Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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Protests in Ukraine's cities against Zelensky's removal of defence minister
By Laura Gozzi, Anastasiia Levchenko, and Sarah Rainsford | July 16, 2026
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx76069n3do
. . . There had been rumours that Mykhailo Fedorov's dismissal was linked to tensions between him and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. [Syrskyi is a Soviet-style Russian who happens to live in Ukraine only because his military officer father got transferred there. He is NOT Ukrainian. His real loyalty is to Russia. The guy who was fired was fired because he noticed that the Russian in charge of Ukraine's defense was a Russian who should have been deported back to Russia. His parents and brother live in Russia. It is no surprise that Syrskyi did a half-assed job. The surprise is that he has not been fired. Instead, the guy who knows from experience that Syrskyi should be fired was fired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleksandr_Syrskyi#Early_life_and_career ]
At a press conference on Thursday, Fedorov all but confirmed that, saying he had suggested to Zelensky that Syrskyi and Chief of the General Staff Andrii Hnatov should be replaced.
"When the president said he did not plan to replace Syrskyi, I... said I would learn to work with him," Fedorov said. But "all the initiatives we proposed were blocked," he added.
"Instead of finding a way of defeating Russia asymmetrically - which is the commander-in-chief's job – Syrskyi has found a way of splitting our country," Fedorov said of Syrskyi.
Fedorov also revealed that Zelensky offered him to stay on his team as an adviser, but that he refused.
He was not seeking to antagonise the president, he explained, saying he was "confident" that Zelensky "hears the Ukrainian people, knows what to do, and the situation will be 100% resolved".
"I don't believe he has yet chosen a side in the Syrskyi matter. I spoke with him today and said that I am acting according to my conscience," he said.
"This is the worst mistake Zelensky has made during his entire presidency," Oleksandr, a Ukrainian soldier, told the BBC.
He had signed up to the army earlier this year because he trusted Fedorov's team and vision, he said: "I don't know anyone who supports the decision to replace him. Not within the army, not in society."
"I have lots of friends in the military. Lots of them died. I don't want this to go on," Maria Lavrynets, 31, told the BBC at a protest in Ivan Franko square in central Kyiv. "We see [Fedorov's] results. We see the motivation of the soldiers, we should stand for them."
When he was brought in, Fedorov set off to restructure the defence ministry, which many in Ukraine see as too bogged down in bureaucracy and old Soviet-era attitudes.
A former minister of digital transformation, he was active from the early days of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 in setting up a volunteer "IT Army of Ukraine" to launch cyber-attacks against Russians.
Later, he led a successful fundraising campaign called the Army of Drones and brought in elements of "gamification" to the war, designing a system that awarded Ukrainian military units with credits for hitting Russian assets.
Fedorov's focus on drones, high-tech warfare and procurement continued after he became defence minister.
In the early days of his tenure he also asked SpaceX founder Elon Musk to stop Russia from using Starlink satellites for drone attacks - a move that caused considerable disruption to Russia's frontline operations and advance.
His ministry also played a significant part in Ukraine's recent attacks on the Moscow-occupied Crimean peninsula, which last month Fedorov vowed to "cut off" from Russia entirely, with the use of mid-range drone strikes.
In a Facebook post shortly after his dismissal, Fedorov listed his achievements and said he would "continue... to defeat the enemy through asym
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Putin loses confidence in his military
By Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth | July 16, 2026 7:00 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5969689-trump-patriot-mi
ssile-production-license/
Once again, Russian President Vladimir Putin, under growing pressure in Ukraine, is resorting to nuclear bluffing. On Wednesday, his aide Nikolai Pastrushev announced that Russia’s “naval nuclear forces are on full alert.”
Although it projects defiance, it also reveals that Putin is losing confidence in his military.
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 second:
Putin loses confidence in his military
I've lost complete confidence in your media.
They lie to you about everything, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Surrounded on all sides by water and nothing to drink...
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
It's surrounded by sea water dummy.
T
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Editorial: By sacking Fedorov, Zelensky risks turning the tide of war back in Russia's favor
President Volodymyr Zelensky's decision to oust popular Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov after just six months on the job could prove to be his most harmful decision of the war in recent years.
By The Kyiv Independent
July 16, 2026 5:58 PM
https://kyivindependent.com/editorial-by-sacking-fedorov-zelensky-risk
s-turning-tide-of-war-back-in-russias-favor/
. . . of all Zelensky’s questionable personnel decisions, Fedorov’s dismissal could have the most devastating consequences for Ukraine’s war effort.
The 35-year old tech trailblazer has something the political and military leadership has lacked: a clear plan to win the war. A strategy.
Facing an overwhelmingly larger Russian army, Ukraine always needed an asymmetric strategy based on advanced technology and creative thinking to have a chance of defeating Russia. A small Soviet army can never beat a large Soviet army, as years of slow but steady Russian advances on the battlefield have shown.
Fedorov understands that.
Maximizing technological advantage, data-driven optimization of everything from procurement to personnel management, improving the distribution of drones to front-line units: Everything was done with the deliberate aim of breaking Russia's war aims, forcing peace on Kyiv's terms, and preserving Ukrainian lives in the process.
By reforming the notoriously corrupt procurement system and introducing competitive tenders for most purchases, Fedorov likely saved Ukraine billions in public funds while angering those who could no longer skim excessive profits from state contracts.
With the honing and scaling up of Ukraine's middle and deep strike campaign from occupied territory to deep inside Russia, Fedorov has also helped bring strategic offensive pressure on Moscow the likes of which hasn't been seen before. . . .
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 THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Surrounded on all sides by water and nothing to drink...
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
It's surrounded by sea water dummy.
T
No shit, you stupid fuck.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Too Early to Celebrate
July 16, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ukraine-s-most-revered-general-ha
s-a-warning-about-the-deep-strike-campaign-russia-can-strike-back-with-equal-or-greater-force/ar-AA284rTQ
. . . There are a couple of issues with the article from The New Yorker. It, like many other analyses from the West, places far too much emphasis on long-range strike capabilities while omitting many important details.
Undoubtedly, long-range strike capabilities are important, but they do not decide the outcome of modern wars. Russia has been striking Kyiv and every other major Ukrainian city for the past four years, including oil refineries, industrial centers, and energy infrastructure, and yet Ukraine shows no signs of capitulating anytime soon.
Yet for some reason, analysts expect Russia to capitulate despite having many more resources and being led by a dictator who has little regard for the mood of the general population.
This opinion was echoed by Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, whom I have referenced many times at this point.
“Ukraine’s increasingly effective strikes against Russian logistics and critical infrastructure have imposed real costs on Moscow,” he writes. “But these attacks are expensive, technologically demanding and ultimately reciprocal.
Russia retains the ability to strike back with equal or greater force. Neither side can rely on this form of warfare to produce a decisive strategic outcome.” While Ukraine’s advances in long-range capabilities should not be ignored, it would be wrong, or, as Zaluzhnyi claims, even dangerous, to insist that these capabilities alone can win the war.
A Rough Battle Still Ahead
Ukraine has indeed turned the tide of the war, only if you ignore the many alarm bells currently ringing in Ukraine.
Fedorov, the visionary reform-minded Defense Minister, has just been ousted from his post after serving only six months in office.
This move has been met with widespread opposition among average Ukrainians, who have taken to the streets to protest Zelensky’s decision.
The country faces a critical manpower shortage, with a sizable portion of its population living abroad and little willingness to return.
Meanwhile, draft dodgers are common among the country’s fighting-age males, as conscription officers continue to snatch people off the street to man the front lines.
Make no mistake. Despite the long lines at Russian gas stations, despite the discontentment among the population, despite the strikes on refineries or cargo ships, the war in Ukraine is not ending soon.
Ukraine still has an uphill battle to fight and has a long way to go before it is able to remove the Russians from its soil.
This is not to demean Ukraine’s advancements, but rather, the goal is to provide a more realistic assessment of what is actually going on in Ukraine.
The situation is not lost, but it is nowhere near as rosy as many analysts seem to believe.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Putin’s false claim of the capture of one Ukrainian town exposes the slow pace of Russia’s bloody advance
By Nick Paton Walsh, Victoria Butenko, Daria Tarasova-Markina | July 16, 2026
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/16/europe/russia-ukraine-kostyantynivka-ca
pture-claim-intl
It is the fate of just one town, over a year, but provides a rare insight into Russia’s ill-fated war of choice.
The slow and costly infiltration of Kostyantynivka, key to Moscow’s advance in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas and claimed as occupied by the Russian defense ministry on July 3, lays bare the persistence of the Kremlin’s forces and the devastating casualties they will tolerate to obtain even the smallest of goals.
On July 3, the Ministry of Defense posted a series of videos of Russian troops at various points inside the town’s center, waving Russian flags, to bolster its assertion they had taken the town. The false claim – contradicted by recent videos, testimony from Ukrainian troops, and independent mapping of the frontlines – was one of several made in past months by Russia’s leaders, seeking to suggest their battlefield progress was greater than it is, to perhaps persuade their domestic audience, or counterparts in the White House, that their military campaign had not stalled.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky swiftly seized on the falsehood, and urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with him in the town to talk peace, if indeed it was under Moscow’s control.
CNN, which has reported in or near Kostyantynivka twice over the past year, has used geolocated videos and testimony, to show the horrific cost and slow pace of the Russian advances that led up to the false claim of the town’s capture. The town’s fate exposes both the dogged, relentless nature of Moscow’s assault, and the relatively minute nature of the victories it claims, even if falsely.
Mapping by the independent Ukrainian analysts Deep State shows Russian forces outside the town, trying to push in. The road into the town is already lined with fishing nets, to protect traffic from Russian attack drones. Cars safely drive into town and the market, in its center, remains busy, despite the occasional threat of drones.
