Author: John Hanno

The New Voice of Ukraine

Retired US General Ben Hodges on how the war might develop

June 28, 2022

In an interview with NV, Hodges also laments the slow Western reaction to the outbreak of the war, as well as the too-low initial level of Ukrainian readiness.

Hodges is currently the Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis and warned of imminent Russian escalation of the conflict in the summer of 2021.

Read also: A catastrophe for Putin

He has also criticized the West for not having a Black Sea security strategy, and a lack of attention to Russian provocations.

NV: Many compare the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war with the Second World War, in terms of its nature and duration. Would you agree with that?

Hodges: I think one of the things they have in common is the horrifying scale of barbarity, destruction, and bloodshed, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in 80 years. I’d also like to point out Russian war crimes and atrocities against civilians – those were of both Second World War and Nazi crimes. Naturally, there are discrepancies: emerging technologies, especially with drones, and modern weapons are much more sophisticated than the Second World War ones. The thinking of Russian military leadership, however, is virtually unchanged since the Second World War.

NV: We’ve also been talking about this war as a long one, lasting years, not months. Do you agree with this assessment?

Hodges: If Ukraine gets everything it needs from Western countries, and if Ukrainians continue to fight for their land as fiercely as they do now, I think the Russians will be pushed back to their Feb. 24 positions by the end of the year. Should the West become reluctant to keep aiding Ukraine in this war – then yes, it could drag on for years.

NV: We’re grateful to our Western partners, but the weapons we’ve been getting from them thus far are not enough to even hold the line. Why do you think weapons shipments to Ukraine are so sluggish?

Hodges: There are several reasons. Clearly, the decision to provide security assistance to Ukraine should have been taken much more quickly, and these weapons should have been in Ukrainian hands much sooner. Western countries were reluctant for a while, for their own reasons. Some overestimated Russian capabilities.

But your audience shouldn’t forget how many weapons, how much equipment and another kind of assistance has already been provided to Ukraine. Many countries have significantly depleted their own defense capabilities in order to send Ukraine what it needs. Millions upon millions of dollars have already been spent, and will be spent still.

Read also: Peskov suggests Zelensky could end Russia’s war on Ukraine by ordering surrender

It’s important you understand that as well, I think. Of course, it’s not enough, not much has yet been given. There are some other reasons we shouldn’t brush off. Let’s be frank: Ukraine didn’t prepare for a possible invasion as effectively as it could have during the last eight years. Much more should have been done – a strategic stockpile of artillery shells should have been established, for example.

The territorial defense force was formed much later than it should have been. Too much blame is currently directed at the West, but I think that doesn’t paint a full picture of why the war is going the way it is.

NV: Do you think Ukraine will get enough weapons to at least hold the line in the east and south in the coming months?

Hodges: First of all, ever more artillery and rockets are arriving in Ukraine right now. German howitzers are already here, along with French weapons, U.S.-made HIMARS MLRS are coming in right now, and more ammunition from other countries. Everything’s going in the right direction, and the supply isn’t drying up.

Logistics is the main challenge now: how to actually deliver all this from Poland and western Ukraine to the front lines in a timely manner. I think the situation will shift significantly once all (these weapons) end up in the hands of Ukrainian troops.

NV: How much more weapons, do you think, does Ukraine need to be able to transition to counter-offensives? Can we make any guesses about when that might happen?

Hodges: I can’t make such forecasts, since I don’t know what Ukraine already has, exactly. But I’m sure that Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief, defense minister, their counterparts and allies in the United States and the UK are all well aware of everything that’s going on. I don’t have that kind of information as a civilian, and I’d wager that none of the civilian experts have it either. All this talk of what exactly Ukraine needs, how much and what kind of weapons – it only helps Russia.

Read also: Who will get to power in Russia after Putin is gone?

NV: Russia is clearly successful in its traditional approach to war – overwhelming artillery firepower. How can the Ukrainian army respond to this doctrine? In some asymmetrical way, perhaps?

Hodges: I’d say Ukraine is already able to muster a very flexible response – your artillery and missiles are striking their artillery and missiles, while the equipment Ukraine is getting, is of better quality than Russia’s. Naturally, the next step is to use every tool you have at your disposal to intercept Russian missiles and hit their artillery.

NV: Judging by the pace of weapon supplies to Ukraine, it seems that the West is looking to exhaust Russia, as opposed to facilitate its total military defeat. Would you agree with that?

Hodges: I don’t know. Personally, I want a total Russian defeat in this war.

