The Ukrainian military on Sunday claimed to have killed nearly 1,000 more Russian soldiers as the conflict in the war-torn country continues.
Russian President Vladimir Putin first began his "special military operation" on Ukraine in February 2022 based on dubious claims of mistreatment of ethnic Russian residents and that the Ukrainian government was being run by Nazis, even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a native Russian speaker of Jewish heritage.
The Eastern European country responded, however, with a stronger-than-expected defense effort, bolstered by Western aid, that has blunted Russian military gains. READ MORE...
Dwindling military resources and a dearth of new targets have left Russian President Vladimir Putin struggling to respond to a rise of troubling drone attacks on Moscow.
Several analysts have noted in recent days that Putin has attempted to downplay dramatic attacks on the Russian capital – for which Ukraine has explicitly denied any responsibility, at least publicly.
The attacks have gained widespread attention on social media, particularly in Russia, with some observers suggesting that they were the result of a false-flag operation orchestrated by the Kremlin to force national support for a new round of military conscriptions it likely needs.
Yet Putin’s response appears to discount that theory.
Instead of maximizing the attacks for propaganda purposes, the Russian leader’s reaction appears to be an attempt “to avoid exposing the limited options he has to retaliate against Ukraine,” the independent Institute for the Study of War concludes in a new analysis note.
The analysis points to Putin’s explanation earlier this week that Russian forces struck the Ukrainian military intelligence headquarters two or three days previously. READ MORE...
Not sure what Russia is famous for? Then you’re certainly in the right place because this guide covers all the things that the Russian Republic, the largest country in the world, is known for internationally!
Russia is famous for the cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg as well its leader, Vladimir Putin. Of course, people also know Russia for its Vodka, Russian Dolls, and many other things.
They’re featured on this list, but we’ve also got lots of other things that are popular about the country, for a total of 21 things that make Russia famous all over the world!
Russia is best known for Moscow, its stunning capital city on the Moskva River in Western Russia. The city is home to many of Russia’s famous landmarks, including the Red Square, the Bolshoi Theater, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Kremlin, Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and many others.
The stunning city is both the largest and the most populated city in Russia, as well as the fourth city in the world by the number of billionaires who reside there. The Moscow metro system is also an impressive engineering feat and is huge at 325.4 km. in total length. Moscow metro is also famous worldwide because of the stunning architecture of many of the metro stations.
Russia is famous for Vladimir Putin, the president who has been in office for what seems like an eternity. He’s been the president of the country since 1999, only stepping down for one term in 2008 because the law required him to do so. Recently he signed legislation that would allow him to stay in office until 2036, so it’s unlikely that he’ll be stepping down again any time soon. READ MORE...
It only took a few hours after Russia’s Vladimir Putin hailed his mobilization as a sparkling success Friday for a torrent of humiliating reports to emerge that suggest the war effort has been more successful in turning the country against him than defeating mythical Nazis in Ukraine.
The most staggering contradiction to the Russian president’s boastful claims came perhaps in Kazan, where dozens of drafted troops were captured on video late Friday berating military leadership outside a collection point for the newly mobilized.
The angry crowd complained of a lack of water, food, and “rusty” rifles from the 1970s that one soldier said were too “dangerous” to even use, according to local outlets. Spectacularly, the troops were not cowed by a military officer who threatened to call in riot police. READ MORE...
Friends, rivals and enemies took their seats in the Grand Kremlin Palace as Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s elite to formalise Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine.
The ceremony was meant to portray strength and unity, but within 24 hours had been overshadowed by Russia’s failures on the battlefield. These losses, which continued into this week on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine, have led to a major, unprecedented rupture within the ruling class as the Kremlin seeks scapegoats for a series of military embarrassments.
The following account is based on 15 interviews with former government and defence officials, members of the military, political observers, journalists, opposition members, and an inmate at a prison where Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin recruited soldiers to join his mercenary group in Ukraine. READ MORE...
MALIBU, Calif. – As the Russia-Ukraine war wages on, we asked Professor Robert Kaufman of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy for his in-depth views. Kaufman specializes in American foreign policy, national security and international relations. He has written several books on these subjects.
What follows is a Q&A that has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. We strongly encourage you to watch the accompanying video so you may hear Kaufman in his own words.
Q: What is the significance of the Feb. 4, 2022, pact that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
A: On Feb. 4, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, announced that China and Russia had signed an extensive security pact – 5,000 words, very detailed – with each side pledging to the other that they would support mutual efforts to supplant the United States as the world's primary power and make the world safe for the survival of Russian and Chinese tyranny.
This is a hugely significant development, and it signals that we are at a major negative inflection point in international relations that is a long time in coming. For years, with honorable exceptions, there's been a wide consensus operating on the delusion that Russia is a partner for peace, and China seeks to become part of our system … This pact should be a warning call that this is not the case and that the free world, and the United States in particular, will have to take seriously the imperative of vigilance across the board, dealing with this threat.
We've already seen manifestations of it already. China is enabling Putin's invasion of Ukraine, blunting the effects of sanctions. And Putin, likewise, has embraced China's implacable determination to subjugate Taiwan. This is in many ways a 21st century version of a dangerous gangster pact known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, consummated between two rogue regimes in August of 1939. READ MORE...
(CNN)After weeks of failing to divide Europe over his war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin enjoyed two small diplomatic victories this weekend.
In both Hungary and Serbia, openly pro-Russian parties comfortably won legislative elections, providing Putin with a welcome reminder that despite the international community's firm and largely united response to the invasion, he does have some friends to his west.
The most significant victory came in the form of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his nationalist Fidesz party winning a landslide. Hungary is a member of both the European Union and NATO, meaning Putin can claim to have a friend with seats at the top table of two of his most-hated institutions.
On Sunday night, during his victory speech, Orban goaded not only the EU but Ukraine.
"We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it's sure that it can be seen from Brussels," he said, adding that Fidesz "will remember this victory until the end of our lives because we had to fight against a huge amount of opponents." Included in that list of opponents were Brussels bureaucrats, international media and, pointedly, Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky has directly criticized Orban for failing to support Ukraine as enthusiastically as many of his European counterparts have over the past weeks. READ MORE...
The cost of oil surged on Wednesday, as traders snapped up non-Russian oil, increasing the chance of further price rises at UK forecourts. Brent crude - the global benchmark for oil prices - passed $113 a barrel, its highest level since June 2014. Traders are struggling to sell Russian oil, even at a discount, because of the new difficulties in shipping and payments amid its invasion of Ukraine.
Gas prices also doubled, which could feed through to energy bills. Almost 70% of Russian crude oil exports do not have a buyer according to UK-based research consultancy, Energy Aspects. On Tuesday, oil trader Trafigura offered a cargo load of Russian crude oil at a record discount of $18.60 per barrel below the market rate for Brent, but could not find a buyer willing to take the risk.
Amrita Sen, its founding partner told the BBC World Service that buyers are concerned that they could run afoul of Western sanctions and "lawyers are poring through the language" of the new rules. The RAC said if the higher oil price is sustained, the cost of filling up a car in the UK will increase with it.
"The sudden $10 jump in the oil price is likely to take the average price of petrol towards 155p a litre and diesel to 160p, particularly as it's looking like this price isn't just a market blip caused by the US and allies deciding to dip into the strategic oil reserve. "If oil does stay at this level, the journey to an average unleaded price of 155p may be far too quick." said RAC fuel spokesperson Simon Williams.
The average price of petrol across UK forecourts on Tuesday was 151.6p per litre, according to the RAC.
Energy price cap
Household gas and electricity bills are set to rise after the annual energy price cap increases to £1,971 in April, but the rise in wholesale prices amid the war in Ukraine may mean the price cap ratchets up to £3,000 by the end of the year, according to one energy analyst.
"Wholesale prices make up between 40-50% of household bills," said independent energy analyst David Cox. "If these high prices stay around 400p per therm we may see the price cap head closer to £3,000 per year, which is terrifying."
Energy analysts at Cornwall Insights also predicted a jump in the energy price cap in October, based on turmoil in the European wholesale gas prices, to over £2,900. READ MORE...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — In a dramatic escalation of East-West tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian nuclear forces put on high alert Sunday in response to what he called “aggressive statements” by leading NATO powers.
The order means Putin wants Russia’s nuclear weapons prepared for increased readiness to launch and raises the threat that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s response to it could boil over into nuclear warfare.
Amid the worrying development, the office of Ukraine’s president said a delegation would meet with Russian officials as Moscow’s troops drew closer to Kyiv.
Putin, in giving the nuclear alert directive, cited not only the alleged statements by NATO members but the hard-hitting financial sanctions imposed by the West against Russia, including the Russian leader himself.
Speaking at a meeting with his top officials, Putin told his defense minister and the chief of the military’s General Staff to put the nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty.”
