From a russian soldier’s perspective this is like hearing that the warehouse you are wandering around in at night is full of angry grizzly bears.

Russian forces are reportedly struggling to advance in the Kupyansk direction reportedly due to Ukrainian forces’ drone density and Russian forces’ shortage of trained personnel and gasoline. A spokesperson for a Ukrainian brigade operating in the Kupyansk direction reported on July 22 that a high density of Ukrainian drone activity in the Kupyansk direction is preventing Russian forces from operating significant amounts of drones, including Lancet and Molniya-type strike drones.[42] The Ukrainian spokesperson reported that elements of Russian 347th Motorized Rifle Regiment (47th Tank Division, 68th Army Corps [AC], Eastern Military District [EMD]) operating in the Kupyansk direction are facing an acute fuel shortage, restricting their use of motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), and passenger vehicles. The spokesperson reported that Russian forces are unable to conduct active offensive operations because of a shortage of trained personnel.

…

Mashovets noted that the Russian military command has been actively reinforcing these CAAs, which are bringing artillery, mortars, and small groups of armored vehicles closer to the frontline, likely in preparation for further efforts toward Dobropillya.[57] Mashovets assessed that Russian forces likely aim to seize Dobropillya quickly in order to set the starting conditions for an offensive against Druzhkivka and free forces to support the Central Grouping of Forces as part of a potential Summer-Fall 2026 offensive against the Fortress Belt. Mashovets noted, however, that Russian forces may become stuck fighting toward and for Dobropillya, undermining the entire Russian effort against the Fortress Belt. Mashovets assessed that the Russian military command is assuming it will be able to use forces currently operating toward Dobropillya to support the Southern Grouping of Force’s effort against the Fortress Belt, but noted that if this assumption fails Russian forces advancing on the Fortress Belt from the south are likely to become even more bogged down than they already are in their current effort against Kostyantynivka.[58]

All you can hear is deep and low frequency metallic screeching and groaning sounds as the russian land war machine begins to buckle at midship and roll over onto its side, the deck quickly becoming a crazed angle for passengers…

Meanwhile, inside a corridor of the ship you think to yourself “Maybe coming to Crimea for a vacation was a bad idea?” as you begin to acclimate to walking along the near horizontal wall, but then bah! banish the negative thoughts! This is probably just a difficult transition period!

This connection to Ukraine is one I am making, not the writers of this but this is good reference material that helps highlight sympathetic patterns in the way the Ukraine War has evolved as well.

As russia is unable to bring artillery to bear because of drones and counter battery operations by Ukraine I think the situation will evolve in a way that has some salience with how once ISIS/ISIL transistioned to a traditional ground offensive in the mid 2010s they were punished heavily for it by coalition airpower used in support of ground forces.

This report focuses mostly on how the use of airpower was successful because it was integrated with actually motivated local forces… which yes of course… and let us take a moment here to reflect I doubt russian soldiers are motivated in such a way to defend their section of the front… but the part I am interested in is why this campaign was so much more successful at subduing ISIS/ISIL forces than fighting in the years before? The clue is in what the impact of the campaign was, which was to force ISIL/ISIS to stop concentrating its forces and go back to guerilla and terrorist operations that did not take and hold terrain.

From a military analysis perspective I would say that ISIS/ISIL forces mistook a dominant power at guerilla fighting with the ability to confidently concentrate forces and take and hold terrain. What happened next was a traditional ground offensive that was dismantled by motivated ground troops backed up by proficient use of airpower. The concentrating of forces that was necessary to take and hold terrain deepened their vulnerability to airpower to an existential degree.

This is relevant because while russia still has a lot of air defenses and aircraft, the size of russia along with the heavily attrited condition of its air defenses means that in many ways russian soldiers are beginning to be forced into fighting Ukrainian defenders without serious airpower or artillery to back them up. In this case we are mostly talking about drones and counter drone systems along with traditional anti-air systems, but also fighter jets and helicopters as well.

Russia’s massively overextended, logistically challenged land army is being harassed from the air basically through the entire extent of the theater of war and the friction that creates places the entire system into a state of brittlness where shocks can build and shatter the coherency of the system easily.

Yes the type of “airpower” is different but there are many similar patterns.

This chapter addresses air-ground coordination during the liberation of Iraqi and Syrian territory from ISIS control. Specifically, it focuses on the United States’ and its coalition partners’ use of airpower to provide CAS for troops in contact with enemy forces and to interdict ISIS forces flowing to the front lines. The chapter focuses on these missions (i.e., CAS and interdiction) in support of the close fight rather than addressing the deep fight, in which airpower was used to strike ISIS well behind the FLOT or to target ISIS’s financial resources (e.g., the Tidal Wave II strikes) and logistical networks. Those aspects of air operations are treated in Chapter Five. The role that ISR, DCA, and lift played in enabling airpower is treated in Chapter Six.

At the height of its advance, ISIS controlled territory roughly the size of Great Britain, encompassing dozens of population centers straddling Iraq and Syria. These population centers ranged from villages to Iraq’s second most populous city, Mosul, which had more than 1 million inhabitants prior to ISIS’s assault on it. The coalition military campaign to liberate this territory lasted roughly four and a half years, from late 2014 to early 2019 (see Figure 4.1). Over this period, the coalition conducted nearly 33,000 strikes at more than 100 locations in Iraq and Syria (see Figures 4.2a and 4.2b). Given the length of the campaign and the number of operations, it would be repetitive to cover all clearing operations in this report. Therefore, we focus our narrative on a smaller number of operations that are emblematic of important aspects of air-ground coordination or represent a strategic turning point in the campaign.

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In Phase I of the operation, the introduction of coalition airpower largely halted ISIS’s offensive that threatened to overrun Baghdad, Erbil, and Kobani. But ISIS swiftly learned the lessons of Kobani, and the organization became unwilling to mass forces and attack out of fear of coalition air strikes. ISIS’s only significant gains thereafter occurred when coalition aircraft could not or would not intervene because of bad weather and political constraints. Although this demonstrated the deterrent impact of coalition air strikes, ISIS’s brutality continued as the organization continued to terrorize Iraqi and Syrian citizens under its control and resist partner forces seeking to roll back its territory.

Deep-strike operations helped stress ISIS’s finances and hasten its demise but were ultimately peripheral to the overall strategy. Because eliminating ISIS’s protostate was paramount, territory was the key measure of success in Operation Inherent Resolve, which in turn meant that the close fight was prioritized over the deep fight. The partner-led strategy relegated the U.S. military and the coalition to a supporting role in the war, but, within that, airpower was the United States’ and the coalition’s primary contribution to combat operations.

It is also worth noting that the coalition’s Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish partners needed significant amounts of air support to seize territorial control from ISIS. They could not have defeated ISIS, certainly not in this time frame, without coalition airpower providing intelligence and precise fires. According to one U.S. Army assessment, coalition ground force partners “depend heavily on fires to disperse or attrite enemy forces prior to the seizure of terrain through maneuver,” which “required fire missions in such number as to increase the risk of error or collateral damage.”8

The difference with the above situation is that Ukrainian ground forces have already become proficient at clearing pockets of surrounded russian troops and retaking territory. There are still lessons to be warned here though about the fact that this military dominance at smashing enemy forces that concentrate in order to take and hold territory never translates into political change nor lasting victory by itself…

Ukraine downed a Russian Su-35 on July 8th using a three-aircraft F-16 ambush and a repositioned Patriot battery, exploiting a Russian intercept habit that had worked every time, until Ukraine built the entire trap around it. Russian military bloggers, including Fighterbomber, confirmed the loss and described it themselves: three aircraft plus a Patriot against one of theirs. Ukraine didn’t have to out-fly the Su-35. It just out-thought the pilot flying it.

…

“By the time the geometry of the fight stopped being what he thought it was, a missile was already seconds from impact. Russia lost its best air superiority fighter to a tactic built entirely out of russia’s own confidence. Ukraine didn’t need better hardware, it just needed to understand a decision cycle well enough to write the script a russian pilot would follow.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_xwKH1WxCU

“A large part of the success … doesn’t depend so much on the physical phenomenon itself, but rather on investment and communities that are well organized and see a benefit in this,” del Río said. “The successful cases happen precisely in those kinds of circumstances.”

link to open access paper https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2688-8319.70259

Peatlands in Europe have been used for hundreds of years in the form of low-intensity agriculture, forestry and peat cutting (Joosten et al., 2017). Many species characteristic of mires (i.e. intact, peat forming peatlands) evolved alongside low-intensity agricultural practices such as grazing and mowing which occurred without fertilization and with minimal to no drainage (Joosten et al., 2017; Silva-Monteiro et al., 2021). Because agriculture now dominates a large extent of the landscape, most birds that breed or winter in open habitats like peatlands now utilize agricultural fields at least partially, and thus many peatland species can also be broadly considered agricultural species (Newton, 2004).

