Syria

The Kremlin has released footage of a Russian helicopter squad training in Syria on how to winch injured troops from places too dangerous to land.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) said the main objective of the training session was to practice rescuing wounded soldiers from a hovering helicopter.

Footage of the exercise shows a Soviet-era Mi 8 chopper using a winch to lower and raise a trooper while a machine gun crew sees off a simulated attack.

The Russian MoD said on May 17: “Footage of an exercise with units of the Russian Armed Forces in Syria to evacuate the wounded using a Mi-8 helicopter hovering above the ground.

“During the exercise, the group, which included pilots, technicians and reconnaissance soldiers, practiced working in teams.

“One soldier went down to the ground using the winch. The lift capacity of the winch is enough to support the weight of two fully-equipped fighters.

“Meanwhile, the descending soldier could only communicate with technicians onboard the helicopter by using gestures.

“The whole operation took place under the cover of sharpshooters in the Mi-8, who were ready to open fire on ground targets.”

Russian servicemen Kirill said: “We worked out how to evacuate the wounded when it is not possible to land the helicopter on the ground.

“For example, in a mined area, when there are reservoirs, mountainous regions, and other places where the chopper cannot land and we need to rescue a wounded soldier.”

Mi-8 helicopter pilot Sergei said: “The pilot’s main task when descending to an unmade platform is to keep everyone safe and in place and prevent a lateral roll.

“The whole crew has to take into account the wind speed and propeller angle.

The update comes after Moscow claimed a strategic victory through the fall of the port city of Mariupol.

Russian authorities said they plan to tear down Azovstal itself and turn Mariupol into a “resort city,” according to the Institute for the Study of War.

The Kremlin also says that more than 900 Ukrainian fighters from the Azovstal metallurgical plant have been taken to a former prison colony in a Russian-controlled part of Donetsk.

Russia’s defense ministry said 771 Ukrainian fighters from the steelworks had surrendered in the last 24 hours, taking the total to 1,730, and 80 of the fighters were wounded.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine an “absolute failure” and said Russian leaders were afraid to acknowledge “that catastrophic mistakes were made at the highest military and state level.” Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman at the same time said at least 231 children have died and 427 were injured since February 24.

Zelensky also said that said Ukraine is determined to reclaim control over the southern cities of Kherson, Melitopol, Berdiansk, Enerhodar, and Mariupol, now occupied by Russian troops.

Elsewhere, G7 partners are set to meet in Germany later Thursday to find a way to fix Ukraine’s devastated finances.

On the ground, Ukrainian forces have retaken villages around the northeastern city of Kharkiv, but Russian forces have advanced slowly in the east of the country.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces claim to have killed about 28,500 Russian soldiers since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24.

They also say that between February 24 and May 19, the enemy lost 1,254 tanks, 3,063 armored fighting vehicles, 595 artillery systems, 199 multiple launch rocket systems, 93 anti-aircraft warfare systems, 203 aircraft, 167 helicopters, 2,157 motor vehicles and fuel tankers, 13 ships/boats, 455 unmanned aerial vehicles, 43 pieces of special units and 103 cruise missiles.

This story was provided to Newsweek by Zenger News .

A plurality of working class and swing voters agree with President Trump that the United States is “too involved” in the Middle East, a new poll finds.

A Rasmussen Poll reveals that most likely voters tend to side with Trump in saying that the U.S. is too involved in Middle East conflicts, with a plurality of 37 percent saying so. Meanwhile, less than 20 percent said the U.S. should be more involved, and 36 percent said the current level of involvement is about right.

Swing voters by a wider plurality of 42 percent say the U.S. is too involved in the Middle East, with only 16 percent wanting more U.S. involvement. Another 34 percent of swing voters said the current level of involvement is about right.

Most working class voters, those with only a high school degree, agree with Trump that the U.S. is too involved in the Middle East. About 43 percent of Americans with only a high school degree say the U.S. is too involved as opposed to just 30 percent who said the current level of involvement is about right. Only 17 percent of these working class voters said the U.S. should be more involved in Middle East conflicts.

Despite rebukes from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and former President George W. Bush, most Republican voters side with Trump’s “America First” foreign policy agenda, with 41 percent saying the U.S. is too involved in the Middle East and about 40 percent saying the current level of engagement is about right. Only 12 percent of GOP voters said they want more U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

Getting the U.S. out of foreign wars is especially popular with young Americans, who are the most likely to agree with Trump on the issue. A plurality of 45 percent of young likely voters between 18 and 33 said the U.S. is too involved in the Middle East. Another 30 percent said the current level of involvement is about right, and less than 20 percent said they wanted to see more U.S. involvement.

Most recently, the Trump administration announced that up to 1,000 U.S. troops would be withdrawn from northern Syria in an effort to bring American soldiers home following more than a decade of U.S. involvement in Middle East conflict.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .

American Veterans who risked their lives in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are increasingly opposing foreign interventionism that continues to dominate the Washington, DC, political establishment.

The latest Pew Research Center survey on the issue finds that 64 percent of Veterans say the Iraq War is “not worth fighting,” along with 62 percent of all American adults who agree. Only 33 percent of Veterans say the Iraq War is worth fighting.

Likewise, nearly 60 percent of Veterans and all American adults say the Afghanistan War was not worth the fight. Less than 40 percent say the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was worth fighting.

In interviews with the New York Times , Veterans explained their support for President Trump’s effort to end what he has dubbed the “endless wars” across the Middle East which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

“All in all, it is a lot of wasted lives and money and time and effort spent to accomplish a goal we never accomplished,” said 31-year-old Tyler Wade, who received a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan, told the Times .

