Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[NOVA Green]

https://twitter.com/WarMonitor3/status/1561767435283451910?s=20&t=wYIOboUoZy...

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1561766992767483908?s=20&t=wYIObo...

Well you know what they say about snitches... (Or in this case collaborators with the ethnic cleansing of occupied Ukraine).

I wonder if it is the work of the same cell in Kherson City, one of whose members was quoted in a post I made a few days back?

One might perhaps wonder if the Russian looting of various storage units in Kherson City was perhaps performed under the pretext of searching for Ukrainian "drop points" for C-4, ammo, weapons, and other partisan hardware?

[NOVA Green]

https://mobile.twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1561666285041336324

With the size of the explosion on the bridge, this makes sense:

https://twitter.com/lilygrutcher/status/1561720969630289925?s=20&t=NjpVBAkVH...

I think the classic expression "taking out two birds with one stone", likely applies here...

Talk about what appears to be a very frugal use of HIMAR rounds (Assuming that was the case and not an IED).

[jaichind]

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/no-matter-who-wins-ukraine-america-has-already-lost-204288

"No Matter Who Wins Ukraine, America Has Already Lost"

"Regardless of who wins the Ukrainian war, the United States will be the strategic loser. Russia will build closer relations with China and other countries on the Eurasian continent, including India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. It will turn irrevocably away from European democracies and Washington. Just as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger played the “China card” to isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War, presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will play their cards in a bid to contain U.S. global leadership."

A USA think tank breaks ranks with the wisdom of the USA getting involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict

[Obama-Biden Democrat]

https://twitter.com/WarMonitor3/status/1561767435283451910?s=20&t=wYIOboUoZy...

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1561766992767483908?s=20&t=wYIObo...

Kherson is 93% Ukrainian speaking and Zaporizhzhia is 86% Ukrainian speaking. There will be a lot of partisan hell the Russian fascists will suffer in these regions.

Groups of Ukrainians civilians in the South are attacking Russian soldiers with knives.

[Lord Halifax]

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/no-matter-who-wins-ukraine-america-has-already-lost-204288

"No Matter Who Wins Ukraine, America Has Already Lost"

"Regardless of who wins the Ukrainian war, the United States will be the strategic loser. Russia will build closer relations with China and other countries on the Eurasian continent, including India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. It will turn irrevocably away from European democracies and Washington. Just as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger played the “China card” to isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War, presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will play their cards in a bid to contain U.S. global leadership."

A USA think tank breaks ranks with the wisdom of the USA getting involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict

This so-called think tank is a bunch of Trump sycophants and Kremlin fellators with a Russian born CEO and Kissinger on the board of directors. It's the former Nixon Center that the Nixon family broke ties with because they attacked McCain for daring to criticize Russia's invasion of Georgia during his presidential campaign.

[NOVA Green]

A never before heard of group of Russian dissidents calling themselves the "National Republican Army" has claimed credit for the Dugin assassination.  This seems to have convinced everyone that it was a FSB hit.

Car bombs are way more typical of actual partisans or terrorists than of the FSB. There are a million ways the FSB could have vanished Dugin or Dugina that wouldn't have made them and the entire regime look totally inept.  Putin is trying to act like everything under control, his supporters getting blown to smitheroons in Moscow completely undermines his appearance of strength.

Most likely it's a lone wolf or small cell looking for attention (since Dugin is both well known to the West and Ukrainians while being far enough from power to be unprotected), possibly with some sort of support from the SBU. Another possibility is that the "NRA" is an SBU front entirely.

Based on what I've read today, the odds of who killed Dugina

70% FSB
20% Dugin himself
5% NRA
4.95% Ukraine
0.05% Inhuman Transhumanists

So Dugin might have in fact actually sought to arrange a martyrdom for himself?

No, for his daughter

https://mobile.twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1561334515490082817

Well, it is not unknown within the Old Testament Tradition for children to sacrifice children "in the name of God".

