#putin's bunker

[tomorrowusa]

Being paranoid goes with being a dictator. While the specifics of these revelations are largely new, Putin’s general paranoia has been on display for some time. 

Gleb Karakulov, a former officer in Russia’s Federal Guard Service (Федеральная служба охраны – abbreviated in Latin script as FSO), has fled Russia and is providing details of Putin’s paranoiac behavior. The FSO is roughly analogous to the Secret Service in the US – but is larger.

Mr Karakulov escaped to safety via Istanbul while on a business trip to Kazakhstan in October 2022 after accompanying president Putin on more than 180 trips over the past 13 years. It is unclear where the 35-year-old is now.

[ ... ]

The former FSO officer claims president Putin opts to stay “in his bunker” rather than make trips because he is so paranoid about an assassination attempt. The Russian president also allegedly travels with a 2.5 meter high box to prevent his secret talks from leaking and Western bugging.

He also claimed that the Russian president is isolating for a fourth year in a row, out of fear of becoming infected with Covid-19, and staff can only work in the same room as Putin once they have been in isolation for two weeks.

President Putin does not use a mobile phone or the internet, meaning his knowledge of events is filtered via the secret services - and what he watches on state-controlled Russian TV, according to Mr Karakulov.

Putin’s sources of news are his toadies and Russian state TV. They basically just tell him what he wants to hear.

Speaking about the war in Ukraine, Mr Karakulov issued an appeal to officers to come forward with evidence about Putin as a “war criminal,” saying the war is “beyond the pale” and “defies reason”.

“How many nameless victims of this war are there, how many of them are children? How many more such victims are required before you stop putting up with it?” he said.

“What is happening now in Ukraine, all this destruction, this war of aggression, terrorism, and genocide of the Ukrainian people - there is no other word for it - all this is a criminal offence.

“Our president has become a war criminal.”

I certainly won’t argue with him about Putin’s criminality.

There had been previous reports that Putin takes extreme measures to keep his poop from falling into foreign hands. Seriously.

Putin's bodyguards collect his poop on trips abroad and take it back to Russia with them, report says

Presumably, transporting Putin’s poop back to Russia was not among Gleb Karakulov’s duties. 

Putin is probably just as paranoid about attempted coups as he is of foreign intelligence gathering. His constant fear and stress are bound to have an effect on his health.

#invasion of ukraine #dictatorship #russia #vladimir putin #war criminal #genocide #putin's paranoia #gleb karakulov #defector #federal guard service #federal protective servive #fso #covid-19 #putin's bunker #putin's poop #россия #владимир путин #глеб каракулов #федеральная служба охраны #фсо #путинская паранойя #бункер путина #какашки путина #путин хуйло #путин – убийца #геноцид #военные преступления #україна переможе #слава україні! #героям слава!

[silverfox66]

#Ukraine #what a legend #Zelenskyy #russian invasion #Bakhmut #meanwhile putin is cowering somewhere in a bunker

[gme-news]

Report: Putin Fled to his Bunker after Declaring Martial Law

via IFTTT

View On WordPress

#gilas #jessica sojo #kapuso mo #kmjs #nba #noypi alliance #pba #Report: Putin Fled to his Bunker after Declaring Martial Law Putin has fled Moscow to bunker at his ‘secret palace’ after Wagner Group rebel #tulfo

[the-jam-to-the-unicorn]

Zelenskyy went on a book fair date (in Kyiv) with his wife two days ago while being surrounded by Ukrainians and shaking hands, talking to the people, taking photos, and buying books.

Putin is sitting alone in a bunker right now because he can't flee and tries not to be Nicholas II because the weaponized Nazi armee of his personal chef wants to overthrow him.

#and thats basically all you have to know about these two leaders #ukraine #war #russia #one is a democratic elected President #the other one is a dictator of a fascist state

[warsofasoiaf]

What do you think of Elon turning off Starlink to stop the attack on the Russian Navy?

Disgusting behavior from a egomaniacal fool.

Dissecting his behavior is fascinating. He may honestly believe that he is saving the world from World War III due to a Messianic complex birthed out of his narcissism. The entire "I just want to avoid World War 3" movement is largely bogus - Putin backs down when confronted with force and strikes when he believes he can get away with it, just like he did with Prigozhin, and that movement never bothers to say what Russia must surrender to ensure world peace, only Ukraine. If the goal really was to avoid World War 3, you'd show teeth and let Putin know he'd lose. He doesn't want to lose out on his fortune and he knows his fortified bunker would be obliterated with a GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator. But it's easy for Musk to delude himself into believing himself being uniquely capable of saving the world.

