From Russia with love..

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The Russian mercenary group Wagner has been supplying Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with missiles to aid their fight against the country’s army, Sudanese and regional diplomatic sources have told CNN. The sources said the surface-to-air missiles have significantly buttressed RSF paramilitary fighters and their leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo as he battles for power with Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s military ruler and the head of its armed forces. In bordering Libya, where a Wagner-backed rogue general, Khalifa Haftar, controls swathes of land, satellite imagery supports these claims, showing an unusual uptick in activity on Wagner bases.

Exclusive: Evidence emerges of Russia’s Wagner arming militia leader battling Sudan’s army

• Where there is trouble, there is Wagner and Russia..
  

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Over the course of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Wagner has recruited tens of thousands of inmates, including murderers and domestic abusers, to fight some of the war’s bloodiest battles. Soslan Valiyev, 38, known as Tsugri, was killed by an ex-Wagner convict. Many are believed to have died in Ukraine, but those who survived the six months in the group’s ranks have earned presidential pardons and are now returning to their home towns. According to the notorious Wagner head Evgeniy Prigozhin, more than 5,000 former criminals have already been freed. One of those is Siukayev who recently returned to his home town of Tskhinvali. Their releases have stoked fears that the men will go on to commit further crimes, worries that will only grow following a string of violent crimes perpetrated by former Wagner soldiers, including the murder of Tsugri.

Murder, alcohol and prostitutes: Wagner convicts pardoned by Putin return to terrorise home towns | Russia | The Guardian

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At least nine people have been injured by shelling as civilians evacuate Kherson city Thursday, local Ukrainian officials said. Two employees of the State Emergency Service, a police officer, a doctor and a volunteer from Germany are among those wounded, said Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of Kherson's regional military administration. “One man is in intensive care with serious injuries, and doctors are fighting for his life,” Prokudin said. 

“Today the Russians have committed another terrorist act! A massive artillery attack on the locations where our rescuers are working," Serhiy Kruk, the head of Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, said. Remember: Rescuers are trying to evacuate thousands of people in the flood zone of the Russian-occupied Nova Kakhovka dam and hydro-electric power plant in the southern Kherson region, which collapsed Tuesday, sending torrents of water gushing down the Dnipro River. Kherson city is under Ukrainian control.

(19) At least 9 people wounded in shelling during Kherson evacuations, Ukrainian officials say

It was Russia that mined the dam

• The dam wasn't bombed or hit by a rocket or drone, it was mined and the Russians are in control of it and have been for over a year.
  
• They have a pattern of targeting civilian infrastructure
  
• The timing, just as Ukraine is about to launch their counter-offensive
  
• The Russians are very afraid of the counteroffensive (see below)
  
• Ukraine doesn't have any motive to blow up the dam, which causes an ecological disaster for decades as well as a host of immediate problems. 
  
• There seems to be evidence
  

The head of Russian state TV network RT and one of Vladimir Putin’s top propagandists has suggested Moscow should freeze the war in the face of state-of-the-art Western weaponry that Ukraine now holds. Margarita Simonyan, who has regularly called for all-out war on Ukraine, argued on prime-time television in favour of a negotiated solution and a halt to hostilities while referenda are organised in Russian-occupied territory. She presented her U-turn as a best-case scenario now that Ukraine has access to Nato-supplied weapons now being used on Russia soil and in the counter offensive. “I’ve been talking about this for the whole year. It would be so good to stop the bloodshed right now, stay where we are, freeze it and hold referenda,” she said on Vladimir Solovyev’s prime-time talk show on Rossiya 1. “Do we need territories where people don’t want to live with us? I’m not sure.”

Putin should freeze war as Ukraine 'too strong', says Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan

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Ukraine's domestic security service said on Friday it had intercepted a telephone call proving a Russian "sabotage group" blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and dam in southern Ukraine.

Kyiv says it intercepted call showing Russia blew up Kakhovka dam | Reuters

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Of course the Russians did it. Blowing up Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine last week is cowardly Vladimir Putin’s long-planned response to what he fears is the start of Kyiv’s counteroffensive. Only Russians really had the means, motive and opportunity. Only this malevolent Kremlin regime would wilfully inflict human and environmental havoc on so vast a scale. 

It’s impossible to prove at this point. And, of course, Putin’s loathsome sycophants lied about it, blaming Ukrainian self-sabotage. That’s what they do, these mobsters. They lied about the Russian-supplied missile that destroyed Flight MH17 over occupied Donbas in 2014. They lied about the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Putin lied blatantly about invading Ukraine, right up to the moment he did.

Putin, Lavrov, Medvedev, Shoigu, Peskov and the gang have been lying through their teeth ever since – even as their absurdly neo-imperial “special operation” imploded, Russia’s soldiers died in droves, Ukraine’s cities burned, and reports of war crimes piled up like tortured bodies in a Bucha basement. It’s pathological. They lie to the world, to their people, to themselves.

Impunity is Putin’s middle name. Now he must pay for his crimes | Simon Tisdall | The Guardian

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Oleh Hryhorak lay on the floor of his friend’s house, his bloodied leg shattered by shrapnel from a Russian mortar, when the floodwaters began to surround him. As he applied pressure to his leg, the water, unleashed by a catastrophic dam collapse, was rising. With the little strength he had left, Hryhorak, a 38-year-old security guard, hoisted himself onto a couch, fearing he would bleed to death or drown. “I was trying to keep myself conscious because I wanted to live,” Hryhorak said.

