Speaking of the seven-week war in Ukraine ignited by Vladimir Putin, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is warning us to expect a war that lasts for years.
“I do think this is a very protracted conflict … measured in years,” Milley told Congress. “I don’t know about a decade, but at least years, for sure.”
As our first response, said Milley, we should build more military bases in Eastern Europe and begin to rotate U.S. troops in and out.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of perpetrating a “deliberate massacre“ in the Kiev suburb of Bucha while the city was under Russian occupation. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the allegations. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed on April 4 that the attack had been staged, saying that evidence of the killings had emerged four days after Russian forces vacated the city on March 30. The Russian Defense Ministry posited that the Ukrainian military shelled Bucha shortly after the Russians left and that the victims in question were likely killed by Ukrainian airstrikes. The Kremlin further points to a video published on March 31 by Bucha mayor Anatoly Fedoruk that reportedly confirmed there were no Russian troops in the city and made no mention of any possible massacre.
Journalist Katie Halper said it is unclear what Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky means by declaring that Ukraine will be the new Israel.
“What’s interesting about it is that you can understand why he would say we would have to have military but it’s weird that he’s creating this kind of uber weaponized culture or that’s what he’s forecasting that he’s going to create,” Halper said while appearing on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”
In Germany, they call it “Day X”. Businesses up and down the land are making contingency plans for what is seen as a growing likelihood that Russian gas will stop flowing into Europe’s biggest economy.
“It would be a disaster – one which would have seemed almost unthinkable just two months ago, but which right now feels like a very realistic prospect,” the owner of a hi-tech mechanical engineering company in western Germany said. The firm produces everything from battery cases for electric cars to train clutch systems.
The speaker did not want to be named, or for his company to be identified, in part for fear, he said, of appearing to support Russia’s war by making the case that if the gas is turned off, his century-old business “will likely not survive”. But he says he is in a deep quandary and feeling very vulnerable, as he is not only heavily reliant on gas – the cost of which has already soared – but also on metals such as nickel and aluminium, much of which comes from Russia.
This will test Euro Solidarity.
For nearly a dozen days in February, a small group of intelligence officers had been going to bed early.
They had seen the intelligence predicting a war and knew that if Russia was really going to invade Ukraine, it would begin in the early hours of the morning.
But when the news finally came on 24 February, it still felt unreal, one recalls: “It was hard to believe it was actually happening until I woke up early that morning and put the radio on.”
For months they had been sounding the alarm.
#Ukraine: A Ukrainian drone dropping a modified PG-7M projectile onto a Russian armoured vehicle (Possibly BMP variant) in #Kyiv Oblast, destroying it. Likely to be around a week old. pic.twitter.com/wsleiaPziO
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 8, 2022
#Ukraine: A Russian tank was hit by the Ukrainian forces and started to burn. The subsequent detonation of ammunition onboard tore the tank apart. pic.twitter.com/wjjPP61dIw
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 8, 2022
Ukraine: Boris Johnson travels to Kyiv for Zelensky talks
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has held talks in Kyiv with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, Downing Street has said.
No 10 said the visit was “show of solidarity” with the Ukrainian people.
A spokesman said Mr Johnson was using the trip to set out a new package of financial and military aid.
It comes the day after the UK announced £100m of weapons for Ukraine after the bombing of refugees at a railway station.
“I think that I acted properly,” said Irina Gen, a 45-year-old English teacher from Penza, a Volga region city of about half a million people. “I don’t regret it. The only problem is that I didn’t manage to reach the minds of our students.”
Gen is under criminal prosecution for discussing Russia’s war in Ukraine with a group of eighth-graders on March 18. One of the students recorded the conversation and released it publicly, prompting prosecutors to file criminal charges that she disseminated “demonstrably false information about the armed forces of the Russian Federation.”
Specifically, Gen was charged for mentioning Russia’s March 9 air strike on a maternity hospital in the Azov Sea port of Mariupol — an incident that Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who questioned her claimed, without evidence, was “fake.”
