Summary of the Week 6: March 31 – April 6, 2022. WITNESSING AND OPPOSING EVIL. Anyone who is aware with minimal security-related knowledge, realised that with his trip to Bucha, president Zelensky risked a lot. It may look danger-free when Volodymyr Zelensky was walking through devastated landscape in Bucha, but it was not. Not for a bit. The president of Ukraine was not able to leave the place where he has been confined in Kyiv for 40 days and nights, due to security concerns. We know that he is a top-target for ‘the liberators’ and their sickly anti-human leadership. He knows it too. But he just cannot allow himself not to visit the place of horror, the place of suffering, the place of hideous crime so near his country’s capital. Because he is a decent and dignified human being. Because he lives this Mean War with his attacked people, not above them.
So, Volodymyr Zelensky goes on the ground in Bucha, with his close assistance, and with his good security detail. We saw his face there in Bucha. We saw the moments when this 44-year man who lives 40 most difficult, highly tragic days of his and his country’s life, could barely compose himself. Those are precious moments, to me. Because if we would not see emotions on the face of anyone who is on the ground there in Bucha, I would not regard this person as a human. We saw the clenched jaws and eyes full of pain and fury of Victor Klitschko, Kyiv’s governor, who was visiting Bucha a day prior president Zelensky’s visit. Those are expected reactions of good people.
Inna Rogatchi ©. Devilspiel II. 2020.
We also saw how president Zelensky and his team were treating local people in Bucha, how much much needed goods, water, juices, food they have brought with them. How it all was very well organised, very human-like, very friendly and warm. And – importantly – how low-profiled the episodes of distributing provisions were handled by the Zelensky’s team. In a very tactful, no PR-oriented way. Nothing of the sort at all. Chapeau to the thoughtfulness and attitude on those small, but not small at all things, to the president and his team.
We also saw how local people in Bucha were looking at Volodymyr Zelensky. It was for real. It was a vivid expression of the moments of light prevailing over darkness.
A few hours after visiting Bucha, probably, the most horrific afternoon in his entire life, so far, presiden Zelensky stated that the meeting with the Russian president ‘could possibly not have a place’. I understand him 101%. He is absolutely right. And it will be only for the better, if he could keep this just and justified attitude. Was it possible for any of the Allies to meet with Adolf in the midst of the war and discuss anything with him? No, it was not. There are boundages. Those butchers, at all levels of their irrational hierarchy, excluded themselves from the relations with normal people and countries.
The next day after his visit to Bucha, president Zelensky spoke to the UN Security Council. His speech can be seen in full, and it is worth it.
The President of Ukraine spoke to the UN Security Council practically immediately after witnessing evil in Bucha. There is one thing when you are getting information, even of the best quality and even in a real-time mode, and it is completely different when you see it with your own eyes, on the ground. Simply because a different group of organs works bringing the knowledge into your brain. In some lucky cases, as Volodymyr Zelensky is, heart, too. There is a special quality of people which is emphasised in the Torah and the Talmud – ‘those wise in heart’. He is from that category.
After witnessing evil, president Zelensky addressed the UN Security Council which some of us find nowadays as limbo-body being wrapped into a heavy tissue of bitter irony. Or, without metaphors, being effectively paralysed. What on earth that country-aggressor that commits unspeakable war crimes is doing on the UN Security Council? To say that it is a joke is not funny. It is a mockery.
The same country-aggressor would block any move by the UN International Crime Court, so processes like the one which has been conducted against those who committed war crimes during the Balkan war in the 1990s, won’t be possible. There should be no illusions about this.
President Zelensky is absolutely right in his addressing the UN Security Council: ‘a veto right ( referring to the Russia’s privilege among the five principals , so to say, at the Security Council) is not the right to cause death’, ‘there were no existing crimes which were not committed in Ukraine during the 40 days of the aggression’, ‘the most terrible thing in this war is that there is a premeditated extermination of people of a sovereign country’. As president Zelensky said, ‘Bucha is just one case of many similar ones in other places of Ukraine’.
And indeed, “if article one of the UN bye-law, is violated in such a devastating way, what far the rest of the bye-law is needed for?”.
The UN bye-law, and its structure was written back in 1945. As the League of Nations has been dissolved, the UN can and should be reformed due to the similar tectonic changes in the system of the world’s security. This country shall not enjoy status of a privy state, the member of the Security Council, due to their actions. It is absurd. If they would, the rest of the world would encourage and institutionalise evil. But the essential meaning of human life is not only to witness evil, but to resist it. To fight it. To overcome it.
