The bodies of Russian soldiers killed in battle in Ukraine are filling up morgues in Belarus, local residents told RFE/RL.

Russian soldiers killed in battle are being brought by truck to the morgues and then sent back to Russia by train or plane, residents said.

Residents described the horror of seeing the bodies loaded on a train at Mazyr for transfer back to Russia.

“The number of bodies was unbelievably large. People at the Mazyr station were simply shocked by the number of bodies being put on the train,” a local resident in Mazyr told RFE/RL.

The morgues in Homel and Naroulia are also filled up, according to local residents.

Belarusian doctors have been threatened with the loss of their job if they are caught spreading information about the dead and injured Russian soldiers.

U.S. officials have estimated that several thousand Russian soldiers have been killed so far in the two-week old war.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-belarus-morgue-soldiers/31750455.html

Former President Donald Trump said there is "a lot of love" behind Russian President Vladimir Putin's efforts to make "his country larger" on Sunday as Russian troops continued to invade Ukraine.

Trump discussed the conflict during an appearance on Fox News host Jeanine Pirro's radio show Sunday. He said he believes Putin's ultimate goal is to eventually rebuild the Soviet Union, and he went on to explain what he believes to be Putin's mindset.

"You say, what's the purpose of this? They had a country. You could see it was a country where there was a lot of love and we're doing it because, you know, somebody wants to make his country larger or he wants to put it back the way it was when actually it didn't work very well," Trump said.

Some critics, however, took issue with Trump's use of "a lot of love," pointing to the widespread destruction and thousands of casualties the invasion has caused in Ukraine.

"Does his love extend to the maternity hospitals and cancer hospitals he's bombing?" wrote Twitter user @dkxkee.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-says-lot-of-love-behind-putin-wanting-to-make-his-country-larger/ar-AAV0OtK

But here are some of the considerations: after three or four weeks of war, you need a strategic pause. You have to refit your armor, resupply your ammo and fuel depots, fix your planes. You have to bring in reserves. There’s always a planned pause after about three to four weeks.

If Kyiv can hold out through that pause, then potentially it could hold out for longer than that, because it can be resupplied while the Russians are being resupplied during their pause.

Moreover, the largest and most important consideration is that Russia cannot successfully occupy Ukraine. They do not have the scale of forces. They do not have the number of administrators they’d need or the coöperation of the population. They don’t even have a Quisling yet.

Think about all those Ukrainians who would continue to resist. The Nazis came into Kyiv, in 1940. They grabbed all the luxury hotels, but days later those hotels started to blow up. They were booby-trapped. If you’re an administrator or a military officer in occupied Ukraine and you order a cup of tea, are you going to drink that cup of tea? Do you want to turn the ignition on in your car? Are you going to turn the light switch on in your office? All it takes is a handful of assassinations to unsettle the whole occupation.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin

A Russian spy chief is said to have been placed under house arrest in a sign that President Putin is seeking to blame the security services for the stalled invasion of Ukraine.

Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, was arrested with Anatoly Bolyukh, his deputy, according to a leading expert on the Russian security services.

Andrei Soldatov, who is co-founder and editor of Agentura, an investigative website that monitors the FSB and other agencies, said that sources from within FSB had confirmed the detention of both men.

“The formal basis for conducting these searches is the accusation of the embezzlement of funds earmarked for subversive activities in Ukraine,” Osechkin said. “The real reason is unreliable, incomplete and partially false information about the political situation in Ukraine.”

The spy chief’s defenestration attests to Putin’s growing fury towards the intelligence services, which he believes provided false information over the situation in Ukraine, Soldatov said. “Putin has finally understood that he was misled,” Soldatov told The Times.

…However, he added: “The problem is that it is too risky for superiors to tell Putin what he doesn’t want to hear, so they tailor their information. The tailoring probably takes place somewhere between the rank of colonel and general in the FSB. We can’t rule out the fact that the intelligence they gathered on the ground was in fact very good.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/51656b28-a167-11ec-b38e-10b333e9179b?shareToken=bfd2f8e3d1a4d48105f47fc2594cf6d5

BROVARY, Ukraine—A local legend says that in 1941, a Nazi soldier tried to burn down the Church of St. George in Zavorychi, a small town on the outskirts of Kyiv, but was stopped by an act of God. Just this week, Vladimir Putin’s tanks finished the job for him. As they shelled the town indiscriminately on their way towards the capital, the church caught fire and burned to the ground.

“A part of me has died” with no hope of being resurrected, said Julia Tymoshenko, a 22-year-old native of the town who supplied The Daily Beast with a video depicting the wreckage. “I always loved Easter… waking up at 3 a.m. to bless the food. People of our village used to bring baskets filled with goods and place them in a circle around the church.”

Now, Julia’s anguish has turned into rage.

“Those bloodthirsty bastards opened fire from their rusty tanks straight at my crib, my motherland… This church was a symbol of that community and my childhood at grandma’s. I can only imagine the sorrow my grandma felt watching from her window how the church was turning into ashes,” she said.

“Everything that is left alive in me now burns.”