I've done three posts on Ukraine's Maidan Color revolution & aftermath, in this one I get into how Ukrainians are wired in dealing with dishonorable enemies.
"Ukraine is returning to its cultural roots from the Kievan Rus/Viking period, the Cossack period being an extension of that. Community is everything.
These people are at heart Viking berserkers – and we have seen it over and over again on the battlefield 3/
...over the last 9 months. Cornered Ukrainian officers, wounded, surrounded by Russian Spetsnaz, pulling the pins on a string of grenades, to take the enemy with them, which they did on multiple occasions."
I've been expecting the full Viking Berserkergang...and seeing it.
The Russian 247th Guards VDV Air Assault Brigade was pivotal to the Ukrainian loss at Ilovaysk in the 2014-15 fighting.
Thus it was likely involved in the Ilovaysk murder of Ukrainian wounded and POWs. 4/
The Ukrainian annihilation of that unit in this invasion was preordained.
A Ukrainian reading friend says he sees the phrase "revenge for ..." popping up all of the time in Ukrainian social media.
Then, when it was reported a Su-27s killed two Russian CANDIDs carrying VDV, 5/
...it was "revenge for the Luhansk Il-76 ambush".
Whatever else happens, Putin will not be able to conquer the entire Ukraine and may not even get to keep the Donbass.
Putin has created a Ukrainian nationalist monster that will hate Russians for both the great famine of 6/
...the 1930’s under Stalin and now the very raw territorial wound of detached Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
Ukrainians will work for a 100 years to get all that back, minus anyone who is visibly, culturally, Russian.
The Ukrainians are now fighting a national people's war. 7/
The Russians are fighting as a classic Oriental despotism whose chief objective is to keep Putin in power, whatever effect this has on Russia’s long term interests.
This Ukrainian Viking Revival will be the defining event of the early 21st Century.
8/End
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
This 2023 post is where I posed the question of how large Russian riverine/littoral/brown water logistical efforts were to support Russian occupation forces in southern Ukraine. 3/
Given the massive Ukrainian victory in the "Battle of the Azov Sea."
We can say Ukraine has achieved “Usable Drone Air Superiority" over the Sea of Azov in exactly the way the Chinese would in the waters around, & air over, Taiwan when it invades.
🧵
The "Battle of the Azov Sea" shares a lot of historical elements of both the WW2 "Battle of the Bismarck Sea" and the slaughter of Allied oil tankers in 1942 during Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag) and Operation Neuland.
2/
The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was the slaughter of 12 ships of a 16 ship Imperial Japanese convoy of eight IJA freighters and eight IJN destroyers moving 6,900 IJA troops.
Tipped off by IJN seaplane deployments & radio intercepts, only 2,700 IJA troops arrived w/o weapons or ammo.
3/
I asked @grok to document this Russian policy of atrocity at the link, excerpt:
"February 24, 2022–present (Full-scale Russian invasion): The scale escalated dramatically. As of May 2026, the WHO had verified more than 3,000 attacks on healthcare via its Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA). A coalition of organizations (including PHR, eyeWitness, Truth Hounds, etc.) documented ~3,095 attacks, with 1,632 damaging or destroying hospitals and clinics"
When I've talked about the legacy of Soviet industrial gigantism (one big factory) making Putin era Russia far more vulnerable to a drone strategic bombing campaign.
I've talked about this vulnerability in a couple of previous threads. Here is a shorter one:
Putin's decades long "Russian exceptionalism" propaganda campaign, that says WW2 was won on the Eastern Front, has made Russians incapable of seeing this.
There is so much to object to here that I'm going to restate some basic design observations on the FP-5 to clarify how the Russian reflexive control data fed AI slop that is polluting public discussions of the FP-5.
1. The FP-5 Flamingo is about four times the launch weight of a BGM-109 Tomahawk (i.e. ~13,200 lb), and 2-3 times the range (i.e. ~1,620 nmi) while carrying twice the warhead mass (i.e. ~2,000 lb).
2/
2. The FP-5 design concept is modelled on the USAF MGM-13 Mace GLCM as Fire Point told Ukrainian military analysts - but designed with modern technology to be extremely cheap to make (claimed 1/6 the cost of a Tomahawk - likely not counting the engine cost).
The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that in 2026 Ukraine has not only replicated, but likely exceeded, the 2018 capabilities of the USAF's Stand-off Munitions Activity Center (SMAC) at at Barksdale AFB.