I used to be a philosophy teacher, with a penchant for Spinoza — meaning my mind tends to be of the logical and down-to-earth kind. But sometimes you've just got to wonder: Last year, looking out the window of my living-room, I saw these tire tracks left after a light snowfall. I grabbed my camera and snapped a picture of this "sign."
Two days before the start of the war, the Kremlin said that there were no plans to attack Ukraine, and that there can be no plans to do so. On the day of the invasion, Putin urged the Ukrainian army to go to Kyiv and take down the "neo-Nazi" Vladimir Zelensky.
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A week later, when the blitzkrieg was clearly a failure, the "liberation of the Donbas" began, and was cited as the purpose for Russia’s invastion. Each time circumstances required, Putin changed the official reasons for the war, although his original goal was to overthrow the Ukrainian government and occupy the entire territory of Ukraine, a goal he still pursues, according to the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolai Patrushev, confirmed the initial goals of Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the war in Ukraine.
"On July 5, Councilor Nikolai Patrushev stated that the Russian military operation in Ukraine will continue until Russia achieves its goals of protecting civilians from "genocide", "denazification" and demilitarization of Ukraine, and Ukraine's obligation to remain permanently neutral between Russia and NATO, almost exactly repeating the goals that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in his speech on February 24, justifying the war," analysts note.
Wallace stated that training will take place across the Northeast, Southwest and Southeast regions and will be led by officers from the 11 Security Force Assistance Brigade. The Ukrainian soldiers will receive the same training as UK soldiers, which include weapons use, battlefield first aid, fieldcraft patrol tactics and training on the Law of Armed Conflict.
Ukraine Renews Calls For More Arms, Tries To Hold Off Russian Advances
Ukraine says its military is trying to fight back the Russian forces trying to advance through the eastern Donbas region. The head of the Luhansk region military administration, Serhiy Gaidai, says Ukrainian fighters are doing everything they can to resist the Russian troops, “we restrain the enemy on the border of Luhansk region and Donetsk region — the occupiers are suffering significant losses, as they themselves admit,” Gaidai added.
He repeated calls for additional weaponary from the West, needed to match the dominant Russian firepower. Moscow’s forces now occupy most of the Luhansk region, and are pressing toward the Donetsk cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
After reports of two civilians killed and seven others injured by Russian shelling in Sloviansk, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote in a Telegram post, that Russian troops were continuing their attacks on “places where civilians are gathered. This is pure terrorism.”.
Another Russian Oligarch Found Dead
\u201cThread. A Russian businessman with ties to Gazprom has died outside St. Petersburg in the latest in a series of mysterious deaths to grip the country\u2019s gas industry in 2022.\n\nYury Voronov, 61, headed the Astra Shipping transportation firm that worked on Gazprom\u2019s Arctic projects.\u201d
Yury Voronov, founder and CEO of the transport and logistics company Astra-Shipping, which worked with Gazprom in the Arctic, was found dead in his mansion near Saint Petersburg. He died of a gunshot wound to the head and his body was found in his swimming pool. There are still no reports of whether his death was a homicide or a suicide.
Voronov’s widow reportedly told the police that her husband had been drinking heavily recently due to a falling out with his contractors and business partners.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, and as the West imposed more sanctions on Russia, several Russian businessmen have been found dead, some in mysterious ways. His death is at least the sixth linked to the Russian gas industry in recent months.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba: Thank You, Mario Draghi
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda
In a rare in-depth interview, Ukraine's top diplomat described how the country’s EU candidacy came together … also with a major hand from Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi:
“Let me remind you that a month ago, leaving the meeting of the European Council, Draghi commented that he was the only leader of a major European state who directly supported candidate status for Ukraine. Then it flashed in the news and disappeared, but it's true. There was a meeting of the European Council. Everyone was silent, but Draghi took responsibility and said: "I support, I am in favor." He wanted to show that not only our traditional best friends – the Poles, Batlic states, and other countries — support the candidacy, but that there is a large country, traditionally considered more favorable to Russia, that made a strategic decision for itself.
Read the full interview here from Ukrainian news media Livy Bereg, in English via Worldcrunch.
A Drag Queen Making Coffins For Bucha: Another Sad And Crazy War Story
Artur Ozerov from Kyiv is one of hundreds of thousands of volunteers who help the Ukrainian army and civilians during the war. Still, he’s got his own approach. The Ukrainian news outlet Novoe Vremya featured a profile of Ozerov, a Ukrainian civil servant, owner of an apiary near Kyiv, and a drag queen artist.
"When the full-scale war started, my first thought was: I won't go anywhere, I'll stay home. I have a big house - lots of bees and animals,” recalls Ozerov, whose drag name is Aura. “But if God forbid, something happens - a rocket hits, or something catches fire, who will put it out?"
As an employee of one of the utilities in the capital city, he and his colleagues were called on by the army to help about ten days after the full-scale invasion. Since he was good with wood and making frames and beehives for his apiary, it fell to Ozerov to begin making coffins. And soon realized some of them were destined for Bucha, the suburb of the Kyiv were an untold number of civilians were massacred in alleged Russian war crimes.
"After Bucha was liberated, the exhumation of bodies from mass graves was shown on television. Then they were reburied,” says Ozerov.“There is footage showing that people killed in settlements near Kyiv were buried in that same coffins. When we produced the coffins and the number passed 100, I couldnt realize how many people died there, if it's some kind of endless conveyor belt. You chop-chop-chop-chop these coffins, and they tell you they need more and more. It was emotionally hard."
Ukrainian Professor Wins Prestigious Fields Medal For Mathematics
Ukrainian mathematician, Maryna Viazovska, received the prestigious Fields Medal at a ceremony in Helsinki for her work on a 400-year-old puzzle about sphere packing. This prize is often regarded as the Nobel Prize for mathematics and is awarded every four years to outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40. The 37-year-old professor received the award alongside three other winners. She is the second woman ever to have received the prize.
After winning the award, Professor Viazovsk paid tribute to those suffering in her war-torn country, saying "my life changed forever" when Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
The International Congress of Mathematicians, where the prize is awarded, was originally due to be held in Saint Petersburg in Russia and opened by President Vladimir Putin. When Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of mathematicians signed an open letter protesting the choice of the host city, as a result, the event was moved to the Finnish capital.
In a rare in-depth interview, Ukraine's top diplomat didn't hold back as he discussed NATO, EU candidacy, and the future of the war with Russia. He also reserves a special "thank you" for Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
The martyrdom of Mariupol
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
A daughter of Kyiv
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.