“Ukraine – Russia”

One large crater but no sign of casualties after Moscow claimed revenge attack against barracks in Donbas

A picture has cast doubt over Russia’s claim that its forces killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers in a missile strike on the eastern Donbas city of Kramatorsk.

There were no signs of any casualties after Moscow claimed to have carried out a “retaliation operation” against a Ukrainian military barracks in the area.

#Ukraine: A torn apart Russian Pantsir-S1 air defence system was discovered in #Kherson Oblast, with 57E6 missiles strewn around the site.

The system was destroyed when the area was still occupied by the Russian Army, but the wreckage appeared only recently. pic.twitter.com/FTqFkt7Wb5

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) January 8, 2023

Russia blamed its own soldiers after Zelensky’s devastating new year strike. It exposes the widening weapons gap between the two sides

At about midnight on New Year’s Eve a barrage of American-built Himars missiles smashed into a building packed with Russian conscripts in Makiivka, just outside Donetsk in occupied east Ukraine.

The Professional Technical School was not a well-chosen sanctuary: it stood out even on commercial satellite imagery as the most prominent building for miles around. Despite that, Russian commanders had filled it with recruits and apparently stored ammunition in the basement. They never stood a chance.

The Russian base in Makiivka is but dust. HIMARS have delivered absolute carnage. An expected response for the Russian Shahed terror attacks on New Years Eve and the newest reminder that no matter where Russians position themselves, they are not safe. #Ukraine #Donetsk #Makiivka pic.twitter.com/Pfguo4phIK

— (((Tendar))) (@Tendar) January 1, 2023

A photo of a Russian soldier using a bow and arrow in Ukraine has brought ridicule online.

The images, which first began circulating on Telegram in November, were shared on Twitter Tuesday by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs.

“A photo of a Russian soldier from Bashkiriya at war in Ukraine is shared by Russian Telegram channels. He is armed with bow and arrows. He also has a rifle just in case. Is there a cavalry riding somewhere?” Gerashchenko tweeted.

Social media is awash with claims, repeated on news websites, that Russian President Vladimir Putin surrounded himself with actors for his New Year’s address and at previous events. But what’s the evidence?

We used facial recognition software to check some of these allegations.

The Russian president has a track record of posing at events where some of the attendees are not what they seem.

A BBC Russian investigation in 2020 found that some events presented as impromptu conversations with everyday people were actually filled with friendly local officials.

… And when the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines exploded in September, the West ignored Russia’s claims of innocence and, in concert, convicted Russia of sabotage. “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage,” said a senior European environmental official. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm immediately said that it “seems” Russia is to blame.

But the Washington Post recently reported that, after months of investigation, there is nothing to suggest that Russia was responsible. The Post article interviewed “23 diplomatic and intelligence officials in nine countries” who said that “[t]here is no evidence at this point that Russia was behind the sabotage.” It reports that “even those with inside knowledge of the forensic details don’t conclusively tie Russia to the attack.”

If Russia didn’t do it, one of us did. The most disturbingly unasked question of 2022 is: Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines?

h/t GT

Ukraine is swatting away as many Iranian-made drones as Russia can throw at its infrastructure sites, knocking down as many as 80 air vehicles over Kyiv during Russia’s surprise New Year’s Eve blitz alone, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week.

So how did they do it? According to Ukrainian officials and advisers to Kyiv who spoke to POLITICO, much of it is thanks to the German-made Gepard system, a vehicle that can send dual streams of 35mm rounds ripping into the sky to hit the drones. Berlin has sent 30 Gepard vehicles to Ukraine over the past year, with seven more on the way this year.

With frustration building about command incompetence, the demand for hapless commanders to be replaced is unlikely to ease up.

There’s one thing Western and Russian military strategists agree on — crowding a large number of mainly new conscripts inside a building within range of Ukrainian missiles so that they could see in the new year was a fatal error.

“They should never have been there,” said Britain’s retired Air Vice-Marshal Sean Bell.

Reportedly, around 600 Russian troops were at the college in Makiivka when it was struck by four American-supplied HIMARS rockets on New Year’s Day. Russia says 89 soldiers were killed — the highest single battlefield loss Moscow has acknowledged since the war began — while Ukraine estimates the death toll nearer 400.

