“Ukraine – Russia”

KYIV, July 8 (Reuters) – Western officials on Friday tried to coax Russia into allowing Ukraine to ship its grain out to the world as the four-month-old war threatened to bring hunger to countries far away from the battlefields.

Moscow for its part accused the West of waging economic warfare on Russia by attempting to isolate it with sanctions imposed over the Feb. 24 invasion.

President Vladimir Putin warned that Russia’s military operations in Ukraine had barely got started and the prospects for negotiation would grow dimmer the longer the conflict dragged on.

#Ukraine: Engineering and artillery forces of the Ukrainian army stopped a Russian tank attack in the East recently – at least two T-80/T-72 series tanks were destroyed with four more damaged and abandoned. pic.twitter.com/iv9rhbDM2J

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) July 8, 2022

Canada’s Ukrainian community has urged the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to refuse to compromise the country’s sanctions against Russia in order to return a turbine that Moscow says is critical for supplying natural gas to Germany.

Russia’s state-controlled Gazprom cut the capacity along the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to just 40% of usual levels last month, citing the delayed return of equipment being serviced by Germany’s Siemens Energy in Canada.

Small groups of Western combat veterans are on the front lines, but many more with fewer skills are left trying to find a role to play.

DRUZHKIVKA, Ukraine — Four months after Russia invaded Ukraine, foreign combat veterans who answered the Ukrainian president’s call to fight are grappling with the grueling reality of a war unlike any they have seen.

Many are American and British veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they could count on calling in airstrikes for protection and other critical support. In Ukraine, the military effort is essentially bare-bones, leaving Ukrainian forces — and their foreign-fighter allies — to face a larger and better armed Russian invasion force without basics, like steady meals, and even some tools of modern warfare that would help them level the field.

“This is way more intense than what I saw in Afghanistan,” said Brian, a former U.S. Army paratrooper, who did not want his last name used for security reasons. “This is combat, combat.”

A small team of remote operators is waging a highly effective campaign to starve the Russian advance of vital fuel and ammunition supplies

Cruising high above dense Ukrainian forest, the combat drone spotted the long Russian column winding down the road from the Belarusian border. Its pilot, operating from afar, used the on-board cameras to scan the treeline for signs of anti-aircraft defences, then selected his target.

The bombs struck the spine of the column and one after another the fuel tankers erupted in a chain reaction of fireballs that illuminated his screen. “I think this was my greatest achievement,” the pilot, with the call sign Odesa, told The Times. “It stopped the offensive in the Chernihiv and Kyiv directions because the enemy had equipment but no fuel.”

KHARKIV — During his videotaped interrogation with Ukraine’s state security bureau, the injured Russian soldier looked nervous.

Breathing heavily as he responded to questions, the young prisoner explained his commander’s orders on the first day of the Russian invasion.

After crossing the border that morning in an armoured column, his unit was on the ring road that encircles Kharkiv city when a traffic jam formed, he said.

Russia is recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine with the promise of almost £3,000 and their sentences being annulled if they come back alive after six months.

Inmates are being actively recruited in St Petersburg jails, according to independent media outlet IStories.

The convicts are told they will be put on the frontline to hunt down ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine in an arrangement that suggests they will be deployed as cannon fodder.

BAKHMUT, Ukraine (AP) — Torched forests and cities burned to the ground. Colleagues with severed limbs. Bombardments so relentless the only option is to lie in a trench, wait and pray.

Ukrainian soldiers returning from the front lines in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region — where Russia is waging a fierce offensive — describe life during what has turned into a grueling war of attrition as apocalyptic.

In interviews with The Associated Press, some complained of chaotic organization, desertions and mental health problems caused by relentless shelling. Others spoke of high morale, their colleagues’ heroism, and a commitment to keep fighting, even as the better-equipped Russians control more of the combat zone.

Support for the Ukraine will wither as more people realize Trudeau is using the crisis to crank up his economically ruinous green-scam.

#Ukraine: A Russian T-80BV tank was hit in recent fighting, and became smouldering scrap with great speed. pic.twitter.com/4knTc1APw5

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) July 2, 2022

Jews have fled Russia in droves, but those who remain are scared of a return to the darkest days of discrimination.

