“Ukraine – Russia”

Small skulls hover on screens inside boardrooms in Kyiv. What looks like the scoreboard of a video game represents the number of Russians killed on the front line in Ukraine.
Kills translate into points and the more virtual points a Ukrainian unit scores, the better the weapons it can buy on the Brave1 online marketplace.

This gamification of the war does not suit everyone. Western leaders have apparently left the meetings grim-faced, perhaps because the cold reality of modern warfare is difficult to square with the Call of Duty-style icons.

The decision to ease sanctions on Russian oil is a disappointing and deeply concerning step by the United Kingdom. For all these years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has looked to Britain as one of its strongest and most principled allies.

It was among the first countries to provide military assistance, political support and tough sanctions against Russia. That support was both practical and symbolic. It showed Ukrainians that democratic countries were ready to stand firmly against aggression and defend international law. That is why Sir Keir Starmer’s move sends a very dangerous message.

The battle between Ukraine and Russia has long come down to drone warfare, but now, drone warfare is even replacing highly-trained snipers on the battlefield, as proven by Ukrainian special forces soldier Vyacheslav Kovalsky.

“I used to be the sniper and everyone danced around me. Now everyone dances around the drone pilot, including me,” Kovalsky told the Wall Street Journal, as cited by Mandiner:

Kovalsky is known for his world-record shot back in 2023, when he shot a Russian officer from a distance of almost four kilometers. However, nowadays, he mainly assists drone operators.

Ukraine is doing the unthinkable: winning its war against Russia. I doubt it will achieve its war aim of removing all Russian soldiers from all its territory, especially Crimea, but it certainly has Russia on the run.

For the first two years of the war, the Europeans, and especially Biden, simultaneously poured billions of dollars of weapons for the country’s defense and restricted the use of those weapons so heavily that the inevitable result was a bloody stalemate and a forever war.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former right-hand man, Andriy Yermak, appeared in a Kyiv court on Tuesday after being named by Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies as a suspect in a money-laundering scheme.

Yermak’s lawyer had earlier denounced as “baseless” the allegations that the former head of the presidential office had been caught up in a corruption scandal surrounding a €8.9m ($10.5m) luxury construction project outside Kyiv.

A major political dispute has opened in Austria after it was revealed that the country has quietly overseen transports of close to €20 billion to Kyiv over the past four years.

The sum was unveiled in response to a parliamentary question from Austria’s right-wing populist FPÖ, following Hungary’s interception in March of an armoured cash convoy carrying tens of millions of dollars and gold from Austria to Ukraine. Hungary has since returned the seized assets in a less-than-transparent move, following the electoral defeat of the ruling Fidesz party.

The trouble was a long time coming. More than a year ago, after the inauguration of President Trump, the United States stopped being the kind of partner it used to be for Ukraine in the war against Russia. But now, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine seems to be stepping back from that relationship as well, distancing his country from what was once its biggest ally.

Call it a trial separation, largely set in motion by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. American-backed peace talks to end the fighting in Ukraine have been halted since late February, when the first bombs fell on Tehran. With the negotiations now on life support, Mr. Zelensky has publicly criticized the United States in ways that would have been unthinkable last year, when Ukraine was waging a delicate fight against the Trump administration’s push for a quick peace that favored Russia.

Germany will do “everything in our power” to ensure that the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia are not brought back into service, a cabinet minister has said.

The 760-mile route along the floor of the Baltic Sea, previously a symbol of Europe’s dependence on Moscow for fossil fuels, was rendered largely inoperable in September 2022 by a series of underwater explosions, which Berlin attributed to a team of Ukrainian saboteurs.

Volodymyr Zelensky has scrapped open-ended military contracts to attract new recruits.

Ukraine’s army has consistently struggled with severe manpower shortages, with troops spending months at a time on the front line and recruiters dragging civilian men off the street to force them into service.

In an attempt to make the military more attractive, the Ukrainian president on Friday promised to increase soldiers’ pay and make it possible for them to be discharged after a set period.

(more…)

TRUMP TO PUTIN: ‘I WANT TO END YOUR WAR’: In a phone conversation that lasted more than 90 minutes, Russian President Vladimir Putin told President Donald Trump that he’d like to help the U.S. get Iran’s enriched uranium out of the country, but Trump said he replied, “I’d much rather have you be involved with ending the war with Ukraine.”

Despite Russia’s overt support for Iran, and intelligence that suggests Moscow has provided Iran both with drone and targeting information to kill Americans, an aide to Putin said “the conversation ended on a warm note, wishing each other all the best.”

On September 26, 2022, several underwater explosions disabled three of the four Nord Stream pipeline lines in the Baltic Sea. The facts are well known: it was a deliberate act of sabotage against one of the key energy infrastructures linking Russia and Germany.

What remains unresolved, nearly four years later, is responsibility. Or at least officially unresolved.

That vacuum is now being filled by new narratives. The latest comes from journalist Bojan Pancevski, who in his book The Nord Stream Explosion introduces a particularly striking element: the involvement of a Ukrainian woman, a former adult model identified under the pseudonym “Freya,” in the sabotage operation.

Ukraine has found itself in a paradoxical situation: while its “Army of Drones” has achieved unprecedented technical feats—including capturing Russian positions using only autonomous robots—the human foundation of the military is fracturing.

A sobering report from Dutch military intelligence warns that the casualty ratio, once heavily skewed against Russia, has leveled out. For a nation with a significantly smaller population, this parity is a slow-motion disaster.