Would be crazy if Ukraine regain the Donbas regions, Crimea and evict the Russian fleet from their Sevastopol base.
Just wanted to share this one as well.... It's a picture from the bairns' school where they all took stuff in to send over to Ukraine. Food, toiletries, nappies, first aid kits and stuff. All donated by the parents and puplis.
What a beautiful picture. About 4 years ago, at my son's 8th grade graduation, there were only three girls with blonde hair, and that's out of three hundred plus - and I live in a very good school district.
There is definitely summat up. There is a US E-8C Joint STARS airborne battle management plane and a US Airforce RC-135 Rivet Joint elint aircraft patrolling over Poland down the borders with Belarus and Ukraine, with the usual airborne tanker loitering in the area. Plus there is also a US Beechcraft RC-12 Guardrail airborne sig-int doing a Y shaped patrol over Lithuania so between Kaliningrad and Belarus Down south there is an E3 Sentry AWACS patrolling near the Romania-Moldova border - first time I've seen one of there in the area. NB Tanker support for this has just switched from a US to an Italian airborne tanker.
RQ-4 Global Hawk drone just arriving over the Black Sea. This is way more coverage than I have seen previously. Of course they may have been there previously with their transponders turned off, but I don't think so.
From The Daily Beast Two Russian soldiers have been caught venting about Putin’s “bullshit” war against Ukraine in an intercepted phone call as devastating losses reportedly led one soldier to drive over his colonel with a tank. “Basically, it’s a ****show here, I’ll put it that way,” an unnamed soldier near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine can be heard telling a colleague in a recording released by Ukraine’s Security Service late Tuesday. After telling his friend that Ukrainian forces “tore apart” a column of Russian forces sent along with his own unit, he described complete disarray among the Russian military, with 50 percent of the unit suffering from frostbite on their feet. “But they don’t plan to treat them in the [field] hospital,” he said. On the fourth day of their deployment, he said, the general commanding the unit, General-Lieutenant Yakov Rezantsev, told them it’d be over quickly. “Do you know what he told us? ‘It’s no secret to anyone that there are only a few hours until this special operation is over.’ And now those hours are still going.” He said soldiers are complaining about having Kevlar vests that lack the hard-armor panel, but they are ignored. “‘Comrade General, damn it, I have this situation,’” he recalled troops telling their leader. “And he just says, ‘Son, be strong,’ and then he ****s off. It’s such trash here… our own plane dropped a bomb on us,” he said. “They couldn’t even send off the 200s here,” he said, using a Russian military term for dead bodies. “They rode with us for five days.” “Even in Chechnya, there was nothing like this,” he said, describing the situation as a “madhouse.” “This ‘special operation,’ damnit… with respect to homes not meant to be destroyed… it’s bullshit.” Even though “on TV” they said the Russian troops were advancing, they were actually surrounded “on all sides” by Ukrainian forces, he said. The damning conversation was released as reports surfaced that things were so bad for Russian troops that it led one soldier to attack a colonel he blamed for troop losses. Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsymbaliuk reported Wednesday that two tactical groups of Russian soldiers in Makarov, in the Kyiv region, lost at least half of their men in battles against Ukrainian forces.
Feel sorry for the Russian lads but it’s up to them to walk away not the Ukrainians to stop killing them.
Another snippet from The Daily Beast With the Russian military stagnating in its invasion of Ukraine and suffering significant losses of men and armaments, many are wondering what happened to the huge sums of money designated by the Kremlin to create a well-trained and well-equipped army. Former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev provided one answer on Twitter: “The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus.” The man responsible for the invasion, Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, who had no prior military service before he assumed his defense post in 2012, bears much of the blame for this alleged thievery and the military’s consequent failings in Ukraine.
