Russian military vehicles roll through outskirts of Donetsk after Putin orders troops into Ukraine

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[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Danielle Wallace | Fox News




Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and at least two senior Ukrainian peacekeepers suffered symptoms from a suspected poisoning attack but have since recovered, according to a report published Monday.

Following a meeting in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv earlier this month, Abramovich and the two senior members of the Ukrainian peacekeeping team, including Crimean Tatar lawmaker Rustem Umerov and a second unnamed individual, began experiencing symptoms that included red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Citing unnamed sources familiar with the incident, the newspaper said it’s not clear who was responsible for the alleged attack, but the victims pointed to hardliners in Moscow trying to sabotage talks to end the war. Abramovich, Umerov and the third officials have since improved in condition and their lives are not in danger following the suspected poisoning, the sources said.

The sources added that Western experts said it was difficult to determine whether the symptoms were caused by a chemical or biological agent or by some sort of electromagnetic-radiation attack.

It wouldn’t be the first time the Kremlin has been blamed for such an attack.

Christo Grozev, a member of the open-source collective Bellingcat, which determined that the Kremlin was behind a nerve agent attack on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020, told the Journal that the suspected attack on Abramovich and Ukrainian negotiators "was not intended to kill," describing the suspected poisoning incident as "just a warning."

Grozev said he’s seen photos of the effects of the suspected poisoning, but a timely sample collection could not be organized in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv because the officials were in a hurry to travel to Istanbul, Turkey for additional talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials this week. Too much time had passed for the suspected poison to be detected before a German-based forensic team with the required expertise could arrive to perform an examination, he added.

When contacted by Fox News, Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied information about the suspected poisoning.

A source at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry also told Fox News that The Journal’s article was the first time they heard about the poisoning and "Minister Reznikov feels good and is working."

"All members of the negotiating team are working normally today," Podoliak also said Monday in reaction to the report about the suspected poisoning of Abramovich and Ukrainian negotiators, according to Ukrainian media outlet, Novoye Vremya. "In the information field there are now many information speculations, various conspiracy theories and elements of one or another information game. Therefore, I will repeat once again - members of negotiating groups work today in regular modes."

In 2018, U.K. officials blamed the Russian intelligence services for a nerve agent attack against defected former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. They both survived, as did a British police officer hospitalized after exposure to the nerve agent. But a British woman accidentally exposed to the poison later died. The Kremlin denied any involvement in the incident.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reportedly asked President Biden not to impose sanctions against Abramovich because he is involved in ongoing negotiations, shuttling between Moscow and Kyiv, Lyiv, Poland, Belarus and other locations for in-person talks since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Abramovich, who owns Chelsea soccer club, a minority stake in the steel company Evraz PLC and has Portuguese citizenship, has been sanctioned by the U.K. and the European Union.

During an interview with Russian journalists this weekend, which has since reportedly been barred from airing on Russian state-run TV stations, Zelenskyy said Abramovich was an initial member of a subcommittee of the Russian negotiating team who later became involved in humanitarian issues, such as civilian evacuations from the port city Mariupol, which has suffered heavy Russian bombardment.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Tyler O'Neil | Fox News




Russian forces have kept up a ruthless bombardment of the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv, despite official statements claiming that Russian troops are withdrawing from Kyiv and Chernihiv to refocus on the eastern Donbas region, Kyiv residents tell Fox News.

"After their statements yesterday nothing has changed at all," Maryan Zablotskyy, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who got his wife and child out of Kyiv, told Fox News Digital. "Fighting [continued] all through the night around Kyiv."

"They are forced to retreat from different areas around Kyiv," Zablotskyy noted, "but only if they are successfully pushed back."



"Yesterday's statement is just a recognition of some military setbacks, and they finally realized that their forces are stretched too thin," he added. "Some of their units were close to being surrounded at Irpin."

Ukrainian forces retook Irpin, a city near Kyiv, on Monday.



Russia claimed to be reducing its military presence in Kyiv and Chernihiv on Tuesday. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reportedly said that "liberating Donbas" in eastern Ukraine – where Russian-backed separatists have taken power – is Moscow's primary objective.

"Nothing is changing whatsoever," Mark Savchuk, Kyiv-based coordinator of the Ukraine Volunteer Journalists Initiative (UVJI), told Fox News Digital. "The fact that people in the world still listen to Russians is super depressing."



"All it is is a shifting of priorities – they move forces to the south," Savchuk insisted. "Fighting near Kyiv will remain as it is now. Nothing will change. All that's changed is their top priority is no longer Kyiv, but Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the south."

Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said Tuesday that the U.S. has seen "increased activity" and "offensive activity" by Russian forces in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

Ukraine's general staff reported that Russia transferred about 2,000 troops from Georgia to fight in Ukraine.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By David Axe - Forbes




The Sukhoi Su-34 was supposed to change the Russian air force. The twin-engine, twin-seat, supersonic fighter-bomber—a highly-evolved variant of the Su-27 air-superiority fighter—promised to usher in a new era of high-tech, precision bombing.

