They are dying senselessly by participating in someone else’s conflict, President Petro pointed out.

On Monday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro rejected mercenarism and denounced that this practice has led about 7,000 of his compatriots to participate in the Ukrainian conflict.

“There are 7,000 men from Colombia, militarily trained, fighting in a foreign war and dying without cause in Ukraine,” he wrote on X.

“We do not want to export death. Mercenarism is prohibited by law,” Petro recalled, referring to a Colombian regulation approved by Congress in 2025 that ratifies the international treaty banning mercenarism.

“Since 2022, the number of Colombian mercenaries who have joined the ranks of the Ukrainian Army ranges between 2,000 and 7,000, making Colombia the foreign nation with the most soldiers in the Slavic country,” Russia Today reported.

“Those figures are impossible to verify, as there are no official statistics available on the presence of foreign fighters in Ukraine, although in November 2024 the Colombian Foreign Ministry spoke of at least 300 compatriots killed in the hostilities, while in April of this year it reported 438 missing in combat,” it added.

Previously, Petro had denounced that “Ukrainians treat Colombians as an inferior race” and that mercenaries are taken to the Slavic country as “cannon fodder.”

In December 2025, the Colombian president called on President Vladimir Zelensky to release Colombians who were “deceived” and who “appear to be kidnapped in Ukraine.”

Currently, Russian authorities are carrying out judicial proceedings against mercenaries hired by the Ukrainian regime, some of whom have already been sentenced.

Ouagadougou, May 6 (Prensa Latina) The government’s High Council of Communication (CSC) in Burkina Faso today banned the broadcasts of the French television channel TV5 Monde, after considering clear informational deficiencies in the channel’s coverage.

In a statement, the regulatory body for communications of the current Military Junta indicated that the decision is due to the distorted reflection by that medium of the fight against terrorism in Burkina Faso and the attacks of April 25 and 26 in Mali.

In that last Sahelian country, extremist and separatist groups of the Tuareg ethnicity violently attacked targets in several Malian cities during those days, with the aim of overthrowing the entity in power.

According to the digital portal Malijet, the CSC cites cases of disinformation and glorification of terrorism detected in certain TV5 Monde news programs between April and May of this year.

After calling on the press to comply with journalistic ethics standards, the regulatory body points out that the French-owned channel was temporarily suspended twice in 2024 for similar misinformation irregularities.

Like its neighboring countries Mali and Niger, the current Burkinabe military junta ordered the withdrawal months ago of the French troops stationed in the country, considering that the former colonial power was only interested in national wealth and not in a thorough fight against radical groups.

The triad of African nations are part of the Alliance of Sahel States, a solidarity confederation that goes beyond political and military objectives, pursuing the economic and social development of its communities.

Right-wing Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan is ousted with 281 votes. On Tuesday, Romania’s bicameral parliament passed a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan’s government, with 281 votes in favor and 4 against, bringing down the government.

The joint sitting of Romania’s bicameral parliament started at 11 a.m., with 431 of its 464 members present for the vote. Romania’s 464-seat parliament requires at least 233 votes to pass a no-confidence motion. A total of 288 lawmakers cast their votes, with three invalid ballots, leaving 285 valid votes.

Under the constitution, the Bolojan government will become an interim administration from the moment the vote passes, limited to handling routine administrative affairs. It will not be allowed to issue emergency ordinances or propose new legislation.

The interim government’s term may not exceed 45 days. The parties now enter negotiations to form a new government. Failure to do so could trigger a snap election.

The Social Democratic Party (PSD), the primary initiator of the motion, is willing to quickly find a solution “to have a government quickly,” and “all options are open,” said PSD President Sorin Grindeanu after the government was dismissed.

Catalin Predoiu, first vice president of the National Liberal Party (PNL), told local media Digi24 that this situation should not have happened, and negotiations between parties should continue.

Dominic Fritz, president of the ruling coalition member Save Romania Union (USR), said on social media that USR will “neither let the PSD and the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) drag Romania back to the past, nor enter into negotiations with the PSD to form a new government.”

Bolojan of the PNL took office in June 2025. However, its austerity policies and proposed sale of strategic state assets drew strong opposition from the PSD, the largest party in the original governing coalition.

In April, the PSD withdrew its political support and pulled all its ministers from the government, seeking Bolojan’s resignation but was rebuffed. The party then, together with major opposition parties and independents, submitted a no-confidence motion in late April.

