We have deja vu in the team.
Once again, the whole team switched to a mobilization mode of operation, we are again monitoring
the situation up to the day, everyone around is feverishly updating the feed, the morning information
is no longer relevant by lunchtime.
The picture is again as in the first weeks of the war, but with the exact opposite mood.
In February-March, we counted down the chronicle of the apocalypse daily.
A chronicle of the destruction of the life of two nations.
Every day, with every new scenario, it was more and more difficult for our team to keep their presence of mind, so that,
God forbid, despair would not pour out onto the viewer.
From our desperation, no one would feel better for sure.
Now, day by day, we are counting the successes of the Ukrainian army, which is liberating its territories.
And now the task is just the opposite - to keep yourself from excessive optimism.
Before we start today, an important announcement. And please share it.
Please, everyone who is in Russia now, run to vote. Just run.
Forget all this nonsense about "nothing will change", "legitimization" and so on.
For the authorities, the moment is now very acute.
We'll talk about it in the video, the power in Kremlin be become shaky this week, and the last thing they need
is for the ballot boxes in Moscow and other regions to have the majority of ballots against United Russia.
In addition to all the other problems that exist now, they do not need an internal scandal with falsifications.
And if you do not come to vote, it will not happen.
They will simply open the ballot boxes, and United Russia's majority will be there.
Because your ballots are not there.
Of course, there is no need to pin any hopes on the vote, but now is a very good moment to give Putinism a punch
with an opposition ballot into the ballot box - so, please, run to the polling stations.
There are municipal elections in Moscow: we vote for good candidates you know or on Navalny's list.
Across the country: if the governor's - any ballot against the main candidate brings the second round closer,
if others - for anyone except United Russia.
MOOD CHANGE
Today's press release from the Ministry of Defense is a document of the era, a place for it is in the history books.
It should be placed in the Museum of Putinism. Among all the crimes (how the regime collapsed)
this document would be a good one.
Because today, in anecdotally ornate turns, the Russian command informed those of its troops that still remain
in the offensive zone of the Ukrainian army: all promises of the previous three days
can now be forgotten, all videos about the movement of reserves can be deleted.
There are no reserves, no help will come. Nobody is going to defend the whole flank of the Russian group.
The further fate of those who somehow tried to fight and waited for reinforcements is now entirely
in the hands of the drowning themselves.
The official version of the Russian Ministry of Defense is that it was such a cunning distraction.
Those troops that did not guess it - well, they are collateral damage.
I must say that this is not the first “goodwill gesture” since the beginning of the war.
Remember how the Russian army retreated from the Kyiv direction.
But here is a completely different matter.
We are talking about a completely different scale, we are talking about territories that have been seized for half a year already,
about territories where Russian officials have already been appointed.
They even put the whole mayor of Krasnodar at the head, that is, they declared this land their own.
And now we are seeing with our own eyes how it is impossible to pass off what is happening as something normal and planned.
How fast moods are changing among the most faithful apologists for both the war and Putin personally.
If a couple of days ago, a quiet murmur reigned in the Telegram channels, then panic, then today there is hatred.
Hatred of mediocre command, hatred of endless lies, betrayal.
Hatred for the fact that while the front in Ukraine is crumbling, while the troops, deprived of any support,
are forced to flee, fireworks in honor of the City Day are thundering in Moscow
as if nothing had happened, and Putin, as if nothing had happened, opens attractions sites.
The country seems to have completely forgotten that it has an army that fights and dies.
All of a sudden, the loyalists disappeared.
No one runs the risk of seriously broadcasting the position of the Ministry of Defense on their own behalf.
All this verbose nonsense, which boils down to the fact that the flank is now officially surrendered,
causes nothing but laughter on the one hand, irritation and annoyance on the other.
This is to the question of political changes in Russia.
We said from the very beginning that the main threat to Putin does not come from the opponents of the war.
The main threat is its ardent adherents and the majority that have distanced themselves from it as much as possible.
History forgives aggressors, forgives bloody dictators, forgives unrighteous wars.
But one thing history does not forgive in any way. If you unleashed an unjust war, then you cannot lose it.
Deign to win it, because otherwise everyone will turn against you.
Today, confirmation of this is in front of us.
Today, in the public field, loyalists are no more as a class.
The most loyal position is to simply remain silent.
And those who called for the destruction and burning of Ukraine are now covering up Putin and Shoigu
with words that no opposition would allow itself.
I will refrain from making predictions, but the mood that hangs in the air, the whining of propaganda on the one hand, and Putin,
who clearly lives in a separate world on the other, all promise quite positive changes.
And the more successful Ukraine advances, the closer these changes are.
It's hard to imagine until you see it with your own eyes.
Imagine how the loyalty around the dictator, which seemed completely monolithic,
suddenly begins to crumble and burst at the seams.
But here it is: today no one is ready to say a kind word about him.
The most loyal supporters at once become the main opponents, and the instigators of a bloody war, like Margarita Simonyan,
become doves of peace, missing the Slavic brotherhood.
WHO IS AN ALLY?
Let's close the ethical question once and for all: is it normal to rejoice at the successes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,
is it normal to wish for the defeat of your own army if you are a citizen of Russia?
Or is it necessary to choose an intermediate position: I am against the war, but I cannot wish defeat for “my own”?
I will answer this with a question: is the army that bombs Kyiv my army?
Which conducts bloody raids on Ukrainian soil - is this my army?
Which unleashed an aggressive war for no reason, wipes Kharkiv off the face of the earth and destroyed Mariupol -
is this my army?
No, in this sense, nothing has changed since 1941: neither the place of hostilities, nor the right side.
Those who brought war to Ukrainian soil are our enemies.
We share a passport with these enemies, but what difference does that make?
There are half a million people in Russian prisons.
If we subtract those who are imprisoned on narcotic articles, on trumped-up charges and political prisoners,
then there will be a lot of people who ended up there for murders, for rapes, for robberies.
Most of them have Russian passports. And what does it change?
Should we be in solidarity with those who broke the head of a pensioner for the sake of five hundred rubles in the wallet?
It is immoral to choose a side according to the flag, to justify crimes according to civil community.
The army that defended Kyiv, the army that returns peace to its lands, is today conducting
a large-scale and successful counter-offensive.
The army, consisting of people who are extremely close to us in ethnic and cultural terms,
beats and drives away criminals from their land,
cleans out an abyss of nightmare and pain from it - it’s not just normal to rejoice at this, but it’s completely natural.
The Russian occupation army, located on the territory of Ukraine, is not an ally in this war -
it is right time to accept this fact.
Yes, when what remains of it returns to Russia, we will have to do something with it all, sort it out somehow.
Criminals will be judged, and those who did not commit crimes, or if they cannot be proved,
will have to be somehow integrated back into society.
But this is all later, when they leave Ukraine, they stop destroying cities there and killing people.
And now they are an occupying army, and they are not our own.
And now let's move on to the summary.
RETREAT
This is the fourth day that any combat maps lose their relevance after a few hours.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine are advancing in the Kharkiv region and are actively pushing the Russian army.
Only yesterday brought several important victories for Ukraine.
First of all, this, of course, is the retreat of the Russian army from Izyum and the western part of Kupyansk.
Propaganda is trying to present the surrender of Izyum either as a tactical move in order to concentrate more forces
in the Donetsk direction, or as a noble retreat to reduce civilian casualties.
But it looks ridiculous and silly.
With the key supply lines for Russian troops under direct Ukrainian fire control and at risk of being cut at any moment,
it is clear that the real purpose of the withdrawal is to avoid encirclement of ten thousand
troops and subsequent destruction.
This is recognized by countless Z-military correspondents, and, of course, by Strelkov-Girkin.