Instead, the Su-34s have flown into Ukraine lugging the same old dumb bombs. A lack of precision-guided munitions—not to mention Russian doctrine that conceives of aircraft essentially as flying artillery—forces the $50-million warplanes to fly low through the thickest Ukrainian air-defenses in order to have any chance of delivering their bombs with any degree of accuracy.

As a result, Su-34s are falling from the sky in numbers that must be startling for air force commanders. Their newest planes are suffering the same fate as their oldest planes.

The Russian air force ordered its first batch of 32 Su-34s back in 2008. A second batch of 92 followed in 2012. The Russians as of 2021 possessed around 122 Su-34s in several regiments. Even taking into account losses, by 2030 the air force could operate nearly 200 Su-34s.

The plan, all along, has been for the Su-34 to replace the 1970s-vintage Su-24, around 70 of which linger in service. Nowhere was that more evident than in Syria. The Kremlin deployed Su-34s to Syria starting in November 2015, shortly after a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Su-24 that reportedly strayed into Turkey’s air space.

The Su-34 is impressive to look at. The type borrows the airframe of the Su-27 but adds a two-person cockpit with side-by-side seating. The Su-34 can strike targets as far as 600 miles away while carrying 12 tons of bombs and missiles, including air-to-air missiles.

The 22-ton jet is armed with a 30-millimeter cannon and also boasts a multi-mode radar and a Khibiny electronic-countermeasures suite. In theory, the Su-34 is compatible with an array of precision-guided missiles and bombs, making the type roughly analogous to the Boeing F-15E, the U.S. Air Force’s own workhorse fighter-bomber.



But there’s a critical difference. Where the Americans every year purchase thousands of satellite-, laser- and infrared-guided missiles and bombs, frequently train with them and use them in combat almost to the exclusion of unguided weapons, the Russians all but stopped buying guided munitions years ago owing to their high cost and, post-2014, the effect of foreign sanctions on Russian manufacturers of bombs and missiles.

So while the Su-34 can carry guided munitions, it—and every other tactical warplane in Russian service—almost never actually does so. “The bulk of the 300 [Russian air force] fixed-wing combat aircraft massed around Ukraine have only unguided bombs and rockets to draw on for ground-attack sorties,” Justin Bronk noted in a recent analysis for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

That’s apparent not only in videos the Kremlin has released depicting the fighter-bombers in combat in Ukraine, but also in the type’s loss rate. Independent analysts have confirmed the destruction of four Su-34s in Ukraine. The Ukrainians reportedly have captured alive at least one Sukhoi pilot, Alexander Krasnoyartsev.

If four Su-34 losses are evident in photos and videos from the front-lines, you can safely assume additional losses have occurred but aren’t well-documented. Only one fixed-wing type has suffered worse in the current war—the subsonic Su-25 close-air-support jet, which flies even lower and slower than the Su-34 does.

Ukrainian officials on March 18 claimed troops firing a shoulder-launched Stinger missile destroyed one Su-34. Officials in Kyiv a week later attributed another alleged Su-34 shoot-down to “mobile” air-defense units. It’s unclear whether they meant man-portable missiles or air-defense vehicles.

In any event, it’s apparent Su-34s are falling prey to short-range missiles that likely are either T.V.- or infrared-guided. These missiles, including Soviet-designed Strelas and American Stingers, usually range only a few miles out and a few miles up.

A warplane employing precision missiles or bombs, perhaps cued by drones or spotters on the ground, could lob the munitions from tens of miles away and three or four miles up, putting them beyond range of the most numerous short-range air-defenses.

But the Su-34s flying over Ukraine appear strictly to carry unguided munitions, even though the latest Su-34M variant comes with a dedicated interface for the new UKR-RT sensor pod that, in theory, should help the type deliver guided bombs through bad weather and cloud cover.

The Sukhois are dropping the same kinds of dumb bombs that the Su-24 carried during its heyday. And that means crews must actually see the ground in order to achieve any degree of accuracy. They have to get below the clouds, where Ukrainian missileers quickly can draw a bead on them.

It’s not just the limitations of technology that put the Su-34s in harm’s way. Even the mos sophisticated warplane is a slave to doctrine—the rules and expectations that guide an army’s conduct of a war.

Russian doctrine unlike, say, American doctrine, doesn’t free the air force to pursue its own campaign. In Russian doctrine, aircraft are extensions of the ground force. They’re airborne artillery: inflexible vehicles for the delivery of massive firepower. The Russians don’t favor precision munitions because they don’t favor precision.

As long as that’s true, the Sukhoi crews will continue to face extreme danger over Ukraine. The Su-34 is a new warplane whose crews are at the mercy of old weapons ... and even older doctrine.

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[Teh One Who Knocks]

by Tyler O'Neil - FOX News




A Russian governor blamed a fire at an oil depot in the Russian city of Belgorod on Ukrainian forces. Vyacheslav Gladkov said two Ukrainian helicopters started the fire.

Yet a German journalist claimed that Ukraine's General Staff has denied having knowledge of the attack, suggesting the attack could have been a Russian false-flag operation to justify attacks on Ukraine.

