Unconfirmed reports of Ukrainian strike on an invader command post near Izium.  Several dead officers, potentially another dead general.

One small step down for man:  Russia to quit ISS over sanctions

After threatening to colony drop the ISS last month, no less.  Good riddance.

Russia might've been first in space, but it has lagged far behind and now looks like it can't keep its gaze off its neighbors long enough to turn it to the stars.

Its economy is in too poor a shape to pursue both space and military conquest, so its dictator has made his choice.

Could be a massive moment for Elon to step up and really cement his place in power if he invested in maintaining the I.S.S..

I don't know if that is a good thing given the precedent it sets, but it is what it is going to be... so it at least would be him instead of someone like Bezos or Zuckerberg.

Russian fascists prepare for Putin parade

Those armbands seem awfully familiar...

Ukraine's Security Services foil Russian plot to shoot down passenger plane and blame it on Ukraine

If that seems far fetched, remember when a passenger plane went down over Donbass and the Russians blamed the Ukrainians even though that area was controlled by the "rebels"?  And for years, no one really quite knew what happened but then we found out that it was without a doubt the Russians (mild shock) and then nothing much happened after that.

Russia kludging together depleted units, sending them back into battle with low morale

There's a reason why you reinforce shattered units with fresh troops.  Otherwise, you just get shell-shocked troops staring into the campfire and telling stories about how half their unit was wiped out with equally shell-shocked troops with similar stories.  And if morale dips down below a certain point, crazy things start happening...

Quote"Shortcomings in Russian tactical co-ordination remain. A lack of unit-level skills and inconsistent air support have left Russia unable to fully leverage its combat mass, despite localized improvements," the ministry said.

In southern Ukraine, Ukrainian forces destroy an electronic warfare system, 3 AA guns, an AA system, 42 invaders, and 2 drones.

On the other front, Russia is having more mysterious fires. A fire broke out at a defense ministry site in Belgorod (voted Russia's most flammable region in 2022), and a rail bridge collapsed near Kursk.  They claim sabotage on the second one.

Truly desperate:  these geniuses are considering a new "zerg rush" strategy (i.e. human wave attack)

Since the invention of the machine gun, human wave attacks have been a catastrophically poor choice.

In central Russia, a mysterious fire broke out at a munitions factory, killing 2 workers

Quote from: Hydra009 on May 02, 2022, 09:26:17 PM

I really hope they don't ever discover just how backwards they look to us; not the first time Russia has attacked West and been about 100 years behind in technology either and I don't know what someone made aware that they exist at that level of cringe is capable of.

In Russia, mysterious fire engulfs pro-Kremlin publishing house (the company that would've scrubbed all references to Ukraine from textbooks)

Handy map of most of the mysterious fires so far:

Ukrainian forces destroy 122 invaders, two patrol boats in the Black Sea (with Bayaraktar drones), and a recon drone approaching Odesa from the sea.

It appears that the Russian offensive in the south has petered out as they focus on regrouping what's left and fortifying their positions.  A losing strategy.

In the meantime, increasingly advanced western hardware is rolling into Ukraine (even moreso with the looming US Lend-Lease) and Ukrainian forces are being trained to use it.  In time, Ukrainian forces will be able to flatten whatever paltry fortifications the Russians have made and retake territory easily.

With mounting sanctions, dwindling supplies, and unsustainable attrition, time is not on Russia's side.  Time is never on an invader's side.

If they were smart, they'd call it quits now and spare themselves a horrendous and embarrassing military defeat later.

Russian-Israeli relations deteriorate even further



I can't imagine why...

Russia also defended its "nazi" accusations by saying that it's possible for a Jewish political leader to be nazi-like (which might've been a good point if they stopped there) because Hitler was Jewish and also a nazi (big yikes)

Russia has also warmed up to Iran quite a bit, bombed a holocaust memorial in Ukraine, and started goose-stepping with uniforms practically identical to Nazi uniforms (literally the only thing missing is the swastika)

Needless to say, Israel is not happy with this deliberate embrace of many Nazi norms under the ludicrous guise of fighting nazism.