Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Now that we know his name Ukraine should put a bounty on Roman Bykovsky. A bonus to any soldier who can confirm him being captured/killed.

[urutzizu]

Further reports appearing to confirm presence of NATO special forces on ground in Ukraine.

SAS troops ‘are training local forces in Ukraine’

SAS troops have trained local forces in Kyiv for the first time since the war with Russia began, Ukrainian commanders have told The Times.

Officers from two battalions stationed in and around the capital said they had undergone military training from serving British special forces, one last week and the other the week before.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sas-troops-are-training-local-forces-in-ukraine-32vs5bjzb

Already previously French intelligence sources told French newspaper Le Figaro about the presence of US and British special forces. (Yes, I am aware fars news is Iranian propaganda, but it is english language, the report itself is correct)

Report: US, UK Conducting 'Secret War' in Ukraine

TEHRAN (FNA)- Elite special forces from the UK and the US have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of hostilities with Russia in late February, a source in the French intelligence community reportedly told Le Figaro.

The claim was reported by the newspaper’s senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot on Saturday, the day when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his surprise visit to Kiev. The British leader was reportedly surrounded by guards from the elite SAS force, though this claim was not officially confirmed.

SAS units “have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did [sic] the American Deltas”, Malbrunot tweeted citing a French intelligence source. He added that according to the source Russia was well aware of the “secret war” waged against its troops by foreign commandos.

https://www.farsnews.ir/en/news/14010122000697/Repr-US-UK-Cndcing-'Secre-War'-in-Ukraine

Le figaro correspondent Georges Malbrunot:
https://www.twitter.com/Malbrunot/status/1512814126367662088

[Storr]

We keep hearing about a forthcoming Russian offensive in the Donbass. I'm skeptical that Russia is even able to capture the rest of the Donbass at this point. In my opinion, there's literally no chane the Russians occupy the Donbass by Victory Day.https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1515001663765073928?s=20&t=UWg69VJ4L5M...

[Omega21]

Remember last nights strike against Kiev?

Guess it was a logical target, he needs something to sell as "retribution" for the massive loss of Moskva.

A Ukrainian military factory outside Kyiv that produced missiles allegedly used to hit Russia's Moskva warship was partly destroyed by overnight Russian strikes, an AFP journalist at the scene saw Friday.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220415-russian-strike-hits-missile-unit-outside-kyiv-afp

Any idea whether this will have a significant effect on the Ukrainian war effort? We're sending them so many missiles already; I can't believe this will noticeably hamper their offensive capabilities.

AFAIK, the US & co are not sending medium & long range cruise missiles (like the Tomahawk), mostly shorter range MANPADs, AT weapons etc.

The Neptune, however, is a heavily upgraded soviet cruise missile, with an additional land attack function & a range of 300km.

It only entered service 2 months ago, so the numbers are likely extremely limited, which is probably why this has been the first time the Ukrainians actually used them.

Russia has deindustrialized most of UA military manufacturing already, so this probably has limited real world effect, much like the sinking of Moskva. The biggest problem with losing the Moskva is humiliation, while the biggest gain from bombing the Neptune facility is mostly just having something to show off as "retribution" to the Russian public.

- Russia has destroyed almost all of Ukraine's defence industry, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said on Thursday in a video address where he welcomed the terms of a proposed peace deal as a win for Ukraine.

"They have practically destroyed our defence industry," Arestovych said.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-destroyed-most-ukraines-defence-101722366.html

[Middle-aged Europe]

We keep hearing about a forthcoming Russian offensive in the Donbass. I'm skeptical that Russia is even able to capture the rest of the Donbass at this point. In my opinion, there's literally no chane the Russians occupy the Donbass by Victory Day. Though, capturing all of Mariupol and hailing it as a great victory for the parade on May 9th in Moscow, does seen possible.

Ah yes, the special military operation to denazify the city of Mariupol of the Azov Battalion by sacrifying 10,000 Russian troops and the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet.

[Omega21]

1 of the 3 pockets of resistance in Mariupol, the Ilyich Factory, defended by the 36th Brigade, has surrendered.

This leaves Azovstal, and a small pocket in the docks.

