Adrian Colley

Ukraine. Wales. Cricket. Rayo

[Adrian Colley @adecolley]

Wales football: 'I'm 150, you know.' https://t.co/R2SnuHa0nI #wales #ghana #walesfans #cowboyfromtreorchy

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

Russia openly admits that it started the war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in 2014.

This is a direct admission of Russian involvement and responsibility for civilian deaths as early as 2014—long before the full-scale invasion of 2022. It contradicts the narrative Russia has maintained for years of a purely "internal conflict" involving no troops of its own.

What experts had long known: Russia lied for years.

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

Zelensky basically says that we are fucking destroying Russia.

[Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @Cymru]

10 years ago today, #EURO2016 kicked off. A summer of memories that will last forever. 😍

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

No, sweetie.

Donetsk was a city of a million roses when its own Ukrainian flag flew above it.

Back then, it was also the fastest-growing and most rapidly prospering city in Ukraine -- home to what was the finest regional airport in Eastern Europe, one of the world's best football stadiums, a state-of-the-art railway terminal, and one of the cleanest, best-maintained cities in the region.

Its elites were running Kyiv, and every time I visited Donetsk as a student, riding the famous trolleybus Route No. 2 through the city, I was amazed by how many new office buildings were appearing, how much money was flowing into the city, and how many international companies were opening their doors there.

Fifteen years ago, to us kids from Donbas, Donetsk felt like the center of the universe because it had everything one could possibly dream of. It was a young city of universities and libraries, where the overwhelming majority of boys and girls from across Donbas went to study, including those from my own small hometown an hour away by bus.

Names like Liverpool or Detroit Rock City may mean nothing to you, but our Ukrainian Donetsk was a city of great rock clubs and unforgettable concerts. We traveled there to see Western bands perform.

We bought rock merchandise at the legendary Right House store near Krytyi Market. Scorpions, Rihanna, and Beyoncé performed at the famous Donbass Arena. Schoolchildren from across Donbas were bused in to watch Shakhtar Donetsk matches. The city even had a famous monument to The Beatles.

It was a city where we sang songs on guitars in its beautifully maintained parks and along the Kalmius embankment before heading out to buy the famous "green Donetsk burgers." Our older friends moved there after graduation, formed rock bands, recorded full albums, and held wedding celebrations in the squares around Donbas Arena. We traveled there to visit the legendary Radio Market in search of films, music, and books.

And then you arrived.

And you turned the wealthiest, most prosperous Ukrainian city into a piece of shit.

You deceived many of its people with sweet promises of Russian oil-fueled prosperity broadcast from television screens, but what you brought instead was war.

You transformed a thriving city into a criminal wasteland ruled by ethnic gangs from Russia, into a kingdom of Stalinist terror straight out of the 1930s, complete with torture chambers in the infamous Izolyatsia prison camp. You turned the magnificent Donetsk Airport into lifeless gray rubble, while the vast stands of Donbas Arena have spent a second decade slowly being reclaimed by weeds instead of hosting Champions League finals and Metallica concerts.

You swept away an entire generation of the city's men through your forced mobilization and threw them against Ukrainian machine guns until there were barely enough people left to keep basic municipal services running. Because of you, prosperous Donetsk became a withered desert without reliable water, because your war destroyed the canal system that carried water from the Siverskyi Donets River into Donbas. For years now, people have lived with chronic water shortages and have been reduced shitting into plastic bags forever.

You dragged Donetsk back like seventy years in time. You turned it into a depressed backwater, devoid of hope and future. Even ten years ago, tens of thousands of people, the most active, the most talented, the most entrepreneurial, fled the city and found refuge in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Many of them still remember our Donetsk with tears in their eyes, the Donetsk that existed before the arrival of the "Russian World."

You transformed it into something that even my pro-Russian acquaintances are shocked to see when they return after years of occupation.

It was you who trampled the million roses of our Ukrainian Donetsk into shit beneath the tracks of your tanks and the boots of your death troops, turning them into a foul swamp of death and despair.

And that stain will forever remain on the conscience of fascist Russia, which brings nothing but destruction, decay, and death wherever it goes.

[DBerber 🇺🇦 @Berber_Doris_]