I think it's combination of contrarian behavior owing to his ego making him easily-manipulatable and his belief that being a freethinking disruptor makes him immune to propaganda and the contrarian path holds the most truth. Certainly, "everyone is stupid except for me" is not unique to the techbro disruptor culture, it's a core component of a whole host of tribal movements from progressivism to MAGA. But Musk is a egotistical blowhard with his feet in his own camp, no matters the justifications he tells himself. And his fans will continue to flatter him no matter how many stupid decisions he makes.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#russo ukrainian war #elon musk

[qqueenofhades]

I kinda doubt there will actually be a civil war or that putin is in any kind of real danger but do you think that maybe prigozhin will be killed? it would at least be sth i guess

I have seen some speculation in various places around the lines that "Putin ordered Prigozhin to do this and Prigozhin is just playing the role of the agent provocateur/setting the stage for another war crime in Ukraine and there's no actual crisis at all." I do not think that's true. They already blew the Kakhova Dam with much less ceremony, and with much less tangible risk to the regime. Likewise, the thing about Russian "provocations" or "false flags" is that they're all lies and don't actually involve any real action, just rhetoric and claims in their information/social media sphere. This also plays into the repeatedly discredited idea that Putin is a "master strategist" and is playing some incomprehensible genius 12-dimensional chess that it's impossible for us to understand, rather than being an aging psychopathic dictator who decided to "reconquer" Ukraine for a) the greed of his rapacious oligarchic inner circle and b) the "messianic militarism"-inspired crusade favored by Alexander Dugin and the other ultra-Orthodox, ultra-nationalist, neo-fascist thinkers who influence Putin the most. It's not actually that complicated.

Likewise, the amount of Russian military activity/attempts to fortify Moscow against an actual siege suggests that whatever Prigozhin is doing, it's not on Putin's orders and is out of Putin's direct control. Putin has given the requisite fiery speech about how Prigozhin is a traitor and he should be destroyed, there are Wagner Group vehicles heading up the M4 motorway to Moscow, anti-terrorism preparations underway in Moscow itself, etc. If you remember the fit they threw when there was one tiny drone above the Kremlin, you can see that they're taking the possibility of an actual attack seriously. If Putin was a master strategist (which he's not), there's no way in hell he would decide on launching an actual, real-world, armed coup against himself as the best way to shore up his power. The Wagner group has been fighting for months, Prigozhin has been blasting the Ministry of Defense for months, and Putin, like any other degenerate Russian dictator increasingly past his sell-by date, fears a coup more than anything else in the world. That's why he keeps hiding in bunkers and using doubles and whatever the fuck else layers of disinformation and misinformation that the regime specializes in. He knows what happened in 1917 and then in 1991 and the collapse of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union as a result. Putin's only aim has been to keep power, no matter what. There's literally no way in hell he would actually run the risk of letting a coup succeed.

Basically: I still don't know what's going on, nobody else does either, and as I said in my last answer, it's a good idea to question everything that comes out of Russia. However, this does absolutely not at all appear to be in Putin's control in any way, and is something he and the establishment are trying desperately to tamp down, because it represents a genuine threat to his power. Also as noted, we're rooting for all of them to bite each other's dicks off and explode. If Putin is still in effective control of the military or the country or anything, he clearly has to give the order to execute/liquidate Prigozhin. If he gives it but can't carry it out, he's no longer in command in reality, regardless of what it says on paper. If he doesn't give it, he's fatally weak and knows the inept regular Russian army of conscripts and criminals can't compete against the battle-hardened Wagnerites, and he's totally dependent on them to continue his insane war. If that's the case, everyone else will also see it too, and things could go very bad for poor old Vladimir Vladimirovich, very fast.

As I said before: Stay tuned.

#anonymous #ask #russia ukraine war

[afranse]

Здесь белое - это чёрное,

А чёрное - это белое,

Сырое - как кипячённое,

Трусливое - типа смелое.

Убийство - освобождение.

Война - гарантия мира.

Слова поменяли значение

В стране одного вампира.