Tegucigalpa, May 6 (Prensa Latina) The president of the Honduran Parliament, Tomás Zambrano, today rejected the audios released by international media that denounce an alleged conspiracy by the ruling party to reposition former president Juan Orlando Hernández in power.

Hernández, who governed this Central American country from 2014 to 2022, was sentenced in 2024 by a US court to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and pardoned on December 1 by President Donald Trump.

A recent investigation by Diario Red, from Spain, exposed a hypothetical plot by sectors of the right-wing National Party (PN), which points to a reconfiguration of political power and the consolidation of obscure interests led by the former ruler.

The report, released in conjunction with the Hondurasgate platform, exposes conversations extracted from WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, which would reveal negotiations between January and April 2026 for political, economic and strategic purposes in Honduran territory.

Through his account on the social network X, Zambrano stated that the recordings circulated by those media outlets are “false” and are part, in his opinion, of a disinformation campaign promoted by sectors linked to the international left.

The head of the legislature assured that the voices appearing in the audios do not belong to him or to other figures from the National Party involved in them, such as the current Honduran president, Nasry Asfura, Vice President María Antonieta Mejía and electoral councilor Cossette López.

“It’s clear that those voices aren’t ours. Some were even fabricated with Colombian or Nicaraguan accents. The crude fabrication of this campaign is so obvious it’s almost comical,” said the leader of the National Congress (Parliament).

In his post, Zambrano noted that Congress approved the previous day sending those sound recordings to specialized laboratories in the United States, “to put an end to this ridiculousness and prevent them from continuing to distract us from the real problems of Honduras,” he emphasized.

“Once we have the results of the international expert analysis, we will immediately proceed to initiate the corresponding legal actions against those who have committed crimes against the honor of several Hondurans,” the parliamentary leader warned.

The motion approved last night by the unicameral body establishes that the evaluations must be carried out by independent experts, both national and international, with the aim of scientifically verifying the authenticity of the recordings.

“We will not allow foreign agendas to divert us from our path. Our commitment is clear: to work without distractions to provide real answers and solutions to the needs of the Honduran people,” Zambrano emphasized.

The audios suggest that Hernández is not only seeking to return to the country, but also to rebuild his political power through alliances with actors in the current government and external support, particularly from sectors linked to Israel and the United States.

In statements reported by the semi-official ISNA news agency, Baghaei said that “Iran is still studying the US proposal” and noted that the official Iranian position would be communicated to the Pakistani side later.

According to reports, Washington recently presented a new offer to Tehran through Pakistan’s mediation with the aim of reaching an agreement to end the conflict.

Meanwhile, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported that Tehran also submitted a proposal to the United States through the Pakistani mediator.

US President Donald Trump had declared on May 3 that the Iranian proposal was “unacceptable,” before Washington presented new conditions within the negotiation process.

Later, Trump stated that talks with Iran had made “great progress” toward reaching a “comprehensive and definitive” agreement.

Santiago, Chile, May 6 (Prensa Latina) The Permanent Forum on Foreign Policy (FPPE) reaffirmed its support for former President Michelle Bachelet in her aspirations to lead the UN, amid allegations of a campaign currently underway in Chile to boycott her candidacy.

In a statement released here, the organization made up of former ministers and diplomats rejected President José Antonio Kast’s decision to withdraw support for the candidacy that the previous government of Gabriel Boric had promoted together with Brazil and Mexico.

Despite growing support from civil society for the candidacy, the government maintains a stubborn determination, and even Kast himself and his Foreign Minister reiterated their erroneous arguments on the very day that Bachelet presented her vision for the future of the organization at the UN, the text recalls.

Transgressing ethical and political boundaries, his presentation was interfered with at the worst possible moment, when he was making his international debut, the forum warned.

The organization notes that Bachelet was Minister of Health and Defense, twice President of the Republic, the first Executive Director of UN Women and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Few figures in the world have that kind of career path,” he argues.

The FPPE rejects the decision adopted by the Government on March 24 and the subsequent interference, and demands that the State of Chile honor the commitments made to the international community, whatever the political affiliation of the government in power.

Among the personalities that make up the forum are Isabel Allende, Adriana Delpiano, Mariano Fernández, José Miguel Insulza, Juan Gabriel Valdés, Patricia Esquenazi, Juan Pablo Letelier, Carolina Tohá, Carmen Hertz and Marta Lagos.

