laurens van keirsbil

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

@justincbzz Rheinmetall with Destinus?

[Vitaly @M0nstas]

The countries that will navigate the next decade of instability are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated platforms.
They are the ones that looked at these questions without flinching and built their doctrine, their industry, and their social contract around honest answers.

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

@justincbzz This will pose a real problem if it goes on for another year

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

I remember when Putin said he only wanted the best for Ukraine and for it to prosper and stop picking the wrong path. Many Europeans believed him then and they are ready to believe Vance too

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

@ColbyBadhwar Which particular stocks?

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

Russia in Donbass

[Tom Parkin @TomPark1n]

Financial Times reports Alberta succession campaign leader Jeff Rath met US State Department officials three times, seeks a $500B loan backstop

Yet we know nothing about who is funding Rath or his APP, even as they co-ordinate with Trump to break Canada https://t.co/qcpim6Q9p1

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

And we wont have elections

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

For myself : Worldview

US is somewhere in the late stages of the Sovjet Union and the beginning of Putin (2003)

US and Russia have the same worldview : they view everyone but their own clan as extractable. Nothing is transactional.

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

Now watch Israel + US attack Iran again in a couple months

[Jessica Simor KC @JMPSimor]

Goebbels could not have improved on this; beyond terrifying. Time for Europe, including the U.K., to prepare people for what is coming.

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

@MichaelAArouet @Waluburga Will they in cities though? I agree that demographic trends are horrific but inversely it comes from the fact that the amount of singles is explosing, so it might compensate

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

@M0nstas Which is probably the smart thing for them to do unfortunately instead of banging their heads to the wall in the Donbass?

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

@MacaesBruno videogame

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Trump:

I was told by real military people that there is no other country on Earth that can do such a maneuver.

I watched it literally like I was watching a TV show.

It was an amazing thing.

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

Complete control over all energy resources in the Americas. Then: Total war against Iran stopping its exports to China. Third stage: Russia gets Ukraine and NS3 built between Siberia and Alaska

[Steve Rosenberg @BBCSteveR]

How does Moscow view Donald Trump at the end of 2025? One Russian paper today: “The US leader’s philosophy is closer to the values of Russia’s president, not the politicians of the Old World…he sees Europe as a liberal stronghold that must be destroyed…” #ReadingRussia

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

@justincbzz Just curious : why is Zaliznyche important? Access to high ground to push further northwest?

[Esfandyar Batmanghelidj @yarbatman]

Unfortunately, this timid response from a Danish MP to Rubio exemplifies how European officials are misreading the situation as the US begins to undermine Europe more openly, and not just through the recently announced sanctions.

The US is not "playing the victim" by sanctioning European individuals and it is not acting because it sees a European crusade against US companies. The word crusade flatters European regulators who have been too timid in enforcing their own laws and have long failed to push back over extraterritorial application of US sanctions and financial regulations. You can't cast this issue as being about "bots," when Elon Musk is a real person using his wealth and his platform to actively stoke racial hatred and political discord in Europe under his own name, facing no real consequences.

It also makes no sense to appeal to Rubio's intelligence here. Sure, he has a comparably better line on Russia than others in the Trump administration, but that is because he is a hawk and an interventionist. The problem Europe faces is that the one area in which in neoconservatives like Rubio and restrainers like Vance can find agreement is in their need to intervene in *European* affairs. Appeals to the transatlantic alliance make no sense in the wake of the new NSS. There can be no alliance when there is a significant divergence of interests and as we have seen this administration is not interested in even maintaining an appearance of an alliance.

Cordial exchanges between European and US officials may continue at the working level across many files. But we should not confuse cooperation among technocrats for the workings of a successful alliance. A pattern has been established. When the order comes down to take actions against "allies," the U.S. bureaucracy implements those polices and folks like Rubio get on message.

Fundamentally, the Trump administration is acting in a predatory manner towards Europe across numerous domains because it sees Europe as weak and easily subjugated. Why reinforce that view?

[laurens van keirsbil @VanKeirsbil]

@Rebel44CZ @Observateur2024 @BohdanKrotevych Assuming everybody works together and does not choose for himself. How often have we seen that in the past years?

[Bohdan Krotevych @BohdanKrotevych]

I have reviewed the article “The Bear in the Baltics: Reassessing the Russian Threat in Estonia,” published by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Its authors, Jennifer Kavanagh and Jeremy Shapiro, conclude that Russia is currently incapable of carrying out a successful armed attack against Estonia and that the level of threat is exaggerated.

This is precisely where the core problem of this analysis begins.

The entire argument is built on theoretical models, force-balance calculations, and deterrence concepts, while completely ignoring the decisive factor of modern warfare: accumulated combat experience under real battlefield conditions.

Today, only two states in the world possess actual experience in conducting high-intensity interstate war — Ukraine and Russia. All others, including Estonia and the vast majority of NATO members, rely on exercises, staff simulations, and doctrinal assumptions that have not been tested in full-scale combat.

Estonia, despite its high level of preparation, lacks practical experience in:
•conducting operations under conditions of sustained enemy artillery dominance and high fire density;
•operating forces in an environment of persistent surveillance and strike capability enabled by tactical and operational-level UAVs;
•maintaining logistics and command-and-control resilience under systematic fire strikes against rear infrastructure;
•executing defensive operations and maneuver while continuously absorbing losses, degradation of units, and uninterrupted fire pressure;
•adapting tactics, force organization, and command systems in real time, rather than after a completed training cycle.

This is not a criticism of the Estonian Defence Forces. It is a statement of fact: combat experience cannot be substituted by doctrines, exercises, or alliance membership.

A separate and particularly dangerous error in the article is the emphasis on Russia’s “exhaustion” through personnel losses.
Russia is structurally insensitive to human losses as a constraint on warfare. Its military-political system is historically designed to:
•sustain mass mobilization;
•accept extremely high casualties as permissible;
•substitute quality with quantity through forced rotation and replacement.

Those who treat manpower losses as a decisive deterrent factor for Russia project Western assumptions onto an adversary to whom they do not apply — and this is precisely how wars are lost.

The greatest damage done by this article is that it fosters a false sense of strategic confidence. It reassures decision-makers that Russia is “not ready,” “not capable,” or “will not dare.” This same logic underpinned strategic failures in both 2014 and 2022.

The most dangerous assumption made by the authors is that war is the outcome of a rational cost-benefit calculation. In reality, Russia wages war according to a logic of political inevitability, imperial revisionism, and a willingness to accept virtually any cost.

Russia will attack — this is not a question of capability, but of timing and conditions.
And the longer European decision-making centers rely on such reassuring, detached analyses, the more severe the shock will be when reality disproves them.

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

Vance is such a deranged Islamophobe he now wants racial purity in Europe. But to someone my age what this reminds m of is when the Soviet Union wanted ideological purity in Soviet-controlled Europe. Granted that racial purity sounds even worse