Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 1058 of 1104
Quote:Wow! Time for a sports analogy from the Indianapolis 500! The race between Ukraine and Russia is at the halfway point. Since Team Ukraine and Team Russia are on the same lap, Team Ukraine is "winning" and doesn't need to stop for refueling or tire changes, which cost money. It is time to send the Ukrainian teams' pit crews home for a well-deserved weekend of rest. The Ukrainian race cars can now cruise to a guaranteed victory from here without ever stopping for the next 250 miles for fuel or maintenance.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Touche.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nah. They're winning. They don't need any more money. Figure it out.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Logic was never SECOND'S strong suit.
Quote:
An Indy 500 race car typically stops for fuel 5 to 8 times during the 200-lap race. Because the fuel tanks hold roughly 18.5 gallons, a car can only run about 30 to 35 laps per tank, making multiple refueling stops a mandatory requirement to cover the 500-mile distance.
A precise breakdown of the variables shaping pit stops includes:
• Stint Length: Drivers can complete between 30 and 45 laps on a single tank of gas. The exact number of laps depends on engine mapping, track temperatures, and whether they are "saving fuel" to stretch their stint.
• Total Time: An ideal pit stop takes roughly 7 seconds, during which crews replenish the 18.5-gallon fuel tank, swap all four tires, and make aerodynamic wing adjustments.
• Caution Flag Impacts: The exact number of stops frequently shifts because of full-course cautions. Pitting under a caution flag costs significantly less track time than doing so under green flag conditions, forcing teams to constantly adapt their refueling strategies.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Russian forces seized or infiltrated 30.42 square kilometers in June 2026 and advanced or infiltrated at an average pace of 1.01 square kilometers per day. Russian forces comparatively seized 481.25 square kilometers in June 2025, advancing at an average pace of 16.04 square kilometers per day.
Russian forces therefore reportedly suffered around 1,298 casualties per square kilometer they seized or infiltrated in June 2026. Russian forces comparatively suffered 32,680 casualties in June 2025, an average of 68 casualties per kilometer taken.[4] Russian forces suffered over 19 times more casualties per kilometer in June 2026 compared to June 2025 . . .
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive
-campaign-assessment-july-1-2026/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Wow! Time for a sports analogy from the Indianapolis 500! The race between Ukraine and Russia is at the halfway point. Since Team Ukraine and Team Russia are on the same lap, Team Ukraine is "winning" and doesn't need to stop for refueling or tire changes, which cost money. It is time to send the Ukrainian teams' pit crews home for a well-deserved weekend of rest. The Ukrainian race cars can now cruise to a guaranteed victory from here without ever stopping for the next 250 miles for fuel or maintenance.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Touche.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nah. They're winning. They don't need any more money. Figure it out.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Logic was never SECOND'S strong suit.
If they can't win the war on their own, fuck 'em. Nobody gives a single fuck if they run out of fuel.
All I keep hearing out of you two fucking idiots is that they're winning.
You don't need any money then. Go fuck yourself, Zelensky. And stop raping kids.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I don't mind telling you that Trump has been credibly accused of being a pedophile. And also a tax cheater. Like his heroic Trump, 6ixStringJoker doesn't pay income tax, but he doesn't even have to cheat to not pay, unlike Trump. Being angry, poor white trash who cheat is the natural condition of Trump voters.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If they can't win the war on their own, fuck 'em. Nobody gives a single fuck if they run out of fuel.
All I keep hearing out of you two fucking idiots is that they're winning.
You don't need any money then. Go fuck yourself, Zelensky. And stop raping kids.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance [to Trump's tunes] always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Ukraine can win the battles. Without the word “victory,” it loses the war.
NATO’s former deputy commander says no one but Ukraine names victory as the goal. Ukraine’s former defense minister warns that without naming it, even a battlefield win is no victory at all.
