"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

And it is just (or even mostly) the actions in Ukraine. People are trying to figure out if he or his plane were deployed to Syria.

What part of "Russia helps Israel fight Syria" is unclear?

On a cheaper but likely accurate level, Israel doesn't want the world spotting the hypocrisy in letting it defend territory it claims is "in dispute" just because it managed to put a few homesteads where Palestinians exist.

"I'm Pickle Rick, muthafuckas!!"

There's also a significant population of Ukrainian Jews in Israel, some of whom probably have relatives still living in the area.

Speculation is that it's related to the Ukrainians taking out a Russian convoy in Kharkiv, about 40 clicks away. (That's 25 Freedom Units, BTW.) Given that folks heard the prick blow up the AT&T building in Nashvegas from several miles away, that seems plausible to me.

That 1980s aesthetic would make a great setting for a Cold War epic.

First, that tweet was misleading (see post 1133). Second, to whatever extent it was true, that was about ad money (cut off by sanctions) and social media influence operations (not carried out over Starlink), not state media outlets. Third, censoring it is valuable only for precedent value to the government asking for it (which isn’t even Ukraine, where there might be a legitimate interest in preventing Russia from getting another covert info channel into the country). Starlink is not available in Russia at all, so blocking RT et al. doesn’t even put a pebble in front of the avalanche of lies from the Kremlin to the Russian people. Every country Starlink is available has other excellent internet access options in the main (except Ukraine, who isn’t asking for this), so it wouldn’t “protect” more than a handful of people (and those have other satellite internet provider options who won’t be censoring, plus VPNs). Fourth, just in case it’s unclear, Starlink doesn’t make any money from this, nor does Russian state media, contra satellite TV, because Starlink isn’t that. This isn’t like DirecTV dropping (or not dropping) RT. Elon Musk’s defense of it is sloppy, but the action isn’t wrong.

Interesting read.

Most likely but it's also possible that it's some sort of backdoor diplomacy.

Russia is jamming Starlink in Ukraine. Why shouldn’t they try to break through that?

"Ukrainian" missile.

This story's from 2017, BTW.

I've said it before, but its always boggled my mind how cheap politician's souls are.
You'd think it would take tens of billions.
Nope, just six zeroes, and they're your slave.
It's a piss-hole in the snowbank in the grand scheme, when you really think about it.

Transformers Prime: S1 Optimus vs S3 Optimus. "Sir, you are looking... rowanbust".

TIL that the deepest subway station in the world is in Kyiv.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenalna_(Kyiv_Metro)

Long but good read:

I’m not sure that in light of Russia’s military actions it matters but if any Ukrainians were on the fence about integrating with the West/joining the EU experiencing first hand how well other former Eastern Bloc states are doing definitely put that to rest.