REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Thursday, May 28, 2026 09:00
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PAGE 205 of 205

Saturday, May 23, 2026 6:59 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
There is a connection between Russia's first nuke in 1949 and NATO's formation the same year.


There is a connection between Russia's first nuke and Horoshima and Nagasaki, stupid.


-----------

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

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 7:50 AM

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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:
There is a connection between Russia's first nuke in 1949 and NATO's formation the same year.


There is a connection between Russia's first nuke and Horoshima and Nagasaki, stupid.


-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
That is very Russian of you to forget that Russia has been threatening to nuke everybody in the West that gets in its way, but it has not because the Russians in charge are cruel cowards afraid of being hurt.

You also forget that the US, at least until Trump, a cruel coward afraid of being hurt, was not issuing nuclear death threats to the world, but there is no shortage of courage in America among the people who would never vote for a guy like Trump. Among the Trumptards, cruel cowardliness is the main force driving them, along with sex, gluttony, and greed, just like Trump's psychology.

I have been amused for years that little 6ixStringJoker has never understood that his misfortunes are caused by defects in his personality, but then all Trumptards are highly defective in the same ways. At this point, 6ix usually comes back with some sneering reply about me claiming to be perfect, always missing the point that you don't have to be perfect to be successful in America, but you can't be successful if you are anything like a Trump. Trump seems successful, but he did it by cheating at every opportunity. His dishonesty and bragging make him very attractive to people who share his defective characteristics.

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

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 7:51 AM

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Putin Can No Longer Hide His Catastrophe

The Russian dictator has lost control of the narrative. In armed conflicts between nations, major momentum shifts occur when one of the combatants loses control of events—when its rulers can no longer convincingly tell themselves or their public that their side is on the cusp of victory.

By Phillips Payson O’Brien | May 23, 2026, 8:45 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/putin-lost-control-russia/68
7269/?gift=BQHDq1p24LRO8cUUEyLQ6_6Vgz0eQYQh_GBzcWPnV88&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

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

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 7:54 AM

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Four Russian satellites are now within striking distance of an ICEYE radarsat

“This capability is not common for satellites conducting typical missions.”

By Stephen Clark – May 22, 2026 5:50 PM

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/05/a-satellite-company-supporting-u
kraine-appears-to-be-in-russias-crosshairs/

At least four Russian military satellites changed their orbits to match that of a Finnish-American radar surveillance satellite in the last week, raising questions about Russia’s intentions amid an ever-expanding standoff high above Earth.

The maneuvers were identified through open source orbital tracking data. Greg Gillinger, a retired Air Force space intelligence officer, revealed the orbit changes Friday in a special edition of his Integrity Flash newsletter, published by Integrity ISR, a private business that provides “combat-proven operational support and elite training that enhances mission success across ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), cyber, space, and targeting domains.”

The Russian satellites in question, designated Kosmos 2610 through 2613, launched together on April 16 on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Over the last week or so, the four satellites adjusted their inclinations—the angles of their orbits to the equator—by less than a degree.

That may sound insignificant, but such “plane change” maneuvers use up a lot of fuel. The delta-v, or velocity change, required for a plane change maneuver of this magnitude is equivalent to the impulse needed to raise altitude by more than 100 miles.

The upshot is that these four Russian satellites are now positioned to routinely pass near a commercial radar surveillance satellite operated by the Finnish-American company ICEYE. This imaging platform, named ICEYE-X36, is part of a fleet of satellites providing all-weather overhead radar images to the US military and European governments. ICEYE also provides imagery to Ukraine’s military in its fight against Russia. ICEYE’s co-founder and CEO, Rafal Modrzewski, met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last year.

According to Gillinger, the cross-track distances between the four Russian satellites and ICEYE-X36 now range between about 500 meters (1,640 feet) and 22 kilometers (13.7 miles). All of this is taking place in polar orbit at an altitude of approximately 340 miles (547 kilometers).

Russian satellite operators are now in a position to close in on the ICEYE satellite with “minor adjustments” in “satellite eccentricity and average altitudes,” Gillinger wrote in his newsletter. A fifth satellite from the same Russian launch last month now appears to be performing a similar set of maneuvers to move closer to ICEYE-X36.

Co-planar or cosplay?

We know little about what these particular Kosmos satellites can do. Perhaps, as one retired US military space official recently told Ars, this is another example of Russia rattling a dull saber. Russian military officials seem to enjoy probing US and allied forces, often flying strategic bombers near US and European airspace.

This same behavior now appears to extend into space, with Russia’s launch of several military spacecraft shadowing the US government’s most sophisticated spy satellites in low-Earth orbit several hundred miles above the planet. US officials believe at least some of these Russian satellites are part of an anti-satellite weapons program.

More recently, a mysterious Russian military satellite arrived in geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles over the equator. Circumstantial evidence suggests this, too, may be part of a Russian anti-satellite system. The US Space Force dispatched one of its own inspection satellites in geosynchronous orbit to get a closer look.

Targeting a single spacecraft, such as ICEYE-X36, in a constellation of similar imaging satellites would do little to inhibit the access of Ukraine or other Western nations to radar surveillance imagery. ICEYE, itself, operates dozens more radar imaging satellites. Unlike optical spy satellites, radars provide imagery day and night, regardless of cloud cover.

But Russia’s maneuvers to match the plane of ICEYE-X36’s orbit appear to be intentional. Russian military satellites have conducted similar operations to move into “co-planar” orbits with Keyhole-class spy satellites owned by the National Reconnaissance Office. The recent maneuvers with Kosmos 2610 and its cohorts appear to mimic what Russia has done to move within striking distance of the NRO’s satellites.

“We do not know Russia’s intentions or the capabilities of these particular satellites,” Gillinger wrote. “However, maneuvering into a co-planar orbit is alarming. Plane matching is the first (and most fuel expensive) step to conducting Rendezvous Proximity Operations (RPO), likely necessary for the Russian satellites to target (kinetically or non-kinetically) ICEYE-X36.

“We also do not know the satellites’ total fuel capacity, however the expenditure [during these maneuvers] is evidence the satellites are capable of conducting high-energy maneuvers,” Gillinger continued. “This capability is not common for satellites conducting typical Earth observation, signal collection, or communications missions.”

ICEYE did not respond to questions from Ars on Friday; the company announced in January that it was expanding its partnership with the Ukrainian military. ICEYE’s newest satellite capture images with a resolution of up to 16 centimeters, about the size of a grapefruit.

“ICEYE is proud and humbled to have supported Ukraine’s defense teams with reliable, near-real-time space-based intelligence since the beginning of the invasion,” said John Cartwright, senior vice president of data product at ICEYE.

“This agreement strengthens assured access to our high-resolution SAR imagery, helping Ukraine make decisions faster and with greater confidence,” Cartwright said. “ICEYE stands firmly with Ukraine in the face of these hostilities, and is deeply committed to strengthening Europe’s security more widely by ensuring our allies have the best decision-ready data when they need it most.”

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

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 8:00 AM

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


The Trump Administration Pivots, The Reason Why Is The Important Thing

By Phillips P. OBrien
May 24, 2026

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-186-a-primer-on-
the

. . . both Vance and Rubio are being dishonest in their own way, which in and of itself is no shock. However the interesting thing is that they are being dishonest to try and convince the American public that the administration was and is more pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin than in reality it has been.

The reason why can only be because the intelligence that the administration is receiving is that Russia is struggling and Ukraine is doing much better than the administration both publicly and privately was saying. Remember this is the administration that not only said Ukraine had “no cards” it also built into its national security estimates that Russia had the upper hand in the war and was going to get a peace deal on its terms. . . .

. . . And now the administration is boasting about helping Ukraine? That does not happen by accident—it is because they are understanding that everything they said in 2025 was wrong. They would not do it otherwise. You know why? Because Trump himself remains wedded enough to Putin not to join the chorus. The administration does not want Ukraine to do well. Its fundamental outlook remains unchanged.

However it is being forced to try and pretend it is more pro-Ukraine than it has been, and that is important.

So take that as a good sign, just do not let these fraudsters get away with 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, May 24, 2026 10:51 AM

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


'Damage in every district of Kyiv' — Massive Russian ballistic missile, drone attack kills 4, injures 100

By Dmytro Basmat, Luca Léry Moffat, Nick Allard | Updated: May 24, 2026 3:46 pm

https://kyivindependent.com/russian-attack-may-24-2026/

. . . Zelensky confirmed that Russia used its Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile during the attack, the third time Russia has used the sophisticated weapon against Ukraine. The strike targeted Bila Tserkva, a town 50 miles south of Kyiv. . . .

. . . Russia first used an Oreshnik against Ukraine in November 2024 in a strike on the city of Dnipro. The missile was most recently used in an attack on western Lviv Oblast on Jan. 9. . . .

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

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Sunday, May 24, 2026 12:32 PM

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


The Pride of Russia’s Defense Industry Dismantled Over the Past Month

By Ivan Stupak, Kyiv | May 21, 2026 21:10

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/4125970-the-april-followers-of-th
e-cruiser-moskva.html

. . . The Zoopark-1M is one of the key components of Russia’s counter-battery warfare capabilities. The system is specifically designed to calculate the trajectory of incoming shells or rockets within seconds and determine the firing positions of Ukrainian artillery, mortars, and multiple-launch rocket systems. In essence, it functions as an artillery “hunter” — a critically important asset in modern battlefield warfare.

The cost of a single Zoopark-1M system is estimated at roughly $25 million, while production remains limited due to chronic shortages of electronic components and other critical parts. As a result, the Russian military is increasingly forced to redeploy these radars between different sectors of the front, effectively patching holes in its surveillance network.

Consequently, the destruction of every Zoopark system represents far more than a localized tactical loss. Each strike weakens Russia’s overall counter-battery architecture, forcing the command to expose other sectors or stretch already limited resources even further.

The broader pattern was becoming increasingly clear: Ukraine was not simply destroying individual pieces of equipment, but methodically eroding the interconnected systems that enable the Russian army to detect, track, coordinate, and respond on the battlefield. . . .

. . . Perhaps the most illustrative aviation episode of April was the strike against the Shagol airbase in Chelyabinsk. According to Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, the April 25 attack put two Su-57 fighters, one Su-34, and another aircraft from the Su family out of action. The latter was reportedly blown apart so completely that it proved impossible to determine the exact modification from the remains left at the burn site.

What makes this episode particularly remarkable is geography: Chelyabinsk lies roughly 1,700 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

And once again, the issue extends far beyond the sheer financial cost of the losses, although that alone is substantial. The Su-34, valued at approximately $35–50 million, serves as Russia’s principal frontline fighter-bomber and has become one of the key instruments of Russian aerial pressure along the front line. Ukraine’s Defense Forces have destroyed these aircraft before.

But the reported disabling of two Su-57s belongs to an entirely different category of losses within the growing pantheon of neutralized Russian “wonder weapons.”

The Su-57 remains Russia’s most advanced and expensive serially produced combat aircraft — the flagship prestige project of the Russian defense industry and one of the very few platforms Moscow attempts to present as a true fifth-generation fighter. For years, the Kremlin showcased the Su-57 at international air shows as a symbol of technological superiority and as Russia’s answer to the American Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II.

And then reality intervened.

The symbolic impact of the strike may ultimately prove even more painful than the material losses themselves. The Su-57 program has long suffered from limited production rates, technological bottlenecks, sanctions-related component shortages, and chronic delays. Russia possesses only a small number of operational aircraft of this type, meaning that every damaged or destroyed airframe immediately becomes a strategic and reputational problem.

