Izogibanje vsega, kar je iz Rusije

LightBit je 29. maj 2022 ob 10:52 izjavil:

sds je 29. maj 2022 ob 10:41 izjavil:

LightBit je 29. maj 2022 ob 10:34 izjavil:

sds je 29. maj 2022 ob 10:12 izjavil:

Ma ja, vec orozja pomeni samo vec mrtvih.

Ni nujno, mislim da je slabše če je orožja ravno dovolj da se nadaljuje.

Mislis? Dajmo pogledat slikico.

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rela%C3%A...

Koliko orozja rabi Ukrajina da ga bo dovolj?

Kaj vidimo na slikci? Da ima Rusija ogromno nenaseljenega ozemlja? Da Ukrajina želi zasesti Rusijo? Ali si samo želel povedati da si na Portugalskem?
Dovolj je vsaj toliko da Rusi ne napredujejo ali po možnosti da se vrnejo domov.

Si ze vredu razumel. Se pravi, rad bi cimvec mrtvih na eni in drugi strani, ter bajne zasluzke orozarske industrije.

To, da se bojo Rusi vrnili domov je mantra, ki jo imate res radi, je pa skregana z vsako pametjo. Domov bojo z malo srece sli takrat, ko pade Odesa in poskrbijo, da jih Ukrajinci na osvojenih ozemljih ne bojo ogrozali. Prej, ko bojo to dosegli, prej bo mir.

cias je 29. maj 2022 ob 10:57 izjavil:

Lonsarg je 29. maj 2022 ob 10:09 izjavil:

V bistvu se EU fokusira premalo na fizično vojno in preveč na sankcije. EU bi morala pač iti all-in v dobavi orožja. Zahodne elite se igrajo igrice z Rusijo in pošiljajo drobiž Ukrajini, ravno dovolj da bodo ubranili glavnino ozemlja, a ne dovolj za popolnoma obrniti razmerje moči.

Saj se lahko komot priključiš Ukrajinskim borcem. Zakaj še nisi tam če si tak intelektualec? Vodi z zgledom ne da samo verbalno podpiraš povišanje skubljenja davkoplačevalcev. Lahko tudi daruješ Ukrajinskim podpornikom vse svojo premoženje.
Ne vem zakaj ne narediš tega če veš da je to edina sprejemljiva moralna strategija.

Tocno tako. Kdor bi rad pomagal, naj se prikljuci ukrajinskim borcem, EU pa naj se cimprej pobota z Rusijo in ukine debilne sankcije, ki neprimerno bolj skodijo EU kot Rusiji.

sds je 29. maj 2022 ob 10:58 izjavil:

Tocno tako. Kdor bi rad pomagal, naj se prikljuci ukrajinskim borcem, EU pa naj se cimprej pobota z Rusijo in ukine debilne sankcije, ki neprimerno bolj skodijo EU kot Rusiji.

Jaz pomagam, da plačujem davke v državi, ki suportira Ukrajino. Ti pa spizdi v Rusijo, pezde -vx-ovsko.

Poldi112 je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:02 izjavil:

Kaj je narobe z nevtralnostjo? Imeli so jo več kot Texas/Kuba/Venezuela, ...

V Ukrajini se ne gre za to, gre se za landgrab, od 2014 naprej.

Svoboda je pravljica za otroke, ki še niso odložili plašnic propagandnih puhlic.

Pravljica ti je mama, bedak puhličarski.

sds je 29. maj 2022 ob 10:52 izjavil:

Se pravi, rad bi cimvec mrtvih na eni in drugi strani, ter bajne zasluzke orozarske industrije.

To bo to ja.
Pa še kripto gre gor, aja ne.

Poldi112 je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:03 izjavil:

Sploh je pa smešno, da o svobodi govorijo oni, ki se tako krčevito oklepajo svetleče ketne.

Težko je živet takim kot si ti, ki vidijo pravljice in puhlice vsepovsod. Ukrajinci z Rusijo ničesar več nočejo imeti. PIKA.

Poldi112 je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:03 izjavil:

Močni argumenti - točno taki, kot bi jih človek pričakoval od kvalitetno indoktrinirane ovce.

here we go again...

Te svoje puhlice pejt prodajat na bolšjak, danes je odprt..

Poldi112 je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:05 izjavil:

Razumem, da ovce niste tolerantne do resnice, ampak to, da verjamete v pravljice resnice pač ne spremeni.

Pa koji si ti kurac, da boš presojal, kdo je ovca in kdo ni.

Niko i ništa.

Zgodovina kolega, zgodovina.

Jaz sem že večkrat nanizal svoje vire. Čakamo, da jih še ovce.

Poldi112 je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:06 izjavil:

Zgodovina kolega, zgodovina.
Jaz sem že večkrat nanizal svoje vire. Čakamo, da jih še ovce.

Kaj ti zgodovina pove o Rusiji, pezde? A bo treba že spet limat tisti Pac Manov post o ruskem "vpliv" v svoji okolici v zadnjem stoletju? A si že pozabil, dementnež?

cias je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:07 izjavil:

TezkoDihanje je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:02 izjavil:

V Ukrajini se ne gre za to, gre se za landgrab, od 2014 naprej.

Kdaj gremo osvobodit Trst? Zakaj se za to nič ne bojuješ? Ker ne znaš misliti in samo ponavljaš kar govori Poptv?

Alo Janković, kolikokrat ti bo treba povedat, da Srbija od Rusije nikoli ni imela ničesar. Kdaj boš nehal goltat srbsko propagando?

TezkoDihanje je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:07 izjavil:

Alo Janković, kolikokrat ti bo treba povedat, da Srbija od Rusije nikoli ni imela ničesar. Kdaj boš nehal goltat srbsko propagando?

No Hojsek, le pomiri se. Te bo se infarkt.

cias je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:09 izjavil:

Po tej logiki moramo tudi zgodovino USA, Nemčije... upoštevat? Torej ne smemo slediti njihovi ideologiji... Zakaj bi sedaj poslušal Nemčijo ko pa Hitler. Zakaj bi poslusal Ameriko, rasizem...?

Upoštevat moramo to, da Ukrajina meji na Rusijo, ne pa na ZDA. Skratka, očitno je bistveno bolj pomembno, kaj je Rusija počela s svojimi SOSEDAMI.

cias je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:09 izjavil:

TezkoDihanje je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:07 izjavil:

Poldi112 je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:06 izjavil:

Zgodovina kolega, zgodovina.
Jaz sem že večkrat nanizal svoje vire. Čakamo, da jih še ovce.

Kaj ti zgodovina pove o Rusiji, pezde? A bo treba že spet limat tisti Pac Manov post o ruskem "vpliv" v svoji okolici v zadnjem stoletju? A si že pozabil, dementnež?

Po tej logiki moramo tudi zgodovino USA, Nemčije... upoštevat? Torej ne smemo slediti njihovi ideologiji... Zakaj bi sedaj poslušal Nemčijo ko pa Hitler. Zakaj bi poslusal Ameriko, rasizem...?

Pac-man je samo priredil zgodovino svojim željam. :)

TezkoDihanje je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:12 izjavil:

sds je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:10 izjavil:

TezkoDihanje je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:07 izjavil:

Alo Janković, kolikokrat ti bo treba povedat, da Srbija od Rusije nikoli ni imela ničesar. Kdaj boš nehal goltat srbsko propagando?

No Hojsek, le pomiri se. Te bo se infarkt.

Janković, spelji se v Srbijo. Kaj počneš tukaj?

S strankarskim kolegom Hojsom (aka TezkoDihanje) se pogovarjam, mar ne vidis? Pa za njegovo fizicno in mentalno zdravje me skrbi.

Lonsarg je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:11 izjavil:

Govoril sem o strategiji velesil v kontekstu kaj se stratesko gledano splaca za EU, morala je tu offtopic.

Zakaj bi Ukrajina v EU bila strateško pozitivna? Kar vi trobite je to nujno izključno zato ker so po Poptv rekli da je moralno. Zakaj torej ne priključimo še Palestino, ali vsaj izrael brcnemo z Evrovizije?

Mate velik problem z dvojnimi standardi v tej vaši ideologiji. Do sedaj vaše strategije še niso proizvedle drugega kot poceni delovno silo za korporacije. Poleg tega še kaj drugega strateškega? Zakonsko obvezne parade ponosa, ... še kaj?

TezkoDihanje je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:12 izjavil:

Janković, spelji se v Srbijo. Kaj počneš tukaj?

Ksenofobija ni del naših največjih vrednot. Raznolikost je naša največja moč!

mackilla je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:15 izjavil:

cias je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:07 izjavil:

TezkoDihanje je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:02 izjavil:

V Ukrajini se ne gre za to, gre se za landgrab, od 2014 naprej.

Kdaj gremo osvobodit Trst? Zakaj se za to nič ne bojuješ? Ker ne znaš misliti in samo ponavljaš kar govori Poptv?

Če bi šli osvajat Trst bi to bil landgrab. Bedak.

Ahhhh, naš Trst.

Mr.B je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:22 izjavil:

TezkoDihanje je 28. maj 2022 ob 09:32 izjavil:

mackilla je 28. maj 2022 ob 09:22 izjavil:

Verjetno bodo Ukrajinci potrebovali kar nekaj časa,da se naučijo uporabljati? Kako natančno pa je to?

Rakete so vodene.

Obstaja en kup municije:

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CHINA: FRIEND OR FOE? | Russia, Get Ready For This


- trgovina med Kitajsko in Rusijo je po treh mesecih padla za 25%
- Kitajska je prepovedala letalom pod rusko zastavo proizvajalcev Boeing in Airbus prelet nad Kitajsko

Industrial output from the commercial hub of Shanghai, located at the heart of manufacturing in the Yangtze River Delta, nosedived 61.5 percent in April, amid a full lockdown and much steeper than the 2.9 percent drop nationally.

Torej ko padaš na clikc bait članke, pač teh 25% pomeni v celo t točno NULA, glede na količino poslovanja z Rusijo.

Boeing in Airbus prelet nad Kitajsko, glede na to da delov tako ali drugače uradno Rusija ne more kupiti, je tudi to, bolj ali manj click bait ...

Imaš še kaj, tako obširno celostnoi sliko.
China’s impact on the U.S. inflation picture will be more profound than many appreciate, but also works through two different channels. Which one ends up predominating will be a significant factor for inflation later this year, and how aggressively the Fed ultimately has to move to contain it.

Tako, da ko se jaz izogima clikc bait čalnkov ti predlagam da tudi ti, ker 25% padec naprav rusiji, ni nič, če se v Juniju Lockdown ne konča.

