Friday Evening Roundup, 5/30/25

Let’s begin with the military situation in Ukraine. There’s been a lot of speculation about an imminent major offensive by Russia. Here are some indicators of what may be planned. Regarding the first part regarding Chinese drones, I was listening to Chas Freeman who says that the Chinese are leery about alliances in general as a matter of geopolitical principle.

Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW

Y'know how I constantly talk about how the Chinese are arming both sides in Ukraine and nobody really believes me? Welp. Also looks like the Chinese may be moving to butter up the Russians now that they're set to win without their rather dubious assistance.

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Gabe @GabeZZOZZ

China is on the right side of history.

6:40 PM · May 29, 2025

Zlatti71 @Zlatti_71

 Ukrainian monitoring resources, based on Western intelligence, have calculated that the Russian army has transferred 40 TU-22M strategic bombers to the Olenya airbase and, allegedly, 20% of the available Tu-95 MS

It is reported that an Il-76 transport aircraft has arrived at the Engels-2 airbase again - this is the eighth flight in the last four days. Such activity has not been observed for three years, enemy sources note.

Ukrainian experts and journalists suggest that the Russian Federation may be increasing its stock of missiles for strategic aviation, preparing for massive attacks.

Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW

A "big" strike in this war is ten bombers and around 40 missiles.

The Russians have now stacked up more than fifty at Olenya in Murmansk, including a huge number of Tu-22Ms - which have not been commonly seen running strikes into Ukraine.

We shall have to see how this develops.

In other words, if true, this looks like a clear indication for a major ramping up of the air war by Russia. These two strategic bombers are missile launch platforms, and the IL-76s are undoubtedly transferring the missiles that will be used.

But what is the ground strategy?

-- GEROMAN -- time will tell -  -- @GeromanAT

Sumy front is expanding very fast.

Next chain of settlements are under attack as we speak.

Front is now around 25km long and so almost doubled in just a few days.

Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW

The Russians may have come to the conclusion - and it's quite logical - that the best way to bring about a Ukrainian military collapse without the risks of a massed offensive is to simply broaden the active front as much as possible and squeeze until it pops.

This, too, could explain the large buildups in different locations that we’re seeing reported. It doesn’t have to signify big arrow offensives as such—just big pressure.

I’d like to paste in the entire long thread on the shambles of the US shipbuilding industry, but I’ll just do an excerpt:

Fascinating explanation of how the US destroyed its shipping and shipbuilding capacity, and handed it foreign competitors—with disastrous national security consequences.

Before WWI the United States had a small shipping industry and relatively little shipbuilding capacity. It had been squeezed out by European shipping cartels and their discriminatory practices. The US also neglected shipbuilding even as European nations were subsidising it.

But when WWI broke out, European countries redirected their shipping capacity to the war effort, leaving the US snookered: it did not even have the capacity to build its own replacements. "The domestic economy went into recession as goods piled up on the docks and imports stopped arriving."

The US government made significant investments to remedy the shipbuilding situation. The results of this were spectacular. By WWII (during which it built 5,500 ships), a whole Liberty class cargo ship could be built in as little as four days in US shipyards.

After the war, the US Congress also set about imposing firm but rational regulation on shipping, enforcing fair competition (by methods such as preventing underhand price discrimination) while ensuring US carriers were simultaneously protected and operating in the public interest.

During the 1980s, all this was torn up as free market ideology swept the US Capitol. [= libertarian ideology]

What happened? Ruinous competition led to the re-formation of cartels. Cheaper foreign companies bought up US shippers who had to pay their American mariners a living wage. Meanwhile, the laissez-faire attitude to shipbuilding came just as Asian nations were starting to subsidise it.

The result: the US has now returned to where it was pre-1914: reliant on foreign shipping companies for its trade; lacking surge shipbuilding capacity in case of emergency.

…

Obviously it means all US trade exists at the pleasure of foreign owned shippers. 90% of the US's containerised shipping trade is controlled by three foreign cartels.

