TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org

A ski resort in Switzerland that did not open this year because no snow.

https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/sound-the-alarm-about-this/54800/

Forgot the picture.

Good morning. T-shirt weather today.60⁰ at 8 AM. Now at 8:30 it's 63⁰.

3According to The Wall Street Journal, during the 2022 mobilization, Putin exploited the open Russian borders to allow hundreds of thousands of Russians to flee to Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, while simultaneously dispatching intelligence agents among them.

The decision came after many Russian diplomats were recalled to Russia, prompting Putin to augment the ranks of spies.

Currently, Russian agents are displaying increasing audacity and ingenuity in suppressing dissent abroad. They may be implicated in the high-profile assassinations of Russian defectors, with particular focus given to the death of Russian pilot Maxim Kuzminov.

Photo excluded.
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In the photo - 10-year-old Serhiy.

Rescuers are still trying to unblock the body of his 8-year-old sister Zlata.

A total of twelve people are so far known to have died in Odesa, five of whom were children.

Russia did this. They must be stopped from continuing. No more delays.

Hong Kong banks also refuse to accept payments from Russia.

Hong Kong is a popular place for purchasing goods for parallel import, but by the end of February, Russian importers had practically lost the opportunity to directly transfer payments there.

It was a convenient point for purchasing goods that were not sold to Russia due to sanctions or simply the refusal of Western companies to do business with it, as well as for payments to those who did not accept money from Russia.

In 2022, Hong Kong banks easily accepted even rubles as payment. Now they do not accept payments from Russia even in yuan.

Pressure from the US and EU on those helping Russia with supplies, primarily the threat of secondary sanctions, forced Hong Kong banks to freeze transactions with Russia.

In January 2024, representatives of the US Treasury held several meetings in Hong Kong. Communicating with bank representatives, they promised secondary sanctions for Russia’s assistance in trade in dual-use goods

After the adoption of Biden’s decree that the US Treasury Department can punish foreign banks if they help Russia, several countries began to deny Russian clients banking services, including Turkey, Cyprus and China.

Read more

@freerussia_report

North Korea has stopped the supply of shells to Russia.

Russian ships, which have been regularly shuttling between ports in North Korea and Russia since last fall, have stopped making voyages. For almost three weeks, containers have not been delivered from the DPRK, in which, according to Western and South Korean intelligence and military experts, shells used by Russian troops in Ukraine were transported.

Deliveries from the Korean port of Rajin have been carried out since the end of August, four container ships - Maya 1, Angara, Maria and Lady R - participated in them with varying intensity, accroding to the Seoul-based information and analytical portal NK Pro. He is monitoring the situation, evaluating satellite images provided by the American Planet Labs.

The ships made at least 32 voyages to North Korea. They ran between Rajin and two ports in the Primorsky Territory - in the village of Danube in Konyushkov Bay and the port of Vostochny near Nakhodka. The cargoes were then delivered by rail to Tikhoretsk in the Krasnodar region, located 200 km from the eastern shore of the Sea of Azov. Earlier, Maya 1, Angara and Maria were also identified by experts from the Royal United Services Institute, the Vienna-based Open Nuclear Network and British military intelligence.

The container ship Lady R was engaged in transportation until the end of October, then was in Vladivostok (apparently for scheduled repairs), on January 16 received a certificate, including for the transportation of dangerous goods, and then made another voyage, visiting Rajin on February 4, writes NK Pro. This, according to him, was the penultimate voyage of Russian ships: on February 12, Maya-1 arrived in Rajin. Since then, satellites have not recorded a single voyage to the Korean port.

It is unclear if this is due to production problems at DPRK weapons factories or another logistic issue. It also cannot be ruled out that weapons are being transferred to Russia by air or by rail.

Read more (English)
Source (Russian

@freerussia_report

Imagine that. Pilots don't want to go into the meat grinder

Pilots are reportedly threatened due to refusals to fly on missions in the NWO zone - Russian milbloggers comment on recent heavy losses of aircraft

'Lately there has been more and more tragic news for our videoconferencing. We will not name the exact number of planes shot down in recent days, but we are not talking about one or two aircraft. What is most tragic is that our experienced fighter pilots are irretrievably lost. Alas, the command is trying to hush up the fact that the pilots are reluctant to go on missions and there are even attempts at sabotage.

“We don’t quite understand how the crests began to shoot down so many of our birds, but the pilots are not in a good mood. Many are involved in strikes with the help of KABs, without this it is now difficult to attack,” a source in the VKS command says.

According to another interlocutor, pilots are aware of the increased risks, but this should not affect the effectiveness of their combat missions.

