“Ukraine – Russia”

This time last year, Volodymyr Zelensky was touring western capitals, calling for weapons and money to launch a decisive summer offensive. NATO eventually provided Leopard and Challenger tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, M777 howitzers, Himars rocket artillery and Patriot air defenses — but too little, too late. The much-vaunted offensive went nowhere, despite a mutiny by the Wagner Group and widespread disarray in the Russian army. Instead, Soledar, Bakhmut and Avdiivka were seized. Today, Russian missile assaults are intensifying, not receding. In March, Russia hit Ukraine with 264 missiles and 515 drones. A relentless bombardment of Kharkiv is making Ukraine’s second city uninhabitable.

The Pentagon is defending its steady rollout of weapons to Ukraine even as officials in Kyiv say the assistance is coming too slowly — and it might already be too late to help turn the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor.

On Wednesday, POLITICO detailed criticisms from high-ranking Ukrainian officials, who said they can’t defend the frontlines any longer: “There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now,” one of the officials said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has signed into law three measures aimed at replenishing the ranks of his country’s exhausted and battered army, including lowering the age when men become eligible for conscription and eliminating some medical exemptions.

While Mr. Zelensky did not say why he had decided to move ahead on at least some changes, Russia’s forces have been on the offensive along the front line and the ongoing fighting has shrunk Ukraine’s supplies of soldiers and weapons.

The Western alliance responded vigorously to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and thoroughly debunked the Sino-Russian background chorus of the time that the Western alliance was now a decrepit myth from the Cold War of no current relevance.

The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, having started out with a contemptible shipment of helmets for the Ukrainian forces, strode to the podium of the Bundestag and announced that Germany would hereafter meet its commitment to two per cent of GDP for defence and got the ball rolling with a motion for €100 billion to begin the long-deferred task of getting Germany’s armed forces up to strength.

The convoy snaked through Ukraine’s north-eastern Sumy region on a bitter February morning.

A police car led the way, followed by a unit of forensic officials and a refrigerated van containing the corpses of dozens of Russian soldiers.

The delegation was travelling into Russian territory for one of the only functioning levels of diplomacy between Kyiv and Moscow: the exchange of dead bodies from either side.

They say the deeper a soldier digs, the better his chances of survival. But on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, the pulverising power of Russia’s newest weapon is testing soldiers’ faith.

Outside the town of Lyman, a crater 15m across and deeper than any Ukrainian trench has been thumped into a Donbas field. The impact of a Russian glide bomb has left a hole big enough to accommodate a small house.

Without western fighter jets to provide the air cover they need, Ukrainian soldiers have little to protect them besides prayer.

The potential scenario is horrific: “If Putin gets his way and Ukraine loses the war, this could turn an additional ten million people into refugees,” migration expert Gerald Knaus told DW.

Russia is reporting more military incursions into Ukrainian territory on an almost daily basis. Both sides are launching missiles and drones, but it is clear that Russia is on the offensive and is better equipped. It also recently started to refer to the war as such, and no longer as a “special military operation.” At the same time, international support for Ukraine is beginning to crumble.

The Canadian Immigration Lawyer Association is calling for a plan to address a looming backlog in work permit and permanent residency applications as the Ukrainian emergency visa program ends.

“We’re going to have about 200,000 Ukrainians in Canada based on this program, probably closer to 250,000. So, what is going to happen when their work permits are ultimately running down and they want to stay? That’s another thing that needs to be addressed,” immigration lawyer Lev Abramovich told Global News. “I don’t think we’re going to be deporting people back to Ukraine. So, I think a little bit more thought needs to go into the permanent residency part of the piece.”

We may not be living in pre-war years — as the period of the Munich Agreement was, and sometimes still is, called — but it feels that way. West Europeans accustomed to decades of peace under a protective American military umbrella find themselves watching the third year of a war on their eastern flank, caused by Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine. Both countries are part of Europe by history and geography. Russia officially recognized its neighbor’s legal sovereignty in 1991.

BERLIN, March 20. /TASS/. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called the presence of troops from some Western countries on Ukrainian territory an open secret.

“As your chancellor [Olaf Scholz] said, there are already some units from major countries in Ukraine,” he said in an interview with the German agency DPA. “In Poland, we have something we call ‘Tajemnica Poliszynela’ (an open secret), which describes a secret that everyone knows about,” Sikorski added.

On February 26, Scholz explained the reason for refusing to supply Taurus missiles to Kiev, stating that “what is done for missile flight control and target tracking by the British and French cannot be done in Germany.” Many politicians interpreted his words to mean that Western military specialists are already present in Ukraine.

DW is reporting the same – Ukraine updates: Presence of foreign troops ‘open secret’

Are we being lead blindly into a wider war.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war has driven new arms purchasing in Europe in dramatic fashion, with US manufacturers being the main beneficiaries, according to a new study from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

From 2019 to 2023, the worldwide trade in weapons declined by 3.3% overall from the 2014-18 figures, but the amount of arms imported by European countries in that period doubled compared with the previous five years.

At 55%, the lion’s share of arms sales to European countries came from the United States. This was up 20 percentage points from the previous period.