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‘Putin could still win war’ – Latvia warns West
The West must adopt a “war-footing” and arm Ukraine properly to defeat Russia, Latvia said yesterday as Ukrainian officials warned Vladimir Putin’s army could still win his war.
In separate interviews, Latvia’s foreign minister Edgars Rinkevics warned the West needed to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes”, and Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, said that the army needed more heavy weapons.Mr Rinkevics said Eastern European countries had now largely run out of Soviet-era tanks and weapons to send to Kyiv and Western Europe needed to step up production to meet the threat from Russia.
“The EU and Nato need what I call strategic endurance,” he said.
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“Unfortunately, like it or not, because of Russia, we are back in a situation where the military defence is a priority for Europe and for Nato.”
Mr Rinkevics, who praised international support for Ukraine, said some countries had “psychological difficulties” in taking a tough line on Moscow but that a “war-footing” towards weapons production was the necessary approach to bring peace.
“Russia will be talking only when there are two elements. Number one, when they understand that the military advance has been stopped. Number two, when they will be pushed back by Ukrainian forces,” he said.
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Despite repelling the Russian army from the gates of Kyiv in March, Ukrainian officials have said Russia could still triumph in the Donbas region, where it has since concentrated its firepower.
Analysts have said Russian troops can outgun Ukraine 20 to one in artillery duels.
In Kyiv, Mr Podolyak said the army was “fighting a tank with a pistol” because of European prevarication over military support.
“Approximately 90pc of casualties on the battlefield are caused by artillery fire,” he said.
“Our men will die until the point that our European partners provide the weapons that we need and when they stop actually asking us to meet Putin halfway and not to humiliate the Russians.”
Mr Podolyak said the scale of the battle and the length of the front required vastly more military capabilities. “In terms of rocket launchers, we don’t need three or four of them, but around 300,” he said.
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Russia resorts to firing anti-warship missiles at targets on land
Russia is firing huge Cold War-era missiles — designed to destroy aircraft carriers — at Ukraine’s military in Donbas because it has run out of precision rockets, according to the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The five-and-a-half-tonne missiles were designed to carry a nuclear warhead, so using them as conventional missiles is causing vast collateral damage.“When employed in a ground attack role with a conventional warhead they are highly inaccurate and can therefore cause significant collateral damage and civilian casualties,” the MoD said.
Since withdrawing from around Kyiv in March, the Russian army has concentrated its main efforts on capturing the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
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Russia warns response to NATO build up in Poland will be 'proportionate'
Moscow's response to the build up of NATO forces in Poland will be "proportionate", Russia's foreign ministry has warned, according to Interfax news agency.
The news agency quoted Oleg Tyapkin, the head of a foreign ministry department in charge of Russian relations with Europe, as saying: "A response, as always, will be proportionate and appropriate, intended to neutralise potential threats to the security of the Russian Federation."NATO has been bolstering its forces in Poland, near to the border with Ukraine, as the war in Ukraine wages on.
In February, US President Joe Biden ordered the deployment of an additional 3,000 US troops to Poland to help strengthen NATO presence in eastern Europe.
Just a month later, the UK said it was deploying a ground-based air defence system to Poland along with 100 troops. -
Both sides using heavier weapons in Ukraine, says Finnish president
Finnish President Sauli Niinisto has claimed both sides are using heavier weapons in Ukraine, including in Russia's case thermobaric bombs.
"We are supporting Ukraine with increasingly heavy weaponry. And on the other hand Russia has also begun to use very powerful weapons, thermobaric bombs that are in fact weapons of mass destruction," Mr Niinisto said.
Ukraine and NATO countries previously accused Russia of using highly destructive thermobaric bombs, which are also known as vacuum bombs.
It comes as a report by Amnesty International claimed Russia has been using banned cluster bombs in the northeastern city of Kharkiv. -
UKRAINE IS WEAK
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Is this still a thing?
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ᑕ💎ᗰᑭᗩᑎY😱ᵙǥͨ wrote:
No we switched to monkey pox now 😂😂😂😂Is this still a thing?
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Russia urges surrender as battleground city is cut off
Russia yesterday called on Ukrainian soldiers in Severodonetsk to surrender after it blew up the last bridge into the city, trapping all those left behind in one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the war.
Kyiv’s forces were told to “stop their senseless resistance and lay down their arms” by Mikhail Mizintsev, the head of Russia’s National Defence Management Centre.Fighting in the industrial city that would give Russia total control of Luhansk, one half of the Donbas region, has raged door to door, with video from the front line showing soldiers desperately firing from close range.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the price of the battle was “terrifyingly high”, describing it as one of the most brutal in European history.
With two of the bridges from Severodonetsk into the neighbouring town of Lysychansk already destroyed, Ukraine had been relying on the only crossing left to ferry in supplies and evacuate civilians.
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Russia has strategically lost the war- UK Armed Forces Chief
Russia has already "strategically lost" the war in Ukraine and is now a "more diminished power", the head of the UK's armed forces has said.
Tony Radakin said Vladimir Putin had lost 25% of Russia's land power for only "tiny" gains.
While Russia may achieve "tactical successes" in the coming weeks, he said any notion that the war had been a success was "nonsense".
Mr Radakin, who is the UK's chief of defence staff, said Russia was running out of troops and advanced missiles and would never be able to take over all of Ukraine.
He spoke to reporters as he visited Scotland yesterday, where he met soldiers at Edinburgh Castle.
He said: "This is a dreadful mistake by Russia. Russia will never take control of Ukraine.
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"Russia has strategically lost already. NATO is stronger, Finland and Sweden are looking to join."
He said Russia had been forced to give up its objectives of taking over most Ukrainian cities and was now engaged in a tactical battle where fighting is "tough".
"The Russian machine is grinding away, and it's gaining a couple of - two, three, five - kilometres every day," Mr Radakin said."And that's tough for Ukraine, but this is going to be a long fight. And we're supporting Ukraine, Ukraine has shown how courageous it really is.
"And Russia has vulnerabilities because it's running out of people, it's running out of high-tech missiles.
"President Putin has used about 25% of his army's power to gain a tiny amount of territory and 50,000 people either dead or injured."
Russia is now a "more diminished power" diplomatically and economically than several months ago, he said.
"Any notion that this is a success for Russia is nonsense. Russia is failing.
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Analysis: Russian propaganda stereotyping Ukraine as a failed state in chaos and disorder makes atrocities and looting more likely to happen
By Kseniya Oksamytna, City, University of London
Speaking to journalist Sophie Raworth on the BBC's Sunday Morning show recently, former war crimes prosecutor Howard Morrison, now an advisor to the Ukraine government, highlighted the dangers posed by the negative – often insulting and dehumanising – statements made by some Russian politicians and media personalities about Ukraine and its people.
"Genocide is often rooted in the way that one nation or one ethnic group views another and how it describes them," Morrison said, citing the way Nazis referred to the Poles as "subhuman" before and during the Second World War, or the way Hutu elites in Rwanda referred to Tutsis as "cockroaches" before the 1994 genocide. "It's this dehumanisation – and the pretence that they are not a real people or have a real culture." -
The many crimes documented in Ukraine committed by Russian soldiers have caused fury and hurt among Ukrainians – but hardly surprise. The conditions and attitudes described by Morrison have existed for centuries: Russians have viewed Ukrainians as inferior since before the Soviet era. A recent report from the Atlantic Council found that Vladimir Putin's regime had "mobilised anti-Ukrainian hysteria among Russians in the decade leading up to the Kremlin's 2014 aggression".
In 2012, Putin's power was shaken by the Bolotnaya Square protests in Moscow, immediately prior to the Russian president's inauguration for his third term which many Russian dissidents believe he won illegitimately. Then in 2014, Putin was unnerved to see pro-democracy protesters succeed during Ukraine's "Revolution of Dignity". Shortly thereafter, Russia annexed Crimea and began a covert campaign of armed violence in the Donbas. -
Since then, Russian propaganda has portrayed Ukraine as a failed state that has descended into chaos and disorder. In Russia, the ghosts of the past are not so much the Soviet-era repressions but rather the struggles and privations of the 1990s, such as the extreme poverty and open mafia violence during Russia's unsuccessful transition to democracy. Putin likes to paint himself as a guarantor of stability. This is the somewhat Faustian bargain Russian society has accepted, giving up their freedoms for this stability.
During Soviet times, Ukraine was considered second only to Russia in the USSR hierarchy, treated better than the central Asian republics. Russians nowadays see Ukraine as the most culturally proximate former Soviet nation, so Ukraine's embrace of democracy and human rights puzzled many of them. They wrote it off as something that Ukrainians, who are stereotyped by Russians as "simple-minded" and "naive", had bought into against their best interests with EU and US encouragement. -
Democratic reforms introduced in Ukraine in order to deepen its engagement with the EU meant visa-free travel to Schengen states for Ukrainians, something that deeply angered many Russians who wondered how "inferior" Ukrainians could be allowed into the EU without a visa while Russians needed one.
