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

Ukraine: Statement by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union on the occasion of the 12th anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

Council of the EU
Press release
17 July 2026 10:30

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/07/17/ukr
aine-statement-by-the-high-representative-on-behalf-of-the-european-union-on-the-occasion-of-the-12th-anniversary-of-the-downing-of-malaysia-airlines-flight-mh17/

The European Union has welcomed the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) of 9 July 2025, and the decision by the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) of 12 May 2025, that the Russian Federation is responsible for the downing of Flight MH17 and for the deaths of 298 people on board. The ECtHR also held that the Russian Federation is responsible for the additional suffering that these events have caused the next of kin.

Australia and the Netherlands requested in August 2025 that the Russian Federation immediately enter into negotiations with them in good faith to resolve expeditiously the matters of full reparation and other legal consequences arising from the Russian Federation’s breach of its international obligations under the Chicago Convention. The Russian Federation has never responded to this request. Instead, the Russian Federation filed on 18 September 2025 proceedings against Australia and the Netherlands before the International Court of Justice exercising its right of appeal against decisions of the ICAO Council.

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Saturday, July 18, 2026 6:47 AM

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Mykhailo Fedorov Transformed Ukraine's Military Into A High-Tech Force. His President Just Fired Him.

The corrupt old guard wins a critical internal fight in Kyiv.

Jul 16, 2026

https://www.trenchart.us/p/mykhailo-fedorov-transformed-ukraines

On Jan. 14, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky tapped Mykhailo Fedorov, then 34 and the country’s minister of digital transformation, to head the ministry of defense.

Six months later on July 15, Zelensky fired Fedorov and appointed Yevhenii Khmara, the head of the state security agency, to replace Federov in an acting capacity.

The move dismayed many Ukrainians and allies. Thousands gathered in Kyiv to protest the decision. In six short months, Federov had reshaped Ukraine’s war effort, primarily by cracking down on corruption inside the defense ministry and expanding the Ukrainian drone force.

At the same time, Federov had correctly identified one of the main sources of dysfunction inside the armed forces: commander-in-chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi.

The CIC has been rightly accused of cronyism. Syrskyi has funneled weapons and scarce manpower into the assault forces, a branch of the ground forces that he personally controls, and which is notorious for brutality and blunt tactics that tend to waste precious manpower.

Syrskyi has also encouraged the formation of “empty” new brigades that lack manpower or equipment but create new command billets that senior officers can dole out to loyal subordinates as a kind of reward for complicity.

At some point in the last few months, Federov pushed for Zelensky to fire Syrskyi. But Zelensky, apparently fearful of replacing a fiercely loyal commander-in-chief with a fiercely independent one, refused. “President Zelensky chose the comfort of the old, incompetent guard over change and a new vision,” wrote Tatarigami, the founder of the Frontelligence Insight analysis group. “Meanwhile, General Syrskyi remains untouchable.”

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Saturday, July 18, 2026 6:52 AM

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Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove

A rocket designer with a dubious past sets out to build a missile shield with Europe—and without America.

By Simon Shuster | July 17, 2026, 8:17 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/ukraine-denys-sh
tilerman-drone-missile/687931/

Nations don’t always get to pick their heroes, especially not in a time of war. Most Ukrainians, given the choice, would probably not want a character like Denys Shtilerman to be the architect of their revenge against Russia. He studied in Russia, became wealthy in Russia, worked for a Russian military institute, and served two stints in Russian jails. Some of his close associates are wanted in Ukraine for corruption. Yet Shtilerman, a prolific designer of weapons, has earned admiration across Europe for his role in Ukraine’s defense.

His company, Fire Point, produces the bulk of the long-range drones that Ukraine has used to bring the war to Russian soil. Scores of them roll off the company’s production lines each day to be launched into Russia by night. Its missiles reach as far as Siberia, more than 1,000 miles away. The campaign of strikes, mostly targeting oil refineries and other energy infrastructure, has humiliated the Kremlin, snarled the logistics of its military, and forced many millions of Russians to suffer through rampant shortages of fuel.

For the first time in years, Ukraine appears to have Russia on the ropes, and no supplier of weapons, foreign or domestic, is doing more than Shtilerman to keep it there. His ambitions go far beyond Ukraine. In several interviews this year in Kyiv, he told me about his plans to change the global balance of power by developing cheap and effective missile technology. Above all, he wants to help Europe build its own missile-defense shield without relying on the United States. “What’s horrible is that America, even before Trump, was a completely unreliable partner and ally,” Shtilerman said this winter during a tour of his missile factory near Kyiv. “We want to be independent of all suppliers, especially the Americans.”

At a gathering on Monday in Paris, the leaders of nine European countries formalized their plans to build such a system alongside Ukraine: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, all members of the NATO alliance. In announcing what they called their Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition, these nations said in a joint statement: “We acknowledge the unique experience of Ukraine, gained in defence against Russia’s war of aggression.” Ukraine, they said, would be a founding partner in the missile shield.

Shtilerman has spent more than a year laying the ground for this system; he prefers to use its code name, Project Freyja, after the Norse goddess of beauty, love, death, and war. In February, he showed me the missile, known as the FP-7x, developed to serve as the basis for Freyja. “This is what the very autonomy we’ve been talking about for years looks like,” Shtilerman wrote in response to Monday’s announcement in Paris. “It’s not America that decides whether Europe can defend itself. Europe is building its own shield.”

The project illustrates how Europe has reacted to President Trump’s threats against NATO, such as his desire to seize Greenland and annex Canada. Denmark, which has faced the most aggressive rhetoric from Trump of any NATO member, has also been the most intent on working with Ukraine and, in particular, with Fire Point. But it’s not alone. By developing their own arms industries and forming new defensive coalitions, many European states have sought to ease their reliance on the U.S. for their security. The shift has made Ukraine a valued partner.

It has also marked a dramatic reversal of fortunes for Shtilerman. Earlier this year, his company got mixed up in one of the worst corruption scandals in Ukraine’s recent history. Shtilerman has not been accused of breaking the law, but anti-corruption investigators are reviewing some of his contracts with the military. Amid the scrutiny, Shtilerman has continued signing production deals and joint ventures with European defense firms, which seem undeterred by all of the controversies.

Some of the points on Shtilerman’s résumé, in particular his ties to Russia, would be enough to tank the career of another Ukrainian businessman. He told me, for example, that he worked in the early 2000s for the Moscow defense institute that produces Vladimir Putin’s “little nuclear suitcase,” which the Russian president would use in a crisis to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. When I asked Shtilerman why he would share this information with a journalist, he shrugged and said that, given his role in the missile industry, all of his secrets would come out eventually. It would be better, he said, for the public to get the dirt from him and not from Russian leaks and character assassins.

In that sense, his disclosures could give him some immunity from further scandal. But he also seems to believe that his success has made him indispensable, not only to Ukraine but also to the rest of Europe. “We have a chance right now, working together, to gain our independence from America and burn down the Russian empire,” he said. “We’re not going to miss it just because of all the crap people say about me.”

The last time we met, on a humid night at the end of May, Shtilerman had just returned to Kyiv from testing the guidance system of his Wunderwaffe, the FP-7x. A group of engineers from Fire Point had loaded the rocket into a long-haul truck and driven it down to the Black Sea coast that morning. Shtilerman had followed in a chauffeured van. In the evening, he sent me a video of the missile taking off from a dirt road surrounded by farmland, its engine leaving a trail of white smoke in the sky.

The test failed, he later told me, because Fire Point had neglected to control the work of its contractors. “Now we’re imposing those controls, and we’re installing cameras to watch what they do.” He did not seem all that disappointed. After the launch, he took off his T-shirt and went for a swim in the Black Sea before making the drive back to Kyiv. We met up that night for a walk in a city park, with Shtilerman’s bodyguards following along.

Calls to assassinate him have appeared on Russian state TV in recent months. “I sleep each night in a different place,” he said. It was close to midnight, and he claimed not to know where he would crash once we finished talking. “Wherever they take me,” he said, glancing around at the security detail, “that’s where I’ll go.”

None of the guards looked more intimidating than their charge. Tall and muscular, Shtilerman carries himself with a kind of impatient menace that makes his employees go stiff around him. Once, when I noted that his biceps must require a lot of time at the gym, he answered without hesitation: “People with a high IQ find that most things come easy. You get used to achieving your goals in no time. Exercise is the antidote. It teaches you that not everything can be achieved in a second.”

His achievements in the field of rocket science have come astonishingly fast. Fire Point emerged after the Russian invasion in 2022, when the company set out to design Ukraine’s most effective long-range attack drones. According to Shtilerman, it now churns out roughly 200 a day. Each one carries enough explosives to blast through a wall of reinforced concrete and, when launched from Ukraine, can hit any point in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Last summer, Fire Point unveiled its first cruise missile, the Flamingo, and now produces up to three of them a day. Fired from the back of a truck, the weapon reaches roughly twice as far as its American counterpart, the Tomahawk, and carries a much larger payload. It also costs about half as much to produce, in part because Flamingos use jet engines repurposed from old Soviet airplanes. The design choice makes the missiles look strange, their rear end bulging. But Shtilerman doesn’t care about aesthetics. He uses the cheapest components available.

At one of his factories, he showed me a stack of fuselages for his drones, pointing out that the wings were filled with what looked like Styrofoam. “They aren’t made to last,” he said. “They need to fly for 15 hours. Anything beyond that is a waste of money.” In another part of the facility, the screams of industrial machinery made talking difficult, and the fumes from hot epoxy filled the air. Most missiles, like the Tomahawk, are made of aluminum alloys and other metals. Here a team of engineers used strands of carbon fiber to form the body of a rocket, which looked like a mummy being wrapped in ribbons of plastic.

Various branches of Ukraine’s armed forces have launched thousands of Fire Point drones and dozens of its missiles. After several of the most dramatic strikes—against Russian oil refineries, military airfields, weapons factories—President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the company and its engineers. But in some cases, Shtilerman told me, the military has kept quiet about the source of its missiles, not wanting to associate itself with him or his company. Following one strike in February, he said, “We had to convince them to announce that it was Fire Point.”

