Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Friday, August 8, 2025 08:11
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Thursday, August 7, 2025 8:12 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Since January 2022, the EU has imported €297 billion worth of Russian goods, including oil, nickel, natural gas, fertilizers, iron, and steel.

This continued trade underscores Europe’s dependence on Russian energy and industrial exports, complicating efforts to enforce sanctions effectively.

Since January 2022, the United States has imported $24.51 billion of Russian goods.

https://www.reuters.com/world/three-years-into-war-us-and-europe-keep-
billions-trade-with-russia-2025-08-05/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, August 7, 2025 8:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Behind the ads Ukrainian units make to compete with one another

Amid a nationwide shortage of soldiers and growing competition among brigades, Ukraine’s military units are turning to advertising agencies to help them stand out and boost recruitment.

By Artem Moskalenko | Aug 06, 2025

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/behind-the-ads-ukrainian-units-mak
e

Imagine looking at a billboard in the street and instead of seeing a sign for Coca-Cola or Adidas, you lock eyes with a Ukrainian soldier. He is urging you to join his brigade.

This isn’t some sci-fi vision taken out of a movie: it’s everyday life in Ukraine, where the challenge of military recruitment has moved far beyond the front lines.

Military ads are now found in the metro stations, in big billboards in the streets, and even show up on coffee mugs and shirts.

Alina Tkachenko, the brand leader at one of Ukraine’s most popular advertising agencies, is one of those helping ensure that these ads spread to even more cities.

“The full-scale war has added a lot of creativity to the Ukrainian military, including its advertising. Billboards and videos [television advertising] have appeared everywhere. This [military service] has become a part of the advertising market,” she said.

Ukraine is unique in the world in that its units compete with each other for talent. The government approved a decentralized recruitment process in the fall of 2024.

If young soldiers voluntarily sign up for a brigade, they won’t be conscripted into a needs-of-the-army role. This creates an incentive for would-be soldiers to shop around, and for brigades to compete for stronger reputations.

At a time when manpower shortages on the frontline have become a serious problem, each brigade has been finding ways to attract more soldiers.

It’s a deeply human problem that hints at what motivates people – what message would get people off the couch to risk their lives for their country?

See Billboards and Videos at https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/behind-the-ads-ukrainian-units-mak
e

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, August 7, 2025 8:25 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Ukraine Won’t Surrender

Tim Mak and Adrian Karatnycky on battlefield reality, stalled U.S. support, and why Ukraine won’t give up

By David Frum | August 6, 2025, 10:30 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/08/david-frum-show-u
kraine-tim-mak-adrian-karatnycky/683772/

I think that the fact that Europe is stepping up with cash and with collaboration on potentially on weapons production—Ukraine has, as I say, been developing its long-range missiles.

I’ve always believed that the only way to get Russia to negotiate is to hit the Russian power grid in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, which together represent 35 to 40 percent of the Russian GDP. If you can knock these things out for 5 percent of the time, it’s a huge impact or, you know, bigger impact than sanctions on Russian growth, and it brings the war in a more dramatic way, and it is a legitimate war target because there are many missile- and military-production facilities in the Moscow and St. Petersburg areas. And I think that the reciprocity, the ability for Ukraine to respond, would probably reduce the Russian attacks on the civilian targets in Ukraine, which have really been scaled up in the last two months.

Frum: Tim, what’s your view of what happens if the United States is even somewhat successful in forcing some kind of unfavorable peace?

Mak: I want to challenge the underlying assumption. I don’t think that they’re going to be able to force a peace on Russia’s terms. I remember in the very first weeks of the war, I heard someone say that as long as there’s a 12-year-old kid in Ukraine with a plastic fork, there’s going to be resistance to Russia and Russian occupation. There is no appetite whatsoever in Ukraine for accepting a peace that would permit the takeover of additional territories simply through diplomacy. And that’s what, I think, in the near term, a diplomatic outcome would look like.

Ever since the Oval Office dustup between Zelensky and Trump, I think Ukrainians have increasingly, to Adrian’s point, adopted the view that they need to have a backup plan and that they need to be able to be more self-sufficient and less reliant, even psychically, on American support for morale or equipment or whatever.

