Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

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

Drones Attack Moscow

By Alex Stezhensky | May 17, 2026, 04:55 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/videos-show-major-drone-attack-on-moscow-
region-with-deaths-and-fires-reported-50608618.html

Several cities in Russia’s Moscow Oblast reported drone attacks overnight on May 17, with explosions reported in Khimki, Durikino, Lobnya, Zelenograd and Naro-Fominsk outside Moscow. Witnesses also reported plumes of smoke and fires in some areas.

Russian Telegram channel Astra reported that the Elma technology park in Zelenograd was hit. More than 150 resident companies are based there.

A fire was also recorded at the Solnechnogorsk oil loading station, a Transneft facility in the village of Durikino used to store and transfer petroleum products.

In a video posted online, a male voice can be heard saying in surprise: “How is that possible?”

The video contains profanity.

An attack was also reported on the MKB Raduga plant in Dubna. MKB Raduga specializes in developing, producing and modernizing missiles of various classes. Its products include Kh-59 and Kh-69 guided air-launched missiles, as well as Kh-32 and Kh-101 cruise missiles.

In Moscow, the drone attack hit the Moscow oil refinery in Kapotnya.

The video contains profanity.

A fire was also recorded on the grounds of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. Russia’s Transport Ministry said 51 planes were unable to land in Moscow because of the drone attack. About 32 departing flights were also reportedly delayed by more than two hours.

Ukrainian monitoring channels said it was the largest attack on the Russian capital since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

In one video posted online, a woman watching a drone fly overhead can be heard saying in surprise: “What is that?”

The video contains profanity.

Russian authorities claim three people were killed in the attack.

Robert Brovdi, commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, stressed that Moscow is not beyond the reach of Ukrainian drones and has lost its “exclusive pass” to a peaceful life.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 17, 2026 10:54 AM

Good luck. You'll need it.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 17, 2026 3:18 PM

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

Pipeline Infiltration by Russian Troops in Ukraine Meets Expected End

By Ivan Khomenko | May 17, 2026 14:13

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/pipeline-infiltration-by-russ
ian-troops-in-ukraine-meets-unexpected-end-18888

Russian assault troops attempted to infiltrate Ukrainian rear positions through a major gas pipeline in the Zaporizhzhia region, but were captured by Ukrainian forces after traveling more than 13 kilometers inside the underground route.

According to Ukrinform on May 17, the operation was confirmed by Vladyslav Voloshyn, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Southern Defense Forces, who said Russian troops had been preparing to use the pipeline system for logistics and covert infiltration for an extended period. https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/4124046-rosiani-vikoristovuut-magi
stralnij-gazoprovid-dla-perekidanna-sturmovih-grup-na-pivdni-volosin.html

“This is an entire system and controlled infrastructure with elements of logistics, shelters, and even internal communications,” Voloshyn said.

According to Voloshyn, Russian troops established communication posts, bypass tunnels, and dugouts inside the pipeline network. The entry points were reportedly located in Russian-controlled territory, while exits were positioned near Ukrainian defensive lines on the Orikhiv axis in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Ukrinform reported that captured Russian soldiers said the assault groups used a 1,000 mm diameter gas pipeline and moved through it using “carts and scooters.” The troops reportedly traveled more than 13 kilometers underground before reaching Ukrainian positions.

One captured Russian soldier, quoted in footage released by Ukraine’s 65th Separate Mechanized Brigade, described how the operation was organized.

“It became clear that we were sent there as cannon fodder. Everyone already understood perfectly well that there was no way back for us. After each group entered, the pipe was welded shut. Every group that went in—whether 8, 6, or 12 people—the pipe was welded behind them,” the prisoner said.

According to Ukrinform, the pipeline used in the operation may have been part of the Shebelynka–Dnipropetrovsk–Kryvyi Rih–Izmail gas transportation corridor, specifically branches connected toward Enerhodar or Melitopol.

The report added that Ukrainian forces had prepared the area near the pipeline exits in advance. Captured Russian troops said leaflets containing surrender instructions had been scattered near the exit points before Ukrainian FPV drones, heavy bomber drones, and infantry units engaged the infiltrating groups.

“When the ‘Baba Yaga’ and FPV drones flew away, I heard soldiers speaking. At first, I didn’t know who it was, but then I realized they were Ukrainian soldiers,” one captured Russian serviceman said in footage published by the 65th Brigade.

Earlier, Russian forces attempted a similar infiltration in Ukraine’s Sumy region through a section of the Druzhba gas pipeline near Yablunivka. According to Ukraine’s 71st Separate Airmobile Brigade, Ukrainian troops repelled the assault, marking at least the fourth known pipeline infiltration attempt in 2026.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, May 18, 2026 4:11 AM

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

The Fastest Russian Weapons Are Hardest To Shoot Down – May 17, 2026

In that heaviest overnight wave, on 14 May, 43 of 753 attack drones and six of 35 Kh-101 cruise missiles got past Ukrainian missiles, guns, interceptor drones and electronic warfare. Ukraine already builds effective defenses against one-way attack drones. In particular, speedy interceptor drones that cost just a few thousand dollars apiece. And Ukrainian air force warplanes have proved they can intercept cruise missiles.

The ballistic missiles are the exception. Six of 18 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles got through, and all three Kinzhals. Against those, Ukraine has fewer than a dozen Patriot and SAMP/T batteries, and they are running out of interceptors.

The war in Iran has drained nearly half the US Patriot stockpile. The intercept rate has slipped to around 25%. Kyiv has received 600 interceptors in four years. It says it needs 2,000 a year.

Much more at https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/17/freya-air-defense/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, May 18, 2026 4:30 AM

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

[After the fighting stops in Ukraine, what is next for Russia?]

I Was the Russian Commander in a War Game. This Is How I Defeated NATO.

Decision paralysis and divisions among alliance members were easy to exploit.

May 15, 2026, 2:00 PM

By Franz-Stefan Gady, an associate fellow for cyber power and future conflict at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/15/russia-war-game-nato-invasion-bal
tics-ukraine-putin-germany-ernstfall/

With Ukraine stabilizing the front line and striking more and more targets deep inside Russia—while Russia’s spring offensive has hit a wall—perhaps it is true what Col. Nicholson said in The Bridge on the River Kwai: “Suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning.”

With prospects that the war may be approaching a ceasefire, if only a temporary one, toward the end of this year or in 2027, European policymakers should be clear-eyed that once the fighting stops in Ukraine, Europe will enter its most dangerous period vis-à-vis Russia. Europe’s military capabilities—and thus ability to deter—will likely be at their weakest point relative to Russian power. Allies will face a Russian military that has grown in size, absorbed nearly five years of combat experience by then, and built real advantages that Europe has been slow to match and will need years to catch up to, especially stand-off warfare and dynamic targeting from behind the front line. What’s more, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s only instrument for forcing his demands to restore Moscow’s Soviet-era sphere of influence is his military. Europe thus faces a hammer-and-nail dilemma: For Putin, every problem looks like one that he can solve with war. That makes the risks very clear.

It is thus worth revisiting my role in a December 2025 war game, when I attacked NATO and won. That is, I played the role of the Russian chief of the general staff in a war game at a German military college. Although the game involved battles, it was not an operational war game testing a campaign plan, military doctrine, or force design. Rather, the focus was on political decision-making. My task as a member of the Red Team was to create a military crisis on NATO’s eastern flank and force the Blue Team, the German government, to react to it. By attacking Lithuania in my first move, I so overwhelmed German political and military decision-making that NATO’s most important European ally did nothing.

Held at the German Bundeswehr’s Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg and produced as a podcast by the Berlin newspaper Die Welt, the war game received outsized media attention—including when a journalist asked NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte about its outcome during a press conference.

To beat and essentially break NATO, I focused on three simple points where I believe Russia holds an advantage.

First, speed. The fundamental problem for NATO is that in a military scenario involving one or more of its Baltic members, Russia will already have a large number of troops in the area. NATO, as of 2026, does not. Along the Russian and Belarusian border with NATO, sizable Russian formations will be positioned in the event of a crisis. NATO, by contrast, needs time—days at best, weeks or more at worst—to bring up reinforcements. Second, if Russia acts quickly, it can seize ground in a limited offensive before a counter-attack materializes. Third, Russia should be able to hold that ground and threaten to escalate to the nuclear level, deterring NATO from counterattacking. Why do I believe this? Because Germany’s political leaders dare not pose a fundamental question head-on: Would they actually risk a direct war, possibly a nuclear one, against Russia for a Baltic state?

The scenario was pretty straightforward, if not to say standard, for these types of games: After a hypothetical Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in the summer of 2026, Moscow offers Berlin economic cooperation and a return to pre-war relations, even as the Kremlin escalates its threats against the Baltic states and claims that there is a humanitarian crisis in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. Following joint Belarusian-Russian military exercises in western Belarus, NATO observes that Russia and Belarus keep 12,000 soldiers stationed there. Vilnius warns of an impending “emergency” in Kaliningrad. The war game begins at the end of October 2026 with Russian troops still in Belarus.

The first question I asked “Putin” as the Red Team military leader was whether that was all the troops I had at my disposal. I was told no. So I quickly went about expanding my attacking force, drawing from four Russian combined arms armies to maximize our military options. There was the anvil from Kaliningrad: the 11th Army Corps. The hammer from Belarus: elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army, around 12,000 troops as the advance force, combined with elements of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division and several thousand troops in support. Right behind them would be the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army to provide mass and flank protection against Poland, while the 6th Combined Arms Army from the Leningrad Military District would tie down NATO forces in Estonia and Latvia on the northern flank.

The plan was simple: Elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 76th Air Assault Division would push from Grodno, Belarus, through Druskininkai, Lithuania, northward toward Marijampole, Lithuania. Simultaneously, the 11th Army Corps would advance with a couple of thousand troops eastward from Kaliningrad. Within 24 hours, they were to link up at Marijampole with the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army securing the flanks of that force. Once that is achieved, a second echelon of forces would move in and dig in. The Baltics would then be effectively cut off from Poland and the rest of NATO.

All of this would be preceded by special operation forces trying to secure important bridges and intersections needed for the advance. The Russian force would be mobilized under the cover of military exercises with troops leaving and going over months and leaving equipment behind in select assembly areas.

