“Ukraine – Russia”

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has said he hopes Russian losses in Ukraine will deter its leadership from repeating its actions.

He added that Ukraine can still win the war if given the right support and praised the efforts of its military.

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” the US military chief said.

Mr Austin was speaking after meeting President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.

Another video of the Russian aircraft spinning before crashing into the ground in Balakliya. https://t.co/sdwiMBhDbW pic.twitter.com/2PMhmTXIWD

— Rob Lee (@RALee85) April 25, 2022

Video of the aircraft hitting the ground. Looks like there are two parachutes, further indicating it may be a Su-34. 3/https://t.co/CXR6S1Voix pic.twitter.com/lbrWidCNPQ

— Rob Lee (@RALee85) April 25, 2022

Kyiv’s arsenal boosted by Soviet-era T-72 tanks from European Nato allies – and they could prove crucial on the flat terrain of the Donbas

Thanks to European resupplies, Ukraine’s military now has more tanks on the battlefield than Russia does, according to the Pentagon.

Two months into the war, the delivery of Soviet-era T-72 tanks to Kyiv from the Czech Republic and other European Nato allies has effectively eroded Russia’s advantage, experts have claimed.

“Right now, the Ukrainians have more tanks in Ukraine than the Russians do, and they certainly have the purview to use them,” an unnamed senior US defence official told reporters on Thursday.

US-based lab documents destruction of churches and theatres

Satellite scrutiny of Ukraine is not just focused on military hardware. Thousands of miles away from the fighting, an international group of archaeologists, historians and technicians are quietly coordinating another high-stakes monitoring effort: the tracking of the mounting losses to Ukraine’s cultural landscape.

Now an impact summary, released this month from their lab at a museum in the US state of Virginia, has revealed the bleak truth.

In a speech delivered, or stumbled through, in Poland on March 26, Joe Biden declared that Russia was in need of regime change, a sentiment echoed throughout the Western media. Many commentators and media talking-heads agreed that “regime change” is and should be a fundamental goal of Western policy towards Russia. One or two went so far as to argue that this is the reason for the West’s effort to prolong the war by continuing to pour arms into the Ukraine—rather than call for an immediate ceasefire, as is the normal procedure in modern wars. One such commentator has been Niall Ferguson, who has cautioned Western leaders that the desired regime change will almost certainly not be materializing in the foreseeable future. Writing in Bloomberg News, Ferguson concludes that the Biden administration “is making a colossal mistake thinking that it can protract the war in Ukraine, bleed Russia dry, topple Putin and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan.” But is regime change the primary goal at all?

h/t John

The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more atrocities against civilians are exposed, and the murkier the prospects for victory and peace become. Western publics remain staunchly supportive of Ukraine’s valiant efforts, but they can become inured to the graphic depictions of gruesome savagery, such as the newly discovered mass grave that could hold as many as 9,000 bodies near the devastated city of Mariupol. Attention spans are inevitably domestic. The pivotal question now, however, is whether the U.S. and NATO will marshal a more muscular response to Russia’s massively superior firepower.

After an air strike hit a school in Chernihiv, a video of a bloodied survivor went viral on Ukrainian social media. But soon her story was hijacked by pro-Kremlin accounts, including one promoted by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which falsely accused her of being a fake.

“There was no whistle, rustling or sound of shelling,” Tania says. “It just hit the building and suddenly everything went dark. The building collapsed.”

Tania was caught up in an air strike in early March. She was helping sort clothes for a humanitarian aid drive in school number 21 in Chernihiv, north of Kyiv, when a missile hit the building.

Very few parts of Russian society have drawn more interest than the so-called “oligarchs.” These are incredibly wealthy men with political connections to Putin’s inner circle because, in the totalitarian kleptocracy that is Russia under Vladimir Putin, if you don’t have political ties to Putin’s inner circle, wealth doesn’t bring you power; it brings you a one-way trip to a Siberian labor camp.

How do you get to be an Oligarch? Do you have to know someone? Is there a School of Oligarchy with a licensing body?

Scarred yet defiant, Mykolaiv will decide the future of the war

Mykolaiv, Ukraine

The lady burrows into the earth. Swathed in blue plastic to protect her against the rain, she pats the soil and digs into it with her hands. She won’t speak to me, but allows me to watch as she tends to her plants and flowers in a patch of soil outside a block of flats in central Mykolaiv.

Dasha smirks at the camera and says in a baby voice: “Hi, I missed you all.” It is 11 March, a few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, and the blond 19-year-old Moscow-based influencer with 126,000 Instagram followers is posting to her stories. “I wasn’t on social media for over a week and I want to talk about my news and the news of the world,” she says.

After taking a weekend trip to a friend’s dacha in the countryside, Dasha posts videos of her friends laughing, making pancakes or playing party games. The atmosphere is warm, the alcohol flowing. The next tile shows Dasha looking solemnly at her phone. “I was constantly watching the news to understand what was going on in the world and one thought wouldn’t escape my mind …” she writes. Next tile: “Maybe I should leave Russia?” in bold red letters. In smaller black text underneath, she elaborates: “At least for a little bit of time, until the situation calms down and we have a better understanding.” There is a question box for followers to answer: “What do you think about this?”

As Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, members of a Ukrainian special forces unit deployed to defend the strategic Hostomel airport outside Kyiv were stunned by what they saw as dawn broke: some 30 Russian attack helicopters coming over the horizon, speeding toward the airport.

An added surprise was that the helicopters were moving on their own toward Hostomel, without supporting ground forces or barrages of long-range missile fire to weaken the Ukrainian defences. It was as if they expected no resistance at all.

Go incognito