Ukraine Breaking News Today Live on 04-19-2024

For the second time in a year the Russian Defense Minister visited a tank factory in Omsk to monitor its performance against the production plan he gave them last June.

Russia’s Defense Ministry reported on Friday that Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu had visited the Omsktransmash tank production plant to assess whether it was implementing the defense procurement plan he gave them in June last year.

This included increased production of T-80BVM tanks, conversion of T-72 chassis into TOS-1A Solntsepyok heavy flamethrower systems and add-on armor for retrofitting to tanks deployed to Ukraine.

In this episode, Alina Hrytsenko interviews Iliya Kusa, an analyst at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, discussing the Israel-Iran confrontation and its geopolitical implications.

Kyiv Post sources in military intelligence confirm that it destroyed a Russian TU-22M3 bomber using an S-200 air defense missile, the first successful destruction of a strategic bomber in the air.

On Friday, April 19, the Ukrainian Forces shot down a Russian long-range strategic bomber, the TU-22M3 (NATO: Backfire), for the first time. Kyiv Post sources confirm that it was an operation planned and executed by the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine (HUR).

The source said that an S-200 air defense system had been used to shoot down the Russian plane at about 300 kilometers (185 miles) from Ukraine.

A Russian attack hit Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, Snelnykove, and Ukrainian National Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia) infrastructure. The Ukrainian Air Force shot down a TU-22M3 bomber that was part of the attack.

Russian missile attacks on Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region early morning Friday, April 19 killed at least eight people, including three children.

Ukraine's State Emergency Service reported that another 29 people were injured.

According to Slidstvo.info investigative website, the head of the SBU Cyber Security Department, Ilya Vityuk, filmed Berkut shooting protesters on the Maidan in 2014.

Ukrainian news outlet Slidstvo.info published claims that General Ilya Vityuk – the current head of the Cyber unit of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) now suspended from duty – filmed the shootings of protesters on Kyiv’s Maidan central square by Berkut officers while standing on their side of the street.

The Berkut, a now disbanded special police force, earned infamy under the regime of exiled Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych for its involvement in crackdowns of civil protests.

In essence, the US is protecting Russian oil exports and allowing Russia to fund the war thereby.

It's been a wild week.  Over the weekend, Iran unleashed a barrage of missiles on Israel; the world awaits the response.  President Trump is in the dock, in a criminal trial he looks set to lose.  Speaker Johnson finally appears ready to introduce various funding bills for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, even as the Clown Show tries to take him down.  And meanwhile, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, admonished Ukraine to observe proprieties and not make waves as the country fights for its life.  The US appreciates that the situation may be desperate, but for goodness sake, please do it quietly! Those attacks on Russia refineries could increase fuel prices and inconvenience all of us.

Ukraine has been facing the twin challenges of an excessively timid Biden administration and a wildly dysfunctional Republican conference in the House.  Barring a vote to fund Ukraine this weekend -- and even with it at some point -- Ukraine may be compelled to try to restrict Russian oil exports through the Black Sea.  A combination of Russian, western and other tankers export almost $10 billion of Russian crude from the Black Sea every month.  That equals the entirety of Russia's defense budget.  The oil continues to flow only because the US and western Europe so desire.  In essence, the US is protecting Russian oil exports and allowing Russia to fund the war thereby. 

“When it comes to Russia's defense industrial base, the primary contributor in this moment to that is China,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters.

G7 foreign ministers Friday expressed “strong concern” about transfers of dual-use materials and weapons components from Chinese businesses to Russia being used by Moscow for its military expansion. 

At a meeting in Italy, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had urged European counterparts to increase pressure on Beijing, who Washington accuses of helping Russia's “most ambitious defense expansion since the Soviet era.” 

The Kremlin’s up-armored T-72 tank looked like a mobile barn which Ukrainian drone operators decided not to attack, instead concentrating on the other armored vehicles it was leading.

Innovative Russian army tankers fighting in the eastern Krasnohorivka sector deployed a T-72 tank rigged with plywood sheets, roof paneling, and a mine plow in an attempt to defeat Ukrainian drone swarms, another example of the intensification of the arms race between the Kremlin's conventional army forces and Ukrainian crowd-sourced drone pilots, combat video and news reports said.

