The massacre and the revolt. It is a terrible day after for the Russian military leaders and for the Kremlin. Military bloggers and politicians from Donetsk, one of the regions annexed by, rise up Putin to the Russian Federation, against generals for the slaughter of recruits a Makiivkain their early thirties enlisted as reservists in nearby Samara.
THE PROTESTS
Here family members take to the streets in a couple of authorized demonstrations. The soldiers were massed a few kilometers from the line of fire, free to use cell phones that signal their position, in a former vocational school now reduced to a pile of rubble. Even yesterday the emergency teams were digging for dead and survivors. And the number of victims of the New Year’s attack of the Himars, the high-precision missiles supplied by the United States to Kiev, is still a mystery. The Russian Defense Ministry, which normally does not admit losses, reports 89 dead but Ukrainian Intelligence speaks of 400 victims (and 300 injured). It is the milbloggers, the pro-Russia military bloggers such as Spetnaz Z who has over 700,000 followers on Twitter, who define what happened as “horrible”. And he adds: «Who had the idea of placing all those soldiers in a single structure? Even a madman understands that with a single artillery attack there would have been many dead and wounded. But the commanders couldn’t care less. Every mistake has a name!». The hunt for the culprit has begun. “Based military forces in a building, not in shelters, is direct aid to the enemy, one must draw the hardest conclusions,” according to conservative journalist and Duma deputy Andrey Medvedev. And the milblogger Vladlen Tatarsky invokes the court for the responsible officers, «unprepared idiots».
Semyoin Pegov, known on social media as WarGonzo, already awarded the Order of Courage by Putin and with 1.3 million subscribers, says that the number of victims “is growing as the rubble is removed” and wants those responsible to be “searched for and punished according to the statute, without looking at the interest of certain military/political clans». Sergei Mironov, leader of a party close to the Kremlin, also calls for a trial for the guilty, “whether they have epaulettes or not”. No impunity for high ranks. “Obviously Intelligence, Counterintelligence and Air Defense did not work as they should.” The spokesman of the Russian administration of Donetsk, Daniil Bezsonov, attributes the defeats not “to the talent of the enemy, but to our mistakes”. And yet, the criticisms do not touch the supreme leader, Putin, rather they are directed against the West which sends lethal weapons to the Ukrainians. Among other things, on 30 December a fourth suspicious death occurred in a week in the circle of people close to the Tsar: Vladimir Nesterov, designer of the Russian Angara rockets, Putin’s rocket man, under house arrest for having illegally pocketed 57 million of pounds.
THE MOVES OF THE Czar
Meanwhile, Putin is rushing to produce a series of measures in favor of families and soldiers active in the Donbass. After the decree which effectively allows corruption and looting, the Tsar signed another which guarantees the families of the fallen 5 million rubles, equal to 66,000 euros, and 3 for the wounded (almost 40,000). To the Defense Minister, Shoigu, his Siberian friend, requests a report by February 1 on weapons, uniforms and equipment supplied to troops in the special military operation. He also orders the production and transmission of docu-films on the war and on the “fight against the diffusion of neo-Nazi and neo-fascist ideology” by the leadership of Kiev and its troops. Meanwhile, he commands the hammering of Ukrainian cities by sending dozens of low-cost Iranian drones, except that the Ukrainians would now be able, according to Zelensky, to neutralize almost all of them. In the last few hours the attack has focused on Kherson, which has been targeted 32 times according to the Ukrainian governor, Yanushecych, out of a total of 79 bombing attacks on the entire region. Two dead, 9 injured. The Russians were reportedly pushed back to 13 locations in Donbass. Prigozhin, Putin’s former cook who is now head of the Wagner mercenaries, tries to explain the failed conquest of Bakhmut. «There is a fortress in every house, the boys fight all day to take one and move on to another. It is not wrong to speak of 500 lines of defense, one every ten meters».
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