Top: “25 Khromov Street.” Left: “Shaman: Victory!” Right: “We are there where we need to be. Serve as a contract soldier in the Russian Army and get a one-time payment starting at one million rubles.”
Source: Caution, Tver! (Telegram), 1 September 2024. Thanks to Andrey Anissimov for the heads-up. “Basurka” is the faux-Russian nonce word I coined for this distressing post. It was suggested to me by our building’s bilingual garbage bin. ||| TRR
Many acquaintances from Russia condemn me for calling for the bombing of Russian factories and supporting the Ukrainian army’s Kursk offensive. They genuinely don’t get how one could wish defeat on one’s own country. Some have quietly unfriended me, while others continue to read my posts but are perplexed and perhaps even offended by them.
They are often the same people who “love (their) country no matter what.” This is where you all and I part ways. You REFUSE to look at reality—you turn away from it in order to love your country without breaking a sweat, as if love were a chain and you’ve been chained to a radiator since childhood. It works differently for me. I make my own decision about whether I like this scene or not. And, if my country jumps from one bloody shitstorm to another like a maniac running in circles, it’s not worthy of my love and I rescind its right to be my country. People are another matter, especially the unborn. It makes sense to fight for them. But it’s secondary to me what the country they’ll live in will be called and how big it will be. If they’ll have a better chance for a decent and safe life in a small country, then we should choose a decent and safe life for them.
Russia is an anti-human phenomenon. It is a threat to the entire world and to the people within the country. Like any rabid macaque with a grenade, it must be stopped. Look reality in the eye at last. Don’t look away. It’s happening right now, and you, with your unadulterated love, are a part of it.
Image number one. A fourteen-year-old girl dressed in white sneakers and a white tank top, sitting on a bench in the yard of her house on an ordinary summer day. It all looks ordinary, but there is one catch: the girl is dead. A fragment of a cluster bomb, which the Russians dropped on Kharkiv on 30 August, tore off the child’s head. Everything happened instantly; no one had time to hide. The girl’s body remained seated on the bench. Perhaps her last thoughts were of her father, who had gone missing in action in the war with Russia. The family knows he was killed, but they can’t get his body back. The worst part is that he gave his life thinking he was protecting his daughter. Russia got to her, though, and so the family’s story is over. Father and daughter are not alive because they were born near Russia. Other Kharkiv residents who were killed in that senseless attack are also “guilty” in this sense.
Image number two. A girl again, but from another city. She is fifteen years old and has come to Novosibirsk from the Altai to enroll in the Olympic reserve school. She is quite beautiful, gentle, kind, and has great hopes. She doesn’t understand why her fellow students call her a “dirty, slant-eyed pig.” They secretly pour waste into her backpack and mock her appearance in public. After two years of this terror, which was encouraged by coaches and school officials, the formerly cheerful girl will come to realize that this life is not for her. In her seventeenth year, she will kill herself and leave a suicide note on her Telegram channel. She will say in the note that the unbearable racist bullying was her reason for leaving this life.
The school will then post a touching obituary on their Vkontakte page. They won’t specify the cause of death, of course. All comments expressing outrage over the bullying will be assiduously deleted. Only the wishes of “soft clouds” and broken heart emojis will be left untouched.
Incitement to suicide is a criminal offense, actually. But no one will answer for the death of Ksenia Cheponova because it is not the custom in Russia to punish one’s own kind for a crime against outsiders. “You’re not my brother, black-ass louse,” says the immortalized Russian movie hero. These words are much more than a mere insult: this is how millions of people in Russia understand justice. Moral rightness is not based on your deeds, but on whether you are an insider or an outsider. It doesn’t matter what you did. What matters is whether you are stronger than me at the moment.
Image number three. Beslan. September first marked the twentieth anniversary of the mass murder of children by Russian security forces in that ill-fated school. For twenty years, the perpetrators have never been held accountable for lying about “350 hostages.” There were 1,100 hostages, as we know. No one has been held accountable for firing from a tank at the building where the children were. Three hundred and thirty-four people were killed during the assault, including one hundred and eighty children. This terrorist attack might not have happened if Russia hadn’t started a war in Chechnya. The hostages might have lived if the security forces had actually tried to save them. But they were killed and twenty years on their sacrifices are still covered in lies and impunity.
All of those people could have lived if it weren’t for their country, sick with messianism and aggression. And the “it’s like this everywhere” ploy doesn’t work. No country in the world has 60 million lives lost in wars, gulags, and famines under its belt.
The time for saying “no war” has passed. It is clear that where there is a “great Russia,” there will be perpetual war. That’s why we should say no to Russia, and yes to independent Ukraine, Ichkeria, Buryat-Mongolia, and all free nations.
Or is the idea of a united Russia dearer than the lives of your children?
Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 3 September 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
Two ballistic missiles blasted a military academy and nearby hospital Tuesday in Ukraine, killing more than 50 people and wounding more than 200 others, Ukrainian officials said.
The missiles tore into the heart of the Poltava Military Institute of Communication’s main building, causing several stories to collapse. It didn’t take long for the smell of smoke and word of the deadly strike to spread through the central-eastern town.