Pac-Man je 28. maj 2022 ob 18:35 izjavil:

Pac-Man je 28. maj 2022 ob 16:59 izjavil:

https://twitter.com/Alexey__Kovalev/sta...
Read this, and if phrases like "off-ramp" or "allowing Putin to save face" or "legitimate security concerns" or "sending weapons to Ukraine unnecessarily prolongs the war" make any sense to you, carefully reevaluate every decision which led you to this point in your life.

New Yorker: A Ukrainian city under a violent new regime

Berem:

...

“Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla­dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

Russian troops also distributed leaflets with instructions on how locals should behave during the “special military operation.” Ukrainians were told to keep away from Russian soldiers and their armored vehicles, to give them the right of way on the street, and to remain unarmed. To avoid “propaganda and disinformation from Kyiv,” the leaflets said, Melitopol’s residents should tune in to Russian state television, and to the Telegram channel of one of Moscow’s most famous and bombastic propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov. People driving around town discovered that the local radio airwaves had been taken over by Russian broadcasts, including one that aired a speech by Putin over and over.

Melitopol is an agricultural center, known for its honey and deep-red cherries, and its population is largely Russian-­speaking. But in recent years, Fedorov told me, as the city attracted funding from the European Union and unveiled a series of urban-renewal projects—a new ice rink and public swimming pool, a state-of-the-art infectious-­disease clinic­—its identity had become less and less tied to Russia, let alone to the long decades of Soviet rule. Fedorov himself, a triathlete with a boyish smirk, close-cropped brown hair, and jutting ears, embodied a new generation of democratic leaders in Ukraine. He won a seat on Melitopol’s city council in his early twenties; in 2020, at the age of thirty-­two, he was elected mayor. “People stopped living in the past and started to believe in the future,” he said.

...

One afternoon, Serhii Pryima, the head of Melitopol’s district council, was driving near the outskirts of the city when he was stopped at a checkpoint. Pryima asked one of the Russian soldiers, who looked no older than twenty, what he was doing there. “We’ve come to liberate you,” the soldier replied. “From whom?” Pryima asked. The soldier had no answer.

After the Russian Army invaded, Fedorov set up temporary headquarters in the Soviet-era House of Culture, on Melitopol’s main square. The occupation had put him in an odd position. Russian troops controlled the city, but he was still mayor. Initially, they told Fedorov that he’d be left alone to run city business. He was summoned at gunpoint to a meeting with a group of senior Russian officials. He told them, “You won’t be here for long.” One replied, “We’re here forever.” Another said, “You carry out your functions, we’ll carry out ours.”

...

“If Russian troops had come to Melitopol in 2014, they would indeed have been welcomed with bread and salt,” Fedorov told me, using a Russian expression that means to be greeted with hospitality. Putin’s acts of aggression since then have changed public attitudes. (...) “We didn’t want to see Melitopol become a banana republic,” Vlad Pryima, Serhii’s twenty-two-year-old son, who works in I.T., said. “And it became clear that’s what one should expect under Russian rule.”

The first mass protest against the Russian takeover of Melitopol was held on March 2nd. Several hundred people gathered in Victory Square, in the center of the city, chanting “Melitopol is Ukraine!” At first, Russian troops “seemed confused, as if they hadn’t been expecting such a situation,” Evhen Pokoptsev, a Melitopol resident who participated in the protest, told me. But, as protesters marched on the S.B.U. headquarters, soldiers positioned inside fired warning shots. One protester was struck in the leg.

...

Every few days, Russian officials came to Fedorov’s office to demand that he stop the demonstrations. It was a case of projection: protests in Russia are either nonexistent or imagined to be the work of outside forces. But in the modern political culture of Ukraine, Fedorov said, demonstrations are “part of our DNA.” If a person doesn’t like her President, or her mayor, for that matter, she takes to the streets and says so. “They couldn’t believe that I wasn’t organizing these protests and paying for them,” Fedorov told me. “They said, ‘Stop the protests!’ And I answered, ‘I can’t.’ ”

On the afternoon of March 11th, two weeks into the occupation, Fedorov was sitting at his desk in the House of Culture when a dozen Russian soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by balaclavas, burst into his office. They tied his hands behind his back and put a black bag over his head. He was told that a criminal case had been opened against him in the Luhansk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. He was accused of financing Right Sector, a nationalist faction that often serves as a bogeyman in Russian propaganda—the “Nazis” of Kremlin legend.

“Are you joking?” Fedorov asked.

“We’re not joking,” one of the soldiers told him. They dragged Fedorov outside and into a waiting van.

...

Two days after Fedorov was imprisoned, eight armed Russian soldiers came to the home of Serhii Pryima and accused him of organizing the protest. Pryima had been expecting such a visit, telling his family, “They’ll probably come for me, too.” The soldiers searched the apartment. They told him to gather a change of clothes, his personal documents, and his cell phone, which they promptly confiscated. Then they tied his hands behind his back, put a bag over his head, and drove him away in a military van.

For more than a month, Pryima’s wife, Natalia, visited the police station, city hall, the regional administration building—anywhere that had been taken over by Russian forces—in search of her husband.

...

Natalia was eventually granted an audience with the newly appointed Russian military commandant of Melitopol. He introduced himself as Saigon, a nom de guerre, and told Natalia that his troops had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. “This is a matter for those higher up,” he said.

...

Back at the police station, Fedorov endured long interrogation sessions. His captors pushed him to resign and transfer his authority to Danilchenko. Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-­ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But after a couple of days the tenor of his interrogations changed. (...) Fedorov sensed that his captors were aware of the uproar: now, instead of pressuring or threatening him, they asked about practical matters of administering the city. “They realized they had created a problem for themselves that they wanted to get rid of,” he told me.

On the evening of March 16th, as darkness was settling over Melitopol, Russian soldiers came to Fedorov’s cell. He was being freed in a prisoner exchange. (...) As Fedorov was led back to Ukrainian-held territory, nine Russian prisoners of war walked in the other direction—the price the Zelensky administration had agreed to pay for Fedorov’s freedom.

Kidnappings have become a hallmark of the invasion. In Melitopol alone, at least three hundred people have been detained by Russian forces. “The aim is to extract a certain benefit from this person while frightening the local population, to send the message that ‘We are the power now, we decide all questions,’ ” Olena Zhuk, the head of Zaporizhzhia’s regional council, said.

...

In Melitopol, the primary targets for arrests and kidnappings have been elected officials, activists, business owners—anyone seen as influential or capable of shaping local opinion. Pryima was eventually released, at the end of April, but others haven’t been as lucky. The owner of a grocery store, for instance, was arrested after handing out free food; the distribution of humanitarian aid was considered the prerogative of the Russian military. Soldiers seized his car and the keys to his store. A month and a half later, he remains missing.

The occupiers seem especially interested in local military-recruitment offices, where they have gathered the names of veterans who they fear might pose a threat. “All you have to do is find a janitor and order him or her at the barrel of a gun to unlock the room where the records are kept,” Zhuk said. In Melitopol, the records were even easier to access. A Ukrainian officer at the city’s recruitment office switched sides and gave the Russian soldiers lists with hundreds of names.

A local veteran of the war in the Donbas, who asked to be called Oleksa, told me that, after Melitopol was occupied, he felt certain that his military service would make him a target. (...) He hid at the homes of friends and relatives, until he could secure a ride out of town. But, as he was fleeing, the car was stopped at a checkpoint manned by troops from the Donetsk People’s Republic, another Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. They ordered him out of the car at gunpoint.

The soldiers marched him to their nearby base, where they slapped and kicked him, and fired a gun next to his ear. They brought him out to a field, handed him a shovel, and told him to dig a grave. Once he was several feet deep, a soldier shot him in the leg. Another soldier slammed him in the head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground in the pit he had dug. He briefly lost consciousness.

After he came to, he was brought to the former base of the 25th Brigade, in Melitopol. Russian soldiers there were carrying out a process known since the Chechen wars of the nineties as “filtration,” a dark euphemism for separating prisoners into categories, with varying degrees of violence applied to each. As Oleksa remembered, interrogators at the airbase were intent on sniffing out anyone they considered a Ukrainian nationalist. Prisoners from Ukrainian military units such as Azov, which has attracted fighters with far-right sympathies, were subjected to regular beatings and torture. Some were locked in a metal safe until they lost consciousness and had to be revived by Russian Army doctors. Oleksa got off relatively lightly: a Russian officer told his soldiers that Oleksa’s head was already smashed in, and not to hit him too hard.

After about a week, Oleksa was driven east to a Soviet-era prison colony outside the city of Donetsk. (...) Oleksa spent several days there before he was moved again, this time across the border into Russia, where he was deposited at a military jail in the Rostov region. This was perhaps the harshest stop of all, he said: “They beat us during interrogations. They beat us because we were standing the wrong way. They beat us for pleasure. They beat us just because.”

Oleksa’s captors broke his ribs and rendered his feet so bruised and swollen that they wouldn’t fit into his boots. His journey continued to a prison in Voronezh, a Russian city nearly four hundred miles away. There, he was given forms to fill out, with questions ranging from his political allegiances (“Nationalist/Patriotic/Indifferent”) to what he thought of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Finally, a Russian official showed him another document, which was dense and complicated but with a clear enough conclusion: a tribunal that Oleksa had never heard of had convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.

But just as quickly Oleksa’s fate shifted again. He and a number of other imprisoned Ukrainians were hustled aboard a military transport plane and flown to Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea and the site of a major Russian base. The next day, he was driven two hundred and thirty miles to a bridge in Kamianske, the same spot where Fedorov, the mayor, was freed, and let go in a prisoner exchange.

Svetlana Zalizetskaya is a one-woman media institution in Melitopol, a gadfly and a muckraker who has worked as a journalist in the city for two decades. She’s been a television news anchor and the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, and, for the past nine years, has overseen her own news site, RIA-Melitopol, which reports on everything from local crimes to the cherry harvest.

RIA-Melitopol has also become the main source for news on the occupation. (...) The site has since tracked who among the local population has agreed to collaborate with the Russian-installed administration, and exposed multiple cases of corruption and theft, such as the three million Ukrainian hryvnia—around a hundred thousand dollars—that Russian troops carted away from a post office in April.

...

Nevertheless, Danilchenko replied, Zali­zetskaya should meet with the Russian commandant, who wanted to see her. “If I entered that meeting, I would not have come out,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I understood it was time to leave.”

Zalizetskaya slipped out of Melitopol unnoticed, decamping to a Ukrainian-­­controlled city that she asked me not to name. She has managed to keep RIA-Melitopol going, scanning social-media posts and relying on a network of sources in Melitopol. But even from a distance Russian authorities moved to silence her. On March 23rd, a week or so after she left town, Russian soldiers showed up at her parents’ apartment, ransacked the rooms, confiscated the couple’s cell phones, and arrested her father. At around ten that evening, Zalizetskaya got a call from him. She asked where he was. “In some basement,” he answered.

