PhilipTheBucket

When Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, went looking for someone to head the National Counterterrorism Center, she landed on Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, past CIA officer, and twice-failed MAGA congressional candidate in Washington state, who, as the Associated Press reported, “stands out for the breadth of his ties to a deep-seated extremist fringe.” During his first campaign in 2022, Kent consulted with white nationalist Nick Fuentes on social-media strategy. He also had a member of the Proud Boys on his campaign staff, and he embraced as a supporter and ally Joey Gibson, the leader of Patriot Prayer, a Christian nationalist group.

But his associations with far-right extremists began prior to his attempt to win a congressional seat. In 2020, Kent helped boost the organizing message of a new right-wing paramilitary outfit that called itself the 1st Amendment Praetorian.

On September 20, 2020, Robert Patrick Lewis, a former Green Beret and QAnon supporter, posted a long thread on Twitter (now X) that announced the formation of the group. Lewis declared that a band of “military, law enforcement & intel community veterans” had come together to protect the First Amendment rights of conservatives. He presented a harsh, conspiratorial, and paranoid view, claiming, “There are Marxist & leftist politicians aiming to lock down total control over our populace.” He asserted, “Their tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups such as ANTIFA & BLM demand total subservience to and adulation of their specific view of the world.” And he maintained the “corrupted Main Stream Media does their best to tarnish the reputation and destroy the lives of any public or private citizen who dares step up to them or fight back against their narrative.”

Lewis called on “military, law enforcement or intelligence community” veterans to join 1AP and fight back. In an apparent sign of support, Kent reposted this thread.

Lewis noted that 1AP would be providing security services for right-wing rallies and marches, including those “with a large number of high-profile, conservative VIPs speaking & attending.” For one event, he said he needed veterans to provide “physical security, intelligence/surveillance and to serve as team leaders for small security & intelligence and intelligence cells.” He promised, “we will keep your names confidential and our personnel records & communications will be encrypted.” He added, “This group was formed to protect attendees at President Trump’s campaign rallies.”

Soon after forming 1Ap, Lewis presented it not only as a security service for the right but as an intelligence operation. He told Fox News, “Our intelligence shows that no matter who wins the election, they [Antifa] are planning a massive ‘Antifa Tet Offensive,’ bent on destroying the global order they are not beholden to any one party. Their sole purpose is to create havoc, fear, and intimidation.” (No such uprising occurred.) After the election, 1AP claimed it was collecting evidence of fraud. On January 6, as the riot began at the Capitol, Lewis tweeted, “Today is the day the true battles begin.” (He later said he was at the Willard Hotel, not Capitol Hill, that day.)

Lewis’ 1AP did provide security at various events featuring far-right extremists. According to the final report of the House January 6 committee, during a December 12, 2020, rally of pro-Trump election deniers in Washington, DC, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing, anti-government militia, “coordinated” with 1AP “to guard VIPs, including retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne.” (Both Flynn and Byrne were prominent promoters of the crackpot conspiracy theory holding that the 2020 election was stolen form Trump.) Months later, Lewis and 1AP provided security at a QAnon conference in Dallas, where Flynn essentially called for a military coup in the United States.

On social media, Kent has often boosted posts from Lewis. At one point each complimented the other for a podcast appearance. When Kent ran for Congress, Lewis expressed his support for him on social media. In a 2022 Telegram post, Lewis said that he knew Kent “personally” and “wish I could personally vote for him.” In January, 1AP posted on Telegram that there were “mumblings” that Kent could be appointed to lead the National Counterterrorism Center and that this “would be a very good thing. I could not support this more strongly.”

Mother Jones sent Kent, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center a list of questions about Kent’s support for 1AP and his relationship with Lewis. Neither Kent nor the agencies responded.

Kent has an established record as an extremist and promoter of conspiracy theories. During his 2022 run, he called for charging Dr. Anthony Fauci with murder to hold him “accountable” for the “scam that is Covid.” He promoted Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged against him. He backed the idea the January 6 riot was orchestrated by the Deep State to discredit Trump and his supporters. He referred to the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.” He pushed the notion that billionaire Bill Gates was seeking to “control the food supply” and “control housing” to force people to “live in the pod eat the bugs.”

