Tag: Russia

Breaking Strongholds

Russian troops report the capture of Ukraine’s most fortified city, Kostantinovka:

Kostantinovka was Ukraine’s “most fortified” stronghold, guarded by some 15,500 troops, most of whom have been eliminated during the Russian operation to capture the city, Colonel General Sergey Rudskoy has said.

During a briefing on Saturday, Rudskoy, who is the head of operations at the Russian General Staff, said that throughout several weeks of intense fighting for the strategic city, the Ukrainian military lost around 13,500 troops, 14 tanks, 283 armored fighting vehicles, 1,400 cars, 200 field artillery guns and eight multiple rocket launch systems.

Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov briefed President Vladimir Putin about the liberation of Konstantinovka in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic when the commander-in-chief visited an auxiliary command post on Friday.

The general described Konstantinovka as “a major industrial and logistics hub, which is the key to the last remaining stronghold of the Kiev regime in Donbass – the Kramatorsk-Slavyansk agglomeration.”

It will be interesting to see how things proceed once the Donbass is fully liberated from Clown World. The fact that NATO is acquiring permission from countries like Lithuania and Finland to position nuclear missiles there tends to indicate that the hostilities are unlikely to cease with the fall of the Kiev regime, because the fall of one puppet state means nothing to the powers behind it.

The question is when the Russians will stop permitting the UK, the EU, and the Americans to continue to wage war against Russia without striking back.

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Clown World Wants War

ITEM: Gen. Chris Donahue seems to have done it all. He led the Army’s Delta Force commandos in Iraq and Syria when it took the fight to Islamic State militants and was the last man out when the troops he commanded at the 82nd Airborne Division were called in to secure the 2021 evacuation of U.S. personnel and Afghan allies from Kabul. Rising to four stars in 2024, Donahue was made the top U.S. Army commander in Europe, where he helped overhaul NATO’s effort to defend against Russian aggression and support Ukraine. To many, he seemed to be on a fast track to become vice chief of staff of the Army and perhaps one day lead the service itself.

ITEM: “We have the capabilities, the plan, we know what needs to be done.” With these words, spoken at the “LandEuro” conference in Germany, U.S. Army Europe and Africa Commander General Christopher Donahue did more than just outline military readiness. He issued a deliberate and unmistakable message aimed far beyond the audience in the room. His pointed remarks about being able to “wipe out” Russia’s A2AD (Anti-Access/Area Denial) capabilities in Kaliningrad were not offhand bravado — they were a calculated signal, deeply rooted in strategy, deterrence, and alliance cohesion. By declaring that U.S. and allied forces could neutralize these assets quickly and effectively, Gen. Donahue sent a message that NATO not only understands the threat, but has prepared specifically to counter it — a direct challenge to the Kremlin’s confidence in Kaliningrad’s defensive umbrella.

ITEM: Gen. Donahue will relinquish his U.S. command at a ceremony in Germany on July 2, people familiar with the matter say, his European assignment cut short by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push to put his imprint on the military’s leadership.

ITEM: David French complains in The New York Times: The Purging of General Donahue Is a Breaking Point. The Trump administration owes the military and the public an explanation for its treatment of Donahue — and an explanation for its treatment of other senior officers it has fired or forced out. As commander in chief, the president has the right to fire an officer, but as a servant of the people, the president has a duty to tell us why.

Translation: President Trump had Hegseth fire Donahue before he could start a war with Russia.

With the war in the Middle East necessarily winding down, convincing the European puppet-governments to sacrifice their citizens in the same way that the Kiev regime did is about the only card they’ve got left. But it’s not going to work; the Europeans are far more inclined to go to war with their own politicians and police than with the Russians.

Literally no one cares what the mainstream politicians say anymore, which is why they’re saying increasingly insane things every passing day in a desperate attempt to whip up a war frenzy in a very uninterested populace. .

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Attritional Math

Even pro-Ukraine analytics that appear to wildly exaggerate Russian casualties are suggesting that attritional exhaustion is rapidly approaching in the Ukro-Russian war.