My two Red Team colleagues—Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, who played Putin, and Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, a former German diplomat and intelligence official, who played Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—in a sense dictated all of this with their political strategy. We went through the military plan in an online meeting a week before the game. Our objective: Destroy NATO but keep the Americans out. Put otherwise: Render NATO discredited and incapable of keeping Russia from dictating the terms of a new security order in Europe. The main objective was therefore to destroy the credibility of NATO and the European Union through a limited incursion. Hybrid warfare alone, although it played an important role in the run up to the conventional campaign, would not get us there. Why not use the best instrument in our arsenal, Russian conventional military power? Taking my cue from what Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby told the Europeans at this year’s Munich Security Conference, I wanted to stay clear of hitting Americans—at least deliberately—to make sure Washington would stay out and tell the Europeans to take the lead. In the game this worked. In reality, of course, this could theoretically turn out different.

The game designers, from what I gathered, did not anticipate a conventional attack; perhaps their focus was on Russian hybrid warfare involving “little green men” like in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. But a conventional attack seemed reasonable given the state of NATO defenses in Lithuania and how fast I would expect at least a part of Russia’s forces to reconstitute after a potential ceasefire in Ukraine. Learning from Ukraine and drawing on the much improved Russian military proficiency in dynamic targeting to prevent a NATO counterattack through the Suwalki Gap, I would turn the corridor into a kill zone by exercising fire control through drones integrated with artillery, with permanent surveillance and hundreds of strike drones and mine-laying drones supported by a robust air and missile defense umbrella.

I knew that as long as we kept the Americans out for 48 hours, there was little risk of an immediate European response. European NATO forces would certainly not attack without first degrading Russian air defenses, which they could not do in the fall of 2026 given the limited offensive power of their air forces and a lack of SEAD/DEAD capabilities, including the shortage of anti-radiation missiles and the lack of equipment for breaching operations. These known European shortcomings were exactly why I had the Russians dig in and fortify the corridor immediately once the incursion was successful. I asked repeatedly during the game: Is no NATO counterattack coming? But no NATO forces were anywhere to be seen.

I certainly pointed out to my political leaders that the attack came with a high risk of failure. The roads in Lithuania are narrow, and there are too few of them. The surrounding terrain is forested and partly swampy. There are chokepoints where our advance could certainly have been stopped. And there were at least two brigade-sized Lithuanian troop formations to deal with during the initial incursion. I planned to degrade these with a combination of drone and artillery strikes, given their and NATO’s lack of adequate drone countermeasures and air defense.

The game ended before a NATO counterattack and before the Lithuanians mounted a counterstrike. Had those played out, a Russian failure would have been possible and perhaps likely. But the question of whether a counterattack might cause Russia’s plan to collapse misses military reality: In an age of drone, artillery, and missile proliferation, Russia does not need to physically control terrain in order to cut off the Baltics. It can exercise fire control with long-range precision strikes, rocket artillery, drones, and remote mining. Exercising fire control over the Suwalki Gap today is much easier for Russia than over the Ukrainian frontline in 2023 and 2024. Since then, Russia has made great strides in dynamic targeting, and this advantage would be boosted by the absence of U.S.-deployed SEAD/DEAD capabilities during the first 48 hours of a Russian operation.

Strategically, the war game’s successful incursion into Lithuania was a nice add-on, but whether it failed or succeeded was of secondary importance when even fire control from outside Lithuania’s borders can cut off the Baltics from the rest of NATO and impose a dilemma on NATO decision-making. If Washington holds back to let the Europeans take the lead, will they accept excessive casualties caused by their lack of U.S.-level capabilities to disintegrate Russian air defense and ground-based precision strike complexes in a counterattack? Would the Europeans still attack—or yield to Russian political demands in order to avoid a potential bloodbath? Would Poland attack on its own, despite those missing capabilities? In the event of a NATO counterattack, I had prepared a plan that used nuclear brinkmanship to frighten the German political leadership: The activation of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Kaliningrad, and western Russia would have accompanied an ultimatum that the corridor was not negotiable. We did not need that phase in the game. We achieved our objectives without it by paralyzing the German political leadership while the Americans stayed out.

In total, the operation drew on roughly 100,000 Russian troops in the wider theater, including air defense, logistics, aviation, and second-echelon formations. Of those, about 12,000 ground troops formed the forward advance force from Belarus on the main axis, reinforced by a few thousand additional maneuver elements from Kaliningrad. I also realized that without an immediate U.S. response—such as air strikes against Russian forces in Kaliningrad, Belarus, and Lithuania—an attack on NATO in the Baltics is in some respects militarily simpler than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The distances are shorter, the military objectives more limited, and Russia’s opponents—at least in the initial phase—weaker, even if they constitute the most powerful military alliance in the world.

But above all, what I take away is that Germany and especially its political leaders must confront uncomfortable yet fundamental questions if Europe is to persevere in such a crisis. Forget the sermons about being committed to NATO’s Article 5. The single, underlying question is whether Germany believes that it’s worth going to war with Russia over the Baltics, even without U.S. help. Is there a genuine consensus on an answer to this question? Is Berlin willing, in the extreme, to endure Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship? Are Germans mentally ready for war?

If those questions cannot be clearly answered before a crisis takes place, then Germany and NATO risk being simply overwhelmed by Russia’s speed and resolve in a real-world military crisis, especially during the initial phase. Deterrence depends not only on military capabilities—which are lacking—but also on what the enemy believes about your resolve. In the war game, my “Russian” colleagues and I knew: Germany will likely hesitate. And that was enough to win.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 3:39 AM

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

Ukraine reveals its first glide bomb — here's why that's a big deal

By Tania Myronyshena | May 18, 2026 5:49 pm

https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-develops-first-domestically-made-g
lide-bomb-minister-says/

Ukraine has developed its first domestically produced guided glide bomb, which is ready for combat use, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced on May 18.

The development is significant as glide bombs are a primitive yet highly destructive weapon widely used against front-line areas. Russia has continuously modified the bombs to increase their range and destructive power, turning them into one of the biggest threats to both Ukrainian troop positions and civilians near the front line.

According to Fedorov, the Ukrainian-made glide bomb carries a 250-kilogram warhead and took 17 months to develop. The Defense Ministry has already purchased an initial experimental batch, while pilots are currently rehearsing combat scenarios and adapting the weapon for use in real wartime conditions.

"This is not a copy of Western or Soviet solutions, but an original development by Ukrainian engineers designed to effectively strike fortifications, command posts, and other enemy targets dozens of kilometers behind the front line after launch," Fedorov said.

A glide bomb is a conventional air-dropped bomb fitted with wings and guidance systems, allowing it to travel long distances after being released by an aircraft instead of falling directly onto a target.

Up until now, Ukraine has relied on Western-supplied Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits to modify so-called dumb bombs into glide bombs.

Russia has relied heavily on glide bombs since 2023, using upgraded Soviet-era FAB bombs equipped with so-called Unified Gliding and Correction Modules (UMPK). The weapons are relatively cheap to produce compared to cruise or ballistic missiles, but have proven highly destructive against both front-line positions and Ukrainian cities.

Russian forces regularly use glide bombs weighing 250, 500, and 1,000 kilograms, while Moscow has also introduced the much larger FAB-3000 bomb with a 3,000-kilogram warhead.

The bombs have become a major threat to Ukrainian positions as they can be launched from outside the range of many air defense systems while delivering massive explosive payloads against bunkers, logistics hubs, bridges, and defensive positions.

Russia has also repeatedly used glide bombs against civilian areas, particularly in Kharkiv, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

Fedorov said the new Ukrainian weapon reflects Kyiv's broader push to shift from importing individual weapons systems to developing its own high-tech military industry.

"Soon, Ukrainian glide bombs will be striking enemy targets," Fedorov said.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 3:46 AM

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

2,000-km strike missile, designed in the Netherlands, tested in Ukraine, built in Germany: Rheinmetall and Destinus accelerate RUTA Block 3

Europe has largely lacked indigenous deep-strike missiles. This one is built to be mass-produced, not stockpiled in symbolic numbers.

By Olena Mukhina | May 18, 2026

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/18/2000-km-strike-missile-designed
-in-netherlands-tested-in-ukraine-built-in-germany-rheinmetall-and-destinus-accelerate-ruta-block-3/

Destinus and Germany's Rheinmetall have announced they are accelerating the development of a 2,000-kilometer strike missile to be tested in Ukraine. The companies say the RUTA Block 3 flight tests are planned for 2027.

Destinus and Rheinmetall are structuring Block 3 for industrial-scale production across three countries under European design control. It is a deliberate break from the small, expensive deep-strike stockpiles that European militaries have relied on, many of which are sourced from the US.

250-kg warhead

The Ruta Block 3 is planned to be equipped with a next-generation turbojet engine, an enlarged Destinus T220, and a 250 kg-class warhead.

The system will combine advanced autonomous navigation for environments with degraded GNSS signals with terminal sensing and guidance capabilities currently under development. It will also feature a standard ISO container launch architecture, enabling deployment on land, at sea, and from fixed platforms

Deep-strike class that European militaries have largely lacked

Block 3 is built for a 2,000-kilometer range, roughly four times that of the RUTA Block 2 now in flight testing, placing the family in a category European forces have mostly had to buy from Washington or do without, AeroTime reported.

Production chain is split across three countries

RUTA Block 1 is in serial production in the Netherlands, while Block 2, developed with Ukraine's state-backed Brave1 platform, is in flight tests in Ukraine and ramps up production in 2026, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

The Netherlands serves as design authority, Ukraine handles testing and key components, and Germany hosts the Rheinmetall Destinus Strike Systems joint venture — Rheinmetall 51%, Destinus 49% — at Unterlüß, with the first missiles expected before the end of 2026, Interfax-Ukraine reported.

The program is built around industrial scale, not exquisite numbers

The company said the program is designed to transition European long-range missiles from limited stockpiles to sustained industrial production, according to UNITED24 Media.

"Europe is entering a new defense era where the decisive factor is ... the ability to produce, replenish, and evolve at an industrial scale during prolonged high-intensity operations," said Mikhail Kokorich, CEO of Destinus.

RUTA Block 3 is "designed around that reality: sovereign European architecture, distributed industrial production, and the ability to scale rapidly across allied nations," he added.

The objective, he added, was "not to manufacture symbolic quantities of exquisite missiles, but to help establish a credible European long-range strike capability with real industrial depth."