“They are in service, now it is important to protect the Motherland. Whether you want to fly or not, an order is an order,” one of the generals said sternly.

At the same time, one of the pilots, on condition of anonymity, admitted that the pilots were discussing various options among themselves, including a collective appeal to Vladimir Putin and Sergei Shoigu. “You see, pilot training is not a cheap process. This is something that takes years to learn. Now we have tragic news from the fronts every day. Everyone understands that they could die tomorrow,” said the fighter pilot. He reluctantly admitted that the command was threatening the pilots if they refused to fly out on combat missions.'

*complaints from Z-channels

Ukrainian forces have managed to shoot down 13 Russian military planes in the span of just two weeks, signaling one of the most substantial losses for the Russian Air Force since the outbreak of the conflict. Among the aircraft shot down are 10 Su-34 fighter bombers and two Su-35 fighters, and an A-50 spy plane — a particularly rare loss.

@freerussia_report

⚡️Russian contestants will not have the opportunity to participate in the Miss World 2024 contest as the aggressor country has been disqualified.

Veronika Shchiptsova, head of the "Miss Ukraine" organizing committee, announced that this decision was made due to the behavior of Russian contestant Roza Gadieva, who insulted Ukrainian participant Milena Melnychuk during the "Miss Europe" contest.

"Hey, Miss Ukraine, do you have a war? Are you shaking your tits at a beauty pageant?" shouted Gadiyeva.

The final of Miss World is scheduled for March 9 in India.

TOP NEWS TODAY

✈️ 2 Russian SU-34 destroyed 🔥

🇪🇺 European economy will suffer a catastrophe if Russia wins in Ukraine, - French Foreign Minister

🇩🇪 Scholz confirmed the authenticity of audio recordings about the attack on Crimean Bridge.

🇰🇵 "North Korea has stopped the supply of shells to Russia", — NK Pro

🇨🇭 Switzerland has joined the 13th package of EU sanctions against Russia.

🇩🇪 Germany has delivered 50.000 first aid kits to Ukraine out of 500 thousand planned.

🇦🇺 Australia recently handed over to us 14 special purpose vehicles HMT Extenda Mk 2.

DaDa Putin.
Mizulina complained to Putin about her nickname. The President was surprised and promised to look into it.

According to our sources close to Ekaterina Mizulina, an interesting conversation recently took place between her and Vladimir Putin.

Mizulina complained to the president about her nickname “Barbie.” It was, as we wrote , given by Western tabloids after it became known about her relationship with the president. Ekaterina Mikhailovna asked to do something about it.

Putin was surprised and replied that he liked the nickname “Barbie”. But, if it is unpleasant for Catherine, then he will order it to be sorted out. Vladimir Vladimirovich did not
specify how he would deal with the Western press.

At the same time, he does everything possible to make Mizulina feel comfortable. So, it was by order of the president that Ekaterina Mikhailovna was provided with additional security in Tyumen .
We at FRR sincerely hope that Budanov takes note.
@freerussia_report

Traffic shut down on the Crimean Bridge amid reports of explosions during the night.

Russian proxy authorities in occupied Crimea shut down traffic on the Crimean Bridge in the early hours of March 3, amid reports of explosions in Feodosia.

Authorities announced that vehicle traffic was blocked on the bridge at around 3:40 a.m. local time. Earlier in the night, local Telegram channels reported that residents heard sounds of explosions near an oil depot in Feodosia.

No reason was given for the traffic closure. Russian officials and the Russian Defense Ministry have not yet commented on reports of explosions.

The bridge, also called the Kerch Bridge, connects the Russian mainland with the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula. Construction on the bridge began after the illegal 2014 annexation and occupation of Crimea, and was completed in 2018.

The 19-kilometer long bridge is a critical supplies and transport route for Russian forces in Crimea and mainland Ukraine, and has been the target of repeated attacks following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

According to Google maps the illegal bridge is still closed.

🇺🇦@ukraine_report🇺🇦🔱Liz

Jeff Tiedrich.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jefftiedrich/p/dumb-ass-trumpers-are-getting-scammed?r=70k1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

(4/4)

If Americans let Ukrainians down, it will be a blow, perhaps a fatal one, to the "spirit of freedom," as a Ukrainian veteran put it in a speech I heard at the Munich Security Council.  We need that spirit, in part to oppose those who lack it.  The people who block aid for Ukraine today wish our own democracy ill.

In the last few days and weeks we have witnessed, again and again, the overlap between Russian influence in American politics, opposition to aid to Ukraine, and hostility toward the American constitutional system.  Putin knows that his only route to Kyiv passes through Washington, D.C., and he has acted accordingly.

