Footage from an unsuccessful Ukrainian assault by the 425th Separate "Skala" Assault Regiment northwest of Pokrovsk. It has been a while since we've seen this much infantry bunched up in one attack.

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Here are the latest five episodes we made before being deplatformed from Patreon, all available in one post.

Whether we were banned for our criticism of USrael or for our candid assessment of a serious crisis in Russia is up to you to decide. Featuring interviews with Big Serge and Sharghzadeh.

A seven-hour podcast bundle, now available on Substack. Enjoy.

Mirrored on Gumroad

Not a great day for the US Air Force.

https://t.me/CIG_telegram/73117

The Revolutions of 1917 brought with them a whole lot of assumptions about society, many of them coming from a place of stunning naïveté, others from cold-hearted pragmatism. Communist ideology holds that crime is the product of exploitation and oppression; thus, the Bolsheviks asserted that the abolition of exploitation in the Soviet state would mean that crime would naturally disappear. Never had the Bolsheviks been so wrong.

Though it must be said that it was the Provisional Government that flung open the prison gates with a general amnesty, riding the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm. Simultaneously, they disbanded the police; thousands of pre-revolutionary gendarmes were lynched by mobs of newly-freed criminals. And this was the nice, civilized Kerensky-liberals! Predictably, Russian cities were immediately flooded with an army of thieves and pickpockets, and armed robbers began organizing into gangs. In the revolutionary chaos, arrests and searches were carried out left and right on the basis of so-called “revolutionary legality” and many a bandit gave himself a badge and a license to steal, rob and extort.

However, not every career criminal who walked out of prison due to the amnesty went back to the old trade. Many had a vision that went further, and ambitions that went beyond lifting wallets at the train station.

(Full post on Substack)

There are no longer any prison recruits or foreign fighters in many Ukrainian line brigades — because they have been transferred to the assault infantry branch.

The "Assault Forces", General Syrski's brainchild, were the right tool to deploy in the situation the AFU was in last year. They are the perfect machine for countering Russian infiltration tactics, which was the doctrinal innovation that carried much of the Russian success in the 2025 summer campaign.

It's more complicated, but the tl;dr is that a bunch of two-man infiltration teams penetrate deep into Ukrainian lines, cross what people call the "kill zone" and start overrunning and killing Ukrainian drone operators, or at least forcing them to retreat -- retreating drone operators means more functional army units can move in, thus, moving the entire frontline and leading to the color changing on the maps.

Syrski's Stormtroopers are the perfect counter to this tactic. The tl;dr on Ukrainian Assault Forces is that they are the fix to one of the biggest Ukrainian problems: quickly redeploying forces.

The Ukrainian army does not have maneuver reserves anymore, and likely won't have any going forward, due to immense manpower problems, and what available manpower there is being funneled into the Assault Forces. Redeploying companies or even platoons from 10 different brigades all across the frontline into one place to reinforce a sector about to collapse takes A LOT of time and is super ineffective -- even worse now with the Ukrainian rail network severely degraded and incapable of transporting serious troop numbers.

The "Assault Forces" fix this. They are the lightest of light infantries. They have nothing. No supply lines, no mechanization, barely any motorization, not even mortars. A non-existent logistics footprint. You stuff 100 guys into two busses and they can get from anywhere to anywhere within a day, max. You throw them into the kill zone to force Russian infiltration teams into infantry combat, which means the Ukrainian drone operators don't flee and don't die, which means the frontline doesn't move.

It works because the "Assault Forces" are much more mobile than our reserves. Obviously, nobody wants to serve in these units because they're a meat assault death machine. You remember the video from near Grishino a couple days ago. All the prison volunteers and many foreign fighters have been shoved into the Assault Forces, too. Alcoholics, junkies, criminals, deserters, press-ganged conscripts. These people are supposed to be consumable items. It's like Wagner's Project K on steroids. It's an inhumane and cruel way to wage war but at the moment it just... works. You just shove 50 losers into a bus and they have "strategically redeployed" within 6 hours. By the time they're dead the next bus has arrived. The "carousel".