Berlin is already moving to dilute EU sanctions
It’s beginning to dawn on the mainstream media that Angela Merkel didn’t just leave a “mixed” legacy behind her, but a disastrous one.
There’s an excellent feature in The Times yesterday, in which Oliver Moody provides a blow-by-blow account of how the Germans surrendered Europe’s security to the Kremlin. Moody reports that ‘President Zelensky of Ukraine [has] invited Merkel to visit the scenes of Russian atrocities in Bucha and witness for herself what ‘the policy of concessions to Russia has led to in the past 14 years’.’
A phone camera pans slowly across the portraits of 55 men, each wearing the dress uniform of Russia’s elite airborne units. Small candles have been placed by the photographs of the men, as have sky blue berets and the blue-and-white striped undershirts worn by the paratrooper units who led Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The video of the memorial for the soldiers of the 247th Guards Air Assault Regiment is unverified – it was first published by Russia’s iStories news outlet, which said it was submitted by a reader.
But the footage adds weight to a growing consensus that the numbers of Russian casualties – especially among elite units such as the Russian airborne – are far higher than officials have so far admitted.
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world has come to the realization that it cannot rely on an autocratic regime for its supply of oil and gas. The European Union, and in particular Germany, now understands that a significant reliance on Russian oil and gas is unacceptable. With such exposure, the EU has found itself in the position of either being forced to make economically damaging reductions in these imports, or in effect continuing to finance Vladimir Putin’s brutal aggression against the people of Ukraine.
ATHENS, April 7 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s address to the Greek parliament on Thursday caused an outrage from opposition parties after a man who identified himself as an ethnic Greek member of Ukraine’s ultranationalist Azov battalion appeared on a video.
Zelenskiy spoke about the destruction of the Russian-besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol – home to thousands of ethnic Greeks – and appealed to Athens for help.
Dozens of people have died after rockets struck a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk that was being used to evacuate civilians to safer parts of the country, Ukrainian authorities have said.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region, said at least 39 people were killed and 87 wounded, many of them seriously, updating an earlier estimate of 30 dead.
Reporters at the scene saw at least 20 bodies grouped and lying under plastic sheets next to the station. Blood was pooling on the ground and packed bags were strewn outside the building.
A video has emerged which purports to show Ukrainian forces shooting and killing a captive Russian soldier.
It was filmed on a road to the west of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where Russian forces have been retreating.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Thursday that he was aware of the video and it would “definitely be investigated”.
The death, destruction, and displacement resulting from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine are gruesome enough to evoke a question that deserves to be asked: Could this have been avoided?
The navel-gazing, second-guessing, and blame peddling of recent weeks have centered on the late 1990s expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact states, and the alliance’s 2008 Bucharest “open door” declaration acknowledging Georgia and Ukraine’s aspirations to join it in the future. Vladimir Putin’s response? By late summer 2008, Russia had occupied disputed territories with Georgia, and in 2014 it infiltrated and seized Crimea from Ukraine. Now he has taken Ukraine’s ethnic Russian-populated Donbas region and a land bridge to Crimea along the Black Sea.
Even a truncated Russian Federation has four times the pre-war population of Ukraine. It enjoys well over 10 times the Ukrainian gross domestic product. Russia covers almost 30 times Ukraine’s area.
And how does Ukraine expel Russian troops from its borders when its Western allies must put particular restrictions on their life-giving military and financial aid?
#Ukraine: Footage from #Mariupol showing a Ukrainian BTR-4E APC attacking two Russian T-72 tanks from the rear with a 30mm cannon. Apparently, both tanks received serious damage. pic.twitter.com/7ecGv5AwkK
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 7, 2022
The European Union nations have agreed to ban Russian coal in the first sanctions on the vital energy industry over the war in Ukraine, but it has underlined the 27 countries’ inability to agree so far on a much more sweeping embargo on oil and natural gas that would hit Russia harder but risk recession at home.
The coal ban should cost Russia 4 billion euros ($4.4 billion) a year, the EU’s executive commission said. Energy analysts and coal importers say Europe could replace Russian supply in a few months from other countries, including the U.S.
WW II was won by buying oil & gas from the Axis
