Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Friday, August 14, 2026 05:46
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Monday, August 10, 2026 3:14 PM

Is also JJ. Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

OMG, you STILL don't get it!

Do you still believe that someone spouting into a camera is providing FACTS?

Dood, I could get in front of a camera and spin a convincing yarn about ... a killer outbreak, a swarm of invading bugs, whatever.... and show flashes of irrelevant pictures and you'd never know that it was completely fabricated.

YOUR filter for whether something is true or not is whether it aligns with what you want. That's a piss poor way of learning the truth.

FACTS, dood.

You can't admit to facts. I get that. Nonetheless, I'm going to post them, and time will show all you've done by defending all things Russia is bury you head in the sand. And the people speaking into microphones that I listen to are honestly trying to report accurately. Not so much with you aye comrade?

T

T

I’m grateful for your posts because they will be around when your reality comes crashing down.

T

Russian Emergency

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Monday, August 10, 2026 5:35 PM

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

Russian anti-war opposition had a 5-day run

By Katie Marie Davies | August 11, 2026 12:07 AM

https://kyivindependent.com/russian-anti-war-opposition-had-a-5-day-ru
n/

Russia's Supreme Court, on Aug. 10, barred the country's only anti-war party from taking part in parliamentary elections scheduled for September. The liberal Yabloko party had been approved to take part in the vote and was assigned a spot on the ballot five days prior.

Between the two dates, a few notable events took place — the largely obscure party received wide-ranging support from anti-war activists and the country's exiled opposition, and pro-Kremlin political projects went after it as a result.

The accusations, spearheaded by the nationalist pro-war Rodina party, circled around Yabloko's anti-war stance, which they viewed as a "support for extremism" and compared to calls for Russia to cede its sovereign territory.

"Part of Russia's territories are occupied by a neo-Nazi regime," a Rodina representative told the court, as cited by Russian news outlet Meduza, referring to Ukrainian territories that Russia views as theirs and has inscribed their ownership into its own constitution.

"Calls for an immediate ceasefire agreement constitute calls to stop the liberation of the occupied territories or to abandon their liberation."

A few other accusations were brought up against Yabloko, among them not asking OpenAI for permission to use an image generated by ChatGPT and violating campaign financing laws, Russian media outlets reported.

Russia's Central Election Committee, which greenlit Yabloko's place in the election days earlier, told the court that they had uncovered foreign sources of funding for Yabloko candidates.

Yabloko denied all of the charges. "(Young voters) support us simply because they want to live in Russia and do not want to be killed. I do not know how to explain this to the plaintiffs," Yabloko chairman Nikolai Rybakov told the court. The party said they would appeal the decision.

Grigory Yavlinsky, Yabloko's co-founder and the chair of its political committee, said that the move exposed "the true nature" of Russia's political system.

"This decision speaks volumes about the importance of our platform — far more than any official election results could. It is evident that the public demand for peace and freedom today has proven far stronger than the authorities anticipated."

A safety valve for dissent

Yabloko is the only officially registered political party in Russia to promote a pro-peace platform.

Short and delicately worded, its manifesto calls for "a ceasefire agreement, diplomacy, and the achievement of peace." It does not directly reference Ukraine.

The text — which, in Russian, reaches just 43 words — shows the difficult line that Yabloko has chosen to walk in order to survive in Russia's increasingly repressive public sphere.

Several of Yabloko's leading members have been jailed for sharing information about Russia's war against Ukraine. Maxim Kruglov, one of the party's deputy chairs and a former member of the Moscow city council, was sentenced to seven years in prison in June after sharing information on Russia's killing of civilians in Bucha and Mariupol. Another deputy co-chair, Lev Shlosberg, is currently facing similar charges.

More high-ranking members have been legally designated as "foreign agents," or found guilty of "displaying extremist symbols" — a designation that in Russia can include images of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny or Facebook and Instagram logos — meaning they are unable to run for office.

But so far, the party itself has been allowed to survive.

For the Kremlin, Yabloko's place on the ballot paper helped to preserve the image of a competitive vote, says David Szakonyi, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

Founded in 1993, the party itself is a stalwart of Russia's political scene. In 1995, it had 45 representatives in Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma. Members of the party also held several regional offices.

Yet the party also isn't a real threat to United Russia's power. Yabloko hasn't reached the 7% and later 5% vote threshold needed to gain parliamentary seats for more than two decades. In Russia's last parliamentary elections in 2021, the party saw a 1.34% result.

In the meantime, parties such as Yabloko can be used to control the risk of protest votes.

"In general, there have always been some liberal opposition party that's been presented to voters and used as a safety valve," Szakonyi says.

"(It's) a way of channeling the angriest votes towards one body that is never going to be able to accumulate enough across the country to surpass the electoral threshold and actually take seats."

Plummeting ratings

The Supreme Court case shows that something may have shifted in these calculations. Yabloko's pro-peace message has resonated, particularly on social media.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has also been forced to contend with growing public discontent. Increasing Ukrainian drone strikes, intermittent internet blackouts, chronic fuel shortages, and growing taxes on small businesses to fund Moscow's invasion have all added to the burden.

Even Putin's government-sanctioned approval ratings dipped sharply over the past few months.

There's a greater chance that Yabloko can not only win the vote of dissenting, anti-war citizens, but also those unhappy with the country at large, says Mikhail Turchenko, a political scientist at Northwestern University in Illinois.

He points to the other parties on the ballot, who are opposition parties in name, but largely support the Kremlin on all major points. Yabloko's anti-war position differentiates it from the main field and attracts anyone who may be dissatisfied with the status quo, he says.

"Yabloko has this unique position inside the Russian political system, this anti-war position," says Turchenko. "I would speculate that this time, Yabloko will be able to get pretty solid popular support from the people."

Yabloko's potential has also been noticed elsewhere. Several of Russia's leading opposition figures, now in exile abroad, had urged their followers last week to vote for the party in protest.

In one video message, Yuliya Navalnaya, the widow of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said that Russians "must view the upcoming elections, no matter how unfair they may be, as the only legal and safe opportunity in many years to express our dissent with the government."

"This can be done by voting for a party that takes an anti-war stance," she said.

Such statements of support, however, were a double-edged sword, and Yabloko has sought to distance itself from these calls in an attempt to avoid repercussions from the state.

Writing on social media, Yabloko chairman Rybakov stressed that the party has "absolutely no foreign sources of funding, maintains no ties with organizations designated as 'undesirable' in Russia, and does not consider statements, appeals, or events organized by anyone abroad to be part of its election campaign."

Despite Rybakov's appeal, Yabloko's disappearance from the ballot will be seen as a swipe at opposition both inside and outside the country.

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

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Monday, August 10, 2026 8:49 PM

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

82% of Ukrainians believe Ukraine will win war with Russia, poll finds

By Alex Stezhensky | August 10, 2026, 09:35 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/poll-82-of-ukrainians-believe-ukraine-wil
l-win-war-with-russia-50631422.html

A large majority of Ukrainians — 82% — believe Ukraine will win the war against Russia, including 59% who are certain of victory and 23% who “tend to believe Ukraine will win.”

