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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War for Ukraine Day 868: What Does Underway Actually Mean?

War for Ukraine Day 868: What Does Underway Actually Mean?

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. The background is black. There is a white cross in a broken window frame. In front of it is a hispital bed with an IV stand falling across it. Wires from a broken monitor on the right are strewn on the floor with a yellow basketball on the right and teddy bear on the left. In the foreground are fragments of a Russian cruise missile, which are red, and have the "Z" war symbol. In the top of the painting in grey is written "Children's Hospital." Below that in red "Is Just Another Target for Russia" is written.

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

A couple of quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is still doing very well after her first chemo treatment of round three on Monday. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, the new router arrived this afternoon. It actually set up without any problems. And I’m back up and running. Despite the old one only being a couple of years old, it is amazingly fast, even with the VPN.

More on the butcher’s bill from the attack on Kyiv on Monday.

“I did not feel [the glass] in my back. But a lot of it was taken out.”

Oleh Holubchenko, a doctor in a blood-stained uniform, whose photo went viral, told about what he experienced during the Russian missile attack on Ohmatdyt children’s hospital.

At the time of the attack, he was performing surgery on the child’s face. He says he heard the explosions and thought the missiles were not flying at the children’s hospital. The device broke down after the hit, and the child was left without ventilation, but the doctors used their wits and saved the little patient.

The child was carried to the shelter right from the operating table. After that, Oleh Holubchenko called his pregnant wife, told her that he was fine, and ran to the shattered toxicology building to clear the rubble with the glass fragments in his back.

He is back at work, saving lives. What an incredible person Oleh is.

📹: TSN

On July 8, five people were killed in the ADONIS clinic as a result of a Russian missile attack on Kyiv.

◾️Svitlana Poplavska was an obstetrician-gynecologist and mother of three children.

◾️Tetiana Sharova was a senior nurse and mother. In 2014, at the beginning of the war, she and her family fled from Donetsk. Her son was in Russian captivity.

◾️Viktor Brahutsa was an ultrasound diagnostics doctor, father of two daughters.

◾️Oksana Korzh was a nurse and mother of two children. Her younger son graduated from school this year, and her older daughter recently gave birth to twins.

◾️Viktoriia Bondarenko was a senior cashier and mother of two children.

Eternal memory. Deepest condolences to the families.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

We Continue Our Work in Washington, and There Will Be a Decision Regarding the F-16s Very Soon – Address by the President

10 July 2024 – 16:12

I wish you health, fellow Ukrainians!

Today, we continue our work in Washington. Very soon, there will be a decision regarding the F-16s. We are increasing the number of aircraft available to Ukraine. Yesterday, we secured a decision on 5 more Patriots and dozens of other air defense systems for Ukraine, and today – a decision on aircraft. There will also be two new security agreements. These agreements include support for sanctions against Russia, support for our accession to the EU and NATO, support for our defense – our soldiers, all our people, and reconstruction – all of this is taken into account in the security agreements exactly as needed.

And our meetings. There will be at least ten negotiations with state leaders. I am grateful to our entire team for their activity. Today, there will also be meetings in the U.S. Congress – both parties, both chambers. We appreciate the American support and will discuss how to add even more good results to our cooperation with America – preferably, long-range and far-reaching. Thank you to everyone who helps! Every day we are becoming stronger and getting closer to a just peace.

Glory to Ukraine!

Denmark and Holland:

🇺🇦 🇩🇰 🇳🇱 An important and productive meeting with the Minister of Defence of Denmark,
@troelslundp and the Minister of Defence of the Netherlands @DefensieMin, Ruben Brekelmans.

The key issue of the meeting was the transfer of F-16 fighters to Ukraine. We are preparing to meet modern fighter jets in the Ukrainian skies.

We also discussed investments in our defence industry.
Denmark is the first NATO country to directly finance Ukrainian production of arms and ammunition. Thank you, Denmark, for your leadership! The first contract is to be signed soon.

Another priority is the establishment of joint ventures. We discussed a model of joint investment in the production of weapons.
Ministry of Defense is creating the “Defense Fund” to be the main partner for our foreign allies in creating joint ventures.

I sincerely thank Denmark and the Netherlands for their support. Together we are stronger.

🇺🇦🤝🇩🇰🤝🇳🇱

Norway:

+6 F-16s from Norway 🔥

Norway will donate six F-16 fighters to Ukraine. 🇳🇴 Prime Minister
@jonasgahrstore announced that the donations will start in 2024.

We are grateful for this important decision by our Norwegian friends. Ukraine is waiting for F-16s in our sky!

@Forsvarsdep @Bjornarildgram

New Zealand:

New Zealand announced a new military aid package for Ukraine valued at NZD 6 million ($3,68 million).
The package includes allocation of $2.45 million for the Drone Coalition within the #UDCG and $1,23 million for the military medical needs.

