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Two Colombian mercenaries have been sentenced by the Supreme Court of the Donetsk People's Republic; they're going to prison for 13 years each.
After leaving Ukraine, they were arrested in Venezuela last year and extradited to Russia to stand trial.
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Based, but it might just be this: restrict migrants for two months, then lift the restrictions at New Year, citing a shortage of couriers and taxi drivers during the holidays. The document states the ban will last "for the rest of 2025". If it isn't renewed, it's largely meaningless.
Still, the overall trend looks positive. We'll find out soon enough.
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With roughly 70% of Pokrovsk (officially "Krasnoarmeysk", as the Kiev government had no mandate to change a city's name in the Donetsk People's Republic, but everyone knows it as Pokrovsk and I like the name better, so I'll keep using it) now under Russian control and the frontline wrapped around the urban area, the question "why Pokrovsk matters" arises again. We all know the "The city is no longer strategically significant" meme (hey, I came up with that in 2022, actually. How time flies).
Pokrovsk sits in western Donbass on the M30/E50 corridor. Although the Donbass is often reduced to Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, the Donets Coal Basin runs westward toward Pavlograd in Dnepropetrovsk oblast. The M30 links Donetsk–Pokrovsk–Pavlograd–Dnepropetrovsk and has also been the main Kiev–Donetsk route. Together with the secondary M03 from Kharkov, this corridor fed the entire AFU grouping across the Donbass.
When Pokrovsk lay well behind the line it served as an excellent operational rear for Ukrainian forces around Donetsk, Gorlovka and Artemovsk/Bakhmut, tied directly by road and rail to Pavlograd (the strategic rear, and site of repeated Russian strikes on rail infrastructure since 2023; ongoing). The role of Pokrovsk shifted from operational rear, to tactical rear, to contested battlespace. In the coming months, the city is going to turn into Russia's tactical rear, and then Russia's operational rear.
West of Pokrovsk lies a long stretch of open steppe before Pavlograd to the northwest and Zaporozhye further south-west. The city's capture opens operational depth for the "Center" army group, enabling either continuation along the M30 toward Pavlograd or lateral maneuvers north/south across western Donbass, with shorter interior lines from Donetsk.
Crucially, Pokrovsk is a major rail node, one of the two arteries that historically supplied the Slavyansk–Kramatorsk agglomeration. Once secured, cleared, and repaired, control of the Pokrovsk junction unlocks the entire Donbass railway web for Russia.
After full capture, Pokrovsk becomes a natural logistics hub for Russia: a forward distribution point on the M30/E50, a marshalling and repair base on the Donbass rail grid, and a staging area that shortens supply lines for further advances. Its industry can likewise be repurposed for fuel storage, ammunition handling, vehicle repair, and medical evacuation nodes.
In short, what was once the AFU's key rear area in the Donbass will now become a primary gateway and supply switchyard for Russian operations west of Donetsk and into the open country beyond.
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Zelensky:
"The Russians understand they lost the battle for Kupyansk and will now fight for Pokrovsk. 170,000 Russian troops are concentrated on this axis.
Undoubtedly, the situation there is tense because the enemy is on all sides.
Our commanders understand perfectly well that encirclement must not be allowed, and the Russians are not dominating in Pokrovsk."
All is fine. Nothing to see here.
Attached: Kupyansk, Pokrovsk-Mirnograd.
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The 5th anniversary of our little project is coming up soon. So we sat down and reflected about how much everything has changed in the last few years.
This episode is free for everyone
Incredible. A lone Russian soldier of the 60th Motor Rifle Brigade, call sign "Mio", assaults a position held by five enemy soldiers.
- First, he throws a grenade into the building, killing two
- Then, he seeks cover in a nearby building
- The three surviving enemy soldiers flee
- He waits in ambush and downs all three with rifle fire
- The drone operators supporting "Mio" finish them off
Skills, courage and a flying camera in one's ear can be incredible force multipliers.
