Ukraine is running out of ammunition as prospects dim on the battlefield

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By Siobhán O’Grady, Liz Sly and Ievgeniia Sivorka

Newly promised Western weapons systems are arriving, but too slowly and in insufficient quantities to prevent incremental but inexorable Russian gains in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, which is now the focus of the fight.

 

The Ukrainians are still fighting back, but they are running out of ammunition and suffering casualties at a far higher rate than in the initial stages of the war. Around 200 Ukrainian soldiers are now being killed every day, up from 100 late last month, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky told the BBC on Friday — meaning that as many as 1,000 Ukrainians are being taken out of the fight every day, including those who are injured.

 

The Russians are still making mistakes and are also losing men and equipment, albeit at a lesser rate than in the first months of the conflict. In one sign that they are suffering equipment shortages, they have been seen on videos posted on social media hauling hundreds of mothballed, Soviet-era T-62 tanks out of storage to be sent to Ukraine.

 

But the overall trajectory of the war has unmistakably shifted away from one of unexpectedly dismal Russian failures and tilted in favor of Russia as the demonstrably stronger force.

 

Ukrainian and U.S. hopes that the new supplies of Western weaponry would enable Ukraine to regain the initiative and eventually retake the estimated 20 percent of Ukrainian territory captured by Russia since its Feb. 24 invasion are starting to look premature, said Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, an adviser to the Ukrainian government on defense and intelligence issues.

 

“The strategies and tactics of the Russians are completely different right now. They are being much more successful,” he said. “They have more resources than us and they are not in a rush.”

 

“There’s much less space for optimism right now,” he added.

 

Ukrainian forces remain resolute. In a cafe in the front line town of Slovyansk, two Ukrainian soldiers on a break from the trenches nearby recounted how they were forced to retreat from the town of Dovhenke, northwest of Slovyansk, under withering Russian artillery fire. Thirty-five of their 100-strong unit were killed in the assault, typical of the tactics Russia is using. “They destroy everything and walk in,” said one of the soldiers, Vitaliy Martsyv, 41.

 

“There is nothing there,” Andriy Tihonenko, 52, said of Dovhenke. “It’s all burned down.”

 

As troop fatalities mounted, the surviving soldiers felt “more motivated to hold our position,” Tihonenko said. To retreat after their comrades were killed defending the town, he said, would have felt like treating their deaths as insignificant.

 

But eventually, the defensive line was no longer effective, the two men said. With more than one-third of their force killed, the remaining soldiers had no choice but to pull back.

 

“Sometimes you feel down,” Tihonenko said. “But then you realize war is war — and you have to finish it.”

 

But the odds against the Ukrainians are starting to look overwhelming, said Danylyuk, the government adviser.

 

“The Russians are using long-range artillery against us, often without any response, because we don’t have the means,” he said. “They can attack from dozens of kilometers away and we can’t fire back. We know all the coordinates for all their important targets, but we don’t have the means to attack.”

 

Ukraine has now almost completely run out of ammunition for the Soviet-era weapons systems that were the mainstay of its arsenal, and the Eastern European countries that maintained the same systems have run out of surplus supplies to donate, Danylyuk said.

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If Putin “wins”, he’ll face endless insurgency in occupied Ukraine, and endless retaliatory attacks on soft targets inside of Russia. The man is an idiot.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

Yeah, that certainly rebuts the observation that I just made.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

Like you’re rebutting the following?

If Putin “wins”, he’ll face endless insurgency in occupied Ukraine, and endless retaliatory attacks on soft targets inside of Russia. The man is an idiot.

Ukrainians who speak Russian are no more Russians than Americans who speak Spanish are Spaniards. Putin’s unprovoked destruction of Ukrainian towns and cities and the slaughter of its people guarantee such an outcome. He has made it personal. Endless insurgency would be inevitable. It would be like having Russian-occupied Afghanistan on the border of Russia, 279 miles from Moscow. Putin is creating a nightmare scenario for his own people. He’s thrown the world’s economies into turmoil in the process. There’s likely going to be famine in areas dependent on Ukraine’s harvests and grain exports, which will result in spreading political instability.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

Because America didn’t bend over and grab its ankles for Vladimir effin’ Putin?

