Data published by the International Institute of Strategic Studies confirms that during the fighting in the Donbass in 2014 and early 2015 Ukraine lost more than half its military equipment.

As I discussed recently for The Duran, Ukraine's President Poroshenko has now effectively admitted that Ukraine has been militarily defeated in the war it waged to reconquer the Donbass.

It is probably not a complete coincidence that this admission has come at the same time as the latest edition of the Military Balance published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies has enabled Colonel Cassad - one of the most consistently intelligent and reliable commentators of the Ukrainian war - finally to provide firm details of the extent of Ukraine's equipment losses during the war (translated into English and published here by the Vineyard of the Saker).

Washington and Moscow have managed to maintain their agreements on Syria after John Kerry assured his Russian oppposite number that the weapons sent by the Pentagon to Al-Qaïda and Daesh in April had been delivered to honour an old programme which is now abandoned. We are moving towards the end of the Geneva negotiations, and the resumption of intra-Syrian discussions - they will include the Kurds, but not the the pro-Saudi faction.

US implication in Syria is as bewildering as ever. Despite the fact that John Kerry had negotiated a cessation of hostilites on the 22 February 2016, and that Russia had withdrawn its bombers, Turkey - a member of NATO - continued its support for Daesh.

On the 8 March, Russia registered a report with the Security Council accusing Ankara of controlling the traffic of antiques for the benefit of Daesh [1]. On the 18 March, it registered a further report accusing Turkey of delivering arms and munitions to Daesh [2]. In both cases, Turkey «totally refuted» these allegations and accused Russia of organising a diversionary manœuvre to «distract the attention of the international community from the civilian losses, the chaos and the considerable destruction caused by the Syrian régime and Russian military operations in Syria». The Russian Chief of Staff retaliated by revealing that Ankara had just allowed 9,000 new jihadists to enter Syria. However, it is possible to imagine that Turkey had acted alone, without referring to the United States.

London miscalculated the strength of Iraq's opposition forces during the United Kingdom's invasion of the Middle Eastern country to topple the regime, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday.

"For sure we underestimated profoundly the forces that were at work in the region and would take advantage of change once you topple the regime," Blair said, as quoted by The Guardian newspaper.

He added that it was a lesson for the country that "these forces of destabilization" would appear once a dictatorship is removed.

Have you ever believed something someone said and then found out it was a lie? You remember the initial feeling of shock and indignation, followed by anger at the audacity of the liar and then perhaps depression that human beings are prone to such weakness and insincerity. Then you might have struggled to understand why, and maybe you achieved that understanding, or not.

Being lied to is undoubtedly something that most people have experienced, and it's a valuable experience in that, ideally, it enables us to spot lies and liars before they cause us too much harm or heartache. The point being, everyone knows that people lie, that they justify some things they do with lies to themselves and others. The reason people lie is generally well understood also. We all live our lives according to a spoken or unspoken set of rules or values. When what a person wants conflicts with those rules, they resort to lying to cover up their momentary departure from living a moral life. Such lies can be conscious or unconscious.

What most people rarely, if ever, experience in the course of their lives, however, is a person who lies as a matter of course or who makes a lifestyle out of lying. We're talking here about someone for whom what they want is always at odds with conventional morality and they can therefore never be honest or express what they really think, feel and want out of fear of being utterly rejected (or worse) by their peers. Such a person would constitute a fundamentally deviant or abnormal human being. They might be fully aware that their desires sharply diverge from those of the average person and actively seek to cover them up with lies, or they may simply react 'instinctively' in each moment with a lie in a (largely unconscious) effort to preserve their ability to exploit others in service to their unwholesome desires.

International Military Review - Syria & Iraq, May 24

How can it be that in virtually all of the Presidential-candidate head-to-head Democratic versus Republican polling that was done of both Democratic and Republican candidates during the primaries, the preferred Democratic candidate against any one of the Republican candidates was Bernie Sanders, but he almost certainly won't be that Party's nominee (and there's more on that here); and the preferred Republican candidate against either one of the Democratic candidates was John Kasich, but he certainly won't be the Republican nominee?

Sanders and Kasich also scored the highest in his respective Party for net favorability rating, but almost certainly neither candidate will even be on the ballot for voters on November 8th. What kind of 'democracy' is this?

