Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 1083 of 1104
The Putinization of the American Military
When poseurs and yes-men run a war
By Paul Krugman
Jul 28, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-putinization-of-the-american
Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable. The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul, are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.
But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.
Granted, U.S. forces haven’t suffered any conventional defeats at Iranian hands either.
But all indications are that the main reason the Trump administration is again calling off major operations against Iran is that America is running critically short of ammunition.
So Trump isn’t backing down because his war of choice is extremely unpopular, although it is. Nor is he backing down because the economic costs of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are too great, or because the fiscal cost of the war is skyrocketing, while the country faces enormous deficits and rising long-term interest rates. Trump says he doesn’t care about any of that. And in a way I believe him — because even a fully reopened Strait won’t recoup his standing with voters fast enough to salvage the midterm elections for Republicans.
No, most reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened. Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases.
For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the US has expended more than half of the Patriot missiles it had before the war, and that it will take until 2029 to replace them:
The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that
· Munitions aren’t depleted
· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail
· It’s Joe Biden’s fault
Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.
How could this happen? How could the best-equipped, most sophisticated military in the world have allowed itself to be humiliated by a third-rate power?
First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.
Now, the idea that being manly and anti-woke makes an army strong was the reason that many on the American right admired Vladimir Putin before he invaded Ukraine. You might think that 1.4 million Russian casualties — 450,000 of them dead — and the spectacle of burning Russian oil refineries and factories would have disabused them of this notion. But no.
And the fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians w
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Putin is trying to shift responsibility for war away from himself
July 28, 2026 12:35
https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/4148683-putin-trying-to-shift-res
ponsibility-for-war-away-from-himself-isw.html
Vladimir Putin is trying to militarize Russian society and to shift the responsibility for the war in Ukraine onto the Russian State Duma deputies and the Russian population.
That is according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Ukrinform reports.
Analysts drew attention to Putin's speech on Navy Day on July 26, in which he heavily emphasized the importance of Russia's national unity around the war effort in Ukraine. He claimed that Russia needs to "imbue the consciousness" of its civil society with the importance of the war and to preserve this sense of national unity even after the war ends.
Putin also said that Russian volunteers are eager to help the Russian military and "are worried that Russian forces will no longer need their help in peacetime." According to analysts, this is an attempt to portray the Russian population as willing to continue the war and bear the necessary sacrifices to achieve victory in Ukraine.
During a meeting with State Duma lawmakers on July 27, Putin spoke about the unity of the Russian authorities around the war effort. In particular, he highlighted the Duma's collective vote on laws concerning the "integration" of the occupied territories of Ukraine's Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
"Putin likely highlighted the role of Duma deputies and ordinary citizens in Russia's military effort in an effort to deflect personal responsibility for the continuing costly war and to portray them as fully supportive of Putin's decisions ahead of the Duma elections in September 2026," ISW analysts said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier that after the State Duma elections, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin plans to launch a mobilization campaign and expects to conscript between 300,000 and 500,000 people.
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
How Ukrainian Paratroopers Spoiled A Russian Tank Offensive
The terrain helped
Jul 27, 2026
https://www.trenchart.us/p/how-ukrainian-paratroopers-spoiled
The Russian army’s 90th Tank Division and a pair of supporting combined arms armies spent months planning a powerful mechanized assault toward Kramatorsk, one of just two big free cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
It’s not for no reason that the attack apparently failed on July 22. A clutch of Ukrainian air assault brigades meticulously spoiled the attack in a complex operation beginning in April. Counterattacking through gaps in Russian defenses around the village of Komar, 60 miles southwest of Kramatorsk, the paratroopers pinned down half of the 90th Tank Division’s forces.
So when the division attacked in July, it attacked weakly. Ukrainian drones made quick work of the advancing T-72B3A tanks and other vehicles.
Mapper and analyst Clément Molin reverse-engineered the Ukrainian operation from the scant evidence that appeared online through a surprisingly thick veil of information security. Molin’s post is worth a close read at: https://x.com/clement_molin/status/2081776514949857694
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 SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
THGR, if the F-35 is so awesome, why does it need an upgrade?