By Alya Shandra | July 2, 2026
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/07/02/ukraine-can-win-the-battles-wit
hout-the-word-victory-it-loses-the-war/
Sir Richard Shirreff has spent a decade being right about Russia and ignored for it. So when NATO's former deputy supreme commander told Euromaidan Press at the GLOBSEC conference that no one apart from Ukraine names the war's objective plainly—victory, meaning the defeat of Russia, with no lasting peace until it comes—we had to check to see precisely who.
What we found: across the people who run Western defense—the NATO Secretary General, the alliance's top soldiers, the leaders of its largest members—Shirreff is right. But there's a twist. The word was once spoken, loudly, at the very top, after Ukraine's inspirational 2022 counteroffensive. It has since drained out of the same mouths that used it—and it has not come back, even now, with deep strikes becoming so effective as to give Ukraine a realistic chance of retaking Crimea.
Occasionally, western officials slip into saying “Ukraine can win.” But it is always followed by “let’s negotiate a ceasefire.” It is never followed by “therefore, let’s make a plan so Ukraine will win.”
The gap between the premise and the conclusion is costing Ukraine the victory its soldiers are winning—because victory is a decision, not an outcome. Someone has to name the political end-state and hold to it. When no one does, the battlefield wins evaporate into a settlement that hands the loser what he could not take by force.
Admiral Rob Bauer, who chaired NATO's Military Committee through the war's first three years, told Euromaidan Press that if the West had armed Ukraine in 2022 as it eventually did, "you might have won." His explanation for why it didn't was not about Russian strength: "It was never formulated as, 'We're doing this so that Ukraine can win the war.'"
Whether this scenario repeats now depends on exactly that—whether victory is named as a goal.
The severed sentence, in one man
Nobody performs this better than Finland's President Alexander Stubb, and he did it in a single interview.
Speaking to the Swiss daily NZZ in early June, Stubb laid out the most detailed victory case any sitting leader has offered. The war, he said, has moved through three stages: "The first year of the war was about survival. The next three years were about resilience. Now it is a question of mathematics—battlefield mathematics." Then he did the math—35,000 Russian casualties a month against 27,000 recruits, a loss ratio gone from one-to-three to one-to-eight, Ukraine in April retaking more ground than it lost for the first time in the war.
His conclusion: Ukraine is in "a much stronger position on the battlefield today than at any time since the beginning of the conflict."
And the step he takes from it is not "so let us resource the win." It is: "I think we should talk to Putin." Why now? Because—his words—"you can only negotiate with the Russians when they are not in a position of power."
Read that twice. Stubb has just proven Ukraine holds the upper hand, and he converts the upper hand into a reason to open talks, not a reason to finish the job. The advantage becomes leverage for a ceasefire. It never becomes a mandate for victory. Even at his most bullish—at Munich in February he told Ukrainians "it seems to me that you will win this war" and that Putin "has suffered a strategic defeat"—the verb is descriptive.
Stubb exemplifies a pattern by Western officials. You may win, we'll grant you that. Never: we will make you win, and here is how.
The same NATO chair, the word gone
Stubb is one clever Finn. NATO
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Putin Is Slipping Into Delusion
The Russian dictator remains obsessed with his war in Ukraine but doesn’t seem to comprehend how badly it’s going.
By Simon Shuster | July 1, 2026, 10:12 AM ET
Simon Shuster has reported on armed conflicts and authoritarian regimes for nearly two decades. His best-selling book, The Showman, chronicles the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/putin-russia-ukr
aine-war/687753/
When things get dicey in Moscow, Vladimir Putin tends to drop out of sight for a while, retreating to one of his residences and canceling public events. Only his closest aides know how he spends his time during these absences, which can go on for days even in the middle of a national crisis. The Kremlin does its best to fill the vacant airtime on state TV with pretaped footage of the president, waiting for him to reemerge and declare that everything remains under his control.
