Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Ilya Knorring
[REGNUM] In the more than thousand-year history of the Russian army, things have happened more than once to which the words of Peter the Great can be applied: "the unheard of happens." Thanks to the desperate courage of the fighters, something happens that contradicts the generally accepted laws of military science, and even the laws of nature.
This includes the attack of Russian submarines on Swedish ships bristling with guns (in honor of this boarding, Peter I ordered the medal "The Unprecedented Happens" to be minted), and the passage of Suvorov's soldiers through the Alps. And the capture of a German "stronghold" near the village of Chernushki in the Kalinin region in February 1943, which would not have happened without the feat of Alexander Matrosov. Now in the same row is Operation Potok - the passage of six hundred attack aircraft along a gas pipeline to the rear of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Kursk's Sudzha.
One of the participants in the throw down the pipe, a fighter with the call sign Medved, told in a recent interview to the editor-in-chief of the Regnum news agency, Marina Akhmedova :
"Everyone understood that they could have simply not come out... They said that there was no gas in the pipe, but it still settled somewhere in the lowlands. The pipe doesn't just go straight. It turns, swerves. So everyone understood that either we were heroes, or... Well, they'll forget: it was unfortunate."
The fear was not unfounded - until the beginning of this year, the gas pipeline was used to pump export fuel to Europe. But the fighters, at their own risk, moved for almost a week along a nearly 15-kilometer stretch, in the dark, suffocating from lack of oxygen. And - they appeared literally from underground, dirty, half-poisoned, but ready for battle.
"They plunged the enemy into such terror that the infantrymen, not accepting the fight, rushed back, trampling each other" - this phrase could well describe the consequences of the "Kursk pipe" (remember how quickly the VSUS left Sudzha). But this is how one of the episodes of the battle at the walls of the Osovets fortress was described almost 110 years ago, in August 1915.
This battle was the predecessor and “brother” of the modern feat, and it was not for nothing that it was called the “attack of the dead.”
DARK GREEN FOG
Osowiec, a small stronghold near the Polish town of the same name, had been under siege by the Germans since February 1915. The Kaiser's troops took the much more serious fortifications of neighboring Novogeorgievsk (today's Modlin), receiving colossal artillery as trophies. And in Osowiec, despite the shelling, the defenders repelled attack after attack.
“The brick buildings were falling apart, the wooden ones were burning, the weak concrete ones were giving huge cracks in the arches and walls… The wire communication was broken, the highway was damaged by craters; the trenches and all the improvements on the ramparts, such as canopies, machine gun nests, light dugouts, were wiped off the face of the earth,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Khmelkov, a participant in the defense of Osowiec.
But the first, and then the second, artillery attack by the Germans was repelled – even though the enemy used 17 artillery batteries, which included four 420-mm “Big Bertha” mortars, the most terrible weapons of that war.
On August 6, the third onslaught began, and not only artillery was involved. At four o'clock in the morning, a dark green fog was directed at the Russian positions - it was a mixture of chlorine and bromine. Before that, the enemy, having installed several thousand cylinders with poison gas, waited for the wind to blow in the right direction - and waited.
The defenders of the fortress did not have gas masks.
"EVERYTHING IS POISONED TO DEATH"
"Everything alive in the open air on the fortress bridgehead was poisoned to death... - people not participating in the battle saved themselves in barracks, shelters, residential buildings, tightly locking the doors and windows, pouring water on them abundantly. All the greenery in the fortress and in the immediate area along the path of the gases was destroyed, the leaves on the trees turned yellow, curled up and fell off, the grass turned black and lay on the ground," testified Lieutenant Colonel Khmelkov.
Chlorine-bromine stagnated in the lowlands, near the water ditches, just as methane stagnated in the "lowlands" and on the bends of the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline. The products were poisoned and unfit for consumption. If the participants of Operation Potok, tormented by thirst, still found some kind of way out - they collected water condensate, then the defenders of Osowiec were deprived of this opportunity.
"About half of the fighters were poisoned to death. The half-poisoned ones trudged back and, tormented by thirst, bent down to the water sources, but here, in the low places, the gases lingered, and secondary poisoning led to death," testified Colonel Vsevolod Bunyakovsky, a participant in the defense of Osovets and commander of the 225th Livny Regiment.
