Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 1030 of 1104
Besides Ukraine, Putin has a second obsession revealed by the Wall Street Journal
Inside Putin’s $26 Billion Quest for Longevity
From mini-pigs and organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia's president has turned anti-aging research into a Kremlin priority
By Bojan Pancevski | May 28, 2026 8:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/putin-longevity-antiaging-92dee6e8
WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN was captured by a hot mic telling Xi Jinping that humans could achieve immortality by replacing their organs, some dismissed the exchange as eccentric small talk between aging autocrats.
In fact, during the conversation at a Beijing military parade last September, Putin appeared to be describing a Kremlin-backed longevity initiative that has become one of Russia’s flagship scientific projects.
Like Silicon Valley billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, Putin has long been fascinated with antiaging research. But in Russia, Putin’s quest to stave off decline is now a state priority relying on methods as wide-ranging as organ printing, harvesting mini-pigs and exposure to ultralow temperatures.
Last month, Russia’s government announced that scientists are developing a gene-therapy treatment aimed at slowing cellular aging as part of “New Health Preservation Technologies,” Putin’s $26 billion longevity initiative.
The drug “represents one of the most promising avenues in the fight against aging,” Deputy Science Minister Denis Sekirinsky said on April 23.
Another auspicious avenue? Creating human organs in a lab for transplantation, one of the lifespan-extending innovations Putin likewise spoke about in Beijing. All these efforts are part of the national longevity initiative he unveiled in 2024, which promises to save 175,000 lives by the end of the decade (the figure had an awkward wartime echo, roughly matching independent estimates of Russian troop losses in the invasion of Ukraine, as critics noted at the time).
Russian state scientists appointed by Putin have focused on two key technologies: bioprinting, or 3D-printing living tissue, and xenotransplantation, or growing human organs inside mini-pigs, a porcine breed deemed genetically compatible to humans. Russian scientists working with government agencies claim to have bioprinted human cartilage tissue and a mouse thyroid gland, with the aim of achieving human organ replacement by 2030. A similar timeline has been discussed for growing organs inside pigs.
"In the Russian Federation, work is under way on a whole range of scientific programs in this field,” the Kremlin press service said in an email. “These projects are supported by the state, and many scientific and research institutions are taking part in them.”
Russia’s longevity initiative is spearheaded by two figures close to Putin: his daughter Maria Vorontsova, an endocrinologist overseeing state-backed genetics programs, and physicist Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Kurchatov Institute, the Soviet-era nuclear research center.
Kovalchuk—the brother of Putin’s close ally Yuri Kovalchuk, a banker and media investor—has become the intellectual architect of the Kremlin's longevity drive. He has argued that science will soon allow humans to repair and replace body parts indefinitely.
“It is difficult to discuss immortality, but the ability to repair man will undoubtedly increase,” Kovalchuk told Russian media.
Unlike similar research funded by Bezos, Altman or Thiel, the work promoted by Putin’s circle has produced little peer-reviewed research in major international journals.
“If there are no publications, then there are no real results, and their statements should probably be taken as aspirations, not to say dreams,” said Alexander Ostrovskiy, a Russian scientist who pioneered bioprinting in the country.
Ostrovskiy left Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and sold his company, which now collaborates with the government. "It’s impossible to do science in isolation,” Ostrovskiy
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Analysis: How Ukraine's new middle strike drone campaign aims to strangle Russian logistics
By Jimmy Rushton
May 31, 2026 10:33 AM
https://kyivindependent.com/analysis-how-ukraines-new-middle-strike-dr
one-campaign-aims-to-strangle-russian-logistics/
"One of the key questions is how does Russia respond?" The Russian military would have to dedicate more air defense systems to address the Ukrainian threat. "If Russia can't develop effective countermeasures, then this year is going to become more difficult as it goes on."
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 SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
“Altered or synthetic content"
Yeah, no shit!
THUGR:
"Altered or synthetic content"
Sad, just sad...
Yep!
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Yup, the video was altered; it was edited dummy. Anyway, here's another update comrade.
T
Crimea Cut from Supplies
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If Putin Dies, the Ukraine War May Die With Him
By Harry J. Kazianis | May 31, 2026
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/if-putin-dies-the-ukraine-war-may-
die-with-him/
The Men Who Would Inherit The War
The field of potential successors tells you a great deal about whether the war would continue, because almost every serious contender is a product of the same security apparatus that produced Putin and shares his worldview.
