Where Every Scroll is a New Adventure
Russian War On Ukraine - Blog Posts
People forget that while Ukraine isn't allowed to harm one hair on Russia's soil, Russia has been working hard to kill Ukrainians not just with misiles
- by destroying the medical infrastructure
- freezing or burning people to death by destroying the power grid that helps people survive during winter and increasingly hot summers
- by kidnapping and re-educating Ukrainian children and adopting them into Russian families
- by destroying Ukraine's food production capacity
- by targetting civilian areas, in broad daylight, such as shopping centres
- by destroying cultural institutions, museums, universities, schools
- by riddling farm land with mines it will take decades to remove that will maim and kill farmers and children
- by causing one of the worst environmental disasters when they blew up a dam
- by executing and torturing and raping men, women, children and elderly who are Ukrainian
- by creating generations of trauma and loss, some of which has and will end with people taking their own lives
- by convincing the whole world that it's ok for them to keep doing this without consequence whether in Chechnya, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Mali, Sudan, Central Africa, and the list goes on
And that all not even touching on how the operate in the actual battle field, using chemical weapons and white phosphorus, or executing POWs, and civilians in captured towns.
And this isn't touching on centuries of linguistic and cultural repression, political repression, forced starvation, forced labour, death by displacement, gulags, and summary executions.
Russia is a plague on the world. Hell, on its own people.
And it's been that way for centuries. Before Putin. Even before Stalin. Even before the Tzar.
Repression. Oppression. Violence. Totalitarianism. Subservience to power. Apathy in the face of it all. That's all it has to offer in its grotesque history, art and culture.
doctors from Ochmatdit clinic, that specialized on treating children with cancer and was struck by missile during the attack this morning, are helping with cleaning up the rubble and getting the children from under the building, even though they themselves are hurt
"russia just invaded ukraine vs israel committing a genocide in palestineā
yeah just invaded.
yeah it a fair war of two relatively the same military powers.
yeah one side never said that the other never existed and shouldnāt exist now.
yeah one side is not targeting civilian infrastructure en masse.
yeah itās just a conflict and not a continuation of a hundred-year conquest of an imperial power to destroy a nation.
itās not like one side has killed at least 10 million people in the space of the last century while specifically targeting this nation in particular.
itās great that you all read about palestinian history - this is a right thing to do and one of the ways to decolonise your own knowledge- but maybe pick up a timothy snyder or serhiy plokhy book and read when russians started killing ukrainians. you would be surprised that it didnāt start either in 2022 or 2014, its been going on FOR CENTURIES.
wording matters. check whether your country recognises holodomor as a genocide. if yes, read about it. if not, read about it as well.
and then check what constitutes a genocide and how both of this tragedies are genocides: of ukrainian people by russia and of palestinian people by israel.
you just read a news piece "Ukraine returned 4 kids from russian territories aged 17, 9, 6 and 3" and think: finally some good fucking news, but then you scroll further and you see the numbers 19,000 deported and 1,400 missing and you just donāt understand what should we do to safe them, who should we ask and beg for help.
In my class we had a refugee from Ukraine whose native language was Russian for a few months (she then moved to a different city) and we have like 6 Russians in our class, but none of them ever talked to her even though they all spoke Russian fluently. It was obvious how much they hated her because she was from Ukraine.
Me and some others in our class tried helping her out a bit but it was not so easy because she only spoke very few English and German.
Gotta say I thought the people in our class would show more support, like even some of the Non-Russians, but with Russian friends, were bitter. The majority would speak to her (over an translator) one or two times and then just coexist. I and like three others were the only ones who were actually sometimes with her during school. (The Ukrainians in our school visited a German class during most of our classes, so that they didnāt have to just sit there and listen to someone teaching something in a language they didnāt understand.)
But, I was actually shocked about the fact that our Russians didnāt want to talk to her, because at I know that at least three or four of them arenāt Putin fans. I mean ignoring a classmate is definitely not the worst thing Russians do to Ukrainians outside of the war but I still think itās important about the ignorance of some. Maybe not all Russians are Pro-Putin but the majority isnāt as Anti-Putin as they should be, either.
a conversation with the older brother; rivne, ukraine.
Thank you. ŠŃŠŗŃŃ.
And another one of us (foreigners fighting for Ukraine) is gone... He wasn't in my unit and I didn't know him really but I remember I briefly met him in Kyiv in the early days of the war. Seemed to be a nice guy. RIP.
According to Wikipedia (here, scroll down to "Foreign fighters and volunteers") at least 313 foreigners have been killed in Ukraine, but I know for a fact it must be much more, because about a third of the people of whom I personally know were killed in combat, because they were in my company in my battalion, don't show up on any lists and or in any media. The ones who are made public are the ones whose parents/family take initiative and bring their kid's or brother's death to the public's attention, like recently in case of my friend Jeff who died in Bakhmut:
[I'm just seeing this for the first time... "Even though Jeffrey Jones suffered a concussion in 2022 while working as a medic in Ukraine...", haha that's funny. Hey, Jeff was a great guy, and please don't tell his family, if they would ever ask me I'd swear he got injured "working as a medic", but just between the two of us, he suffered this concussion during training from a kind of play-fight with our unit leader at the time, who threw him over his shoulder on the ground and Jeff's head hit the concrete so hard he was passed out for literally 30 minutes. I was the first medic to help him, because I was watching while it happened, and was worried his skull cracked, but luckily he recovered. Only to come back to Ukraine a few months later and get killed in Bakhmut...Fuck, I wish he had stayed home]
The media doesn't mention that for some reason, but fyi, he was with 204th Bn TDF. That's not very well known but yes, there are also foreigners in the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Force. He died in a trench in Bakhmut area from shrapnel wounds, together with another foreigner, a Brazilian named Antonio whom I didn't know.
