#2022 russia-ukraine news
2022 Ukraine-Russia War
Ukrainian Grad MLRS bringing the hurt and pain to Russian positions.
2022 Ukraine-Russia War
A Ukrainian EOD tech defuses a Russian MON-90 directional anti-personnel mine that was hidden under a shopping bag on a street in the Kyiv area.
The Ukrainian Neptune
The Neptune is a Ukrainian designed and developed Anti-Ship Cruise Missile System.
On 13 April 2022, two Ukrainian officials said that Moskva had been hit by Ukraine’s Neptune anti-ship missiles and was afire in heavy seas. The Russian Ministry of Defense said the ship was seriously damaged after a fire caused a munitions explosion. The following day, following an effort to tow it ashore, Russian officials confirmed the ship had sunk.
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2022 Ukraine-Russia War
Two Russian BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles were destroyed by bombss dropped from the drones of the 503rd Marine Battalion of Ukraine.
2022 Ukraine-Russia War
Never assume you’re safe in a war zone.
This Russian soldier assumed he was.
He wasn’t.
“First main task is completed, the score is 5+. We have 3 wounded in total” … Caboom!
His wife was on the phone with him: “Sounds like you’re having a blast over there!”
2022 Ukraine-Russia War
Fantasy vs Reality …. Russian propaganda vs the cold brutal reality of what is happening today in Ukraine!
“Advantages” of military service in the USSR.
“Advantages” of military service in the Russian Federation.
Peace For Ukraine
A little girl is warmly welcoming her father she has not seen for months.
Patron the sapper dog hard at work hunting for mines in Ukraine!
Four-legged friends doing there part for the war effort in Ukraine!
Peace For Ukraine
Secret the Australian Shepherd Paints a Sunflower For Ukraine!
2022 Ukraine-Russia War
Ukrainian ground forces shell Russians with a SPG-9.
2022 Ukraine-Russia War
A possible rocket booster of a Ukrainian Tu-143 UAV.
The Tupolev Tu-143 Reys was a Soviet unmanned reconnaissance aircraft in service with the Soviet Army and a number of its Warsaw Pact and Middle East allies during the late 1970s and 1980s. It contained a reconnaissance pod that was retrieved after flight, and from which imagery was retrieved.
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The Ukrainian Army has captured tanks, armored vehicles, weapons and now a Russian military dog!
Meet the former Russian service dog nicknamed Kolbin. He was abandoned and survived heavy fighting in the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine where he was found by local residents.
Kolbin is now doing his part for Ukraine!
2022 Ukraine-Russia War
Ukrainian forces hit a Russian tank with a NLAW strike,
Russians Looted Priceless Artifacts From Museums in Mariupol and Melitopol
The heist started when a mysterious man in a white lab coat showed up at the museum.
A squad of Russian soldiers stood behind him, with guns, watching eagerly.
Using long tweezers and special gloves, the man in the white coat carefully extracted scores of special gold artifacts more than 2,300 years old from cardboard boxes in the cellar of a museum in Melitopol, a southern town in Russian-occupied territory, Ukrainian officials said. The gold items were from the Scythian empire and dated back to the fourth century B.C.
Then the mysterious expert, the Russian soldiers and the gold disappeared.
“The orcs have taken hold of our Scythian gold,” declared Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fyodorov, using a derogatory term many Ukrainians reserve for Russian soldiers. “This is one of the largest and most expensive collections in Ukraine, and today we don’t know where they took it.”
This was hardly the first attack on Ukrainian culture since the war began.
In Mariupol, the town that has been hammered for weeks by Russian forces, officials said that Russian agents broke into an art museum and stole masterpiece paintings, a famous sculpture and several highly valued Christian icons.
Across Ukraine, officials said, dozens of Orthodox churches, national monuments and cultural heritage sites have been destroyed. In one town near Kyiv, Borodianka, Russian soldiers shot the bust of a famous Ukrainian poet in the head.
On Saturday, Ukrainian officials said that more than 250 cultural institutions had been damaged or destroyed.
But perhaps no cultural heist has been as brazen as what unfolded in Melitopol just a few days ago.
According to Leila Ibrahimova, the director of the Melitopol Museum of Local History, the trouble started in late February, when Russian forces shelled the airport and took over the city. Soldiers went on a rampage, smashing into supermarkets, stores and homes.
Most of the city’s residents hid inside their houses. But a few museum workers, including Ms. Ibrahimova, made their way back to the museum.
It is an elegant, three-story, stone building in the old part of town, home to 50,000 exhibits, from Soviet-era medals to old battle axes. But its prized collection was a set of rare gold ornaments from the Scythians, a nomadic people that founded a rich, powerful empire, centered in the Crimean Peninsula, that endured from around the eighth century B.C. to the second century A.D.