PARIS — Major Western powers have finally decided to send armored vehicles to Ukraine, a move Kyiv’s leadership had long asked for and which it hopes will provide a major boost as it battles Vladimir Putin’s troops.

It started on Wednesday when Emmanuel Macron announced he was sending “light tanks” — AMX-10 RC armored fighting vehicles — to Ukraine. Macron decided to “amplify help” in response to “needs expressed by Ukraine,” the French presidency said.

The French decision was “the first time a Western-designed tank will be delivered to Ukraine. Symbolically, it’s important,” said François Heisbourg, senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Russia’s failures in Ukraine are creating fissures within the country’s power bases, starting with the FSB.

Is the Putin regime entering its terminal stage amid Russia’s repeated setbacks in Ukraine? As the war continues with no end in sight, there has been much speculation about Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s refusal to attend the G20 summit in Bali and his recent decision to dispatch Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, to Beijing. Analysts have focused on Putin’s failed military offensive in Ukraine, his fear of Covid-19, and possible health issues related to cancer. Russian historians, however, recognize a more likely scenario behind these developments.

Seven months after they were first promised by Ottawa, fleets of Canadian-made armoured vehicles have been spotted reaching the Ukrainian frontlines.

At the close of a NATO summit in June, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the surprise announcement that 39 armoured vehicles originally intended for the Canadian Armed Forces would instead be diverted to Ukraine.

Anti-Tank missiles, drones, artillery shells etc must be causing a lot of deployment re-thinking.

Early in their invasion of Ukraine, some Russian fighters closing in on the capital, Kyiv, made calls with cellphones and uploaded videos to TikTok, betraying their location to Ukrainian eavesdroppers.

The Ukrainians used the cellphone signals to launch missiles at their location — to devastating effect, according to Ukraine’s head of military intelligence.

Now, almost a year later and despite a ban on personal cellphones, Russian soldiers in the war zone are still using them to call wives, girlfriends, parents and each other, and still exposing themselves to Ukrainian attacks. After a strike that killed dozens — possibly hundreds — of Russian soldiers this week, one of the deadliest since the invasion began, the Russian military itself acknowledged the problem, using it to explain the heavy losses.

The work of a very similar submunition (which is believed to be a German SMArt 155) can be seen here.https://t.co/Bp0ObwbM4R

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) January 4, 2023

Russian forces are having to fight for weeks to capture “a single home” in Bakhmut, the head of the mercenary Wagner Group has said, as he appeared to cast the blame for slow progress on a lack of supplies from the Kremlin.

Bakhmut is one of the largest towns still held by Kyiv in the industrial Donetsk region and has been the focus of the Russian onslaught since August.

British intelligence has said that Russia’s forces are unlikely to make a breakthrough despite throwing thousands of men at the town in one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

War is hell on earth — and if you doubt it, visit Ukraine or watch Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Netflix’s gut-wrenching new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic antiwar novel of 1929.

Even a small war is hellish for those caught up in it, of course. But a world war is the worst thing we humans have ever done to one another. In a memorable essay published last month, Henry Kissinger reflected on “How to Avoid Another World War.” In 1914, “The nations of Europe, insufficiently familiar with how technology had enhanced their respective military forces, proceeded to inflict unprecedented devastation on one another.” Then, after two years of industrialized slaughter, “the principal combatants in the West (Britain, France and Germany) began to explore prospects for ending the carnage.” Even with US intermediation, the effort failed.

h/t DM

Mystery fires that have broken out across Russia in recent months have been blamed on Ukrainian saboteurs and even Western intelligence operatives. But a new documentary by British filmmaker Jake Hanrahan suggests a “large-scale, active resistance inside Russia” is now being waged by Russia’s own citizens.

“There’s this thing like, ‘Well, it must be the CIA,'” Hanrahan told RFE/RL when asked about the spate of attacks on war-related infrastructure inside Russia. “How about, ‘No’? How about some Russians are genuinely so sick of Putin that they’re going to do something about it.”