The Russian armed forces have taken control of the settlement of Novy Donbass in the Donetsk People's Republic, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday.

"As a result of the active offensive actions of the units of the Tsentr [Center] group of forces, the settlement of Novy Donbass has been liberated," the ministry said in a statement.

Ukraine lost over 425 soldiers in combat against Russia's Battlegroup Vostok over the past day, in addition to losses in manpower and equipment on other fronts, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

"The losses of the Ukrainian armed forces amounted to over 425 military personnel, three armored fighting vehicles, six vehicles and an artillery unit," the ministry said.

This is in addition to up to 210 Ukrainian soldiers eliminated over the past day by Russia's Battlegroup Sever, over 280 by Battlegroup Tsentr, over 210 by Battlegroup Zapad, up to 165 by Battlegroup Yug, and up to 40 by Battlegroup Dnepr, the ministry said.

Russian air defense systems shot down two Flamingo missiles, 12 guided aerial bombs and 491 UAVs, the ministry said, adding that Russian troops also attacked energy and transport infrastructure facilities used by the armed forces of Ukraine, as well as their UAV assembly sites.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20260616/russian-forces-liberate-novy-donbass-settlement-in-donetsk-peoples-republic---mod-1124315699.html

 

ONLY 1050 NAZI KIEV REGIME TROOPS ELIMINATED YESTERDAY....

 

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         Gus Leonisky

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On the night of June 15, the Russian Armed Forces launched a massive strike against Ukraine’s largest cities. According to Ukrainian sources, 611 kamikaze drones of various types and at least 70 missiles were fired at Ukrainian targets. Military facilities in Kyiv were among the main targets of the attack. In addition to the drones, at least 30 ballistic missile strikes were recorded. In northern Kyiv, 140,000 residents were left without power.

Reports indicate a fire at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, one of the most significant Orthodox cultural sites in Eastern Europe. European allies of the Kyiv regime were quick to blame Russia for the incident. However, several media outlets claim that the fire was caused by a U.S. Patriot missile.

For its part, Kyiv continues to focus its efforts on blockading the Crimean Peninsula. As a result of a massive attack by the Ukrainian army on the Kherson region today, two bridges were damaged: one in the Chongar area and another connecting Genichesk with the Arabat Spit. On one of the bridges connecting Crimea to the mainland traffic has been halted due to previous strikes by UAVs.

The situation on the front lines has also been developing dynamically.

In the Sumy region, Russian troops secured a foothold in the eastern part of the border village of Bachevsk on June 14. Ukrainian units continue to hold the central part of the settlement for now.

South of Volchansk, fighting is taking place in the village of Losevka and the surrounding forests. During the fighting, two Ukrainian servicemen from the 159th Mechanized Brigade were taken prisoner.

Intense fighting continues in the Kupyansk sector. According to reports, the advance units of the Russian army are making significant gains in the Kondrashovka area. Ukrainian forces had previously launched a massive offensive in this area to disrupt supply lines to Russian units in northern Kupyansk. Now that the offensive potential has been exhausted, the Russian army is beginning to seize the initiative.

Russian army assault units have entered the eastern outskirts of Kupyansk-Uzlovoy. Ukrainian troops had previously held back the advance for quite some time, keeping the city entirely under their control. Now, however, the situation is beginning to change dramatically. A second significant success for Russian forces in this area was the start of fighting in the neighboring settlement of Kovsharivka.

It is safe to assume that the Kupyansk sector is facing a serious operational crisis. All Ukrainian army forces have been deployed to hold Konstantinovka. At the same time, they have already effectively lost control over the city. Thus, due to an overestimation of its own strength, the Ukrainian command risks losing two important sectors of the front at once.

https://southfront.press/ukraine-opened-door-to-disaster/

 

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Defend Ukrainian Holocaust scholar Marta Havryshko!

James Clayton

27 July 2025

 

The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns the vicious and life-threatening political witch hunt targeting Dr. Marta Havryshko, a scholar of the Nazi Holocaust. Havryshko has come under attack by the Ukrainian state, its intelligence agencies, neo-Nazi forces, and their supporters in academia. Her life and the safety of her family are in serious danger because her research has challenged the far-right nationalist forces that have been systematically cultivated for the NATO proxy war against Russia. Workers, youth and progressive intellectuals must come to her defense.

The campaign against Havryshko—which includes professional retaliation, public denunciations, and death and rape threats—exposes as a pack of lies the claims by the imperialist powers that the Ukrainian state is fighting for “democracy” and “freedom.” In reality, the government is a deeply reactionary regime riddled with fascists.

