quote:

Russische militair bekent schuld
Een 21-jarige Russische militair heeft bekend een ongewapende Oekraïense burger te hebben gedood. Hij stond vandaag als eerste Russische militair in Kiev terecht wegens oorlogsmisdaden.

De sergeant zegt een 62-jarige Oekraïner in het hoofd te hebben geschoten vanuit een open autoraam, vier dagen na het begin van de oorlog. Volgens Oekraïense aanklagers reed de militair in een gestolen voertuig met andere soldaten in de noordoostelijke regio bij Soemy, toen ze het slachtoffer zagen fietsen.

De man had een mobiele telefoon in zijn hand. De Russische militair zegt dat hij de man neer moest schieten, zodat hij niet de locatie van de Russische militairen kon doorgeven aan de Oekraïense troepen. "Ik kreeg de opdracht om te schieten", zei de 21-jarige man in de rechtszaal. "Ik schoot een keer, hij viel en we reden door." De man kan een levenslange gevangenisstraf krijgen.

De Oekraïense aanklagers kijken nog naar 10.700 andere gevallen van mogelijke oorlogsmisdaden. Ze hebben daarin 600 verdachten op het oog, waaronder Russische soldaten en overheidsfunctionarissen.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 17:26 schreef slashdotter3 het volgende:
Russisch leiderschap heeft compleet schijt aan de manschappen
[ twitter ]

quote:

Whether Putin has enough troops, ammunition, and time to complete the destruction of the UAF positions in the Donbas without mobilizing some portion of its reserve forces is an open question. What is clear, however, is that Russia’s current operations are slowly strangling Ukrainian troops in the Donbas and that despite optimistic rhetoric out of Kyiv and Western capitals, the battle is trending towards a Russian tactical success, possibly within two months.

quote:

. Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 18:45 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:
Hierbij ook een wat nuchterdere analyse die voorspelt dat het voor de Donbas / Oekraïne niet de goede kant opgaat.
[..]
https://www.19fortyfive.c(...)ns-ukraine-wont-win/

En nee dit is een normale militaire experts uit de VS en geen vage site.
[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 18:45 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:
Hierbij ook een wat nuchterdere analyse die voorspelt dat het voor de Donbas / Oekraïne niet de goede kant opgaat.
[..]
https://www.19fortyfive.c(...)ns-ukraine-wont-win/

En nee dit is een normale militaire experts uit de VS en geen vage site.
[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 18:45 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:
Hierbij ook een wat nuchterdere analyse die voorspelt dat het voor de Donbas / Oekraïne niet de goede kant opgaat.
[..]
https://www.19fortyfive.c(...)ns-ukraine-wont-win/

En nee dit is een normale militaire experts uit de VS en geen vage site.
[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 18:50 schreef bijdehand het volgende:

[..]
Die site noem je nuchter?

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:09 schreef Hathor het volgende:

[..]
De man die ze quoten is natuurlijk geen kwakzalver, en daarnaast is het natuurlijk ook zo goed als uitgesloten dat Oekraine dit op de lange termijn kan winnen, in principe is dit 10 tegen 1 en vroeg of laat gaat die numerieke meerderheid de doorslag geven. Net zoals de Finnen de Russen in de beginfase van de winteroorlog vermorzelden met honderdduizenden tegelijk, gaf ook daar uiteindelijk het verschil in aantallen de doorslag.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:04 schreef TheoddDutchGuy het volgende:

[..]
Satelliet beelden van commerciële spionage bedrijven, denk aan máxar of hoe je dat ook schrijft, laten een ander beeld zien.

Kharkiv staat UA letterlijk bij de grens van Rusland.
In de Donbas is het vooral door de rivieren een probleem, voor beide kampen, de een probeert over te steken, de ander moet dat zien te stoppen.

Uiteindelijk moet UA hetzelfde doen willen ze al het gebied weer terug nemen incl de Krim.
Dit is niet onmogelijk, de vraag is hoe lang duurt dat, hoe ver zal Poetin gaan bijvoorbeeld met nukes waar het alweer een tijdje stil rondom is.
En natuurlijk wie heeft straks de meeste wapens en munitie.

Rusland kampt met serieuze productie problemen.
Ze hebben domweg geen onderdelen meer en strippen wat toch al niet meer reed of gebruiken commerciële tech om militaire tech te vervangen, zie hun Mig vloot met commerciële gps systemen, wat ronduit crimineel is jegens hun piloten.

Ukraine: military situation update with maps, May 17, 2022

Ukraine: military situation update with maps, May 17, 2022

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:24 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
10 tegen 1? Eerder 3 tegen 1.
Wel opvallend dat beide landen een bevolkingskrimp hebben.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:27 schreef Hathor het volgende:

[..]
Als de Russen een algehele mobilisatie afkondigen dan is het wel wat meer dan 3 tegen 1, daarnaast kunnen ze ook nog putten uit vazalstaten zoals Tsjetsjenie.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:09 schreef Hathor het volgende:

[..]
De man die ze quoten is natuurlijk geen kwakzalver, en daarnaast is het natuurlijk ook zo goed als uitgesloten dat Oekraine dit op de lange termijn kan winnen, in principe is dit 10 tegen 1 en vroeg of laat gaat die numerieke meerderheid de doorslag geven. Net zoals de Finnen de Russen in de beginfase van de winteroorlog vermorzelden met honderdduizenden tegelijk, gaf ook daar uiteindelijk het verschil in aantallen de doorslag.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:30 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Aantal inwoners:
Rusland: 141.722.205 (2020)
Oekraïne: 43.922.939 (2020)

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:31 schreef TheoddDutchGuy het volgende:

[..]
Welke numerieke meerderheid?
Je bedoelt Russische reservisten? Dat doen betekent voor Poetin aankondigen dat je de oorlog verliest.

Rusland heeft, en dit lijkt na tig keer dit onderbouwd te hebben, geen “leger van 1 miljoen”.
Ja als je alle koks en technici en administratie figuren meetelt ja.

Het gaat om inzetbare strijdkrachten, van met name de landmacht.
De marine heeft zijn belangrijkste schip al verloren, die kun je al wegstrepen.
De luchtmacht heeft nul komma nul overwicht in de lucht.

Dan hou je die oorspronkelijke 350.000 Russische troepen over, waarvan in eerste instantie 190.000 waren ingezet.
In termen van “battle tactical groups” of wel BTG’s, bestaande uit ~1000 man plus voertuigen, hadden ze er van de 168 zo’n 130 ingezet.
Die overige BTG’s, vind je richting oost Rusland, Japan en Kalingrad. (Plus wat verdeeld over de rest van de buitengrenzen en gebieden, denk aan Syrië bijvoorbeeld)

Die “overige” kunnen ze niet weghalen, voor het geval de navo wel degelijk direct betrokken raakt.

Van die 190.000 is de helft in praktische zin over.
Daar is recent 60.000 aan toegevoegd, officieel als taak “politie” achtige functie zodat de rest kan doorvechten richting het front.

Oekraïne aan de andere kant heeft nu 350.000 troepen, wat zich langzaam uit aan het breiden is richting 750.000 met als doel de volledige 900.000 reservisten op te roepen. (Dit duurt maanden, nou zie het tijdsbestek tot dusver en opbouw)

Deze reservisten hebben grotendeels ervaring in de strijd rondom Donbas, ironisch genoeg.
Zijn getraind op navo niveau.

Tel op dat UA bakken en bakken en nog eens bakken aan allerlei wapens krijgt, waarvan zelfs de afdankertjes geavanceerder zijn dan wat Rusland kan bieden..

Rusland zal dit absoluut verliezen, zonder oproep als in massale oproep van reservisten.
Poetin weet, weinige zitten daar op te wachten in Rusland, gezien de Exodus van de eigen bevolking.

Wat doen ze? Zoveel mogelijk huurlingen huren en hopen op het beste, dit komt volledig overeen met het laatste nieuws rondom deze oorlog.

Lang verhaal, TLDR, Rusland verliest dit geheid zonder massale oproep en inzet reservisten.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:31 schreef TheoddDutchGuy het volgende:

[..]
De marine heeft zijn belangrijkste schip al verloren, die kun je al wegstrepen.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:37 schreef LitmanenAFCA het volgende:

[..]
Huh Rusland haalt de militaire doelen toch gewoon volgens die kremlinpijpers in dit topic.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:38 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:

[..]
Volgens diverse bronnen heeft Rus overmacht over de hele zwarte zee, desondanks het verlies van dat schip.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:43 schreef sp3c het volgende:

[..]
klopt, verder heeft niemand echt een marine daar

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:45 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Heeft Turkije daar niks liggen?

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:43 schreef sp3c het volgende:

[..]
klopt, verder heeft niemand echt een marine daar

quote:

. While Russia failed in its advance on the Black Sea port city of Odesa, the Russian navy controls the Black Sea itself and has effectively blockaded Ukraine, which the United Nations and other international observers have said is fueling a global food crisis.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:48 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:

[..]
Naja dan zal de newyork times het fout hebben is ook maar een flutblaadje hè?
[..]
https://www.seattletimes.(...)s-russia-hold/?amp=1

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:49 schreef sp3c het volgende:

[..]
wat betekend 'klopt' in jouw hoofd?

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:50 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:

[..]
Ja sorry dacht dat je sarcastisch was zoals dat gaat hier in het topic

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:49 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:
Poetin heeft wel een mooi excuus om te stoppen met zijn speciale missie.
Doel bereikt, de nazi's zijn opgepakt.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:52 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]
Maar, hoe bepaal je of iemand een nazi is?

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:52 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]
Maar, hoe bepaal je of iemand een nazi is?

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:53 schreef sp3c het volgende:

[..]
je laat hem een paar keer Scheveningen zeggen

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:53 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Het ging hem natuurlijk om dat Azov bataljon.
Tenminste, dat was zijn excuus.
Die heeft hij nu.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:38 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:

[..]
Volgens diverse bronnen heeft Rus overmacht over de hele zwarte zee, desondanks het verlies van dat schip.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:56 schreef TheoddDutchGuy het volgende:

[..]
De overmacht qua op afstand een blokkade opzetten.

Dichtbij de kust komen ze niet meer, begrijpelijk.
Daarbij een eerdere of latere opmerking over Turkije, Turkije heeft op zijn beurt een algehele blokkade opgezet, geen enkel militair schip mag in of uit de zwarte zee.

Wat Rusland daar heeft liggen, mag er niet uit en niets komt er nog bij of in.

Vandaar dat ik zei, kan je wegstrepen, op wat kruisraketten na, waar Rusland er bijna niets meer van heeft, stelt het geen zak meer voor.
Een bestorming vanaf de zee op odessa kan je ook wel vergeten.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:52 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]
Maar, hoe bepaal je of iemand een nazi is?

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:49 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:
Poetin heeft wel een mooi excuus om te stoppen met zijn speciale missie.
Doel bereikt, de nazi's zijn opgepakt.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 20:37 schreef Zwoerd het volgende:

[..]
Maar ze moeten nog steeds de Donbass regio's blijven bezetten, de oorlog duurt dus nog wel voort.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 20:38 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Ja dat wel maar biedt wel ruimte voor onderhandelingen.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 20:58 schreef polderturk het volgende:
[ twitter ]

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:27 schreef Hathor het volgende:

[..]
Als de Russen een algehele mobilisatie afkondigen dan is het wel wat meer dan 3 tegen 1, daarnaast kunnen ze ook nog putten uit vazalstaten zoals Tsjetsjenie.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 18:36 schreef superniger het volgende:
Hopelijk krijgt deze klootzak levenslang.
[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 21:23 schreef George_of_the_Jungle het volgende:

[..]
Dat is een jongetje die geld voor zijn moeder probeerde te verdienen, zich bedreigd voelde (de Oekrainer had hun positie kunnen verraden) en door een meerdere werd verteld dat hij hem dood moest schieten. In het leger een bevel niet opvolgen wordt doorgaans niet verwelkomd met het ophalen van de schouders.
Ja, hij zal wel levenslang krijgen, en daar zit ik ook zeker niet mee, maar hij zat wel in een lastige situatie (tuurlijk, dat had hij misschien ook wel deels kunnen vermijden).

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 21:36 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]
Ik dacht dat er tijdens de processen van Neurenberg al was afgesproken dat "Befehl ist Befehl" geen geldige reden meer was om oorlogsmisdaden te plegen. Maar ik kan er naast zitten natuurlijk.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 19:31 schreef TheoddDutchGuy het volgende:

[..]
Welke numerieke meerderheid?
Je bedoelt Russische reservisten? Dat doen betekent voor Poetin aankondigen dat je de oorlog verliest.

Rusland heeft, en dit lijkt na tig keer dit onderbouwd te hebben, geen “leger van 1 miljoen”.
Ja als je alle koks en technici en administratie figuren meetelt ja.

Het gaat om inzetbare strijdkrachten, van met name de landmacht.
De marine heeft zijn belangrijkste schip al verloren, die kun je al wegstrepen.
De luchtmacht heeft nul komma nul overwicht in de lucht.

Dan hou je die oorspronkelijke 350.000 Russische troepen over, waarvan in eerste instantie 190.000 waren ingezet.
In termen van “battle tactical groups” of wel BTG’s, bestaande uit ~1000 man plus voertuigen, hadden ze er van de 168 zo’n 130 ingezet.
Die overige BTG’s, vind je richting oost Rusland, Japan en Kalingrad. (Plus wat verdeeld over de rest van de buitengrenzen en gebieden, denk aan Syrië bijvoorbeeld)

Die “overige” kunnen ze niet weghalen, voor het geval de navo wel degelijk direct betrokken raakt.

Van die 190.000 is de helft in praktische zin over.
Daar is recent 60.000 aan toegevoegd, officieel als taak “politie” achtige functie zodat de rest kan doorvechten richting het front.

Oekraïne aan de andere kant heeft nu 350.000 troepen, wat zich langzaam uit aan het breiden is richting 750.000 met als doel de volledige 900.000 reservisten op te roepen. (Dit duurt maanden, nou zie het tijdsbestek tot dusver en opbouw)

Deze reservisten hebben grotendeels ervaring in de strijd rondom Donbas, ironisch genoeg.
Zijn getraind op navo niveau.

Tel op dat UA bakken en bakken en nog eens bakken aan allerlei wapens krijgt, waarvan zelfs de afdankertjes geavanceerder zijn dan wat Rusland kan bieden..

Rusland zal dit absoluut verliezen, zonder oproep als in massale oproep van reservisten.
Poetin weet, weinige zitten daar op te wachten in Rusland, gezien de Exodus van de eigen bevolking.

Wat doen ze? Zoveel mogelijk huurlingen huren en hopen op het beste, dit komt volledig overeen met het laatste nieuws rondom deze oorlog.

Lang verhaal, TLDR, Rusland verliest dit geheid zonder massale oproep en inzet reservisten.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 21:36 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]
Ik dacht dat er tijdens de processen van Neurenberg al was afgesproken dat "Befehl ist Befehl" geen geldige reden meer was om oorlogsmisdaden te plegen. Maar ik kan er naast zitten natuurlijk.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 20:09 schreef Aether het volgende:
Zweden en Finland schaffen samen wapens aan

Zweden en Finland hebben afgesproken om samen wapens in te kopen. Beide landen gaan onder meer antitankwapens aanschaffen, maar de overeenkomst maakt ook de aankoop van raketten, geweren, munitie en andere wapens mogelijk. De Finse minister van Defensie heeft al de opdracht gegeven voor een gezamenlijke aankoop van kleine vuurwapens.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 21:42 schreef George_of_the_Jungle het volgende:

[..]
Daarom wordt hij ook gestraft, maar wat was zijn alternatief geworden als hij niet geschoten had? Kan best dat hij in een situatie zat dat hij dan zou worden doodgeschoten. Wat zou jij doen als je in zo'n situatie zat als 21-jarige? Al maanden van huis, je maten doodgeschoten zien worden, constant stress, slechte omstandigheden. Zou jij dan tegen je leidinggevende zeggen: "Ik weiger, schiet mij maar neer."

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:35 schreef suijkerbuijk het volgende:
https://www.nu.nl/economi(...)-9-miljard-euro.html

Hub EU gaat even gratis geld naar Oekraïne.
We gaan weer Sinterklaas spelen .

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:35 schreef suijkerbuijk het volgende:
https://www.nu.nl/economi(...)-9-miljard-euro.html

Hub EU gaat even gratis geld naar Oekraïne.
We gaan weer Sinterklaas spelen .

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:40 schreef over_hedge het volgende:

[..]
Welk gedeelte van lening snap je niet

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:45 schreef suijkerbuijk het volgende:

[..]
Dat het niet terug word betaalt simpel

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:48 schreef over_hedge het volgende:

[..]
Ja wat een onzin is dat. Als ze dat zouden willen hadden ze het geen lening genoemd.
Enige bron dat het niet terug betaald gaat worden? Of zuig je dit uit je suikerbuijk

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:35 schreef suijkerbuijk het volgende:
https://www.nu.nl/economi(...)-9-miljard-euro.html

Hub EU gaat even gratis geld naar Oekraïne.
We gaan weer Sinterklaas spelen .

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:40 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:

Nou juist goed toch?

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:52 schreef suijkerbuijk het volgende:

[..]
Tuurlijk we zullen zien.
Als het nog Oekraïne gaat heten in de toekomst.
Het is tenslotte een lening met onbeperkte tijd en geen renten.
Lekker verstandige.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:26 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]
Ik heb in het leger geleerd dat iedere individuele militair verantwoordelijk is voor het handhaven van de Conventie van Genève. Als je een foute opdracht krijgt moet je nee zeggen en dan kom je voor de krijgsraad (of als Rus word je doodgeschoten). Zeg je ja, kan je na de oorlog opgepakt worden en dan moet je hopen dat je word vrijgesproken omdat je die opdracht hebt gekregen.

Dat is kut, maar het is niet anders. Maar oorlog is sowieso kut.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:00 schreef Za het volgende:
MOSKOU - Rusland staat op het punt een krachtige nieuwe laser in te zetten die drones en lichte vliegtuigen kan neerhalen. Dat meldt het staatspersagentschap Tass.

Volgens Borisov heeft het nieuwe laserwapen een bereik van vijf kilometer en kan het drones op die hoogte neerschieten. Volgens het rapport werd het nieuwe systeem dinsdag getest en naar verluidt verbrandde het een drone binnen vijf seconden. Nu wordt het gestaag ingevoerd in de strijdkrachten, zei hij. „De eerste prototypes worden al gebruikt”, zei Borisov.

https://www.telegraaf.nl/(...)ne-binnen-5-seconden

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:21 schreef Za het volgende:

[..]
Fijn om te horen.
De VS doen goede zaken.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:00 schreef Za het volgende:
MOSKOU - Rusland staat op het punt een krachtige nieuwe laser in te zetten die drones en lichte vliegtuigen kan neerhalen. Dat meldt het staatspersagentschap Tass.

Volgens Borisov heeft het nieuwe laserwapen een bereik van vijf kilometer en kan het drones op die hoogte neerschieten. Volgens het rapport werd het nieuwe systeem dinsdag getest en naar verluidt verbrandde het een drone binnen vijf seconden. Nu wordt het gestaag ingevoerd in de strijdkrachten, zei hij. „De eerste prototypes worden al gebruikt”, zei Borisov.

https://www.telegraaf.nl/(...)ne-binnen-5-seconden

Imma Firin' Mah Lazer

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 21:38 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Maar als het de beste man daadwerkelijk de locatie van de Russen aan het doorgeven was?
Was het dan nog een oorlogsmisdaad?
Lastig allemaal.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:08 schreef Za het volgende:
Duitsland: Rusland gebruikt blokkade graanexport als oorlogswapen
De Duitse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Baerbock beschuldigt Rusland de blokkade van graan uit Oekraïne als oorlogswapen te gebruiken. "Rusland is een graanoorlog begonnen die een wereldwijde voedselcrisis aanwakkert", zei Baerbock tijdens een bijeenkomst van ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken bij de Verenigde Naties in New York.

Moskou doet dit niet alleen door Oekraïense havens te blokkeren, maar ook door silo's, wegen, spoorwegen en velden te vernietigen. Volgens Baerbock verhindert Rusland Oekraïne om 20 miljoen ton graan te exporteren, waarvan het grootste deel in de haven van Odessa.

https://nos.nl/index.php/(...)-van-beleg-verlengen

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 21:42 schreef George_of_the_Jungle het volgende:

[..]
Daarom wordt hij ook gestraft, maar wat was zijn alternatief geworden als hij niet geschoten had? Kan best dat hij in een situatie zat dat hij dan zou worden doodgeschoten. Wat zou jij doen als je in zo'n situatie zat als 21-jarige? Al maanden van huis, je maten doodgeschoten zien worden, constant stress, slechte omstandigheden. Zou jij dan tegen je leidinggevende zeggen: "Ik weiger, schiet mij maar neer."

