🇷🇺 🇺🇸 Before his departure from Alaska, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited a cemetery and laid flowers at the graves of Soviet pilots who lost their lives during World War II.
The head of the Russian state also spoke with a hierarch of the Orthodox Church in America, Archbishop of Sitka and Alaska Alexei.
The President of Russia presented the hierarch with an icon of St. Herman of Alaska, the patron saint of America, and an icon of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos.
“I would like to convey to you the very best wishes from His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. We met with him before my trip here. He himself told me about how the Orthodox Church began here.
He told me that he too had visited, and had served here. He spoke of you with great warmth,” said Putin.
Archbishop Alexei thanked the President of Russia and also presented him with an icon of St. Herman of Alaska, which had been written on Mount Athos.
“This is an icon that was given to me as a gift when I was consecrated a bishop on Mount Athos.
For four years it has been in my prayer corner, and I would like to give it to you in order to express the gratitude of the native people of Alaska to the leader of the country that once sent missionaries here.
Because Russia gave us what we value most, what is most precious — the Orthodox faith,” said the hierarch.
🇷🇺 🇺🇦 For the past 18 months, Pavlo has barely left his house. His reclusiveness has nothing to do with the Russian bombs and drones pounding Kyiv. It is not the air strikes he fears, but his own Ukrainian countrymen.
It is draft officers, seeking to press-gang able-bodied men like him into units bound for the front that he dreads.
Pavlo is no conscientious objector. He regards himself as a patriot and never questions the righteousness of Ukraine’s cause. Yet he – and millions like him – will not fight for their country.
Reluctance to serve – or to keep serving, in the case of the ever-swelling number of deserters – has long troubled Ukraine.
In the past 48 hours, Russian troops breached Ukrainian defences near the coal-mining town of Dobropillia, pushing nine miles into territory around the city of Pokrovsk, a long-time Russian target.
The shock advance, the most significant Russian gain this year, cast Ukraine’s manpower problems in stark relief.[/b]
Ukraine has since deployed some of its best reserves to slow the incursion, but DeepState, a monitoring group close to the defence ministry, called the situation “chaotic”.
Russian troops had found gaps in the lines, advanced and were “consolidating positions and gathering forces for new advances”.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, cast the push as an attempt to shape the narrative at the Trump-Putin summit, showing that “Russia is advancing while Ukraine is losing ground” in the hope Mr Trump will back Putin’s terms.
That may be true, but it does not change the reality on the ground.
“The entire defence line is like a sieve,” wrote Stansislav Bunyatov, a Ukrainian serviceman and blogger, a sentiment echoed by Borden Krotevhych, former chief of the Azov Brigade.
Krotevhych wrote: “This chaos has been growing for a long time, worsening with each passing day. A stable line of combat, as such, effectively doesn’t exist.”
Ukraine is “visibly losing the war”, says Konrad Muzkya, a Polish military analyst, largely because of the manpower crisis. So why won’t men like Pavlo, 35 and a new father, enlist?
“Probably because I am afraid,” he says, with disarming honesty.
“Afraid to die or, worse, lose my mind and become a burden to my family. Afraid to leave my family in poverty. Afraid that my daughter will grow up an orphan. Afraid of being captured and tortured for months.
“I feel ashamed of this. People look for excuses not to join the army. People tell themselves that it is the government which is wrong, or that Europe is to blame, or that someone else should be sent. But for most, it’s simply fear.”
Fear is part of it. But not the whole story.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine had 260,000 troops. By summer that had swelled to 700,000 as volunteers flooded in.
Outnumbering the invading Russians, Ukraine recaptured 5,800 square miles of territory by the end of the year.
Those days are gone. Mobilising reservists, recruiting prisoners and offering financial inducements to men in the country’s left-behind villages, Russia – with a far larger population – regained numerical supremacy by late 2023.
Until recently however, Ukraine compensated with superior drone power. But Russia has caught up, deploying more drones and better counter-measures, as well as becoming better at neutralising Ukraine’s.
“Ukraine has an infantry shortage while its drones, the very thing its defences hinged on, are being suppressed,” says Mr Muzyka. “The result is that over the past couple of months we have seen the Russians make significant pushes on several axes.”
Worse, Ukraine’s infantry is shrinking, with desertions and casualties exceeding the 200,000 mobilised last year.
Around 650,000 men of fighting age are thought to have fled Ukraine. Others hide, like Pavlo, or bribe draft officers and army psychiatrists for health exemptions.
Fearing a public backlash, Mr Zelensky has resisted Western pressure to lower the draft age from 25 to 18, which would add 800,000 potential recruits.
The desertion crisis is even starker. Unofficial estimates suggest more than 400 soldiers are abandoning the battlefield daily – exhausted by years of war, frustrated by rigid, top-down command, and disheartened by those avoiding service. Mr Trump’s perceived tilt towards Moscow has deepened defeatism.
