Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Sunday, July 19, 2026 16:45
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Friday, July 17, 2026 7:13 PM

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

“To Be Continued”: Ukraine Burns Third Russian FSB Patrol Boat This Year

By Roman Kohanets | Jul 17, 2026 19:44

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/to-be-continued-ukraine-burns
-third-russian-fsb-patrol-boat-this-year-20860

. . . NASA's FIRMS satellite system recorded a fire on the water off the eastern edge of Kerch beginning around 2 a.m. local time. That location, the report indicated, did not match other Russian vessels struck in the area that day, pointing to a separate hit. . . .

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 6:46 AM

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

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

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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

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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

SIGNYM

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

SECOND

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

SECOND

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

SECOND

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

SECOND

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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