Day 903
Start with the prisons
If you haven’t been paying attention, “correctional facilities” in Russia are large torture chambers, especially in Kursk region.
The little red blobs mark prisons in Lgov. A third correctional facility (far right) is located in Malaya Loknya, closer to Sudzha, which Ukrainian forces occupied last week.
Just ask Oleksiy Anulia. The plight of dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians held in Kursk and other Russian regions has been extensively documented. One objective of the incursion is to rescue people like him, I hope.
Ukraine has never been great at OPSEC. Neither has Russia. Soldiers from both countries haven’t been able to resist posting videos and selfies from Russian towns in Kursk region, bragging about killing one another.
A dozen (12) journalists wrote a wordy frontpage article for The New York Times about the incursion1 . But they left out the part about Putin putting Aleksiy Dyumin in charge of managing the counterterrorism op aimed to eject Ukrainian interlopers. That’s a shame, because we are in the eleventh (11) year of the war that Dyumin helped to start.
Dyumin oversaw Putin’s invasions of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014. He, along with Dmytro Utkin, created Wagner Group, a private state-funded military company that Evgeny Prigozhin managed until his plane dropped out of the sky last summer after an unsuccessful mutiny23.
Fun fact of the day: Dyumin was born August 28, 1972, in Kursk.
Team USA spends about $1 trillion a year on intelligence. The Wagner PMC and Dyumin folders are capacious, chock full of at least a decade’s worth of intercepted electronic communications.
On the Team USA jacket, Uncle Joe says Putin is in a pickle
"I have spoken with my staff on a regular basis, probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days and it [Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk region] is creating a real dilemma for Putin. And we've been in direct contact, constant contact with the Ukrainians. That's all I'm going to say about it while it [Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk] active." - Biden
What “direct, constant contact” with “the Ukrainians” means is anyone’s guess.
The “dilemma” Putin faces is that Russians have agreed to invade Ukraine for money, as mercenaries, but they are unwilling — and, so far, unable — to defend their own country pro bono publico (for the public good).
Here’s what Prigozhin predicted could/should happen if Ukraine moved on Kursk.
Deception and a Gamble: How Ukrainian Troops Invaded Russia. Planned in secrecy, the incursion was a bold move to upend the war’s dynamics and put Moscow on the defensive — a gambit that could also leave Ukraine exposed (The New York Times, August 13, 2024)
Z scuppered an op — authorized in 2018 by his predecessor Petro Poroshenko — to lure Wagner PMC fighters to Ukraine and arrest them.