Like Gabbard, Kent has no experience in leading a large intelligence organization. (After serving in the Army, he was a field operative for the CIA for a short time.) Both Kent and Gabbard were on the infamous Signalgate chat. As head of the NCTC, Kent will have the responsibility for monitoring and preventing both foreign and domestic terrorism. But his past as a conspiracy theorist and his association with far-right extremists raise questions about his analytical abilities and his capacity to assess threats of domestic terrorism that arise from the right. His association with 1AP and Lewis is just one more reason to wonder about his judgment.

As President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders Tuesday aimed at keeping coal power alive in the United States, he repeatedly blamed his predecessor, Democrats, and environmental regulations for the industry’s dramatic contraction over the past two decades.

But across the country, state and local officials and electric grid operators have been confronting a factor in coal’s demise that is not easily addressed with the stroke of a pen: its cost.

For example, Maryland’s only remaining coal generating station, Talen Energy’s 1.3-gigawatt Brandon Shores plant, will be staying open beyond its previously planned June 1 shutdown, under a deal that regional grid operator PJM brokered earlier this year with the company, state officials, and the Sierra Club.

Read full article

Comments

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at “protecting” American energy from “state overreach.” The move, some energy experts say, is a legally dubious federal overstep designed to undermine the rights of states and local authorities to combat climate change.

The order claims “many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.”

It specifically points to Blue-state policies like Vermont’s Superfund rules, which require fossil fuel companies to pay for damage to the climate, and California’s cap-and-trade program as examples of efforts to “dictate national energy policy.” In Section 2 of the order, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify state laws or policies “burdening” access to “domestic energy resources that “are or may be…unconstitutional, preempted by Federal law, or otherwise unenforceable.”

What might some of those state laws be? According to the executive order, that could include any effort to address “climate change,” support “environmental justice,” or reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, among others.

That’s not the end of it. The order also directs the attorney general to “expeditiously” take action to “stop the enforcement of State laws and continuation of civil actions” determined to be illegal.

It’s unclear whether this will stand up in court. Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told E&E News that the executive order is “toothless” and that Trump “has no authority on his own to nullify state laws.” Journalist David Roberts, who runs the clean energy newsletter Volts called the order on Bluesky, “wildly, unambiguously unconstitutional” and “dictator shit.”

Others on social media noted the president’s contradiction of traditionally conservative values. As climate reporter and Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt put it on Bluesky, “States rights! But only when the states agree with us[.]”Climate scientist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributing author Zeke Hausfather posted, “So much for federalism…” And Tulane environmental studies professor Joshua Basseches wrote, “Federal overreach has historically been a crusade of the Right, but these times are wild and different.”

This new White House executive order says that the US Attorney General is going to prevent states from implementing democratically passed laws regarding climate change and clean energy. It scarcely needs stating at this point that this is wildly, unambiguously unconstitutional. Dictator shit.

— David Roberts (@volts.wtf) 2025-04-09T05:42:55.516Z

Earlier this year, elected officials from 18 towns and counties devastated by Hurricane Helene gathered outside the Madison County courthouse in Marshall, North Carolina. Standing in a street still stained with the mud left behind when the French River overran its banks, they called for swifter state and federal help rebuilding their communities.

Everyone stood in the chill of a late January day because the first floor of the courthouse, built in 1907, remains empty, everything inside having been washed away in the flood. The county’s judicial affairs are conducted in temporary offices as local leaders wrangle state and federal funding to rebuild. Local officials hope to restore the historic downtown, and its most critical public buildings, without changing too much about it. They, like most of the people impacted by Hurricane Helene’s rampage in September, don’t doubt another flood is coming. But they are also hesitant to move out of its way.

“When you talk about what was flooded and moving it, it would be everything, and that’s just not realistic,” said Forrest Gillium, the town administrator. “We’re not going to give up on our town.”

They may not have to. FEMA is no longer enforcing rules, first adopted during the Obama administration, that required many federally funded construction projects to adopt strict siting and building standards to reduce the risk of future flooding. The rules were withdrawn by the first Trump administration and then re-implemented by executive order under Biden. Now, they’ve been withdrawn by Trump for the second time.

The change eases regulations dictating things like the elevation and floodproofing of water systems, fire stations, and other critical buildings and infrastructure built with federal dollars. Ultimately, the rules were intended to save taxpayers money in the long run. Many other federal, state, and local guidelines still apply to the programs that help homeowners and businesses rebuild. Still, FEMA said rolling back the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will speed up recovery.

“Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements,” the agency said in a statement released March 25.

President Trump rescinded the standard through an executive order on Jan 20. It required federal agencies to evaluate the impact of climate change on future flood risk and weather patterns to determine whether 500- and 100-year floodplains could shift and, if so, consider that before committing taxpayer money to rebuilding. The guideline required building critical facilities like fire stations and hospitals 3 feet above the floodplain elevation, and all other projects receiving federal funding at least 2 feet above it, said Chad Berginnis, who leads the Association of State Floodplain Managers. The idea was to locate these projects so they were beyond areas vulnerable to flooding or design them to withstand it if they could not be moved.

Easing the standard comes even as communities across the United States experience unprecedented, and often repeated, flooding. Homeowners and businesses in Florida, along the Mississippi River, and throughout central Appalachia have endured the exhausting cycle of losing everything and rebuilding it, only to see it wash away again. The Federal Flood Risk Management Standard was meant to break that cycle and ensure everything rebuilt with taxpayer money isn’t destroyed when the next inundation hits.

“Why on Earth would the federal government want it to be rebuilt to a lower standard and waste our money so that when the flood hits if it gets destroyed again, we’re spending yet more money to rebuild it?” Berginnis said.

Last fall, federal climate scientists found that climate change increases the likelihood of extreme and dangerous rainfall of the sort Helene brought to the southeast. Such events will be as much as 15 to 25 percent more likely if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. With more extreme rainfall come challenges for infrastructure that was designed for a less extreme climate.

“You’re going to have storm sewers overwhelmed. You’re going to have basins that were designed to hold a certain kind of flood that don’t do it anymore,” Berginnis said. “You’re going to have bridges that no longer can pass through that water like it used to. You have all of this infrastructure that’s designed for an older event.”

The National Resources Defense Council said the Obama-era standard was developed “because it is no longer safe or adequate to build for the flood risks of the past” and with the rollback, “the federal government is setting up public infrastructure to be damaged by flooding and wasting taxpayer dollars.”

Officials across western North Carolina have expressed frustration with the pace of rebuilding while acknowledging that they don’t want to endure the same problems over and over again.

Canton, North Carolina continues recovering from its third major flood in 20 years. “Everything that flooded in 2004, flooded in ’21. Everything that flooded in ‘21, flooded in 2024,” Mayor Zeb Smathers said. Stategies like new river gauges and emergency warning systems, coupled with land buyouts, have helped mitigate the threat. However, mitigation brings its own risk. The town has seen its tax base dwindle as people who lost their homes moved on after accepting buyouts or deciding that rebuilding was too much effort. When it comes to public buildings, Smathers struggles with the idea of moving something like the school, which has seen its football field flooded in each storm. He feels it is more cost-effective to rebuild than to move, and saves energy and hassle, too.

“I don’t think it’s a one size fits all situation,” he said. “But in the mountains, we’re limited on land and where we can go.”

Much of downtown Canton lies in a floodplain next to the Pigeon River. Smathers wants more flexibility from FEMA and greater trust in local decisions rather than more rules about where and how to build.

Though local governments fronted some of the cost of rebuilding according to FFRMS standards, much of that required work has been federally subsidized.

Josh Harrold, the town manager of Black Mountain, said the Obama-era rules weren’t onerous. Helene decimated the town’s water system, municipal building, and numerous buildings and homes. “We know this is going to happen again,” he said. “No one knows what that’s going to be like, but we are taking the approach of, we just don’t want to build it back exactly like it was. We want to build it back differently.”

Harrold and other officials said they don’t yet know how Trump’s order rescinding the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will impact reconstruction. And it comes as some municipalities adopt and refine stricter floodplain rebuilding rules of their own. In January, Asheville adopted city ordinance amendments to comply with the rebuilding requirements set forth by the National Flood Insurance Program. It is not clear what Trump’s order might mean for that. City officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Berginnis said communities may not see immediate results from this change – but the effects will be felt in the future if leaders bypass the added protection it required: “Everything that gets rebuilt using federal funds will be less safe when the next flood comes.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has inadvertently hit Russia’s economy after his "Liberation Day" tariffs caused oil prices to drop drastically on April 7, with potentially massive ramifications for the Kremlin's ability to fund its ongoing war in Ukraine.

Russia has so far failed to agree to a full ceasefire, and while Trump has been vocal about being "pissed off" and "very angry" with the Kremlin, he is yet to take any concrete action to force Russia to end its full-scale invasion.

He has multiple forms of leverage he could use against the Kremlin — increasing military aid to Ukraine, strengthening the enforcement of existing sanctions, or imposing additional tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil.

So far, he has not used any of it, but his "Liberation Day" tariffs imposed on nearly every country in the world — but notably not Russia — may end up forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to reconsider his options — and the Kremlin is already panicking.

Russia's oil economy

Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on oil revenues, which make up around 30% of its total state budget.

As the war in Ukraine has dragged on, the Kremlin has massively increased defense spending, and 32% of the 2025 budget expenditure was allocated to the military and its war machine in Ukraine.

But there's an issue — when drawing up the 2025 budget, the Kremlin budgeted for an oil price of $70 per barrel. But on April 7, the price of Russian Urals oil tumbled to a 21-month low of $51.54 per barrel on the Baltic port of Primorsk, according to Argus Media. "If the average price is lower (than $70 per barrel) throughout the year, Russia will have less money to earn and spend, especially to cover growing expenses connected to illegal actions against Ukraine," Wojciech Jakobik, a Warsaw-based energy analyst, told the Kyiv Independent."Russia’s National Wealth Fund would be depleted faster, and Russia would need a truce quicker," he added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in Murmansk, Russia, on March 26, 2025. (Contributor / Getty Images)

What's caused the drop in oil prices?

Ukraine has long been targeting Russian oil assets with drones in an attempt to deplete the Kremlin's oil revenue, but Trump has done a more effective job in recent days by dragging the world into economic uncertainty. Trump’s 34% tariffs on China caused Beijing to retaliate with its own 34% tariffs on American goods. The White House responded on April 7 by saying it would add an additional 50% tariff to Chinese goods on top of last week’s 34% tariff and the previous 20% tariff, bringing the total to over 100%. The EU, which was slapped with 20% tariffs on its goods, has also threatened retaliation.

Trump’s actions sparked concerns of a global recession, leading global oil prices to plunge in anticipation of a slowdown in economic activity.

So while Russia was spared the imposition of tariffs, it's now suffering heavily due to the global ramifications of the unfolding global trade war.

The price drop ignited panic in Moscow, and the Kremlin is monitoring the "extremely turbulent, tense" situation, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Interfax on April 7.

"Our economic authorities are monitoring this situation very closely and, of course, are doing and will do everything necessary to minimize the consequences of this international economic storm for our economy," he added.

Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China, on October 23, 2022. (Lintao Zhang / Getty Images)

Are tariffs the only reason Russian oil revenue is falling?

Peskov laid the blame squarely on Trump’s tariffs but there are other factors contributing to the drop in oil revenue for Russia.

Russian fossil fuel revenues were declining even before the tariffs, partly due to American and British sanctions in January which caused "shadow fleet" shipments to drop by 21% in February, the Center for Research on Energy and Clear Air (CREA) reported. The sanctions have also lowered demand for Russian crude in China and India — Moscow’s main markets. On top of this, Trump’s tariffs are likely to hurt China’s economy in particular and consequently, its oil demand. "Since the start of the war with Ukraine, Russia has become significantly dependent on China. Therefore, it's more vulnerable to the health of the Chinese economy," Lilit Gevorgyan, associate director of economics at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told the Kyiv Independent.

Additionally, the OPEC+ oil cartel, of which Russia is a member, has recently unwound restrictions on oil production faster than expected, John Gawthrop, editor at Argus Eurasia Energy, told the Kyiv Independent.

Trump previously said Russia’s war could end "immediately" if OPEC+ lowered oil prices. The cartel, consisting of 12 countries, accounts for 40% of the global oil production and 60% of global oil trade.OPEC+ pledged to increase oil production by 411,000 barrels per day instead of the expected 140,000 per day, starting next month. This will push down prices as there is more oil on the market. "There’s massive uncertainty about what's going on in the global economy and you've also got more oil coming out into the market. It creates the perfect storm," Gawthrop said.

Banks have cut forecasts for Brent crude, the global benchmark, to as low as $60 per barrel. As recently as late March, Brent prices reached $72.52 a barrel.

What does this mean for Russia?

It doesn’t look good for Russia — reduced income from energy would add additional pressure to its already strained economy. Moscow is balancing funding living standards, a war, and macroeconomic stability.

Sanctions alone haven’t yet toppled its economy largely due to the Russian energy sector raking in cash.

