Free Republic

The first warm, sunny days of spring in the southern Mykolaiv region are ushering in a grim new reality: the smell of the dead. As the frost melts and ground thaws, the bodies of Russian soldiers strewn across the landscape are becoming a problem. In his nightly video address on Saturday, Vitaly Kim, the region's governor, called on local residents to help collect the corpses and put them in bags, as temperatures rise to above freezing. "We're not beasts, are we?" he implored residents, who have already lost so many of their own in this war.

The US government has formally declared that members of the Russian armed forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Wednesday. The official US declaration that Moscow has violated the laws of conflict comes after Blinken, President Joe Biden and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman all said it was their personal opinion that war crimes have taken place. "Today, I can announce that, based on information currently available, the US government assesses that members of Russia's forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine," Blinken said in a statement.

After telling his friend that Ukrainian forces “tore apart” a column of Russian forces sent along with his own unit, he described complete disarray among the Russian military, with 50 percent of the unit suffering from frostbite on their feet. Two Russian soldiers have been caught venting about Putin’s “bulls***” war against Ukraine in an intercepted phone call as devastating losses reportedly led one soldier to drive over his colonel with a tank. “Basically, it’s a s***show here, I’ll put it that way,” an unnamed soldier near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine can be heard telling a colleague in a recording...