Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Friday, July 25, 2025 14:23
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PAGE 174 of 174

Tuesday, July 22, 2025 6:35 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

European fuckheads in the political class deserve to be shot for their sheer stupidity and corruption.

Comparing Russia’s Life Expectancy and GDP per capita with the EU indicates Russian leaders should be shot before EU leaders:

1) Overall Life Expectancy: As of 2023, EU life expectancy at birth was around 81.5 years, while Russia's life expectancy in 2021 was 70.06 years.

https://www.google.com/search?q=compare+life+expectancy+between+Russia
+and+EU

2) The EU's GDP per capita is significantly higher than Russia's, with FRED Blog stating Russia's GDP per capita being about two-thirds smaller than the EU's in 2020. While Russia's nominal GDP per capita for 2025 is projected at $14,260, and PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) GDP per capita is $49,380, the EU's nominal GDP per capita for 2025 is estimated at $44,387, and its PPP GDP per capita is projected at $64,545. The EU also has a substantially larger overall GDP than Russia.

https://www.google.com/search?q=compare+gdp+per+capita+between+Russia+
and+EU

3) Signym, since Russia is hiding recent data, the comparison with the EU has gotten worse:

No births, no deaths, no data
Russia is pulling demographic stats from public view. What’s the Kremlin trying to hide?
July 14, 2025

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/07/14/no-births-no-deaths-no-data

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

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 3:58 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Yep. Pre- 2000 leadership was really fucked up. But look at the progress Russia's made since then.

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

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

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Wednesday, July 23, 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

Ukraine’s military death tolls underestimated, Russia recruits sufficient to cover its frontline losses

By Ben Aris in Berlin | July 22, 2025

https://www.intellinews.com/ukraine-s-military-death-tolls-underestima
ted-russia-recruits-sufficient-to-cover-its-frontline-losses-392172/

Ukraine’s official military casualty figures in the war with Russia may be vastly understated, according to a report published by the French newspaper Le Monde on Monday. Russia’s death toll is much higher, but official figures show the Kremlin’s voluntary recruitment drive is replenishing the ranks faster than its soldiers are being killed.

Death tolls in the four-year old war are state secrets on both sides of the conflict and analysts have been reduced to using proxies to estimate the true toll and official estimates from Defence Ministries are almost certainly massaged up or down. However, even these estimates are stark.

Since the start of the conflict over three years ago a total of 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and another 380,000 wounded, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told CBS News in February.

“The real death toll is likely much higher,” Le Monde reported based on Ukraine’s efforts to build military cemeteries. The state has two new national military memorial projects under construction in Kyiv and Lviv, as graveyards for fallen Ukrainian soldiers are nearing capacity. “Construction projects rising across Ukraine say more about the scale of the slaughter than statistics ever could,” Le Monde said, in comments widely shared in Russian media.

Ukraine’s manpower shortage

While the actual numbers remain cloaked in confusion, it is very clear that Ukraine is suffering from an acute manpower shortage, while Russia is not. No men aged 18 to 60 have been allowed to leave the country since February 2022 without special permission.

Russian President Vladimir Putin resorted to a partial mobilisation in September 2022 in the first year of the war, when the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) faced a temporary manpower shortage. The Kremlin has avoided a general mobilisation at all costs, aware that it could cause a major revolt. And the costs have been high; the Kremlin has been paying out an entire year’s salary or more as signed up fees for voluntary recruits, which takes up a third of the military budget by itself.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was forced to order a general mobilisation almost as soon as the war started. Now anger and resentment is rising at the aggressive press-ganging of military-age men into the army – a process known as ‘busification’. Ukraine’s social media is filled with videos of men being snatched from the street and bundled into minivans by recruitment officers, sometimes at gunpoint.

Those forced to fight are fleeing their positions in record numbers. Desertions from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) is rampant. In the first six months of this year, Ukraine’s Prosecutor’s Office reported that it had opened 107,672 new criminal cases for desertion. Since 2022 some 230,804 such criminal cases have been instigated, suggesting that more soldiers have deserted the Ukrainian army than there are fighting men in today’s British, French and German armies combined, The Spectator reports.

And there is no respite for the members of the AFU. While Russia has sufficient men to be able to rotate them in and out of combat, Ukrainian soldiers serve continuously and are exhausted. A draft law proposed last year releasing military personnel from service after 36 months was squashed by the government for fear exacerbating the labour shortage. Small protests are regularly held by the families of soldiers calling not for the release of their men, but simply to give them a break from the front line occasionally.

