Mara, Slavic goddess of winter’s end, by Margo Kai
Good Afternoon!!
Putin’s war on Ukraine continues unabated. Each day he commits more atrocities. It’s getting very difficult for me to understand the U.S. and NATO’s refusal to get more involved in the conflict. Obviously I’m no expert and I do think President Biden has handled this unmanageable situation very well. Every day I’m thankful that Trump is no longer in charge. But surely we can find a way to do more? After Russia’s deliberate bombing of a children’s and maternity hospital, don’t we have to consider further actions? As I said, I’m no expert, but today I’m going to post some articles that present some alternative views of the events in Ukraine.
Bombing a maternity hospital is an atrocity, by definition. The only possible reason for it happening might be that it was collateral damage, or accidentally perpetrated. But the Russians have another story.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told a press conference that the Russians deliberately targeted it – because it was not being used as a maternity unit at all, whatever the western journalists claim. Lavrov explained to a disbelieving world that, contrary to the pictures carried by responsible media outlets, this wasn’t a hospital but was in fact a military installation, taken over by the Ukrainian Azov Battalion and “other ultra-right”, “radical” groups.
Lavrov explained that the mothers had already been “driven out” by these extremists. Hence what Lavrov called the “pathetic outcries concerning so-called atrocities” and the biased media coverage. You may think that what you saw was a heavily pregnant woman being carried away on a stretcher, but the foreign minister of the Russian Federation is telling you that she’s a neo-Nazi renegade, or possibly an actor, or else a human shield (which is no justification for the attack anyway). Lavrov invites the world to draw its own conclusions.
That’s Russia’s side of the story, an atrocity against the truth itself, the ultimate in gaslighting. If you’re going to lie, I suppose you might as well go big. But the world has already drawn its conclusions about what it can see, not just in Mariupol but in many other places across Ukraine – just like the previous atrocities and war crimes committed by Russians and Russian stooges in Syria, Georgia and Chechnya.
Still Life with Cups, by Lena Vylusk, 2018
O’Grady argues that the U.S. has appeased Putin going back to Obama’s failure to defend his “red line” in Syria and Trump’s disgraceful defense of Putin in Helsinki.
Biden and every western European power gave Putin due notice that they would not fight for Ukraine, and wouldn’t do much more than slap the usual token sanctions on him. They let him have Crimea with not much more than some modest barriers to trade with Russia and some eloquent indignation from Obama.
What was Putin supposed to think about the west after a decade and a half of empty threats? He prodded his bayonet at us and never found the hard steel of a credible military response. What would the west really do if he invaded Ukraine?
What indeed. Not even the atrocity in Mariupol will provoke western intervention. Not even a single rattly old MiG jet will be lent to the Ukrainians so they can defend their citizens against the next atrocity.
So, because of that, there will certainly be more atrocities. There is disturbing talk about the use of chemical weapons – the red line that Obama laid down in Syria and then forgot about. Maybe they’ll go for battlefield nuclear weapons next, or organise a surrogate Russian militia to plant a dirty bomb in Maidan Square. Whatever happens, Putin may be sure that he will face no retaliation and no direct military action.
Let’s step back for a moment from the awful human tragedy in Ukraine as the Russian army targets civilians. There is an even bigger issue here. And until we come up with an answer it’s going to continue to plague the world.
It’s an issue that Americans, more than anyone else, should understand. Yet based on all the news and commentary I’ve been reading since the Russian buildup began almost a year ago, this overarching issue is not even on the table.
The bigger issue is that there is no way to stop a nuclear power from invading a non-nuclear power, as America did 18 years ago this month when it took down the dictatorship in Iraq.
Three years ago I spent a week in Ukraine. Every person to whom I spoke, whether in a formal interview or casual conversation, said that Putin was going to invade their country.
Putin, whose words I have carefully read for two decades, doesn’t plan to stop with Ukraine. He has called the collapse of the old Soviet Union the worst geopolitical disaster of the 20th century and has said he is determined to put it back together. His words:
“Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory.
“Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.”
As I said, this is a long read, and I can’t give you the full flavor with brief excerpts. I’ll just add that Johnston writes that the same fear of invasion by Russia is common in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well. If you’re interested in what’s happening in Ukraine, I recommend reading the whole thing.
The clear issue at the center of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s unprovoked invasion and intended occupation of a sovereign nation. This crude reality explains the world’s united opposition to Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
Citizens in free countries everywhere recognize that if Russia wins, a principle of invasion and occupation that World War II was fought to reverse will be re-established. Plausibly, a strategy of unprovoked invasion and occupation will be repeated by China against Taiwan, North Korea against South Korea and Iran against Israel or its neighbors in the Middle East.
It is conventional wisdom that if Mr. Putin takes Ukraine, eventually he will similarly pressure the Baltic states or Poland. Sweden and Finland already operate civilian-based defense plans on this assumption.
Forest Fairy, by Ivan Marchuk
But while the world’s people recognize this invasion can’t stand, they don’t know how to stop it.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has rejected the no-fly zone requested by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as likely to start a war between nuclear-armed Russia and the West. The effectiveness of sanctions on Russian oil is uncertain.
The West’s policy of mounting a stand-off defense of Ukraine likely means we are rolling toward a world in which invasion and occupation become normalized, bringing a succession of trips to the nuclear brink with China, North Korea and surely Iran.
Henninger’s recommendation:
At the end of World War II, Germany was divided into zones of occupation by the victorious armies. Though the capital of Berlin was in the Soviet-occupied east, the Western allies refused to let Berlin be absorbed into Stalin’s communist bloc. Berlin was divided into sectors, with West Berlin protected by the U.S., Britain and France, and East Berlin by the Russians….
Just as the three major Allied powers occupied the western sector of Berlin then, NATO—which was created during the Berlin blockade—should assert and establish control in western Ukraine of Lviv, its airport, the perimeter, and transport connections to nearby NATO members Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.
