hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intelligence update for saturday the 26th of february 2022. so let's get right to it i don't have too much information coming out of europe today i've really been focused on trying to figure out where the front lines are but there has been some pretty big news with regards to sanctions the eu has stated that they will be closing european union airspace to all russian aircraft we're still waiting on a bit of clarification on that because that would mean that more or less the entire continent of europe's airspace would be closed to russia and that would actually be a pretty significant move to counter russia's actions in ukraine but again russia would have had to have planned for this and could have guessed that this would happen so who really knows if this is going to affect russia that much plus russia has a lot of trading partners out in the far east and in the rest of asia so really trying to figure out what this is going to mean for russia and what the actual details are the european union has also agreed to cut off some russian banks from the swift banking system which i will admit i did not think they would do but again we will have to see what banks get cut off with these sanctions because as with all sanctions the devil is in the details and we'll have to actually go through and read the actual documents and not a news story on the documents to see what is actually going to happen to russia with regards to sanctions in russia alexander chulakov was found dead this morning allegedly taking his own life i say allegedly because much like other powerful figures in the world top-ranking politicians oligarchs and important people in russia do not normally meet to their end by natural or their own causes and alexander tulikov was the financial director for the entirety of gazprom russia's biggest energy monopoly and is the largest natural gas company in the world along these same lines and because i didn't have anywhere to put it there are rumors of dissension within the top-ranking politicians in russia again with propaganda flying everywhere from all sides at this point it's really hard to say what is actually going on and it is very unlikely that we're going to have any kind of information gathering capability behind closed doors in russia's top political sphere however rumors are running rampant right now that a lot of dissension is breaking out between some of the old guard in russian political structures and some of putin's closer friends and associates and things like that a lot allegedly a lot of people were kept in the dark in russian high society with regards to this ukraine situation and they're not too happy about it because like we're getting ready to talk about in a bit uh the invasion is not exactly going as smoothly as one would have hoped right it's not a complete and decisive uh conflict just yet uh russia is having to fight for every inch of terrain they get uh for the most part we'll talk about that again in on the fronts but i just wanted to mention that there are inklings of some dissension going on within within russia's political sphere much like the rest of europe which is completely and utterly disorganized in shambles with regards to the sanctions like i mentioned last time things aren't exactly perfect in russia either so i guess we'll have to see what comes of this we'll be on the lookout for any kind of indicators of squabbling going on but really i just wanted to point it out because it might be an it might be a factor for how this ukrainian conflict goes in the future i'm going to skip over the naval updates for today because i don't really have anything constructive to add and we'll talk about the black sea here in just a bit but moving on to the overall operating picture intel gaps are many and wide regarding the positions of the front lines at this stage russia continues her assault on all fronts though there has been a measurable decrease in the speed at which forces have been moving many russian units have been scattered on various fronts or are black on logistics like food water and ammunition much like yesterday russia's advance seems to be the most speedy down south along the crimean front but this is likely due to the open terrain and lack of significant populated areas to hold up the russians in places like urban centers or the more densely populated areas around the country russian forces are being observably bogged down by both ukrainian military actions and civilian efforts to slow their advance as to whether or not this will be effective enough time will have to tell on that again we are continuing to see russian forces being sent into action piecemeal which if you step back and look at things from a historical perspective is almost morbidly ironic considering the historical significance of this exact terrain it was almost 80 years ago that the german sixth army was advancing across what is now ukraine to fight that battle that would decide their fate at stalingrad which was renamed as volgograd after the war and both belligerents of the current war are echoing some of the same tactics used by both sides during the conflict during world war ii ukraine is taking the fight to the cities and letting their invader come deeper and deeper into their territory so that she stretches her supply lines thin russia is echoing the ghost of yetumenka by not taking advantage of the doctrine of massing her forces sending relatively smaller units into battle piecemeal when she should and could be sending in massive coordinated waves of troops ukraine on the other hand is a much smaller and more disadvantaged force but still somehow is managing to deny the russians the air even if it is mostly with shoulder-launched man pads russia seemingly ignorant or dismissive of the importance of air power has not yet dedicated enough aerial forces for this conflict and is now beginning to pay the price for it russia also largely relying on speed and rapidly advancing armored columns have begun to realize that a blitzkrieg might be an effective tactic but it requires fuel and logistics to make it work and putin surrounding himself with yes men instead of people who know what they are doing might be a pretty big reason for the losses that have been sustained taking the initiative to rapidly pierce deep into enemy terrain has been proven to withstand the test of time in the field of warfare but it does have its downsides punching deep into enemy terrain is all fine and dandy until you realize that you have no supplies and you are deep inside enemy terrain i think that all of these observations are utterly fascinating to those who study history and though i certainly don't think that this is an exact parallel to the stalingrad campaign these observations are plain as day to us here so i just wanted to point this out to anyone who might also be thinking along the same lines both the ukrainians and the russians are cherry-picking the best and sometimes the worst parts of their own history in order to fight this war before we get to each front let's briefly examine the iff markers that russia has been observed to be using since we're getting a lot of questions about this for the most part russian forces are using alphanumeric letters to identify friend or foe or iff this is extremely common for all militaries to do and extremely important for russia because ukraine has pretty much the same equipment so having some measure to tell each other apart is important however there has been some variation between the iff markers used some units stationed in the east have the letter v on their vehicles some from crimea have the letter o like the forces from belarus so just remember that as you see the thousands of videos or pictures that are coming out there's a little bit of variation between these on the northeastern front more or less a united front has emerged with russian forces linking up from cherniv konotop sumi and kharkiv i do want to caveat that by saying there's a big uncertainty bubble right there in the middle between kanotop and cherniv because we don't exactly know if this link up has occurred or not the troops in konatop have have been experiencing great difficulties just surviving over the past day or so so we don't really know if this nice flip we have drawn on the slide here is an accurate line or we don't we don't know if this is a complete line or if this is just pockets of front lines as russia moves forward either way this has occurred with great difficulty and at great cost to the russians like i mentioned locals in the vicinity of kanatop are reporting that russians are scavenging for fuel and supplies lots of single tanks and single btrs are also noticed to be driving around sometimes instead of in column form i don't know if this is an isolated event but it seems like some units in countertop have gotten lost or been the only survivors of their column it's hard to say the situation is far too fluid to make a judgment call either way but it is certain to say that the situation is quite serious in countertop for the russians this grants a little bit of credence to our earlier assessments that russian logistics are not nearly adequate enough for a slow-paced assault plus the downsides of russian doctrine are coming out now heavily relying on the battalion tactical group while an adequate tool for the task of invading a nation like ukraine still presents problems when it comes to the allocation of logistics bringing in btgs from all over russia and having them work together in a non-traditional command structure has got to be a logistical nightmare in other words the russian army is right now figuring out their logistical limits and they are figuring it out the hard way so over the coming days we will see how big of a problem logistics will be for the russians along the central part of the northeastern front sumi has been retaken by ukrainian forces with the assistance of local citizens who have been helping with the defense of their city with kiev being a primary target russia appears to have made the decision to break contact with ukrainian forces in the vicinity of sumi or tie up ukrainian forces so that other armor divisions can maneuver around sumi and head for kiev this is an interesting play for anyone who knows what the word salient means so if russia has indeed decided to encircle and bypass sumi this could be a significant vulnerability that ukraine could exploit if they try this tactic in other places along the eastern front not much new information to report it looks like a lot of the civilians out east have already started to kind of move away from the area so information is going to be kind of spotty probably from here on out on the eastern front we do know that an amphibious landing did occur in the vicinity of marapol though we don't know any other details besides that but this amphibious landing will be important for the rest of the southern front which we'll talk about now along the southern front the situation remains much the same with kirsan still in ukrainian hands though there is fighting in the city right now in the city might have been lost over the past few hours it's hard to tell there are also reports of russian troops fighting in miyakev right now just to the north of kirusan but again it's really uncertain and the front line is very fluid in this area so we'll have to wait and see what the line actually turns out to be and probably by tomorrow or a few days from now it's possible that russian troops are doing what they have done up in the northeast in sumi where some russian forces encircle a city and tie up ukrainian forces while other russian units maneuver around and bypass the city entirely whether or not russia has the forces to keep doing this leapfrog action remains to be seen but it seems to be attacked that they have started to use in the past couple of days along the eastern portion of the southern front advances continue to be made in the vicinity of mara pole and like i mentioned the amphibious forces that have landed in the vicinity of marapol will be very much needed in order to secure the city remember here in the south this terrain is wide open and this kind of terrain is exactly where russia maintains an overwhelming advantage which is why their advance has been so fast however that advantage rapidly diminishes in the urbanized areas and in areas that require the use of paratroopers to win decisively which we will talk about when we get to kiev along the western front not very much new to report moldova continues to accept refugees as does romania hungary and slovakia so there's that for those who are concerned about refugee movement in transnistria we've tried to do some digging and get to the bottom of what's been going on there and it looks like russia only has about one or two btgs worth of troops there so maybe maybe a thousand troops top that's just kind of a rough guess so that's really not enough to do anything with in fact the tensions with moldova right now moldova the rest of moldova supporting ukraine in this conflict that tension there has probably got those russian troops and transnistria a little bit more concerned with their own security than was conducting any kind of operation within ukraine plus just looking at the map the southwestern portion of ukraine is very much a low population density area so they've got to punch a long way before they actually get to anything that's militarily significant so is probably going to be very much an irrelevant front uh for this conflict but again we'll still keep an eye on it and see what goes on with russia taking more and more losses there's no telling what they might do up north on the northwestern front limited fighting has been observed within the outskirts of kiev but again we have one of those little uncertainty bubbles here because the terrain between chernobyl and kiev is highly dynamic and very fluid at this moment so we don't really know what's going on uh in in the area between chernobyl and kiev uh just other than fighting is occurring but it's it's very sporadic it's not like there's a fluid front line that we can draw for you but let's get into kiev in kiev proper fighting has broken out all around the city today as russian forces continue their attempts to use helicopter assault forces to conduct air assault operations to seize and hold critical targets that will allow fixed-wing operations bringing in even more troops efficiently in other words for those of you who don't speak staff officer russia has been putting a lot of troops on a lot of helicopters and flying them into locations near airports so that they can seize the airports and therefore allow bigger aircraft to land and offload troops and supplies the fight for kiev might be a long and drawn out affair so russia is going to have to seize all of the airports in the area for that fight to actually be a victory russia has also been conducting many devastating airborne paratrooper drops for the same reason and i say devastating because these attempts have been very costly for the russians ukrainian forces have learned quite a bit and have been taking advantage of every weapon system that they have and concentrating those weapon systems in and around all prospective paratrooper landing zones there are only so many places a helicopter or a paratrooper can land which is something that the ukrainians know full well and the russians learned today ukraine even shot down two il-76 over kiev today both of which were allegedly fully loaded with russian paratroopers we're still waiting on photos of the wreckages to confirm this with any certainty as always but that might take a while since one wreckage apparently came down a few miles outside of kiev in the vicinity of vasilkev and the other much further south about 20k out from the city if this is true and two il-76s have been shot down by a ukrainian su-27 as is being claimed this is going to sting for russia as these can carry between 150 and 200 paratroopers depending on configuration and what the pilot is willing to fly with as far as weight numbers wise it's not a huge blow to the forces that have already been committed for the invasion russia has hundreds of il-76s but it's not nothing more importantly this indicates that the ukrainian air force might still have some fight left in them maybe though i'm not really sure how but this definitely proves that russia has not been able to achieve aerial superiority in the skies over kiev just yet aerial superiority which will 100 percent be a requirement for this invasion to go much further also in kiev civil defense preparations by civilians are fully