Another new law making it possible for men aged 18-26, that are not subject to conscription, to volunteer for military service managed to attract a total of 500 recruits.

Russia fewer deaths, faster recruitment

The numbers of reported Russian dead from the war are clearly higher, but they also don’t add up. Ukraine’s supporters report the Russian death toll practically every day, usually citing the official estimates released by Ukraine’s Defence Ministry, as part of its media campaign to denigrate the AFR and boost support for Ukraine. Currently the numbers coming from the “meat grinder” that is the battle for Donbas sees at least a 1,000 Russian soldiers die a day according to these estimates.

However, other sober estimate put the number far lower. A verified list of dead Russian soldiers maintained by Mediazona and the BBC already exceeds 115,000 -- about 5,000 names are added each month, or 161 deaths per day from the whole of Ukraine, not 1,000.

The actual number of deaths is widely estimated at roughly double the Mediazona estimates, or around 300 dead a day. Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), for example, puts Russian fatalities at 250,000, the Moscow Times reports. However, due to the incomplete access to information, the real number could be far higher.

Nevertheless, these estimates are still a third of what the Ukrainian Defence Ministry is reporting, and they are low enough to allow Russia to sustain its fight indefinitely as it can replace all the casualties with fresh recruits.

Typically, three times more soldiers on the offensive die than those on the defensive, However, what few numbers have come out on the daily death toll of the AFU are roughly on the same order as the estimate of Russian deaths – and with its smaller population even if fewer Ukrainians are dying than Russians, it can still lose the war by running out of men before Russia does.

While the AFU has the drone advantage, Russia maintains an overwhelming artillery, missile and heavy glide bombs advantage, powerful weapons that can completely destroy Ukraine’s defensive positions.

Much clearer is the information on Putin’s ability to replenish his manpower by recruiting fresh volunteers to fight for Russia.

“Some analysts — including myself — recently thought Putin would be unable to find enough conscripts to cover losses this year and that by late 2025, forcing him to choose between a forced draft and a ceasefire,” said Sergei Shelin in an opinion piece in the Moscow Times. “Unfortunately, the data paints a different picture.”

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi claimed Russia suffered 32,000 irreversible losses in June alone (100 deaths a day), but official Russian figures suggested Russia added 190,000 volunteer and contract soldiers in the first five months of 2025, or 38,000 per month (1,225 per day). Russia is recruiting more soldiers a month than it is losing on the frontline, even if you believe Syrskyi’s probably inflated number. Monthly inflows exceed losses by roughly 10,000, according to Shelin.

Putin says about 700,000 Russians are currently fighting in Ukraine. His goal is to increase the number of active servicemen to 1.5mn largely through volunteers that draw heavily on Russia’s poorest regions, while the AFU is forced to resort to conscription of the dwindling pool of men left in the country. Russia’s population is at least four-times bigger than that of Ukraine’s, and that calculation is before you count out the roughly six million men that have already fled the country after the war started.

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

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 7:05 AM

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Russian authorities recently detained Bryansk Oblast Vice Governor Nikolai Simonenko and former Belgorod Oblast Vice Governor Rustem Zainullin, likely as part of the Kremlin’s continued efforts to scapegoat local officials for larger Russian border security failures following Ukraine's August 2024 Kursk Oblast incursion. Russian law enforcement officials told Kremlin newswire TASS on July 22 that Russian authorities detained Simonenko on abuse of power charges and searched Simonenko’s home and workplace as part of a larger criminal case investigating the embezzlement of funds allocated for the construction of defensive fortifications in Bryansk Oblast border areas.[19] Russian authorities similarly detained Zainullin for fraud on June 21 on suspicion of embezzling 32 million rubles (roughly $408,000) in funds allocated to constructing defensive fortifications in the Belgorod Oblast border area.[20] Russian authorities previously detained former Kursk Oblast Governor Alexei Smirnov on similar embezzlement charges in what ISW assessed to be a concerted Kremlin effort to use Kursk Oblast officials as scapegoats for Russia’s failure to repel the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast.[21] Russian President Vladimir Putin also notably dismissed Russian Minister of Transport and former Kursk Oblast Governor Roman Starovoit on July 7 just prior to Starovoit’s reported suicide.[22]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-july-22-2025

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

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 3:21 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Ukraine’s military death tolls underestimated, Russia recruits sufficient to cover its frontline losses

By Ben Aris in Berlin | July 22, 2025

https://www.intellinews.com/ukraine-s-military-death-tolls-underestima
ted-russia-recruits-sufficient-to-cover-its-frontline-losses-392172/

Since the start of the conflict over three years ago a total of 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed

I hope you see now why we shouldn't believe "reports" out of Kiev, and their slavish quotes in western "intelligence" agencies

Quote:
and another 380,000 wounded, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told CBS News in February.

