Dirk Pilat

Oleksandr Yakovenko, the founder of TAF Industries, one of Ukraine's largest drone makers wrote a good response to @RheinmetallAG's Papperger's irritating statement. I used AI to translate it for you. It is worth reading in full. "Dear Mr. Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, When you called Ukrainian drone manufacturers “Ukrainian housewives with 3D printers in their kitchens,” you demonstrated how deeply the European defense establishment still fails to understand the nature of modern warfare. This is not about emоtions. This is about battlefield reality. Here are the figures your industry refuses to acknowledge: In 2025 alone, Ukrainian drones carried out 819,737 confirmed strikes. They accounted for 90% of all combat losses of the Russian army—more than all other types of weapons combined. A single company, TAF Industries, produces up to 100,000 FPV drones per month. Over any given 90-day period, the products of my company alone have more confirmed hits than your entire fleet of equipment over its entire history of combat use across all conflicts. And most importantly—I built this company and achieved these results in two years, not fifty. Think about that. Our drones achieve greater kinetic effect in three months than your flagship platforms have in half a century. Why? Because the battlefield has changed, while your business model has not. Russian electronic warfare has rendered GPS-guided Western munitions (Excalibur, GMLRS, etc.) almost ineffective. Expensive and complex systems designed for wars with air superiority and conventional “peer-on-peer” conflict have become easy targets for drones costing $500–2,000 that attack them from above. The cost-effectiveness ratio has been turned upside down: one 120mm Rheinmetall shell or one anti-tank missile costs more than a dozen of our drones—yet our drones still prevail. This is not a “Lego game.” This is industrial Darwinism in real time. We iterate weekly. We lose factories to missile strikes and rebuild them within weeks. We print parts in basements and deploy 100,000 strike systems per month, while your engineers still require 3–5 years and hundreds of millions of euros to certify even minor upgrades. The war in Ukraine is not a temporary anomaly. It is the first true drone-industrial war. And it has already proven that outdated European platforms—no matter how expensive or “serious”—are becoming increasingly irrelevant if they do not integrate the very technologies you are mocking. So when you say “this is not innovation,” I hear something else: “We do not want to admit that the future is being written in Ukrainian workshops, not in Düsseldorf offices.” The hashtag #MadeByHousewives is trending for a reason. Because these “housewives” destroy more enemy equipment every month than entire European armies do over full campaigns. And they do so while your industry continues to sell 20th-century solutions at 21st-century prices. The invitation stands, Mr. Papperger. Stop laughing at the kitchen table. Come and learn how the war of tomorrow is actually fought. Because the next time someone asks, “Who needs tanks in the age of drones?”, the answer may be simpler than you think: Those who still believe in 1979 will lose to those who are building in 2026. With respect (but with facts), Oleksandr Yakovenko Founder of TAF Industries One of those “Ukrainian housewives”" pravda.com.ua/columns/2026/0…

The Geneva Convention says it’s a war crime to target journalists, even if they work for an enemy organisation. It’s also a war crime to target medical workers. After the killing of 3 Lebanese TV journos last week, several medics coming to help them were killed as well.

I do hope that European states finally understand what a strategic asset Ukraine is right now. People need to stop talking about Ukraine needing Europe. Europe needs Ukraine for its own freedom and security.

If there is precisely one thing you watch today, make it this. French Senator Claude Malhuret. A microphone. And the most magnificently savage dismantling of the Trump administration ever delivered in a language they almost certainly don’t speak. He covers Iran. He covers corruption. He covers the kind of staggering, industrial-scale incompetence that would get you fired from managing a car park. And he does it with the calm, unhurried certainty of a man who has read every page of the indictment and found it, if anything, worse than expected. France has never pretended to like these people. But this is contempt elevated to an art form. The kind of refined, aristocratic disdain that takes centuries of civilization to produce and approximately ninety seconds to deploy. Malhuret sounds like he is four seconds from the button. Not out of panic. Out of sheer, exhausted disgust. Honestly? Understandable. Watch it. Share it. The adults are speaking. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

The European countries that have invested the most in renewables are the most shielded from the Iran War's energy price shocks right now. So what is the European right's solution? Dismantle the climate laws that spur renewables investment. open.substack.com/pub/davekeatin…

