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.

Direct from the EU:

The loans will become repayable only once Russia has paid war reparations to Ukraine.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/04/23/council-finalises-90-billion-support-loan-to-ukraine/

Until then, it’s a donation.

Evasion is a reality. Every time they enact another sanctions package, there are new lists of persons and companies, and yes, they are not very effective. But life without them would be much worse.

In the current sanctions package: no selling of fancy machine tools into Kyrgyzstan. Because (not a surprise) it turns out that companies from there resell those to Russia.

A drop in popularity would be a strong incentive to negotiate a solution, because they aren’t fools.

If propaganda is no longer working and critical thresholds are passed (“the fridge defeats the TV”) and government workers feel that status no longer protects them, then a wave of protest can’t be far. When it comes to protest, sadly it will be violent in Russia - because previous protest has been violently dealt with.

Putin and his elite will definitely want to avoid that.

One can hope, but sadly, there is a difference in EU responses. There is no consensus and nothing gets done. :o

I’m helping you understand the terms of the loan, which you mis-represented while spreading propaganda.

EvergreenGuru@lemmy.world wrote:

Last I checked Russia wasn’t explicitly targeting civilians and infrastructure like power plants, schools and hospitals, unlike the Israelis and Americans.

You checked badly then. Just to bring the most poignant example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_safari_(terror_campaign)

According to a UN human rights commission report from October 2025, at least 200 civilians have been killed and over 2,000 have been wounded by Russian-operated drones in Kherson.[2]

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.

I would like to disagree, but mildly.

People being unable to find partners in life is an actual problem, but not the only problem. Most dating sites are designed to keep users searching, gamify the process and extract payment, while they could instead use widespread sociological knowledge to give good recommendations or enable effective searching.

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.

It seems they’re collecting an exchange fund of seized ships to get their own vessel back. Risky. But I guess they want show that they aren’t risk-averse.

Sad to hear. Small island countries should stick together. Today someone bullies Taiwan, tomorrow someone bullies Madagascar.

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.

For cheaper detection of drone invasions, I would recommend a network of sensitive microphones. In nice weather, a scanning thermal sky camera (note: avoid the Sun, or kiss the camera good bye) is also very effective.

Genuinely curious why would any one need a radar.

People studying weather, the atmosphere, birds and of course people expecting aircraft. :)

This particular radar is bloody expensive, though - its price tag is about 15 000 euros.

Other fun radar projects, most of them well above my head, so I won’t dare to wade in:

Henrik Forsten: home made polarimetric synthetic aperture radar drone (takes photographic quality radio images of ground, budget several kiloeuros + ability to fly or a high vantage point)

Radar Tutorial - old military guy explains all the concepts, provides many schematics and various formulas

WetterSat - Mobile amateur rain radar - helps you locate rain at 10.5 GHz within a 100 km circle, cost about 1500 euros

Daniel Kamiński’s blog - explains the principles of a GPU-accelerated passive coherent location finder (radar that uses non-cooperative external illumination sources like TV signals), cost a few hundred + a high end GPU, but completeness is low (hard to recreate)

At the moment, it certainly is not open. Whatever the foreign minister of Iran said, ships ain’t passing. Possibly because the guy on radio from the IRGC navy says otherwise.

Yesterday, traffic was almost 14% of the 60-day average, today it’s approximately 4%.

https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/

But of course I hope they’ll reach an agreement. Just treat everyone’s words as hot air for a while, because information takes time to travel on ground.

Nope. That makes it somewhat odd.

This is not a special law against antisemitism. This is a generic law against incitement of hate and discrimination, with more serious punishments if violence is done, or if a group does it, or if serious consequences happen.

They added the word “anti-semitism” to the list of forbidden forms of incitement (it already forbade inciting ethnic and religous hate).

The Israeli newspaper makes it sound special, but it really is not.

Details can be found here:

Alteration: https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2037-IX

Paragraph one of Part One of Article 161 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (Vidomosti Verkhovnoi Rada of Ukraine, 2001, No. 25-26, p. 131) shall be supplemented with the words “manifestations of anti-Semitism” after the words “honor and dignity”.

Code: https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2341-14#Text

They upgraded paragraph 161 of the criminal code of Ukraine. It forbids discrimination, specifies punishments for deliberately inciting hate, and more severe punishments if the inciter also does violence or if the incitement leads to severe consequences.

Notably, so far it did not contain the word “antisemitism” and inciting hate against Jewish people was considered either as inciting ethnic, national or religious hate, according to the context. Now antisemitism is mentioned. No protected group is given more protection. I’m not sure if I agree with the wording (how does antisemitism differ from what was already forbidden?). But it’s fairly standard text for an average European country.

Article 161. Violation of the equality of citizens depending on their racial, national, regional affiliation, religious beliefs, disability and on other grounds

1. Intentional actions aimed at inciting national, regional, racial or religious enmity and hatred, at humiliating national honor and dignity, or insulting the feelings of citizens in connection with their religious beliefs, as well as direct or indirect restriction of the rights or establishment of direct or indirect privileges of citizens on the grounds of race, skin color, political, religious and other beliefs, gender, disability, ethnic and social origin, property status, place of residence, on language or other grounds -

shall be punishable by a fine of two hundred to five hundred non-taxable minimum incomes of citizens or restriction of liberty for a term of up to five years, or imprisonment for a term of up to three years, with deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for a term of up to three years or without it.

2. The same actions, combined with violence, fraud or threats, as well as committed by an official, -

shall be punished by a fine of five hundred to one thousand tax-free minimum incomes of citizens or by imprisonment for a term of two to five years, with or without deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for a term of up to three years.

3. The actions provided for in parts one or two of this article, which were committed by an organized group of persons or caused grave consequences, -

shall be punished by imprisonment for a term of five to eight years.

Note. In this article, regional affiliation should be understood as a person’s affiliation by birth or residence to a region - part of the territory of Ukraine or a territory of compact settlement of Ukrainians outside the territory of Ukraine - that differs from other territories by a number of historical, geographical, linguistic and other features.