pluggerslugs

My dear Russian friends, when the winter months are cold and there’s no fuel to be had, just remember that citation and the fact that your bureaucracy is surprisingly flammable.

Isn’t Russia trying to buy fuel abroad to make up for the refinery losses? I wonder what ports they’re planning to use for deliveries, because the ones in southern Russia don’t look so safe these days.

Sometimes I see a spike on the daily “scoreboard” post’s casualty number and I wonder what happened, so I guess this answers that question.

The sanctions are coming one way or another.

It was a joke, obviously buzzing Russian military bases at night is a stupid idea.

Stupid fun.

If there’s no AA for those arctic bases, do low altitude flyovers in the dead of night.

Another comparison near the Saratov oil refinery showed an abundance of air defense systems in August 2025, where the same patch was largely empty in satellite images from May 2023.

The fact that the Saratov oil refinery got hit a week ago is even funnier now.

I can never make archive.ph links work, so here’s that Bloomberg article publicly available at Yahoo! Finance. The lede:

Four-week average seaborne crude shipments were almost unchanged at 4.21 million barrels a day in the period to July 12, according to tanker-movements data compiled by Bloomberg. That was down by just 10,000 barrels from the highest since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2022, before which about 600,000 barrels a day was piped to refineries in Europe.

But soaring crude exports aren’t being matched by deliveries, leaving the number of barrels at sea back near the highs from around the start of the year as cargoes of Russian oil build up off Mersa El-Hamra in Egypt and in the Riau archipelago, east of Singapore, tanker-tracking data show. A growing proportion of those supplies are on ships that appear to be idling, rather than in transit.

I’m not sure if these numbers include any changes to export volume due to the recent halt of shipping in the Sea of Azov, but it’s still a little disappointing that they can still get the oil shipped even if it it’s not selling.

Hopefully there’s new US sanctions that make potential buyers less willing, but Trump has been yapping about some trade deals and a blockade so maybe prices go way up.

In response to the widespread domestic fuel shortage, local authorities in Russia’s Krasnodar region have directed public school teachers to work shifts at gas stations to monitor queues and manage interactions with drivers.

Um

Unexpected genius move - they scuttled the ships because Ukrainian drones can’t hit them under water.

And the war crimes continue

Місія проходила у взаємодії з підпільним повстанським рухом на території рф «Черная искра».

I wonder if this is actually true or just Ukraine using this opportunity to mess with Russia’s head.

If you think about it, she’s not really breaking the rules because she herself is ethically handicapped.

Hopefully the price of wheat doesn’t go up on the international market, but then again fuck Russia.

I understand that they can’t build new engines, but is there really nobody in Russia who refurbish these things? Are they just in awful shape after being pulled from storage or something, because otherwise it’s hard to believe that Russian industry is incapable of overhauling a Soviet-era turbo diesel. Like even if they do a shitty job and the engines only last a year or two, it seems like they should be able to make them run at least.

Seems like it’d be feasible (and fun!) to build an anti-EM drone/loitering munition for targeting radar and EW systems. I mean, that emitter is basically screaming “I’m right here, come explode on me!”

Beyond causing problems for international trade, the attacks probably mess up a major Crimean supply route.

I think it’s a piefed/federation bug, the posts have titles if you look at them on the original lemmy instance.

I think I’ve seen videos of this guy in his car looking for/complaining about gasoline. I guess he wasn’t successful since he’s walking around now.

Cyberboroshno’s analysis of satellite imagery tracked the shadow fleet’s collapse in numbers. Around 1 July, about 100 vessels sat north of the Crimean Bridge in the Azov Sea, with roughly 100 more to the south near the Taman port. By 6 July, the northern group had thinned to about 40. By 8 July, some 20 remained in the north, one of them burning, with massed movement toward the bridge.

The northern vessels are mostly small river-class tankers, the analysts found. They shuttle fuel south, where cargo is transshipped onto much larger ships for direct Black Sea runs to importer countries. The vessels belong to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, used to circumvent sanctions.

I hadn’t seen this detail elsewhere, but it seems like disabling these smaller tankers would have a wider effect on Russia’s oil exports than just taking down ocean-going tankers. They hit a bunch of oil depots in that supply the tankers, too.