Ukraine military unit’s have been VERY active in the last 48 hours against Russian targets….
Sunday’s assault, carried out on the eve of the latest round of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, appeared designed to send a clear message to Mr. Putin: Continuing the war still poses serious risks for Moscow, even if Ukraine is no longer able to advance on the battlefield.
“It’s all about trying to convince the Russians — whether it will succeed, I don’t know — that there is a reason now for them to negotiate seriously,” said James M. Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Wars are hard to end, Mr. Acton said, in part because the side that thinks it is winning often sees little incentive to negotiate seriously or offer any concessions.
“If the side that is doing better believes that the war is going to get more costly in the future, it has much more of an incentive,” he said.
The Ukrainian operation somewhat erodes Russia’s ability to attack Ukraine by taking out some of the aircraft Russian forces have been using to launch longer-range missiles at Ukrainian targets. Russia of late has been intensifying such attacks on Ukrainian cities, with record barrages of drones and missiles…
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Hegseth will skip a meeting on organizing military aid to Ukraine in a first for the US
For the first time since the U.S. created an international group to coordinate military aid to Ukraine three years ago, America’s Pentagon chief will not be in attendance when more than 50 other defense leaders meet Wednesday.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who returned from a national security conference in Singapore on Sunday, will not arrive in Brussels until Wednesday evening, after the Ukraine Defense Contact Group’s meeting is over.
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss scheduling details, confirmed that Hegseth also will not participate by video conference.
It is the latest in a series of steps that the U.S. has taken to distance itself from the Ukraine war effort. And it comes on the heels of French President Emmanuel Macron’s warning at the security conference last weekend that the U.S. and others risk a dangerous double standard if their concentration on a potential conflict with China is done at the cost of abandoning Ukraine.
France and other NATO nations are concerned that the U.S. is considering withdrawing troops from Europe to shift them to the Indo-Pacific. Macron said abandoning Ukraine would eventually erode U.S. credibility in deterring any potential conflict with China over Taiwan.
Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, created the group after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Since then, more than 50 member nations have collectively provided Ukraine with some $126 billion in weapons and military assistance, including over $66.5 billion from the U.S.…
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Satellite pictures of a Russian airbase taken shortly after Ukraine carried out a deep strike with drones show strategic bombers destroyed or badly damaged. Ukraine targeted at least four airbases across Russia using 117 unmanned aerial vehicles launched from containers close to the targets in Operation Spiderweb. Capella Space, a satellite company, supplied Reuters with images of one of those airfields, located in the Siberian region of Irkutsk, taken on 2 June, the day after the operation.
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The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) pictures appear to show the debris of several aircraft located along the runway of the Belaya military airbase or parked in protective revetments nearby. John Ford, a research associate at the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said they showed what appeared to be the remnants of two destroyed Tu-22 Backfires – long-range, supersonic strategic bombers that have been used to launch missile strikes against Ukraine. The SAR image, as well as drone footage of the strikes posted on social media, also indicated that four strategic heavy Tu-95 bombers had been destroyed or severely damaged, he added.
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Brady Africk, an open source intelligence analyst, agreed that the SAR imagery of Irkutsk airbase showed several Tu-95s and Tu-22s had been destroyed and damaged, although more imagery was needed to properly assess the impact. “But it is clear that the attack on this airbase was very successful,” he said. “The aircraft targeted in the attack were a mix of Tu-22 and Tu-95 bombers, both of which Russia has used to launch strikes against Ukraine.” Africk added that Belaya airbase is home to several flat decoy aircraft, which he said had apparently failed to mislead Ukrainian drones.
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Ukraine on Tuesday detonated a massive underwater blast that “severely damaged” the base of pylons holding up the illegally built Kerch Bridge, which connects the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula of Ukraine to Russia. The signature project of Vladimir Putin was hit with the equivalent of more than a metric tonne of TNT, said Kyiv’s SBU security service, write Peter Beaumont and Artem Mazhulin.
