#Russian Invasion of Ukraine

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

[thyinum]

It's so wild to me to see under that Xiran Jay Zhao's post about the bombed ukrainian printing house comments like "I hope everyone is safe." And I get it, people are saying this out of kindness and pure consern, there's nothing wrong with it. It just shows how little coverage our war has abroad.

No, no one in Ukraine is safe. No one in that printing house was safe, in fact, 7 people died. No one in a huge hypermarket in Kharkiv on Saturday was safe, in fact, there were 18 killed and 48 injured. And all this happened in the span of only a few days.

No one is safe in territories occupied by russians because the whole family can get killed by refusing to give up their home to russian soldiers. And every time ukrainian army liberates some region, they find mass graves and torture chambers there.

No one is safe even far away from the front line and the border with russia, because missiles and drones fly all over Ukraine, and you never know when the next one will land on your house.

Hell, ukrainians aren't safe even abroad, because there's always a chance there will be some crazy russian or russian supporter who will decide to beat or kill us. And I'm not making this up.

I'm aware that I'm more safe than the people close to the front line and the border with russia or in occupied territories. I don't hear explosions every day, unlike my friend from Kharkiv. But that doesn't mean I'm completely safe. Missiles and drones fly by at least several times a week, especially at night, when I don't hear the sound of an air raid siren simply because I'm asleep. 

I am not safe.

My family is not safe.

My friends all over Ukraine are not safe.

We're not safe until russia is gone from our territories. That's why we need all that ammunition and aid. War won't magically stop if our allies stop sending us weapons; that's not how it works. We'll just be more unsafe, because russia won't stop unless it is forced to.

Here's ukrainian news sources you can follow that report daily:

United24: Instagram, YouTube, Twitter

Svidomi: Instagram, Twitter

WeAreUkraine: Instagram

[valcaira]

People who used to be vocal about Ukraine now being exclusively vocal about Palestine while calling the Ukrainian genocide "low priority" or "attention seeking" are a special kind of evil.

Treating global conflicts like fandom has rotted your brains.

[vyvilha]

this is the art of nika kozhushko, an 18 year old ukranian artist from kharkiv. she was killed by russia yesterday.

[canberramaidan]

I'm not American, but my feed is full of soft russian propaganda. Fake accounts, or clueless Westerners, posting over and over about how Ukraine has to surrender for their own good.

They keep using the term "to the last Ukrainian", acting as if Ukrainians have no agency in fighting for their freedom, and as if russia has a right to invade and colonise their neighbour. AGAIN.

I have family killed, missing, or POWs in this genocidal invasion. They know what they're fighting for. Let them speak about their own country, which apparently nobody here can even find on a map.

And it's no coincidence that the Kremlin has upped their "Ukraine must surrender to genocide" narratives so much right now, days out from MAGA likely sending the world into WW3.

[hummingbird-hunter]

The thing is, I have nothing against socialism or communism as a political ideology; trust me, I'm as anti-capitalist as they come. The leftism is really not the problem here.

The problem is when in their leftism, people – Americans, really, and western Europeans – use the ussr as this sort of goal, this complete antithesis to the modern capitalist society, this almost-utopian place to live. They use hammer and sickle symbol, the ussr anthem; sometimes, as a joke, sometimes, not so much.

Not only that clearly shows that they know absolutely nothing about the ussr – it's also spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not, which is especially insidious now, when russia is literally committing a genocide.

The ussr wasn't a socialist utopia where everyone is equal. It was a totalitarian dictatorship, responsible for colonisation and genocide of multiple people and cultures. Just like the russian Empire before it. Just like modern russia continues to do now.

For many Eastern European and Central Asian people, hammer and sickle is not just a symbol of a political ideology. It's the symbol, under which people were starved to death, imprisoned or executed for daring to write in their own language; in which cultures were erased, people – forcefully assimilated, stripped of their own national identity.

It's the propaganda of being "the same people, the same nation" that russians love to use; that westerners love to believe, for the sole reason of the oppressed daring to look similar to the oppressor; for the sole reason of Americans being unable to look past their own history and realize oppression comes in many shapes and forms.

By using the ussr symbols in your political movement, you're denying the atrocities commited under that symbol and spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not.

It's not "progressive" to wave around a hate symbol.

Do your research.

[chrysocomae]

[error4343]

Project Nedopysani confirmed at least 194 literature figures killed by Russia during war.

This list will continue to grow. Russia commits genocide, both physical and cultural, every day. This is why you likely didn't know much about Ukraine until 2022: Russia tried and continues to wipe out our culture from existence.

Please, support Ukrainian artists and spread awareness about Russia's war crimes.

[justacynicalromantic]

Bahmut had 17 schools, 29 kindergartens, 5 colleges, 5 theaters, 12 libraries, a salt mine and the biggest underground concert hall in the world.

