Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 983 of 1104
Moscow accused France and the U.K. of seeking to provide Ukraine with nuclear arms.
Offering no evidence, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claimed on Feb. 24 that the "British and French elite" are helping Kyiv acquire nuclear weapons technology and delivery systems to secure "more favorable terms" in peace talks.
Fact-check: Russia pushes nuclear claims to derail peace talks, distract from war anniversary
By Martin Fornusek | February 24, 2026 7:48 PM
https://kyivindependent.com/fact-check-russia-pushes-nuclear-claims-to
-derail-peace-talks-distract-from-war-anniversary/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:This thread works fine
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
You may need to start a new thread here SOCOND?
T
Agreed. No reason to split this up into 10 other threads when we can keep all of your embarrassing post history on this topic right here.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What is Putin hiding? 115 Russian statistics suddenly go dark
By Kathrine Frich | Feb 24, 2026
https://www.dagens.com/war/what-is-putin-hiding-115-russian-statistics
-suddenly-go-dark
... according to Ukrainian intelligence officials.. Kyiv now claims ... Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) says ... According to the agency ... The Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistics System reportedly ... The SVR claims ... Information on social benefit payments has also reportedly ... The Ukrainian intelligence service further alleges ...
According to the SVR ...
Officials in Kyiv argue ...
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Ukraine learned four things in four years of war. You won’t like any of them.
We know because we lived it.
By Euromaidan Press Staff
24/02/2026
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/02/24/four-years-of-war-taught-ukrain
e-four-things-you-wont-like-any-of-them/
1. Russia won't stop—and negotiations are how it buys time.
Russia has signed 26 ceasefires with Ukraine. It has violated all 26. It is a strategy. Putin applies the playbook of Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko: stall, demand the impossible, blame the other side, rearm while the world talks.
The only thing that has ever made Russia retreat has been military force. History has no example of an unconfronted aggressor stopping on its own. Rhineland led to Austria led to Sudetenland led to Poland. Chechnya led to Georgia led to Crimea led to Donbas led to the full-scale invasion.
A bully only stops when somebody stops him.
2. Russia can be stopped—but not for free
Russia came with the world's supposedly second-strongest army. We forced it to retreat from Kyiv. We drove it out of Kharkiv Oblast. We made it abandon Kherson—the only regional capital it ever captured. Ukraine had no navy—Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is gone, anyway. It has suffered 1.2 million casualties for 11% of our territory. We destroyed one-third of its nuclear-capable bomber fleet in a single operation. No retaliation came.
Russia is beatable. But stopping evil costs money, weapons, political courage. It costs blood—people willing to put their lives on the line for freedom. Ukrainians are already paying that price. The question is whether the rest of the world will share it, or keep hoping the problem goes away while Ukrainians do the dying.
Experts in Norway did the math: equipping Ukraine to win costs Europe roughly half of what a Russian victory would.
The uncomfortable truth is that for four years, the West has chosen not to.
3. The red lines are in your head.
Leopards were "escalatory." They weren't.
ATACMS were "escalatory." They weren't.
F-16s were "escalatory." They weren't.
Striking inside Russia was "escalatory." It wasn't.
Every Western red line was imaginary—fed by Russian threats designed to trigger exactly that paralysis.
A senior European official admitted it at GLOBSEC: "We are good at deterrence, but even better at self-deterrence."
Estonia's Defense Ministry put it bluntly in 2023: the fear of escalation is "unnecessarily high," and drip-feeding Ukraine aid doesn't create a strategy—it merely drags the war out "at an immense cost, primarily for Ukraine." Lithuania's foreign minister asked why NATO is protecting Russian bombers better than it is protecting Ukrainian civilians.
The logic is perverse. The West chose four years of half-measures to avoid a nuclear threat that Russia has never acted on, despite Moscow’s repeated threats.
And what did caution buy? A destroyed energy grid. Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. The deadliest year for Ukrainian civilians since the full-scale invasion began. And a precedent every dictator is studying: threaten nuclear war, and democracies will let you grind your neighbor to dust at a pace they can tolerate.