The findings come from a survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, or KIIS, on July 16–31.

Only 3% believe Russia will win, while 16% were undecided.

In February 2024, a KIIS poll found that 89% believed Ukraine would win, including 60% who were certain of victory.

Only 7% of Ukrainians believe the current battlefield situation favors Russia, while 39% said it favors Ukraine. Another 32% believe neither side has the advantage, while 22% were undecided.

By comparison, in February 2024, when KIIS conducted a similar survey, 15% of Ukrainians believed Russia had the advantage and 24% believed Ukraine did. Another 47% said neither side had the advantage, while 14% were undecided.

Only 22% of Ukrainians expect the war to end by the end of 2026. Another 13% expect it to end in the first half of 2027, while 39% believe it will end in the second half of 2027 or later. Another 26% could not answer the question, further indicating that only a minority expect the war to end in the near term, the survey results said.

The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology conducted the nationwide public opinion survey on July 16–31, 2026. The survey used a mixed-mode methodology: half of respondents were interviewed by telephone using computer-assisted telephone interviewing, or CATI, while the other half took part in face-to-face interviews using tablets.

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

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Monday, August 10, 2026 10:49 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
82% of Ukrainians believe Ukraine will win war with Russia, poll finds

Wow. Their propaganda machine was way better than yours was before it broke.

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

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

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Tuesday, August 11, 2026 2:18 PM

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

Polish MP calls for deporting unemployed Ukrainians

August 11, 2026, 07:07 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/polish-opposition-lawmaker-calls-for-depo
rtation-of-unemployed-ukrainians-50631700.html

Polish opposition lawmaker Andrzej Sliwka of the Law and Justice party said unemployed Ukrainians in Poland should be deported, arguing they could form at least one brigade to fight for their country, Polsat News reported on Aug. 11.

The lawmaker was commenting on a recent proposal by his party to deport Ukrainian men of draft age from Poland if they do not have legal employment in the country.

Asked whether his party had any proposals regarding "unemployed Georgians, Belarusians, Russians or Germans," Sliwka said his proposal was prompted by the fact that "Ukraine is facing a shortage of personnel in its military."

"I believe a deadline should be set for these people to return to Ukraine, and if they do not return, Polish authorities should take action in accordance with the law and deport them. To me, this is obvious," the lawmaker said.

On June 26, European Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration Magnus Brunner said the European Commission was proposing to extend temporary protection for Ukrainians until March 4, 2028. However, the extension would not apply to recently arrived Ukrainian men ages 23 to 60 who are eligible for mobilization in Ukraine.

The same day, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, citing an anonymous EU official, reported that Ukrainian men eligible for military service could begin being denied temporary protection within weeks.

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

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Tuesday, August 11, 2026 2:40 PM

THG

Is also JJ. Keep it real please, and use a VPN

At the end comrade signym he asks me to share this video with my friends. So, I'm sharing it with you and Gilligan.

T

How Ukraine retook Donetsk territory after four-hour assault I Battle Plans Exposed

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Tuesday, August 11, 2026 7:30 PM

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

Aug. 11, 2026, 5:44 pm

If you’re not from Ukraine and Russia, then who cares. But if you know the region, what’s going on here is hugely embarrassing for Russia and Russian seashore defenses; it’s the equivalent of Xi Jinping sailing an explosives-packed robot cigarette boat back and forth past Mar-a-Lago while Trump was entertaining some of his business buddies, and the US Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard not even showing up to try and interfere with it.

https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/82150

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

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Wednesday, August 12, 2026 6:14 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 petty loyalty beef behind the MAGA Ukraine revolt

Volodymyr Zelenskyy takes advantage of the America First split between Laura Loomer and Tucker Carlson

By Sophia Tesfaye | August 11, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)

https://www.salon.com/2026/08/11/the-petty-loyalty-beef-behind-the-mag
a-ukraine-revolt/

The spectacle of Laura Loomer touching down in a Kyiv bomb shelter to announce her sudden conversion to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia has been covered by much of the media as a sort of a political awakening. . . .

. . . There is no ideological conversion here. Loomer’s evolution comes at precisely the moment when the Republican coalition is undergoing a bitter fight over what “America First” is supposed to mean. The old MAGA formula — distrust Ukraine, NATO and GOP hawks, and view Putin as a potentially useful counterweight to American liberalism — is colliding with a newer reality related to Trump’s ongoing and unpopular war of choice against Iran. Russia is increasingly difficult to portray as a friendly or even neutral power while it cooperates with the Islamic Republic. Ukraine’s resilience and effective drone campaigns, meanwhile, have made it impossible for even the most hardened cynics to paint Moscow as the inevitable victor.

Loomer’s reversal is also inseparable from her rivalry with fellow podcasters Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and other right-wing media figures who have become increasingly hostile to Trump over Israel, Iran and the use of American military power. Loomer herself has said the right-wing split over Iran prompted her to reconsider Ukraine, and she claimed to have noticed that people she regarded as opponents of Trump were simultaneously advancing Russia-friendly arguments. Now she worries those pro-Russian voices inside the MAGA coalition have become “the biggest detriment to social cohesion” heading into what, by all credible predictions, will be a brutal midterm cycle for Republicans.

Owens’ decision to travel to Putin’s marquee conference in St. Petersburg and Carlson’s ongoing pushing of lines amplified directly by Russian state media have provided Loomer with a tactical opening. She realized that her online nemeses had cornered the market on reflexive Kremlin apologetics. By pivoting to a pro-Ukraine posture wrapped in the language of America First security investments, she’s weaponizing patriotism against her rivals while positioning herself as the true guardian of the movement’s ideological purity. This evolving narrative frames support for Ukraine not as an act of charity or foreign aid, but as a hard-headed business transaction, one Trump appears to have welcomed. He publicly endorsed her meeting with Zelenskyy, and Loomer has said she spoke twice with Trump while in Ukraine. . . .

. . . Republican voters have also been moving in this direction. In January 2026, Pew Research Center found that 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents described Russia as an enemy of the U.S, up from 40% the year before. Republican confidence in Zelenskyy also rose four points to 34%.

While Loomer works to convert MAGA to the Ukrainian cause, the press should stop treating her reversal as a heroic story about one brave influencer seeing the light. They should instead frame it for what it actually is: a split in MAGA media over Ukraine and Russia that is ultimately a domestic turf war disguised as statecraft.

Much more at https://www.salon.com/2026/08/11/the-petty-loyalty-beef-behind-the-mag
a-ukraine-revolt/

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

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Wednesday, August 12, 2026 6:27 AM

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

'Hemingway Knows Nothing': Ukraine's writers are redefining literature of war

By Kate Tsurkan | August 12, 2026 1:07 pm

https://kyivindependent.com/war-faith-and-a-new-kind-of-literature-eme
rge-from-hemingway-knows-nothing/

When war, loss, and unimaginable suffering become routine, a book can offer a kind of lifeline — especially one by a writer who has lived through such an ordeal and tried to make sense of it.

