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A team of vigilante hackers carrying out cyber-attacks against Russia has been sent awards of gratitude by Ukraine's military. The team, One Fist*, has stolen data from Russian military firms and hacked cameras to spy on troops. The certificates are a controversial sign of how modern warfare is shifting. [excerpt] *One Fist is made up of hackers from eight different countries including the UK, US and Poland.

Letter to Congress from American Veteran in Ukraine Jake Broe [I am a United States Air Force veteran who served as a Nuclear and Missile Operations Officer (13N). 437K subscribers 2-24-2024 17:00 Minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg49VcsWvd8 Excerpt: "Jake is sharing an opinion piece from an American Service veteran currently in Ukraine. An American Veteran plea arm Ukraine or Surrender Freedom. This man's name is John Roberts call sign name is Jackie Not everyone has and uses social media. Not everyone wants to be on camera. So today, I'm going to use my platform and my voice to share his message. This is...

“Robotyne has been liberated,” Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar announced on August 28. Although the tiny village, which had a pre-war population of fewer than 500 people, may be of little importance in itself, it lies along a strategic road that leads to the Russian-occupied road and railway hub of Tokmak. From there, another road leads to the key city of Melitopol, which, prior to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, was known to Ukrainians as the “gateway” to the peninsula. Last week’s victory was therefore an important advance for Ukraine. Just a few days earlier, however, fighters...

A plane carrying notorious warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner group launched a failed coup against president Vladimir Putin in June, has crashed on a flight from Moscow to St Petersburg. All 10 people on the plane, including three crew members, died in the crash, Russia’s emergency ministry said, according to state newswire RIA Novosti. Russian officials said a man with Prigozhin’s name was among the passengers, without elaborating further.

Daniel Swift’s nerves were shot. By the start of 2019, his Navy SEAL colleagues said, he was hardly eating or sleeping. He had separated from his wife. A court had barred him from seeing his four children, and he was facing legal charges for false imprisonment and domestic battery. Mr. Swift told fellow SEALs in San Diego, where he was based, that he was planning to go to Africa to fight wildlife poachers. They brushed off the comment, convinced that Mr. Swift, a soldier’s soldier, would never abandon his post. A week later, he disappeared. Navy investigators searched for him,...

While at least nine Americans have been killed in the war, alongside hundreds of other foreign volunteers, Campbell was the very first and only to be buried in Ukraine.In just over a year, Ukraine and its struggle became everything for Campbell, who drew upon his experience serving in the U.S. military to fight with distinction among some of the war’s toughest battles, training and sharing experience with Ukrainian soldiers on the way.

Russia is still cutting deals with China, Iran, and North Korea to make sure they don’t run out of missiles and ammunition, but there’s one thing that they can’t import in any significant numbers. What they’re running short of are soldiers. Moscow doesn’t publish precise figures, but one recent estimate puts the Russian death toll in Ukraine at more than 70,000. Others suspect that the true figure is closer to 100,000. And then there are the tens of thousands who survived but were too grievously injured to return to combat. With the ranks thinning so badly, Vladimir Putin has launched...

ON THE ROAD The air-raid siren sounded again through the defiant city, but William McNulty refused to be bothered by it. After a long morning of meetings in Kyiv with Ukrainian partners in need of medical tourniquets and cold-weather clothing, the man had earned an afternoon nap. The air flowing through the hotel room’s open window nipped of brittle autumn, and sunlight was leaking through gray clouds; winter, as the Ukrainians liked to quip, was coming. F**k it, McNulty thought. The chances of getting hit by a drone strike in a city of three million people seemed low. A U.S....

Humanitarian worker and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Pete Reed was killed while aiding civilians in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Thursday, according to his family and two medical aid groups he worked with. Reed, who served two deployments as a Marine rifleman in Afghanistan, founded the nonprofit Global Response Medicine in 2017. In a statement, the organization said, "Pete was the bedrock of GRM, serving as Board President for 4 years. In January, Pete stepped away from GRM to work with Global Outreach Doctors on their Ukraine mission and was killed while rendering aid." Andrew Lustig, the founder and president of Global...

A former American Navy SEAL was killed this week during Russia’s assault on eastern Ukraine while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, a Navy official tells TIME.Daniel Swift, a Navy Special Warfare Operator First Class who had gone AWOL, died Jan. 18 after suffering injuries with a unit under attack by Russia, the official said.

Two British soldiers fighting with the Ukrainian army have appeared on Russian state television after being captured in the besieged port city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine. Several propaganda clips aired on Rossia 1 and RT channels on Sunday and Monday, picturing U.K. citizens Shaun Pinner, 48, and Aiden Aslin, 28. They fought in Mariupol as part of Ukraine's 36th Marine Brigade. On Sunday, Pinner, who appeared to be tired and bruised, spoke to Russian TV war reporter Andrey Rudenko and gave some details about the battle of Mariupol. "I was fighting in Mariupol for five to six weeks and...