A lot of the controversy surrounding Shtilerman comes down to a question of fairness: Did he achieve success through hard work and ingenuity, or did he use his connections to gain an edge? Shtilerman admitted to me that a mix of these factors had allowed his company to pull ahead.

By Shtilerman’s account, Fire Point got off the ground with a few million dollars of his own fortune, which he earned in Russia, mostly through real-estate deals. In 2023, during the second year of the war, he bankrolled the creation of his first long-range drone. The weapon, known as the FP-1, gained attention the following spring, when it earned top marks in a competition for drone makers. Various suitors then offered to buy the company from Shtilerman, he said, including some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen. Among them was Tymur Mindich.

Mindich, an old friend of Zelensky’s, is now a wanted fugitive in Ukraine, hiding out in Israel to escape arrest on charges of large-scale corruption. His ties with the president go back decades. During Zelensky’s early career in show business, Mindich co-owned the production company that made the future president’s movies and TV shows. They remained close after Zelensky took office, in 2019, and they stayed in touch after the Russian invasion.

Shtilerman knew about their relationship; it had been widely reported in the media. In the spring of 2024, when Mindich sought to invest in Fire Point, Shtilerman asked him for a political favor. He told me that he needed the state to grant him access to blueprints for Soviet-era missile technology, which was stored in classified archives in Ukraine. “I didn’t care how this got done,” he told me. “I just needed to get it done.” (Mindich’s lawyers in Israel did not respond to emails seeking comment.)

According to Shtilerman, Mindich used his political connections to pry open those archives in 2024, making them available to a group of Ukrainian companies, Fire Point among them. The files included instructions for how to make the S-300 missile system, a centerpiece of Russia’s air defenses inherited from the Soviet Union. Those blueprints proved useful to Fire Point in learning how to clone Russia’s more advanced missile system, the S-400, which formed the basis for the FP-7x.

By the end of 2024, Shtilerman said he’d agreed to sell half of his company to Mindich for $100 million, a discount of 20 percent from its estimated value at the time. Before they could finalize the sale, Shtilerman told me, a foreign bidder appeared with a more enticing offer. Edge Group, a defense conglomerate from the United Arab Emirates, wanted to buy a third of the company for $780 million. Shtilerman maintains that neither sale went through.

While the talks were under way last year, Mindich was under investigation for serious crimes. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, a law-enforcement agency known as NABU, had bugged Mindich’s apartment in Kyiv, and detectives picked up his conversations about Fire Point. In one intercepted call that was later leaked to the press, Mindich had told the defense minister about the proposed sale of a large stake in the company. Their conversation did not identify the buyer. But Mindich talked about Fire Point as though he already controlled it and stood to profit from its sale.

Not long after that conversation, police raided Mindich’s apartment. NABU accused him of masterminding a scheme to extort millions of dollars from companies in the electricity sector. The case had nothing to do with Fire Point, but anyone associated with Mindich suddenly came under suspicion. Hours before detectives came to arrest him, on the morning of November 10, Mindich fled the country. Ukrainian journalists later tracked him down in Israel. In an interview with Ukrainska Pravda filmed on a beach in Tel Aviv, he denied all of the charges against him, and he insisted that he’d never owned a stake in Fire Point.

When I asked Shtilerman about this, he stuck to the same story. Nearly all of the company’s shares—97.5 percent, according to corporate records—belong to Shtilerman. But the leaked recording of Mindich’s phone call created widespread suspicions in Ukraine that he secretly owns the company, and that Shtilerman is just a front.

Despite all of the damage that Mindich’s case has done to Fire Point’s reputation, Shtilerman holds no grudge against him. “I can’t say anything bad about Mindich,” he said. “First off, he loves his mom. He’s very charming. He helped us out, all the way to hell and back, without asking anything in return. He helped Fire Point.”

Since the end of last year, Shtilerman has faced the corruption scandal head-on, addressing it during numerous podcast and TV interviews. His strategy appears to be a kind of radical transparency, revealing details about his past in Russia that other businessmen might go to great lengths to hide.

His first stint in a Moscow jail, Shtilerman told me, resulted from his involvement in one of Russia’s most notorious financial schemes. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the state privatized many of its enterprises by handing out shares to the people who worked in them. Many of these workers sold their shares for pennies to a class of savvy entrepreneurs, who thus gained ownership of entire industries on the cheap. The deals defined one of the ugliest chapters of Russia’s transition to capitalism in the 1990s. The newly minted millionaires fought one another for control of the privatized assets. Many of these battles played out in fits of gangland violence. Some businessmen used corrupt cops and judges as weapons in their corporate wars.

Shtilerman, then living in Moscow under the name Denis Danilov, had earned a small fortune in the software business, and he told me that he had used it to buy up millions of dollars’ worth of shares in a privatized oil company. In 1999, he said, a rival oligarch tried to steal those shares from him. When Shtilerman refused to hand them over, he was arrested and spent the next two years in Butyrka, a crowded pretrial detention facility near the center of Moscow. “I’ve spent so much time in smoke-filled cells that cigarettes don’t bother me anymore,” he said about this period in his life.

Upon his release, his main asset in the job market seemed to be his diploma from one of Russia’s elite technical universities. It helped him find work at a defense institute in Moscow that, according to Shtilerman, develops computer systems and communications gear for the Russian military, including Putin’s nuclear briefcase. He worked at the institute until 2008, when he resigned in protest over the Russian invasion of Georgia, he said. For about a decade afterward, he invested in real-estate deals in Moscow, amassing about 12,000 hectares of land in its suburbs and another “few thousand hectares” in the city itself, he said. That amount of property would likely be worth billions of dollars.

One of these deals, involving the purchase of land from a bankrupt chicken farm, got Shtilerman locked up again in 2018, according to Russian court documents that he shared with me. He remained behind bars for about six months before the authorities agreed to release him without charge. The following year, he moved to Ukraine, the country of his birth, and started using the name Shtilerman. (The change, he told me, reversed a decision made by his father, who tried to protect the family from anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union by using a Russian-sounding surname, Danilov, rather than their Jewish name.)

Once settled in Kyiv, “I didn’t get involved in business,” Shtilerman said. “So that I would not have to pay bribes and deal with our local beau monde.” He said that his ex-wife and their two children remained in Moscow while he focused on passion projects and philanthropy in Ukraine. In 2021, he worked with a young architect named Iryna Terekh on a plan to develop and beautify public spaces in Kyiv. When the Russian invasion started the following year, the two of them became co-founders of Fire Point, and Terekh served first as the company’s chief technology officer and later became its CEO.

Shtilerman ran the operation from behind the scenes. To protect his ex-wife and children in Russia, he said, he hid his ownership during the first three years of the company’s existence. Journalists dug up his links to Fire Point only last summer. The Kyiv Independent reported in August that anti-corruption investigators in Ukraine were looking into whether Mindich owned the company, and it identified Shtilerman as an early investor in Fire Point.

The report forced him out of the shadows. After its publication, he rushed to evacuate his family from Moscow. Shtilerman feared that his ex-wife would be arrested and their kids placed in an orphanage if the Russian authorities discovered their ties to one of Ukraine’s top arms manufacturers. “I moved them elsewhere,” he said. “Bought them a house.”

Based on the offer from the United Arab Emirates, the value of Fire Point could be well over $2 billion. But Shtilerman declined to sell the stake, he told me, in part because of Project Freyja: He wagered that his collaboration with the Europeans could soon make his company even more valuable. No other arms manufacturer in Ukraine, let alone a start-up, has had nearly the same success. Some of Fire Point’s competitors in the defense sector have complained that through his political connections, Shtilerman had an unfair advantage.

“The stratospheric growth of Fire Point has two key reasons: the lobbying of senior officials who generously stuffed money into an unknown start-up, and the blatantly high prices that gave the company’s owners exorbitant profits,” Yuri Kasyanov, the developer of a rival drone, wrote in a column published in May.

Shtilerman dismisses such attacks as bellyaching. His most basic long-range drone, the FP-1, costs the military about $55,000, within the same price range as its Russian counterpart. In a letter to Fire Point in May, NABU said the company’s owners are not suspects in any of the agency’s investigations. But, as part of a broader probe of defense contracts, the pricing of some of its drones remains under review, according to the letter.

Even amid the scrutiny, the Defense Ministry continues to do business with Fire Point. So do Ukraine’s European allies. In March, the Danish government partnered with Fire Point on the construction of a factory to make fuel for its missiles. To clear the way for another collaboration with the company last year, Denmark reportedly bypassed more than 20 of its own laws and regulations. Hensoldt, a major defense firm in Germany, announced a project with Fire Point last month to develop the antiballistic-missile system. On Monday, France agreed to license Ukraine to produce French-designed cruise missiles and air-defense interceptors as part of the coalition to develop a joint missile shield.

Last week, at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, Trump made a similar pledge. He told Zelensky that the U.S. would grant a license for Ukraine to produce Patriot interceptors, one of the most effective weapons in the world for shooting down ballistic missiles. The day of that announcement, Shtilerman told me that Fire Point would be ready to make Patriots in Ukraine. But the challenge could take years, and it will not distract him from working with the Europeans on a missile shield free of American components. “The principle is simple,” he told me. “Let’s make a missile shield that no one can shut off, that can make us independent and secure.” That is to say: secure from Russia, and independent of the United States.

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

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Saturday, July 18, 2026 11:59 AM

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

CIA Director Says AI Drones Reduce Russian Recruits’ Battlefield Lifespan to Minutes

In brief: CIA Director John Ratcliffe reported that Ukrainian artificial intelligence-guided drones have reduced the average battlefield survival time of new Russian recruits to 20-30 minutes. Speaking at a defense summit, Ratcliffe noted these cost-effective systems help Ukraine counter Russia’s manpower advantage, as US officials estimate Russian losses at 7,000 soldiers weekly.

By Kyiv Post | July 18, 2026, 1:55 pm

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/80579

. . . Ratcliffe’s remarks coincide with reports that Washington and its allies are evaluating new funding mechanisms for Ukrainian drone development programs, with the objective of gaining access to Kyiv’s AI targeting technologies.

