Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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Terror over Starlink: Russia pressures families of POWs to restore drone communications
Author: Kateryna Danishevska | Tue, February 10, 2026 – 15:20
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/terror-for-starlink-russia-pressures-f
amilies-1770729177.html
Russians are seeking a replacement for blocked Starlink systems and are forcing families of prisoners of war to register terminals in their own names, Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for Treatment of Prisoners of War said in a statement.
The Defense Ministry of Ukraine, in cooperation with SpaceX, managed to disable illegal Starlink terminals that Russians used to control kamikaze drones.
"Seeking a way out of the difficult situation they found themselves in, occupiers turned attention to families of prisoners of war. Cases of threats and demands to officially register Starlink terminals in their own names have been recorded. This equipment is then supposed to be used against Ukraine and Ukrainians," the statement said.
Coordination Headquarters for Treatment of Prisoners of War stressed that Russians are exploiting the vulnerability of POW families, for whom they are a one-time resource. In addition, official registration of the enemy terminal makes it possible to identify the person who did it.
"If a terminal is used to control drones that destroy infrastructure and take lives, the fact of registering a terminal by a Ukrainian citizen is grounds for criminal liability," the statement said.
It recently became known that Russia is increasingly using Starlink on drones. This allowed them to bypass Ukrainian air defense and electronic warfare systems.
After that, Ukraine's Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said he promptly contacted SpaceX to resolve this issue.
Later, the Ministry of Digital Transformation reported that Ukraine is introducing a whitelist. It refers to a list of verified Starlink terminals that would work stably for every Ukrainian user, but not for the enemy.
The adviser to Defense Ministry head Serhii Beskrestnov (callsign Flash) said Russian forces are looking for ways to activate Starlink terminals at the front.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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tick tock tick tock...
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RUSSIAN ARMY PANIC: LOST CONNECTION, AFU COUNTEROFFENSIVE Vlog 1316: War in Ukraine
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The New Laser That Can Take Down Aircraft
Russian strikes have forced Ukraine to build high-tech air defense on the cheap.
By Simon Shuster | February 10, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/02/ukraine-drones-l
asers-iron-dome/685944/
If you’ve never seen a laser shoot an aircraft out of the sky, the experience can be unsettling. The weapon fits comfortably into the trunk of a car. It makes no noise and emits no light, not even the glowing red beam that’s so familiar from the movies. When a team of Ukrainian soldiers and engineers took me to see their prototype the other day, it seemed easy to use. Almost too easy.
The operator set up the laser cannon on the roof of his pickup truck in the middle of an empty field. It resembles a hobbyist’s telescope with some cameras affixed to the sides. For target practice, one of the engineers launched a small drone, and it flew a few hundred yards away from us, hovering in the gauzy winter sky. The laser swiveled as its cameras followed the target. The operator shouted, “Fire!” Within seconds, the drone began to burn as if struck by invisible lightning, then fell to the ground in a fiery arc.
The Ukrainian model, known as the Sunray, is not the world’s first laser weapon system. The U.S. Navy has one called Helios, which Lockheed Martin developed as part of a $150 million contract signed in 2018. Four years later, the first Helios laser was installed on a U.S. destroyer to defend against enemy drones. The creators of the Sunray, whose existence has not been previously reported, told me they built their laser in about two years for a few million dollars, and they expect to sell it for a few hundred thousand dollars.
Pavlo Yelizarov, the newly appointed commander of Ukraine’s air-defense forces, sees this price differential as a result of the war with Russia. “Many American companies are driven by money,” he told me last month at his office in Kyiv. “For them, it’s a job. They do it. They get paid. We have another component at play: the need to survive. That’s why we are moving faster.”
In recent months, President Volodymyr Zelensky has prioritized the push to deploy Ukraine’s own air defenses as the United States and Europe have failed to provide enough of them. A lot of U.S. weapons are being diverted to the Middle East, where the U.S. needs them for both a possible strike on Iran and defense against retaliatory strikes from Iranian drones and rockets. The Europeans, for their part, are loath to give Ukraine any more of the weapons they might one day need to guard their own people from Russian drones.
The Ukrainian response has been a race to build a bootstrapped version of the Iron Dome, Israel’s short-range air-defense system, which is thought to be the most effective in the world. (Lockheed Martin is now at work on a comparable system for the United States, which President Trump has dubbed the “Golden Dome.”) But the task of shooting projectiles out of the sky—or, as ballistic-missile defense is often described, “hitting a bullet with a bullet”—has bedeviled engineers at least since the invention of ballistic missiles during World War II. Even in the case of Israel, which has nearly 30 times less territory than Ukraine, the construction of an effective air-defense shield took about four years. A single battery of Iron Dome interceptors cost as much as $100 million in 2012.
Ukraine’s arms manufacturers have tried for several years to get the same results on a far tighter budget, and a handful of them took me to see their inventions last week. These include a 3-D-printed interceptor drone, a carbon-fiber clone of Russia’s best air-defense rocket, wheeled robots armed with chain-gun turrets, and more exotic weapons like the Sunray. Taken together, the trajectory of their development suggests that Ukraine may soon be able to neutralize one of the biggest threats to its security: the swarms of Russian drones that continue to terrorize its civilians and destroy its infrastructure.
“The anti-drone dome is not about the future,” Ukrai
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“There are no good hands anymore”: Training gaps erode Ukraine’s air defenses
Lack of training time prevents mobilized personnel from mastering air defense systems
By Igor Kossov | 10/02/2026
While Russia more than doubled its drone and missile strikes last year, Ukrainians’ interception rate fell from 96.58% in January 2025 to 82.7% in December, according to the Institute for Science and International Security.