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From: Frontline realities of 2025
Small squads are fighting a huge war. A "strongpoint" can be held by a handful — two, three, or four people. The line of contact has been completely transformed. In 2023 our mission was to get a company into a village with ten BMP-3s. That was already difficult back then.
Now the vehicles sit tens of kilometers from the LOC. If in 2023 those same BMP-3s could play the role of little tanks, today they’re unlikely to reach a firing position. Not because the vehicles are "obsolete" — it’s that, for whatever reason, they can’t be systematically protected or covered from the main threat: kamikaze drones.
Here’s what “getting there” looks like for a regular infantryman. It’s a full march now. With all your kit — roughly 30 kilos — you get dropped 10–15 kilometers from the point where you will actually fight. Some approaches run up to 30 kilometers. Other routes, under forest cover, let you leap to within a few kilometers of the LOC. Beyond that, resupply and movement rely on ATVs, dirt bikes, and whatever sort of sketchy electric scooters people are improvising. The rear area now begins some 50 kilometers from the LOC.
The hardest part is getting there. Routes and lines of communication are being mined — via drones. Improvised mines and booby traps are shoved into medkits, casings are smeared with glue and covered with grass, scores of small bomblets are scattered on trails, and where you can see a wheel track there are large magnetic mines. If you don’t know how all these mines look, you will step on one.
The route is the single most dangerous segment. Small Mavics constantly watch movement and can instantly pass coordinates to an FPV strike team or an artillery battery. On the LOC itself — in a dugout — it can be less dangerous than on the way to it. The common pattern now: guys sit holed up for a month or two and pull through with no losses, then get into trouble on the exit.
There is no organized mechanized resupply. Everything moves on foot. The best you can hope for is a gutsy motorcyclist who’ll dash in and get out. At night the nastiness wakes up. Large drones with thermal sensors drop mortar rounds. If you haven't found your fighting position before sunset — you die.
That leads to the core problem. You can’t amass forces or sustain large numbers on the LOC anymore. That’s true for both sides. To fix this and start winning systematically you need unit-authorized ATVs, large logistics drones, small evacuation buggies, and drone interceptors. Right now all of those are off the books — bought privately or cobbled together through aid channels.
Micro-teams must do everything. There are no dedicated combat engineers, signalers, or medics in many units. You have to know it all yourself. First — navigation and working with mobile maps; second — radio and signal procedures; third — explosive ordnance recognition and basic EOD tradecraft. Without those skills you’ll get physically lost, lose contact with those who could help, and step on a little woolly thing in no-man’s land that will end you.
The gray zone is now about 2–3 kilometers. In that "no-man’s territory" there’s nothing but abandoned KIAs and mines. It’s crushing for fighters’ morale. The enemy will often break and run after taking their first losses during an assault. The quality of their troops — you can see the forced draft and degradation for yourself. Even their special units have lost their old edge. Still, the bottom line is we can barely reach them.
A natural order has emerged:
Telegram = the Russian World
FB Messenger = the e-US Empire (Zuck's world)
WhatsApp = the Globalists (Zuck again)
Viber = the Balkans, forever
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French special forces raided a tanker they accuse of being part of the "Russian shadow fleet" and launching drones at Denmark (lol). As many people correctly predicted, the whole fake drone story was just a manufactured pretext to engage in piracy.
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Dropping tomorrow, by the way. Nine hours into the series. About to reach the 2nd Chechen War now.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
New podcast. There's a flood of lies about Russia. But beneath them are real, dangerous problems: weak deterrence against NATO, Soviet hangovers, and the curse of reactivity
We lay it out in the new RWA NEWS episode, as we track the not-so-distant drums of WW3
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A new video has surfaced: On Sept 21, Ukraine struck the Foros resort in Crimea with drones, damaging hotels and a middle school. The attack came exactly as fireworks were set to begin, meaning someone might have leaked the schedule.
3 killed, 16 wounded. Miraculously, no children were hurt.
