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Ukraine's air force has previously said Russia has used the Tu-22M3 aircraft to fire Kh-22 cruise missiles at Ukrainian territory. The HUR said the bomber that was downed "carried out a missile attack against Ukraine on the night of April 19." The aircraft was shot down "as a result of a [HUR] special operation in cooperation with the Air Force," it said, adding that it was struck at a distance of about 300 kilometers from Ukraine. The HUR added: "It should be noted that this is the first successful destruction of a strategic bomber in the air during a combat...

DRAMATIC footage captured the moment Ukraine "shot down" a Russian Tu-22M3 nuke bomber sending it spiralling to the ground. The £228million aircraft was part of Vladimir Putin’s nuclear strike force - and the downing is seen as a major blow to the dictator. It crashed over the Stavropol region - some 250 miles from the border - in southern Russia after completing a bombing attack on Ukraine. The long-range strategic bomber was shot down by a S-200 anti-aircraft missile system, said Channel 2, citing sources in Ukraine's GUR military intelligence agency. The GUR said: “As a result of the damage,...

UKRAINE has launched another blistering attack on one of Putin's key military airfields in occupied Crimea. Dramatic footage shows blinding explosions erupting overnight as Kyiv's forces destroyed valuable ammunition stores in the blitz. Ukraine launched it's overnight ambush above Dzhankoi airfield in northern Crimea. The military base - a key hub for Russia - is used by Putin’s twisted forces to launch strikes on Ukraine. Ukraine used US-made ATACMS long range missiles in the pinpoint strike. Some of Putin's valued choppers are kept at Dzhankoi along with Russian S-300 and S-400 missile systems. Missile alerts were only sounded after the...

..... Today these drones—hundreds of thousands of them—are the most important systems in the Ukrainian inventory. This means tactical radio jammers, which can block the signals operators use to control their drones, are the most important systems in the Russian inventory. So when Russian tanks began rolling toward the front line with a giant new jammer—actually, clusters of multiple jammers—in recent weeks, Ukrainian drone operators were interested. Very interested. If the new jammers worked, the Ukrainian operators would need to develop countermeasures. Their chance to find out came earlier this month, when a Russian T-72 festooned with jammers ran over...

Tens of thousands of residents in the Russian city of Orenburg and neighbouring Kazakhstan have been told to evacuate immediately as flood waters inundate homes. -snip- Orenburg is home to half a million people, and the city's mayor Sergei Salmin said the situation was extremely dangerous. "Over the last 10 hours, the water level in the Ural River has risen by 40cm … these levels are dangerous," he wrote on the Telegram messenger app. He called on residents to gather essential items and to abandon their homes. Emergency workers said water levels in the Ural River were more than two...

Welcome to the club, Tucker. It won’t end well for you. What do Tucker Carlson, the isolationist conservative pundit, and Elizabeth Warren, the woke progressive senator of Massachusetts, share in common? Not much, other than their sickening slander of Israel, America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East. -snip- Yesterday, in an interview on X (formerly Twitter) that already has over 7 million views, Tucker Carlson gave a platform to Pastor Munther Isaac, the conference director of Christ and the Checkpoint, a well-known anti-Israel propagandist forum in Bethlehem that seeks to undermine Evangelical Christian support for Israel. Christ and the...

Former CIA Director John Brennan criticized former President Trump in an interview with a Belgian state broadcaster published Sunday, saying Trump isn’t qualified to handle national security matters. “I think he didn’t believe what we were telling him,” Brennan said in the interview with RTBF, referring to a meeting on national security he had with Trump before his inauguration in 2017. “And he was especially trying to find out how we knew what we knew about Russian interference in the election,” Brennan continued. “According to me, he was not qualified at the time, and he is not qualified today. We...

Russians left homeless following floods have directed their frustration towards President Vladimir Putin and local officials. Over a hundred individuals sought aid from Putin on Monday after the city or Orsk was struck with the worst flooding ever recorded, expressing their discontent with local authorities whom they accuse of insufficient assistance. An emergency was declared in the Orenburg region near Kazakhstan, as the Ural River, Europe’s third longest, surged several meters in mere hours last Friday, breaching a dam embankment in the city. Large portions of Orsk, situated 1,800 km east of Moscow with a population of 230,000, now lie...

Russia is having to use electronic parts meant for its air defense systems to manufacture its Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) due to shortages caused by sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine, according to a local report. -snip- "Sources of VChK-OGPU say that today the Krasnoyarsk Machine-Building Plant is experiencing a serious shortage of electronic components...for the production of strategic missiles," the channel said. "The electronics of the new RS-28 (Sarmat) missile system are largely of foreign origin and, due to sanctions, are experiencing a serious shortage. Now all efforts are being made to somehow correct the situation with...