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 11:33 AM

Fuck Ukraine.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 5:13 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The two largest remaining Donbas cities are Slaviansk and Kramatorsk. They merge into each other on a north-south axis. This urban agglomeration is now enclosed in a semicircle, the Russian army within single-digit miles from the urban perimeter.

Meanwhile, the third, smaller city to their south, Konstantiovka, is about 50% taken.

It looks as if Russia is aiming at Kiev from the north. Having superior numbers, the Russian MOD can afford to switch their activity on or off anywhere along the entire front.

*****

It looks as if the EU sees defeat on the horizon, cranking up their drone production and having Ukraine send them deep into Russia. If the Baltic states panic enough, they'll openly allow Ukraine to use their airspace. If EU nations openly expand the war beyond the Ukrainian border, Russia has promised to strike EU decision -making centers.

-----------

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 9:13 PM

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

Day after day, Russian warplanes pummel Ukrainian positions with as many as a hundred KAB glide bombs. The 40-km-range, satellite-guided bombs, some as heavy as three tons, are among the most devastating weapons in Russia's 51-month war on Ukraine—and a crucial factor in Russia's plans for a renewed push in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

Russia rains thousands of glide bombs on Ukrainian troops every month. Ukraine gets a few dozen American- and French-made ones. A homemade bomb is Ukraine's only realistic way to start closing that gap.

There's a destructive disparity as Ukrainian drones lightly tap Russian supply lines while Russian glide bombs heavily smash Ukrainian supply lines. A steady supply of Ukrainian-made glide bombs could help close the middle-strike gap.

Ukraine is now preparing to bomb back with its own homemade glide bombs.

More at https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/19/ukrainian-kab/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 9:14 PM

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

Is Ukraine about to repeat Hitler´s mistake with the London Blitz?

Is Ukraine about to adopt Russia´s playbook – bringing the war home by striking civilian infrastructure? The author argues that this would be a strategic mistake.

By Hans Petter Midttun | May 19, 2026

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/19/is-ukraine-about-to-repeat-hitl
ers-mistake-with-the-london-blitz/

In 2026 so far, Russia has launched 30,587 long-range strike drones — an increase of 172% over the same period last year. Ukraine downs about 90% of them. The remaining 10%, multiplied by an escalating launch rate, still translates into rising civilian casualties and accelerating destruction of energy, water, heating, hospitals, and schools.

The outlook is grim. Russia's ability to produce and launch long-range strike drones continues to grow, on top of an escalating campaign of missile strikes and guided glide bombs. In 2026 so far, missile strikes are up 190% over last year, according to Ukrainian Air Force daily reporting. Guided glide bomb strikes are up 173% — and their range is increasing too. Targeting predominantly civilian infrastructure, Russia's strike campaign amounts to war crimes — and it is escalating.

Kyiv now faces two questions: how long can it restrain itself from responding in kind? How will its western allies react if it does?

In August 1940, the Luftwaffe was about to win the Battle of Britain. RAF bases, radar stations, and aircraft factories were taking daily punishment. Nazi Germany was within reach of the air superiority it needed for an invasion.

Then a German bombing raid accidentally hit London. Britain retaliated with a symbolic raid on Berlin. Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring — furious — ordered the Luftwaffe to abandon the RAF and bomb British cities instead. The Blitz began.

That decision relieved the pressure on Britain's air defense network. The RAF used the reprieve to repair airfields, restore radar, regroup fighter squadrons. Historians widely view Hitler's pivot as the moment Germany lost any realistic chance of invading Britain.

That lesson is becoming relevant again.

On 10 May, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would now respond in kind to Russia's actions. "If the Russians decide to return to full-scale warfare, our 'sanctions' [meaning missile and drone strikes] for this will be immediate and tangible," he said.

On 14 May, a red line was crossed. At a meeting of the Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Zelenskyy instructed Ukraine's defense forces and special services to identify possible formats for response to the continuous Russian strikes. "I instructed the defence forces of Ukraine and the special services to propose possible formats for our response to this Russian attack."

The phrasing signals a possible shift in strategy. Hypothetically, it could mean adopting Russia's playbook — bringing the war home to Russia by striking civilian infrastructure: residential heating, water plants, civilian railways, civilian airports.

I understand the impulse. I share it. I am still going to argue against it.

Ukraine's deep-strike campaign — against Russian oil refineries, military airfields, ammunition depots, and drone factories — is the most effective instrument Kyiv has against the Kremlin's war economy. Strike capacity is finite. Diverting it to hit Russian apartment buildings and heating plants would force Ukraine to scale back the strikes that are bleeding Russian gas and oil revenue — the same strikes that are constraining the Kremlin's ability to fund its war.

The second cost compounds the first. If Ukraine begins copying Russia's war crimes, the international support that underwrites its resilience will erode — and with it, the flow of weapons, ammunition, and defense industrial backing that lets Ukraine absorb the strikes in the first place. The moral argument is also a strategic one. Both end in the same place: less Ukrainian capacity to fight.

Kyiv should not even consider mirroring Russia's strategy.

For 12 years, Ukraine has made it a matter of policy to uphold international law where Russia does not — a deliberate demonstration of the historical and cultural gap between the two countries. That distinction is part of Ukraine's strategic identity. Throwing it away to satisfy a moment of rage would be the deeper cost.

More at https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/19/is-ukraine-about-to-repeat-hitl
ers-mistake-with-the-london-blitz/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 9:34 PM

Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The two largest remaining Donbas cities are Slaviansk and Kramatorsk. They merge into each other on a north-south axis. This urban agglomeration is now enclosed in a semicircle, the Russian army within single-digit miles from the urban perimeter.

Meanwhile, the third, smaller city to their south, Konstantiovka, is about 50% taken.

It looks as if Russia is aiming at Kiev from the north. Having superior numbers, the Russian MOD can afford to switch their activity on or off anywhere along the entire front.

*****

It looks as if the EU sees defeat on the horizon, cranking up their drone production and having Ukraine send them deep into Russia. If the Baltic states panic enough, they'll openly allow Ukraine to use their airspace. If EU nations openly expand the war beyond the Ukrainian border, Russia has promised to strike EU decision -making centers.

-----------

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

Funny comrade, funny.

T

RUSSIAN DEPUTIES DEMAND PUTIN TO END WAR Vlog 1414: War in Ukraine

Russians Admitted a Total Disaster on Frontlines. Ukraine has an Advantage

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 6:03 AM

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

Russia prepares the ground for Baltic aggression as its spy agency threatens Latvian “decision-making centers”

Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claimed on 18 May that Ukrainian forces are preparing to launch drone strikes against Russia directly from Latvian territory, stating that Ukrainian drone operators have "already deployed to Latvian military bases."

The SVR went further, heavily implying that Russia intends to strike the claimed Ukrainian drone launch points — specifically identified as Latvian military bases — as well as "Latvian decision-making centers," in response to any strikes it attributes to Ukrainian forces operating from Latvian soil.

Latvian authorities have repeatedly denied Russian accusations that Latvia allowed Ukraine to use their airspace or territory to launch strikes against Russia.

Much more at https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/20/isw-russia-prepares-the-ground-
for-baltic-aggression-as-its-spy-agency-threatens-latvian-decision-making-centers/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 6:57 AM

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

A sitting member of Russia’s State Duma said the country’s economy will crash if the Russo–Ukrainian war continues for much longer, in comments published on May 19.

Renat Suleymanov (CPRF) told regional news site Continent Sibir that “it is perfectly obvious that the economy cannot survive a prolonged continuation of the SMO [Special Military operation, Kremlin’s preferred term for the invasion of Ukraine].”

“Officially, 40% of the federal budget is defense and security,” he said.

“What development, investment or capital spending can you talk about? Tanks and shells have no consumer value: the economy produces them, but they cannot be consumed by the population.”

Suleymanov said defense spending supports jobs and wages in defense industries and acts as a driver of employment, but it also fuels inflation and forces cuts in social and investment programs.

He said an end to the war is “simply necessary,” noting it has already lasted longer than the Soviet participation in WWII. He also warned that merely trimming military spending would not solve the problem.

“Adopting a budget that reduces military expenditures is not the hardest part,” said Suleymanov.

“What will happen to the people employed in defense? To those now under arms? One million people will return to civilian life. Where are the jobs, decent pay, social adaptation?”

Independent outlet Agentstvo.Novosti noted it was likely the first such statement by a State Duma member, and that it comes amid a noticeable shift in political rhetoric ahead of autumn parliamentary elections.

https://english.nv.ua/russian-war/russian-economy-can-t-sustain-war-fo
r-much-longer-50609319.html

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 7:12 AM

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

War Spending Pushes Russia’s Classified Budget Outlays to Post-Soviet High, Study Finds

The Moscow Times | May 20, 2026

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/05/20/war-spending-pushes-russias-
classified-budget-outlays-to-post-soviet-high-study-finds-a92798

Russia’s rapidly expanding war spending is driving a sharp rise in secret federal budget expenditures, with nearly one-third of all state spending now hidden from public view, according to estimates by the Gaidar Institute.

The share of classified spending in Russia’s federal budget rose to 28.6% in 2025 from 24.9% in 2024 and nearly doubled from 15.1% in 2021, the last full year before Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine, the institute said in a budget review.

Russia has not published detailed federal budget expenditure data since 2022, forcing analysts to reconstruct spending patterns using partial information from multiple sources.

The Gaidar Institute cautioned that its calculations were based on “fragmentary information available from different sources” because budget expenditure data has not been fully disclosed since the start of the war.

Based on the institute’s estimates, classified spending reached 12.3 trillion rubles ($172.2 billion) out of total federal expenditures of 42.9 trillion rubles ($600.6 billion) in 2025.

Open spending amounted to 30.6 trillion rubles ($428.4 billion), roughly 1 trillion rubles ($14 billion) less than the amount listed in draft legislation on the implementation of the 2025 budget. Official documents disclosed spending of only 31.6 trillion rubles ($442.4 billion), with the remainder omitted because it was designated secret or top secret.

Russia had already surpassed its prewar record for classified expenditures in 2023, when secret spending reached 22.6% of the budget.

Before that, the highest share had been 21.7% in 2016, when the government moved to repay loans to defense companies backed by state guarantees ahead of schedule.

The institute said spending under the “national defense” category remained the main driver behind the increase in secret expenditures in 2025, accounting for more than one-third of all federal spending.

It also said some expenditures had been shifted from the open to the classified portion of the budget, particularly social policy spending.

Open social policy expenditures fell to 6.5 trillion rubles ($91 billion) from 8.4 trillion rubles ($117.6 billion), a decline of 26.6% in inflation-adjusted terms.

Combined with what the institute described as “optimization” of spending on healthcare, education, the economy and inter-budget transfers, this left open spending largely unchanged in nominal terms at 30.6 trillion rubles ($428.4 billion) in 2025 versus 30.2 trillion rubles ($422.8 billion) in 2024.

Adjusted for inflation, however, that amounted to a reduction of 3.8%, or 0.4 percentage points of gross domestic product.

Among the 13 categories of open expenditures, excluding debt servicing, inflation-adjusted spending fell in eight sectors, including defense.

Spending on the economy and inter-budget transfers dropped 8%, while the largest increases were recorded in “general state issues” at 42%, housing and utilities at 24%, and healthcare at 7%.

The Gaidar Institute warned that budget pressures were becoming increasingly difficult to sustain and called for tighter spending discipline.

“Risks of chronic budget imbalances from year to year are clearly increasing,” it said, adding that expenditures should be brought into line with Russia’s revenue-generating capacity.

Read this article in Russian at The Moscow Times' Russian service.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 7:43 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

10,166 posts.

80% are crap.

No wonder fff.net is choking!

SECOND, how can your bot be so unerringly wrong?

-----------

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 9:23 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
10,166 posts.

80% are crap.

No wonder fff.net is choking!

SECOND, how can your bot be so unerringly wrong?

-----------

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

I am wondering. Signym, what do you think is happening in Ukraine to Russia? Winning? On a path to Russia's prosperity and peace?

I think Russians are wasting their lives. Kind of like 6ixStringJoker wasting his life.

In the not-too-distant future, Russia is gonna be sorrowful for electing Putin as the leader. Meanwhile, Ukraine resists because surrender is death. What hardships it faces are preferable to becoming Russian property again. And Eastern Europe knows Russia, after decades of temporarily being Russian property, which is why some of the EU continues to support Ukraine. Obviously, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of the EU would prefer to drink wine and forget Russia's violent past, where it killed tens of millions for no better reason than the dead were in the way of the glorious plans made by leaders such as Stalin and Putin.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/russia-population/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 11:14 AM

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

Russians Fear Ukraine ‘Slaughterbot’ Drones Are Head-Hunting Them

By David Hambling | May 19, 2026, 11:41am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2026/05/19/slaughterbots-no
w-ukraines-head-hunting-drones-terrify-russians/

Russian military bloggers are warning of a new type of Ukrainian FPV drone with thermal imaging and AI, which detects the target’s face and fires a high-velocity projectile at them. A video shows a Russian soldier cut down with what look like a precise headshot from one such drone. A further video confirms the kill. https://x.com/NOELreports/status/2056316815832170717

It is impossible to validate the claim, but this looks like a plausible evolutionary step. Ukraine aims to produce some 7 million FPVs this year. With AI guidance and suitable warheads they could inflict unprecedented casualties on Russian foot soldiers.

Kill Mechanism: Explosively Formed Projectile

FPVs are typically armed with armor-piercing shaped charges, typically repurposed RPG warheads, or fragmentation warheads. Both of these detonate on impact; the warhead in the video looks like something different. It is detonated around 20 meters from the targets, with a projectile leaving a trail of smoke from the point of the explosion to the impact point.

This is characteristic of an Explosively Formed Projectile or EFP. In a typical shaped charge, the blast from a hollow cone of explosive lines with metal converts the metal liner into a high-speed armor-piercing jet. In an EFP, a heavier metal liner is converted into an aerodynamic slug.

EPPs are less efficient at punching holes in armor, but have a greater range, while a typical shaped charge needs to be set off within a meter of the target. EPFs have ranges of tens or even hundreds of meters.

One of the most commonly seen EFP in the current conflict is the BONUS 155mm artillery round used by Ukraine, made by Bofors of Sweden and Nexter of France and supplied to Ukraine. The round ejects two submunitions above the target area which scan for targets and, if they locate one, aim and detonate, firing an EFP at it. A video from July 2022 shows a BONUS round destroying a Russian tank. Some small anti-tank mines also fire EFPs.

Drones with EFP warheads are an obvious countermeasure to netting, wire cages and other forms of protection, including “turtle tanks” as the drone can attack from some distance and the slug will go right through such protection. However, this type of warhead needs to be aimed and detonated at the right moment, which requires a higher level of operator skill.

Using EFP as an antipersonnel round is more challenging. Ukraine has previously used FPVs with Claymore-type warheads spraying shrapnel forward over a wide arc. These are not widely seen, possibly because of the skill needed to use them properly. As well as being detonated at the right distance, an EFP needs to be aimed even more exactly, or it is useless. That’s a tall order, unless the operator has some AI assistance.

AI Headhunting

Back in the innocent days of 2018, YouTuber Michael Reeves made a funny video about his efforts to create a swarm of quadcopters to home in on a target’s face. Facial detection software ensures that cameras focus on the right point in an image. Reeves had the idea of combining face detection software with a simple autopilot to make a bargain-basement autonomous attack drone that sought out and crashed into heads. After a few false starts, he succeeded, and his video racked up millions of views.

Fast forward to 2026 and similar quadcopters are everywhere in Ukraine. Many now have AI capability, thanks to companies like Auterion and The Fourth Law, who produced add-on modules that will convert any small drone into a smart munition with terminal guidance to lock on to a target and pursue it. So far, these autonomy systems have been used to improve the hit rate against vehicles, by allowing them to operate even under intense jamming which breaks the link with the operator. Some makers claim that AI-enabled FPVs have around an 80% hit rate instead of 40% for manual control. A basic FPV with a TFL-1 autonomy module costs just $442, similar to other FPVs. Some simple AI targeting systems use even lower-cost hardware down to the $100 Raspberry Pi Zero.

One of Ukraine’s biggest priorities is targeting Russian foot soldiers. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces commander, has bluntly stated on many occasions that a prime goal is taking out Russians faster than they can be recruited, more than 30,000 a month. His figures suggest that Ukrainian drones are now achieving this.

Drone kills have recently increased sharply. Some of this might be driven by the deployment of new anti-personnel drones that are locked onto a target and complete the killing process themselves.

“The enemy has begun using upgraded tactical drones with combat artificial intelligence. There are signs of facial targeting and a corresponding heat signature loaded into the drones' brains,” stated a post on the Russian Telegram channel Ruspanorama accompanying the video

FPVs which rely on impact can be dodged, and Russians frequently throw helmets, rifles and other objects at drones in a last-ditch attempt to survive. Shotguns can provide short-range protection. Drones armed with EFPs, which they can launch accurately will be deadlier and harder to avoid.

Enter The Slaughterbots

We do not know whether the Russian claims are accurate, and whether the drones are using AI guidance or are in fact operator-controlled. Nor do we know their hit rate compared to standard FPVs.

We do not even know for sure that they really aim for the head. Firearms training invariably emphasizes aiming at the center of mass in the middle of the chest, which gives a much better chance of a hit. Only snipers go for head shots, and the only video example we have of an apparent head-hunting drone attack may have been a case of chance rather than aim.

But clearly these drones are causing some concern, and the Russians will doubtless experiment with countermeasures. Would a mask prevent the drone from finding a target? How about a dummy head? If you curl up into a ball so your head cannot be seen, will the drone still target you? If you flatten yourself against a tree or wall and remain perfectly still, will it be able to track you? Reinforced helmets and armor will be be useless as even a small EFP will go through an inch of steel with ease.

Campaign Against Killer Robots

Perhaps the most eerie aspect of the new drone is how it was foreshadowed in the 2017 dark SF video Slaughterbots created by computer science professor Stuart Russell, as a warning against autonomous killer robots. In the video, a U.S. tech CEO shows off drones with facial recognition and head-seeking shaped charges. Developed to find and target terrorist leaders, the technology is soon copied by terrorists and swarms of low-cost Slaughterbots are loosed to seek out and kill civilians, a low-cost weapon of mass destruction.

The Ukrainian drones are certainly not fully autonomous, and are not being used against civilians. But if you need to know how rapidly technology has advanced, 2017s science fiction warning is 2026’s terrifying reality--for the Russians.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 11:25 AM

Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
10,166 posts.

80% are crap.

No wonder fff.net is choking!

SECOND, how can your bot be so unerringly wrong?

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
I am wondering. Signym, what do you think is happening in Ukraine to Russia? Winning? On a path to Russia's prosperity and peace?

I think Russians are wasting their lives. Kind of like 6ixStringJoker wasting his life.

In the not-too-distant future, Russia is gonna be sorrowful for electing Putin as the leader. Meanwhile, Ukraine resists because surrender is death. What hardships it faces are preferable to becoming Russian property again. And Eastern Europe knows Russia, after decades of temporarily being Russian property, which is why some of the EU continues to support Ukraine. Obviously, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of the EU would prefer to drink wine and forget Russia's violent past, where it killed tens of millions for no better reason than the dead were in the way of the glorious plans made by leaders such as Stalin and Putin.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/russia-population/

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

Another point is that by reading comrade signyms’ posts, it becomes obvious she wants Putin, i.e. Russia, to win. Why, Ukraine is not a part of Russia so why does she always post Putins’ propaganda?

T

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 12:49 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

Another point is that by reading comrade signyms’ posts, it becomes obvious she wants Putin, i.e. Russia, to win. Why, Ukraine is not a part of Russia so why does she always post Putins’ propaganda?

T

Signym's father was a prisoner of the Russians. He absorbed Russian propaganda about their superiority to Western Europeans and passed it on to his daughter. When the father did NOT prosper as highly in the US as the family felt they deserved, the daughter became bitter at the US.

6ixStringJoker has a slightly different motivation. He is angry, poor white trash who feels like he has not prospered as highly as he deserves. He is bitter that money was spent on ammo for Ukraine instead of being spent on him.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 12:49 PM

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

I’m the Foreign Minister of Sweden. Don’t Overestimate Russia.

May 20, 2026

By Maria Malmer Stenergard

Ms. Stenergard is Sweden’s minister for foreign affairs. She wrote from Stockholm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/opinion/sweden-intelligence-russia-
economy.html

The war in the Middle East may be consuming much of the world’s attention, but Russia’s war against Ukraine has not abated. It will not end until we make it cost President Vladimir Putin more than he believes it is worth.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago, the Kremlin has tried to make the world believe that the Russian economy is strong and that sanctions don’t work. The Swedish government disagrees, and has commissioned several studies by leading economists and intelligence services to uncover the truth behind Russia’s official statistics: The economy is more fragile than it appears.

