“Ukraine – Russia”

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears its one-year anniversary on Feb. 24, many Americans’ patience is wearing thin. A new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that American support for shipping weapons and tax dollars off to Ukraine is declining.

Less than half of Americans, 48 percent, now say they favor the U.S. providing weapons to Ukraine, with 29 percent opposed and 22 percent neither in favor nor opposed. This is a decline from May 2022, when less than three months into the conflict 60 percent of U.S. adults were in favor of sending weapons to Ukraine.

President Putin has sacrificed thousands of tanks and tens of thousands of men in an effort to grind Ukraine into submission. Yet so far he has appeared reluctant to use planes and helicopters to win the battle for the skies.

Barrages of cruise and ballistic missiles have been the main way Putin has sought to press the Russian aerial advantage, while holding his expensive aircraft in reserve. A Russian SU-35 fighter typically costs about £35 million.

The SU-25 Soviet era ground attack fighter-bomber pictured has not fared especially well to date with numerous reports of shoot-downs.

Russia’s army is estimated to have lost nearly 40% of its prewar fleet of tanks after nine months of fighting in Ukraine, according to a count by the specialist thinktank the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS).

That rises to as much as 50% for some of the key tanks used in combat, forcing Russia to reach into its still sizeable cold war-era stocks. Ukraine’s tank numbers are estimated to have increased because of the number it has captured and supplies of Soviet-era tanks from its western allies.

John Chipman, the thinktank’s chair, said the war had been “a political and military failure for Russia” highlighting shortcomings in leadership and deficiencies in its munitions, despite Kremlin modernisation efforts.

#Ukraine: A Ukrainian BMK-460 tugboat was struck and taken out of action by a Russian Lancet loitering munition. pic.twitter.com/YKwRNYnI6c

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

Western analysts are spreading a false narrative

If you were a Russian mother, would you rather believe that your son gave his life heroically fighting Ukrainian Nazis, or that he died butchering innocent civilians? The former, most likely. It is not easy to admit — to oneself or to others — that you live in a country that has murdered tens of thousands of Ukrainians, or that has pointlessly sacrificed the lives of its own people.

Yet it is one thing to turn a blind eye to the truth, and quite another to be “brainwashed”. The West is fixated on the idea that “Putin’s war” is not Russia’s, and that the Russian people only support it because they have been “zombified” by a totalitarian regime. But this is missing the wood for the trees.

Nato members concede that Western militaries risk running out of the ammunition Kyiv needs, but also protect themselves going forward

Far from the battlefield of Ukraine, a new conflict is taking shape that could determine the future of the war – one between Western governments and the global arms industry.

Nato member states gathered in Brussels have conceded that Western militaries are in danger of running out of the ammunition Kyiv needs to win the war, but also protect themselves going forward.

Ukraine’s armed forces are burning through artillery shells at a rate of 6,000 a day – more than a smaller European country’s orders in an entire year in peacetime.

#Ukraine: A Russian Su-24M strike aircraft (RF-93799) operated by the Wagner PMC was severely damaged by a Ukrainian MANPADS strike over Bakhmut, #Donetsk Oblast.

It managed to get back to base but is very unlikely to fly again any time soon. pic.twitter.com/1MtLtNALF2

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) February 14, 2023

As the battlefront news for Ukraine turns grim, with even the New York Times conceding that “Ukrainians in [the] East” are “outnumbered and worn out,” the hope, as usual, is that a magic weapon will save the day.

We have seen many such invocations in the last twelve months: Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, M777 Howitzers, HIMARS long-range precision missile launchers, assorted Western tanks. All have been hailed in their time as potentially tipping the balance against Putin’s hordes. None have succeeded, or, in the case of as yet undelivered tanks, are likely to succeed, in altering the fundamental military balance in the war, though they contribute much to the balance sheets of the relevant Western arms corporations. Now the embattled Zelensky is calling for “wings for freedom,” jet fighters that will “close the sky,” according to one of his advisors, helping to “destroy practically any target in the air or on the ground.”

In Kherson, battle-hardened troops are prepared for the worst

The entrance to Kherson is littered with ruined market stalls that the Russians burned when they occupied the city. Inside, the centre is deserted. Cafes are shut; restaurants are boarded up. On a municipal building in Freedom Square hangs a huge McDonald’s poster, sodden with rain.

