Someone is spray painting “wolverines” on destroyed Russian vehicles in Ukraine. It’s probably a reference to the classic Cold War film, Red Dawn, about a group of American teens who fight to protect their small Colorado town after a Soviet invasion…
As first reported by Task & Purpose, one of the earliest instances of the graffiti showed up on a T-72 spotted on a Ukrainian roadway on April 7. Since then, the graffiti has appeared all over downed Russian assets…
In Red Dawn, the Soviet Union invades America and the audience watches as a group of kids resists occupation using guerilla warfare. When the kids destroyed a piece of Soviet military equipment, they’d spray paint the name of their high school mascot— “Wolverines”—on to it…
Colorado and Ukraine are far apart, but the images of burned out tanks tagged on highways are similar in both places. It’s surreal and disturbing to see images from a war zone that imitate a Hollywood film so perfectly.
Art imitates life and vice versa … comes to mind.
Eideard 
Russian provinces bordering Ukraine report series of blasts https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/27/series-of-blasts-hit-three-russian-provinces-bordering-ukraine
Russian authorities said explosions hit three border provinces, including an ammunition depot, in the Belgorod province.
Russia said it was sending investigators to Kursk and Voronezh regions to document what it calls “illegal actions by the Ukrainian army”.
A top Ukrainian official on Wednesday described the attacks as payback and “karma” for Moscow’s invasion.
“If you (Russians) decide to massively attack another country, massively kill everyone there, massively crush peaceful people with tanks, and use warehouses in your regions to enable the killings, then sooner or later the debts will have to be repaid,” Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said.
7AM MDT, tomorrow morning, 28th
😔
If the US and UK keep ratcheting up tensions instead of pushing for peace, The Day After will be the next real life rerun.
…maybe they could just ask Putin nicely to refrain from further aggression – like President Roosevelt did in his April 14, 1939 message to German Chancellor Adolph Hitler after his invasion of Czechoslovakia. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/WorldWar2/fdr3.htm
Adolf Hitler addresses the Reichstag on April 28, 1939 and ridicules U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plea to avoid aggression. (American Experience PBS)
Gandhi’s Letters to Hitler: https://historyofyesterday.com/gandhis-letters-to-hitler-e3e987817c33
(AP 8/9/22): “In a growing challenge to Russia’s grip on occupied areas of southeastern Ukraine, guerrilla forces loyal to Kyiv are killing pro-Moscow officials, blowing up bridges and trains, and helping the Ukrainian military by identifying key targets.
The spreading resistance has eroded Kremlin control of those areas and threatened its plans to hold referendums in various cities as a move toward annexation by Russia.”
I imagine that if Hitler had nukes the equation changes markedly.
Why so eager to start WW3 for The Ukraine? Asking for the Yemeni.
Russia’s biggest competitor for wheat exports. Why not take ALL the business. Plus typical ex-colonial reasoning, e.g., quite a number of former overseer Russian families stayed on in Ukraine after split from Soviet Union. Prolly feels like Mississippi.
😔
Einstein’s Letter to President Roosevelt (August 2nd, 1939) http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/pdfs/docsworldwar.pdf
“What I particularly admire in him is the firm stand he has taken, not only against the oppressors of his countrymen, but also against those opportunists who are always ready to compromise with the Devil. He perceives very clearly that the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”
Albert Einstein, in his tribute to Pablo Casals (30 March 1953), in Conversations with Casals (1957), by Josep Maria Corredor, translated from Conversations avec Pablo Casals : souvenirs et opinions d’un musicien (1955). https://archive.org/stream/conversationswit1957casa/conversationswit1957casa_djvu.txt
In protest of dictatorships throughout the world, including the totalitarian Franco regime in Spain [which he’d fled during the Spanish civil war in 1936], cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973) refused in 1946 to ever perform on stage again. He eventually returned to playing for audiences but would not perform in countries that supported the Franco government.