A “turtle tank” possibly operated by one of the armored formations in Moscow's 150th Motor Rifle Division located west of the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk led a column of armored vehicles through a barrage of artillery fire, cluster munitions, and drones to reach Ukrainian forward fighting positions during battles in the first week of April, combat video from the Ukrainian joint forces command  Hortitsa showed.

The two neighbors share a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border, and Helsinki has said the surge in asylum seekers has been orchestrated by Russia, a charge that Moscow has denied.

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said Friday that Russia was now focusing its hybrid attacks on neighboring Finland, using migrants to try to destabilize the country.

The Nordic nation closed its eastern border in mid-December after nearly 1,000 migrants had arrived without a visa through its border crossings with Russia since August.

The G7 is looking at bolstering Ukraine’s air defense capabilities using frozen Russian assets.

G7 foreign ministers Friday pledged to “bolster Ukraine's air defense capabilities” following a meeting on the Italian island of Capri.

In a final statement, they said that they were looking at “all possible avenues and feasible options” to use frozen Russian assets to help Kyiv, ahead of a G7 leaders’ summit in June.

Fedir Serdiuk is an example of how entrepreneurship can serve the fight for survival. He is not only saving lives on the battlefield but also shaping the future of emergency healthcare in Ukraine.

Fedir Serdiuk, a 28-year-old entrepreneur born in Odesa, embodies the new generation of Ukrainian leaders emerging during the conflict with Russia, overshadowing the old post-Soviet generation. His extraordinary professional itinerary has marked a new chapter in entrepreneurship and innovation, guiding change in a time of dire need for his country.

In 2014, as Ukraine faced increasing instability, Serdiuk voluntarily stepped up by joining the Red Cross Rescue Team. During this experience, he understood the lack of organization in Ukraine concerning first aid. This awareness inspired his subsequent entrepreneurial initiative: the founding of FAST, a company dedicated to providing first aid training to over 220 businesses.

In June during a televised broadcast President Putin held up what he said was the 2022 “peace agreement” that Ukraine had “thrown aside.” Newly acquired documents give context to his claim.

Less than a week after the start of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale of invasion of Ukraine peace talks began as, even then, it was clear that Putin’s boast to be “in Kyiv in three days” wasn’t going to happen. There then began several rounds of intense negotiation between Moscow, Kyiv, and several others that could have stopped the war virtually before it had begun.

The US international relations journal and think tank, Foreign Affairs, has acquired copies of the various draft versions of a peace treaty. They show how the discussions progressed and how the text of the treaties changed until eventually they reached a point where insurmountable differences stopped the process.

The announcement came a day after Polish and Ukrainian prosecutors said they had detained a man in Poland suspected of planning an attack on Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Polish authorities have arrested two men suspected of attacking a close ally of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Vilnius in March, Lithuania's President Gitanas Nauseda said Friday.   

Leonid Volkov was briefly admitted to hospital after he was repeatedly struck with a hammer outside his home in Vilnius on March 12. 

The world in focus, as seen by a Canadian leading global affairs analyst, writer and speaker, in his review of international media.

Two US officials have confirmed that an Israeli missile has struck Iran. Early Friday morning, explosions were heard around the central city of Isfahan, Iranian media reported, saying three drones were destroyed after the country's air defence systems were activated. Isfahan is home to an Iranian air base and the province has several military sites. There are no reports so far that anything was hit and Iranian media says all nuclear facilities are safe. Meanwhile, several flights have been diverted around Iran's airspace, tracking sites show. Israel's military and the Pentagon have both declined to comment so far - BBC

In Gaza, at least 10 members of the same family, including five children, were killed in an overnight airstrike on a neighborhood in Rafah, according to the local hospital.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argued that the international community should defend Ukraine's air space in the same way it defended Israel's.

Following the internationally coordinated and effective air defence against the Iranian attack on Israel, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for the West to show similar resolve in protecting Ukrainian airspace against Russian attacks, arguing that the example of Israel shows that Nato membership is not necessary for a country to be defended in this way. Europe's press compares the situations of the two countries.

No convincing arguments for restraint

Securing Ukraine’s war time financing with the use of immobilized Russian assets cannot be delayed any further.

It is interesting that the ECB and EU seem to be closing ranks around Euroclear on the debate around using immobilized Russian assets for Ukraine. The Belgian depository is being ring fenced now as “systemic - with the argument going that we cannot go after Russian assets there as it might risk a run on the euro or legal action by Moscow which could risk the stability of the Belgian based depository.

Both arguments appear more like scaremongering (bollox actually - excuse my French or Flemish) and indeed if Euroclear was so systemically important then it could be indemnified against any future lawsuits by Moscow by the EU. I would argue that the defeat of Ukraine by Russia, which would send Red Army tanks West again, is a much bigger and more likely systemic risk to Europe, and the euro, if we don’t secure Ukraine’s war time financing with the use of immobilized Russian assets.

Since President Putin declared Russia was developing hypersonic weapons in 2018, more than a dozen physicists working in the field have been accused of treason.

A physicist working in hypersonic aircraft research, Alexander Kuranov, became the latest such scientist to be found guilty of high treason, for activities usually considered as a normal part of a scientist’s work but considered a crime by the Kremlin.

The City Court of St. Petersburg sentenced the 76-year-old man to 7 years in a maximum-security colony and fined him 100,000 rubles ($1,100) on Thursday, April 18.

The CIA chief warned Thursday that Ukraine could lose the war to Russia by the end of this year unless the United States sends more military aid.

The grim warning by Bill Burns came as the US House of Representatives is scheduled to vote Saturday on a $61 billion aid package for Ukraine that has been held up for months by Republican lawmakers allied with Donald Trump as he seeks reelection.

The administration of President Joe Biden has been warning as it lobbied to send more ammunition and other materiel to Ukraine that the pro-Western US ally could lose territory to Russia's invasion forces unless it got more American help.

The game chronicles the ordinary life of a fictional history teacher in Kharkiv seeking shelter in the metro station at the onset of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A Ukrainian gaming studio has released a video game called “Twenty-second: Stories of Underground Kharkiv” that depicts the initial days of Russia’s 2022 invasion, taking place within the Kharkiv underground metro in eastern Ukraine where many locals have sought shelter in real life.

The game is currently available on the Steam gaming store for Hr.50 ($1.27). The developers Brenntkopf Studio Kharkiv called it a “quest and a visual novel” that will inform the players “in the first person about the events of 2022 in the Kharkiv metro.”

Last December, France seized a villa on the Atlantic Ocean purchased for €5.4 million by the new companion of Putin’s ex-wife.

In December last year, French officials confiscated a villa on the Atlantic coast that is linked to the ex-wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Challenges reports.

The confiscated home, Rêverie (or Souzanna), belongs to Russian Arthur Ocheretny, the possible secret new husband of Putin’s ex-wife, Lyudmila, and is located in Anglet, near Biarritz.

The moment of truth has arrived, and the US cannot delay helping Ukraine defeat Russia’s aggressive plans any longer, otherwise the consequences for all will be dire.

On Oct. 20, 2023, the President of the United States requested from the US Congress a $61 billion aid package for Ukraine to “provide the critical training, equipment, and weapons necessary to help Ukraine defend and recapture its sovereign territory and protect the Ukrainian people against Russian aggression”.

Ukraine’s President voiced publicly that, without this financial aid, Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine could seriously take a turn for the worse.

Trump chimes in on Ukraine-aid bill; More drone strikes on nuclear plant; Zelensky announces ramped-up domestic production of howitzers; Budanov predicts heightened attacks in June.

Republican candidate Trump says Ukrainian survival more important to Europe than US

Former US president and legally embroiled 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump said Thursday that Europe should step up its funding for Ukraine, as Congress debates sending a months-delayed $61 billion package to Kyiv. At his urging, House Republicans have designed part of that package in the form of a loan.