Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“China has surged sales to Russia of machine tools, microelectronics and other technology that Moscow in turn is using to produce missiles, tanks, aircraft and other weaponry for use in its war against Ukraine, according to a U.S. assessment.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-intelligence-finding-shows-china-183204749.html
“The need for such defenses is all too clear for residents of Kyiv. Just an hour before Kuleba sat down with POLITICO at the foreign ministry on Monday, in broad, mid-morning daylight, the Ukrainian capital came under attack from Russian ballistic missiles.
A couple of loud blasts rang out just moments after air raid sirens blared across the city. Kuleba was in the city’s botanical gardens to make a video for an upcoming trip at the time.
The missiles were intercepted by Patriot air defenses. But nine people, including a teenage girl, were still injured from falling debris, including in the district near to where Kuleba was filming.
The foreign minister’s demand comes at a fraught moment for Ukraine in its attempt to repel Vladimir Putin’s invading forces. Western support, strong at the start of the invasion two years ago, has weakened in recent months, with a major new U.S. aid package held up by partisan divisions in Congress.
European allies have struggled to plug the gap in the supply of funding and arms that Kyiv so badly needs. Ukraine’s war of self-preservation is precariously placed. Russia is making advances on the battlefield and Putin, fresh from a distorted election victory, is leaping on every opportunity to intensify the Russian assault.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/give-us-the-damn-patriots-ukraine-needs-air-defenses-now-minister-says/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXQlmpdydPY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkhoWXak4J8
“Because of the problem with American ammunition and the shortage at a really crucial moment when they were making inroads…they haven’t been able to push that much further…most of the marines..spend all their time in the basements hiding from heavy artillery fire.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVRu9hRy_hk
“Earlier this month, the top U.S. general in the Middle East said ISIS-K could attack U.S. and Western interests outside of Afghanistan “in as little as six months and with little to no warning.””
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“While the attack by ISIS-K in Russia on Friday was a dramatic escalation, experts said the group has opposed Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent years.
“ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years, frequently criticizing Putin in its propaganda,” said Colin Clarke of Soufan Center, a New York-based research group.
Michael Kugelman of the Washington-based Wilson Center said that ISIS-K “sees Russia as being complicit in activities that regularly oppress Muslims.”
He added that the group also counts as members a number of Central Asian militants with their own grievances against Moscow.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/explainer-why-did-isis-k-011615857.html
“Assailants burst into a large concert hall in Moscow on Friday and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, killing over 60 people, injuring more than 100 and setting fire to the venue in a brazen attack just days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on power in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on affiliated channels on social media. A U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies had learned the group’s branch in Afghanistan was planning an attack in Moscow and shared the information with Russian officials.”
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“the IS statement cast its claim as an attack targeting Christians, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an expert on the terrorist group, said it appeared to reflect the group’s strategy of “striking wherever they can as part of a global ‘fight the infidels and apostates everywhere.’”
In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacation-goers returning from Egypt. The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in the past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of former Soviet Union.
On March 7, Russia’s top security agency said it thwarted an attack on a synagogue in Moscow by an Islamic State cell, killing several of its members in the Kaluga region near the Russian capital. A few days earlier, Russian authorities said six alleged IS members were killed in a shootout in Ingushetia in Russia’s Caucasus region.”
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“Friday’s attack followed a statement earlier this month by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that urged Americans to avoid crowded places in view of “imminent” plans by extremists to target large gatherings in the Russian capital, including concerts. The warning was repeated by several other Western embassies.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gunmen-combat-fatigues-open-fire-174053657.html
“The US has long placed its faith in expensive weapons as the key to victory in conflicts, but the Ukraine war is forcing it to revise its assumptions, The Washington Post has reported.
Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, told the outlet the conflict had challenged long-held ideas that expensive, precision-guided weapons were key to winning US wars.
US-made Himars or Excalibur shells, which are guided to their targets using GPS, have proven vulnerable to Russian electronic-warfare units, which scramble their signals and send them off course.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraines-war-shown-us-expensive-113140807.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-avoided-bankrupting-itself-2-003101855.html
“Russia is entering its third year of war in Ukraine with an unprecedented amount of cash in government coffers, bolstered by a record $37 billion of crude oil sales to India last year, according to new analysis, which concludes that some of the crude was refined by India and then exported to the United States as oil products worth more than $1 billion.
This flow of payments, ultimately to Moscow’s benefit, comes from India increasing its purchases of Russian crude by over 13 times its pre-war amounts, according to the analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), exclusively shared with CNN. It amounts to US strategic partner New Delhi stepping in to replace crude purchases by Western buyers, reduced by sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the analysis said.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kremlin-never-richer-thanks-us-080408989.html