The collapse in morale is feeding a vicious cycle.
As ranks thin, generals strip other units to fill the front line. Air force mechanics and radar operators are sent to fight as infantry –where life expectancy is far shorter. That, in turn, makes evaders even more determined to stay away.
[b]“I’m not ashamed to say that I’m scared of joining the infantry,” says Oleksandr, a 36-year-old programmer in hiding.
“My contacts in the military say that practically every recruit from the small amount of draftees the military now gets is sent to replenish the infantry, whose ranks suffer the highest number of casualties.”
In the ruins of front-line towns, and on the battlefield, there is no escape. Despite the reversals, many soldiers fight on regardless.
“I don’t plan on stopping any time soon,” says Oleg, serving near Pokrovsk, speaking shortly after losing a close friend in combat.
“If I quit now, I wouldn’t feel like a man – I wouldn’t feel right. I would feel like I’m letting my team and my family down.”
Mr Muzkya points out: “When you are losing and there is a manpower shortage then obviously, if you are a Ukrainian male, your willingness to join up is far smaller than in 2022 when Ukraine was pushing the Russians back and looked like it was winning.”
LordReed: Russia is scavenging mothballed tanks that have no stabilisers from Siberia. You guys should stop being such propaganda hogs. A war is costly for all involved especially if your territory is invaded so there are many reasons not go to war but it is not because Russia has some mythical military might. The biggest deterance is their nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine still had theirs Russia would not have invaded them.
Show us the ones Ukraine is using. Let's see if they're any different. What does stabilizers have to do with armored tanks.
Let's assume you're right. Isn't it shameful that Russia is using "mothballed tanks" to defeat Ukraine and demilitarize NATO?
These "mothballed tanks" are outclassing so called "sophisticated" US/NATO tanks in Ukraine. Isn't that shameful?
You're living in a bubble. You think Hollywood is the same as reality right? You'll learn a bitter lesson.
Israel has nukes but Iran without nukes decimated them left and right and destroyed their cities.
Only one country have ever used Nukes to win a war. The United States. They nuked Japan and without that Japan wouldn't have surrendered.
Did Russia use Nukes to defeat Nazi Germany?
Before Nukes were invented, was the West afraid of Russia? Yes or No?
Yes I did and the last time I checked the US ran away from goat herders after fighting them for 20 years.
Even though the entire NATO sent troops to assist the US, they lost and fled hurriedly that they forgot to evacuate their equipments.
$4 trillion dollars and 20 years wasted. Over 500,000 US troops excluding NATO was deployed to fight the poorest country in the world Afghanistan.
As for Russia, only about 100k troops were sent. And they spent less than 10 years there. And even spent less money. Russia wasn't backed by anyone btw.
🇺🇸 Donald Trump is preparing to offer 🇷🇺 Vladimir Putin access to rare earth minerals to incentivise him to end the war in Ukraine.
The US president will arrive at the much-anticipated meeting with his Russian counterpart on Friday armed with a number of money-making opportunities for Putin.
They will include opening up Alaska’s natural resources to Moscow and lifting some of the American sanctions on Russia’s aviation industry, The Telegraph can reveal.
Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, is understood to be among administration figures briefing Mr Trump ahead of his sit-down with Putin in Anchorage.
Mr Bessent is exploring the economic trade-offs the US can make with Russia in order to expedite a ceasefire agreement.
Proposals include giving Putin access to the rare earth minerals in the Ukrainian territories currently occupied by Russia.
Mr Trump said Putin would face “severe consequences” if he did not agree to end the war in Ukraine during their meeting on Friday.
The US leader revealed his intention to seek an immediate second meeting with Putin, this time involving Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, after their one-on-one talks in Alaska.
Mr Trump said: “If the first one goes okay, we’ll have a quick second one. I would like to do it almost immediately, and we’ll have a quick second meeting between President Putin and President Zelensky and myself, if they’d like to have me there.”
Mr Zelensky said Mr Trump supported security guarantees for Ukraine.
The two leaders attended a virtual summit along with other European leaders on Wednesday.
“There should be security guarantees,” Mr Zelensky said at a press conference alongside Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor. “President Trump said that he supports this and America’s readiness to take part.”
Ukraine is thought to hold 10 per cent of the world’s reserves of lithium, used in the production of batteries.
Two of its largest lithium deposits are in areas held by Russia, and Putin has staked his claim to the valuable minerals found in the regions his forces occupy.
Foreign Affairs › Re: Putin Gifts Archbishop Of Alaska Orthodox Church An Icon Of St Herman (Photos) by Kaliningrad(op): 5:12pm On Aug 16, 2025*. Modified: 6:46pm On Aug 16, 2025
