Ukrainan kriisi - Venäjä hyökkää Ukrainaan maalta, mereltä ja ilmasta

[El Mencho]

^

In short, western leaders’ repeated pledges at the beginning of the war to give Ukraine ‘whatever it takes’ for ‘as long as it takes’ (Joe Biden in June and November 2022), were fundamentally misleading. Indeed, these open-ended but non-specific promises – which became a mantra repeated by all British prime ministers since Boris Johnson and were recently reaffirmed by Andrew Burnham in Kyiv – ended up achieving the worst of all worlds. The already-paranoid Kremlin was convinced that it was fighting the ‘collective West’ – while that self-same West continued to buy the Kremlin’s oil and gas and transport it in their ships.

The crunch point – where those promises will finally crash hard into reality – will come soon in the form of an imminent fiscal crisis in Kyiv. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Serhii Koretsky recently announced that Kyiv has already spent most of its 2026 defence funds and faces a looming €26 billion (£22 billion) budget black hole – despite a recent €90 billion (£78 billion) loan from the EU. That loan, secured after months of Brussels horse-trading, represented the high-water mark of what the EU is realistically capable of raising. As Ukraine heads into the hardest and most punishing winter of the war, it is about to run out of not only Patriot missiles and men for the front lines, but money to fight on.

At the same time, Zelensky faces a perfect political storm at home. A year of relentless corruption scandals in Kyiv – the latest featuring the arrest of a deputy prosecutor general on charges of protecting online scam centres – has seriously eroded trust in Zelensky’s administration. A dozen senior members of his team are now in jail, under investigation or have fled abroad. A shoot-out in a Kyiv street between rival factions of Ukraine’s SBU and HUR domestic and military intelligence services have left many Ukrainians wondering if their country is sliding back to 1990s-style gangsterism. Last week, an investigation by the New York Times found that Ukraine’s military procurement system has suffered from serious fraud, waste and mismanagement during the war. Secret audits show that in 2024 alone, about $1.2 billion (£900 million) was lost through overpayments and corrupt contracts. Unsurprisingly, August polls by SOCIS show that a majority of Ukrainians consider corruption a more serious threat to their state than Russia – and that nearly 57 per cent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky for the prevalence of corruption, nearly double the number in a similar poll from April 2025. The same poll also also projects that three different rivals would beat him in a second-round election, each by a landslide margin of around two-to-one.
https://spectator.com/article/ukraine-i ... r-witkoff/

[rikkalapio]

Niin ne aatokset muuttuvat kun ei enää kyetä tappiota peittemään

[El Mencho]

Kyllähän siinä kesti mutta tässä kohtaa voi jo todeta, että koronapiikittämisen puolestapuhujat olivat väärässä jälleen kerran.

[Schimanski]

Ukrainalaiskomentaja julkaisi videon Putinin ”vallatuksi” julistamasta kaupungista. Ristiriita Venäjän puheiden ja todellisuuden välillä on yhä räikeämpi.

– Haluan puhua Venäjän sotilasjohdolle ja sotilaspoliittiselle johdolle. Ottakaa pellenenät ja värikkäät peruukkinne pois. Älkää näyttäkö typeryksiltä. Kolmannen armeijakunnan 60. mekanisoitu prikaati hallitsee kaupunkia täysin. Käytännössä tämä on meidän selusta-aluettamme.

https://www.is.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000012260017.html