• Explosions erupted across Crimea on Tuesday, with reports of smoke and fire in at least three different areas where military bases or munitions depots are located. The first one, at an ammunitions depot near Dzhankoi in the north, severely disrupted railway services and wounded two people. Ukraine hinted at involvement but has not explicitly claimed responsibility. Mykhailo Podolyak, a key adviser to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, told the Guardian in an exclusive interview that there could be similar attacks in the “next two or three months”.

• A record number of cars have crossed the Crimea Bridge that links Crimea to Russia – which suggests that a number of Russians who settled in the region after the annexation in 2014 are now fleeing. Russian state media are reporting that 38,297 cars crossed the bridge on 15 August.

• The Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has said Russia has no need to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. During a speech at the Moscow international security conference, he alleged that Ukrainian military operations were being planned by the US and Britain, and that Nato had increased its troop deployment in eastern and central Europe “several times over”, Reuters reports. Shoigu added that the Aukus bloc of Australia, the UK and US had the potential to develop into “a political-military alliance”.

• Ukraine has received six more M109 howitzers from Latvia, its minister of defence, Oleksii Reznikov, announced.

• The UN secretary general, AntónioGuterres, announced on Tuesday that he will meet Zelenskiy and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, in Lviv on Thursday. Guterres will go on to visit the Black Sea port of Odesa on Friday.

• A Russian court fined the US-based streaming service Twitch for hosting a short video containing what the court called “fake” information about alleged war crimes in Bucha – a Ukrainian town out of which there have been numerous verified accounts of Russian soldiers torturing, killing and sexually assaulting civilians. Though the content of the video was not specified, Russia has repeatedly threatened to fine sites such as Google, Twitter and Wikipedia, accusing them of hosting “fake” content related to its military campaign in Ukraine.

• The Ukrainian security service has identified eight additional Russian soldiers suspected of war crimes in Bucha. These eight servicemen, most of them of unit 6720 of the federal service of the national guard of the Russian federation, are accused of looting property and ransacking abandoned homes. Previously, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, identified at least 10 soldiers allegedly involved in human rights abuses in Bucha,

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told Turkey’s Deputy Finance Minister Yunus Elitas that Russian entities and individuals were attempting to use Turkey to bypass Western sanctions imposed over Moscow’s war in Ukraine, the Treasury Department said.

In a phone call, the two also discussed ongoing efforts to implement and enforce sanctions against Russia, the department said in a statement.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A spate of explosions and fires has turned Russian-occupied Crimea from a secure rear base into a new battleground in the war, demonstrating both the Russians’ vulnerability and the Ukrainians’ capacity to strike deep behind enemy lines.

Nine Russian warplanes were reported destroyed at an air base in Crimea last week, and an ammunition depot on the peninsula blew up on Tuesday.

Ukrainian authorities have stopped short of publicly claiming responsibility, preferring to keep the world guessing, but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alluded to Ukrainian attacks behind enemy lines after the latest blasts, which Russia blamed on “sabotage.”

Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and has used it as a staging ground for attacks on the country in the war that began Feb. 24. Ukrainian authorities have vowed to recapture Crimea and other occupied territories.

“The invaders will die like dew in the sun,” Zelenskyy, in his nightly video address Wednesday, said of the effort to retake Crimea and other areas.

The explosions represent the latest setback for Moscow, which began its invasion with hopes of taking Kyiv in a lightning offensive but soon became bogged down in the face of fierce resistance. As the war nears the six-month mark, the two sides are engaged in a grinding war of attrition, fighting village to village, largely in the country’s east.

The attacks in Crimea may mark the opening of a new front that would represent a significant escalation in the war and could further stretch Russia’s resources.

“Russian commanders will highly likely be increasingly concerned with the apparent deterioration in security across Crimea, which functions as rear base area for the occupation,” Britain’s Defense Ministry wrote on Twitter.

