#luhansk oblast

[dontforgetukraine]

A soldier of 12th Special Forces Brigade “Azov” walks in the trench in Serebryansky Forest in Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine on Oct. 12, 2023. 

[athis333]

In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time. “If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

Eight decades later, as a fascistic Russian regime wages war against Ukraine, a motley collection of voices from across the political spectrum has called upon the United States and its allies to adopt neutrality as their position. Ranging from anti-imperialists on the left to isolationists on the right and more respectable “realists” in between, these critics are not pacifists in the strict sense of the term. Few if any oppose the use of force as a matter of principle. But nor are they neutral. It is not sufficient, they say, for the West to cut off its supply of defensive weaponry to Ukraine. It must also atone for “provoking” Russia to attack its smaller, peaceful, democratic neighbor, and work at finding a resolution that satisfies what Moscow calls its “legitimate security interests.” In this, today’s anti-war caucus is objectively pro-fascist.

To appreciate the bizarrely kaleidoscopic nature of this caucus, consider the career of a catchphrase. “Is Washington Fighting Russia Down to the Last Ukrainian?” asked the headline of a column self-published in March by Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and presidential candidate. It was a strange question for Paul to be posing just three weeks into President Vladimir Putin’s unjustifiable and unforgivable invasion, especially considering the extraordinary lengths to which the Biden administration had gone to avoid “fighting Russia.”

Even stranger than Paul’s assertion that the U.S. was goading Ukrainians into sacrificing themselves on the altar of its Russophobic bloodlust, though, has been the proliferation of his specious talking point across the ideological spectrum.

Ten days after Paul accused his country of treating Ukrainians as cannon fodder, the retired American diplomat Chas Freeman repeated the quip. “We will fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence,” Freeman declared sarcastically—even as he excused Russia’s “special military operation” as an understandable reaction to being “stiff-armed” by the West on the “28-year-old demands that NATO stop enlarging in the direction of Russia.” Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, made these remarks in an interview with The GrayZone, a self-described “independent news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.”

Although The GrayZone would characterize itself as an “anti-imperialist” news source, the opaquely financed publication is highly selective in the empires it chooses to scrutinize; it is difficult to find criticism of Russia or China—or any other American adversary—on its site. A more accurate descriptor of its ideological outlook is “campist,” denoting a segment of the sectarian far left that sees the world as divided into two camps: the imperialist West and the anti-imperialist rest.

Freeman, who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his 1972 visit to China, seemed to feel at home in The GrayZone. In that Manichaean domain—one that lacks, naturally, any shades of gray—no anti-Western tyrant is too brutal for fawning adulation, and America is always to blame. A Republican foreign-policy hand in conversation with a fringe leftist website might seem like an odd pairing, but Freeman has a fondness for dictators.

In 2009, when Freeman was appointed to serve on the National Intelligence Council during the first year of the Obama administration, a series of leaked emails revealed a window into his worldview. Observing the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Freeman praised the Chinese Communist Party for its bloody crackdown on peaceful student demonstrators; his only criticism of its dispersal of this “mob scene” was that it had been “overly cautious” in displaying “ill-conceived restraint.” It is quite something to read a retired American diplomat criticizing the Chinese regime for being too soft during the Tiananmen massacre, but such views are not as aberrational as they sound. Within the school of foreign-policy “realism,” notions of morality are seen as quaint distractions from the real business of great-power politics.

In April, it was Noam Chomsky’s turn to recite the Pauline mantra in a podcast with the editor of Current Affairs, a leftist magazine. Going out of his way to praise Freeman as “one of the most astute and respected figures in current U.S. diplomatic circles,” the world’s most famous radical intellectual endorsed the crusty veteran of realist GOP administrations for characterizing American policy in Eastern Europe as “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

From Chomsky’s mouth to Putin’s ears.

“A great deal is being said about the United States’ intention to fight against Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’—they say it there and they say it here,” the Russian president mused the following week, prefacing his mention of the gibe with his own version of that Trumpian rhetorical flourish, “A lot of people are saying.” That same month, an American Conservative article by Doug Bandow of the libertarian Cato Institute was headlined “Washington Will Fight Russia to the Last Ukrainian,” denying Ukrainians any agency in their own struggle by answering the question Paul had rhetorically asked.

Soon after, the dean of realist international-relations theorists, the University of Chicago scholar  John Mearsheimer, used the line as though he’d just thought of it. By then, the argument that America was “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian” had ping-ponged between both ends of the ideological spectrum an astonishing number of times. The point for the anti-imperialist left and the isolationist right, as well as the realist fellow travelers hitched to each side, was that blame for the conflict lies mainly with the U.S., which is using Ukraine as a proxy for its nefarious interventionism in Moscow’s backyard.

