Chromdome35

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t's possible they don't have the combat ability even if drones didn't exist.

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Short answer: Yes — Shell did have a gas processing plant in the Eustace, Texas area.

Here’s what the record shows with documented context:

In a 1998 filing related to industrial contracting work, someone described contracting with Smackover Shell Limited Partnership at the Eustace Field and Plant beginning in January 1985. That strongly implies that Shell operated or was directly involved with a gas plant near Eustace during that era.

Independent local sources mention a former Shell gas plant in Eustace connected with a historic railroad spur (Southern Pacific line) serving the facility — today abandoned but noted in rail-history posts.

Local obituary content references an individual working as a technician for Shell Oil in the gas treatment plant around Eustace, with retirement in 1999.

Regulatory records from OSHA refer to an “Eustace Gas Processing Plant” in the same town, though at the time of that report it was owned/operated by a different company (Tristream East Texas LLC). This suggests the facility changed hands over time after Shell’s involvement.

Put together, the evidence points to Shell having owned and/or operated a gas processing plant in the Eustace/Smackover Field area historically, likely through a partnership structure, with subsequent changes in ownership over the years. If you need specifics on dates of operation, ownership transitions, or exact facility names in regulatory filings, I can pull those for you next.

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It's best just to walk past the crazy guy yelling outside the CVS...

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Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II. It has also resulted in the largest depletion of military equipment in 80 years. Vast stockpiles of primarily Soviet-era weaponry, originally designed at the height of the Cold War for use in a global confrontation with the Western world, have been exhausted at an unprecedented rate. According to the latest available estimates, Russia’s armed forces have already lost more than half of their available military hardware. If no unexpected developments occur, the most likely scenario involves a gradual decline in combat intensity by late 2025 or early 2026, driven by a basic shortage of tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery. Alternatively, the nature of the war may shift, with both sides relying more on missile and drone strikes against rear positions, while the front lines remain largely static.

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For the Russian military, the primary source of heavy equipment remains Soviet-era stockpiles. New production is nowhere near sufficient to compensate for battlefield losses. T-90M tanks are the only model still produced from scratch, with an estimated 250 units built per year. Military analyst Andriy Tarasenko told The Insider that Russia likely produces no more than 300 new tanks annually — less than half of what is lost in offensives like the one on Avdiivka and Pokrovsk.

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In the artillery category, Russia’s key limitation lies in its inability to manufacture gun barrels. As a result, there have been notable instances of Russia abandoning efforts to reactivate certain artillery systems from storage. For rocket artillery, the primary challenge is the production of a sufficient number of rockets to sustain operations.

A group of independent researchers using satellite imagery to analyze Russia’s Soviet-era equipment stockpiles at open storage bases released a comprehensive report at the end of 2024. Their findings indicate that over the course of the full-scale war, across key categories of military equipment (tanks, IFVs, APCs, and artillery systems), only 41% to 52% of pre-war reserves remain in storage.

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Having burned through an enormous amount of military resources in a localized war with Ukraine, the Kremlin will face an almost insurmountable challenge if it is seriously preparing for a new Cold War with the West. To maintain combat readiness, Russia would need to replenish not only frontline units, but also storage reserves, and given the depletion of its Soviet-era stocks, it would need to do this with newly manufactured vehicles, which are far more complex and expensive to produce. By even the most conservative estimates, rebuilding the Russian military’s combat potential would require massive investments in its core assets and take decades to complete.

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Russia is set to reject the new 19-point cease-fire deal drafted by the US and Ukraine but may use disinformation tactics to keep President Trump engaged in continued talks — suggesting the war will last at least through Christmas, sources told The Post on Tuesday.

The White House has said it is working to secure a deal after Special Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff developed a previous controversial 28-point version of the plan that heavily favored Moscow. That plan included input from Kyiv, the Trump administration has insisted.

The proposal, roundly criticized by both sides of the US political aisle and international community because it was so one-sided, was then narrowed down to a 19-point plan acceptable to Ukraine after talks between top Washington and Kyiv officials happened Sunday.

But sources told The Post that Russia won’t agree to the 19-point version, as they already weren’t completely satisfied with the broader previous plan.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publicly went on the offensive Tuesday, reiterating that Moscow will not outright support any plan that deviates from Trump’s original 28-point proposal.

Lavrov sought to contrast the latest plan with discussions between Trump and Putin at the August summit in Anchorage — implying that the Kremlin came away from the meeting with the idea that Trump had agreed to side with Moscow.

“After Anchorage, when we thought these understandings had already been formalized, there was a long pause. And now the pause has been broken by the introduction of this document. . . A whole series of issues there, of course, require clarification,” Lavrov said.

The Kremlin had praised the original plan as a real pathway to peace, with Lavrov adding that any proposal that deviates from that will not have Moscow’s backing.

“If the spirit and letter of Anchorage are erased from the key understandings we have documented, then, of course, the situation will be fundamentally different,” Lavrov warned, according to the Financial Times.

Still, Moscow may want to appear as if it is not out-right rejecting all US efforts to bring peace to Ukraine for fear of further provoking Trump’s suspicion that the Kremlin is unwilling to play ball, sources said.

Russia may also being planning to use other disinformation tactics, such as issuing vague statements or even signing documents indicating support — without actually committing to end its war, they said.

“Rule of law in Russia is non-existent. Putin historically amends the constitution of Russia whenever it suits him,” said Institute for the Study of War Russia program leader George Barros to The Post. “So any sort of Russian agreement, be it verbal or even legal, must be treated with utmost skepticism.

“It means that whatever the US and Ukraine agree to here has to be absolutely bulletproof and not depend on Russian agreement, but the backing of our own resolve and concrete commitments.

Trump has been wide-eyed about Russia’s efforts to drag out the war, previously accusing Putin of “tapping him along.”

Myroslava Gogadze, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, added on a call with reporters Tuesday, “From Ukrainian perspective, they don’t see this 19-point plan as something that Russia would accept.

“However, the point of this exercise was not exactly to make an agreement but to throw out that 28 point plan and put some Ukrainian interest in that possible negotiation and show that Ukraine is really willing and want to discuss and negotiate at peace in terms of situation on the ground, you have to look at what is going on.”

“From my understanding and what I’m hearing from sources [is that] the American side is very concerned about possible leaks of that 19-point plan. So I mean, we don’t really have a clear understanding of these 19 points,” the expert said.

The 28-point plan prompted heavy bipartisan and international outcry.

It called on Ukraine to shrink its current army of about 2 million active and reserve personnel to just 600,000 — all while ceding the entire Donbas region, the defensive stronghold that Russia has failed to conquer for more than a decade.

It also demanded Ukraine abandon any hope of joining NATO in exchange for vague security guarantees that would do little to stave off another Russian invasion.

Putin has maintained that Ukraine should never be allowed to join NATO, which he described as one of the “root causes” that led him to launch the invasion in 2022.

The original plan, which leaked last week, caused an uproar and forced US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to scramble to amend the proposal.

The new 19-point deal vastly differs from the original, eliminating the cap on Ukraine’s active forces and leaving the door open for the country to join NATO.

The framework came together in recent days following Rubio’s meeting with Ukrainian negotiators in Geneva, with the secretary of state touting it as their most productive meeting yet.

Ukraine agreed to the terms of the peace deal on Tuesday following a meeting with American officials in Abu Dhabi.

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