Today, in a powerful speech that read like a poem, the Champion of Democracy President Zelenskyy said:
I am grateful to every Ukrainian who stays to defend our cities even in the encirclement. Our freedom.
But I also know that there are people who really need to get out. Who cannot stay.
And we heard the promise that there would be humanitarian corridors. But there are no humanitarian corridors, Instead of humanitarian corridors, they can only make bloody ones.
A family was killed in Ispen today. A man, a woman and two children. Right on the road. As in the shooting club. When they were just trying to get out of town. To escape. The whole family. How many such families have died in Ukraine!
We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will punish everyone who committed atrocities in this war. On our land.
We will find every bastard. Which shot at our cities, our people. Which bombed our land. Which launched rockets. Which gave the order and pressed “start”.
There will be no quiet place on this earth for you. Except for the grave.
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Strength and Honor to the free, heroic people of a democratic Ukraine to defeat Russia’s fascist dictatorship.
Right now there is a dictator who thinks he can violently conquer a sovereign democracy…but Joe Biden beat him in the last election. anon
Putin wants to make Russia an Empire again. But there’s a problem.
Without Ukraine, Russia can’t be an Empire…ever. And Putin knows it.
Problem is. The people of Ukraine have tasted freedom. They will never go back to Russian tyranny.
Poland just transferred all its Russian-made MIG-29 fighter jets to the US.
President Zelenskyy praised President Biden today: “Thankful for US and @POTUS personal leadership in striking at the heart of Putin’s war machine by banning oil, gas and coal from US market. Encourage other countries and leaders to follow.”
Whoa — slow down.
Poland OFFERED to transfer all its Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets to the US.
A non-starter. That would mean that the US would have to transfer them to Ukraine — a significant escalation by the US directly against Russia.
The question of how to get these jets into Ukraine is a hot potato that nobody wants to end up with.
It also isn’t clear whether Ukraine can even use this relatively small number of aging Soviet-era fighters. It isn’t clear that Ukrainian pilots know how to fly them, and it isn’t clear whether Ukraine has the ground personnel needed to keep them in the air.
To correct an earlier report by Forbes, MSNBC last night reported that Poland offered to deploy its older MIG-29 jets to a U.S. base in Germany but the offer was rejected by the Pentagon.
Evidently SOS Blinken had said on CNN Sunday that if the deal was approved “the US would work with Poland to backfill anything they provided to the Ukrainians.” I interpreted that to mean we would replace Poland’s obsolete fighter jets with newer US fighters.
DOD spokesman just said US transfer of Polish jets was “high risk” therefore unlikely to happen.