REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Wednesday, April 30, 2025 19:15
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Monday, March 24, 2025 7:00 AM

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


Trump’s Lust for Canada Echoes Putin’s Lust for Ukraine

Expansionist rhetoric, economic grievance, and fantasies of erasing an “artificial” border.

By Will Saletan | Mar 18, 2025

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-lust-for-canada-echoes-putin-lust-f
or-ukraine-artificial-borders-greenland

America’s allies are reportedly stunned by two things Donald Trump has done since returning to power. One is his alignment of U.S. foreign policy with Russia. The other is his fixation on annexing Canada.

Here’s the key to understanding these two confounding moves: They’re related. Trump thinks about Canada in much the same way Vladimir Putin thinks about Ukraine. He identifies with his fellow imperialist.

In July 2021, Putin published an article outlining his view of Ukrainian history. Historically, “Russians and Ukrainians were one people—a single whole,” he asserted. “The idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians” had “no historical basis.” He dismissed this idea as an artificial result of “chopping the country into pieces.”

Putin also belittled Ukraine as dependent on Russian money. “Throughout the difficult 1990’s and in the new millennium, we have provided considerable support to Ukraine,” he wrote. Russia was “the largest trade and economic partner of Ukraine,” he noted. For these and other reasons, he concluded, “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” This sounded like—and in a few months would prove to be—Putin’s rationale for seizing Ukraine.

In February 2022, days before launching his invasion, Putin delivered a speech elaborating on these themes. “Our Ukrainian colleagues . . . turned to us for financial support many times,” he complained. “The subsidized loans Russia provided to Ukraine, along with economic and trade preferences . . . amounted to $250 billion” over two decades, he said. But “the Ukrainian authorities always preferred dealing with Russia in a way that ensured that they enjoy all the rights and privileges while remaining free from any obligations.”

Trump shared Putin’s view of Ukraine as weak, subordinate, and ripe for annexation. In 2016, he defended Putin’s seizure of Crimea, asserting that “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia.” Two years later, Trump repeated that Crimea should be Russian. Fiona Hill, the senior Russia expert on Trump’s national security council, later told New York Times reporter David Sanger that “Trump made it very clear that he thought . . . Ukraine, and certainly Crimea, must be part of Russia. . . . He really could not get his head around the idea that Ukraine was an independent state.”

In his second term, Trump has suggested that all of Ukraine could be folded into Russia. “They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday,” he told Bret Baier in an interview in early February. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov welcomed Trump’s suggestion. “A significant part of Ukraine wants to become Russia” and in fact “has already become Russia,” said Peskov.

Trump has also talked about folding Canada into the United States. It’s not clear how this notion got into his head. But the idea that the America should think about Canada the same way Russia thinks about Ukraine—as a barely distinct neighbor, essentially an extension of itself—is at least four years old. And the person who proposed that analogy was Putin.

“Look at how Austria and Germany, the USA and Canada live next to each other,” Putin wrote in his 2021 article. These paired countries, he observed, were “close in ethnic composition, culture, in fact sharing one language,” with “the closest integration” and “very conditional, transparent borders.” In a similar way, Putin proposed, Russians viewed Ukrainians in Russia “as our own close people.”

It’s unlikely that Trump, who seldom reads past a headline, paid any attention to Putin’s article. But the way Trump talks about annexing Canada bears a disconcerting resemblance to the way Putin talks about annexing Ukraine.

Trump first raised the Canadian annexation idea in late November, during a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Canadian officials brushed it off as a joke, but Trump kept pushing.

Trump made the same economic case for absorbing Canada that Putin made for absorbing Ukraine. “Canada has been taking advantage of the United States for years,” Trump complained on January 25. “Without our subsidy, Canada, you know, doesn’t exist really. . . . Canada is totally reliant on us. Therefore, they should be a state.”

Trump didn’t talk about invading Canada. Instead, he threatened to destroy it financially. He even cited—albeit in a shorter time frame—the same figure Putin had cited to justify taking Ukraine. “We lose $250 billion a year on Canada,” Trump alleged, misrepresenting both the size and the meaning of the U.S.-Canada trade deficit. “I could stop that in one day. And if I stopped that, Canada wouldn’t exist . . . as a country.”

On February 9, in his interview with Baier, Trump added another bogus rationale for his threats against Canada. “Canada has a very big car industry. They stole it from us,” Trump lied. Later that day, as he signed a proclamation declaring “Gulf of America Day,” Trump bragged that “with a stroke of a pen,” he could impose economic consequences that “would not allow Canada to be a viable country.”

In his February 9 remarks, Trump fantasized about obliterating the U.S. border with Canada. He sounded eerily like Putin talking about Russia’s border with Ukraine. “Think of how beautiful that country would be without that artificial line running right through it,” said Trump, referring to the Canadian border. “Somebody drew it many years ago with a ruler.” (Actually, the border isn’t exactly straight, and it’s the result of multiple treaties and agreements.)

On February 20, Trump said Canada would eventually have to capitulate. “They get 95 percent of their product from the United States. I think they have to become the 51st state,” he predicted. At a cabinet meeting on Feb. 26, he repeated: “We subsidize them $200 billion a year. Without us, Canada can’t make it. . . . Canada should be our 51st state.”

Last week, standing in front of the White House with Elon Musk, Trump mused again about erasing the Canadian border. “When you take away that artificial line . . . and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that,” he boasted.

“Plus Greenland,” Musk added. And Trump chimed in: “If you add Greenland . . . that’s pretty good.”

Two days later, in a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump again brought up the idea of absorbing Canada. “This would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it—between Canada and the U.S.,” he lamented. It “makes no sense.”

Rutte tried to humor the president. When Trump talked about annexing Greenland—essentially threatening Denmark, the island’s sovereign state and a founding member of NATO—the secretary general pleaded, “I don’t want to drag NATO in[to] that.” Instead, he praised Trump for having “started the dialogue with the Russians” to end the war in Ukraine.

Good luck with that. Trump will never see the war through NATO’s eyes. He sees Ukraine through Putin’s eyes. They’re the same eyes through which Trump stares hungrily at Canada, Greenland, Gaza, and the Panama Canal. They’re the eyes of a predator.

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

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Monday, March 24, 2025 9:52 AM

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


A Lot More Russian Troops Are Attacking In Compact Cars, Vans And Golf Carts

The growing abundance of civilian-style vehicles is evident in the tallies of Russian losses.

By David Axe | Mar 24, 2025, 03:04am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/24/a-lot-more-russian-tr
oops-are-attacking-in-compact-cars-vans-and-golf-carts/

Armored trucks and civilian vehicles such as vans, compact cars and all-terrain vehicles—that is, golf carts—now account for around 70 percent of Russian losses, according to one recent survey.

But the growing proportion of civilian-style vehicles in the wreckage of Russia’s 37-month wider war on Ukraine doesn’t mean there are fewer Russian tanks and fighting vehicles—the traditional mounts for mechanized troops—along the 700-mile front line.

No, there are actually more destroyed and abandoned tanks and fighting vehicles dotting the line of contact today than there were a year ago, even as these purpose-made armored vehicles represent a smaller proportion of Russian losses.

The growing abundance of vehicles of all sorts—unarmored and armored—speaks to the intensity of the overlapping Russian offensives that have kicked off along multiple sectors in eastern Ukraine and western Russia in the last 18 months.

Until recently, the Russians were attacking almost everywhere, in large numbers, in whatever vehicles they could source from official or unofficial channels.

But Russian losses rose in proportion to Russian assaults, and stocks of traditional tanks and infantry fighting vehicles ran low relative to increasing demand, compelling regiments and brigades to switch to golf carts, Lada compact cars and Bukhanka vans in order to lend mobility to increasingly frequent attacks.

The numbers tell the story. As illustrated by analyst Chris Jones, armored tanks and fighting vehicles accounted for around half of the roughly 375 vehicles Russia lost in February 2024.

A year later this February, Russia lost around 1,100 vehicles—and 250 were tanks and fighting vehicles. Fully half of Russian losses that month were civilian vehicles or armored trucks. But the half that included tanks and fighting vehicles still represented a raw increase in the number of these vehicles appearing along the front line.

Vehicular output

Russian industry builds maybe 200 new BMP-3 fighting vehicles and 90 new T-90M tanks annually as well as a few hundred other new armored vehicles, including BTR-82 wheeled fighting vehicles.

Since Russian mechanized regiments have been losing armored vehicles at an annualized rate of 6,000 a year, or 500 a month—largely to Ukrainian mines, artillery and drones—there’s a shortfall.

Growing desperate for battlefield mobility as early as 2022, the Russians opened up vast storage bases that once sheltered tens of thousand of obsolete Cold War vehicles.

But even these old vehicles couldn’t fully equip front-line regiments fast enough, given the accelerating pace of the regiments’ operations. Open-source analyst Jompy explained it best in January, taking BTR wheeled fighting vehicles as a case study. “It looks like Russia still has overall 2,358 stored BTR-60/70/80s out of the 3,673 it had in storage before the war,” Jompy wrote.

Looks can be deceiving. “In reality, most of the vehicles are older BTR-60s and -70s, and in poor condition” and very difficult to reactivate, Jompy explained.

Civilian-style vehicles were the last resort. But it was a last resort that became normal. “I guess this Lada storming is the norm now?” open-source analyst Moklasen mused as they scrutinized yet another video feed from a Ukrainian drone unit blowing up Russian compact cars attacking Ukrainian positions in late January.

Two months later, the norm is entrenched. So many Russians are attacking in so many unarmored civilian vehicles that these vehicles now account for more than two-thirds of losses.

But there are still plenty of armored tanks and fighting vehicles in the mix. More and more, in fact—even if many of them are decades old.

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

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Monday, March 24, 2025 5:34 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Ukraine continues to attack Russian energy facilities. It destroyed part of the gas pipe and metering system that crosses thru Ukraine to western nations, and attempted to destroy an international pipeline carrying Russian oil.

Also, Zelensky wants another negotiator besides Witkoff, claiming that he has been influenced by Russian disinformation.

Clearly, Zelensky et al want to derail any possible cease fire.





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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, March 25, 2025 6:34 AM

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Clearly, Zelensky et al want to derail any possible cease fire.
Signym, do you ask yourself why don't Ukrainians surrender? Or move to the EU? A partial answer:

Putin is Still Stealing Ukrainian Children

By Karolina Hird | Mar 24, 2025

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/putin-still-stealing-ukr
ainian-children

Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine over three years ago with the intent, among other things, of stealing its children. Putin launched his imperial conquest to first and foremost dominate the Ukrainian people, and he recognized that to deprive Ukraine of its children would be to deprive it of its multigenerational potential. When Russian troops rolled across the border into Ukraine on the night of February 24, 2022, the groundwork for the massive deportation of Ukraine’s children was already in place. Ukrainian human rights activists uncovered Kremlin documents dated February 18, 2022, which laid out plans to remove Ukrainian children from orphanages in occupied Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts and bring them to Russia under the guise of “humanitarian evacuations.” These documents revealed that Russia planned to target vulnerable Ukrainian children, especially those without parental care before the full-scale invasion had even begun. In the subsequent three years, Russia has embarked on a Kremlin-directed, deeply institutionalized project to abduct Ukrainian children and forcibly turn them into the next generation of Russians.

Ukraine has been able to verify Russia’s deportation of 19,456 children to date, although the true figure is likely to be much higher because Russia frequently targets vulnerable children without anyone to speak for them.[1] Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab placed the number of deported children closer to 35,000 as of March 19, 2025.[2] Putin’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova (against whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in March 2023 for her role in abducting children alongside Putin) claimed that Russia has “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023—a terrifying benchmark for the lengths that Russia is willing to go to rob Ukraine of its own people.[3] The true number of deported children is near-impossible to verify, but the implication remains the same—Russia has stolen tens, potentially hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children with the explicit intent of eradicating their Ukrainian identities and turning them into Russians. International law explicitly forbids the forcible transfer of children from one group to another group for the purpose of destroying, in whole or in part, a national or ethnic group, and considers these violations as constituent acts of genocide.[4]

Russia's crimes against Ukrainian children have been remarkably well-documented, particularly by the perpetrators themselves. The Russian legal system made immediate accommodations for the intended influx of stolen Ukrainian children, signaling the intentionality behind Putin’s deportation project. Putin signed a decree in May 2022 providing for a simplified procedure for the acquisition of Russian citizenship for Ukrainian “children left without parental care and incapacitated persons,” which amounted to a legalization of the process of deporting Ukrainian children and forcibly granting them Russian citizenship.[5]

With the legal framework in place before the full-scale invasion, Russian occupation administrators and occupation officials have blatantly advertised programs that take Ukrainian children from their homes in occupied Ukraine to Russia under a variety of guises, such as camps for their supposed rest, relaxation, and rehabilitation.[6] As recently as March 19, 2025, Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky announced that his administration, with financial support from the Russian Ministry of Education, plans to remove 70 children from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast to a Russian government-controlled children’s camp in occupied Crimea in order to give the children an opportunity to “rest and improve their health” after living in proximity to the frontline.[7] Russia has gone to great lengths to claim that these crimes are humanitarian gestures, but the legally-consistent humanitarian response would be to transfer Ukrainian children back to Ukrainian-controlled territory and return them to the care of their fellow Ukrainians—not deport them to the invading country.

Much more at https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/putin-still-stealing-ukr
ainian-children

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

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 8:36 AM

SECOND

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


Russia Produces $189 Billion Of Oil A Year. Ukraine Is Determined To Blow It All Up.
It’ll take many more, and much more destructive, oil raids to nudge Russia toward a meaningful peace.

By David Axe | Mar 25, 2025, 11:43pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/25/ukraines-drones-and-m
issiles-hit-russia-where-it-hurts-the-189-billion-oil-industry/

Back in August, workers broke ground for a new drone factory in Oryol Oblast, in western Russia 100 miles from the Ukrainian border. Four months later, the factory was ready to churn out Shahed one-way attack drones, one of Russia’s main munitions for bombarding Ukrainian cities.

But Ukrainian intelligence was watching. And on Dec. 26, Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-24 bombers flung several British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles at the factory. “As a result of the strike, a storage, maintenance and repair facility for Shahed kamikaze drones, consisting of several reinforced concrete shelters, was destroyed,” the Ukrainian general staff reported.

A follow-up attack on Jan. 26 compounded the damage. In total, at least 200 Shaheds burned.

But does it really matter? Russian factories produce nearly 1,000 Shaheds a month, each ranging farther than 900 miles with a 110-pound warhead. In destroying 200 drones, the Ukrainians may have slightly reduced the pace of Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cities for a few weeks or months.

Overall, Ukraine’s campaign of deep strikes targeting munitions depots and factories hundreds of miles inside Russia has yielded mixed results.

Yes, they may have offered some relief to bombarded civilians. More broadly, however, “air-launched cruise missiles were often out of sequence with combat operations,” explained Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.

Sure, the Oryol raids may have spared a few Ukrainians, but they and other deep strikes on the most explosive targets—even the most visually impressive ones that produce towering fireballs and dramatic videos that circulate on social media—haven’t altered the fundamental problem facing Ukrainian and Russian forces.

“Both sides struggled to overcome a prepared defense,” Kofman observed. While deep strikes may have “shaping effects on enemy forces,” Ukrainian brigades are “often not in a position to capitalize on them.”

It isn’t particularly helpful for the Ukrainian air force to blow up, say, a Russian field army’s entire stock of heavy mortar rounds if the adjacent Ukrainian army corps is boxed in by minefields or lacks the manpower to mount an offensive and exploit the dip in the Russians’ short-term ammunition stocks.

Failure to destroy

In that sense, a major part of Ukraine’s deep strike campaign—the raids targeting military supply—is impressive but far from decisive. According to Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight, more than half of the observed Ukrainian strikes between September and February “had limited impact.”

Drones and missiles may have struck a few Russian factories and depots and triggered a few frightening blazes, but firefighters eventually extinguished the flames and workers eventually rebuilt. All the while, Ukrainian forces were still incrementally losing ground in eastern Ukraine.

Attacking more often, and with heavier munitions, might inflict lasting damage. But Ukraine doesn’t get enough of the best foreign-made deep-strike munitions to mount a sustained and intensive campaign on Russian logistics. And it doesn’t yet build enough similar munitions on its own.

It’s not for no reason that, in recent months, Ukrainian strike planners have shifted their aim—and are now mounting more raids targeting Russian oil infrastructure. And not just any oil infrastructure, but refineries in particular: the beating chemical hearts of the Russian economy ... and any war effort that economy sustains.

“As these are more technically complex and expensive structures, their importance for the Russian oil refining industry and exports of oil products is also higher, and they are more difficult and expensive to restore,” Frontelligence Insight explained.

Recent raids on refineries have cost Russia between $658 million and $863 million, Frontelligence Insight estimated. But Russia's total revenue from oil exports in 2024 was $189 billion. So far, the oil attacks are also too infrequent and insufficiently destructive to inflict the kind of economic damage that could alter the course of Russia’s 37-month wider war on Ukraine.

That could change. “To enhance the effect of the strikes, Ukrainian troops should conduct regular attacks on large unique cracking units at modern Russian refineries,” Frontelligence Insight advised, citing economist Vladimir Milov.

The cracking units, which break down crude oil into useful products, are delicate and complex and extremely difficult for Russian industry to replace under the current sanctions regime.

Frequent and precise strikes might prevent them from being repaired, Milov told the analysis group. Maybe that would accomplish what the deep strikes on munitions depots haven’t accomplished—and hurt Russia badly enough to end the war on terms that favor Ukraine.

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

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 9:39 AM

SECOND

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


The ‘America First’ Masquerade

Though packaged as a kind of foreign policy realism, the doctrine guiding the Trump administration is riddled with contradictions

By Danny Postel | March 25, 2025

https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-america-first-masquerade/

It seemed at the time like a Freudian slip.

A few years ago, when Tucker Carlson still had his prime-time show on Fox News, he asked: “Why do I care what’s going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? And I’m serious. Why do I care? And why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”

Putting to the side the glaring internal contradiction — If you really don’t care what happens in Ukraine, then why are you rooting for Russia? — Carlson’s utterance speaks to a pervasive tendency to conflate two very distinct (indeed incompatible) foreign policy outlooks. This slippage, which has a long history, has had a confusing and mystifying effect on the debate about U.S. foreign policy in the Trump era.

The first half — “Why do I care what’s going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?” — expresses an outlook that is typically characterized as “America First” nationalism or foreign policy realism, while the second half — “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.” — conveys something much darker and much closer to the views of Vice President JD Vance, who shares deep ideological affinities with Carlson.

Realizing that his comments had raised some hackles, Carlson attempted to walk them back. “Earlier in the show, I noted I was rooting for Russia in the contest between Russia and Ukraine,” Carlson said. “Of course, I’m joking. I’m only rooting for America.” But this was far from an isolated remark. On another occasion, Carlson grumbled: “Why would we take Ukraine’s side? Why aren’t we on Russia’s side? I’m totally confused.” And on another broadcast, he made it even more explicit: “I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine. That is my view.”

And Carlson is hardly alone in this regard. In certain quarters of the American right — the ones Carlson and Vance represent — sympathy with Vladimir Putin abounds. Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, has called Putin “the preeminent statesman of our time.” “On the world stage,” Caldwell asked, “who can vie with him?”

Pat Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and a founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, went further, arguing in 2013 that in “the culture war for mankind’s future,” Putin is “one of us” — meaning a so-called paleoconservative. (Unlike libertarians and free-market Republicans, “paleocons” oppose free-trade deals, favor strict controls on immigration and support policies that benefit the working class; unlike neoconservatives, they generally oppose military interventions and are deeply skeptical of schemes for democratization.)

Putin’s appeal “as a defender of traditional values” is especially strong, Buchanan wrote, “when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.”

Although Buchanan, now 86, no longer enjoys the prominence he once had on the national stage (he was for many years a regular on cable news and ran for president three times — in 1992, 1996 and 2000), it’s important to underscore how important he was in laying the groundwork for Trump’s rise. “America First!” (with an exclamation mark) was the slogan of Buchanan’s presidential campaign in 2000. He staked out the ideological ground that Trump would make his calling card many years earlier. The veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield has called Trump “Pat Buchanan with better timing.”

Vance is more careful in the way he frames his position. Unlike Buchanan, he doesn’t wax enthusiastic about Putin — at least not explicitly. “Get America out of Ukraine!” he exclaimed in 2023 at a confab celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. MAGA fixture Kari Lake, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Arizona in 2022 and for the U.S. Senate in 2024, and is currently a senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, expressed the America First position succinctly when she declared at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, “I say we should invest in protecting our borders, not Ukraine’s.”

