Werekat @werekat@mastodon.acc.sunet.se

A small contribution that we've made to IT operator security. I got our drone people together with our movie people to make a short video with instructions on how to fly drones safely in a warzone where enemies have Aeroscopes (and so know your home point and where your drone lands).

No subtitles yet, but please share with any drone ops you know!

https://www.facebook.com/parfan/posts/10224438880534197

I will just leave this little indie game here: https://ukrainian.itch.io/ukrainian-farmy

Everyone who's following the news has already heard about Mariupol. Briefly: test drive of a chemical attack.

So I'm going to post Tais's schedule for her art streams, when she's going to collect money that goes to getting people out of Mariupol.

Streams this week are Tuesday 15:00-17:00 Kyiv time (this means the stream starts 14:00 CET or 13:00 UTC) and the same on Thursday.

Come watch Tais draw and help her save people from her home city.

Had the biggest miscommunication clusterfuck with our shipments yet this week. Finally resolved, and now I'm looking at the mountain of stuff I need to fix which was delayed by that. But despite the delay, we still haven't lost a single shipment, and all of our shipments are working on the front lines, so we're not doing too badly.

A very important initiative: people are creating a charitable foundation to help people who were victims of sexual violence during the war. Medical and psychological rehab, legal aid in prosecution.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19-5RXXknwbbs96UG7bhHWDIlytWt8Wv0/view?fbclid=IwAR0BlD6tN3UwkIUviOwXjeJ4VZDyEyt2B45WsBJg2BN3QwKUTsZE6QcJZM0

Please boost if you can.

The gist of it is this: if you see grief-stricken Ukrainians howling and wishing death upon all responsible - show some kindness. You have no idea what sort of death might have just visited their kith and kin and what they have just learned.

Give us time to grieve. We will be kinder again in a kinder day. But that day is not today.

In their slang, "nationalist" is "anyone who will not accept Russian rule." As if "the final solution to the Ukrainian question" was not proof enough, they have spelled it out.

This is why Western analysts' "why can't they just give up the East, it would only cost them some dignity" rhetoric misses the mark entirely.

It wouldn't cost us dignity, it would cost us our lives. And the deaths would be brutal.

So we will fight as long as we need to.

400 murdered civilians in one city. And there are many cities in the north of Ukraine.

People made jokes in the beginning of the war: "why did they prepare 45000 body bags? Did they really plan to lose their entire army?"

Well, now we know. And now we know that Russia adopted a state standard for digging mass graves in advance of the invasion.

And now we see official news outlets openly writing about "denazification means liquidation of all the nationalists."

Unfortunately, this childish understanding has proven true.

One of the first messages to the volunteers was: "Please don't bring baby food. Nearly all the children are dead."

And quite a few of those children were tortured as well. Not to mention the adults, who were gunned down in the streets or taken to makeshift torture chambers.

Anyone who was slow to run, anyone who was unlucky, anyone just going about their business, anyone trying to help people or animals.

Somehow, even back when I was a child, I have always been a fan of fighting when faced with a threat to my life. I'd managed to absorb - from somewhere, somehow - that if you aren't fighting, they will kill you anyway. Mercy for those who give up is a fiction. They'll just torture you first. Join whichever group is fighting if you can do anything, anything at all. You'll be safer. As a combatant, you might just be too dangerous to capture, or be valuable for a prisoner exchange.

Well, this is the first time since the beginning of the war when I have seen the bulk of my Ukrainian friends completely stunned and shocked.

This is because news started trickling in from the north, which Russia has abandoned in order to focus on the east.

And there's only one word to describe what happened in my beautiful north, where I'd walked every summer with my grandfather.

That word is massacre.

Definitely a historian to follow!

https://twitter.com/ksvarnon/status/1505902563186466817

Tais is doing an art stream to collect money to help evacuate people from Mariupol, including her family: https://www.twitch.tv/taisartplace

2/3rds of goal collecteD! Come watch her work and help out!

A very small personal loss is that the bulk of the northern assault towards Kyiv is going through forests I spent my childhood in and around. The very same forests I learned how to make a 20-km backpack-laden run in 4 hours or less (not at all sure I could repeat that now), and where I learned how to hike and camp in general.

Even after the war is over, those forests won't be safe for many long years. They have been thoroughly mined.

My friend the artist, Taya, the one who in peacetime draws lovely, cute art, still has family there. She has only heard about them, not from them, since the siege began.

Can you imagine getting a phone call from a familiar number that last a few seconds before it's disconnected, and you don't even know if it was really them? In that situation?

I can't either.

If you are to read one article on the Russian-Ukrainian war, read this one: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-edf7240a9d990e7e3e32f82ca351dede

But be warned that it speaks of the worst horrors this war has seen to date: the siege of Mariupol.

Friend of mine is donating everything he makes from his music to the army right now. Support us if you like his music!

https://vldpltnkv.bandcamp.com/

Update: at least from what neighbors say, our apartment appears to be fine? Couldn't get in, obviously, no keys. But so far so good.

My house in Kyiv, though pretty far from my apartment (the house is long).

This isn't even a missile strike, though. This is damage from pieces of a missile that has been successfully neutralized by anti-air.