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I do not like what has been going on with the Baltics, Scandinavia, Poland and Moldova lately. I am fairly certain of several things:
1) At least part of the EU ruling class intends to make war on Russia in the medium term, presumably within the next 2-5 years;
2) Mobilization and "tightening the screws" go hand in hand; and many EU countries have been cracking down hard on free speech, interfering in or annulling elections left and right, in addition to ramping up military production;
3) Mobilization and political consolidation reinforce each other, and I am finding it hard to interpret whether the Western Blob intends to wage war in order to preserve their domestic power, or are strengthening their domestic power in preparation for wartime;
4) more crucially, we have learned that war in the 2020s requires an increasingly rare ingredient for our current demographic reality - not just drones and standoff munitions, but men, and, as tasteless as it may sound, expendable men. The realities of current warfare require a cadre of infantrymen who can be treated as one-time consumables. The Ukrainian side realized this earlier than the Russian side, and managed to inflict a defeat on Russia in 2022.
5) the decision who gets used as one-time infantry is dictated by a combination of sociological, military and political factors - it's biopolitics, a term that has become more important again since the Covid pandemic. The Sovereign decides who is expendable. In Ukraine, the decision was quick and dirty, and the group it was decided to sacrifice was "middle-aged conscripts", i.e., random 50 year old men grabbed off the street. In Russia, it was more complicated; first the so-called Allied Forces were used that way (whether PMCs or the Donbass militias before their incorporation in the the Russian Armed Forces). Then, Wagner came up with Project K and started emptying out Russia's prisons by offering convicts a chance at redemption on the battlefield.
6) Western European societies are neither willing nor able to find such a group among their own. Cultural, sociological, economical reasons all preclude this. It just can't be done. But there is a reservoir of manpower that could be used by the EU for their war against Russia....
7) Total Ukrainian TCC-style conscription in Moldova may net 100k bodies. Adding the Baltics (obviously, every Balt will line up to be a recruitment officer who gets to send Ivanskas Petrovskas to his death) and veiled regular Romanian and Polish army units as well as PMC-type formations full of Scandinavians, Colombians and various other Third Worlders, there's a good chance they could get half a million bodies in the field - bodies that are expendable and can be used freely as disposable one-time infantry. This would be the only type of army the EU could field in Eastern Europe without collapsing their societies.
8) If I were a Moldovan citizen or an ethnic Russian in the Baltics, I would take everything that has been happening recently as a sign to leave and not return until there's a new, uh, what's the term, "European security architecture".
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Ukrainian drone hunts a Russian military Bukhanka evacuating WIA. The crew yank the handbrake and bail
The cameraman rolls to dodge it, then blasts the drone with a shotgun until it explodes
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Ukrainians lamenting that they didn't poison Crimea's water supply with arsenic and mercury
Reminder that every time they open their mouth about 1991 borders, they don't actually mean it
They recognize that Crimea and Donbass are Russian, and they want all the people there dead
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On November 4th, Russia celebrates two holidays, separate but one.
National Unity Day — in honor of the brave warriors of the people's militia who came together in the hour of greatest need, uniting peasants, craftsmen and aristocrats, and chased the Polish occupiers out of Moscow.
The Feast day of Our Lady of Kazan — an ancient icon of the Theotokos, venerated as the Holy Protectress of Russia.
The militia carried this icon along with their banners when they drove the enemy from Moscow in 1612.
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Nikolai's back from Japan! This episode kicks off with some light travel tales. Then, your favorite SITREP: on Pokrovsk and Kupyansk, mainly. Japan's new Iron Lady. Russia's futuristic Burevestnik nuclear missile. And, of course, Venezuela. Should we expect a Happening?
Go listen now (while you still can), full episode available to subscribers
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To summarize today's Zelensky briefing:
- The situation in Pokrovsk is fully under control, the Russians aren't getting anywhere
- Putin really wants to visit Pokrovsk, but he would be killed if he did
- Russia has lost the battle for Kupyansk
- Ukrainian intelligence destroyed an Oreshnik in the summer of 2023 at the Kapustin Yar rocket launch complex
- Russia is running out of resources to produce missiles, bombs and drones
We are reaching previously unseen levels of copium. It's bad.
