Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

Can you quote the update? The nearest phrase that can be interpreted as the internal passport is "please hand in your red civilian passports" (full context below), but this refers to the red-coloured external passport (as opposed to green diplomatic, blue service, and maroon internal passport).

Quotation follows:

> Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official, said passport restrictions had now expanded beyond individuals with security clearance.

> “Now they are coming to certain people and saying, ‘please hand in your red civilian passports, because you have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements’,” she said.

Even if Russia is advancing 100 meters (300 feet) a day eventually it will reach the Western point of Ukraine unless something changes.

In some ways, Ukraine has already won; Putin intended to capture Kyiv in three days and completely failed to do that. He turned to some minor territory gain, but that's also going very poorly. Russia's winter campaign is almost a complete failure, with tens of thousands of lives lost for very minor gains.

Ukraine is smaller than Russia, but by no means a small country. Ukraine has 40 million people and is far more motivated to fight than Russia is. Russians really have nothing to win here; it's just about Putin's pride. Meanwhile Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, their country, and the future of their children. These are powerful motivators, and go a long way towards explaining Ukraine's unwavering morale in the face of overwhelming odds.

Ukraine also fights much smarter. Russia uses very primitive tactics: use massive artillery to flatten entire cities, move infantry in, and if they get killed, flatten the place with artillery again. And then they ran low on artillery ammunition, not to mention that many of their barrels have been so overused they can't shoot straight anymore, so now they've resorted to human wave attacks. Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut have described wave after wave of Russian attackers crawling over the dead bodies of their dead comrades only to get gunned down too. There's no sophistication at all, and coordination is often poor.

Meanwhile Ukraine with its more limited resources executes very smart attacks. Most of the time they target Russian supply lines to make it harder for Russia to fight. But sometimes they've undermined Russian positions so much that they can suddenly grab an enormous swath of territory, like they did east of Kharkiv and west of Kherson.

I frankly don't see how Ukraine can lose this. In some ways they have already won. Although of course it really depends on how you define victory and loss here; both sides have lost a lot, and any end result where Putin is in a position where he can try again later, means that the war for Ukraine is not really over.

But Russia is not advancing 100 meters a day. Not even close.

Because they're old rust-buckets that are only good as supplies of replacement parts for the tanks that still work.

Have you seen that smoking aircraft carrier? Russian military equipment is often in a terrible state.

Of course they also have this brand new super tank, the T-14 Armata. No idea why they're not fielding that one, but I suspect it doesn't work.