We've been documenting that Ukraine has been demonstrating deeper targeting reach inside Russia, as several key oil sites have come under direct drone attack over several days and weeks, resulting in significant destruction.
Just in the last several days, Russian state media has recorded over 50 Ukrainian drone attacks targeting the country's capital of Moscow.
Moscow at night, via MediumMoscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin on Tuesday confirmed that since the start of this month, Ukrainian efforts to target the capital region have greatly increased.
The distance of Moscow from the Ukrainian border is nearly 300 miles, but lately Ukraine has also demonstrated the ability of its long-range drones to target as far away as Perm and the Ural Mountains.
"The defense ministry’s air defense assets have downed yet another UAV. Emergency relief specialists are working at the scene, where the debris from the UAV landed," Mayor Sobyanin stated.
And he detailed, per TASS, that "from May 2 to 5, the capital was attacked by 51 drones. In the current 24-hour period, 19 UAVs have been shot down."
Also, one of Russia's largest refineries came under fresh attack on Tuesday, with Oil Price reviewing the following:
One of Russia's largest oil refineries, the 400,000 barrels-per-day Kirishi refinery southeast of St. Petersburg, was on fire early on Tuesday following drone attacks overnight, Bloomberg reports, citing satellite images from NASA.
According to satellite images taken on Tuesday by NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System, the Kirishi refinery owned by oil producer Surgutneftegas and nearby areas were detected to emit heating anomalies which signal fires.
Alexander Drozdenko, the governor of the Leningrad region where the refinery is located, posted on Telegram early on Tuesday that the fire at the Kirishi industrial zone has been localized, while the Kirishi refinery was the main target of the drone attacks overnight. The post did not confirm a hit on the refinery, only stating that it was targeted.
Initial footage widely circulating of the overnight attack on Kirishi:
The VNIIR-Progress facility in Cheboksary, Russia, was reportedly hit. It produces secure Kometa navigation modules used in Russian drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles.
The Kirishinefteorgsintez (KINEF) refinery in Kirishi, Russia’s Leningrad region, was also struck.… pic.twitter.com/6Jp31QQCWd
Currently, the globe's attention is largely focused on the Iran war and the Hormuz Strait blockade, and with that efforts to reach a political and peace settlement in Ukraine have faded as well. Earlier in the Ukraine war, these major refinery attacks would dominate world headlines, but at the moment they have remained in the background given the constant Iran-related news flow.
President Putin has lately communicated to Trump that he's open to a 'Victory Day' ceasefire, a proposal the Kremlin said Washington has backed. Ukraine is meanwhile offering its own ceasefire, but on a different set of days, and the warring sides haven't reached agreement.
Tyler Durden Wed, 05/06/2026 - 02:45Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
How does economic growth emerge? Let us turn to Ludwig von Mises, one of the defining economists of the 20th century – and paraphrase his idea: growth arises where private capital is guided in a free market by an undistorted price system. Prices signal scarcity and direct scarce resources to where they generate real value. When this system is distorted by ideological intervention, capital is misallocated – potential growth simply evaporates.
That is the theory. And there is no doubt that the reality of emerging economies has repeatedly confirmed the teachings of the Austrian School. Take Argentina, for example: the economic policy shift under President Javier Milei is leading to a rollback of the state and new private investment impulses. That is how it should be: the state as a rule-setting referee, not a player in the economy.
This thesis meets maximum resistance in German editorial offices. There prevails a staunchly statist spirit, a vulgar Hegelianism that regularly loses itself in the labyrinth of economic causality. As a reminder: Milei is the libertarian whom Chancellor Friedrich Merz and German media denounced as a far-right eccentric, accusing him of trampling on his own people. As said: ideologically blinded, intellectually shallow.
