SitRep - 23/12/25 - An Il-38N maritime patrol aircraft destroyed?

An overview of the daily events in Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The SBU released new info about the recent attack on Novorossyisk, claiming it also hit an Il-38N prior to the attacks.

REPOST=appreciated

1/X

Missed the latest SitRep?

https://x.com/NOELreports/status/2003393988791783462

As usual we start with Russian losses

https://x.com/NOELreports/status/2003394270104027589

What would really be the implications of taking Santa Claus seriously?

It's the time of the year to review the current state of the physics of Santa Claus

1/12

The classical theory of Santa Claus is highly problematic:

- there are 2 billion children worldwide
- about 15% are Christian
- that makes 86 million households (with 3.5 children on average)
-Santa has ~31 hours to work with

2/12

This works out to ~770 visits per second.

Santa has ~1/1000 seconds to

- park
- hop out of the sleigh
- jump down the chimney
- leave the right presents
- eat snacks
- move to the next house

3/12

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Apparently, every self-proclaimed crusader of secularism arrives with a curious accessory: a finely sharpened caste lens. These guardians of harmony speak eloquently of Hindu–Muslim–Christian unity,

yet somehow develop a sudden academic obsession with dividing Hindus among themselves—by caste, region, language, culture, attire, skin tone, geography, and even culinary preferences.
North versus South, Hindi versus Tamil,

Bengal’s alleged intellectual monopoly versus Dravidian exceptionalism—nothing is too sacred or too trivial to escape this grand festival of fragmentation. Sikhs must be carefully separated from Hindus, Ambedkarite neo-Buddhism must be aggressively marketed,

During pass three days at SEMICON JAPAN, we witnessed a brand-new Japan emerging from its 'Lost 30 Years.' Speaking with industry veterans, it’s clear that both exhibitor and visitor numbers have surged this year. There is a palpable sense of optimism among the locals regarding the future of Japan’s semiconductor industry. (1/3)

This year, the spotlight is almost entirely on Rapidus. For those unfamiliar with the company, Rapidus is a Japanese 2nm semiconductor manufacturer established in Hokkaido for strategic national interests.

The visitor and the industry is eager to know if they can achieve 2nm mass production by 2027. While we didn't obtain a confirmed production timeline for 2027, the sentiment among the many suppliers we visited was overwhelmingly positive—they expressed high confidence that successful mass production in 2027 is very likely. (2/3)

Small batch sizes enable faster processing times in certain steps such as baking and cooling, but will rely heavily on metrology. This model may start with only small volumes in 2027, but it is the engine that will push Japan’s semiconductor ecosystem (including new type of chamber, new metrology and inspection) into advanced process. Year ago, We've written about Rapidus's small batch business in (3/3)
newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/clash-of-the…

Tren de Aragua & Al-Qaeda Linked Groups -

Following up on the article that was first distributed by the Wall Street Journal.

“Venezuela Gangs and African Jihadists Drive Europe’s Cocaine”

A topic that has long been a point of discussion on this page, the connections that Transnational Criminal Organizations have to well-known terrorism networks abroad.

If you read the article in question, it leaves a lot of gaps in the convergence of these groups, and how we have arrived at this point. Not being critical of the authors, but there is a deeper connection that needs to be examined.

Earlier this fall, Policy Center for the New South released their report on the convergence of cartels and Jihadist in West Africa. The report goes into detail on how far this relationship goes back. In 2017, it was noted that the Sinaloa Cartel had established routes and markets into Africa with the help of AQ-linked networks.

So, who are these AQ-linked networks, and why are they working narco-trafficking groups?

Islamic Terror Groups -

Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) – West Africa

Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) is a terrorist group based in Mali and active across much of West Africa, including parts of Burkina Faso and Niger. It formed in March 2017, when four Mali-based extremist groups—Ansar al-Din, al-Murabitun, the Macina Liberation Front (MLF), and the Sahara Emirate subgroup of al-Qa‘ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—announced that they had merged, formalizing cooperation among them. The leader of JNIM, Iyad ag Ghali, pledged the group’s allegiance to the amir of AQIM, to the amir of al-Qa‘ida, and to the leader of the Taliban.

