Russia

Armed with amphibious rifles, Russian Spetsnaz turn the waterline into a kill zone instead of a transition point.

After a deadly ambush near Palmyra, US forces hit more than 70 ISIS targets across central Syria in a heavy retaliation strike meant to keep ISIS cells from regrouping. Russia is pounding Odesa while massing forces near Pokrovsk, and back home a Bellevue officer-involved shooting is under review by King County’s independent investigators as both the officer and suspect recover.

Trump’s National Security Strategy reads like a needless pickaxe to America’s European alliances while offering a transactional “reset” with Russia that risks trading long-standing democratic commitments and regional stability for short-term political and economic convenience.

Floods in Washington, a brutal drone-and-missile strike in Ukraine, and a new UK intel superstructure all point to the same truth: when things go sideways, it’s the quiet professionals on watch, on shift, and on the ground who keep people alive. And on the Army National Guard’s 388th birthday, the message is simple: everyone loves the Guard the moment the mission gets real, because these citizen-soldiers show up, do the unsexy work, and hold the line.

Ukraine is plugging more women into the drone fight on the front line, while back home Pete Hegseth is pushing U.S. industry to crank out weapons faster for the next war, and Poland is set to grab about 250 U.S. Strykers for a buck each to beef up NATO’s eastern flank.

The war is unlikely to end with a clear military decision; instead, as Russia’s reserves erode and Ukraine’s strikes steadily raise the cost of continuation, Moscow will be pushed toward a de facto halt sometime in 2026.

From the Black Sea to Krasnodar and Kyiv, Ukraine and Russia are trading long‑range blows. Inside the U.S., an Afghan evacuee now charged over an alleged TikTok bomb plot in Texas.

Russia’s elite “Green Beret” recon paratroopers have the training, gear, and reputation to shape the battlefield, yet in Ukraine they’ve been squandered by a leadership stuck in blunt, Soviet-style frontal assaults that bleed the VDV for no real gain.

The arrest of a GRU-linked cyber-operative down the road was a reminder that the world’s sharpest edges have a way of slipping quietly into ordinary places.

Watching Pokrovsk ground to dust meter by meter, I see Washington and Budapest flirting with an alliance of convenience that would codify the stalemate into Western policy and rename exhaustion as realism.

In the harsh neon glow of a Kansas hotel room, a 28-year-old Guardsman inked a “covert relationship” with ghosts he thought were Russian agents, pocketed cash, snapped pics of Fort Riley, and tried to mail an American helicopter radio to Russia—only to learn later the feds were the ones writing the script.

Russia’s nuclear-powered 9M730 Burevestnik (SSC-X-9 Skyfall) is a low-altitude, long-endurance cruise missile, with a claimed 14,000 km in 15 hours still unverified, built to slip past missile defenses and push the nuclear arms race into a harder phase.