America First nationalism and foreign policy realism are not identical, but the two outlooks converge on the belief, expressed in Lake’s remark, that U.S. interests should take precedence over those of other countries, that we should prioritize our problems at home above those in foreign lands. This view has deep roots in U.S. history. In his 1796 farewell address, George Washington warned against foreign entanglements and argued that “inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.” In 1821, Secretary of State (and future president) John Quincy Adams famously admonished against venturing “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” — a reference point to this day for advocates of “restraint” in foreign policy. In 1992, at the onset of the war in Bosnia, Secretary of State James Baker is reported to have remarked, “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”

These views are often characterized as “isolationist,” but I prefer to avoid that loaded term, which is mainly used as a form of disparagement. (In 1952, the American political writer Walter Lippmann argued that the term isolationist “must be handled with the greatest care, or it can do nothing but confuse and mislead.”) Very few people actually call themselves isolationists. In contrast, Trump enthusiastically embraces the America First label. “America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration,” he declared in a foreign policy speech in 2016. And virtually everyone likes to be thought of as a realist.

But a truly consistent America First-er wouldn’t take sides in wars between other countries, let alone in their internal politics. In the language of international relations theory, realists see other states like billiard balls: It doesn’t matter what’s inside them, just how they bounce off each other, and the point is to pursue the strategic interests of your state on the global pool table. The domestic affairs of other states are not our business, only what they do on the international stage.

But that is decidedly not the approach of the Trump administration. The president and vice president in particular are partial to Russia and actively hostile to Ukraine. They are not neutral on the war. Indeed, they sympathize with Putin, albeit in slightly different ways: Trump identifies with the Russian leader on a mainly psychological and aesthetic level, as a strongman who projects power and doesn’t let anything stand in his way, whereas Vance sympathizes with Putin’s ideological project and sees him as a fellow culture warrior against liberalism and “globalism.” Vance and others in his intellectual orbit don’t merely side with Russia against Ukraine, but side with Putin against his domestic enemies — opposition leaders like the late Alexei Navalny, members of the feminist rock band Pussy Riot, critics of his invasion of Ukraine, dissident intellectuals and writers (most of whom have fled the country) and others.

It goes well beyond Russia. Vance was far from neutral about Germany’s recent elections. Breaking a taboo, he met with the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel, and made it perfectly clear that he feels an affinity with the far-right party. In his much-discussed speech at the Munich Security Conference during the same trip, the vice president lambasted European leaders not for their foreign but rather their domestic policies, taking them to task for marginalizing far-right movements and squelching free expression. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance inveighed.

The Bulgarian writer Ivan Krastev has noted that Trump and Vance routinely chastise democracies over their internal affairs but rarely (if ever) apply the same standards to authoritarian regimes guilty of far more severe repression. Incidentally, it’s hardly surprising that Putin’s longtime right-hand man Dmitry Medvedev gloated over Vance’s address, which he summarized as saying to the Europeans, in effect: “Your democracy is weak, your elections are garbage, and your rules, which violate basic human morality, are crap. And you don’t even have freedom of speech!”

And let’s not forget the American right’s “special relationship” with Viktor Orban. CPAC held its 2023 conference in Budapest, at which the Hungarian prime minister delivered the keynote address. At the U.S. edition of the event, Orban said that Hungary must resist becoming a “mixed-race” country like various European states that have opened their doors to large immigrant populations. (One of Orban’s top aides resigned over the comments, saying his speech sounded as if it were given by a “Nazi.”) Trump has similarly warned that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America.

The term “America First” is just as confusing and misleading as Lippmann argued “isolationism” had become. Its advocates would have us believe that they are merely pursuing a realist foreign policy, one of neutrality and restraint, while in actuality they have dogs in various fights, both between warring countries and inside them. In one breath, they profess indifference about “what’s going on” in faraway lands, and in the next breath, they let slip their fondness for dictators and war criminals. Or, in a sleight of hand, they disavow it. Carlson is more loose-lipped than JD Vance but they are kindred ideological spirits to the core. Vance has said that he is “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” Affinities for Putin, the AfD and other far-right parties and leaders are pervasive in those subcultures.

This ambiguity goes back to the America First Committee in 1940, which was formed to oppose U.S. entry into World War II. In principle, the argument was for neutrality: Let the Europeans fight it out. It doesn’t concern us. And the committee appealed to people across the ideological spectrum. Its adherents included pacifists and socialists. But the body’s most visible member, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, openly sympathized with the Nazis and promoted the regime’s propaganda, as did other prominent spokespeople for the cause. Eventually, this drove away the committee’s progressive and centrist supporters and damaged its reputation nationally. The body collapsed under the weight of these contradictions, dissolving in 1941.

These contradictions have bedeviled “America First” nationalism from its inception and remain present to this day. In his recent book “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators,” the political writer Jacob Heilbrunn examines conservative enthusiasm for the German emperor Wilhelm II during World War I, for Mussolini in the 1920s and Hitler in the 1930s, for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, and for apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Heilbrunn emphasizes that while conservatives often frame their position on issues like Ukraine in realist terms, the actual motivation goes unacknowledged. They often blame NATO expansion for pushing Putin into a corner, but such complaints are “not about foreign policy realism,” Heilbrunn argues. Rather, they are rooted in real admiration for Putin — for his disdain for LGBTQ rights, for his support for the Russian Orthodox church, and for his cult of masculinity.”

In the worldview of Buchanan and Vance, the realms of foreign and domestic policy are impossible to disentangle. Buchanan makes this explicit in his paean to Putin. “As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”

Putin, according to Buchanan, “is seeking to redefine the ‘Us vs. Them’ world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent West.”

It’s revealing that in his ambush on Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, Vance made a point of complaining that the Ukrainian president “went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October.” Thus, from Vance’s perspective, “Putin is not so much a potential foreign policy partner as an ideological ally in the common struggle against ‘global liberal elites,’” the Russian political theorist Ilya Budraitskis, author of “Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia” (2022), told New Lines. (As it happens, Vance’s claim was false. As PolitiFact pointed out, Zelenskyy met with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, but it was not a campaign event. The meeting took place at an ammunition plant, where the Ukrainian leader thanked the workers producing munitions for Ukraine.)

The historians Matthew Specter and Varsha Venkatasubramanian also underscore this point in their recent essay “‘America First’: Nationalism, Nativism, and the Fascism Question, 1880–2020.” The slogan “America First” has always operated on two discrete levels, they argue. It is both “an answer to a question about national identity: ‘Who are we?’” and “the answer to a question about action: ‘How should we act in international affairs?’ — thus serving to “condense the realms of immigration policy and foreign policy into a single symbol.” Indeed, they note, Trump originally deployed the slogan “to promote the fear of migrant ‘hordes’ coming in from the southern border and endangering the safety of (white) American citizens.”

It is this overriding preoccupation with domestic issues — particularly identitarian and racial ones like immigration and demographic change — that makes America First nationalism ultimately incompatible with foreign policy realism. While the administration and its supporters present the foreign policy orientation of Trump and Vance in a realist guise, they then smuggle in a very different agenda.

They can’t have it both ways. Either they don’t care who wins, or they’re rooting for a side — it’s one or the other.

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

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 10:42 AM

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


If it survives another year, Kyiv can win the war

By Sam Kiley | Wednesday 26 March 2025 13:43 GMT

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-ceasefi
re-war-putin-zelensky-b2721859.html

An analysis by the Kiel Institute concludes that the cost of replacing all US military support for Ukraine “would be possible with relatively little additional effort”.

“Currently, European governments contribute about €44 billion annually to Ukraine’s defence, or roughly 0.1% of their combined GDP, a relatively modest fiscal commitment,” the Kiel study found.

“To replace total US aid, Europe would need to increase its annual support to approximately €82 billion per year, or 0.21% of GDP — essentially doubling its current financial effort,”

It went on to put that financial commitment into context “...the Baltic countries, Sweden or Norway are already contributing more than 0.3% of their GDP each year to Ukraine’s defence”.

The UK spends about 0.17% of its GDP on Ukraine while Sir Keir Starmer is leading an effort to establish a “coalition of the willing” to defend a future peace deal, he has yet to point out the relatively small proportion of GDP replacing US help would entail for his “coalition”.

The US has spent less on Ukraine’s forces ($50 billion) than it did on the Afghan army and air force ($80 billion).

Ukraine is desperate for air defences, especially the US-made Patriot missile system – although Germany has supplied three systems compared the US two.

The US has not supplied a single modern aircraft to Ukraine. It has given Kyiv 20 Mi-17V5 Soviet era helicopters once destined for Afghanistan but no fighter jets.

Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium, have supplied F-16s while North Macedonia and Slovakia sent Kyiv four Su-25 attack aircraft and over 10 MiG-29 fighter jets.

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

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 1:50 PM

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Ukraine Unleashes Nikola Tesla’s Weapon In The Black Sea

By David Hambling | Mar 26, 2025, 06:58am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/03/26/ukraine-unleashe
s-teslas-weapon-in-the-black-sea/

In 1898 famed inventor Nikola Tela unveiled a new development which he believed would transform war: a radio-controlled boat which would allow small powers to fight off larger ones.

“War will cease to be possible when all the world knows to-morrow that the most feeble of the nations can supply itself immediately with a weapon which will render its coast secure and its ports impregnable to the assaults of the united armadas of the world,” Tesla declared. “Battleships will cease to be built, and the mightiest armorclads and the most tremendous artillery afloat will be of no more use than so much scrap iron.”

Needless to say, the technology took longer to mature than Tesla expected. But now Ukraine has launched a new type of drone boat carrying torpedoes which may fulfil Tesla’s prophecy.

Robots Of The Black Sea

Ukraine has already fought a highly successful campaign on the Black Sea, pitting small robot speedboats – Uncrewed Surface Vessels of USVs – against Russian warships. In the vast majority of attacks, these USVs have been packed with explosives for one-way attacks to ram opposing vessels and explode.

As HI Sutton has recorded in detail, the drone boats, in conjunction with aerial drones and long-range anti-ship missiles, have successfully driven back the Russian fleet, allowing Ukraine to continue grain exports. Ukraine has deployed at least fifteen different types of USV, from simple robot jet skis and repurposed commercial boats to the large custom-built Sea Baby which carried out attacks on the Kerch Bridge. http://www.hisutton.com/Russia-Ukraine-USVs-2024.html

Evolutions have included arming the boats with unguided rockets to attack land targets, and USVs with surface-to-air missiles. One of these shot down a Russian helicopter last December, the first ever such kill from a drone boat.

More recently, Ukrainian USVs have acted as aircraft carriers for small FPV attack drones, carrying out strikes on coastal targets including radar and surface-to-air missile launchers.

Introducing A Shark With Torpedoes

On Tuesday, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister – and drone supremo – unveiled a new USV called Katran (“Shark”) on his official Telegram channel. This is a multipurpose vessel for attack and reconnaissance missions. https://t.me/zedigital/5619

Katran (also known as Katran VENOM) is advertised as having a range in excess of 1,000 kilometers/ 600 miles and able to destroy targets on land, sea and air. Speed, powered by two waterjets, is estimated at 130 kph / 80 mph. It communicates via secure satellite link and may also have considerable autonomy allowing it to operate in radio silence.

It carries its own electronic warfare system, probably designed to known down Russian FPVs previously used to attack drone boats. It also has decoy flares and smoke launchers.

Katran can be armed with miniguns, machine guns, surface-to-air missiles or torpedoes. This last addition makes Katran the fulfilment of Tesla’s dream.

We do not know what sort of torpedoes might be carried. But previously Sweden provided Ukraine with unspecified underwater weapons, possibly Torped 47 or SLWT guided torpedoes. These are modern guided torpedoes which can target submarines as well as surface ships. The Torped 47 weighs some 340 kg/ 750 pounds, of which 50 kg/110 pounds is the warhead, and has a range of more than 20 km / 12 miles.

Such weapons are expensive and in short supply. But for the first time USVs can carry out long-range attacks against Russian warships with a high probability of success.
https://defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/shvedska_pidvodna_zbroja_dlja_u
krajini_scho_tse_mozhe_buti_ta_jak_magura_v5_ta_sea_baby_stanut_sche_efektivnishimi-14507.html

“Literally everything about this vehicle is impressive,” notes Ukrainian magazine Defense Express reviewing the new release.

Russian bloggers reported sightings of a Ukrainian torpedo-armed USV earlier this month, but this had not previously been confirmed. The Katran was developed in association with the Ukraine’s Brave1 technology accelerator, which assists the development of defense systems and has been a great driver of innovations in the drone world.

Russian Roulette

The very existence of Katran makes defending against USVs far more challenging. Ukraine operates a mixed fleet of drone boats, and an attacking flotilla could include low-cost expendable USVs carrying explosives, others with missiles, and others with torpedoes, while still others might be carriers with FPVs.

Previously, a standard tactic was to send out helicopters to destroy the drone boats at long distance. However, if some of the USVs have surface-to-air missiles the helicopters may be flying into a trap. The Katran’s machine-gun also seems to be on a high-angle mount to engage helicopters.

The alternative is letting the drone boats get closer and destroying them with machine guns or cannon fire. That may be effective against boats which need to run into a vessel, but torpedoes change the equation. A Russian vessel which allows drone boats to get within ten miles of it risks being sunk without warning.

And while it takes years to build a warship, Ukraine’s drone fleet is growing by the week, both in size and in sophistication. It appears to be evolving much faster than the countermeasures to stop it, which may have a dramatic effect on sea power.

“I have no desire that my fame should rest on the invention of a merely destructive device, no matter how terrible,” Tesla told reporters when he showed off his drone boat in 1898. “I prefer to be remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.”

The second part still looks some way off, though a fleet of drones may be an effective asymmetric way of discouraging aggression for Ukraine, Taiwan and other nations threatened by large, more powerful neighbors.

But in the near term, the Katran and other USVs may started a serious debate on whether crewed warships are likely to become “no more use than so much scrap iron.”

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

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Thursday, March 27, 2025 6:58 AM

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


Artillery Is Still King, And Ukraine Has Mastered Producing Howitzers

By Vikram Mittal | Mar 26, 2025, 11:59am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/vikrammittal/2025/03/26/artillery-is-stil
l-king-and-ukraine-has-mastered-producing-howitzers/

Until recently, Ukrainian artillery accounted for the majority of Russian combat losses in the Russia-Ukraine War. However, drones have now taken on this role, partly due to Ukraine’s significant losses of howitzers. In response, Ukraine has increased its ability to deploy large numbers of its domestically produced 2S22 Bohdana self-propelled howitzers. This progress is the result of adjustments to the system’s development process, allowing Ukraine to emerge as a leader in howitzer production. Ukraine’s ability to manufacture these weapons is crucial, as combining artillery with drones and infantry tactics creates a powerful combat advantage.

Production of the Ukrainian 2S22 Bohdana

In a recent interview, Igor Fedirko, the Executive Director of the Ukrainian Defense Industry Council, indicated that Ukraine has the capacity to domestically produce 40 Bohdana self-propelled howitzers per month. The Bohdana is a self-propelled howitzer mounted on a wheeled truck chassis, featuring an autoloading gun capable of firing 155mm shells with a range exceeding 40 km. Ukraine started developing the Bohdana in 2016, with the initial system fielded in 2022.

Ramping production up to 40 howitzers per month is an impressive feat when compared to the production capacities of other countries. A report by the Kiel Institute approximates that Russia, with its established defense industry and large military budget, also produces 40 howitzers per month. The same report indicates that France can now produce 8 Caesar cannons per month and that Germany can only produce 5 to 6 of their Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzers per year. Meanwhile, BAE Systems delivered 216 M109A7 Paladins to the United States military over 54 months, equating to 4 howitzers per month.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/fit-for-war-in-decades-europes-an
d-germanys-slow-rearmament-vis-a-vis-russia-33234/

To achieve its current production levels, Ukraine leveraged its domestic manufacturing capabilities to streamline component production. However, chassis availability became a bottleneck. Initially, the Bohdana was mounted on the KrAZ-6322 6×6 truck chassis. To accelerate production and reduce dependence on a single supplier, Ukrainian manufacturers introduced alternative chassis, including the Ukrainian Bogdan-6317 chassis and the Czech Tatra Phoenix 8×8. Ukraine also introduced a towed variant of the howitzer. Despite these efforts, the limited availability of truck chassis remains a primary constraint on production rates.

The Need For Artillery On The Modern Battlefield

Last month, Ukrainian drones were responsible for approximately two-thirds of Russian combat losses. While drones have become an essential asset, this figure may be inflated due to Ukrainian artillery shortages and ammunition conservation. According to Oryxspionkop.com, Ukraine has lost 735 howitzers, including towed and self-propelled, averaging 20 per month. Since Oryxspionkop only includes those items that have been verified through open-source images, the actual number of losses would be higher. As Ukraine’s artillery production likely now outpaces its losses, combined with its domestic shell production, artillery should return to playing a very prominent role in the conflict.

Artillery Strikes Guided by Ukrainian Drone

The ability to deploy large quantities of artillery is a decisive factor on the modern battlefield. Both Russia and Ukraine have refined the integration of artillery and drones to maximize effectiveness. Reconnaissance drones operate above jamming range, using advanced optics to detect enemy vehicles and troops. They then use a combination of artillery and FPV drones to strike these targets and suppress the enemy formations. Artillery offers several advantages compared to the more precise FPV drones, including that artillery rounds are cheaper than most drones, can carry heavier payloads, and are not vulnerable to jamming.

Artillery also plays a critical role in supporting infantry operations, particularly in assaults aimed at securing territory. To gain control of an area, Ukrainian troops must push forward and dislodge Russian forces. While drones excel at targeting key equipment, the sheer firepower of an artillery barrage forces Russian troops out of fortified positions and vehicles. Once enemy defenses are weakened, Ukrainian infantry can advance and eliminate any remaining opposition, securing the area. Ukraine recently used these tactics successfully in a counterattack in Chasiv Yar, reclaiming positions held by Russian forces.

When Russia launched its invasion in 2022, few expected Ukraine to still be fighting three years later. A key factor in Ukraine’s resilience has been its ability to innovate in both technology and tactics. While drones and electronic warfare have drawn significant attention, Ukraine’s rapid expansion of howitzer production has been equally remarkable. With a monthly output of forty Bohdana howitzers, Ukraine’s production capacity rivals that of Russia and surpasses every Western military. Combined with its advancements in other defense domains, Ukraine’s growing howitzer arsenal enhances its ability to sustain and adapt to a very uncertain battlefield.

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

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Thursday, March 27, 2025 6:59 AM

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


The French Caesar and Swedish Archer in Ukraine
Mar 18, 2025



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

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Friday, March 28, 2025 5:25 AM

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


The Triple Tap Raid On the Engels Bomber Base Cost Russia $960 Million

By David Axe | Mar 27, 2025, 07:29pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/27/the-triple-tap-raid-o
n-the-engels-bomber-base-cost-russia-96-billion/

Those 96 destroyed missiles accounted for two months of production at the Raduga Design Bureau munitions factory near Moscow. Each Kh-101 costs at least $10 million. That means the strike on Engels may have carried a price tag of $960 million — not counting the additional damage to fuel storage and other facilities at the base.

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

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Friday, March 28, 2025 5:28 AM

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


Russia seen ready for big troop move year after Ukraine truce

By Rudy Ruitenberg | Mar 27, 2025, 12:09 PM

https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/03/27/russia-seen-ready
-for-big-troop-move-year-after-ukraine-truce-dutch/

Russia is seen ready to execute a “large scale” troop move about one year after the conclusion of a ceasefire or peace in Ukraine, Dutch Minister of Defence Ruben Brekelmans said in a speech at a security conference on Thursday, citing the military intelligence service of the Netherlands.

Brekelmans asked his audience in the Dutch town of Baarn to imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin stationing hundreds of thousands of troops on the border with the Baltic countries for a large-scale exercise. Ukraine’s experience shows “we know only one week in advance” whether such a move would indeed be an exercise or a preparation for an attack, he said.

The Dutch threat assessment appears even more acute than warnings by European Commissioner for Defence Andrius Kubilius that Russia may be ready to test NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause by 2030, citing Danish and German intel. The European Commission is pushing European Union countries for more defense spending to build up a credible military deterrent to Russia by the end of the decade.

Russia will be able to free up “significant” military resources in case the war in Ukraine stops or freezes, thus increasing its military capability to pose a credible threat to NATO countries, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service assessed in a February report. In that case, Russia would be ready to fight a regional war in the Baltic Sea area within about two years, according to the DDIS.