The day before, opposition members of parliament walked out of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, after denouncing a boycott of the former president’s candidacy.

“They have repeatedly belittled former President Bachelet, who is the candidate not only of Brazil and Mexico, but also of the majority of Chileans to lead the UN Secretary General,” said Congressman Raúl Soto, of the Party for Democracy.

Meanwhile, legislator Nelson Venegas, of the Socialist Party, denounced an alleged “internal operation, where high-ranking officials of the Foreign Ministry are taking actions to torpedo” the candidacy of the former president.

In turn, Deputy Ericka Ñanco, of the Broad Front, asserted that the president of the commission, Stephan Schubert, of the Republican Party (far right), is trying to sabotage Bachelet and that is why they decided to leave the meeting and not play along.

During the 2026 war, Iran was able to more or less destroy all US bases on the Gulf littoral using cheap and plentiful short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) and drones, forcing the evacuation of most US military personnel and aircraft. CNN reported recently that sixteen bases have been destroyed. The US air force was forced to operate from rear area bases in central and western Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. Even these bases came under heavy attack from Iranian MRBMs and long-range drones, with the US losing two E-3 Sentry airborne command posts and multiple aerial refueling tankers at Prince Sultan Airbase. More than a dozen expensive and difficult-to-replace radars across the region were also destroyed. These developments were clearly not anticipated by the US military, since evacuation orders were not issued until after the counter-base attacks.

…

The Counter-Base War Game

Given the arsenal, magazines and force posture, each side is allowed to choose a tactical doctrine. For the US, a tactical doctrine is an interceptor expenditure policy given by the number of interceptors it fire at each inbound ballistic missile or cruise missile. For China, a tactical doctrine is given by three parameters. First, what proportion of strikes are directed at suppression instead of aircraft in the park. Second, what proportion of suppression strikes are aimed at HAS. Third, a front-loading parameter that controls how much China front-loads the suppression strikes. A Nash equilibrium is defined as a situation where neither side can gain any advantage by deviating from its tactical doctrine, given the enemy’s tactical doctrine. We identify the equilibrium by iterated best response and then verify it through perturbation checks. The equilibrium tells us what the two sides can be expected to do during the war and the expected outcome.

Results

We consider a number of scenarios given by different force posture and strategic investments.

• Until recently, the US concentrated its aircraft at just six bases. In this scenario, China allocates only 22% to suppression strikes; 27% of which are directed at HAS. The front loading is modest. The US fires both types of interceptors at the maximum allowed rate of 5 per inbound weapon. The expected aircraft losses are a crippling 392 of 450.
• In our baseline scenario, we assume that the US has dispersed its aircraft to all 24 bases. In equilibrium, China allocates 41% to suppression strikes; 75% of which are directed at HAS. The front loading is very modest. The US again fires both types of interceptors at the maximum allowed rate of 5 per inbound weapon. The US loses 336 aircraft by the end of the week.
• The civilian defense analysts are unanimous in their recommendation for building HAS [Hardened Aircraft Shelters]. Our model replicates their main result. In this US hardens scenario, we assume that the US has added 300 HAS. In equilibrium, China has to allocate 70% of its missiles to suppression; 83% of which are directed at HAS. This is because China must expend a lot of missiles to “crack the eggs open to expose the birds” before it can hit them. Expected aircraft losses come in at 204, compared to 336 in the reference case. HAS thus works as a “missile absorber.”
• Anderson and Press (2025) assume that electronic countermeasures are so effective that they increase the CEP of all Chinese missiles to 45m. This seems highly improbable to your analyst. (Another highly implausible assumption in Anderson and Press (2025) is that the campaign will last for 30 days. This is because they do not allow China to front-load suppression strikes. We find that, once China is allowed to choose to font-load suppression, the counter-base war lasts under a week.) China has already fielded cruise missiles that are immune to guidance jamming. We explore a jamming scenario in which Chinese ballistic missiles CEPs rise to 45m but jamming does not work against air-breathing missiles. In addition, we assume that the US has built 300 HAS. In this effective jamming scenario, we find that China does not bother with suppression at all, which is no longer possible given the assumed CEPs, and instead directs all attacks to the apron. The number of aircraft lost comes in at 88. We emphasize that this is still a highly implausible scenario in which the Chinese have found no countermeasures for guidance jamming. This is certainly not the lesson to be drawn from the conflict in Ukraine. But what the scenario does show is the dramatically rising importance of electronic warfare.
• Finally, we consider a precision-mass scenario where China counters HAS and guidance jamming by fielding 3,000 cheap long-range drones that are jamming-resistant (drones are just slower cruise missiles with a greater wingspan). This is arguably the central scenario for war in the near future given that Russia has already deployed variants of the Shahed drone with precisely this capability. In this precision-mass scenario, China allocates 72% of all strikes to suppression; 73% of which are allocated to HAS targets. The US is forced to conserve interceptor inventories, allocating 2.54 and 2.36 per inbound missile and drone respectively. The US loses 301 aircraft.