It was the Scythian gold that Ms. Ibrahimova was most worried about.
She and other staff members secretly hid it and some other historic artifacts in cardboard boxes, stashing the boxes in a dank cellar where they didn’t think anyone would find it.
“We knew that any second someone could come into the museum with a weapon,” she said. So they worked fast, she said, because “the collection is priceless.”
In mid-March, Ms. Ibrahimova said Russian troops burst into her house with assault rifles, threw a black hood over her head and kidnapped her. After several hours of intense questioning, they let her go. Two weeks later she left Melitopol for an area not under Russian control.
But on Wednesday, she received a call from a caretaker at the museum. The caretaker said Russian soldiers, along with intelligence officers and a Russian-speaking man in a white lab coat, had come to her house in the morning and ordered her, at gunpoint, to go with them to the museum.
They commanded her to take them to the Scythian gold.
The caretaker refused, Ms. Ibrahimova said. But the man in the white coat found the boxes anyway with the help of a Ukrainian, Evgeny Gorlachev, who was appointed by the Russian military as the museum’s new director, she said. A Russian crew filmed part of the robbery.
“We hid everything but somehow they found it,” she said.
What was stolen: at least 198 gold items, including ornaments in the form of flowers; gold plates; rare old weapons; 300-year-old silver coins; and special medals. She said many of the gold artifacts had been given to the Scythians by the Greeks.
In an interview on Russian television, Mr. Gorlachev said the gold artifacts “are of great cultural value for the entire former Soviet Union” and that the previous administrators of the museum “spent a lot of effort and energy” to hide them.
“For what purpose, no one knows,” he said. “But thanks to these people and the operational work carried out, residents of the city of Melitopol — and not only Melitopol — will be able to observe again a large collection of Scythian gold.” He did not say when or where the artifacts would be displayed.
Ms. Ibrahimova, who spoke by phone, sounded despondent as she spoke about the Russian invaders.
“Maybe culture is the enemy for them,” she said. “They said that Ukraine has no state, no history. They just want to destroy our country. I hope they will not succeed.”
Scythian gold has enormous symbolic value in Ukraine. Other collections of the artifacts had been stored in vaults in the capital, Kyiv, before the war broke out. But Ms. Ibrahimova said events unfolded too fast for her museum to spirit out their collection.
For years now, Ukraine has been locked in a complicated dispute with Russia over collections of Scythian gold that several museums in Crimea had lent to a museum in Amsterdam. After Russia seized Crimea in 2014, Ukraine pleaded with the Amsterdam museum not to return the gold. Russia demanded the museum do just that. A court has ruled in Ukraine’s favor and the gold remains in Amsterdam.
But historians said the looting of the artifacts in Melitopol is an even more egregious attempt to appropriate, and perhaps destroy, Ukraine’s cultural heritage.
“The Russians are making a war without rules,” said Oleksandr Symonenko, a fellow of Ukraine’s Archaeology Institute and a Scythian specialist. “This is not a war. It is destroying our life, our nature, our culture, our industry, everything. This is a crime.”
The caretaker who refused to help the Russians was released on Wednesday after the gold was stolen. But on Friday she was taken away from her house at gunpoint again, Ms. Ibrahimova said, shortly after the mayor, who is also in exile, announced the theft.
She has not been heard from since.
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Oleksandr Chubko.
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2022 Ukraine-Russia War
Ukrainian Drone Destroys Two Russian Patrol Boats off Snake Island
Two Russian Raptor patrol boats were destroyed near Snake Island by a Ukrainian Bayraktar drone Monday morning local time, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense reported, citing the head of the Armed Forces General.
“Two Russian Raptor patrol boats were destroyed in the early hours of this morning near Snake [Zmiinyi] Island. #Bayraktar works! Together to Victory!” the MOD tweeted.
Video of the drone targeting one of the Raptor patrol boats near the island in the Black Sea was included in the MOD post.
The Bayraktar TB-2 is a Turkish-designed armed drone that has been used to considerable effect by the Ukrainian Armed Forces against Russian targets.
2022 Ukraine-Russia War
A Russian tank destroyed by a Ukrainian ATGM strike in Kharkiv Oblast.
Ukraine Armed Forces: We Train to Win
Cat and Mouse …..
Meanwhile in Washington DC, people are projecting the Ukrainian flag on the Russian embassy (back entrance) & embassy staff trying to blank it out with a white light.
God, the embassy staff would’ve been smart to just say ‘fuck it’ and let the people project the flag. Sure, that’s not a good look, but this? This?
This is funny. This will spread farther than pictures/video of the flag just statically projected on the embassy would have. Instead of a basic article maybe remembered for a week, this is gonna make it immortalized as a meme.
Good on those activists, and boy howdy did those embassy workers fuck up.