Dr Powell’s model suggests that the war is rapidly nearing a tipping point. Ukraine is approaching the fulcrum beyond which the weight of the war tips its forces into rapid depletion, allowing the Russian military to start achieving much more significant territorial gains. In turn, this would lead to accelerated Ukrainian losses through the ruthless reality of the square law. This road heads toward an eventual Ukrainian collapse.

Ukraine’s effective combat power (a composite of manpower, machinery and munitions) is depleting, the model shows, at a net rate that outpaces its replenishment, while Russia’s holds steady or grows marginally. This imbalance, compounded by recent reductions in Western support, suggests a tipping point where Ukrainian force density thins below viability, triggering rapid territorial losses and operational collapse.

Based on his integrated projections from an updated model (as of 15 May), Dr Powell estimates window for this tipping point is 3-6 months from now (July-September 2026), followed by a 3-4 month cascade to functional exhaustion. Overall, this yields a 6-9 month horizon to “floodgates opening,” where advances accelerate from the current 0.3-1 km/day to 5-10 km/day, as seen in historical breakthroughs like the 2022 Kherson retreat. This non-linear result is the manifestation of the pitiless square law which Frederick Lanchester first codified into a usable model for military operations in 1916. But it boils down to this: Dr Powell’s model estimates Ukrainian collapse by early Spring next year (nine months from mid-May 2026) at the outside.

Two factors support Dr Powell’s conclusion. The first is that Anusar Farooqui, the hedge fund CEO and international relations scholar, and friend of Multipolarity, has managed to replicate Dr Powell’s results using the model. The second is that Peter Turchin, emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut in the departments of ecology and evolutionary biology and mathematics, has produced his own model, which reaches a similar conclusion: Ukraine is heading toward a tipping point beyond which its position becomes irretrievable.

A key understanding here is that it matters not who is attacking and who is defending; who is capturing territory and who is losing it. The losses of men, munitions and weapons platforms carry on regardless, and in an attrition war, it is exactly that which counts. Absent a black swan event, Ukraine continues heading toward the tipping point whether it is successfully counter-attacking or doggedly defending.

It must be noted that the tipping point Dr Powell’s model suggests would not be the end of the war. It would simply be the point at which the war of attrition finally makes Ukraine’s conventional military position irretrievable, with Russian territorial gains accelerating from that moment.

No doubt this explains the increased volume of the EU’s insane belligerence, but the reality is that the anti-democratic governments of Europe are far more likely to find themselves fighting their own citizens over their attempts to deny everyone air conditioning than they are to ever fight the Russians.

French health officials recorded around 1,000 excess deaths in less than a week as the country was hit by its most severe heatwave in more than two decades.

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The Banned Article

Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, was asked to write an article for a European political magazine, but it was pulled from publication at the last minute. Here is the article that Clown World didn’t want Europeans to read:

Some reflections on resolving the Ukrainian crisis, Europe and global security

At a meeting in London on June 7, 2026, the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany, as well as Vladimir Zelensky, laid out five preconditions for Russia to secure a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine. United Europe now presents this list of demands as the basis for dialogue with Moscow.

More than two decades of negotiations with Europe, as part of the collective West, lead to only one conclusion: engaging Russia in dialogue has served as a diplomatic smokescreen for the geopolitical expansion of Western institutions, above all NATO and the European Union, eastwards, right up to Russia’s borders.

Europe’s complicity in fueling the Ukrainian crisis is undeniable. Together with the United States, European countries orchestrated the Orange Revolution in Kiev in 2004. To create an anti-Russian bridgehead in Ukraine, they spent years buying off politicians and entire parties, rewriting history and educational curricula, cultivating and nurturing Ukrainian nationalism, and going to great lengths to pull Ukraine away from Russia.

In 2013, the European Union outright rejected our proposal for a compromise on the association agreement – a deal Brussels had long been pressing Viktor Yanukovich to sign. It is worth recalling that Ukraine was offered unilateral market opening without reciprocal commitments – terms that would have proved incompatible with Kiev’s continued membership in the CIS free-trade zone. When Viktor Yanukovich requested a deferral, the Europeans incited street riots that swiftly escalated into a coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014.

Germany, France, and Poland then proved themselves to be equally treacherous. Having guaranteed that the agreement reached between the opposition and Viktor Yanukovich would be honored, they washed their hands of it the moment that same opposition, their own handiwork, took power. “Democracy,” they shrugged, “takes unexpected turns.”

Europe thereafter lent its backing to the new authorities. In Odessa on 2 May 2014, the burning alive of dozens of innocent supporters of closer ties with Russia did not draw a single word of condemnation from European capitals.

As co-guarantors of the 2015 Minsk Agreements, France and Germany effectively encouraged the Ukrainian regime to sabotage its own commitments. As Angela Merkel and François Hollande later conceded – after the special military operation had already begun – Kiev’s implementation of the Minsk Agreements, unanimously approved by the UN Security Council, was never genuinely intended. The objective, they admitted, was merely to buy time: to shore up the Armed Forces of Ukraine and flood them with Western weaponry.

Russia, for its part, explored every diplomatic avenue to defuse Europe’s security crisis. However, in January 2022, the United States and NATO rejected Russia’s proposal for legally binding mutual security guarantees. European NATO members actively endorsed that rebuff.

Following the launch of the special military operation, United Europe threw its support behind the British prime minister’s efforts to sabotage the Istanbul negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Boris Johnson’s appeal to Kiev – “don’t sign anything, just fight” – slammed the door on genuine diplomacy for the foreseeable future.

Current situation

So what has prompted European leaders to suddenly shift their rhetoric and start talking about negotiations, and what are they aiming to achieve with these statements? For instance, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has stated that the purpose of any dialogue with Russia is to dictate Europe’s terms. These include paying “reparations” to Ukraine; withdrawing troops from Transnistria and the South Caucasus; abolishing the “foreign agents” law; and accepting strict limits on the size of the Russian Federation’s Armed Forces. In her framing, “there can be no just and lasting peace without accountability for Russia.” During the UN Security Council session on 19 May 2026, an EU representative made the point unequivocally: “Supporting Ukraine militarily does not contradict the pursuit of peace, but rather serves as a fundamental prerequisite for any credible, good-faith negotiations.”

Europe’s plan is to talk with Russia while simultaneously pressing ahead with a campaign of legal warfare orchestrated through the Council of Europe. Within this once-respected organization, an entire infrastructure is being assembled for the express purpose of “holding Russia accountable”: a Register of Damage, a Claims Commission, and a Special Tribunal.

The European Union has also given the green light to detaining merchant vessels on the high seas. Several incidents have already taken place in the Baltic and the Atlantic. At the same time, the West studiously averts its gaze from the terrorist acts of sabotage perpetrated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Black and Mediterranean Seas.

The real objective of Europe’s leaders, then, is not to negotiate with Russia. It is to shore up the Zelensky regime and preserve it as a launchpad for continued confrontation against Russia. With this in mind, European leaders are scrambling to secure a ceasefire as quickly as possible and for one reason only: to prevent the collapse of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the battlefield. The plan is to “freeze” the conflict without addressing its root causes, and then rapidly deploy military contingents from the Anglo-French “coalition of the willing” onto Ukrainian soil.

It is widely known that European elites have invested their “political capital” in the confrontation with Russia, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into propping up the Kiev regime and ramping up the military budgets of EU member states and NATO. Europe now aims to achieve “defense readiness” against Russia by 2030. Until then, they mean to buy time by whatever means are available. In a strikingly candid remark this April, Belgium’s chief of staff put it bluntly: “We still have a few years. Thanks to the courage and blood of the Ukrainians, who are buying us that time.”

United Europe continues to dream of expansion. It intends to absorb Ukraine and Moldova while pulling Armenia into its sphere of influence. NATO has already expanded eastward, swallowing up Finland and Sweden. As for Ukraine, it is increasingly being eyed as the “striking fist” of a future European military force, independent of the United States and independent of NATO.

Risks to global security

This state of affairs poses serious threats to global security. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia could rapidly escalate into an exchange of nuclear strikes, with catastrophic consequences.

Under the banner of “strategic autonomy,” Europe is witnessing a significant build-up of its military capabilities, including in the nuclear sphere. Paris’s intention to extend its “nuclear umbrella” to several EU and NATO member states is a source of deep concern. This will do nothing to strengthen the security of France itself or of the recipients of its so-called protection.

For all that, Europe’s political and military establishment continues to attribute aggressive plans to Russia – plans that, they claim, reach far beyond Ukraine. The Russian president has stated on numerous occasions that all of this is nonsense, provocation, and disinformation, aimed solely at extracting budget funds for the fight against Russia. That is scarcely the climate for substantive dialogue.

Russia’s position

As for negotiations, Vladimir Putin reiterated at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that Russia is not opposed to contacts with any party. We see Europe, however, as a party bent on Russia’s defeat – a stance the Europeans themselves openly avow. Dialogue with Europe, therefore, cannot be conducted as though it were an impartial third-party observer.

Russia would prefer to achieve the goals of the special military operation through diplomacy.

That requires reliably guaranteeing security along Russia’s western borders and ensuring respect and dignity for our citizens and compatriots, including the right to speak their native Russian language and practice the Orthodox Christian faith. Further military, political, and economic expansion by the West is unacceptable: it runs counter to the imperatives of a multipolar world.

European leaders should recognize that the model of regional security built in Europe over decades, ever since the adoption of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, has been destroyed by their own hands. And it will never be restored. We must now move toward creating a continent-wide security architecture open to all Eurasian countries and reflective of today’s multipolar reality.

The principle of equal and indivisible security, trampled upon by the Euro-Atlanticists, can be embodied within a new Eurasian architecture. When the time is ripe, Europe too will be able to join this great effort.

The key point is that meaningful dialogue requires the restoration of trust, shattered by the anti-Russian actions of the West, and Europe as part of it, in the post-Cold War era. Trust can be recovered only through concrete steps that demonstrate a sincere commitment to moving away from using diplomacy as a cover for expansionist ambitions. Trust cannot be restored, nor can dialogue be resumed, through ultimatums such as the one issued to Russia in London on 7 June 2026.  It is noteworthy that the London ultimatum was unequivocally reaffirmed by the ambassadors of Britain, France, and Germany at the meeting at the Russian Foreign Ministry on 11 June 2026 – a meeting they had so insistently requested.

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Work, Brothers

Russia appears to be gearing up for something, if Putin’s coded message to her soldiers is any guide:

Rather than engage with Zelensky’s proposals, Putin turned away from the letter entirely. He said the ones to be addressed were Russia’s combatants and soldiers at the line of contact, telling them:

The country is proud of you and places its hopes on you. We should address not the authors of this letter, nor lovers of the epistolary genre, but our fighters on the front line.

He then closed with the phrase: “Work, brothers!”

To understand the import of that phrase you need to be introduced to Magomed Nurbagandov:

Magomed Nurbagandovich Nurbagandov (January 9, 1985 – July 10, 2016) was a police lieutenant serving in the National Guard of Russia, stationed in Kaspiysk in the Republic of Dagestan. He was a Dargin by nationality, born in the village of Sergokala. By all accounts an exceptional student — he graduated from lyceum with a gold medal and then with honors from the law faculty of Dagestan State University.

On the morning of July 10, 2016, Nurbagandov was vacationing with his family near the village of Sergokala when he was attacked by five armed militants. Having learned he was a policeman, the militants forced him and his brother into the trunk of a stolen car, drove them away from the recreation area, and then shot them. The murder was filmed on a mobile phone and posted on an extremist website. Wikipedia

The militants’ goal was psychological — they wanted him to appear on camera and call on his fellow officers to quit the police and stop fighting. Instead, looking directly at the camera, Nurbagandov urged: “Keep on working, brothers” (Работайте, братья) — an act which took tremendous courage.

The militants had uploaded an edited version of the video where they cut out Nurbagandov’s last words. His defiance was suppressed — until fate intervened. Several militants from the group were killed in September 2016, and when examining the bodies, the mobile phone that had filmed the original, unedited video was found. The full footage — with his final words intact — was then released by Russian authorities. The phrase went viral on September 12, 2016, and became a nationwide sensation.

By invoking it in front of the international audience at SPIEF, Putin was making a layered statement: that Zelensky’s letter was an enemy propaganda exercise, that it deserved to be treated with the same contempt Nurbagandov showed his captors, and that the only people worth addressing are those doing the actual fighting. Putin’s visage was grim when he spoke this phrase.

Now the limits of the US military have been clearly established, it makes sense that Russia no longer feels the need to maintain the holding pattern it has been in for the last three years. And unlike his people, who are primarily focused on Ukraine, and to a lesser extent the European Union, Putin understands that their real enemy is Clown World.

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Kiev Meets Mr. Hazel

Andrei Martynov is pretty confident that it’s going to be necessary for the Russians to drop an Oreshnik or three on the European power centers, as they did with Kiev last night, to convince them to stop playing poke the Bear.

NATO criminals are doing everything they can to censor any info coming out of destroyed sites, especially around Belaya Tserkov airfield complex which contained many things ranging from bunkers to aviation repair and “mad maxing” facilities for all kinds of flying means for strikes against Russia.

Again, terrorism against Russian civilians will continue–UAVs and hence striking schools, dormitories, kindergartens et al are the only real means of “influencing” anything by allegedly creating dissatisfaction within Russian society with Kremlin and discrediting Russian leadership–this is the way primitive inbred and pervert cretins in London, Berlin and Paris think. Militarily NATO is impotent and terrorism is the only weapon they have. This IS the spread, so to speak. At this stage, Europeans must be made to have chronic diarrhea from fear of Russia. Non-stop, they need to live in paralyzing fear because Europe is a Satanists’ playground.

Next time it could be Berlin or Paris and they can do nothing about it.

It’s understandable that the Russians feel no need to save the Europeans from Clown World. After all, they had to save themselves, and if the nations of Europe are sovereign and healthy, they are a proven potential threat to Europe. But Clown World is the greater evil, and the Russians know perfectly well who is behind Ukraine and using it as a proxy to make war on them.

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Running Out of Steam

Peter Turchin calculates that the Ukraine war will be over later this year:

The Persian Gulf war of USA/Israel against Iran has largely displaced reporting on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Reading the news on mainstream media one may think that this war, now in its fifth year, is still in stalemate; or even that the tide is turning against Russia (Washington Post: Putin remark on war ‘coming to a close’ points to exhaustion, not peace, analysts say; NYT: I’m the Foreign Minister of Sweden. Don’t Overestimate Russia).
Upgrade to paid

But quantitative models of attritional warfare say otherwise: Russia continues to dominate the battlefield and the eventual outcome, barring a Black Swan event, is inevitable defeat of Ukraine. My readers may know that three years ago I developed a an Attritional Warfare Model, AWM (based on the Lanchester equations) for forecasting this war’s outcome.

More recently a similar conclusion was reached by Warwick Powell (see Estimating Trajectories in Attritional Warfare: The Russia-Ukrainian Conflict Through a Quantitative Lens). Powell used a similar model, with the most important difference being the choice of the end point. My model assumes that the war ends when the level of casualties, as a percentage of population, exceeds a certain threshold, which I estimated via a sample of past attritional wars from the Correlates of War data.

Powell, alternatively, assumes that the beginning of the end for Ukraine will happen when its army size declines below a certain threshold (0.65-0.73 of the initial size of 550,000). From that point, Ukrainian losses will accelerate and the full collapse will happen once the army size is below 50% of the prior peak. Powell’s model predicts that the tipping point will happen in July-September (updated on May 14).

Naturally, this is only a model-based forecast, not a prophesy. There is a lot of uncertainty about the estimates of various parameters. Furthermore, the threshold at which collapse occurs is only imprecisely estimated. For example, it’s not clear whether the threshold of 0.65-0.73 above which the Ukrainian force can maintain its operational integrity still applies on a battlefield heavily dominated by drones. For example, a smaller force size may be sufficient to continue defending positions given an abundant supply of drones.

My model also doesn’t incorporate any possible effects of the shift to the drone warfare — simply because it hadn’t happen when I published its predictions. Determining how this technological shift affects the AWM’s predictions will have to wait until the post-mortem after the war is over and when estimates would become much more precise. However, I tried a few preliminary explorations and they suggest that the drone effect on the war trajectory is not quite as huge as might be imagined. What’s important is the casualty rate inflicted on the Ukrainian army by the Russians, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a result of artillery, air bombing, or drones.

Is Ukraine reaching its recruitment limit? This is the key factor in both our models. There are some indications that this is the case. A week ago, Branko Marcetic (using Ukrainian sources) provided some relevant numbers in a Responsible Statecraft article, Ukraine’s conscription crisis is getting increasingly bloody; While outside voices insist the war can still be won on the battlefield, young men in the country are violently resisting recruiters to stay out of it. Here are some numbers supporting this conclusion.

The number of complaints over possible violations committed by enlistment officers, received by Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets:

2022 — 18
2023 — 514
2024 — 3312
2025 — 6127

The number of violent attacks against enlistment officers shows the same trend: from 5 in 2022 to 117 in just the first four months of this year.

One can hardly blame the young Ukrainians for attacking the “enlistment officers” who are really straight-up kidnappers. At the end of the day, the odds of surviving a violent encounter with these rear-echelon thugs is a lot higher than surviving one with frontline Russian troops.

Young European men have probably already figured that out, which is why I expect any attempt by any European country to enact a draft besides Russophobic Poland and Finland to meet with literally violent resistance. Why would any European man fight to defend against civilized Russia instead of rapey third-world invaders?

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All Indicators

Andrei Martyanov, whose track record has been very good for more than a decade, believes Russia is going to strike Europe, specifically Germany, soon in retaliation for manufacturing the drones used by Ukraine to attack Russian territory.

Now, per strikes–all indicators are that Russia will strike Europe. Russia doesn’t need to use nukes because she has more than enough conventional means for both destruction of a critical industrial infrastructure involved in support of 404 and, if it comes down to it, decapitating governments of hostile countries.

Russia has enough conventional means to strike at any facility in Europe and the US IS NOT coming for a simple reason–it has no resources. Demilitarizing NATO was one of the key strategic aims of the Special Military Operation once it became clear that the US sabotaged Istanbul talks and Iran has demonstrated it fully. Who will be hit first? Yeah, I am inclined to see Germany “getting the message”–it is long overdue.

And Russia will be perfectly justified in attacking any of the belligerent parties. It would be very difficult for the leaders of the EU, the UK, Germany, and even Switzerland to have more incompetently mishandled their various relations with Russia in futile attempts to appease Clown World and keep the US military in Europe. All they had to do was stay neutral and keep out of what was never any of their business in the first place.

Their collective lunacy is only exceeded by that of Finland and Sweden, who were perfectly safe as neutral parties, but have now unnecessarily painted targets on their national chests by joining NATO and declaring themselves enemy of the Russian Federation.

And now, ironically, they all find themselves falling afoul of both the USA and China as well. The last four years have been marked by some of the most incompetent national diplomacy in the history of international relations.

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UK Jets Attack Russian Targets

This reported attack by UK jets on Russian drones over Ukraine appears to be such a spectacularly stupid thing to do that the UK Ministry of Defence is denying that it took place:

The Ministry of Defence has denied the Romanian military’s claim that RAF jets on a NATO patrol shot down Russian drones over Ukrainian territory for the first time.

Two Royal Air Force Eurofighters were scrambled from Borcea Air Base in the early hours of Saturday 25 April, as Putin’s forces attacked ports on the River Danube in Ukraine.

It is understood both aircraft returned to base and did not engage any Russian assets, nor did they enter Ukrainian airspace.

It comes after the Romanian Ministry of National Defence claimed crew engaged and downed the Russian drones.

The strike over Ukraine aimed at protecting NATO state Romania represents a new development in the four-year war, it claimed.

‘On the morning of Saturday, April 25, Russian forces resumed drone attacks on civilian and infrastructure targets in Ukraine, near the river border with Romania, in Tulcea County,‘ said the Bucharest statement.

‘MApN radars detected drones flying near Romanian airspace. Two Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft of the British Air Force from the Reinforced Air Police combat service took off at 02:00 from the 86th Air Base in Fetești. The National Military Command Centre notified IGSU [General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations] regarding the establishment of measures to alert the population in the localities of Grindu and Isaccea, in Tulcea County, and at 02:14, a RO-ALERT message was transmitted. The Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft had radar contact with a target located 1.5 km [1 mile] from Reni, above Ukrainian territory. The pilots had authorisation to engage the drones.’

If the Russians ever decide to start bombing the UK, the morons in the Labor and Conservative parties will only have themselves to blame. They helped start the war, and they’re unnecessarily involving British military forces in it. A Russo-British conflict in 2026 would make the charge of the Light Brigade look brilliant.

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Russian Objectives are Expanding

When Russia launched its special military operation in 2022, the initial objective was the liberation of the Donbass from Clown World. Now that the initial objective has been largely achieved, but neither the Kiev regime nor the NATO clowns are willing to accept the situation and surrender, there is no reason for the Russians to refrain from expanding their objectives:

In his February 9, 2026, interview with TV BRICS (and echoed in related remarks), Lavrov reiterated Russia’s demands for a settlement: eradicating “Nazi foundations,” preventing weapons in Ukraine that threaten Russia, and protecting rights of Russian/Russian-speaking people in Crimea, Donbas, and Novorossiya (who the Kyiv regime has labeled as “subhuman” and launched a civil war against them early in 2014).

In a February 10, 2026, speech/ceremony marking Diplomatic Workers’ Day (reported by TASS and mid.ru), Lavrov stated that Russia will “complete the process of returning” Crimea, Donbas, and Novorossiya to their “native harbor” (i.e., full integration with Russia), in line with the “will” expressed in the 2022 referendums. He added that linguistic, cultural, and religious rights of Russians/Russian-speakers in areas remaining under Kyiv’s control must be restored, alongside eliminating military threats from Ukraine to Russia’s security.

Similar phrasing appeared in his February 11, 2026, remarks during the Government Hour in the State Duma, where he criticized Western “double standards” (e.g., supporting self-determination for Greenland while denying it for Crimea, Donbas, and Novorossiya) and vowed to defend Russia’s position diplomatically.

Novorossiya (Russian: Новороссия, meaning “New Russia”) is a historical term that originated in the 18th century during the era of the Russian Empire. It referred to a large administrative and colonial region in what is now southern and southeastern mainland Ukraine, along the northern coast of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

The term entered official use in 1764, when Empress Catherine the Great established the Novorossiya Governorate (Novorossiyskaya guberniya). This was part of Russia’s southward expansion during the late 18th century, driven by a series of Russo-Turkish Wars (notably 1768–1774 and 1787–1792).

I believe that when Putin and Lavrov speak of Novorossiya today they are signaling maximalist goals… Not just holding annexed territories (Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia) but laying a claim to adjacent regions, which include Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa, Mykolaiv where Russian speakers live or there are historical ties.

I tend to agree. While I always felt that Russia would insist on reclaiming Odessa for strategic reasons, the fact that it’s now clear that they will have to impose terms on Kiev and Clown World rather than reach an accommodation, it makes more sense to simply acquire the four additional regions that would complete the liberation of Novorossiya in its entirety.

Which probably explains the way in which Russian military activity will be increasing as the US ties itself up in Israel’s Middle East conflict with Iran and potentially a number of other countries, including Turkey.

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