​​​​​​​🇯🇵🇺🇸 "Japan has officially agreed to cooperate with USA to support Ukraine with weapons", - Yomiuri

🇺🇦👀 First of all, as part of the discussions, the United States plans to purchase Japanese weapons, which are produced domestically under an American license.

An explosion at Russian polling station in Belgorod.

Alive or simply regurgitating an old film?

How is voting going?

They are listening to the messages and evacuating Belgorod themselves.

More hits on oil refineries

The response that Russia does not mention when going on about using their nukes.

True, which is why pipelines would seem to be great targets. I'm surprised they haven't been targeted.

​​​​​​​Update: 16 killed, 55 hospitalized following Russian missile attack on Odesa.

The death toll of a Russian missile strike on Odesa on March 15 has risen to 16, Governor Oleh Kiper said. Some 55 people were hospitalized with injuries, he noted.

Probably a conscious decision to avoid unintended consequences of impacting supply and pushing up oil prices globally. That would not only place pressure on the Ukraine backers in the run up to the US elections (Trump can use it for his election campaign) but also increase revenue for the Russian war effort. It's a fine balancing act.

Hitting Russian Railways.
I am led to believe one of the main problems of hitting the railways through sabotage is the tracks are quite easily repaired, with minimal machinery.
Taking out a section of the railway usually doesn't stop the trains being re-routed.
To stop that you need multiple sabotage teams over a wide area.
The risk of hitting a section in a remote area, is that its remote...so the team has to get to the remote area undetected and exfil.
That can only be done once or twice without people becoming suspicious.
Moving to a new area is easier said than done, if your face is new in an area again you are a target and you don't know the lay of the land.
Hitting the railways works best when the general populace is involved and or on your side.
As we have seen a great many Russians are in favour of the SO.

It’s Hammertime…….



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armeme...-Sol_Modulaire

Probably because you would need to hit multiple bridges, roads and rail, to stop the flow out to where it was needed. roads and rail are easily repaired, its not rocket science to lift track re-ballast and replace it, pipelines too.
But hit the cracking towers and take them out means nothing and I mean nothing is going anywhere and cracking towers do not grow on trees, they are complex bits of kit, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the stuff they use was bought in from abroad. Better to hit the heart than the arteries, then everything stops.

Railroad can be repaired fast (already Germans during WW2 were able to repair a direct hit within 5 hours and less). Bridges would be a better target but are guarded by armed sentries.

Russia was dependent on western companies when we speak about refinery technology and major ones pulled out after invasion. Attacking distillation columns seems to create a bottleneck. I think Ukrainians know why they chose to hit them.

When Partisans blow something up inside `your` country the political message far outweighs the event. These attacks are a reminder that Putin is not fully in control and reminds the Russian people `they` are at war.
Wolverines and all that.

Ukraine's Sergyi Flesh: "Mark my words - in six months to a year, both sides will begin to produce enough FPVs to target every single soldier - all will be detected and destroyed day and night in a zone of up to 5-8 km. All infantry will retreat underground, and all surface activity will belong to ground robots."

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I would like to think so too, and hope the partisans keep at it. But the Russian populace seems to be numb, insensitive in any meaningful way. The Russian populace doesn't seem to have potential intent to oppose the current regime, they seem deaf to any "political message." One can only hope for all the damage that partisans can create for the military value of that.

If a survey I read about recently is to be believed,
20% pro-war
60% agnostic, don`t give a proverbial
20% anti-war
I suggest it would take a lot of fuel and food shortages, and unfortunately it seems a lot more "200`s", for anything approaching any semblance of a "critical mass" groundswell.

I don't think that any survey of the Russian people will yield a true indication. I'd say that a high percentage are too frightened to voice their honest opinion!

Indeed. In a country where it's illegal to say that WW2 started in 1939 it's easy to get on the wrong side of the law.
Kremlin approved history marks the start of the 'Great Patriotic War' as being June 1941, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin.