REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Saturday, August 23, 2025 12:13
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Saturday, August 16, 2025 9:34 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Has No Cards

Why would Putin need to make a deal with him?

By Anne Applebaum | August 16, 2025, 10:50 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/trump-putin-ukraine-
talks/683899/

President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement.

Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.

Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored. No wonder all of Trump’s negotiating deadlines for Russia have passed, to no effect, and no wonder the invitation to Anchorage produced no result.

There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians. It’s strange that Russian reports of the meeting focused on business cooperation. “Russian-American business and investment partnership has huge potential,” Putin said today.

I appreciate that many Ukrainians, Europeans, and of course Americans are relieved that Trump didn’t announce something worse. He didn’t call for Ukrainian capitulation, or for Ukraine to cede territory. Unless there are secret protocols, perhaps some business deals, that we haven’t yet learned about, Anchorage will probably not be remembered as one of history’s crime scenes, a new Munich Conference, or a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that’s a very low bar to reach.

The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.

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

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Saturday, August 16, 2025 10:10 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Has No Cards

Why would Putin need to make a deal with him?


Annie is right, but it has nothing to do with Trump.

Between deindustrialization and our high-profit model of military weaponry, plus our multi-front, delusional "full spectrum dominance" ambitions, we don't have weapons to spare.

What does it take to be a realist around here???

End of story, case closed.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 12:01 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Here's your realism:

1. Fuck Ukraine.

2. Nobody cares.


That's been the truth since the genesis of this thread.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 7:54 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Has No Cards

Why would Putin need to make a deal with him?


Annie is right, but it has nothing to do with Trump.

Between deindustrialization and our high-profit model of military weaponry, plus our multi-front, delusional "full spectrum dominance" ambitions, we don't have weapons to spare.

What does it take to be a realist around here???

End of story, case closed.
Signym, you are insane. Or just an overly articulate ignoramus. The USA has NOT been "deindustrialization". The USA has an abundance of weapons, which it chooses not to use for the purpose they were built, to kill Russians. When it was Biden making the decisions, he allowed the Russians to control his weapon stockpile by listening to Russians talk about red lines not to be crossed unless the USA wanted to be nuked. Trump is now making the decisions, and he is on Russia's side against Ukraine. His red line is to make it less than obvious that he is on Putin's team.

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 7:54 AM

SECOND

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


It Took 10 Brigades, Urgently Redeploying, For Ukraine to Block Russia's Pokrovsk Incursion

There may have been thousands of Russian troops in the nine-mile salient, but they lacked drones

Aug 16, 2025

https://www.trenchart.us/p/it-took-10-brigades-urgently-redeploying

The Russian penetration of Ukrainian lines northeast of Pokrovsk last week was bigger and more dangerous than some analysts initially concluded.

We know this because we know what it took for Ukrainian forces to block further Russian advances—and then begin rolling back the incursion this week. It took all or some of around 10 brigades and regiments, including several fighting under the banner of the Ukrainian national guard’s new 1st Azov Corps.

Ukraine redeployed elements from the 79th and 82nd Air Assault Brigades, 1st and 425th Assault Regiments, 25th Assault Battalion, 2nd Battalion of the 92nd Assault Brigade, 32nd and 93rd Mechanized Brigades, 38th Marine Brigade, 14th National Guard Brigade and the Birds of Magyar drone brigade.

Ukrainian police, special operators, Leopard 1A5 tanks and a few gun-armed ground robots (see video below) also joined the counterattack.

The Russian contingent that slipped past effectively empty Ukrainian trenches northeast of the besieged city of Pokrovsk wasn’t just a loose gaggle of “five to 10 mythical monsters trying to crawl deep into the territory,” the Ukrainian Deep State analysis group observed.

No, the Russians were “a serious problem,” Deep State explained. It’s telling that, in the first three days of their counterattack, the Azov troopers reported inflicting nearly 400 Russian casualties.

By the time the Ukrainian counterattacked, there may have been thousands of Russians in the narrow salient stretching nine miles north from the former front line. Turning left at the top of their salient, the Russians threatened the village of Dobropillya, 10 miles north of Pokrovsk.

There are just two main roads into besieged Pokrovsk, and one of them—the T0515—threads through Dobropillya. The garrison in Pokrovsk, including a few Leopard 2A4 tank crews, can’t afford to lose the T0515.

Luckily for the Ukrainians, the Russians were their own worst enemy as they marched on Dobropillya. The Russian advance through those under-manned trenches was “chaotic,” according to Deep State.

Messy march

The 51st Combined Arms Army, the main Russian force in the battle for Dobropillya, “did not have time to properly establish itself in order to pull up the main forces—in particular, the drone crews,” Deep State noted. Russia’s elite Rubicon drone group is somewhere near Pokrovsk, but may not have made a significant contribution to the march on Dobropillya.

“The enemy's movements at that time were carried out without the active support of aerial reconnaissance, artillery and other means.” When the Ukrainian reinforcements finally arrived, they were better-supported and better-coordinated. They “set about stabilizing” the situation, Deep State recalled.

But the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, guardsmen, marines, commandos, police and robot-operators who are now aggressively chopping up the Russian salient may represent the bulk of Ukraine’s operational reserve.

Short 100,000 trained infantry across their 130 or so combat brigades, the armed forces of Ukraine—the AFU—almost certainly don’t have enough uncommitted troops to respond to more than one Dobropillya-scale incursion at a time. Indeed, further Russian incursions are possible because Ukraine has too few infantry.

“The conditions for such a breakthrough [as in Dobropillya] have been in place for some time,” the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team warned, “with a shortage of infantry the most serious problem for the AFU—one that is unlikely to be solved quickly.”

“Even if this breakthrough is swiftly reversed,” CIT added, “we do not rule out that it could happen again, as Russian forces are continually probing for weak points in the Ukrainian defenses.”

Thanks for reading Trench Art! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 8:08 AM

SECOND

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


Weekend Update #146: A Deal To Destroy Ukraine
Europe Will Have To Choose Soon; The Pokrovsk "Collapse" Was Nothing Of The Sort

By Phillips P. OBrien | Aug 17, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-146-a-deal-to-de
stroy

Hi All,

Well, Its been fewer than 48 hours since the Trump-Putin love and respect fest in Anchorage, and the analysis is finally catching up to the reality. This meeting has brought about arguably the most dangerous moment of the war for Ukraine and the rest of Europe. They have been put in a situation soon where Donald Trump might urge upon them a very Putin-friendly “peace” plan and they reject it and the US basically leaves and even ends sanctions on Russia, or they, God forbid, agree to Putin and Trump’s terms and leave themselves both in a state of permanent instability.

r/Military - American troops rolling a red carpet for Putin
US soldiers in Alaksa, on their knees, preparing the red carpet for Putin: Trump humiliates Americans continually and calls it greatness.

Its a terrible situation—that should have been anticipated and prepared for. However, sadly we are here and the preparations (outside of Ukraine) are far less advanced than they should have been. Moves towards any kind of strategic autonomy from the USA are far less advanced than they should have been.

Beyond the geopolitics, the poverty of the military analysis regularly wheeled out about the war was on full display this week. It started with reports of a brilliant Russian operation north of Pokrovsk (which has been falling since August 2024 if you remember) that indicated, supposedly, that Ukraine was getting so weak it might collapse. The week ended with the Ukrainians counterattacking, slicing the Russian advance into pieces and retaking much of the land.

This kind of story should not be being repeated 3.5 years into the war, but amazingly/regrettably it is.

A Deal To Destroy Ukraine

Though at first there was a rush to try and claim that little was accomplished at Anchorage, more and more there are pieces of evidence of a possible “deal” that will be presented to Zelensky for his approval when he arrives in Washington on Monday (tomorrow). The Anchorage meeting, as I wrote yesterday, was a catastrophe for Ukraine and Europe for a number of reasons—it normalized relations between the US and Russia, it destroyed fully (for the hopelessly naive) that Trump would ever put sanctions on Russia and it established clearly that the US was now saying Ukraine had to give up land to Russia for any “peace” deal.

Different elements of a deal have appeared in different outlets. The New York Times had arguably the most element when it claimed that Putin had demanded all of the Donbas (which he has not conquered) and in exchange would no longer demand the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia which he has not conquered. Moreover the Times claimed that Trump told European leaders that he (Trump) supported a deal of this kind.

Even writing these words, the debasement of the USA is clear. The USA is basically telling Ukraine to give up one part of its unseized land so that Russia won’t take another part which Russia cannot take.

In other words the US is not only validating Russian illegal conquest, its now arguing that these conquest needs to be extended. The Kyiv Independent put together this helpful map (see below). The most important thing to note is that the unconquered large part of Donetsk Oblast (the part still in white) would go to Russia in the “deal” as well as the small part of Luhansk that has not been conquered. This includes the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, which are surrounded by heavy defenses.

Now what would Ukraine get in exchange for this sacrifice of its own people and territory to Russia. Well two things were mooted—the first, which I cannot believe was said with a straight face, was that Putin would offer a “written guarantee” to not go back to war with Ukraine. Wow! Where have we seen those used to keep the peace before? I think I remember something….
r/HistoryPorn - Neville Chamberlain returning from Germany with the piece of paper signed by Hitler which would bring "peace for our time" September 30th, 1938. [1920x1080]

And what else does Ukraine “get”. Well Trump is offering them super-duper (but of course non-Nato) security guarantees. The details of these security guarantees are unknown, but they are or at least should be seen as worthless. The whole fact that Ukraine is being kept out of NATO shows their hollowness.

Other areas such as the continuation of present sanctions on Russia and what the US does with its seized Russian assets are left unclear for now—but I think we can safely assume that the US gets back to business with Russia asap (that’s was Trump’s big point at Anchorage anyway). What happens to abducted Ukrainian children, accused Russian war criminals, etc, etc—that would be irrelevant to Trump.

So the deal being offered to Ukraine is arguably subjugation to Russia in all but words, and would set the stage for Russia to reinvade at its leisure. Its even worse than the deal that Trump was proposing in April-May, which had no large extra sacrifices of land by Ukraine.

And yet here we are, and some people refer to this deal as progress.

Europe Will Have To Choose Soon

The moment of decision for Europe is approaching. As I tried to say on Thursday, the decision is not about whether to maintain the post 1945/1989 European world. That world is over, and if you did not believe it on Thursday you better have started on Friday when the US and Russia started normalizing.

The “deal” being proposed for Ukraine could very well be the pivot which decides what the new Europe will be. Will it be one of validated conquest, of war crimes covered up, of abducted children and normalization with butchers? And more, will it be one in which European states basically continue to outsource their security to a completely unreliable USA—a USA which made all the above possible.

Or will Europe start clearly, aggressively and with purpose, to take responsibility for its own future?

There will be voices in Europe, not just Orban and Fico, pressing Ukraine to take this deal and basically to leave the continent dependent on the USA and thus always vulnerable to Russia. And there will be others, who know the existential threat that they are facing and which will push for something better. In the different statements that have emerged since Anchorage, you can already see some of the different perspectives.

The Baltic 8 (which includes Iceland as well as the four Nordic states and three Baltic states) released a very skeptical comment in which they accused, entirely truthfully, Putin of lying and said Ukraine’s pathway to NATO had to stay open. Here is the text from the Swedish Foreign Ministry. https://www.government.se/statements/2025/08/joint-statement-of-the-le
aders-of-the-nordic-baltic-eight-on-ukraine/
Quote:
To achieve a just and lasting peace the next step must be together with Ukraine. Only Ukraine can make decisions concerning its future. No decisions on Ukraine without Ukraine, and no decisions on Europe without Europe.

Experience has shown that Putin cannot be trusted. Ultimately it is Russia's responsibility to end its blatant violations of international law. Russia's aggression and imperialist ambitions are the root causes of this war.

Achieving a just and lasting peace requires a ceasefire. And credible security guarantees for Ukraine. A peace agreement needs firm and concrete commitments by transatlantic partners to safeguard Ukraine against any future aggression. We welcome President Trump’s statement that the US is prepared to participate in security guarantees. No limitations should be placed on Ukraine’s armed forces or on its cooperation with other countries. Russia has no veto over Ukraine’s pathway to the EU and NATO.
The UK government, which is still invested in maintaining a mostly non-existent special relationship, was the most effusive in its praise of Trump. Though it tried to hedge a little, Prime Minister Starmer resorted to a great deal of flattery in his official statement yesterday. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-statement-on-ukraine-16-august-2
025
Quote:
President Trump’s efforts have brought us closer than ever before to ending Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. His leadership in pursuit of an end to the killing should be commended.

While progress has been made, the next step must be further talks involving President Zelenskyy. The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without him.

This morning, I spoke to President Zelenskyy, President Trump and other European partners, and we all stand ready to support this next phase.

I welcome the openness of the United States, alongside Europe, to provide robust security guarantees to Ukraine as part of any deal. This is important progress and will be crucial in deterring Putin from coming back for more.
Hmmm

Later Starmer was part of a larger group of European leaders, including those of Germany, France and Poland, that released a statement that was somewhere between the more resolute stance of the Baltics and Nordics and the open flattery of Trump.

Soon, however, statements will not be enough. If Trump tries to force Ukraine to take this deal, then European states one way or the other will have to either join with Trump or back Ukraine. The fact that we do not really know what many/most European states will do, is hardly comforting.

