Latest news with #paratroopers
Al Jazeera
6 days ago
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Russia eyes Ukraine's ‘fortress belt' after fall of Chasiv Yar
During a difficult week in Ukraine's ground war, Russian troops completed their conquest of Chasiv Yar, a high ground in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, and claimed to have breached the outskirts of Kupiansk, a city with a pre-war population of more than 26,000, in Ukraine's northern Kharkiv region. Both conquests are the result of months-long efforts and have cost the Russians dearly in blood and weapons. At the same time, Russian forces pushed into Dnipropetrovsk, a Ukrainian region whose borders they first breached over the weekend of June 7-8, capturing the village of Sichneve, which Russians call Yanvarskoye. It was the third claimed conquest in Dnipropetrovsk. Earlier, Russia captured Dachnoye and Malynivka. Russia also began to launch jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicles to deadly effect, killing 31 people in Kyiv on July 31. Ukraine responded with deep strikes on Russian transport networks and energy hubs. Chasiv Yar and the 'fortress belt' Russia's Ministry of Defence said its paratroopers overran Chasiv Yar on July 31. Moscow's forces began to besiege the city in March 2024, about a month after the fall of Avdiivka, 30km (20 miles) to the south freed up offensive troops. Russia prioritised this line of attack after conquering the city of Bakhmut in May 2023, following months of battles led by Wagner Group mercenaries. Since Bakhmut fell, Russian forces have conquered a salient running 27km (17 miles) west of it. Chasiv Yar presented a challenge and a prize – a challenge because it sat astride a canal that formed a natural defensive barrier, and a prize because it is a vantage point from which Russia can survey the remaining free areas of Donetsk. 'Chasiv Yar is a key height in terms of adjusting observation and conducting combat operations,' military expert Vitaly Kiselyov told the Soloviev Live television network in Russia. 'To all appearances, we will be outflanking from the south and the north, gradually puncturing the enemy forces and edging them out, all the more so as we now hold an advantageous height relative to all other settlements,' said Kiselyov. Another Russian military expert said the capture of Chasiv Yar enabled Russian forces to advance towards the so-called 'fortress belt' of heavily defended Ukrainian cities in Donetsk. 'Chasiv Yar is situated on a hilltop, and beyond it, there are very vast expanses of flat terrain. The nearest agglomeration – Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka – is well fortified,' Andrey Marochko told the Russian newswire TASS. Chasiv Yar sits at the northern end of an attempted Russian encirclement of Konstiantynivka, and on Saturday, the Russian Defence Ministry claimed its forces had captured Aleksandro-Kalinovo, on the southern end of the crab's claw enclosing Konstiantynivka. Some analysts disagreed that the fall of Chasiv Yar was as important as Russian analysts made it sound. 'Tactical Russian advances westward in Chasiv Yar do not constitute an operationally significant development in this area,' said the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank. 'Russian forces have held most of northern and central Chasiv Yar since late January 2025 and began advancing in southwestern Chasiv Yar in mid-June 2025,' the ISW said. It added that Ukrainian lines of communication were not further threatened, since 'Russian forces have been within tube artillery range of Ukraine's main logistics route through the fortress belt since late January 2025 and have held positions along the T-0504 Bakhmut-Kostyantynivka highway for several months, and have yet to significantly threaten Ukrainian positions in Kostiantynivka.' The situation was different in Pokrovsk, some 35km (22 miles) southwest of Chasiv Yar, which Russia has also besieged. Denis Pushilin, the head of the pro-Russian, self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, said Ukrainian lines of communication into Pokrovsk had been impaired. 'The enemy has been largely denied the possibility to deliver ammunition and carry out troop rotation,' Pushilin said. Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii said on Telegram, 'The most difficult situation now is in the Pokrovsk, Dobropillia, and Novopavlivka directions,' naming two more settlements that lie behind Pokrovsk in unoccupied Donetsk. 