Today's Belle

Not that MAGA will even notice.

Ukraine

Today's Belle

There's nothing there, and the only one who doesn't know that is Trump.

BTW - Trump is now 201 days behind schedule on that whole "end the war in 24 hours with one phone call" thing.

Today's TweeXt

Freeonis is our national treasure https://t.co/2sh9Yz6SfK

— Kate from Kharkiv (@BohuslavskaKate) July 27, 2025

A Revoltin' Development

Maybe Xi sent them to Ukraine to observe the Russians, and learn how not to fight a 21st-century war.

But China has a lot more guys to waste, so maybe they're just looking at how the Russians are doing it, and that way they can boost their estimates as to the number of wasteable people they'll need to storm the beaches of Taiwan.

China is sending soldiers to Ukraine to prepare for a Taiwan invasion

A former Western intelligence official told Reuters that approximately 200 Chinese soldiers are fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Two current U.S. officials, speaking anonymously, confirm that there are more than a hundred of them.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky put the number at 155. His forces have recently captured two of them.

Reuters reports that the U.S. government believes these soldiers are mercenaries and apparently have no “direct link” with the Chinese government. Whether this view is correct or not, Washington and other governments should impose severe costs upon China for permitting its nationals to enter the battle against Ukraine.

As an initial matter, China’s regime is in fact sending soldiers to that Eastern European country. Reuters reports that “Chinese military officers have, with Beijing’s approval, been touring close to Russia’s frontlines to draw lessons and tactics from the war.” The former Western intelligence official told the news service that these officers “are absolutely there under approval.”

“The Communist Party craves first-hand experience of the battlefield in Ukraine to inform its People’s Liberation Army for its future wars,” Richard Fisher of the Washington, D.C. area-based International Assessment and Strategy Center told me late last week. “For the PLA, the Ukraine battlefield offers the most livid and brutal evolution of the revolutionary and see-saw battle between unmanned weapons and electronic warfare defenses arrayed against them.”

“If the PLA can grasp and expand on the lessons of the Ukraine battlefield, it can vastly increase its chances of a rapid blitzkrieg victory in Taiwan,” says Fisher.

It is also likely that the Chinese officers are doing more than observing and reporting back to China. They may also be giving advice to their Russian counterparts. China, after all, has been backing Russia’s war effort from the beginning.

China almost certainly greenlighted the invasion with its 5,300-word joint statement issued by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Beijing on Feb. 4, 2022, just 20 days before the Russian attack. Putin might have invaded earlier, but he evidently acceded to Chinese wishes and waited until after the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics to hit the former Soviet republic.

China has during the war supported Putin almost across the board. For instance, Beijing has purchased Russian oil sanctioned by the United Kingdom, U.S. and the European Union, opened its financial and banking systems to Russia’s institutions under sanction, provided military intelligence and diplomatic and propaganda support and sold both dual-use items and, according to some sources, weapons.

Given Beijing’s support to both Moscow and Pyongyang, it is unlikely that North Korea could have joined the war on Russia’s side without China’s approval.

With regard to the mercenaries, Beijing probably both knew and approved of their participation in the war.

“It is unlikely that these soldiers would have been permitted to travel to Russia without the full consent of the Xi regime,” Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank told me.

“Xi runs a near-total surveillance state and pays special attention to the interactions of its nationals with close partners such as Russia,” Burton, also a former Canadian diplomat stationed in Beijing, said. “A couple hundred military-age Chinese men leaving the country to fight in a foreign war is certainly something Beijing would know about.”

There are, for instance, bound to be Ministry of State Security agents monitoring visa applications for Russia.

The presence of Chinese soldiers in Ukraine is reminiscent of the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” who went to fight United Nations troops in North Korea beginning in 1950.

“China sending in an initial small cohort to join the Russians is consistent with Chinese Communist strategy to initially create plausible deniability and then a veneer of legitimacy for a gradual build-up of those at the front lines,” says Burton. “This will almost certainly be accompanied by the gradual introduction of sophisticated Chinese offensive weaponry,” he added.

Burton is also concerned that Russia, indebted to China because of the support in Ukraine, will not be able to say no when China demands that Moscow send forces to help it invade Taiwan or another neighbor.

The Chinese and Russian militaries regularly hold joint drills in East Asia. Therefore, the Pentagon should assume that these two powers, along with North Korea, will fight together during the next war. 

So China probably sees great advantage in Chinese troops, even if just mercenaries, fighting in Ukraine.  

The U.S. and other countries have imposed almost no costs on China for its extensive support for the Russian war effort. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, send soldiers to fight in Europe. 

