About 120 civilians have used the opportunity to leave the battle zone near "Azovstal" steel mill in Mariupol. Every chance to reduce the number of civilian casualties is being used by the Russian army.

I like Daily Mail - they sometimes would publish the refutation of their own gaffes/fakes. Not so long ago they were claiming that Sergei Shoigu - Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation was side-lined and has got a heart attack. Now he is fine and working. Miracle. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10731805/Russias-missing-defence-minister-Sergei-Shoigu-reappears-following-rumours-heart-problems.html

‼️🇷🇺Прекрасные девушки из ЛНР создали молодежное движение "Сестры Победы" и сняли хороший клип в поддержку России 🇷🇺

Движение состоит из жен и девушек бойцов, участвующих в спецоперации.
❤️Спасибо, девчонки!❤️
t.me/RVvoenkor

Above - "Victory sisters" - wives and girlfriends of the Luhansk militia fighters supporting their men in the battlefield.

That is what below the surface at the "Azovstal" steelworks.

🇷🇺🇺🇦 The fighters of the Central Security Service of the DPR are currently cleaning up the Azovstal plant in Mariupol from the Azov national battalion.

When the main British press are writing articles saying who you are, you know you've arrived. When those articles are just collections of the nastiest things they can legally say about you, it means you've done something right. 😎

Graham Philips - Bravo!!!

Russian marines are closing on "Azovstal" steelworks.

Only Russians will understand it in context, but I will try to deliver the message: "There is such a job - to talk to the bloody idiots" - on a sleeve of a Russian soldier.

🇱🇻 Study in Russian. A rally in defense of education in the native language is being held in Riga.

A rally in defense of education in Russian is taking place in Old Riga opposite the Latvian Ministry of Education.

What are parents protesting against?

The new project of the Ministry involves the complete translation of schools of national minorities and kindergartens into Latvian from September 1, 2023. This applies to both state institutions and private schools.
After that, Russian and literature will no longer be included in the main program — they are proposed to be conducted as an interest-based education.
According to the amendments, in case of insufficient use of the Latvian language in schools, Russian teachers and principals can be dismissed simply by the decision of the inspectors of the State Language Center.

Liaoning (16; Chinese: 辽宁舰; pinyin: Liáoníng Jiàn) is a Chinese Type 001 aircraft carrier. The first aircraft carrier commissioned into the People's Liberation Army Navy Surface Force, she was originally classified as a training ship, intended to allow the Navy to experiment, train and gain familiarity with aircraft carrier operations. Following upgrades and additional training in late 2018, Chinese state media announced that the ship would shift to a combat role in 2019.

Originally laid down in 1985 for the Soviet Navy as the Kuznetsov-class aircraft cruiser Riga, she was launched on 4 December 1988 and renamed Varyag in 1990. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, construction was halted and the ship was put up for sale by Ukraine. The stripped hulk was purchased in 1998 and towed to the Dalian naval shipyard in northeast China.

The ship was rebuilt and commissioned into the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) as Liaoning on 25 September 2012.

I am continuing answering our subscribers' questions.
The beginning is here
https://t.me/TrFormer/460
https://t.me/TrFormer/461

I have got another question/objection from a subscriber, concerning the justification of the Russian military operation. It goes along the following line of argument:

"Well, if someone (Ukraine) is trying to ensure its safety, for instance, by joining NATO, should it wary somebody else (Russia)?"

The answer is - yes. And there is a reason why. There is an internationally recognised principle of indivisible security that states (in a simplified way), that security of one of the states should not be achieved at the expense of the other. https://www.ft.com/content/84a43896-2dfd-4be4-8d2a-c68a5a68547a

However, that principle, as well as many other good principles, like "non-interference into the internal affairs of another state" - one of the key points of the international relations, were selectively applied or forgotten altogether. Selective vision is a special topic, do you know, for example, that currently Turkish army is carrying out a "special military operation" on the Iraqi territory against Kurdish militia?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/25/turkish-forces-hit-pkk-in-northern-iraq

Probably not, but Kurds were American allies and probably there are collateral casualties among civilians as well. And the Iraqi government is not welcoming it either:
https://tass.com/world/1439653
However nobody is calling for suctions against Turkey...
But let's return to the main line of our conversation.

Of course, we should believe, that the NATO alliance is purely defensive and is not posing any threat to anyone. How many times we have heard it. However, repeating it again and again can not make people to forget the facts. And the facts are:
NATO Intervention, Location Year Initiated
Anchor Guard, Kuwait-Iraq 1990
Ace Guard, Kuwait-Iraq 1991
Operation Joint Guard, Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992
Operation Allied Force, Kosovo-Montenegro-Serbia 1999
Afghanistan War, Afghanistan 2003
NATO Training Mission-Iraq, Iraq 2004
Operation Ocean Shield, Somalia 2009
Military Intervention in Libya 2011

Well, officially NATO was not participating in the Iraqi war. True, it was not lead by NATO, but just by two leading and strongest NATO members - US and UK with a participation of the other allies. The purpose was strictly defensive, of course, to save the world from the chemical weapons, which were never found. In that sense, biological laboratories in Ukraine are much more threatening and solid case than that notorious test tube in the Colin Powell's hand.
Each of those "operation" has very little to do with the security of the NATO countries and caused unmeasurable suffering to the peoples of the countries, where they were carried out.
Certainly, Syria was not invaded (formally) by NATO, but the majority of the US allies took part one way or the other. Wider intervention was prevented only by Russian involvement.

Do you really want Russians to believe, that this is strictly defensive organisation? Majority of the Russian population - those 80-90% that are supporting special military operation in Ukraine believe that NATO is a tool of projecting geopolitical interests of the collective West. They can’t all be wrong. Question number 3:
What will happen next?
Stay subscribed...

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/19/politics/us-weapons-ukraine-intelligence/index.html US sees the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of equipment to be vital to the Ukrainians' ability to hold off Moscow's invasion. A senior defence official said Tuesday that it is "certainly the largest recent supply to a partner country in a conflict." But the risk, both current US officials and defence analysts say, is that in the long term, some of those weapons may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm.
"We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero," said one source briefed on US intelligence. "It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time."
In making the decision to send billions of dollars of weapons and equipment into Ukraine, the Biden administration factored in the risk that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places, a defence official said.

Well, they may have a look, where many of those weapons have gone... Not just American Stingers, but British NLAW, Canadian, Swedish - and many others. Russian army has a sufficient supply of modern weapons. However, Luhansk and Donetsk militia is using all those trophies... And this is just a fraction of the total number.