Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence had predicted a blistering assault by Moscow that would quickly mobilize the vast Russian air power that its military assembled in order to dominate Ukraine’s skies.
But the first six days have confounded those expectations and instead seen Moscow act far more delicately with its air power, so much so that U.S. officials can’t exactly explain what’s driving Russia’s apparent risk-averse behavior.
Canada will hit Russia with more sanctions and economic policies designed to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ability to wage war — and some of those moves might end up hurting Canada’s economy, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said Tuesday.
Freeland made those remarks Tuesday afternoon after meeting with the finance ministers of the other G7 nations and the Ukrainian finance minister to discuss measures to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
Freeland’s remarks suggest the Trudeauscu regime will use the Ukraine invasion to advance his economy killing green-agenda. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Gas prices in Ontario set to soar this week to ‘a price we have never seen’
Gas prices in Ontario are set to hit another record this week, one expert says.
Dan McTeague, President of Canadians for Affordable Energy, told CTV News Toronto on Tuesday that prices will jump two cents per litre on Wednesday to an average of $1.60 per liter.
The bigger increase will come on Thursday, when gas prices are expected to jump six cents to and average of $1.66 per litre.
Bank of Canada raises key interest rate to 0.5%
The Bank of Canada has hiked its key interest rate to 0.5 per cent, the first step of a series of signalled increases amid economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The overnight rate target will rise 25 basis points, the central bank announced Wednesday, up from the floor of 0.25 per cent it held for much of the pandemic.
Province says 847 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Ont., including 273 in ICU
Provincial health officials confirmed another 27 virus-related deaths today as the number of patients with COVID-19 in Ontario hospitals dropped below 900.
Provincial health officials said there are currently 847 patients with COVID-19 receiving treatment in hospital, down from 1,106 last week. The number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care also dipped from 319 last Wednesday to 273 today.
273 people are in ICU with #COVID19. 82% of patients admitted to the ICU were admitted for COVID-19 and 18% were admitted for other reasons but have tested positive for COVID-19.
There are 1,959 new cases of COVID-19.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) March 2, 2022
Ontario judge declines to impose COVID vaccine on kids
An Ontario judge says he is not prepared to accept as fact that vaccinating children against COVID-19 is what’s best for them simply because it’s encouraged by the government, noting a number of factors – including the children’s own preferences – must be taken into account.
We are approaching a critical phase in the Russian conquest of Ukraine. There have been multiple commitments of Western lethal and non-lethal aid in the past 72 hours. Concurrently, the Russians continue to commit more combat forces. According to background briefings at the Pentagon, Russia now has committed about 75 per cent of its combat power initially arrayed at the Ukrainian border.
After an initial lack of progress, it is likely that the Russian military leadership has rethought its strategy and will change its operational approach in the Ukraine. This will result in an increase in the use of artillery, rockets, thermobaric weapons, and air-delivered munitions as they turn to their more traditional approaches to war to secure their version of “victory”.
We can defeat the globalist agenda, for the simple fact that there are more of us than there are of them, but we have to be vocal about it — we need to join forces and present a united front, resisting peacefully, like the Canadian truckers.
Russia aims to erase Ukraine, its history and its people, the besieged country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said, as Moscow, in the face of international isolation, claimed to have seized its first large city amid continued heavy fighting.
A Russian defence ministry spokesperson said its forces had taken control of the strategically important city of Kherson on the Black Sea, with nearly 250,000 inhabitants. Local authorities said the port and train station had been captured overnight but denied the city had been occupied.
Ukraine: Putin’s miscalculations could see him strike harder
Ukraine has fought back much harder during the first week than Vladimir Putin expected, or very probably than his generals promised him, it would. But these are still the early stages of what could be a very nasty war.
Putin must have hoped that a few days after Russian forces invaded, Kyiv would have fallen. And he surely expected that Western countries, cowed and divided, would have accepted that he had reclaimed a territory that he says is historically part of Russia.
None of this has happened.
Ukrainians say they are fighting on in southern city of Kherson
Ukrainians said they were fighting on in the first sizeable city Russia claimed to have seized, while Moscow stepped up its lethal bombardment of major population centres that its invasion force has so far failed to tame.
With Moscow having failed in its aim of swiftly overthrowing Ukraine’s government after nearly a week, Western countries are worried that it is switching to new, far more violent tactics to blast its way into cities it had expected to easily take.
