AFU still shelling residential areas in Donetsk - Kirovsky district, today
What strikes me the most when I see footage from Donetsk is how the people are... used to this. Everyone knows what to do when they hear artillery, "duck & cover", fire brigades move swiftly on muscle memory. 16-year-olds have lived half their lives like this.
In mid-February I started reading local Donetsk group chats to keep track of what's going on, teenagers discussing the shelling, afraid to go to sleep, talking about which districts are getting hit, how they haven't stayed up this late in forever, trying to joke through it
No one will talk about this now, but around February 17th Ukrainain shelling of Donetsk intensified to 2014 levels and no one gave a damn about it. People dying, left without water and electricity, hiding in basements. It's sad that it's happening to other civilians now, but...
... Kiev's actions have made sure that it would happen sooner or later. “It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.”
Several civilians killed in Donetsk just today. No military utility to these strikes, pure terror tactics and spite. No idea why people thought this could just go on forever.
Crazy to contemplate how easily this war could have been avoided. If the Maidan government hadn't insisted on passing a bunch of anti-Russian laws immediately after taking power. If they had compromised on regional autonomy (within Ukraine!) for Donbass. If they adhered to Minsk.
Four people killed, five wounded. Rocket artillery fired straight at the city center, a children's hospital, cluster munitions. You have heard this phrase very often now, but think about what it really means - this has been going on for over EIGHT YEARS
All of it is being recorded.
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New episode! Frontline Sitrep, mobilization(?), Ukrainian TikTok PsyOps, newest Russian weapons, lend-lease, Victory Day, the bloody spectacle, French dogs. Go check it out, the episode is free:
Speaking for myself (Kirill), all of my great-grandfathers fought in the war, one was a pilot & was shot down in the first days of the war, one was head of a railway station & joined the partisans, one was an artillery officer, one was a surgeon
Don't know much about the pilot — he was pretty young when he died, leaving behind a family & only one or two photos that I've seen, he was shot down somewhere in Belorussia in late June 1941.
The train man had suffered an injury to his leg & couldn't walk properly; he sabotaged the railway, derailing several trains with German supplies & went into the woods to join the partisans when he was discovered. He survived the war.
@im_1776 "Mobilization" can mean a lot of things, from putting БАРС into action, to calling up reservists, to grabbing random men on the street, like in parts of Ukraine currently. Lately, there have been rumors about the announcement of a "general mobilization" in Russia on May 9th.
if lavrov felt like scoring a rhetorical "gotcha" he could've just asked why israel supports a country that names streets after people who participated in the holocaust against a country that names streets after people who liberated concentration camps
that would have been just as diplomatically inappropriate but at least factually correct