Robert James Rider

[Dan O'Hagan ⚽️🎙️ @danohagan]

Yaxley-Lennon, instigating unrest on the streets of the UK, literally from Moscow. What does it take for this country’s thickerati to finally join the dots?

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

This needs posting everywhere

[Mick Ryan, AM @WarintheFuture]

Ukraine has just struck a Russian defence plant with its new long-range FP-5 missiles and damaged a key bridge to Crimea. Things keep getting worse for Putin and Gerasimov. My Part 2 assessment of Russia's losing war, and how Putin might reverse things. 1/5 🧵

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

This is absolutely insane. Trumps love of Russia is stunting the US military’s ability to modernize.

https://t.co/LYOkJmnKg5

[The Royal Family @RoyalFamily]

🇺🇦 The President of Ukraine visited The King this afternoon at Windsor Castle

[David Aaronovitch @DAaronovitch]

I think it's about time women journalists started walking out on Trump. 'Ok Mr President, you've now insulted me three times during this interview and that is enough. You either apologise or I terminate the broadcast'.

[Carlo "Realism, Gedankenfetzen and Rants" Masala @CarloMasala1]

Gott sei Dank müssen wir darüber jetzt nie wieder reden @Sicherheitspod

[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

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Trump is exactly what we knew he was. The harshest questions and criticisms of journalism today and history tomorrow are about how a generation of Republican politicians, partisan media, and US voters willingly chose to ignore it for power.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Kasparov: Merkel was the best agent of Russian interests, not as a spy, but politically.

She made Germany and Europe dependent on Russian gas, built Nord Stream 2 after Crimea, and paralyzed efforts to build a strong coalition against Putin.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

🇸🇪 Saab CEO Micael Johansson: The most important thing we can do right now is to ensure that Ukrainian industrial base becomes part of Europe and starts working with us.

We need them in Europe, not just in Ukraine. We are working very hard to create partnerships and joint ventures so that we can begin collaborating with Ukrainian industry in this way.

Defense industry must do the same. We have to get Ukrainians working with us, they know how to scale production extremely well.

Ukrainians produce 5 to 7 million drones a year. We produce thousands. We have so much to learn from them, and we must integrate them into Europe’s industrial base. That is the key.

[Shashank Joshi @shashj]

Extraordinary. “ U.S. Defense Secretary ​Pete Hegseth warned on Saturday that Europe faced what he ‌called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy” https://t.co/cDxnVBbrhj

[Just Dave now @justdavenow89]

Almost like Farage and Boris Johnson lied to us....

[Brexit Air Cargo Ltd @jemmy_wood]

Farage is being open about setting up his own Gestapo. And people say he’s not a facist? 🙄

[Mike Galsworthy @mikegalsworthy]

It really wasn’t. It was an outright abuse of Henry’s father’s wishes.

And the US government is hardly in a place to reprimand the UK on police brutality, racism or error.

[Greg Bagwell @gregbagwell]

The commemoration of the bravery, tragedy and importance of D-Day is not ever the place to try and score cheap political points. What an ignorant and disrespectful dumbass.

[Gideon Rachman @gideonrachman]

I suspect Vance’s intervention in British politics will be as ineffective and counterproductive as his intervention on behalf of Viktor Orban in Hungary.

[David Yelland @davidyelland]

"We've made ourselves irrelevent..." the now late Alex Younger on the effect of Brexit. We are living through a time when the smart people are away from public space. He was an exception.

[Rt. Hon Ben Wallace @BenWallace70]

It has been a consistent block by the Treasury that the MOD can have AUKUS subs or GCAP or major reductions in Army. But they cant have all three. We are about to witness a classic fudge that will lead to deep hollowing out. The Government is preparing to push GCAP to the right and string it out with incremental work and no clear guarantees to commit to it. They will be hoping that Japan ( who cannot tolerate an extended time line) will pull out and blame can be avoided. The authors of the SDSR were clear on the funding levels needed. £16/18bn over 4 years wont cut it.

[D.Radka, #NAFO 🇨🇿🤝🇺🇦 @DakdaR22]

"Trump has already done everything he could for Putin.

Cut aid to Ukraine, stopped giving weapons, even stopped selling them to Europeans, raised oil prices with the Iran war, quarreled with Europe, and practically buried NATO"

- Garry Kasparov