Integration of Ukrainian combat data into global AI systems

The push to access combat-tested AI systems is already evident among allied nations and defense contractors.

The Australian Army recently tested the Vector AI reconnaissance drone during the Southern Jackaroo exercises in Queensland. Manufactured by the German company Quantum Systems, the platform utilizes software refined through extensive combat deployment in Ukraine.

The electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) drone features AI data processing capabilities that generate real-time terrain maps and autonomously track targets. Quantum Systems reported that thousands of flight hours in Ukraine provided the necessary data to adapt the platform to operate effectively in complex electronic warfare environments.

Corporal Harrison Hinson of the Australian Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment stated the system functions as an additional tool for intelligence and strike capabilities, reducing the need for forward physical reconnaissance by military personnel.

In the private sector, US-based data-labeling firm Enabled Intelligence recently released an AI training dataset containing 500,000 hours of drone footage recorded during the war in Ukraine. The full-motion video library includes pre-labeled imagery covering aerial object detection and vehicle classification.

Enabled Intelligence CEO Peter Kant stated the dataset is intended to train autonomous military systems using unsimulated combat footage, reducing the time required to validate imagery. The dataset is currently accessible to approved users in the US, Ukraine, and NATO member states.

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

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Saturday, July 18, 2026 12:48 PM

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

Russia bet 50 vehicles that the drones would miss. The drones did not miss.

Russian commanders had banned their own vehicles from these roads, knowing what the drones do to them. Then they lined up 50 and sent them anyway.

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/07/15/50-russian-vehicles-hit/

1. Why did Russian commanders line up more than 50 vehicles just a few kilometers south of the gray zone in Donetsk Oblast?
2. The vehicles were easy prey for Ukrainian drones
3. Occupied Ukraine is becoming more dangerous by the day for all Russian vehicles

The Russian force in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles and shifted to infantry-led assaults across the drone-patrolled gray zone.

Which is why what happened on or just before 8 July is so bewildering. Despite Russian commanders concluding that vehicles are too easy for Ukraine's tiny first-person-view drones to find and strike, and despite a reported ban on Russian vehicular traffic on eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Ring Road, the Russian Center Group of Forces massed no fewer than 50 vehicles 12 km south of the gray zone stretching between Kostiantynivka and Toretske in Donetsk Oblast.

The outcome was predictable. Drones from the Ukrainian State Security Service's Ivan Franko Group detected and attacked the column of trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles just south of the ring road near the village of Malynivka, an important base for Russian forces fighting in Donetsk Oblast. When the smoke and dust cleared, more than 50 vehicles had been hit and immobilized if not destroyed.

"Despite the ban on movement of cargo and military transport on the Donetsk Ring Road, IFG with a firm hand and drones that you donated 'detained' several violators," the Ivan Franko Group quipped.

It's unclear how many Russians were killed or wounded. But the Center Group of Forces clearly failed at whatever it was trying to achieve—and the assembly of the column, in daylight, within drone reach, is the puzzle. Russian commanders knew what the sky over the gray zone does to vehicles. They sent the column anyway.

It's possible the column was trying to reach the Donetsk Ring Road in order to turn west toward Toretske or east toward Kostiantynivka. Russian forces are attacking in both directions, aiming to break through Ukrainian defenses to open a path, any path, toward the twin free cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, 22 km north of Kostiantynivka.

Left or right?

Whether the Russians planned on investing those vehicles in a direct assault in either direction is anyone's guess. It's possible the column was merely transporting infantry closer to the gray zone, sparing them a long foot march ahead of a dangerous foot assault.

But it's also possible that, yes, the Russians meant to send the trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles across the gray zone. Vehicular assaults are rare these days, but they still happen from time to time. They almost never succeed. There are just too many drones over and behind the gray zone.

Indeed, the vehicular kill zone is getting wider by the day as Ukraine deploys more and more drones for strikes on Russian supply lines at depths up to 200 km. The Ukrainian counterlogistics campaign that kicked off this spring has struck potentially thousands of Russian trucks as well as trains, bridges, and, more recently, cargo ships plying the Sea of Azov and Black Sea hauling critical war supplies.

The Russians are now adding anti-drone cages to some trucks and guarding the most important convoys and supply routes with gun-armed air defense teams. More convoys are taking back roads, hoping to escape the attention of the ever-present drones.

But these measures aren't working as more Ukrainian drones take flight, including $6,000 AI-assisted fixed-wing models and $500 first-person-view quadcopters with detachable wings for greater range. Scrutinizing official videos for evidence of drone strikes, mapper Clément Molin tallied 600 destroyed or damaged Russian cargo trucks in June and another 240 in just the first week of July.

Importantly, Molin only counted confirmed strikes. There are surely many others that don't leave behind clear, public video evidence.

The pace of strikes is increasing even as the Russians add anti-drone protections. There were 20 hits on Russian trucks every day in June, on average, and 34 hits every day in July. The strike near the Donetsk Ring Road occurred too late to be included in Molin's count. When he adds it, the daily average will be higher still.

All that is to say, more of occupied Ukraine is becoming steadily more hostile to Russian vehicles. Knowing that, why would the Russians line up 50 vehicles so close to the gray zone? On the evidence near Malynivka, they no longer have a good answer.

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

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Saturday, July 18, 2026 8:58 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
CIA Director Says AI Drones Reduce Russian Recruits’ Battlefield Lifespan to Minutes

In brief: CIA Director John Ratcliffe reported that Ukrainian artificial intelligence-guided drones have reduced the average battlefield survival time of new Russian recruits to 20-30 minutes. Speaking at a defense summit, Ratcliffe noted these cost-effective systems help Ukraine counter Russia’s manpower advantage, as US officials estimate Russian losses at 7,000 soldiers weekly.

By Kyiv Post | July 18, 2026, 1:55 pm

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/80579

. . . Ratcliffe’s remarks coincide with reports that Washington and its allies are evaluating new funding mechanisms for Ukrainian drone development programs, with the objective of gaining access to Kyiv’s AI targeting technologies.

Oh look!

Another get-rich-quick scheme!

This is a load of bollocks.

-----------

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

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Saturday, July 18, 2026 9:48 PM

As long as we're talking about Russians, they're just fucking numbers, right?

What's 7,000 men dying weekly?

Now do Iran.

Let's see how many lefty retarded faggots start screaming about 7,000 Iranians dying every week for over 2 years.

Seriously. Fuck you, Second.

Everybody hates you.

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

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

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Sunday, July 19, 2026 6:50 AM

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

Putin, Gerasimov, and other senior Russian commanders have routinely advanced claims that intend to convince Russians, Ukrainians, and the West that a Russian victory in Ukraine is inevitable.[7] These claims of advance continue to portray Putin’s fabricated reality, which significantly differs from that portrayed by all available evidence.

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive
-campaign-assessment-july-18-2026/

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

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Sunday, July 19, 2026 6:51 AM

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

How food delivery works in Ukraine’s ‘killing zone’

In the breadbasket of the world, people on the front lines can’t access food without the help of U.N. convoys outrunning Russian drones.

By Bartosz Brzezinski | July 18, 2026 4:00 am CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-front-line-food-crisis-un-conv
oys-russian-drones/

Ukraine's farms grew some 60 million metric tons of grain this year, enough to help feed hundreds of millions of people abroad. Yet along the country's own front line, 700,000 Ukrainians depend for their next meal on U.N. convoys that barely stop moving.

The trucks roll through whole cities draped in anti-drone netting, mesh strung over roads and rooftops like the covers on fruit trees. They pause just long enough for families to hurry out and grab a box, then move on.

They cannot linger, because Russian drones now strike vehicles and people across a "killing zone" that reaches 50 kilometers from the front. That’s up from 10 to 15 kilometers not long ago, according to the World Food Programme's acting chief Carl Skau, speaking to POLITICO in Brussels after a week visiting front-line operations from Kharkiv to Odesa. . . .

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

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Sunday, July 19, 2026 6:57 AM

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

Weekend Update #194: The Worst Week For Ukraine In Years. Can It Become The Best?

An update on Ukraine and Patriots; Moscow and Kyiv

Phillips P. OBrien
Jul 19, 2026

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-194-the-worst-we
ek

. . . Fedorov did not start from a blank sheet. Ukrainian strategy had been moving in this direction before he became defense minister. There had been an understanding of the importance of increasing drone production, of decreasing Ukrainian casualties and raising Russian ones under accelerated attrition, of the importance of the long-range/mid-range strike campaign, etc. However, he understood all of it and provided energy and direction that had been lacking. And, unlike earlier defense ministers, he was willing to go after corruption—hard. He also brought in the most ambitious attempt to improve the pay and conditions for Ukrainian soldiers that has ever been attempted.

All of this brought him into conflict with older, Soviet-influenced elements in the armed forces, most prominently Syrskyi. The two looked at the war completely differently. Syrskyi wanted more soldiers for tactical operations to fight over every village, and Fedorov looked at the big picture. . . .

In firing Fedorov and protecting Syrskyi last week, Zelensky was once again showing his worst side as a war leader. He was protecting loyal incompetence over what was better for the country. There can be no sugarcoating of the pill on this.

Fedorov, thankfully, chose not to go quietly. When his dismissal was made clear, he gave a press conference in which he outlined his vision point by point and described what he was trying to achieve. Here is an English-language translation of the press conference, which really is too long and detailed to quote, but provides a great glimpse into why he was so important. . . .

The dissension in the armed forces seems to have been extremely worrying for Zelensky. Many of the best and most effective units had members willing to speak up against Syrskyi and for Fedorov—and at the same time, Syrskyi was pressuring them to support him.

This really is a crucial moment. The firing of Fedorov, if it is allowed to stand along with the keeping of Syrskyi, will not mean that Ukraine will lose the war. However, it will mean higher casualties, more corruption, less flexibility, and more Soviet-style thinking. I can think of nothing worse.

So right now, as I am writing, we are still facing the worst week of the war as we have:

Fedorov out and Syrskyi in.

