A NY Times analyis of F-16 for the Ukraine and air superiority in combat situations….
Drone war efforts continue between the two countries ….
Brtiish Intel thinks Russian President has stopped funding the Wadner group which now may have to downsize….
Ah?
Where do those troops and families end up?
Confirmation that the Ukraine counter offense IS advancing finally….
As what has been a historical Russian thing?
Putin is changing the countries history book’s for it’s students…..
Some experts said the dearth of air power had put Ukraine at a disadvantage this summer against Russian attack helicopters that have picked off Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles. At least some of the helicopters are equipped with anti-tank missiles that are shot either too far or too low to be intercepted by Ukraine’s air defenses, according to Britain’s Defense Ministry.
Col. Markus Reisner, who oversees force development at Austria’s main military training academy, said that with more warplanes, Ukraine could better defend its ground troops from those attacks.
“This is what it is actually intended for,” said Colonel Reisner, a trained intelligence officer. “Military logic tells you, you have to have air superiority to conduct successful land operations.”
He added: “Some American generals, they say, ‘Well, it’s not what the Ukrainians need at the moment.’ I think this is a political statement, it’s not a military logical statement.”
Neither Ukraine nor Russia — despite its seemingly overwhelming advantage — has managed to achieve air superiority since the war began in February 2022…
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If Ukraine had multiple properly trained and equipped squadrons of F-16s, Mr. Barrie said, “would it have helped in the counteroffensive? It’s a theoretical question, but the theoretical answer is yes.”
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Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry released photos of what appear to be blurred-out bodies near the charred remains of a one-story home in the village of Shiroka Balka in Kherson, where the family and one other resident were killed Sunday. Two men died in strikes on the neighboring village of Stanislav, according to Klymenko. Russian forces withdrew from Kherson city late last year amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive, but they still control territory on the left bank of the Dnieper River.
A Russian warship fired warning shots at a Ukraine-bound cargo vessel in the Black Sea on Sunday, Russia’s state-run Tass news agency reported. It was the first such incident since Russia withdrew last month from a U.N.-backed deal allowing for the safe wartime export of Ukrainian grain. Tass quoted Russia’s Defense Ministry as saying it fired warning shots after the vessel did not heed orders to stop. Russian forces then boarded and inspected the ship before allowing it to continue on to the Ukrainian port city of Izmail.
The incident came a day after Ukraine began registering vessels to pass through temporary corridors in the Black Sea.Ukraine’s navy announced the creation of the corridors last week and said they would be used mostly to allow civilian vessels stuck since the start of the war to exit Ukrainian ports, Interfax Ukraine reported on Saturday, citing Ukrainian Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said Sunday that “there is a realistic possibility that the Kremlin no longer funds” the Wagner mercenary group, which “is likely moving towards a down-sizing and reconfiguration process.” Wagner relocated to Belarus last month after a failed mutiny by its founder, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, once an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine has made “tactically significant advances” along the border between the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, according to Ukrainian officials and an analysis Saturday by the Institute for the Study of War. The advances, while small, could dispel fears that the Ukrainian counteroffensive may be faltering at a time of growing weariness among Ukrainians.
More than 100 people were evacuated Sunday from the Kupiansk district in the Kharkiv region of northeast Ukraine, a local official said. Oleg Sinegubov, the head of Kharkiv’s regional administration, last week ordered a mandatory evacuation of Kupiansk’s civilian population, which he said numbered 11,000, because of increased Russian shelling. He said Ukrainian authorities have evacuated about 200 people since the announcement Thursday.
Russia’s new history textbooks teach Putin’s alternate reality:Russian high-schoolers are set to head back to class next month, and when they do, some of their textbooks will have a timely, if untrue, update.
Among the sections in the new history textbook — formally introduced by Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov last week and aimed at graduating 17-year-olds — will be “confrontation with the West” and “Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state.” It also includes a falsehood that Putin has asserted throughout his invasion of Ukraine: “Russia did not start any military actions but is trying to end them.”
The new manuscript is part of an extraordinary gaslighting campaign in which Putin has tried to convince his people that the West is to blame for the war in Ukraine — which he refers to as a “special military operation” — and that Russia is a victim rather than the aggressor…..