Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 1025 of 1104
Europe must take Russia threat seriously, Estonia’s spy chief says
May 27, 2026 5:03 pm
by Martin Fornusek, Vladyslav Samusenko
https://kyivindependent.com/europe-must-take-russia-threat-seriously-e
stonias-spy-chief-says/
The Kyiv Independent’s Martin Fornusek speaks with Kaupo Rosin, director general of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, about Russia’s long-term strategy against Ukraine and Europe, the risks facing NATO’s eastern flank, and why Moscow still views the United States as its main adversary. Rosin explains whether Putin’s regime is weakening under wartime pressure, why Russia is unlikely to stop at Ukraine, and how sabotage campaigns, hybrid operations, and military reforms are reshaping Europe’s security landscape.
00:00 Intro
00:24 Is Putin under pressure?
03:00 Chances of a ceasefire in 2026
05:57 Putin’s strategy toward Europe and the US
08:25 How soon could Russia threaten NATO?
10:48 Russia’s hybrid operations in Europe
12:59 Outro
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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All non-drone militaries are obsolete
All warfare is drone warfare now.
Noah Smith and Latent.Space
May 19, 2026
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-non-drone-militaries-are-obsolete
Drone warfare has been a fascination of mine for a very long time. When I read Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” as a kid, I imagined what would happen if the attacking swarms were mechanical birds, controlled with AI. When I read about Japanese kamikazes in WW2, I reasoned that someday we’d have drones do the same. In 2013, I wrote a post about the advent of drone warfare that’s still probably the most prophetic thing I’ve ever written. It simply made sense that if we could create AI-controlled swarms of exploding artificial insects, then as long as they had enough battery power to sustain themselves over long flights, they’d be an unstoppable weapon.
Thirteen years later, my imagination has mostly become reality. Batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to sustain long drone flights, and AI has gotten good enough to guide drones to their targets (and, often, to select the targets in the first place). All we need now to fulfill my vision is for AI to start autonomously directing large numbers of drones in concert. That’s coming very soon.
The Ukraine War isn’t the first war in which drones are proving decisive — that would be the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 — but it’s the war in which drones have truly come into their own. Ukraine’s intensive use of drones has allowed them to inflict casualty rates as high as 5 to 1 on the Russian army in recent months, while giving up little or no territory. Around 96% of those casualties are estimated to be caused by drones. In just the past year, Ukraine went from using just a few thousand FPV drones per day to using around 60,000.
You can read lots of stories about how drones represent a revolution in military affairs; the recent Carnegie Endowment piece is a good one, as is the slightly older one by the Army University Press. But to really viscerally understand how deeply things have changed, you have to watch videos from the war. Here is a montage of drone strikes in Ukraine, including a terrifying final sequence where a drone flies into a Russian barracks and destroys it. It’s difficult stuff to watch, but if you want to understand the changes that have come to modern warfare, you have to see it.
https://x.com/WarRoomArchives/status/2046638924060315766
The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close.
Much more at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-non-drone-militaries-are-obsolete
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:
THGR, I listened to the first 5 minutes of your video. Did you count the # of times it referenced Ukraine's military intelligence??? In five minutes, there was not one true statement, and I'm not about to waste my time listening to 48 minutes of bull.
So, quick comments to you and SECOND:
a) If drones were enough to win a war, Russia would have won two years ago. Airwars don't make victories.
b) Everything... EVERYTHING ... said about Russia goes 10x for Ukraine. Ruined logistics? Failed economy? Ginormous deficits? Mobilization? Check, check, check, and check!
c) If it wasn't for the USA and EU, Ukraine would have cratered a long time ago. As it is, EU weapons, supplies, finances, and economies are being drained into the black hole that is Ukraine. It's becoming politically insupportable.
Ukraine is a giant grift.
THGR:Quote:
Catastrophe is coming for Putin as the Ukraine war looks now like disastrous defeat for Russia
Summary and Key Points: As Russia's economy buckles under sanctions and drone strikes on its oil infrastructure, the elite consensus around Vladimir Putin is showing visible cracks — with a well-connected business leader telling The Guardian there is now "profound disappointment in Putin" and a growing sense that "some kind of catastrophe is looming." Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told PBS Frontline that "things are crumbling around Putin" and now openly discusses scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea — an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee just two months ago.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/catastrophe-is-coming-for-putin-a
s-the-ukraine-war-looks-now-like-disastrous-defeat-for-russia/ar-AA24aYvQ?