However, the mood music seems to be heading to—Fedorov back in some position and Syrskyi under threat. If things evolve into:

Fedorov back and Syrskyi out—it will be the best week for Ukraine in years.

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

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Sunday, July 19, 2026 4:45 PM

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

Analysis: Why many Ukrainians feel Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi must go

By Francis Farrell | July 19, 2026 9:27 PM

16 minutes read

Listen to this article 22 minutes.

https://kyivindependent.com/analysis-why-ukrainians-feel-commander-in-
chief-syrskyi-must-go-2/

"Fedorov = more Russian deaths;
Syrskyi = more Ukrainian deaths."

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

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Monday, July 20, 2026 5:57 AM

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

Fighter Jets Are Passé

The future of warfare is drones, clearly.

By Phillips Payson O’Brien | July 18, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/us-military-tech-drones/6879
45/

In the interwar period, some military officers did not believe the combustion-engine vehicle would replace the horse for combat operations. Cavalry officers from around the world, including the United States and United Kingdom, argued strongly against trading their lovely mounts for new tanks. Many insisted that heavy armored vehicles could never conquer the hilly terrains in which horses thrived.

In 1925, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the World War I commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, described the new airplanes and tanks as “only accessories” to warfare that would still be determined by “man and horse.” In 1938, Brigadier General Hamilton S. Hawkins, a prominent American crusader for horses in combat, lamented the “sheep-like rush to mechanization.”

These arguments ensured that the U.S. and British militaries kept mounted cavalry units until the outbreak of World War II. But when the horse came up against the tank, even the most strident defenses of a horse-bound army became an embarrassing footnote in military history.

The world’s biggest militaries, most notably that of the United States, are now at a similar turning point. The deployment of cheap unmanned vehicles on a mass scale, in the war between Russia and Ukraine and more recently in the U.S. war with Iran, has revealed the vulnerability of hugely expensive tanks, aircraft, and ships and the near impossibility of making major advances by infantry on the ground. Yet Western militaries have failed to reckon with these innovations in warfare, planning and spending as if nothing new is afoot.

In 2024, Brigadier General Douglas Wickert, the U.S. Air Force official in charge of AI piloting technology, insisted that robotized warfare was still “centuries” away. A few weeks ago, the Department of Defense requested more than $5 billion to cover just the 2027 fiscal-year costs of its next generation of manned combat aircraft, the Boeing F-47. At about $300 million a jet, the F-47 is the most expensive fighter in the world. Flight tests aren’t expected to start until after 2031.

The U.S. isn’t the only major military sinking enormous sums into legacy systems. The French and Germans are designing a new tank, which is not slated to be ready until 2040. The Chinese are similarly continuing their buildup of massively armed and staffed aircraft carriers, and will soon start work on the largest nuclear aircraft carrier in the world.

Yet the lessons of the wars before us are that cheaper, nonhuman piloted systems are changing the balance of fighting. The future will be dominated by weapons of war that do not have a human onboard. These include cruise and ballistic missiles, a long-familiar category of weapons that can effectively attack targets anywhere in the air, on land, or in water. More and more, warfare will also include unmanned ground vehicles, which can fight, deliver goods, and evacuate the wounded; sea drones, which threaten ships and containers around the world; and unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, which Ukraine, Russia, China, Israel, and the U.S. are making by the millions.

By still spending so much on conventional manned equipment, the United States and many other countries are diverting funds from more efficient systems. Placing a human in a tank or plane makes these vehicles larger, more easily trackable, and trickier to deploy than their unmanned counterparts. Adding a human to a cockpit requires many more millions of dollars in cost, including small items such as the explosive bolts needed to launch ejector seats and specialized helmets. The helmets worn by F-35 pilots, for instance, were so expensive to develop and build that they are estimated to have cost up to $700,000 each.

Like most bureaucracies, militaries can be resistant to change. Procurement officers would rather stick to familiar ideas and actions. Defense contractors would prefer to keep building what they know how to make, and lawmakers want to preserve jobs in their districts. Defense-industry leaders have moved quickly to dismiss the ways that drone technology is reshaping the battlefield in Ukraine.

Taking the human out of the cockpit does not take humans out of the fight; it just puts them in a safer place. The Ukrainians, for example, made strides in their war against Russia when they reduced the number of human soldiers on the front line and turned over much of the fighting to remotely controlled systems. By some accounts, drones are responsible for more than 90 percent of Russia’s losses.

Questions over whether autonomous vehicles and weapons are handy supplemental tools or disruptive innovations are in keeping with a long-running debate over what constitutes a revolution in military affairs. The notion that modern technology was radically changing the battlefield originated with Soviet military planners—who noticed in the 1970s that Western equipment incorporated more electronic advances than their own did—but gained particular force in 1991 after the lopsided results of the first Gulf War, in which the U.S. used precision-guided weaponry to swiftly defeat the large and supposedly well-armed Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein.

A growing faith in the focused, targeted lethality of a digitized battlefield helped convince the United States that it could indefinitely rely on its technical lead to win future battles—despite the evidence otherwise in Iraq and Afghanistan. Throughout most of the post-9/11 wars, the U.S. military focused on counterinsurgency warfare—a lower-intensity form of combat than in the first Gulf War or the 2003 invasion of Iraq—and deployed drones of its own. But the Pentagon’s confidence in its priciest, most complex weapons systems went unabated.

Sadly, subsequent experience has done little to curb the U.S. military’s smug complacency. Even as less-expensive drones have been wreaking havoc for years in Ukraine and Russia, the U.S. has seemed to think that its military is far too strong and technologically advanced to have to learn any new rules of warfare from the Ukrainians. This blinkered thinking about the superiority of America’s military is also what left President Trump insufficiently prepared in his war against Iran.

The growing role of machines that are operated by a human at a distance—or programmed to operate autonomously—represents a fundamental “de-humanizing” of war. This has enormous implications for how wars start, end, and are waged. Instead of wasting time and resources debating whether future military systems should be manned or not, the U.S. military and others should be wrestling with the degree to which unmanned systems should remain under direct human control or be guided by artificial intelligence.

Autonomous AI-controlled weapons are developing apace as well. By crunching massive amounts of data in a short time, AI can help identify and strike enemy targets. The U.S. has claimed to have used such weapons in the bombing of Iran. The Ukrainians have announced a new air-defense system that can operate completely autonomously from launch, and can make its own “decisions” on how best to attack a Russian target.

Such innovations challenge conventional assumptions about air superiority. Cheap Iranian drones have been effectively targeting American bases in the Persian Gulf, regardless of the patrolling of fancy F-35 jets. Digital advances also raise pressing questions about the ethics of outsourcing life-and-death decisions to machines. These are the discussions we should be having. The nature of war has changed, and countries that fail to acknowledge it run the risk of sounding like nostalgic defenders of a mounted cavalry—and of being left behind.

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

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Monday, July 20, 2026 10:53 AM

THG

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

SECOND, Gilligan says everybody hates you. He says that to me too. Since he is a narcissist; I think it is safe to say he is everybody.

T

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Monday, July 20, 2026 4:07 PM

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

Ukraine's MoD unveils new guided munition with 800-meter release altitude

What is the new class of munitions designed for?

By Kateryna Shkarlat | Mon, July 20, 2026 - 18:45

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/ukraine-s-mod-unveils-new-guided-munit
ion-1784561244.html

Ukraine's Ministry of Defense has developed and successfully tested a new class of guided munitions called Firefly. The cutting-edge weapon is expected to enter serial production in the near future.

Firefly's features and effectiveness

Firefly munitions are designed to strike some of the most challenging targets, including enemy bunkers, fortifications, and other protected positions. The system was tested on Ukraine's main bomber drones, where it demonstrated high effectiveness.

Key features and advantages include:

• Operating at altitudes of up to 800 meters.

• After release, the munition independently calculates and adjusts its flight path to the target.

• Maintains high accuracy even in the presence of enemy electronic warfare (EW) systems.

• Enables the destruction of enemy positions from a safe stand-off distance for the carrier platform.

Technology transfer to private manufacturers

The path to mass production of Firefly was opened by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 1310, adopted on October 13, 2025. The document allows the Ministry of Defense to transfer technology usage rights to private defense companies.

As a result, manufacturers and innovators within the Brave1 platform can now help scale up production of the munitions and integrate the ready-made technology into their own manufacturing processes.

As previously reported, the Ukrainian military is set to receive more than 22,000 new ground robotic systems for various missions. Since the beginning of 2026, procurement volumes have already nearly doubled the total purchased throughout the entire previous year.

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

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Monday, July 20, 2026 5:31 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

SECOND, Gilligan says everybody hates you. He says that to me too. Since he is a narcissist; I think it is safe to say he is everybody.

T

No. Everybody hates the both of you. Just the both of you.

And Shit Golem hates you too, Ted Bundy Clone.

You're just too fucking stupid to pick up on it.

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

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

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Monday, July 20, 2026 10:23 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No. Everybody hates the both of you. Just the both of you.

Two things I love about Putin and Trump:

1) Putin and Trump increase my gross profit, thanks to increasing fuel prices from wars they started.

2) Putin kills Putin-loving Russians, and Trump kills Trumptards, thanks to their self-delusions of being superior leaders and their grotesquely inferior leadership abilities.

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

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Monday, July 20, 2026 11:54 PM

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

No. Everybody hates the both of you. Just the both of you.
Two things I love about Putin and Trump:

1) Putin and Trump increase my gross profit, thanks to increasing fuel prices from wars they started.

As you've alleged before. Hundreds of times by now.

We're all very happy for your your fake internet persona, Shit Golem.

Quote:
2) Putin kills Putin-loving Russians, and Trump kills Trumptards, thanks to their self-delusions of being superior leaders and their grotesquely inferior leadership abilities.

Who is getting killed, Shit Golem?

Be specific.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 7:16 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:

Who is getting killed, Shit Golem?

Be specific.

