• But Russian forces are stalled, and it’s unclear if Putin is denying, unwilling to confront or misinformed about the true nature of the battlefield. 

      

  A reportedly leaked Russian Ministry of Defense map from April showed Russian forces occupying Ukrainian towns it had failed to capture. The ISW said it had reason to believe the map was authentic and matched claims of military advances and victories from top Russian generals.

      

  Stepanenko said it’s possible Putin is operating on misinformation.
• Public criticism against Putin is a “fresh development,” Milov said, still generally mild but no longer a taboo. 
• Milov said Russia faces an “unholy trinity” that is culminating this year: Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) began to contract in the first quarter of 2026, the budget deficit is ballooning and inflation is rising.
• “The government is effectively funding the deficit through monetary emission, through printing money, which has enormous pro-inflationary effects,” he said, “which fuels inflation again, prevents the Central Bank from cutting rates and investment is going down.”
• But Milov said any political change in Russia is hard to predict, with Putin having destroyed and criminalized all manners of political organization and opposition. Milov said the Russian public had evolved toward adaption and survival. He said Russia is more likely to experience a major rupture similar to other points in its history, like the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

• “At some point it collapses and there’s no one to defend it,” he said.

    

• The attack appeared to mark the first time the Flamingo was deployed successfully in combat, the Kyiv Post reported, with the bus-size missile having undergone testing and tweaking for about a year. 

      

  The Flamingo is one part of Ukraine’s accelerating domestic military production base, said Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

      

  Ukraine’s ability to improve on the Flamingo’s targeting and distance — plus its military’s drone advancements, including all-domestic production — have helped push Ukraine on the front foot against Russia after a period of stalemate between 2023 and 2024. 
• Ukraine is accelerating development of a ballistic missile interceptor, a dire need in its air defenses as Europe and the U.S. have not provided enough to defend against the onslaught of Russian attacks. 
• Zelensky is pleading with the U.S. to permit licenses for the joint production of Patriot interceptors. President Trump has not dismissed Ukraine’s request but has not agreed to it either. 

• In the meantime, Ukraine and its allies must prepare for surviving the winter, stockpiling key humanitarian goods like warming tents and generators to combat what is likely to be Russian attacks on Ukrainian electrical infrastructure — a punishing strategy Putin employed last winter. 

      

  “There’s no reason to assume this winter will be any easier,” Coffey said. 

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• Smith still warns about the ideology gaining traction, though. “Marx has this great quote: History happens twice, first as tragedy, then as farce,” he said. “Even though America has already experimented and did not like socialism, we’re doing that same experiment again.”

• However, the Stanford research indicates that real-world driving patterns—including varied charging habits, temperature fluctuations, and stop-and-go traffic—actually slow battery degradation compared to controlled lab tests.
• Longer-lasting batteries enhance the resale value of used EVs, making them more attractive to budget-conscious buyers and accelerating the transition to electric mobility.
• real-world driving involves a mix of gentle acceleration, regenerative braking, and partial charging cycles that are gentler on the battery.
• As battery longevity improves, the total cost of ownership for EVs decreases, potentially driving higher demand and profitability for manufacturers.
• In summary, the Stanford study provides a more optimistic outlook for EV owners and the industry as a whole, suggesting that batteries are not the weak link they were once considered. As more real-world data becomes available, further refinements to battery expectations are likely.

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• This essay originally ran in 2016, shortly after its author published his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. We are republishing it on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, so that our readers can judge for themselves how well his assessment of the man he now serves as vice president has stood the test of time.
• During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.
• Trump’s large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities. Not all Trump voters spend their days searching for an analgesic.
• Yet a common thread among Trump’s faithful, even among those whose individual circumstances remain unspoiled, is that they hail from broken communities
• What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission.
• As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out.
• He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.
• The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals.
• Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.
• I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.
• J. D. Vance

  J. D. Vance is the vice president of the United States. He is the author of Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith and Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

