Thread by @WilliamYang120

"Asked about Putin’s statements, he drew a parallel with those of the #Ukrain President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government in Kyiv: “I’m a simple man. They decide what do on their own. Why would they want to bother with us?” he said." rferl.org/a/luhanks-done…

"Just a couple of hours before Russia’s president moved to redraw Ukraine’s borders again, artillery shells blew out the upstairs windows of Maria Artyomova’s home, ripped a hole in the roof of a two-story building housing a grocery and small apartments --...

... and killed her neighbor, Roman, as he worked in a tin-roof shed 20 meters from her front gate."

“We just want it to stop. That’s all,” said Artyomova, a 75-year-old retired village secretary and schoolteacher who was in her kitchen giving her diabetic husband an insulin injection when the shelling started -- the worst in at least five years.

"For many in Kyiv and the West, Putin’s words and actions sounded like a declaration of war against Ukraine. For Artyomova, and for others who have tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy in their lives in the Donbas, ...

... Russia’s recognition of the separatists’ claims was just the latest in a litany of distant political insults -- a barrage of bad news whose relevance is often outweighed by the more immediate concerns of daily life."

“Of course, we want Russia and Ukraine to get along together,” she said as the dull thud of artillery fire echoed from the front line about seven kilometers away.

Would Putin’s announcement change anything? “I don’t know,” she said. “Will there be tanks? I don’t know. All I know is the shelling, it was frightening, so unbelievably frightening.”

"In the yard next door, where the neighbor, Roman, was killed, Raisa Andriyonova, 74, swept glass shards and metal scraps into a neat pile with a straw broom as workers arrived to put plywood on the shattered windows of surrounding buildings."

Andriyonova said she expected nothing good to come out of the latest development.

Anything that stops this madness; that’s a good thing,” she said, adding: “I don’t think that [Putin] really knows what he’s doing. He’s old already.”