My parents’ generation understood what Hitler was—a lesson that’s apparently lost, only two generations later.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

My father dropped bombs on them, in North Africa and Italy. My grandfathers were too old to go to war against the fascists and Nazis.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

Maybe you should come back when you sober up.

Because America didn’t bend over and grab its ankles for Vladimir effin’ Putin?

Idiot Biden had already destroyed our economy BEFORE he gave Putin the green light to invade Ukraine.

Putin isn’t Hitler.

Stop it.

What conversation? You’ve had nothing to say about any of the comments I’ve made, other than Twitter posts from Putin trolls and playground taunts. I suppose you might win on points, if the contest is judged by retire05, Deplorable Me, and TrumpWon. But then what have you won?

Reason doesn’t seem to enter in. Facts are irrelevant, and principles are missing entirely. Hostility seems to be the driving force, directed into some sort of crack-brained desire to “own the libs” or “defeat the dims”—symbols for whatever it is that’s actually eating at you. This is what Trump and his GOP have harnessed to further their own ends. Unfortunately, furthering their own ends is not a matter of promoting unification, or the collective good of everyone in the nation. It’s a matter of promoting divisions and rendering us increasingly vulnerable to bad actors, foreign and domestic. It’s a matter of promoting distrust of every principle and institution that’s the foundation of our democracy.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

06/10/22 – Putin undermined his own rationale for invading Ukraine, saying that the war is to expand Russian territory

Russian President Vladimir Putin said publicly for the first time on Thursday that his invasion of Ukraine is about expanding Russian territory, which Western leaders have long maintained. 

To date, Putin has justified the invasion by saying, baselessly, that he’s preventing Ukraine and what he described as a neo-Nazi government from committing genocide against ethnic Russians. He has also said that NATO’s eastward expansion threatens Russia’s national security.

Putin, speaking with students on Thursday after visiting an exhibition about Peter the Great, Russia’s first emperor credited with making the country a major power in the early 18th century, compared himself to the ruler and said they were both destined to expand Russia.

“Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well,” he said. “And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.”

In addition to seizing territory in a 21-year war with Sweden in the late 17th century, Peter captured the territory of Azov from Crimean Tatars, who were aligned with Turkey, in 1696, and he seized territory on the Caspian Sea from Persia in 1723.

“On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it,” Putin said of Peter. “He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.”

In a tweet on Friday, Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Putin’s comments prove his “contrived pretexts of people’s genocide” in Ukraine were false and demanded “immediate de-imperialization” of Russia.

Putin’s attempts to expand Russian territory started long before his invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 and still backs pro-Kremlin factions there. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and invaded the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine via proxies that same year.

Just two days before invading Ukraine, Putin said claims he wanted to restore the Russian empire were false. 

But Western leaders have long maintained that this was not the case.

“He has much larger ambitions than Ukraine. He wants to, in fact, reestablish the former Soviet Union. That’s what this is about,” President Joe Biden said on February 24, the first day of the invasion.

——————————-

Every source of information provided to you, you dismiss as trolls.

Most of the anti-Ukrainian Twitter posts being shared here ARE from Russian trolls. Elon Musk has opined that upwards of 20 percent of all Twitter accounts are propaganda bots. Some have actually been identified as Russian State Media accounts. Putin has locked down all Russian media sources.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

Notice the correlation between support for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin?

It’s on full display here, should anyone think that it’s somehow significant.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

Meanwhile in matters that truly impact Americans, the economy is getting worse by the day with no workable plan to rectify.

biden thinks the answer is to flood America with illegal aliens who have zero skills and do not speak the language of the land

Notice the correlation between support for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin?

It’s on full display here, should anyone think that it’s somehow significant.

No, I don’t. Point it out.

I just did.

See, if they worked for idiot Biden, HE would carry it back for them… in his pants.

Screw Ukraine

Putin has already screwed YOU at the gas pump, and you don’t even realize it.

