Tag: ukraine

Russia races for Ukranian mineral wealth before a potential ceasefire

Russia has spent the past five months swallowing up ever bigger tracts of Ukrainian coal, lithium, and uranium in the Donbass. Yet Western politicians still cling to the belief that they will be able to tap these resources to repay Ukraine’s ever mounting pile of debt. This is economic madness.

In the summer of 2024, most Western politico-military commentators were predicting that Russia was focussed on storming the strategically important military hub of Pokrovsk in Donetsk. Russian troops had advanced slowly, inexorably westward in a straight line following the bloody attritional battle for Avdiivka which was captured in February 2024.

But from August, Russian tactics shifted. First from the south of Donetsk they stormed Vuhledar, literally translated as “Gift of Coal,” a site of significant reserves, capturing it on October 1. That opened the way to swallow up large swaths of land in the south. Following the apparent encirclement of Velyka Novosilka in the past two days, one of Ukraine’s three licensed blocks of extractable lithium is now within short reach in Shevchenko.

Russian armed forces skirted Pokrovsk, instead battling through Selydove and in a straight line for about 20 miles, capturing a Uranium mine in a village called Shevchenko (not the same Shevchenko where the lithium is located). In recent weeks, Russian forces have taken Ukraine’s most important mine for coking coal in Pishchane and two related coking coal shafts in Udachne and Kotlyne. Together, these mines alone had produced the coking coal for 65% of Ukraine’s steel production. There are now fears that Ukrainian steel production could plummet to 10% of its prewar level in 2025.

Since President Trump was elected in November, and the prospect of an enforced ceasefire grew brighter, Russia’s advance has progressively accelerated. Today it is on the verge of completing its capture of the coal-rich bastion of Toretsk, the only town on the line of contact that hadn’t moved since 2014.

That’s bad news for Ukraine, not just because of a potential loss of further territory.

Keep reading

Russian President Vladimir Putin: “2020 Election Victory Stolen” From President Trump – Acknowledges Ukraine War Never Would Have Happened Under Trump

Russian President Vladimir Putin has broken his silence on the 2020 Presidential Election between President Trump and Joe Biden.  In a recent interview, Putin stated the President Trump had his victory “stolen” from him and that “perhaps the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022 wouldn’t have happened” if he had been re-elected.

The Russian leader also called out the previous “United States administration,” presumably Joe Biden, for refusing to “communicate” with Russia, stating that he had “business-like and pragmatic” relationship with the Trump administration before.

In a clip from an interview, Putin stated:

“I’d like to say that Russia never refused to come into contact with the United States administration and it is through no fault of ours that the previous administration refused to communicate.  I always had business-like relations with the previous US President, that were very business-like and pragmatic.  But there was trust as well.

If he had been the President, if the victory wasn’t stolen from him in 2020, maybe the Ukrainian crisis that arose in 2022 would have [appeared]”

Keep reading

Russians Enter Last Major Ukrainian Stronghold In Key Eastern Sector

Russian forces have entered the Donetsk Oblast town of Velyka Novosilka, according to Russian and Ukrainian sources. The settlement is Ukraine’s last major stronghold in the southern Donbas region. Located at the intersection of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts, its capture could provide Russian forces with a potential route for advancement into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukrainian military analysts say, according to Euromaidan Press.

“Military personnel of the ‘Vostok’ group continue to hack into the defense of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Velyka Novosilka,” the Russian MoD claimed on Telegram. “Servicemen from the ‘East’ military group installed the Russian flag on one of the buildings recaptured from the enemy in the center of the settlement.”

The Ukrainian DeepState open-source tracking group confirmed that assessment, saying “The enemy is successful in advancing on the eastern outskirts, and has also occupied a small part of the central streets of the settlement, where they filmed their videos with rags.”

Video emerged on social media appearing to back up that claim.

Keep reading

Pentagon Employees Responsible For Weapons Deliveries To Ukraine Have Been Fired

Ukrainian journalist Roman Bochkala is reporting personnel changes at the Pentagon for the office involved in weapons delivery to Ukraine.

“Everyone who was responsible for Ukraine has been fired or suspended. Or they will be transferred to other positions somewhere. A complete reboot,” Bochkala wrote, reported Ukrainian news entity Focus.

He explained that he received this information from a journalist from The Washington Post, who is responsible for Ukrainian topics and went to the Pentagon to find out what they were hearing about Ukraine.

“So, there will definitely be changes. A new format of relations. It’s all a bit disturbing. But somehow it will happen,” Bochkala emphasized.

The head of the Servant of the People parliamentary faction, David Arakhamia, stated that 
negotiations with Trump’s team could take place in early February.

Keep reading

WSJ: Trump Wants Ukraine War Deal Within 100 Days

President Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg has stated the President would like the conflict ended in 100 days, reported The Wall Street Journal.