Despite the significant distance between our countries, we are united by common values. We continue our fight for freedom! Thank you, New Zealand!
🇺🇦🤝🇳🇿
@chrisluxonmp

NATO:

NATO countries (🇺🇸 🇳🇱 🇩🇪 🇮🇹 🇷🇴) have announced the donation of 5 more air defense systems to Ukraine.

The package includes additional #Patriot and #SAMP-T systems, and components for their operation. We are grateful to our allies from the USA, Germany, Romania, the Netherlands, and Italy.

Also, in the coming months, the US and its allies will provide dozens of tactical air defense systems: NASAMS, HAWK, IRIS T-SLM, IRIS T-SLS, and Gepard.
Special thanks to Canada, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, and other countries for providing these systems and interceptors.

Lithuania:

The UK:

I held my first meeting with the new UK Prime Minister @Keir_Starmer.

I thanked Prime Minister Starmer for all the UK’s military and financial assistance provided to our country. This morning, I learned about the permission to use Storm Shadow missiles against military targets in Russian territory. Today, we had the opportunity to discuss the practical implementation of this decision.

I’m grateful to the UK for its unwavering support for Ukraine and our people.

🇺🇦🇬🇧

Today, Secretary Blinken said this:

❗️”As we speak, the transfer of F-16 jets is underway, coming from Denmark and the Netherlands. Those jets will be flying in the skies of Ukraine this summer, to make sure that Ukraine can continue to effectively defend itself against the Russian aggression.” – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

While this is good news, what does underway actually mean here? We know from other reporting that the first twelve or so planes, as well as the pilots and maintenance crews, won’t be ready for several more months. So what does the transfer is underway mean? Are we talking the paperwork? There’s also only about ten weeks left in summer 2024. Are these things going to actually get to Ukraine and in the air by the 22 of September? All the previous statements from the Danish and Dutch governments, as well as the Biden administration, make that unlikely. At this point Blinken needs to either put up or shut up.

Speaker Johnson then picked the low hanging fruit:

Here’s the full text of Trofimov’s tweet:

Medvedev: Even if Ukraine surrenders the territories we claim and renounces NATO aspirations in exchange for a peace deal, sooner or later we would still have to put the nail into the coffin of Ukrainian statehood and return the rest of the country’s lands “into the bosom of Russia.”
Cc: Western governments hoping for a diplomatic solution.

https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/515

From The LA Times:

Kyiv, Ukraine — 

We hear this refrain a lot these days: “America is only prolonging the war by helping Ukraine. We need diplomacy.”

To Ukrainian ears, however, “diplomacy” sounds like a euphemism for “Ukraine surrendering and ceasing to exist.”

Admittedly, an honest question underlies the refrain: Why can’t Ukraine seek peace with Russia?

But here’s how the question could be rephrased: Why not give away huge swaths of sovereign territory to a brutal and corrupt regime? Why not stay away from NATO, allow the Russian sanctions to be lifted, create a demilitarized zone (sacrificing more territory, of course) and aspire to mutual trust?

The answers are obvious, given the reality on the ground and in the fevered mind of Vladimir Putin, especially this week, after Russia bombed the children’s hospital in Kyiv in a massive daytime missile attack that killed at least 39 across Ukraine.

For a decade, Russia’s President Putin has played the West’s fear of a European war like a master. The West initially gave in to his threats and persistently kept Ukraine out of NATO (God forbid we trigger a war!) and thus made the invasion of 2014, and the ongoing full-scale war, starting in 2022, inevitable. Ukraine was barred from the world’s most successful defense alliance and was vulnerable to major aggression, which is exactly what the Kremlin wanted.

Since then, exercises in “escalation management” and major restrictions on defense aid to Ukraine have not brought Putin to reason as he carries out the largest European war of aggression since Adolf Hitler. Instead, those limits have cost Ukraine a chance to disable Russia, and instead enabled a long war of attrition.

In this photo taken from video released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Wednesday, July 3, 2024, Russian soldiers fire from their 152-mm «Giatsint-B» howitzer from their position at Ukrainian troops at an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

Half-measures of support have helped Putin to recover from his military’s early failure in northern Ukraine, as well as helping him to adapt to sanctions, to make the war profitable for his elites, to find allies and new markets, and to prepare Russia for perpetual war.

Until very recently, Ukraine was strictly banned from using the West’s weapons to attack military targets inside Russian territory, a red line that effectively tied Ukraine’s hands. Did the Kremlin appreciate the gesture? It did — the Russian military used its safe haven status to prepare new offensives and devastating bombing campaigns unchallenged.

Starting last fall, the chorus demanding a “diplomatic solution” grew louder on the know-nothing right in America, and defense aid foundered for six critical months in Congress, creating a gargantuan shortage of munitions in the Ukrainian military.

The lack of U.S. help did nothing to precipitate a halt in hostilities or bring about the “compromise” that Putin hypocritically chatters about in his periodic surrender ultimatums to Ukraine.

