“Ukraine – Russia”

The German army’s new assault rifle is not accurate enough and cannot be relied upon to work properly in battle, according to a classified report.

The Bundeswehr was forced to lower testing standards for its G95A1 after it failed to pass trials using military-standard ammunition, said the report, which was sent to the Bundestag by Germany’s national audit office.

“Current testing by the army in laboratory conditions shows that the weapon doesn’t meet army standards when loaded with combat ammunition,” said the review, which was first revealed by Der Spiegel news magazine.

Oh Oh!

How Russia is arming itself faster than Nato

Once upon a time, the Itlamas shopping mall in Izhevsk represented the arrival of the modest middle-class dream in Russia’s provinces.

Its steel and glass facade advertised H&M, McDonalds, and Destsky Mir, Russia’s most famous chain of toy shops – symbols of the social contract Vladimir Putin cut with the Russian public more than 20 years ago.

Today, both Western and Russian brands have vanished. The Italmas Mall is now the Italmas Scientific Research Centre, producing Lancet attack drones for the war in Ukraine.

Employees at Ukraine’s well-known investigative outlet Bihus.Info have been covertly wiretapped and filmed. A video leaked online, purportedly showing team members consuming illegal substances at a New Year’s party, has caused a scandal.

The video was released on January 16 on a little-known YouTube channel called Narodna Pravda (Ukrainian for “national truth”). It ostensibly also contained snippets of private conversations between Bihus.Info employees as they discussed buying drugs. The video has since been removed.

A group of journalists founded the investigative outlet in 2013 under the aegis of editor-in-chief Denys Bihus. One of its reports uncovered the financing schemes of Ukrainian power plants located in Russian-held territories and owned by the brother of Rostyslav Shurma, Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine.

There are few places from where you can see Russian-occupied territory with the naked eye in Ukraine.

The western bank of the Dnipro river in the city of Kherson is one of them.

You can’t see the Russian troops on the other low, marshy riverbank, but you know they’re there.

Incoming artillery fire as we arrive at an abandoned building serves as a sharp reminder.

Ukraine doesn’t have a viable pathway for victory without foreign arms shipments and monetary support, experts say.

WASHINGTON—Forces from Russia and Ukraine are fighting, bleeding, and dying in the trenches of Europe’s frozen east.

After so much gore, however, the end of this conflict still seems distant, and none in power appear confident that it’ll go their way.

A wild card in all this is the United States and the question of whether the world’s greatest military power can or will continue to provide direct security assistance to Ukraine.

A significant, even far-reaching event would have slipped almost silently under the radar in Ottawa this week, had it not been for Ukrainian news media.

The Liberal government quietly (perhaps deliberately so) handed over a draft of its proposed security assurances plan for Ukraine to officials in President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office.

The milestone was acknowledged by Canada’s Ambassador to Ukraine Natalka Cmoc, who was widely quoted by several media outlets in Kyiv.

Good luck.

Volunteers who signed up at the beginning of the war with Russia are mentally and physically exhausted and are no longer being replaced by younger fighters

When the Russian missiles began to fall, some of the Ukrainian troops sprinting for the cover of a nearby basement were quicker than others. “There was one soldier, he was 48. He was really slow and there was a queue of people behind him waiting to get in,” said Andriy Piddubnyak, a Ukrainian serviceman who is also in his forties. No one died but the delay was “really dangerous”, he said. It was also uncomfortably familiar.

In wartime Ukraine, young men anxious to stay off the front lines pay rapt attention to the weather warnings.

“From the village of Zavalivka, the road to Makariv is very cloudy. Snowballs are thrown at every car,” read the advice Wednesday morning on the anonymous Kyiv Summons channel on the Telegram messaging app, referring to two communities just west of the Ukrainian capital. In Kyiv itself, the channel warned, there was “rain” at several locations, including a popular grocery store and the subway station closest to the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, and “a blizzard” at a gas station on the highway north of the city.

Russia T-90 M,Russia’s most advanced tank in a fight with Ukraine’s M2 Bradley.#Russia #USA #Ukraine #deadly #terrifying #tank #T90M #M2Bradley #footage #Warzone #RussianUkrainianWar pic.twitter.com/fMJ56JS7zS

— Interesting Shit (@Interest1ngSh1t) January 18, 2024

Two years ago, it momentarily looked like the Ukraine war might be concluded as soon as it had begun. As Zelenskyy’s former advisor Oleksiy Arestovych revealed in his interview with UnHerd, when he returned from the Istanbul peace negotiations with Russia in April 2022, his team cracked open the champagne to celebrate. The talks had been “completely successful”, he said, with 90% of contentious issues resolved in a manner broadly advantageous to Ukraine. All that was left was for Zelenskyy and Putin to meet in person a few days later to hammer out the final size of the post-war Ukrainian army, and ink the final deal. And then everything changed: “Something changed in Zelenskyy absolutely during this [period]. And historians have to find the answer to what happened.”

The director of a Russian state propaganda TV channel was found poisoned in her home last weekend at Krasnodar, some 400 miles south of Ukraine. A bomb disrupted rail traffic Sunday at Nizhny Tagil, home to the world’s largest tank factory, 1,400 miles east of Ukraine.

A 16-year-old boy was arrested last week for torching a $50 million SU war jet, at Chelyabinsk, 1,100 miles east of Ukraine’s border. A TV announcer who said that Ukrainian children should be drowned is struggling to recover from near fatal poisoning at Moscow, 400 miles north of Ukraine.

According to a report by the Pentagon inspector general, more than 40,000 weapons worth more than $1 billion were shipped to Ukraine but never made it to the battlefield.

Many of the weapons were sent to a U.S. military logistics hub in Poland, while others were shipped directly to Ukraine. The equipment includes shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones, and night-vision goggles.

Call it the mystery of the disappearing missile system.

In January 2023, Anita Anand, then-minster of defence, announced an act of sweeping largesse on the part of the Canadian government.

This country would purchase a National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) for Ukraine.

I bet the LPC stole it.

h/t Mauser