🇷🇺 Ein ehemaliger Moderator des ruzzischen Wirtschaftssenders RBC fasst die Stimmung auf dem Internationalen Wirtschaftsforum in St. Petersburg (SPIEF) zusammen. RBC ist das größte Finanzfernsehen in Ruzzland – quasi das Moskauer Gegenstück zu Bloomberg. Direkt nach dem Treffen teilt er diese Metapher, die zwar den Absturz perfekt beschreibt, aber auch das ganze Dilemma der ruzzischen Gesellschaft offenbart:
„Ich habe alle vier Tage des Wirtschaftsforums miterlebt und möchte zusammenfassen, wie das Ganze gewirkt hat.
Es wirkte so, als würden wir uns alle in einem fallenden Flugzeug befinden. Wir sind die Passagiere. Und wer ist "wir"? Die Ökonomen, die Unternehmen, die Investoren und sogar die Beamten. Sie alle sind Passagiere in der Kabine eines Flugzeugs, das sich im Sturzflug mit der Beschleunigung des freien Falls nach unten bewegt.
Und während wir da so sitzen, diskutieren wir untereinander leidenschaftlich darüber, was wir tun könnten, um dieses Flugzeug irgendwie zu stabilisieren.
Aber die Sache ist die :
Die wahre Macht sitzt vorne im Cockpit. Und diese Kabine ist komplett schallisoliert und absolut undurchdringlich für all die Passagiere hier hinten. Uns allen bleibt im Grunde nur noch eines übrig: Hoffen und beten, dass der Pilot des Flugzeugs das Steuer endlich wieder fest in die Hand nimmt und es zu sich heranzieht. Nur das kann uns alle retten. Deshalb ist das Einzige, was uns zu tun bleibt, einfach nur zu beten.“

Die Metapher zeigt zwar, dass die ruzzische Elite genau weiß, dass Ruzzland wirtschaftlich und politisch im freien Fall ist. Aber das bittere Schlussfazit entlarvt die totale Passivität:
Statt das Cockpit zu stürmen und den Wahnsinn da vorne im Keim zu ersticken, wird am Ende nur darauf gehofft und gebetet, dass der Diktator von alleine den Kurs ändert. Ein Zeugnis absoluter Ohnmacht, aber eben auch fataler Tatenlosigkeit.

#StandWithUkraine #Russland #SPIEF

[Her Royal Heinous 🇮🇪🇵🇸 @HerRoyalHeinous]

@SkySportsNews @SJview It’s a tainted spectacle not a football tournament.
Lots of people have lost interest already including me.

[Devana 🇺🇦 @DevanaUkraine]

🩹 ⛓️ Ukrainian medic who returned from Russian captivity, when asked by a journalist what he would like to change in the past, answers: "I would wish never to have been born. Too much pain..."

When an individual—specifically someone whose profession is dedicated to the preservation of life—expresses the desire to have never been born, we are witnessing the total victory of the torturer over the spirit. We have faced the greatest evil the Earth has ever known - Russia.

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

🇺🇦 Russian soldiers surrendered with the help of a Ukrainian drone

The POWs said their commanders were sending them into suicide assaults and threatening to "zero them out" if they refused.

At their position, they found a leaflet with instructions on how to surrender, laid down their weapons, and waited for a Ukrainian drone, which guided them safely away from the front line.

Now they are urging other Russians not to sign military contracts, avoid the war, and, if already at the front, surrender.

“If you see one of these leaflets, follow the instructions. Everything will be fine — a drone will come, guide you out safely, and you'll be welcomed and given water,” one of the soldiers said.

[Will Hayward @WillHayCardiff]

Reform UK has a big problem in Wales.

It's going to be really hard for them to grow because they are very unpopular with three groups in Wales:

1. Women (who make up 51% of voters)
2. People who feel more Welsh than British (the single largest identity group in Cymru)
3. Young people.

While a narrative has grown up around the idea that young men really like Farage. The data suggests this really isn't the case in Wales as only 10% of young people voted for the party.

[A Funny Old Game @sid_lambert]

It’s 36 years since Italia 90 kicked off in sensational style.

Big Benjamin Massing launches Claudio Caniggia into The Land of Wind and Ghosts.

Run it off, son.

(👍🎥 @90sfootball)

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Europe Wins Again. Obviously.

Armenia went to the polls yesterday. And the results are exactly what you’d expect if you’d been paying attention for the past five years, rather than wallowing in Kremlin nostalgia like a damp sock.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared victory on Monday, with his Civil Contract Party leading with 52.5% of the vote.  Armenia, a landlocked country the size of Belgium that Russia has spent decades treating as a vassal state, has looked at its options and made a decision that required roughly the same level of intellectual effort as choosing between a Michelin-starred restaurant and a skip fire.

They chose Europe.

This election was less a routine vote than a referendum on Pashinyan’s post-2020 course reducing dependence on Russia and moving toward an explicit European orientation. And Russia, naturally, did everything in its power to stop it. According to Reuters, citing Western intelligence officials, the election faced heavy Russian covert interference, including disinformation campaigns and a plan to transport Russian Armenians into Armenia to sway the vote. One analyst collective described it as one of the largest state-backed disinformation campaigns in modern European history. And Armenia still told them to get lost.

Putin had already warned Armenia it would face economic consequences for drifting westward, and introduced restrictions on Armenian agricultural exports in the weeks before the vote.  Threats, propaganda, economic blackmail. The full Russian toolkit. Result: irrelevant.

