Wagner Group troops have captured the strategic village of Klescheevka in Russia’s Donetsk Region from Ukrainian forces, the head of the private military company Yevgeny Prigozhin has said.

“One can safely say that the settlement of Kleshcheevka, which is one of the important suburbs of Bakhmut (called Artymovsk in Russia), has been completely taken under control by the Wagner PMC units,” Prigozhin claimed in a statement distributed by his press service on Thursday.

But while Kleshcheevka has been reportedly “liberated,” intense fighting continues around the settlement, with “the opponent clinging on to every meter of land,” he pointed out.

The Russian Defense Ministry hasn’t yet commented on the situation in Kleshcheevka.

“Contrary to some opinions that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are fleeing Artyomovsk, this is not the case,” Prigozhin said, but still expressed confidence that Artyomovsk, which is a major Ukrainian stronghold and logistics hub “will be captured.”

Klescheevka is located around 9km southwest of Bakhmut. The village, which was populated by just over 500 people before the conflict, had been heavily fortified by the Ukrainian military.

The claimed capture of Klescheevka follows the Russian takeover of the key town of Soledar last week as well as several other settlements in the area as part of the operation to encircle Artyomovsk.

The Russia Defense Ministry praised “the courageous and selfless actions” of the Wagner Group’s strike teams during the battle for Soledar, but pointed out that victory was achieved by a “mixed group of forces,” including aviation and artillery units.

Late last year, the US Department of Commerce labeled the Wagner Group “one of the most notorious mercenary organizations in the world” and put it on the Military End User List, which could potentially restrict the company’s access to any technology made with American equipment anywhere in the world.

Prigozhin ironically reacted to the move by saying that it will definitely make it tougher for the Wagner Group to get ammunition and repair the M-777 howitzers and other US-supplied weapons that its troops have allegedly seized.

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https://www.rt.com/russia/570124-klescheevka-donbass-wagner-ukraine/

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ALJAZEERA

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy renews war on corruption amid scandals

President promises changes to government after reports of corruption at defence and infrastructure ministries.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he will make changes to the government and security services as part of a renewed crackdown on corruption, nearly a year since Russia invaded the country.

In his nightly video address on Monday, Zelenskyy did not name the officials who would be replaced but indicated the reshuffle was imminent.

“There are already personnel decisions — some today, some tomorrow — regarding officials of various levels in ministries and other central government structures, as well as in the regions and in the law enforcement system,” the president said.

Zelenskyy was elected in a landslide in 2019 on promises to reform the government and tackle corruption, which plagued the country long before Moscow sent its troops across the border on February 24 last year.

Ukraine ranked 122 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2021.

Over the weekend, it emerged that the defence ministry had been buying food for soldiers at inflated prices, raising questions about government procurement processes

On Sunday, anticorruption police said they had detained the deputy infrastructure minister on suspicion of receiving a $400,000 kickback to facilitate the import of generators into wartime Ukraine last September. The deputy minister was also removed from his post.

Ukrainian media have reported that a number of cabinet ministers and senior officials could be sacked as Zelenskyy moves to streamline the government.

One of the president’s top allies earlier said corrupt officials would be “actively” jailed.

Zelenskyy also announced on Monday that government officials would be banned from making personal trips abroad.

The move followed revelations that Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Symonenko had gone on holiday to Spain in December and January using a Mercedes belonging to a Lviv businessman. Citing sources in law enforcement, online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda reported that Symonenko had resigned.

A committee of parliament agreed on Monday to toughen regulations on procurement and make some prices public during times of conflict.

Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov, quoted by media, told the committee that the reports of corruption at the ministry were based on a “technical error” with no money changing hands.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau said it was investigating the possible crime of appropriation of funds or abuse of power with regard to the procurement, which it said was valued at more than 13 billion Ukrainian hryvnias ($352m).

