Tag: perpetual war

Developments in Kursk Region: Ukrainian fighters suffer losses, face charges in Russia

Ukrainian forces lost more than 100 servicemen in the Kursk area over the past day, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

The enemy’s losses during the hostilities totaled more than 32,680 troops, according to the ministry.

The Main Military Investigation Department of the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Ukrainian soldiers suspected of shelling the Dmitrievskaya church in the Sudzha district.

TASS has put together the key developments.

Progress of operation to destroy Ukrainian forces

– Units of the battlegroup North continued their offensive and struck Ukrainian formations in the areas of the settlements of Daryino, Leonidovo, Malaya Loknya, Maryevka, Nykolayevo-Daryino and Plekhovo.

– Strikes by army aircraft and artillery fire inflicted damage to clusters of Ukrainian personnel and equipment in the Kursk Region.

– Tactical aircraft and rocket forces struck at enemy concentration areas and reserves in the Sumy Region.

– The operation to destroy Ukrainian formations is pressing on.

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‘Record number’ of resistance drone attacks target Israel in November

About 1,300 drones were launched against Israel between 1 and 13 November in at least 40 different attacks from the different factions of the Resistance Axis, according to a report by Israel’s Channel 12 News.

Noting that drone attacks have become “a routine matter,” the Hebrew broadcaster said the army recorded a rate of 3.3 drone attacks per day since the end of October. This is a marked spike from the rate of 2.77 daily attacks in October and two per day in September when Tel Aviv expanded its war against Lebanon.

Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has launched daily drone attacks against Israel for the past several weeks, sparking chaos in the northern city of Haifa and reaching targets as far as 145 kilometers deep.

On Thursday night, a drone exploded in the Eliakim area near Haifa, where Hezbollah says its forces targeted the “Eliakim base, which houses training camps under the Israeli army’s Northern Command … with a squadron of attack drones,  achieving precise hits.”

Footage shared on social media shows another drone continuing toward Tel Aviv. 

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Kiev admits its forces collapsing as Russia advances fast in Donbass

Ukrainian officials acknowledge that Russian forces are advancing in Donbass faster than at any time since the conflict escalated, while at the same time, Kiev says its defences are collapsing due to a shortage of fighters, the Financial Times reported. The news only deepens problems for the Kiev regime, especially following the announcement that Mike Pompeo, who is sympathetic to Ukraine, was confirmed not to have a position in the incoming Trump administration.

The newspaper said Ukrainian military officials and international experts expect the conflict to enter a critical phase in the coming months as both sides jockey for territorial advantage ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 with a key “[battle] shaping up in Russia’s Kursk region,” parts of which Ukraine invaded in August with some of its best-equipped units. Russian troops ultimately held off that invading force.

According to the Financial Times, while Kiev is directing resources to reinforce its incursion into the Kursk region, Ukrainian defences in Donbass are “crumbling” due to a shortage of fighters and ammunition. Russian troops have intensified attacks in recent months, where Ukrainian troops have been unable to hold the front line.

“The average age is already above 40 in various brigades and there doesn’t seem to be enough reinforcements arriving on the frontline,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst and fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, to the outlet.

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Officials: Musk Meets with Iranian UN Ambassador

Officials have claimed that Elon Musk met with Amir Saeid Irvani, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, on Monday. The purported meeting suggests a shift from the “maximum pressure” campaign undertaken by the first Trump administration.

The Iranian officials, who spoke to the New York Times about the meeting, reported the meeting as “good news” and “positive.”

Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, neither confirmed nor denied the existence of the meeting, telling the Times: “We do not comment on reports of private meetings that did or did not occur.”

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UN Committee Says Israel Is Carrying Out a Genocide, HRW Says Israel Is Committing War Crimes

On Thursday, a report published by a special UN committee said Israel’s actions in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” while Human Rights Watch released a report saying Israel was committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

The UN report, released by the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, said Israel has used “criminal means” to achieve its military goals, including the use of starvation as a weapon.

“This included intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering, and serious injury, using starvation as a method of warfare, and intentionally directing attacks against civilians,” the report reads.

The committee, which was formed in 1968, also discussed the occupied West Bank, where it said Israel has an “apartheid system of injustice.” The report said the “killing of and serious bodily or mental harm caused to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are violations under international law.”

The HRW report focused on Israel’s forcible displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. “Israeli authorities have caused massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity,” HRW said. “There is no plausible imperative military reason to justify Israel’s mass displacement of nearly all of Gaza’s population, often multiple times.”

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Trump’s Hegseth Caper and the Delusion of ‘Peace Through Strength’

Well, you can say this much about the Donald’s off-the-wall pick of Fox’s weekend news commentator, Pete Hegseth, for Secretary of Defense: At least it wasn’t a hard-core neocon like House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala), Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) or the horrid Senator Tom Cotten of Arkansas. Better a cheerleader for patriotism and valorization of the military than war-mongering interventionists like those three blemishes on the Republican brand.

Well, maybe. Yet what this insensible pick also shows, if any more proof is needed, is that Donald Trump is a clueless, lightweight political demagogue who has no intention of bringing the Empire Home. Nor does he have the remotest chance of making the American economy great again. That’s because if you don’t dismantle the war machine and slash the hideously bloated national security budget by upwards of $500 billion per year, the already debt-saturated US economy is going to be KO’d by an exploding public debt.

For want of doubt, however, here is the Donald’s rationale for selecting a guy to run the $1 trillion/2.9 million employee Pentagon who has never managed anything bigger than a household of three successive wives and the accumulation of seven kids:

“Nobody fights harder for the Troops, and Pete will be a courageous and patriotic champion of our ‘Peace through Strength’ policy… Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country… With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice – Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.

What unmitigated breast-beating rubbish!

For crying out loud, the last thing America needs is another Warrior for the Troops. Instead, what it really needs is a Fearless Slayer of the sacred cows and obese pigs of the military/industrial complex who gorge themselves at the Pentagon’s trough.

Likewise, the pointless, costly Forever Wars stem from too much of the false “strength” of a globe-spanning War Machine that thrives upon inventing enemies, exaggerating threats to national security and provoking conflicts. We are referring, for instance, to the Washington-funded and orchestrated coup in Ukraine during February 2014 that deposed a duly-elected, Russia-friendly President and fostered the hellacious civil war now raging in Ukraine.

The fact is, the very slogan “peace through strength” is a vestigial relic of the Cold War. In today’s world it is utterly irrelevant because subsequent to the Soviet Union’s disappearance into the dustbin of history there remains no rival military superpower which poses a remote threat to the liberty and security of the American homeland. In the year 2024 America doesn’t need “strength” to deter hostile like-sized enemies because, well, there are none.

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US calls on Taiwan to stop supplying AI chips to China

Washington has officially demanded that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing companies, stop supplying China with chips used in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Reuters reported on November 10. However, Washington’s pressure on China’s semiconductor industry also includes Taiwan once Donald Trump comes to power next year.

TSMC is one of the largest chip producers and cooperates with several technology companies, such as Nvidia and AMD, and specialises in integrated circuit, also known as a microchip, a small device made up of several interconnected electronic components that are etched onto a small piece of semiconductor material.

Taiwan produces about 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, mostly by TSMC, and ensuring these chips do not reach China is a priority for Washington, an effort that will only intensify when Trump becomes president.

“The US ordered Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to halt shipments of advanced chips to Chinese customers that are often used in artificial intelligence applications,” Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the subject.

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Israel ignores Biden ‘ultimatum’ over Gaza aid, but U.S. will continue sending weapons regardless

Last month the Biden administration announced that the Israeli government had 30 days to increase humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza or else the country could lose access to some U.S. weapons.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin established the deadline in a letter to Israel’s ministers, in which it laid out 16 conditions that Israel would have to meet. “Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for U.S. policy,” it read.

When asked about the move during a press briefing State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller reiterated the need for Israel to act.

“The bottom line is we felt it was appropriate, if we are making clear to the Government of Israel that there are these changes that need to be implemented, that we give them an appropriate period of time to implement it – implement them,” he told reporters. “We didn’t think it was appropriate to send a letter and just say this has to happen overnight; we gave them a – made clear there’s a short window in which we want to see changes, because the humanitarian situation is so dire on the ground.”

That deadline has now passed and a group of aid organizations (including Oxfam and Save the Children) have published a detailed report showing that Israel has failed to meet any of the conditions mentioned in the Blinken/Austin letter.

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Will Trump End Washington’s Proxy War in Ukraine?

Donald Trump’s election as president is fueling speculation that he will terminate U.S. financial and logistical support for Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.  Trump himself has contributed to that speculation during his June 28, 2024 debate with President Biden when he said, “If we had a real president, a president that was respected by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, he would have never invaded Ukraine.”  Indeed, Trump has boasted that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours.

His critics, both in the United States and the other NATO countries, however, contend that he would likely do so by abandoning Ukraine and appeasing Russia.  Allegations that Trump was a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin cast a pall over his entire first term as president, and there are no signs that his opponents have abandoned that tactic.  It was an absurd accusation, since Trump’s policy toward Russia actually was more hardline than that of his predecessors.  Not only did he ship arms to Ukraine (a step that Barack Obama had refused to take) but he engineered the U.S. withdrawal from two major arms control agreements (Open Skies and Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) that Putin and other Russian leaders considered vital to their country’s security.  The Trump administration also continued NATO’s provocative expansion into Eastern Europe despite the Kremlin’s escalating warnings about such unfriendly moves.

The notion that Trump was “soft” on Russia during his first term was (and remains) a destructive, highly politicized myth.  Over the past four years, though, Trump and at least some supporters in Congress, the news media, and the foreign policy community seem to have gained an understanding that Washington’s current Russia policy has been disastrous and requires drastic reforms.  It is less certain whether he will muster the courage to ignore the smears and make the necessary policy changes to begin repairing relations with Russia.

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New survey says over 61 thousand dead in Sudan’s Khartoum state with death toll likely higher than reported

More than 61,000 people are estimated to have died in Khartoum state during the first 14 months of Sudan’s war, with evidence suggesting the toll from the devastating conflict is significantly higher than previously recorded, according to a new report by researchers in Britain and Sudan.

The estimate includes some 26,000 people who suffered violent deaths, a higher figure than one currently used by the United Nations for the entire country.

The preprint study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Sudan Research Group, released on Wednesday before peer review, suggested that starvation and disease are increasingly becoming the leading causes of death reported across Sudan.

The estimated deaths from all causes in Khartoum state were at a rate 50 percent higher than the national average before the conflict between the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces erupted in April 2023, researchers said.

The UN says the conflict has driven 11 million people from their homes and unleashed the world’s biggest hunger crisis. Nearly 25 million people – half of Sudan’s population – need aid as famine has taken hold in at least one displacement camp.

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