Now, Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance would like you to believe that Russia represents some superior civilisational model. A proud, white, Christian fortress holding the line against the Muslim hordes supposedly swamping Europe. It is a compelling narrative, in the same way that flat earth theory is compelling if you ignore every single fact available to you.

Here is one such fact: between 10 and 15 percent of Russia’s own population is Muslim. Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis. Millions of them. Russia is, by its own demographic reality, a multi-ethnic, multi-faith state with a larger Muslim population than most of Western Europe. But you’re not supposed to know that. It complicates the story.

Meanwhile, the Muslim share of the EU population sits at around 5 percent. But the Tucker Carlsons of the world need you frightened, so the numbers get quietly shuffled off stage.

So Armenia joins the queue. Behind Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, and every Eastern European country that isn’t currently run by a Slovak who seems to have wandered in from a Moscow focus group. The pattern is not subtle. Every country that has actually experienced Russian influence in practice is sprinting in the opposite direction. The only nation currently moving toward Russia’s orbit is the United States, which managed to elect a man whose foreign policy instincts were apparently shaped by a property developer’s admiration for strongmen with good buildings.

The world watches America and hopes it finds its way back. Most people think it will. Eventually. The damage, however, is already considerable, and democracy, like a soufflé, does not always survive rough handling.

Armenia made its choice. The right one. Obviously.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Yaroslava @strategywoman]

Three years ago, russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam.

The flood badly damaged Polina Raiko’s painted house in occupied Oleshky.

She began painting at 69 and turned her home into art.

The video shows a reconstruction of the house, created for the Ukraine WOW exhibition.

[Jonay Amaro @AmaroJonay]

⚡ EL DÍA QUE EL RAYO VALLECANO AVISABA 👇

🥹 5 años del asalto a Butarque que nos daba el pase a la final del playoff contra el Girona.

👊 Nadie daba un duro por los de Iraola, pero acabaron callando bocas.

🤯 Ahí es donde se gesta el Rayo actual. El INICIO de todo.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Christopher Walken’s white-suit tap dance during NIGHT OF 100 STARS (1982) at Radio City Music Hall is pure showmanship. A joyful reminder of just how effortlessly he could command a stage.

[Shaun Pinner @ShaunPinnerUA]

It’s over. Absolutely over.

He promised Russia greatness, security, and prosperity. Instead, he delivered isolation, economic strain, staggering losses, and a war that has consumed hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen.

Far from strengthening Russia, he has weakened it beyond belief.

Vladimir Putin may go down as the man who sacrificed not only a generation of Russians, but Russia itself.

My article for LLB

[ChrisO_wiki @ChrisO_wiki]

1/ Igor 'Strelkov' Girkin predicts that Russia will be stripped to the bone – "IN THE EVENT OF DEFEAT, THEY WILL TAKE EVERYTHING FROM US—UP TO AND INCLUDING NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND SOVEREIGNTY" – in a long and deeply gloomy commentary posted on Telegram. ⬇️

[Antifa_Ultras @ultras_antifaa]

Brazilian footballer David Luiz says:

❝A few months after I moved to Paris, two of my friends from Diadema came to spend some time with me there. They had broken up with their wife and girlfriend and were sad, so I invited them, hoping the visit would help clear their minds. Great.

They soon met other Brazilians, who played for a team like the seventh-division amateur league in the suburbs of Paris — all immigrants without proper papers.

Every night, my two friends came home angry, complaining that they were constantly beaten up. So, I said: “I’ll go over there tomorrow to watch you play.” And I did.

I arrived wearing a ninja hat, half disguised, and watched. The opponents were all dressed up, with their uniforms, equipment, water bottles, and a coach. And my friends’ team was wearing nothing: one in white shorts, another in purple, a third in yellow. The guys were hanging from the goalposts to warm up…. It was a mess.

At the end of the match, which they lost, I asked:

“Do you want me to train the team?”

I’ll never forget the guys’ smiles. They were so genuinely happy and excited, something I had only seen when I was a kid, when we would fly kites in Diadema.

I started training the guys every Monday, from 10 to midnight. Sometimes I would train them on Monday and play a Champions League match on Tuesday. I even remember scoring a goal against Barcelona on one of those days. I started loving Mondays. I couldn’t wait to be with those guys. We talked, I listened a lot, and I got to know each one’s stories and struggles.

Some made money playing capoeira, others delivering items on motorbikes or washing dishes. All of them had a hard life, afraid because of their illegal status, with little hope that things would improve, but football brightened up and took the weight off their days.❞

(Source: The Players’ Tribune)

[Paul Reidy @paulreidy67]

Even UEFA (who were happy to take €15 off me for a @Conf_League keyring) were touched by the Rayo post-game banner!

https://t.co/oan8c48y08

as reported by @jfelixdiaz via @English_AS

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Former CIA director Burns: Putin always believed Russia couldn't be a great power without controlling Ukraine.

When I met him before the invasion, he was utterly unapologetic. No denial. His message was: "So, what are you going to do about it?"

1/