Of the 360,000 troops that made up Russia’s pre-invasion ground force, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, according to the assessment. 2,200 of 3,500 tanks have been lost, according to the assessment.

“I was in those meetings, and Gorbachev has [also] said there was no promise not to enlarge NATO,” Zoellick recalls. Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, later president of Georgia, concurred, he says. Nor does the treaty on Germany’s unification include a limit on NATO enlargement.

John Durham testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and admitted he didn’t know about several elements of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia: releasing stolen email through cutouts, Trump negotiating a tower deal, Manafort and Kilimnik.

The loss of Kherson will spark a fresh round of recriminations inside Russia as supporters of the invasion and regime officials search for guilty parties to blame for the debacle. The mood among regime loyalists and hardliners is already dark. Former Kremlin advisor Sergei Markov branded the decision to leave Kherson, “Russia’s biggest geopolitical defeat since the collapse of the USSR.”

The FSB and GRU are as ambitious as they are dangerous in their operations, but the same cannot be said about their operational security practices. You do not need to look for dead drops in a park or trail people through alleyways to uncover the cover identities of spies, rather you just need a keen eye, patience, and the sense of knowing where to look for available leaked data sources.

What Trump is alleged to have done is not a garden variety crime; it’s worse. It involved misusing $250 million in aid appropriated by Congress for his benefit—the kind of gross misconduct that easily clears the bar of high crimes and misdemeanors set by the Constitution when impeaching a president. Which means the best way to hold Trump accountable for that misconduct isn’t a criminal trial; it’s for Congress to impeach him.

Pursuing criminal cases that won’t stand legal scrutiny, or arguing that Trump has violated a criminal statute, risks undermining that goal.

Labeling Trump’s alleged conduct as “bribery” or “extortion” cheapens what is alleged to have occurred and does not capture what makes it wrongful. It’s not a crime—it’s a breach of the president’s duty to not use the powers of the presidency to benefit himself. And he invited a foreign nation to influence the 2020 presidential election on the heels of a nearly three-year investigation that proved Russia had tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.

No one should expect law enforcement to act if our elected representatives are unwilling to do so.

bellingcat!