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“Sometimes hope returns to me. But sometimes it leaves, and I think that we are all going to die,” says Anastasiia Kiseliova, a 40-year-old mother of three, as she walks through the streets of Mariupol, voice-recording herself on an iPhone. “The city is gone,” she adds, her voice trembling. Kiseliova’s hometown, Mariupol, once populated by nearly half a million Ukrainians, was razed to the ground by the Russian army. Ceaseless bombardment and shelling didn’t leave a single building untouched, local authorities said. Thousands have already been killed by Russian attacks or even starvation and dehydration, as Russia’s blockade left the city without any utilities, food, or water. Despite Ukraine’s continuous efforts to evacuate Mariupol citizens, over 100,000 civilians remain trapped in the city. “Every day and night we have spent in the cellar,” Kiseliova says in the video, a few seconds after a round of explosions is heard in the background. “We cried, prayed, and really wanted to survive.” Kiseliova’s district of Mariupol, Prymorskyi, was under attacks from day one, when Russia launched a full-scale offensive against Ukraine on Feb. 24. “Schools, apartments, private houses, they dropped bombs on everything,” she recalled. Together with her three children and other family members, Kiseliova spent a week in a cellar under her house.
On March 22, a woman saw a nine-story apartment building burning in its entirety. She also saw three Russian tanks shooting at an apartment block. She knew she had to leave. “I was scared that they can come at night, rape us, take our kids and kill them,” she says. “We are pieces of meat for them. They hate us. I don’t know what for.” For days, her family walked through the city which became filled with graves, dead bodies, and burning houses. There was a car with a large pool of blood underneath. And a body of a man without arms and legs. “We were left with nothing but cold, empty boxes,” she said about people’s homes, each and every one of which soon became a target for Russian tanks and missiles. “No one counts the dead here. We buried people in our yard. There are cemeteries in every park. And how many people burned in their homes? How many died of natural causes and just lay in their flats? No one will find them.” On April 6, Mariupol City Council said the Russian military began using mobile crematoriums to burn the bodies of killed Ukrainians. Ukraine may never uncover the true scale of Russia’s atrocities in Mariupol.
What those who remain in Mariupol are enduring is horrendous, as war always is. I wonder how the citizens of the northern port city of the former Leningrad (St. Petersburg) who's parents and grandparents endured this hell 80 years ago, now feel about Russians starving and killing by continual bombardment the trapped Ukrainians under siege in the southern port city of Mariupol? 45 days of siege may not equate to 872 days yet, but the inhumanity by man to mankind is still the same. War is f'ed up and always has been. Do not be sucked into its vortex and widen/escalate the war.
Be well and stay alive.
Evilroddy.
Possibly the only way to stop it is to “widen” it…..What those who remain in Mariupol are enduring is horrendous, as war always is. I wonder how the citizens of the northern port city of the former Leningrad (St. Petersburg) who's parents and grandparents endured this hell 80 years ago, now feel about Russians starving and killing by continual bombardment the trapped Ukrainians under siege in the southern port city of Mariupol? 45 days of siege may not equate to 872 days yet, but the inhumanity by man to mankind is still the same. War is f'ed up and always has been. Do not be sucked into its vortex and widen/escalate the war.
Be well and stay alive.
Evilroddy.
Rogue Valley:The Putin regime is not informing Russians of what is really going on in Ukraine.
According to the Kremlin, Ukrainian Nazis are shelling Mariupol.
Rexedgar:Possibly the only way to stop it is to “widen” it…..
There was an old commercial for FRAM oil filters…the adage was, “pay me now or pay me later.” If mankind is bent on destruction, (quoting a Canadian,) “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Apologies to Neil YoungRexedgar:
Humanity has never been able to stop war. Stop individual wars, yes. But the need/desire for war, never. There is no reason to believe that the world can stop war here. We can only turn it into a protracted and bloody stalemate in an effort to so exhaust both combatant sides so that they finally see the wisdom of talking rather than shooting. By getting directly involved we risk spreading and escalating war, making an horrendous problem in Ukraine a cataclysmic problem in Europe or further abroad. What price Mariupol?
Be well and stay alive.
Evilroddy.
The "media" is only one conduit for the flow of information into Russia. With hundreds of thousands of Russians recently leaving Russia since the war "restarted" and with millions of expat Russians living outside of Russia, Putin's media bubble is not air-tight.
Evilroddy.
I need some Ukrainian postage stamps, can you help?I never implied that the regime's grip on war iformation was "airtight".
But I will say that at least 50% of the Russian population receives its news strictly from television... all controlled by the state.
Newspapers are monitored and heavily censored. The only way to receive unfiltered news is via a VPN, and Roskomnadzor has the means of telling who is using a VPN within Russia.
Anyone protesting the war is arrested and warned that any reprise will result in serious jail time.