Zalizetskaya could hear the voice of a man with a Chechen accent. (Many of the Russian troops in Melitopol are Kadyrovtsy, so named for their allegiance to Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, and known for their violence and brutality.) “Tell her that she should be here,” the Chechen said. Zalizetskaya was terrified, but also furious. “You are holding a pensioner in ill health,” she said. Her father had a heart condition and had recently suffered a stroke. “I won’t come back and I won’t collaborate with you.” The Chechen hung up the phone.

Two days later, Zalizetskaya got another call from her father. He started to recite what sounded like a prepared text: “Sveta, no one is beating me here, they treat me well, everything is fine.” She asked if he had access to his medication; he said no. She pleaded with his captors to release him. She heard a soldier in the background saying, “Tell her not to write any more nasty things.” Later that evening, she got a call from a man who introduced himself as Sergey. From the tenor of his questions, Zalizetskaya assumed he was from the Russian secret services. He was interested in the workings of her news site: who owned it, what interests it represented, and who her sources of information were. Sergey said that Zalizetskaya should coöperate with Russian forces or, barring that, hand over the site to them. “You know that what you are writing about Russian soldiers is not true,” he told her. “They’re not like that.”

Finally, Sergey offered a compromise: if Zalizetskaya wrote a public post saying that the site did not belong to her, her father would be released. “The site belongs to Ukraine, then and now,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I didn’t coöperate with the occupiers, and don’t plan to.” But she wrote the post, and thirty minutes later she got a text message asking where she wanted her father delivered. Home, she answered. The next morning, Zalizetskaya received a photo of her father standing in his front garden.

By early April, as Russia’s occupation of Melitopol stretched into its second month, Danilchenko was trying to project an air of normalcy, reopening the ice rink and resuming municipal services. In an interview with a Crimean news outlet, she thanked the Russian Army for entering the city “so gently and carefully” and freeing it from the “Kyiv regime.” She often spoke to residents in a tone that resembled a parent trying to sound sensible and convincing to her children. In one video address, she announced that the city was replacing Ukrainian television channels with Russian ones. “These days, we feel an acute shortage of access to reliable information,” she said. “Reconfigure your TV receivers and get accurate information.”

...

Local businesses, especially those in the city’s agricultural sector, began to report significant theft. Russian troops broke into the showroom of one company, Agrotek, and made off with more than a million euros’ worth of farm equipment, including two advanced combines, a tractor, and a seeding machine. A few days later, G.P.S. trackers showed that the stolen items were in a rural part of Chechnya. According to Fedorov, the new authorities have been forcing grain producers to give up much of their harvest, and moving it across the border to Russia by the truckload.

Communications slowed. Mobile service cut in and out. Residents took to standing with their phones outside long-closed cafés whose Wi-Fi connections were still active. One afternoon, I reached Mikhail Kumok, the publisher of a local newspaper called the Melitopol Vedomosti. He, too, had been held briefly by a contingent of armed Russians. He was taken from his apartment to the Russian military headquarters for a talk with officers from the F.S.B. “They asked me for ‘informational coöperation,’ ” he remembered. For the next several hours, the F.S.B. officers pushed Kumok to use his newspaper to produce “favorable coverage of events” in town. He declined.

...

Days later, the Russian occupiers began printing counterfeit copies of Kumok’s paper, which they used to distribute propaganda around town. One issue featured a portrait of Danilchenko on the front page. “Melitopol is getting used to peaceful life,” she said in an accompanying interview.

The occupying authorities devoted particular attention to the city’s schools, which had been closed for in-person classes since the first day of the invasion.

...

Artem Shulyatyev, the director of a performing-arts school in Melitopol, told me that he was visited by an officer from the F.S.B., who introduced himself as Vladislav. The conversation began politely enough. “You are governed by fascists,” Vladislav told him. “They oppress Russians. But this is wrong, and we are Slavic brothers.” Shulyatyev replied that he didn’t think there were any fascists in Melitopol. “You don’t understand anything,” Vladislav said. “You don’t know about the global plans of fascists.” He then asked if the school had a library, and whether it carried the collected writings of Lenin. “These are very important works,” he said. Shulyatyev said that there wasn’t any Lenin on hand, but, then again, why should a performing-arts school have his works? “Lenin didn’t dance or sing.”

Vladislav moved on to his main point: it was imperative that the school resume in-person classes. Shulyatyev said that this wasn’t possible—it wasn’t safe, and many families had left. Vladislav grew frustrated. “It doesn’t interest us what you want,” he said. “What matters is what we want.”

...

Danilchenko appointed Elena Shapurova, the head of a local technical college, as Melitopol’s education chief. In late March, Shapurova assembled the city’s school principals for a meeting at the college. The educators who attended had conferred beforehand and decided to submit their resignations—none of them were willing to work with the city’s occupying authorities. From the building’s front steps, Shapurova implored them to resume classes and repeatedly motioned for them to come inside. The principals refused. Suddenly, Danilchenko appeared, trailed by men in masks carrying Kalashnikovs, and tried to herd the group inside the building.

“We just turned around and left,” one of the principals told me. This seemed to enrage Danilchenko. She chased after them and, as the principal remembered, yelled, “Then we’ll have you all sent the fuck out of town!”

The educators planned to meet the following day to decide how to respond. “We were in shock,” the principal said. But, the next morning, news went around: four of the principals had been taken from their apartments. One of them later told me that they were held in an unheated garage, where they could hear the sounds of a man being beaten through the walls. After two nights, they were driven twenty miles outside of town. “You refused to coöperate with us, so therefore you are punished,” a military officer told them. “You are deported from Melitopol and prohibited from returning.”

In the end, Danilchenko got her way, at least to a degree: Melitopol’s schools were officially reopened in April, but only a few of them have actually held any classes. Attendance levels have been paltry. (...) Meanwhile, Danilchenko has announced that “pseudo-historical books propagating nationalist ideas” would be removed from Melitopol’s central library, and only “books that tell the true version of history will appear on the shelves.” In a segment that aired on pro-Russian propaganda channels, Shapurova’s husband, a onetime powerlifter who had been appointed head of a grade school, held up a copy of “Ukraine Is Not Russia,” written by the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, as an example of the kinds of books that should be banned.

...

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Nearby, I came across two mothers and their teen-age daughters, drinking tea and having a bite to eat. I asked what made them decide to leave. “It’s like the nineties have returned,” Larisa, one of the mothers, said. Instead of driving to the supermarket, she hauled bags back from the open-air market. Lines were everywhere. She had adopted a nickname for the armored vehicles that Russian soldiers drove around town, often with a big letter “Z”—the symbol of the Russian invasion—painted on the side: zalupa mashiny, or “dickhead mobiles.”

...

Russian forces and their local ­proxies, meanwhile, have tried to entrench their hold on Melitopol. In advance of Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, Danilchenko announced, with great fanfare, that the Ukrainian flag on the main square would be replaced with a Soviet Red Army flag.

...

Sem prebral,
Hvala

Pac-Man je 28. maj 2022 ob 18:35 izjavil:

Pac-Man je 28. maj 2022 ob 16:59 izjavil:

https://twitter.com/Alexey__Kovalev/sta...
Read this, and if phrases like "off-ramp" or "allowing Putin to save face" or "legitimate security concerns" or "sending weapons to Ukraine unnecessarily prolongs the war" make any sense to you, carefully reevaluate every decision which led you to this point in your life.

New Yorker: A Ukrainian city under a violent new regime

Berem:

...

“Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla­dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

Russian troops also distributed leaflets with instructions on how locals should behave during the “special military operation.” Ukrainians were told to keep away from Russian soldiers and their armored vehicles, to give them the right of way on the street, and to remain unarmed. To avoid “propaganda and disinformation from Kyiv,” the leaflets said, Melitopol’s residents should tune in to Russian state television, and to the Telegram channel of one of Moscow’s most famous and bombastic propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov. People driving around town discovered that the local radio airwaves had been taken over by Russian broadcasts, including one that aired a speech by Putin over and over.

Melitopol is an agricultural center, known for its honey and deep-red cherries, and its population is largely Russian-­speaking. But in recent years, Fedorov told me, as the city attracted funding from the European Union and unveiled a series of urban-renewal projects—a new ice rink and public swimming pool, a state-of-the-art infectious-­disease clinic­—its identity had become less and less tied to Russia, let alone to the long decades of Soviet rule. Fedorov himself, a triathlete with a boyish smirk, close-cropped brown hair, and jutting ears, embodied a new generation of democratic leaders in Ukraine. He won a seat on Melitopol’s city council in his early twenties; in 2020, at the age of thirty-­two, he was elected mayor. “People stopped living in the past and started to believe in the future,” he said.

...

One afternoon, Serhii Pryima, the head of Melitopol’s district council, was driving near the outskirts of the city when he was stopped at a checkpoint. Pryima asked one of the Russian soldiers, who looked no older than twenty, what he was doing there. “We’ve come to liberate you,” the soldier replied. “From whom?” Pryima asked. The soldier had no answer.

After the Russian Army invaded, Fedorov set up temporary headquarters in the Soviet-era House of Culture, on Melitopol’s main square. The occupation had put him in an odd position. Russian troops controlled the city, but he was still mayor. Initially, they told Fedorov that he’d be left alone to run city business. He was summoned at gunpoint to a meeting with a group of senior Russian officials. He told them, “You won’t be here for long.” One replied, “We’re here forever.” Another said, “You carry out your functions, we’ll carry out ours.”

...

“If Russian troops had come to Melitopol in 2014, they would indeed have been welcomed with bread and salt,” Fedorov told me, using a Russian expression that means to be greeted with hospitality. Putin’s acts of aggression since then have changed public attitudes. (...) “We didn’t want to see Melitopol become a banana republic,” Vlad Pryima, Serhii’s twenty-two-year-old son, who works in I.T., said. “And it became clear that’s what one should expect under Russian rule.”

The first mass protest against the Russian takeover of Melitopol was held on March 2nd. Several hundred people gathered in Victory Square, in the center of the city, chanting “Melitopol is Ukraine!” At first, Russian troops “seemed confused, as if they hadn’t been expecting such a situation,” Evhen Pokoptsev, a Melitopol resident who participated in the protest, told me. But, as protesters marched on the S.B.U. headquarters, soldiers positioned inside fired warning shots. One protester was struck in the leg.

...