…

To add insult to injury, Western estimates of Chinese missile inventories may be off by as much as an order of magnitude. For if Western estimates are Chinese inventories are correct, then Iran has already fired as many SRBMs and MRBMs as are estimated me to be in China’s missile order of battle. At any rate, if the US can invest in HAS, China can invest in missile stockpiles. China’s defense-industrial base is as large as that of America and Europe combined. The US is the strategic defender in Asia meaning that China gets to choose when to attack. It can simply choose to time the attack at the peak of its war-preparedness, including stockpiling a large number of missiles and drones. All of this means that the US will find it very hard to win an arms race against China. In addition, the balance of resolve is favorable to China because the US will be fighting for an extended deterrence commitment while China will be fighting for what they see as national reunification. The unfavorable balance of resolve rules out any hope that the US could prevail in a nuclear crisis by threatening nuclear escalation. Given these observations and our results, deterrence in Asia is no longer a feasible foreign policy objective for the United States.

And clearly things are still being bought, such as Warthogs which until very recently were available in big quantities. This isn’t a complete list, like I said in the beginning. There are many companies which don’t disclose their stockpiles. OIP Land Systems has become (in)famous, but it’s one such example. We only know what they have left because of journalists that looked into their warehouse. Based on their website, they should still have some Leo 1s and M113/AIFVs, plus 23 Gepards, but we don’t know for sure. Many other big defense companies such as Excalibur Army and STV group with Soviet AFVs, Military Vehicle Solutions with CVRTs, possibly Flensburger Fahrzeugbau with German-made armor, etc. also are unknowns, tho we can see on Google Earth that they still have some stuff left. But most of the times, we can see that lately their stockpiles have thinned out a lot, for obvious reasons.

Some of the stuff still stored is also probably already charted for Ukraine in one way or another, such as those 96 Leopard 1s from the Swiss company RUAG bought back by Rheinmetall in 2024 which will probably be as the basis for Skyranger SPAAGs. In the end, most of what remains are diverse types of CVRTs that the UK is still slowly phasing out and uparmored logistics vehicles such as BV-206s. All in all, what I want to point out with this small thread is that the private stock of heavy equipment in Europe have dried out as a way to resupply Ukraine, and the official govt stocks are for the most part looking the same. It’s mostly just old Soviet crap that’s left, but a lot of it won’t be given to Ukraine in the foreseeable future. Which explains apparently unreasonable things such as the restarted BMP-1 production line by SVT Group in the Czech Republic. Old armor is still a huge part of the Ukrainian fleet, and you need to keep it running somehow.

As usual, I didn’t bother talking about trucks because meh. But even the companies and places that used to stored military trucks have been emptied out. And that’s it for now!

Heh, just in time regarding the depleted govt military stocks: https://xcancel.com/NichoConcu/status/2051727452762755495

Ive been shared some satellite imagery of the Lenta military graveyard in Italy. Although I cannot share the images, I can say that most of what we saw previously and documented being there has likely been sent to Ukraine. What remains mainly is Italian Army prototypes. There is a few B1 Centauro’s still there, but these will likely also be transferred in the near future. The M113’s and derivatives which were stored outside which we saw months back are no longer there. Now there very well may still be some vehicles hidden in the buildings. However for now, we cannot confirm or deny if that is still the case.

https://xcancel.com/JustTheChuck2/status/2051754163915104342

It feels that Europe is mostly drained of armored vehicles. Not sure if any country outside of Europe would be willing to sell anything given how world is turning for worse, and it’s mostly free-for-all political climate in many parts of the world.