An international team of archaeologists and historians has completed an extensive analysis of a rare leather armor waistcoat recovered from the grave of an ancient horse-riding soldier in Northwest China. Notably, the climate in that region of China is desert-like and bone-dry. This is significant, because the arid conditions and lack of moisture in the soil allowed the leather armor to survive intact despite being buried for nearly 3,000 years. Under the supervision of archaeologist Patrick Wertmann from the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at University of Zurich, the research team members used radiocarbon dating procedures to establish the...

CNN is having a field day with illicitly obtained tapes of First Lady Melania Trump's private conversations, recorded by a so-called "friend." This is going to backfire. CNN got all breathless with news of what Melania Trump said in private to Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a Manhattan socialite who had been best friends with Melania since 2003. First Lady Melania Trump was secretly recorded in the summer of 2018 expressing her frustration at being criticized for her husband's policy of separating families who illegally crossed the southern border while at the same time needing to perform traditional first lady duties, such...

FORT WORTH -- A 51-year-old Navy veteran whose body was found in a DeSoto apartment had been dead for about three years. A cause of death for Rodney Wayne White is pending toxicology reports and other tests, according to the Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office. White was found dead last week on the kitchen floor of his apartment at DeSoto Town Center. DeSoto police found no evidence of foul play, according to Star-Telegram media partner WFAA-TV. His mother, Doris Stevens, told WFAA-TV she didn't know how her son could have been dead in the apartment for so long and nobody...

About 300 men working for a Kremlin-linked Russian private military firm (Wagner Group) were either killed or injured in Syria last week, according to three sources familiar with the matter. ...A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said last week that a force aligned with Assad, backed with artillery, tanks, rockets and mortars, had on Feb. 7 attacked fighters with the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces near Deir al-Zor. U.S. special forces were accompanying the SDF forces that came under attack, officials in Washington said. The U.S.-led coalition in Syria retaliated, killing about 100 of the pro-Assad forces, according to...

Patrick N. Hunt discusses his new book on Hannibal and how much of his success was based on solid financing. Audio Player Few military leaders hold as much allure for historians as Hannibal Barca of Carthage (today’s Tunisia). Born in 247 B.C., he is still studied today because of his unparalleled ability to strategize and get inside the mind of his opponent in battle. Archaeologist Patrick N. Hunt, who had been the director of Stanford’s Alpine Archaeology Project, has written a new book about the legendary figure that is simply titled Hannibal. He joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel...

Russian mercenary Arseniy Pavlov, better known as Motorola, was killed in an explosion in Donetsk, several news agencies reported on Oct. 16. Police in the Kremlin-controlled area were reportedly looking for suspects in the killing. Interfax News Agency, citing a source, said Pavlov was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated in the elevator of his apartment building. Other reports say the Kremlin-backed separatists blame Ukrainian officials for the blast. If his death is confirmed, he becomes the latest in a growing number of assassinations of separatist military leaders in the Donbas. Pavlov was a war hero in the view...

Good video at link about squad mates having to sign non-disclosure statements.Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl slept on his bed frame, and then the concrete floor, collected contact information, and talked about becoming a mercenary in what his squad mates now describe as behavior that laid the groundwork for his disappearance in Afghanistan nearly six years ago. "I asked him, 'Why are you sleeping on the frame of your bed?'" former Sgt. Matt Vierkant recalled in a recent interview with Fox News. "I was like well, that's weird. And then I remember coming back -- I don’t know if it was a...

Hundreds of South African mercenaries and hired fighters of other nationalities are playing a decisive role in Nigeria’s military campaign against Boko Haram, operating attack helicopters, armored personnel carriers and fighting to retake towns and villages captured by the Islamist militant group, according to senior officials in the region.The Nigerian government has not acknowledged the presence of the mercenaries, but a senior government official in northern Nigeria said the South Africans — camped out in a remote portion of the airport in Maiduguri, the city at the heart of Boko Haram’s uprising — conduct most of their operations at night...

All it took was a plane ticket, and an informal background check over Facebook. Then he was ushered to the front lines in Syria, fighting against the Islamic State. In a rare, exclusive interview with Fox, a U.S. military veteran with multiple tours in Iraq detailed his journey to Syria to fight against ISIS, on the condition his identity was protected. The veteran, who asked to be identified as “John,” described a surprisingly simple process that took him from America to the dangerous Syrian civil war – and not as part of the U.S. military. "I just went online and...