underway with dozens of photos and videos showing the thousands of molotov cocktails that civilians have prepared for the upcoming urban fighting molotov cocktails are a cheap and easy munition to make and one which is devastatingly effective against pretty much all armored vehicles when massed in concentration as has been observed during the ukrainian war so far 30 or 40 ukrainian citizens with 30 or 40 molotov cocktails in their hands taking on a single btr might not seem that effective but so far in the previous fighting this has been observed to be a very valuable tactic and that's not considering the psychological effectiveness of such a crude but gruesome weapon system additionally the interior ministry of ukraine has asked all citizens to turn off their cell phones or only use them in emergencies due to russia's capabilities to detect cell phone signals and therefore detect large groups of people which could be targeted easily again this highlights how important electronic warfare has become in modern conflict and how even civilians must consider the risks that their smartphone brings to the table along the civilian front not too many changes from yesterday although i would like to point out that ukraine's neighbors to the west poland slovakia hungary romania and moldova have been more than willing to accept ukrainian refugees there hasn't been any hang-ups on this on this part other than the traffic to get to the border it looks like that's going pretty smoothly right now but again we have to remember that even though it's a good thing to see nations stepping up and taking uh people away from combat zones who don't want to be in combat zones right it's good to see european nations accepting refugees from this conflict right we also have to remember that europe is a political entity and nation states are political entities and this invitation might not last uh forever so unfortunately we have to think about things like this as we know the invitations for afghan refugees just four months ago was handled with not as much good-naturedness as one might have hoped from european nations now again the afghan culture and the ukrainian culture is very different so i think that kind of a side note is the reason why nations in europe are kind of hesitant to take afghan refugees is because of cultural reasons but and and of course historical political stuff um but i do just want to point out that hey even though nation states are doing the right thing right now or at least trying to with regards to refugees that might not be the case forever just wanted to point that out and that's pretty much all i've got for now we've as a side project been working on a sort of a briefing of or this might just turn into a slide on one of these briefs of information that encapsulates world events that have happened while the world's eyes have been on ukraine because a lot of people are asking and rightfully so what else is happening while the world is you is distracted with ukraine and the answer is kind of a lot a lot of things are happening around the world everybody's asking us what do you think is going to happen about china what are they going to move on taiwan now because of this i don't know it seems like to answer that question just while i'm here i don't know i don't think so at the moment more than likely what china is going to do is wait a little bit longer and see what other sanctions europe comes up with because again russia and china are very different nations russia before this conflict and before their ruble dropped down to the bottom russia was not in as severe dire straits economically as china is china is barely functioning economically right now they've had a lot of economic problems and again the fight for taiwan is going to be a lot different fight than the ukrainian conflict so yes it is a valid concern to think that we might be witnessing global conflicts kicking off here but at the same time i would also like to stress that the fight for taiwan is going to be very very different and the nature of it's different is different strategically different operationally and different tactically so i don't think that is much of a concern at this stage that might change tomorrow who knows nobody really knows what china is going to do so i guess we'll have to call that and play that by ear as far as other stuff going on around the world we're also keeping an eye on the united states that is for us who for for those of us who are located here in the united states that is a much more pressing concern than ukraine even though ukraine's the ukrainian wars impacts are being felt here in the united states in the form of cyber attacks and just uncertainty and of course the market implications but some of the stuff that's been going on in the u.s with regards to um tracking protesters and intelligence collection on uh american citizens on u.s soil some of that stuff we'll have to get into a little bit deeper as time goes on i just wanted to let everybody know that we are thinking about it we are seeing this stuff and we're not neglecting it uh just because ukraine is still going on um we're trying to get as much out there as we possibly can but again we're a pretty small team here so we're doing what we can so again that's all i've got for right now thanks again everyone for your support and we'll see you next time and as always fight in the shade

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the intel update for wednesday the 10th of august 2022 and as usual it is being recorded the day prior on the 9th so let's get right to it so for today this is going to be more of a quick and dirty brief i didn't really have a whole lot of time for research this week due to working on a lot of other projects so unfortunately i'm going to have to skip pretty much all of the infrastructure incidents and concerns i know that's like the main meat and potatoes of these briefings here but i haven't really had a whole lot of time to run a lot of these things to ground so it's not that there hasn't been anything that's happened it's just that it's getting a lot more difficult to figure out what is a legitimate infrastructure concern and what isn't in like an actual attack on infrastructure uh this briefing was really is really right on the cusp of my own personal goal which is to not put a brief out just for the sake of putting a brief out but we have just enough stuff to talk about that's occurred in the past few days really that's worth putting a brief out so just wanted to kind of mention that for everyone and i guess we'll go ahead and quickly move to suspicious fires so really only one to add this time around and this is in birmingham alabama new mount moriah baptist church uh was basically burned to the ground actually two days ago so on the 7th into the 8th of august if i remember correctly again like pretty much all of these other church fires there's really no indication of whether or not this was arson or not this one i added to the slide because out of the five or six church fires that have occurred in the past 48 hours uh this is the only one that did not specifically mention a cause so i wanted to kind of put that out there moving on to kinetic incident tracker nothing for the northeast just yet there have been a lot of things that have occurred in new york i still haven't really figured out what my own personal benchmark is for these kinds of events because quite literally there is what you might consider a domestic terror attack occurring in pretty much every city in the united states every single day so i don't know what to include as just general violence now that the the bar has shifted so far uh that generalized street violence is now to the level of what we might have considered a domestic terror attack 10 years ago i really don't know where we're at with this so i'm just going to for the moment leave these leave high profile events on this on this series of slides so moving down to the southeast region really there was only one item of note and i think this is less of a domestic terror thing and more of a personal dispute and that is in arkansas we don't really hear a whole lot coming out of arkansas with regards to kinetic incidents like this but this took place in randolph county arkansas specifically at the home of the randolph county sheriff someone who apparently had a beef with the sheriff tried to attack his home with an improvised explosive slash incendiary device uh the device actually set fire to his home while the sheriff and his family were sleeping there in the middle of the night around 1 30 in the morning or so uh the sheriff did get a tip off before uh the the assailant actually got to his property because the person who committed the attack was a is a well-known uh felon in the area and he was wearing an ankle monitor so for those that don't know in many jurisdictions around the country uh these ankle monitoring services they're not just monitoring someone to make sure they don't leave a certain geographic area they're also monitoring where a person goes so in this case the law enforcement branch there the county sheriff either i don't know if it's internally or some kind of third party company or whatnot but anyway the the monitoring service that was monitoring this guy's anklet noticed that he was headed towards the sheriff's home so the sheriff got a phone call got an advanced warning uh things like that so just just so everyone's aware that's that's why this is kind of a unique incident because this guy obviously was caught quite quickly there's no real motive on this one obviously a firebombing is kind of a high profile thing but this looks like this was more of a personal dispute between this guy and the sheriff so i'm just i'm going to leave it on there obviously because it's a high profile event but we'll move on to the midwest specifically the east central midwestern region and really there were two incidents that have occurred both of these new incidents are kind of similar but the first one i wanted to talk about occurred in chicago illinois uh actually this was a suburb of chicago uh this occurred just a couple of days ago on the 7th of august at the uprising bakery however this was specifically targeting a drag queen brunch so this bakery uprising bakery is seems to be from like the stuff i've seen on social media an extreme leftist um bakery and uh it looks like they were hosting an event called drag queen brunch in which case there were performers that came in and do the stuff that we all kind of know they do now well people showed up and graffitied their bakery up pretty good calling them groomers and such so yeah pretty pretty standard they actually broke a few windows front door things like that um but as far as emotive and like a claimant it's probably a solid guess this was done by people that have kind of had enough of this kind of behavior we don't often see conservatives or traditionalists i guess you should say uh conducting these kinds of operations but my guess is this kind of thing will probably continue well into the future such as in the case of number seven so moving on to number seven there in kalamazoo michigan this was a planned parenthood that was attacked via arson so apparently a pro-life individual tried to set fire to a local planned parenthood in kalamazoo michigan on the 31st of july the facility wasn't damaged too much and this guy left a very long trail of evidence and so he was arrested pretty quickly but yeah i again would expect these kinds of reactionary attacks moving forward into the future moving on to the west central midwestern region only two items of note in lawrence kansas something we don't normally see too often in kansas this was again vandalism most likely by jane's revenge the victory bible church and the calvary temple assembly of god uh both in lawrence kansas both located kind of close to each other i guess both were vandalized in the classic james revenge faction so unfortunately as unfortunate as this event is it is not uncommon whatsoever at this point thus even talking about in the first place i guess uh so i guess we'll move on to the southwestern region again i haven't really found any number of kinetic events that have occurred within the last 90 days with regards to the southwest i think it's due to population density and maybe perhaps my own benchmark and search parameters i'm sure stuff has occurred i just haven't found it we'll keep an eye out and i'll make sure to dig a little bit deeper next time so moving on to the western region again only one significant item of note but just to mention uh the one item of note that i thought was very interesting number seven there in los angeles california an ied attack occurred at a convenience store by unknown assailants so this is a very strange one so that's why i wanted to mention it so some guy entered a small convenience store with a backpack set the backpack down on the ground and ran off the backpack then ignited slash partially exploded uh this caused a fire in the store obviously but it didn't seem to do much damage otherwise i didn't see too many windows knocked out or anything like that nothing is known about the device itself as usual literally all we have to go on are witness accounts and the completely ignorant local news media so i'm not sure if this counts as a true ied attack but yeah i did want to mention it so just based on how weird it is you don't normally see this kind of thing but i guess in los angeles anything goes these days and moving on to the meat of the matter for this time which is significant governmental actions first up is the ups fiasco so right now i don't really have a lot of new details that i can talk about uh just yet still kind of working through the the process to figure out what is actually uh going down with that but um maybe i'll have some more information next time of course as you might expect a lot of people are kind of you know anxious to figure out what's going on with this ups stuff is ups banning or trying to seize packages are they going after individual consumers uh the only thing that i can say at the moment right now just from you know my basic analysis is that it's more complicated than you think but this again does not set a great precedent moving forward with regards to shipping and online firearms dealers or firearms parts dealers things like that so when i have some more information i will bring it but for right now i just wanted to remind everyone that this is still going on and did not forget about it because as we all know once something gets out of the 24-hour news cycle we tend to forget about it and the ups potentially cracking down on firearms parts distributors is kind of a big freaking deal so i don't want to let this one slip into the abyss of you know last week right so we'll just keep that one on the slide for now up next is the fbi document leak which is interesting i'm sure everyone on the planet has heard about it by now to me i am i don't want to be condescending but to me this is not really exciting news because we've already kind of seen this much of what was leaked in the fbi's uh domestic terror brief right much of what was briefed in that document has already been circulating throughout law enforcement communities for gosh at least over a year now we remember the dod's extremism stand down most of what was in the fbi paper that was leaked was also in that saying that anyone who is a fan of american history anyone who has a betsy ross flag is an extremist uh that's none of that's new so i don't know why the sudden outrage over this uh other than you know just i guess people maybe not keeping up to date with what the federal government has been doing i don't know again i'm trying not to be super condescending but when i saw this it was like okay you know okay we now have it formalized that the fbi has been doing this i mean we formalized this last year i thought so anyway uh yeah the fbi document leak happened uh and all of that being said the the the most interesting thing to me which i've seen a few people online mention as well is that the the groups that were not listed on the fbi's extremism brief right so the groups that were not mentioned were any kind of imagery or symbology tied to antifa or blm which again is to be expected because the fbi is well they're they're what they are we all know what they are now uh but what was also interesting to me is that the patriot front was not listed so the patriot front is all about symbols they're all about nice uniforms and interesting little you know formations and things like that but the patriot front was not listed very interesting i don't