Brekelmans said Putin has repeatedly said he wants revenge for the breakup of the Soviet Union, and wants to restore its sphere of influence. The Dutch minister said Russia only continues to invest more in its war industry and in recruiting soldiers.

He said the Russian economy is running entirely on the war industry, and the country will face “a big problem” should thousands of soldiers return to society with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“In short, Putin has the intention, capabilities and incentives to continue his aggression beyond Ukraine,” Brekelmans said.

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

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Saturday, March 29, 2025 8:02 AM

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


Russian President Vladimir Putin is reintensifying efforts to portray the current Ukrainian government as illegitimate and unable to engage in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Putin reiterated longstanding boilerplate rhetoric during a visit to a Russian submarine command post in Murmansk Oblast on March 27, claiming that "Nazis" and people with "neo-Nazi views" have significant influence in the Ukrainian government and that "neo-Nazi groups" have the "actual power in their hands" in Ukraine.[1] Putin reiterated claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is illegitimate because Ukraine did not hold presidential elections in 2024 and additionally alleged that all Ukrainian civil authorities are therefore illegitimate since the president appoints regional officials. The Ukrainian Constitution explicitly prohibits elections during periods of martial law and invasion by a hostile country, however.[2] Putin claimed that "neo-Nazi formations" are ruling Ukraine in the absence of a legitimate Ukrainian government and questioned how Russia can negotiate with these groups. Putin has previously characterized the Ukrainian government as illegitimate in an effort to justify Russia's unwillingness to engage in good faith negotiations to end the war and has consistently identified "denazification" – a phrase the Kremlin uses to make its demand for the removal of the Ukrainian government and the installation of a pro-Russian puppet regime – as a goal of his full-scale invasion since February 2022.[3]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-28-2025

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

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Saturday, March 29, 2025 9:01 AM

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


A Ukrainian Drone Sneaked Up On Russian Troops Snug In Their Sleeping Bags

Night-vision fiber-optic drones are especially dangerous.

By David Axe | Mar 28, 2025, 01:41am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/28/a-ukrainian-drone-sne
aked-up-on-russian-troops-snug-in-their-sleeping-bags/

The nightmarish drone strike, captured in real time by the drone’s camera, was a bloody reminder that tiny drones are everywhere all the time all along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 37-month wider war on Ukraine.

A simple net or screen — or even just closing a door — might’ve saved the sleeping Russians. Their negligence doomed them. One unfortunate Russian seemed to wake up and notice the drone right before it struck.

The nighttime strike on somnolent Russians might not have been possible just a few months ago. The first generation of Ukrainian fiber-optic FPVs was awkward and inefficient in design — and potentially too bulky to maneuver through a building.

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

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Saturday, March 29, 2025 12:25 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Where do you find the time to dig up so much cope, SECOND?


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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Saturday, March 29, 2025 2:43 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin reiterated claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is illegitimate because Ukraine did not hold presidential elections in 2024 and additionally alleged that all Ukrainian civil authorities are therefore illegitimate since the president appoints regional officials. The Ukrainian Constitution explicitly prohibits elections during periods of martial law and invasion by a hostile country,


The Ukrainian Constitution is SILENT on the status of President under martial law.

Quote:
The Constitution explicitly extends the five-year authority of the Verkhovna Rada (the national parliament of Ukraine) [BUT NOT THE PRESIDENT] in the state of martial law until the first meeting of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine of the next parliamentary term, elected after the cancellation of the state of martial law.


And also

Quote:
The Constitution of Ukraine shall not be amended in conditions of martial law or a state of emergency.


The Constitution of Ukraine

https://rm.coe.int/constitution-of-ukraine/168071f58b




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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Saturday, March 29, 2025 4:52 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Man...

How many times is Second going to suffer a brutal beatdown by the Truth?

You've had a bad week, buddy.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, March 29, 2025 5:44 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Man...

How many times is Second going to suffer a brutal beatdown by the Truth?

You've had a bad week, buddy.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Russia’s Latest Combat Vehicle Is A Truck From 1952

GAZ-69s appear along the front line.

By David Axe | Mar 29, 2025, 02:02pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/29/russias-latest-combat
-vehicle-is-a-truck-from-1952/

The GAZ-69 was one of the earliest Soviet off-roads vehicles. The first example of the 3,500-pound, four-wheel-drive truck rolled off the assembly line at the Molotov plant in Moscow in 1952. The last was completed in 1972.

Developed in the late 1940s, the GAZ-69 is—generously speaking—an 80-year-old design. It’s also one of the latest vehicle types to roll into battle with the Russian army in Ukraine. Recent photos have depicted GAZ-69s near the front line of Russia’s 37-month wider war on Ukraine. At least one deployed GAZ-69 has been fitted with anti-drone screens.

The arrival of the aged off-road vehicles is the latest evidence of the Russian military’s accelerating de-mechanization as losses of purpose-made armored vehicles and other heavy equipment exceed 20,000. To put into perspective how many vehicles that is, the entire British military operates around 18,000 vehicles.

Losing far more armored vehicles than they can replace through new production or by retrieving older vehicles from long-term storage, the Russians increasingly depend on civilian vehicles not just for battlefield logistics—but also for direct assaults on Ukrainian positions.

“I guess this Lada storming is the norm now?” open-source analyst Moklasen mused as they scrutinized yet another video feed from a Ukrainian drone unit blowing up Russian Lada compact cars attacking Ukrainian positions in late January.

Vehicular death spiral

But civilian vehicles are even more vulnerable to mines, artillery, drones and missiles than armored vehicles. Up-armored trucks and civilian vehicles such as vans, trucks, compact cars and all-terrain vehicles—that is, golf carts—now account for around 70 percent of Russian losses, according to one recent survey.

In switching to civilian transport, Russian regiments risk accelerating their de-mechanization as the civilian vehicles get destroyed even faster than the increasingly precious armored vehicles, resulting in greater demand for even less suitable modes of transportation such as electric scooters and even horses and donkeys. The only other alternative, of course, is for Russian troops to walk into battle.

The de-mechanization of the Russian military doesn’t mean Russia can’t sustain an offensive and incrementally advance in Ukraine. The Russian armed forces still have more people and, incredibly, more vehicles than the Ukrainians—and they’re willing to expend them for modest territorial gains.

But the loss of militarily appropriate vehicles does constrain Russian forces. De-mechanized Russian regiments might overwhelm and push back Ukrainian brigades under certain circumstances. But realistically, these hollowed-out regiments can’t exploit the resulting gaps in Ukrainian defenses.

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

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Saturday, March 29, 2025 6:01 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND keeps quoting David Axe bc Axe is the biggest bald-faced liar, after Zelensky of course.

I watch, or listen to, Military Summary Channel nearly twice a day. And Dima - who keeps an eagle eye on Telegram Channels, "Kiev says", and especially videos from the front ... and who is so pro-Ukrainian he would pounce on any indication of Russian frontline deficiency ... hasn't once shown a video of Russian civilian cars or 1952 vehicles on the front.

I've seen plenty of UKRAINIAN civilian vehicles tho... station wagons, trucks, sedans ... on the front. Usually from an FPV drone, just before it strikes.

*****

Meanwhile, all indications are that Russia is building up for a major offensive in May once the mud season is over.


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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Sunday, March 30, 2025 6:30 AM

SECOND

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


Black Sea Ceasefire Deal

By Brendan Cole | Mar 30, 2025 at 4:00 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-zelensky-black-sea-2051529

Yörük Isik, head of the Istanbul-based Bosphorus Observer consultancy, told Newsweek the Riyadh talks had not yielded a deal but rather "a surrender document to Kremlin talking points."

"It gives Russia the opportunity to bring its navy out to rest of the Black Sea and will reset all the gains obtained by Ukraine," he said. "That means, at any given moment, Ukraine's operational posts are under Russian threat again."

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

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Sunday, March 30, 2025 6:31 AM

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


The U.S. Has Changed Its Mind About Europe

After following America’s lead for 80 years, the continent’s democracies do not recognize the danger now before them.

By Phillips Payson O’Brien | March 29, 2025, 11:30 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/europe-trump-nato-ru
ssia/682239/

Democracies in Europe and their detractors in Washington have radically different understandings of why the continent depends on American military protection. Donald Trump and his aides constantly talk as if crafty Europeans have cynically manipulated the United States for decades, making Americans pay for their defense while Germany, France, and the like enjoy their lavish welfare states, early retirements, and carefree lives. “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Vice President J. D. Vance in the Trump-administration Signal chat that accidentally included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. “It’s PATHETIC,” Hegseth added.

European leaders, meanwhile, believe their countries have been dutifully following America’s direction on geopolitical matters for 80 years. Hundreds of millions of Europeans have completely subordinated their fate to the desires of the United States, which looks after them, protects them, and even thinks for them. Most Europeans now alive have known no other security arrangements. Contemplating the disappearance of NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance, is so unnerving for many in Europe, including many of the continent’s political leaders, that they seem incapable of thinking for themselves.

But they need to confront that possibility soon. In practice, NATO may already be doomed. The U.S. commitment to European defense was grounded not in the long-ago NATO treaty, but in a political consensus among Americans that a free and democratic Europe was in their interest. Presidents of both parties defended the continent in the Cold War and then oversaw NATO’s subsequent expansion. This policy was a brilliant success. Freedom and democracy spread across the old Eastern bloc, leading to growing prosperity.

Today, Trump and his movement—which dominates the Republican Party—declare that they despise liberal Europe. In the now-infamous Signal chat, when Vance appeared to endorse a delay in bombing Yemen, he implied that Europe would benefit disproportionately from an American attack on the Houthis. The vice president visited Greenland yesterday as part of an American effort to wrest the island from Denmark, a faithful NATO member.

For reasons that are difficult to comprehend as a matter of geopolitical strategy, Trump is moving the United States closer and closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, an economically weak but militarily expansionist state that is committed to ending the period of American global dominance. In part because Ukraine, an emerging democracy, sought integration into a U.S.-led security framework in democratic Europe, Russia has attacked that country’s very existence and called for the Ukrainians to surrender much of their internationally recognized territory. Putin had previously invaded one other neighbor—Georgia—and has threatened many others, including the Baltic States, Poland, and Finland. Russia has also worked hard to promote extremist parties across Europe and to subvert democracy in NATO states such as Hungary and Slovakia.

After decades of protecting Europe against Russia, the U.S. has abruptly lurched away from its past commitments. The Trump administration has deprived Ukraine of weapons and intelligence at crucial moments. Trump is helping Russia try to escape from the harsh economic sanctions that have been placed on its economy since the invasion of Ukraine. At this moment, the U.S. could very well be classified as a noncombatant ally of Russia, much like it was a noncombatant ally of Great Britain before Pearl Harbor. While the U.S. was not yet fighting alongside Britain, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted the British to defeat Nazi Germany, so he choreographed support for them even without formally siding with them. Trump is offering Russia similar help against Ukraine.

Under these circumstances, a key question is whether European leaders can now emotionally break away from the United States. They have outsourced their strategic thinking, and arguably sacrificed their self-respect, for so long that they no longer know how to defend their continent by themselves. As Trump has moved progressively closer and closer to Putin, European leaders continued to think they could build bridges with Trump’s White House and maintain the Atlantic alliance for a few more years.

Extreme optimists might hold out hope that, however dangerous Trump is, he will be in office only for a few years, and NATO’s unity can be restored once he leaves. But how likely is the post-Trump Republican Party to return to an Atlanticist outlook? Comments by Vance, perhaps the likeliest of Trump’s political heirs, suggest that such a reversion is a long way off. And even if the Democrats regain power, they cannot simply undo the damage Trump has caused. Europe needs to start facing the future, not harkening back to a probably lost past.

A few weeks ago, Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, spoke of the need for Europe to be more independent from the United States. French President Emmanuel Macron struck a similar note last year when he discussed sending European forces to Ukraine without American help if need be.

But Europe will need to go beyond rhetoric. Europe has underfunded its own defense for more than 30 years. Military budgets on the continent started collapsing when the Cold War ended. Governments on the continent need to spend more on defense—in some cases twice as much. They must also use their money far more efficiently. European states don’t all need to make their own tanks or other armored personnel carriers. Rationalizing and consolidating production of arms and supplies will be a key long-term survival skill.

In the short term, Europe must also do everything it can to help Ukraine survive—either by providing the supplies that the country needs to continue fighting or by offering real security guarantees in the event of a truce. The more NATO withers and the closer the U.S. draws to Russia, the more Europe needs a strong, democratic Ukraine to help protect its eastern flank.

Europe’s devotion to the United States has left the continent, in a word, pathetic. It now has an opportunity to rebuild its strategic thinking and capabilities, and to learn again how to protect its own freedom and liberties. As Trump flirts dangerously with authoritarianism, Europe needs to save itself. If it can, Europe might also someday play a role in saving the United States.

Phillips Payson O’Brien is a professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. He is the author of The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler—How War Made Them, and How They Made War.

Download his books for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Phillips+Payson+O%E2%80%99Brien
or from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Phillips+Payson+O%E2%80%99Brien

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

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Sunday, March 30, 2025 12:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


They're all practically Muslim countries now, and that's their own doing.

Nobody cares.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, March 30, 2025 2:46 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They're all practically Muslim countries now, and that's their own doing.

Nobody cares.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump thinks he is going to win at Russian Roulette, but the revolver pointed at his own head has 6 bullets in it:

Trump holds gun to Zelensky’s head with unprecedented reparation demands to force Ukraine to restore Putin’s gas empire

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard | 27 March 2025 5:34pm GMT

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/27/revealed-trump-plan-fo
rce-ukraine-restore-putin-gas-empire/

Donald Trump is holding a gun to the head of Volodymyr Zelensky, demanding huge reparations payments and laying claim to half of Ukraine’s oil, gas, and hydrocarbon resources as well as almost all its metals and much of its infrastructure.

The latest version of his “minerals deal”, obtained by The Telegraph, is unprecedented in the history of modern diplomacy and state relations.

“It is an expropriation document,” said Alan Riley, an expert on energy law at the Atlantic Council. “There are no guarantees, no defence clauses, the US puts up nothing.

“The Americans can walk away, the Ukrainians can’t. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

The text leaves little doubt that Mr Trump’s chief objective is to incorporate Ukraine as a province of America’s oil, gas and resource industries.

It dovetails with parallel talks between the US and Russia for a comprehensive energy partnership, including plans to restore West Siberian gas flows to Europe in large volumes, with US companies and Trump-aligned financiers gaining a major stake in the business.

The revived gas trade would flow through Ukraine’s network, and later via the Baltic as the sabotaged Nord Stream pipelines are brought back on stream.

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

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Sunday, March 30, 2025 3:46 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Reading articles by people pretending to explain something can be amusing.
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The U.S. Has Changed Its Mind About Europe

After following America’s lead for 80 years, the continent’s democracies do not recognize the danger now before them.

By Phillips Payson O’Brien | March 29, 2025, 11:30 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/europe-trump-nato-ru
ssia/682239/

Democracies in Europe and their detractors in Washington have radically different understandings of why the continent depends on American military protection. Donald Trump and his aides constantly talk as if crafty Europeans have cynically manipulated the United States for decades, making Americans pay for their defense while Germany, France, and the like enjoy their lavish welfare states, early retirements, and carefree lives. “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Vice President J. D. Vance in the Trump-administration Signal chat that accidentally included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. “It’s PATHETIC,” Hegseth added.

European leaders, meanwhile, believe their countries have been dutifully following America’s direction on geopolitical matters for 80 years. Hundreds of millions of Europeans have completely subordinated their fate to the desires of the United States, which looks after them, protects them, and even thinks for them. Most Europeans now alive have known no other security arrangements. Contemplating the disappearance of NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance, is so unnerving for many in Europe, including many of the continent’s political leaders, that they seem incapable of thinking for themselves.
It's a combination of both. Ending NATO was contemplated in the early 1990s wgen the Soviet Union fell. That would have been the logical time to disband. But America's MIC and EU and American bureaucracy didn't want to go quietly into that great good night.

Quote:
But they need to confront that possibility soon. In practice, NATO may already be doomed. The U.S. commitment to European defense was grounded not in the long-ago NATO treaty, but in a political consensus among Americans that a free and democratic Europe was in their interest. Presidents of both parties defended the continent in the Cold War and then oversaw NATO’s subsequent expansion. This policy was a brilliant success. Freedom and democracy spread across the old Eastern bloc, leading to growing prosperity.


Europe, under the EU, is not democratic. And its national leaders are mostly integrationist, pro-globalist idiot puppets who literally can't see reality or think of their nations' interests, especially long term. Right now, they're throwing themselves into a pit of unending debt, decay,and misery.

Quote:
Today, Trump and his movement—which dominates the Republican Party—declare that they despise liberal Europe. In the now-infamous Signal chat, when Vance appeared to endorse a delay in bombing Yemen, he implied that Europe would benefit disproportionately from an American attack on the Houthis. The vice president visited Greenland yesterday as part of an American effort to wrest the island from Denmark, a faithful NATO member.

For reasons that are difficult to comprehend as a matter of geopolitical strategy, Trump is moving the United States closer and closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, an economically weak
Wrong.

Quote:
but militarily expansionist


Wrong.

Quote:
state that is committed to ending the period of American global dominance.

Dollar dominance, financial dominance

Quote:
In part because Ukraine, an emerging democracy, sought integration into a U.S.-led security framework in democratic Europe,


Because Ukraine has been the USA's "destroy Russia" proxy ever since its legitimately elected government was toppled by a USA-led coup

Quote:
Russia has attacked that country’s very existence and called for the Ukrainians to surrender much of their internationally recognized territory


Russia never wanted a full-on war. They don't need or want more territory, and they don't want to capture a bunch of Ukrainians who hate them.

Quote:
Putin had previously invaded one other neighbor—Georgia—

He "forgot" that Georgia, under US prompting, fired missiles first. Georgia started the war. Russia ended it.

The rest is just more blah blah blah....



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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 31, 2025 3:13 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Quote:
Russia has attacked that country’s very existence and called for the Ukrainians to surrender much of their internationally recognized territory


Russia never wanted a full-on war. They don't need or want more territory, and they don't want to capture a bunch of Ukrainians who hate them.


This needs adding:

Russia doesn't want to conquer all of Ukraine because all they'd do is lose more men, just to move their border right up to NATO nations. They'd multiply their internal security problems (restive anti-Russians inside their borders) WITHOUT having secured their (new) western border.

Conquering all Ukraine?
All downside, no benefit.

Military people want a military victory.

BUT THEN WHAT?

It's a little like a dog chasing a bus: What do you do if you catch it?

What they REALLY need is a neutral, non-NATO, non-nuclear, demilitarized BUFFER NATION. LIKE AUSTRIA. That's why they need a political solution.

Now, apply that reasoning to Europe. What would conquering Poland do except add a lot of pissed off Poles to their population, and move their western border to Germany? Just keep applying that reasoning moving further westward: more losses, more headaches, less border security

This bogeyman scenario of Russia conquering all of Europe?
Piffle!
Scare stories for unreasoning people.

THAT is Trump's trump card. Not sanctions, not bluster, not bullying the global majority, not more weapons to Ukraine.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 31, 2025 3:40 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Key Takeaways From NYT's Secret History Detailing US 'Shocking' Involvement In Ukraine War

In essence many counter-Russia operations happening on Ukraine's battlefields were simply run from the [Wiesbaden] base in Germany.




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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 31, 2025 6:23 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

He "forgot" that Georgia, under US prompting, fired missiles first. Georgia started the war. Russia ended it.

The rest is just more blah blah blah....
Signym, do your Russian reinterpretation of reality on this news story:

US angered that Ukraine sank cruiser Moskva without warning – NYT

Sun, March 30, 2025 - 14:11

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/us-angered-that-ukraine-sank-cruiser-m
oskva-1743332194.html

US and Ukrainian naval officers were on a routine call when radar screens showed the sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva.

This move caused anger among US officials, as the Ukrainian military had not warned them of the planned operation.

Also, the US was surprised that Ukraine had missiles to hit the cruiser. It also caused panic among Americans, as the then Joe Biden administration did not intend to allow Ukraine to attack such a powerful symbol of Russian power.

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

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Monday, March 31, 2025 6:32 AM

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


Trump adamant on Ukraine’s NATO membership

March 31, 2025, 01:56 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/trump-doubles-down-no-nato-for-ukraine-ze
lenskyy-understands-that-50502147.html

US President Donald Trump once again ruled out the possibility of Ukraine’s NATO membership, Reuters reported on March 30.

"He [Zelentskyy] wants to be a member of NATO, but he's never going to be a member of NATO. He understands that," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Trump previously supported Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's statement that Ukraine's NATO membership was an unrealistic outcome of the peace deal.

