“Ukraine – Russia”

Leery of a national draft for the Ukraine war, the Kremlin is offering cash bonuses and employing strong arm tactics.

Four Russian veterans of the war in Ukraine recently published short videos online to complain about what they called their shabby treatment after returning to the Russian region of Chechnya, after six weeks on the battlefield.

One claimed to have been denied a promised payment of nearly $2,000. Another grumbled that a local hospital declined to remove shrapnel lodged in his body.

Their public pleas for help got results, but not the kind they were hoping for. Instead, an aide to Ramzan Kadyrov, the autocrat who runs Chechnya, berated them at length on television as ingrates and forced them to recant. “I was paid much more than they promised,” said Nikolai Lipa, the young Russian who had claimed that he had been cheated.

The British public should turn down their heating and switch the time when they eat dinner this winter in order to avoid rolling blackouts, government advisors have warned.

Contingency planning from the British government’s UK National Infrastructure Commission has warned that as many as six million households could face power cuts if there are additional supply issues Russian energy imports.

Parents and educators in the Russian-occupied areas of southern Ukraine say the occupation authorities are using blackmail to compel them to cooperate with pro-Moscow schools being created for the coming academic year.

Sources tell RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service that the occupation authorities are telling parents that they could lose their parental rights if they do not acquire Russian passports and send their children to the designated schools.

“The situation in the city is very, very bad. The Russian occupiers are increasing their presence all the time. They ride around the city with impunity and break down the doors of houses and apartments. Soldiers usually come at around midnight and start searching for evidence of partisan activity. Often, they just take people away. Now they’ve turned their attention to officials. A few days ago, they arrested the mayor and some members of the city council. It’s getting worse…”

Ukraine will lose without drastic Western mobilisation

A couple of weeks ago, I was smoking a cigarette outside my hotel in Kharkiv when a Ukrainian man, hearing me speak English, came over to show me a photo on his phone. It was of his 21-year-old son who he had just buried that day, killed fighting as part of a volunteer battalion outside Izyum. “He was my only son,” the man told me, “I still can’t believe my line has died out. I keep calling his phone and then remembering. Tomorrow I will join his unit and take his place.”

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