The sounds of war have become louder in Belgorod, a mid-sized Russian city about 25 miles (40km) from the Ukrainian border. And the blasts are more frequent.
“On Sunday, we were woken up again by explosions. You never know if it’s them or us firing,” said Vladimir, a shopkeeper in the city.
Locals such as Vladimir first witnessed Russia’s military buildup at the start of the year, when thousands of troops amassed near Belgorod prior to Moscow’s attack in late February.
At a former paintball park in west Ukraine, Canadian, British and American military instructors were putting two dozen recruits through a warm-up drill.
“Breathe!” a U.S. army veteran told the trainees, who lay prone in the ankle-high grass, aiming their AK-47 rifles at the treeline.
“Keep your fingers on those triggers!”
The instructors were members of the Wolverines, a group started by international veterans who have been quietly operating in Ukraine.
After initial hesitation about the seriousness of Turkey’s objections, its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has doubled down on his threat to veto Finland’s and Sweden’s applications for membership of Nato, saying there is no point in either country sending delegations to Ankara to persuade him otherwise.
On Wednesday, he also extended his demands from the two he outlined on Monday to 10, leading to claims that he is using blackmail.
Farmers are being killed and their barns looted
Lviv, Ukraine
“In the old days, we had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are dying of hunger. In the old days, we fed the world. Now they have taken all we had away from us and we have nothing. In the old days, I should have bade you welcome, and given you as my guest chickens and eggs and milk and fine, white bread. Now we have no bread in the house. They are killing us.”
Branding the Azov Battalion as ‘neo-Nazi’ long after it shed its far-right origins is part of a deafening corruption of public discourse
The Ukrainian port town of Mariupol is the hometown of the Azov Battalion, a special operations detachment of the Ukrainian National Guard with a past neo-Nazi association—which is one self-evident reason the Russian high command chose the city to serve as an example for Vladimir Putin’s “denazification” campaign. In the last few months, the siege of Mariupol has witnessed the most thorough destruction of a European city since the bombing of Dresden. In the process of committing numerous war crimes (and likely crimes against humanity), the Russian army leveled the city’s housing stock to the ground. The fighting reportedly killed tens of thousands of civilians, and most of the city’s nearly half million residents have fled, even as tens of thousands more remain trapped in basements and bunkers under ruins without access to medicine, water, electricity, or basic health care. These include the parents of several of my friends and acquaintances—incidentally ethnic Jewish and Armenian citizens of Ukraine. One, the Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius, was killed in Mariupol as he was filming the war.
Reports that president is interfering in tactical decisions show a lack of trust in the Russian military and a chain of command in disarray
When it comes to military operations, political leaders should be looking outwards: explaining the action to maintain support from domestic society and international allies.
But on Monday we were told that Vladimir Putin is personally intervening in the tactical direction of the Kremlin’s stuttering war in Ukraine.
“We think Putin and Gerasimov are involved in tactical decision-making at a level we would normally expect to be taken by a colonel or a brigadier,” a military source told The Telegraph.
General Valery Gerasimov is the head of the Russian armed forces, but he too should be primarily focused on the politicians: garnering resources and top cover in case things go wrong.
It was an extraordinary piece of television.
The programme was 60 Minutes, the flagship twice-daily talk show on Russian state TV: studio discussion that promotes the Kremlin line on absolutely everything, including on President Putin’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The Kremlin still maintains that the Russian offensive is going according to plan.
But on Monday night, studio guest Mikhail Khodarenok, a military analyst and retired colonel, painted a very different picture.
I doubt this happened by accident without official sanction.
BERLIN, May 18 (Reuters) – Germany has registered a slight increase in the number of Russian nationals applying for asylum since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, an Interior Ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday.
In April, the second full month of the war, 222 people from Russia applied for asylum in Germany, the spokesperson said at a regular government news conference in Berlin.
Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said on Wednesday it was closing the Moscow bureau of the CBC and withdrawing visas and accreditation from the public broadcaster’s journalists, after Canada banned Russian state TV station Russia Today.
