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The lack of vehicles forced Ukrainian command to back down from the original plans. The leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has reorganized the 153rd Mechanized Brigade into an infantry brigade. This change was announced through the official social media channels of the brigade.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard reports like this from Russian conscripts. Every few months we get a fresh glimpse at the Russian front lines from individuals who describe the conditions as “absolute f**king hell” or as an ongoing slaughter. The most recent entry of this type comes from an ex-convict named Aleksandr who has been serving in the Russian Army. (snip) You may remember that last year Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group was allowed to recruit tens of thousands of conscripts from Russia’s prisons. Wagner was eventually cut off from recruiting more prisoners in one of the first signs...

The Ukrainian military has halted a Russian advance in the east of the country and is now moving south, officials said on Friday. “We had very fierce battles in the Kupiansk and Lyman directions, but our soldiers stopped the enemy there,” Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar told Ukrainian television. Ukraine’s summer counterattack has won multiple small victories, but Russian officials have denied Ukrainian claims that it has taken eight villages and pushed back Russian forces. That offensive is still in its early stages, with Ukrainian forces not yet advancing on the best-defended Russian positions in Donetsk and Luhansk.

On the night of March 31, the defender of Ukraine and four-time world kickboxing champion Vitaliy Merinov died in the hospital from his injuries. Merinov was also the champion of Ukraine in universal combat and a master of sports in boxing. He also served as President of the Ivano-Frankivsk Boxing Federation. The athlete went to war on the first day of a full-scale invasion. He received a gunshot wound in the leg, but after that he was able to recover and return to the front. Merinov is survived by his wife and two-year-old daughter.

In a thick pine forest in western Ukraine, not far from the border with the Kremlin-aligned nation of Belarus, a military engineer named Anton is supervising a vast underground construction site. "It's a bunker," says Anton, who, like the other soldiers in this story, declined to give his last name for security reasons. "We shipped in most of the wood because we didn't want to cut the trees here. We need them for cover." He won't say how many soldiers the bunker, which is almost finished, will house. But he does give NPR a tour, walking us through a labyrinth...

Vladimir Putin's commanders are forcing his conscript soldiers at gunpoint to remain at the frontline. They are using a brutal Stalin tactic to prevent Russian reservist troops leaving their positions, say men who have seen the horror of the cannon-fodder killing fields. 'People are abandoned in the trenches as if homeless and littered with corpses,' complained Russian reservist draftees in a new video appealing directly to Vladimir Putin. 'Retreat-blocking detachments were set up against us and they did not let us out of positions.' They are forced at gunpoint to remain in position, a tactic used by Stalin's cruel SMERSH...

Ruslan Kubay was surprised to receive a draft notice in late January. Registered as seriously disabled since childhood—Mr Kubay is missing both hands—he falls under a list of automatic exemptions from service. Even more surprising, however, was the reaction of officials at the local registration office in Drohobych, near Lviv. Far from admitting their error, they doubled down and declared him fit for service. Only a social-media post and subsequent national scandal reversed the decision. “I was disgusted by how easily our blind people can start seeing,” he wrote on Facebook. Mr Kubay’s case was an extreme, but far from...

Peering through an infrared scope, a Ukrainian soldier noticed some heads poking over a trench a few dozen yards away. “‘Are there any of our guys in front of us?’” he asked, according to an account of the ensuing firefight by fellow Ukrainian soldiers. There were not. Two Ukrainians crept forward into the muddy wasteland of artillery craters between the two trench lines outside the eastern city of Lyman, eventually reaching the wreckage of an armored personnel carrier. Using it as cover to shoot from an unexpected angle, they forced the Russians to retreat. When it was over, they found...

Kovaliov said the situation in Bakhmut was under control, and Ukrainian forces were fighting back the invaders. “As long as there are basements in Bakhmut and the ability to hold this territory, the fighters will stay there,” Kovaliov said. He added that invading Russian forces had obliterated the nearby town of Soledar, so the Ukrainian military had taken the decision to leave it. Serhiy Cherevatyi, the spokesman for the Eastern Group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, announced on Jan. 25 that Ukrainian troops had withdrawn from Soledar to save lives, as the main task there had been accomplished. According to...