Moreover, the strike on Shagol demonstrated something else that would have seemed almost unthinkable just a few years ago: Ukrainian drones are now capable of threatening not only tactical aviation near the front line, but also Russia’s most prestigious military assets deep inside the country’s strategic rear.

Much more at https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/4125970-the-april-followers-of-th
e-cruiser-moskva.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, May 24, 2026 7:35 PM

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


Why Putin continues warring

Sun, May 24, 2026 - 23:57

Despite internal problems, Putin's approach to the war has not changed. According to two sources with access to the president, he has made it clear to his inner circle that Moscow could allegedly capture the entire Donbas region by the end of the year.

"Putin is fixated on Donbas and he will not stop before that," an interlocutor said.

A Ukrainian intelligence official said that Russian generals have convinced Putin of the possibility of capturing Donbas by the end of the year. "Fabricated reports are being fed up the chain of command, claiming victory is imminent," he said.

Military analysts say that at the current rate of Russian advance, it could take years to fully seize Donbas.

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/war-and-economic-pressure-spark-frustr
ation-1779655802.html

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 7:48 AM

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Sun 24 May 2026 01.00 EDT

Putin has made clear to his inner circle that he believes Moscow can capture the entirety of the Donbas region by the end of the year, two sources with access to the president said. “Putin is fixated on Donbas and he will not stop before that,” one of them said.

Speaking after the 9 May Victory Day parade, Putin surprised many by suggesting the war was “coming to a close”. The remark made headlines, but those familiar with his thinking caution that it should not be interpreted as a sign he is prepared to compromise. Instead, it suggests Putin believes a military breakthrough is imminent.

For now, Moscow’s goal is the capture of the Donbas, and Russian negotiators have made clear that Moscow would be ready to sue for peace once this happens. Yet those close to Putin say his ambitions may increase again if he senses Ukraine beginning to collapse. Then, two people familiar with his thinking said, he could push further, crossing the Dnipro River, in an attempt to seize all four Ukrainian regions that Russia claimed to annex in 2022 but still does not fully control.

“He is not a long-term strategist,” one of them said. “His appetite grows as he eats.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/may/24/there-is-
profound-disappointment-in-him-mood-in-russia-turns-against-putin

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 7:49 AM

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


Russia Launched $361 Million in Missiles and Drones at Ukraine in Overnight May 24 Barrage

By Ivan Khomenko Updated May 25, 2026 12:00

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russia-launched-361-million-i
n-missiles-and-drones-at-ukraine-in-overnight-may-24-barrage-19123

The enemy used 690 air attack vehicles - 90 missiles and 600 UAVs of various types:

• 1 average-range ballistic missile "Oreshnik" - $50 million;

• 2 aeroballistic missiles X-47M2 "Kinzhal" - $10 million;

• 3 M22 Zircon anti-ship missiles - $16.2 million;

• 30 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, S-400 - $120 million;

• 54 cruise missiles X-101, Iskander-K, Kalibr - $135 million

• 600 strike UAVs, ramming munitions and drones of the type - $30 million.

https://armyinform.com.ua/2026/05/24/oryeshnik-czyrkony-ta-balistyka-k
ombinovana-ataka-na-kyyiv-koshtuvala-rosiyanam-361-mln/

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 7:50 AM

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


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Russia Launched $361 Million in Missiles and Drones at Ukraine in Overnight May 24 Barrage
Russian nationalist milbloggers dismissed the strikes on Ukraine as mostly symbolic and noted that the strikes come amidst Russian failures on the battlefield. Russian milbloggers heavily criticized the May 24 strikes as expensive but not militarily useful and that the Oreshnik strike against Bila Tserkva did not have a clear militarily significant target.[14]

Milbloggers further criticized the strikes as expensive and as not contributing to the Russian war effort, while Russian forces are under-resourced and unable to advance on the frontline.[15]

One milblogger argued that the Russian military command is wrong to prioritize expensive strikes given Russian forces’ lack of sufficient first-person view (FPV) drones on the frontline, which is enabling Ukraine to achieve a larger number of FPV drones and advance.[16]

Another Russian milblogger argued that Ukrainian forces are successfully striking Russian logistics targets in occupied Ukraine, and that Russian strikes on Kyiv will not be able to prevent Ukraine from continuing these strikes.[17]

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive
-campaign-assessment-may-24-2026/

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 8:14 AM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
At the Scene of a War-Game: How the UK Would Respond if Russia Attacked the Baltics

While Russia has dismissed claims it has plans to invade NATO, the alliance is rushing to prepare for the nightmare scenario.

By Ellie Cook | May 23, 2026

https://www.newsweek.com/at-the-scene-of-a-war-game-how-uk-would-respo
nd-if-russia-attacked-baltics-11977606

The main fear on NATO's eastern edge is that with the U.S. pulling back, Russia may be more willing to risk an invasion.

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


OMG. Such fear- mongering.

Yanno what the "decision- making centers" of NATO states SHOULD be afraid of?

A quick Oreshnik strike.

In thanks for helping Ukraine deliberarely strike colleges and apartment buildings.

-----------

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


Bombing into submission: Russian targeting of civilians and infrastructure in Ukraine

Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure
The war on housing, education, and health care
Violent incidents targeting infrastructure in Ukraine

2022 2023 2024
Education 271 199 214
Energy 428 195 346
Health 132 116 116
Residential 1,312 1,349 1,573

The impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine goes beyond the mere deaths and injuries. ACLED data show a persistent pattern of targeting of populated areas during the three years of Russian invasion

https://acleddata.com/report/bombing-submission-russian-targeting-civi
lians-and-infrastructure-ukraine


Signym, you're a lying propagandist for Russia. The world knows it is Russia who targets civilians. All you do is expose yourself when you say otherwise. I'd also point out you've been accusing others of fear mongering about the threat of Russia invading Ukraine going back a decade to when they first invaded. And you're still doing it. Too funny...Too sad...

T

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Monday, May 25, 2026 1:34 PM

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


How Ukraine Found the Cards To Win, Without Help From the U.S.

By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, William B. Taylor, Cedric Leighton and Steven Tian

May 23, 2026 3:03 PM CT

President Donald Trump has boasted about cutting off all financial support for Ukraine and tried to impose a surrender on terms many see as favorable for Russia. Yet, as we predicted two years ago**, Ukraine has proven it doesn’t need it.

Just 15 months ago, in the Oval Office, Trump shouted at Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky: “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.”

Zelensky fired back, “I'm not playing cards. I'm very serious, Mr. President. I'm very serious... Of course we want to stop the war. But I said to you, with guarantees."

More at https://time.com/article/2026/05/23/how-ukraine-found-the-cards-to-win
-without-help-from-the-u-s-/ or https://tinyurl.com/wx3ydydd

** Donald Trump’s invitation for Russia to invade NATO countries catalyzed anxiety that Europe may have to fight Russian aggression alone, as Trump and his followers are becoming increasingly assertive that supporting Ukraine is a bad deal for the U.S. https://time.com/6694915/ukraine-aid-bill-what-united-states-gains/

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 2:37 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:
There is a connection between Russia's first nuke in 1949 and NATO's formation the same year.


There is a connection between Russia's first nuke and Horoshima and Nagasaki, stupid.


-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
That is very Russian of you to forget that Russia has been threatening to nuke everybody in the West that gets in its way,

As usual, you misrepresent.
I remember what Russian spox ACTUALLY said. What they said was: If you attack us in any way that threatens our existence, we may respond with nukes.
It's called deterrence.
Unlike USA nuclear posture, which includes first-strike.

IDK what's wrong with you, SECOND, but your brain is full of shit and has been since you were young.


-----------

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 2:54 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Ukraine Found the Cards To Win, Without Help From the U.S.

By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, William B. Taylor, Cedric Leighton and Steven Tian

May 23, 2026 3:03 PM CT

President Donald Trump has boasted about cutting off all financial support for Ukraine and tried to impose a surrender on terms many see as favorable for Russia. Yet, as we predicted two years ago**, Ukraine has proven it doesn’t need it.

Just 15 months ago, in the Oval Office, Trump shouted at Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky: “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.”

Zelensky fired back, “I'm not playing cards. I'm very serious, Mr. President. I'm very serious... Of course we want to stop the war. But I said to you, with guarantees."

More at https://time.com/article/2026/05/23/how-ukraine-found-the-cards-to-win
-without-help-from-the-u-s-/ or https://tinyurl.com/wx3ydydd

** Donald Trump’s invitation for Russia to invade NATO countries catalyzed anxiety that Europe may have to fight Russian aggression alone, as Trump and his followers are becoming increasingly assertive that supporting Ukraine is a bad deal for the U.S. https://time.com/6694915/ukraine-aid-bill-what-united-states-gains/

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


Ok, let's drill down into part of the article...

Quote:
nSome question whether this [drone technology] is a sustainable advantage as Russia plays catch-up, but we are told by senior Biden and Trump Administration sources that Ukrainian drone and anti-drone defense technology are heavily reliant in part on unparalleled U.S. technology, which Russia does not have access to, such as Motorola’s Silvus* infrastructure-less solutions, which are utilized by Ukraine to operate its drones.


What Motorola says about acquiring Silvus

Quote:
A number of forward-looking statements will be made during this presentation. Forward-looking statements are any statements that are not historical facts. These
forward-looking statements are based on the current expectations of Motorola Solutions, and we can give no assurance that any future results or events discussed in these
statements will be achieved. Any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any
subsequent date. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from the statements contained in this presentation


So, what is Silvus? It's a mesh network.
Russia already has that.

The article is all about drones.
Since Russia has the equivalent, plus artillery, guided bombs, missiles, jets, and armored vehicles, I don't see any advantage to Ukraine. Drones do save lives and allow better reconnaissance and logistics disruption, but their payload is still relatively light. And in the end, winning still requires boots on the ground, which Ukraine is running short of.
.

-----------

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 6:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'm still just wondering how in the hell this thread got to over 10,000 posts and why anybody gives a shit.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, May 25, 2026 7:34 PM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, what is Silvus? It's a mesh network.
Russia already has that.

The article is all about drones.
Since Russia has the equivalent, plus artillery, guided bombs, missiles, jets, and armored vehicles, I don't see any advantage to Ukraine. Drones do save lives and allow better reconnaissance and logistics disruption, but their payload is still relatively light. And in the end, winning still requires boots on the ground, which Ukraine is running short of.
.

-----------

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



So then why is Russia losing? And why did Putin mandate the complete destruction of Kiev?

T

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Monday, May 25, 2026 7:41 PM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN



Here you go comrade, I bring receipts.

T

Leaked From Russia: 15 Videos of the Real Economy (No Propaganda)



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Monday, May 25, 2026 8:29 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:

As usual, you misrepresent.
I remember what Russian spox ACTUALLY said. What they said was: If you attack us in any way that threatens our existence, we may respond with nukes.
It's called deterrence.
Unlike USA nuclear posture, which includes first-strike.

IDK what's wrong with you, SECOND, but your brain is full of shit and has been since you were young.
Signym, what does this phrase mean? If you attack us in any way that threatens our existence, we "may" respond with nukes.

Because if it means to Russians what it says, Russia "may" have already nuked Ukraine.

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 8:36 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:
I'm still just wondering how in the hell this thread got to over 10,000 posts and why anybody gives a shit.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
6ix, everything other than the batty ideas flying inside your head, synchronized to crazy music only you can hear, is meaningless to you.

