In recent days, Zelensky has been taking his case directly to Western lawmakers, urging them to help Ukraine fight Russia. To the British Parliament he recalled the Nazis’ campaign of terror. To Congress, he spoke of Pearl Harbor. On Thursday, it was Germany’s turn: Zelensky, addressing the Bundestag, offered multiple references to German atrocities inflicted on Ukraine and Russia, among others, in World War II, and analogies to the Berlin Wall.
“You are like behind the wall again,” he said. “Not the Berlin Wall but in the middle of Europe, between freedom and slavery.”
Honest to God, if I was Scholz I'd tell Volo to go pound sand, he wouldn't get a pfennig's more aid from me. Fuck Volo and the Zoom that brought him there.
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While Russian forces have made a bit of progress in the south and east, said one of the officials, they are stalled outside Kyiv, the capital, where they have taken heavy casualties and — perhaps most surprising — have failed to achieve dominance in the air. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments.
Given all the setbacks, the Western officials said they were no longer confident that Russia planned a ground assault on Kyiv, a major objective. “An ill-judged assault on a city as well-prepared and well-defended as Kyiv would be a very costly business,” one said. They cautioned that Russia could still decide to assault the city or, failing that, strangle it in a prolonged siege.
As cruise missiles hammered their capital, Ukrainian fighters described several successful, if modest, counteroffensives against Russian forces.
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Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken suggested that Putin “may be growing more desperate,” and warned that Moscow might be preparing to use chemical weapons and had begun to kidnap local officials in Ukraine and replace them with Mr. Putin’s allies.
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But for all their struggles, Russian forces are reported to have taken control of large sections of Ukraine, particularly in the east and south. In eastern cities controlled by Russia, witnesses described desolation and ruin, as well as looting by Russian troops, where tens of thousands of people had once lived.
So, they're still winning, slowly they are still winning.
In the eastern city of Volnovakha, the Russian defense ministry declared it “liberated,” but after weeks of bombardment, Moscow’s prize was a landscape of rubble and ash.
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Russia is destroying Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
Unable to take control of the city, Russia has been destroying it in a relentless barrage. Evoking memories of Syria and Chechnya, Russia has been terrorizing the city’s inhabitants with overwhelming and indiscriminate force. It is following a similar plan in other Ukrainian cities, such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv.
...A kindergarten, where children once played, was pulverized into ruins. ...