Having an accurate picture of the state of the Russian economy is crucial. We can’t afford to underestimate Russia’s strength and its ability to harm Ukraine and NATO allies — by providing Iran with intelligence, for instance — but we must not overestimate it either.

There are several reasons to believe that Russia has been exaggerating its economic strength. Russia has claimed that its economy grew by around 13 percent between 2020 and 2024, but by measuring nighttime luminosity, an established way of assessing economic activity in countries where official statistics are not available or cannot be trusted, we have estimated that the economy actually contracted by around 8 percent during this period.

We also believe inflation is substantially understated. In 2024, when inflation in Russia was reportedly around 10 percent, the central bank raised the benchmark interest rate to 21 percent, suggesting that inflation was higher. And Sweden’s Military Intelligence and Security Service believes that it is higher than the current official forecast of around 5 percent. This would mean Russia is overstating its purchasing power, and that its military spending capacity is weaker than it appears.

A study published by the British government estimates that the overall losses to the Russian economy as a result of international sanctions amount to at least $450 billion since February 2022. The effect on sectors such as energy exports has been devastating: Russia’s energy revenues in January 2026, before the beginning of the war in Iran, were down by 50 percent from the same month the year before.

Russia is benefiting from the waiving of some sanctions because of the war in Iran and the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but Swedish intelligence estimates that Russia would need the average oil price for Urals oil to remain above $100 a barrel for the rest of the year to make a significant difference. The benefits to Russia have also been limited by Ukraine’s successful strikes on Russian oil refineries.

Not everyone agrees with Sweden’s assessment of Russia’s reporting on its economy, but there is growing agreement about the economy’s general fragility. Inside the country, elites are increasingly alarmed. Mr. Putin has acknowledged some weaknesses in the economy’s performance, and last month ordered officials to improve it. A Kremlin-friendly think tank, run by the brother of the Russian defense minister, recently warned of the risks of a systemic banking crisis this year. And last week, the economic growth forecast for 2026 was downgraded to 0.4 percent, despite rising oil prices.

Then there are Russia’s strategic failures in Ukraine. Advances at the front have almost ground to a halt, with Ukraine even regaining some territory. Russia’s casualty rates at the front are catastrophic. Russia has suffered 1.2 million casualties since the start of the invasion, by some estimates, an average of roughly 35,000 a month in 2025. Recruitment is increasingly expensive.

Ukraine is in a stronger position than it has been in a long time. It has given counterdrone assistance to the Gulf states in response to Iran’s attacks, and increased cooperation between Ukrainian and Western defense actors, such as weapons manufacturers, to develop and produce completely new kinds of defense matériel.

In April, the European Union made two important decisions to strengthen support for Ukraine and further increase the pressure on Russia: It greenlit a loan of 90 billion euros, or $106 billion, that will cover a significant part of Ukraine’s funding needs for 2026-2027 and approved a 20th package of sanctions against Russia.

The work cannot stop there. One measure in particular would make a tremendous difference: The introduction of a ban on providing maritime services — insurance, access to ports, financing and so on — to any ships leaving Russian ports carrying oil, gas or coal. Escalating from a price cap to an outright prohibition would deal a significant blow to the Kremlin’s war chest. Sweden would like to see the European Union, and ideally the rest of the Group of 7, impose this measure.

Russia’s economy, in nominal terms, is barely bigger than the State of New York’s, smaller than that of Texas and fragile. Russian households are feeling the pinch of daily expenses, and the lion’s share of the liquid assets in the country’s national wealth fund — its financial buffer — has been drained to finance the war. The weakness in the economy shows how effective Western sanctions have already been, and why further pressure is the best way to force Mr. Putin to engage in serious peace negotiations.

We can’t change Mr. Putin’s wish to control Ukraine, but we can change how much it will cost him.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 3:37 PM

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

Unexpected Words from Ukraine: We Have an Overproduction of Drones

A chat with the Ukrainian ambassador to Poland reveals that the government in Kyiv now finds itself with more drones than it needs in certain areas.

By Jim Geraghty

May 20, 2026 10:20 AM

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/unexpected-words-from-
ukraine-we-have-an-overproduction-of-drones/

Warsaw, Poland — For a man representing a country still fighting off a full-scale invasion for the fifth year, Vasyl Bodnar, Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland, can find promising signs of a transformed landscape in the war. With the U.S. war against Iran demonstrating the terror that Shahed drones can inflict upon civilian populations, suddenly every country on earth wants to build its own anti-drone defenses, and fast. And no country has spent more time fighting off drone attacks than Ukraine, and no country has more expertise, experience, production lines . . . or, believe it or not, more extra drones lying around.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced last year that Ukraine was pursuing joint weapons production agreements with Canada, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania, Norway, and the United Kingdom. In April, Ukraine signed ten-year defense export agreements with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. As mentioned yesterday, Poland is trading nine decommissioned MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in exchange for some unspecified assistance with drone technology.

And now:

Kyiv has said that the US is seeking the transfer of technology and access to intellectual property rights from Ukraine as part of a drone deal that is awaiting approval at the highest political level, a person familiar with the matter said.

The US Department of Defense has asked to test a range of Ukrainian defense products, including drones and electronic warfare systems, as Washington is considering their potential purchase for military use, the official said. The agreement has not been finalized, the person added, speaking on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private.

Growing interest from the US shows how the world’s largest military is looking to tap into the drone expertise that Ukraine has acquired over four years fighting against the Russian invasion. Through a combination of new technology and tactics, Kyiv’s forces have been able to strike deep into Russia territory, to slow and in some cases even reverse battlefield gains by Moscow’s bigger army, and to inflict significant damage on oil facilities that help finance the Kremlin’s war machine.

(Hey, do you remember a bit more than a year ago, someone loudly insisting that Ukraine didn’t have any cards?)

“In the beginning of the war, we were asking for everything, because we were lacking everything,” Bodnar recalled. “We were traditionally, a peaceful country who had nothing to fight with. . . . Here at the embassy, we have an officer of the border guard who had been in the surroundings of the city of Sumy fighting for a couple of weeks without [enough] ammunition, without any supplies, just like a partisan group. They organized attacks on the Russians, and were fighting, even without any orders.”

That early desperation prompted a lot of Ukrainians in and out of uniform to start experimenting with off-the-shelf, commercially available recreational drones and jury-rigging them to drop grenades on Russian positions. “It was a completely new, an unbureaucratic approach,” Bodnar said. “Businesses that yesterday had been creating kitchens, cooking things, started making drones. They started from small innovations, which are now widely used on the front line.”

Ukraine was one of the scientific, engineering, and manufacturing cornerstones of the old Soviet Union; during one stretch, Ukraine was producing around half of all the USSR’s tanks and missiles. Even for the generation after the Cold War, the country churned out about 130,000 engineering graduates annually, which adds up to a lot of highly motivated engineering minds thinking up new ways to fly over to the enemy undetected and eliminate them.

Over four years of nonstop trial-and-error and ingenuity under the pressure of an invading army along with the construction of specialized facilities (see past reporting from drone factories in Ukraine here and here) have turned Ukraine into the drone supplier to the world.

“We now have, to some extent, overproduction of drones,” Bodnar said. “For example, Magura drones, which is a sea drone, they practically demolished the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. But we don’t have a target now for them. So, it’s possible to sell them abroad, as well as with the FPV [first person view] drones. So, the production is now more than 4 million per year.” (That’s all kinds of drones, not just sea or FPV ones.) Last month, Ukraine announced that it was on pace to produce 7 million drones this year.

Back in March, President Trump scoffed regarding Ukraine, “We don’t need their help in drone defense. We know more about drones than anybody.”

It’s odd to hear Trump speak so dismissively of the Ukrainians, because the Ukrainians are big fans of what Trump is doing in some parts of the rest of the world. Asked about the administration’s capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and placing of additional pressure on Cuba, Bodnar smiled, “To be blunt, we are happy with that.” And the Ukrainians are happy to see every blow that the U.S. and Israel strike against the Iranian mullahs.

“Iran is our enemy,” Bodnar declared firmly. “They have sold Russians this technology for Shahed drone production, and now it is the most terrible weapon for the civilians. But it’s useless on the front line. You couldn’t attack a target because it’s too easily shot down. But the civilian cities are attacked by hundreds of these drones. They are suffering the most from these terrible night attacks.”

“Our society understands the value of freedom,” Bodnar continued. “We have only 35 years of statehood, but we have been a nation for more than a thousand years. It was an impetus from inside. The people understand that it is theirs. It is my home, I’m defending it.”

For those wondering how the Ukrainians can find the strength to fight on after more than four years of war, the simple answer is that they don’t have any choice. It is either fight on, or watch more of their country endure the nightmare that is living under Russian occupation — indiscriminate attacks against civilians, systematic torture, mass rape, and the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia — a demonic swath of war crimes that some contend meets the definition of an attempted genocide.

“There are many problems in Ukraine,” Bodnar conceded. “We are not a 100 percent pure society, which has everything resolved. We have corruption, we are fighting that. We have our problems inside, but there is also a unity inside. The enemy is terrible, so we have two choices, and it is visible for the Ukrainian society: We either die in the battlefield, or we die in the concentration camp. Sometimes — maybe it is not direct, but sometimes it is like Israel. Either you are fighting and you may live, or you are dying in either a jail or a concentration camp.”

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 7:53 PM

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

Putin threatens Armenia

May 20, 2026

Given Armenia’s extensive trade with Russia, Putin went on, the issue of EU membership really ought to be put to a referendum. And anyway, he added, remember “everything that’s happening on the Ukrainian track”? Remember how it all started? That’s right, with “Ukraine joining, or trying to join, the EU.” And look what happened next! “A coup, the Crimea incident, the positioning of southeastern Ukraine, and the military action—that’s where it all led.” Of course, Putin was blaming Western malfeasance, but the coded threat to Armenia was still transparent: Nice little country you got there. Shame if it got reduced to rubble.

