i hope the rest of the world understands that there's a wipeout of an entire nation going on right now. cities are being leveled with the ground, while everyone else is advised to continue as normal. this is how the Holocaust was allowed to happen. and by the way, yesterday a Russian missile hit the Babyn Yar memorial site, where WW2 nazis slaughtered more than 30,000 Ukrainian Jews.
first of all, don't even try to tell me i think every single person outside of Ukraine doesn't care. i saw the protests, i saw thousands of people on the streets, i saw worldwide social media campaigns, and i am eternally grateful, and they did drive me to tears. i have a lot of friends from around the world, who are still consoling me and helping me every day, who are donating money, just because they can't really do much else.
but you know what, the war is still going on. and i want to talk about how horrendous it is, and how it makes us all feel. i don't know who this is directed at, i guess into the void, just as any social media post is. and i might not be the smartest person when it comes to politics, but i am allowed to express what's on my mind.
we are not being taken into NATO, billionaire politicians tell us it is certain. fine, sure, maybe not now, but this essentially means that the EU and the USA governments are using our country, our people, our children who are being bombed and shot, as a shield for the comfort of their countries, because they don't want the WW3 to start. because if they do something more drastic than sanctions, Putin will shoot nuclear weapons at them.
what is the alternative? allowing genocide and totalitarian regimes? as my friend told me, it's ridiculous to let Russia continue to threaten nukes every time there's international blowback to them engaging in humanitarian and war crimes, which, by they way, they have been engaging in for a while now, in countries like Georgia and Kazakhstan, and many more.
why does anyone still think Putin won't try to erase every single Ukrainian he can get to? why does anyone still think that's an exaggeration? Stalin, who Putin seems to be really fond of, already tried this before. and not many believed us all those 8 years that things would escalate. but they did. and people still don't believe it can get much worse if this psychopathic dictator isn't stopped.
the official death toll among civilians only is more than 2,000 right now, but it's definitely much, much higher, as the attacks are so frequent and destructive that rescuers aren't even able to get to the bodies and count them.
and yes, me and my family are still here, unable to get out, waiting for our turn. and even in this moment, i still feel ashamed posting about this because people shut me down as ungrateful for the help we get, tell me that i think of them badly, tell me i don't understand anything about politics or diplomacy, or that reading about the fucking genocide of my nation is upsetting them and ruining their mental health. well, what about us? can't we allow ourselves to grieve out loud?
i really do hope sanctions will help. maybe they will, after a long period of time (while the Russian troops are still killing our civilians). but honestly, if you think about it for a second, sanctions don't do much, because this is Putin's war. Putin and his friends already have everything they need in their own country for the rest of their lives, because they're extremely rich.
sanctions mostly hit ordinary Russians, who are either oblivious due to propaganda, plainly don't care, or are unable to stand against the war because of arrests (today, the Russian police even arrested primary school kids for laying flowers at the Ukrainian embassy). and i do still feel sorry for them and their soldiers who are being deployed here to die and kill for absolutely nothing, who don't know who and why they're killing, whose families don't even know they're here and if they're still alive.
what those sanctions are doing is, in my humble opinion, turning Russia into an isolated misinformed totalitarian empire akin to the proverbial USSR or North Korea. and if Russia does take us, our country will fall under these sanctions too, it seems. and we will be forever gone. maybe that's just what the rest of the powerful governments wanted. to use us as pawns, to use us as a shield for their own homes. while they smile and clap at their bureaucratic meetings, telling us they admire our stoicism or some shit.
you can block me and report me all you want, call me dramatic and unhinged, but i won't change my opinion until the rest of the world does something that can stop our people from being mercilessly, pointlessly killed to no end as every day a new city is claimed and destroyed. Ukrainians are burying their loved ones in their gardens, if they are even able to retrieve their bodies under endless airstrikes.
i do know that ordinary people that frequent this site can't do much, but listen, i'm allowed to be angry, for the last fucking time in my life, and this is the only public platform i have right now, so you will gonna have to read it, if we have to live through it. and i'm allowed to write these kinds of posts, because i'm grieving, i am horrified at what's happening around me. this is blatand nazism, all over again.
Ukrainians will never forgive.
P.S. please, i beg of you, read this article.
upd: i've been informed that article is paywalled, although for me it's not, for some reason. but you can use 12ft.io to read it anyway. if it still doesn't work, i copied it into this doc.
that's kind of weird to paywall something so important. i know most info there is publicly available, but i haven't seen it all laid out this well before.