Russian Invasion of Ukraine

[ti-amie]

i do have a problem with "wet behind the ears" reporters breathlessly reporting where people have taken shelter or where Ukrainians weapons caches are located. War is not a video game.

[ti-amie]

Judd Legum
@JuddLegum 1h
@KochIndustries statement is a direct rejection of the plea Zelenskyy made today: "All American companies must leave their market immediately because it is flooded with our blood"

[ti-amie]

[dryrunguy]

This is from today's NY Times e-newsletter. WARNING: This is heartbreaking stuff.

::

Good morning. We give you a rare dispatch from Mariupol, a city under siege.

‘Show this to Putin’
Mariupol — in southeastern Ukraine, near the Russian border — has been under siege for more than two weeks. It is the city where Russia last week bombed a maternity hospital and yesterday attacked a theater that hundreds of civilians were using as a shelter. It was unclear how many of those sheltering survived, according to a Ukrainian official.

Since the war began, two of the few working journalists in Mariupol have been Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka of The Associated Press. My colleagues and I were deeply affected by their dispatch, and we’re turning over the lead section of today’s newsletter to an excerpt from it.

The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling.

There’s 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body. There’s 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. There’s the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns and who was among the first of Mariupol’s children to die from a Russian shell.

They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.

“Damn them all, those people who started this!” raged Volodymyr Bykovskyi, a worker pulling crinkling black body bags from a truck.

More bodies will come, from streets where they are everywhere and from the hospital basement where the corpses of adults and children are laid out, awaiting someone to pick them up. The youngest still has an umbilical stump attached.

Each airstrike and shell that relentlessly pounds Mariupol — about one a minute at times — drives home the curse of a geography that has put the city squarely in the path of Russia’s domination of Ukraine. This southern seaport of 430,000 has become a symbol of the drive by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to crush a democratic Ukraine — and also of a fierce resistance on the ground. The city is now encircled by Russian soldiers, who are slowly squeezing the life out of it, one blast at a time.

The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is sparse, with residents melting snow to drink. People burn scraps of furniture in makeshift grills to warm their hands in the freezing cold.

Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.

Death is everywhere. Local officials have tallied more than 2,500 deaths in the siege, but many bodies can’t be counted because of the endless shelling. They have told families to leave their dead outside in the streets because it’s too dangerous to hold funerals.

Just weeks ago, Mariupol’s future seemed much brighter. If geography drives a city’s destiny, Mariupol was on the path to success, with its thriving iron and steel plants, a deepwater port and high global demand for both.

By Feb. 27, that started to change, as an ambulance raced into a city hospital carrying a small motionless girl, not yet 6. Her brown hair was pulled back off her pale face with a rubber band, and her pajama pants were bloodied by Russian shelling.

Her wounded father came with her, his head bandaged. Her mother stood outside the ambulance, weeping.

As the doctors and nurses huddled around her, one gave her an injection. Another shocked her with a defibrillator. “Show this to Putin,” one doctor said, with expletive-laced fury. “The eyes of this child and crying doctors.”

They couldn’t save her. Doctors covered the tiny body with her pink striped jacket and gently closed her eyes. She now rests in the mass grave.

This agony fits in with Putin’s goals. The siege is a military tactic popularized in medieval times and designed to crush a population through starvation and violence, allowing an attacking force to spare its own soldiers the cost of entering a hostile city. Instead, civilians are the ones left to die. Serhiy Orlov, the deputy mayor of Mariupol, predicts worse is soon to come. Most of the city remains trapped. “People are dying without water and food, and I think in the next several days we will count hundreds and thousands of deaths.”

For more: See more photographs from Mariupol in The A.P.’s full story (which Lori Hinnant, based in Paris, helped write). And read a dispatch from Mykolaiv — another besieged city, on the Black Sea — by my colleague Michael Schwirtz, with photos by Tyler Hicks.

[meganfernandez]

Came here hoping for an update from Mick. Praying for him and his family...

I always admire these people that go into a war zone to report on it. Guts personified.
I will not joke about them being Fox News "Journalists" due to the gravity of the news.

Same. And what they do it so critical. As much as I want to be a real journalist and investigative journalist, I'm not cut out for danger. More like, I'm not cut out to put my family through the stress of it. Personally, I think I could do it. Not sure I could work the contacts properly - that's a special skill. I'm also really seduced by the sexiness of being a spy, but same problem.

I've been reading a book called The Correspondents, about six female reporters in WW2. No way could I have done what they did. They weren't all on the front lines - one was a powerful editor in chief in Germany. It takes an incredible amount of balls, and if you're an editor, political skills. I'm not a politician.

So I write fluff and a little more-meaningful stuff if I can find it.

[ti-amie]

[Owendonovan]

There's very little, if anything, good one can say about the Koch's.

[ti-amie]

There's very little, if anything, good one can say about the Koch's.

Old tweets but since a lot of people aren't aware of how bad the Koch's are someone aggregated some threads about them that go back about three years.









I skipped some Tweets but clicking on any one of the links will take you to the entire thread.

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

[ponchi101]

Good call, but this is not news. It is no secret that all the main powers, plus N. Korea, have very sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities. And Russia must have a considerable number of cyber "bombs" planted around the USA and EU cyber-structure.
I would say that this week it would be good to stay away from Wall Street (electronically). The USA and EU have wiped out billions out of the Russian population's pocket, simply by the devaluation of the ruble. I don't think Vlad would mind returning the favor.

[ti-amie]

[ponchi101]

New poll. A truly insane question that no longer sounds that farfetched.

[Suliso]

@ponchi: I think you'll agree that this invasion has proceeded with a lot more difficulty than you anticipated.