Other high-level Russian officials, from Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin to foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, have followed up with even more belligerent messages in recent days: charges that Armenia is being “subjugated” by the West and force-fed “liberal values,” warnings that the country is in danger of losing its sovereignty and its spiritual foundations, and personal attacks on Pashinyan himself. Meanwhile, Russian authorities have, by total coincidence, found dangerous pests or harmful chemicals in imported Armenian fruit, vegetables, dairy products, cognac, and flowers. And Kremlin bots in Armenian internet spaces have been busy spreading anti-Pashinyan fakes from their familiar dog-eared playbook: allegations of corruption, rumors about grave health problems, or dire warnings of warmongering plans for confrontation with Russia.

More at https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-empire-putin-tried-to-rebuild-armenia

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 21, 2026 9:42 AM

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

It is nice to see the uppermost echelon in Ukraine has finally figured out that war is a 24/7 3-shift factory rather than an episode of Firefly ( adventure | drama | action | heroics | run the credits at the end )

Ukraine is developing low-cost interceptor missiles for Russian Shahed-type drones, Fedorov says

By Kateryna Hodunova | May 21, 2026 2:29 pm

https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-developing-low-cost-missiles-to-in
tercept-russian-shahed-type-drones-fedorov-says/

Ukraine is developing low-cost interceptor missiles to counter Russian Shahed-type drones, with prototypes already undergoing testing, Ukraine's Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told journalists at a closed-door press briefing on May 16.

"We have already identified solutions that are nearly ready and have begun testing them," Fedorov said.

The Iranian-made Shahed is one of Russia's main long-range strike systems used against targets in Ukraine. First deployed in 2022, it was later produced domestically by Russia, which developed its own variant, the Geran.

Fedorov added that Ukraine plans to increase production of the missiles "tenfold" and build up additional stockpiles for the fall and winter season, following this winter's Russian strikes on energy infrastructure that caused widespread power outages and left many areas without heating during periods of severe cold.

The minister said the steps are necessary to counter Russia's expanded use of Shahed-type jet-powered drones, which can reach speeds of up to 600 km/h. Such kamikaze drones were first recorded in Ukraine in early 2024.

Over the past four months, Ukraine has doubled its rate of downing Shahed-type drones, even as Russian attacks have increased by 35%, Fedorov said. The minister added that interceptor drone supplies have also grown 2.6-fold, with a strategic goal of achieving a 95% aerial interception rate.

"The introduction of the after-action review played a significant role in this process. This is a standard NATO procedure for conducting a detailed analysis of combat operations after they have concluded," Fedorov said.

"For us, it has become one of the key elements in building a modern air defense system."

Fedorov also said the number of private air defense units protecting businesses has increased to 27 in Ukraine, with requests to create additional units growing each week.

Fedorov added that the Defense Ministry has three main near-term priorities, including revising recruitment and service terms in the Ukrainian army, shifting to competitive defense procurement, and implementing a basic guaranteed minimum supply of drones to brigades.

However, the minister did not give a timeframe for the planned changes. The recruitment and service reforms would reportedly cover fair pay, clear terms of service, unit staffing, and efforts to reduce AWOL cases.

President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on May 1 that a reform of the Ukrainian military's pay system for soldiers, sergeants, and commanders is set to begin in June. Under the new system, personnel in non-combat roles would receive at least Hr 30,000 ($680) per month, while infantry soldiers would be paid between Hr 250,000 ($5,645) and Hr 400,000 ($9,000) depending on their combat duties.

Zelensky also said changes will be made to the way units are staffed to introduce fixed terms of service and begin the gradual discharge of personnel who have served since 2022 and earlier.

Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said in an interview with Militarnyi published on May 20 that the Ukrainian military is considering introducing new contract terms of six to 10 months for personnel who have served for an extended period.

Syrskyi added that Ukraine has the capacity to conduct rotations for troops who have been in the combat zone for a long time.

"We have calculated everything — the number of personnel stationed in brigades on average at their positions and the number of personnel deployed to the area of operations. There is a large number of service members stationed in combat zones," Syrskyi said.

"We have all the conditions to establish three rotations and ensure the training of the rotation that will take over on a rotational basis."

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 21, 2026 2:19 PM

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

Ukraine aims to inflict 200 Russian casualties per square kilometer of advance, Fedorov says

By Kateryna Hodunova | May 21, 2026 5:35 pm

https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-aims-for-200-russian-personnel-cas
ualties-per-square-kilometer-of-advance-fedorov-says/

Ukraine's strategic objective is to impose up to 200 casualties among Russian military personnel for every square kilometer of advance, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on May 16 at a closed-door press briefing.

The statement comes amid reports that earlier this year Ukraine briefly seized the initiative on the front lines, retaking more territory than it lost to Russian forces for the first time in about 10 months.

While Russia lost 67 soldiers per square kilometer of advance in October, that figure rose to 165 in January, 244 in February, 254 in March, and 179 in April, according to Fedorov.

"The situation on the ground confirms that Ukraine has succeeded in significantly slowing the enemy's advance and is gradually regaining the initiative," Fedorov said.

"At the same time, we are stepping up offensive operations and liberating territory."

Russia lost 35,203 military personnel — killed and wounded — in April 2026. In March, the figure was 35,351, and in December 2025, it was 34,544, Fedorov said, pointing to an increase in Russian casualties.

"Today, every kilometer the enemy advances comes at a disproportionately high cost in terms of casualties," the minister added.

Ukraine's Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on May 20 that since the beginning of 2026, Russia has lost 141,500 military personnel, of whom more than 83,000 were killed.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on March 10 that "out of 100% of losses, 62% are killed and 38% wounded" among Russian forces, citing intelligence assessments reviewed by Ukraine — a ratio of nearly 2:1.

Syrskyi's latest figures show a slightly lower split: 58% killed, 42% wounded.

Ukraine's General Staff has not revealed its own losses during the full-scale invasion, citing operational secrecy.

A January 2026 CSIS report said Ukraine has likely suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties from February 2022 to December 2025, of which between 100,000 and 140,000 are thought to be killed in action (KIA). https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 21, 2026 2:36 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Ukraine aims to inflict 200 Russian casualties per square kilometer of advance, Fedorov says

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth"- Mike Tyson

*****

Oh, BTW SECOND, you're as misdirected about my motives as THGR is.
Yanno what formed my politics (besides Pope John XXIII's version of Catholicism)?
Like you, it was the Vietnam war.
But instead of jumping in with both feet, like you did, I became very anti-war.
I see the USA as a great source of misery and destruction across the globe, so unworthy of us.
Stop posting shit about which you know nothing.

-----------

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 21, 2026 6:59 PM

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

Clearing Russian mines will take decades

By Peeter Helme | May 20, 2026

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/20/ukraine-demining-bezkaravainyi-
11-billion/

The annual economic losses from contaminated land are around $11 billion. Around $9 billion of that is lost exports, and roughly $1.1 billion is lost local tax revenue. About 57,900 km² of agricultural land has been affected, which is approximately 40% of the 133,300 km² of national territory affected by the war.

Kharkiv Oblast alone accounts for roughly 475 km² of confirmed or suspected hazardous agricultural land. That is about 59% of all such areas in Ukraine. Mykolaiv has around 205 km², and Kherson around 111 km².

Peeter: Tell me about the compensation program for farmers. How does it actually function?

Bezkaravainyi: It started from a number we refused to accept. A few years ago, a widely cited report, I believe Time picked it up, suggested Ukraine would need 700 years to be demined. We were not satisfied with that, so we started thinking about what we could change.

The bottleneck was simple. We had farmers who needed clearance, and Ukrainian companies ready to provide it. The missing piece was payment, because farmers do not have those resources. So we built a state program that pays for the service when a farmer applies.

A farmer applies through the state agrarian register. We filter for farmers who are officially registered in the area, pay taxes, and have no record of cooperation with the Russian Federation. Then we assess what the clearance will require—what kind of ordnance is likely on the site, how active the area was during combat. Operators bid for the contract, and competition drives prices down.

More than 15,500 hectares have already been cleared and returned to farmers under the program. The average cost is around UAH 60,000 per hectare ($1,360). The state has allocated UAH 2 billion ($45 million) this year within the Ukraine Facility framework.

The costs have risen. Prices are about 30% higher now than two years ago, partly because of broader economic shifts and partly because the tasks themselves have become harder.

When we started, we worked on the easiest cases first—fields with a few craters and a destroyed tank or two. As we move to fields with trenches, combined minefields, and cluster munitions contamination, the work becomes much more demanding. War is not cheap. The result of war is not cheap either.

One thing the program keeps surfacing is older history. In the past year, companies clearing agricultural land have found Second World War ordnance on three different sites. Two weeks before this interview, an operator clearing a field in Kharkiv Oblast uncovered a large Second World War air bomb two meters underground. We came to clear after a modern war, and we kept finding the previous one.

The First World War left France with the Zone Rouge, territory deemed too dangerous to ever return to productive use. We can compare it to Chornobyl. To Fukushima. It is our assessment that something similar will happen in Ukraine on a large scale: areas where we will never operate safely. We do not have full evidence yet, but the trajectory points that way.

Much more at https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/20/ukraine-demining-bezkaravainyi-
11-billion/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 7:17 AM

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

‘Whoever Controls Mala Tokmachka Controls the World’: How the Battle for a Ukrainian Village Became a Meme

By Anna Snegireva | May 21, 2026

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/05/21/whoever-controls-mala-tokmac
hka-controls-the-world-how-the-battle-for-a-ukrainian-village-became-a-meme-a92734

Mala Tokmachka has been mentioned so often in Russian military reports and pro-war Telegram channels lately that it has started to sound as though it were the key to victory in the entire war.

The long-running battle for this small Ukrainian village in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region — and Moscow’s repeated claims of progress and victory there — has now become an unexpected meme.

It all started when a video compilation of pro-Kremlin military commentator Boris Rozhin’s repeated comments over the past year that Russian forces were “continuing to press” near the village went viral on the Russian internet.

Russia’s Defense Ministry first claimed control of the village in March 2022, during the opening phase of its full-scale invasion. By that summer, reports said Ukrainian troops had returned to the area.

From then on, Mala Tokmachka became a regular feature in Russian military updates, with the Defense Ministry and war correspondents alike repeatedly reporting strikes on Ukrainian positions there.

In May 2024, the Defense Ministry even staged an exhibition showcasing what it described as Ukrainian military “trophies” captured there.

In 2025, Russian military briefings reported that troops had begun direct combat operations in and around the village itself.

