New: I acquired the private memoir of Gen. Alexander Zorin, a senior GRU officer who was Putin's envoy to Syria and is now leading POW exchanges with Ukraine. A feature film, "Porcelain Soldier," is set to debut in Russia next month, all about Zorin's adventures -- sort of a Stierlitz meets Bourne production, which was green-lit by former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-… In all, I've acquired over a thousand pages of documents: Zorin's 186-page memoir, which he titled "The Negotiator" (watch your back, Sam Jackson), some of the ancillary production material for the movie, and five iterations of the screenplay, each more cartoonish in plot and dialogue than the last. The first draft is actually rather nuanced and ends with Zorin weeping upon learning a rebel commander he persuaded to evacuate was subsequently killed by the Russian army after Zorin gave his word that would not happen. (Who says the GRU is a heartless organization?)

Re: Trump's denial of the WSJ story, read this paragraph twice. Transferring authorization from Hegseth to Grynkewich is almost the scoop itself. Cuts Elbridge Colby out of the process, and one wonders how and why this decision was taken -- note, taken before the Ze visit to the WH -- given all Cheese's unflattering press. Trump recently called him "J.D.'s guy." (Second screenshot from prior WSJ piece on Colby pausing deep strike authorization under this review process.) wsj.com/politics/natio…
Not the first time Grynkewich v. Colby has popped up. When PURL was announced, Grynkewich was the guy named running point with DoD (logical enough given he's SACEUR). This was around the time of the Colby memo diverting USAI kit meant for Ukraine back into U.S. stockpiles. cnn.com/2025/08/08/pol…

Suspected the timing of Storm Shadows over Bryansk wasn’t a coincidence.
Story: wsj.com/politics/natio…

Steve Witkoff's Public Financial Disclosure form, which he filed late, is unsigned by any ethics official. It also falsely states Witkoff held no federal position before June of this year. He did not divest from relevant assets before he started his diplomatic job, as he was supposed to. And note the company at the heart of the big @nytimes investigation into his questionable business dealings with the Emiratis concerning World Liberty Financial, "a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps." On page 23 of Witkoff's disclosure, World Liberty Financial is given with no value listed. nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/…

Why is this document unsigned or certified by any government ethics official? Does this mean that no one has actually conducted the conflict of interest assessment and associated divestitures normally required before an official can start the job?

Elbridge Colby has hindered Ukraine's ability to defend itself at least four times since he joined the Pentagon. The most recent example: wsj.com/politics/natio… Earlier this month: edition.cnn.com/2025/08/08/pol…

Quite a lot of revisionism now. But Miller helped lead the CIA team and is a registered Republican. Note, too, the self-evident conclusion that it was not possible to determine the full impact of the influence operation on American voters. Intel practitioners were a lot more careful and judicious than cable news pundits in 2016-2017. nbcnews.com/politics/natio…
One of the sleights of hand Gabbard, et al. are pulling is to conflate in the popular imagination the compromise of “election infrastructure” and vote altering with the hack-and-leak operation targeting the DNC, DCCC and Podesta. The latter was ratified in Mueller’s grand jury indictments of the dozen GRU officers from Units 26165/74455. The former was never alleged in any ICA, although the Senate Intel Committee investigation, overseen by Marco Rubio, noted Russian attempts to “probe” election infrastructure and some successful efforts to exfiltrate voter data from multiple states, albeit without any impact on the election outcome itself. Case in point:

Darren Beattie, the MAGA appointee who dismantled the State Department’s counter-disinformation program, “is married to a woman whose uncle has taken several roles in Russian politics and once received a personal ‘thank you’ message from Vladimir Putin.” archive.ph/Q818Z You really cannot make this up: “The funny thing is just about every Western institution would improve in quality if it were directly infiltrated and controlled by Putin,” [Beattie] wrote in September 2021.