To give a taster of what this means, during the pandemic, these cartels increased their fees by as much as 1,000%, making $190 billion in windfall profits. They also left American agricultural produce to rot on the docks in preference for more profitable Chinese goods.

Moving on.

During the Russia Hoax days I made a lot about the importance of Nellie Ohr. This is now becoming an issue again. Regarding what you’ll be reading below about how the FBI hid the evidence about here major role in the Russia Hoax, I want to make three points. First, please note the good work done by FBI personnel in analyzing the data and connecting the dots. Second, it is abundantly clear that the decision to hide the evidence was made by a handful of higher ups—managers, not investigators or analysts. Third, there should be a digital record of who authorized the designation of incriminating “serials”, documents, as “Restricted Access.” Those are the people to squeeze to learn the dimensions of the coverup and the identities of those who perpetrated it.

New Docs Reveal How FBI Insiders Buried Evidence Of Spygate Crimes

…

It’s long been suspected that former British intelligence agent turned Clinton operative Christopher Steele’s role wasn’t to generate the dossier’s content himself but to act as a cutout, lending British intelligence credibility to stories manufactured by Fusion GPS operatives and Clinton campaign affiliates. That part of the operation was wildly successful. To this day, many still believe it was Steele who wrote the dossier’s stories, when in reality, he was just the frontman.

But Steele’s role as a cutout, along with other details—such as Steele’s meetings with former MI6 head Richard Dearlove—confirm British intelligence’s role in the Russia Hoax.

The FBI analysis also reviewed emails of Trump-Russia material sent directly by Ohr to DOJ prosecutors, including individuals she never disclosed to Congress. Further, while under oath, Ohr claimed to have had no knowledge of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, insisting that her work for Fusion just happened to align with it. Those claims were also false. In reality, she was deeply embedded in the FBI-DOJ pipeline. Far from a passive researcher, she functioned as a conduit between Clinton-funded smear artists and federal law enforcement.

The FBI discovered that she deleted emails, met multiple times with Steele, and lied to Congress about when she took ham radio classes. In truth, she became familiar with ham radio concurrently while working on the Russia collusion hoax, likely as a way to evade digital surveillance. Additionally, she was involved in the so-called Alfa Bank dossier, a fraudulent document pushed to the FBI by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann in an attempt to spark yet another investigation into Trump. In short, Nellie Ohr was no low-level researcher. She was a central player and a key conduit linking the FBI, DOJ, and Clinton operatives driving the smear campaign.

Wouldn’t you like to know with whom she was communicating by ham radio. That’s a rather extraordinary measure, given the time expended in training her—and whoever received her messages. My guess? Members of either CIA or British intel. That gives some idea of the enormity of this plot.

But as bad as all that is, the bigger scandal may be how the FBI handled this information. Instead of referring her for prosecution, they buried the evidence. The FBI analysis of Ohr’s lies was hidden and is only coming to light now, six years later, conveniently after the five-year statute of limitations for lying to Congress expired. Perhaps even worse, the report exposes the FBI’s “black hole” system, where sensitive documents are dumped into “prohibited files” that remain unsearchable, even by other agents. This systemic opacity was repeatedly flagged by the very analyst who wrote the FBI’s report on Nellie Ohr:

“‘Prohibited Access’ status precludes investigators from detecting the existence of potentially relevant serials (…) when search terms that exist in the Prohibited Access–status cases are searched in Sentinel, the particular search will receive a false-negative Sentinel search response.”

In other words, there’s likely far more that remains hidden to this day, or “unknown unknowns,” as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it. One critical question is whether Inspector General Michael Horowitz or Special Counsel John Durham ever had access to the FBI’s black hole system. The answer is that they probably did not.

…

In the end, it’s the same story: Nellie Ohr was caught, repeatedly and provably, lying to Congress. But instead of facing justice, she was protected. Like everyone else who pushed the Russia collusion lies, and the list is long, she walks away scot-free.

There’s lots more good stuff at the link.