#Andrei Kurkov

[robynsassenmyview]

How to break bread in no man’s land

SOUP’S up: Serhiich (Viktor Zhdanov) and Pashka (Vladimir Yamnenko) in Dmytro Moiseiev’s film Grey Bees on the European Film Festival in South Africa. Photograph courtesy iffr.com THE INTERMINABLE DISCOMFORT of waiting helplessly for something terrible to happen is one of the central devices which hold together the extraordinary Ukrainian film, Grey Bees, directed by Dmytro Moiseiev. You can…

[zoevaldes]

Muerte con pingüino. Autor: Andrei Kurkov

Origen: Muerte con pingüino. Autor: Andrei Kurkov

[segurancaecienciasforenses]

Propaganda e Ucrânia

O conceito de propaganda pode ter diferentes interpretações dependendo do contexto em que é usado. Geralmente, a propaganda refere-se à prática de promover ou publicitar informações, ideias, produtos ou serviços com o objetivo de influenciar a opinião, atitude ou comportamento do público-alvo, o que pode ser efetuado através de diversos meios, nomeadamente a comunicação social e a internet. Em…

[ghost-of-books]

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[nicklloydnow]

“On the night of Nov. 5, I didn’t sleep at all, but it wasn’t because of air raid sirens. When it seemed clear that Donald Trump would win the U.S. presidential election, the mood on Ukrainian social media and among friends turned overwhelmingly negative (when it wasn’t outright disbelief: My publisher, who lives in Kharkiv, insisted for more than 30 minutes that something was surely wrong with the data).

The war was effectively over, people said. Mr. Trump would halt all American military aid and Ukraine would be forced to cede large swaths of territory to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. I told myself that Ukrainians have a tendency toward pessimism. That Ukraine is the front line against Mr. Putin’s project to make Russia great again, a project that is certainly incompatible with Mr. Trump’s. Surely Mr. Trump would decide that it is in his interest to thwart Mr. Putin and act decisively. But my mood, too, eventually tumbled to dark places.

(…)

In Ukraine, there is safety in simply trusting that the worst will happen. To dare to hope has always been the risk.

“What good things have I seen in my lifetime?” our 87-year-old neighbor Grandma Anya likes to say, with a solid fatalism that’s built on being born soon after the famine of the early 1930s to parents who had lost three children; on watching her savings, like many others’, become worthless right before the breakup of the U.S.S.R.; and on the steely hand from Moscow that has grasped at the heels of Ukrainians as we’ve strained for democracy, Europe and the rule of law.

In the past few years, however, there have been moments for hope. Like in the spring of 2022, when our army routed Russian forces from the suburbs around Kyiv and then took back nearly all of Kharkiv region, in the north, in the fall. There was a confidence then that Ukraine had earned the support of allies and that together we would repel Russian aggression.

But we’re tired. Some troops on the front lines have gone without leave for many months. Some in the east are falling back more than a mile a day at times. This week it snowed. The cold season is beginning, and with so many power stations already destroyed, the prospects for the winter are bleak.

We read that Russia is burning through men and matériel, but also that it has harnessed its economy to serve the war and produces weapons and ammunition around the clock. That it has used fewer missiles recently not to go easy on us, but because it is stockpiling them to inflict more damage when it gets colder.

Even before Mr. Trump’s election, the West’s support for Ukraine was indecisive, and the clamor among those who think this war is simply costing too much is growing louder. “Some still want to continue sending enormous amounts of money into this lost war,” Viktor Orban, Hungary’s president, told Hungarian national radio last week. “But the number of those who remain silent, and those who cautiously argue that we should adjust to the new situation, is growing.” Mr. Orban is on particularly friendly terms with America’s president-elect.

So what happens now? We wait. We wait for the publication of Mr. Trump’s plan for peace and eagerly consume the reported details of it that appear in American newspapers. We decide whether to believe the news reports that Mr. Trump had a call with Mr. Putin, or the Kremlin, which said the call never took place. We wait for Mr. Trump to tell us our fate in his own time. We decide whether to risk a hope.”

“Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months if Donald Trump withdraws US military assistance, according to a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.

The country would quickly be able to build a basic device from plutonium with a similar technology to the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the report states. "Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did within the framework of the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later," the document reads.

With no time to build and run the large facilities required to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely instead on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods taken from Ukraine's nuclear reactors.

Ukraine still controls nine operational reactors and has significant nuclear expertise despite having given up the world's third largest nuclear arsenal in 1996. The report says: "The weight of reactor plutonium available to Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons ... A significant nuclear weapons arsenal would require much less material ... the amount of material is sufficient for hundreds of warheads with a tactical yield of several kilotons."

Such a bomb would have about one tenth the power of Fat Man, the document's authors conclude.

"That would be enough to destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial or logistics installations. The exact nuclear yield would be unpredictable because it would use different isotopes of plutonium," said the report's author, Oleksii Yizhak, head of department at Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government research centre that acts as an advisory body to the presidential office and the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.

The plutonium would need to be imploded using "a complicated conventional explosion design, which must occur with a high detonation wave velocity simultaneously around the entire surface of the plutonium sphere," the report reads. The technology is challenging but within Ukraine's expertise, according to the briefing.

Last month President Zelensky said he had told Trump that Ukraine would need nuclear weapons to guarantee his country's security if it were prevented from joining Nato, as President Putin has demanded. Zelensky later said he had meant there was no alternative security guarantee, and Ukrainian officials have since denied Kyiv is considering nuclear rearmament.

