Ukraine Update May 27

2026 — Cutting Ties, Another Night of Strikes

So Goes the Invasion of Ukraine

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Ukraine launched more drones into occupied Crimea, attacking the naval base in Sevastopol. The headquarters of Naval Aviation was hit as well. Russian forces moved the headquarters of the Navy to the Naval Aviation building after Ukraine destroyed the old Navy HQ two years ago.

The Belbek aerodrome was targeted, as well as naval assets on Cape Fiolent, to the south of the city. Saki and Kacha airfields were attacked as well. Russian sources claim intercepting 14 drones. The attack lasted just under three hours. There is a fire near the port. Russian air defense damaged a government building. I love the quote from the pro-Ukrainian “Voice of Crimea” Telegram channel… “According to preliminary data, no people were injured. As for the Russians, it is being clarified.”

In Russia, the Taganrog aircraft repair plant #325 was targeted, and smoke is visible. Locals complain that Russian air defenses are causing the drones to impact civilian targets. Translated by Google.

Tuapse was targeted again, for the fifth time this year, with smoke rising from the oil storage tank area, though it was gray rather than black, suggesting a minor fire. It looks like a gas station is burning. At least that is a sign that they actually have gasoline for sale, so that’s good, right?

Air defenses were very active in Novorossiysk, with tracer rounds and air defense missiles lighting up the night sky. It’s unclear if any damage was done to the port facilities there. A cell phone video from a visiting sailor was synchronized with the drone feed published by Ukraine, showing the launch of an air defense missile.

“For SALE: Port Facility, slightly damaged, under frequent attack by migrating birds.” The Russian government is offering to sell its direct 20% stake in the Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port (NMTP is the Russian abbreviation). Transneft, the state-controlled oil company in which the Russian government owns 100% of the voting shares, owns 60% of the port facilities, and those shares are not being sold at this time. NMTP also owns assets in Primorsk, near St. Petersburg, another port that is under frequent drone attacks from Ukraine. With all of its facilities, NMTP handles half of Russia’s oil exports. The goal of the sale is to raise $450 million for the state to help pay for the war in Ukraine. It may also prompt the new owners to invest in air defense, thanks to a new law passed this week in Russia that allows private companies to invest in air defense weapons, encouraging them to protect themselves because the government can’t stop the Ukrainian drones.

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Russian bloggers posted an AI image of an airfield in Ukraine, claiming that it was the target of the Oreshnik missile. Unfortunately, Ukrainian bloggers actually pay for satellite imagery, and the airfield was not damaged. Also, the explosions on the airfield were at a higher resolution than the surrounding terrain, a dead giveaway that the image was altered. Try harder, Russia. This is not even video-game quality footage.

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Russia is preparing for another large attack, probably concentrated in Kyiv, either today or tomorrow. Strategic bombers have been relocated to their Western bases and are loading weapons.

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Ukraine has warned that it has detailed over five hundred targets in Belarus that will be destroyed, should Lukashenko make the fateful decision to get involved in the invasion of Ukraine (again).

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Financial Times reports that “Nine countries pull out of Ukraine ammunition coalition” — that was the headline anyway. The reality is that with Babis in charge of Czechia, nine countries have decided that the deal has run its course and are moving their investments in the former Czech initiative elsewhere, but still supporting Ukraine. Alarmist title, clickbait headline. Be better, FT.

The Czech initiative was about buying ammuntion for Ukraine from third party countries that wanted to help Ukraine but were unable to for financial reasons, didn’t want to help for free when they could get some of those juice Euros for their aid, or wanted to hide their assistance behind a third-party go-between to avoid souring relations with Russia. The initiative is less important now, given that ammunition production in Europe has surpassed even that of the US.

This is deliberate misinformation, or just incompetent reporting. Either way, why would I want to pay $45 a month for such drivel?

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Head of the State Duma (russian legislature) Defense Committee said that striking the Ukrainian Rada (Ukrainian legislature) doesn’t make sense, adding that the legislature does not make the decisions. “Just as in Russia, for example, the State Duma (is not a decision-making center).” He also added that Zelensky is “hiding in a bunker” somewhere, which is odd, as Zelensky is routinely photographed at the scene with firefighters in Kyiv and with soldiers on the front lines. Putin, meanwhile, is actually hiding in a bunker.

What I’m hearing him say is, “take out Putin, not us, it’s not our fault, we have no power here.”

Note: “Rada” in Ukrainian is rooted in the word for council, advice, and agreement. “Duma” is rooted in the Russian word for “thinking”. Rada comes from the Cossack tradition of open debate among the councils, where officers and ordinary citizens would openly debate decisions. Duma comes from the historically smaller body of advisors around the Tsar, a group of nobles who make decisions, while the rank-and-file abides without a voice. Ukrainian political traditions — especially among the Cossacks — emphasized assemblies and elected councils. Muscovite traditions emphasized centralized authority with advisory elites around the ruler.

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The Russian grain ship that tried to sell stolen Ukrainian grain in Israel, then diverted to Turkiye when Israel refused, is now returning to Ukraine, unable to sell the contents of its hold.

