🇺🇸🪖⚡️ — Under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge A. Colby:

The United States is not leaving the continent. It’s not leaving the Alliance.

We’re going to go back to the origins of what NATO is supposed to be, where Europe is going to take the lead.

🇨🇦🇺🇸⚡️ — Canadian PM Mark Carney:

We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.

Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.

🇺🇸🇷🇺🇺🇦 According to the New York Times, CIA director John Ratcliffe, went to Moscow to ask "deliver an urgent message" to FSB director, Alexander Bortnikov about Russia's alleged "high" casualty rate in Ukraine.

CIA analysts believe Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is "ill informed" about the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine and unaware of the "high manpower losses" of the Russian Army.

Ratcliffe allegedly urged Bortnikov to inform Putin about the "serious need" for Russia to pursue peace negotiations and stop attacking Ukraine.

@CIG_telegram

🌟 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) has released a new video update from Adm. Brad Cooper, announcing that U.S. forces have cleared an international shipping channel of mines and declared the Strait of Hormuz open.

According to Cooper, U.S. forces have assisted more than 1,500 vessels through the Strait over the past several months, carrying more than 750 million barrels of oil.

The announcement comes as commercial traffic through the Strait remains well below prewar levels and amid continued concerns over remaining Iranian mines and threats to shipping. U.S. allies have privately assessed that not all mines may have been cleared, while the International Maritime Organization continues to advise vessels to exercise maximum caution.

📎 OSINTdefender

🇺🇸🚫💰 US Navy is running out of money because of the Iran War: Leaked Pentagon memo says the Navy has “shortfalls in payroll” accounts due to DoD “raiding” them to fund the war.

Experts and former officials say the accounts are running dry. “The piggy bank is broken,” said Harlan Ullman, a retired naval officer. Ullman is a member of the National Commission for the Future of the Navy but he said he is not speaking on the commission’s behalf.

One official and one navy contractor said non-emergency maintenance on shore-based facilities has been deferred because of the cash crunch.

The navy’s budget for 2026, almost $300bn, has different batches of money allocated by Congress for various requirements: personnel, shipbuilding, procuring specific weapons systems and “operations and maintenance”, the day-to-day running of the fleet and its bases. The law limits how money can be rejiggered throughout all those batches of money.

The issue has occasionally surfaced in some hearings on Capitol Hill. Susan Collins, in a 21 July hearing of the Senate appropriations committee, said: “I’m told some military services face near-term solvency challenges.” A staffer said the navy was one of the services Collins was referring to.

📝 I also suspect this is the real reason why US-South Korea drills were cut back.

🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/27/trump-iran-war-navy-budget

🇺🇸🇷🇺🇺🇦 More details on CIA director, John Ratcliffe's message towards FSB director, Alexander Bortnikov:

Ratcliffe allegedly repeated a debunked claim, which said that the average life expectancy of a Russian soldier "is estimated to be between 20-30 minutes".

The claim originated from a Russian anti-Putin opposition Telegram channel which was picked up by the magazine, Foreign Policy, which popularised it for Western, English-speaking medias which ended up being repeated by Ratcliffe himself in July.

These kill to death ratios favoring Ukraine immediately fall apart upon paying closer attention to territorial changes in Ukraine with the Russian Army making significant gains in the Donbass in the last two months, while a high KDR should have, at the very least, stopped the Russian Army's advance.

Ratcliffe also told Bortnikov that Russia was losing at least 200 soldiers for every sq km captured, a claim which originates with the Ukrainian ministry of defense. He informed Bortnikov that Ukraine "mastered" drone warfare and that the Russian Army captured 1% of Ukraine's territory in the last 18 months which wasn't worth the cost.

The CIA director made no threats about consequences if Putin refuses to negotiate.

Before the trip, Ratcliffe assured Ukrainian counterparts he would explore Russian positions, not make concessions on their behalf.

The visit contradicts Trump's own characterization of the trip as "standard business" with "no message."

The NYT reports it was a deliberate effort to bypass normal diplomatic channels, with officials hoping Putin, a former intelligence officer himself, would find a CIA director's assessment more credible than messages from envoys Witkoff and Kushner, whom Ukrainians view as too close to Moscow.

📝 Why would Vladimir Putin believe U.S. intelligence reports over his own intelligence reports?

@CIG_telegram

🌐🇺🇦⚔️🇷🇺 What Happened to the Coveted Western Tanks Sent to Ukraine?

Ukraine pleaded for the expensive weapons, and ultimately got them, but drones have rendered them almost unusable.

Once Ukraine’s most sought-after Western weapons, tanks now mostly sit idle, hidden in forests and collecting cobwebs. The $10 million machines, procured with great fanfare, proved no match for cheap drones that now dominate the battlefield. Yet Ukraine still maintains them and trains soldiers to use them, while trying to imagine new ways to deploy them.

“We’re making virtually no use of armored vehicles,” Alexander Syrsky, who until last month was Ukraine’s top general, said recently. “This raises the question: How can we neutralize this advantage enjoyed by drones and give our armor a new lease on life?”

Ukraine started asking for Western-made tanks almost immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, when they seemed essential. Kyiv’s allies resisted sending them until January 2023, when Britain, Germany and the United States changed course following fraught negotiations and public pressure.

The 33rd Brigade was formed in part to receive those Western tanks. But by the time they entered the fight late that spring, cheap drones were already inflicting a deadly toll and were able to strike tanks at their most vulnerable points.

Russian forces started covering their tanks with anti-drone meshes and cages. “People laughed at them back then, saying they were making BBQ grills,” recalled a tank maintenance chief with the 33rd whose call sign is Energetyk. “But they were heading in the right direction.”

Ukraine followed suit, adding protective cages and reactive armor — external panels that detonate when struck, to deflect attacking munitions — in hopes of maintaining tanks’ relevance.

But soon both sides stopped using heavy armor for assaults.

Today Energetyk, 57, works in a forest in the Kharkiv region, well behind the front line. There, birds chirp, the air smells like wood and only upon a close look can camouflage netting be spotted among the trees.

German-made Leopard tanks sit beneath the nets, their turrets turned backward in the “travel position.” Some await repairs or maintenance like oil changes. Others, like one covered in spider webs, are parked in reserve for combat, though those orders have stopped coming.

Energetyk oversaw a crew swapping out the engine of a tank that had hit a mine and caught fire. Another tank had taken a drone strike to the turret, he said, pointing to its parking spot as he set off down a mud track through the woods with ammunition slung over his shoulder.

The damage occurred not during combat but “evacuations,” when tanks towed damaged equipment, effectively acting as extraordinarily expensive tractors.

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/world/europe/ukraine-russia-tanks.html