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When seeing America’s we’ll-fight-to-the-last-Ukrainian approach to Russian aggression, many Arabs conclude that the U.S. can’t be counted as a security guarantor, and that nuclear weapons—which Russia has, Iraq didn’t and Ukraine gave up—make all the difference. To be sure, many of my Arab interlocutors have perfected the art of expressing grievance through historical cherry-picking: highlighting America’s inadequacies while sidestepping their own governments’ follies and self-inflicted wounds. The reality is more complicated, and no critique of American policy can justify indulgence of Russia’s criminal behavior or reluctance to lend assistance to the Ukrainian people. These Arabs have a point, however. If...

CHERNOBYL is back under the control of Ukrainian troops after Russian forces formally gave up the nuclear plant. The site of the 1986 nuclear tragedy in northern Ukraine was captured in the opening days of the war, sparking fears of a major radioactive disaster as a result of heavy fighting around the plant. Ukraine's state nuclear company Energoatom said on Thursday that all of the "outsiders" who had been occupying the plant have left. It released a letter signed by the Russian National Guard in which custody of Chernobyl was handed back to Ukraine. Earlier, it said that some Russian...

Several hundred Russian troops have been withdrawn from the Chernobyl nuclear facility in Ukraine after suffering from “acute radiation sickness” and are being treated in Belarus, according to reports. The Pentagon confirmed earlier that the Russian forces began to pull out from the defunct facility, which was taken on the first day of the invasion, after a pledge by the Kremlin to scale back its offensive. But an employee at the Public Council at the State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone management said the soldiers had fled while “irradiated” and bused to a medical facility in Gomel, Belarus, the...

Based upon interactions here on Free Republic and various other sources, this war is a war over resources: Oil, Natural Gas, Water, Aluminum... as well as strategic buffering and traditional tyrant terrorizing. --------------------------------------------------------------- https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4050271/posts?page=119#119 To: gleeaikin Look at the Azov Natural Gas Preserves region, and then look at Russia’s Occupation Map. He has captured all the land mass of the preserve and all the access land to the underwater portion of that preserve. Mariopol happens to be smack dab in the middle of it. All the shoreline of the Azov Sea West to just short of Odessa and then out...

BREAKING: Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov says Russia would use nuclear weapons if faced with "existential" threat. “…If it is an existential threat, a threat for our country, then it can be used in accordance with our concept."pic.twitter.com/X5Z6XBlSnq— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 22, 2022

Russia destroys Chernobyl lab, gaining 'highly active samples' BY JOSEPH CHOI - 03/23/22 12:37 PM EDT © AP Photo/Sergei Grits The Russian military has reportedly destroyed a laboratory near the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant that was working to improve the management of nuclear waste and contained "highly active samples." The State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management said in a statement on social media that Russian forces had destroyed the most recently established laboratory in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The laboratory, which was created with the cooperation of the European Union, sought to improve the infrastructure for handling...

Sub Headline: According to its data, by implementing programs in both nuclear and rocket spheres over more than two decades, Ukraine was consistently nearing all the necessary conditions to create its own nuclear weaponsUkraine could have obtained nuclear weapons within several months, a source in one of Russian agencies told TASS."According to conclusions by Western experts, the Kiev regime was extremely close to creating a nuclear explosive device based on plutonium due to its covert obtainment from spent nuclear fuel stored in the country’s territory. Ukrainian specialists could have made such a device within several months," the source said.