One doubts that Russia can do much of anything gainst Finland and Sweden joining NATO with a good amount of the Russian military tied up in what is beginning to look like a losing operation in the Ukraine…
Actually?
The Ukraine is trying to join the EU and would ofcourse like to join NATO….
All this while crews keep recovering the Ukraina and Russian military dead…..
All this while weapons keep flowing into the Ukraine from the West…..
Congress will probably vote to send the Ukraine $40 Billion this week….
The United Kingdom’s Defense Ministry said that Russia has likely lost one-third of its ground combat forces in Ukraine almost three months into its war.
in a Twitter thread on Sunday, the ministry added that Moscow’s forces in the Donbas region have lost their momentum and fallen behind schedule.
The ministry also said that Russia failed to achieve substantial territorial gains in the past month, as it sustained “consistently high levels of attrition.”…
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Almost three months after Russia shocked the world by invading Ukraine, its military faces a bogged-down war, the prospect of a bigger NATO and an opponent buoyed Sunday by wins on and off the battlefield.
Top diplomats from NATO met in Berlin with the alliance’s chief and declared that the war “is not going as Moscow had planned.”
“Ukraine can win this war,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, adding that the alliance must continue to offer military support to Kyiv. He spoke by video link to the meeting as he recovers from a COVID-19 infection.
On the diplomatic front, both Finland and Sweden took steps bringing them closer to NATO membership despite Russian objections. Finland announced Sunday that it was seeking to join NATO, citing how the invasion had changed Europe’s security landscape. Several hours later, Sweden’s governing party endorsed the country’s own bid for membership, which could lead to an application in days….
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On May 11, the Russian command reportedly sent about 550 troops of the 74th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 41st Combined Arms Army to cross the Donets River at Bilohorivka, in the eastern Luhansk region, in a bid to encircle Ukrainian forces near Rubizhne.
Satellite images reveal that Ukrainian artillery destroyed several Russian pontoon bridges and laid waste to a tight concentration of Russian troops and equipment around the river.
The Institute for the Study of War, citing analyses based on the publicly available imagery, indicated that there could have been as many as 485 Russian soldiers killed or wounded and more than 80 pieces of equipment destroyed.
As the news of the losses at the river crossing in Bilohorivka started to spread, some Russian bloggers did not appear to hold back in their criticism of what they said was incompetent leadership.
“I’ve been keeping quiet for a long time,” Yuri Podolyaka, a war blogger with 2.1 million followers on Telegram, said in a video posted on Friday, saying that he had avoided criticizing the Russian military until now….
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Earlier on Sunday, Finland’s prime minister and president announced that the nation is seeking NATO membership, with a formal application expected as soon as Tuesday. President Sauli Niinisto said in an interview Sunday on CNN that a call with Vladimir Putin was “calm and cool” and that the Russian president made no specific threats even though he called Finland’s decision a “mistake.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was “very confident” that NATO would reach consensus on admitting Sweden and Finland to the military alliance. The top U.S. diplomat said that during a meeting in Berlin of NATO foreign ministers, he “heard almost across the board very strong support” for the countries’ plan to join. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had earlier criticized Sweden and Finland as “home to many terrorist organizations,” a reference primarily to Kurdish separatists.
- Four Russian missiles hit military infrastructure in the Lviv region early Sunday, the regional governor said, destroying military equipment but without causing fatalities or injuries. The claims could not be independently verified by The Washington Post.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with a U.S. Senate delegation led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Saturday in Kyiv, calling the visit “a powerful signal of bipartisan support for Ukraine from the U.S. Congress and the American people,” his office said. A $40 billion aid package for Ukraine will be up for full Senate debate in the coming week.
- Britain’s Defense Ministry says Russia now appears to have suffered the loss of a third of the ground combat force it committed in February. The destruction of equipment and low troop morale mean that Russian forces are unlikely to accelerate their rate of advance in the next month, the ministry said….