TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org

Monobank will buy a house for 98-year-old Lidiia Stepanivna, who left partially occupied Ocheretyne on her own

"She will definitely live in it, until the moment when this abomination (Russia) disappears from our land," the bank's co-founder writes.

The grandmother walked about 10 kilometers to get to the free territory. Her house in the village was destroyed by the Russians.

Video: united 24

🇺🇦@ukraine_report 🇺🇦🔱 Liz

https://t.me/noel_reports/11377

https://t.me/noel_reports/11371

The Air Force told how they will store F-16 fighters to prevent them from being hit by Russia.

"These are enormous funds if we are talking about digging underground, storage facilities, bunkers. This also takes time. Therefore, we are now developing other methods of how to place them, where to place them. We understand that this will be a dispersed use on different types of runways, airfields, where it is difficult for the enemy to find them," Air Force speaker Yevlash said.

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Interrogations would last 40 minutes and often consisted of electric shocks, blows to the head and sexual abuse, real or threatened.

“They start with maximum violence,” the serviceman said. “They say ‘You are lying, you are not telling us everything.’ They put a knife to your ear or offer to cut off one of your fingers.”

Others would beat them on the back of the head so regularly that they lost consciousness, he said.

“If one gets tired, another takes over,” he recalled. “When you fall, they make you stand again. It can last 30 to 40 minutes. At the end they say, ‘Why did you not tell us everything immediately?’”

Smiley said much of the violence was of a sexual nature. One prison unit repeatedly struck the prisoners all over their bodies, including on the genitals, with batons that gave electric shocks, he said.

On another occasion, he said, a cellmate was repeatedly kicked in the genitals during roll call, where the prisoners were lined up with their legs spread, facing a wall in a corridor. Smiley suffered permanent injury from an untreated broken pelvis from a truncheon blow and could not bend or lie down without assistance for two weeks.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has very limited access to prisoners of war held in Russia, was not permitted to visit him during his nine months of imprisonment, he added.

The second serviceman said he was forced to strip and place his genitals on a stool as his interrogators hit them with a ruler and lay a knife on them, threatening to castrate him.

Interrogators put him through a mock execution, firing a volley of gunfire beside him while he was blindfolded.

They threatened him with rape, the serviceman said, making him choose what they should use — a mop handle or the leg of a chair. “Do you want to do it yourself or do you want us to help you?” they taunted him.

He said he was never actually penetrated, but others were raped. “After that you cannot walk normally,” he said. “You suffer for weeks. Other guys had the same treatment.”

“I think they had such an order to break us psychologically and physically so that we would not want anything else in life,” he said, adding that there were suicides in the Taganrog jail.

“You could hear the screams all day,” the serviceman said. “Impossible screams.” Sometimes during a lull, the prisoners could hear the voices of children playing outside, he said.

The ordeal for the former prisoners is by no means over once back home.

“The most difficult thing is having too many people around,” the serviceman said. “Everyone is peacefully walking in the park and you are still afraid that someone is listening, or that you might get shoved or say the wrong thing.”

Maj. Valeria Subotina, a military press officer and a former journalist who was also taken prisoner at Azovstal and who spent a year in women’s prisons in Russia, recently opened a meeting space in Kyiv called YOUkraine, for former prisoners.

“There are many triggers and people do not realize they still need care,” she said.

She returned to service three months after her release in April 2023, but found it hard to sit in an office. “I cannot bear someone approaching me from behind or standing behind me,” she said.

The government psychologists were not of much use, she said. “They often don’t know how to help us,” she said, and civilians often ask careless questions.

As a result, many former prisoners find returning to the front line easier than rejoining civilian life, she said, and only fellow survivors really understand what they are going through.

“We don’t want to feel pity,” she said, “because we are proud that we survived and we overcame this.”

- The New York Times

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Russia’s torture of prisoners of war has been well documented by the United Nations, with former inmates speaking of relentless beatings, electric shocks, rape, sexual violence and mock executions, so much so that one expert described it as a systematic, state-endorsed policy. Many detainees have also reported lingering symptoms such as blackouts and fainting spells stemming from repeated blows to the head that were severe enough to cause concussions.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, said in September that “about 90% of Ukrainian prisoners of war have been subjected to torture, rape, threats of sexual violence or other forms of ill-treatment.”