The Pokrovsk "Collapse" Was Nothing Of The Sort

What do you do if you’ve been constantly prophesying about a Ukrainian collapse around Pokrovsk and it stubbornly keeps from happening? If you are the Washington Post or a well known military analyst, you simply write that the collapse is about to happen the next time.

Now, the Post is truly remarkable in this regard. It has published stories of Ukraine being on the verge of collapse since early 2024. Six months ago I put together a summary of some of these.
A Year of Ukrainian "Collapse" Narratives:
A Year of Ukrainian "Collapse" Narratives:
Phillips P. OBrien
·
Feb 26
Read full story

Lets go back to how the Post has described the Ukrainian military for the last year and a half (all sources are in that piece). Here was the Post in February 2024.

The Ukrainian military is facing a critical shortage of infantry, leading to exhaustion and diminished morale on the front line, military personnel in the field said this week — a perilous new dynamic for Kyiv nearly two years into the grinding, bloody war with Russia….

Well when the Ukrainian military stubbornly refused to collapse in 2024, that did not stop the Post—no indeed. This is how the situation was described in Ukraine in January of 2025.

At the same time, the ranks of Ukrainian soldiers have grown more and more depleted and unequipped to fend off the Russian onslaught. Those in the field describe exhaustion and slumping morale. And soldiers who said they believed in fighting until the last of the Russian occupiers were pushed off all of Ukraine’s territory are increasingly supporting President-elect Donald Trump’s call to begin negotiations to end the war.

The shift in attitude has come as Ukrainian soldiers said they have grown frustrated with their own government in Kyiv, criticizing what has been a slow and disjointed mobilization campaign. Many also said they had to invest their own money or were dependent on civilian volunteers for equipment such as drones and the vehicles they drive near front-line positions because they couldn’t rely on the government for essential equipment.

Now that collapse did not occur either. However when the Russians seemed to make a breakthrough (that was not a breakthrough) to the North of Pokrovsk last week, the Post and the analytical community which has been prophesying a Ukrainian collapse lost their heads again and jumped on the collapse bandwagon.

Here was the situation that got them all excited. By August 11, the Russians had seemingly advanced threateningly in that double pronged fork shape.

Now, Michael Kofman went to great lengths to highlight this development immediately and cast it in the worst possible light. Here are segments from his twitter thread on the subject. First, this advance shows massive Ukrainian problems.

and things are so bad that they might even result in a Russian “operational” breakthrough!

And the real problem (in language strikingly similar to that used in the Post (and Financial Times too it must be said) is Ukraine’s screw ups.

This sets off a large scale focus on Ukrainian weakness and failures, such as these three tweets:

And could this lead to a “collapse”! They love that word.

Well guess what. The Russian operation has been quickly countered by the Ukrainians who have counterattacked effectively (amazing that considering all their faults). Indeed, the Russian operation seems to be turning into a bit of a fiasco. Here is the present Deep State map.

So, what does the Post do? Well, clearly they had been planning to write a dooming piece about how the Russian infiltration was a sign of Ukrainian collapse. However when that did not happen, they decided to press on anyway and write this piece about how it was really a disaster anyway. Guess what—even though the Ukrainians successfully cut up the Russian infiltration—it was really a “calamity” for Ukraine.

That this story could have been written after this last week is a sign that military analysis is getting worse, not better. Its been well over a year and a half that Ukraine was on the verge of collapse, that Pokrovsk was about to fall, that the world was ending. And yet time and again the analytical community pushing this narrative is proven wrong and wrong again. And amazingly, that community almost always errs in one way—in favor of the idea that Ukraine is close to collapse and Russia is a steamroller.

I say this now without hesitation. We have the worst military analysis community in the history of military analysis.

Thanks for reading Phillips’s Newsletter! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 8:39 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Here's your realism:

1. Fuck Ukraine.

2. Nobody cares.


That's been the truth since the genesis of this thread.
On the flight to Alaska, President Trump declared that if he did not secure a cease-fire in Ukraine during talks with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “I’m not going to be happy,” and there would be “severe consequences.”

Just hours later, he got back on Air Force One and departed Alaska without the cease-fire he deemed so critical. Yet he had imposed no consequences, and had pronounced himself so happy with how things went with Mr. Putin that he said “the meeting was a 10.”

Even in the annals of Mr. Trump’s erratic presidency, the Anchorage meeting with Mr. Putin now stands out as a reversal of historic proportions. Mr. Trump abandoned the main goal he brought to his subarctic summit and, as he revealed on Saturday, would no longer even pursue an immediate cease-fire. Instead, he bowed to Mr. Putin’s preferred approach of negotiating a broader peace agreement requiring Ukraine to give up territory.

The net effect was to give Mr. Putin a free pass to continue his war against his neighbor indefinitely without further penalty, pending time-consuming negotiations for a more sweeping deal that appears elusive at best. Instead of a halt to the slaughter — “I’m in this to stop the killing,” Mr. Trump had said on the way to Alaska — the president left Anchorage with pictures of him and Mr. Putin joshing on a red carpet and in the presidential limousine known as the Beast.

For all the promises of a cease-fire, of severe economic consequences, of being disappointed, it took two minutes on the red carpet and 10 minutes in the Beast for Putin to play Trump again. What a sad spectacle.

The cease-fire that Mr. Trump gave up in Alaska had been so important to him last month that he threatened tough new economic sanctions if Russia did not pause the war within 50 days. Then he moved the deadline up to last Friday. Now there is no cease-fire, no deadline and no sanctions plan.

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/08/16/once-again-trump-exposed-h
is-weakness-and-got-played-by-putin/

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 9:47 PM

SECOND

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


"Our task is to reach the Volga. It has a cascade of power plants, and then it will be a matter of who drives whom into a corner. If we strike a few power plants, 40% of Russian territory will clearly be without electricity,' said Romanenko.

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/palianytsia-and-own-ballistics-what-is
-known-1724954613.html

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 10:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
"Our task is to reach the Volga. It has a cascade of power plants, and then it will be a matter of who drives whom into a corner. If we strike a few power plants, 40% of Russian territory will clearly be without electricity,' said Romanenko.

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/palianytsia-and-own-ballistics-what-is
-known-1724954613.html

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


Imagine if people were discussing this online about your local power plant.

Then imagine the last time your power was knocked out for a few days.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 11:16 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Has No Cards

Why would Putin need to make a deal with him?


Annie is right, but it has nothing to do with Trump.

Between deindustrialization and our high-profit model of military weaponry, plus our multi-front, delusional "full spectrum dominance" ambitions, we don't have weapons to spare.

What does it take to be a realist around here???

End of story, case closed.
Signym, you are insane. Or just an overly articulate ignoramus. The USA has NOT been "deindustrialization". The USA has an abundance of weapons, which it chooses not to use for the purpose they were built, to kill Russians. When it was Biden making the decisions, he allowed the Russians to control his weapon stockpile by listening to Russians talk about red lines not to be crossed unless the USA wanted to be nuked. Trump is now making the decisions, and he is on Russia's side against Ukraine. His red line is to make it less than obvious that he is on Putin's team.

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


Tell me, SECOND, how many Patriot missiles do we have left, and what is our production rate?

Why were the USA and EU scrounging the world for a 155 mm shells?

How long does it take to modernize an Abrams tank and make it ready for warfare?

Your problem, SECOND, is that you don't have the faintest idea. So you live in a world of delusion.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

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Monday, August 18, 2025 7:31 AM

SECOND

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


Russian forces are currently struggling to complete the encirclement or envelopment of Kupyansk from the northwest and have not yet seized the settlement despite 22 months of offensive operations. Russian forces began a dedicated effort to seize Toretsk, Donetsk Oblast in mid-June 2024.[8] Russian forces started this effort not far from the positions that Russian forces held prior to the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Russian forces seized Toretsk by August 1, 2025, taking 14 months to advance about 6.4 miles from the southeastern outskirts of Toretsk to the northwestern outskirts of Toretsk.[9]

The Russian campaign for Chasiv Yar, Donetsk Oblast, began in May 2023 after Russian forces seized Bakhmut (east of Chasiv Yar), and Russian forces intensified efforts to seize Chasiv Yar in April 2024.[10] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces completed the seizure of Chasiv Yar on July 31, 2025, although ISW has yet to observe evidence that Russian forces have seized the entirety of the settlement.[11] It has taken Russian forces 26 months to advance about 6.8 miles (roughly 11 kilometers) from western Bakhmut to the western edge of Chasiv Yar.

Russian forces began efforts to seize Pokrovsk, Donetsk Oblast, in February 2024 after the seizure of Avdiivka and have dedicated multiple efforts to seizing Pokrovsk through frontal assaults, envelopment, or encirclement – all of which have thus far been unsuccessful after more than 18 months.[12]

Russian forces took open areas without any significantly fortified settlements during their recent penetration northeast of Pokrovsk near Dobropillya.[13] Russian forces still have not demonstrated any capability to rapidly seize large, fortified positions, however, as the campaigns for Kupyansk, Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, and Pokrovsk have shown.[14] Russian forces are struggling to supply and reinforce their tactical penetration near Dobropillya and defend against Ukrainian counterattacks on the flanks —suggesting that Russian forces may not be able to consolidate their positions and exploit this penetration. The Russian effort for Dobropillya is just one part of Russia's broader 18-month effort to seize Pokrovsk, moreover. Russia's efforts near Dobropillya result from the failure of Russia's initial effort to encircle Pokrovsk from the southwest and northeast, causing the Russian command to try a deeper envelopment further northeast and north. ­­

None of these many-months-long efforts to take Kupyansk, Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, and Pokrovsk have been at the scale needed to seize all of Ukraine's fortress belt – Ukraine's highly fortified, main defensive line in Donetsk Oblast that consists of cities that are significantly larger in terms of size and population.[15] Russian efforts to seize the rest of Donetsk Oblast by force would take several years, given the number of fortified urban areas Russian forces must overcome to reach the Donetsk Oblast administrative boundaries.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-august-17-2025

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

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Monday, August 18, 2025 7:34 AM

SECOND

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


Ukraine's 1,900-Mile Cruise Missile Is Very Big, Very Fast and Very Destructive

Can Kyiv afford it?

Aug 17, 2025

https://www.trenchart.us/p/ukraines-new-7-ton-cruise-missile

Most of Ukraine’s deep-strike drones range no farther than 800 miles. Worse, the best of them—the extended-range Ukroboronprom An-196s, for instance—reach their maximum range by adding fuel at the expense of explosives. The farthest-flying An-196s may pack warheads weighing fewer than 220 pounds. https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/08/09/ukraine-liutyi-drone-warhead-50
-percent-growth/

That trade-off—less payload for greater range—is the main reason why Ukraine’s deep strikes aren’t always very destructive. Especially the ones targeting oil refineries, weapons factories and air bases in the 800-mile zone.

“Drones that can fly that far typically can’t deliver the kind of payload needed to inflict serious or lasting damage to a facility that big,” explained Tatarigami, the founder of the Frontelligence Insight analysis group.

A new cruise missiles may change the math. For Ukraine, the ramp-launched Flamingo is an opportunity to massively expand its strike campaign—hitting more targets farther away while inflicting greater damage.

The Flamingo, which may be based on the FP-5 from Emirati firm Milanion, recently entered serial production, according to Associated Press jouranlist Efrem Lukatsky. An A.P. photo depicts two of the seven-ton rocket-propelled on their trailers at an unspecified workshop belonging to Kyiv-based manufacturer Fire Point.

With its likely combination of GPS and inertial guidance and its potentially 2,200-pound warhead, the Flamingo is essentially a modern version of the 1970s-vintage Tupolev Tu-141 reconnaissance drones that Ukraine transformed into crude cruise missiles early in Russia’s wider war on the country.

The Flamingo also borrows from the nuclear-tipped ground-launched cruise missiles of the early Cold War—including the U.S. Air Force’s Mace and Matador, which themselves traced their origins to Nazi Germany’s V-1 buzz bomb.

How many missiles?

The question, of course, is scale. Yes, the Flamingo is reportedly in “serial production,” according to Lukatsky. But how serial?

In late 2024, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky announced Ukraine would acquire 30,000 deep-strike munitions this year, but the best of them are available in relatively small numbers. Germany invested hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Ukraine an extra 500 or so An-196s alongside an unspecified number of Bars cruise missiles.

The Bars in particular has “potential for mass production within Ukraine,” the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team noted. Again, we don’t know what “mass production” means in this context. “The extent to which the new Bars missile will affect the front line will depend entirely on how many are made available to the Ukrainian military,” CIT wrote.

The same is true of the Flamingo.

Russia is producing its own main deep-strike munition, the 440-pound Shahed attack drone, at a rate of around 1,000 per day. To strike back at equal intensity, Ukraine needs to launch hundreds of drones or missiles every day—not the 80 a day that Zelensky’s 30,000-munition program implies.

It’s unclear how much a Flamingo costs, but its size and performance—its 600-mile-per-hour speed is especially impressive—might point to a unit cost of at least $1 million. That’s probably too expensive.

One way to lower the cost is to build more copies, of course. As Shahed production at the type’s main Russian factory in Yelabuga has ramped up, the unit price has dropped a lot—down a factor of four to potentially just $50,000 per drone.

If Ukraine can scale up Flamingo production and intensify strikes beyond 800 miles, it may opt to finally bombard … the Shahed factory. Sprawling across 1.7 million square feet, it’s a very hard target—but one of the most valuable for a long-range missile with a heavy warhead.