By the time the Germans approached the Russian positions, the number of its defenders was estimated at some 160–200 people “capable of using weapons.”
"WE'RE NOT GOING TO DIE!"
"The morning was cold and foggy; a moderate north wind was blowing," Bunyakovsky recalled. The wind drove the gas toward our positions.
Three companies of the Zemlyansky Regiment, sent out from the Zarechny Fort Osovets to counterattack, lost up to 30 percent of their men along the way, poisoned only, and “after some time of releasing the gases, the Germans simultaneously launched red rockets along the entire front and opened hurricane fire.”
Three companies of "zemlyantsy" perished entirely, from the 12th company there remained about 40 men with one machine gun; from the three companies that defended positions near the village of Bialogrondy, there remained about 60 men with two machine guns.
It would seem that after this the Osowiec fortress should have fallen at the feet of the Kaiser, but... the commandant of the fortress, Lieutenant General Nikolai Brzhozovsky, gave the order to attack.
Lieutenant Colonel Khmelkov, himself poisoned during the German attack, recalled:
"The 13th and 8th companies, having lost up to 50% to poisoning, deployed on both sides of the railway and began an offensive; the 13th company, having met units of the 18th Landwehr Regiment, rushed forward with bayonets, shouting "Hurray". This attack of the "dead men", as an eyewitness of the battle reports, so shocked the Germans that they did not accept the battle and rushed back; many Germans died on the wire nets in front of the second line of trenches from the fire of the fortress artillery."
Khmelkov’s officer-like restrained testimony is complemented by the “trench prose” of Alexei Lepeshkin, the commander of a half-company of the 13th company of the 226th Zemlyansky regiment:
"We had no gas masks... When we breathed, we wheezed and bloody foam came out of our lungs. The skin on our hands and faces bubbled. The rags we had wrapped around our faces did not help. However, the Russian artillery began to act, sending shell after shell from a green chlorine cloud towards the Prussians. Here, the head of the 2nd Osowiec Defense Department, Svechnikov, shaking from a terrible cough, wheezed: "My friends, we are not going to die like Prussian cockroaches from poisoning, let's show them so that they will remember forever!"
"ROUTINE WORK"
Russian soldiers and officers, with their faces wrapped in bloody rags, appeared from the greenish gas fog as if from underground.
The enemy was afraid - "some devils are crawling out of the ground... we didn't expect such a turn of events." But, by the way, this is already the testimony of a fighter with the call sign Medved about the consequences of the attack of half-poisoned soldiers and officers of the volunteer detachment "Veterans" of the 11th airborne assault brigade of the 30th motorized rifle regiment and the special forces detachment "Akhmat".
In both cases – in 1915 and in 2025 – the disoriented enemy, not expecting the “unprecedented”, retreated, abandoning their weapons: then – Krupp cannons and machine guns, now – American and European armored vehicles.
After the enemy's third attack on Osowiec failed, our command gave the order to evacuate the survivors, among whom were officers Khmelkov and Bunyakovsky, and to organize the removal of weapons and artillery. The Germans' calculations on this section of the front went to waste, just as the plans of the "Germans" (as the VSSU men are often called) on the Kursk front were nullified.
What seemed to the enemy an absurd, suicidal move, or at best a display of daring courage, was the result of coordinated action. Just carried out in the spirit of "the unheard of happens." As a surviving participant in the "attack of the dead" told a reporter for the newspaper "Russkoye Slovo," "there were no stragglers, no one had to be rushed. There were no individual heroes here, the companies moved as one man."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] In the Zaporizhia region, they demanded to recognize the crimes committed by the Nazi invaders and their accomplices in the region during the Great Patriotic War as genocide of the Soviet people. This was reported on March 20 by the press service of the regional department.
It is noted that the prosecutor's office established the fact of mass torture and brutal murders during the German occupation of the region from October 1941 to October 1943.
