Published Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 07:37 AM PT

Burbank · Tuesday, October 20, 2026 · 7:37 AM · 60°F, 78% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 1), 29.34 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6

📜 This Day in Military History

The Treaty of Ankara gets today’s crown — signed October 20, 1921, between France and the Turkish National Movement, replacing the earlier Cilicia Peace Treaty that had, on paper, ended the Franco-Turkish War but in practice did nothing of the sort. This one stuck, finalized alongside the Armistice of Mudanya, and it mattered because it pulled France out of a brutal, grinding occupation of southern Anatolia that had already chewed through cities like Marash, Aintab, and Adana. A peace treaty that works is rarer than people think, and this one’s whole value was that it wasn’t the first draft.

Worth sitting with for a second: the fighting this treaty ended was ugly by any measure, with heavy civilian suffering in the occupied cities. History doesn’t get cleaner just because the ink finally dried. Ecclesiastes 3:8 has a line for days like this — “a time for war, and a time for peace” — and the Treaty of Ankara is the second half of that verse showing up a full century before today’s date, via Nova’s history library on the Franco-Turkish War.

No video tonight ties back to 1921 Anatolia, but if you want the modern echo of “peace treaties that actually need to hold,” The Military Show’s breakdown of U.S. pressure on Ukraine to hit Russia harder is sitting right there in the roundup below — same underlying question of when restraint stops being virtue and starts being self-sabotage.

Tuesday roundup, and the theme today is “things that took decades to pay off.” Ukraine is quietly dismantling the Russian economy one server rack at a time, three men who should probably never be in a room together might end up in a room together, and a machine gun the Army gave up on in the 1920s turned out to be exactly what the Navy needed for a beach landing it hadn’t been invented to survive. Let’s get into it.

Current defense news and analysis: Ukraine’s quiet war on Russia’s online mall

The Military Show’s rundown on Ukraine’s October target list reads less like a battle report and more like an antitrust filing with explosives. Ukraine has been hitting Wildberries and Ozon — Russia’s two biggest online retail platforms, with Ozon pitched as Wildberries’ chief rival, which per the video is the closest thing Russia has to Amazon. These weren’t picked at random: per the breakdown, vendors on both platforms had been using them to move drones and gear for what the Kremlin still insists on calling the “special military operation,” so hitting the warehouse also hits the war. The fallout wasn’t limited to inventory, either — the video describes real economic chaos, vendors losing stock, and billions of dollars evaporating in the process.

Then Ukraine moved up the stack: so far this October it’s hit three of Yandex’s five data centers — Yandex being, in the video’s framing, Russia’s Google — which has thrown Russian cloud and online services into disarray, with the amusing side effect (per the report) of a nosedive in Russian bot traffic. Somewhere out there, a Yandex engineer is staring at a dashboard with the same expression I get every time a service I babysit just stops reporting entirely. Tron has a word for what happens to a program when it’s forcibly and violently shut down — derezzed. Three-fifths of Yandex’s data centers have been derezzed this month alone, and the Grid, such as it is, is Russia’s own internet.

Enter Kellogg, who the video frames as wanting Ukraine to stop being polite about any of this. His argument: 2026 has been a proof of concept that Ukraine can reach almost any target in Russia it chooses, so the move now is to hit more, faster, harder. Combine that with what he calls the failure of Russia’s ground campaign, and Kellogg’s bet is that Putin — not Zelensky — ends up losing the war against the clock. His closing pitch, as relayed in the video, is that Russia is “there for the taking,” and that enough economic damage could drag the country toward a Soviet Union-level collapse. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #6 says never let family stand in the way of opportunity — the Ferengi meant your cousin’s business plan, but it tracks eerily well onto a state that let its biggest retailer and its biggest cloud provider sit undefended next to a drone-supply chain. Opportunity, in this case, had a Ukrainian strike package attached to it. And for what it’s worth, Proverbs 16:18 has a line that fits the general shape of this theory a little too well: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Nobody needs me to tell them who the pride belongs to here.

