Russian natural gas exports drop…
Ukraine Prime Minister meets with the Pope….
The fight goes on in the Donetsk region….
The Ukraine has received almost all of the promised combat vehicle’ s from the West and trained thousands of Ukraine troops…..We’ll see how they perform …..
Russian is sending some of its poor to captured Ukraine area’s to change the mix of occupalnts even is the Ukraine retakes the area’s….
The US has moved more troops* to Europe an change from the ‘pay me or ur on ur own’… Trump’s European Policy….
Here’s the latest on the war and its impact across the globe.
- The Kremlin on Thursday welcomed the first phone call between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, since the war began. “We are ready to welcome anything that may bring the end of the conflict in Ukraine closer,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of Wednesday’s conversation. The White House also expressed cautious optimism over the call.
- Ukraine named Pavlo Riabikin as its ambassador to China. Zelensky said the appointment would give a “powerful impetus” to the relationship. Beijing said it would send a representative to Kyiv to hold talks with “all parties.” China has tried to maintain a balancing act by positioning itself as neutral on Ukraine and has refrained from critiquing Russia for starting the war.
- The United States has asked Brazil to extradite an alleged Russian spy charged last month by the Justice Department with posing as a foreign student in Washington while carrying out espionage operations against the West, according to U.S. and Brazilian officials.
- President Biden and his senior military advisers were rebuked Thursday by senators exasperated by what they claimed is the glacial pace at which his administration is moving to supply Abrams tanks to Ukraine, whose leaders say they need such weapons for a highly anticipated counteroffensive to retake Russian-occupied territory.
- Russia rejected a U.S. consular request to visit Gershkovich on May 11, its Foreign Ministry said, according to Russia’s Interfax news agency. The Wall Street Journal correspondent was detained in March on espionage charges, which he and U.S. officials deny. Moscow said the decision was in response to the denial of U.S. entry visas to Russian journalists seeking to cover Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s recent trip to the United Nations in New York.
- A Russian missile attack overnight on the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv killed at least one person and injured 23 others, including children, Zelensky said Thursday. Russia “never ceases to prove that the main goal of this war is terror and the destruction of Ukrainians,” he said in a Telegram post that shared a video of the attack’s aftermath.
- NATO has delivered 98 percent of “combat vehicles” promised to Ukraine, according to Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s secretary general. “That means over 1,550 armored vehicles, 230 tanks and other equipment, including vast amounts of ammunition,” he said Thursday in Brussels, Reuters reported. “In total, we have trained and equipped more than nine new Ukrainian armored brigades. This will put Ukraine in the strong position to continue to retake occupied territory.”
- Russia is attempting to change the demographics in areas it has annexed from Ukraine by resettling poor citizens from remote Russian regions, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar alleged on Telegram. These efforts, she said, are intended to undermine Ukrainian identity and are ongoing in the Luhansk region in the country’s east. The Washington Post could not immediately verify the claim. The International Criminal Court lists such actions as war crimes.
- Russia will be able to finance its war effort in Ukraine for another year, despite heavy and increasing sanctions, according to U.S. military documents that were part of a trove leaked online and obtained by The Post. The previously unreported documents provide a rare glimpse into Washington’s understanding of the effectiveness of its own economic measures…..
*NATO’s reinforced eastern flank
Just before Russia’s expanded invasion in February 2022, the United States was already moving more forces into Eastern Europe. Now, the U.S. has “just shy of 20,000 deployed service personnel who are not normally stationed in Europe [deployed] forward in Europe,” Cavoli said. “We have all of the Army V Corps headquarters formed. We have two division headquarters, and we have five brigade combat teams” in places like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia. He said his command also has a “large amount in Poland and each of the three Baltic countries”: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Cavoli also serves as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. In that capacity, “I have over 40,000 troops turned over to my command right now. And nations are prepared to add more with regard to what else we can do to help Ukraine,” he said.
The ascension of Finland into NATO will provide the alliance with new capabilities, Cavoli noted.
“Finland brings a large army at full mobilization, 280,000 ground troops. [It] brings a very competent Navy, brings a large and growing Air Force. They’re in the process of acquiring 64 F-35 [joint strike fighter aircraft] which will create 250 fifth-generation fighters across the northern three Scandinavian countries,” he said. ….