The Russian military did not answer a request for comment on the allegations of mistreatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Most of the released prisoners have returned to active duty after about three months of rest and rehabilitation, as the Ukrainian military, short of troops on the front line, has given relatively few medical exemptions to former prisoners of war.

A law passed this month will allow former prisoners of war the choice of returning to service or being discharged from the military, recognition that many have been subjected to severe mental and physical torture and need prolonged rehabilitation. Ukrainian officials acknowledged that there have been problems in providing sufficient care for former prisoners, but said they had now developed special centers for them using best international practices.

Ukrainian prosecutors have identified 3,000 former military and civilian prisoners who can serve as witnesses for a case they are building for the Ukrainian courts to charge Russian individuals and officials with mistreatment of prisoners. The prosecutors encouraged two of the former prisoners to speak to The New York Times.

One of them was Smiley, 22, who was captured at the beginning of the war when the Russian navy seized Ukrainian positions on Snake Island in the Black Sea. He spoke a year after his release, saying he hoped that shedding light on the conditions of Russian prisons would help not only his own rehabilitation, but also the thousands of prisoners of war still in captivity.

“My sister persuaded me to give my first interview,” he said. “‘You need to tell,’ she said. Maybe if we speak, it will help the treatment of our guys.”

A second Ukrainian serviceman made available by the prosecutors gave a lengthy interview but declined to give his name or call sign, because of the stigma surrounding the abuses he suffered.

The serviceman, 36, said he was taken prisoner along with several thousand soldiers and marines after a long siege at the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol in May 2022. He spent nine months in Russian captivity before being released in a prisoner exchange in early 2023.

He spent most of his time in three detention facilities in the Russian towns of Taganrog, Kamensk-Shakhtinsky and Kursk.

He returned critically underweight and suffering from an injured spine and, like many others, blackouts, dizziness and ringing in the ears from frequent beatings on the head.

“I am not fainting any longer,” the serviceman said, “but I have difficulties with my back and concussion, and a squeezing all the time of the area around my heart.”

Despite his injuries, he was ordered to return to light duty as a guard after only two months’ rest in a sanitarium.

“I don’t know if I could run a kilometer,” he said.

Prisoners were subjected to brutal daily beatings on their legs, backs and fingers, and mental and physical torture during interrogations, as well as hunger, cold and a lack of medical care, he said.

Three men died in custody during his imprisonment, including one who died in the communal cell they shared, he said.

Some of the Russian units guarding or interrogating the prisoners were worse than others, the two former prisoners said, but there were consistent beatings every morning at roll call and torture at most detention facilities.

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Many Ukrainian Prisoners of War Show Signs of Trauma and Sexual Violence

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The Ukrainian marine infantryman endured nine months of physical and psychological torture as a Russian prisoner of war, but was allotted only three months of rest and rehabilitation before being ordered back to his unit.

The infantryman, who asked to be identified only by his call sign, Smiley, returned to duty willingly. But it was only when he underwent intensive combat training in the weeks after that the depth and range of his injuries, both psychological and physical, began to surface.

“I started having flashbacks, and nightmares,” he said. “I would only sleep for two hours and wake up with my sleeping bag soaking wet.” He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and referred for psychological care, and is still receiving treatment.

Ukraine is just beginning to understand the lasting effects of the traumas its prisoners of war experienced in Russian captivity, but it has been failing to treat them properly and returning them to duty too early, say former prisoners, officials and psychologists familiar with individual cases.

Nearly 3,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war have been released from Russia in prisoner exchanges since the 2022 invasion began. More than 10,000 remain in Russian custody, some of whom have endured two years of conditions that a United Nations expert described as horrific.

The Ukrainian government’s rehabilitation program, which has usually involved two months in a sanitarium and a month at home, is inadequate, critics say, and the traumas suffered by Ukrainian prisoners are growing with the length and severity of the abuse they are being subjected to as the war drags on.

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More recently, a French helicopter crew gunned down a Houthi drone over the Red Sea.

*Machine-gunning drones from the back of a helicopter or plane saves valuable air-defense missiles.*

“Expending many thousands (if not millions) of dollars on each missile to eliminate an inexpensive UAV is an economically losing affair,” wrote Paul Maxwell, the deputy director of the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy in New York.

