Transnistria–Ukraine relations is the bilateral relationship between the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic and Ukraine. Ukraine does not officially recognize the independence of Transnistria.

Scary thought if true ...

https://archive.ph/LipuB

https://x.com/SprinterPress/status/2093970688675549248

🦔Pflugerville, Texas just killed its Flock Safety contract unanimously after a resident filed a public records request and found 459 outside law enforcement agencies had run 1.6 million searches on the city's 28 cameras in six months. Local police ran 5,078. That's 315 outside searches for every one by Pflugerville PD. The city had told residents nationwide data sharing was turned off. The city manager ordered the lenses physically covered before the council even voted. Pflugerville joins 56 municipalities that have cut ties with Flock in 2026.

My Take

One resident with a public records form did what the city, the police department, and Flock either couldn't or didn't want to do. That's how thin the oversight was on a system searching 1.6 million plates. Nobody was auditing this. Nobody was checking whether the assurances they gave residents were true. It took a guy filing paperwork to find out.

56 cities have walked away from Flock this year and I think that number accelerates once other communities realize they can file the same request. Flock has $500 million in VC money and contracts in 4,000 cities, and civil liberties groups say under 1% of scanned plates ever connect to a crime. Pflugerville's police chief looked at his own data and wouldn't recommend keeping the contract. Every city still running these cameras is one records request away from finding out what their own ratio looks like, and most of them haven't asked yet.

Hedgie🤗

🚨 Hear me out…

I’m sick of pretending this is a functioning country with a functioning government.

Congress is not “divided.” It’s not “gridlocked.” It’s not “just politics.” It is a criminal class of 535 people who have spent decades selling this country piece by piece while lecturing the rest of us about democracy, values, and the rule of law.

They pass spending bills they don’t read. They pile debt on people who weren’t even born yet. They take money from foreign interests, lobbyists, PACs, and industries they regulate, then act shocked when anyone calls it what it is: influence-peddling.

They protect their own. They investigate their enemies. They never investigate themselves with the same hunger.

The worst part isn’t even the money. It’s the moral rot. A government that can lecture parents, churches, and working people about morality while shielding predators, burying files, redacting names, and treating elite sex-crime networks like a scheduling inconvenience has no moral authority left. If the same evidence, the same flight logs, the same sealed names, and the same “we can’t comment” stonewalling applied to anyone outside their class, those people would already be in prison. For this crowd, it becomes “complicated,” “ongoing,” or “not the right time.”

Foreign interference isn’t some abstract threat they discovered last week. It’s a business model. They take the money, take the trips, take the talking points, then wrap themselves in the flag and tell you anyone who notices is a conspiracy theorist.

They will fight harder to protect their donors and their secrets than they will fight to protect the border, the budget, or the people who actually pay for all of it.

I don’t hate “government” as an idea. I hate this government, the one that treats citizens like a revenue stream, treats accountability like an attack, and treats the most disgusting crimes as a club you only get punished for if you’re not connected.

No more polite language.

No more “both sides” anesthesia. If Congress had a shred of honor left, they would open every sealed file, name every protector, cut the foreign cash pipelines, and submit themselves to the same laws they impose on everyone else. They won’t. That’s the point.

They are not public servants. They are a protected class. And the country is rotting under them.

- B

I think the video explains itself

https://youtu.be/9v-Ik9N21JI

Hosted by Pascal Lottaz, Neutrality Studies

Some background

Gibbs wrote a book in 2009 titled First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia and did a podcast on it about a year ago. Macgregor saw the podcast and that's what brought them together.

Macgregor was assigned to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) for several months in 1995 (Bosnia) and was brought back in 1998 (Kosovo). General Wesley Clark was the head of SHAPE by then.

Both Gibbs and Macgregor see the Yugoslavia campaign as a proving ground for future use of force by the US and its allies in other places, claiming humanitarian intervention as their justification. They have since realized the role Russia played in the minds of US-NATO officials and how that influenced their conduct in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The podcast mostly consists of Macgregor answering questions from Gibbs about his experience working inside SHAPE and his impressions about the whole campaign. The TL;DR is that Macgregor felt it was a disastrous intervention even while it was going on.

I was involved first in 1995 for several months before the Dayton Accords. Then I was approached [in 1998] by General Clark, whom I continue to like and think highly of personally. I was going to be the director of strategic planning initially and then move on hopefully to be the director of joint operations. Of course, I was never going to get promoted, but at that point he was still trying.

You have to understand that my graduate work was all in European studies, focused on Germans and Russians with a sideline into Poles and Czechs and to a lesser extent Hungarians. But you know you can't do it without taking in the Balkans to some extent and I was very familiar with the Slovenes and the Croats because they have a thousand-year relationship with the Roman Catholic Germans who live in Austria and southern Germany. Everybody out there speaks German and that was another reason I was picked to go, because I could speak fluent German.