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• Eric Metaxas says he set out simply to tell the story of the Revolution — and kept finding robust Christian faith at its center. His new book explores how that faith shaped the founding generation and set them apart from the British elites they fought against.
• His latest book, Revolution: the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World, tells the story of America's founding on its 250th anniversary.
• ten years before Lexington and Concord. But at the heart of this conflict between the 13 American colonies and Great Britain, it was a moral and spiritual conflict.
• the American colonists were dramatically Christian. I mean, no matter where you look, you see robust Christian faith everywhere. Everybody knew the Bible. Everybody is quoting the Bible when they talk. It's just a culture suffused with Christian faith, which makes perfect sense. Because you realize, why did everybody come across the Atlantic, you know, a hundred plus years before that? For their faith. They came here, they risked life and limb, because of their devout Christian faith. So these are the descendants of those folks.
• you get to the 1760s when this conflict happens, and then into the war after that, you're dealing with an explicitly, dramatically Christian population for whom virtue and character and principle are everything.
• And on the British side, this is where it really kind of hit me: the British were not just “not that,” they were really “anti-that.” They were really irreligious, mocking of the Christian faith of the colonists. The British elites were really cynical, corrupt, openly godless in the way they kind of lived their lives.
• George Washington, he is extremely upright. He's known to be upright, and he's known to care that all of his officers and the people around him behave in a way that is virtuous. That, you know, they go to church on Sunday, there's no swearing, there's no gambling, that we have to honor God in this army otherwise God will not honor us. And everybody knows this about Washington, and everywhere you look, you see it
• on the British side, his British counterpart—who is General Howe—is known to have a mistress while he is here in the colonies. It's not just that he has a mistress, he's known. Everybody knows it. And it's part of the British elite culture. Like, well, that's what we do, of course, you know, and we gamble and we drink, and that is who we are.
• But then the way the British fought the war, it makes sense from that worldview. They were genuinely barbaric, barbaric.
• I mean, John Adams and Washington write letters to General Howe and others complaining and saying you're behaving in such a barbaric way. We don't know what to say. We will not stoop to that. You know, we are Christians and we will not stoop to barbarism.
• But by barbarism I mean the most classic example was that the British, when Americans would surrender, many times the British would bayonet them to death. And I read this, I thought, this is a one-off. And it kept coming up over and over and over. Barbarism, the kind of thing that the Nazis or the Japanese in World War II, the way they would fight a war based on their worldview, like we're not going to play by the rules. We're going to crush you because we can. We don't believe in rules.
• the Americans were just the opposite. The Americans said over and over, we've covenanted with God. This is a sacred cause. And we want to honor God even in how we fight, how we treat our prisoners.
• the British treated the prisoners is another huge example of their barbarism. I mean, 10,000 American prisoners died in captivity. That's far more than died on the battlefield because the British conditions were so… even reading about it is painful.
• you have people dedicated to power and winning on the one side, who are cynical and there's a lot of corruption and they kind of wink at that. They're like, but that's just the way it is.
• the Americans really believed in these principles and really believed that if we behave in a godly way, if we fight this war God's way, God will give us the victory. I mean that's real faith.
• everywhere I looked. I saw this and I was absolutely amazed at the spiritual and religious component underneath everything.
• But I'm curious, did that affect how the founders built the nation, making it such that chattel slavery could later be dismantled?
• whenever people talk about the founders, that's already sloppy. Who are the founders? Some of the founders were bitterly anti-slavery. John Adams, Samuel Adams, any of these serious Puritan Christians from Massachusetts, and others were bitterly anti-slavery, and they were sick that they had to deal with South Carolina and Georgia. So to pretend that all of the men involved in this era were fine with slavery is, is intellectually dishonest, very dishonest.
• you realize that who started the war, who really began this whole thing was the Massachusetts Puritans. They come right out of the Reformation. They are dedicated to a biblical view of things. They're the ones that are leading the charge that we will not allow ourselves to be enslaved by the British. We have to obey God rather than man. And so you know, it's important for us, at least, to be honest about what happened.
• I mean the Americans were largely a people of robust Christian faith.
• Why was it significant for the founders to create a constitutional republic instead of a democracy?
• A democracy gives people the power to do demonic things, right? If everybody says, you know what, we believe in X. we can make X happen. Well, what if X goes against everything in the Bible and against what is right in God's eyes?
• Shouldn't we have in our constitution protections so that the majority can't do wicked things? That's called a constitutional republic. 
• And that's why we have a Supreme Court, we have checks and balances, we have a number of things to prevent the people, if they get the ability, from doing wicked things. And so I think that you maybe can't prevent it a hundred percent, but the point is that the Supreme Court,
• if everybody voted to do something that is not consonant with our deepest values, you know. Let, let's say we, we, we get enough people in the country who believe in Islam and say, “Okay, we're gonna have Sharia law all over the country.” The founders would say, “Well, you, you can't do that because Sharia law says you could do this and this and this and we don't believe in that.” You know, we don't believe in child marriage, or we don't believe that women should be treated like second class citizens. Those laws precede the will of the people if the will of the people goes in that direction.
• whereas in ancient Greece, they didn't have that, or ancient Rome, or anywhere where it's just like, “What does everybody vote?” I mean, in Germany, you know, if everybody says let's kill all the Jews. They'd be like, okay, let’s just, we'll go with that.
• So we have checks and balances,
• In our country we would say, “Well, we can't. Even if everyone in the country wanted to do that or enough people wanted to do that, that goes against our values.” So it's a big deal to understand that we're not a democracy, we're a constitutional republic.
• we should be able to know the difference between telling the truth and pushing forward a point of view.
• And I think it made a lot of liberals angry because they had had a good thing going. They'd effectively hijacked his legacy for 50 years. And I think that's always going to be the case if you tell the truth.
• There are people who disagree with you who are going to say, “You're not telling me the truth. You're importing your point of view,” you know. And I think, “Well, no, I'm trying to import the point of view of the men of the revolution into the story of the revolution.”
• check the footnotes, read the sources. If I ever put anything in that somebody could say, you missed this, I'll change it. But I don't see, I never see that because I really care, you know, as a Christian, about about telling the truth. Even if I don't like the truth I want it to be historically, you know, as accurate as conceivably possible. That I take that very seriously.
• George Washington.

