Posted on 02/28/2022 8:10:18 PM PST by Mariner
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 30, 2024
North Korea may be expanding the volume and variety of weapons it is providing to Russia. A Ukrainian battalion operating in the Ukraine-Belgorod Oblast border area reported on July 30 that Russian forces northwest of Shebekino, Belgorod Oblast are fielding a North Korean provided Bulsae-4 anti-tank guided missile system mounted on a North Korean-M2010 wheeled armored personnel carrier (APC).[19] Several Russian milbloggers cautiously amplified the Ukrainian report but questioned its veracity.[20] ISW cannot independently confirm if Russian forces in Belgorod Oblast are using a North Korean-provided system, but if confirmed, this report would indicate a step up in the types of weapons that North Korea has been providing to Russia. North Korea-focused outlet NK Pro reported on July 26 that satellite imagery indicates that North Korea is intensifying its production of anti-tank missiles, likely due to growing Russian interest in procuring North Korean munitions.[21] NK Pro found that North Korea started building a large production facility at the Sinuiju Measuring Instrument Factory in May 2024 and began upgrading several production facilities at the Taegwan Glass Factory in June 2024, both of which produce anti-tank missiles. The increase in volume and variety of North Korean weapons provisions to Russia is likely a stipulation of the comprehensive strategic partnership agreement that Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un signed during Putin’s visit to Pyongyang in June 2024.[22]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-30-2024
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 31, 2024
Russian border guards withdrew from Armenia’s main international airport. Armenian and Russian sources reported on July 31 that Russian border guards left Zvartnots International Airport in Yerevan, Armenia.[20] Armenian authorities requested in March 2024 that Russia remove its border guards from the airport by August 1 because Armenia can conduct its own border control without the help of Russian border guards who had been stationed at the airport since 1992.[21]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-31-2024
The day before yesterday, on July 29, one of the leading aviation bloggers Fighterbomber https://t.me/fighter_bomber with five hundred and eleven thousand subscribers posted about the motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces:
“Motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces. MSP VKS.
People recruited from airfields. There are engineering and technical personnel, flight and lift personnel, and flight personnel are present. Gunners, radio operators, mechanics, engine and brake operators. Sergeants, warrant officers and officers. It seems there is even one navigator.
They fight normally. Like everyone else. Everyone is provided for. No complaints. Everything is fine. It's about the same as the motorized rifle regiment of the Alexandrov Choir. Well, or the DShB CSKA. There should be some kind of message or conclusion here. But there is none. Today it is a given.”
This post has not been deleted yet and is present in the Fighterbomber Telegram channel at:
https://t.me/fighter_bomber/17554
Is this really true? If this really is the case, then what were the commanders thinking when they created this motorized rifle regiment, sending the flight, flight and technical personnel as simple infantrymen into battle? After all, this is the same as hammering nails with a microscope. Do they know how much it costs to train one pilot or navigator? Even one aviation engineer. In the 80s, training one pilot or navigator, translated into Western currency, cost more than ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Was a pilot or navigator with military ranks from lieutenant to colonel handed Kalashnikov assault rifles and sent to storm some village that cannot even be found on the map?
Something similar existed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany, when airfield divisions were created in the Luftwaffe. And even then they performed mainly security functions in the rear of the Wehrmacht. And only on the eve of Germany's collapse in the winter and spring of 1945 were they sent to the front, including pilots and navigators.
Why create a motorized rifle regiment in the VKS now? Fighterbomber himself partially answered this question with the phrase “Today it is a given.”
It seems that due to the large losses of our group in the SVO zone and the lack of volunteers going to serve in the army under contract, a decision was made to replenish the ranks of the group with manpower by any means. This is evidenced, in particular, by the sharp increase in payment for joining the contract service to one and a half to two million rubles. And the Kremlin is afraid to go for a new mobilization, fearing a sharp negative reaction to this from Russian society. But apparently it is becoming more and more inevitable every day.
https://t.me/blackcolonel2020/1432
i.e. Russia has an acute shortage of of soldiers
Baroness Thatcher, speaking shortly after the Kursk submarine disaster in Russia in August 2000: “I looked at the pictures of Mr. Putin trying to look for a trace of humanity. I should ... have known better”.
https://x.com/KyleWOrton/status/1612171882555400195
The Russians have had to move out of Sevastapol, then the Sea of Azov, now they are setting up a naval base in a disputed area of Georgia. I wonder if this is why they have so peacefully moved out of Armenia? Now that they feel they control Georgia, Armenia is no more a concern? Also, Armenia is in easy travel distance from Georgia if anything seems to be needed to maintain Russian security.
