#головне управління розвідки міністерства оборони україни

[tomorrowusa]

Ukraine is said to have provided intelligence which led to deadly attacks by insurgents on Russian mercenaries in the West African nation of Mali. FYI: Tinzaouaten, the city closest to the attacks in Mali, is 2,440 miles/3,928 km from Ukraine's port city of Odesa.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has claimed it was involved in an ambush that killed fighters from Russia’s Wagner group in the west African nation of Mali, thousands of miles away from the frontline in Ukraine. A Telegram channel linked to the Wagner leadership on Monday admitted the group had suffered heavy losses during fighting in Mali last week. It said Wagner and the Malian armed forces had “fought fierce battles” over a five-day period against a coalition of Tuareg separatist forces and jihadi groups, who had used heavy weapons, drones and suicide bombers. Numerous Wagner fighters, including a commander, Sergei Shevchenko, were killed, the channel said. Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, said on Monday that “the rebels received necessary information, and not just information, which enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals”. Yusov did not say whether Ukrainian military personnel were involved in the fighting or were present in the country. He said the agency “won’t discuss the details at the moment, but there will be more to come”. The Mali government, which has been fighting various insurgencies in the north of the country for more than a decade, requested help from Wagner after a military junta took power in 2020.

The Wagner Group is still around but under new management since Putin killed off its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.

So why is Russia in Africa?

The group is also active across Africa, and continues to be so even after Prigozhin was disgraced following a failed coup attempt last summer. He later died after an explosion onboard his plane, widely believed to have been ordered by the Kremlin, but Wagner’s influence in Africa remains. “For Moscow, the African countries where Wagner is present is just a zone of interest that allows it to get hold of resources – gold, diamonds, gas and oil – and the money goes to finance Russian aggression,” said Serhii Kuzan, director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center in Kyiv, explaining why Ukraine might want to target Wagner in Africa. He added that the raids had additional benefits for Kyiv: “liquidating” some of the most experienced Wagner fighters and lowering the overall military potential of the group, and also exacting revenge for war crimes in Ukraine. “A significant part of the destroyed fighters got military experience in Ukraine, where they carried out hundreds or thousands of war crimes … these crimes should be punished, and Russian war criminals should know that they will never be safe,” said Kuzan.

Ukrainian intelligence has a long reach and Ukraine has a long memory for war crimes committed by the invaders.

On a linguistic note, GUR should realistically be written HUR. The full name of Ukrainian military intelligence is: Головне Управління Розвідки Міністерства Оборони України (Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine). For short, that's Головне Управління Розвідки.

In Russian, Г is pronounced like the English hard G. In Ukrainian, Г is pronounced like a regular English H. There's a separate letter in Ukrainian for English hard G written like this Ґ. But the Soviet Union tried to suppress this letter because its existence was another reminder that Ukrainian is not Russian. So there's been some lingering alphabetic confusion over the use of this letter. But I promise you that it is preferable to transliterate ГУР as HUR.

[irta-fax]

ГУР повідомляє про понад 150 страт українських військових Кількість страт українських військових на полі бою невпинно зростає. Головне управління розвідки Міністерства оборони України (ГУР) повідомляє, що наразі лише розвідниками зафіксовано вже понад 150 подібних випадків. https://irtafax.com/hur-povidomliaie-pro-ponad-150-strat-ukrainskykh-vijskovykh/

[newsundphotos]

Дипломати та військові Росії тікають із Сирії - розвідка

У Сирії ситуація для росіян погіршується, військовий контингент і дипломати РФ терміново залишають Дамаск та інші міста через збройні заворушення опозиційних сил. Про це Головне управління розвідки Міністерства оборони України повідомило у Фейсбуці. За даними ГУР, опозиційні до підтримуваного Росією режиму Башара Асада сили активно просуваються на південь країни, відбулись перші бої у містах…

[tomorrowusa]

F-16 fighter jets are apparently now in Ukraine and under Ukrainian command. 🇺🇦

Ukraine has received the first batch of fourth-generation U.S.-made F-16 jets, Bloomberg reported on July 31, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The news comes a year after the allied "fighter jet coalition" took shape at the Vilnius NATO summit under the Danish and Dutch leadership. The deadline for the transfer of F-16s was late July, the sources told Bloomberg. Ukraine received "a small number" of the planes, the sources said. Ukraine is expected to receive at least 79 F-16s from the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway, with the deliveries to continue in the coming years. The fighter jet coalition also pledged to help train Ukrainian pilots and technical staff to operate the jets. It is unclear whether the trained Ukrainian pilots will be able to use combat aircraft immediately or the process will take longer, unnamed people told Bloomberg. Kyiv is yet to confirm these reports. The General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon is an American air superiority fighter that Kyiv has begged for since the start of the full-scale invasion. Although some defense experts do not expect F-16s to become game-changers in the war, the jets may strengthen Ukraine's air defense capabilities and shield the country's population centers from Russia's daily bombardments.