Leonard Cohen's classic song: "Story of Isaac" tells a similar story... (Live in Norway 1985).

Although arguably the beauty of Leonard Cohen's classic song, which was written at the time of the US War in Vietnam, also talks about the role of the family structure when it comes to the promotion of of certain religious and totalitarian ideals, and ultimately is an "Antifa Anthem".



Reality is that grassroots resistance can only go so far, and in an extremely repressive Russian Fascist State, I find it very difficult to believe that was as the hands of Ukrainian Partisans, despite the propaganda beamed into every Russian home every night, not to mention in most parts of Russian Occupied Ukraine.  

All sorts of theories out there, but it is curious that the Kremlin is now moving to target Estonia to respond to the escalation from the Russian Nationalist War Machine...

Putin traditionally tends to dial up and dial down the needle of Russian Nationalism, depending upon current domestic dissent, local political economy, not to mention foreign policy when it comes to "recreating the great empire".

 Putin... we now have a Russian VDV veteran from the Russian Invasion and Occupation of Ukraine, who posted a (141) page diary on Russian Telegram.

Washington Post has select exclusive quotes from his diary:

A Russian soldier’s journal: ‘I will not participate in this madness’

Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev spent more than a month fighting in Ukraine after his poorly equipped unit was ordered to march from its base in Crimea for what commanders called a routine exercise.

In early April, the 34-year-old Filatyev was evacuated after being wounded. Over the next five weeks, deeply troubled by the devastation caused by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion, he wrote down his recollections in hopes that telling his country the truth about the war could help stop it.

His damning 141-page journal, posted this month on Vkontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, is the most detailed day-by-day account to date of the attacks on Kherson and Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a Russian soldier.

The document describes an army in disarray: commanders clueless and terrified, equipment old and rusty, troops pillaging occupied areas in search of food because of a lack of provisions, morale plummeting as the campaign stalled. He tells of soldiers shooting themselves in the legs to collect the $50,000 promised by the government to injured servicemen. He describes units being wiped out by friendly fire. He blasts Russian state media for trying to justify a war that the Kremlin had no “moral right” to wage.

Very long article, and plus it is extremely important this story gets out to the world, so please don't over-mod on % of post counts from articles..

Feb. 15: Gearing up before the invasion

I arrived to the training ground [in Stary Krym, Crimea]. Our entire squadron, about 40 people, all lived in one tent with plank boards and one makeshift stove. Even in Chechnya, where we only lived in tents or mud huts, our living conditions were organized better. Here we had nowhere to wash up and the food was horrible. For those who arrived later than the rest, me and about five other people, there was neither a sleeping bag, nor camo, armor, or helmets left.

Feb. 23: Bracing for something serious

The division commander arrived and, congratulating us on the [Defender of the Fatherland] holiday, announced that starting from tomorrow, our salary per day would be $69. It was a clear sign that something serious is about to happen. Rumors began spreading that we are about to go storm Kherson, which seemed to be nonsense to me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/21/ukraine-russian-soldier-diary/

Time up before I exceed post count, so not gonna go beyond the early days, but honestly one of the best reads thus far from a Russian soldier posted in Ukraine which I have read thus far...

Reality is that a lot of times soldiers deployed to combat zones have no idea why or when...

"Military Exercises" is always the common excuse for the "Grunts".

Sure... Lost a friend in Iraq War 2.0 but yet still remember listening to the 4th of the 25th "Deployment Song", shortly after his death at the hands of an IED outside of Taji / Camp Cooke.

Then the s**t gets real when things start to get rough around Sadr City and South Iraq, not to mention a Baathist Counter-Insurgency Campaign where the Sunni Tribes from historical business trading routes in NW Iraq and down the River Valleys, take up arms against the occupation regime, and not because they are fans of Saadam..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMbkIZKErAc

Told my buddy while he is getting mobilized for deployment... he comes back from Fort Hood after a (3) Month military training program getting trained into how to raid ammo depos, support ops, and all that crap... assigned to Air Cav...