The war has increased the likelihood that any successor will come from the ranks of the siloviki, the security and intelligence bosses, much as Putin himself was elevated during the second Chechen war.
The name that recurs most often is Nikolai Patrushev, the former FSB chief and longtime Security Council figure, whom the former British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove has identified as the most likely person to replace Putin. Patrushev is, if anything, more hawkish than Putin. He has described the war in Ukraine as a direct military confrontation between Russia and NATO and accused the West of trying to erase Russia from the map.
A Patrushev succession would almost certainly mean continuity of the war, not its end. His advanced age, a year older than Putin’s, may count against him, but his son Dmitry, a deputy prime minister who has built a rapid career and regularly attends Kremlin meetings, has increasingly been floated as a generational alternative who carries the family’s hardline lineage forward.
Other names span the Russian power structure. Newsweek’s roster of possible successors has included Aleksey Dyumin, Sergey Kiriyenko, Dmitry Patrushev, the elder Patrushev, and Alexander Bortnikov, each representing a different faction from the Kremlin administration to the security services. Dyumin, a former Putin bodyguard who helped seize Crimea in 2014, has risen quickly.
Mishustin, the man the constitution would actually elevate first, is the rare contender who was reportedly skeptical of the invasion. Still, he is not close enough to Putin to be an obvious long-term choice. He has built no independent power base, which would leave him dependent on the presidential administration and vulnerable to challenge the moment he tried to act on his own. The strongest contender, analysts caution, may not be the one with the broadest appeal but the one most capable of intimidating rivals and securing elite loyalty in the scramble that a sudden vacancy would create.
Much more at https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/if-putin-dies-the-ukraine-war-may-
die-with-him/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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1. Speaking in an interview with Face the Nation on May 31, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had sent a letter to the White House and US Congress asking for licenses that would allow Ukraine to expand Patriot missile production.
Zelenskyy urged the United States to let Ukraine produce Patriot interceptor missiles, warning that current US output is far too low as Russia ramps up ballistic missile production.
“60–65 anti-ballistic missiles per month, compared to current challenges, is nothing. It is no secret, and Russia knows this. We need to expand the production. I asked the previous US administration, and I am asking today’s administration to give Ukraine licenses to produce Patriot missiles,” Zelenskyy said.
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/zelenskyy-says-60-65-patriot-
missiles-a-month-is-nothing-asks-us-to-let-ukraine-produce-them-19354
The US allows Poland to produce Patriot missiles amid shortages for Ukraine
Tue, May 26, 2026 - 18:00
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/us-allows-poland-to-produce-patriot-mi
ssiles-1779805685.html
_____________________________________________________
2. You can see the stupidity of Biden in this 2022 article. (Note that Biden eventually reversed himself and allowed Ukraine to have Patriot missiles.)
March 10, 2022 - Pentagon officials will not send the advanced Patriot air-defense system to Ukraine, saying Thursday that U.S. forces would need to enter Ukraine to operate it, which is a non-starter for the Biden administration.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2022/03/why-us-wont-give-patriot-in
terceptors-ukraine/363042/
_____________________________________________________
3. Google AI summarized Biden’s bullshit reasons for not allowing Ukraine to build Patriot missiles:
The Biden Administration did not grant Ukraine a license to build Patriot missiles and systems due to security risks, intellectual property protection, and infrastructure vulnerabilities. The U.S. government cited major concerns about safeguarding highly classified defense technology and preventing manufacturing facilities from becoming direct military targets during the ongoing conflict. Key factors influencing the decision:
• Technology Security: The Patriot system contains heavily guarded, state-of-the-art radar and interceptor technology. The U.S. restricts foreign co-production to trusted allies to prevent this sensitive intellectual property from being compromised or reverse-engineered if a facility were overrun.
• Vulnerability to Attack: Building a complex, long-range air defense system requires large-scale, permanent manufacturing plants. Given the constant threat of Russian missile and drone strikes across Ukraine, ensuring the security and stability of such critical infrastructure was deemed unfeasible.
• Geopolitical Escalation: The administration sought to avoid measures that could directly entangle the U.S. or NATO in the conflict or that the Kremlin might interpret as a significant escalation of direct Western involvement.
Instead of localized production in Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies prioritized rapidly transferring completed systems and interceptors to Ukraine, while expanding joint-production agreements with more secure international partners like Japan and Germany.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Comrade, more bad news for you to call fake. Let's see after 30 days as he said in the video. I'll remind you; the altered content is most likely the video look and nothing more.
tick tock tick tock
T
Ukraine Just CUT Russia's Last Supply Line — 80,000 Soldiers Have No Way Out | Ben Hodges
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Oh good. The war is finally over. That's nice. 