It's kind of a short to medium term solution, because the casualties produced by Syrski's Stormtroopers (they even use the leopard as their emblem, which is Syrski's personal call sign (Барс) are unsustainable in the long run, considering how much strain the Ukrainian army is already under with regards to manpower. There are also second-order effects such as stripping personnel from line brigades to feed the meat conveyor belt, which is bad for unit cohesion and other things.

But for now it works, and the Russian military's main task for 2026 is to figure out a way to counter this counter (that's basically what war is: a counter to the counter deployed against your counter to whatever your enemy is doing).

There are several ways to go about this -- I think Russian high command has big plans for the Unmanned Systems Forces, which are currently being greatly reorganized and expanded. Western analysts have started writing about the "Russian Drone Line", a doctrinal concept that is offensive in nature, as opposed to the defensive "Ukrainian Drone Line". We'll talk more about this later.

Russians with Attitude

The US President's beautiful Easter message
(real post, I checked)

Which side are the unhinged Islamist terrorists again?

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

The Islamic Resistance Movement announces that Tuesday shall be, God willing, the Day of the Power Plants and the Day of the Bridges — combined into a single day of reckoning upon the lands of the Persians. There shall be nothing like it, and the world shall bear witness.

Open the Strait, O depraved ones, or you shall dwell in the fire of Jahannam — WATCH AND SEE!

All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the Worlds.

— Abu Dawud al-Turumbi, Commander of the Faithful and President of the Believers

The leader of Jabhat Tahrir al-Naft, Abu Daud al-Turumbi, who assumed command of the organization following the disapperance of its former chief Abu Jafar al-Epstayni, has issued renewed threats against the Islamic Republic of Iran, vowing to target civilian infrastructure.

The statement, released on the occasion of the Christian holiday of Easter, was notable for its invocation of Islamic religious phrases, which analysts describe as an attempt to sow confusion among the Muslim ummah.

Meanwhile, the organization's takfiri proxies operating out of Wilayat al-Khinzir have continued their aggression against the Russian Federation, raising questions about the front's ability to sustain simultaneous campaigns across multiple theaters.

Regional observers note that the Jabhat's rhetoric has grown increasingly erratic since al-Turumbi's rise to power, with recent communiqués departing sharply from established norms of militant discourse.

Meanwhile, Iranian government officials:

Dagestan has been hit by a severe flood and mudslide, destroying thousands of homes. At least six people are reported dead so far.

It’s the result of several factors coming together. The region's terrain is harsh even in normal conditions, roads can be completely blocked by rockfalls after even mild rain.

On top of that, a large share of buildings were constructed without proper regulation or oversight, leaving them especially vulnerable to extreme weather.

Russians with Attitude

Soviet nuclear Auftragstaktik. "Atomic weapons and operations under conditions of their use", Soviet Ministry of Defence, 1956.

Russians with Attitude

“A revolution is fine in books, long after the fact — but not in the street, while it’s happening. They looted, smashed up shops, beat people senseless for no reason at all. The dregs, the rabble, and the soldiery poured into the streets, having lost all human semblance. The people — the peasants — took no part in the revolution.”

— Sergey Mamontov, Campaigns and Horses

The so-called “February Revolution” is one of the most inexplicable, and unexplained, events in all of Russian history. A core reason for this is that all participants, active and passive, had the utmost incentive to lie and falsify the events, and those who had motive to tell the truth were either killed or spent the rest of their lives as anonymous émigrés, often under assumed names. The Tsar himself was murdered.

Popular understanding of 1917 ranges from “Lenin led peasants with pitchforks to overthrow the Tsar” at the bottom to a more intricate understanding of parliamentary politics and such at the top. However, I have never encountered a full accounting of the February coup that does not dissolve into a black box at some point, either vaguely pointing at “structural factors” or just taking for granted that the participants of a major conspiracy had told the truth.

Read the full post on Substack