Russia is trying to erase from captured Ukraine childtren their homeland….
The EU has begun sending Ukraine the first of the Billions pledged for support…
They are looking to also send Ukraine the profits from sized Russian assets …
Ukraine keeps pounding the Russian city of Belgorod….
The Russia’s have attacked Kharkiv
Is Putin thinking of taking on NATO?
Or?
Is that worry about the recent NATO big military excesise in Norway?
A fight with NATO would be WWIII which even Putin doews NOT want…
The Ukraine has captured soliders from as far away as Asia and the Carribean that Russia has offered pay to fight…
Ukraine is in-line to receive freah ammo from Czech efforts…
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Russia has tortured and arbitrarily detained people in occupied Ukraine, creating a “climate of fear” and suppressing Ukrainian identity, a UN report said on Wednesday. The report, which the UN human rights office said was based on more than 2,300 interviews, accused Moscow of “committing widespread violations” of human rights law.
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The UN report also said Russia had tried to suppress Ukrainian identity among children, replacing the curriculum in schools with a Russian one which sought to “justify” Moscow’s invasion, the report added. UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk said in a release linked to the report, that “the actions of the Russian Federation” had resulted in “profound and long-lasting consequences for Ukrainian society as a whole”.
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The European Commission disbursed the first €4.5bn of support under the EU’s new Ukraine Facility. In a statement published on Wednesday by the commission, its president Ursula von der Leyen said: “Today is a good day for Ukraine, as more EU funds are flowing to meet urgent needs.” Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal said in a social media post on X that the disbursement “strengthens our economic and financial stability”.
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Two people were killed and two more were injured when Ukraine attacked Russia’s Belgorod region with multiple-launch rocket systems, its regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Wednesday. Earlier, had said one person had been killed in separate shelling of the regional capital, and two others injured.
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Authorities also said on Wednesday that Belgorod would be expanding its closure of schools and colleges amid a major evacuation plan. The measures were announced a day after Gladkov unveiled plans to evacuate about 9,000 children from the region.
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Putin vowed on Wednesday to provide support for Belgorod civilians who have lost their homes and businesses. “There is a lot to do and we will do everything which depends on us,” he said at a televised meeting at the Kremlin.
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Russia and Ukraine each said they had repelled numerous air attacks late on Tuesday and early on Wednesday, with intensified pounding of border regions forcing evacuations of civilians on both sides. Russia’s defence ministry said it intercepted 13 Ukrainian rockets over the Belgorod region around mid-morning on Wednesday.
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A Russian attack on Ukraine’s northern city of Kharkiv on Wednesday hit an eight-storey building and a factory, killing three people and injuring at least five others, the head of the investigative unit of the regional police said. The attack also sparked a fire across more than 1,000 square metres.
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The European Commission has proposed transferring to Ukraine profits of €2.5-3bn a year generated by Russian central bank assets frozen in Europe. The exact amount available for Kyiv each year will depend on global interest rates as the profits are the returns on €210bn of Russian central bank assets held in various currencies in the 27-nation EU.
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The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said he will propose the EU use 90% of revenue from Russian assets frozen in Europe to buy arms for Ukraine via the European Peace Facility fund. Russia criticised the plan on Wednesday, saying it would lead to decades of lawsuits. Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Borrell’s proposals to use revenues from frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine amount to banditism and theft.
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Indian prime minister Narendra Modi held separate phone calls on Wednesday with Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy and discussed strengthening ties with both. The Indian government said in its own statement that Modi had reiterated India’s “consistent position in favour of dialogue and diplomacy as the way forward” in the Ukraine crisis.
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Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba will visit India next week as Kyiv looks to build support for its peace plan, two Indian officials aware of the matter said. It would be the first visit by a top Ukrainian official since Russia’s invasion.
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Ukrainian drones operated by the GUR military intelligence agency attacked the Engels airbase deep inside Russian territory early on Wednesday and Kyiv was assessing the damage, a Ukrainian intelligence source told Reuters. The governor of the Saratov region, where the base is located, said Ukrainian drones had been downed near the city of Engels but did not report any damage.
