I didn't get it at all. Has something happened to him?Wojciech Szczęsny - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I didn't get it at all. Has something happened to him?Wojciech Szczęsny - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The Ukrainian Marines have been sent to Fort Bragg for a jump school. An Army instructor comes out and starts talking about the training, mentioning that a plane will take them to about 7,000 feet and they will jump from that height. One of the Marines in the back row raises his hand and asks, "Wouldn't it be better if we jumped from 100 feet or so?"
The instructor, chuckling: "From 100 feet the parachute won't have time to open..."
Marine, smiling and turning to his brothers, "Hear that, we'll have parachutes!"
Perlou posted twice the french version, in english from Deepl, interesting take on Wagner's move :Pendant que les médias idiots, mensongers, gavés d’argent public vous racontaient qu’il y avait un coup d’Etat en Russie, le groupe Wagner s’est transféré en Bielorussie (je vous en parlais dès samedi).
Pourquoi Wagner a-t-il été transféré en Biélorussie ?
Selon une chaîne ukrainienne ayant des sources dans l’administration de Zelensky, des agents britanniques du MI6 auraient déclaré au bureau du président et à l’état-major de la défense ukrainienne que le déménagement de Wagner en Biélorussie est une décision visant à contrecarrer les plans de l’Ukraine, de la Pologne et de la Lituanie de placer un contingent militaire aux frontières occidentales de l’Ukraine. Les services de renseignement britanniques seraient sûrs du fait qu’une nouvelle unité militaire de 30 à 40 000 hommes sera formée en Biélorussie, dont la tâche principale sera une nouvelle campagne contre Kiev à un moment où les forces armées ukrainiennes sur le front sud se retrouvent en difficulté. Les actifs de cette unité ont déjà été transférés au Bélarus entre 2022 et 2023.
Sure he did and wasn't hiding it. It's in Russian Wiki, even the French Wiki mentioned it. I linked somewhere in this thread to his two docudrama productions: recent "The Best in Hell" (Wagner and SVO) and a year earlier was "Solntsepyok" (Blazing Sun) about Donbas.So he DID have a media empire. No wonder the whole world knows what Prigozhin thinks!
https://rusvesna.su/news/1688203304Medvedev told what the deployment of NATO nuclear weapons in Poland will lead to
Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev told what Poland's desire to participate in the NATO program on the joint use of nuclear weapons (Nuclear Sharing) can lead to.
"Taking into account the fact that only patent degenerates are collected in the Polish leadership today, the request for the deployment of nuclear weapons in Poland threatens only one. Such weapons will be used.
Finally, to the joy of all madmen (even with the understanding that the final decision will be made by senile people overseas).
But there is a positive side to this. All the dudes, Moravets, Kaczynski and other evil spirits will disappear. Well, others will disappear, alas ..." — Medvedev wrote in Telegram.
https://rusvesna.su/news/1688215657"They know how to fight": the Ukrainian Armed Forces struck Donetsk with a missile with a mocking inscription (PHOTO, VIDEO)
The news is being updated
The Ukrainian Nazis do not leave the long-suffering Donetsk alone, continuing to use NATO weapons to attack civilians.
On one of the NATO missiles that hit homes in the Leninsky district of Donetsk, there was a strange inscription: "Vmiut voivati" ("They know how to fight").
Apparently, this is how the Kiev authorities decided to confirm in writing that they can only fight against civilians.
The scenes are part of a 2-minute video Kastyukevich posted on the Telegram messaging app showing Russian officials and their local allies removing young children from the Regional Children’s Home in Kherson in late October, weeks before it was liberated by Ukrainian forces. Dozens of children were taken to “safety,” he said.
According to Kyiv, the video is evidence in a growing case against the Kremlin for its alleged war crimes in Ukraine. The country accuses Moscow of abducting tens of thousands of its children and shipping them to Russia with the intent of stripping them of their national identity, a crime that Ukrainian officials call a form of genocide. Russia denies allegations of war crimes, and says it has evacuated close to 2 million civilians, including hundreds of thousands of children, from what it said were dangerous areas of Ukraine.