"In the city of Melitopol alone, the Nazis brutally dealt with more than 1,800 innocent families in one day. The fascists were especially brutal in their treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. The Red Army soldiers were not given food or drink, those who fell from fatigue and exhaustion were shot, other prisoners had their ears cut off, their eyes gouged out, their hands chopped off, and ultimately they were killed," the article says.
According to the department, over 67,000 civilians and 11,000 prisoners of war were killed in the Zaporizhia region, and over 157,000 people were sent to hard labor. In addition, the amount of damage from the devastation and destruction of collective farms, factories, plants, schools, hospitals, cultural institutions and monasteries by the German military exceeded 25.6 trillion rubles.
The prosecutor's office also submitted a significant body of evidence to the court for consideration, in particular archival documents, expert opinions and materials from the criminal case.
As previously reported by the Regnum news agency, similar lawsuits were previously filed by prosecutors in a number of other Russian regions. In particular, on February 27, the actions of the Nazis near Novgorod during the Great Patriotic War also demanded to be recognized as genocide. The regional prosecutor's office noted that at that time, punitive battalions formed by the invaders were operating on Novgorod lands, which massively destroyed civilians and prisoners of war ; during the occupation, more than 202 thousand people died, and another 166 thousand were driven into slavery.
Moreover, the Nazis razed to the ground the cities of Malaya Vishera, Novgorod, Soltsy, Staraya Russa and Chudovo, and destroyed many cultural monuments. The total amount of damage was about 48 trillion rubles.
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin.
Note that Rozhin's grandfather was in the NKVD.
[ColonelCassad] I watched the domestic TV series "Atom".
It turned out to be a quite watchable comic book movie based on the Soviet nuclear project.
The main message is quite correct - under the leadership of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the Chekists, intelligence officers and scientists together implemented the nuclear project and gave the country a nuclear shield. And not only that.
Lavrentiy Pavlovich did not even shoot anyone or "grind them into camp dust", he just threatened a couple of times in the style of meme jokes like "You can be free. Bye" and a demonstration of Stalin's resolution "Calm the fool".
In general, he effectively managed a zealous fool from counterintelligence, a project curator mired in women (I can't stand Guskov at all after "4 days in May", he was a real piece of crap), infantile scientists and Germans brought from Germany.
However, in the entire series, only one character was shoved into the camp, and even then, for good reason (his personal dislike for the Germans was ruining the project), to dig a pit for a reactor under the supervision of the GULAG chief. In general, the Bloody KGB in the film looks rather positive and mainly scares, rather than punishes. It threatens with a finger, but-but, make a bomb, comrades.
Well, Fitin also looks like a smart leader (as does the intelligence line, although it is still quite crumpled), and Kurchatov is cured of infantilism somewhere in the middle and he himself begins to build scientists who do not understand where they ended up and what they are doing. When the Bloody KGB organizes everything correctly, Soviet scientists make scientific breakthroughs, and our intelligence agents drag secret documents to the USA - everything works out in the end and Lavrenty Pavlovich is happy.
Stalin is not in the film, so he is the main one here. Perhaps this is the most complimentary film about Beria of all that I have seen, although this is rather because he is not particularly scolded here, which distinguishes him favorably from the usual perestroika and post-perestroika films, where Beria is usually a "bloody executioner".
In general, if you do not take the film too seriously and do not consider all this as a manual on the history of the Soviet nuclear project (this is immediately a fibroid), then it is quite possible to watch it. A kind of comic book movie. If it were not for the sagging "love stories", it would have looked more cheerful. Some scenes are shot well, although it is obvious that the series did not have enough budget for more colorful scenes with equipment and a nuclear test.
In general, it is so-so shot, but the film has the right message. They noted the contribution of everyone - scientists, intelligence officers, and the Bloody KGB. As it was. Without any of this "contrary to".
And the fact that the authors piled up a bunch of improvisation is more a question for the script. In some moments I laughed at the stupidity of what was happening.
[HotAir] This is incredible. Not only did President Trump just manage to compel an elite law firm to admit wrongdoing by its former partner, Mark Pomerantz—the architect of NY’s lawfare against him—but he also secured $40 million in free legal work for causes of his choosing.
