🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡️For the first time in war, FAB-3000 was used. Liptsy, Khrakov region.

🇷🇴Romanian President Iohannis has withdrawn his candidacy for the post of NATO Secretary General, Digi24 TV channel reports.

🇷🇺🇺🇦 The Russian Aerospace Forces daily strike with gliding bombs from the UMPC against the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the Vremevsky sector of the front.

🇺🇸 🇷🇺 Niall Ferguson: We’re All Soviets Now

⬛️ A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?

🔶️ I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets.

🔶️ A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5% of GDP for the foreseeable future.

🔶️ The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”

🔶️ We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear.

🔶️ The share of GDP going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3% of GDP this year to a projected 2.3% in 30 years’ time.

🔶️ Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership.

🔶️ Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. To reread Russians’ complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present.

🔶️ The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase "deaths of despair" for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia.

🔶️ Like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.

🔶️ As in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.

🔶️ A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot ? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid.

https://www.thefp.com/p/were-all-soviets-now

🇷🇺🇺🇦Kharkov direction.

In the area of ​​the village of Khotomlya, east of Kharkov, the UAV crew detected the position and launch of the M142 "HIMARS" MLRS of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Having carried out the installation to the temporary base area, a strike was carried out using the Iskander tactical missile system.

🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡️Kiev’s attempts to squeeze the Russian Armed Forces out from near Kharkov at any cost will cost it dearly

— Putin

🇷🇺🇺🇦FPV drone attacks on Ukrainian equipment and infantry at night.

🇱🇧🇮🇱 The first footage of Hezbollah using an attack FPV drone on a target on the Israeli-Lebanese border. In this episode, the anti-aircraft system for combating drones Drone Dome came under attack in area of ​​the city of Metula.

The video also shows the moment of the destruction of reconnaissance equipment located on the tower using an anti-tank missile system.

🇷🇺🇺🇦In Crimea, agents of the State Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine received sentences for preparing terrorist attacks and sabotage on the territory of the peninsula and attempting to assassinate senior officials.

The GUR intelligence group included both Russian citizens and Ukrainians: Viktor Podvalny, Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Krivoshein, Konstantin Evmenenko, Igor Zorin, Sergei Voinarovsky and Kirill Barannik.

🇧🇾❗️A sudden check of the readiness of formations and military units of the Armed Forces began in Belarus

Military units and units of operational commands, special operations forces, missile forces and artillery, air force and air defense forces are involved in the inspection.

🇰🇷🇷🇺The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea summoned the Russian Ambassador in Seoul Georgy Zinoviev and expressed his protest to him in connection with the conclusion of the agreement on a comprehensive strategic partnership between Russia and the DPRK - Yonhap Agency

🇷🇺The main statements from Sergei Lavrov following the meeting of the CSTO Council of Foreign Ministers:

— Putin’s peace initiative on June 14 became Russia’s fourth proposal for a settlement around Ukraine;

— All countries of the continent should participate in discussions about a new Eurasian security without outside interference;

— The heads of the CSTO Foreign Ministry agreed to work on the formation of a new Eurasian security architecture;

— The conflict unleashed by the West in Ukraine poses a very serious threat to the CSTO;

— The West wants to privatize security issues in the Eurasian space and destroy the existing structures there;

— Threats to Eurasian security come mainly from NATO;

— The Russian Federation invited the CSTO Secretary General to speak at a meeting in the UN Security Council on July 19 on the topic of cooperation between the CSTO and the SCO.

🇷🇺🇺🇦 The Ukrainian Kozak-2M1 armored car, produced by the Kiev company NPO Praktika, was destroyed in the Zaporozhye direction.

🇧🇦🇲🇪⚡️Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and other neighboring countries are almost completely without power due to a fire on a power line, local publication Avaz reports.

The publication writes “about the failure of the entire electrical power system,” which is why hydro and thermal power plants cannot operate.

In chats, people write that the water has disappeared, and the Internet is working intermittently.

🇷🇺🇺🇦 And here is a video from the enemy, filmed near the place where the first FAB-3000 from the UMPC arrived.