TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2993. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
German president will not send Putin a congratulatory letter
https://t.me/warinukraineua/3580
Not a single Ukrainian soldier saw Red Cross representatives while in captivity
Ukrainian servicemen released from russian captivity confirmed to the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner of Ukraine that none of them met with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross during their imprisonment.
"During the exchanges, we conduct a survey of those released from captivity and ask if they have seen representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross. So far, there has been not one positive response," stated Dmytro Lubinets at a meeting with relatives of persons missing under special circumstances.
At the meeting, the commissioner also explained to the Ukrainian defenders' relatives that the status of missing does not imply that the person has died. He claims that missing people are frequently held captive, but the International Committee of the Red Cross cannot confirm this.
@ukrainejournal
🇦🇺 The Australian broadcaster ABC aired the documentary "The Ukrainian War: The Other Side". This film by British director Sean Langan covers the war through the eyes of Russians and shows their life at the front.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Australia called the film "the equivalent of a vomit bowl" that repeated Russian propaganda and historical distortions.
The Federation of Ukrainian Organizations of Australia stated that the film gave Russian soldiers a platform to justify a brutal invasion, gross lies, hatred and calls for genocide.
ABC defended the movie. The film allegedly offers the audience a glimpse into the lives of Russian soldiers and is an "important contribution" to war reporting.
@liveukraine_media
REPUBLICANS NEED TO AID UKRAINE - TRUMP IS GOING TO LOSE
Trump has been forced to admit that, having been criminally found guilty of 17 cases of fraud, he owes $464 million to the State of New York. He cannot get an insurance company to put up a bond because he doesn’t have anything like the assets to secure it. This is in addition to another $93 million he was able to get a bond for, to appeal the E Jean Carroll sexual assault case.
Trumps outlandish rhetoric and behaviour at rallies have really started to put off the electorate. The Republican Party is facing ‘67% reductions in small donor funding’ against the same time in the 2019 campaign when he was president. Worse still the big donors are nowhere to be found. SuperPacs supporting Trump are short of money and virtually begging. There is a huge drop in the money available to elect senators and representatives - most of them are having to raise their own or self-finance.
And that puts many in the Senate on alert. Some are facing uphill battles. Many in the House have decided not to even run.
Amongst the topics that are not largely discussed is that Americans in a sizeable majority, want Ukraine to survive and win - and they want to aid the country to do so. Republicans have swallowed so many Russian talking points and become so beholden to the right wing extremity bubble, they just don’t see that what they espouse isn’t what the average decent American wants to see or hear. For their own sake funding Ukraine properly would be good for them, but they have gone so far down the Trumpian rabbit hole of lies and misinformation they can’t find their way back out even if they wanted to.
All the indicators right now suggest that unless there is fraud, Trump is losing the path to election. Even his old vice-president Mike Pence refused to endorse him - the first time that’s ever happened.
Aiding Ukraine may actually help the republicans hold some of their seats, but they’ll never acknowledge it.
The only good thing, is that longer term, the torture of another Trump term will with luck, fade into obscurity.
@EveryUkraineWarVideo Subscribe
Republican Party is shrinking fast
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/last-one-out-the-door-turn-out-the-lights-2/55090/
Will deliver 500,000 shells by end of March
This is an article by Rebecca Barth of the German broadcaster ARD. I translated it, because the story told stands for so many Crimean tatars and Ukrainians who are abducted, tortured, imprisoned. It highlights a tragedy whose full extent will probably only become clear after Ukraine's victory.
"Crimea has become a prison"
It has been ten years since the annexation of Crimea - since then Russia has been arming the peninsula and is apparently abducting civilians from other occupied areas there. The whereabouts of the prisoners have long been unclear and the conditions in which they are held are appalling.
Faride Abdurachmanowa took extra time for the conversation. The 27-year-old gives her cell phone to her daughter and turns on a children's series. Then she begins to talk about the day two years ago that would change her life forever. "They took my husband with them. There were seven of them, they came into the house, sent the children into my room. And then all I heard was screaming and beating. They tortured him very badly."
At the beginning of the Russian war of aggression, the young family still lived in a small village in the south of Ukraine - just a few kilometers from the annexed Crimean peninsula, right by the sea. The Russian occupiers accused Abdurakhmanova's husband of being a member of a Crimean Tatar battalion. The Muslim minority to which the family belongs is particularly in the focus of the Russian authorities.
"We didn't have a chance to ask anything. The whole room was covered in blood," she says. "They tied his hands with tape, put a bag over his head, tied everything up with tape and threw him in the car. After three or four days we got a call from the FSB that he was there."
There - that means: in Simferopol, in the Crimea. Ten years ago, Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. Today it is of extremely great symbolic, political and military importance. But not only that, explains Olha Skrypnyk from the human rights group Crimea: "What is important to mention - and a completely new situation for Crimea - is that Crimea has become a prison for people from the newly occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. They are kidnapped and taken to Crimea. Previously, there was only the number one detention center in Simferopol, where, among others, political prisoners were imprisoned."
Abdurakhmanova's husband is one of an estimated hundreds of Ukrainian civilians who were forcibly brought to Crimea from the south of the country. How many people in total have been abducted and imprisoned in the areas occupied since 2022 is difficult to determine, says Olha Skrypnyk.
People would disappear into the Russian prison system, cut off from the outside world: "When relatives, lawyers, the Red Cross or the Ukrainian authorities get involved, the Russian authorities do not confirm the detention of the person they are looking for. They don't have a lawyer," she says. "They were kidnapped in Kherson, Oleshky or Melitopol, but are not officially in Simferopol either. Formally they don't even exist."
In the first year of Russia's war of aggression alone, two new prisons were registered in Simferopol in Crimea, says Skrypnyk. The AP news agency has researched that there will be at least 25 new prisons in the occupied territories of Ukraine within a few years. There is currently little hope of release for detained civilians, explains human rights activist Skrypnyk.
"The Geneva Convention says nothing about civilian prisoners. It was not assumed that a country would simply hold thousands and thousands of civilians during a war."
There is an established procedure for prisoners of war; soldiers can return home through prisoner exchanges. "There is no such thing for civilians. We are now looking for a mechanism, at least some way, to bring these people home," says Skrypnyk. But often it is too late: the captured and abducted people die as a result of torture, a lack of medical care or the terrible prison conditions - "and we don't even know exactly where they are."
to continue 👇
The Houthis congratulated Putin on his “victory” in the elections
A member of Yemen's Supreme Political Council, formed by the Houthis, Lieutenant General Sultan al-Sami congratulated Vladimir Putin on his re-election to a fifth presidential term. He called the result announced by the Central Election Commission of more than 87% of the votes a “convincing victory.” “The re-election of President Vladimir Putin as head of state is a victory for the BRICS group, which is fighting to destroy the unipolar system that fuels wars and conflicts around the world and pursues a policy of colonization and impoverishment of peoples,” al-Sami said.
Earlier, Putin was congratulated on his re-election by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, Iran, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nicaragua, North Korea, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping also sent telegrams. The latter expressed his conviction that Putin would remain to rule Russia for a fifth term, a year ago during a visit to Moscow.
In total, Putin was congratulated by the leaders of 17 states, while after the 2018 campaign there were almost twice as many. Western leaders were not among them this time. In Europe, the vote organized by the Russian authorities, to which not a single independent candidate was allowed, was perceived negatively or with sarcasm. Back on March 15, European Council President Charles Michel congratulated Putin in advance on his “convincing victory,” emphasizing that Russians would have “no freedom, no choice.” Germany refused to call Putin president.
TOP NEWS TODAY 👀🔝
🇨🇿 Czech Republic found another 700,000 (❗) shells for Ukraine that can be secured with additional funding, - WSJ
🇧🇪 Belgium has announced a $450 million military assistance package for Ukraine: 300 Lynx, 3 minehunter ships and ammunition.
