Tag: Russia

Hell No, They Won’t Go

It would appear Ukrainian men are no longer willing to be conscripted and fed into the maw of the Russian military machine:

A senior recruitment officer has reportedly been killed in a car explosion in Ukraine’s Odessa Region on Friday, according to police and local media reports.

Investigators suspect the blast was intentional and may have been triggered remotely. Odessa regional police confirmed one fatality and said an investigation is under way, but did not name the person who was killed when a vehicle exploded in a village in Berezovsky District.

Law enforcement sources cited by local media said that the vehicle belonged to a local draft office. The Southern Courier named the victim as Colonel Oleg Nomerovsky, a top official at a regional military recruitment center.

While it could have been Russian intelligence behind the assassination, the fact that it was a car bomb and not a missile strike tends to indicate disaffected Ukrainians or Novyrussian rebels were responsible. To be honest, I’m a little surprised it has taken this long for the Ukrainian resistance to the draft to become violent, as it’s obviously a lot safer to fight rear-echelon UFA recruiters than frontline Russian troops.

But I suppose it takes an amount of time and a considerable amount of counternarrative information to eliminate the lasting effects of a relentless propaganda campaign, especially in the minds of naturally patriotic young men. I doubt it would take nearly as long for similar resistance to appear if the British or German governments were foolish enough to attempt to impose a draft on the very sort of young nationalists they’ve been persecuting for years in the name of diversity, immigration, and inclusion.

Regardless, this is another sign that the UFA’s will to resist Russia is crumbling, and that the rapid advance phase across the next six provinces expected this summer has likely already begun.

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Belligerence Has Consequences

The British are suddenly not celebrating the drone attacks on the Russian airbases now that Russia is showing signs of holding them responsible:

Russia has blamed Britain for Ukraine’s devastating drone attacks on its airfields.

And it claimed that this country’s alleged role in the strike that destroyed as many as 40 Russian aircraft could lead to ‘World War Three’.

The Kremlin turned its sights on Britain on Thursday night with its ambassador Andrei Kelin insisting that the UK military’s advanced technology helped Ukraine to hit targets inside Russia. He offered no evidence for the claim.

It’s an interesting shift from “the most stunning and brave and cleverest smart boy special op ever” to “you haven’t proved we were involved”. Because Russia has got to have learned by now that people who believe in word magic simply don’t pay attention at all to anything their enemies say, they only pay attention to what their enemies do.

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Report: US Intelligence Backed Kiev Strikes

If the French military and media are to be believed, it would appear the USA has effectively ruled itself out of any future peace talks:

Ukraine could not have carried out a large-scale attack on Russian airfields using drones without information from US intelligence. This was stated by a former senior officer of the French army, Guillaume Ansel.

“This is possible and conceivable only with the support of satellite communications. Ukrainians do not have such systems, and if they were able to act remotely, then, of course, thanks to the USA,” — Mr. Ansel told the newspaper Le Monde.

We are talking about attacks by the Armed Forces using FPV drones on airfields in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanov, Ryazan and Amur regions. The Ministry of Defense reported the fire of several units of equipment.

CNN June 2 wrote with reference to sources that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth knew about the attacks of the Armed Forces on Russian facilities and regularly received relevant information. At the same time, according to the interlocutor, the White House authorities did not inform about this.

Important Caveat: the European Union and the Kiev regime are desperately attempting to enmesh the US military into fighting the war in Ukraine for them. So, I wouldn’t trust any report from any French source, or indeed, any Clown World source, with regards to US involvement in any attack on Russia.

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Civilian Infrastructure is Fair Game

  • Ukraine’s SBU claims it carried out an attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge from Russia to Crimea, placing 1,100 kg of explosives on the bridge’s supports under water.
  • Reports now coming in saying there has been a SECOND significant explosion at the Kerch Strait Bridge.
  • RUSSIA: “The Kerch bridge has been reopened to the public and is now safe to use. This was an attack on a major civilian infrastructure, the longest bridge in Europe. I don’t see any western leader condemning it, please don’t cry when we retaliate.”

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An Irrelevant Innovation

Larry Johnson cites an estimate that three percent of Russia’s strategic air fleet was either damaged or destroyed in the recent drone attack on five of its airfields and concludes that NATO intelligence officers were involved in the attack:

In my opinion, none of these attacks could have been planned and executed without assistance, if not the direct involvement, of Western intelligence and NATO officers. The drones likely were activated by a remote signal made possible by Western satellites and/or systems like Starlink. Those systems also played a critical role in enabling the drones to navigate to the targeted airfields.

While this is clearly a PR victory for Ukraine, it is a classic example of a Pyrrhic victory–i.e., a tactical win, leading to a strategic defeat. The Trump administration is denying any knowledge of the attack. I take that disavowal with a big grain of salt. People within the CIA and USEUCOM offices, who are providing assistance to Ukraine, likely knew about the plan, and may even have provided intelligence support to get the drones to their targets. Like any covert operation, they may have tried to give Trump plausible deniability, but the Russians know how this game is played.

I expect Russia will launch a massive retaliatory strike after the talks in Istanbul on Monday conclude. The Ukrainian attacks on the bridges, the train and the airfields have done nothing to alter the situation all along the line of contact in Ukraine. News continues to pour in from the front, from both Ukrainian and Russian news outlets, painting a picture of growing desperation, even panic, among Ukrainian forces, as Russians capture more territory and kill more Ukrainian troops.

The thing that is so pointless about these sorts of clever little innovations is that they are the sort of things that tend to appear after the outcome of the war is already determined, but the losing side hasn’t accepted its defeat yet. The flashy nature of the drone attacks reminds me of the German ME 262 and ME 163 jets, which between them shot down 542 Allied aircraft, and the Japanese kamikazes that sunk or damaged 402 ships.

Both were innovations that captured the imagination and succeeded in producing material results, but at a scale that was totally irrelevant to the outcome of the war.

Upon further review, I don’t think it’s even necessary for Russia to respond to this latest provocation by Western forces, as its best revenge and most effective deterrence will be to simply refuse to call off its infantry and armor as they continue to advance rapidly across the future Russian lands.

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Strategic Drone Attacks

The Western media is convinced that a few trucks full of drones have decimated Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers:

Ukraine has launched one of its most audacious attacks of the war using a ‘swarm’ of kamikaze drones unleashed from the backs of trucks to devastate two of Russia’s most major airfields.

Dubbed ‘Operation Spiderweb’, the co-ordinated strikes have left Vladimir Putin humiliated and his prized warplanes in smouldering ruins.

Two remote military airfields, Olenya in the Arctic Murmansk region and Belaya in eastern Siberia, were rocked by massive explosions overnight, with dramatic footage showing fires raging for hours.

The bases, located thousands of miles from Ukraine, are key to Russia’s nuclear strike capability and were considered untouchable.

Yet Ukraine appears to have struck them with deadly precision, using first-person-view (FPV) drones launched from unmarked vans parked near the airfields.

Both are thousands of miles from Ukraine but were ‘under drone attack’, with dozens of Moscow’s nuclear capable warplanes evidently destroyed.

The Ukrainian media claimed more than 40 Putin aircraft had been hit, including Tu-95, Tu-22M3, and A-50 strategic bombers. The damage to the enemy was alleged to exceed £1.5billion.

If Kiev, Berlin, and London aren’t hit with major missile strikes in the next 24 hours, I think it will be safe to conclude that the damage reports are significantly exaggerated. Which I assume to be the case, in light of the number of Russian planes shot down by “the Ghost of Kiev”, the number of times Russia has run out of ammunition, and the number of times Vladimir Putin has died of cancer.

But it is interesting to observe how Ukraine is now reduced to celebrating acts of subterfuge and terrorism that may or may not even be real as the Russian military continues to advance at an increasing pace.

I’m mostly posting this here for the purposes of future comparison when the numbers are inevitably revised downward. However, it does show that Russia’s attempt at strategic deterrence through doctrine is not working.

UPDATE: It appears eight planes were confirmed damaged or destroyed.

5 Tu-95MS bombers, 2 Tu-22M3 bombers, 1 An-12 military transport aircraft.

Which is two more than Russia has lost in all of 2025, bringing the total to 14. To put this into perspective, in 2022, Russia lost 104 planes.

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Five Down, Six to Go

Russia makes it clear that it’s moving on to the third phase of territorial acquisition by taking 200 km2, including a lot on the new Sumy front, in the last week.

The Russian army took 18 settlements, almost 200 km², in 7 days. Russian troops are demonstrating the most active advancement in the DPR, Kharkov and Sumy regions. According to the publication’s experts, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are unable to stop the offensive due to an acute shortage of personnel, which cannot be eliminated in the near future. — Bild

As I and many others have predicted, the failure of the Kiev regime to surrender when it is observably defeated means that the Russians now intend to take on the battlefield what they obviously desired from the beginning.

State Duma Defense Committee Chairman Kartapolov issued an even more pronounced statement—that Ukraine would lose Sumy, Zaporozhye, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Nikolayev, and Odessa if it continues to resist.

There is absolutely nothing the USA, NATO, or anyone else can do to stop Russia from taking the entirety of those six additional provinces except try to negotiate a conditional surrender that confirms Russia’s control of all the territory up to the Dnieper and turns over Odessa to the Russians. I expect control of Odessa is a non-negotiable at this point and that we are likely less than one year from Russia being in a position to demand an unconditional surrender by Kiev. Russia now has the full and open support of China; the clumsy attempts of the USA to pivot from Ukraine to Taiwan, the trade war, and the US support for the Gazacaust have only increased China’s appreciation for the importance of its alliance with Russia.

Since 2022, the Chinese have resolutely refused to blame Russia for the war in Ukraine despite US demands to do so, and now, to the contrary, they have very publicly, and correctly, laid “a major responsibility” for the war on the USA.

The United States bears a major responsibility for the outbreak of the war and the continuation of the war. But, of course, the United States has a responsibility to work its efforts and play its part for an early ending of the conflict. We urge the United States to concentrate on the ongoing diplomatic effort and stop this rather boring blaming game. — Deputy UN Representative Geng Shuang

All of this highlights the intrinsic danger of allowing men and women who believe in subversion and word magic to hold power at the national level. They will cling to their belief in their fantasies even when objective reality conclusively disproves them.

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A Chilling Warning

Also, and more importantly, a foolish and futile one:

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a chilling warning on the China threat during a defense summit in Singapore. He said on Saturday that the threat from China was potentially imminent as he pushed allies in the Indo-Pacific to spend more on their own defense.

Hegseth, speaking for the first time at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Asia’s forum for defense leaders, militaries and diplomats, underlined that the Indo-Pacific region was a priority for the Trump administration.

‘There’s no reason to sugar coat it. The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent’ Hegseth said, in some of his strongest comments on the Communist nation since he took office in January. He added that any attempt by China to conquer Taiwan ‘would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world,’ and echoed Trump’s comment that China will not invade Taiwan on the president’s watch.

Hegseth is sufficiently educated in military affairs to know better than to spout nonsense like this. The US not only will not win a war with China in the Indo-Pacific, it cannot even put up a serious military challenge to China.

The entire world has been watching as Russia, with only limited assistance from Belarus, Iran, and North Korea, has almost singlehandedly defeated the entire might of the USA and its NATO allies. The result would not be any different even if the USA had attempted to utilize its own forces directly; the Kiev regime has already lost twice as many men as exist in the US armed forces without ever even forcing the Russians to utilize most of its frontline troops, its best hardware, or the greater part of its missile stocks.

The Russians, knowing the possibility of direct NATO intervention, have been keeping very powerful reserves in order to utilize them if necessary. This is why most of the Russian casualties have been from the provincial militaries and the mercenary companies. The Russian air force has lost all of 6 aircraft in 2025; the US Navy lost half that many from a single carrier in a single deployment in the Red Sea.

So I very much doubt that the Chinese are very impressed by the performance of the US military or are afraid to risk a confrontation with it over Taiwan. I also doubt there will be an actual invasion as such; it is far more likely that reunification will be quietly negotiated behind the scenes, then announced one day along with a series of arrests of pro-independence advocates.

It’s a shame that the foreign rulers of the USA have inverted the historical American philosophy coined by Teddy Roosevelt, and instead elect for speaking loudly while carrying a small and fragile stick.

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Maximum Pressure

Wow. Sounds serious.

US President Donald Trump is prepared to apply “maximum pressure” on Russia if Ukraine peace talks fail to produce results, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce has told Fox News. Trump could resort to using all the tools at his disposal, including additional sanctions on Moscow.

I think it’s admirable that they were willing to try 18 rounds of sanctions before resorting to “maximum pressure”. I mean, who wouldn’t be intimidated by “all the tools” being used against them. No doubt Putin and the Russian generals are quaking. If this doesn’t have the Russians waving the white flag and withdrawing their 650,000 troops from the Crimea and the Donbass, I wonder what the next rhetorical step will be?

Supermaximum pressure?

I would think Trump would be aware of how the State Department is making both himself and the USA look like a laughingstock on the global stage. He can’t even call off Israel, so how impressed does he really expect the Russians to be?

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There Will Be No Peace

In which Piero San Giorgio and Andrei Martyanov discuss the prospects for peace in Europe and NATO’s total lack of preparation for an escalated conflict with Russia:

Piero: So it was a few days ago that it was Victory Parade, and as you know, for me it is an event that is very dear because it is on May 9th, 1945 that my grandfather was liberated from a prisoner camp in Germany by the Red Army. So we always had this 9th of May as a family important day. And in fact, I will drink to it. I brought this from Moscow – I think it’s a 20mm shell anyway. And I wanted to start asking you the question: what does it mean for you and what does it mean for Russians in general, and what should it mean for everyone else, especially on this 80th anniversary of May 9th Victory Day?

Andrei: Well, it’s part of the family. Every family – literally every – there’s not a single family in Russia which hasn’t been touched by those events. And I understand, especially for you being a European, essentially it wasn’t the fight of Soviet Union, which was historic Russia, Russian Empire, new edition of Russian Empire. It was the fight against the combined forces of… It wasn’t just Germans. People who say that it’s “oh Germany” – yes Germany, but what about Romanian, Italian, Hungarian armies? Finnish half a million force of SS who participated in blockade of Leningrad, the siege of Leningrad. And you look at the SS divisions from France – Charlemagne – you know, Blue Division from Spain.

So when you go and look at this, yes, this was a unified European front against the Soviet Union. And as the result, we had a cataclysmic event of the kind which humanity never experienced. In four years, up to 70 million people on different fronts have been killed. Some of them have been killed in the most brutal way which haven’t been experienced before – be that concentration camps, let alone death camps, the industrial scale annihilation of the civilians like it was in Russia. And 27 million Soviet people died – actually majority of them civilians.

So whenever the so-called revisionists in the West begin… So-called revisionists – they don’t revise things, they just rewrite history. Most of them are not professional historians and they don’t know the first thing about warfare. But when they begin to rewrite history, they forget to say that majority of those were civilians. And the atrocities which have been committed against Soviet Union, and especially the utter destruction of European part of Soviet Union – primarily Russia and Belarus and Ukraine what is today – is unprecedented. And only Poles suffered equally, and obviously Chinese, but they had a much larger population already then.

So that’s the result. Scott Ritter stated a very interesting thing and I liked it very much, and I quote him: he said Russians cannot do anything about it because they have those people looking down at them. This is like… it was such a profundity. One of very few Americans who really grasped what it was.

So my family – no granddads, all killed at the front. My maternal grandfather was killed in 1941 around Donetsk. Then of course when my grandma remarried in 1945 – four years after, you know – she married again a veteran and he fought starting from the Soviet-Finnish War. So it’s in every family. My wife – she doesn’t have grandfathers. Pretty much 80-85% of the 23-year-olds generation in Soviet Union have been killed on the front. Yeah, disaster.

Piero: And it’s even more pitiful to consider the situation of today, that first of all it wasn’t the first time that Europeans tried to invade Russia – the Swedes, the Poles of course, but also Napoleon’s international armies. It was not just French. Crimean War, World War I was also… okay, we can argue on who really started it, but certainly there was a major front on the east in Russia. And all of this for me is very sad because you mentioned Europeans in World War II, the Charlemagne division and all that, and these young men were idealistic for the wrong reasons. And it’s always sad when you see young men dying for stupid reasons against other young men which could have had a bright future on all sides. And it’s such a disaster for me, for Europe and European civilization.

And so Victory Parade, the 80th anniversary last week – what do you… I obviously watched it, of course you watched it as well. What do you feel when you watch it?

Andrei: Well, it’s a sacred event really, and for any Russian. And especially most important thing actually is not even the parade – it’s the tradition, it’s a relatively new tradition of the Immortal Regiment. In St. Petersburg alone, which became Leningrad for a day sort of, 1.1 million people went out with their portraits of their grandfathers and grandmothers who fought and worked in rear to supply the front and all that. So it’s… I don’t even know how to explain it. I mean, many people they do not comprehend what is happening in terms of spiritual importance of all that. And it’s extremely important, extremely important. This is the part of you – you cannot change it, you just cannot change it. It’s there, you know.

So it’s… how can I forget my grandfathers? How? I mean, you know, they defended their motherland. Yes, they didn’t invade somebody, you know. Like people want to say, “Oh yeah, you split Poland between Germany.” Well, you wanted it, you refused to… So people don’t know the history, most people don’t. And in the West it is completely rewritten by the falsifiers and lowlifes, especially British succeeded, and Germans by the way. So when you look at that, what can I say? I mean Europe made up its mind. It’s Europe’s choice and nothing could be done about it. It cannot be changed.

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