Germany no longer trusts that the US will share intelligence. So Berlin is unshackling its spy agency to stand on its own, after Trump briefly cut Ukraine off.

A new law hands the BND its broadest powers in 70 years, putting the service on a war footing against Russia — FT. 1/ Merz raised the BND budget 25 percent to €1.51 billion and will send parliament a law granting powers it has never held.

Signals intelligence, AI, the right to hack back, and lighter oversight. Chief Martin Jäger calls the BND Germany's first line of defence. 2/

Kasparov: Ukraine's drone revolution is the equivalent of gunpowder ending feudalism.

A townsman trained with an arquebus could take down a knight from 50 meters — and the entire medieval vassal system collapsed. What we're witnessing now is a shift of the same magnitude. 1/ Kasparov: The head of Rheinmetall mockingly said a Ukrainian housewife on a 3D printer can make a drone. He didn't realize he was signing the death warrant for the entire military procurement system

A drone for $1,000 that destroys a $10 million tank, that changes everything. 2/

Snyder: Trump thinks everybody is going to roll over when he says stuff. That's true of a lot of people in his party. It's not true of people in the rest of the world.

Nobody in the world thinks Trump is strong. Nobody. I leave the US— nobody thinks he's strong. 1/ Snyder: They think he has power within a set of institutions that can do things. But they don't think he personally is strong or threatening. He's seen as an incredibly weak leader by everyone.

They're polite to him — you have to be. But everybody sees him as colossally weak. 2/

Snyder: We've lost this war. I'll make that very clear. We lost it a long time ago.

Americans are very slow to realize we've lost wars, but that doesn't mean we're slow to lose them. We lost this one very quickly. The terms of this peace are basically capitulation. 1/ Snyder: This goes to two issues of American power. First — how incompetent leadership can be. Second — how you get to a situation where radically incompetent leadership is possible.

That second point worries me. We're in a cycle now. And these are wars of whimsy. 2/

Ex-Ukrainian FM, Kuleba: Trump's G7 softening on Ukraine is not a real shift. Right words at the right table, nothing more. Before the summit he spoke to Putin and called him wonderful.

Every change in tone is situational. This is performance for the camera. 1/ Kuleba: Trump desperately needs a big foreign policy victory. There are only two places left on Earth where he can get one, Cuba and Ukraine.

That is why American efforts on Ukraine will intensify. Not from conviction — from necessity. Trump needs a win he can sell. 2/

800,000 — that is how many verified Russian military targets Ukrainian drones hit in the first half of 2026, with an estimated 167,000 Russian casualties.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's defense minister: Today, drones account for more than 90% of enemy targets hit — United24. 1/ The verified hits since January span Russian personnel, air defense, artillery, rocket systems, command posts, ammunition depots, and electronic warfare units.
Ukraine's Defense Forces aim the strikes at logistics routes and key assets behind the front lines. 2/

Ukrainian drones struck both sides of the Kerch Strait.

They hit logistics, fuel infrastructure, and air defenses in occupied Crimea and Russia's Port Kavkaz — about 300 km from the front, United24.

1/ Zelenskyy: Ukraine hit military logistics, oil industry facilities, four radar stations linked to S-400 systems, and two Pantsir air defense complexes.

It is a fair response to Russia's brutal strikes against our people.

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Putin crosses red lines with his own society one after another. Drone strikes hit Moscow.

Draft officers now grab men in Penza — with population of 500,000 people, 560 km from Moscow. The only prior mobilization, in 2022, drove 700,000 out of Russia, — The Times. 1/ Weeping women grabbed the hood of a draft van trying to stop it. "We know you are hitting them!

Why won't you give us five minutes to say goodbye?" one screamed. Officers slammed the door shut. 2/

Anthropic CEO Amodei: Russia invading Ukraine, the risk of China invading Taiwan. That's the authoritarian bloc we defend against.

We can't let China and Russia use AI to attack Ukraine and Taiwan while we can't defend them. Not for the money, government networks pay little.1/ Amodei: Conflicts happen when both sides misunderstand each other — without oversight, accidents become likely.

But superior intelligence deters conflict. Predict an invasion of Taiwan or troop movements in Ukraine, and adversaries think twice before acting.

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Kasparov: Putin cannot stop the war. His system is built on it, budget, economy, propaganda, education. Kindergartens train with drones. Universities open special courses. Plan: a million drone operators by 2030.

War became Russia's routine. You can't reverse this in one second. 1/ Kasparov: An inclined plane from physics, one direction, speed always increasing. Napoleon couldn't stop. Hitler couldn't stop. Macron admitted diplomacy won't work here

For Putin, ending the war means total collapse, ideology, system, power. All of it built on permanent war 2/

Kasparov: Drones hit the Urals, Petersburg, barely noticed, but Moscow? The imperial reflex snapped. Citizens asking why someone drags their city into a war between Ukraine and Russia

That question is the virus at its purest. Moscow sees itself as above the war it launched 1/ Kasparov: Anti-Putin opposition carries the same virus. They say stop the war because you can't win, not because invading a neighbor is wrong. The moral case drops to third, fourth place.