It’s especially important for the Ukrainians to save their best air-defense munitions as the wider war grinds into its third year.

Ukraine still gets most of its missiles from its foreign allies, and the six-month interruption in supplies from the United States—the result of Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress slow-walking aid legislation—means missile stocks are desperately low right now.

But the cheap anti-drone tactic isn’t necessarily easy. Consider one of the first dogfights over the European front line in World War I. “We met a German aeroplane at about the same altitude as ourselves, and about the same speed, so that we couldn’t get any closer than 600 yards,” Royal Flying Corps observer Archibald James recalled.

“I put up my sights on the service rifle to 600 yards and fired six deliberate shots, and was miserable that I didn’t apparently hit him at all,” he said. “I’ve no doubt I was miles away. We had no conception then at what close ranges it was necessary to shoot to have any effect at all.”

In other words, sniping a drone from the back of a plane requires the pilot to get really close—and the shooter to take careful aim.

- David Axe, Forbes

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WWI Tactics make a Comeback as a Ukrainian Gunner in the back of a Propeller Plane Shoots Down a Russian Drone

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The first aerial dogfights during World War I were slow, almost comical affairs. In the early years of the war, propeller-driven observation planes lacked forward-firing machine guns.

So the pilots—or, more often, the observers in the second seats—aimed their pistols or rifles at enemy planes.

More than a century later, aerial observers are still firing small arms from the back seats of propeller-driven planes.

Last week, a gunner in a 1970s-vintage Yakovlev Yak-52 training plane belonging to a Ukrainian volunteer flying club engaged a Russian Orlan drone over southern Ukraine, reportedly shooting down the $100,000 drone.

It’s not the first time the combatants in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine have revived tactics and technology from World War I. Trench warfare is back. So are “turtle tanks” and Maxim machine guns.

But the aerial gunner-versus-drone dogfight might be the most dramatic example of modern warfare devolving in the brutal conditions of the Ukraine conflict.

The apparent drone shoot-down was captured in videos shot from the ground as well as inside the two-seat Yak-52. In the videos, the 1.5-ton trainer—which cruises a little faster than 100 miles per hour—circles around the 33-pound Orlan.

Gunfire can be heard. The seemingly damaged drone descends under its automatically-deployed parachute.

Slow-flying aircraft carrying gunners are an obvious choice for engaging slow-flying unmanned aerial vehicles without spending a lot of money.

One of the very first shoot-downs of a modern drone happened this way—in Bosnia in the early 1990s.

“One innovative Serbian anti-UAV tactic was to launch a military Mi-8 Hip helicopter to fly alongside a [U.S. Army] Hunter UAV and then have the door gunner blast the UAV with his 7.62-millimeter machine gun,” JD R. Dixon, then a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, wrote in a 2000 thesis.

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From the beginning of the week from April 22 to 28, the sapper units of the State Special Transport Service discovered, removed and neutralized 4,140 explosive objects.

The territory with an area of 3430.74 hectares was demined (verified).
The most explosive objects were seized in the Kharkiv region - 2983.

In total, since the beginning of the large-scale aggression, units of the State Special Transport Service have discovered, seized and neutralized 145,574 explosive objects and demined a territory with an area of 86,149.57 hectares (verified).
Water area - 23.48 ha
Motor roads – 881.66 km
Railway tracks – 2513.83 km
Power grid lines – 468.63 km
Gas pipes - 51.87 km
The residential area is 341.12 hectares

@ukrainejournal

They hit the Harry Potter Castle in yesterday's attack.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/31873

Painted on aircraft again.

https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/31900

Two losers ought to hang out together

https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/donald-trump-dumps-kari-lake/55780/

I always thought Trump was berserk.

https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/donald-trump-goes-berserk-3/55784/

Good morning Resisters. 52⁰ and blue skies here.

https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/gop-just-cant-help-itself-on-this-one/55766/

New charges for Trump?
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/turns-out-the-michigan-criminal-probe-really-is-ongoing-and-its-time-for-donald-trump-to-worry/55777/

Turtle in the driveway

Goodnight Resisters everywhere.

The official hangman at Nurenberg
https://t.me/ukrainejournal/10842