Russia’s state budget earned around $100 billion from crude exports alone in 2024, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence."If you take out a big chunk of revenue that had been expected, it becomes harder to maintain that already precarious balance. Something may have to give," Gawthrop said. Russia could cut social spending and investment activities to fund its war machine, but continued prices below $70 per barrel could affect its ability to do so in the longer term, Jakobik said.

And if oil prices fall even further, it could force Moscow into seeking a truce with Ukraine quicker, he added.

A view of Gazprom Neft's oil refinery on the southeastern outskirts of Moscow, Russia, on April 28, 2022. (Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP via Getty Images)

Will oil prices continue to drop?

[Content truncated due to length...]

America is witnessing an unprecedented series of attacks on higher education that commenced well before Donald Trump was re-elected, amid the contentious protests that followed Hamas’ attacks on Israel and Israel’s ruthless (and ongoing) retaliation on Gaza and its inhabitants.

But Trump, as president, has taken matters much further. Claiming antisemitism, his administration is revoking student visas and arresting students who have engaged in nonviolent protests or expressed opinions on social media or in innocuous op-eds. The government’s pauses, reviews, and cancellations of grants and contracts at top universities—including new funding freezes totaling $1 billion for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern—are creating havoc. And its attempt to cap federal funding for the indirect costs of medical research, though tied up in court, could prove devastating to research universities, some of which have already fired staff, imposed hiring freezes, and slashed or postponed graduate programs in response. Now Republicans are considering a tenfold tax increase on endowment investment income for certain universities to help pay for up to $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

All told, these actions amount to the most profound crisis US colleges and universities have ever faced, with likely ripple effects on regional economies and employment, public health, and medicine. Indeed, they have thrown the future of America’s leadership in science and innovation into question.

Yet, instead of speaking out forcefully and cracking open their endowments to cover any shortfalls, most top schools have hunkered down, and even, in Columbia’s case, cut a deal with the administration. Only a few university presidents, including Princeton’s Chris Eisgruber and Wesleyan’s Michael Roth, have had the courage to stick their necks out.

To better understand why, I reached out to Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at the University of California, Merced, who studies the “financialization” of higher ed, and who argued, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that elite institutions can absolutely afford to fight—and should.

Trying to walk too fine a tightrope between the schools’ needs and the interests of wealthy donors, after all, is a high-risk endeavor. In Eaton’s view, “pretending that these attacks aren’t political and not making a political strategy to push back is a fatal error.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Few college presidents have spoken out publicly about these attacks. It’s baffling to me that our top colleges—and law firms, for that matter—aren’t fighting en masse to protect the interests of their students and faculty. What do you make of the reluctance?

By their nature elite universities are conservative—as in cautious—institutions, and I don’t think that equips them well to deal with a full frontal assault like this. Also, elite universities are tied to other elites, especially from the world of finance, who themselves are somewhere between the lines with Trump, and have some sympathy for the Trumpist attacks on diversity and inclusion as university values. So that’s part of what we’ve seen that’s frozen these institutions in their tracks—why they are reacting like deer in the headlights.

Right. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers just had an op-ed in the New York Times in which he decries colleges’ emphasis on identity politics as opposed to academic excellence, in hiring and so forth.

I think that’s the same Summers op-ed where he says [to Harvard]: Don’t be intimidated, spend the endowment—which is pretty different than what we’ve seen from Columbia and a lot of the other elite schools. Summers has played a different role for a long time than your conventional university president. He was the secretary of the Treasury. He’s highly political and has been engaged in politics, and this is a political struggle. Universities like to pretend to not be political—and there are plenty of ways they shouldn’t be, in order to foster free speech and open debate. But pretending that these attacks aren’t political and not making a political strategy to push back is a fatal error.

Wasn’t it this sort of waffling that got them into trouble in the first place amid the Gaza protests? Everybody wanted administrators to issue statements, and they didn’t really know what to do. They’d already spoken up on other things, in support of Ukraine or whatever. And now it looks like they’re stuck back in this mode of indecision.

Yeah. You know, the primary job of an elite university president is to raise money from donors, and if you’re spending a lot of your day talking to your wealthiest alumni—who may have donated to Trump or may feel sympathetic with Trump’s critiques of diversity at the university—it’s hard for folks who spend their day in those social circles to imagine pushing back.

That gets at my next question. Your research examines the relationships between what you call “financialization” and inequalities in higher education. Can you explain how your work applies to the current situation?