A team of vigilante hackers carrying out cyber-attacks against Russia has been sent awards of gratitude by Ukraine's military. The team, One Fist*, has stolen data from Russian military firms and hacked cameras to spy on troops. The certificates are a controversial sign of how modern warfare is shifting. [excerpt] *One Fist is made up of hackers from eight different countries including the UK, US and Poland.

Russian Armed Forces appear to have downed their own Su-27 fighter jet over occupied Crimea. A Ukrainian spokesperson said human error was to blame for the Russian blunder. Russia's aviation losses have been growing significantly in 2024.

Belarus' strongman dictator Alexander Lukashenko has seemingly undermined Russia's claims that Ukraine was behind the deadly Moscow massacre, after revealing the four terrorists tried fleeing to Belarus, not Ukraine.

The governor of Russia's Samara region said on Saturday that Ukrainian drones had struck two Rosneft oil refineries in the region, causing no casualties but leaving one facility on fire. Governor Dmitry Azarov said in a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app that the Volga river region's Syzran refinery was on fire, but that an attack on the Novokubyshev refinery had been thwarted. He said workers at both plants had been evacuated, and that there were no casualties. Unverified footage published online showed what appeared to be a major fire at the Syzran refinery, with emergency services working at...

The incumbent Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, who is vying for the country’s top office as an independent candidate, has cast his electronic vote in the presidential election, APA reports quoting TASS. The published video footage shows Putin walking to a computer in his office, casting his vote and then smiling and waving at the camera. The computer monitor displayed a standard notification for a successfully cast vote.

Voting for Russia's presidential elections was disrupted today in the border region Belgorod amid new shelling and incursions of anti-Kremlin Russian groups from Ukraine that forced 'thousands' of people to evacuate. Polling was suspended in Belgorod city after it came under artillery fire, with clips circulated by Russian news channels on the Telegram messaging app showing trucks and cars blown to pieces by the shelling. Election officials were seen wearing bulletproof gear as they monitored voting on the first day of a three-day election expected to return Putin by a landslide. Meanwhile, footage appears to show anti-Putin pro-Ukrainian partisan paramilitary...

Vladimir Putin could raise taxes after the presidential election this month to keep the money flowing to pay for the country's war in Ukraine. Bloomberg reported on Monday that the Kremlin is considering dipping into the pockets of high-earning Russians and corporations, as the government plans to hike taxes by as much as 4 trillion rubles ($44 billion). Sources said that the hikes could be finalized this summer. Under the plan, the government would raise personal income tax from 15% to 20% for those earning over 5 million rubles (roughly $55k USD) and from 13% to 15% for those making...

President Vladimir Putin is facing trouble in his ongoing war in Ukraine, days before the country's election, which is expected to result in the Russian leader remaining in power until at least 2030. This week has so far been tumultuous for the Russian president. On Tuesday night, the country was attacked by more than 60 Ukrainian drones, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, with targets including a Federal Security Service building in the southern Belgorod region and an oil refinery—both of which sustained damage. Multiple incursions by Russian defectors were also launched on Russian soil. The militia groups Freedom of...

Deliveries of all-new Russian aircraft have been delayed by two years due to safety concerns ... The publication said that, for example, the weight of the new MS-21 passenger aircraft has increased by 5.75 tons, compared to the previous version, which used foreign components and Western engines. This means its flight range and altitude have been significantly reduced. One of Kommersant's sources said that, if Russia is unable to reduce the weight of the aircraft, it will be impossible for authorities to make the plane achieve the desired performance characteristics. "It's impossible to increase engine thrust by 20 percent," the...

An NBC News review of available 2024 crime data from the cities targeted by Texas’ “Operation Lone Star,” which buses or flies migrants from the border to major cities in the interior — shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants. Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles. Crime has risen in Washington, D.C., but local officials do not attribute the spike to migrants.

ussian spies have developed an artificial intelligence tool that Moscow is using to meddle in elections in Britain and the United States on a scale “exponentially greater” than ever before, Ukraine’s national security adviser has warned. In an interview with The Times, Oleksiy Danilov said that AI had enabled Russia to substantially ramp up its disinformation campaigns, designed to sow division and influence public opinion, and that Moscow now had specific units dedicated to every country holding an election in Europe. He said: “Artificial intelligence is a huge step forward for Russia and it makes the impact [of their meddling]...