But during recent talks in Saudi Arabia, Ukraine refused to compromise on its NATO aspirations as a part of a potential peace agreement with Russia.

“We also discussed the issue of NATO and stated unequivocally that for Ukraine, it cannot be taken off the agenda for Ukraine,” said a source in the Ukrainian negotiating team.

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

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Monday, March 31, 2025 6:58 AM

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


An Assault Group Attacked Pokrovsk While Flying A Giant Russian Flag—And Got Destroyed
Artillery and drones struck all 12 attacking vehicles.

By David Axe | Mar 30, 2025, 02:01pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/30/an-assault-group-atta
cked-pokrovsk-while-flying-a-giant-russian-flag-and-got-destroyed/

It’s tempting fate to roll into a battle in Ukraine while flying a giant flag from your armored vehicle. But that’s exactly what a Russian regiment did on Thursday as they attacked under the white, blue and red banner of the Russian Federation.

Marshaling a dozen increasingly precious armored vehicles, the Russians attacked toward the fortress city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian 35th Marine Brigade and the Birds of Magyar drone group were waiting for them with drones and artillery.

“The entire column was completely destroyed,” one Ukrainian blogger reported. The same thing happened the last time the Russians attacked under a giant flag—in that case, the blood-red flag of the defunct Soviet Union.

The wholesale destruction of the flag-waving Russian assault group came as the Kremlin is once again increasing pressure on Pokrovsk, the anchor of a chain of fortified settlements stretching toward the north.

Russian forces spent a year marching the roughly 25 miles from the ruins of Avdiivka to Pokrovsk. But the offensive ground to a halt a few miles outside of Pokrovsk as it ran into the thickest concentration of Ukrainian drones and artillery last month.

There was a weeks-long lull in assaults as Russian forces first focused on ejecting Ukrainian troops from western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, which they finally did late last month. Now “Russian forces increase the intensity of their attacks on the Pokrovsk direction and attempt to reach the same level of intensity as in January 2025,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies observed.

For the Thursday assault, a Russian regiment assembled a dozen armored vehicles in one column—an increasingly rare sight as Russian losses of armored vehicles and other heavy equipment exceed 20,000 and regiments turn to civilian vehicles to keep their troops moving.

The Russians were victorious in Kursk because the Ukrainians occupied a narrow salient with vulnerable supply lines—and the Russians deployed their best drones to sever the main road into the salient.

The only salients around Pokrovsk are held by the Russians. And the only vulnerable supply lines are also Russian. The doomed flag assault was “unnecessary confirmation of the offensive weakness of the Russians, who, even having accumulated equipment, cannot do anything” around Pokrovsk, the Ukrainian blogger concluded.

Given the conditions, it was imprudent for Russian troops to call their shot and attack under a giant Russian flag as though they’d already won the battle.

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

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Monday, March 31, 2025 8:53 AM

SECOND

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


The Kremlin's ongoing effort to characterize the Ukrainian government as an illegitimate negotiating partner casts serious doubt on the Kremlin's willingness to negotiate in good faith about a settlement of the war and sets informational conditions for Russia to violate any future peace agreement on the grounds that the Ukrainian government had no legal right to conclude it.[3]

A Russian diplomat provided additional details following Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent thinly veiled demand for regime change in Ukraine by having external parties establish a “temporary international administration” in Ukraine under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). Russian Permanent Representative to the European Union Kirill Logvinov presented a detailed plan to Kremlin newswire TASS on March 30 that supports Putin's recent demand for the UN, United States, and European countries to establish a temporary government in Ukraine in the near future.[4] Logvinov argued that the UN should reach an agreement between the parties to the conflict following the implementation of a ceasefire, either directly or indirectly through intermediaries, on the appropriate transfer of power to the UN. Logvinov suggested that one of the parties, mediators, or the UN Secretary General should submit an official appeal that the UN establish a temporary internal administration in Ukraine.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-30-2025

New Russian Requirement Before A Ceasefire With Ukraine: Putin insists that Ukrainians shave off one eyebrow to demonstrate sincerity, or else Putin will not negotiate.

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

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Monday, March 31, 2025 9:28 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

He "forgot" that Georgia, under US prompting, fired missiles first. Georgia started the war. Russia ended it.

The rest is just more blah blah blah....
Signym, do your Russian reinterpretation of reality on this news story:


I see that instead of misrepresenting my posts you decided to insinuate that I'm "reinterpreting" reality.
I'm not.

And you ALMOST called me a "Russian troll", but couldn't quite pull the trigger.

You're a cowardly liar.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 31, 2025 10:41 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

He "forgot" that Georgia, under US prompting, fired missiles first. Georgia started the war. Russia ended it.

The rest is just more blah blah blah....
Signym, do your Russian reinterpretation of reality on this news story:


I see that instead of misrepresenting my posts you decided to insinuate that I'm "reinterpreting" reality.
I'm not.

And you ALMOST called me a "Russian troll", but couldn't quite pull the trigger.

You're a cowardly liar.
Signym, do your corkscrew-twisting of reality with this story. I know you can do something clever. You have talent!

US angered that Ukraine sank cruiser Moskva without warning – NYT

Sun, March 30, 2025 - 14:11

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/us-angered-that-ukraine-sank-cruiser-m
oskva-1743332194.html

US and Ukrainian naval officers were on a routine call when radar screens showed the sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva.

This move caused anger among US officials, as the Ukrainian military had not warned them of the planned operation.

Also, the US was surprised that Ukraine had missiles to hit the cruiser. It also caused panic among Americans, as the then Joe Biden administration did not intend to allow Ukraine to attack such a powerful symbol of Russian power.

What does Russia believe caused the Sinking of the Moskva?
No Mention of Ukrainian Missiles:
Russia has consistently denied that the sinking was the result of a Ukrainian missile strike, despite Ukrainian claims to the contrary.
https://www.google.com/search?q=What+does+Russia+believe+caused+the+Si
nking+of+the+Moskva%3F

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

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Monday, March 31, 2025 11:52 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.




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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 31, 2025 3:42 PM

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


Putin to conscript 160,000 more Russians for war with Ukraine

Ukraine warned the Kremlin is preparing for a massive new military offensive.

By Veronika Melkozerova | March 31, 2025 6:12 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-ordered-conscript-16000
0-more-russians-army-spring/

KYIV — Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered another 160,000 Russian citizens be called up to serve in the military, Russian news agency Interfax reported Monday. https://www.interfax.ru/russia/1017479

Russia drafts men aged 18 to 30 years old. The new order, starting April 1 and to be completed by July 15, comes amid the ongoing negotiations for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, brokered by the United States.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claims Russia is dragging out the peace process as it is preparing a massive new offensive to grab more Ukrainian land before actual peace talks.

“According to our intelligence, Russia is preparing for new offensives in Sumy, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia regions,” Zelenskyy said last week.

“They are dragging out negotiations and trying to drag the U.S. into endless, meaningless discussions about fake conditions to buy time and then try to seize even more land. Putin wants to negotiate territory from a stronger position. He only thinks about war. So, our job — all of us — is defense in the broadest sense of the word,” he added.

Yet U.S. President Donald Trump, who on Sunday said he was "pissed off" by Putin’s desire to remove Zelenskyy from power for a peace treaty to become possible, still believes the Kremlin’s leader will stick to his word and that he wants the war to end.

Some conscripts will also be dismissed from the military, having served their terms. Independent Russian journalists managed to verify the names of over 100,000 Russian soldiers who have been killed since Putin invaded Ukraine, though Kyiv claims overall Russian losses are getting close to a million dead and wounded as of March. https://zona.media/casualties https://en.zona.media/article/2025/03/28/casualties_eng-trl

Ukraine has lost more than 46,000 troops and over 380,000 have been wounded, Zelenskyy said in February. In March, Kyiv managed to improve the survival rate of Ukrainian soldiers, Ukrainian Army Chief Commander General Oleksandr Syrskyi said in a statement on Monday. https://t.me/osirskiy/1115

“We have modernized [the] basic military training course and increased its duration to 1.5 months, and also introduced a mandatory adaptive period for new recruits to combat brigades. And this is giving positive results — this month we recorded a decrease in losses compared to the previous ones," Syrskyi said.

Putin, though, thinks his troops "will finish" the Ukrainian army, as the Kremlin leader said last week.

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

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Monday, March 31, 2025 4:56 PM

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The militarization of Ukrainian children also continues within occupied territories. Ukrainian outlet Suspilne published an investigation on March 24 detailing how Russia is building a "Voin" (Warrior) training camp at the site of a demolished children's camp in occupied Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast.[17] This will be the fourth such "Voin" military training camp in occupied Ukraine. "Voin" camps are primarily intended to teach Ukrainian children basic military skills, such as small arms fire, tactical first aid, and drone operation, under the supervision of Russian veterans and active military personnel.[18] Beyond instilling hyper-militaristic ideals in Ukrainian children, the "Voin" program also supports various Russian efforts to prepare Ukrainian children for eventual service in the Russian military. Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Artem Lysohor noted on March 25 that upwards of 12,000 children in occupied Luhansk Oblast alone are undergoing military-patriotic indoctrination and military training in programs such as "Voin" and "Yunarmia (Russian Young Army Cadets National Movement)."[19] The Ukrainian Resistance Center similarly reported that Russian occupation authorities in occupied Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast, have mandated military training for all 10th and 11th grade students in order to prepare students for the Russian military's "conscription standard."[20] The "Voin" branch in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast will oversee this military training.[21]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-occupation-updat
e-march-31-2025

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

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Monday, March 31, 2025 8:21 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Moscow. March 31. INTERFAX.RU - Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered to recruit 160 thousand people for military service in April-July 2025.

The corresponding decree was published on the official portal of legal information.

“To carry out from April 1 to July 15, 2025, the conscription for military service of citizens of the Russian Federation aged 18 to 30 years, not in reserve and subject (...) conscription for military service, in the amount of 160 thousand people”, – stated in the document.

Implement in accordance with the Federal Law of March 28, 1998. 53-FZ "On Military Duty and Military Service" dismissal from military service of soldiers, sailors, sergeants and petty officers, the term of military service on which has expired.

The President instructed the government, the executive bodies of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and the conscription commissions to ensure the implementation of measures related to the conscription of Russian citizens.

According to official data, during the last autumn draft for military service (one year) 133 thousand recruits were sent to the army.

During the spring campaign last year, according to the decree of the President of the Russian Federation, 150 thousand people were drafted into the army.

On January 1, 2024, changes in the conscription system came into force, the maximum age for conscription for military service was increased to 30 years.


This conscription is far too late for any meaningful role in Ukraine in the next 6-12 months. It sounds like this is standard replacement of soldiers due to be released from service.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 6:11 AM

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Ukraine's European allies continue to provide financial and military aid to Ukraine. The Dutch Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on March 30 that the Netherlands is allocating 500 million euros (roughly $541 million) for Ukraine's Drone Line project that aims to integrate drone and ground operations in the Ukrainian military.[18] The Dutch MoD stated that this package is part of the Netherland's two billion euros (roughly $2 billion) accelerated support package in 2025. Sweden announced on March 31 its largest military aid package to Ukraine to date, worth roughly 16 billion Swedish kronor (roughly $1.6 billion) to strengthen Ukraine's air defense, artillery, satellite communications, and naval capabilities.[19] The package includes 9.2 billion Swedish kronor (roughly $920 million) for the supply of materiel from the defense industrial bases (DIBs) of Sweden, other Nordic states, and European states; over five billion Swedish kronor (roughly $500 million) in financial donations to the Ukraine Defense Contact Group; and roughly 500 million Swedish kronor (roughly $50 million) worth of materiel donated from the Swedish military.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-31-2025

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

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 8:06 AM

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Why Norway is restoring its Cold War military bunkers

By Mark Piesing | March 30, 2025

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250328-why-norway-is-restoring-it
s-cold-war-military-bunkers

At the peak of the Cold War, the sparsely populated, mountainous country had around 3,000 underground facilities where its armed forces and allies could hide and make life difficult for any invader.

The role of the reactivated base which has had structural and equipment upgrades is to help the "resilience and survivability" of Norway's F-35s in the face of a Russian attack.

Construction of the naval base mostly occurred in stages from the 1950s onwards in response to the buildup of the Soviets' Northern Fleet, with the purpose of helping to turn a bear gap into a bear trap. Costing around $450m (£360m), the base – with its underground command centre, storage, deep-water dock, dry dock, and exit tunnel –was such a massive undertaking for Norway that Nato had to fund a great deal of it. The Soviet Union had collapsed by the time it was fully completed.

The reason for the reactivation of these bases is simple: Russia.

Putin's Russia is not the Soviet Union. But from a Norwegian security point of view there are the same issues. How do you deter Russia and, if you end up in a war, how do you fight Russia?

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

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 10:08 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Ukraine Has Secret Nuclear Doomsday Plan, According To Former Zelensky Advisor
Tuesday, Apr 01, 2025 - 05:40 AM

Via Remix News,

Ukraine has a secret last-ditch “scorched earth” plan to render its entire territory uninhabitable in the event of a Russian victory in the war – and perhaps the rest of Europe with it.

This is according to Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In an interview with a Ukrainian journalist that he gave last month, Arestovych claimed that Ukraine’s current head of military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, has floated a plan to blow up all of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, and possibly some of Russia’s as well, if all other defensive measures fail.

Ukraine currently operates four nuclear power plants with a total of 15 reactors. One of them, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, is the largest plant in Europe and has been under Russian occupation since March 2022. Russia, for its part, has 37 reactors divided among 11 power plants.

If all or even some of these reactors were attacked and destroyed simultaneously, the destructive impact would be beyond calculation. The Chernobyl nuclear accident that occurred in Ukraine in 1986, and which remains the worst disaster involving nuclear energy in history, killed dozens and led to long-term health problems for thousands of others. It also led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and rendered the surrounding area permanently uninhabitable, spreading radioactivity over a large area and even into Western Europe

MORE AT https://rmx.news/article/ukraine-has-secret-nuclear-doomsday-plan-acco
rding-to-former-zelensky-adviser/

IF TRUE, Budanov and Zekensky share the same stash of coke.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, April 2, 2025 7:25 AM

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


Senior Russian officials continue to reiterate the Russian demand for the elimination of the "root causes" of the war in Ukraine as a precondition for a peace agreement — a reference to Russia's initial war demands that directly contradict US President Donald Trump's goal to achieve a lasting peace in Ukraine. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov claimed on April 1 that the Trump administration is attempting "some kind of scheme" to first achieve a ceasefire and then move to "other models and schemes" to end the war.[6] Ryabkov further claimed that the Trump administration's plan to resolve the war in Ukraine does not address the "root causes" of the war and that Russia, therefore, cannot accept the US proposal. Senior Russian officials have repeatedly defined these root causes as NATO's alleged violation of obligations not to expand eastward and Ukraine's alleged violations of the rights of Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine.[7] The Kremlin's demands to address these so-called "root causes" amount to a demand for the full capitulation of Ukraine with the installation of a pro-Russian government in Ukraine and long-term commitments of Ukrainian neutrality — the same demands Putin has made since before the full-scale invasion in February 2022.[8] Russian President Vladimir Putin recently intensified efforts to portray the current Ukrainian government as illegitimate and unable to engage in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine in an effort to undermine Ukraine's role as a legitimate participant in discussions about the resolution of the war.[9] Putin and Russian diplomats made thinly veiled demands in late March 2025 for regime change in Ukraine by having external parties establish a “temporary international administration” in Ukraine under the auspices of the United Nations (UN).[10] US Department of State Spokesperson Tammy Bruce stated on March 31 that Trump did not appreciate Russia's suggestion to establish a "temporary administration" in Ukraine.[11] Bruce also noted that Trump understands that negotiations will "require both Russia and Ukraine to make tough decisions and compromises." Russia has so far refused to make any concessions and rejected the US-Ukrainian 30-day general ceasefire when Trump called Putin on March 18.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-1-2025

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

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Thursday, April 3, 2025 6:36 AM

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The Ukrainian General Staff reported on April 1 that Russian forces in Ukraine are continuing to use ammunition equipped with chemical agents prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).[20] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces recorded 767 cases of Russian forces using regulated K-51 and RG-VO grenade launchers to launch munitions containing chemical agents and ammunition containing unspecified hazardous chemicals that are banned under the CWC in March 2025. The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces have used banned chemical agents a total of 7,730 times since February 2023.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-2-2025

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

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Friday, April 4, 2025 7:03 AM

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Atesh: Russian soldiers’ morale crumbles in Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast

April 4, 2025, 03:22 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/failed-assaults-dead-left-behind-russian-
forces-collapse-under-pressure-in-ukraine-50503486.html

Panic and despair are spreading among Russian troops in Ukraine's frontline Kherson Oblast amid numerous failed attempts to gain a foothold on the Dnipro islands and heavy losses, the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar resistance movement Atesh reported on Telegram on April 4. https://t.me/atesh_ua/6664

The Russian 80th Separate Motorized Rifle Arctic Brigade's commanders are giving ridiculous orders in an attempt to gain a foothold, regardless of the cost in human lives.

"The latest attacks have failed again. According to our men from the 3rd Battalion of the 80th Brigade, the losses during the recent attacks in the area of the Golubiv Lyman Island amounted to 26 - "200" (irrecoverable losses - ed.) and more than 20 - "300" (wounded - ed.)," Atesh said.

"Untrained personnel are sent to the attacks, deprived of the necessary training and support, the dead are not taken out, the wounded are not provided with timely assistance, which increases panic among the soldiers, morale is rapidly falling, which directly affects the ability of units to perform combat missions."

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

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Friday, April 4, 2025 7:23 AM

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Why Putin Is Stalling Trump on Ukraine

The Russian leader cannot afford to end the war he started.

By Ian Garner, an assistant professor at the Pilecki Institute’s Center for Totalitarian Studies | April 3, 2025, 11:03 AM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/03/trump-putin-russia-ukraine-ceasef
ire-peace-negotiations-economy/

Even U.S. President Donald Trump—not known as a critic of Russia—has signaled frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stalling over a cease-fire in Ukraine. Why does Putin, three years after it became clear that his army could not destroy Ukraine in battle, seem so unwilling to countenance any sort of cease-fire?

Despite some recent gains on the ground—notably in pushing the Ukrainians out of Russia’s own Kursk region—the chance of a decisive Russian military victory remains vanishingly small. Indeed, the clock appears to be ticking on Russia’s war effort. Moscow’s forces are hemorrhaging men and equipment, and analysts cast doubt on how long Russia’s economy can keep producing enough materiel to feed the front. Ukraine’s intelligence service claims that the Kremlin recognizes that the war has to end by 2026 if Russia is to avoid a serious deterioration of its geopolitical power.

Yet Putin is not putting any brakes on the war. Nor has he offered any concessions that would even hint at the possibility of a peace settlement short of Ukraine’s capitulation. Despite the flurry of U.S.-Russia negotiations over a cease-fire, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov this week spoke of an inevitably “drawn-out process.” Meanwhile, Russia continues to barrage Ukrainian cities with rockets and drones, and Putin has just announced a plan to conscript another 160,000 men into the military this spring, the highest rate in 14 years. At the same time, the Russian Armed Forces are still drawing in thousands of soldiers every month through contract recruiting. Pausing the war may seem like a no-brainer for an exhausted Russia, but the country’s long-term militarization continues apace.

Putin may believe that, by holding out, he can extract even more concessions from Trump, who seems to be increasingly willing to strike any deal with Russia at all—even if it means forcing Ukraine to collapse. Putin may hope to be gifted by Washington what he has failed to achieve on the battlefield.

Let’s set these speculations aside for now and focus on another critical set of motivations for the Russian leader. Putin, eager to preserve his own security above all, may judge that the risks of ending the war are greater than those of continuing it. On the one hand, the current level of war effort is unsustainable in both economic and demographic terms. (Although Russia has a greater population than Ukraine, it is losing soldiers at a far higher rate.) On the other hand, a rapid cessation of hostilities comes with clear economic and social dangers. Pulling the rug out from under the conflict—and ending the vast spending stimulus the war has brought—may also end the social stability on which Putin has built his 25-year rule.

Peace could deal a hammer blow to an economy that is running on the fumes of military-led investment. In 2024, military spending was set to reach around 35 percent of the public budget and fueled economic growth. Consumer spending is booming, especially away from Moscow in the economically deprived provinces, where the Kremlin recruits most of its soldiers. A large part of that boom is due to the 1.5 percent of Russian GDP that the state is currently spending on increasingly outlandish payouts for military enlistment and service. In a region like Samara oblast, the sign-on bonus alone is around $40,000—more than four times the average annual salary there. For every month soldiers serve at the front, thousands more dollars land in their bank accounts. Much of Russia’s manufacturing economy has shifted to defense as well—and with it, well-paid jobs.

