Ukraine’s top commander Zaluzhny argued last fall that Russia’s “center of gravity” in the war is impunity, a sense among Russians that the war is remote and doesn’t touch their lives. My piece on how recent drone strikes and, now, incursions, upend this.
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Yaroslav Trofimov
@yarotrof
Chief Foreign-Affairs Correspondent of The Wall Street Journal. Author of Siege of Mecca. Endorsing nothing.
Yaroslav Trofimov’s Tweets
It was indeed some weird Chechen joke
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Something untoward seems to have happened to Adam Delimkhanov, the Chechen commander and Russian MP who boasted of having “destroyed” Mariupol. Kadyrov can’t find him and Chechen units in Maryinka abandon positions to go look for him. twitter.com/maxseddon/stat…
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Though maybe it is some weird Grozny trolling — let’s see.
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Something untoward seems to have happened to Adam Delimkhanov, the Chechen commander and Russian MP who boasted of having “destroyed” Mariupol. Kadyrov can’t find him and Chechen units in Maryinka abandon positions to go look for him. twitter.com/maxseddon/stat…
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Something untoward seems to have happened to Adam Delimkhanov, the Chechen commander and Russian MP who boasted of having “destroyed” Mariupol. Kadyrov can’t find him and Chechen units in Maryinka abandon positions to go look for him.
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Russia's "liberation" of Mariupol looks like this, according to Ramzan Kadyrov's Telegram channel
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Much more. We've counted less than 10 so far.
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Putin says that Russia lost 54 tanks in the Ukrainian counteroffensive this month. That’s much more than what @oryxspioenkop has counted, right?
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Putin says that Russia lost 54 tanks in the Ukrainian counteroffensive this month. That’s much more than what has counted, right?
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Russian official mouthpiece publishes post by ex president Medvedev where he says that Russia next year will celebrate on central Maidan square in Kyiv.
No one can take seriously the claim that NATO somehow is responsible for this war. The imperialism is in the open.
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A resident on the Russian cruise missile attack on Krivyy Rih tonight
“This is the Russian World for you guys. You’re in your fucking bed, 3.30 am, and you have fucking nothing. No flat. No car. And over there people are dying .”
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A Russian major-general by the way is a one-star, equivalent to a NATO brig-gen.
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Russian reports that a Ukrainian missile strike on the Zaporizhzhia front killed Maj Gen Sergey Goryachev, chief of staff of Russia’s 35th Army and former top Russian commander in Transnistria (Moldova). First Russian general to die in nearly a year. t.me/voenkorKotenok
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Russian reports that a Ukrainian missile strike on the Zaporizhzhia front killed Maj Gen Sergey Goryachev, chief of staff of Russia’s 35th Army and former top Russian commander in Transnistria (Moldova). First Russian general to die in nearly a year.
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Ukraine says Blahodatne and Makarivka liberated, after the taking of Neskuchne yesterday.
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Ukraine has managed to retake several villages in its offensive, and now confirms the liberation of Blahodatne, on the border or Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia — or whatever remains of it.
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Chinese drone manufacturer DJI stopped selling its products in Russia and Ukraine after the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion — yet its drones have still ended up on battlefields.
How? We reveal how Russian firms are importing them via Kazakhstan.
occrp.org/en/investigati
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A father from Bakhmut explains why he refused to evacuate his family, including two teenage daughters, even as Russia squeezed Ukrainian soldiers out of the eastern city
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And all of these combined arms operations are being conducted without Ukraine having achieved air superiority, something no Western-style military, including the United States, has any experience in.
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With the exception of the U.S, no other Western-style military can conduct sustained combined arms operations at scale. So Ukrainian forces are attempting to do something at the tactical level no other European NATO member is currently capable of.
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A video of Chinese-built armored vehicles posted this week by the leader of Chechnya, a backer of Russia's war in Ukraine, is raising new questions of whether equipment from China could be used to support Moscow’s campaign.
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“Who’s going to help now, if not us?” We spent the day with Ukrainian volunteers rescuing people stranded by flooding in Kherson, including behind enemy lines. Not long after noon, one of them came under intense Russian shelling just as he made to go back.
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Having said that, this is one destroyed Ukrainian column on one stretch of the frontline that Russian propaganda has shown from several angles over the past 48 hrs. The offensive has just begun, and it was never going to be easy. The first weeks in Kherson were also grim.