• Washington is almost… he's like a figure from history that you think he's gotta be made up, but he's not.

   

  There's a scene in the book from 1775. He arrives in Cambridge and the militia are, you know, so disparate. I mean you've got guys from Virginia, you've got guys from the seaports along Massachusetts, whatever, completely different. And they're really at war with each other. I mean, they're sort of existing. But then there's like a snowball fight and it's just a scene. Washington rides his horse into the middle of this and like a giant grabs two of these guys and practically throttles them. And it's almost like the children were caught at recess. The principal showed up and they freeze. And I just think, this really happened. We have a firsthand account of Washington, who's physically huge and powerful, and also commands this respect.
• Samuel Adams.
• Samuel Adams. There ought to be a statue of Samuel Adams in every state in America. He is the father of the American Revolution. He was onto this stuff before anybody, and he was so dedicated to the cause that he didn't care if people knew he was involved. He just wanted good to happen. But he is one of the most dramatic heroes of the time and deeply Christian, motivated by his faith, just absolutely one of the greatest names in American history.
• King George
• King George was, you know, he wasn't really a bad guy, but he was a creature of his time. And his government was corrupt. They were cynical. That was who they were. And so he had plenty of money, effectively, to buy votes in Parliament. So his own corruption prevented him from hearing the truth from members of parliament and enabled him to lose the colonies.
• And it's an amazing thing because I think later on he recognizes—when he calls George Washington the greatest character of the age— he recognizes, “I got it all wrong. Like these guys really believed in these principles. I didn't know that anybody could believe in principles. We're all cynical over here. We just kind of do what you need to do.” So yeah, he was not a bad person. He was not a bad man by any means, but boy did he play it wrong politically.
• Benjamin Franklin?
• Franklin emerges along with John Adams as one of the heroes of the story because he's there from the beginning, and he's there at the end. One of my absolute favorite chapters in the book is when he is in England. It's January 1774, right after the Boston Tea Party, and the British are furious at the Americans. And they try to make an example of Washington and they humiliate him in the King's Privy Council. And it is a moment. You could see this man go from being someone who wants to reconcile Great Britain with America to being someone who says, “I am your enemy. I am now an American.” And he doesn't go back. I mean, he really sees. It's like the scales fall from his eyes, and he sees the true nature, the corruption, and the cynicism among the British elites that he had never
• John Adams
• Other than Washington he is the hero. I mean, there's nobody like John Adams, and he should be 10,000 times more famous than Thomas Jefferson. John Adams is deeply Christian and very funny and acerbic. There's a chapter in the book about an essay that most people are unaware that he wrote. But this essay, every American should know this essay.
• He's 30 years old in 1765, before any of this has really happened. He sees it all clearly. And he seems prophetically to see where this is going, that God has a plan for America—and for the world—centered around freedom, which is a biblical idea. He could see God's hand in history with this clarity. He could see that this is not, it's just we're rebelling against the British. Not at all. This is God's hand in history to create a free people who can govern themselves and to whom the whole world can look and say, that's a shining city on a hill.
• I really think that God planted that model in America, which is why America is the greatest nation in the history of the world, because of God, not because of us.
• Adams could see that. He could see God's hand. And, I think, that he would see God's hand on us still today, but he would know that today, as back then, if we don't keep our eyes on God, it all goes away.
• So we are one hundred percent dependent on the Lord, and we have a covenant with the Lord, and if we honor him, he'll honor us. And if we don't honor him, he will not honor us.
• Eric Metaxas’ latest book, Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World,

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• G.K. Chesterton once quipped that America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.
• But America was founded on certain ideas—ideas about freedom, about human dignity, about social responsibility.
• The creedal ideas of liberty enshrined in
• the Declaration of Independence,
• the Federalist Papers
• the Articles of Confederation
• the Constitution

• “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

   

  “All men are created equal.”

   

  “They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

   

  “Among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

   

  “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...”

   

  “...deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

   

  “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.”

   

  “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

   

  “Power is of an encroaching nature, and it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”

   

  “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
• an exceptional formal terminology drawn from Western Christendom’s rich historical, philosophical, and theological literary legacy.
• arcana, those mysterious or secret bits of information
• Latinate terms
• desideratum, the needful or desired end
• éclaircissement, the clarification of obscure matters
• obviate, a prescient preventive action
• opprobrium, a harsh criticism or public scandal
• usurpation, the wrongful seizure of authority or power.
• bill of attainder, a legislative maneuver to sanction without judicial proceedings
• innumerable technical legal terms
• ex post facto, retroactive enforcement
• emolument, the remuneration received for public service
• evince, to indicate or show clearly
• James Madison asserted that “No language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas.”
• Understanding this, the founders stretched the limits of the English vocabulary using other obscure terms
• factious
• remonstrate
• indissoluble
• palliate
• imputation
• exigencies
• detractable
• adventitious
• venial
• promulgate
• aphorism
• disquisition
• innervate
• odium
• votary

• If America’s great 250-year-long experiment in liberty is indeed exceptional in the course of human events, it should not surprise us that it was best expressed early on with exceptional language.

   

  Lofty ideas warrant lofty vocabulary.

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