Шагает дорогою чёрта,

Не может ни дня без насилия,

Абсурда страна - перевёртыш,

Путинская Россия.

Опасней всего здесь мёртвые,

Скрывают в морге их тело.

Здесь люди в прислуге у чёрта,

И подлости нет предела.

Тут правдой записана ложь,

И ложь подаётся как правда.

Страны другой не найдёшь,

Где сахаром стала отрава.

Шагает дорогою ирода,

Не может ни дня без насилия,

Страна одного выродка -

Путинская Россия.

###################

Here white is declared as black,

Black is white, truth is fake, life is grave.

Raw is boiled, angel spoiled, lie is fact,

Bunker’s coward promoted as brave.

Murders bring to folks liberation.

War is guarantor of peace.

Words used to change their meaning

In the land of kremlin vampire the beast.

Folks walk along the path of devil.

A day can’t pass without violence.

Absurd country - a shapeshifter,

Putin’s Russia got crazy entirely.

Murdered folks are most dangerous here,

Ask for body from morgue is obsceneness.

Looks like people serve here to devil,

There is no at all limit to meanness.

Here truth is presented as lie.

Lies disguised as truth by kremlin booger.

One may not find another country,

Where poison is offered as sugar.

Stubbornly walk the path of Herod,

Can’t go a day without violence,

The country of distorted mirrors

Lives with common sense in denial.

Folks walk along the path of devil.

A day can’t pass without violence.

Absurd country guided by a shapeshifter,

Putin’s Russia of deadly silence.

#книга #стихи #poetry #поэзия #литература #песня #искусство #русский блог #театр #навальный #убийство #война #политика #история #россия #украина #politics #history #alexei navalny #navalny

[mariacallous]

MONS, Belgium—It was the summer of 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war in Ukraine was 6 months old. NATO officials feared more than ever that they would one day have to send hundreds of thousands of troops to fight and die against the Russians.

With war on NATO’s doorstep, the alliance faced an existential question: Was it up to the job of defending every square inch of its turf? Christopher Cavoli, the four-star U.S. Army general tapped as the alliance’s military chief that July, decided it wasn’t.

Cavoli ordered his top lieutenants to come up with a plan to transform Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE)—NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, which had lost most of its power after the Cold War—into a proper war command center.

“His initial guidance and direction that started all of this was: I need to be able to command,” said Col. Bryan Frizzelle, the project manager for SHAPE’s strategic warfighting headquarters.

The effort to remake the alliance’s headquarters is just one element in the most ambitious military reforms that NATO has embarked on in years. NATO is growing the size of its response force by eightfold. The war room in Mons has been remade to call up troop reinforcements and map out long-range military strikes on Russian soil even before a war breaks out. For the first time, NATO forces are exercising those brand new war plans in Europe’s hinterlands this spring.

The plans could take years more to put in place. “We are talking decades—potentially plural,” said Becca Wasser, a senior fellow for the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.

But the war in Ukraine is already 2 years old. Most NATO nations are struggling to boost defense spending and produce artillery shells. Russia’s military is reconstituting faster than anyone expected. And the United States is just nine months away from a presidential election in which the Republican front-runner, former U.S. President Donald Trump, is already openly questioning whether the United States would help enforce Article 5—the self-defense clause at the heart of NATO—if he is elected as U.S. president.

All of this means that the alliance may not have decades to get its act together. “That’s the open question,” Wasser said. “Does NATO actually have that time?”

The first thing you see at SHAPE is the bunker. Built in 1985, when NATO’s military headquarters had a Soviet nuclear target on its back, the massive concrete structure looms over the parking lot. It’s not built to withstand a modern Russian nuclear blast—you can’t dig deep enough to shelter from that—but it’s a symbol of what SHAPE used to be at the height of the Cold War: the central nervous system of NATO’s 3 million troops and 100 army divisions in Europe.

It’s also where a group of NATO planners from a half-dozen countries took the first steps toward rebuilding the sleepy military command. As the Kremlin was building up more than 100,000 troops to invade Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022, NATO scrambled jets, rolled tanks, and hardened the eastern flank with more than 8,000 troops from 30 countries. NATO once again needed a central nervous system to command them.

