Friday, June 19, 2026

Things Are Flying Everywhere Over Moscow Tonight

You were discussing, uh, air supremacy, Sir Arthur?
-- from the movie Patton, as the characters are hiding under a table during a German air raid


If you wanna know how Putin's war on Ukraine is going, just look to how Moscow is blowing up (via Peter Beaumont, Pjotr Sauer, and Jennifer Rankin for the Guardian):

Ukrainian drones have hit several locations across Moscow in Kyiv’s biggest air raid on the city since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, setting a major ⁠oil refinery on fire and forcing evacuations at the country’s largest airport.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attack as a response to Russia’s strike on a historic Kyiv monastery complex earlier this week.

“We do not want this war and never did,” the Ukrainian president said in a voice message to journalists. “But if Ukraine is going to burn, your Moscow will burn too … it is time to end the aggression, time to end this war.”

Heavy smoke has been covering Moscow for days now, with reports of soldiers running around in public with shoulder-mounted anti-air rockets trying to shoot down the drones that civilians cannot ignore.

One of those attempted shoot-downs ended up as a own-goal, when one of those missiles failed to target and slammed into a large refinery tank, leading to this explosion:


UFO jokes flew faster than that tank lid:

As an X-Phile,
I love this poster

Putin can try to gaslight his own people about all this, but he can't hide all that smoke and all that flame. He's been promising Russians a huge victory over Ukraine for years now, and it's becoming clearer he and his country aren't winning.

2 comments:

dinthebeast said...

I have a feeling Putin is already not popular there, perhaps explosions will hasten his exit. (Word is that he is hiding for his safety already)

-Doug in Sugar Pine

Paul said...

Last I heard, Putin is fearful of his generals and War minister staging a coup, but he can't bring himself to get rid of them because he's already gone through too many replacements and can't trust anyone else to promote upward.