NV: What about the popular Western talking point that nobody wants Russia to lose badly enough to resort to nukes, so it’s important to strangle Moscow’s economy instead.

Hodges: I wouldn’t be that dramatic. Many people across the globe are interested in Russia’s total defeat. You’re incorrect in saying that nobody wants Moscow to lose.

NV: Around 300 Russian and 200 Ukrainian troops die every day. It’s a very high price we’re paying for our defense. Do you think Russian manpower will be exhausted in near future?

Hodges: Every nation decides for itself whether the price it has to pay for victory is acceptable or not. Every soldier killed is a loss to a Ukrainian family, and I’m sure that Ukraine’s Armed Forces are doing everything they can to minimize these losses.

Read also: Russia fires $200 million worth of missiles at Ukraine over weekend – Forbes

Unfortunately, we can see that Russia does not value its own citizens, and there’s nothing to indicate this will change. Ukraine and its Western allies are doing everything to ensure the losses in this war aren’t colossal. It’s important for Ukraine to continue training its troops, extending it to the territorial defense forces. It’s as important as getting more artillery.

NV: How effective, in your opinion, are the regular Ukraine, EU, and NATO defense minister meetings at the U.S. Air Force Ramstein base in Germany?

Hodges: I think it’s a very effective format, and the U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, along with all other participating countries should get credit for it. I think these are meetings between very reasonable and practical people, and they are valuable for Ukraine and the rest of the world.

NV: You’ve talked a lot about the strategic importance of the Black Sea. Turkey has rejected the U.S. proposal to get a NATO naval task force to clear the Black Sea of naval mines and facilitate maritime trade. Is it possible to convince Turkey to reconsider its position?

Hodges: As you know, Turkey has closed the Bosporus to all military ships, since the very beginning of the war. This includes NATO ships as well. There are still some NATO vessels in the Black Sea – Turkish, Romanian, and Bulgarian. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to come up with a comprehensive security strategy for the Black Sea before the war, and our current relations with Turkey aren’t good enough to resolve this. I still hope that we will eventually be able to take care of this problem.

Read also: Zelensky believes Lend-Lease for Ukraine will help Ukraine defeat ‘the ideological successors of Nazism’

NV: When do you think this war will end? Will it end with a ceasefire?

Hodges: We all sincerely hope that the war will end with Ukraine liberating and reclaiming all of its lost territories. And I’m convinced that the Ukrainian army will be able to push the Russians back to their Feb. 24 positions by the end of this year.

The New Voice of Ukraine

Ukraine soon to get more HIMARS weapons, second stage of training of Ukrainian troops starts

June 28, 2022

“We’re continuing to work our security assistance and moving heaven and earth to get that assistance forward to the Ukrainians as fast as we can, and I think what you’re seeing on the battlefield is that the Ukrainians are making good use of not just our assistance, but systems that they’re obtaining from our partners and allies around the world,” the official said.

Reporter Jack Detch of the Foreign Policy news outlet also said that the Ukrainian military will soon begin a new stage of training in the use of the HIMARS multiple launch rocket system.

“U.S. training for about 50 Ukrainian troops on the HIMARs multiple rocket launch systems will take about two weeks: (according to a) senior U.S. defense official,” Detch tweeted.

“U.S. expects the second round of training to begin soon and to cover Ukrainian troops of different ranks.”

Read also: Ukrainian National Guard obliterates Russian MLRS near Severodonetsk

In early June, the United States announced that it would send four HIMARS MLRS and ammunition for them to Ukraine.

The Defense Minister of Ukraine, Oleksiy Reznikov, confirmed on June 23 that the first of the U.S. systems had already arrived in Ukraine. On the same day, the Pentagon announced another aid package for Kyiv, which, according to media reports, includes an additional four systems.

The New Voice of Ukraine

With missiles hitting Kyiv, Russia wants to bring Belarus into war – CIT analyst

June 27, 2022

Read also: Russia increases its military footprint in Belarus, Ukrainian intelligence says

“This was Russian attempt to respond to deliveries of modern artillery and rocket systems to Ukraine, as they are hitting command centers, storages and all kinds of targets deep in the Russia-controlled territory quite hard,” Mihaylov said on Radio NV.

Read also: Lukashenko allows Ukrainians to pick berries in Belarus

“The Russians are responding in the only possible way they can. These are attempts to conduct attacks on military targets that they’re aware of as those are marked on old Soviet maps. So far, we may conclude that this was another rather unsuccessful attempt to hit a defense manufacturing facility built yet in the Soviet times.”

