As the war drags on and the brutality and terrorism of Russian aggression continue, achieving depths of depravity barely imaginable just one year ago, the news of the day — Putin’s announcement of a draft and the mixed Russian responses that greeted it (ranging from visceral protest to quiet flight to media discombobulation to further fascist frenzy), the kidnapping and subsequent release of the director of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, Ukrainian armed forces’ victories in the northeast and southeast — all seem like blips on a screen that continues to flicker its emergency signal to a world gradually, and increasingly, tuning out.
There is of course much that I could be sharing here on this blog, but most of it is easily found. The New Yorker’s David Kortava’s piece on Russian “filtration camps,” for instance, makes for suitably depressing reading. The camps, according to Human Rights Watch researcher Tanya Lokshina, are used for multiple purposes, including for “processing civilians for transfer to Russia, screening for combatants and saboteurs, gathering military intelligence, soliciting false testimonies of war crimes committed by Ukrainian soldiers, collecting personal data on the civilian population, and purging the occupied territories of residents insufficiently loyal to Moscow.”
The piece ends with its central figure, Taras, speaking of Mariupol “not as a real place in the world, under temporary occupation by the Russian Federation, but as a memory or a dream, a phantom city situated somewhere in the distant past. ‘I would really like to return there, but Mariupol doesn’t exist,’ Taras said. ‘There’s nowhere to return to.'”
The genocide continues. For those with doubts about the fascist nature of Russian mobilization, a glimpse of the “Holy War” rhetoric celebrating the “annexation” of parts of eastern and southern Ukraine — “holy war” against “madmen, perverts, and Satanists” — should suffice to remind us what the world is up against. The response is somewhat tepid, showing that many of those present are bussed-in state employees; if anything, this is fascism-from-above.
Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Visual Investigations team has produced another excellent multimedia report, this one focusing on Russian soldiers’ cell phone calls from the front, which they analyzed and authenticated over a two-month period. It can be viewed here:
