28 Mar, 2024 09:38

Ukraine’s army in ‘stagnation’ – Zelensky’s top adviser

Mikhail Podoliak has blamed weapons and ammo shortages for Kiev’s inability to mount major operations against Russia

Ukrainian forces have reached a state of “stagnation” on the battlefieldbecause the West is failing to provide Kievwith enough military equipment to make any substantial progress, President Vladimir Zelensky’s top adviser has said.

Speaking to NV Radio on Wednesday, Mikhail Podoliak complained that Kiev does not have enough resources to mount effective offensive actions that would undermine Russia.

“In general, [there is] a slow supply of resources to Ukraine, slow decision-making on appropriate tools, a certain stagnation along the front line,” he said, admitting thatKiev’s forces are completely on the defensivein Russia’s Donetsk, Lugansk and Zaporozhye regions.

This stagnation, Podoliak argued, is due toinadequate Western sanctions, which he said are not strong enough to suffocate Russia’s military industry. The other factor, he added, is insufficient arms supplies from the West. “[We are talking about] drones, munitions… and considerably ramping up investment in ammo production. We see that all this is moving slowly.”

However, he said “stagnation” doesnot mean “stalemate,” because that wouldimply that “Ukraine does not know what to do in this war,”which he said is not the case. Ukraine’s former top general Valery Zaluzhny described the situation as a stalemate in November after Kiev’s much-hyped summer counteroffensive failed to break through Russian lines, despite being reinforced by large quantities of Western equipment.

His “stalemate” remarks reinvigorated debate about whether Ukraine could ever hope to win the conflict, and were widely seen as a sign of a growing rift between Zaluzhny and Zelensky. The Ukrainian president fired the general last month, with his replacement, Aleksandr Syrsky, saying that thefrontline situation was “extremely difficult.”

Ukrainian troops have been on the back foot in recent weeks after Russian forces liberated the strategic Donbass city of Avdeevka, and later pushed Kiev out of several nearby settlements.

Officials in Kiev have repeatedly linked the lack of battlefield success to a deficit of Western-supplied munitions. This comes as the US has struggled for months to approve President Joe Biden’s proposed $60 billion supplemental aid package for Ukraine due to Republican opposition in Congress, with GOP representatives demanding more efforts to increase security on the Mexican border.

(That’s Ukrainian gratitude for you!. They are fighting a war they were never going to win. Look at the history of Russia in war, they will never give up. Bidan set these goofballs up, when their only talents are arrogance, terrorism, propaganda, corruption and excuses.)

https://www.rt.com/russia/595050-ukraine-army-stagnation-podoliak/

POLL POSITIONUPDATED MAR. 27, 2024

What the Polls Say Today: RFK Jr. Now Hurting Biden, Helping Trump

Portrait of Ed Kilgore

ByEd Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015

In October, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr.abandoned his primary challenge to Joe Biden and instead launched an independent candidacy,the initial conventional wisdom was that he might hurt Donald Trump more than Biden. For one thing, so long as he was threatening Biden’s Democratic nomination, Kennedy was treated to a lot of favorable conservative media attention. More generally, the thinking was that RFK Jr. was best known recently for the kind of hostility to vaccine mandates most prevalent among Republicans, along with a conspiracy-theory orientation most congenial to deeply alienated voters unlikely to support the incumbent.

Polling at the time validated this hunch. Right after Kennedy went indie, an NPR-PBS-Marist survey showed Biden leading Trump by three points (49 to 46 percent) in a head-to-head contest, but by 7 percent (44 to 37 percent, with RFK Jr. at 16 percent) in a three-way race. Similarly Quinnipiac had Biden leading Trump by one point head-to-head (47 to 46 percent) but by three points (39 to 36 percent, with 22 percent for RFK Jr.) with Kennedy in the mix.

Kennedy was obviously drawing some votes from both major-party candidates, and he still is. But more recentpolling has most often shown him helping Trump more than Biden, bothnationally and in the battleground states. The RealClearPolitics polling averages nationally now show Trump leading Biden by 1.6 percent (46.6 to 45.0 percent) in a two-candidate race, and by 5.4 percent (40.7 to 35.3 percent, with Kennedy at 12.3 percent) in a three-candidate race. There isn’t much battleground state polling of a three-candidate race, but we do have ample numbers for a five-candidate race, with Kennedy’s support dwarfing that of Jill Stein and Cornel West combined. These polls tell a similar tale of Kennedy boosting Trump marginally. In the RCP averages, Trump’s lead grows from 5.2 to 6.0 percent in Arizona, 5.2 to 7.4 percent in Georgia, 3.0 to 6.0 percent in Nevada, 4.4 to 6.7 percent in North Carolina, 0.2 to 2.0 percent in Pennsylvania, and 0.8 to 2.7 percent in Wisconsin (Michigan is an outlier with Trump’s lead dropping slightly — from 3.5 to 2.8 percent — when the other candidates are added in).