Day 42: April 6, Wednesday
LOOTING-AT-LARGE
Inna Rogatchi ©. Cold Winds I. 2022. War Pictures.
I am receiving various material regarding the Mean War, first-hand reports and information, round o’clock, daily, for six weeks by now.
One is supposed to get used to at least some features of the war, especially when the war gets extended. Perhaps, I also managed to tune myself in the mode of a receiver, suppressing the emotional reactions as much as possible, otherwise, it would not be possible to do what I am busy with these days, to collect the material, to analyse the Mean War phenomena and features, to extract people’s psychological threats under such tragic circumstances. Sometimes, my self-defence falls, sometimes it happens spectacularly, as after Bucha and with several more episodes or features of the Mean War. But I am determined to work productively. I know that this kind of work has meaning and is historically important.
So among the materials I got yesterday, there was a dry list. A full name, postal address in Russia, a telephone in Russia of the postal package’s receiver, description of goods sent via post, and number of kilos of the packages. The list was made in the Belorussian postal office in the place quite near Chernobyl and Pripjat from the Ukrainian side. Actually, Mozyr is where that postal office is located. It is the first city which appears on your way when you drive from Ukraine from Chernobyl, the way in which ‘the liberators’ troops were retreating recently.
The postal office camera also monitored ‘the liberators’ who queued there with their multiplied packages to be sent to their homes. Greetings from the front, so to say. The surveillance record is three hours long. It all is there.
The go-called soldiers and so-called looters were sending their loot to home. The packages vary between 30 and 450 kilos. In the descriptions, there are ‘televisors, kitchen supplies, machines for home, clothes, carpets, furniture, conditioners, instruments, accumulators, spare parts, fishing equipment’, as is written in the postal documentation. It is all looted by the Russian army’s thugs in Ukraine.
Most of the senders from that Mozyr post office sent their packages to Rubzovsk, a mid-size city in Altai, Siberia. The rest of them have sent their loot to nearby places in Siberia as well.
It was only one group of about 20 thugs and looters whose action was documented. There are much, much more facts about an unprecedented giant loot which the Russian so-called army commits in Ukraine today.
People from Belarus are reporting frequently about ‘columns of huge heavy military trucks reaching Belarus from Ukraine from tons and tons of all kinds of loot’, from jewellery to carpets, computers, tv sets, clothes, just anything. There is not one, but many spontaneously set markets in many places in Belarus where all this loot is traded. Daily. Many days by now.
I have got the first-hand information from a person whose family member entered Bucha with the Ukrainian forces on the first day of them taking back control over the tortured town. According to that eye-witness, ‘all apartments in Bucha were bulgared. All of them. Every single one. All were looted”.
And I will remember a half of a sentence uttered by the president Zelensky about the women who were shot by the animals in the Russian military uniform after they were thrown the hearing off them, in the way of barbarians who they are.
There are also interceptions of ‘the liberators’ telephone talks with their families back in Russia. In some of those conversations, one hears instigation by their mothers and wives ‘to take everything from them’. One can also hear an amazement by ‘the liberators’ on ‘ how come those in Ukraine live so well’.
There is a giant-loot, a non-stop loot, an instigated, uncontrolled, total loot which is committed by those in Russian military uniform in Ukraine for almost six weeks by now.
The scale of this mega-loot by the Russian army in Ukraine, the way in which it is carried on, the totality of it shows that in contrast with their futile dreams about world domination, in fact, they are just low despicable thugs.
Day 41: April 5, Tuesday
‘TATTOOS’ ON THE CHILDREN’S BACKS
There is a new habit among Ukrainian parents currently, among those who are living in the areas of the country which are prone to ‘the liberators’ attacks. Ukrainian parents are writing on their kids’ backs their names, the date of a child’s birth, and the contact phones of the parents or family members. The thinking behind its necessity is that in the case parents would be murdered, the child could be found and identified. We have known about many cases by now when a child was saved in ‘the liberators’ attack because an adult who was next to a child, a father or mother, did cover it by his or her body.
This new habit is massive in Ukraine nowadays. Just who would have thought about it just a couple of months ago?
They are writing in a Latin script. They would not come to think about doing it yet a couple of months ago, because their own Ukrainian language uses a cyrillic alphabet, similarly to the Russian and Belarussian ones. But now, the young parents in Ukraine deliberately use a latin alphabet, in the circumstances in which they anticipate their possible murder by the Russian so-called army, in fact, the quasi-gang of murderers.
Little Vira from the photo on my poster is just 2 years and 4 month old. She starts her life with the experience of being ‘tattooed’ by her mom amidst the bombing and deliberate killing of civilians. Her mom is not alone in doing these precautions. People under extreme circumstances are learning very fast. There are very many families in Ukraine today who have to ‘tattoo’ their kids, in order for them not to be lost.