#Ukraine: In the vicinity of #Nikolaev, a MT-LBV (Or vehicle based on it) was abandoned by Russian troops, also leaving behind an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher, 6x RPG-26, PG-7L, 2x RPG-7, and other ammo. pic.twitter.com/Bf8bvrKTuJ
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 2, 2022
The 500-plus reports spanning nearly 300 pages contain dozens of strange sightings from commercial pilots, soldiers, and police officers. (Here are some of the highlights.) Obtained by VICE World News through Canadian freedom of information laws, the reports were made to federal transportation authorities as recently as last year, when a Canadian military flight spotted a “bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud then disappeared” over eastern Canada.
We can only hope that the madness in Ukraine doesn’t escalate to the extent that the U.S. military ends up getting involved. It’s clear that Gen. Mark Milley and the rest of the brass have learned absolutely no lessons from Afghanistan and are determined to repeat the same mistakes that led up to the catastrophically mishandled withdrawal from Kabul. If the Army were called upon to move into Ukraine, which would be an indication that the situation there had gotten wildly out of control, it isn’t at all clear that today’s woke force would pose a significant threat even to the manifestly weak and sluggish Russian forces. An American army presence in Ukraine would likely herald World War III, and we hope it won’t come to that, but if it does, look out.
Canada asked the International Criminal Court on Tuesday to speed up its investigation into Russia for possible war crimes because of its invasion of Ukraine as the government moved to close its ports to Russian ships.
That’s one of the many troubling findings in the report submitted Tuesday by a state-appointed special counsel to the Wisconsin Assembly.
Both during the time the Freedom Convoy was parked around downtown Ottawa and after police raided the protest zone, polling companies have been pushing out hastily made polls about the event. The polls the companies put out are supposedly gauging what Canadians thought about the Freedom Convoy, but these polls seem oddly disconnected from reality.
There’s a reason why Putin and Ukraine evidently cured COVID. They no longer want us discussing COVID because the daily revelations about the safety and efficacy of the shots – along with all the other lies about the pandemic – will create a frenzy of poignant and consequential questions from the public directed at elected officials. It’s precisely for that reason that we must not allow them to move on. They dragged us into COVID against our will; now it is our job not to allow them to distract us from it until justice is served.
Federal regulators have not committed to removing Chinese state propaganda from Canadian airwaves even as they prepare to ban the television channel Russia Today (RT).
Instead of imposing emergency powers within Canada, we should be initiating an emergency military expansion and building pipelines to get more oil & natural gas to our European allies.
Deputy Prime Minister and former Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland was photographed on Sunday with a scarf promoting a far-right Ukrainian Nationalist movement linked to Neo-Nazis and extremism.
Canada has a fascist psychopath as prime minister and a nazi as deputy prime minister. They recently gave themselves extraordinary powers to crush peaceful dissidents.
But according to media talking heads, PPC is a threat to Canadian democracy. 🤷🏻♂️
— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) March 1, 2022
There are so many complex reasons for Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. And so many outcomes yet to be determined – sadly, all of them bad for the USA.
“Several hours before the launch of missiles or movement of tanks on February 24, Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) detected a new round of offensive and destructive cyberattacks directed against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure,” Microsoft president Brad Smith wrote in a blog post. Monday. “We immediately advised the Ukrainian government about the situation, including our identification of the use of a new malware package (which we denominated FoxBlade), and provided technical advice on steps to prevent the malware’s success.”
A vacuum bomb, or thermobaric weapon, uses up oxygen from the surrounding air to produce a high-temperature explosion that carries an explosion of a significantly longer duration than that of a traditional blast. It is so powerful that it can instantaneously vaporize human bodies.
China is the only major economy that still has a direct line to a fast-isolated Russia — but the pressure is increasing on Beijing to change that.
Just weeks after the two countries signed a “no limits” partnership agreement, China now has no choice but to recalibrate its position on bilateral trade and macroeconomics with Moscow, after President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked war on Ukraine.
While Beijing still wants to count on Moscow as a long-term strategic partner to fend off America’s global influence, it will no doubt be wary of the international reaction if it opts for measures that could be interpreted as an endorsement of Putin’s aggression, according to experts.
… Putin’s attack on Ukraine will have more serious repercussions than rising gas prices, wavering confidence that the United States can act as the world’s policeman or even the dismantling of a sovereign nation. It represents a shock to the system for the cozy “rules-based international order” that has for decades reassured the West that things like naked aggression are relics of the past.
