#Kremlin drone attack

[ivovynckier]

Russia today. After the drone attack on the Kremlin, Vladimir needs to run an errand.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Last night in Odintsovo near Moscow, a powerful fire. Drone attack suspected, August 10, 2023. Source: IanMatveev

[know-news-is-good-news]

They will get you eventually Vlad ! !

BUT it's NOT the Ukraine ! !

THIS is your own people, and they have had enough ! !

Your time is UP ! !

Vlad in trouble ! !

[torillatavataan]

We Finns know Russia. Russia shares a land border with 14 countries. Only one of them has constantly remained an independent democracy through the Second World War and the Cold War, and that's Finland. History has taught us that Russia respects only strength and resolve.

Russia's current war is based on imperialistic ambition that goes beyond Ukraine. The Kremlin's appetite does not diminish when fed, it only grows.

Take it from us. Whatever happens in this war, Russia will remain a long-term strategic threat to Euro-Atlantic security. Rather than encourage, we need to keep it at bay. Of course, we need to be open for re-engagement in the future if Russia started to adhere to international law again, but going forward, it would be a mistake to let go of our deterrence or rebuild strategic dependency on Russia. And this goes for all of Europe.

So far we have not seen any sign that President Putin has any genuine will to negotiate a lasting agreement — on the contrary. A week ago on Monday, on the third anniversary of Russia's invasion, Russia launched the so far largest drone attack on Ukraine. That is not what you would expect from someone who is truly interested in peace.

There is no reason whatsoever to believe that Putin has moderated his demands from those he laid out in December 2021. Demands that if accepted, would roll back decades of progress in European security. Caving to these demands would expose Europe to further aggression. Instead, our objective must be a just, lasting peace that respects international law, including prohibition of annexation of territory through the use of force.

Let me emphasise. Peace does not and must not mean submission. True peace is built on justice, accountability, and deterrence. We must not mistake a temporary pause for a sustainable peace.

If in doubt, you can ask the Baltic states what kind of peace it was to live under Russian, or back then, Soviet occupation. Deported civilians, missing children, a massive setback in prosperity, and subpar living standards for decades. No political or personal freedoms. You can call that peace, but it's not something the brave Ukrainians have been sacrificing their lives for, or what they or anyone would deserve going forward.

Elina Valtonen, the Finnish Minister for Foreign Affairs

[mariacallous]

As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth year, the toll of relentless drone attacks, grim front-line updates, and the psychological strain of protracted conflict have shifted Ukrainian public opinion. Roughly one-third of Ukrainians surveyed are now open to territorial concessions and 44 percent believe negotiations are overdue.

Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signaled his openness to negotiations and suggested to the Trump administration that U.S. military support—or a potential NATO path—be traded for access to Ukraine’s vast rare earths and natural resources. Instead of strengthening Kyiv’s negotiating position, however, the proposal invited what many Ukrainians view as economic colonization: a draft agreement granting Washington control over critical minerals, oil and gas deposits, strategic infrastructure, and half of Ukraine’s resource extraction revenues—all without firm security guarantees. Ultimately, Ukraine rejected the deal.

At the same time, the diplomatic landscape has grown more complex as U.S. President Donald Trump has decided to end Russia’s international isolation and normalize U.S.-Russia relations. After a three-year effort by the United States to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine, Trump talked to him on the phone last week, which was followed by U.S.-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia. Notably, the conversations excluded Ukrainian and European representatives.

U.S. officials have begun checking off items on Putin’s wish list. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently dismissed the idea of Ukraine joining NATO and urged Kyiv to abandon its goal of reclaiming all occupied territory. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks signaled a growing rift within the Western alliance, which was welcomed by Moscow.

The next possible item on the list? Forcing early elections in Ukraine before any peace agreement is signed—an effort to remove Zelensky from power. On Feb. 18, Trump suggested Ukraine was to blame for starting the war and said Ukraine should have new elections as a precondition for negotiations.

Kyiv may soon find itself caught between two foreign leaders, both eager to see a change in its leadership for their own reasons. Delegitimizing another country’s leader is a familiar ploy in the Russian playbook, and while Ukraine falling back into Russia’s sphere of influence might seem unthinkable now, it could, in fact, become a reality over the course of a decade. Recent Ukrainian history and broader geopolitical trends provide ample evidence of this risk.