Update from Ukraine | Ruzzia wants to Encircle Bakhmut | Ukraine should act FAST to defend it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCfrypVCf4 Follow on Instagram up to date uploads. https://www.instagram.com/denys_pilot/ SUMMARY Military MAPS & COMMENTS here: https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-328-summary/ https://militaryland.net/maps/deployment-map

The U.S. military has launched an expanded, more sophisticated training program of Ukrainian forces that is focused on large-scale combat and meant to bolster Ukraine’s ability to take back territory from Russian forces, the Pentagon’s top general said Sunday. Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on a flight from Washington to Europe that the training began Sunday at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany and will continue for five or six weeks. About 500 soldiers will go through the initial version of training, focused on what the military calls combined-arms warfare, in which tanks,...

The U.S. military’s new, expanded combat training of Ukrainian forces began in Germany on Sunday, with a goal of getting a battalion of about 500 troops back on the battlefield to fight the Russians in the next five to eight weeks, said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Milley, who plans to visit the Grafenwoehr training area on Monday to get a first-hand look at the program, said the troops being trained left Ukraine a few days ago. In Germany is a full set of weapons and equipment for them to use. Until now the Pentagon...

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, about the only thing that’s certain right now is that the fighting and destruction will continue.Vladimir Putin remains fully committed to bringing all of Ukraine back under Russian control or — failing that — destroying it as a viable country. He believes it is his historical destiny — his messianic mission — to reestablish the Russian Empire and, as Zbigniew Brzezinski observed years ago, there can be no Russian Empire without Ukraine. Both of us have dealt with Putin on a number of occasions, and we are convinced he believes time is...

Update from Ukraine | Big shame for Ruzzia! More Ruzzian Airfields on fire | Ukraine is going to Win https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqyE7r6ixg4 Follow on Instagram up to date uploads. https://www.instagram.com/denys_pilot/ SUMMARY & MAPS Military maps & Comment here: https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-286-summary/

Update from Ukraine | Ukraine is getting ready for the winter Attack | Ruzzia will lose it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juPq8FdyC_g&t=6s Follow on Instagram up to date uploads. https://www.instagram.com/denys_pilot/ SUMMARY & MAPS Military maps & Comment here: https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-280-summary/

Russian military, the month of November was the deadliest in the war in Ukraine so far. According to the official Ukrainian numbers, the Russian forces lost more than 15,000 troops killed and hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces, and other weapon systems in the past 30 days or so. Russian Casualties in November in Ukraine The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense assesses that in November alone, its forces killed more than 16,400 troops, which means that the Ukrainians wounded between 32,800 and 49,000 Russians, if we go off from the standard one killed for three wounded formula. Moreover, the Ukrainians claim...

No one wants to sit down with foes who bomb their homes indiscriminately and target their energy infrastructure, plunging households into darkness and forcing surgeons in hospitals to perform operations by torchlight. And as the remains of civilians tortured by Russian soldiers occupying the southern city of Kherson are unearthed, the cold fury Ukrainians felt at the documented abuses — from rape to casually gunning down non-combatants in Bucha and Irpin — only intensifies. .... Nuts!” also fairly sums up the reaction of “ordinary” Ukrainians I spoke with this week, as to whether they would endorse peace negotiations — and...

Russia’s first mobilization since World War II may be complete, but the deployment of thousands of soldiers to the battlefields of Ukraine is generating dissent and protest on the front lines – and back home. With the Russian government touting that at least 50,000 of the recently drafted are now in Ukraine, a long list of complaints is emerging: Lack of leadership from mid-ranking officers, tactics that lead to heavy casualties, non-existent training, promised payments not received. There are also logistical difficulties, as reported by soldiers, their families and Russian military bloggers: Insufficient uniforms, poor food, a lack of medical...

Videos show desperate Russian troops fleeing from their burning tanks and a group of soldiers being blown up by Ukrainian missiles during a disastrous assault on a town in eastern Ukraine that saw 300 soldiers reportedly killed or wounded. Footage shows Russian marines from the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade driving a burning T-80BVM tank, along a road in the largely destroyed town of Pavlivka, as flames and black smoke erupted from the vehicle following a Ukrainian strike. A group of Russian soldiers can be seen climbing on top of the tank and jumping down before they ran away from the...

Footage showed thousands of Russian conscripts shouting at Major-General Kirill Kulakov at a training base in Kazan, a city in Russia, with some yelling 'let's go home'. Russian marines have said their 'incompetent' generals are treating them as 'cannon fodder' after their unit suffered devastating losses, with 300 men reportedly killed or wounded in four days of heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine. Marines from Russia's 155th Naval Infantry Brigade wrote a scathing letter to their regional governor, claiming they had lost 300 servicemen in a four-day massacre in Pavlivka thanks to the catastrophic planning of Generals Rustam Muradov and Zurab...