“Ukraine – Russia”

Germany has decided to supply battle tanks to Ukraine. International law experts are now debating whether this makes Germany a party to the conflict with Russia.

After German Chancellor Olaf Scholz decided to send Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine last week following a long hesitation, the response from the Russian government was swift.

“Everything the alliance and the capitals of Europe and the United States do is perceived in Moscow as direct involvement in the conflict,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday, according to a report by the Russian news agency Interfax.

That’s exactly what Scholz has been trying to avoid: triggering an accusation from Moscow that Germany is now also a direct party to the war in Ukraine. Speaking with public broadcaster ZDF on Wednesday, he rejected any interpretation that Germany is directly involved in a war with Russia. “No, absolutely not!” he said. “There must be no war between Russia and NATO.”

US President Joe Biden has ruled out providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, despite renewed calls from top Kyiv officials for urgent air support.

Asked on Monday if the US would be sending the planes, Mr Biden said “no”. The UK also said it was “not practical” for it to send its aircraft to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, France’s Emmanuel Macon said “by definition, nothing is excluded” ahead of meeting a Ukrainian minister.

‘Whoever comes to our land with a sword will die by the sword’: Ukrainian officer reveals footage of the moment their forces wipe out advancing Russian soldiers

Destruction of Russians with a death ray pic.twitter.com/VSJQF71fed

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) January 30, 2023

We have clearly reached the point where The Narrative has undergone a radical evolution when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Originally, there were many discussions taking place about how wrong it was for Russia to invade a neighboring country and how democratic countries needed to assist Ukraine in fighting off the invaders. There was nothing wrong with those proposals, obviously. Vladimir Putin started an unprovoked war in Europe that nobody else wanted or even saw any justification for. He was “the bad guy” in this scenario and decent people don’t root for the bad guy.

He was released from a Russian prison and thrown into battle in Ukraine with a promise of freedom, redemption and money. Now, Andrei Yastrebov, who was among tens of thousands of convict soldiers, is part of a return from the battlefield with potentially serious implications for Russian society.

Mr. Yastrebov, 22, who had been serving time for theft, returned home a changed man. “We all feel like he is in some sort of hypnosis, like he is a different person,” said a relative of his, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “He is without any emotions.”

December 13, 2022. UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace tells the House of Commons that, since the start of the war in Ukraine, “over 100,000 Russians are either dead, injured, or have deserted”. Today, the figure is undoubtedly higher. The losses to the Russian army have been such that on September 21, Putin decreed a mobilization. Tens of thousands of men were sent to ,military training. Thousands of others were immediately deployed to the front, with no training, no arms, or with only rusty guns, and sent to a certain death. Another mobilization seems to be in the works. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently said that the Russian army will soon number 1.5 million men, but whatever the number, if front-line soldiers do not have adequate equipment, they will be killed.

BAKHMUT, Ukraine—Russia’s invasion forces tightened the noose around this beleaguered city in eastern Ukraine, while Kyiv urged the West to provide longer-range firepower to counter Russia’s missile barrages.

Ukrainian troops here described mounting difficulties in stopping the Russian advances around Bakhmut, the site of this winter’s heaviest fighting in the 11-month-old war.

Russia on Sunday claimed the capture of another village in the Bakhmut area as its forces try to surround the city and force a Ukrainian retreat.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine needed advanced weapons systems such as the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to counteract Russian strikes that were killing Ukrainian civilians.

Russia recently announced its intention to increase its armed forces by another 350,000 soldiers to a total of 1.5 million personnel. In justification of this move, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the “military security of the nation,” as well as of the “new subjects” — as he called the illegally annexed Ukrainian territories — and the country’s “critical infrastructure” could only be secured “if the most crucial components of the armed forces are reinforced.”

According to Shoigu, the reform will begin this year and conclude in 2026. Its aim is threefold: to restore the former military districts of Moscow and Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg), create new troop formations in the illegally occupied zones in Ukraine, and establish 12 new mobile units.

As West’s ruling class leads us closer to the brink of nuclear conflict with Russia, dissent can barely be heard

… Yesterday I wrote about how Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said the West’s sending tanks to Ukraine is another sign that we are in a real war with Russia. To be clear, Orban thinks this is an extremely bad idea! His point is that led by the United States, NATO countries are bumbling into an honest-to-God war with nuclear-armed Russia, over Ukraine.

I can’t get this out of my mind … because it’s true. 

Your thoughts? pic.twitter.com/vx29ZvZgDr

— Antonio Sabato Jr (@AntonioSabatoJr) January 28, 2023

h/t XC

Fifty years after America signed the Paris Peace Accords with Vietnam, the pact is a reminder that Congress is capable of abandoning an ally in the middle of a war.

The thing to remember — on the anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, a catastrophic compromise forced by America on the government of Free Vietnam — is that it could yet happen in respect of Ukraine. This time the pressure for a negotiated settlement is coming, at least in part, from the right. Senator Rand Paul, the libertarian-type Republican, just offered another warning against the war in Ukraine becoming “endless.”

So left or right, it is a possibility — slim at the moment, but history teaches to beware — that Congress will get tired of this war and end the support. Even if no GIs ever go to Ukraine. This is one of the great lessons of Vietnam. It wasn’t about saving our GIs there. American combat soldiers were long since withdrawn from Vietnam when Congress cut off military support for the Free Vietnamese forces.

Germany’s government on Friday accused Russia of pouncing on a statement by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to twist it to the Kremlin’s own ends and reiterated that neither Germany nor NATO were parties to the war in Ukraine.

Baerbock had called for Western unity during a meeting of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on Tuesday, saying, in English: “We are fighting a war against Russia, not against each other.”

NATO and Germany have emphasized that their support for Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s unprovoked invasion does not constitute participation in the war.

“A little bit pregnant”

In general, the war in Ukraine is being approached by Western public opinion from a humanitarian perspective that sympathizes with the enormous suffering of the Ukrainian people while at the same time morally denouncing the aggressor: Putin. All this, though undoubtedly a just analysis that gives an accurate account of the culprits and victims, nevertheless brings with it at least two problems.

Firstly, the humanitarian focus gets in the way of hard geopolitical analysis, which is more important than the former both because of what is at stake and because statecraft, as opposed to humane sympathy, acts as the driving force on the global chessboard. But not only does a purely humanitarian focus conceal such important considerations; worst still, those who dare to engage in unsentimental geopolitical discourse outside of military and intelligence circles are automatically condemned by the media and the political class, and then ostracized. Geopolitics, it seems, is a mode of analysis not sanctioned by the court of political correctness.

Former security official Viktor Yahun says Ukraine’s SBU agency has long been overly close to Russia’s FSB

The arrest of a high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence agent accused of spying for Russia has highlighted the urgent need for a cleanout of the country’s key security service, a former deputy head of the agency has said.

The Ukrainian security service (SBU) reported on Thursday that they arrested a lieutenant colonel in their ranks on suspicion of “high treason” and published a photograph of bundles of cash found in his home.

The unnamed man is said to have used his mobile phone to photograph documents detailing the location of military checkpoints in Zaporizhzhia, a frontline region in the south-east of the country, and sending the information via an email account registered on a Russian domain.