4. Russia wants you to think this is only about Ukraine.
Firebombs at DHL hubs in Leipzig and Birmingham. A German navy ship sabotaged in Hamburg. Five Dutch rail lines hit during the NATO summit. Sabotage attacks in Europe tripled in a single year. These weren't random. Russia is rehearsing.
Four years of fighting us taught Russia priceless lessons: exactly where NATO breaks. Which leaders fold. How many months the debate takes. That 32 nations will argue themselves into paralysis while drones fly every night.
Now imagine we fall. Russia absorbs our defense industry, our resources, and the most combat-hardened army in Europe. Thirty-seven million Ukrainians learn that the West watched them be erased rather than act. Who fights for you then?
Our po
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Hungary’s Orbán stakes his reelection on anti-Ukraine message
By Justin Spike | February 25, 2026
https://apnews.com/article/hungary-orban-anti-ukraine-campaign-electio
n-2f729cf3694dc06fb8bc564c123c80e2
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Facing tough odds in an upcoming election, Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister is trying to convince voters that the greatest threat to the country is not economic stagnation — the focus of his top opponent — but neighboring Ukraine.
Viktor Orbán is running an aggressive media campaign replete with disinformation whose central message is that Hungarians should refuse to align with the rest of Europe in supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. That path, he argues, risks bankrupting the country and getting its youth killed on the front lines.
Billboards erected across the country show AI-generated images of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy flanked by European officials, holding out his hand as if demanding money. It’s a not-so-subtle reference to the European Union’s efforts to help Ukraine financially and bolster its defenses as the war enters its fifth year.
“Our message to Brussels: We won’t pay!” the publicly funded billboards read.
Orbán, who retook office in 2010, faces the strongest challenge to his power in an election set for April 12. The EU’s longest-serving leader and his right-wing Fidesz party are trailing in most independent polls to an upstart center-right challenger, Péter Magyar. His rise was aided by political scandals that have damaged the credibility of Orbán’s party; a presidential pardon given to an accomplice in a child sexual abuse case led to a public outcry, prompting the president and justice minister to resign.
Orbán and Fidesz have sought to change the conversation. They have blanketed the country with taxpayer-funded billboards, as well as advertisements on radio, television and social media. A petition mailed to every Hungarian of voting age claimed the EU’s plans to help Ukraine financially would bring economic ruin.
In a video Fidesz released on social media last week, a little girl asks her forlorn mother: “Mommy, when is daddy coming home?” In the next frame, the fictional father — bound, blindfolded and kneeling on a muddy battlefield — is approached by a [Ukrainian] soldier and shot in the head.
Much more at https://apnews.com/article/hungary-orban-anti-ukraine-campaign-electio
n-2f729cf3694dc06fb8bc564c123c80e2
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Declining birth rates could spell economic disaster
Feb 24 2026
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/russia-ukraine-birth-rate-fertility-ra
te-war-women-children-demographics-economy.html
In 2021, Ukraine’s total fertility rate stood at 1.22 but this has since dropped to 1.00 in 2025, according to United Nations population data. Some have cited a more dire metric, with the First Lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska, warning in December that the fertility rate in the country had plunged to 0.8–0.9 children per woman, with the war and insecurity across Ukraine causing this “critical decline.”
For a society to replace itself from one generation to the next, without relying on migration, a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman is necessary.
Russia, too, has also seen a longer-term trend downwards in its fertility rate exacerbated by the war. In 2021, Russia’s fertility rate was 1.51 but by 2025, it had dropped to 1.37 children per woman, down from 1.4 recorded the year before.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ukraine Battlefield Dead Could Reach 500,000 in Fifth Year, Estimates Suggest
Russia has lost as many as 325,000 troops, according to some estimates, with more than 200,000 deaths verified by researchers.
