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Kyle Orton Profile picture
Kyle Orton
Terrorism and national security | Lot of history and religion; regrettably, also some politics | Check out the Substack |
Crystal Steiniger 🌟🌟🌟 Profile picture প্রদীপ্ত মৈত্র (Pradipto Moitra) Profile picture ❌BigMamaTEA❌ Profile picture Potato Of Reason (Evil Arc) Profile picture Kevin Jaibur ✝️ Profile picture 9 added to My Authors
Feb 15 • 9 tweets • 6 min read
Senior Biden officials confirm to @washingtonpost that they are not trying to help #Ukraine achieve victory; they are trying to empower Kyiv to negotiate with #Putin, i.e. agree to the partition of the country and continued Russian occupation of parts. washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… The Biden people show how susceptible they are to #Russia's vision, unsurprisingly since so many are Obama holdovers: they leaked a CIA assessment that #Ukraine is militarily unable to retake #Crimea to WaPo, and expressed worries about the Russian "mobilisation".
Dec 12, 2022 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
.@shustry interviewed #Ukraine's President Zelensky on his way back from liberated #Kherson, a trip his security detail did not want him to make and that he concedes was a "bit reckless". A deeply interesting look at the man TIME made its Man of the Year. time.com/person-of-the-… After #Kherson was liberated from nine months of #Russian occupation, #Zelensky went down there to "show them that #Ukraine has returned ... Maybe it will give them enough of a boost to last a few more days. But I'm not sure. I don't lull myself with such illusions."
Dec 11, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Abu Agila Masud, whom the #US indicted two years ago over the 1988 Lockerbie/Pan Am atrocity, was kidnapped by a militia in #Libya a month ago and is now in American custody. Masud will make an initial appearance in court im Washington, D.C., next week. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla… #pt
Dec 11, 2022 • 12 tweets • 9 min read
Signs that #Russia is re-escalating the "mobilisation", picking people up off the streets again to send to #Ukraine, presumably because so many of the mobiks have been killed already and now there is this insane effort to break through in Bakhmut. Helpful thread here on the background from #Bakhmut. Really, whatever happens in the next period, whether #Russia can break through #Ukraine's lines or not, there is no meaningful way of assessing this as anything but a catastrophe for the Russians
Nov 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
#Russian man claims he was in prison with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the nominal manager of "Wagner". Says Prigozhin was an "offended/outcast" (Обиженный), the lowest caste, who regularly provided sex to prisoners, including this man personally.

[Translated by @wartranslated] "[Priogozhin] had his place ... and agreed to his place. ... [T]hose who join Wagner ... are commanded and managed by a faggot ... [and therefore] become lower than faggots."
Nov 29, 2022 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Shapur Bakhtiar broke with a lifetime of opposition activity to form a government at the Shah's behest as the King left Iran in January 1979. A stern secularist, Bakhtiar tried fight the laws of gravity to pull his country back from the brink of madness as the Revolution crested. If everyone, even the greatest men, get only a sentence in history, Shapur Bakhtiar's is that he reigned in Iran for 37 days after 37 years in opposition. However, his life both before and after the Iranian Revolution is equally as interesting.
Nov 11, 2022 • 14 tweets • 8 min read
So much for the idea #Ukraine negotiated a deal with #Russia to allow the Russians to withdraw unmolested from #Kherson: the Ukrainians are battering the Russians as they fall back, and all indications are this has degenerated into a rout for the Russians. #pt
Nov 10, 2022 • 9 tweets • 6 min read
Thread on the latest, really pretty pathetic, excuses #Israel has put forward for not assisting #Ukraine with air defence systems 👇🏼 Eran Lerman, former deputy NSC director, explains how powerful #Israel's military-industrial complex has become since February now everyone needs Jerusalem's help ... then says Israel can't help #Ukraine b/c "there are limits to what Israel can part with" jns.org/opinion/the-wa…
Nov 10, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In the aftermath of the FTX crisis, @Noahpinion asks: "What if crypto just ... dies?" noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-cryp… #pt: The FTX fiasco has left its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried not only with personal financial exposure but potential criminal exposure, too, and for the same basic reason: lies about how much money was in the system. uk.news.yahoo.com/us-justice-dep…
Nov 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
Utterly absurd, but a useful reminder that the #US administration is not committed to victory in #Ukraine: every time the Ukrainians break through and actually bring us closer to ending the war by defeating #Russia, these officials leak these mad ideas for "diplomacy". #pt: The #Biden people leaking to the press that "now is the time for diplomacy" over #Ukraine, when it plainly isn't and only #Russia thinks it is, comes a day after it was revealed the US was back at totally "compartmentalised" nuclear talks with Moscow. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Nov 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
There it is: #Russia accepts defeat in #Kherson, announces a withdrawal from the west bank of the Dnipro River.

