Majorityrights News > Category: World Affairs

The loss of Starlink was bad for Russian operations.  The loss of Telegram is worse.  But the sheer pace of Ukrainian innovation is the killer.  Prof Gerdes explains how, four years to the day when the Ukrainians first switched from defence to attack, the balance is shifting that way again.  Ukrainian forces are gaining more land than the Russians are taking.  The latter’s spring-summer offensive can’t get started.  The Russian deep rear is being hit.  At the line of contact losses are already running at or beyond what the Russian army can recruit.  The Russian strategies of attrition and war from the skies against the civilian population is being blunted.  Where does it all go from here?

0:00 ISW confirms Russia’s offensive is faltering
0:20 Ukrainian drone strikes hit key industry
0:54 Achilles 429th unit shows new capabilities
1:19 Ukraine’s expanding mid-range drone power
2:07 Targeting Russian air defense and logistics
2:45 Shift toward FPV and mid-strike drones
3:33 The economics of drone warfare
4:40 Mapping Ukraine’s strike patterns
5:17 Hits on Russian nitrogen facilities
5:40 Russia’s drone activity and defenses
6:13 Mounting Russian losses in detail
7:05 Real-time casualty and equipment trends
8:10 Measuring the offensive’s intensity
8:55 ISW: Ukraine disrupting offensive prep
9:30 Defense holds on the Lyman axis10:11 Phoenix Regiment and Achilles impact
11:00 Russian milbloggers admit heavy losses
11:39 SBU arrests suspected infiltrator
12:03 Electronic warfare training expands
12:53 Kyiv battle anniversary context

For some weeks now there have been growing signs of Russian failure at the front, particularly in the north and south.  In Donetsk, meanwhile, the Russian advance is slower than ever.  Pokrovsk is still not fully under Russian control, and may now never be so.  In this video Jason Jay Smart alights on the apparent flight of Vladislav Surkov as a sign of trouble in Putin’s inner circle, and pulls together the political and military strands to make the case for something broken at the top of Russian power that can’t be put back together again.

00:00 – Intro: Putin’s House of Cards
01:40 – Kremlin Exile: The Fall of Vladislav Surkov
03:04 – Putinism Unmasked: The Architect of Russian Propaganda
04:17 – Crimea Assault: Ukraine Destroys Russian Radar
05:04 – Frontline Failure: Russian Soldiers in Retreat
05:47 – Command Paralysis: The Kremlin’s Communication Crisis
06:52 – Internal Sabotage: Putin’s Health and Elite Purges
08:53 – Bot Network Collapse: Russia’s Failed Influence War
09:51 – Russian Shadow Fleet: Espionage and Oil Smuggling
12:38 – The Breaking Point: Putin’s Final Stand

Paul Warburg explains the technical impact and potential military consequences of the ending of unauthorised access to the Starling system:

Friday 9th January

Mahyad Tousi, an Iranian–American film-maker, scriptwriter, producer and director lives in London and runs TousiTV, claimed to be the most watched political channel in the UK.  As one would expect he is following the people’s revolution in his homeland with amazement and joy.  What he showing us now makes it very unlikely that the Khamenei regime can survive.  For a flavour of the electric excitement on the streets here is his latest show:

24 hours on, Saturday evening, 10th January

... and this is the TousiTV broadcast:-

... and then the IRGC began its slaughter of somewhere between 6,000 and 30,000 protesters on the streets of Iran’s cities.  The process came to a halt.  But now ...

February 28th - Khamenie dead, IRGC leaders dead, US strikes on-going.

The people are celebrating already.  There are calls for Pahlavi to return.  A gun battle is being waged to free political prisoners in Tehran (which could be important, because there is no revolutionary leadership among the people at large).  We wait for news.

From the exiled dissident news outlet Moscow Times:

Residents of the town of Valdai in Russia’s Novgorod region said they neither heard nor saw signs of a large-scale drone attack overnight on Monday despite official claims that nearly 100 Ukrainian drones targeted President Vladimir Putin’s residence there.

Fourteen residents told the independent outlet Mozhem Obyasnit that they received no text alerts warning of a drone threat and did not hear any buzzing sounds or explosions characteristic of a drone attack.

“There was no noise that night, no explosions, nothing,” one resident was quoted as saying. “If something like that had happened, the whole town would have been talking about it.”

Putin’s Valdai residence, known as Dolgiye Borody, lies northeast of the town and is separated from it by Lake Valdai.

Residents told Mozhem Obyasnit that they usually know when the Russian president visits his residence due to the heavy helicopter traffic accompanying his arrival.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that Ukraine’s armed forces had attempted a “massive” drone attack on Putin’s residence using 91 drones, all of which were allegedly destroyed by air defense systems.

The Russian Defense Ministry’s official report said only 18 drones were shot down over the Novgorod region during the night.

Lavrov said the alleged attack would prompt Russia to revise its negotiating position on Ukraine, though he added that Moscow did not plan to withdraw from talks with the United States.

