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The 95 percent figure is almost certainly inflated, but pre 2014 a large chunk of Ukraine's GDP came from the Donbas. Lots of industry there. That's why it has a large population from other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Well, Kazakhstan plans to drop the Cyrillic alphabet for the Latin one by 2025. They have to be high up on the list of countries to be brought back into the fold. And didn't Putin tell the members of the Samarkand summit that all former Soviet republics are historically part of Russia or something similar?

I was wondering. There isn't much news coming from the northern front, but apparently the Ukrainians are east of the Oskil. Svatove would be another traffic hub to take from the Russians. Pushing into Luhansk also means no referendum any soon.

The dam has been damaged, but it hasn't collapsed.

They'd better be a bit faster. ULA relies on those rocket engines for their Vulcan.

Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"

No. This is about the late Queen's personal wealth. You could argue that she held it for the Windsor clan, but definitely not the Crown.

Apparently, Russia has acknowledged the withdrawal of its troops from Izyum.

That may be a great idea if you have the boots on the ground. With a front line of 2500 km, the Russians haven't.

It's far behind what used to be the front line, so why should there be troops in that area. And the troops that used to hold the front line aren't exactly in an orderly retreat. It's hard to dig in when you are running as fast as you can.

It has been a while since I have seen figures from Western intelligence but they used to be much smaller than what Ukraine published.

Not sure how reliable this is, but the figure of Russians killed in action computed from this document is very close to Ukraine's claims: Here is what Ukraine says: https://twitter.com/MFA_Ukraine/status/1568150309154836480/photo/1

It's a bit more complicated than that. Gas was supposed to be the backup for renweables, as wind and solar regularly fail during the winter in Germany. Gas can be powered up on short notice while nuclear can't. Of course, that doesn't mean getting rid of nuclear entirely wasn't criminally stupid ...

Can't give you a comprehensive answer, but: Gas consumption varies strongly over the year. Even without the Russian gas, there's a surplus of gas in the summer, which is used to fill up stores. As everybody expects shortages in the winter, they have been filling up their stores at any cost, which drives up prices. The situation isn't improved by the circumstance that Europe failed to fill up its stores in the summer of 2021, when everybody balked at what was perceived as high prices. So we went into this summer with the stores more depleted than usual. There is no easy substitute for the missing Russian gas. In theory, western Europe could import more LNG, but that needs to be shipped and the capacity probably isn't there on short notice. Germany is building terminals, but that won't be much use if there aren't enough ships.

Yes, but it doesn't say how much gas Germany imports /consumes. After Russia has stopped supply, their percentage has obviously dropped. That's a pretty meaningless (or downright deceptive) statistic. The real question is: can other sources make up for the deficiency? The answer is: probably not. We'll have to make do with substantially smaller quantities of gas than we used to consume. The Bundesnetzagentur has some real figures: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/ElektrizitaetundGas/Versorgungssicherheit/aktuelle_gasversorgung/_downloads/09_September/220907_gaslage.pdf;jsessionid=B3814627FCDBC5803AB7266059DB305A?__blob=publicationFile&v=2 Nordstream 1 can supply 55 TWh / month. That's a little less than 2 TWh / day. Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium together provide between 2.5 and 3 TWh / day and that figure hasn't changed over the last two months, so it's probably as much as they can deliver. Not much more than Nordstream alone at full capacity and definitely way below consumption figures in the winter (120 TWh/month or 4 TWh/ day). Bottom line: without Russian gas there is a shortage, and that's what being dependent on Russian gas means.

If Russia annexes the occupied territories then the Russian forces are no longer invading Ukraine. They are defending the Motherland against foreign terrorists.

I listened to an interview with Beat Zehnder recently, and he is convinced that BMW Sauber was on track to win a championship when BMW pulled the plug. He blames it on change of leadership. The new CEO didn't like motor racing. I heard a similar story about Toyota. Apparently the car they built for 2010 was a huge improvement over their 2009 car. I guess we'll never know how good it really was, but we do know that Honda pulled the plug just when they finally had a good car, as Brawn's success shows. (Of course it's possible that they had a good car before and the engine sucked.)

Why would China need a proxy seller? They can openly sell whatever they want, provided it doesn't contain Western technology. 152mm shells and Katyusha rockets and the likes is all old Soviet technology. No sanctions on that stuff.

BMW actually owned Sauber, and when they pulled the plug the team would have been shut down had Peter Sauber not bought it back. Big car makers and Formula 1 generally hasn't been a good fit so far, despite the recent Mercedes success. Renault keeps entering Formula 1 only to pull out a few years later, dito Honda. Peugeot, Toyota, Ford (Jaguar), BMW - there's quite a list of unsuccessful Formula 1 entries. As for Sauber, they also have some history with Mercedes and Red Bull.

Apparently the Porsche-Red Bull deal is dead. Marko has stated in a TV interview that Porsche won't become a Red Bull shareholder. That probably means Porsche won't enter Formula 1.

We had that in the late 90s and early 2000s. Casual watchers were complaining about the lack of overtaking but if you were actually watching the championship rather than individual races, there was a lot more suspense. Qualifying speed and strategy were everything and a single messed-up pit stop could decide not just the race but the entire championship. DRS was a workaround for the dirty air problem, which the latest rule changes have supposedly fixed. With the current cars, we'd probably see more interesting races without DRS, especially if they brought back refueling and use of a single type of tyre.

I think this is an old story from the early days of the war. I have definitely heard it before, and it wasn't recently. As for the strength of a corps, I don't think there's a fixed number even within the same army, much less between different armies. A corps in the Russian army is whatever they call so. Of course, units being understaffed (and officers stealing the pay for the missing soldiers) seems to be wide-spread in the Russian armed forces.

The CRB has ruled in favour of McLaren in the Oscar Piastri case.

Another one falls out of a window in Russia: https://www.politico.eu/article/chairman-of-russian-oil-producer-lukoil-dies-after-reportedly-falling-out-of-window/

And that's the downside. It doesn't move traffic from the road to the railway. It creates extra traffic. People do railway trips for fun on the cheap. The railway (and the commuters using it) have to deal with the extra load.