By Paul Sonne and Constant Méheut | Feb. 24, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/world/europe/ukraine-war-deaths.htm
l
Paul Sonne reported from Berlin, and Constant Méheut from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Even as President Vladimir V. Putin hails Russia’s advances on the battlefield, four years into his invasion of Ukraine, his force has suffered perhaps the worst losses any major power has seen in a conflict since World War II.
There is little sign that the conflict is getting any less deadly, as Ukraine looks to harness new battlefield technology to raise the cost of Russia’s gains. Estimates suggest that the death toll for the entire war among both Russian and Ukrainian fighters could rise beyond half a million this year, with deaths adding up particularly on the advancing Russian side. By some counts, the toll could even have already topped that figure.
The number of soldiers killed in the war remains a heavily guarded secret on both sides, as Moscow and Kyiv aim to avoid projecting weakness.
Some estimates indicate that Ukraine has lost more soldiers as a proportion of its wartime population than Russia has, even if Russian losses have been far larger overall. Estimates put the number of Russian troops killed at more than five times the losses that the U.S. military suffered during the Vietnam War.
Journalists from the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service published new results on Tuesday of their effort, dating to the early months of the invasion, to compile the number of Russian soldiers who have died. Their count is based on verified names in obituaries, cemetery burials, social media reports from relatives, probate records and other Russian state data.
https://en.zona.media/article/2026/02/24/casualties_eng-trl
The outlets updated their tally of verified Russian deaths to 200,186 but emphasized that the figure “remains a conservative floor, not a ceiling.” They identified nearly 27,000 Russian cities, towns and villages that sent soldiers to Ukraine who were ultimately killed.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, based in Washington, recently said that Russia had suffered up to 325,000 deaths on the battlefield. The number appears to be a reasonable projection, given the confirmed numbers from Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service, which do not fully capture battlefield deaths from 2025 and 2026.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine
“No major power has suffered anywhere near these number of casualties since the Second World War,” said Seth Jones, a co-author of the C.S.I.S. study, noting that one exception could be Chinese losses during the Korean War, though estimates from that conflict vary widely. “It is just short of shocking.”
The center’s study estimated the number of wounded and killed on the Russian side, often referred to together as casualties, to be as many as 1.2 million.
On Tuesday, Mr. Putin marked the fourth anniversary of the war with a speech to the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B. He said that the Russian intelligence service needed to do more to protect the Russian homeland from Ukrainian attacks. A day earlier, Mr. Putin met with widows of fallen soldiers at the Kremlin.
In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered an address highlighting Ukrainians’ perseverance, hosted senior European leaders in Kyiv, and visited a makeshift memorial in the capital’s central square, where he said he hoped that President Trump would visit the country to see its suffering.
The authorities in Ukraine, like Russian officials, have been secretive about army losses. Ukraine has restricted access to demographic data that could help estimate the number of Ukrainians killed in action, and it has released casualty figures in the tens of thousands that most observers consider understated.
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Prosecutor details scandal rocking Ukraine's defense
February 25, 2026
https://english.nv.ua/nation/ukraine-detains-air-force-logistics-chief
-in-aircraft-shelter-corruption-probe-50586999.html
As Ukrainska Pravda reported on Feb. 25, authorities detained the commander of logistics for the Ukrainian Air Force, Col. Andrii Ukrainets, and the head of the SBU directorate in Zhytomyr Oblast, Col. Volodymyr Kompanichenko.
In May 2025, 1.4 billion hryvnias were allocated to build prefabricated arched shelters. Inspections later found that the projects did not meet safety standards, the shelters failed to protect aircraft adequately, and the cost of the work was significantly inflated.
Despite those findings, advance payments under the contracts were transferred.
The Air Force logistics commander approached the head of the SBU directorate to conceal the embezzlement of budget funds and halt inspections.
He asked to “facilitate” the bribery of the leadership of military counterintelligence.