That the fringe left would blame America—which it views as the source of all capitalist exploitation, military aggression, and imperialist evil in the world—for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is predictable. It blames America for everything. When, two days after the Russian invasion began on February 24, the Democratic Socialists of America called upon “the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” mainstream Democrats condemned the statement. More significant has been the position taken by mainstream realists, who similarly fault the West for somehow “provoking” Russia into waging war on its neighbor. These politically disparate forces share more than a talking point. They also have a worldview in common.

Consider America’s leading realist think tank, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. This “transpartisan” group enjoyed great fanfare upon its founding, in 2019, with seed funding from the libertarian Charles Koch and the left-wing George Soros. After two decades of “forever wars,” here at last was an ideologically diverse assortment of reasonable, sober-minded experts committed to pursuing a “foreign policy of restraint.” But counseling restraint as a rapacious, revisionist dictatorship wages total war on its smaller, democratic neighbor had a whiff of appeasement for at least one of Quincy’s fellows, leading to a split within the organization.

“The institute is ignoring the dangers and the horrors of Russia’s invasion and occupation,” Joe Cirincione, a nuclear non-proliferation expert and one of the group’s leading left-of-center scholars, said upon his resignation this summer, adding that Quincy “focuses almost exclusively on criticism of the United States, NATO, and Ukraine. They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies.”

The moral myopia Cirincione identifies is an essential trait of the new online magazine Compact, where self-styled anti-woke Marxists and Catholic theocrats unite in their loathing of classical liberal values at home and their opposition to defending those values abroad. In an article titled “Fueling Zelensky’s War Hurts America,” the left-wing writer Batya Ungar-Sargon took issue with the U.S. supplying defensive weaponry to Kyiv, arguing that resources devoted to supporting Ukrainians would be better spent helping economically disadvantaged Americans.

Pushing the United States to prioritize the needs of its poorest citizens, even if that means forgoing its responsibilities for maintaining the European security order, is at least an intellectually defensible position (if a shortsighted and reductive one). But Ungar-Sargon also went out of her way to give credence to Russia’s specious territorial claims.

“If Ukraine’s territorial integrity were of such immense national interest,” she wrote, “surely we would have climbed the rapid-escalation ladder back in 2014, when Moscow invaded and annexed Crimea—a move that a referendum found was popular among Crimeans.” The plebiscite Ungar-Sargon endorsed was held under Russian gunpoint to provide a legal fig leaf for the first armed annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II. She also identified Donetsk and Luhansk—the two Russian-backed separatist enclaves in Eastern Ukraine that Putin recognized as puppet states on the eve of his invasion and where he has now held similarly meaningless referenda annexing them to Russia—as “independent republics,” conferring a legitimacy that was in marked contrast to the way she referred dismissively to “the United States and its European satrapies.”

Many commentators have likened Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill for his charismatic resistance to foreign invaders and his ability to raise the morale of his people. In light of this popular association, the headline that the editors of Compact devised for Ungar-Sargon’s apologia—“Zelensky’s War”—is nauseating, blaming the victim while seeming to evoke the title of a notorious book by the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, Churchill’s War.

Condemning the U.S. and its allies for the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine requires one to ignore or downplay a great deal of Russian misbehavior. This is a characteristic that unites left-wing anti-imperialists, right-wing isolationists, and the ostensibly more respectable “realists.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe,” Mearsheimer wrote in a 2014 essay titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.” “But this account is wrong.” Eight years on, as Russian forces marched toward Kyiv and Putin issued vague threats of nuclear escalation, Mearsheimer made no acknowledgment of how very wrong his own earlier, sanguine assessment of Putin’s intentions had been.

“We invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine,” he told The New Yorker a week into the invasion. Putin’s apparent goal of overthrowing Zelensky and installing a puppet regime would not be an example of “imperialism,” Mearsheimer argued, and was meaningfully different from “conquering and holding onto Kyiv.” All of this linguistic legerdemain would surely come as news to the Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, and other peoples of the region who once suffered under the Russian imperial yoke.