Every few days, Russian officials came to Fedorov’s office to demand that he stop the demonstrations. It was a case of projection: protests in Russia are either nonexistent or imagined to be the work of outside forces. But in the modern political culture of Ukraine, Fedorov said, demonstrations are “part of our DNA.” If a person doesn’t like her President, or her mayor, for that matter, she takes to the streets and says so. “They couldn’t believe that I wasn’t organizing these protests and paying for them,” Fedorov told me. “They said, ‘Stop the protests!’ And I answered, ‘I can’t.’ ”

On the afternoon of March 11th, two weeks into the occupation, Fedorov was sitting at his desk in the House of Culture when a dozen Russian soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by balaclavas, burst into his office. They tied his hands behind his back and put a black bag over his head. He was told that a criminal case had been opened against him in the Luhansk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. He was accused of financing Right Sector, a nationalist faction that often serves as a bogeyman in Russian propaganda—the “Nazis” of Kremlin legend.

“Are you joking?” Fedorov asked.

“We’re not joking,” one of the soldiers told him. They dragged Fedorov outside and into a waiting van.

...

Two days after Fedorov was imprisoned, eight armed Russian soldiers came to the home of Serhii Pryima and accused him of organizing the protest. Pryima had been expecting such a visit, telling his family, “They’ll probably come for me, too.” The soldiers searched the apartment. They told him to gather a change of clothes, his personal documents, and his cell phone, which they promptly confiscated. Then they tied his hands behind his back, put a bag over his head, and drove him away in a military van.

For more than a month, Pryima’s wife, Natalia, visited the police station, city hall, the regional administration building—anywhere that had been taken over by Russian forces—in search of her husband.

...

Natalia was eventually granted an audience with the newly appointed Russian military commandant of Melitopol. He introduced himself as Saigon, a nom de guerre, and told Natalia that his troops had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. “This is a matter for those higher up,” he said.

...

Back at the police station, Fedorov endured long interrogation sessions. His captors pushed him to resign and transfer his authority to Danilchenko. Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-­ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But after a couple of days the tenor of his interrogations changed. (...) Fedorov sensed that his captors were aware of the uproar: now, instead of pressuring or threatening him, they asked about practical matters of administering the city. “They realized they had created a problem for themselves that they wanted to get rid of,” he told me.

On the evening of March 16th, as darkness was settling over Melitopol, Russian soldiers came to Fedorov’s cell. He was being freed in a prisoner exchange. (...) As Fedorov was led back to Ukrainian-held territory, nine Russian prisoners of war walked in the other direction—the price the Zelensky administration had agreed to pay for Fedorov’s freedom.

Kidnappings have become a hallmark of the invasion. In Melitopol alone, at least three hundred people have been detained by Russian forces. “The aim is to extract a certain benefit from this person while frightening the local population, to send the message that ‘We are the power now, we decide all questions,’ ” Olena Zhuk, the head of Zaporizhzhia’s regional council, said.

...

In Melitopol, the primary targets for arrests and kidnappings have been elected officials, activists, business owners—anyone seen as influential or capable of shaping local opinion. Pryima was eventually released, at the end of April, but others haven’t been as lucky. The owner of a grocery store, for instance, was arrested after handing out free food; the distribution of humanitarian aid was considered the prerogative of the Russian military. Soldiers seized his car and the keys to his store. A month and a half later, he remains missing.

The occupiers seem especially interested in local military-recruitment offices, where they have gathered the names of veterans who they fear might pose a threat. “All you have to do is find a janitor and order him or her at the barrel of a gun to unlock the room where the records are kept,” Zhuk said. In Melitopol, the records were even easier to access. A Ukrainian officer at the city’s recruitment office switched sides and gave the Russian soldiers lists with hundreds of names.

A local veteran of the war in the Donbas, who asked to be called Oleksa, told me that, after Melitopol was occupied, he felt certain that his military service would make him a target. (...) He hid at the homes of friends and relatives, until he could secure a ride out of town. But, as he was fleeing, the car was stopped at a checkpoint manned by troops from the Donetsk People’s Republic, another Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. They ordered him out of the car at gunpoint.

The soldiers marched him to their nearby base, where they slapped and kicked him, and fired a gun next to his ear. They brought him out to a field, handed him a shovel, and told him to dig a grave. Once he was several feet deep, a soldier shot him in the leg. Another soldier slammed him in the head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground in the pit he had dug. He briefly lost consciousness.

After he came to, he was brought to the former base of the 25th Brigade, in Melitopol. Russian soldiers there were carrying out a process known since the Chechen wars of the nineties as “filtration,” a dark euphemism for separating prisoners into categories, with varying degrees of violence applied to each. As Oleksa remembered, interrogators at the airbase were intent on sniffing out anyone they considered a Ukrainian nationalist. Prisoners from Ukrainian military units such as Azov, which has attracted fighters with far-right sympathies, were subjected to regular beatings and torture. Some were locked in a metal safe until they lost consciousness and had to be revived by Russian Army doctors. Oleksa got off relatively lightly: a Russian officer told his soldiers that Oleksa’s head was already smashed in, and not to hit him too hard.

After about a week, Oleksa was driven east to a Soviet-era prison colony outside the city of Donetsk. (...) Oleksa spent several days there before he was moved again, this time across the border into Russia, where he was deposited at a military jail in the Rostov region. This was perhaps the harshest stop of all, he said: “They beat us during interrogations. They beat us because we were standing the wrong way. They beat us for pleasure. They beat us just because.”

Oleksa’s captors broke his ribs and rendered his feet so bruised and swollen that they wouldn’t fit into his boots. His journey continued to a prison in Voronezh, a Russian city nearly four hundred miles away. There, he was given forms to fill out, with questions ranging from his political allegiances (“Nationalist/Patriotic/Indifferent”) to what he thought of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Finally, a Russian official showed him another document, which was dense and complicated but with a clear enough conclusion: a tribunal that Oleksa had never heard of had convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.

But just as quickly Oleksa’s fate shifted again. He and a number of other imprisoned Ukrainians were hustled aboard a military transport plane and flown to Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea and the site of a major Russian base. The next day, he was driven two hundred and thirty miles to a bridge in Kamianske, the same spot where Fedorov, the mayor, was freed, and let go in a prisoner exchange.

Svetlana Zalizetskaya is a one-woman media institution in Melitopol, a gadfly and a muckraker who has worked as a journalist in the city for two decades. She’s been a television news anchor and the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, and, for the past nine years, has overseen her own news site, RIA-Melitopol, which reports on everything from local crimes to the cherry harvest.

RIA-Melitopol has also become the main source for news on the occupation. (...) The site has since tracked who among the local population has agreed to collaborate with the Russian-installed administration, and exposed multiple cases of corruption and theft, such as the three million Ukrainian hryvnia—around a hundred thousand dollars—that Russian troops carted away from a post office in April.

...

Nevertheless, Danilchenko replied, Zali­zetskaya should meet with the Russian commandant, who wanted to see her. “If I entered that meeting, I would not have come out,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I understood it was time to leave.”

Zalizetskaya slipped out of Melitopol unnoticed, decamping to a Ukrainian-­­controlled city that she asked me not to name. She has managed to keep RIA-Melitopol going, scanning social-media posts and relying on a network of sources in Melitopol. But even from a distance Russian authorities moved to silence her. On March 23rd, a week or so after she left town, Russian soldiers showed up at her parents’ apartment, ransacked the rooms, confiscated the couple’s cell phones, and arrested her father. At around ten that evening, Zalizetskaya got a call from him. She asked where he was. “In some basement,” he answered.

Zalizetskaya could hear the voice of a man with a Chechen accent. (Many of the Russian troops in Melitopol are Kadyrovtsy, so named for their allegiance to Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, and known for their violence and brutality.) “Tell her that she should be here,” the Chechen said. Zalizetskaya was terrified, but also furious. “You are holding a pensioner in ill health,” she said. Her father had a heart condition and had recently suffered a stroke. “I won’t come back and I won’t collaborate with you.” The Chechen hung up the phone.

Two days later, Zalizetskaya got another call from her father. He started to recite what sounded like a prepared text: “Sveta, no one is beating me here, they treat me well, everything is fine.” She asked if he had access to his medication; he said no. She pleaded with his captors to release him. She heard a soldier in the background saying, “Tell her not to write any more nasty things.” Later that evening, she got a call from a man who introduced himself as Sergey. From the tenor of his questions, Zalizetskaya assumed he was from the Russian secret services. He was interested in the workings of her news site: who owned it, what interests it represented, and who her sources of information were. Sergey said that Zalizetskaya should coöperate with Russian forces or, barring that, hand over the site to them. “You know that what you are writing about Russian soldiers is not true,” he told her. “They’re not like that.”

Finally, Sergey offered a compromise: if Zalizetskaya wrote a public post saying that the site did not belong to her, her father would be released. “The site belongs to Ukraine, then and now,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I didn’t coöperate with the occupiers, and don’t plan to.” But she wrote the post, and thirty minutes later she got a text message asking where she wanted her father delivered. Home, she answered. The next morning, Zalizetskaya received a photo of her father standing in his front garden.

By early April, as Russia’s occupation of Melitopol stretched into its second month, Danilchenko was trying to project an air of normalcy, reopening the ice rink and resuming municipal services. In an interview with a Crimean news outlet, she thanked the Russian Army for entering the city “so gently and carefully” and freeing it from the “Kyiv regime.” She often spoke to residents in a tone that resembled a parent trying to sound sensible and convincing to her children. In one video address, she announced that the city was replacing Ukrainian television channels with Russian ones. “These days, we feel an acute shortage of access to reliable information,” she said. “Reconfigure your TV receivers and get accurate information.”

...

Local businesses, especially those in the city’s agricultural sector, began to report significant theft. Russian troops broke into the showroom of one company, Agrotek, and made off with more than a million euros’ worth of farm equipment, including two advanced combines, a tractor, and a seeding machine. A few days later, G.P.S. trackers showed that the stolen items were in a rural part of Chechnya. According to Fedorov, the new authorities have been forcing grain producers to give up much of their harvest, and moving it across the border to Russia by the truckload.

Communications slowed. Mobile service cut in and out. Residents took to standing with their phones outside long-closed cafés whose Wi-Fi connections were still active. One afternoon, I reached Mikhail Kumok, the publisher of a local newspaper called the Melitopol Vedomosti. He, too, had been held briefly by a contingent of armed Russians. He was taken from his apartment to the Russian military headquarters for a talk with officers from the F.S.B. “They asked me for ‘informational coöperation,’ ” he remembered. For the next several hours, the F.S.B. officers pushed Kumok to use his newspaper to produce “favorable coverage of events” in town. He declined.

...

Days later, the Russian occupiers began printing counterfeit copies of Kumok’s paper, which they used to distribute propaganda around town. One issue featured a portrait of Danilchenko on the front page. “Melitopol is getting used to peaceful life,” she said in an accompanying interview.

The occupying authorities devoted particular attention to the city’s schools, which had been closed for in-person classes since the first day of the invasion.

...