quite know what that means just yet and i'm not trying to imply that the patriot front is entirely the fbi but i think that there's probably a good portion of the patriot front who is either willingly or unwillingly serving the fbi in some capacity either with informants or just being stupid either way i'm not entirely certain but all the memes going around about the the patriot front are at least kind of entertaining and i just don't have enough information to say what that group is either way maybe we'll do a deep dive on on that group in the future but for now i think that's really all that kind of i have on that up next is the irs so as many people are finding out now after the fact congress just passed a bill to to more than double the size of the irs this will mean that the irs when this becomes law which it most certainly will this will mean that the irs will have more employees than the fbi the pentagon and customs and border protection so that's very interesting to me right the irs is specifically going to be targeting middle class taxpayers which is not just something that conservative pundits have been kind of bringing out right this is actually what their history is less than nine percent of people making over five hundred thousand dollars are to be audited right because that's what they did last year so this bill also increases the irs's budget by over six times at least by my math uh from reading the bill this is a they're going to increase their budget by 600 percent from just last year which it was already increased uh for last year so yeah um the democrats and republicans in congress who supported this bill claim that the bill will not increase audits on people who earn less than 400 000 a year uh and i'm just going to say this is an outright lie this is the most false thing i have heard today because last year 51 of every single human being audited by the irs made less than 75 000 last year over half of who the irs targets is the middle class so what's the deal here 4.8 percent of all the audits irs did were on people making over 10 million dollars so less than five percent are going to be millionaires right and the interesting part is that in this bill 57 of this new budgetary increase has already directly been allocated to targeting americans so the irs has targeted the middle class uh lower classes always always always which is something that i cannot shout loud enough to anyone who will listen i guess but oh well i've contained my rage on the irs for as long as possible so let's move on to something else before i say something that will get me in trouble uh like talking about the raid that occurred in florida so i am sure that by now uh everyone has realized what has happened last night as i'm making this brief right now donald trump's compound down at mar-a-lago in palm beach florida was raided by the fbi last night it is unclear as to what the fbi was doing uh however there have been several rumors that have been floating around uh i will that the main rumor that's been floating around is that the fbi has been uh trying to investigate slash c's documents related to the donald trump's potential or alleged removal of documents from the white house uh following uh his uh you know tenure in office right so they're saying the fbi is trying to say that donald trump illegally took documents and is improperly storing classified material so i don't know if that's going to hold water because here's the interesting thing that a lot of people might not understand about classified information is that the president of the united states is an original classification authority this means that the president of the united states has the ability to say they have the ability to change the classification level of anything so they can declassify whatever they want so i'm not entirely sure how the fbi is going to try to justify this but really again this just occurred this just happened last night so i haven't really had time to think about it and as usual this points to this brief being more haphazard than normal but i think that one of the things we need to consider is the potential for the fbi to use this as an intelligence collection opportunity obviously obviously obviously people were going to flock to mar-a-lago once they realized the fbi had raided it donald trump has a lot of supporters right either passively or very very actively and you have to admit that his his people will most certainly turn up and they did they immediately flocked to mar-a-lago me just looking at the tweets of that and the the video of that uh last night my first thought was okay where's the fbi surveillance van collecting intelligence on their cell phones uh because you've got live streamers showing up to mar-a-lago like dude the fbi is there collecting intelligence on you so i think that they're going to get a lot more intelligence on this from the actual people who showed up rather than donald trump himself and the same thing applies online the we we know for a fact that one of the fbi's main tricks is to see who is outraged about something they did online so someone gets online they get really angry they say something they shouldn't online and that stays online forever yeah i think that's some i think that's probably the biggest lesson the average american can can take from this in this incident so far again this is not an unexpected event we were expecting donald trump to not just be raided but most likely arrested at some point they're going to have to whatever one's feelings are about donald trump i think are kind of irrelevant at this point with regards to this specific kind of raid and for whatever reason i feel the need to caveat once again that i'm personally no fan of donald trump either uh for for many different reasons um but the the fact of the matter is is that this is a president of the united states who has been raided his personal residence has been raided by the fbi now when i look at that i see a lot of different things for one i wonder okay was the secret service in on this as well because donald trump still writes secret service protection so that the secret service agents on his personal detail cooperate with the fbi i also question whether or not donald trump himself got the tip off somehow my guess is he probably did the the man was president of the united states he's got intelligence collection networks working for him no matter where he goes he's got friends in very high places right so i find it very hard to believe that he would not have been prepared for this raid and that shows the naivety of the fbi that conducted the raid it's not just a political move to target the president united states but but look like even andrew cuomo has figured out that this was going to hurt the liberals more than it's going to help them because now you just made the man a martyr even you know even if not literally you've made him a figurative martyr in the political game and even andrew cuomo has taken to twitter to mention that this is going to decrease the legitimacy of the other extreme leftist stuff they're doing which in fact it will my guess is that donald trump if he has any brain cells left would never never never keep anything incriminating at his house like that's the most like junior level stuff right so the fbi raiding his residence did they actually seriously think they were gonna find anything maybe they did i don't know either way a lot of ecos got involved of a very important decision-making process and that's dangerous because as we're getting ready to as i'll talk about when we get to international issues i think that incompetence and and egotistical thinking is is going to get a lot of people in trouble inside the federal regime at this point when it comes to thinking about how government works i'm trying not to take a side with regards to how i know internal federal agencies work i'm trying to see things as objectively as possible and i tell you that like look raiding the home of a former president is not good you're talking about things like invoking executive privilege privilege concerns you're talking about watergate level stuff like matt you're it's it's a huge deal and as if these concerns were not strong enough uh we're finding out this morning that the federal magistrate judge which authorized the fbi raid into donald trump's personal residence has a history this guy is the same guy who left the u.s attorney's office about 10 years ago or so to represent legally employees of jeffrey epstein so yeah this is quite literally something that even i don't think even hollywood could come up with uh the levels of corruption that we're seeing here which again is not surprising but i think that the larger lesson for all of us here is that we should most certainly expect more political persecution by federal agents i mean if they're going to raid donald trump's house and not be afraid of what's going to happen to them then what do you think they'll do to you and me so i think that's probably something that we should be mindful of but to bring my sort of disorganized rambling to a close uh i think that this event is really just for most people going to be a an indicator of just how serious the situation is like i mentioned if they're going to raid donald trump's house what are they going to do to you i think that for most people in the country this is really just going to be a solidification of how serious the situation is i think this event is going to wake up a lot of people to what's going on this is not just some conservative pundit right saying uh the fbi did this the fbi is doing that no this this is this is real here uh the the president of the united states the former president united states uh had his home raided by the current administration's fbi you know that that is really hard to deny and the fact that that even occurred i don't i don't care what the raid was about right the fact that that occurred is is pretty shocking um i can guarantee you that this is an event that is going to live in infamy for a very very long time and i think that this is not going to be the last one for whatever reason the current regime has decided to target donald trump in any way possible using any resources possible again regardless of whatever your feelings are about the man i think that it's very interesting to to see that the biden regime is so terrified of him that they're willing to risk all of the the the the fallout from raiding his opponents home uh they're willing to risk that fallout simply because of how scared they are of him i don't know if that is a i don't know if that fear is misplaced or not uh but in any case it's what's happening and i would expect it to continue quite seriously at first i thought when this stuff kicked off i thought you know what they're probably going to just go after his chief his chief people right his leadership his chiefs of staff things like that but no um we're here now they've raided donald trump's house so there's no coming back from that and i think that the only way forward for the biden regime is to continue on forward and double down because that's what they've been doing with quite literally every single event they have done every single thing they've done so far so so yeah i'll i'll shut up talking about that for now and we'll kind of see what the fallout from this is i'm not really going to pay attention to what's going on in congress with regards to congressional republicans because i think it's going to be interesting to see which republicans do not denounce this raid that's going to be interesting but i think that really any actions that congressional republicans are going to take is mostly going to be political theater and i don't think it's going to be any kind of effective you know whatsoever so anyway i guess we'll have to see what happens so let's go ahead and move on to international issues so again this brief is quite haphazard this time i haven't really had time to talk about sri lanka or india just yet but it looks like the famine that is underway in sri lanka uh has started to either affect india or it's more of a correlation not a causation type thing basically india is having some trouble with rice so the main manufacturer distributor for rice in india has expressed that they're it's kind of confusing i've seen headlines either way they've said that either they're having trouble or they're going to have trouble in the near future again i haven't dug into this too much and probably by the time that we figure things out it's going to be too late anyway but yeah food shortages are certainly uh on the menu or or would it be off the menu either way for the world for this winter so that's going to be something to follow i will let you know again rice is not a huge dietary thing for the united states we don't really consume that much rice as part of our diet and we have a lot of corn which is in the same kind of nutritional class i guess you'd call it it's a staple good right most people in the united states have corn as a significant part of their diet however a rice shortage is going to affect southeast asia like you would not believe because most people in southeast asia you know shocker eat a lot of rice so india most of india's exports go to the rest of southeast asia so that's going to be the market that's going to be hit the most with this i would guess but i would also expect you know rice shortages to kind of pop up in random places as is typical by now moving on to russia this is a very interesting one and something that i would keep an eye on in the future if you're interested in uh foreign defense stuff and that is that the fsb has been arresting scientists uh throughout many of their programs over the past few uh weeks actually so the latest guy to be arrested is alexander shiployok who was arrested by the fsb on charges of treason so they're not messing around uh he was the director of the institute of theoretical and applied mechanics of the siberian branch of the russian academy of sciences what a job title this entity the the institute has been leading russia's efforts to produce and improve their hypersonic missiles which they have announced are supposed to be implemented uh the newest hypersonic missiles they have uh they're supposed to be implemented on their naval vessels or deploy on the naval vessels sometime this fall yeah very interesting this is the third scientist that has been arrested in the past month from the same exact project area the institute's lead researcher and another researcher in the laser physics department have also been arrested again on charges of treason so when i look at this i think oh there's some international espionage going on either these guys were working for the cia and spying for the united states or maybe even china who knows my guess is that russia has have found out about it and they're cracking down on some kind of spy network they've got going on in their technology divisions so again this is not uncommon the united states has people leaking secrets to china basically daily at this point but yeah russia also has the same problems so i would be very interested to see what their hypersonic missile program looks like and whether or not these hypersonic missiles actually work and finally let's talk about taiwan for just a second as many of you have already seen many people are kind of freaking out over the recent escalations of tensions between taiwan china and the us nancy pelosi's visit to taiwan to check on her insider trading investments increased tension sharply for a couple of days but for the most part we haven't really seen anything beyond posturing and saber rattling many volumes can and have been filled by discussing the highly complicated and intricate balance of diplomacy in southeast asia so right now let me just take a couple of minutes and alleviate some concerns really really quickly as for me i'm not really worried about china right now i'm not really super concerned about world war iii breaking out with china over the next few weeks or months uh no matter how much some people on the planet seem to want that uh my my own personal opinion is that china they're going through a lot of domestic concerns right now that would make war not really an option at the moment ukraine has shown that a major superpower the former soviet union can't even reoccupy one of their former republics in the exact same terrain that their military their entire military was built for china you know looking at the mountainous hellscape of taiwan's terrain and the fact that they're an island uh would pretty much expend the entirety of their military invading taiwan or at least enough to