This targeting is our preliminary assessment, due to be refined in the nearest one to several days.
Assuming correct assessment, these are 3rd elections targeted by Matryoshka, the bot network in question, in just 2 months—after Germany (24 Jun–03 Aug) and France (04–18 Aug).
2/3
As always with Matryoshka, organic reach of this campaign is marginal at best, typically as low as several hundreds of views per video.
3/3
The gasoline lines are back in Russia. The fuel situation had only just begun to stabilize when new strikes hit the refineries and brought back the shortages at gas stations.
In the West, this keeps raising the same question: can Ukraine inflict damage on the Russian oil industry so critical that routine, background-mode repair no longer replaces the losses? Or will Russia simply patch things up, as it has so far and as Moscow insists it always will?
The short answer: yes, it can.
Repairing — seriously repairing — a plant that has been hit with tens or hundreds of kilograms of explosives, a plant that has burned and been doused with water, is impossible without shutting it down. Work like that requires major capital repair, with the replacement of the units themselves.
That is not being done. What is being done is the opposite. Scheduled maintenance is being stopped, and by that means the plants squeeze out somewhat more fuel. The quality fuel they can no longer produce is being replaced with low-quality fuel, which duly ruins car engines. This relieves some of the tension on the gasoline market, and on the fuel market generally. But it’s not equal to repairing the plants, even if they’re kept operational and there’s no immediate shortage, they are dramatically degraded compared to baseline.
If that’s the case, at what point do patches on top of patches on top of patches become critical, and everything breaks down completely?
No one will tell you that, and neither can I.
But this is the thing I know for certain: if fire burns around a refinery unit for long enough, and the unit heats up, then its structural strength decreases — its ability to hold weight, withstand pressure, and withstand temperature. By how much does it decrease? That can be calculated, but only by conducting very serious studies, and for those studies the units have to be stopped. And yet, nobody is stopping them. So in reality, the calculation can only be done approximately.
This is the detail that outside observers don’t get: it is not that Moscow is hiding the true condition of its refineries from the world.
They themselves don’t know it.
And no one will tell you that this particular strike will be the last one, the one after which the unit simply collapses. But the Ukrainians are continuing to strike the refineries and at some point this will lead to very heavy technological consequences that cannot be made good while the plants keep running. That is what irreparable means here: not that the damage looks dramatic today, but that it accumulates in the steel itself, faster than anything the current mode of operation can restore.
I very much hope these consequences stop at technology and do not claim more human lives. But that, too, is possible: if a hole has simply been punched in a unit, that is a disaster — but it is one kind of disaster. If at some moment a unit or a storage tank collapses and the fuel splashes out in all directions, and there are people standing nearby, that is a disaster of a completely different kind.
I remember from my Yukos years that a significant number of units, and a significant number of storage tanks, stand on rises — they are placed so that fuel can drain from them downhill, by gravity; not all of them, but a significant share. Around them, there are containment berms.
But if such a tank, an enormous vessel, loses its structural strength in a single minute, and that can happen if it has been hit several times, then the fuel inside will spill out all at once. And it will flow downhill. Where will it flow? Who and what will be on its way? In some cases, people have managed to build settlements in these areas: somewhere dacha plots, somewhere outright residential neighborhoods. And, of course, no Russian official is going to tell those people any of this. If a catastrophe like that comes, the responsibility will lie with the man who started this war and works and lies every day to hide its consequences from his citizens.
No one can name the day when the patches give out — not in Kyiv, not in Washington, and not in Moscow. But the question is no longer whether Ukraine’s campaign is working, it’s what happens as the breaking point approaches.
When will this ■■■■ show ever end?
Horrible situation for the people of both countries, more so Ukrainians obviously fighting for their survival
that gets a like just for “Mordor”
Russian losses per 19/08/26 reported by the Ukrainian General Staff
+1190 men
+2 tanks
+50 artillery
+3 MLRS
+1738 UAVs
+19 GRCs
Reports that Fedorov is still pizzed at losing the defence minister’s job and wants a change to the ‘No wartime election ‘. True?
True.
Zelensky must be exhausted after the last 4 1/2 years. If someone was to succeed him Fedorov seems the kind of guy who could do it. He is obviously very popular. How to hold elections during war time seems to be the problem.
Apparently polls show he has the numbers. Is this playing into Russia’s hands?
Most definitely, yes. The most basic question: How do you run a proper, nation-wide election during a full-scale war? Not just because of the obviously guaranteed insane amount of russian interference in the process but the pure logistics of it. Unless the whole thing is run online people turning out to vote will be targets. It is not safe. The resources that would be needed in time and energy better spent on survival. There would be a multitude of other reasons why it is, practically, a bad move…
Not so much the exhaustion because that’s obvious but Fedorov also mentioned corruption. Not a good look when you’re asking for so much from other sources. Not saying that those sources shouldn’t cough up though.
A country that has the ability to develop a system to display real-time enemy movements on a soldiers ipad can probably do that.
Yes, they definitely have the capability to do it. There are obviously practical considerations as to why the OG old-school paper based system is still being used.
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJEG.2021.119492?journalCode=ijeg
