“Ukraine – Russia”

In the new film by the Ukrainian director Oleh Sentsov, soldiers pinned down in a trench try to organise the evacuation of a group of fellow fighters who are stuck and wounded in a frontline position.

Sentsov, who spent several years as a political prisoner in Russia and is now fighting in the Ukrainian army, found the 90 minutes of shaky footage six months after the battle. He was going through old files on his GoPro camera and realised it had been switched on that day.

“I was about to delete everything when I found this and I realised I had a very interesting imprint of that battle and of war how it truly is – ugly, incomprehensible, twisted and stupid,” he said in an interview with the Guardian, conducted by video while he was on home leave.

Ukraine’s allies are running out of patience

Volodymyr Zelensky’s Global Peace Summit in Switzerland was meant to demonstrate the world’s support for Kyiv and underscore Russia’s isolation. It did the opposite. Russia wasn’t invited. China didn’t send a delegation. Other major countries that might influence the Kremlin – including Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE – refused to sign the watered-down final communiqué.

According to a former senior member of Zelensky’s administration, Ukraine’s leader had ‘hoped the conference would mark a new benchmark of international support… [but] it just showed how badly we have lost the support in the Global South’. Take Brazil’s President, Lula da Silva. He was one of the first world leaders to condemn Russia’s invasion, yet in Switzerland he accused Vladimir Putin and Zelensky of ‘enjoying the war… otherwise they would have already sat and talked and tried to find a peaceful solution’. Only the US and the EU unequivocally supported Zelensky.

“… Alexander (name changed), a 37-year-old Ukrainian who spent about a year living on the citizen’s income in Berlin, said he could understand the sentiment behind the FDP and CDU’s calls, but that the Bürgergeld had been vital to helping him find his feet in a very dark period of his life.

“When I came here I was totally lost, I was mentally lost,” he told DW. “Then we went to the Job Center, and we had the payments, we had the support from them. In my case everything went pretty smoothly.”

Receiving Bürgergeld — currently €563 ($603) a month for single people — also meant Alexander, a music producer and sound designer who had a successful business in Ukraine, had access to job counselling and help finding a German language course, all of which ultimately allowed him to get off state support within a year. Under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act, he would have received just €354 a month, and no help from the Job Center.”

He’s 37 why was he a “refugee”?

The issue of fighting age men evading the draft undermines support for Ukraine.

It’s not just a “few” estimates now place the number at 1 million men.

Is the Zelensky government one we should support?

Our 19 Billion in funding been nothing more than an ego trip for Trudeau and Freeland. 

Have all of Canada’s problems been solved?

The United States is making “excuses” over its failure to train sufficient numbers of Ukrainian F-16 fighter jet pilots, the head of Ukraine’s special parliamentary commission on arms and munitions has claimed.

The hold-up means that Ukraine will probably have only 20 pilots who have been fully trained to fly F-16s by the end of the year, Oleksandra Ustinova said. “So far we’re going to have fewer trained pilots than fighter jets,” she added.

Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway have pledged to transfer more than 60 F-16s to Ukraine. The first jets are expected to arrive later this year, but it is unclear when they will begin combat missions.

Volodymyr Pikuzo does not look like someone immersed in the shadowy arms trade, scouring the globe in search of weapons capable of sending Russian troops to an early grave.

Yet that is precisely what the 38-year-old lawyer has been doing for two years, having founded Ukraine’s Defence Procurement Agency shortly after President Putin invaded his country. “In Ukraine we have a saying that not everyone can become a lawyer, but a lawyer can become anyone,” he says.

OBBÜRGEN, Switzerland (AP) — Eighty countries jointly called Sunday for the “territorial integrity” of Ukraine to be the basis for any peace agreement to end Russia’s two-year war, though some key developing nations at a Swiss conference did not join in.

The joint communique capped a two-day conference at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland marked by the absence of Russia, which was not invited, but that many attendees hoped could join in on a roadmap to peace some time in the future.

Today, I gave $5-billion more of your tax dollars to President Zelenskyy.

Volume up, and listen to me tell him "I can never get enough hugs from you".

If you're wondering why nobody takes me seriously on the world stage, it's because of my socks, and comments like this. pic.twitter.com/HyMYqG6cmh

— Justin Trudeau's Ego (@Trudeaus_Ego) June 13, 2024

This weekend, a secluded Swiss resort above Lake Lucerne will be transformed as dozens of world leaders and thousands of soldiers and police descend on Bürgenstock.

More than 90 countries and global institutions are attending the event, which aims to discuss basic principles for ending the conflict in Ukraine.

The Swiss hope that the Ukraine summit might produce the first tentative sketch marks for a peace process, some 28 months after Russia invaded its neighbour.

It is the biggest gathering for Ukraine since the full-scale invasion.

President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Russia would cease-fire and enter peace talks if Ukraine withdrew its forces from four regions claimed by Moscow.

Putin also said Kyiv would need to relinquish any ambitions of joining NATO for peace to be achieved.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, called Putin’s suggestions “offensive to common sense.”

Angela Merkel knew that Russia could attempt to blackmail Europe into launching a major gas pipeline but “concealed” the information, according to Handelsblatt, the German newspaper.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was designed to double the flow of Russian gas directly to Germany but it was hugely controversial because of the risk it posed to Ukraine.

Critics feared that if it supplied gas directly to Europe, Russia would be able to starve Ukraine’s economy of the transit fees it had been collecting.