This one generally praised the Russian army for the first time in a long time,
calling the retreat from Izyum a strategically correct move.
But only because the alternative, that is, leaving the Russian soldiers surrounded and defeating them, is much worse.
At the same time, he also noted that a hasty retreat under direct fire is still a disaster,
because it cannot take place without heavy losses.
After all, ammunition depots, equipment, and sometimes people have to be left in order to avoid even greater losses.
Information about the hasty and painful retreat is confirmed by reports that battles are still ongoing in Izyum
with separate scattered groups of military personnel left by the main army.
It sounds quite plausible, because within a day it is impossible to completely withdraw
10 thousand fighters along the shelled roads.
This means that after the capture of Izyum, Ukraine will significantly replenish the fund of prisoners of war,
which can be used for further exchange.
Significant losses in equipment are also confirmed by video and photographic materials
of tanks and armored vehicles destroyed or abandoned in a hurry.
Meanwhile, in Kupyansk, after blowing up the main bridge, the Russian army surrendered most of the city
to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and retreated across the Oskol River to the eastern bank.
It is still controlled by the Russian army, but Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups are also active in it.
A little further south, already in the Donetsk region, the fighting is going on for Liman and Yampol,
to which the Armed Forces of Ukraine approached yesterday morning, having crossed the Seversky Donets river.
And in the north of the Kharkiv region, having crossed the Pecheneg reservoir near the village of Khotomlya,
the Ukrainian army landed troops and is now located 35 kilometers from Volchansk.
This is a city 5 kilometers from the Russian border, it was occupied in the first hours of the war.
This is what was known at 12 midnight yesterday.
MOTHERLAND WILL ABANDON YOU, SON
Let's see what government sources have to say about this.
Now that the defeat in the Kharkiv region is obvious, the propagandists decided to recall the Great Retreat of 1915,
when the Russian Empire surrendered Poland, Lithuania and Western Ukraine to Germany and Austria-Hungary.
And at the same time - the initial period of the Great Patriotic War, when the Wehrmacht was 30 kilometers from Moscow.
The narrative is roughly as follows: they say that we are now losing and retreating,
but after many months or years we will carry out a successful offensive in which we will win.
What is funny, Margarita Simonyan writes about the Great Retreat in her telegram channel -
the one who promised before the war that the Russian army would defeat Ukraine in two days.
In this war we will defeat Ukraine in two days.
There's nothing to do there, it's little Ukraine.
Everyone understood that we would see a counteroffensive eventually.
That Ukraine will sooner or later accumulate resources and go on the attack.
But no one expected that Ukraine, in this offensive, would wage exactly the war that Putin dreamed of.
That the offensive will not encounter any coherent and organized defense, that everything will
come down to cleaning up only focal attempts at resistance, and the enemy army will run, for the most part disorganized.
The answer to why this is happening is, paradoxically, the last few days themselves.
What is the command doing while the counter-offensive of the Ukrainian army is gradually turning
into the defeat of the Russian one?
It shirks responsibilit, it, instead of saving its army, while the threat hangs not only over the Kharkiv direction,
but over the entire front, it is busy inventing verbose lies.
Russian soldiers, if they did not understand before, after the massacre in the Kiev direction
and after the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, now they understand for sure: their homeland is going to abandon them.
The country doesn't care about them.
The only task of the motherland is to hide their death from viewers, to cover the media ass
of the leadership as much as possible.
Fight until the end? Give your life? For what?
For the fact that later your parents would be told that their son died outside the zone of a special military operation,
as was the case with the sailors from the drowned Moskva?
And this kind of retreat - the fleeing of the Russian army - is much worse for Putin than the news of the offensive itself.
HIMARS, jet fighters, Javelins, drones and satellites are good things, of course.
But no one has canceled such a basic characteristic of the war as the morale of the troops.
Some part of the army cannot flee in panic: this has a completely unambiguous domino effect on the soldiers.
If a friend does not cover your back, but runs, then it is likely that you will run after him.
