Here we go again-Ukraine once again pt2

[Jimbuna]

[Jimbuna]

[Jimbuna]

Ukrainian counter-attacks were holding Russians back from taking full control of Avdiivka, the UK Ministry of Defence said in its latest intelligence report. Russian forces have suffered heavy personnel and armoured vehicle losses, frequently caused by Ukrainian uncrewed aerial vehicle munitions. Though they continue to attempt to bypass Ukrainian fortifications by entering the city edges via service tunnels – a method of infiltration they have been attempting since October 2023 – “Ukrainian counter-attacks are holding Russian forces from progressing further within the city”.

Ukrainian officials say Russia has provided no credible evidence to back its claims that their own forces shot down a military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war who were to be swapped for Russian POWs.

Joe Biden will host the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, at the White House on 9 February to discuss aid to Ukraine. This comes as the US president has been pressing Congress to embrace a bipartisan Senate deal to pair border enforcement measures with aid for Ukraine. The talks have hit a critical point as Republican opposition mounts. Some Republicans have set a deal on border security as a condition for further Ukraine aid.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, are in Russia’s Leningrad oblast today to attend the opening ceremony of a memorial complex. The ceremony marked the 80th anniversary of the battle that lifted the siege of Leningrad.

The Biden administration has announced the approval of a $23bn deal to sell F-16 warplanes to Turkey, after Ankara ratified Sweden’s Nato membership, the state department said.

The US is planning to station nuclear weapons in the UK for the first time in 15 years amid a growing threat from Russia, according to a report. Warheads three times as strong as the Hiroshima bomb would be located at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk under the proposals, the Daily Telegraph reported.

[Skybird]

Giggle-giggle: just hours after the Turkish ratification document regarding Sweden arrive din Washington, Biden has nodded off the sale of 40 F-16V and kit for the modernisation of 79 older Turkish F-16s.
I was a bit worried that they maybe would revive the sale of F-35s again.

[Jimbuna]

‘Corrupt Ukrainian officials stole £31.5m meant to buy arms for war with Russia’

Employees from a Ukrainian arms firm conspired with defence ministry officials to embezzle almost 40 million US dollars (£31.5 million) earmarked to buy 100,000 mortar shells for the war with Russia, Ukraine’s security service has reported.

The SBU said late on Saturday that five people have been charged, with one detained while trying to cross the Ukrainian border. If found guilty, they face up to 12 years in prison.

The investigation comes as Kyiv attempts to crack down on corruption in a bid to speed up its membership of the European Union and Nato.

Officials from both blocs have demanded widespread anti-corruption reforms before Kyiv can join them.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on an anti-corruption platform in 2019, long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Both the president and his aides have portrayed the recent firings of top officials, notably that of Ivan Bakanov, former head of the State Security Service, in July 2022, as proof of their efforts to crack down on corruption.

Security officials say the current investigation dates back to August 2022, when officials signed a contract for artillery shells worth 1.5 billion hryvnias (£31 million) with arms firm Lviv Arsenal.

After receiving payment, company employees were supposed to transfer the funds to a business registered abroad, which would then deliver the ammunition to Ukraine.

However, the goods were never delivered and the money was instead sent to various accounts in Ukraine and the Balkans, investigators said.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general says the funds have since been seized and will be returned to the country’s defence budget.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...378ab3f3&ei=35

[Jimbuna]

How Vladimir Putin has disposed of his enemies - including poisonings and plane crashes

Vladimir Putin has been Russia's longest serving president since Joseph Stalin - and the Kremlin has disposed of its political critics, treacherous spies and investigative journalists in a number of ways.

The attacks range from poisoning by drinking polonium-laced tea or touching a deadly nerve agent, to getting shot at close range, while others have plunged to their deaths from an open window. In August 2023, global news outlets went wild when the former head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, perished in plane accident after he attempted to stage a brief coup against the Kremlin. The aircraft plummeted into a field from tens of thousands of feet after breaking apart.

Assassination attempts against foes of President Putin have been common during his nearly quarter century in power. Those close to the victims and the few survivors have blamed Russian authorities, but the Kremlin has routinely denied involvement in these deaths - adding to the mystery and deadly power of the Kremlin's reach.
There also have been reports of prominent Russian executives dying under mysterious circumstances, including falling from windows, although whether they were deliberate killings or suicides is sometimes difficult to determine. Here we look at prominent cases of the fallen, or their attempted killings.

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been behind bars in Russia since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, Navalny campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests. He has since received three prison terms and spent months in isolation in Penal Colony No. 6 for alleged minor infractions. He has rejected all charges against him as politically motivated.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a prominent opposition activist who twice survived poisonings in 2015 and 2017 that he blamed on the Kremlin. Last year he was jailed for a quarter of a century for criticising tyrant Putin's war in Ukraine. The charges against Kara-Murza stem from his March 15 speech to the Arizona House of Representatives in which he denounced Russia's military action in Ukraine. Investigators added the treason charges while he was in custody.

Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Russian opposition was shot dead in front of the Kremlin seven years ago. Nemtsov, then one of Russia's most outspoken critics of Putin, had at the time of his death been organising opposition rallies against Russia's military involvement in Ukraine. He became deputy PM and was once touted as a possible presidential candidate - but it was Putin who took over from former president Boris Yeltsin in 2000.

Alexander Litvinenko was a Russian spy who died in 2006 after he was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 while drinking tea at London's Millennium Hotel. He had been investigating the shooting death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya as well as the Russian intelligence service’s alleged links to organized crime. He had fled to Britain in 2000 after being arrested in his home country for exceeding the authority of his position.

Another former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, was poisoned in Britain in 2018. He and his adult daughter Yulia fell ill in the city of Salisbury and spent weeks in critical condition. They survived, but the attack later claimed the life of a British woman and left a man and a police officer seriously ill. Authorities said they both were poisoned with the military grade nerve agent Novichok. Britain blamed Russian intelligence, but Moscow denied any role.

Journalists that have been critical of authorities in Russia have either been killed or suffered mysterious deaths, which their colleagues in some cases blamed on someone in the political hierarchy. In other cases, the reported reluctance by authorities to investigate raised suspicions.

Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006 - Putin’s birthday - after she won international acclaim for uncovering human rights abuses in Chechnya. The gunman, from Chechnya, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Four other Chechens were given shorter prison terms for their involvement in the murder.

Meanwhile Yuri Shchekochikhin, another Novaya Gazeta reporter, died of a sudden and violent illness in 2003. He was investigating corrupt business deals and the possible role of Russian security services in the 1999 apartment house bombings, which at the time were blamed on Chechen insurgents. His colleagues claimed he was poisoned and accused the authorities of deliberately hindering the investigation.

Yevgeny Prigozhin and top lieutenants of his Wagner private military company died in a plane crash in August of last year - two months to the day after he launched an armed rebellion that Putin branded “a stab in the back” and “treason.”

In a televised address from his offices, Putin said his ex-pal was a "man of difficult fate" and that he "made serious mistakes in life". He went on to detail how Prigozhin worked in Russia and Africa, claiming that he was "engaged in oil, gas, precious metals and stones there", but without mentioning how his shadow army was accused of atrocities on the continent. He added that Prigozhin "also sought to achieve the necessary results - both for himself and at time when I asked him to, for the common cause, such as in these recent months".

But a preliminary intelligence assessment found that the crash that killed all 10 people aboard was intentionally caused by an explosion, according to U.S. and Western officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment. One said the explosion fell in line with Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics.”

Dmitry Peskov, denied allegations the Kremlin was behind the crash, telling reporters: “Of course, in the West those speculations are put out under a certain angle, and all of it is a complete lie." Former Kremlin speechwriter turned political analyst, Abbas Gallyamov, said: “Putin has demonstrated that if you fail to obey him without question, he will dispose of you without mercy, like an enemy, even if you are formally a patriot.”
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...1e585cf8&ei=22

[Skybird]

‘The enemy is amassing’: Ukrainian army officials give unvarnished account of the battlefield.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/27/e...hnk/index.html

[mapuc]

Markus

[Jimbuna]

[Jimbuna]

[Skybird]

Tja. Things are going as I feared two years ago: it's starting to smell like a rotten endgame.

https://www-focus-de.translate.goog/..._x_tr_pto=wapp

You can sugarcoat it however you want, it is and remains a devastating defeat with staggering territorial losses, and the loss of the core of Ukrainian heavy industry and a very significant part of Ukraine's agricultural land. Crimea will allow the Russians to continue to threaten the airspace over the Black Sea and almost all of Ukraine. And contrary to what the author seems to believe, the result at the end of the negotiations is not peace, but only a ceasefire. Russia will move on sooner or later.

The West has messed it up.

[mapuc]

It makes me truly, truly sad that Russia seems to get away with their aggressive action against Ukraine.

Are we letting Ukraine on their own ? Where is these strong words like-We are with you all the way and Russia is not allowed to win.

Markus

[Skybird]

Sober as always: Col. Reisner.

[mapuc]

The Nato alliance should rearm, and Europe should not underestimate the Russian forces and the possibility of an all-out war against Russia.

https://ekstrabladet-dk.translate.go..._x_tr_pto=wapp

Markus

[Jimbuna]

Russians who want rid of Putin pin election hopes on anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin

Thousands of Russians queued for hours in the freezing cold across the country over the past few days to show their support for an anti-war candidate before this year’s stage-managed presidential ballot in which Vladimir Putin is the only permitted winner.

Boris Nadezhdin, a centre-right candidate who has called himself a “principled opponent” of the war, has said in his manifesto that Putin made a “fatal mistake by starting the special military operation”, the Kremlin’s preferred term for its invasion. “Putin sees the world from the past and is dragging Russia into the past.”

