“Ukraine – Russia”

One week into its invasion of Ukraine, Russia massed a 40-mile mechanised column in order to mount an overwhelming attack on Kyiv from the north.

But the convoy of armoured vehicles and supply trucks ground to a halt within days, and the offensive failed, in significant part because of a series of night ambushes carried out by a team of 30 Ukrainian special forces and drone operators on quad bikes, according to a Ukrainian commander.

#Ukraine: Ukrainian drones dropping more munitions onto Russian armour, destroying the vehicles. It is claimed that two BMP variants were taken out, but we cannot verify the precise type from this footage. pic.twitter.com/NUTr5wdQQe

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 28, 2022

Like a lot of foreigners eager to fight the Russians, Paul Hughes arrived in Ukraine expecting to be handed a gun and taken straight to the front line.

And, like many would-be combatants, he had decided to come to Ukraine on a bit of a whim. Mr. Hughes, 57, is an anti-poverty activist from Calgary who spent some time with the Princess Patricia Light Infantry years ago. He felt compelled to join the struggle in Ukraine after the Russian army invaded last month, even though all he knew about the country was that it contained a city called Kyiv.

LONDON, March 28 (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Monday that U.S. President Joe Biden’s remark that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” was a cause for alarm, a guarded response to the first public call from the United States for an end to Putin’s 22-year rule.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the end of a speech to a crowd in Warsaw. He cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a battle in a much broader conflict between democracy and autocracy.

Face-to-face peace talks between Ukraine and Russia are likely to start in Turkey on Tuesday, the Kremlin has said, as Kyiv insisted that with Moscow’s invasion largely stalled it was not prepared to make any concessions on its territorial integrity.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, agreed on Sunday that ceasefire talks would be held in Istanbul, possibly beginning as early as the following day.

#Ukraine: After a while with no shootdowns, the Ukrainian side claims to have taken down a Russian Su-35 jet fighter on March 24th near #Izyum.

We cannot verify the precise type, but the single pilot survived and footage is previously unseen so this claim is credible. pic.twitter.com/40fqRyx5A4

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 28, 2022

At midday on Jan 20 1943, a little girl skipping on the playground of Sandhurst Road School in southeast London waved at what she thought was an RAF bomber. It was a German plane, whose pilot “sliced her down” in a round of machine-gun fire. He then turned and released a 500 kilogram bomb onto the school building, instantly killing 32 children and six staff. Sixty others were injured, some grotesquely. Parents searched the rubble frantically for their missing children.

A Russian soldier has handed himself and his tank over to Ukrainian troops for a reward of $10,000 (£7,500) and a chance at Ukrainian citizenship.

Misha, one of alleged war criminal Vladimir Putin’s invading soldiers, surrendered in a T-72B3 main battle tank after his two other crewmates escaped home and his commanding officer threatened to shoot him.

Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Victor Andrusiv said Misha had contacted Ukraine’s national police by phone and arranged a place to meet.

h/t RM

Whatever the outcome of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the crisis it triggered may have one lasting effect: the return of war as a routine instrument of politics on a global scale.

Before the invasion, there was an implicit consensus that war was something that happened in the so-called “developing world,” where Arabs fought Israelis, Africans slaughtered Africans, and Indian and Pakistanis were at each other’s throats.

Europe, however, was believed to have closed its book of wars for good. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were regarded as a multi-layered civil war involving component parts of the failed Yugoslav state.

Despite reaching one of the darkest moments in more than 40 years as a dissident and human rights activist, Oleg Orlov says that he has no plans to flee Russia. “I made a decision a long time ago that I want to live and die in Russia, it’s my country,” Orlov told the Observer. “Even though it’s never been so bad.”

That’s saying something for Orlov, who can recall printing homemade anti-war posters in the late 1970s to protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or in support of Poland’s Solidarnost movement, and was an observer and negotiator during the bloody war in Chechnya in the 1990s.

Ukraine is prepared to discuss adopting a neutral status as part of a peace deal with Russia but it would have to be guaranteed by third parties and put to a referendum, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in remarks broadcast on Sunday.

Zelensky was speaking to Russian journalists in a 90-minute video call, an interview that the Russian authorities had pre-emptively warned Russian media to refrain from reporting. Zelensky spoke in Russian throughout.

Zelensky said Russia’s invasion had caused the destruction of Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine, and said the damage was worse than the Russian wars in Chechnya.

#Ukraine: In the same location in #Donetsk Oblast, other Russian vehicles also ran into mines or Ukrainian fire, and were totally destroyed. This includes two more BMP-2, and three T-72 tanks. https://t.co/OkQaJ1hYoc pic.twitter.com/b01rhZZoDP

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 27, 2022

Vladimir Putin wants to split Ukraine into two, emulating the post-war division between North and South Korea, the invaded country’s military intelligence chief has said.

Gen Kyrylo Budanov, who predicted Russia’s invasion as far back as November, said Moscow had been unable to “swallow” the country but faced guerrilla warfare should it seek to split it.

His warning came as Leonid Pasechnik, the leader of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic in the contested Donbas region in the east, said he may stage a referendum on his territory becoming part of Russia.

War crimes?

This vid is making the rounds on Twitter, trending under POWS. Ugly if true but then again all wars result in war crimes often committed in tit for tat fashion by both sides in a conflict.

Vid 1

18+ (21+)

Ukrainian soldiers shoot Russian prisoners of war in the legs and afterwards give them a severe beating. At the beginning of the video, there are Russian POWs lying on the ground with bullet wounds in their legs, some of them have got leg bones broken. #WarCrimes pic.twitter.com/t8Wj33X8rv

— Maria Dubovikova (@politblogme) March 27, 2022

Vid 2

Appalling footage of #UkrainianHeroes shooting & beating #Russian POWs. Will you see this on BBC, Sky or CNN tonight? pic.twitter.com/Gq9yIkxsA7

— Nick Griffin (@NickGriffinBU) March 27, 2022

This is what Russians did in Mariupol.

Having this in mind, Ukrainians letting Russians live and taking them as POWs is a display of mercy and restraint. pic.twitter.com/eQnkXJk7ye

— Name can't include invalid characters. (@ProcessIts) March 27, 2022