“Ukraine – Russia”

Canada is targeting Russia’s defence industry with its latest round of sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly says the new measures impose restrictions on 33 entities in the Russian defence sector.

Given it’s performance in Ukraine I don’t think the Russian armaments industry has a bright future.

Tens of thousands dead in Mariupol, Zelenskyy says amid plea to South Korea for arms

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday asked Seoul for any military aid it could provide as he said Russia could only be forced to make peace.

Speaking in a video address to South Korean lawmakers, Zelenskyy said his country needed more help, including weapons, if it is to survive the war.

“You have something that can be indispensable for us … armored vehicles, anti-aircraft, anti-tank, anti-ship weapons,” he said.

#Ukraine: Ukrainian indirect fire continues to strike Russian armored vehicles in #Mariupol; seen here, a (possible MT-LB based) vehicle is struck, and when ammo cooks off causes further damage and a fire to start on two T-72B tanks. (The damage looks very minor to one of them.) pic.twitter.com/oAHHC7YVm0

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 11, 2022

#Ukraine: A compilation of the recent operations by the 30th Mechanized Brigade of Ukraine on the eastern front – as can be seen a Russian BTR-80 armored personnel carrier was hit twice by Stugna-P ATGM and at least one BM-21 Grad MRL + a cargo truck were destroyed by artillery. pic.twitter.com/7M8EpsdW0Q

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 11, 2022

Oleg Orlov, a prominent Russian human rights activist, has been detained after staging a one-man protest in Moscow’s Red Square against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Members of Memorial, a now-banned human rights organisation of which Orlov had been a leader, shared a video of him on Sunday holding a banner before being taken away by police.

Just like Ottawa.

Canada will offer Ukraine up to $1 billion in new loan resources via the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and provide an additional $500 million in military aid, the Liberal government said on Thursday.

Why are we sending more billions to Ukraine and contributing to escalate this war??

Our army doesn’t even have the resources to defend our territory. Let’s solve our problems first. https://t.co/sadRG8Hn6d

— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) April 9, 2022

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says there is no better source of extra funds for Ukraine‘s recovery from the Russian invasion than from the assets of those backing the war.

In an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Freeland emphasized the proposal in the budget she tabled last week that would allow Canada’s minister of foreign affairs to not only freeze Russian assets, but seize them, too.

The tragedy discovered amid the rubble of Bucha and Borodianka overshadowed any jubilation that Kyiv had defeated Russian forces that had spent a month trying to envelop the capital and snuff out the Ukrainian nation. Nevertheless, the defeat of Russian forces in the north marks a turning point in the war. For the medium term, Ukraine will now survive. But for its soldiers there is no respite, for having had its first objective denied Moscow has turned its gaze on the Donbas, where a major offensive is imminent.

The Donbas has been at war for eight years. More than 90 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in 2021 defending the line of contact. Since late February Ukrainian positions have come under regular artillery fire, with mobilised civilians from Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk pushed into attacks on the Ukrainian trenches. The aim of this Russian activity was to fix the 40,000 Ukrainian troops in the Joint Forces Operations (JFO) area, preventing them from impacting the fights for Mariupol, Kharkiv or Kyiv.

The Russian military claims it has destroyed a Ukrainian base hosting “foreign mercenaries” with warship-launched cruise missiles.

“During the night, high-precision sea-based missiles destroyed the headquarters and base of Dnepr nationalist battalion in Zvonetskoe, Dnepropetrovsk Region, where foreign mercenaries had recently arrived,” claimed Major-General Igor Konashenkov, the Russian defence ministry’s chief spokesman, in one of his regular social media briefings.

Sometimes the dead have more to say than the living. Those lying beneath the soft, yellow earth in the grounds of the church of Andrew the Apostle, in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, have many terrible stories to tell.

In a deep mass grave, a forearm and hand, the fingertips turning black, lay under a foot at a sickening angle; another man’s arm looked like it was clawing its way out of the disturbed soil in an attempt to escape his fate.

On Friday morning a team of forensic investigators from Kyiv arrived at the site to begin documenting the terror inflicted on civilians by Russian troops during Moscow’s six-week-old invasion. They strapped a door to a municipal digger to create a makeshift gurney, and got to work.

A “real embargo” on Russian energy by Western countries could stop war in Ukraine, President Putin’s former chief economic adviser has suggested.

Dr Andrei Illarionov said Russia “did not take seriously” other countries’ threats to reduce their energy usage.

Despite trying to reduce its reliance on Russian sources, Europe is continuing to buy oil and gas.

Last year, soaring prices meant oil and gas revenues accounted for 36% of Russia’s government spending.

Much of that income comes from the European Union, which imports about 40% of its gas and 27% of its oil from Russia.

