That would require the US to actually be interested in helping out, though. Hard sell these days.
Open source advocate, OSINT enthusiast, founder at Klartika. Passionate about the Caucasus and the Balkans. Coffee lover based in Zagreb, Croatia. šŖšŗ
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That would require the US to actually be interested in helping out, though. Hard sell these days.
NS got a decent bike lane network, comparatively much better than the poor state of Zagrebās, but if thereās one thing I donāt miss from living there is the fact that cars pollute every single cm of sidewalks once you leave the main streets. Moving by bike was still a decent experience though.
Maybe they could catch somebody falling out of the windows tooā¦
Maybe heās a fan of Turkmenbashi?
cutting its international rail connections (the ones to Romania underwent a similar destiny), for no apparent reason, thereās obviously something more that I donāt know. 2/2
When I was living in Serbia, the justification was a mysterious ādisagreementā between the Serbian and Croatian railways about a deteriorated part of the tracks between Tovarnik and Sremska Mitrovica, which always sounded to me like a convenient excuse. Since Serbia has long been intent on 1/2
So Trump greenlighted Ukraine disabling pipelines to Hungary and Slovakia forever?
I would say that Trump split US and Europe, irregardless of what Russia might or might not have done. No need to credit Putin for something he didnāt have to lift a finger to do.
Thanks Giorgi, the points of contention are clear and transparent; what I am wondering is if thereās any major change in the way the protests are led, especially in light of the gradually increasing brutality of the regime.
Maybe next time they could shoot the drones down instead of condemning the action and escorting them back to Ukraine to kill people and damage property.
Why are they even pretending to be shocked?
The result of suppressing Ukrainian voices (and performing algorithmic manipulations) on social media platforms. #Ukraine #UkrainianView
Is there any evolution in the protests and their objectives compared to the past 9 months?
Thatās a cryptic reference. This said, what I am saying here is very simple: Ukraine needs to defeat Russia, and what we are giving them militarily (now and for the past 3.5 years) is not enough to do so. 300 billions could be a decisive boost to finally do just that.
How exactly is giving 5/10B per year to Ukraine better than giving 300B to Ukraine?
There will be no Ukraine to reconstruct if we do not do everything in our power for Ukraine to win this war - including unblocking and using those 300B immediately.
Yeah, but you also win or lose the war once. Nowās not the time to think about future budgets.
Secondary sanctions on China by the EU would start a trade war, which would in the end afford Ukraine less money and less arms. Not the greatest idea. As for oil, agreed.
Mainstream pundits have instantly sanitized and ignored Charlie Kirk's core political project and its impacts. He has been remembered by the mainstream press as someone they merely disagreed with, a debate me-guy whose words and actions had zero consequences: www.404media.co/charlie-kirk...
And itās not like he would be more or less deserving of death if he were a single man. Thatās nothing more than the kind of mellow rhetoric thatās common in the US, though.
In todayās Vatnik Soup, Iāll cover the agenda-setting and flood of disinformation that spread on X and other platforms right after Charlie Kirkās assassination. Itās far from the first or last time a tragedy has been weaponized for political purposes. 1/18
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempt...
Thatās reasonable. Thank you.
Yeah and go figure, we wouldnāt approve of Ukraine bombing buildings in Montenegro because of some Russians having a meeting there either - except Ukrainians respect international law, unlike Russians and Israeli.
Would that move the statistical needle at all though, given the current amount of gun deaths? Asking earnestly, Iād like to understand if Iām actually underestimating the risk.
If she were talking about people leaving the country for good, alright. But we really donāt need tourists from an aggressive fascist state, thank you.
Wrong Georgia.
Iād say we disappoint ourselves if we expect anything but the worst from that psycho.
Sorry to hear that? About a person who wishes for the death of millions of people?
1% in the last 3 years. The other areas were already occupied since 2014 + the first push in early 2022.
With what money?
Not every leader. Certainly didnāt happen to Macron, for example.
Non ĆØ esattamente una trattativa se āvuole quello che dice luiā, ovvero tutto.
Why will Georgia āsoonā have the most pro-Russian government in the region? Been already a while.
I have deep respect for the Atlantic Council, but honestly this is the kind of article that could have been written in 2023, not in September 2025. Itās pretty naive to think that Trump has really got an interest to make this war end, if that means damaging Russia.
No such thing in Slovenia. Jugoslavia was not in the best terms with the USSR.
Hard to lock him up, seen as heās been living in Russia for the past 11 years.
