TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/how-stephen-miller-is-using-america-first-legal-to-assail-voting-rights/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/us/politics/trump-gop-voting.html

Two grumpy old men 2nd round

https://open.substack.com/pub/twogrumpyoldmenonukraine/p/another-reminder-that-russias-war?r=70k1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Two grumpy old men

https://open.substack.com/pub/twogrumpyoldmenonukraine/p/what-happens-when-ukraine-confronts?r=70k1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Good morning. This morning I am thinking of the brave Ukrainian women out on the front lines. Did you realize they are there? All volunteers! Fighting and dying for freedom.

Two live examples and two who gave their lives for Ukraine - for freedom.

Two Redemptorist fathers were released from Russian captivity. They are Ivan Levytsky and Bohdan Geleta, priests of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. They were Two Redemptorist fathers were released from Russian captivity. They are Ivan Levytsky and Bohdan Geleta, priests of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. They were taken prisoner in Berdiansk on November 16, 2022.

Since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, priests Ivan Levitsky and Bohdan Geleta have decided to stay with their people in the temporarily occupied territories. They served both the Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic communities, giving a light of hope to people under occupation. They were arrested, then some military items were planted in the church, and accused of illegal possession of weapons. There were reports that they were being tortured mercilessly to extract a confession to a crime they did not commit.

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Just sitting here relaxing with sun tea and macaroni salad. With 4th of July next week our local super has Resers macaroni salad, potato salad and cole slaw on sale. And I got to try out my 2 gallon glass sun tea dispenser I bought last fall on clearance

The Ukrainian FPV drone "Queen of Hornets" is equipped with a TM-62 anti-tank mine.

operational information as of 10.00 28.06.2024 regarding the Russian invasion

❗️Main information:

🔵Over the past day, there have been 140 military clashes.

За according to updated information, over the past day, the enemy has carried out seven missile strikes on the positions of our troops and settlements, with the use of nine missiles, 48 air strikes (in particular, with the use of 77 Kabiv), carried out about 4,300 attacks, including 109 with the use of multiple launch rocket systems, more than 1,300 attacks with kamikaze drones of various types.

During the day, the Air Forces and missile forces and artillery of the Defense Forces of Ukraine hit five areas of concentration of personnel and military equipment, one air defense system, a radar station, as well as three ammunition depots.

🔵Since the beginning of this day, 59 military clashes have already taken place. The invaders carried out 16 air strikes with the use of 33 Kabs, more than 565 times fired at the positions of our troops and settlements.

🔵In the Kharkiv direction, the enemy continues to storm in the area of Volchansk. Three attacks were repelled by Ukrainian soldiers, and another one continues.

🔵In the Kupyansky direction, since the beginning of the day, there have been two clashes near Stepnaya Novoselovka and Stelmakhovka.

🔵In the Limansky direction, Russian invaders are conducting assault operations in the areas of Makeyevka, Nevsky, Torsky and Serebryansky forests. Four attacks ended without success for the aggressor. The same number continue.

🔵In the Seversky direction, the enemy has somewhat increased the intensity of offensive operations. Today, 12 battles have already taken place here, 10 of them were recaptured near disputed, Razdolovka and Vydenka, and two more clashes continue in the area of disputed.

На in the Kramatorsk direction, the invading troops are attacking the positions of our defenders near Ivanovsky and Chasovny Yar, where three enemy attacks are currently underway.

🔵In the Toretsk direction, the Russian aggressor twice carried out unsuccessful assault operations from Horlivka.

🔵19 military clashes have already taken place in the Pokrovsky direction today. The enemy is trying to break through from the Ocheretino area in the directions of Vozdvizhenka, Yevgenyevka, Novoaleksandrovka and progress. Our defenders have successfully repelled five attacks of the invaders, and another seven are continuing.
At the same time, the invaders made seven attempts to break into our battle formations near Novoselovka Pervaya. Three attacks were unsuccessful, and four more continue.

Чотири in the Kurakhovsky direction, four assault operations of the occupation army near Georgievka, Konstantinovka and Praskoveyevka ended without success, and one clash is still ongoing.

🔵In the Vremovsky direction, Ukrainian soldiers repelled two enemy attacks near Vodiane.

На in the Orekhovsky direction, the Russian invaders do not abandon their intentions to oust our defenders near Malaya Tokmachka. One assault Action for the enemy ended unsuccessfully, and another clash continues.

The president of Ukraine together with the president of Slovenia paid tribute to the memory of the fallen defenders and defenders on Mikhailovskaya Square in Kiev

"Ukraine will always remember everyone and everyone who gave their lives in battle – it has become the life of our entire state. 

Together with Slovenian President Natasha Pirc Musar, the memory of the fallen defenders and defenders of Ukraine was honored. 