As long as Lviv remains free, Mr. Putin will never “occupy” Ukraine. A free Lviv would stand as a counter-symbol to Russian invasion and occupation.
Read the rest at the link. The WSJ has opened it’s Ukraine coverage to everyone.
A Silicon Valley employee and her children are the subjects of photos so devastating that they shocked the world: a Ukrainian family lying dead on the pavement, killed by Russian mortar fire while trying to flee the conflict.
Oleksandr Balbyshev, Flower Face
The images of Ukrainian soldiers tending to the bloodied bodies of a woman, her teenage son and young daughter, and their friend ran on the front page of the New York Times this week, along with online videos of the unprovoked attack on civilians. They stirred international outrage and a pledge from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to punish the perpetrators. “There will be no quiet place on Earth for you,” Zelenskyy said. “Except for the grave.”
Palo Alto startup SE Ranking confirmed Wednesday that the photo depicts its chief accountant, Tatiana Perebeinis, 43, along with her daughter, Alise, 9, and son, Nikita, 18, who were killed by Russian forces as they tried to flee the town of Irpin, a suburb about 15 minutes from Kyiv. They had just dashed across a partially destroyed bridge over the Irpin River into Kyiv when a mortar hit.
“For me as her colleague it’s a tragedy to see those pictures,” Ksenia Khirvonina, the company’s spokeswoman, told The Chronicle. “They show that it’s real. On the other hand, they prove that (the) Russian army and Putin himself are monsters who deserve no mercy for their doings.”
On his first anniversary as attorney general, Merrick Garland said he’s committed to unraveling the conspiracy behind the storming of the U.S. Capitol, in what he calls “the most urgent investigation in the history of the Justice Department.”
Members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot have asserted former President Trump could be charged with conspiracy and obstruction for his actions. But Democrats in Congress and even some of Garland’s friends have worried he’ll shy away from the political firestorm that would result from charging a former commander-in-chief with a crime.
“We are not avoiding cases that are political or cases that are controversial or sensitive,” the attorney general said in an exclusive interview with NPR. “What we are avoiding is making decisions on a political basis, on a partisan basis.”
Victor Onyshchenko, Autumn in Synevar Glade
This week, prosecutors won their first convictions in federal court in a Jan. 6 case against former Texas oil worker Guy Reffitt. That followed a guilty plea to seditious conspiracy by an Alabama man affiliated with the far-right Oath Keepers militia.
“We begin with the cases that are right in front of us with the overt actions and then we build from there,” Garland said. “And that is a process that we will continue to build until we hold everyone accountable who committed criminal acts with respect to January 6.”
Garland discussed his wide remit, where the priorities range from price-fixing in the chicken industry to Russian oligarchs financing the war in Ukraine with ill-gotten gains.
Listen to the interview or read highlights at the NPR link.
The war in Ukraine continues to be the top story in the news, but there are plenty of other things happening, so I hope you’ll forgive me if also I highlight non-Ukraine stories today.
Russia/Ukraine News
Major General Vitaliy Gerasimov, the chief of staff with Russia’s 41st Combined Arms Army, has been eliminated by Ukraine's military intelligence operators. I still don’t get it what Russians are hoping for in this war. pic.twitter.com/LBWPYpAFMN
— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) March 7, 2022
CONSTANTA, Romania — When it comes to war, generals say that “mass matters.”
But nearly two weeks into President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — Europe’s largest land war since 1945 — the image of a Russian military as one that other countries should fear, let alone emulate, has been shattered.
Ukraine’s military, which is dwarfed by the Russian force in most ways, has somehow managed to stymie its opponent. Ukrainian soldiers have killed more than 3,000 Russian troops, according to conservative estimates by American officials.
Ukraine has shot down military transport planes carrying Russian paratroopers, downed helicopters and blown holes in Russia’s convoys using American anti-tank missiles and armed drones supplied by Turkey, these officials said, citing confidential U.S. intelligence assessments.
The Russian soldiers have been plagued by poor morale as well as fuel and food shortages. Some troops have crossed the border with MREs (meals ready to eat) that expired in 2002, U.S. and other Western officials said, and others have surrendered and sabotaged their own vehicles to avoid fighting.
To be sure, most military experts say that Russia will eventually subdue Ukraine’s army. Russia’s military, at 900,000 active duty troops and two million reservists, is eight times the size of Ukraine’s. Russia has advanced fighter planes, a formidable navy and marines capable of multiple amphibious landings, as they proved early in the invasion when they launched from the Black Sea and headed toward the city of Mariupol.
And the Western governments that have spoken openly about Russia’s military failings are eager to spread the word to help damage Russian morale and bolster the Ukrainians.
But with each day that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky holds out, the scenes of a frustrated Russia pounding, but not managing to finish off, a smaller opponent dominate screens around the world.
The result: Militaries in Europe that once feared Russia say they are not as intimidated by Russian ground forces as they were in the past.
Read all about it at the NYT.
Morgan Stanley projects a Russian default by mid-April.
Putin rose to power on the economic rubble of the 1998 default and promised to bring stability and prosperity to the Russian people. He's traded it away…for what?https://t.co/Ggdc5erIqh
The odds of Russia making its foreign debt payments are diminishing as bond prices fall, recession in the nation looms and various payment restrictions pile up after the invasion of Ukraine, according to Morgan Stanley & Co.
“We see a default as the most likely scenario,” Simon Waever, the firm’s global head of emerging-market sovereign credit strategy, wrote in a Monday note. “In case of default, it is unlikely to be like a normal one, with Venezuela instead perhaps the most relevant comparison.”
The default may come as soon as April 15, which will mark the end of a 30-day grace period on coupon payments the Russian government owes on dollar bonds due in 2023 and 2043, he said.
Indicative pricing show investors value the 2023 bonds at around 29 cents on the U.S. dollar, the lowest ever, according to data collected by Bloomberg, though there appears to have been no trades at that level. In the days before Russia invaded Ukraine last month, the debt was trading above par.