Removing Zelensky and initiating elections is exactly what Russia is waiting for. Putin has claimed Zelensky is “illegitimate” because Ukrainian elections scheduled for 2024 were postponed and said he has no right to sign any peace agreements as a result. More importantly, ousting him would allow Putin to claim progress on one of his war’s key objectives: “denazification.” Despite Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, Russian propaganda has cast him as the leader of a “Nazi-controlled” Ukraine—a narrative that Putin has used to justify the invasion and rally domestic support.

Trump has his own grievances. Zelensky was at the center of Trump’s first impeachment, after he attempted to pressure Kyiv into investigating Joe Biden. On Feb. 19, Trump, who has previously criticized Ukraine’s push for U.S. aid, called Zelensky a “dictator without elections,” after the Ukrainian leader said that the U.S. president is living in a “Russian disinformation bubble.”

A change in power would hand Putin the leverage he needs to achieve his ultimate goal—erasing Ukraine as an independent state. Russia has mastered the art of infiltrating foreign governments by using the Kremlin’s well-worn playbook, which includes spreading disinformation, as well as promoting pro-Russian narratives and political candidates. Often referred to as hybrid warfare, it is used to shift the political direction of nations aligned with Western ideals, pulling them back under Moscow’s influence.

In Ukraine’s case, this strategy would allow Russia to exploit internal divisions and political corruption, gradually maneuvering pro-Russian leadership into power through political subversion. From there, Ukraine could be pulled back into Russia’s orbit, especially if the United States continues to treat Kyiv as a resource to be extracted rather than a partner to be defended and if Europe remains unwilling and unable to confront Moscow directly. The consequences of such a scenario would be far more devastating in the long run than any negotiated settlement over territory or security guarantees.

Ukraine’s recent history offers a stark example of how pro-Russian forces can reemerge, even after a seemingly decisive defeat.

The 2004 Orange Revolution famously thwarted Viktor Yanukovych’s presidential ambitions and brought a pro-Western leader, Viktor Yushchenko, to power. But in 2010, just six years later, Yanukovych returned and won the Ukrainian presidency, demonstrating how quickly political momentum can shift. What appeared impossible in 2004 became a sobering fact in 2010, a reminder that Moscow’s favored candidates can rebound if Western support for Ukraine falters or fragments.

The experiences of Georgia and Moldova, too, show that even countries that have faced Russian aggression and partial occupation of their territories can still fall back under the Kremlin’s influence.

Despite Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and ongoing Russian occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Moscow was eventually able to steer the ruling Georgian Dream party toward a pro-Russian position. With the help of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the Georgian government froze European Union accession talks and pushed through a “foreign agents” bill similar to Russian legislation, which was seen by many Georgians as a betrayal of their nation’s pro-Western aspirations. Sustained propaganda, political corruption, and voter intimidation have all contributed to this slow drift eastward.

Moldova’s continued vulnerability is obvious, given the de facto occupation of Transnistria since 1992. The Kremlin’s playbook—spanning clandestine financing of pro-Russian political forces, election meddling, and organized intimidation—resurfaced in Moldova’s recent presidential elections. President Maia Sandu claimed that Russian money aimed to buy 300,000 votes for a pro-Russian candidate. The country staved off a turn toward Russia due to Sandu’s eventual victory, which hinged on the support of Moldovans living abroad, beyond Moscow’s reach.

Additionally, Hungary and Slovakia also show how Russia manipulates political corruption to steer EU and NATO members closer to its orbit.

In Hungary, Moscow capitalizes on Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government through lucrative projects financed largely by Russian loans and high-profile sponsorship deals, such as Gazprom’s support for the Ferencvaros football club. Such economic entanglements benefit Orban’s inner circle while pro-Russian media outlets like Voice of Europe spread Kremlin-friendly narratives. Hungary has become a low-risk hub for Russian intelligence activities and a shield for key Kremlin allies from EU sanctions, positioning Budapest as a Trojan horse within Western institutions.

