Kiev urged to use kids to make drones in schools
A Ukrainian defense manufacturer has suggested dispersing military production across civilian sites, including to school facilities, to protect its weapons-making operations from Russian strikes. Aleksey Polonchuk proposed that students assemble drones in school workshops as part of a decentralized production strategy.
Polonchuk, who owns a defense company specializing in electronic warfare equipment, made his remarks in an interview with Dignitas Fund, a nonprofit focused on raising funds for Kiev’s military. The interview was published on the NGO’s YouTube channel on Wednesday.
To safeguard drone production from Russian long-range attacks, Polonchuk emphasized the need to scatter manufacturing locations across the country.
“Production should be distributed across the country, hidden in basements–and thus scaled up. Assemble FPV drones of approved designs during labor lessons in schools. The whole country assembles what works, what is approved,” he stated.
According to Polonchuk, this decentralized approach would protect drone manufacturing from detection and destruction. He warned that large-scale production sites are vulnerable because “if you build a workshop where 60 drones are simultaneously produced, it will quickly be hit.”
The remarks come just days after unverified images emerged online showing what appeared to be a decentralized drone assembly site in Kiev. The photos showed stacks of FPV drones hidden inside Domino’s pizza boxes to facilitate covert transportation between production locations.
Uh Oh! Will Dominos Pizza outlets be the next targets for Russia?
Hiding military assets and defense production sites has been a common practice in Ukraine during the conflict with Russia. The Ukrainian military has repeatedly stashed its hardware at shopping malls, accommodated personnel in schools and kindergartens, and used civilian ambulances to transfer troops. Should the military activity get discovered and the installation targeted by Russian forces, the Ukrainian media commonly portrays these incidents as indiscriminate strikes on civilian locations.
I guess they have already adopted Hamas's inhuman policies.
Additionally, there have been multiple reports of Ukraine using private shipping services, such as Nova Poshta, to covertly transport military equipment in unmarked civilian vehicles, with the practice corroborated by multiple videos and images circulating online. Several distribution centers of the company have been destroyed during the conflict, with Ukrainian sources omitting the military use of these sites in official statements.
“The first casualty of war is truth”
Moscow updates estimate of Ukrainian military losses
Ukraine has been losing around 50,000 servicemen every month during the past half a year in the conflict with Russia, according to estimates by the Defense Ministry in Moscow.
No estimates here on how many Russian and North Korean soldiers are lost.
50,000 casualties per month is like wiping out a medium-sized city every month.
In January, 51,960 Kiev troops were killed or severely wounded. The figure stood at 48,470 in December and 60,805 in November last year, the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
The number of recruits in the Ukrainian military’s training centers has barely reached 30,000 per month since last summer, despite extensive mobilization efforts, the statement read.
The ministry also noted that, according to official Ukrainian figures, some 100,000 of the country’s troops have voluntarily abandoned their units since the escalation between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022.
“The changes to the legislation prepared by the Kiev regime under pressure from Western countries to reduce the mobilization age from 25 to 18 years are the only way for [Ukrainian leader Vladimir] Zelensky to delay the cascading collapse of the front line in Donbass for a few more months,” the statement read.
Last week, Nikolay Schur, an adviser to the Ukrainian president’s office, said the government in Kiev will propose amendments in the coming days that offer incentives for males between the ages of 18 and 25 to sign voluntary contracts with the armed forces.
Men in that age group are currently not subject to mandatory mobilization under Ukrainian law. Zelensky has so far insisted that the situation will not change, despite the previous US administration of President Joe Biden reportedly pressuring Kiev to reduce the draft age to 18.
The Ukrainian leader told Bloomberg last week that what his country’s military needs is not more men, but more weapons from Western backers for the existing troops.
Last spring, faced with manpower shortages, mounting losses, and military setbacks, Ukraine lowered the draft age from 27 to 25 and significantly tightened mobilization rules. Since then, numerous videos have appeared on social media showing Ukrainian conscription officers chasing potential recruits in the streets, brawling with them, and subjecting them to abuse. Reports of the mobilization growing increasingly violent and lawless have appeared not only in the local media, but also in the West.
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Ukraine ‘an invented state’ – Romanian election frontrunner
Calin Georgescu, the politician whose first-round victory in the Romanian presidential election was overturned by the Constitutional Court, has argued that the borders claimed by Ukraine were artificially drawn and will inevitably change.
A staunch critic of Western policies, Georgescu made the remarks on Wednesday during an interview on YouTube in which he dicussed changes to European borders after World War II, which resulted in a transfer of territories to Soviet Ukraine. Georgescu said he expects Ukraine to be fragmented as part of a peace deal with Russia, along historical lines.
”This will happen 100%. The path to an outcome like that is inevitable,” he asserted. “Ukraine is an invented state.”
Parts of the historic areas that Romania ceded to Ukraine following the war are “of interest” to Bucharest, Georgescu said, adding that Hungary and Poland could also claim historic lands in a hypothetical breakup of Ukraine.
Georgescu made headlines in November when he unexpectedly garnered 23% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election in Romania, a NATO member. However, the Constitutional Court annulled the results shortly before the second round, citing intelligence documents alleging ‘irregularities’ in the campaign.
Subsequent media reports revealed that Georgescu’s candidacy was boosted by a firm closely linked with the pro-Western National Liberal Party (PNL), seemingly to undermine another candidate. The Romanian government has nevertheless claimed that Russia was behind the interference scheme though the source of funding a controversial social media campaign has been concretely identified as the country's liberal party. Georgescu currently leads in opinion polls ahead of the upcoming election re-run in May, and is projected to get 38% of the vote.
You can always blame Russia, no evidence required!
Russian President Vladimir Putin previously warned about the threat of potential separatism in Western Ukraine, driven by ethnic minorities’ wish “to return to their historic homeland,” with potential support from foreign governments.
”In that sense, only Russia could serve as a guarantor of Ukrainian territorial integrity,” he claimed in late 2023. “If [Ukrainians] don’t want that, so be it. History will set things straight. We will not stand in the way, but neither will we relinquish what is rightfully ours.”