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 1, 2024
Russia, Belarus, the US, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Turkey, and Norway conducted a high-profile prisoner exchange involving 26 prisoners from multiple countries on August 1. Turkey mediated the 26-prisoner swap, which took place in Ankara.[30] US officials confirmed the release of three US citizens — retired US Marine Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) journalist Evan Gershkovich, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) journalist Alsu Kurmasheva — seven Russian political prisoners, including Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza — four German citizens from Russian detention — and one German citizen from Belarusian detention.[31] Russian President Vladimir Putin signed pardons for the 15 individuals released from Russian detention, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed a pardon for the German individual released from Belarusian detention.[32] The US, Germany, Poland, Norway, and Slovenia released eight imprisoned Russian nationals, including Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) contract killer Vadim Krasikov, Russian intelligence agents Artem and Anna Dultsev, Russian General Staff’s Main Directorate (GRU) agent Pavel Rubtsov, hacker Roman Seleznev, and businessman Vladislav Klyushin, and also returned two minors (reportedly the children of two of the released Russians).[33] Putin met the returned Russian prisoners on the tarmac at Vnukovo-2 airport in Moscow and stated that he is nominating them for state awards.[34]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-1-2024
As BILD has learned, Western intelligence services suggest that Putin and Krasikov were closely connected in the past and that the killer has knowledge that is dangerous for the Kremlin. The Russian dictator may have feared that Krasikov would reveal important information if he remained in a German prison - out of revenge against the Russian regime, which is not doing everything to free him, or to make a deal with the German authorities.
There is a suspicion that Krasikov could have played a role in Putin's rise to power. It is believed that in the 1990s, he worked for Anatoly Sobchak and his deputy and took measures against their political opponents. However, in February 2000, a few weeks after Putin took office as president, Sobchak died suddenly. The official cause of death - a heart attack - remained just one of the versions. Relatives assumed that Sobchak was murdered. Is Krasikov connected to the alleged murder of Putin's political mentor? And does the trail lead to Putin himself?
Western intelligence suspects exactly that, and suggests that this is why Putin fought so hard for Krasikov’s release.
The Russian dictator attaches great importance to what is known about his past. If the intelligence agencies’ suspicions of his involvement in Sobchak’s murder are true, it will cast doubt on Putin's favorite character trait - loyalty, which he supposedly values so highly.
https://x.com/nofmgeopolitics/status/1819291287775830525
15 Years Later, Questions Remain About Death Of The Man Who Made Putin
Few municipal leaders are credited with changing the path of history. Anatoly Sobchak, the late reformist mayor of Russia's northern capital and political mentor to a young Vladimir Putin, is different.
Sobchak rose to prominence as a charismatic voice for perestroika, a mayor who dumped his city's Soviet-era moniker of Leningrad and pushed for democratic reforms. But 15 years after his death, he's best remembered as the earliest champion of Putin, his onetime deputy, whom Sobchak once praised as “a man who really thinks about the state... not about his own interests and needs.”
During a February 19, 2000, campaign trip to Russia's western exclave of Kaliningrad, the 62-year-old Sobchak died in a hotel room, apparently of a heart attack. But media reports later suggested he had been poisoned. Suspicions were further raised when the two former KGB agents traveling with Sobchak were later shot dead in what appeared to be professional hits.
https://www.rferl.org/a/questions-remain-about-death-of-man-who-made-putin/26867539.html
Local journalists soon picked up on some odd circumstances surrounding Sobchak’s death. Chief among them was the fact that two different autopsies had been performed on the body—one in Kaliningrad and one in St. Petersburg, at the military hospital run by Yuri Shevchenko, the same doctor who had helped engineer Sobchak’s escape to Paris; he was now Russia's minister of health, but he had not given up his post at the hospital. The official cause of death was a massive but natural heart attack.
