Max is a Maine Coon from Bucha. He was taken by Russian soldiers & left in Belarus. Thanks to kind people who used his QR tag to find his owners, Max has been reunited w/ his family. @USAID is proud to have helped make this possible thru our partnership w/ the 🇺🇦startup Animal ID pic.twitter.com/GYNyEuAjov
Stealing washing machines is weird, but it’s understandable if you assume that they have no basic appliances back home. But stealing pets is done purely out of malice.
They’re selling off all their assets in Russia, and will “de-Arch” all their sites, meaning that under international law the McDonalds logos and whatnot will not be allowed to be used for any business in Russia. Given Russia’s dubious relationship with intellectual property and copyright laws, I kinda expect McDonalds to *seem* to still be in business, many of the existing locations being bought out and re-opened by some Kremlin-crony using the existing hardware and much of the staff. I *assume* that the bulk of their food ingredients were sourced from Russian providers; I would imagine that producing virtually identical menu items to what they made as McDonalds should be fairly straightforward.
It should prove interesting to see how McDonalds iconography gets mutated into Russian propaganda.
Chinese TV crew captures Russian tank turret going rocketing into the sky. A design flaw in many Russian tanks is that the ammo store is directly underneath the turret – if a hit detonates it, the turret goes straight up, sometimes reaching extremely impressive heights, like here pic.twitter.com/Flli1DK4t3
A video taken by Ukrainian forces after taking a formerly Russian-held position, showing a good reason why the Russian military seems so incompetent: instead of loading their positions with militarily useful equipment, they burdened themselves with loot. And not even *good* loot… not gold and diamonds and Lugers and such, but washing machines. The fact that these soldiers think hauling pilfered home appliances – and big ones – around an entire *war* makes any kind of sense says a lot about how things are back home in Russia. In a country where the Dear Leader has himself yachts the size of warships that cost as much as space programs, apparently the average schmoe doesn’t have the sort of mundane normal stuff that people in the west take for granted. So they’re stealing it from Ukraine.
Seems the Russian soldiers are pointing their guns in the wrong direction.
Other than lobbing rockets at Odessa, at least so far none of the kinda-expected escalations of Putins war came about. Not a single NATO country got nuked, for instance. Still, Operator Starsky, a Ukrainian National Guardsman who has put out a lot of videos and tweets and whatnot in this war, “celebrated” the day with a video compiling several interesting bits of Russia: the head of the Russian space program being an actual Nazi, Russian politicians proposing genocide, excuses made for theft, etc.
Today is “Victory Day” for Russia, celebrating the victory of the democidal Soviets over the genocidal Nazis. Parades and celebrations and bloviation, oh my. Basically everyone is expecting Putin to either announce some crazy new offensives against Ukraine or to actually enact said craziness. This could include strikes against non-Ukrainian targets, possibly NATO nations, even nukes. Wheeee!!!!! The next day or so should prove interesting… even if nothing happens. A *lack* of some new offensive might indicate things are falling apart.
Those who have been looking at this blog for long enough may recall that, years ago, it would shut down or lock up or disappear for hours or days at a time due to outside attacks. These attacks were, until I added a bunch of security features, apparently meant to add spy/malware to the blog, to make it a money-making venture for other people. Exactly how that was supposed to work I’m not sure… but most of the attacks – as in well in excess of 90% – seemed to come from Ukraine. Ukraine has a large number of nerds with excess free time, lots of skill and a willingness to unleash it upon just about anybody. Well… now they have a valid target in the form of the Russian military.
ISIS and similar groups tried using the same idea – drones with bombs – against the US in the middle east. There, success was minimal… not because the idea wasn’t good, but because ISIS is not exactly filled with nerds. The US countered the drones with electronic warfare: our nerds were better than their nerds, which was not at all surprising. But Russian nerds seem to be absent from this fight. Or, perhaps worse, the Russian military simply took the Russian nerds away from their computers, slapped second-rate AK-47s into their hands and dumped them into trucks.
Previous footage showed a little drone dropping something akin to a grenade, doing damage to soft targets. Here’s one apparently kerploding a *tank.* WTF??? It drops *two* bombs, so it’s clearly not one of those dinky camera drones, but something bigger, but it still seems like a whole lot of bang for the buck.
