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Revelation indicates that Russian leader may still be reliant on the Wagner chief despite all the recent turmoil
— Read on www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/07/10/putin-met-prigozhin-private-talks-in-moscow-after-mutiny/ -
www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/07/26/ukraine-russia-war-counter-offensive-zelensky-weapons/
Ukraine launched the main thrust of its counter-offensive on Wednesday with thousands of men and Western armoured vehicles pouring onto the frontlines in Zaporizhzhia.
Ukraine is currently attacking in three directions, in Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Bakhmut.
Sources within the Pentagon told the New York Times that Ukrainian officials are focusing on Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine as turmoil engulfs Russian leadership in the region.
Biden on Wednesday ordered his administration to begin sharing evidence of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court.
The Pentagon had been resistant to the move amid concerns any cooperation with the court in the Hague could open the way for the prosecution of American troops deployed overseas.
The ICC, a permanent war crimes tribunal, in March issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for suspected deportation of children from Ukraine, which would be a war crime.
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Americans are dying because these paid-off shills have either failed to act or actively blocked any meaningful change in our nation’s climate policy. They have blood on their hands, with more to come as every year brings more severe floods, storms, and drought.
— Read on hartmannreport.com/p/is-earth-close-to-the-great-dying-7ff -
Boris Kagarlitsky, a Russian sociologist and Marxist theorist who has openly opposed Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, has been detained on charges of “justifying terrorism” online, his lawyer said Wednesday.
— Read on www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/07/26/russian-anti-war-sociologist-charged-with-justifying-terrorism-a81969 -
Many of the Russian speakers in Ukraine on whose behalf Putin claimed to be acting now prefer to speak Ukrainian, while the Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas have been battered, deindustrialized, and depopulated because of this ruinous war.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/putin-running-out-options-ukraineexcerpts from a very good article:
Before February 2022, Russia could be confident that Ukraine would not be able to challenge the illegal annexation of Crimea, but now even Russia’s hold of the peninsula is no longer certain.
Being stuck with bits and pieces of Ukrainian territory with hostile populations, massive reconstruction bills, and long frontlines with an undefeated Ukraine would not look like a big win—especially when set against the many casualties incurred by Russian forces, the degradation of the Russian army, the sputtering Russian economy, and the knock to Russia’s standing as a great and influential power.
It is on the frontlines that the extent of the blunder has become inescapable and where there is the most evidence of dissent. The brief mutiny of the Wagner mercenary group had much to do with the desire of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to protect his business model from the Defense Ministry. But Prigozhin also tapped into a wider dissatisfaction with Russia’s high command and its unimaginative strategy, wasteful tactics, and corrupt practices.
But loyalty comes first. It is the military officials closely associated with Prigozhin who have been sidelined.
One way out of such a dilemma might be for Putin to get his propagandists to concoct a story to explain why, despite the appearance of loss, Russia has in fact won. The simplest story he can tell is that Russia’s war is not with Ukraine but with NATO.
Russian victory would be a geopolitical catastrophe for NATO, posing the far greater risk of an all-out war between the alliance and Russia. Better that Russia is pushed back by Ukraine, with its army degraded in the process.
Kyiv can add to the anxieties in Moscow, demonstrating that no part of Russia is secure, punishing Russian forces at the front and opportunistically liberating territory even if it is not quite what military planners intended. This has become a war of endurance.
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Many of the Russian speakers in Ukraine on whose behalf Putin claimed to be acting now prefer to speak Ukrainian, while the Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas have been battered, deindustrialized, and depopulated because of this ruinous war.
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