The strike appeared to be one of the deadliest carried out by Russian forces since the war began more than 900 days ago, with Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, full-scale invasion.
“People found themselves under the rubble. Many were saved,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video posted on his Telegram channel. He ordered an investigation.
Shattered bricks were visible inside the closed gates of the institution, which was off-limits to the media, and small pools of blood could be seen just outside hours later. Field communications trucks were parked along the perimeter. Roads were covered in glass from shattered apartment windows.
“I heard explosions … I was at home at that time. When I left the house, I realized that it was something evil and something bad,” said Yevheniy Zemskyy, who arrived to volunteer his help. “I was worried about the children, the residents of Poltava. That’s why we are here today to help our city in any way we can.”
By Tuesday evening, the death toll stood at 51, according to the general prosecutor’s office.
“My deepest condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the Russian missile attack on Poltava,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, posted on social media Tuesday. “This is a shocking tragedy for the whole Ukraine.”
Filip Pronin, governor of the region that bears Poltava’s name, announced on Telegram that 219 people were wounded. Up to 18 people may be buried under the rubble, he said.
Ten apartment buildings were damaged, and more than 150 people donated blood, Pronin said.
He called it “a great tragedy” for the region and all of Ukraine, and announced three days of mourning starting Wednesday.
[…]
The academy trains officers in communications and electronics, honing some of the most valued skills in a war where both sides are fighting for control of the electronic battlefield.
“The enemy certainly must answer for all (its) crimes against humanity,” Pronin wrote on Telegram.
The Kremlin offered no immediate comment on the strike. It was not clear whether the dead and wounded were limited to Ukrainian military personnel, such as signal corps cadets, or if they included civilians.
Since it embarked on its full-scale invasion in early 2022, the Russian military has repeatedly used missiles to smash civilian targets, sometimes killing scores of people in a single attack.
Some of the deadliest such assaults included a 2022 airstrike on a theater in Mariupol that killed hundreds of civilians sheltering in the basement and a strike that same year on the train station in Kramatorsk that killed 61. Apartment buildings, markets and shopping centers have also been targeted.
Poltava is about 350 kilometers (200 miles) southeast of Kyiv, on the main highway and rail route between Kyiv and Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, which is close to the Russian border.
The attack happened as Ukrainian forces sought to carve out their holdings in Russia’s Kursk border region after a surprise incursion that began Aug. 6 and as the Russian army hacks its way deeper into eastern Ukraine.
The missiles hit shortly after an air-raid alert sounded, when many people were on their way to a bomb shelter, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said, describing the strike as “barbaric.”
Rescue crews and medics saved 25 people, including 11 who were dug out of the rubble, a Defense Ministry statement said.
The strike came on the day that Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Mongolia. There was no indication that his hosts would heed demands to arrest him on an international warrant for alleged war crimes.
Zelenskyy repeated his appeal for Ukraine’s Western partners to ensure swift delivery of military aid. He has previously chided the U.S. and European countries for being slow to make good on their pledges of help.
He also wants them to ease restrictions on what Ukraine can target on Russian soil with the weapons they provide. Some countries fear that hitting Russia could escalate the war.
“Ukraine needs air defense systems and missiles now, not sitting in storage,” Zelenskyy wrote in English on Telegram.
“Long-range strikes that can protect us from Russian terror are needed now, not later. Every day of delay, unfortunately, means more lost lives,” he said.
Ukraine’s air force said Monday that Russia had launched an overnight barrage of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones at Kyiv as children prepared to return to school. Multiple explosions echoed across the capital early Monday morning as Ukraine’s air defenses shot down many of the weapons, causing damage and fires as the debris fell onto the capital.
Source: CBS News, 3 September 2024
Ufa’s Kirov District Court has remanded 20-year-old university student Makar Nikolayev in custody to a pretrial detention center for a month on charges of “promoting terrorism.” The court issued its ruling on 30 August, but it was made public only on Monday, 2 September, as reported by the Telegram channels of Baza and Idel.Realities, who cited sources. The court confirmed Nikolayev’s arrest to news website Ufa1.ru.
In 2020, Nikolayev, then a prep school student, designed an information retrieval method for creating a Russian national archive on the history of the Great Patriotic War. The boy wanted to recover information about his great-grandfather and in the process designed an entire system. His project, “Methodology for Creating a Family Archive,” won the Russian national contest “My Country — My Russia,” one of the projects of the Russia Is a Land of Opportunities presidential platform.
Later, Nikolayev went to Germany to study. According to Idel.Realities, Nikolayev had been studying at a university in Frankfurt am Main in recent years. In August 2024, he came home on holiday to Ufa, where he was detained.
According to police investigators, during his time abroad, Nikolayev wrote comments on social networks supporting Ukraine and urging people to join the Russian Volunteer Corps. The stipulated punishment for violating Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 205.2.2 (“Public calls to carry out terrorist activities; public justification of terrorism or promotion of terrorism, committed using mass media or electronic or telecommunication networks”) is five to seven years in prison.
Source: Sergei Kuprikov, “Winner of ‘My Country — My Russia’ contest detained in Ufa,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 2 September 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
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