Tag: ukraine

Moscow has announced a very serious escalation out of Ukraine on Wednesday, with defense ministry officials saying that six US-made ATACMS ballistic missiles were launched against a Russian airfield inside the country’s sovereign territory.

Taganrog is a Black Sea port city in southwestern Russia, and was targeted in the heavy attack. The military claimed that all six were able to be intercepted and downed before reaching their target, with two reported intercepts by a Pantsir air defense system, and the others destroyed after electronic warfare systems diverted them.

“Missile fragments caused injuries among personnel. There was no destruction, but two buildings in the airfield’s technical area and three military vehicles sustained minor shrapnel damage. Civilian vehicles in a nearby parking lot were also damaged,” the Russian Defense Ministry statement said.

Apparently this damage occurred through “falling fragments of the missiles” according to the ministry, which also vowed that retaliation is coming for the strike.

“This attack by Western long-range weapons will not go unanswered, and appropriate measures will be taken,” it added, but without specifying anything further.

It appears that at least other drones or missiles which were part of the broader assault made it through Russian aerial defenses:

In the early hours of Wednesday, Dec.11, multiple explosions shook the city of Taganrog in Russia’s Rostov region, regional governor Yuri Slyusar reported, describing the attack as a “missile strike.”

The attack, reported around 4:20 a.m., triggered air defense systems and caused at least ten explosions, local residents told the Shot Telegram channel. Eyewitnesses suggested the target might have been a military airfield, according to CHEKA-OGPU Telegram channel.

Keep reading

The Biden administration announced today that the U.S. will pump Ukraine with $20 billion in stolen Russian assets to keep the war going — which is part of a $50 billion effort by the G7 announced in October

“These funds – paid for by the windfall proceeds earned from Russia’s own immobilized assets – will provide Ukraine a critical infusion of support as it defends its country against an unprovoked war of aggression,” Janet Yellen, the secretary of the Treasury, said in a statement. She continued: “We are sending an unmistakable message of resolve by making Russia increasingly bear the costs of its illegal war, instead of taxpayers in our coalition.”

(U.S. taxpayers already sent Ukraine over $60 billion in weapons.)

The International Monetary Fund warned in May that the Western push to confiscate Russian assets or the interest on these funds could dramatically undermine the global monetary system.

Keep reading

If a ceasefire is reached in Ukraine, the West is considering “exiling” Volodymyr Zelensky to London, writes Do Rzeczy, citing a report out of the Spanish daily El Mundo via government sources in Kyiv. 

A rumor has been circulating in diplomatic circles in the Ukrainian capital for two weeks that if a ceasefire occurs, the West will convince Zelensky to “exile” himself to the U.K. and presidential elections will be held in Ukraine.

European peacekeeping forces, mainly troops from Great Britain and France, would then be deployed in Ukraine. Kyiv could also count on “rapid” accession to the European Union and aid for the country’s post-war reconstruction.

Ukraine had a bad November, with Russia occupying the largest amount of territory in Ukraine since March 2022, mainly in the east of the country, near Pokrovsk, according to experts from the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

The group says Moscow has occupied a total of 68,500 square kilometers since the beginning of the war, or about 19 percent of Ukraine’s entire pre-2014 territory, including the annexed Crimea and part of Donbas.

Senior aides of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump have met with officials from Kyiv, as the incoming president has made ending the conflict a top priority of his administration, while Zelensky is clearly tired of war. 

Keep reading

On December 3rd in Russian and December 5th in English, RT News, which is owned by Russia’s Government, published an article, “Dmitry Trenin: How Russia plans to win in Ukraine”, which says that “For Moscow, anything less than full victory equates to defeat.” This means that there is no longer any possibility for negotiations regarding that war. And that means Trump’s promise to negotiate an end to it is no longer considered acceptable by Russia. It means that any U.S. President’s proposal to negotiate about the end of America’s now-ten-year-long war against Russia that’s being waged by Ukraine’s troops and U.S.-and-allied weapons and satellite intelligence in order to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine, will no longer be considered by Russia. Why is this so? He doesn’t explain.

Trenin provides no answer to this other than that, “The authorization [by Biden] to use US and British long-range missiles to hit targets in the Kursk and Bryansk regions [those are long-term unchallenged provinces of Russia itself — and so this was Biden’s authorization for Ukrainians to use U.S.-and-allied weapons to bomb Russia itself: it was directly America’s war to conquer Russia] is both a defiant challenge to Putin, and a ‘gift’ to the president-elect.” That’s vague language; it says really nothing except that Biden hates Putin — which everyone already knows — and it alleges (which no one knows) that it was Biden’s ‘gift’ to Trump (whatever that is supposed to mean).

One statement by Trenin that IS clear (and it is obviously also true) is “The conflict represents a direct, though proxy, clash between two nuclear superpowers in a region of vital importance to one of them.” (By that vague “one of them,” he obviously means Russia.)

Keep reading

The strategy of constructing a narrative of lies to justify going to war is certainly nothing new. There is a long history in the U.S. that appeared to reach its apogee with the lie that Iraq had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. That false narrative was reused with various faces with chemical weapons in Syria and, currently, with nuclear weapons in Iran.

“T]ruth is invariably the first casualty of war, but,” as Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent and this generation’s most distinguished specialist on Russia, says in his soon to be published book, The Culture of the Second Cold War, “propaganda in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is exceptionally intense.” Sakwa argues that “[a]t its heart” the Second Cold War, “is the struggle to control narratives, to shape popular perceptions of reality. This is an age-old endeavour,” he says, “but in Cold War 2 the misrepresentation of situations is exacerbated by the decline of high modernist ideals of fact-based journalism and impartial scholarship.”

Sakwa cites Jacques Baud, a Swiss army colonel who served in NATO and the UN, who argues that the false narratives that result from the refusal to conduct impartial investigations into important events has shaped the foreign policy of Western countries. Sakwa adds that this has been especially so with Russia, who has become the target of a “whole ‘anti-disinformation’ industry,” leading to especially “damaging consequences on international politics.”

The art of heresthetics, or the structuring of political reality to advantageously fit your narrative, seemed to reach its perfection in the Downing Street Memo, during the Iraq war, which reported that American “intelligence and facts were being fixed” around the policy. But the art of heresthetics seems to have burgeoned during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Several lies have been told to justify and sustain the war. And several of those lies told by the West have been revealed and refuted by the West’s own words.

Keep reading