The summer is looking bleak for the Russian military. Russia’s summer offensive ‘doomed to fail’ With forces plagued by problems, experts say Moscow will not be able to capitalise on any gains renewed assaults may bring https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/04/11/russian-summer-offensive-doomed-to-fail-ukraine/
Trump’s ‘Peace’ Effort Is Dead. Putin Killed It. Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities are up more than 50 percent since the Trump talks started. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/ukraine-russia-trump-so-called-peace-effort-dead-putin-killed-it WHILE DONALD TRUMP IS WAGING A TRADE WAR on penguins and American pocketbooks, his Ukrainian peace-deal effort seems all but dead and forgotten. Or, in the blunt words of Russian expatriate lawyer and political activist Mark Feygin: “Trump’s peace plan has gone down the drain.” Late last month, Trump was touting an apparent success in his peacemaking quest: A Russian/Ukrainian agreement on a partial ceasefire, achieved after the Kremlin rejected a thirty-day full ceasefire proposed by the United States and accepted by Ukraine. Even the limited ceasefire was narrower than the Ukrainians had expected: Their initial statement referred to pausing attacks on “energy and infrastructure,” while Russia spoke only of “energy infrastructure.” Such an agreement, even aside from predictable Russian violations, benefits the Kremlin by protecting Russian oil depots and processing facilities which literally fuel Russia’s war effort, and which had become sitting ducks for Ukrainian drones. Russian strikes on the Ukrainian energy grid, on the other hand, are not quite as devastating now that winter is over. Other kinds of “infrastructure”—non-“energy infrastructure”—are of greater concern, especially hospitals. On March 25, the White House announced that it had also brokered an agreement with Russia and Ukraine to “eliminate the use of force” in the Black Sea. Once again, this deal was likely to benefit Moscow more than Kyiv. Ukraine had already managed to secure the passage of its grain-exporting ships in the Black Sea. It had also effectively neutralized Russia’s fabled Black Sea Fleet by destroying or damaging about a third of its 74 warships and forcing the rest to retreat to safe Russian waters, a victory the maritime ceasefire could reverse. Even so, Ukraine agreed—while Russia demanded extra concessions, namely exemptions from U.S. and European sanctions to allow some Russian banks to rejoin the SWIFT global banking-payment system. It’s unclear whether or when the ceasefire will formally take effect, but in the meantime, Russia’s Black Sea fleet is murdering Ukrainian children. In the midst of all this supposed peacemaking, Vladimir Putin gave no indications that he wants anything but more war. On March 27, he made a televised visit to the nuclear-powered submarine Arkhangelsk, during which he not only reiterated his claims about Volodymyr Zelensky being an “illegitimate” president because of the canceled elections in Ukraine (as constitutionally mandated in wartime) but also asserted that all of the Ukrainian government lacks legitimacy and that the real power in Ukraine is now in the hands of armed neo-Nazi groups. The solution, he said, was to place Ukraine under the “temporary administration” of the United Nations and the United States (and maybe even the Europeans), hold “democratic elections,” and establish “a competent government that enjoys public trust” and can be a legitimate negotiating partner. Leave aside the stunning cynicism of such attacks on Zelensky’s legitimacy from the man who repeatedly vandalized the Russian constitution to make himself president for life. What’s abundantly clear is that Putin is not willing to negotiate or make agreements until he’s stripped Ukraine of its sovereignty and installed a satisfactory puppet regime. For good measure, Putin also saber-rattled about the Russian navy’s nuclear prowess and insisted that Russia was clearly winning in Ukraine: “Our troops have the strategic initiative along the entire contact line. I just recently said, ‘We’ll grind them down’; there are reasons to believe we’ll finish them off.”1 Do these sound like the words of a man who, as Trump has repeatedly told us, “wants peace”? PUTIN’S COMMENTS ON THE SUBMARINE seem to have finally annoyed Trump. On March 30, he called NBC News’s Kristen Welker to say that he was “very angry” and even “pissed off”; for once, he actually threatened to punish Russia, albeit hedging his words with mealy-mouthed “ifs”: If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault—which it might not be—but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia. . . . That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be . . . a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil. Some Ukrainian Trump-watchers took the president’s apparent frustration as a hopeful sign. Some also saw a cause for optimism in the fact that shortly before this statement, Trump had been playing golf at Mar-a-Lago with Finnish President Alexander Stubb, a Russia hawk who has confirmed that he and Trump discussed Russia’s vexing habit of trying to throw in bonuses for itself when an agreement is already finalized. Ukrainian journalist Vitaly Portnikov speculated in a YouTube interview that Stubb may have convinced Trump that Putin was jerking him around and making him look like a “weakling,” triggering an “emotional reaction” from the thin-skinned Trump. But just a few hours after venting to Welker, Trump struck a more conciliatory note: Yes, he was “disappointed in a certain way” because of Putin’s comments about Zelensky (“He’s supposed to be making a deal with him, whether you like him or you don’t like him”), but he still didn’t think Putin was going to “go back on his word.” He also reverted to sniping at Zelensky, this time for wanting to “back out of” or “renegotiate” the rare earths deal. Meanwhile, Russia got another break: The Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions on high-level Putin adviser Kirill Dmitriev so that he could come to Washington for talks last week. The talks, however, reportedly focused primarily on avenues of Russian-American cooperation while leaving Ukraine on the back burner. And right after Dmitriev’s visit, Russia escalated its attacks on Ukrainian residential neighborhoods. In Kryvyi Rih, a missile supposedly targeting military personnel hit a playground, killing nine children and eleven adults. According to Ukrainian journalist Ihor Yakovenko, Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities are up 52 percent since the start of the negotiations. Trump’s reaction to the latest attacks? “We’re talking to Russia. We’d like them to stop. I don’t like the bombing.” And: “I’m not happy about what's going on with the bombing because they’re bombing like crazy right now. . . . I don’t know what’s happening there.” In a scathing commentary, Russian-Ukrainian radio host and YouTuber Matvey Ganapolsky dismissed these words as “pathetic babbling” after all the threats of “scary sanctions” if Russia undermined the peace talks. He also flatly concluded, “There will be no peace.” The White House still claims that the peace negotiations are happening. Trump makes obligatory noises about the need to stop the killing. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett even told ABC that the reason Russia was one of the very few countries spared in Trump’s tariff barrage was that slapping it with tariffs could disrupt peace talks—a reasoning that apparently didn’t apply to Ukraine, which did get tariffed (and which, unlike Russia, actually imports from the United States more than it exports).2 And yet the latest round of U.S.-Russia talks, which opens in Istanbul today, will be entirely Ukraine-free: State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce has stressed that “Ukraine is not, absolutely not, on the agenda,” The bottom line is that, as Zelensky hasrepeatedlycharged, Putin has no interest in ending the war. If anything, he seems to be escalating it, perhaps emboldened by a more friendly White House. Russia has just announced its biggest spring draft since 2011, with plans to call up 160,000 men—up from around 135,000 in 2019–22 and about 150,000 in 2023–24. (While the Kremlin’s stated policy is that these recruits cannot be used to fight in the “special military operation” in Ukraine, the young men are frequently pressured or even tricked into signing military contracts that allow them to be sent to the frontlines. Or they’re just sent there anyway, rules or no rules.) The Ukrainian government has also been warning about apparent Russian preparations for a spring offensive—which may already be here: On Wednesday, the Ukrainian military’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said that Russia had increased its attacks in the Kharkiv region and in the border region of Sumy at a rate that amounted to a new offensive. Yuri Fedorov, a prominent Russian military expert now teaching in Prague who has also talked about signs of an imminent spring offensive by Russian forces, does not believe such an offensive has much chance of succeeding. Things are not going nearly as well for Russia as Putin claims: While Russian forces are still making some gains, British intelligence reports that the tempo of their advance has been declining since last November and has now slowed down to a crawl, with Ukrainian troops successfully counterattacking in many areas and retaking some lost positions. While Ukrainian forces have been mostly dislodged from Russia’s Kursk region, they maintain enough of a foothold to tie down a large Russian contingent—and have opened a second front on Russian territory in the Belgorod region. And even though Ukraine has apparently refrained from targeting Russian oil facilities under the “energy ceasefire,” its drones are still striking and disabling important Russian military factories, including producers of explosives and of optic fiber used in drones. Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression will almost certainly continue into 2026. The future of America’s role as an ally in that fight, which continues to be crucial despite increased European support, is very much up in the air. It depends, among other things, on whether pro-Ukraine Republicans in Congress can find their spines and join the Democrats in pushing for more sanctions against Russia and for continued aid to Ukraine. Trump may quietly drop his faux peace effort once its futility becomes undeniable. If not, maybe someone should get Alexander Stubb back to Mar-a-Lago for another round of golf. 1 My translation. The English version on the official Kremlin site translates Putin’s words as “Only recently, I said that we would squeeze them into a corner”—but “grind down” is closer in meaning to dozhmyom. 2 On Monday, Trump contradicted Hassett and said that Russia wasn’t included because “we’re not doing business”; in fact, the United States does a roughly equal amount of trade with Ukraine and Russia, and the trade imbalance for the latter skews heavily toward Russian exports to the United States—precisely what Trump would consider a “rip-off.”