On July 13, Dr. Havryshko, a refugee since 2022, was summarily dismissed from her position at the Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, part of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. This decision violated her official status as a scholar on “unpaid leave until the end of martial law,” a protection nominally guaranteed to all Ukrainian academic refugees. Havryshko currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts.

On July 22, the journal New Global Politics published “An Open Letter in Defence of Academic Freedom,” signed by dozens of academics and journalists. The letter denounces Havryshko’s dismissal as retaliation for her political criticism of the Ukrainian far right:

This case exemplifies a dangerous political dynamic in which critique of far-right ideologies and ethnonationalism is rebranded as a “national security threat,” thereby legitimizing persecution and censorship. Academic freedom, freedom of speech, and scholarly integrity must not be subordinated to political or geopolitical loyalties. Their only legitimate standards are intellectual honesty and analytical rigor.

The letter was signed by several of the most eminent scholars of the Holocaust and the crimes of fascism in Ukraine, including John-Paul Himka and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. David North, the chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site, also signed the letter. 

Havryshko, working within the framework of identity politics, previously authored a book of stories about women who served in the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. She has also delivered multiple presentations detailing accounts of sexual violence against Ukrainian women following Russia’s reactionary 2022 invasion. Her book on the OUN has been branded “extremist literature” by the Russian government.

But Havryshko has increasingly run afoul of the Ukrainian authorities due to her continued exposure of fascists within the Armed Forces, academia and the state. Her dismissal from the Krypiakevych Institute marked the culmination of an escalating series of political reprisals originating from the highest levels of the Ukrainian government and academic establishment.

In October 2023, Havryshko spoke out against a photo exhibition titled Storm of Steel at the Kiev History Museum, which glorified the Waffen SS Galician Division in the wake of the two standing ovations given by the Canadian Parliament to Waffen SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka. The exhibition linked the Waffen SS division to the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ Third Assault Brigade, which is identical to the fascist Azov paramilitary battalion, integrated into the Ukrainian military. Responding to criticism of the Division, a member of Azov declared on his Telegram channel, “The Galicia Division are heroes… they, like us, were fighting for what is right.”

Havryshko’s criticism—that “the glorification of the Waffen-SS ‘Galicia’ Division leads Ukrainian democracy to a dead end”—was mild compared to what must be said about Ukraine’s so-called “national memory project.” This state-sponsored campaign promotes a falsified history of World War II in which the Nazis and their Ukrainian nationalist collaborators are cast as “heroes,” while the Bolsheviks are depicted as agents of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christian civilization. This is not the ideology of democracy, but of fascism.

However limited Havryshko’s criticism, it provoked direct and life-threatening attacks from the Azov-linked media outlet “Political Theology,” run by Yaroslav Kulyk. In a stark example of the intimate ties between Ukrainian academia and fascist forces, Kulyk is the son of Volodymyr Kulyk, one of Ukraine’s most prominent academics. Volodymyr Kulyk holds multiple research positions at institutions such as the University of Alberta, the London School of Economics, Harvard University, and Stanford. While he serves as “Ukraine’s representative in the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance,” his son Yaroslav is a priest and ideological figurehead for an openly Nazi regiment.

Havryshko responded by exposing Yaroslav Kulyk’s fascist political activity, including photos of him dressed in a Nazi uniform.

Havryshko writes,

As soon as I began writing critically about Ukrainian nationalists, I didn’t just feel pressure—I was bullied by colleagues at conferences. The “political correctness” of my articles was discussed by my boss behind closed doors. My then-director denounced me to the SBU [the Ukrainian Secret Service] as a “Russian agent.” I was subjected to antisemitic attacks.

A year later, claiming that “Azov had lost its ideological orientation,” the academic Volodymyr Kulyk smeared Havryshko publicly as “a person who works against Ukraine.” 

“In this way, he designates me as a ‘legitimate target’ for far-right extremists,” Havryshko wrote in response. “He puts the rock in the hands of those ready to use it.”

 

Havryshko’s prediction proved correct. In January 2025, she was added to the infamous “Myrotvorets” (“Peacemaker”) death list, which publishes the personal contact information and addresses of individuals it declares to be “enemies of Ukraine.” Several prominent political opponents of the Kiev regime have been murdered after being listed on Myrotvorets. The listing brands Havryshko a “criminal” and includes links to her social media accounts.