He also warned that the incident would not go unanswered, saying Russian forces had already selected targets and timing for retaliatory strikes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Lavrov’s allegations “fake” and “extremely dangerous,” arguing that Moscow was trying to sabotage diplomatic efforts to end the war and justify continued strikes on Ukraine.

Shortly after Lavrov issued his statement, the White House said U.S. President Donald Trump concluded a “positive” phone call with Putin about Ukraine.

Trump then criticized the alleged Ukrainian drone attack, saying it was “not the right time” given the ongoing talks to end the war.

This morning Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that Russia’s negotiating position towards Ukraine will become tougher.  So the lumbering, lying Kremlin machine clunks into gear to prevent Donald Trump from moving forward on the basis of Zelensky’s 20-point peace plan.  It had been 95% agreed, Trump had said.  Now nothing will be agreed.

So, a question.  Does Trump actually believe that Ukrainian armed forces chose this most critical moment, of all moments, to launch a 91-drone attack on one of Putin’s palatial homes, but failed to get a single one past the creaking Russian anti-aircraft defences?  Or does he, in fact, understand perfectly well that Putin told him the most obvious, bare-faced lie, but his policy-aim of making American corporations great again requires him to smile on the Russian dictator all the same and in all things?

As a rule, ignorance in high places does not go unremarked.  Ignorance is one of the markers of the Trump administration, almost as though the president does not believe in knowledge and experience.  Perhaps he associates it with that self-interested profession of government which he saw, at least at the beginning of his first term, as “the swamp”.  He certainly values loyalty and ideological unity above it.  How else could one explain Hegseth and Gabbard ... Witkoff ... Kushner?  As best, they are signifiers of the shallowness and inconsistency of MAGA thinking.

Here is Paul Warburg lucidly explaining the new National Security Strategy’s intellectual failings.  He doesn’t venture into MAGA ideology.  Alas, there are no revelations about Donald Trump’s Cromwellian leanings, courtesy of Curtis whatsisname.  But the trespass of ideology on the ground of strategy is identified as the basic mistake of the confused people in the State Department who fashioned the new policy (which, if it survives reality for any extended period is going to have profoundly negative implications for the European world).

Paul is a geopolitical analyst associated with The Icarus Project.

Caolan Robertson, the young independent film-maker and campaigner for truth and justice in Ukraine, demonstrates the will and unity, courage and simple virtue of the people of the Donbas.  This is the real Ukraine, at war for the values of home, family, land.

UK Defence Journal has revealed that thousands of pro-Scottish independence commenters fell silent all at once and in the immediate aftermath of an Israeli strike on an Iranian cyber infrastructure:

On 12 June 2025, dozens of anonymous X (formerly Twitter) accounts advocating Scottish independence abruptly went silent. Many had posted hundreds of times per week, often using pro-independence slogans, anti-UK messaging, and identity cues like “NHS nurse” or “Glaswegian socialist.”

Their sudden disappearance coincided with a major Israeli airstrike campaign against Iranian military and cyber infrastructure. Within days, Iran had suffered severe power outages, fuel shortages, and an internet blackout affecting 95 percent of national connectivity.

... What emerges is a picture of a state actor, Tehran, deliberately using the Scottish independence issue to weaken its adversary by amplifying internal division.

... Iranian objectives

Iran’s strategy is asymmetric. Lacking the economic leverage or conventional military reach of its Western adversaries, it has turned to covert online influence as a low-cost, high-impact tool for shaping perceptions and political fault lines abroad. Within this broader playbook, the UK has long been a target. Tehran sees Britain as a historic antagonist associated with colonial exploitation and perceived meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. Weakening the UK’s internal cohesion fits into Iran’s strategic objectives, and Scottish independence provides a compelling wedge issue.

... The accounts were designed to be persuasive by appearing local, consistent, and emotionally resonant. Many used AI-generated profile pictures. Their language mimicked that of real users, and their timing matched major political news cycles. These tactics enabled what researchers call narrative laundering, where external influence is disguised within what appears to be organic public sentiment.

Professor Darren Linvill, one of the lead researchers on the project, said the goal was not necessarily to convince but to create the impression that support for independence was more widespread than it really was. “Anyone in sales will tell you the bandwagon fallacy is a powerful tool,” he said. This form of amplification does not have to shift public opinion directly to be effective. It simply reshapes the perceived size and momentum of a movement.

Real users frequently engaged with the network’s content. Tweets from these fake accounts received hundreds of thousands of retweets, likes, and comments. Many followers were unaware of the accounts’ origins. Over time, this helped create a feedback loop in which synthetic content was treated as legitimate, and fringe narratives gained disproportionate visibility.

Thread warfare is hardly something we are unaccustomed to ourselves, of course.  But we don’t have state sponsorship.  We have the intelligence community actively working against us, as well as the whole of the legal system and prison system should we err.  We know that part of that work involves disinfo activism from a specialist unit of the British Army.  It does feel, though, that the state is fighting a losing battle in trying to keep the lid on our political dissent.

As for Tehran, it will be back in business, no doubt - and it’s obviously not alone.  If it could mount such an effort how much greater in scale must be such activity from Moscow (which we can see daily), or China, India, and Pakistan (which we generally can’t)?  Israel too, of course.