At the start of Russia’s full-scale war, some Ukrainians speculated if they’d see the rise of their own Ernest Hemingway: a writer whose books would not only capture the experience of a generation but come to define it.

Yet it soon became clear that the old paradigms of war literature no longer spoke to them in quite the same way. Among those who sensed this was Artur Dron, a young writer who, after Russia invaded, joined the fight to defend the country.

“Hemingway knows nothing about (our) war. That’s it. For a long time, I believed in what Hemingway wrote, but I got a radically different war than the one he knew,” Dron writes in his essay collection “Hemingway Knows Nothing.”

“In 2022, it became clear that Ernest Hemingway couldn’t tell me the most important thing about what had been happening in my country since 2014.”

Originally published in Ukraine in 2025, Dron’s “Hemingway Knows Nothing” became a bestseller, with readers praising the book for how it explored the dynamics of front-line realities, the question of faith amid crisis, and how Russia’s war of total annihilation is compelling people to rethink everything they once thought they knew.

It is set to be released in Hanna Leliv’s English translation by Jantar Publishing on Sept. 10.

The strength of the book is arguably Dron's thoughts on faith. Among the book’s most arresting passages are those that circle a question that has haunted writers across generations: How does one go on believing in God after witnessing the horrors of war? Moreover, is being faced with the prospect of one’s own death enough to inspire a previously lacking faith in God?

It all boils down, as Dron explains, to choice: the greatest blessing and curse bestowed by God upon man. When confronted by evil in the world, it is too easy to conclude that God “allowed” it to happen. Dron, however, writes that when people commit atrocities, it is not because God has turned away, but because they have turned away from God.

“It wasn’t God who drove tanks into Northern Saltivka in Kharkiv. It wasn’t God who fired a bullet into (my brother-in-arm’s) chest. It wasn’t God who bombed hundreds of churches in eastern Ukraine. It wasn’t God who destroyed Bakhmut and Mariupol. Human beings did that,” Drone writes.

Yet amid the horrors of war, as Dron notes, God does not abandon us. The self-sacrifice, courage, and moral authority shown by people in Ukraine — who choose to protect, help, and care for others even as they long for the chance to return to their ordinary, pre-war lives — are qualities that reveal God’s continued presence, despite the suffering Russia has inflicted upon them.

“The habit of seeing the heroes as ‘someone else’ makes it easy to justify inaction.”

In the book, Dron also explores the inevitable rifts in a society between those who went off to fight and those who did not. It's a common wartime theme, but one he approaches with unique frankness.

While it’s important to honor and thank those defenders who show remarkable bravery in wartime, Dron warns there’s also an inevitable mental trap: we can come to see their courage as so exceptional that ordinary people begin to believe they could never rise to such acts themselves.

“The habit of seeing the heroes as ‘someone else’ makes it easy to justify inaction,” Dron writes. But “joining the army now isn’t quite heroism. It’s maturity and awareness of the new mechanism of existence. You may become a hero on the battlefield. Or you might not. Not every soldier is a hero; any soldier will tell you that.”

The harsh reality — one that remains difficult for some to fully grasp even after more than four years of all-out war — is that Russia’s aim is to kill not only so-called “career” soldiers, but every man, woman, and child who proudly calls Ukraine home. That is why it’s the moral responsibility of everyone here to ask themselves what they can do to help bring Ukraine closer to victory, Dron argues.

That’s why each person who is proud to call Ukraine home must make the mental jump from believing in the Armed Forces of Ukraine to helping and eventually joining the military.

The title of the book draws its impact from the acceptance of this reality. Hemingway was of enlistment age when the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, but he was ultimately disqualified on account of poor eyesight. Determined to make his way to Europe, he found his own way to the front, volunteering as a Red Cross ambulance driver. As he wrote to his sister Marcelline, “I can’t let a show like this go on without getting in on it.”

Hemingway would go on to become one of the foremost literary voices of the 20th century, his stark and unflinching prose shaping how generations understood the realities of war. His participation in World War I wasn’t motivated by an existential threat to his country’s existence, though. Despite the military draft, American society remained, for the most part, shielded from the devastation that was ravaging Europe.

Dron and his fellow Ukrainians, by contrast, are faced with a struggle against Russian aggression for the very survival of the nation — for Ukraine’s language, collective memory, and the right to dictate its own history. The stakes could not be higher, and the burden is shared by nearly every individual.

This difference doesn’t diminish Hemingway’s achievement or lessen the importance of his work. Rather, Dron’s so-called “dismissal” of Hemingway compels us to understand that literature must do more than recycle past frameworks — the horrors of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine demand not only a forging of new stories but the moral reckonings that form their core.

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

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Wednesday, August 12, 2026 2:44 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

THGR, thank you for doubling down on bullcrap.

Here are a few issues in the first part of the video

The ship being buzzed by a drone is a grain ship. Do you know how to tell the diff between a grain ship and a tanker? I do bc I looked it up.

No mention of WHERE the "highly trained" Ukie soldiers took a position. No way to validate it.

Who was filming the drone chasing a fruit vendor? Bc, of course, there's always a handy videographer when you need one! (i.e. was thus staged? )

ONE instance of a French glide bomb? Hardly a stunning success. In addition, everyone knows that Ukraine has no air defenses to speak of.

Oh goodie. Ukraine is attacking Russia's equivalent of Amazon. That's pretty pointless.

And finally, the BIG LIE: @ appx 11:20 map shows Konstantinovka still under Kiev's control! Sorry dood. EVERYONE knows Konstantinovka is fully under Russian control! Either the video is a year out of date or the presenter is lying his ass off.

"*****

So here's what's really happening:

Since Ukraine started attacking Wildberries (fully civilian) warehouses and Russian grain ships, Russia has returned the favor by attacking all ships near Odessa area ports (Ukraine's ONLY port), destroying its facilities, preventing grain and iron ore exports and weapons imports, and damaging the bridges that connect Odessa to the rest of Ukraine, in addition to destroying Ukraine's fuel distribution network, the weapons sites that Ukraine thought were protected in Kiev, NATO sites etc. Plus, the front line has moved a lot farther than your sources admit.

-----------

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

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Thursday, August 13, 2026 7:11 AM

SECOND

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

A $533 million factory in Texas was built to make 155mm artillery shells for Ukraine. It produced nothing because the machinery is defective.

By Jesse Coburn | August 12, 2026

https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artillery-factory-
failed

Extreme cases like this one could become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

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

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Thursday, August 13, 2026 7:18 AM

SECOND

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

5% of US Patriot stocks gets Ukraine through winter, 10% ends the ballistic threat — and Zelenskyy has just 1%, he tells CNN

By Maria Tril
13/08/2026

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/08/13/sell-us-10-of-your-patriots-and
-well-destroy-every-russian-ballistic-missile-zelenskyy-tells-cnn/

Ukraine holds only about a tenth of the Patriot interceptor missiles it needs from the United States to stop Russia's surging ballistic strikes, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN. Selling Kyiv 5% of the current US stockpile would carry the country through winter, he said, and 10% would let it "destroy all the Russians' ballistic missiles" — but he holds 1%.