The boss of the Russian mercenary Wagner group said it could take Russia two years to seize the entire east of Ukraine in a rare interview that suggests at least some key figures in Moscow are gearing up for a protracted conflict.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has emerged from the shadows to become a high-profile figure since the start of the war, suggested Russia’s focus was now on capturing the rest of the Donbas region it has not occupied since the start of the war nearly a year ago.

Doing so would take “about one and half to two more years of work”, the ally of president Vladimir Putin said. If the goal was to occupy all of Ukraine east of the Dnipro River, this would “take about three years”, he said.

Feb 12 (Reuters) – NATO should hold an emergency meeting to discuss recent findings about September explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipelines, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said late on Saturday.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970, said in a blog post on Wednesday, citing an unidentified source, that U.S. navy divers had destroyed the pipelines, with explosives on the orders of President Joe Biden.

#Ukraine: Serious Russian losses to Ukrainian AT mines and artillery in the vicinity of Avdiivka, #Donetsk Oblast: 3x BMP-1 IFV, 5x BMP-2 IFV, two ancient T-72 "Ural" tanks, and a T-72B were destroyed/damaged/abandoned.pic.twitter.com/5WJ2scLlXd

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) February 10, 2023

They Are Russians Fighting Against Their Homeland. Here’s Why.

The soldier knelt in the snow, aimed a rocket launcher and fired in the direction of Russian troops positioned about a mile away. He was set up at a Ukrainian firing position, and looked just like the other Ukrainian troops fighting south of the city of Bakhmut in one of the most brutal theaters of the war.

But he and his comrades are not Ukrainian. They are soldiers in a Ukrainian military unit made up entirely of Russians who are fighting and killing their own countrymen.

Russian military column enters a Ukrainian mine field and makes every mistake possible.

Did they receive any training at all after mobilization?pic.twitter.com/MRPhHyy0EI

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 12, 2023

Russian soldiers are dying in greater numbers in Ukraine this month than at any time since the first week of the invasion, according to Ukrainian data.

The Ukrainian data shows 824 Russian soldiers dying per day in February.

The figures were highlighted by the UK’s Ministry of Defence. The figures cannot be verified – but the UK says the trends are “likely accurate”.

The increase comes amid talk of a spring offensive by Russian forces in the east of the country.

#Ukraine: Russian troops filmed some of their own losses in the vicinity of Vuhledar, #Donetsk Oblast: a destroyed T-80BV with a KMT-6 mine plough and a damaged T-72B3. pic.twitter.com/y0bMWhM07o

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

The twin Nord Stream pipelines that connect Russia to Germany were wrecked by an undersea explosion on Sept. 16. The catastrophe was both environmental and economic. The severed pipes released enormous amounts of planet-warming methane, Germany lost its main source of cheap energy, and Russia one of its main sources of foreign exchange earnings.

The catastrophe was also political, of course. Who was to blame for the destruction of the Russian-owned pipelines? It was no accident. A Swedish inquiry concluded in November that the damage was the result of “gross sabotage” – investigators found traces of explosives on the metal pieces they recovered in the Baltic Sea.

Just a matter of time:

Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges believes that information proving Sy Hersh's conclusions about US involvement in the Nord Stream explosions will definitely appear….. pic.twitter.com/etWiH3msDm

— Richard (@ricwe123) February 10, 2023

An invasion through Belarus would accelerate negotiations

Looking ahead, there are only two possible major military moves for Russia. Following the mobilisation of 300,000 reservists last autumn, Putin’s army is now larger than when it invaded last February. Then, the aim was not to start a war but to end it, with a quick victory forecast by Russian and US Intelligence, both equally intoxicated by the false promise of “post-kinetic” warfare; this would combine electronic propaganda with cyber-attacks on everything from military headquarters to civilian infrastructures. Generals who had never fought against patriotic Europeans but only against Middle Eastern sectarians, if they had fought at all, who considered tanks old-fashioned and had limitless respect for “information warfare”, heavily influenced the totally wrong estimates that misled both Biden and Putin.

#Ukraine: Two Russian tanks and what may have been two UR-77 mine clearing vehicles (very difficult to tell since both were nuked) were destroyed by the Ukrainian army north of Volodymyrivka near Vuhledar, #Donetsk Oblast. pic.twitter.com/S6ILqTCX3W

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) February 10, 2023