The Russian Ministry of Defenses has provided a detailed summary of Ukrainian losses during week seventeen of the so-called spring counteroffensive.

According to the ministry, the Russian military carried out nine group strikes with high-precision long-range missiles and drones between September 24 and 29. The strikes hit ammunition depots, military-technical hardware, saboteurs training sites and accommodation points for Ukrainian troops and foreign mercenaries.

If so many Ukrainians weren’t dying this would be a joke. But with thousands of dead and injured this is no laughing matter.

Only four months ago UK military chief Admiral Sir Tony Radakin told a British parliamentary committee that Russia was now “so weak” that it could no longer wage a military counteroffensive of its own.

While Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has enjoyed great success in cajoling Western countries to contribute a vast amount of military hardware to support Kiev’s fight against Russia, there is one precious commodity he must provide for himself: manpower.

The NATO-bloc countries can send Ukraine all of the military equipment at its disposal, but if there are no qualified personnel to operate the sophisticated machinery the massive contributions will be of no avail. And make no mistake: Ukraine is bleeding troops faster than they can replace them.

House Republicans have approved an amendment to slash U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s annual salary to no more than $1. The move comes as Congress remains in a gridlock over the budget, which could lead to a government shutdown.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Wednesday introduced the measure, which was approved in a voice vote as part of the 2024 fiscal year appropriations bill for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). (pdf)

As a budget showdown looms in Congress, MAGA Republicans are alone in challenging the vast quantities of American weapons and cash being funneled to Kiev, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene warning The Grayzone that increasing escalation could turn the proxy war into a “potential nuclear conflict.” When approached for comment, progressive members of the ‘Squad’ dodged our questions.

Some of the West’s modern heavy weapons are not suitable for the Ukraine conflict because their design has been shaped by decades of fighting involving much weaker opponents, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

“A lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity,” a Ukrainian promoter of drone warfare named Taras Chmut told the outlet. “If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform.”

After the breakout of the First World War, the Second International and the numerous socialist organizations affiliated with it across Western Europe threw their weight behind their governments’ new military adventurism and became completely oblivious to the suffering of their fellow man at the hands of their countries’ economic and political elites.

The killing last weekend of a Kosovo police officer by a group of 30 or more heavily armed Serbian nationalist militants marks the most significant security incident in that country, and the western Balkans region, in more than a decade.

The United States called on Belgrade to pull its forces back from the border with Kosovo on Friday, September 29, after detecting what it called an unprecedented Serbian military build-up. Serbia had deployed sophisticated tanks and artillery on the frontier after deadly clashes erupted at a monastery in northern Kosovo last week, the White House warned. The violence in which a Kosovo policeman and three Serb gunmen were killed marked one of the gravest escalations for years in Kosovo, a former Serbian breakaway province.