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 8:37 PM

SECOND

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


May 25, 2026

For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker. His pitch during these rendezvous is that the United States should sell out Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for glittering billion-dollar projects for Russian and American companies—digging for precious minerals in the Arctic, say, or joint missions to Mars.

These fantasies are rooted in the idea that the Americans can be talked into ignoring some of the most salient facts about contemporary Russia. What sane investor would put long-term money into a country where the law is a facade, where the intelligence services can expropriate your business as soon as it looks profitable, and where another neo-imperial war might flip the chessboard at any given moment?

Putin chose Dmitriev for this job not only because of his reassuring American credentials—degrees from Stanford and Harvard Business School, work experience at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs—but because his profile matches that of his two main American interlocutors. He is an oligarch whose glamorous blond wife is close friends with Putin’s younger daughter. That makes him a virtual son-in-law of the ruler, and it may be the reason his real-estate holdings alone have soared from some $5 million to $100 million over the past decade.

But Dmitriev is more than just a gifted Kremlin illusionist. He is living proof that if you squint hard enough, you can blur out the difference between a free society and one ruled by fear. You can convince yourself that everything Ukrainians have been fighting for since 2014—democracy, civic rights, a European future—is meaningless.

. . .

Dmitriev’s father still lived in Kyiv in early 2022, when the Russian army was massing on the Ukrainian border. Many prominent people in Ukraine and Russia—including Zelensky—thought Putin was bluffing. It may be a measure of Dmitriev’s closeness to the Russian leader that he was not fooled. A few days before the invasion, his father abruptly left the country, most likely at his urging, according to neighbors of the family who spoke with the Ukrainian channel TSN last year.

When I spoke with Dmitriev’s former classmates, I thought they would express some surprise at what has happened to their old friend. Instead, they responded with a weary familiarity. “We have a name for people like this,” Ariev said. The word—yanichar—originated centuries ago, when the Ottoman officials who controlled parts of what is now Ukraine would kidnap boys to indoctrinate and train in the imperial capital before sending them back as men to crush local rebellions by their former compatriots. “Traitor” is probably too weak a translation.

Oleksandr Lisnichenko, another former classmate, said that one of Dmitriev’s closest childhood friends was seriously wounded at the front. That friend refused my request to speak.

“He said, ‘I don’t want to talk about Kirill,’” Lisnichenko told me. “‘I just want to shoot him in the knees.’”

More at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/05/russia-putin-kirill-
dmitriev/687283/

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 8:56 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

As usual, you misrepresent.
I remember what Russian spox ACTUALLY said. What they said was: If you attack us in any way that threatens our existence, we may respond with nukes.
It's called deterrence.
Unlike USA nuclear posture, which includes first-strike.

IDK what's wrong with you, SECOND, but your brain is full of shit and has been since you were young.

SECOND:
Signym, what does this phrase mean? If you attack us in any way that threatens our existence, we "may" respond with nukes.

Because if it means to Russians what it says, Russia "may" have already nuked Ukraine.


How can you possibly claim to know "what it means to Russians" since everything in your head about Russians is fabricated?

There's a difference between "threstens our security" and "threatens our existence".
Fortunately for us, Russians make those distinctions, even if you don't.

Meanwhile, in the world outside of SECOND'S mixed up head ...



-----------

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 10:58 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:

How can you possibly claim to know "what it means to Russians" since everything in your head about Russians is fabricated?

There's a difference between "threstens our security" and "threatens our existence".
Fortunately for us, Russians make those distinctions, even if you don't.

Meanwhile, in the world outside of SECOND'S mixed up head ...

Video "Russia issues final warning – total war begins"
Don't you think it is 4 years too late for Russia to announce that Total War Begins Tomorrow?

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

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Monday, May 25, 2026 11:29 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm still just wondering how in the hell this thread got to over 10,000 posts and why anybody gives a shit.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
6ix, everything other than the batty ideas flying inside your head, synchronized to crazy music only you can hear, is meaningless to you.






It doesn't change the fact that aside from me coming in here and laughing at you or reminding you that nobody gives a fuck about Ukraine, the only three people that made up 98% of the rest of the 10,000+ posts in this thread was you two knuckleheads losing a who's got the biggest dick competition with Sigs.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 7:05 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:

It doesn't change the fact that aside from me coming in here and laughing at you or reminding you that nobody gives a fuck about Ukraine, the only three people that made up 98% of the rest of the 10,000+ posts in this thread was you two knuckleheads losing a who's got the biggest dick competition with Sigs.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
6ix, a new signature for you: once you have given up on existentialism and grown out of nihilism, all that is left is to embrace the absurdity

6ix, you will have essentially summarized the core premise of Absurdism, as pioneered by Albert Camus. If nihilism states that life has no meaning, and existentialism tries to force a subjective meaning onto the void, absurdism is the liberating acceptance that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to our search for purpose.

Rather than succumbing to despair, embracing the absurd turns meaninglessness on its head. It frees you from the pressure of grand designs or ultimate destinations. Since there are no intrinsic rules or predetermined paths, you are free to live passionately, authentically, and defiantly in the present moment.

As Camus famously noted, acknowledging the absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. It becomes an active rebellion where you choose to savor the sheer experience of living without illusions. You can dive deeper into this philosophical liberation through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Camus, or explore its practical applications on Psychology Today.

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

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 7:06 AM

SECOND

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


Russia May Have Launched 2 Oreshniks At A Time. Seems 1 Failed, 1 Missed.

The $30-million missile is unreliable and inaccurate.

May 25, 2026

https://www.trenchart.us/p/russia-may-have-launched-2-oreshniks

Russia apparently fired two Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Ukraine on Saturday night, not one. https://x.com/kimhvik2/status/2058675911273148893 https://www.trenchart.us/p/russias-30-million-missile-blew-up

One of the 40-ton missiles seems to have failed mid-flight—and crashed on Russian-occupied Ukraine. The other dropped its 36 non-explosive submunitions on Bila Tserkva, 40 miles south of Kyiv—and blew up a few garages. https://x.com/cyber_boroshno/status/2058856164129943793

It’s possible the Oreshnik that hit Bila Tserkva was aiming for the air base just outside of town. It’s also possible the Oreshnik was supposed to hit Kyiv, and simply missed by a wide margin.

In other words, it’s possible two Oreshniks missed on Saturday. If so, it’s a damning indictment of the missile’s effectiveness in a non-nuclear role. It may be unreliable and inaccurate.

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

Russia may have fired two Oreshnik missiles in attack on Ukraine, analysts say
May 25, 2026, 08:46 AM
https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-may-have-fired-two-oreshnik-missil
es-at-ukraine-analysts-say-50610781.html

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

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 7:22 AM

SECOND

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


Ukraine May Test New Low-Cost Alternative to Patriot Air Defense System by End of 2026

By Dariia Mykhailenko | May 25, 2026 19:44

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-may-test-new-low-cost
-alternative-to-patriot-air-defense-system-by-end-of-2026-19161

Ukraine could conduct tests of a new air defense system designed as a more affordable alternative to the US-made Patriot system before the end of 2026, according to Denys Shtilerman, co-founder of the Ukrainian defense company Firepoint.

The announcement was made during a broadcast hosted by Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksii Honcharenko on May 25.

According to Shtilerman, Firepoint is participating in the international Freya project, which aims to develop a modern air defense system capable of intercepting ballistic missiles.

He said developers expect the first tests of the system to take place by the end of the current year.

The Freya project is being positioned as a lower-cost alternative to the American Patriot air defense system, with its primary mission focused on destroying ballistic targets.

Currently, systems with such capabilities are limited, with Patriot regarded as one of the most effective air defense platforms for countering ballistic missile threats.

Shtilerman noted that Ukraine’s participation in the project allows developers to incorporate practical battlefield experience gained during Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The initiative comes as Ukraine seeks long-term alternatives to Western-made interceptor systems amid growing concerns over limited supplies of Patriot missiles.

Earlier this month, Ukraine’s ambassador to Japan, Yuriy Lutovinov, said Tokyo could support the development of a Ukrainian-produced air defense system financially, helping Kyiv reduce dependence on US-made Patriot interceptors.

Speaking in an interview with Reuters, Lutovinov said Ukraine was interested in combining Japanese technology with Ukrainian wartime experience to create advanced defense products.

“We are not the country that would like to just ask. We are the country that is going to provide as well,” he said. “The technology of Japan and experience of Ukraine, if we can put them together, it would be a high-class product.”

According to the ambassador, discussions have also included possible Japanese participation in the PURL mechanism, a procurement framework that has already enabled the delivery of more than $4 billion worth of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.

Additionally, Ukrainian Patriot air defense crews are reportedly intercepting ballistic missiles using a single interceptor instead of the typical two to four.

The report is based on a video released by Ukraine’s Air Command West, featuring a Patriot system operator who describes how the system is employed during large-scale Russian missile and drone attacks, including strikes on critical energy infrastructure.

He said the unit has experience engaging ballistic and aeroballistic threats, including Kinzhal missiles, and noted that crews continuously reposition their assets to enhance operational effectiveness.

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

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 12:51 PM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN





T

Ukraine Starts a Massive Attack! Russians are Panicking



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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 6:15 PM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN



T

Wow! Russia Completely Lost it! No Safe Supply Lines Left



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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 7:35 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Ukraine is focusing on roads to the Zaparozhiy front. Too bad for them the front is 1000 miles long, and Russians mostly use rail lines.

-----------

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

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 7:50 PM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Ukraine is focusing on roads to the Zaparozhiy front. Too bad for them the front is 1000 miles long, and Russians mostly use rail lines.

-----------

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



T

Ukraine just outplayed Putin so badly… even the US is impressed | Other War Stori

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ukraine%20just%20
outplayed%20Putin%20so%20badly%E2%80%A6%20even%20the%20US%20is%20impressed%20|%20Other%20War%20Stories&mid=9F86D88DB6DFAE147AC39F86D88DB6DFAE147AC3&ajaxhist=0

The Numbers Are WORSE Than Anyone Imagined… Putin Is Now in an UNWINNABLE Scenario

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Ukraine+just+outp
layed+Putin+so+badly%e2%80%a6+even+the+US+is+impressed+%7c+Other+War+Stories&refig=6a16327407cd43a3b5df37b4b60dadb7&mkt=en-us&ocid=&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3dUkraine%2bjust%2boutplayed%2bPutin%2bso%2bbadly%25E2%2580%25A6%2beven%2bthe%2bUS%2bis%2bimpressed%2b%257C%2bOther%2bWar%2bStories%26form%3dSTARH1%26refig%3d6a16327407cd43a3b5df37b4b60dadb7%26mkt%3den-us%26ocid%3d&mmscn=vwrc&mid=62A687549A73669D50B062A687549A73669D50B0&FORM=WRVORC&ntb=1&msockid=3e76062d595e11f1b5d728bbed1bd82d

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 8:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Putin Is Now in an UNWINNABLE Scenario


Those are big words.

I remember when you said the exact same thing about Trump before you disappeared for 3 weeks after election day because you're a pussy and a coward.

And almost 18 months later you still haven't finished crying.



As for Putin and his scenario... We'll see...



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 8:09 PM

SECOND

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


Russia Has No Chance of Winning the Ukraine War

By Reuben Johnson | May 26, 2026

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/russia-has-no-chance-of-winning-th
e-ukraine-war/

Does anyone still remember way back when the prospect of a missile or other aerodynamic weapon system launched from Ukraine hitting a target on actual Russian territory was a terrifying prospect? This would result in horrific “E” word coming to pass –escalation of the conflict into a global war – those of us who were calling for Ukraine to receive long-range weapons from the US, we were told repetitively.