Eternal glory to all our heroes!",- Vladimir Zelensky.

https://t.me/ukrainejournal/14063

Ukrainian long-range kamikaze drones attacked an oil depot in russia's Tambov region yesterday morning. @ukrainejournal

🇺🇸 The first debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump took place in the United States. They talked about the economy, migration, the abortion ban, and the war in Ukraine and Gaza

◽ Trump called Biden a "bad leader" and blamed him for the war in Ukraine. He says that "during his presidency, Putin did not take land" because he knew that "you can't play with Trump." Biden allegedly "encouraged Russia to invade" Ukraine because he showed US weakness during the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 2021.

◽ Trump called Putin's conditions for ending the war in Ukraine "unacceptable". However, he believes that the United States is spending "too much money" to support Ukraine and called President Volodymyr Zelensky "the best salesman."

◽ Biden called Putin a war criminal. He emphasized that he must be stopped because the war will spread to other European countries.

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Ukraine Fighting To Hold Key Supply Lines, Russian Attacks Intensify | Ukraine Front Line Update - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Ukraine Front Line Update: Ukrainian troops are fiercely defending a crucial road between Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka in the Donetsk region amid intensified Russian attacks. Moscow aims to seize more territory. CurrentTimeTV correspondent Borys Sachalko spent a day with a Ukrainian unit working to secure vital supply lines in this embattled area.

From "The Analyst" (Military & Strategic): (3/3)

Germany lost WW2 on June 22nd 1941 when it invaded the Soviet Union - it could never win that war from the start as so many of the Generals later admitted they feared. It took four years to end that war.
This one will end. Probably not before 2026 at the earliest. But it will end. And Ukraine will survive. And join the EU and NATO. Quite what that will mean for the future? Who knows. It depends how the war ends and how Russia deals with it.
Meanwhile the fight goes on…

Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦!

From "The Analyst" (Military & Strategic): (2/3)

The reality is that minimum production lasted for the first year, as new plant was constructed to make more and then bring that online. It was only by the late part of 1917 and again the late part of 1943 that shell production - indeed general war production started to reach its peak.
Two and half years in, our factories and our production are starting to ramp up fast and by year three they will start to meet that production demand. That’s just the way it is. And that production and its delivery to Ukraine will start to have its impact.
Ukraine itself has faced onslaughts from bombs, missiles, frontline attacks and tragedies. Yet it still fights. It is still standing and it is still showing Russia that it’s not going to win. Its capacity to fight back, to fight on, to take the war into the heart of Russian oil, airfields, factories and military targets has multiplied exponentially.
Ukraine has hobbled and humbled the once mighty Russian navy and it doesn’t even own a warship.
It has held its ground. It has destroyed half a million Russian men and over 8,000 of its once feared tanks. It has drained the vast stockpiles of Soviet era weapons and equipment to the point of exhaustion. It has systematically destroyed so much Russian artillery that they have more shells to fire than guns to fire them from, a problem that worsens every day.
Armoured assaults of 60 tanks have vanished - if they can muster 2 or 3 for an attack it’s now a good day for Russia. Kharkiv is proving to be a catastrophic failure and underlines how badly Russian military forces have been degraded.
Without an air force to speak of, with no navy at all, with limited resources and a dependence on foreign financial and military aid Ukraine has pulled off a miracle. From its late 2022 counter offensive which Russia has never recovered from, to its fierce refusal to give up any land without a fight, Ukraine has held on. Its people haven’t been cowed by the attacks on civilians, on schools and universities, on hospitals and supermarkets, book printers and power plants.
They make a million drones a year in their homes at night. They cook food and they make uniforms, they work and they carry on, because they must . This war is the battle for their right to independence, to democracy, to a better world for them and their children. It’s existential. And they are our frontline.
We cannot fail them.
The war is far from over. I see no resolution even if Trump comes to office. Europe is now becoming the key to Ukraine’s victory. President Macron - once a member of the Talk To Putin Coalition with the Germans, has seen the light. And with him is far more of Europe than anyone expected. Russian propaganda has become pervasive and stirred up far-right sympathies and yet even they see things aren’t all as they appear in the Kremlin.
Russia buckles under the economic strain of the war. It struggles to make a handful of tanks and its strengths are few but very visible - drones, missiles, glide bombs, endless mindless manpower. Its weakness is it has failed to ever imagine Ukraine could reach so far into its lands and devastate its economy. That was never on the cards and has been a rude awakening with no easy answers. Sanctions are cutting deep and Russian gas is almost unsellable, its oil sold at barely cost price in dodgy trades on shady tankers. Its refinery capacity so reduced it’s having to import refined fuels from profiteering neighbours.
The Chinese have Russia up against the supply chain wall and have crept deeply into Russian interests inside Russia itself. Even Russia’s friends rip it off commercially because they know Moscow has no other choices. They’re so desperate they need N.Korean insanity and mad Mullahs to feed the war machine. The cracks are showing and the nuclear sabre rattling never ends.
Germany lost WW1 in April 1917 when America joined the war. It took another 19 months to end it.