Trump was way too kind.
Recall, dear Reader, that in 2023 Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought felony charges of falsifying business records against former President Trump for payments his lawyer, Michael Cohen made five years earlier to Stormy Daniels, then billed back to a Trump trust.
Equals only 40 hours of Pro Bono time, instead of, say, $5,000/hour = 8,000 work hours.
As a comparison, one I was talking to about a rather day-to-day case wanted $100/hour including billable driving time (Working Kansas Lawyer Prices), 400,000 work hours.
[PJMedia] PJ Media has been covering the Joe Biden autopen scandal ever since it broke earlier this month. According to the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, the White House used an autopen to sign nearly every document Joe Biden signed. Given Biden’s cognitive decline, this revelation prompted concerns about whether he was aware of or authorized these actions.
The media largely ignored the issue until Donald Trump intervened, declaring Biden’s autopen-signed pardons “void” and claiming Biden “did not know anything about them.” This movie finally forced the media to pay attention to the scandal, and that’s pretty huge. This is a discussion that needs to take place, and while I’m skeptical that anything will ultimately come of it, legal scholars insist that anything that was the autopen signed may, in fact, be invalid.
Here's legal analysis from the Oversight Project’s memorandum:
The United States Constitution vests numerous powers in one man and one man alone—the President of the United States. These powers include signing or vetoing bills, signing or vetoing orders, resolutions, or certain legislative votes, nominating and commissioning Officers, and granting reprieves and pardons. In all of these instances, the President’s personal action is required, i.e., he “shall” perform some action. These mandates are exclusive to the President. Therefore, it is well established that the President cannot delegate these decisions to anyone. The President affixing his wet signature not only signifies consent, but is the legally required act.
What happens when the president doesn’t personally sign documents exercising his powers, instead relying on a proxy or autopen to fulfill constitutional duties or issue pardons? And how does this change when the president lacks the mental or physical capacity to perform these duties?
“At its core, the longstanding historical practice that the President affix his wet signature to Acts of Congress and clemency warrants stems from the interconnected issues of authority and authenticity,” explains the Oversight Project. “The Constitution vests the execution of Executive powers, the signing of bills into law, and the awarding of pardons and clemency in one person—the President.”
While the president can seek advice, the final decision and responsibility rest with him. Since the nation’s founding, requiring the president’s wet signature on key documents has served as a vital safeguard against fraud and unauthorized authority.
The use of the autopen to affix the President’s signature has been justified by the modern Administrative State through tortured Constitutional interpretation, asking the wrong core questions, and deliberately ignoring contrary authority. Thus, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) in 2005 reversed their longstanding interpretation that had seen bills flown around the world for the President’s wet signature and has opined that the President may even autopen bills. This opinion is wrong. But even that erroneous opinion was clear that “[w]e emphasize that we are not suggesting that the President may delegate the decision to approve and sign a bill, only that, having made this decision, he may direct a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to the bill.” Thus, the Biden Administration’s use of the autopen may well have been contrary even to the most permissive interpretation of the law.
To this point, Trump explained this week that he doesn’t use an autopen for any legally binding documents.
"We may use it, as an example, to send some young person a letter because it’s nice," Trump said. "You know, we get thousands and thousands of letters, letters of support for young people, from people that aren’t feeling well, etcetera. But to sign pardons and all of the things that he signed with an autopen is disgraceful."
In this light, the key issues associated with any auto-penned document involving a non-delegable decision that only the President can make under the Constitution are two-fold: (1) whether or not President Biden made the decision; and (2) whether or not President Biden, having made the decision, then directed a subordinate to affix his signature to the document at issue. Again, this is a concept well known to everyday Americans. Even though in some instances the law permits ministerial acts to be delegated, one must be competent to act, and that requirement protects all against fraud (including the individual in question).
“Every leftist who shrieked, whined, and moaned about defending democracy is a complete hypocrite if they are not outraged by the antidemocratic action on the scale of presidential actions enacted by people who were never elected to anything,” Oversight Project Executive Director Mike Howell told The Daily Signal on Tuesday. “The pardons are as valid as a $3 bill.”