Al-Shabaab – East Africa

Al-Shabaab is a Sunni Islamic terrorist group that publicly pledged loyalty to al-Qa‘ida in 2012. The group seeks to overthrow the Somali Federal Government, expel foreign forces from Somalia, and establish a fundamentalist Islamic state. Since 2014 al-Shabaab has killed more US citizens than any other al-Qa‘ida affiliate, and as of 2025, the group is al-Qa‘ida’s wealthiest component.

AQIM – North and West Africa

Al-Qa‘ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is a North Africa–based Sunni terrorist group that seeks to eliminate governments and Western influence in the region and to establish sharia (Islamic law). It has conducted attacks across North and West Africa that have killed hundreds, including Americans.

Brief History -

The above descriptions are pulled from the National Counterterrorism Center website. The relationship between Islamic groups in Africa and South American Narcotics traffickers is not a new concept. The relationship goes back decades, but the primary reason this relationship exists is that it has allowed Islamic groups to sell narcotics for profit and revolutionary groups to obtain a steady supply of weapons and advanced communications.

“The Sahara has become a focal point in the global narcoterrorism network, with a complex web of relationships connecting South American drug cartels, European mafias, and jihadist groups. This criminal alliance is rooted in a history of cooperation between Marxist liberation movements and criminal organizations. In South America, groups like FARC have long trafficked cocaine in exchange for weapons, a practice that has now extended to jihadist groups in Africa and Europe.” (Cammarano)

However, that drug trafficking relationship has allowed these AQ linked groups to steadily flourish and grow their ranks in several west African countries. The influence of narco-trafficking groups in Africa has led to a surge in drone use in the region. With Europe becoming a growing market for Cocaine use, AQ linked groups such JNIM are poised to continue their expansion, recruiting and influence in the regions they control in Africa.

"Jihadist organizations, such as those linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and other extremist factions, have increasingly turned to drug trafficking as a major source of funding for their operations. The profits generated from the narcotics trade enable these groups to purchase weapons, recruit fighters, and expand their influence across West Africa, particularly in the Sahel region." (Cammarano)

AlignerZ Labs: The Launchpad for True Diamond Hands

2025 is littered with launchpads promising “fair” launches, yet the story remains the same: snipers win big, retail holders get farmed, charts bleed red in the first week.

@AlignerZ_Labs is completely changing the game on Base:

•IWO: No more fastest wallet wins. You bid with your vesting commitment length the longer you hold, the better allocation + deeper discounts. Real conviction gets rewarded.

•TVS: Vesting is now an asset. Wrapped as NFTs, flexibly splittable, sellable on secondary for cash without direct sell pressure on the token.

$A26Z tokenomics built for perfect alignment:

•Hard-capped 26M supply.

•15% quarterly profits → buyback & burn until price hits $26 (and beyond).

•Founder salary tied to the lowest daily price l misaligned means they suffer too.

Dapp in smooth public testing, community crushing Epoch 2 Wallchain leaderboards, explosive momentum despite being <2 months old.

TGE expected Jan 2026.
This is where conviction gets paid real value, while paper hands naturally get priced out.

The new meta has begun. AlignerZ is leading it.

g26. Stay aligned. 🟦
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FACT CHECK: The "Stable Employment" Contradiction The Prosecution's Claim: SAUSA Corinne Lambert argues Conrad Rockenhaus should have paid restitution because he had "stable employment with his wife’s company."

The Prosecution's Action: Probation seized the very devices (iPhone/Watch for app development) Conrad Rockenhaus used to perform that employment.

The Reality: The Government labeled these as "personal devices" to justify the seizure, conveniently ignoring that they were essential hardware for his role at a digital media company.

You cannot demand a defendant maintain "stable employment" while confiscating the only tools he has to do the job. rockenhaus.com/how-detroit-au…

The devices WERE APPROVED.

