John Vail

[John Vail @vailini1]

@KBAndersen Shameful. I’ll pick it up when I’m back in the city in October. Hope it does well.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@franklinleonard I’ve got a pal with Newcastle season tickets who occasionally hooks me up with a ticket. Let me know when you’re in the U.K. and I can see what games are on and whether there’s one available.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@adrianmckinty OG=Divock!!

[John Vail @vailini1]

@franklinleonard 18,000 shouting “Trump sucks” at the top of their lungs can defeat that hex.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@KBAndersen @randomhouse Sounds extraordinary. Can’t wait to read.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@paranoiacs It’s a travesty that they’re not in the Hall.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@TweetStemkowski His laugh is infectious.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@tomwatson AOC for Schumer’s Senate seat.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@dwallacewells Do you have a link to the article?

[John Vail @vailini1]

@TweetStemkowski Oh hell yeah. The next generation now! Love it.

[Pete @splendid_pete]

And another great documentary by ARTE.

This two-part ARTE investigation is a brutal reality check for anyone still clinging to the fantasy that Russia is somehow “isolated” or “running out of steam.” What the films show, methodically and with receipts, is that Russia’s war against Ukraine is not being sustained despite sanctions, but through a deliberately constructed global system designed to bypass them. This is not improvisation. It is industrialized, coordinated, and openly contemptuous of Western enforcement.

The first part dismantles the myth of Russian military self-sufficiency. Yes, the Kremlin is still drawing heavily on vast Soviet-era stockpiles, tens of thousands of tanks, missiles, and artillery shells inherited from the USSR. But that is only the foundation. On top of it, Russia has layered a modern weapons program that depends almost entirely on foreign technology. Hypersonic missiles like Kinzhal are paraded as symbols of invincibility, yet their real story is failure, interception, and paranoia. When these “wonder weapons” underperform against Western air defense, Putin does not adapt policy, he purges people. Scientists and engineers are arrested, publicly humiliated, or die in custody, not because they betrayed secrets, but because the regime cannot tolerate reality contradicting propaganda. Fear is not a side effect of the system, it is the system.

At the same time, the documentary exposes how sanctions are systematically hollowed out. Investigators trace Western-made microelectronics inside Russian missiles and drones, parts manufactured in the EU, the US, and Japan. These components do not magically appear. They travel through shell companies, fake transit routes, and permissive jurisdictions, especially via Central Asia and Turkey. Thousands of front companies exist for one purpose only: to keep Russian weapons flying. Sanctions increase cost and friction, but they do not stop the flow, because enforcement is fragmented, slow, and politically timid. The result is grotesque: European technology embedded in weapons that are leveling Ukrainian cities.

The second part widens the scope and shows that Russia is no longer acting alone at all. Iran is not just supplying drones, it has effectively exported a full weapons industry into Russia. The documentary reveals a secret drone factory on Russian soil, built with Iranian expertise, producing hundreds of Shahed-type drones per day. Even more damning is how this factory is staffed. Young women from Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Mali are recruited under false pretenses, trafficked into a militarized industrial zone, forced to work in toxic conditions without protection, and kept silent through confiscated passports and constant surveillance. This is not just a war crime supply chain, it is human exploitation at scale, baked directly into Russia’s military production.

North Korea completes another piece of the puzzle. The film documents, using satellite imagery and weapons forensics, how Pyongyang has supplied Russia with millions of artillery shells, ballistic missiles like the KN-23, and eventually troops. Tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers are effectively being used as disposable manpower to spare Russian urban elites from mobilization. In exchange, Moscow transfers military know-how and strategic technology. This is not desperation, it is strategic outsourcing of death.

Then there is China, the quiet enabler holding the entire structure together. The documentary is careful and devastating here. China does not send soldiers. It does not openly ship weapons. Instead, it allows Russia to survive. Roughly 60 percent of components found in Russian weapons now transit through China or Hong Kong. Chinese companies, often newly created or repurposed, move massive volumes of dual-use goods that keep Russian factories running. Without this permissive Chinese role, the film makes clear, the Russian war machine would stall. Beijing does not need to fire a shot to reshape the battlefield. It simply keeps the taps open.

Overlay all of this with Western political drift and internal division, and the warning becomes impossible to ignore. The documentary shows how Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China are not united by ideology so much as by shared hostility toward democratic constraint. They cooperate because none of them are accountable to voters, courts, or parliaments. The goal goes far beyond Ukraine. It is about forcefully rewriting the international order, proving that borders can be changed by violence, that sanctions can be mocked, and that democratic hesitation is a strategic weakness to be exploited.

Taken together, these films do something most coverage still fails to do. They stop pretending this is a regional conflict or a temporary crisis. They show it for what it is: a coordinated authoritarian war economy facing a fragmented democratic response. The conclusion is uncomfortable but unavoidable. If Europe and its allies do not close loopholes, enforce their own rules, and act like this is a systemic threat, not a talking point, then this axis will keep pushing until something breaks.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@mattyglesias Kollantai erasure.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@TweetStemkowski Alonso in!

[John Vail @vailini1]

@tomwatson Gallego should be in the top ten.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@ringer @paranoiacs Fantastic, hysterically funny review. Might be enough to actually get me to watch the show.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@DAMendelsohnNYC Rota?????

[John Vail @vailini1]

@franklinleonard Fifth time might be the charm!

[John Vail @vailini1]

@TweetStemkowski Wonder goal but terrible defending. Virgil late as usual. They won all these last year but not anymore.

[John Vail @vailini1]

@franklinleonard Number three on the Guardian’s top 100 male footballers. https://t.co/dl3H0jpR0f