DeepState – Russian troops have made significant advances in the Toretsk direction and entered New York
The Russian Armed Forces have achieved success on the northern flank of the Avdeevka operational area, while their offensive on the southern flank has been stopped
In the north of the Kharkiv region, the Ukrainian Armed Forces managed to disrupt the enemy’s logistics and recapture some of the positions in Glubokoe
It has been reliably established that the Okhmatdit Children’s Hospital in Kyiv was hit by a Russian Kh-101 missile on July 8
In June, the Russian Aerospace Forces launched over 2,300 glide bombs at Ukrainian territory
The Economist — the total losses of killed and wounded on the Russian side in the war amount to between 462,000 and 728,000 people
NATO countries have secured a commitment to provide Ukraine with €40 billion in military aid in 2025
Investigative journalists have found that the EU’s actual artillery ammunition production capacity is at least half that stated
The situation at the front
According to DeepState , Russian troops have been advancing in the Torets direction for almost the entire week . In particular, they managed to enter New York ( Novgorodskoye in 1951–2021 ) and reach the center of the village. The Russian Defense Ministry, in turn, reported the capture of the village of Chigari , which is actually the southern outskirts of Pivnichnoye , located to the north .
Cutting-edge technologies in the Russian-Ukrainian war are bizarrely mixed with century-old inventions: FPV drones on Starlink with thermal imagers drop shells from the 1950s or ram other drones with a tethered stick, “maize” drones from the First World War shoot down drones with machine guns or turn into unmanned drones themselves, and a wide variety of transport, from horse-drawn carts to unicycles, scurry behind the front line. Russians are going into assault attacks on motorcycles (which they didn’t do even in the Second World War), and the sky is protected by century-old Maxim machine guns with thermal imagers. The Insider tells how the co-evolution of modern technology and century-old equipment has turned the battlefield into a Mad Max sequel.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, standing alongside top officials in New York on Friday, underscored the essential need to bolster the UN agency assisting Palestine refugees (UNRWA) across the Middle East amid continued attacks on its mandate, staff, premises and operations.
Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraq-based Iranian proxy militia, threatened Saudi Arabia in a statement on July 13 for enabling the “the battle against the Palestinians.” Following previous threats to Riyadh, the group criticized via Telegram the “malicious role of Saudi Arabia’s rulers in harnessing their land routes to perpetuate the momentum of the battle against the Palestinians.”
Who Disbanded Iraq’s Army and De-Baathified Its Bureaucracy?
The history of Iraq was already being rewritten by L. Paul Bremer on his flight into Baghdad. It was May 2003, and Bremer, an experienced former ambassador and bureaucratic player—he’d served as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s chief of staff—was just weeks into his new role as presidential envoy to the freshly liberated country. After a flurry of briefings in Washington and a final Oval Office meeting with President George W. Bush, “Jerry,” as everyone called Bremer, had flown into Qatar and on to Kuwait and then Iraq. Bremer’s diplomatic career had taken him to most Middle Eastern capitals, but this was the first time he’d ever seen Baghdad. He had spent the previous two weeks trying to learn as much as he could about the country he would now rule.
From EU aspirations to political turmoil Georgia’s relations with the West have seen better days. The country has recently found itself embroiled in controversy and diplomatic tensions, stemming from the passage of a controversial “foreign influence” law. This law has had far-reaching consequences, including the suspension of Georgia’s EU membership bid and the annulment of Western financial aid and military drills.
Political challenges among NATO members, the spectre of a second Trump presidency, and a bleaker military situation in Ukraine – compared to the expectations at the 2023 Vilnius Summit for the Ukrainian counteroffensive – made Washington feel like a ‘pre-storm summit’.
In recent days, widespread protests have erupted across many Turkish-controlled towns and cities in the countryside to the north of Aleppo and around Idlib. Some protests have escalated into violence, as clashes have broken out between local armed groups and Turkish forces, resulting in multiple casualties among both protesters and Turkish soldiers. The unrest followed racist attacks against Syrians that started in the Turkish city of Kayseri on June 30, destroying several Syrians’ properties.
At a time when there is widespread anxiety around the world about the fate of democracy but not enough debate on the future of autocracy, Turkey presents an interesting case for scholars and policy-makers. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spent two decades in power taking steps to build his neman rule. 2023 was the year when many thought it would finally come to an end. The government’s poor response to the devastating earthquake in February 2023 and Turkey’s mounting economic problems strengthened popular discontent with Erdoğan’s rule. Yet he still managed to win another term as president in the May 2023 elections thanks to the disarray among the six-party opposition coalition and its uninspiring candidate.
An incident in the central Anatolian city of Kayseri last week sparked a wave of anti-Syrian attacks across Turkey, just as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s normalisation efforts with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reach a pivotal point.
