I just discovered Liveuamap, a service that compiles ongoing reports from the war in Ukraine and plots them on a map. It seems to have a Ukrainian bias, which is OK, I guess, if you look at it as a representation of where the fighting is going on, but it’s also depressing when you’re looking at it and suddenly an icon of a bomb pops up with a label like “6 people killed as result of Russian missile strike at residential house in Mykolaiv”. What a godawful waste.
Ukraine does seem to be winning in the south, for now…where “winning” means lots of people on both sides dying in ferocious combat.
…and Ukraine liberating their people from a genocidal occupying force.
Winning.
Yeah, I think Ukraine’s cause is righteous…it’s just that Ukrainians and Russians are dying right now, and that’s distressing. Go home, Russia.
Amen to that!
From the comments at Daily Kos: “Tears today for all the victims of war. Tears of joy for the people of Ukraine.”
I have… little sympathy for the Russians at this point. The revelations at Bucha was a turning point in the limits of my willingness to expend the mental resources to see humanity on both sides. Which is, admittedly, horrific to admit.
It’s a state of mind I, even on the inside, struggle to understand & that incomprehension scares me. But then, so too am I horrified by what came out in Northern Ukraine.
A family tied with duct tape sequentially executed with assault rifle rounds to the head, obliterating the skull. And one body, stripped naked & pale as porcelain, singled out from other corpses by not being lined up with them. A girl probably no older than 11. Her hairless crotch bloody & brutalized. Her head split in two by a rifle bullet.
Months on & I still wish I didn’t see that. The Russian way of war is an ontological evil, & please forgive me because I can’t do it myself, but you cannot do anything evil to those soldiers who don’t surrender.
The Ukrainians seem to have entered Kherson already.
This is a stunning and major defeat for the Russians.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is one of the more obvious examples of a battle between the forces of light and dark. The Russians are decidedly the darkside here.
I think Ukraine is on the side of the right. I can’t help but feel for the many Russian conscripts press ganged into this war and for Russian society as a whole. Hopefully they band together for a post-Yeltsin do over.
With neoliberal triumphalism (end of history?) and shock therapy I can’t help but think the Russians were given a raw deal.
The NATO thing is complicated. The joining countries did so voluntarily. Dubya’s missile shield idea didn’t help quell the paranoia.
The Kukly puppet show that raised Putin’s ire was prescient AND a canary in a coalmine.
We can see where white people are dying. We cannot see where Uighurs are dying in the concentration camps, or where people in Myanmar are being massacred. As for Congo (aka Zaire) it has been an open wound for decades, the slaughter financed by coltan extracted by slave labor.
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I am not trying to diminish the suffering in Ukraine. Bur we knew what Putin was doing to brown people in Chechenya and Syria and the western leaders did not give a damn. Likewise our leaders continue to ignore the other conflicts. Eventually, some of those conflicts will have än impact on western economies and only then will we hear condemnations.
Interesting. They have a USA map too, if you click in the upper left corner…
Near Dallas, there’s a skull icon…
“Police are investigating a fatal double shooting that happened in Arlington last night”
Unlike in Ukraine, we kill our own citizens in the great U S of A!
A time capsule from a much different time:
Contextualized within the framing of Putin’s ascent:
Now Putin has made his own puppet show.
birgerjohansson @ #9:
Go to the site and click on “Select regions” at the top.
Scythies eunt domus?
No, that would include Ukraine/ Moscovites perhaps?
Russians have died in this too. They’re Putin’s victims in a way too.
I have far less sympathy for the Russians who have been killed than I do for the Ukrainians. Even the ones that were conscripted were there as soldiers.
And now it seems that over 200,000 people on both sides had to die in this stupid useless paranoid criminal pea-brained ego-driven war. All this because the Putidiot went full-on plemplem during lockdown. Depressing.
Pity I don’t believe in hell, cause I would really like to see him boiling in it for a nice long time.
as much as this particular war is the responsibility and the result of one “man” War is a failure, war is always the result of a failure, it is a funeral for all involved and for those who watch, their is no glory for the conqueror. Even so their are educated and influential people advocating for peace that would give Putin some of the territory he has occupied. As far as I know none of them are from Ukraine all are western some American, Just why should anyone trust in an agreement wwith this man as being worth as much as the paper it would be written on. To engage in this war previous agreements had to be completely ignored.
one of the wars we have tried to prevent has happened we did nothing but prepare for it for 70+ years the only question we have any hope in is can we prevent the strategic weapon exchange we have lived in dread of all this time because we can not prevent that war it has already begun.
SC @ 12
Thanks.
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Now it seems the Russians have pulled out of Kherson in varying levels of disarray. The Ukrainans are now expected to prioritize other parts of the front. The war could drag on until the next winter, but the Ukrainans have a far stronger motivation than the Russian soldiers.
They named World War One the War to end all Wars didn’t they? What a pity they were wrong and it wasn’t.
Wilfred Owen’s* parable of old and young poem stillseems so grimly horribly accurate here. Fpor Putin’ s pride and folly this time.
Can we NOT repeat history in wasting so many young lives and destroying so much for so little reason please?
Armistice day today here & in most of Europe at least so I gather. 11th hour 11 day.
Will Ukrainians be as magnaminous in their sentiments as Kemal Attaturk? We’ve no right to ask it of them of course. Only hope. Plus the invasionand occupation ordered by Puitin has to end first as well.
https://www.turkeytravelcentre.com/blog/ataturks-speech-about-gallipoli-turkish-history/
Incredibly powerful poet and victim of the war as most probly already know : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen
NitricAcid: I don’t particularly think it’s less horrific that Russians are getting drafted and killed than that Ukrainians are getting killed. Even Russian regulars I have pity for.
Now, if Putin were to meet his end, I wouldn’t be too upset about that.