'The enemy is increasing efforts to capture our key agglomerations, looking for vulnerable spots in our defence, and conducting active combat operations simultaneously on several fronts,' he said. He said Russian forces were forming sabotage groups in the Ukrainian rear in an attempt at 'total infiltration', and that Ukraine was 'using anti-sabotage reserves, whose task is to search for and destroy enemy sabotage groups'. Kupiansk and the 'buffer zone' At the northern end of the front, Russia claimed to have entered Kupiansk in Kharkiv on Tuesday. Russian troops were fighting street battles in Kupiansk, Russian military expert Andrey Marochko told TASS. He said troops were deploying small, mobile groups targeting Ukrainian positions with precise strikes. Russia's forays into Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv lie beyond Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, the four regions Russia formally annexed in September 2022. Russia claims to be creating a buffer zone to protect those regions, but Ukraine believes that claim to be an excuse for further occupation. Russian low-level officials have suggested that the buffer zone should be at least 30km (20 miles) deep, but the Russian leadership has placed no such limit. Moscow also continued its long-range strikes against Ukraine. An overnight drone attack on July 31 killed 31 people in Kyiv. The Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said Russia used jet-powered Shahed drones, which travel much faster than the propeller-driven kind, and are difficult to intercept. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched eight Iskander-K cruise missiles from Kursk city and 309 Shahed-type and decoy drones. United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it 'an absolutely vile, brutal strike'. The war of words Even as he pressed on with these offensives, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine was not ready for peace talks. During a news conference with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday, Putin said, 'In principle, we can wait if the Ukrainian leadership believes that now is not the time,' adding that 'all disappointments arise from excessive expectations.' He was referring to the fact that three rounds of direct negotiations have yielded no ceasefire. United States President Donald Trump repeated last week that he was 'disappointed' in Putin, and has in recent weeks allowed US weapons to flow to Ukraine. On Friday, the US Pentagon said it would sell Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air (AMRAAM) missiles to Ukraine. Trump also got into a social media spat with Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia's National Security Council, after Medvedev objected to Trump's August 9 deadline for Russia to seal a ceasefire deal. On Saturday, Trump wrote on his TruthSocial service that he had 'ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that'. On the same day, Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on India for buying Russian oil. On Tuesday, he told CNBC, 'I'm going to raise that very substantially over the next 24 hours, because they're buying Russian oil, they're fuelling the war machine, and if they're going to do that, I'm not going to be happy.' Ukraine's strikes Meanwhile, Ukraine stepped up its interdiction campaign against Russian energy and transport infrastructure. On July 31, Russia said it shot down 32 Ukrainian long-range UAVs in its western border regions. As a result of the Ukrainian attack, it said rail services in the Volgograd region were delayed. Ukraine has been attacking the Russian railways connecting defence factories to the front, said open-source intelligence gatherer Frontelligence Insight. Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, said a radio factory in Penza, Russia was attacked, which made mobile command complexes and automated combat control systems. On Saturday, Ukraine unleashed a wide-ranging set of strikes. Kovalenko said the Radio Plant in Penza was attacked a second time, along with Electropribor, a manufacturer of encryptors, secure modems and switches for military and intelligence agencies. Ukraine also hit a storage and launch site for Shahed drones at the Primorsko-Akhtarsk military airfield in Krasnodar. But its biggest hits were against oil refineries. Ukraine attacked the Ryazan Oil Refinery, one of Russia's four largest, responsible for more than 6 percent of all refining in Russia, causing a fire. Also hit was the Novokuybyshevsk Oil Refinery near Samara city, where explosions were filmed. Ukraine also struck the Annanafteproduct oil depot in the Voronezh region, setting it alight, and on Sunday, a Ukrainian long-range strike hit an oil depot in Sochi on the Black Sea. Ukrainian media reported that explosions damaged the main Russian gas pipeline carrying gas from Turkmenistan to Russia, shutting it down indefinitely. The media outlets said it supplied military industries, including the Demikhov Machine-Building Plant, the MiG aircraft company, and the Magnum-K ammunition plant.