He also emphasized that the Russians are still using Soviet intelligence data.

Read also: Interview with NSDC Secretary Danilov on Russia, Belarus, and the war

“As we well see, their intelligence is based on the maps that the Soviet military had. So we see these rockets miss their targets by 100 or 200 meters and produce explosions in residential blocks. We can’t say this isn’t terrorism. It could be that this attack was planned as an attempt to hit civil infrastructure, but the rockets that Russians used are not strong enough to conduct a terrorist-grade bombing operation. I mean – depressing the civil population and its ability to resist. Russia doesn’t have enough capacity to achieve these goals, doesn’t have enough strategic aircraft and rocket-operating units.”

Mihaylov also commented on Belarus and its involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine. He believes Russia wants a greater engagement from Belarus, so that it effectively joins the war, but for that to happen Ukraine needs to attack Belarus in the first place. Russia’s tactical goal is to provoke Ukraine into direct military action against Belarus as a sovereign state.

“Since the beginning of this war, Belarus has been providing its own territory for Russia to use a base to station launchers for missiles, like the Iskander, which are still present there,” said Mihaylov.

“Russian aircraft also use Belarussian airports for operations against Ukraine in the air. However, not so long ago Russia was using mostly Belarussian airports for striking Ukraine and now we see that (June 26) the attack on Kyiv was done from bombers based in Russia – this is confirmed by Ukrainian intelligence data and Belarussian activists. After hitting the targets, these planes went back to their Russian base.”

Read also: Belarus dictator: Putin’s Ukraine invasion is not going according to plan

“I think Russia wants to provoke Ukraine to hit Belarus and engage it into the war, open another area for combat (in northern Ukraine). Besides that, I have to say that these Russian missiles are too old and are not good at hitting long-distance targets. So Russians have to admit strength of Ukraine’s air defense system and, therefore, launch missiles from a closer distance.”

Mihaylov was commenting after two Russian bombers hit targets in Kyiv at 6.20 a.m. on June 26. Several explosions did serious damage to at least one residential building in Lukyanivka district, an area close to the city’s downtown. At least one person was killed in the attack.

Business Insider

‘Russia needs to be defeated’: Russian socialists in exile say Putin has to be defeated in Ukraine

Charles R. Davis – June 27, 2022

• Ilya Matveev and Ilya Budraitskis are socialist activists from Russia.
• They fled the country weeks after the February 24 invasion of Ukraine.
• For the good of Ukraine — and Russia — they argue that Vladimir Putin cannot be allowed to win.

Over coffee in a bustling Eurasian neighborhood full of cafés, bars, delivery drivers on mopeds, and scores of cigarette-smoking hipsters, Ilya Matveev — a democratic socialist and academic — said he had come to terms with the fact that he may have to spend the rest of his life in exile here or in one of the handful of other places currently open to Russian expats.

He also knows that he will be hated — not just by nationalists in the country he fled, but by the victims of a war that he himself opposes.

“How can you create anything besides hatred after what Russia did?” Matveev asked. Maybe the hate won’t last forever, but if there ever is peace, there will also be loathing, with memories having been created that will last generations. “If Ukrainians don’t like me,” he said, “it’s perfectly understandable.”

In the wake of the Bucha massacre, where dozens of unarmed civilians were executed by Russian forces, and the bombing and killing of more than 600 men, women, and children sheltering in a Mariupol theater, there will be no easy postwar reconciliation.

“I feel a lot of shame,” Matveev, in his early 30s and wearing round glasses with clear frames, said in an interview. “Maybe I’m not personally responsible for the war, but when I look at these atrocities — that definitely happened — I’m very ashamed of Russian soldiers, of Russian everything.”

Even acknowledging that what Moscow is waging in Ukraine is indeed a “war” is punishable by up to 15 years in prison in Russia. It’s why Matveev — an associate dean for international relations at the North-West Academy for Public Administration in St. Petersburg, and a founder of the Openleft.ru socialist website — left a country that he loved for a land he doesn’t know. Vladimir Putin’s government had long been repressive, jailing and assassinating its opposition, but after the February invasion it became intolerable for liberals, leftists, and anyone else who would not remain silent as their homeland became an international pariah.

“I’m feeling awful because my country is destroyed in every sense possible,” Matveev said. Cultural and academic exchanges are a thing of the past, with Russia turning inward on the orders of those at the top, extinguishing hope that an open society could be built from the bottom up. “It’s just the destruction of everything.”