Note: Tweet is from a Russian shill, but the Info has been verified by independent OSINT

https://twitter.com/NuestraIraSLG/status/1515067818378674177

[Omega21]

Since Ukraine has beat all expectations and is still holding in a full intensity conflict, the US & allies are running into a new problem, similar to the Russians.

America is following an “arsenal of democracy” strategy in Ukraine.

That strategy, reminiscent of U.S. support for Britain in 1940-41, has worked wonders. Yet as the war reaches a critical stage, with the Russians preparing to consolidate their grip on eastern Ukraine, the arsenal of democracy is being depleted.

General Mark Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that the West has delivered 60,000 antitank weapons and 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons to Kyiv.

Pentagon officials say that Kyiv is blowing through a week’s worth of deliveries of antitank munitions every day.

 The U.S. has provided one-third of its overall stockpile of Javelin anti-tank missiles. It cannot easily deliver more without leaving its own armories badly depleted — and it may take months or years to significantly ramp up production.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-14/russia-ukraine-war-u-s-is-running-out-of-weapons-aiding-kyiv

[NOVA Green]

Further reports appearing to confirm presence of NATO special forces on ground in Ukraine.

SAS troops ‘are training local forces in Ukraine’

SAS troops have trained local forces in Kyiv for the first time since the war with Russia began, Ukrainian commanders have told The Times.

Officers from two battalions stationed in and around the capital said they had undergone military training from serving British special forces, one last week and the other the week before.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sas-troops-are-training-local-forces-in-ukraine-32vs5bjzb

Already previously French intelligence sources told French newspaper Le Figaro about the presence of US and British special forces. (Yes, I am aware fars news is Iranian propaganda, but it is english language, the report itself is correct)

Report: US, UK Conducting 'Secret War' in Ukraine

TEHRAN (FNA)- Elite special forces from the UK and the US have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of hostilities with Russia in late February, a source in the French intelligence community reportedly told Le Figaro.

The claim was reported by the newspaper’s senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot on Saturday, the day when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his surprise visit to Kiev. The British leader was reportedly surrounded by guards from the elite SAS force, though this claim was not officially confirmed.

SAS units “have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did [sic] the American Deltas”, Malbrunot tweeted citing a French intelligence source. He added that according to the source Russia was well aware of the “secret war” waged against its troops by foreign commandos.

https://www.farsnews.ir/en/news/14010122000697/Repr-US-UK-Cndcing-'Secre-War'-in-Ukraine

Le figaro correspondent Georges Malbrunot:
https://www.twitter.com/Malbrunot/status/1512814126367662088

If true this is NOT good news.

Loose lips sink ships and all that...

Last thing we need are Russian Propaganda artists talking up how "Western Countries" are training Ukrainian "Neo-Nazis".

First rule of this type of stuff is don't talk about it, since now any countries allegedly involved might have lost "plausible deniability", and could effectively be seen as direct combatants if based upon Ukrainian soil.

Will Russia now start creating false claims that English, American, and French Special forces are creating sabotage activities within Russia and Belarus?

[NOVA Green]

How do you buy these stamps?

They'll become collectibles one day.

https://twitter.com/olgatokariuk/status/1514595550011838466

This is the website that I was directed to from the main Ukrposhta site when I wanted to buy something from them: http://pm.ukrposhta.ua/nishop.php

The website is running extremely slow and timed out multiple times before I could place an order (I wonder if they are getting overloaded by people that want the stamps). They didn't take any payment and wouldn't until my order was about to be fulfilled, so 🤷🏻‍♂️

Is the site secure?

The link I got shows it's a non-secure site, so hesitant to provide financial information, especially considering Russian related hacking networks and the current situation....

[NOVA Green]

New NYT article on the sinking of the Moskva, including a few items not previously reported on this thread.

Russian ships have already been pushed farther off the Ukrainian coast, U.S. officials confirmed, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments of the war. The remainder of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is still within range to launch cruise missiles into Ukraine but is unable to support any sort of amphibious assault on the country’s coastal cities, according to former officials.

The Moskva was itself designed as a ship killer. Construction of the ship, originally known as the Slava, began in 1976, and the vessel went into service in 1983. Built by the Soviet Union to sink American carriers, it was armed with missiles capable of striking planes, ships and submarines.

