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Bulletins and International News Discussion from September 21st to September 27th, 2026 - Saudis Panic, Try To Bring In US / Diesel Prices Soar / Poland Wants In On Western Military Humiliations? (thelemmy.club)
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A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like "in Minecraft") and comments containing it will be removed.

Image depicts the aftermath of a Yemeni missile impacting King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preambleIt's been a much slower week than last week, consisting mainly of consolidation and (so far, empty) threats.

In Yemen, Ansarallah continues to battle Saudi-backed mercenary groups. Gains have been relatively slower compared to the lightning offensive earlier that took the western coastline, which makes sense with all the new territory they have to administer and generally sort out, including fortifying towns and cities against potential Saudi assaults from the north. The biggest news so far has been Trump apparently being on the verge of striking Yemen over the weekend due to Saudi insistence, to the extent that embassies across the region issued alerts warning that they might soon be attacked, but then deciding not to when people in his administration told him not to. I haven't cared for Trump's theatrics for several months now, so I won't care to speculate whether this is a bluff or a double bluff and so on; all I will say is that a couple years ago, a significantly stronger US military tried and failed to dislodge Ansarallah's control of the Red Sea, and that this time, they even seem willing to hit Saudi oil facilities in response.

On that note, diesel continues to break new price records, and gasoline isn't too far behind it. Outright shortages haven't yet become systemic, as tempting as it is to look at a couple gas stations running out and drawing trend lines from there, but it's certainly going to be where we're headed if there isn't a diesel export ban eventually, which Russia and others have already implemented. A ban would somewhat alleviate US price hikes, but would cause major instability throughout the rest of the world due to the ubiquity of diesel in transportation infrastructure, and if you've created a favourable international order over the past century or so, you really don't want to blow it up.

Next up: Poland's been amping up their anti-Russian rhetoric to new heights lately, joining Germany and others in advocating for further aid to Ukraine and the creation of modern national armies in Europe to send into Ukraine to battle Russia directly. This type of thing would have been rather frightening to me back in 2023 and 2024, but at this point, all I can do is shake my head. We all saw how the US military, which is more powerful than yours, has faired against Iran, which is weaker than Russia - and you want to arm yourself with largely American weapon systems, or at least systems heavily inspired by the American MIC? Lol. Lmao, even.

Lastly for today, Trump seems to have taken a victory lap over their more-or-less annexation of Greenland after Denmark permitted it. As I and many others noted back when this was all over the media initially months ago, the US has had a military base there for decades already and has been investing in mining there too for a while, so this is more of a formalization of the de facto status quo. Denmark previously technically had a veto on US military activity there, but now seems to be gone; after all, there is little chance that Denmark would ever have the courage to actually use said veto anyway at this point. So, geopolitically, it's a fairly minor news item that serves mainly as yet another humiliation for Europe in a long chain that stretches far into the past and continues to stretch into the future. For the Greenlanders themselves, however, this does seem like pretty catastrophic news, with any and all non-US foreign investment (such as by China) likely to be cut.

(and as a postscript here just before I hit post: yes, the Iranian president physically travelling to the US is embarrassing for Iran and very embarrassing for him. at least Araghchi going makes sense given he's the foreign minister. the silver lining of this debacle might be a further discrediting of the non-hardliner side?)

Last week's thread is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.

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[–] 57 points 1 day ago (6 children)

dang, they invented attrition for cyberwarfare https://archive.ph/QTiQD

‘Cyber magazine’ can run out ‘pretty damn quick’ in modern conflict: Admiral

In the wake of public debates about the health of physical US munitions, a senior Navy official said the "cyber magazine" isn't infinite either.

more

While US officials have warned of munitions shortfalls from the Iran conflict, the Navy’s top cyber official identified another key observation from recent military operations: the “cyber magazine” can be vulnerable to exhaustion as well. “Your cyber magazine of these exquisite fires is empty pretty damn quick,” Vice Adm. Heidi Berg, commander of Fleet Cyber Command/10th Fleet, said in response to a question regarding lessons from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and US operations in Venezuela, the Middle East and elsewhere. “How are you going to regenerate and continue to develop accesses and effects to be able to deliver over the course of what will almost always be against a peer competitor, a longer-term sustained conflict?” she added, speaking at HammerCon, hosted by the Military Cyber Professionals Association on Thursday. Berg did not go into details, but officials and experts for years have acknowledged that cyber capabilities and bespoke exploit tools are not limitless, necessarily reusable or easy to come by: once an adversary, or company, patches a flaw in a system, the tactic can become obsolete. They also can’t be replenished like traditional munitions with an infusion of money and production lines, given it requires time and skill to discover exploits and develop the tools to take advantage of them.

