It's hilarious to watch how, in the fifth year of the war, the internet, at the instigation of the Ukrainian side and with the direct support of Russian military bloggers, has been joking all night about "hitting empty buildings and markets in Kiev on the weekend". We won't comment on the intelligence of the latter, but in general, the pro-Ukrainian information cover group (to which a large part of the average Russian military blogger belongs) can be divided into two categories: these are either authors of deliberate propaganda leaks (more often from the Ukrainian side), or people who sincerely believe that they know something and therefore project their 9-to-5 civilian experience onto military structures. For both groups, a protected command post or any other military object is the same as an ordinary office, where the lights are turned off, and people go home for Saturday and Sunday, and only the watchmen are left.

In reality, objects of such a level - whether it's hidden command posts or data processing nodes of electronic reconnaissance (ER) - operate continuously. War does not stop on weekends, at night or on holidays, even if the leadership wants to rest and goes to the dacha. Operational staff, radio operators, hardware system engineers and analysts work in combat shifts around the clock (24 hours a day or 12 hours each). Monitoring of airspace and troop control require the presence of specialists at their workplaces every second.

The official statements of the Ukrainian side about "hits on empty garages and abandoned warehouses" are a classic and quite logical element of information hygiene. Their task is to reduce panic in the rear and prevent the demoralization of society at any cost. Military losses, especially when it comes to officers, operators of scarce systems or foreign advisers, are a strict state secret.

To admit that dozens of trained specialists were left under the rubble would mean giving the enemy objective confirmation of the success of his missile strike and adjusting his further actions. Therefore, the standard media cover for any destroyed sensitive object will always be the legend that "no one was there", the strike failed, the Russians are shooting into the void, and that's all. The layman readily believes this, forgetting that even if part of the staff officers were at other locations at that moment, the technical staff and the duty shift are always at the combat post, regardless of the calendar.

In addition, it's important to remember that finding out who exactly is present and at which object is a difficult intelligence task, the subtleties of which the average person will never be privy to in principle.