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Bjays92 said:
The use of the TB2 as a distraction by Ukraine is another genius tactical move.

Ukraine seems to be saying the ship is sunk/unsalvageable, Russia is saying the fire is extinguished and the ship is being towed. Anyone here have insight on which may be more accurate?
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Pentagon says its still afloat, but badly damaged.

It may be sinking, it hasn't yet sunk, as of last update.

But its out of the fight.
 
kEiThZ said:
Actually, they only built 3. They now have 2. Both of them are shadowing NATO carrier groups in the Mediterranean. I posted one a few days back.

They do have two large nuclear powered battlecruisers that are double the size of the Slava class. Nevertheless, this is a massive blow to the Russian Navy. One has to wonder what confidence and morale will be like on other two ships knowing how easily the Moskva was both taken down (likely due to crew incompetence) and how quickly it sank after being hit. A ship that big and that heavily armed should have never driven near the coast, should have swatted two missiles away like flies and should have lasted longer after getting hit. This is bad in so many ways. Here's how a trained crew operating in littoral areas handles a missile attack:
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My source indicated he was including the Kirov-class when he said they have/had 5.

Though, he added, one of the those is currently in re-fit.
 

Hundreds of Ukrainians forcibly deported to Russia, say Mariupol women​


Troops ordered women and children on to buses and sent them to ‘filtration camps’, according to witness accounts

From link.

Russian forces are sending Ukrainian citizens to “filtration camps” before forcibly relocating them to Russia, according to the accounts of two women who said they were transported to Russian territory from the besieged city of Mariupol last month.

“On 15 March, Russian troops stormed into our bomb shelter and ordered all the women and children to get out. It was not a choice,” said one woman who had been hiding with her family in a suburb of Mariupol since early March. “People need to know the truth, that Ukrainians are being moved to Russia, the country that is occupying us.”

Ukrainian officials have accused Russian troops of transporting several thousand Mariupol residents through “filtration camps” and forcibly moving them to Russia through the Russian-controlled republics in eastern Ukraine.

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has denied these accusations, claiming “such reports are lies”. Russian officials have previously said 420,000 people have been voluntarily evacuated to Russia “from dangerous regions of Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics”.

The women requested anonymity because they were concerned about the safety of their relatives who are still in the heavily shelled city. Their accounts, along with similar stories published by the Washington Post and the BBC and reports from human rights groups, contradict Russian claims that Ukrainians are not being forcibly moved to Russia.

The southern port of Mariupol came under heavy fire from Russian forces soon after the invasion of Ukraine, with many families seeking refuge in bomb shelters. Russian troops have since taken control of large parts of the damaged city.

After leaving her shelter, the first woman said she was bussed with “two or three hundred” others to the border town Novoazovsk, in the Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine.

“Once we came to a stop, we had to wait for hours inside the bus until ordered to go through a large tent complex, to what everyone called ‘filtration camps’.”

A satellite image captured by the US-based Maxar Technologies last week showed tented camps set up in the Russian-controlled village of Bezimenne, near Novoazovsk. Representatives of the two self-proclaimed republics in the Donbas have said they have set up a “tent city of 30 tents” for Mariupol residents, with the capacity to hold up to 450 people.
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A report in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a newspaper owned by the Russian government, said that 5,000 Ukrainians had been processed at the camp in Bezimenne and undergone checks to prevent “Ukrainian nationalists from infiltrating Russia disguised as refugees so they could avoid punishment”.

The woman described how she was photographed and fingerprinted once she entered the camp. She was then “extensively questioned” by men who presented themselves as members of Russia’s FSB security service.

“They went through my phone; they asked if I knew anything about the Ukrainian army, if I had friends in the military,” she said. “They also asked me what I thought about Ukraine, about Putin and about the conflict. It was very degrading.”

After passing through the “filtration camp”, which took a few hours, according to the woman, the group was eventually taken to Rostov, a city 80 miles (130km) east of the Ukrainian border. Once there, the group was told that their final destination would be Vladimir, a city just over 100 miles (160km) east of Moscow.

But in Rostov, the woman decided to separate from the main group, telling the Russian guards she had family living there. “They let me go without much hassle. But for many, leaving was simply not an option,” she said.

The woman recalled that many on the bus complained that they were given only a few minutes to gather their belongings and often did not have any money or official papers, making it complicated to leave Russia afterwards. After separating from the group, the woman made her way first to Moscow by bus and then took a train to St Petersburg. She said she was now safe after crossing the border to an EU country on foot.

The scale of Russia’s reported forced deportations remains unclear. The Helping to Leave Fund, a Russian-run group that addresses the needs of people relocated to Russia from Ukraine, said they had received about 200 requests from deported Ukrainians asking them for help.

“Each of those requests usually comes from a whole family, so the actual number of people deported is higher,” said Maria Ivanova, a representative of the group.

Ivanova said the group saw an increase in requests for help from 28 March and heard first-hand reports of “long lines” at the “filtration camps”.

The reported deportations have raised alarm among international human rights groups.

“These people weren’t given any option to evacuate to a safer place in Ukraine. Many found themselves in a situation when their only choice was essentially crossing into Russia or dying as shelling grew more intense,” said Tatyana Lokshina, associate director for the Human Rights Watch’s Europe and central Asia division.
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“Under international human rights law, forced displacement or transfer doesn’t necessarily mean people were forced into a vehicle at gunpoint, but rather that they found themselves in a situation that left them no choice.”

Lokshina pointed to the Geneva convention, under which “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory, are prohibited, regardless of their motive”.

A second woman the Guardian talked to gave a similar account of her forced transport from Mariupol through a “filtration camp” in Novoazovsk.

“I never asked to be taken away. The filtration camps, the journey, it has been very traumatic,” said the woman, who left the city on a Russian bus on 16 March.

She is currently in Rostov, planning her route out of the country.

Russian officials have openly talked about their efforts to relocate what they call “Ukrainian temporarily displaced people.”

The Russian defence ministry has posted almost daily about its efforts to evacuate Ukrainian civilians “trapped” in Mariupol.

The governor of Vladimir told local media that his city had received over 1,000 “refugees” from territories “liberated” by Russia, including Mariupol.

Not everyone who has been moved from Ukraine to Russia said they were unhappy to do so.

“I wanted to go to Russia; I am glad to be safe. And my family lives here, so I was looking for how to get here,” said Vladimira, a third woman from Mariupol who spoke to the Guardian, who has since moved in with family members in Rostov.

Mariupol is just 37 miles from the Russian border, and many of its residents have relatives on the other side. While the invasion has dramatically decreased pro-Russian sentiment in the city, Vladimira said she welcomed the safety that she felt moving to Russia offered.

She also confirmed that she had gone through “filtration camps” but said they did not bother her as she was just “glad to be out of danger”.

“There is certainly a group of people that have been moved out of Mariupol who will not mind being in Russia. Who will stay there,” said Ivanova from the Helping to Leave Fund. “But we know of hundreds who were moved against their will. That is extremely worrying.”
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Bjays92 said:
again begs the question of how its possible they're failing this badly.
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Corruption. Rotten from top to bottom. See my last post on 70% of the funds for their Northern Fleet's air defence upgrades being stolen. There's only so much that they can cover up with numbers. It's becoming obvious that their conventional forces are a Potemkin military.

Bjays92 said:
Likewise the more the Russian military gets decimated, the more I fear Putin will act rashly.
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He was always going to be brutal if he was losing. This is why holding back is a terrible strategy. The sooner this war is over, the better for everyone, including the Russian people.

Also, if they lose to Ukraine, they will definitely think twice about challenging NATO anywhere. People forget, but they actually tried taking on American forces in Syria with predictably disastrous results. American SOF killed dozens of Russian mercenaries for 0 casualties.

en.m.wikipedia.org

Battle of Khasham - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org

And I don't recall anybody saying that Putin would nuke the US if they killed Russians. Her fears NATO. But he does understand how gullible civilians are in Western democracies.
 

Pianist Defiantly Plays Ukrainian Music At Moscow Concert Before Police Storm The Stage​


From link.

Alexei Lyubimov continued to perform the works of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov before officers stormed the stage at the show in Moscow.

According to a Telegram shared by Russian independent news channel Meduza, Lyubimov and singer Yana Ivanilova largely devoted the show to Silvestrov’s music.

When officers stormed the stage, the pianist was playing a song by Austrian composer Franz Schubert.
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As is shown in the footage, he was able to finish his performance as officers stood over him, leading to a standing ovation and cheers from the crowd.

Authorities claim the reason they disrupted the show was because of an anonymous bomb threat.

Sergey Vasiliev, associate professor of international criminal law at the University of Amsterdam, shared the powerful clip on Twitter.

“Civic resistance through culture: The antiwar piano concert of Alexei Lyubimov & Yana Ivanilova ‘Songs against the Time’ in the Culture Center ‘Rassvet’ in Moscow was raided by the police officers saying the building was mined,” he said. “But everyone knew why; that's quite an applause!”

Dozens of people have spoken about the moment on Twitter, with one writing: “The reason was ‘an anonymous bomb threat’.

"You can forbid playing and disrupt concerts, but you will never be able to forbid the love of Ukrainian art.”
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Another described it as ‘Stalinism in full swing’, adding: “Unless something snaps, the regime is bringing down all of Russia’s society!”

“Soon they will start to burn books,” said a third, with another calling Lyubimov a ‘hero’.

Russian independent media has faced even stricter censorship laws since Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, which started on 24 February.

The Kremlin passed a law criminalising any public opposition or news reporting that doesn’t support Putin’s narrative on the conflict, and media outlets are not even permitted to describe it as an ‘invasion’ or ‘war’ – it must instead be called a ‘special military operation’.

The ruling aims to punish the distribution of what it describes as ‘fake news’, and those convicted face up to 15 years in jail.
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Numerous independent news outlets have been forced to shut down in recent weeks, perhaps the most symbolic of all being the closure of Russia’s liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow), which went into liquidation after a state censorship watchdog ordered its website to be blocked.

The station was considered a beacon of truth, having survived the Soviet Union’s dying days even as Russia took an authoritarian turn.
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kEiThZ said:
This is what desperation looks like:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1514408665444323335
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Officially reported as sunk. Revell has updated their kit.

1649972822113-jpeg.664794
 
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