It almost goes without saying these days that more refineries are burning today.
🔥🛢️Fire and smoke rising over Russia’s Orsk oil refinery following the overnight drone attack.
The refinery is located roughly 1,450 km from the front line and has a processing capacity of about 6.6 million tonnes of crude oil per year. https://t.co/7LUqlviG8O pic.twitter.com/FK077z7c2G
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) August 11, 2026
Another Wildberries hub is burning too.
A morning view of the still burning Wildberries logistics hub in Voronezh. As can be seen, part of the complex survived the attack. https://t.co/SD6QUznBmZ pic.twitter.com/xfWnYUS88K
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) August 11, 2026
Some gas lines are returning to Moscow, though it’s still not as bad as last month.
A renewed wave of fuel problems in Russia is now reaching Moscow as well.
Queues at gas stations and empty Lukoil stations without gasoline have once again appeared in the capital.
For now, however, the scale remains significantly smaller than during the peak of Russia’s fuel… https://t.co/5szi3f52Ag pic.twitter.com/dTsnTE2rPk— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) August 11, 2026
So the beat goes on inside Russia, enough so that Putin must be worried about how people feel about the “special military operation.” Yesterday a Russian court banned the country’s only remaining anti-war party from participating in elections set for next month.
Russia’s only antiwar party, Yabloko, has been barred from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, the latest sign that the Kremlin will not tolerate any political forces that question its determination to continue fighting in Ukraine.
The Supreme Court, in a hastily called hearing on Monday, upheld a lawsuit seeking to strike Yabloko from the ballot for the Sept. 18 election.
Kirill Goncharov, head of the party’s Moscow chapter, said Yabloko had been bracing for that decision.
“We were aware that the more popular we were getting, the more trouble we’re creating for the Kremlin,” he told The New York Times shortly after the verdict. “People want peace, freedom and a life without fear — people want what this party represents.”
In a democracy, all of that might matter, but in a dictatorship where Putin plans to rule for life, it just makes you a target. Yabloko is Russian for apple so lots of younger people, the kind who might be called up in the next mobilization, have been showing their love for apples. This kid below is apparently a pop star in Russia.
Anyway, that’s all over now thanks to a lawsuit by a rival party who accused them of violating copyright law. Somehow the lawsuit got an immediate response.
The case for striking Yabloko off the ballot was started by Rodina, an obscure nationalist party whose leader, Aleksei Zhuravlyov, accused Yabloko of “working for the West” and betraying Russia by opposing the war in Ukraine.
A trial that would normally take at least a few weeks to set up was scheduled for Monday, the next working day after the claim was filed.
The trial itself was a complete joke. Bane from The Dark Knight Rises would have been embarrassed by this kangaroo court.
On its face, the case appeared simple enough: a petition to disqualify the Yabloko party from fielding candidates in next month’s parliamentary elections — the first since the start of the all-out invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago — on the basis of alleged copyright and other violations. The petition was filed by a small nationalist party…
Rodina’s lawyers presented the court with several examples of copyright violations that they argued were grounds for disqualifying Yabloko.
One involved a Soviet-era children’s song called Let There Always Be Sunshine that Rodina’s lawyers argued was used illegally in a Yabloko video interview with Yavlinsky.
Yabloko’s lawyers said the lyrics were spoken by an interviewer speaking with Yavlinsky, not as part of campaign literature. The son of the author of the song lyrics — which includes the line “May There Always Be Mama” — later told Novaya Gazeta Europe that he had no objection to its use – and in fact supported it.
Another argument said that Yabloko’s main logo was a rip-off of a 1919 Bolshevik propaganda print that was part of the avant-garde Suprematist art movement. Yabloko’s lawyers pointed out that the party has used the logo for years in past elections — well before the upcoming campaign.
Other complaints from Rodina focused on images of doves, used by Yabloko in its campaign literature as a symbol of peace, and a photograph of a tank surrounded by sunflowers that Rodina said was stolen from the Kommersant newspaper without attribution.
Normally a case this thin would be laughed out of court but not this time. Judges sided with Rodina and ruled Yabloko wasn’t allowed to participate in the coming election.
Needless to say, this has nothing to do with the rule of law and everything to do with Putin shutting down anyone who challenges him.
“The Kremlin is scared,” Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who lives in exile and has taken up the leadership of the her late husband’s political organization, said in a video.
Putin lashes out when the opposition is getting traction. That’s clearly what he’s worried about here. The war is not popular anymore even if most people know better than to say so out loud.
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