A British man fighting for Ukraine in the besieged city of Mariupol was forced to surrender Tuesday after his unit ran out of ammunition — making him the first known UK prisoner of Russia’s war, according to reports.
Aiden Aslin, 27, a member of Ukraine’s marines, surrendered along with his unit during an intensified assault from Russia that is feared to have included phosphorous bombs or even chemical weapons.
NEW YORK — The United Nations said Monday that Ukrainian women and children are at heightened risk of sexual violence, rape and trafficking as reports grow of such violations.
“These allegations must be independently investigated to ensure justice and accountability,” U.N. Women Executive Director Sima Bahous told the Security Council. “The combination of mass displacement with the large presence of conscripts and mercenaries, and the brutality displayed against Ukrainian civilians, has raised all red flags.”
And no one knows rape better than the rapey UN!
Leading from behind has an exciting new name.
Last year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed that a new strategy called “integrated deterrence” would be at the heart of Biden’s new defense strategy. Last month, he was talking up a new National Defense Strategy driven by integrated deterrence while claiming that it would prove effective against Russia in the war in Ukraine. Instead the war showed “ID” doesn’t work.
What is “integrated deterrence”? It sounds better than leading from behind, which was Obama’s version of it, but it’s not too different from the failed approach of the Obama administration.
Like a lot of organizational jargon, “integrated deterrence” is a collection of meaningless buzzwords that no one understands concealing the same old thing that dresses up failure as success because under the exciting new approach, no one was even trying to succeed.
It is thought that Russia has lost hundreds of tanks within two months of invading Ukraine.
Military experts put the losses down to the advanced anti-tank weapons which western nations have given to Ukraine, and to the poor way Russia has used its tanks.
#Ukraine: "Gifts from Her Majesty" – rare footage of a UK-supplied NLAW in use with Ukrainian troops, destroying a Russian armoured vehicle. pic.twitter.com/MpFr93yEH3
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 11, 2022
#Ukraine: What used to be a Russian T-72 tank – in #Kyiv Oblast. pic.twitter.com/K68uU3cYm4
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 11, 2022
LONDON, April 12 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday peace talks with Ukraine had hit a dead end, using his first public comments on the conflict in more than a week to vow that his troops would win and to goad the West for failing to bring Moscow to heel.
Addressing the war in public for the first time since Russian forces retreated from northern Ukraine after they were halted at the gates of Kyiv, Putin promised that Russia would achieve all of its “noble” aims in Ukraine.
Russia is receiving munitions and military hardware sourced from Iraq for its war effort in Ukraine with the help of Iranian weapons smuggling networks, according to members of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and regional intelligence services with knowledge of the process.
RPGs and anti-tank missiles, as well as Brazilian-designed rocket launcher systems, have been dispatched to Russia from Iraq as Moscow’s campaign has faltered in the last month, the Guardian has learned.
An Iranian-made Bavar 373 missile system, similar to the Russian S-300, has also been donated to Moscow by the authorities in Tehran, who also returned an S-300, according to a source who helped organise the transport.
Pro-Russia protesters rallied for a second day in Germany on Sunday, demanding an end to discrimination against the country’s large Russian-speaking population since the conflict in Ukraine erupted.
Around 600 people marched in the financial hub, Frankfurt, with many waving Russian flags.
A similar-sized demo took place in the northern city of Hanover, police said, accompanied by a convoy of 350 cars.
However, the start was delayed because authorities ruled that the vehicles’ bonnets could not be covered by flags.
Tactical incompetence doomed it from the start
Nothing was more predictable about this most predictable of wars than the certain failure of Putin’s Coup de Main invasion to seize Kyiv and conquer Ukraine in one fell swoop. And yet its success was confidently predicted by Russia’s FSB domestic security service, which, instead of the SVR foreign intelligence, was given the task of sustaining the fiction that Ukraine is Russian.
Shortly after Russia invaded on Feb. 24, Ukraine prohibited men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country. Most willingly signed up for military service to fight for their country, despite it having no formal conscription. Some others, however, packed up a few belongings and quietly left.
“Thousands of Ukrainian men of military age have left the country to avoid participating in the war,” the New York Times wrote over the weekend. “Smuggling rings in Moldova, and possibly other European countries, have been doing a brisk business. Some people have paid up to $15,000 for a secret night-time ride out of Ukraine.”
The moment Russia invaded Ukraine, the White House, Democrats, and the corporate media saw an opportunity to gaslight the American people into a reboot of His Fraudulency Joe Biden’s presidency.
This campaign has fired utterly and entirely.
The Trudeau government’s announcement of $500 million in military aid for Ukraine in the budget may finally unblock a bureaucratic logjam that has seen Canada’s words of support far outpace its actions.
Ottawa is understood to be in the final stages of naming a supplier of armoured personnel carriers to send to Ukraine, with Mississauga, Ont.-based Roshel expected to win the initial contract with its Senator APC armoured vehicle. Roshel was founded by Roman Shimonov, a board member of the Canada-Ukraine Chamber of Commerce, a decade ago.
“I’m not a war tourist or anything like that,” Ajay tells me, from his base near Kyiv where Ukraine’s armed forces have been defending the country’s capital.
“I was quite comfortable back home sitting with my cat,” he says in a strong Belfast accent.
Ajay Spence travelled to the war in Ukraine from Northern Ireland a month ago, having first got in touch with the Ukrainian embassy in Dublin.
Having told them about his previous experience with the British army in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was soon on his way to Poland before crossing into Ukraine.
Russians are for the first time expressing their open outrage and anguish at the catastrophic death toll of Vladimir Putin’s troops – especially among young ‘cannon fodder soldiers’.
They are speaking out online despite the threats of severe punishment for doing so.
Putin’s invasion has suffered another blow after it was revealed on Friday his force’s death toll rose to 19,000, according to Kyiv’s estimates.
The FRANCE 24 Observers team has launched an investigation into three Twitter accounts that claim to be run by journalists on the frontlines in Ukraine. The suspicious accounts were originally spotted by Conspirador Norteño, an account that specialises in studying misinformation on social media. But before that, they were thought to be authentic – one even appeared in an article in a British newspaper. We found several clues that raise concerns about whether these three people exist.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia claimed that it destroyed several air defense systems in Ukraine over the weekend, in what appeared to be a renewed push to gain air superiority and take out weapons Kyiv has described as crucial ahead of a broad new offensive in the east.
In one strike announced Monday, Moscow said that it hit four S-300 launchers provided by a European country it didn’t name. Slovakia gave Ukraine just such a system last week but denied it had been destroyed. Russia previously reported two strikes on similar systems in other places.