As a result of the airfield attacks, Russia is moving dozens of warplanes and helicopters to deeper positions in Crimea and to Russian bases elsewhere, Ukrainian military intelligence reported.

Tuesday’s explosions ripped through an ammunition site near the town of Dzhankoi, forcing the evacuation of about 3,000 people. Munitions continued to explode Wednesday and authorities fought the fires with a helicopter, said Crimea’s regional leader, Sergei Aksyonov. He said a search for the perpetrators was underway.

The Kommersant business paper also reported explosions Tuesday at a Crimean base in Gvardeyskoye. There was no confirmation from the Russians.

The British intelligence report said Gvardeyskoye and Dzhankoi are home to two of the most important Russian military airfields in Crimea.

Just over a week ago, explosions rocked the Russians’ Saki air base on Crimea and destroyed planes on the ground. Moscow suggested that the blasts were accidental, caused perhaps by a careless smoker, but Ukrainian authorities mocked that explanation and hinted at their involvement.

Last month, a small explosive device carried by a makeshift drone blew up in a courtyard at the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, wounding six people and prompting the cancellation of ceremonies there honoring Russia’s navy.

In other developments Wednesday, two civilians were reported killed and seven wounded by Russian shelling of several towns and villages in the Donetsk region in the east that is the current focus of the Kremlin offensive.

In the south, Russian warplanes fired cruise missiles at the Odesa region overnight, wounding four people, according to regional administration spokesman Oleh Bratchuk. In Mykolaiv, also in the south, two Russian missiles damaged a university building but injured no one.

Russian forces also shelled Kharkiv and the surrounding region in the northeast, killing at least six people, wounding at least 16 and damaging residential buildings and civilian infrastructure, authorities said.

Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres arrived in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv for a meeting Thursday with Zelenskyy and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said Guterres will raise the topic of food and grain shipments, nuclear power plant safety and the recent prison explosion that killed scores of captured Ukrainian fighters, and will “do what he can to essentially lower the temperature as much as possible.”

The last time the U.N. chief came to Ukraine, in April, Russia launched a missile strike on Kyiv.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

There should be no doubt that the Russian military is significantly superior to that of Ukraine. Furthermore, prior to the war, the Ukrainian Army was nothing more than obsolete machinery that had never seen serious combat.

Comparing Russia and Ukraine is like comparing apples to oranges. However, the Ukrainian troops should be commended for their bravery in surviving the perilous war trap.

And you will be surprised to know that, this war trap, however, was not laid by Russia. The groundwork to eradicate the Ukrainian army was laid by Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.

This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave an interview to the Washington Post during which, the ‘Herculean President’ was seen justifying his failure to share important intelligent reports with common Ukrainians. The President confirmed that he purposely denied sharing the details of repeated U.S. warnings of Russia’s plan to invade Ukraine.

As per Zelensky, if he had shared the important intelligence, Ukrainians would have panicked, fled the country, and the economy would have collapsed. Zelensky asserted: “This is the reason why I chose not to share the stark warnings passed on by U.S. officials regarding Russia’s plans.”

Source- BBC News

Through Zelensky’s words, it may sound like, he didn’t want to provoke panic and wanted to alleviate the impact of the invasion. But, you’re getting the wrong end of the stick. Zelensky tricked common Ukrainians and the military through his idiotic act and hallucinated the country by proclaiming that the Russian invasion is not happening.

Furthermore, Zelensky trapped unwilling Ukrainian troops into fighting a war with Russia.

Trapping the unwilling Ukrainians

On 24th February 2022, Russia officially declared its military operation in Ukraine. At that time, it was pretty clear that Ukraine’s days are numbered. The military was not prepared for the invasion at all, the whole army was scattered, weaponry was empty and most importantly, Kyiv had no frikking strategy to stop the Russian invasion.

If Zelensky would have shared vital information with Ukrainians, the situation could have been much better. But, ‘people’s hero’ had different plans to save his nation. In the midst of the war, the Ukrainian President took the first step to trap common Ukrainians. He unilaterally declared the Ukrainian war to be a “people’s war.”