As Vladimir Putin’s war rages on for the fifth month in Ukraine and repression suffocates civil liberties back home, Russian Jews are worried they’ll soon become the Kremlin’s targets.

Jews have been fleeing Russia in droves; those who’ve stayed behind are terrified of directly criticizing the war, which Putin has cynically claimed he launched to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.

“In our congregation, we don’t talk about any political issues,” said a Moscow rabbi who asked not to be named. He added that after a 2011 crackdown on protests linked to Putin’s reelection, he ordered that politics must stay out of his synagogue, which has roughly 300 members.

Many of the fighters for Ukraine’s western territorial defense units were assigned benign tasks away from the fighting when they first joined. Then they were called to the front to fight.

RUDNE, Ukraine — Yurii Brukhal, an electrician by trade, did not have a very dangerous role when he volunteered for Ukraine’s territorial defense forces at the start of the war. He was assigned to make deliveries and staff a checkpoint in the relative safety of his sleepy village.

Weeks later, his unit deployed from his home in the west to a frontline battle in eastern Ukraine, the center of the fiercest fighting against Russian forces. He was killed on June 10.

Andrii Verteev, who worked in a grocery store in the village, spent the first months of the war guarding a small overpass after work and returning home to his wife and daughter at night. Then he, too, volunteered to head east. He died in battle in Luhansk, only weeks before Mr. Brukhal.

Russia has accused Ukraine over explosions which reportedly killed three people in the city of Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine.

The regional governor said the blasts hit dozens of residential buildings and air defences had been activated.

The Kremlin said that Sunday’s attack had been a deliberate attempt by Ukrainian forces to target civilians.

Ukraine dismissed the claim, saying the Russians had lied about similar incidents in the past.

#Russia: This morning two Russian cities were woken by explosions – the Ukrainian army fired on targets in #Belgorod and #Kursk, however neither were successfully hit according to preliminary information. pic.twitter.com/AeEIDI4g7l

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) July 3, 2022

The Russian navy appears to have accidentally blown up one of its own ships in the black sea in the latest blunder for Putin’s forces.

A landing craft is reported to have exploded when it hit a Russian sea mine near Mariupol.

The crew is said to have survived the friendly-fire incident, but the reputation of Russia’s naval commanders is not so unscathed.

h/t RM

For Ukraine to win, the West still has to answer painful questions of itself

One minute the pundits believe Ukraine will win, the next we are warned that Russia is winning. But what does “victory” mean — and is the West really prepared to pay its price?

There is a tragic irony here. In their own ways, Russia, Ukraine and the West are all committed to a struggle without knowing for sure how the endgame should or will look. For Moscow and Kyiv, this is essentially because they are still waiting on the verdict of the battlefield — but for the West, it is because we are not yet willing to discuss the most difficult questions.

A lot of this sort of reflection going around these days.

I’m not sure if they are hoping to sleepwalk us into a wider conflict or test the waters for an abandonment of Ukraine.

Maybe both.

Here’s the Star’s take: Here’s why Canada could be paying for the economic war against Russia for a long time

This was the week our economic warfare against Russia was exposed for the problematic long game that it is.

As the G7 was readying new ways to cut off Russia’s gold, Vladimir Putin was busy bombing near a Kyiv kindergarten.

As the West contemplated how to cap Russian oil revenues, Putin’s forces struck a shopping mall with 1,000 people inside.

#Ukraine: A Russian T-72 series tank was hit by a Ukrainian ATGM in previously unseen footage. The cope cage flight adds extra flair.pic.twitter.com/LhEM3M3g5U

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) July 2, 2022

At 170 metres long, with a red hull, white painted superstructure and towering deck cranes, the Matros Koshka is difficult to miss.

But the bulk carrier – whose name means “the sailor cat” in Russian – has not been seen since it turned off its transponder in the middle of the Black Sea three weeks ago.

The vanishing ship is one of nearly a dozen Russian and Syrian flagged vessels at the centre of what Western governments believe is large-scale smuggling of looted Ukrainian grain.