Russians who opposed the war on principle from day one were a vanishing minority. 2/

A «lonely» Ukrainian housewife traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander for months. "Send me a picture," she asked. He photographed himself and a map of his unit's position pinned on the wall behind him.

The housewife did not exist — The Atlantic. 1/ "She" was a middle-aged Ukrainian intelligence officer named Serhiy. Shortly after Achmad sent the photo, a drone struck the coordinates it revealed.

His commander: "Serhiy was great at flirting. Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice." 2/

Hodges: Trump told G7 leaders that Ukraine is their problem — a long way from the US, not America's concern.

Very short-sighted and wrong, but that is the policy. Europe working with Ukraine is going to have to be the main effort. No significant change coming from Washington. 1/ Hodges: Shadow fleet seizures must become the norm, not the exception. France has done it, Sweden has done it, the UK just did it.

Seizing these vessels going through the Baltic and Black Sea would be a major step in cutting Russia's ability to export oil and gas. 2/

Bolton: Damage to Iran's military infrastructure is real, but the regime stays and this deal is a significant political defeat.

Trump wanted the strait open to get gasoline prices down before November. He lost sight of the strategic issues that should have been central. 1/ Bolton: Gulf Arabs will live in fear that Tehran turns the strait on and off like a light switch.

Friends around the world wonder even more what an American commitment means. If we had taken military control of the strait at the outset, none of this would have happened. 2/

Graham: If the Iran deal fails, Trump takes the Strait of Hormuz by force. The US will control it and charge a fee for all ships passing through.

He says he spent four and a half hours with Trump on Friday laying this out. Expand the Abraham Accords in 2026. 1/ Graham: New policy if diplomacy collapses — when Hezbollah attacks Israel, the US hits Iran directly.

Not the proxy. Iran itself. "If Iran tests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them." To the Iranians: that is the message. 2/

Hodges on Hegseth saying Trump tested our allies and they failed over the Iran war: Absolute total horseshit. The war is now being spun as a test of alliance solidarity.

That's the mentality. And that's what's going into the NATO summit in Ankara in a few weeks. 1/ Hodges: What a childish, immature way to think about strategy — reward allies that spend enough, punish those that don't. US soldiers in Europe are not here to guard Germans or protect Poles.

It's for our interest. Just like British forces on the continent are for UK's interest. 2/

Hodges: Hard to imagine a worse outcome of this war of choice. Worse than Obama's JCPOA. Failed every objective the president laid out, and they changed the objective several times and still didn't hit any of them.

The IRGC came out of this more empowered than before. 1/ Hodges: This demonstrated the limits of American power — especially going it alone. Even with the best navy and air force, we could not achieve the strategic end state.

The technology is incredible. But we could not solve our military problem with technology alone. 2/

The US may win AI and still lose the technology race — Bloomberg.

AI is only one piece of the competition with China. Twenty years ago, the US led China in 61 of 64 key technologies tracked by ASPI. Three years ago, China led in 57 of them. 1/ The bigger challenge is turning innovation into industrial power.

For example, China now manufactures 70–80% of the world’s drones, despite many core technologies being invented in the US, Europe, and Japan. 2/

Vector, who leads a Ukrainian unit striking deep inside Russia with long-range drones: They are now our most important card in this war.

Ukraine now flies 200 to 300 of these drones at targets inside Russia every night, up from a few dozen a month in early 2024 — Politico. 1/ In a secret warehouse, GUR specialists assemble 15-foot Liutyi kamikaze drones that carry up to 150 pounds of explosives and fly 1,300 miles.

Each costs about $230,000. Small teams scatter across Ukraine to launch them, so losing a few sites or drones changes little. 2/

Ukrainian strikes have already disabled almost 40% of primary oil refining in European Russia

Russia runs its war on refined fuel. Diesel moves trucks and logistics. Jet fuel keeps aviation in the air. Generators need fuel every day, — Hromadske. 1/ Ukraine is hitting the core refinery units that turn crude into usable fuel.

These units are large, complex and hard to replace under sanctions.

Every successful strike removes capacity, adds repair time and increases pressure on the Russian fuel system. 2/

Russia killed her husband when she was 20. She became an FPV pilot and killed an enemy pilot. First in her battalion.

Iryna “Bilka” Kolobaeva for Radio Svoboda: After around 2 weeks from the burial, I started regaining consciousness and understood it would be revenge.

1/ Bilka: During my last shift before leave, I destroyed my first enemy vehicle. There isn’t much in our sector, so this is a big deal.

I also have the battalion’s first enemy pilot kill to my credit. I’m the first girl in the battalion, and I destroyed the first enemy pilot.

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