As the German economist Janis Kluge put it: “If the Kremlin wants to avoid an economic collapse, it will have to continue spending at current levels long after the war is over.” But there are no signs of any Kremlin plans to replace military spending with any other government stimulus. Despite the challenges of producing enough materiel and munitions to feed the vast front line in Ukraine, the economy as it exists today cannot exist without some sort of war—or, short of that, a vast and growing army perpetually ready for war.

Putin’s domestic problem, however, reaches beyond the war’s economic stimulus. For large swaths of society, the war is functioning as a form of social and cultural stimulus as well. The lavish bonuses paid to enlistees function as more than bribes to get young men to the front. For contract soldiers, who are disproportionately from poorer regions and less well-educated backgrounds, joining the war in Ukraine is an opportunity for transformation. The Russian military’s advertising campaigns promise young men not just riches but the opportunity to “create your future” by signing on, with tantalizing hints of masculine power and consumerist self-realization. In a society where young men in the provinces have found themselves stuck or tumbling down the social ladder in recent years—and where the state has failed to supply a hopeful vision for the country’s future—the offer of life-changing sums of money has introduced a novel possibility of social mobility into the public imagination.

In Russia’s far-flung regions, this social transformation is physically evident in the changing spaces of once-desolate provincial cities and towns, newly equipped with the accoutrements of consumerist living like gyms, shops, and cafés. Wealthy veterans—those who survived the front and managed to end their service—and their families have money to burn, enabling them to lead lifestyles that, before the war, were available only to their wealthy compatriots in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In the 2000s, Putin built his popularity on a consumer boom fueled by rising global commodities prices, with Russian GDP racing upward by as much as 7 percent a year. Now, the boom is back, but it is fueled by war.

Demolishing all this social and economic hope may prove as damaging to Putin’s popular standing as the end of the previous growth spurt in the 2000s. Then, discontented Russians coalesced around the political opposition led by the murdered Boris Nemtsov and, a few years later, the protest movement led by the murdered Alexey Navalny. If the war ends and the military spigot runs dry, many Russians may be equally keen to look for other opportunities to transform their standing in society. Returning Ukraine veterans will see the regime’s promises of self-realization evaporate as their hometowns begin to crumble once again. There may also be a bloc of disgruntled younger men, who did not sign up, who will feel they missed the boat when it comes to sign-on bonuses. If postwar Putinism cannot offer either the wealth of the contract soldier or the social respect of the war hero—if the sacrifices of war no longer promise a better future—young Russian men will look for alternatives.

Just as the Kremlin has no plan to replace the war’s economic stimulus, so it appears that it has no plan to replace the war’s social stimulus. This time, the disenchanted may not look for alternatives in the relatively liberal politics of another Nemtsov or Navalny; today, liberal voices are effectively outlawed by the regime and have little visibility or traction in the public sphere. Moreover, the Russian and Soviet past shows that liberal views generally have little appeal in a postwar socioeconomic depression. Soldiers returning from the Soviet-Afghan War and First Chechen War, angry at the vain sacrifices they had made and marginalized by a society that rapidly moved on from war, did not turn to democracy or liberalism to express their disenchantment with the status quo. Instead, they looked to extreme nationalist forces that proved toxic to whoever held power in the Kremlin at the time.

Thus far, the Russian state has stymied the potential for growing nationalist discontent by giving the appearance of listening to the extreme right’s concerns through staged PR briefings with Putin, astroturfed social media campaigns, and by dealing swiftly with public figures who have overstepped the mark—like the late Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and the imprisoned ultra-nationalist mercenary Igor Girkin. But unlike the silenced liberals, the nationalists have been allowed to garner a large audience on social media, in particular on Telegram. It would not be a surprise if the sudden return of hundreds of thousands of disaffected veterans and the emergence of a cohort of futureless young men—their anger further accelerated by economic collapse—saw nationalist factions achieve a critical mass of support that the Kremlin’s propagandists and censors would find difficult to control.

In such a scenario, new and popular promises of individual and collective masculinity, strength, and power might lead, if not to some sort of collapse or revolution that would dethrone Putin for good, to a level of domestic instability that far exceeds the strains of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Putin is a diligent student of his country’s history and will be keenly aware of the dangers posed by a postwar sociocultural vacuum. He has been a careful manager of veterans in the past, bringing veterans of the Chechen and Afghan wars into positions of social responsibility. Today, he offers troops not just economic but a range of social and cultural benefits.

Suddenly ending Russia’s war against Ukraine may unleash a torrent of anger across Russia’s regions that echoes the violent disillusionment of the post-Afghan and post-Chechen eras. Putin and his advisors may suppose that it is better to keep the war rolling on slowly, offering big payouts to keep the provinces booming, and promising that a brighter future is just around the corner. Until the pain of continuing the war is greater—perhaps real economic pressure from outside, such as severe sanctions on the oil industry, or the threat that Kyiv might actually win altogether—Putin may choose to keep stalling on any decision to stop, pause, or otherwise end the fighting.

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

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Friday, April 4, 2025 8:02 AM

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Russia Executes P.O.W.s Without Caring Who Watches, Ukraine Says

Live drone footage allows Ukraine to observe what it views as war crimes unfold in real time, soldiers say.

Video of Drone footage shows captured Russian soldiers executing Ukrainian prisoners of war near the village of Novoivanovka in the Kursk region of Russia. The Times has shortened the clip because of its gruesome nature.

By Kim Barker reported from Kyiv, Ukraine; Sanjana Varghese from London; and Yurii Shyvala from Lviv, Ukraine.

April 4, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/europe/russia-ukraine-pow-exe
cutions.html

On a Monday morning last fall, Ukrainian drone pilots watched what had become a familiar scene unfold on a drone’s live feed: Russian soldiers pointed their guns at two Ukrainians, who seemingly surrendered. Then, the footage showed, the Russians shot them point blank.

The video, provided by a pilot who said he had witnessed the killing on the feed, was verified by The New York Times and the Centre for Information Resilience, a nonprofit organization. It appeared to show the Ukrainian prisoners executed near the village of Novoivanovka in the Kursk region of Russia.

“There were no polite words spoken among us — we were filled with rage and an intense desire for revenge,” said the pilot, 26, who served with the 15th Mobile Border Guard and asked to be identified by his call sign of “One Two” in accordance with military protocol.

As the United States embraces Russian talking points in its push for a cease-fire in Ukraine, many Ukrainians wonder whether allegations of Russian war crimes will simply be forgotten. President Trump has indicated that he would like to re-establish ties with Russia and end the war — or at least, wind down the U.S. commitment to Ukraine made under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The U.S. informed European officials recently that it is withdrawing from a multinational group created to investigate allegations of war crimes against senior Russian leaders and allies responsible for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Biden administration joined the group in 2023. The U.S. State Department has also ended funding for the tracking of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.

While both sides have been accused of committing war crimes, Russia has faced far more allegations, not only from Ukraine but also human-rights groups and the United Nations. In recent months, Ukrainian and international human-rights officials have accused Russian troops of executing Ukrainian soldiers who have surrendered instead of taking them as prisoners of war, as required under the Geneva Conventions treaties that outline how nations should treat enemy forces and civilians during armed conflict.

A recent U.N. report decried an “alarming spike” in Russian executions of Ukrainian prisoners. In December, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman office announced that 177 Ukrainian prisoners of war had been executed on the battlefield since the beginning of the war; of those, 109 were killed in 2024 alone. Russians have killed at least 25 additional Ukrainian soldiers since then, according to Artem Starosiek, who runs Molfar, a Ukrainian consultancy that supports the war effort and analyzed videos to come up with that tally. The Times could not independently verify that count.

“This could be one of the largest campaigns of intentional P.O.W. murder in modern history,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said in February.

The Russian Defense Ministry did not reply to a request for comment on the Ukrainian allegations, although the Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russia commits war crimes in Ukraine.

Five Ukrainian drone pilots said in interviews that they had watched as drone videos showed their fellow soldiers surrendering, only to be killed. On Telegram, such videos have become commonplace. Although Russian officials have denied committing war crimes in Ukraine, some Russian soldiers appear so unconcerned about potential repercussions that they have posted their own videos of killing unarmed Ukrainians.

In past conflicts, war crimes usually happened out of sight, only to be revealed later through investigations. But drones mean that these executions can be tracked in real time: Grainy footage showed as many as 16 men, lined up and shot dead Sept. 30, after surrendering near the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office. Nine Ukrainian drone operators were forced to strip to their underwear and lay face down on the ground in Kursk before being shot Oct. 10 — the footage was so clear, a mother of one man later recognized him.

Some perpetrators film the videos themselves — like one posted in January that circulated widely on social media and appeared to show the executions of six Ukrainian soldiers near Donetsk, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said.

“One’s mine,” one Russian said on the video.

“Film me on camera, damn it,” another added.

The video ended with a seventh Ukrainian on the ground, his fate unclear.

Video (1:17)
A Russian soldier filmed his colleagues executing at least three Ukrainian prisoners of war. The Times has cut the video short and blacked out some scenes because of its gruesome nature. Credit...The New York Times

Although the video’s location couldn’t be independently verified, the men killed in the video wore yellow armbands, like Ukrainian forces are known to. One soldier involved was identified by open source researchers, and later The Financial Times, as a Russian named Oleg Yakovlev.

Since the end of August, the U.N. human-rights monitoring mission in Ukraine has documented 29 encounters in which Russian soldiers killed at least 91 incapacitated Ukrainian soldiers, including the episode witnessed by One Two. Human-rights monitors analyzed videos and photos published by Ukrainian and Russian sources showing executions and dead bodies, interviewed witnesses and verified that the reported executions took place near Russian offensives, said Danielle Bell, the head of the mission.

“It’s horrible,” Ms. Bell said in an interview. “And these are just the cases that we have assessed as being credible and reliable.”

During those same six months, the United Nations documented one execution of an incapacitated Russian soldier by Ukrainian troops, Ms. Bell said.

She would not speculate on why the number of killings has increased. But in August, Ukrainian soldiers invaded Kursk, potentially sparking retaliation. Some military analysts said the Russians could be trying to intimidate potential Ukrainian recruits from joining the army and make Russian soldiers think twice before surrendering — because the Ukrainians might want revenge.

Russian soldiers captured after executing Ukrainian troops said in interrogations that they were ordered to kill them — even after telling commanders that the Ukrainians had surrendered and tossed their weapons on the ground, according to an edited video of the interrogations released recently by the Ukrainian Special Forces.

The Ukrainians apparently began to run “after hearing the command over the radio to open fire,” one captured Russian said in the video. He added: “And fire was opened on them.”

In mid-March, as Russian forces sought to retake Kursk, a photo circulated of several Ukrainian prisoners of war with their hands behind their backs. Another video, which could not be independently verified, showed the same prisoners, now dead, with three of them bleeding from the backs of their heads. The person filming used slurs to refer to them as he counted the corpses for the camera.

The orders are likely to come from the top, analysts said. The deputy head of Russia’s Security Council — Dmitri Medvedev, the former president — said that Ukrainian soldiers had no right to life or mercy after Ukraine’s Azov Brigade posted a video of a soldier shooting what appeared to be an injured Russian soldier on social media in July. “Execute, execute and execute,” Mr. Medvedev wrote on Telegram.

In October, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said: “Russian commanders are likely writ large condoning, encouraging, or directly ordering the execution of Ukrainian P.O.W.s.”

When drone pilots have seen the Russians pointing their weapons at the Ukrainians on video, the pilots said, they often went quiet watching their comrades get shot. Then they swore.

One commander said one scene still haunted him: A Russian soldier shot four Ukrainian soldiers lying face down in a trench near Chasiv Yar, and he could do nothing to stop it. “Without hesitation, he executed them all,” said the commander, who uses the call sign “Madara,” for a Japanese manga hero.

In another video, Russians surrounded four injured Ukrainians, forced them out of their shelter into a yard and confiscated their weapons. The Russians then took three of the soldiers to the street and shot them, said one military intelligence officer from the 110th Brigade with the call sign of “Grandfather.” It was one of three executions of Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region he had watched on video feeds from drones at a command post over the past year.

“The worst part was the helplessness — we couldn’t do anything to help our men,” Grandfather said.

After seeing the Ukrainian soldiers killed on the morning of Nov. 11, One Two said commanders wanted the drone pilots to retaliate. The pilots of three units met on a video call. One Ukrainian drone tracked five Russians — the two who shot the Ukrainians, and the three who stood by — and gave a live feed of their movements into the forest. Ten other drones followed, surrounding the five Russians. And then, One Two said, the drone pilots fired their weapons and killed them.

Marc Santora, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Alina Lobzina from London.

Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about the war in Ukraine.

Sanjana Varghese is a reporter on The Times’s Visual Investigations team, specializing in the use of advanced digital techniques to analyze visual evidence.

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

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Saturday, April 5, 2025 6:56 AM

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


Thu 3 Apr 2025 20.45 EDT

Ukraine appears to have resolved some of its shortages of troops fighting against Russia, including by widening the pool of eligible recruits, the top US general in Europe, Christopher Cavoli, said on Thursday. He also underscored that any US cutoff of weapons and intelligence would be extremely harmful to the Ukrainian war effort, despite Kyiv’s attempts to diversify its weapons suppliers.

Under questioning from senators in Washington, Cavoli, commander of US European command and the Nato supreme allied commander Europe, said Ukraine depended on the US for larger anti-aircraft and missile defence systems. “If the Ukrainians were not able to receive intelligence from us, they would struggle to target, especially in-depth operational level targets such as command posts, logistics areas and things like that.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/04/ukraine-war-briefing-kyi
v-solving-its-troop-shortages-says-top-us-general-in-europe

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

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Saturday, April 5, 2025 7:47 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Test

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Saturday, April 5, 2025 11:48 AM

SECOND

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


How The USA Aided Ukraine Explains A Great Deal

Why The US Is The Greatest Battle-Winning, War-Losing Force in History

By Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 02, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/how-the-usa-aided-ukraine-expla
ins

Sometimes historical developments are too shocking to fully comprehend while they are happening. Things occur that make little sense and as such they are often not faced directly and dissected in the way that they deserve. That is certainly the situation with the period of US-dominance globally and how America approached war. The United States since 1945 has arguably been the greatest hegemon in the history of the world. It possessed between one half (at the end of World War II) to a quarter of the world’s economic output. It was the globe’s technology leader—with by far the best equipped and most capable military, and was able to project force around the world in a way that no power before could even dream. It even had enormous soft power—as its culture and language became ubiquitous.

And the USA proceeded to lose almost every war that it chose to fight during this period of dominance. With the one exception of the First Gulf War (1991-1992), when the US has deployed its military power it has almost always failed to achieve anything like its strategic/political objectives. Its wars have ended either ignominiously with scenes of total failure (See Saigon and Kabul), or at best partial success (Korea). Indeed the greater the US application of force, the more likely the war would be a disaster—such as in Vietnam and the War on Terror.

he fact that the US has so disastrously misused and frittered away its period of dominance deserves deep interrogation. It also calls into question the whole way the US government, from the Pentagon to the Presidents, have intellectually approached the concept of war. One thing that seems clear, is that the US has very little idea how to win wars, and has been consistently capable of losing them.

I have been working on a book over the last year and a half, with looks at the larger concepts of War and Power, and tries to analyse why they are so regularly misunderstood and misanalyzed. Here is the provisional cover and title (though it could all still be changed). The book will be released in late August. Its coming out with Penguin in UK and Basic Books in the USA.

WAR AND POWER
How To Really Understand Modern Conflict - And Why That Matters For Everyone
PHILLIPS PAYSON O'BRIEN
Released 28/08/2025

One of its arguments is that war is often approached as a battle-winning exercise, whereas winning battles is one of the poorest ways to understand the process of winning wars.

The USA is the poster child of this problem.

What the US has done since 1945, while its regularly been losing wars, is to construct arguably the most awesome battle-winning machine in world history.

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

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Saturday, April 5, 2025 11:52 AM

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


The Secret History of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War

By Adam Entous | March 29, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/29/world/europe/us-ukraine
-military-war-wiesbaden.html

Adam Entous conducted more than 300 interviews over more than a year with government, military and intelligence officials in Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Turkey.

On a spring morning two months after Vladimir Putin’s invading armies marched into Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars slid up to a Kyiv street corner and collected two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.

Leaving the city, the convoy — manned by British commandos, out of uniform but heavily armed — traveled 400 miles west to the Polish border. The crossing was seamless, on diplomatic passports. Farther on, they came to the Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, where an idling C-130 cargo plane waited.

The passengers were top Ukrainian generals. Their destination was Clay Kaserne, the headquarters of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany. Their mission was to help forge what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war in Ukraine.

One of the men, Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, remembers being led up a flight of stairs to a walkway overlooking the cavernous main hall of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium. Before the war, it had been a gym, used for all-hands meetings, Army band performances and Cub Scout pinewood derbies. Now General Zabrodskyi peered down on officers from coalition nations, in a warren of makeshift cubicles, organizing the first Western shipments to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155-millimeter shells.

Then he was ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, who proposed a partnership.

Its evolution and inner workings visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.
Behind the story with Adam Entous

How the promise of Texas barbecue led to a meeting with a key Ukrainian general.

Today that order — along with Ukraine’s defense of its land — teeters on a knife edge, as President Trump seeks rapprochement with Mr. Putin and vows to bring the war to a close. For the Ukrainians, the auguries are not encouraging. In the great-power contest for security and influence after the Soviet Union’s collapse, a newly independent Ukraine became the nation in the middle, its Westward lean increasingly feared by Moscow. Now, with negotiations beginning, the American president has baselessly blamed the Ukrainians for starting the war, pressured them to forfeit much of their mineral wealth and asked the Ukrainians to agree to a cease-fire without a promise of concrete American security guarantees — a peace with no certainty of continued peace.

Mr. Trump has already begun to wind down elements of the partnership sealed in Wiesbaden that day in the spring of 2022. Yet to trace its history is to better understand how the Ukrainians were able to survive across three long years of war, in the face of a far larger, far more powerful enemy. It is also to see, through a secret keyhole, how the war came to today’s precarious place.

With remarkable transparency, the Pentagon has offered a public inventory of the $66.5 billion array of weaponry supplied to Ukraine — including, at last count, more than a half-billion rounds of small-arms ammunition and grenades, 10,000 Javelin antiarmor weapons, 3,000 Stinger antiaircraft systems, 272 howitzers, 76 tanks, 40 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, 20 Mi-17 helicopters and three Patriot air defense batteries.

But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.

One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.

The partnership’s guiding idea was that this close cooperation might allow the Ukrainians to accomplish the unlikeliest of feats — to deliver the invading Russians a crushing blow. And in strike after successful strike in the first chapters of the war — enabled by Ukrainian bravery and dexterity but also Russian incompetence — that underdog ambition increasingly seemed within reach.

Ukrainian, American and British military leaders during a meeting in Ukraine in August 2023.

Valerii Zaluzhnyi

An early proof of concept was a campaign against one of Russia’s most-feared battle groups, the 58th Combined Arms Army. In mid-2022, using American intelligence and targeting information, the Ukrainians unleashed a rocket barrage at the headquarters of the 58th in the Kherson region, killing generals and staff officers inside. Again and again, the group set up at another location; each time, the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.

Farther south, the partners set their sights on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet loaded missiles destined for Ukrainian targets onto warships and submarines. At the height of Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive, a predawn swarm of maritime drones, with support from the Central Intelligence Agency, attacked the port, damaging several warships and prompting the Russians to begin pulling them back.

But ultimately the partnership strained — and the arc of the war shifted — amid rivalries, resentments and diverging imperatives and agendas.

The Ukrainians sometimes saw the Americans as overbearing and controlling — the prototypical patronizing Americans. The Americans sometimes couldn’t understand why the Ukrainians didn’t simply accept good advice.

Where the Americans focused on measured, achievable objectives, they saw the Ukrainians as constantly grasping for the big win, the bright, shining prize. The Ukrainians, for their part, often saw the Americans as holding them back. The Ukrainians aimed to win the war outright. Even as they shared that hope, the Americans wanted to make sure the Ukrainians didn’t lose it.

As the Ukrainians won greater autonomy in the partnership, they increasingly kept their intentions secret. They were perennially angered that the Americans couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give them all of the weapons and other equipment they wanted. The Americans, in turn, were angered by what they saw as the Ukrainians’ unreasonable demands, and by their reluctance to take politically risky steps to bolster their vastly outnumbered forces.

