TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org

🇺🇸 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.

🪐 Subscribe to Live: Ukraine

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 🇨🇿 🇷🇺

Another AfD scandal.
The ex-assistant to the deputy of the Bundestag, who worked for the FSB, was deprived of his illegal received German citizenship.

Former assistant to the German deputy of the Bundestag (from the Alternative for Germany) Vladimir Sergienko, recruited by the FSB, received his German passport illegally. He has been now deprived of this citizenship.

According to Der Spiegel, the decision was made by the Berlin Administrative Court in mid-June. According to it, Sergienko fraudulently obtained German citizenship by hiding his Russian passport during the naturalization process. In his statement in 2019, Sergienko indicated that he only has Ukrainian citizenship. In November 2022, despite significant security concerns, he became German.

Until the beginning of the year, Sergienko worked as an employee of Eugene Schmidt, a member of the Bundestag from the Alternative for Germany, and for a long time had a parliamentary identity card. According to court documents, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution suspects him of acting "on behalf of the Russian state authorities to the detriment of the Federal Republic of Germany."

According to an investigation by The Insider and Der Spiegel, Sergienko, a former Ukrainian political strategist with German citizenship, corresponded with his handler, FSB Colonel Ilya Vechtomov. In the correspondence, Sergienko reported on the work done, discussed with Vechtomov, who is responsible for issues related to Ukraine, his funding from Moscow and actions.

One of the results of the activities of the deputy's assistant was a lawsuit filed by the Alternative for Germany to the Federal Constitutional Court, at the behest and financed by the Kremlin, against the supply of weapons to Ukraine.

Officially, the AfD does not admit its connection with the Kremlin, but, as hacked correspondence shows, the deputies of this faction not only coordinated their actions with Moscow, but received direct instructions - even prepared speeches, which they obediently followed.

After a hesitating start Germany turned into the second largest supplier of military aid for Ukraine behind the US, so it got important for Putin to expand his influence in Germany, as he does in US.

Source

@freerussia_report
🇪🇺@EU_Report 🇩🇪

For once no war support, but a real cause.
Chelyabinsk schoolchildren refused caviar, sushi and pizza at graduation, donating money to feed homeless animals

11th grade students decided that they would not celebrate their last day of school in a grand manner, but instead would help cats and dogs from an animal shelter. The kids refused expensive menu items in favor of buying animal food.

As Maxim, one of the graduates, told state-controlled media, the class liked this idea, and all 29 students unanimously approved it. Some parents were initially against it, but at the general meeting they still agreed to do as their children wished. As a result, they managed to save 1,000–1,500 rubles per student and buy more than 50 boxes of food (about 1,200 bags in total).

The graduates visited five shelters, one of which was home to just over two hundred cats. The volunteers appreciated the schoolchildren’s good deed and were happy with the children’s decision.

@freerussia_report

PUTIN gave Kim a car with South Korean parts

https://kyivindependent.com/putin-gifted-kim-russian-made-luxury-car-made-by-company-that-uses-south-korean-parts-reuters-says/

https://kyivindependent.com/spotify-removes-music-by-pro-war-russian-singers/

Journalist Anna Zueva was fined for "violating the foreign agency legislation.” She is not recognized as a “foreign agent”, only a member of organisation labeled as “foreign agent”.

The Sovetsky District Court of Ulan-Ude fined Zueva for not having a label on her YouTube channel - the court decided that the label should be due to the fact that the journalist is a participant in the “Soft Power” movement which is included in the register:

In her resolution, Vlasova wrote that she “takes into account my property status and the social danger of this offense,” so “the most humane court in the world” imposed a fine of 10.000 rubles. Amazing generosity, of course, except that I am not recognized by the Ministry of Justice as a foreign agent.

My lawyer and I will, of course, challenge this unfair decision. I haven’t put up these stupid people’s badges and won’t, since the law on “foreign agents” is illegitimate and discriminatory. I don’t plan to pay the fine either ,” Zueva said.