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 21:58 schreef Ulx het volgende:
[ twitter ]

Aardig draadje over de zinloosheid van Poetin een uitweg gunnen. Dat is helemaal niet nodig, je dondert de Russen gewoon terug over de grens en de media in Rusland krijgt vervolgens de opdracht het ergens anders over te hebben. Probleem opgelost.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:00 schreef Za het volgende:
MOSKOU - Rusland staat op het punt een krachtige nieuwe laser in te zetten die drones en lichte vliegtuigen kan neerhalen. Dat meldt het staatspersagentschap Tass.

Volgens Borisov heeft het nieuwe laserwapen een bereik van vijf kilometer en kan het drones op die hoogte neerschieten. Volgens het rapport werd het nieuwe systeem dinsdag getest en naar verluidt verbrandde het een drone binnen vijf seconden. Nu wordt het gestaag ingevoerd in de strijdkrachten, zei hij. „De eerste prototypes worden al gebruikt”, zei Borisov.

https://www.telegraaf.nl/(...)ne-binnen-5-seconden

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:19 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]
Lijkt me een prima reden om Rusland binnen te vallen.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:21 schreef Za het volgende:

[..]
Fijn om te horen.
De VS doen goede zaken.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 21:38 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Maar als het de beste man daadwerkelijk de locatie van de Russen aan het doorgeven was?
Was het dan nog een oorlogsmisdaad?
Lastig allemaal.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:27 schreef LitmanenAFCA het volgende:

[..]
Nee gek het is helemaal niet lastig. Er zijn nog zoveel stappen tussen ingrijpen en iemand kapot schieten en maar laten liggen. Hoe kan je dit toch ook maar weer proberen goed te lullen.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:32 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Er is echt helemaal niemand die dit goed probeert te praten.
We hebben het alleen over verschillende scenario's die de strafmaat kunnen beïnvloeden.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:00 schreef Za het volgende:
MOSKOU - Rusland staat op het punt een krachtige nieuwe laser in te zetten die drones en lichte vliegtuigen kan neerhalen. Dat meldt het staatspersagentschap Tass.

Volgens Borisov heeft het nieuwe laserwapen een bereik van vijf kilometer en kan het drones op die hoogte neerschieten. Volgens het rapport werd het nieuwe systeem dinsdag getest en naar verluidt verbrandde het een drone binnen vijf seconden. Nu wordt het gestaag ingevoerd in de strijdkrachten, zei hij. „De eerste prototypes worden al gebruikt”, zei Borisov.

https://www.telegraaf.nl/(...)ne-binnen-5-seconden

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:20 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:

[..]
De oorlog was, volgens de beschrijving, toen net 4 dagen bezig, geen maanden.
En wat ik zelf zou hebben gedaan? Hoog over het hoofd man de man geschoten, of meters naast.

quote:

Back at the police station, Fedorov endured long interrogation sessions. His captors pushed him to resign and transfer his authority to Danilchenko. Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-­ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

SPOILER

A Ukrainian City Under a Violent New Regime
How the Russian occupation transformed life in Melitopol.

It was still dark on the morning of February 24th when Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, a midsize city in southern Ukraine, awoke to the sound of explosions. He thought it was a thunderstorm and went back to sleep. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that in the twenty-first century some sick mind would think to start firing missiles in the center of Europe,” he said. A duty officer called, waking him again, and told him the city was being bombed.

The attack was directed at a military base for the Ukrainian Air Force’s 25th Transport Aviation Brigade. In recent years, the unit’s aircraft have flown in support of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to deliver fuel to a Danish-­run scientific station in Greenland. Russia wanted to seize the base and fly in personnel and equipment for its ground campaign. Cruise missiles crippled the control tower and a fuelling station. Ukrainian pilots scrambled to get their planes airborne before they could be destroyed. Within minutes, an aviation technician was killed as a blast hit the IL-76 transport plane he was preparing for takeoff.

At daybreak, a hundred or so men went to the local branch of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer military corps, to join up. A Ukrainian commander took out his pistol and laid it on the table. “This is the only weaponry we have,” he said, and sent the volunteers home. That afternoon, the 25th Brigade was ordered to pull out of Melitopol entirely, a tactical retreat. “It was painful,” Marina Rodina, one of the unit’s medics, told me. “We knew the city was counting on us.” But the brigade’s mission is transport logistics; the five hundred or so airmen at the base had no heavy weaponry, just Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades. Rodina and the others could only hope that, if Ukrainian forces evacuated, Melitopol would be spared further assault.

Fedorov, who had gone to his office at city hall, was informed about the pullout by phone. “Imagine the situation,” he told me. “I’m a mayor of a city with a hundred and fifty thousand people, three hundred thousand if we include the surrounding region. It’s four in the afternoon and already getting dark. Russian tanks are at the entrance to town and all I have are five garbage trucks, three tractor trailers, and, I don’t know, a metal shovel. That’s it. There’s not a single armed person left.”

The next morning, Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers were in the streets. Soldiers seized city hall, the regional administration building, and the headquarters of the Ukrainian security service, the S.B.U. “Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla­dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

Russian troops also distributed leaflets with instructions on how locals should behave during the “special military operation.” Ukrainians were told to keep away from Russian soldiers and their armored vehicles, to give them the right of way on the street, and to remain unarmed. To avoid “propaganda and disinformation from Kyiv,” the leaflets said, Melitopol’s residents should tune in to Russian state television, and to the Telegram channel of one of Moscow’s most famous and bombastic propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov. People driving around town discovered that the local radio airwaves had been taken over by Russian broadcasts, including one that aired a speech by Putin over and over.

Melitopol is an agricultural center, known for its honey and deep-red cherries, and its population is largely Russian-­speaking. But in recent years, Fedorov told me, as the city attracted funding from the European Union and unveiled a series of urban-renewal projects—a new ice rink and public swimming pool, a state-of-the-art infectious-­disease clinic­—its identity had become less and less tied to Russia, let alone to the long decades of Soviet rule. Fedorov himself, a triathlete with a boyish smirk, close-cropped brown hair, and jutting ears, embodied a new generation of democratic leaders in Ukraine. He won a seat on Melitopol’s city council in his early twenties; in 2020, at the age of thirty-­two, he was elected mayor. “People stopped living in the past and started to believe in the future,” he said.

Now Russia had occupied the city. A little more than a hundred miles away, Russian forces were pummelling Mariupol, destroying whole residential districts; in Melitopol, the offensive was nowhere near as savage but still all-­encompassing. The city was effectively blockaded: there were no shipments of food or medicine, except from areas already under Russian control, and no cash for A.T.M.s. Russian soldiers were everywhere, patrolling the streets and questioning people at random. One afternoon, Serhii Pryima, the head of Melitopol’s district council, was driving near the outskirts of the city when he was stopped at a checkpoint. Pryima asked one of the Russian soldiers, who looked no older than twenty, what he was doing there. “We’ve come to liberate you,” the soldier replied. “From whom?” Pryima asked. The soldier had no answer.

After the Russian Army invaded, Fedorov set up temporary headquarters in the Soviet-era House of Culture, on Melitopol’s main square. The occupation had put him in an odd position. Russian troops controlled the city, but he was still mayor. Initially, they told Fedorov that he’d be left alone to run city business. He was summoned at gunpoint to a meeting with a group of senior Russian officials. He told them, “You won’t be here for long.” One replied, “We’re here forever.” Another said, “You carry out your functions, we’ll carry out ours.”

Fedorov began recording daily video addresses for his constituents, rattling off locations where they could find groceries and access cash. When city buses stopped running, he called on residents to give rides to medical workers. Much like the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who, in the early days of the Russian assault, rallied people across the country with defiant videos posted to social media, Fedorov tried to project an upbeat spirit. On March 1st, he filmed himself at a social-services center that offered free food and clothes to people in need. “Melitopol did not surrender,” he said. “Melitopol is temporarily occupied.”

When Putin set out to invade Ukraine, he expected an easy victory. Many experts predicted that, within a week, his fearsome army would overcome all resistance; arrest or, if necessary, assassinate Zelensky; and establish a pro-Russian puppet regime in Kyiv. Instead, with the help of Western arms and intelligence, the Ukrainian military fought back and inflicted heavy losses on Russia.

And yet the Russian military has made advances in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, and, with its naval superiority, threatens to form what amounts to a land bridge to Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014. It has also occupied a number of cities and towns in the southeast, Melitopol among them. In Berdyansk, on the Sea of Azov, Russian troops took control of the port and began docking their own naval vessels. During a short but fraught battle in Enerhodar, missile and rocket fire came perilously close to the city’s nuclear power plant, the largest such facility in Europe; after Russia captured the city, the plant’s managers were informed that they now worked for Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear-power company. Kherson fell on March 2nd, the first major city to be seized, with a popu­lation of two hundred and eighty thousand. Andrey Turchak, the head of the main pro-Putin party in Russia’s parliament, recently visited Kherson, where he declared, “Russia is here forever. There should be no doubt about this.”

The cities of southeastern Ukraine, by dint of geography and history, tend to be overwhelmingly Russian-­speaking. But their vulnerability had little to do with cultural ties. The proximity to Crimea meant that Russia could efficiently transport armor and equipment into the region, with few of the logistical barriers it faced in the north. And the landscape, which is dominated by steppe, made it harder for Ukrainians to mount the kind of ambushes that so mangled Russian forces around Kyiv. In Kherson as in Melitopol, Ukrainian commanders retreated rather than risk losing units with little chance of victory.

“If Russian troops had come to Melitopol in 2014, they would indeed have been welcomed with bread and salt,” Fedorov told me, using a Russian expression that means to be greeted with hospitality. Putin’s acts of aggression since then have changed public attitudes. Melitopol was once a hub for visitors headed to Crimea, but that connection was all but severed following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. The war in the Donbas, where Russia stoked a separatist conflict for eight years, further soured residents’ feelings toward their neighbor. “We didn’t want to see Melitopol become a banana republic,” Vlad Pryima, Serhii’s twenty-two-year-old son, who works in I.T., said. “And it became clear that’s what one should expect under Russian rule.”

The first mass protest against the Russian takeover of Melitopol was held on March 2nd. Several hundred people gathered in Victory Square, in the center of the city, chanting “Melitopol is Ukraine!” At first, Russian troops “seemed confused, as if they hadn’t been expecting such a situation,” Evhen Pokoptsev, a Melitopol resident who participated in the protest, told me. But, as protesters marched on the S.B.U. headquarters, soldiers positioned inside fired warning shots. One protester was struck in the leg. The following day, Russian armored vehicles drove along Melitopol’s central avenues with loudspeakers blaring, “The military-civilian administration of Melitopol, in order to prevent law-breaking and to insure public order, temporarily prohibits rallies and demonstrations.” A curfew was declared from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The protesters were undeterred. They gathered every day at noon to march around the city, singing the Ukrainian anthem and calling on the invaders to leave. Russian soldiers responded by firing off smoke grenades and chasing people through the streets. Pokoptsev told me of a day when, amid the chaos, Russian soldiers grabbed a dozen protesters from the crowd, then drove them fifteen miles out of town and left them in an open field. “The goal was to maximally frighten people,” Pokoptsev said.

Fedorov was heartened by the protests but worried for the well-being of those who took part. “I know perfectly well how the Russian Federation reacts to protests and those who attend them,” he told me. In one of his video addresses, Fedorov appealed to the city’s residents to remain peaceful and not confront the soldiers. “Our task is to save your life,” he said.

Every few days, Russian officials came to Fedorov’s office to demand that he stop the demonstrations. It was a case of projection: protests in Russia are either nonexistent or imagined to be the work of outside forces. But in the modern political culture of Ukraine, Fedorov said, demonstrations are “part of our DNA.” If a person doesn’t like her President, or her mayor, for that matter, she takes to the streets and says so. “They couldn’t believe that I wasn’t organizing these protests and paying for them,” Fedorov told me. “They said, ‘Stop the protests!’ And I answered, ‘I can’t.’ ”

On the afternoon of March 11th, two weeks into the occupation, Fedorov was sitting at his desk in the House of Culture when a dozen Russian soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by balaclavas, burst into his office. They tied his hands behind his back and put a black bag over his head. He was told that a criminal case had been opened against him in the Luhansk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. He was accused of financing Right Sector, a nationalist faction that often serves as a bogeyman in Russian propaganda—the “Nazis” of Kremlin legend.

“Are you joking?” Fedorov asked.

“We’re not joking,” one of the soldiers told him. They dragged Fedorov outside and into a waiting van.

As they sped through town, Fedorov kept track of how many turns they made, and when. “I know the city well,” he said. Even with his eyes covered, he guessed that he’d been brought to police headquarters, which Russian forces had taken over on the first day of the occupation. When the soldiers removed the bag from his head, he found himself alone in a jail cell. “Ten steps in one direction, four in the other,” he recalled.

The next day, the local Russian military command named an interim mayor, a city-council deputy named Galina Danilchenko. Danilchenko had been a close aide to a local pro-Russian politician named Evgeny Balitsky, who was famous for wearing a Soviet military uniform around town. (In May, Russian authorities made Balitsky the region’s governor.) Danilchenko recorded a video address for the residents of Melitopol. “Our main task now is to adapt all mechanisms to the new reality so that we can begin to live in a new way as soon as possible,” she said. In an oblique reference to the protests, she added, “Despite all our efforts, there are still people in the town who try to destabilize the situation. I urge you, please, be sensible and do not fall for these provocations.”

Few listened. Later that day, more than a thousand people gathered in front of the regional administration building, chanting “Freedom to the mayor!” By then, the Russian troops in town had been joined by a contingent from the riot police and the state security service, the F.S.B. One guard confided to Fedorov, “After every single protest, we get it upside the head from Moscow.” As Fedorov explained, “In their picture of the world, if there are rallies, they should be in support of Russia.”

Two days after Fedorov was imprisoned, eight armed Russian soldiers came to the home of Serhii Pryima and accused him of organizing the protest. Pryima had been expecting such a visit, telling his family, “They’ll probably come for me, too.” The soldiers searched the apartment. They told him to gather a change of clothes, his personal documents, and his cell phone, which they promptly confiscated. Then they tied his hands behind his back, put a bag over his head, and drove him away in a military van.

For more than a month, Pryima’s wife, Natalia, visited the police station, city hall, the regional administration building—anywhere that had been taken over by Russian forces—in search of her husband. “Write a missing-persons claim,” she was told. She did so, many times, but got no reply. After a week, one of the Russian soldiers in the mayor’s office told her to give up writing her appeals. “We’re sick of reading them,” he said.

Natalia was eventually granted an audience with the newly appointed Russian military commandant of Melitopol. He introduced himself as Saigon, a nom de guerre, and told Natalia that his troops had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. “This is a matter for those higher up,” he said.

Natalia also reached out to her husband’s former deputy in the district council, Andrei Siguta, who had switched sides and was now working with the occupying administration. In fact, he had taken Pryima’s job as head of the council; Pryima’s son, Vlad, called Siguta a “pure collaborator.” Siguta came to the courtyard of the family’s apartment building to meet with Natalia. He began by saying that he had tried to warn Pryima, telling him that he needed to have a “not so aggressive” attitude toward the Russian forces in town. “I made the right choices, and look, everything is fine with me,” he said. “But Serhii did not make the right choices, and now he’s in a cellar.” Siguta could offer only a vague assertion: “The decision about when and how to release him has not yet been made.”

Back at the police station, Fedorov endured long interrogation sessions. His captors pushed him to resign and transfer his authority to Danilchenko. Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-­ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But after a couple of days the tenor of his interrogations changed. Among Ukrainians, Fedorov had become a symbol of oppression and resistance, an example of courage in the face of in­vasion. In a video address, Zelensky declared, “The seizure of the mayor of Melitopol is a crime not only against a specific person and not only against a particular city and not only against Ukraine. It’s a crime against democracy as such.” Fedorov sensed that his captors were aware of the uproar: now, instead of pressuring or threatening him, they asked about practical matters of administering the city. “They realized they had created a problem for themselves that they wanted to get rid of,” he told me.

On the evening of March 16th, as darkness was settling over Melitopol, Russian soldiers came to Fedorov’s cell. He was being freed in a prisoner exchange. A soldier put a bag over his head and led him to a waiting jeep. He was driven to the village of Kamianske, near the front line where Russian and Ukrainian forces were battling for control of the Zaporizhzhia region, and let out of the jeep. An officer from the S.B.U. stepped forward to identify him. As Fedorov was led back to Ukrainian-held territory, nine Russian prisoners of war walked in the other direction—the price the Zelensky administration had agreed to pay for Fedorov’s freedom.

Kidnappings have become a hallmark of the invasion. In Melitopol alone, at least three hundred people have been detained by Russian forces. “The aim is to extract a certain benefit from this person while frightening the local population, to send the message that ‘We are the power now, we decide all questions,’ ” Olena Zhuk, the head of Zaporizhzhia’s regional council, said. Zhuk has tried to keep track of those who are kidnapped or go missing, but she is certain the Ukrainian authorities are aware of only a fraction of such cases. “We didn’t understand what was going on in Bucha until Russian forces left,” she said, referring to the suburb of Kyiv where, in the wake of Russia’s withdrawal, in early April, evidence surfaced of torture, rape, and the summary execution of hundreds of people. “We will only know the real scale of atrocities and violence when we get our territory back.”

In Melitopol, the primary targets for arrests and kidnappings have been elected officials, activists, business owners—anyone seen as influential or capable of shaping local opinion. Pryima was eventually released, at the end of April, but others haven’t been as lucky. The owner of a grocery store, for instance, was arrested after handing out free food; the distribution of humanitarian aid was considered the prerogative of the Russian military. Soldiers seized his car and the keys to his store. A month and a half later, he remains missing.

The occupiers seem especially interested in local military-recruitment offices, where they have gathered the names of veterans who they fear might pose a threat. “All you have to do is find a janitor and order him or her at the barrel of a gun to unlock the room where the records are kept,” Zhuk said. In Melitopol, the records were even easier to access. A Ukrainian officer at the city’s recruitment office switched sides and gave the Russian soldiers lists with hundreds of names.

A local veteran of the war in the Donbas, who asked to be called Oleksa, told me that, after Melitopol was occupied, he felt certain that his military service would make him a target. “If southern Ukraine stays under their control,” he recalled thinking, “I won’t survive.” He hid at the homes of friends and relatives, until he could secure a ride out of town. But, as he was fleeing, the car was stopped at a checkpoint manned by troops from the Donetsk People’s Republic, another Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. They ordered him out of the car at gunpoint.

The soldiers marched him to their nearby base, where they slapped and kicked him, and fired a gun next to his ear. They brought him out to a field, handed him a shovel, and told him to dig a grave. Once he was several feet deep, a soldier shot him in the leg. Another soldier slammed him in the head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground in the pit he had dug. He briefly lost consciousness.

After he came to, he was brought to the former base of the 25th Brigade, in Melitopol. Russian soldiers there were carrying out a process known since the Chechen wars of the nineties as “filtration,” a dark euphemism for separating prisoners into categories, with varying degrees of violence applied to each. As Oleksa remembered, interrogators at the airbase were intent on sniffing out anyone they considered a Ukrainian nationalist. Prisoners from Ukrainian military units such as Azov, which has attracted fighters with far-right sympathies, were subjected to regular beatings and torture. Some were locked in a metal safe until they lost consciousness and had to be revived by Russian Army doctors. Oleksa got off relatively lightly: a Russian officer told his soldiers that Oleksa’s head was already smashed in, and not to hit him too hard.

After about a week, Oleksa was driven east to a Soviet-era prison colony outside the city of Donetsk. He was held there with dozens of Ukrainian soldiers who had been captured during fighting; he also met a man who had been detained while driving to Mariupol to pick up family members trapped in the siege. His car had caught the attention of Russian forces, who arrested him and kept the car for themselves. Oleksa spent several days there before he was moved again, this time across the border into Russia, where he was deposited at a military jail in the Rostov region. This was perhaps the harshest stop of all, he said: “They beat us during interrogations. They beat us because we were standing the wrong way. They beat us for pleasure. They beat us just because.”