Rumsfeld and Bush gave him an "Up-Armored Hummer"... he was the gunner.

They hit the roadside bomb on the dangerous route, I had had a closed service casket ceremony, hugged his wife, and we watched the helicopter formation missing one, as part of an official family and military ceremony in a small town of 4,000 in Oregon.

I love you and miss you Eric.   RIP my friend.



Russian Veterans might potentially be at the frontline of any potential future transformation from Russia as a Fascist Christian Nationalist State, to perhaps be potential future rebels, that thus far are considered to be hero's of "Mother Russia", hence thus far exempt from calling a "war a war".

Sure, we can't completely do a compare and contrast (C&C) when it comes to Soviets in Afghanistan vs Russians in Ukraine, yet when it comes to the potential impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union back in the dayz.

Still % of KIA, WIA, and MIA are likely MUCH, MUCH, LARGER as % of TOTAL POP.

[NOVA Green]

Russian Assassins are Russian Assassins, and generally tend to run with impunity using the old dirty tricks of the KGB era.

Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst, wrote that Ms. Dugina’s murder “is serving to increase dissatisfaction with the authorities in conservative circles, who believe that the Kremlin is drawing red lines in the wrong place and is too hesitant when they are violated.”

The F.S.B.’s remarkably swift claim to have solved the killing of Ms. Dugina may not convince those who are skeptical of an agency once headed by Mr. Putin that, in previous cases, had been much slower to identify suspects or never did. After the deaths of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 and the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015, the authorities eventually charged and tried groups of people they accused of carrying out the killings, but not those who hired or directed them.

Like its Soviet-era predecessor, the K.G.B., the F.S.B. has been dogged for years by suspicions that it blames others for crimes it either committed itself or had no real interest in solving because they involved well-connected Russians.

There have been many attempts on the lives of Russian public figures, but they have usually been on Kremlin opponents, not allies, like Ms. Politkovskaya and Mr. Nemtsov. Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former F.S.B. agent living in London who was openly critical of Mr. Putin’s government, was fatally poisoned in 2006, and there were failed attempts to use a nerve agent to kill a turncoat former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, in Britain in 2018, and the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny in 2020. Western intelligence agencies blamed all three attacks on Russian security services.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state television network RT, on Monday recalled the poisoning of Mr. Skripal as she echoed the Russian threats against Estonia for allegedly harboring Ms. Dugina’s assassin.

Somehow lost the quote, but this might lead those interested down the rabbit hole.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/world/europe/russia-ukraine-daria-dugina.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/world/europe/russia-fsb-crime.html

Still pretty clear that within a Fascist State, "War is Peace", "Lies are Truth", and mass mobilization of the population of the population behind various symbols, uniforms, where effectively all independent opposition to the regime has been eliminated, and after 10-15 years of state run political propaganda makes it extremely difficult for even Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine to explain the truth to their grandparents, let alone the heartbreaking stories of Russian Nationals (Within the USSR era), who are trying to explain what is actually going on to their relatives within the "Mother Country", but suddenly lose all ability to talk to fellow family members.

[NOVA Green]

Ukrainian Artillery Battalions blowing up Russian Ammo Dumps, Command and Control Centers, Anti-Air, Russian Artillery Battalions...

Partisans blowing up railroad bridges, sending drones to demolish Russian "Rear Base" facilities in places such as Crimea, not to mention Russian occupied Donbass, and even deeper into the border lands within Russia itself.

Sorry--- don't believe there should be any apologies whatsoever with all of the massive War Crimes Russia has already committed against innocent civilian populations within Ukraine since late Feb '22.

Sure--- Ukraine is actually a democratic nation, regardless of corruption levels.

This is absolutely 100% Black and White... Totalitarian Russian Fascism in Former Republics vs potential emerging democracies in the former Republics of the Soviet Union.

Metallica songs from back in the dayz float through my mind...

Here are a few live from Mexico City not so long ago...

Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine suffering the same fate as their comrades in Afghanistan:

Arguably one of my favorite Metallica songs from back in the dayz when I grew up and Vietnam seemed like a distant memory when I was a kid, but reality was actually real for those who had family members who had fought in the Vietnam War.

The Rump of the Russian Empire will likely suffer so much more damage once this current war in Ukraine is done, than what they experienced during their adventures in Afghanistan.

Please Atlas Comrades... spread this through the "subvert city" channels to penetrate the Russian firewalls (Facebook being a decent bet).

We need to continue to support the Anti-War movement within Russia itself and support those who promote democracy versus totalitarian Ethno-Fascist rule...

We need to help spread songs, which actually started to pop up in the former Eastern Bloc back in the '80s, where there was a massive explosion of both Punk & Metal bands...

Hip-Hop didn't really start to take off too much in pop culture until a decade or so later, but still....

[Antonio the Sixth]

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/no-matter-who-wins-ukraine-america-has-already-lost-204288

"No Matter Who Wins Ukraine, America Has Already Lost"

"Regardless of who wins the Ukrainian war, the United States will be the strategic loser. Russia will build closer relations with China and other countries on the Eurasian continent, including India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. It will turn irrevocably away from European democracies and Washington. Just as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger played the “China card” to isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War, presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will play their cards in a bid to contain U.S. global leadership."

A USA think tank breaks ranks with the wisdom of the USA getting involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict

cool story bro

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

A rail link between Moldova and Ukraine closed since 1997 has been restored. It runs south of Russian-occupied Transnistria. The information I can find regarding these lines is incomplete, but it seems likely that any which might have remained open prior to the war closed afterwards. The lines north of Transnistria were already open; the line to Odesa is the one which has been reopened.



Zelensky claimed the reopened line could carry 10 million tonnes per year and would be used as an alternative route for goods to be shipped out of the port of Odesa or sent over the (previously damaged to the point of disuse) Dniester rail bridge which led to Romania.

[Storr]

Grozny moment:

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1561823098105733123?s=20&t=pZgyI83S...

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Grozny moment:

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1561823098105733123?s=20&t=pZgyI83S...

Grozny was, at least, rebuilt over the decades - because it was only one (big) city, it was claimed by Russia and it had a healthy population pyramid. None of these factors apply to occupied Ukraine, besides Crimea where there wasn't much conflict.

The signs we've seen so far (especially w.r.t. repairs in damaged bits of the Donbas over the last 8 years) would suggest Mariupol will get some TLC, but won't reach its former heights.

[Storr]

Yikes.

"Mindful of how Poland was unwilling to let Soviet troops through to help Czechoslovakia in 1938, Moscow insisted that its Eastern European neighbors allow the Red Army to pass in the event of an attack by Nazi Germany, but was refused." [Gee, I wonder why?]

"The real threat of a war on two fronts left the Soviet Union no choice."

"Thanks to the Soviet-German non aggression pact, the war began on more advantageous borders for the Soviet Union, and hundreds of thousands of lives were saved."

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1562072473201479681?s=20&t=pZgyI83...

Notably absent from the video:

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1562075176531001345?s=20&t=pZgyI83...

Edit: added the tweet below, mentioning the secret part of the pact (that wasn't really a secret, but the Soviets denied its existence until 1989) which divided Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania into Soviet and German spheres of influence.

https://twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/1560167723824447488?s=20&t=tiF-5ON7...

[jaichind]

Yikes.

"Mindful of how Poland was unwilling to let Soviet troops through to help Czechoslovakia  in 1938, Moscow insisted that its Eastern European neighbors allow the Red Army to pass in the event of an attack by Nazi Germany, but was refused." [Gee, I wonder why?]

"The real threat of a war on two fronts left the Soviet Union no choice."

"Thanks to the Soviet-German non aggression pact, the war began on more advantageous borders for the Soviet Union, and hundred of thousands of lives were saved."

But that has been the USSR/Russian position for decades.  Another point they make which they have a point is that Poland actually participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia in Munich in 1938 and annexed territories from Czechoslovakia which included the railway junction city of Bohumín so Poland has no moral right to complain when they became a target of partition between Germany and USSR in 1939.

