If you're gonna listen to any speech about #Ukraine ����, let it be this one.
The Kenya ambassador to the UNSC perfectly explains how people across Africa understand Ukraine, and what the Kremlin's acts of aggression mean in our post-colonial world. pic.twitter.com/0gTuAni0DC
In case it's paywalled for you and to save you the trouble of working around it (I just ask Kam how):
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Vyacheslav Steshenko, a businessman in Kyiv, first noticed a drop-off in customers visiting his restaurant chains a few weeks ago. Perhaps this was normal, he thought: a new covid-19 variant was ripping through Ukraine, so people must be staying home. Then he heard from colleagues in the industry that restaurants in Lviv, Ukraine’s westernmost city, near the border with Poland, were filling up with out-of-towners “from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia”–places closer to Russia. Next Mr Steshenko noticed that his petrol stations had sold out of 20-litre gas canisters, the largest size.
Ukraine is not in the middle of a full-blown panic, Mr Steshenko stresses. But the remarkable calm shown by ordinary Ukrainians throughout the months-long crisis with Russia is starting to dissipate. The news suggesting a possible Russian invasion grows more unnerving by the day. That, in turn, is having a dire effect on the economy, which is “already being strangled”, in the words of a diplomat. Conflict with Russia cost Ukraine $280bn between 2014 and 2020, according to one estimate. But the damage from the past few months is of a different order.
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Quote:
Ukraine might have suffered even more had Mr Zelensky not played down the risk of an invasion until recently. His nonchalance may yet come back to haunt him. It may also have left millions of Ukrainians mentally unprepared for what seems to be on the way. But it kept Ukrainians going to work and living normal lives in a way that has astounded many foreign observers.
Luckily we have a bloke named Boris in charge here in Londonistan to deal with the Russians. He pretends to be more concerned about defending Ukraine's borders than he is about the UK's own.
I'm sure he's privately very happy about the invasion: how could people think of getting rid of him over something as trivial as Party gate while there's a war going on?
The company where I work was using a team of Ukrainian developers until very recently. I had never heard of Lviv until my co-worker told me he lived there. One other guy lived near there, and all the others were in Kiev. A woman posted a harrowing video on TikTok of her moving to her basement while shelling was going on outside her house but when I looked again last night the video was gone. Another woman I found on TikTok who works as a translator and former English teacher is doing her best to give live analysis from Ukraine. I'm sure there are many more that I haven't found.
Oh and Jack Crosbie (the aforementioned journalist on the ground in Ukraine for Rolling Stone) was on The Majority Report to give an update.
One of the things Russia might do, in the escalation of sanctions, is ban commercial flights over its airspace. Which would be a bit of a pain for Finnair.
I have a strong suspicion poorly-targeted cyber-attacks might bring down chunks of the global Internet, or the whole thing for some undefined time. (Russia have carried out significant cyber-attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure over the past few years.)
Meanwhile Trump is doing his part by splitting the Republican party,
“That’s the strongest peace force I’ve seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. There’re going to keep peace alright.” Tells me two things, one in a darker timeline we would be sending our peace keeping storm troopers to help Russia’s peace keeping tanks, and second is that they smartly kept Trump away from large numbers of US tanks.
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