How can it be that in the UK, the 'Labour' Prime Minister Tony Blair served as George W Bush's lap-dog on the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to eliminate «Saddam's WMD» (which didn't even exist) - it wasn't a Conservative Prime Minister who did that extremely conservative (i.e., aggressive, invasion, especially on the basis of lies) thing? What kind of 'democracy' is that?

And how can it be that throughout the EU, the public are against GMOs, toxic chemicals such as Roundup or glyphosate, and toxic 'trade' treaties such as TTIP, but the political leaders are pushing as hard as they can for all of those things? That's the way to stay in public office? Not in a democracy.

Ahead of further international negotiations in Vienna this week on the Syria conflict, US Secretary of State John Kerry made a telling preliminary visit to Saudi Arabia. The top American diplomat met with King Salman on May, 15, the day before the Vienna talks opened, urging the Saudis to support the tortuous ceasefire in Syria.

From Western news media reportage, such as this one from Reuters, one would never guess the sinister role played by Saudi Arabia and its Washington patron in the five-year Syrian war. Indeed, quite the opposite is inferred by vapid reports on how Kerry, along with Russia's Sergey Lavrov and others, is convening talks in Vienna to «end the conflict». Kerry the unstinting diplomat for Middle East peace. How dashing! How noble!

The Vienna summit hosted by the International Syria Support Group includes the United Nations, the US, Russia, China, the European Union, Iran and Saudi Arabia among other Middle East states.

So why, it begs to be asked, should Kerry preface his meetings in the Austrian capital with an additional special visit to Saudi King Salman. The entreaty from the American diplomat is a giveaway about the deeper role played by both the US and Saudi Arabia in the Syrian crisis, which has resulted in more than 250,000 deaths and millions of refugees.

Christian Science Monitor, an American news outlet, headlined Kerry's stopover with King Salman thus: «Kerry in Saudi Arabia for mideast talks».

Since Moscow started its air operation in Syria on September 30 last year, the Russian Air Force has eliminated over a third of Islamic State fighters in the country, the deputy head of Russia's top security body revealed."We estimate that at the beginning of our operation Al-Nusra Front and Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL] possessed about 80,000 fighters, of whom 28,000 (35 percent) have already been eliminated. This is [the result of] our actions together with the Syrian Army," Evgeny Lukyanov said at the VII international security summit being held in Grozny, the capital of Russia's Chechen Republic.

"Well, the [US-led anti-terrorist] coalition eliminated an additional 5,000 in two years," Lukyanov added."There were people predicting that it [Russia's anti-terrorist operation in Syria] would result in another Afghanistan or something like that. That would never be. There are only limited military plans," Lukyanov said, stressing that Syrians "must solve their issues for themselves."

The scorched moonscape of Nevada's former nuclear test site will be used for drone radiation detection trials, as the US ramps up an emergency response program in case of a Fukushima-like meltdown or attack on its territory.

Two 'Sandstorm' drones will be tested at the site for operation in the event of large scale nuclear contamination.

The state-of-the art drones have been bought by National Security Technologies (NSTec), who run the Nevada National Security Site, formerly the infamous Nevada Test Site or 'Proving Grounds'.

The news brings the purpose of the 1,351 square mile (3,500 sq km) desert test site almost full circle: the US military began above-ground experiments there in the 1950s, using catastrophic nuclear weaponry such as the bombs dropped on Japan during World War II.

In January 1951 the first nuke was dropped on the desert's Frenchman Flat area, paving the way for an era of hazardous experiments that would expose workers and nearby inhabitants to harmful radiation.

Beijing has ramped up imports of Russian oil by 52.4 percent last month compared to a year earlier. China's General Administration of Customs calculated a record 4.81 million tons.

In March, China bought 4.65 million tons of oil from Russia. Russia, Saudi Arabia and Angola were China's three major oil suppliers last month.

April imports from Saudi Arabia fell by 22 percent year-on-year to 4.12 million tons. In March, China imported 3.98 million tons of oil from the country.

China increased year-on-year oil imports from Angola last month by 39 percent to 3.98 million tons. Imports from Iran in April fell by 5.1 percent yoy to 2.76 million tons.