Ukraine’s economy shrank by a third last year, and the country is hugely dependent on Western financial aid. Donors, including the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, have repeatedly asked for more transparency and better governance.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/24/ukraines-zelenskyy-renews-war-on-corruption-amid-scandals

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With thanks to Batiushka, the author

Introduction: After Bakhmut

Some consider that the conflict in the Ukraine is now half-way through. In any case, we are beginning to get a much clearer idea of the possible outcome, which may be in about a year from now. After the fall of Bakhmut, Russian forces will move forwards, towards the River Dnieper, taking most of the east of the present Ukraine back into Russia, and possibly even more to the south. With over half a million unused Russian troops on the borders of the old Ukraine, the waiting Russian occupying force is quite large enough. At this point, the US-installed puppets in Kiev will fall like the puppet governments of Saigon and Kabul before it. Helicopters will evacuate the still unkilled CIA and NATO operatives off the US embassy roof in Kiev, evacuating also the senior members of the dreaded Secret Police, the SBU. Zelensky will be taken to Miami. Polish mercenaries will flee towards the Polish border.

Three Winners: Local, Continental and Worldwide

a. The Ukraine

After the war there will be three winners. The first will be the newly liberated Ukraine itself, returned to its natural borders after the Crimea, the east and perhaps the south have been returned to Russia. A free and independent Ukraine, perhaps under a Ukrainian President like Oleg Tsaryov, will be established. The Ukraine, whose infrastructure has been ignored for thirty years, as to-be-exiled oligarch-thieves expatriated Ukrainian money to Tel Aviv, London and New York, will be renewed. Prosperity will come from the completed New Silk Road linking Eurasia. The Ukraine has a great future as a transport and energy hub. Gradually, over the next five years, the 3 million Ukrainian refugees in Russia and some of the 8 million in Western Europe, once they have been carefully vetted or denazified by Russia’s security services, will be able to return. The fact is that there are few real Ukrainian refugees outside Russia. Those gone to Western Europe over the last thirteen months are simply those who would have left, had the Ukraine been allowed to join the EU. Without the attraction of the EU (see below), many will return home in due course.

b. The Russian Federation

The second winner will be the Russian Federation. Allied with Belarus and the new Ukraine, it will be by far the largest of a solid troika of countries, whose combined population will near 200 million. Belarus, alienated by the US attempt at a colour revolution there in 2021, is now a loyal ally to Russia and has turned away from flirting with the perfidious West. As for the new Ukraine, after the western betrayal of the old Ukraine, it too will certainly have no further illusions about the empty and absurd promises of the West with its redundant NATO and EU, which have brought only destruction, impoverishment and enserfment to all Eastern Europe. The three brothers of East Slavdom will be reunited as never before, on account of the meddling US attempts to destroy their unity after the fall of the USSR. Moreover, Russia’s international prestige will be great. Its diplomatic standing in the Global South, in Africa, Latin America and Asia, especially in Iran and Syria, will never have been so high.

c. The Global South

As a result, the third winner will be BRICS +, whose economic engine is the Chinese People’s Republic and whose ideological engine is the Russian Federation. BRICS + means not just BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but also the new members of Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Mexico and Argentina. This will mean an organisation of ‘The Twelve’, with a balance of six countries in Eurasia, three in Africa and three in Latin America. It would have to receive a new name – we have long suggested something like the SA, ‘The Sovereign Alliance’. It is only an idea. This would include about half the world’s population and over half of its production. A giant. And who will follow after them? Obviously, Belarus and the Ukraine. Then perhaps Nigeria, Venezuela, Pakistan – the list may well begin to resemble the membership of the hopelessly old-fashioned and soon to be defunct, post-1945 US puppet, ‘you know’, UNO, the United Nations Organisation. BRICS + will mean for the moment everyone except for the ‘exceptional’ West, that is, Northern America (the USA and Canada), the Western European peninsula (by which we here mean Europe as far as Belarus and the Ukraine), Oceania and for the moment (but not for much longer) the few offshore or coastal US vassals in Asia – Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Israel.