This is a major victory for #Ukraine, two months after the Kharkiv offensive.

The question now is if Kyiv lets the Russians withdraw in good order; has no reason to. #pt: The government of #Ukraine, including President Zelensky, had publicly said that #Russia was not really withdrawing from #Kherson, but was trying to draw the Ukrainians into a trap. Now reasonably clear that is not true; unclear if it *was* true at some earlier point.
Nov 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Very sceptical of this. The idea is that #Russia sent planes of money and captured US/UK anti-tank weapons (NLAWs and Javelins) to #Iran in exchange for the "suicide drones". There is reason to be sceptical of this in both directions. #pt: On the one side, the @SkyNews framing makes it sound like the Iran-Russia axis is a narrow, transactional relationship, rather than a strategic partnership. Iran was sending drones to help Russia's war, and Russia was sharing any captured technology, no matter what.
Oct 26, 2022 • 50 tweets • 32 min read
Thread: 26 October 2022: Day 245 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine Latest @DefenceHQ update: the governor of Belgorod within #Russia announced on Oct. 24 that the main rail line linking Russia and #Belarus was sabotaged by "Stop the Wagons" (StW), ostensibly a "Russian anti-war group".
Oct 25, 2022 • 27 tweets • 18 min read
Thread: 25 October 2022: Day 244 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine Latest @DefenceHQ update: #Russia has lost at least 23 Ka-52 HOKUM attack helicopters, a quarter of its in-service fleet, in #Ukraine, many to MANPADS. The Russians still do not have air superiority and the helicopters have less cover from combat jets than they are meant to. Image
Oct 24, 2022 • 43 tweets • 30 min read
Thread: 24 October 2022: Day 243 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine Latest @DefenceHQ update: #Russia is using #Iran's Shahed-136 drones, but #Ukraine is "increasingly successful" dealing with them. Even if President Zelensky exaggerates when he says 85% of them are brought down, they are slow, noisy, and a poor replacement for precision missiles Image
Oct 15, 2022 • 42 tweets • 25 min read
Thread: 15 October 2022: Day 234 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine Latest @DefenceHQ update: #Russian mobilised reservists have begun arriving in #Ukraine over the last two weeks with even fewer provisions than the Army. Notably, they have been buying their own body armour. Corruption and poor logistics remain central features of Russia's Army.
Oct 15, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Saddam was so self-destructively reckless: on Dec. 7, 2002, the day he was supposedly complying with UNSCR 1441 that demanded he come clean at last on the WMD, he made a speech calling for "the mujahideen" in Kuwait to join his "jihad" against the infidels news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/news… Incidentally, the speech was framed by Saddam as an apology to Kuwait (at last) for ransacking and massacring the country in 1990-91, but the Kuwaiti government correctly saw it as incitement to terrorism, against them and against the Coalition troops.
Oct 14, 2022 • 35 tweets • 22 min read
Thread: 14 October 2022: Day 233 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine Latest @DefenceHQ update covers the Bakhmut front in the Donetsk Oblast, where #Russia is trying to make advances and making little progress against #Ukraine.
Oct 13, 2022 • 73 tweets • 52 min read
Thread: 13 October 2022: Day 232 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine Cretinous. #France's President Macron playing into #Russia's propaganda about "World War [Three]".
Oct 12, 2022 • 43 tweets • 25 min read
Thread: 12 October 2022: Day 231 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine #Israel could help #Ukraine with air defences without even having to reassess its misguided policy of appeasing #Russia in the belief Moscow is helpful vis-a-vis Iran in Syria.
Oct 5, 2022 • 20 tweets • 14 min read
Thread: 5 October 2022: Day 224 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine Latest @DefenceHQ update: #Ukraine is advancing on both the north-east front, bearing down on the Luhansk Oblast that #Russia claimed to annex on Sept. 30, and on the southern front in Kherson.