In the wake of her listing on Myrotvorets, Prof. Kulyk effectively wished her dead, stating that she should “chase Buzyna for all our joy.” Oles Buzyna was a journalist murdered in 2015 shortly after his name and contact information were published on Myrotvorets. Kulyk’s harassment exposes the fact that the entire Ukrainian capitalist ruling class, along with its academic institutions and its European, American, and Canadian sponsors, is in a political and military alliance with fascists and Nazis. 

Havryshko’s family in Ukraine is now facing harassment, and her foreign academic colleagues have been subjected to hours-long interrogations upon entering the country about their connections to her. The claims by the SBU, Ukraine’s state intelligence service, that it “lacks the mechanisms” to take down or block the Myrotvorets website are transparent lies. The SBU had no such difficulty blocking the World Socialist Web Site in Ukraine in June 2024, after it arrested and imprisoned Bogdan Syrotiuk, the leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, for the political “crime” of being a principled socialist opponent of the war who called for the unification of the Ukrainian and Russian working classes.

Despite these threats, Havryshko continues to denounce the Ukrainian regime on her Twitter/X account, regularly posting videos recorded by ordinary Ukrainians showing press gangs seizing young men off the streets for forced military service. The widespread hatred of the war among Ukraine’s youth is unmistakable: young men are increasingly resisting being dragged away, and their wives, mothers, and girlfriends can often be seen surrounding the vans and resisting alongside the men.

For her principled opposition to the Nazification of Ukraine, Havryshko’s life has been put in real danger. Announcing the Open Letter on X, she declared:

I don’t let my 13-year-old child go alone on the school bus, to the city library, or even to the nearest supermarket. I’ve changed my daily route to the university. I carefully inspect all package labels and never open anything unless I’m sure where it came from. I’ve changed my entire lifestyle because of the death and rape threats I constantly receive from neo-Nazis fighting in Ukraine. In their closed channels, they openly discuss how to kill me, behead me, pour acid on me, rape me, and burn me alive seasoning it all with antisemitic jokes about Auschwitz, soap and strip pajama. (sic)

In April, Yaroslav Kulyk declared his hope that the fascist Trump regime in the United States would deport Havryshko back to Ukraine, where “a lot of people are waiting for her.” This is a very real threat to her life.

The attacks on Havryshko expose not only the fraud of Ukraine’s claims to “democracy,” but also the nationalist lie that provoking war with Russia would “mechanically weld together all the classes” of Ukraine by redirecting the working class’s anger toward an external enemy. In reality, the seething hostility of the Ukrainian working class toward the puppet regime in Kiev has never been greater. The ruthless repression of Ukrainian workers is the domestic expression of imperialism’s international campaign of war. Havryshko’s “crime,” in the eyes of the Ukrainian ruling class, is that she publicly reveals the real state of class relations in the country.

The WSWS calls for an immediate end on the attacks on Havryshko and the broadest possible support for her by workers, young people and intellectuals. The neo-Nazi forces and state agencies behind the attacks on her must be exposed, as must be their hirelings in academia! The working class must be mobilized in her defense!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/28/geio-j28.html

 

=========================

 

Interviews by Jeff Rich:

 

How Far Right Fanatics Ruined Ukraine | Historian Tells the Story the West Hides | Marta Havryshko

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuL6pInMWfs

 

Ukraine War, Decolonisation and History as a BIG LIE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWORpsrljhs

 

========================

 

I’m Jeff Rich — historian, writer, and former Australian government official.

I earned my PhD in history from Australian National University in 1993, then spent 33 years in government (mental health, education, social policy) while never stopping my historical research and writing. In 2022, I left government to write and think full-time.

I’ve published three books, interviewed distinguished historians like Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Marie Favereau, and built this community of over 5,000 readers who care about understanding the world through history and literature.

I write from Melbourne, Australia—which gives me a perspective outside the usual US/Europe-centric commentary. I believe in dialogue across borders, compassionate observation, and the power of history to help us live more thoughtfully.

Why “Burning Archive”? 

An archive preserves the past. A burning archive reminds us that history isn’t dead—it’s alive, urgent, and essential for understanding our present moment. The past is not dead. It’s not even past.

The name comes from Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” who sees the debris of the past piling up while being blown into the future by the storm of progress. We live in that storm. History helps us navigate it.

How to Follow 

Subscribe here for weekly Saturday essays (free) or become a paid supporter for the full experience.

https://jeffrich.substack.com/about

 

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         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….