This was the hallmark of Joe Biden’s presidency, who, as The Atlantic described it, ensured that the war would continue indefinitely as he “thought of the conflict as a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.”

His decision to finally permit strikes with shorter-range US systems like the HIMARS rocket artillery system came only after 33 months of the war. During this almost three-year period, Russia consistently launched long-range missile and drone attacks almost anywhere in Ukraine the Kremlin wanted, and Moscow also increasingly began using Iranian- and North Korean-made weapons to do so.

As the magazine recalls in this November 2024 assessment, “Biden has promised the Ukrainians that he will stand by them ‘for as long as it takes’— but he has nevertheless made sure that the war has gone on much longer than it had to.”

Now, in May 2026, as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “10-day Special Military Operation” inches up on the counter towards day number 1600, Ukraine is hitting targets inside of Russia on practically a daily basis and doing so at will. Moreover, it is striking at not just military sites and command centers, but also at strategic facilities that are essential to Putin’s ability to keep funding his war effort.

These include some of the largest oil refineries and gas transit facilities in Russia, as well as many of the terminals and ports needed to load oil onto tankers for export.

Changing the Dynamic in the Ukraine War

Ukraine’s drone and missile attacks have sharply altered the dynamic of this war and have made it one in which Moscow no longer has the initiative, no longer has the upper hand in the war of air, drone, and missile strikes, and – most importantly – no longer shows any chance of prevailing in the conflict.

The Washington, DC-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think-tank’s 25 May assessment concludes, “Ukraine is actively challenging the positional character of the war that has dominated the battlefield since 2023. Russian battlefield gains are approaching net zero, while Ukrainian forces are setting conditions potentially to break out of positional warfare by reintroducing limited elements of mechanized maneuver at the tactical level.”

With an ominous warning about what could be in store for Russia’s forces in the near future, the ISW now reports that “Ukraine has re-secured an overall drone advantage and fielded systems capable of disrupting Russian forces throughout their operational depth in support of planned Ukrainian offensive or defensive ground operations.”

In plain language, a new-generation version of combined arms, which military experts used to refer to as the “Air-Land Battle.” It is the type of warfare that Russia’s military always claimed they were the world’s experts at, but which they have shown almost no signs of having any institutional memory of ever since the February 2022 invasion.

Long and Medium Range Strikes

Long-range Ukrainian strikes inside Russia, which were once a surprise to Putin’s military, are now so frequent that they are not just hitting valuable targets in Russia’s rear. They are also testing – as well as wearing down – Russian air defenses and straining Moscow’s logistics.

They are also a major boost for Kyiv’s war effort. After years of almost robotically chanting “there is no way the Ukrainians can win,” and wanting to look the other way, Western governments are now reconsidering how much they are willing to do to support the Ukrainian military and their defense companies.

But attacks on shorter-range targets are also causing the Russian military no end of headaches.

Ukraine has been systematically and increasingly interdicting Russian supply lines across southern Ukraine – as well as along the land bridge that connects mainland Russia to Crimea.

These attacks that occur in the 50-to-150-kilometer range have become the most damaging for Moscow’s war effort in recent months. These Middle Strike operations or Mid-Range Strikes have effectively cut off Crimea from the rest of Russia. But they have done so through drone-based interdiction of supply routes rather than through an armored force ground offensive that Western analysts had predicted.

It seems that these low-cost drones can be assembled quickly and cheaply and can accomplish what some of the most expensive and sophisticated Western tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery have failed to do.

About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson

Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, with a specialization in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.

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

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 9:34 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


THGR, I listened to the first 5 minutes of your video. Did you count the # of times it referenced Ukraine's military intelligence??? In five minutes, there was not one true statement, and I'm not about to waste my time listening to 48 minutes of bull.

So, quick comments to you and SECOND:

a) If drones were enough to win a war, Russia would have won two years ago. Airwars don't make victories.

b) Everything... EVERYTHING ... said about Russia goes 10x for Ukraine. Ruined logistics? Failed economy? Ginormous deficits? Mobilization? Check, check, check, and check!

c) If it wasn't for the USA and EU, Ukraine would have cratered a long time ago. As it is, EU weapons, supplies, finances, and economies are being drained into the black hole that is Ukraine. It's becoming politically insupportable.

Ukraine is a giant grift.

-----------

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

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026 10:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

It doesn't change the fact that aside from me coming in here and laughing at you or reminding you that nobody gives a fuck about Ukraine, the only three people that made up 98% of the rest of the 10,000+ posts in this thread was you two knuckleheads losing a who's got the biggest dick competition with Sigs.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
6ix, a new signature for you: once you have given up on existentialism and grown out of nihilism, all that is left is to embrace the absurdity

6ix, you will have essentially summarized the core premise of Absurdism, as pioneered by Albert Camus. If nihilism states that life has no meaning, and existentialism tries to force a subjective meaning onto the void, absurdism is the liberating acceptance that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to our search for purpose.

Rather than succumbing to despair, embracing the absurd turns meaninglessness on its head. It frees you from the pressure of grand designs or ultimate destinations. Since there are no intrinsic rules or predetermined paths, you are free to live passionately, authentically, and defiantly in the present moment.

As Camus famously noted, acknowledging the absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. It becomes an active rebellion where you choose to savor the sheer experience of living without illusions. You can dive deeper into this philosophical liberation through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Camus, or explore its practical applications on Psychology Today.

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



This might be the biggest fucking Straw Man that I've ever seen constructed in my life.

Go fuck yourself, retard.

This isn't about not caring what happens in Ukraine because one cares about nothing.

This is NOBODY GIVES A SINGLE FUCK ABOUT UKRAINE.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 7:43 AM

SECOND

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


Council of the EU
Press release
11 May 2026 13:17

Ukrainian children unlawfully deported and forcibly transferred to Russia: EU sanctions 16 individuals and seven entities

On the day of the high-level meeting of the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children, the Council has decided to adopt restrictive measures against further 16 individuals and seven entities responsible for actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.

The decision targets those responsible for the systematic unlawful deportation, forced transfer, forced assimilation, including indoctrination and militarised education, of Ukrainian minors, as well as their unlawful adoption and removal to the Russian Federation and within temporarily occupied territories.

Since the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Russia is estimated to have deported and forcibly transferred nearly 20,500 Ukrainian children. These actions constitute grave breaches of international law and a violation of the fundamental rights of the child and aim to erase Ukrainian identity and undermine the preservation of its future generations.

The entities listed today include federal state institutions linked to the Russian Ministry of Education such as the All-Russian Children's Centres Orlyonok, Scarlet Sails, and Smena. They organise -- in coordination with occupation authorities -- programmes for Ukrainian children in which they are subjected to pro-Russian indoctrination, including through patriotic events, ideological education, and military-oriented activities. Other listed entities host Ukrainian minors transferred from occupied territories of Ukraine and expose them to programmes aligned with Russian state policies, including political indoctrination and activities consistent with education frameworks designed for basic military training. The DOSAAF Centre in Sevastopol, the Nakhimov Naval School and the Military-Patriotic Club “Patriot” in Crimea run the re-education, ideological indoctrination, and militarisation of minors, fostering loyalty to Russia and undermining Ukrainian national identity.

Much more at https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/05/11/ukr
ainian-children-unlawfully-deported-and-forcibly-transferred-to-russia-eu-sanctions-16-individuals-and-seven-entities/

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

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 9:08 AM

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


Exclusive: Zelensky sends Trump urgent letter warning of Ukraine's critical missile defense shortages

May 27, 2026 3:43 pm

by Tim Zadorozhnyy

https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-sends-trump-urgent-letter-warning
-of-critical-missile-defense-shortages/

"When it comes to defending against ballistic missiles, we rely almost exclusively on the United States."

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

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 9:29 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:

This is NOBODY GIVES A SINGLE FUCK ABOUT UKRAINE.
Ukraine is buying the West time to rearm against Russia, Czech General Karel Rehka told Euromaidan Press.

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/27/ukraine-is-buying-the-west-time
-and-should-be-in-nato-top-czech-commander-says/

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

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 9:53 AM

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


Exclusive: Senior Ukrainian commander sees imminent 'turning point' in war

By Dan Peleschuk | May 27, 2026 3:07 AM CDT

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/senior-ukrainian-co
mmander-sees-imminent-turning-point-war-2026-05-27/

Summary
• Andriy Biletsky commands Ukraine's Third Army Corps
• He predicts a turning point in war in Ukraine
• Biletsky believes Russian forces are exhausted
• He thinks they are incapable of major breakthroughs

KHARKIV REGION, Ukraine, May 27 (Reuters) - Ukraine has a six-month window in which to seize the battlefield initiative from Russia and strengthen its hand for peace talks, a senior commander told Reuters, predicting a "turning point" was imminent after more than four years of war.

Russian forces have made grinding gains since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but the advances have slowed this year and Ukrainian troops are increasing pressure on the battlefield to try to push them back.

Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky, who commands Ukraine's Third Army Corps, one of Ukraine's most respected fighting forces, told Reuters in an interview that he believes Russia's army is exhausted and incapable of making major breakthroughs.

If Ukraine's military can build and maintain momentum over several months, it can gain the initiative along the frontline and push Russia to abandon its designs on the last part of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine that it does not yet occupy, he said.

"I believe the next six to nine months are a turning point," Biletsky said at an undisclosed underground location in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

"More precisely, I think the next six are the most critical," he said.

The issue of who controls Donetsk has been a stumbling block in U.S.-backed peace talks that have stalled, with Russia wanting the entire region and Ukraine refusing to withdraw from territory that Moscow's troops have been unable to conquer.

"We need to define those directions where we can improve our positions, take some strategic points, and then speak with the Russians from a position of strength - not weakness - about a truly stable truce," said Biletsky, a right-wing political leader who founded the battle-hardened Azov Battalion and now commands tens of thousands of troops.

"From a military point of view, this is realistic."

Russia's Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed victory in Ukraine and said this month he thinks the war is nearing an end.

'CRITICAL' MONTHS AHEAD

Russia's advances have been complicated by a decision by billionaire Elon Musk to deny Moscow's forces access to his Starlink satellite-based internet service. Kyiv has meanwhile stepped up medium-range drone attacks on Russian air defences and logistics, helping more long-range strikes get through to hit oil and military facilities in Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said last week Ukraine had retaken nearly 600 square km (230 square miles) of territory in 2026. Reuters could not independently verify the figure. Moscow currently controls almost one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

Assessing the military situation, John Helin of the Finland-based Black Bird conflict-analysis group echoed Biletsky in saying fatigue was a problem for Russian forces, while Ukraine's war effort is hampered by a manpower shortage.

"It does seem like, four or five months into this year, it's much more likely that the Russians will get exhausted before the Ukrainian problems come to a breaking point," he told Reuters.

On Monday, the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said Kyiv's forces were now "actively challenging the positional character of the war" and could soon be capable of staging limited mechanised assaults.

'FORTRESS BELT'

Russian troops are bearing down on eastern Ukraine's "Fortress Belt" where fighting is raging inside the strategic city of Kostiantynivka, its southern end.

The constellation of heavily fortified cities anchors Ukrainian defences. Capturing it would position Russia to threaten the rest of the Donbas.

Biletsky, whose forces hold over one-tenth of the total front line, said his troops were firmly holding the flank around Sloviansk, the belt's northern bastion, and forcing Russia to attack the city head-on.

Such costly assaults have helped drain Russian forces and led to heavy losses of field commanders, he said, in what he described as a professional degradation of Moscow's military.

