Braybuddy wrote:

Yet again Macron says that Putin must not be humiliated:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ru ... ce=twitter

""We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means," Macron said in an interview to regional newspapers published on Saturday. "I am convinced that it is France's role to be a mediating power."

Macron has spoken with Putin regularly since the invasion as part of efforts to achieve a ceasefire and begin a credible negotiation between Kyiv and Moscow."

How about stopping speaking with Putin, which is poinless, and only serves to feed his already oversized ego. Macron needs to stop humiliating himself. Will the penny ever drop here?

Washington (CNN)In the buildup to the current Ukrainian counteroffensive, the US urged Kyiv to keep the operation limited in both its objectives and its geography to avoid getting overextended and bogged down on multiple fronts, multiple US and western officials and Ukrainian sources tell CNN.
Those discussions involved engaging in "war-gaming" with Kyiv, the sources said -- analytical exercises that were intended to help the Ukrainian forces understand what force levels they would need to muster to be successful in different scenarios.
The Ukrainians were initially considering a broader counteroffensive, but narrowed their mission to the south, in the Kherson region, in recent weeks, US and Ukrainian officials said.
[...]
Still, despite a more bullish assessment of Ukrainian fighting capabilities, US officials aren't placing any bets that Ukraine will successfully retake Kherson -- yet.
"I'm not sure this is going to be the big, massive counteroffensive that folks might be waiting on — it might be a smaller number of forces," the US military source cautioned. Much will depend on how well Russia is able to defend newly-claimed territory, the source said—something that it has not yet been called upon to do in the last six months.
A Ukrainian presidential adviser also warned that the offensive will be a "slow operation to grind the enemy."

"This process will not be very fast," Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine,

Ravil Maganov, the chairman of an oil company that criticized Russia's invasion of Ukraine, reportedly died on Thursday after falling from a hospital window.

Although the cause of his death has not yet been confirmed, he is the latest in a series of prominent Russians who have died in seemingly similar circumstances.

Lukoil, Russia's second-largest oil producer confirmed Maganov's death, saying it came after "a serious illness

However, Russian media reported that he had been found dead by medical personnel after falling out a sixth-floor window of a Moscow hospital.

readytotaxi wrote:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61463876

McDonald's has said it will permanently leave Russia after 30 years and has started to sell its restaurants there.
The move comes after it temporarily closed its 850 outlets there in March.

Russia has released 215 Ukrainians it took prisoner after a protracted battle for the port city of Mariupol earlier this year, including top military leaders,
[...] in return, Kyiv had freed 55 Russian prisoners as well as Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of a banned pro-Russian party who was facing treason charges.

Turkey stands with Ukraine in the war and will defend its territorial integrity and sovereignty, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said.

The country won’t recognize the result of Russia’s referendums to annex occupied Ukrainian territories, Kalin said in an interview with NTV channel late Friday.

readytotaxi wrote:

Wow! The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is advising any Americans in Russia to leave the country now.

https://www.wftv.com/news/trending/us-e ... GM42UYJNA/

What do they know that we don't.

CNN was among the first media outlets into the recently liberated city, arriving 30 minutes after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared the town completely cleared of Russians troops.
01 putin 4 regions

Annexation fails to hide gulf between what Putin wants and what his forces can hold

Ukrainian officials and troops had spoken repeatedly of large numbers of Moscow’s better units being trapped there. Yet on Sunday there were few signs of encirclement to be seen.

Some officials said Russian corpses had already been cleared away and prisoners removed. But locals offered another explanation: that Russian forces had left the city on Friday in an orderly fashion.

“They got on their tanks, and drove out,” said Tanya, riding her bicycle back to the bomb shelter, where she still spends the nights with 15 others.

A Ukrainian army spokesman, asked to respond to CNN’s reporting, denied there had been a Russian withdrawal two days ago, saying there had been fighting in the area as recently as Saturday.

In the northeastern Kharkiv region where Ukrainian forces regained a large swathe of ground in September, the bodies of 534 civilians including 19 children were found after Russian troops left, Serhiy Bolvinov of the National Police in Kharkiv told a briefing. The total included 447 bodies found in Izium. He also said that investigators had found evidence of 22 sites being used as “torture rooms”.

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
[...]
“First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have the threat of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going,”

Even so, Russian officials and hard-line military bloggers were already calling for revenge, with one member of Crimea’s Parliament warning that anything less than an “extremely harsh” response would show weakness.

President Vladimir Putin says Russia is ready to resume gas supplies via one link of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that remains operational, in his address to the Russian Energy Week international forum.

The Russian leader said gas could still be supplied by one remaining intact part of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The ball was in the EU’s court on whether it wanted gas supplied via the pipeline, he said.

Putin says:

"Russia is ready to start such supplies. The ball is in the court of the EU. If they want, they can just open the tap."

In a U.N. vote Wednesday on a resolution condemning Moscow’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory last month, 143 of the body’s 193 members voted in favor—the highest number of votes against Moscow since its invasion began. Thirty-five countries abstained, while just five—Russia, as well as its allies in Belarus, North Korea, Syria, and Nicaragua—voted against.

Russian-installed authorities ordered all residents of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson to leave “immediately” ahead of an expected advance by Ukrainian troops waging a counteroffensive to recapture one of the first urban areas Russia took after invading the country.

...

Kherson’s Kremlin-backed authorities previously announced plans to evacuate all Russian-appointed officials and as many as 60,000 civilians across the river, in what local leader Volodymyr Saldo said would be an “organised, gradual displacement”.