where they're going to be in some serious trouble if they try to go for taiwan plus we we may be outraged at the hundreds of billions of dollars of you know our tax money that's been sent to ukraine but but we must remember that our recent funding of ukraine does not hold a candle to the mountains of funding that we have given to taiwan over the past few decades again i'm certainly no southeast asia expert i'm reading up on the region i'm trying to get smart on that but at the moment i will 100 say that every day that goes by i distrust military strategy analysts more and more uh the china boogie man is big business both for the defense industry and for the private sector as well very rarely will defense blogs talk about china's problems which is important to understanding the whole picture and china's problems are numerous like their starving military their almost complete lack of any adequate electrical grid they're failing financial structures they're laughably substandard naval vessels their failing banks the massive drought and food shortages throughout the nation and the hydroelectric dam that is upstream of 15 of the entire world's manufacturing capability the same dam that has been forming 10 meter long cracks in it since 2003. the us defense industry is certainly drooling over the opportunity to do everything they can to start localized conflicts uh the powers that be would be very happy to start some of those small wars that have been the standard for a while but they also don't understand that big wars as in thermonuclear wars won't do too much to pad their wallets and will actually make their bank accounts kind of irrelevant if they were to occur so the ultra short bottom line is expect lots of saber rattling by china and the united states china will seek to maintain their dominance over southeast asia and the united states will seek to keep poking the dragon as a way to increase the potential for another series of forever wars which will benefit the us defense industry however with inexperienced and incompetent people conducting diplomacy in southeast asia we average citizens have to be mindful of these sheer stupid mistakes that could be made with potentially irreversible results we can't expect and plan for corruption but we cannot plan for stupid mistakes are always what make me nervous and the current us regime is most certainly playing with fire with their flippant egotistical attitude towards issues bigger than themselves so i don't want to dismiss china as completely not a threat they most certainly are and china's national aspirations are quite clear they you know for lack of a better term have expressed they want world domination or at least domination in southeast asia and i think that that's a little uh a little concerning for everyone even if china is not able to to meet a lot of those goals so now on the other hand the united states gave putin permission to reinvade ukraine we all remember maybe some of us remember the small minor incursion uh scandal from the early opening days of the the reigniting of the ukrainian war and that's something that china has noticed too so my guess is that if china were to somehow get the gumption to invade taiwan the u.s response would probably be the same if not much less than the situation in ukraine the reason for us politicians funding ukraine with so much of our tax money and just printing printing billions hundreds of billions of dollars is mostly due to corruption and not defense but with taiwan the roles are reversed a bit sort of half of our politicians are quite literally in bed with chinese agents daily so i don't think the dynamic is going to be quite the same with the china taiwan conflict as we have seen in ukraine either way the u.s can do all the poking it wants but at the end of the day china is going to have to be the one to launch the invasion and i don't know if they are militarily capable of doing so at the moment but again stupid exists on both sides of the aisle and china's leadership might think they have a chance at taking taiwan right now maybe they think they're pushed up against the wall with their failing economy and they have to do something although i'm not really sure what they would get from taking taiwan other than national prestige and the potential for further invasions down the line but again i think this is a pretty remote possibility considering the domestic issues china is going through right now of course i could be wrong and probably am but out of all the issues we're dealing with in the united states right now china is pretty close to the bottom of my list of concerns so it's already kind of disappointing anyone out there expecting an in-depth analysis of the situation with china in years past i know myself would have been fascinated with stuff like this but these days i'm just having a really hard time caring about the intricate details of diplomacy in southeast asia but again we'll keep an eye out and if anything squirrely starts going on we'll we'll do what we can to keep everybody informed as to what's going on so that's pretty much all i have for today again thank you all for watching uh sorry this is more of a haphazard one than normal but that's the case when things seem to happen very very quickly it's almost like every single day we find out of some milestone groundbreaking event that's never occurred before in history so again it's not it's not easy to kind of keep up with these kinds of things but that's okay we'll do the best we can and thank you again to all of those who support us on patreon and nutrient you guys have really helped us out a lot and you're continuing to help us make these briefs a possibility well into the future so thank you so much for that and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the briefing for wednesday the 18th of november and as always it is being recorded the day prior on the 17th of november so let's get right to it because we've got a lot of stuff to talk about today but first kind of a quick heads up we've noticed that based on a lot of the dms and emails that we've gotten that a shocking number of people don't actually check out the description box on these videos and we tend to put a lot of information down there we have chapters if you don't want to hear me ramble on about a specific topic you can just click to the section you want to hear we've also started to include lots of other information and any corrections that we have once this video goes out because obviously we can't edit this video once it goes out so it's going to stay on the internet forever and the only way that we can kind of make slight changes is in the description box right we're certainly not perfect so if there are any little minor mistakes we will correct them there and finally we also have links to other stuff as well like our website the number of people who email us and say that the link doesn't work is kind of astounding because they either don't read the the line literally right above it which is that the link requires the tour browser to work or that people don't realize that youtube shortens links so you have to right click on the link save it and then drop it in your tor browser and then once you do that you're good to go so just a little heads up on that we also have other stuff like our reading list and other things like that so if you're looking for books to read or if you are trying to get into the field of intelligence analysis yourself we have several reading lists that will help you get started and finally kind of a short announcement we just created another youtube channel for our war kitchen content so if you like those kinds of videos that we put out on that just stay tuned because we've got a lot coming out uh that's going to be on the other channel i haven't we haven't decided if we wanted to do dual posting over here on this channel and the other channel just yet we may at first i don't really know just yet because the war kitchen as anybody knows a new youtube channel has a hard time getting started and even if you were as of right now i literally just tried to search for the war kitchen in youtube and it's not even coming up even though it already has several thousand subscribers so youtube doesn't like new channels so we might have to see how that goes but i just wanted to let everybody know that we've started this new channel because the war kitchen stuff is just different enough from the actual like intel stuff we do that it kind of warrants its own thing so that's what we did so let's get right into this with the weather winter is definitely upon us for at least for isr weather concerns uh for most of the country with really uh heavy with cloud cover and things like that so lots of different uh aviation concerns for any kind of aerial operations and also right now we're we are in a green illumination cycle so it's going to be a really full moon 97 percent illumination gonna be a really bright moon and also moon's going to start rising a little bit earlier in the night so at least for today for the next 12 hours the moon's gonna be rising in the afternoon at 4 35 pm and continue to grow and get above the horizon and get really bright as the night goes on and for winds for the next 18 hours as you can see pretty powerful winds up in the northern regions as that winter weather starts to creep in and like i mentioned mostly the eastern u.s is going to have most of the warnings and things like that moving forward for the next couple of days moving into no tams really there are only two of note of course they're both presidential this time around uh the first one being the standard vacation no tam at over biden's house in wilmington delaware and also uh biden is planning to go uh to detroit michigan actually as of the recording of this i should already be there so uh by the time this video goes out the snow temp will of course expire on the 18th uh but yeah i just wanted to point that out for anyone interested as far as civil unrest goes really the flavor of the week is of course the issue that everyone's talking about the kyle rittenhouse trial so i'm not going to delve too much into the trial itself but as of the recording of this there has not been a verdict so really everybody's just kind of on pins and needles waiting to see what happens a few people are saying that it's there's going to be violence no matter what because there have already been decently violent uh demonstrations so far and the trial wasn't even over yet and also a lot of very famous people with a lot of influence on social media have been encouraging violence in the local area as well as other major u.s cities it's not just kenosha that's that's a huge problem or where the threat exists so so far uh really we haven't done the analytical leg work to kind of figure out what the threat assessment for this is because it's just really unknown we've got winter weather creeping in and usually colder weather prohibits people from demonstrating slash rioting slash looting but that will almost certainly occur on some level no matter what happens the national guard has already been activated as i'll as i'll mention here in a bit uh for this but again they're not really being staged in any productive manner at least from what we can see for right now and it's really just kind of wait and see mode and see how see how the rioting goes and then i guess everybody will kind of assess things once that happens so we'll talk more about that in a minute let's move right into logistics all right so moving on to logistics a pretty big change to this slide i've just finally decided that it's a lot simpler and easier to put an actual legend on this slide because far too many people could not read and uh it was just getting in the way of things so i finally made the the column on the left hand side of the slide an actual legend for what's on the screen it makes it a little easier for people to screenshot if they wanted to share it and things like that and we'll talk about the national level concerns here in a minute but as far as events from last time school bus driver shortage continues however massachusetts their mission for their national guard driving kids to school that mission is complete and we'll talk more about that in just a bit again when we get to the national guard slides as far as the water shortage out west that continues to be a problem as a matter of fact here is the recent drought monitor chart at least as of november 9th it was again released just a few days ago on november 11th and as you can see the western united states is still very much in a state of drought a severe drought so we're going to have to see how that plays with the winter weather coming into the area over the winter season also the microchip shortage has gotten quite a bit worse manufacturers are it's gotten worse but it's also gotten a little bit better and by better i mean you're not getting your money's worth so for for instance tesla has stopped incorporating a few uh charging options with some of their devices like they've left out the usb chargers and things like that general motors is removing the heated seats and the heated steering wheels from their crossover vehicles and pretty much all of their pickup trucks so a lot of these vehicles manufacturers are simply leaving parts out that they can so they can get these vehicles out the door and they will either plan to have you come back into a dealership to install for free when they get the parts back in or it might not ever happen who really knows you know this chip shortage we're still projecting it to last for at least two years of course varying in severity but we really don't know likewise the tire shortage in montana continues uh in localized areas there's really not much more to add on that we're just seeing a few more news stations essentially do circular reporting and talk about that one article we found from last time so just because you're seeing more reports doesn't necessarily mean that more shortages are occurring it just means that more news stations are buying that article and affiliates are starting to talk about it because they purchase the rights to that story so that's why these shortages things it's really hard to track and then new for this cycle are snow plow and salt truck drivers being in quite severe shortage at least there you can see in the northern states and in the parts of the midwest that is a severe shortage in a lot of areas they're doing things like recruiting for the first time they've never had to recruit for a snowplow driver but some states are now other states are increasing or trying to offer bonuses or increasing their hourly rate rates and wages and things like that again it it's hard to say if it's going to work or do anything or or have any kind of impact at all but if you're in the northern area and you get a lot of snow and you regularly have to get your roads plowed this is something you should be concerned about even places down here uh in the mid-atlantic region or even further south with those places in the south they get like a quarter of an inch of snow a year you know you guys know if you grew up in those areas where you get one snow day a year and it's only like a dusting the entire state will shut down like that's what i remember growing up and you still have people plowing the roads for like a dusting and that's a huge concern as well so you have the volume issues from the northern states where there's literally so much snow on the road that you cannot drive and there's a shortage of snowplow drivers to physically clear the roads and then there's also the cultural cultural thing of some of the more warmer states not getting as much snow but snow snowplow drivers and salt trucks are so much more important in a lot of these areas because people are just not used to the snow so the impact can be quite high in a lot of these states when it comes to uh the winter weather creeping in also before i move to the next slide the liquor shortage has kind of expanded we're seeing connecticut uh being uh impacted by the liquor shortage as well texas we're still seeing articles pop up here and there and people you know posting pictures of liquor store shelves being empty this is kind of a thing that's hit or miss because we're getting into the holiday season uh the whole pandemic thing made everybody start drinking a little bit more so demand has gone up sharply and production hasn't uh been able to keep up with that so the liquor shortages are kind of a hard thing to track as well so let's move into the next slide and we'll talk about the national level shortages that are kind of prevalent throughout the entire