Slovakia, meanwhile, offers a parallel cautionary tale. By fueling disinformation networks that framed NATO and the United States as aggressors in Ukraine, the Kremlin helped propel nationalist leader Robert Fico back to power in Slovakia’s 2023 parliamentary elections. Once in office, Fico halted direct arms shipments to Ukraine. His next step was to weaken democratic safeguards by dismantling the Special Prosecutor’s Office, which was investigating corruption cases and taking greater control over media. Today, Fico continues to align Slovakia’s policies more closely with Russian interests.

These examples demonstrate how consistently Russia applies the same methods, from choosing and backing a figure with electoral prospects to installing authoritarian pro-Russian regimes, funding them through corruption and supporting them by spreading disinformation.

If Ukraine is pushed into early elections now, Moscow would have the perfect opportunity to promote a candidate who promises an end to the bloodshed, a return to “normalization” with Russia to avoid everyday terror, or simply a seat at the negotiating table—offering, at least on the surface, better terms than Zelensky’s isolation.

A Kremlin-backed candidate wouldn’t need to win outright; they would only need to fracture Ukraine’s political landscape, erode unity, and create a perception that a pro-Russian alternative is viable. In the short term, this might appear as a path to peace, offering war-weary Ukrainians relief from relentless attacks. However, in the long run, it would pull Ukraine back under Russia’s influence, especially without a strong Western alternative to counterbalance Moscow’s grip.

For Trump, this would amount to a strategic loss, allowing Russia to achieve its objectives without a military victory. Worse, it could happen before the end of his term, shaping a legacy of defeat in one of the most significant conflicts of the 21st century. This would not only empower Moscow but also send a message to U.S. allies across the world that U.S. commitments are unreliable.

If Ukraine falls, the Kremlin’s success would echo far beyond Eastern Europe, encouraging further geopolitical shifts in Russia’s and, more importantly, China’s favor. To prevent this, the Trump administration should approach Ukraine’s future with patience and strategy, resisting quick fixes that could ultimately embolden the Kremlin and signal waning U.S. influence on the global stage.

[forgetmenotseason]

Kiev breaks energy ceasefire five times in 24 hours – Moscow

The US-mediated moratorium was intended to safeguard crucial infrastructure on both sides of the Ukraine conflict

Ukrainian forces have launched five separate attacks against Russian energy infrastructure in 24 hours, the Defense Ministry in Moscow reported on Friday. The strikes are the latest breach by Kiev of a US-mediated ceasefire on such attacks, the ministry said.

The listed incidents included shelling against elements of the Russian power grid and a drone strike against a transformer station, all causing disruptions in electricity supply, according to the ministry.

A partial ceasefire was announced by Russia on March 18, after President Vladimir Putin held a phone call with his US counterpart, Donald Trump. Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has publicly supported the idea, but also complained that Russia wouldn’t agree to a full ceasefire. Putin cited difficulties with monitoring violations along the lengthy front line and the potential for Kiev to use the pause for military build-up, explaining his concerns about a full truce. Russia continues to honor the ceasefire on energy strikes despite Ukrainian breaches, the Defense Ministry said on Friday.

The Russian military has reported Ukrainian attacks breaching the moratorium on a daily basis, some of them involving long-range kamikaze drones targeting major energy facilities on Russian soil. The Defense Ministry has described the incidents as demonstrating Kiev’s duplicity.

The Kremlin has said that while Moscow reserves the right to pull out of the 30-day agreement early, it opts to honor the deal to build goodwill with Washington.

The latest military update comes amid speculation that Trump’s special diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, who is currently visiting Russia, may meet Putin in St. Petersburg later in the day. Witkoff has met with the Russian leader twice already this year, and is closely involved in the attempt to normalize bilateral relations between the two nations.

source

[shamanicnoise]

The cringe story was in the news today..

Some stupid idiot from the USA decided to become a "hippie" in 2023, went to Europe for a hippie festival, then to Turkey, and then to ruzzia, ​​where he decided to help the orcs, kill, rob, rape, and enslave my people… because he doesn't like "capitalism" and the USA. This idiot fell under the influence of conspiracy theory, communism, and other crap fashionable among naive fools…

The Orcs deceived the useful idiot as usual, and sent the degenerate to the famous classic russian suicide meat attack, where fortunately he died in 2024…

Also, this scum was going to relax and enjoy the sea and festivals in Crimea, from where missiles and kamikaze drones also fly… also every day they blow up houses with sleeping people, children, the elderly, in hospitals, churches and schools in Ukraine.