According to investigators, the officials proposed transferring about 13 million hryvnias — 1% of the project financing — in exchange for concealing the misappropriation of budget funds. They also planned to involve “loyal” auditors to prepare fictitious reports on the quality of construction.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Pokrovsk has likely fallen, yet Russian momentum stalls — ISW
February 26, 2026, 02:38 AM
https://english.nv.ua/russian-war/pokrovsk-falls-to-russia-but-kremlin
-fails-to-exploit-its-capture-50587178.html
The slow, agonizingly expensive capture of Pokrovsk — a city far smaller than the "fortress belt" strongholds of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk — serves as a grim omen for the Russian army. Their inability to exploit this "victory" exposes the fragility of the Kremlin's claim that the rest of the Donbas will fall quickly or easily.
Major Hryhoriy Shapoval, spokesperson for the Eastern troops grouping, said on Feb. 25 that eight key settlements in the Pokrovsk direction remain under full Ukrainian control.
These include Sukhetske, Suvorove, Nykanorivka, Dorozhne, Ivanivka, Nove Shakhover, Novyi Donbas, and Vilne.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ukraine Is Losing the War
With Moscow Pressing Its Advantage, Kyiv Should Trade Land for Peace
Michael C. Desch
February 26, 2026
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/ukraine-losing-war
MICHAEL C. DESCH is Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations at the University of Notre Dame and founding Brian and Jeannelle Brady Family Director of the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center.
Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration is pressing Kyiv to agree to painful territorial concessions as the price for peace. In a draft peace agreement first reported by Axios in November, the administration proposed that the entire regions of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk be recognized as de facto Russian territory and that Russia retain control of the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia its forces now occupy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing back, refusing to do anything that would violate his country’s territorial integrity. Yet the realities of the battlefield are not on his side.
Ukraine has been putting up valiant resistance, but its determination cannot disguise the fact that it is losing the war. Russia controls a large swath of Ukrainian territory, and Kyiv has little chance of dislodging it, as Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive in 2023 demonstrated. To be sure, recent Russian gains have come very slowly and at significant cost; over the last three years, Russia has taken a mere one percent of additional Ukrainian territory. But that does not change the reality that Russia now holds almost a fifth of the land within Ukraine’s 1991 borders—or that Russia’s greater resources and population mean that Moscow can fight on for years to come. Overcoming those Russian advantages and clawing back lost land on the battlefield would require time and investment that Ukraine doesn’t have. Current circumstances are therefore pushing Kyiv toward a compromise peace—one that will necessarily include the surrender of Ukrainian territory.
FALLING BEHIND
Judging by sheer numbers, the trajectory of the war does not favor Ukraine. The rates of battlefield losses on each side are one example. The Russian media outlet Mediazona tracks Russian military deaths using social media, obituaries, and official government notices and provides the most reliable estimates. (Estimates by Western intelligence agencies vary dramatically and often correlate with government policy preferences.) As of the end of 2025, Mediazona’s analysts identified 156,151 Russians who have been killed in the war and, because not every death is publicly reported, used population data to estimate a total of 219,000 dead. The Ukrainian nongovernmental organization UA Losses, employing a similar methodology, has reported 87,045 Ukrainians killed in action and 85,906 missing in action, a figure that likely includes unacknowledged deaths and desertions.
Although Ukraine is suffering fewer losses in absolute terms, the war is depleting a greater proportion of its manpower. Ukraine’s population today is just under 36 million, which is about 26 percent of Russia’s population of 140 million. Ukraine has just under 9.5 million men between the ages of 25 and 54, and it has lost between one and two percent of that cohort. For Russia, which has a little over 30.2 million men in the same age group, somewhat higher losses account for just 0.5 to 0.7 percent of the total. Ultimately, Russia, with its much larger population, can sustain larger total losses than Ukraine can.
Moreover, Russia is fighting mostly with contract soldiers—people who have volunteered—and keeping conscripts away from the front. The result is more motivated Russian soldiers. So far, Moscow is not having much trouble meeting recruitment needs. Ukraine, in contrast, relies heavily on conscription. Recent recruitment shortfalls and desertions have prompted increasingly draconian efforts to meet conscription a goal of 30,000 men per month. These include “busification,” the practice of grabbing men off the street and taking them in minivans
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