Zelensky and the European Union NATO members want more war. I would urge President Donald Trump to stop all aid to Ukraine and to normalize ties with Russia, remove all sanctions and start trade with Russia. Russia has the rare earth minerals that China is now refusing to sell to the US. Russia could be a good supplier of rare earth minerals.
Let's see what the two Chinese men -- who were lured to Russia for fake jobs and then sent directly to the Ukraine front as soldiers -- have to say about the Russian military. A Chinese man who said he fought for Russia said he couldn't even go to the bathroom without an armed escort https://www.businessinsider.com/chi...sians-couldnt-go-bathroom-armed-escort-2025-4 Russian forces weaker than they claim, say Chinese POWs Wang Guanjung and Zhang Renbo tell reporters in Ukraine they were ‘fed lies’ while fighting for Moscow https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-n...s-not-strong-claim-captured-chinese-fighters/
The Kremlin is rounding them up and dragging them out of their homes, workplaces, hiding locations, and off the streets. The average live span of a Russian conscript in the Ukraine conflict region is a mere eight weeks. Russia’s largest military call-up whips up fear among young men With more than 100,000 Russian soldiers killed in the war against Ukraine, Moscow is making life harder for draft dodgers. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025...ilitary-call-up-whips-up-fear-among-young-men On April 1, Russia began a new conscription drive with the goal of enlisting 160,000 military-age men between 18 and 30. It is the largest such call-up since 2011, aiming to fulfil last year’s presidential decree to boost the armed forces to 2.5 million personnel. And it is making Bogdan, a 21-year-old on the outskirts of Moscow, nervous. Some young men often try to avoid mandatory military service. But as Russia’s war against Ukraine stands at a critical juncture, with the rival sides desperately attempting to appear triumphant amid peace talks, there is a particular urgency to the matter. “I received a summons to be drafted in the spring of 2024, despite my hypertension. And by the autumn the police were searching to forcibly conscript me,” Bogdan told Al Jazeera, requesting to withhold his surname fearing reprisal. He is currently hiding from the authorities. “I hope that I will be able to register for military service in Saint Petersburg, undergo a new medical examination there and receive a military [exception] due to hypertension. Because in Moscow and the Moscow region, no complaints and court hearings have yielded results. In Moscow, they do not allow me to undergo a new medical examination and want to enlist me according to my summons.” Rights advocates have warned that the cracks which one might have earlier been able to slip through are tightening, while being a conscript is increasingly risky. “A year ago there was an age amendment, and now summons are issued to young people from 18-30 years old,” Ivan Chuviliaev, spokesman for the organisation Go By The Forest, which helps people escape the ranks, told Al Jazeera. Previously, the maximum age for conscription was 27. “Now the decision of the draft board will be valid not until the end of the draft, but for a whole year. This means it won’t be as easy to run away by simply not showing up when you receive the summons. [Another] major change is that they’re revising the list of illnesses of those ineligible for military service,” Chuviliaev said. “Those conditions they wouldn’t accept before, they now accept. It’s clear this is simply an artificial creation of chaos, so that doctors will simply stamp Category A fitness for everyone without bothering to dig through their papers. [Thirdly,] various sanctions will be imposed for failure to appear in response to a summons, such as a ban on taking out loans, a ban on opening an individual enterprise, a ban on leaving the country, and so on and so forth.” According to an open-source tally compiled by the BBC and independent Russian outlet Mediazona, more than 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since 2022 – a figure that frightens young men like Bogdan. While conscripts are not technically supposed to be deployed to the front lines, “conscripts can be deployed in regions that border Ukraine, including the Belgorod and Kursk regions, and therefore can theoretically participate in combat operations in these regions”, Oleg Ignatov, senior Russia analyst at Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera. “Conscripts have been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian attacks in the border regions,” he said, adding, “I have not seen any information that conscripts are being sent to the occupied territories” like Donetsk and Luhansk. Since the onset of