Anyone who worked at SHAPE had an open invitation to join a planning session in the bunker on a Saturday afternoon in late fall of 2022. Few did. Of the nearly 3,000 people who work at SHAPE, just 30 people showed up. That ragtag group of volunteers who committed to work nights and weekends became the so-called “Tiger Team” that would remake—and is still remaking—NATO’s military headquarters for war.

The team members came from all over the headquarters and hailed from all across Europe, including Denmark, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom. Some got roped in on long email chains by their bosses. Some told their colleagues about it and convinced them to join. Frizzelle told a few of them himself. Kenneth Boesgaard, a Danish special operations officer, found out the agenda had very little to do with special operations, but he went anyway. The fear of missing out was too strong.

They didn’t waste any time. Led by a three-star French Army general, they went right after NATO’s sacred cows. The two-hour discussion became the foundation for a series of “hard truths.” SHAPE was no longer useful. It was built for peacetime, not to fend off a Russian attack. It was no longer “fit for purpose,” Frizzelle said.

The group had homework: to deliver an update to Cavoli in just eight weeks, cutting through four ranks in the chain of command. And they had only four full-time planners.

By December 2022, they had written a first draft of SHAPE’s new job description. It had about a half-dozen major bullet points. It included planning for war as well as resourcing and commanding it. SHAPE also still had to advise NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on military policy and take the 31-nation political commitments that come out of NATO summits—carefully worded and littered with diplomatic jargon—and turn them into military reality: sensors, shooters, troops, and brigades on the ground.

Then they had to get the rest of the headquarters to buy in. “[In] NATO, you’ve got to build consensus,” said Lt. Col. Alex Price, a British Army officer involved in the project. “I’ve learned that the hard way.” The Tiger Team didn’t need any convincing. But the biggest problem was getting the rest of SHAPE to understand what a “strategic warfighting headquarters” was supposed to do.

The job of the command is to say who goes where—whether it’s a bomber, a fighter jet, or a rocket artillery system—and what they’re going to hit. For years, it was the other way around. NATO’s three joint force commands, which are meant to divide up responsibility for security in Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean and report back to Mons, did most of SHAPE’s job for it. They ran the show in the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, and Afghanistan, where NATO’s military might was mostly delivered in airstrikes, not boots on the ground to stop Russian tanks.

By the time Putin invaded Ukraine, about 80 percent of SHAPE’s work was reporting to Stoltenberg, NATO’s civilian leader. “We were not in charge,” said French Army Lt. Gen. Hubert Cottereau, SHAPE’s vice chief of staff, who oversees the headquarters transformation effort.

That worked in the small wars of the 1990s. But computer simulations quickly made it clear that that approach wouldn’t work on a larger scale. In one digital exercise in September 2022, officials at Naples, Italy, the hub of NATO’s naval forces, and Brunssum, Netherlands, the nerve center for NATO ground troops, told SHAPE to step aside: Just give them the shooters, sensors, and troops, and they would plot out the targets.

Once the simulated bullets started flying in NATO’s digitized war with “Occasus”—a bloc of four fictional Russia-like countries—the lower-level commanders hit a wall. Who would prioritize the main effort? Who would give them the resources? And who would call up the reserves?

They needed SHAPE to do it.

Cavoli didn’t go easy on the Tiger Team. The group had missed a key bullet point: strategic targeting. If Putin ever ordered Russian troops onto NATO soil, Cavoli knew he would need to be able to strike back, hitting targets deep inside Russia to paralyze the Kremlin’s war industry and break their logistical chains.

Dating back to the end of the Cold War, most NATO countries wanted to make nice with Russia. Few were comfortable with identifying military targets in the Kremlin’s backyard, fearing that first Boris Yeltsin, and then Putin, would see it as warmongering. So they gave that power away.

“We discovered that SHAPE actually in peacetime had no targeting authorities because that was politically sensitive,” Frizzelle said. If a war had broken out, NATO military planners would have had to start planning out Russian targets from scratch.

Ukraine changed everything. In the summer of 2023, during the annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, the alliance unanimously granted SHAPE the ability to conduct targeting. Now, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, SHAPE is using that authority—in peacetime. NATO planners are deciding what would be valid targets on Russian soil, plotting them out for Naples, Brunssum, and NATO’s U.S.-based command in Norfolk, Virginia, and running the potential bull’s-eyes through all of the legal traps.