The plea puts a number on a shortage that has run through Ukraine's diplomacy all summer and left its cities increasingly exposed. It is the concrete cost of near-empty interceptor stocks: on 5 August, Russia fired 28 ballistic and anti-ship missiles at Kyiv and Ukraine intercepted none of them, killing 17 people, and four days earlier launched 27 ballistic missiles with only one stopped. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, according to the UN.

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

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Thursday, August 13, 2026 9:27 AM

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

Ukraine’s new ballistic missile puts Putin within reach

Kyiv is developing its own domestic ballistics as Russia’s missile threat grows.

By Veronika Melkozerova | August 12, 2026 1:24 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-fire-point-ballistic-missile-r
ussia-war/

KYIV — Ukrainian defense tech company Fire Point's first ballistic missile will be ready this fall, its CEO told POLITICO — a crucial development if Kyiv hopes to survive the growing ferocity of Russian missile attacks.

Iryna Terekh, who is also Fire Point's chief technology officer, said it is working on its tactical short-range FP-7 ballistic missile. With a 200-kilometer range and carrying a 150-kilogram warhead, the missile can hit ground targets and is also being reworked to be used in air defense systems.

Fire Point is also developing the FP-9 ballistic missile, carrying an 800-kilogram warhead with a range of up to 855 kilometers, putting Moscow well within range.

Both programs are crucial to Ukraine. Kyiv faces a growing shortage of Patriot interceptors, and the Pentagon is now scrambling to rebuild its own supplies. Ukraine also wants its own long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia, especially ballistic missile launchers. The lack of interceptors is allowing large numbers of Russian missiles to hit their targets, and Moscow's attack capabilities are now being boosted by its North Korean allies.

“Our FP-7 is already in a certification process. That requires a certain number of battle-testing launches performed under a special procedure,” Terekh said this week. “We’re going to do those launches, prove its effectiveness in real combat against our enemy, and after that it will be ready for contracting."

She added that if all goes well, "it is completely realistic to get it ready by this fall.”

Fire Point's timeline was backed up by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, although he said deploying the FP-7 will require significant international cooperation. "As for mass application, I cannot say, because there are things that do not depend on Ukraine... there are some elements from other countries."

The FP-7 is a key part of Europe’s first common anti-ballistic system, called Freyja. Fire Point will provide the missiles and launchers, while Ukraine's allies will work on components and surveillance and tracking radars.

“I can’t share the details because it’s a matter for the partners whether they want to talk about it. But everything is going quite quickly. All the partners work in the rhythm of Ukrainian defense companies,” said Terekh.

She also underlined the complexity of shifting from a simple ground-to-ground missile to adapting the FP-7 to missile defense systems.

“Their aerodynamic form and production principles are similar, but their functions are different. One has to fly from point A to B and hit the target; another one has a more sophisticated assignment to find and intercept the target,” she said.

The future Freyja interceptor will be produced in two iterations. The first will be similar to the PAC-2s used by Patriots, which explode next to their targets; the other has the more complex task of finding and intercepting a missile, something done by Patriot's PAC-3 interceptors.

“It is way faster to produce a PAC-2-like missile,” said Terekh, adding: “We don’t have the luxury of spending decades to invent our own hit-to-kill [interceptors], so we decided to go in iterations ... and in the future, we will learn how to make our own hit-to-kill similar to the PAC-3.”

Building Ukraine's own missiles

While working to develop its own capabilities, Ukraine is also pushing to get a licensing agreement from the U.S. to make its own PAC-3s. U.S. President Donald Trump told Zelenskyy last month that such a deal would be possible, but he has since walked that back and is now pressing for the Pentagon to rebuild its own stocks after reports that the U.S. burned through huge numbers of missiles in the first days of the war against Iran.

Terekh stressed that even if the will was there, getting a Patriot PAC-3 production deal still involves "bottlenecks" in component production. She would prefer a separate agreement allowing Ukraine to produce homing heads — the autonomous guidance system housed in the nose of a missile that directs it to its target — calling it the "critical and most hard-to-produce component."

Terekh also said that the long-range FP-9 will be ready this fall "if no one interferes with our work." That would make Ukraine one of only about a dozen countries with such a capability.

Ukraine largely relies on long-range drones — including Fire Point's FP-1, with a range of up to 2,300 kilometers, and the FP-2, with a 700-kilometer range — to conduct its ongoing campaign to destroy Russia's oil refining industry and logistics giant Wildberries.

"This year, we attacked Russia with twice as many drones as it attacked us," said Terekh. "This is something we could not dream of back in 2022. And we all did it together, the Ukrainian army, politicians and producers. And it's our ability, independent from others, no more asking permission to hit targets."

Ukraine is now developing its capability to hit Russia with much more lethal missiles.

Fire Point already has its FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles, carrying a 1-metric-ton warhead up to 3,000 kilometers, but it has only been used sporadically. A ballistic missile like the FP-9 would be more difficult for Russia to intercept and could hit Russian launch sites, which is far more efficient than trying to knock down incoming Russian missiles.

While Fire Point develops new missiles and puts them into production, Russia is trying to hit Ukraine's labs and factories.

Russia sees Ukrainian ballistics and its growing long-range and mid-strike drone production as serious threats and has been conducting reconnaissance, said Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine's defense ministry.

"They are trying to prevent us from entering mass production of these weapons," he said.

Terekh confirmed the Russian threat.

"No one but our partners want Ukraine to be armed with its own ballistics. That is why we work under such tremendous pressure,” she said.

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

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Thursday, August 13, 2026 2:08 PM

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

Ukraine’s new Tu-95 killer is a $48,000 copy of a drone China refused to sell

Ukraine went to China to buy the drone. China refused. Two years later, the MICH 2000 costs $2,000 less than the original—and just took out a Russian bomber.

By David Axe
13/08/2026

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/08/13/mich-2000/

• Ukraine's state security service has its own special attack drone

• The MICH 2000 is a highly evolved copy of a Chinese drone China refused to sell

• There are at least eight versions of the 2,000-km drone, from $48,000

Whittling down the bomber fleet

Ukrainian drones are slowly chipping away at the Tu-95 fleet. A 2022 drone raid badly damaged one of the lumbering turboprop bombers at Engels-2, potentially leaving no more than 51 intact Tu-95s in the Russian air force inventory at the time. Smuggling tiny explosive drones across Russia in trucks on 1 June, 2025, the SBU hit at least seven more Tu-95s as well as four Tu-22Ms, among other aircraft.
Trending Now

The 16 July raid is the more recent Ukrainian effort to shrink the Russian bomber force, but it surely won't be the last. The Russians' roughly 120 bombers—Tu-95s, Tu-22Ms and Tupolev Tu-160s—launch the cruise missiles that routinely blast Ukrainian cities and power plants.