7AM MDT, tomorrow morning, 8th
Russia’s invasion of The Ukraine is wrong on so many levels. It needs to stop. The US and UK don’t seem interested in peace and want to fight this war to the last Ukrainian. This is also wrong on many levels. The war does have the viciousness of a civil war and it is in some ways. Very sad and troubling.
It also saddens me that the war has become a culture war fixture, fought on both sides with nonsense logic about Nazis and an idiotic lust for world war or tacit support for Putin to ‘own the libs’. This also needs to stop.
You keep kicking a dog it is eventually going to bite you, and the ‘left’ in GOUSA has been kicking this dog for years with bullshit like Russiagate. Putin is not a good guy, but he is dangerous and has the means to end life as we know it. Proceed with caution.
“There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them.” Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic 3/31/22) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/autocracy-could-destroy-democracy-russia-ukraine/629363/
“…But while we were happily living under the illusion that “Never again” meant something real, the leaders of Russia, owners of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, were reconstructing an army and a propaganda machine designed to facilitate mass murder, as well as a mafia state controlled by a tiny number of men and bearing no resemblance to Western capitalism. For a long time—too long—the custodians of the liberal world order refused to understand these changes. They looked away when Russia “pacified” Chechnya by murdering tens of thousands of people. When Russia bombed schools and hospitals in Syria, Western leaders decided that that wasn’t their problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, they found reasons not to worry. Surely Putin would be satisfied by the annexation of Crimea. When Russia invaded Ukraine the second time, occupying part of the Donbas, they were sure he would be sensible enough to stop.
Even when the Russians, having grown rich on the kleptocracy we facilitated, bought Western politicians, funded far-right extremist movements, and ran disinformation campaigns during American and European democratic elections, the leaders of America and Europe still refused to take them seriously. It was just some posts on Facebook; so what? We didn’t believe that we were at war with Russia. We believed, instead, that we were safe and free, protected by treaties, by border guarantees, and by the norms and rules of the liberal world order.
With the third, more brutal invasion of Ukraine, the vacuity of those beliefs was revealed.”
The Ukraine is / was a democracy? Who knew?
The greatest threat to Democracy is not the Russians or the other autocratic nations. Its the corporations, associated elites and their neo-liberal / neo-con enablers who are slowly turning democracy into dictatorship. The same corporations who are forecasting endless war / endless weapons sales in The Ukraine cos Putin.
Hard to know if Orwell is turning in his grave or laughing his mouldering arse off.
“The politics of Ukraine take place in a framework of a semi-presidential representative democratic republic and of a multi-party system. A Cabinet of Ministers exercises executive power (jointly with the president until 1996). Legislative power is vested in Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian: Верховна Рада, lit. ’Supreme Council’).
As part of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1991, the political system featured a single-party socialist-republic framework characterized by the superior role of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), the sole-governing party then permitted by the Ukrainian SSR’s constitution. In 1996, the current constitution replaced the previous constitution that was introduced in 1978.
From 2014 changes in the administration on-the-ground in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk have complicated the de facto political situation associated with those areas.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Ukraine
See also the Maidan Uprising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
“How Ukrainians Saved Their Capital : When Russia attacked Kyiv, Ukrainians dropped everything to protect the city—and to ease one another’s suffering.” (The New Yorker. May 9, 2022 issue) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/09/how-ukrainians-saved-their-capital
“Better to die on your feet than live on your knees”.
Sched this for 7AM MDT, tomorrow morning, 7th. Note – I’m more than familiar with a fair amount of military gear – most of it too heavy and not especially useful. Never seen anything like the leather and fabric(?) piece covering the American kid’s lower jaw and neck.
Dancing with death – seen momentarily in that look from the older guy smoking his cigarette as the kids are getting their shit together
“How Ukraine is using resistance warfare developed by the US to fight back against Russia.” https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/27/politics/russia-ukraine-resistance-warfare/index.html
Resistance Operating Concept (ROC), U.S. Special Operations Command https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=838149