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One item of news that I find interesting is the terrorist attacks in the far east of Russia where there have been some serious attacks in Dagestan, resulting in the deaths of a priest, at least 15 Russian police officers and an unstated number of civilian deaths. I understand that there is a clampdown on reporting from the area which will surprise no one.
There have been uprisings in the area over many years which Putin has tried to crush using his usual less than subtle tactics. What seems to be new is that one of the driving forces is the significant losses incurred by people from this area who were forced, persuaded, mobilised to take part in the fighting in Ukraine. Russia has lost approx 500,000 casualties. Most of these will have come from the sparsely populated border territories and the % lost in those areas must be significant. Putin is making a rod for his own back.
I suspect that we are both right. If you have an already very sensitive area where her have been attacks before, and then add a lot of casualties from Ukraine. It will only make a bad situation worse.I suspect the Dagestan violence is driven more by the Gaza war than any concern over Ukraine. I could certainly be wrong, but iirc they had a major shitfit when Israeli refugees fled the 7 Oct attack. I think this might be follow-on to that.
If it is indeed protests regarding the conscription of Dagestanis to Ukraine and they are protesting that, I'm very happy to be wrong.
I suspect that we are both right. If you have an already very sensitive area where her have been attacks before, and then add a lot of casualties from Ukraine. It will only make a bad situation worse.
A somewhat sobering analysis