The question swirl around the crash of the aircraft that most believe the Wagner leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin was on board and was the target of a planted explosive ….
The ‘Hit’ is generally sseen as being ordered by Russian President Putin after the Wagner Group marched on Moscow and left Putin looking weak….
The Ukraine is now expecting possible F-16 delieveries from Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands….The number they hope could to as many 70+….They now have to wait for pilots to be trained and maintance and equipment support being put in place ….
Ukraine military says it’s Special Operators have been doing ops IN the Crimea….
A burning question that HAS to be worrying the West and Russia?
What is the future for the Wagner troops in Belarus and Africa?
Today was the Ukraine Indepedance Day….
U.S. and other Western officials said Thursday that preliminary intelligence reports led them to believe that an explosion on board likely brought down the aircraft in Russia, killing all the passengers aboard. And, for the first time, the Pentagon openly said it believed Mr. Prigozhin was dead.
“Our initial assessment is that it’s likely Prigozhin was killed,” the Pentagon spokesman, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, said on Thursday afternoon.
There has been no official confirmation that Mr. Prigozhin was killed, but President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday, in his first comments on the crash, spoke obliquely of his death, referring to him in the past tense. “He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results,” Mr. Putin said in a televised meeting.
Mr. Prigozhin founded and led the Wagner private military group, which made significant battlefield gains in Ukraine before staging a brief mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in June. The episode was one of the most dramatic challenges to Mr. Putin’s rule in decades, and many observers speculated that Mr. Prigozhin’s betrayal was tantamount to a death sentence…..
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Ukraine’s Defense Ministry claimed on Thursday that its special forces had staged a brief raid inside the occupied Crimean Peninsula overnight and clashed with Russian forces. If confirmed, the incursion, though apparently small, would suggest the Ukrainian military’s growing ability to strike far behind Russian lines even if such attacks are unlikely to have a significant effect on the direction of the war.
According to a statement shared by the defense ministry’s intelligence directorate on the Telegram app, special forces soldiers working with Ukraine’s Navy landed on Crimea’s western tip at the settlements of Mayak and Olenivka. The closest land under Ukrainian control to Mayak is approximately 100 miles away across the Black Sea.
“Ukrainian defenders clashed with the occupier’s units,” the statement said. “As a result, the enemy suffered losses among its personnel and destroyed enemy equipment.” Neither claim could be independently verified, nor could the authenticity of a video that the ministry posted, showing a soldier manning a mounted machine gun on what appeared to be a moving boat at nighttime and a Ukrainian flag pinned to the wall of a building.
The claim came on Ukraine’s Independence Day….
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As part of the counteroffensive, the tempo of long-distance attacks on Crimea has increased in recent weeks, although it remains unclear if the strikes have affected Russia’s broader operations on the battlefield….
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Here’s what to know