In a caption to the video, Kastyukevich said the children were “evacuated” and moved to the nearby Crimean Peninsula, occupied by Russia since 2014. Around the same time, Russia was trying to evacuate thousands of residents from Kherson in the face of a looming Ukrainian offensive.
“We have saved them,” Kastyukevich wrote.
Ukrainian officials in Kherson immediately called it a “kidnapping.”
Very little is known about what happened to the children, but senior Russian officials told NBC News that they are still in Crimea. They say no one has come looking for them.
Ukrainians dispute this, saying they are working to bring the 48 children home, but fear they could disappear into Russia.
On Friday, Ukraine formally charged Kastyukevich, who shared the video of the children’s evacuation, as well as an ex-worker at the orphanage and an official in the region, accusing them of the illegal transfer and deportation of the children from the facility.
NBC News has contacted Kastyukevich about the charges but did not receive a reply.
The young children from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home are not the only children who have disappeared.
Ukraine says it has documented nearly 20,000 cases of deported or forcibly transferred children. But that number could be as high as 300,000, according to the Ukrainian president’s adviser on child rights, Daria Herasymchuk.
In an unprecedented move against the leader of a permanent United Nations Security Council member state, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Putin and his children’s representative, Maria Lvova-Belova, in March. Prosecutors at the Hague-based war-crimes court accused them of “unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children” from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia, including “the deportation of at least hundreds of children taken from orphanages and children’s care homes.”
Moscow has dismissed accusations that it illegally deports Ukrainian children, and Russian officials have touted cases where they say they rescued children from active fighting. Last month, Putin said that his forces have legally moved “entire orphanages,” saving children’s lives, and that Moscow has never been against reuniting Ukrainian children with their families.
Lvova-Belova, who has said in multiple Telegram posts that she is now the foster parent of a child from Mariupol, a city devastated by Russia’s war, has borne the brunt of international scrutiny. In many ways, she has become the face of a new type of alleged war crime.
Her social media feeds are full of videos of Russian foster families greeting Ukrainian orphans, whom she has personally delivered across the country, with balloons and toys.
Lvova-Belova says she visited the children from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home in a home in Crimea shortly after they were removed from Ukraine, and promised to find their relatives.
She did not respond to a request to visit the children in Crimea but did tell NBC News that her office was actively looking for their relatives in Ukraine. The children would not be put in foster care or up for adoption until that search had been exhausted, she says.
Ukrainian officials looking into the case disputed her claim that no one is looking for the missing children.
Mykola Kuleba, CEO of Save Ukraine, a leading nongovernmental organization that helps deported Ukrainian children return home, said the organization had identified the children taken from the Kherson orphanage and is looking into the case.
The challenge with a case involving such young children is that they become difficult to trace after being moved into territory occupied by Russia or into Russia itself. Kuleba said the time window to bring them back to Ukraine was shrinking every day because many won’t even know their own names.
“It will be very hard to return them,” he said.
After the ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova — in part to prevent “further commission of crimes” — Kuleba said reuniting children with families had become even more challenging.
“We found that it's harder and harder to return any child,” he said.
Lyudmyla Afanasieva is a former staff member of the Kherson orphanage and cared for the children while they were in the basement of a church whose pastor had sheltered them during heavy fighting.
The young children, whom Afanasieva said she recognized from the video shared by Kastyukevich, had been “stolen.”
“These are our children,” she said in a telephone interview.
Except for two orphanage staffers, the adults who took them to Crimea were strangers to the children, Afanasieva said.
At least three senior Ukrainian officials told NBC News they were actively working on the case: the country’s chief prosecutor, its children’s representative and the human rights ombudsman. They declined to disclose detailed information about the children's whereabouts or the status of their investigations, saying that doing so would jeopardize their work.
