“Ukraine – Russia”

Prisoners warned they will be executed if they arrive in Ukraine and refuse to fight

The head of a notorious pro-Kremlin mercenary group has told inmates at a Russian prison that they will be set free if they survive a six-month tour of duty in Ukraine, but executed if they try to desert.

The offer was made to convicts at a prison camp in central Russia by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy tycoon who runs the Wagner Group private military contractor. The group’s fighters have been accused of war crimes in Ukraine and Syria.

The founder of Russia’s shadowy Wagner mercenary group has appeared in leaked footage attempting to recruit prisoners to fight in Ukraine.

In filmed footage, verified by the BBC, Yevgeniy Prigozhin can be seen addressing a large group of detainees.

Mr Prigozhin told prisoners their sentences would be commuted in exchange for service with his group.

The video would confirm long-running speculation that Russia hopes to boost its forces by recruiting convicts.

Russian President Vladimir Putin does not realise the invasion of Ukraine is a mistake, German chancellor Olaf Scholz has said, after the leaders spoke on the phone on Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Mr Scholz said he urged Mr Putin to withdraw troops and re-enter talks with Ukraine during the 90-minute call.

He called for Russia to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine.

The chancellor has come under pressure to increase military support for Kyiv.

Mr Scholz said the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine would be the only way for “peace to have a chance in the region”.

Ukrainian citizens accused of collaborating with occupying Russian forces in Kharkiv province and the neighbouring Donbas region are fleeing from recently liberated areas and queueing to cross into Russia at the border, Ukrainian officials have said.

“The ‘commandant’s offices’, ‘prosecutor’s offices’, occupiers and gauleiters are leaving,” the governor of Luhansk province, Serhiy Haidai, wrote on Telegram. “The Ukrainian flag, which our guerrillas raised last night over the administration building in Kreminna, remains intact as the Russians now seem to have understood everything so they don’t dare to take it down. Russians and their collaborators are fleeing from Luhansk region, heading towards Russia”. Luhansk makes up the Donbas region with Donetsk to the south.

In one week in September, Ukrainian forces liberated 1,100 square miles in Northeastern Ukraine. This is more than Russia’s military managed to seize in months of costly attritional warfare in the Donbas region. Further withdrawals announced by Russia’s Defense Ministry may result in over 3,200 square miles falling back under Ukrainian control.

Lurking in the shadow of Ukraine’s heavily advertised counteroffensive in Kherson, the Kharkiv campaign took Russian forces by surprise. It became a textbook example of a fast-paced breakthrough and exploitation operation – the very sort of campaign Russian armored units mostly failed to achieve at the beginning of the war.

#Ukraine: Video from another part of this area shows at least two more MT-LB armoured vehicles and a T-72B tank left behind by Russian forces. https://t.co/F9MImfSOmn pic.twitter.com/pBxhnQjd2c

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) September 13, 2022

Western-leaning politician allowed to voice rare criticism in what may be ploy to prepare the Russian people for possibility of peace talks

A war commentator invited on to Russian state television told viewers that Vladimir Putin has been misled by advisers and said Ukraine cannot be defeated, in what appeared to be a rare example of sanctioned criticism.

Boris Nadezhdin, a Western-leaning politician appearing for the first time in months, called for peace talks as he made a surprise appearance on state-controlled NTV over the weekend.

Mr Nadezhdin, who for years played the token liberal on state television, said: “We’re not at the point where we have to understand – it’s absolutely impossible to defeat Ukraine, using the resources and colonial war methods that Russia is using to win this war.

#Ukraine: The 59th Motorized Brigade of the Ukraian Army hit a Russian tank in the South, causing damage at least. pic.twitter.com/OksaOuJwxs

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) September 13, 2022

The Kremlin is being fed fake news from the front

“You better stay out of our country. The more Russians you send to Ukraine, the more of them we will kill, and the more death you will bring back to your homes.” Nataliya Zubar, native of Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, and documenter of Russian war crimes, is giving me her message to Moscow, which over the last 48 hours has seen the Ukrainian army smash through much of the territory it conquered in the north-eastern Kharkiv Oblast

You can normally expect Russian state TV’s flagship weekly news programme to trumpet Kremlin successes.

But yesterday’s edition opened with a rare admission.

“On the frontlines of the special operation [in Ukraine], this has been the toughest week so far,” declared sombre-looking anchor Dmitry Kiselev.

“It was particularly tough along the Kharkiv front, where following an onslaught by enemy forces that outnumbered ours, [Russian] troops were forced to leave towns they had previously liberated.”

#Ukraine: A Russian Su-25[SM] CAS jet crashed shortly after takeoff and was destroyed. This is claimed to have occured recently in Crimea, but so far the precise date and location is unclear. pic.twitter.com/44V2M9lxib

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) September 12, 2022

Panicked Russian soldiers are abandoning their tanks, weapons and even clothes as they “literally run from their positions” in the face of a shock Ukrainian offensive, soldiers have told The Telegraph.

A Ukrainian intelligence unit on the front line said the Russian chain of command was broken and soldiers were fleeing without putting up a fight, many of them changing into civilian clothes to avoid detection.

Enterprising Ukrainian soldiers are using modified World War II-era hand grenades dropped from mini-drones, an innovative tactic that is reportedly damaging and destroying advancing Russian armored vehicles.

Interestingly, the grenades themselves were originally made in the Soviet Union to use against German tanks toward the end of World War II.

“The Russians invented a hand grenade. It was a shaped hand grenade that you could throw at a tank. And if you hit it, you could knock a tank out. And that was a result of them not being able to knock out German tanks with the stuff they had,” Mike Mears, former director of human capital at the CIA, told The National Interest in an interview.