“Ukraine – Russia”

Three days before the Feb. 24 anniversary of his Ukraine invasion, Vladimir Putin outlined what he had learned during a year of war. With its ever-increasing supply of sophisticated weapons, Putin said, the West was now using Ukraine as a “testing range” for its plans to destroy Russia.

Its goal was “to spark a war in Europe, and to eliminate competitors by using a proxy force,” he said in a presidential address. “They plan to finish us once and for all.”

Biden Confronted About U.S. Troops Reportedly Operating in Ukraine Without Congressional Authority

Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL), known for his efforts to withdraw U.S. troops from overseas missions that have not received congressional approval, has introduced a new Privileged Resolution of Inquiry demanding President Biden to disclose the exact number of American military personnel operating in Ukraine.

This resolution comes after leaked Pentagon documents revealed the presence of previously unreported U.S. Special Forces in Ukraine.

h/t xc

Two former Russian mercenaries have admitted killing hundreds of Ukrainian civilians, including dozens of children who were sheltering in a basement in eastern Ukraine.

Alexey Savichev and Azamat Uldarov told a Russian human rights activist that they had been recruited from Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine for the Wagner Group, the private military company that is headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked tycoon.

The head of Russia’s mercenary Wagner group caused a stir by saying that an end to the war in Ukraine would be an “ideal result.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin made the remark in a blog post published Friday that has only now come to light.

“The ideal option would be to announce the end of the special military operation and declare that Russia has achieved all of its planned goals — and, in some respects, we really have achieved them,” Prigozhin wrote in comments that were picked up by Ukrainian media.

#Ukraine: A Russian T-80BVM tank was destroyed by artillery of the Ukrainian 58th Motorized Brigade in the area of Shypylivka, #Luhansk Oblast. pic.twitter.com/9NSpdyzA8v

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 15, 2023

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is well into its second year. While valiant, brave and committed, Ukraine’s army is David to Russia’s Goliath military force.

Expelling Russia from Ukraine and bringing an end to this deadly, costly conflict will take more than NATO tanks and the determined hearts of Ukrainian fighters, according to a new report exclusively obtained by CTV National News.

Three retired NATO soldiers, who’ve spent the last nine months in Ukraine training its military, have co-authored what they’ve dubbed the “White Papers.”

So what did everyone learn from the massive trove of more than a hundred top secret US documents a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman apparently put on a gaming server to wow some fellow God-fearing gun enthusiasts? Both little and a lot.

Despite some clumsy cut-and-paste editing of casualty figures, as well as some carefully-worded claims that, as a British defence official put it, ‘a significant proportion of the content of these reports is untrue, manipulated, or both,’ the Americans are shamefacedly admitting that these are genuine documents. There will no doubt continue to be suspicions in some quarters that there is some baroque plot at work, whether a Russian long con or a US attempt to spread disinformation. But nevertheless this is one of those cases where the simplest explanation is the most likely.

The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zelensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.

What also is unknown is that Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.”

Note – This is Seymour Hersh again.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has opined on who he believes is responsible for the damage to the Nord Stream Pipeline in the Baltic Sea in September 2022, hinting that his own country is to blame.

“I don’t want to get our country in trouble, so I won’t answer it,” Trump said during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “But I can tell you who it wasn’t was Russia … It wasn’t Russia.”

Recent intelligence leaks suggest Western special forces have been in the field assisting the Ukrainian army, despite previous reassurances to the contrary. According to the latest revelation from an anonymous cache of classified intelligence documents disseminated from gaming platforms, Britain, Latvia, France, America, and The Netherlands are all alleged to have up to 100 operatives in the field advising Ukrainian forces.

As Moscow’s troops set booby traps in forests, houses and backyards, finding them has become a dangerous art for Ukrainian soldiers.

With a practiced calm, a Ukrainian de-mining expert gingerly pushed aside stalks of dry grass, revealing a lethal surprise — a hand grenade rigged to a trip wire, waiting for someone to heedlessly step on it.

The discovery, near the Ukrainian town of Lyman, was just one small development in a wider cat-and-mouse struggle between mining and de-mining teams that is becoming a pivotal element in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

#Ukraine: Two Russian tanks (Presumably T-72/T-80 series) were destroyed- as claimed, by HIMARS strikes. A Ukrainian Leleka-100 UAV was used for observation. pic.twitter.com/nKgUkf1Pbn

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 11, 2023