Oleksa’s captors broke his ribs and rendered his feet so bruised and swollen that they wouldn’t fit into his boots. His journey continued to a prison in Voronezh, a Russian city nearly four hundred miles away. There, he was given forms to fill out, with questions ranging from his political allegiances (“Nationalist/Patriotic/Indifferent”) to what he thought of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Finally, a Russian official showed him another document, which was dense and complicated but with a clear enough conclusion: a tribunal that Oleksa had never heard of had convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.

But just as quickly Oleksa’s fate shifted again. He and a number of other imprisoned Ukrainians were hustled aboard a military transport plane and flown to Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea and the site of a major Russian base. The next day, he was driven two hundred and thirty miles to a bridge in Kamianske, the same spot where Fedorov, the mayor, was freed, and let go in a prisoner exchange.

Svetlana Zalizetskaya is a one-woman media institution in Melitopol, a gadfly and a muckraker who has worked as a journalist in the city for two decades. She’s been a television news anchor and the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, and, for the past nine years, has overseen her own news site, RIA-Melitopol, which reports on everything from local crimes to the cherry harvest.

RIA-Melitopol has also become the main source for news on the occupation. When Russian troops first took over the city, Zalizetskaya tried to figure out their intentions. “No one explained anything—they basically just stuck to themselves,” she said. The site has since tracked who among the local population has agreed to collaborate with the Russian-installed administration, and exposed multiple cases of corruption and theft, such as the three million Ukrainian hryvnia—around a hundred thousand dollars—that Russian troops carted away from a post office in April.

Before Danilchenko was announced as interim mayor, she invited Zali­zetskaya to a meeting. Danilchenko seemed eager to aid the Russian military command. “The old city administration didn’t give me a chance,” Danilchenko said. She also told Zalizetskaya to think about collaborating with Russia: “If you join us, you’ll have a brilliant career. You can rise all the way to Moscow.” Zali­zetskaya balked. “I love Ukraine,” she said. Nevertheless, Danilchenko replied, Zali­zetskaya should meet with the Russian commandant, who wanted to see her. “If I entered that meeting, I would not have come out,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I understood it was time to leave.”

Zalizetskaya slipped out of Melitopol unnoticed, decamping to a Ukrainian-­­controlled city that she asked me not to name. She has managed to keep RIA-Melitopol going, scanning social-media posts and relying on a network of sources in Melitopol. But even from a distance Russian authorities moved to silence her. On March 23rd, a week or so after she left town, Russian soldiers showed up at her parents’ apartment, ransacked the rooms, confiscated the couple’s cell phones, and arrested her father. At around ten that evening, Zalizetskaya got a call from him. She asked where he was. “In some basement,” he answered.

Zalizetskaya could hear the voice of a man with a Chechen accent. (Many of the Russian troops in Melitopol are Kadyrovtsy, so named for their allegiance to Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, and known for their violence and brutality.) “Tell her that she should be here,” the Chechen said. Zalizetskaya was terrified, but also furious. “You are holding a pensioner in ill health,” she said. Her father had a heart condition and had recently suffered a stroke. “I won’t come back and I won’t collaborate with you.” The Chechen hung up the phone.

Two days later, Zalizetskaya got another call from her father. He started to recite what sounded like a prepared text: “Sveta, no one is beating me here, they treat me well, everything is fine.” She asked if he had access to his medication; he said no. She pleaded with his captors to release him. She heard a soldier in the background saying, “Tell her not to write any more nasty things.” Later that evening, she got a call from a man who introduced himself as Sergey. From the tenor of his questions, Zalizetskaya assumed he was from the Russian secret services. He was interested in the workings of her news site: who owned it, what interests it represented, and who her sources of information were. Sergey said that Zalizetskaya should coöperate with Russian forces or, barring that, hand over the site to them. “You know that what you are writing about Russian soldiers is not true,” he told her. “They’re not like that.”

Finally, Sergey offered a compromise: if Zalizetskaya wrote a public post saying that the site did not belong to her, her father would be released. “The site belongs to Ukraine, then and now,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I didn’t coöperate with the occupiers, and don’t plan to.” But she wrote the post, and thirty minutes later she got a text message asking where she wanted her father delivered. Home, she answered. The next morning, Zalizetskaya received a photo of her father standing in his front garden.

By early April, as Russia’s occupation of Melitopol stretched into its second month, Danilchenko was trying to project an air of normalcy, reopening the ice rink and resuming municipal services. In an interview with a Crimean news outlet, she thanked the Russian Army for entering the city “so gently and carefully” and freeing it from the “Kyiv regime.” She often spoke to residents in a tone that resembled a parent trying to sound sensible and convincing to her children. In one video address, she announced that the city was replacing Ukrainian television channels with Russian ones. “These days, we feel an acute shortage of access to reliable information,” she said. “Reconfigure your TV receivers and get accurate information.”

Nearly all supermarkets were closed, not to mention cafés and restaurants. Pharmacies were running low on drugs. Ukrainian authorities tried to dispatch humanitarian convoys with food and medicine, but Russian soldiers intercepted them and seized their contents. An open-air market still operated every day, offering fresh meat and produce, but access to cash was almost nonexistent, a particular problem for pensioners who get their monthly payments on bank cards. Danilchenko promised a transition to Russian rubles, but little of the currency was available in town. Gasoline was scarce and expensive; Russian soldiers and speculators moved to corner the black market, selling cannisters of fuel by the side of the road.

Local businesses, especially those in the city’s agricultural sector, began to report significant theft. Russian troops broke into the showroom of one company, Agrotek, and made off with more than a million euros’ worth of farm equipment, including two advanced combines, a tractor, and a seeding machine. A few days later, G.P.S. trackers showed that the stolen items were in a rural part of Chechnya. According to Fedorov, the new authorities have been forcing grain producers to give up much of their harvest, and moving it across the border to Russia by the truckload.

Communications slowed. Mobile service cut in and out. Residents took to standing with their phones outside long-closed cafés whose Wi-Fi connections were still active. One afternoon, I reached Mikhail Kumok, the publisher of a local newspaper called the Melitopol Vedomosti. He, too, had been held briefly by a contingent of armed Russians. He was taken from his apartment to the Russian military headquarters for a talk with officers from the F.S.B. “They asked me for ‘informational coöperation,’ ” he remembered. For the next several hours, the F.S.B. officers pushed Kumok to use his newspaper to produce “favorable coverage of events” in town. He declined. “I don’t see anything favorable going on here,” he said. “And you won’t allow me to write about what is actually happening.” Rather than publish lies, he closed the paper down. “They made it clear that, whatever I thought was going on now, things could get even worse for me,” he said.

Days later, the Russian occupiers began printing counterfeit copies of Kumok’s paper, which they used to distribute propaganda around town. One issue featured a portrait of Danilchenko on the front page. “Melitopol is getting used to peaceful life,” she said in an accompanying interview.

The occupying authorities devoted particular attention to the city’s schools, which had been closed for in-person classes since the first day of the invasion. Many students and their families had left town; others were studying online, joining lessons conducted elsewhere in Ukraine. The basements of a number of schools had been turned into bomb shelters. Reopening the facilities would be a way to signal to Melitopol’s residents that life was returning to normal. It would also provide a forum for a central aspect of the invasion—namely, installing Russia’s preferred version of Ukrainian history and ideology.

Artem Shulyatyev, the director of a performing-arts school in Melitopol, told me that he was visited by an officer from the F.S.B., who introduced himself as Vladislav. The conversation began politely enough. “You are governed by fascists,” Vladislav told him. “They oppress Russians. But this is wrong, and we are Slavic brothers.” Shulyatyev replied that he didn’t think there were any fascists in Melitopol. “You don’t understand anything,” Vladislav said. “You don’t know about the global plans of fascists.” He then asked if the school had a library, and whether it carried the collected writings of Lenin. “These are very important works,” he said. Shulyatyev said that there wasn’t any Lenin on hand, but, then again, why should a performing-arts school have his works? “Lenin didn’t dance or sing.”

Vladislav moved on to his main point: it was imperative that the school resume in-person classes. Shulyatyev said that this wasn’t possible—it wasn’t safe, and many families had left. Vladislav grew frustrated. “It doesn’t interest us what you want,” he said. “What matters is what we want.” Vladislav urged Shulyatyev to think about the proposal: “We will be waiting for you to inform us of your decision.” Shulyatyev, his wife, and their two children packed their things and left Melitopol.

A child looks through the window of a car in a parking lot.
The first destination for families fleeing southern Ukraine is the parking lot of a big-box store in the city of Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital eighty miles north of Melitopol.
Danilchenko appointed Elena Shapurova, the head of a local technical college, as Melitopol’s education chief. In late March, Shapurova assembled the city’s school principals for a meeting at the college. The educators who attended had conferred beforehand and decided to submit their resignations—none of them were willing to work with the city’s occupying authorities. From the building’s front steps, Shapurova implored them to resume classes and repeatedly motioned for them to come inside. The principals refused. Suddenly, Danilchenko appeared, trailed by men in masks carrying Kalashnikovs, and tried to herd the group inside the building.

“We just turned around and left,” one of the principals told me. This seemed to enrage Danilchenko. She chased after them and, as the principal remembered, yelled, “Then we’ll have you all sent the fuck out of town!”

The educators planned to meet the following day to decide how to respond. “We were in shock,” the principal said. But, the next morning, news went around: four of the principals had been taken from their apartments. One of them later told me that they were held in an unheated garage, where they could hear the sounds of a man being beaten through the walls. After two nights, they were driven twenty miles outside of town. “You refused to coöperate with us, so therefore you are punished,” a military officer told them. “You are deported from Melitopol and prohibited from returning.”

In the end, Danilchenko got her way, at least to a degree: Melitopol’s schools were officially reopened in April, but only a few of them have actually held any classes. Attendance levels have been paltry. Shulyatyev said he heard that around twenty students are coming to his school these days, compared with more than five hundred before the invasion. Meanwhile, Danilchenko has announced that “pseudo-historical books propagating nationalist ideas” would be removed from Melitopol’s central library, and only “books that tell the true version of history will appear on the shelves.” In a segment that aired on pro-Russian propaganda channels, Shapurova’s husband, a onetime powerlifter who had been appointed head of a grade school, held up a copy of “Ukraine Is Not Russia,” written by the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, as an example of the kinds of books that should be banned.

By most estimates, nearly half of Melitopol’s population has left the city. “I understand those who are leaving perfectly well,” Fedorov told me. “We are used to living in a different city, with a different mentality, and a different set of freedoms and values. And they are trying to force new ones on us.”

For those who flee, the first destination is the city of Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital eighty miles north of Melitopol. Since the start of the war, an Epicenter—a Ukrainian big-box store specializing in home improvement and gardening supplies—has served as a one-­­stop welcome-­and-processing center for those coming from occupied territories in the south. Volunteers hand out tea and snacks, medics help the sick and injured, and police roam among the new arrivals, looking for pro-Russian collaborators and saboteurs.

Leaving cities under Russian occupation has been a tricky affair. From Mariupol, where as many as ten thousand people have been killed, Russian forces guarantee safe passage in only one direction: to Russia. Those travelling to Ukrainian-held territory are forced to brave roads under constant shelling, with Russian troops frequently shooting in their direction. I saw a number of cars arrive at the Epicenter parking lot with shattered windshields and bullet holes strafing the sides. But even the route out of Melitopol passes through the front line, with tank shells and rocket fire occasionally striking cars. At each checkpoint, Russian soldiers make male passengers lift up their shirts, looking for nationalist tattoos and bruises from the recoil of a Kalashnikov.

While hanging around the Epicenter’s parking lot, I met the members of a convoy of buses and cars that had managed to depart Melitopol. Space on the buses was so limited that some people rode in the cargo holds of tractor trailers. Just about every car was stuffed with more people than it could sensibly fit; parents had held their children in their laps as they jostled along the road. Many drivers had taped handmade signs reading “children” to the windows.

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Nearby, I came across two mothers and their teen-age daughters, drinking tea and having a bite to eat. I asked what made them decide to leave. “It’s like the nineties have returned,” Larisa, one of the mothers, said. Instead of driving to the supermarket, she hauled bags back from the open-air market. Lines were everywhere. She had adopted a nickname for the armored vehicles that Russian soldiers drove around town, often with a big letter “Z”—the symbol of the Russian invasion—painted on the side: zalupa mashiny, or “dickhead mobiles.” “We understood that it won’t be like this for one or two months, but for much longer,” Larisa said. For three days they had tried, unsuccessfully, to pass a checkpoint on the outskirts of Melitopol. Finally, on their fourth try, soldiers let them through.

Fedorov had also made his way to Zaporizhzhia. He set up an office at the headquarters of the regional administration, a concrete Soviet-era structure on the main square. Inside, I found him in a vast ministerial office, plain and bureaucratic, with a Ukrainian flag standing in a corner. He hadn’t done much to make the space his own; he was only going to be there a short time, he insisted. “Our next interview will be in Melitopol—Ukrainian Melitopol,” he said, a mantra that sounded not all that dissimilar to the traditional prayer from Passover Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

In a way, Fedorov spends his days as he previously did. There are meetings with the water department, the gas company, local business leaders, concerned citizens—only now they take place by phone or videoconference. Hundreds of city employees still technically report to him; a number of municipal expenditures require his signature. And yet keeping up services in Melitopol, without aiding the occupation, he said, is a peculiar challenge: “We do everything we can so that our enemies don’t ever feel comfortable, but so that regular people, who aren’t guilty of anything, don’t suffer.”

Fedorov continues to record video addresses to the residents of Melitopol, sharing news of the city’s occupation and the wider war effort. The Ukrainian Army has managed to recapture some villages near occupied Kherson. In Melitopol, as many as a hundred Russian soldiers have been “liquidated” by partisan fighters, Fedorov claimed, citing the Ukrainian intelligence service. But, given the geography and the military realities of the region, it may be some time before a full-scale operation is mounted to retake the city.

Russian forces and their local ­proxies, meanwhile, have tried to entrench their hold on Melitopol. In advance of Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, Danilchenko announced, with great fanfare, that the Ukrainian flag on the main square would be replaced with a Soviet Red Army flag. Red Army stars appeared on buildings in the city center; a banner declaring “Glory to the Victors” went up on the city’s historic archway. The aim, Danilchenko said, was to undo Ukraine’s policy of “de-Communization,” in which, following the outbreak of fighting in the Donbas, Soviet emblems, monuments, and street names were removed from cities across the country. “The Nazi Ukrainian regime has sabotaged our ability to celebrate this holiday,” she said in a video address. “Everything that we loved and held dear—they have destroyed it. But we will restore it all again to how it was.”

On the morning of Victory Day, May 9th, Danilchenko, accompanied by a camera crew, brought a bouquet of white roses to the city’s memorial for the Second World War. During a brief speech, she told Melitopol’s residents, “I wish you joy, happiness, and a peaceful sky above your head.” Later that day, the city held an “Eternal Regiment” procession, in which hundreds of people marched with portraits of their relatives who fought in the war. Soviet flags in the crowd were interspersed with the Russian tricolor; many attendees wore an orange-and-black St. George’s ribbon, originally a symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazism, which, in recent years, has been co-opted as a talisman for Russian nationalism and militarism. That evening, residents were treated to a fireworks salute. Once again, the sound of explosions echoed across Melitopol’s dark sky. ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 23, 2022, issue, with the headline “The Captive City.”

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:19 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]
Lijkt me een prima reden om Rusland binnen te vallen.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:43 schreef George_of_the_Jungle het volgende:

[..]
Ze waren al maanden aan de Oekrainse grens gelegerd om te 'trainen'.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:00 schreef Za het volgende:
MOSKOU - Rusland staat op het punt een krachtige nieuwe laser in te zetten die drones en lichte vliegtuigen kan neerhalen. Dat meldt het staatspersagentschap Tass.

Volgens Borisov heeft het nieuwe laserwapen een bereik van vijf kilometer en kan het drones op die hoogte neerschieten. Volgens het rapport werd het nieuwe systeem dinsdag getest en naar verluidt verbrandde het een drone binnen vijf seconden. Nu wordt het gestaag ingevoerd in de strijdkrachten, zei hij. „De eerste prototypes worden al gebruikt”, zei Borisov.

https://www.telegraaf.nl/(...)ne-binnen-5-seconden

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:15 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
Leuk geprobeerd, maar alles wat daar staat maken ze in de regio zelf. Kleine vuurwapens zijn of Duits of Belgisch.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:46 schreef Repentless het volgende:

[..]
3% van de wereldwijde graanproductie en 9% van de wereldwijde graanexport komt uit Oekraïne. De voorlopige blokkade van die export is een prima reden om Rusland binnen te vallen? Voor wie?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:10 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Het zou me niet verbazen als UA spiegeltjes op drones monteert en dat die laserstralen gewoon weer teruggekaatst worden.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:11 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Huh? Volgens mij ga je nu wat stappen te ver, Oekrains graan kan ook, weliswaar langzamer, over land uitgevoerd worden en via andere havens naar de afnemers, Rusland binnenvallen om Oekrains graan te kunnen exporteren klinkt wel erg vreemd.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:11 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:
Rusland binnenvallen om Oekrains graan te kunnen exporteren klinkt wel erg vreemd.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:11 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Huh? Volgens mij ga je nu wat stappen te ver, Oekrains graan kan ook, weliswaar langzamer, over land uitgevoerd worden en via andere havens naar de afnemers, Rusland binnenvallen om Oekrains graan te kunnen exporteren klinkt wel erg vreemd.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:26 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]
Maar Rusland binnenvallen om een wereldwijde voedselcrisis te voorkomen klinkt al heel anders.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:30 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:
Ik weet niet hoe het met jullie is, maar ik ben er gewoon naar van als ik denk aan die mannen uit de fabriek.
En dat niemand ze helpt nu, dat onze leiders andere prioriteiten hebben.

300 man naar de slachtbank, en niemand uit de EU grijpt in. Echt ziek.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:38 schreef Repentless het volgende:

[..]
Dat klinkt inderdaad al heel anders. Het slaat nergens op, maar dat terzijde.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:30 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:
Ik weet niet hoe het met jullie is, maar ik ben er gewoon naar van als ik denk aan die mannen uit de fabriek.
En dat niemand ze helpt nu, dat onze leiders andere prioriteiten hebben.

300 man naar de slachtbank, en niemand uit de EU grijpt in. Echt ziek.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:45 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Wat verwacht jij dat de EU doet dan? Wel even realistisch blijven, Rusland de oorlog verklaren is nu eenmaal geen optie.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:41 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

[..]
Maar wat kon men doen dan? Ze waren compleet ingesloten.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:44 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]
Het klinkt beter dan een invasie om Ukraine te de-NAZIficeren.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:50 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Wat ze konden doen? Een kernraket op Moskou richten en ze terughalen. Iets, krijgsgevangenen uitwisselen, dreigen met iets richting de Russen. Je schiet die jongens af en we doen nooit meer zaken, zo iets. Het idee dat die 300 honderd mannen nu gemarteld en gedood worden, ik vind het te heftig.

Nederland heeft al een trauma, ik heb gewerkt met de nabestaanden toen. Werkte je met een jong meisje van 16, die op zoek was naar het massagraf van haar vader, broers en neven.

Deze houding van onze politici, gewoon niks en door feesten. En straks zeggen dat “we” het niet wisten.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:50 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Wat ze konden doen? Een kernraket op Moskou richten en ze terughalen. Iets, krijgsgevangenen uitwisselen, dreigen met iets richting de Russen. Je schiet die jongens af en we doen nooit meer zaken, zo iets. Het idee dat die 300 honderd mannen nu gemarteld en gedood worden, ik vind het te heftig.

Nederland heeft al een trauma, ik heb gewerkt met de nabestaanden toen. Werkte je met een jong meisje van 16, die op zoek was naar het massagraf van haar vader, broers en neven.

Deze houding van onze politici, gewoon niks en door feesten. En straks zeggen dat “we” het niet wisten.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:45 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Wat verwacht jij dat de EU doet dan? Wel even realistisch blijven, Rusland de oorlog verklaren is nu eenmaal geen optie.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:50 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Wat ze konden doen? Een kernraket op Moskou richten en ze terughalen. Iets, krijgsgevangenen uitwisselen, dreigen met iets richting de Russen. Je schiet die jongens af en we doen nooit meer zaken, zo iets. Het idee dat die 300 honderd mannen nu gemarteld en gedood worden, ik vind het te heftig.

Nederland heeft al een trauma, ik heb gewerkt met de nabestaanden toen. Werkte je met een jong meisje van 16, die op zoek was naar het massagraf van haar vader, broers en neven.