Cavoli needed to get NATO’s eyes on the target, too. Until last summer, SHAPE’s around-the-clock watch center had only a dozen seats. After a three-month construction project, the center now fits a workforce of 85 people, seven times as big as it was.

Left: SHAPE’s new headquarters appears under construction in Mons on March 21, 1967. Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images   Right: NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg (second from right) walks with outgoing and incoming Supreme Allied Commander Europe generals toward a change-of-command ceremony at SHAPE in Mons on May 4, 2016. Thierry Monasse/AFP via Getty Images

It’s not just a watch center, though. Officials see it as a nerve center of all of NATO’s military operations. By putting all of the experts in one room, within a few minutes, a few chair swivels, and a couple of phone calls, the new multidomain operations team can quickly give Cavoli and his aides-de-camp everything they need to respond to a Russian attack.

“Let’s say there’s a report of a Russian rocket or part of a drone landing in Romania,” Frizzelle said. “The senior watch officer can turn around in her chair and say, ‘OK, we have this report. Give me the geographic subject matter expert.’” They can brief Cavoli within a few minutes of getting the alert.

They’re still getting all of the right people in place. In a crisis, there’s no time to be flipping through the phone book; SHAPE needs officers in the bunker who can immediately direct it to NATO’s land, air, and maritime commanders. The idea is to be able to connect from Mons to a shooter on the eastern flank if war breaks out—almost instantly.

“The key to effective deterrence is the demonstrated capability to inflict real pain on Russia,” said Ben Hodges, a former head of U.S. Army Europe who is now a NATO senior mentor for logistics. “If you want to prevent the Russians from making a terrible decision, then that means we have to be able to move as fast—or faster—than them.”

Two years into Russia’s invasion, NATO nations have now put 150,000 ground troops on the eastern flank. But NATO has no troops of its own. It has no tanks. It has no fighter jets. It’s the job of each country to get its troops, tanks, and planes ready to go when the alliance asks for them.

“The biggest catastrophe can be summed up in two words,” Cottereau said. “Too late.”

For decades, SHAPE had very little power over troops in NATO countries. But Russia’s invasion prompted those nations to give Cavoli more authority. He can adjust the level of air defense cover in Europe. He can move NATO’s two standing maritime task forces at sea. He can scale up the eight battlegroups on Russia’s border from battalions, with just over 1,000 troops, all the way up to brigades, which are at least three times that size. Some of them are already on the way.

Cavoli still can’t order troops to fire, but he can order more troops to move into place—or get ready to move. And he now has at his command 300,000 troops ready to exercise and respond to a crisis—almost eight times what he had before the war. It’s called the Allied Response Force.

Once it’s activated in July, the newly readied force will be trained twice a year: once for a pre-crisis simulation and again for an out-of-area operation that simulates a real war. The aim is to send a clear message to Russia: Keep out.

“Every ship that sails, every aircraft that flies, every tank that rolls sends a message,” said Gunnar Bruegner, the one-star German general who serves as assistant chief of staff to Cavoli for developing and training NATO’s forces. “We are ready.”

The new force is intended to be the tip of NATO’s spear, similar to the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, the Pentagon’s on-call force of paratroopers that deployed to Afghanistan for the 2021 evacuation effort and then served as the boots on the ground in Poland when Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine started.

The next stage is to keep a larger reserve of forces prepared for an Article 5-level war, distinct from the eastern flank battlegroups, that would be the size of somewhere between the 300,000-troop rapid response force and the 3.2 million-plus troops in NATO’s 31 militaries. Each unit will be assigned its own patch of dirt to defend and will exercise based on NATO’s war plans. Cavoli could order some of those troops to be ready immediately, more at a month’s notice, and even more in six months.

“That’s the kind of process we’re going through now,” said a NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the alliance. “[We’re] going to allies and saying, ‘What have you got? What could you stick on the table in an Article 5 situation?’”

Although defense spending in Europe has grown by almost a third in the past decade and as many as 20 countries could hit the alliance’s 2 percent defense spending target this year, there’s an ongoing give-and-take. In NATO, members have the control button by providing the money and the troops. Just one ally saying “no” can cause a major headache. Greece refused to participate in airstrikes on the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. During NATO’s 2011 intervention to shut down Libya’s skies, Germany refused to provide its early warning aircraft.

The NATO official said European nations are going to have to invest more in weapons systems and training that they’ve been leaning on the Americans to provide, such as air and missile defense, long-range artillery and missiles, command and control, and land combat formations.