There are multiple reasons for this decline, from better drones and tactics on the Russian side, to equipment and personnel shortages on the Ukrainian side. But training is an important reason that often goes overlooked.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/02/10/there-are-no-good-hands-anymore
-training-gaps-erode-ukraines-air-defenses/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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US support at rock bottom
Author: Oleh Velhan | Thu, February 12, 2026
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/us-support-at-rock-bottom-surprising-p
layer-1770849754.html
Europe increased its military aid to Ukraine by 67% in 2025, effectively replacing support from the US, which collapsed by 99%, according to the updated data from the Ukraine Support Tracker and an analytical paper, Kiel Policy Brief, by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
From the US there was only one "symbolic" military support package worth approximately €0.4 billion, and no new major financial or humanitarian commitments were recorded.
https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/ukraine-support-after-4-
years-of-war-europe-steps-up/
https://www.kielinstitut.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Publications
/fis-import/dd24a73f-4270-46c5-9c40-bcc9df4f1672-KPB2023_EN.pdf
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Russian losses in Ukraine 'astonishing,' former MI6 chief says
February 11, 2026 9:12 pm
https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-war-latest-128/
Russia may have lost about twice as many soldiers in Ukraine in December 2025 as the Soviet Union lost during the Soviet-Afghan War, a former British intelligence chief said on Feb. 10.
Sir Richard Moore, the former MI6 chief, gave an interview on Sky News' on the World podcast with journalist Yalda Hakim on Feb. 10, where he said that about 30,000 Russians were killed in Ukraine in December, describing the number as "astonishing."
Moore compared this monthly death toll for Russian soldiers to the casualties in the Soviet-Afghan war, which lasted for 10 years (1979-1989) and resulted in the death of approximately 15,000 Soviet soldiers.
"The losses are terrible, and even the Russians will struggle to replace that level of losses. So, they continue to do appallingly badly on the battlefield," Moore said.
When he left his job in 2025, the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Moore said that he didn't think he’d left the world in a better place than when he was first appointed in 2020.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Movie Review
How documentary film 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin' struggles with the uncomfortable truths of wartime Russia
By Kate Tsurkan | February 11, 2026 7:49 PM
https://kyivindependent.com/how-mr-nobody-against-putin-fails-to-answe
r-the-uncomfortable-truth-of-wartime-russia/
"I wish I could be as brave as them," says Pavel Talankin, a school videographer in the industrial town of Karabash, speaking of Russians who protested the invasion of Ukraine in its first days. "But I'm not."
The line is not self-pitying so much as diagnostic, and it becomes the foundation of "Mr. Nobody Against Putin," an Academy Award-nominated documentary that offers one of the clearest portraits of how Russian authoritarianism sustains itself not through mass fanaticism, but through routine moral abdication and prioritizing one’s own survival.
After the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the school where Talankin works is methodically repurposed. What was once an educational institution becomes an extension of the state's war machinery. The children are prepared by their teachers — both mentally and physically — for a permanent state of war that awaits them as their destiny.
Talankin, horrified by what is happening, does the only thing he knows how to do: he films it.
The school is required to produce propaganda and upload videos to a government portal. Teachers and students recite prewritten scripts about the glory of the Russian military and the existential threat posed by the so-called "Ukrainian Nazis." But Talankin also begins filming something else: the awkward reality behind the performances, the mechanisms of indoctrination laid bare. He plans to show the world, as he puts it, how his beloved school, its teachers and students, are "sinking into the abyss."
Being the school videographer gives him a kind of institutional camouflage. A camera doesn't register as a threat — at least not right away. It lets him capture not just the pageantry, but the slippages: the strained smiles, the off-script unease, the dawning recognition, among the few who still have a conscience, of what this place is becoming. Still, as he himself notes later on in the documentary, filming becomes an increasingly dangerous act.
The new "patriotic" curriculum begins to take precedence over regular classes, and some of the teachers complain that their students are beginning to fall behind in their regular coursework. The students write letters of support to the Russian soldiers killing Ukrainians. They practice military drills in school hallways. They are taught to throw grenades. Wagner mercenaries visit to lecture the students on how to recognize mines and survive gunshot wounds.
Teachers are made to read scripts prepared by the state. They stumble over phrases like "denazification" and "demilitarization." In one darkly funny scene, Talankin calls a teacher from behind the camera to start over, and implies that her lack of ability to pronounce such words means she herself doesn't understand what "knowledge" she is imparting to the children. The awkwardness is revealing. These are not meant to be lessons. They are loyalty tests — ritualized words meant not to persuade, but to enforce submission.
On the one hand, it shows the world that this is not just Putin’s war. On the other hand, it shows how the fear of the masses enables it.
What matters is not whether people believe it, though. Most of the teachers recognize the absurdity of it all, but they fall silent when Talankin suggests in the teacher's lounge that they just stop implementing the new curriculum. They all know refusal carries professional, social, and even legal consequences. And so they comply. They nod, they read the scripts through uncomfortable laughs and awkward smiles, and they oversee the military drills.
There are true believers among the faculty, among them a history teacher who praises Joseph Stalin's executioners
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Nobody cares.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Pro-Kremlin social media accounts are using the latest Jeffrey Epstein files to bolster efforts to spread baseless claims that Russia has saved Ukrainian children from sex trafficking, research by AFP and a London-based think-tank showed Thursday.
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