Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty since 2003. Views of my own. RT = interesting. Read the whole threads before replying. Email krotovm@rferl.org for inquiries.
Prague, Czech Republic
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1/ Looks like yet another air defense ring is being built around Moscow, this time with S-400 surface-to-air missile systems. I found the new position near Moscow State University – right next to the 'Innopraktika' Foundation, headed by Putin's daughter, Katerina Tikhonova.
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Fire in the reservoir park of the Kuibyshevsky oil refinery near Samara, Russia, following an overnight Ukrainian strike, as seen in a @planet satellite image taken today at 10:44 a.m. local time.
🔥🛢️BREAKING: The Kuibyshev Oil Refinery in Samara, around 920 km from the front, was attacked overnight.
Several major fires have broken out across the refinery, with a large blaze and a thick column of smoke visible over the site.
The Rosneft-owned refinery has a processing capacity of about 6.7–7 million tonnes of oil per year.
The same refinery was also hit on June 10, when both of its primary crude-distillation units were forced offline.
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At least 4 fuel tanks were taken out of at the Kuibyshevsky oil refinery following the September 22 Ukrainian strikes, as can be seen in the @planet satellite image taken today. There were no reports of damage to processing units or of the refinery temporarily halting operations.
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🧵Remember GRU General Andrey Averyanov, the commander of the 'Salisbury tourists' Chepiga and Mishkin, who now oversees the Russian Defense Ministry’s 'Africa Corps'? Seven years ago, when we investigated him for the first time, he was forced to conceal even his name.
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/12 How it all started: rferl.org/a/member-of-the-we…
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/13 Bonus post
Quite a few Frenchmen and Russians got those orders from Congo before, mostly military guys and diplomats, like these predecessors of Averyanov and co from 1969. archive.gazettes.africa/arch… archive.gazettes.africa/arch…
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1/4 Instead of the TEC-22 power plant, Ukraine hit a warehouse/production facility connected with the Austrian plastic goods maker @ALPLApackaging, which still operates in Russia (I couldn't find any evidence otherwise), as this @planet satellite image taken today shows.
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3/4 The 'target' (I assume the plastic bottles factory or warehouse was an unintended target) can also be confirmed via Yandex’s 2026 Street View: yandex.com/maps/-/CXA8IYkI
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4/4 At the same time, that’s what I see in the Moscow Oil Refinery image, but it’s 3m/px @planet imagery, so let’s wait for better one before assessing this.
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1/3 One of the most picturesque open-source images of a Moscow Oblast air-defense tower I've seen ('Tor,' I guess?). But a place where it stands is particularly interesting...
4/v (NC)
Zamoshinskiy territorialny otdel, Mozhayskiy Municipal District, Moscow Region
(714th Object ''S'' (Mozhaysk-10), military unit 52025)
55.408453, 35.783892
CS: ~ 2025-08-24
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3/3 Dynamic map of Moscow and Moscow Oblast SHORAD positions, limited to those appeared after the start of the full-scale war: google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1…
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