Posted on 02/23/2026 3:51:01 AM PST by RandFan
At first glance, Yelets in winter looks like something from a Russian fairy tale.
From the embankment I spy the golden domes of Orthodox churches and, down below, ice fishermen dotted along the frozen river.
But in this town, 350km (217 miles) south of Moscow, the fairy tale feeling is transient.
On the riverbank I spot an army recruitment billboard. It promises a one-off sum equivalent to £15,000 ($20k) to anyone who'll sign up to fight in Ukraine.
Close by there's a poster of a Russian soldier taking aim with a Kalashnikov.
"We're there where we need to be," the accompanying slogan declares.
The Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Outside Russia it was widely seen as an attempt to force Kyiv back into Moscow's orbit and to overturn the entire post-Cold War security architecture in Europe.
The Russian leadership envisaged a short and successful military operation.
It didn't go to plan.
Four years later, Russia's war on Ukraine grinds on. It has lasted longer than Nazi Germany's brutal war on the Soviet Union, known here as the Great Patriotic War.
And, in this town, you can see some of the consequences.
A giant mural fills one side of a nine-storey Yelets apartment block. Depicted here are the faces of five Russian soldiers, local men killed fighting in Ukraine.
"Glory to the heroes of Russia!" has been painted at the top.
The Russian authorities do not release casualty figures for the so-called "special military operation". But Russia is known to have suffered huge battlefield losses. So many of the towns and villages I've visited in the last two years have had museums and monuments dedicated to soldiers killed in Ukraine, as well as separate sections for recent war dead at local cemeteries.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
So Ukraine is winning?
Kiev in two weeks!
The propaganda arm is really up and running. But that’s all Ukraine has. Ukraine doesn’t have enough troops left and NATO/US isn’t going to send its people to die. Russia is blurring the line of contact now that the fixed fortification lines have been passed. The line isn’t static now, it moves back and forth about 15 kilometers, chewing up soldiers Ukraine can’t spare. Russia’s army is larger than when the war started and adding 35,000 trained troops a month, Ukraine’s army is smaller and its troops are inexperienced because there’s no time to train the few they are able to add by grabbing men who are trying to hide so they can stay alive.
So they buddy up with Iran and act like they will defend them against the USA. That is a total joke.
Yet the front continues to move west, the only measurement that matters.
That wasn’t much of a statement about anything at all.
Yet the front continues to move west, the only measurement that matters.
If that statement feels good for you to say after 4 years, enjoy.
Wars are won less by toughness than by military competence and depth of resources. Russian is losing on both counts.
It does.
Do your own research.
https://youtu.be/XWIegZ-84VE?t=613 Shopping mall in Moscow. Turn off the sound. Don’t look at what the camera is pointing at, look beyond that, especially when he gets to the Globus supermarket. This helps defend against propaganda.
Here is what I see:
1) I can’t find any women wearing mourning clothing. The place is busy the day before New Years, and no one enshrouded in black.
2) No scarcity of military aged men, where were alleged to have fled Russia in early days.
3) Full shelves.
Some have said Moscow was kept safe and non Caucasian populations outside Moscow were send to Ukraine to die.
You can Do Your Own Research. There are many youtube travelers passing through elsewhere like Vladivostok, Krasnoyarsk, Yakutsk, Novosibirsk. Youtube has a huge subculture of people who make their living travelling the world and posting videos. Find them. They are numerous and there are just no mourning women.
Russian advances rank among the slowest in modern warfare
“Full scale invasion…”. Its getting comical how the Brits work that line into every single story
The propaganda reported by the British media about it, easily, exceeds anything Baghdad Bob claimed about the war in Iraq.
Do your own research on Youtube? ROFLMAO. Why don’t you cut out the middleman and suggest RT or Pravda? Putin’s Russia is fake and Potemkin. Loved by Epstein and day dreaming men the world over.
Don’t be fooled by the hordes of Russian propagandists here on FR. They always strike hard to shut down any voice that does not so along.
I don’t get it, myself. Why is Putin so determined to conquer Ukraine, that he is willing to kill so many Russian young men? Pay so much to mercenaries?
Since the actual territory occupied by Russia hasn't shifted much in three years despite the enormous human and economic costs, if Putin were a rational actor with Russia's genuine interests in mind (as opposed to his own), he would have cut his losses two or three years ago by negotiating a Cold Peace where he keeps the territory he currently occupies - de facto if not de jure, claims victory, and gradually normalizes relations with the rest of the world and rebuilds his shattered economy. He could even claim "victory" through the continued occupation of his 15-18% eastern sliver of Ukraine under those circumstances. Without Boris Johnson to egg him on, Zelensky would have accepted such a stalemate.
Since Putin refuses to do that even today, despite zero prospect of real battlefield progress, the biggest irony of Putin's Ukraine project is that he's become a worse enemy to Russia than he could dream of being towards any other nation, including Ukraine.
There is a detectable trend in left wing ‘reporting’ toward the use of a discursive, story-book style writing. One can see it here, like a tv reporter on the scene, setting the stage with irrelevant, peripheral details. The purpose seems to be to mask critical thinking about the core issue at hand.
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