“Ukraine – Russia”

Moscow says it will respond to any Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory by striking Kyiv with more missiles.

The “number and scale” of attacks will go up if its own settlements become targets, the ministry said.

The warning came as Russia announced a missile strike on a military factory near Kyiv, which it claimed was in response to a Ukrainian helicopter attack on a Russian village.

Ukraine denies it carried out the attack.

Russia near to defaulting on overseas debts, says ratings agency

Russia’s switch to making debt payments in roubles has brought the heavily sanctioned country to the brink of defaulting on its debts, according to a leading credit rating agency.

Heaping further pressure on Vladimir Putin’s beleaguered government, Moody’s said that without a return before 4 May to making payments in dollars as agreed under the terms of Russia’s loans, Moscow could be in default, allowing creditors to claim insurance payouts and tainting the country’s reputation as a reliable counterparty.

The warning by Moody’s of an impending default is expected to be met with an angry response from Putin’s administration, which has denied that the rules governing its loans prevent Russia making interest payments in roubles.

#Ukraine: A Ukrainian BTR-4 took out a Russian tank with 30mm autocannon fire in #Donetsk Oblast recently. pic.twitter.com/PCukpUjw3r

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 14, 2022

“This Is an Organized Crime Story”: Putin Critic Bill Browder’s New Book on Corruption in Russia Finds New Relevance

… For years, Browder has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, and devoted his life to exposing corruption in Russia after his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was tortured and beaten before he died in a Russian prison after being denied proper medical care for pancreatitis. For the past several years, he has urged the passage of the Magnitsky Act, in the U.S. and countries around the world, to punish those who commit human rights abuses. In Browder’s telling, he was analogously trapped in a glass box; he claims his warnings about Putin fell on deaf ears. “If we had used sanctions before the invasion, we could have done a much smaller amount of sanctions and it would’ve had a much bigger effect and the reason I say that is because Vladimir Putin has had a history over the last 20 years of doing terrible things and not having robust reactions to his terrible things,” he had told me earlier in the day at the Gansevoort Hotel in the Meatpacking District. The U.S. should give Volodymyr Zelenskyy the no fly zone, he added.

On 25 February, the day after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian warship Moskva opened fire on Snake Island, a strategically important rocky outcrop in the Black Sea. Facing imminent capture, Snake Island’s hopelessly outgunned Ukrainian defenders told the Moskva to ‘Go fuck yourself’.

At the time, this brief, hopelessly uneven battle seemed to capture in miniature outside observers’ grim expectations of the conflict. Ukrainians would certainly be brave and defiant. But, before the might of the Russian army, navy and airforce, their resistance was bound to be futile. This was a war that Russia was going to win, and it was probably going to do so easily and swiftly.

#Ukraine: It turns out that this attack near Borova, #Kharkiv Oblast, was larger than we realised- the bridge was detonated by UA SOF as the Russian convoy passed over it, taking out 4 trucks and a Tigr-M IMV. https://t.co/0xMvOuyXYk pic.twitter.com/NK7tBC1enZ

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 14, 2022

#Ukraine: A Russian BMP-2 was hit by Ukrainian fire, filmed by a DJI drone. pic.twitter.com/kg4nis5Mel

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 14, 2022

Kiev faces a choice: make peace for its people or war for its supposed friends?

Russia’s war against Ukraine rages on. The U.S. and Europe continue to support Kiev. But not, it seems, to make peace. Rather, the allies are prepared to back the Zelensky government as long as it fights Moscow to the last Ukrainian—which has always been the West’s approach to Kiev.

Ukraine has become a cause célèbre in the West. People who normally pay little attention to international affairs have gone all-in for Ukrainians. Indeed, frenzied backers have borrowed the practice of self-criticism from China’s Cultural Revolution and demanded that Russian athletes, singers, conductors, and others make public confessions, abasing themselves and denouncing Putin, or lose their jobs.

Allied governments have offered abundant weapons to Kiev and imposed excruciating sanctions on Moscow, all of which serves to keep Ukraine in the war. America and the Europeans have made clear that they do not intend to take part in combat. Equip Ukrainians to fight, sure. Help Ukrainians fight, forget it.

An interesting take. I am not impressed with Trudeau’s use of the conflict as cover to advance his asinine green agenda.

Russian state media outlet RT is growing its presence on a Canadian video sharing site after large social-media firms blocked or limited content from the Kremlin-controlled network.

Since March 1, RT has more than quadrupled its subscriber count on Toronto-based Rumble Inc., a YouTube competitor that bills itself as a “neutral” platform vowing to uphold free speech. On Twitter, RT recently encouraged followers to subscribe to its Rumble channel. “They can block social networks, but they can’t block the truth,” the tweet reads. (Twitter labels RT as Russian state-affiliated media, and has taken steps to reduce the visibility of such tweets.)

Western governments widely view RT as a Russian propaganda outlet.

Go incognito

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Russian military says the flagship of its Black Sea fleet sank while being towed to a port after being badly damaged.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the Moskva sank Thursday in a storm after being gutted by fire. The ministry previously said that a fire on the warship set off some of its weapons and forced the crew to evacuate.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused European countries that continue to buy Russian oil of “earning their money in other people’s blood”.

In an interview with the BBC, President Zelensky singled out Germany and Hungary, accusing them of blocking efforts to embargo energy sales, from which Russia stands to make up to £250bn ($326bn) this year.

There has been a growing frustration among Ukraine’s leadership with Berlin, which has backed some sanctions against Russia but so far resisted calls to back tougher action on oil sales.

Buy Russian oil, send Ukraine weapons to fight the Russians. Watch Trudeau as he uses Ukraine’s crisis to further his anti-human green agenda.

Why should I support an effort to do myself harm? It don’t make no sense.

Iran’s efforts to conclude a revised nuclear deal with the Biden administration could result in the Kremlin receiving a windfall of half-a-billion dollars to fund its war effort against Ukraine.

That is the conclusion reached by Western security officials who are becoming increasingly concerned by the discussions taking place between Moscow and Tehran about deepening their cooperation once the nuclear deal has been signed.

Iran has already engaged in detailed discussions with Moscow about helping Russia to evade Western sanctions by giving it access to Tehran’s sophisticated financial sanctions-busting network.

Russia’s defence ministry said it was investigating what happened to its flagship cruiser Moskva after Ukraine said it had hit the vessel with an anti-ship missile, forcing its crew to abandon ship.

The ministry denied reports the warship had sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea. It said the Moskva had “retained buoyancy”, with fires extinguished and the crew transferred to another vessel.

Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesperson, was unable to give the cause of the explosion on the warship, saying: “I can’t tell you anything. This is a topic for the ministry of defence.”

#Ukraine:❗️ShKH vz. 77 DANA 152mm self-propelled howitzers are already in Ukraine – seems a batch of them was recently delivered from the Czech Republic. The amount of supplied howitzers is currently unknown, however as seen they are already deployed/tested by the Ukrainian army. pic.twitter.com/zGQPklmiwW

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022

#Ukraine: Rare combat footage of FGM-148 Javelin in action in Ukraine – a Russian BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launcher being destroyed by the US-supplied anti-tank guided missile. pic.twitter.com/Z0OJb9rzjo

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022

I have found it almost impossible to look away from the images of the carnage unleashed by Russian troops on occupied Ukrainian towns. Overcome with numbness, I masochistically zoom in on the photos of victims, studying every face, or whatever is left of it. All I can think is: “They have done this before. They are doing it again.”

The indiscriminate shelling, the looting, the evidence of rape, torture and executions, and, above all, the sense of enthusiasm with which these war crimes are being carried out are painfully familiar. In recent days, my mind has kept wandering to another photo, taken 18 years ago in Rigakhoy village in Chechnya by my mum, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. It shows the corpses of five tiny, grey-faced children, all siblings, lined up according to height. The oldest is five years old, the youngest – twins – were not even 12 months old. The children and their mother, Maydat Tsintsayeva, were killed in a deliberate bombing by the Russians on 9 April 2004.

Police Chief Vitaliy Lobas was sitting at a child’s desk in an abandoned school in Bucha, collecting the details of the bodies.

Every few minutes, Chief Lobas, who has broad shoulders and short dark hair, and rarely uses an unnecessary word, received a call on his mobile phone, and the brief conversations went the same: a location, a few details, a phone number of a relative or friend.

Before the Russians came, Lobas was an ordinary local police chief, the head of Buchanksy District 1, who spent his days dealing with ordinary local crime and the occasional murder. Since the liberation of Bucha, he has spent his days in this abandoned school classroom, where school posters still hang on the walls, coordinating the massive operation to find the dead.

The Ukrainian leader wants weapons, not penitent visits from has-been leaders

Today, a train is headed for Kyiv, carrying the four presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They would have been five, except that the Ukrainians slapped down a proposal that they be accompanied by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany, accusing him of having been too close to Russia for too long.

A veteran human rights lawyer who prosecuted the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic says Russians could be tried for war crimes over their actions in Ukraine.

Geoffrey Nice, who prosecuted several cases at The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service that building a war crimes indictment relating to Ukraine “is a substantial task” but “not necessarily” difficult.

Results of the vote to suspend Russia from the UNHRC show again that the UN General Assembly has completely lost its moral compass.

The UN General Assembly completely lost its moral compass when it voted on 7 April for Russia’s suspension from the Human Rights Council – with only 93 of its 193 member Nations voting to do so.