Bwahahahahaha

Yahoo and Ukraine. ok so there is a morgue, you must go way back in history where there were not makeshift morgues. Guess the Nazis just leave their dead to rot.

Bullshit

energy prices were rising from inflationary pressures long before the skirmish in Ukraine

That is a lie the con man biden keeps pushing

Putin has already screwed YOU at the gas pump, and you don’t even realize it.

You spelled “idiot Biden” wrong and we are all very, very aware.

Biden did that.
Not Putin

Oil was $83.92/barrel in January 2022; it’s now $120/barrel. Do you remember what happened in February 2022? Are you aware that gasoline is refined from oil?

Biden did that.

Not Putin

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

Oil was $58.31/barrel in January 2021. When Putin invaded Ukraine it was $101.98/barrel. Now it’s $120.00. How do you excuse the doubling in barrel cost before Puting invaded Ukraine?

Biden did that. He campaigned on doing that; he promised he would do that. He’s bending over and grabbing his ankles for OAC and her radical global warming cult. And now he’s going to use the nation’s corn supply not to feed the people but to make ethanol.

Meanwhile Americans are suffering because the stupid believed Biden when he said he would take responsibility for what happens and all he can do is blame Putin, Trump, et al.

You should be ashamed of voting for Biden. He will destroy this nation.

There’s nothing to explain or excuse. Demand for oil cratered during the global COVID pandemic. There was such a huge surplus that it cost more to pump and refine than it could be sold for.

I can’t believe that you really don’t know that.

Oil was $58.31/barrel in January 2021. When Putin invaded Ukraine it was $101.98/barrel. Now it’s $120.00. How do you excuse the doubling in barrel cost before Puting invaded Ukraine?

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

There’s nothing to explain or excuse. Demand for oil cratered during the global COVID pandemic. There was such a huge surplus that it cost more to pump and refine than it could be sold for.

Which is why it is pretty dishonest to brag about energy production being more than Trump’s first year (after 8 years of Obama strangling it) or his final year. I can’t believe that you really don’t know that.

Biden said he’d phase out oil.

Finck said no one would be able to afford gas so they HAVE to buy electric.

These people tell what they are going to do.

And they do it.

Biden did that…was already doing that.

Not Putin.

Your lie failed.

Give up.

Americans Call Out Biden’s Economy LIES

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Last edited 1 year ago by TrumpWon

I really don’t think anyone even listens to this idiot liar. Everyone KNOWS every statement he pukes out is a massive lie. They’ll repeat what he says, but they know it’s a lie.

Dang, remember the actual leader we HAD before fraud took him out of office? Look at the disaster all that corruption brought us.

Last edited 1 year ago by Just Plain Bill

The trolls greg and michael do

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Ukraine is almost as massive a disaster for illegitimate joe as was Afghanistan

I don’t have a Twitter account and have no intention of acquiring one, so any tweets requiring login are pretty much pointless. This one is I can see without a login. The first thing I noticed was the RT in the upper right hand corner.

I wonder how many of these images RT is showing?

Presumably you know that Putin has bombarded much of the ethnically Russian city of Mariupol out of existence.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

greg.

You DO have a twitter account.

You have quite a few.

Dirtbag zelensky is clamoring for more weapons. Shove it dirtbag, you are getting you asses kick by Putin

Your predictions record isnt exactly stellar.

His propensity to embellish is second to none

Greg is sloppy seconds of MSM bullsh!t

I recall telling you Trump’s debt-financed binge would guarantee runaway inflation over 4 years ago. Also, that Trump would lose by a landslide in 2020, that the southwest would dry up and burn due to climate change, that $5 gasoline was inevitable, and that our invasion of Iraq would bleed us dry while Russian and China watched and waited. I’m curious about what predictions you’re referring to. Got some examples?

Your predictions record isnt exactly stellar.

That is bullshit

anyone can say I told you so without documentation

greg. For you to propaganda-bomb this post over a matter of hours is proof you work for our enemies.

Russia is winning this war, and the conflict was started by your master’s arrogance.

Stop spreading lies.

Obama ran up debt. Trump? Not so much.

Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years

“The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any president.”

