treatment of civilians is abhorrentHow rotten indeed!
taken to Russia, interrogated, released after weeks in prisoner swap. Toes amputated from frostbite.The Russians took away their boots, filled them with water and put them back on. Then the prisoners were forced to lie face down on the field in the freezing cold. "We lay like that for three or four nights, under the rain, getting colder and colder,"
Hopefully those Cardinals have strong backs, and can fill hescos and sand bags.I think the Vatican's support is most significant.
"As of March 2022, The Vatican has sent two Cardinals to Ukraine to provide “material and spiritual support” to the Ukrainian people"
As heavy fighting continues in the east, a Ukrainian presidential adviser has acknowledged serious losses - but said Russia's were even worse.
Oleksiy Arestovych said Ukraine had lost control of some towns and villages - but claimed Russia's own casualties had been "colossal".
Arestovych said Russia was losing a company of troops* every day, according to remarks quoted by the UNIAN news agency.
He said his soldiers were continuing to conduct a successful defensive operation.
It was not possible to independently verify the claims.
Earlier this month, Russia conceded that it had suffered "significant losses" of troops during its invasion - but has not been frequently updating its numbers.
Meanwhile, the civilian toll continues to mount as fighting in the east of Ukraine rages on.
The regional governor of Luhansk - part of the Donbas - has again urged remaining civilians to leave.
Meanwhile, police in the Donetsk region say three people were killed and six wounded over the past day during Russian strikes.
And the north-eastern Kharkiv region continues to see heavy fighting as well. Officials there say five civilians were killed in the latest shelling.
Why is Russia setting up detention centres in Ukraine?
“Filtration camps”, a tool of terror used since the 1940s have reappeared
Since russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine began, hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly deported to Russia by occupying forces. The exact number is unclear: on April 21st Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, put the figure at half a million. Russian officials have claimed that 420,000 civilians have been “voluntarily evacuated”. Many passed through Russian “filtration camps” on their way out of Ukraine. What are these detention centres?
The concept of fil’tratsiia or filtration emerged at the end of the second world war, as the Soviet Union and other Allied forces liberated prisoners from the Nazis. Some 2.4m Soviet citizens—mostly soldiers—survived concentration camps. But their release placed them in the cross-hairs of military commissars, who worried that those who had been taken prisoner or displaced by war had been exposed to liberal influences abroad. Forced repatriation resulted in an estimated 5m people being sent back to the Soviet Union. To counter anti-Soviet ideology, more than 4m of them were subjected to filtration, undergoing rigorous screening, interrogation and incarceration in holding stations set up by the secret police and intelligence agencies. Some 280,000 ended up in gulags. Five decades later, filtration reappeared in Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim region in the northern Caucasus. During the two wars of the 1990s Russian authorities arbitrarily detained civilians at checkpoints, sending thousands to camps in an effort to stamp out Chechen separatism, adherents of which the Kremlin demonised as terrorists and bandits. Widespread human-rights abuses including rape, extortion, beatings and torture were documented by human-rights groups. In many cases, detainees simply disappeared.
There are disturbing parallels in Ukraine. Before Russia’s invasion, American officials said that Russian forces were creating lists of people to be killed or sent to camps if Russia occupied parts of the country. Likely targets included Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile, anti-corruption activists, members of religious and ethnic minorities and LGBT people. A satellite image captured in March by Maxar Technologies, an American firm, showed Russian-backed forces had begun building a temporary camp of regimented blue-and-white tents in the Russian-controlled village of Bezimenne near the port-city of Mariupol, in south-eastern Ukraine. According to witnesses, Ukrainians sent there were photographed and forced to turn over their mobile phones and identity documents before being interrogated and deported to Russia. The Kremlin describes these people as “refugees”. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a pro-Kremlin newspaper, claims that 5,000 civilians were screened at Bezimenne to prevent “Ukrainian nationalists from infiltrating Russia”. But escapees tell a different story, comparing conditions to those of a ghetto or concentration camp. They claim to have witnessed torture and killings carried out by Russian security services to weed out “Ukrainian Nazis”.
According to the UN, the deportation or transfer of people from an occupied territory constitutes a war crime. Russia insists that the relocation of civilians by its armed forces is benign and voluntary. But filtration camps appear to be a tool of war, used to erase Ukrainian identity.
US being coy about it. But they are feeding the Ukrainians Intel from satellite feeds and assets on the ground. It's then backed up by local knowledge from the Ukrainians.Seems like the most dangerous place to be for the Russians in Ukraine is with the Officer Corp and General Staff.
