Author: Blazingcatfur

Kyiv’s arsenal boosted by Soviet-era T-72 tanks from European Nato allies – and they could prove crucial on the flat terrain of the Donbas

Thanks to European resupplies, Ukraine’s military now has more tanks on the battlefield than Russia does, according to the Pentagon.

Two months into the war, the delivery of Soviet-era T-72 tanks to Kyiv from the Czech Republic and other European Nato allies has effectively eroded Russia’s advantage, experts have claimed.

“Right now, the Ukrainians have more tanks in Ukraine than the Russians do, and they certainly have the purview to use them,” an unnamed senior US defence official told reporters on Thursday.

US-based lab documents destruction of churches and theatres

Satellite scrutiny of Ukraine is not just focused on military hardware. Thousands of miles away from the fighting, an international group of archaeologists, historians and technicians are quietly coordinating another high-stakes monitoring effort: the tracking of the mounting losses to Ukraine’s cultural landscape.

Now an impact summary, released this month from their lab at a museum in the US state of Virginia, has revealed the bleak truth.

In a speech delivered, or stumbled through, in Poland on March 26, Joe Biden declared that Russia was in need of regime change, a sentiment echoed throughout the Western media. Many commentators and media talking-heads agreed that “regime change” is and should be a fundamental goal of Western policy towards Russia. One or two went so far as to argue that this is the reason for the West’s effort to prolong the war by continuing to pour arms into the Ukraine—rather than call for an immediate ceasefire, as is the normal procedure in modern wars. One such commentator has been Niall Ferguson, who has cautioned Western leaders that the desired regime change will almost certainly not be materializing in the foreseeable future. Writing in Bloomberg News, Ferguson concludes that the Biden administration “is making a colossal mistake thinking that it can protract the war in Ukraine, bleed Russia dry, topple Putin and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan.” But is regime change the primary goal at all?

h/t John

The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more atrocities against civilians are exposed, and the murkier the prospects for victory and peace become. Western publics remain staunchly supportive of Ukraine’s valiant efforts, but they can become inured to the graphic depictions of gruesome savagery, such as the newly discovered mass grave that could hold as many as 9,000 bodies near the devastated city of Mariupol. Attention spans are inevitably domestic. The pivotal question now, however, is whether the U.S. and NATO will marshal a more muscular response to Russia’s massively superior firepower.

After an air strike hit a school in Chernihiv, a video of a bloodied survivor went viral on Ukrainian social media. But soon her story was hijacked by pro-Kremlin accounts, including one promoted by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which falsely accused her of being a fake.

“There was no whistle, rustling or sound of shelling,” Tania says. “It just hit the building and suddenly everything went dark. The building collapsed.”

Tania was caught up in an air strike in early March. She was helping sort clothes for a humanitarian aid drive in school number 21 in Chernihiv, north of Kyiv, when a missile hit the building.