Sept. 21 — Day 941b — Spinning the “debris”

There’s debris, and then there’s the debris that hurts you

Which brings me to the funny part. Ukrainians are pretty sick of being bombarded. One of the many frustrations that comes from years of being targeted by Russia is that the Ukrainians have all the access to Russian state media that they could possibly want. (Not least because the Russian state media spends a lot of money pushing its messaging on the Ukrainians.) This means not only are the Ukrainians bombarded and killed or injured, it’s not just that houses are blown up and millions of people get their water and electricity cut off, as it all goes on day after day the Russian messaging comes through loud and clear to the Ukrainians. They’re human, they want to see payback.

So, for the Ukrainians, one of the most irritating features of Russian propaganda is that Ukraine can carry out a really effective attack, there can be all manner of evidence the attack was effective, video, photographs, eyewitnesses, analysts, whatever, and then the Ukrainians see and hear Russian state media reporting all the drones were shot down and if there were ground fires it was from falling debris.

In Russia, following attack after attack, state media inevitably trots out an official, usually a governor or mayor, who repeats the mantras that everything is under control, all the drones were shot down, damage was minimal but there perhaps was some noise or scuffles on the ground from falling Ukraine drone debris.

Here is, verbatim, my translation but trust me the original style is more clumsy, the official Defense Ministry statement on Ukraine’s drone raids against the Russian Motherland last night:

“Over the course of the previous night the Kyiv regime attempted a terrorist attack using drones against sites in the Russian Federation. On duty air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 101 aircraft-type drones.”

This was followed by TASS flash reports on Tikhorestsk, quoting the Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev as stating “Following the landing of debris from Ukrainian drones in the Tikhoretsk region of the Krasnodar district, there has begun the detonation of dangerously-explosive objects.”

The Ukrainian internet answer to that, and have no doubt the idea is it will get punted over to the Russian internet, which the Russian government still is having a lot of trouble censoring, has been the final photo of this review: A Ukrainian drone, with the word “debris” painted in big black letters on it. In Russian. Image attached.

This is funny Ukrainian internet content. The word says “Debris” in Russian. The Ukrainians are trolling the Kremlin and Russian officials who keep saying the Ukrainian drones never hit anything, it’s just falling debris from shot-down drones that’s causing all the fires and explosions in Russian army ammo depots.

More than 1,200 people mostly from Kamenniy had evacuated their homes by mid-afternoon Saturday, and fires at the ammo storage site were still burning, Russian news reports said.

No doubt civilian satellites will offer us pictures of the fires and damage in the next 48–72 hours.

The questions I have are: How many of these drones do the Ukrainians still have right now, and how fast can they manufacture more?