While it is rare for sovereign debt to tumble to the single digits, Morgan Stanley said Russia’s bonds “could get close.” Lebanon and Venezuela are the only recent examples of a country’s debt slipping so low…..
JPMorgan Chase & Co. said on Monday it will remove Russian bonds from all of its widely-tracked indexes, further isolating the nation’s assets from global investors. Venezuela’s dollar bonds were also removed from the bank’s benchmark indexes in 2019 after sanctions curbed trading.
– Analysts are projecting Russia’s GDP to drop at least 11% due to sanctions. – The ruble has plunged to a record low against the dollar. – Russian stocks are nearly worthless. – Russia may default on its debt payments.
The united states reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deathswent uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, TheNew York Timesfilled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?
Many countries have been pummeled by the coronavirus, but few have fared as poorly as the U.S. Its death rate surpassed that of any other large, wealthy nation—especially during the recent Omicron surge. The Biden administration placed all its bets on a vaccine-focused strategy, rather than the multilayered protections that many experts called for, even as America lagged behind other wealthy countries in vaccinating (and boosting) its citizens—especially elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus. In a study of 29 high-income countries, the U.S. experienced the largest decline in life expectancy in 2020 and, unlike much of Europe, did not bounce back in 2021. It was also the only country whose lowered life span was driven mainly by deaths among people under 60. Dying from COVID robbed each American of, on average, nine years of life at the lowest end of estimates and 17 at the highest. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century. Neither World War II nor any of the flu pandemics that followed it dented American longevity so badly.
Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. An estimated 149,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver. Many people were denied the familiar rituals of mourning—bedside goodbyes, in-person funerals. Others are grieving raw and recent losses, their grief trampled amid the stampede toward normal. “I’ve known multiple people who didn’t get to bury their parents or be with their families, and now are expected to go back to the grind of work,” says Steven Thrasher, a journalist and the author of The Viral Underclass, which looks at the interplay between inequalities and infectious diseases. “We’re not giving people the space individually or societally to mourn this huge thing that’s happened.
The Senate on Monday unanimously passed legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime, in a historic first that comes after more than a century of failed efforts to pass such a measure.
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which was introduced by Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) in the House and Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in the Senate, now goes to President Biden for his signature.
Booker said in a tweet Monday night that he was “overjoyed” by the legislation’s passage.
“The time is past due to reckon with this dark chapter in our history and I’m proud of the bipartisan support to pass this important piece of legislation,” he said.
In a statement, Rush called lynching “a long-standing and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy.”
“Perpetrators of lynching got away with murder time and time again — in most cases, they were never even brought to trial. … Today, we correct this historic and abhorrent injustice,” he said.
The legislation would amend the U.S. Code to designate lynching a hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison. More than 4,000 people, mostly African Americans, were reported lynched in the United States from 1882 to 1968, in all but a handful of states. Ninety-nine percent of perpetrators escaped state or local punishment, according to Rush’s office.
The Supreme Court Just Came Perilously Close to Blowing Up Federal Elections | By Mark Joseph Stern https://t.co/9A5Z7Mb1xg
The Supreme Court will not overturn a century of pro-democracy precedent and two centuries of historical practice to give state legislatures unlimited power over elections—yet.
That’s the upshot of the court’s orders on Monday in two huge redistricting cases out of Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The court refused to block new congressional maps drawn by the high court of each state, declining—for now—to embrace a radical theory rejecting state courts’ authority over election law. In the process, however, four justices did endorse this theory, and three attempted to blow up North Carolina’s upcoming election in a dissent with terrifying implications for democracy. The court stepped back from the abyss, but the ensuing reprieve may not last for long.
Both of Monday’s orders involve this year’s redrawing of congressional maps. In Pennsylvania, the Republican-controlled legislature drew a GOP gerrymander, which the Democratic governor vetoed. Because of this impasse, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stepped in to draw new, fairer districts. In North Carolina, the Republican-controlled legislature drew a GOP gerrymander, which the Democratic governor could not veto under state law. Voters challenged the map under the state constitution, and in February, the state Supreme Court struck it down. The legislature drew a new map, which a trial court rejected and replaced with its own, fairer version.
Republicans appealed both court-draw maps to SCOTUS. They claimed that these plans violated the U.S. Constitution’s elections clause, which says that the “manner” of federal elections “shall be prescribed” by the “legislature.” For at least a century, SCOTUS has read this language to give other organs of state government a say in election law. But conservative scholars have devised a theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine” that would give legislatures complete control over elections, including voting rules and redistricting. Under this theory, state constitutional provisions governing elections would be null and void, and state courts would have no power to intervene in election disputes. The legislature alone would set the rules—and, in extreme versions of the theory, even dictate the outcome of an election.
The Supreme Court has never endorsed this doctrine, and has explicitly rejected it as recently as 2015. There is a good reason why: It contradicts the original meaning of the elections clause as well as historical practice reaching back to the early days of the republic. A mountain of evidence proves that framers never intended to give states lone authority over federal elections, and instead expected state constitutions to impose substantive limits on election law. Exhaustive research demonstrates that—aside from a few opportunistic arguments raised by congressional partisans in the 19th century—state legislatures, state courts, federal courts, and Congress have all rejected the doctrine for more than two centuries.
And yet, for nearly two decades, the conservative legal movement, working alongside Republican politicians, has pushed relentlessly to enshrine this theory into law.
The invasive 3-inch Joro spider is resilient to cold, had a population boom last year, stow away readily, and could soon dominate the Eastern Seaboard. https://t.co/bGkuhMntqF via @sciam
New research, published Feb. 17 in the journal Physiological Entomology, suggests that the palm-sized Joro spider, which swarmed North Georgia by the millions last September, has a special resilience to the cold.
This has led scientists to suggest that the 3-inch (7.6 centimeters) bright-yellow-striped spiders — whose hatchlings disperse by fashioning web parachutes to fly as far as 100 miles (161 kilometers) — could soon dominate the Eastern Seaboard.