How difficult it is to be self-contained while learning about such phenomena of sorrow which the Mean War brings daily.
Day 40: April 4, Monday
The ART OF DIGGING
Due to the shockwave caused in the world by ‘the liberators’ massacre in Bucha, there is one fact which somehow escaped the close public attention which it deserved. According to the Western official military sources, starting from February 1st, 2022, a new, specific intense training has been introduced among the troops. The subject? Digging.
Why should a matter of digging be trained in a specific way, and intensely so? Because they started to train the mass of 150-plus troops which they accumulated in the proximity to the Ukraine border, a special kind of digging. They were training their troops to dig trenches for mass graves to accommodate up to 1000 corpses, the Western military sources have reported recently. The training started three and half weeks before Russia’s ‘special operation’. We saw some results of that recent rapid digging training recently in Bucha. We should be prepared to see it also in the other Ukrainian places, quite possibly.
If the army decides to train its troops, in advance of an imminent ‘operation’, to dig mass graves, what does it tell about that army? Its commanders, so to say? Its officers? Those with strips and shoulders who are supervising it all from Moscow? Those without strips and shoulders who are benefiting their army’s advances? Advances in digging and filling mass graves. What does it tell about the army’s objectives in the planned actions, at the stage of planning, let alone the implementation which we all saw with unspeakable horror?
All the atrocities which the world has seen in Ukraine are beyond comparison. And you know why? Because of the simple fact that these atrocities had already happened, during WWII and during the War in the Balkans. It has happened. It has been punished though inadequately and far from fully. It has been condemned. It has been researched. It is massively aggravated in the public conscience. Somewhere, perhaps, but obviously not in Russia.
I am researching the Holocaust and post-Holocaust for several decades, non-stop. You cannot research the Holocaust from a distance. This kind of a distant research will be incomplete. You have to be at the place which you research, otherwise, it will be a shallow repetition of the facts you won’t be able to comprehend. I saw many different places connected to the Holocaust. Extermination camps, concentration camps, cities, villages, forests, ravines. Rationally, extermination camps are encompassing your mind in a storm, in a process of your brain’s desperate effort to comprehend the scale, methodical approach and sometimes that sick tidiness of the implementation of the operation, so to say. Emotionally, however, it is ravines and forests, an open spaces of genocide which brings your heart on its edge. Here, on the distance of a stretched hand, just under your foot, you are experiencing the horror of the crimes committed at the spot there. That horror stays there. It goes nowhere. Does not matter how many years and decades gone. For those who doubt it, an excursion to the Lithuanian Paneria forest is recommended. This forest is full of trenches there, big and small, the trenches are all over there. Those trenches were mass graves of the Holocaust.
And now, we have these trenches in Ukraine, just nearby Kyiv. And most likely in some other places, as the training manual for that huge gang of trench-digging specialists was renewed in the beginning of February this year, prior to their march to Ukraine. Everybody involved in the crime of Bucha and alike, should be brought to justice. Every single one of them.
Day 39: April 3, Sunday
BUCHA. BUCHA. BUCHA.
So you are awakening on Sunday morning. The morning is sunny. The birds are chirping in an exalted way of a spring. You are reaching for the news, as you do for 39 days and nights of the Mean War, and the sun in your window is gone, along with the birds and their happy chirping.
You are seeing the photos from the town near Kyiv whose name will become a symbol of a terrible catastrophe, the one of the screaming notes in that horrendous ongoing cacophony of the Mean War. Bucha.
Bucha. Bucha. Bucha.
You see the bodies on the streets, every few metres, among a lot of litter around. Men. Of different ages. In a range between 18 and 60. Their hands tight behind their backs. They are killed from a very close range. Executed. In a rush spree of the leaving troops of monsters calling themselves ‘liberators’.
Adult, experienced men were refusing to believe that the massacre in Bucha was conducted by a regular army. They were thinking that it had been done by a special Russian Einsatzkommandos. But no, we are told by the official sources now. It was done by those who were on the ground and were leaving in a rush.
The photos are coming. There are women, naked, with plastic sacks over them. Those naked bodies were put on fire. What is left is covered by plastic.
You see the photo of a man who was tortured and left to die in a sewerage hatchway.
There are photos of the mass grave containing 280 people at least. Civilians. Nobody buried them. Just thrown hundreds of bodies in the sand. Grey sand. With a lot of browned red all around. Here you see a head. In another place, a hand. In the third place you see somebody’s hair.
Here you see the family. On my poster, there is a family. Mother, father, son, and other members. I know who they were and I know the story behind the murdering them. But the most important thing is that they were people. Human beings. Unlike the monsters who did commit this screaming crime.
In Bucha, and in many places where the monsters had retreated, they raped very many women, from very young ones, till quite old. It was the hellish, non-stop rape all over those places.
The world has awakened this Sunday to the terrible reality of Bucha crime. There is no sun for me today despite the weather. And there is no spring either. But the nightmare is that there are and will be more than one Bucha in this extraordinarily cruel, meaningless, barbarian Mean War.
When on the earth the world, those who are in the position and on duty, will react to this as hideous escalating crimes should be reacted to?
Day 38: April 2, Saturday
SHAVED WOMEN
There has been a lucky day for Ukraine. On the day, the country was greeting their captured back, in an exchange with the aggressors. We know that the matter of exchange of prisoners has become one of the top priorities for the president Zelensky’s administration from the day one of the war. This leader values human life as we all are seeing for over five weeks of the Mean War.
The aggressors are not easy to carry on the exchanges with. That we know as well, also from the history of that country, both past and relatively recent one. We were told that despite all efforts of the Ukrainian side to carry on the exchanges of POWs from the start of the Mean War, the Russian side was all the time insisting on ‘equality’ of the personnel to be exchanged. ‘But where on earth would we get over ten mayors of the Russian cities to exchange them for our 11 mayors which they are keeping in captivity till now?” – president Zelensky exclaimed in one of his recent interviews. Indeed.
The smile on the face of the Ukrainian vice-PM Iryna Vereshchuk in this photo is justified. In this photo, she who works round o’clock on the most grim matters for so long, meets with the second group of Ukrainians POWs who came home in the second exchange with the aggressor. 86 people were exchanged by each side in this recent second exchange of the POWs. The first one was an exchange of 10 personnel from each side.
Don’t you worry about anything in this photo where people are smiling? I do. A lot. All females in this photo are shaved. Do you think they did it by themselves? They did not. I have checked. Some of the women in this photo are elderly, meaning that they were members of the territorial volunteer brigades, not regular army personnel.
What are we expected to say about those ‘liberators’ of Ukraine who shave women they took captives ? Trying to keep calm, we can only refer to the known historical precedents. There are two in the XX century: women who were pushed to the gas chambers by the Nazis, they were millions; and women who were publicly shamed in France for collaboration with the Nazis just after the WWII, those were approximately 20 000. Whose step these Russians who did it to the captive women from their neighbouring country were following? Does it matter? They are marking themselves with indelible marks of manifested barbarism. This is a new material from the XXI century for historians.
Day 37: April 1, Friday
UKRAINIAN LOCAL LEADERS, and the IMAGE OF RESILIENCE
Inna Rogatchi ©. Song for Ukraine 2022. Exclusive Art Poster. 100 x 100 cm. 2022. Donated by the artist to the state of Ukraine for public purposes in support of the people of Ukraine.
Ones of the indisputable heroes of the Mean War are mayors of many Ukrainian cities and governors of many places in Ukraine. Some of them have become not only very popular public figures, they were popular before, but true leaders, and true heroes. And dignified human beings, most importantly.
Klitschko brothers, mayor of Kyiv Victor and his brother Volodymyr who came to fight with his brother shoulder to shoulder literary, not only doing their job in a great way, in extreme danger, non-stop, for 37 days and nights of the Mean War, but they also have capacity for empathy towards the people around them, and in such physically mighty hands as the box champion brothers possess, it has become their mightiest weapon. One should see and hear how, in which way the Mayor of Kyiv speaks with the people of his city. Tired people, people under fire, under bombs, under round-o-clock shelling. What are the mayor’s intonations, what is his voice. What are his words. This way a well-bred son speaks to his parents, and to his family. The moments of mortal danger provide the most exact litmus test for many qualities. Mayor Klitschko is not only a great sample of fearless resistance against mean hyenas ( this term comes from Moscow, actually, it is how a normal people there attests nowadays ‘the liberators’ and those who support them). He also cares. He does. And people in his big city, the capital of their country, in the city where over 3 million people left under the Russian bombing, knows that their mayor cares about them. There is nothing more important for the morale of the people under attack than to be sure that they are cared for by their leaders.