Struggling to intercept all Russian deep strike munitions in the target zone, in part owing to a deepening shortage of the best air defense missiles, Ukrainian forces increasingly aim to prevent the Russian munitions from even launching—by smashing munitions factories or, yes, destroying irreplaceable bombers. Of the three Russian bomber types, just one—the Tu-160—is still in production, albeit at a rate of barely just one every year or two.

Expect more MICH 2000 raids. The type's anonymous builder churns out 6,000 MICH 2000s a year but aims to boost output to 10,000 a year. And the firm customizes the drones to suit particular missions.

According to Oboronka, there are eight main versions. "Fighters can choose what kind of communication they need: analog, digital or Starlink. They can choose the warhead, the size of the fuel tank, the possibility of additional guidance." The navigation system can be made more jam-proof by adding additional jam-resistant controlled reception pattern antennas.

Drone strikes by MICH 2000s and other drone types aren't the only ways Ukrainian forces are trying to blunt Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and power plants. Ukrainian drone teams are also trying to take out the last five warships in the battered Russian Black Sea Fleet that can fire Kalibr cruise missiles.

On 11 August, drones struck at least three of the ships in the port of Novorossiysk in southern Russia. The frigates Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov and the corvette Bykov all suffered visible damage.

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

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Thursday, August 13, 2026 3:14 PM

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

Ukraine Is Done With the NATO Fairy Tale

By David Averre | Aug 12, 2026 at 05:50 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-nato-fairy-tale-zaluzhnyi-future-west
ern-security-12308372

In 2024, NATO members gathered to declare that, after two years of bitter war with Russia, Ukraine was on an irreversible path to NATO membership.

The statement still takes pride of place on the NATO website, but today the promise rings hollow. When alliance members descended on Ankara last month for the bloc’s summit, there were sweeping declarations of support and pledges of funding, yet not a word was uttered about when Kyiv could expect to be welcomed into the club.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky cannot kick up a fuss about this. His words are scrutinized endlessly by his allies, his adversaries, and most of all his own people. The former commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhnyi, is under no such pressure to mince his words.

"I know NATO very well. For 12 years, I personally worked to ensure that we met NATO standards, and every year I listened to tales that we were about to join NATO. Unfortunately, we never will," Zaluzhnyi, now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, reportedly told fellow diplomats in Kyiv earlier this month.

This was met with jubilation in the Russian media, where the former general's words were paraded as a "belated epiphany" and evidence that the "corrupt Kyiv regime" had "betrayed its people."

Yet Zaluzhnyi, who successfully repelled Russia’s 2022 assault on Kyiv and spearheaded Ukraine’s rapid adoption of battlefield tech innovation to combat its larger adversary, is not capitulating to the Kremlin’s perspective; he is proposing a new approach to Western security—one in which Ukraine plays a leading role.

It Was All a Dream

Ukraine has been waiting a long time to be welcomed into the transatlantic security club. Eighteen years, to be precise.

It was at their summit in Bucharest in April 2008—an event attended by Vladimir Putin—that NATO allies first stood together and declared Ukraine and Georgia would one day be accepted into the alliance.

Russia went on to annex Crimea from Ukraine, armed separatists in the nation’s eastern Donbas region and then launched a full-scale invasion designed to conquer Kyiv. It was only in July 2024, at the alliance’s 75th anniversary celebrations in Washington, that the bloc finally confirmed it would continue to support Ukraine’s journey down the "irreversible path" to NATO membership.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as he addresses the media during a press conference on the third day of the NATO Summit conference in Bucharest, Friday April 4 2008.

...

Then America reset the game board. In February 2025, newly minted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States did not consider NATO membership a "realistic outcome."

Last month’s NATO summit in Ankara seemingly confirmed Ukraine’s NATO bid as a pipe dream: the declaration called Kyiv a contributor to transatlantic security and pledged €70 billion (over $80 billion) in military equipment and assistance—but the word membership was not mentioned once.

Formally, the door remains open, but Ukraine may never reach it. Zaluzhnyi, for one, says Ukraine must recognize this and seize the initiative to determine its own future.

Although he later stressed his enduring support for NATO and said Ukraine should still become a member, the former commander in chief offered a damning assessment of the security bloc as a hangover from the mid-20th century, arguing Ukraine’s innovation of battlefield tactics has surpassed NATO's outdated thinking.

"It is impossible to join an organization that possesses the doctrines of World War II with the level of development that exists in the Armed Forces of Ukraine," he said at a meeting of ambassadors in Kyiv on August 3, according to a report by European Pravda. "Most likely, NATO will remain in the same form as it is, and will spend 12 years, like Ukraine, transitioning to the standards that need to be achieved."

Music to Putin’s Ears?

It wasn't long after Ukrainian press reported Zaluzhnyi’s comments to fellow ambassadors that Russia’s vast network of state-backed media outlets published interviews with various commentators claiming Ukraine has finally come to the realization that Moscow was right all along: Kyiv should never have trusted the West.

Unsurprisingly, two of the most forceful of these commentators are based in Ukrainian territory now occupied by Russia. Mikhail Sheremet, a representative of Crimea in Russia’s State Duma, told the state-backed TASS news agency that "Zaluzhny's statements speak both of a belated epiphany" on the part of Kyiv and serve as proof that Zelensky’s government had "betrayed the interests of its people by rejecting…favorable peace proposals."

This tirade was followed up by Alexander Protsenko, a member of the Russian Society of Political Scientists based in Ukraine’s Luhansk region, who interpreted Zaluzhnyi’s words as a "tangible, public slap in the face" for Zelensky’s "long-standing dogma."

Zaluzhnyi’s comments were also seized upon as fresh evidence to support one of Moscow’s favorite stories: that the former general is gearing up to knock Zelensky off the throne. Here, at least, there may be a kernel of truth.

When Zelensky relieved Zaluzhnyi of his duties as commander in chief two years into the war effort, rumors abounded of a rift between the pair. Zaluzhnyi was awarded the title "Hero of Ukraine" for his efforts but was promptly removed from the military apparatus and instead awarded a position as ambassador to the U.K.

Speaking at an event hosted in London by the Chatham House think tank and attended by Newsweek earlier this year, Zaluzhnyi refused to say whether he would challenge Zelensky for the presidency. He affirmed his only priority is to carry out his duties as ambassador to the best of his abilities and that, until martial law is lifted or Ukraine is victorious in war, he will do nothing that could cause division.

But the general has acknowledged that his relationship with the president soured ahead of his sacking in February 2024, while a July report by Ukrainska Pravda citing sources close to both men claimed Zaluzhnyi intends to run against the incumbent Zelensky should Kyiv decide to hold elections.

That said, Moscow should be careful what it wishes for.

...

Zaluzhnyi’s criticism of NATO by no means equates to skepticism of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, and replacing the incumbent Ukrainian president—a former comedian, as Russian commentators love to remind us—with a battle-hardened military man who repelled its assault on Kyiv and presided over the technological revolution of Ukraine’s armed forces does not seem like a good trade.