I bring more receipts. This is the story no matter what or who you source unless it is a Russian propagandist; as you are. Fact, Russia is heading for an end that will prove me to be right. I can wait.
Good. Just don't hold your breath.
Let's start with the first reference:
Quote:
a well-connected business leader
Who? Could it be a BRITISH business leader "well connected" to the British government? Nothing says it isn't.
Every reference except one is anonymous, "they/ them", American, or British.
Here's the real story: Putin is being criticized all right. Not for starting the war. But for not going hard enough. For engaging in "negotiations" with Frump, Witless, and Pushner.
Part of the reason is bc China kept angling for a negotiated settlement. But apparently, for a # of reasons, Iran probably being one, Wang Yi just told Lavrov to step on the gas, war-wise.
Russia is fighting all of NATO. The only thing that NATO ISN'T providing (overtly) is "boots on the ground and planes in the sky". The CIA, MI6, various military specialists, mercs, politicians, weapons mfrs, drone mfrs, western spy planes and satellites, saboteurs, terrorists, banks etc etc are all pouring as much as they can get away with into Ukraine. It's as close to all-out war as NATO and the EU can get and still keep their war on Russia technically confined the Ukraine. And the farther Russia advances thru Kupiansk and Konstantinovka, towards Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Dneipro and Zaparozhiy, the more frantic the west becomes and the more blatant EU warfighting.
Of course Russia is going to take hits. That is the nature of attritional warfare: Who can take the most hits.
Russia is in far better shape than western press would have you believe. In better shape than the EU, and in far FAR better shape than the west's puppet Ukraine.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Russia is fine. Ukraine is fucked. Zelensky is a dead man walking.
I can easily name over 100 current Democratic Party politicians that do far more harm to the American Citizen every day than Russia has ever been capable of doing to us.
I don't give one single fuck about Russia. Nobody else does either.
#Rootin4Putin
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Like a broken record: Kremlin reviving conspiracy theory linking US and Ukraine to justify the war
By Jens Asbjørn Bøgen | May 28, 2026
https://www.dagens.com/war/like-a-broken-record-kremlin-reviving-consp
iracy-theory-linking-us-and-ukraine-to-justify-the-war
Recycled stories
The latest spark came from Russia’s Investigative Committee. A representative claimed the agency has proof concerning “the development of bioweapons with US funding and with the participation of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine.” . . .
In early 2022, state actors regularly talked about dangerous experiments. They alleged that Ukraine was tracking coronavirus-carrying bats and doing “work with pathogens of birds and reptiles with a subsequent transition to studying the possibility of them carrying African swine fever and anthrax,” according to media reports.
Top officials kept the narrative alive. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed the weapons were targeted at specific ethnic groups, while other officials claimed the U.S. ran dozens of secret human experimentation labs.
United24Media reports that the claims peaked at the United Nations in late 2022. That is when Russian envoy Vasily Nebenzya alleged that Ukraine had built special drones to unleash “combat mosquitoes” infected with diseases.
The real facilities
Despite the loud accusations, international investigators have found absolutely nothing.
The United Nations and the World Health Organization looked closely at places like the Mechnikov Anti-Plague Institute in Odesa and found entirely normal public health facilities.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Catastrophe Is Coming for Putin As the Ukraine War Looks Now Like Disastrous Defeat for Russia
By Reuben Johnson
May 27, 2026
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/catastrophe-is-coming-for-putin-as
-the-ukraine-war-looks-now-like-disastrous-defeat-for-russia/
Summary and Key Points: As Russia’s economy buckles under sanctions and drone strikes on its oil infrastructure, the elite consensus around Vladimir Putin is showing visible cracks — with a well-connected business leader telling The Guardian there is now “profound disappointment in Putin” and a growing sense that “some kind of catastrophe is looming.” Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told PBS Frontline that “things are crumbling around Putin” and now openly discusses scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea — an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee just two months ago.