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Ukraine Turns the Tide
Why a Cease-Fire Is Now a Real Possibility
By Jack Watling | June 1, 2026
Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London and the author of Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ukraine-turns-tide
The war in Ukraine has reached a turning point. Since the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, Russia’s full-scale invasion settled into a predictable rhythm of summer and winter offensives, between which the pressure of attacks would ease while Russian units rotated and regrouped. At first glance, this year looks no different. With spring edging into summer, Ukrainian troops in their dugouts along the front are once again seeing the steady rise of Russian strikes and attempted infiltrations. The mood among Ukrainian commanders, however, has changed. Russian attacks are putting less pressure on their units than they did in previous years. Although drone strikes and shelling remain constant, Russian combat performance is waning. In Kyiv, there is a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire.
Ukraine’s mood shift is not the result of a radical transformation of how the war is being fought but rather stems from a subtle turn in several trends that together point to a major change in the war’s trajectory. For all of 2024 and most of 2025, Russia was able to recruit more soldiers than it was losing, such that Russian forces could increase the intensity of assaults on Ukrainian units even as they suffered high casualties themselves. Ukraine, by contrast, was suffering slightly more casualties than it could offset with new troops, with defensive lines getting thinner and thinner every month. In Moscow, this led to a complacent belief that, even if progress was slow, the Russian military would eventually occupy the entirety of the Donbas, the contested region in eastern Ukraine that Russia laid claim to in 2022. At some point, the Kremlin believed, its gains would accelerate, as international support for Ukraine dried up and as Ukraine struggled to find the combat troops to hold the breadth of the front. This led Moscow to adopt an intransigent stance in negotiations brokered by the United States following the reelection of Donald Trump. If talks failed, after all, the Kremlin anticipated getting what it wanted on the battlefield.
Russia, however, is no longer on an inexorable path to achieving even its minimal military objective of securing the Donbas. As Ukraine manages to make gains along the frontline and frustrates Russian offensives, and as the Russian military increasingly feels the strain of the war and the deterioration of its combat power, what has long seemed so implausible has become more likely. Kyiv and its partners could convince Moscow that a cease-fire is its best option.
UKRAINIAN REVIVAL
Over the last two years, Ukrainian commanders have been hampered by dwindling manpower. Monthly casualties exceeded the number of personnel dispatched to combat units from training centers. The inability of units to rotate, allowing soldiers breaks from combat duty, led to exhaustion among the infantry. Ukraine has been able to mobilize some 30,000 new soldiers a month, but fewer than half of these troops tend to make it to the front. Many were not medically fit for service in battle. Others were demoralized by the poor standard of training provided.
Troops become significantly less effective if required to remain more than 40 consecutive days in the combat zone, according to a study performed by the office of the Inspector General of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Rotating troops, however, has been dangerous, as soldiers moving back and forth from positions on the frontline became vulnerable to enemy drones and artillery. As a result, soldiers have spent more than 200 consecutive days in the combat zone. This has led to fatigue within brigades and a perception that service is a one-way ticket to the infirmary or the morgue, encouraging new recrui
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EU's last shipyard servicing Russian LNG fleet may repair 6 vessels before ban, report says
By Tim Zadorozhnyy | June 1, 2026 12:24 pm
https://kyivindependent.com/eus-last-shipyard-servicing-russian-lng-fl
eet-may-repair-up-to-6-vessels-before-ban-report-says/
The Danish shipyard Fayard, the last EU shipyard still servicing Russian Arctic liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers, could repair up to six Russia-linked vessels before new EU restrictions take effect, according to a report by environmental and sanctions-monitoring NGO Urgewald.
The vessels play a key role in sustaining exports from Russia's Yamal LNG project, one of the country's most important gas export hubs.
Despite the Danish government's opposition to the tankers, Urgewald's analysis, shared with the Kyiv Independent on June 1, suggests that as many as six of the fleet's 15 Arc7 ice-class LNG carriers may require maintenance this summer.
The estimate relies on historical servicing patterns showing that vessels operating in harsh Arctic conditions typically undergo major repairs approximately every three years.