Thanks for reading Trench Art! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

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Monday, August 18, 2025 3:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Scarborough: We've Always Known Ukraine Would Have To Give Up Land, Never Join NATO

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/08/18/scarborough_weve_al
ways_known_ukraine_would_have_to_give_up_land_never_join_nato.html

Quote:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Let's underline two things here—just again, to set expectations.

Even during the Biden administration, every Biden official, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said they're going to have to give up land. They're not going to like giving up land, but they're going to have to give up land. That's number one.

Number two, they're not going to become members of NATO. There may have been people writing articles in The Wall Street Journal or elsewhere saying they have to be members of NATO, but you go around to every European leader—that was never going to happen. But there was an idea of a quasi–NATO-type guarantee. And they need that guarantee.


Shut the fuck up, Joe. Don't you have more interns to rape and murder?

YOU didn't say shit. I told YOU that Ukraine would have to give up land and would never join NATO. You called me a Nazi for saying it.

There's only two things about this war that were true from the beginning, and I was the only one saying them.

1. Fuck Ukraine

2. Nobody Cares


--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, August 19, 2025 5:54 AM

SECOND

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


NATO banned weapons to this Ukrainian unit. Now they study its tactics.

Azov went from pariah to the territorial defense case study.

By Julian McBride | August 19, 2025

https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/08/19/nato-banned-weapons-to-this-ukr
ainian-unit-now-they-study-its-tactics/

When NATO militaries examine effective territorial defense, they keep running into an uncomfortable problem: one of the best examples comes from a unit they refused to arm for years.

The 1st Azov Corps was synonymous with far-right extremism. NATO countries wouldn’t send weapons. Today, those same militaries study how Ukraine systematically purged the extremists while keeping the effectiveness.

Why does this matter beyond Ukraine? Because territorial defense just became essential for every democracy with an authoritarian neighbor. And Azov shows it’s possible to transform controversial volunteer forces without losing what makes them effective.

When armies collapse, volunteers fill the gap

Ukraine’s regular army was falling apart in 2014. Corruption, no equipment, units that wouldn’t fight. Russian forces and their proxies grabbed footholds in Luhansk and Donetsk while Ukrainian brigades crumbled.

Someone had to step up. On 5 May 2014, Russian-speaking Ukrainians formed Azov during the initial phase of the Donbas war. Initially called the “Black Corps” for their black masks and urban combat gear, they weren’t your typical volunteer battalion.

They got results fast. Azov helped retake Mariupol in September 2014 and Marinka in June 2015. Effective fighters who could actually push Russian forces out of key cities.

But here’s the thing: effectiveness came with baggage. Among the nationalists and patriots were members with alleged ties to far-right extremists. The Kremlin seized on this, turning Azov into a propaganda goldmine for justifying future aggression.

Much more at https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/08/19/nato-banned-weapons-to-this-ukr
ainian-unit-now-they-study-its-tactics/

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

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Tuesday, August 19, 2025 5:56 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

There's only two things about this war that were true from the beginning, and I was the only one saying them.

1. Fuck Ukraine

2. Nobody Cares
A Russian servicemember recently murdered a Ukrainian woman in the Pokrovsk direction in clear violation of international law. The Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast Prosecutor's Office reported on August 18 that it opened an investigation into a Russian servicemember murdering a Ukrainian woman as she walked on a street near Rodynske (north of Pokrovsk).[39] The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) states that "intentionally direct attacks against the civilian population or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities” constitutes a serious violation of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict within the established framework of international law.[40] Russian soldiers have notably committed extreme atrocities against civilians and soldiers in Ukraine as part of the wider military modus operandi.[41]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-august-18-2025

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

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Tuesday, August 19, 2025 6:41 AM

SECOND

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


War And Power: An Excerpt
Plus: Trump Worked Himself Up Into A Lather -- Then TACO'D (For Now)

By Phillips P. OBrien | Aug 19, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-and-power-an-excerpt

It’s easy to count tanks; it’s much harder to assess how well those operating the tanks have been prepared for combat, and whether those operating the tanks really want to operate them in combat. Militaries (at least for now) still must be controlled by human beings, and often it is their learned skills and continuing ability to take risks that determine the course of wars. Of course, human abilities need to be backed up by constant operational sustainment. When the myth of the short, decisive war collapses, as it usually does, what is left is a long-term struggle to constantly regenerate — and even grow — military force as it is being destroyed in combat. The military equipment with which a country starts a war is normally eaten up in short order, and the war becomes a desperate test to make, repair and recreate military force.

Alliances often determine the outcome of a war even for the most powerful states. Allies play an enormous role in providing aid, and can even take over a significant amount of the fighting burden. The two world wars were decided by alliances acting in concert, not individual states fighting their own wars. Or, to put it more bluntly, the states that acted most like individual actors - such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in World War II — were doomed when faced with the Allies, who were willing to act far more cooperatively. In other words, those states that try to act like individual great powers, like Germany in both world wars, ended up defeated; while those nations that were able to work in larger coalitions — such as Britain — had their victory parades.

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

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Tuesday, August 19, 2025 6:59 AM

SECOND

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


On the meeting between Trump and Europe about Ukraine:

By Andrew Pavelyev

I had a bizarre experience with that meeting. My parents live with us, and my mother has dementia. Last morning a nurse came and gave us some tips. Among other things she told us that when Mom starts talking nonsense (like hearing voices or seeing something, or asking about her mother), we should not try to reason with her (which is my natural inclination, as not only am I a scientist, but she used to be an analytical chemist), lest she gets agitated, but rather play along, sooth her and then try to distract. A couple hours later I was watching the Oval Office meeting and suddenly realized that all visitors were treating Trump like a dementia patient!

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-and-power-an-excerpt/commen
t/146893223

Trump's behavior at the meeting is described at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-and-power-an-excerpt

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

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Tuesday, August 19, 2025 11:04 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

There's only two things about this war that were true from the beginning, and I was the only one saying them.

1. Fuck Ukraine

2. Nobody Cares
A Russian


There's only two things about this war that were true from the beginning, and I was the only one saying them.

1. Fuck Ukraine

2. Nobody Cares

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, August 19, 2025 4:05 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Instead of burying your head up the asses of know-nothings, SECOND, maybe you should listen to this guy. He has a wealth of detailed fact and well grounded analysis at his fingertips.

Quote:
Col Jacques Baud
Jacques Baud holds a Master's degree in econometrics and a postgraduate degree in international security from the Graduate Institute of International Relations in Geneva and was a colonel in the Swiss Army. He worked for the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service and was an advisor on the security of refugee camps in Eastern Zaïre during the Rwandan war, worked for NATO in locations including Ukraine, and is the author of several books on intelligence, asymmetric warfare, terrorism and disinformation.



Quote:
Jacques Baud is a former colonel of the General Staff, ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist on Eastern countries. He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He has served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations. As a UN expert on rule of law and security institutions, he designed and led the first multidimensional UN intelligence unit in the Sudan. He has worked for the African Union and was for 5 years responsible for the fight, at NATO, against the proliferation of small arms. He was involved in discussions with the highest Russian military and intelligence officials just after the fall of the USSR. Within NATO, he followed the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and later participated in programs to assist the Ukraine. He is the author of several books on intelligence, war and terrorism, in particular Le Détournement published by SIGEST, Gouverner par les fake news, L'affaire Navalny, and many other books.




In the video:

To persuade Ukraine to return Russia's nuclear weapons to Russia (weapons that Ukraine didn't possess) it was offered security guarantees. The agreement was not a treaty and not legally enforceable.

There WAS a treaty that gave Ukraine security guarantees, that was the Friendship Treaty between Russia and Ukraine signed in 1997. That promised Ukraine security provided that Ukraine guaranteed equal rights to its ethnic Russians. Once Ukraine eliminated Russian as an official language and started beating up ethnic Russians, the treaty was broken

Crimea was an autonomous region by agreement between Ukraine and Russia. There was no 'invasion' of Crimea bc Russian troops, by agreement,were already there

Russia didn't "invade" Ukraine. Even within NATO, the word "invasion" wasn't to be used, bc there weren't Russian units under orders in Ukraine. There were Russian fighters, but as individuals.

Russia intervened to protect the people of the Donbas.

The history of agreements and treaties isn't important to western negotiators, bc to them negotiations start at T=0. However, Russia has a very different and legalisticapproach. They won't violate treaties that may have been signed decades ago unless the "other side" violates it first.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 5:35 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Instead of burying your head up the asses of know-nothings, SECOND, maybe you should listen to this guy. He has a wealth of detailed fact and well grounded analysis at his fingertips.

Quote:
Col Jacques Baud
Download all his books for free from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Jacques+Baud

A typical quote from How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat [2024] :
Quote:
Reasons for Russian Success

At the end of September 2023, Russia was clearly on the road to success—the objectives set out by Vladimir Putin in February 2022 have been achieved, while Ukraine is living on Western aid, which is getting weaker by the day. We use the word “success” here—not “victory,” as the terms of the latter are still unknown. Yet even those who were fiercely opposed to Russia are beginning to speak of a Russian victory. In December, the British daily The Telegraph headlined “Putin’s Russia nears devastating victory. Europe’s foundations tremble.”805
Maybe next year, or later, there will be a 2nd edition, where Jacques explains why Russia hasn’t reached “victory” despite success after success, so many that it is hard to keep track of all the winning.

1) Operation Z
Jacques Baud
Max Milo éditions, 2022
English [en] · PDF · 2.1MB · 2022 · Book (non-fiction) · /lgli/lgrs/nexusstc/zlib
description
Why did Putin trigger Operation Z in Ukraine? Do Ukrainian forces use neo-Nazi volunteers? What are the forces involved and the reality of the military conflict over the past six months? What do we know about war crimes like Boutcha? Have Western economic sanctions worked? Does the massive shipment of weapons by the West have an effect on the conflict? After the bestseller Putin: Master of the Game?, whose analytical work has been praised around the world, Jacques Baud returns in this book to the root causes of the war in Ukraine and the reasons that pushed Vladimir Putin to intervene on February 24, 2022. Drawing on intelligence information and official reports, it analyzes the course of military actions and how they have been interpreted in the West. It explains the upheaval of the world order politically and economically, as well as the long-term consequences of Western sanctions on our daily lives. It reveals how the conflict could have been avoided and which tracks were deliberately abandoned by the United States and Europe.

2) The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat
Jacques Baud
Max Milo Editions, 1st, 2024
English [en] · EPUB · 9.3MB · 2024 · Book (non-fiction) · /lgli/lgrs/nexusstc/zlib
description
Why is Ukraine losing the war against Russia? How do both sides think and operate? What were the mistakes on both sides? How did the West contribute to the Ukrainian defeat. To answer these and many other questions, Jacques Baud draws on official information as well as American, Western and Russian documents. He explains how Russia understands and conducts the war. He shows how the West’s inability to grasp this reality and its determination to weaken Russia has backfired in Ukraine. Following on from the bestsellers Putin: Game master?, Operation Z and Ukraine Between War and Peace, whose analytical work has been acclaimed worldwide and translated into several languages, the author returns to the war in Ukraine. He explains how Russia waged the war, and reveals how the image portrayed by the West led to Ukraine’s failure.

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

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 5:51 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

There's only two things about this war that were true from the beginning, and I was the only one saying them.

1. Fuck Ukraine

2. Nobody Cares
Russia’s Imperial Black Sea Strategy

Maritime Power and the Quest for Regional Dominance

By Daniel S. Hamilton and Angela Stent | August 19, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/georgia/russias-imperial-black-sea-stra
tegy

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and other neighbors is transforming the Black Sea into Eurasia’s strategic frontier. Russia has disrupted flows of energy, food, and other commodities; generated millions of migrants; and heightened insecurity not just in Ukraine but also across the entire Black Sea region. These efforts constitute part of a much longer and larger strategy. Russia does not merely seek to dominate Ukraine. It wants to render each of the other five states that border the Black Sea—as well as Moldova, which borders Romania and Ukraine and whose waters flow into the sea—subservient to its interests so that it can exercise veto power over choices these countries make. Moscow also aspires to use the Black Sea as a platform from which to project power and influence throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the Caucasus.

Russia’s quest to become the dominant force in the Black Sea is an essential element in its strategy to reassert itself as a great power. The Kremlin believes that a failure to establish a commanding presence in the region would leave Russia exposed to Western encroachment, render it less able to influence adjoining areas and disrupt commodity exports that are critical to the Russian economy. Turkey poses the greatest obstacle to Russian objectives in the region because it is the only Black Sea state that Russia has not historically dominated and it is a NATO member. But even after the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin retained considerable levers of influence over the former Soviet empire’s Black Sea space in Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine.

In recent decades, Russia has sought to further subordinate these states to Moscow through a combination of persuasion and coercion. Increasing Russia’s Black Sea presence is also at the heart of President Vladimir Putin’s decades-long plan to resurrect the country’s maritime power. He prioritized modernizing the Black Sea Fleet, whose interventions proved critical in supporting Russia’s Mediterranean Squadron and its 2015 intervention in Syria. Putin has ignored internationally recognized borders to seize a great expanse of Black Sea coastline, including Georgia’s territory of Abkhazia in 2008, Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014, and the Ukrainian part of the Sea of Azov coast in 2022. Although Ukraine has prevented Russia from taking all of its Black Sea coast, Moscow has deployed naval mines as well as blockaded and bombed Ukrainian ports to sever Ukraine’s sea access and minimize the presence of other navies.