Putin Can’t Escape His Ukraine Mistake
No end of bad news keeps piling up for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The worst of it is that the more time goes by, the more there is a sense that his invasion of Ukraine was the most fatal of a long string of bad decisions. The end of his rule, which may be closer than anyone thinks, may also be the beginning of the end of Russia as we know it.
The increasing trend is that the worse conditions become inside of Russia, the more of the nation’s oil and gas industry is destroyed, and the higher the casualty figures for Moscow’s military climb, the less anyone sees of Putin or hears him make comments to address what he intends to do about it. What seems to be the former KGB Lt. Col.’s isolation from the outside world has even forced the Kremlin to deny that he is being told the true state of affairs in the nation.
“No. It is not so,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said publicly back in April. “Putin is the head of state, and his powers mean he deals with the widest range of issues on the agenda.”
However, the level of confidence behind that statement appears not to be shared by the upper elites in Russia.
The overall sense, said the UK Guardian newspaper this past weekend, is that the increasingly negative consequences of the February 2022 invasion have “broken Putin’s unwritten contract with the Russian public.” This contract is the public’s pledge that “we do not get involved in politics and trying to gain power for ourselves – but only as long as the state acts in our best interests.”
It Is Too Late to Save The Situation Now in the Ukraine War
“There’s definitely been a shift in mood among the elites this year … there is profound disappointment in Putin,” a man described as a well-connected business leader told the Guardian for a long assessment published last weekend. There is now in Russia “a growing sense that some kind of catastrophe is looming,” he continued.
“No one believes everything will suddenly collapse tomorrow,” the source told the UK daily. “But there is a growing realisation that utterly senseless, self-destructive decisions keep being made. People who once defended Putin no longer do. Any sense of a future has disappeared.”
The two authors also know the political landscape and the country’s situation well. One is Shawn Walker, who reported for the Guardian from Moscow for more than a decade, and Pjotr Sauer, who reports from there now and is the son of the late Derek Sauer. The elder Sauer was the 1990s champion of trying to build a free press in what was then Boris Yeltsin’s Russia and is famous for founding the English-language Moscow Times.
They are also not alone in their pessimistic view of how, as former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told Frontline this week, “things are crumbling around Putin.” The level to which Putin’s empire is flailing about to no good effect in its battlefield operations in Ukraine makes him and others now even talk about scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea, said the former Washington envoy. This is an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee even two months ago.
Rising Instability
The combination of drone
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Quote:How Ukraine Put Russia on the Back Foot in Year 5 of the War
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Of course Russia is going to take hits. That is the nature of attritional warfare: Who can take the most hits.
Russia is in far better shape than western press would have you believe. In better shape than the EU, and in far FAR better shape than the west's puppet Ukraine.
By Benjamin Hart | May 25, 2026
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ukraine-russia-war-drones-iran
.html
Iran, not Ukraine, is currently at the center of America’s volatile foreign policy. But while the U.S. has shifted its focus elsewhere, Ukraine has been more than holding its own. Its military has increasingly taken the initiative in the country’s east, where small factions of Russian and Ukrainian troops are locked in a hellish form of drone-based hybrid warfare. Ukraine continues to inflict heavy casualties on Russian forces and has sometimes even clawed back small portions of territory it has lost over the past few years, though major breakthroughs seem all but impossible. Perhaps even more significantly, Ukraine has been able to hit Russia’s interior with drones and missiles, even in Moscow, which has spooked Vladimir Putin and a war-weary public. Still, the oil crisis caused by the war in Iran has handed Russia a temporary economic lifeline. (Ukraine’s drone expertise, meanwhile, is suddenly in hot demand in the Middle East.) And as Russia continues to bombard Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine, two of its most intense attacks have come in the last few days, including a devastating barrage on Saturday night.
Since Russia’s invasion, I have periodically checked in with Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and perhaps the foremost expert on the conflict in the U.S. We spoke once again last week about Ukraine’s improved position, its biggest vulnerabilities, and whether an end to the war might arrive anytime soon.
