producing thick plumes of oily smoke.

That’s what happens when oil burns. Specifically, when oil storage tanks burn. Burning oil makes big plumes of thick, oily smoke.

In the video below, a shot-down drone can be seen jettisoning its special FX package.

Ukraine managed to get a drone through three (or more) layers of air defense around Moscow, only to drop an FX package? Look… Even I make fun of Russian air defense, but it’s not entirely useless and it does work.

It now makes perfect sense how Ukraine was able to fabricate such an eye-catching mise-en-scene

No. It doesn’t make any sense at all, per the above reason. If you send a drone to Moscow, make it through the air defense and have the opportunity to bomb a refinery, just bomb the fucking refinery. Burning oil is your FX package, dipshit.

The actual damage to the refinery itself turned out to be disappointing, as only a few oil storage tanks were actually destroyed.

Oil tanks are big, contain a fuck-ton of oil and burning tanks are a pain in the ass to extinguish. Heat damage alone can shut a refinery down if any high pressure tanks or lines were exposed. They would need to be inspected properly and that isn’t a small task. So yeah, a couple of destroyed tanks is kind of a bad thing. (Also, he just confirmed that is wasn’t an “empty strike”, employing “FX packages”. Shit got blowed up, dawg.)

In fact, much of Ukraine’s recent narratives

… narratives, propaganda or whatever… Those are likely Russian videos of Russian oil tanks on fire. No narrative is needed. (I stay away from most state news sites and steer clear of most opinion-based news, blogs or videos. Getting actual information about a conflict is hard enough, thanks. My point: I don’t know the narratives and reading a blog like this just lets me know that the propaganda engine is having to chooch really fucking hard about this.)

Alas, these propaganda blogs are just made to sow doubt with large groups of idiots. It doesn’t matter if they are true or not, what matters is that their future front-line meat waves stay dumb and that .ml posters have another hyperlink to add as a “source”: These links are also for idiots to click that don’t validate any of those sources. This stuff fuels confirmation bias, consciously or not, and regardless if any of it is true.