While the world has focused on Russia’s battle for Ukraine, Moscow has often advanced these goals under the radar—extending the war, skirting sanctions, disrupting markets, and enhancing its influence in the Middle East and North Africa. Other key leaders should work with Black Sea countries to build a region more resilient to Russian pressure. Failing to do so will likely prolong the war, further enable Russia’s massive human rights violations, exacerbate refugee flows, and provoke turbulence in global energy and commodity markets. Regional insecurities are, in turn, likely to spill over into the Caucasus, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.

Black Swan

For centuries, the Black Sea has served as a critical junction for the movement of people and commodities. Russia has long believed that controlling the sea is essential for its security: in 1783, Catherine the Great annexed Crimea from the Ottoman Empire to increase the Russian Empire’s control over the Black Sea. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Russia competed with the Ottoman Empire and Europe’s major powers for influence in and around the sea. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union became the region’s leading power. Turkey was its main competitor, but Moscow came to dominate all the other Black Sea coastal states.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Russia’s regional role changed dramatically. Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine became independent countries and pursued closer ties to the West. Bulgaria and Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007. As a result, Russia lost its access to parts of the Black Sea coastline. In March 2014, Putin justified the annexation of Crimea by warning that otherwise, “NATO ships would have ended up in the city of Russian navy glory, Sevastopol.” Between 2014 and 2022, the Kremlin tripled the amount of Black Sea coastline under its de facto control and strengthened its influence by wielding a combination of military, diplomatic, economic, energy, and disinformation tactics.

Today, the Black Sea is a central hub for Russia’s energy trade: Russian oil and oil products account for most of the cargo flowing out of Novorossiysk, the largest port in Russia and the Black Sea basin and the fifth-largest in Europe. The country’s remaining westward pipeline gas routes run under the Black Sea to Turkey and then on to southeastern Europe. The sea is also vital to Russian agriculture: Russia routes almost all of its grain exports and a significant proportion of its fertilizer and other agricultural goods through its ports there. These flows enable Moscow to increase revenue, create new markets, establish trading systems less reliant on the U.S. dollar, and gain influence in recipient countries.

Russia now employs a variety of interference tactics to swing Black Sea states toward Moscow. Hard power, of course, remains a crucial element of its strategy, and not only in Ukraine. The 1991–93 civil war in Georgia unsettled that country’s political life and granted Moscow opportunities for influence; in 2008, Russia invaded and defeated Georgia in a brief war and recognized the separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. About eight percent of Georgians have been internally displaced because of that invasion and other Russian efforts to exploit the country’s ethnic conflicts.

But military campaigns are not the only way Russia has sought to bring the Black Sea region to heel. The Kremlin has frequently used disinformation to persuade populations in post-communist countries to align with Russia over what the Kremlin calls pro-Western elites, appealing to people disillusioned with their governments’ failures. Moscow has also supported pro-Russian political parties, interfered in elections, and sought to carry out coups against incumbents.

And historically, Russia has leveraged Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine’s dependence on Russian energy to influence each country’s elites. Moscow cut all gas transit through Ukraine to Europe several times before its initial 2014 incursion and shut off gas supplies to Bulgaria in 2022 and Moldova in early 2025. It has restricted food flows, banning wheat exports to Georgia or limiting Moldovan wine exports to Russia, for instance, to discipline Georgia and Moldova when it believes that either is diverging from Moscow’s priorities. And Russian interference extends to the cultural: the Russian Orthodox Church appeals to its counterparts abroad to battle “satanic” or “woke” Western culture. The Kremlin also deploys espionage and sabotage to destabilize these societies.

Mixed Record

Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine both accelerated its efforts to dominate the Black Sea and revealed the benefits of the groundwork it laid earlier to solidify control. Its ability to disrupt maritime traffic has scrambled regional energy flows: although Russia’s gas exports to Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine have declined significantly since February 2022, its exports to Georgia and Turkey have increased substantially as each of those countries has refused to join sanctions on Russia. Turkey has become the world’s largest buyer of Russian refined oil products. Many of these imports are relabeled in Georgia and Turkey and then reexported to circumvent the European Union’s import ban.

The sea has also become a major staging area for Russia’s “shadow fleet” of unregistered ships, which it uses to circumvent Western sanctions. Russia has used its access to the Black Sea to disrupt its agricultural competitors. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev calls food Russia’s “silent weapon.” The Kremlin has stolen Ukrainian agricultural products and bombed Ukraine’s farmlands, agricultural infrastructure, and ports to undercut a primary source of Kyiv’s revenue and gain new markets for Moscow.

Russia’s efforts to destabilize other Black Sea states are a tale of uneven successes and setbacks. The region’s weakest links are Georgia and Moldova. Russian forces are stationed in each country’s breakaway regions, and broader domestic discontent provides fertile ground for subversive Russian tactics. Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, has turned toward Russia, suspending accession negotiations with the EU in November 2024 and later introducing legislation that represses freedom of speech and assembly. Although a large segment of Georgian society opposes these moves, the party has managed to win successive elections; many Georgians fear that if the country continues along a pro-EU path, Russia will invade again. Intimidation apparently works. The victory of pro-Western candidates in recent Moldovan and Romanian elections illustrates the limits of Russian interference, but the Kremlin is working hard to manipulate Moldova’s fall 2025 parliamentary elections to boost pro-Russian parties.

The fight for Ukraine is also a fight for the future of the Black Sea.

Moscow has secured access to key grain markets at Ukraine’s expense, but flexing its agricultural power has aggravated tensions with recipient countries. African leaders have told Putin that the war has created food insecurity: in July 2023, for instance, the Kenyan diplomat Korir Sing’Oei called Russia’s withdrawal from a pact that allowed Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea “a stab on the back.” Although Moscow has managed to leverage the sea to evade sanctions, generate revenue, and access critical technology, that effort has required developing elaborate and inefficient trading and shipping schemes, and some Black Sea countries have also sought alternative energy sources. The war in Ukraine has also forced Moscow to contend with the largest outflow of its own people since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Ukraine’s success in denying sea control to Russia and inflicting heavy damage on its Black Sea Fleet has crimped Moscow’s influence over nearby regions. So did Turkey’s decision to close the Turkish straits to Russian military vessels days after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Ankara has complex ties with Moscow: Turkey is a significant trading partner and purchaser of Russian oil, as well as a key transit route for Russian gas. Yet Ankara’s choice to close the Turkish straits not only limited Moscow’s ability to wage naval war against Ukraine; it also stopped Russia from using the sea to project naval power in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Moscow remains a significant player in the South Caucasus but has lost its role as the regional hegemon; Turkey now plays a much more important regional role than it did before 2022. Until 2023, Russia acted as Armenia’s protector in its conflict with Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, but when Azerbaijan attacked Armenia in 2023, Russia, its military overextended, did not come to Armenia’s assistance. After decades of fighting, in August 2025, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a peace agreement to end the conflict—but they signed it at the White House, not the Kremlin, highlighting the limits of Russian influence in the region. Strains to its military capabilities also forced Moscow to prioritize its war in Ukraine over its support for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. After the ouster of Assad’s regime last December, the Kremlin is scrambling to regain influence with Damascus’s new leadership. It needs such influence: the loss of Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base and Tartus Naval Base in Syria would complicate Moscow’s efforts to expand its operations in the Mediterranean and Africa. And Russia now faces rising competition in the Black Sea and Central Asia from China and the European Union, each of which is building out its economic and political presence.
Sea Change

Policymakers seeking to exploit Moscow’s mixed record in the Black Sea must overcome several challenges. The region’s post-communist countries continue to struggle, leaving them vulnerable to Russian influence. The end of U.S. foreign assistance programs in Ukraine and other states in the region geared toward fighting corruption, supporting an independent news media, and promoting economic development, health, and good governance has left a gap that only EU and NATO allies can fill. EU accession negotiations with Moldova and Ukraine are moving slowly and face opposition from some member states.

The EU and NATO have each put forth new strategies for the region, but both face obstacles to implementation. Brussels’s plan is full of good intentions but lacks concrete commitments and has no budget. NATO has focused on defending its northeastern flank, even though Russia’s last three invasions have taken place in the Black Sea, not the Baltic. In the past three years, EU and NATO countries have prioritized their own resilience strategies; now they must develop plans to stabilize vulnerable Black Sea partners.

Brussels must mobilize funding to match the ambitious rhetoric it presented in May 2025 on a so-called connectivity agenda with Black Sea states and the Caucasus, Eurasia, and the Middle East. The EU should forge West-East corridors that link the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas––circumventing Russia and including Turkey, which EU plans have thus far avoided. Additionally, members of the Three Seas Initiative, which seeks to build digital, energy, and transport links between the Adriatic, Black, and Baltic Seas, should invite Ukraine and Moldova to become full members

Black Sea states should further develop their own considerable energy resources. Bulgaria, Georgia, and Romania are already constructing an underwater Black Sea energy cable that would bypass Russia and directly connect Azerbaijan’s renewable energy resources to Europe’s energy grid. Romania’s recent offshore gas discoveries, once fully exploited, could lead Bucharest to become the EU’s largest gas producer. Turkey’s Sakarya gas field holds similar promise. The war has limited Ukraine’s ability to exploit its gas resources, but in peacetime, EU and U.S. energy companies and international financial assistance could help the country become a major gas producer.
Building Blocks

Turkey will be central to any strategy to prevent Russia from controlling the Black Sea. Ankara often diverges from its NATO allies on the nature of regional challenges: it has armed Ukraine and refused to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, for instance, but maintains lucrative commercial ties with Moscow. European and U.S. policymakers should recognize this complexity and build on shared interests such as strengthening regional supply chains and infrastructure links as well as upholding freedom of navigation and curbing Russian expansionism in the Black Sea.

Turkey opposes a formal NATO maritime presence in the sea involving countries outside its immediate coastal region. But Ankara is offering concrete material support for Bulgaria’s and Romania’s defense modernization efforts. By 2030, NATO plans to make its installation near Constanta, Romania, its principal Black Sea site and its largest base in Europe. The alliance could bolster its forward presence by improving air defense capabilities and deploying additional forces to its multinational battle groups in Bulgaria and Romania. NATO could rotate ships and allied maritime groups in the Black Sea complemented by regular air patrols and exercises. Enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance could better monitor Russian activities.

The United States has an interest in a Europe that is whole, free, and at peace—and thus in enhancing freedom in the Black Sea region. Strengthening U.S. support for NATO and EU initiatives can have an outsize impact at relatively low cost. Following the Trump-Putin Alaska summit, however, it is unclear whether Trump will exert pressure on Russia to end the conflict, which may continue for some time. Yet halting Moscow’s expansionist aims must start with ending that war. Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure has already pushed millions from their homes and entrenched Russian domination in occupied Ukrainian lands.

The Kremlin is likely to persist in these efforts until international actors understand that the fight for Ukraine is also a fight for the future of the Black Sea. Efforts to end the war must be paired with a robust strategy to prevent Moscow’s dominance in the greater Black Sea region. North American and European policymakers should prioritize initiatives designed to improve the region’s democratic governance and economic development and assure the secure production and transit of commodities. If such steps fail to stabilize the region, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine may well extend to Moldova and Georgia and could even balloon into a direct confrontation with NATO states that border the Black Sea—the consequences of which would ripple across markets worldwide and threaten an even wider variety of U.S. and European interests.

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 21, 2025 8:21 AM

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Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova recently said that Russia could not tolerate the presence of troops from NATO member states in Ukraine as part of any security guarantees.[3]

European leaders recently released a joint statement reaffirming that no peace agreement should place limitations on Ukraine’s armed forces or on its cooperation with third countries nor can Russia have veto power over Ukraine’s pathway to joining the European Union (EU) or NATO.[4]

European Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas stated on August 19 that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted to honor any promises or commitments to permanently cease military activity against Ukraine and that any security guarantees must be robust and credible to deter the Russian military command does not re-group and launch a future invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-august-20-2025

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 21, 2025 9:26 AM

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War In Our Time
In this week's Europe Dispatch, Minna Ålander reflects on Europe's Russia problem.

Minna Ålander | Aug 21, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-in-our-time

. . . my pet theory of Russian superiority complex is that Putin simply couldn’t stand the idea that a whole generation of Finns and other people of (in the Russian view) inferior nationalities grew up, never thinking about Russia, knowing nothing about Russia, and disinterested in Russia. By choosing violence, Putin forced people like me to think about Russia. I am often deeply annoyed about it because fundamentally, Russia still does not interest me particularly. There are so many other fascinating countries in Eastern Europe I’ve always been much more interested in, such as Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus, as well as Moldova and Ukraine.

Given its superiority complex toward most of Europe, and persistent delusions of grandeur, Putin has been obsessing over the US as a more suitable rival – nevermind that Russia is far from on par with the US. At the same time, it has been much more convenient for Russia to have a weak Europe as a neighbour, dependent on the US and with a question mark hovering over US commitment to Europe. Although it is good for Russia’s goals in its war against Ukraine to cut off the US from aiding Ukraine and to drive a wedge between Europe and the US, in the long run it’s worse from a Russian point of view if Europe actually becomes capable to operate independently from the US. It has already been a nasty surprise that Trump has not been as good an agent as Putin has hoped for, not being able to coerce Ukraine or Europe into accepting Russian terms for a ceasefire or peace. In the long run, a Europe that can easily overmatch Russian military capability and industrial output will be a big headache for the Kremlin that chose to make Europe its enemy.

