Peter Kruit

Research, strategy & history

[Peter Kruit @Peter_Kruit]

@Zosoei1 @ThaiEnquirer If you want respect, give respect first. Commanding fellow travelers to shut it is disrespectful when they just chat, nobody in the vdo screams. Lately there are many agressive Thai social media witchhunts against foreigners. Perhaps you are the problem and not vice versa.

[Peter Kruit @Peter_Kruit]

@robin_j_brooks Ankara is not in Europe

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Kuleba: Syrskyi didn't have to go because he was a bad general.

A commander-in-chief can't be handed a political function — once he got tangled up in the defense minister's removal, wanted it or not, he became a political actor. The army has to stay out of politics. 2/

[Peter Kruit @Peter_Kruit]

@0d114514 @Defence_Index If any of it is true. This is not proven nor operational. US is actually finetuning their system, with working steam catapults on the other operational CVNs. Never has a PRC carrier group operated in another ocean fighting a war, never. Perhaps this is just PRC propaganda.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

Having seen the infamous 47-minute compilation of the 7 Oct atrocities with my own eyes (not publicly available), I can attest that the Silenced No More report, which is freely available online, is even worse. It's just words on a page, but it leaves enough to the imagination to be even more horrific than the video. At least for me.

In the 47-minute compilation, there is some evidence of sexual sadism, but not much. Probably for two reasons: proud though Hamas was of massacring Jews, they were less keen on broadcasting scenes of sexual depravity. And the Israeli government likely declined to include the most horrific footage out of respect for the victims.

The report is exhaustively documented, horror story after horror story. I've read it only once, and I won't do so again. Especially the sections about the Nova festival are extremely disturbing. So I asked Claude to summarize the documented patterns in the report:

- Rape and gang rape, with victims passed between attackers in sequence, witnesses describing laughter throughout
- Targeted gunshots to groin, abdomen, buttocks and face; genital mutilation of both women and men
- Rape followed by execution—victims shot or stabbed immediately afterward, some shot in the head during the assault
- Rape continuing after victims were dead
- Sexual mutilation—breasts severed, genitals cut off or shot
- Burning, including deliberate burning of the groin; bodies set alight with accelerants
- - Hands bound behind backs; bodies tied to trees and poles along the road
- Sharp objects inserted into victims' genitals
- Women raped in view of their desperate partners, who were then killed
- Male victims gang-raped, beaten, and threatened with castration
- Dismemberment and decapitation

These findings of systematic sexual violence and torture are corroborated by the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict (2024) and the UN Commission of Inquiry (2024).

Just one quote from a survivor:

"I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams—screams you have never heard anywhere. It's between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die. These are screams... it's something I have never heard in my life, and I have no way to explain to you what it sounds like. But it's screams. It's screams. It was simply horrific. And after one finished, he told another to go up 'Ta'al' [in Arabic], like to the next one. And apparently there was a round... And after they finished, they shot her." She continued: "You hear the screams, and then you hear silence. You hear a bang—and silence. And then there's a kind of calm. And then you say: okay, it's over at least. She's done with it. And like that with each person they abused—you heard. The moment they were killed, I said, 'Oh my God, finally, it's over.'"

You privileged Westerners have no idea how you would react if this happened to you and your loved ones—if a group committed these atrocities, vowed to repeat them again and again, and openly declared that it would not stop until your country no longer existed. You have no idea.

https://t.co/wzWytLLkUz

[Peter Kruit @Peter_Kruit]

@telegraaf Mag dat niet omdat het anders oorlog wordt? Het is overigens niet ondenkbaar dat criminelen zich vermengen met politiek-religieus extremisme, dus islamisme. Dat is een bekende dynamiek. Hoe langer de autoriteiten beiden laten gaan, hoe groter het probleem later wordt.

[Boudewijn Steur @boudewijnsteur]

Op deze dag in 1914 stelde Oostenrijk-Hongarije een ultimatum aan Servië, waarin geëist werd dat Servië meewerkte aan het onderzoek naar de moord op Frans Ferdinand. In feite was het ultimatum aanleiding om Servië binnen te kunnen vallen. Plaveide de weg naar Eerste Wereldoorlog

[Marineschepen @marineschepen]

Voor de volledigheid: in deze toch wel opvallende wending, gaat het niet over ASW-fregatten of FDI (zoals door een Frans medium wordt beweerd). Hier wordt gesproken over een nieuwe fregattenklasse voor beide landen. Wat betekent dat voor Damen en andere bedrijven in de Nederlandse industrie? Daar gaan we in dit artikel ook op in.

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

Russian LNG is still flowing into at least 10 European ports this year. Zeebrugge alone has taken 2.96 million tons.
Dunkirk 2.02. Montoir de Bretagne 1.86.

