WAR IN UKRAINE: September 25, 2023
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 214
For the first time, Iranian-made kamikaze drones have been used on Ukrainian targets. I’m one strike overnight, a drone struck the administration building in the port of Odesa. The area is supposed to be protected as part of that grain deal signed between Russia, Turkey, the UN and Ukraine. Because of their low altitude and maneuver capabilities, anti missile defenses have more difficulty striking the drones.
Kyiv says it has stripped the Iranian ambassador of his accreditationand decided to reduce Iran's diplomatic presence in Ukraine to protest drone deliveries to Russia.
Finland says it will "significantly restrict" Russian citizens from entering the country after President Vladimir Putin's decree announcing a partial mobilization of military reservists for the war in Ukraine triggered an exodus from Russia that has clogged its borders - RFE/RL
Separately, Russia struck the Pechenihy dam on the Siverskiy Donets River in northeast Ukraine this week using short-range ballistic missiles or similar weapons, the U.K. Defense Ministry said.
Hundreds of people have been arrested by authorities as protests against Russia's new "partial mobilisation" continue across the country, an independent rights group has said. OVD-Info said 724 people were detained across 32 different cities on Saturday. Widespread demonstrations have broken out since President Vladimir Putin announced plans to draft 300,000 men to fight in Ukraine - BBC
Ukrainian officials say they have finished exhuming bodies from a mass burial site in Izium -- and that of the 436 bodies found, 30 showed signs of torture. In a gruesome reminder of the human cost of Russia's invasion, most of the bodies showed signs of a violent death, said Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv region military administration - CNN
Mr Putin signed fresh decrees on Saturday imposing punishments of up to 10 years imprisonment for any soldier caught surrendering, attempting to desert the military or refusing to fight.
Zelensky rebukes Israel for 'zero' military support, slams China's 'ambiguous' position on war. In an interview with Ouest-France, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Israel "has not given anything" to Ukraine since Russia launched its al-out invasion on Feb. 24. "I am stunned," he said. "I don't understand. Why not give us an air defense system?" - Kyiv Independent
Required reading…
Why are American Conservatives Garroting the Nation that Helped “Make America Great Again”?
No event secured President Reagan’s legacy more than his epochal redirection of American policy -- rejecting “containment” and “détente,” and implementing an affirmative policy of bringing an end to the “Evil Empire,” writes Victor Rud.
Small wonder that, under KGB head Yurij Andropov, operatives in the U.S. were alerted that they may be asked “to get rid of Reagan;” this, from KGB defector, Boris Yuzhin. North Korea’s Kum Il-Sung was equally incensed at the upstart Republican president, and contemplated having Reagan assassinated during his visit to South Korea in 1983.
Although the succeeding Bush administration strove to prevent it, Ukraine’s recovery of its independence in 1991, set the tombstone for the USSR. It halted America’s strategic retreat, allowing us to recoup a global primacy we hadn’t seen since the end of WWII. Prodigious wonder, therefore, that by opposing assistance for Ukraine a growing segment of America’s conservative right is garroting both it and their own party’s implicit torchbearer. It’s one thing to honestly advocate a revised legislative process to better aid Ukraine. It’s another to cheer with paroxysmal zeal for a Russian victory in a genocidal war against the very nation that saved the U.S. from an apocalyptic trajectory. And proclaiming hosannas for the Butcher of Bucha as the elan vital of “traditional values?” The same Yurij Andropov was Putin’s pinup boy in his KGB training. Putin reintroduced Soviet symbolism, laments the fall of the USSR, and unfurls Soviet flags in Russia and now occupied Ukraine. Putin’s confreres on America’s conservative right know that, do they not?
Read the full analysis by Victor Rud here