country now i know this slide's pretty ugly and looks kind of empty right now but trust me this is going to fill out sadly it's going to fill out quite significantly over the next few weeks and months but for now this is what we've got when it comes to the things that we know are in national level shortages where basically you can go to anywhere in the united states and find a shortage of this kind of stuff so really the biggest one or one of the bigger ones is christmas trees obviously christmas trees are highly seasonal and christmas trees take forever sometimes decades to grow so it makes sense that there would be a shortage of that around this time of year there are shortages of christmas trees in some areas in the united states every year because of a drought you know 10 years ago that's just how this works with the christmas tree market so higher demand this year you know problems with production and of course shipping and things like that are going to mean that some parts of the country are going to have a hard time finding christmas trees but really the biggest one that i wanted to touch on is fertilizer so for the fertilizer shortage specifically diamonium phosphate really in the united states we're just seeing rument at this point writing a rumor intelligence right of certain fertilizers being in short supply this kind of makes sense because around the world this is a huge deal china is cutting down on exports a lot due to a coal shortage in china which has caused an electrical power shortage in china which is directly impacting the ability to process fertilizer in china which reduces supply and with india's increasing demand for fertilizer we're essentially having a case of world events killing the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that america built right so we have all this stuff lining up and it's going to domino effect into the united states not having so much fertilizer at least that's what makes sense it makes sense that these fertilizer shortages will reach the united states at some point but again nothing is set in stone and honestly like most of the shortages that i'm mentioning it's probably not even worth talking about because it's pretty much impossible to determine when and where shortages will strike especially considering the fact that we also make fertilizer here in the us but just like always our intensely complex globalistic logistical networks make it impossible to track these things with any level of real satisfaction but i did just want to mention it anyway and again on the slide as well we are experiencing a nationwide shortage of medical personnel police officers firefighters and more of your trauma emergency personnel like emts paramedics ems transport drivers and things like that so i'll talk more about that in just a bit but i did want to touch on it here as well and sticking with the theme of logistics let's talk a little bit about a trend that is occurring in grocery stores all over the world and that trend is stores attempting to conceal their supply chain issues with photographs or selectively staged products so this has always been a practice in most grocery stores from an advertising standpoint and just one of the things that you do as a like a grocery store manager or owner a lot of grocery stores at pretty much every grocery store i can think of they do things like back filling the shelves when they run out of items so that instead of having an empty shelf for a customer to look at customers receive full shelves but not the normal products that they normally might see most stores did this with the toilet paper shortages from last year like think about it toilet paper is a very big bulky product and it usually has an entire aisle dedicated to it so rather than have an entire aisle empty they put things like bundles of firewood or other large products on the shelves that normally held toilet paper so that customers wouldn't see empty shelves so why would a company do this why would a company want to make sure customers don't see empty shelves well it's pretty simple market research consistently proves that people tend to shop more when the shelves are full and products are correctly fronted and faced meaning that products they're not at the back of the shelves right they're moved right up forward right right up front near the edge with all the labels aligned forward towards the customer so i say all of that to hopefully shed some light on these practices yes deception is a factor all advertising is deception but there is a huge leap between a company wanting to fill a void on a shelf to make it look better for a customer and a company actively concealing a supply chain shortage because of a political reason the latter scenario is something that is straight out of the soviet union and despite what the experts on twitter will tell you this is not usually the motivation for doing this which is why i am showing you these two images both images were taken in a tesco in the united kingdom as that grocery store chain has been observed to do this kind of a lot lately so they have the best examples and in the image on the left empty produce containers are being filled with cardboard cutouts of artistic photos of oranges and on the right empty laundry detergent shelves are holding pictures of the product rather than the actual product itself these two images are very different in motivation in the image on the left it's obviously supposed to be artistic it's supposed to be a nice thing to look at rather than an empty plastic container the oranges are the size of soccer balls and obviously even like cut open in the picture how often do you see soccer ball sized oranges on the shelf that are actually cut up like when it comes to this photo the deception factor is quite low right there's not a whole lot of intentional deception here it's just something nice to look at rather than an empty container yes the store could have just left the boxes empty and not put a cardboard cut out but all in all in the image on the left this is really just for aesthetically pleasing reasons but let's take a closer look at the other photo this photo is a much different story in fact when i first saw this image myself i had to do a double take because the optical illusion was so good these photos are actually of the proper containers on the shelf scaled appropriately and with the right lighting conditions to make it look like the shelves are full in other words you might literally walk past this shelf and not even notice anything is wrong of course looking at a two-dimensional image is obviously different from looking at this shelf with your two eyes in person but these images are quite clearly meant to maintain the illusion that there is something on the shelf plus combined with the normal pricing signage and the disclaimer that these products can be purchased they're just behind the counter so they can be rationed this image has a lot more perceived deception than the other image and i say perceived deception because there's really no way to tell this could be just some super stellar rock star work by an employee who took the time to photograph these products in the right lighting and then print out a two scale oversized image on photo paper and put it in a frameless low profile plastic holder that's almost invisible that's possible but as an analyst i know good camouflage when i see it and my assessment is that this specific practice in this specific image is intended to conceal a shortage as for the reasons for that concealment who knows it could be financially based or it could be political taking the north korea approach to trying to pretend like everything is perfectly fine when the store is empty it could be any of these reasons i don't know i just wanted to point this out because to me it's utterly fascinating and i would urge everyone to pay attention to these kinds of camouflage efforts this stuff is pretty crazy and often done in advance of and in preparation for an impending shortage so you might notice that if a grocery store is trying to hide something and you detect these camouflage efforts early enough you might be one of the last few lucky ones to get that product from behind the counter while they still have it and before most people even discover the camouflage and notice that there is a shortage of something and moving on to kind of going back to uh what we had last time when it comes to the mandate update so we're not legal experts i'm certainly not a lawyer so i don't understand a lot of this stuff but i can read pretty well i think and it seems like there's a lot of stuff going on here so let's let's tackle it so this first mandate right the one in green up at up on the top with that every private company with 100 more employees must get uh the employees jabbed right that actually came out so osha officially ordered that mandate and pretty much instantly a court put it on hold likewise the federal contractor mandate that was expanded a little bit or at least i guess the wording was changed slightly and despite the fact that several federal judges have over the past few months since the beginning of october the beginning of november uh they have declined and refused to put that order on hold another federal judge appears to have put this one on hold as well so really the the question is what is going on uh when it comes to these mandates now when it comes to you guys in the military you guys are still screwed um yes we know about the things like the kubernetes shots not actually available for anybody so technically all of these mandates all of these orders are illegal orders and you can get into the weeds on that as well but as far as for our guys in the military who are being faced with this kind of stuff really there's not a whole lot of new information that we have and others are doing a far better job at covering it uh than than we can do uh the point is is that a lot of these mandates are coming on hold but companies are still kind of going forward like you know the regime said hey doesn't matter what the court says go forward and go ahead and still order these mandates well what this isn't the soviet union you know at least not yet so it's really hard to say if companies and even if the federal regime is going to go by a court and clearly the federal regime has made it quite clear that they are not going to abide by a court's regulation so i guess we'll have to see on that but i just wanted to let everybody know that what we briefed last time is kind of on hold for now it went into place and then now it's on hold so we'll see how it turns out hopefully we'll be able to roll back some of this authoritarianism but you never really know so that's enough on that let's roll into critical infrastructure concerns so a lot of interesting stuff this time uh really the first one to kind of get it out of the way because it's the one that we know least about and that is a us defense contractor was hit with a cyber attack a few days ago this cyber uh this cyber attack was uh implemented on the systems of a contracting group called electronic warfare associates uh and basically was a data breach at least what the what the company's publicly said it seems like it's financial in nature i like they just wanted to steal some credit card numbers and birth certificates from the employees but you never really know because literally the name of the company is electronic warfare associates i wonder what kind of stuff they do those of you that have a couple of brain cells to rub together can imagine that they do things like a build radar they build uh communication setups and satellite communication suites and simulators and other kinds of training equipment and things like that and a lot of electronic warfare packages and softwares and things like that for the us military so you know this is the second time they've been hit with a ransomware attack they were hit uh last year as where as well and that was a ransomware attack this was when the ransomware attacks were kind of gaining traction amongst the defense community so something to keep an eye on really not a whole lot any of us can do from a you know average citizen you know standpoint but i did think it was kind of interesting and really the most interesting one on the slide interesting interesting that the most interesting one on the slide is point two when i literally have smallpox on the slide last uh point two there is the first i say first uh domestic uas attack on electrical substation so the u.s intel community released uh some details to a few different journalistic websites and this photograph actually of an a uas system a dji drone that was used to attack an electrical substation so this is allegedly the first time this has been done i know personally this is definitely not the first time this has been done this has been done many times before but this is the first time that the us intel communities actually come out and said yeah this was a this is a legitimate attack now the attack was a failure because the drone actually didn't make it to the electrical substation however whoever did this attack is one smart cookie because this is exactly the kind of technology that the us military still uses and used very famously during the iraq invasion to take out saddam's electrical substations basically there's this electrical substations obviously have a lot of exposed wires so the the us military doctrine or at least the doctrine that was used at the time was to use stealth fighters to get in there launched some i think there were tomahawk missiles that actually trailed behind the missile a very thin carbon uh filament and that wire would then fall through the air and land on top of electrical substation cause a shortage and that's your uh that's your attack on the substation you end up taking an entire neighborhood uh their entire neighborhood's electricity offline without ever killing anyone at all and that's kind of the the goal of that kind of military munition now this uas system used almost the exact same thing it was a simple as you can see in the image the very blurry image that the us government provided it was a drone system with a trailing copper wire or some kind of some kind of wire that was intended to cause a short at the electrical substation again very smart very smart level attack so whoever did this has some knowledge of how this stuff works or at least has google or maybe a history book in any case i thought it was very interesting that this kind of thing is now occurring we've seen similar things with a bunch of antifa guys putting coat racks and things like that or coat hangers on um railroad crossings and things like that there have been a lot of attacks on critical infrastructure that nobody really reports on because guess who does it it's antifa right so the you know mainstream media doesn't want to talk about antifa because well many reasons i guess but this is an interesting thing nobody really knows who who did it um or at least they're not publicly saying who did it or and no group has claimed responsibility so it could just be a lone lone guy but as you can see a loan guy with a couple hundred dollar drone and you know 20 feet of wire can certainly uh cause a lot of problems for you for the united states and moving on to number three there our strategic oil reserves are actually down now this is something that a lot of websites are actually just picking up on this has been a thing that's been going on for months now so i'm not quite sure why anybody suddenly starts reading the eia's website but really our our the report was released this morning uh or i think maybe yesterday morning that our strategic petroleum reserves are currently at they're sitting at around 433 million barrels which is seven percent below the five-year average so our strategic oil reserves are down our gasoline reserves are down our um gasoline blending components levels that's doing okay which makes sense because it's only on demand of gasoline and things like that so our our petroleum products are not doing super hot right now as far as why or what this means well you can you can talk hours about this with people who are vastly more intelligent than us on this topic but basically one of the problems one of the reasons for these problems in the oil community is demand demand went down and then it came back up sharply and production has had a lot of problems you also have medical mandates uh people walking out and things like that so now you've got a supply issue so you've got some issues on the supply side of things you've got issues on the demand side of things and the nature of how our logistics