Tag: Ukraine

A feminist community emerging from the war in Ukraine

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Inside a shelter dubbed ‘FemApartment’, residents support one another as they help others affected by the Ukraine war…Boisterous female laughter emanated intermittently from the corner unit of a drab, Soviet-style residential building. Sandals and a pink lamp sat at the entrance to the warmly-lit apartment, reached via the gloomy communal corridor…

Twenty-three-year-old Mira Kapitan, a cheery copywriter and hip-hop artist originally from a suburb of Kyiv, had just popped mackerel in the oven. Also in the kitchen was her flatmate Tanya Vynska, an 18-year-old political science student with dyed orange hair…

The suburban Lviv apartment where Mira and Tanya live – known affectionately as “FemApartment” by its residents – was originally meant to be a temporary home to five young women. Now, however, it is a refuge for the women – strangers to one another until June last year – for as long as they need.

The women were forced to flee from different parts of Ukraine – mostly in the country’s northeast – when the full-scale invasion by Russia began in February 2022. Unable to afford to rent a room in Lviv, they found themselves homeless, but through TikTok and other social media, they learned about a shelter for women involved in different types of community activism.

Not so rare in these circumstances. Often…in a wartime context…what is needed to survive the toughest times survives to move on to other places, other times. Often initiated by the best people caught up inside a disaster.

Thief busted stealing Banksy art in Ukraine

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The ringleader of a group that allegedly tried to steal a Banksy mural from a wall in Ukraine could face up to 12 years in prison, the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said in a statement Monday.

The suspect, who has not been named, was served a “notice of suspicion” after police detained the alleged thieves attempting to remove the artwork from a house destroyed by Russian shelling in the city of Hostomel last month.

Depicting a woman in a gas mask carrying a fire extinguisher, the mural is one of several works completed by the British street artist in cities across Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv, following Russia’s invasion.

Modern communications let folks know about everything of interest around this silly planet. If you know where to look.

Even the bad guys!

Some wars are older than any of us…

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In a camera phone clip posted on social media [Telegraph Оперативний ЗСУ] Saturday at least four Ukrainian soldiers wait in a muddy trench for the enemy to attack or to receive new orders.
[click sound icon lower right and also go to full screen].

The adage ‘war is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror’, is said to date from the First World War and its trench warfare.

Banksy mural in liberated Ukrainian town

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Renowned street artist Banksy has unveiled his latest artwork in an Instagram post — a mural in the liberated Ukrainian town of Borodianka.

The artwork shows a female gymnast balancing on a pile of rubble on the side of a building damaged by Russian strikes.

The graffiti artist posted three images of the piece Friday on social media, with a simple caption reading “Borodyanka, Ukraine,” using an alternative spelling for the town’s name…

Borodianka was hit particularly hard by Russian airstrikes at the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February, with many buildings reduced to piles of rubble by long-range attacks.

Artistic talent can offtimes find a way to bring beauty to the ugliness created by the worst of us.

An Explanation for UFOs Spotted Above Ukraine

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In September, Ukrainian astronomers published a report detailing what they thought were unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAPs, flying above the war-torn region. Now, alien-hunting Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has weighed in on the science out of Kyiv with a paper posted online on Wednesday…

Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project at Harvard University, a program that uses scientific rigor to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life and technology, and former chair of the school’s astronomy department…

Loeb told Motherboard…the authors of the initial paper out of Kyiv had contacted him with their work but that he hadn’t looked at it. The skies above Kyiv, Loeb said, are the last place people should be looking for UAPs right now.

“In science, we’re trying to minimize the noise so that we can pick up the signal and therefore Ukraine would be the last palace on earth where I would search for unidentified aerial phenomena… The noise level is so high,” he said.

Ukraine is at war, and during a war there’s lots of stuff flying through the sky. Drones, aircraft, and artillery shells, and satellites would conflict with any observations made of the sky.

Lots of useful information in MOTHERBOARD’S article. Interesting stuff. Some crap debunked…and how and where more research is needed.

Then and now!

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I refused to participate in the war crimes on the left of this picture. I counseled other young men on how to fightback, refuse to join the madness, reject that cruel and unjust political violence. We must do it all over again.

Russia looking for buyers in Africa for stolen Ukrainian grain

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Bulk carrier loading grain in Crimea

Russia has bombed, blockaded and plundered the grain production capacity of Ukraine, which accounts for one-tenth of global wheat exports, resulting in dire forecasts of increased hunger and of spiking food prices around the world.

Now, the United States has warned that the Kremlin is trying to profit from that plunder by selling stolen wheat to drought-stricken countries in Africa, some facing possible famine…

The American alert about the grain has only sharpened the dilemma for African countries, many already feeling trapped between East and West, as they potentially face a hard choice between, on one hand, benefiting from possible war crimes and displeasing a powerful Western ally, and on the other, refusing cheap food at a time when wheat prices are soaring and hundreds of thousands of people are starving.

Rock and a hard place come to mind. Especially when feelings in Africa about any warnings coming from two-faced American politicians aren’t exactly welcome…or considered believable.

Russian troops stole ~$5 million worth of tractors in Ukraine

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Нова серія тракторів 9R/9RT/9RX

Too bad they can’t make them run, eh?

Russian troops stole almost $5 million worth of farm equipment from a John Deere dealer in the occupied city of Melitopol, Ukraine, only to discover that the machines have been shut down remotely, making them inoperable, according to a report from CNN. Some of the equipment, which comes with a remote locking feature and a built-in GPS, was tracked over 700 miles away in the Zakhan Yurt village of Chechnya…

“When the invaders drove the stolen harvesters to Chechnya, they realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely,” CNN’s source told the outlet.

This isn’t the first time that looting has backfired on Russian troops during its invasion of Ukraine. According to a report from The Times, a Ukrainian man has been using Apple’s Find My feature — which locates a device using Bluetooth signals that bounce off other nearby Apple devices — to track the movements of Russian troops after they stole his AirPods. He’s been able to view their movements on a map and even watched them as they appeared to retreat from an attack on Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv…

Anyone acquainted with the changes in warfare in the last century or so barely recognizes what is happening outside of technology used in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Everything but hardware is run like the 19th Century or earlier. Including theft and looting as a military responsibility.