If you wonder who number 1 and 2 were, have a look at the article.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

pro-pubica

Easily dismissed

Facts remain facts, whether they’re “easily dismissed” by fools or not.

Last edited 1 year ago by Greg

Troll alert

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Leftist articles aside, blaming Trump for the debt incurred when COVID hit, Democrats kept the economy closed AND pushed through massive and unnecessary wasteful spending is pretty dishonest, even for you.

Obama plowed $10 trillion into the debt with NOTHING to show for it. It still took Trump to recover the economy. Idiot Biden added $5 trillion (already) and the economy is utterly destroyed.

But neither greg nor michael will honestly discuss the real context of the issues. Their content is to frame it as something else, not bidens fault. It was the hand he was dealt except when he had a winning hand, he discarded three cards and was left with a losing hand.

Obama ran up debt. Not Trump

Biden ran it up even more

Trump leveraged it. Dems lie.

We made billions in tariffs and savings with Trump.

I recall telling you Trump’s debt-financed binge would guarantee runaway inflation over 4 years ago.

And it never happened. Then idiot Biden, thanks to election fraud, came forth, added $5 trillion to the debt practically over night, killed energy independence, production and refining, paid people not to work, destroyed the supply chain and inflation “necessarily skyrocketed”. You can blame idiot Biden’s utter failures on the most successful President (the last duly elected President) in 5 decades.

I predicted if idiot Biden was allowed to destroy this nation, he would. I guess I’m f**king Nostradamus.

06/09/22 – The Putin price hike is real — and huge

It seemed silly, in March, when President Biden started calling persistent inflation “Putin’s price hike.” The price of gasoline and many other things had been soaring well before Putin ordered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, and blaming that on Putin all of a sudden was opportunistic blame-shifting.

More than 100 days into the war, however, the Russian president’s belligerence has clearly had the most pronounced effect on global prices of any single geopolitical development since the oil shocks of the 1970s. A new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares current forecasts for inflation, growth, incomes and living standards with forecasts at the end of 2021, to present a before-and-after perspective of how Russia’s warmongering is affecting the entire world economy. The impact is stark and likely to get worse, not better.

The pre-war year-over-year inflation forecast for the 38 OECD member countries was 4.4%. It’s now double that, at 8.8%. The United States, struggling with 8.3% inflation, is actually doing better than many other countries. Eastern European countries near the war zone, such as Poland, Latvia and Estonia, are on track for double-digit inflation. The inflation forecast for the U.K. is 8.8%. In Turkey, already beset by monetary-policy missteps, inflation has skyrocketed from 24% before the war to 72% now.

War in one country is causing economic pain nearly everywhere for a few reasons. The United States and many nations in Europe and elsewhere have layered tough sanctions on the Russian economy, to punish Russia for its barbarity, and that is causing considerable collateral damage. Russia is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and while Russia is still exporting energy, sanctions have cut into Russian sales, leaving a supply shortfall just as the world economy is recovering from the COVID pandemic, which is boosting demand for energy.

“We were already in a tightening market last year,” says Raoul LeBlanc, vice president of the energy practice at S&P Global. “The COVID pandemic took down a lot of capacity and the rebound happened fast. It’s hard to restart a system, and meanwhile people want to get back on planes and drive to vacations.”

Oil markets could get tighter, sending prices even higher. Europe plans to phase out 90% of its Russian oil purchases by the end of the year, shifting to different suppliers or other types of energy. Russia will be able to sell some of that product, at a discount, to other buyers, such as China and India. But S&P Global estimates Russia’s supply of oil and oil products to world markets could drop by 20% to 25%, at a time when demand in China picks up as strict COVID lockdowns end there. Other countries could slowly boost production to cash in on high prices, but there’s no spigot anybody can turn that will flood the market with new oil.

A ‘cost of living crisis’

Energy is an important input in transportation, manufacturing, food production and many other things. So rising energy costs push up the cost of other products, including necessities such as food. Compounding that problem is the Russian blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, which is blocking shipments of cooking oil, barley, wheat and corn to regions such as Africa and the Middle East that depend on Ukrainian food exports.