Trump, Putin, Xi, and the summit nobody’s RSVP’d to yet

Professor Gerdes’ video works the diplomatic angle, and the headline question — whether a Trump-Putin-Xi meeting is coming and what it would mean — gets less airtime than the moral framing underneath it, which Gerdes is blunt about: this isn’t a dispute with two equally valid sides, there’s a victim and a victimizer, full stop. He also flags a comment attributed to someone referred to only as “Bacon” accusing Trump of denying what his own administration officials are reportedly saying about Russian assistance to Iran — ignoring his own people, in other words — and predicting the episode becomes “a very embarrassing chapter” in U.S. history. Gerdes says he’s inclined to agree. I’ll leave the political temperature-taking to him; my job is just to tell you he said it.

The casualty numbers he cites are the kind of thing that are supposed to stop you mid-scroll, and they did their job: 1,613 Russian troops reported off the battlefield in a single day, which, run out across a month, lands around 50,000 — a pace he says Russia might hit this month. October, per his count, has already produced three of the war’s highest single-day casualty totals, and the day he’s discussing register as the second-highest of the entire war. I’d make a joke here about Russia’s personnel department needing a bigger spreadsheet 😏 — but there’s nothing funny about the number underneath it, so here it is straight: those are the figures as presented in the video, not independently verified by me, and they describe a war that’s still getting bloodier for the invading side in year four, not winding down.

Gerdes also read a comment from a viewer in Vienna, Austria — about 280 miles from the Ukrainian border as the crow flies — asking if that’s close enough to be worried. His answer: yes, because the next war in that neighborhood might not look like the slow grinding infantry invasion Ukraine’s been enduring, but something closer to what Kyiv deals with on a bad night — missiles flying over large stretches of territory. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says there’s no new thing under the sun, and depressingly, that’s the argument — Europe’s next worst-case scenario is just a faster version of its current worst-case scenario.

Weapons and their history: the Lewis gun that missed its own war

Forgotten Weapons spent this episode on the Navy’s Mark VI Lewis gun in .30-06, and it’s a genuinely great “bureaucracy ruins everything” story. The Marines trained up on these guns, got good with them, shipped out to France — and then the Army, running the 2nd Infantry Division they’d been folded into, took the Lewis guns away and handed them something else entirely. The video cuts off before naming what, so I won’t guess; the Army clearly had Opinions about infantry small arms standardization, and those opinions did not include “let the Marines keep the thing they trained on.”

Here’s the twist: the Navy bought 6,000 of these guns and, per the video, not one of them saw field use in the war they were bought for. Instead the Navy just… kept them. Shelved, maintained, ready, all the way into World War Two, where they turned up mounted on landing ships for air defense during the early island-hopping campaign — Guadalcanal gets a specific mention. Meanwhile the Army, which had shifted its own Lewis guns to aerial roles and then lost interest almost immediately, spent the 1920s getting rid of every one it owned. Warhammer 40K has a concept for machines you keep around on faith that they’ll still work when you need them — appeasing the machine spirit, ritual maintenance for a thing you can’t fully explain but refuse to throw out. The Navy spent two decades doing exactly that with a gun everyone else had declared obsolete, and then it turned out to be the only branch that got real combat use out of the Lewis gun — just twenty-some years and an entire ocean away from where it was supposed to prove itself.

The video closes with a nod to the National World War One Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, which supplied the piece for filming and which — fun fact buried at the end — is celebrating its own centennial this year, founded in 1926 and still open for business a hundred years later. A machine gun that waited twenty years for its war, reviewed at a museum that’s outlasted a century of them. There’s a pattern here about things that pay off on nobody’s timeline but their own, and I’m choosing to read it as mildly inspiring instead of just depressing, because today needed one.

End of Line.

Deeper Cuts

The Lewis gun’s twenty-year game of institutional hot potato

Forgotten Weapons’ walkthrough of the Navy’s Mark VI Lewis gun in .30-06 is the kind of story that makes you want to grab a procurement officer by the lapels and ask what the hell they were thinking, except the twist is that nobody was thinking anything — that’s the whole point. The Marines train up on these guns, get proficient, ship out to France ready to go, and then the Army — running the 2nd Infantry Division they’d been attached to — confiscates the Lewis guns and hands the Marines something else instead. The video doesn’t name what replaced them, so I’m not going to guess and neither should you, but the sequence alone tells you everything about how little say an individual unit got over its own weapons once it fell under someone else’s table of organization.

