With Apologies to the OG Stalkers

I've been swamped.

Thanks to me suddenly getting linked left and right, we have had a lot of new readers coming in and they may not know what it is that we got up to here on Slavland Chronicles for the last year.

Also, there is a frantic panic now as more and more people writing about Russia and living within Russia are now waking up to dire state that the Russian army is in. This leads to a veritable deluge of news. Prigozhin, for example, has declared that the Bakhmut front is crumbling and others have confirmed that unprepared and unequipped soldiers have been throw against Ukrainian armor and have been badly mauled. SouthFront, which has always been level-headed and good throughout this war, to my knowledge anyways, confirms the Russian rout.

Meanwhile, on the city outskirts clashes continue between the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and units of the Russian Army. While loosing in the city, the AFU began launching counterattacks on the outskirts.  On May 9, Ukrainian units managed to repel Russian forces from some of their positions along the road east of the village of Stupochki. The Ukrainian advance was stopped by Wagner fighters who were urgently deployed on the spot. LINK

On May 11, new Ukrainian advance was reported on the western outskirts of Bakhmut. According to the military reporter who close to  Wagner, units of the 9th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation left the forest belt and fortified area near Khromovo. Retreating northward to a depth of 600 meters, they lost control of the section of the Chasov Yar—Bakhmut road.

As a result of another counterattack of the AFU, the same 9th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation also lost a section of the front up to 650 m wide and up to 600 m depth in the Bogdanovka area. Ukrainian advance was reportedly again stopped by the Wagner reserve units deployed on the spot.

Basically, the Ukrainians had success with their tanks in the open, but cannot beat Wagner (yet) in urban warfare.

Last night was stressful. I tried to go to bed earlier, but my phone started blowing up about news regarding the start of the Ukrainian offensive. My heart skipped a beat, but, as it turns out, it was all a hoax. My podcast chat had deliberately posted a piece of fake news about Ukrainian boats being assembled for a river crossing and this got picked up by all the news aggregators literally within minutes of them creating the rumor. It was a prank with a point - to prove how dumb and gullible the Russian-language Telegram “Info-Gypsies” as they are referred to in Russia, are. Now, I don’t approve of such hijinks, especially not now. But I have no control over my chat and they bully me mercilessly for thinking that Ukraine is winning, so my hands are tied.

What we do know is that there will be feints in the coming days and deliberate maskirovka of when and where Ukraine will attack. Prigozhin thinks that it has already started, around Bakhmut. Strelkov scoffs and says that this is a tactical action and that the real attack will be much worse. Both are right.

Prigozhin continues dropping abuse on the MoD and has even written a letter asking Shoigu, mocking his “extensive military experience, and asking him to actually come visit the frontlines.

No, Shoigu won’t visit. Prigozhin is just trying to prove his point - that these people are too busy boozing and carousing to know what is actually going on on the front.

Actually, there are many questions that I have about Prigozhin and the entire drama surrounding him as well. I just don’t have the time to dig into it. For me, it was more important to sound the alarm. But, once the storm breaks and things settle for a bit, for better or for worse, we will have to revisit this topic.

Some questions for later:

• Prigozhin doesn’t strike as the suffering martyr type. If he is being so bold as to attack the MoD and governors and other powerful people, that means that he thinks he won’t be killed off. Who does he have in his corner? I doubt that it is Putin. Is he just bold and fearless or does he have something up his sleeve?

• How is it that Prigozhin is finding out just now how badly the MoD is run? Wasn’t he close enough to power to be privy to this information earlier?

• What was the real reason why Bakhmut was chosen? I don’t buy the meat-grinder plan and I don’t trust Surovikin, who appears to be just as bad as the others, except he realizes that he needs Wagner.

Anyways, I bring this all up to highlight the kind of gossip and internal squabbling that is happening every day now when, months ago, you would get just one of these spats and it would dominate the news for a week.

I used to write all these deep dives into Slavlands lore though, and I loved doing it, and my readers really enjoyed them as well. I haven’t had the time to do these deep dives and the thematic concept of the blog has suffered as a result.

Here are some examples of my earlier work:

And:

I’m very proud of these and I have a lot more stories to share. But, I have none in the works right now because I am swamped. And that is a shame because I wanted to talk about Boris Yeltsin’s drug trips in Big Sur, California. About Nicholas Roerich, the self-claimed reincarnation/long lost heir of the original Rurikid founders and his Agni Yoga religion. The conspiracy theory that Stalin was a Pakistani. And so much more.

We’re in the informational trenches now and we won’t be able to get back to doing what we love until we are rotated out, unfortunately. I’ve also got this backlog of interviews that I wanted to get published on Unz, that I will release here instead. I need a couple of days to edit and polish them up as well. Then there are the other parts of the blog that languish, neglected in recent weeks as well.

Oh well. I hope the OG Slavland Stalkers will hang in there until we get some closure on this offensive and the fate of Wagner.