A top US general has issued a warning that despite significant losses in Ukraine, Russia’s ground forces are bigger than they were at the start of the 2022 invasion, a sobering assessment of the country’s military capabilities.
Ahead of the Defence Ministers’ meeting at the SCO conference in Delhi later this week, military commanders of India and China held a crucial meeting in Eastern Ladakh along the disputed border on Sunday.
“Depleted Uranium (DU) is a toxic, radioactive heavy metal that is the waste byproduct of the uranium enrichment process when producing nuclear weapons and uranium for nuclear reactors. Because this radioactive waste is plentiful and 1.7 times more dense than lead, the United States government uses DU in munitions/ammunition which are extremely effective at piercing armored vehicles. However, every round of DU ammunition leaves a residue of DU dust on everything it hits, contaminating the surrounding area with toxic waste that has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the age of our solar system, and turns every battlefield and firing range into a toxic waste site that poisons everyone in such areas. DU dust can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through scratches in the skin. DU is linked to DNA damage, cancer, birth defects, and multiple other health problems. The United Nations classifies Depleted Uranium ammunitions as illegal Weapons of Mass Destruction because of their long-term impact on the land over which they are used and the long-term health problems they cause when people are exposed to them.”
The Pentagon denies that they’re sending depleted uranium ammunition (if you can even believe them)!
CIA Director William J. Burns traveled in secret to Ukraine’s capital at the end of last week to brief President Volodymyr Zelensky onhis expectations for what Russia is planning militarily in the coming weeks and months, said a U.S. official and other people familiar with the visit.
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t want a war with Russia.
On 30 November 2022, EU President Ursula von der Leyen announced that at least 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died. The announcement was so shocking that the figures were subsequently removed from the official announcement on the European Commission’s website and from the video version of the statement. Here is a look back at the battle over the figures and the attempt to rewrite the story in 1984 style.
Anti-Russia activists and former Russian lawmakers opposed to Russian President Vladimir Putin have been gathering in Poland in recent days to discuss what removing Putin from power would look like nearly nine months into his war in Ukraine.
On November 9, 2022, Sergey Surovikin, the military commander of the special military operation for liberation of Donbass, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, reports publicly to Sergey Shoigu, Russian defense minister
[…] Kherson cannot be fully supplied and function. Russia did everything possible to ensure the evacuation of the inhabitants. Kiev strikes at the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station and creates a threat of flooding of vast territories. The most expedient option is to organize defense along the barrier line of the Dnieper River. It is proposed to take up defense along the left bank. Keeping a grouping of troops on the right bank is futile […]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, as the Biden administration vows more military aid for Ukraine we host a debate on the U.S. response to the war and U.S. policy toward Russia. We will speak with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst who specialized in the Soviet Union, as well as former Bernie Sanders advisor Matt Duss, a Ukrainian-American who is now a Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International peace. Stay with us.
For several days the threat of the use of a dirty bomb or the destruction of the Kakhovka dam by Ukraine has caused an extremely dangerous rise in tension. By dint of letting Kyiv do whatever it wants, even the worst war crimes and terrorist acts, the West encourages Ukraine to continue playing with fire, at the risk of causing a disaster that would go beyond the country’s borders.
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