"The lack of personnel no longer allows them to advance the way they did, for example, a year ago," said Biletsky.

Biletsky said it was too early to draw conclusions from Kyiv's recent success, but that Ukraine could capitalise on it by continuing mid-range attacks and advancing "carefully".

Moscow is "radically losing" in battlefield communications because of Musk's crackdown on use of Starlink, Biletsky said.

But he described the sides at parity in evolving technology, with Ukraine leading in unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and heavy bomber drones, and Russia winning the race for fibre-optic drones, which cannot be jammed.

A potential blueprint for a modernised Ukrainian army, his corps has led efforts to transform training and integrate new technology such as UGVs as an important part of its battlefield strategy.

Biletsky's units lead the way in deploying stealthy kamikaze drones and robots armed with machineguns or rocket launchers to replace significant portions of infantrymen, aiming for 30% by 2027, he said.

The next "revolution" will allow commanders to stage more "creative" combined assault operations while conserving precious troops, Biletsky said.

"It will happen this year, and I think we'll show how our corps is a vivid example of it," he said.

Editing by Timothy Heritage

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

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 11:39 AM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

THGR, I listened to the first 5 minutes of your video. Did you count the # of times it referenced Ukraine's military intelligence??? In five minutes, there was not one true statement, and I'm not about to waste my time listening to 48 minutes of bull.

So, quick comments to you and SECOND:

a) If drones were enough to win a war, Russia would have won two years ago. Airwars don't make victories.

b) Everything... EVERYTHING ... said about Russia goes 10x for Ukraine. Ruined logistics? Failed economy? Ginormous deficits? Mobilization? Check, check, check, and check!

c) If it wasn't for the USA and EU, Ukraine would have cratered a long time ago. As it is, EU weapons, supplies, finances, and economies are being drained into the black hole that is Ukraine. It's becoming politically insupportable.

Ukraine is a giant grift.

-----------

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


Catastrophe is coming for Putin as the Ukraine war looks now like disastrous defeat for Russia

Summary and Key Points: As Russia's economy buckles under sanctions and drone strikes on its oil infrastructure, the elite consensus around Vladimir Putin is showing visible cracks — with a well-connected business leader telling The Guardian there is now "profound disappointment in Putin" and a growing sense that "some kind of catastrophe is looming." Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told PBS Frontline that "things are crumbling around Putin" and now openly discusses scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea — an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee just two months ago.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/catastrophe-is-coming-for-putin-a
s-the-ukraine-war-looks-now-like-disastrous-defeat-for-russia/ar-AA24aYvQ?


I bring more receipts. This is the story no matter what or who you source unless it is a Russian propagandist; as you are. Fact, Russia is heading for an end that will prove me to be right. I can wait.

tick tock

T





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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 1:42 PM

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


Europe must take Russia threat seriously, Estonia’s spy chief says

May 27, 2026 5:03 pm

by Martin Fornusek, Vladyslav Samusenko

https://kyivindependent.com/europe-must-take-russia-threat-seriously-e
stonias-spy-chief-says/

The Kyiv Independent’s Martin Fornusek speaks with Kaupo Rosin, director general of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, about Russia’s long-term strategy against Ukraine and Europe, the risks facing NATO’s eastern flank, and why Moscow still views the United States as its main adversary. Rosin explains whether Putin’s regime is weakening under wartime pressure, why Russia is unlikely to stop at Ukraine, and how sabotage campaigns, hybrid operations, and military reforms are reshaping Europe’s security landscape.


00:00 Intro
00:24 Is Putin under pressure?
03:00 Chances of a ceasefire in 2026
05:57 Putin’s strategy toward Europe and the US
08:25 How soon could Russia threaten NATO?
10:48 Russia’s hybrid operations in Europe
12:59 Outro

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

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 6:05 PM

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


All non-drone militaries are obsolete

All warfare is drone warfare now.

Noah Smith and Latent.Space
May 19, 2026

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-non-drone-militaries-are-obsolete

Drone warfare has been a fascination of mine for a very long time. When I read Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” as a kid, I imagined what would happen if the attacking swarms were mechanical birds, controlled with AI. When I read about Japanese kamikazes in WW2, I reasoned that someday we’d have drones do the same. In 2013, I wrote a post about the advent of drone warfare that’s still probably the most prophetic thing I’ve ever written. It simply made sense that if we could create AI-controlled swarms of exploding artificial insects, then as long as they had enough battery power to sustain themselves over long flights, they’d be an unstoppable weapon.

Thirteen years later, my imagination has mostly become reality. Batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to sustain long drone flights, and AI has gotten good enough to guide drones to their targets (and, often, to select the targets in the first place). All we need now to fulfill my vision is for AI to start autonomously directing large numbers of drones in concert. That’s coming very soon.

The Ukraine War isn’t the first war in which drones are proving decisive — that would be the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 — but it’s the war in which drones have truly come into their own. Ukraine’s intensive use of drones has allowed them to inflict casualty rates as high as 5 to 1 on the Russian army in recent months, while giving up little or no territory. Around 96% of those casualties are estimated to be caused by drones. In just the past year, Ukraine went from using just a few thousand FPV drones per day to using around 60,000.

You can read lots of stories about how drones represent a revolution in military affairs; the recent Carnegie Endowment piece is a good one, as is the slightly older one by the Army University Press. But to really viscerally understand how deeply things have changed, you have to watch videos from the war. Here is a montage of drone strikes in Ukraine, including a terrifying final sequence where a drone flies into a Russian barracks and destroys it. It’s difficult stuff to watch, but if you want to understand the changes that have come to modern warfare, you have to see it.
https://x.com/WarRoomArchives/status/2046638924060315766

The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close.

Much more at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-non-drone-militaries-are-obsolete

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

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 7:04 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

THGR, I listened to the first 5 minutes of your video. Did you count the # of times it referenced Ukraine's military intelligence??? In five minutes, there was not one true statement, and I'm not about to waste my time listening to 48 minutes of bull.

So, quick comments to you and SECOND:

a) If drones were enough to win a war, Russia would have won two years ago. Airwars don't make victories.

b) Everything... EVERYTHING ... said about Russia goes 10x for Ukraine. Ruined logistics? Failed economy? Ginormous deficits? Mobilization? Check, check, check, and check!

c) If it wasn't for the USA and EU, Ukraine would have cratered a long time ago. As it is, EU weapons, supplies, finances, and economies are being drained into the black hole that is Ukraine. It's becoming politically insupportable.

Ukraine is a giant grift.



THGR:

Quote:
Catastrophe is coming for Putin as the Ukraine war looks now like disastrous defeat for Russia

Summary and Key Points: As Russia's economy buckles under sanctions and drone strikes on its oil infrastructure, the elite consensus around Vladimir Putin is showing visible cracks — with a well-connected business leader telling The Guardian there is now "profound disappointment in Putin" and a growing sense that "some kind of catastrophe is looming." Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told PBS Frontline that "things are crumbling around Putin" and now openly discusses scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea — an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee just two months ago.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/catastrophe-is-coming-for-putin-a
s-the-ukraine-war-looks-now-like-disastrous-defeat-for-russia/ar-AA24aYvQ?


I bring more receipts. This is the story no matter what or who you source unless it is a Russian propagandist; as you are. Fact, Russia is heading for an end that will prove me to be right. I can wait.


Good. Just don't hold your breath.


Let's start with the first reference:

Quote:
a well-connected business leader

Who? Could it be a BRITISH business leader "well connected" to the British government? Nothing says it isn't.

Every reference except one is anonymous, "they/ them", American, or British.

Here's the real story: Putin is being criticized all right. Not for starting the war. But for not going hard enough. For engaging in "negotiations" with Frump, Witless, and Pushner.
Part of the reason is bc China kept angling for a negotiated settlement. But apparently, for a # of reasons, Iran probably being one, Wang Yi just told Lavrov to step on the gas, war-wise.

Russia is fighting all of NATO. The only thing that NATO ISN'T providing (overtly) is "boots on the ground and planes in the sky". The CIA, MI6, various military specialists, mercs, politicians, weapons mfrs, drone mfrs, western spy planes and satellites, saboteurs, terrorists, banks etc etc are all pouring as much as they can get away with into Ukraine. It's as close to all-out war as NATO and the EU can get and still keep their war on Russia technically confined the Ukraine. And the farther Russia advances thru Kupiansk and Konstantinovka, towards Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Dneipro and Zaparozhiy, the more frantic the west becomes and the more blatant EU warfighting.

Of course Russia is going to take hits. That is the nature of attritional warfare: Who can take the most hits.

Russia is in far better shape than western press would have you believe. In better shape than the EU, and in far FAR better shape than the west's puppet Ukraine.

-----------

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

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 7:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Russia is fine. Ukraine is fucked. Zelensky is a dead man walking.


I can easily name over 100 current Democratic Party politicians that do far more harm to the American Citizen every day than Russia has ever been capable of doing to us.

I don't give one single fuck about Russia. Nobody else does either.


#Rootin4Putin


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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, May 28, 2026 5:56 AM

SECOND

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


Like a broken record: Kremlin reviving conspiracy theory linking US and Ukraine to justify the war

By Jens Asbjørn Bøgen | May 28, 2026

https://www.dagens.com/war/like-a-broken-record-kremlin-reviving-consp
iracy-theory-linking-us-and-ukraine-to-justify-the-war

Recycled stories

The latest spark came from Russia’s Investigative Committee. A representative claimed the agency has proof concerning “the development of bioweapons with US funding and with the participation of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine.” . . .

In early 2022, state actors regularly talked about dangerous experiments. They alleged that Ukraine was tracking coronavirus-carrying bats and doing “work with pathogens of birds and reptiles with a subsequent transition to studying the possibility of them carrying African swine fever and anthrax,” according to media reports.

Top officials kept the narrative alive. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed the weapons were targeted at specific ethnic groups, while other officials claimed the U.S. ran dozens of secret human experimentation labs.

United24Media reports that the claims peaked at the United Nations in late 2022. That is when Russian envoy Vasily Nebenzya alleged that Ukraine had built special drones to unleash “combat mosquitoes” infected with diseases.

The real facilities

Despite the loud accusations, international investigators have found absolutely nothing.

The United Nations and the World Health Organization looked closely at places like the Mechnikov Anti-Plague Institute in Odesa and found entirely normal public health facilities.


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

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Thursday, May 28, 2026 5:59 AM

SECOND

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


Catastrophe Is Coming for Putin As the Ukraine War Looks Now Like Disastrous Defeat for Russia

By Reuben Johnson

May 27, 2026

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/catastrophe-is-coming-for-putin-as
-the-ukraine-war-looks-now-like-disastrous-defeat-for-russia/

Summary and Key Points: As Russia’s economy buckles under sanctions and drone strikes on its oil infrastructure, the elite consensus around Vladimir Putin is showing visible cracks — with a well-connected business leader telling The Guardian there is now “profound disappointment in Putin” and a growing sense that “some kind of catastrophe is looming.” Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told PBS Frontline that “things are crumbling around Putin” and now openly discusses scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea — an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee just two months ago.

Putin Can’t Escape His Ukraine Mistake

No end of bad news keeps piling up for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The worst of it is that the more time goes by, the more there is a sense that his invasion of Ukraine was the most fatal of a long string of bad decisions. The end of his rule, which may be closer than anyone thinks, may also be the beginning of the end of Russia as we know it.