In other interviews you’ve done recently, you’ve described the fighting in this war as more disorganized and diffuse than ever. What does it look like now?
It’s become a much more difficult battlefield to map because there aren’t really cohesive defensive lines. Often positions are commingled, especially in cities, and there is a substantial gray zone between the two sides where both sides tend to claim degree of presence, but presence does not necessarily confer control on this battlefield. And there’s a fairly low density of infantry forces on the front lines, particularly on the Ukrainian side. So the popularized image from a few years ago, that this is a bit like World War I with trenches plus drones, is simply inaccurate. The battle space hasn’t looked that way at least for the last year or year and a half, if it ever did.
There are defensive positions, and there are lines of defense and defensive barriers, but what they really do is present an obstacle to enemy infantry or enemy vehicles that are primarily destroyed by drones, artillery, and mines. These are not trenches of defensive positions that are being held by a large number of people. And at this point, the contest that really matters is the contest for superiority in what folks colloquially call the kill zone, which means superiority in employing drones on the battlefield. The side that has the advantage in both qualitative and quantitative employment of drones can dictate the initiative and has the ability to displace the drone units and supporting artillery of the other side. And control really shifts not by infantry assaulting the infantry positions of the other side but by one side being able to effectively suppress and displace the drone units and the supporting artillery units of their opponent.
Is it even possible for Russia to make much progress with this form of warfare?
It’s very unlikely. So far this year, the Russian military is performing quite a bit worse than last year. The rate of gain is barely half of what it was around this time in 2025. They’re not necessarily l
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I was part of Putin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary Russians won’t overthrow him
Four years after fleeing Moscow, Marina Ovsyannikova warns the threat to the regime lies not with the public, but from the Kremlin itself
By Roland Oliphant | May 28, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/i-was-part-of-putin-s-propaganda-
machine-ordinary-russians-won-t-overthrow-him/ar-AA24gK83
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/28/i-was-part-of-putins-propa
ganda-machine-now-im-in-exile/
Key takeaways
• Media Control: Marina Ovsyannikova, former Channel One producer, reveals the Kremlin's use of propaganda and fear to shape public opinion, presenting Putin as a saviour while restricting coverage of the West.
• Public Fear: Ordinary Russians remain scared and trapped in an information bubble, making grassroots protests unlikely; change may come only through elite conspiracies.
• Personal Journey: Ovsyannikova's experience spans 19 years in state media, witnessing the gradual tightening of censorship, leading her to protest the war in Ukraine and flee to Europe.
It’s the conundrum that disgusts many Ukrainians, bothers Western governments and is the despair of opposition-minded Russians. Vladimir Putin has led Russia into a national disaster. Yet after four years of war, one million casualties and victory nowhere in sight, the public has not turned on him. Why not?
For Marina Ovsyannikova, a 47-year-old former producer for Russian state television, now forced into exile in Europe for protesting against the war in Ukraine during an on-air stunt, the answer is simple. “I think this regime is based on these two things: strong propaganda and fear,” Ovsyannikova tells The Telegraph by phone from France, where she fled after staging her high-profile demonstration in March 2022.
Most of the general public is scared of taking action and trapped in an “information bubble”. And so there is little point in expecting change via “protests from ordinary people”, she adds. “They are very scared. If change comes, it will probably be an elite conspiracy against Putin.”
Ovsyannikova, who was sentenced in absentia to eight-and-a-half years in jail for “spreading false information about the Russian army”, speaks with the authority of experience.
For 19 years, she worked at Channel One, Russia’s primary federal television channel and, for decades, the keystone of the Kremlin’s domestic propaganda operation. For at least the last 15 of those years, she says, she was perfectly aware of what she was complicit in – a media machine built to lie to the Russian public and make Putin into a national saviour.
“When I came to Channel One, it was an absolutely ordinary TV channel. We broadcast news from all over the world – from the United States, from the United Kingdom, from Europe – and there were no special restrictions. But step by step, the rules changed, and more and more topics became forbidden,” she says.
By the time she left, “we couldn’t say anything positive about Europe, about Western Europe, about the United States, and we had to show Putin as the saviour of Russia. If something was going wrong, we had only one rule. We had to say Putin is good, but his officials are to blame.”
Ovsyannikova’s insider perspective forms part of a new BBC documentary, Putin: In Ten Pictures, which traces the Russian president’s two-and-a-half decades in office through the carefully curated images he has presented to the world.
She herself is a member of the last Soviet generation, who entered adulthood at around the same time Putin came to power and benefited from the boom years he initially oversaw. Indeed, Ovsyannikova freely admits to having voted for him in the past. But she can also remember Russia before its long-time president. Born in 1978 in Odesa in what was then Soviet Ukraine, to a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother, Ovsyannikova still has relatives in both countries.
Her father died when she was young, and she and her mother moved to Grozny in Chechnya. When war broke out there in 1994, they f
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Russia is fine. Ukraine is fucked. Zelensky is a dead man walking.
I can easily name over 100 current Democratic Party politicians that do far more harm to the American Citizen every day than Russia has ever been capable of doing to us.
I don't give one single fuck about Russia. Nobody else does either.
#Rootin4Putin
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
THGR, I listened to the first 5 minutes of your video. Did you count the # of times it referenced Ukraine's military intelligence??? In five minutes, there was not one true statement, and I'm not about to waste my time listening to 48 minutes of bull.
So, quick comments to you and SECOND:
a) If drones were enough to win a war, Russia would have won two years ago. Airwars don't make victories.
b) Everything... EVERYTHING ... said about Russia goes 10x for Ukraine. Ruined logistics? Failed economy? Ginormous deficits? Mobilization? Check, check, check, and check!
c) If it wasn't for the USA and EU, Ukraine would have cratered a long time ago. As it is, EU weapons, supplies, finances, and economies are being drained into the black hole that is Ukraine. It's becoming politically insupportable.
Ukraine is a giant grift.
THGR:Quote:
Catastrophe is coming for Putin as the Ukraine war looks now like disastrous defeat for Russia
Summary and Key Points: As Russia's economy buckles under sanctions and drone strikes on its oil infrastructure, the elite consensus around Vladimir Putin is showing visible cracks — with a well-connected business leader telling The Guardian there is now "profound disappointment in Putin" and a growing sense that "some kind of catastrophe is looming." Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told PBS Frontline that "things are crumbling around Putin" and now openly discusses scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea — an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee just two months ago.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/catastrophe-is-coming-for-putin-a
s-the-ukraine-war-looks-now-like-disastrous-defeat-for-russia/ar-AA24aYvQ?
I bring more receipts. This is the story no matter what or who you source unless it is a Russian propagandist; as you are. Fact, Russia is heading for an end that will prove me to be right. I can wait.
Good. Just don't hold your breath.
Let's start with the first reference:Quote:
a well-connected business leader
Who? Could it be a BRITISH business leader "well connected" to the British government? Nothing says it isn't.
Every reference except one is anonymous, "they/ them", American, or British.
Here's the real story: Putin is being criticized all right. Not for starting the war. But for not going hard enough. For engaging in "negotiations" with Frump, Witless, and Pushner.
Part of the reason is bc China kept angling for a negotiated settlement. But apparently, for a # of reasons, Iran probably being one, Wang Yi just told Lavrov to step on the gas, war-wise.
Russia is fighting all of NATO. The only thing that NATO ISN'T providing (overtly) is "boots on the ground and planes in the sky". The CIA, MI6, various military specialists, mercs, politicians, weapons mfrs, drone mfrs, western spy planes and satellites, saboteurs, terrorists, banks etc etc are all pouring as much as they can get away with into Ukraine. It's as close to all-out war as NATO and the EU can get and still keep their war on Russia technically confined the Ukraine. And the farther Russia advances thru Kupiansk and Konstantinovka, towards Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Dneipro and Zaparozhiy, the more frantic the west becomes and the more blatant EU warfighting.
Of course Russia is going to take hits. That is the nature of attritional warfare: Who can take the most hits.
Russia is in far better shape than western press would have you believe. In better shape than the EU, and in far FAR better shape than the west's puppet Ukraine.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
How about the institute of war as a source comrade?
T https://www.picgifs.
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