Zelenskyy: The Soviet Union was the most dangerous enemy for the United States, not only for your democracy or way of life, but for 70 years.
Putin’s global idea is to take everything back: the Soviet Union, former Soviet republics, and Europe too.
1/
Zelenskyy: If Russia becomes the Soviet Union again, this becomes a global war. Then you get China and a restored Soviet empire with the biggest army in the world.
They would be bigger than the United States, and that would be dangerous for America.
2/
Zelenskyy: Israel’s Russian-speaking Jews are not all from Russia.
Many came from Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Lithuania after the Soviet Union killed languages, churches, religion and traditions for 70 years. They know Russian, but they are not “Russian-speaking people.”3/
Keane: Ukraine can put 10,000 drones in the air in a single day.
The entire US Army does not have 10,000 drones. Ukraine’s defense industry gets new technology into soldiers’ hands at a speed that is nothing short of remarkable. 1/
Keane: Ukraine will manufacture 8 million drones this year — aerial drones and unmanned ground vehicles.
Ukrainian forces pushed Russians off a position defended by troops with no humans in the fight. It was the first time this had happened in warfare. 2/
Keane: Ukraine defeated Russia’s Black Sea Fleet without having a navy of its own.
It did it with surface drones, aerial drones and subsurface drones. We will likely see what Ukraine has proven reproduced in other countries. 3X
Kasparov: Putin called the Soviet collapse the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century in a 2005 speech.
Had he broken Ukraine's defenses in 2022, he wouldn't have stopped there. The real goal was rolling NATO back to its 1997 borders, pushing Eastern Europe out. 1/
Kasparov: What looks like bravado is really an understanding of an obvious truth: anything short of victory ends Putin and his regime.
War has become how Russia is governed — it's penetrated every layer of society, from kindergartens to the top of government. 2X
WSJ: Russia is bombing Odesa’s grain silos, port infrastructure, commercial ships, homes and energy sites. Life still goes on.
Resorts open, freight moves, cadets graduate, engineers repair substations, and the city keeps refusing to live on Moscow’s terms. 1/
Odesa keeps Ukraine connected to the world. The city sends billions of dollars in agricultural exports through the Black Sea and the Danube, even after years of Russian attempts to cut that route. 2/
Ukraine broke Russia’s naval blockade in late 2023. Sea drones and missiles pushed the Black Sea Fleet away from the coast and reduced the immediate threat of a landing operation. 3/