Quote:Zelenska gave the example of a hospital destroyed in the southeastern city of Izyum at a speech at an international donor conference hosted earlier this week in Paris. When Russian troops fled in September, she said they also looted the facility of its remaining working medical equipment and supplies. 

• “They took everything that was of any value. Even sockets, wiring and toilets were removed,” she said. “This is what their invasion is, this is what the Russian army is.” 
  

The conference comes as relief workers rush to deliver drugs, medical supplies and primary care services to people in regions like Kherson and Kharkiv following Russia’s recent retreat from key areas in the east and south.

The World Health Organization has verified 715 attacks on health-care facilities and providers since Russia invaded the country at the end of February. There have been at least 630 attacks on health facilities and more than 170 of them affected medical supplies. Approximately 100 people have died because of the attacks, and 129 have been injured. Most losses were recorded in the east and south, according to Jarno Habicht, WHO’s representative in Ukraine and head of WHO’s Ukraine Country Office. 

Russian troops damaged or destroyed the health infrastructure in nearly all of the recently recaptured villages, forcing health providers to flee the area, according to Christopher Stokes, the emergency coordinator in Ukraine for Doctors Without Borders. As a result, thousands of Ukrainians have been without access to primary care, psychological treatment, gynecological services, critical drugs and medical supplies since March, he added. “A lady died because she was quite old and needed her hypertension medication and felt sick, but we just couldn’t evacuate her and no one was there to help her,” Stokes told The Health 202. 

• The problems are compounded by the strikes on electricity internet and water infrastructure, having to operate in sub-zero temperatures without light and electricity and no availability of electronic patient records.
  
• These guys have placed themselves outside of civilization
  

Quote:Any shipment of US Patriot missiles to Ukraine could "lead to unpredictable consequences" and threaten global security, the Russian Embassy in Washington said in a statement Wednesday.  The Biden administration is finalizing plans to send the advanced long-range air defense system to Ukraine to help counter Moscow's attacks, according to US officials cited in a CNN report Tuesday. "If this is confirmed, we will witness yet another provocative step by the [Biden] administration, which can lead to unpredictable consequences," the Russian Embassy statement said. It added that continued arms deliveries to Ukraine "will only strengthen the Zelensky regime’s sense of impunity and push it to new crimes against civilians" in four Ukrainian regions that Russia claims to have annexed.

• Apparently it's ok for Russia to invade a country and when that runs aground to bomb civilian infrastructure for the population to freeze to death, but not for shipments of defensive weapons..
  

Quote:As Russian tanks were stuck in the mud outside Kyiv earlier this year and the economic fallout of war with Ukraine took hold, one part of Russia’s government hummed with precision: television propaganda. Spinning together a counternarrative for tens of millions of viewers, Russian propagandists plucked clips from American cable news, right-wing social media and Chinese officials. They latched onto claims that Western embargoes of Russian oil would be self-defeating, that the United States was hiding secret bioweapon research labs in Ukraine and that China was a loyal ally against a fragmenting West.

Day by day, state media journalists sharpened those themes in emails. They sometimes broadcast battlefield videos and other information sent to them by the successor agency to the K.G.B. And they excerpted and translated footage from favorite pundits, like the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose remarks about the war were shown to millions of Russians. “Be sure to take Tucker,” one Russian news producer wrote to a colleague. The email referred to a clip in which Mr. Carlson described the power of the Chinese-Russian partnership that had emerged under Mr. Biden — and how American economic policies targeting Russia could undermine the dollar’s status as a world-reserve currency. 

The correspondence was one of thousands of email exchanges stored within a leaked database from Russia’s largest state-owned media company, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Company, known as V.G.T.R.K. The data was made publicly available online by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes hacked documents..

Quote:Sanctions have not been enough to shake Russia’s determination to restore its empire at the cost of peaceful neighboring states. Instead of continuing to set up more targets for Russia to knock down, the US and Ukraine’s other Western backers should change the terms of the conflict. The international community must do more than simply tolerate Russia’s naked aggression and the savagery with which it is pursuing its war of colonial reconquest. More direct intervention is long overdue.

It is past time for the West to tell Russia that if it continues down this path, its fantasy of a hostile West seeking the overthrow of Putin will become a reality. Russia could hardly claim this, too, was an escalation, when it has long told the world and itself that it is already at war with the West. It’s hard to imagine any other country being permitted by the world to wage the kind of campaign Russia has in Ukraine (and in Syria before it); still less with an overt agenda of exterminating the Ukrainian people.