The dramatic nature of the story about hippies and Crimea is that the occupation of Crimea and the war and genocide of Ukrainians became possible only because Ukraine voluntarily gave up one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world and a huge number of weapons because they saw no point in war and believed that pacifism works...

Most people don't know what the occupation of Crimea meant for Ukrainian hippies… I'll explain.. Until 2014 it was something like San Francisco… like in that song about flowers in your hair… you could find your people there.. but then the orcs attacked and occupied everything..

Imagine a parallel reality where in 1967 a huge armada of cannibal neo-Nazis lands on the shores of California, from where they expel, kill or put in concentration camps everyone who doesn't welcome Hitler, who is in any way different from an "Aryan". And the whole world, looking at this, simply said: "it's a pity, but what can you do... Sorry, but we have business with the Reich. And you are pacifist, you have no money, you have no cards, just say thanks.."

.… and then such "hippies" as that dead stupid bastard are going to come there, he is going to enjoy the sea that was stolen.. He even joins the ranks of the Reich.. But what's sadder is that it's 1979 when neo-Nazis occupy even more states and launch terrorist missiles at other states, and it's been clear to everyone for a long time that they are real neo-Nazis.

Once again confirms the horseshoe theory, which claims that the far-left are just as scum as the far-right.

There's a lot I want to say, but I'm too emotional…

It's good that that scum is dead.. sometimes I think again that karma exists..

I want to say that if you have friends who love conspiracy theories, or are passionate about left-wing ideas, you should understand that the Kremlin finances not only the right but also the left… they know how to brainwash, especially via the Internet. Don't let your friends go fight for the orcs and do evil…

What a disgrace.. for the entire counterculture, for all alternative humanity, for the entire psychedelic wave, that this is even possible, and that someone needs to explain it.

That stupid guy, judging by everything, was essentially a left-wing normie and didn't communicate with the hippies for long, unfortunately they didn't have time or brains or energy to explain anything to him, didn't have time to teach him anything, didn't have time to show him anything. But the orc propaganda did have time and managed to put into his head what the "sponsor" paid for, and the fool went to help the orcs kill me and my people, after which he died.

Stupid and scary story, dude should have read Timothy Leary instead of communist bastards.

Rest in piss, moron.

[olekciy]

A week ago, on 4 April, Russian ballistic missile strike on the residential area of Kryvyi Rih, the industrial heart of Ukraine, killed 20 civilians, including 9 children (one of the hits was on a playground); 75+ people were wounded.

Today, on 13 April (on Christian Palm Sunday and Jewish Passover), a double ballistic missile strike on the city of Sumy killed at least 34 civilians; 117+ people were wounded. The second strike was deliberately shelled at rescue efforts, as the Russian invaders have been hunting on emergency workers on many occasions. Russian attacks today targeted civilians in other places in Ukraine as well (they killed two women in Kupiansk in Kharkiv Oblast; a kamikaze drone fell near an anarchist squat in Odesa).

While Putin continues to escalate his war crimes with impunity, his partner Trump, along with his minions, insists on the “goodwill” of the Russians and their supposed “compliance” with “deals”. Trump's buffoonish emissaries daydream about partitioning Ukraine to occupation zones as if it were post-WWII Nazi Germany, spouting utterly anti-historical nonsense (like naming “Khrushchev's gifts to Ukraine” all the regions illegally proclaimed part of Russia in the course of this invasion - including places they couldn't occupy like Zaporizhia, the actual hotbed of Ukrainian Cossacks) just to justify their craving for Trump-Putin global reactionary Axis 2.0.

Russian propaganda claims they're not killing countless civilians in peaceful cities, but mythical gazillions of “foreign instructors.” The most cynical attacks on civilian infrastructure are usually accompanied by the tired excuse: “We don’t strike civilians, only military targets” — whether it’s been German Nazis, Americans in Iraq, IDF in Palestine, or Russians in Syria and Ukraine now. And still, one can find plethora of useless idiots in the West who'll perpetuate the myth of Kremlin's eagerness for “ceasefire” and “peace”.