THGR:
Wow, Ok. Think computer and then see if you can understand that upgrades are newer more advanced technology. The jet was designed to do this. It continually improves.
I notice you left out my reply.Quote:
THGR:
And another thing I think you've missed comrade. The Russians are focusing on taking ground, be it a little at a time. The Ukrainians are not trying to take land; they are focused on killing a thousand Russians a day. Get it?
You left out my reply to that, too.Quote:
THGR:
F35's are a great plane. Russias' top plane, the SU-57, not so much. ,
It's not even sure that it was an Su-57.
Here you go.
T
EXPOSED: Russian soldiers only live for 20 minutes on the frontline
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
OMG, do believe EVERY idiot on the internet??
That's better than “the refinery next to the Kremlin“!
-----------
"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
When righteous calls to end the war become warmongering
By Andrew Chakhoyan | July 28, 2026 7:10 PM
Andrew Chakhoyan is an academic director at the University of Amsterdam and a former U.S. government official at the Millennium Challenge Corporation. A Ukrainian-American, he studied at the Harvard Kennedy School and Donetsk State Technical University.
https://kyivindependent.com/when-righteous-calls-to-end-the-war-become
-warmongering/
Russia's war on Ukraine has yet to end because Russia keeps waging it.
It is shocking, though regrettably unsurprising, that in the fifth summer since the 2022 escalation by the aggressor, and 12 years since Russia first invaded Ukraine, pundits, scholars, and unscrupulous politicians still offer "solutions" to resolve a "conflict," pointing up and calling it down while ignoring basic facts and laundering the Kremlin's lies in plain sight.
To offer blood, sweat, and tears would be decidedly out of fashion and no way to make friends these days, so why not call for "diplomacy," always a safe choice? Is not talking better than killing?
This rhetorical misdirection invites agreement with a claim no one disputes while quietly smuggling in insidious manipulations.
Moscow plants false premises in seemingly innocuous language, and these enter public debate through either careless repetition or deliberate amplification. Russia's invasion becomes a "war in Ukraine." Moscow's neo-imperial bid for a sphere of influence, where neighbors are to be murdered until they give up sovereignty, becomes "security interests." Ukraine's refusal to be massacred morphs into an obstacle to peace. A few carefully chosen narrative threads can make Russian occupation, torture chambers, and mass graves sound humane, and self-defense appear reckless.
Two recent examples stand out.
A Russian oligarch, Andrey Melnichenko, whose ammonia plants feed the aggressor's military-industrial complex – a supply chain culminating with Russian missiles hitting Ukrainian homes – is presented to us by The Economist as an "industrialist." A calculated choice for everyone knows that an oligarch in today's Russia is a billionaire who is allowed to keep his fortune at Vladimir Putin's pleasure.
Melnichenko's guest essay is full of "fresh" ideas; The Economist bills it as an act of courage to speak up. But engage with the four scenarios he lays out: humiliation, Chinese vassalage, fragmentation, and permanent siege, and you will have tacitly legitimized the premise-setting fraud. To contest Melnichenko's asinine take on sovereignty comes at the cost of giving credence to the big lies on which the whole argument rests. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/07/09/why-a-broken-russia
-is-bad-for-the-world
Moscow's war of choice, an attempt to recolonize Ukraine, is surreptitiously repainted as a struggle between "the West" and Russia. Neither Ukraine's suffering, as the only country spilling blood in defense of freedom, nor the agency of the Ukrainians, embodied in the valor of the bravest nation on Earth, resisting its destruction, gets a mention. In fact, both are dismissed in absentia.
The proxy-war sleight of hand is nearly invisible, yet it undergirds the Melnichenko "info op," with The Economist cast as a patsy.
The tired fabrication "Russia under siege" is deployed to justify the unjustifiable. In 1942, Joseph Goebbels addressed a crowd in Berlin beneath a giant banner that read, "Never forget that England forced the war on us." In an eerie echo of that logic, Putin, and now Melnichenko, blame Russia's war of choice on NATO.