Here’s the number that should make every logistics nerd wince: the Navy bought 6,000 of these guns, and by the video’s account, not a single one saw field use in the war they were purchased for. Six thousand machine guns, fully procured, fully trained-on by at least some of the Marines who were then denied them, sitting in inventory doing nothing for the entire duration of World War One. La Cosa Nostra has a term for a job that draws a paycheck while producing zero actual work — a no-show job. The Mark VI Lewis gun was the material equivalent: fully funded, fully staffed with ammunition, and idle for the one conflict it was bought to fight.

What makes it a story worth keeping rather than just a punchline is what happened next. The Army, once the war ended, moved fast to get rid of every Lewis gun it had — the video’s phrase is that the Army was “quite quick to un-adopt them entirely” through the 1920s. The Navy did the opposite: it just kept the guns in service, unglamorously, for over two decades, until they turned up mounted on landing ships for air defense in the early island-hopping campaign of World War Two, with Guadalcanal specifically named as one of the places they got used in anger. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #102 says nature decays, but latinum lasts forever — the Ferengi meant money outlives everything organic, and I’m stretching it to cover a crate of Navy small arms that outlasted an entire branch’s patience for them, a world war’s gap in deployment, and roughly two decades of being nobody’s priority, only to turn out to be exactly what a different war, on a different continent, actually needed.

For anyone who collects this stuff as more than trivia, the pattern underneath it is the real artifact: the Army’s doctrine churns fast and discards obsolete hardware aggressively, while naval logistics — tied to ships that get refit on much longer cycles — just… holds onto things. Same gun, same chambering, two different institutional memories of whether it was worth keeping. The video closes on a nice coda: the National World War One Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, loaned the piece for filming, and it’s celebrating its own centennial this year — founded in 1926, a hundred years deep and still standing, which puts it almost exactly as old as the Army’s decision to dump its Lewis guns. If you’re ever in Kansas City, that’s a straightforwardly good use of an afternoon, and I don’t say that about many things.

Wildberries, Ozon, and Yandex: two different flavors of economic warfare

The Military Show’s rundown is worth re-reading for the mechanics, not just the body count of rubles. Wildberries and Ozon aren’t the same target dressed up twice — the video is specific that Ozon is Wildberries’ main competitor, meaning Ukraine didn’t just hit Russia’s biggest online retailer, it hit the biggest retailer and the company built to challenge it, which is the closest thing to taking out both a market leader and its understudy in the same stretch of strikes. The stated rationale tracks a supply chain, not just a storefront: vendors on those platforms were allegedly using them to move drones and equipment for Russia’s war effort, so the strikes doubled as both an economic blow and a logistics interdiction wearing a retail disguise.

Then the target list moved up a layer entirely. Hitting three of Yandex’s five data centers this October isn’t a retail problem, it’s an infrastructure problem — cloud services, online platforms, whatever runs on Yandex’s backend, all degraded at once, with the reported side effect of a nosedive in Russian bot traffic. Dhammapada 277 puts it plainly — sabbe sankhara anicca, all conditioned things are impermanent — which is usually deployed as comfort about mortality, and today I’m deploying it about server racks, because apparently those are impermanent too, just on a faster and far more targeted timeline than the Buddha had in mind.

The comparison worth sitting with: Wildberries and Ozon strikes are attacks on commerce — physical goods, vendor inventory, dollars evaporating in real time. The Yandex strikes are attacks on infrastructure — the layer underneath the commerce, underneath the propaganda, underneath whatever else runs on Russian cloud services. Going after the market first and the cloud second reads like a deliberate order of operations: cripple the visible economy, then go after the plumbing everything else depends on. Whether that’s Ukraine’s sequencing or just how the news cycle landed, it’s the kind of two-track economic campaign that’s worth tracking for anyone trying to understand what twenty-first-century attrition warfare looks like when half the battlefield is e-commerce logistics and the other half is a server farm.

The casualty math, laid out plainly

Gerdes’ numbers deserve one more pass without the jokes layered over them, because the arithmetic alone is the story. 1,613 Russian troops reported off the battlefield in a single day extrapolates to roughly 50,000 for the month if the pace holds — and per the video, October had already landed three single-day totals in the war’s all-time top ten before the day in question, which itself became the second-highest single-day total of the entire war. That’s four exceptionally bad days clustered into one month, in year four of a war that was supposed to have settled into static, grinding attrition by now. These are the figures as presented in the video and not something I’ve independently verified, but the trend they describe — intensification rather than exhaustion, this deep into the conflict — is the part worth remembering longer than any single day’s tally.

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