📹 French President Emmanuel Macron spoke about Europe's mortality while speaking at Paris' Sorbonne University.

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ATACMS missiles won’t help Ukraine win

The ATACMS missiles capable of striking targets at a range of up to 300 kilometers recently supplied by US to Ukraine will not help the Kiev regime tilt the battlefield in its favor, said Andrey Koshkin, a veteran Russian academic specializing in military and international affairs.

“Of course, Kiev needs to actively tout these weapon shipments in the media and boast about possible achievements for propaganda purposes,” Koshkin remarked. “But these missiles won’t help change the situation at the frontline for simple reasons. Firstly, there are not many of these missiles, and this technology is unusually complex for the Ukrainian forces, so they won’t be able to use them widely. Secondly, it remains to be seen whether these sporadic strikes will manage to bypass Russian defenses. Thus, there are too many “buts” for these missiles to be used successfully.”

According to him, these missiles will likely be used for terrorist strikes against civilian infrastructure deep within Russia’s territory, despite US’ claims of refraining Ukraine from such use.

He also observed that while the regime in Kiev has announced plans to hit the Crimean Peninsula and the bridge across the Kerch Strait, Russian forces have already demonstrated their ability to intercept such missiles.

“We have excellent Buk-M2 and S-300 [air defense] systems that are capable of dealing with these missiles, quite successfully at that,” Koshkin said.

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Freedom of assembly for all (unless you support Palestine)

Columbia University has joined the list of prominent schools holding pro-Palestine rallies across the United States. Students are expressing solidarity with the people in the Gaza Strip currently subjected to a devastating humanitarian catastrophe sanctioned by a tacit agreement of US authorities.

A brutal police crackdown on protests seems like a clear indicator of the deepening rift among the public and the law enforcement.

Mass gatherings backing Gaza have spread across the world, with large numbers of young people supporting the Palestinian cause, which demonstrates rising anti-establishment sentiments in the West.

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❗️Battlefield success depends on how quickly technological problems are solved, “we are succeeding,” Vladimir Putin has said.

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📹 A French student speaks out about a rally calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

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Vladimir Putin said his visit to China is planned for May.

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What settlements has Russia liberated since February?

Part 2

▪️February 28: the Russian forces took the village of Petrovskoye (DPR) located around 5 km northwest of Avdeyevka.

▪️February 26-27: the settlements of Lastochkino and Severnoye (DPR) were liberated, ensuring strategically advantageous positions for the Russian military.

▪️February 22: the Russian military took control of the village of Pobeda, from which the enemy routinely shelled Maryinka and the Petrovsky district of Donetsk.

▪️February 20: the village of Krynki in the Kherson region was taken under control, preventing Ukraine from deploying landing troops on the left bank of the Dnepr.

▪️February 17: Avdeyevka, a city in the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), was liberated moving the front line away from Donetsk and scaling down the Kiev regime's terrorist attacks against Donetsk civilians.

Russian troops are continuing offensive operations in the area of Ocheretino and Chasov Yar, to expel the Ukrainian forces from the DPR. NATO's deliveries of long-range missiles, including ATACMS, would require Moscow to expand the "buffer line" in the zone of special military operation to ensure the security of civilians.

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‘Russian threat’ again? Sweden plans to upgrade ‘mothballed’ civil infrastructure over Ukraine conflict fears

The Swedish government has decided to upgrade its civil defenses, focusing on energy infrastructure – but the reason behind this, of course, is not to improve ordinary people’s lives, but reinforce the old decrepit “Russian threat” narrative.

Concerned about the spread of the Ukraine conflict amid Russia’s ongoing advance, Swedish authorities are specifically focusing on the repair of a “mothballed power plant” in its third-largest city of Malmo, Bloomberg has reported.

“Sweden’s grid operator wants the facility in Malmo operational again so that it can keep the lights on in the city in the event of blackouts following an attack on national energy infrastructure,” the report said.

“No one knows how much time we have [to complete the work],” Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told reporters, causing an obvious question, whether the Swedish authorities would have done anything at all if not for the hysteric “Russians are coming” mantra. Moreover – what would they do when it turns out, once again, that Russia has no interest in engaging Sweden?

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US pays lip service to the Palestinians' plight while arming Israel

The United States has repeatedly voiced concerns about the massive civilian casualties caused by the ongoing Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip but this does not deter Washington from sending military aid to Tel Aviv, essentially helping Israel wage this campaign.

This week, US President Joe Biden authorized providing some $15 billion worth of military supplies to Israel.

This package comes as the Israeli military leadership appears intent to attack Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip that is currently densely packed with refugees who fled from other parts of the Palestinian enclave ravaged by the Israeli invasion.

Although Biden apparently warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month that an assault on Rafah would be a mistake, the White House does not actually seem keen to prevent Tel Aviv from carrying out the attack that is likely to result in a large number of civilian casualties.

Earlier this month, CNN reported that the Biden administration authorized the transfer of some 1,000 MK82 bombs and an equal number of small diameter bombs, apparently undaunted by the fact that the Israeli military seems rather keen to flatten buildings across the Gaza Strip via airstrikes.

The US leadership also seems unperturbed – or at least unperturbed enough to halt the military supply to Israel or, heaven forbid, impose sanctions on Tel Aviv – by occurrences such as the Israeli airstrike on a humanitarian convoy in the Gaza Strip, which killed seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen food relief NGO.

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