Governor of Dnipropetrovsk 2014
Ihor Kolomoyskyi, 13 February 1963 (age 59)

According to Putin, Kolomoysky "even managed to cheat our Roman Abramovich two or three years ago. Scammed him, as our intellectuals like to say. They signed some deal, Abramovich transferred several billion dollars, while this guy never delivered and pocketed the money. When I asked him [Abramovich]: 'Why did you do it?' he said: 'I never thought this was possible'" :haha:


(Wikipedia)

Certainly cheered me up this morning learning of this.

Putin’s new flagship warship ‘on fire’ after Ukrainian missile strike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8zCQOBmyGg

Ukraine is continuing a counter-offensive near the city of Kharkiv, and says it has recaptured five villages.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War says the Ukrainians could soon free Kharkiv from the threat of Russian artillery.

In Mariupol, 50 civilians were evacuated from the Azovstal steel works on Friday.

Russia has voted with the other 14 members of the UN Security Council to back a declaration supporting efforts to find a peaceful end to the war.

US President Joe Biden announced a new $150m package of military aid for Ukraine.

Italy has ordered the seizure of a $700m yacht linked to Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

The Scheherazade has been undergoing repairs at a port in Tuscany since September last year.

Italy's finance ministry said that the boat's owner had ties to "prominent elements of the Russian government".

It is being seized under EU sanctions brought in over Russia's invasion of Ukraine that have seen other vessels confiscated.

An opinion piece from FOCUS.

Hasn't it always been a characteristic of the left to tremble like aspen leaves over everything? And now the Greens, of all people, want to supply weapons to Ukraine, and people like Dieter Nuhr [a - rather good - comedian in Germany, Skybird ] and Martin Walser [a writer] are fighting against it out of fear.

For a long time, many Germans have been asking themselves how they would have behaved 80 years ago. In the case of the 28 publicists and artists who appealed to Chancellor Olaf Scholz in an open letter in "Emma" not to supply heavy weapons to Ukraine, one no longer has to rely on conjecture. The 28 would have been among those who sought the peace treaty with Hitler's Germany.

All the arguments they mention would have been valid even then: that the fear of world conflagration made prudent action necessary. That the duty to stand by the weak ends where resistance makes the aggressor even more ferocious. That even justified resistance to an aggressor could increase the suffering of the civilian population to such an extent that it could no longer be morally justified.

There was a similar discussion 80 years ago, after the Blitzkrieg against France, as there is today. Should one oppose the dictator - or does resistance only conjure up greater misfortune?

"Five Days in London" is the title of a small book, well worth reading, in which historian John Lukacs traces the 1940 discussion in the British War Cabinet. Here the warners around the just resigned Prime Minister Chamberlain, who thought that one should not rely on escalation and should offer Hitler peace negotiations. There the group around Churchill, who said: Fight? Now more than ever! In the end, Churchill narrowly prevailed, fortunately for the continent and the world.

There are well-known names among the appeal to Scholz, which has been stirring emotions since its appearance. Antje Vollmer, a former Green, has signed it, as has social psychologist Harald Welzer, who weeks ago described the "unpleasant feelings" he gets when someone fights "bravely for his country.

But there are a number of names that surprised me. Even Dieter Nuhr or Gerhard Polt think that Olaf Scholz should deny tanks to Ukraine? And what on earth has gotten into Juli Zeh, the woman who writes hit books about people who can't stand it in Prenzlauer Berg, and who now advises Ukrainians to come to terms with the Russian occupation?

"With a burning heart and in great sorrow," that's how signature campaigns used to begin, in which people took up arms against all sorts of things - overpopulation, the dying of the forest, the nuclear state. I thought that with Günter Grass, the intellectual who admonished politicians had disappeared from the stage forever. I was clearly mistaken.

War leads to strange constellations and alliances. Suddenly I find myself on the side of people with whom I had just been at odds on almost every issue. I read what left-wing pests like Friedemann Karig, Jagoda Marinic or Mario Sixtus have to say about the war, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. I mean Sixtus. The man who blocked half the Internet on Twitter. And now I can subscribe to every word he says.

The last time my world got so messed up was after the September 11 attacks. I was living with family in New York when the towers fell and George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. In my mailbox there were letters from friends saying they had wanted to visit, but since the visit could be seen as solidarity with the U.S., they would have to postpone it.

Some friendships never recovered from that. There are moments when you look at the bottom of a relationship. It's like in a marriage when your partner shows a face that you can't forget afterwards, no matter how hard you try.