Further, he proclaimed that common Ukrainians will fight for Ukraine. Zelensky stressed, “We will fight as long as we need to. Even if children are born in shelters, the enemy will have no chance in this People’s War,”

Then, the Ukrainian president immediately declared that men would not be permitted to leave the nation. He emphasized that Ukrainian men must protect their nation from Russian forces and that anyone who steps forward will be provided a weapon to fight with.

With this, the fate of most Ukrainian young men was sealed. Even though they were not willing to fight, they were made to serve the army. They were forcefully separated from their families against their will.

Read More: Like, Share and Subscribe: Ukrainian officials share classified information on social media to get famous

Zelensky Exxarcebated the condition

Now, here’s a quick question.

Did such a nonsensical act help Zelensky or even Ukrainian Forces? The answer is a big No.

Zelensky’s actions forced thousands of inexperienced men into combat, resulting in several tragedies.

The Ukrainian Military was not at all ready for the war. Even Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk province’s regional war administration,  admitted the fact that many of the Ukrainians who participated in the fighting lacked the necessary military training.

Moreover, many Ukrainian volunteers said in a video sent on Telegram that they are no longer willing to fight because they lack military hardware, rear support, and capable leadership. Several fighters have even claimed that they are only given 30 bullets to practise with before fighting.

Read More: With the click of a button, Zelensky has burnt his legacy to the ground

The ‘Heroic’ President’s admission that he purposefully withheld crucial intelligence information from ordinary Ukrainians only proves that he cleverly conned them into fighting against Russia.

Some brave and clever decisions could have saved Ukraine, but, Zelensky opted for tragedy and misery instead.

OMAHA, Neb.—FBI Director Christopher Wray stood before immense paintings of an eagle and an American flag at the field office here last week to talk about how agents had used a tip from Ireland to help save a local hospital from a ransomware attack.

It was the sort of threat that Mr. Wray has made it a bureau priority to counter. But the first two questions from the press were about former President Donald Trump. Two days earlier, 1,500 miles away in Florida, FBI agents had seized more than two dozen boxes from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in a criminal investigation into the handling of classified documents there.

The seizure set the political world ablaze, with many Republican lawmakers and officials rallying around the former president and describing the unprecedented action of searching an ex-president’s house as the Biden administration weaponizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation against its opponents.

It also thwarted what Mr. Wray has been trying to achieve since Mr. Trump appointed him to the job five years ago for a 10-year term: keeping the bureau out of partisan politics and the Washington media maelstrom after being at the center of both for years, prompted by errors in the handling of investigations into presidential candidates in 2016.

Photo: Nate Palmer for The Wall Street Journal

Meanwhile, Mr. Wray has sought to broaden the bureau’s focus to include other priorities, especially economic espionage by the Chinese government and the growing blizzard of cyberattacks that have the potential to paralyze the American economy.

But the Mar-a-Lago search promises to keep the FBI and the Justice Department, which oversees it, under scrutiny that will only intensify if Republicans take control of the House in November’s midterm elections. It has already prompted a rash of new threats against agents, a development Mr. Wray addressed in an interview Thursday in his office on the seventh floor of FBI headquarters in Washington, where a plaque on his wall memorializes the nine agents killed in the line of duty under his tenure.

“I have faith in the American people and I think most people rightly condemn violence and threats of violence, but there are a noisy few who seem to believe otherwise,” he said, noting that the bureau was bolstering its own security.

While Mr. Wray didn’t address the Mar-a-Lago search in the interview, people familiar with the matter say he was involved in weeks of discussions with Attorney General Merrick Garland and other senior DOJ and FBI officials about the decision to execute the search warrant at Mr. Trump’s Florida home. They said Mr. Wray came to believe it was a step that had to be taken to recover classified documents there.

The day before his meetings in Omaha, Mr. Wray met with officials in Iowa including Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. “If the FBI isn’t extraordinarily transparent about its justification for yesterday’s actions and committed to rooting out political bias that has infected their most sensitive investigations, they will have sealed their own fate,” Sen. Grassley said in a statement after their meeting.

“Preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” top House Republican Kevin McCarthy tweeted at the attorney general after the search, saying he would investigate the FBI’s actions if Republicans win the House.

FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret, according to a search warrant released by a Florida court Friday. Photo illustration: Adele Morgan

Mr. Wray, 55 years old, took over the agency in the wake of Mr. Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey. Along with the fallout from the report of an internal watchdog that in 2019 found serious failures in how the FBI sought to monitor a former 2016 Trump campaign adviser, prompting wide-ranging reforms, he inherited an agency that had made other missteps. A 2021 inspector general report found FBI agents disregarded allegations by Olympic gymnasts that they were sexually assaulted by their former national team doctor Larry Nassar and later made false statements to cover their mistakes.

During the Trump administration, Justice Department officials said they were unsure from one week to the next whether Mr. Wray might be fired. A year and a half into Biden’s term, the FBI’s reputation remains tangled up with Mr. Trump. The White House said on Mr. Biden’s second day in office that he planned to keep Mr. Wray on the job.

“To all the pundits, they think what we do looks easy, and they have no shortage of opinions about how we should do it,” Mr. Wray told a group of graduating FBI agents last week in Quantico, Va. “Follow the facts wherever they lead, no matter who doesn’t like it,” he said.

“Trust me, there’s always somebody who doesn’t like it.”

That same morning, a Trump supporter and military veteran tried to use a nail gun to breach bulletproof glass at the FBI office in Cincinnati, following through on a call for violence he posted on his Truth Social account soon after the Mar-a-Lago search. Police officers later killed him in a shootout after an hourslong standoff.

Mr. Wray said he viewed the increase in threats against the FBI as part of two trends: a rise in attacks on all law enforcement, with more officers killed last year than in any since 9/11, according to FBI data, and the increase of Americans across the political spectrum resorting to violence to manifest their views.

“Too many people seem to keep forgetting: It’s a very special and unique kind of individual who is willing to sacrifice his or her life for a total stranger,” Mr. Wray said of law-enforcement officers, including those he oversees.

Mr. Wray has said he is seeking to restore “a bit of calm and normality” to the bureau after a turbulent time, and his preference is to let the FBI’s investigative work speak for itself while showcasing its initiatives. Last month, for instance, he flew to London to issue a joint warning with the head of Britain’s domestic security service about the industrial espionage threat posed by the Chinese government, and to New York with the National Security Agency director to warn that Russia posed a potential threat to the November midterm elections. China has denied wrongdoing, and Russia has denied interfering in U.S. elections.

Photo: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire/Zuma Press

Mr. Wray’s low-key approach has drawn the support of many agents, said Brian O’Hare, the president of the FBI Agents Association, whose members are current and retired agents. Others say it won’t be sustainable in the current politically heated environment and that he might need to be more vociferous in defending the bureau and articulating his rationales for action.

“I’m concerned that in this polarized and disinformation-driven environment, more may be required,” said Greg Brower, a former senior FBI official who worked alongside Mr. Wray. “You may see him in his next five years be more outgoing as the reality has changed and perhaps does require the FBI director to be more outward in terms of defending the bureau and explaining the bureau’s work.”

Mr. Wray has grown more visibly relaxed and off-the-cuff in public during his tenure, to the point of telling self-deprecating jokes. He described talking to an FBI agent when deciding whether to take the job who told Mr. Wray that the bureau could “use a little boring.” Mr. Wray said he told the agent: “All right! I’m your man. I can suck drama out of anything.”

A former senior Justice Department official and corporate lawyer who rowed crew at Yale, Mr. Wray stresses teamwork. In Omaha he met with local police officers who described working with the FBI to take on a violent gang, made up largely of children of Sudanese and Liberian immigrants, that had turned a local park into a drug market and had fights often triggered by tribal battles in their homelands.