The Ukrainian Army is effectively targeting these command posts.
Report: Russia's top uniformed officer visited Ukraine last week
Russia’s top uniformed officer, General Valery Gerasimov, visited dangerous frontline positions in eastern Ukraine last week in a bid to reinvigorate the Russian offensive there, the New York Times has reported citing Ukrainian and US officials.
The Guardian was unable to verify the report.
During the visit, Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, narrowly escaped a deadly Ukrainian attack on a school being used as a military base in the Russian-controlled city of Izium late Saturday, the Times reported.
Around 200 soldiers including at least one general were killed in the strike, a Ukrainian official told the paper, but Gerasimov had already departed for Russia.
The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, earlier said that Ukrainian forces had “likely conducted a rocket artillery strike on a Russian command post in Izyum on April 30 that struck after Russian chief of staff Valery Gerasimov had left but killed other senior Russian officers.”
US officials could not confirm the attack and the Russian Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Our working assumption is that he was there because there’s a recognition they haven’t worked out all their problems yet,” one of the US officials told the Times. The Russian offensive has been slow, with widespread disarray and poor morale reported among Russian forces.
Macquarie Bank’s Viktor Shvets, New York-based head of global and Asia-Pacific strategy also predicts China will not be in a position to open up fully until the middle of next year.
Born in Ukraine and educated in both the Soviet system and the Australian system, Shvets was a highly credentialed home-grown pick for MacBank’s annual conference on Wednesday.
He delivered a sobering assessment of the war in Ukraine, which he says will continue for a long time.
Shvets dismisses the prevailing view that NATO expansion and the aggressive privatisation of Russian industry in the 1990s triggered the war.
In the 1990s, he argues, Russia had the choice to become either a democracy or reconstitute the Russian empire: a democracy would allow former soviet states like Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to develop independently, but an empire would put these states in a very dangerous neighbourhood.
“It has become clear that Russia is not becoming a democracy, it’s not integrating. It is becoming an empire. As soon as you make that decision, not just (Vladimir) Putin, the country as a whole, it is almost inevitable that Ukraine and Belarus somehow have to be integrated or kept within the Russian sphere of influence,” he says.
Shvets says the house view, consistent since the invasion, has been that there is no basis for compromise. This is less about NATO. Russia is not after Ukraine neutrality, but disarmed neutrality and also control – not over everything, but all important strategic decisions have to be under Russian control.
“Countries like Russia or China regard themselves as large continental powers. They don’t view that every country has the same sovereignty. Large countries deserve to have sovereignty. Small countries only have the sovereignty they are allowed to have. The closer you are to China, Russia, the more you lose sovereignty,” he says.
Shvets says behind the imperative to rebuild the Soviet sphere lies historical grievances, from the Napoleonic Wars, the northern wars, the Mongols, the Germans.
“The West tends to look in terms of opportunity and profit maximisers, look at everything as marginal returns. Because of the history of Russia they tend to believe they are surrounded by enemies, they tend to be loss minimisers, to be pain minimisers. They tend to look in average rather than marginal terms and the average doesn’t change that quickly. So the country very much feels they are besieged.”
The Ukrainian-born Shvets says true conflict resolution will only come when one side or the other is exhausted. An independent Ukraine is now armed to the teeth.
As per Moxjo commentsUS being coy about it. But they are feeding the Ukrainians Intel from satellite feeds and assets on the ground. It's then backed up by local knowledge from the Ukrainians.
This is the major advantage that the Ukrainians have over Russians.
Lol and the media reports drone strike taking out a landing craft on snake island. Pro - Ukrainian propaganda cant get their stories straight. They even had to admit there was no such ace pilot called "Ghost of Kyiv" when the narrative became that the ghost plane was shot down.Snake Island hit by Ukrainian bombs
Two Su-27s made low level bombing raids. Drone footage shows immediate and secondary explosions. Previously, TB-2 drones had hit the wharf area and sunk a landing barge. SAM missile systems neutralised, says the commentary
The strategic rationale would be to deny any Russki air corridor from Crimea to the breakaway area of Moldova, or at least reduce likelihood of another front opening up (and putting pressure on Odesa)
It was but the war won't have helped.Using Sri Lanka as an example of the repercussion of the war in Ukraine is stretching the facts more than a little. The country was just about broke before the Russian invasion.
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