Deze houding van onze politici, gewoon niks en door feesten. En straks zeggen dat “we” het niet wisten.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:52 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
De EU heeft geen kernraketten, dat weet je hopelijk?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:52 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:
EU heeft geen kernraketten

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:55 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Dus we laten die mensen 300 mannen vermoorden de aankomende 24 uur? Hoop dat je lekker slaapt dadelijk.

Onze politici doen net alsof ze het niet weten? Je hebt de bussen en de mannen toch zien gaan?

Wanneer is het klaar? Ook aan Russische zijde, wie grijpt er in? waanzin dit, je man zou er maar zitten of je zoon.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:55 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Dus we laten die mensen 300 mannen vermoorden de aankomende 24 uur? Hoop dat je lekker slaapt dadelijk.

Onze politici doen net alsof ze het niet weten? Je hebt de bussen en de mannen toch zien gaan?

Wanneer is het klaar? Ook aan Russische zijde, wie grijpt er in? waanzin dit, je man zou er maar zitten of je zoon.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:56 schreef Pokkehandtas het volgende:

[..]
Welke landen hebben nucleaire bommen?
Volgens het meest recente rapport (14 juni 2021) van het Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) zijn er negen staten met kernwapens: Rusland, de Verenigde Staten, het Verenigd Koninkrijk, Frankrijk, China, India, Pakistan, Israël en Noord-Korea.

Wat? Frankrijk is geen EU?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:56 schreef Pokkehandtas het volgende:

[..]
Welke landen hebben nucleaire bommen?
Volgens het meest recente rapport (14 juni 2021) van het Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) zijn er negen staten met kernwapens: Rusland, de Verenigde Staten, het Verenigd Koninkrijk, Frankrijk, China, India, Pakistan, Israël en Noord-Korea.

Wat? Frankrijk is geen EU?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:55 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

[..]
Erm....wat? Ik kan begrijpen dat dit je aangrijpt hoor, begrijp me niet verkeerd. Maar het eerste wat je noemt is gewoon mutual destruction met miljoenen doden als gevolg, het tweede is afhankelijk van Rusland. De EU of wie dan ook heeft hier echt bijzonder weinig invloed op, hoe triest het ook is.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:01 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Triest? Je noemt het triest?

In Europa hebben we afgesproken, dit nooit meer… En het gebeurt nu.

Ik verwacht van onze wereldleiders dan ook alle aandacht en inzet, maar ze zijn alweer druk met wat anders.
En Poetin maar lachen.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:59 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Frankrijk heeft kernwapens, de EU niet. Franse kernwapens kunnen alleen door de Franse President gebruikt worden, niet door de EU. Snap je het verschil?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:50 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Wat ze konden doen? Een kernraket op Moskou richten en ze terughalen. Iets, krijgsgevangenen uitwisselen, dreigen met iets richting de Russen. Je schiet die jongens af en we doen nooit meer zaken, zo iets. Het idee dat die 300 honderd mannen nu gemarteld en gedood worden, ik vind het te heftig.

Nederland heeft al een trauma, ik heb gewerkt met de nabestaanden toen. Werkte je met een jong meisje van 16, die op zoek was naar het massagraf van haar vader, broers en neven.

Deze houding van onze politici, gewoon niks en door feesten. En straks zeggen dat “we” het niet wisten.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:01 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Triest? Je noemt het triest?

In Europa hebben we afgesproken, dit nooit meer… En het gebeurt nu.

Ik verwacht van onze wereldleiders dan ook alle aandacht en inzet, maar ze zijn alweer druk met wat anders.
En Poetin maar lachen.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:01 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Triest? Je noemt het triest?

In Europa hebben we afgesproken, dit nooit meer… En het gebeurt nu.

Ik verwacht van onze wereldleiders dan ook alle aandacht en inzet, maar ze zijn alweer druk met wat anders.
En Poetin maar lachen.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:02 schreef Pokkehandtas het volgende:

[..]
Eh nee, want Frankrijk zit diep in de reet van de EU. En gatver dat die enge Macron dus kan beslissen over de mensheid in zijn eentje, volgens jou.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:05 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Ik weet bij god niet waar deze post van jou op slaat maar het zou fijn zijn als je geen wartaal meer post.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:06 schreef Pokkehandtas het volgende:

[..]
Dat heb ik bij jou, dus zo gaat dat

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:06 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Prima, reageer dan niet en dan zijn we beiden tevreden. Opgelost, volgende.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:04 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

[..]
Nogmaals; erm....wat? We zijn scheepsladingen aan wapens en medisch materieel aan het sturen daar, en Rusland is zware verliezen aan het leiden. Plus alle sancties die de Russische economie hard raken. Wat wil je nog meer? WOIII?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:11 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
De Amerikaanse USNS schepen zijn overigens onderweg naar Europa waaronder hun grootste transportschepen, ik vermoed dat een deel van de Lend-lease steun van de VS zich in die schepen bevind en onderweg is naar Rotterdam wat mij de snelste verbinding lijkt omdat de Zwarte Zee invaren niet echt een optie is.

Qua tonnage is invliegen natuurlijk altijd een lastig verhaal terwijl een Ro-Ro alles mee kan nemen en zich nauwelijks om afmetingen of gewicht druk hoeft te maken

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:17 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

[..]
Dit had ik ook meegekregen. En als Oekraïne al dat spul - and it's a shitload - goed in kan zetten heeft Rusland een probleem. Dan gaat het echt een langdurig conflict worden. En Rusland kan zich dat niet veroorloven, mede door hun eigen propaganda. Oekraïne daarintegen is bereid door te gaan tot het einde.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:19 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Oekraine heeft geen keuze, Rusland kan zich terugtrekken maar Oekraine heeft niets om zich in terug te trekken dus ja, die gaan door totdat ze winnen of verliezen.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:22 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

[..]
Putin heeft zichzelf gewoon in een onmogelijke positie gemanouvreerd. En de enige weg eruit is aan hem.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:25 schreef Hatseflats22 het volgende:

[..]
Dat klopt toch niet helemaal, ik dacht dat ook.


Wat dat betreft is dit stuk van Timothy Snyder toch echt verhelderend.

[ twitter ]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:25 schreef Hatseflats22 het volgende:

[..]
Dat klopt toch niet helemaal, ik dacht dat ook.

Wat dat betreft is dit stuk van Timothy Snyder toch echt verhelderend.

[ twitter ]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:29 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Ben ik het niet echt mee eens. Poetin heeft weliswaar een grote mate van controle over de pers in Rusland maar Rusland is niet afgesneden van het Internet en vroeg of laat sijpelen zaken gewoon door naar de burgers en dat heeft vaak een olievlek werking. Vergeet niet dat ook Russen WhatsApp en Telegram hebben.

Vroeg of laat gaat Poetin een face saving positie nodig hebben, denk ik. Als dat is "IK heb gewonnen, de nazi's zijn verslagen en onze glorieuze troepen zijn weer thuis" dan is dat natuurlijk wel ideaal.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:02 schreef Poem_ het volgende:

[..]
Laat die fles nou eens staan...

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:29 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

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Ben ik het niet echt mee eens. Poetin heeft weliswaar een grote mate van controle over de pers in Rusland maar Rusland is niet afgesneden van het Internet en vroeg of laat sijpelen zaken gewoon door naar de burgers en dat heeft vaak een olievlek werking. Vergeet niet dat ook Russen WhatsApp en Telegram hebben.

Vroeg of laat gaat Poetin een face saving positie nodig hebben, denk ik. Als dat is "IK heb gewonnen, de nazi's zijn verslagen en onze glorieuze troepen zijn weer thuis" dan is dat natuurlijk wel ideaal.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:34 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

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Pot thee, ik kan er gewoon steeds slechter tegen. Het idee dat ze afgemaakt worden nu.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:01 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

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Triest? Je noemt het triest?

In Europa hebben we afgesproken, dit nooit meer… En het gebeurt nu.

Ik verwacht van onze wereldleiders dan ook alle aandacht en inzet, maar ze zijn alweer druk met wat anders.
En Poetin maar lachen.

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Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 22:21 schreef Za het volgende:

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Fijn om te horen.
De VS doen goede zaken.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:34 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Pot thee, ik kan er gewoon steeds slechter tegen. Het idee dat ze afgemaakt worden nu.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 06:48 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
De reden dat Poetin invalt was ook dat 'nazi's' het de russische bewoners erg moeilijk zouden maken. Wat wellicht ook waar is (of niet)

Punt is, denk niet dat het er voor Russen in Oekraine veel beter op wordt (op z'n zachts gezegd). Elke rus is straks vogelvrij. De vraag is hoe de media in Rusland daarmee omgaan. Die zullen natuurlijk staan te trappelen om elk incident uitgebreid uit te lichten, maar aan de andere kant, als er nog steeds onrust is tussen Oekrainiers en Russen, was de speciale operatie dan wel een succes?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:50 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

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Wat ze konden doen? Een kernraket op Moskou richten en ze terughalen. Iets, krijgsgevangenen uitwisselen, dreigen met iets richting de Russen. Je schiet die jongens af en we doen nooit meer zaken, zo iets. Het idee dat die 300 honderd mannen nu gemarteld en gedood worden, ik vind het te heftig.

Nederland heeft al een trauma, ik heb gewerkt met de nabestaanden toen. Werkte je met een jong meisje van 16, die op zoek was naar het massagraf van haar vader, broers en neven.

Deze houding van onze politici, gewoon niks en door feesten. En straks zeggen dat “we” het niet wisten.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:55 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

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Dus we laten die mensen 300 mannen vermoorden de aankomende 24 uur? Hoop dat je lekker slaapt dadelijk.

Onze politici doen net alsof ze het niet weten? Je hebt de bussen en de mannen toch zien gaan?

Wanneer is het klaar? Ook aan Russische zijde, wie grijpt er in? waanzin dit, je man zou er maar zitten of je zoon.

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Trial of Ukrainian Nazis and war criminals will start today

Of the Ukrainian radicals who surrendered, Denis Nuryga, the Aidar militant, will be the first to appear before the court - he is accused of blowing up a bridge in the Lugansk region in 2019, as a result of which sentries of the People's Militia of the LPR were killed.

The trial will take place on May 19 at 14:00 in the Leninsky District Court of Rostov-on-Don.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 08:15 schreef nixxx het volgende:
Zou Turkije niet een konvooi graan transport schepen met bijv een Aegis kruiser en een fast attack sub als bescherming door kunnen laten naar Odessa?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 08:38 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

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Zijn er bijna 1000 en vandaag begint het eerste proces.
[..]

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 08:38 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

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Zijn er bijna 1000 en vandaag begint het eerste proces.
[..]

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 08:56 schreef mcmlxiv het volgende:

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Dit eerste proces is natuurlijk wel interessant. Wanneer Rusland Oekraïners gaat berechten voor het uitvoeren van normale oorlogsdaden (zoals het opblazen van een brug in dit geval) dan is het hek wel van de dam gok ik.

Het geeft wel weer hoeveel er waar is van het gejank over Azov, wanneer het eerste proces gewoon over normale oorlogsvoering gaat. Waarom niet het vervolgen voor al die nazi-misdaden waar sommigen hier zo over lopen te jammeren? Oh wacht? Misschien zijn die vreselijke nazi-misdaden wel verzinsels?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 09:02 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Het schijnt gebeurd te zijn in 2019.
Waren ze toen in oorlog?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 02:15 schreef slashdotter3 het volgende:
Hij heeft waarschijnlijk op z'n kop gekregen dat hij zo negatief is. Nu is ie terug en praat ie positiever over het Russische leger
[ twitter ]
[ twitter ]

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 09:02 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Het schijnt gebeurd te zijn in 2019.
Waren ze toen in oorlog?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 09:03 schreef zalkc het volgende:

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Ja, zeker met de LPR, maar het mooie is dat de LPR toen nog geen staat was. Dus juridisch is het wat lastig.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 01:11 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

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De Amerikaanse USNS schepen zijn overigens onderweg naar Europa waaronder hun grootste transportschepen, ik vermoed dat een deel van de Lend-lease steun van de VS zich in die schepen bevind en onderweg is naar Rotterdam wat mij de snelste verbinding lijkt omdat de Zwarte Zee invaren niet echt een optie is.

Qua tonnage is invliegen natuurlijk altijd een lastig verhaal terwijl een Ro-Ro alles mee kan nemen en zich nauwelijks om afmetingen of gewicht druk hoeft te maken

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 08:52 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

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Misschien kunnen ze Chuck Norris ook nog even bellen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 09:02 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Het schijnt gebeurd te zijn in 2019.
Waren ze toen in oorlog?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 06:48 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
De reden dat Poetin invalt was ook dat 'nazi's' het de russische bewoners erg moeilijk zouden maken. Wat wellicht ook waar is (of niet)

Punt is, denk niet dat het er voor Russen in Oekraine veel beter op wordt (op z'n zachts gezegd). Elke rus is straks vogelvrij. De vraag is hoe de media in Rusland daarmee omgaan. Die zullen natuurlijk staan te trappelen om elk incident uitgebreid uit te lichten, maar aan de andere kant, als er nog steeds onrust is tussen Oekrainiers en Russen, was de speciale operatie dan wel een succes?

SPOILER

A Ukrainian City Under a Violent New Regime
How the Russian occupation transformed life in Melitopol.

It was still dark on the morning of February 24th when Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, a midsize city in southern Ukraine, awoke to the sound of explosions. He thought it was a thunderstorm and went back to sleep. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that in the twenty-first century some sick mind would think to start firing missiles in the center of Europe,” he said. A duty officer called, waking him again, and told him the city was being bombed.

The attack was directed at a military base for the Ukrainian Air Force’s 25th Transport Aviation Brigade. In recent years, the unit’s aircraft have flown in support of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to deliver fuel to a Danish-­run scientific station in Greenland. Russia wanted to seize the base and fly in personnel and equipment for its ground campaign. Cruise missiles crippled the control tower and a fuelling station. Ukrainian pilots scrambled to get their planes airborne before they could be destroyed. Within minutes, an aviation technician was killed as a blast hit the IL-76 transport plane he was preparing for takeoff.

At daybreak, a hundred or so men went to the local branch of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer military corps, to join up. A Ukrainian commander took out his pistol and laid it on the table. “This is the only weaponry we have,” he said, and sent the volunteers home. That afternoon, the 25th Brigade was ordered to pull out of Melitopol entirely, a tactical retreat. “It was painful,” Marina Rodina, one of the unit’s medics, told me. “We knew the city was counting on us.” But the brigade’s mission is transport logistics; the five hundred or so airmen at the base had no heavy weaponry, just Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades. Rodina and the others could only hope that, if Ukrainian forces evacuated, Melitopol would be spared further assault.

Fedorov, who had gone to his office at city hall, was informed about the pullout by phone. “Imagine the situation,” he told me. “I’m a mayor of a city with a hundred and fifty thousand people, three hundred thousand if we include the surrounding region. It’s four in the afternoon and already getting dark. Russian tanks are at the entrance to town and all I have are five garbage trucks, three tractor trailers, and, I don’t know, a metal shovel. That’s it. There’s not a single armed person left.”

The next morning, Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers were in the streets. Soldiers seized city hall, the regional administration building, and the headquarters of the Ukrainian security service, the S.B.U. “Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla­dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

Russian troops also distributed leaflets with instructions on how locals should behave during the “special military operation.” Ukrainians were told to keep away from Russian soldiers and their armored vehicles, to give them the right of way on the street, and to remain unarmed. To avoid “propaganda and disinformation from Kyiv,” the leaflets said, Melitopol’s residents should tune in to Russian state television, and to the Telegram channel of one of Moscow’s most famous and bombastic propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov. People driving around town discovered that the local radio airwaves had been taken over by Russian broadcasts, including one that aired a speech by Putin over and over.

Melitopol is an agricultural center, known for its honey and deep-red cherries, and its population is largely Russian-­speaking. But in recent years, Fedorov told me, as the city attracted funding from the European Union and unveiled a series of urban-renewal projects—a new ice rink and public swimming pool, a state-of-the-art infectious-­disease clinic­—its identity had become less and less tied to Russia, let alone to the long decades of Soviet rule. Fedorov himself, a triathlete with a boyish smirk, close-cropped brown hair, and jutting ears, embodied a new generation of democratic leaders in Ukraine. He won a seat on Melitopol’s city council in his early twenties; in 2020, at the age of thirty-­two, he was elected mayor. “People stopped living in the past and started to believe in the future,” he said.

Now Russia had occupied the city. A little more than a hundred miles away, Russian forces were pummelling Mariupol, destroying whole residential districts; in Melitopol, the offensive was nowhere near as savage but still all-­encompassing. The city was effectively blockaded: there were no shipments of food or medicine, except from areas already under Russian control, and no cash for A.T.M.s. Russian soldiers were everywhere, patrolling the streets and questioning people at random. One afternoon, Serhii Pryima, the head of Melitopol’s district council, was driving near the outskirts of the city when he was stopped at a checkpoint. Pryima asked one of the Russian soldiers, who looked no older than twenty, what he was doing there. “We’ve come to liberate you,” the soldier replied. “From whom?” Pryima asked. The soldier had no answer.

After the Russian Army invaded, Fedorov set up temporary headquarters in the Soviet-era House of Culture, on Melitopol’s main square. The occupation had put him in an odd position. Russian troops controlled the city, but he was still mayor. Initially, they told Fedorov that he’d be left alone to run city business. He was summoned at gunpoint to a meeting with a group of senior Russian officials. He told them, “You won’t be here for long.” One replied, “We’re here forever.” Another said, “You carry out your functions, we’ll carry out ours.”

Fedorov began recording daily video addresses for his constituents, rattling off locations where they could find groceries and access cash. When city buses stopped running, he called on residents to give rides to medical workers. Much like the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who, in the early days of the Russian assault, rallied people across the country with defiant videos posted to social media, Fedorov tried to project an upbeat spirit. On March 1st, he filmed himself at a social-services center that offered free food and clothes to people in need. “Melitopol did not surrender,” he said. “Melitopol is temporarily occupied.”

When Putin set out to invade Ukraine, he expected an easy victory. Many experts predicted that, within a week, his fearsome army would overcome all resistance; arrest or, if necessary, assassinate Zelensky; and establish a pro-Russian puppet regime in Kyiv. Instead, with the help of Western arms and intelligence, the Ukrainian military fought back and inflicted heavy losses on Russia.

And yet the Russian military has made advances in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, and, with its naval superiority, threatens to form what amounts to a land bridge to Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014. It has also occupied a number of cities and towns in the southeast, Melitopol among them. In Berdyansk, on the Sea of Azov, Russian troops took control of the port and began docking their own naval vessels. During a short but fraught battle in Enerhodar, missile and rocket fire came perilously close to the city’s nuclear power plant, the largest such facility in Europe; after Russia captured the city, the plant’s managers were informed that they now worked for Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear-power company. Kherson fell on March 2nd, the first major city to be seized, with a popu­lation of two hundred and eighty thousand. Andrey Turchak, the head of the main pro-Putin party in Russia’s parliament, recently visited Kherson, where he declared, “Russia is here forever. There should be no doubt about this.”

The cities of southeastern Ukraine, by dint of geography and history, tend to be overwhelmingly Russian-­speaking. But their vulnerability had little to do with cultural ties. The proximity to Crimea meant that Russia could efficiently transport armor and equipment into the region, with few of the logistical barriers it faced in the north. And the landscape, which is dominated by steppe, made it harder for Ukrainians to mount the kind of ambushes that so mangled Russian forces around Kyiv. In Kherson as in Melitopol, Ukrainian commanders retreated rather than risk losing units with little chance of victory.

“If Russian troops had come to Melitopol in 2014, they would indeed have been welcomed with bread and salt,” Fedorov told me, using a Russian expression that means to be greeted with hospitality. Putin’s acts of aggression since then have changed public attitudes. Melitopol was once a hub for visitors headed to Crimea, but that connection was all but severed following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. The war in the Donbas, where Russia stoked a separatist conflict for eight years, further soured residents’ feelings toward their neighbor. “We didn’t want to see Melitopol become a banana republic,” Vlad Pryima, Serhii’s twenty-two-year-old son, who works in I.T., said. “And it became clear that’s what one should expect under Russian rule.”

