Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu is a Russian politician and military officer who has served as Secretary of the Security Council since 2024. He served as Minister of Defence of Russia from 2012 to 2024. Shoigu has served as the chairman of the Council of Ministers of Defense of the Commonwealth of Independent States since 2012.
Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov is a Russian army general serving as the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and First Deputy Minister of Defence.
Pavel Yuryevich Gubarev is a Ukrainian-born Russian public figure, primarily known for his pro-Russian activities in Donbas in 2014. He is married to Ekaterina Gubareva.
The Minsk agreements were a series of international agreements which sought to end the Donbas war fought between armed Russian separatist groups and Armed Forces of Ukraine, with Russian regular forces playing a central part. After a defeat at Ilovaisk at the end of August 2014, Russia forced Ukraine to sign the first Minsk Protocol, or the Minsk I. It was drafted by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format. After extensive talks in Minsk, Belarus, the agreement was signed on 5 September 2014 by representatives of the Trilateral Contact Group and, without recognition of their status, by the then-leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR). This agreement followed multiple previous attempts to stop the fighting in the region and aimed to implement an immediate ceasefire.
The Volnovakha bus attack was an attack on a highway checkpoint near the village of Buhas outside of the Volnovakha municipality in the Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on 13 January 2015. It resulted in the deaths of 12 passengers of an intercity bus and injuries to 18 others in the area. The attack was the largest single loss of life since the signing of the Minsk Protocol in September 2014, which attempted to halt the War in Donbas. The incident has been labeled an "act of terror" by both the Ukrainian authorities as well as the rebels.
InformNapalm is a volunteer initiative to inform Ukrainian citizens and the foreign public about the Russo-Ukrainian War and the activities of the Russian special services as well as the militants of DPR, LPR, and Novorossiya. The team members are engaged in a wide range of other volunteer activities. Authors publish materials in 30 languages, including Japanese and Chinese.
The Wagner Group, officially known as PMC Wagner, is a Russian private military company (PMC) controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin. The Wagner Group has used infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces. Evidence suggests that Wagner has been used as a proxy by the Russian government, allowing it to have plausible deniability for military operations abroad, and hiding the true casualties of Russia's foreign interventions.
During Ukraine's post-Soviet history, the far-right has remained on the political periphery and been largely excluded from national politics since independence in 1991. Unlike most Eastern European countries which saw far-right groups become permanent fixtures in their countries' politics during the decline and the Dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the national electoral support for far-right parties in Ukraine only rarely exceeded 3% of the popular vote. Far-right parties usually enjoyed just a few wins in single-mandate districts, and no far right candidate for president has ever secured more than 5 percent of the popular vote in an election. Only once in the 1994–2014 period was a radical right-wing party elected to the parliament as an independent organization within the proportional part of the voting: Svoboda in 2012. Since then far-right parties have failed to gain enough votes to attain political representation, even at the height of nationalist sentiment during and after Russia's annexation of Crimea and the Russo-Ukrainian War.
The Battle of Khasham, also known as the Battle of Conoco Fields, was a military engagement of the Syrian civil war fought on 7 February 2018 near the towns of Khasham and Al Tabiyeh in the Deir ez-Zor Governorate, Syria. The Operation Inherent Resolve coalition delivered air and artillery strikes on Syrian Armed Forces and pro-government militias after they reportedly engaged a U.S. military and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) position in the region.
From April 2014 until September 2022, the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) claimed to be independent states. Their sovereignty was recognized by South Ossetian authorities in 2014, Russia and Abkhazian authorities in February 2022, Syria in June 2022 and North Korea in July 2022.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has seen foreign volunteers participate on both sides of the conflict. Most foreign fighters joined the conflict during one of two waves. The first wave happened from 2014 to 2019 during the War in the Donbas and consisted of approximately 17,241 foreign fighters. The second wave is considered by researchers to have been much larger and began in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"On conducting a special military operation" was a televised broadcast by Russian president Vladimir Putin on 24 February 2022, announcing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On 9 March 2022, the Russian Air Force bombed Maternity Hospital No 3, a hospital complex functioning both as a children's hospital and maternity ward in Mariupol, Ukraine, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, killing at least four people and injuring at least sixteen, and leading to at least one stillbirth.
Patrick Lancaster is an American vlogger, podcaster and influencer. Although described as pro-Kremlin, Lancaster has been called a double agent due to his videos covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine regularly revealing compromising Russian military information, which is used against Russia by Ukrainian forces, western intelligence agencies, and western media. Lancaster is known for regularly filming staged scenes and attempting to pass them off as real, and has been referred to as a fake master.
Evgeniy Poddubny is a Russian war correspondent, propagandist, and special correspondent for the Russia-24 and Russia-1 television channels. He was born in Belgorod, and received a master's degree in psychology and has worked as a war correspondent for Russian state television. He has covered Russian conflicts in Georgia, Syria, as well as in Ukraine. For his work, he has received sanctions by both the United Kingdom, and Australia who accuse him of disinformation on behalf of the Russian government. In August 2024, he received injuries after his vehicle was struck with a loitering munition while covering the August 2024 Kursk Oblast incursion.
Darya Aleksandrovna Dugina, also known under the pen name Daria Platonova, was a Russian journalist, political scientist, and activist. She was the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a supporter of Vladimir Putin and a far-right political philosopher, whose support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine she shared.
On 30 September 2022, Russia, amid an ongoing invasion of Ukraine, unilaterally declared its annexation of areas in and around four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. The boundaries of the areas to be annexed and their borders were not defined; Russian officials stated that they would be defined later. None of the oblasts were fully under Russian control at the time of the declaration, nor since. If limited to the areas then under Russian control the annexation would still be the largest in Europe since World War II.
The Sabotage Assault Reconnaissance Group(DShRG) "Rusich" is a Russian far-right and neo-Nazi paramilitary unit that has been fighting against Ukrainian forces in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Its co-founder and leader is Alexey Milchakov and operates within the Wagner Group. "Rusich" fought on the side of pro-Russian military in the Donbas war from June 2014 to July 2015, and in the Russian invasion of Ukraine alongside Russian troops.
On 5 January 2023, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, called on both sides of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for an Eastern Orthodox Christmas truce. On the evening of the same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to declare a 36-hour temporary ceasefire along the entire line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian troops from midday on 6 January to midnight on 7 to 8 January 2023.