Still, ten weeks following Sobchak’s death, the prosecutor's office in Kaliningrad opened an investigation into a possible case of “premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances.” Three months later, the investigation was closed without a finding.
Vaksberg who dug up the most puzzling detail of the circumstances of Sobchak’s death: the two bodyguard-assistants, both physically fit young men, had had to be treated for mild symptoms of poisoning following Sobchak’s death. This was a hallmark of contract killings by poisoning: many a secretary or bodyguard had fallen similarly ill when their bosses were killed.
In 2007, Arkady Vaksberg published a book on the history of political poisonings in the USSR and Russia. In it, he advanced the theory that Sobchak was killed by a poison placed on the electrical bulb of the bedside lamp, so that the substance was heated and vaporized when the lamp was turned on. This was a technique developed in the USSR.
A few months after the book was published, Vaksberg’s car was blown up in his Moscow garage; Vaksberg was not in it.
Excerpted from THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE by Masha Gessen
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-mysterious-death-of-putins-mentor-2015-2
In the late summer of 1998, Russian journalist Anatoly Levin-Utkin was returning to his St. Petersburg apartment after a long day at the startup newspaper he'd helped launch. He made it as far as the elevator before his attackers pounced. The assailants smashed the journalist's skull with a metal bar and fled the scene with Levin-Utkin's documents, cash, and a briefcase carrying material for his newspaper's next issue.
There was another article Levin-Utkin worked on, Domnin added, that was published in his final issue and that also drew outside attention: a dive into the past of the newly appointed head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), an ex-KGB-spy-turned-functionary named Vladimir Putin.
On July 25, 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Putin as the new head of the FSB. For Putin, who had come to work in Yeltsin's administration in 1996 after a six-year tenure at St. Petersburg city hall, it was a homecoming of sorts.” I started as a junior agent...in the St. Petersburg [KGB] directorate. That was 23 years ago or so. I repeat, these walls are home to me,” Putin told a news conference following his appointment. As the head of St. Petersburg’s External Relations Committee under Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Putin was an influential local official whose involvement in lucrative and murky deals drew scrutiny from local lawmakers, who at one point called for his ouster.
Under the headline “Lieutenant Colonel Putin Illegally Heads Up FSB,” the article delves into Putin's personal and professional ties with regional and national political figures, including his mentor, Sobchak; Yeltsin's former chief of staff and first deputy prime minister, Anatoly Chubais; and former Prime Minister Viktor Cherdomyrdin, head of the Our Home Is Russia party, whose regional campaign in St. Petersburg was led by Putin in the 1995 parliamentary elections.
“Since his recent appointment, journalists have been trying to dig up more information about the past of the new Lubyanka [FSB headquarters] boss. It turned out that Putin has left neither good nor bad memories about himself: Very little is known about his career aside from the official information. As befits a spy, he doesn't have a single major scandal on his record. Still, a few facts about his work in St. Petersburg have managed to be ‘declassified,’” the article states.
But the profile of Putin published in Levin-Utkin's paper does touch on areas and claims unaddressed in the Kommersant piece, including the inquiry by St. Petersburg lawmaker Marina Salye into Putin's suspicious barter deals as head of the External Relations Committee that led Salye to call for his firing.
The profile, published under the pseudonymous byline “A. Kirilenko,” concluded with the questionable claim that Putin's appointment as FSB director violated the agency's internal staffing policy. It cited an alleged internal requirement that the position can only be filled by someone with the rank of general, while Putin had never risen higher than the rank of lieutenant colonel. (Russian law governing the FSB states that the director is appointed by the president and makes no mention of rank requirements.)
https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-journalist-killing/31910359.html
Ukraine ping
[Putin personally met Vadim Krasikov, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany for the liquidation of the Ichkerian terrorist Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, aka “Dyshno” at the airport. On this video, an excerpt from the interview with Tucker Carlson, the reason why he met him at the airport.
https://x.com/nofmgeopolitics/status/1819291287775830525]
Artur Rehi:
While almost the entire world is discussing the delivery of the first F-16s to Ukraine and news from Venezuela, the behind-the-scenes struggle continues in Russia. Not only is Shoigu’s team being cleaned out, but something is also happening to the witnesses in this case.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1819118687498260548.html
Thanks Zhang Fei.
Thanks AdmSmith.
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