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[Grim Portent]

According to this unsourced wikipedia claim it's roughly a third.

I am surprised. It is way more than I expected. Getting a large Russian minority and a very underdeveloped region is a questionable desire.

They've probably not thought about the negatives or the practicalities much. Tends to be the thing with people who want land for historical reasons in my experience.

[EuchreJack]

According to this unsourced wikipedia claim it's roughly a third.

I am surprised. It is way more than I expected. Getting a large Russian minority and a very underdeveloped region is a questionable desire.

They've probably not thought about the negatives or the practicalities much. Tends to be the thing with people who want land for historical reasons in my experience.

It's LAND.  They're not making any more of it!

[Grim Portent]

It's also 90% garbage in this case. Garbage land can be a net drain on the rest of the country, and it can take decades to catch it up to the developed areas.

[EuchreJack]

While true...LAND!

Relevant

[Grim Portent]

Somehow I knew what that link would be before I clicked it. 

[King Zultan]

But what about the LAND?

[scriver]

According to this unsourced wikipedia claim it's roughly a third.

I am surprised. It is way more than I expected. Getting a large Russian minority and a very underdeveloped region is a questionable desire.

They probably want the land returned to the descendants of the people who owned it that was driven away, and that Russia can keep the Russians.

[Strongpoint]

"DNR" reports that a captured British citizen, Paul Urey, died "due to illness and stress" (Read: didn't survive tortures). He wasn't even a combatant...

And remember that tens of thousands of Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, are in Russian captivity. The difference is that should they die, no one will bother announcing anything

[Loud Whispers]

"DNR" reports that a captured British citizen, Paul Urey, died "due to illness and stress" (Read: didn't survive tortures). He wasn't even a combatant...

And remember that tens of thousands of Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, are in Russian captivity. The difference is that should they die, no one will bother announcing anything

Poor chaps. This one wasn't even a combatant and they killed him anyways

[King Zultan]

I haven't payed attention to news in quite a while and I have a question, have any more generals died?

[Starver]

Ukraine claimed a whole host of officers (twenty-odd of various levels?) in an ammo-dump strike the other day, I recall, courtesy of hyper-accurate targetting missile (well, better than Russia, even if they care). Moscow, however, said it was a hit on fertiliser, which is what their lot have liked to do, firing on fields and farm buildings with incendiary shells in literal scorched-earth.

Can't recall the details. Likely to be not as spectactular as claimed, nor meaningless as counter-claimed.

[Strongpoint]

Frontlines are relatively calm. We blow up their ammo dumps, fuel storages, barracks, etc behind enemy lines (I am still salty that Americans don't allow us to use their toys against targets on Russian territory, limiting our deep strikes to occupied Ukraine...). Russia responds by terror attacks with their cruise missiles killing many random civilians.

Likely, a new Russian major offensive will start on the Donbas front soon.

[brewer bob]

I haven't payed attention to news in quite a while and I have a question, have any more generals died?

There's been some news about dead generals, but it could've been just about the previously dead ones. Can't remember.

Also, sort of related, there was this kind of meme (or whatever) circulating on teh interwebs:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Starver]

...just to correct/downplay my above recollection, the ammo-dump/fertiliser incident doesn't mention officers, at least in that particular report[1], so maybe I'm conflating it with a different thing from shortly before that I didn't spot in passing.

From other reports, the missiles coming the other way seem largely civilian-targetted (or untargetted except for "in the general vicinity of something nebulously military"). A spacecraft (satellite, not rocket?) factory got hit, but I don't think that can be considered legitimate and was probably just accidental/careless/incidental to whatever 'legitimate' targetting they would claim, because it was a large building.

Though that was probably an air-launched missile (safely from far from any air-defences, even across the borders), many incoming missiles seem to be sub-launched from the Black Sea. Operationally, probably makes sense. Isolates the launch platform and crew from both retaliation and any chance of hearing that their commanded targets have been largely civilian in nature (blissfully unaware of any social-media chatter, if you're isolated in a submerged tincan) but I'm wondering what equally stealthy efforts are being made to disrupt their activities out beyond any national/notional territorial limits.

If there's not a Ukrainean-ally's sub or three in the Black Sea, I would be surprised. Even given the risks concerned (and the unliklihood of it ever turning into a U-863/HMS Venturer encounter... the only fully submerged successful sub-on-sub encounter publically known from non-fiction), there'd be some benefits from keeping close tabs, if only in advance of any hotting up of the situation where resupply schedules and opportunities are more precisely observed.


[1] Not sure from which news-site I heard/read what I thought I had. The above was clearly dated after I was forced to delete the BBC News App, so when I half-recall it being a web-page I rather assumed it was theirs that I was now looking at instead, but I have a few others on other tabs (those that don't deluge me with ads/popups).

[Lord Shonus]

Fertilizer explodes spectacularly under the right conditions, so it is plausible that they tried to pass off one of the truly spectacular ammo-dump explosions (several of which have been large enough to generate a mushroom cloud, which isn't easy with conventional explosives) as precisely that. The severe degradation in volume of their artillery fire of late (and consequent slowing of the already glacial rate of advance) suggests that they're lying.