And what enemies Russia has made along the way! I wrote last week that Russia is always its own worst advocacy, and this habit has been particularly impressively at display with France. Macron has gone from talking about off-ramps and not humiliating Russia to calling Putin “a predator, and an ogre at our doorstep”.

Now, my generation of Europeans are facing war in our time, on our continent. Many are aware that the war can one day reach them personally. I, for one, am happy if we can push it back as many years as possible, for time is precious for Europe as it is building up its military capability. If (and that’s a big if) we can avoid a war altogether, Europe will be fine when all is said and done.

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 21, 2025 9:37 AM

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Andrew Pavelyev

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-in-our-time/comment/1475827
87

Yes, Russia has acted against its own strategic interests. Putin wants to cancel the outcomes of WWII because really, really hates its main outcome - American-led rules-based liberal international order. It remains to be seen whether he succeeds at that with Trump's help. But he has already managed to cancel the other big outcome of WWII - disarmament of Germany and Japan. Which, after initial postwar reconstruction, for a half a century were the biggest economies in the world except for the US. Even now, after the rise of China, Germany is still the third biggest economy, and Japan is the fourth. And now they are rearming, especially Germany. German troops are already permanently stationed on Russian borders (in Lithuania) for the first time since WWII. Is that what Russia really wanted?

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 21, 2025 11:43 AM

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Ukrainian man arrested over Nord Stream pipeline attacks

The suspect was identified only as Serhii K. under German privacy laws

By Rachel More, Matthias Williams and Giulio Piovaccari
August 21, 2025 9:45 AM CDT

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/ukrainian-man-arrested-ove
r-nord-stream-pipeline-attacks-2025-08-21/

In January 2023, Germany raided a ship that it said may have been used to transport explosives and told the United Nations it believed trained divers could have attached devices to the pipelines at about 70 to 80 metres deep.

The boat, leased in Germany via a Poland-registered company, contained traces of octogen, the same explosive that was found at the underwater blast sites, according to the investigations by Germany, Denmark and Sweden.

German media reported last year that Germany had issued a European arrest warrant against a Ukrainian diving instructor who allegedly was part of the team that blew up the pipelines.

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 22, 2025 5:44 AM

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When Dwight Eisenhower asked Gen. Georgy Zhukov, the foremost Soviet hero of World War II, how the Red Army cleared minefields, Zhukov replied that it marched through them. Putin has been marinated in lore about that war, and about “the West” trying “to cancel a whole 1,000 year culture, our people.” He is delusional, but serious.

https://andrewtobias.com/never-a-bad-word-about-putin/

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 22, 2025 5:58 AM

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Ukraine May Already Have 500 of Its Giant Flamingo Cruise Missiles
Missile-maker Fire Point aims to churn out hundreds of Flamingos a month

Aug 21, 2025

https://www.trenchart.us/p/ukraine-may-already-have-500-of-its

Ukraine has a giant new cruise missile—the seven-ton, 600-mile-per-hour Flamingo, which ranges 1,900 miles under GPS and inertial guidance while hauling a massive 2,200-pound warhead.

And it’s possible Ukrainian firm Fire Point has already built nearly 500 of the missiles. An Associated Press video from an ostensible Fire Point facility depicts two Flamingos with the serial numbers 479 and 480.

It’s possible the serials don’t reflect the actual production total. It’s equally possible they do. Fire Point spokesperson Iryna Terekh told the A.P. Fire Point is already building one Flamingo every day—and aims to ramp up production to seven a day by October ahead of full-rate production in January.

That’s … a lot of missile. Especially given the enormous size, apparent capability and possible price of the Flamingo. An American Tomahawk cruise missile weighs a fifth what a Flamingo weighs yet costs $2.4-million. To be fair, a Flamingo may lack some of the Tomahawk’s more sophisticated features.

Still, it wouldn’t be shocking if a Flamingo costs a million dollars. The price will come down a lot if Fire Point can secure the financing to scale up production. But even low-rate initial production of 210 missiles a month could easily cost $100 million. That’s an annual cost of more than a billion dollars.

It’s possible—likely, even—that Germany is footing the bill. In May, German lawmakers approved a $5.7-billion aid package that’s financing, among other things, “deep strike capabilities,” according to the Ukrainian defense ministry.

The German funds have paid for hundreds of Ukroboronprom An-196 long-range attack drones as well as, potentially, Bars cruise missiles. The propeller-driven An-196 motors along at a top speed of 200 miles per hour out to a distance of around 500 miles—and with a 110-pound warhead. The turbojet Bars might be faster but otherwise has similar performance.

The Flamingo is in a whole other class. It flies three times as far with a warhead 10 times bigger—and at a top speed nearing Mach one. Ukrainian analysts have long complained that Ukraine’s deep-strike munitions lack the punch to inflict lasting damage on the toughest and most valuable targets: air bases, factories and oil refineries.

They should have no complaints about the Flamingo.

Ukrainian forces have reportedly already launched some Flamingos at targets inside Russia. If Ukraine can acquire hundreds of the missiles every month, it could finally begin to match—missile for missile, drone for drone—Russian bombardment of Ukrainian cities.

Display of strength

The timing of the Flamingo’s reveal—around the same time Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin was visiting U.S. Pres. Donald Trump in Alaska—isn’t random. In showing deference to Putin, Trump weakened the Western alliance backing Ukraine against Russian aggression.

Revealing Flamingo demonstrates Ukrainian resolve to keep fighting—and fight harder—despite American intransigence. Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky called the Flamingo “the most successful Ukrainian development.”

But the reveal was risky. It’s not clear that Fire Point invited the A.P. to its actual factory. It’s possible the company trucked some missiles into a temporary facility for a staged media event.

But if the facility the A.P. visited really is the Flamingo plant, the plant is now in danger. “It is striking how many details were left exposed—enough to make geolocation possible,” observed Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group.

“Equally concerning is the decision to show crew members’ faces and list their positions,” Tatarigami added. “In our past investigations, my team was able to identify Russian servicemen and intelligence officers using just one facial photo, tracing some even to their actual home addresses.”

“Revealing factory staff could enable local agents to follow employees and, in turn, uncover the site almost certainly making it a target.”

Note that Ukraine is doing everything in its power to strike the factory in Yelabuga, Russia that produces Russia’s own most important deep-strike asset—its 440-pound Shahed attack drone. Indeed, that factory—800 miles from Ukraine—could be a top target for the Flamingo.

If Russian agents find the Flamingo factory, whether it’s in Ukraine or some allied country, expect them to do everything in their power to destroy it. That’s how dangerous the Flamingo is to the Russian war effort.

Thanks for reading Trench Art! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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 22, 2025 7:47 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Seems like Germans want a re-do of WWII.

One of the things I wonder about is where these missiles are being built, and with what resources. It probably requires a concentration of resources and workers in Ukraine (unless its built entirely in Germany) and so far Russia has been adept at "neutralizing" Ukrainian weapons production.

Could be that accounts for the massive drone and missiles strikes on Ukraine, and so far nothing has made a big enough boom to satisfy Russian MOD into thinking it hit the factory.

Or, this could all be one giant psyop.



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Friday, August 22, 2025 3:25 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Seems like Germans want a re-do of WWII.

One of the things I wonder about is where these missiles are being built, and with what resources. It probably requires a concentration of resources and workers in Ukraine (unless its built entirely in Germany) and so far Russia has been adept at "neutralizing" Ukrainian weapons production.

Could be that accounts for the massive drone and missiles strikes on Ukraine, and so far nothing has made a big enough boom to satisfy Russian MOD into thinking it hit the factory.

Or, this could all be one giant psyop.
Everybody, not Germany alone, is getting ready to nuke Moscow:

The View from NATO’s Eastern Flank

Lithuania has become an outspoken defender of Ukraine against the Russian invasion

By Garry Kasparov | August 22, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/08/resilience-face-r
ussian-aggression/683960/

Kasparov: Lithuania and other Eastern European countries—they’re willing to walk an extra mile to boost their defenses. So recently, your country and, I think, two other Baltic nations left the global agreement that banned land mines.

Cmilyte-Nielsen: Yes.

Kasparov: So you are planning to mine your entire border.

Cmilyte-Nielsen: That’s right.

Kasparov: So that’s quite a step; I think it’s the right direction. But that shows that you recognize how real this threat is.

Cmilyte-Nielsen: Absolutely. And it was not an easy decision from, well, from the human-rights perspective. But it was a quick decision, and it is connected to the fact that we considered the danger real. So Latvia, Estonia—not just Lithuania—Latvia, Estonia, Finland are leaving the Ottawa Convention. Well, have left already. And that means that we will both, we can produce land mines and also mine our borders. Interestingly enough, the Russian propaganda channels reacted to it quite strongly. Saying that, Well, this is a further sign of a planned aggression against Russia from the NATO side. So that gives you an idea of how sometimes dumb that propaganda is, because it is so clearly a very defensive step. You mine your border in order not to be attacked from that side.

Kasparov: Okay. Leaving the Ottawa Convention is one step, but would your country and other Eastern European countries—and Germany, of course—consider one point, you know, leaving nonproliferation treaties and developing nukes? And just making sure that nuclear missiles will be aimed at Moscow from a short distance?

Cmilyte-Nielsen: Well, it’s a theoretical, of course, discussion. But yes. In our region, well, Poland is talking about nukes. And, well, there is the serious discussion about France’s nuclear umbrella for the Baltic countries. Among the others as well. So we are thinking in terms also of how to boost our security, our 360-degree security, here in Europe—not necessarily relying on transatlantic security.

Kasparov: Everything that we discussed just indicates that Europe now is looking, especially Eastern Europe and Central Europe, looking for its own resources to boost its own defenses. Even as you just agreed—you know, building its nukes or having nuclear weapons in the region. Is it the result of just America basically walking away and departing from its role of a great defender or the guardian of the free world?

Cmilyte-Nielsen: Well, first of all, for us in Lithuania, it is crucial—it is very important—to show that we are good allies in NATO, in the European Union. That when we say that we care about security and defense, we do not just want to free ride and rely on someone who is bigger and stronger than us. But we do our part, and maybe even do more than we are expected. That has been the principle of how we operate for 35 years. And I think it’s important.

Second, when it comes to America, it is a challenge to see that the values that have been, you know, figuratively speaking, shining so brightly for so many decades, perhaps changing colors to an extent. If I have to put it bluntly, it’ll also take longer for us to start seeing the United States in a different light. And we have a lot of good cooperation. But Europe has to step up. Europe has been, for very long, relying on that the peace dividend is forever. And that is not the case.

We have learned some painful lessons. We in the Eastern NATO flank are happy to drive the process further—be it on defense, more money for defense. Be it on supporting Ukraine as much as possible. Or developing defense industries as quickly as possible. All of these things are very important, and all of this is done defensively in order to avoid a war. So we are peaceful people. We are an example that a country can live—it can have a great standard, can have free speech, can have human rights in quite a short time. And I think that is the painful thing for the Kremlin. They do not want to see successful countries from the former empire, because it might lead their people to think that there is another way, there is another track for their country as well. And that is definitely very scary for the regime.

Kasparov: But we can summarize it by saying that when America walks away, the world becomes a more dangerous place.

Cmilyte-Nielsen: Absolutely.

Kasparov: Viktorija, thank you very much. And again, good luck. And I believe that independent Lithuania will play a crucial role in defending the freedom of the region. And again, definitely, see you soon—because Vilnius is one of the places that I’ve been visiting since, I’m afraid to say, since 1973.

Cmilyte-Nielsen: Thank you, Garry. And looking forward to seeing you in Vilnius.

Kasparov: This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Arevalo. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Original music and mix by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Special thanks to Polina Kasparova and Mig Greengard. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Oleksandra Matviychuk: I know that some politicians abroad, they have this wishful thinking that The war is so horrible, that Okay, occupation is not good, but at least it’ll stop the war and decrease human suffering. But believe me: I document war crimes in occupied territories for 11 years. Occupation doesn’t stop human suffering. Occupation just makes human suffering invisible.

Kasparov: I’m Garry Kasparov. See you back here next week.

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 22, 2025 3:39 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Everybody, not Germany alone, is getting ready to nuke Moscow.


Everybody?

Spain couldn't give a shit, Italy wobbles, Hungary and Slovakia against, France is pretending so Macron can stay in power, Starmer's got one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel.

China, Brazil, etc definitely against.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Friday, August 22, 2025 5:46 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Everybody, not Germany alone, is getting ready to nuke Moscow.


Everybody?

Spain couldn't give a shit, Italy wobbles, Hungary and Slovakia against, France is pretending so Macron can stay in power, Starmer's got one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel.

China, Brazil, etc definitely against.
Maybe this will clarify: Signym, if you had a half dozen neighbors, like Russia does, who are planning to kill you if you set foot on their land, you are an evil person, not the neighbors who are planning to kill you.

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 22, 2025 8:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Everybody, not Germany alone, is getting ready to nuke Moscow.


Everybody?

Spain couldn't give a shit, Italy wobbles, Hungary and Slovakia against, France is pretending so Macron can stay in power, Starmer's got one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel.

China, Brazil, etc definitely against.
Maybe this will clarify: Signym, if you had a half dozen neighbors, like Russia does, who are planning to kill you if you set foot on their land, you are an evil person, not the neighbors who are planning to kill you.