According to the newspaper, “dealmaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin will be far more difficult than Trump promised on the campaign trail, when he said he would end the conflict before he took office.”

Trump is determined to control peace talks himself, the Wall Street Journal adds.

Ukrainian media is reporting many of those responsible in the Pentagon for weapons deliveries to Ukraine have been fired, and is causing ‘worry’ in the war-torn nation.

Keep reading

Russia Accuses Kiev of GENOCIDE

A Russian diplomat has accused Ukraine of committing genocide. Senior Russian diplomat Rodion Miroshnik claimed on Sunday that captured Ukrainian soldiers “have reported they were given orders to kill Russian speakers.”

According to Miroshinik, this amounts to genocide. He claimed that the Ukrainian military is conducting “language-based genocide” by giving orders to kill anyone who speaks Russian.

Miroshnik was commenting on the discovery of civilian bodies in a recently liberated village in Russia’s Kursk Region. He asserted that the alleged Ukrainian policy amounts to the “elimination of all civilians” in the area, which Kiev recognizes as Russian, according to a report by RT. 

On Sunday, the Foreign Ministry described the discovery as evidence of a “massacre” and the latest confirmation of the “terrorist and neo-Nazi essence of the Kiev regime,” as spokeswoman Maria Zakharova put it. She accused Western supporters of the Ukrainian government of turning a blind eye to Kyiv’s crimes and charged that foreign officials secretly condone such behavior. –RT

The Russian Investigative Committee is probing the Ukrainian military for alleged terrorism, based on the reports from Russkoye Porechnoye. A person convicted of such a crime can be sentenced to life imprisonment in Russia.

Keep reading

Zelensky is desperately trying to provoke a Pearl Harbour moment

There has been much reporting of Ukraine’s aerial attack on Russia over recent days that struck as far as Tatarstan. Western media has been quick to point out the use of western ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles in these attacks and six of each appear to have been used.

What does this all mean?

As talk increases of a possible meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin to discuss ending the war, Volodymyr Zelensky is grasping for a Pearl Harbour moment. Specifically, he wants to provoke Russia into a retaliatory strike against NATO that would be so strategically damaging that NATO would be drawn into Ukraine’s war with Russia.

In that regard, Zelensky is trying to position himself as a modern-day Winston Churchill.

Churchill famously said in a radio broadcast on 9 February 1941 addressing President Roosevelt, ‘Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.’

In April 2024, Zelensky said, ‘We will have a chance for victory if Ukraine really gets the weapon system which we need.’ He has used a different form of the same Churchillian entreaty several times.

In truth, Churchill knew that Britain could only defeat Nazi Germany in western Europe with the industrial might of the United States. So too, Zelensky has always wanted a more direct NATO role in the war, because it has always been clear that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on its own.

History will record that the outcome of World War II was sealed by events far from Europe, but rather in the Pacific, namely the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, on 7 December 1941. That so enraged the United States that they had no choice but to enter the war.

By attacking targets deep inside of Russia using western supplied weapons, Zelensky’s gamble is that Russia will retaliate by striking a significant NATO target inside of Europe.

Keep reading

Without job opportunities in their homeland, Colombians are recruited by Kiev

NATO’s proxy war against Russia through Ukraine has shown significant changes in various aspects, particularly regarding the participation of foreign mercenaries. While, at the start of the war, the flow of fighters was predominantly composed of individuals from Europe and the United States, a notable shift occurred throughout 2024, with a considerable increase in mercenaries from Latin America, especially Colombia. The driving factor behind this growing presence of Latin American fighters is not ideological, but rather economic, with many of these soldiers seeking a way to survive financially abroad, considering the extreme poverty in their home countries.

Colombia, one of the nations most affected by economic inequality in Latin America, serves as an example to understand this reality. With a large portion of the population living below the poverty line, many Colombians see themselves with few viable alternatives to improve their financial situation. For many Colombians, military service appears to be one of the few legal options that guarantees some level of financial stability, albeit modest. However, with scarce job opportunities and a struggling economy that fails to offer appealing alternatives, the chance to participate in the war in Ukraine, where mercenaries’ payments can be much higher, becomes attractive to many ex-soldiers who were previously trained in the Colombian armed forces.

The situation in Ukraine, however, does not turn out to be a “simple battlefield” for these mercenaries, as it might have seemed initially. When the first foreign fighters arrived, particularly Europeans and Americans, many saw the war as an opportunity to test their skills or even to partake in an “adventure.” However, as the conflict intensified, it became clear that the reality of the Ukrainian battlefield was far more brutal than many had imagined. Modern warfare, with its predominant use of heavy artillery, airstrikes, and large-scale exhausting confrontations, is an environment unfamiliar to soldiers who, like many Colombians – as well as Brazilians and other Latin soldier – were used to urban combat and guerrilla warfare, where the use of light weapons at short distances is common.