The former general’s vision is not one of a subservient Ukraine, humbly accepting handouts from its Western benefactors while handing over all its battlefield knowledge and drone technology in the hope it will one day receive a golden ticket to NATO.
Flipping the Script

Zaluzhnyi is committed to ensuring this very scenario does not materialize, declaring during an interview with the Ukraine Crisis Media Center last week that "Ukraine must not become the foundation of European armed forces at Ukraine’s expense."

On the contrary, he lays out a future in which Kyiv takes a leading role in shaping the European security landscape, entering into multilateral security partnerships with various NATO countries based on shared security, economic and technological interests that can act outside of the slow, inflexible alliance structure.

There is evidence that Ukraine is already hard at work on this under Zelensky.

Kyiv recently cut through the red tape surrounding its export licenses, allowing its myriad drone manufacturers to strike up joint ventures and manufacturing initiatives with companies across Europe, Canada and the U.S., provided a portion of the revenue comes back to Kyiv to guarantee Ukraine’s economic and industrial development.

There is also a precedent of multilateral security blocs operating outside of NATO.

Zaluzhnyi cited one of them directly in his interview last week: the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), led by the U.K. along with the Nordic and Baltic states, of which Ukraine is an "enhanced partner." The JEF acts as a rapid response force and surveillance initiative to defend the North Atlantic, the Baltic Sea and Arctic waters against Russian aggression, and according to Zaluzhnyi, serves as a model for future security partnerships between Ukraine and other states.

"While being part of this bloc within NATO, just as Sweden and Finland have done, one could begin to create a completely different bloc right there within NATO, one with entirely different capabilities," he told the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. "Why not use this, for instance, to build up the combined capabilities of the Nordic and Baltic countries and Ukraine, envisioning this as the prototype for the future armed forces of a united Europe?"

Ukraine has already twice proven it is capable of doing what many believed was impossible.

In February 2022, Russia sent tanks, planes, helicopters and thousands upon thousands of troops bearing down on the Ukrainian capital. Many expected Kyiv to fall within weeks, if not days. Instead, it held.

Then, critics said that, while Ukraine may be able to hold the Russian army at bay, it could never take the fight to Moscow. Now, Kyiv’s drone operators routinely deliver long-range strikes hundreds of miles beyond the Russian border, sinking ships, destroying oil refineries and demolishing infrastructure supporting Vladimir Putin’s war effort, and Ukraine fields one of the world’s most technologically advanced fighting forces.

The next upset could unfold on an institutional level.

If Zaluzhnyi gets his way, Ukraine will assume a leading role in reshaping Western security architecture from outside the alliance it spent years trying to enter. Kyiv will turn its battlefield experience, technology and regional alliances into a model built to deter wars Europe now fears rather than ones it remembers—and will wield more influence as a result.

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

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Thursday, August 13, 2026 5:01 PM

THG

Is also JJ. Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

THGR, did it ever occur to you to look for actual FACTS on the ground to either validate or refute the blah blah blah that that you fill your head with?

More blah for ya comrade.

T

F-35 slated to be a major element in U.S. Air Defense architecture !

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Thursday, August 13, 2026 8:22 PM

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

During a briefing on August 12, 2026, acting Defense Minister Major General Yevhen Khmara confirmed that Ukrainian forces are rapidly expanding their long-range strikes. The strategy aims to force Moscow into a just peace by relentlessly crippling its supply networks.

By Daniel Wolfram | August 13, 2026 3:29

https://www.dagens.com/war/ukraine-vows-russia-will-burn-in-bold-new-s
trategy-to-cripple-moscow-and-end-the-war

. . . Escalating the war

Senior military officials recently met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to map out the next phase of these deep-territory strikes.

Khmara made the military’s intentions clear after the planning session. “Today, at a meeting chaired by the President, further joint steps were determined. Ukrainian operations will become increasingly complex to counter. Ukrainian weapons will only become more mass-produced. Strikes will be more precise. Russia will burn,” he said.

Meanwhile, Zelenskyy and his advisors are beginning to outline a new, broader strategy. Ukraine and its international partners have established a joint action plan aimed at forcing Vladimir Putin to end the invasion.

Zelenskyy argued that ordinary Russian citizens must feel the consequences of the conflict on their own soil. Only then, he noted, will public pressure build against the Kremlin. As Moscow prepares for a crucial and grueling winter, Kyiv is urging Western allies to supply more air defense systems without delay.

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

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Friday, August 14, 2026 5:38 AM

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

Ukraine’s Deep-Strike Strategy

Deep Trouble

By Evan Spear, James P. Sutton, Daniel Sipes, & Ross Anderson | July 13, 2026

From The Dispatch.com newsletter

https://tinyurl.com/4tt3mc97

Russia’s Syzran Oil Refinery, located more than 500 miles from the front lines of the war with Ukraine, usually processes between 7 and 8.5 million tons of crude oil each year.

Over the weekend, waves of Ukrainian drones pummeled it for the third time since January, a bombardment that some intelligence analysts believed knocked out both the plant’s primary crude-distillation units.

On July 6, Ukraine sent long-range drones roughly 1,800 miles to strike the Omsk oil refinery—Russia’s largest, and its top gasoline producer—and attacked a primary crude-processing unit, setting a fire that halted the plant’s operations entirely. And on July 8, Ukrainian drones struck the Stavropol oil depot and the Krasnaya Zvezda oil depot, both located more than 300 miles from the war’s front lines. The campaign has also spread to Russian shipping. Over the weekend, Ukrainian drones hit a Russian oil tanker in the Don-Azov Canal, part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” that transports sanctioned oil.

The deep strikes on Russian energy infrastructure come as part of a 40-day influence operation, approved by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in June, to force Russia to the negotiating table. Zelensky is matching the military pressure with a political shake-up, announcing Sunday that Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko will step down as he pivots toward a more aggressive strategy. And although Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected calls to negotiate—Kremlin insiders say Putin is more likely to escalate the war than end it—the Ukrainians have done immense damage.

Ukrainian drones have successfully struck all 11 of Russia’s largest oil refineries (the Angarsk petrochemical plant in Siberia is the only major facility still untouched), and Russia’s diesel production fell by 1 million metric tons in April 2026 and then another 600,000 metric tons in May. Between July 6 and 12, Ukraine hit 90 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov, forcing Russia to suspend shipping operations in the connecting Kerch Strait, which it relied on to ship oil, grain, and steel to international markets and to feed its forces in Crimea. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s siege on its former territory has forced Russian authorities to declare a state of emergency.

Ukraine’s increased use of long strikes to hit energy targets deep behind Russian lines is partly the result of Zelensky’s decision to appoint former digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov, known as the architect of the country’s “Army of Drones,” to lead the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense; and, in recent months, U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon have provided Ukraine with information on these targets.

But the shift also comes from the lessons learned after the failed 2023 counteroffensive. The Ukrainian high command had attempted to break entrenched Russian positions through massed frontal assaults with armor and infantry—and when that largely failed, the military leaders changed focus, instead attempting to collapse the army from behind.

