Summary and Key Points: Whenever the fighting stops, Russia will still be sitting on a slice of Ukrainian territory, and many observers will read that as a win for the Kremlin. It is not.
-Measured by the things that actually make a country powerful — its people, its economy, its credibility, its alliances, its independence — Putin has left Russia worse off than the day he invaded.
For three years, anyone who said Ukraine could win was waved off as naive — the numbers were against them, the bean counters insisted, more Russians, more territory, more guns. Then something shifted on the front this spring. And the people now saying the war has turned against Putin aren’t pro-Ukraine bloggers or talk-radio hosts. They’re the most cautious, establishment voices in the field — and one of them just put it in the pages of Foreign Affairs.
The group of men arrived at the Central Bank of Iraq before sunrise on March 18, 2003.
Hours before the bank officially opened for the day, Qusay Hussein—the younger of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s two sons—presented a signed letter from his father. The letter authorized a withdrawal so large that it required three large trucks to take it away.
Also Read: Operation Tapeworm: How the US Army’s most elite hunted down Saddam’s sonsAs Qusay and Saddam’s personal bodyguard watched, several men loaded stacks of $100 bills, totalling a staggering $900 million of American money.
Most commentary on Russia’s frozen reserves treats the story as one of irony. Vladimir Putin accumulated nearly $300 billion to protect Russia from Western pressure, only to watch the West immobilize that cushion the moment he needed it most, when Putin invaded Ukraine. That reading is accurate as far as it goes, but the more consequential part of the story is what happened next.
What happened to Russia’s reserves is really a story about what governments in Beijing, New Delhi, and Riyadh took away from watching it unfold, and what they have started doing about it.
Rumors in the past few days have raised fresh concerns that the Belarusian authoritarian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, may permit Russia to use his territory to invade Ukraine for what would be a second time.
In 2022, he permitted Moscow’s military to use Belarus as a launchpad to send large convoys of an invasion force towards Kyiv, but the incursion quickly bogged down due to a combination of Ukrainian territorial defense forces ambushing these columns and mechanical breakdowns of numerous vehicles.
T-72 Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Pro-Iran hackers gained access to the official Instagram account of John Bentivegna, the top enlisted guardian in Space Force, for several hours on Sunday evening.
Bentivegna’s account for his role as Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force included at least one profile post showing pro-Iranian art, and several Instagram stories showing anti-American and pro-Iranian messages were posted over the course of the evening of May 31. Photos of the hacked account and its posts spread around military social media and Reddit pages.
Chinese state media has commented on reports that J-35 fifth generation fighters are being tested for integration into the air wings of the aircraft carriers Liaoning and Shandong, which has long been speculated after the new fighters were integrated into the air wing of the supercarrier Fujian in 2025.
Reaching an area 800 miles from the border with Russia, on Sunday, 31 May, Ukrainian drones struck a Russian fuel depot, oil pumping station, and a refinery.
These attacks are another in what is becoming a regular practice of Ukraine taking out strategic sites that are hundreds of miles inside of Russia and well east of Moscow.
Neptune Missile. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
What is driving this Ukrainian air campaign is the desire to inflict maximum damage on Russian energy infrastructure.
Ryan Finnerty, Flight Global
Engineers at Boeing are advancing design work to repurpose decomissioned weapons stations for the US Air Force’s (USAF’s) B-1B Lancer supersonic bombers.
Ben Wolfgang, WashT
The ability of adversaries to use commercial location data from smartphones to find and target U.S.