The increasing trend is that the worse conditions become inside of Russia, the more of the nation’s oil and gas industry is destroyed, and the higher the casualty figures for Moscow’s military climb, the less anyone sees of Putin or hears him make comments to address what he intends to do about it. What seems to be the former KGB Lt. Col.’s isolation from the outside world has even forced the Kremlin to deny that he is being told the true state of affairs in the nation.

“No. It is not so,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said publicly back in April. “Putin is the head of state, and his powers mean he deals with the widest range of issues on the agenda.”

However, the level of confidence behind that statement appears not to be shared by the upper elites in Russia.

The overall sense, said the UK Guardian newspaper this past weekend, is that the increasingly negative consequences of the February 2022 invasion have “broken Putin’s unwritten contract with the Russian public.” This contract is the public’s pledge that “we do not get involved in politics and trying to gain power for ourselves – but only as long as the state acts in our best interests.”

It Is Too Late to Save The Situation Now in the Ukraine War

“There’s definitely been a shift in mood among the elites this year … there is profound disappointment in Putin,” a man described as a well-connected business leader told the Guardian for a long assessment published last weekend. There is now in Russia “a growing sense that some kind of catastrophe is looming,” he continued.

“No one believes everything will suddenly collapse tomorrow,” the source told the UK daily. “But there is a growing realisation that utterly senseless, self-destructive decisions keep being made. People who once defended Putin no longer do. Any sense of a future has disappeared.”

The two authors also know the political landscape and the country’s situation well. One is Shawn Walker, who reported for the Guardian from Moscow for more than a decade, and Pjotr Sauer, who reports from there now and is the son of the late Derek Sauer. The elder Sauer was the 1990s champion of trying to build a free press in what was then Boris Yeltsin’s Russia and is famous for founding the English-language Moscow Times.

They are also not alone in their pessimistic view of how, as former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told Frontline this week, “things are crumbling around Putin.” The level to which Putin’s empire is flailing about to no good effect in its battlefield operations in Ukraine makes him and others now even talk about scenarios where Ukraine could retake Crimea, said the former Washington envoy. This is an eventuality that was almost impossible to foresee even two months ago.

Rising Instability

The combination of drone attacks, internet blackouts, and the continuing downturn in the Russian economy is combining into a perfect storm of discontent that contributes to a growing sense of instability in Moscow, concluded another long essay in The New Yorker from three weeks ago.

But, as the New Yorker profile points out, “Just about everyone would like to stop the war tomorrow—that’s obvious,” a well-known member of Russia’s political élite told the magazine. “There’s not a single person, other than Putin and the military brass, who wants to keep on fighting. But no one would ever dare to express their displeasure.”

In a separate interview with Farida Rustamova, founder of the newsletter, Vlast, a Russian word meaning “political power”, the New Yorker writer Joshua Yaffa concludes that the recent series of events “has created a sense that the political system is at once tightly controlled and utterly rudderless.”

“On the one hand, the regime is more airless than ever,” said Rustamova. “All the screws have been tightened to the max, but it’s also never been as chaotic and unpredictable. The old rules are breaking down, and no one knows what the new ones are, or whether they exist at all.”

The Ukraine war has created a fundamental sense of despair, and that probably has eroded the support of the population to as little as “less than 20 percent” said Volker in the same broadcast.

The war has tested but not yet broken the loyalty of the Russian public to their “Tsar” Putin, according to the conclusions of almost all current analyses, including those of two Russian-based analysts who spoke to National Security Journal.

But the only hope – and it is a faint one – is that someone with influence over Putin, such as the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, would convince him that a ceasefire is the only way to prevent Russia from eventually collapsing. Otherwise, this war will go on until some catastrophe tears the country apart.

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

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Thursday, May 28, 2026 8:11 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:

Of course Russia is going to take hits. That is the nature of attritional warfare: Who can take the most hits.

Russia is in far better shape than western press would have you believe. In better shape than the EU, and in far FAR better shape than the west's puppet Ukraine.
How Ukraine Put Russia on the Back Foot in Year 5 of the War

By Benjamin Hart | May 25, 2026

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ukraine-russia-war-drones-iran
.html

Iran, not Ukraine, is currently at the center of America’s volatile foreign policy. But while the U.S. has shifted its focus elsewhere, Ukraine has been more than holding its own. Its military has increasingly taken the initiative in the country’s east, where small factions of Russian and Ukrainian troops are locked in a hellish form of drone-based hybrid warfare. Ukraine continues to inflict heavy casualties on Russian forces and has sometimes even clawed back small portions of territory it has lost over the past few years, though major breakthroughs seem all but impossible. Perhaps even more significantly, Ukraine has been able to hit Russia’s interior with drones and missiles, even in Moscow, which has spooked Vladimir Putin and a war-weary public. Still, the oil crisis caused by the war in Iran has handed Russia a temporary economic lifeline. (Ukraine’s drone expertise, meanwhile, is suddenly in hot demand in the Middle East.) And as Russia continues to bombard Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine, two of its most intense attacks have come in the last few days, including a devastating barrage on Saturday night.

Since Russia’s invasion, I have periodically checked in with Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and perhaps the foremost expert on the conflict in the U.S. We spoke once again last week about Ukraine’s improved position, its biggest vulnerabilities, and whether an end to the war might arrive anytime soon.

In other interviews you’ve done recently, you’ve described the fighting in this war as more disorganized and diffuse than ever. What does it look like now?
It’s become a much more difficult battlefield to map because there aren’t really cohesive defensive lines. Often positions are commingled, especially in cities, and there is a substantial gray zone between the two sides where both sides tend to claim degree of presence, but presence does not necessarily confer control on this battlefield. And there’s a fairly low density of infantry forces on the front lines, particularly on the Ukrainian side. So the popularized image from a few years ago, that this is a bit like World War I with trenches plus drones, is simply inaccurate. The battle space hasn’t looked that way at least for the last year or year and a half, if it ever did.

There are defensive positions, and there are lines of defense and defensive barriers, but what they really do is present an obstacle to enemy infantry or enemy vehicles that are primarily destroyed by drones, artillery, and mines. These are not trenches of defensive positions that are being held by a large number of people. And at this point, the contest that really matters is the contest for superiority in what folks colloquially call the kill zone, which means superiority in employing drones on the battlefield. The side that has the advantage in both qualitative and quantitative employment of drones can dictate the initiative and has the ability to displace the drone units and supporting artillery of the other side. And control really shifts not by infantry assaulting the infantry positions of the other side but by one side being able to effectively suppress and displace the drone units and the supporting artillery units of their opponent.

Is it even possible for Russia to make much progress with this form of warfare?
It’s very unlikely. So far this year, the Russian military is performing quite a bit worse than last year. The rate of gain is barely half of what it was around this time in 2025. They’re not necessarily losing control of terrain, but they’re certainly not gaining it at any significant rate, especially given the substantial casualties they’re taking to try to advance. The way the Russian military has been fighting for some time represents a fundamental trade-off. Infiltration tactics and light motorized attacks with small amounts of infantry are simply not capable of generating any kind of operationally significant breakthroughs. So even when there’s a localized breach of Ukrainian defenses, the Russian military can’t exploit it, can’t generate momentum, and can’t turn that into anything because Ukrainian forces are then able to stabilize the situation and increasingly even counterattack.

What it does allow the Russian military to do is two things. First, they’re able to sustain or, at least up until this year, had been able to sustain an offensive period roughly from late March all the way to December. Contrary to typical depictions in the press, there is no spring offensive or summer offensive or fall offensive. It is just one offensive that doesn’t really end, other than a short period over the course of the winter. The cycle of Russian offensive operations in this war is a series of mechanized attacks starting from March through April. Then, as foliage and terrain cover returns, the Russian military switches to infiltration tactics, which are more effective and reduces their casualties, and that continues on until about October, when the weather turns poor again, drones are not nearly as effective, and Russian forces try mechanized assault once again. That typically goes on up until November and December.

So in the cycle of combat operations, the trend that can be observed is that Russian casualties last year started to roughly match their monthly recruitment rate, so they’re no longer able to generate reserves or expand the force. And the Ukrainian military has been able to consistently adapt to Russian tactics, such that the Russian forces who are trying to fight in 2026 the way they fought in 2025 are seeing a significantly reduced effectiveness. They are suffering both from the reduced quality of their forces and the steady improvement in how Ukrainian units are able to employ drones and organize their defense — even if those units themselves still suffer from a lack of manpower and a lack of cohesive defensive lines.

That lack of Ukrainian manpower is something we’ve discussed before as a major problem for them. Have drones been able to counterbalance that?
I think it’s a combination of things. First, the manpower situation in the Ukrainian military has improved slightly. It stabilized over the course of the winter, and the Ukrainian force along the front line is no longer shrinking as it was last year. This is not a dramatic improvement, but it is a notable one. Second, Ukraine has had time to prepare defenses over the course of last year and this year, which, in combination with the growing Ukrainian drone force, is able to present the Russian military with fairly substantial and difficult-to-overcome drone engagement — what you could consider to be a “defeat zone,” essentially. Despite the fact that Ukrainian force presence on the front line is actually very sparse, they are able to control the terrain with drones, artillery, and other prepared defenses.

So the Russian military is seeing reduced effectiveness from attempting the same tactics this year that they did last year and are probably going to be in search of some sort of new approach. But I’m not sure what they will be able to do, because the Ukrainian military has also begun to invest heavily in what folks call “middle strike.” That is the ability to strike at greater operational depth beyond the front lines and into the Russian rear, where Russian forces have up until now been relatively safe in their ability to organize logistics, command, and control and conduct various supporting activities. And so now the thrust of the Ukrainian approach is that even though for a while there’s been a relative parity in the kill zone at the tactical level, they’re expanding their footprint steadily over the Russian military’s rear, which I think is going to create a lot of issues for Russian military operations this year.

We’re also getting more clarity about Russian losses. There are recent estimates that they stand at about 350,000 troops killed.
It’s more than that.

What’s your estimate?
I do not have an exact accounting, but my own estimate is over 400,000.

Incredible. Doesn’t that start to hurt on the battlefield as well? Who can they recruit without instituting another draft, which I know is something Putin doesn’t want to do?
On the one hand, Russian recruitment for the past several months seems down compared to 2025, but typically recruitment is lower around winter time and then picks up over the course of summer and fall. I would say, and you may be surprised to hear this, that the Russian military largely met its recruitment goal over last year because of a combination of contracts being offered, big payouts and bonuses, and also a host of coercive measures. For example, police officers are given a bonus for every person charged who, rather than trying their luck with the Russian justice system, will instead sign up to go to the military operation instead. There’s a host of these schemes.

But the force-generation engine that Russia had, the pipeline they’ve created to replace their losses in this war, is visibly struggling to produce the same numbers it did in 2024 and 2025. So they are running into issues, but there are still quite a few people seemingly willing to take contracts and sign up. The challenge is that while the quantity remains, the quality has consistently gone down over the past several years. The way the Russian military has been fighting is by having a consistently regenerated layer of assault troops that they employ with these infiltration tactics, who are then replaced within a couple of weeks by individuals who were recently contracted and have been given barely two weeks, if not less, worth of training.