Negotiations are among the instruments through which Moscow delays accountability, disguises aggression, and seeks to legitimize gains achieved through violence.
The second example comes from the pages of the FT, where Samuel Charap, an American scholar who studies Russia but appears to understand nothing
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
24 hours under glide bombs in Dobropillia
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
Russia's war is getting cheaper for Russia, which extends its ability to sustain that destruction for years.
2026 has been the most brutal year for Ukraine yet. Based on Ukrainian General Staff daily reports, long-range drone strikes against Ukraine are up 160% on last year. The use of tactical and operational drones—surveillance, reconnaissance and strike—is up a staggering 756%. First-person-view drone launches have risen 304% as Russia expands its "human safari" strikes on civilians. Guided glide bombs are up 214% as their range and destructive scale grow.
From a Ukrainian perspective, the attrition war is unsustainable. If the present trajectory holds, the country's future existence is in question.
Russia was losing the war it planned to fight—and potentially is winning the one it is fighting instead. Ukraine forced Russia to abandon maneuver warfare. Having chosen attrition, Russia is now forcing Ukraine to adapt in turn. That is why Ukraine is bringing the war to Russia and its population.
More about Russia beating Ukraine by Hans Petter Midttun | 29/07/2026 at
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/07/29/russia-and-ukraine-justify-thei
r-strikes-the-same-way-only-one-justification-holds-up/
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
U.S., French intelligence lets Ukraine map drone routes into Russia — report
Editor: Eric Malinovsky | July 29, 2026, 01:49 PM
https://english.nv.ua/nation/u-s-french-intel-helps-kyiv-plan-drone-st
rikes-ft-50628322.html
In recent months, Ukraine has refined its targeting of Russian infrastructure, favoring precise strikes on critical components that are hardest to replace, the Financial Times reported on July 29.
“Ukrainian military planners, drone operators and energy specialists say Kyiv’s goal is no longer simply to start fires at refineries or destroy storage tanks, but to keep plants offline for longer and make each strike more costly for Moscow,” the FT wrote.
According to the report, intelligence provided by the United States and France is instrumental in routing swarms of strike drones through gaps in Russian air defenses.
“Ukrainian officials said intelligence provided by the U.S. and France had helped map Russian air-defence deployments and identify routes that allowed drones to evade them and reach targets deep inside Russia,” the article said.
Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said the campaign also depends on “systematically elimination” of Russian air defenses, radars and electronic-warfare systems to open corridors for drones. Once those corridors exist, he said, selecting targets becomes “a matter of pure mathematics,” weighing production volumes, domestic consumption, export flows, and shipping points.
Andrii Zahorodniuk, a former defense minister who now heads the Center for Defense Strategies, told the FT the European part of Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory are now within reach. “Eighty million people — roughly two-thirds of Russia’s population — live in the European part of the country, in a strike zone that is no longer considered and will not be considered a safe rear,” he said.
Zahorodniuk said U.S. and French intelligence also improved target selection by helping Ukrainian long-range drone units “learn where to strike.” Ukrainian planners have mapped Russia’s energy network to identify critical nodes whose destruction would disable far larger parts of the system, and to target equipment that would be hardest to replace.
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
With God as Putin's right-hand man, why has the war not already finished?
Lavrov says Putin’s rise was ‘divine intervention’
By Eric Malinovsky | July 29, 2026, 12:42 PM
https://english.nv.ua/nation/lavrov-says-putin-s-rise-was-divine-inter
vention-50628320.html
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the transfer of power from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin in 2000 was “evidence of extraordinary divine intervention,” calling it a historic turning point for Russia.
Lavrov made the remark in an interview with state propaganda agency TASS on July 29, saying that in the 1990s “everything was on the brink” because of “separatist sentiment.” He said Yeltsin “found the courage” to hand power over early and that he gave it to “the one person who at that moment alone could preserve Russia.”
“That is a historic turn; it means that Russia is, after all, marked by God. When it gets really difficult, we get help from above,” the minister stated.
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