Palestine, Gaza Is Not Trending Anymore

So if you go downthread on the linked tweet here, people are saying there were up to 300,000 people at one night of protests in Tbilisi:

That's wild. Rooting for them.

Protests in Georgia (Sakartvelo) against Russian-style "Foreign Agents Law". International media doesn't pay enough attention to these brave people.

Maybe the war made me a cynical and bitter person but all of the Eurovision discourse this year makes me laugh. No, for real

First of all, all the comparisons to Russian case are ridiculous. Russia wasn’t banned in 2008 after invasion of Georgia. Russia wasn’t banned in 2014 after invasion of Ukraine. Russia wasn’t banned in 2015 after intervention in Syria. “bUt wE bAnNEd ruSsIa in 2022.” Dude, you all missed a fucking decade.

Secondly, Ukrainians have been trying to uphold their contestants to some standards for years. But I DO remember the annoyance of Eurovision fans about Maruv and Alina Pash being cancelled. “Music is out of politics.” “Why these fucking Ukrainians making everything so political.” The phrase “Crimea is Ukraine” was turned into a meme. Yeah, why do Ukrainians care so much about annexed territories and ongoing war.

And this year somehow became the year of politics. Two-faced morons

💔 A Ukrainian poet and soldier, Maksym Kryvtsov, was killed by Russians at the front. He first volunteered for the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2014. After the full-scale Russian invasion began in 2022, he returned to its ranks to defend Ukraine.

Just yesterday, Maksym posted a photo with his new poetry book called "Poems from the loophole". It was recognised by PEN Ukraine, an NGO protecting freedom of speech and authors' rights, as one of the best Ukrainian books of 2023.

Shortly before his death, Maksym also posted a photo with his ginger cat on Instagram. The cat, to whom he had dedicated a poem, died with him.

Russia keeps killing Ukrainian poets and trying to destroy our culture. The evil must be held accountable for every crime, every life, and every word taken away.

Photos: Maksym Kryvtsov / Facebook

Грицько і Одарка

Це пара лелек з Полтавщини і за ними можно спостерігати у прямій трансляції на ютуб

Я давно почала їх малювати, але закінчила тільки зараз

The girls singing in this video were killed in a missile attack on Zaporizhzhia an hour after the performance 💔

Svitlana Semeikina and Kristina Spitsyna were performing to raise funds for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Their parents are now also defending Ukraine in the Zaporizhzhia sector.

The girls were only 19 and 21 years old. On August 9, they were killed by a Russian missile.

My entry for the #swoyodtiys! It was pretty fun to draw as it wasn't boring or too difficult. Thanks, @/swoyo.o (on Instagram), for hosting this dtiys!

I think I've found some ideas of how to color which I like... I'm happy about it!

✨️

Моя участь у #swoyodtiys! Малювати було досить весело, оскільки завдання не було нудним чи надто важким. Дякую, @/swoyo.o, за проведення цього dtiys!

Гадаю, я тепер маю кілька ідей для розфарбовування, які мені подобаються... Радісно через це!

Happy pride month!🌈

Щасливого місяцю гордости!🌈

These two are my characters who are happy with each other. The art is in the format of a phone screen. :)

Summer! I hope I will draw more often, although progress in this goal is already visible for me.😄

How are you? Do you have plans for the summer?

💞

На малюнку — двоє моїх персонажок, щасливих одна з одною. Арт у форматі заставки на телефон.)

Літо! Сподіваюсь, малюватиму частіше, хоча прогрес у цьому бачу вже.😄

Як ви? Маєте плани на літо?

Thank you. Дякую.

BBC News

British volunteer killed fighting in Ukraine - BBC News

The family of Samuel Newey say he died fighting alongside Ukrainian forces on Wednesday.

And another one of us (foreigners fighting for Ukraine) is gone... He wasn't in my unit and I didn't know him really but I remember I briefly met him in Kyiv in the early days of the war. Seemed to be a nice guy. RIP.

According to Wikipedia (here, scroll down to "Foreign fighters and volunteers") at least 313 foreigners have been killed in Ukraine, but I know for a fact it must be much more, because about a third of the people of whom I personally know were killed in combat, because they were in my company in my battalion, don't show up on any lists and or in any media. The ones who are made public are the ones whose parents/family take initiative and bring their kid's or brother's death to the public's attention, like recently in case of my friend Jeff who died in Bakhmut:

Task & Purpose

‘He was willing to sacrifice himself:’ Army veteran killed in Ukraine

Army veteran Jeffrey Judd Jones returned to Ukraine this year even though he was seriously injured last year by a Russian artillery strike.

[I'm just seeing this for the first time... "Even though Jeffrey Jones suffered a concussion in 2022 while working as a medic in Ukraine...", haha that's funny. Hey, Jeff was a great guy, and please don't tell his family, if they would ever ask me I'd swear he got injured "working as a medic", but just between the two of us, he suffered this concussion during training from a kind of play-fight with our unit leader at the time, who threw him over his shoulder on the ground and Jeff's head hit the concrete so hard he was passed out for literally 30 minutes. I was the first medic to help him, because I was watching while it happened, and was worried his skull cracked, but luckily he recovered. Only to come back to Ukraine a few months later and get killed in Bakhmut...Fuck, I wish he had stayed home]

The media doesn't mention that for some reason, but fyi, he was with 204th Bn TDF. That's not very well known but yes, there are also foreigners in the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Force. He died in a trench in Bakhmut area from shrapnel wounds, together with another foreigner, a Brazilian named Antonio whom I didn't know.

This is Jeff:

And then there are the many foreigners who died here who never make it public because they have no family to care about these things. Like my friend Sebastian from Poland, whom I served with last year at the Izyum Front. Shot in the head in Bakhmut, died a week later in a hospital in Poland. If you google him you find nothing, if you google him via image search the only thing that comes up is this Reddit thread:

(Sebastian is the left one)

Sebastian was genuinely one of the best soldiers and just generally greatest people I've met in Ukraine. And I'm not saying that because he's dead but it's true. I was devastated when I heard about his death, because he was really one of the best of us in every possible way. Here's Sebastian sitting in front of the house that we both lived in last year in summer:

And then there are the many (more than killed) whom you'll never hear anything about, because they go home with serious, permanent injuries. But they're not dead, so no media is interested in their stories. Like my friend F, a former Marine who was in my unit almost since the very first day of training, who got shrapnelled in the head over half a year ago on one of the exact positions I'm still working at today. I visited him in the hospital in February after his brain surgery:

He's back home in the states for a couple months now, but his life will never be the same. And there are many more like him.

Don't forget about us. Not all heroes in Ukraine are Ukrainians.