Ukraine: State Dept. Confirms Death of American Citizen, CIA Trained Ukrainians in 2014

Ukraine: State Dept. Confirms Death of American Citizen, CIA Trained Ukrainians in 2014

I’ll pick up my live posts on Monday. I get back to Oklahoma on Saturday!

But the State Department confirmed an American citizen died in Chernihiv, Ukraine when the Russians shelled the city.

We also learned the U.S.fears Putin will use nuclear weapons if the troops remain stalled in Ukraine.

Live Stream:

Mariupol: Finding Survivors at the Theater

Russia destroyed Mariupol’s Drama Theater where many people took shelter. It seems a lot of people stayed in the bomb shelter:

For weeks Mariupol has been the target of relentless shelling by Russian forces seeking to advance along Ukraine’s southern coast. Russia has long coveted Mariupol for its strategic location 35 miles west of the Russian border on the Azov Sea. Controlling the strip of land from Mariupol to Crimea would alleviate Moscow’s logistical complications in supplying and administering the peninsula it annexed in 2014 and solidify its grip on Ukraine’s southern coast and seaborne export economy.

A resident of Mariupol who escaped the city told Ukrainian TV there had been more than 1,000 people in the theater before it was bombed, sheltering in an underground bunker, in the main auditorium and on stage.

“It was a symbol of the city,” said Mykola Osychenko, chief executive of Mariupol TV, one of the city’s three channels, which is now off the air, its offices destroyed by recent shelling. “It showed that the city is not only a city of metallurgical engineers but also a city of people who, in addition to being tough working people, are not alien to art.”

The people who had taken refuge in the building were principally those who had lost their homes in Russia’s bombardment of the city, Mr. Osychenko said.

“People left their houses and went toward the drama theater because there was nowhere else to live,” he said. “Every day there were more and more of them.”

Other residents visited the theater’s cellar kitchen for subsistence meals. There was no electricity there.

In recent days, residents collected rocks and used them to spell the word “children” in Russian on the ground near the theater, signaling to overhead aircraft their presence in the building.

Nuclear Weapons?

I hate hyperbole. But like Zelenskyy, I don’t think any of this is hyperbole because who knows what Putin will do. He knows the West is spinless so why not? Russia updated 85% of its weapons:

Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, revealed the concerns in a new report on global threats dated March 15 and obtained by Fox News Thursday.

“As this war and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength, Russia likely will increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength to its internal and external audiences,” he wrote.

U.S. officials believe Putin intends to “overturn the U.S.-led rules based post-Cold War international order” and reclaim former Soviet territories.

“Russia views a powerful, survivable nuclear force as the foundation of its national security, and its modernized general purposes forces as critical to meet any conventional military threat and project Russian power abroad,” Berrier wrote.

Additionally, Russian forces are using “indiscriminate methods” of attack that are leveling cities, killing civilians and damaging infrastructure in retaliation for Ukraine’s effective resistance, according to the report.

CIA Trained Ukrainians

It turns out the CIA trained Ukrainians after Putin invaded in 2014.

Dead American Citizen

From Fox News:

Local police said that James Whitney Hill, 68, was killed during heavy Russian artillery shelling against civilians in the city of Chernihiv, according to The New York Times. His identity was confirmed by Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.

Hill was from Driggs, Idaho, and had been seeking medical care in Ukraine for his partner Ira, a Ukrainian citizen, according to a local outlet in Idaho.

“My brother Jimmy Hill was killed yesterday in Chernihiv, Ukraine,” Hill’s sister Cheryl Hill Gordon wrote Thursday on Facebook. “He was waiting in a bread line with several other people when they were gunned down by Russian military [snipers]. His body was found in the street by the local police.”

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.