The paper, which is published by the Centre for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, an influential Ukrainian military think tank, has been shared with the country's deputy defence minister and is to be presented on Wednesday at a conference likely to be attended by Ukraine's ministers for defence and strategic industries.

It is not endorsed by the Kyiv government but sets out the legal basis under which Ukraine could withdraw from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), the ratification of which was contingent on security guarantees given by the US, UK and Russia in the 1994 Budapest memorandum. The agreement stated that Ukraine would surrender its nuclear arsenal of 1,734 strategic warheads in exchange for the promise of protection.

"The violation of the memorandum by the nuclear-armed Russian Federation provides formal grounds for withdrawal from the NPT and moral reasons for reconsideration of the nonnuclear choice made in early 1994," the paper states.

Russian troops are gaining momentum as they advance in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, and Trump has pledged to cut US military aid unless Kyiv submits to peace talks with Putin.

Bryan Lanza, a Trump adviser, has already said that Ukraine will have to surrender Crimea. This week Donald Trump Jr taunted Zelensky, posting on X: "You're 38 days from losing your allowance."

Ukrainian forces are heavily dependent on US weaponry, and any reduction in the flow of western arms into the country, let alone a complete curtailment, would have catastrophic consequences on the battlefield. That has prompted Ukrainians to look for a way to take matters into their own hands.

"You need to understand we face an existential challenge. If the Russians take Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under occupation," said Valentyn Badrak, director of the centre that produced the paper. "There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulags." Badrak is from Irpin, where occupying Russians tortured and murdered civilians, and he was hunted by troops with orders to kill him.

Western experts believe it would take Ukraine at least five years to develop a nuclear weapon and a suitable carrier, but Badrak insists Ukraine is less than a year from building its own ballistic missiles. "In six months Ukraine will be able to show that it has a long-range ballistic missile capability: we will have missiles with a range of 1,000km," Badrak said.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer of the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment told Times Radio that Ukraine "certainly" had the technical know-how and practical wherewithal to produce a nuclear weapon.

"Trump will take note because the last thing we want is more nuclear proliferation and any sort of nuclear strike in Europe, be it from Ukrainians or the Russians," he added.

Bretton-Gordon called Zelensky a "master strategist" who was willing to try "absolutely everything".”

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Grey Bees | Author: Andrey Kurkov | Publisher: MacLehose Press (2020)

[rosemariecawkwell]

Review: Our Daily War, by Andrey Kurkov

PUBLICATION DATE: 18TH JULY 2024HARDBACK ORIGINAL | £ 20.00 | OPEN BORDERS PRESS Blurb Ten years on from the annexation of Crimea, two years on from Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian people continue to fight back. In the second volume of his war diaries, Andrey Kurkov gives a fresh perspective on a people for whom resistance and solidarity have become a matter of…

[mknewsmedia]

'The war has become the background of life'

As the second anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion approaches, Ukraine's acclaimed novelist Andrey Kurkov reflects on his country's efforts to keep on 'kipping on'

[rotzaprachim]

German belongs to mascha kaleko as much as it is the language of of 🇩🇪. Modern hebrew belongs to sayed kashua as much as it is the language of 🇮🇱. Russian belongs to Andrey Kurkov as much as it is the language of 🇷🇺. no state or dictator or political party can ever own the beauty of a language

[chiimi-png]

The Silver Bone

4.75/5⭐️

Written by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov, the first book in The Kyiv Mysteries series marks his return to fiction after over a year of writing about the ongoing war back in his home country. Before I go on to talk about the story itself I just want to say something, I LOVE MAPS ON BOOKS, they're my guilty pleasure and JUST LOOK AT IT!

ALSO SPOILERS AHEAD SO PROCEED WITH CAUTION!!

Ok, so starting with how gut wrenching Samson's father's death is, and we don't really get to know much about him, just that he saved his son from death but ended up dying himself.

The way Kurkov writes about early soviet Kyiv and the struggles of a mid-war life as well as the life of the main character helps us understand and empathise with Samson but not feel pity for him. As I read and reached the 100 page mark, I found myself feeling both proud and excited for what he would accomplish; I felt for him at the beginning with such a change in his life but as the pages went on, he grew up in the sense that he tried his best to rise up to the situation and also, speaking about how he is written now, not fall into weird clichés some main characters from mystery novels sometimes fall into like being know it alls and extremely lucky when going through the respective mystery. The ending marks the great beginning of a series and the case was wrapped up just fine. I overall enjoyed this book and look forward to the next book in the series.

[17panicattacksinatrenchcoat]

max's reads of 2024

terribly out of order and short cause I forgot to keep track of my reads this year! but I put the titles I remember here

I reread a few old books that I like this year s well

I've put a heart next to any books I particularly love. let me know if you've read any!

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti 💜

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado 💜

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado 💜

Nada by Carmen Laforet (translated)

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin (translated)

Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi 💜

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi 💜

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 💜

Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood 💜

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood 💜

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone 💜

Eileen by Otessa Mosfegh

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami (translated)

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff 💜

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Florida by Lauren Groff

Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang 💜

Bestiary by K-Ming Chang 💜

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Skin and its Girl by Sara Cypher

The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen by Hans Christian Andersen 💜

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

Bunny by Mona Awad

(and the multitude of books I forgot)

as well as a multitude of short stories and poetry online

DNFS

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (intend to finish next year) 💜

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (intend to finish next year)

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang

Beartown by Frederick Backman

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar (intend to finish next year) 💜

[ghost-of-books]

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

when andrey kurkov was writing death and the penguin he must have been thinking like. what if there was a book where while you read it you Felt Weird