The people working to assure the destruction of democracy in Ukraine also oppose democracy in America. We have just experienced a bogus impeachment proceeding against President Biden, where the chief accusation (long ago discredited by Ukrainian and other journalists, incidentally) arose from a Russian agent. Mike Johnson is in a submission chain that passes through Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Trump presents himself as an admirer of Putin and had been his client, in one form or another, for a decade. He has succeeded in conditioning the media by teaching his followers to shout "Russia hoax" whenever the subject comes up: but, all the same, Russia has backed him in every campaign and is backing him in this one. Johnson's 2018 congressional campaign, for that matter, took laundered funds from a Russian oligarch, and Johnson was one of the congressmen most deeply implicated in Trump's attempted coup in 2021.

Ukraine should and can win this war.  To do so, it needs arms and funds.  The amount needed of both is tiny on an American scale, not anything we would even notice.  It is the choices of certain Americans that have
brought the Ukrainians to this cruel pass, and brought the world to the edge of multiple catastrophe.  Should we fail to assist Ukraine, we will be inviting the worst of catastrophes.  We will put the security of the world at risk, and betray what is best about ourselves.  Americans can enable Ukrainian victory.  If we fail to do so, we will face an apocalypse Americans have chosen.  And, in particular, an apocalypse Mike Johnson has chosen.

Ukrainian resistance, though, has put the backbone into "never again."  Where Ukraine holds territory, and that is most of the country, people are saved.  Ukrainians have shown that a genocide can be halted -- with the right kind of help. When we cut off that help, as we have done, we enable genocide to proceed.  This is not only a horror in itself, but a precedent.

A great fear of our age is nuclear war, and Russia has used nuclear blackmail against Ukraine. Russians want Ukraine (and the rest of us) to give up because Russia has nuclear weapons. Russian propaganda instructs that a nuclear power cannot lose a war. This is of course untrue. The U.S. lost in Vietnam, the USSR lost in Afghanistan. Nuclear weapons did not hold the British and French empires together, or bring Israel victory in Lebanon. Had Ukraine submitted to Putin's nuclear blackmail, this would have incentivized every country to build nuclear weapons: some to intimidate, some to prevent intimidation. Ukrainian resistance has saved us from this scenario -- thus far. Should America abandon Ukraine, we can expect nuclear proliferation and nuclear jeopardy.

Another traditional worry has been a Russian attack upon a European country that triggers the collective defense provision of the NATO alliance.  For now, Ukraine is making this all but impossible.  Ukraine has absorbed an attack by Russia.  At horrible cost, Ukraine is fulfilling the entire mission of NATO, thereby sparing all other NATO members any risk of loss of territory or of life.  The NATO economies are about two-hundred and fifty times as big as the Ukrainian economy.  If they exploit a tiny fraction of their economic power, they could easily sustain the Ukrainian armed forces.  Unfortunately the largest by far of these NATO members, the United States, is doing nothing.  Should this continue, and should Russia win its war in Ukraine, then further war in Europe becomes not only possible, but likely.

For the past two decades, the main concern in Washington, D.C. has been a war with China in the Pacific over Taiwan. Never was this concern more pressing than in February 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin had just received China's blessing for his adventure. Had Ukraine fallen, as so many expected, it would have been a signal that other such adventures were possible. Ukraine's endurance has made clear that offensive operations are unpredictable and costly. Ukrainians are achieving what we could not, as Americans, achieve ourselves: sending a counsel of caution to China without in any way antagonizing the Chinese. Of course, should Ukraine be abandoned by its allies, and should Russia win, our earlier fears would return, and rightly so.

Russia is testing an international order.  The basic assumption, since the Second World War, is that states exist have borders that war cannot alter.  When Russia attacked Ukraine, it was attacking this principle.  Russia's rulers expected that a new age of chaos would begin, in which only lies and force would count.  The consensus in Washington, we should remember, was the same.  In the beginning, the American leadership expected the Ukrainian president to flee and for the country to fall in three days.  Every day since the fourth day is one in which Ukrainian blood has bought for us a future that we ourselves did not think we had.  After two years, too many of us take this for granted.  But if we decide not to help the Ukrainians, disorder will ensue, and prosperity will collapse.

For the past half century, people have been rightly concerned about global warming.  Whether we get through the next half century will depend upon a balance of power between those who make money from fossil fuels and lie about their consequences and those who tell the truth about science and seek alternative sources of energy.  Vladimir Putin is the most important fossil fuel oligarch.  Both his wealth and his power arise from natural gas and oil reserves.