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Russia's elite drone unit "Rubicon" is heavily striking Ukrainian soldiers attempting to escape the Pokrovsk-Myrnograd pocket.
This screenshot shows strikes from a single one of their compilations today.
Hohol counterattack near Mirnograd did not go particularly well
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RWA News: Winter is Coming Edition
We've talked about some of the weird stuff that has been going on. The Monty Python Maidan in Georgia failed, for now. Trump wants to turn Gaza into Labubu Matcha Dubai Disneyland. The British are still salty over the Light Brigade. Domestically, things have been stirring, too. Putin gave a four-hour speech at the Valdai Club meeting. Mutual energy strikes by Russia and Ukraine are showing results.
There has been a non-issue about the renaming of some villages in Chechnya, but it has brought up a larger event, happening mostly in the background — the slow collapse of Chechen influence in Russia, and attempts to fight or revert it.
Tune in to your favorite news show right now! Open to all subscribers — yes, even free ones.
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"This is getting ridiculous. Drones appear from nowhere and then disappear to nowhere. This is like the sixth country this has happened to in the past week. No debris, no solid photos, nothing happens. Just drones from nowhere doing nothing."
During both world wars, there were regular mass panics, sightings of bombers etc in places where there were no enemy planes at all. But people swore they "saw" them.
It's either entirely fabricated or genuine mass psychosis caused by constant exposure to media fearmongering.
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Dutch F-35A proudly showing off that it managed to down a single Russian Gerbera decoy drone (no munitions, no camera, no sensors) on September 10th
A proud chapter in their book of triumphs
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New Episode OUT — Part 5 of our "Chechen Wars" Series.
Everyone knew that the shameful Khasavyurt agreements of 1996 could only be a pause, not a real peace. Chechnya quickly degenerated into a complete failed state, run by competing warlords, each with their own militia. Foreign agitators kept spreading the most radical forms of jihadist ideology, and terrorists from all over the Muslim world flooded the mountainous scar on the face of the Caucasus.
"Ichkeria" did not have an economy: the remnants of Soviet industry were quickly looted. Other than subsistence farming, the only ways to make money were drug trafficking, hostage-taking, oil theft, and the slave trade. Clearly, this enclave could not exist forever. The metastases of terror and crime spread across southern Russia and reached even Moscow.
The situation came to a boiling point. Bombs were shaking Russian cities, the corrupt Yeltsin regime was in its death throes, and the jihadists were sure the Caucasian underbelly of Russia was ripe for conquest.
At the same time, a certain former KGB officer appeared on the scene, promising to solve the problem once and for all...
Also available on Gumroad & Boosty
"A stupid person who works for [Putin] mentioned the word 'nuclear'. I moved a submarine or two over to the coast of Russia"
Trump still can't get over Medvedev owning Graham on X two months ago.
But there's more: "There are two N-words, and you can't use either of them. Frankly, we have more than anybody else"
No argument here - America does have a lot of N-words.
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Cargo cult news: in a recent interview, Andrey Biletskiy, commander of the Azov Corps, complained that all McDonald's employees in Ukraine are exempt from military conscription, whereas many critical infrastructure workers are being drafted.
New religions, new priorities.
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Trump going full NAFO after his latest talk with Zelensky. Not an "I told you so" I am particularly happy about, but it was pretty certain to happen. Biden or MAGA, it'll always be Lindsey Graham.
I think it's true what people have been claiming, Trump literally just repeats whatever the last person he talked to said to him, no matter what it is.
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Go check out my friends over at Kargach. Some of the finest Russian shitposting. That's their English-language outpost. I will post over there too on occasion when I find the time. But it's not all just shitposting, just the other day they had a fascinating piece over on the site on how Ukrainians take over international gaming communities, with the example of Gwent.
This is not a paid ad, I had drinks with the founder, he's a great guy
New pod, open to all. I invited three of our American listeners who live in Russia or travel back and forth
They shared how to get visas, navigate bureaucracy, deal with sanctions, pass FSB interviews, transfer money, and even find a spouse
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