This is turning into a phony war.

Russian soldiers took highly radioactive “souvenirs” from laboratories in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Ukraine said Saturday.

Invading Russian forces entered two laboratories in Chernobyl, which they looted and destroyed in an act of “nuclear terrorism,” the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management said on Facebook.

Russian troops entered a repository of ionizing radiation sources in the Ecocentre laboratory and “stole and damaged 133 sources with a total activity of about seven million becquerels,” the agency said.

The most unlikely hero of the war in Ukraine has been a drone — or, to use the Pentagon’s preferred term, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2, a medium-altitude, long-endurance drone that’s 21 feet long with a 39-foot wingspan, can stay aloft for 24 hours at a stretch. It also carries a lethal punch: a “smart” munition that has been taking out Russian armored and supply columns and helping to grind the Russian ground offensive to a halt.

A #Russian soldier spotted our drone and started running away, aventually leading us to his positions that were effectively targeted by our artillery as a result.

I added the sound for dramatic flare.

Glory to #Ukraine 🇺🇦✊🏻 pic.twitter.com/GtHrt8Uv4V

— Canadian Ukrainian Volunteer 🇺🇦🇨🇦✊🏻 (@CanadianUkrain1) April 7, 2022

The video you didn't know you needed:#Ukraine's military orchestra performing the song "Bayraktar" (named after the Turkish-made drone) pic.twitter.com/s2c8xlSNxQ

— Michael A. Horowitz (@michaelh992) April 4, 2022

Speaking of the seven-week war in Ukraine ignited by Vladimir Putin, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is warning us to expect a war that lasts for years.

“I do think this is a very protracted conflict … measured in years,” Milley told Congress. “I don’t know about a decade, but at least years, for sure.”

As our first response, said Milley, we should build more military bases in Eastern Europe and begin to rotate U.S. troops in and out.

Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of perpetrating a “deliberate massacre“ in the Kiev suburb of Bucha while the city was under Russian occupation. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the allegations. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed on April 4 that the attack had been staged, saying that evidence of the killings had emerged four days after Russian forces vacated the city on March 30. The Russian Defense Ministry posited that the Ukrainian military shelled Bucha shortly after the Russians left and that the victims in question were likely killed by Ukrainian airstrikes. The Kremlin further points to a video published on March 31 by Bucha mayor Anatoly Fedoruk that reportedly confirmed there were no Russian troops in the city and made no mention of any possible massacre.

Journalist Katie Halper said it is unclear what Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky means by declaring that Ukraine will be the new Israel.

“What’s interesting about it is that you can understand why he would say we would have to have military but it’s weird that he’s creating this kind of uber weaponized culture or that’s what he’s forecasting that he’s going to create,” Halper said while appearing on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”

In Germany, they call it “Day X”. Businesses up and down the land are making contingency plans for what is seen as a growing likelihood that Russian gas will stop flowing into Europe’s biggest economy.

“It would be a disaster – one which would have seemed almost unthinkable just two months ago, but which right now feels like a very realistic prospect,” the owner of a hi-tech mechanical engineering company in western Germany said. The firm produces everything from battery cases for electric cars to train clutch systems.

The speaker did not want to be named, or for his company to be identified, in part for fear, he said, of appearing to support Russia’s war by making the case that if the gas is turned off, his century-old business “will likely not survive”. But he says he is in a deep quandary and feeling very vulnerable, as he is not only heavily reliant on gas – the cost of which has already soared – but also on metals such as nickel and aluminium, much of which comes from Russia.

This will test Euro Solidarity.

For nearly a dozen days in February, a small group of intelligence officers had been going to bed early.

They had seen the intelligence predicting a war and knew that if Russia was really going to invade Ukraine, it would begin in the early hours of the morning.

But when the news finally came on 24 February, it still felt unreal, one recalls: “It was hard to believe it was actually happening until I woke up early that morning and put the radio on.”

For months they had been sounding the alarm.

#Ukraine: A Ukrainian drone dropping a modified PG-7M projectile onto a Russian armoured vehicle (Possibly BMP variant) in #Kyiv Oblast, destroying it. Likely to be around a week old. pic.twitter.com/wsleiaPziO

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

#Ukraine: A Russian tank was hit by the Ukrainian forces and started to burn. The subsequent detonation of ammunition onboard tore the tank apart. pic.twitter.com/wjjPP61dIw

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

Ukraine: Boris Johnson travels to Kyiv for Zelensky talks

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has held talks in Kyiv with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, Downing Street has said.

No 10 said the visit was “show of solidarity” with the Ukrainian people.

A spokesman said Mr Johnson was using the trip to set out a new package of financial and military aid.

It comes the day after the UK announced £100m of weapons for Ukraine after the bombing of refugees at a railway station.