And the biggest question mark is Trump. Again the Republican front-runner in the 2024 election, the former president is publicly throwing cold water on NATO’s self-defense pledge. If European nations don’t pay up for defense, he said at a campaign rally this month, he would encourage Russia to attack them. (NATO officials fired back: While the alliance gives nations a defense spending target, it is not a dues-paying group. “This is not a country club,” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told CNN.)

Trump’s rhetoric might not have been an existential issue for NATO in the days of voluntary operations such as Kosovo and Libya. But after Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, everything has changed.

“Article 5 is fundamentally different,” the NATO official said. “Everybody is on the hook.”

When he was Estonia’s defense chief, between 2016 and 2017, Margus Tsahkna and his aides counted more than 120,000 Russian troops massed on the other side of the country’s Baltic border. Putin could send those troops into battle within 24 to 48 hours. “All that was needed was the command from the Kremlin,” said Tsahkna, now Estonia’s top diplomat.

The invasion never came. Today, two years after Russian troops began to roll over the border into Ukraine, most of the soldiers arrayed against the borders of the three former Soviet nations on NATO’s eastern flank—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are gone. Many of them have fought and died in Ukraine.

It may not be an all-out invasion of the Baltic states that’s coming. After all, more than 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured in Ukraine. It could be a hybrid attack, too—cyberattacks, the cutting of pipelines, or a limited invasion to undermine Western confidence in Article 5 that’s already been damaged by Trump. But either way, there’s a growing fear in the West that Russia is already picking itself up off the mat much faster than anyone expected.

The question is not just when a Russian attack might come but where.

“[Putin] will continue. He must continue the aggression. He needs to have a new conflict somewhere,” Tsahkna said. “Testing NATO, is it Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland? I don’t know. [But] it’s not even a question.”

Estonian officials believe that Putin is planning to put two to three times more firepower against the borders with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland than it did before the Ukraine war. And Putin is making up for Russia’s combat losses, expanding the size of the military to more than 1.3 million troops, only a bit smaller than the U.S. armed forces.

NATO planners said last October that they were following expert estimates that Russia could reconstitute in a three-to-five-year period after the shooting stops in Ukraine, with Russian land forces degraded but much of the rest of the military intact. But Russia’s military comeback has accelerated. Some European officials now believe Russia could attack NATO directly. This month, Denmark’s defense minister said Russia could test Article 5 within three to five years.

So NATO’s planning has accelerated, too.

This year’s ongoing Steadfast Defender exercise, which started in January and won’t end until May, will top out at 90,000 troops—only about a quarter of them American. Marines from three countries will ship out of Norfolk aboard the USS Gunston Hall and launch an amphibious assault to take back the beaches of Norway. Then NATO’s highest-readiness troops will assault across the Vistula River in Poland.

It’s the alliance’s biggest military demonstration in 36 years. “If you’re Russia, you might say: ‘I can attack this spot here now, and maybe I’ve got a temporary advantage,’” the NATO official said. “But the knowledge that we can and will bring basically two full American corps to Europe—and they will fight—that is a pretty big deterrent.”

Another key reason for doing large-scale exercises so soon after Cavoli’s team put the plans on paper is to see what works and what doesn’t. How do you move land forces across Europe? How do you supply them? And when the shooting starts, will they arrive in time?

“There might be a big attack coming on NATO,” Bruegner said. “It gives you the bloody truth about what you really are capable of doing.”

Back in Mons, dozens of military officers from NATO countries huddled in the SHAPE bunker in October 2023 to test their latest plans in a 10-day exercise dubbed “Steadfast Jupiter.” This time, they were fighting off a fictional invasion of Eastern Europe from Occasus, their Russia-like foe.

In the end, SHAPE received more than a passing grade. The allies didn’t steamroll their enemy but degraded Occasus enough to the point that the mock conflict could end at the bargaining table.

Every three to four months, Frizzelle’s team emerges from the bunker to present Cavoli with another set of recommendations to change the SHAPE headquarters, each time wrenching down on more problems. In the October exercise, Cavoli and his team realized their rules of engagement were too strict—better suited for Afghanistan than Article 5. So they tweaked them.