Upgraded many times over the years, the Moskva should have had defenses to shoot down the Ukrainian missiles. The ship was armed with a medium-range surface-to-air system that was thought to be effective within seven miles, and it also had other missiles designed to take out threats 50 miles away. In theory, its guns could have shot down a Neptune missile as well. But none of those defenses worked.

The Moskva would have played a primary role in any potential amphibious assault on the Ukrainian coastal city of Odesa. While other landing ships would have been used to bring Russian naval infantry to the coastline, the Moskva would have protected those ships and launched missile strikes on the city.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/politics/russia-moskva-ship-ukraine.html

[AndyHogan14]

How do you buy these stamps?

They'll become collectibles one day.

https://twitter.com/olgatokariuk/status/1514595550011838466

This is the website that I was directed to from the main Ukrposhta site when I wanted to buy something from them: http://pm.ukrposhta.ua/nishop.php

The website is running extremely slow and timed out multiple times before I could place an order (I wonder if they are getting overloaded by people that want the stamps). They didn't take any payment and wouldn't until my order was about to be fulfilled, so 🤷🏻‍♂️

Is the site secure?

The link I got shows it's a non-secure site, so hesitant to provide financial information, especially considering Russian related hacking networks and the current situation....

Not sure, but I intend on using a Visa gift card when I pay for them just to be safe.

[NOVA Green]

Ukraine is using a bit of a ghoulish strategy as part of their asymmetrical IT warfare in an attempt to influence Russian public opinion against the Invasion and Occupation of Ukraine.

Not really sure how I feel about this from a moral perspective when it comes to public display of dead enemy combatants, plus "rules of war", without even going into Clearview as a company with all of their shady history even within the US of A with LEA and Domestic Protest Movements.

Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since the war began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.

The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.

The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.

Clearview AI’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.

Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several “‘oh, wow’ moments” as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/15/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/#link-P53WP7UTMZHAFMXLUVFFE6AN5M

[NOVA Green]

Curious case of the Anti-Ship Mines which have been floating around the Black Sea update...

Naturally reasons to be skeptical on sourcing here, but thus far Ukrainian Information has generally proven to be much more accurate than Russian Information overall when it comes to regarding the War in Ukraine.

Naval mines discovered in Turkish waters in recent weeks are Soviet-era ordnance that had been stored in Crimea, under Russian control since 2014, and may have been deliberately left near Turkey’s coastline by Russian vessels to discourage commercial shipping, a Ukrainian official said Friday.

The appearance of floating mines in the southwest Black Sea set off alarm bells in Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria, drove up the costs of insuring cargo ships and stymied local fishermen. Since late March, Turkey’s military has defused at least three mines discovered in its territorial waters, including one in the busy Bosporus Strait, which bisects the country’s biggest city of Istanbul. Romania has also neutralized a stray mine.

The U.S. Embassy in Ankara on Friday warned that “an undetermined number of drifting mines in the western Black Sea … pose a hazard to commercial and passenger vessels” and urged American citizens to reconsider traveling by ship in the area.

Russia has accused Ukraine of laying the mines and alleged that hundreds of them broke free during bad weather in March. Ukraine has denied the Russian assertion. Turkey’s defense minister has said the mines’ origins have not been determined.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/15/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/#link-B2OGJKFU4JA5VFBDZWYIA5C53I

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/highprogressive/status/1515033352251838465?s=20&t=38xHBK...

[Middle-aged Europe]

https://twitter.com/highprogressive/status/1515033352251838465?s=20&t=38xHBK...

Ha, that's exactly what had come to my mind too recently and I wanted to try that argument out in online places that are less pro-Ukraine than this one.

[Obama-Biden Democrat]

Maybe it will, sooner or later, dawn on at least some in Russia that making all sorts of scary threats without the ability to follow them up is actually counter productive?

This is a good point and leads neatly to a very important one: the present Russian leadership (largely comprised of people in their late 60s and early 70s: the remains of the last Komsomol cohort to reach middle management before the Collapse) act as if they had the resources available to them that Soviet leaders had forty years ago. And they just don't.

After the Soviet collapse, Russia lost half of it's population. It was a catastrophic loss for Russia to lose the breadbasket of Ukraine as well as the rest of the former USSR.