And so I think over the last few months, those plans have been put in place. I don’t think you’ll see that Ukraine will accept just a dictated peace in which they have to give up huge amounts of sovereignty and territory and freedom of action in order to achieve a short-term peace—which, by the way, no Ukrainian believes, or very few Ukrainians believe, would be sustainable in the long term. They believe that this would just be the prelude to the next war, which is coming in a matter of a few years.

Frum: Is there any voice—Adrian, you’ve chronicled the transformation of Ukraine from a culture and a people into a state. Is there any voice in the Ukrainian state system that would be willing to play ball with the Trump-Witkoff vision of the Ukrainian future?

Karatnycky: No. I mean, I think there may be a residual 5 percent of people with a kind of Soviet mentality and maybe a few percent who feel comfortable being in Russia’s embrace. But I would say, the society is as consolidated as ever in Ukrainian history. The culture is as dynamic as ever. This is like the high point of Ukrainian unity, and I think that that’s actually a counterweight to the earlier part of our discussion.

The Ukrainian people are united in the purpose of defending their way of life, their culture, their—to an extent—language, their civilization, which they see as a more open one than what Russia offers. And this unity is not going to be broken by disputes about anti-corruption policy or even some inordinate concentration of power by the president. That they will stick together. They will fight. And I think eventually, they will resolve this in a way that defends the existence of a persistence of a sovereign state.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, August 7, 2025 9:14 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

they monitor tv propaganda from Russians

Igor Korotchenko says Russia's strikes bring peace

Trump to meet Putin soon, the Kremlin says as a White House deadline looms on Ukraine?

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-poll-trump-sanctions-dea
dline-7cefb2df66f494f58a16b684a2c76687

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Friday, August 8, 2025 7:23 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Russia has yet to seize roughly 6,500 square kilometers of Donetsk Oblast, or about 25 percent of the region. Russian advances aimed at enveloping Pokrovsk have accelerated in recent weeks, but Russian forces have spent the last 18 months trying to seize an area of about 30 square kilometers.[19] Russian forces have been fighting to seize Chasiv Yar (pre-war population of 12,000) since April 2024, and it took Russian forces 26 months to advance 11 kilometers from western Bakhmut to western Chasiv Yar.[20] Russian forces in the Chasiv Yar and Toretsk directions are increasingly threatening the southern tip of Ukraine's fortress belt in Donetsk Oblast at Kostyantynivka.[21] Kostyantynivka is roughly 30 kilometers from Slovyansk, the northern tip of the fortress belt, and the cities in the fortress belt (Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk) collectively had a pre-war population of roughly 373,000. Russian forces have not demonstrated the capacity to seize cities of this size since mid-2022, and ISW continues to assess that the seizure of the fortress belt will be a difficult, multiyear effort.[22]

Future Russian operations to seize the entirety of Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts will require significant river crossing operations that Russian forces have historically struggled to complete since 2022. Russian forces still have to seize roughly 7,200 square kilometers of Zaporizhia Oblast (about 26 percent of the region) and roughly 7,000 square kilometers in Kherson Oblast (about 26 percent of the region). Russian gains in the Zaporizhia direction in the past two years have mostly consisted of advances in areas that Ukrainian forces liberated during their Summer 2023 counteroffensive, and Russian forces have yet to seize Orikhiv (roughly 35 kilometers southeast of Zaporizhzhia City).

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-august-7-2025

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, August 8, 2025 8:11 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

In the military, the war in Ukraine is over

With both armies exhausted and increasingly powerful drones stifling any offensive attempts, Putin's insistence on prolonging the invasion makes no military sense

By Alberto Rojas | Aug 8, 2025 - 06:16 ET

https://www.mundoamerica.com/news/2025/08/08/6895ce25e85ece9f0d8b4599.
html

If any term can define the current military situation in Ukraine, it is "kill zone" or death zone. It refers to the place where weapons of all calibers, drones, aerial bombs, or mines can kill you. Since the beginning of this invasion, the bloodiest conflict of the century so far, the death zones have only increased.

