Tens and tens of thousands more people have died preventable gruesome deaths during the first 100 days in the ninth year of fascist Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine. The map below shows that most of the recent fighting is taking place in eastern Ukraine.
The primary goal of the exercise — which began with the annexation of Crimea and occupation of areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in early 2014 — has remained the same: subjugation of Ukraine.
Marian Kushnir from RFE/RL’s Ukrainian bureau filed this report from frontline Severodonetsk on June 3 (Day 100) to give you an idea of what today’s epicenter of bloody mess looks and smells like.
Past is prologue
CIA Director William Burns met with Z in Kyiv on January 12 to share intelligence about the inevitable and imminent all-out invasion of Ukraine, including plans to seize capital and decapitate Z1.
One month later, Putin blurted out after a beano with Macron in Moscow that Ukraine should bite the pillow and fulfill her duty2. Few people expected at the time that Russia’s supreme leader intended to commit genocidal acts in order to prevent more atrocities.
Putin’s spelled out his demands on February 22, 20223.
Ukraine must demilitarize
Ukraine must not to join NATO
Ukraine must reject any/all military alliances
Ukraine must recognize de facto independence of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics
Putin may well have lacked "intentions" insofar as he failed to think about the new crimes he is now responsible for, but maybe the term "thinking" should be be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality.
To have "intentions" means thinking reflectively about one's own actions as a human being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others.
What’s shocked me most over the last 100 days — and the 100 days before that — has been the rejection of reason, humanism, science and progress, as well as the amount of non-thinking itself.
The collection of out-of-work mercenaries and untrained Russian peasants sent to pillage towns around Kyiv early during the campaign is not a regular, combat-ready force, just a bunch of undisciplined licensed privateers4.
Any army that robs and rapes civilians is not an effective fighting force. All the demonstrative acts of extreme violence evokes the Eternal Struggle, man against man against nature, reminding us that, in the end, there's no escape and that Ukraine’s pain is irrelevant.
While death claims all in the end, it is the struggle to survive that defines life, as evinced in the first stanza of the original lyrics of Ukraine’s national anthem:
Never perished is Ukraine, nor her glory and freedom!
Still upon us, young brethren, fate shall smile!
Our enemies shall vanish like dew in the sun;
We shall rule in our beloved country.
Carousing is not only a key to Special Operations success but is also a great way to push your mind and body to new limits. Stay Out of Doorways. Tactical athletics at Tootsie’s (January 12, 2022)
‘It’s Your Duty, My Beauty.’ The doorman with nukes and no friends (February 9, 2022)
A Separate Reality. Swing for a ruble, blow for a penny (February 23, 2022)
Thank you, David.