“They moved them farther, most likely. So we are still looking for them,” said Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine's Commissioner for Children's Rights. “But we know exactly who we are looking for. We know the names of these children.”
Like Kuleba, she fears that returning the children will be a challenge.
“If we are speaking about little ones who, in a year, can forget about where they are from, what their names are … it will be very difficult to return these children, but we will fight for every one of them,” Herasymchuk said.
In May, nearly 15 months after Russia’s invasion, Lvova-Belova said that Kyiv had for the first time sent concrete information on 11 children whose parents were looking for them, without providing their locations or further details.
Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights chief, disputed this.
“Thousands of names” had been forwarded to his counterpart in Moscow, Tatyana Moskalkova, who works closely with Lvova-Belova, he said, although he did not provide any documents or other evidence.
At least 373 children have been returned to Ukraine without Russian help, Lubinets said. He declined to provide more information on how they were returned, saying that doing so would compromise future operations.
Ukrainian officials allege that abducted children are being put up for adoption by Russian families. Moscow denies that but acknowledges that 380 Ukrainian orphans have been placed with foster families in Russia. Lvova-Belova insists that they have not been formally adopted and that they will be reunited with their families in Ukraine if the families look for them.
In fact, she says, all that families or legal guardians have to do is write an email to her office to start a search. Her claim runs counter to statements from Ukrainian officials and families, who say they have to devise a new rescue mission for every child.
The Russians are doing “everything” to block their efforts to get the children back, Lubinets said.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, whose office is investigating some 90,000 cases of alleged war crimes, said the deportation of children is a special case.
The Russians are intentionally keeping Ukrainian children as “hostages,” refusing to return them and stripping them of their identities, Kostin told NBC News in an interview.
“This is the type of crime which is so far from the war,” he said. “It's not about the war itself. It's about the intention to steal children from the Ukrainian nation.”
Molly Hunter, Brock Stoneham, Ed Flanagan and Ostap Hunkevych contributed reporting.
Design and Development JoElla Carman
Photo Editor Max Butterworth
Art Director Chelsea Stahl
Iron Dimon anneals as before.
Finally, to the joy of all madmen (even with the understanding that the final decision will be made by senile people overseas).
But there is a positive side to this. All the dudes, Moravets, Kaczynski and other evil spirits will disappear. Well, others will disappear, alas ..." — Medvedev wrote in Telegram.
All one can say, trauma of it all aside for the children and nbcn's spin, is thank God these children were rescued by the Russians, cause who knows what evil would have been done to them as the situation unfolds.Ukraine's missing children: The search for babies taken by Russia
Moscow is accused of abducting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. NBC News investigates what happened to babies taken from one orphanage in Kherson.www.nbcnews.com
Российские военные высокоточным ударом артиллерии уничтожили станцию спутниковой связи StarlinkThe Russian military destroyed the Starlink satellite communication station with a precision artillery strike
Russian artillery destroyed a Starlink communications station and a drone control point near Artemovsk.
Confirming the success of their operations, the Russian military reported the destruction of the Starlink satellite communication station and the control point for unmanned aerial vehicles on the territory near Artemovsk. This was stated by Vadim Astafyev, head of the press center of the Yug group, in an interview with RIA Novosti.
"In the Soledaro-Artemovsky direction, the artillery of the group destroyed the Starlink communication station, the control point for unmanned aerial vehicles together with the Leleka-100 drone, a communications hub and a pickup truck with a group of infantry," Astafyev described in detail.
In addition, the Southern grouping of the Russian Federation troops successfully repelled an attack by an enemy assault group near the village of Berkhovka, which is located in the Artemovsky district of the DPR.
"About 30 servicemen from the 77th Airmobile Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, operating with the support of four tanks and three infantry fighting vehicles, were involved in the breakthrough attempt. In the first minutes of the battle, two tanks and the same number of infantry fighting vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed. The further advance of the enemy was thwarted," Astafyev added.
