California’s 36th Congressional District is home to many amazing tech companies – including Rainmaker. It was a pleasure to see firsthand how Rainmaker’s cloud seeding technology helps combat water scarcity in the U.S. Democrats are working in Congress to support innovative technology and fight for solutions to the climate crisis.

Mendel structured her interview around a classic propaganda formula: 80% truth and 20% lies - the lies she actually wants to push. When she tells the truth, the audience begins to trust her because those truthful parts are things we have lived through here in Ukraine and know from our own experience. Unfortunately, once that trust has been established, propagandists can easily exploit it. Mendel, who has been skilled at propaganda since her time working in Ukraine, uses the credibility she gains from the truthful parts of the interview to advance her own ideas. Mendel is an ideological vatnik, and she always has been. Even after entering the service of the president of Ukraine, she never stopped being a vatnik and sincerely despised Ukraine, the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian journalists, and Ukrainian civil society. Her entire work in office was aimed at undermining democracy and establishing authoritarianism. And when she comes out now and unloads on Zelensky, this is not really criticism of Zelensky. It is resentment that he never became a full-fledged dictator like Lukashenko - the kind of leader that vatnik Mendel wanted to see ruling Ukraine. He simply failed to live up to her hopes for a “strong hand” that everyone fears, where people disappear and everyone else keeps quiet so they do not become the next ones. Zelensky’s authoritarianism in economic matters and financial flows turned out not to be brutal enough to satisfy Mendel. So she is taking revenge. Her latest interview was recorded to convince Ukrainians that this is not their war and that they should not resist the Russians. To make people believe her, she told the truth about corruption, Mindich, and then seasoned it with the lie that the war can be ended simply by giving up Donbas. This idea that we should give Russia something so that it will finally leave us alone is very popular among latent vatniks in Ukraine. They are afraid to admit that, in our war for independence, they are effectively on Russia’s side, but they actively promote narratives that benefit Russia. One of those narratives is that Ukraine simply refused to give Russia something it wanted, and that this is supposedly why we have had years of war and Ukrainians continue to be killed. This is a false position, and this is precisely where you cannot listen to people like Mendel. Because the entire history of our war demonstrates that Russia gets what it says it wants and then does not stop. Did Russia want a land corridor to Crimea? It got one. Did it stop? No! Did Russia want to capture Mariupol and gain full control over the Sea of Azov? It captured Mariupol and got that control. Did it stop? No! Did Russia want buffer zones in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions, the nuclear power plant in Enerhodar, Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Pokrovske? Russia has all of these. Is it stopping? Of course not! Mendel’s calls to give up Donbas so that people will stop dying are deeply dishonest. Because the entire history of this war shows that if we give up Donbas, tomorrow they will want Kharkiv, Odesa, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia. And no matter how much truth Mendel tells about corruption or personal details about Zelensky, understand this: all that truth is not being presented to make your life better. It is being presented so that Russia can conquer all of Ukraine faster. Because vatniks do not become former vatniks. The “Russian world” settled in her head a long time ago, and she genuinely wants us to become part of that Russian world - with a strong hand, a dead civil society, and clean streets. Everyone sitting quietly at home, keeping their heads down, with “order” everywhere - the way vatniks like it. But we will never have that here. Source: translated from the text of Serhii Marchenko.

Ukraine is opening a new chapter in the warfare of the future. Ukrainian forces have carried out their first aerial assault in which robots were delivered to the battlefield by drones. Heavy drones are now used not only to strike, but to carry ground robots close to russian positions. A drone lifts a robot into a dangerous zone, drops it, and the robot then moves on its own to carry out its combat mission. This solves a basic problem with ground robots. They are slow, they get stuck, and they are often destroyed long before they reach the target. Delivered by air, combat platforms arrive faster, reach farther, and no Ukrainian soldier has to drive them into fire. It appears to be the first known case of one drone delivering another robotic system directly into combat. The purpose is to save soldiers’ lives – and to make russia fight robots on the ground as well as drones in the sky.

Many of us who write about Ukraine have noticed a pattern in our comment sections. A disproportionate share of hostile replies appears to come from accounts whose names, photos, and stated locations suggest they are African. When I first noticed this, I assumed it was something I could explain by pointing to the labor economics of troll operations – cheaper wages, English fluency, useful IP address diversification. The actual explanation is more interesting and more disturbing. Read the full article on my Substack:

lullia Mendel has become a typical vatnik. After her “coming out,” she chose a very predictable path: pushing russian narratives, appearing on platforms that amplify russian propaganda, and publishing content that echoes Kremlin talking points. At this point, anti-Ukrainian messaging has become part of her business model. Plainly, that’s how she is making money. And given the silence of her husband, Pavlo Kukhta, I would not be surprised if both of them are now benefiting financially from this kind of content. A very sad story.

A Wildberries warehouse is burning near St. Petersburg, For a month, Ukraine has been methodically destroying Wildberries logistics hubs in russia, each containing $1-1.5 billion in inventory. To make matters worse, after the first strikes on Elektrostal, Wildberries prohibited sellers from withdrawing their products from the warehouses. Overall, two dozen Wildberries facilities have been hit, resulting in estimated losses of 15 billion. The company is heading to bankruptcy.

On the night of August 1, russians burned eight million books – among them 600,000 school textbooks, weeks before children return to class. This was not the first time. In July alone, russian strikes destroyed more than 1.5 million Ukrainian books. On July 2, a warehouse holding BookChef’s inventory in Kyiv burned with 800,000 books inside. On July 19, a ballistic missile hit the Konvi printing plant in Kyiv – one of the three largest in Ukraine – destroying a quarter of a million ninth-grade textbooks packed and ready to ship to schools. The same night, a Knyholav warehouse was destroyed with another 250,000 books. In May 2024, a missile hit Faktor Druk in Kharkiv, the country’s largest printing house, killing seven workers and wounding twenty-one. In occupied territory the work is done by hand. In June 2022, the entire library of the Petro Mohyla church in Mariupol was confiscated and burned in the church courtyard. Months later, occupiers threw Ukrainian books out of the windows of the Pryazovskyi State Technical University library and carted them off for disposal. The director of Mariupol’s central library says every Ukrainian-language book in the city was destroyed. Witnesses describe Shevchenko’s Kobzar tossed into a fire. The pattern is what matters here. Wherever russia occupies Ukrainian land, it strips the Ukrainian language out of schools, replaces Ukrainian curricula with russian propaganda, empties the libraries and pulls down cultural symbols. It is a continuation of centuries of russification. Book burning has always exposed what a regime is afraid of. Tyrants fear words, ideas, history and national memory as much as they fear weapons. Every Ukrainian book russia burns is another reminder of why Ukraine’s resistance matters. This war is not only about territory. It is about whether an entire nation has the right to keep its language, its culture, its memory and its identity.