As evidence of Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians mounts, Mearsheimer has cleaved to his position that NATO enlargement is to blame for the war. “I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO,” he also told The New Yorker. Although the NATO communiqué did express the alliance’s hope that the two former Soviet republics would become members at some indefinite point in the future, it came after France and Germany had successfully blocked a proposal by the Bush administration to offer Ukraine and Georgia an actual path to membership. But even if the U.S. had made such a promise, how would that justify the invasion and occupation of Ukraine? Mearsheimer also ignores the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, according to which the United States, Britain, and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine surrendering its nuclear weapons. This concord lasted for 20 years, until Putin abrogated it by invading and occupying Crimea.

Even more obtuse are the excuses for Russian aggression made by Mearsheimer’s fellow academic realist, the Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs has worked as an adviser to a host of international institutions, such as the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, as a development economist. Unlike Mearsheimer, he has no particular expertise in foreign political affairs, but this has not stopped him from pronouncing on geopolitical issues. Last December, as Russia was amassing its forces on Ukraine’s border, Sachs suggested that “NATO should take Ukraine’s membership off the table, and Russia should forswear any invasion.” This ignored the fact that Russia had already invaded the country in 2014.

Seeking to explain “the West’s false narrative” about Ukraine after the war began, Sachs noted, “Since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria and Yemen to name just a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.” This sentence contains two significant qualifications. First, Sachs’s counting only those “wars of choice” that Russia waged “beyond the former Soviet Union” implies that its invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were permissible through some sort of Cold War–continuity droit de seigneur. Second, Sachs’s selection of 1980 as the starting point for his comparison conveniently excludes the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began in December 1979 and became the Red Army’s own forever war, lasting almost 10 years and playing a crucial role in the Soviet Union’s demise.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed the incompetence of the Russian military and the hubris of President Putin. It has also revealed the bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people, who, contrary to Ron Paul’s ambulatory talking point, had no need of any American to prod or gull them into defending their homeland. Here in the U.S., the war has also exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of an ideologically diverse set of foreign-policy commentators: the “anti-imperialists” who routinely justify blatant acts of imperial conquest, and the “realists” who make arguments unmoored from reality.

[classyclips]

The enemy is trying to create reserves from local residents of temporarily occupied territories.

The goal is the emergency replenishment of the front-line units of their troops, which are daily experiencing large losses in manpower.

In some settlements on the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine, the Russian invaders carry out raids and detain local residents.

During roundups, all detainees are checked for loyalty to the occupation regime, and men who are old enough to be called up for military service are arrested, mostly on false pretenses.

As a rule, those arrested in this way are sent to specially equipped field camps, in which criminals brought from Russian prisons who have agreed to participate in hostilities are already being held.

Currently, several such camps have been set up near the settlements of Rohove and Mozhnikivka in the Luhansk region, to which batches of recruited prisoners are delivered under convoy from Russia.

Local men who were detained for minor offenses and did not agree to support the occupiers are being held together with them.

By the end of May, the number of personnel in the camps is expected to increase with the arrival of two more batches of prisoners from Russia, convicted mainly for committing murders with particular cruelty.

Today, there are more than 800 people in these camps, who are undergoing intensive combat training, which is planned to be completed within one month.

After the prisoners undergo a combat training course, contracts will be concluded with them, which provide for mandatory participation in combat operations on the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine.

[cedarnommer]

undefined

“  Ukrainian forces from the 80th Airborne Brigade hunt down a Russian Tor SAM outside of Svatove, Luhansk Oblast. “

[kramlabs]

[mapsontheweb]

Russia's control over the annexed regions of Ukraine as of 14th June 2024

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on 24. February 2022. In the first weeks Russia made significant territorial gains. However Ukraine had won the most important battle of the war: the Battle of Kyiv. Russian troops retreated from Northern Ukraine by April 2022. Russia captured Mariupol in May 2022 following a destructive siege. On 30 September 2022 the Russian Federation formally annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts although not entirely controlling any of them. The Ukrainians launched successful counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts, liberating Kherson city. The Russians managed to take Bakhmut and Avdiivka of Donetsk oblast. As of today the war is in a stage called war of attrition with minimal territorial gains and large losses on both sides, however in the past few months Russian numerical advantage resulted in territorial gains for Russia most notably in the Avdiivka sector west of Donetsk city.

by hunmapper

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

2023 in Sievierodonetsk, Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine. All that remains of the church after russian bombing. X

[panimoonchild]

Sport is not beyond politics

Oleksandr Pelyeshenko is an athlete from Luhansk Oblast. In 2016, he came one step short of a medal at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics (fourth place).

How many Ukrainians will never be able to build careers, and families, and live their lives while Russian athletes can and will keep pursuing their goals in sports? At the same time, represent their bloodthirsty country, which is Russia itself. This is unfair. It should not be this way. Make Russia pay!