There are three big factors that may well affect the size and shape of Kennedy’s vote in the future. First, his veep reveal on March 26, in which he chose California tech entrepreneur and former Democratic donor Nicole Shanahan as his running-mate, could modestly enhance the progressive image of his ticket . Second, and more importantly, he will almost certainly be the object of unfriendly attention from the camp of the major-party candidate (at the moment, Joe Biden) he seems to be hurting. This could come in the form of attacks on his credibility, his ideology (perhaps to make him more attractive to voters from the other major party), or his effect on the outcome (i.e., for Democrats, the benefit Trump might receive). Third and perhaps most important will be the extent to which RFK Jr. gains ballot access, a laborious and expensive process, as Politico observed last week:

His campaign is officially on the ballot in one state so far — Utah. But it says it has collected enough signatures to also qualify in Nevada, Hawaii and New Hampshire. American Values 2024, a pro-Kennedy super PAC, says it has collected enough signatures to get him on the ballot in Michigan, South Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.

Shanahan’s wealth could help her ticket-mate in that arena. It’s also at least remotely possible Kennedy could pursue and secure the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party, which would give him near-universal ballot access while limiting and perhaps skewing his vote.

Historically, non-major-party candidates almost always lose support as the general election grows nearer and voters choose not to “waste their votes.” That’s likely to happen to Kennedy as well. But if they do “return” to major-party candidates or move to another minor-party candidate or simply decide not to vote, there’s no guarantee the net effect on Biden and Trump will be neutral. So where he’s on the ballot and how he’s polling will be of enormous continuing interest even though he’s not going to follow his Uncle Jack into the presidency.

https://12ft.io/proxy

Jesse Watters

@JesseBWatters

For two decades, Diddy was the Democrats’ biggest black celebrity influencer.Democrats used Diddy’s charisma, star power and street cred in the black community, every single election. He was a political enforcer and in the back pocket of the powerful. That made him powerful, with a free pass. Now if Diddy’s found guilty, he’s a combination of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. So how prevalent is sexual blackmail in American industry and Democrat politics? It’s more than you think. And the powerful not only tolerate it, they participate in it.

Mar. 27, 2024

https://x.com/JesseBWatters/status/1773149397909389471

Penthouse to prison: Sam Bankman-Fried’s journey from crypto king to convicted conman

MAR 27 2024

Two years ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was a 30-year-old multibillionaire living in a $35 million Bahamas penthouse, partying with his pals while running one of the world’s most valuable crypto companies.

Today, he’s a 32-year-old inmate at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, waiting for a judge to tell him how long he’ll spend behind bars for masterminding “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history,” in the words of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.

Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of failed crypto exchange FTX, will head on Thursday to a federal court in downtown Manhattan, where U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan will deliver his sentencing. Prosecutors have recommended a prison sentence of 40 to 50 years.

It took jurors only about three hours of deliberationsin November to find Bankman-Fried guilty of all seven criminal accounts against him. For a high-profile monthlong trial that involved nearly 20 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits,experts said at the time that they’d never seen such a speedy decision. Bankman-Fried plans to appeal his conviction and sentence.

It was a steep and swift fall from grace for Bankman-Fried, who was once hailed as a titan in the industry and had a peak net worth — on paper — of roughly $26 billion….

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/27/how-ftxs-sam-bankman-fried-went-from-crypto-king-to-convicted-conman-.html

Fairfax Democrats Choose Easter Sunday as ‘Transgender Visibility Day’

Mar. 26, 2024

Fairfax County Virginia has named Easter Sunday 2024 as “Transgender Visibility Day,” in what many Christians see as a hijack of their most sacred holiday.

The Fairfax County School Board has added Transgender Visibility Day to its prior designations of June as LGBT Pride Month and October as LGBT History Month for a remarkable 62 days of LGBT celebration in the district’s schools.

The Rev. Emma Chattin, executive director of Transgender Education Association, praised the board’s decision, asserting that visibility can be “a heroic thing, especially for our trans women of color in our community, who face additional intersectional obstacles of prejudice regarding safety, housing, employment and health care.”

Writing for the Washington Examiner, however, Fairfax local Stephanie Lundquist-Arora saidthe board members are telling Christians they do not matter by turning “one of their holiest daysinto acelebration of an ideologythat undermines the church’s core convictions.”

The school board’s nine Democrats all voted in favor of the measure, whereas the token Republican on the board, Patrick Herrity, did not show up for the vote.

“I’m looking forward to the day when we have a full dais for this proclamation, and that day will come,” said board member James Walkinshaw of Herrity’s absence. “One way or the other, that day will come.”

That sentiment was echoed by Democrat Dalia Palchik, supervisor for the Providence district of the county. “What we say at this dais matters,” she said. “What you say in the community, what our leaders say and the outcome of that really matters.”

“Our transgender students are depressed,” Palchik contended. “Nearly half have considered suicide. You see across the board in our LGBT community that it is the one community that stands out higher than any other demographic in our students of depression, attempting suicide, considering suicide.”

“To me, it is a moral imperative and also a public health imperative that we band together,” she said.

(Fire the Entire School Board, the judgement of God will descend quickly by subtly trying equate trans to Jesus)

https://12ft.io/proxy

>>20641658

You know when he’s lying, he always says “no joke”, “no lie”, “you think I made this up” and many others. He’s announcing he’s lying and the dummies believe him. He has so many tells its not funny. He also touches his nose or face when lying,he should just superglue his hand to his face, thats how much he lies

>>20641672

They probably would do it, they need a wake up call. these people are so ideologically conditioned they would willingly go to Muslim countries to celebrate desecration of God and Jesus and Mohammed.

I think when these programmed people wake up to the horror programmed into them they will kill others or kill themselves.

The School Board saying they are depressed, its only because they are celebrated all the time and they need more and more attention until they lose their minds. They are creating a whole generation of future terrorists