“People should try to learn to live with them,” lead author Andy Davis, a research scientist at the University of Georgia, said in a statement. “If they‘re literally in your way, I can see taking a web down and moving them to the side, but they‘re just going to be back next year.”
Since the spider hitchhiked its way to the northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, inside a shipping container in 2014, its numbers and range have expanded steadily across Georgia, culminating in an astonishing population boom last year that saw millions of the arachnids drape porches, power lines, mailboxes and vegetable patches across more than 25 state counties with webs as thick as 10 feet (3 meters) deep, Live Science previously reported.
Common to China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, the Joro spider is part of a group of spiders known as “orb weavers” because of their highly symmetrical, circular webs. The spider gets its name from Jorōgumo, a Japanese spirit, or Yōkai, that is said to disguise itself as a beautiful woman to prey upon gullible men.
True to its mythical reputation, the Joro spider is stunning to look at, with a large, round, jet-black body cut across with bright yellow stripes, and flecked on its underside with intense red markings. But despite its threatening appearance and its fearsome standing in folklore, the Joro spider‘s bite is rarely strong enough to break through the skin, and its venom poses no threat to humans, dogs or cats unless they are allergic.
Well, that’s a relief. Read more at Scientific American.
That’s a sampling of today’s news. Have a nice Tuesday, Sky Dancers!
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I feel as though I’ve become addicted to War Porn. I usually do not watch TV at all over the weekend but I couldn’t help but check the news. I spent yesterday talking to Alex several times asking about his 8-year-old daughter who is now with her mother in a town near Moldova with papers and passports ready should they need to cross the border. The schools are gone so she is learning English online. His elderly mother refuses to leave and is determined to fight. He’s ready to defend his country on whatever level he can. We get interrupted a few times as he tells me and our other friends from all over the world with similar concerns that the sirens have gone off again. Yesterday, he says, the Russians took out their airport and schools. I haven’t heard from a friend in Hungary all weekend. Refugees are fleeing What next?
I think what next is the question of this decade. Yesterday, as I watched Russian artillary kill a young mother and her two small children while their dog screamed out I was stunned and out of it for hours. The NYT photojournalist Lynsey Addario’s “security advisor (e.g. mercenary) runs and screams medic for a helpful family friend who still had a heart beat while the children and mother lie in the street pale and lifeless. I can’t imagine ever forgetting that image.
These are war crimes, captured as they occur on TV. They are not the grainy black and white film we have as Holocaust survivors appear after being liberated by US and allied troops years but we see these years after the crimes themselves. It’s not the film of Soviet Tanks running over Czechlosavkia, Hungary, or Poland in short snippets during the 6 p.m. news carefully scripted and edited by news editors. This is real-time and we continue to see it. There was the slaughter of the Kurds at the hands of the Turks as Donald Trump abandons them. The flood of refugees trying to flee Afghanistan with their Taliban overlords ready to blow them up. The flattening impact of Russian bombs during the attack on Aleppo. Our shock and awe attack on Baghdad instigated by Cheney and Bush. Over and over we see these things. We see reporters lining up to get their wartime credentials but this time I sense Ukraine has made them shell-shocked early and less enwrapt in the image.
Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany.
A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine.
The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.
The whistleblower added that no one in the government knew the true figure of the dead because “we have lost contact with major divisions”.
FSB officers had been ordered to assess the effects of western sanctions, they said, but were told that it was a hypothetical box-ticking exercise. “You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor . . . otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,” they wrote. “Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.
“[We are] acting intuitively, on emotion . . . our stakes will have to be raised ever higher with the hope that suddenly something might come through for us.
“By and large, though, Russia has no way out. There are no options for a possible victory, only defeat.”
The letter said that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and an ally of Putin, was on the verge of outright conflict with the Russians after his “hit squad”, sent to kill President Zelensky, was destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
Even if Zelensky were killed, the report said, Russia would have no hope of occupying Ukraine. “Even with minimum resistance from the Ukrainians we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply and logistics workers.”
Well, that doesn’t sound good does it?
How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy? There is no monopoly on common sense On either side of the political fence We share the same biology, regardless of ideology Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too
Viktor Zaretsky, The night arrest, 1962. Ukrainian Unofficial.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday said NATO is looking at more permanent troop deployments in the Baltic region as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine.
Asked if the U.S. will send troops to the Baltic region permanently to protect NATO countries, Blinken told reporters that the alliance is “looking at questions of more permanent deployments.”
“We’re continuously reviewing within NATO our defense posture, including looking at questions of extending the deployment of forces, looking at questions of more permanent deployments,” Blinken said during a joint press conference with Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis in Lithuania.
“All of that is under regular review, and we’re engaged with NATO Allies in doing just that,” he added.
The secretary emphasized that “When it comes to NATO, the line is very clear,” pointing to article five of the North Atlantic Treaty.
“If there is any aggression anywhere on NATO territory, on NATO countries, we the United States, all of our allies and partners, will take action to defend every inch of NATO territory,” Blinken said. “It’s as clear and direct as that.”
It’s good they’re still trying to talk but so far the Russians can’t even deliver safe corridors for the women, children, and elderly fleeing the war zones.
Ukrainian officials say Russia’s proposal to open "humanitarian corridors" for cities in Ukraine is not a genuine offer because it offers to evacuate civilians only to Belarus and Russia. https://t.co/kGwuG9EPmYpic.twitter.com/KOp7QOBPFL
I had a friend here in New Orleans who now refers to looking for updates on Ukrainia as “doom-scrolling”. That seems an apt description. However, this has me thinking about little 8-year-old Vera with her mother. From The Washington Post by Chico Harlan: “After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Moldova worries it might be next”. Moldova maintains permanent neutrality per its constitution.
There have been no air raid sirens in Moldova, no explosions and no casualties, but already some of the turbulence and anxiety of war is starting to build.