Beyond the current conflicts, exploits or hacking methods that were used in the Iran or Venezuela operations may now be burned for any future conflict. A former senior Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said China, for instance, is most likely watching how US cyber operators are performing and observing their tactics. While the debate about a shortfall in physical munitions has splashed across headlines, the status of America’s cyber munitions has remained largely out of the public eye, especially in the context of operations in Iran. Cyber has often been thought of as a persistent, daily contest below the threshold of armed conflict, but now the US has found itself in sustained combat operations in cyberspace since the launch of Operation Epic Fury (OEF). “From an OEF perspective, just to put in perspective, so 28 February, and it hasn’t stopped. Probably for the first time for the cyber force at large, it’s been this constant,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank, commander of Army Cyber Command and the cyber official charged with running cyber operations in the Middle East, said during the same event.

After Epic Fury initially kicked off, experts told Breaking Defense that in one-off operations such as Absolute Resolve that captured Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro — which Berg described Thursday as “the largest and most complex cyber operation that had ever been executed” — perpetual access isn’t always as big a concern as sustaining a military campaign over time. But Jason Kikta, a former cyber operator with CYBERCOM, told Breaking Defense today that access was the “real asset” in cyber operations and agreed that it is “quickly expended and slow to replenish.” With sustained activity in Epic Fury, there will be many missions that will evolve and change parameters and priorities as the battlefield and cyberspace evolves, while American hackers will be working around the clock to find more accesses. But, there’s still always the question of what to do once accesses are gained: continue to gather intelligence, or to break something, which almost certainly eliminates the ability for cyber to impact that target again while also closing any intelligence value. As far as the price tag for developing ever-newer cyber capabilities, US Cyber Command, in an unfunded priorities list sent to Congress earlier this year, requested an additional $229 million for scaling cyber operational capacity and the development and deployment of cyber munitions, according to InsideDefense. Those funds would go toward limitations in CYBERCOM’s ability to generate and sustain cyber effects at speed and scale, the publication reported.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I guess eventually you just run out of known exploits

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago

    Not just exploits it's backdoors and implanted sleeper cell malware weapons that once activated you can't continue to use as they either do their job and have nothing left to do or get ripped out as they're detected because they're doing damage and can't stay hidden. Enemy also implements increasing hardening and countermeasures to prevent more activations and kill your command and control networks.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 day ago

    I dont think attrition or magazine depth really describe the relationship between adversaries in cyberwarfare. Those terms are reductive to the dialectical nature at hand - Just because you exhaust a particular attack against your enemy doesnt mean that the methodology at large is obsolete. in an effort to harden a system against one attacker, you may make a tradeoff that weakens them on another axis. Systems hardened in one area for a particular attack are not necessarily immune to it in another.

    If that were the case, Wordpress would be impenetrable.

    Take a DDoS attack for example. The response would usually be to place the attacked services behind a proxy (ie. cloudflare) which has large capacity and features to mitigate heavy traffic spikes. Now, the same organisation is vulnerable to the proxy service's datacenters facing outages - perhaps those datacenters are easier to target with an airstrike, or you can target the DNS which is responsible for routing traffic into the proxy.

    Point being you could start an operation with fewer offensive options than by the end, which doesn't align to the concept of "magazine depth". At least for the analogy of military attrition, that also implies an expenditure (or loss) of friendly assets/materiel to achieve an objective. However, the costs of a cyber attack incurred on the attacker are usually much lower than the defender.

    The US, being driven by an ideology that rejects the notion of dialectics, and argues one of ""systems thoery"", does not have the capacity to view cyberwarfare outside of the narrow lens of bullets and traditional logistics. What they are dealing with is much closer to the cold war military arms race, which existed as a dialog with its adversaries, rather than a unilateral attacker vs defender dichotomy.

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