This is the misery of life in Kherson, a riverfront community in southern Ukraine where thousands of residents like Hryhorak have faced one calamity after another. Their homes, already on a deadly front line, are now suddenly underwater. Kherson was invaded by Russians and occupied for months. A billboard, echoing a sentiment of Russian President Vladimir Putin, once read: “Russia is here forever.” In November, the city was the first regional capital liberated by Kyiv’s forces, becoming a symbol of resistance. But once Ukraine refused to surrender Kherson, Putin seemed determined to destroy it. Russian bombing attacks have left hundreds of people here dead or injured. Now, after months under fire, the city has been devastated by the flood, with thousands evacuated, the Dnieper River polluted with at least 150 tons of oil, and the Kakhovka Reservoir, a critical water source, lost to an entire region heavily dependent on agriculture.

After failing to conquer Kyiv, the capital, and losing territory throughout last fall, Putin has sought to bludgeon Ukraine into submission with seemingly little concern to what might be obliterated in the process. He has destroyed entire cities, none worse than Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region. Putin has sought to wipe out the country’s infrastructure with airstrikes and has stepped up the missile attacks in recent weeks, leaving Kyiv residents sleepless...

“Russia is using a tactic of scorched land,” said Serhii Kindra, a Kherson resident and former emcee whose 13-year-old son was killed by a cluster bomb in November, just days after they celebrated the liberation of their city. The boy was one of 265 people killed since Kherson’s liberation, six of them children. The father said he knows dozens of those who have died — four people on his street alone. Moscow’s message to Ukraine, Kindra said, is this: “If it’s not for us, then nobody will have this land.”

Putin wanted Kherson. Now, residents say Russia is trying to destroy it.

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Saboteurs target a nation leading the world in clean energy. They hack into vulnerable wind and solar power systems. They knock out digitalized energy grids. They wreak havoc. It's the stuff of nightmares for European power chiefs. Henriette Borgund knows attackers can find weaknesses in the defences of a big renewables power company - she's found them herself. She joined Norway's Hydro (NHY.OL) as an "ethical hacker" last April, bringing years of experience in military cyberdefence to bear at a time of war in Europe and chaos in energy markets. "I am not sure I want to comment on how often we find holes in our system. But what I can say is that we have found holes in our system," she told Reuters at Hydro's Oslo HQ, declining to detail the nature of the vulnerabilities for security reasons. Hydro is among several large power producers shoring up their cyberdefences due in significant part to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which they say has ramped up the threat of hacker attacks on their operations, according to Reuters interviews with a dozen executives from seven of Europe's biggest players.

Cyberattacks on renewables: Europe power sector's dread in chaos of war

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Olena Yahupova was first taken by the Russian occupiers in the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar last October. Neighbours she knew had informed on her, telling the FSB secret police that her husband was a Ukrainian military officer. What followed, she says, was two days of torture with the secret police – which turned out to be only a prelude to a nightmare of five months of detention and forced labour, during which she also had to act in faked news clips. “There was a complete absence of any source of law, they did whatever they want,” Yahupova says, now speaking in Ukraine, describing the situation in a town after Russia “gradually built up this repression machine” aimed at liquidating opposition and trying to force locals to collaborate.

‘They enjoyed this’: Ukrainian woman recounts five-month nightmare of torture and imprisonment | Ukraine | The Guardian

Police are investigating the suspected poisoning of two Russian exiles who attended a conference in Germany organised by a high-profile Kremlin critic. Detectives in Berlin said a “file had been opened” after two women reported symptoms suggesting a possible poisoning, German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported, citing Russian investigative media group Agentstvo. The conference was arranged by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch-turned-dissident who was once one of Russia’s richest men.

Two Russian exiles ‘poisoned’ at conference organised by Kremlin critic | The Independent

Russian infantry are dispatched on blind charges nicknamed ‘Zombie Waves’ across no-man’s land, running headlong into machine gun fire

No armour, no shoes, no hope – the daily life of a Russian soldier

[url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russian-exiles-poisoned-berlin-conference-b2342970.html][/url]

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The Eastern Front is a harrowing film about the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine. It documents, in forensic detail, the war crimes being perpetuated by Russian forces. Putin has already been indicted by the International Criminal Court for forcibly taking children from Ukraine into Russia. After this documentary, you can add torture, indiscriminate attacks against non-combatants, and the use of white phosphorus munitions to burn out civilians. Not in the film, but we can also add the blowing up of the Kakhohka dam. This has rendered vast tracts of farmland useless and left millions without clean drinking water.

Directly attacking civilians is an abhorrent method of warfare. The Russians perfected the contemporary version of the technique in Syria. They saw how the Syrian regime attacked towns and cities conventionally for years, and got nowhere. So the focus then became direct attacks on civilians – first by bombing schools, hospitals and infrastructure. Afterwards, they used white phosphorus and other incendiary weapons in a ‘medieval’ type scorched earth policy to burn them out as if vermin. If all this failed, they finally resorted to chemical weapons.  In Syria, this evil plan worked. All of these acts are illegal and contravene the Geneva Conventions and all the rules of war.

We have only scratched the surface of Putin's war crimes

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A band of mercenaries seizes a major city, shoots down multiple aircrafts and drives a column of tanks to within 125 miles of Moscow, with the declared aim of ousting the defense minister. The president quickly pardons them and says their billionaire commander can withdraw, untouched, to Belarus. An opposition politician leads peaceful protests and campaigns for honest elections. Branded a traitor and prosecuted for “extremism,” he now spends his days in a concrete punishment cell, denied even a pen and paper. Welcome to the weird, through-the-looking-glass world of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where everything is its opposite and almost nothing is what it seems..

Opinion: Welcome to the ‘looking-glass’ world of Putin’s Russia | CNN