“The real death toll is likely much higher,”

Yeah, no shit. Why aren't any western "news" agencies attempting to estimate Kiev's dead, like Mediazona is doing with Russia's?

Quote:

Russia fewer deaths, faster recruitment

The numbers of reported

By Kiev. Until about six month ago, our policy was to make "our" intelligence estimates to match Kiev's. Talk about delusion by policy!

Quote:
Russian dead from the war are clearly higher [than what?], but they also don’t add up. Ukraine’s supporters report the Russian death toll practically every day, usually citing the [Kiev's] official estimates released by Ukraine’s Defence Ministry, as part of its media campaign to denigrate the AFR and boost support for Ukraine. Currently the numbers coming from the “meat grinder” that is the battle for Donbas sees at least a 1,000 Russian soldiers die a day according to these estimates.

However, other sober estimate put the number far lower. A verified list of dead Russian soldiers maintained by Mediazona and the BBC already exceeds 115,000 -- about 5,000 names are added each month, or 161 deaths per day from the whole of Ukraine, not 1,000.

The actual number of deaths is widely estimated at roughly double the Mediazona estimates, or around 300 dead a day. Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), for example, puts Russian fatalities at 250,000, the Moscow Times

Moscow Times isn't even in Moscow

Quote:
reports. However, due to the incomplete access to information, the real number could be far higher.

Or lower.

According to Mediazona/ BBC, despite the fact that Russians are on the offensive, the LONG term trend of Russian deaths in going LOWER. That's despite the fact that Mediazona is now including probate proceedings.

There's always a lag so discount the last three months, but the trend is unmistakable.

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

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 7:22 AM

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

Putin’s chief ideologue: Media reveals who is rewriting history for Kremlin leader

By Kateryna Shkarlat | Tue, July 22, 2025 - 23:00

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/putin-s-chief-ideologue-media-reveals-
who-1753212861.html

Former Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky is likely leading a Kremlin project aimed at promoting its version of history, according to the Skhemy investigative project.

In particular, sources of the Skhemy project claim that Medinsky knows how to craft the right phrasing for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Putin has his own ideas — for example, at the Bucharest summit in 2008, he already stated that the Ukrainian state does not exist. So these ideas were not new for Putin, but now Medinsky is helping to give them an ideological form," said a source close to Estonia’s security structures.

At the same time, investigators found that Medinsky, through the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO), which he controls, is carrying out ideological initiatives in the occupied territories and supporting military units. Moreover, Medinsky is reportedly overseeing the imposition of Kremlin ideology on schoolchildren across the post-Soviet space and is involved in publishing history textbooks.

Medinsky and Crimea

In March 2014, just two weeks after the occupation of Crimea, then-Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky presented Putin with his ministry’s plans for the peninsula. Specifically, he proposed organizing theatrical performances based on Russian literary works, holding exhibitions dedicated to the Russian Empire, and supplying Crimean libraries with books from Russia. Since then, Medinsky regularly visited Crimea to oversee the implementation of these initiatives.

Six months later, he introduced a school textbook presenting the Russian interpretation of Crimea’s history. In the foreword written by Medinsky himself, it is emphasized that the involvement of the Russian Military Historical Society, which he heads, influenced the content of the publication — particularly the emphasis placed on military and political aspects. The text also claims that the "reunification of Crimea with Russia" allegedly enriches national historiography with "interesting and necessary works."

Occupied Crimea and Luhansk

In the temporarily occupied cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, the first branches of the Russian Military Historical Society began operating in 2022 — after the Kremlin announced their "accession" to the Russian Federation, a move that violates international law.

