Russia has made progress towards encircling Bakhmut but failed to capture it in time to deliver a victory for President Vladimir Putin to announce on Friday’s anniversary of his invasion. Ukrainian military spokesperson Serhii Cherevatyi has denied a claim by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Russia’s private military organisation Wagner, that Russian forces now control over 80 per cent of the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. From the day of the invasion until April 12, 2023, Russia has lost around 180,050 personnel and 3,646 tanks, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. One video discovered on V'Kontakte showed soldiers' graves at a cemetery north-east of Kostroma. The graves shown in the videos match the names of the soldiers we have collated.



Prigozhin has a particular style for these short, social media-optimised clips. He speaks in clear, simple Russian, the close-up of his heavy, fleshy face, with bags under the eyes, assuring us that nothing he says is scripted or debated or mulled over; this is just the way things are, straightforward common sense. "Wagner assault detachments are engaged in high-intensity combat operations to capture areas of western Bakhmut with airborne forces supporting on the flanks," the ministry said in a statement. Russia said eight drones targeted civilian areas of Moscow and the Moscow region - with a population of over 21 million - in the early hours of Tuesday but were either shot down or diverted with special electronic jammers. It has been rare for Moscow to be targeted by drones during Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine – but the capital has been told by one politician to prepare for “the new reality” of such attacks.

ISR flights by NATO nations before the conflict while have undoubtedly assisted in building up an order of battle and revealing the attackers main thrusts. The video comes as CNN cited reports of heavy fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces around the city, which is positioned on the main route from Belarus to Kyiv. “We see that propaganda activities have intensified over the last couple of months.

It has also enabled ongoing atrocities committed by the invading Russian forces to be documented in real-time. Russian military movements are now available via videos on TikTok or public satellite platforms. Even when we must accept the deaths and suffering of soldiers, we should not forget that when a drone annihilates its target there can be civilians as well as soldiers among the wreckage. Last year, the US attempted

to carry out a ‘righteous strike’ against terrorists in Afghanistan and killed an aid worker and a carload of children. Most of the actual fighting, though, has been observed from an aerial perspective. Drone footage has shown columns of tanks being obliterated or, in one instantly memorable scene, a Russian soldier fleeing

back to his unit before it was destroyed by Ukrainian artillery.
“Assurances by NATO officials that the Kyiv regime will not launch strikes deep into Russian territory prove to be completely hypocritical,” the ministry said in a statement. Russia’s deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko warned that supplying F-16s to Ukraine could pose a “colossal risk”. US president Joe Biden gave the green light for Western allies to hand over their F-16 fighter jets to Kyiv during the G7 conference in Japan to bolster Ukraine’s defences, and also agreed to train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s. The article he is wanted under has not been specified, RIA reported, citing the ministry’s wanted person database. Russia’s Interior Ministry has put Ukraine’s top general Valeriy Zaluzhnyi on a “wanted list”, the state-run RIA news agency said on Tuesday. Vaskov told a grain conference on Tuesday that the new depth of the Bystre Canal allowed ships to stop at Ukraine’s Danube ports, but that it was still not enough for loaded ships that have to use Romania’s Sulina Canal, which is deeper.

Washington and most EU countries have recognised Kosovo as an independent state, but Serbia, Russia and China have not. The conflict in Kosovo erupted in 1998 when separatist ethnic Albanians rebelled against Serbia’s rule, and Serbia responded with a brutal crackdown. More than a dozen Serbs and five Kosovar police officers were injured in clashes last Friday, and Serbian troops on the border with Kosovo were put on high alert the same day. Defence minister Milos Vucevic said the Serbian army is wrapping up deployment following the decision to raise combat readiness and will be ready to “fulfil any task and any order”. Serbia’s Prime Minister, Ana Brnabic, criticised the international handling of the events in Kosovo, saying that KFor is “not protecting the people … they are protecting the usurpers,” apparently referring to the new mayors.
And the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, with all the chaos that wrought, was live-tweeted into our homes last year. Images of unspeakable horrors supplanting the banality of status updates and selfies is nothing new. But the current conflict is a very different kind of social media war, fueled by TikTok’s transformative effect on the old norms of tech. Its more established competitors fundamentally changed the nature of conflict, but TikTok has created a stream of war footage the likes of which we have never seen, from grandmothers saying goodbye to friends to instructions on how to drive captured Russian tanks.

Two Russian marines trudge through a trench they claim to have just stormed. The black earth is quite dry and the walls of the trench bristle with pale, slender tree roots. Much larger roots appear to stretch across the bottom of the trench, until we realise they are the bodies of dead Ukrainians, distinguishable by the green tape around their helmets and arms.

On a visit to the front in December, Gov Sitnikov told viewers that "we need to help [the] guys so they have decent conditions". He had brought with him crowd-funded care packages and commercially sold drones. When one considers those seriously wounded or taken prisoner, it's reasonable to assume that the Ukraine war has cost the regiment several hundred soldiers. Some of the soldiers are from towns outside Kostroma, which makes tracking down information about them much more difficult. Several soldiers have been reported missing - some of these may count among the dead.
The significance of the Ukrainians in that video attacking trucks towing artillery is that artillery usually operates five to ten miles behind the front lines. They are maneuvering without opposition in Russia's rear area in Kherson. The Russians are falling apart in Kherson if they can't protect their rear. Hypersonic and space technology expert Dr MALCOLM CLAUS, Kingston University and member of the RAeS Weapon Systems & Technology Group analyses the recent news of a 'game-changing' Chinese hypersonic missile test that has reportedly taken the US by s...