With NATO's help Ukraine continues its military assault on Donetsk Peoples Republic

Joaquin Flores
Fort Russ

Fort Russ publishes a complete summary of the military situation in the Donetsk People's Republic over the past day as a result of today's briefing by the deputy commander of operations, Eduard Basurin.

The situation on the battle line remains tense.

Over the past day in the Donetsk area Ukrainian occupation forces shelled the districts of eight settlements. The enemy fired 60 mines from mortars of various caliber, and also fired from the arms of infantry fighting vehicles, grenade launchers and small arms.

Five settlements were attacked in the Gorlovsky area. During the shelling, mortars of 82 mm caliber, BMP armament, grenade launchers and small arms were used.

In the Mariupol area, the enemy fired at areas of five settlements, firing 80 minuntes from mortars of various calibres, and also used BMP armament.

As a result of shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, two housing constructions and an electrical substation in the city were damaged. Likewise in Dokuchaevsk, in addition, neat the city of Donetsk three houses were destroyed in the Kominternovo.
The Ukrainian punitive forces did not stop there and continued shelling the settlements of the Republic since morning. So, as a result of shelling in Dokuchaevsk, multiple fragment wounds were received by Valery Prokopenko, and as a result of the shelling of the village of Zaitsevo, citizen Moskalets Anatoly Nikolayevich was killed.

Also, during the restoration work on the DFS in the presence of representatives of the OSCE mission, the soldiers of the Armed Forces, despite the security guarantees provided, opened fire from small arms.

I would like to note that the Ukrainian leadership is doing its utmost to resume the active phase of the fighting in the Donbass, resulting in this week injured nine civilians and one died.
In just one day Ukrainian gangs violated the truce 36 times.

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Pentagon is spooked from what it has seen from Russia in Donbass

Patrick Tucker
Russia Insider

US army planners have been thoroughly shaken by what they have seen Russian artillery and electronic warfare can do and how well-protected its tanks are.

 When Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster briefs, it's like Gen. Patton giving a TED talk — a domineering physical presence with bristling intellectual intensity.

These days, the charismatic commander of the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command is knee-deep in a project called The Russia New Generation Warfare study, an analysis of how Russia is re-inventing land warfare in the mud of Eastern Ukraine. Speaking recently at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., McMaster said that the two-year-old conflict had revealed that the Russians have superior artillery firepower, better combat vehicles, and have learned sophisticated use of UAVs for tactical effect. Should U.S. forces find themselves in a land war with Russia, he said, they would be in for a rude, cold awakening.

"We spend a long time talking about winning long-range missile duels," said McMaster. But long-range missiles only get you through the front door. The question then becomes what will you do when you get there.

"Look at the enemy countermeasures," he said, noting Russia's use of nominally semi-professional forces who are capable of "dispersion, concealment, intermingling with civilian populations...the ability to disrupt our network strike capability, precision navigation and timing capabilities." All of that means "you're probably going to have a close fight... Increasingly, close combat overmatch is an area we've neglected, because we've taken it for granted."

So how do you restore overmatch? The recipe that's emerging from the battlefield of Ukraine, says McMaster, is more artillery and better artillery, a mix of old and new. 

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Russian human rights groups to file thousands of lawsuits against Kiev over human rights violations in Donbass

RT

Russian human rights groups will soon file about 17,000 lawsuits from Ukrainian citizens in the European court. They seek compensation of about $5.6 billion over numerous rights violations committed by pro-Kiev military during the conflict in Donbass.

The court action is coordinated by the Russian Public Chamber. Activist Georgy Fyodorov, a co-chairman of the chamber's committee for humanitarian aid to the southeastern regions of Ukraine, said in comments with Izvestia daily that each lawsuit is prepared on behalf a single person or a family whose rights had been infringed.

Fyodorov said that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg had accepted about 400 cases and was considering 500 more. He said that at first the ECHR tried to reject the applications offering "far-fetched excuses," but stopped doing so after the cases started flowing en masse.

The activist noted that the first process on one of these cases should start before the end of this year.

The average compensation sought by the Donbass residents from the Kiev government amounts to €300,000 (US$335,000). The total amount of money sought by all plaintiffs could reach €5 billion ($5.58 billion).
The activist said that Russian rights groups had collected materials for 10,000 cases from refugees who fled to the Russian Federation from the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions after the start of Kiev's military campaign. Seven thousand more lawsuits were written in southeastern Ukraine, both in the self-proclaimed republics in Donbass and on territories controlled by the Ukrainian government, such as the Kharkov and Odessa Regions. 

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Howling in Donetsk

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

Asia Times' roving correspondent Pepe Escobar just returned from a reporting trip to the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the pro-Russian enclave in the Donetsk Oblast province of eastern Ukraine. The area's been the scene of heavy fighting between pro-Russian rebels and the Ukrainian military.

I've just been to the struggling Donetsk People's Republic. Now I'm back in the splendid arrogance and insolence of NATOstan.

Quite a few people - in Donbass, in Moscow, and now in Europe - have asked me what struck me most about this visit.

I could start by paraphrasing Allen Ginsberg in Howl - "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness".

But these were the Cold War mid-1950s. Now we're in early 21st century Cold War 2.0 .

Thus what I saw were the ghastly side effects of the worst minds of my - and a subsequent - generation corroded by (war) madness.

I saw refugees on the Russian side of the border, mostly your average middle-class European family whose kids, when they first came to the shelter, would duck under tables when they heard a plane in the sky.  

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