From "The Analyst" (Military & Strategic): (1/3)

TAKING STOCK OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE

As I am about to sign off for the next fortnight I thought it worth taking time to take a look at where we are and how we got here in more general terms - and where we go next.
One of the key aspects of this war at the start was everyone - including me - gave the Russians the benefit of the doubt based on what we knew in the past about their abilities and the scale of their military forces.
That assessment - that they would have occupied pretty much all of Ukraine in 7-10 days, and in my view then face a major internal conflict and partisan action, was shattered by two things. First Zelensky stayed to fight and rallied the nation - a pivotal and fundamentally critical moment in history that instantly changed everything. A foundational moment of staggering importance that can never be overlooked.
The second key fact was the slow rolling reality of the Russian war machine as it humiliated itself through corruption and incompetence on a scale I don’t think anyone realised was even possible. Russian propaganda had been very effective over a very long time in conditioning us to believe that the modern Russian army may be smaller, but its traditions and strength had never really been compromised. How wrong we were. Money, greed, lawlessness and corruption had rotted its teeth and its brains.
In the West we were shaken out of our complacency at first slowly, realising that what was happening was real but still finding it painfully difficult to accept that the Putin regime had gone so far, that it would jeopardise its position as European energy master and be willing to cut itself off from the materialistic consumer goods its wealthy and middle class craved, for war. We had failed to appreciate the absolute power that Putin had accumulated and that he had no opposition left.
Western leaders bent over backwards to try and get him to see reason. He did not.
Then something truly remarkable began.
I believe that Zelensky deciding to stand and fight acted as a catalyst for the west to realise it to had to stand up too. It was slow and it was painful to watch as we tied ourselves up in knots worried over escalation - afraid of Putin’s wrath and his now ignored red lines.
As we bickered over what aid to give, we did carry out the most dangerous and shockingly effective - even daring transformation, especially given the vast economic impact it had on westerners generally. We dumped Russian energy. And we did so in a time frame that was, given its scale, logistics and global resources, frankly incredible. Our bills spiked and we moaned - governments stepped in even in the UK to partly subsidise our energy bills to heat our homes. The shock for the Russians was that we did it. They simply didn’t think it possible, that after years of energy domination - a long laid plan that was as much about strategic leverage as it was about making billion dollar a day profits - had failed and failed spectacularly.
Putin was the chief strategist. He conceived of the energy plan 25 years ago, writing papers on it. He was notoriously well known for his understanding of the oil and gas industry. He was the mastermind behind the attack on Ukraine, as he played a 19th Century game of great power politics in 21st century world where nobody else even understood what he was failing to comprehend. The world doesn’t work like it did in 1899.
The West finally started to cross its red lines over what to supply Ukraine - now we have crossed every one of them. Nothing has happened.
Another achievement has been the uplift in military equipment and ammunition production.
The ubiquitous 155mm shell that was being produced in numbers that barely passed 25,000 a month in the entire free world, was barely enough to meet Ukraine’s needs for 60 hours of combat. Russia was lobbing 60,000 152mm every day at Ukraine at peak points.
Why in this ‘want it now’ world, could we not produce more faster? This is an age old problem. The same was faced in both World Wars.
(1/3)

In Dnipro, a part of the building that was attacked by the ruzzian federation collapsed.

Ruzzia attacked a high-rise building in Dnipro

There are at least 12 victims. Six are in the hospital. Among them is a pregnant woman and a 7-month-old baby.

One of the victims was poisoned by combustion products, OVA reported.

Czech Prime Minister accuses russia of arson of Prague car fleet

The arson of a bus depot in Prague was another evidence of the "hybrid" sabotage campaign that Russia is waging on the territory of European countries, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said. Western intelligence agencies believe that the scattered but increasingly numerous acts of sabotage are part of Moscow's systemic attempt to destabilize the situation in the countries supporting Ukraine.

Police on Saturday detained a Spanish-speaking man from South America who spent only five days in the Czech Republic, the BBC reported. In the early hours of Thursday morning, he poured gasoline on several buses in a Prague car park and tried to set them on fire. The damage caused was small, but Fiala in a statement linked the incident to recent fires at an Ikea store in Vilnius and Poland's largest shopping mall in Warsaw.

"A connection with russia is not only possible, but also very likely. This attack was probably organized and financed by russia."

Carrying out sabotage by proxy is a characteristic feature in the work of russian intelligence.

- In March, five people recruited by them, including 20-year-old Briton Dylan Earle, tried to set fire to a Ukrainian warehouse in London.

- Last year, a Bulgarian spy group working for russia, which was monitoring local military facilities, was uncovered in the UK.

- In Germany, two men with German and Russian citizenship were arrested this spring. They monitored military factories, arms delivery routes and the US base where Ukrainian tankers are trained, and also planned sabotage at military and industrial facilities.

- In 2023-2024, several groups of spies and potential saboteurs were arrested in Poland, including recruited Ukrainians and Belarusians who were trying to quickly earn money by performing seemingly simple tasks.

"For russia, this is normal behavior... They hired 10 people to attack [in February] the cars of the Minister of Internal Affairs and a journalist," Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur recently said. "We need to understand that russia is acting more and more aggressively towards the countries of Europe and NATO."

🇪🇺@EU_Report 🇨🇿 🇷🇺