work in this country mean that if there's a problem at any level that problem is going to spread quite quickly so something to keep an eye on definitely need to figure out or start thinking about alternative energy methods which is kind of something we've talked about before but i don't know about you but i can't make gasoline in my garage right i can't go into my backyard and pump petroleum out of the ground and then put it in my car it doesn't work like that so the federal government controls a strategic oil reserves the federal government has the ability to turn a pipeline on or off as we learned quite quickly a few months ago so the the the bottom line i guess is to start thinking about your energy needs because this stuff is important and uh it can it can come up on you sneak up on you really quickly and speaking of sneaking around uh number four there is a apparently now we have to deal with smallpox this is a story that just came out a few days ago but a worker in a america research facility uh discovered they were cleaning out the freezer and came upon i think 15 vials of that were they were labeled smallpox um and for those of you who might not understand this is uh probably one of the biggest deals that's going to hit the world this year because smallpox is kind of a big deal smallpox has been eradicated since uh 1980 officially there have been zero cases of smallpox on the planet since 1980 there have been mishaps and there have been accidents where people get smallpox researchers working with it but but here's the kicker there are only two places in the entire world that are allowed to have smallpox one of those is the cdc center in atlanta and the other one is the state research center of virology and biotechnology in russia's siberia also known as the vector institute so you've got the cdc and some random secret squirrel probably run by the fsb facility in siberia and it's a little bit out of place for smallpox which is again been eradicated globally since 1980 and only two places on the planet can even possess it it's a little weird for smallpox to pop up in a freezer outside of philly and that's so yeah kind of a problem uh i don't know what this means i'm sure that our i'm sure our conspiracy theory brethren are freaking out over this right now but as of right now there's no data there's no data to analyze so we just know the vials were found the fbi is investigating if you know and of course the fbi investigating anything these days is probably a strong indicator of some kind of nefarious activity based on what the fbi is currently interested in which we'll talk about again in just a minute but who really knows there's no there's really no telling as to what this means or or anything like that this could just be a colossal colossal mistake there's no it could be intentional who knows there's no data to say either way um i just wanted to point out that it did in fact happen mostly for posterity's sake i guess so let's go ahead and move into significant governmental actions android to start with is an event that really isn't something that occurred even in the united states but i thought i'd mention it because it kind of matters a lot so this is this occurred in australia and the australian government discovered that the store chain as 711 actively collected hyper accurate imagery for facial recognition purposes called you know face prints so i know kind of ironic that the australian government out of all the governments on the earth is the one that's concerned about overreach and spying and things like that but i did want to mention it because it's kind of interesting because there are kind of a lot of 7-elevens here in the united states and you never really know what the system is going to be doing right the way that this collection worked in australia was there was a sort of like an ipad kiosk station set up for customers to take surveys and things like that and they were capturing people's facial images uh several times during that so i don't know if it's just some kind of uh in the united states i don't know if if this is a factor or not i did just want to point it out though because it's yet another company that is going above and beyond to spy on people in the corporate uh world so i thought it was kind of interesting to note moving on to number two there the biden regime's nomination for the comptroller of currency uh solely omrova has been revealed to be a very radical choice as one might expect from the biden regime at this point she has made statements in the past which of course you'd expect conservative mainstream media to pick up some of these quotes are that she wants quote the complete migration of demand deposit accounts to the federal reserve um meaning that she wants you to not have a savings account she wants me to not having savings account or a checking account and quite literally the federal reserve will decide how much money you get that's what she wants she's also made statements that she wants to quote bankrupt the energy sector for climate change purposes and things like that she's also she's of course as you might expect an unabashed communist in her doctoral thesis in college was titled karl marx's economic analysis and the theory of revolution in das capital marx's book or ghost written book however you want to define that um so yeah she's a very extreme choice this is going to be not super great as one might expect look economics is one of those things where if most people figured it out the whole system would collapse if even just a percentage of people figured it out the entire system would collapse if anybody actually knew what the federal what the federal reserve did this country would be very different but i'm not hanging my hat on any hopes that people might do this do this research and figure out what this stuff is the point is is that now would be a very good time to reassess your eggs and make sure they aren't all in the same basket i find it very hard to believe that the us government is going to start sucking money out of personal savings accounts tomorrow but clearly they have the capability and as this regime has shown us and i suppose other regimes as well other regimes around the world and even other prior presidential administrations if it can happen it will happen so that's the thing that i guess we should be prepared for as far as specific things to do i'm not an economics expert so i don't feel comfortable uh really telling people what to do all i can say is be smart diversify do all the good things that you know are economically sound and we can research this a little bit more and figure out what to do later but by and large the system is is not as secure as we were led to believe like i grew up in a world where it was perhaps a false hope i guess but you put money in a bank account and you were going to be sure that it was going to be there when you retired that's not the case anymore i don't think that's been the case for a very long time probably since before even i was born but the point is is that we're here now and if you don't understand even the basic economic structures of how this country works and how it's supposed to work and how it actually works you should probably start researching that that would be a good idea to to do moving forward so i'll just leave it there at that and we can talk about that more later but moving on to number three uh this was kind of an inflammatory one that came out on social media this was a video that occurred that that kind of came out in which in in texas a a certain antibody treatment for a certain um viral infection right was denied based on purely racial criteria right the the antibodies are not available or at least the video in the video the hospital worker says that the options for this antibody treatment are not available to white or asian patients as ordered as written into the criteria by texas's department of health and human services so as of gosh i think actually as of this morning you know greg abbott's office has not yet responded to this event but it seems like texas's department of health and human services has started denying treatment based on racial means this comes if if this is true again we don't really know anything this is one social media post one guy's video we don't really know what the deal is however many journalists of of course again untrustworthy mainstream media or journalists have physically called the department of health and human services and they have confirmed it at least to the journalists so i don't know how much more confirmation you need for that but it seems like this is definitely the practice at least in texas um and i guess we'll have to see how that how that works out it's not really any particular surprise uh from us because we've been tracking medical groups denying treatment based on race for wow gosh two years now i guess but i just wanted to point it out that if you're in texas i would look into this a little bit more or if you're in really any state look into this more and see what your local hospitals are doing moving on to number four there um man new york city is just i don't know what to even say about it it's gotten to the point to where it's it's beyond any kind of fantasy novel we can try to try to compare it to and really the flavor this week is bill de blasio wants five year olds to show uh show papers right when they're entering businesses so this has already been a thing in san francisco and some other parts of california as well and now you new york is kind of getting on this train and and look um really the only thing i have to say on that is we here all the staff here recommend leaving new york city and other cities like it as soon as you can yes it's not as easy to move these days and job uncertainty is at an all-time high and even amongst ourselves here uh most of our staff here cannot afford to move to a more remote area uh just yet because it's just too expensive and um yeah but if you live in some of these more dystopian cities like new york anywhere in california right like i myself have never been one to recommend moving away from a problem right because that problem is just going to follow you look at texas right texas a lot of as a whole right dallas and austin extremely politically nut cities now and that's because people were leaving california for texas so we know and i know in myself that this cancer just kind of follows you however um you also have to do what's right for you and your family and i can't even imagine how it must feel to have your your five-year-old child show papers to a police officer um i i just can't i can't fathom that and um yeah so our recommendation here is to try to find a place where you can rest and recoup regroup you know someplace cheaper new york expensive place to live and see what you can do to help get this country out of the gutter we're in so i'll just leave it at that and we can move on to number five which is equally cheery in that uh the main p company there um i'm self-censoring this one because i have no freaking clue as to what algorithms youtube is using to listen to what i'm saying right now but in any case the big company the big p company we all know about that makes uh alleged medicine um has been confirmed to falsify data to indicate that not as many people suffered from adverse reactions during the trials shocker i know it's almost like we said we and hundreds of other thousands of people have been saying this for literally years now um and it just turns out that the truth is that more people died after getting the jab than died unjabbed at least during the clinical trials of pfizer but don't take my word for it please don't go and check out the sources we have you can check the links research the the peer-reviewed articles there or the articles that are currently being peer-reviewed and you can research the data yourself it's pretty easy to do at this point um so yeah i just wanted to point out that that did occur and then before we move on to anything else i did briefly want to touch on this so this is a letter or at least the first two pages of a letter that was sent by jim jordan to the attorney general of the united states merrick garland and i'll just read the first paragraph to kind of give you the abstract of what this is about so dear attorney general garland last month during your testimony before the judiciary committee you testified that the department of justice and federal bureau of investigation were not using federal counterterrorism tools to target concerned parents at local school board meetings we are now in receipt of a protected disclosure from a department whistleblower showing that the fbi's counterterrorism division is compiling and categorizing threat assessments related to parents including a document directing fbi personnel to use a specific quote threat tag to track potential investigation this new information caused into question the accuracy and completeness of your sworn testimony so you can read the full letter yourself there's page one and two here is the third page and here is the actual evidence so these are the screenshots of the email that pretty much indicates that uh senior fbi leadership uh is in fact collecting intelligence on u.s persons uh with regards to parents and school board meetings this email from senior fbi leadership references quite clearly that merrick garland quite literally and openly lied under oath and that the fbi is using their intelligence collection tools to spy on and specifically target investigations towards parents who get slightly upset at school board meetings so yeah i don't think this is a surprise to anyone because but i think that it's pretty clear right now what the fbi's intentions are um and again just for those of you who don't know merrick garland the the attorney general um for those of you who don't remember is the father-in-law of alexander tanner alexander tanner is the co-founder of a company that has very large contracts we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contracts to provide critical race theory propaganda curriculum to school systems so there's quite literally the most clear of conflicts of interest in this case and you know again i don't want to be just some other guy that's shouting about this on the internet but man like you've got to talk about this kind of stuff and kind of get a feel for how dystopian we are and uh that's pretty dystopian so got the fbi openly targeting parents at school board meetings instead of the islamic insurgents that are running around this country because i don't know if anybody remembered or not but the virginia state police and about 30 different law enforcement groups were saying that there were isis militants running around virginia planning an attack um a couple weeks ago and uh didn't hear anything back from that so um they didn't announce that they caught the guys uh they did not they did not announce that anything had happened so i guess we have to assume that those isis militants are still in this country and still at large but again the fbi is more concerned about parents not wanting their children to learn critical race theory in school so again quite dystopian but let's go ahead and punch forward into the national guard deployments for this cycle so here is your reference slide and let's move right into the northeast so the biggest one for this cycle is the mission accomplished so for massachusetts massachusetts their mission to drive children to school is officially over they had by their own admission over 500 soldiers doing this i don't think that anybody liked that and if anybody sort of liked the idea of what that precedent was what that precedent became i'm pretty sure they haven't read too many books in their life but in any case you should not be seeing any soldiers driving children to school in the state of massachusetts anymore at least for now until when they put this mission back on again because that's how uh that's how things work right so there's there you go on that also we don't have much more information about new york they're keeping that very tight lipped as to how much how many soldiers are actually deployed to new york area hospitals we know the deployment occurred we know the deployment is currently occurring we just don't have numbers and we don't have units so something to something to to keep in mind moving forward and also no real update on connecticut uh doing the same so i guess we'll have to wait and see on that likewise moving forward into the southeast absolutely no change here we're seeing numbers fluctuate wildly so as time goes on and as we don't make any changes to these slides