Russia is also a major food exporter, and while nobody is sanctioning food directly, financial sanctions are making it harder for Russia to export nearly everything. Sanctions are also affecting Russian exports of some fertilizer compounds, which has more than doubled the cost of fertilizer and added to the cost of growing food far from Russia or Ukraine.

The OECD calls this a “cost of living crisis” and says, “The war in Ukraine has quashed hopes for a quick end to rising inflation from COVID-19 related supply bottlenecks seen across the global economy during 2021 and early 2022. Consumer price inflation will peak later and at higher levels than previously foreseen.”

The World Bank recently warned of global “stagflation,” with many countries falling into recession this year. The principal cause is Russia’s war. Most economists see slowing growth in the United States, but not a recession, given that unemployment remains extremely low. Europe, which is more dependent on Russian energy, will likely fare worse, and developing countries could face outright crises. A May report by the Eurasia Group and DevryBV Sustainable Strategies estimates the loss of food exports from Ukraine and Russia will boost the number of people suffering from food insecurity by 101 million toward the end of 2022, and the number living in extreme poverty by as much as 201 million.

Putin probably doesn’t mind, and some analysts think that destabilizing countries seeking to punish Russia with sanctions is part of his war strategy. Putin also probably knows it could get politically more difficult to keep sanctions on Russia when it causes painfully high energy and food costs for consumers not accustomed to such hardships. In that sense, the sanctions are a battle of attrition in which Russia hopes to show it can bear more pain, for longer, than the nations trying to punish it.

Here in the United States, Biden’s rhetoric about the Putin price hikes is growing more legitimate as the damage mounts. That may not help him, though. Polls show Americans do think Putin’s war in Ukraine is pushing prices higher, but they think Biden policies are the No. 1. cause, which is a big reason for Biden’s weak approval rating. Russia, for its part, has inflation, too, with some consumer products costing 50% or 60% more than before the war. But it would probably have to get way worse than that for Putin, a dictator, to have any problem with the public. Russia can take the pain, for a while at least.

Biden wants high prices.

Biden price hike.

Forever.

The tanking economy AND the war in Ukraine is idiot Biden’s responsibility. He caused them and they would not have happened without his policies.

PERIOD.

So if this is what you believe, why did Biden give Putin permission to invade? Didn’t Biden know a “small incursion” could go big? After all Biden was the most experienced man in Washington, DC.

Trump=low oil prices=Putin stays home.
Biden=high oil prices=Putin invades.

Trump=Low inflation, no war, low gas prices, affordable groceries, baby food and tampons available. In other words, everything Democrats hate.
Biden=Fastest presidential disaster in US history. Shortages, supply chain unsolved, war, unabated inflation, high gas and diesel prices, etc.

Joe’s just getting started. He says we are transitioning. How’s it going so far?

I’ll take mean tweets any day over this idiot and his blind followers

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Last edited 1 year ago by Mully

Even the NYTs is now reporting that Ukraine is losing the war.

You’d better follow up with headquarters. I think you orders have changed, chump.

Trump told Putin to not invade. Putin didn’t.

Biden told Putin to not invade. He did.

This war is Biden’s fault.

Trump leveraged debt.

Obama and now Biden ran it up.

Gas prices were low under Trump, because the President can control gas prices.

Gas went up under the Biden occupation, and his handlers are trying to seed the silly “Putin” price hike to cover up Biden doing exactly what he said he was going to do: phase out petroleum.

As things collapse, you’ll see more Biden voters admitting they know Biden didn’t win the election as they beg for forgiveness.

Literally NO ONE Is Watching Joe Biden White House Videos – The Viewership Is Abysmal – Pathetic

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On Saturday Biden gave a pathetic presentation in New Mexico. Only 2,700 people have since clicked on it. The page has only 150 upvotes. The downvotes are hidden. YouTube won’t report the number of dislikes. They stopped doing this on Biden videos. From the background noise, it sounds like hardly anyone is in attendance at this event as well. This is horrible. Biden has no base! He looks lost.

Last edited 1 year ago by TrumpWon