I couldn't help but snicker as I read this Times piece on Vlad's dyspepsia. As would be expected, the toxic medicine he's been dishing out to Ukrainians isn't going down well in his own system, either. Bullies always cry the loudest.
"President [Fascist dictator and butcher] Vladimir V. Putin of Russia lashed out at the West over Ukraine’s weeklong incursion into Russian territory, in a tense televised meeting with his top officials on Monday, a sign of how the surprise attack has unsettled the Kremlin," writes the Times.
He said "the West is fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians" — which is neither true nor even remotely believable. The Ukrainians are merely defending against Russia and the West is shamefully tolerating Putin's fascist blight of Eurasia.
"The Kursk region’s acting governor, Aleksei Smirnov, was shown telling Mr. Putin by video link that 28 towns and villages were under Ukrainian control. He said Ukrainian troops had pushed seven miles into Russian territory along a 25-mile front" and that "2,000 people were believed to be in Ukrainian-held territory," news which was followed by a thunderous belch from the butcher. About 59,000 were soon to be evacuated and another 121,000 people had fled the area of Kursk, which lies NNE of Ukraine proper.
No one wants to see civilians killed, especially in a needless conflict created by a revanchist worm like Vladimir Putin. But Governor Smirnov was compelled to add that 12 innocent Russians had so far succumbed to the sociopathic leader's deadly delusions of a Soviet empire redux. Lucky for Putin, sociopaths aren't troubled by the loss of other people's lives.
Ukraine launched the incursion in hopes that Russia would pull some of its front-line forces out of eastern Ukraine, where the heaviest fighting is taking place. That's a realistic goal; utterly unrealistic for Ukraine is "to seize territory that could serve as a bargaining chip in future peace negotiations," as the Times puts it. Putin won't sit down at the poker table until he has all the chips.
There's also this "Conflict Situation Update," 27 July to 2 August, from the Ukraine Conflict Monitor. The report's totality is heartbreaking enough. But the horror to which Putin is subjecting Ukrainian children — and their families — is straight out of the pages of ancient history, when in wars women and children were taken as slaves.
Russian shelling, drones, and airstrikes killed over 20 civilians in the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Sumy regions. On 27 July, Russian rockets struck Hlukhiv in the Sumy region, killing two civilians and wounding at least a dozen, half of them children. Russian forces subjected Kherson city’s civilian infrastructure to daily artillery fire and drone strikes, resulting in the deaths of at least three civilians. Meanwhile, reports continue to emerge of Russian authorities deporting children from occupied regions to Russia. On 31 July, the Ukrainian government claimed that Russian authorities forcibly transferred an unspecified number of Ukrainian children from occupied Bilovodsk to a military training camp in the Novosibirsk region of Russia.
It seems Putin wanted the children nowhere close to Ukraine. They were transported 1,264 miles.
The Conflict Monitor's Europe and Central Asia Regional Specialist Nichita Gurcov was asked in an interview about Ukrainian fatalities in the war's second year, which declined by 70%, to 1.600 dead. (A mere 1,600 dead.) "What does that say about the conflict?" Gurcov's reply:
The decrease in civilian fatalities does not mean less armed violence — there is, in fact, more of it. In the first six months of the all-out invasion a lot of people got killed, creating a high benchmark. Even though the numbers ACLED records suggest fewer civilian fatalities in the second year of the war, there are many other aspects that cannot be quantified. How can one measure the constant threat of shelling along the frontlines, or drone and missile attacks in hinterlands? To get a glimpse of what life is like in Ukraine, try the ubiquitous air raid alert app for your phone. It can give you a sense of waking up to country-wide alerts several times a week, even in relatively safe central and western Ukraine. They occur when there are many incoming drones and missiles whose target is not immediately clear, prompting a general alert. It almost always happens at night. Just imagine the agonizing choice of whether or not to go to the shelter.
I can't imagine the agony. But I would be wondering why the West hasn't come to my country's defense — with direct force against the barbarians.
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