A commentator on a Russian online forum in 2016 imagined the entire population of Ukraine abandoning their homeland to "clean toilets" in the EU:
95% of the population [of Ukraine] does not need [visa-free travel to the EU]: they do not have money for Euro-tourism, and "visa-free" does not give the right to work in Europe ... No one in their right mind would provide even a half-visa regime to an impoverished country full of weapons and laws that do not work. And what types of work are and will be performed by Ukrainian migrant workers in Europe – everyone knows too ... Prostitution and cleaning toilets is called "European integration". -
This comment represents Russian stereotypes of Ukraine as poor, disorderly and lacking civic patriotism – and of Ukrainians as "second-class" Europeans. Researchers have also documented various forms of hate speech denigrating Ukrainians and denying Ukrainian statehood on Russia's most popular social network, VK.
Cognitive dissonanceWhen the Russian forces began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most Russian soldiers expected not only to be greeted as liberators but also to find people suffering under the yoke of "Nazi usurpers". They thought Ukraine would be like Russia of the 1990s – divided, disorganised and poor.
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Ukraine's per capita GDP was US$3,725 (€3,543) in 2020, while Russia's was almost three times higher at US$10,127 (€9.633). On the other hand, as recently as 2017, Ukraine topped the list of the world's most equal countries by the Gini index. Russia was a long way down the list.
In fact, Russian invaders found neat, prosperous villages and towns where people lived decently and as communities. Ukrainians apparently could have it all: a democracy and an economy, imperfect but functioning. The invaders were astonished at Ukrainians' standards of living (Russian looters were reportedly surprised at the sight of Nutella in Ukrainian houses, which they apparently saw as a sign of untold luxury). -
They were also surprised by Ukraine's community spirit: mayors, priests and volunteers braved bullets to distribute food to compatriots, rejecting and defying Russian soldiers' threats and bribes. This stood in stark contrast with the Russian military leadership's disregard for supplying, directing and evacuating its soldiers. Confronted with Ukraine's stiff resistance but also signs of a good life, Russian soldiers must have wondered how Ukrainians, considering their stereotyping in Russia as "simple" and "naive", could have built a functioning country on their own.
The narrative of Ukraine being under the control of – variously – the west, George Soros or "Judaeo-Masons" would have resonated with the soldiers. And, as Morrison said, stereotyping and denigrating a people as inferior or lacking agency makes atrocities and looting more likely to happen, as we are seeing in Ukraine.
Kseniya Oksamytna is a Lecturer in International Politics at City, University of London. -
Commission proposes Ukraine for EU
The European Commission has recommended EU "candidate status" for Ukraine.
This is on the understanding that Ukraine can carry out a number of reforms, EC President Ursula von der Leyen told a press conference in Brussels.She added: "Ukraine has clearly shown commitment to live up to European values and standards. And embarked, before the war, on its way towards the EU."
Ms von der Leyen said Ukraine had "already implemented roughly 70 % of rules, norms and standards.
"Yet important work remains to be done, on the rule of law, oligarchs, anti-corruption and fundamental rights. The process is merits-based. So progress depends entirely on Ukraine."
The European Commission also recommended Moldova be designated as a candidate for membership.
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UPDATES:
Fighting
Ukrainian officials said their troops were still holding out against massive Russian bombardment in the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk.
An air strike hit a building sheltering civilians in Ukraine's embattled eastern city of Lysychansk, killing at least three people, according to the governor.
The United States said it has not asked Russia about two U.S. citizens reported missing after travelling to Ukraine to fight, and said there are reports of a third missing American. -
Diplomacy
~Britain will welcome representatives from Ukraine and business leaders on Friday to discuss how British companies can help rebuild infrastructure in Kyiv.
~Ukraine alone should decide whether or not to accept any territorial concessions towards Russia, French President Macron told TF1 television.
~The European Union's executive is expected to propose on Friday that Ukraine become a formal candidate for membership.
~Russia said it had banned 121 Australian citizens from entering.
~The Dutch intelligence service said it had uncovered a Russian military agent attempting to infiltrate the International Criminal Court.
~Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he would attend a NATO meeting in Madrid at the end of the month.
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Economy
~Russia promised to speed up talks about increased gas sales to China and warned that Europe would pay a hefty price for its oil embargo against Russia.
~Russian-flagged ships have been carrying Ukraine's grain to Syria, U.S. satellite imagery company Maxar said.
~Ships loaded with grain and metals will leave the port of Mariupol soon, with shipments potentially headed to the Middle East, a pro-Russian separatist leader told the Interfax news agency.
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༺ ᗪᗰᒪ ༻ wrote:
This is what I was talking about previously. Russia will probably just end up with the eastern parts of Ukraine until another war happens down the line or some shit.Diplomacy
~Ukraine alone should decide whether or not to accept any territorial concessions towards Russia, French President Macron told TF1 television.
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Russia escalates attacks
Russian forces captured territory along a frontline river in eastern Ukraine today, and President Volodymyr Zelensky predicted Russia would escalate attacks ahead of a summit of European leaders expected to welcome Ukraine's bid to join the European Union.
Russia's separatist proxies claimed to have captured Toshkivka, a town on the mostly Ukrainian-held western bank of the Siverskyi Donets river, south of Sievierodonetsk, which has become the main battlefield city in recent weeks.
Ukraine acknowledged that Russia had success in Toshkivka and said the Russians were trying to gain a foothold there to make a breakthrough into the wider, Ukrainian-held pocket of the eastern Donbas region.
It also confirmed a Russian claim to have captured Metyolkine on Sievierodonetsk's eastern outskirts.
"Obviously, this week we should expect from Russia an intensification of its hostile activities," Mr Zelensky said in a video address. "We are preparing. We are ready."
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Russia threatens EU member Lithuania over 'openly hostile' move
Moscow has threatened EU and NATO member Lithuania by saying it will take measures to defend its national interests unless the transit of goods to Russia's Kaliningrad exclave is swiftly restored.
Lithuanian authorities have banned the movement of goods which are sanctioned by the European Union across its territory - which includes the only rail route between mainland Russia and the province which is sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.Banned goods include coal, metals, construction materials and advanced technology.
Russia's foreign ministry has summoned Lithuania's top envoy in Moscow while the Kremlin said the situation was a "violation of everything".
"The situation is more than serious," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
"This decision is really unprecedented. It's a violation of everything."
Russia's foreign ministry demanded Lithuania immediately reverses what it cast as an "openly hostile" move. -
Putin fears democracy spreading to Russia, according to German chancellor
Vladimir Putin fears the "spark of democracy" spreading to Russia, according to Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Mr Scholz said that Mr Putin is trying to divide Europe and return to a world dominated by spheres of influence.
The chancellor was responding to a question in an interview with the newspaper Muenchner Merkur, which was published on the government website on Monday.Asked whether Mr Putin would accept Ukraine moving closer to the European Union, he said: "The Russian president must accept that there is a community of law-based democracies in his neighbourhood that is growing ever closer together.
"He clearly fears the spark of democracy spreading to his country." -
Putin: Russia will strengthen armed forces, new missile to be ready by year end
Russia will further strengthen its armed forces, President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.
"We will continue to develop and strengthen our armed forces, taking into account potential military threats and risks," he said in televised comments.
He added that Russia's newly tested Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of carrying 10 or more nuclear warheads and decoys, would be deployed for duty by the end of the year.In April, President Putin was shown on TV being told by the military that the long-awaited missile had been test-launched for the first time from Plesetsk in northwest Russia and hit targets in nearly 3,700 miles away.
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"This truly unique weapon will strengthen the combat potential of our armed forces, reliably ensure Russia's security from external threats and provide food for thought for those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country," he said at the time.
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'It has never been as serious as it is now' - Estonia accuses Russia of violating airspace
Estonia has accused Russia of violating its airspace for the first time by helicopter, in a highly provocative move ahead of a major NATO summit.
The Baltic state, a member of the NATO alliance, also said ongoing Russian military exercises are simulating missile strikes against its country daily.
"This is the picture of the threat. How we see the Russian threat… It has never been as serious as it is now," said Kusti Salm, the top civil servant at the Estonian defence ministry, speaking to journalists on Tuesday.The hostile activity emerged as Russia is locked in a heated exchange with Lithuania, another Baltic state and fierce critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, over a decision by Vilnius to block the transit by rail of certain sanctioned goods to the Russian territory of Kaliningrad.
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