Nice story in @DelfiEE on how Russia paid young "protestors" 1,000 rubles (10 euros) each to stand outside eleven embassies of EU nations in Moscow before the May 9th parade: delfi.ee/artikkel/12037… Payments were likely made with mobile app transfer on-site after the event. A list of those who responded to calls in chat groups was compiled so that the police would know whom not to detain. Screenshots not in the article below but shown to me demonstrate this fee-for-service arrangement:

I've been emphasizing lately the unintended consequences of Trump's headlong embrace of Russia -- consequences not wholly undesirable for Russia. While it's wonderful for Moscow to see an American president so eager to realign with Russia's strategic interests, and so keen to denigrate and alienate American allies in that re-alignment, smarter figures in the Kremlin realize the hazards of such an embarrassment of riches. A helpful constant in this administration's rush to give Putin everything all at once is that the worst capitulationist ideas are being stress-tested in the media and in the GOP almost as soon as they're invented -- and often *before* the Trump administration has agreed on whether or not they're feasible. One of ideas these is that the U.S. will recognize Crimea as Russian territory. As you might expect, this was Steve Witkoff's proposal, which is to say it was Vladimir Putin's. Dim Philby isn't so much an envoy as an unblinking relay of Putin's maximalist demands, all of which he presents to Trump as eminently reasonable, if not accomplished facts. (Recall Witkoff's lie that Russia was in full control of the Ukrainian regions it "annexed," regions Witkoff doesn't know the names of, when it is in full control of none of them.) The "Krym Nash" brain fart, I'm told, happened without any inter-agency coordination or buy-in from the principals, least of all Marco Rubio, who is at odds with Witkoff on this and on much else, regardless of the flattering tweets he is obliged to post about his scandalous colleague. Now notice this little nuance in the WSJ story cited above:

America's "washing its hands" of Ukraine-Russia talks can mean several things. First and foremost, it would mean ending this Witkoff/Rubio fandango to attain (or impose) a Russia-favorable peace deal of some kind, which reportedly would include de facto ceding occupied territory to Moscow. But what else does an American walk-away entail? Some unresolved questions below: 1. It is a near certainty that no additional military aid packages will come from this administration once the Biden-era ones run out. But does that mean Trump will refuse to sell weapons and ammunition directly or indirectly to Ukraine? Does it mean he will actively slap end user restrictions on European countries from buying American kit for the express purpose of donating it to Ukraine? (Even Rubio alluded to Ukraine's right to bilateral agreements with other countries.)

Right now, Germany continues to supply Kyiv with Patriot missiles. Long-range air defense is one of three critical areas in security assistance where Europe cannot yet compensate for the absence of American platforms, the other two being rocket artillery and howitzer ammunition. So new European aid packages featuring U.S.-made hardware seriously matter. Does Trump's pivot to Moscow include his limiting U.S. arms exports to Europe, something that would grievously harm the American arms industry beyond the harm Trump already inflicted on it with his attacks on transatlanticism, NATO, etc.? Between 2020 and 2024, Europe overtook the Middle East as the largest region for U.S. arms exports for the first time in two decades. Now, this government is clearly not above economic own goals, but it'll nonetheless be interesting to see how it sells a new dawn with Russia -- one without a concomitant peace -- as the price worth paying for crippling the American military-industrial complex.

There is zero fucking chance this was "unclassified." theatlantic.com/politics/archi… "This is when the first bombs will definitely drop."

Excellent analysis by Kiel Institute. Some conclusions track with what @JimmySecUK wrote for @newlinesmag here: newlinesmag.com/argument/can-e… “To replace US aid flows and keep total support at the same level: Europe needs to double its yearly support to an average level of 0.21% of GDP. This is less than half of what Denmark and the Baltics are already doing and on a level of what Poland and the Netherlands do.”