There is also the governor of the Mykolaiv region Vitaly Kim, another hero. Smart, young, resilient, always with a good, but measured pinch of humour which does help people to bear unbearable. Always in his position, day and night, brave, mobile, determined. The people of Mykolaiv and the rest of Ukraine started to call him ‘our Swarzenegger’, and with a good reason. So popular governor Kim has become that ‘the liberators’ conducted a precision attack on his very office a few days back. The explosion went off at 8.30 am , the very moment when the governor’s office started their working day. The damage is colossal. They were getting people out from the ruins of the administration building for four days. They excavated 35 corpses. Vitaly Kim stopped short of his customary slightly joking tone these days, naturally, but he did not stop short neither of his commitments, or determination. His composure and resilience is the best support of the people of Mykolaiv who are under merciless attacks by ‘the liberators’. Kim literally charges them with the energy to withstand.
There are many more figures of the local leaders in Ukraine today who are conducting their extremely dire mission whole-heartedly, including the leaders of Kharkiv, Mariupol, Odessa, and many other big cities, towns, villages.
I do not know anyone like the Klitschko brothers, or Kim among the local leadership of the country which being three times bigger in population has decided to attack its neighbour for no reason, but evil. Pure, premeditated evil. The country whose leaders and whose military has sinked it as a whole to the first ring of the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno. For good.
Here is my special poster in which I visualised Ukraine as an acrostic. Creating it, I was thinking of those leaders which Ukraine is lucky to have, and whose energy and determination will get the people of Ukraine to their victory. I donated the image to the state of Ukraine for public purposes, and dedicated it to the people of Ukraine who fight for their country and for their families. They will win. People always win over the monsters.
Day 36: March 31, Thursday
CHERNOBYL: MACABRE UNPRECEDENTED
Inna Rogatchi ©. Chernobyl Zone 2022. War Pictures. 2022.
The Russian ‘liberators’ entered the territory of the Chernobyl nuclear station on the first day of their Mean War against Ukraine, on February 24th, 2022. As a matter of fact, this scenario was known to the Western special agencies, and the Ukrainian leadership was warned about it, as we are learning now. It is the shortest way to Kyiv, the Ukraine’s capital, from the Belorussian border. And there also was such a mad trick in the tactical geniuses who has planned ‘the special operation of the liberation of Ukraine’ as a nuclear facility, with a ticking bombing of a tactical nuclear attack. Or an accident. Or ‘an accident’.
We know the chilling details of ‘the liberators’ take-over of Chernobyl. We know the dreadful, inimaginable situation with people there taken and kept hostages for three weeks non-stop. I wrote about it at the time, in the entry Chernobyl 2.0 on March 9, 2022 in my Diary of the Mean War.
Now, with ‘the liberators’ being pushed away from Chernobyl, we know more details from the Ukrainian authorities of their behaviour at the nuclear facility. These details surfaced at the time and in connection with an urgent visit to the place for in-site assessment of the director of the IAEA Rafael Grossi. These unbelievable-but-true facts should be recorded, registered and taken very seriously, given the fact of the nuclear materials in hands of these new-time’ pathetic, but very dangerous made-in-Russia ‘robocopes’.
So, we learn that Russian tanks were moving towards the Chernobyl station site at a high speed, causing huge clouds of heavy and extremely dangerous radioactive dust from the zone which is categorically forbidden for any use, not to mention a military activity. They were warned by the Ukrainian side, but ignored the warning, of course. Their soldiers were without any protective gear at all, even a minimal one. What for? After raising huge clouds of heavily radioactive dust up in the air – with their own cities being just a 30 km distance, who cares? – their soldiers were commanded by their officers to dig trenches into the 5-km, the most dangerous zone in the whole Chernobyl area, which is not in any use for 36 years by now, from April 1986, and still be extremely dangerous. ‘The liberator soldiers spent quite a while in those trenches. Naturally, they all were exposed and over-exposed to the radiation in no time.
As a whole, they were acting in and around the Chernobyl zone as nothing ever happened there, and as they had no idea which kind of place it was. The most unbelievable thing is that this supposition turned out to be true. This information came from Belorussians, not from Ukrainians. The Belorussian media, in a complete astonishment, has reported that after the seizure of the Chernobyl plant, the people from the Ukrainian shift who were taken hostages, and the Russian soldiers who took them hostages and who were guarding them, had had to work together, nearby. So they spoke. And Ukrainian staff of the Chernobyl station have learned from their Russian ‘liberators’ that those who never had heard about the explosion in 1986, and had no clue about what had happened in Chernobyl. This kind of robocopes. Of a third, or worse, sorts of robocopes. The same as their commanders. Who might remember about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster but did not care about it, and their own soldiers, for a bit. What on earth are we expecting them to care about in general?
The quality of education. The way of thinking. The level of planning. The way of execution. The damage caused. Barbarians of the XXI centuries. Nothing more. But nothing less.
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