“So shooting over here—over friction points over there?” Mr. Wray said, asking an FBI official how the bureau was engaging with the African immigrant community. The official said the community was reluctant to cooperate but was happy after the bureau and local police had worked together to make several arrests and stop the shootings, giving them back access to the park. “That’s what it’s all about,” Mr. Wray said.

In the interview, Mr. Wray identified a number of moments that have stuck with him from his tenure so far: seeing a sea of law-enforcement personnel when he stepped out at the Miami Dolphins stadium to speak at the funeral service for two agents who were shot and killed last year while executing a search warrant in Florida in a crimes-against-children investigation; and the bureau’s effort in 2018 to quickly identify and arrest Cesar Sayoc in a terror plot that targeted senior Democrats and vocal opponents of Mr. Trump, from a fingerprint taken from one of the mail bombs he sent. Mr. Sayoc was later sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Photo: Ting Shen for The Wall Street Journal

A range of sensitive matters have continued to keep the FBI in the middle of the political storm. The investigation into the Jan. 6 riot has moved beyond the violence of that day—which has already resulted in the arrest of around 850 members of the mob—and closer to those in Mr. Trump’s orbit. One former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, was convicted of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, and another former Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, who has denied wrongdoing, is headed for trial later this year on the same charge.

Mr. Wray said the bureau has taken on board the lessons of the past few years. “The FBI, at its best, is zealously committed to rigor and objectivity and professionalism and excellence,” he said, before adding: “We are humans.”’

In the days following the Mar-a-Lago search, Mr. Wray went about regular business. In Omaha, he got an update on a child-pornography case and other matters, viewed a new software tool to help write affidavits, spoke to the new recruits at Quantico and took pictures with their families.

But the controversy over the search was never far from the scene. When asked to address it at the Omaha press conference, he responded in keeping with bureau practice of not commenting on continuing investigations. “As I’m sure you can appreciate, that’s not something that I can talk about,” he said.

—Sadie Gurman in Washington contributed to this article.

Write to Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com

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Federal officials are saying little so far about Monday’s FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, but Trump and one of his sons have said the move is part of an investigation into Trump’s removal of official documents from the White House.

While such a search of a former U.S. president’s residence would appear to be unprecedented, investigations into the removal or unlawful retention of classified information is not.

FILE – Workers move boxes out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds, before the departure of U.S. President Donald Trump, in Washington, Jan. 14, 2021.

Since 2005, the FBI and the Justice Department have launched at least 11 such investigations, some targeting high-profile former U.S. officials, including a former national security adviser and a former CIA director.

Others who have been prosecuted and who have pleaded guilty or were convicted include Defense Department employees, defense contractors and employees or contractors with the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Here’s a list of some notable cases:

April 2005 – Former U.S. national security adviser Sandy Berger pleaded guilty to knowingly removing classified documents from the National Archives and Records Administration. Berger admitted to concealing and removing five copies of a classified document from the Archives in September and October 2003.

Berger also admitted to concealing and removing handwritten notes in violation of the Archives’ policy. In September 2005, Berger was ordered to pay a $50,000 fine and give up his security clearance for three years.

March 2013 –Retired Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Pierce Bishop was arrested in Hawaii and charged with one count of unlawfully retaining documents related to the national defense and one count of willfully communicating national defense information to a person not entitled to receive such information. Court papers alleged Bishop, who was working for a defense contractor, stored 12 documents containing classified information at his residence. The documents further allege Bishop willfully communicated that information to a 27-year-old Chinese woman with whom he had a relationship.

Bishop pleaded guilty in March 2014. He was sentenced to more than seven years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

March 2015 – Retired U.S. Army General David Petraeus, a former CIA director, pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. The plea followed revelations that Petraeus shared some of the materials with his biographer and mistress.

Petraeus was sentenced to two years of probation and a $100,000 fine.