This is Jeff:
And then there are the many foreigners who died here who never make it public because they have no family to care about these things. Like my friend Sebastian from Poland, whom I served with last year at the Izyum Front. Shot in the head in Bakhmut, died a week later in a hospital in Poland. If you google him you find nothing, if you google him via image search the only thing that comes up is this Reddit thread:
(Sebastian is the left one)
Sebastian was genuinely one of the best soldiers and just generally greatest people I've met in Ukraine. And I'm not saying that because he's dead but it's true. I was devastated when I heard about his death, because he was really one of the best of us in every possible way. Here's Sebastian sitting in front of the house that we both lived in last year in summer:
And then there are the many (more than killed) whom you'll never hear anything about, because they go home with serious, permanent injuries. But they're not dead, so no media is interested in their stories. Like my friend F, a former Marine who was in my unit almost since the very first day of training, who got shrapnelled in the head over half a year ago on one of the exact positions I'm still working at today. I visited him in the hospital in February after his brain surgery:
He's back home in the states for a couple months now, but his life will never be the same. And there are many more like him.
Don't forget about us. Not all heroes in Ukraine are Ukrainians.
"My son was tortured by separatists (those who believe Donbas and Crimea are russian). His documents were handed over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Inhumans carved a kolovrat on his face." - mother of the soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Ivan Isyk.
A month after his death, the body of 30-year-old Ivan was given to his parents.
An autopsy performed by Ukrainian doctors revealed that his internal organs had been cut out and later sewn back into his body. A piece of the Ukrainian flag was found in his throat, and brain fragments were found in his stomach. And Ivan Isyk, who was still alive, had a kolovrat carved on his cheek (the symbol of the "Rusich" battalion, where maniacs Petrovsky and another ghoul named Milchakov served.)
This photo shows Russian neo-Nazi Yan Petrovsky, who was arrested by Finland in July 2023:
We must never forget that back in 2014, the Ukrainian Hero, a simple boy from Drohobych IVAN ISYK, died at the cost of his life with a terrible death":
After a russian missile strike on Chernihiv killed 6 year old Sophia 64 000(!!!) russians posted and reposted jokes, such as "Chernihiv. Selling child sandals. Unworn."
When russian missile hit Vinnytsya in 2022, killing 23 people among whom was 4 year old Lisa, tens of thousands of russians online mocked her disability, laughing at her death, or even making open claims that she's better off dead.
They think murdering children is funny. They think dead children are funny.
It's definitely not "just Putin". The russian society is rotten to its core.
The girls singing in this video were killed in a missile attack on Zaporizhzhia an hour after the performance š
Svitlana Semeikina and Kristina Spitsyna were performing to raise funds for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Their parents are now also defending Ukraine in the Zaporizhzhia sector.
The girls were only 19 and 21 years old. On August 9, they were killed by a Russian missile.
When I see some foreigners wholeheartedly say that Ukrainians shouldn't judge all russians by the actions of the russian army, I think they miss a couple of points.
Firstly, Western belief that there is good in every person leads to self-deception and naivety. Many people still want to believe that russian society isn't different from the ones they live in. "Well, of course they are just like us. Look at their cities, at their youth, look at the things their activists write and say. Army gets the orders from the government, that's it. Ordinary people are against this war" Well, I don't know about you, but in my country army IS a part of the society. In fact, it's a scaled down version of the society. Soldiers aren't grown in laboratories where they gain their own, separate mentality.
Of course, if you are lucky/unlucky enough to speak russian, you know that the image and the essence of the russian mentality are two different things. russians are extremely good at creating an attractive and somewhat alluring image of their country for those who don't go in too deep. People who still try to judge russians from their own, West-oriented perspective, make a huge mistake. They conclude that the ordinary russians strive to the same values and civilizational goals as a common folk from, let's say, Berlin or Copenhagen.
The second thing has to do with us, Ukrainians. For us it's not the time for the shades of gray. To survive and to gain the victory, we need to look at the enemy through a white and black lense. Here are us and there are them. If we start pondering which russian is better and which is worse, we risk to lose everything. Every living russian at this given moment is an enemy - either a current or a potential one. Those russians who were kids at the beginning of the war in 2014, grew up and came to kill us in 2022. So we don't have the privilidge of going through all of the life details of those russians who beat themselves in the chest and proclaim they are good. Besides, in most cases after a few crucial questions 'good' russians turn into the ordinary ones. And thus we return to the first point once again - it's improtant to understand that russians are extremely good at hiding their ugly core from those who don't study the topic deep enough.
ik people say you shouldn't read news first thing in the morning or reach for your phone but this is how many times my city was shelled by russians in the last 24 hours (almost each paragraph is a separate case)
russia breaks the ceasefire two hours after they agreed to stop strikes on Ukraineās energy sector - by bombing the power system of Slovyansk, Donetsk region, half of the city is without electricity.
Another 2 hours later they bomb a hospital in Sumy. Then launched attack drones all over the country.
āCeasefireā my ass
Fuck you and fuck your āpeace talksā
You donāt want peace. You want us to die more quietly.