Then, in November, the Defense Ministry announced what it described as the village’s “liberation” for the second time since the start of the war. Defense Minister Andrei Belousov congratulated Russia’s 42nd Guards Motor Rifle Division and called the capture “a major step toward victory.”

Yet by 2026, Russian officials and military commentators quietly dropped references to the village being under Russian control.

The back-and-forth has inspired an outpouring of memes in both Ukraine and Russia.

“Expectation: Kyiv in three days. Reality: spending an entire year ‘continuing to press’ near Mala Tokmachka,” Ukrainian journalist Denis Kazansky wrote on social media, referring to the Rozhin compilation video.

“If not for Mala Tokmachka, they’d already be in Berlin by now!” joked the Ukrainian Telegram channel Zabor Zaporizhzhia.

The jokes soon spread into Russia’s own nationalist and pro-war online circles, where some users used the village as shorthand for what they saw as exaggerated official narratives of battlefield success.

“It’s hilarious and depressing at the same time,” wrote Russian military Telegram channel, Reporter Filatov. “I get the need for propaganda. Back in the Soviet Union, under ‘wild and merciless censorship,’ they would simply say ‘local battles,’ even when there was a slaughter going on. But they didn’t spend a year and a half [in 1944-45] storming some random granny village. Stalin’s army knew how to wage both war and propaganda.”

In comment sections under pro-war Telegram channels, users voice frustration and fatigue with what they see as endless declarations of progress without decisive results.

Much more at https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/05/21/whoever-controls-mala-tokmac
hka-controls-the-world-how-the-battle-for-a-ukrainian-village-became-a-meme-a92734

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 7:37 AM

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

"Every third sortie results in a hit": How the 412th Nemesis brigade destroys Russian air defence with mid-range drones

By Bohdan Miroshnychenko and Iryna Lutsak | 21 May 2026, 12:50

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2026/05/21/8035736/

Over the past year, Ukrainian mid-range drones have conducted reconnaissance and destroyed targets up to 200 kilometres away, potentially disrupting logistics, slowing down offensives and thinning out surface-to-air missile systems, opening the way to the enemy's oil infrastructure.

Pavlo Laktionov, deputy commander of the 412th Nemesis Brigade, told Ukrainska Pravda how these drones are developing:

Why cannot Russian air defence protect itself from drones?

Soviet-designed radars are not well suited to shooting down small aircraft with composite air frames. Russian surface-to-air missile systems do shoot down our drones quite often, using up missiles in the process, but we fly at low altitudes, making the assets less visible to radar. Some of their missiles have a minimum altitude for interception, and we fly below it.

Overall, the small size of the aircraft, the right tactics, the dispersal of air defence systems and the depletion of their missile stocks give us a significant advantage. But Russian interceptor drones are causing us serious problems. Ukrainian manufacturers should already be thinking about developing countermeasures.

How effective are your strikes at the moment?

In our case, roughly every third sortie ends in an effective hit. There is a difference between "hit" and "destroyed". "Hit" means the target has been damaged and may be repaired. "Destroyed" means it no longer can be. So effectiveness is not just about whether the asset hits the target.

Much more at https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2026/05/21/8035736/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 8:03 AM

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

Zelenskyy confirmed asking for "ammunition, not a ride." Four years ago, I got pushback for reporting that.

By James LaPorta | May 21, 2026 4:54 PM EDT

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zelenskyy-i-need-ammunition-not-a-ride-wh
ite-house/

Zelenskyy's reply: "The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." The story and the quote were verbatim accurate in the English translation — in Ukrainian, it's "I need a weapon, not a taxi."

In a speech marking four years since the full-scale Russian invasion had begun, the embattled president recounted that as Russian forces were closing in, the U.S. offered to evacuate him. That line was his response. Zelenskyy told Ukrainians he had said it "not because we are all fearless or made of steel…but [that] on some invisible level, all of us know that we have no other Ukraine, that this is our home."

The Washington Post fact-checked the quote in March 2022 and reported that Biden administration officials expressed confusion about the claim and denied Zelenskyy was asked to leave Kyiv by the U.S. government. The Post quoted me: "I can understand why they have been denying it. It makes them look bad."

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 8:23 AM

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

Vladimir Putin wants to conclude the war against Ukraine by the end of this year, but only on terms he considers "victorious," Bloomberg reported on May 22.

According to an anonymous source who spoke to the publication, these conditions include the complete capture of Donbas and a broad security agreement with Europe that effectively recognizes Russia's "territorial acquisitions."

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied that Putin set any deadline.

https://english.nv.ua/nation/facing-drone-strikes-and-elite-panic-puti
n-aims-to-end-the-war-by-late-2026-50610106.html

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 10:18 AM

Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Ukraine aims to inflict 200 Russian casualties per square kilometer of advance, Fedorov says

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth"- Mike Tyson

*****

Oh, BTW SECOND, you're as misdirected about my motives as THGR is.
Yanno what formed my politics (besides Pope John XXIII's version of Catholicism)?
Like you, it was the Vietnam war.
But instead of jumping in with both feet, like you did, I became very anti-war.
I see the USA as a great source of misery and destruction across the globe, so unworthy of us.
Stop posting shit about which you know nothing.

-----------

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

Funny comrade. There are decades of posts by other browncoats accusing you of being a Russian propagandist. We have decades of posts by you and kiki defending Putin’s wrongs globally. He does something subhuman and you are right there supporting him or denying he did it altogether.

Like his kidnapping tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. You said he did it to save them; bullshit. Or gassing civilians in Syria, women and children. And intentionally destroying hospitals; one after the other there and in Ukraine. You comrade like Putin, are a pig.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60521&p=1#1
244047

T

Update from Ukraine | This is Huge! Ukraine Strikes Russian FSB Base in Crimea

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 12:55 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Ukraine aims to inflict 200 Russian casualties per square kilometer of advance, Fedorov says

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth"- Mike Tyson

*****

Oh, BTW SECOND, you're as misdirected about my motives as THGR is.
Yanno what formed my politics (besides Pope John XXIII's version of Catholicism)?
Like you, it was the Vietnam war.
But instead of jumping in with both feet, like you did, I became very anti-war.
I see the USA as a great source of misery and destruction across the globe, so unworthy of us.
Stop posting shit about which you know nothing.

-----------

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

Funny comrade. There are decades of posts by other browncoats accusing you of being a Russian propagandist. We have decades of posts by you and kiki defending Putin’s wrongs globally. He does something subhuman and you are right there supporting him or denying he did it altogether.

Like his kidnapping tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. You said he did it to save them; bullshit. Or gassing civilians in Syria, women and children. And intentionally destroying hospitals; one after the other there and in Ukraine. You comrade like Putin, are a pig.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60521&p=1#1
244047

Signym's Catholism is NOT real. The Pope is a real Catholic and does not support Russia, unlike Signym. Pope: ‘War of aggression against Ukraine is inhuman and sacrilegious.’
Pope Francis calls the war in Ukraine an act of violent aggression and a sacrilege without justification, and appeals for an end to the violence and long-term welcome of Ukrainian refugees. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2022-03/pope-francis-ukraine-w
ar-inhuman-sacrilegious.html

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 12:59 PM

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

Russian officials privately admit Putin’s system has no future

May 22, 2026, 09:20 AM

https://english.nv.ua/russian-war/russian-officials-privately-admit-pu
tin-system-has-no-future-verstka-50610201.html

Russian officials are moving their children abroad, fearing criminal cases and worrying they could lose their jobs under a future government, with some privately admitting that Vladimir Putin’s system has no future, Russian outlet Verstka reported on May 22.

The original article being summarized by the Ukrainians was written in Russian. Could it be mistranslated? Here it is:

"The jackals have flocked to the taste of blood": How the Russian elites are living in anticipation of the end of the war and the crisis of power

Officials are taking their children abroad, fearing criminal charges and job losses under the next government.

https://btvrwdbs---fuvomvkb-vaa6o7gpmq-ez.a.run.app/kak-rossiiskie-eli
ty-zhivut-v-ozhidanii-koncza-voiny-i-krizisa-vlasti

The google translation continues: "The fact that the system has no future is obvious to everyone, and we're all discussing it. But no one goes beyond stating a fact. The idea hasn't really taken off," a mid-level presidential administration official told Verstka. He added that "despite the natural thought that something needs to be done about it," they try to avoid expressing such things "even in bars and smoking rooms": "Because no one knows for sure whether anyone is a rat or not."

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 1:41 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

THGR, a specific listing of everything that you're wrong about would take forever. So, in sum:

You're brainwashed, son.

-----------

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 2:31 PM

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

Russia Uses 695 Forms of Torture Against Ukrainian POWs, Includeing Sexual Violence

By Dariia Mykhailenko | Updated May 22, 2026 20:09

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russia-uses-695-forms-of-tort
ure-against-ukrainian-pows-includeing-sexual-violence-19092

. . . Lubinets added that one of the forms of torture known as the “barber” involves deliberately cutting not only hair during shaving, but also pieces of skin from the head. He added that if a detainee begins to scream, they are immediately beaten again and subjected to electric shocks.

The ombudsman noted that international partners have identified 29 detention sites used to hold Ukrainian prisoners—18 located on the territory of the Russian Federation and 11 in temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories. At the same time, he said Ukrainian intelligence agencies have verified 186 locations where Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian hostages are being held across Russia and occupied territories, including facilities in Siberia.

According to Lubinets, detention conditions are largely similar across these sites and are not suitable for the humane treatment of prisoners.

He argued that the weak international response to documented cases of systematic torture sends Moscow a signal that such actions can continue without consequences. . . .

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 2:33 PM

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

The Circassians are commemorating the 162nd anniversary of their final subjugation and genocide by the Russian Empire in 1864, where it is estimated that between 95 and 97% of all Circassians were killed by Russians or deported under inhuman conditions to the Ottoman Empire.

Other smaller peoples, closely related to Circassians, were also targeted. The Ubykh, a small nation living in an area around modern Sochi, were deported entirely.

https://kyivindependent.com/the-anniversary-of-russias-long-forgotten-
genocide/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 2:38 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
THGR, a specific listing of everything that you're wrong about would take forever. So, in sum:

You're brainwashed, son.