Lambert was repeatedly served this evidence & was entirely cognizant of the truth.

SAUSA Corinne Lambert did not have a momentary lapse in judgment, but rather, she made a series of deliberate & conscious choices to ignore facts and lie to the court.

It has become disturbingly clear that SAUSA Corinne Lambert is not just prosecuting a case; she is weaponizing the federal court record to target a private citizen (me, Adrienne Rockenhaus).

1/ 3 This Christmas Eve, my thoughts are with every family shattered by banking frauds - the homes lost, businesses stolen & of course we remember the precious lives ended too soon by despair. Peace and security have been stolen - however, remember you are seen and believed by advocates @Wftproof @BankConfidenti1 @stevemiddi1

2/3 In Ireland, hidden credit lines & phantom liabilities were weaponized against ordinary people, loans were unlawfully engineered into default, while banks buried the truth in defective & in some cases forged documentation.

Families have been torn apart by blame, when in many cases individuals were utterly financially responsible - just duped by bank staff “selling protection” - while deceptively offering the direct opposite. Often occurring as senior bank executives oversaw the manipulation of the very benchmark interest rates that on dropping would earn windfall profits for the bank.

What has happened represents the abject failure of a banking & shadow banking system that prioritised (& prioritises) numbers on balance sheets, over their customers’ lives, while @TheFCA and @centralbank_ie shielded the banks.

We @ BankConfidential name it for what it is: fraud, aided and abetted

As one of your advocates, the pledge is clear: to dismantle the veil of silence over banks, non-banks, credit servicers, law firms and courts that have enabled this and to demand an independent inquiry that holds perpetrators to account. May this season bring you a flicker of hope amid the darkness.

Justice is slow, but it is coming. Hold fast; the tide turns.

When a prime minister tells her own staff to rest because next year will be much worse, it is not gallows humor. It is not exhaustion speaking. It is a slip of the mask, the kind of remark leaders make only when the internal forecasts no longer align with the public script.

Giorgia Meloni was not addressing voters. She was addressing the state itself — the bureaucratic core tasked with executing decisions whose consequences can no longer be disguised. Her words were not about a mundane increased workload. They were about constraint. About limits. About a Europe that has crossed from crisis management into managed decline, and knows that 2026 is when the accumulated costs finally collide.

What Meloni let slip is what Europe’s elites already understand: the Western project in Ukraine has run head-first into material reality. Not Russian propaganda. Not disinformation. Not populism. Steel, munitions, energy, labor, and time. And once material reality asserts itself, legitimacy begins to drain.

The War Europe Cannot Supply

Europe can posture for war. It cannot produce for war.

Four years into a high-intensity war of attrition, the United States and Europe are confronting a truth they spent decades unlearning: you do not sustain this kind of conflict with theatrical speeches, sanctions, or abandoning diplomacy. You sustain it with shells, missiles, trained crews, repair cycles, and production rates that exceed losses — month after month, without interruption.

By 2025, the gap is no longer theoretical.

Russia is now producing artillery ammunition at a scale that Western officials themselves concede outpaces the combined output of NATO. Russian industry has shifted to continuous near-wartime production (without even being fully mobilized), with centralized procurement, simplified supply chains, and state-directed throughput. Estimates place annual Russian artillery production at several million rounds — production already flowing, not promised.

Europe, by contrast, has spent 2025 celebrating targets it cannot ever materially meet. The European Union’s flagship pledge remains two million shells per year — a goal dependent on new facilities, new contracts, and new labor that will not fully materialize within the decisive window of the war, if ever. Even the dreamed target if reached, would not put it at parity with Russian output. The United States, after emergency expansion, is projecting roughly one million shells annually once and a big if, full ramp-up is achieved. Even combined on paper, Western production struggles to match Russian output already delivered. Talk about paper tiger.

This is not a gap. It is a major tempo mismatch. Russia is producing at scale now. Europe is dreaming of rebuilding the ability to produce at scale later.

And time is the one variable that cannot be sanctioned.

Nor can the United States simply compensate for Europe’s hollowed-out capacity. Washington faces its own industrial choke points. Production of Patriot air-defense interceptors runs in the low hundreds per year while demand now spans Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and U.S. stockpile replenishment simultaneously — a mismatch senior Pentagon officials have acknowledged cannot be resolved quickly, if ever. U.S. naval shipbuilding tells the same story: submarine and surface-combatant programs are years behind schedule, constrained by labor shortages, aging yards, and cost overruns that push meaningful expansion into the 2030s. The assumption that America can industrially backstop Europe no longer matches reality. This is not a European problem alone; it is a Western one.

Part 2/3 👇

Part 2/3 — War Footing Without Factories

European leaders speak of “war footing” as if it were a political posture. In reality, it is an industrial condition and Europe does not meet it.

New artillery production lines require years to reach stable throughput. Air-defense interceptor manufacturing runs in long cycles measured in batches, not surges. Even basic inputs such as explosives remain bottlenecks, with facilities shuttered decades ago only now being reopened, some not expected to reach capacity until the late 2020s.

That date alone is an admission.

Russia, meanwhile, is already operating inside wartime tempo. Its defense sector has delivered thousands of armored vehicles, hundreds of aircraft and helicopters, and vast quantities of drones annually.

Europe’s problem is not conceptual; it is institutional. Germany’s much-vaunted Zeitenwende exposed this brutally. Tens of billions were authorized, but procurement bottlenecks, fragmented contracting, and an atrophied supplier base meant delivery lagged years behind rhetoric. France, often cited as Europe’s most capable arms producer, can manufacture more sophisticated systems — but only in boutique quantities, measured in dozens where attritional war demands thousands. Even the EU’s own ammunition acceleration initiatives expanded capacity on paper while the front consumed shells in weeks. These are not ideological failures. They are administrative and industrial ones and they compound under pressure.

The difference is structural. Western industry was optimized for shareholder efficiency and peacetime margins. Russia’s has been reorganized for endurance under pressure. NATO announces packages. Russia counts deliveries.

The €210 Billion Fantasy

This industrial reality explains why the frozen-assets saga mattered so much, and why it failed.

Europe’s leadership did not pursue the seizure of Russian sovereign assets out of legal creativity or moral clarity. It pursued it because it needed time. Time to avoid admitting that the war could not be sustained on Western industrial terms. Time to substitute finance for production.

When the attempt to seize roughly €210 billion in Russian assets collapsed on December 20th, blocked by legal risk, market consequences, and resistance led by Belgium, with Italy, Malta, Slovakia and Hungary, aligned against outright confiscation, Europe settled for a degraded substitute: a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for 2026–27, serviced by 3B in annual interest, further mortgaging Europe’s future. This was not strategy. It was triage, and further divided, an already weakened Union.

Outright confiscation would have detonated Europe’s credibility as a financial custodian. Permanent immobilization avoids the blast — but creates a slow bleed. The assets remain frozen indefinitely, a standing act of economic warfare that signals to the world that reserves held in Europe are conditional and not worth the risk. Europe chose reputational erosion over legal rupture. That choice reveals fear, not strength.

Ukraine as a Balance-Sheet War

The deeper truth is that Ukraine is no longer primarily a battlefield problem. It is a solvency problem. Washington understands this. The United States can absorb embarrassment. It cannot absorb open-ended liabilities indefinitely. An offramp is being sought — quietly, unevenly, and with rhetorical cover.

Europe cannot admit it needs one. Europe framed the war as existential, civilizational, moral. It declared compromise appeasement and negotiation surrender. In doing so, it erased its own exit ramps.

Now the costs land where no narrative can deflect them: on European budgets, European energy bills, European industry, and European political cohesion. The €90 billion loan is not solidarity. It is securitization of decline — rolling obligations forward while the productive base required to justify them continues to erode.