I don't know where you get this notion that it is a simple matter to get credible war information from within Russia, but it is not.
And even so, obtaining information and transmitting it are two vastly different things.
This situation has divided families within Russia, and also families with relatives split between Russia and Ukraine.
I need some Ukrainian postage stamps, can you help?
What those who remain in Mariupol are enduring is horrendous, as war always is. I wonder how the citizens of the northern port city of the former Leningrad (St. Petersburg) who's parents and grandparents endured this hell 80 years ago, now feel about Russians starving and killing by continual bombardment the trapped Ukrainians under siege in the southern port city of Mariupol? 45 days of siege may not equate to 872 days yet, but the inhumanity by man to mankind is still the same. War is f'ed up and always has been. Do not be sucked into its vortex and widen/escalate the war.
Be well and stay alive.
Evilroddy.
Juin:I am sure Russians of Leningrad will understand the price necessary to liberate ethnic Russians in Mariupol under control of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion. The Russians in Leningrad did not accept that Russia abandon them to the Naxis, if they were alive today they will also expect Russia not to abandon ethnic Russians of Mariupol to the Naxist Azov Battalion
Juin:
With all due respect, never was there a three-line-post filled with such malarkey.
You don't liberate people in a siege that uses starvation and indescriminate bombardment to break the defenders' wills. You just kill them indescriminatly. That's what the NAZI Germans did to Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1944 and that's what Putin's Russia is doing to ethnic Russian-Ukrainians and other Ukrainians in Mariupol. It's always easier to "understand" inhumanity when it is being done by "your" people to someone else's people and not to your own.
Come back to the real world please and stop peddling Kremlin propaganda. No one west of the Dnieper River believes the crap you're parroting here.<<
Possibly the only way to stop it is to “widen” it…..
I hear ya but what if Putin starts firing missiles to major cities surrounding Ukraine in parts of Europe as retaliation?I wish NATO would just say '**** it and join Ukrainian forces in completely annihilating Russian forces inside Ukraine. Leave the exit roads unbombed and give them a chance to pack their shit up and go, but for those aren't on that road, just annihilate them. Blow up every individual, every piece of equipment that belongs to the Russian army. Total slaughter.
I hear ya but what if Putin starts firing missiles to major cities surrounding Ukraine in parts of Europe as retaliation?
From all the threats he's been making, it sounds like he's going to get there eventually, anyway. Doesn't it?I hear ya but what if Putin starts firing missiles to major cities surrounding Ukraine in parts of Europe as retaliation?
From all the threats he's been making, it sounds like he's going to get there eventually, anyway. Doesn't it?
I've always been on your side about this, Vitamin man, but I keep earnestly trying to let cooler heads talk me down. I am not at all eager to get into a nuclear war. It would be irresponsible to the rest of the planet if we did it just because we're pissed off. But I agree the only way to handle Putin is to turn him to road pizza. If he throws a nuke that would be extremely unfortunate, but we would throw one right back and I don't think Putin will actually play that card. He's the humbug behind the curtain.I would be willing to have a nuclear war with Russia. Obviously, it's the absolute last resort, for all the obvious reasons, but if a country is willing to threaten others with nuclear force, willing to commit mass murder, willing to commit genocide, willing to use chemical weapons...they're capable of anything. A major part of the reason Russia is 'capable of anything' is because they assume that we're too afraid to get dirty.
My view is this: living in the nuclear age, and being a power that possesses nuclear weapons, necessarily means that you have to be willing to get your uniforms dirty. You have to be willing to take punishment. If the US has nuclear weapons, we have to expect that at some point we might be involved in nuclear war.
Russia threatens to use nukes because, as we've seen, their armed forces are shit. And they assume we're too afraid to get involved with Russia one on one. We need to turn this on its head. Economic sanctions alone won't work. We have to annihilate Russia's army, and we have to do so even if they threaten nukes. We have to threaten nukes in retaliation. Putin needs to know we're not afraid -- of any outcome.
I wish NATO would just say '**** it and join Ukrainian forces in completely annihilating Russian forces inside Ukraine. Leave the exit roads unbombed and give them a chance to pack their shit up and go, but for those aren't on that road, just annihilate them. Blow up every individual, every piece of equipment that belongs to the Russian army. Total slaughter.
I've always been on your side about this, Vitamin man, but I keep earnestly trying to let cooler heads talk me down. I am not at all eager to get into a nuclear war. It would be irresponsible to the rest of the planet if we did it just because we're pissed off. But I agree the only way to handle Putin is to turn him to road pizza. If he throws a nuke that would be extremely unfortunate, but we would throw one right back and I don't think Putin will actually play that card. He's the humbug behind the curtain.
Still arguing for Russia, huh? Those guys in that sub were guessing, for Godssake. Not much of an example.The last time we assumed the Russians would let us walk all over them we were one Soviet submarine officer away from a global thermonuclear war.
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