The first mass protest against the Russian takeover of Melitopol was held on March 2nd. Several hundred people gathered in Victory Square, in the center of the city, chanting “Melitopol is Ukraine!” At first, Russian troops “seemed confused, as if they hadn’t been expecting such a situation,” Evhen Pokoptsev, a Melitopol resident who participated in the protest, told me. But, as protesters marched on the S.B.U. headquarters, soldiers positioned inside fired warning shots. One protester was struck in the leg. The following day, Russian armored vehicles drove along Melitopol’s central avenues with loudspeakers blaring, “The military-civilian administration of Melitopol, in order to prevent law-breaking and to insure public order, temporarily prohibits rallies and demonstrations.” A curfew was declared from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The protesters were undeterred. They gathered every day at noon to march around the city, singing the Ukrainian anthem and calling on the invaders to leave. Russian soldiers responded by firing off smoke grenades and chasing people through the streets. Pokoptsev told me of a day when, amid the chaos, Russian soldiers grabbed a dozen protesters from the crowd, then drove them fifteen miles out of town and left them in an open field. “The goal was to maximally frighten people,” Pokoptsev said.

Fedorov was heartened by the protests but worried for the well-being of those who took part. “I know perfectly well how the Russian Federation reacts to protests and those who attend them,” he told me. In one of his video addresses, Fedorov appealed to the city’s residents to remain peaceful and not confront the soldiers. “Our task is to save your life,” he said.

Every few days, Russian officials came to Fedorov’s office to demand that he stop the demonstrations. It was a case of projection: protests in Russia are either nonexistent or imagined to be the work of outside forces. But in the modern political culture of Ukraine, Fedorov said, demonstrations are “part of our DNA.” If a person doesn’t like her President, or her mayor, for that matter, she takes to the streets and says so. “They couldn’t believe that I wasn’t organizing these protests and paying for them,” Fedorov told me. “They said, ‘Stop the protests!’ And I answered, ‘I can’t.’ ”

On the afternoon of March 11th, two weeks into the occupation, Fedorov was sitting at his desk in the House of Culture when a dozen Russian soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by balaclavas, burst into his office. They tied his hands behind his back and put a black bag over his head. He was told that a criminal case had been opened against him in the Luhansk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. He was accused of financing Right Sector, a nationalist faction that often serves as a bogeyman in Russian propaganda—the “Nazis” of Kremlin legend.

“Are you joking?” Fedorov asked.

“We’re not joking,” one of the soldiers told him. They dragged Fedorov outside and into a waiting van.

As they sped through town, Fedorov kept track of how many turns they made, and when. “I know the city well,” he said. Even with his eyes covered, he guessed that he’d been brought to police headquarters, which Russian forces had taken over on the first day of the occupation. When the soldiers removed the bag from his head, he found himself alone in a jail cell. “Ten steps in one direction, four in the other,” he recalled.

The next day, the local Russian military command named an interim mayor, a city-council deputy named Galina Danilchenko. Danilchenko had been a close aide to a local pro-Russian politician named Evgeny Balitsky, who was famous for wearing a Soviet military uniform around town. (In May, Russian authorities made Balitsky the region’s governor.) Danilchenko recorded a video address for the residents of Melitopol. “Our main task now is to adapt all mechanisms to the new reality so that we can begin to live in a new way as soon as possible,” she said. In an oblique reference to the protests, she added, “Despite all our efforts, there are still people in the town who try to destabilize the situation. I urge you, please, be sensible and do not fall for these provocations.”

Few listened. Later that day, more than a thousand people gathered in front of the regional administration building, chanting “Freedom to the mayor!” By then, the Russian troops in town had been joined by a contingent from the riot police and the state security service, the F.S.B. One guard confided to Fedorov, “After every single protest, we get it upside the head from Moscow.” As Fedorov explained, “In their picture of the world, if there are rallies, they should be in support of Russia.”

Two days after Fedorov was imprisoned, eight armed Russian soldiers came to the home of Serhii Pryima and accused him of organizing the protest. Pryima had been expecting such a visit, telling his family, “They’ll probably come for me, too.” The soldiers searched the apartment. They told him to gather a change of clothes, his personal documents, and his cell phone, which they promptly confiscated. Then they tied his hands behind his back, put a bag over his head, and drove him away in a military van.

For more than a month, Pryima’s wife, Natalia, visited the police station, city hall, the regional administration building—anywhere that had been taken over by Russian forces—in search of her husband. “Write a missing-persons claim,” she was told. She did so, many times, but got no reply. After a week, one of the Russian soldiers in the mayor’s office told her to give up writing her appeals. “We’re sick of reading them,” he said.

Natalia was eventually granted an audience with the newly appointed Russian military commandant of Melitopol. He introduced himself as Saigon, a nom de guerre, and told Natalia that his troops had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. “This is a matter for those higher up,” he said.

Natalia also reached out to her husband’s former deputy in the district council, Andrei Siguta, who had switched sides and was now working with the occupying administration. In fact, he had taken Pryima’s job as head of the council; Pryima’s son, Vlad, called Siguta a “pure collaborator.” Siguta came to the courtyard of the family’s apartment building to meet with Natalia. He began by saying that he had tried to warn Pryima, telling him that he needed to have a “not so aggressive” attitude toward the Russian forces in town. “I made the right choices, and look, everything is fine with me,” he said. “But Serhii did not make the right choices, and now he’s in a cellar.” Siguta could offer only a vague assertion: “The decision about when and how to release him has not yet been made.”

Back at the police station, Fedorov endured long interrogation sessions. His captors pushed him to resign and transfer his authority to Danilchenko. Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-­ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But after a couple of days the tenor of his interrogations changed. Among Ukrainians, Fedorov had become a symbol of oppression and resistance, an example of courage in the face of in­vasion. In a video address, Zelensky declared, “The seizure of the mayor of Melitopol is a crime not only against a specific person and not only against a particular city and not only against Ukraine. It’s a crime against democracy as such.” Fedorov sensed that his captors were aware of the uproar: now, instead of pressuring or threatening him, they asked about practical matters of administering the city. “They realized they had created a problem for themselves that they wanted to get rid of,” he told me.

On the evening of March 16th, as darkness was settling over Melitopol, Russian soldiers came to Fedorov’s cell. He was being freed in a prisoner exchange. A soldier put a bag over his head and led him to a waiting jeep. He was driven to the village of Kamianske, near the front line where Russian and Ukrainian forces were battling for control of the Zaporizhzhia region, and let out of the jeep. An officer from the S.B.U. stepped forward to identify him. As Fedorov was led back to Ukrainian-held territory, nine Russian prisoners of war walked in the other direction—the price the Zelensky administration had agreed to pay for Fedorov’s freedom.

Kidnappings have become a hallmark of the invasion. In Melitopol alone, at least three hundred people have been detained by Russian forces. “The aim is to extract a certain benefit from this person while frightening the local population, to send the message that ‘We are the power now, we decide all questions,’ ” Olena Zhuk, the head of Zaporizhzhia’s regional council, said. Zhuk has tried to keep track of those who are kidnapped or go missing, but she is certain the Ukrainian authorities are aware of only a fraction of such cases. “We didn’t understand what was going on in Bucha until Russian forces left,” she said, referring to the suburb of Kyiv where, in the wake of Russia’s withdrawal, in early April, evidence surfaced of torture, rape, and the summary execution of hundreds of people. “We will only know the real scale of atrocities and violence when we get our territory back.”

In Melitopol, the primary targets for arrests and kidnappings have been elected officials, activists, business owners—anyone seen as influential or capable of shaping local opinion. Pryima was eventually released, at the end of April, but others haven’t been as lucky. The owner of a grocery store, for instance, was arrested after handing out free food; the distribution of humanitarian aid was considered the prerogative of the Russian military. Soldiers seized his car and the keys to his store. A month and a half later, he remains missing.

The occupiers seem especially interested in local military-recruitment offices, where they have gathered the names of veterans who they fear might pose a threat. “All you have to do is find a janitor and order him or her at the barrel of a gun to unlock the room where the records are kept,” Zhuk said. In Melitopol, the records were even easier to access. A Ukrainian officer at the city’s recruitment office switched sides and gave the Russian soldiers lists with hundreds of names.

A local veteran of the war in the Donbas, who asked to be called Oleksa, told me that, after Melitopol was occupied, he felt certain that his military service would make him a target. “If southern Ukraine stays under their control,” he recalled thinking, “I won’t survive.” He hid at the homes of friends and relatives, until he could secure a ride out of town. But, as he was fleeing, the car was stopped at a checkpoint manned by troops from the Donetsk People’s Republic, another Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. They ordered him out of the car at gunpoint.

The soldiers marched him to their nearby base, where they slapped and kicked him, and fired a gun next to his ear. They brought him out to a field, handed him a shovel, and told him to dig a grave. Once he was several feet deep, a soldier shot him in the leg. Another soldier slammed him in the head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground in the pit he had dug. He briefly lost consciousness.

After he came to, he was brought to the former base of the 25th Brigade, in Melitopol. Russian soldiers there were carrying out a process known since the Chechen wars of the nineties as “filtration,” a dark euphemism for separating prisoners into categories, with varying degrees of violence applied to each. As Oleksa remembered, interrogators at the airbase were intent on sniffing out anyone they considered a Ukrainian nationalist. Prisoners from Ukrainian military units such as Azov, which has attracted fighters with far-right sympathies, were subjected to regular beatings and torture. Some were locked in a metal safe until they lost consciousness and had to be revived by Russian Army doctors. Oleksa got off relatively lightly: a Russian officer told his soldiers that Oleksa’s head was already smashed in, and not to hit him too hard.

After about a week, Oleksa was driven east to a Soviet-era prison colony outside the city of Donetsk. He was held there with dozens of Ukrainian soldiers who had been captured during fighting; he also met a man who had been detained while driving to Mariupol to pick up family members trapped in the siege. His car had caught the attention of Russian forces, who arrested him and kept the car for themselves. Oleksa spent several days there before he was moved again, this time across the border into Russia, where he was deposited at a military jail in the Rostov region. This was perhaps the harshest stop of all, he said: “They beat us during interrogations. They beat us because we were standing the wrong way. They beat us for pleasure. They beat us just because.”

Oleksa’s captors broke his ribs and rendered his feet so bruised and swollen that they wouldn’t fit into his boots. His journey continued to a prison in Voronezh, a Russian city nearly four hundred miles away. There, he was given forms to fill out, with questions ranging from his political allegiances (“Nationalist/Patriotic/Indifferent”) to what he thought of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Finally, a Russian official showed him another document, which was dense and complicated but with a clear enough conclusion: a tribunal that Oleksa had never heard of had convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.

But just as quickly Oleksa’s fate shifted again. He and a number of other imprisoned Ukrainians were hustled aboard a military transport plane and flown to Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea and the site of a major Russian base. The next day, he was driven two hundred and thirty miles to a bridge in Kamianske, the same spot where Fedorov, the mayor, was freed, and let go in a prisoner exchange.

Svetlana Zalizetskaya is a one-woman media institution in Melitopol, a gadfly and a muckraker who has worked as a journalist in the city for two decades. She’s been a television news anchor and the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, and, for the past nine years, has overseen her own news site, RIA-Melitopol, which reports on everything from local crimes to the cherry harvest.

RIA-Melitopol has also become the main source for news on the occupation. When Russian troops first took over the city, Zalizetskaya tried to figure out their intentions. “No one explained anything—they basically just stuck to themselves,” she said. The site has since tracked who among the local population has agreed to collaborate with the Russian-installed administration, and exposed multiple cases of corruption and theft, such as the three million Ukrainian hryvnia—around a hundred thousand dollars—that Russian troops carted away from a post office in April.

Before Danilchenko was announced as interim mayor, she invited Zali­zetskaya to a meeting. Danilchenko seemed eager to aid the Russian military command. “The old city administration didn’t give me a chance,” Danilchenko said. She also told Zalizetskaya to think about collaborating with Russia: “If you join us, you’ll have a brilliant career. You can rise all the way to Moscow.” Zali­zetskaya balked. “I love Ukraine,” she said. Nevertheless, Danilchenko replied, Zali­zetskaya should meet with the Russian commandant, who wanted to see her. “If I entered that meeting, I would not have come out,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I understood it was time to leave.”

Zalizetskaya slipped out of Melitopol unnoticed, decamping to a Ukrainian-­­controlled city that she asked me not to name. She has managed to keep RIA-Melitopol going, scanning social-media posts and relying on a network of sources in Melitopol. But even from a distance Russian authorities moved to silence her. On March 23rd, a week or so after she left town, Russian soldiers showed up at her parents’ apartment, ransacked the rooms, confiscated the couple’s cell phones, and arrested her father. At around ten that evening, Zalizetskaya got a call from him. She asked where he was. “In some basement,” he answered.

Zalizetskaya could hear the voice of a man with a Chechen accent. (Many of the Russian troops in Melitopol are Kadyrovtsy, so named for their allegiance to Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, and known for their violence and brutality.) “Tell her that she should be here,” the Chechen said. Zalizetskaya was terrified, but also furious. “You are holding a pensioner in ill health,” she said. Her father had a heart condition and had recently suffered a stroke. “I won’t come back and I won’t collaborate with you.” The Chechen hung up the phone.

Two days later, Zalizetskaya got another call from her father. He started to recite what sounded like a prepared text: “Sveta, no one is beating me here, they treat me well, everything is fine.” She asked if he had access to his medication; he said no. She pleaded with his captors to release him. She heard a soldier in the background saying, “Tell her not to write any more nasty things.” Later that evening, she got a call from a man who introduced himself as Sergey. From the tenor of his questions, Zalizetskaya assumed he was from the Russian secret services. He was interested in the workings of her news site: who owned it, what interests it represented, and who her sources of information were. Sergey said that Zalizetskaya should coöperate with Russian forces or, barring that, hand over the site to them. “You know that what you are writing about Russian soldiers is not true,” he told her. “They’re not like that.”

Finally, Sergey offered a compromise: if Zalizetskaya wrote a public post saying that the site did not belong to her, her father would be released. “The site belongs to Ukraine, then and now,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I didn’t coöperate with the occupiers, and don’t plan to.” But she wrote the post, and thirty minutes later she got a text message asking where she wanted her father delivered. Home, she answered. The next morning, Zalizetskaya received a photo of her father standing in his front garden.

By early April, as Russia’s occupation of Melitopol stretched into its second month, Danilchenko was trying to project an air of normalcy, reopening the ice rink and resuming municipal services. In an interview with a Crimean news outlet, she thanked the Russian Army for entering the city “so gently and carefully” and freeing it from the “Kyiv regime.” She often spoke to residents in a tone that resembled a parent trying to sound sensible and convincing to her children. In one video address, she announced that the city was replacing Ukrainian television channels with Russian ones. “These days, we feel an acute shortage of access to reliable information,” she said. “Reconfigure your TV receivers and get accurate information.”

Nearly all supermarkets were closed, not to mention cafés and restaurants. Pharmacies were running low on drugs. Ukrainian authorities tried to dispatch humanitarian convoys with food and medicine, but Russian soldiers intercepted them and seized their contents. An open-air market still operated every day, offering fresh meat and produce, but access to cash was almost nonexistent, a particular problem for pensioners who get their monthly payments on bank cards. Danilchenko promised a transition to Russian rubles, but little of the currency was available in town. Gasoline was scarce and expensive; Russian soldiers and speculators moved to corner the black market, selling cannisters of fuel by the side of the road.

Local businesses, especially those in the city’s agricultural sector, began to report significant theft. Russian troops broke into the showroom of one company, Agrotek, and made off with more than a million euros’ worth of farm equipment, including two advanced combines, a tractor, and a seeding machine. A few days later, G.P.S. trackers showed that the stolen items were in a rural part of Chechnya. According to Fedorov, the new authorities have been forcing grain producers to give up much of their harvest, and moving it across the border to Russia by the truckload.

Communications slowed. Mobile service cut in and out. Residents took to standing with their phones outside long-closed cafés whose Wi-Fi connections were still active. One afternoon, I reached Mikhail Kumok, the publisher of a local newspaper called the Melitopol Vedomosti. He, too, had been held briefly by a contingent of armed Russians. He was taken from his apartment to the Russian military headquarters for a talk with officers from the F.S.B. “They asked me for ‘informational coöperation,’ ” he remembered. For the next several hours, the F.S.B. officers pushed Kumok to use his newspaper to produce “favorable coverage of events” in town. He declined. “I don’t see anything favorable going on here,” he said. “And you won’t allow me to write about what is actually happening.” Rather than publish lies, he closed the paper down. “They made it clear that, whatever I thought was going on now, things could get even worse for me,” he said.

Days later, the Russian occupiers began printing counterfeit copies of Kumok’s paper, which they used to distribute propaganda around town. One issue featured a portrait of Danilchenko on the front page. “Melitopol is getting used to peaceful life,” she said in an accompanying interview.

The occupying authorities devoted particular attention to the city’s schools, which had been closed for in-person classes since the first day of the invasion. Many students and their families had left town; others were studying online, joining lessons conducted elsewhere in Ukraine. The basements of a number of schools had been turned into bomb shelters. Reopening the facilities would be a way to signal to Melitopol’s residents that life was returning to normal. It would also provide a forum for a central aspect of the invasion—namely, installing Russia’s preferred version of Ukrainian history and ideology.

Artem Shulyatyev, the director of a performing-arts school in Melitopol, told me that he was visited by an officer from the F.S.B., who introduced himself as Vladislav. The conversation began politely enough. “You are governed by fascists,” Vladislav told him. “They oppress Russians. But this is wrong, and we are Slavic brothers.” Shulyatyev replied that he didn’t think there were any fascists in Melitopol. “You don’t understand anything,” Vladislav said. “You don’t know about the global plans of fascists.” He then asked if the school had a library, and whether it carried the collected writings of Lenin. “These are very important works,” he said. Shulyatyev said that there wasn’t any Lenin on hand, but, then again, why should a performing-arts school have his works? “Lenin didn’t dance or sing.”

Vladislav moved on to his main point: it was imperative that the school resume in-person classes. Shulyatyev said that this wasn’t possible—it wasn’t safe, and many families had left. Vladislav grew frustrated. “It doesn’t interest us what you want,” he said. “What matters is what we want.” Vladislav urged Shulyatyev to think about the proposal: “We will be waiting for you to inform us of your decision.” Shulyatyev, his wife, and their two children packed their things and left Melitopol.

A child looks through the window of a car in a parking lot.
The first destination for families fleeing southern Ukraine is the parking lot of a big-box store in the city of Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital eighty miles north of Melitopol.
Danilchenko appointed Elena Shapurova, the head of a local technical college, as Melitopol’s education chief. In late March, Shapurova assembled the city’s school principals for a meeting at the college. The educators who attended had conferred beforehand and decided to submit their resignations—none of them were willing to work with the city’s occupying authorities. From the building’s front steps, Shapurova implored them to resume classes and repeatedly motioned for them to come inside. The principals refused. Suddenly, Danilchenko appeared, trailed by men in masks carrying Kalashnikovs, and tried to herd the group inside the building.

“We just turned around and left,” one of the principals told me. This seemed to enrage Danilchenko. She chased after them and, as the principal remembered, yelled, “Then we’ll have you all sent the fuck out of town!”

The educators planned to meet the following day to decide how to respond. “We were in shock,” the principal said. But, the next morning, news went around: four of the principals had been taken from their apartments. One of them later told me that they were held in an unheated garage, where they could hear the sounds of a man being beaten through the walls. After two nights, they were driven twenty miles outside of town. “You refused to coöperate with us, so therefore you are punished,” a military officer told them. “You are deported from Melitopol and prohibited from returning.”

In the end, Danilchenko got her way, at least to a degree: Melitopol’s schools were officially reopened in April, but only a few of them have actually held any classes. Attendance levels have been paltry. Shulyatyev said he heard that around twenty students are coming to his school these days, compared with more than five hundred before the invasion. Meanwhile, Danilchenko has announced that “pseudo-historical books propagating nationalist ideas” would be removed from Melitopol’s central library, and only “books that tell the true version of history will appear on the shelves.” In a segment that aired on pro-Russian propaganda channels, Shapurova’s husband, a onetime powerlifter who had been appointed head of a grade school, held up a copy of “Ukraine Is Not Russia,” written by the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, as an example of the kinds of books that should be banned.

By most estimates, nearly half of Melitopol’s population has left the city. “I understand those who are leaving perfectly well,” Fedorov told me. “We are used to living in a different city, with a different mentality, and a different set of freedoms and values. And they are trying to force new ones on us.”

For those who flee, the first destination is the city of Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital eighty miles north of Melitopol. Since the start of the war, an Epicenter—a Ukrainian big-box store specializing in home improvement and gardening supplies—has served as a one-­­stop welcome-­and-processing center for those coming from occupied territories in the south. Volunteers hand out tea and snacks, medics help the sick and injured, and police roam among the new arrivals, looking for pro-Russian collaborators and saboteurs.