A little earlier, Russian military commanders reported that the APU still managed to break into the territory of the settlement of Berkhovka, where fierce fighting began, however, in all likelihood, the APU attack was repelled.
Украинские военные налепили на немецкие танки советскую динамическую броню "Контакт"The Ukrainian military has stuck Soviet dynamic armor "Contact" on German tanks
. Ukrainian armored vehicles use old Soviet armor on Western tanks.
Information from open sources confirms that the Ukrainian military uses the Contact-1 dynamic protection complex, developed in the USSR in the 1980s. This complex was specially designed to protect armored vehicles from cumulative ammunition and anti-tank missiles and was installed on T-72 tanks.
The design of the complex includes explosive charges, which, when hit by a shaped projectile, detonate and deflect the jet, whose task is to burn through the tank body. This leads to the fact that the effectiveness of cumulative projectiles is reduced by 50-80%. However, it should be noted that the dynamic protection "Kontakt-1" does not provide protection against armor-piercing sub-caliber shells.
The reason for the use of the old Soviet dynamic armor is that Germany and other countries did not provide Ukraine with any additional means to protect tanks, which makes them extremely vulnerable to Russian ATGMS, helicopters and tanks.
Ukraine wants to make some progress on the battlefield in its counteroffensive against Russia before the upcoming NATO summit, President Vladimir Zelensky said on Friday, although he admitted that this would lead to new losses.
Speaking to several Spanish media outlets, the Ukrainian leader stated that Kiev has to “show results” before NATO leaders convene in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11, adding that “every kilometer costs lives.”
Zelensky noted that “torrential rains… slowed down some processes quite a bit” and reiterated calls for Kiev’s Western backers to continue sending arms to Ukraine. He also claimed that Ukraine’s offensive operations conducted last autumn were undermined by the late arrival of artillery.
“We stopped because we couldn’t advance. Advancing meant losing people and we had no artillery,” he explained. “We are very cautious in this aspect. Fast things are not always safe.”
The Ukrainian president also reiterated his long-standing demands that Kiev eventually be admitted to NATO. “NATO without Ukraine is not NATO,” he stated, claiming that there were no other armies on the continent like Ukraine’s that had the same battlefield experience.
Zelensky’s comments come after Igor Zhovka, a deputy head of the president’s office, warned that the Ukrainian leader could skip the NATO summit altogether if the bloc did not make a serious commitment to Kiev’s accession. Earlier, Jens Stoltenberg, the head of the US-led military bloc, stated that any discussions about Ukraine’s membership could start only on the condition that it prevails over Russia.
Ukraine launched a large-scale offensive against Russian positions in early June but has failed to gain any ground and has suffered heavy losses, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Zelensky himself has admitted difficulties, saying that the offensive is proceeding “slower than desired” in the face of “tough resistance” from Russian troops.
According to a Financial Times report from earlier this week, Western officials have been unimpressed by Ukraine’s performance on the battlefield, with the paper’s sources noting that long-term Western support for Kiev is contingent on the eventual outcome of the offensive.
Sean Bell Military analyst Saturday 1 July 2023 23:20, Uk Diagrams Satellite Data
Following Yevgeny Prigozhin's abortive "march for justice" towards the Russian capital last weekend, President Lukashenko of Belarus intervened and apparently offered the Wagner boss safe sanctuary in exile.
Vladimir Putin was evidently furious that his old protégé could turn against him and is unlikely to forgive or forget Prigozhin's apparent attempted coup.
Under normal circumstances one might have expected Prigozhin's prospects to be limited, but Mr Putin will not want to risk turning him into a martyr, so while the dust settles on last weekend's events, Mr Lukashenko has provided an invaluable short-term solution.
However, Prigozhin is potentially a very dangerous animal, so Mr Lukashenko will want to proceed with caution.
Although the offer of exile in Belarus might have strengthened Lukashenko's hand with Putin, Prigozhin's presence in his country presents a significant long-term risk if accompanied by a significant number of battle-hardened Wagner fighters.