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Gathering stormclouds can't wipe smile from Trump's face as long-held dream of military parade is realised
It may have been billed as a military parade to celebrate the American military's history, but it said even more about the country's present and future under Donald Trump. Soldiers, tanks and even robot dogs paraded along Constitution Ave. on Saturday, as paratroopers swooped in from overhead and military aircraft buzzed past the Washington Monument for the first major military parade held in the US capital since the victory after the first Gulf War of 1991. Or was this all a celebration for Trump's 79th birthday? As the president took the stage under ominous stormclouds, it appeared that the celebrant could not have beamed any wider, his eight-year-old dream of holding a military parade in the capital finally coming to fruition. Related: 'No Kings' protests stir US as Trump celebrates birthday with military parade – in pictures For both his supporters and opponents who flocked to the National Mall on Saturday, this was 'Trump's parade' (he even billed it as his own in a fundraising email this week). 'This could only happen under President Trump,' bellowed one voice after the Star-Spangled Banner played on the National Mall as families queued to sit in Army helicopters and atop anti-aircraft batteries. It felt like it could have been a scene from Moscow. Such is the line-blurring taking place as America's military finds itself at the centre of the most contentious legal fight in decades. While the Trump administration has vowed to limit the military's footprint abroad, it has also greenlit the deployment of hundreds of marines to Los Angeles in a controversial move that has led to legal battles and the eruption of protests around the country against the aggressive use of law enforcement to arrest and deport immigrants. For Trump, the parade is an opportunity to signal the ambitions of his administration's second term: no longer constrained by concerns over a price tag estimated as high as $90m or the concerns of comparisons to authoritarian leaders who also love to parade their tanks and missiles. 'Every other country celebrates their victories. It's about time America did, too,' Trump said on Saturday night. 'That's what we're doing tonight.' It is also a paradox: Donald Trump campaigned on the premise of ending foreign wars, and yet what Americans got was a show of strength in the heart of Washington DC. JD Vance, the voice of Trump's anti-interventionist foreign policy, spoke to that contradiction, telling the assembled soldiers that the parade was a sign of the administration's respect for America's servicemen and women. 'To our soldiers, we're so proud of you,' he said. 'And let me tell you, the way that we honor and respect you, number one, we never ask you to go to war unless you absolutely have to.' Trump's love of military pomp is well known. His desire for a parade goes back at least to his attendance of the French Bastille Day parades in 2017, when he was so in awe of the event that he said it was a 'tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France.' 'We're going to have to try to top it,' he added. Whether he succeeded in that is a question that will be fought on cable television and in internet forums. There were sour notes, as when several second world war-era tanks creaked past the tribune. Yet many of the attending faithful appeared overjoyed at the spectacle. Administration officials have pushed back at criticism that it is a reflection of an authoritarian turn under Trump. 'No one ever calls Macron a dictator for celebrating Bastille Day,' one official told CNN. Yet Trump has also indicated that his parade is meant to keep up with the real heavyweights, including the yearly Victory Day parade in Russia meant to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany. 'We had more to do with winning World War II than any other nation,' he said this week. 'Why don't we have a Victory Day? So we're going to have a Victory Day for World War I and for World War II.' Parades do not exist in vacuums – they expand and change to reflect the political times in which a country lives. Russia's Victory Day celebrations became muted marches under the administration of Boris Yeltsin. In 2008, Putin reintroduced the T-90 tanks and heavy ballistic missiles to recognise Russia's resurgent military might and geopolitical ambitions. Months later, Russia invaded Georgia in a war that many say presaged the later invasion of Ukraine. Yet sitting in front of the assembled crowds on Saturday evening, the president managed to hold his event – defying the skepticism over the spectacle and even the forecasts of a downpour that would rain on his parade.