Russia has been able to terrorize Ukrainian cities with missile and drone strikes for years, and it continues to do so. But increasingly Ukraine has been able to penetrate Russian air defenses with drones, fairly deep into the country. They’ve been able to hit energy infrastructure, military infrastructure, and civilians to some extent. How and why is this happening now?
The answer is straightforward. First, it is the result of a significant increase in the quantity of long-range strike drones that Ukraine now produces and can employ on a monthly basis. The actual sortie size has gotten much larger with a sizable number of decoy drones, and this presents a challenge for Russian air defense to deal with. Second, the qualitative advancements year on year from 2024 are notable. Ukraine is conducting some of these strikes in a much more sophisticated way. And lastly, Ukrainian strike campaigns along the front line have created a problem for Russian air defense. That is, the current rate of strikes has been depleting Russian short-range air defense of ammunition, which is a problem that the Ukrainian military itself ran into back in 2024 and had to adapt to.

And Russia simply lacks enough air defenses to cover the length and depth of this vast front line while defending Moscow, which is politically significant, and defending their distributed energy infrastructure. Here, Russia’s size, which in some cases historically has been an advantage, is actually a disadvantage because the span of the country is so vast that it is very easy for sorties of strike drones and cruise missiles to cut corridors through Russian air defense. And it’s very difficult now for Russia to cover its troops along the front line supporting rear areas, Moscow, and all the different energy infrastructure they have. So increasingly, you see the pressure on Russian air defense combined with improvement in Ukraine’s long-range strike coming together for a much more effective campaign.

In previous conversations, we’ve discussed how America won’t let Ukraine use its weapons to strike deep into Russia, and that it has imposed other restrictions on Ukraine. There was always this push and pull with Zelenskyy asking Biden and then Trump for permission to do more. But these new strikes seem to be homegrown and not dependent on Western weaponry. Is that right?
I think it’s fair, yes. At this stage, the overwhelming percentage of strikes, if not pretty much all of them, are being done with Ukrainian-produced drones or Ukrainian-produced cruise missiles. Ukraine is trying to increase production of its own ground-launch cruise missile and various types of long-range, one-way attack munitions, but most of these strikes are being done with a large number of one-way attack drones.

The Trump administration is no longer selling weapons to Ukraine — it sells them to NATO allies who then transfer them to Ukraine. But does Ukraine even need that weaponry to the extent it did before?
These strikes are being done in part thanks to Western capital, which Ukraine still needs. That’s why it was very important for Europeans to issue Eurobonds last year, in order to help sustain and fund the war. You would not have had the stepped-up production of these drones were it not for Western capital working together with Ukraine’s defense industry. Also, there probably is some kind of intelligence support from Western countries to help aid the strikes. But I think at this stage, much of it is being done independently by Ukrainian drone-strike units. The U.S., as far as I understand, still plays an important role in supporting Ukraine when it comes to provision of intelligence and coordination of military assistance via the Security Assistance Group Ukraine (SAG-U), working alongside NSATU (NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine), which is another coalition-type mission. The most important things that the United States provides at this point are interceptor missiles for patriot batteries, which are costly and not easy to produce but remain essential to Ukraine’s ballistic missile defense, and of course parts and components for the various types of systems that have already been provided to the Ukrainian military.

How much has that been screwed up by the Iran war? I know Patriot batteries and other weaponry has been moved there.
I think many of those watching this war are bracing for the Department of Defense to potentially say that once the Iran war is over, they need to redirect new production ammunition to replenish the stockpile. So far I’ve not heard of any cutoffs to Ukraine. But there are growing rumblings among U.S. allies that there may be a significant backlog for the various capabilities they had bought from the United States and that they may not see them for many years.

If Russia keeps struggling, are there any other tactics it could use that worry you? I’m not talking nuclear weapons here, but I figure it would switch up its strategy at some point.
I think it is fair to say that the way the Russian military has been fighting is clearly yielding diminishing returns. That was evident last year. And the bet that the Russian leadership had been making in this war for some time is that if they sustain pressure on a broad front — that is, rather than conducting discrete large scale combat operations, they continue a high intensity of small-scale operations, but on a broad front pressuring the Ukrainian military — that eventually they will achieve a collapse of the front. This has not taken place, and now it looks increasingly unlikely, especially given the way they’re fighting and the way the Ukraine military has adapted.

However, there is a growing challenge, and that is the Russian strike campaign against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. This past fall and winter, Russia conducted a sustained strike campaign against Ukraine’s electricity grid, Ukraine’s power generation, and Ukraine’s ability to provide home heating using gas, which many cities depend on. And this was probably the worst winter, weather-wise, that Ukraine had seen in many years. Unfortunately, the strike campaign inflicted significant damage and some of it is irreparable, which raises big questions on how Ukraine will fare and adapt if this war goes into another winter season.

Having now followed the war since even before it began, I’m confident that Ukraine will get through another winter. But it’s important that we do not get overly fixated on the tactical situation along the front line and miss the other war, which is the strike campaigns between the two countries. Because a country at the end of the day is its people, its economy. Even with defense industrial production, which we just discussed, Ukraine produces a lot of what it needs day-to-day for its battlefield needs. But all that depends on having access to electricity, water, and having people to actually work in these industries. So the other bet that I think Russia has been trying to make is that even if they’re not successful along the front line, they can break Ukraine through a strike campaign. On the one hand, this is a poor bet because the history of bombardment campaigns consistently shows us that in the absence of battlefield successes, a strike and bombardment campaign is unlikely to be effective. The United States, I think, has drawn some lessons on this score in its strike campaign against Iran. It can do a lot, but when it comes to big political aims in the war, long-range, precision-strike campaigns and bombardment don’t get you nearly as much as people think it does.

But nonetheless, I am increasingly worried simply looking at the growing number of one-way attack drones — the Russian military employs on average now 6,500 per month — combined with a growing number of ballistic missiles, which are difficult to intercept and currently do not have cheap missile defenses available.

You’ve spent quite a lot of time in Ukraine — I don’t know when you were last there.
February through March.

When Ukraine was really on the back foot in the battlefield a couple of years ago, I remember reading about how Ukrainians were more open to the idea of a cease-fire, maybe even ceding some territory, just in order to end the war. Now they’re in a better position, but Russia continues to kill many civilians. So from what you’ve seen and heard, what’s the appetite to negotiate at the moment?
Ukraine is objectively in a better position. It was actually visibly in a better position last year. In fact, I think some of the perception here in the West is only catching up to what was the battlefield reality over the course of fall and winter.

The last time Ukraine’s situation seemed to be deteriorating was probably fall of 2024, and then it stabilized such that for almost the last year and a half, Ukraine has been doing consistently better than expected. I think the political leadership has a reasonably accurate reading of the military situation and Ukraine’s prospects, and that informs us that Ukraine’s situation is not fragile, Ukraine’s not desperate, and this is why there’s no eagerness to make a deal or sign a cease-fire under onerous or unreasonable terms.

For the Ukrainian population, I can only give you one analyst’s opinion. The sentiment that I pick up is sort of equally exhausted and determined. Nobody going into the fifth year of a conventional war, which has inflicted so many casualties and economic damage on Ukraine, would like to see the war continue. But equally, nobody would like to give up or to surrender to Russia that which Russia demands. And part of the challenge is that the Russian position in negotiations remains frankly unreasonable. It is not tethered to Russian battlefield performance. It is more closely tied to aspirational performance they wish they had rather than how well they’re actually doing.

I know you don’t like to play political analyst, but if Russia keeps making these maximally unreasonable demands and Ukraine doesn’t want to make a deal, where does that leave us? Where we’ve been for the past two years? No prospects of anything?
This has now gone from a war of attrition into one of exhaustion, and both sides in some respect are playing for time. I’ve been of the opinion ever since last year that time is increasingly not on Russia’s side in this war.

Which was its whole bet — that it has many more people than Ukraine, it can go as long as it wants, and the West will eventually get exhausted.

Yes, they had greater mobilization potential, and a materiel advantage. They had sustained support from China and later North Korea. And ultimately they assumed that one of two things would happen. Either there would be a collapse of the front on the Ukrainian side, or there would be a collapse of Western support for Ukraine, which would achieve much the same for them in this war. And neither of those two bets have been proven true for the past several years. I think that very likely the best-case scenario is that we have another year of war pushing this conflict into 2027. That’s what many Ukrainian colleagues assume.

Now, there is a possibility that ultimately Putin will change his mind or view of what he can hope to achieve in this conflict. When political leaders get into a prolonged war like this, the costs and the stakes are such that it’s very difficult for them to realize that they don’t really have a good prospect of achieving what they want. They start betting that something will break their way if they just keep the war going. And sometimes that happens, but usually it doesn’t. Usually you’re just throwing good money or good people after bad. So from my point of view, the Ukrainian strategy is to try to make this war futile for Russia and eventually convince Moscow into substantially revising its current negotiating position into something that might be acceptable to Ukraine, and also at the same time attain security guarantees from the United States in order to backstop any future deal. Because I think everyone understands that whatever deal Ukraine makes with Russia is not likely to last so long as Putin’s in power.

And do you have any sense of what kind of deal would be acceptable to Ukraine?
The course the Trump administration has taken is a bit of a problematic one, because they’ve largely positioned negotiation as a land-for-security guarantees deal, focusing on the remaining 24 percent or so of Donetsk, essentially proposing a swap where Ukraine gives territory to Russia and the territory may become some kind of free economic zone. And in exchange for that, Ukraine would receive security guarantees from the United States. The problem with that approach is that this war was never about Donetsk and cannot principally be resolved by an exchange of land. And there’s no guarantee that after Ukraine gives up Donetsk, Russia won’t simply renew the war later and then lay further claims to Ukrainian territory. The greater problem is that Moscow has larger restrictions that it’s seeking on Ukrainian sovereignty, from limits to the size of the Ukrainian forces to limits on Ukraine’s ability to join Western organizations like NATO, and a host of other demands, which would have to be negotiated beyond just what happens with Donetsk.

So this is the problem of the conversation fixating just on territory, because the territory itself is unlikely to ensure any kind of cease-fire.

And lastly, folks looking at negotiations and the possible parameters of a deal often miss the more technically thorny issue of sequencing and implementation. This is in part where the Minsk Two agreement fell apart. One could potentially make a deal on paper that reads acceptably to all sides, but it’s impossible to implement because of the sequencing challenges. That is, who does what first, who withdraws from where? Is a referendum necessary first for there to be a cease-fire? And these technical issues, which may seem mundane, actually are a better predictor of whether or not any agreement will last, beyond assumptions about anybody’s political sincerity,

Any other thoughts about the war?
The only thing I would add is a bit of uncertainty. Folks should keep in mind that wars are fundamentally unstable systems. We tend to extrapolate where the war is going by where we have been. Tactics and technology in this war tend to evolve every three to four months as both sides innovate and adapt to each other, but there’s also a host of external factors, for example the U.S. war with Iran, that can significantly affect the course of the war down the line, and we can’t easily account for them.

Other conflicts will not necessarily wait for this war to be over. This analysis, or at least what I’ve told you today, is assuming all things being equal. But we also know that the only thing we’re guaranteed in this war is that things will continue to change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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Thursday, May 28, 2026 9:00 AM

SECOND

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


I was part of Putin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary Russians won’t overthrow him

Four years after fleeing Moscow, Marina Ovsyannikova warns the threat to the regime lies not with the public, but from the Kremlin itself

By Roland Oliphant | May 28, 2026

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/i-was-part-of-putin-s-propaganda-
machine-ordinary-russians-won-t-overthrow-him/ar-AA24gK83

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/28/i-was-part-of-putins-propa
ganda-machine-now-im-in-exile/

Key takeaways

• Media Control: Marina Ovsyannikova, former Channel One producer, reveals the Kremlin's use of propaganda and fear to shape public opinion, presenting Putin as a saviour while restricting coverage of the West.