Fox News has as yet been unable to confirm the report.

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Pretty much sums up why Russia has struggled from day 1

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Brie Stimson | Fox News




Russian troops attacked a packed railway station in eastern Ukraine Friday morning and dozens were feared dead.

More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 hurt in the attack, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense said.

"russians carried out two missile stikes on railway station in Kramatorsk, where evacuation of civillians was taking place," the ministry tweeted. "But russian war criminals not only deliberately targeted thousands of people; they've used cluster munitions. More than 30 killed More that 100 injured."

The station was being used to evacuate civilians.

"Thousands of people were at the station during the missile strike, as residents of Donetsk region are being evacuated to safer regions of Ukraine," Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region, said on Telegram, confirming the number of dead, according to the New York Times.



This marked the latest attack on civilians as evidence of the intentional killing of civilians in Bucha and in other parts of the country has mounted, causing a global outcry.

Josep Borrell, the European Union's foreign policy chief, tweeted Friday morning that he "strongly" condemned the "indiscriminate" attack.



"This is yet another attempt to close escape routes for those fleeing this unjustified war and cause human suffering," Borrell said.

The attack came after Russian troops have completely withdrawn from northern Ukraine, according to the U.K. Defense Ministry, with some forces redeploying to eastern Ukraine.

Russia characteristically denied the attack claiming without basis that Ukraine might have launched the attack.

[Godfather]

Fuck man, imagine just waiting for that train out of hell, full of hope thinking you'd almost made it... Sickening.

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Ukraine Opens Russian Drone, Finds Canon DSLR Inside

...

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Adam Aiken - Daily Star


A mum was tied to a chair and forced to watch as depraved Russian soldiers raped her 11-year-old son, it has been claimed.

It's the latest barbaric tale to emerge from the Ukrainian warzone.

Russian troops are reported to have raped the boy in the town of Bucha, which has been the scene of what are thought to be widespread atrocities.

Ukraine’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights Lyudmila Denisova said five soldiers also sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, who had fallen pregnant as a result, reports The Sun.

Meanwhile, it has also been claimed that Russian soldiers had it has also been claimed more than 120,000 Ukrainian children.

A number of them had reportedly been raped and thousands had allegedly been smuggled over the Russian border.

The war in Ukraine has become increasingly barbaric, with governments around the world accusing Vladimir Putin and his military of carrying out war crimes and genocide.

In a Facebook video, Ukrainian official Oleksandr Vilkul said he had found things that made his “blood run cold in [his] veins”.

Vilkul, the head of the military administration of Kryvyi Rih, added: “While rebuilding a peaceful life in the villages liberated in the Kherson region, a task we are currently working on, we are confronted with more and more horror stories,” he said.

"For example, the rape of a 16-year-old pregnant girl and a 78-year-old grandmother in one of the villages towards Ingulets.”

News of the latest horrific rape story comes after one of Putin’s soldiers was arrested back in Russia following the publication of a video showing a baby being raped.

The sicko, Alexei Bychkov, was said to have filmed himself abusing the baby.

Bychkov was held in his home country on Saturday after the sick clip emerged on social media.

Bychkov is also alleged to have shared other videos of child abuse with his friends and colleagues.

[PorkChopSandwiches]

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[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Will Stewart, Russia Correspondent & Adam Cailler - The Daily Star




The Russian warship sunk by Ukrainian missiles allegedly had “nukes on board” when it was destroyed.

The news of the sinking of the flagship Russian missile boat Moskva was hailed as a huge loss for Russia yesterday.

And 24 hours later it is proving even more devastating that first thought, as it has now emerged the huge ship, badly damaged after a Ukrainian attack off the coast of Sevastopol, actually carried several nuclear weapons.

Although not confirmed, BlackSeaNews editor-in-chief Andriy Klymenko called for an urgent international probe into whether the Moskva was carrying nuclear weapons.

"Friends and experts say that there are two nuclear warheads for cruise missiles on board the Moskva,” he said.

“Perhaps for many this is new information, but it is true - the warship is a carrier of nuclear weapons.”

Russia originally claimed that the ship was damaged because ammunition had “exploded” causing a fire on board.

But this is a claim nobody, especially Mr Klymenko, believed.

He continued: “Where are these warheads? Where were they when the ammunition exploded?

“Where is the point on the map, the coordinates?

“This is with the competence of the UN Security Council, and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency).”



And Mykhailo Samus, deputy director of the Lviv-based Centre for Army Studies, Conversion and Disarmament, warned: “On board the Moskva could be nuclear warheads - two units.”

“They would be in a protected place, so most likely they were not damaged by the explosion.”
Despite Russian claims of a fire, famous Russian filmmaker Vladimir Bortko might have let slip that it was in fact Ukrainian's who sunk the ship.

Overnight, on national Russian television, he gave an impassioned and tearful speech on a panel debate show about the ship.

During the rant, which has now gone viral on social media, he said that the sinking of the ship was a “real casus belli” for war against Ukraine.

The phrase “casus belli” is Latin for “an act or an event that either provokes or is used to justify a war”.