become more inaccurate but we don't have any information to put on them so um yeah there you go earliest we don't have any information that can be talked about and can be verified in an open source manner i should say that that way but moving forward into the big one uh for the cyclist midwest obviously the wisconsin national guard has been activated in kenosha um for domestic policing actions and things like that so those guys are going to be on the ground for a while um following this verdict whenever it comes out and see how that works out but no no other change so far also the southwestern region a lot of troops still on the ground the border mission is expanding every day and it's getting a little bit more hairy down there at the border but i haven't really had time to sit down and do the bean counting and figure out how many units are there and how many more people are there so sorry this slide hasn't been updated in a couple weeks but that's pretty much what i've got on this one and then very similar situation out west i do know the oregon mission is winding down mostly because that letter that i mentioned last time was sent i ruffled some feathers so as it will as it rightly should so the oregon national guard air national guard is reducing that mission quite significantly so that's really all i have on that and moving forward into the school mass mandates i do have one change and that is tennessee unfortunately a judge has blocked the mask mandate ban so this is kind of confusing here a judge didn't outright block it but the judge said that both parties in the lawsuit have to maintain the status quo until it can go to court which is in practicality this is like we're having people are having to interpret well what does a judge actually mean so this effectively means that the mandate ban has been blocked and he but again this gets more complicated because not really many people know how to interpret this court order and a lot of school districts are saying yes that yay the jud the judge blocked the mask mandate ban now we're going to require masks for school so now it looks like a significant number of uh school districts in tennessee are now requiring masks for school now again it there's a difference between endorsing a mask mandate and um not allowing a mandate ban there's a difference there right that's why they're different colors on this slide here but in practicality it looks like a lot of a lot of school districts are going are using this court order as kind of a de facto victory and in using that as a way to institute mask mandates remember like i mentioned last time a lot of companies a lot of entities around the world they're just waiting to use that excuse well we were just following orders right the classic excuse from a certain political party in a regime during the 1930s and 40s right we were just following orders we didn't really do any of this stuff ourselves well look at look around the country there are so many hundreds if not thousands of places that are chomping at the bit to use that excuse we were just following orders and school districts are one of those so they saw this did they saw this order and they're saying okay they're using that as to to stomp on the gas when it comes to mass mandates so huge problem for tennessee i'm sure that it will probably get ironed out here soon because all these lawsuits are actually finally making it to court now but we'll see as far as the jab of mandates themselves really no major change here california is still doing stupid california things and i'm sure other states will probably follow suit soon but you never really know really what i want to do is push forward into this slide the overall resistance tracker because there's one major change over where the wind comes sweeping down the plane that's right in oklahoma the national guard adjutant general there has ordered that national guard members in oklahoma will not be mandated to get the jab as long as they stay on title 32 orders if they federalize they go on title 10 as in if the president federalizes them they will be required because the federal government has a different thing but the adjutant general has said that he is taking his orders from the governor as long as they are on title 32 orders so gold star to oklahoma this is great this is the first state that we're aware of where a a state national guard is actually going against the federal government and this is a huge deal i don't think people realize how big of a deal this is for a national guard unit a national guard for a state to go against a federal mandate that's just completely unheard of and it's it's good to see and oklahoma's national guard is not super big so it kind of makes sense but i think that's a very good metric to track so actually moving forward i wanted to end on some good news uh before we hit the international stuff for once right talking about some good news right so i built this slide to show which companies and entities are being forced to go against the mandates because they can't afford to lose their employees so this is obviously not a complete list but this is a fantastic way to measure the effect effectiveness of resistance efforts remember being able to assess resistance effectiveness is very important because it

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intel update for march 2nd 2022. let's get right to it much like last time i don't really have a whole lot for the geopolitical sphere even though a lot has happened uh there's really not a whole lot worth talking about or commenting on i did want to briefly mention something that i thought was interesting and that is in russia there are extremely unconfirmed reports that valeri grassimov was fired by putin yesterday but i think these rumors are untrue firing the chief of staff for the russian armed forces during an invasion is something that is not very likely to happen even if the invasion is going badly so far it sounds like these reports are the result of western leadership trying to cast doubt on russia's leadership and this is a trend that has continued over the past few days because we've heard constantly that russia is losing and that putin has gone insane or that there has been rioting and mutiny among russian forces in belgorod or that a military coup is brewing in russia from russia's invasion failures none of this is verifiable to any degree and all of this is probably false the only way that i can think that putin would outright fire his version of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is if something so egregious occurred that it was worth losing face in the act of firing him and i highly doubt that that has occurred also in ukraine the evacuation issues have become more prevalent as more and more people try to egress to neighboring countries in the west but we'll talk more about that in a bit and in belarus things are heating up as well uh with belarus approving a referendum to give up their non-nuclear status so basically what this means is that belarus could be they they could be host to nuclear weapons in the future meaning that russia could deploy nuclear weapons to their terrain or belarus potentially could even get nuclear weapons of her own this is something that's pretty big when it comes to european politics but again this is just a direct result of russia and belarus trying to expand into the rest of europe any time that word nuclear gets turned around people tend to panic a little bit with this i wouldn't necessarily view it as anything more significant i mean if you just look at geography and how nuclear weapons work it doesn't really matter if there's a nuclear weapon in belarus or not because a nuclear weapon in belarus versus being launched from smolensk or briansk or something like that that doesn't really matter too much when it comes to that sort of thing but this is definitely a political play which we will talk about in just a bit before we go on i briefly wanted to mention a major warfare tactic that is being used in the information war right now by all sides and all players and that concept is called gaslighting those of you who have been downloading our slides should recognize this from several days ago but i've only found it prudent to verbally talk about right now for instance i pulled all of these graphics from various domestic abuse websites because that's how most people are aware of this psychological warfare tactic if you take a moment to read these graphics you might notice a lot of familiarity between these gaslighting tactics and pretty much everything that's been said by various political and social groups around the world over the past few years without getting too much into the weeds we are seeing gaslighting and other similar psychological tactics being the primary weapons of very powerful people around the world and this is becoming a significant problem for the ukrainian war causing someone to doubt their own sanity and reality is certainly where we are at with regards to most of the events that are being talked about in the world today of course a false tweet is not comparable at all to a grodd strike but those of us who are located outside of the combat zone and are trying to help people in the combat zone the information war becomes the primary fight for us and this is where we come to a standstill ourselves because right now the misinformation that is out there is so thick that it's not possible to know what's going on with any reliability for the most part the theme for this brief is that there's a lot happening but almost none of it is verifiable due to the blatant lies that are being told by all sides i go out of the way to make this distinction now because understanding this concept is an important lens with which to view what i'm about to say when we get to each front line moving to the overall operating picture much like last time the situation on the ground with regards to front line locations has become more ambiguous plus we also have to remember that russia is conducting this invasion mostly along surface roads it's not like uh when we think of a normal front lines of troops advancing across the countryside there isn't a whole lot of cross-country travel being used by the russians except for tactically uh in various uh situations where they need to maneuver off of a a hardpacked road right so for the most part it's not really it's not really doing justice to the invasion to kind of put lines on the map but it's kind of the best way to visualize it so we're still going to keep doing that but in any case forces to the north northeast and east have observably slowed down the pace of their advance this is mostly in the north as russian forces build up for the fight for kiev the southern front continues to be the front where most advances have occurred although much like the rest of the fronts the pace has slowed down over the past three days there have been reports slash rumors of the russian ministry of defense calling up reinforcements by way of more conscripts and there is some evidence to support this but it is difficult to determine what fronts are the priority for any reinforcements that arrive in theater or move forward into ukraine from forward operating bases along the russian and belarusian border in other words we don't know if russia is calling up troops from all over the country like they did for this initial initial invasion or if they're just moving guys they had pre-staged along the border this whole time so it's really unclear really hard to say which units are moving where so at this point our graphics showing each unit is very inaccurate speaking of belarus lukashenko has been more vocal than usual lately and very strongly indicating that belarus will be joining this conflict soon and it looks like belarusian forces have already joined the fight in certain areas and probably were part of the initial invasion as well belarus doesn't have a super large military but lukashenko clearly wants a piece of this action and since the only reason that he hasn't been mussolini in the streets is because putin is propping him up lukashenko's entire existence is dedicated to currying favor with putin so we will see belarus join this fight the question that remains unanswered is how much they will bring to the table as far as iff markers nothing really major new there have been a few new symbols or letters but it's really hard to tell if they're actually a new letter or if it's an older letter that's either due to combat damage kind of disfigured or if somebody painted it wrong or something that's really hard to tell but this is really what we were still sticking with as far as iff markers on the northeastern front we continue to see russian forces make very small limited advances and there appears to be a split in various uh forces and what i mean by that is forces that are west of kharkiv appear to be dedicated for the fight for kiev they were supposed to go further into the countryside but it looks like russia has determined that kiev is going to be a big fight which it is and they are pushing forces that probably were dedicated for other locations to kiev now forces that are taking kharkiv those forces are going to take that city as well again kharkiv is ukraine's second largest city so it's not a small town by any means so there's going to be a lot of forces dedicated for that also we're seeing that tactic of russia basically encircling or and or bypassing cities occurring as well the town of sumi has been taken and retaken it's changed changed hands a few times but again then we fall into the definition of or fall into the tactic of trying to define what taking a village actually means does it mean driving through it do you mean does that mean you took the village you know it's really hard to say so really what we're seeing is russia trying to tie down forces in some of these smaller cities like konatov and sumi and then larger forces bypassing these cities to head for their primary primary objectives which in this case are kiev and kharkiv we're even seeing forces starting to bypass kharkiv and head further to the south and east as they try to conduct a pincer operation from kharkiv all the way down to just off the slide to the eastern front and lugansk regions so we'll move down there now on the eastern front it's become clear to us that two major lines of effort have emerged one which is a sort of pincer movement or really just an advance on two different fronts two opposing fronts for the city of maripo forces in the occupied territories are trying to push to the west to cut off marple to the north and try to link up with the forces that have advanced from the south from crimea around the city uh to to pincer around it and cut off the city further moropole for all intents and purposes is more or less cut off right now from the outside world although there are pockets right it's not like there's an imaginary line stretched around the city right so breakout operations are certainly still possible for any ukrainian forces that wish to egress further back into ukraine's territory but it's unclear as to what ukraine's motives are for mario paul it looks like they're going to be trying to take that city or hold that city rather for the foreseeable future moving down south there appear to be three main lines of effort with one like i mentioned being dedicated to supporting marupul from the west another one appears to be piercing to the north most likely along the nipah river north to japanese and an additional unit that's pushing to the west uh to take the city of kerrson uh as of a few hours ago we've got the notification that kirsan has been taken or at least their mayor says so uh so ukrainians are admitting that uh russian units have taken kerosene and are actually trying to set up administrative areas uh already in the city further attempts to push west across the deneber are really hard to say right now most likely odessa will be assaulted with an amphibious assault very very soon if it hasn't occurred already by the time this video gets out because odessa is a major is a major port town and that's going to be a very critical avenue for things like trade and it's just a very populated city right so it's going to be a major target for the russian advance moving to the western front the front which is really the forgotten front because not really much has occurred here still continues to give us some information and that is this time to do with alexander lukashenko so yesterday belarusian dictator alexander lokashenko held a televised meeting with his security council to discuss the situation in ukraine what caught many people's