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Can children and old men operate those spiffy planes?
Military aid, including weapons and ammunition, sent by the United States to Ukraine was overestimated by at least $3 billion owing to an accounting mistake by the Pentagon, Defense Department officials have said.
“During our regular oversight process of presidential drawdown packages, the Department discovered inconsistencies in equipment valuation for Ukraine,” said Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times.
Are there any verified casualty figures?
Freedom of Russia Legion declares liberation of a settlement in Belgorod Oblast
“The advanced units have entered Grayvoron. We are moving forward. Russia will be free,” the Legion’s post read.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Belgorod Oblast, confirmed there had been an armed incursion into the territory of the oblast’s Grayvoron District...
...
The Freedom of Russia Legion is a unit within the Armed Forces of Ukraine, established in March 2022 to combat the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It comprises defectors from the Russian Armed Forces and other Russian volunteers who had not previously served in military units.
Previously, fighters from the Russian Volunteer Corps, who are engaged in combat against the Russian army in Ukraine, reported that they had once again infiltrated Russian territory. They released videos of themselves alongside signs displaying the names of settlements in Russian oblasts bordering Ukraine.
According to the videos, RVC volunteers are currently located in the settlements of Bezludovka (Belgorod Oblast, Russia), Churovichi (Bryansk Oblast, Russia), and Lyubimovka (Kursk Oblast, Russia).
Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine's Defence Intelligence, has described the events taking place in Russia's Belgorod Oblast on 22 May as the creation of a "security zone" to protect Ukrainian citizens.
Quote from Yusov: "Yes, today the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Legion of Freedom of Russia, which consist of citizens of the Russian Federation, launched an operation to liberate these territories of Belgorod Oblast from the so-called Putin regime and push back the enemy in order to create a certain security zone for the protection of the Ukrainian civilian population."
Details: Yusov stressed that the operation was conducted exclusively by Russian citizens.
Background:
On the afternoon of 22 May, the Russian Volunteer Corps, who claim to be fighting on the side of Ukraine, and the Legion of Freedom of Russia announced the liberation of the village of Kozinka in Russia's Belgorod Oblast.
Distraction from the ringing failure in Bakhmut.
You mean Bakhmut was a ringing failure for Russia - right?
Russians in Belgorod are crying as they see that their region is under attack.
The crying woman asks “what have we done to deserve something like this”?
Still no self-reflection in sight
socal2 says
You mean Bakhmut was a ringing failure for Russia - right?
I guess the propaganda is now claiming knowledge of alternate dimensions.
Why do people treat this like a football game where they have a "team" they're supporting?
It's just a fucking slaughter.
100% agreed. Does it even matter whether you are on the "right" side of a war if there are zero serious efforts to end the bloodshed and solve the conflict via diplomacy?
I've read that European countries are starting to pressure both parties to negotiate and resolve this idiotic and painful war via diplomacy asap.
Why pick sides even? The results will be the results, it's ENTIRELY irrelevant who you root for. Don't support either side.
It's reasonable to be on the side of those being invaded, similar to the principle of helping someone in self defense.
The real invasion was the SOROS/NATO color revolution in 2014, bronco'd by Victoria the Serpent Nuland, breaking every promise and treaty NATO ever made to Russia after WWII. Aside from the Nazis and their supporters, the Ukrainians are otherwise innocent bystanders.
Who knows? You can't trust information on Wikipedia anymore, you can't trust the EU, you certainly can't trust the US government, you can't trust the CIA, you can't trust the FIB.
But you can trust Rich Wicks. The internet is pure truth.
All kidding aside. Who can you trust...
The head of the Wagner mercenary force has said that 20,000 of its fighters have been killed in the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and warned that Russia could face another revolution if its leadership did not improve its handling of the war.
Yevgeny Prigozhin said 20% of the 50,000 convicts Wagner had recruited, and a similar number of its regular troops, had been killed over several months in the fight for Bakhmut.
Prigozhin pointed to the social disparity underlined by the war, with the sons of the poor being sent back from the front in zinc coffins while the children of the elite “shook their arses” in the sun.
“This divide can end as in 1917 with a revolution,” he said in an interview posted on his channel on the Telegram messaging app. “First the soldiers will stand up, and after that – their loved ones will rise up. There are already tens of thousands of them – relatives of those killed. And there will probably be hundreds of thousands – we cannot avoid that.”
20K KIA to take a town the size of Gilroy (and put themselves into a potential encirclement in the process) :
The head of the Wagner mercenary force has said that 20,000 of its fighters have been killed in the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and warned that Russia could face another revolution if its leadership did not improve its handling of the war.
Yevgeny Prigozhin said 20% of the 50,000 convicts Wagner had recruited, and a similar number of (some text omitted to shorten quote...) of the elite “shook their arses” in the sun.
“This divide can end as in 1917 with a revolution,” he said in an interview posted on his channel on the Telegram messaging app. “First the soldiers will stand up, and after that – their loved ones will rise up. There are already tens of thousands of them – relatives of those killed. And there will probably be hundreds of thousands – we cannot avoid that.”
Sounds like he's getting tired of winning THAT bigly....
Is it constitutional to send jet fighters to fight a war that congress has not declared? Rhetorical.
Is it constitutional to send jet fighters to fight a war that congress has not declared? Rhetorical.