And yet, Russia’s UN Security Council veto and the fear it has instilled through nuclear propaganda have given it a free pass to behave as it wishes, without fear of interference from a global community looking on in either ambivalence or helpless paralysis.That sets a disastrous example for other aggressive powers around the world. It says possession of nuclear weapons allows you to wage genocidal wars of destruction against your neighbors, because other nations won’t intervene.

If that’s not the message the US and the West want other aggressor states around the world to receive, then supply of Patriot should be followed by far more direct and assertive means of dissuading Moscow..

Quote:Mr Zelensky, Donald Trump Jr tweeted on Wednesday, was "basically an ungrateful international welfare queen" - summing up what is becoming an increasingly prevalent view among the former president's "America first" supporters.

Quote:Overall, of course, rank-and-file Republicans support aiding Ukraine against Russia. But the Trumpian GOP is now controlled by its fringe, the same activists and primary voters who wear the I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat T-shirts. Although much of the aid for Ukraine (including the Patriot system) is already in the pipeline, GOP grandstanding for the base could create more danger for Ukraine by encouraging Putin to believe that America’s commitment to freedom will wane over time. Indeed, the Russian president’s decision to invade Ukraine, as The New York Times reported this weekend, was predicated in part on his belief in the West’s weakness and short attention span.

Quote:A Russian court has ordered the seizure of a billion dollar luxury resort belonging to a tycoon who criticised Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The court order to seize the Imeretinskiy hotel and marina in Sochi, owned by Oleg Deripaska, an aluminium magnate, came after he was urged by the Kremlin to stop publicly criticising the war, the Financial Times reported. Mr Deripaska is one of the few Russian tycoons to have voiced cautious criticism of the invasion of Ukraine. He tweeted in March, calling for peace, saying that “we have already passed a point of no return”. He also warned that “destroying Ukraine would be a colossal mistake”.

Quote:Vladimir Putin's soldiers have been caught on CCTV raiding an orphanage in Ukraine to abduct children.
Footage obtained by Sky News shows agents from the FSB - Russia's secret police - with soldiers armed with rifles walking through the building, which was thankfully empty. Orphanage director Volodymyr Sahaidak said they started hiding children due to the risk of them being captured by Russians. Fifty-two orphans were sent to the care of local people before Putin's soldiers advanced. Mr Sahaidak told Sky News that the children's files were confiscated by Russians hoping to find their whereabouts..

Quote:There are strong indications that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to supply the missile that downed flight MH17 in 2014, international investigators say. The aircraft was hit by a Russian-made missile over Ukraine, killing nearly 300 people. Prosecutors said there is evidence that Mr Putin decided to provide the missile to Moscow-backed separatists. There is no suggestion that Mr Putin ordered the aircraft be shot down. In November, a Dutch court found three men - two Russians and a Ukrainian - guilty of murder in absentia for their part in the downing of MH17.

The prosecutors said on Wednesday that they had exhausted all leads and could not continue with any more criminal proceedings. The Boeing 777 was flying from the Dutch capital to Kuala Lumpur when it was hit by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile in July 2014 during a conflict between pro-Russia rebels and Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

Of the 298 passengers and crew, 196 were Dutch while many of the other passengers came from Malaysia, Australia, the UK, Belgium and other countries. In a statement, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) said the court ruled that Moscow had "overall control" over the Donetsk People's Republic, which controlled the area in July 2014. It cited recorded telephone conversations where Russian officials said that the decision to provide military support "rests with the President". "There is concrete information that the separatists' request was presented to the president, and that this request was granted," it said.

Quote:Members of a recently formed Russian assault unit say their commanders deployed troops to stop them from retreating and threatened them with death after they suffered “huge” losses in eastern Ukraine. In a video addressed to President Vladimir Putin, a group of about two dozen men in military uniform say they are the remnants of Storm, a unit under the defence ministry. “We sat under open mortar fire and artillery for 14 days,” Alexander Gorin, a Russian soldier, is heard saying in the appeal, which first appeared on Friday on Russian Telegram channels. “We took huge losses. Thirty-four people were injured and 22 died, including our commander.” Another soldier said the unit initially comprised 161 men at the start of the operations. Gorin said his men made the decision to head back to the Russian army headquarters but were denied evacuation by their superiors: “They placed barrier troops behind us and weren’t letting us leave our position … They are threatening to destroy us one by one and as a unit. They want to execute us as witnesses of a completely negligent criminal leadership.”

