Free Republic

But Russia has adjusted during the second phase of the war by hiding its men behind its fearsome artillery. “Russian artillery has been the decisive factor, but only because it’s had to be the decisive factor,” says Mason Clark, a senior analyst and Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War. Russia has at least 10 times as many artillery and missile systems as Ukraine, and in some places on the front line the disparity is closer to 20 to 1, former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk says. With a range of hundreds of miles Russian missiles can...

The United States is fighting a proxy war in Ukraine against Russian aggression, and we’re not doing it on the cheap. The Biden administration announced on Friday that we were sending another $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. This comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory over the eastern Luhansk region last week. Putin jumped the gun a little, although Russian troops hold the upper hand throughout most of the region. The problem for Putin is that those pesky Ukrainians refuse to surrender. And the United States is making their continuing resistance possible by giving Kyiv high-powered weapons...

Russian forces are reportedly relying on Soviet-era munitions for certain tasks as the invasion of Ukraine labors on. The Russian government has, in recent weeks, increasingly ordered its forces in Ukraine to repurpose outdated anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles for use on land-based targets, according to a Tuesday report from iNews. In Mykolaiv, a city in Southern Ukraine, six strikes over the last weekend have been attributed to Russian S-300 missiles, anti-aircraft munitions introduced roughly 40 years ago with a range of 75 miles. Two Kh-32 missiles, originally designed to sink aircraft carriers, were also credited with the strike on a...

Remember this "exclusive" story in the Daily Star about "general Pavel", who was supposedly "dragged out of retirement" by Putin and sent to Ukraine? So yeah, turns out that's total bullshit.@Lotte_Lambrecht and I found out who's _actually_ in this photo. Follow along!1/ The Daily Star quoted an anonymous "senior intelligence source" for the article. It was picked up by virtually every other tabloid in the UK and by a lot of international newspapers. In Belgium @HLN_BE also ran the story: archive.ph/166h92/ Reverse Image Search didn't reveal much, apart from the fact that the earliest online version of the photo...

Western leaders are beginning to recognize, if not openly acknowledge, that their unprecedented sanctions against Moscow are hurting their own countries’ economies without significantly crimping the Kremlin’s war machine. The fallout from the U.S.-led sanctions on Russia has ended the era of cheap oil and gas and contributed to surging inflation, supply-chain disruptions and a looming recession in the West. In poorer countries, by sending fuel and food prices higher, the sanctions are threatening livelihoods and political stability. As the West is now discovering, sanctions against a large, powerful state not only entail significant costs for the countries imposing them,...

With Luhansk Province firmly in Russia’s grasp after weeks of brutal fighting, the country’s military forces on Tuesday were already setting their sights on the next target. On the outskirts of Bakhmut, a key supply hub for Ukrainian forces, the Russian Army was ramping up its shelling as an apparent prelude for an inch-by-inch offensive into the province of Donetsk. In Sloviansk, one of the cities in Donetsk that lies in Russia’s path, the mayor, Vadym Lyakh, urged residents on Tuesday to flee the city, which he said was now on the front lines. “Artillery is already hitting the city,”...

During a briefing, the head of the press center of the security and defense forces of the operational command of the South, Nataliya Gumenyuk, said that only the military can comment on the advance of the Ukrainian troops. “Any analysts, deputies, other political or just active figures at the moment only do harm with such statements…” Gumenyuk said. “Firstly, it does not correspond to reality, and secondly, it disorients our people, the local population. It harms not only the military operation, but the image of those who say such things.” Earlier, the UK weekly newspaper The Economist reported, citing a...