[tomorrowusa]

Ukraine is said to have provided intelligence which led to deadly attacks by insurgents on Russian mercenaries in the West African nation of Mali. FYI: Tinzaouaten, the city closest to the attacks in Mali, is 2,440 miles/3,928 km from Ukraine's port city of Odesa.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has claimed it was involved in an ambush that killed fighters from Russia’s Wagner group in the west African nation of Mali, thousands of miles away from the frontline in Ukraine. A Telegram channel linked to the Wagner leadership on Monday admitted the group had suffered heavy losses during fighting in Mali last week. It said Wagner and the Malian armed forces had “fought fierce battles” over a five-day period against a coalition of Tuareg separatist forces and jihadi groups, who had used heavy weapons, drones and suicide bombers. Numerous Wagner fighters, including a commander, Sergei Shevchenko, were killed, the channel said. Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, said on Monday that “the rebels received necessary information, and not just information, which enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals”. Yusov did not say whether Ukrainian military personnel were involved in the fighting or were present in the country. He said the agency “won’t discuss the details at the moment, but there will be more to come”. The Mali government, which has been fighting various insurgencies in the north of the country for more than a decade, requested help from Wagner after a military junta took power in 2020.

The Wagner Group is still around but under new management since Putin killed off its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.

So why is Russia in Africa?

The group is also active across Africa, and continues to be so even after Prigozhin was disgraced following a failed coup attempt last summer. He later died after an explosion onboard his plane, widely believed to have been ordered by the Kremlin, but Wagner’s influence in Africa remains. “For Moscow, the African countries where Wagner is present is just a zone of interest that allows it to get hold of resources – gold, diamonds, gas and oil – and the money goes to finance Russian aggression,” said Serhii Kuzan, director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center in Kyiv, explaining why Ukraine might want to target Wagner in Africa. He added that the raids had additional benefits for Kyiv: “liquidating” some of the most experienced Wagner fighters and lowering the overall military potential of the group, and also exacting revenge for war crimes in Ukraine. “A significant part of the destroyed fighters got military experience in Ukraine, where they carried out hundreds or thousands of war crimes … these crimes should be punished, and Russian war criminals should know that they will never be safe,” said Kuzan.

Ukrainian intelligence has a long reach and Ukraine has a long memory for war crimes committed by the invaders.

On a linguistic note, GUR should realistically be written HUR. The full name of Ukrainian military intelligence is: Головне Управління Розвідки Міністерства Оборони України (Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine). For short, that's Головне Управління Розвідки.

In Russian, Г is pronounced like the English hard G. In Ukrainian, Г is pronounced like a regular English H. There's a separate letter in Ukrainian for English hard G written like this Ґ. But the Soviet Union tried to suppress this letter because its existence was another reminder that Ukrainian is not Russian. So there's been some lingering alphabetic confusion over the use of this letter. But I promise you that it is preferable to transliterate ГУР as HUR.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Details: The ISW states that several indicators suggest that the strike was designed by Russia internally(..)

P.S. Long-term personal experience shows that any information spread by the Russians should be taken as BS at first until the opposite is confirmed. Too many things related to this incident look very strange and illogical. First of all, the information did not appear immediately...in the morning. All signs point to another "Ryazan sugar"...

[liberty1776]

Scott Ritter on the drone attack against the Kremlin

[partisan-by-default]

The Trump administration said Tuesday that it would immediately lift its suspension of military aid to Ukraine and its intelligence sharing with Kyiv, a week after imposing the measures to push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to enter talks to end the war with invading Russian forces.

Ukraine also said it was open to a 30-day cease-fire in the war with Russia, subject to Kremlin agreement.

The announcements emerged as senior officials from Ukraine and the United States opened talks in Saudi Arabia focused on ending Moscow’s three-year war against Kyiv and hours after Russia shot down over 300 Ukrainian drones. It was Ukraine’s biggest attack since the Kremlin ordered the full-scale invasion of its neighbor.

President Donald Trump ‘s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, is expected to travel later this week to Moscow, where he could meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a person familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment publicly. The person cautioned that scheduling could change.