I suspect that the tank supply opponents have more people behind them than they appear to. They may even represent the majority opinion in the country. Just because the newspapers are dominated by the voices of those in favor of decisive intervention on Ukraine's behalf doesn't mean readers have to see it that way. Staying out of it has always been closer to post-war Germans than getting involved.

However, the fact that one represents the majority opinion does not necessarily make the arguments any better. The underrepresentation of the hesitant in German talk shows may also be due to the fact that there is a big, black hole in their argumentation.

They all affirm how much they care about the fate of the country beset by Russia. Of course, Ukraine must not lose the war, is the last sentence in the essay with which philosopher Jürgen Habermas delivered something like the long version of the "Emma" appeal to Olaf Scholz over the weekend. But everyone knows that it will be difficult to stop an invading army without tanks and howitzers.

So in the end, all that remains is the argument that in times of war, every nation has to see for itself where it stays. Björn Höcke [an AfD-Nazi] put it most brutally: "The war in Ukraine is terrible, but it's not our war." Of course, that's not how people outside the AfD want to put it. Yet that is exactly what it boils down to.

They say that we must not provoke Putin any further, otherwise he will bring out the nuclear weapon, and before you know it, we will be in the Third World War. Curiously, the people who think this way are not far from those who think Putin is a revenant of Hitler. Assuming that Putin would even detonate the atomic bomb to put his völkisch ideas into practice, what is to stop him from just going ahead once he has subjugated Ukraine?

I noticed one thing: There are quite a lot of people on Team Caution who normally lean more toward my worldview politically. Conversely, in the camp of Ukraine supporters, you find an above-average number of people who tend to sympathize with the Greens. This is also reflected in the polls. The strongest support for military aid to Ukraine is among the supporters of Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock. There, 72 percent support the delivery of heavy weapons, even if that means Germany would be considered a party to the war.

Why are conservative-minded people more afraid of nuclear war than Green supporters? I always thought it was a character trait of the left to tremble like aspen leaves over anything and everything. The fear of nuclear war in particular was a leftist invention. Can we no longer rely on it?

Even in terms of age, many of those who are now calling for "prudence," the new word for inaction, are less affected by a nuclear war. Alice Schwarzer will be 80 this year, Alexander Kluge has just turned 90, Habermas is 92, and Martin Walser is already 95. I know that death always comes prematurely. But for a 25- or 30-year-old, it comes much more prematurely.

Perhaps the key to the explanation lies in the self-confidence of a certain intellectual milieu. A friend gave me the idea. He thinks that people like Walser or Habermas cannot imagine that there is talk of a first strike on the evening news, and they are not there. They say to themselves: If there is a nuclear war, then the atomic bomb will be the first to fall on my head.

This explanation made sense to me spontaneously.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

A technical question: is it known whether Russia has brought any combat vehciles of their new Armata design into action? And if so, how did they perform? Especially the MBT, by design concept, is revolutionary. I'm a bit surprised that one sees and hears and reads nothing about them beign in use. Wouldn't they have wanted to use the opportunity to test it under real war conditions?

This, if accurate probably answers your question.

Quite a good article with some photos. The comments at the bottom are also worth reading.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/...-from-ukraine/

From what I’ve read Russia only has a very limited number of T-14s. I don’t think it ever went into full production. What good would the super tank be anyway if it ends up like the T-80’s? Abandoned in the mud without a crew, fuel and logistical support?

As far as I know they have only a very low two-digit-amount of them, very likely less than 20.

From a Swedish newspaper

Will we see a change in gameplay-Here I'm thinking of war games where you either has to fight the Russian or are in control of the Russians...So far programmer have had a certain love for Russian tactics and weapons..I know this from Modern Operations...

Markus

Thanks for the replies on the Armata. I was not aare that they had these delays and production setbacks. Last I red years ago was that by now the series production should be running by routine already.


They cannot afford to lose an Armata. But it seems they can afford to lose a capital warship and a major one, plus transports and patrol boats. . :D

Ukraine claims that it has sunk a landing boat of the Serna class. Again: Ssnake Island. South of Odessa - that may be why.

Mercenary group Wagner says on Telegram that Russia would need 600.000 troops to win the war in Ukraine. - Is this a coordnated PR effort by the Kremlin to prepare for mobilization of forces?!

I wonder if the Chinese are watching this war and thinking "let's scrap our entire fleet! The Ukrainians are winning a naval war without even having an actual navy!" :rotfl2: