While the bipartisan majority of lawmakers support arming Kyiv, 57 Republicans voted against a $40 billion emergency aid supplemental in May. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., made several concessions to those Ukraine aid skeptics to secure the votes to win his protracted speakership battle. But Smith also said ATACMS producer Lockheed Martin no longer makes the missiles, and the U.S. military still needs them in its stockpiles. Smith indicated he disagrees with the Biden administrations decision not to send long-range missiles, noting every Ukrainian official assured him they would not use them to attack Russia. It would have to get pretty bad for the Russians to get there, he said, adding that theres no way of knowing how many reserves the government stashed away after years of fat checks from energy sales.

• Emily Harding, a former National Security Council staffer, warned Tuesday that the U.S. and Europe should prepare for 8-10 years of economically disruptive conflict in Ukraine, Roll Call reports.
• While its forces are pushing to also seize the nearby city of Lysychansk, Russia on Thursday announced the withdrawal of its troops from the strategically important Snake Island.
• I mean, an interesting thing about the regime is, of course, that Putin is the linchpin.
• Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor in Ukraine's internal affairs ministry, posted a video on X, formerly known as Twitter, in which Shoigu said the Russian army is continuing to "build up the combat power" of its forces to face Ukraine's counteroffensive.
• Putin illegally annexed four territories from Ukraine in September and now presents Ukraine's efforts backed by the West to take back its own territory as a fascist attack on the Russian homeland.

But there is no smooth drop-off most of them end relatively quickly. Ukrainian military officials have conceded that hopes and expectations of a great breakthrough in the counteroffensive were not met. They predict intense fighting is likely to continue into the next year but say Kyiv's forces are unlikely to launch any more counteroffensives. Russia, meanwhile, is likely to focus on consolidating the territory it has already seized, particularly in eastern Ukraine. https://richard-andresen.hubstack.net/ukraine-invasion-uk-troops-will-not-fight-against-russia-says-wallace suggested that a Russian military transport plane carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war that was shot down over the Belgorod region Wednesday was part of a two-plane convoy en route to a prisoner swap with Ukraine. The Ukrainian leadership knew very well that, according to established practice, today Ukrainian military personnel would be transported by military transport aircraft to the Belgorod airfield for exchange.

Is Russia still using the concept of denazification as justification for the war? Anya

As the sun rises on a seventh day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a 40-mile-long Russian military convoy appears stalled about 20 miles north of Kyiv, and the Ukrainian-held cities of Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol are encircled. Russia also intensified its bombing of cities on Tuesday, including in civilian areas. Footage "of the aftermath of a missile strike that hit Kyiv's main TV tower and a nearby Holocaust memorial showed a gruesome scene of blown-out cars and buildings and several bodies on fire," The Washington Post reports.

• This is an example that you see occurring over and over again.
• If the US abandons the military alliance, it will fall to European countries to ensure a Ukrainian victory, Mr OBrien says.
• After liberating a handful of villages in the summer, Ukrainian and Russian forces have been caught in largely attritional battles, with neither side making significant gains.

Russian forces are already trying to slow down tanks in Ukraine with mines, trenches, and pyramidical, concrete dragons teeth, a type of fortification not seen in combat since World War II. Ukrainian forces, once equipped and trained for combined arms warfare and tank tactics, will be designed to punch a hole through a defensive network, Donahoe predicted. I would love to think the kinetic phase could end in 2023, but I suspect we could be looking at another three years with this scale of fighting, Roberts said. Russia was not present at the discussions, however, andU.S. national security spokesperson John Kirby stated ahead of the talks that the White House did not expect any "tangible deliverables." It's become clear that the counteroffensive won't produce quick results and that success however that might be measured in terms of retaking Russian-occupied territory is not guaranteed. Ukraine will do all it can to keep pressure on the Russians there to make it untenable for the Russian navy in Sevastopol, the handful of air force bases there and their logistics base at Dzankoy.

Russian woman jailed for 27 years for handing bomb to war blogger

I mean, an interesting thing about the regime is, of course, that Putin is the linchpin. And thats exactly why he designed a system like that, right? So that he would be irreplaceable because he keeps the factions together and the flow of money to the right people. So hes the linchpin of the regime and the question is, does Putin have the repressive apparatus of a Saddam Hussein who basically killed the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south when he lost the Gulf War? Or is he kind of a regime that cannot fully repress any domestic opposition?