That's how you judge good vs. evil?

A popularity contest.

No wonder you're so fucked in the head.




Speaking of planning to kill somebody, I hope you took a look at my PSA thread for you. Trump and Co. are scouring the internet for people like you saying things that you've said here.

Don't worry about going back and scrubbing that. It would be a waste of time. I've got it all archived for you.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, August 22, 2025 8:19 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Here's somebody else with TDS that belongs in prison.

Lunatic Tries to Start a Movement to murder Trump supporters



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, August 22, 2025 8:56 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Everybody, not Germany alone, is getting ready to nuke Moscow.


Everybody?

Spain couldn't give a shit, Italy wobbles, Hungary and Slovakia against, France is pretending so Macron can stay in power, Starmer's got one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel.

China, Brazil, etc definitely against.
Maybe this will clarify: Signym, if you had a half dozen neighbors, like Russia does, who are planning to kill you if you set foot on their land, you are an evil person, not the neighbors who are planning to kill you.


That's how you judge good vs. evil?

A popularity contest.

No wonder you're so fucked in the head.
Russia murdered millions of Europeans after WWII ended and peace treaties had been signed. Those countries are preparing for Russia to go on another murder spree beginning in 2025. Five NATO countries that share a border with Russia or Belarus have announced their withdrawal from the 1997 Ottawa Convention, which bans anti-personnel mines globally. These countries include:

• Finland (Scandinavia): This decision is particularly significant due to Finland's 1,340-kilometer (833-mile) border with Russia.

• Estonia (Eastern Europe)

• Latvia (Eastern Europe)

• Lithuania (Eastern Europe): The country plans to use mines as part of a $1.2 billion defense plan.

• Poland (Eastern Europe): As part of its "Eastern Shield" border fortification program, Poland is preparing for the potential use of minefields.

6ixStringJack, the landmines are meant to keep Russians out of Europe.

It's impossible to give a precise number of deaths directly after World War II, as the conflict's devastation led to millions more deaths in the years that followed from starvation, disease, and the aftermath of forced migrations and expulsions. The post-war redrawing of borders by the Russians led to massive forced migrations and ethnic expulsions, particularly of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. While the total death toll is debated, it's known that many died from violence, starvation, and hardship during these forced movements.


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 22, 2025 9:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You were there. You saw it all.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, August 22, 2025 9:52 PM

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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You were there. You saw it all.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Russia killed these Germans after WWII: The death toll attributable to the flight and expulsions is disputed, with estimates ranging from 500,000[13][a] up to 2.5 million according to the German government.[14][15][16]

The Russians will kill millions more Europeans after 2025, unless NATO stops the Russians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2
%80%931950)

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 22, 2025 10:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I mean yeah. I'm sure they did and I'm sure that all happened. It had to have because somebody at some point in time at some specific place with either a writing utensil and paper or a typewriter or a computer entered it into the system and got a rubber stamp on it that said approved and so that's what happened. God's honest truth.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, August 22, 2025 10:29 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


GERMANY and its allies murdered millions of people, SECOND. Quite often civilians.

If you judge a nation by how many people it's killed, why not start with Germany? Or Japan? Or us?

Or do your ethics not work consistently?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Friday, August 22, 2025 11:39 PM

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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
GERMANY and its allies murdered millions of people, SECOND. Quite often civilians.

If you judge a nation by how many people it's killed, why not start with Germany? Or Japan? Or us?

Or do your ethics not work consistently?
The Allies killed Axis Citizens who deserved it because those citizens, even children, old women, and feeble-minded men, believed they owned the people in adjacent lands. And then there was the Allie known as Russia, which had a thousand-year history of stealing land and turning free people into serfs. Russia did NOT stop killing and enslaving even after peace treaties were signed. There are rules to War, but Russia doesn't know or care when it violates those rules because it lies about what it did, using the ancient Russian/Trumptard technique of denial.

This was covered in a recent episode of Star Trek -- Strange New Worlds. A reporter was operating under the delusion that scientific exploration must stop if it would result in the death of those who oppose knowledge. The Starfleet officers never were blunt enough with this reporter. They never told him that nobody owns outer space nor owns the stars, and nobody can demand that Starfleet has to obey the biggest, dumbest, most belligerent, self-centered ignoramuses in the Universe. As a rule, Starfleet kills assholes, ignoramuses, depraved Russians, and Trumptards who try to order it around as if Starfleet is violating trillions of "No Trespassing" signs hanging on every cubic meter of outer space.

Here on Earth, we have billions of people who think they deserve ownership of everything, controlling it all, from the Earth's core to the farthest reaches of the Universe, including all the living things in that volume. For example, the Russians act like they own the neighbors in adjacent lands such as Ukraine.

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 22, 2025 11:42 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Oh, that's right ... you believe in killing children and the feeble minded and the politically helpless because... well, just because.

You just can't admit that you're evil.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, August 23, 2025 1:36 AM

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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh, that's right ... you believe in killing children and the feeble minded and the politically helpless because... well, just because.

You just can't admit that you're evil.
Did you see any The Lord of the Rings movies? Did they have a contest to see who could kill the fewest on the path to eventual victory over evil? Or was the contest to kill the most?

The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit Kill List
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls020797187/

So-called good people think that efficiency is the goal of war, meaning killing the fewest evil people on the way to victory. But time spent convincing evil people to change their minds is a waste of time because evil people flip their behavior switch back to evil at the earliest opportunity.

Check out the Bible. God would be the most persuasive advocate for good, but doesn't argue with evil people, selling the idea of being good. Instead, God goes directly for the kill of women, children, and old men in the story of the Flood and Noah's Ark, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the story of Armageddon in Revelation. God does not do efficiency. God kills them all. In contrast to godlike behavior, humans who follow the rules of war will know that there are limits. Once the war is won, decent humans stop killing their enemies. Russians didn't stop in the past because they are indecent. Russians won't stop in Ukraine after achieving victory. The Ukrainians know this because the Russians have killed millions of them during peacetime.

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

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Saturday, August 23, 2025 8:16 AM

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1) Ukrainian authorities returned Ukrainian civilians whom Russian authorities deported from occupied areas of Ukraine to a checkpoint on the Russia-Georgia border. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha and Internal Affairs Minister Ihor Klymenko stated on August 22 that Ukrainian authorities organized the return of 65 Ukrainian civilians, including eight seriously ill, who Russian authorities deported and abandoned without documents, food, or water at the Verkhny Lars border checkpoint on the Russia-Georgia international border.[19] Non-profit organization Volunteers Tbilisi and Russian opposition outlet Vazhnye Istorii added that the Ukrainian civilians spent about three months in a basement at the border checkpoint meant to hold only 20 people.[20] Vazhnye Istorii reported that the civilians included residents of Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine who refused to cooperate with occupation authorities or accept Russian passports during forced Russification campaigns.[21]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-august-22-2025

2) Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova

https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest
-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and

Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, born on 7 October 1952, President of the Russian Federation, is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute).

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

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Saturday, August 23, 2025 8:31 AM

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Talking With Phillips O'Brien
As the war goes on ...

By Paul Krugman | Aug 23, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-phillips-obrien

I spoke a while back with Phillips O’Brien, a military historian who completely changed my understanding of World War Two and has been, as I read it, one of the most level-headed analysts of the Russia-Ukraine war — a war all too many analysts keep getting wrong. After the horrible Alaska summit — and after another Russian “breakthrough” trumpeted by the press, which even I knew enough to realize was nothing of the sort — I thought I’d check in with him again. Transcript follows.

Download OBrien's books from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Phillips+Payson+O%27Brien

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Phillips O’Brien

(recorded 8/20/25)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Paul Krugman again. I'm speaking for a second time with Phillips O'Brien, a military historian. He's had a lot of influence on how I think about history even before Ukraine. His book, How the War Was Won, completely changed how I thought about World War II. He’s often contrarian but almost always right in his comments since this whole Ukraine thing started. And I thought that after this past week with Alaska and then the gang of Europeans coming to DC, it would be a good time to check in again. So hi, Phillips.

Phillips O’Brien: Hi Paul.

Krugman: I want to get to your new book towards the end and I want to talk about the diplomacy or whatever it was that we just saw in Washington shortly, but first I'd like to talk a little bit about the war in Ukraine.

O’Brien: Okay.

Krugman: You recently wrote that we have the worst military analysis community in the history of military analysis communities. And I want to talk about that a bit because I think I have some notion of what you mean.

O’Brien: Yeah. They just don't know how to judge war. Never have. This is the same group of analysts that said Kiev would fall in three days and Russia is a great power and the war would be quick and fast. And now they seem to be watching and obsessing about every little—not even village—almost every little farm field in the Donbas, and impregnating all of these tiny little Russian advances or failures to advance as some part of the indication of an impending Ukrainian collapse or anything in the like. They just don't understand, I think, how to judge a war and what really matters.

Now, the battlefield is what the battlefield is. I mean, it's one of those things where, technologically, they were wrong. The analysts were all telling us how tanks were going to rule the battlefield early in the war. They didn't understand that. So they thought, “Drones? Who cares about drones?” They simply, I think, have an old paradigm, like, the battle-centric paradigm, where literally, if Russia takes a farm field, that indicates something. But it never really does. I mean, we have seen the same basic war for two years now. The Russians have made very small, very bloody advances for 1% of Ukraine. Now, Ukraine isn't turning the tide of the war with that, but it's not about to collapse. I think that's the problem in their analysis.

But actually, the real part of the war that I think people have to pay much more attention to is what we'll call the strategic air war. The war in some ways is going to turn a lot on the strategic air war.

Krugman: So let's just back up for a second about the ground war. Last week, there was a Russian incursion near Pokrovsk. And I've been reading about the strategic city of Pokrovsk has been imminently falling for well over a year now. And it's not clear how strategic it is. But there were these screaming headlines about a Russian breakthrough. And this is not my field, but even I thought I understood that this is not that kind of war, right?

O’Brien: Mm-hmm. There can't be a breakthrough, Paul, because what you can't do is mass vehicles near the front. You can't support supply depots and logistics depots because they'll be blown up by ranged weapons, like drones, artillery. So you can make a hole or infiltrate with very small numbers of infantry, which is what the Russians did.

They got infantry on motorcycles and on foot sneaking through the lines. They found a weak part in the Ukrainian line, but there was no way they could exploit it because there's no follow-up. You can't actually have another echelon ready to go. And it's just sort of a weird view of what they thought was happening. One of the analysts said, “This might lead to a Russian operational breakthrough.” Operational breakthroughs are what the US did in the Second World War, when they broke through the lines and sent their tanks charging 50 miles. That just was never going to happen in Ukraine. And that's the thing that drives me crazy, that they seem to not understand the war they're looking at.

Krugman: I don't know what the Ukrainians think, but pro-Ukrainian sources claim there's this great victory with vast numbers of Russians trapped in a pocket. And again, what I learned from you from World War II was that even battles like Kursk—in terms of the actual losses—are irrelevant to the course of the war.

O’Brien: Russians didn't lose a lot there. I mean, the Russians are losing a thousand soldiers a day. If they infiltrated this line with a thousand soldiers or maybe two thousand soldiers at most and they lose 90% of them, that's basically two days loss in the war. So it's not like it's a transformative loss that will change the trajectory.

Krugman: So it's not just that you keep on having the same analytical error about the nature of the war, but it's the same people who get quoted again and again. I sometimes see something similar in my own home field, but tell me what do you think sustains that? Why does it work that way?

O’Brien: Because it's a fraternity of failure. So many people were so wrong that it's much easier for them to defend each other and keep hiring each other and keep referring to each other than admit that they all screwed up and don't know what they're talking about. So it was a community that failed, not just a few people, a whole community failed.

And that community existed in the analytical community, it existed in the intelligence community, it existed in the Pentagon and the ministries of defense. And instead of having a real introspection—like what the heck have we got wrong?—they have gone into self-defense mode. Everyone got it wrong. And that somehow makes it okay. We all got it wrong. And all that means is that the same people who got it wrong to begin with are getting it wrong now, but they're being treated as if they have any idea of what they're talking about when they don't.

Krugman: The parallel in economics is there were a lot of people predicting that getting down from the high inflation of 2022 would require mass unemployment which was utterly wrong. And, you know, we all make bad forecasts, but it was clearly analytically wrong. It just had the wrong model of what this inflation was about. And those same people are still out there, you know, talking to Bloomberg every couple of days and making confident pronouncements. So, yeah.

O’Brien: I mean, we’ve all seen community behavior where a community would rather defend itself than actually look at its own methods, it seems to me. And that's what we're seeing now. Protection of reputation is all. In towns like Washington, New York, Boston, whatever, it's so important to be smart, and to be seen to be smart.

Krugman: Well, anyway, tell me about what you think is the strategic air campaign.

O'Brien: Yeah, the strategic air coming. The Russians have a lot of these Shaheed type drones with their own cruise missiles and IC and ballistic missiles. They went after Ukrainian power. They seem to have dialed down a bit on that now, or maybe they've destroyed most of the large power plants they can. They're going after cities. They're trying to kill people, break Ukrainian morale.

And they're also trying to attack certain, I think, industrial targets, but it's hard to say which because the Ukrainians won't let us know what they hit. But the Russian campaign is nightly. When you hear about these flocks of drones coming over, that's part of the campaign to try and drive Ukraine to basically throw in the towel and I would say, accept a really bad peace by breaking the Ukrainian will to resist.