July 2015 – U.S. Navy reservist Bryan Nishimura was sentenced to two years of probation and a $7,500 fine after he pleaded guilty to downloading and storing classified documents from his deployment to Afghanistan in 2007-2008 on his personal devices and media. A search of his home in May 2012 turned up numerous classified materials, both in digital and hard copy formats.

August 2016 – Former National Security Agency contractor Harold Martin was arrested for what federal prosecutors described as a theft of top-secret government information that was “breathtaking in its longevity and scale.”

Martin was indicted in February 2017 on charges of stealing and retaining classified documents and other material, according to a statement from the Justice Department. The department further alleged Martin “stole and retained” highly classified top secret documents covering 20 years, keeping them in his home and in his vehicle.

According to the indictment, the documents stolen and retained by Martin contained NSA planning information and information on intelligence collection targets. Other documents, from U.S. Cyber Command, contained information on U.S. military capabilities, some to be used in specific operations, and documents about gaps in U.S. cyber capabilities.

Martin pleaded guilty to the willful retention of national defense information in March 2019. In July 2019, Martin was sentenced to nine years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.

January 2017 – Former defense contractor and sailor Weldon Marshall was arrested for unlawfully retaining classified information, stored on compact discs and computer hard drives that he kept at his home in Texas. The information included classified documents from Marshall’s time with the U.S. Navy and from his time as a defense contractor in Afghanistan.

Marshall pleaded guilty in March 2018. He was sentenced in June 2018 to more than three years in prison followed by a year of supervised release.

January 2018 – Former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee, also known as Zhen Cheng Li, was arrested on charges of unlawful retention of national defense information. Prosecutors alleged that Lee, while staying at hotels in Hawaii and Virginia, was in possession of two, small books that contained handwritten notes that included the true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.

Lee was indicted in May 2018 on two counts of unlawfully retaining documents related to the national defense, as well as one count of conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government.

Lee pleaded guilty and was sentenced in November 2019 to 19 years in prison for conspiring to communicate, deliver and transmit national defense information to China.

May 2018 – Former CIA contractor Reynaldo Regis pleaded guilty to charges of unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, as well as to making false statements to federal law enforcement officers. Prosecutors said during his time at the CIA, Reyes conducted unauthorized searches of classified databases and copied the information into dozens of notebooks, which he then took home.

In November 2018, Reyes was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Regis’ lawyer later told the Associated Press and other news outlets that his client “had no nefarious purpose. It was just a mistake.”

August 2019 – Former National Security Agency (NSA) employee Elizabeth Jo Shirley was arrested in Mexico City on charges of parental kidnapping and was later charged with retaining top secret documents on her electronic devices, both in Mexico and some stored at her home in West Virginia.

Prosecutors additionally alleged that Shirley sought to offer the information to the Russian government.

In July 2020, Shirley pleaded guilty to one count of willful retention of national defense information and to one count of international parental kidnapping. She was sentenced in January 2021 to more than eight years in prison for the willful retention of national defense information. She was also sentenced to three years in prison on the kidnapping charges.

June 2020 — Investigators conducted a search of the Hawaii home of Asia Janay Lavarello, a U.S. Defense Department employee, following her return from a temporary assignment to the U.S. Embassy in Manila. Investigators found numerous classified documents, writings, and notes relating to the national defense or foreign relations and said the documents – first seen by guests at a dinner party hosted by Lavarello – had not been transported by secure diplomatic pouch, as required.

Lavarello pleaded guilty to knowingly removing classified information in July 2021. She was sentenced in February 2022 to three months in prison and a $5,500 fine.

May 2021 – Kendra Kingsbury, an employee at the FBI’s Kansas City division, was indicted on two counts of having unauthorized possession of documents relating to the national defense. The court documents allege Kingsbury removed sensitive material and classified documents from her workplace over a period of more than 12 years and kept them at her home. One of the documents included information on al-Qaida members in Africa, including a suspected associate of al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden.