“Ukraine – Russia”

DRUZHKIVKA, Ukraine — Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and Grad rockets on a key eastern front line. Outnumbered, untrained and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end — and for their own tanks to stop targeting the Russians.

Neither side can afford to take an off-ramp

Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy has told world leaders that “only diplomacy will end the war” raging in his country, as Russia’s invasion stretches into its thirteenth week.

Up until now, the idea that anything less than Moscow’s total military defeat would be acceptable was effectively a taboo. Those, like French President Emmanuel Macron, who have called for Vladimir Putin to be given an ‘off-ramp,’ enabling him to save face with some kind of propaganda victory, have been slammed for carving up a nation that is doing everything to defend itself.

More than 100 Russian national guardsmen have been fired for refusing to fight in Ukraine, court documents show, in what looks to be the clearest indication yet of dissent among some parts of security forces over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

The cases of the 115 national guardsmen, a force also known as Rosgvardia, came to light on Wednesday, after a local Russian court rejected their collective lawsuit that challenged their earlier sacking.

Can a country truly change overnight? Having cultivated a national culture that is inherently suspicious of intervening in foreign conflicts after 1945, the war in Ukraine seemed to have caused a fundamental shift in the way Berlin sees its position in the international order. Within days of the Russian invasion chancellor Scholz declared to ramp up defence spending above 2% of GDP and dedicating an additional 100bn euros to the German armed forces.

But in recent weeks, some of Germany’s leading intellectuals are coming out of the woodwork to voice their unease about their country’s involvement in Ukraine.

Big guns are defining a new phase of the war against Russia, with artillery, rocket launchers and mortars likely to decide the outcome

In the leaves, a muzzle barked. A flash of smoke spun out across the field, something whirred into the distance, and the butterflies among the young crops barely flinched.

The howitzers in the trees fired twice in quick succession, then their crews dismounted, scrambled around, replaced dislodged camouflage, and reloaded.

Artillery, rocket launchers and mortars are more likely to decide the outcome of the war in Ukraine than any other weapon system.

In eastern Donbas, massive Russian barrages are pounding a path for the infantry and tanks as they try to surround the city of Severodonetsk – with ghastly consequences for anyone caught in the way.

OTTAWA – Canada has tapped into its own strategic stockpile of emergency medical supplies — stored for a national emergency — to help Ukraine.
It has donated over 375,000 items of medical equipment and medicines from Canada’s strategic stockpile since the invasion by Russia began.

This includes first aid and trauma kits, medicines and surgical instruments, as well as gloves, masks and gowns.

Russia’s offensive in the Donbas region is making slow progress. Having rushed to launch the operation to avoid giving Ukraine time to bring up new weapons from the west, Russia has found that its depleted and exhausted units are unwilling and unable to assault Ukrainian positions without incurring unacceptable losses. The Russian army has, therefore, fallen back on the mass application of artillery, destroying village after village, which they occupy after Ukrainian units withdraw.

#Ukraine: For the first time we see the self-contained ground launch of US-supplied Switchblade 300 loitering munitions by the Ukrainian forces- these drones are starting to be used more widely in the East and are great against non-armoured targets and infantry. pic.twitter.com/ZAUPyLePOk

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) May 25, 2022

Russia has deployed mobile propaganda vans with large-screen televisions to humanitarian aid points in the captured city of Mariupol as the Kremlin has pushed forward with efforts to integrate newly occupied territories across the south of Ukraine.

Videos published by the Russian ministry of emergency situations showed the vans, which it called “mobile information complexes”, playing state TV news segments and political chat shows where pundits support the invasion to locals in the ruined city that still lacks electricity and running water.

… While it has historically been considered a rich agricultural region, it is now considered extremely valuable. Putin understands that Ukraine is also very rich in the precious metal lithium. One source reports that for fixed contracts, the annual average lithium price in the United States was $17,000 per ton in 2021, more than double that in 2020.

Well well well.

The war in Ukraine may be just the first test of the western alliance

There are many ways to fracture a people. But one of the best is to destroy all the remaining ties that bind them. To persuade them that to the extent they have anything of their own, it is not very special, and in the final analysis, hardly worth preserving. This is a process that has gone on across the western world for over a generation: a remorseless, daily assault on everything that most of us were brought up to believe was good about ourselves.

When their dogs started digging insistently at a spot in the woods, villagers in Zavalivka called in the authorities.

A Ukrainian military team were soon at the scene in white protective suits, carefully removing the topsoil.

They uncovered a man’s body, face down with his legs oddly twisted beneath him. It was clear from his uniform that he was a Russian soldier.

Kremlin vows to service its debt in roubles – an option that’s already been rejected

It is “a matter of time” until Russia defaults on its foreign debts after Joe Biden cut the Kremlin off from paying its bondholders.

Moscow is on the cusp of its first ­foreign debt default in a century after the US allowed an exemption permitting Russia to meet its obligations to international creditors to lapse.

The cut-off, which means US banks and individuals are banned from receiving bond payments from Russia, comes before Moscow is due to make a tranche of payments worth around $100m this Friday.