While past presidents have used autopens for minor or routine proclamations, Howell argued that this situation was different. He pointed to the 25th Amendment, enacted after JFK’s assassination, which established a process for replacing an incapacitated president.
“This was a device used as a workaround of the 25th Amendment,” Howell said.
A 2024 Justice Department report by Special Counsel Robert Hur on Biden’s handling of classified documents found he had “diminished faculties,” which ultimately saved him from prosecution. It should have forced his removal from office, but Democrats swiftly came to his defense. It wasn't until after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June forced them to confront the reality that they couldn’t hide it anymore, and party leaders forced Biden off the ticket.
[MRCtv] “You’re wrong, Hugh,” Constitutional Scholar Levin counseled fellow conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt Wednesday after Hewitt defended Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issuance of a public statement condemning the use of impeachment to oust radical, activist lower-court judges.
After President Donald Trump posted a call for the impeachment of activist judges seeking to usurp and deny his executive authority granted by the Constitution, Chief Justice issued a rare public statement, declaring that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Roberts’ statement ignored concerns of judicial overreach and the breach of separation of powers, reframing the issue as one of mere “disagreement.”
In his social media post defending Roberts’ injection of himself into matters of the Legislative Branch, Hewitt made six basic arguments:
Chief Justice Roberts’ job is to defend judges
Roberts will do the right thing, in the end.
Roberts would be derelict if he didn’t respond to Trump’s comment.
Impeachment is weaponization of power and will probably be waged against Trump a third time.
House Republicans should reject the impeachment option as being “non-justiciable” and should rely on the D.C. District Court for relief.
Being wrong on the law isn’t an impeachable offense.
Levin responded with six observations about the role of Chief Justice Roberts and judges, in general:
Hewitt should defend the Constitution, not the ruling class.
It’s Roberts’ job to defend the Constitution, not to pontificate about matters that are not before him.
Radical judges are “systematically attacking the constitutional power of the executive branch with nationwide orders, radical political and policy rulings, and picking to pieces the authority granted a president.”
Remaining silent about the judges’ misdeeds is “exactly the wrong response” – rogue judges need to be publicly condemned, because “separation of powers is the heart of our system.”
Roberts can, and should. act to end the judicial overreach, rather than lecture the elected representatives who are trying to stop it.
If Roberts does, ultimately, do the right thing in the matter, it’ll be because Americans forcefully spoke out against the judicial tyranny and demanded he do so – not because Hewitt defended him.
I wish people would stop doing this for anything that matters, like "How much insulin should I take?" ChatGPT is a chatbot. Its skill is predicting the next word in a sentence, something it does quite well. But it is *not* a database, or information storage/retrieval system. It only knows about the word patterns it has been trained on. Train it on garbage, ChatGPT will happily spit out garbage. They are just words.
Now he’s spouting stuff while going after Musk and Tesla. The piece below is from 2018 and shows his long term outlook is still violent against all who have different points of view.
[MonsterHunterNation] Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a debate about gun control, suggested a mandatory buyback—which is basically confiscation with a happy face sticker on it—and when someone told him that they would resist, he said resistance was futile because the government has nukes.
And everybody was like, wait, what?
Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.
See? That’s way better.
But this post isn’t about that particular line from one foolish congressman. It’s about all of the silly left wing memes that have popped up since, trying to justify the congressman’s basic premise that the 2nd Amendment is obsolete for resisting tyranny, and the government would obliterate anyone who failed to comply. Like this one:...
Head to the article at the title link for the rest of this story except for the following extract so you can see the IDIOT DEMON-CRAT CONGRESS-CRITTER'S NAME.
Okay, so let’s say Congressman Swalwell gets his wish, and the government says turn them in or else.
The honourable gentleman from California talks big — especially when drunk — but fortunately he has no control over the nation’s weapons or much of anything else. Despite that particular bit of political stupidity, not to mention his earlier association with the lovely honeypot spy from China, Miss Fang Fang, and his current obsession with Teslas, his constituents send the former prosecutor back to the House in each election with overwhelming majorities. Besides, anything by Larry Correia is worth rereading for the sheer joy of his invective.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