This city no longer exists

[mewlabu]

People forget that while Ukraine isn't allowed to harm one hair on Russia's soil, Russia has been working hard to kill Ukrainians not just with misiles

- by destroying the medical infrastructure

- freezing or burning people to death by destroying the power grid that helps people survive during winter and increasingly hot summers

- by kidnapping and re-educating Ukrainian children and adopting them into Russian families

- by destroying Ukraine's food production capacity

- by targetting civilian areas, in broad daylight, such as shopping centres

- by destroying cultural institutions, museums, universities, schools

- by riddling farm land with mines it will take decades to remove that will maim and kill farmers and children

- by causing one of the worst environmental disasters when they blew up a dam

- by executing and torturing and raping men, women, children and elderly who are Ukrainian

- by creating generations of trauma and loss, some of which has and will end with people taking their own lives

- by convincing the whole world that it's ok for them to keep doing this without consequence whether in Chechnya, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Mali, Sudan, Central Africa, and the list goes on

And that all not even touching on how the operate in the actual battle field, using chemical weapons and white phosphorus, or executing POWs, and civilians in captured towns.

And this isn't touching on centuries of linguistic and cultural repression, political repression, forced starvation, forced labour, death by displacement, gulags, and summary executions.

Russia is a plague on the world. Hell, on its own people.

And it's been that way for centuries. Before Putin. Even before Stalin. Even before the Tzar.

Repression. Oppression. Violence. Totalitarianism. Subservience to power. Apathy in the face of it all. That's all it has to offer in its grotesque history, art and culture.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

I’ve recently been thinking about one of the times I was in russia—in Saint Petersburg—in April of 2007.

People think this evil from Putin is a new thing. It’s not.

2007 was before russia invaded Georgia, and before they invaded Ukraine.

It was about a month before “Victory Day”, and already the entire city was covered in the black and orange ribbons, and Nevsky Prospect—the most famous street in russia—had multi-storey banners of propaganda and Putin’s face all over the buildings.

Because of my (Northern Irish) surname, the woman my brother and I were meeting up with assumed I wasn’t Ukrainian. And so when I said I was, she BURST OUT LAUGHING. She said “Sorry, but I always laugh when I meet Ukrainians. They sound so stupid when they speak.”

She was then horrified that my Ukrainian family didn’t like the Soviet Union.

russians say one thing to Westerners and something else entirely to the people they invade and colonise over and over again. They hide their racism when they speak to people in the West.

That same trip to russia, the building we were staying in ON NEVSKY PROSPECT was raided by two truckloads of men with machine guns. Tour buses were driving past, and armed men were raiding our apartment!

A few days later we were in Tallinn in Estonia. Bronze Night had just happened, when russian thugs trashed the city because the Estonians moved a Soviet statue. Every single window in the city centre was held up with wooden boards.

This was nearly twenty years ago.

I look at all these idiotic tankies in the West (and on Tumblr). And I’m shocked by their wilful ignorance when it comes to russia.

[thyinum]

Please, when you see something written in Cyrillic, don't assume right away that it's russian. Russian is not the only language that uses Cyrillic. There are also Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Mongolian.

It's a sensitive topic especially for us Ukrainians because russian language is a weapon. It's a colonial language, it's presented like one and only true slavic language, it erases and replaces other languages. Belarusian is literally on the verge of extinction because of russian. Ukrainian has been banned 134 times throughout history, it is still called a "village language", a dialect of russian. Russian colonialism is literally the reason why there are so many russian speaking people in Ukraine (I was one of them btw). Ukrainian is banned on russian occupied territories and people are getting in trouble or even killed for using it there, Ukrainian POWs in russian captivity are getting brutally beaten for speaking Ukrainian.

Like okay, I can get why there's this confusion, so here's a clue to understand that the language you're looking at definitely is not russian — the letter і. If you see ї (like i but with two dots) it's 100% Ukrainian. If you see j it's Serbian. Russian alphabet also doesn't have such letters as Ђ, Љ, Њ, Ў, Џ (dont confuse with Ц ). Yes, it's not always gonna be easy to detect that the language in front of you is not russian, but when you have trouble with it just ask or run it through any translation app and it'll probably tell you the language.

Hope this will be helpful.

[nereidaa]

DO NOT SCROLL!

this morning, russians bombed Ukraine again. this is Children's Hospital Okhmadyt in Kyiv, and it's the largest children's hospital in Ukraine. there are dead and injured, the exact number is currently unknown. under the rubble there are people, it is possible that there are also children.

the blow to Okhmadyt fell on the building where children received blood purification for kidney failure: intensive care, operating, and oncology departments were damaged. some children could not physically go down to the shelter due to their health.

you can donate to the Foundation Okhmadyt, or donate to the Fund to help children with cancer Tabletochki.

PLEASE SHARE AND NOT FORGET ABOUT UKRAINE

[vyvilha]

this year, when hearing the tune of carol of the bells, remember that the city of pokrovsk, where the melody was composed, currently looks like this because of russia

[sandygarnelle]

Today a russian rocket got fired in a the place that was like 2 miles from us :>

Granted it was early morning so no one was hurt. My gf even woke up from an explosion. A casual reminder that the war in Ukraine has never ended. Ukraine is big - roughly the size of Texas, and I live on the opposite end of the active zone.

This was 1 rocket in a long while. But far over there - at the east - there are 3000 explosions like that a month, which is roughly a 100 per day.

We already have several towns and cities DESTROYED. Totally vanished.

Like, say, you are from Rochester NY. Imagine you growing up here, and you moved to California for college. Just imagine coming back one day not having Rochester anymore.

And this is all you see.

We are LUCKY to be safe now. That is not the case for many many ukrainians.

You can help. Anything helps. Even just spreading the message - if not from me, then any kind of such message.