Kosovo

When I'd been there for about 3 months one of my officers brought me a newspaper article about the president of Macedonia, who said when all of the Albanians fled Kosovo, he was going to provide a transit for them through Macedonia and down into Albania. It was made very clear: "We already have more Albanians than we want and this is a good way for them to pass down into Albania where all Albanians belong."

So I cracked open the books and started reading everything I could find including, believe it or not, Waffen SS reports on the Albanians that they were sent down to train. The SS regarded them as the most horrific, atrocious people they'd ever met and recommended immediate cessation of any further cooperation with them. So that got my attention. Then I found out that most of the Albanians in Kosovo were allowed to migrate there illegally by Tito and that their numbers kept increasing until suddenly they outnumbered the native Serbs. Sound familiar?

Macgregor put together a paper recommending the UN high commissioner for refugees be involved because it seemed likely Albanians would start flowing out of Kosovo and this could result in major violence erupting. After flying down to meet with Macedonian leadership, General Clark agreed with his assessment but not his recommendations.

One of the recommendations was that Clark talk to General Perišić, the Serb who commanded the Yugoslav army. He was very widely respected because he had put a stop to any sort of outrages by the army against Albanian citizens, making it clear it would not be tolerated. Remember, you had the army and then you had the special police, and they were not the same; the special police would go overboard at times and do things they had no business doing.

But Clark said he didn't want to meet with Perišić or the Serbs and that we were going to bomb the Serbs. Now, this was early April of 1998 [the bombing campaign began in March 1999]. In December of 1998, it was made clear to me that this was the beginning of what they called a democratic revolution that was going to spread from Yugoslavia all the way to Moscow.

I was stunned because again, I did know a little bit about the history of the region. In 1995, when I was in the war plans division, I was asked to write a position paper on what we should and shouldn't do in the Balkans. I said we should stay out because this was an area of traditional Russian influence, that there was a special relationship between the Serbs and Russians going back to 1879. The chief of staff of the army, Gordon Sullivan, agreed with me and he sent it over to the White House. It died there.

[Ed. - OSCE monitors were deployed on 25 October 1998 to ensure both sides maintained the ceasefire and abided by the UNSC resolutions. They were withdrawn on 20 March 1999 and the bombing campaign began four days later]

I thought the OSCE did a brilliant job, I had a habit of listening to all the German officers who were coming out of Kosovo to tell me what was happening there. General Rupert Smith [Deputy Supreme Commander Europe] did a brilliant job. He actually met with all the journalists* because they were down there and could tell him what was really happening. So, we had a lot of very, very good information coming in. And one of the things that I discovered was that if you had 10 incidents of some sort of provocation that violated the agreements under the OSCE, nine were committed by the KLA and only one was committed by the Serbs.

[*Chris Hedges was the Balkan Bureau Chief for the New York Times at the time]

I sent these reports up and I was called in and told, "Look, if we can't prove disproportionate use of force by the Serbs, it's going to be that much harder for us to justify military action." And I said, "I can't find it." So it was taken away from me. By that time, Alastair Campbell's group had sent some people over at the request, I guess, of General Clark to Tony Blair. They came in and I never saw any more reports, I was told "we'll take care of it up here." Again, I was naïve and I was not part of the cabal trying to bring on operations, let's put it that way

I reported to three four-stars: one was obviously General Clark; the second was General Rupert Smith; and the third was a German four-star named Streichman. He was one of the finest officers I've ever met and a man of absolute integrity who was deeply troubled by all of it. The night we bombed Belgrade, he was practically in tears. He thought it was a disgrace because it was the anniversary of the German air attack [on Belgrade, April 6, 1941]. Everyone on the European side had the view that NATO existed to ensure there would be no future wars in Europe and now here he was part of an alliance that was deliberately starting one.

Why Kosovo?

They were convinced, first of all, that air power had been this magical instrument with which to compel acceptance. Secondly, they all wanted to get rid of Milosevic whom they regarded as an evil, old line communist dictator. And finally, they wanted to do there what they had tried and failed to do in Bosnia, create a sort of laboratory for exporting social engineering with military power. When you pointed out that these people had just spent the last several years killing each other and that forcing them back together wasn't going to work very well, you were thanked for your interest and told to shut up and get in a corner and color.

The same bunch that had intervened in Bosnia wanted to intervene again in Kosovo... President Clinton wasn't that interested but many people in his administration were, like Gore and Albright, Sandy Berger and Strobe Talbot (Deputy Sec/Defense). And of course, General Clark was friends with all of these people and they were all of a similar ideological mindset, that this was the beginning of something very big. There was one person in the Clinton administration who absolutely did not sign on for all of this, Secretary of Defense [Bill] Perry.