Without Ukraine, Russia is a great power, with Ukraine it is a superpower. Putin needs Ukraine to bring back the Russian empire.

[NOVA Green]

Strength of Ukrainian Domestic Armaments Industry in light of the the likely UKR sinking of the Moskva by Ukrainian domestic Neptune missiles:

Soon after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, a Ukrainian defense firm used an arms show in Kyiv to unveil its latest project: An anti-ship cruise missile it called “Neptune.”

The strike on Wednesday marked a major boost for Ukraine — not only for its war effort but also for the homegrown arms industry, even as it relies on weapons donated by Western allies.

Since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, foreign-made weapons have poured into Ukraine. Among them are anti-armor weapons produced in the United States, small arms manufactured in Europe and even Russian-designed antiaircraft systems.

But Ukraine is a significant arms exporter itself, with a legacy of building missiles and rockets that goes back deep into the Soviet era.

Russia was once a key export market for those weapons: Between 2016 and 2020, 1 in 5 Ukrainian arms exports went to Ukraine’s larger neighbor, according to tracking from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/15/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/#link-ECL3FUUSGJEXDLCNSXRQDBHJTU

Can't wait for the second addition of Riyadh of "The World Defense Show" to see in 2023 of the relative popularity of different Global producers and "sales guys" trying to sell off "old stock" internationally.

https://www.arabnews.com/node/2020006/business-economy

[NOVA Green]

Sounds like bad news from the area around Kherson City when it comes to mass graves.

Wouldn't be surprised if this is part of geolocation of war crimes locations by some of my Twitter Butts.

Obviously considering the scale of Russian Military atrocities and war crimes committed thus far, perhaps not a total surprise.

Still Kherson was not a city which was completely rubbled by Russian artillery, air strikes, "dumb bombs", and even what are called "Russian Smart Bombs" (Oxymoron I know).

Rows upon rows of graves are being dug in Russian-occupied Kherson, according to recent satellite imagery analyzed by London-based nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience (CIR).

Planet Lab imagery revealed at least 824 new grave plots were added to the Kherson cemetery between Feb. 28 and April 15, CIR reported. The burial site is on the city’s outskirts, just east of the airport.

CIR has been monitoring a number of gravesites and cemeteries in Russian-occupied areas or areas where Russian forces are close by, said Benjamin Strick, the director of investigations. “It’s scary to think of how [civilians] died and what else is happening in these areas,” Strick told The Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/15/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/#link-KXSBO4VEE5GS3B75NN4Q7CB65Q

I fear the worst is yet to come when it comes to the extent of Russian War Crimes in Ukraine.

There is no plausible deniability here.... there is no legal defense when it came to directly waging war against a sovereign nation in 2022, as opposed to the "stealth actions" of 2014, where much of the world wasn't really paying attention.

Likely we will never really know the extent of Ukrainian Civilian deaths in this current war.

I would imagine it took much time for researchers to estimate numbers of Jews who died during the Holocaust and how many Slav's were murdered by Hitler's armies.

What would it take to get to something akin to the Nuremberg Trials, where even top leaders were held accountable for the crimes they had committed?

Confess, although I have been a HUGE Spencer Tracy fan over the years, this was one of those movies that I couldn't watch.

Schindler's List was even more controversial and disturbing for various reasons.

Still we can't close our eyes to what we are seeing and reading and following and what appears to be a systemic pattern of Russian War Crimes, well beyond individual soldiers and individual units.

Unfortunately, the low-level perps might well face justice but those higher up the food chain will likely walk free unless their is a Russian Popular Uprising...

We are not seeing any real evidence that this is occurring, and quite possibly the propaganda machine from the invaders and occupiers has set attitudes and mental conditioning for (10) years before.

[DaleCooper]

https://twitter.com/highprogressive/status/1515033352251838465?s=20&t=38xHBK...

Ha, that's exactly what had come to my mind too recently and I wanted to try that argument out in online places that are less pro-Ukraine than this one.

Their answer, once you strip away all the flowery pseudo-academic language, would be a simple "Fighting Russia is bad and fighting America is good."

It has literally nothing to do with human life or principles or anything of the sort.