[Storr]

Welp:

https://twitter.com/auto_glam/status/1561867911467343873?s=20&t=IwxJaDpJzN1V...

https://twitter.com/IntelCrab/status/1562085841685696512?s=20&t=IwxJaDpJzN1V...

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1562166385324818433?s=20&t=BVQfUxz...

[Torie]

Yikes.

"Mindful of how Poland was unwilling to let Soviet troops through to help Czechoslovakia  in 1938, Moscow insisted that its Eastern European neighbors allow the Red Army to pass in the event of an attack by Nazi Germany, but was refused." [Gee, I wonder why?]

"The real threat of a war on two fronts left the Soviet Union no choice."

"Thanks to the Soviet-German non aggression pact, the war began on more advantageous borders for the Soviet Union, and hundred of thousands of lives were saved."

But that has been the USSR/Russian position for decades.  Another point they make which they have a point is that Poland actually participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia in Munich in 1938 and annexed territories from Czechoslovakia which included the railway junction city of Bohumín so Poland has no moral right to complain when they became a target of partition between Germany and USSR in 1939.

Did Putin ever admit that Russia's complicity in the partition of Poland was a sin? And Russia or  its puppet state still retain some of that territory.

https://www.expatica.com/be/general/poland-says-role-in-czechoslovakias-annexation-a-sin-74925/

[NOVA Green]

WaPo article from earlier today on the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy.

Economic news stories tend to be much more complex and hard to synthesize in a handful of soundbite quotes, but here are a few snippets, from what is a fairly long article.

While most economists agree that Russia is suffering real damage that will mount over time, the economy — at least on the surface — does not yet appear to be collapsing. The ruble’s initial nosedive in value quickly reversed after the state limited currency transactions and after Russia’s imports plummeted — an economic picture that can hardly be described as healthy, but one that calmed public fears about a currency crisis. Unemployment hasn’t noticeably surged, and Russia continues to earn the equivalent of billions of dollars every month from oil and gas exports.

In Moscow and St. Petersburg, restaurants and bars remain busy and grocery stores are stocked, even if prices have jumped and some imported goods, such as whiskey, are harder to find. The International Monetary Fund predicts Russia’s economy will contract by 6 percent this year — a sharp fall, but less than the 10 percent or more that some economists were initially forecasting.

Sanctions “are working, definitely, but unfortunately much slower than everybody was expecting six months ago,” said Maxim Mironov, a Russian economist at IE Business School in Madrid.

To inflict more damage, economists say, the European Union must cut Russia’s main lifeline: oil and gas export revenue. The United States and the United Kingdom have banned Russian oil and gas imports, but Europe, which relies heavily on Russian energy, has only agreed to restrict purchases over time. The White House and others are pushing for more immediate action via a worldwide cap on the price of Russian oil, which would force Moscow to sell at a discount to global prices.

U.S. diplomats are pressing allies to accept the cap, which they view as “the biggest macroeconomic measure that remains,” according to a senior Biden administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic talks.

Russia is facing “a sharp economic recession, and the recession is almost certainly going to be protracted in the next year, too,” the official said. “Look, they were able between the higher energy prices and between some of their own management to have a slightly less sharp economic recession than some of the initial estimates … but I think what you’re seeing now is a kind of Potemkin economy.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/23/russian-sanctions-economy/

[NOVA Green]

This is definitely disturbing if true (Bolded Part)...

Chemical and laboratory areas are critical to maintain the safe and secure operation of a Nuclear Power Plant.

Recent shelling has further damaged infrastructure at the nuclear power plant, Ukraine told the International Atomic Energy Agency. Shelling over the past three days damaged laboratory and chemical facilities, as well as transformers at a nearby thermal plant. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi repeated his call for an urgent expert mission to the plant, saying the agency’s presence would “reduce the risk of a severe nuclear accident in Europe.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/

Below is a link to the IAEA document titled "Chemistry Programme for Water Cooled Nuclear Power Plants", which is a (68) page document.

