Last fall, Banksy traveled to Ukraine and spray-painted a series of murals that offered a stinging commentary on the war launched by Vladimir Putin and Russia’s military forces. Now, to mark the first anniversary of the invasion, a defiant Ukraine has released an official postage stamp featuring one of Banksy’s murals. It depicts a young boy judo flipping an older man on his back. Seeing that Putain likes to pretend that he’s a judo expert (he does the same with hockey too), it’s not hard to get the message here. But just for good measure, the Ukrainians drive the point home with a little shorthand at the bottom of the stamp. Translating the Cyrillic script, it reads “FCK PTN!” And who could disagree.
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The Ukrainian military and political leadership have been able to fight the Russians and inflict devastating & catastrophic strategic losses on the Russian military. The capture of Kherson has been the biggest setback for Putin and the Russian Army, this was the first greatest strategic loss. The battle of Bakhmut is the second great loss for the Russians and it does not matter now if the Wagner terrorists can take over the remainder of the city, the Ukrainians have strategically won this battle too.
Within next weeks once the muddy ground gets dry and becomes more solid, the Ukrainians will be able to wage a massive counterattack involving and utilizing the newly delivered western tanks Challenger and Leopard 2 tanks and Bradley, Stryker, AMX-10 and Marder infantry fighting vehicles. These battle tanks and vehicles have much more superior firepower and high tech options vs. the Russian equipment. If Ukraine will have enough number of the tanks and fighting vehicles, they should be able to start a massive counterattack and liberate more of its occupied territories across Donbass, Luhansk and at a later stages Crimea.
The only strategy for the wanted war criminal Putin now is to keep inflicting massive civilian terror, casualties on the Ukrainians and keep attacking the civilian infrastructure to starve them and leave the Ukrainians without electricity or water supply. It feels like Putin is utilizing the usual Russian military playbook he used in Georgia, Chechnya, Crimea and Syria: win the war by spilling more civilian blood, inflict more civilian terror and keep committing more war crimes to further inflict more fear and terror.
Hopefully the NATO members, the US especially will be able to throw in more weaponry, especially the F-16 fighter jets, hopefully higher range MGM-140 ATACMS rockets, counter rocket C-RAM weapons systems to better fight the Iranian drones and more for air defenses to counter the Iranian drones and ballistic missiles.
With such phase this war will most likely end in 2023 or maximum with Crimea’s liberation within few months of the start of 2024. The Russian forces will be also forced to leave Moldova, Georgian regions of Abkhazia and Samachablo (so called South Ossetia), Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria. Ukraine will be victorious and the Russians should be very concerned about the fate that awaits afterwards. With the Ukrainian victory the world will forever destroy Russia’s imperialistic ambitions, Russian nationalism and this will save future generations from future wars and peace will definitely follow.