Wow, @texty.org published their research about bias and disinformation about #Ukraine in #AI just the other day: texty.org.ua/projects/115... #UkrainianView #StandWithUkraineļø #LLM
From Zg now we have 07:05, 10:34, 12:50, 19:40, 20:37. Unfortunately still a large gap in the afternoon, if one more connection were to be added it would shape up to be a really good service.
Ah, thatās great then!
There were already two daily pairs though, although the timing was different? The second one from Zagreb was leaving around 15, if Iām not mistaken.
Is it a stable increase in frequency from the current 2xd?
Some of the data is completely off. Zagreb, for example, closed July at +1.0 vs 91-20 (+2.7 vs 71-00).
Yes, we do not prioritize the energy security of a country which doesnāt miss a single chance to boycott the union they belong to and steal money from. May an old style winter come to freeze them and slovaks solid.
Being afraid to take action, Iām sure the Commission is counting on OrbĆ”n to lose the next elections. But Fico is still going to be there, some more idiots are likely to take power in Czech Republic, Austria is never reliable, Romania is alright today and it blows up tomorrow, etc.
Oh boy. Iām afraid people like these arenāt even paid - they really believe in their alternate reality.
Exactly. Thatās pretty much the magic formula that has worked wonders for OrbĆ”n so far.
Georgia being Georgia, the exception is the (public) harmony of GD. They must have received some rather good training from their Russian and Hungarian friends in the past few years.
Share and repost. This cannot fly.
Quite smoky for a repelled attack.
Absolutely flawless article. The Mediterranean diet is to the modern world (and especially Italy) what film is to modern photography: a relic of the past that somebody still clings onto, more as a romantic idea than in daily practice.
Not an accident that the longest life expectancy and the lowest obesity rate in Italy today is in regions where the diet has never been Mediterranean. Apart from other considerations (health system, physical exercise) the diet regimen is important, but so are the total quantities of food consumed.
Oh, those lovely Russian-sponsored polls.
No doubts about the israelian strategy, but what have western journalists done wrong?
Hi Szabolcs, do you guys have a RSS feed of your main page? I can subscribe to the one for the newsletter archive, but the main one doesnāt seem to be working.
Precisely. There are well-defined requirements for visa-free travel, if the requirements are no longer respected, visa-free is no longer granted. Itās as easy as that.
We might have to take a hit, but we canāt give in to this bully on principles as well, after giving in on economy.
Important the NYT has picked up on what can arguably be considered the largest neo-fascist rally in Europe since the fall of Franco; Nazi sympathizer Thompsonās enormous Zagreb concert, endorsed and attended by the most senior levels of Croatiaās HDZ govt. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/w...
Yep, the sad side is that if things magically changed tomorrow it would take a long time to revert the damage which has been done in the last 3 years, which saw such a huge part of the foreign community - slowly built over more than 10 years - leave for safer places.
How I miss those places. I hope Georgia will someday head back to being a reliable country, so that Iāll be able to move back.
Years Iād say, Biden didnāt allow it either with his terror of imaginary red lines.
Nobody is debating the fact that China can play its cards. What I am saying is that it isnāt in a position to split the West with proposals whose bias would be hard to swallow even for puppets like OrbĆ”n - nor does it really care do to so, as the continuation of this war is beneficial to Beijing.
How would they undermine western unity? Nobody takes such Chinese proposals seriously.
Replacing humans is not inherently bad, and itās happened multiple times during the evolution of mankind. The issue is that society isnāt ready yet for a serious discussion about UBI, so any major disruption to the status quo is very tricky to navigate - all the more so in aging countries.
That was actually in NS - there were a bunch between Podbara and the center.
The tags remained in my memory exactly because they surprised me and, I remember thinking that it made sense for somebody whoās big on Kosovo being part of Serbia to support territorial integrity of any other countries. āDonbas je Rusijaā wouldnāt have surprised me, but yeah, this was just one guy.
āKosovo je Srbijq, Donbas je Ukrajinaā, which at least made some wicked but coherent nationalistic sense. 2/2
That was actually an absolute mindfuck for me to witness, as with the Kosovo issue youād expect Serbia to be a staunch supporter of any countryās official borders - but I guess many people somehow found a new philosophy around it. In NS, where I was living back then, I saw a few tags stating 1/2
After 2 years in Serbia I moved to Croatia, and one of the most obvious differences was precisely the general lack of this sort of victimism; a country with enormous, damning problems with nationalism and revanchism, as well as mediocre media, but with a much wider spectrum of opinions. 2/2
Yeah, heard the song -proof that itās a deep, long-standing sentiment. Serbiaās certainly not the only country (or area: many southern Italians also feel persecuted by great powers) in Europe to have certain odd feelings, but itās certainly elevated it to an art. 1/2
Very interesting read, and it doesnāt surprise me. I will never understand why so many Serbians feel that the country does not have the international standing it ādeservesā.
