Ukraine Drones Reach All the Way to the Caspian Sea to Destroy Two Sanctioned Russian Ships Delivering Iranian Military Equipment to Russia

There's a lot of whining from the Russians and Iranians and the hard left, but the rules are clear, ships transporting arms and military gear are fair targets in war.

And Russia is meanwhile sinking Ukranian ships delivering grain to foreign buyers. So, fair is fair.

Ukraine struck an Iranian cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea, claiming it was transporting drone and missile components to Russia, marking the first direct military link between the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

Well... it is also reported that Russia is providing Iran with the targeting data it uses to hit our bases with missiles, including the deadly attack on a base in Jordan a couple of weeks ago.

Iran vowed retaliation, accusing Kyiv of violating international law, while Ukraine defended the strike as part of its campaign to disrupt Russia's military supply chains and its partnership with Tehran.

The attack carries broader geopolitical implications, potentially deepening coordination between Russia and Iran while signaling closer strategic alignment between Ukraine and the U.S. amid the expanding regional conflict.

...

While details of the July 25 incident are murky, Ukraine's intelligence agency the SBU said its drones hit an oil platform in the Caspian Sea along with a Russian missile boat and "cargo ships that are under international sanctions."

President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday announced that Ukrainian forces had achieved "very good results" in long-range strikes in the Caspian Sea, including against vessels used to transport military cargo linked to Iran.

As you probably know, Ukraine has been sinking Russian military and sanctioned cargo ships throughout the Black Sea, despite having no navy. They use drones, both flying and water-borne.

They're intensifying the war against the Russian economy and military supply lines, blowing up oil refineries so that oil-rich Russia actually has a fuel crisis. And they're also hitting the factories of Russia's mega-store Wildberries, called Russia's Amazon.

Wildberries itself might go bankrupt from having $4 billion of the stock stored at its warehouses destroyed. The company itself is worth only $9 billion.

Russian banks are limiting customers from withdrawing their money and oligarchs are warning that a bank crisis is coming. A Wildberries bankruptcy might collapse the whole system.

The war is going very badly for Russia. It turns out their vaunted army was third-or-fourth rate. Their equipment just doesn't work well and sometimes doesn't work at all. This is due to Russia's relative poverty and backwardness and probably also due to governmental corruption.

The CIA director estimates that the average life expectancy of a Russian soldier at the Ukraine front is... thirty minutes.

The war is extremely unpopular in Russia. So unpopular that Putin has flinched from using Russia's big advantage, its huge population advantage. So far, Russia is mostly using ethnic minorities from the peripheral states it dominates as well as prisoners and the sick. He pays people an $80,000 signing bonus -- and that's dollars, not rubles -- which is a huge amount of money in Russia.

He does not want to draft ethnic Russians, especially those living in the cities and the middle or intellectual classes.

But with a 30 minute life expectancy, it's getting harder and harder to field men for Putin's "three day Special Military Operation."

Reports say that after the elections, when he feels his power is safe and he won't have to face the public for another couple of years, he will in fact order a big draft to bring 500,000 fresh draftees into the army.

That might be enough to finally break Ukraine... or it might wind up breaking Putin. Russia does have a tendency towards coups, especially during unpopular wars.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:43 PM

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