US President Joe Biden has apologised to his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for delays in military aid to Ukraine and has pledged $225m (£191m) in support.
The pair met for talks in Paris, a day after they both attended the 80th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France.
The US Department of Defense said the new aid package would include ammunition and anti-aircraft missiles.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mr Biden said previous delays in aid had been caused by some Republicans in Congress, but reiterated US support for Ukraine.
"The United States will stand with you," Mr Biden told Mr Zelensky. "You haven't bowed down. You haven't yielded at all. You continue to fight in a way that is just remarkable, just remarkable."
In response, Mr Zelensky stressed the importance of his country's relationship with the US, saying it was crucial in the fight against Russia: "We count on your continuing support in staying with us shoulder to shoulder."
After meeting Mr Zelensky, Mr Biden made a passionate speech at Pointe Du Hoc, a site in Normandy where US army rangers scaled a cliff to storm a Nazi stronghold on D-Day.
The US president spoke about the sacrifice of those who lost their lives on 6 June 1944, saying: "Does anyone doubt that they would want America to stand up against Putin's aggression here in Europe today?"
"They're asking us to do our job: to protect freedom in our time, to defend democracy, to stand up to aggression abroad and at home," he added.
On Thursday, Bided dropped more unfriendly remarks in relation to his Russian counterpart. In particular, he claimed that Putin was a "murderous dictator" and a "pure thug" waging an "immoral war" against the people of Ukraine.
One year ago, on March 17, 2021 the US leader made another tough statement addressed to his Russian counterpart - he replied in the affirmative when asked by an interviewer if he regarded Putin as a "killer."
Later, in a comment on Biden’s statement Putin said he had heard dozens of such accusations and already got accustomed to attacks from various sides over many years in office. He then wished Biden good health and recalled a children’s saying "If you call someone names, that’s really your name."
Weighed down by over 4,000 amendments, the legislation — which came into effect on May 18 — also narrows exemptions from military service and makes it harder to dodge the draft. It was meant to contain a provision limiting the time conscripts serve to three years, in order to appease their families, but that was spiked at the behest of military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi.
The language around the war is offputting both to young people and to family members who might otherwise let them fight, according to Melnyk, the analyst. The language of death for the sake of Ukraine is the “wrong approach”, he said. “Nobody wants to send the gene pool to destruction.”
The first is that autocrats by their nature desire conquest and the expansion of their empires. “We have also seen many times in history,” the U.S. ambassador to NATO said, “where if a dictator is not stopped, or an authoritarian leader, they keep going.”
Inconveniently, this axiom is not borne out by history. Nor does the U.S. apply it to several of its contemporary friends; Washington does not assume that the autocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia or Egypt are bent on conquering the Middle East or Africa.
The second is that Putin has said as much. Putin is often quoted as saying that “people in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart.” The second part of his statement is quoted less often: “And those that do regret it have no brain.” The historical record shows that, in his over two decades in power, Putin has not “kept going.” When Russian forces have been deployed, they have been limited to specific objectives when they could have easily kept going, as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when military conquest could have been accomplished with ease. If Putin went to war in Ukraine to prevent a war with NATO, then it makes little sense that he would use the war in Ukraine as a means to start a war with NATO.
LONDON — Boris Johnson’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings launched a sweary attack on Western support for Ukraine Thursday.
“This is not a replay of 1940 with Zelenskyy as the Churchillian underdog,” he said.
“This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence. We are getting f**ked now right?”
In a follow-up tweet, Cummings later branded Zelenskyy a “potemkin” leader — but denied he’d called him a “pumpkin” as originally quoted in the interview.
He argued that war would only strengthen the relationship between Russia and China, saying Western nations “pushed [Russia] into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power.”
Cummings has long been critical of support for Ukraine, a stance that puts him sharply at odds with his old boss Johnson, a vocal supporter of Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s war effort.
He told the paper the West had failed to send Russian President Vladimir Putin a worthwhile signal which would deter him from invading another country.
Here is how Cristopher Miller describes the “operation” in his book “The War Came to Us”. If you disregard some gloating over the Russian mistakes, on the whole the picture of the war is accurate:
“By mid-March it became clear that Russia’s invasion was for the Kremlin, in fact, a fuck-up of historic proportions.
As the troops rolled into Ukraine, relaxed, sitting on top their armored vehicles, they had been told that they’d meet little or no resistance and would be welcomed as liberators by the Ukrainians. The Russians had no maps to help guide them to Kiev or they used old maps of the city from 1989, which showed them roads that were no longer there, terrain that had long been altered with new towns and infrastructure. They carried little food and no spare clothing items except parade uniforms they believed they’d be wearing as they marched victoriously down Khreshchatyk Street in a few days’ time. And they over-extended their supply lines.
Putin’s troops never adapted to the situation, and instead repeated the same failing tactics over and over, with the same devastating results. They took wrong turns; they tried to punch-throw Ukrainian defenses with huge armored columns, including one more than 40 miles long; and they ran themselves into traps, where Ukrainian troops and volunteer fighters armed with Javelins and NLAWs easily picked them off.’
[Miller, 2023: 297]
The special military operation showed what Russian commentators, philosophers, literary figures and philologists call key concepts of Russian life and culture: irresponsibility and slovenly work at all the levels.
It is only with a passage of time that the Russians regained their victorious spirit that came down on Ukrainians with a vengeance.
Operation Hummingbird (German: Unternehmen Kolibri)
The Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer), also called the Röhm purge (German: Der Röhm-Putsch) or Operation Hummingbird (German: Unternehmen Kolibri), was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from 30 June to 2 July 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the concerns of the German military about the role of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis' paramilitary organization, known colloquially as "Brownshirts". Nazi propaganda presented the murders as a preventive measure against an alleged imminent coup by the SA under Röhm – the so-called Röhm Putsch.
The term “Bandar-log” had already entered political discourse by this time as a direct allusion to the monkey people described by Rudyard Kipling.
The Bandar-log feature most prominently in the story "Kaa's Hunting", where their scatterbrained anarchy causes them to be treated as pariahs by the rest of the jungle. Their foolish and chattering ways are illustrated by their slogan:
“We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.”
Bandar-log communicate almost entirely through the repetition of other animals' speech.
In Hindi, Bandar means "monkey" and log means "people" – hence the term simply refers to "monkey people". The term has also since come to refer to "anybody of irresponsible chatterers."
The striking phonological similarity between the name of the leader of Ukrainian nationalists “Bandera” and the name for the monkey people “Bandar-log” made the latter go immediately viral as a derisive allusion. It is not surprising that Ukrainian Bandar-log came to be associated with the extreme right of Ukrainian voters but who behave as if they were the ones who represented the overwhelming majority and who in reality represented the most unpleasant, intolerant, arrogant and aggressive species among the citizens of Ukraine.
“I walk a thin line,” Kapustin says, disputing the neo-Nazi label and noting, almost teasingly, that he doesn’t put swastikas on any of the T-shirts he flogs, as though that proves anything.
The militias don’t act in Russia on the direct orders of Kyiv, and their actions just go to show “the Kremlin is once again not in control of the situation in Russia.”
Maybe so, but it depends on how you define “under orders.”
Protesters on the route to Westminster could also be heard chanting "Rishi Sunak, shame on you" and the slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free".
Earlier this week, Home Secretary Suella Braverman urged police chiefs to consider whether the slogan should be interpreted as an "expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world", possibly making it a "racially aggravated" public order offence in some contexts.