Here are some relevant from the section on Laboratory Monitoring and Radiochemistry (Starts on Page 42).

Mods--- I believe this is common source material, but in the event this hits the "copywrite rule", please accept my honest and sincere apologies.

Laboratory monitoring
6.17. Laboratory monitoring involves sampling of plant systems and analysing
for specific chemistry properties, concentrations of dissolved and suspended
impurities and activities of radionuclides. The scope and periodicity of chemistry
monitoring activities to be performed should be set out and made available.
Sampling points, periodicity of analysis and procedure should be established for
each chemistry regime (startup, shutdown, operation at stable power levels,
transients).
6.18. ‘Check standards’ (measurements made at specified time intervals) should
be analysed and control charts should be maintained to show that the methods
applied continue to give accurate results. The establishment of an interlaboratory
comparison programme may be considered.
6.19. In determining the analytical methods to be employed, expected
concentration levels should be considered for the chemistry parameter of interest.
The method chosen should provide sufficient sensitivity in the expected
concentration range. The ‘matrix effect’ (the effect of other components in the
sample) should be determined and corrected if necessary

RADIOCHEMISTRY
6.20. Control of radiochemistry is a fundamental part of chemistry activities at a
nuclear power plant. Measurement of radiochemistry parameters is important for
the safe management of the plant at all stages of its lifetime, from initial operation
to decommissioning.
6.21. Radiochemistry measurements should be carried out for systems such as
closed cooling water circuits and the primary and secondary sides of PWRs to detect leaks in material barriers. Radiochemistry measurements should be
implemented for a wide basis of plant activities, as described below.
6.22. Primary coolant activity monitoring should be carried out in support of the
following tasks:
(a) Measurement of fission product activity as a means of evaluating the fuel
integrity, identifying fuel cladding leaks and estimating cladding defect
type and number:
— For this purpose, good quality, well-maintained and calibrated gamma
spectrometry instrumentation, a sufficient variety of calibrated
measurement geometries, and effective and verified radiochemical
separation procedures should be applied.
— Results of such measurements should serve as input data for validated
calculations for evaluating fuel leaks. Sufficient sensitivity with respect
to activity measurements of key fission products should be ensured as a
major condition for the early detection of fuel leaks.
— Power transients accompanied by ‘spiking phenomena’3
 for fission
products should be adequately monitored.
— As part of these actions, and depending on the type of fuel, proper
selection of both volatile (e.g. noble gases, iodine) and non-volatile (e.g.
caesium, transuranic elements) radionuclides should be made to enable
the detection of both small and large cladding defects.
— Properly selected radionuclide activity ratios should be applied to assess
the burnup of leaking fuel rods in order to facilitate their identification
during operation or outages, depending on the type of reactor.
(b) Measurement of the activities of corrosion products as a means of
monitoring chemistry performance, radioactive material transport processes
and potential foreign material ingress. In order to ensure good
representative data, appropriate isokinetic sampling methods capable of
‘activity fractioning’ for liquids and particles (separation of activity into
specific fractions) should be implemented if possible.
(c) Measurement of other activated species (e.g. radioisotopes of sodium,
potassium and chlorine) as a useful means of verifying or cross-checking the results of chemical analyses and for early warning of low concentrations
of possibly unknown impurities.
6.23. Radiochemistry measurements should be part of spent fuel handling
operations, starting from reactor pool storage through any transport operations to
interim storage facilities, in order to monitor fuel integrity and the possible
propagation of defects after removal of fuel from the reactor.
6.24. Radiochemistry measurements should be applied in monitoring the
performance of purification systems, especially when removal of radioactive
material is the main purpose of operation of the purification system.
6.25. Measurement of the activities of relevant radionuclides should be carried
out while monitoring the efficiency of decontamination processes, especially in
the decontamination of large components, in order to optimize treatment time and
minimize radioactive waste generation. Monitoring practices should be in
accordance with ALARA principles and objectives.
6.26. Radiochemistry methods should be applied to provide the results necessary
for the characterization of radioactive waste with regard to its treatment,
conditioning and disposal:
(a) Effective and validated radiochemical separation methods should be
developed for activity measurement of difficult-to-measure radionuclides
(e.g. pure alpha or beta emitters and low energy gamma emitters).
(b) For the radionuclides specified for each disposal facility, and as defined in
the safety analysis report, the activities should be determined repeatedly in
a defined set of waste streams, so that sufficient data are accumulated from
which mathematical correlations can be derived between difficult-tomeasure radionuclides and key (reference) radionuclides (so-called
‘fingerprinting’).
(c) Such correlations should then be used for the calculation based
characterization of newly generated waste, but periodic checks of their
correctness should be carried out by new radiochemical analyses.
6.27. The activities of radioactive effluents, both liquid and gaseous, should be
monitored regularly by appropriate activity fractioning and monitoring methods.
6.28. Radiochemical methods that rely on radiochemical separation methods and
properly calibrated liquid scintillation counters should also be applied to monitor liquid and gaseous releases of tritium and 14C as specific low energy beta
emitters.
6.29. Determination of the activity of primary surface deposits serves for the
identification of either potential specific radionuclide contaminants (e.g.
antimony, silver) or trends and anomalies in occupational radiation exposure.
This determination should be made by the use of wipe sampling, corrosion layer
scraping or electrochemical sampling, or by in situ gamma spectrometry of
appropriately selected parts of the primary circuit, or by other methods.