Their next assignment is to present their work to all 31 NATO allies—and Sweden—at the upcoming Washington summit in July. It’s a chance for the civilian brass to grill Cavoli. “How far are we? How good are we at being able to execute the plans?” said Royal Netherlands Navy Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee.

In the meantime, they’ve got more homework to do. SHAPE’s experts are still looking at how to optimize intelligence gathering, integrating artificial intelligence into the headquarters, and building out their own wargaming capability, with a team of experts who live, breathe, eat, and sleep Russian tactics as the “red team” on the other side.

The tweaking will continue as long as Cavoli is NATO’s military commander—at least for the next year and a half. But they’ll never be 100 percent sure that the war plans will work until the first shot is fired in an actual war.

“We’ve built an airplane—the new strategic warfighting headquarters,” Frizzelle said. “It’s informed by the blueprints of airplanes that have flown well in the past. But until we fly the airplane, we don’t know how it’s going to handle. We don’t know if we’ve forgotten a part.”

“Hopefully,” he added. “We haven’t.”

[tomorrowusa]

Speaking of courage, am I the only one struck by the contrast between President Biden’s daring visit to Kyiv and the way President Donald Trump retreated to the White House bunker in the face of unarmed protesters in Lafayette Park?

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in a New York Times column on how the far right in the US worships loser Vladimir Putin. (archived)

People on the far right love to talk tough. But in reality they are mega wimps with fake bone spurs.

#paul krugman #joe biden #biden's visit to kyiv #donald trump #trump cowering in white house bunker #far right adoration of putin #invasion of ukraine

[argumate]

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin seized the Victory Day holiday as an opportunity to mock Putin and question his judgment. Prigozhin referred to a “happy grandfather” figure who “thinks that he is good” during a discussion of ammunition shortages and Russia’s future prospects in Ukraine. Prigozhin then rhetorically asked what Russia and future generations should do and how Russia can win if the “grandfather” turns out to be a “complete asshole.” Prigozhin also noted that unnamed figures (likely referring to Putin and the senior Russian MoD figures) should stop showing off on Red Square. Prigozhin is likely referring to Putin, who is often referred to as “grandfather” (or more specifically “Bunkernyi ded” or “bunker grandfather”), and Prigozhin has previously attacked other senior Russian officials and officers by name — but has not done so against Putin. Prigozhin has previously attempted to upstage Putin’s authority through similar rhetorical stunts. Prigozhin’s escalating attacks on Putin may — if the Kremlin does not respond to Prigozhin’s thinly veiled criticism of Putin on Victory Day — further erode the norm in Putin’s system in which individual actors can jockey for position and influence (and drop in and out of Putin’s favor) but cannot directly criticize Putin.

bite each other's dicks off, etc.

[leeenuu]

Photos from the past few days:

Teenagers on bicycles pass a bridge destroyed by shelling near Orihiv, Ukraine, Thursday, May 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A woman who fled from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol is helped from a bus upon her arrival at a reception center for displaced people in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, late Sunday, May 8, 2022. Thousands of Ukrainians continue to leave Russian-occupied areas. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

A man fills cans with water as a boy swings on on a rope in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, Saturday, May 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Andriy Andriyenko)

A Ukrainian sapper searches for unexploded explosives at the Antonov An-225, world's biggest cargo aircraft during recent fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces, at the Antonov airport in Hostomel, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, May 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Workers at the Metinvest Group Central Mining and Processing Plant in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, took shelter in an underground bunker as an air-raid siren sounded on Saturday, May 7, 2022. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)

A stone with a sign reads "Don't be jealous" is seen in a yard of an apartment building destroyed by night shelling in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, Thursday, May 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Andriy Andriyenko)

Soldiers carry a coffin with remains of a volunteer soldier Oleksandr Makhov, a well-known Ukrainian journalist, killed by the Russian troops, at St Michael cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, May 9, 2022. The coffin is followed by Makhov's widow. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Ukrainian soldiers greeting each other along the road near Pokrovsk on Friday, May 6, 2022. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times)

Women wrapped in the Ukrainian national flag take selfies near an installation depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin with a gun in his mouth and writing "Shoot yourself" in central Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, May 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Twin sisters Nika and Miya, 3, surveying vehicles destroyed in the war near Irpin on Sunday, May 8, 2022. (Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)

#war in ukraine #russian world

[3nding]

Russia's security forces are reported to be in disarray following the attempted mutiny by the Wagner Group. It seems to have been perfectly timed for a moment – Friday night – when many personnel were too drunk to respond quickly, while others are refusing to fight Wagner.