the full-scale war in 2022, Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions have come under bombardment and cross-border raids. “If someone comes into contact with the Ministry of Defence, they will likely sooner or later find themselves in the midst of hostilities,” said Chuviliaev. “Not to mention the fact that any conscript deployment, at any time, even without your own knowledge, can turn out to be a contract.” He pointed to a recent case in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region in which the local prosecutor’s office recognised that at least 13 conscripts had contracts signed on their behalf illegally and ordered their discharge. In that case, the commandant simply ignored the court’s order. Mikhail Liberov, of the Conscientious Objectors’ Movement, told Al Jazeera that while the likelihood of someone receiving a summons actually ending up in combat is “less than one percent … any conscript can, at any time, under one or another form of duress, sign a contract, become a formal soldier and immediately be sent to that very hell”. “Practice shows that even the prosecutor’s office helps the actions of commanders to force [conscripts] into signing contracts illegally,” he continued. “The prosecutor’s office doesn’t really care about protecting citizens’ rights and does not file lawsuits in their interests. Sometimes signatures on conscripts’ contracts are simply forged.” There are ways, lawful and otherwise, to evade military service. These include health grounds and unfitness to serve; court appeals; higher education; certain family circumstances; feigning mental or physical illness; going into hiding; leaving the country; or applying for alternative civil service. Politicians and members of certain professions – for example, in the military-industrial complex – are also exempt. “Each of these deferrals requires you to take action – the draft board won’t do it automatically,” Chuviliaev explained. “You need to go [to the office], bring all the necessary documents, [or] draw up a power of attorney, preferably for relatives, so they can present those documents to the enlistment office and not the draftee themselves.” Liberov listed a number of other complications that might arise. “[Educational] deferrals are not available to everyone, and only postpone the problem – those who have completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree inevitably face the same problem at about 22 and 24 years old, respectively,” he said. “Not everyone can afford to leave the country: often the lack of an overseas passport becomes an obstacle, the registration of which is mistakenly considered impossible without a military ID or a visit to the military registration and enlistment office.” Liberov said that while alternate civil service – for example, working in state-run services such as hospitals or libraries – is an option for conscientious objectors, whose religious or personal beliefs are incompatible with military service, in practice, the authorities refuse most such requests. Then, like Bogdan, there are those who simply go on the run. But in Moscow, it is useless to hide, warned Liberov. “You can only stay at home”, he said, given the Russian capital’s “total digitalisation and surveillance system.”
One of the problems Vlad has now too is that all this talk about ceasefires and Trump working to end the war gives some of these vatniks hope that a couple months might make a lot of difference. They know that they cannot hide out long term. But if their cousin lives out in the boondocks and supports you living in the woods there through the summer that might be a workable plan. And gaming the system with lots of appeals etc won't work for the long term but, again, if you are just trying to buy three months or so, go for it. But if Trump does not achieve an end, they are dead.
Europe has told the Trump administration to take a hike with their absurd proposal. Europe will go on with sanctions and arming Ukraine. US proposes leaving occupied areas under Russian control, easing sanctions, Bloomberg reports https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/18/rich-americans-opening-swiss-bank-accounts.html I thought Trump was going to end the Ukraine war in one day. Instead Rubio and Trump will simply moving on and ignoring the subject. US will abandon Ukraine peace push if no progress soon, Trump and Rubio say https://www.reuters.com/world/us-re...sia-ukraine-peace-deal-rubio-says-2025-04-18/ Rubio says US needs to decide 'in a matter of days' Warning comes amid some progress in Ukraine talks Diplomats say his comments reflect frustration with Russia Trump had promised to end war on first day in office
The West scream about cruel Russian attrocities, all the while encouraging Israel to bomb and obliterate Gaza. Hypocrisy? Nah!