Veteran Dan Caldwell said American men and women signed up to defend their homeland against terrorists, not to nation-build whole countries and remain until stability in the region is regained.

“For conservative-leaning veterans, we signed up to defend our country,” Caldwell said. “We didn’t sign up to build girls schools in the Al Anbar Province. We had friends killed or wounded in action; it wasn’t clear for what.”

Veteran Amber Smith, 37-years-old — who served in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2005 and 2008 — said the minority of Veterans in Congress who continue to support U.S. military intervention in foreign countries do so at the expense of their brothers and sisters in the uniform.

“We gave it nearly two decades, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and we have learned at this point there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan,” Smith told the Times . “There are a few veterans in Congress who are very pro-military-involvement in the Middle East. Well, they already fought that fight. They are not going back. As we have seen, when Trump talks about reducing troops, everyone in D.C. becomes unhinged. Unfortunately, the U.S. service members pay the consequences for that.”

Even when it comes to the U.S. intervention in Syria, Veterans by a majority oppose the effort. The Pew Research Center survey found that 55 percent of Veterans said U.S. involvement in Syria is “not worth it” while almost 60 percent of American adults agreed.

Former President George W. Bush led the U.S. into war in Afghanistan and Iraq with more than 4,500 Americans dying in Iraq — including more than 3,500 killed in combat — and up to 205,000 Iraqi citizens dying in the war since March 2003.

In total, Bush’s post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and intervention in Pakistan have resulted in the deaths of between 480,000 and 507,000 people — including nearly 7,000 American soldiers who had deployed to the regions.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .

GENEVA — In a world beset by conflicts and natural disasters, the number of people who fled their homes and sought shelter within their own countries hit a record high of close to 60 million by the end of last year, according to new data.

Disasters, including weather events such as cyclones and floods in Asia as well as protracted conflicts in places like Syria, Afghanistan and Ethiopia were factors behind high levels of new displacements last year, according the report compiled by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

“The world is falling apart, too many countries are falling apart,” said Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council which set up the IDMC in 1998 to document displaced people whom he said would otherwise be “unseen”.

“2021 was, as we documented here, a very bleak year and 2022 is proving to become even worse,” he said, adding that the war in Ukraine would lead to a new record this year.

In total, 59.1 million people were living in displaced conditions at the end of last year compared with 55 million people in 2020, the annual report showed.

The countries with the highest numbers of displaced people were Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, Afghanistan and Yemen, it said.

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The report does not count refugees — people fleeing to other countries — although there is often a correlation between internal and cross-border trends.

“It’s a damning indictment of the world’s lack of ability for conflict prevention and conflict resolution,” Egeland told journalists this week.

He said he was “nervous” about the Ukraine crisis diverting aid funds from other locations, saying some countries were using their aid budgets to help Ukrainian refugees.

“That means that it will go down, the money we have for the rest of the world,” he said. The Ukraine war is also increasing the cost of aid for the displaced because it has driven up food and fuel prices, he said.

Extreme weather drove people from their homes more than 22 millions times in 2021, according to new analysis.

This brought the total number of internally displaced people (IDPs) to a record high of 59.1 million.

The “unprecedented” number of IDPs was up from 55 million the year before , and also driven by fresh violence and drawn-out conflict in countries including Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Syria, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said in its yearly review.

“The situation today is phenomenally worse than even our record figure suggests, as it doesn’t include nearly eight million people forced to flee the war in Ukraine,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which set up the IDMC.

He called for a “titanic shift in thinking from world leaders” on how to end “this soaring human suffering”.

People were forced to flee their homes around 38 million times in 2021, bringing the total number of internally displaced people to 59.1 million, as many uprooted in previous years still hadn’t returned home.

The majority (22.3 million) of the new displacements were driven by weather-related disasters, including cyclones, floods, wildfires, drought, landslides and extreme temperatures.

Last year flooding in China triggered 1.4 million internal displacements, Hurricane Ida sparked thousands of evacuations in Cuba an the United States, and cyclone Yaas uprooted people in India and Bangladesh in areas already battered by cyclone Amphan the year before.

The impact of climate change on weather is complex and varied, but generally the crisis is making heat waves worse, fuelling the conditions for wildfires and super-charging hurricanes and rainfall.

“Yet weather does not need to mean disasters,” said Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London.

What makes a hazard like a flood become a disaster depends on how vulnerable or marginalised people are, where and how they live or access to infrastructure like early warning systems.

“Human-caused climate change, in general, does not cause disasters and does not force displacement,” Prof Kelman told Sky News.

For example, deaths from drought are more due to lacking access to water or alternative livelihoods or planned migration, irrespective of the drought’s cause, he said.

The exception is heat-humidity, which climate change change is driving “into realms beyond our experience and our ability to survive,” Prof Kelman explained.

“It was terrifyingly lethal in British Columbia last year and in India and Pakistan this year… There is little we can do, except stop the climate change we are causing,” he urged.

IDMC director Alexandra Bilak told Sky News: “Displacement is not only a result of environmental change.

“Human-driven factors, such as unsustainable land-use practices, the destruction of ecosystems and large-scale development projects, play a role too,” she said.

“Climate change can be seen as both a slow and a fast moving crisis,” said Dr. Lisa Schipper from Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.

The gradual shift in seasons, rainfall, temperatures create uncertainty and vulnerability, so when extreme events happen, people are less able to cope, making displacement one of the only remaining options, she said.

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