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

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

6ix, don't you remember almost being dead from a lung infection? What happens to you when Medicaid ends for the unemployed in Indiana? You gonna get a Trump-approved job before that happens? (In Russia, that Putin-approved job would be fighting in Ukraine)

Coming January 1, 2027- HIP Work Requirements
Beginning January 1, 2027, new federal and state Medicaid laws will require some Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) members between the ages of 19 and 64 to meet work, volunteer, training, or education requirements to keep their coverage. More information about these changes and your coverage will be coming soon. For information on HIP work requirements, please visit https://www.in.gov/fssa/

To beat a dead horse: 6ix, your next health crisis (infection|diabetes|alcoholism|drugs|bi-polar freakout|etc) ends with your death if you are without Medicaid.

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

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 7:17 AM

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

Not much happening, other than the wrong guy got fired:

Fedorov would reject every role but a return as defense minister, NV source says

By Alex Stezhensky | July 20, 2026, 10:24 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/fedorov-hoche-povernutisya-lishe-na-posad
u-ministra-oboroni-i-inshiy-variantiv-ne-rozglyadaye-50625845.html

Former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov plans to reject any position President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may offer unless Zelenskyy offers to reinstate him as defense minister, a source close to Fedorov told NV.

Fedorov had reportedly been offered a position on the National Security and Defense Council with direct access to the president and authority to oversee defense innovation and military reform. Other proposals included serving as a military technology coordinator, or “miltech czar,” and becoming deputy prime minister with responsibility for defense.

The source said Fedorov would most likely reject all three proposals.

Fedorov’s communications chief, Snizhana Rakcheieva, meanwhile, told NV that his former deputies remained in their posts.

Oksana Ferchuk was the only one to move, becoming digital transformation minister. Serhiy Boiev had been appointed acting head of Ukroboronprom before the latest government changes.

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

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 10:57 AM

THG

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

SECOND, Gilligan says everybody hates you. He says that to me too. Since he is a narcissist; I think it is safe to say he is everybody.

T

No. Everybody hates the both of you. Just the both of you.

And Shit Golem hates you too, Ted Bundy Clone.

You're just too fucking stupid to pick up on it.

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

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

That's what i said. Everybody is you, we agree.

T

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 1:09 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

SECOND, Gilligan says everybody hates you. He says that to me too. Since he is a narcissist; I think it is safe to say he is everybody.

T

No. Everybody hates the both of you. Just the both of you.

And Shit Golem hates you too, Ted Bundy Clone.

You're just too fucking stupid to pick up on it.

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

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

That's what i said. Everybody is you, we agree.

T

Everybody in America hates the idea of you, Ted Bundy Clone.

Everybody you have ever personally met IRL and online hates you, Ted Bundy Clone.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 2:12 PM

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

Ukrainian drone commander issues 5-point warning to NATO

By Bohuslav Romanenko | July 21, 2026, 11:30 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/magyar-urges-western-states-to-be-ready-f
or-potential-russian-aggression-50626170.html

The Western defense establishment is fundamentally unprepared for the future of robotic warfare and risks total systemic failure if Russia turns its drone arsenal against NATO, warned Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces commander, in an interview with Caolan Robertson on July 21.

Brovdi, who transitioned from a civilian businessman trading grain before 2022 to leading thousands of drone operators in Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), reflected on how cheap civilian quadcopters evolved into the primary striking force on the European battlefield—and offered a sharp warning to Western military leaders.

From water-filled condoms to deep strikes

Brovdi recounted the origins of his unit, Magyar's Birds, during the defense of the Kherson sector in April 2022. Trapped under heavy Russian artillery with 27 men, his team lacked visibility over Russian positions.

"An old-school commander told us: 'Drones are bulls**t; I need you to walk on foot through the gullies,'" Brovdi recalled.

But the unit started figuring out how to make use of UAVs, rigging hand grenades to Chinese commercial drones.

“They would take condoms, fill them with water, hang them from trees and posts, and fly those FPV sports drones at targets—sort of aiming and practicing flying,” he added.

Four years later, Brovdi’s command structure oversees 12 specialized units that have recorded over 400,000 tracked targets and 110,000 verified destroyed pieces of enemy equipment and personnel.

“For me, this is purely math. It’s about optimizing resources and leveraging calculations—preserving their effectiveness and achieving the best possible outcome from their application, so they don’t take risks in vain, but rather take risks to achieve results,” said the drone commander, attributing his management approach to his early training in mathematics and conducting orchestras as a child.

The 5-step defense blueprint for NATO

Addressing NATO and European defense officials directly, Brovdi outlined five mandatory steps Western militaries must execute immediately to adapt to modern air-domain threats:

1. A 2–5 km border buffer zone: Establish a continuous automated drone-engagement zone along national borders where any unauthorized enemy movement is detected and neutralized immediately.

2. Hardwired fiber-optic networks: Deploy a dense matrix of fiber-optic communication lines to forward launch sites, allowing a single pilot in a remote bunker to command 10 to 15 drones simultaneously.

3. Dedicated anti-drone air defense layers: Build specialized mobile interception networks specifically designed to destroy reconnaissance UAVs and cheap attack drones like the Iranian-designed Shahed ($50,000–$70,000 unit cost).

4. Specialized unmanned systems brigades: Form standing 300-crew drone brigades capable of providing complete recon, strike, mining, and logistics coverage across a 100-kilometer sector.

5. Operational deep-strike squads: Immediately train and equip 30 to 50 deep-strike crews capable of hitting high-value strategic targets deep inside enemy territory.

"If Putin sends 300 Shaheds today, in a year he will send 1,000 a day," Brovdi warned. "If a country faces 1,000 drones on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, they will raise a white flag so large there won't be a pole long enough to hold it.”

Shooting down $50,000 drones with $4 million Patriot missiles will ultimately bankrupt any nation, he stressed.

Even if active hostilities cease through geopolitical negotiation, Russia's imperial ambitions will not vanish, Brovdi argues.

"Even if Putin dies or is replaced, his successors will mentally strive for revenge," Brovdi stated, adding that Ukraine’s future will permanently depend on technology, adaptation, and maintaining the technological upper hand.

The above article came from the video find below:

This man is destroying Putin's empire

Jul 21, 2026

Since Ukraine began its operation to isolate occupied Crimea, I have been desperate to understand what is really happening on the peninsula.

Independent journalists cannot report anywhere near Crimea. The information coming out is fragmented, heavily controlled and buried beneath propaganda.

So I went to the closest possible source: the man directing the operation.

His name is Robert Brovdi, callsign Madyar. He's the Commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces and one of the central figures behind the campaign targeting Russia’s fuel, logistics, air defences and military infrastructure in occupied Crimea.

This is an unprecedented, in-depth interview about far more than one operation.

Brovdi explains what Ukraine is trying to achieve in Crimea, why he believes the occupation can be made unsustainable without a ground assault, and how Ukraine’s increasingly deep strikes inside Russia could shape the outcome of this war far beyond the front line.

He also tells the extraordinary personal story behind it all: how a grain trader became a soldier, how a group of just 27 people began experimenting with civilian drones, and how that improvised effort grew into an entirely new branch of the Ukrainian military.

In this interview, we discuss:

• The operation to isolate occupied Crimea
• Strikes against Russian fuel, shipping and logistics
• How Ukraine penetrated Russia’s air-defence network
• The rise of long-range Ukrainian drone warfare
• Why Brovdi believes NATO is running out of time
• How civilian drones transformed the battlefield
• His journey from businessman to military commander
• The family life, art and future he has placed on hold
• What he believes comes next for Ukraine and Russia

I am so incredibly proud to bring you this interview as an independent journalist.

This film was produced without government funding or political sponsorship. Work like this is possible because people watch, share and directly support my reports.

Thank you sincerely for giving me your time and for continuing to watch my reporting from Ukraine.

To support my work and help fund future investigations and frontline documentaries, please follow the links below.

Thank you for watching.

Caolan

https://linktr.ee/CaolanRobertson

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

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 2:57 PM

#Rootin4Putin

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

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

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 6:27 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

This has become another slugfest, like our war against Iran.

The gloves are almost fully off.

Ukraine lacks the drones, mortars, artillery, bombs, and missiles to make a meaningful impact at the front or inflict a meaningful number of casualties (no matter what Kiev/CIA/MI6 say). So it will continue to peck away at Russian refineries, ports, e-commerce warehouses etc. They will also assasinate civilians and commit terrorism in Russia with the idea that the Russian government will collapse.

Sorry, ain't gonna happen.

Russia will continue to destroy the port of Odessa (a key import facility for western drones and missiles), arms depots, drone manufacturing, truck terminals, gas stations and logistics centers in the deep rear, AND have enough drones, bombs, and mortars to obliterate Ukrainian positions at the front before Russian troops advance. Having watched this war in detail for quite a while, I can say that Russia is very sparing of its troops while Ukraine is not.

So far, the west has not expanded to striking Russia from NATO territory, and Russia has (mostly) resisted assassinating Ukrainian political leaders and sabotaging western drone assembly.

-----------

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 6:02 AM

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

Inside the Zelensky-Fedorov stalemate: Neither side is ready to yield

By Tim Zadorozhnyy, Kateryna Denisova

July 21, 2026 5:17 PM (Updated: July 21, 2026 11:24 pm)

https://kyivindependent.com/inside-the-zelensky-fedorov-stalemate-neit
her-side-is-ready-to-yield/

President Volodymyr Zelensky and former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov remain locked in a political standoff, with neither side willing to compromise as protests over the minister's dismissal pause for three days, people familiar with the matter told the Kyiv Independent.

Days after thousands of people rallied against Fedorov's dismissal, both camps remain committed to their maximalist positions.

Zelensky fired Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi in an attempt to defuse public anger, but has no intention of reinstating Fedorov as defense minister.

The Ukrainian president said on July 21 that he offered Fedorov "a prominent position in the government" focused on strengthening Ukraine's technological sector.

Fedorov, meanwhile, has made it clear he will only return as defense minister and is unwilling to accept another role in the government.

He has not yet responded to Zelensky's recent proposal.

"They'll keep talking about it," one person familiar with the matter said.

The outcome could determine not only the future leadership of Ukraine's military but also whether the demonstrations resume later this week.

From Fedorov to Syrskyi

Fedorov's dismissal last week immediately triggered protests across Ukraine.

