Bashkortostan

The military cooperation between Russia and these GCC countries are not doing so great beginning from the 19, uh, uh, 91, and all these, uh, Russian positions in the Middle East, in Syria, for example, or Egypt, it's much, much more important than in the GCC countries, for example.

And, um, the second, uh, uh, the second point which was really interesting for me is actually how Russians are using the, uh, Muslim majority republic in order to foster this cooperation between the GCC countries, and we can see the, a general line of the Russian diplomacy in Saudi Arabia, in United Arab Emirates, in Qatar, how Russia is engaging the Chechnya, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Ingushetia republics in order to deal with the, uh, GCC countries.

For me, the important, uh, you know, to add to this conclusion was, and we look to answer the question to begin with, how the relationship between the GCC countries and Russia have evolved in the last, uh, you know, four and a half years, and also since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, but also in the last, last six months at the time we finished writing, US bombing of Iran and Iran's response and the Hormuz crisis.

And what we discovered, for me was really important, is that there is this dichotomy of, uh, in the relationship between GCC countries and Russia, which is kind of a mirror phenomenon of what we also observe in Europe to another extent.

Kyiv has not formally claimed the strike, but it rarely does.

But Andriy Kovalenko, the former head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, posted on Telegram that Ukrainian forces did it and added, as AFP reported, four words: "Two can play at this game." The same night, the Kyiv Post reports Ukraine hit a major oil refinery in Bashkortostan.

Fuel and data burning together.

The mirror strategy.

So yeah, that's just the backdrop to what we're about to see.

So Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia, 1,600 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

23 million tons of oil per year and it's not looking healthy now i didn't see a lot about ufa i did see a lot about samara and so let's focus more on that samara region the kubashev oil refinery was attacked overnight and you can see this plume of smoke here that's not a good look for it here we are some more from different directions or different vantage points so and more scenes from samara this morning a thousand kilometers distance from ukraine it's one of the country's largest refineries faces its fifth and worst attack of the war so here we see oops i'm sorry let me put that on here uh sorry about the sound so this is what it looks like and it's just yeah it's it's it's pretty clear that it's been hit hard uh and again these refineries they get hit multiple times until they're put out of business and I'll show you one that has been effectively put out of business before we're done At least three UAV storage buildings were hit when enemy attack UAV storage and launch sites were hit in Orel region.

Five launchers were damaged.