[dontforgetukraine]

Yuliia "Athena" Khomiak

Being a woman in the Armed Forces of Ukraine

I am surrounded by male soldiers who are constantly trying to protect and care for me somehow. They make sure I do not lift anything heavy and try to create comfortable conditions for me. Some will say that these adhere to gender stereotypes that need to be eliminated. But in reality, it's just life as it is. Some people have different experiences, but this is mine. Once, I went to one of our positions in Donetsk Oblast. The guys there lived in spartan conditions. They had domestic difficulties, in particular, with their water supply. But they got used to it, they were fine with it. As soon as I arrived, improvements began: They bought a pump, looked for adapters, and connected something to the generator so that there was warm water because…Yuliia had arrived! I dream about our victory, the end of the war, and an end to people dying. We constantly hear about the dead and gradually get used to all this information. Human destinies turn into numbers on paper. But every person is a universe. When one person dies, the darkness of grief covers two or three more people. It may be that the relatives of the deceased soldier will never be able to return to a normal life. Unfortunately, it happens. I really want this to end as soon as possible. Of course, I also have my dreams. I'm tired of living like a nomad. My belongings are now scattered in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts. I want to have a home, a family, and the opportunity for self-development. I plan to pursue science. After all, my speciality is reproductive medicine.

—Yuliia "Athena" Khomiak, junior lieutenant and combat medic

Source: War tears off masks. Сombat medic Athena talks about the fear of death, the fragility of life, and her sense of time at the frontline

[athis333]

Last week, civilians in Russia experienced something new—something Chechens, Georgians, Syrians, Ukrainians, and other civilians in the path of Russia’s military have known about for decades. After Russian tanks withdraw and shelling stops, Moscow holds certain hot spots in stasis. They become “gray zones”: neither at war nor fully at peace, wrecked by heavy artillery, psychologically traumatized and economically ruined, under Russia’s boot but subject to its neglect.

The gray zone has now come to the Russian side of the border with Ukraine. At 8 a.m. last Tuesday, dozens of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles broke across the frontier and entered the southwestern region of Kursk, where more than a million people live. In the Russian town of Sudzha, locals fled Ukrainian shelling, abandoning belongings in their burning homes. Thousands of residents lost electricity, running water, and cellphone coverage. The Ukrainians pushed deeper into Russia, reportedly controlling as much as 390 square miles of Russian territory within a week of the initial incursion. Russian authorities report that 121,000 people have been evacuated from 28 villages controlled by Ukrainian fighters.

Now, for the first time in many decades, a swath of Russia—including not only Kursk but other regions near Russia’s border with Ukraine, such as Rostov, Belgorod, Voronezh, and Krasnodar—could become a gray zone, a functional part of no country, controlled and punished by Russia’s adversary. And there is nothing like experiencing something for oneself to concentrate the mind.

“If there is a civil society in Russia, I hope they can see in real life what it feels like when you have no border left—it’s being demarcated by a foreign state right in front of their eyes, as it was in Ukraine in 2014,” Inna Varenytsa, a journalist and the mother of a 4-year-old boy whose father was killed outside Kyiv in 2022, told me. She said she hoped the intrusion would puncture the indifference of many Russians, “which would not make them feel empathy for Ukraine, but at least it will definitely make them think.”

Gennady Gudkov, a former member of Russia’s Parliament now in exile, also noted the impassivity among Russians. “First, Ukrainian Luhansk and Donetsk, now even Crimea and several Russian regions are turning into abandoned, ruined gray zones, and nobody in Moscow cares,” he told me. “They only think of their own profits and enrichment.”

Certainly, few in Russia have given a thought to the region of Abkhazia. In 1992, Russia fought the Republic of Georgia in a war that killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 200,000. When the fighting stopped, Russia swiftly recognized Abkhazia as independent and installed a base for its security services there. Abkhazia became a gray zone: Gudkov traveled to the area in 2001 and found it economically depressed and physically devastated. “My job was to visit these regions in the Caucasus where Russian citizens lived and voted,” he told me. “I saw minefield signs, abandoned armored vehicles, and sandbags.”

Not much had changed 13 years after Gudkov’s visit, when I reported from Abkhazia for Newsweek. In Gagry, hungry dogs roamed abandoned parks littered with bullet cartridges. Once-graceful old buildings moldered in ruins, and local athletes, artists, and ballet dancers complained that their republic, which they had dubbed Apsna, or the Land of Soul, was like Russia’s unwanted child.

