Thanks David,

There are no good days in war, only death and destruction. its a warped mind that see war as good

"Don't be such a crybaby the Russian invaders are being slaughtered with 250 000 dead or wounded."

- Still getting your news from the most corrupt country in Europe backed by the CIA and MI6 I see... Okay.
Didn't we already go through your one track mind in yesterdays outing?

Anyways...
I wouldn't like to speculate on who killed Prigozhin, assuming he's dead, and I think it's fairly likely he is.
The bloke had many enemies both inside and outside Russia.
Even if you disregarded Putin, Ukraine and the US / Collective West.
He fought Islamic State in Syria and Africa.

He got in Putins bad books, not just for the 'coup' itself, but also from the things he said at that time.

Betrayal is the one crime Putin would not forgive.
Then he got on the bad side of the military generals.
Ukrainians would take him out if they had the chance, they assassinate bloggers
And the US was getting peeved about Wagner in Africa, in formerly colonial / US puppet government countries that had become anti-west.
- Knowing full well that Putin would get the blame, they may have engineered his demise, the West does have sleeper cells in Russia.
Prigozhin was seen as a hero by many people in Russia, so to have them think Putin did it, might be something the West wanted to do.
- They took out Soleimani after all.

There's just too many possibilities to speculate.

"Your mate Yevgeny Prigozhin who killed 50,000 Russians to take tiny abandoned Bahkmut was shot down by Putin."
- You mean the town they lost 100,000 men failing to defend?

"You have been claiming every month that the Ukrainian forces have wiped out yet every month they keep destroying Russian men and machinery."

It takes a while to kill and main a million Ukrainians and destroy the military might of 40 odd countries, but its happening.
Shame the West scuttled the peace agreement a month after the SMO started.
Preliminary documents had already been signed.

All this merely demonstrates how much Putin opposes NATO on his doorstep.

"Your previous predictions that Russia would break out of Kherson and take Odessa, or that Russia would retake Lyman etc. have all been rubbish."

The keyword SM is 'yet'.
Just because we don't know Russia's objectives doesn't mean it doesn't have any.

Currently there's a lot of talk in Washington (past diplomats and such) about the need to freeze the conflict, like in Korea, Biden wants to keep the war going or specifically not allow Ukraine or the West to face outright military defeat, others want the conflict frozen so Ukraine can join NATO.
Biden's concerned about re-election next year.

Russia fears a frozen conflict would allow the west to rebuild the Ukrainian military again and have another crack later no doubt.

Russia will be pushed to negotiate and accept a western lead peace agreement, (now that the counter-offensive failed) but Russia has no reason to accept it.
They have military objectives and plan on achieving them, after the lies surrounding the Minsk agreements Russia knows the West cannot be trusted to keep its word.
Also Putin would face a loss in approval rating if he did a deal with the West.

And so, Ukrainians will keep dying, and Russia will likely have a second mobilisation of 4 or 5 hundred thousand troops and start a big arrow offensive with it's fresh reserves to gain significant territory while Ukraines military is tired and depleted.

If Russia brings in new troops, it can push forward and create a bulge (which would extend the length of the front line - and force the Ukrainians to be spread thinner across that extended front line allowing Russians to overrun the Ukrainian positions, just as they did to Russia in Kharkiv last year)

This is how armies eventually collapse.

"had a helicopter stolen with aircraft spares, had an S400 system destroyed"
- I didn't hear about the chopper incident, but that S-400 was quite the explosion.

Russia's day wasn't a complete loss, 6 new countries to join BRICS announced.
(Argentina, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates)
I'd thought maybe Saudi Arabia, Argentina, and UAE, (if any)
- since India wasn't all too keen on the blocs expansion so soon.

It's a good deal for developing countries.
They can get loans from the BRICS development bank in local currencies
trade and settle in those local currencies (no need to hold so much US dollar reserves)
And can avoid brunt of the Wests economic sanctions when they don't wish to do what the US demands

The US previously could use sanctions on IMF debt laden nations who step out of line, tank their economy and currency, making them unable to repay the debts / face a default and have no other financial options.

It was a system of threats, blackmail, regime change, military intervention.
(That's the Wests tools)

So, de-dollarisation continues.
That's worth far more than a few tanks, Robotyne and a helicopter.
Lemme know when they reach Tokmak.
- Oh that's right their counter-offensive and Western trained troops have largely been destroyed already, so the captured abandoned village was a wasted effort.
- Let's see how long Ukraine can hold the place for, I'll give it a week tops.

David and Pauliar,

I generally ignore virtue signalling as meaningless noise, but when a brutal tyrant set on conquest has launched an unprovoked invasion deliberately targeting civilian buildings, hospitals etc. and torturing and murdering civilians in occupied areas there is a point where vacuous virtue signalling crosses over to snivelling appeasement.

As with Hitler, this is not a path to peace, but an inducement to Putin to continue with a formula that has subjugated others before.

For me, it is a good day when the evil Russian army is further degraded and less capable of continuing to murder and maime.

Dear shadowminster,

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

What army a person is in is usually determined by the country they live in, not by whether they are a good person or right or wrong. You refer to the evil Russian army. I doubt that all Russians are evil, and all Ukrainians are good. War is not a football match. I continue to hope for an international order which may be effective in settling disputes between countries without resorting to war.

The tears of a Russian mother grieving for her son are as salty as the tears of a Ukrainian mother doing the same.