This has led to a raft of conspiracy theories as to Prigozhin's actual role in Belarus.
In context, notwithstanding Prigozhin's apparent betrayal, Mr Putin still needs mercenary fighters; they have proved vital to Russian battlefield success.
However, he will want to "weed out" those fighters loyal to Prigozhin and bring the remainder under closer control of the Russian ministry of defence to minimise the threat of a further coup.
Offering fighters the opportunity to join Prigozhin in Belarus is a relatively simple way to identify those loyal to the mercenary leader, easing the process of purging Prigozhin loyalists.
'Relatively low-key'
Satellite imagery of extensive tented camps being erected suggest that several thousand Wagner fighters might relocate to Belarus.
Although Prigozhin is probably grateful for the opportunity afforded him by Lukashenko, he must also be aware that Putin has broader ambitions to subjugate Belarus and there is potential that Prigozhin could prove a useful asset for Putin when required - perhaps as a way back into the Moscow fold.
However, mindful that most Belarusians want nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, and are likely to be increasingly suspicious of Lukashenko's developing partnership with Putin, Prigozhin's activities in Belarus are likely to be relatively low-key, at least in the short term.
It is possible that Putin, having expunged the direct threat posed by Prigozhin, will coerce him into mounting operations against the Ukrainian capital Kyiv from Belarus territory.
Kyiv is significantly closer to Belarus than Russia, which would provide a significant logistical advantage to the attacking force.
However, although Lukashenko is a puppet of the Putin regime, he also leads a democratic country and will be keen to avoid a repeat of the riots that threatened to unseat him after the last election.
If Lukashenko was to provide a launchpad for mercenary fighters to attack its neighbour this might be seen as an unprovoked escalation and drag Belarus into the war - something Lukashenko will be keen to avoid.
But, mindful that many of the Wagner fighters are battle-hardened veterans of the urban fight for Bakhmut, that might form a potent threat to Kyiv - indeed, reports suggest that Ukraine is already bolstering its defences against a potential threat from the north.
Read more: (Disfo)
Key figures unaccounted for week after Russia mutiny
Putin has offered Wagner fighters three choices
The extraordinary events of last weekend have left more questions than answers, and we simply do not know exactly what will happen next.
But, the chess pieces have been moved around the board, creating new threats and opportunities, which will become more apparent over the coming days and weeks.
I live your experience every day when I meet two little old men in a small park when I walk Arturo, who also goes by the name of Putin, now. These two people are convinced that Putin is the worst human being on earth, that he should be killed. Propaganda works perfectly, but that's the way it's always been in war, because the first victim of war is the truth. I'm taking this with a sense of humor, with the two little old men who know that I'm pro-Putin and who laugh when Arturo answers to Putin's name. They don't know the truth and are parroting the system and there's nothing we can do about it. But that doesn't stop me laughing with them and learning from them. It's an exercise in accepting this reality and knowing a little more about how things work and a shell that you have to develop to survive this nonsense, this insult to the truth. Humor and laughter are there to help us, I use them as a weapon of protection.(I'm not sure if it fits here in this thread, but I didn't know where else to post it. Feel free to move it if someone thinks of a better place.)
It's unbelievable how the programming of the people in Germany worked. We had a concert in the garden of our house yesterday with a three-piece ensemble (Here's one of the songs from one of their other performances). They played mostly Eastern European, Roma and Klezmer music. And among other things, Russian songs. It was beautiful because in this kind of music you can feel the feelings of the people who made it. I had goose bumps all over.
During one of the Russian songs, my seat neighbour made a comment: "Beautiful, isn't it? But are we even allowed to listen to that at the moment?"... I was speechless... and glad she didn't say that to me. And I think there are unfortunately, unfortunately very many people who now reject everything that is Russian. It's so sad to see that people don't think for themselves anymore. And I thought the bizarre thing was that she actually liked it. Please excuse me if it's just noise, but I had to write it down somewhere.