Vodka come arma strategica.

Le ore passano e non ci sono foto e video di scontri a fuoco seri tra Wagner e regolari in Russia. Anche dopo il discorso di Putin. Questo può indicare che molto probabilmente i regolati non stanno sparando o si stanno unendo a Wagner. Putin partirà per la dacia a Sochi o per il bunker?

[myrskytuuli]

Part of me did wish that the ao3 attackers would have been russian hackers, because it would have been incredibly funny to imagine Putin seething in his bunker, after spectacularly failing in his war, descending down to a undergorund volcano-lair where I imagine all Kremlin online-trolls work, and with glowing eyes declaring that if nothing else works it’s time to hit those degenerate westerners where it really hurts, and then all the faceless hackers unifyingly start working to take down ao3.

#personal nonsense

[warsofasoiaf]

So Putin and the Russians are putting tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. What do you think Putin is trying to do here?

Personally I think he's trying to dissuade anymore NATO support after all the other "red lines" were crossed and he's hoping this works. I don't think he'd use them though.

Frankly, I think he's trying to do it to show strength and attempt to intimidate the West into slowing or stopping Ukrainian aid, especially in not giving Ukraine better systems. The whole "depleted uranium represents a nuclear escalation of the conflict" line that Russia has been giving in response to the UK providing depleted uranium anti-tank rounds to Ukraine is a lie for two reasons.

First, depleted uranium is, as the name might imply, depleted. The amount of depleted uranium dust you'd need to inhale just to reach the level of radioactivity you'd get from a chest X-ray or several high altitude flights would be so high you'd have to be doing rails of DU dust off the husk of a burned out T-72. You'd need to actually ingest significant quantities of DU to increase your radiation risk to a measurable degree.

The second is that Russia has already been using depleted uranium rounds in the T-80, so there's no escalation given that they've already been used. Of course, Russian statements and a quarter are worth 25 cents, so I don't put a lot of stock in it. The chance Russia uses nuclear weapons at this point are as close to zero as you can be without the ability to actually read Putin's mind and confirming it for yourself. He won't use them, not just because he'd start World War III, but because in all likelihood, someone would attempt to coup him since they don't have a bunker to retreat to. You'd have to see a serious collapse of the Russian lines and the Ukranians moving to take either Crimea or Belgorod before that even becomes a possibility.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#russo ukrainian war #engineering #technology #depleted uranium

[qqueenofhades]

Idk re latest news on wagner's withdrawal the hopeful part of me is like. Well prigozhin blinked and putin cannot afford this type of thing again. IF it really was a "wink wink" situation i feel like putin wld have made a bigger show of staying in moscow and not helicoptering out like a little bitch (even if the presidential planes leaving for st. Petersburg were a fakeout its such a little bitch move). But wagner is an effective component of russian offensive. So like for putin it may be more prudent 2 stamp out wagner which wld be great and i wld like 2 see it! Like net positive forcing putin to cut himself off at the knees by executing his most powerful and useful warlord....putin louis xiv era incoming where he locks everyone up in his remotest palace in the urals and makes them clap while he does judo before the whole compound gets bombed tbh. And the immediate relief to ukraine syria mali u name it

The word from various Russian and Ukrainian sources seems to be that this was real, it wasn't a fake-out or psy-op, and that the presidential administration/Putin and co. were genuinely panicked and scrambling to save their own asses before things really went bad. Putin fled like the aforementioned little bitch to one of his bunkers, the Russian oligarchs hopped on their private jets, the remaining flights from Moscow sold out, people crowded onto trains trying to get out of Rostov, etc. So yeah, if this was all planned beforehand, Putin would have made a big show of staying in Moscow and coming out looking heroic. Not like, well, a little bitch.

Anyway: after all that "we will take Kyiv in three days!" talk, it looks as if indeed, Moscow is the one that will be taken in three days or less whenever the Wagnerites really put their mind to it, and that's not a comfortable situation for your average incredibly paranoid bunker-bound dictator. Putin isn't going to enjoy the next few days at all, to which I say: hahahahahhaha, sucks to suck, buddy. Get fucked.

#anonymous #ask #russia ukraine war