The Guardian
15-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Gathering stormclouds can't wipe smile from Trump's face as long-held dream of military parade is realised
It may have been billed as a military parade to celebrate the American military's history, but it said even more about the country's present and future under Donald Trump. Soldiers, tanks and even robot dogs paraded along Constitution Ave. on Saturday, as paratroopers swooped in from overhead and military aircraft buzzed past the Washington Monument for the first major military parade held in the US capital since the victory after the first Gulf War of 1991. Or was this all a celebration for Trump's 79th birthday? As the president took the stage under ominous stormclouds, it appeared that the celebrant could not have beamed any wider, his eight-year-old dream of holding a military parade in the capital finally coming to fruition. For both his supporters and opponents who flocked to the National Mall on Saturday, this was 'Trump's parade' (he even billed it as his own in a fundraising email this week). 'This could only happen under President Trump,' bellowed one voice after the Star-Spangled Banner played on the National Mall as families queued to sit in Army helicopters and atop anti-aircraft batteries. It felt like it could have been a scene from Moscow. Such is the line-blurring taking place as America's military finds itself at the centre of the most contentious legal fight in decades. While the Trump administration has vowed to limit the military's footprint abroad, it has also greenlit the deployment of hundreds of marines to Los Angeles in a controversial move that has led to legal battles and the eruption of protests around the country against the aggressive use of law enforcement to arrest and deport immigrants. For Trump, the parade is an opportunity to signal the ambitions of his administration's second term: no longer constrained by concerns over a price tag estimated as high as $90m or the concerns of comparisons to authoritarian leaders who also love to parade their tanks and missiles. 'Every other country celebrates their victories. It's about time America did, too,' Trump said on Saturday night. 'That's what we're doing tonight.' It is also a paradox: Donald Trump campaigned on the premise of ending foreign wars, and yet what Americans got was a show of strength in the heart of Washington DC. JD Vance, the voice of Trump's anti-interventionist foreign policy, spoke to that contradiction, telling the assembled soldiers that the parade was a sign of the administration's respect for America's servicemen and women. 'To our soldiers, we're so proud of you,' he said. 'And let me tell you, the way that we honor and respect you, number one, we never ask you to go to war unless you absolutely have to.' Trump's love of military pomp is well known. His desire for a parade goes back at least to his attendance of the French Bastille Day parades in 2017, when he was so in awe of the event that he said it was a 'tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France.' 'We're going to have to try to top it,' he added. Whether he succeeded in that is a question that will be fought on cable television and in internet forums. There were sour notes, as when several second world war-era tanks creaked past the tribune. Yet many of the attending faithful appeared overjoyed at the spectacle. Administration officials have pushed back at criticism that it is a reflection of an authoritarian turn under Trump. 'No one ever calls Macron a dictator for celebrating Bastille Day,' one official told CNN. Yet Trump has also indicated that his parade is meant to keep up with the real heavyweights, including the yearly Victory Day parade in Russia meant to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany. 'We had more to do with winning World War II than any other nation,' he said this week. 'Why don't we have a Victory Day? So we're going to have a Victory Day for World War I and for World War II.' Parades do not exist in vacuums – they expand and change to reflect the political times in which a country lives. Russia's Victory Day celebrations became muted marches under the administration of Boris Yeltsin. In 2008, Putin reintroduced the T-90 tanks and heavy ballistic missiles to recognise Russia's resurgent military might and geopolitical ambitions. Months later, Russia invaded Georgia in a war that many say presaged the later invasion of Ukraine. Yet sitting in front of the assembled crowds on Saturday evening, the president managed to hold his event – defying the skepticism over the spectacle and even the forecasts of a downpour that would rain on his parade.
Washington Post
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
76 broken norms led the big parade
In today's edition: It's a weird moment for the military, and not only because one wonders whether the Army's Golden Knights paratroopers, scheduled to drop onto the Ellipse on Saturday to present President Donald Trump with an American flag, will also be toting a cake for the commander in chief who scheduled this big, martial shebang to coincide with his own birthday. How does fondant hold up at near-terminal velocity?
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Paratroopers release footage showing capture of Russian soldiers
Paratroopers have released a video showing how they, together with neighbouring units, captured Russian soldiers on the Kursk front. Source: Air Assault Forces Command Quote: "Russian soldiers are surrendering because the abuse in their units is worse than captivity. In their units on Russian territory, they were subjected to inhumane treatment, psychological pressure and threats." Details: The paratroopers emphasised that the POWs could be used for further exchange for Ukrainian soldiers held captive in Russia. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