“Western countries aren’t only taking unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, but top officials from leading NATO members made aggressive statements regarding our country,” Putin said in televised comments.
Putin threatened in the days before Russia’s invasion to retaliate harshly against any nations that intervened directly in the conflict in Ukraine, and he specifically raised the specter of his country’s status as a nuclear power.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations responded to the news from Moscow while appearing on a Sunday news program.
“President Putin is continuing to escalate this war in a manner that is totally unacceptable,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. “And we have to continue to condemn his actions in the most strong, strongest possible way.”
The practical meaning of Putin’s order was not immediately clear. Russia and the United States typically have the land- and submarine-based segments of their strategic nuclear forces on alert and prepared for combat at all times, but nuclear-capable bombers and other aircraft are not.
If Putin is arming or otherwise raising the nuclear combat readiness of his bombers, or if he is ordering more ballistic missile submarines to sea, then the United States might feel compelled to respond in kind, according to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. That would mark a worrisome escalation and a potential crisis, he said. READ MORE...
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014; now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years.
Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him. Teenagers, of course, do not have hundreds of thousands of troops and nuclear weapons.
Even discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists. For all his Soviet nostalgia, the Russian president is right that his Soviet predecessors intentionally created a demographic nightmare when drawing the internal borders of the U.S.S.R., a subject I’ve explained at length here.
But Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse—except for Russia—were real countries. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect.”
It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”
By that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe. Putin’s foray into history was nothing less than a demand that only Moscow—and only the Kremlin’s supreme leader—has the right to judge what is or is not a sovereign state (as I recently discussed here). Putin’s claims are hardly different from Saddam Hussein’s rewriting of Middle East history when Iraq tried to erase Kuwait from the map. READ MORE...
About the author: Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Peacefield.
Pat Buchanan, When the Union was fighting to preserve itself in the Civil War, the France of Napoleon III moved troops into Mexico, overthrew the regime of Benito Juarez, set up a monarchy and put Austrian Archduke Maximilian von Habsburg on the throne as Emperor of Mexico — one month before Gettysburg.
Preoccupied, the Union did nothing.
At war’s end, in 1865, however, at the urging of Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman, the Union sent 40,000 troops to the Mexican border.
Secretary of State William Seward dispatched Gen. John Schofield to Paris with the following instructions: “I want you to get your legs under Napoleon’s mahogany and tell him he must get out of Mexico.”
The U.S. troops on Mexico’s border convinced Napoleon to comply, though Maximilian bravely refused to leave and was captured and put before a firing squad.
The point of the episode for today’s crisis in Ukraine?
A powerful army on a nation’s border can send a message and dictate terms without going in and without going to war.
Whether Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to send his 100,000 troops now on the Crimean, Donbass and Belarusian borders of Ukraine into the country to occupy more territory we do not know.
But the message being sent by the Russian army is clear: Putin wants his own Monroe Doctrine. Putin wants Ukraine outside of NATO, and permanently.
If his demands are unacceptable, Putin is saying with his troops on the border, we reserve the right to send our army into Ukraine to protect our vital national intserests in not having a hostile military alliance on our doorstep.
U.S. officials have been describing a Russian invasion as “imminent,” an attack that could come “any day now.”
Given the Russian preparations and size of its forces, some U.S. officials said last week Kyiv could fall within hours of an attack and there could be 50,000 civilian casualties and 5 million Ukrainian refugees.
Ukrainian leaders are less alarmist, arguing that an invasion is not imminent and there is still room for a negotiated settlement.
Russian officials are contemptuous of U.S. claims that they are about to invade. Last weekend, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN tweeted, “Madness and scaremongering continues. … What if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300k civilian deaths?” READ MORE...
Berlin, Germany – Determining the front lines of Europe’s potential energy conflict with Russia is no mean feat. Because should Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government decide to use what analysts often call Moscow’s “gas weapon”, the fallout would impact some European Union nations far more than others.
The variations in potential impacts stem from how different national energy markets are organised and legislated.
Around 35 percent of the EU’s natural gas comes from Russia. And as political tensions have mounted around the build-up of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, there has been much discussion of whether Russia, the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas, might weaponise that dependency to get its way.
Of the 167.7 billion cubic metres of natural gas Europe imported from Russia in 2020, Germany bought the most – 56.3 billion cubic meters – followed by Italy, with 19.7 billion, and the Netherlands, with 11.2 billion.
But what really determines a country’s vulnerability to Moscow’s energy export policies is not how much it buys but what part Russian gas plays in its national energy mix. READ MORE...