Many Ukrainians struggled to understand why the president removed one of his most popular ministers, widely credited with delivering tangible results during wartime.

Zelensky offered only one public explanation, pointing to an alleged conflict between Fedorov and Syrskyi.

The first day of demonstrations focused almost entirely on Fedorov's dismissal.

By the second day, however, the protests had begun to evolve.

Serhii Sternenko, Fedorov's former adviser and one of Ukraine's most influential activists, devoted a livestream on July 17 to criticizing Syrskyi.

He accused the commander-in-chief of covering up friendly-fire incidents and deliberately weakening some Ukrainian brigades during Russian assaults.

Other public figures and military veterans echoed the criticism, shifting the conversation away from Fedorov's dismissal itself and toward Syrskyi's leadership.

The tension between the two men had long been expected.

Fedorov represented a reform-minded approach centered on innovation, decentralization, and technological modernization.

"People on the streets are looking for a clear explanation of all these decisions."

Syrskyi, by contrast, has favored a highly centralized command structure rooted in Soviet military doctrine. He has faced criticism for micromanagement and for preserving what critics describe as a Soviet-style command culture.

The shift in public attention accelerated after fresh controversy surrounding the Skelia Regiment.

One of Ukraine's largest assault formations, numbering more than 10,000 personnel, the regiment was expanded as part of Syrskyi's effort to build specialized assault units. It receives newly mobilized recruits and is assigned high-risk assault missions.

On June 23, Ukrainian outlet Babel published detailed allegations of abuse within the regiment, reporting at least 25 noncombat deaths among recruits. It later identified seven additional cases.

Just as protests were taking place, Russian forces also captured two Ukrainian soldiers belonging to Skelia during an operation in which the Ukrainian flag was raised in Kostiantynivka in an area the unit had claimed was clear of Russian troops.

An anonymous Ukrainian Telegram channel published a video on the same day featuring the Skelia logo, in which three alleged members of the unit, holding flags with portraits of Syrskyi and Zelensky, said that the cultural center in Kostiantynivka had been cleared and the Ukrainian flag had been raised.

The video has since been removed from the Telegram channel but is still available on other platforms.

The reports intensified scrutiny of Syrskyi's leadership and strengthened calls for his dismissal.

By the second and third days of protests, chants of "Syrskyi out" had become as common as demands to reinstate Fedorov.

Zelensky changes course

The President's Office quickly recognized that public anger had begun shifting.

Even before the protests, Zelensky had privately told lawmakers from his Servant of the People party that, in an ideal scenario, he would replace both Fedorov and Syrskyi.

As criticism of the commander-in-chief mounted, the president began actively searching for a replacement.

Over the past several days, Zelensky met with potential candidates for the position, an official familiar with the discussions told the Kyiv Independent.

Those meetings coincided with efforts to contain the growing backlash.

At the same time, Zelensky maintained direct contact with Fedorov.

Recognizing the former minister's popularity, the president offered him another senior role within his team.

Zelensky proposed that Fedorov oversee military modernization either as a presidential adviser or as a deputy prime minister.

The proposal reflected the president's belief that Fedorov could continue many of the reforms he had launched without returning to the Defense Ministry.

Often compared to "Ukraine's Elon Musk" — in terms of innovation, not politics — Fedorov oversaw reforms ranging from drone warfare and military modernization to disrupting Russian forces' access to Starlink systems and coordinating strikes against Russian logistics.

He also launched what he himself described as "an unpopular but extremely important" military reform.

No compromise

For Fedorov, however, the offer was never acceptable.

According to people familiar with his position, he told Zelensky he intends to return only as defense minister.

He believes the reforms he launched during his six months in office can only be completed from that position.

Fedorov said his tenure as defense minister centered on three priorities, including reforming military recruitment, overhauling defense procurement, and scaling up drone supplies for the army.

The President's Office, however, has shown no willingness to reverse course.

Officials around Zelensky believe public pressure has largely shifted away from Fedorov and toward Syrskyi, reducing the political cost.

Fedorov's team sees the situation differently.

They believe sustained public pressure could force Zelensky into another reversal, much as widespread demonstrations last year pushed the president to retreat from efforts to weaken Ukraine's anti-corruption institutions.

"It looks like they're trying to remove the commander-in-chief just to quiet the protests," a source familiar with the situation told the Kyiv Independent on condition of anonymity. "But it seems people on the streets are looking for a clear explanation of all these decisions."

That calculation now underpins the current standoff.

As protests continued in Kyiv, Zelensky appeared increasingly prepared to sacrifice Syrskyi to calm public anger in hopes that it would be enough.

Last week, Zelensky's first choice for defense minister was then Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko. But the nomination quickly ran into trouble, drawing an immediate public backlash.

As protests grew, Zelensky pivoted to a different nominee. He put forward Yevhen Khmara, the acting head of Ukraine's Security Service (SBU), who led the agency's Alpha Special Operations Center.

Khmara is widely respected in military circles, and his nomination has been received far more favorably by many of those demonstrating.

"Yevhen Khmara is an outstanding professional in his field. But defense minister isn't the job he should be doing," Oleksii, a 39-year-old IT specialist who attended the protests, told the Kyiv Independent.

Khmara was soon appointed acting defense minister by the government, with the formal confirmation to be made by parliament after a presidential nomination. The parliament is technically on recess until Aug. 18, and Zelensky hasn't officially nominated Khmara for the full-time position.

Waiting for Friday

The latest protest against Fedorov's dismissal and Syrskyi's continued tenure took place in Kyiv on July 20.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the capital, while smaller rallies were held across other Ukrainian cities.

After Monday's demonstration, organizers announced a three-day pause, giving Zelensky until July 24 to meet their two central demands: reinstating Fedorov as defense minister and dismissing Syrskyi as commander-in-chief.

The expectation inside Zelensky's office is that replacing Syrskyi would satisfy protesters to prevent demonstrations from resuming.

Officials also hope that, as public pressure fades, Fedorov will have little choice but to reconsider the alternative government role already offered to him.

People close to the former minister, however, appear prepared to wait.

For now, neither side is backing down.

The next test comes on July 24, when it will become clear whether replacing Syrskyi alone is enough to satisfy protesters — or whether demands for Fedorov's reinstatement would be enough to pull people back into the streets.

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 7:25 AM

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

Ukraine publishes emergency guide for residents of occupied Crimea

by Polina Moroziuk | July 21, 2026 8:44 pm

https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-publishes-emergency-guide-for-resi
dents-of-occupied-crimea/

Ukraine's Center for Strategic Communications has published a guide advising residents of Russian-occupied Crimea how to prepare for emergencies and possible fighting during the peninsula’s eventual de-occupation.

The "Dovidka.Crimea" brochure, available in Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar, was compiled using recommendations from Ukrainian state agencies, emergency services, civil society groups, and experts. https://dovidka.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/dovidka_ua.pdf

"People's lives and safety are Ukraine's highest value," the center said, warning that military operations would increase risks for civilians and that advance preparation offered the best protection.

The guide recommends that families prepare for scenarios in which relatives are separated when an emergency begins.

"Agree in advance on a meeting point, routes and a general plan of action," the brochure says. Families should also decide how to communicate during outages and ensure everyone carries a written list of important telephone numbers.

Residents are advised to prepare water, nonperishable food, medicine, cash, copies of documents, power banks, flashlights, warm clothing, and an emergency bag. The guide also covers shelters, evacuation, mine safety, water purification, information security, and questioning by Russian authorities.

Those crossing Russian checkpoints are advised to remove sensitive pro-Ukrainian material from their devices and disable biometric unlocking. Residents with access to Ukrainian resources should prioritize information from official government, military, and emergency-service channels.

Russia occupied and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. In recent months, Ukrainian forces have increasingly targeted power substations, bridges, ferry crossings, air defenses, military logistics routes, and Russian vessels in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov as part of a broader campaign to isolate Crimea.

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 1:57 PM

If I were one of them I'd tell child rapist Zelensky to go fuck himself and I'd be siding with Russia.

Fuck Ukraine. And fuck your Ukranian Nazis. Nazi.

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

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 6:26 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If I were one of them I'd tell child rapist Zelensky to go fuck himself and I'd be siding with Russia.

Fuck Ukraine. And fuck your Ukranian Nazis. Nazi.

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

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

Indeed.

-----------

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 6:38 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Well, sometimes it takes a while for a lightbulb to go on in my head, but I think I finally see the long term direction of Ukraine's "drone war".

For a while they targeted political and military leaders, naval ships, airstrips, refineries etc along with the usual gratuitous strike on school dormitories and shopping malls. One could argue that many targets were at least dual use if not exclusively military, being important sources of fuel etc for Russia's army.

But when Ukraine started focusing on e-commerce giant Wildberry's warehouses, it occurred to me that the goal wasn't military or even economic.

It wasn't even to "destroy Russia's economy" (not feasible) or to cause "regime change" (not likely) or even to rattle the Russian people (direct attacks piss people off) or cause widespread discontent (people blame Ukraine, not Putin).

Nope!

The goal is to put pressure on influential business leaders (Rosneft, Gazprom, Wildberry etc) and friendly governments (Kazakhstan, India, China) so THEY will bitch at the Kremlin.

-----------

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 6:48 PM

THG

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 7:47 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If I were one of them I'd tell child rapist Zelensky to go fuck himself and I'd be siding with Russia.

Fuck Ukraine. And fuck your Ukranian Nazis. Nazi.

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

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

Ditto? The Dittoheads who listened to Rush Limbaugh preferred to use "ditto" rather than "indeed".

MAGA Commentator Laura Loomer Visits Kyiv After Years of Echoing Kremlin Narratives. What Changed?

By Cyril Barabaltchouk | Jul 22, 2026 18:59

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/maga-commentator-laura-loomer
-visits-kyiv-after-years-of-echoing-kremlin-narratives-what-changed-20990

American political commentator Laura Loomer highlighted Russian ballistic missile strikes on Western commercial infrastructure during a visit to Ukraine’s oldest McDonald’s in Kyiv, according to her post on X on July 21.

Laura framed the attacks as direct evidence of Moscow’s hostility toward Western enterprise.

Long prominent for echoing Kremlin narratives and criticizing US assistance to Kyiv, Laura Loomer is a popular MAGA commentator who underwent a public reversal after embarking on a fact-finding trip to Ukraine in July 2026. Following visits to mass graves in Bucha and witnessing Russian missile strikes firsthand in the capital, Loomer publicly acknowledged that she had been misled by Russian disinformation campaigns. Loomer stated that she had lived in an “information bubble” and pledged to correct her past rhetoric, The New Voice of Ukraine reported.

“For so long, I was against Ukraine and kept repeating these arguments, thinking I was saying the right things. But I didn’t even realize how much I was being emotionally manipulated by online propaganda,” she said, according to 24tv.

The visit focused on Ukraine’s first McDonald’s location, opened in 1997 as a post-Soviet symbol of openness and integration with Western consumer culture. The restaurant has sustained structural damage from blast waves and shrapnel at least seven times since the start of the full-scale invasion, including during a massive strike on May 24, 2026, and a recent barrage involving 40 ballistic missiles aimed at civilian districts in the capital, Loomer wrote.

Despite recurring damage, workers sheltered safely during the attacks and reopened the facility shortly after each incident.

Connecting the physical destruction of commercial sites to wider geopolitical tensions, Loomer argued that Russian forces are deliberately targeting civilian gathering places and Western commercial icons to undermine Ukraine’s societal orientation toward the West.

“Kyiv’s McDonald’s is not collateral damage. It is the deliberate targeting of a society trying to live normally and free from communism,” Loomer wrote. She asserted that “by striking symbols of Western presence and normal civilian life, and by firing at American businesses, Moscow demonstrates contempt for the very idea of a prosperous, Western-oriented Ukraine”.

Describing her observations on the ground in Kyiv, the commentator noted that Ukrainian resilience remains unbroken despite ongoing air raids across urban centers. Loomer observed that “McDonald’s Ukraine serves burgers under a sign warped by past explosions,” adding that “there’s nothing like enjoying a meal with the backdrop of a Russian ballistic missile attack and blown-out windows at McDonald’s to really make you appreciate being an American”.

She further warned that “what’s happening in Ukraine today can and will happen in America in the near future if we do not stop communism and multipolarity,” according to Loomer.

Russian strikes have repeatedly impacted Western commercial operations in Ukraine, including a previous drone attack on a St. Louis-based Bunge oil processing plant in Dnipro that spilled 300 tons of oil across major city streets. The resulting fires and multi-day roadway blockages prompted Ukrainian officials to accuse Moscow of deliberately targeting American business infrastructure.

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 9:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If I were one of them I'd tell child rapist Zelensky to go fuck himself and I'd be siding with Russia.

Fuck Ukraine. And fuck your Ukranian Nazis. Nazi.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Indeed.
Ditto? The Dittoheads who listened to Rush Limbaugh preferred to use "ditto" rather than "indeed".

I have posts here saying that I'd piss on Rush Limbaugh's grave if it were near me.

Fuck Rush Limbaugh, and fuck you Shit Golem.

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

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 4:41 AM

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

Zelensky can kick Kachka out of Ukraine, but not his reforms

By Chris Powers | July 22, 2026 1:44 pm

https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-can-kick-kachka-out-of-ukraine-bu
t-not-his-reforms/

. . . EU is taking no chances

To open those next clusters, essentially the to-do lists of reforms Ukraine must push through to become an EU country, the existing 27 members have to vote unanimously in support every step of the way.

Both for doing the technical work and assuaging concerns of the 27, Kyiv has no choice but to travel down the road of improving democracy and the rule of law, and winning the fight against corruption.

The Kachka-Kos plan was intended to commit Kyiv, with a bit of publicly expressed political pressure, to make significant progress by the end of 2026.

But it has not worked.

As of June, when Kyiv opened the first EU accession cluster, which covers the rule of law, EU officials estimated that only 15% of the plan had been addressed.

Of the plan's ten points, not one has been done and finalized, an EU official told the Kyiv Independent.

Now, the EU is putting the Kachka-Kos plan on a more enduring basis by taking a carrot-and-stick approach.

First, when Kyiv unlocked the first accession cluster, it was presented with a list of interim benchmarks that must be fulfilled before any of the 33 chapters spread across the EU's six enlargement clusters can be marked as completed.

The Kachka-Kos reforms have been folded into those interim benchmarks.

Concretely, that means Ukraine cannot advance its EU membership bid until it, for example, significantly strengthens its anti-corruption agencies — the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office — appoints prosecutors transparently and via a merit-based process; no longer leaves judges' seats unfilled for long periods; and ensures that government spending can be properly audited.

If EU membership ends up too long-term and too abstract an incentive, the European Commission has also proposed tying the so-called Kachka reforms to billions of euros in financial support.

In April, the EU approved a 90 billion euro ($103 billion) loan for Ukraine, half to be disbursed in 2026 and half in 2027. Two-thirds of the total — 60 billion euros ($68 billion) — is earmarked for defense spending.

The remaining third is for general budgetary support. Part of that money, 8.35 billion euros ($9.53 billion), will be paid this year via a mechanism called the Ukraine Facility, which greenlights transfers based on Ukraine's fulfillment of a so-called Ukraine Plan, essentially a timetable for when Kyiv will carry out the reforms required for EU membership.

On July 22, EU ambassadors are expected to vote through an amendment to the Ukraine Plan, which would embed items from the Kachka-Kos plan as actions to be implemented by the end of the year.

With Kachka gone, the job of coaxing Kyiv into carrying out those reforms now falls to Chentsov.

Failure to do so risks leaving up to 5 billion euros ($5.7 billion) on the table.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 4:43 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Zelensky can kick Kachka out of Ukraine, but not his reforms

Child rapist Zelensky couldn't kick his own faggot ass.

Fuck Ukraine and fuck you, Shit Golem.

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

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 6:50 AM

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

Ukraine is winning. Here’s what it needs to finish the job.

By Leslie Shedd | July 21, 2026 5:26 p.m. ET

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/ukraine-is-winning-heres-wh
at-it-needs-to-finish-the-job/

Bottom lines up front

Ukraine has regained momentum against Russia’s invasion, with successful battlefield advances driven by innovative, low-cost drones.
________________________________

During the author’s recent visit, Ukrainian leaders praised US support but stressed an urgent need for Patriot interceptors to defend civilians from Russian ballistic missile attacks until domestic production is established.
________________________________

The United States should continue intelligence sharing with Kyiv and deepen cooperation with Ukraine’s defense industry.

PAVLOHRAD—The drive from Kyiv to Dnipro and Pavlohrad reveals a Ukraine of contrasts. Beautiful fields of sunflowers wave in the wind, and gorgeous churches with gleaming golden tops grace the landscape. Children play on playgrounds, while parents sit nearby chatting with friends and drinking coffee. But also, there are burned-out gas stations and shops, recently struck by Russian drones or ballistic missiles. Puffs of smoke hover over a playground from a recent drone or missile interception. Netting encases major roadways to help protect cars from drone attacks. And on the street, many men carry noticeable injuries, including missing hands, arms, or legs.

In other words, it is a beautiful country marred by the horrors of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war that is filled with people who refuse to let those horrors prevail.

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Ukraine along with Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX), as he visited Ukrainian troops in eastern Ukraine and met with senior government officials. The trip followed the NATO Summit in Ankara, where US President Donald Trump agreed to allow Ukraine to make Patriot missiles, and came as Ukraine continues to deliver strikes deep inside Russia. Four-and-a-half years in, it felt like a conflict that was reaching a turning point.

Battlefield movement

Once we arrived in Pavlohrad, we stopped in town to grab a coffee, and I could not get over the normalcy of it all. There was a large playground area for children, with a beautiful church on one side and a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the other. But that beauty was quickly marred by the sound of multiple explosions. The stray dogs in the area began running around barking, alerting people of the danger. And above the playground a large puff of gray smoke, indicating a Russian drone or missile had been successfully intercepted by Ukrainian forces.

Yet life in the center of Pavlohrad went on. People stopped, looked up, and then continued to sip their coffee while their children played on the playground. Not because they were not afraid, and not because there wasn’t real danger. But because—what else could they do? The Ukrainian military now intercepts at least 90 percent of the longer-range drones that target civilians outside the battlefield. So the best you can do is hope you are not in the other 10 percent.

From there, we drove closer to the front lines to meet with a Ukrainian Air Assault Brigade. While this was my first visit to Ukraine, I had met with Ukrainian officials and advocates for years. My meetings this time were different. There was excitement that I hadn’t heard since the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, when Ukraine was able to drive Russian forces from much of the country.

Ukrainians are winning. And, importantly, they know that.

Not far from the front lines, the troops told us they had taken back roughly five hundred square kilometers over the last six months in their area. They showed off the aerial and land drones they have used and walked us through their operations center, highlighting some of their recent successful strikes. One aerial drone they showed us, the Vampire, can carry up to four anti-tank mines, travel twenty meters per second, and fly for forty minutes. It’s a reusable drone, so it can drop the payload and return—and make as many as twenty flights per day. We later visited the drone manufacturer, Skyfall. The company can make almost three hundred Vampire drones per day. If one Vampire can carry up to four payloads and make as many as twenty flights per day, that means Skyfall is able to produce the equivalent of almost 24,000 strikes per day with just this one drone line.

In Kyiv, a need for Patriots

Once we returned from the east, we met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk, Presidential Commissioner for Sanctions Policy of Ukraine Vladyslav Vlasiuk, and then-Deputy Commander of Ukraine’s Air Force Pavlo Yelizarov.

The Ukrainian officials expressed appreciation to the United States for its support throughout this war, particularly for the invaluable intelligence that Washington has shared with Ukraine. That intelligence has allowed Ukraine to help protect citizens and to successfully conduct some of the recent long-range strikes inside of Russia. The officials also expressed joy and optimism at Trump’s announcement that he would grant Ukraine a license to produce their own Patriot interceptor missiles.