People trade jittery messages on social media as Russian troops move through neighboring Ukraine. Some Moldovans are stockpiling foreign currency and drawing up plans to flee. Many, seeing how abruptly lives collapsed in Ukraine, say they fear the potential for catastrophe in their own country: All it takes is for Russian President Vladimir Putin to expand his ambitions.
“You never know what is in the mind of a crazy person,” said Evgheni Liuft, 32, who lives in Moldova’s capital of Chisinau.
Ten days into a conflict that is shifting alliances and upending the world order, the repercussions are hitting most directly in countries such as Moldova — post-Soviet nations that balanced for years between East and West, and are now realizing the middle ground is untenable.
In Moldova, the war has accelerated the drive to align fully with Europe. On Thursday, the country signed an application to join the European Union, in what its prime minister described as a vote for “freedom.” Moldova has also strained to accommodate more than 250,000 Ukrainian refugees who have crossed its borders, the prime minister noted. In a visit Sunday to Moldova’s capital, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the country a “powerful” example of a democracy moving forward, not backward.
Irina Karkabi
Despite calls for a no-fly zone over Ukraine Airspace, people in the know say it’s ” War with Russia by Another Name”. This is from Crisis Group: Some current and former officials, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, call for Western powers to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine. This Q&A explains what a no-fly zone would entail, where similar zones have been established before and the dangers of that option in Ukraine.
Those advocating for a no-fly zone over Ukraine have not clarified the precise contours of such a military operation, including whether it would be limited to excluding Russian aircraft from Ukrainian airspace or, as occurred in Libya with different actors, also entail attacks against Russian ground forces. In any event, a no-fly zone would likely require not merely the threat of the use of force, but actual U.S. and/or allied attacks on Russian forces. To be very clear, a U.S. no-fly zone over Ukraine would necessitate a direct military confrontation with Russia, and as noted above, President Putin has said he would regard this as bringing the U.S. into the conflict.
Yevgenia Albats, who serves as editor-in-chief of the independent The New Times magazine, says Russian President Vladimir Putin “wants to have the kind of international order that Stalin agreed to have with Roosevelt and Churchill,” at the end of World War II.
“That’s what he wants, he wants to think himself as a nowadays Stalin.”
Albats says she believes Putin decided to invade Ukraine months ago, “when he realised that he was unable to force the West to provide him with the kind of world – international arrangements – that he wanted, that is to say that he wanted to divide the world into spheres of influence and assign Russia all the former Soviet Republics … he decided to start the war”.
On UpFront, Yevgenia Albats, a journalist and author; Stefanie Babst, the former deputy assistant secretary-general of NATO; and Agnia Grigas, an author and Atlantic Council senior fellow, join Marc Lamont Hill for a roundtable discussion looking at Putin’s possible reasons for launching the invasion of Ukraine and the likely consequences of his war – not just for Ukrainians, but for Russian citizens as well.
Well, this is another mess you’ve gotten us into Vlad the Mad Bomber! I’m going to read something and quit doom-scrolling for a while. The artists featured are all Ukrainian.
What’s on your reading and blogging list!?
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We all know that Fox “News” has seemingly brainwashed many Americans into believing things that simply aren’t true, like Trump’s claims that he actually won the presidential election in 2020. But Russian media is even worse than Fox, and most Russians don’t have alternate news sources readily available. The Russian government is lying to it’s people about what is happening in Ukraine, and many Russians completely buy into the false narratives.
Oleksandra and her four rescue dogs have been sheltering in the bathroom of her flat in Kharkiv since the shelling began.
“When I heard the first explosions, I ran out of the house to get my dogs from their enclosures outside. People were panicking, abandoning their cars. I was so scared,” she says.
The 25-year-old has been speaking regularly to her mother, who lives in Moscow. But in these conversations, and even after sending videos from her heavily bombarded hometown, Oleksandra is unable to convince her mother about the danger she is in.
“I didn’t want to scare my parents, but I started telling them directly that civilians and children are dying,” she says.
Painting by Francine Van Hove
“But even though they worry about me, they still say it probably happens only by accident, that the Russian army would never target civilians. That it’s Ukrainians who’re killing their own people.”
It’s common for Ukrainians to have family across the border in Russia. But for some, like Oleksandra, their Russian relatives have a contrasting understanding of the conflict. She believes it’s down to the stories they are told by the tightly-controlled Russian media.
Oleksandra says her mother just repeats the narratives of what she hears on Russian state TV channels.
“It really scared me when my mum exactly quoted Russian TV. They are just brainwashing people. And people trust them,” says Oleksandra.
“My parents understand that some military action is happening here. But they say: ‘Russians came to liberate you. They won’t ruin anything, they won’t touch you. They’re only targeting military bases’.”
A majority of Russians get their news from broadcast television, which is fully controlled by the state. “This is largely a country of older people and poor people,” Lev Gudkov told me. Gudkov is the director of the Levada Center, which was once Russia’s leading public-opinion-research organization and which the state has now branded a “foreign agent.” There are more Russians over the age of forty-five than there are between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Even those who get their news online are still unlikely to encounter a narrative that differs from what broadcast television offers. The state continues to ratchet up
pressure on the few surviving independent media outlets, blocking access to their Web sites, requiring them to preface their content with a disclaimer that it was created by a “foreign agent,” and, ultimately, forcing them to close. On Thursday, the radio station Echo of Moscow and the Web-based television channel TV Rain, both of which had had their sites blocked earlier in the week, decided to stop operations. What the vast majority of Russians see, Gudkov said, are “lies and hatred on a fantastical scale.”
