injunjane | Entries tagged with war

Recent article by former commander, current ambassador Valerii Zaluzhny:

https://www.liga.net/ua/politics/opinion/polityka-i-viyna-realnist-proty-ochikuvannia

Same news half a year later: Trump is NOT interested in helping Ukraine. He WON'T give us any military help - on the contrary, he'll be pressing our country to capitulate and surrender to Russia.

Why? Because MAGA. The vision of 'greatness' of him and his supporters is ruined and miserable Europe.

Not only Ukraine, but whole Europe, at least all democratic European countries.
Ukraine stands between Russia and Central and Western Europe, and if it loses the war - Russia will continue to EU.

Then EU will be in ruins, and the USA will be 'great' the same way they were after WWII.
Everyone will be bringing them money as before. That's what American money bags want. Ethics, law, justice are irrelevant here.

THEY WANT MONEY, and Russia wants more land.
Current US government and establishment and Russian empire are BOTH pathological bloody maniacs. Each in their own way.

This wonderful guy was killed in action this week fighting Russian aggressors. Arthur was a long-term member of Kyiv role play community and "La Reverie" dance studio :(

After the Russian shelling of 19 november in the Ukrainian city of Ternopyl 33 dead (including 6 children), 94 injured (including 18 children). Witnesses say some people were literally burned alive :(

Meanwhile, fat old pig potus wants to give still unconquered parts of Ukraine to Russians and continue doing business with them as usual.

He should had perished instead of poor Ternopyl children. This planet would be much cleaner and safer after that.

The closest friend of my childhood, and still one of the closest people in the world is my cousin.

We are quite different people, not complementary personalities - but in many things we have very similar ways of perceive this world. Unlike me, he's a real genius - an engineering marvel who can repair essentially any device running on electricity.

We don't talk much, even more now - during the time when we are on opposite sides of the border and he's hiding from being enslaved as a Russian soldier and sent to die and to kill the people some of whom might even be his former friends.
No, it's not a 'civil war' like some Western media are lying - it's a war between former master and former slave who tried in vain to remain a neighbour when his slavery was finally over.

But we still talk, because my cousin sincerely hates what's going on. And he's desperate because despite of all what he'd done against the monster named Russian state, that monster still prevails.

Last time I suddenly told him about my brooding over a problem of modern men feeling increasing urge to 'be a woman' or find something 'feminine' (= some trace of a role opposite to what they were always taught to play) inside them.
My cousin, whose hair have been constantly longer than mine since the time he's 16, sighed and said:

- Maybe that's because the world that masculine part of humanity has created is not so wonderful and attractive even for men, after all.

12 people dead (10 in Kyiv and 2 in Odessa) and some 16 injured after today's night attack by Russians.

Yesterday the secondary school in Kyiv I used to attend between 8 and 13 yo was damaged by Russian bombing.
The explosions were quite close to our house where my parents and my brother still live.

They launched a massive attack with drones and ballistics on Saturday night, between 1 and 6 AM.

And this weekend is a great celebration in Kyiv, The City's Day. That's how they congratulated us.

One of these funny historical reconstruction guys, art designer Jura Kir, our friend from Kyiv, was yesterday killed in action at the front lines. Along with another of our historical reconstruction colleagues.

This war continues and the next ones can be my brother and two of my close old friends.

Just have listened to this interview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b9hWo27fZU

Yuri Felshtinsky is a well-known Russian historian and a person from anti-Putin opposition currently living in the USA. What he's talking about is happening before his eyes, so I don't have reason not to believe his prognosis.

He says that the slogan "Make America great again" essentially means USA world domination on the level of immediately after WWII, where the two major powers in the world were the US and the USSR. There was no EU yet, and the European countries all lied in ruins, with poverty everywhere and destroyed economics. The US avoided this, because the war for the most part was not held on their territory. That defined their economical and political success. In fact, the "greatness" started already after WWI and for the similar reasons.

So, what this means for EU (that Trump hates)? To make the US as great as before, another war should start in Europe. And evidently, that should be the war between the EU and Russia. That's why Trump wants Ukraine to capitulate - free Ukraine stands between EU and Putin, but taking it and its resources (both natural and human ones), Russia will have the means to continue its war further to the west.

This is both terrible and disgusting, and means nothing good for us after already several years of war.

Suddenly I've got the thought that MAGA and "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free (from whom? from Jewish population, obviously)" are equally genocidal slogans. Make USA "great" for the cost of the EU and Ukraine, make Palestinian Muslims (I'm not saying "Arabs", because they are genetically the closest relatives to Israelis, not at all to Arabian tribes) "free" for the cost of lives of Palestinian Jews. NB, I do not approve the actions of Netanyahu and his government, they are autocratic/religious fanatic minority, but that's another story.