On a tactical level, the partnership yielded triumph upon triumph. Yet at arguably the pivotal moment of the war — in mid-2023, as the Ukrainians mounted a counteroffensive to build victorious momentum after the first year’s successes — the strategy devised in Wiesbaden fell victim to the fractious internal politics of Ukraine: The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, versus his military chief (and potential electoral rival), and the military chief versus his headstrong subordinate commander. When Mr. Zelensky sided with the subordinate, the Ukrainians poured vast complements of men and resources into a finally futile campaign to recapture the devastated city of Bakhmut. Within months, the entire counteroffensive ended in stillborn failure.

A Ukrainian soldier fired at Russian positions near Bakhmut.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The partnership operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats. The story of the partnership shows how close the Americans and their allies sometimes came to that red line, how increasingly dire events forced them — some said too slowly — to advance it to more perilous ground and how they carefully devised protocols to remain on the safe side of it.

Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.

In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.

It was also a grand experiment in war fighting, one that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war.

During the wars against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, American forces conducted their own ground operations and supported those of their local partners. In Ukraine, by contrast, the U.S. military wasn’t allowed to deploy any of its own soldiers on the battlefield and would have to help remotely.

Would the precision targeting honed against terrorist groups be effective in a conflict with one of the most powerful militaries in the world? Would Ukrainian artillery men fire their howitzers without hesitation at coordinates sent by American officers in a headquarters 1,300 miles away? Would Ukrainian commanders, based on intelligence relayed by a disembodied American voice pleading, “There’s nobody there — go,” order infantrymen to enter a village behind enemy lines?

The answers to those questions — in truth, the partnership’s entire trajectory — would hinge on how well American and Ukrainian officers would trust one another.

“I will never lie to you. If you lie to me, we’re done,” General Zabrodskyi recalled General Donahue telling him at their first meeting. “I feel the exact same way,” the Ukrainian replied.

A Ukrainian soldier keeps watch in Kharkiv on Feb. 25, 2022, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Part 1 February–May 2022
Building Trust — and a Killing Machine

February–May 2022

Held by Russia since 2014
U.S. & Allies

Lloyd J. Austin III Defense Sec.

David S. Baldwin General

Joseph R. Biden Jr. President

Christopher G. Cavoli General

Christopher T. Donahue General

Mark A. Milley General

Ukraine

Oleksii Reznikov Defense Min.

Oleksandr Syrsky General

Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi General

In mid-April 2022, about two weeks before the Wiesbaden meeting, American and Ukrainian naval officers were on a routine intelligence-sharing call when something unexpected popped up on their radar screens. According to a former senior U.S. military officer, “The Americans go: ‘Oh, that’s the Moskva!’ The Ukrainians go: ‘Oh my God. Thanks a lot. Bye.’”

The Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The Ukrainians sank it.

The sinking was a signal triumph — a display of Ukrainian skill and Russian ineptitude. But the episode also reflected the disjointed state of the Ukrainian-American relationship in the first weeks of the war.

For the Americans, there was anger, because the Ukrainians hadn’t given so much as a heads-up; surprise, that Ukraine possessed missiles capable of reaching the ship; and panic, because the Biden administration hadn’t intended to enable the Ukrainians to attack such a potent symbol of Russian power.

The Ukrainians, for their part, were coming from their own place of deep-rooted skepticism.

Their war, as they saw it, had started in 2014, when Mr. Putin seized Crimea and fomented separatist rebellions in eastern Ukraine. President Barack Obama had condemned the seizure and imposed sanctions on Russia. But fearful that American involvement could provoke a full-scale invasion, he had authorized only strictly limited intelligence sharing and rejected calls for defensive weapons. “Blankets and night-vision goggles are important, but one cannot win a war with blankets,” Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro O. Poroshenko, complained. Eventually Mr. Obama somewhat relaxed those intelligence strictures, and Mr. Trump, in his first term, relaxed them further and supplied the Ukrainians with their first antitank Javelins.

Then, in the portentous days before Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the Biden administration had closed the Kyiv embassy and pulled all military personnel from the country. (A small team of C.I.A. officers was allowed to stay.) As the Ukrainians saw it, a senior U.S. military officer said, “We told them, ‘The Russians are coming — see ya.’”

When American generals offered assistance after the invasion, they ran into a wall of mistrust. “We’re fighting the Russians. You’re not. Why should we listen to you?” Ukraine’s ground forces commander, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, told the Americans the first time they met.

General Syrsky quickly came around: The Americans could provide the kind of battlefield intelligence his people never could.

In those early days, this meant that General Donahue and a few aides, with little more than their phones, passed information about Russian troop movements to General Syrsky and his staff. Yet even that ad hoc arrangement touched a raw nerve of rivalry within Ukraine’s military, between General Syrsky and his boss, the armed forces commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. To Zaluzhny loyalists, General Syrsky was already using the relationship to build advantage.

Further complicating matters was General Zaluzhny’s testy relationship with his American counterpart, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In phone conversations, General Milley might second-guess the Ukrainians’ equipment requests. He might dispense battlefield advice based on satellite intelligence on the screen in his Pentagon office. Next would come an awkward silence, before General Zaluzhny cut the conversation short. Sometimes he simply ignored the American’s calls.

To keep them talking, the Pentagon initiated an elaborate telephone tree: A Milley aide would call Maj. Gen. David S. Baldwin, commander of the California National Guard, who would ring a wealthy Los Angeles blimp maker named Igor Pasternak, who had grown up in Lviv with Oleksii Reznikov, then Ukraine’s defense minister. Mr. Reznikov would track down General Zaluzhny and tell him, according to General Baldwin, “I know you’re mad at Milley, but you have to call him.”

Ragtag alliance coalesced into partnership in the quick cascade of events.

In March, their assault on Kyiv stalling, the Russians reoriented their ambitions, and their war plan, surging additional forces east and south — a logistical feat the Americans thought would take months. It took two and a half weeks.

Unless the coalition reoriented its own ambitions, General Donahue and the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, concluded, the hopelessly outmanned and outgunned Ukrainians would lose the war. The coalition, in other words, would have to start providing heavy offensive weapons — M777 artillery batteries and shells.

The Biden administration had previously arranged emergency shipments of antiaircraft and antitank weapons. The M777s were something else entirely — the first big leap into supporting a major ground war.

The defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, and General Milley had put the 18th Airborne in charge of delivering weapons and advising the Ukrainians on how to use them. When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed on to the M777s, the Tony Bass Auditorium became a full-fledged headquarters.

A Polish general became General Donahue’s deputy. A British general would manage the logistics hub on the former basketball court. A Canadian would oversee training.

The auditorium basement became what is known as a fusion center, producing intelligence about Russian battlefield positions, movements and intentions. There, according to intelligence officials, officers from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency were joined by coalition intelligence officers.

The 18th Airborne is known as Dragon Corps; the new operation would be Task Force Dragon. All that was needed to bring the pieces together was the reluctant Ukrainian top command.

At an international conference on April 26 at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, General Milley introduced Mr. Reznikov and a Zaluzhny deputy to Generals Cavoli and Donahue. “These are your guys right here,” General Milley told them, adding: “You’ve got to work with them. They’re going to help you.”

Bonds of trust were being forged. Mr. Reznikov agreed to talk to General Zaluzhny. Back in Kyiv, “we organized the composition of a delegation” to Wiesbaden, Mr. Reznikov said. “And so it began.”

At the heart of the partnership were two generals — the Ukrainian, Zabrodskyi, and the American, Donahue.

General Zabrodskyi would be Wiesbaden’s chief Ukrainian contact, although in an unofficial capacity, as he was serving in parliament. In every other way, he was a natural.

Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, a key Ukrainian figure in the Wiesbaden partnership.

Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Like many of his contemporaries in the Ukrainian military, General Zabrodskyi knew the enemy well. In the 1990s, he had attended military academy in St. Petersburg and served for five years in the Russian Army.

He also knew the Americans: From 2005 to 2006, he had studied at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Eight years later, General Zabrodskyi led a perilous mission behind lines of Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine, modeled in part on one he had studied at Fort Leavenworth — the Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart’s famous reconnaissance mission around Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. This brought him to the attention of influential people at the Pentagon; the general, they sensed, was the kind of leader they could work with.

General Zabrodskyi remembers that first day in Wiesbaden: “My mission was to find out: Who is this General Donahue? What is his authority? How much can he do for us?”

General Donahue was a star in the clandestine world of special forces. Alongside C.I.A. kill teams and local partners, he had hunted terrorist chiefs in the shadows of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. As leader of the elite Delta Force, he had helped build a partnership with Kurdish fighters to battle the Islamic State in Syria. General Cavoli once compared him to “a comic book action hero.”

Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, center, no helmet, in Afghanistan circa 2020.

Now he showed General Zabrodskyi and his travel companion, Maj. Gen. Oleksandr Kyrylenko, a map of the besieged east and south of their country, Russian forces dwarfing theirs. Invoking their “Glory to Ukraine” battle cry, he laid down the challenge: “You can ‘Slava Ukraini’ all you want with other people. I don’t care how brave you are. Look at the numbers.” He then walked them through a plan to win a battlefield advantage by fall, General Zabrodskyi recalled.

The first stage was underway — training Ukrainian artillery men on their new M777s. Task Force Dragon would then help them use the weapons to halt the Russian advance. Then the Ukrainians would need to mount a counteroffensive.

That evening, General Zabrodskyi wrote to his superiors in Kyiv.

“You know, a lot of countries wanted to support Ukraine,” he recalled. But “somebody needed to be the coordinator, to organize everything, to solve the current problems and figure out what we need in the future. I said to the commander in chief, ‘We have found our partner.’”

Soon the Ukrainians, nearly 20 in all — intelligence officers, operational planners, communications and fire-control specialists — began arriving in Wiesbaden. Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets. The priority lists were then handed over to the intelligence fusion center, where officers analyzed streams of data to pinpoint the targets’ locations.

Inside the U.S. European Command, this process gave rise to a fine but fraught linguistic debate: Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”?

Some officers thought “targets” was appropriate. Others called them “intel tippers,” because the Russians were often moving and the information would need verification on the ground.

The debate was settled by Maj. Gen. Timothy D. Brown, European Command’s intelligence chief: The locations of Russian forces would be “points of interest.” Intelligence on airborne threats would be “tracks of interest.”

“If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” one U.S. official explained.

Each point of interest would have to adhere to intelligence-sharing rules crafted to blunt the risk of Russian retaliation against N.A.T.O. partners.

There would be no points of interest on Russian soil. If Ukrainian commanders wanted to strike within Russia, General Zabrodskyi explained, they would have to use their own intelligence and domestically produced weapons. “Our message to the Russians was, ‘This war should be fought inside Ukraine,’” a senior U.S. official said.

Ukrainian soldiers preparing to fire an M777 howitzer at Russian forces in the Donetsk region.

Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

The White House also prohibited sharing intelligence on the locations of “strategic” Russian leaders, like the armed forces chief, Gen. Valery Gerasimov. “Imagine how that would be for us if we knew that the Russians helped some other country assassinate our chairman,” another senior U.S. official said. “Like, we’d go to war.” Similarly, Task Force Dragon couldn’t share intelligence that identified the locations of individual Russians.

The way the system worked, Task Force Dragon would tell the Ukrainians where Russians were positioned. But to protect intelligence sources and methods from Russian spies, it would not say how it knew what it knew. All the Ukrainians would see on a secure cloud were chains of coordinates, divided into baskets — Priority 1, Priority 2 and so on. As General Zabrodskyi remembers it, when the Ukrainians asked why they should trust the intelligence, General Donahue would say: “Don’t worry about how we found out. Just trust that when you shoot, it will hit it, and you’ll like the results, and if you don’t like the results, tell us, we’ll make it better.”

The system went live in May. The inaugural target would be a radar-equipped armored vehicle known as a Zoopark, which the Russians could use to find weapons systems like the Ukrainians’ M777s. The fusion center found a Zoopark near Russian-occupied Donetsk, in Ukraine’s east.

The Ukrainians would set a trap: First, they would fire toward Russian lines. When the Russians turned on the Zoopark to trace the incoming fire, the fusion center would pinpoint the Zoopark’s coordinates in preparation for the strike.

On the appointed day, General Zabrodskyi recounted, General Donahue called the battalion commander with a pep talk: “You feel good?” he asked. “I feel real good,” the Ukrainian responded. General Donahue then checked the satellite imagery to make sure the target and M777 were properly positioned. Only then did the artilleryman open fire, destroying the Zoopark. “Everybody went, ‘We can do this!’” a U.S. official recalled.

But a critical question remained: Having done this against a single, stationary target, could the partners deploy this system against multiple targets in a major kinetic battle?

That would be the battle underway north of Donetsk, in Sievierodonetsk, where the Russians were hoping to mount a pontoon-bridge river crossing and then encircle and capture the city. General Zabrodskyi called it “a hell of a target.”

The engagement that followed was widely reported as an early and important Ukrainian victory. The pontoon bridges became death traps; at least 400 Russians were killed, by Ukrainian estimates. Unspoken was that the Americans had supplied the points of interest that helped thwart the Russian assault.

In these first months, the fighting was largely concentrated in Ukraine’s east. But U.S. intelligence was also tracking Russian movements in the south, especially a large troop buildup near the major city of Kherson. Soon several M777 crews were redeployed, and Task Force Dragon started feeding points of interest to strike Russian positions there.

With practice, Task Force Dragon produced points of interest faster, and the Ukrainians shot at them faster. The more they demonstrated their effectiveness using M777s and similar systems, the more the coalition sent new ones — which Wiesbaden supplied with ever more points of interest.

“You know when we started to believe?” General Zabrodskyi recalled. “When Donahue said, ‘This is a list of positions.’ We checked the list and we said, ‘These 100 positions are good, but we need the other 50.’ And they sent the other 50.”

The M777s became workhorses of the Ukrainian army. But because they generally couldn’t launch their 155-millimeter shells more than 15 miles, they were no match for the Russians’ vast superiority in manpower and equipment.

To give the Ukrainians compensatory advantages of precision, speed and range, Generals Cavoli and Donahue soon proposed a far bigger leap — providing High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS, which used satellite-guided rockets to execute strikes up to 50 miles away.

The ensuing debate reflected the Americans’ evolving thinking.

Pentagon officials were resistant, loath to deplete the Army’s limited HIMARS stocks. But in May, General Cavoli visited Washington and made the case that ultimately won them over.

Celeste Wallander, then the assistant defense secretary for international security affairs, recalled, “Milley would always say, ‘You’ve got a little Russian army fighting a big Russian army, and they’re fighting the same way, and the Ukrainians will never win.’” General Cavoli’s argument, she said, was that “with HIMARS, they can fight like we can, and that’s how they will start to beat the Russians.”

At the White House, Mr. Biden and his advisers weighed that argument against fears that pushing the Russians would only lead Mr. Putin to panic and widen the war. When the generals requested HIMARS, one official recalled, the moment felt like “standing on that line, wondering, if you take a step forward, is World War III going to break out?” And when the White House took that step forward, the official said, Task Force Dragon was becoming “the entire back office of the war.”

Wiesbaden would oversee each HIMARS strike. General Donahue and his aides would review the Ukrainians’ target lists and advise them on positioning their launchers and timing their strikes. The Ukrainians were supposed to only use coordinates the Americans provided. To fire a warhead, HIMARS operators needed a special electronic key card, which the Americans could deactivate anytime.

HIMARS strikes that resulted in 100 or more Russian dead or wounded came almost weekly. Russian forces were left dazed and confused. Their morale plummeted, and with it their will to fight. And as the HIMARS arsenal grew from eight to 38 and the Ukrainian strikers became more proficient, an American official said, the toll rose as much as fivefold.

“We became a small part, maybe not the best part, but a small part, of your system,” General Zabrodskyi explained, adding: “Most states did this over a period of 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. But we were forced to do it in a matter of weeks.”

Together the partners were honing a killing machine.

Russian forces collapsed in the Oskil river valley, abandoning their equipment as they fled.

Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Part 2 June–November 2022
‘When You Defeat Russia, We Will Make You Blue for Good’

June–November 2022
U.S. & Allies

Joseph R. Biden Jr. President

Christopher T. Donahue General

Ben Wallace Defense Min.

Ukraine

Oleksandr Syrsky General

Oleksandr Tarnavskyi General

Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi General

Volodymyr Zelensky President

At their first meeting, General Donahue had shown General Zabrodskyi a color-coded map of the region, with American and NATO forces in blue, Russian forces in red and Ukrainian forces in green. “Why are we green?” General Zabrodskyi asked. “We should be blue.”

In early June, as they met to war-game Ukraine’s counteroffensive, sitting side by side in front of tabletop battlefield maps, General Zabrodskyi saw that the small blocks marking Ukrainian positions had become blue — a symbolic stroke to strengthen the bond of common purpose. “When you defeat Russia,” General Donahue told the Ukrainians, “we will make you blue for good.”

It was three months since the invasion, and the maps told this story of the war:

In the south, the Ukrainians had blocked the Russian advance at the Black Sea shipbuilding center of Mykolaiv. But the Russians controlled Kherson, and a corps roughly 25,000 soldiers strong occupied land on the west bank of the Dnipro River. In the east, the Russians had been stopped at Izium. But they held land between there and the border, including the strategically important Oskil river valley.

The Russians’ strategy had morphed from decapitation — the futile assault on Kyiv — to slow strangulation. The Ukrainians needed to go on the offensive.

Their top commander, General Zaluzhny, along with the British, favored the most ambitious option — from near Zaporizhzhia, in the southeast, down toward occupied Melitopol. This maneuver, they believed, would sever the cross-border land routes sustaining Russian forces in Crimea.

In theory, General Donahue agreed. But according to colleagues, he thought Melitopol was not feasible, given the state of the Ukrainian military and the coalition’s limited ability to provide M777s without crippling American readiness. To prove his point in the war games, he took over the part of the Russian commander. Whenever the Ukrainians tried to advance, General Donahue destroyed them with overwhelming combat power.

What they ultimately agreed on was a two-part attack to confuse Russian commanders who, according to American intelligence, believed the Ukrainians had only enough soldiers and equipment for a single offensive.

The main effort would be to recapture Kherson and secure the Dnipro’s west bank, lest the corps advance on the port of Odesa and be positioned for another attack on Kyiv.

General Donahue had advocated a coequal second front in the east, from the Kharkiv region, to reach the Oskil river valley. But the Ukrainians instead argued for a smaller supporting feint to draw Russian forces east and smooth the way for Kherson.

That would come first, around Sept. 4. The Ukrainians would then begin two weeks of artillery strikes to weaken Russian forces in the south. Only then, around Sept. 18, would they march toward Kherson.

And if they still had enough ammunition, they would cross the Dnipro. General Zabrodskyi remembers General Donahue saying, “If you guys want to get across the river and get to the neck of Crimea, then follow the plan.”

That was the plan until it wasn’t.

Mr. Zelensky sometimes spoke directly with regional commanders, and after one such conversation, the Americans were informed that the order of battle had changed.

Kherson would come faster — and first, on Aug. 29.

General Donahue told General Zaluzhny that more time was needed to lay the groundwork for Kherson; the switch, he said, put the counteroffensive, and the entire country, in jeopardy. The Americans later learned the back story:

Mr. Zelensky was hoping to attend the mid-September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. A showing of progress on the battlefield, he and his advisers believed, would bolster his case for additional military support. So they upended the plan at the last minute — a preview of a fundamental disconnect that would increasingly shape the arc of the war.

The upshot wasn’t what anyone had planned.

The Russians responded by moving reinforcements from the east toward Kherson. Now General Zaluzhny realized that the weakened Russian forces in the east might well let the Ukrainians do what General Donahue had advocated — reach the Oskil river valley. “Go, go, go — you have them on the ropes,” General Donahue told the Ukrainian commander there, General Syrsky, a European official recalled.

The Russian forces collapsed even faster than predicted, abandoning their equipment as they fled. The Ukrainian leadership had never expected their forces to reach the Oskil’s west bank, and when they did, General Syrsky’s standing with the president soared.

In the south, U.S. intelligence now reported that the corps on the Dnipro’s west bank was running short on food and ammunition.

The Ukrainians wavered. General Donahue pleaded with the field commander, Maj. Gen. Andrii Kovalchuk, to advance. Soon the American’s superiors, Generals Cavoli and Milley, escalated the matter to General Zaluzhny.

That didn’t work either.

The British defense minister, Ben Wallace, asked General Donahue what he would do if General Kovalchuk were his subordinate.

“He would have already been fired,” General Donahue responded.

“I got this,” Mr. Wallace said. The British military had considerable clout in Kyiv; unlike the Americans, they had placed small teams of officers in the country after the invasion. Now the defense minister exercised that clout and demanded that the Ukrainians oust the commander.