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These tanks and Bradleys would have made all the difference if supplied a year ago, before Russia had the time to build its Maginot line in Zaporizhzhia. And Russian Ka-52 gunships wouldn’t be able to have a turkey shoot if Ukraine had received F-16s. Lost time = lost lives. twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/…
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These tanks and Bradleys would have made all the difference if supplied a year ago, before Russia had the time to build its Maginot line in Zaporizhzhia. And Russian Ka-52 gunships wouldn’t be able to have a turkey shoot if Ukraine had received F-16s. Lost time = lost lives.
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#UkraineWar: Ukrainian losses updated with:
3x Leopard 2A6 (1 destroyed, 2x abandoned)
4x M2 Bradley (abandoned)
1x VAB APC (abandoned)
1x Oshkosh M-ATV MRAP (abandoned)
More losses will be added tonight (including ~six more M2 Bradleys).
Full list: oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack
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It wasn’t within Ukrainian at the time, before the UK supplied Storm Shadows.
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Based on this geolocation, I believe Ukraine has just hit an army headquarters visited by Putin in April.
46.019844, 34.846380
2R9W+WHJ Shchaslyvtseve, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine
t.me/operativnoZSU/
@GeoConfirmed
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"Yes, Slovenia may have disrupted an otherwise straightforward race,” says , "but Belarus has been an accomplice to a war of aggression."
By 's .
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Canada's Globe and Mail says Ukrainian authorities have so far declined to renew the accred of Anton Skyba and even asked him to take a lie detector test.
Seems shocking - Anton is a great guy, a brilliant photographer and certainly a Ukrainian patriot.
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First the dam, then hitting people trying to flee the flooding with deliberate artillery barrages. No words.
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Panic at the evacuation point at the sound of incoming fire - difficult to judge distances - maybe 500 metres - enough to scare everyone in the vicinity #kherson #Russia #ukraine
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This casual advocacy of genocide, by the way, is made by a general who is also professor at the once ultra-prestigious Higher School of Economics in Moscow. hse.ru/org/persons/35
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Meanwhile, on Russian state TV a Russian general casually proposes destroying the Kyiv reservoir dam to drown millions of people in the Ukrainian capital. “We are not holier than the Pope, are we?”
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Meanwhile, on Russian state TV a Russian general casually proposes destroying the Kyiv reservoir dam to drown millions of people in the Ukrainian capital. “We are not holier than the Pope, are we?”
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In which Tucker Carlson says that the first Jewish president of Ukraine is "sweaty and rat like, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of Blackrock."
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We’re in Kherson where entire districts are now submerged and water levels are still rising. People are saving pets and belongings. City centre is on higher ground and mostly unaffected.
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Literally, “who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes.”
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Russians have released a video in which they claim a Russian Ka-52 helicopter strikes on “Leopard 2 tanks.” Only for some reason this “Leopard” looks more like a tractor. For example, John Deere 4830.
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John Deere, Leopard… same difference. Comrade Colonel, we have successfully eliminated NATO machines.
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Also is it really a Leopard? Or even a tank? Some military analysts say these are harvesting machines. twitter.com/yarotrof/statu…
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Also is it really a Leopard? Or even a tank? Some military analysts say these are harvesting machines.
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Russia’s ministry of defense releases this video of an ATGM strike on what it says is a Ukrainian Leopard tank. The video ends after the hit, so it’s not clear what damage has been inflicted, and whether the tank has in fact been disabled.
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Russia’s ministry of defense releases this video of an ATGM strike on what it says is a Ukrainian Leopard tank. The video ends after the hit, so it’s not clear what damage has been inflicted, and whether the tank has in fact been disabled.
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Fifteen months after President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, expecting a quick victory, the war has come to the heart of Russia. The country’s elites, who believed themselves safe as the invasion campaign rumbled far away, are rattled wsj.com/articles/from- via
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Russia has been controlling the dam and the entire Kakhovka HPP for more than a year. It is physically impossible to blow it up somehow from the outside, by shelling. It was mined by the Russian occupiers. And they blew it up.
Russia has detonated a bomb of mass environmental… Show more
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To be fair, USSR was also famous for its scorched earth tactics. In August 1941, Soviets blown up the Dnieper Dam, aiming to halt the German advance. Tends of thousands civilians & Soviet soldiers were killed as a result
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Among the few things that the USSR was famous were huge dams and provision of electricity. Perhaps the successor states will, after destroying villages and dams, decide to go back to pre-1917 gas light and candles.
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War comes to Russia — puncturing Putin’s authority and the myth of Russia’s invincibility. My story on the critical new front of the conflict, and on what the drone strikes inside Russia and incursions by anti-regime Russian insurgents herald.
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A house seen floating down the Dnipro River after today’s flood caused by the destruction of Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine.
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