“Ukraine – Russia”

Ukraine doesn’t have a viable pathway for victory without foreign arms shipments and monetary support, experts say.

WASHINGTON—Forces from Russia and Ukraine are fighting, bleeding, and dying in the trenches of Europe’s frozen east.

After so much gore, however, the end of this conflict still seems distant, and none in power appear confident that it’ll go their way.

A wild card in all this is the United States and the question of whether the world’s greatest military power can or will continue to provide direct security assistance to Ukraine.

A significant, even far-reaching event would have slipped almost silently under the radar in Ottawa this week, had it not been for Ukrainian news media.

The Liberal government quietly (perhaps deliberately so) handed over a draft of its proposed security assurances plan for Ukraine to officials in President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office.

The milestone was acknowledged by Canada’s Ambassador to Ukraine Natalka Cmoc, who was widely quoted by several media outlets in Kyiv.

Good luck.

Volunteers who signed up at the beginning of the war with Russia are mentally and physically exhausted and are no longer being replaced by younger fighters

When the Russian missiles began to fall, some of the Ukrainian troops sprinting for the cover of a nearby basement were quicker than others. “There was one soldier, he was 48. He was really slow and there was a queue of people behind him waiting to get in,” said Andriy Piddubnyak, a Ukrainian serviceman who is also in his forties. No one died but the delay was “really dangerous”, he said. It was also uncomfortably familiar.

In wartime Ukraine, young men anxious to stay off the front lines pay rapt attention to the weather warnings.

“From the village of Zavalivka, the road to Makariv is very cloudy. Snowballs are thrown at every car,” read the advice Wednesday morning on the anonymous Kyiv Summons channel on the Telegram messaging app, referring to two communities just west of the Ukrainian capital. In Kyiv itself, the channel warned, there was “rain” at several locations, including a popular grocery store and the subway station closest to the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, and “a blizzard” at a gas station on the highway north of the city.

Russia T-90 M,Russia’s most advanced tank in a fight with Ukraine’s M2 Bradley.#Russia #USA #Ukraine #deadly #terrifying #tank #T90M #M2Bradley #footage #Warzone #RussianUkrainianWar pic.twitter.com/fMJ56JS7zS

— Interesting Shit (@Interest1ngSh1t) January 18, 2024

Two years ago, it momentarily looked like the Ukraine war might be concluded as soon as it had begun. As Zelenskyy’s former advisor Oleksiy Arestovych revealed in his interview with UnHerd, when he returned from the Istanbul peace negotiations with Russia in April 2022, his team cracked open the champagne to celebrate. The talks had been “completely successful”, he said, with 90% of contentious issues resolved in a manner broadly advantageous to Ukraine. All that was left was for Zelenskyy and Putin to meet in person a few days later to hammer out the final size of the post-war Ukrainian army, and ink the final deal. And then everything changed: “Something changed in Zelenskyy absolutely during this [period]. And historians have to find the answer to what happened.”

The director of a Russian state propaganda TV channel was found poisoned in her home last weekend at Krasnodar, some 400 miles south of Ukraine. A bomb disrupted rail traffic Sunday at Nizhny Tagil, home to the world’s largest tank factory, 1,400 miles east of Ukraine.

A 16-year-old boy was arrested last week for torching a $50 million SU war jet, at Chelyabinsk, 1,100 miles east of Ukraine’s border. A TV announcer who said that Ukrainian children should be drowned is struggling to recover from near fatal poisoning at Moscow, 400 miles north of Ukraine.

According to a report by the Pentagon inspector general, more than 40,000 weapons worth more than $1 billion were shipped to Ukraine but never made it to the battlefield.

Many of the weapons were sent to a U.S. military logistics hub in Poland, while others were shipped directly to Ukraine. The equipment includes shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones, and night-vision goggles.

Call it the mystery of the disappearing missile system.

In January 2023, Anita Anand, then-minster of defence, announced an act of sweeping largesse on the part of the Canadian government.

This country would purchase a National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) for Ukraine.

I bet the LPC stole it.

h/t Mauser

Canada has reversed course after initially blocking a Russian anti-war activist from receiving citizenship because she had run afoul of Moscow’s harsh laws criminalizing dissent over the invasion of Ukraine.

Maria Kartasheva’s plight had baffled immigration lawyers and exposed the confusing reality of Canada’s immigration bureaucracy. Last year, the 30-year-old was charged and convicted by Russian prosecutors of violating a law barring criticism of the military. And even though her opinions mirrored Canada’s foreign policy, the conviction threatened to derail her application for Canadian citizenship.

“I’m being punished for writing what Canada believes is the truth about Russia’s actions,” she said.

The way the American media has dealt with the Ukraine War brings to mind a remark credited to Mark Twain: “The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”

“I had a hunch that someone was watching me. My heart was pounding.”

A man, who we’re calling Agent One, takes photos as he crouches down in some bushes.

He tells us he’s part of a group called Atesh – a word that means fire in Crimean Tatar.

And via a messaging app, he describes his secret life to the BBC: spying on Russian forces in occupied Crimea.

Is Vladimir Putin trying to end his war in Ukraine? According to recent reports, the Kremlin has launched a new ‘back-channel diplomacy’ to reach out to senior officials in the Joe Biden administration. Putin’s message: to signal that he could accept a ceasefire that freezes the fighting along current lines.

Reactions to the story have been furious. Some Ukrainians, sheltering from Russia’s biggest-ever missile and drone assaults of the war over Christmas, saw it as evidence of a nefarious Washington insider plot to sell Kyiv down the river. President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed Putin’s initiative as disingenuous, saying that he saw ‘no sign’ Russia genuinely wanted to negotiate. ‘We just see brazen willingness to kill,’ he told the New York Times.