Russia has layered air defenses along its front lines and around the areas it values most—Moscow and St. Petersburg chief among them—but given Russia’s size, it has been unable to cover the front line and a rear that spans 11 time zones at once. Interceptor shortages are forcing commanders to strip batteries from one region to reinforce another, leading to porous air defenses, which Russia’s vocal military bloggers have loudly criticized.

Ukraine has also changed the way it uses drones, emphasizing scale. It has started copying Russia’s own saturation tactic—sending enough drones at once to swamp any single Russian Pantsir air defense system, which can engage no more than four targets simultaneously.

“Russia’s air defense systems are not as poor as I think people make out,” Emily Ferris, a senior associate fellow in the International Security research group at the Royal United Services Institute and an expert on Russian military infrastructure, told TMD. “It’s just that it’s not necessarily designed to withstand such an onslaught of multiple drones, all acting simultaneously and trying to target different sites. I think part of the reason they’ve been so effective is that it’s overwhelming.”

Ukrainian officials have drawn a simple lesson: build more drones. “??We need to be able to buy more drones, and more drones, and more drones,” Oleksii Antoniuk, an official at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, told TMD. “Our industry can produce … millions of drones, but we simply don’t have enough funding to be able to buy out all that capacity.”

Ukraine’s long-range drones have hit military plants, ports, and Russian air defenses themselves, but the bulk of the campaign falls on the nation’s energy infrastructure: It “degrades Russia’s ability to finance the war,” George Barros, director of innovation and open source tradecraft at the Institute for the Study of War, told TMD. The Financial Times reported last week that Russian oil refineries have been struck almost 200 times since the start of the year, an elevenfold increase compared with the same period last year, and gasoline output is 35 percent below demand.

“We’ve actually seen shipments of gasoline or diesel go from India to Russia, which is very novel,” Isaac Levi, an analyst of Russia’s energy sector at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told TMD. “We never really see Russia as an importer of refined fuels.” The Russian government has increased its purchases of gasoline from Belarus, sought more from Kazakhstan, shipped in Belarusian jet fuel, and started draining its own gasoline reserves.

Russians are buying horses and bicycles to get around fuel shortages, and shortly after the governor of Vologda said residents should “refrain from hoarding fuel” and not “give in to panic,” his car ran out of fuel.

Ukraine has also planned its long-range drone strikes to have the maximum psychological and political effect on its foe. On June 3, Ukrainian drones slammed into targets on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, just hours before Putin’s flagship St. Petersburg Economic Forum got underway. The attack was “absolutely perfectly timed by the Ukrainians to maximize political embarrassment,” Ferris said.

The other part of Ukraine’s strategic shift is with Crimea, where Ukraine has begun a slow-motion siege of the peninsula. Using mid-range strike drones, naval drones, and long-range missiles, Ukraine has essentially isolated the Russian-occupied territory, closing the peninsula and the Azov shipping route from the sea, air, and land.

As Bob Hamilton, the president of Delphi Global Research Center and an analyst of the Russian military, put it, “Crimea is the crown jewel of this war.”

Putin deployed Russia’s “little green men” to seize Crimea in February 2014, dismissed the Crimean government, and annexed it weeks later after a hastily staged referendum. The peninsula has been indispensable to Russia’s war ever since: Sevastopol anchors its Black Sea Fleet, and Crimea’s air bases and highways served as the staging ground for the 2022 invasion of southern Ukraine. Russian forces still supply and defend their occupation of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia from there.

“It’s very important to demilitarize Crimea to ensure that it cannot fire ballistic missiles [into] Odesa,” Antoniuk said, and so “it cannot launch its own naval drones from there.”

Since the early days of the war, Russia has been resupplying Crimea in two major ways: across the Kerch Strait bridge and along Highway R-280, the land corridor that runs from Russia through occupied southern Ukraine into the peninsula. But Ukraine’s siege has disrupted both routes. Moscow has tried to employ workarounds—including disguising fuel trucks as civilian vehicles—but Ukrainian strikes have been so successful against them that the R-280 has been nicknamed the “Highway of Death.”

Since Putin’s occupation, his regime has spent the decade since annexation trying to make Crimea unmistakably Russian—forcibly naturalizing residents as Russian citizens, moving in settlers while barring Crimean Tatars (indigenous people of the region) who initially fled from returning, and banning the Tatars’ own representative body outright—and recently allocated 4.3 billion rubles (roughly $55 million) to support the tourism industry in occupied Crimea and Sevastopol.

President Zelensky has consistently made restoring full Ukrainian control over the peninsula a cornerstone of his agenda. In August 2022, speaking at the Second Crimea Platform Summit, Zelensky vowed to “return the Ukrainian flag to our land of Crimea.”

But Ukraine’s ability to inflict damage on the Russian occupying army “doesn’t mean that the Ukrainians can reconquer Crimea,” Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told TMD. “That’s a completely separate, totally separate issue, and I can see no way in which they can do that.”

The campaign still has military consequences. Ukraine has driven Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk, costing Moscow the naval position it once used to project power across the Black Sea.

“Putin has basically claimed a lot of his success stealing Crimea for Russia,” Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, told TMD. “So the fact that he cannot defend Crimea when it’s been so important to him is quite a key thing.”

Russia has no immediate answer to Ukraine’s drone campaigns, and its air defenses are stretched thin. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Ukraine has the upper hand in the war.

Over the weekend, Russian glide bombs killed four people in the city of Sumy, including a child, and Russian drones hit Kharkiv, Kherson, and Chernihiv. Due to a shortage of Patriot missile interceptors, Ukraine has been unable to defend itself against Russia’s ballistic missiles. At NATO last week, President Donald Trump said he would allow Ukraine to build its own Patriot systems under a U.S. license, but that will take years.

The war’s front lines—which have widened into a roughly 12- to 15-mile kill zone patrolled by drones—haven’t moved much since 2023. Infantry on both sides now advances in one- or two-man teams to dodge drones, and any full-scale offensive would likely fail.

Ukraine still sees its long-range strikes on energy as beginning to cause real economic pain in Russia, giving it a key opportunity.

“The enemy is faltering, and this is the moment where you need to intensify the pressure. But to do so, we need the resources,” Antoniuk said. “We really believe we can close the deal.”

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

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Friday, August 14, 2026 5:46 AM

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

Two Years On From Kursk Offensive, Now Ukraine Has Real Leverage

By David Averre | Aug 13, 2026 at 05:01 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/zelensky-ukraine-leverage-trump-russia-novoro
ssiysk-12317123

Two years ago almost to the day, a cohort of Ukrainian soldiers launched a daring mission: to give Vladimir Putin a taste of his own medicine and seize some Russian territory.

They piled into tanks and armored vehicles, broke out of Sumy and surged across the border into Russia’s Kursk region, and quickly locked down more than 500 square miles of enemy soil.

It was widely billed as a stunning offensive, one that saw Russia’s borders breached for the first time since World War II, and gave Kyiv a valuable bargaining chip as rumors swirled that ceasefire talks might gather pace.

