Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Soldiers preparing to launch drones at targets in Russia from an undisclosed location in Ukraine last month.Credit. Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times Midrange attacks, using upgraded drones that Ukraine produces in huge numbers, are causing fuel shortages and complicating troop rotations. By Marc Santora, The New York Times Reporting from Dnipro, Kyiv and eastern Ukraine Published June 10, 2026 Updated June 16, 2026   [JB: republished June 18] article contains links First Ukraine assembled an arsenal of millions of drones that, along with Russia’s own buildup, turned a 25-mile-wide strip along the front line into a killing ground. Then Kyiv expanded its reach deep into the Russian heartland as it targeted oil infrastructure and military factories, making long-range violence in the war a two-way street. Now, Ukraine is focusing on the middle ground — the critical roads and railways, in some cases more than 100 miles from the front, that feed Russian troops and matériel in...

The attack, which shut down the capital’s airports for several hours, appeared to be the biggest wave of strikes on the city since the start of the war.   The scene over the area of an oil refinery on the outskirts of Moscow on Thursday. Credit... via Reuters By Paul Sonne and Nataliya Vasilyeva Paul Sonne reported from Berlin. June 18, 2026 Updated 8:34 a.m. ET original article contains links as well as an image,  "Damage in Moscow after Ukrainian drone strikes" Black smoke from a burning oil refinery filled the Moscow sky. The city’s four airports were urgently closed. And part of the busy highway that rings the Russian capital, a metropolis of 13 million people, was shut down. As Ukraine escalated its effort to bring the war home for Russians, the strikes on Thursday appeared to be the largest drone attack on the Russian capital since President Vladimir V. Putin launched the war more than four years ago. No deaths were immediately reported. But the large-scale assault see...

  Quora Digest Dima Vorobiev  ·  Follow Former Propaganda Executive at Russia What reason had Nikita Khrushchev, in 1954, to give Crimea to Ukraine? In 1954, we celebrated a 300 anniversary of the “re-unification of Ukraine and Russia”. Soviet rulers decided to make it the largest nationwide celebration after the death of Stalin. Which they did. Celebration They unveiled one of the Stalin’s sky scrapers that became a major upscale hotel and gave it the name Hotel Ukraina . In the vicinity of the edifice, they also gave “Ukrainian” names to a couple of major streets and raised a monument to a Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko (whom our Nobel-prize taker in literature Joseph Brodsky considered second-rate, at best). A richly ornamented palace-like subway station was called “ Kiyevskaya ” in a reference to the Ukrainian capital. And Crimea was transferred from Russia to Ukraine. Between brothers Amazingly, no one in 1954 held the view that the entire Russia nowaday...