• Public Fear: Ordinary Russians remain scared and trapped in an information bubble, making grassroots protests unlikely; change may come only through elite conspiracies.

• Personal Journey: Ovsyannikova's experience spans 19 years in state media, witnessing the gradual tightening of censorship, leading her to protest the war in Ukraine and flee to Europe.

It’s the conundrum that disgusts many Ukrainians, bothers Western governments and is the despair of opposition-minded Russians. Vladimir Putin has led Russia into a national disaster. Yet after four years of war, one million casualties and victory nowhere in sight, the public has not turned on him. Why not?

For Marina Ovsyannikova, a 47-year-old former producer for Russian state television, now forced into exile in Europe for protesting against the war in Ukraine during an on-air stunt, the answer is simple. “I think this regime is based on these two things: strong propaganda and fear,” Ovsyannikova tells The Telegraph by phone from France, where she fled after staging her high-profile demonstration in March 2022.

Most of the general public is scared of taking action and trapped in an “information bubble”. And so there is little point in expecting change via “protests from ordinary people”, she adds. “They are very scared. If change comes, it will probably be an elite conspiracy against Putin.”

Ovsyannikova, who was sentenced in absentia to eight-and-a-half years in jail for “spreading false information about the Russian army”, speaks with the authority of experience.

For 19 years, she worked at Channel One, Russia’s primary federal television channel and, for decades, the keystone of the Kremlin’s domestic propaganda operation. For at least the last 15 of those years, she says, she was perfectly aware of what she was complicit in – a media machine built to lie to the Russian public and make Putin into a national saviour.

“When I came to Channel One, it was an absolutely ordinary TV channel. We broadcast news from all over the world – from the United States, from the United Kingdom, from Europe – and there were no special restrictions. But step by step, the rules changed, and more and more topics became forbidden,” she says.

By the time she left, “we couldn’t say anything positive about Europe, about Western Europe, about the United States, and we had to show Putin as the saviour of Russia. If something was going wrong, we had only one rule. We had to say Putin is good, but his officials are to blame.”

Ovsyannikova’s insider perspective forms part of a new BBC documentary, Putin: In Ten Pictures, which traces the Russian president’s two-and-a-half decades in office through the carefully curated images he has presented to the world.

She herself is a member of the last Soviet generation, who entered adulthood at around the same time Putin came to power and benefited from the boom years he initially oversaw. Indeed, Ovsyannikova freely admits to having voted for him in the past. But she can also remember Russia before its long-time president. Born in 1978 in Odesa in what was then Soviet Ukraine, to a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother, Ovsyannikova still has relatives in both countries.

Her father died when she was young, and she and her mother moved to Grozny in Chechnya. When war broke out there in 1994, they fled, along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees, and eventually settled in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar. It was an experience, she says, that later informed her anger at what was being inflicted on Ukrainians.

It was in Krasnodar, after studying journalism at university, that she landed her first reporting and presenting job at a local television station. In the early 2000s, she moved to Moscow and completed a master’s degree, and in 2003 – she remembers because it was the year the Americans invaded Iraq – she finally secured a job at Channel One. It was a position that provided a salary, a decent Moscow lifestyle and a ringside seat for the Kremlin’s construction of a draconian propaganda machine.

When Ovsyannikova arrived in the Russian capital, Putin was still in his first presidential term and in the process of cementing a shaky grip on power. At home, many of the landmarks in his crackdown on democracy were yet to come. Abroad, he positioned himself as an ally of the West in the war on terror, and made a point of praising democracy, free markets and political liberalism.

His campaign to tame the Russian media had already begun, however. And critics would challenge Ovsyannikova’s claim that Channel One was ever an ordinary channel. Its chief executive, Konstantin Ernst, has never been anything other than loyal to Putin and also choreographs set-piece events, such as presidential inaugurations and Victory Day parades.

The station hosts the president’s annual national phone-in show and has always been careful to stick to the government’s approved script of current events. For a time, however, it was widely considered less rabid than other state-owned stations. Yet Ovsyannikova recalls the climate becoming even more restrictive as the years rolled by.

The new rules came gradually, and never in the form of formal written instructions. Instead, Kirill Kleimyonov, the director of news, would have daily phone calls with the presidential administration, and then tell reporters and producers verbally that certain things were expected or forbidden.

It was when Putin anointed Dmitry Medvedev as his placeholder president in 2008 that the scales fully fell from Ovsyannikova’s eyes. “At that time, we immediately received special instructions from the presidential administration – our correspondents must follow Medvedev all of the time, and we have to broadcast Medvedev every hour. Every news broadcast must include Medvedev, not only Putin, but Medvedev too. And we were just broadcasting these two people every time.”

During her time at Channel One, Ovsyannikova worked as a foreign news producer for its flagship nine o’clock news show. Her job was to monitor overseas channels and news wires for potential stories, and put together world news bulletins. It meant that she was constantly consuming journalism that most Russians simply did not have access to, and the contrast with the official Russian version of events began to get to her.

She has previously said that it was the cynical coverage of a 2012 ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans, part of the Kremlin’s increasingly bitter culture war with the West, that began her disillusionment. By then, Ovsyannikova was a mother of two young children herself, having married Igor Ovsyannikov, a television director at a fellow state media outlet. (The pair are now separated, and only Ovsyannikova’s teenage daughter is with her in France. Her son, who is now an adult, remains in Russia, as does her former husband.)

“We spoke about it with such cynicism on Channel One and all other government channels,” Ovsyannikova told Politico in mid-2022. “We were so cruel.” The lies about the shooting down of flight MH17 in 2014 were another moment of disgust. But it was a decade after those first feelings of discontent before she finally reached her breaking point over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ovsyannikova was not on duty the night Putin launched the assault. But when she came into work a few days later, the shock in the newsroom was still palpable. No one, she says, had believed the president would actually go to war. The channel’s leadership had adapted quickly, however. Hastily printed notices had been posted around the newsroom reminding staff that the war must only be referred to as a “special military operation”.

There was another rule. No footage was to be used unless it was from Channel One correspondents or the Russian ministry of defence. Sitting on the channel’s foreign desk, Ovsyannikova could see the newswires’ footage of Ukrainian cities being bombed and the flows of refugees into Poland, but could not broadcast it.

After three weeks of war, she had had enough. On a day off in mid-March, Ovsyannikova went to an art shop and bought supplies to make a poster denouncing the conflict. The following day, March 14, she smuggled her effort into work in the sleeve of her jacket and waited for an opportune moment to unfurl it behind the newsreader on Vremya, the prime-time national news programme.

She was on air for about five seconds before the directors cut the feed, but in that time, viewers got a full view of her banner. “No war” it read in English. In Russian, it said: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda, here you are being lied to. Russians against war.”

At the same time, a human rights organisation released a pre-recorded video on Telegram in which Ovsyannikova described the war as a crime, blamed it on Putin and declared herself “ashamed that I allowed lies to be broadcast from TV screens. Ashamed that I allowed others to zombify Russian people”.

“The whole world has turned its back on us. And the next 10 generations won’t wash away the stain of this fratricidal war. We Russians are thinking and intelligent people. It’s in our power alone to stop all this madness. Go protest. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t lock us all away,” she added in a final call to action.

It was a brave thing to do, and one of a few high-profile acts of protest by ordinary Russians that gained international attention. Unsurprisingly, it came with a personal cost. Ovsyannikova was immediately arrested and, she says, spent hours under interrogation. She was eventually forced into exile. Kleimyonov, her former boss, claimed that she was a British spy.

Meanwhile, opposition figures, including the late Alexei Navalny, seized on her protest. “Five seconds of truth can wash away the dirt of weeks of propaganda,” said Lev Shlosberg, an anti-Putin politician, at the time. Outsiders were also quick to praise her courage. Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Ovsyannikova in one of his nightly addresses, while Emmanuel Macron announced that he wanted to offer her refuge.

Yet many people, particularly Ukrainians, reacted with scepticism. Were we meant to believe, scoffed critics, that she just woke up one day and realised that she worked for a lie factory? More likely, said some, that she was just part of another opaque Federal Security Service (FSB) information operation, perhaps designed to garner sympathy for Russians in the West.

Such suspicions were fuelled by the fact that Ovsyannikova initially received only a relatively light fine for her protest and was apparently allowed to leave the country freely afterwards. Besides, why take seriously someone who had looked the other way when real, independent Russian journalists had been jailed, exiled or killed for challenging the kind of propaganda she had spent years pumping out?

But Ovsyannikova insists that she is no Kremlin stooge. The dull and unedifying truth, she says, is that she had simply compromised her principles in exchange for a quiet life. “I perfectly understood it for maybe the last 15 years [that I was at Channel One]. But I was playing by Putin’s rules, because I couldn’t find another job in Russia,” she says by way of explanation. Moving to another channel would have solved nothing, because they faced the same restrictions, Ovsyannikova adds.

The only exception, the liberal TV Rain launched in 2008, was small and could hardly take on every journalist with a troubled conscience. Over the years, she toyed with the idea of quitting to start her own business. But somehow or other, she says: “I could not find the motivation to leave the propaganda machine.”

Almost all of her former colleagues, she claims, were in the same boat. “Probably only 30 per cent of my ex-colleagues support this regime and really admire Putin. The rest of them perfectly understand where they’re working and what they’re doing. But they’re playing this role for a big salary. You know, they’ve been trying to build this career all their life, and are not really ready to suddenly leave this position.”

That explains why the number of Channel One staff who quit over the invasion can be counted on one hand, Ovsyannikova says. She herself resigned days after her on-air protest and left the country the following month, initially to Berlin. Later in 2022, she briefly returned to Russia, but was forced to flee once more – this time to France – after authorities levelled fresh charges against her over the Channel One protest, eventually culminating in her being sentenced in absentia in October 2023.

She has not remained in contact with those who stayed. “They’re scared to communicate with me. After my protest, the FSB checked all my calls, all my contacts and all my social networks. One guy sent me a message of support on Telegram. They found him, and Kleimyonov [her former boss] had a strong conversation with him, and finally he was fired.”

That culture of self-interested compromise extends beyond state media, and in part explains why the Russian public still, by and large, acquiesce to the war.

“Propaganda in Russia is working extremely effectively, and all Russians now, they’re living inside a huge information bubble,” she says. “They really think it’s better now under this regime than [it was during] the chaos of the 1990s, and that given we started this war, we now have to win it,” she says, adding that the Russian public is undoubtedly “united” on the latter point.

The idea that the “stability” offered by Putin, however repressive, is preferable to the “chaos of the 1990s” is one of the Kremlin’s oldest propaganda tropes. That many remain under its spell, despite Putin’s “stability” now meaning an open-ended war, is astounding – and for Ovsyannikova, proof of just how powerful the Kremlin’s grip on public information remains.

“On the other hand, it’s fear, because FSB officers, police – they’re everywhere. And if you merely raise your hand, your life will be immediately destroyed. You lose your job, you lose your family and then you have to emigrate,” she says. “So I do not expect some protests from ordinary people. They are very scared.”

Perhaps when the Kremlin’s propaganda monopoly is broken, or the threat of redundancy and prison loses its sting, that will change. But until then, says Ovsyannikova, there will be no uprising against the tyrant in the Kremlin.

“I have only one hope, and that is an elite conspiracy against Putin,” she says. Oligarchs and Kremlin insiders badly affected by the sweeping sanctions imposed on Russia have many reasons to want a turnaround in fortunes, after all. “But when it will happen, I don’t know. Don’t ask me.”

Putin: In Ten Pictures is on BBC Two and iPlayer from Thursday, May 28

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

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