Usuaully quiet the last 24 hours in the fighting ceasefire zone--actually to quiet.

While Russia has achieved a form of a "frozen conflict" it definitely is not to their advantage at the moment as it appears momentum has shifted on the political front to the Ukrainian side as has the military as the several attempts to expand territorial wins by Russian mercenaries has been largely pushed back by the UA with the general perception that the Ukraine is fulfilling Minsk 2 and the Russians are not.

It actually appears Russia ie Putin does not quite know what the next step should be.

Unusual is the Russian announced callup today of another 150K conscripts in July which is outside their normal callup cycles as they just completed a large call up.

If one takes the simple fact that after the last large snap exercise involving 80K plus troops and virtually the entire Russian military services which while back into their bases are still maintaining a relative high state of readiness coupled with the unusually large conscript callup in July would place them on an effective war footing.

Question is why the high levels of alert status and the unusually high manpower levels when NATO and the US has not taken similar stances.