The Future of Western Europe

a. A DeNATOised and DeNazified Europe

After the liberation of the Ukraine, it is clear that Western Europe will take the road to freedom from the post-1945 US occupation. Clearly, NATO is finished, as it only ever was an organisation against the long-ago-disappeared USSR and it will be even more meaningless after the US routs in Kabul and Kiev. This liberation from NATO will proceed at different paces, following the principle, last in, first out. Therefore, the collapse will begin in Eastern Europe, go through Germany (after the US betrayal and sabotage of Nordstream, Germany will want revenge), France (after the ejection of US banker-puppets like Macron and the return of Gaullism) and the process will end in the UK, which has been occupied by US forces since 1942 at the invitation of the half-American Churchill. Any generals who then ask, ‘But what will replace NATO’? will be laughed off their armchairs. The question is as absurd and as anachronistic as, ‘But what will replace the Warsaw Pact’?

b. A Reconnected Western Europe

However, freedom for Western Europe does not end with the collapse of the Brussels-based NATO. Next comes the collapse of the US-orchestrated Brussels-based EU, the United States of Europe, the USE. In this second stage of liberation, it is clear that Eastern Europe will have to make friends with the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus troika. The New Berlin, reconnected with Russian energy after being cut off by the US and traitors like Scholz, will play a very important role here. And finally, from his grave the US-deposed De Gaulle will see a European Confederation, not just from Vladivostok to Lisbon, but to London, no, to Dublin, no, to Reykjavik. Northern Eurasia will be sovereign but economically co-operating, from Vladivostok to Reykjavik, from the Pacific to the mid-Atlantic. The attraction of such a Eurasian movement, led with Russian energy, food, space technology and arms and Chinese consumer goods on the New Silk Road, will be irresistible. In order to survive Japan will eventually have to join BRICS +, as will a reunited North and South Korea.

c. A Confederal Europe

To the east of the European peninsula, Poland could wall itself off from Russia to become a German economic colony (again), if it wanted to. Or else it could make peace with its Slav neighbours to the east, as so many of its people want. In any case, the Baltic statelets will have to make peace with Russia and their much-persecuted Russian minorities. An autonomous Moldova will go to Romania, providing that it is pro-Russian and its US puppet elite is removed. Hungary, with its land corridor to Serbia, already is a Russian favourite. Perhaps Hungary like Romania will receive some small lands from the former Ukraine, where Hungarian and Romanian minorities live. With the US thrown out of the Balkans, we can see the coming of justice for the whole region of ill-treated Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Western Europe, the old and discredited Russophobic US puppet governments will be toppled by people power – it has already begun – in France (Americanised by Sarkozy and Macron), Germany (by Scholz), which now faces the greatest strikes since 1992, and the UK (the unholy trinity of Johnson, Truss and Sunak removed). In a Confederal Europe, there will be no reason why Catalonia could not achieve independence from Spain and there will no longer be any reason for Ireland to be disunited or England, Scotland and Wales to be bound together in a burdensome union. The UK will dissolve. Justice all through Europe will at last be envisageable.

Conclusion: After Liberation

There are those in Western establishments who complain that Russia has fallen into the arms of China. Apart from the profound racism of this statement, that somehow the genocidal Opium War West is better than China, it also betrays the profound historical ignorance of those who make such statements. After all Western aggression towards Russia has for centuries meant that Russia has turned east. Such is the history of St Alexander Nevsky (1221-1263). And nearly seven centuries later in 1941, Moscow was saved from the western Nazis because the east refused to invade Siberia, and so Russia troops could be transferred from the Far East to Moscow. That Russia and China are today allies is completely the result of Western aggression. As a result, the US period with its Hollywood fantasy-movies in which the US always wins is over, because reality is different. The virtual world of the neocon White House is over. The US has been roundly defeated and expelled from Asia, Africa, and Europe. The US will have to retreat to its Great Island and at last begin to solve its own critical problems, not least the problem of global economic dedollarisation. After Bakhmut we shall step by step be proceeding to regime change in the US.

READ MORE:

https://globalsouth.co/2023/03/29/wanted-new-pr-scriptwriters-for-zelensky/

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