House members who're knowledgeable about Ukraine's vulnerability, are sounding the alarm🚨about the need for more F-16s & air defense:
"No accident that most of these House members have visited Ukraine more than once since 2022, and they know what is at stake.
Request to SECDEF to lift the restrictions on the use US weapons to strike strategic targets in Russia, and to provide more F-16s and air defense."
-M McKew
The #Russian Army of today is not the same army that blundered into Ukraine in February 2022. #Russia has proven its ability to learn and adapt to challenges.
After two years of war, one of those challenges is attacking #Ukraine on the cheap.
#UK CLAIMS #CHINA SENDING WEAPONS TO #RUSSIA: In a break with the U.S., the British defense secretary has said that China has sent "lethal aid" to Russia, calling on #NATO to "wake up."
Since the start of the war #Russia has been targeting #Ukraine culture especially fiercely - it has ruined dozens of museums, now it moved to targeting book warehouses and printing works. In today’s attack in #Kharkiv Russian rockets have killed 7 book warehouse workers (5 women and 2 men).
#fascist#russia has removed border markers in the #narvariver that has been placed by #Estonia to mark where it's border ends so that boats won't get into #nazi russian waters by mistake.
Estonia sees this as a border incident and it's investigated by Estonian authorities, as russians had to get to the Estonian side of the border to remove them.
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 22, 2024
"The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) proposed on May 21 that the Russian government reassess Russia’s maritime borders in the Baltic Sea so that these borders “correspond to the modern geographical situation.”
#Russia's border guard removed more than 20 buoys demarcating shipping lanes from the #Narva River on Thursday (May 23), #Estonia's PPA said.
Estonia installed the markers in its waters based on the State Borders Act and the buoys' location were agreed by the border agencies in 2022.
However, this year Russia disagreed with the locations of approximately half of the 250 markers. Some of those removed on Thursday morning were those disputed by Russia
#Russia embassy in Poland boasts of ‘rebuilding Mariupol’. Only it omits a minor detail - the Russians are not rebuilding #Mariupol in the sense of renovating or rebuilding existing buildings for their existing residents.
What they do is demolishing existing buildings and raising new multi-family houses in their place, offered on the open market, which are unaffordable for existing residents…. because no one will give a mortgage to a person whose flat has been demolished! Residents rendered homeless by the Russian army are thus left in the lurch, as can be seen from the many desperate appeals they publish on Telegram.
The Mariupol authorities also officially run a housing restitution programme but, in typical Russian government fashion, they use many tricks to make it a sham - for example, the new buildings have a slightly different address and plot number and the allocation is no longer ‘due’! Or it turns out that the person in question still has a (also ruined) allotment garden, so as a ‘holder of two properties’ the return of the flat is also ‘not due’!
Such ‘reconstruction of Mariupol’ thus has the character of a exploitative colonisation of the city by the new owners rather than a real reconstruction of the city, and on top of that it only concerns attractive plots of land near the sea and in the centre. Hundreds of blocks of flats in popular bedroom neighbourhoods have remained without water, electricity, without windows and with holes in the roofs for two years.
P.S. I can provide numerous appeals from Mariupol residents on request
🇪🇺 New details of Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka’s espionage for #Russia
The Insider and Re:Baltica examined 19,000 of Ždanoka's emails, revealing her extensive correspondence with FSB agents and work for the Kremlin — while being an MEP.
How #Russia understands Western #deescalation? Margarita Simonyan’s husband Tigran Keosayan explains to his colleagues:
Everything we wanted to know about NATO is now quite clear: we can start a war with any NATO country, almost any, and US will not intervene. As long as US doesn’t intervene, they are just a bunch of paper tigers.
Intense fighting continued in #Vovchansk area, with some reports of #Russia 🇷🇺 losing ground previously gained in the town thanks to #Ukraine 🇺🇦 counterattacks.
#Russia war correspondent Romanov doesn’t hide the fact he’s personally engaging in fighting, quite the opposite - he proudly publishes videos of himself firing a mortar. What ICRC says about journalists protection at war time?
Journalists and their equipment enjoy immunity, the former as civilians, the latter as a result of the general protection that international humanitarian law grants to civilian objects. However, this immunity is not absolute. Journalists are protected only as long as they do not take a direct part in the hostilities. News media, even when used for propaganda purposes, enjoy immunity from attacks, except when they are used for military purposes or to incite war crimes, genocide or acts of violence.
🇷🇺 #Russia is still recruiting enough men willing to fight for money, but it looks increasingly stretched. Some regions have doubled sign-up bonuses. Analysts say a new mobilisation is “just a question of when.”
New filings reveal FBI authorized use of DEADLY FORCE when they raided Mar-a-Lago (notthebee.com)