kravietz 🦇

@promotion

100% - and he precisely is the type you described :)

From my days of travelling to the Russian #Caucasus, I’ve got quite a few friends there – one of them is a highlander and he’s fine, whilst the other used to work for RIA (Russian state news agency).

I messaged the first one on Telegram, but the message isn’t getting through and I don’t know if he’s up in the mountains or if the Roskomnadzor is already blocking it. So I ask the other one, who spends most of his time in the lowlands, whether Telegram works there without a VPN. And here I get this reply that sounded like read from an official government statement 😂

It depends – sometimes it’s needed, and sometimes it isn’t. On the other hand, the number of cybercrimes and scams on social media has plummeted since communication restrictions were introduced. Everything has its pros and cons.

I gather he’s probably still working at RIA 😂 Let me emphasise – it was the sort of question that calls for a yes or no answer.

If they cut off the internet for them altogether, he’ll probably send me a letter by post giving a detailed explanation of why life without the Internet has “certain disadvantages, but also advantages”.

As with previous such sieges, in #Konstantinivka right now we’re facing a classic #Russia #Ukraine there and back “we took it, no you didn’t”.

Russians always declare capture of towns or villages “on credit”, that is long before they actually control it, which often leads to ridiculing themselves, as it was with #Kupyansk and #MalaTokmachka.

But military experts have long predicted that Konstantinivka will fall, because Russians concentrated all their forces there and Ukraine abandoned the old “fortress Bakhmut” tactics which as it led to high losses of the defenders.

Under the “active defense” tactics, fall of Konstantinivka is planned, it is only matter of losses ratio curve going beyond Ukraine’s acceptable threshold. At that point ZSU will retreat… and move to another defense line behind Konstantinivka, as they did when #Pokrovsk fell.

And the defense lines around the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration are probably the most dense and best prepared in the whole war.

That’s what military experts from both Ukraine and Russia write, the latter pointing out that “liberation” of the towns may take another few years at an insane human cost to Russia. And I think that’s the very point of Ukraine’s tactics here.

Fanatics on both sides - Musk, Le Pen and the anti-AC movement - forget that a air conditioner and heat pump are one and the same device. The only difference is in the direction of pumping. Logically, the former should ban AC with heating function, the latter - heat pumps with cooling function 😆

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/05/europe-air-conditioning-culture-wars-heat-up