Quote:The authorities in Russia's Tula region have placed a single father under house arrest until March 27 after his daughter drew an anti-war picture at school, the independent rights watchdog OVD-Info reported Thursday. Alexei Moskalev, 53, and his daughter Masha Moskaleva, 12, came to the attention of local law enforcement back in April in the town of Yefremov, south of Moscow, when Moskaleva drew an anti-war painting in her sixth-grade art class.  The painting featured a Ukrainian flag and a Russian flag with the phrases “No to war” and “Glory to Ukraine” written on it, as well as a woman shielding her child from Russian missiles.  Moskaleva’s art teacher flagged her painting to the school principal, who reported the incident to the authorities.  Days later, Moskalev was charged with “discrediting” the Russian military for an anti-war comment he left on the Russian social media platform Odnoklassniki, OVD-Info reported. His daughter was visited at school by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, according to OVD-Info.  In December, the authorities opened a criminal case against Moskalev, accusing him of repeated violations of wartime censorship laws that criminalize “discrediting” the Russian military — charges that are now punishable by up to three years in jail.

Quote:Russia has punished a man known for drawing his daughter against Russia's war in Ukraine. Aleksej Moskalyova has been sentenced to two years in a prison camp for criticizing the armed forces, human rights movement OVD-Info reports. He was under house arrest but would have fled.

Quote:A Russian court on Tuesday ordered a two-year jail sentence for the single father of a 13-year-old girl who drew an antiwar picture in art class at school, in a case that led to the daughter being seized by authorities and placed in an orphanage. But in a stunning turn, the father, Alexei Moskalyov, 54, escaped from house arrest on Monday night, opting not to wait for the almost-certain guilty verdict after the state prosecutor demanded the two-year jail term on Monday... 

The family’s lawyer, Vladimir Bilienko, was finally admitted to the orphanage on Tuesday, a month after Maria was taken into custody there, but he was denied access to her and told that she was “away at a cooking competition.” He was given a letter from Maria to her father and pictures she had drawn of rabbits and a butterfly, and another of a dog. Her letter ended with a picture of a heart and the words, “Dad, you’re my hero,” Bilienko said on the Telegram channel of the legal rights group OVD-Info.

Quote:A former Wagner mercenary has admitted to killing and torturing dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war, in one of the most detailed first-person accounts of atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. Alexey Savichev, 49, a former Russian convict recruited by Wagner last September, told the Guardian in a telephone interview that he participated in summary executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war during his six months of fighting in eastern Ukraine. “We were told not to take any prisoners, and just shoot them on the spot,” he said. 

In one instance, while fighting near the eastern Ukrainian city of Soledar last autumn, Savichev said he participated in the killings of 20 Ukrainian soldiers who were surrounded. “We sprayed them with our bullets,” he said. “It is war and I do not regret a single thing I did there. If I could, I would go back.”  Savichev said that in another episode, with other Wagner fighters he had killed “several dozen” injured Ukrainian PoWs by “tossing grenades” into the ditch where they were held near the city Bakhmut in January. “We would torture soldiers too, there weren’t any rules,” he said.

Savichev’s account was first published on Monday by the Gulagu.net rights group in an hour an 17 minute-long video, where he appeared alongside another former Wagner fighter, identified as Azamat Uldarov, who also said he had killed civilians, including children, during the battle for Bakhmut. Uldarov said his fellow mercenaries in one instance killed a group of people who had taken shelter in the basement of a nine-floor block of flats in Bakhmut, including a young girl. “She was screaming, she was a little kid, she was five or six and I shot her, a kill shot. I wasn’t allowed to let anyone out, you understand?” Uldarov told Vladimir Osechkin, the head of the Gulagu.net rights group. He could not be reached for comment.

Quote:A Russian pensioner who described Ukraine's president as a "handsome young man" has been fined by a court in Moscow. Olga Slegina was convicted of “discrediting the Russian armed forces” by calling Volodymyr Zelensky a "handsome young man with a good sense of humour", Russia’s human rights group Memorial said. The 70-year-old was arrested in Nalchik, southern Russia, after making the comment to a waitress in a canteen at the medical centre where she was a guest last Christmas.