According to the report, based on vessel-tracking data from Kpler, each of the six vessels has transported an average of 5.3 million metric tons of Russian LNG since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Urgewald estimates the market value of those cargoes at roughly 4 billion euros ($4.6 billion) per vessel. Over their operational lifetimes, the six tankers have carried Russian LNG worth an estimated 32 billion euros ($37 billion).
Alexander Kirk, a sanctions campaigner at Urgewald, urged Fayard to end its cooperation with the vessels.
"Fayard should stop benefitting from this business," he said. "This is not routine ship repair. Every Arc7 tanker serviced in Denmark could help prolong Russian Arctic LNG exports for years and send millions more back to the Kremlin."
Campaigners argue that repairing the vessels before the restrictions take effect could allow them to continue generating revenue for Russia even as Europe moves to tighten sanctions on Russian gas exports and supporting infrastructure.
The EU's restrictions on maritime services for Russian LNG projects are part of a broader strategy to phase out imports of Russian gas beginning next year, a move expected to further reduce activity at the Yamal LNG facility.
The maritime services ban for LNG tankers operating in Russia is scheduled to enter into force in 2027. Analysts say this summer could represent Russia's final opportunity to service Arc7 vessels at European shipyards before the restrictions take effect.
Svitlana Romanko, founder and executive director of Razom We Stand, called on Danish companies to align their business practices with Denmark's support for Ukraine.
"Denmark has been a strong supporter of Ukraine, and Danish companies should reflect that sentiment," she said. "Fayard should not undermine solidarity with Ukraine and must now refuse to service vessels connected to Russian Arctic LNG."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Russian monthly territorial gains slip into negative for first time since 2023, DeepState reports
By Jimmy Rushton, Asami Terajima | June 1, 2026 7:36 pm
https://kyivindependent.com/russian-monthly-territorial-gains-slip-int
o-negative-for-first-time-since-2023-deepstate-reports/
Ukraine has gained more territory than Russia occupied over the same period in May, pushing overall Russian advances into the negative for the first time since 2023, Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState reported on June 1.
This is despite the group's public map showing a Russian advance of 14 square kilometers (5.4 square miles) in May, due to the delay in publicly acknowledging advances by the Ukrainian military amid security concerns, according to DeepState.
"According to our map, in May the enemy occupied only 14 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory," DeepState posted on Telegram, adding that "for security reasons, we show the advance of the Defense Forces of Ukraine with a delay."
Due to this lag in updating their map, DeepState claimed that "this is the first month in recent years after the 'Counteroffensive 2023' when the increase in the occupied territory for the Russians became negative."
"Russia typically advances faster in the late spring-fall, but we aren't seeing an increase in the rate of advance," Rob Lee, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on the Russian military, told the Kyiv Independent.
"It is important because the seasons have already changed and Russian advances have not increased."
DeepState said in the same Telegram post that the reverses Russia suffered came despite a significant increase in Russian assault actions, which jumped up by 37.5% in May.
Considering the majority of Russian assault troopers are killed or severely wounded during assaults, Russian casualties likely increased as well.
The first non-government report on the Russian advances underperforming Ukraine's battlefield gains in a month since 2023 comes as Kyiv slowly begins to create conditions to turn the tide in its favor, launching counterattacks over the past half a year and honing its deep-strike capabilities inside Russia.
Tracking battlefield gains, however, has become an immense challenge for both government and independent observers, with estimates of liberated and occupied territory varying across sources.
DeepState's report clashes with earlier claims made by Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who claimed that Ukraine liberated more territories in February than Russia had occupied over the same period.
Syrskyi's claim came as Ukraine launched a surprise counterattack on the border of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts in the southeast at the end of January. Ukrainian units fighting there told the Kyiv Independent that they were able to advance further in the first weeks in the high-stakes operation that caught the Russian military off guard, but making progress in later months has become much more difficult since Russia reinforced the area with more effective drone units.
With the "gray zone" — the contested forefront part of the battlefield that neither side controls — constantly expanding and shrinking, tracking advances and territorial losses has become more difficult than ever in the current drone-dominated phase of the war. Infiltrations from both sides are constant, obscuring front line boundaries.
Russia hasn't been able to gain "any real momentum" in its spring offensive and has failed to capture similar amounts of territory in recent months to what it occupied over the same period in previous years, retired Australian Army Major-General Mick Ryan said.
But he stressed that the second half of the year, particularly the fall months, would show how much Ukraine has improved its military effectiveness in 2026, as that period tends to see the fiercest fighting.
"I would say that there's a glimmer that a turning point might be coming bec
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