In the early months of the invasion, what determined the dimensions of these lethal zones was the artillery range of both armies, about 10 kilometers on either side of the front line. But drones have changed the war to a level that can only be compared to what the invention of gunpowder did in the 9th century in China.

Today, there are already drones capable of attacking enemy infantry, armored vehicles, and logistical lines from 40 kilometers away, multiplying the death zones in just over three years. What impact does this robotic presence in the sky have on the war? A significant one. Currently, thousands of quadcopters are flying over all positions, trenches, fortifications, gray areas, and supply lines on both sides of the front line. Moreover, above them fly even more powerful spy drones that, with their powerful eye, can see from a kilometer high if a soldier has shaved that morning. When their batteries run out, another drone takes off and replaces it, even at night, as they have night vision.

In other words, never have armies been so hyper-vigilant, never has the life of the infantry been so miserable, hidden underground even to relieve themselves for weeks without rotation, as leaving exposes them to mortal danger. Even wounded evacuations are done at night and at full speed.

In this context, breakthrough operations, even those carried out with armored vehicles, are detected before they even start and crushed by artillery and drones from a distance before they can fire a single shot. Current technology prevents armies from making significant advances in depth and defenders from collapsing. In other words, offensives in Ukraine have lost their military sense for any force other than the extension of a brutal and dehumanized dictatorship that no longer cares about its own casualties.

War never makes sense, but even less so in these conditions where Russia's operations focus more on terrorizing and punishing civilians in rear cities than on victories on the front. That is why today the key weapon in this effort is the Iranian-origin Shahed drone with a Chinese microchip: it is a slow and predictable device, but so cheap (around 22,000 euros) that it can be launched in swarms to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. Furthermore, Russian production of this winged terror has increased from about 100 to 500 per day. Its sound, like that of a moped, is reminiscent of the terrible V-1 rockets that the Nazis launched over London in 1944.

Russia has been trying for over a year to surround four cities that only exist on paper: Pokrovsk, Konstantinivka, Siversk, and Kupiansk. In all cases, the operations follow the same pattern: assaults on motorcycles, golf carts, or on foot to try to take and occupy Ukrainian positions. Sometimes Russia needs weeks of waves to conquer a trench occupied by four guys in the middle of nowhere. Until they run out of ammunition and then have to abandon the position in a hurry until the next time. Like a spreading stain, Russia was in Avdivka at the beginning of 2024 and is now at the gates of Pokrovsk, 35 kilometers away. Its propaganda presents it as great victories, when in reality all it shows is its inability to win the war once and for all after almost four years of carnage.

Both armies are exhausted, although for different reasons. Zelenski has not wanted to mobilize those under 25, resulting in his army having an average age between 45 and 50 and enormous difficulties in recruiting. Russia has fewer problems in obtaining manpower but has to offer increasingly higher salaries, and the number of new contracts decreases every month. In 2024, there were about 50,000 monthly. Today, there are about 30,000.

Ukraine receives a continuous trickle of Western military equipment. For many analysts, Europe and the US could do much more in this effort, but the fact is that huge shipments of weapons and ammunition land every week at the border with Poland to then be distributed along the Ukrainian front. As long as this flow continues and the European Union continues to support the Ukrainian state, it will be difficult for the Ukrainian army to collapse. Furthermore, with drone supremacy on the battlefield, the war has become more affordable for Kiev. Most of these devices (60% quadcopters and 100% long-range) are already locally produced.

Russia, on the other hand, is depleting its Soviet reserves from the Cold War, which were huge but not eternal. However, it has the arsenals of North Korea and Iran, loyal allies that, combined with Chinese technology, can meet Russian needs to some extent. Another issue is the true state of the Russian economy, boosted by the war effort but at the same time burdened by the enormous expenditure that is depleting Russian national funds. Any other leader would have long considered stopping the war as a useless instrument. But we are talking about Putin, a resentful and obsessed Putin with the imperial past.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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