This is an excellent and timely factsheet on Ukraine, U.S. v. European security assistance, and other misunderstood or lied about aspects of the war, by our friends at @TheStudyofWar. I'll summarize a few main points below, with additional sources of my own: understandingwar.org/backgrounder/u… Russia's advances have slowed considerably in the last few months. It was taking, on average, 28 sq km per day in November; it took 16 sq km in January. Why is this? Russians are suffering severe manpower and equipment losses and Ukraine is causing them greater pain with its fleet of domestically sourced FPV drones, which now include fiber-optic wire-guided drones to evade electronic warfare. (Drones increasingly compensate for artillery shortages on the Ukrainian side.) Such is the state of Russia's army, its soldiers are now using donkeys to transport ammunition to the frontlines: independent.co.uk/news/world/eur…

New: After an eighteen-month investigation, @InsiderEng has uncovered new evidence suggesting that Russia’s GRU paid tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban in Afghanistan to target American, coalition, and Afghan military forces. GRU Unit 29155 was behind this operation. We have unmasked the officers and their Afghan agents. theins.ru/en/politics/27… The program, per four former Afghan intel (NDS) sources we queried, averaged $200,000 per killed American or coalition soldier. There were smaller allowances for killed Afghan troops. One former official estimated that Russia paid a total of approximately $30 million to the Taliban via the scheme.

New "Karl" thread, with @holger_r: 🧵 "The situation on the frontlines has not significantly changed in the last month. For UA, the most difficult area remains the southern part of the eastern front—Pokrovsk and Kurakhove. RU continues to advance there, but very slowly and at the cost of heavy losses."

Breaking: The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has released an unclassified report into the IC and its work on Havana Syndrome, or Anomalous Health Incidents. From the first lines of the executive summary: "It appears increasingly likely that a foreign adversary is behind some AHIs." Last March @InsiderEng and @60Minutes concluded a yearlong investigation pointing at evidence that Russian military intelligence -- specifically GRU Unit 29155 -- was likely behind AHI. You can read that here: theins.ru/en/politics/27…

The reporting on Ankara’s hand in all this will be necessary reading. turkishminute.com/2024/11/29/erd… Rare opportunity for the Tukrs here. IRGC/proxies are a busted flush. Russia is busy elsewhere, in a battle space where Erdogan has quietly armed the opposing side to rather impressive result (while not antagonizing VVP as other NATO allies have). Erdogan and Fidan are thoroughly and utterly fed up with Assad's BS on normalization.

New: Remember "Pablo Gonzalez," the GRU illegal traded back to Russia in August? He posed for years as a Spanish journalist. A #FreePablo campaign was undertaken by various press freedom organizations when he was arrested in Poland on charges of espionage. Well, guess who gave him a big old hug at Vnukovo Airport when Pablo touched down? This guy.👇 Oleg Sotnikov is a GRU officer and team member of Unit 26165, or "Fancy Bear," which is responsible for the 2016 DNC hack. He helped with the close access hacking of the OPCW in The Hague, and also anti-doping organizations, including USADA, for which he was indicted in District Court in PA. Sotnikov was consul in Rio during the Brazil Olympics in 2016, when over a hundred Russian athletes were caught cheating with performance enhancing drugs. Our story below: theins.ru/en/politics/27…

New "Karl" thread, the first since the U.S. election, with @holger_r: "RU is pushing hard on 2-3 fronts. On the Kursk front, they have managed to gain control over a third of the territory occupied by UA. I don’t see RU being able to push UA out of Kursk within this year or by the time Trump takes office on Jan 20. Their pace of progress is slow everywhere on the front."

New insights from "Karl," the Estonian military analyst, as told to @holger_r and me: 🧵 "Last time, we discussed that the situation near Vuhledar had become critical for UA. By now, it has been abandoned. In summary, RU's offensive toward Vuhledar began a year ago with an attack on Novomykhailivka. The situation in Vuhledar itself started to become uncomfortable a few months ago."

New "Karl" analysis on the latest in Ukraine, with @holger_r: 🧵 "In Kursk, the UA offensive developed further (since last time we spoke), and in total UA managed to conquer as much territory as RU had conquered in eastern Ukraine since the beginning of the year. This was done in the first 2 weeks of the operation."