Things are even worse in Mariupol. Russians aren’t letting civilians evacuate. There’s no heating or drinking water. Mariupol is a large industrial city. It’s early March, so heating is crucial. Residents are running out of food and medication. The number of civilian casualties is impossible to know.

The reason why Russians are particularly brutal with Mariupol is that they failed to occupy it in 2014. Mariupol is a Russian-speaking city, and they hoped to defeat it easily. But the residents of Mariupol threw them out and organized a gigantic demonstration, one of the very first in 2014. They came out among a sea of Ukrainian flags, singing about their love for their country. It was all over social media. Russians were humiliated and are now starving the entire city to death.

The next on Russians’ list of cities slated for annihilation is Odessa, another Russian-speaking city. In 2014, Russians tried to occupy Odessa and in the process burned a group of Ukrainians alive. Still, Odessans bravely resisted and threw Russians out. Now Russians came back to exact their revenge.

Want to know which other city defeated the Russian invasion in a humiliating way in 2014? Kharkiv. There was no army, so citizens organized and threw the invaders out. Then they organized a parade and marched through the historical center with bouquets of flowers. Now the invaders retaliated. The historical center is gone. The civilian casualties are high. Schools, hospitals and daycares were purposefully targeted. Nobody is going to march with flowers anymore.

Somebody wrote a poem in Russian that I translated. Today is the anniversary of Stalin’s death, and the poem commemorates that.

Stalin died today. He died of shame

Because he has been bested at his own game.

“Moral panic over Ukraine” and “emotional manipulation” are the right’s “we are all in this together” and “mostly peaceful protests.”

What’s really funny is that the exact same people who mocked the left for being incapable of accepting that death from natural causes exists are now in the exact same kind of denial that violent death exists.

We are caught between people who are too fragile to accept that aerosolized particles can travel around a mask and people who are too fragile to accept that wars happen no matter how pouty it makes you. One side denies physical nature, while the other denies human nature. Both sides think that chanting mantras at reality will change the reality.

Before anybody says that the Russian soldiers aren’t shooting the unarmed protesters – yes, they are. I’m sparing everybody’s feelings and not posting the images of when they start shooting. That beautiful protest in the tiny Novopskov? The bastards shot at unarmed Ukrainians.

In the Ukrainian city of Kherson that has been occupied by Russian troops, crowds of people are coming out to protest the invasion. “We are not afraid!” they chant.

This is in the village of Novopskov:

People on the news call Novopskov “a city” but the population was about 8,000 before the war. You can imagine what it is now. It looks like everybody who’s left in the village has come out.

In the meantime, a few minutes ago, we got news that a Chechen batallion took control of a psychiatric hospital in Borodyanka and is holding the patients hostage. Again, very typical. Chechen troops specialize in population intimidation tactics where they take little kids, moms with newborn babies, or ill people hostage.

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1500071320746405893?t=TB2FqYGRH6NhuyFnJBl-iQ&s=19

Thousands of people were supposed to be evacuated through a green corridor. There was supposed to be a ceasefire. Once the civilians started crossing over, Russians intensified the shelling of the green corridor. Evacuation didn’t happen.

This is exactly how it was in 2014. If the world noticed back then, we wouldn’t be here right now.

Ukrainian soldiers have added to the traditional greeting of “Glory to Ukraine” a new line which rhymes in English, too:

Glory to the nation and fuck the Russian Federation.

Note the use of the word ‘nation’ which offers a contrast with Putin’s efforts dating back many years to cancel the word “Russian” and substitute it with “a citizen of the Russian Federation.” (It’s one word in Russian and doesn’t sound clunky.)

People who say that Putin is a nationalist are. . . very, very confused. In Ukraine, the nation-state is fighting against whatever comes next. To understand how these Putin-Trudeaus think, try to eliminate the word “country” from your way of thinking. There are no countries for these people. “But he’s destroying Russia’s economy.” “But this are Canadian citizens he’s calling fascists and terrorists.” There’s no Russia and no Canadian citizens in this way of thinking. These are all annoying imagined communities with arbitrarily drawn borders and stupidly entitled masses that bleat about rights and democracy, and wave meaningless flags.

Spain’s leftist party “Together We, Ladies, Can” (seriously, it’s the name, look it up) is saying that the way to stop Putin is “through a dialogue.” I want to poke my eyes out to avoid seeing the Spanish language debased like that.

Remember when Spaniards were neither idiots nor pussies?

I have found a single conservative media personality/ pundit / talking head who isn’t a total shit on the subject of Russia’s war with Ukraine. And it’s Sean Hannity, for my sins. Does anybody know of at least a couple others?

I’m not expecting profound insight but at least somebody who can abstain from the “moral panic / fake news / emotional manipulation / they are trying to get us into a war with Russia” type of thing. I’ve heard it so many times that it reminds me of how the Democrats were repeating “we have to reimagine policing” as if on cue for weeks.

To distract myself a little, I want to tell you about the history of the Orthodox Church in the USSR which explains why, after converting at age 8, I didn’t become baptized until 2018.

Stalin was anti-church until 1941. Not as much as Lenin, who was completely rabid, but still a lot. But when Nazis invaded, Stalin decided to use everything possible to motivate people to fight. For instance, he permitted a small amount of nationalism in the republics, especially in Ukraine because it was particularly heavily hit. He also decided to permit a small dose of religion.

Stalin called in the Patriarch and proposed a deal. Some of the church buildings would be allowed to hold services. They’d not be molested. Even a few small processions with crosses would be allowed. In return, the priests would break the seal of confession and inform on their parishioners. Lists of parishioners would be handed over to the KGB because anybody who wanted to visit a church was by default suspicious.

Many brave priests refused. They were murdered, persecuted, sent to the camps, tortured in madhouses. Some managed to worship and hold services in secret. But the official church was comprised solely of KGB informants.

I had an opportunity to observe how it all worked with my own eyes. One of my closest school friends was from a practicing Orthodox family. Obviously, this was a closely held secret. She never told me or anyone else.

One day, the literature teacher drags this poor kid in front of the classroom and proceeds to mock and humiliate her. Turns out the teacher’s dad was a KGB officer who curated the church. He was informed that not only did my friend’s parents go to the services, they even – oh, horror – had their kids sing in the choir.

The literature teacher really went to town on my friend. This was a tiny, scrawny kid in ill-fitting clothes. Underfed and terrified. (They were religious, so had many kids and not enough food.) We were all terrified and confused. We had no idea why the teacher was screaming or what was so bad about singing in the choir. We all sang in the school choir, and it was incomprehensible why the teacher would get so mad.

After the USSR fell apart, everybody expected the KGB church to go away or at least do penance for these crimes. We expected that the heroic catacomb priests would be allowed to take the place of the KGB priests and cleanse the church of this garbage.

This never happened. The KGB priests remained fully in control. It’s so bad that they rent out the banquet hall at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior for oligarch orgies. Their main source of income is tobacco sales. You just can’t make it up.

The priest who baptized me here in Illinois is a convert to Orthodoxy. He told me about how he went to the seminary in Russia to get trained, and he was horrified. Had to move to a Bulgarian diocese because, while not perfect, it was better than any heir to the Soviet church.

Of course, seeing all of this put me off the idea of church attendance for a very long time.