On Thursday, Handelsblatt presented its readers with the result of the marriage between green-statist ideology and editorial missionary zeal. In its morning briefing, the author made clear how she interprets the world: at the top, the all-knowing state; far below, the misguided, dependent individual. The piece appeared under the title “When Father State must save German growth” and stands as a case study of the spirit dominating German media. The individual counts for nothing, the state for everything. A hint of Orwell runs through these lines. They are meant to remind us that our economic fate now lies in the hands of an all-knowing federal government. Listening closely, one can still hear the fading odes of the press to former vice chancellor and manager of green chaos Robert Habeck.
Many people find it helpful to embed their existence into the prevailing ideology, thereby relieving themselves of existential responsibility. When this happens on a mass scale, a state within the state emerges – what we call the welfare state. Yet this attitude carries a problem: in journalism it obscures the search for the causes of the current crisis. Editorial work blurs the overregulation of our economy, the destruction of nuclear energy, and clientelist climate policy – together forming the broad delta of deindustrialization.
We are facing a media-historical phenomenon. Magazines such as manager magazin, Handelsblatt, WirtschaftsWoche, and even once-bourgeois papers like FAZ now only vaguely suggest through their names that they were once committed to economic analysis. Condensing tone, imagery, and reporting style, one can hardly escape the impression of a media phalanx of the Green Deal.
The shift in perspective has succeeded. Economic rationality has been replaced by an iron belief in the net-zero cult. For the socialists in editorial offices, a fortunate development – since it is tied to the expansion of a vast state apparatus, conveniently justifying long-term funding of their own activities within the framework of so-called democracy promotion. The state orders – the media deliver: all from a single mold, always in the tone of climate apocalypse.
Manager Magazin confirmed this week the suspicion that even business-oriented outlets operate as a media arm of the green extraction economy. Economics Minister Katherina Reiche, after her cautious criticism of the green subsidy cult, is already depicted on the cover as an oil-soaked fossil-era lobbyist. The rest: a cheer for the energy transition.
The media climax of kneeling before Father State came last year with the presentation of the so-called Draghi Plan. Former Italian prime minister and ECB president Mario Draghi outlined a program intended to lift the eurozone out of stagnation through massive state investment. The plan envisioned around €800 billion annually. Over at least five years, roughly five percent of European GDP would be politically directed. Draghi describes nothing less than a future EU in which economic dynamism is increasingly eroded by state control.
Those who followed media coverage of Draghi’s megalomania rarely encountered dissent. After decades of successful indoctrination – beginning in schools and continuing through universities and media transformed into socialist re-education matrices – this is hardly surprising. Brussels has now largely integrated the plan into the new seven-year budget. Between 2028 and 2034, around €2 trillion will pass through the hands of the Brussels bureaucracy – a remarkable joint success of political elites and their compliant media narrators.
That Draghi, Merz, and von der Leyen are leading us into a new form of socialism under bright daylight is not even up for debate – it is actively reinforced by media work. They pave the ever-widening road into a command economy with rising subsidies and taxes, ultimately resulting in a state quota well above 50 percent – socialism in all but name. The disappearance of market economy is accompanied by massive public-sector expansion: 205,000 new government jobs in just one year – public job creation under state flag.
Meanwhile, the value-creating part of society is bleeding out, while the transformation project coldly smiles at the population. Declining productivity, industrial flight from Germany – a program of impoverishment for the private sector, which was openly mocked by Handelsblatt on Thursday. “Bloodless,” the author called it. Once again, the state must rescue it and pull the chestnuts from the fire – a remarkable worldview given fiscal, regulatory, and energy realities.
You may not notice it – neither at Handelsblatt, manager magazin, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, nor public broadcasting – but their persistent defensive effort, the immunization of the state against criticism, is freezing society in place.
The media form a phalanx shielding government representatives, administration, and the ideological party apparatus from reality. In doing so, they become complicit in enabling the ongoing destruction of the economy. The longer the green transformation unfolds its devastating effects, the more capital and resources are burned – resources needed for rebuilding after the green-statist catastrophe.
Yet nothing happens by chance. Chancellor Merz, like his predecessors Scholz and Merkel, together with the Brussels power cartel, is pursuing a scorched-earth policy. A return to market economy is to be prevented at all costs, despite being the only genuinely democratic and meritocratic form of economic organization. It stands in the way of building green socialism.
Over time, the state apparatus has succeeded in establishing an incentive structure that absorbs people through migration, public employment, or welfare systems into dependency. In such a climate, anyone who raises their voice against the paternal state inevitably stands against the majority – and must expect a storm of outrage.
And as long as Greta Thunberg’s cohorts at Fridays for Future dance in the streets and parts of the population celebrate economic decline as degrowth progress, this children’s party is far from over. A blurred hope remains in the darkest night of the emerging socialism.
* * *
About the author: Thomas Kolbe has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.
Tyler Durden Wed, 05/06/2026 - 02:00Biotech entrepreneur and former 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy just beat the pants off of political newcomer Casey Putsch (R) by a margin of 82% - 18% (approximately 530,000 votes to 116,000) in the Ohio gubernatorial primary.
The win positions Ramaswamy to face Democrat Amy Acton, the former Ohio health director who led the state’s COVID-19 response and won her party’s nomination unopposed, in the November general election. Acton’s running mate is former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper.
The Republican primary lacked suspense after Ramaswamy, 40, secured early endorsements from President Trump and the state party. Still, the scale of his victory surprised some observers given his relatively recent entry into Ohio politics.
Ramaswamy announced his candidacy in February 2025 after stepping down from his role in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration initiative he co-led with Elon Musk. He has framed his gubernatorial bid as a natural extension of that work - bringing a “startup mindset” to Columbus to make Ohio a national leader in innovation, economic growth, and government efficiency.
His campaign was exceptionally well-funded. Ramaswamy raised more than $25 million from donors and contributed another $25 million of his own money, ending the primary with over $30 million in cash on hand — resources he used for a $10 million television ad blitz in the final weeks. The spending underscored his determination to lock down the nomination early and build momentum for the fall.
Still, the scale of his victory was notable given lingering divisions within the GOP base over one of his signature policy positions: H-1B visas.
Calling the system 'badly broken,' Ramaswamy has called for replacing it with a pure merit-based system designed to attract the world’s top STEM and technical talent, insisting this is essential for U.S. competitiveness against China - except he shat on Americans in saying so. In a widely discussed December 2024 post, he attributed American companies’ preference for foreign-born engineers partly to cultural factors, writing that the U.S. has “venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long” and that immigrant families often prioritize achievement more rigorously than “normal” American households.
Critics, including some Trump supporters and anti-H-1B voices, accused him of wanting to displace American workers and favoring foreign (particularly Indian) talent. His primary opponent Casey Putsch and online influencers amplified claims that Ramaswamy’s companies had previously used the program (filing for 29 H-1B visas historically) while publicly criticizing it. The backlash intensified after Trump’s endorsement, with some MAGA accounts posting comments like “Better work on your H-1B visa.”
His brief tenure at DOGE ended when he resigned to pursue the Ohio governorship, a move some critics viewed as opportunistic but which supporters praised as prioritizing state-level impact. Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement on the night Ramaswamy launched his campaign gave him instant credibility with the GOP base.
Democratic Side and General Election OutlookAmy Acton, 60, has positioned her campaign around affordability - targeting inflation, gas prices, and housing costs. The fact that she was a lockdown nazi during COVID, however, remains a potential vulnerability in a state that has trended strongly Republican in recent cycles.
Ohio has not elected a Democratic governor in nearly two decades. Yet early polling has suggested the general election could be closer than the state’s partisan lean might indicate, particularly if national headwinds affect Trump-aligned candidates or if Acton successfully mobilizes suburban and independent voters.
The race is already shaping up to be one of the most expensive gubernatorial contests in Ohio history.
Tyler Durden Tue, 05/05/2026 - 23:53