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On 9 February 2017, European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, a member of the Expedition 50 crew, captured a winter landscape image from the International Space Station. It was of the Dnipro River. The photograph showed a great, coursing white snake that reminded Pesquet of a Japanese ‘Hokusai painting’. The white was ice and it explains why Russian forces on the Dnipro right bank now face a ‘difficult situation’, as described by General Sergei Surovikin, the recently appointed operational commander of Russian forces in Ukraine. In winter the Dnipro freezes over, usually after a 20-day spell of sub-zero temperatures. A...

More than 90,000 troops make up Russia’s “irrecoverable” military losses in Ukraine, as reported by the Russian media project iStories (or Vazhnye Istorii). One of the two sources of this information works in the FSB; the other is a former state security officer. [Emphasis added.] “Irrecoverable losses” is a category that includes servicemen who were killed, went missing, died from their wounds or were disabled and cannot return to military service. This new estimate is close to the figures stated earlier by the Pentagon and the British Defense Ministry. Last August, the Pentagon estimated that 70–80 thousand Russian troops had...

⚡️#BREAKING Ukraine blows up border bridges with Belarus – Minsk— TPYXA ⚡ Middle East 🇸🇩 🇮🇷 🇷🇺 (@MEPaper1090) October 9, 2022⚡️Representatives of #Ukraine's territorial defense are coming to the border, aiming at the border guards of Belarus and shooting in the air, head of Belarusian border committe says— TPYXA ⚡ Middle East 🇸🇩 🇮🇷 🇷🇺 (@MEPaper1090) October 9, 2022

“Early retirement” is a strange way to describe a 44-year-old’s acceptance of a new government role, but for Mikk Marran, Estonia’s spymaster, it feels a lot like that. As of next month he will no longer helm Välisluureamet, the Baltic state’s foreign intelligence service, which, long before Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion of Ukraine, was at the forefront of assessing the threats and capabilities of a resurgent and revanchist Russia.(snip) According to one former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer, “Estonia punches far above its weight on Russian affairs. The respect for Marran and his service in the U.S. intelligence community is quite...