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Comments from the Russian public… A few days ago, Russia bombed a “Light of the Gospel” evangelical church in Ukraine, all the while accusing Ukraine of persecuting the war-blood cult that is the ROC.

Here’s the commentary from the Russian public.

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In a scene reminiscent of Black Friday sales at an Alabama Walmart, a new clothing store opened in Yekaterinburg. Shoppers trashed the new store, tearing clothes off hangers, leaving a mess in the changing rooms, stealing clothes, and leaving behind their old clothes, and generally ruining the business. Great and mysterious Russian culture.

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Levada, the semi-independent (as independent as anything can be in Russia) polling agency, shows that 62% of Russians favor peace talks with Ukraine, and only 27% want to continue the war. This is just bad polling. They aren’t asking the right questions. How many Russians favor withdrawing their army from Ukrainian territory? The answer is very close to zero. Thus, there is still a lot of work to do.

Cutting Ties

Russia is going down the road of threatening Armenia with cutting off oil supplies if it continues down the road of allying with Europe. Think Russians have a short memory — this is what Russia did to Ukraine starting in 2004. All it accomplished was making Ukrainians, who had previously had a positive or at least neutral view of Russia, hate Russians more. Mucking about with the gas supply as a political tool causes countries to look elsewhere, and Armenia has other options. Russia, however, is quickly running out of customers. The gas threats are a short-term solution that creates long-term problems.

In a similar vein, Ken Paxton’s “victory” in Texas republican primaries looks like one of those short-term solutions. Trump is alienating a huge number of Republicans to consolidate the entire GOP around the MAGA base. With Putin and Trump, there can be no disagreement on any issue, no matter how small. Anything other than total, unquestioning fealty is seen as enemy behavior.

With Ukraine, what would realistically have happened to Russia if it had joined NATO, say, in 2004, and the EU in 2014? Nothing, except that Ukraine’s economy would have grown like Poland’s, meaning Russia could sell more gas and more oil to yet another friendly neighbor.

You don’t get stronger by cutting ties, by bullying those who agree with you on 99%, 90%, or even 51% of the issues.

A Few Words on LLMs

In a few years, the entire internet will be replaced with AI slop. We are facing several core problems.

First, the training models will increasingly rely on analyzing AI-generated content to improve themselves. There is no room for improvement there. Already, nearly all human-created content has been dumped into the training models, so there is no more genuine content to add. All the newer models can do is train themselves on data generated by previous versions of themselves, the human equivalent of aspiring to be as good a writer as I was when I was 14. I was horrible. I still have some of that trash lying around

Second, as more and more content is generated by AI, the storage requirements for retaining human-created content will be overtaxed. LLMs can simply generate too much content too quickly. Even before “AI”, storage requirements were growing exponentially. Now, content can be generated faster than ever before. YouTube, TikTok, and other video sites are going to break under the strain of unlimited slop uploads. Already, by sheer quantity, although not yet based on page views, AI “news” sites run by malevolent actors outnumber legitimate reporting. Hundreds of articles are generated every day across thousands of sites.

Third, content consumption is increasingly just “AI”s reading the slop generated by other “AI”s. If an article gets 100 views, half of them are probably from AI web crawlers. I know that some of the responses to my articles on Medium look suspiciously AI-generated. Now, I can generously assume that they were left by humans who perhaps need help with English — that’s fine, I guess. But what about sites that make revenue based on page views, like Facebook and Twitter?

Language models are already gobbling up the slop they created, using it as training data, and regurgitating it as fact. As the simulations improve, distinguishing fact from fiction will become even more difficult. Information will become meaningless. The old content, the human-generated content, will be sidelined, unable to compete. Anything a human can do, an AI can replicate in a more clickbait fashion and do it a thousand times over.

I already saw, in the human world before AI, how “news” sites would take a story from the New York Times and copy out all the information, adding nothing, and removing the paywall, while adding dozens of “personalized” ads. Now the “AI”s are doing it even more quickly, adding whatever bias their controller asks for, as well as the bias inherent in the “AI” itself.

Hopefully, we can create a separate internet without any AI content. I would like that. Failing that, and we will, as a species, fail to do that, we will all have to go back to reading books. But only books published before 2022.

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Antisemitism in the USA

I’m often told by certain people that antisemitism is mostly on the left in America. Let’s compare. Is it close? Does the left engage in more anti-semitic behavior than the right? The Anti-Defamation League monitors antisemitism in the United States, cataloging all antisemitic incidents, white supremacist propaganda, white supremacist events, extremist murders linked to antisemitism, terrorist plots, and police shootouts. Their database goes back to 2002. Here is the map of all left-wing-linked incidents of antisemitism in the US, from 2002 to 2026.

Note that many of these attacks had nothing to do with anti-semitism, and it’s not clear why they were included here. The event in Kansas City, for example, was someone throwing two Molotov cocktails into the empty office of a democratic mayor (who is not Jewish). Other attacks listed as “left-wing” were several incidents of people burning Cybertrucks. I was not aware that Tesla, Elon Musk, or those god-awful trucks were Jewish.

Autodrive doesn’t even work, much less have the computing capacity for “faith”, even if trusting in Tesla’s software is an act of faith in itself.

The link made by the ADL was that the trucks were attacked in response to Musk giving what looked a lot like a nazi salute at a political event, and calling anybody a nazi is apparently anti-semitic. Seems like a stretch to me.

Other “left-wing” attacks were against ICE, which is also not Jewish, like the Joshua Jahn attack in Dallas, TX, in 2025.

In total, the ADL listed 66 events committed by left-wing groups between 2002 and 2026. Sixty-six. And even a cursory examination of them shows that many of them had nothing to do with antisemitism.

And here is the map of right-wing incidents in the same timeframe. Larger bubbles represent more events.

In total, the ADL listed 31,763 events committed by right-wing groups between 2002 and 2026. Thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and sixty-three. That’s a ratio of 481 right-wing for every one left-wing. Among the recent right-wing events, the Patriot Front group is responsible for many of the attacks, the people that Donald Trump called “very fine people on both sides” at the Unite the Right rally in 2017.

[embed]*HEAT Map™ *ADL Center on Extremism experts developed this unique visualization using data points from information sources including news and media reports, government documents (including police reports), victim reports, extremist-related sources, Center on Extremism investigations and more. ADL H.E.A.T. Map is updated monthly. Frequently asked questions about the H.E.A.T. Map can be . www.adl.org

The media needs to be better about covering these groups and linking them to the politicians who support, condone, or even fail to condemn not only their behavior but also their beliefs. There is absolutely no proof that I’m aware of the Patriot Front has links to Russian intelligence, but I am 100% sure that such links exist. Their imagery, language, and behaviors mimic those of similar groups in Russia. They wear masks, carry flags, communicate in racist and supremacist language, and some of their members are also members of Russian extremist organizations like Street Fights Club.

[embed]Revealed: how a Russian fight club expanded into the US with the help of American neo-Nazis Members of white supremacist 'active clubs' spearheaded a US expansion of a Russian fighting group that has raised…www.theguardian.com

There is also “The Base”, founded by Rinaldo Nazzaro, an American living in Russia, and SouthFront, the Russian propaganda outlet that courts relationships with groups like Patriot Front.

When the media leaves out the “neo-nazi” adjective when they talk about these groups, they do the public a disservice.

“Vigilante group?” That’s what they call Russkaya Obschina? Yes, they are a vigilante group, but they are a neo-nazi vigilante group, and I feel that descriptor is rather important for BBC audiences. Like Western neo-nazi groups, Proud Boys, and so on, they hide behind the “we are defending traditional values” shield, but the reason they raided the party was that they were looking for “LGBT propaganda,” which we should all remember is illegal in Russia. RO has conducted hundreds of raids in the past few years, three hundred of which, including this one, were assisted by Russian police.

Asked for comment on our investigation, the Russian embassy in London said: “The broad public support [Russkaya Obshina] enjoys reflects the… growth of interest in national culture and historical traditions” and “it would appear that… civic engagement in Russia provokes irritation among those who seek to denigrate and discredit our country.” — Russian Embassy, speaking with the BBC

Their platform is “Russia is for (white, Christian) Russians.” They are opposed to immigration, violently opposed to Muslims, including the Chechen groups led by Kadyrov, and advocate for a pan-Slavic state, “uniting” all Slavic people under Russian rule. They are descended from the “Slavic Union” political party in Russia, whose symbolism was too extreme even for Putin, who banned it in 2010. Below, a “Russkaya Obschina” rally, and the flag of “Slavic Union”. Note that in Russian, Slavic Union is “SS”.

“Before we achieve whatever agreement, the core reasons why the whole thing started should be eliminated. This is the NATO membership, the threat that Ukraine poses to Russia, the neo-Nazi nature of the regime, the persecution of the Russian-speaking population.” — Russian Ambassador to the UN Nebenzya

Ukraine is often depicted by Russia as being under the control of far-right nationalist groups, but the reality is that it is Russia that is beholden to these groups. They accuse others of what they themselves are guilty of. These groups are violent and hardline, and hold tremendous influence over Putin’s regime, represented within the halls of power.

The idea that Ukraine, which was one of the very few European countries that supported Israel during the Gaza war over the last few years, and is led by a Jewish Russian-speaking president whose ancestors died in the Holocaust, is some kind of haven for right-wing violence, or that the left in America is somehow antisemitic, is false. Antisemitism is overwhelmingly the domain of the right wing, the extremist white-supremacist wing of the extremist MAGA wing of the extremist Republican party.

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To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Trump’s “Bored of Peace” fund has received no money from donors. Either that, or Trump simply stole all of it. Either way.

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Humor?

“In order not to cry harder, I laughed.” — Ukrainian

Thank you for reading!

[embed]Dylan Combellick is A holistic approach to war and everything else. I write and research themes around geopolitics and war. Retired intelligence analyst. World traveler.Check out the…buymeacoffee.com