When the corpse of a Wagner mercenary fighter arrived in his small Russian village in late February after he was killed fighting in Ukraine, some residents wanted to give him a hero’s burial. Others could not forget that the former prisoner had stabbed his father to death. The ruckus prompted a stream of acrimonious comments […]
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For months, Yevgeny Prigozhin has been Russia’s most public and provocative military leader in Ukraine. When he is not lauding the heroics of his private fighting force from the front lines, he is castigating the Russian generals for starving him of the supplies he needs to finish the work they could not. Yet now, as […]
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KYIV, Ukraine — From Kupiansk in the north to Avdiivka in the south, through Bakhmut, Lyman and dozens of towns in between, Russian forces are attacking along a 160-mile arc in eastern Ukraine in an intensifying struggle for tactical advantage before possible spring offensives. Heavy fighting was reported on Monday in and around Avdiivka, a […]
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KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has been forced to use more of its professional recruits in Bakhmut to replace its depleted supply of enlisted prisoners, who are perishing by the thousands in the longest battle of the war, a Ukrainian official said on Tuesday. The claim suggested that Ukraine sees an opportunity, despite […]
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KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s top generals want to bolster the defenses of the embattled eastern city of Bakhmut, the government said Monday, signaling that rather than retreat from the city, they will pursue a strategy of bleeding the Russian army in a battle of attrition before a planned Ukrainian counterattack. Ukraine has calculated that the […]
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The commander, who uses the code name Duke, said Wagner used untrained prisoners in the first line of attack and then, after one or two hours, as the Ukrainian troops were tiring, sent special forces into the fray, attacking from the flanks. “It was very good tactics,” Duke said. The Kill Box But Ukraine has […]
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President Emmanuel Macron of France has embarked on a quest to win favor across Africa on the basis of a policy of “profound humility,” chastened by a decade-long frustrated military intervention and a wave of anti-French sentiment in France’s former African colonies. In practice, as he outlined in a speech this week, this reset will […]
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On Tuesday, Yevgeny Prigozhin went further than he ever had in his public standoff with Russia’s military leaders, claiming the defense minister and the country’s most senior general were starving his private army of ammunition. He then accused them of treason for weakening his fighters at a crucial moment in the war in Ukraine. By […]
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BAKINSKAYA, Russia — It was a lonely funeral. Four narrow caskets, recently pulled from the back of a covered truck, rested on stands under an insistent snowfall as an Orthodox priest performed last rites. Three gravediggers in tattered jackets looked on with their hands folded solemnly. An excavator was parked close by, ready to dig […]
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Federal agents on Tuesday arrested the owners of a South Florida security company with ties to the assassination of Haiti’s former president, according to one of their lawyers, the latest step in an investigation that has implicated several American citizens. The suspects, Antonio Intriago, a Venezuelan-American businessman, and Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, a Colombian American citizen, […]
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LVIV, Ukraine — Creeping forward along a tree line late at night toward an entrenched Ukrainian position, the Russian soldier watched in horror as his comrades were mowed down by enemy fire. His squad of 10 ex-convicts advanced only a few dozen yards before being decimated. “We were hit by machine gun fire,” said the […]
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He challenged Ukraine’s president to a duel from the cockpit of a bomber. He threatened to urinate on the face of a critic. He declared his private army was fighting for “every street, every house, every stairwell” in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. And that was just the past couple of weeks in the […]
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KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces attacked dozens of Ukrainian positions across the eastern front, the Ukrainian military said on Monday, as Moscow’s assaults widened and intensified ahead of what Kyiv has warned could be the Kremlin’s largest offensive since the first weeks of the war. The Ukrainian General Staff, which is responsible for military strategy, […]
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The Russian military has been following the Wagner playbook and deliberately using the poorly trained troops to draw, and deplete, Ukrainian fire, senior American military and defense officials said. Kusti Salm, Estonia’s deputy defense minister, in a briefing with reporters in Washington last week, said that Russia’s casualties were high in part because of its […]
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