I have a few translator friends and theyād love to go back to 3 years ago - today theyāre all struggling to make ends meet. Proofreading the most critical parts of a text is very different from translating a whole manual or catalogue - of course you wouldnāt do that with mission-critical equipment.
Excuse me, but I believe humans got better things to do than translating manuals of milk frothers, describing the content of pictures for archiving and answering support requests. Thatās Luddism. Agreed about environment/electricity, but thatās because we are still too far behind with renewables.
For whom? For translations, where no human touch is required (think manuals, or descriptive texts), there isnāt a single downside from the end userās side. Same to create alt texts for blind people, and generally speaking plenty more use cases where humans do not add any value.
267 days of great efforts, sacrifices, dedication and risks, repeating the same strategy over and over with zero results. I donāt know what to think anymore, at this point.
Yeah, only 3.5 years after Ukraine asked for it.
If thatās the case, as with Navalny and his nationalistic positions, itās hard to break out of the loop and the conversation will keep on being lead by SNS. 2/2
My biggest question is: are the movements forced to frame it this way on the outside (flags, territory, ample use of Cyrillic) to have legitimacy, or is it out of sheer conviction? Iām afraid itās the second, based on the (few, admittedly) relevant talks I had in the two years I spent in Serbia. 1/2
I feel that the student/civic movements in Serbia are to VuÄiÄ what Navalny was to Putin.
I surely donāt mean to equate them, especially not traditional, long-standing movements. Iām *extremely* suspicious of new ones, though, and I believe secret services should be keeping a much sharper eye on them, as opposed to obsessively focus on pro-Pal movements as in the case of the UK and DE.
Why conspiracy theories? Itās been widely proven that Russia has been sponsoring groups using (fake) pacifism as a tool to manipulate public opinion: alliance4europe.eu/fake-doves-o... Itās fundamental to distinguish between real pacifism and state-sponsored propaganda, the way I see it.
I know real pacifists do exist, and maybe these guys are among them, but itās become increasingly difficult to recognise the real ones - and it was a lot easier to understand their reasons and support their ideals 20 years ago than it is now. 2/2
The issue with that statement is that it sounds precisely what Russia-sponsored āpacifistsā say most of the time. We are against NATO, we are against an arms raceā¦ but we are not in favour of our neighbour spending 40% of their budget for military expenses and becoming an existential threat. 1/2
This is CNN, a channel I really enjoy when I'm in the US. I wonder if American journalists are aware of how completely insane they look to the rest of the world. How utterly detached their narrative is from everyone else's. edition.cnn.com/2025/08/19/p...
Not exactly, the preconditions, on top of the Donbas, always included Kherson and Zaporizhzhia too.
Iām always against forbidding events and demonstrations, and what Germany and other countries are doing with pro-Pal demonstrations is rather shameful, but in these cases I have a recurring suspicion: is it a real grassroots peace movement, or are these guys the usual Russia-sponsored āpacifistsā?
āAnti-establishmentā, though? Really?
About 12%.
Goes together with the love for heavy makeup - odd but inoffensive. Serbia is a bit behind the curve under many points of viewā¦
The issue is with intelligence sharing. If that ceases (again), thatās an issue. Europe can probably find a way to take care of the rest, but not that.
1/11 š š·šŗ Vatnik Hall of Fame: Part 7 Time to induct 10 more figures into the gallery of grifters, propagandists, and useful idiots doing the Kremlinās work
Hopefully, if there will be free elections and if the gerrymandering wonāt have gone too farā¦
I wouldnāt be so optimistic about his successor. In any case, itās clear that Europe needs to learn to stand on its own legs without depending on Daddy US.
Agreed on that, heās seriously weird.
š“The Real Story of the Trump-Putin Summit Is a US Oil Deal Hiding in Plain Sight While no progress was made on a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire, the Kremlin opened the door to a deal that could pour billions into its own war coffers, reports @zarinazabrisky.bsky.social bylinetimes.com/2025/08/18/t...
The title of this article is somewhat misleading and thereās no per-country breakdown yet, but at this point itās safe to say that Trump is certainly doing a disservice to US tourism: www.forbes.com/sites/suzann...
Americans better remember very well about the > 50% of voters who support(ed?) Trump, and their opposition politicians who did jack to stop or slow his plans down. The marvellous āland of the freeā isnāt supposed to be saved by the president of a small country at war 8000 km away, last I checked.