It’s impossible to say how many other Russians are mortified by their country’s war on its neighbor. What is known is that there was an uptick in Russians leaving the country this year. Most are not antiwar socialist dissidents but driven by concerns about their economic prospects under a pariah regime.

Even abroad, Russians who spoke to Insider did not always feel comfortable sharing their opinions on the record. Some, after all, may wish to return. Even the outspoken, like Matveev, remain cautious; he asked that his host country not be revealed, wishing to avoid drawing attention to the fact it’s hosting anti-Putin activists.

What unites all in the Russian diaspora is that they had the means to leave, something not available to the vast majority of those living under the Putin regime and suffering under sanctions for a war they cannot stop.

A necessary evil

As a leftist and a Russian, Matveev is adamant that the masses are not to blame for a war launched by one man. He takes no pleasure in seeing the pain imposed by broad sanctions that have tanked the economy and indirectly contributed to shortages of things like medicine.

Recognizing the privilege of living abroad, “I’m not going to cheer that,” he said.

At the same time, “I cannot even call for the lifting of sanctions,” he said, “because I think they can be effective.” What hurts the economy also hurts Russia’s military-industrial complex, potentially compelling an early end to the war effort in Ukraine.

And Matveev is clear: His country needs to lose.

“Russia needs to be defeated, basically,” he said.

On this count, Russia’s democratic left finds itself more anti-Moscow than some other socialists in the United States and Western Europe, where the wisdom of Noam Chomsky — the former MIT linguist who argues the US aimed to “draw the Russians into Ukraine” and is now intentionally prolonging the conflict — is sometimes given more airtime than the perspective of those in Kyiv or Moscow.

“Most of the leftists were wrong on this,” Matveev said. Chomsky, for example, dismissed concerns about an imminent invasion as an “annual media event,” an argument echoed by his anti-imperialist fellow travelers. “And they are still wrong on this,” Matveev continued, “because they cannot understand Russian imperialism. They don’t understand there is imperialism outside the West. They just reject this idea.”

This manifests itself in demands that Ukraine, viewed as a mere proxy for US power, be made to effectively surrender in order to stop the war. But ceding territory and laying down arms at this point means “ethnic cleansing,” Matveev said — the elimination of any shred of Ukrainian identity in lands seized by Russian forces. For Ukrainians, the fight is existential, “a nightmare scenario”; on the other hand, he said, “the worst thing that will happen for Russia is that it just goes back to its borders.”

Confused and in exile

Openly agitating against the government is not possible in today’s Russia. That, in some ways, has eased some Russians’ transition to the opposition abroad. There, at least, they can write and publish what they really thinks.

Until recently, Ilya Budraitskis, a stocky, left-wing political writer in his 40s, was based in Moscow. In 2015, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s support for armed insurrection in east Ukraine, he warned the left abroad that his country was as imperialist as Washington.

Even so, “I didn’t believe until the last moment that this invasion was possible, because it was clear that it’s such a stupid plan,” he said, speaking to Insider thousands of miles from home in a location that he asked not be named.

Budraitskis — like Matveev — has joined the Russian diaspora. As with the invasion he did not see coming, he’s still coming to terms with his new reality and the possibility he will never go back to the place he was born.

“Little bit confused,” he said, repeating the words to himself, of his new life as an expatriate, one where he still faces the brunt of sanctions in the form of banks being hesitant to open an account for him. He blames the lack of any dissenting voices around Putin for the quagmire in Ukraine that also served to push him and others out of Russia.

“One old man is the only powerful political institution,” he said. “The system is this man, and no one around him is [able] to balance his decisions in any way.”

The point of propaganda in modern Russia, he argued, is not to rally people behind a government whose actions they cannot influence. It’s more “psychotherapy,” Budraitskis explained — a state-sponsored coping mechanism, minimizing cognitive dissonance by fashioning reality to something more bearable, so at least the masses have a rationale to help them sleep at night.

There is, indeed, not much else that a Russian can do within Russia other than to keep their head down and try to improve their own life (although resistance persists: someone has been setting fire to military-recruitment offices).

“People sort of feel — and it is proved to them by their material conditions — that they cannot do anything. Whatever they do, wherever they go, if they try to protest and do something, to organize or whatever, it doesn’t really work,” Budraitskis said. Especially in more remote regions of the country, far from Moscow and St. Petersburg, there are few prospects and less hope.

“And these people, they’re not so much supportive of either Putin or the war. It’s just their practice, their everyday life, that tells them nothing is going to change — and they’ve never seen any change in their lives,” Budraitskis said.

