Russia (click here) is now six months into its long-feared full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February when Vladimir Putin announced his “special military operation” in a televised address to his citizens.
Ukraine’s cities have been under attack ever since, with the locals putting up a courageous resistance at street level to ensure the conquest is far from the formality Mr Putin and the Russian military appear to have assumed it would be.
As the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, leads by example from the streets of the capital Kyiv, tirelessly rallying the international community for support, his troops are holding back Russia’s armed forces as best they can....
Izium, Ukraine - The hundreds of graves (click here) had been cut into the sandy soil of a pine forest, isolated and unexamined for months. A chilly wind blew through the tree branches. Police officers spoke in hushed tones. And newly dug up bodies lay all about on the forest floor.
Ukrainian investigators on Friday began exhuming hundreds of bodies found after Russian forces fled the city of Izium in disarray last weekend. It was the first step in what officials said would be a painstaking process of figuring out how people had died during a three-week siege of their city and the six months of Russian occupation that followed.
The site consisted of around 445 individual graves and one mass grave where soldiers appeared to have been buried. Some had died when a Russian airstrike leveled an apartment building in March, residents said. “Here are my neighbors and friends,” said Serhiy Shtanko, 33.
Among the bodies already exhumed were a family — a mother, father, daughter and two grandparents — killed in Russian bombardments in the spring, Ukrainian officials said....
...He refused and was released, he said. But only a short time later, the Russians were at his door again. This time, they took him along with his wife and 15-year-old son to the basement.
“They tied our hands and put bags on our heads,” said Andriy, who, along with another resident interviewed by The New York Times, asked that only his first name be used for fear of reprisals. “For two days, they didn’t allow us to go anywhere, not even to the toilet, and gave us no food. They tortured me again, but I didn’t confess. After a week they saw it was useless and let us go.”
Andriy’s account, which could not immediately be verified, fits with a pattern of Russian abuses described by residents of the city who remained during the months of Russian occupation. It is also supported by the well-documented behavior of Russian forces during their brief occupation of areas outside Kyiv and other northern cities and testimony by witnesses who have fled still-occupied parts of Ukraine....
I agree with the US Senate bill to name Russia a country that sponsors terrorism, but, the current price to pay for that designation is high and the world's global food supply would be at risk in making that designation. There is no guarantee that Russia will back down from committing these crimes, but, they are all well documented. It would be wrong to inflict further pain and strife on the world due to Russia's unexpected war into Ukraine.
If Russia backs away from the grain deal there is plenty of reason to apply the terrorist label to Russia.
The USA Senate bill is correct, but lacks balance in recognition of the current state of hunger caused by Russia.
August 18, 2022
By Alexander Ward