(continues 2/4)

His war in Ukraine is a foretaste of the struggle for resources we will all face should Putin and other fossil fuel oligarchs get the upper hand.  Precisely because Ukraine resisted, important economies have accelerated their green transition.  Should Ukraine be abandoned and lose, it seems unlikely that there will be another chance to hold back fossil fuel oligarchy and save the climate.  More broadly, Putin's idiotic nation that there is no Ukraine is an example of the kind of oligarchical fantasy wastes time and destroys life as we try to confront the world's actual problems.

Global hunger is an important scenario for catastrophic global suffering in an age of drastic inequality and resource strife. Here no country is more important than Ukraine. For more than two thousand years, since the ancient Greeks, the fertile soil of Ukraine has fed neighboring lands and civilizations. Ukraine today is capable of feeding something like half a billion people. Russia's war against Ukraine has also been a hunger war. Russia has mined farms, flooded others by destroying a critical dam, targeted grain-storage facilities, and blockaded the Black Sea to prevent exports. In 2023, Ukraine was able to win an astonishing victory, clearing the western Black Sea of the Russian navy, and opening lanes for export of grain. Because the Ukrainians did this on their own, it has hardly been covered in our press. But it is a huge achievement. People in the Near East and Africa are being fed who might otherwise starve. If Ukraine is allowed to fall, all of this can be reversed, and suffering and war will spread to those vulnerable and critical areas.

From a different perspective, people fear that our world can end as a result of artificial intelligence, digital propaganda, and the collapse of the human contact needed for political decency.  For a decade now, Russia has been in the forefront of digital manipulation.  Its first invasion of Ukraine, in 2014, was successful chiefly as a hybrid war, in which it found vulnerable minds in the West and inserted useful memes -- ones which are still in use today.  And Russia does find backers today among the digital oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, who has bent his personal account and indeed his entire platform to become an instrument of Russian propaganda.  That said, the Ukrainians have, this time, shown how this can be resisted.  Volodymyr Zelens'kyi and other Ukrainian leaders, by taking personal risks in time of danger, have reminded us that there is a real world.  And Ukrainian civil society has this time taken a playful approach to new media, deconstructing Russian propaganda and reminding us of the human side -- and the human stakes.

Perhaps the most insidious calamity we face is one of doubt: we cease to believe in ourselves, as human beings with values, who deserve to rule themselves in the system we call democracy.  For most of this century, democracy has been in decline, and this decline has been accompanied by a discourse of passivity and a lack of resolve.  Russia's attack on Ukraine -- the rare event of an armed autocracy seeking to destroy a peaceful democracy by military force -- was a turning point in this history.  Which way we will all turn remains to be seen.  By resisting on the battlefield, Ukraine has, for the time being anyway, preserved its own democracy, and given new hope to democracies in
general.  There is nothing automatic about democracy.  People have to believe that they should rule.  And this will always involve some risk.  By taking great risks for the right values, Ukrainians can and do encourage others around the world.  If Ukrainians are killed, maimed, and forced to retreat as a result of U.S. policy, everyone is demoralized -- including us.

(continues 3/4)

By order of Putin, the Russian Ministry of Defense “rehearsed” a nuclear strike

On March 1, a combat training launch of a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile of the Yars mobile complex was carried out at the Plesetsk cosmodrome.

According to the official version, the purpose of the launch was to confirm the tactical, technical and flight characteristics of the modern missile system.

The Strategic Missile Forces “worked out the procedure for redeploying the Yars PGRK launch battery to a remote area with preparation and conduct of the launch.”

Valery Mykhaylov's life was taken by Russian shelling of the village of Velikiy Burluk, Kharkiv region.

On February 28, 2024, the Russian army attacked a defunct railway station with guided aerial bombs. Valeriy and his granddaughter Kira were walking there and found themselves at the epicenter of the impact.

Valery was 48 years old. He worked as a chief mechanic. He adored spending his free time with his relatives, and devoted a lot of attention to his granddaughter. He is described as a wonderful and sincere person.

"He was very kind, never refused help, always ready to support. He loved his family very much, smiled a lot," said his daughter's godmother and granddaughter's godmother, Liliya Tsebro.

Valery is survived by his wife, daughter, son-in-law, parents, brother.

British farmers brought 27 pickup trucks to the Lviv Region

The vehicles are filled with tools, shovels, spare tires, medical supplies, clothing, generators, tents, sleeping bags and other humanitarian aid for our defenders.

"These 27 SUVs, in accordance with the requests sent by the military units to the Lviv OVA, we handed over 24 King Danylo OMBr, 125 TrO OBr, 150 training center of the TrO Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Omega special unit and to reinforce mobile fire groups in the Lviv region" , - said the head of Lviv OVA Maksym Kozytskyi.

As part of the "Pickups for Peace" campaign, British farmers have already handed over 300 vehicles to the front lines.