Russia had recognized South Ossetia, too, as independent in the aftermath of the same Russo-Georgian war. And South Ossetia was likewise a gray zone, where life was poor, pinched, and cold. Not a single hotel was operational during the week I visited the region’s capital, Tskhinvali, in 2012, so I stayed in a private home, where my elderly landlady kept water boiling in big pots on the stove day and night just to heat her small house. The average income in her neighborhood was less than $300 a month. South Ossetia had held a presidential election the year before, but the winner, Alla Dzhioyeva, was kept under arrest in a local hospital, where I saw gunmen pacing up and down the hallway of her ward.

Russia maintains military and security forces in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria (another internationally unrecognized territory, this one in Moldova). But it does not care to reconstruct or breathe economic life into these regions. Their indeterminate status also isolates them internationally—years go by, and still none of these territories can issue travel or citizenship documents that would be considered valid abroad—and the sanctions on Russia complicate residents’ financial transactions with almost any bank in the world.

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and occupied the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, landing more than 4 million Ukrainian citizens in additional gray zones. Particularly in Donetsk and Luhansk, the fighting never stopped, and in all three territories, civilians have lived under harsh conditions for the past decade. Anton Naumlyuk, the editor and founder of Graty, a Ukrainian media group focusing on law and justice, told me that Crimea’s security services abduct and torture detainees in a manner “sometimes even worse than in the Northern Caucasus.”

Now the gray zone, a signature legacy of Russian wars, may have come home to Russia. Since last week, Russians, rather than Ukrainians, have taken to social media and blogs to wonder whether the nuclear plant nearest the combat area is safe, to watch videos of their young conscript soldiers taken prisoner and civilians stripped of shelter as the Kursk region disappears behind an active front line. The residents in these border regions can look forward to the same conditions that prevail in other gray zones: intermittent utilities, cash machines empty of money, communications gone dark, no investment that would allow them to rebuild. For those who had to leave the region, President Vladimir Putin has promised a onetime payment of 10,000 rubles, or $111.

Naumlyuk has seen this story unfold before.“For as long as the war goes on, the regions along the border will be abandoned,” he said, “and the population will remain in the gray zone, deprived of rights and compensated with miserable pennies.”

[blueiscoool]

undefined

Scrap Metal

A Russian T-80BV tank was struck and destroyed by an FGM-148 Javelin ATGM fired by Ukrainian forces in Luhansk Oblast- filmed by Russian soldiers in the tank behind.

According to Russian sources, after a while the tank from which the video was filmed was also destroyed.

[jacensolodjo]

Today, January 31st 2024, UN court rules that russia has officially broken an international treaty on anti-terrorism financing in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. This is referring to actions taken back in 2014, where russia armed various groups for proxy fighting in Ukraine.

Ukraine first put gears in motion back in 2017.

The ruling passed 13 to 2.

Further, the court agreed that russia has been teaching Ukrainophobia and Tatarphobia in Crimea.

Despite this, no actual sentence can be put down, no enforcement of anything can be done, and no reparations or sanctions can be called. It is merely a paper trail. But it is something.

[pretordh]

Oleksandra "Mike" Mulkevich, a 35-year-old hospitalist, and Yuliya Boyanovska, 19, died on the front lines.

Oleksandra died in Kharkiv Oblast, from a Russian FPV attack on a car. Oleksandra's crew, consisting of three girls, had to work the last day of their rotation today, and tomorrow they were supposed to be at home with their families.

Yulia was a soldier of the 3rd OShbr. Died as a soldier during a combat mission in the Luhansk region.

Honor and memory 🕯️🕯️

[captain-price-unofficially]

Earlier today, a Russian truck carrying ammunition through Pervomais'k, Luhansk Oblast, suffered a fire and subsequent catastrophic detonation. The Russian KAMAZ 5350 was effectively vaporized, damaging several nearby buildings and cratering the roadway. 19 June 2024

[mapsontheweb]

Russia's control over the annexed regions of Ukraine after 2 years of war

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on 24. February 2022. In the first weeks Russia made significant territorial gains. However Ukraine had won the most important battle of the war: the Battle of Kyiv. Russian troops retreated from Northern Ukraine by April 2022. Russia captured Mariupol in May 2022 following a destructive siege. On 30 September 2022 the Russian Federation formally annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts although not entirely controlling any of them. The Ukrainians launched successful counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts, liberating Kherson city. The Russians managed to take Bakhmut and Avdiivka of Donetsk oblast. As of today the war is in a stage called war of attrition with minimal territorial gains and large losses on both sides.

by hunmapper