“With regret we continue to notice open attacks on the Russian media from the countries of the so-called collective West who call themselves civilized,” ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters.
Will it work here? CBC is nothing if not Canuckophobic.
… Leonid Slutsky, a Russian MP who took part in negotiations with Ukraine earlier in the war, suggested Russia should lift its moratorium on the death penalty for fighters from the Azov regiment, one of the main forces defending the steelworks, calling them “animals in human form”.
“Nazi criminals should not be exchanged,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, one of Russia’s most powerful officials and the chair of the State Duma, during a speech on Tuesday. “Our country treats those who surrendered or were captured humanely. But with regards to Nazis, our position should be unchanged: these are war criminals and we must do everything so that they stand trial.”
Volodin did not directly address the surrender of the troops at Azovstal in his statement, but the context was clear as Russia’s defence ministry released video of the evacuation of the Ukrainian fighters on Tuesday morning, saying some of them were members of the Azov battalion.
Sounds fishy!
#Ukraine: UA forces continue further development of ways to deliver munitions from commercial drones – this time they adapted fish bait bombs, placing ordinary F-1/RGD-5 grenades inside.
Note that the UZRGM fuze can be modified to remove the delay, causing an instant explosion. pic.twitter.com/vQokEqKWMg
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) May 17, 2022
Zelensky opens Cannes Film Festival, links war and cinema … Broadway musical in the works
An interesting development involving an unlikely source.
Mikhail Khodaryonok served in the Soviet and Russian air forces before becoming a commentator on military affairs. You might assume that in Russia that means toeing the Kremlin line in all things, but you’d be wrong. Here’s Khodaryonok writing three weeks before the invasion of Ukraine
The fifth floor condo in Irpin, a suburb north of Kyiv, was new and well-furnished, with attractive tile floors and an espresso machine on the kitchen counter.
But the residents had wisely abandoned it and the Canadian sniper known as Wali knew there were scores of Russian soldiers nearby. He warned “Shadow,” his fellow Canadian foreign fighter, not to touch the curtains, a sure signal to the enemy they were inside and potential targets.
Vladimir Putin has become so personally involved in the Ukraine war that he is making operational and tactical decisions “at the level of a colonel or brigadier”, according to western military sources.
The Russian president is helping determine the movement of forces in the Donbas, they added, where last week the invaders suffered a bloody defeat as they tried on multiple occasions to cross a strategic river in the east of Ukraine.
The sources added that Putin is still working closely with Gen Valery Gerasimov, the commander of the Russian armed forces, in contrast to claims made by Ukraine last week that the military chief had been sidelined.
Ukraine has confirmed that hundreds of its fighters trapped for more than two months in Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks have been evacuated.
Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said 53 badly wounded soldiers were taken to the town of Novoazovsk, held by Russian-backed rebels.
She said another 211 were evacuated using a humanitarian corridor to Olenivka – another rebel-held town.
Russia earlier said a deal had been reached to evacuate the injured troops.
WTF?
#Russia: Why it is unwise to take items from the battlefield: Today, a Swedish Pansarskott 86 (AT-4) launcher exploded in the truck of a civilian car- not in UA, but in Mytishchi, Russia.
It was taken from the battlefields of E. Ukraine- perhaps as a souvenir or for sale. pic.twitter.com/OohtR3ExeJ
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) May 17, 2022
According to Russian propaganda, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were CIA agents tasked with destroying the USSR.
This narrative, although debunked by the EU’s foreign affairs service, still holds in parts of Russian society; the last President of the USSR and the first President of Russia accused of having harmed the motherland, the first by surrendering in the Cold War without a fight, and the second for allegedly allowing the US to deplete Russia of much of its wealth.
Following such dubious logic, we could say that Putin is possibly a CIA asset because his war in Ukraine is damaging Russia more than its most powerful adversary could ever dream of inflicting (without using nuclear weapons).