[misfitwashere]

Moscow Terror

A Chronology that Might Help Predict

Timothy Snyder

Mar 22, 2024

1. US warns that Russia will invade Ukraine.  General disbelief, daily Russian mockery. (December 3 2021-February 24 2022)

2.  Russia invades Ukraine, kills tens of thousands of people, kidnaps tens of thousands of children, commits other ongoing war crimes (February 24 2022-present)

3.  Russia blames US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine (March 2022-present)

4. US warns of terror attack in Moscow.  Putin denies any risk and mocks the United States. (March 7 and March 19 2024).Since Russia invaded Ukraine, its riot police and security forces have been tasked with terror measures in Ukraine and suppressing dissent in Russia.

5.  Terror attack near Moscow, ISIS takes responsibility, Russia meanwhile kills Ukrainian citizens with drones and missiles as it has for more than two years. (today, March 22 2024)

6.  Russia's security apparatus, focused on bringing carnage to Ukraine, has failed in Moscow.  Russia's leaders, focused on demonizing the US, did not protect Russians.  What next?  Where to direct the blame?

7.  It would not be very surprising if the Kremlin blames Ukraine and the United States for terror in Moscow and uses the Moscow attack to justify continuing and future atrocities in Ukraine.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Rachel O'Donoghue

Two incidents came to light over the past week that should be the final nail in Al Jazeera‘s credibility coffin.

The first was the unmasking of one of the network’s journalists as a Hamas commander.

The IDF revealed evidence that was obtained from a laptop found in Gaza and showed Mohammed Wishah held a senior role in the terrorist group’s anti-tank unit, including photographs of him teaching young jihadis how to fire anti-tank missiles and making incendiary devices.

Unsurprisingly, Wishah’s terrorist background did not preclude him from securing a comfortable reporting job at the Qatari-owned network, which has previously been forced to take down fake anti-Israel stories and stands accused of repeatedly promoting Hamas propaganda.

The second incident involved another Al Jazeera journalist, Ismail Abu Omar, whose leg was amputated after being injured in an Israeli air strike in Rafah.

Around the same time that Al Jazeera was describing the injuries Omar sustained as proof of a “full-fledged crime [to be] added to Israel’s crimes against journalists,” it was revealed that Omar accompanied Hamas terrorists into Israel on the day of the October 7 massacre.

In footage that Omar himself posted online on the day of the attacks, he can be seen inside Kibbutz Nir Oz and even praised the Hamas terrorists carrying out the atrocities, saying: “The friends have progressed, may God bless.”

On October 7, he also boasted that Palestinian children would “play with their heads” in reference to massacred Israeli civilians.

Despite the trend of Al Jazeera employees moonlighting as either Hamas supporters or seasoned Hamas terrorists, which included another two journalists being revealed as terror operatives after their deaths in January, the media continue to ignore the unpleasant truth about Al Jazeera.

Indeed, the very same outlets that quite rightly balk at the idea of trusting media controlled by authoritarian regimes, such as Russia Today or the New China News Agency, seem worryingly comfortable with uncritically regurgitating Al Jazeera’s lies. Worse, they seem to actively cover for the network.

Take The Guardian, for example, and its repeated criticism of Russian state-owned media, which it has accused of being “Vladimir Putin’s fake news factories” and of promoting the “Kremlin message.”

But apparently, such ethical concerns don’t extend to uncritically reprinting the claims of an outlet that is effectively owned by an Islamic regime that is headed by the all-powerful Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

The Guardian failed to do a modicum of journalistic due diligence when it came to reporting Al Jazeera’s absurd claim that Omar was “directly targeted by a missile fired by a drone.”

Did the article state that Omar accompanied terrorists who murdered and raped civilians during the October 7 massacre? No. Did it reveal that he expressed a wish to see Palestinian kids play with the severed heads of Israelis? No. Did it mention that Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari state and closely aligned itself with Hamas? Of course not.

The Guardian journalist who wrote the piece, Peter Beaumont, even had the audacity to lament how “Al Jazeera’s Gaza team has paid a particularly heavy price during the war” while referencing the deaths of Hamza Al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya and omitting the fact that they were terror operatives.

As for Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah, whose Instagram page includes photos of him with Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, The Guardian failed to cover his exposure as a Hamas commander at all.

Of course, The Guardian wasn’t alone in not reporting the damning revelations about Al Jazeera.