🇺🇦 NATO soldiers are already in Ukraine for arms control, intelligence operations and training, - El Pais
🇬🇧 UK advises Ukraine to focus on strikes on Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet and postpone counteroffensive, - Sunday Times
🦅 The government has allocated an additional 5 billion hryvnias for for the purchase of drones, - Prime Minister Shmyhal
🇷🇴 President Iohannis approved the training of the Ukrainian military in Romania, who will learn to use F-16 at the military base in Fetești.
🇰🇵 North Korea 'ships 7,000 containers of military aid to Russia', - Sky News
The Spanish El Pais once again states in its latest article the presence of NATO soldiers in Ukraine.
ℹ️ France's statements about the possibility of sending NATO troops to Ukraine opens a debate, which confirms that the soldiers of the alliance are already operating on Ukrainian territory
ℹ️ NATO helps Ukraine in almost every possible way, from supplying weapons and intelligence on Russian targets to flying enemy bombers and training thousands of Ukrainian servicemen in Europe.
ℹ️ But until the French president proposed it, no one dared to consider the possibility of sending in Allied troops to stop Russia. Macron not only opened the discussion, but also confirmed that NATO troops are already on Ukrainian soil.
💬 There are already NATO soldiers in Ukraine, and I would like to thank the embassies that took this risk. Unlike other politicians, I will not say which countries these are, - Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said at a conference in Warsaw on March 8.
ℹ️ The presence of NATO soldiers in Ukraine is not something new. In October 2022, Pentagon press secretary General Pat Ryder confirmed that the United States had deployed military representatives there to monitor arms shipments.
ℹ️ In classified Pentagon documents leaked in April 2023, the US Department of Defense noted that the five countries of the Atlantic alliance - the US, France, the UK, Lithuania and the Netherlands - have about 100 special forces in their embassies in the country.
ℹ️ In a television interview on March 10, the President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, recalled that NATO soldiers have been present in Ukraine for more than ten years, but not as part of combat units, but as instructors for the Ukrainian army.
ℹ️ EL PAÍS interviewed scores of military personnel from Ukraine and the EU over more than two years of war, and they all agree that no NATO army has taken part in ground combat.
ℹ️ But they also agree that they have whistleblowers on the ground who provide information on the situation on the front, determine the effectiveness of the weapons being supplied, as well as possible problems during their use, and identify possible cases of corruption in the delivery of aid.
ℹ️ Some of these unofficial informants are retired foreign military personnel who serve as volunteers in the Ukrainian armed forces. At least two sources, one American and one Ukrainian, say Washington is particularly active in monitoring the aid delivery, arranging missions between its embassy and Ukrainian authorities, as well as making visits outside official channels.
There may be limited, technical reasons for the presence of NATO personnel on Ukrainian territory, but this should be avoided. It is better to replace him with civilian specialists... The case with the Storm Shadow missiles cannot be unique, but because it is likely that NATO instructors will be sent to Ukraine when the first American F-16 fighter jets arrive there this year.
ℹ️ On March 11, Volodymyr Zelenskyi cited as an example in the Le Monde newspaper the possibility of repairing and manufacturing French Caesar howitzers and German Leopard tanks in Ukraine with inevitable military assistance on the ground.
ℹ️ The call of political leaders such as Macron to involve NATO soldiers in Ukraine is primarily a strategy to avoid being blackmailed by Russian President Vladimir Putin:
It is about creating a dilemma for Putin and adding a new risk factor
-In Factum
Russians still enjoying American burgers and sandwiches as companies refuse to leave
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, most major Western fast-food chains closed up shop, sold off assets, and exited the Russian market.
A small cohort of six American fast-food chains decided otherwise. The franchises of Carl’s Jr., Papa John’s, Costa Coffee, Burger King, and TGI Fridays have continued to operate, business as usual.
Trump has never known reality very well.
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/senile-donald-trump-files-for-divorce-from-reality/55078/
Is a dead man about to speak? Is that what Trump fears?
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2993. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
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