Modern-day intensive agriculture and peatland drainage are contributing to a rapid decline amongst agricultural species (Rigal et al., 2023). In particular, the use of pesticides and fertilizers has been identified as the biggest cause of bird decline in Europe, which has been particularly impactful for insectivorous species (Donald et al., 2002; Rigal et al., 2023). Peatland drainage dries out the topsoil layer reducing prey accessibility, and clutch mortality of ground nesting birds has risen due to mowing during the breeding season (Newton, 2004; Silva-Monteiro et al., 2021). Herbicide use reduces seed production, plant diversity and therefore also arthropod diversity, reducing food availability for birds (Newton, 2004). The use of fertilizer, seeding and frequent mowing has changed grasslands from structurally and species diverse areas to fields dominated by dense, fast-growing species, with reduced tussock forming species that provide structure for ground nesting bird species (Newton, 2004; Vickery et al., 2001). At a landscape level, a shift to monocultures has resulted in the decline of species that rely on a mix of habitat to provide multiple food sources (Newton, 2004).

Solar parks have emerged as a new form of land use and studies have shown mixed results, including reduced species richness compared to grazed grassland (Visser et al., 2019), and greater species richness compared to arable farmland (Copping et al., 2025), or compared to both arable farmland and grassland (Jarčuška et al., 2024; Montag et al., 2016). The response of birds to the solar park may depend on site management, such as whether parks are designed with biodiversity in mind, for example by including hedges, wildflower meadows, etc. (Copping et al., 2025). Studies have demonstrated that solar parks can provide habitat for species in an otherwise homogenous and habitat-depleted landscape, such as those dominated by high-intensity agriculture (Copping et al., 2025).

In this study, we assessed the species diversity of birds using bioacoustics. A space-for-time substitution was used, and therefore, one solar park site was compared with two adjacent intensively managed grassland sites on drained peat soil, which are representative of the former land use.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/65614

“Yet again, the Trump administration has sold out our endangered wildlife to the highest bidder,” said one biodiversity advocate after the US Department of Interior, in a Friday news dump, issued two new policy changes that would weaken the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and make it easier for corporate polluters to prioritize their own bottom lines over habitat protection. The US Fish and…

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Since its founding in 2014, Cain has focused primarily on high-end real estate investments in major global cities, alongside a private equity business geared towards lifestyle, hospitality and entertainment brands. 

The firm manages around $14bn of assets worldwide, with flagship developments including luxury hotels in Dubai and One Beverly Hills, a multi-billion-dollar, 17.5-acre scheme centred on the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles.

Tel Aviv-based Menora Mivtachim is one of Israel’s largest and longest-established insurance and financial services groups, managing the retirement savings, insurance reserves and investments of around two million customers. 

According to the research centre Who Profits, Menora Mivtachim is a significant investor in Israeli military infrastructure projects in the Negev desert through public-private partnership deals.

These include the vast “City of Training Bases”, built to accommodate around 10,000 permanent military personnel, and Kiryat HaModi’in, a massive intelligence and cyber campus for the Israeli military’s intelligence units.

Menora Mivtachim has a substantial shareholding in Shikun and Binui, a construction company with significant involvement in settlement and occupation infrastructure in the West Bank, and is a major shareholder in G1 Secure Solutions, one of Israel’s largest private security and electronic-surveillance companies.

Khushalsar and Gilsar are living examples. When we started Mission Ehsaas, many people laughed at us. They said, ‘We’ve seen these things before. You will take your money and disappear.’ I told them only one thing: Give me a week and don’t disturb me. Let our work speak.’

Within days, we managed to reopen part of the blocked navigation channel. People began to notice that something was actually changing. Slowly, they started believing and joining us. Over the next 100 days, nearly 1,000 truckloads of waste and muck were removed. Water that had remained stagnant for decades started flowing again.

That is the power of community participation. When people, stakeholders and the administration come together, anything and everything is possible.