@freerussia_report

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that a radiation monitoring station near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) was destroyed due to shelling.

Rafael Grossi, the IAEA's director general, stated that this destruction has significantly impaired the ability to detect and measure radioactive emissions in emergency situations. The station was located approximately 16 kilometers from the Zaporizhzhia NPP. Presently, only 4 out of the 14 such facilities that were operational before Russia's full-scale invasion are still functioning.

Holy traditional values in the ruZZian army
A 19-year-old conscript was found dead in the Kaliningrad region. He may have committed suicide or being killed after being sexually assaulted.

The body of 19-year-old Lev with a bullet through his jaw was found on June 19 on the territory of a military unit.

“My father was told in passing that my brother was sexually abused and he committed suicide. The investigator said that Lev was forced to do very specific actions with someone,” his sister Daria told Mediazona.

The young man's family does not believe in suicide and suggests that he could have been killed.

Photo: “Caution, news”

@freerussia_report

UK's Nigel Farage doubles down on controversial Ukraine/Putin comments.

Nigel Farage has doubled down on his controversial claim that "Russia was provoked into launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the expansion of NATO and the EU."

In an article for The Telegraph on June 22, titled "The West’s errors in Ukraine have been catastrophic. I won’t apologize for telling the truth," Farage denied he was "an apologist or supporter of Putin."

The politician, who heads a newly-resurgent Reform UK party, drew widespread criticism on June 20 when he said the EU and NATO "provoked" Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by expanding eastwards.

Farage's comments echo Kremlin disinformation lines used to justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, namely that Russia was "forced" to start the war to "protect itself" from the threat from NATO.

The stance ignores the fact NATO is a defensive alliance and one of the main motivating factors for countries in Eastern Europe – including Ukraine – to join, is an understanding of the Kremlin's imperialist ambitions rooted in a long and bloody history of falling victim to it.

Russia has invaded two European countries this century – Ukraine and Georgia, neither of which are members of the EU or NATO.

Sweden and Finland both joined NATO as a direct response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Putin himself has in recent years revived a distorted version of Russia's imperialist past in an attempt to create a new national identity and convince Russia's citizenry that in order to survive, it must wage war on the West.

In a 2021 essay titled "On the historical unity of the Russians and Ukrainians," often overlooked by those saying Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine, Putin laid out what he saw as Russia's rightful claim to Ukraine.

From the analysis of the Atlantic Council: In one particularly ominous passage, he openly questions the legitimacy of Ukraine’s borders and argues that much of modern-day Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands, before stating matter of factly, “Russia was robbed.” Elsewhere, he hints at a fresh annexation of Ukrainian territory, claiming, “I am becoming more and more convinced of this: Kyiv simply does not need Donbas.”

Putin ends his lengthy treatise by appearing to suggest that Ukrainian statehood itself ultimately depends on Moscow’s consent, declaring, “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”

Despite being around 5,500 words long, the essay only mentions NATO once in a paragraph that falsely claimed the "Ukrainian authorities, security services and armed forces" were under the influence of "NATO infrastructure."

But in June 2022, Putin admitted openly the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was an imperial war to "return" Russian lands.

Read all

🇪🇺@EU_Report 🇬🇧

A series of attacks is ongoing in Dagestan. Two orthodox churches and a synagogue were set on fire and gunmen attacked a traffic police post in Derbent and Makhachkala.

The chairman of the Public Monitoring Commission of Dagestan, Shamil Khadulaev, also claims that among the dead is 66-year-old father Nikolai, whose throat was cut:
“Mikhail’s security guard in the Makhachkala-1 church, armed only with a gas pistol, was shot. The priests have closed themselves in the Church and are waiting for help.”

the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Dagestan confirmed the death of six policemen, and 12 injured.
The shooting reportedly continues in Derbent.

A counter-terrorist operation regime has been introduced in Dagestan.

As foreseeable State Duma deputy from Dagestan Magomed Gadzhiev claimed that “special services of Ukraine and NATO countries” are behind the terrorist attacks without specifying what they possibly could achieve by attacking churches, synagogues and traffic police posts.

@freerussia_report

Addition to previous post Terrorist attack in Dagestan. According to Astra:

- Those who attacked Makhachkala and Derbent are adherents of an international terrorist organization;

- Two sons of the head of the Sergokalinsky region of Dagestan, Magomed Omarov, took part in the attack on Makhachkala: Osman and Adil Omarov. The information has not been confirmed;

- Two attackers at a traffic police post in Makhachkala were killed. At least two more were detained on the territory of the Beryozka beach;

- Nine people died, seven of them were police officers. 25 people were injured;

- A priest was killed during an attack on a church in Derbent. His throat was cut;

- 40 hostages are locked in an Orthodox church in the Kirov district of Makhachkala. The information has not been confirmed;

- a CTO regime was introduced in Dagestan. The Russian National Guard operates on the streets of Makhachkala with armored vehicles. Helicopters and armored personnel carriers are deployed in Derbent.

@freerussia_report

Official who gave Putin wrong intelligence on Ukraine war resigns.

Sergei Beseda has resigned as head of the 5th Service of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) on the formal grounds that he had turned 70, the age limit for service.

"However, this personnel decision is explained not only by formal reasons: inside the FSB, there is a fierce feud between various power groups for several high-ranking posts being vacated this year, including Bortnikov's job," Russian investigative outlet Important Stories stated, citing its undisclosed sources.

The 5th Service is in charge of the FSB's relations with foreign partners and gathering intelligence in former Soviet countries, including Ukraine.

The service provided ruZZian dictator Putin with information about political developments in Ukraine on the eve of the full-scale invasion.

The intelligence provided by the 5th Service turned out to be inaccurate in many ways when the all-out war started. But based on this intelligence, the Z-regime was confident that the russian army would not meet serious resistance in Ukraine.

Beseda was replaced by Alexey Komkov and was appointed as an aide to Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB.

The director of the FSB will turn 73 this year (he is not subject to age restrictions due to the high rank of army general), and he has long been "asking to retire for health reasons," according to IStories sources. One of the candidates for his place is Sergei Korolev, the first deputy director of the FSB. He has numerous connections with the leaders of the russian underworld, including the "killer No 1" of russia Aslan Gagiev.

Alexei Komkov, appointed head of the fifth service, is considered a protégé of Korolev.

Source

@freerussia_report

Putin instructed russia's richest billionaire to create yet another "SWIFT analogue".

Problems with settlements with foreign partners due to sanctions are forcing the Z-regime to look for various ways to create payment systems. Another attempt to do this received the blessing of Putin himself.

As part of the merger of the Wildberries marketplace and russia's largest outdoor advertising operator Russ, it is planned to create not only a "high-tech digital trading platform", as the companies themselves reported, but also a payment platform. It could replace the SWIFT international bank payment system, two sources close to the Kremlin told proposedly to Bloomberg in order to get the news circulating in Western media. Russian banks lost access to SWIFT after Putin unleashed the war in Ukraine.

The founder and head of Wildberries, Tatyana Bakalchuk, is the richest woman in Russia. Her fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is $8.1 billion, which has increased by 40% since the beginning of the war in Ukraine thanks to the growth of the Wildberries business, in which she owns 99%.

Bakalchuk is not under Western sanctions, but the creation of a payment system increases the risk that she may fall under them. Earlier, sanctions were imposed against the Mir payment system and its operator NSPK.

The G7 countries and the EU are discussing restrictions against banks that use the russian analogue of SWIFT - the Financial Messaging System of the Bank of russia (SPFS). Foreign banks in 20 countries, including China, Belarus, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan, are connected to it.
According to Western officials, the SPFS is used to circumvent sanctions and purchase products prohibited for supply to russia.

The 14th package of sanctions, which the EU unveiled on June 20, prohibits European companies operating outside russia from connecting to the SPFS, as well as conducting transactions with blacklisted companies that use this system to circumvent sanctions.