[Mopsus]

Ukraine is using a bit of a ghoulish strategy as part of their asymmetrical IT warfare in an attempt to influence Russian public opinion against the Invasion and Occupation of Ukraine.

Not really sure how I feel about this from a moral perspective when it comes to public display of dead enemy combatants, plus "rules of war", without even going into Clearview as a company with all of their shady history even within the US of A with LEA and Domestic Protest Movements.

Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since the war began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.

The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.

The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.

Clearview AI’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.

Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several “‘oh, wow’ moments” as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/15/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/#link-P53WP7UTMZHAFMXLUVFFE6AN5M

I watched a video the other day in which an Ukranian soldier used a phone swiped off a dead Russian to video call the guy's girlfriend and tell her that her boyfriend was dead. He was quite happy to break the bad news, and it's not hard to sympathize with him. But it was still sad to see.

[CumbrianLefty]

https://twitter.com/highprogressive/status/1515033352251838465?s=20&t=38xHBK...

Ha, that's exactly what had come to my mind too recently and I wanted to try that argument out in online places that are less pro-Ukraine than this one.

Their answer, once you strip away all the flowery pseudo-academic language, would be a simple "Fighting Russia is bad and fighting America is good."

It has literally nothing to do with human life or principles or anything of the sort.

Related to this is the take you see from such people that US imperialism is the only "real" imperialism. Those saying this sometimes claim it is based on what Lenin once wrote (spoiler: its not)

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Ukraine is using a bit of a ghoulish strategy as part of their asymmetrical IT warfare in an attempt to influence Russian public opinion against the Invasion and Occupation of Ukraine.

Not really sure how I feel about this from a moral perspective when it comes to public display of dead enemy combatants, plus "rules of war", without even going into Clearview as a company with all of their shady history even within the US of A with LEA and Domestic Protest Movements.

Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since the war began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.

The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.

The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.

Clearview AI’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.

Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several “‘oh, wow’ moments” as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/15/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/#link-P53WP7UTMZHAFMXLUVFFE6AN5M

The gloating that is probably going on is grim, but the Russian government tendency to lie or simply not know about the fate of their soldiers means a lot of families are going to be worrying about their men being MIA unless someone else tells them what happened. Personally, I’d rather know.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Ukraine is using a bit of a ghoulish strategy as part of their asymmetrical IT warfare in an attempt to influence Russian public opinion against the Invasion and Occupation of Ukraine.

Not really sure how I feel about this from a moral perspective when it comes to public display of dead enemy combatants, plus "rules of war", without even going into Clearview as a company with all of their shady history even within the US of A with LEA and Domestic Protest Movements.

Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since the war began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.

The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.

The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.

Clearview AI’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.

Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several “‘oh, wow’ moments” as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/15/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/#link-P53WP7UTMZHAFMXLUVFFE6AN5M

The gloating that is probably going on is grim, but the Russian government tendency to lie or simply not know about the fate of their soldiers means a lot of families are going to be worrying about their men being MIA unless someone else tells them what happened. Personally, I’d rather know.

Frankly, I don't give a sh*t if Ukrainians are being "ghoulish" in their information warfare right now, while Russia is literally attempting ethnic cleansing everywhere it can. Ukraine is justified in doing virtually anything to push them out.

The question of whether this is effective is another matter, but probably not one any of us can answer.

[Torie]

Apparently Boris will need to change his vacation plans.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/16/world/ukraine-russia-war-news#moscow-bars-boris-johnson-and-other-british-officials-from-visiting-russia

It does seem Putin really does intend to commit genocide in Mariupol. I don't know what else to call it when Russian forces are not letting civilians exit the killing zone.

"Members of the public have relayed reports of Russian soldiers exhuming the bodies of civilians buried in the yards of residential buildings in Mariupol as the soldiers forbid people to bury or remove the bodies of the dead, according to a statement posted on the City Council’s Telegram channel. Local officials say that such moves are part of an effort to hide the extent of the slaughter in the city.

'Mr. Zelensky has said that “tens of thousands” in Mariupol have been killed since the war began. More than 100,000 civilians are estimated to still be in the city, whose pre-war population was over 400,000."

[CumbrianLefty]

That part of it still holds out after 50 days (they probably thought it would take about 50 hours) obviously enrages Russia, as well as being inconvenient to them militarily.