Fast forward a few months to February 2025, and Russia’s forces had practically erased all Ukrainian troops from Kursk, save for a thin wedge of territory, and a weary Volodymyr Zelensky headed to meet newly minted President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. We all remember how that meeting turned out.

Now, with U.S. negotiators expected to visit both Russia and Ukraine in the coming weeks, Zelensky has submitted a fresh peace proposal to Washington.

This time, his leverage is real, and although the prospect of a ceasefire with Russia materializing in the near future is vanishingly small, the Ukrainian president has a much better chance of focusing the Trump administration’s ire on Moscow to heap pressure on his opposite number in the Kremlin.

You Don’t Need Land To Have a Good Hand

The Kursk offensive was supposed to change the equation for Ukraine.

In January 2025, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken openly acknowledged that Kyiv’s foothold across the border would play an important role in any ceasefire negotiations as the Biden administration prepared to hand over the keys to the White House to Team Trump.

Instead, what started as an operation to secure vital leverage, while distracting Russian forces from pressure points on the front line and giving a middle finger to Moscow in the process, ended in a grisly defeat.

...

Ukrainian forces were eventually forced back out of Kursk, with soldiers and civilians alike later condemning the operation as "illogical" and "not worth the cost."

But Kyiv learned the lesson, and with the exception of a small cross-border operation into Belgorod, Ukraine’s armed forces have not attempted to set foot on Russian soil since.

They have, however, developed a new bargaining chip that does not have to be occupied, supplied or defended. Thanks to its extraordinary innovations in drone technology and increasing numbers of homegrown missiles, Ukraine’s forces can strike deep into Russian territory.

Since the start of the year, Kyiv has steadily ramped up the quantity and ambition of its strike campaigns to destroy oil refineries, energy and logistics infrastructure; it launched three times as many long-range attacks in July as it did in January, according to data gathered by independent conflict monitor ACLED. Last week, a drone attack hit a warehouse used by Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries in Yekaterinburg, more than 1,200 miles from the Ukrainian border.

Then came Novorossiysk. In a major overnight operation Wednesday, yet more Ukrainian drones and anti-ship missiles struck grain export terminals and Russian warships at the port city that, until this week, had been the only place Russian vessels in the Black Sea could shelter from Ukrainian fire.

Moscow claimed its defenses shot down more than 500 Ukrainian drones, yet still enough got through to cause significant damage. The numbers illustrate Kyiv’s emerging strategy: it does not necessarily need to defeat Russian air defenses so much as overwhelm and stretch them, according to an analysis by Emily Ferris, senior associate fellow for international security at the RUSI think tank.

Territory can change hands and be retaken, but the capability and will to destroy valuable targets deep behind enemy lines is much harder to erase.

Has Zelensky Learned the Art of the Deal?

Ukraine’s strikes on Russian assets in Novorossiysk are impressive, but the real value lies in what Kyiv’s drone operators chose not to hit.

The city hosts an oil export terminal for the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which brings vital crude from Kazakhstan’s Tengiz oil field to the world. The CPC normally moves more than 1 million barrels of Kazakh crude a day; around 80 percent of the landlocked country’s oil exports and roughly 2 percent of global supply.

Two American energy giants, Chevron and ExxonMobil, have stakes in the terminal and the oil field, and with global energy markets in turmoil thanks to America’s war with Iran and disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, the Trump administration hardly needs another major source of crude squeezed.

Kyiv agreed to hold off strikes on CPC infrastructure and any non-Russian, nonsanctioned vessels coming to and from the port. Then it battered Novorossiysk anyway, just very selectively.

The message, intentional or otherwise, is difficult to miss. Two years ago, Kyiv was desperate for American multiple launch rocket systems to strike just a few dozen miles inside enemy territory. Kyiv can now reach a strategic hub that Washington cares deeply about, hammer Russian assets sitting inside it, and spare the infrastructure Trump’s administration wants protected.

Ukraine still needs what the U.S. is selling—interceptors to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles in particular—but Zelensky has gone from begging Washington for help to granting the White House favors.

This isn’t the only dimension in which Ukraine’s relationship with the U.S. has changed, either. Now the Pentagon itself wants access to Ukrainian technology.

Washington and Kyiv recently signed a statement of intent opening a path for Ukrainian land, sea and aerial drones to undergo U.S. military testing. Ukraine, meanwhile, is already exporting its tech through joint-production arrangements with European allies, ensuring that a portion of the profits and the drones produced flow back east to bolster Ukraine’s economy and arsenal.

Four-and-a-half years of fighting for its existence have given Ukraine a unique capability that money alone can’t buy—a defense industry operating on the fastest possible feedback loop, with manufacturers building systems, watching Russians find ways to defeat them, modifying them and sending the next version back into combat in a matter of weeks, rather than decades.

Pressure creates diamonds, as they say, and the value of Ukraine’s is rising. Zelensky must make sure Trump sees it, too.

…

Putin Can Still Raise the Stakes

None of this means Kyiv is close to winning the war.

Despite labor shortages and the specter of economic stagnation, Russia retains an enormous defense industrial base and a vast armory of cheap drones and missiles to wreak havoc across Ukraine.

Russia still holds the larger army and remains capable of grinding forward inch by blood-soaked inch in eastern Ukraine, even if its advances have slowed and Ukrainian forces have recently clawed back ground elsewhere. But the Russians’ snaillike progress is due in no small part to a near-four-year moratorium on more military mobilization.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Zelensky immediately placed Ukraine under martial law, instituting conscription to swell the fighting ranks and hold off Moscow’s onslaught.

Putin, meanwhile, has not announced a fresh round of mobilization since September 2022, when 300,000 reservists were called up for war. The move proved woefully unpopular, and sent tens of thousands of Russian citizens fleeing across the border into the likes of Finland, Estonia, Georgia and Kazakhstan.

Ever since, the Russian military has kept the war effort going through recruitment drives, raising military salaries, offering signing bonuses to new recruits, and relaxing restrictions that prevent criminals from joining the military. It has also leaned on support from North Korean soldiers, more of whom recently arrived in Russian preparation for fresh deployments.

This is unlikely to change in the next month, because Putin’s United Russia party is preparing for the first parliamentary elections since the February 2022 invasion. Even a quasi-dictator presiding over carefully managed elections can’t afford to announce a military mobilization this close to the ballot.

Come October, though, the elections will be disappearing in Putin’s rear-view mirror. Then all bets are off.

Zelensky recently told British broadcaster Sky News that Ukrainian intelligence believes Moscow would call up between 300,000 and 500,000 soldiers later this year, a view shared by many Russian military bloggers and independent media outlets.

Ukraine’s technological superiority can help Kyiv damage oil refineries, sink ships and confound Russian air defenses. It can’t conjure more manpower, shoot down ballistic missiles, or prevent Moscow from throwing more men into the meat grinder.

The next time Zelensky walks into a room with Trump, he will still need Patriot missiles, money and political support. But he won’t be going in empty-handed.

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

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