The Ukrainians are more interesting. Now, they're not as effective yet, but they are bringing on more and more systems. So they've developed a new cruise missile, supposedly, which was announced yesterday, which I think someone said had a one ton warhead. The Ukrainians are going to get some punch. They've had some very successful individual strikes. So they had the strikes when they used the drones against Russian strategic air power in Siberia. They've had a lot strikes against Russian oil facilities, but then they stopped.

So they've had sort of a sporadic on-off strategic air. I think the Ukrainians have partly been controlled by the US and European powers not wanting them to take this too far. But I think if they can develop some new systems and they look to be, they might try to actually go against what we'd call Russia's military industrial complex. Now, if they can do that, that would be a huge blow to Putin. And that's the thing I'm watching because that could change the trajectory. The battlefield is what the battlefield is. You'll change the battlefield if you change what gets to the battlefield, what can be made and deployed. And that's how the war will change.

Krugman: Okay, and pardon my amateur military history, but isn't sort of trying to terrorize the civilian population rather than going after more strategic targets, isn't that kind of the mistake that the Nazis made in the Battle of Britain?

O’Brien: Yeah, and that the Allies made against Germany too. The British bombing of German cities didn't seem to work. And it's probably not going to work with the Ukrainians. In other words, it's based on the assumption Russia is not going to conquer Ukraine, but might wear down the Ukrainian ability to resist and that they would therefore accept a worse peace. I think it's not a strategy to win because the Ukrainians will fight to the death. But it's the strategy to try and get the Ukrainians to accept perhaps handing over the Donbas or something like that, which I think Putin would take now. So I think it's that kind of strategy. It's not a war winning strategy, but it's getting a temporary ceasefire through hostility strategy.

Krugman: Okay, so we had the summit in Alaska [between Trump and Putin] which was obviously embarrassing and then this thing in Washington [with European leaders]. I think the story that’s emerged is kind of different from what we thought might have happened in Alaska.

O’Brien: Well, actually, I think people always underestimate Trump. Actually I think Trump is far cagier in getting what he wants than people think. So people are saying about Anchorage, “Oh, he didn't get a deal, it ended early, he was sort of humiliated.” Well, actually, no, it turns out he and Putin have sort of reached an understanding of how the war might end, at least temporarily, but if he can get the Ukrainians to turn over the Donbas, that might have some kind of temporary ceasefire. So, there's an attempt to say, “Oh, he's a buffoon,” and not actually pay him the credit he sometimes deserves.

The Europeans are the worst for this. So they come over and they've obviously got their briefing papers that say, “Suck up to Trump and we'll get what we want. And they go and they tell him how wonderful it is. And he throws out very vague things about security guarantees. And they go home and pat themselves on the back. Well, guess what's happened? What has changed in the last week since these summits? Sanctions on Russia are off the table. This was a thing two weeks ago. Sanctions on Russia were gonna be the big thing now. Europeans said, “We must have sanctions. We want to hit Russia.” Now that's gone. Trump has won that fight. He's gotten sanctions gone, which he's always wanted to do. He's never wanted to sanction Putin.

Krugman: Okay. Yeah.

O’Brien: But he's always played along that he might, and now he killed them off, at least for now. And the other thing he got is the Europeans are now talking about what land Ukraine might have to give to Russia. The Europeans are talking about this. The Latvian foreign minister—a Baltic state—yesterday said, “Well, you know, the Ukrainians might have to be reasonable and at least have de facto recognition, which is really uncomfortable.” So the Europeans love to think they're clever and that they know how to manipulate Trump. But actually, I think he manipulates them far more than they understand.

Krugman: Yeah, I mean, the starting point here really always ought to be that fundamentally Trump supports Putin, right? I mean, the constant messaging that Trump has finally had enough and he's going to actually start to put pressure on Putin, I've read that story at least every six weeks, for years now.

O’Brien: Do you remember the pivot in July? “Trump has pivoted towards Ukraine.” It was all nonsense. There was nothing to this pivot. Yeah, there were a few tweets, but he did nothing to help Ukraine in any material way. All he did was delay sanctions on Putin. I think you saw in Anchorage, he rolled out the red carpet. He invited Putin into the limo. He likes Putin. He wants to work with Putin. That is his base position.

Krugman: Neither of us is a psychologist here, but what do you think that's about?

O’Brien: Well, with Trump, it's always money. I think there's got to be some financial history incentive. I've heard that he had an interesting history with Russia in the past. They know a lot about his business dealings and other dealings so it's much better for him to get along with the Russians. So it could be that.

Krugman: Yeah, I have to say that the compromise theory has this problem that as far as we can tell, Trump supporters wouldn't care.

O’Brien: That's it. They really won't care. He could do anything. Trump is, in that sense, an extraordinary politician. He is bulletproof. And I've never seen anything like it in my life.

Krugman: So, the Europeans have not lifted their sanctions, of course, it's just that the United States is not doing anything.

O’Brien: Well, you know the economics better than I do. But my understanding is if they don't keep updating the sanctions and toughening them, and they're not updating them and they're not toughening them, then Russia finds ways around them and can take advantage of that. So the sanctions are not some immobile feast. There's some things that need to be adapted. And since he's been president, Trump has not brought in a new sanction and he's keeping the Europeans from it. So the Russians are finding more ways around the sanctions because they're certainly the old sanction regime. So that's what's going on. He's actually protecting Putin by not allowing new sanctions in and the Russians are being very good at getting around the existing ones.

Krugman: Okay. And my amateur sense is that US military aid has become gradually less critical to the war. But we're not at the point of irrelevance yet, right?

O'Brien: Well, basically Trump aid is really small. There's a new Patriot battery that came from Israel through Germany and maybe another two Patriot batteries. But when we're talking about US military aid to Ukraine, almost all of it is legacy Biden aid. Even now, it's been legacy Biden aid. That's the thing about Trump. He always says, “well, you know that I don't want to give Ukraine aid. The Ukrainians will buy 50 billion dollars. They've asked to buy 50 billion dollars in US weapons.” Amazingly, only like a hundred million here, a hundred million there gets approved. So they're not even selling Ukraine weaponry in the way that they could, which is an indication that he was truly just mercenary and whoever wanted to give him money, he'd take it. He'd take the Ukrainian money, but he's not doing that. So what is getting to Ukraine now is either European or European-purchased or Biden aid, but the Biden aid is almost gone.

So the US now will only be what the Trump administration allows the Europeans to send to Ukraine. And then the US will backfill what the Europeans sent. We don't know how much that is, but it's not going to be anything like it was under Biden. It's up to the Europeans now. This is their conflict. As Trump says, they're going to have to help Ukraine.

Krugman: And they are getting substantial amounts of stuff, right?

O’Brien: They are doing better than they were. There are certain things they can't do. The air defense will struggle without a lot of American equipment. But in terms of weapons development, the Ukrainians are actually a success story and the Europeans are helping with that. What they have to really then do is work on producing up to scale. It's fine to develop a cruise missile, but if you can't develop it at scale, then it's not a great deal of help. So what the Europeans nearly need to do is work with the Ukrainians to grow a lot of their war industry.

Krugman: Okay, this is a change. It's from US-supplied weapons at the beginning to now largely Ukrainian-produced weapons with a lot of the money coming from Europe. But they still really want Patriot missile defense systems.

O’Brien: Well, that's another example of Trump helping Putin. The Russians, they've been able to run down Ukrainian air defense, and now the Americans are sort of slipping a little bit more in. But it's not nearly enough to defend the Ukrainian cities in the way that they want. So the Russians are starting to really hammer Ukrainian cities every night. Every night they're sending over large numbers of attack systems and the Ukrainians are having to fight them off. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Krugman: Wow, this really is a weird war just in general because there really is no front line.

O’Brien: Or there is a front line that doesn't move much. Yeah.

Krugman: Well, there's a kind of 40 kilometer wide no man’s land, as I understand it, right?

O’Brien: Well, that's the key thing, yeah. And what's interesting is there's not a lot of Ukrainian soldiers on the front line because the Ukrainians are using drones. If you have a soldier on the front line, like you had with the lines of trenches, the soldier in those trenches is going to be found and killed. They wouldn't have much time because of the drones flying overhead and particularly now that they have these ones on fiber optic cables, which can't be drowned with electronic warfare.

It's just very deadly. When the Russians did that infiltration, they hit a line where there probably were very few, if any, Ukrainians. They can't have soldiers near the front line because of the casualties. So you have what you would call masses of observation and killing ability in a very concentrated area. And only soldiers that really have a high percentage chance of dying are in that area.

Krugman: Okay, and then no air superiority really for either side.

O’Brien: The Russians had it for a while in the sense that they could drop these glide bombs and there's no way that the Ukrainians could stop them. But really, it does seem to now be a duel of UAVs and, you know, the Russians still have much better aircraft. The Ukrainians have a handful of F-16s and not a lot, but the Russians haven't been able to use their air power in a decisive way on the battlefield and that's good.

Krugman: Right. But nowhere is safe in either country. You can be struck one way or another by UAVs of some kind, even thousands of kilometers from the front.

O’Brien: Yep, you can be struck anywhere. I mean, people in Lviv are under threat. People in Siberia can be attacked. There's far more [range] over the battlefield. So you would say that there is nowhere to hide within 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers of the other side's frontline. There's just nowhere to hide. But when you're anywhere even closer, the Russians do these human safaris in Kherson where they literally just fly over drones to kill a civilian waiting at a bus stop. That's the kind of war it's become.

Krugman: So it's a war of, not even really attrition, but of strategic attempts to undermine the other guy's ability to fight.

O’Brien: That's absolutely right. The battlefield is what the battlefield is. If Ukraine runs out of soldiers, then they will have a crisis. But they're not about to run out of soldiers right now. But this war will probably be determined by how successful the ranged attacks are on either side. That's one thing with Trump in a sense changing sides and becoming pro-Putin for the United States. The Ukrainians are going to have a little less restraint in what they'll attack in Russia.

The Biden administration really didn't want to threaten Putin too much. But with Trump now siding with Putin, I think the Ukrainians, if they can develop these systems, will go after things they have so far been a little reluctant to finish off. I mean, if they could go after the Russian oil industry and really cripple it, that would be a very damaging thing for the Russians.

Krugman: Okay, and the end result of this diplomatic flurry basically just strengthened Putin's hand.

O’Brien: Well, certainly right now, Putin has been given no sanctions. The United States president has endorsed the policy of handing over unconquered Ukrainian land to Russia, the rest of the Donbas—where Ukrainians live in Ukrainian citie—and handing these to Russia as part of a deal. And he's now got the Europeans at least discussing that. So that's actually not a bad situation for Putin to be in. And the Ukrainians are all okay having discussed giving up their land.

There's a good chance this doesn't result to anything in the short term. The Ukrainians will say no, I think. They actually constitutionally can't hand over any of their land. So the Ukrainians will say no. And what we don't know is what happens then. The worst situation, which part of me fears, is that the Europeans put pressure on the Ukrainians to just do it. Okay, hand over the territory, we'll declare peace and go, which I don't think will be peace, but that would be for another day. The opposite scenario is that the war keeps going for a few more months, at least into 2026. And we see where things stand.

I mean, that mitigates towards war lasting say another year, or year and a half to all of 2026 and then both these sides are exhausted. The Ukrainians have suffered. Russians have also suffered massive casualties. And they are not a limitless machine. They're actually running out of vehicles from what we can tell. So we could have some kind of temporary agreement or not in the next few months.

Krugman: Wow. And giving up the whole of Donbas would mean sort of also giving up of a fortress belt, right?

O’Brien: This is what Ukraine's been fighting for: Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, these cities which they've defended. One thing that's really hard is once you get into a city, fighting through it is really hard too. We know that cities have been very useful as fortress breaks from Bakhmut to Abdiivka. Once you get into a city, Ukrainians actually do a very good job of bleeding the Russians. And you would just be handing over these cities, you'd hand over the defensive belts, you would bring the Russians far more into Ukraine than they are now and give them more strategic possibilities. It would be a catastrophe for Ukraine to hand it over. Think about handing over New Jersey. That's what it would be like.

Krugman: Right. Horrifying thought. And Europeans are not stupid. They understand all of this.

O’Brien: You know, Paul, one thing that has been a shock to me in the last few years, is that I just don't think the Europeans have the capacity now to think for themselves. I think the US domination has been so strong that they have become infantilized strategically and they don't look at the world from a real strategic, European perspective. They ultimately look on the world as, “we need the US to defend us. So let's get the US on our side and then we can do other things.” I think they still are operating within this world that they have to keep the US on their side first. I think both economically, strategically and almost psychologically, it would be better for Europe now to move on from the USA. And I say this as an American living in Europe that what we see now is really unhealthy. Like they prostrate themselves and call him daddy. It's just not good.

So I don't actually think the Europeans have shown the capacity now to defend themselves in the way that I would like. And that is actually a question of imagination, strategic imagination. There's signs that they're changing, but they still have a long way to go.

Krugman: I have to say, Europe has a 25 trillion dollar economy, their industrial base is still quite powerful, and they still act as if they're utterly dependent upon the United States for leadership and God knows.

O’Brien: It's bizarre. It's like the Stockholm syndrome. Basically, it's a continent suffering from the Stockholm syndrome.