Since the end of last year, when Ukraine intensified its campaign of drone and missile strikes on Russian cities, Putin has taken a few of these breaks. Two of them lasted for more than a week. He has mostly avoided talking about the Ukrainian strikes, even as they caused fuel shortages across Russia, destroyed infrastructure, and shattered the sense of stability that Putin offers his people in exchange for their loyalty. His first detailed response to the threat came on Monday, and he did his best to seem unmoved.
In a carefully scripted interview on state TV, Putin looked bored with the details of governing Russia and managing the frustrations of his citizens, but he did not appear tired of his war in Ukraine. He spent most of the 19-minute conversation with a Russian news anchor dissecting the minutiae of the fighting, even naming a particular street in one small town in the region of Donetsk where, according to Putin, his forces had managed to gain a bit of ground. The performance seemed designed to suggest that, away from the cameras, the Russian leader spends his time hunched over maps of the battlefield.
The Russian people, by contrast, have run out of patience with the war their leader seems so eager to continue. A survey released on the same day as Putin’s interview found that 81 percent of Russians want the war to end “as early as tomorrow.” The number of respondents who want the fighting to continue until Russia’s victory, no matter how long it takes, dropped in the survey to 9 percent, the lowest level ever recorded by the Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia, which has conducted 10 rounds of polling since the start of the war, in 2022.
Its most recent survey matched up with the images and complaints that have flooded Russian social networks in the past few weeks, showing long lines at gas stations in Moscow and trucks stalled without fuel on the roadside. “There’s no gasoline in the city,” one man posted from a suburb of Moscow. “And the TV is silent about it.”
If Putin cares about such problems, he has done a decent job of hiding it. “Everything is working stably and with a big reserve of strength,” he said in Monday’s interview, referring to the fuel shortages spreading through Russia. His tone reminded me of Putin’s attitude toward the war in Syria, where Russian forces intervened in 2015 to save the regime in Damascus from a revolution. Back then, Putin still held regular meetings in Moscow with Russian businesspeople and corporate executives, hearing out their concerns about high interest rates, slow economic growth, and other matters of concern for the state.
One of the regular guests at those meetings described to me how Putin had trouble sitting through them. Obviously distracted, he would fidget in his seat and doodle in his notebook. When the conversation turned to the subject of war, however, the president would come alive, describing the kinds of fighter jets Russia used to bombard rebel positions in Syria and naming towns with stubborn pockets of resistance. “This was his passion,” the businessman told me. “Nothing else interest
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The clock is ticking on Europe's gas: barely 4 months to fill storage tanks before winter
By Mykola Kolisnyk | July 2, 2026 9:19 PM
Head of the Generation Department at Naftogaz of Ukraine
https://kyivindependent.com/the-clock-is-ticking-on-europes-gas-barely
-four-months-to-fill-the-storages-before-winter/
With the Strait of Hormuz shut and storage only a third full, Europe has barely four months until Nov. 1 to refill its tanks before winter. And this year, for the first time since the 2022 crisis, the market alone will not do it.
Across Europe, gas is pumped during spring and summer into vast underground reservoirs, mostly depleted gas fields, then drawn back out in winter as households turn up the heating. These stores are the continent's buffer against a cold snap or a sudden loss of supply. Filling them has always been left to the market: traders buy gas cheaply in summer and sell it in winter, and they fill storage only when that price gap makes it worth their while.
That is why holding gas purely as a reserve has never been standard practice — nobody is paid to do it.
And it is why, until now, there has been no policy forcing security-grade reserves at scale. After the 2022 crisis, the EU added how-full targets: 80%, then 90% by winter, but it still leaves the actual filling to traders chasing that price gap. This year, the gap has all but vanished, and with it the market's reason to fill the tanks at all.
EU storage stood at just 35 bcm at the start of May, about a third of the bloc's total capacity of a little over 100 bcm, and more than 7 bcm below the level a year earlier.
On current trends, analysts at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies expect the bloc to reach only around 70% of capacity by Nov. 1 — short of its own 90% target, and the thinnest winter cushion since 2022.
