Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters he thinks it’s “absolutely right” more people are using the word genocide to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but stopped short of using the word himself.
“There are official processes around determinations of genocide, but I think it’s absolutely right that more people be talking and using the word genocide in terms of what Russia is doing, what Vladimir Putin has done,” Trudeau said at a news conference in Laval, Que.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is forcing a long-overdue reevaluation of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s legacy of appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Questions are being belatedly asked — and grudgingly answered — about many aspects of Merkel’s failed Russia policy, including her decisions to block Ukraine’s prospective membership of NATO, gut the German military, undermine the transatlantic alliance, and institutionalize Germany’s overdependence on Russian energy supplies.
A growing number of commentators in Germany and elsewhere are saying that Merkel’s years-long deference to Putin made his invasion of Ukraine possible, and some are even accusing Germany of being complicit in the war.
I am getting a bit tired of the Ukraine – Russia conflict. What sort of war has half of Europe still sucking on Russia’s tit for gas?
Trudeau and Freedolph appear solely interested in using the conflict as a front for pushing their ludicrous green agenda.
Aman, cigarette jammed into his mouth, carries a land mine off a road. A woman teases a tank driver with threats of witchcraft. A coastguard responds to the threat of bombardment with the now infamous line “Russian warship, fuck off”. The people in these viral videos, as in many others that have emerged from Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s barbaric invasion, are doing the same three things: they are showing incredible courage in defending their homeland, they are speaking Russian, and they are swearing.
More than 1,000 Ukrainian marines defending the besieged port city of Mariupol have surrendered, Moscow has said, as the presidents of four countries bordering Russia head to Kyiv in a show of support for Ukraine.
In one of the most critical battles of the war, Russia’s defence ministry said on Wednesday 1,026 soldiers from Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, including 162 officers, had “voluntarily laid down their arms” near the city’s Ilyich iron and steelworks.
There was no independent confirmation of the claim.
Analysis: Looming battle in Donbas to shape course of Russia’s war in Ukraine
LONDON, April 13 (Reuters) – Russia is beefing up its forces for a new assault on Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, setting the stage for a protracted battle that is certain to inflict heavy losses on both sides as the Russians try to encircle Ukraine’s fighters, analysts said.
Military analysts are wary of predicting who will win the battle for Ukraine’s industrial heartland of Donbas, a crucial conflict that will likely be brutal and ultimately define the course of the war.
#Ukraine: Indirect fire from the 14th Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Army striking Russian targets, observed from both TB-2 and commercial drones.
Although what is hit is very unclear, it appears that 3+ vehicles are damaged or destroyed. pic.twitter.com/xQGGJzwZMM
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022
#Ukraine: A projectile launched by the Ukrainian troops hitting the side of what appears to be Russian BTR-80 armored personnel carrier in #Mariupol. It is likely to be damaged. pic.twitter.com/lTpkWP1FAW
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022
A “Stalinist” mass purge of Russian secret intelligence is under way after more than 100 agents were removed from their jobs and the head of the department responsible for Ukraine was sent to prison.
In a sign of President Putin’s fury over the failures of the invasion, about 150 Federal Security Bureau (FSB) officers have been dismissed, including some who have been arrested.
All of those ousted were employees of the Fifth Service, a division set up in 1998, when Putin was director of the FSB to carry out operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union with the aim of keeping them within Russia’s orbit.
A British man fighting for Ukraine in the besieged city of Mariupol was forced to surrender Tuesday after his unit ran out of ammunition — making him the first known UK prisoner of Russia’s war, according to reports.
Aiden Aslin, 27, a member of Ukraine’s marines, surrendered along with his unit during an intensified assault from Russia that is feared to have included phosphorous bombs or even chemical weapons.
NEW YORK — The United Nations said Monday that Ukrainian women and children are at heightened risk of sexual violence, rape and trafficking as reports grow of such violations.