Artem Shulyatyev, the director of a performing-arts school in Melitopol, told me that he was visited by an officer from the F.S.B., who introduced himself as Vladislav. The conversation began politely enough. “You are governed by fascists,” Vladislav told him. “They oppress Russians. But this is wrong, and we are Slavic brothers.” Shulyatyev replied that he didn’t think there were any fascists in Melitopol. “You don’t understand anything,” Vladislav said. “You don’t know about the global plans of fascists.” He then asked if the school had a library, and whether it carried the collected writings of Lenin. “These are very important works,” he said. Shulyatyev said that there wasn’t any Lenin on hand, but, then again, why should a performing-arts school have his works? “Lenin didn’t dance or sing.”

Vladislav moved on to his main point: it was imperative that the school resume in-person classes. Shulyatyev said that this wasn’t possible—it wasn’t safe, and many families had left. Vladislav grew frustrated. “It doesn’t interest us what you want,” he said. “What matters is what we want.”

...

Danilchenko appointed Elena Shapurova, the head of a local technical college, as Melitopol’s education chief. In late March, Shapurova assembled the city’s school principals for a meeting at the college. The educators who attended had conferred beforehand and decided to submit their resignations—none of them were willing to work with the city’s occupying authorities. From the building’s front steps, Shapurova implored them to resume classes and repeatedly motioned for them to come inside. The principals refused. Suddenly, Danilchenko appeared, trailed by men in masks carrying Kalashnikovs, and tried to herd the group inside the building.

“We just turned around and left,” one of the principals told me. This seemed to enrage Danilchenko. She chased after them and, as the principal remembered, yelled, “Then we’ll have you all sent the fuck out of town!”

The educators planned to meet the following day to decide how to respond. “We were in shock,” the principal said. But, the next morning, news went around: four of the principals had been taken from their apartments. One of them later told me that they were held in an unheated garage, where they could hear the sounds of a man being beaten through the walls. After two nights, they were driven twenty miles outside of town. “You refused to coöperate with us, so therefore you are punished,” a military officer told them. “You are deported from Melitopol and prohibited from returning.”

In the end, Danilchenko got her way, at least to a degree: Melitopol’s schools were officially reopened in April, but only a few of them have actually held any classes. Attendance levels have been paltry. (...) Meanwhile, Danilchenko has announced that “pseudo-historical books propagating nationalist ideas” would be removed from Melitopol’s central library, and only “books that tell the true version of history will appear on the shelves.” In a segment that aired on pro-Russian propaganda channels, Shapurova’s husband, a onetime powerlifter who had been appointed head of a grade school, held up a copy of “Ukraine Is Not Russia,” written by the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, as an example of the kinds of books that should be banned.

...

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Nearby, I came across two mothers and their teen-age daughters, drinking tea and having a bite to eat. I asked what made them decide to leave. “It’s like the nineties have returned,” Larisa, one of the mothers, said. Instead of driving to the supermarket, she hauled bags back from the open-air market. Lines were everywhere. She had adopted a nickname for the armored vehicles that Russian soldiers drove around town, often with a big letter “Z”—the symbol of the Russian invasion—painted on the side: zalupa mashiny, or “dickhead mobiles.”

...

Russian forces and their local ­proxies, meanwhile, have tried to entrench their hold on Melitopol. In advance of Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, Danilchenko announced, with great fanfare, that the Ukrainian flag on the main square would be replaced with a Soviet Red Army flag.

...

o

Mr.B je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:22 izjavil:

TezkoDihanje je 28. maj 2022 ob 09:32 izjavil:

mackilla je 28. maj 2022 ob 09:22 izjavil:

Verjetno bodo Ukrajinci potrebovali kar nekaj časa,da se naučijo uporabljati? Kako natančno pa je to?

Rakete so vodene.

Obstaja en kup municije:

---
CHINA: FRIEND OR FOE? | Russia, Get Ready For This


- trgovina med Kitajsko in Rusijo je po treh mesecih padla za 25%
- Kitajska je prepovedala letalom pod rusko zastavo proizvajalcev Boeing in Airbus prelet nad Kitajsko

Industrial output from the commercial hub of Shanghai, located at the heart of manufacturing in the Yangtze River Delta, nosedived 61.5 percent in April, amid a full lockdown and much steeper than the 2.9 percent drop nationally.

Torej ko padaš na clikc bait članke, pač teh 25% pomeni v celo t točno NULA, glede na količino poslovanja z Rusijo.

Boeing in Airbus prelet nad Kitajsko, glede na to da delov tako ali drugače uradno Rusija ne more kupiti, je tudi to, bolj ali manj click bait ...

Imaš še kaj, tako obširno celostnoi sliko.
China’s impact on the U.S. inflation picture will be more profound than many appreciate, but also works through two different channels. Which one ends up predominating will be a significant factor for inflation later this year, and how aggressively the Fed ultimately has to move to contain it.

Tako, da ko se jaz izogima clikc bait čalnkov ti predlagam da tudi ti, ker 25% padec naprav rusiji, ni nič, če se v Juniju Lockdown ne konča.

Pac-Man je 28. maj 2022 ob 18:35 izjavil:

Pac-Man je 28. maj 2022 ob 16:59 izjavil:

https://twitter.com/Alexey__Kovalev/sta...
Read this, and if phrases like "off-ramp" or "allowing Putin to save face" or "legitimate security concerns" or "sending weapons to Ukraine unnecessarily prolongs the war" make any sense to you, carefully reevaluate every decision which led you to this point in your life.

New Yorker: A Ukrainian city under a violent new regime

Berem:

...

“Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla­dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

Russian troops also distributed leaflets with instructions on how locals should behave during the “special military operation.” Ukrainians were told to keep away from Russian soldiers and their armored vehicles, to give them the right of way on the street, and to remain unarmed. To avoid “propaganda and disinformation from Kyiv,” the leaflets said, Melitopol’s residents should tune in to Russian state television, and to the Telegram channel of one of Moscow’s most famous and bombastic propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov. People driving around town discovered that the local radio airwaves had been taken over by Russian broadcasts, including one that aired a speech by Putin over and over.

Melitopol is an agricultural center, known for its honey and deep-red cherries, and its population is largely Russian-­speaking. But in recent years, Fedorov told me, as the city attracted funding from the European Union and unveiled a series of urban-renewal projects—a new ice rink and public swimming pool, a state-of-the-art infectious-­disease clinic­—its identity had become less and less tied to Russia, let alone to the long decades of Soviet rule. Fedorov himself, a triathlete with a boyish smirk, close-cropped brown hair, and jutting ears, embodied a new generation of democratic leaders in Ukraine. He won a seat on Melitopol’s city council in his early twenties; in 2020, at the age of thirty-­two, he was elected mayor. “People stopped living in the past and started to believe in the future,” he said.

...

One afternoon, Serhii Pryima, the head of Melitopol’s district council, was driving near the outskirts of the city when he was stopped at a checkpoint. Pryima asked one of the Russian soldiers, who looked no older than twenty, what he was doing there. “We’ve come to liberate you,” the soldier replied. “From whom?” Pryima asked. The soldier had no answer.

After the Russian Army invaded, Fedorov set up temporary headquarters in the Soviet-era House of Culture, on Melitopol’s main square. The occupation had put him in an odd position. Russian troops controlled the city, but he was still mayor. Initially, they told Fedorov that he’d be left alone to run city business. He was summoned at gunpoint to a meeting with a group of senior Russian officials. He told them, “You won’t be here for long.” One replied, “We’re here forever.” Another said, “You carry out your functions, we’ll carry out ours.”

...

“If Russian troops had come to Melitopol in 2014, they would indeed have been welcomed with bread and salt,” Fedorov told me, using a Russian expression that means to be greeted with hospitality. Putin’s acts of aggression since then have changed public attitudes. (...) “We didn’t want to see Melitopol become a banana republic,” Vlad Pryima, Serhii’s twenty-two-year-old son, who works in I.T., said. “And it became clear that’s what one should expect under Russian rule.”

The first mass protest against the Russian takeover of Melitopol was held on March 2nd. Several hundred people gathered in Victory Square, in the center of the city, chanting “Melitopol is Ukraine!” At first, Russian troops “seemed confused, as if they hadn’t been expecting such a situation,” Evhen Pokoptsev, a Melitopol resident who participated in the protest, told me. But, as protesters marched on the S.B.U. headquarters, soldiers positioned inside fired warning shots. One protester was struck in the leg.

...

Every few days, Russian officials came to Fedorov’s office to demand that he stop the demonstrations. It was a case of projection: protests in Russia are either nonexistent or imagined to be the work of outside forces. But in the modern political culture of Ukraine, Fedorov said, demonstrations are “part of our DNA.” If a person doesn’t like her President, or her mayor, for that matter, she takes to the streets and says so. “They couldn’t believe that I wasn’t organizing these protests and paying for them,” Fedorov told me. “They said, ‘Stop the protests!’ And I answered, ‘I can’t.’ ”

On the afternoon of March 11th, two weeks into the occupation, Fedorov was sitting at his desk in the House of Culture when a dozen Russian soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by balaclavas, burst into his office. They tied his hands behind his back and put a black bag over his head. He was told that a criminal case had been opened against him in the Luhansk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. He was accused of financing Right Sector, a nationalist faction that often serves as a bogeyman in Russian propaganda—the “Nazis” of Kremlin legend.

“Are you joking?” Fedorov asked.

“We’re not joking,” one of the soldiers told him. They dragged Fedorov outside and into a waiting van.

...

Two days after Fedorov was imprisoned, eight armed Russian soldiers came to the home of Serhii Pryima and accused him of organizing the protest. Pryima had been expecting such a visit, telling his family, “They’ll probably come for me, too.” The soldiers searched the apartment. They told him to gather a change of clothes, his personal documents, and his cell phone, which they promptly confiscated. Then they tied his hands behind his back, put a bag over his head, and drove him away in a military van.

For more than a month, Pryima’s wife, Natalia, visited the police station, city hall, the regional administration building—anywhere that had been taken over by Russian forces—in search of her husband.

...

Natalia was eventually granted an audience with the newly appointed Russian military commandant of Melitopol. He introduced himself as Saigon, a nom de guerre, and told Natalia that his troops had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. “This is a matter for those higher up,” he said.

...

Back at the police station, Fedorov endured long interrogation sessions. His captors pushed him to resign and transfer his authority to Danilchenko. Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-­ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But after a couple of days the tenor of his interrogations changed. (...) Fedorov sensed that his captors were aware of the uproar: now, instead of pressuring or threatening him, they asked about practical matters of administering the city. “They realized they had created a problem for themselves that they wanted to get rid of,” he told me.

On the evening of March 16th, as darkness was settling over Melitopol, Russian soldiers came to Fedorov’s cell. He was being freed in a prisoner exchange. (...) As Fedorov was led back to Ukrainian-held territory, nine Russian prisoners of war walked in the other direction—the price the Zelensky administration had agreed to pay for Fedorov’s freedom.