Leaving cities under Russian occupation has been a tricky affair. From Mariupol, where as many as ten thousand people have been killed, Russian forces guarantee safe passage in only one direction: to Russia. Those travelling to Ukrainian-held territory are forced to brave roads under constant shelling, with Russian troops frequently shooting in their direction. I saw a number of cars arrive at the Epicenter parking lot with shattered windshields and bullet holes strafing the sides. But even the route out of Melitopol passes through the front line, with tank shells and rocket fire occasionally striking cars. At each checkpoint, Russian soldiers make male passengers lift up their shirts, looking for nationalist tattoos and bruises from the recoil of a Kalashnikov.

While hanging around the Epicenter’s parking lot, I met the members of a convoy of buses and cars that had managed to depart Melitopol. Space on the buses was so limited that some people rode in the cargo holds of tractor trailers. Just about every car was stuffed with more people than it could sensibly fit; parents had held their children in their laps as they jostled along the road. Many drivers had taped handmade signs reading “children” to the windows.

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Nearby, I came across two mothers and their teen-age daughters, drinking tea and having a bite to eat. I asked what made them decide to leave. “It’s like the nineties have returned,” Larisa, one of the mothers, said. Instead of driving to the supermarket, she hauled bags back from the open-air market. Lines were everywhere. She had adopted a nickname for the armored vehicles that Russian soldiers drove around town, often with a big letter “Z”—the symbol of the Russian invasion—painted on the side: zalupa mashiny, or “dickhead mobiles.” “We understood that it won’t be like this for one or two months, but for much longer,” Larisa said. For three days they had tried, unsuccessfully, to pass a checkpoint on the outskirts of Melitopol. Finally, on their fourth try, soldiers let them through.

Fedorov had also made his way to Zaporizhzhia. He set up an office at the headquarters of the regional administration, a concrete Soviet-era structure on the main square. Inside, I found him in a vast ministerial office, plain and bureaucratic, with a Ukrainian flag standing in a corner. He hadn’t done much to make the space his own; he was only going to be there a short time, he insisted. “Our next interview will be in Melitopol—Ukrainian Melitopol,” he said, a mantra that sounded not all that dissimilar to the traditional prayer from Passover Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

In a way, Fedorov spends his days as he previously did. There are meetings with the water department, the gas company, local business leaders, concerned citizens—only now they take place by phone or videoconference. Hundreds of city employees still technically report to him; a number of municipal expenditures require his signature. And yet keeping up services in Melitopol, without aiding the occupation, he said, is a peculiar challenge: “We do everything we can so that our enemies don’t ever feel comfortable, but so that regular people, who aren’t guilty of anything, don’t suffer.”

Fedorov continues to record video addresses to the residents of Melitopol, sharing news of the city’s occupation and the wider war effort. The Ukrainian Army has managed to recapture some villages near occupied Kherson. In Melitopol, as many as a hundred Russian soldiers have been “liquidated” by partisan fighters, Fedorov claimed, citing the Ukrainian intelligence service. But, given the geography and the military realities of the region, it may be some time before a full-scale operation is mounted to retake the city.

Russian forces and their local ­proxies, meanwhile, have tried to entrench their hold on Melitopol. In advance of Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, Danilchenko announced, with great fanfare, that the Ukrainian flag on the main square would be replaced with a Soviet Red Army flag. Red Army stars appeared on buildings in the city center; a banner declaring “Glory to the Victors” went up on the city’s historic archway. The aim, Danilchenko said, was to undo Ukraine’s policy of “de-Communization,” in which, following the outbreak of fighting in the Donbas, Soviet emblems, monuments, and street names were removed from cities across the country. “The Nazi Ukrainian regime has sabotaged our ability to celebrate this holiday,” she said in a video address. “Everything that we loved and held dear—they have destroyed it. But we will restore it all again to how it was.”

On the morning of Victory Day, May 9th, Danilchenko, accompanied by a camera crew, brought a bouquet of white roses to the city’s memorial for the Second World War. During a brief speech, she told Melitopol’s residents, “I wish you joy, happiness, and a peaceful sky above your head.” Later that day, the city held an “Eternal Regiment” procession, in which hundreds of people marched with portraits of their relatives who fought in the war. Soviet flags in the crowd were interspersed with the Russian tricolor; many attendees wore an orange-and-black St. George’s ribbon, originally a symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazism, which, in recent years, has been co-opted as a talisman for Russian nationalism and militarism. That evening, residents were treated to a fireworks salute. Once again, the sound of explosions echoed across Melitopol’s dark sky. ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 23, 2022, issue, with the headline “The Captive City.”

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 09:21 schreef mcmlxiv het volgende:

[..]
Niet met Rusland, dus het is sowieso geen zaak voor Rusland. Dat Oekraïne in een interne oorlog was, zul je vast wel weten toch?

Maar ik begrijp dat jij het niet sneu vindt dat de "gruwelijke nazi-misdaden van Azov" dus gewone oorlogsdaden zijn van mensen die onder bevel staan van de Oekrainse regering. Jij vindt het blijkbaar geen probleem dat Rusland mensen denkt te kunnen veroordelen op valse gronden?

Of bedoel je dat niet met jouw "kritische vragen"?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 09:25 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Nee hoor, dat bedoel ik niet.
Gisteren was er een discussie over een rus die voor moest komen in Oekraïne en ik zag nu dat er een Oekraïner voor moet komen in Rusland dus daarom post ik het
Puur om te informeren eigenlijk.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:17 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Croatië dreigt NAVO uitbreiding te blokkeren. Schop Croatië uit de NAVO.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:17 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Croatië dreigt NAVO uitbreiding te blokkeren. Schop Croatië uit de NAVO.

quote:

The suspects are reported to be members of a radical group called Sober and Angry Youth. Some members of this group have ties to the former volunteer battalion Azov, which fought in eastern Ukraine and is implicated in numerous allegations of unlawful detention, torture, and other abuses..

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 09:07 schreef icecreamfarmer_NL het volgende:

[..]
Kroatië en dan verder via de trein? Maar wat zou het zijn dan want ze hebben ook behoorlijke voorraden in de EU.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:35 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:
Dit zou een van die zaken zijn waar de rechtbank wel naar mag kijken.
https://www.hrw.org/news/(...)tack-roma-settlement
[..]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 08:53 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]
Grappig dat Rusland mensen die buiten Rusland wat zouden hebben gedaan probeert te berechten

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:00 schreef Za het volgende:
MOSKOU - Rusland staat op het punt een krachtige nieuwe laser in te zetten die drones en lichte vliegtuigen kan neerhalen. Dat meldt het staatspersagentschap Tass.

Volgens Borisov heeft het nieuwe laserwapen een bereik van vijf kilometer en kan het drones op die hoogte neerschieten. Volgens het rapport werd het nieuwe systeem dinsdag getest en naar verluidt verbrandde het een drone binnen vijf seconden. Nu wordt het gestaag ingevoerd in de strijdkrachten, zei hij. „De eerste prototypes worden al gebruikt”, zei Borisov.

https://www.telegraaf.nl/(...)ne-binnen-5-seconden

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:39 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]
Ja, dan gaat Rusland maar lekker naar Den Haag als ze het zo graag berecht willen zien.
Wat Rusland nu doet is niet veel beter dan wat de VS deed met mensen die opgesloten waren en zijn in Guantanamo. Alleen zijn hun martekmethoden wat primitiever dan die van de VS.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 00:50 schreef ootjekatootje het volgende:

[..]
Wat ze konden doen? Een kernraket op Moskou richten en ze terughalen. Iets, krijgsgevangenen uitwisselen, dreigen met iets richting de Russen. Je schiet die jongens af en we doen nooit meer zaken, zo iets. Het idee dat die 300 honderd mannen nu gemarteld en gedood worden, ik vind het te heftig.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:41 schreef voetbalmanager2 het volgende:

[..]
[ twitter ]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:49 schreef Za het volgende:
[ twitter ]

quote:

Poetin noemt de besluitvorming binnen de EU 'chaotisch'.

quote:

Poetin noemt de besluitvorming binnen de EU 'chaotisch'.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:49 schreef Za het volgende:
[ twitter ]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:53 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Ik sprak vandaag een collega en die zei dat z'n maandbedrag is verdubbeld.
Die was niet blij met de sancties.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:54 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Want als die sancties er niet zouden zijn zou Poetin lekker goedkoop gas blijven leveren ?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:58 schreef polderturk het volgende:
[ twitter ]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:35 schreef Lospedrosa het volgende:
Dit zou een van die zaken zijn waar de rechtbank wel naar mag kijken.
https://www.hrw.org/news/(...)tack-roma-settlement
[..]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:55 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Dat denk ik wel, dat heeft hij in het verleden toch ook gedaan?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:54 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Want als die sancties er niet zouden zijn zou Poetin lekker goedkoop gas blijven leveren ?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:01 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
De afgelopen maanden niet hoor, toen was hij al de gasstroom aan het afknijpen in voorbereiding op deze oorlog. En daarbij: Wat zou het Poetin boeien of mensen in Europa wel goedkope energie hebben? Als het op veiligheid aankomt heeft hij een zero sum beeld van de wereld dus hoe meer onrust er hier is hoe veiliger hij denkt dat Rusland is.

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:53 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:

[..]
En tijdens die trainingen werden zijn maten doodgeschoten, was er constant stress en slechte omstandigheden?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:54 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

Want als die sancties er niet zouden zijn zou Poetin lekker goedkoop gas blijven leveren ?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:04 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Of wij goedkope energie hebben interesseert hem helemaal niks.
Maar hij wilt wel ons geld en daarom is hij altijd blijven leveren.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:44 schreef Tengano het volgende:

[..]
Tip aan Oekraine: Zet snel even wat spiegels op je drone zodat je die beam terug kan stralen waar hij vandaan komt en dat ding zichzelf opblaast

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:05 schreef Za het volgende:

[..]
[ twitter ]

Deze maand 487.500 barrels per dag and up.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:08 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]
Fijn voor India.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:06 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Dat geld krijgt hij toch ook als hij minder levert maar wel meer meer geld per m3 vangt?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:08 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

Fijn voor India.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:10 schreef Za het volgende:

[..]
Ze rekenen af in Roebels.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:10 schreef Za het volgende:

[..]
Ze rekenen af in Roebels.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:10 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Dat zou best kunnen maar is dat ook zo?
Hij is pas maatregelen gaan nemen toen er sancties in werden gesteld.
Als hij er beter van was geworden had hij dat al eerder gedaan lijkt mij.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:59 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Die stond ff lekker voor joker.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:13 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Ja dat is ook zo . Nogmaals: De gasstroom beperken is een maatregel die hij al maanden geleden genomen heeft, ver voor de oorlog en enige sancties die daaruit volgden. Zo moeilijk is het toch niet te geloven dat Poetin misschien wel eens niet het allerbeste voor heeft met ons (zelfs met zijn eigen inwoners heeft hij dat immers niet) ?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:06 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Dat geld krijgt hij toch ook als hij minder levert maar wel meer meer geld per m3 vangt?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:14 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Ik heb toch al gezegd dat Poetin geen interesse heeft in onze welvaart?

Maar kan je even laten zien dan wanneer hij is begonnen met het beperken van de gasstroom en dat hij nu net zo veel geld binnen krijgt?

quote:

Analisten en toezichthouders vermoeden dat het Russische staatsbedrijf Gazprom al vorig jaar begonnen is met het terugschroeven van de aardgasvoorraden in West- Europa. Dit heeft bijgedragen aan de enorme stijging van de gasprijs die burgers en bedrijven te verwerken krijgen, terwijl ze ongewild bijdragen en de oorlogskas van president Poetin.

Rusland ontvangt nog altijd dagelijks tientallen miljoenen euro's uit West-Europa, omdat energieleveranties vooralsnog uitgezonderd zijn van de economische boycot. Energie-analist en hoogleraar in Groningen Machiel Mulder: "Poetin heeft ons zonder meer in het pak genaaid. Met een extra opbrengst van 60 cent per kubieke meter heeft hij gemakkelijk 120 miljard euro extra inkomsten verdiend", zegt hij bij Stand van Nederland

https://wnl.tv/2022/03/09(...)0procent%20vol%20zit.

quote:

NEW DELHI, May 18 (Reuters) - India is looking to domestic firms and eastern European nations for military gear and ammunition, as the world's biggest buyer of Russian arms seeks alternative suppliers at a time when Moscow is fighting a war with Ukraine and facing sanctions.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:17 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

Rusland ontvangt nog altijd dagelijks tientallen miljoenen euro's uit West-Europa,

Poetin heeft ons zonder meer in het pak genaaid. Met een extra opbrengst van 60 cent per kubieke meter heeft hij gemakkelijk 120 miljard euro extra inkomsten verdiend", zegt hij bij Stand van Nederland

quote:

Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:17 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 18 mei 2022 23:44 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:
Een artikel over wat de Russen vis de officiële kanalen meekrijgen over de oorlog militaire operatie.
https://www.economist.com(...)05/17/the-putin-show
Lijkt lastig omdat als je over een krant of tweet scrollt er steeds vertalingen door het beeld schuiven, maar zo zie je wat er in die krant geschreven is.
Ook staat in het artikel dat jongeren via internet redelijk geïnformeerd kunnen blijven, maar ouderen alleen zien wat Poetin wil dat ze zien.
Ook de psychologische aspecten als vaak herhaalde boodschappen krijgen een waarheidsallure en geloven wat het makkelijkst/ prettigst is om te geloven worden benoemd.

Nieuws uit Melitopol:
[..]

SPOILER

A Ukrainian City Under a Violent New Regime
How the Russian occupation transformed life in Melitopol.

It was still dark on the morning of February 24th when Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, a midsize city in southern Ukraine, awoke to the sound of explosions. He thought it was a thunderstorm and went back to sleep. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that in the twenty-first century some sick mind would think to start firing missiles in the center of Europe,” he said. A duty officer called, waking him again, and told him the city was being bombed.

The attack was directed at a military base for the Ukrainian Air Force’s 25th Transport Aviation Brigade. In recent years, the unit’s aircraft have flown in support of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to deliver fuel to a Danish-­run scientific station in Greenland. Russia wanted to seize the base and fly in personnel and equipment for its ground campaign. Cruise missiles crippled the control tower and a fuelling station. Ukrainian pilots scrambled to get their planes airborne before they could be destroyed. Within minutes, an aviation technician was killed as a blast hit the IL-76 transport plane he was preparing for takeoff.

At daybreak, a hundred or so men went to the local branch of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer military corps, to join up. A Ukrainian commander took out his pistol and laid it on the table. “This is the only weaponry we have,” he said, and sent the volunteers home. That afternoon, the 25th Brigade was ordered to pull out of Melitopol entirely, a tactical retreat. “It was painful,” Marina Rodina, one of the unit’s medics, told me. “We knew the city was counting on us.” But the brigade’s mission is transport logistics; the five hundred or so airmen at the base had no heavy weaponry, just Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades. Rodina and the others could only hope that, if Ukrainian forces evacuated, Melitopol would be spared further assault.

Fedorov, who had gone to his office at city hall, was informed about the pullout by phone. “Imagine the situation,” he told me. “I’m a mayor of a city with a hundred and fifty thousand people, three hundred thousand if we include the surrounding region. It’s four in the afternoon and already getting dark. Russian tanks are at the entrance to town and all I have are five garbage trucks, three tractor trailers, and, I don’t know, a metal shovel. That’s it. There’s not a single armed person left.”

The next morning, Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers were in the streets. Soldiers seized city hall, the regional administration building, and the headquarters of the Ukrainian security service, the S.B.U. “Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla­dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

Russian troops also distributed leaflets with instructions on how locals should behave during the “special military operation.” Ukrainians were told to keep away from Russian soldiers and their armored vehicles, to give them the right of way on the street, and to remain unarmed. To avoid “propaganda and disinformation from Kyiv,” the leaflets said, Melitopol’s residents should tune in to Russian state television, and to the Telegram channel of one of Moscow’s most famous and bombastic propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov. People driving around town discovered that the local radio airwaves had been taken over by Russian broadcasts, including one that aired a speech by Putin over and over.

Melitopol is an agricultural center, known for its honey and deep-red cherries, and its population is largely Russian-­speaking. But in recent years, Fedorov told me, as the city attracted funding from the European Union and unveiled a series of urban-renewal projects—a new ice rink and public swimming pool, a state-of-the-art infectious-­disease clinic­—its identity had become less and less tied to Russia, let alone to the long decades of Soviet rule. Fedorov himself, a triathlete with a boyish smirk, close-cropped brown hair, and jutting ears, embodied a new generation of democratic leaders in Ukraine. He won a seat on Melitopol’s city council in his early twenties; in 2020, at the age of thirty-­two, he was elected mayor. “People stopped living in the past and started to believe in the future,” he said.

Now Russia had occupied the city. A little more than a hundred miles away, Russian forces were pummelling Mariupol, destroying whole residential districts; in Melitopol, the offensive was nowhere near as savage but still all-­encompassing. The city was effectively blockaded: there were no shipments of food or medicine, except from areas already under Russian control, and no cash for A.T.M.s. Russian soldiers were everywhere, patrolling the streets and questioning people at random. One afternoon, Serhii Pryima, the head of Melitopol’s district council, was driving near the outskirts of the city when he was stopped at a checkpoint. Pryima asked one of the Russian soldiers, who looked no older than twenty, what he was doing there. “We’ve come to liberate you,” the soldier replied. “From whom?” Pryima asked. The soldier had no answer.

After the Russian Army invaded, Fedorov set up temporary headquarters in the Soviet-era House of Culture, on Melitopol’s main square. The occupation had put him in an odd position. Russian troops controlled the city, but he was still mayor. Initially, they told Fedorov that he’d be left alone to run city business. He was summoned at gunpoint to a meeting with a group of senior Russian officials. He told them, “You won’t be here for long.” One replied, “We’re here forever.” Another said, “You carry out your functions, we’ll carry out ours.”

Fedorov began recording daily video addresses for his constituents, rattling off locations where they could find groceries and access cash. When city buses stopped running, he called on residents to give rides to medical workers. Much like the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who, in the early days of the Russian assault, rallied people across the country with defiant videos posted to social media, Fedorov tried to project an upbeat spirit. On March 1st, he filmed himself at a social-services center that offered free food and clothes to people in need. “Melitopol did not surrender,” he said. “Melitopol is temporarily occupied.”

When Putin set out to invade Ukraine, he expected an easy victory. Many experts predicted that, within a week, his fearsome army would overcome all resistance; arrest or, if necessary, assassinate Zelensky; and establish a pro-Russian puppet regime in Kyiv. Instead, with the help of Western arms and intelligence, the Ukrainian military fought back and inflicted heavy losses on Russia.

And yet the Russian military has made advances in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, and, with its naval superiority, threatens to form what amounts to a land bridge to Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014. It has also occupied a number of cities and towns in the southeast, Melitopol among them. In Berdyansk, on the Sea of Azov, Russian troops took control of the port and began docking their own naval vessels. During a short but fraught battle in Enerhodar, missile and rocket fire came perilously close to the city’s nuclear power plant, the largest such facility in Europe; after Russia captured the city, the plant’s managers were informed that they now worked for Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear-power company. Kherson fell on March 2nd, the first major city to be seized, with a popu­lation of two hundred and eighty thousand. Andrey Turchak, the head of the main pro-Putin party in Russia’s parliament, recently visited Kherson, where he declared, “Russia is here forever. There should be no doubt about this.”

The cities of southeastern Ukraine, by dint of geography and history, tend to be overwhelmingly Russian-­speaking. But their vulnerability had little to do with cultural ties. The proximity to Crimea meant that Russia could efficiently transport armor and equipment into the region, with few of the logistical barriers it faced in the north. And the landscape, which is dominated by steppe, made it harder for Ukrainians to mount the kind of ambushes that so mangled Russian forces around Kyiv. In Kherson as in Melitopol, Ukrainian commanders retreated rather than risk losing units with little chance of victory.

“If Russian troops had come to Melitopol in 2014, they would indeed have been welcomed with bread and salt,” Fedorov told me, using a Russian expression that means to be greeted with hospitality. Putin’s acts of aggression since then have changed public attitudes. Melitopol was once a hub for visitors headed to Crimea, but that connection was all but severed following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. The war in the Donbas, where Russia stoked a separatist conflict for eight years, further soured residents’ feelings toward their neighbor. “We didn’t want to see Melitopol become a banana republic,” Vlad Pryima, Serhii’s twenty-two-year-old son, who works in I.T., said. “And it became clear that’s what one should expect under Russian rule.”

