If you're in Moscow, you might wish to avoid walking too close to buildings over the next few weeks to avoid having somebody fall on you. Putin doesn't handle setbacks and failures very well.

Russian generals, security officials, and senior intelligence officers should avoid going above the ground floor. Flying is also to be avoided. And if Putin doesn't eliminate them, they still need to worry about Ukrainian drones and scooter bombs.

Yeah, Putin is threatening revenge like some unhinged villain. blah blah blah. 🥱

Everybody needs to be reminded daily that Putin started an unprovoked and illegal war on 24 February 2022. Putin's "3-day special operation" is now in its 1,197th day (or is it 1,198th? – IDK).

So Putin is having a neverending hissy fit because his shit army has failed him and that he has to import mercenaries from starving North Korea to keep his useless war going. He can throw all his senior military lickspittles out the window but he still won't win.

Anno 1917. Russian October Revolution. 

* Have to wait for hours until the revolutionary marines manage to start the siege of the Winter Palace.

* Can’t shoot at this piece of building, because canons on the Peter and Paul Fortress are totally ancient and will fall apart. 

* Got new canons. No fitting munition.

* Needed to light up a red lantern for a signal sign. Idiots didn’t manage to get one earlier. 

* Had to get a new lantern. No vehicle can be found. It’s fuckin’ dark already.

* Had to borrow a car from the guys I was fighting against. They were quite surprised, but didn’t really care about that. 

* Got a motherfuckin’ lantern. It was white. Bolsheviks with a WHITE lantern, Carl.

* Lit up this crap. No one sees it, it’s not hight enough. 

Remember Putin's two-day "special operation" to capture Ukraine? It is now into Day 1,020 if I counted correctly. And that has involved Russia suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Putin's adventure in Syria over the past decade has yielded another failure. Instead of making Russia look like a superpower, these engagements show that it is merely a miserable muddled meddler.

For nearly a decade it was Russian firepower that had kept Bashar al-Assad in power. Until the extraordinary events of the last 24 hours. Damascus has fallen, Syria's president has been toppled and has, reportedly, flown to Moscow. Quoting a source in the Kremlin, Russian news agencies and state TV reported that Russia has granted Assad and his family asylum "on humanitarian grounds". In a matter of days, the Kremlin's Syria project has unravelled in the most dramatic circumstances, with Moscow powerless to prevent it. [ ... ] The fall of the Assad regime is a blow to Russia's prestige. By sending thousands of troops in 2015 to shore up President Assad, one of Russia's key objectives had been to assert itself as a global power. It was Vladimir Putin's first major challenge to the power and dominance of the West, away from the former Soviet space.

Russia left behind an air base at Khmeimim and a naval base at Tartus. And in the near future we are likely to hear of smaller cantonments.

We may also be hearing how deeply Russia was involved in internal repression by Syria's al-Assad régime.

Russia looks decreasingly like a place other countries would wish to emulate.

Bashar al-Assad was the sort of person Putin likes to do business with – a mass-murdering autocrat. This report from Amnesty International is from 2017.

Russia smugly proclaimed a few years ago that nobody could shoot down its hypersonic missiles. Ukraine shot one of them down a few days ago using a US Patriot air defense system. 😁

Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said in a Telegram post that the Kinzhal-type ballistic missile had been intercepted in an overnight attack on the Ukrainian capital earlier in the week. It was also the first time Ukraine is known to have used the Patriot defense systems.

“Yes, we shot down the ‘unique’ Kinzhal,” Oleshchuk wrote. “It happened during the night-time attack on May 4 in the skies of the Kyiv region.”

Oleshchuk said the Kh-47 missile was launched by a MiG-31K aircraft from Russian territory and was shot down with a Patriot missile.

The Kinzhal is one of the latest and most advanced Russian weapons. The Russian military says the air-launched ballistic missile has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles) and flies at 10 times the speed of sound, making it hard to intercept.

A combination of hypersonic speed and a heavy warhead allows the Kinzhal to destroy heavily fortified targets, like underground bunkers or mountain tunnels.

Ukraine actually withheld news of this for a few days.

Direct from the Ukrainian Air Force Telegram channel:

Також оприлюднюємо інформацію щодо нічної атаки 4 травня! Близько 2.30 у небі Київщини ЗРК "Patriot" знищено аеробалістичну ракету Х-47 "Кинджал", запущену із МіГ-31К з території росії.

❗️Ще раз наголошуємо, військовим керівництвом було прийнято рішення не оприлюднювати інформацію про збиття Х-47 "Кинджал" системою "Patriot" ОДРАЗУ❗️ Причини цілком зрозумілі. На все свій час!

Rough translation.

We're also releasing information about the attack on the night of May 4th! Around 2:30 AM in the skies above the Kyiv region, a Patriot air defense system destroyed a Kh-47 "Kinzhal" aeroballistic missile launched from a MiG-31K over Russian territory.

❗️We emphasize once again, the military command made the decision not to publish information about the downing of the X-47 "Kinzhal" by the "Patriot" system IMMEDIATELY❗️ The reasons are quite clear. All in good time!

There have been reports that Russian troops and members of the mercenary Wagner Group, founded by a crony of Putin, were shooting at each other. 

A shoot-out allegedly occurred between Russian soldiers and Wagner Group mercenaries over which side is to blame for Russia's failures amid the invasion of Ukraine, military authorities from Kyiv said on Sunday.

[ ... ]

The fight then escalated into a shootout, leaving an unspecified number of troops on both sides dead, according to the general staff. More details about the alleged fight, including exactly when it occurred and how many soldiers were killed, remain unknown.

The incident took place in Stanytsia Luhanska which is about 100 km east of the besieged town of Bakhmut.