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1469_web.pdf

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1562214864227115008?s=20&t=j-t4U97kd...

[Storr]

Due to obvious safety concerns, there is no Ukrainian Independence Day parade this year. In lieu, have this unedited complete video of the first Independence Day Parade in 1996, celebrating 5 years of independence. Zelensky would have been 18 at the time of this recording.

Shoutout to whoever uploaded this to youtube (the actual parade itself only lasts 34 minutes, the rest is an orchestral performance):

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Lukashenko has congratulated Ukraine on their Independence Day. I often find it hard to understand what he’s angling for.

[jaichind]

Yikes.

"Mindful of how Poland was unwilling to let Soviet troops through to help Czechoslovakia  in 1938, Moscow insisted that its Eastern European neighbors allow the Red Army to pass in the event of an attack by Nazi Germany, but was refused." [Gee, I wonder why?]

"The real threat of a war on two fronts left the Soviet Union no choice."

"Thanks to the Soviet-German non aggression pact, the war began on more advantageous borders for the Soviet Union, and hundred of thousands of lives were saved."

But that has been the USSR/Russian position for decades.  Another point they make which they have a point is that Poland actually participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia in Munich in 1938 and annexed territories from Czechoslovakia which included the railway junction city of Bohumín so Poland has no moral right to complain when they became a target of partition between Germany and USSR in 1939.

Did Putin ever admit that Russia's complicity in the partition of Poland was a sin? And Russia or  its puppet state still retain some of that territory.

https://www.expatica.com/be/general/poland-says-role-in-czechoslovakias-annexation-a-sin-74925/

What Putin will most likely say is that the 1939 partition merely pushes the border back to the Curzon Line of 1919 plus the Białystok region which actually went back to Poland after WWII ended so he would argue that the line is something even a third party thought was fair.

Also, a good part of the 1939 partition of Poland territories actually is now a part of Ukraine including Lvov.  I wonder what Ukraine's position on the 1939 partition is and whether will they consider giving back the Lvov area back to Poland.  BTW the argument against this would be that right after WWII USSR and Poland had a bunch of population exchanges around this USSR (Ukraine SSR) border.

[CumbrianLefty]

Lukashenko has congratulated Ukraine on their Independence Day. I often find it hard to understand what he’s angling for.

To stay in power himself, basically.

[Sir Mohamed]

https://twitter.com/axios/status/1562435700204929025