"Medinsky is uniquely valuable to Putin because he believes in what he says. Even 20 years ago, he sincerely believed that Russia was innocent and surrounded only by enemies — and he still believes that today. And Putin believes the same. In that sense, they’ve found each other," said a former Russian politician, speaking on condition of anonymity to Delfi, Estonian media outlet.

In December 2021, Putin established the Interdepartmental Commission on Historical Enlightenment and appointed Medinsky as its head. According to the presidential decree, the commission operates under the Russian president and coordinates government agencies, particularly on matters related to the "protection of historical truth and preservation of historical memory."

The commission has three main objectives:

• to unify the approach of state bodies to historical education;

• to analyze and counter the activities of foreign actors that harm Russia’s national historical interests;

• to propose counter-propaganda historical and cultural initiatives.

The Skhemy investigative project obtained the minutes of one of the commission’s meetings held in February 2025.

According to the document, under Medinsky’s leadership, the commission instructed Russia’s Ministry of Education to develop a "unified state textbook on regional history" for schools in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine. The textbook is to be titled The History of Novorossiya and Donbas, with completion planned by June 2025.

Earlier, we reported that the head of the Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine, Vladimir Medinsky, attempted to justify why a ceasefire was unnecessary for negotiations — citing a fabricated quote falsely attributed to Napoleon. Russian 'historian' Medinsky quoted a fake Napoleon statement after Ukraine talks https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russian-historian-medinsky-quoted-a-fa
ke-1747424590.html

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

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 8:03 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 Long Process of European Unity

Leadership in Europe today goes beyond the big three Western European countries - France, Germany and the UK. Poland is now an important power that cannot be ignored.

By Minna Ålander | Jul 24, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-long-process-of-european-un
ity

Hi Everyone,

I gave an interview to the New York Times recently that would have been unremarkable otherwise, had they not so carefully omitted mentioning Poland – which I did talk about quite a bit. The article was about Germany, France and the UK coming together to figure out what to do about Trump and to prepare alternative solutions for Europe to be ready for the US to reduce its presence to a minimum. But discounting Poland from that equation simply misses the point of what has happened in Europe in the course of the past three years of Russia’s war in Ukraine: power becoming more diffusely, but in some ways also more fairly distributed. It is not enough anymore to get Western Europe together, Central and Eastern (and Northern) Europe have developed a much stronger voice of their own. In some ways, this is still part of the process of healing from the Cold War division in Europe, and the war in Ukraine has accelerated it.

Yours,
Minna

The Long Process of European Unity

The Cold War was not that long ago and its shadow has been long in Europe. It has been only 20 years since the EU (and NATO) integrated the Central and Eastern European countries in the early 2000’s. Within the EU, Germany and France were the dominant powers in the past decade after the UK’s decision to exit the EU, and Western European economic interests dominated over Eastern Europe’s security interests. The Nord Stream gas pipelines with Russia were perhaps the most obvious display of this dynamic. That the West knew better was the Zeitgeist when the East was being integrated into the (Western) European project. Not so anymore – that Western Europeans clearly got Russia wrong is indisputable. What was considered peripheral views and interests have become much more central now that Europe is beginning to imagine a new security order.

Not only has Central and Eastern Europe gained new recognition, but power has generally become distributed in a more diffuse way. Small states have stepped up to fill the vacuum that France and Germany’s initial inability to offer credible leadership caused, as I have described previously. Some small states have gone to exceptional lengths, like Denmark. The Nordic-Baltic 8 have developed a strong voice of their own. And among the larger states, Poland and Italy have entered centre stage in Europe: in an unexpected turn of events, Giorgia Meloni’s government has been more stable than the previous UK governments. Poland has taken its place next to Germany and France and the Weimar triangle has gained new prominence. The Weimar+ format can flexibly include other aforementioned partners, recently particularly the UK.

That is truly new: that while it is necessary and welcome that the three big Western European countries – France, Germany and the UK – work more closely together again, it is not sufficient alone. Poland has now become much more part and parcel of that inner circle. And both Europe’s south and north demand to be represented more directly, not just through Germany and France. European unification and overcoming the Cold War division is not growing through amalgamation into one entity but through a multiplicity of voices.