THE KREMLIN HAS A SECURITY PROBLEM
Drone attacks in Moscow, incursions over the border—Russians are starting to wonder whether Putin really does have, as he promised, “everything under control.”
By Anna Nemtsova
MAY 25, 2023
President Vladimir Putin sustains his power on the promise to Russians that he has, as he put it in 2010, “everything under control.” This week’s attack on the southern Belgorod region, launched from Ukraine, would have been alarming under any circumstances, but Putin’s posture as the man in command makes it particularly hard to explain away.
A string of bad news that began earlier this month suggests to Russians that their security system is crumbling. First came the drone attack on the roof of Putin’s residence in the Kremlin on May 4. Now comes an incursion into Belgorod, demonstrating that a year and a half into the war, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which is in charge of the borders, does not have the manpower to protect against small units attacking from Ukraine. Russia was not even able to secure a nearby storage site for nuclear-weapons components, known as Belgorod-22—instead it reportedly moved the materiel away.
Russians in the border regions are beginning to realize that the war that has destroyed dozens of towns and villages in Ukraine is coming to their own land. Nobody seemed to be defending Belgorod, so on Tuesday, locals demanded answers from their governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, in a live chat on Vkontakte, a social-networking site.
Governor Gladkov read the questions aloud: “They said that everything was under control, that fortifications have been built, some pyramids and so on, but the enemy is coming to our regional center by tanks. Why is the border full of holes?” he read from one message. “And we are not mentioning the constant artillery and mortar fire, wounded residents—how come?”
The complaint seemed valid enough. And the more information that emerged, the more the episode risked turning the entire nationalist rationale behind Russia’s war in Ukraine back on the Kremlin: The invaders were Russian nationalists serving in the Ukrainian armed forces who claimed that they were liberating Russia from Putin’s regime.
Somebody had to be honest with locals, and Governor Gladkov, surprisingly, was. “I agree with you,” he said, looking tired and grim. “I have many more questions for the Defense Ministry than you.” He called on his listeners to draw their own conclusions “from the mistakes that have been made.”
Russians have been drawing conclusions rather quickly this week. Thousands jumped into their vehicles and left their villages in the Belgorod region, without waiting for further explanation or assistance from the security services. One video shows local residents trying to break into an old Soviet bomb shelter, screaming at the top of their lungs.
Ilya Ponomarev is a former member of Russia’s Parliament now in exile. He acts as a spokesperson for the Freedom of Russia Legion, the anti-Kremlin group that crossed into the Belgorod region.
Ponomarev told me that the legion’s soldiers were “just four kilometers away” from the Belgorod-22 nuclear-storage site, and that the group’s goal was to demonstrate to Russians that their border was unprotected.
The attack seems to have struck its psychological target. Tsargrad, a nationalist television channel in Russia, headlined a program with the question of whether, after a year of “bombs raining on … Russian regions,” the “special military operation” in Ukraine was coming to resemble the second Chechen war. The comparison jabbed at dark memories of fighting that killed thousands of civilians in the Northern Caucasus and created streams of internal migrants.
Now again, Russians have been internally displaced. “This is just a shock; there is no safe place in the south,” 72-year-old Nina Mikhailova, a pensioner from Russia’s Krasnodar region, south of Belgorod, told me by phone on Tuesday. “There is no end to this war, to killings, and nobody tells us when or how it will end. The jokes and threats about nuclear mushrooms are not funny. If the only solution is to nuke America, we are all in real trouble.”
Boris Vishnevsky, a city-council member in St. Petersburg, is one of the very few opposition figures left in government in Russia. I spoke with him by phone yesterday. Russia’s generals, he observed, can “promise us to destroy everything alive coming our way”—but then they will come up against the problem that “the FSB, who are actually responsible for protecting the borders, are busy hunting down and imprisoning Russians for their posts on social media.”
This week, some of my Russian friends said they caught themselves walking around with their mouths open in absolute shock. “The border is supposed to be protected by the FSB, but it is not; they just look more and more like some dumb thugs,” a former Russian member of parliament, Gennady Gudkov, himself a veteran of the KGB, told me on Tuesday. Like many of his friends and colleagues in Moscow, he gasped at the news of tanks and armored vehicles rolling from Ukraine to Russia, unstopped. Nothing was under control.
Putin pretends to love history. While his security services were in Belgorod chasing armed invaders from Ukraine, he was staring at a French map, allegedly dated from the mid-17th century, with the word Ukraine on it, but still insisting that Ukraine did not exist before the Soviet times.
Meanwhile, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, is building political capital from every failure of the Russian military. When the attack began from Ukraine, and the legion took over village after village, Prigozhin took aim at the armed forces on his Telegram channel: “Instead of providing security for the state, some of them are dividing cash and the others make fools of themselves. There is no leadership, no desire and no personalities ready to defend their country.”
Ukraine, however, is only getting stronger, according to Prigozhin: “Ukraine had 500 tanks in the beginning of our special operation and now they have 5,000. If before, 20,000 of their men knew how to fight, now 400,000 men know how to fight. So it turns out we militarized them in a big way.”
Prigozhin has predicted an apocalyptic ending for Putin’s regime as a result of the attack on Belgorod. “People will come out with pitchforks to the streets,” he told Russian media. When that day arrives, he warns, he will be the one taking the situation under control: “And then we come.”
Anyhow, I find it unlikely that 20,000 Russians were killed.
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