History Lesson

I was an on-again-off-again fan of John McCain. There was always something likeable about him, even though he was pretty much a total nepo-baby fuckup until he spent 5 years as a POW in North Vietnam.

He was the logical heir to Barry Goldwater (also on-again-off-again for me), but McCain seemed less like a Bomb-'Em-First-And-To-Hell-With-Asking-Questions kinda guy - way less than Goldwater anyway. For a while, you could count on the guy to go with his intellect and not his emotions.

That began to change as MAGA made inroads, and he began to feel forced to go along with it.

We'll forever have to wonder about 'what if' McCain had still been around to keep guys like Lindsey Graham on the right side of things.

Long sad late night bull sessions are waiting to be had by the PoliSci majors of the future.

From 10 years ago:

John McCain's prophetic words spoken 10 years ago...but nobody listened.
byu/yaponetsa inukraine

Today's Belle

Russia signed on to the Budapest Agreement in the early 90s, promising to assure Ukraine's security.

Russia signed on to Article 147 of the Geneva Conventions - the part that makes it a war crime to attack civilians and civilian infrastructure. 

Ukraine

🇫🇷 Marine Le Pen, the unofficial leader of France’s right-wing populist party National Rally, condemned the White House’s decision to freeze military aid to Ukraine.

“In my opinion, the brutality of this decision deserves condemnation. It is a very cruel move against the Ukrainian soldiers who are patriotically defending their country,” she stated.

A Day

Irish-born Eileen Keenan prepares to celebrate the death of a tyrant, March 5th, 1953 in Washington DC.

And try not to worry too much, Ukrainians. You'll have good reason to celebrate again.

Слава Україні

Свобода знаходить шлях

🇺🇸❤️🇺🇦

Your Lunchtime AI

via JR Colo - FB

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fibby McFibFace (@fibbymcfibface)

And Now Putin Knows

I love this guy.

Слава Україні

Свобода знаходить шлях

🇺🇸❤️🇺🇦

@cnn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about recent talks with US President Donald Trump regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin. #cnn #news ♬ original sound - CNN

A Poem

A Rider at the Oval

--Eduardo Montes-Bradley

 

A stranger rode into the hall of power,

a weary traveler from a battered land.

He came not to beg, but to stand,

bearing the weight of his people's sorrow.

Yet cruelty met him at the door,

words like stones, cold and sharp,

not from foes upon the battlefield,

but from hands once outstretched in promise.

 

Oh, how the world watches in silence,

as dignity is trampled by arrogance.

But the rider will ride on,

for his people still stand.

And history will remember—

not the cruelty, not the insult,

but the unbroken spirit

of those who will not kneel.

The Mugging

Trump and Vance are too afraid to set foot in Ukraine because they're both cowards. And it's easier for the coward to bully everybody around him into doing what he wants, than it is for him to step up and lead from the front.

Professor Tim Wilson

What The Blue-Eyed Buck-Naked Fuck Is This Shit

Today's WTF

FWIW:

1. Ukraine owes me nothing
2. Trump and Vance can tie the whole thing to a cinder block and shove it up their ass
3. Not sorry not sorry, but I hate these fuckin' people

Ukraine

Look at this place.

                                 

What kind of a fuckin' jerk would

wanna drop bombs on a place like this?

                                                                     

ICYMI

The US (via Ambassador Elise Stefanik) has voted against a UN resolution saying Russia started the shit in Ukraine.

We are now pretty much fully aligned with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

Does this really feel like we're headed in the right direction?

Today's Reddit

Basically: "It was all NATO's fault."

Trump says Ukraine “can forget about joining Nato” and claims Nato is “the reason the whole thing started”
byu/1DarkStarryNight inukraine

He Can't

Trump makes it up, and internalizes it to the point where he's going to swallow his foot no matter what.

It's like he doesn't know it's not true, or he doesn't know that he can't just blurt it out in front of somebody who's going to call him on it.

Or maybe, he's so far gone that he believes he can say anything he wants, and everybody either has to accept it as gospel, or keep their mouths shut and do whatever they have to do to make it so.

It's just too fuckin' bizarre with this guy.

Watch his face when Macron calls bullshit.

Macron has to interrupt Trump and correct a lie about Europe’s contribution to the Ukraine War
byu/ExactlySorta inPublicFreakout

Ukraine Is The Key

Help Ukraine beat Putin

Which weakens Iran

Which weakens Hamas and the Houthis

Which removes a fair part of Netanyahu's rationale for holding power

Which eases tensions across the board in the middle east

All of which tells Xi he'd better watch his ass.