Among the ten countries that joined the EU in the 2004 “big bang enlargement”, Poland and Estonia rank among some of the most impressive success stories. Estonia has quadrupled both GDP per capita and average monthly salaries since joining the EU and Poland’s GDP per capita has increased by 40 percent, which is significantly higher than the 27 percentage average for the group of ten countries that joined at the same time (Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia). As a share of GDP per capita, Poland leads in NATO with the highest defence spending – higher than that of the US. Poland is also on course to become one of Europe’s largest military powers, aiming to motivate every male citizen to get a basic military training in order to build a large reserve that can sustain a prolonged defence effort. In addition, Poland is mining its border with Russia, including also other defensive structures and obstacles. Poland is taking no chances of being invaded again, as has been its fate many times over in the past. Poland’s economic and military power are recognized now in ways that were far from self-evident as recently as three years ago.

Power distribution in Europe is shifting - for the better. It is not necessarily easier or faster to deal with many more players, but on the other hand various groups of (smaller) countries can take and drive initiative in lieu of larger powers, if domestic political instability or lack of fiscal space restrict the latter’s ability to lead. When more countries are contributing, the EU is less likely to become paralyzed by Franco-German inability to build consensus. It is certainly not making it any easier to answer Kissinger’s famous question about whom to call if he wants to call Europe - the EU Commission, for example, is one actor among many. There will never be a single European leader; leadership only exists in plural. A more evenly and, perhaps even to an extent, fairly shared leadership is needed when the continent is taking charge of its security. Europe needs good ideas and bold initiatives, no matter from which geographical location or size of economy they come from.

P.S. In today’s good news: already by April, Europe had filled the gap left by no new US aid to Ukraine this year. The effort has mainly been led by the Nordics and the UK (and the EU institutions), with other Europeans allocating significantly less aid. Given that it has been the four small Nordic countries who have filled the support gap, it is yet more proof that one should never underestimate the small ones!

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

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Friday, July 25, 2025 6:33 AM

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Former Ukrainian army chief gives grim forecast on duration of war

By Kateryna Shkarlat | Thu, July 24, 2025 - 16:35

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/former-ukrainian-army-chief-gives-grim
-forecast-1753363352.html

If Ukraine does not take care of its future defense, the full-scale war could drag on until 2034 or even longer, according to Ukraine's ambassador to the UK and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in an interview with LB.ua.

According to Zaluzhnyi, since 2024, the full-scale war has entered an entirely new phase — one of "attrition." Today, the front line primarily serves to eliminate the enemy — "the more, the better" — while everything else is happening in the rear.

"If we try to pursue only a ceasefire without building up our defense for the future, then it (the full-scale war - ed.) will drag on for a long time. It started in 2014, and God willing, it might end by 2034," he added.

How long the war may last

In early July, experts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) updated their forecast regarding the duration of the full-scale war in Ukraine. According to the baseline scenario, intense hostilities could come to an end by late 2025. https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/imf-updates-forecast-how-long-the-war-
in-1751348842.html

According to France’s Strategic National Review, the war in Ukraine could continue for up to five more years. https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/war-in-ukraine-could-last-for-years-wa
rns-1752587075.html

The issue of an unconditional ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine is actively being raised on the international stage. In particular, the Ukrainian delegation continues to insist on this during negotiations with the Russian side. The latter, however, has repeatedly rejected this proposal or attached conditions to it.

Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s interview with LB.ua

Exclusive interview with Valeriy Zaluzhny

191,510 views Premiered Jul 23, 2025

Valeriy Zaluzhny: "The frantic development of means of armed struggle, as well as the forms and methods of their application, will end in 3-5 years. Interview with the former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and now the Ambassador of Ukraine to the United Kingdom. We talk about:

• new technological war and drones;
• the role of Great Britain and the "coalition of the willing";
• the future of NATO;
• the demographic crisis and the economy of war;
• why the "war of February 24, 2022" is already over;
• how long will the war of "attrition" last;
• what Ukraine needs to win.

Timecodes:
00:00 Introduction
01:30 The war of the future: technology, not soldiers
03:20 Why NATO is lagging behind reality of modern warfare
06:45 How to convince partners to invest in weapons for the future
08:00 The "Coalition of the Willing": how it works and where it stumbles
10:55 Is a peacekeeping contingent possible after the war
13:00 Will Britain be able to pay for American weapons
14:35 Is NATO losing its relevance as a power bloc
17:10 Technology war: how Russia and Ukraine are looking for a breakthrough
24:00 Demography and economics - key factors of future war
26:10 Ukraine and the technological revolution in war
27:00 Farewell

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

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Friday, July 25, 2025 6:46 AM

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Ukrainian soldiers cut off from Musk’s Starlink after blackout

Reconnaissance and combat work disrupted after 150-minute network failure

By James Warrington | 25 July 2025 8:57am BST

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/07/25/ukrainian-soldiers-cut
-off-from-musks-starlink-after-outage/

. . . Ukraine’s dependence on Starlink has been a continued source of tension given the erratic nature of Mr Musk’s behaviour.

In March, the Tesla billionaire boasted that Starlink was the “backbone of the Ukrainian army”, adding: “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”

The comments fuelled concerns about Mr Musk’s influence over the war, especially after Donald Trump halted military aid and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine following a disastrous meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this year.

Mr Musk’s post also triggered a row with Poland, which pays for roughly half the active Starlink terminals in Ukraine at a cost of approximately $50m a year.

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, has said the country will look for alternative suppliers if Mr Musk proves to be unreliable.

OneWeb, the UK government-backed subsidiary of French satellite company Eutelsat, has said it is ready to “swiftly deploy” equipment in Ukraine if needed.

The Ukrainian army appeared to acknowledge its over-reliance on Starlink in the Telegram post, saying the outage showed there were “bottlenecks” and calling for the need to “diversify communication”.

Ukraine’s forces provided an update shortly before 1am stating that connectivity had been restored.

Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s head of engineering, wrote in a post on X: “Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours.

The outage was because of the failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.

“We apologise for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”

Mr Musk added: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

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

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Friday, July 25, 2025 6:48 AM

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The US State Department approved two Foreign Military Sales (FMS) to Ukraine totaling $322 million. The US Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DCSA) announced on July 23 that the US State Department approved an FMS to Ukraine for Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and maintenance and repair equipment valued at $150 million, and that the agency has notified Congress.[23] The US State Department also approved an FMS to Ukraine valued at $172 million for equipment and services related to the HAWK Phase III missile system, including MIM-23 HAWK missile spare parts, five-ton cargo trucks, HAWK system spare parts, refurbishment and system overhaul of HAWK air defense fire units, tool kits, test and support equipment, and US Government and contractor technical assistance.[24]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-july-24-2025

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

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Friday, July 25, 2025 2:23 PM

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Democracy Is Ukraine’s Most Powerful Weapon

Protesters seem to have beaten back Volodymyr Zelensky’s assault on anti-corruption agencies.

By Christian Caryl, the former Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report.

July 24, 2025, 5:08 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/24/ukraine-zelensky-corruption-law-p
rotests-democracy/

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s most ardent supporters sometimes depict him as a new Winston Churchill. It is not hard to understand why. Both men demonstrate innate understanding of the stagecraft and symbolism of modern politics. Churchill gave rousing speeches and insisted on heroic defiance to Nazi aggressors. Zelensky has channeled his people’s collective will to resist numerically superior Russian invaders, refusing to leave his office in the center of Kyiv for refuge overseas even as the Kremlin’s assassins prowled the city in the early days of the war.

Yet the comparison is illuminating for other reasons as well. Even at his most forceful, Churchill still made a point of sharing power. When he became prime minister in May 1940, he formed a unity coalition government that included representatives of all the major political parties. Clement Attlee, the head of the opposition Labour Party, ultimately became Churchill’s deputy, a position that gave him wide-ranging authority. It’s true that Britain didn’t hold any general elections from its last pre-war vote in 1935 until 1945, and of course little changed for the subject peoples of the British Empire, who came out of the war just as unfree as they entered it. Even so, Churchill never succumbed to the temptation to exercise autocratic power—even though his country was fighting one of the most vicious dictatorships in history.

Zelensky could learn a thing or two from the British wartime leader—as the events of this week have so vividly demonstrated. The Ukrainian president’s imperious decision on Monday to impose control on the country’s independent anti-corruption investigators has triggered the biggest public protests since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022—protests that have now spread from Kyiv and a few big cities to many other parts of the country.

The scale of that popular backlash reflects a widespread perception that Zelensky has become increasingly isolated from society at large, not least due to his propensity for rule through a small coterie of loyal advisors. Rather than power sharing, Churchill-style, some critics say, Zelensky has marginalized rivals and excluded critical voices.

“The source of power in Ukraine is the people of Ukraine,” Daria Kaleniuk, the head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv, told me in a phone interview. “This is what Zelensky forgot. He didn’t expect that there would be such an outcry in society in response to his act to demolish anti-corruption organizations.”

In response to the protests, Zelensky has now said that he plans to rescind the controversial law. That would be a welcome move. The institutions that he was targeting aren’t run-of-the-mill agencies; they are the product of more than a decade of dogged efforts to combat pervasive graft. Demonstrators who toppled pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych in the Maidan Revolution in 2014 opposed him in part because of his ostentatious malfeasance. Ukrainian activists, with broad backing from the United States and the European Union, worked for years to establish the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), both of which received extensive powers to investigate and prosecute officials. Zelensky’s law attempted to subordinate both agencies to the country’s chief prosecutor, abolishing their independence.

That would be bad enough in its own right. But an editorial in the Kyiv Independent, a leading Ukrainian newspaper, warned that Zelensky’s assault on the anti-corruption bodies was just part of a larger and more ominous trend: “The move isn’t an isolated incident, but part of a massive crackdown.”

The paper cited a series of police raids on NABU personnel and the ominous prosecution of a high-profile anti-corruption activist, Vitaliy Shabunin, who has a long and illustrious career as a watchdog. Zelensky has rejected such criticisms, claiming that he was merely attempting to cleanse the agencies of alleged Russian influence—although his critics have responded that the government has signally failed to provide any evidence for the claim.

During my visits to wartime Ukraine over the past two years, I’ve heard many concerns about the erosion of democratic institutions. I’ve heard reports about government pressure on leading newspapers. I’ve heard people express worries that the prosecution of a prominent Zelensky rival looks suspiciously like a political vendetta. And I’ve heard frequent criticisms of the overweening power of Zelensky’s hard-charging chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who has used his position as the president’s primary gatekeeper to concentrate immense power in his own office.

And yet Zelensky is far from being a dictator—as shown precisely by the thousands of demonstrators who have taken to the streets in recent days to protest his actions. Even so, the latest events have prompted some observers to warn that public discontent with the president threatens Ukraine’s national unity at a moment when Moscow continues to press home attacks on multiple fronts.

The Kremlin is using the protests “to undermine Ukraine’s legitimacy and discourage Western support,” as noted by a report from the Institute for the Study of War. (Never mind the absurdity of Russians sneering at demonstrations that would be brutally suppressed if anyone tried them at home.) Some observers contend that the turmoil merely gives additional fodder to the members of the U.S. Republican Party who are still trying to convince President Donald Trump and his loyalists that Ukraine is a permanent basket case. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confirmed her status as the most unhinged MAGA member in Congress by claiming that the crowds on Ukrainian streets were actually assailing Zelensky because “he is a dictator and refuses to make a peace deal and end the war”—a breathtakingly cynical inversion of reality.

One sometimes hears the assumption that democracies can’t really successfully prosecute wars. It is inherently better, the argument goes, to have a single leader calling the shots, thus streamlining decision-making and eliminating the messy turmoil of competing voices. What Ukraine shows us, once again, is that the opposite is true. It is precisely the country’s strong culture of bottom-up activism and civic pride that has made it so hard to defeat. Ukraine and its democratic institutions have survived precisely because ordinary Ukrainians have been so quick to take to the streets and the battlefield to defend them. Perhaps the most poignant slogan from the demonstrations: “This is not the future my brother died for.” It has been striking, over the past few days, to hear front-line soldiers echoing and amplifying the protesters’ claims.

Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko made a similar point in a recent post on X. The Russians, he wrote, believe that the rallies “somehow bring Ukraine closer to collapse and defeat.” In fact, he continued, “it’s precisely the fact that Ukraine’s civil society takes to the streets, protests, and keeps kicking its own government in the ass even during wartime” that has been one of the main reasons the country has been able to continue “resisting Russia’s power for twelve years already, including three and a half years of full-scale war.”

Ponomarenko is right. It is this same grassroots energy that propelled ordinary civilians to battle the invaders in 2022, marshalled the efforts of millions of volunteers in support of the armed forces, and unleashed the ingenuity of countless inventors and designers. Kyiv’s forces have invented many impressive weapons during the conflict with Moscow. But it is the stubborn desire of millions of ordinary citizens to vote, protest, speak their minds, and determine their own fates that represents the most powerful resource in the Ukrainian arsenal.

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

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