Instead, it expedited Ukraine’s tragic loss of the city of Avdiivka to the Russians in early 2024, as well as Moscow’s overconfident spring offensive in Kharkiv. Ukraine’s front line did not fall, as many predicted, thanks to the valor and inventiveness of the Ukrainian military.

Russia responded to the delay of aid from the U.S. by tripling its missile attacks on Ukraine’s electricity and heating infrastructure, exploiting Ukraine’s under-resourced air defense. Now the lion’s share of Ukraine’s energy production and distribution system is destroyed. Ukrainians go most of the day without electricity, and only heaven knows what nightmare awaits us in the winter to come.

Decision-makers in Washington keep following the same dangerous script over and over. Ukraine asks for weapons and the response comes back: providing X ammunition or Y missile system would cross a red line and cause an escalation. Months-long deliberations follow; the situation in Ukraine worsens. Belated permission is granted and the weapons — artillery, armored vehicles, rocket systems, missiles, air defense, fighter jets — arrive late. Then the whole scenario is repeated, as Ukraine plays catch-up and suffers.

When Ukrainian troops finally got HIMARS rocket launchers in the summer of 2022, they were able to stunningly derail Russia’s logistics, undermine Russia’s immense artillery power, halt a Russian offensive and help precipitate the liberation of Kherson later that year.

The U.S.-made PATRIOT air defense system was an absolute no-go until late 2022, when it could finally be used against Russia’s air force. The long-belated arrival of ATACMS missiles, declared off limits for more than two years, eventually did devastating damage to Russia’s airfields and air defense systems in occupied Crimea. All without “escalating” blowback.

After tallying up the red lines crossed and the consequences, the Kremlin’s nuclear saber-rattling begins to sound a bit tinny, doesn’t it? As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has noted, Putin may be crazy, but his instinct for self-preservation is alive and well. We need to be brave enough to call his bluff.

Placating Putin is not the way to peace; it’s an open invitation to eliminate Ukraine as a nation, absorb its territory and its resources, and install Russian aggressors directly on Europe’s borders.

Putin will stop only when he is made to, with a proper and powerful response that defeats his ability to fight on. Ukrainians held off Russia’s attempted decapitating blitz on Kyiv in February and March 2022 with just that kind of all-out effort.

More at the link.

Kyiv:

SBU has found new evidence that Russia hit the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital with a Kh-101 cruise missile. A fragment of the missile engine was found at the site. Plus:
▪ a fragment of the Kh-101 wing deployment mechanism
▪ a fragment of the Kh-101 jamming unit
▪ the middle part of the body of the Kh-101 cruise missile (pictured under the rubble);
▪ tail section fairing and a fragment of the Kh-101 cruise missile’s hydraulic unit;
▪ fragments of the Kh-101 cruise missile engine cowling with the inventory (inside) and serial numbers (outside). https://t.me/SBUkr/12348

Kharkiv:

The Zaporizhzhia front:

Kasputin Yar, Russia:

Kalach-na-Don, Volgograd Oblast, Russia:

That’s enough for tonight.

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Reader Interactions

14Comments

  1. 1.

    Nukular Biskits

    I know what you meant, Adam, before reading the post but the first thing that popped into my mind as to what does “underway” actually mean was  “Haze gray and underway!”

    I’ve been doing this job for a long time. Forgive me. LOL!

    Anyway, long post. Good info. Not sure I’ll make it all the way through before racking out, but do appreciate the hard work as always.

    v/r

  5. 5.

    Eolirin

    Hopefully that Storm Shadow thing ends up making a difference here. I suspect other NATO countries providing long range weapons will also open up to attacking military targets on Russian soil once these are being used that way and Russia, predictably, doesn’t do anything new in response.

    As much as it’s far later than it should be, that could end up being decisive in the end. Russian air defense doesn’t seem to work very well.

  6. 6.

    Comrade Bukharin

    How long will Ukraine be willing to fight a gentleman’s war when Russia is bombing children’s hospitals and executing prisoners?

  8. 8.

    wjca

    Perhaps the way to get thru Speaker Johnson’s thick head is to suggest to him that Russians attacking Ukranian hospitals like this is merely at-a-distance abortions.  So, ask if he is OK with abortions, as long as they are somewhere else?

  13. 13.

    Barry

    @wjca: “So, ask if he is OK with abortions, as long as they are somewhere else?”

     

    Yes.  Putin’s Will Be Done, on Earth as well as in Hell.

  14. 14.

    Eolirin

    @wjca: But in this particular case, Johnson is effectively saying that Ukrainians should be allowed to use the weapons the US is providing on Russian soil if they think that’s appropriate.

    He’s already on side. Or is at least pretending to be, given that his opinion doesn’t actually matter here.

    It’s the Biden administration that isn’t. (so far)

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