Perhaps no piece of Ukrainian soil was more precious to Mr. Putin than Crimea. As the Ukrainians haltingly advanced on the Dnipro, hoping to cross and advance toward the peninsula, this gave rise to what one Pentagon official called the “core tension”:

To give the Russian president an incentive to negotiate a deal, the official explained, the Ukrainians would have to put pressure on Crimea. To do so, though, could push him to contemplate doing “something desperate.”

The Ukrainians were already exerting pressure on the ground. And the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.

That same month, U.S. intelligence overheard Russia’s Ukraine commander, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, talking about indeed doing something desperate: using tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the Ukrainians from crossing the Dnipro and making a beeline to Crimea.

Until that moment, U.S. intelligence agencies had estimated the chance of Russia’s using nuclear weapons in Ukraine at 5 to 10 percent. Now, they said, if the Russian lines in the south collapsed, the probability was 50 percent.

That core tension seemed to be coming to a head.

In Europe, Generals Cavoli and Donahue were begging General Kovalchuk’s replacement, Brig. Gen. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, to move his brigades forward, rout the corps from the Dnipro’s west bank and seize its equipment.

In Washington, Mr. Biden’s top advisers nervously wondered the opposite — if they might need to press the Ukrainians to slow their advance.

The moment might have been the Ukrainians’ best chance to deal a game-changing blow to the Russians. It might also have been the best chance to ignite a wider war.

In the end, in a sort of grand ambiguity, the moment never came.

To protect their fleeing forces, Russian commanders left behind small detachments of troops. General Donahue advised General Tarnavskyi to destroy or bypass them and focus on the primary objective — the corps. But whenever the Ukrainians encountered a detachment, they stopped in their tracks, assuming a larger force lay in wait.

General Donahue told him that satellite imagery showed Ukrainian forces blocked by just one or two Russian tanks, according to Pentagon officials. But unable to see the same satellite images, the Ukrainian commander hesitated, wary of sending his forces forward.

To get the Ukrainians moving, Task Force Dragon sent points of interest, and M777 operators destroyed the tanks with Excalibur missiles — time-consuming steps repeated whenever the Ukrainians encountered a Russian detachment.

Ukrainians celebrated the recapture of Kherson.

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

The Ukrainians would still recapture Kherson and clear the Dnipro’s west bank. But the offensive halted there. The Ukrainians, short on ammunition, would not cross the Dnipro. They would not, as the Ukrainians had hoped and the Russians feared, advance toward Crimea.

And as the Russians escaped across the river, farther into occupied ground, huge machines rent the earth, cleaving long, deep trench lines in their wake.

Still the Ukrainians were in a celebratory mood, and on his next Wiesbaden trip, General Zabrodskyi presented General Donahue with a “combat souvenir”: a tactical vest that had belonged to a Russian soldier whose comrades were already marching east to what would become the crucible of 2023 — a place called Bakhmut.

Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut, a site of prolonged combat that President Volodymyr Zelensky called the “fortress of our morale.”

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Part 3 November 2022–November 2023
The Best-Laid Plans

November 2022–November 2023
U.S. & Allies

Antonio A. Aguto Jr. General

Lloyd J. Austin III Defense Sec.

Christopher G. Cavoli General

Christopher T. Donahue General

Mark A. Milley General

Ukraine

Oleksandr Syrsky General

Oleksandr Tarnavskyi General

Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi General

Volodymyr Zelensky President

The planning for 2023 began straightaway, at what in hindsight was a moment of irrational exuberance.

Ukraine controlled the west banks of the Oskil and Dnipro rivers. Within the coalition, the prevailing wisdom was that the 2023 counteroffensive would be the war’s last: The Ukrainians would claim outright triumph, or Mr. Putin would be forced to sue for peace.

“We’re going to win this whole thing,” Mr. Zelensky told the coalition, a senior American official recalled.

To accomplish this, General Zabrodskyi explained as the partners gathered in Wiesbaden in late autumn, General Zaluzhny was once again insisting that the primary effort be an offensive toward Melitopol, to strangle Russian forces in Crimea — what he believed had been the great, denied opportunity to deal the reeling enemy a knockout blow in 2022.

And once again, some American generals were preaching caution.

At the Pentagon, officials worried about their ability to supply enough weapons for the counteroffensive; perhaps the Ukrainians, in their strongest possible position, should consider cutting a deal. When the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Milley, floated that idea in a speech, many of Ukraine’s supporters (including congressional Republicans, then overwhelmingly supportive of the war) cried appeasement.

In Wiesbaden, in private conversations with General Zabrodskyi and the British, General Donahue pointed to those Russian trenches being dug to defend the south. He pointed, too, to the Ukrainians’ halting advance to the Dnipro just weeks before. “They’re digging in, guys,” he told them. “How are you going to get across this?”

What he advocated instead, General Zabrodskyi and a European official recalled, was a pause: If the Ukrainians spent the next year, if not longer, building and training new brigades, they would be far better positioned to fight through to Melitopol.

The British, for their part, argued that if the Ukrainians were going to go anyway, the coalition needed to help them. They didn’t have to be as good as the British and Americans, General Cavoli would say; they just had to be better than the Russians.

There would be no pause. General Zabrodskyi would tell General Zaluzhny, “Donahue is right.” But he would also admit that “nobody liked Donahue’s recommendations, except me.”

And besides, General Donahue was a man on the way out.

The 18th Airborne’s deployment had always been temporary. There would now be a more permanent organization in Wiesbaden, the Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, call sign Erebus — the Greek mythological personification of darkness.

That autumn day, the planning session and their time together done, General Donahue escorted General Zabrodskyi to the Clay Kaserne airfield. There he presented him with an ornamental shield — the 18th Airborne dragon insignia, encircled by five stars.

The westernmost represented Wiesbaden; slightly to the east was the Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport. The other stars represented Kyiv, Kherson and Kharkiv — for General Zaluzhny and the commanders in the south and east.

And beneath the stars, “Thanks.”

“I asked him, ‘Why are you thanking me?’” General Zabrodskyi recalled. “‘I should say thank you.’”

General Donahue explained that the Ukrainians were the ones fighting and dying, testing American equipment and tactics and sharing lessons learned. “Thanks to you,” he said, “we built all these things that we never could have.”

Shouting through the airfield wind and noise, they went back and forth about who deserved the most thanks. Then they shook hands, and General Zabrodskyi disappeared into the idling C-130.

The “new guy in the room” was Lt. Gen. Antonio A. Aguto Jr. He was a different kind of commander, with a different kind of mission.

General Donahue was a risk taker. General Aguto had built a reputation as a man of deliberation and master of training and large-scale operations. After the seizure of Crimea in 2014, the Obama administration had expanded its training of the Ukrainians, including at a base in the far west of the country; General Aguto had overseen the program. In Wiesbaden, his No. 1 priority would be preparing new brigades. “You’ve got to get them ready for the fight,” Mr. Austin, the defense secretary, told him.

That translated to greater autonomy for the Ukrainians, a rebalancing of the relationship: At first, Wiesbaden had labored to win the Ukrainians’ trust. Now the Ukrainians were asking for Wiesbaden’s trust.

An opportunity soon presented itself.

Ukrainian intelligence had detected a makeshift Russian barracks at a school in occupied Makiivka. “Trust us on this,” General Zabrodskyi told General Aguto. The American did, and the Ukrainian recalled, “We did the full targeting process absolutely independently.” Wiesbaden’s role would be limited to providing coordinates.

A satellite image of a school in occupied Makiivka where Russians had established a barracks.

Maxar Technologies

The site after a strike that was aided by U.S. intelligence.

Maxar Technologies

In this new phase of the partnership, U.S. and Ukrainian officers would still meet daily to set priorities, which the fusion center turned into points of interest. But Ukrainian commanders now had a freer hand to use HIMARS to strike additional targets, fruit of their own intelligence — if they furthered agreed-upon priorities.

“We will step back and watch, and keep an eye on you to make sure that you don’t do anything crazy,” General Aguto told the Ukrainians. “The whole goal,” he added, “is to have you operate on your own at some point in time.”

Echoing 2022, the war games of January 2023 yielded a two-pronged plan.

The secondary offensive, by General Syrsky’s forces in the east, would be focused on Bakhmut — where combat had been smoldering for months — with a feint toward the Luhansk region, an area annexed by Mr. Putin in 2022. That maneuver, the thinking went, would tie up Russian forces in the east and smooth the way for the main effort, in the south — the attack on Melitopol, where Russian fortifications were already rotting and collapsing in the winter wet and cold.

But problems of a different sort were already gnawing at the new-made plan.

General Zaluzhny may have been Ukraine’s supreme commander, but his supremacy was increasingly compromised by his competition with General Syrsky. According to Ukrainian officials, the rivalry dated to Mr. Zelensky’s decision, in 2021, to elevate General Zaluzhny over his former boss, General Syrsky. The rivalry had intensified after the invasion, as the commanders vied for limited HIMARS batteries. General Syrsky had been born in Russia and served in its army; until he started working on his Ukrainian, he had generally spoken Russian at meetings. General Zaluzhny sometimes derisively called him “that Russian general.”

The Americans knew General Syrsky was unhappy about being dealt a supporting hand in the counteroffensive. When General Aguto called to make sure he understood the plan, he responded, “I don’t agree, but I have my orders.”

The counteroffensive was to begin on May 1. The intervening months would be spent training for it. General Syrsky would contribute four battle-hardened brigades — each between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers — for training in Europe; they would be joined by four brigades of new recruits.

The general had other plans.

In Bakhmut, the Russians were deploying, and losing, vast numbers of soldiers. General Syrsky saw an opportunity to engulf them and ignite discord in their ranks. “Take all new guys” for Melitopol, he told General Aguto, according to U.S. officials. And when Mr. Zelensky sided with him, over the objections of both his own supreme commander and the Americans, a key underpinning of the counteroffensive was effectively scuttled.

Now the Ukrainians would send just four untested brigades abroad for training. (They would prepare eight more inside Ukraine.) Plus, the new recruits were old — mostly in their 40s and 50s. When they arrived in Europe, a senior U.S. official recalled, “All we kept thinking was, This is not great.”

The Ukrainian draft age was 27. General Cavoli, who had been promoted to supreme allied commander for Europe, implored General Zaluzhny to “get your 18-year-olds in the game.” But the Americans concluded that neither the president nor the general would own such a politically fraught decision.

A parallel dynamic was at play on the American side.

The previous year, the Russians had unwisely placed command posts, ammunition depots and logistics centers within 50 miles of the front lines. But new intelligence showed that the Russians had now moved critical installations beyond HIMARS’ reach. So Generals Cavoli and Aguto recommended the next quantum leap, giving the Ukrainians Army Tactical Missile Systems — missiles, known as ATACMS, that can travel up to 190 miles — to make it harder for Russian forces in Crimea to help defend Melitopol.

ATACMS were a particularly sore subject for the Biden administration. Russia’s military chief, General Gerasimov, had indirectly referred to them the previous May when he warned General Milley that anything that flew 190 miles would be breaching a red line. There was also a question of supply: The Pentagon was already warning that it would not have enough ATACMS if America had to fight its own war.

The message was blunt: Stop asking for ATACMS.

Underlying assumptions had been upended. Still, the Americans saw a path to victory, albeit a narrowing one. Key to threading that needle was beginning the counteroffensive on schedule, on May 1, before the Russians repaired their fortifications and moved more troops to reinforce Melitopol.

But the drop-dead date came and went. Some promised deliveries of ammunition and equipment had been delayed, and despite General Aguto’s assurances that there was enough to start, the Ukrainians wouldn’t commit until they had it all.

At one point, frustration rising, General Cavoli turned to General Zabrodskyi and said: “Misha, I love your country. But if you don’t do this, you’re going to lose the war.”

“My answer was: ‘I understand what you are saying, Christopher. But please understand me. I’m not the supreme commander. And I’m not the president of Ukraine,’” General Zabrodskyi recalled, adding, “Probably I needed to cry as much as he did.”

At the Pentagon, officials were beginning to sense some graver fissure opening. General Zabrodskyi recalled General Milley asking: “Tell me the truth. Did you change the plan?”

“No, no, no,” he responded. “We did not change the plan, and we are not going to.”

When he uttered these words, he genuinely believed he was telling the truth.

In late May, intelligence showed the Russians rapidly building new brigades. The Ukrainians didn’t have everything they wanted, but they had what they thought they needed. They would have to go.

General Zaluzhny outlined the final plan at a meeting of the Stavka, a governmental body overseeing military matters. General Tarnavskyi would have 12 brigades and the bulk of ammunition for the main assault, on Melitopol. The marine commandant, Lt. Gen. Yurii Sodol, would feint toward Mariupol, the ruined port city taken by the Russians after a withering siege the year before. General Syrsky would lead the supporting effort in the east around Bakhmut, recently lost after months of trench warfare.

Then General Syrsky spoke. According to Ukrainian officials, the general said he wanted to break from the plan and execute a full-scale attack to drive the Russians from Bakhmut. He would then advance eastward toward the Luhansk region. He would, of course, need additional men and ammunition.

The Americans were not told the meeting’s outcome. But then U.S. intelligence observed Ukrainian troops and ammunition moving in directions inconsistent with the agreed-upon plan.

Soon after, at a hastily arranged meeting on the Polish border, General Zaluzhny admitted to Generals Cavoli and Aguto that the Ukrainians had in fact decided to mount assaults in three directions at once.

“That’s not the plan!” General Cavoli cried.

What had happened, according to Ukrainian officials, was this: After the Stavka meeting, Mr. Zelensky had ordered that the coalition’s ammunition be split evenly between General Syrsky and General Tarnavskyi. General Syrsky would also get five of the newly trained brigades, leaving seven for the Melitopol fight.

“It was like watching the demise of the Melitopol offensive even before it was launched,” one Ukrainian official remarked.

Fifteen months into the war, it had all come to this tipping point.

“We should have walked away,” said a senior American official.

But they would not.

“These decisions involving life and death, and what territory you value more and what territory you value less, are fundamentally sovereign decisions,” a senior Biden administration official explained. “All we could do was give them advice.”

The leader of the Mariupol assault, General Sodol, was an eager consumer of General Aguto’s advice. That collaboration produced one of the counteroffensive’s biggest successes: After American intelligence identified a weak point in Russian lines, General Sodol’s forces, using Wiesbaden’s points of interest, recaptured the village of Staromaiorske and nearly eight square miles of territory.

For the Ukrainians, that victory posed a question: Might the Mariupol fight be more promising than the one toward Melitopol? But the attack stalled for lack of manpower.

The problem was laid out right there on the battlefield map in General Aguto’s office: General Syrsky’s assault on Bakhmut was starving the Ukrainian army.

General Aguto urged him to send brigades and ammunition south for the Melitopol attack. But General Syrsky wouldn’t budge, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. Nor would he budge when Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner paramilitaries had helped the Russians capture Bakhmut, rebelled against Mr. Putin’s military leadership and sent forces racing toward Moscow.

U.S. intelligence assessed that the rebellion could erode Russian morale and cohesion; intercepts detected Russian commanders surprised that the Ukrainians weren’t pushing harder toward tenuously defended Melitopol, a U.S. intelligence official said.

But as General Syrsky saw it, the rebellion validated his strategy of sowing division by impaling the Russians in Bakhmut. To send some of his forces south would only undercut it. “I was right, Aguto. You were wrong,” an American official recalls General Syrsky saying and adding, “We’re going to get to Luhansk.”

Mr. Zelensky had framed Bakhmut as the “fortress of our morale.” In the end, it was a blood-drenched demonstration of the outmanned Ukrainians’ predicament.

Though counts vary wildly, there is little question that the Russians’ casualties — in the tens of thousands — far outstripped the Ukrainians’. Yet General Syrsky never did recapture Bakhmut, never did advance toward Luhansk. And while the Russians rebuilt their brigades and soldiered on in the east, the Ukrainians had no such easy source of recruits. (Mr. Prigozhin pulled his rebels back before reaching Moscow; two months later, he died in a plane crash that American intelligence believed had the hallmarks of a Kremlin-sponsored assassination.)

Which left Melitopol.

A primary virtue of the Wiesbaden machine was speed — shrinking the time from point of interest to Ukrainian strike. But that virtue, and with it the Melitopol offensive, was undermined by a fundamental shift in how the Ukrainian commander there used those points of interest. He had substantially less ammunition than he had planned for; instead of simply firing, he would now first use drones to confirm the intelligence.

This corrosive pattern, fueled, too, by caution and a deficit of trust, came to a head when, after weeks of grindingly slow progress across a hellscape of minefields and helicopter fire, Ukrainian forces approached the occupied village of Robotyne.

American officials recounted the ensuing battle. The Ukrainians had been pummeling the Russians with artillery; American intelligence indicated they were pulling back.

“Take the ground now,” General Aguto told General Tarnavskyi.

But the Ukrainians had spotted a group of Russians on a hilltop.

In Wiesbaden, satellite imagery showed what looked like a Russian platoon, between 20 and 50 soldiers — to General Aguto hardly justification to slow the march.

General Tarnavskyi, though, wouldn’t move until the threat was eliminated. So Wiesbaden sent the Russians’ coordinates and advised him to simultaneously open fire and advance.

Instead, to verify the intelligence, General Tarnavskyi flew reconnaissance drones over the hilltop.

Which took time. Only then did he order his men to fire.

And after the strike, he once again dispatched his drones, to confirm the hilltop was indeed clear. Then he ordered his forces into Robotyne, which they seized on Aug. 28.

The back-and-forth had cost between 24 and 48 hours, officers estimated. And in that time, south of Robotyne, the Russians had begun building new barriers, laying mines and sending reinforcements to halt Ukrainian progress. “The situation was changed completely,” General Zabrodskyi said.

An abandoned Ukrainian military vehicle near the front line of Robotyne.

Reuters

General Aguto yelled at General Tarnavskyi: Press on. But the Ukrainians had to rotate troops from the front lines to the rear, and with only the seven brigades, they weren’t able to bring in new forces fast enough to keep going.

The Ukrainian advance, in fact, was slowed by a mix of factors. But in Wiesbaden, the frustrated Americans kept talking about the platoon on the hill. “A damned platoon stopped the counteroffensive,” one officer remarked.

The Ukrainians would not make it to Melitopol. They would have to scale back their ambitions.

Now their objective would be the small occupied city of Tokmak, about halfway to Melitopol, close to critical rail lines and roadways.

General Aguto had given the Ukrainians greater autonomy. But now he crafted a detailed artillery plan, Operation Rolling Thunder, that prescribed what the Ukrainians should shoot, with what and in what order, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. But General Tarnavskyi objected to some targets, insisted on using drones to verify points of interest and Rolling Thunder rumbled to a halt.

Desperate to salvage the counteroffensive, the White House had authorized a secret transport of a small number of cluster warheads with a range of about 100 miles, and General Aguto and General Zabrodskyi devised an operation against Russian attack helicopters threatening General Tarnavskyi’s forces. At least 10 helicopters were destroyed, and the Russians pulled all their aircraft back to Crimea or the mainland. Still, the Ukrainians couldn’t advance.

The Americans’ last-ditch recommendation was to have General Syrsky take over the Tokmak fight. That was rejected. They then proposed that General Sodol send his marines to Robotyne and have them break through the Russian line. But instead General Zaluzhny ordered the marines to Kherson to open a new front in an operation the Americans counseled was doomed to fail — trying to cross the Dnipro and advance toward Crimea. The marines made it across the river in early November but ran out of men and ammunition. The counteroffensive was supposed to deliver a knockout blow. Instead, it met an inglorious end.

General Syrsky declined to answer questions about his interactions with American generals, but a spokesman for the Ukrainian armed forces said, “We do hope that the time will come, and after the victory of Ukraine, the Ukrainian and American generals you mentioned will perhaps jointly tell us about their working and friendly negotiations during the fighting against Russian aggression.”

Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential office of Ukraine and arguably the country’s second-most-powerful official, told The Times that the counteroffensive had been “primarily blunted” by the allies’ “political hesitation” and “constant” delays in weapons deliveries.

But to another senior Ukrainian official, “The real reason why we were not successful was because an improper number of forces were assigned to execute the plan.”

Either way, for the partners, the counteroffensive’s devastating outcome left bruised feelings on both sides. “The important relationships were maintained,” said Ms. Wallander, the Pentagon official. “But it was no longer the inspired and trusting brotherhood of 2022 and early 2023.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky and Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli in Wiesbaden in December 2023.

Susanne Goebel/U.S. European Command
Part 4 December 2023–January 2025
Breaches of Trust, and of Borders

December 2023–January 2025
U.S. & Allies

Antonio A. Aguto Jr. General

Lloyd J. Austin III Defense Sec.

