Ukraine may be forced to announce a maximum scale mobilization if there is ever a real threat to the country’s statehood, according to Verkhovna Rada MP and deputy chairman of the country’s national security committee Egor Chernev.

Speaking to Novosti.LIVE, the official explained that the country was currently in the second phase of mobilization out of four, but this number could be extended based on how long the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues and the resources are required.

“The fourth assumes that all men go to war,” Chernev said. “If the country is in danger and there is a real threat of losing statehood, then everyone will go,” he added, noting that he believes that “it is the duty of every man to defend his own country.”

According to Ukrainian laws on mobilization, a fourth stage means that all able-bodied residents of the country between the ages of 18 and 60 will be called up for service.

The politician noted, however, that there were no plans to increase th

A civilian cargo vessel has left Ukraine’s southern port of Odesa, Kyiv has said, despite warnings from Russia that its navy could target ships using the Black Sea export hubs.

The announcement raises the spectre of a standoff with Russian warships, after Moscow pulled out of a key deal last month brokered by the UN and Turkey, which guaranteed safe passage for grain shipments from three Ukrainian ports.

Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, said the Hong Kong-flagged Joseph Schulte left on Wednesday morning from the port of Odesa – one of three vessels that participated in the now-scrapped grain export deal.

The Joseph Schulte is the first vessel to sail from the port since 16 July, according to Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister. It had been stuck in Odesa since February 2022.

The ship was travelling down a temporary corridor that Ukraine asked the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to ratify. With ship insurance likely to be high for oper

t is now two months since Ukraine launched its counter-offensive against Russian lines that stretch across 1,000km of occupied territory. It is just over a week since the campaign appeared to be entering a distinct second phase.

The first phase got off to a bad start when an overambitious thrust by newly formed mechanised units swiftly became bogged down. It was subsequently marked by concerted attempts to use Ukraine’s advantage in long-range firepower to disrupt Russian supply lines and destroy its logistical hubs and command centres. The aim is to reduce the ability of Russian forces to respond to Ukraine’s “probing” operations, which are seeking out gaps and weaknesses. (The tactics are similar to the “bite and hold” approach used by both sides in the first world war.) These operations have recently been supplemented by small-scale drone strikes on Moscow and a series of attacks by Ukraine’s developing fleet of naval drones on Russian patrol vessels in the Black Sea. The Moscow dr

They should be hung for this under the Geneva Convention.

Hanna Maliar, a lawyer by training, called on those who claimed to have been targeted to meet her, after a whistleblower alleged that a commander in a combat unit had ordered female subordinates to have sex with him or face their husbands being sent to the front.

She also said she would investigate allegations that women in the armed forces had been threatened with being sent to psychiatric units for raising allegations of sexual harassment or seeking to transfer to a combat unit, warning the accused that she would personally take any credible cases to the police.

Pozharskyi put in writing that he did, in fact, get access to Joe Biden.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote Hunter Biden in an email the following morning. “It's realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

Later that year, in December, as Archer testified to congressional investigators, Pozharkskyi and Zlochevsky requested a meeting so that Hunter Biden could “help them with some of that pressure” that the Ukrainian government was putting on Burisma with its investigations.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden visited Ukraine mere days after this meeting and began to call for Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin—the official in charge of investigating Burisma—to be fired. Later, Vice President Biden would threaten to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee from the country if Shokin was not removed. Biden bragged about it in a Counsel on Foreign Relations interview in 2018.

“We were treated as cannon fodder, without communication, without anything” a captured AFU servicemen said, according to the Russians. “There was no training. Weapons were the simplest, there was no weapons at all.”

“When we began to actively move forward with the aim of clarifying this crime and finding who had been guilty of violating Ukrainian laws at Burisma. We ended up discovering that the administrators recruited in May-June 2014 were probably involved. These were Devon Archer, Hunter Biden, and others. Joe Biden had reason to fear that all this would eventually fall on his son,”

“I understand very well that the United States has one of the strongest intelligence agencies in the world… Apparently, Mr. Biden was informed that we are approaching the moment when the interrogations of his son and other persons began,” Shokin said.

Shokin maintained that the real motivation behind Biden’s push for his removal was to protect his personal and family interests rather than the interests of the American people.

Biden and his Democrat and media backers are pushing the most ridiculous of narratives:

• Biden didn’t want Shokin fired for investigating Burisma, but for not investigating Burisma.
• Then-Vice President Biden was only executing American policy — a policy supported by our allies, you see?
• So neither Joe nor Hunter Biden did anything wrong, the party line goes.

Let’s connect these dots that do not appear to be in dispute:

• Burisma thought it was bribing Joe Biden through his son;
• they paid that son millions of dollars; and then
• Joe Biden did exactly what they wanted him to do.

Even if this was just a happy accident for the Bidens - that Joe doing the right thing in regard to Shokin serendipitously also made his kid rich - it is obviously a legitimate target of investigation.

As such, the first impeachment, so gravely conducted by the Democrats in the House of Representatives, must be expunged.

Ukraine cannot protect all of its main cities from Russian missile threats without a significant increase in the provision of air defence systems, according to a key adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Mykhailo Podolyak said the strikes on Odesa over the past week had shown clearly that the Russian strategy was to bombard Ukrainian cities, with the aim of overwhelming air defence systems.

“Russia’s tactics are clear: they use massive drone attacks to overload our anti-aircraft systems and then in parallel they have a window of opportunity to use ballistic missiles to target infrastructure,” he told the Guardian, in an interview at the presidential administration in Kyiv.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/199884

Ukraine was always going to expose the world-historical folly of NATO expansion. Indeed, Russian and Western diplomats warned, from the collapse of the USSR onwards, that Ukraine becoming part of NATO would provoke Russia. But that didn’t stop successive Western leaders from continuously flirting with the prospect, as part of NATO’s new expansive purpose. As early as 1994, NATO concluded a framework agreement with Ukraine, in the shape of the Partnership for Peace initiative. At the Bucharest summit in 2008, NATO explicitly declared, at the urging of then US president George W Bush, that Ukraine and Georgia would become members. A few weeks later, in an ominous sign of what was to come for Ukraine, Putin launched an invasion of Georgia.