Krugman: Okay, let's talk about War and Power. Now, I have an advanced copy which you sent me, which I strategically left in the wrong city. But why don't you talk a little bit about the thesis of it, and then maybe we'll have a few other topics to discuss.

O’Brien: Well, it came out of the frustration that I've shown, that I don't think a lot of the discussions understand power and war. Maybe we had a way of addressing the problems that came from this period of US domination. The US was the most powerful nation. So we can talk about US power and the US military could do this and it could do that. But that era is over.

And what we have left is, therefore, an inability to really judge the nuances of power. China is a power like the US, but we need a way of understanding that. So it's a thought book. Compared to the normal things I write, it's actually quite short, 230 pages or so. It asks, what is a way of understanding power? What variables matter, because I don’t think a helpful international relations theory is based on the idea that all states are doing things similarly. That is clearly not the case. They don't. I think we can now say that individual leaders are a problem, as well.

So I said, okay what matters is that you have to have the economic and technological capabilities that's sine qua non. But that in and of itself is not enough. You need to have the right leadership, political structures, societal cohesion. You have to look at the military as a product, not an end in and of itself. We often think of the military as if the military itself indicates something. The military is created by these other factors. And by looking at those other factors, you'll have a better idea about the military than you will by playing a war game with in which the war game tends to have them all behave in the same way.

And the final thing I wanted to scream out loud is that people de-emphasize alliances. Alliances are very important. I mean, US dominance has been based on the fact that it had subservient alliances in Europe and Asia, which for some reason the United States is now in the process of throwing away.

Krugman: Right.

O’Brien: When we look at war, what we constantly get wrong is the short idea, that a war starts and you can’t have any idea how it will end when it starts. You'll have no idea. If you're to start a war, you're going to basically have no idea what's going to happen in the end. It's going to be very different than you think. And these are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself about how a war would develop. How can you regenerate force? Whatever the military enters with in a war, that will be gone in a few months. Threen and a half years in, the Russians and Ukrainians have utterly different militaries than the ones they had at the start of the war. Technologically vastly different. The original soldiers have mostly been killed or made prisoners or wounded. So they've had to generate utterly different armies doing completely different things. A test of the war is how you can adapt to that kind of challenge, not how you can run a military war game when the war starts.

Krugman: Yeah, it does strike me just as an amateur observer that the pace at which the fundamental technology of the war has changed, the weapons, is faster than ever before. That the armies of 1944, although very different in many ways, still bore some family resemblance to the armies of 1941, but now we went from handheld missiles to drones and it's unrecognizable.

O’Brien: Maybe one of the things is that US dominance has been such for a while that it restrained the importance of technological development because the US military was so much more advanced. In many ways, no one tried to compete with it. Whereas when the Russians and Ukrainians fight, they're fighting for every advantage of every kind. And that's forcing adaptation on a souped up scale.

I've been hearing from Ukrainians that literally the adaptation cycle is about six weeks. Within six weeks, the fundamental lessons of how you're going to protect your drone and operate it will be different than it was six weeks earlier. And yet you're constantly trying to update what you're doing. So it's not a matter of years, it's a matter of weeks at times. And the change can come in very rapidly. Someone had to come up with a solution to electronic warfare stopping all your drones—what happens if you run out of cable? Once they [figured out] going with these fiber optic cables, that instantly changed the entire drone warfare.

Krugman: I gotta say, the idea that we're back to fly-by-wire and that's the cutting edge. That just boggles the mind.

O’Brien: This is one of the areas where I try to admit when I get things wrong. I didn't think this would have the dramatic impact that it did, to fly-by-wire. Because I assume they get tangled in trees, they get tangled with each other, that there would be a lot of problems in operating them in large numbers. But it seems to be that they can operate them in large numbers. A lot of it is that the area of fighting has been so blown up that it’s like operating on a bit of a moonscape which allows, I think, the fly-by-wire to work. But they've been extraordinary because all of sudden it took the teeth out of electronic warfare, which everyone had been talking about. Everyone worries about electronic warfare. Well, this is their way around electronic warfare.

Krugman: I actually worry a lot about if the next time the US or Europe gets into armed conflict, are we just going to be actually hopelessly behind the times?

O’Brien: I've been told that NATO did a maneuver with a Ukrainian drone unit and the Ukrainian drone unit destroyed a full NATO armored brigade in a few hours because they simply had no way to respond to what the Ukrainians were doing. They didn't have any equipment, didn't have any hint, it was an intellectual hinterland. So the Ukrainians were just flying their drones all around them, destroying whatever they wanted, and the NATO unit failed. So they're not used to this kind of war. They're going to have to learn it, but right now they don't know how to do it.

Krugman: Oh boy. A brief anecdote: Years ago, I was speaking with someone from the aircraft industry, and asked whether they derived a lot of benefit from spillovers from the military side. And he said no, not really, because the civilian aircraft are just so much more advanced.

O’Brien: Mm-hmm.

Krugman: I just worry that, you know, our military has really gotten used to not having to deal with what smart people who are not in their stovepipe do.

O’Brien: I agree. Yeah, the militaries are not always that reflective and they are very bureaucratic and very defensive in their way of doing business and they assume they know. That's the difference. Every military should be saying to themselves now, “We screwed up. We did not see this war. We did not understand this war. What are we doing to adjust to it?” And you know, they're not really doing that.

Krugman: I would hope, that West Point has been sending observers to Ukraine to find out what modern war actually looks like.

O’Brien: Well, let's see if they start developing new armored fighting vehicles now. I think we're going to have to change the entire concept of how you arm units. The Ukrainians and Russians are [operating with] very small numbers of soldiers with a lot of autonomous systems and a lot of smaller systems flying around.

Krugman: And now, talk a little bit about alliances. The US economic hegemony depended a lot on alliances. And you're saying that’s also crucial in war.

O’Brien: Well, the greatest military power in Europe in the First World War was the German army. A lot of people said it was the best army in the first and second World Wars. So, why does Germany lose? Because it's confronted by more powerful alliances and its own allies are terrible.

So, Germany in the Second World War has Mussolini's Italy. In the First World War it has Austria-Hungary. These are not helpful countries fighting with you, but they're fighting an alliance that has the British, the Americans, the Russians and then Soviets. And alliances win wars, not individual powers. I think that's all. That has been a case for a long, long time. There are occasionally these small wars, like the Franco-Prussian War or whatever, where a country beats another country. But in most cases, alliances win wars.

And the key of the United States has been that it has maintained arguably the most successful alliance system in history since 1945. What the U.S. maintained with NATO, an alliance which kept Europe very much on the American orbit, in the American orbit, both economically and militarily, also with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and countries in Asia is, they constructed this alliance system which hugely amplified both America's economic possibilities but also its strategic possibilities. Whereas now we seem to be saying, it's all about zero-sum, what do I get from you? What do you give to me? And within that kind of world, that MAGA world, there's no scope for alliances because everything is zero-sum.

So Trump ends up screwing US allies more than he does, theoretically, US competitors like China. He's throwing it all away. And then it's going to end up in a few years with no allies. Unless the Europeans are so pathetic, they'll just end up hugging American shoes the entire time and holding on to the ankles. What the US is doing seems so extraordinarily self-defeating.

What I don't see is any real pushback against it. So much of the Trumpite rhetoric seems to just be passing by and not being challenged.

Krugman: Yeah, what always struck me, is that the U.S. had a specialty of creating international organizations that were formally equal, where we were all partners together. Now, everybody understood that the United States was actually in charge, but we went to great lengths to make sure that the World Trade Organization or NATO were alliances of equals, at least on paper. And it was a very effective trick. Clearly the people now in charge of the United States have no idea of what the advantages of that kind of thing are.

O’Brien: That’s because the United States was getting the substance of power but giving up the style. They would treat everyone as equal without actually being equal so they get the substance. They're now giving up the substance in exchange for acting like a great power, acting like this dominant force, but all they're doing is losing the substance of power. It just seems to me extraordinary what the United States is doing in an era where China is there and powerful. The United States is going to great lengths to antagonize its allies. I don't get it. None of this makes any sense to me.

Krugman: Well, unless you assume that the people in charge have no idea what they're doing, which is a reasonable hypothesis.

O’Brien: Or that they want to weaken the US. Part of me gets very sort of depressed and thinks they don't care. They don't mind blowing the whole thing up.

Krugman: Any final thoughts on war or peace and what happens next? What do you think the world will look like by the 2026 midterms?

O’Brien: Well, that’s the key thing, isn’t it? The 2026 midterms. I don't think people are paying enough attention, because they have to be run fairly. I do think the Democrats have a very good chance of winning them if they are run fairly and happen under normal conditions. But they could also be easily perverted from what we can. We don't know what's going to happen with the elements.

Krugman: Yeah.

O’Brien: I would say that 2026 elections will show not whether America can come back, but whether it has a chance to come back, or whether the period we're going into could be a lot longer and darker than we imagined.

Krugman: Okay, and Ukraine is probably both cause and effect of all of that, right? What happens there may have some impact here, and what happens here obviously has a huge impact there.

O’Brien: Particularly to Europe. I think what happens to Ukraine will determine how Europe deals with this. If Ukraine is sacrificed, I think Europe is going to have a terrible future. Because it's going to be dependent on the US, which has basically sacrificed Ukraine to Putin's Russia. Europe might even break apart, structurally, such that you'll have the Central Eastern Europeans, the ones who want to stand by Ukraine, the Finns, the Baltics, the Nordics going one way and then the Western Europeans sort of pretending things are okay. So I think people are underrating the chance of Europe splitting over Ukraine, which is why it's so important, I think, that Ukraine comes out of the war in good shape.

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

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Saturday, August 23, 2025 10:14 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh, that's right ... you believe in killing children and the feeble minded and the politically helpless because... well, just because.

You just can't admit that you're evil.
Did you see any The Lord of the Rings movies? Did they have a contest to see who could kill the fewest on the path to eventual victory over evil? Or was the contest to kill the most?

The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit Kill List
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls020797187/

So-called good people think that efficiency is the goal of war, meaning killing the fewest evil people on the way to victory. But time spent convincing evil people to change their minds is a waste of time because evil people flip their behavior switch back to evil at the earliest opportunity.

Check out the Bible. God would be the most persuasive advocate for good, but doesn't argue with evil people, selling the idea of being good. Instead, God goes directly for the kill of women, children, and old men in the story of the Flood and Noah's Ark, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the story of Armageddon in Revelation. God does not do efficiency. God kills them all. In contrast to godlike behavior, humans who follow the rules of war will know that there are limits. Once the war is won, decent humans stop killing their enemies. Russians didn't stop in the past because they are indecent. Russians won't stop in Ukraine after achieving victory. The Ukrainians know this because the Russians have killed millions of them during peacetime.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
So now you're using a fantasy movie to justify yourself?
Yeah. Another rationalization.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, August 23, 2025 10:34 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I couldn't stop reading Krugman's interview of O'Brian. It was a masterpiece of eacho-chamber delusion.

As long as O'Brian confabulates liberal/globalist fantasy statistics, hell keep on being wrong.

Two big stumbling blocks in his "analysis"

Russia is not "losing 1000 soldiers a day". There are several real-world stats to look at. One is Meduza, which tracks open source info like funeral notices and court probate proceedings. (There's no similar effort to estimate Ukrainian dead, but the number is extremely high). The latest that I heard was a statistical sampling of infantry soldiers on each side, the sample numbers were in the hundreds. Of these samples, Russian troops experienced about 10% KIA and about 10% disabled. On the Ukrainian side, about 80% KIA and 10% disabled. 8:1 KIA, 9:2 permanent losses.

The Dems are not about to win 2026 given the hole that they're in. Trump may be unpopular, but the dems are even MORE unpopular. And as long as they keep harping about Ukraine and other things most Americans don't care about, they'll STAY unpopular.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, August 23, 2025 11:32 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So now you're using a fantasy movie to justify yourself?
Yeah. Another rationalization.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Maybe you would better understand today's wars if you understood the U.S.'s Civil War. Lincoln's side was losing until he fired Generals who went about war as an exercise in Civility, Ceremony, and Chivalry. Years too late, Lincoln finally replaced General George B. McClellan with those who understood that winning was about killing slave-owners and burning down their plantation mansions.

The Confederates never acknowledged that their slave-owning, their murdering of rebellious slaves, and their beating and raping of slaves was the cause of the war. In the aftermath, the Confederates were never forced to admit they were evil because the Confederates were all pardoned by the slave-owning President Andrew Johnson. In contrast, the Allies murdered millions of Axis citizens as a lesson in what happens to evil people, a lesson that the Confederates never learned. The former Axis powers: Germany, Japan, and Italy, are now good citizens, but if they hadn't been firebombed and nuked, they would have learned nothing, just like the Confederates learned nothing from their loss.

The Russians do NOT acknowledge that their stealing of land, murdering Ukrainians and enslaving the rest is the cause of the war in Ukraine.

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

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Saturday, August 23, 2025 12:13 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russian troops experienced about 10% KIA and about 10% disabled. On the Ukrainian side, about 80% KIA and 10% disabled. 8:1 KIA, 9:2 permanent losses.
If this is true, then Russia will finish Ukraine in two years. Ukraine will have zero troops, and Russia will have millions inside Ukraine. Russia is counting down to Victory in Ukraine Day! It is a mathematical certainty, but only if what you wrote is true, Signym.

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

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