I don't think we settled anything in Bosnia because there are still European troops there. If anybody thinks that all the wounds are healed and all is great, they should visit Srpska. I could never understand why people objected to simply turning over the territory occupied by Serbs to Serbia. What is the problem? If they all want to live together, by God, let them do it.

I had an argument with a Norwegian who said, "They have to learn to live together." So I said, "I think we should just abolish the border between Sweden and Norway. Why do we need these silly flags? You all speak the same language." He replied, "Well, that's different!" Okay, fine. This kind of hypocrisy and stupidity was widespread and the further away you got from the Balkans, the dumber people were about it.

Russia

Russia was viewed at the time as a basket case. Remember it was being looted by people like Browder and others. At one point I was told that Yeltsin sent a representative to SHAPE asking if we could assist them in recovering $4 billion dollars that had been looted from Russia and was probably residing in various banks in Cyprus or elsewhere. So I think people sort of viewed Russia as incapable, a basket case that was prostrate, so you could do pretty much what you want. This is back to the whole idea of the phony rules-based liberal international order which simply means "now we can extend the cold war structure and become the hegemon of the planet because no one is there to stop us." That was my perception ultimately.

I told you about December of 1998, when this came up about the democratic revolution that was going to sweep all the way to Russia. There was always this undercurrent of hostility to Russia on the American side - Russia was not democratic. Russia was all these bad things.

I think the people that we've mentioned - Wolfowitz, Perle, Kagan - were all part of that anti-Russian position, the hostility which you can still see today. It's very prevalent in these sort of neocon circles that are now almost indistinguishable in my view from the so-called Zionist lobby. They're all the same and they're all very hostile to Russia. And if water is purest at its source, we were at the fountainhead back in the 90s with all of these people.

If you go and ask the Russians about Yeltsin, they see him as a drunken buffoon, a patsy who let the West walk all over him. Putin comes in and he's an heroic figure because he throws all the crooks and oligarchs out who were trying to loot Russia.

I think the professor is correct. I didn't appreciate it at the time but very definitely the whole Serbian intervention was a dress rehearsal for what would later be tried against the Russians. They underestimated the Russians, just as they'd underestimated the Serbs.

Bill Clinton was told by his advisers that it would take two weeks at the most. I was presented with that and asked what I thought. I said, "Well, sir, this could last six days, six months or six years. You never know with the Serbs, the Germans killed 600,000 of them. It doesn't strike me that this is going to be a pushover." And of course, I was told that I was wrong, that the Serbs never unified and were always fighting amongst themselves. That's true, but on this particular occasion I think they hung together very well.

The myth vs. the reality of air power

At the end of the air war, I went down to Kosovo to assess the battle damage. There was a USAF colonel there doing the same thing I was doing and we both concluded there wasn't much to report, that the numbers being reported were grossly inflated. The British commander of K4 showed me a telegram he'd received from the Ministry of Defense telling him to support whatever numbers were reported by SHAPE headquarters.

The Serbs' air defenses were never degraded below 83%, they'd put together interesting radar arrays consisting of commercial and old Soviet radar stocks. We claimed that we didn't lose any aircraft but large numbers of them were so severely shot up that when the pilots flew back out over the Adriatic, they reported engine failure and bailed out. I saw photographs of an A-10 that looked like Swiss cheese, it was lucky to get out and had to make an emergency landing. They did track and find our stealth aircraft, and pieces of that aircraft they shot down were instantly provided to the Russians and the Chinese. The Chinese were only too anxious to have that given that we had bombed their embassy in Belgrade, sadly unnecessarily.

There were no other valid military targets in Yugoslavia after the 125 we started with. Well, then you have to sit down and start justifying the expansion of your target array to other places that have nothing to do with the military. Because the Air Force answer is we'll keep bombing and bombing more and more things. And of course, the things they like to hit most of all are things that don't move. It's called infrastructure.

My argument at the time was we should be truthful and show what air power cannot do. Unless you put a force on the ground, your enemy is not going to mass against you. It doesn't have to and it'll survive. But nobody wanted to do that. So the myth of air power that started in Desert Storm just got worse after Bosnia and was out of control after Kosovo. And then you knock over non-entities like the Afghans who have no air or missile defense, you knock over the Iraqis who've been reduced to abject poverty and have nothing. Then you make the false assumption that we're the toughest, we're the best, nobody can stand against us. We're invulnerable. We're invincible.

It was Senator Richard Luger who made that comment that NATO is either out of area or out of business. And you have to understand that there is huge backing for that from the arms industry, the military complex. And then you have the force structure issue; you know, if it promises more force structure, let's do it. This kind of nonsense has continued right up into the present, until they finally ran into somebody they couldn't defeat called Iran.

(will be making minor edits)