The Crimea Bridge is still open….
But is carrying limited train traffic and vehicle traffic….
The effort to close it failed….
Ukrainan’s wait for Russian President Putin’s possible retaliation response…
US civilian’s are negociating a deal to get American hostage Brittney Griner back….It should involve a swap of some sort…
President Biden, ever the past US Senator, is now looking for way to get Russian Putin to cut a ‘deal’ with the Ukraine that won’t make it look like he what he has done…Messed up his efforts going into the Ukraine….
But ever Joe Biden?
This effort is leaking out to the media….
On the use of tactical nuclear weapons….
Here’s what we know:
Less than a day after an explosion damaged Moscow’s bridge to Crimea, Russian missiles again hit residential areas of Zaporizhzhia, local officials said.
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Putin blames Ukraine for the Crimea bridge blast, calling it an act of ‘terrorism.’
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Trains and cars are moving on the Kerch bridge, but not all traffic.
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At least 13 are killed in Zaporizhzhia, as Ukraine braces for a response to the bridge attack.
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Joy over the bridge blast shifts to a sense of foreboding in Kyiv.
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Russian soldiers, fleeing southern Ukraine, leave haunting mementos.
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After unofficial talks, a former U.S. diplomat says he’s ‘cautiously optimistic’ about Brittney Griner’s release…..
Biden efforts to try to end the Ukraine conflict….
With comments about nukes?
President Biden’s declaration on Thursday night that the world may be facing “the prospect of Armageddon” if President Vladimir V. Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine included a revealing side note: that Mr. Biden has been looking to help the Russian president find an “off-ramp” that might avert the worst outcome.
His logic came right out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to which Mr. Biden referred twice in his comments at a Democratic fund-raiser in New York, a good indication of what is on his mind. In that famous case — the closest the world came to a full nuclear exchange, 60 years ago this month — President John F. Kennedy struck a secret bargain with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, to remove American missiles from Turkey.
With that deal, which came to light only later, a disaster that could have killed tens of millions of Americans and untold numbers of Soviet citizens was averted.
For weeks now, Mr. Biden’s aides have been debating whether there might be an analogous understanding, a way for the wounded Russian leader to find an out. They have offered no details, knowing that secrecy may be the key to seeking any successful exit and avoiding the conditions in which a cornered Mr. Putin reaches for his battlefield nuclear weapons. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, reiterated on Friday that Mr. Biden had no new intelligence about nuclear weapons use and said she “saw no indications” the Russians were “preparing to use them.”…
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After Mr. Biden’s remarks, some foreign leaders said they would like to go back to the days when nuclear threats were not discussed in public….
Key developments
- “More than 70 people were injured, including 11 children,” Zelensky said of the airstrike on Zaporizhzhia that killed at least 14 people. “Hundreds of families were left homeless,” he said in his nightly address Sunday. “An entire block, from the first to the sixth floor, was destroyed by one of the missiles — a heavy anti-ship missile Kh-22 — aimed at an ordinary nine-story residential building.” About 200 people were involved in rescue efforts, Ukraine’s emergency services agency said on Telegram.
- Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said there had been strikes overnight and urged other nations to send more weapons to Ukraine. “We urgently need more modern air and missile defense systems to save innocent lives. I urge partners to speed up deliveries,” he tweeted.
- Putin said he had “no doubt” that this weekend’s Crimean Bridge explosion was the work of Ukrainian special forces. In a video, Investigative Committee leader Alexander Bastrykin tells Putin that he suspects “terrorism” and that he has given his agency’s findings to the Federal Security Service and the Internal Affairs Ministry — an implication that he suspects Russians were also involved in a plan to damage the bridge. Putin will lead a Russian Security Council meeting Monday, according to state media.
- Ukraine hasn’t taken credit for the explosion on the bridge in Crimea, which poses a potential strategic and symbolic disaster for Putin, although a Ukrainian official told The Washington Post that the country’s special services were behind the attack….
Russian tactical nukes will NOT change things in the conflict it is believed….
And would probably force President Biden and NATO to do ‘something’ in response…
As Russian officials up their nuclear saber-rattling and the Pentagon games outwhat might happen if Russia were to use one of its 2,000 or so lower-yield nuclear weapons, experts caution that even a relatively small nuclear blast would have far-reaching political and environmental effects. But it would not help Russia win the war.
You might be used to thinking about nuclear weapons in terms of the civilization-destroying half-megaton-class warheads atop intercontinental ballistic missiles. But both the United States and the Soviet Union had a number of smaller nuclear weapons in the one- to 50-kiloton range throughout the Cold War. These are sometimes referred to as “tactical” nuclear weapons, which technically refers to the delivery system but also speaks to their likely use as part of a conventional conflict rather than to deter one. U.S. inventories of these peaked in 1967 and fell afterward, especially when the Cold War ended. ….
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How much damage could one of these do?
The answer depends greatly on where it was used….
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“The biggest uncertainty and likely most consequential result of such use is likely political, which I think dwarfs the purely physical uncertainty of the results of a nuclear explosion.”….