The first mass protest against the Russian takeover of Melitopol was held on March 2nd. Several hundred people gathered in Victory Square, in the center of the city, chanting “Melitopol is Ukraine!” At first, Russian troops “seemed confused, as if they hadn’t been expecting such a situation,” Evhen Pokoptsev, a Melitopol resident who participated in the protest, told me. But, as protesters marched on the S.B.U. headquarters, soldiers positioned inside fired warning shots. One protester was struck in the leg. The following day, Russian armored vehicles drove along Melitopol’s central avenues with loudspeakers blaring, “The military-civilian administration of Melitopol, in order to prevent law-breaking and to insure public order, temporarily prohibits rallies and demonstrations.” A curfew was declared from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The protesters were undeterred. They gathered every day at noon to march around the city, singing the Ukrainian anthem and calling on the invaders to leave. Russian soldiers responded by firing off smoke grenades and chasing people through the streets. Pokoptsev told me of a day when, amid the chaos, Russian soldiers grabbed a dozen protesters from the crowd, then drove them fifteen miles out of town and left them in an open field. “The goal was to maximally frighten people,” Pokoptsev said.

Fedorov was heartened by the protests but worried for the well-being of those who took part. “I know perfectly well how the Russian Federation reacts to protests and those who attend them,” he told me. In one of his video addresses, Fedorov appealed to the city’s residents to remain peaceful and not confront the soldiers. “Our task is to save your life,” he said.

Every few days, Russian officials came to Fedorov’s office to demand that he stop the demonstrations. It was a case of projection: protests in Russia are either nonexistent or imagined to be the work of outside forces. But in the modern political culture of Ukraine, Fedorov said, demonstrations are “part of our DNA.” If a person doesn’t like her President, or her mayor, for that matter, she takes to the streets and says so. “They couldn’t believe that I wasn’t organizing these protests and paying for them,” Fedorov told me. “They said, ‘Stop the protests!’ And I answered, ‘I can’t.’ ”

On the afternoon of March 11th, two weeks into the occupation, Fedorov was sitting at his desk in the House of Culture when a dozen Russian soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by balaclavas, burst into his office. They tied his hands behind his back and put a black bag over his head. He was told that a criminal case had been opened against him in the Luhansk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. He was accused of financing Right Sector, a nationalist faction that often serves as a bogeyman in Russian propaganda—the “Nazis” of Kremlin legend.

“Are you joking?” Fedorov asked.

“We’re not joking,” one of the soldiers told him. They dragged Fedorov outside and into a waiting van.

As they sped through town, Fedorov kept track of how many turns they made, and when. “I know the city well,” he said. Even with his eyes covered, he guessed that he’d been brought to police headquarters, which Russian forces had taken over on the first day of the occupation. When the soldiers removed the bag from his head, he found himself alone in a jail cell. “Ten steps in one direction, four in the other,” he recalled.

The next day, the local Russian military command named an interim mayor, a city-council deputy named Galina Danilchenko. Danilchenko had been a close aide to a local pro-Russian politician named Evgeny Balitsky, who was famous for wearing a Soviet military uniform around town. (In May, Russian authorities made Balitsky the region’s governor.) Danilchenko recorded a video address for the residents of Melitopol. “Our main task now is to adapt all mechanisms to the new reality so that we can begin to live in a new way as soon as possible,” she said. In an oblique reference to the protests, she added, “Despite all our efforts, there are still people in the town who try to destabilize the situation. I urge you, please, be sensible and do not fall for these provocations.”

Few listened. Later that day, more than a thousand people gathered in front of the regional administration building, chanting “Freedom to the mayor!” By then, the Russian troops in town had been joined by a contingent from the riot police and the state security service, the F.S.B. One guard confided to Fedorov, “After every single protest, we get it upside the head from Moscow.” As Fedorov explained, “In their picture of the world, if there are rallies, they should be in support of Russia.”

Two days after Fedorov was imprisoned, eight armed Russian soldiers came to the home of Serhii Pryima and accused him of organizing the protest. Pryima had been expecting such a visit, telling his family, “They’ll probably come for me, too.” The soldiers searched the apartment. They told him to gather a change of clothes, his personal documents, and his cell phone, which they promptly confiscated. Then they tied his hands behind his back, put a bag over his head, and drove him away in a military van.

For more than a month, Pryima’s wife, Natalia, visited the police station, city hall, the regional administration building—anywhere that had been taken over by Russian forces—in search of her husband. “Write a missing-persons claim,” she was told. She did so, many times, but got no reply. After a week, one of the Russian soldiers in the mayor’s office told her to give up writing her appeals. “We’re sick of reading them,” he said.

Natalia was eventually granted an audience with the newly appointed Russian military commandant of Melitopol. He introduced himself as Saigon, a nom de guerre, and told Natalia that his troops had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. “This is a matter for those higher up,” he said.

Natalia also reached out to her husband’s former deputy in the district council, Andrei Siguta, who had switched sides and was now working with the occupying administration. In fact, he had taken Pryima’s job as head of the council; Pryima’s son, Vlad, called Siguta a “pure collaborator.” Siguta came to the courtyard of the family’s apartment building to meet with Natalia. He began by saying that he had tried to warn Pryima, telling him that he needed to have a “not so aggressive” attitude toward the Russian forces in town. “I made the right choices, and look, everything is fine with me,” he said. “But Serhii did not make the right choices, and now he’s in a cellar.” Siguta could offer only a vague assertion: “The decision about when and how to release him has not yet been made.”

Back at the police station, Fedorov endured long interrogation sessions. His captors pushed him to resign and transfer his authority to Danilchenko. Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-­ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But after a couple of days the tenor of his interrogations changed. Among Ukrainians, Fedorov had become a symbol of oppression and resistance, an example of courage in the face of in­vasion. In a video address, Zelensky declared, “The seizure of the mayor of Melitopol is a crime not only against a specific person and not only against a particular city and not only against Ukraine. It’s a crime against democracy as such.” Fedorov sensed that his captors were aware of the uproar: now, instead of pressuring or threatening him, they asked about practical matters of administering the city. “They realized they had created a problem for themselves that they wanted to get rid of,” he told me.

On the evening of March 16th, as darkness was settling over Melitopol, Russian soldiers came to Fedorov’s cell. He was being freed in a prisoner exchange. A soldier put a bag over his head and led him to a waiting jeep. He was driven to the village of Kamianske, near the front line where Russian and Ukrainian forces were battling for control of the Zaporizhzhia region, and let out of the jeep. An officer from the S.B.U. stepped forward to identify him. As Fedorov was led back to Ukrainian-held territory, nine Russian prisoners of war walked in the other direction—the price the Zelensky administration had agreed to pay for Fedorov’s freedom.

Kidnappings have become a hallmark of the invasion. In Melitopol alone, at least three hundred people have been detained by Russian forces. “The aim is to extract a certain benefit from this person while frightening the local population, to send the message that ‘We are the power now, we decide all questions,’ ” Olena Zhuk, the head of Zaporizhzhia’s regional council, said. Zhuk has tried to keep track of those who are kidnapped or go missing, but she is certain the Ukrainian authorities are aware of only a fraction of such cases. “We didn’t understand what was going on in Bucha until Russian forces left,” she said, referring to the suburb of Kyiv where, in the wake of Russia’s withdrawal, in early April, evidence surfaced of torture, rape, and the summary execution of hundreds of people. “We will only know the real scale of atrocities and violence when we get our territory back.”

In Melitopol, the primary targets for arrests and kidnappings have been elected officials, activists, business owners—anyone seen as influential or capable of shaping local opinion. Pryima was eventually released, at the end of April, but others haven’t been as lucky. The owner of a grocery store, for instance, was arrested after handing out free food; the distribution of humanitarian aid was considered the prerogative of the Russian military. Soldiers seized his car and the keys to his store. A month and a half later, he remains missing.

The occupiers seem especially interested in local military-recruitment offices, where they have gathered the names of veterans who they fear might pose a threat. “All you have to do is find a janitor and order him or her at the barrel of a gun to unlock the room where the records are kept,” Zhuk said. In Melitopol, the records were even easier to access. A Ukrainian officer at the city’s recruitment office switched sides and gave the Russian soldiers lists with hundreds of names.

A local veteran of the war in the Donbas, who asked to be called Oleksa, told me that, after Melitopol was occupied, he felt certain that his military service would make him a target. “If southern Ukraine stays under their control,” he recalled thinking, “I won’t survive.” He hid at the homes of friends and relatives, until he could secure a ride out of town. But, as he was fleeing, the car was stopped at a checkpoint manned by troops from the Donetsk People’s Republic, another Russian-backed territory in the Donbas. They ordered him out of the car at gunpoint.

The soldiers marched him to their nearby base, where they slapped and kicked him, and fired a gun next to his ear. They brought him out to a field, handed him a shovel, and told him to dig a grave. Once he was several feet deep, a soldier shot him in the leg. Another soldier slammed him in the head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground in the pit he had dug. He briefly lost consciousness.

After he came to, he was brought to the former base of the 25th Brigade, in Melitopol. Russian soldiers there were carrying out a process known since the Chechen wars of the nineties as “filtration,” a dark euphemism for separating prisoners into categories, with varying degrees of violence applied to each. As Oleksa remembered, interrogators at the airbase were intent on sniffing out anyone they considered a Ukrainian nationalist. Prisoners from Ukrainian military units such as Azov, which has attracted fighters with far-right sympathies, were subjected to regular beatings and torture. Some were locked in a metal safe until they lost consciousness and had to be revived by Russian Army doctors. Oleksa got off relatively lightly: a Russian officer told his soldiers that Oleksa’s head was already smashed in, and not to hit him too hard.

After about a week, Oleksa was driven east to a Soviet-era prison colony outside the city of Donetsk. He was held there with dozens of Ukrainian soldiers who had been captured during fighting; he also met a man who had been detained while driving to Mariupol to pick up family members trapped in the siege. His car had caught the attention of Russian forces, who arrested him and kept the car for themselves. Oleksa spent several days there before he was moved again, this time across the border into Russia, where he was deposited at a military jail in the Rostov region. This was perhaps the harshest stop of all, he said: “They beat us during interrogations. They beat us because we were standing the wrong way. They beat us for pleasure. They beat us just because.”

Oleksa’s captors broke his ribs and rendered his feet so bruised and swollen that they wouldn’t fit into his boots. His journey continued to a prison in Voronezh, a Russian city nearly four hundred miles away. There, he was given forms to fill out, with questions ranging from his political allegiances (“Nationalist/Patriotic/Indifferent”) to what he thought of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Finally, a Russian official showed him another document, which was dense and complicated but with a clear enough conclusion: a tribunal that Oleksa had never heard of had convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.

But just as quickly Oleksa’s fate shifted again. He and a number of other imprisoned Ukrainians were hustled aboard a military transport plane and flown to Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea and the site of a major Russian base. The next day, he was driven two hundred and thirty miles to a bridge in Kamianske, the same spot where Fedorov, the mayor, was freed, and let go in a prisoner exchange.

Svetlana Zalizetskaya is a one-woman media institution in Melitopol, a gadfly and a muckraker who has worked as a journalist in the city for two decades. She’s been a television news anchor and the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, and, for the past nine years, has overseen her own news site, RIA-Melitopol, which reports on everything from local crimes to the cherry harvest.

RIA-Melitopol has also become the main source for news on the occupation. When Russian troops first took over the city, Zalizetskaya tried to figure out their intentions. “No one explained anything—they basically just stuck to themselves,” she said. The site has since tracked who among the local population has agreed to collaborate with the Russian-installed administration, and exposed multiple cases of corruption and theft, such as the three million Ukrainian hryvnia—around a hundred thousand dollars—that Russian troops carted away from a post office in April.

Before Danilchenko was announced as interim mayor, she invited Zali­zetskaya to a meeting. Danilchenko seemed eager to aid the Russian military command. “The old city administration didn’t give me a chance,” Danilchenko said. She also told Zalizetskaya to think about collaborating with Russia: “If you join us, you’ll have a brilliant career. You can rise all the way to Moscow.” Zali­zetskaya balked. “I love Ukraine,” she said. Nevertheless, Danilchenko replied, Zali­zetskaya should meet with the Russian commandant, who wanted to see her. “If I entered that meeting, I would not have come out,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I understood it was time to leave.”

Zalizetskaya slipped out of Melitopol unnoticed, decamping to a Ukrainian-­­controlled city that she asked me not to name. She has managed to keep RIA-Melitopol going, scanning social-media posts and relying on a network of sources in Melitopol. But even from a distance Russian authorities moved to silence her. On March 23rd, a week or so after she left town, Russian soldiers showed up at her parents’ apartment, ransacked the rooms, confiscated the couple’s cell phones, and arrested her father. At around ten that evening, Zalizetskaya got a call from him. She asked where he was. “In some basement,” he answered.

Zalizetskaya could hear the voice of a man with a Chechen accent. (Many of the Russian troops in Melitopol are Kadyrovtsy, so named for their allegiance to Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, and known for their violence and brutality.) “Tell her that she should be here,” the Chechen said. Zalizetskaya was terrified, but also furious. “You are holding a pensioner in ill health,” she said. Her father had a heart condition and had recently suffered a stroke. “I won’t come back and I won’t collaborate with you.” The Chechen hung up the phone.

Two days later, Zalizetskaya got another call from her father. He started to recite what sounded like a prepared text: “Sveta, no one is beating me here, they treat me well, everything is fine.” She asked if he had access to his medication; he said no. She pleaded with his captors to release him. She heard a soldier in the background saying, “Tell her not to write any more nasty things.” Later that evening, she got a call from a man who introduced himself as Sergey. From the tenor of his questions, Zalizetskaya assumed he was from the Russian secret services. He was interested in the workings of her news site: who owned it, what interests it represented, and who her sources of information were. Sergey said that Zalizetskaya should coöperate with Russian forces or, barring that, hand over the site to them. “You know that what you are writing about Russian soldiers is not true,” he told her. “They’re not like that.”

Finally, Sergey offered a compromise: if Zalizetskaya wrote a public post saying that the site did not belong to her, her father would be released. “The site belongs to Ukraine, then and now,” Zalizetskaya told me. “I didn’t coöperate with the occupiers, and don’t plan to.” But she wrote the post, and thirty minutes later she got a text message asking where she wanted her father delivered. Home, she answered. The next morning, Zalizetskaya received a photo of her father standing in his front garden.

By early April, as Russia’s occupation of Melitopol stretched into its second month, Danilchenko was trying to project an air of normalcy, reopening the ice rink and resuming municipal services. In an interview with a Crimean news outlet, she thanked the Russian Army for entering the city “so gently and carefully” and freeing it from the “Kyiv regime.” She often spoke to residents in a tone that resembled a parent trying to sound sensible and convincing to her children. In one video address, she announced that the city was replacing Ukrainian television channels with Russian ones. “These days, we feel an acute shortage of access to reliable information,” she said. “Reconfigure your TV receivers and get accurate information.”

Nearly all supermarkets were closed, not to mention cafés and restaurants. Pharmacies were running low on drugs. Ukrainian authorities tried to dispatch humanitarian convoys with food and medicine, but Russian soldiers intercepted them and seized their contents. An open-air market still operated every day, offering fresh meat and produce, but access to cash was almost nonexistent, a particular problem for pensioners who get their monthly payments on bank cards. Danilchenko promised a transition to Russian rubles, but little of the currency was available in town. Gasoline was scarce and expensive; Russian soldiers and speculators moved to corner the black market, selling cannisters of fuel by the side of the road.

Local businesses, especially those in the city’s agricultural sector, began to report significant theft. Russian troops broke into the showroom of one company, Agrotek, and made off with more than a million euros’ worth of farm equipment, including two advanced combines, a tractor, and a seeding machine. A few days later, G.P.S. trackers showed that the stolen items were in a rural part of Chechnya. According to Fedorov, the new authorities have been forcing grain producers to give up much of their harvest, and moving it across the border to Russia by the truckload.

Communications slowed. Mobile service cut in and out. Residents took to standing with their phones outside long-closed cafés whose Wi-Fi connections were still active. One afternoon, I reached Mikhail Kumok, the publisher of a local newspaper called the Melitopol Vedomosti. He, too, had been held briefly by a contingent of armed Russians. He was taken from his apartment to the Russian military headquarters for a talk with officers from the F.S.B. “They asked me for ‘informational coöperation,’ ” he remembered. For the next several hours, the F.S.B. officers pushed Kumok to use his newspaper to produce “favorable coverage of events” in town. He declined. “I don’t see anything favorable going on here,” he said. “And you won’t allow me to write about what is actually happening.” Rather than publish lies, he closed the paper down. “They made it clear that, whatever I thought was going on now, things could get even worse for me,” he said.

Days later, the Russian occupiers began printing counterfeit copies of Kumok’s paper, which they used to distribute propaganda around town. One issue featured a portrait of Danilchenko on the front page. “Melitopol is getting used to peaceful life,” she said in an accompanying interview.

The occupying authorities devoted particular attention to the city’s schools, which had been closed for in-person classes since the first day of the invasion. Many students and their families had left town; others were studying online, joining lessons conducted elsewhere in Ukraine. The basements of a number of schools had been turned into bomb shelters. Reopening the facilities would be a way to signal to Melitopol’s residents that life was returning to normal. It would also provide a forum for a central aspect of the invasion—namely, installing Russia’s preferred version of Ukrainian history and ideology.

Artem Shulyatyev, the director of a performing-arts school in Melitopol, told me that he was visited by an officer from the F.S.B., who introduced himself as Vladislav. The conversation began politely enough. “You are governed by fascists,” Vladislav told him. “They oppress Russians. But this is wrong, and we are Slavic brothers.” Shulyatyev replied that he didn’t think there were any fascists in Melitopol. “You don’t understand anything,” Vladislav said. “You don’t know about the global plans of fascists.” He then asked if the school had a library, and whether it carried the collected writings of Lenin. “These are very important works,” he said. Shulyatyev said that there wasn’t any Lenin on hand, but, then again, why should a performing-arts school have his works? “Lenin didn’t dance or sing.”

Vladislav moved on to his main point: it was imperative that the school resume in-person classes. Shulyatyev said that this wasn’t possible—it wasn’t safe, and many families had left. Vladislav grew frustrated. “It doesn’t interest us what you want,” he said. “What matters is what we want.” Vladislav urged Shulyatyev to think about the proposal: “We will be waiting for you to inform us of your decision.” Shulyatyev, his wife, and their two children packed their things and left Melitopol.

A child looks through the window of a car in a parking lot.
The first destination for families fleeing southern Ukraine is the parking lot of a big-box store in the city of Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital eighty miles north of Melitopol.
Danilchenko appointed Elena Shapurova, the head of a local technical college, as Melitopol’s education chief. In late March, Shapurova assembled the city’s school principals for a meeting at the college. The educators who attended had conferred beforehand and decided to submit their resignations—none of them were willing to work with the city’s occupying authorities. From the building’s front steps, Shapurova implored them to resume classes and repeatedly motioned for them to come inside. The principals refused. Suddenly, Danilchenko appeared, trailed by men in masks carrying Kalashnikovs, and tried to herd the group inside the building.

“We just turned around and left,” one of the principals told me. This seemed to enrage Danilchenko. She chased after them and, as the principal remembered, yelled, “Then we’ll have you all sent the fuck out of town!”

The educators planned to meet the following day to decide how to respond. “We were in shock,” the principal said. But, the next morning, news went around: four of the principals had been taken from their apartments. One of them later told me that they were held in an unheated garage, where they could hear the sounds of a man being beaten through the walls. After two nights, they were driven twenty miles outside of town. “You refused to coöperate with us, so therefore you are punished,” a military officer told them. “You are deported from Melitopol and prohibited from returning.”

In the end, Danilchenko got her way, at least to a degree: Melitopol’s schools were officially reopened in April, but only a few of them have actually held any classes. Attendance levels have been paltry. Shulyatyev said he heard that around twenty students are coming to his school these days, compared with more than five hundred before the invasion. Meanwhile, Danilchenko has announced that “pseudo-historical books propagating nationalist ideas” would be removed from Melitopol’s central library, and only “books that tell the true version of history will appear on the shelves.” In a segment that aired on pro-Russian propaganda channels, Shapurova’s husband, a onetime powerlifter who had been appointed head of a grade school, held up a copy of “Ukraine Is Not Russia,” written by the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, as an example of the kinds of books that should be banned.

By most estimates, nearly half of Melitopol’s population has left the city. “I understand those who are leaving perfectly well,” Fedorov told me. “We are used to living in a different city, with a different mentality, and a different set of freedoms and values. And they are trying to force new ones on us.”

For those who flee, the first destination is the city of Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital eighty miles north of Melitopol. Since the start of the war, an Epicenter—a Ukrainian big-box store specializing in home improvement and gardening supplies—has served as a one-­­stop welcome-­and-processing center for those coming from occupied territories in the south. Volunteers hand out tea and snacks, medics help the sick and injured, and police roam among the new arrivals, looking for pro-Russian collaborators and saboteurs.

Leaving cities under Russian occupation has been a tricky affair. From Mariupol, where as many as ten thousand people have been killed, Russian forces guarantee safe passage in only one direction: to Russia. Those travelling to Ukrainian-held territory are forced to brave roads under constant shelling, with Russian troops frequently shooting in their direction. I saw a number of cars arrive at the Epicenter parking lot with shattered windshields and bullet holes strafing the sides. But even the route out of Melitopol passes through the front line, with tank shells and rocket fire occasionally striking cars. At each checkpoint, Russian soldiers make male passengers lift up their shirts, looking for nationalist tattoos and bruises from the recoil of a Kalashnikov.

While hanging around the Epicenter’s parking lot, I met the members of a convoy of buses and cars that had managed to depart Melitopol. Space on the buses was so limited that some people rode in the cargo holds of tractor trailers. Just about every car was stuffed with more people than it could sensibly fit; parents had held their children in their laps as they jostled along the road. Many drivers had taped handmade signs reading “children” to the windows.

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Nearby, I came across two mothers and their teen-age daughters, drinking tea and having a bite to eat. I asked what made them decide to leave. “It’s like the nineties have returned,” Larisa, one of the mothers, said. Instead of driving to the supermarket, she hauled bags back from the open-air market. Lines were everywhere. She had adopted a nickname for the armored vehicles that Russian soldiers drove around town, often with a big letter “Z”—the symbol of the Russian invasion—painted on the side: zalupa mashiny, or “dickhead mobiles.” “We understood that it won’t be like this for one or two months, but for much longer,” Larisa said. For three days they had tried, unsuccessfully, to pass a checkpoint on the outskirts of Melitopol. Finally, on their fourth try, soldiers let them through.

Fedorov had also made his way to Zaporizhzhia. He set up an office at the headquarters of the regional administration, a concrete Soviet-era structure on the main square. Inside, I found him in a vast ministerial office, plain and bureaucratic, with a Ukrainian flag standing in a corner. He hadn’t done much to make the space his own; he was only going to be there a short time, he insisted. “Our next interview will be in Melitopol—Ukrainian Melitopol,” he said, a mantra that sounded not all that dissimilar to the traditional prayer from Passover Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

In a way, Fedorov spends his days as he previously did. There are meetings with the water department, the gas company, local business leaders, concerned citizens—only now they take place by phone or videoconference. Hundreds of city employees still technically report to him; a number of municipal expenditures require his signature. And yet keeping up services in Melitopol, without aiding the occupation, he said, is a peculiar challenge: “We do everything we can so that our enemies don’t ever feel comfortable, but so that regular people, who aren’t guilty of anything, don’t suffer.”

Fedorov continues to record video addresses to the residents of Melitopol, sharing news of the city’s occupation and the wider war effort. The Ukrainian Army has managed to recapture some villages near occupied Kherson. In Melitopol, as many as a hundred Russian soldiers have been “liquidated” by partisan fighters, Fedorov claimed, citing the Ukrainian intelligence service. But, given the geography and the military realities of the region, it may be some time before a full-scale operation is mounted to retake the city.

Russian forces and their local ­proxies, meanwhile, have tried to entrench their hold on Melitopol. In advance of Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, Danilchenko announced, with great fanfare, that the Ukrainian flag on the main square would be replaced with a Soviet Red Army flag. Red Army stars appeared on buildings in the city center; a banner declaring “Glory to the Victors” went up on the city’s historic archway. The aim, Danilchenko said, was to undo Ukraine’s policy of “de-Communization,” in which, following the outbreak of fighting in the Donbas, Soviet emblems, monuments, and street names were removed from cities across the country. “The Nazi Ukrainian regime has sabotaged our ability to celebrate this holiday,” she said in a video address. “Everything that we loved and held dear—they have destroyed it. But we will restore it all again to how it was.”

On the morning of Victory Day, May 9th, Danilchenko, accompanied by a camera crew, brought a bouquet of white roses to the city’s memorial for the Second World War. During a brief speech, she told Melitopol’s residents, “I wish you joy, happiness, and a peaceful sky above your head.” Later that day, the city held an “Eternal Regiment” procession, in which hundreds of people marched with portraits of their relatives who fought in the war. Soviet flags in the crowd were interspersed with the Russian tricolor; many attendees wore an orange-and-black St. George’s ribbon, originally a symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazism, which, in recent years, has been co-opted as a talisman for Russian nationalism and militarism. That evening, residents were treated to a fireworks salute. Once again, the sound of explosions echoed across Melitopol’s dark sky. ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 23, 2022, issue, with the headline “The Captive City.”

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:39 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Vermoeden,

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“If Gazprom does not fill the Salzburg storage facility with gas, Austria is ready to confiscate it and make it available to other suppliers.” The ultimatum to the Russian multinational responsible for most of the gas exports to Europe comes from the Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:08 schreef BEFEM het volgende:
Ja slim, dan zijn je drones veel zichtbaarder vanaf de grond door weerkaatsend licht.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:45 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
Ik ga er vanuit dat controleren hoeveel er in opslag zit, niet een kwestie van natte vingers is hé?
[..]
https://europe-cities.com(...)rehouse-in-salzburg/

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:48 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
En waar zijn wij nou precies gas tekort gekomen?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:11 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:
Aan Indiase Roepie's heb je nog minder inderdaad. Heb nog wel een halve schoendoos van dat spul staan als je intresse hebt.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:49 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
Hebben we het nou over een gas tekort, of over kunstmatige schaarste creëren om op die manier de prijs op te drijven?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:51 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Gas tekort.
Kunstmatige schaarste creëren om de prijs op te drijven is niks nieuws hè.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:54 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Je initiële uitgangspositie was nou net dat Rusland dat niet deed ...

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:56 schreef Momo het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

Mensen ontslaan, net of ze betere generalen in huis hebben...

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:56 schreef Momo het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

Mensen ontslaan, net of ze betere generalen in huis hebben...

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:54 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Je initiële uitgangspositie was nou net dat Rusland dat niet deed ...

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:08 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Ja natuurlijk wel dat doen alle landen die grondstoffen leveren.
Maar hij was gewoon blijven leveren.
Als dan blijkt dat er geen problemen met leveringen zijn daalt de angst en dus ook de prijs.
Iedereen wilde ineens zijn gas voorraden vol hebben, ja dan gaat de prijs omhoog.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:13 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
Is dat nou erg lastig voor jou, blijven volhouden dat dat moordende regime heus wel 'redelijk' is, of niet?

Nee hé?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:15 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Waarom denk jij steeds dat ik Poetin redelijk vind?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:39 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Vermoeden, ja alles komt ineens door Poetin.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:39 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Vermoeden, ja alles komt ineens door Poetin.
Er waren geen problemen met leveringen voor de sancties.
Dat er kutgeintjes uitgehaald worden om de prijs hoog te houden is niks nieuws voor OPEC landen hè.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:17 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:
Ik weet niet of het al gemeld is hier maar Australie stuurt nog eens 20 Bushmasters plus medische en andere voorraden met een waarde van AU$825 miljoen naar Oekraine:

https://www.abc.net.au/ne(...)-surrender/101079444

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 11:48 schreef Tengano het volgende:

[..]
Zou dat echt zo zijn? Die spiegel staat immers naar beneden gericht en het licht komt van boven. Dus welk licht zou dan weerkaatst moeten worden?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:20 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
Gister al aangekomen.

Was een AUS Globemaster gespot richting Rzeszów.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:18 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
[..]

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:19 schreef BEFEM het volgende:

[..]
Rusland zit neit bij de OPEC

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:21 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Ja precies, Poetin is een mooie afleiding.
Alles wat nu fout gaat komt allemaal door Poetin.
Omdat ik meerdere figuren zie die niet deugen vind ik Poetin ineens redelijk?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:20 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]
Okay, ik lees niet alles

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 12:17 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:
Ik weet niet of het al gemeld is hier maar Australie stuurt nog eens 20 Bushmasters plus medische en andere voorraden met een waarde van AU$825 miljoen naar Oekraine:

https://www.abc.net.au/ne(...)-surrender/101079444

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:24 schreef over_hedge het volgende:
Vind het maar een rare regel dat 1 land alles kan blokkeren als ze zouden willen. Er is vast een goede reden voor. Maar toch. Hoezo niet 90% van de stemmen is genoeg. Zodat niet elk willigkeurig land moeilijk kan gaan zitten doen. Maar ook weer niet dat de grote landen maar alles kan bepalen omdat je als nog 90% moet halen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:24 schreef over_hedge het volgende:
Vind het maar een rare regel dat 1 land alles kan blokkeren als ze zouden willen. Er is vast een goede reden voor. Maar toch. Hoezo niet 90% van de stemmen is genoeg. Zodat niet elk willigkeurig land moeilijk kan gaan zitten doen. Maar ook weer niet dat de grote landen maar alles kan bepalen omdat je als nog 90% moet halen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 13:59 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Natuurlijk, gooi een land er gewoon uit als ze een veto uitspreken, dat zal je alliantie vast een stuk sterker en betrouwbaarder maken.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:03 schreef fjs het volgende:
De Turkse president Recep Tayyip Erdogan heeft beklemtoond dat hij er niet over piekert om in te stemmen met een Navo-lidmaatschap van Finland en Zweden. Hij zei in een toespraak tot jongeren dat de Noord-Europese landen terroristen herbergen en dat hij goede betrekkingen wil blijven houden met Moskou en Kiev. Turkije is sinds de Koude Oorlog een historische pijler van de Navo en heeft net als elk lid de mogelijkheid aanvragen van nieuwe leden te blokkeren.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:06 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Nou heb ik helemaal niks met die Erdogan maar in dit conflict vind ik hem wel goed bezig.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:08 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
Want?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:03 schreef fjs het volgende:
De Turkse president Recep Tayyip Erdogan heeft beklemtoond dat hij er niet over piekert om in te stemmen met een Navo-lidmaatschap van Finland en Zweden. Hij zei in een toespraak tot jongeren dat de Noord-Europese landen terroristen herbergen en dat hij goede betrekkingen wil blijven houden met Moskou en Kiev. Turkije is sinds de Koude Oorlog een historische pijler van de Navo en heeft net als elk lid de mogelijkheid aanvragen van nieuwe leden te blokkeren.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:08 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
Want?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:12 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Hij probeert te de-escaleren.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:13 schreef over_hedge het volgende:

[..]
Nee, hij probeert er iets uit te halen voor zichzelf

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:15 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Er zijn maar weinig landen die belangeloos helpen.
Maar hij probeert te de-escaleren en daarom vind ik dat hij goed bezig is.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:12 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Hij probeert te de-escaleren.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:15 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Er zijn maar weinig landen die belangeloos helpen.
Maar hij probeert te de-escaleren en daarom vind ik dat hij goed bezig is.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:16 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Is dat het, of is dat omdat 'de-escaleren' toch vooral Rusland in de kaart speelt?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:13 schreef Panthera. het volgende:
Tot nu toe hebben ze vooral de Bosporus gesloten wat ook heel erg in eigenbelang Turkije is. Als ze dat niet hadden gedaan was het verdrag van Montreux vervallen

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:18 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Ik denk dat beide partijen toch wel belang hebben met een de-escalatie?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:18 schreef over_hedge het volgende:

[..]
Er zijn ook weinig landen die het blokkeren En daar hebben we het over. Ja andere landen leveren niet alleen de wapens omdat ze Ukraine zo lief vinden. Maar het blokkeren van het joinen van navo is hij toch echt alleen in. En gebruikt dat om er zelf iets aan over te houden. Heeft niet veel met de-escaleren te maken.

Maar we kunnen van mening verschillen. Dat mag natuurlijk

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:19 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
Oh ja? Wat voor belang hebben Finland en Zweden erbij om buiten de NAVO te blijven?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:20 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Ik had het over Oekraïne en Rusland.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:18 schreef ExTec het volgende:

[..]
Deze eigen, nogal opportunistische interpretatie van het verdrag van Montreux brengt dat verdrag juist in gevaar.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:13 schreef over_hedge het volgende:

[..]
Nee, hij probeert er iets uit te halen voor zichzelf

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:22 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]
De post waar jij op reageerde met je pleidooi voor een de-escalatie ging over de toetreding van Zweden en Finland, niet over Oekraïne.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 10:24 schreef over_hedge het volgende:
Vind het maar een rare regel dat 1 land alles kan blokkeren als ze zouden willen. Er is vast een goede reden voor. Maar toch. Hoezo niet 90% van de stemmen is genoeg. Zodat niet elk willigkeurig land moeilijk kan gaan zitten doen. Maar ook weer niet dat de grote landen maar alles kan bepalen omdat je als nog 90% moet halen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:13 schreef Panthera. het volgende:
Tot nu toe hebben ze vooral de Bosporus gesloten wat ook heel erg in eigenbelang Turkije is. Als ze dat niet hadden gedaan was het verdrag van Montreux vervallen en die willen ze niet kwijt want is erg voordelig voor Turkije. Verder hebben ze natuurlijk drones geleverd aan Oekraïne maar dat is in ieder formeel een private aangelegenheid.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:28 schreef zarGon het volgende:

[..]
Ach, kom nou.

Zweden en Finland willen meedoen aan de NAVO uit de goedheid van hun hart. Daarom willen ze ook nu pas meedoen, op het moment dat ze er zelf absoluut niets aan hebben.

De enige reden dat Finland en Zweden wél overstag gaan is puur omdat ze er iets aan hebben ('profiteren' wil ik het niet noemen). Dat ze er andere landen of de organisatie ook mee helpen, is mooi meegenomen, maar daar doen ze het niet voor.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:15 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Er zijn maar weinig landen die belangeloos helpen.
Maar hij probeert te de-escaleren en daarom vind ik dat hij goed bezig is.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:28 schreef zarGon het volgende:

[..]
Ach, kom nou.

Zweden en Finland willen meedoen aan de NAVO uit de goedheid van hun hart. Daarom willen ze ook nu pas meedoen, op het moment dat ze er zelf absoluut niets aan hebben.

De enige reden dat Finland en Zweden wél overstag gaan is puur omdat ze er iets aan hebben ('profiteren' wil ik het niet noemen). Dat ze er andere landen of de organisatie ook mee helpen, is mooi meegenomen, maar daar doen ze het niet voor.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:36 schreef Isdatzo het volgende:

[..]
Jij denkt dat de positie die Erdogan inneemt volledig belangeloos is?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:38 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Nee

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:35 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]
Dat is toch zo voor elk lid?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:40 schreef Isdatzo het volgende:

[..]
Leg dan eens uit hoe Erdogan precies aan het de-escaleren is.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:28 schreef zarGon het volgende:

[..]
Ach, kom nou.

Zweden en Finland willen meedoen aan de NAVO uit de goedheid van hun hart. Daarom willen ze ook nu pas meedoen, op het moment dat ze er zelf absoluut niets aan hebben.

De enige reden dat Finland en Zweden wél overstag gaan is puur omdat ze er iets aan hebben ('profiteren' wil ik het niet noemen). Dat ze er andere landen of de organisatie ook mee helpen, is mooi meegenomen, maar daar doen ze het niet voor.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:28 schreef zarGon het volgende:

[..]
Ach, kom nou.

Zweden en Finland willen meedoen aan de NAVO uit de goedheid van hun hart. Daarom willen ze ook nu pas meedoen, op het moment dat ze er zelf absoluut niets aan hebben.

De enige reden dat Finland en Zweden wél overstag gaan is puur omdat ze er iets aan hebben ('profiteren' wil ik het niet noemen). Dat ze er andere landen of de organisatie ook mee helpen, is mooi meegenomen, maar daar doen ze het niet voor.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:35 schreef zarGon het volgende:

[..]
Voor zover ik weet is het allemaal vrijblijvend voor Turkije, als in 'kan'. En dus niet de verplichtende 'moet'.

Kun je aangeven waar er in het Verdrag van Montreux staat dat Turkije zijn rechten moet verdedigen, en bij het nalaten daarvan zijn rechten kwijtraakt?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:55 schreef Lyrewyn het volgende:

[..]
Een verschil is dat Zweden en Finland willen toetreden vanwege hun veiligheid (een militair doel, voor degenen die dat liever horen), en Turkije net doet alsof het op zijn strepen gaat staan om er op een niet-militair vlak op vooruit te gaan. Dat mag, maar ga nou niet doen alsof Turkije geen koehandel drijft.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:54 schreef suijkerbuijk het volgende:

Gravitas Plus: Which countries could go the Sri Lanka way

Waarom zet ik deze linke hier neer ?
Er is een stuk over hoe de economie door graan en zonnebloem olie invloed heeft door deze oorlog.

Dus niet alleen op de westen maar letterlijke over de hele wereld
Zo heeft India een handels verbod gezet op graan zodat zijn eigen bevolking nog te eten heeft .

En enzz.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 14:59 schreef Candymannetje het volgende:

[..]
Ik vind het wel een beetje Paniekvoetbal.
Alsof Rusland nog mankrachten over heeft om ook nog Finland en Zweden binnen te vallen, beide EU lidstaten.
Aan de andere kant is dit wel hét moment om lid te worden van de NAVO omdat Rusland er nu weinig tegen kan doen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 15:54 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Finland en/of Zweden laten toetreden zou op dit moment niets meer zijn dan pure provocatie

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 15:54 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Finland en/of Zweden laten toetreden zou op dit moment niets meer zijn dan pure provocatie zonder groter doel. Zinloze symboolpolitiek, Rusland is op dit moment (en ook de komende jaren, gezien de huidige verliezen) geen actieve dreiging voor die landen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 15:54 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Finland en/of Zweden laten toetreden zou op dit moment niets meer zijn dan pure provocatie zonder groter doel. Zinloze symboolpolitiek, Rusland is op dit moment (en ook de komende jaren, gezien de huidige verliezen) geen actieve dreiging voor die landen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 15:54 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Finland en/of Zweden laten toetreden zou op dit moment niets meer zijn dan pure provocatie zonder groter doel. Zinloze symboolpolitiek, Rusland is op dit moment (en ook de komende jaren, gezien de huidige verliezen) geen actieve dreiging voor die landen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 15:54 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Finland en/of Zweden laten toetreden zou op dit moment niets meer zijn dan pure provocatie zonder groter doel. Zinloze symboolpolitiek, Rusland is op dit moment (en ook de komende jaren, gezien de huidige verliezen) geen actieve dreiging voor die landen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 16:06 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Als het nodig was geweest, de NAVO en de landen er zelf open voor hadden gestaan dan waren ze al lid geweest.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 16:05 schreef Ronald-Koeman het volgende:

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Dus hoezo provocatie?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 16:06 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Als het nodig was geweest, de NAVO en de landen er zelf open voor hadden gestaan dan waren ze al lid geweest.

Alles wat ze nu besluiten is net zo zinvol als het verbranden van een Koran omdat er dan Moslims boos worden. No shit, Sherlock. En nu?

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 16:16 schreef sp3c het volgende:
het is ook een leuke provocatie

zelfs als ze er over 2/.3 jaar weer uitstappen

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 16:16 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

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Ik denk zelf dat ze dat pas over 40-45 jaar zullen doen.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 16:15 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:
Zowel Finland als Zweden waren, bij eigen keuze, tientallen jaren neutraal. Vanwege handel, andere onderlige banden die diep gaan, familie die werkt in Finland of juist andersom. Niet alles is zwart-wit. Maar het is onzin om te stellen dat Rusland voor de recente inval van Oekraïne de grote betrouwbare vrienden waren van de hele wereld.

Dat andere NAVO-landen het nu wel een leuke provocatie zouden vinden als ze anders besluiten, tja. Die landen zullen flink wat druk uit hebben gevoerd de laatste maanden.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 16:17 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

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Volgens mij kondigden zowel Zweden als Finland dit al maanden geleden aan, direkt na de inval in Oekraine, dus ik vermoed dat jij dit uit je duim zuigt.

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Op donderdag 19 mei 2022 16:18 schreef Mr.Sandman het volgende:

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Maanden nog wel, poeh!