“Ukraine – Russia”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for a preemptive strike against Russia in a Thursday speech. “But what is important, I once again appeal to the international community, as I did before February 24 – we need pre-emptive strikes, so that they’ll know what will happen to them if they use nukes, and not the other way around,” he said. “Don’t wait for Russia’s nuclear strikes, and then say, ‘Oh, since you did this, take that from us!’ Reconsider the way you apply pressure. This is what NATO should do – reconsider the order in which it applies pressure [on Russia].”

In Bakhmut the AFU is actively repulsing PMC Wagner attacks. The enemy struggles to take terrain while sustaining huge losses. Already between 1200-2000 PMC Wagner soldiers died in the last 2-3 weeks during the Zaitseve offensive. pic.twitter.com/aPzswUxC04

— NOËL 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) October 11, 2022

Interviews in Kraków offer a collective portrait of their experience.

Three weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I arrived in Poland intending to volunteer, maybe by ladling soup for refugees or by unpacking boxes of humanitarian aid. Instead, I began a series of interviews with refugees in Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, located just a few hours from the Ukrainian border.

By the time I arrived, Poland felt, if not quite like a country at war, certainly a nation poised to support a war. The trains and train stations overflowed with evacuees, mostly women and children. Volunteers in dayglow vests manned help points in train stations, bus depots, airports, and shopping malls. Blue and yellow flags were everywhere. Even local shopkeepers were stepping up. One convenience store I visited had posted a sign on a shopping cart: “Please take an item from your bag to help feed our Ukrainian visitors.”

Zelensky must make concessions, or prepare for the worst.

For the sake of the world, no less, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky needs to heed the events of Oct. 1962.

That’s when the Soviet Union and the United States came too close to nuclear war.

The United States considered it intolerable when it found Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida. Remove them, or prepare for retaliation.

Both sides were bloated with nuclear weapons. It was a time of advancing communism and when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev blustered, “We will bury you.”

Our commander-in-chief is weak and fearful.

Livening up a Thursday fundraiser, President Joe Biden said, “Think about it. We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. We’ve got a guy I know fairly well; his name is Vladimir Putin…. It’s part of Russian doctrine that they will not — they will not — if the motherland is threatened, they’ll use whatever force they need, including nuclear weapons.” He added, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”

An apparently co-ordinated denial-of-service attack organized by pro-Russia hackers rendered the websites of some major U.S. airports unreachable early Monday, though officials said flights were not affected.

The attacks — in which participants flood targets with junk data — were orchestrated by a shadowy group that calls itself Killnet. On the eve of the attacks the group published a target list on its Telegram channel.

Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, have agreed to form a joint group of troops on the Ukrainian border, amid fears of a new ground invasion of Kyiv.

Alexander Lukashenko told a security meeting he and the Russian president last weekend agreed to bring their troops together “due to tensions on the western border” of Belarus.

The strongman president’s comments came just a few hours after Ukrainian cities suffered a devastating barrage of strikes, with the capital Kyiv bombed for the first time since the spring as Russia sought to retaliate after an apparent attack on the bridge linking Russia with Crimea.

Moment exploding rocket.
russia is a terrorist!
Ukraine need more weapon for winning!#RussiaIsANaziState #RussiaTerroristState #ArmUkraineNow pic.twitter.com/SkS4dyfsUj

— Назар Віталійович (@Nazar_Gumenuk) October 10, 2022

Sweden has said it will not allow Moscow to participate in its ongoing investigation into the causes of multiple leaks in underwater pipelines transporting Russian natural gas to Europe.

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said on October 10 that while Russia would not be allowed to join the investigation, Stockholm would invite a joint EU probe and Moscow was free to carry out its own inspections of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines.

“In Sweden, preliminary investigations are confidential, and this is of course also true in this case,” Andersson told reporters.

#Ukraine: Better quality video of these HIMARS/M270 strikes has now been released by Ukrainian SSO, showing the additional destruction of at least three 9P140 launch vehicles of the BM-27 Uragan 220mm MRLS, as well as three 2S19 Msta-S 152mm SPG. https://t.co/dLt5zo2qkA pic.twitter.com/dEiNrIszM5

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) October 10, 2022

The Russian strongman is in a pickle

The Russian army has been the source of an endless list of shortcomings and embarrassments over the last eight months. There are simply too many of them to count, from the failure to move through Kyiv’s suburbs in March to the sinking of the flagship Moskva in April to the loss in September of more than 3,000 square kilometers of territory in just days.

The past few hours have seen wave after wave of explosions, not just here in Kyiv, but all across this vast country, from Lviv in the west to Kharkiv in the east and Odesa in the south.

For those of us who were here when Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February, there’s an element of déjà vu. We’ve been told to spend as much time as we can in the basement, as further attacks, using missiles and drones, are expected.

But this is also different. The explosions here in Kyiv are much closer to the centre. Not distant thumps from the suburbs, but loud reverberations close to streets and locations we’ve come to know well in the past eight months.

Russian footage of missile launches towards Ukraine this morning. Probably in the Black Sea. pic.twitter.com/bNpy83a9Y4

— NOËL 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) October 10, 2022

Vladimir Putin on Sunday called the attack on the Crimea bridge a “terrorist act” carried out by the Ukrainian secret service, paving the way for an escalation in the Kremlin’s response.

Putin made his first comments about Saturday’s explosion in an unscheduled 33-second video address late on Sunday night.

“There is no doubt. This is an act of terrorism aimed at destroying critically important civilian infrastructure,” the Russian president said in the broadcast, published on the Kremlin’s Telegram channel. “This was devised, carried out and ordered by the Ukrainian special services.”

Moral absolutism plagues our response to Ukraine

Less than a year after 9/11, Dick Cheney had a message for Americans: the “old doctrines of security do not apply… Containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction.”

Cheney was referring to Saddam Hussein, but it is not difficult to imagine the current President saying something similar about his Russian counterpart. Just last week, Joe Biden stated that Vladimir Putin was “not joking” about the use of nuclear weapons, warning that “we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis”. Cheney’s hawkish worldview has been reinvigorated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This time, however, those advocating restraint — the “realists” — are no longer just opponents, they are now enemies too.

SOLEDAR, Ukraine — “Please, come with me.”

He was begging. He didn’t have much time. The Russians were blasting this town in eastern Ukraine with rockets, airstrikes and thundering artillery. The ground shook.

Andrew Milburn, a retired Marine colonel, could have been hanging out at home, 6,000 miles away in the Florida suburbs, enjoying retirement. Instead he was standing in Soledar, a town under fierce assault, black smoke filling his nostrils, staring at a Ukrainian woman he had never met, pleading with her to evacuate.

“Please,” he tried again. “You will die here.”