The ban does not take effect until January 2027, and Europe is still taking delivery across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal.

The infrastructure being dismantled on paper is still running at full geographic spread in practice.

[Peter Kruit @Peter_Kruit]

@moranjohna1 For an officially "neutral" country this is all very awkward. Ireland hasn't realised yet that supporting Russia in this war makes all the talk about neutrality unserious and unconvincing. Alumina and its ships are military targets for Ukraine.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

ICYMI, There is/was never a genocide in Gaza. The opposite actually, one side (Israel) vaccinating, feeding, helping with all services (medical, drinking water, power) while taking extraordinary steps to protect civilians in the worst urban warfare scenario arguably ever seen and the other side (Hamas) doing everything it can to get civilians killed, stealing food, targeting civilians that do not do their demands.

[Peter Kruit @Peter_Kruit]

@AT5 De verloedering geldt ook voor de Spaarndammerbuurt. Jaren 80 en 90 gevoel.

[ChrisO_wiki @ChrisO_wiki]

1/ The 'SVOshnik' – a drunk, traumatised, violent veteran of the Ukraine war – has become a figure of fear in Russia. Russian journalist and activist Anastasia Kashevarova, who has fought for soldiers' rights, admits that some veterans are out of control. ⬇️

[Jacob in Cambodia 🇺🇸 🇰🇭 @jacobincambodia]

First the FBI Sent Agents to Bangkok, Then a Deputy Director, Now Kash Patel

The FBI and the Royal Thai Police co-hosted a two-day summit on scam center compounds in Bangkok this week, with Director Kash Patel attending alongside police chiefs from 20 Asia-Pacific countries, 109 delegates in all. Patel also called on Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul at Government House on Tuesday. The readout from Anutin's office describes expanded intelligence sharing aimed at what it calls uprooting the networks, and cites tens of billions of baht in criminal assets already seized or frozen.

The summit caps eleven months of FBI buildup in Bangkok. Its office there formed a joint task force with the Royal Thai Police in August 2025, with agents rotating in on six-month assignments. The Justice Department's Scam Center Strike Force, launched in November, embedded FBI agents with the Thai police war room. Joint Disruption Weeks with Meta followed in December and March, disabling 59,000 accounts, pages and groups, then more than 150,000 accounts, with 21 arrests in the second round. In June the Thai police anti-scam center hosted another joint operation with the FBI and agencies from 10 countries. The FBI's co-deputy director was in Bangkok last month. Now the director.

The same day the summit closed, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime put 2025 scam losses across East and Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand at $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion, at least triple its estimate for 2023.

[Peter Kruit @Peter_Kruit]

Damen is een hoofdpijn dossier aan het worden. Wat is daar aan de hand? Levert aan Rusland, Duitse order weg, daarvoor Indonesia, heeft werven veel te dichtbij Rusland en in proRussisch Vietnam nabij China, en nu morrelt België aan de strategische samenwerking met Nederland. WTF

[Theo Francken @FranckenTheo]

Het fregattendossier bezorgt hoofdbrekens. Het gaat helemaal de verkeerde kant uit met leveringstermijn en prijs. Dit is voor ons niet aanvaardbaar.

We zijn in gesprek met de Nederlandse regering, maar intussen zal ik me - via een RFI procedure - informeren bij de andere Europese fregattenbouwers: Italië, Frankrijk, Duitsland, Spanje en ook Turkije om te kijken wat de opties zijn.

In oktober neem ik een beslissing over het programma. We hebben sowieso dringend nieuwe fregatten nodig. De huidige zijn echt op.

@VTMNIEUWS

[Willem de Zwijger @WillemdePrater]

Amsterdam, 19 juli 1599. Meer een jaar na hun vertrek naar Oost-Indië keerden vier schepen uit Bantam (Java) naar de Republiek terug. Vier andere schepen kwamen een jaar later aan met ook nootmuskaat, foelie en kruidnagel aan boord. 1/2

[Dr. Jan van de Beek @demo_demo_nl]

De prioritering van onze faaloverheid, die steeds meer belastinggeld int en daar steeds minder voor levert:
✔️KAN WEL: elke week 800 asielzoekers inschrijven.
✖️KAN NIET: binnen 2 weken aangifte opnemen van een brute fysieke beroving van een 96-jarige👇
https://t.co/3OKKxriUOi

[Peter Kruit @Peter_Kruit]

Eens, ook ik loop hier iedere dag en het is één grote puinbak

[Symphony @Symphony_res]

Degene die het statiegeld op blikjes heeft bedacht, verdient een levenslange taakstraf: elke dag 500 kleverige blikjes inleveren.