A Russian tank killed a Canadian fighter who was trying to carry a fallen comrade to safety in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, grieving members of his battalion say.
Emile-Antoine Roy-Sirois, 31, from Montreal, died alongside three other foreign fighters on July 18, after his company was ambushed by a Russian tank near the front line in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was eviscerated by social media users over his Vogue photoshoot with his wife, First Lady Olena Zelenska, which transpired while their country continues to be invaded by Russia.
The Germany city of Hanover has become the first big city in Europe to ban hot water and central heating in public buildings in response to Vladimir Putin’s weaponizing of gas supplies.
The drastic step comes as Germans have been told to expect sky high electricity bills and sweeping gas rationing measures that will affect their day-to-day lives.
In a sign of things to come, Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony in the north west of the country, will cut off the hot water in public buildings, swimming pools, sports halls and gyms.
Some weeks ago the Russians announced an “operational pause” in the Donbas.
Breaks in fighting like these are pretty normal in this type of high-intensity warfare, because of the vast supplies required and damages inflicted.
Armies sometimes just have to take time-outs to regroup and build up their supplies again, although normally you don’t broadcast to everyone that you’re doing it.
That’s a bit odd, and makes it seem like there must be another reason that Russian military activity has decreased.
Yes, do it again! #nafo #fellas pic.twitter.com/kNWz1YwkT7
— Is it HIMARS o'clock? (@HIMARStime) July 24, 2022
In our age of crisis, the state has been reawakened, breaking the taboos of the past few decades. But it’s still an uphill climb. Over the past 40 years, there was broad political agreement that markets were not to be meddled with, and that the power of the state had to be reined in. Economists such as Milton Friedman argued that the overbearing nature of the Keynesian state had suffocated the entrepreneurial spirit, making workers lazy and entitled. Much of this situation, they claimed, was the result of intrusive government interfering with the smooth running of the free market.
The EU’s plan for mandatory gas rationing is utterly terrifying.
The EU’s 27 member states – all modern, advanced industrialised economies, some among the richest in the world – are about to start rationing their energy supplies. This week, at an extraordinary summit, EU members agreed to a European Commission proposal to slash their gas use by a punishing 15 per cent over the next eight months. From August 2022 to March 2023, the lamps will, quite literally, be going out all over Europe.
Germany has accused Moscow of engaging in “power play” over energy exports, as Russian state-run Gazprom further throttled gas supplies into Europe.
As announced two days earlier, the energy giant on Wednesday reduced the gas flow through Nord Stream 1 to 33m cubic metres a day – about 20% of the pipeline’s total capacity and half the amount it has been delivering since resuming service last week after 10 days of maintenance work.
According to network data from the gas transfer station in Lubmin, north-east Germany, only about 17m kilowatt hours of gas arrived between 8am and 9am, compared with more than 27m kWh between 6am and 7am.
#Russia: In a first for the war so far, today Ukrainian forces are confirmed to have used a US-supplied Switchblade 300 loitering munition on Russian territory, at the Troebortnoe crossing in #Bryansk Oblast, barely 2km from the Ukrainian border (51.88214, 34.34705). pic.twitter.com/u3ALulfIY4
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) July 26, 2022
Familiar Eurozone fault lines are starting to re-surface
It has been nearly six months since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, but for Europe, the worst is yet to come. Already companies are contemplating shutting down production, including aluminium smelters in Slovakia and fertilizer producers in the UK. Corporations need to plan long term, and forward contracts for electricity (which are supposed to lock in energy costs) are at all-time highs for 2023 and 2024.
It is an occupational hazard that people who are granted half a page in a newspaper every day start to think they’re geniuses and everyone else is an idiot. It is almost a relief to be wrong — it suggests the world is working as it should.
PEREMOHA, Ukraine — For years, Serhiy Kulyk has been holding onto a plot of land next to his modest house in Peremoha, a village about 60 kilometers northeast of Kyiv.
He hoped his 27-year-old son, Ruslan, would one day build a home on the spot for his own family so they could remain close together.
That dream is gone forever: It died along with Ruslan, one of five civilians whom relatives and residents say were summarily executed by Russian soldiers at a post office in Peremoha shortly after they seized control of the village on February 28, according to an investigation by Schemes.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has given the green light to a Black Sea grain export deal, the first major agreement between Moscow and Kyiv since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
“This is an agreement for the world,” said UN secretary-general António Guterres on Friday. “It will bring relief for developing countries on the edge of bankruptcy and the most vulnerable people on the edge of famine. It will help stabilize global food prices which were already at record-levels even before the war.”
Barely a kilometre from Russian positions defending the captured eastern city of Izium, Ukrainian and foreign fighters hunker in a dank basement. Artillery rains down on them most nights, shaking loose the plaster and filling the air with dust.
At the sharp end of efforts to stop the Russian army’s progress in eastern Ukraine are the Carpathian Sich battalion, a unit of Ukrainians and foreign nationals who answered Kyiv’s call for help to confront the invader.
“Now it’s more of an artillery war. It’s a tougher war, a scarier war, where only people who are strong in their spirit can fight,” said Dzvin, a field commander in the battalion who asked to be identified by his nom de guerre for security reasons, due to his leadership role.
The Government of Ukraine has issued a blacklist of individuals who they judge to be “promoting Russian propaganda” — including a number of prominent Western intellectuals.
American-supplied Himars missile launchers have destroyed more than 50 Russian ammunition dumps since they arrived on the battlefield last month, Ukraine’s defence minister said.
Oleksiy Reznikov told Ukrainian television that the scalpel-like accuracy of the missiles had significantly eroded Russia’s supply chains and its ability to conduct active fighting and cover our armed forces with heavy shelling.
We are talking about 50 sites in terms of ammunition storage locations alone, he told Ukrainian television.
Moscow has charged 92 members of the Ukrainian armed forces with crimes against humanity, the head of Russia’s investigative committee has said.
Alexander Bastrykin told government news site Rossiiskaya Gazeta over 1,300 criminal investigations had begun.
He also proposed an international tribunal backed by countries including Iran, Syria and Bolivia – traditional allies of Russia.
Ukraine is also conducting its own war crimes investigations.