eye was the map that he was standing in front of which showed a few interesting things so let's enhance if we enhance the image a bit we can clearly see that someone is planning an attack on moldova maybe again this could all be a deliberate mistake that is made to make us think that russia and belarus are going to invade moldova specifically transnistria next this map also shows ukraine being broken up into four administrative areas again hinting at the goal of a total eradication of the ukrainian state if this is genuinely russia's plan then the situation is far worse than we thought and russia's goals are far more ambitious than we thought but i myself am withholding judgment on this for now attacking transnistria would be a really really big deal even if it is a breakaway republic russian puppet state that would prove without a doubt that russia's intentions do not lie only within ukraine the other interesting part of this map is that it is slightly out of date and based on the lines of advance we can clearly see that things are not going as planned for the russians so many forces have had to change their plans and as we can now see the mad dash for kiev has begun so rather than following this map's scheme of advance every unit along the northern and northeastern front is headed for kiev but again this might be all a trick who knows russia has been known to genuinely accidentally leak very sensitive top secret information to the press such as the stuff that came out a few years ago about the canyon nuclear torpedo project and other gucci directorate stuff ordinarily it's a pretty bold move to show a map of your invasion on live tv but lukashenko is a pretty bold guy so it would make sense for him to show this map and boast about his military goals and if this is a deception operation i can't imagine what goal that deception operation would have it seems like there wouldn't be much to gain by leaking this intentionally as always we will have to wait and see if these lines of effort materialize and more importantly keep a closer eye on the situation in moldova on the northeastern front russian troops have begun stacking up for the assault on kiev which should be getting underway in earnest right about now but the russian advance has slowed to a crawl so much so that i would go as far as to say the advance to kiev has stalled at least temporarily as russia continues to stage troops russia has dedicated a lot of forces for the battle of kiev and those forces have been observed in what is now called the 40-mile convoy a vehicle stretching along the main highway south into kiev but we will talk about this in a moment let's zoom in a little closer in kiev various local tv towers have been struck resulting in television broadcast outages throughout the area this is something that again we should have expected honestly on the first day of this conflict it should also be noted that russia has announced that civilians who want to leave kiev kharkiv and other cities will not be harmed for trying to leave and at this stage we here have no reason to doubt that this policy will be honored uh russia may have indiscriminately targeted civilians passively with artillery and airstrikes but for the most part russian ground forces have not been targeting civilians and mass however seeing as the ukrainian resistance will be heavily concentrated in cities russia will also begin to conduct strikes in these locations as well artillery strikes have already been conducted in some parts of kiev and we expect that to continue and increase in severity over the coming days as russian troops begin to enter the city it's unlikely that russian forces will attempt to level the city it's more alike they'll probably be going for just pockets of resistance or military things military targets within the city but again russia's complete and utter lack of concern for collateral damage means that there's going to be a lot of damage throughout kiev over the coming days and that kind of leads us to something that we have been observing and thinking about this invasion since it began and that is the question of why is russia performing so poorly in this fight and for the entire western world who is fervently taking notes on this war this question keeps coming up as well why has russia not had a single notable action during this entire conflict yeah sure russia is still invading and they're not losing and they're still moving forward and making progress but it's almost like every goal they have achieved has been almost on accident there has been fierce fighting in places like kharkiv journey of chernobyl luhansk maripol and places like that and russia has won battles in these areas but it does not appear that russia has achieved a clear decisive total victory anywhere every battle they have fought has cost them dearly even in the skies russia doesn't maintain dominance every first lieutenant at every army unit that has ever existed wrote a term paper at some point detailing the importance of aerial superiority during an invasion and even people who have no understanding of warfare doctrine can see that russia should have achieved total and complete aerial superiority over the entire country of ukraine within the first few minutes of the invasion but they weren't able to do that and even three days after the invasion began they had two il-76s get shot down and then there's the 40-mile convoy headed to kiev let me tell you every single military service member who has ever driven a vehicle can look at that satellite imagery and cringe that is without a doubt the fattest target for an ambush that i have ever seen in my entire life remember these guys are not stacked up like this inside their own country no they are miles behind enemy lines in a country which has an active insurgency against them and this comes after some of their comrades down south got decimated by a ukrainian drone strike in this exact situation so all of these thoughts are not to push the western propaganda that russia is losing or demoralized we have no way to know that this is just a genuine observation that at this point is worth talking about anybody who has studied warfare for five minutes can plainly see that russia is making a lot of mistakes mistakes that are so serious that it makes you wonder if there's something here we don't know and that is certainly the case we're just spectating this like everyone else however one mistake that we see being made on the part of western military strategists is that they are grading russia's actions using a western textbook russia's style of warfare is different from ours and there are a lot of things that people tend to forget like vehicle spacing we here in the us are hypersensitive to that due to several decades of fighting insurgencies russia's last insurgency-ish fight was in georgia in 2008 and that wasn't a great learning exercise for russia with regards to counter-insurgency because they overwhelmingly won that conflict in just a few days but even going back to the chechen war russia has not had the same experience that the united states has and russia's military is certainly not an expeditionary one russia's reliance on rail to move the majority of her logistics and the doctrine of not really stressing truck-based transport at lower and lower echelon levels might be the main reason that russia is having logistical problems right now and the logistical stresses of pre-invasion training exercises is something to think about too remember these troops were on the border of ukraine for a couple weeks and just keeping a hundred and seventy-five thousand troops fed and warm in the field had to have been a logistical nightmare and that was before the invasion even began and we know that these logistical woes did exist because we saw a lot of soldiers being sent forward uh to staging areas along the border without winter gear or with sparse food supplies for the aviation threat another way to look at why we haven't really seen the skies full of russian aircraft is that they know the man pad threat is real what's the point of sending in your brand new shiny fighter jets or massive waves of ground attack aircraft against an enemy that's extremely dispersed dug in and with a single dude with a shoulder launched missile on every apartment rooftop even though russia has the capability to send in hundreds of aircraft every hour if they aren't willing to get a lot of them shot down in the process do they really have that capability same with the armored divisions we've seen rolling around we think of russia's actions in terms of total numbers and not the numbers that are actually being observed in practice sure we might see a column of vehicles in armor that is over 40 miles long with hundreds and hundreds of armored vehicles stretching out to take kiev but here's the thing at the very front of that column you're not fighting all 40 miles of it you're fighting just the first few vehicles again the warfare doctrine that armies around the world learn the hard way over time is that this sure-fire way to whittle down an overwhelming force is to take them on one at a time this concept goes all the way back to the gates of thermopylae and the story of the 300 spartans canalizing terrain even self-imposed canalizing terrain in the form of sticking to roads for ease of navigation is something that the russians don't appear to be too concerned with and with a civilian populace in full-on guerrilla warfare mode this is a decision that russia will regret later a lot of people are split along the following lines those that think that russia is intentionally holding back for some reason and actually does have the capability to fight better and those that think that the russian military is old and busted and doesn't actually have the capabilities that they claim they do going back to a cold war mentality that russia's power comes from the perception of her power in either case if russia is voluntarily or involuntarily not as effective as they should be the effect is the same they're not as effective as they should be whether they can't or they can but won't isn't super relevant to the 19 year old bmp driver outside of kiev or to the civilian defending their home i don't think that any one of these thoughts is the complete explanation for why russia doesn't seem to be doing as well as we might have guessed they would or why russia seems to be making a lot of poor decisions but maybe these random thoughts provide a different perspective or a different way of thinking about the russian military in general in any case russia is writing a lot of doctrine right now and they are writing it the hard way the same way the u.s wrote ours by gaining experience and maybe the biggest lesson that russia has learned from this conflict is that kiev is not tbilisi and ukraine is not georgia russia may start learning these lessons and if they are fully committed to taking kiev they might just win this war though win would be definitely too strong of a word whatever happens this will not be a total victory for russia russia's actions on the international stage have embarrassed herself even taking aside the obvious western propaganda and meaningless sanctions russia is supposed to be a superpower that should have taken ukraine on the first day much like the u.s and her overseas ambitions in the past expeditionary military operations to a country where the local populace doesn't want you there is a lot harder than it looks on the civilian front not too much to report other than the increasing tensions along evacuation routes to the west traffic is still atrociously bad along with the rail transport to the west trains are still running as far as we know and lots of people are cramming as many people as they can onto trains to get them to the west out of these areas but it's really hard to say when or where services might stop likewise with traffic there's really no good way to to show people how to get around it because every road is jammed heading to the west we aren't seeing too many problems or too many issues popping up although tensions are really high along the obviously the border zones there have been a few fights breaking out here and there along the border at various immigration controls and things like that um so it's really hard to to say exactly what's going on i wouldn't say that it's complete and total pandemonium no it's it's not like an all-out panic you know like a mad bat a mad dash to the border but there is there is tension there and uh the tensions are increasing and um it's just not really a super pleasant time right now so uh if we get any more information regarding the civilian front and how that's going to affect the civilian populace in the occupied territories we'll let you know before we close the day i wanted to mention just a few thoughts because there's a lot of there's a lot of ideological thoughts out there these days and it's really clear that a lot of the sources that are talking about ukraine are talking about in a certain way and like i mentioned in the beginning the situation for us has become a lot more complex and a lot more irritating when it comes to the information that is available to us about this war the information that we can use to make decisions about our own lives uh what i find myself doing really at this stage is just making observations and then taking steps to reduce my own personal vulnerabilities and increase my own capabilities those of you who have been listening to our stuff for a while you know that we're all about that we're all about reducing personal vulnerabilities and increasing capabilities no matter what the situation is right so rather than get bogged down in the ideological fighting over what belief is better or what piece of information is better or worse i find that it's a lot less stressful and a lot more productive to think about certain events and then the potential impacts like right now the reason that we're even talking about ukraine is that we generally don't think it's a super great idea for one nation to invade another especially in europe especially for the reasons that russia is claiming to have invaded for but i also don't want to engage in situations that might increase the risk of going to war with another superpower that internal conflict that debate over what opinion to have is not very useful to kind of flesh out in my mind plus i mean the world is such a different place today i mean remember how for two years now we've had that magical c word on our minds for the past two years barely an hour has gone by without us thinking about the virus for a lot of people that became their identity nothing more important than that however they felt about it and now the same thing is happening right now with ukraine a lot of people do not go five minutes without talking about or consuming the ukrainian war for political or social reasons so we want to avoid that and taking a step back reassessing what's actually going on and prioritizing what lessons to learn is sometimes necessary this isn't going to be the last event like this and we're looking into the future be it another invasion or some other worldwide polarizing event we've got to get in the right mindset for the next decade so that's all we've got for now i just wanted to briefly touch on how keeping the right mindset is important moving forward and as we move forward into this conflict we have to remember that information is going to be few and far between when the fighting for kiev begins in earnest there will be very little that we or anyone else can do for us our own goals are largely complete we chronicled the lead up to the invasion and the initial invasion itself our goals were to help provide enough information for people to make the decision to stay or leave ukraine and what avenues of approach to take to do so so in that regard our work is mostly done there seem to be very few people left in ukraine that have not either made the decision to stay or go what we will try to do moving forward is to provide our thoughts and lessons learned so as our information about the situation on the ground becomes more and more ambiguous we can still at least learn some lessons that will be helpful in making decisions in the future so we're not going anywhere but we also don't want to waste anyone's time if we don't have anything meaningful to add so thanks again everyone thank you for your support and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

ommanders who might have been at a disadvantage in numbers began to use terrain to even the odds the cunning use of terrain is one of the major reasons why Alexander the Great was able to…