-----------

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

Signym, your standard response is that your enemies are brainwashed and you have behaved well despite provocations. But that is standard for all Russians: We are not at fault; you are.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 2:39 PM

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

Russians Establish “Drone Corridors” Through Ukrainian Kill Zones

By Vikram Mittal | May 19, 2026, 06:50am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/vikrammittal/2026/05/19/russians-establis
h-drone-corridors-through-ukrainian-kill-zones/

Over the past year, the Russian offensive has effectively stalled, unable to push through Ukraine’s drone-patrolled “kill zones.” As a result, Russia has had to adopt new approaches to break through these defenses, with its current strategy centered on the creation of what can be termed “drone corridors.” These are pathways through contested areas where Russian tactical drones can operate in sufficient numbers to dominate the local airspace. The goal appears to be for these drone corridors to turn into mobility corridors that allow Russian forces to move through Ukrainian kill zones without suffering the heavy losses currently associated with direct assaults. However, while these tactics may improve Russia’s ability to penetrate Ukraine’s defenses, they have yet to produce meaningful operational gains.

Russia’s Drone Corridors

Despite Russia’s advantages in manpower, weapons, and armored vehicles, it has generally struggled with the Ukrainian kill zones. These areas are heavily patrolled by Ukrainian drones that can detect Russian formations, especially squad-sized units or larger, long before they are within range of the Ukrainian lines. Once detected, those formations are targeted with drones and artillery. These kill zones can extend several kilometers forward of Ukrainian lines and have been used extensively around urban areas such as Kostyantynivka and Chasiv Yar.

Given the effectiveness of these kill zones, the Russian military has had to move away from the large-scale armored assaults common in its doctrine. Instead, Russian forces are sending small groups of three to five soldiers into these contested areas to infiltrate the Ukrainian defenses. These teams consist primarily of drone operators, though they may include a security element. Given their size, they are able to avoid detection by Ukrainian drones. The teams move quickly to designated sites that offer cover and concealment, including basements, damaged buildings, and tree lines, where they establish forward outposts for launching and operating drones. Once established, they may deploy counter-drone systems to reduce the effectiveness of Ukrainian drones.

Russian forces are establishing a large number of these drone outposts, which collectively form drone corridors through the kill zone where Russian drones can dominate the local airspace. These forward drone outposts can then support larger Russian elements as they push through the kill zone. They launch drones to hunt for Ukrainian drone teams and artillery positions, both of which become more visible when engaging advancing Russian forces. Russian drones are also used to intercept Ukrainian drones already in flight. In addition, they can monitor and strike Ukrainian ground forces moving into position to counter the assault. These strikes have been highlighted by the Russian Ministry of Defense which has released numerous videos showing drones launching from these forward positions and destroying various Ukrainian targets in support of assault operations.

Current Russian Drone Corridors Around Kostyantynivka

Russia recently established drone corridors in Kostyantynivka, in its effort to take the city. They have spent the past year trying to seize the city as part of a broader effort to capture the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk urban belt, which anchors Ukraine’s defenses in Donetsk Oblast. Russia currently controls approximately ten percent of the city, primarily in the eastern sector. According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces are conducting infiltration missions, pushing numerous small teams of drone operators into the western portion of the city. These forward outposts, scattered throughout western Kostyantynivka, combine to form a series of drone corridors intended to support broader assaults.

While the Russian infiltration teams have established temporary footholds and are disrupting Ukrainian operations, they have not translated into meaningful operational gains. According to Ukrainian sources, Russian advances toward Kostyantynivka have slowed to approximately one kilometer per week over the past month despite the significant manpower and equipment Russia has committed to the effort.

There are several factors affecting Russia’s inability to exploit these drone corridors. One key issue is the broader battlefield picture, where Ukraine is strategically launching counterattacks to disrupt Russian operations. In particular, Ukrainian forces have launched counterattacks against Russian positions in Kostyantynivka as well as neighboring areas, including Chasiv Yar. These attacks force Russian commanders to divert forces away from offensive operations in order to defend vulnerable positions and maintain their infiltration routes.

Another key factor is resources. While Russia maintains an advantage in manpower and equipment in the region, Ukraine holds an advantage in drones. The forward Russian drone teams require a constant resupply of drones and batteries, and these resupply missions are easy targets for Ukrainian strikes. Therefore, Russian drone teams are constrained in the number of drones that they can operate compared to the Ukrainian defensive positions, which generally have larger stockpiles and more consistent resupply.

In addition to holding an advantage in drone quantity, Ukraine also maintains an edge in drone quality. Over the course of the war, Ukraine has consistently fielded a wide range of cutting-edge drone systems. Russia has generally lagged behind, most recently in interceptor drones. While Russia has developed the Yolka interceptor, which was carried by security personnel at recent public events in Moscow, these systems appear to be fielded only in limited quantities and not at a scale sufficient to support tactical operations across the front. As a result, Ukrainian drones continue contesting the airspace over these corridors, limiting Russia’s ability to fully suppress Ukrainian defenses during assaults.

Longer Term Tactical Implications Of Drone Corridors

Despite the current drone corridors not translating into operational gains for Russia, they remain Russia’s most viable approach for getting through the Ukrainian kill zones. For these drone corridors to become effective, Russia must improve its ability to sustain their forward drone teams. Russia will also need better drone systems, especially interceptor drones and more survivable reconnaissance platforms. At the same time, these improvements would need to outpace continuing Ukrainian drone developments. Ukrainian drones are increasingly integrating improved optics, allowing them to more effectively detect Russian infiltration teams and their forward drone outposts.

However, the kill zones are only one portion of Ukraine’s defenses. Even if Russian forces succeed in pushing through the kill zones, they would still face Ukraine’s layered obstacle belts and defensive fortifications. Breaching those positions would require armor and engineering assets to move forward, which would require larger and more secure drone corridors. This would become even more difficult as Ukrainian forces continue launching frequent counterattacks designed to disrupt large Russian maneuvers.

Over the past year, Russian forces have struggled with Ukraine’s drone-patrolled kill zones, where persistent surveillance and precision strikes have made maneuver difficult and costly. In response, Russia is attempting to regain battlefield mobility through the creation of drone corridors, using its own drones to dominate the local airspace and suppress Ukrainian defenses. As the war continues to evolve, both sides will find more ways to deeply integrate cutting-edge drone technology across all levels of their operations.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 6:17 PM

Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

THGR, a specific listing of everything that you're wrong about would take forever. So, in sum:

You're brainwashed, son.

-----------

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

I always bring receipts.

T

Russia's Worst Nightmare Just Happened to Crimea

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 22, 2026 6:36 PM

Clickbait thumbnails from channels you watch that are always wrong about everything are not classified as receipts.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 23, 2026 5:15 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Clickbait thumbnails from channels you watch that are always wrong about everything are not classified as receipts.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

A reminder of how Russia blundered in the first 10 days of invasion. Ukraine would have long been defeated if only Putin were better at careful planning than at sloppy murdering. Trump is even worse at careful planning. The Iran War is proof of wishfully believing in inherent superiority.

This video was originally published in March 2023 by the Imperial War Museums

Russian invasion of Ukraine: How Putin lost in 10 days

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Since the initial attack, pain, destruction and bloodshed has been caused, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions more displaced from their homes. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

According to research by the think tank RUSI, when Vladimir Putin began his invasion, he expected to take control of Ukraine within 10 days. So what went wrong? Why did his plan fail? And how close did he come to succeeding?

We answer these questions in our YouTube video below. Visit our War in Ukraine page to watch more videos from our Ukraine series. https://www.iwm.org.uk/Ukraine

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 23, 2026 5:19 AM

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

US senators press Hegseth on delayed $400 million aid package for Ukraine

By Dmytro Basmat | May 23, 2026 7:57 am

https://kyivindependent.com/us-senators-press-hegseth-on-delayed-400-m
illion-aid-package-for-ukraine/

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators urged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a May 23 letter to release a previously approved $400 million aid package for Ukraine that has been delayed for months.

The letter, spearheaded by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, comes after months of delays and mounting pressure from U.S. lawmakers for the Pentagon to release a broader $600 million security package, that includes $400 million in assistance to Ukraine and $200 million for Baltic states.

The $400 million package was approved by Congress in December 2025 but remained stalled at the Pentagon for months. Hegseth previously told the House Armed Services Committee on April 29 that the funding had been unlocked after bureaucratic hurdles were resolved. Despite promises by the Pentagon to deliver a spending plan to the Senate by May 15, senators say they have yet to receive details as to how the money will be disbursed.

"Any further delays — particularly as the Department reportedly plans troubling U.S. troops withdrawals from the region — risks our ability to adequately deter Russia," the letter read, according to the Associated Press (AP).

"Ukraine has persistently and bravely repelled a four-year Russian onslaught, but its military needs and deserves continued American support," the letter, co-signed by three Republican and three Democratic senators, continues.

Congress reauthorized the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) in December as part of a $900 billion defense spending bill, allocating $400 million annually for fiscal years 2026 and 2027 to sustain military support for Kyiv. The broader legislation also reinforced congressional oversight of Ukraine policy, including new reporting requirements if the Pentagon seeks to limit intelligence sharing or alter troop deployments in Europe.

Since his inauguration in January 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has not allocated any new defense aid packages under the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) — a tool frequently used by his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. Instead, the Trump administration has opted to sell weapons to Ukraine via NATO partners, using the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL).

On May 21, the U.S. State Department approved a $108.1 million sale of equipment to Ukraine to support the HAWK air defense missile system.

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy reported on Feb. 11 that U.S. military aid to Ukraine fell by 99% in 2025, with the European Union now providing the majority of financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, while a small group of donor countries providing most of the military aid.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 23, 2026 11:05 AM

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

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 23, 2026 2:35 PM

You are so fucking dumb, dude.

Go ahead. Ruin another weekend of yours. You don't have a lot of weekends left to waste though, old man.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 23, 2026 3:17 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 23, 2026 3:35 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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

The Oreshnik is an advanced Russian intermediate-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missile designed to travel at hypersonic speeds exceeding Mach 10 (approx. 8,000 mph). It features Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs), making it notoriously difficult to intercept and capable of delivering strikes with little to no warning.

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

The West was acutely aware of the Soviet Union’s pursuit of atomic technology. Allied intelligence had observed the Soviets actively increasing their mining and processing of uranium, with some British and American reports as early as 1948 hinting at the locations of Soviet plutonium production reactors.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 23, 2026 4:02 PM

Nobody cares about your irrational fear of Russia while you put on full display your desire for Muslims to invade America and Europe every day.

Your opinion, on any topic, doesn't matter and is not necessary.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 23, 2026 6:43 PM