From late February, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz cut Europe off from Qatari and Emirati LNG, together nearly a fifth of all global LNG trade.
The result was a loss of 2 bcm per month, totaling close to 8 bcm of missed supply across the prime injection season. Reopening the Strait, currently under negotiation, would stop the monthly shortfall, but it cannot recover what has already been lost. Europe is left with a shrinking window to reach its winter storage targets, and less room for error than at any point since 2022. https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Comment-
LNG-and-Europe-Storage.pdf
This is where Europe rediscovers what Ukraine has known for years: filling storage before winter is a security obligation, not a market option.
What Ukraine has actually tested
This is not a theory for us. Ukraine has required suppliers to hold an insurance stock, up to 10% of planned monthly volumes, since 2016. On Feb. 26, 2022, two days after the full-scale invasion, we activated an emergency-level gas crisis regime and resorted to non-market tools, including halting gas exports except for volumes held under customs-warehouse rules.
In this way, we've managed to balance the gas transmission system even when part of the equipment (gas compressor stations, regulation and metering units) was occupied, and part was affected by shelling.
Today, we operate the largest underground storage system in Europe: 31 bcm, most of it concentrated in well-protected facilities in the west of the pre-mounting territory of Ukraine. It's 1.5 times the combined capacity of Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Slovakia, and we have run it through three winters of war, with the infrastructure itself under Russian missile and drone attacks.
We never had the option of treating reserves as a trade. For us, filling before winter was about survival and continuity of day-to-day operation. Despite all challenges, we didn't reject any nomination for storing or shipping gas.
In 2023, and again in 2024, together with the European Commission's Joint Research Center, the Energy Community Secretariat, and USAID, we stress-tested how the sys
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Russians want to know why Ukraine has recently been able to retaliate against Russia so late in the war. Ukraine is supposed to get weaker and weaker as victory approaches for Russia. Why isn't it weakening?
Despite it being illegal, a few Russians are openly questioning Vladimir Putin’s competence to win the war. How about the rest of Russians? They stopped praising Putin. They want the war over. Either Putin finishes the war very soon or else he loses their confidence he can ever finish it.
Complaining about the War will get you killed in Russia: Suspicious Russia-related deaths since 2022
Russian billionaires, many from the oil and gas industries, have been found dead under unusual circumstances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deaths_since_2
022
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Paul Warburg grew up in Moreno Valley, CA. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Biblical & Theological Studies from Liberty University in 2015, as well as a Master of Divinity degree from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in 2017. Paul moved to Utah in 2021 after learning that it had one of the smallest populations of evangelical Christians in the United States, giving him a desire to help support churches in the area. Paul currently works as a marketer in the tech industry, specializing in data science and analytics software.
In other words, he sells something about which he knows nothing.
Quote:
Paul is married to Vienna and together they are raising one child, Lucas. In his free time, Paul enjoys reading about theology and economics, creating YouTube videos...
In which he opines about Russia based on his vast experience with Russia. /snark
*****
Dood, the guy knows nothing. He doesn't speak Russian. He's never been there. He doesn't talk to people on the street.
You wanna know what tipped me off to what an idiot he is?
About two minutes in, he cites a study that polled "several Russians".
Wait, what???
SEVERAL Russians? How many was that? Three? Seven?
Then he starts blabbing percentages from this non-existent 'poll'.
That's when I stopped listening.
You should have too.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
How many times have we read Russia is on the back foot, Ukraine has the momentum"?
2023, when Ukraine attempted a combined arms maneuver, only to smash against the Surovikin line?
Rabotyn (over and over)?
Bakhmut?
Kursk?
Meanwhile, Russia advances like a lava flow.Quote:
Ukraine’s Desperate Propaganda Campaign While Russia Advances along the Entire Front
---------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Can you Invision me laughing comrade. Cause I am.
T
Russia Military BEGINS Crimea Evacuation
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME