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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Good luck to the soldiers who decided to go public with their situation. I hope they get rotated out and get some extremely deserved rest, if they get lucky then until war is over.

    As for the brigade commander, unless he can show the court spectacular excuses, I sincerely hope he likes it in jail, because without a spectacular excuse, that’s where things are heading for him.

    One does not leave units to die, but recalls them. If one cannot recall an unit, one does not lie about it, and supplies them with all available means of staying alive and getting out.








  • unpayable debt,

    To be paid by Russia from reparations. If reparations won’t be obtained, Ukraine won’t have to repay this.

    As for the last point, I believe Russia has been repeatedly assured, gently and behind the scenes, that if forbidden weapons are used, then some flavour of doomsday will come. Now the assurance only depends too heavily on French and UK systems, since the US is suffering from mad president syndrome.

    The reassuring thing is that Ukraine has worn Russian air defense so thin during the years, that an assurance from France and UK is now credible. The mistake of invading Ukraine has considerably weakened Russia’s deterrents, and infiltration by Ukraine has limited Russia’s ability to achieve surprise.


  • This will almost certainly go onto Netanyahu’s list of charges at the ICC.

    As further details of the killing emerged on Thursday, it became clear that the group Khalil was with had come under sustained attack over several hours – and that Israeli forces had apparently been aware of their identities.

    Adding to the sense of horror was the fact that Khalil was trapped for hours in a house that had been bombed by Israeli forces. She died despite frantic efforts by her family, her editors and Aoun to organise a rescue.

    According to her employer and the Lebanese health ministry, Khalil was working near the village of al-Tiri when a vehicle she was driving behind was hit by an Israeli airstrike, killing two people and wounding her and her colleague Zeinab Faraj, a freelance photographer.



  • IMHO, with this sum, Ukraine can finance enough drone production to saturate and overwhelm Russia’s air defense regularly, and regularly bomb industries which the Russian war effort relies on, with enough drones to disable them.

    It is unlikely that Russia will stop producing drones and doing the same, but starting from this summer, it will take damage to strategically important places on a weekly basis, and might run out of money to finance things.

    If one looks at polls from “levada.ru”, Putin’s popularity is already dropping at a rapid rate for some months. Hopefully this will accelerate.

    The remaining question is: how exactly will the war end? Hopefully with negotiations, but other scenarios are possible. It could be economic crisis, strikes and protests in Russia. Or a coup. But it could also be escalation to weapons of mass destruction. The role of Ukraine’s allies should be to deter Russia from using that last option.





  • This was an interesting read.

    Especially his speculation that lack of a clear constitution (Basic Law was adopted as late as 1994 and is not a full-fledged constitution) and lack of clear borders contributed to Israel’s fall into the current state.

    Too generous US “security assistance” certainly helped. If you can solve a problem with bombing without worrying about getting bombed, you may start thinking of war as a normal thing.

    Failure to contain the populist extreme right is another stumbling block. If there had been no Netanyahu (and his corruption scandals, and the court cases awaiting him domestically, filed a considerable time before the ones awaiting abroad), things might be different.

    Ultimately, I would say: Israel failed to install brakes, and failed to contain its greed for power and land. It had too much cooperation and still has too much cooperation.

    I don’t know if there’s a reasonable way out.