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Debkafiles – March 17, 2022<\/p>\n
\u201cUnacceptable and unforgivable,\u201d was the Kremlin\u2019s response to the US president\u2019s branding of Vladimir Putin as \u201ca war criminal,\u201d on Wednesday, March 16. Incensed rather than cowed by sanctions and international condemnation, the Russian president is likely to double down on his war offensive against Ukraine \u2013 regardless of the spreading death, human misery and ravaged cities. An expanding confrontation therefore cannot be ruled out for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n
President Joe Biden spoke after the horror of Russia\u2019s bombing of a theater in Mariupol where more than a thousand people including many children were sheltering against the constant shelling. The death toll is unknown as are the numbers still buried under the rubble while rescuers are prevented from reaching the scene.<\/p>\n
Although the White House previously stopped short of accusing the Russians of war crimes in the Ukraine pending an investigation, President Joe Biden was now ready to say bluntly: \u201cI think [Putin] is a war criminal.\u201d His press secretary Jen Psaki said that Biden was \u201cspeaking from the heart\u201d (not the head?). An investigation into war crimes was still underway, she said, aware that some form of due process is required for a charge of war crimes.<\/p>\n
The president, however, did not stop at oratory. The $800 m military aid package he approved for Ukraine reportedly included 100 kamikaze drones, apparently referring to Switchblade 300 or Switchblade 600. (See photo.) The former can pinpoint strikes on personnel and the latter aims to destroy tanks and armored vehicles. The Switchblades are essentially robotic smart bombs equipped with cameras, guidance systems and explosives. They can be programmed to strike targets miles away and hover over objectives until ordered to strike.<\/p>\n
The US aid package will also include 800 anti-aircraft systems, 9,000 anti-armor systems and 20 million rounds of ammunition.<\/p>\n
Moscow was seen in Washington as expanding its targets beyond the Ukraine border with the assault by 30 Russian cruise missiles on the large Ukrainian Yavrov military facility outside Lviv near the Polish border. The Russian defense ministry said that the air strike destroyed a large quantity of weapons supplied by foreign nations and that the Yavrov base had long been used to train Ukrainian military personnel, often with instructors from the United States and other NATO countries. For Putin, this Ukrainian base embodied his complaint that NATO had expanded to Eastern Europe close to Russian territory.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.debka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Debkafiles – March 17, 2022 \u201cUnacceptable and unforgivable,\u201d was the Kremlin\u2019s response to the US president\u2019s branding of Vladimir Putin as \u201ca war criminal,\u201d on Wednesday, March 16. Incensed rather than cowed by sanctions and international condemnation, the Russian president is likely to double down on his war offensive against Ukraine \u2013 regardless of the … Continue reading Ukraine war is veering fast towards a big power conflict<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[28,14931,11,661,821,312,8],"class_list":["post-20767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-red-horse","tag-europe","tag-joe-biden","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-united-states","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-war"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8fAkI-5oX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20769,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20767\/revisions\/20769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}