Woman and Cat by Lucian Bernhard
State television varies little, aesthetically and narratively, from channel to channel. Aside from President Vladimir Putin interrupting regular programming in the early hours of February 24th to announce a “special military operation” in Ukraine, the picture has changed little since before the war. There is no ongoing live coverage, no acknowledgment that what’s happening is extraordinary, even as Russian bombs fall on Ukraine’s residential areas and the Russian economy enters a tailspin. The news lineup, too, changes little day to day. On Thursday, the 7 a.m. newscast on Channel One lasted six minutes and contained six stories: a new round of Russian-Ukrainian peace talks in which Russia was eager to seek “common ground”; the “shelling of the Donetsk People’s Republic by the Ukrainian armed forces,” from which “twenty-five civilians have died.” A segue: “And now let’s look at footage from the Chernigov region, an area that is now controlled by the Russian armed forces. . . . Civilians continue driving around on their regular business.” (There were no civilians in the footage shown, only an endless sequence of armored vehicles.) Then: “Russia has prepared more than ten and a half thousand tons of humanitarian aid for the people of Ukraine”; “The West is pumping Ukraine full of offensive weapons”; “Aeroflot is organizing charter flights to return Russian citizens stranded in Europe.” Then the young male host announced, “The next scheduled program is ‘Good Morning.’ ” There was no mention of Kharkiv or Kyiv, which had been bombed the day before. Most remarkably, there was no mention of Russian military casualties, even though on Wednesday the defense ministry had acknowledged four hundred and ninety-eight deaths. (Ukraine has put Russian military losses at more than ten times that number.) The government has banned the use of the words “war,” “aggression,” and “invasion” to describe its “special military operation” in Ukraine. Media outlets that violate these bans face fines and closure. On Friday, the upper chamber of parliament passed a bill making the dissemination of “false information” about the conflict punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. The bill was responsible for TV Rain deciding to stop broadcasting on YouTube: the risks of calling things what they are have become too high—and the cost of trying to walk a fine line, as TV Rain had been doing, was morally unsustainable. Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper edited by Dmitry Muratov, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, took a vote among people it calls its “co-conspirators”—those who support the paper through private donations. Sixty-four hundred and twenty people have voted; about ninety-four per cent of them asked the paper to submit to the censorship requirements and continue publishing.
Several Western media organizations moved on Friday to suspend their journalistic operations in Russia in the wake of a harsh new crackdown on news and free speech by President Vladimir V. Putin’s government.
Bloomberg News and the BBC said their correspondents in Russia could no longer freely report because of the new censorship law signed by Mr. Putin on Friday, which effectively criminalized independent journalism on the invasion of Ukraine. Under the legislation, which could take effect as early as Saturday, journalists who simply describe the war as a “war” could be sentenced to prison.
Cat Nap, by Donna Hillman-Walsh
“The change to the criminal code, which seems designed to turn any independent reporter into a criminal purely by association, makes it impossible to continue any semblance of normal journalism inside the country,” Bloomberg’s editor in chief, John Micklethwait, wrote in a note to staff.
CNN International, the global arm of CNN, said it had stopped airing in Russia, and ABC News said that it would not broadcast from the country on Friday. “We will continue to assess the situation and determine what this means for the safety of our teams on the ground,” ABC News, which is based in New York, said in a statement.
News organizations are not necessarily asking their correspondents to leave Russia, at least not yet.
“We are not pulling out BBC News journalists from Moscow,” Jonathan Munro, the interim director of BBC News, wrote on Twitter. “We cannot use their reporting for the time being but they remain valued members of our teams and we hope to get them back on our output as soon as possible.”
Ivan Kolpakov, editor in chief of Meduza, one of Russia’s most popular independent media outlets, had been expecting the government to block the public’s access to his website every day since the war with Ukraine began.
On Friday morning it finally happened. But then Russia’s parliament went further, passing a law banning what it considers “fake” news about the military, including any rhetoric that calls the invasion of Ukraine an “invasion” — the preferred language is “special military operation” — with a potential 15-year prison sentence. Putin signed it into law hours later.
By Francine Van Hove
“Our sources say they are likely to use this against journalists,” said Kolpakov, speaking from a location he would not disclose. “They can use it against journalists, and why wouldn’t they? They decided to destroy the industry entirely.”
Kolpakov, whose website is based in Latvia, began what he called “an urgent evacuation” of his Russian staff.
Similar scenarios are playing out at countless independent media outlets across Russia, a nation that has never had a fully welcoming attitude toward a free press.
While several Western news organizations say they have temporarily curtailed their activities in Russia while they assess the impact of Putin’s new policy, it is Russia’s homegrown media that is bearing the brunt. Many outlets are closing their doors, and journalists are fleeing the country.
The result is a silencing of the media voices that provided the Russian public with information that differed from the government’s official spin on domestic and world affairs, as presented by state-owned media.
Russia was most recently ranked 150th out of 180 nations on the World Press Freedom Index compiled by the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders, and the government has often pushed restrictions on independent media during times of military conflict, according to Gulnoza Said, coordinator for Europe and Central Asia programs for the Committee to Protect Journalists. But the latest crackdown is unprecedented.
As President Vladimir V. Putin wages war against Ukraine, he is fighting a parallel battle on the home front, dismantling the last vestiges of a Russian free press.
On Thursday, the pillars of Russia’s independent broadcast media collapsed under pressure from the state. Echo of Moscow, the freewheeling radio station founded by Soviet dissidents in 1990 and that symbolized Russia’s new freedoms, was “liquidated” by its board. TV Rain, the youthful independent television station that calls itself “the optimistic channel” said it would suspend operations indefinitely.
By Belinda Del Pesco
And Dmitri A. Muratov, the journalist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said that his newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which survived the murders of six of its journalists, could be on the verge of shutting down as well.
“Everything that’s not propaganda is being eliminated,” Mr. Muratov said.
Precipitating the outlets’ demise were plans by the Russian Parliament to take up legislation on Friday that would make news considered “fakes” about Russia’s war in Ukraine punishable by yearslong prison terms. The Russian authorities have already made it clear that the very act of calling it a “war” — the Kremlin prefers the term “special military operation” — is considered disinformation.