David S. Baldwin General

Joseph R. Biden Jr. President

Christopher G. Cavoli General

Christopher T. Donahue General

Donald J. Trump President

Ukraine

Oleksandr Syrsky General

Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi General

Volodymyr Zelensky President

Shortly before Christmas, Mr. Zelensky rode through the Wiesbaden gates for his maiden visit to the secret center of the partnership.

Entering the Tony Bass Auditorium, he was escorted past trophies of shared battle — twisted fragments of Russian vehicles, missiles and aircraft. When he climbed to the walkway above the former basketball court — as General Zabrodskyi had done that first day in 2022 — the officers working below burst into applause.

Yet the president had not come to Wiesbaden for celebration. In the shadow of the failed counteroffensive, a third, hard wartime winter coming on, the portents had only darkened. To press their new advantage, the Russians were pouring forces into the east. In America, Mr. Trump, a Ukraine skeptic, was mid-political resurrection; some congressional Republicans were grumbling about cutting off funding.

A year ago, the coalition had been talking victory. As 2024 arrived and ground on, the Biden administration would find itself forced to keep crossing its own red lines simply to keep the Ukrainians afloat.

But first, the immediate business in Wiesbaden: Generals Cavoli and Aguto explained that they saw no plausible path to reclaiming significant territory in 2024. The coalition simply couldn’t provide all the equipment for a major counteroffensive. Nor could the Ukrainians build an army big enough to mount one.

The Ukrainians would have to temper expectations, focusing on achievable objectives to stay in the fight while building the combat power to potentially mount a counteroffensive in 2025: They would need to erect defensive lines in the east to prevent the Russians from seizing more territory. And they would need to reconstitute existing brigades and fill new ones, which the coalition would help train and equip.

Mr. Zelensky voiced his support.

Yet the Americans knew he did so grudgingly. Time and again Mr. Zelensky had made it clear that he wanted, and needed, a big win to bolster morale at home and shore up Western support.

Just weeks before, the president had instructed General Zaluzhny to push the Russians back to Ukraine’s 1991 borders by fall of 2024. The general had then shocked the Americans by presenting a plan to do so that required five million shells and one million drones. To which General Cavoli had responded, in fluent Russian, “From where?”

Several weeks later, at a meeting in Kyiv, the Ukrainian commander had locked General Cavoli in a Defense Ministry kitchen and, vaping furiously, made one final, futile plea. “He was caught between two fires, the first being the president and the second being the partners,” said one of his aides.

As a compromise, the Americans now presented Mr. Zelensky with what they believed would constitute a statement victory — a bombing campaign, using long-range missiles and drones, to force the Russians to pull their military infrastructure out of Crimea and back into Russia. It would be code-named Operation Lunar Hail.

Until now, the Ukrainians, with help from the C.I.A. and the U.S. and British navies, had used maritime drones, together with long-range British Storm Shadow and French SCALP missiles, to strike the Black Sea Fleet. Wiesbaden’s contribution was intelligence.

But to prosecute the wider Crimea campaign, the Ukrainians would need far more missiles. They would need hundreds of ATACMS.

At the Pentagon, the old cautions hadn’t melted away. But after General Aguto briefed Mr. Austin on all that Lunar Hail could achieve, an aide recalled, he said: “OK, there’s a really compelling strategic objective here. It isn’t just about striking things.”

Mr. Zelensky would get his long-pined-for ATACMS. Even so, one U.S. official said, “We knew that, in his heart of hearts, he still wanted to do something else, something more.”

General Zabrodskyi was in the Wiesbaden command center in late January when he received an urgent message and stepped outside.

When he returned, gone pale as a ghost, he led General Aguto to a balcony and, pulling on a Lucky Strike, told him that the Ukrainian leadership struggle had reached its denouement: General Zaluzhny was being fired. The betting was on his rival, General Syrsky, to ascend.

The Americans were hardly surprised; they had been hearing ample murmurings of presidential discontent. The Ukrainians would chalk it up to politics, to fear that the widely popular General Zaluzhny might challenge Mr. Zelensky for the presidency. There was also the Stavka meeting, where the president effectively kneecapped General Zaluzhny, and the general’s subsequent decision to publish a piece in The Economist declaring the war at a stalemate, the Ukrainians in need of a quantum technological breakthrough. This even as his president was calling for total victory.

General Zaluzhny, one American official said, was a “dead man walking.”

General Syrsky’s appointment brought hedged relief. The Americans believed they would now have a partner with the president’s ear and trust; decision-making, they hoped, would become more consistent.

General Syrsky was also a known commodity.

Part of that knowledge, of course, was the memory of 2023, the scar of Bakhmut — the way the general had sometimes spurned their recommendations, even sought to undermine them. Still, colleagues say, Generals Cavoli and Aguto felt they understood his idiosyncrasies; he would at least hear them out, and unlike some commanders, he appreciated and typically trusted the intelligence they provided.

For General Zabrodskyi, though, the shake-up was a personal blow and a strategic unknown. He considered General Zaluzhny a friend and had given up his parliamentary seat to become his deputy for plans and operations. (Soon he would be pushed out of that job, and his Wiesbaden role. When General Aguto found out, he called with a standing invitation to his North Carolina beach house; the generals could go sailing. “Maybe in my next life,” General Zabrodskyi replied.)

And the changing of the guard came at a particularly uncertain moment for the partnership: Goaded by Mr. Trump, congressional Republicans were holding up $61 billion in new military aid. During the battle for Melitopol, the commander had insisted on using drones to validate every point of interest. Now, with far fewer rockets and shells, commanders along the front adopted the same protocol. Wiesbaden was still churning out points of interest, but the Ukrainians were barely using them.

“We don’t need this right now,” General Zabrodskyi told the Americans.

The red lines kept moving.

There were the ATACMS, which arrived secretly in early spring, so the Russians wouldn’t realize Ukraine could now strike across Crimea.

And there were the SMEs. Some months earlier, General Aguto had been allowed to send a small team, about a dozen officers, to Kyiv, easing the prohibition on American boots on Ukrainian ground. So as not to evoke memories of the American military advisers sent to South Vietnam in the slide to full-scale war, they would be known as “subject matter experts.” Then, after the Ukrainian leadership shake-up, to build confidence and coordination, the administration more than tripled the number of officers in Kyiv, to about three dozen; they could now plainly be called advisers, though they would still be confined to the Kyiv area.

Perhaps the hardest red line, though, was the Russian border. Soon that line, too, would be redrawn.

In April, the financing logjam was finally cleared, and 180 more ATACMS, dozens of armored vehicles and 85,000 155-millimeter shells started flowing in from Poland.

Coalition intelligence, though, was detecting another sort of movement: Components of a new Russian formation, the 44th Army Corps, moving toward Belgorod, just north of the Ukrainian border. The Russians, seeing a limited window as the Ukrainians waited to have the American aid in hand, were preparing to open a new front in northern Ukraine.

The Ukrainians believed the Russians hoped to reach a major road ringing Kharkiv, which would allow them to bombard the city, the country’s second-largest, with artillery fire, and threaten the lives of more than a million people.

The Russian offensive exposed a fundamental asymmetry: The Russians could support their troops with artillery from just across the border; the Ukrainians couldn’t shoot back using American equipment or intelligence.

Yet with peril came opportunity. The Russians were complacent about security, believing the Americans would never let the Ukrainians fire into Russia. Entire units and their equipment were sitting unsheltered, largely undefended, in open fields.

The Ukrainians asked for permission to use U.S.-supplied weapons across the border. What’s more, Generals Cavoli and Aguto proposed that Wiesbaden help guide those strikes, as it did across Ukraine and in Crimea — providing points of interest and precision coordinates.

The White House was still debating these questions when, on May 10, the Russians attacked.

This became the moment the Biden administration changed the rules of the game. Generals Cavoli and Aguto were tasked with creating an “ops box” — a zone on Russian soil in which the Ukrainians could fire U.S.-supplied weapons and Wiesbaden could support their strikes.

At first they advocated an expansive box, to encompass a concomitant threat: the glide bombs — crude Soviet-era bombs transformed into precision weapons with wings and fins — that were raining terror on Kharkiv. A box extending about 190 miles would let the Ukrainians use their new ATACMS to hit glide-bomb fields and other targets deep inside Russia. But Mr. Austin saw this as mission creep: He did not want to divert ATACMS from Lunar Hail.

Instead, the generals were instructed to draw up two options — one extending about 50 miles into Russia, standard HIMARS range, and one nearly twice as deep. Ultimately, against the generals’ recommendation, Mr. Biden and his advisers chose the most limited option — but to protect the city of Sumy as well as Kharkiv, it followed most of the country’s northern border, encompassing an area almost as large as New Jersey. The C.I.A. was also authorized to send officers to the Kharkiv region to assist their Ukrainian counterparts with operations inside the box.

The box went live at the end of May. The Russians were caught unawares: With Wiesbaden’s points of interest and coordinates, as well as the Ukrainians’ own intelligence, HIMARS strikes into the ops box helped defend Kharkiv. The Russians suffered some of their heaviest casualties of the war.

The unthinkable had become real. The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.

Summer 2024: Ukraine’s armies in the north and east were stretched dangerously thin. Still, General Syrsky kept telling the Americans, “I need a win.”

A foreshadowing had come back in March, when the Americans discovered that Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the HUR, was furtively planning a ground operation into southwest Russia. The C.I.A. station chief in Kyiv confronted the HUR commander, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov: If he crossed into Russia, he would do so without American weapons or intelligence support. He did, only to be forced back.

At moments like these, Biden administration officials would joke bitterly that they knew more about what the Russians were planning by spying on them than about what their Ukrainian partners were planning.

To the Ukrainians, though, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” was “better than ask and stop,” explained Lt. Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, a former Ukrainian military intelligence commander. He added: “We are allies, but we have different goals. We protect our country, and you protect your phantom fears from the Cold War.”

In August in Wiesbaden, General Aguto’s tour was coming to its scheduled end. He left on the 9th. The same day, the Ukrainians dropped a cryptic reference to something happening in the north.

On Aug. 10, the C.I.A. station chief left, too, for a job at headquarters. In the churn of command, General Syrsky made his move — sending troops across the southwest Russian border, into the region of Kursk.

For the Americans, the incursion’s unfolding was a significant breach of trust. It wasn’t just that the Ukrainians had again kept them in the dark; they had secretly crossed a mutually agreed-upon line, taking coalition-supplied equipment into Russian territory encompassed by the ops box, in violation of rules laid down when it was created.

The box had been established to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Kharkiv, not so the Ukrainians could take advantage of it to seize Russian soil. “It wasn’t almost blackmail, it was blackmail,” a senior Pentagon official said.

The Americans could have pulled the plug on the ops box. Yet they knew that to do so, an administration official explained, “could lead to a catastrophe”: Ukrainian soldiers in Kursk would perish unprotected by HIMARS rockets and U.S. intelligence.

Kursk, the Americans concluded, was the win Mr. Zelensky had been hinting at all along. It was also evidence of his calculations: He still spoke of total victory. But one of the operation’s goals, he explained to the Americans, was leverage — to capture and hold Russian land that could be traded for Ukrainian land in future negotiations.

Provocative operations once forbidden were now permitted.

Before General Zabrodskyi was sidelined, he and General Aguto had selected the targets for Operation Lunar Hail. The campaign required a degree of hand-holding not seen since General Donahue’s day. American and British officers would oversee virtually every aspect of each strike, from determining the coordinates to calculating the missiles’ flight paths.

Of roughly 100 targets across Crimea, the most coveted was the Kerch Strait Bridge, linking the peninsula to the Russian mainland. Mr. Putin saw the bridge as powerful physical proof of Crimea’s connection to the motherland. Toppling the Russian president’s symbol had, in turn, become the Ukrainian president’s obsession.

It had also been an American red line. In 2022, the Biden administration prohibited helping the Ukrainians target it; even the approaches on the Crimean side were to be treated as sovereign Russian territory. (Ukrainian intelligence services tried attacking it themselves, causing some damage.)

But after the partners agreed on Lunar Hail, the White House authorized the military and C.I.A. to secretly work with the Ukrainians and the British on a blueprint of attack to bring the bridge down: ATACMS would weaken vulnerable points on the deck, while maritime drones would blow up next to its stanchions.

But while the drones were being readied, the Russians hardened their defenses around the stanchions.

The Ukrainians proposed attacking with ATACMS alone. Generals Cavoli and Aguto pushed back: ATACMS alone wouldn’t do the job; the Ukrainians should wait until the drones were ready or call off the strike.

In the end, the Americans stood down, and in mid-August, with Wiesbaden’s reluctant help, the Ukrainians fired a volley of ATACMS at the bridge. It did not come tumbling down; the strike left some “potholes,” which the Russians repaired, one American official grumbled, adding, “Sometimes they need to try and fail to see that we are right.”

The Kerch Bridge episode aside, the Lunar Hail collaboration was judged a significant success. Russian warships, aircraft, command posts, weapons depots and maintenance facilities were destroyed or moved to the mainland to escape the onslaught.

For the Biden administration, the failed Kerch attack, together with a scarcity of ATACMS, reinforced the importance of helping the Ukrainians use their fleet of long-distance attack drones. The main challenge was evading Russian air defenses and pinpointing targets.

Longstanding policy barred the C.I.A. from providing intelligence on targets on Russian soil. So the administration would let the C.I.A. request “variances,” carve-outs authorizing the spy agency to support strikes inside Russia to achieve specific objectives.

Intelligence had identified a vast munitions depot in the lakeside town of Toropets, some 290 miles north of the Ukrainian border, that was providing weapons to Russian forces in Kharkiv and Kursk. The administration approved the variance. Toropets would be a test of concept.

C.I.A. officers shared intelligence about the depot’s munitions and vulnerabilities, as well as Russian defense systems on the way to Toropets. They calculated how many drones the operation would require and charted their circuitous flight paths.

On Sept. 18, a large swarm of drones slammed into the munitions depot. The blast, as powerful as a small earthquake, opened a crater the width of a football field. Videos showed immense balls of flame and plumes of smoke rising above the lake.

A munitions depot in Toropets, Russia.

Maxar Technologies

The depot after a drone strike assisted by the C.I.A.

Maxar Technologies

Yet as with the Kerch Bridge operation, the drone collaboration pointed to a strategic dissonance.

The Americans argued for concentrating drone strikes on strategically important military targets — the same sort of argument they had made, fruitlessly, about focusing on Melitopol during the 2023 counteroffensive. But the Ukrainians insisted on attacking a wider menu of targets, including oil and gas facilities and politically sensitive sites in and around Moscow (though they would do so without C.I.A. help).

“Russian public opinion is going to turn on Putin,” Mr. Zelensky told the American secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in Kyiv in September. “You’re wrong. We know the Russians.”

Mr. Austin and General Cavoli traveled to Kyiv in October. Year by year, the Biden administration had provided the Ukrainians with an ever-more-sophisticated arsenal of weaponry, had crossed so many of its red lines. Still, the defense secretary and the general were worrying about the message written in the weakening situation on the ground.

The Russians had been making slow but steady progress against depleted Ukrainian forces in the east, toward the city of Pokrovsk — their “big target,” one American official called it. They were also clawing back some territory in Kursk. Yes, the Russians’ casualties had spiked, to between 1,000 and 1,500 a day. But still they kept coming.

Mr. Austin would later recount how he contemplated this manpower mismatch as he looked out the window of his armored S.U.V. snaking through the Kyiv streets. He was struck, he told aides, by the sight of so many men in their 20s, almost none of them in uniform. In a nation at war, he explained, men this age are usually away, in the fight.

This was one of the difficult messages the Americans had come to Kyiv to deliver, as they laid out what they could and couldn’t do for Ukraine in 2025.

Mr. Zelensky had already taken a small step, lowering the draft age to 25. Still, the Ukrainians hadn’t been able to fill existing brigades, let alone build new ones.

Mr. Austin pressed Mr. Zelensky to take the bigger, bolder step and begin drafting 18-year-olds. To which Mr. Zelensky shot back, according to an official who was present, “Why would I draft more people? We don’t have any equipment to give them.”

“And your generals are reporting that your units are undermanned,” the official recalled Mr. Austin responding. “They don’t have enough soldiers for the equipment they have.”

That was the perennial standoff:

In the Ukrainians’ view, the Americans weren’t willing to do what was necessary to help them prevail.

In the Americans’ view, the Ukrainians weren’t willing to do what was necessary to help themselves prevail.

Mr. Zelensky often said, in response to the draft question, that his country was fighting for its future, that 18- to 25-year-olds were the fathers of that future.

To one American official, though, it’s “not an existential war if they won’t make their people fight.”

General Baldwin, who early on had crucially helped connect the partners’ commanders, had visited Kyiv in September 2023. The counteroffensive was stalling, the U.S. elections were on the horizon and the Ukrainians kept asking about Afghanistan.

The Ukrainians, he recalled, were terrified that they, too, would be abandoned. They kept calling, wanting to know if America would stay the course, asking: “What will happen if the Republicans win the Congress? What is going to happen if President Trump wins?’”

He always told them to remain encouraged, he said. Still, he added, “I had my fingers crossed behind my back, because I really didn’t know anymore.”

Mr. Trump won, and the fear came rushing in.

In his last, lame-duck weeks, Mr. Biden made a flurry of moves to stay the course, at least for the moment, and shore up his Ukraine project.

He crossed his final red line — expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia — after North Korea sent thousands of troops to help the Russians dislodge the Ukrainians from Kursk. One of the first U.S.-supported strikes targeted and wounded the North Korean commander, Col. Gen. Kim Yong Bok, as he met with his Russian counterparts in a command bunker.

The administration also authorized Wiesbaden and the C.I.A. to support long-range missile and drone strikes into a section of southern Russia used as a staging area for the assault on Pokrovsk, and allowed the military advisers to leave Kyiv for command posts closer to the fighting.

In December, General Donahue got his fourth star and returned to Wiesbaden as commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa. He had been the last American soldier to leave in the chaotic fall of Kabul. Now he would have to navigate the new, unsure future of Ukraine.

General Cavoli, center, passed the colors to General Donahue in a ceremonial change of command in Wiesbaden.

Volker Ramspott/U.S. Army

So much had changed since General Donahue left two years before. But when it came to the raw question of territory, not much had changed. In the war’s first year, with Wiesbaden’s help, the Ukrainians had seized the upper hand, winning back more than half of the land lost after the 2022 invasion. Now, they were fighting over tiny slivers of ground in the east (and in Kursk).

One of General Donahue’s main objectives in Wiesbaden, according to a Pentagon official, would be to fortify the brotherhood and breathe new life into the machine — to stem, perhaps even push back, the Russian advance. (In the weeks that followed, with Wiesbaden providing points of interest and coordinates, the Russian march toward Pokrovsk would slow, and in some areas in the east, the Ukrainians would make gains. But in southwest Russia, as the Trump administration scaled back support, the Ukrainians would lose most of their bargaining chip, Kursk.)

In early January, Generals Donahue and Cavoli visited Kyiv to meet with General Syrsky and ensure that he agreed on plans to replenish Ukrainian brigades and shore up their lines, the Pentagon official said. From there, they traveled to Ramstein Air Base, where they met Mr. Austin for what would be the final gathering of coalition defense chiefs before everything changed.

With the doors closed to the press and public, Mr. Austin’s counterparts hailed him as the “godfather” and “architect” of the partnership that, for all its broken trust and betrayals, had sustained the Ukrainians’ defiance and hope, begun in earnest on that spring day in 2022 when Generals Donahue and Zabrodskyi first met in Wiesbaden.

Mr. Austin is a solid and stoic block of a man, but as he returned the compliments, his voice caught.

“Instead of saying farewell, let me say thank you,” he said, blinking back tears. And then added: “I wish you all success, courage and resolve. Ladies and gentlemen, carry on.”

Oleksandr Chubko and Julie Tate contributed research. Produced by Gray Beltran, Kenan Davis and Rumsey Taylor. Maps by Leanne Abraham. Additional production by William B. Davis. Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

Sources and methodology

For each war map, we used data from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project to calculate changes in territorial control. Russian forces in eastern Ukraine include Russian-backed separatists. The composite image in the introduction draws on data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and was compiled using Google Earth Engine. We combined images from January and February of each year since 2020 to generate a cloud-free satellite image.

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

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Saturday, April 5, 2025 12:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Ukraine.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, April 5, 2025 2:51 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Wow! An entire page of blamestorming and history-rewriting!
300 interviews to stitch together excuses, rationalizations, blame-shifting, and propaganda. What an achievement!

Sorry, folks.
All that failure rests squarely on America's and Britain's shoulders.

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