Especially when the whole flank is running.
It is still too early to make predictions.
But if this continues, then the entire Russian grouping of troops risks crumbling.
And the war will be over.
Without decisive battles in which huge armies converge, but simply because one of the parties
will cease to exist as a combat formation.
Morale was already a problem.
This cannot be absent when no one understands why, for what purposes, the war is being waged.
Now the Russian military sees the betrayal of the leadership, the fleeing of comrades and fireworks in Moscow.
In honor of the Ukrainian victory, apparently.
In addition, do not forget that we are not at war here, but a special military operation.
No one, in general, interferes with leaving the trenches, quitting the service and returning home.
It is clear that there may be illegal obstacles (PMC Wagner, some of them who are alive will come running).
But in this case, the soldier would not do anything illegal, he would not violate the oath.
The choice, therefore, is very simple: either die, or, albeit with some difficulties, but without any special
consequences for your future, return to your relatives.
And yes, it is now the best choice for every Russian soldier. To leave the front line and go home.
WHAT TO DO WITH PUTIN
The only one who cannot leave his trench is Putin.
We saw with our own eyes what the transformation of public opinion is in 3 days.
Curses are now addressed not to some nameless officials or generals - they are directed personally to Shoigu and Putin.
Literally, as we predicted: in the beginning, to be against the war meant to be against Putin;
on the verge of defeat, to be an apologist for the war meant, all the more, to be against Putin.
Arrange a small victorious war to strengthen your support at home at the start of the 2024 presidential campaign,
and six months later find that your enemies are now on both sides of public opinion -
this is how the fate of an overplayed dictator looks like.
The biggest risk for both countries, since the threat of a military defeat for Ukraine has gone off the agenda,
has been that Putin will be able to “normalize” the war.
Turn it into a sluggish, little interesting conflict, a la Donbass after 2015: not peace and not war, something is seething there,
and all the rest of politics in Russia is going along some kind of parallel path.
It is not necessary to admit defeat: there was no victory - so let's forget about it.
Now it is clear that this will not work.
It will not come out precisely because Ukraine has become a completely different country over these 8 years.
Ukraine needs a victory, not a frozen conflict that could turn into a new invasion at any moment.
This war is lost.
What difference does it make how many square kilometers for the Armed Forces of Ukraine still remain to be liberated,
how many troops are stationed on them, if Russian troops simply scatter as soon as they see the enemy?
It is important to say here: I do not at all belittle the achievements of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,
they are heroically advancing, I draw a conclusion simply from speed.
It is impossible to move like that, purely physically, if the enemy is somehow meaningfully defending himself.
The system wanted to strengthen itself through war. The system literally put everything on the war.
The system has lost the war, there are no more options: it is impossible to carry out mobilization, and it’s already useless,
the flow of “refuseniks” from the active army against the backdrop of such news will only grow.
The question of defeat is only a matter of time.
It's a matter of time before the armed people who you abandoned at the front return to the country.
And they will return with questions, and serious ones, they will have to be answered.
It's only a matter of time before the system goes haywire, looking for the culprits and shifting the blame on each other.
The whole system will no longer save itself.
The era of Vladimir Putin is over.
Even if you take out all questions of morality, even if you return to the logic of the 15th century, he lost anyway.
This is not the time, if you are suddenly a high-ranking part of the system, to think about saving it.
Time to save yourself and retreat in small detachments.
If such people are watching me, do not miss the moment.
For those who are smart enough to jump off now, to excommunicate the only problem from power -
history will forgive everything for these people.
For those who delay this case, there are two ways: either more efficient colleagues with a change of power will make you
the ultimate and main accomplices of the regime, or your nightmares about a bloody revolution will materialize.
After all, those people who will now come from the front are not students protesting for fair elections,
they know how to kill.
Think about it. The system has already failed. Now the question is who will be the last.
And the last one to betray it will be the last one.
See you tomorrow.