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Russia’s defence ministry said that its forces had cleared the Russian border village of Kozinka in Belgorod region of Ukrainian forces, according to the state news agency RIA. Ukrainian forces have made several attacks on Kozinka and nearby frontier settlements in recent weeks.
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The US Treasury said in a statement on Wednesday that it had imposed sanctions on the two people and two entities for providing services to Russia’s government in connection with a foreign malign influence campaign, including attempting to impersonate legitimate media outlets. Reuters reports that those targeted are: Moscow-based Social Design Agency, its founder Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze, Russia-based Company Group Structura LLC and its CEO and owner Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tupikin.
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On Wednesday, the EU reached provisional agreement to extend Ukrainian food producers’ tariff-free access to its markets until June 2025– albeit with new limits on grain imports. Polish protest leaders said they were not happy with the latest deal as it included the last few years as a reference for import limits. Polish police said they knew of more than 580 protests planned for Wednesday, with an estimated participation of 70,000 people.
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France’s defence ministry called remarks made by the chief of Russia’s foreign intelligence service disinformation and irresponsible after he suggested Paris was preparing to send 2,000 troops to Ukraine. Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russian foreign intelligence, was quoted by the Russian state news agency Tass as saying France was preparing to send 2,000 troops to Ukraine and that French troops would be a legitimate target for Russian forces if they “ever come to the territory of the Russian world with a sword”.
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The Czech Republic said it is on the verge of delivering thousands of extra artillery shells to Ukraine, just weeks after it announced an initiative to source the much-needed supplies from outside the EU. Its foreign minister, Jan Lipavský, said it had so far secured 300,000 shells and that the ammunition would provide a vital “few months’ breathing space” on the frontline.
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Russia has lost 433,090 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, according to the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces. This number, reported on 20 March via the Kyiv Independent, includes 700 casualties Russian forces suffered just over the past day.
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Ukraine could make 2m drones a year – double the existing rate of production – with extra financial support from the US, other western governments and private citizens, the country’s minister for digital transformation has claimed. Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview that Ukraine’s government was “contracting much less than our manufacturers are capable of” because it did not have enough funds on hand.
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A Russian court on Wednesday sentenced a St Petersburg woman to eight days in jail for writing “no to war” on a ballot paper during the country’s presidential election in protest at Putin’s Ukraine campaign. St Petersburg’s Dzerzhinsky district court said it ordered Alexandra Chiryatyeva to be jailed for eight days and fined 40,000 rubles (€399/$433/£341). It said she was guilty of hooliganism and “discrediting the Russian armed forces”.
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A man living in Russia’s far east who allegedly spied for Ukraine to help it carry out sabotage has been charged with high treason, local FSB security services said on Wednesday. The FSB did not name the suspect, but said he was a resident of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, a remote Russian city in the far eastern region of Khabarovsk.
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Foreign soldiers captured by Ukraine say they travelled to escape poverty from homes in Asia, the Caribbean and Africa but were tricked into fighting for Russia on the frontlines. At a recent press event organised by Ukrainian officials, organisers defined the men as “mercenaries” from the “global south” and said they were treating them the same as Russian PoWs.
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The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to ban Russia’s athletes from the opening parade of the Paris Olympics in July does not paint the IOC in a good light, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday. Peskov called it a violation of the athletes’ interests that ran against the entire ideology of the Olympics.
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Zakharova said on Wednesday that a decision by the European Organization for Nuclear Research to cut cooperation with Russian scientists was politicised and unacceptable. The organisation, better known as Cern, said in December it would cut cooperation with Russia from November 2024….
Mar 20, 2024 – ISW Press
Several Russian financial, economic, and military indicators suggest that Russia is preparing for a large-scale conventional conflict with NATO, not imminently but likely on a shorter timeline than what some Western analysts have initially posited. The Russian military continues to undertake structural reforms to simultaneously support the war in Ukraine while expanding Russia’s conventional capabilities in the long term in preparation for a potential future large-scale conflict with NATO.