Kidnappings have become a hallmark of the invasion. In Melitopol alone, at least three hundred people have been detained by Russian forces. “The aim is to extract a certain benefit from this person while frightening the local population, to send the message that ‘We are the power now, we decide all questions,’ ” Olena Zhuk, the head of Zaporizhzhia’s regional council, said.

...

In Melitopol, the primary targets for arrests and kidnappings have been elected officials, activists, business owners—anyone seen as influential or capable of shaping local opinion. Pryima was eventually released, at the end of April, but others haven’t been as lucky. The owner of a grocery store, for instance, was arrested after handing out free food; the distribution of humanitarian aid was considered the prerogative of the Russian military. Soldiers seized his car and the keys to his store. A month and a half later, he remains missing.

The occupiers seem especially interested in local military-recruitment offices, where they have gathered the names of veterans who they fear might pose a threat. “All you have to do is find a janitor and order him or her at the barrel of a gun to unlock the room where the records are kept,” Zhuk said. In Melitopol, the records were even easier to access. A Ukrainian officer at the city’s recruitment office switched sides and gave the Russian soldiers lists with hundreds of names.

A local veteran of the war in the Donbas, who asked to be called Oleksa, told me that, after Melitopol was occupied, he felt certain that his military service would make him a target. (...) He hid at the homes of friends and relatives, until he could secure a ride out of town. But, as he was fleeing, the car was stopped at a checkpoint manned by troops from the Donetsk People’s Republic, another Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. They ordered him out of the car at gunpoint.

The soldiers marched him to their nearby base, where they slapped and kicked him, and fired a gun next to his ear. They brought him out to a field, handed him a shovel, and told him to dig a grave. Once he was several feet deep, a soldier shot him in the leg. Another soldier slammed him in the head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground in the pit he had dug. He briefly lost consciousness.

After he came to, he was brought to the former base of the 25th Brigade, in Melitopol. Russian soldiers there were carrying out a process known since the Chechen wars of the nineties as “filtration,” a dark euphemism for separating prisoners into categories, with varying degrees of violence applied to each. As Oleksa remembered, interrogators at the airbase were intent on sniffing out anyone they considered a Ukrainian nationalist. Prisoners from Ukrainian military units such as Azov, which has attracted fighters with far-right sympathies, were subjected to regular beatings and torture. Some were locked in a metal safe until they lost consciousness and had to be revived by Russian Army doctors. Oleksa got off relatively lightly: a Russian officer told his soldiers that Oleksa’s head was already smashed in, and not to hit him too hard.

After about a week, Oleksa was driven east to a Soviet-era prison colony outside the city of Donetsk. (...) Oleksa spent several days there before he was moved again, this time across the border into Russia, where he was deposited at a military jail in the Rostov region. This was perhaps the harshest stop of all, he said: “They beat us during interrogations. They beat us because we were standing the wrong way. They beat us for pleasure. They beat us just because.”

Oleksa’s captors broke his ribs and rendered his feet so bruised and swollen that they wouldn’t fit into his boots. His journey continued to a prison in Voronezh, a Russian city nearly four hundred miles away. There, he was given forms to fill out, with questions ranging from his political allegiances (“Nationalist/Patriotic/Indifferent”) to what he thought of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Finally, a Russian official showed him another document, which was dense and complicated but with a clear enough conclusion: a tribunal that Oleksa had never heard of had convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.

But just as quickly Oleksa’s fate shifted again. He and a number of other imprisoned Ukrainians were hustled aboard a military transport plane and flown to Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea and the site of a major Russian base. The next day, he was driven two hundred and thirty miles to a bridge in Kamianske, the same spot where Fedorov, the mayor, was freed, and let go in a prisoner exchange.

Svetlana Zalizetskaya is a one-woman media institution in Melitopol, a gadfly and a muckraker who has worked as a journalist in the city for two decades. She’s been a television news anchor and the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, and, for the past nine years, has overseen her own news site, RIA-Melitopol, which reports on everything from local crimes to the cherry harvest.

RIA-Melitopol has also become the main source for news on the occupation. (...) The site has since tracked who among the local population has agreed to collaborate with the Russian-installed administration, and exposed multiple cases of corruption and theft, such as the three million Ukrainian hryvnia—around a hundred thousand dollars—that Russian troops carted away from a post office in April.

...

Nevertheless, Danilchenko replied, Zali­zetskaya should meet with the Russian commandant, who wanted to see her. “If I entered that meeting, I would not have come out,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I understood it was time to leave.”

Zalizetskaya slipped out of Melitopol unnoticed, decamping to a Ukrainian-­­controlled city that she asked me not to name. She has managed to keep RIA-Melitopol going, scanning social-media posts and relying on a network of sources in Melitopol. But even from a distance Russian authorities moved to silence her. On March 23rd, a week or so after she left town, Russian soldiers showed up at her parents’ apartment, ransacked the rooms, confiscated the couple’s cell phones, and arrested her father. At around ten that evening, Zalizetskaya got a call from him. She asked where he was. “In some basement,” he answered.

Zalizetskaya could hear the voice of a man with a Chechen accent. (Many of the Russian troops in Melitopol are Kadyrovtsy, so named for their allegiance to Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, and known for their violence and brutality.) “Tell her that she should be here,” the Chechen said. Zalizetskaya was terrified, but also furious. “You are holding a pensioner in ill health,” she said. Her father had a heart condition and had recently suffered a stroke. “I won’t come back and I won’t collaborate with you.” The Chechen hung up the phone.

Two days later, Zalizetskaya got another call from her father. He started to recite what sounded like a prepared text: “Sveta, no one is beating me here, they treat me well, everything is fine.” She asked if he had access to his medication; he said no. She pleaded with his captors to release him. She heard a soldier in the background saying, “Tell her not to write any more nasty things.” Later that evening, she got a call from a man who introduced himself as Sergey. From the tenor of his questions, Zalizetskaya assumed he was from the Russian secret services. He was interested in the workings of her news site: who owned it, what interests it represented, and who her sources of information were. Sergey said that Zalizetskaya should coöperate with Russian forces or, barring that, hand over the site to them. “You know that what you are writing about Russian soldiers is not true,” he told her. “They’re not like that.”

Finally, Sergey offered a compromise: if Zalizetskaya wrote a public post saying that the site did not belong to her, her father would be released. “The site belongs to Ukraine, then and now,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I didn’t coöperate with the occupiers, and don’t plan to.” But she wrote the post, and thirty minutes later she got a text message asking where she wanted her father delivered. Home, she answered. The next morning, Zalizetskaya received a photo of her father standing in his front garden.

By early April, as Russia’s occupation of Melitopol stretched into its second month, Danilchenko was trying to project an air of normalcy, reopening the ice rink and resuming municipal services. In an interview with a Crimean news outlet, she thanked the Russian Army for entering the city “so gently and carefully” and freeing it from the “Kyiv regime.” She often spoke to residents in a tone that resembled a parent trying to sound sensible and convincing to her children. In one video address, she announced that the city was replacing Ukrainian television channels with Russian ones. “These days, we feel an acute shortage of access to reliable information,” she said. “Reconfigure your TV receivers and get accurate information.”

...

Local businesses, especially those in the city’s agricultural sector, began to report significant theft. Russian troops broke into the showroom of one company, Agrotek, and made off with more than a million euros’ worth of farm equipment, including two advanced combines, a tractor, and a seeding machine. A few days later, G.P.S. trackers showed that the stolen items were in a rural part of Chechnya. According to Fedorov, the new authorities have been forcing grain producers to give up much of their harvest, and moving it across the border to Russia by the truckload.

Communications slowed. Mobile service cut in and out. Residents took to standing with their phones outside long-closed cafés whose Wi-Fi connections were still active. One afternoon, I reached Mikhail Kumok, the publisher of a local newspaper called the Melitopol Vedomosti. He, too, had been held briefly by a contingent of armed Russians. He was taken from his apartment to the Russian military headquarters for a talk with officers from the F.S.B. “They asked me for ‘informational coöperation,’ ” he remembered. For the next several hours, the F.S.B. officers pushed Kumok to use his newspaper to produce “favorable coverage of events” in town. He declined.

...

Days later, the Russian occupiers began printing counterfeit copies of Kumok’s paper, which they used to distribute propaganda around town. One issue featured a portrait of Danilchenko on the front page. “Melitopol is getting used to peaceful life,” she said in an accompanying interview.

The occupying authorities devoted particular attention to the city’s schools, which had been closed for in-person classes since the first day of the invasion.

...

Artem Shulyatyev, the director of a performing-arts school in Melitopol, told me that he was visited by an officer from the F.S.B., who introduced himself as Vladislav. The conversation began politely enough. “You are governed by fascists,” Vladislav told him. “They oppress Russians. But this is wrong, and we are Slavic brothers.” Shulyatyev replied that he didn’t think there were any fascists in Melitopol. “You don’t understand anything,” Vladislav said. “You don’t know about the global plans of fascists.” He then asked if the school had a library, and whether it carried the collected writings of Lenin. “These are very important works,” he said. Shulyatyev said that there wasn’t any Lenin on hand, but, then again, why should a performing-arts school have his works? “Lenin didn’t dance or sing.”

Vladislav moved on to his main point: it was imperative that the school resume in-person classes. Shulyatyev said that this wasn’t possible—it wasn’t safe, and many families had left. Vladislav grew frustrated. “It doesn’t interest us what you want,” he said. “What matters is what we want.”

...

Danilchenko appointed Elena Shapurova, the head of a local technical college, as Melitopol’s education chief. In late March, Shapurova assembled the city’s school principals for a meeting at the college. The educators who attended had conferred beforehand and decided to submit their resignations—none of them were willing to work with the city’s occupying authorities. From the building’s front steps, Shapurova implored them to resume classes and repeatedly motioned for them to come inside. The principals refused. Suddenly, Danilchenko appeared, trailed by men in masks carrying Kalashnikovs, and tried to herd the group inside the building.

“We just turned around and left,” one of the principals told me. This seemed to enrage Danilchenko. She chased after them and, as the principal remembered, yelled, “Then we’ll have you all sent the fuck out of town!”

The educators planned to meet the following day to decide how to respond. “We were in shock,” the principal said. But, the next morning, news went around: four of the principals had been taken from their apartments. One of them later told me that they were held in an unheated garage, where they could hear the sounds of a man being beaten through the walls. After two nights, they were driven twenty miles outside of town. “You refused to coöperate with us, so therefore you are punished,” a military officer told them. “You are deported from Melitopol and prohibited from returning.”

In the end, Danilchenko got her way, at least to a degree: Melitopol’s schools were officially reopened in April, but only a few of them have actually held any classes. Attendance levels have been paltry. (...) Meanwhile, Danilchenko has announced that “pseudo-historical books propagating nationalist ideas” would be removed from Melitopol’s central library, and only “books that tell the true version of history will appear on the shelves.” In a segment that aired on pro-Russian propaganda channels, Shapurova’s husband, a onetime powerlifter who had been appointed head of a grade school, held up a copy of “Ukraine Is Not Russia,” written by the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, as an example of the kinds of books that should be banned.

...

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Nearby, I came across two mothers and their teen-age daughters, drinking tea and having a bite to eat. I asked what made them decide to leave. “It’s like the nineties have returned,” Larisa, one of the mothers, said. Instead of driving to the supermarket, she hauled bags back from the open-air market. Lines were everywhere. She had adopted a nickname for the armored vehicles that Russian soldiers drove around town, often with a big letter “Z”—the symbol of the Russian invasion—painted on the side: zalupa mashiny, or “dickhead mobiles.”

...

Russian forces and their local ­proxies, meanwhile, have tried to entrench their hold on Melitopol. In advance of Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, Danilchenko announced, with great fanfare, that the Ukrainian flag on the main square would be replaced with a Soviet Red Army flag.

...

Sem prebral,
Hvala

Pac-Man je 28. maj 2022 ob 18:35 izjavil:

Pac-Man je 28. maj 2022 ob 16:59 izjavil:

https://twitter.com/Alexey__Kovalev/sta...
Read this, and if phrases like "off-ramp" or "allowing Putin to save face" or "legitimate security concerns" or "sending weapons to Ukraine unnecessarily prolongs the war" make any sense to you, carefully reevaluate every decision which led you to this point in your life.

New Yorker: A Ukrainian city under a violent new regime

Berem:

...

“Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla­dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

Russian troops also distributed leaflets with instructions on how locals should behave during the “special military operation.” Ukrainians were told to keep away from Russian soldiers and their armored vehicles, to give them the right of way on the street, and to remain unarmed. To avoid “propaganda and disinformation from Kyiv,” the leaflets said, Melitopol’s residents should tune in to Russian state television, and to the Telegram channel of one of Moscow’s most famous and bombastic propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov. People driving around town discovered that the local radio airwaves had been taken over by Russian broadcasts, including one that aired a speech by Putin over and over.

Melitopol is an agricultural center, known for its honey and deep-red cherries, and its population is largely Russian-­speaking. But in recent years, Fedorov told me, as the city attracted funding from the European Union and unveiled a series of urban-renewal projects—a new ice rink and public swimming pool, a state-of-the-art infectious-­disease clinic­—its identity had become less and less tied to Russia, let alone to the long decades of Soviet rule. Fedorov himself, a triathlete with a boyish smirk, close-cropped brown hair, and jutting ears, embodied a new generation of democratic leaders in Ukraine. He won a seat on Melitopol’s city council in his early twenties; in 2020, at the age of thirty-­two, he was elected mayor. “People stopped living in the past and started to believe in the future,” he said.

...

One afternoon, Serhii Pryima, the head of Melitopol’s district council, was driving near the outskirts of the city when he was stopped at a checkpoint. Pryima asked one of the Russian soldiers, who looked no older than twenty, what he was doing there. “We’ve come to liberate you,” the soldier replied. “From whom?” Pryima asked. The soldier had no answer.

After the Russian Army invaded, Fedorov set up temporary headquarters in the Soviet-era House of Culture, on Melitopol’s main square. The occupation had put him in an odd position. Russian troops controlled the city, but he was still mayor. Initially, they told Fedorov that he’d be left alone to run city business. He was summoned at gunpoint to a meeting with a group of senior Russian officials. He told them, “You won’t be here for long.” One replied, “We’re here forever.” Another said, “You carry out your functions, we’ll carry out ours.”

...

“If Russian troops had come to Melitopol in 2014, they would indeed have been welcomed with bread and salt,” Fedorov told me, using a Russian expression that means to be greeted with hospitality. Putin’s acts of aggression since then have changed public attitudes. (...) “We didn’t want to see Melitopol become a banana republic,” Vlad Pryima, Serhii’s twenty-two-year-old son, who works in I.T., said. “And it became clear that’s what one should expect under Russian rule.”

The first mass protest against the Russian takeover of Melitopol was held on March 2nd. Several hundred people gathered in Victory Square, in the center of the city, chanting “Melitopol is Ukraine!” At first, Russian troops “seemed confused, as if they hadn’t been expecting such a situation,” Evhen Pokoptsev, a Melitopol resident who participated in the protest, told me. But, as protesters marched on the S.B.U. headquarters, soldiers positioned inside fired warning shots. One protester was struck in the leg.

...

Every few days, Russian officials came to Fedorov’s office to demand that he stop the demonstrations. It was a case of projection: protests in Russia are either nonexistent or imagined to be the work of outside forces. But in the modern political culture of Ukraine, Fedorov said, demonstrations are “part of our DNA.” If a person doesn’t like her President, or her mayor, for that matter, she takes to the streets and says so. “They couldn’t believe that I wasn’t organizing these protests and paying for them,” Fedorov told me. “They said, ‘Stop the protests!’ And I answered, ‘I can’t.’ ”

On the afternoon of March 11th, two weeks into the occupation, Fedorov was sitting at his desk in the House of Culture when a dozen Russian soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by balaclavas, burst into his office. They tied his hands behind his back and put a black bag over his head. He was told that a criminal case had been opened against him in the Luhansk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. He was accused of financing Right Sector, a nationalist faction that often serves as a bogeyman in Russian propaganda—the “Nazis” of Kremlin legend.

“Are you joking?” Fedorov asked.

“We’re not joking,” one of the soldiers told him. They dragged Fedorov outside and into a waiting van.

...

Two days after Fedorov was imprisoned, eight armed Russian soldiers came to the home of Serhii Pryima and accused him of organizing the protest. Pryima had been expecting such a visit, telling his family, “They’ll probably come for me, too.” The soldiers searched the apartment. They told him to gather a change of clothes, his personal documents, and his cell phone, which they promptly confiscated. Then they tied his hands behind his back, put a bag over his head, and drove him away in a military van.

For more than a month, Pryima’s wife, Natalia, visited the police station, city hall, the regional administration building—anywhere that had been taken over by Russian forces—in search of her husband.

...

Natalia was eventually granted an audience with the newly appointed Russian military commandant of Melitopol. He introduced himself as Saigon, a nom de guerre, and told Natalia that his troops had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. “This is a matter for those higher up,” he said.

...

Back at the police station, Fedorov endured long interrogation sessions. His captors pushed him to resign and transfer his authority to Danilchenko. Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-­ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But after a couple of days the tenor of his interrogations changed. (...) Fedorov sensed that his captors were aware of the uproar: now, instead of pressuring or threatening him, they asked about practical matters of administering the city. “They realized they had created a problem for themselves that they wanted to get rid of,” he told me.

On the evening of March 16th, as darkness was settling over Melitopol, Russian soldiers came to Fedorov’s cell. He was being freed in a prisoner exchange. (...) As Fedorov was led back to Ukrainian-held territory, nine Russian prisoners of war walked in the other direction—the price the Zelensky administration had agreed to pay for Fedorov’s freedom.

Kidnappings have become a hallmark of the invasion. In Melitopol alone, at least three hundred people have been detained by Russian forces. “The aim is to extract a certain benefit from this person while frightening the local population, to send the message that ‘We are the power now, we decide all questions,’ ” Olena Zhuk, the head of Zaporizhzhia’s regional council, said.

...

In Melitopol, the primary targets for arrests and kidnappings have been elected officials, activists, business owners—anyone seen as influential or capable of shaping local opinion. Pryima was eventually released, at the end of April, but others haven’t been as lucky. The owner of a grocery store, for instance, was arrested after handing out free food; the distribution of humanitarian aid was considered the prerogative of the Russian military. Soldiers seized his car and the keys to his store. A month and a half later, he remains missing.

The occupiers seem especially interested in local military-recruitment offices, where they have gathered the names of veterans who they fear might pose a threat. “All you have to do is find a janitor and order him or her at the barrel of a gun to unlock the room where the records are kept,” Zhuk said. In Melitopol, the records were even easier to access. A Ukrainian officer at the city’s recruitment office switched sides and gave the Russian soldiers lists with hundreds of names.

A local veteran of the war in the Donbas, who asked to be called Oleksa, told me that, after Melitopol was occupied, he felt certain that his military service would make him a target. (...) He hid at the homes of friends and relatives, until he could secure a ride out of town. But, as he was fleeing, the car was stopped at a checkpoint manned by troops from the Donetsk People’s Republic, another Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. They ordered him out of the car at gunpoint.

The soldiers marched him to their nearby base, where they slapped and kicked him, and fired a gun next to his ear. They brought him out to a field, handed him a shovel, and told him to dig a grave. Once he was several feet deep, a soldier shot him in the leg. Another soldier slammed him in the head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground in the pit he had dug. He briefly lost consciousness.

After he came to, he was brought to the former base of the 25th Brigade, in Melitopol. Russian soldiers there were carrying out a process known since the Chechen wars of the nineties as “filtration,” a dark euphemism for separating prisoners into categories, with varying degrees of violence applied to each. As Oleksa remembered, interrogators at the airbase were intent on sniffing out anyone they considered a Ukrainian nationalist. Prisoners from Ukrainian military units such as Azov, which has attracted fighters with far-right sympathies, were subjected to regular beatings and torture. Some were locked in a metal safe until they lost consciousness and had to be revived by Russian Army doctors. Oleksa got off relatively lightly: a Russian officer told his soldiers that Oleksa’s head was already smashed in, and not to hit him too hard.

After about a week, Oleksa was driven east to a Soviet-era prison colony outside the city of Donetsk. (...) Oleksa spent several days there before he was moved again, this time across the border into Russia, where he was deposited at a military jail in the Rostov region. This was perhaps the harshest stop of all, he said: “They beat us during interrogations. They beat us because we were standing the wrong way. They beat us for pleasure. They beat us just because.”

Oleksa’s captors broke his ribs and rendered his feet so bruised and swollen that they wouldn’t fit into his boots. His journey continued to a prison in Voronezh, a Russian city nearly four hundred miles away. There, he was given forms to fill out, with questions ranging from his political allegiances (“Nationalist/Patriotic/Indifferent”) to what he thought of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Finally, a Russian official showed him another document, which was dense and complicated but with a clear enough conclusion: a tribunal that Oleksa had never heard of had convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.

But just as quickly Oleksa’s fate shifted again. He and a number of other imprisoned Ukrainians were hustled aboard a military transport plane and flown to Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea and the site of a major Russian base. The next day, he was driven two hundred and thirty miles to a bridge in Kamianske, the same spot where Fedorov, the mayor, was freed, and let go in a prisoner exchange.

Svetlana Zalizetskaya is a one-woman media institution in Melitopol, a gadfly and a muckraker who has worked as a journalist in the city for two decades. She’s been a television news anchor and the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, and, for the past nine years, has overseen her own news site, RIA-Melitopol, which reports on everything from local crimes to the cherry harvest.

RIA-Melitopol has also become the main source for news on the occupation. (...) The site has since tracked who among the local population has agreed to collaborate with the Russian-installed administration, and exposed multiple cases of corruption and theft, such as the three million Ukrainian hryvnia—around a hundred thousand dollars—that Russian troops carted away from a post office in April.

...

Nevertheless, Danilchenko replied, Zali­zetskaya should meet with the Russian commandant, who wanted to see her. “If I entered that meeting, I would not have come out,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I understood it was time to leave.”

Zalizetskaya slipped out of Melitopol unnoticed, decamping to a Ukrainian-­­controlled city that she asked me not to name. She has managed to keep RIA-Melitopol going, scanning social-media posts and relying on a network of sources in Melitopol. But even from a distance Russian authorities moved to silence her. On March 23rd, a week or so after she left town, Russian soldiers showed up at her parents’ apartment, ransacked the rooms, confiscated the couple’s cell phones, and arrested her father. At around ten that evening, Zalizetskaya got a call from him. She asked where he was. “In some basement,” he answered.

Zalizetskaya could hear the voice of a man with a Chechen accent. (Many of the Russian troops in Melitopol are Kadyrovtsy, so named for their allegiance to Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, and known for their violence and brutality.) “Tell her that she should be here,” the Chechen said. Zalizetskaya was terrified, but also furious. “You are holding a pensioner in ill health,” she said. Her father had a heart condition and had recently suffered a stroke. “I won’t come back and I won’t collaborate with you.” The Chechen hung up the phone.

Two days later, Zalizetskaya got another call from her father. He started to recite what sounded like a prepared text: “Sveta, no one is beating me here, they treat me well, everything is fine.” She asked if he had access to his medication; he said no. She pleaded with his captors to release him. She heard a soldier in the background saying, “Tell her not to write any more nasty things.” Later that evening, she got a call from a man who introduced himself as Sergey. From the tenor of his questions, Zalizetskaya assumed he was from the Russian secret services. He was interested in the workings of her news site: who owned it, what interests it represented, and who her sources of information were. Sergey said that Zalizetskaya should coöperate with Russian forces or, barring that, hand over the site to them. “You know that what you are writing about Russian soldiers is not true,” he told her. “They’re not like that.”

Finally, Sergey offered a compromise: if Zalizetskaya wrote a public post saying that the site did not belong to her, her father would be released. “The site belongs to Ukraine, then and now,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I didn’t coöperate with the occupiers, and don’t plan to.” But she wrote the post, and thirty minutes later she got a text message asking where she wanted her father delivered. Home, she answered. The next morning, Zalizetskaya received a photo of her father standing in his front garden.

By early April, as Russia’s occupation of Melitopol stretched into its second month, Danilchenko was trying to project an air of normalcy, reopening the ice rink and resuming municipal services. In an interview with a Crimean news outlet, she thanked the Russian Army for entering the city “so gently and carefully” and freeing it from the “Kyiv regime.” She often spoke to residents in a tone that resembled a parent trying to sound sensible and convincing to her children. In one video address, she announced that the city was replacing Ukrainian television channels with Russian ones. “These days, we feel an acute shortage of access to reliable information,” she said. “Reconfigure your TV receivers and get accurate information.”

...

Local businesses, especially those in the city’s agricultural sector, began to report significant theft. Russian troops broke into the showroom of one company, Agrotek, and made off with more than a million euros’ worth of farm equipment, including two advanced combines, a tractor, and a seeding machine. A few days later, G.P.S. trackers showed that the stolen items were in a rural part of Chechnya. According to Fedorov, the new authorities have been forcing grain producers to give up much of their harvest, and moving it across the border to Russia by the truckload.

Communications slowed. Mobile service cut in and out. Residents took to standing with their phones outside long-closed cafés whose Wi-Fi connections were still active. One afternoon, I reached Mikhail Kumok, the publisher of a local newspaper called the Melitopol Vedomosti. He, too, had been held briefly by a contingent of armed Russians. He was taken from his apartment to the Russian military headquarters for a talk with officers from the F.S.B. “They asked me for ‘informational coöperation,’ ” he remembered. For the next several hours, the F.S.B. officers pushed Kumok to use his newspaper to produce “favorable coverage of events” in town. He declined.

...

Days later, the Russian occupiers began printing counterfeit copies of Kumok’s paper, which they used to distribute propaganda around town. One issue featured a portrait of Danilchenko on the front page. “Melitopol is getting used to peaceful life,” she said in an accompanying interview.

The occupying authorities devoted particular attention to the city’s schools, which had been closed for in-person classes since the first day of the invasion.

...

Artem Shulyatyev, the director of a performing-arts school in Melitopol, told me that he was visited by an officer from the F.S.B., who introduced himself as Vladislav. The conversation began politely enough. “You are governed by fascists,” Vladislav told him. “They oppress Russians. But this is wrong, and we are Slavic brothers.” Shulyatyev replied that he didn’t think there were any fascists in Melitopol. “You don’t understand anything,” Vladislav said. “You don’t know about the global plans of fascists.” He then asked if the school had a library, and whether it carried the collected writings of Lenin. “These are very important works,” he said. Shulyatyev said that there wasn’t any Lenin on hand, but, then again, why should a performing-arts school have his works? “Lenin didn’t dance or sing.”

Vladislav moved on to his main point: it was imperative that the school resume in-person classes. Shulyatyev said that this wasn’t possible—it wasn’t safe, and many families had left. Vladislav grew frustrated. “It doesn’t interest us what you want,” he said. “What matters is what we want.”

...

Danilchenko appointed Elena Shapurova, the head of a local technical college, as Melitopol’s education chief. In late March, Shapurova assembled the city’s school principals for a meeting at the college. The educators who attended had conferred beforehand and decided to submit their resignations—none of them were willing to work with the city’s occupying authorities. From the building’s front steps, Shapurova implored them to resume classes and repeatedly motioned for them to come inside. The principals refused. Suddenly, Danilchenko appeared, trailed by men in masks carrying Kalashnikovs, and tried to herd the group inside the building.

“We just turned around and left,” one of the principals told me. This seemed to enrage Danilchenko. She chased after them and, as the principal remembered, yelled, “Then we’ll have you all sent the fuck out of town!”

The educators planned to meet the following day to decide how to respond. “We were in shock,” the principal said. But, the next morning, news went around: four of the principals had been taken from their apartments. One of them later told me that they were held in an unheated garage, where they could hear the sounds of a man being beaten through the walls. After two nights, they were driven twenty miles outside of town. “You refused to coöperate with us, so therefore you are punished,” a military officer told them. “You are deported from Melitopol and prohibited from returning.”

In the end, Danilchenko got her way, at least to a degree: Melitopol’s schools were officially reopened in April, but only a few of them have actually held any classes. Attendance levels have been paltry. (...) Meanwhile, Danilchenko has announced that “pseudo-historical books propagating nationalist ideas” would be removed from Melitopol’s central library, and only “books that tell the true version of history will appear on the shelves.” In a segment that aired on pro-Russian propaganda channels, Shapurova’s husband, a onetime powerlifter who had been appointed head of a grade school, held up a copy of “Ukraine Is Not Russia,” written by the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, as an example of the kinds of books that should be banned.

...

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Nearby, I came across two mothers and their teen-age daughters, drinking tea and having a bite to eat. I asked what made them decide to leave. “It’s like the nineties have returned,” Larisa, one of the mothers, said. Instead of driving to the supermarket, she hauled bags back from the open-air market. Lines were everywhere. She had adopted a nickname for the armored vehicles that Russian soldiers drove around town, often with a big letter “Z”—the symbol of the Russian invasion—painted on the side: zalupa mashiny, or “dickhead mobiles.”

...

Russian forces and their local ­proxies, meanwhile, have tried to entrench their hold on Melitopol. In advance of Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, Danilchenko announced, with great fanfare, that the Ukrainian flag on the main square would be replaced with a Soviet Red Army flag.

...

Hvala

A zato Putin moleduje, da skenslamo sankcije? Lep signal, da je potrebno se sankcije se pojacati.

kow je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:26 izjavil:

A zato Putin moleduje, da skenslamo sankcije? Lep signal, da je potrebno se sankcije se pojacati.

Sankcije fajn delujejo. Saj ČE pride do kakšne sporazuma med UA in Rusijo, Rusi zahtevajo da se sankcije umaknejo, to je eden njihovih pogojev. Če sankcije nebi delovale, nebi imeli Rusi takšnih pogojev.

Saj to se samo rusofili delajo/trolajo, da ne razumejo, da sankcije fajn prijemljejo.

UkrFTW! je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:35 izjavil:

Saj to se samo rusofili delajo/trolajo, da ne razumejo, da sankcije fajn prijemljejo.

A res,
Brez težav lahko preveriš cene v Ruskih supermarketih, ali misliš da tam še vedno delujejo po sistemu Planskega gospodarstva.

Pa da ne bo pomote, ruski profit teh energetskih firme je letos že 14 mijard $ višji. Koliko od tega si plačal ti s ceno energentov v Evropi ? verjento nič, ker uporabljaš kolo in doma prideluješ hrano "ročno".

Priporočam da vzamejo še Kadirova in koze.

Baje je Putler nejevoljen zaradi Kadirova

Lepo a ne korenje ko putler dobesedno lakotni ljudi v revnih predelih. Dej še malo bolj ploskaj.
Putler dela potencialni svetovni holodomor. Po tem bo tudi v enciklopedijah znan

Mr.B je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:37 izjavil:

A res,
Brez težav lahko preveriš cene v Ruskih supermarketih, ali misliš da tam še vedno delujejo po sistemu Planskega gospodarstva.

Komot komot...

na primer: 14:00 krompir iz 25 rublov na 70 rublov.

Tole je pa najboljš, ravno za take kot si ti, da malo razširiš svoje vedenje o svetu:
CHINA: FRIEND OR FOE? | Russia, Get Ready For This

TezkoDihanje je 29. maj 2022 ob 13:01 izjavil:

Mr.B je 29. maj 2022 ob 11:37 izjavil:

A res,
Brez težav lahko preveriš cene v Ruskih supermarketih, ali misliš da tam še vedno delujejo po sistemu Planskega gospodarstva.

Komot komot...

na primer: 14:00 krompir iz 25 rublov na 70 rublov.

Tole je pa najboljš, ravno za take kot si ti, da malo razširiš svoje vedenje o svetu:
CHINA: FRIEND OR FOE? | Russia, Get Ready For This

click bait pa to...
Zgleda je spet popularno, pred dvema tedmnoma objavljeno...