I can't believe that in 21 century with the Declaration of Human Rights and democracy such slogans can sound from the people of the most powerful country in the world. Who was supposed to respect both.

The whole last week I was processing the samples for the new project - pieces of moss and soil from all around the world. Got a guest, a colleague from Minsk, Belarus (now emigrated to avoid political prosecution). I proposed him an experiment - me speaking Ukrainian that he doesn't know, and him speaking Belorussian, and (not surprisingly) we had no problem understanding each other.

There are many almost identical words in Ukrainian and Belorussian (no wonder, our countries were one big country way before Moscow was built), also we've got beautiful names for the months derived from nature and human agricultural activities - same as in most Slavic languages, but unlike in Russian where they are just Latin words that mean nothing for a Slavic person. For example, "жнивень" in Belorussian and "серпень" in Ukrainian both mean the time of harvesting wheat and rye, while Russian "сентябрь-september" does not sound any way familiar. Same way as in Ukrainian, in Belorussian Participles I are not used (and in Russian they are, sometimes in a very stupid and confusing way).

Laughed a lot about reciprocal stereotypes - Belorussians see Ukrainians as furious and chaotic, while we see them as too quiet and soft, maybe way too rational, and rather tight-fisted.

We could be great friends as nations if not for the Russian neo-empire who de-facto turned their country into a complete satellite without its own will and culture, serving as a training ground for their army. And they did it using incredible cruelty - there are people who have been killed, gone missing, were tortured and raped by the police.

Friday evening horrible news arrived - Russia bombed my country again, killing 9 little children in Krivy Rih town. Ukrainian internet is full of mourning and pictures of the playgrounds with peluches - for the memory of the diseased kids.

Cancer at a certain point goes to metastasis.
Our pour planet, the malignant process in your prostate seem to send metastases in many other organs, including your brain.

Because the brain was too afraid to go for chemotherapy and surgery in time. And now it's everywhere.

My Russian uncle died from brain cancer a year ago. All this time he was telling my mom (his sister) that Putin does everything right and we'll soon be saved.

Can the heart still save the stupid brain?

More and more people I know are saying that the US now reminds them of Russia in 2012.

Me too, guys. I see the same level of zombification in a substantial part of the population, and the similarly increasing helplessness, fear and confusion "What can we do about it?" in another.

And I wouldn't care (adult people should be self-sufficient, right?), but the fate of my country, and the countries I'm deeply connected with, is dependent on the situation across the Atlantic. Oh how much I wish it wasn't.

Hubris is the mother of all sins. It was very true for Russia, and it looks like it becomes true for the US too :(

Two of my very good old friends are going to the frontlines.

The scum who refused Ukrainian army support and intelligence data right during the missile attacks on civilian infrastructure, and is threatening to switch off the Starlink connection (which we are paying all together, regularly collecting donations for it) -

that scum dared to tell us "We'll write on the graves of your killed civilians that you didn't want to say "Thank you".

We'll see you in your graves, bastards.

And then we'll spit on those graves and write on them:

MURDERERS AND TRAITORS TO HUMANITY

- Why do you think they invaded back then?
- Why does any advanced civilization seeks to destroy a less advanced one? Because the land is strategically valuable, because there are resources that can be cultivated and exploited, but most of all - simply because they can.

Babylon 5 is a prophetic sci-fi series.

There is everything: cultural differences, problems with aliens (= foreigners and emigrants), odd national customs, typical 'american' style of solving international problems, neo-nazi Psi Corps organization...even a moment of alternative dystopian future where the heroic station crew changed the camp and became nazi-like murderers of alien races themselves.

And in a couple of episodes there is an excellent example of 'journalism' made state propaganda - filming everyday life with all its ups and downs, and in the same time telling a story that people have to see to support the agenda of the corrupted government.

I'm astonished that people who created this series and were supposed to watch them in the first place has fallen into all these traps.

While Russian propaganda learned the lesson very well.

I'm re-watching the series to keep me out of despair. And to be able to stand between the candle and the star.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/science/frozen-rotifers-siberia.html

The NY Times report on our paper is still there on the web. Starting from the next week, I'm re-taking my job at the university, at the same table I missed so much, haha (seriously, they didn't even want to let me in to collect my things). Stas Malyavin has emigrated to Israel at the very beginning of the open phase of the war, for me that's another proof he's a good person who never supported what their government does.

