Last few days we’ve heard numerous reports about so called, “filtration,” which Ukrainian army is doing on the “liberated” territory near Kharkhov. They break into the houses, beat up people, rob them, the abuse turning into more serious violence when they find some signs of sympathy to the Russians. They arrest, torture, and “disappear” teachers, policemen, officials and numerous others who simply continued with their work under Russians.

A recurring feature of the Cold War was that the United States almost always placed great store on the optics of a Soviet-American affair while Moscow chose to concentrate on the end result. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the best known example where the denouement was about the publicised abandonment of the planned Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba and a US public declaration and agreement not to invade Cuba again. But it later came to be known that there was also an unpublicised part, namely, the dismantling of all of the Jupiter ballistic missiles that had been deployed to Turkey.

The New York Times has disclosed that the US shared vital intelligence with the Ukrainian military and took part in the preparation of the latter’s current “counteroffensive” near Kharkov. No matter the Biden Administration’s motivations in publicising its role in what western media is celebrating as a success story — presumably, with an eye on domestic politics in America — it could be factually correct. The media leak puts the dramatic happenings in the past 3-4 days in proper perspective.

East-West divide in EU widening as Italy moves towards easing on Moscow while Baltics and Eastern Europe stand firm behind Kiev

Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the eastern part of the country has been very successful so far. They have retaken about 3,000 square kilometers of territory from Russian forces.

Voluntarily limiting Russia’s special operation was done for the right reasons related to humanitarian and political goals, but it unwittingly prevented the military success of this campaign upon which those two aforementioned objectives’ success is dependent, thus making last weekend’s outcome inevitable.

In my last essay, I devoted considerable attention to commentary by the host of the leading political talk show on Russia’s state television Friday night with respect to the country’s obvious military setback in the Kharkov front, which still had not yet reached its culmination in the evacuation of the strategic town of Izyum and the withdrawal from a vast territory in the neighborhood measuring 3,000 square kilometers.

His latest request could push total spending on the war to $70 billion. Will Congress get the chance to even debate it?

The UK and Commonwealth may be mourning the passing of Queen Elizabeth II yesterday. I am in mourning as well, but for a very different reason: the gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in the Ramstein air base in Germany yesterday reshuffled the deck on Western military and financial assistance to Ukraine, raising contributions to the ongoing holy crusade against Russia from still more nations and adding new, still more advanced precision strike weapons to the mix of deliveries to Kiev.

As I write, Russia is destroying Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in response to Kiev’s renewed ethnic cleansing against pro Russian-separatists in the Kharkov Region.