“Ukraine – Russia”

You can normally expect Russian state TV’s flagship weekly news programme to trumpet Kremlin successes.

But yesterday’s edition opened with a rare admission.

“On the frontlines of the special operation [in Ukraine], this has been the toughest week so far,” declared sombre-looking anchor Dmitry Kiselev.

“It was particularly tough along the Kharkiv front, where following an onslaught by enemy forces that outnumbered ours, [Russian] troops were forced to leave towns they had previously liberated.”

#Ukraine: A Russian Su-25[SM] CAS jet crashed shortly after takeoff and was destroyed. This is claimed to have occured recently in Crimea, but so far the precise date and location is unclear. pic.twitter.com/44V2M9lxib

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) September 12, 2022

Panicked Russian soldiers are abandoning their tanks, weapons and even clothes as they “literally run from their positions” in the face of a shock Ukrainian offensive, soldiers have told The Telegraph.

A Ukrainian intelligence unit on the front line said the Russian chain of command was broken and soldiers were fleeing without putting up a fight, many of them changing into civilian clothes to avoid detection.

Enterprising Ukrainian soldiers are using modified World War II-era hand grenades dropped from mini-drones, an innovative tactic that is reportedly damaging and destroying advancing Russian armored vehicles.

Interestingly, the grenades themselves were originally made in the Soviet Union to use against German tanks toward the end of World War II.

“The Russians invented a hand grenade. It was a shaped hand grenade that you could throw at a tank. And if you hit it, you could knock a tank out. And that was a result of them not being able to knock out German tanks with the stuff they had,” Mike Mears, former director of human capital at the CIA, told The National Interest in an interview.

Ukraine’s military says its forces have retaken over 3,000 sq km (1,158 sq miles) during a rapid counter-offensive in eastern Ukraine.

The remarkable advance, if confirmed, means Kyiv’s forces have tripled their stated gains in little over 48 hours.

On Thursday evening, President Zelensky put the figure at 1,000 sq km, and then 2,000 sq km on Saturday evening.

The BBC cannot verify the Ukrainian figures, and journalists have been denied access to the frontlines.

A successful offensive means continued western aid. Banning access by the press is not a good look however.

This isn't over! At least 5 (Likely 6) BMP-2 IFV neatly parked, Msta-SM2 152mm self-propelled howitzer, and a logistics truck. pic.twitter.com/4XflHwEu92

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) September 11, 2022

KYIV/HRAKOVE, Ukraine, Sept 10 (Reuters) – Moscow abandoned its main bastion in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday, in a sudden collapse of one of the war’s principal front lines after surging Ukrainian forces threatened to encircle the area in a shock advance.

The swift fall of Izium in Kharkiv province was Moscow’s worst defeat since its troops were forced back from the capital Kyiv in March, and could prove a decisive turning point in the six-month-old war, with thousands of Russian soldiers abandoning ammunition stockpiles and equipment as they fled.

#Ukraine: The Ukrainian 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade destroyed a Russian T-72B3 tank using multiple drone-dropped munitions in #Kherson Oblast. pic.twitter.com/OfxjUtXY3l

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

Vladimir Putin’s regime seeks to make “friendship” between Russia and Ukraine a supreme bond—rejection of which can only be punished by death.

In 1960, Vasily Grossman submitted the manuscript of his masterwork Life and Fate to the review Znamya. The editor-in-chief, Vadim Kojevnikov, read it but, appalled, passed it to KGB headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka building. The work was immediately confiscated, one might even say kidnapped. The lesson of this massive book (1,200 pages) was unbearable for Soviet power: Grossman, who had been at Stalingrad, explains that Nazism and Communism are two warring brothers, who fight so much because they converge on the essential. Their rivalry is essentially mimetic; today, we know of Stalin’s fascination with Hitler—his admired as much as abhorred double—and that, later, Stalin also fascinated the Führer, as the Red Army pushed back the Wehrmacht and invaded eastern Prussia. The fanaticism of race was fully the equal of the fanaticism of class, each a source of mass murder. This was proven by the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, which included, among its secret clauses, the dividing up of Poland and the Baltic States, as well as the USSR’s massive delivery of petroleum, grains, and minerals to Nazi Germany. As Grossman spelled out in his last novel, Everything Flows, those who saw themselves as enemies were indeed twins, but the crushing of the Third Reich by the USSR, and especially by the Allies, has long dissimulated this terrible truth. “Anti-fascism” became a leitmotif of all Moscow leaders: any enemy of Russia must be fascist.

WASHINGTON, Sept 9 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is scheduled to speak to U.S. arms makers and military leaders on Sept. 21, when he is expected to make an appeal for more weapons for his country’s defense against Russia, according to an advance notice of the speech seen by Reuters.

Zelenskiy was set to speak by video link before a conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association in Austin, Texas, in his first-ever speech to the U.S. defense industry.

It may appear at times that the U.S. can call on a bottomless pit of military stores to supply Ukraine. Increasingly, however, western allies are balking at taking any more equipment out of their inventories to support the eastern European country’s war against Russia.

It’s an untidy, uncomfortable aspect of alliance politics that was acknowledged publicly on Friday by the secretary general of NATO.

“Some allies are now raising the issue of whether these stocks are depleted too much,” Jens Stoltenberg said after his meeting in Brussels with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

In the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s top propagandists predicted a swift victory and derided the Ukrainian military as an unwilling bunch of incompetents. As the war dragged on, they continued to claim that Volodymyr Zelensky’s government was about to fall. Faced with Ukraine’s mounting counteroffensive, which is rapidly achieving impressive gains, Russian propagandists are now describing an enormous horde, armed with the best Western weaponry and swimming in foreign specialists.

We must not trade Ukrainian sovereignty for cheaper gas.

Western leaders seemed almost pleased with themselves on Friday afternoon. The G7 finance ministers (from the UK, US, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada) had agreed a plan to cap Russian oil prices. Meanwhile, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen suggested also capping Russian gas prices. It looked like they were on the brink of reining in soaring energy costs at home, while still putting the squeeze on Russia.

But within hours the mood had soured. Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas company, announced that the vital Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline to Germany – which supplies approximately 35 per cent of Europe’s gas – would remain shut indefinitely after weeks of intermittent closures. There was more than a whiff of retaliation in the air.

The head of the CIA has said Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine can already be judged as a failure, as Ukrainian troops continue a counteroffensive against Russian occupying forces in the north-east of the country.

William Burns said Putin had underestimated Ukrainian resolve when he decided to invade in February and was now making the same mistake when it came to international support for Kyiv.

The raging energy crisis has claimed another victim: toilet paper.

After enduring the hoarding fiasco brought on by COVID-19 government shutdowns, the future appeared bright for toilet paper manufacturers. Now, however, the energy crisis has wiped out the industry’s success stories in a very short time. The German company Hakle, a traditional toilet paper manufacturer, in business since 1928, has now succumbed to high gas prices and has filed for bankruptcy.

Ilya Yashin had always known that his time as a free man was rapidly running out. The Russian opposition politician was determined to use whatever weeks or months were left to tell his fellow citizens the truth about the war in Ukraine. But the truth is a dangerous thing in President Putin’s Russia.

In early March, eight days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin approved a new law that made it a crime to promote “fake” news about the actions of the Russian army. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in a prison camp. Scores of people have been charged under the law in the six months since it was adopted.