Ukraine Violated: My Village is Occupied by Russia

 

The stunning Dnieper River, a major European waterway, 
the Ukrainian Mississippi. The bridges over Kyiv. Anton Petrus/Getty image.

On the 100th day of Putin's vicious war crimes campaign and genocide in Ukraine:

At a summer camp for kids from all over
the Lugansk region. Where are they now?

Дорогая Фрэн, Мы в подвале...Русские преследуют людей. стучится в двери. Я думаю, что могу быть в списке за свою активность. Я плачу, когда вижу, что наш флаг опущен. Мы боимся каждого звука, каждого шума, каждого шага, каждого голоса. Как долго мы сможем продержаться? Я не знаю. From a dear friend in the Donbas

Dear Fran, We're in the basement...The Russians are after the people, knocking on doors. I think I might be on a list for being active. I cry when I see our flag down. We are afraid of every sound, every noise, every step, every voice. How long can we hold on? I don't know.

The village where I served with the Peace Corp in the Donbas is now occupied by the Russians. The town I know and love, where I lived for two years, is suffering, overwhelmed by a war the world didn't think possible in our time. 

My friends write that Russian soldiers are stalking them, scaring them, arresting them. Some are "disappearing," исчезновение.  They are horrified at the thought they are being tortured, or sent to gulags in Russia, along with thousands of other Ukrainians. They fear young girls are being brutalized and trafficked. They live under constant stress. Russian military leaders occupying towns and villages have lists, they say, and  they fear they may be on them.

A lovely window on a 
home in my village.

Putin's war crimes campaign to obliterate Ukraine from the face of the earth is a 21st-century genocide that we thought, we prayed, would never happen again. 

The people of the town where I served have been resisting Russian incursions  since 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea and the Donbas, Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts, and nothing was done to stop it. Now they too are being "temporarily occupied," as the Ukrainians say. But I'm terrified of the outcome. Meanwhile, the residents, my Ukrainian family and beloved friends, are living under unbearable fear and anxiety. 

It's what happens when a vicious dictator, using the Hitler/Stalin war and purge playbook, plus the Georgia and Syria total mass destruction play book, invades a foreign country and gets away with it.    

Inessa Morozova, born 1981 in Kherson,
southern Ukraine, now under relentless
RU attacks & unspeakable war crimes. 

Putin is destroying everything in sight, intentionally bombing civilian targets without mercy, relentlessly. Death and destruction for the purpose of death and destruction. Putin's depravity on full display.  No military targets, just civilian targets. Not just once, but over and over. Mariupol writ large. 

At this writing it's Severodonetsk that's being savaged, the Lugansk oblast city where I did my banking and where I loved walking the streets around the Chemical Palace, the bus station, the markets.  I would buy Luba flowers, like the large white calla lilies Frieda Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe painted. I'd also buy Roshen chocolates and good cognac, though I knew she regifted them. 

Severodonetsk is now obliterated. The whole city, gone. Since Putin's war crimes campaign began on February 24, 2022, all battles have come at a heavy price to civilian lives, infrastructure, hopes and dreams. Ukraine is being bombed to death into Putin's Mariupol, his Bucha, his Kherson.  He is claiming victory over the wasteland he's created. 

Putin's using every weapon in his arsenal: heavy artillery, long-range and ballistic missiles, illegal cluster bombs and hypersonic bombs, weapons of mass destruction, aimed indiscriminately at the places where people live, work, go to school, go to church, go to a hospital, celebrate their cultural heritage, walk and bike about their neighborhoods.

It's a form of murder. It's a Syrian style of Russian warfare, "to wipe everything off the face of the earth and then 'conquer' the ruins. A city of over 100,000 residents is now in rubble." (EuroMaidan PR and RPCV Harlen Rife, who is following the war closely, reporting). 

Ukraine's request for longer-range rocket systems is in part driven by the need to prevent this destruction through counter-battery fire.

Severodonetsk in Lugansk oblast
no more. 90% of the city destroyed.

 Biden is promising this aid. Will it arrive soon enough? Russia now occupies 20% of the country, according to President Zelensky. It's overwhelming.

The war won't stop until Putin is stopped.  

Ukrainian artist Iryna Kolesnikova,
lives and works in Odessa

An emotional John Kirby, Pentagon spokesperson and retired Navy admiral, put it honestly and forthrightly at a recent press conference, when he admitted how hard it is to absorb the tragedy of Putin's lethal invasion:

Odessa, by Roman Chudnovsky, born 1965 in Kyiv.

"It’s hard to look at what Putin's doing in Ukraine, what his forces are doing in Ukraine, and think that any ethical, moral individual could justify that. It’s difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious, mature leader would do that....So I can’t talk to his psychology, but I think we can all speak to his depravity. It’s hard to square [Putin’s], let’s just call it what it is, his BS, that this is about Nazism....about protecting Russians in Ukraine...about defending Russian national interests, when none of them — none of them — were threatened by Ukraine,” Kirby added, while lightly pounding his fist on the podium./"It’s hard to square that rhetoric by what he’s actually doing inside Ukraine to innocent people: shot in the back of the head; hands tied behind their backs; women, pregnant women being killed; hospitals being bombed. I mean, it’s just unconscionable,” he said. “It’s just beyond me. (crisis.org/en/rosiyany-provodyat-masshtabnu-filtratsiyu-gromadyan-ukrayiny)

Save Odessa.
The Opera House by Roman Chudnovsky

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysychansk

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/20/russia-ukraine-war-severodonetsk-zelenskiy-says-donbas-hell

https://kyivindependent.com/national/russia-destroys-ukraines-historic-heritage-steals-rare-collections-from-museums/.  This also pains me, Russia's deliberate bombing of cultural and historic museums, theaters, Houses of Culture, collections and artifacts. Putin aims to destroy Ukrianian heritage and identity. 

Harlan Rife Reports: "The Ukrainians continue to request longer range precision rocket systems like HIMARS and MLRS. They want to disrupt Russian logistics and prevent advances like we are seeing in the Donbas. They want to push Russian artillery back so they cannot level whole towns as they have at Rubizhne, Popasna, and now Severodonetsk. They want to support their own infantry in liberating occupied territory. At present, they are outgunned. / Chris Miller explains, "With artillery superiority, Russian forces are pounding Ukrainian troops and pulverizing everything else in their way with massive barrages around the clock in an effort to surround and capture strategic cities in the East of Ukraine, colloquially known as the Donbas. He quoted Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk regional military government who said, “They are carpet-bombing us. The cities they attack are simply being erased from the face of the earth."