Earlier this week we heard that Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) was involved in successful attacks on Russian mercenaries in the West African nation of Mali. Now there's news that Ukraine was behind an attack on a Russian base in Syria – a Putin client state.

Ukrainian special forces strike Russian base in Syria after Putin-Assad meeting

The military intelligence's special unit Khimik struck Russian military equipment at the Kuweires airfield, located east of Aleppo and occupied by Russian forces, NV's sources in the HUR confirmed. The Kyiv Post published a video showing a Russian electronic warfare mobile complex being destroyed, followed by drones attacking Russian military facilities at the airfield. [ ... ] The Defense Intelligence conducted the attack a day after Russian dictator Vladimir Putin met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on July 24. The Kuweires airfield has been controlled and used by Russian forces for military purposes since 2015.

Putin helped Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad crush the Arab Spring uprising early in the 2010s. There are still Russian forces in Syria. Apparently Russia is recruiting mercenaries in the country to fight in Ukraine.

Ukraine is putting Putin on notice that Russian military activity anywhere on the planet is a valid target for Ukrainian forces.

[tomorrowusa]

The Sukhoi Su-57 is Russia's most advanced stealth fighter jet. Only about two dozen are operational. It is known that Russia has used these jets to launch Kalibr missiles into Ukraine.

So Ukraine became the first country ever to destroy a Su-57 – and there's reason to believe that it may have taken out TWO of them.

It’s increasingly clear a Ukrainian drone badly damaged, and possibly destroyed, a Russian air force Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter in a Saturday raid on Russia's Akhtubinsk State Flight Test Center in southern Russia 365 miles from the Russia-Ukraine border. And it’s possible a second Su-57—out of around two dozen Su-57s the Russian air force has acquired since the type’s first flight in 2010—was also damaged in the raid. “There is preliminary information that there could be two Su-57 aircraft affected,” Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian intelligence agency, said in a Sunday interview.

The Su-57 is roughly the equivalent of the US F-22.

As recently as 2019, there were at least six twin-engine, supersonic Su-57s at Akhtubinsk. Ground crews routinely parked the radar-evading jets out in the open—eliciting a bitter protest from the Fighterbomber Telegram channel, a popular forum for Russian airmen and their boosters. Fighterbomber asked why, 28 months into Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the air force hasn’t built hardened shelters for its most precious aircraft—including the Su-57 that Fighterbomber itself confirmed suffered shrapnel damage during the Saturday drone raid.

You read that correctly. These very expensive and relatively rare planes were parked outside in the open during wartime when Ukrainian drones have already struck more than twice the distance into Russia of the Akhtubinsk air base. The Russian military continues to prove that it simply is not very bright.

Meanwhile, Ukraine gets increasingly resourceful and innovative.

But the Ukrainians strike Russian airfields more effectively than the Russians strike Ukrainian airfields—thanks in large part to Ukraine’s growing inventory of long-range strike drones and the relative sluggishness of Russian decision-making. Ukrainian air force commanders frequently, sometimes more than once a day, scatter their jets across a vast network of small airfields and even highway airstrips—all in a preemptive effort to complicate Russian raids on parked planes. Russian air force commanders do no such thing. When Russian jets change bases, it’s usually the result of a long-planned move—often in response to particular bases repeatedly coming under attack by Ukrainian rockets or drones.

Here are before and after satellite photos of one of the wrecked Russian Su-57s.

^^^ Date format is DD/MM/YYYY. The Ukrainian captions simply identify the aircraft and point out burn marks and debris from the explosion. You don't have to annihilate an expensive aircraft to make it unusable.

Russian disinformation, as parroted by both extreme right and extreme left in Europe, often goes like this...

"OMG, there's no way Ukraine can ever defeat Russia with its unlimited resources."

We know that those "unlimited" resources are unable to provide almost a quarter of Russia's rural population with toilets. 🚽

Those Putin stooges want you to ignore how Russia has suffered frequent military humiliations, demonstrated bizarre military incompetence, and has lost hundreds of thousands of troops in the past 28 months. Russia, or rather its predecessor the USSR, lost the 1979-1989 Afghan invasion. Russian incompetence certainly did not vanish 35 years ago when that war ended.