 All right, let's start with just the kind of breaking news from Ukraine. So two big stories, the big one was yesterday was Putin's birthday as a birthday gift. It seems as though the Ukrainians manage, we think it's Ukrainians, we'll find out. It's like the pipeline explosion, who did it? This one is a gift for Putin's birthday. The bridge that Putin had built after he annexed Crimea to Russia, the bridge he had built between Crimea and Russia. If you've ever seen maps of that region, Crimea is like this piece of land that juts out of Ukraine. It's not exactly, it's indirectly connected to Russia, though now that Russia is occupied southern Ukraine it is, but it wasn't after Putin took it. So he built a bridge that basically connects Russia to Crimea. And this Crimea peninsula has a long history of being fought over. So the bridge includes kind of a highway for cars, two directions, and a rail line that crosses between the two. And it's been used as a main way of supplying troops, particularly in the Gershon area of Ukraine where the Russians are occupying and there are battles almost daily between the Ukrainians and the Russians as Ukraine is trying to retake the Gershon area. Anyway, yesterday there was a massive explosion on the bridge, this video of it actually exploding, how to tell exactly what happened, how to tell what exploded exactly looks like a truck or maybe something under the bridge or you know it might have been a car bomb. It's how to tell. But it exploded, it basically destroyed half of the highway, so one part of the highway fell into the Black Sea and so that's, you can see pictures of that, that's going to take them a while to fix. And then there was a train, so it exploded strategically because it exploded, it appears, again this is all still I think speculation, but with the pictures it exploded just as a train was crossing on the train and that train exploded into flames. And it could have been that the train exploded but unlikely given the damage, given the damage on the highway it looks like the explosion happened on the highway and then the train ignited. So the train, you know the train was in flames and the consequence of that is that, why two shows today, only one show today? The train exploded so the train track is significantly damaged, so that's out of commission. It seems like the train is what's really important and what they're focused on and maybe that'll be repaired in a few days or maybe it's already repaired or they're working hard to repair that. The highway is going to take them a while, that really was destroyed but a huge blow to the Russian symbolic and material, material in a sense that it's just more difficult to continue resupplying their troops in the south. They do have alternative paths through Donetsk to supply the troops in Gesson but the easiest way was through Crimea. It's also kind of a, what do you call it, a morale issue, right? I mean this is the third time I think the Ukrainians have reached into Crimea and created massive damage in Crimea. They hit an airport, they hit some other ammunition depot and now they've hit this symbolic bridge that is very much Putin's. Then it happened on Putin's birthday, can't be particularly good for Putin's morale. So good for Ukraine, I assume Ukrainians did this. They seem to have reached, the rumors now also, the CIA believes that it is Ukrainians who killed Dugan's daughter so if that's true then they have reached right into Moscow and have the ability to assassinate people in Moscow. It shows a certain reach and a certain, I don't know, daring of the Ukrainians to be able to pull this off in the bridge that was hard to imagine that they would be able to do at the beginning of the campaign. You know, could they have blown up the pipeline? Very unlikely, Ukraine as far as I know does not have the kind of submarine technology that would be acquired, but in the North Sea, nevertheless, to go to the North Sea and do something like this. So I think it's highly unlikely that Ukrainians blew up the pipeline, although clearly the Ukrainians have the most incentive to blow it up and to create, you know, to kind of force Russia's hand. As I said, I don't really bite and have anything to do with that. I think it's one thing for the United States to be providing the Ukrainians with intelligence on various issues. I think it's a completely different ballgame for the United States, actually use its own submarines to go out there and blow up something that is European, right? The pipeline is actually European. So anyway, so I think as time goes on, we'll discover more and more and more about what happened and what's going to happen. I think the Swedes, because it happened in Swedish Danish water, I think the Swedes are heavily investigating the pipeline explosion. So I think we'll get a lot more information out of Sweden and out of Denmark in terms of how it happened and who was responsible. Once they get the munitions that caused it, we should be able to tell pretty easily who did it given the nature of the munition. All right, let's see. Of course, it could be what do you call it, something flag where you do it, pretending at somebody else and use their munitions or something who knows. So that's one story coming out of Ukraine. The second one is this one's very speculative, very kind of on Twitter. Hard to tell if there's any truth to this. False flag. Thank you, false flag. Hard to tell if there's any truth to this, but it is something that Twitter is imploding over and coming out of Ukrainian intelligence. So hard to tell if there's any viability to this, but I'll report it anyway as highly speculative. And that is that there's a rumor that there have been arrests in Moscow that senior military officials, senior officials in the Defense Department are being arrested by the Russian authorities, that in a sense there is a cleansing going on, that the explosion on the bridge yesterday was the final straw that Putin is cleaning house. He's getting rid of what he views as incompetent people. Now, whether this will work in Putin's favor or not, it's hard to tell because already the people in important positions were Putin's allies, so now he's getting rid of his allies and putting in other allies. It's hard to tell. More confirmed reports suggest that, so that's more as these people are being arrested and dragged off by special units of the Russian military. I think more reasonable reports suggesting that actually what's going on is that Putin has just fired his Minister of Defense and has fired the top general in the Russian army and replaced them with what he considers better people. So that is I think much more reasonable and pretty likely to be happening right now. The kind of losses the Russian military has suffered, the kind of humiliation Russia has suffered requires Putin to find scapegoats and to shift the blame and this is I think reasonable in terms of what I think he is doing. So yeah, that's coming out of, by the way, if you remember the head of the Chechen guy who has threatened nuclear, who said Russia should use nuclear weapons and who has criticized the military and everything, he has been promoted to general within the Russian military. So in spite of him being critical of Putin, I guess Putin figures bring him closer, make him more responsible, and let's see what's happened, and let him base on the responsibility of whatever happens now. So it'll be interesting how this all plays out in terms of the internal politics within Moscow, which is clearly an upheaval, I mean they didn't expect the Ukrainians to pull off what they've pulled off over the last month and a half, they didn't expect any of this, and Ukraine is still in their offensive, they haven't stopped yet, they're still movement, they're still chipping away, expect to see big moves from the Ukrainians in the south and some more significant moves in the east in the next few weeks. This is going exactly the opposite of how Putin and his Russian fans would expect, so it's a complete and utter disaster and its people are shocked, shocked, shocked by this. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. 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