What happened to Liuba Shmakova, the woman who actually spotted the creature in the sterile sealed Petri dish with the 24 thousand years old soil, I don't know. But the photo with her writings on the 24-well plate experiment (of my design, I'm rather proud of it) is still there in NY Times pages.

We all had given tons of interviews within 3 months after the paper was out. But the NY Times journalist contacted me by email 8 hours BEFORE the paper was officially published in Current Biology, and their questions were the most clever ones. In the next interviews I was by the way asked 'what about Crimea, since you're a Ukrainian working with Russians' (technically, Liuba's the only Russian in the team because Stas is probably a Jew, and other people were from the US and Germany). Shame on me, I always considered Crimea Ukrainian/Crimean Tatar, but back then I was still thinking that science is an international thing and the discovery we're making is more important than political agenda. I don't think that anymore.

But I'm glad it was out before things got totally caboom.
And I'm not over with my own research on those animals.

Watch on YouTube

That's our sad reality now and we are preparing for it. Not only Ukraine, but EU as well.

Fuck DumbTrump, an orange-faced redneck disgrace. That illiterate lying trash won't be giving us orders.

WE UKRAINIANS ARE INFURIATED

Trump is such a brainless moron. He's just bowed to Russia, not even having a single direct clash between NATO and the Russian Federation.

Cathy's mom (I speak about my friend Cathy from Virginia, USA) seems to be a trumpist (she's a wonderful charming lady otherwise), and from time to time she's posting something about Trump and his policy which is difficult not to react to considering that the future of my country depends on his whims as a new president.

The people who in turn react to my comments are some crazy US guys 40+ who try to convince me that they know my country, our people and government better than me Ukrainian. Considering that an 'average' US citizen who's never been to Europe has about the same idea about our life here as I have an idea how life could be on Mars or Venus (or what I knew about Americas before visiting any of them), that's both ridiculous and disgusting. One of such animals (no, beings, I don't want to offend animals) was aggressively trying to preach further...by becoming my friend on fb (got immediately banned), another just asked me 'does your brain even work?' (yeah, unlike him I do have a brain).

The first mentioned guy was trying to convince me and others 'to open their hearts and minds and stop this war'.
Dude, it's not us, we were attacked unprovoked. The attacker should stop - if we stop defending, we're dead.

Meanwhile, I'm talking online with my cousin (who's about the same age as me and we're best friends since the early childhood). He's a Russian citizen born and still living in Russia, unable to leave and hiding from the conscription to the Russian army in some obscure village in the middle of big Russian nowhere. Biologically speaking, we're both half Ukrainians (by our grandfathers) half Russians (by our grandmothers), but spiritually we belong not just to Ukraine but to the city of Kyiv and ancient Kyjevan state.

That's what he told me about the ongoing war: Russian wives are actually quite happy to have their husbands away to the war. Not all but many (probably most) Russian families are deeply patriarchal with the rule of the man imposed by regular beatings of his spouse. Divorces are uncommon because their folk are religious and both the church and public opinion condemn divorce. So, like my cuz told, the women are happy to have the formal marriage kept while the beast is away fighting, and when the beast is dead, she gets as much money as she has never seen in her life before.

Too bad our lads in Ukraine have the mortal job of disposing of that biological garbage.
So much for 'opening hearts and minds', damn it.
My friends from the US are often making fun of Russians, but they have never knew their kind as well as we do. There is very little space for humanity with those guys who are proud to be constantly drunk, profoundly uneducated and even more profoundly cruel.

Watch on YouTube

Stupid title, but a very interesting interview worthy of watching.

There is something which was not directly discussed in there but I think it's very important. In the middle of the talk Dr Kanojia says that social media and modern isolation do make people more narcissistic. I notice not only that, but the increasing tendency of failing to see 'big picture' out of enormous amount of facts nowadays available to people due to the internet.

This is IMHO similar to the 'differential diagnosis' mentioned by him a bit earlier in the same interview - people find opposite information about the same thing and assume that either one is 100% correct and another 100% wrong, or worse they are both equally true. Despite that usually there is general tendency and some outliers.

For example, for war in Ukraine there is a general truth - we are an independent state which was attacked unprovoked by the much larger and stronger neo-empire, and our people are fighting for 3 years for their survival as a nation. And there are (numerous but still) outliers like false volunteers selling humanitarian aid, deserters, and corrupted officials profiting from war. That doesn't mean all Ukrainians are corrupt or war crimes and deserting the battlefield are normal in Ukraine.

Learn to see differential diagnosis, not only separate facts.

By the way, there are tons of other useful info in this interview, too :)