How an Ukrainian village armed with two flags defeated two Russian tanks:
1. 4 Russian tanks enter village. Villagers watch carefully from distance. Russians transfer fuel from two of them to other two, get onto those two and leave the two dry tanks in the village.
2. Villagers plant Ukrainian flags on those tanks.
3. The other two tanks return, see tanks with Ukrainian flags and open fire, destroying them completely. Keep driving around looking for their other two tanks.
4. One of the yanks drives onto a bridge with 5 tonnes weight limit. the bridge collapses, tanks falls into the river, everyone inside dies.
5. The other tank keeps driving around, get lost and finally gets stuck in the ditch. Russians get out of it and walk away.
She's planning to return to Poland. According to her, EU people are moving back to EU left and right as "everything in Britain is collapsing". Some of our common friends are also planning to or have already moved. 1/x
- she says she is the only person in her work who still has access to a dentist, as dentist surgeries are so overwhelmed they refuse to see patients even privately
- she says that the rents in Battlefield, where we both used to live, are so high that people who earned... 2/x
...much more than we used to some years back can't afford to live there
- "Everything is so bloody expensive that even though I make 60 000 in my current job I feel just as when I was making less than 35 000 in the last one" she said.
3/x
After looking for a job for some time I went to local equivalent of Job Centre as I found online that unemployed people might get free language courses. 1/
The lady gave me proper bollocking for not claiming my job seekers allowance. I told her it must be mistake, how can I be entitled to job seekers allowance if it was me who quit a job and if I haven't worked in Finland even one full year yet. 2/
An interesting discussion is brewing up between Poland and Ukraine.
We all want Ukraine wants to join Europe in all ways possible. So some years ago they started building a standard gauge railway. It was supposed to reach Lviv by last year.
Now, the new idea of Ukrainian minister of agriculture is for Poland to build a Russian gauge railway from Ukrainian border to ports in Gdańsk, as well as in Klaipeda in Lithuania.
Minister Solski argues that Ukraine has more grain-carrying rail cars than all of Europe combined, so it would make the large scale transport easier - the issue here is not just a rail gauge but loading gauge too: Russian-standard rail vehicles are taller and wider, so... (3)
I don't buy this bullshit with "Russian people don't protest against Putin because they are afraid to die". Do you know why?
They volunteer to go to special military operations in their thousands. Knowing what survival rates are. 1/x
That means they are not afraid of dying. They are willing to die for Putin, or for money - as I guess this is a major incentive to sign for the army as pay in Russia is so shit that if you are from some shithole in the middle of nowhere, it's the only chance to make some... 2/x
...money you might ever have in your life.
But if for someone risking one's life to fight for freedom and hope that even if you die their kids will have a better life is "too much of a risk", but risking their life to fight against the freedom of Ukrainians and hope that... 3/x
You might have noticed that many pro-Ukrainian pundits and self proclaimed "Eastern Europe experts" have recently came attacking the new Polish government for their take over of public media, accusing them of destroying a valuable TV channel TVP World.
This is my take on this 🧵
So let's paint the background here. TVP was formerly a polish public broadcaster, a Polish equivalent to BBC so to speak. After PIS took power in 2015 they conducted an illegal takeover of Polish public media and turned them into an awful party propaganda tool. It needs to be /1
"recovered" and repaired so it can serve as a reliable source of as impartial information as possible. I explained this in detail in my recent piece for @WCountryVoices, you can read it here: