Day 18, Phase 2
Divine rule and Sarin
I spent a lot of time during 2014 and 2015 watching battle clips from eastern Ukraine. Most of them were uploaded to a server, downloaded, dissected, translated, titled, worded over, packed into 90-second YouTube videos, used for presentation overlays, Instagram and Facebook posts and archived for later use in documentary films.
We all remember the first and second battles for Donetsk Airport and the cyborgs who defended it. Sergei Loiko even wrote a book about it, Airport, which sells for $20 on Amazon.
Today’s siege of Mariupol reminds me of the cyborgs and the months of bloody battles for Donetsk airport, including the steeplechase of hacks making hay out of unspeakable tragedy1.
Exhibit A. The Kyiv Independent.
Criticize commandment? Confused it with Avostal?
Exhibit B. Adding to the confusion, the newspaper’s defense reporter Illia Ponomarenko chirps:
The world is a lot more interested in whether Russia actually used chemical weapons than what confused anonymous sources representing the Office of the President, Azov regiment and The Kyiv Independent are messaging. The same goes for lobbing Kh-31P missiles at Kyiv2.
This might explain why Arestovych and Podoliak (and maybe now Ponomarenko) are unreliable sources of information about anything.
Unverified reports about the use of chemical agents made by anonymous representatives of Azov regiment are, er, clickable but not factual, according to the Pentagon. At least, not yet.
When in doubt, check w/ Hanna, who says she does not know.
A quick boo at the Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency’s Telegram channel gets me thinking about how fighting tyranny with ineptitude and random Latin aphorisms is a bad idea. (Day 15. Mariupol Massacre. March 10, 2022)
Oh, and fyi, all that was left of the Kh-31P anti-radar air-to-ground missile was the booster stage that wrecked a billboard early on Thursday morning in Kyiv’s Holosiivsky District. It’s a notoriously inaccurate piece of shit. (Day 2. Enemy Sabotage Groups. February 25, 2022)