Keep reading

The Merits Of A Demilitarized “Trans-Dnieper” Region Controlled By Non-Western Peacekeepers

This proposal is the most realistic means for keeping the peace after an armistice.

Bloomberg cited unnamed “people with knowledge of Kremlin thinking” to report that Russia will only demand that Ukraine restore its constitutional neutrality, “drastically cut back military ties with the NATO alliance”, limit its army, and freeze the front lines, albeit with some territorial swaps. Also, “The Kremlin’s position is that while individual NATO members may continue to send arms to Ukraine under bilateral security agreements, any such weapons should not be used against Russia or to recapture territory.”

To be sure, Bloomberg might have either invented their sources or they’re uninformed of what the Kremlin thinks, but there’s also the possibility that they’re accurately reflecting what it plans to ask for during peace talks. Hopefully Russia’s demands of Ukraine are more than what Bloomberg just reported, however, because the aforesaid requests would be settling for much less than it might otherwise be able to achieve as suggested by some of the proposals made at the end of this analysis here.

For instance, any agreement to limit the Ukrainian Armed Forces is meaningless without a monitoring mission paired with credible enforcement mechanisms to enforce compliance. After all, even written guarantees that individual NATO members won’t arm Ukraine for the purpose of using these weapons against Russia or to recapture territory – not to mention purely verbal ones – could be broken. There’s also the question of how Russia would respond to future drone and missile strikes from Ukraine.

The most realistic way to address these concerns is through the participation of only non-Western countries in monitoring and peacekeeping roles, the latter of which could concern deployment along the entire Russian-Ukrainian border, including the Line of Contact (LOC). About the second-mentioned, the reported territorial swaps could see Russia give back its part of Kharkov Oblast in exchange for Ukraine giving back its part of Kursk Oblast, which each would formally retain their territorial claims to the other.

Keep reading

Analyzing Ukraine’s Attempted Drone Strike On TurkStream’s Russian Infrastructure

Here are five observations about Kiev’s latest provocation in terms of the bigger picture.

Russia accused Ukraine of attempting a drone strike against one of TurkStream’s gas compressor stations, which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described as “energy terrorism” while Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that the US greenlighted it in order to obtain an energy monopoly over the EU. This comes less than two weeks after Ukraine cut off Russian gas exports to Europe across its territory. Here are five observations about Kiev’s latest provocation in terms of the bigger picture:

———-

1. This Isn’t The First Attempted Ukrainian Attack Against TurkStream

Ukraine tried to destroy this pipeline at least three times in late 2022 alone, with two of its failed sabotage attempts being analyzed here and here, but this is the first time that it tried using drones. What this shows is that TurkStream remains a priority target for Kiev, yet strangely enough, this hasn’t led to a downturn in ties with Ankara as proven by their continued military cooperation that even includes a drone factory. The latest attempted attack therefore isn’t expected to harm their relations either.

2. Neither Turkiye Nor NATO As A Whole Cares About This Provocation

Turkiye’s stance is difficult to understand, but it either doesn’t believe Russia’s claims of Ukraine attempting to attack TurkStream or it inexplicably believes that it has more to gain from continuing to arm Ukraine in spite of these provocations than to cut it off in response. As for NATO, while member state Hungary condemned this as a violation of its sovereignty due to the country’s partial dependence on that pipeline’s exports, the bloc as a whole predictably doesn’t care since it’s anti-Russian to the core.

3. Ukraine Wanted To Complete Russia & The EU’s Pipeline Decoupling

Ukraine’s motive was to destroy the last operating pipeline between Russia and the EU, which it believed would then make it more difficult for them to enter into a meaningful rapprochement after the conflict ends while also depriving the Kremlin of revenue for financing its ongoing special operation. It was essentially meant to complement September 2022’s Nord Stream terrorist attack in the sense of serving as a geopolitical power play for influencing Europe’s post-war future.

4. Was This A Rogue Deep State Operation Or Was It Approved By Biden?

The first scenario would align with the hypothesis posited here last spring regarding Ukraine’s attacks against Russia’s early warning systems, which were thought to be a desperate attempt at escalation that was later brought under control, while the second would align with the Nord Stream II precedent. Lavrov already blamed the US so the question is the extent to which its elected government was aware of this. The answer will help predict whether or not Trump’s return to office next week will make a difference.

5. How Might Trump React To This Development After Returning To Office?

Building upon the above, rogue deep state behavior would be more difficult for Trump to rein in if he was against what they did, but the precedent of Biden (or rather those who control him) being able to stop Ukraine’s attacks against Russia’s early warning systems suggests that it’s not impossible. On the flip side, it can’t be ruled out that he might support sabotaging TurkStream in order to obtain an energy monopoly over the EU and/or leverage over Turkiye, in which case more such attempts might follow.

Keep reading