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At least as of right now, the official-line-adjacent Telegram channels I know about (anna_news, sashakots, rybar) are not really giving this any priority over their daily war reporting noise, and I'm not seeing any traces of an "IRL action movie hero" framing. They are just talking about how those perpetrators that were caught admitted to being paid money by the Ukrainian secret services and the like.
Even if you think a false flag is conceivable, why would it be more likely than that the Ukrainians indeed did it? This wouldn't be the first time, unless you claim that all the assassinations of prominent Russian figures until now, including the ones that they openly took credit for, were actually false flags, and the benefits for their side are obvious without mental gymnastics (eliminating useful individuals, encumbering Russian processes with friction and fear, signalling Russian weakness to internal doubters and external supporters). It seems like you want this to be a false flag, contra LW principles.
I just thought it's odd that the man was shot 3 times at point blank range at survived, and i'm trying to think of an explanation. But I admitted that I'm biased because I've been reading spy thrillers recently. I'm really not making a strong claim here about anything, I just thought it was an odd story. Whats the point of Ukrainian secret services shooting some random general in Moscow?
People fail to collapse like a sack of potatoes in response to getting shot all the time, especially with handguns. The variance of how much damage pretty much anything does is huge - people have survived falling 10+km without a parachute and people have died from falling 2m. People have survived being shot with handguns, rifles, machineguns - it wouldn't surprise me if someone has survived a hit from an autocannon at some point.
If the guy clocked his assailant before the first shot went off, this goes double - hitting someone who doesn't want to be hit is hard. It's not as if cops have handguns with 15+ rounds in the mag because they need to be able to drop 15 suspects before reloading.
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Obviously, he was using a weapon that only did 33 damage. Human beings have 100 HP; upon reaching 0 you become a ragdoll, but you'll be perfectly fine and suffer no ill effects even if you only have 1 HP. (This is why using .50 BMG, or other guns that can do 100 or more damage, are considered war crimes- people just hate the instakill meta.)
In all seriousness, it's not the getting shot that kills you, it's the other biological consequences of what happens when you get a hole punched in a part of you that may result in death, where the cells that make you up can't get enough fuel or oxygen to sustain the combustion reaction necessary for life (as in, you can't breathe, or you have no more blood) and die. When people appear to die instantly from this, it's mainly because the hole that was punched in them resulted in an immediate, catastrophic loss of blood flow (that system is also pressurized, so this tends to be really dramatic).
The meta for killing things is to create either larger holes, or more holes, so that this process happens faster. As a general rule, concealable weapons (handguns, especially the smaller ones) are relatively bad at making the large holes, so they have to depend on many holes in the most vital part of the target; typically in the blood pump [heart], the air intake/exhaust manifolds [lungs], or by destroying the ECU's ability to run either of the former two [brain]. You can make bigger more destructive holes with a rifle, but it's useless if you can't even get the gun into the fight.
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It's odd, but far from unheard of. Bullets can do unpredictable things and it's not impossible to 'roll low for damage' so to speak.
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If the person who shot him had no experience with firearms, it's entirely plausible. Hit a non-lethal spot the first time because you are nervous, and two more times because you underestimated recoil and now your hands are hurt and shaking.
What do you figure was the point in the 2024 case? I think I gave a reasonable enough list of benefits. High-ranking military being scared to leave their house without a bodyguard degrades military performance: people make worse decisions under stress, and more competent candidates may not want such a job.
But maybe it was actually done by a Japanese high schooler with a magic notebook - I've been reading a lot of manga lately...
Well, the true answer is I don't know. I don't speak Russian, and I'm not very well-informed about that case or the results of it.
But it seems to me that the reporting focuses on that general's role in charge of chemical weapons. Those are a huge trigger-word for western civilians. By killing him, the Ukrainians are making a big public statement that "the Russians are using chemical weapons on us." If that's true, it would significantly increase Western public support for Ukraine. Of course, I have no idea if that's true or not (I hadn't heard of chemical weapons being used anywhere else), and frankly I don't care, I think a few thousand dead from chemical weapons is much less important than hundreds of thousands of dead from artillery. But politically, they are a big deal.
Also, you know, they killed the guy. They didn't just lightly injure him by sending an assassin who had no prior experience with firearms. That seems like an important step in carrying out an assassination.
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