Personally it was a nice day for me. It's still cold at night but the sun has been out and shining for 4 days now. We inaugurated the barbecue season, with a mix of meats but also sardines. I spent almost the entire afternoon without checking my phone for news on Putin's Invasion.
The only downside today was that my bicycle's chain broke cycling home (3rd consecutive mechanic failure when riding with my son).
Further East, in the East European Plain, it was a bit difficult to evaluate. New actions or movements from the Russian troops were few. They have been increasing the air operations in the last few days but today was bad for the Russian Air Force after losing several aircraft, all confirmed via geolocated photo and/or video evidences.
There has been few to none reports of the aircraft using PGMs (precision-guided munitions), or smart bombs in other words, meaning they have to fly much lower and closer to the targets and that makes the aircrafts much more at danger from SAMs (surface-to-air missile) and MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems). Talking about MANPADS, that Ukrainians have in their stock but are also getting more from the outside (NATO countries), this is a method to create a no-fly zone: if the Ukrainians have plenty of those, Russians will stop sending their planes (to prevent them being shut down).
After the sort of madness of the previous day, where Russians shelled and fired directly Europe's biggest nuclear power plant, there was supposed to be a ceasefire in some cities, to allow civilian evacuation. But the Russians apparently shelled a train that was going into one of the cities and made other strikes during the ceasefire, so the evacuation was suspended. It's another case where Ukrainian civilians have provided video evidences, but this need an independent analysis.
Still, some important developments regarding the future: the PM of Israel flew to Moscow to talk directly to Putin. Then talked a long time (via telephone, I think) with Zelenskyy. Then Zelenskyy talked to Biden.
It seems something is going on, and hopefully the Israeli PM is able to achieve some sort of breakthrough in the dialogue and allow for the killing and destruction to stop
Tomorrow is Sunday. Maybe it won't be just like any other day of this week so far...
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