained for bridge and salient/valley interdiction in the very early 80's.

Video for your delectation