“These allegations must be independently investigated to ensure justice and accountability,” U.N. Women Executive Director Sima Bahous told the Security Council. “The combination of mass displacement with the large presence of conscripts and mercenaries, and the brutality displayed against Ukrainian civilians, has raised all red flags.”
And no one knows rape better than the rapey UN!
Leading from behind has an exciting new name.
Last year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed that a new strategy called “integrated deterrence” would be at the heart of Biden’s new defense strategy. Last month, he was talking up a new National Defense Strategy driven by integrated deterrence while claiming that it would prove effective against Russia in the war in Ukraine. Instead the war showed “ID” doesn’t work.
What is “integrated deterrence”? It sounds better than leading from behind, which was Obama’s version of it, but it’s not too different from the failed approach of the Obama administration.
Like a lot of organizational jargon, “integrated deterrence” is a collection of meaningless buzzwords that no one understands concealing the same old thing that dresses up failure as success because under the exciting new approach, no one was even trying to succeed.
It is thought that Russia has lost hundreds of tanks within two months of invading Ukraine.
Military experts put the losses down to the advanced anti-tank weapons which western nations have given to Ukraine, and to the poor way Russia has used its tanks.
#Ukraine: "Gifts from Her Majesty" – rare footage of a UK-supplied NLAW in use with Ukrainian troops, destroying a Russian armoured vehicle. pic.twitter.com/MpFr93yEH3
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 11, 2022
#Ukraine: What used to be a Russian T-72 tank – in #Kyiv Oblast. pic.twitter.com/K68uU3cYm4
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 11, 2022
LONDON, April 12 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday peace talks with Ukraine had hit a dead end, using his first public comments on the conflict in more than a week to vow that his troops would win and to goad the West for failing to bring Moscow to heel.
Addressing the war in public for the first time since Russian forces retreated from northern Ukraine after they were halted at the gates of Kyiv, Putin promised that Russia would achieve all of its “noble” aims in Ukraine.
Russia is receiving munitions and military hardware sourced from Iraq for its war effort in Ukraine with the help of Iranian weapons smuggling networks, according to members of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and regional intelligence services with knowledge of the process.
RPGs and anti-tank missiles, as well as Brazilian-designed rocket launcher systems, have been dispatched to Russia from Iraq as Moscow’s campaign has faltered in the last month, the Guardian has learned.
An Iranian-made Bavar 373 missile system, similar to the Russian S-300, has also been donated to Moscow by the authorities in Tehran, who also returned an S-300, according to a source who helped organise the transport.
Pro-Russia protesters rallied for a second day in Germany on Sunday, demanding an end to discrimination against the country’s large Russian-speaking population since the conflict in Ukraine erupted.
Around 600 people marched in the financial hub, Frankfurt, with many waving Russian flags.
A similar-sized demo took place in the northern city of Hanover, police said, accompanied by a convoy of 350 cars.
However, the start was delayed because authorities ruled that the vehicles’ bonnets could not be covered by flags.
Tactical incompetence doomed it from the start
Nothing was more predictable about this most predictable of wars than the certain failure of Putin’s Coup de Main invasion to seize Kyiv and conquer Ukraine in one fell swoop. And yet its success was confidently predicted by Russia’s FSB domestic security service, which, instead of the SVR foreign intelligence, was given the task of sustaining the fiction that Ukraine is Russian.
Shortly after Russia invaded on Feb. 24, Ukraine prohibited men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country. Most willingly signed up for military service to fight for their country, despite it having no formal conscription. Some others, however, packed up a few belongings and quietly left.
“Thousands of Ukrainian men of military age have left the country to avoid participating in the war,” the New York Times wrote over the weekend. “Smuggling rings in Moldova, and possibly other European countries, have been doing a brisk business. Some people have paid up to $15,000 for a secret night-time ride out of Ukraine.”
The moment Russia invaded Ukraine, the White House, Democrats, and the corporate media saw an opportunity to gaslight the American people into a reboot of His Fraudulency Joe Biden’s presidency.
This campaign has fired utterly and entirely.