He’s skeptical of economy-wide sanctions, not seeing the pain inflicted on those Russians as contributing to the end of a war. But he does believe that for the sake of Ukraine as well as his own country — and for others who fear they are targets for Russian expansionism — there can be no victory for Moscow.

“To end the regime,” he said, “there should be some defeat.”

Yahoo! News

‘They’re no match for us’: Ukrainian pilot says they can defeat Russia, but only with more Western help

Alexander Nazaryan, Senior W. H. Correspondent – June 27, 2022

WASHINGTON — Moonfish and Juice, the two Ukrainian fighter pilots who visited Washington, D.C., last week with their representatives, had a simple message for the elected leaders, defense officials and journalists they met: We can win this war, and have to. Because if Russia wins, there is no telling where it will stop.

“If it’s not stopped right now, right here in Ukraine on the ground, the rest of the democratic world could find itself in a much, much worse situation,” says Moonfish — Yahoo News is not using his real name — who has been flying missions over eastern Ukraine, where Russia has been making steady gains in recent weeks.

On Sunday, rockets hit Kyiv, a reminder that the setbacks Russia suffered throughout the winter and early spring have hardly convinced the Kremlin to negotiate a compromise.

Nor is it clear that such a compromise would be palatable to Ukraine, which was initially invaded by Russia in 2014 in a bid to reclaim its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Asked by Yahoo News what victory would look like, Juice said that Ukraine must return to the borders established in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His handlers hasten to point out that Kyiv’s official position is not quite so ambitious, but Juice is not concerned with the finer points of diplomacy.

“So it’s the position of politicians,” he says insistently. “But the position of soldiers is the borders of 1991.”

American policymakers have insisted that it is for Ukrainians to decide when they are ready to negotiate, but there is little secret that the foreign policy establishment in Washington is nervous about just how much longer the U.S.-European coalition will hold.

“NATO policy appears to be that, to keep the alliance together, we will give them enough to fight, but we won’t give them enough to win,” Mark Kimmitt, a former senior policy official at the departments of Defense and State, told Yahoo News. “Such a policy often leads to a lowest common denominator, held captive by the more conservative alliance members.”

When the invasion first started, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top generals thought they might take Kyiv within three days. A ferocious Ukrainian defense repelled the Russian assault, giving hope to a victory by the much smaller nation. But now, several months later, the war has entered a grinding phase that has seen Russia take smaller cities like Severodonetsk but hardly consolidating its gains in the Donbas region to any extent that would allow Putin to claim victory.

“Russians are just eking out inch by inch of territory,” a senior Pentagon official told reporters on Friday.

Last week, the U.S. announced it was sending $450 million in military equipment — including four advanced rocket systems — to Ukraine. But it might not be enough.

“The Ukrainian air defense capacity was gutted in the opening few days of the war in February,” Daniel L. Davis, a military expert with Defense Priorities and a combat veteran, told Yahoo News. “Latest reports are that Russia is able to fly somewhere between 200 and 300 sorties per day. Most reliable assessments suggest Russia has had around 30 combat fixed-wing aircraft shot down during the war — which means thousands of jets fly each month and only six or seven get shot down in any given month.”

And until Ukraine can knock out Russian air defense systems, Davis warns, sending it Western fighter jets and helicopters is not likely to do much good, since those will simply be shot out of the sky.

The Ukrainians are appreciative that they have not been forgotten by the West. But the uncomfortable reality is that they are up against one of the most powerful militaries in the world, commanded by a Kremlin leadership that is fixated on proving its might to the rest of the world. Gratitude is thus followed by the question of what will come next, and when.

“We need all the help we can get,” says Yulia Marushevska, who works with the Ukrainian military in securing Western aid and who traveled to Washington with Moonfish and Juice.

The two pilots say they simply need more Western equipment: air defenses that can take down Russian missiles, jets more nimble and advanced than the Soviet-era MiGs that have been supplied to the Ukrainians thus far.

“We need to do better. We need to save more lives,” Juice says. “We are trying to do our best, but it’s old equipment.”

Both pilots say Russian rockets and missiles have hit civilian targets along with military ones. “They don’t care about hospitals or schools,” Juice says of Russia. “They are not real professionals” who follow Western standards of conduct.

“They don’t have enough technical training, enough real-fire training,” says Juice, who was involved in the initial defense of Kyiv. “So that’s why they’ve suffered such great losses.”

Moonfish, usually the more subdued of the pair, jumped in. “They’re no match for us. They’re no match for American pilots. I am 100% sure of that.” He says that even with superior aircraft like the Sukhoi Su-30, poor training blunts Russia’s advantage, as does a command-and-control structure at once chaotic and despotic.