Yeah. So, my book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower, shows a radical increase in the proportion of elite university board members coming from finance, particularly private equity and hedge funds. If you go back to the ’80s, private equity and hedge funds didn’t really exist. Investment bankers were prominent on university boards but it’s nothing like today. And these are folks who have some official reach in university policy, and who are the primary fund-raisers—a main job of board members is both to donate a lot and to raise money from other donors.

We saw the activation of these ties around the Gaza war protests, with a subset of wealthy donors saying they wanted to suspend donations to the university until protests were suppressed. It’s not hard to imagine that board elites from Wall Street who were always uncomfortable with elite universities embracing diversity and inclusion see an opportunity to push back, and Trump has opened the space for it to be okay to oppose this.

And of course, their complaints often involved perceived antisemitism at Harvard and so forth, with rich alums like Bill Ackman chiming in. It does seem, in any case, that college presidents are under extraordinary pressure to align themselves with the interests of trustees and top donors.

You often don’t quite see how a system works and the preferences of different actors, their roles in the system, until the system is threatened by disruption. I don’t think anybody was terribly attuned to the dispositions of the financiers on university boards 5 or 10 years ago because, outside of a crisis, donors weren’t engaging to pressure the university to be one thing or another. Since the Gaza war and allegations of antisemitism, and now even more so with the Trump attacks, the preferences and dispositions of these donors may become more visible.

A lot of them must be aghast to see colleges they care about taking such a hit.

Yeah. A proactive, offensive university strategy would be to say no to Trump, to try to weather the storm by tapping the endowment and by turning to alumni of all wealth levels, to say, “Help defend your alma mater. Now is the time that we need you.”

You wrote that top colleges can afford a fight. I think we have 16 schools now with endowments over $10 billion, yet many are cutting deals, and in some cases graduate programs. Why would any private foundation, let alone an educational one, hoard money in the face of such a crisis?

I have to give Larry Summers credit for saying endowments are not to be admired; they are there to be spent in a crisis. And I acknowledge President Obama for saying the same. But universities have become attached to steadily growing their endowment as a status object. And that course of action is at this moment potentially fatal for the university as we know it.

We think of endowments as one giant pot of money, but really they consist of thousands of individual gifts, most earmarked for specific purposes.

[Content truncated due to length...]

Russian offensive operations across the front line in Ukraine have intensified just as Washington is pushing for a truce, CNN reported on April 9, citing Ukraine's General Staff and soldiers.

The news comes as Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on April 9 that Moscow's new spring offensive "has actually already begun."

For over a week, Russian forces have been conducting more aggressive maneuvers in multiple regions, particularly south of Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast — a critical logistics hub situated roughly 70 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Russian-occupied Donetsk.

Syrskyi earlier claimed that despite renewed pressure, Russia is "stalling" in the Pokrovsk sector and failing to achieve major territorial gains. He previously said 7,000 Russian troops were killed near Pokrovsk in January alone.

A Ukrainian reconnaissance officer deployed in the area told CNN that Moscow has been moving in reinforcements and equipment to prepare for expanded attacks.

The Lyman sector, located in northern Donetsk Oblast, has also seen escalating clashes. Ukrainian troops there are heavily outnumbered, sometimes by a ratio of 10 to 1, according to Anastasia Blyshchyk, a spokesperson for Ukraine's 66th Separate Mechanized Brigade.

Russian forces are pushing from the east, aiming to capture key logistical routes linking Lyman with the rest of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The second region remains almost entirely under Russian occupation, with Ukrainian forces holding only a few small settlements.

Combat data analyzed by CNN confirms a surge in Russian activity across the front line over the past two weeks.

President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in March that Russia is preparing for new assaults on the northeastern Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts after Moscow's rapid advances in Kursk Oblast.

Despite efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to mediate a ceasefire, Russia rejected a U.S.-Ukraine proposal for a full 30-day truce, continuing its onslaught to seize more land before potential peace talks.

Data from the battlefield monitoring group DeepState shows that Moscow captured only 133 square kilometers (50 square miles) in March, the lowest monthly gain since June 2024.

Still, pressure is building again. Fighting has surged at the end of the month, especially in Donetsk Oblast, where Russian forces are testing Ukraine's defenses.

Zelensky said on Jan. 15 that Ukraine's military consists of 880,000 soldiers, tasked with defending the entire country against 600,000 Russian troops concentrated in different areas.

Presidential Office Deputy Head Pavlo Palisa said on April 3 that Moscow plans to increase its grouping by 150,000 more soldiers in 2025, equivalent to around 15 motorized infantry divisions.