“We’re going to punish those who spread panic using fakes by up to 15 years,” a senior lawmaker, Sholban Kara-ool, said on Thursday. During World War II, he said, such people “were shot on the spot.”
The crackdown on independent journalists — many of whom fled the country this week, fearing that even worse repressions were to come — added to the sense of crisis in Russia. The economy continued to reel from Western sanctions as airlines canceled more international flights and more companies suspended operations — including Ikea, the Swedish furniture retailer, a totem for Russia’s middle class and the employer of some 15,000 Russians.
And we thought Fox News propaganda was bad. I’ll post more news links in the comment thread. Have a great weekend, Sky Dancers!
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I am so late getting started on this! Today I finally got some reprieve from the 8 days of dawn to dusk grinding, sawing, and hammering from my neighbor’s next door. They have a covered porch in the back now and I have a migraine. Then, I spent my evening in disbelief that some Russian Batallion fired on, hit, set on fire, then captured the largest Nuclear Power Plant in Europe. All that while I nurse whatever I did to my little left toe while managing to pull a heavy garbage bin onto it. I’m exhausted.
The number of Ukrainians who have fled Russia’s war on their country surpassed 1 million on Thursday, and that number is rising hourly.
“I have worked in refugee emergencies for almost 40 years, and rarely have I seen an exodus as rapid as this one,” United Nations Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement Thursday.
European governments and humanitarian organizations have been planning for their arrival for weeks, but the number of refugees has surpassed those expectations. The UN has projected that 4 million Ukrainian refugees could arrive in neighboring countries just in the coming weeks.
Such a heavy influx would be a “huge burden for receiving states and would no doubt stress reception systems and related resources,” Grandi said during a United Nations Security Council meeting on Monday.
So far, at least 505,000 Ukrainians have gone to Poland, 139,000 to Hungary, 97,000 to Moldova, 51,000 to Romania, 72,000 to Slovakia, and 90,000 to other European countries. Nearly 48,000 have also gone to Russia and a few hundred have gone to Belarus. Most of the refugees are women and children, including a growing number of unaccompanied children. Ukraine has conscripted men between the ages of 18 and 60 to fight, prohibiting them from leaving.
I haven’t heard from my Ukrainian friend Alex for two days now. He’s in the north but is west so he still might be out of the warzone.
The Russians are regrouping in the North where that column of vehicles is still stalled. However, they are consolidating hold over the southern parts of Ukraine capturing a city with a major port.
Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council chief Oleksiy Danilov announced during a briefing Tuesday that Ukrainian forces had foiled an assassination plot against President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to a Telegram post from Ukrainian authorities.
The big picture: According to the Telegram message, Danilov said that a unit of elite Chechen special forces, known as Kadyrovites, had been behind the plot and had subsequently been “eliminated.”
“We are well aware of the special operation that was to take place directly by the Kadyrovites to eliminate our president,” Danilov said, per the post.
Ukrainian authorities had been tipped off about the plot by members of Russia’s Federal Security Service who do not support the war, he added.
Danilov elaborated that the Kadyrovite group had been divided into two, with one being destroyed in Gostomel and the other “under fire.”
As I write, I’m listening to our Secretary of State talk about the situation and our relationship with our allies.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gives a news conference in Brussels after a series of diplomatic meetings with NATO and EU allies to discuss Ukraine https://t.co/8tfgBe4eor
The US has multiple channels open and is sharing intelligence with Ukraine at a “frenetic” pace, US officials said Thursday, disputing criticism that the Biden administration is not sharing battlefield intelligence fast enough.
Still, the US’ secure communications with Ukrainian officials are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as the war rages on, the sources told CNN. Officials also acknowledged that the US is now more limited in its ability to collect real-time intelligence with no one on the ground, and the apparent lack of military drones flying overhead. The CIA has not acknowledged whether it is flying its own drones to surveil the conflict.
Republican Sens. Ben Sasse and Marco Rubio, the top GOP member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have both said publicly in recent days that they are concerned intelligence isn’t getting to the Ukrainian military quickly enough. House Republicans began amplifying those concerns this week, ramping up criticism of the Biden administration for allegedly “withholding” intelligence from the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians, though, have not complained publicly about any lack of intelligence-sharing by the US.
One Senate source familiar with GOP concerns said that lawmakers were concerned both that the intelligence was being downgraded, or made less specific, and that it wasn’t being conveyed to the Ukrainians fast enough.
Sources familiar with the intelligence said it is indeed being downgraded, but primarily to scrub sensitive sources and methods — a particular concern given the logistical challenges with establishing fully secure lines with Ukrainian officials amid the Russian onslaught.
Many UK people and NGOs also believe the UK may not be doing enough. This is from The Guardian. The two difficult topics are a no-fly zone which could lead to a direct battle between Russian and NATO forces. The other appears to be the degree to which Russia can be cut off from the international oil markets. There are also calls for more help to get on top of the expanding refugee crisis. “Charities and opposition parties urge UK to do more for Ukrainian refugees. Lib Dems call for fully funded refugee scheme and Mark Drakeford wants Wales to be a ‘nation of sanctuary’ ”
Charities and opposition parties have urged the government to do more to help with an expected surge in refugees fleeing Ukraine after the Russian invasion, with concerns also raised about the issuing of visas now UK diplomats have left the country.
With the UN refugee agency warning that as many as 5 million Ukrainians could be forced to flee, the Liberal Democrats called for a comprehensive and fully funded refugee scheme. Mark Drakeford, the Labour Welsh first minister, said he wanted his country to be a “nation of sanctuary”.
Dozens of refugee charities have jointly called for an evacuation and resettlement plan similar to the one that housed thousands of families in the UK after the Balkans conflicts in the 1990s.
I was in London during the Balkans conflict. I sat up in the Parliament’s small balcony and watched PM Thatcher taking questions from the opposition party. I have to admit it was one of the most thrilling moments of all my travels given my heritage and my interests. I can’t imagine I’d feel the same watching Bojo.
.As Ukrainians flee in massive numbers, Europeans have opened their countries and homes with unprecedented speed and generosity. The scale and pace of the Ukrainian refugee exodus—more than 1 million within only a week—dwarfs even the worst of recent humanitarian crises and is quickly approaching the epic dislocations last seen in Europe in 1945. In Syria, it took two years before refugee flows reached a similar level. In 2015 and 2016, the European Union took in 1 million asylum-seekers each year from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, and this so-called migration crisis quickly turned into an existential issue for the continent. Ukraine, with twice the population of Syria and three times its territory, could generate over 10 million refugees and internally displaced people in the coming months and years. Nonetheless, recent international experience and initial European responses suggest that the open-door strategy is sustainable—not to mention morally right.
We already know that most refugees seek shelter in neighboring countries. Syrians primarily fled to Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan; Afghans to Pakistan and Iran; and South Sudanese to Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sudan. This makes sense since families fleeing conflict, often on foot or by any immediately available transport, will search for refuge in the closest area where they can find protection. In principle, staying close to home can also expedite returning home once the conflict ends. Neighboring countries are also likely to host diaspora communities that can help ease the hardship and transition for refugees.
This global rule applies fully to the crisis in Ukraine. Over the past week, a majority of refugees fled to Poland—which already had a large and well-integrated Ukrainian community of over 300,000—with the rest going primarily to the other states on Ukraine’s western border: Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia, and Romania. Some Ukrainians are moving and will move to other parts of Europe or countries with large diasporas, such as the United States and Canada, but many will stay in the front-line states of first refuge. Being uprooted is difficult every time.
None of the front-line states are as affected as Poland, which immediately mobilized for the influx. The mass deployment of Polish government officials, municipal workers, emergency services, and ordinary civilians on behalf of Ukrainian refugees is as admirable as it is unsurprising. Etched deep into Poland’s DNA is the memory of Soviet and Nazi aggression—and the experience of facing impossible odds against an occupying power. Poland’s support to Ukrainian refugees is visceral as much as rational.
More than a million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring countries to escape the Russian invasion — and that number could soar to more than 4 million in coming months, the United Nations refugee agency says.
More than half have entered Poland, with others going to Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia and Romania — and they have been receiving a warm welcome.
Ukrainians arriving in Hungary are coming to a “friendly place,” Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said.
“We will do everything to provide safe shelter in Poland for everyone who needs it,” said Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski.
At the Polish border, guards hand out sandwiches to Ukrainians in waiting rooms. Polish citizens donate piles of toys and meet migrants with hot tea and free rides to where they need to go.
The open-arm welcome for those fleeing Ukraine stands in sharp contrast to the treatment of previous waves of refugees from places like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Just two months earlier, Orbán said Hungary was keeping its restrictive immigration policies: “[W]e aren’t going to let anyone in.”
Earlier this week, Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov drew a distinction between those fleeing Ukraine and others.
“These people are Europeans,” Petkov said. “These people are intelligent, they are educated people. … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists …”
Some folks sure haven’t read their Jesus teachings. And this is another reason why:
NEW: Lawyers from around the world to file appeal to the UN on behalf of Black refugees facing discrimination while trying to flee Ukraine. https://t.co/7d4Dwc8idW
An alliance of prominent civil rights lawyers from around the world on Wednesday announced it will file an appeal to the United Nations on behalf of Black refugees facing discrimination while trying to flee Ukraine.
The group includes Ben Crump, the civil rights attorney for the families of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery; attorney Jasmine Rand, who represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; Peter Herbert, one of Britain’s few nonwhite judges; Jamaican Member of Parliament G. Anthony Hylton; British solicitor Jacqueline McKenzie; and Carlos Moore, president of the National Bar Association in the U.S. They plan to file the appeal to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as well as the U.N.’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Earlier this week Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, and Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs, acknowledged that some Africans looking to escape the Russian invasion of Ukraine had experienced discriminatory practices at the country’s borders.
“Such blatant racism cannot be tolerated,” Zita Holbourne, the chairwoman of the Black Activists Rising Against the Cuts U.K. told The Independent. “Human rights of Black and brown people, predominantly students situated in Ukraine, must be honored and safe exit facilitated for all, free of discriminatory selection processes at borders. The targeting of Black and brown people in this way is a racist human rights abuse on top of a human rights crisis impacting all people forced to flee Ukraine.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is sparking concerns worldwide. In Puget Sound, groups like Lutheran Community Services Northwest are gearing up to help.
The agency has helped resettle more than 2,100 Ukrainians in Washington and Oregon in the past five years. That includes placing 100 Ukrainians in the past year in Washington state.
The group is helping Ukrainian refugees even now. David Duea is CEO/President of LCS Northwest.
“We have been scheduled to resettle 55 in the next couple of weeks. We don’t know if they are coming. I don’t know if we are ready. But we have to be,” said Duea.
Months ago, there was an urgent plea for help from the community when Afghans started arriving from their war-torn country.
According to LCS Northwest, since last summer the agency helped resettle 700 Afghans in the Pacific Northwest after the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
“What the overall community can do (now) is continuing what we do with Afghans–which is donating furniture; We have welcome kits. Just being ready,” said Duea. “It is a bit of a deja vu. We know the community is already starting to rally and people are volunteering their homes to be host homes–which we are going to take them up on because of the housing crisis in our area. It’s all hands on deck.”
Yes, people of Earth. It’s all hands on decks.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
I haven’t heard from my Ukrainian friend Alex for two days now. He’s in the north but is west so he still might be out of the warzone.
Many UK people and NGOs also believe the UK may not be doing enough. This is from 
Foreign Policy indicates that “There Could Be 10 Million Ukrainians Fleeing Putin’s Bombs. Europe has opened its borders to the continent’s biggest exodus of refugees since 1945.” 
NPR explores one issue we’ve discussed here: “R
So, I’m hearing that many parts of the United States are already preparing to accept refugees. 
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