A CNN team that visited in July last year found streets bustling with civilians, although some were reluctant to be filmed, perhaps fearing future Russian occupation and being sanctioned for “cooperating” with Western media.
By the first winter months, the map shows the so-called gray zone of disputed territory edging closer to the town center. Russia’s assault with airstrikes had escalated. Videos posted by Ukrainian forces show apartment blocks in the town’s southwest in flames.
And a Russian drone captures the damage caused by an airstrike, just a few streets away.
But the Ukrainians are still confidently inside the town center, with the General Staff posting a video of one officer casually standing in Victory Square in November.
Russian footage posted from that time shows what appears to be their infantry’s point of view from inside an apartment complex courtyard, off the town’s Gromov Street, on the southwestern edges again.
It is in the latter days of the year that Russia appears to take its largest steps forward, recorded by Deep State in the first week of 2026. The gray zone has reached the town and two separate Russian prongs edge closer to its main access roads.
Two key factors inform the extent of Moscow’s progress. The range of attack drones – either the tiny First-Person View drones that target individuals or vehicles, or the larger-payload machines that hit buildings – grows monthly, slowly putting the safe space around Kostyantynivka at a greater distance and complicating its defense by Ukraine. More significantly, at this time Western officials began to echo Ukrainian claims that Russia was experiencing up to 35,000 dead or wounded on the battlefield every month.
This staggering figure – an apparent result of both a Ukrainian mandate to kill as many soldiers as pos
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin’s false claim
Nobody believes when you say somebody is making a false claim.
Even Putin.
You're worthless, brainfucked idiot.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Ukraine’s most effective defense minister? What Fedorov got right, and what his dismissal risks reversing
By Asami Terajima, Kateryna Hodunova, Jimmy Rushton, Polina Moroziuk, Francis Farrell
July 17, 2026 9:58 AM
https://kyivindependent.com/what-fedorov-achieved-and-what-his-dismiss
al-risks-reversing/
Among those gathered in Kyiv on July 16 to protest the dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov were members of Ukraine's military voicing fears that the controversial decision could seriously hinder the country's war effort.
"People who are actually trying to bring our victory closer keep getting removed or replaced," Serhii, a 43-year-old veteran protesting alongside active-duty soldiers, told the Kyiv Independent.
President Volodymyr Zelensky's decision a day earlier to dismiss Fedorov from his role has been met with outrage across Ukrainian society, largely due to a long list of his achievements during his productive, albeit short, six-month tenure. . . .
. . . The Fedorov-Syrskyi conflict
As news of the imminent dismissal unfolded, so did the understanding of the reason: the escalating personal and professional conflict between Fedorov and Oleksandr Syrskyi, Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.
The tensions, anticipated from the moment of Fedorov's initial appointment, stemmed from a difference in leadership styles and approaches to military culture.
Yuriy Hudymenko, a prominent veteran and head of the Public Anti-Corruption Council at the Defense Ministry, told NV news outlet the two men approach problems from "fundamentally different perspectives" in an interview on June 17.
"This is a conflict between a young technocrat and a general from a largely post-Soviet military school," Hudymenko said.
Syrskyi, who graduated from the Moscow Higher Military Command School in 1986, favors the heavily centralized style of command and control used by the Soviet Union, and has been frequently criticized for undermining the war effort through micromanagement of the battlefield and encouraging a "Soviet-style" culture where responsibility is avoided at all levels of command, false information is passed up the command chain and bad orders passed down.
Over years of attritional war under Syrskyi, these systemic problems led to a deepening of Ukraine's chronic manpower crisis, exacerbated further by the preferential distribution of mobilized recruits to large assault regiments under the general's direct command.
For months, despite the conflicting mentality, Fedorov and Syrskyi co-existed, with the former acting as a counterweight, pushing reforms and optimizing processes.
Openly acknowledging the conflict for the first time in a press conference on July 16, Fedorov revealed he had suggested, without success, that Zelensky remove Syrskyi.
"When the president said that he did not plan to replace Syrskyi, I completely agreed with this decision and said that it meant I would learn to work with him," Fedorov said, "because our client is the entire Ukrainian people."
"But we were faced with the fact that all the initiatives that we proposed began to be blocked, and Syrskyi is not ready to personally talk about problems face to face," he added.
While acknowledging Syrskyi's early achievements in the Battle of Kyiv and Kharkiv counteroffensive of 2022, the minister argued that Syrskyi has not adapted to changes in warfare, and lacks a proper strategy for this stage of the war.
"Instead of thinking about how to asymmetrically defeat Russia, he thought about how to split the country," Fedorov said, "and this is a big problem."
‘Syrskyi should be the one replaced’
Fedorov's dismissal triggered an immediate backlash from former and serving members of the Ukrainian military, some of whom gathered outside the President's Office in Kyiv on July 16, arguing the reforms they had waited years to see were only beginning t
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