Free Republic

Dima never puts out a cigarette until he smokes it right down to the filter, risking burning his fingers to squeeze out one more drag. He spent years on the Ukrainian front lines. He knows the price of a good smoke. As a battalion commander, Dima was in charge of around 800 men who fought in some of the fiercest, bloodiest battles of the war – most recently near Pokrovsk, the strategic eastern town that is now on the brink of falling to Russia. But with most of his troops now dead or severely injured, Dima decided he’d had enough....

Several German Bundestag members have approved the idea of Western “cross-border” anti-aircraft units shooting down Russian missiles over Ukraine, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. “This would relieve the burden on Ukrainian air defenses and allow them to protect the front line,” Roderich Kiesewetter of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) argued. He referred to the US, the UK and France helping Israel repulse Iran’s massive missile attack in April, which Kiesewetter claimed shows that “the involved states do not necessarily have to become ‘warring parties’ to a conflict.”