There was silence among mainstream Western news outlets — from CNN to The Washington Post — when the evidence against Mohammed Wishah emerged. It almost defies belief that not a single story was written about a journalist tasked with reporting the facts out of Gaza who was also a Hamas terrorist.

The Knesset has started advancing a bill that would give the government the power to close the offices of foreign media channels that are found to be likely to harm the security of the state, including, potentially Al Jazeera.

But the foreign press attitude toward Al Jazeera remains stubbornly positive.

How much more evidence of the network’s terror ties does the media need for that to change?

[mariacallous]

One of the bleakest places on Earth today is the central processing facility for the remains of dead soldiers in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the logistical hub of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Designed to process hundreds of corpses at a time, this sprawling mega-morgue has been hopelessly overwhelmed for many months. Footage from the inside, posted by witnesses on social media, shows hundreds of bodies in various stages of decomposition and limbs strewn across the corridor floors. In wooden boxes lining the walls from floor to ceiling, row after row after row, are the lucky ones: those whose bodies were recovered from the battlefield, identified, sealed in zinc-lined caskets, and prepared for dispatch to their grieving relatives in the farthest corners of Russia. Many more corpses have been abandoned to rot in Ukrainian fields because evacuating them is impractical under the constant barrage of the defenders’ artillery and drones.

To be sure: These soldiers’ deaths are the necessary consequence of Ukraine’s right to defend itself against an illegal war of conquest. What’s more, many of these ordinary Russian soldiers likely committed despicable brutality and war crimes against Ukrainians, including defenseless civilians. But the horrific rate at which Russians are getting killed at the front—much higher than corresponding Ukrainian losses, although exact numbers are kept secret by both sides—points to two disturbing truths about the Russian way of waging war. First, a cruel disregard for human life extends to Russia’s own forces, which the Kremlin systematically deploys in so-called meat grinder and human-wave attacks. Second, mass death among Russian troops has become part of an increasingly explicit eugenics policy, by which the Kremlin seeks to rid Russia of undesirable elements and reconfigure the Russian population. The eugenics aspect of Russia’s war has long been an open secret, widely discussed on Russian talk shows and social media. Now, a high-ranking Russian politician has made it plain for the first time.

The numbers boggle the mind. With an estimated rate of 1,500 casualties per day, October was the bloodiest month of the war for Russia as President Vladimir Putin throws everything he has into battle. Estimates for total Russian war deaths range from 115,000 to 160,000, more than 10 times Soviet combat deaths in Afghanistan. Total Russian casualties—killed and wounded—are estimated at around 800,000. According to Anastasia Kashevarova, a rabidly pro-war Russian journalist, the average Russian infantry soldier lasts less than one month at the front before being killed. With casualties exceeding Russia’s ability to recruit fresh soldiers, few of the troops receive any serious training before they’re sent to assault the Ukrainian lines.

It’s not just lives that Russia is losing in astonishing numbers—equipment, too, is being lost at a rate far beyond what’s possible to replenish from weapons production or dwindling stocks. According to WarSpotting, an open-source intelligence project that uses video confirmation to track Russian equipment losses, Russia lost more than 500 pieces of heavy equipment in October—including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and aircraft—twice as many as during the Battle of Grozny from 1994 to 1995, whose catastrophic losses in men and equipment demoralized Russian forces and society at the time. Today, some of the largest Russian military storage bases have almost been stripped clear of equipment, with even old Soviet-era tanks and armored vehicles dragged to the front.

Russian politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens, who fantasize publicly about mass murdering Ukrainians, make no secret of the view that their own soldiers’ lives are worth hardly more. The shift to World War II-style meat grinder tactics has been widely and passionately discussed on pro-war Telegram channels since the battle for Bakhmut, which began in the summer of 2022 and lasted almost an entire year. The battle marked a doctrinal shift from the failed concept of battalion tactical groups—composed of some of the most elite and efficient Russian units, such as paratrooper and special forces regiments—to Soviet-style mass frontal assaults.

In Bakhmut, Wagner Group commander Yevgeny Prigozhin introduced what is now the standard Russian tactic of sending human wave after human wave of disposable infantry into the assault until the Ukrainian defenders’ guns jam or run out of bullets. In Wagner’s case, these were mainly convicts recruited from prisons with promises of freedom and mercenaries lured by exorbitant pay. Russia finally won the yearlong fight over the city’s smoldering ruins at the cost of at least 20,000 Wagner mercenaries alone. Later, the meat grinder policy was adopted for the entire Russian army, with each major unit setting up assault groups for that purpose.

It has been a terrifyingly effective tactic, but Russian casualties incurred by it are beyond comparison in recent military history. The battle for the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka alone may have cost around 16,000 Russian lives—and that appears to be a very conservative estimate circulated by Russian pro-war bloggers, who generally have an incentive to downplay their own side’s losses.

But Russian disregard for life is not just a question of battlefield tactics. What stands out is the deliberate cruelty. The Russian military has stunned the world with its wanton brutality toward Ukrainian civilians—including widespread rape, torture, killings, and abductions—and prisoners of war. (The latter are now routinely executed, another in a long list of Russian war crimes.) But the cruelty dispensed by officers on their own subordinates is also shocking. Russian Telegram channels are full of accounts of soldiers tortured for refusing or questioning orders, of seriously wounded troops sent to a certain death in an assault, and of Soviet-style barrier troops behind the front line, whose sole job is to shoot shirkers and deserters—also known as nullification. Suicidal human-wave attacks are both a means and an end: Commanders have reportedly assigned soldiers to these expendable units as a punishment for various disagreements or for the failure to pay a bribe.

Under these circumstances, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many Russian soldiers choose to end their lives. By now, there are hundreds of videos online showing Russian soldiers shooting themselves through the mouth to spare themselves an even grislier death, knowing that there is little hope for medical evacuation on the Russian side.

An even more sinister aspect of Russia’s disregard of the value of life is the increasingly open framing of the war as a national eugenics project. “Spare people” with low “social value” is how Russian parliamentarian Aleksandr Borodai described his compatriots sent as cannon fodder to Ukraine in a leaked tape, the authenticity of which he later confirmed. Expendable manpower, he explained, can be thrown at Ukraine’s “bravest [and] boldest,” and “exhaust the enemy to the maximum.” Borodai isn’t just anybody: He’s a political consultant from Moscow who declared himself prime minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine in 2014, and he’s now a member of the Russian parliament for the ruling United Russia party. Coming from someone this prominent, it is essentially a confirmation of how Russia is running the war.

That the war has changed the composition of the Russian population has long been clear from the incomparably higher rates at which non-Russian ethnic minorities—Buryats, Tatars, Tuvans—are dying in the war. But these are not the only disfavored parts of the Russian population while the Russian leadership shields the politically important populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where unrest could endanger the regime and where much of the Russian elite resides. Prisons have been virtually emptied as inmates are sent to the bloodiest sections of the front. And the protection of the major urban populations in European Russia means that the more remote, poorer, and less ethnically Russian regions are bleeding out.

To compensate for the deliberate loss of “expendables” at the front, a crucial part of Moscow’s eugenics program is played by Ukrainians. Several million Ukrainians have been removed from the occupied territories and resettled in Russia, a disproportionate share of them women and children. In their place, Russian settlers are moving in. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of these abducted children are now being Russified to strip them of any Ukrainian identity, a clear echo of the Nazi eugenics policy of shipping blond Polish children back to the Reich to be adopted and turned into Germans. Some of the Ukrainian boys are now old enough to be forcibly conscripted into the Russian army—yet another war crime on an already long list.

Russia still has numerical superiority, but its resources are not infinite. The suicidal Russian strategy of waging war, while effective, is not sustainable in the long term, especially with the Russian economy already showing signs of immense strain.

The fate of Russia’s invasion now effectively hinges on Western willingness to commit to Ukraine’s push for independence from Russia’s neo-imperialist aspirations. U.S. President Joe Biden’s final weeks in office may yet prove to be critical: His decision to grant Ukraine permission to strike key military targets inside parts of Russia with U.S.- and British-supplied weapons has already elicited an angry response from Moscow, even if there is nothing new about Ukraine using Western arms to strike vital targets in what Russia considers its lands, including illegally annexed Crimea. It’s up to the West to help Ukraine make sure that Putin loses his gamble as he throws everything he has against Ukraine before his equipment and trained soldiers run out. Catastrophic human losses won’t deter him, as they are deeply ingrained in Russia’s cruel way of waging war.