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The Kerch Bridge is heavily protected and Ukraine’s ability to place explosives directly on its underwater structure, coming after Operation Spiderweb, is the second grave embarrassment for Putin and Russian security services in three days. In October 2022 a truck exploded on the bridge, shutting it down, while in July 2023 the SBU said it had blown up part of the bridge using an experimental naval drone. Both times, Russia repaired the damaged sections. The bridge is regularly closed in security scares. Lt Gen Vasyl Maliuk, of the SBU, who supervised the latest operation, described it as “an absolutely legitimate target, especially considering that the enemy used it as a logistical artery to supply its troops … Crimea is Ukraine, and any manifestations of occupation will receive our tough response.”
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A Russian attack killed at least four people and wounded 25 in the north-eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy on Tuesday, officials said. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, posted that the “completely deliberate” strike on civilians was “all you need to know about Russia’s ‘desire’ to end this war”. Russia also fired rocket artillery at Chystovodivka village in the Kharkiv region, killing two people and injuring three others, said the regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov.
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The attacks came a day after direct peace talks in Istanbul made no progress on ending the fighting – and as Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s former prime minister and proxy president now on Russia’s security council, strongly suggested there was no sincere effort from the Kremlin’s side. “The Istanbul talks are not for striking a compromise peace on someone else’s delusional terms but for ensuring our swift victory and the complete destruction [of Ukraine’s government],” he said.
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Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, posted after meeting Trump envoy Keith Kellogg on Tuesday: “[Russia is] playing for time, manipulating the talks, trying to avoid US sanctions and not wanting a ceasefire.” The Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said that at their latest talks in Istanbul “the Russian side passed a set of old ultimatumsthat do not move the situation any closer to true peace”. Russia meanwhile ignored a request to comment on Ukraine’s ceasefire proposals, he said. “We demand Russia’s reply. Each day of silence from them proves their wish to continue the war.”
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Britain pledged on Wednesday to supply 100,000 drones to Ukraine by April 2026. The £350m package is part of a broader £4.5bn military support initiative that the UK defence secretary, John Healey, will make at a 50-nation Ukraine defence contact group meeting in Brussels co-hosted with Germany. For the first time since the group was created, the US defence secretary – currently Pete Hegseth – will not be there when all the other defence ministers meet……
ISW…Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 3, 2025
- Kremlin officials publicly acknowledged that Russia seeks the “complete destruction” of Ukraine, indicating Moscow’s disinterest in good faith peace negotiations and a near-term resolution to the war.
- Ukraine struck the Kerch Strait Bridge on June 3 for the third time since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
- Western officials and open-source analysts continue to clarify the battlefield damage following the Ukrainian long-range drone strike series (Operation Spider Web) on June 1.
- Russia continues to produce and stockpile missiles and drones to strike Ukraine, demonstrating Russia’s continued commitment to winning the war through military means.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov announced a series of Ukrainian military command changes on June 3.
- Ukrainian forces recently advanced in Kursk Oblast. Russian forces recently advanced near Kurakhove….
Daily Kos grunt Report for Today….
Body Counts….
Nearly one million Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the country’s war against Ukraine, according to a new study, a staggering toll as Russia’s three-year assault on its neighbor grinds on.
The study, published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that close to 400,000 Ukrainian troops have also been killed or wounded since the war began. That would put the overall casualty figure, for Russian and Ukrainian troops combined, at almost 1.4 million.
Officials cautioned that casualty figures were difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures. The study published on Tuesday relied on casualty figures from American and British government estimates, among other sources.
The figures present an overall accounting of Russia’s slow progress in Ukraine, with Russia proceeding in some places at around 165 feet a day, slower than even the bogged-down and costly Somme advance of British and French troops in World War I. Since January 2024, Russia has seized less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory, according to CSIS, even as it continues to advance in the country. Overall, Russia occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine….
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