Meloni knows this. That is why her tone was not defiant, but weary.

Part 3/3 👇

Part 3/3 — As material limits harden, narrative control tightens. The aggressive enforcement of the EU’s Digital Services Act is not about safety. It is about containment, in its most Orwellian form — constructing an information perimeter around an elite consensus that can no longer withstand open accounting. When citizens begin asking calmly, and then not calmly, relentlessly, what was this for?, the illusion of legitimacy collapses quickly.

This is why regulatory pressure now reaches beyond Europe’s borders, provoking transatlantic friction over jurisdiction and speech. Confident systems do not fear conversation. Fragile ones do.Censorship here is not ideology. It is insurance.

Europe did not merely sanction Russia. It sanctioned its own industrial model.

By 2025, European industry continues to pay energy costs far above those of competitors in the United States or Russia. Germany. the engine, has seen sustained contraction in energy-intensive manufacturing. Chemical, steel, fertilizer, and glass production have either shut down or relocated. Small and medium enterprises across Italy and Central Europe are failing quietly, without headlines.

This is why Europe cannot scale ammunition the way it needs to. This is why rearmament remains a promise rather than a condition. Cheap energy was not a luxury. It was the foundation. Remove it via self-sabotage (Nordstream et. al), and the structure hollows out.

China, watching all of this, holds the other half of Europe’s nightmare. It commands the deepest manufacturing base on earth without having entered wartime footing. Russia does not need China’s breadth, only its strategic depth behind it in reserve. Europe has neither.

What Meloni Actually Fears

Not hard work. Not busy schedules. She fears a 2026 in which Europe’s elites lose control of three things at once.

Money — as Ukraine’s funding becomes an EU balance-sheet problem, replacing the fantasy that “Russia will pay.”

Narrative — as censorship tightens and still fails to suppress the question echoing across the continent: what was this all for?

Alliance discipline — as Washington maneuvers for exit while Europe absorbs the cost, the risk, and the humiliation.

That is the panic. This is civilizational. A system that cannot produce, cannot replenish, cannot tell the truth, and cannot retreat without collapsing credibility has reached its limits. When leaders begin preparing their own institutions for worse years ahead, they are not forecasting inconvenience. They are conceding structure.

Meloni’s remark mattered because it pierced the performance. Empires announce triumph loudly. Systems in decline lower expectations quietly, or loudly in Meloni’s case. 

Europe’s leadership is lowering expectations now because it knows what the warehouses contain, what the factories cannot yet deliver, what the debt curves look like and what the public has already begun to understand.

For most Europeans, this reckoning will not arrive as an abstract debate about strategy or supply chains. It will arrive as a far simpler realization: this was never a war they consented to. It was not fought to defend their homes, their prosperity, or their future. It was fought for greed for Empire, and paid for with their living standards, and their children’s future.

They were told it was existential. They were told there was no alternative. They were told sacrifice was virtue.

Yet what Europeans want is not endless mobilization or permanent austerity. They want peace. They want stability. They want the quiet dignity of prosperity — affordable energy, functioning industry, and a future that is not mortgaged to conflicts they never consented to.

And when that truth settles, when the fear recedes and the spell breaks, the question Europeans will ask will not be technical, ideological, or rhetorical.

It will be human. Why were we forced to sacrifice everything for a war we never agreed to and told there was no peace worth pursuing?

FACT: Sanctions are the most important method of global financial moderation to help keep us safe from the world's worst terrorists.

This key defensive tool is now converted to a weapon of state repression and censorship by Trump admin under false guise of defending free speech.

We're not just talking the regular ol' domestic state repression, either.

The sanctions list has just become a global cleaver to financially terminate Trump's political enemies who are not U.S. citizens nor residents. He seeks to antagonize his targets and send a public message.

The clear message being broadcasted is that opposing Trump or engaging in advocacy which runs counter to the ideology this administration is installing in the U.S. is likely to result in significant consequences.

The admin repeats this message of fear via every channel, daily.

Gquack Legend
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