The problem is that Ukraine is currently out of Patriots, the only weapons that can consistently shoot down a ballistic missile. Putin knows this, which is why he is using ballistic missiles to kill civilians in Kyiv. Ballistic missiles are so fast, they hit before the alarms can even warn people to take cover.

The first night I was in Kyiv, a loud explosion rattled my hotel windows at 12:30 a.m. That was immediately followed by the sound of alarms going off around the city and the alarm on the Air Alert app on my phone. By then, it was too late—the damage from the missiles had already been done. Russia had launched five ballistic missiles at Kyiv, along with a bevy of drones. The Air Alert app proceeded to go off every few hours all night long with warnings of incoming attacks. In total, three people were killed and thirteen were injured. The same scene played out on my last night in Kyiv, when Russia launched six ballistic missiles, six cruise missiles, and over 120 drones. Thankfully, no one was killed but twelve people were injured.

Even with a license to make Patriots, it will take time for Ukraine to build the facilities and the interceptors. Between now and then, Ukraine needs a band-aid to stave off Russia’s attacks on innocent civilians. European countries such as Greece that have Patriots that are getting close to the end of their operational lifespan should quickly sell them to Ukraine. Zelenskyy assured us that Ukraine stands ready to use them quickly before the expiration date to protect his people.

Ukraine’s weapons superiority

Beyond the resiliency and determination of the Ukrainian people, the most impressive thing I witnessed in Ukraine was the country’s weapons capabilities, particularly in production. Ukraine can make inexpensive, effective drones in massive quantities that can evade Russian spoofing and signal jamming. And crucially, Ukrainians can quickly adapt those drones as Russian capabilities change. As a result, even though there are about seven times as many Russian troops on the frontline, they are killed or injured six times as often as Ukrainian troops, we were told. The US intelligence community’s own assessment released right after we returned from our trip estimates that a new Russian recruit arriving on the Ukrainian battlefield lasts less than half an hour, on average, before being killed or wounded.

While visiting a drone operations center run by Yelizarov and his unmanned systems unit called Lasar’s Group, we were told of two operations that exemplify this. The first, which took place over two days in May 2025 and June 2025, cost Ukraine about $12 million to conduct and destroyed more than $14 billion worth of Russian equipment, including ten air defense systems—all without risking a single Ukrainian soldier’s life. In the second operation, Ukraine successfully had a reusable drone plant a mine on train tracks that were being used to move fuel for Russian troops. When the mine blew, the fuel caught on fire. For days, Russia tried to send in troops and equipment to put the fire out and salvage the much-needed fuel. Each time, they were eliminated by Ukrainian drones. Russia eventually sent in two S-300 air defense batteries to try to reclaim the air space and secure the fuel train. Ukraine used inexpensive aerial drones to eliminate both batteries, each of which costs an estimated $160 million. Once again, not a single Ukrainian soldier’s life was lost.

Ukraine is not just bleeding Russia dry with offensive weapons. It has also been able to develop effective and cost-efficient interceptors to shoot down Russia’s drones and missiles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates a Shahed drone costs $35,000 on average. One Ukrainian drone company we visited showed us an interceptor it has developed and can produce for $1,000 per unit that can chase a Shahed down and shoot it out of the sky. At the same time, the United States has been using million-dollar interceptors to shoot down Shaheds in the Persian Gulf.

The American technology behind the destruction

One of the most troubling meetings we had was with Vlasiuk, the presidential commissioner for sanctions policy. His office’s research makes clear that American technology is fueling Russia’s war machine. This is most prevalent with American chips. We reviewed page after page of the different American components that had been diverted to Russia and were found in the Iranian-designed and now Russian-built Shahed drones being used on the battlefield in Ukraine—Texas Instruments, Intel, and Analog Devices, to name a few. The United States isn’t alone in this. There were German, British, Swiss, and other European components, as well as South Korean and Japanese components. But the United States was by far the biggest offender.

The good news is that Vlasiuk’s research shows Russia is dependent on US technology. In one example, a hypersonic missile launched against Ukraine in 2022 contained a Texas Instruments chip. The same weapon was found two years later with a Russian-made chip. But by 2026, the weapon once again had a Texas Instruments chip. This suggests that Russia tried to replace American chips, but the Russian versions didn’t work—so it switched back to the American chips. The Netherlands has been able to effectively eliminate its technology from Russian weapons through a mix of compliance enforcement and a focus on end users. If the United States and its allies would replicate what the Netherlands was able to do, it could hobble Russia’s defense industrial base.

Ukraine’s limited asks

It is remarkable what the Ukrainian people have been able to achieve. They have become the most lethal, most experienced, and best equipped fighting force in Europe. But there are fears as to how long they can maintain their superiority—and how many civilians Putin will be able to kill with ballistic missiles before Ukraine can get hold of more Patriots.

Ukrainian officials made it clear that the list of what they need now to continue winning is short. First, they need Patriot interceptors—today. Trump has done his part by offering them a license to build their own. European and other partner countries that have expiring interceptors should sell them to Ukraine as quickly as possible. Second, Ukraine needs the United States and its allies to strengthen sanctions enforcement and track down end users to stop so much US technology from getting into Russian weapons. Third, Kyiv continues to need US intelligence, which has been critical both on the front lines and in long-range strikes against Russia.

In exchange, Ukraine stands ready to be a valuable partner. The country is essentially one big laboratory developing cost-efficient systems that can quickly scale and adapt to be successful on the battlefield. The United States—and the world—has much to learn from Ukraine.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 7:00 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Zelensky can kick Kachka out of Ukraine, but not his reforms

Child rapist Zelensky couldn't kick his own faggot ass.

Fuck Ukraine and fuck you, Shit Golem.

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

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

6ix, I know where you get your ideas. For one example (by the way, none of it is true; all of it is Russians being Russians and drunkenly lying, which a Trumptard then repeats because Trumptards gotta be Trumpy, just like Trump is):

Quote:
Russian Media Confirms Ukrainian President Zelenskyy is a Pedophile and Seller of Children
TASS news reported that Zelenskyy, whose name appears in the Epstein files 37 times, is indeed a pedophile. Both Zelenskyy and his wife, Olena Zelenska, are notoriously prolific child traffickers.
Joe Tuzara, M.D. @TuzaraPost
Apr 23, 2026
https://tuzarapost.substack.com/p/russian-media-confirms-ukrainian

There is no credible evidence or official accusation labeling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a child rapist; rather, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the person who accused Russian soldiers of committing sexual violence and child abuse during the war in Ukraine. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/04/12/7339062/

Context of the Allegations

• Zelenskyy’s Statements: In April 2022, President Zelenskyy publicly stated that Ukrainian authorities had recorded hundreds of cases of sexual violence and abuse in areas previously occupied by Russian forces, including cases involving young children and infants. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/04/12/7339062/

• Misinformation: Online rumors or reciprocal claims falsely attempting to invert these accusations are common in wartime propaganda and disinformation campaigns, but they are entirely unsubstantiated by any factual or legal evidence.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 11:45 AM

Go bounce on your Ukrainian propaganda rag Pravada, faggot.

How many kids have you molested in your life, Shit Golem?

Is that why nobody in your family talks to you anymore?

Please tell me it wasn't a family member? Your poor nieces and nephews.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 12:55 PM

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

Mykhailo Fedorov Says He Will Accept Only the Post of Ukraine’s Defense Minister

By Roman Kohanets | Jul 23, 2026 19:02

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/mykhailo-fedorov-says-he-will
-accept-only-the-post-of-ukraines-defense-minister-21019

Mykhailo Fedorov stated on July 23 that he would accept only the position of Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, arguing that only the role has the authority needed to complete military reforms and continue ongoing initiatives, according to UNITED24 Media on July 23.

Fedorov wrote that he joined the Ministry of Defense in January 2026 at the invitation of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bringing a specific plan to end the war. According to the statement, the team called it AIR–LAND–ECONOMY: defend the skies, hold the front line, and strike the enemy's economy.

That plan was executed consistently over the following six months, the statement noted. Fedorov claimed Ukraine began seizing the initiative for the first time in recent years, opening what he described as "a window of opportunity to force Russia into peace through strength."

He framed his decision around where authority actually sits over the course of the war.

"I'm grateful to the president for all the options offered. However, today there are only three positions in the country that, alongside the troops on the battlefield, actually shape the course of the war: the President of Ukraine, the Minister of Defense, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine," Fedorov wrote.

"No other role carries the actual authority to combat procurement corruption, complete the army's transformation, plan and execute asymmetric operations against the enemy, root out a culture of lies and unaccountability within the system, or finish the initiatives our team has already started at the defense ministry," he emphasized.

Fedorov added that he was grateful to the president for all the options offered, without specifying them.

"For me, it was never about the title or status — it has only ever been about having a real impact on the outcome and bringing Ukraine closer to victory," Fedorov stated.

On the same day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed that he offered Fedorov several positions after his dismissal, most recently the role of Deputy Prime Minister for Military Innovation. He noted that the position would coordinate defense technology efforts among the Defense Ministry, the military leadership, the General Staff and the President.

The remarks follow a week of public pressure over Fedorov's removal from the ministry. He announced his departure on July 15 in a farewell post on his Telegram channel.

Thousands then gathered on July 16 in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Lviv, and Odesa to protest a dismissal carried out without public explanation, while Volodymyr Zelenskyy treated the rallies as a legitimate expression of democracy and confirmed that Fedorov would remain on his team, with his exact role to be announced later.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 12:59 PM

I love that I finally found a way to shut your stupid ass down.

You get really quiet these days when we're talking.

Does it terrify you how much I know about you, loser?

It should.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 4:36 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love that I finally found a way to shut your stupid ass down.

You get really quiet these days when we're talking.

Does it terrify you how much I know about you, loser?

It should.

Uniformly, Trumptards blame others, not themselves. For example, Trump blames Democrats or Iranians for his own failures. 6ix does the same, except he expands the blame to all Muslims, all foreigners. Trumptards refuse to see that their crappy lives are their fault, their laziness, their dishonesty, their mental illnesses, their inadequate self-control, their ignorance, and nobody else's fault. Russians act like Trumptards, shifting blame to Ukrainians, the EU, and NATO.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 4:36 PM