Aiden Aslin, British POW on Russian captivity: Russian said "I am your death". He asked "do you want a beautiful death or a quick death? I wanted a quick death.
He said "no, you're going to have a beautiful death". I was fully expecting to be murdered at that point. 1/
Aslin: I remember they came for three of the guys that were in the cell with me. They put bags on their head, and then the door closed. You hear the guards shouting, laying on the floor. Then you hear them get beat. While they're crawling, you can hear them being beat. 2/
Aslin: They put a bag on my head. They shout at me to lay down. He asked "do you speak Russian?". And then he started beating me and started giving me directions.
I had to crawl on in prone. He was beating me in the back with a police baton. 3X
Zelenskyy: The Americans have proposed a direct negotiation in the Ukraine-US-Russia format, and possibly Europe.
Today there is no peace deal, and there cannot be one until the war is stopped. Ukraine’s MFA is working on creating the infrastructure for elections abroad. 1/
Zelenskyy: There is no peace agreement today. And there may not be one.
A peace agreement will exist only when it is not just on paper, but when it is signed by leaders and when the war has stopped. That is what constitutes an agreement — unlike the Budapest Memorandum. 2/
Zelenskyy: Ukraine’s MFA is working on creating the infrastructure to hold elections abroad.
Elections will not be held in Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories due to the risk of Russia falsifying the results. 3/
Dmitri Kozak, ex Putin aide, refused the president's orders on day two of the Ukraine invasion, insisting he didn't know Russia's goals.
He told Putin he was ready to be arrested or shot, — NYT. 1/
Days before the invasion, Kozak warned Putin at a Security Council meeting: Ukrainians will resist, sanctions will be severe, Russia's position will suffer.
He drafted a memo predicting Sweden and Finland would join NATO, which came true. 2/
Kozak had worked with Putin since the 1990s in St. Petersburg. He managed Putin's first re-election, oversaw the 2014 Olympics, and integrated Crimea.
He was negotiating genuinely with Ukraine when Putin invaded. 3/
An 18-year-old from occupied Crimea was about to be drafted into the Russian army. Instead, he escaped more than 3,000 kilometers and reached Kyiv.
This is the story of Artem, who chose flight over serving the state that occupied his home. — Suspilne 1/
Artem was born in Zaporizhzhia. At age five, his family moved to Sevastopol. In 2014, Russia occupied Crimea. From that moment on, his life unfolded inside a closed, repressive system that punished dissent and offered young people no real choices. 2/
At school, Artem once shouted “Glory to Ukraine” out of a window. Minutes later, a school psychologist entered the classroom. Artem was taken aside and told those words were “Nazi slogans” used during the alleged “killing of children in Donbas.” 3/