The core of the war in Iran is that we remain addicted to oil. If we had acted on science, away from climate crisis, we would no longer depend on fossil-fuels. Just like many actors are doing. War accelerates global warming. A vicious spiral. We all lose. mailchi.mp/75017dfaa31e/c…

Heat pumps are the most efficient heating technology ever invented. They harvest and compress pre existing heat in the air, ground or water and transport it where it is needed. That energy is all around us. And it does not have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

An absolute disaster on every level

Solar does not care about the Strait of Hormuz. Oil flows through chokepoints. Solar follows a learning curve. Great piece @azeem exponentialview.co/p/solar-superc…

Oh look, after Spain spent the past six years investing heavily in solar and wind renewables, energy price fluctuations because of the US-Israel attack on Iran will impact them the least "Since 2019, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity, adding over 40 GW - more than any other EU country except Germany, whose power market is twice the size of Spain’s" "As a result, Spain’s electricity price is much less influenced by the ever-fluctuating cost of gas, which increased by 55 per cent the day after the Iran war started and has continued to rise"

"Putin never escalates when we help Ukraine. He escalates when we don't help enough." - Gabrielius Landsbergis Former Foreign Minister of Lithuania Don't stop supporting Ukraine, that country needs defense!🫡 🇺🇦

And I’d like to remind everyone that not so long ago, by helping Ukraine with weapons, America was: - securing valuable contracts for its own defense industry and spending a large part of U.S.-Congress-allocated funds in America - gaining massive global advertising for American weapons, which in Ukrainian hands performed superbly in a war against a vastly superior enemy (just look at the impact systems like the Bradley, HIMARS, and Patriot had) - gaining an extremely loyal ally in Ukraine, ready to share its cutting-edge experience from a new era of warfare, especially in drones and highly intensive missile defense - reinforcing its image as the arsenal of democracy and the powerful leader of the free world, sending a clear signal to dictatorships worldwide: don’t even think about wars of conquest, we will support our democratic allies - sending Ukraine, to a significant extent, older weapons from its stockpiles that would have had to be written off anyway in the future, while simultaneously modernizing its own arsenals - achieving the radical military weakening of an aggressive militaristic Russia, a dictatorship fundamentally built on revenge for the Cold War, hatred of America and the West, and a desire to dismantle the American-led world order And all of this -- without a single American servicemember having to get deployed and fire a single shot. Ukraine pleaded, humbly asking for nothing more than a simple win-win partnership: with your weapons we save ourselves from extermination -- you get a defeated fascist Russia. I genuinely cannot understand how anyone could trade all of that for absurd lies about “$350 billion,” then smear and humiliate Ukraine, insult America’s key NATO allies, side with that KGB cyborg in the Kremlin -- and then to squander billions of dollars, cost American lives, and derail the global economy in a poorly thought-out war in the Middle East. And then eventually end up asking Ukraine to help defend American bases in Jordan from Iranian-Russian drones.

While you were asleep, Americans were already making memes about US requests for Ukrainian interceptor drones and Zelensky's cards.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: "Regarding Russia, the quantity of Patriot air-defense missiles, that has been used in just the last few days [in the Middle East] would have been enough to protect Ukrainian cities from the devastating blows to the electricity system over the past couple of months. The United States has made a choice: it doesn't want to protect Ukraine or help Ukraine survive the war. Instead, we've decided to use that same capacity for this war of choice, one with an unclear outcome, against Iran. And the Europeans have seen that. The Ukrainians have seen it."

We can help you fight against Shaheds. Help us fight against ballistic missiles.

Investigative journalists, together with European security services, have established that Russian leader Vladimir Putin instructed a group of political technologists and Russia’s military intelligence to interfere in Hungary’s parliamentary elections in April in order to 🧵

⚡️More Patriot missiles used in Middle East in 3 days than in Ukraine since 2022, Zelensky says. kyivindependent.com/over-800-patri…

About 800 Patriot missiles were used in just three days of fighting in the Middle East — more than Ukraine has had during the entire war, Zelensky said.

The reason we gotta spend $4 million per Patriot missile to shoot down a silly $20,000 Shahed drone is because Donald Trump refused to give Ukraine the Tomahawks necessary to take out the Shahed factories in Russia

The willingness of major European states such as Britain and France to send their military forces to actively defend counties in the Middle East but not to defend Ukraine shows how Europe has a distorted sense of its own interests.