“They’re afraid to speak up,” Moonfish says, an assessment he bases on interrogation of captured Ukrainian pilots.

Fear of speaking up is endemic in Russian society, which has been cowed by two decades of Putin. “Yeah, it was disappointing,” Moonfish says of how quickly protests in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg ended, to be replaced by acquiescence to Kremlin propaganda. “We believed that something actually might have happened, especially in the first month,” when Putin’s grip on power seemed as fragile as it had in years. Now, though, the war is popular with ordinary Russians, who have adjusted to international sanctions and widespread condemnation.

“Shit like that would never have happened in Ukraine,” Moonfish says.

Now he is preparing for a war that could go on for years. Even if Putin is replaced, it will likely be by an understudy eager for decisive military victory — the very kind that Putin enjoyed in Chechnya when he first came to power in 1999.

“We are all set for a long-term confrontation with Russia,” Moonfish says. “And because of that, we need more weapons to free our territories. To at least make them think twice before invading again.”

Business Insider

Financier Bill Browder: Vladimir Putin has been a ‘psychopath’ since childhood and lacks normal ‘human emotions’

Sam Tabahriti – June 26, 2022

Bill Browder, Vladimir Putin’s nemesis, said the Russian president has been mentally ill.

In a new documentary on Paramount+, Browder said Putin has been ill as a “psychopath.”

There have been rumors about Putin’s health – an oligarch was recorded saying he had blood cancer.

Vladimir Putin’s nemesis, investor Bill Browder, says the Russian president has been ill since childhood, but not in the way many think.

In a new documentary called, “Secrets of the Oligarch Wives,” which will stream on Paramount+ starting June 28, Browder said Putin has been ill and is a “psychopath.” The wives of Russian billionaires paint a picture of a vengeful Russian leader who saw treachery at every turn, forgave nothing, settled every score and was jealous of their lifestyles.

Insider viewed the documentary ahead of its streaming debut. It starts with 2010 footage of Putin singing in front of Western celebrities in St Petersburg.

Browder is an international investor who once ran the largest foreign investment fund in Russia. He was barred in 2005 from entering the country, “blacklisted,” and named a “threat to national security” after he accused Russian tax officials of corruption and embezzlement.

Browder says in the documentary: “Putin is ill, but not in the way that most people think Putin is ill. Putin is mentally ill, but he has been mentally ill as a psychopath since childhood.”

“Putin’s illness leads him to lack any empathy, lack any conscience, lack any normal human emotions when it comes to the fate of other people,” Browder adds.

There have been speculations about the Russian president’s health. An oligarch secretly was recorded saying Putin had “blood cancer” and Oliver Stone, who made a four-part documentary on Putin, also said he had cancer but had “licked it.”

Putin appeared to be limping and sat a blanket over his lap during his public appearance on Victory Day in early May. Videos also emerged showing him tightly gripping a table and appearing to shake uncontrollably.

Browder concluded that being a psychopath “will lead him to all sorts of terrible crimes.”

Tatiana Fokina, whose partner Evgeny Chichvarkin was once worth over $1.5 billion, says in the documentary that the rumors of Putin’s health are “likely to be true,” and if they are “that makes me really frightened.”

“A person who is really ill doesn’t really care about what happens next,” Fokina added.

Reuters

U.S. likely to announce this week purchase of missile defense system for Ukraine – source

Steve Holland – June 26, 2022

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is likely to announce this week the purchase of an advanced medium to long range surface-to-air missile defense system for Ukraine, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Sunday.

Washington is also expected to announce other security assistance for Ukraine, including additional artillery ammunition and counter-battery radars to address needs expressed by the Ukrainian military, the source added.

The weaponry is the latest assistance to be offered to Ukraine by the United States since Russia invaded its eastern European neighbor in February.

This month, President Joe Biden agreed to provide Ukraine with $700 million in military aid, including advanced rocket systems that can strike with precision at long-range targets.

Ammunition, counter fire radars, a number of air surveillance radars, additional Javelin anti-tank missiles, as well as anti-armor weapons are also part of that package, officials said.

Another effort, to sell four large, armable drones to Ukraine, was paused earlier this month amid concerns that their radar and surveillance equipment could create a security risk for the United States if it fell into Russian hands.

(Reporting by Steve Holland in Washington, Additional reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, Calif., writing by Ismail Shakil; Editing by Ross Colvin and Himani Sarkar)