As the end-of-the-month deadline approached for Nadezhdin to collect the necessary 100,000 signatures to appear on the ballot for the elections in March, social media posts showed Russians joining long lines to give their signatures in cities across the country.
Nadezhdin is a decades-long veteran of Russian politics, with a history of ties to Kremlin insiders, including Putin’s domestic politics curator, Sergei Kiriyenko, and some of its most pointed critics, such as the slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

Nadezhdin is a rare critical voice allowed to appear on the shouty chatshows that dominate state TV, playing the role of token opposition that some have said maintains the fiction of competition in Russia. Now, those critics see him as a spoiler in an election otherwise devoid of drama.

But for anti-war Russians there is no one else. And his last-second dash to collect 100,000 signatures and get on the ballot for March’s election has invigorated a moribund opposition as Putin marches toward a fifth term in the Kremlin.

“I don’t have any illusions about Nadezdhin or whether he has a chance to win,” said Natalya, who described queueing for an hour in the cold on Sunday alongside young people and families with children. “But even if we get him on the ballot, it will feel like a little victory.”

Little victories are all that the country’s opposition appears capable of at the moment. Public protest against the war has virtually evaporated as police are quick to stop demonstrations, and hundreds of outspoken critics of the war have been jailed while thousands more have fled the country. For most Russians, the war has faded into the background of daily life.

“It was cool to stand in a line like that, people were making jokes and the mood was generally good,” she said. “I used to go to protests before February 2022, but now that is impossible of course. You quickly forget that at one point there were thousands of people on the street.”

Nadezhdin’s campaign said on Monday that they had collected more than 200,000 signatures – twice as many as he needs to officially join the race. But the authorities could still refuse to put him on the ballot by deeming tens of thousands of signatures as invalid, a tactic previously used with other opposition candidates.

Nadezhdin’s is not the first anti-war candidacy to appear in this Russian election cycle. Yekaterina Duntsova, a Russian TV journalist, had submitted documents to run as an independent candidate for president when she was disqualified by the Russian central elections commission last month. She has since announced her support for Nadezhdin’s campaign.

“As the opposition, we need to look for common ground and not for conflicts,” she said of her decision to support Nadezhdin. “Our common ground is the desire for peace. And that’s my priority. And then time will tell.”

She defended participation in Russia’s carefully controlled elections, calling it a “training for Russia’s civil society”. “The elections will count no matter who comes or doesn’t come,” she said. “The state employees, the military, the prisons, the retirement homes will all vote at nearly 100% turnout … if we don’t go to the elections, we’ll be abandoning it.”

Yet Russian political realities are changing and Nadezhdin’s criticism of the invasion, including meetings with women calling for Putin to return their husbands from the front and end the war, have angered Russia’s pro-war political elite.

Related: The mothers and wives of Russian soldiers daring to defy Putin – podcast

Since launching his bid, Nadezhdin has also courted the support of Russia’s “non-systemic opposition”, in particular allies of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a third rail of Russian politics who was banished last month to an Arctic prison because of his strong criticism of Putin.

Duntsova said Nadezhdin had allowed himself to be “more outspoken” than her campaign because “he has spent more time in federal politics and has more relations with the various levels of government … he can feel more liberated in that sense.”

From prison, Navalny said he would put his signature down for Nadezhdin’s presidential run, and his wife, Yulia, was photographed on Wednesday signing in support of Nadezhdin’s candidacy for president.

“From the start of the election, our main focus was to campaign against Putin,” said Ruslan Shaveddinov, a close ally of Navalny’s. “Nadezhdin criticises the war and also, somewhat carefully, criticises the government … He is not an ideal candidate, but many see him as a vehicle to voice their opposition against the government.”

He added: “Standing in line and supporting Nadezhdin is a safe way to protest and we support that.”

The Kremlin has so far disregarded Nadezhdin’s candidacy, saying he does not pose an electoral threat. “We do not see him as a rival,” said Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, who declined to comment when asked whether Nadezhdin’s campaign was “coordinated” with the Kremlin.

In a widely expected move, Russia’s central election commission on Monday recognised Putin as a candidate for the presidential elections in March.

Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst and founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik, said Nadezhdin was probably permitted to try (and fail) to collect signatures for the elections to “show the hopelessness of the anti-war agenda. And they made a mistake … they didn’t understand he would start to play not by the rules.”

She said “Nadezhdin is their own guy, they know him from back to front”, noting that he likely gave advance notice to his political contacts, including Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s domestic politics tsar, of his plans to run for president. “He was expected to play by the rules.”

But his openness to working with Navalny supporters and other actions had “poured gas on the fire of the non-systemic opposition”, Stanovaya said, referring to a set of political campaigners who have virtually been outlawed since the war began.

She said Nadezhdin’s bid would probably be rejected when he submits his signatures to the elections commission in the coming days. Blocking Nadezhdin’s run “is not a problem for the Kremlin”, she said.

Putin, meanwhile, would demand to see a crushing victory in the elections worthy of a ruler fighting an offensive war.

“He needs to show overwhelming support,” Stanovaya said of Putin. “He wants the elections to prove that the country stands behind him.”
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...f37bd11f&ei=61