Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Hot air and ill-informed banter

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

Fight them, without becoming them!

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about it’s history.”

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

People are weird.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War for Ukraine Day 641: The New York Times Actually Corrects a Head Line & Above the Byline Lede

War for Ukraine Day 641: The New York Times Actually Corrects a Head Line & Above the Byline Lede

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Quick housekeeping note: I think one you asked me a question/follow up question in the comments overnight after I’d racked out. If you can remember what it was, just repost it and I’ll try to get to it tomorrow.

I did not think this was actually possible:

Hoocoodanode?

Russian occupied Crimea:

No word yet as to whether Jim Cantore is being HALO airdropped into Crimea. Also, do they have Waffle Houses in Crimea?

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

We cannot stand aloof from Ukraine’s defense, and glory to all our people who understand this – address by the President of Ukraine

26 November 2023 – 20:49

I wish you health, fellow Ukrainians!

Today, a considerable part of our country is facing extremely difficult weather conditions. The situation is particularly difficult in the southern regions of Ukraine. Our units of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, the National Police, utilities and local authorities are working around the clock and will continue to do so.

I ask all Ukrainian citizens in the areas affected by the bad weather to be as cautious as possible. If necessary, please contact the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, the National Police, and our other state and municipal agencies. Our power engineers will restore electricity supply to all cities and villages that are currently experiencing temporary power outages due to the weather as soon as possible.

As of now, these are about 400 settlements in ten regions. In particular, operational headquarters have already been deployed and are currently functioning in Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad, Cherkasy, and Kyiv regions. Special vehicles have been deployed to the roads where needed. I would like to thank everyone who is working now and will continue to work tomorrow to protect us from this bad weather and to restore normal living conditions in all our Ukrainian communities as soon as possible.

Now, when it is so difficult, in such conditions, we should all be especially grateful to those who defend our country, who carry out Ukrainian offensive operations, who are in combat positions, at combat posts, on duty in mobile fire groups and in all our other units that protect Ukraine, the life of our state and our independence.
Intense hostilities do not stop for a single hour in the Donetsk directions and in Kharkiv region – in the direction of Kupyansk. Our warriors are also holding their positions in the south of the country: Zaporizhzhia region, our Kherson region.

I want to thank everyone who rightly responds to Russian terrorist attacks, who repels enemy assaults even now – in such conditions.

Soldier Oleh Danylchenko, a combat medic of the 110th separate mechanized brigade, Senior Soldier Oleksiy Tokariev and Junior Sergeant Mykola Tyshchenko, both of the 53rd separate mechanized brigade, Senior Soldier Yaroslav Bazil and Junior Sergeants Ihor Ponomarenko and Serhiy Kashyrin, all three of the 118th separate mechanized brigade, Soldier Andriy Shabelnyk of the 93rd separate mechanized brigade, Sergeant Andriy Tarhoniy of the 80th separate air assault brigade, Junior Sergeant Ihor Shapran of the 92nd separate assault brigade, and soldier Oleksandr Voronenko of the 57th separate motorized infantry brigade particularly distinguished themselves this week.

I thank each of you, warriors, all your brothers-in-arms, everyone who helps our brigades, all Ukrainian defense and security forces, who works in our defense production facilities, who supplies everything needed by Ukraine and our people, who tends the wounded, trains our warriors, and organizes volunteer fundraisers for the sake of Ukrainian strength.

We cannot stand aloof from defense. And glory to all our people who understand this, who fight, who work and help for the sake of Ukraine and Ukrainians! We are strong in unity.

Glory to Ukraine!

More on the Black Sea storm:

The storm over the Black Sea will severely disrupt the ordinary life. The Odesa region is completely covered in snow and wind.

Operations relating to the war will certainly have an impact, too. Especially in the east of Ukraine, where the wind is pushing a lot of humid air from the Black Sea and Azov Sea will cause a lot of snow and rain in the coming days.

Source of videos: https://t.me/stranaua

#Ukraine #BlackSea

Marinka:

Avdiivka:

I’m not sure what’s going on there, but that Russian soldier is in need of assistance. I know it would be easy to write they should’ve just taken him out, but that soldier is either ill, drunk, drugged, suffering from the effects of the cold, or a combination of some/all of those. That he’s wandering around alone without a battle buddy is the sign of a major failure. Hopefully the Ukrainians were able to get to him, take him into custody, and provide assistance.

Bakhmut:

Screen grab of a Dmitri translation about the situation in Bakhmut.

Krynky, left bank of the Dnipro, Russian occupied Kherson:

Magyar’s Birds strike hard!

Here’s more footage:

In Magyar’s latest video we can see a Russian BTR-82A firing near Krynky. In the end the Russian driver shows us all his intelligence and reverses his vehicle right into a ditch where, expectedly, it gets stuck. A FPV drone ends the vehicle for good.

Shortly before, we can see another Russian BTR-82A which somehow ended up in the same ditch and shared the same fate.

Coordinates:

46°44’56″N 33°07’43″E

The coordinates are actually interesting which I will show soon.

Source and full video: https://t.me/robert_magyar/707

#Ukraine #Krynky

 

Based on Magyar’s latest footage we can assume that at some point and possibly even at this moment Ukrainian forces have widened their hold on the left (South) side of the Dnipro River. The Russian attempt to dislodge Ukrainian troops at this particular area in the east failed.

#Ukraine #Kherson #Krynky

Russian occupied Donetsk:

Screen shot of translation by Dmitri about Ukrainian strikes on Russian occupied Donetsk

Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia:

Smolensk, Russia:

Tula, Russia:

Reciprocity is a bitch!

Here’s Illia Ponomarenko’s take on what to expect in the upcoming winter campaign:

My own anticipation for the upcoming winter of war in Ukraine for the overall civilian population — it will be less difficult than the previous one.

With the recent massive drone attacks, Russians probably made their first effort this cold season. With almost all of over 70 Shaheds downed, one would say that was hardly a successful step.

And that, following last year’s failed campaign to deprive Ukraine of heating and electricity in winter (which started as early as October 10), they would not waste their entire missile stockpile again, especially now that the production is much more expensive and complicated due to the need to smuggle components worldwide, and given the last year’s poor results that essentially had little to no effect on the Ukrainian military effort.

Yet, if that balding scum of a human being obsessed with his bruised ego and his megalomanic thirst for power says so and stamps his foot — the Russian military will be delivering new strikes with dozens of missiles every Monday, and fuck that voice of common reason.

You should have seen and heard the night of January 1 in Kyiv when Russia launched dozens of Shaheds shortly after the midnight countdown, initiating a loud air battle over the sleepless city.

Just imagine how petty and ridiculous one needs to be to do that just to spoil New Year’s Night for the people of Kyiv.

The Missile Winter 2022-23 was, quite frankly, one hell of a time. Power failures, rotating outages, mobile communications, internet connection troubles, and warming posts in communities nationwide.

For instance, my building in Bucha was more or less okay regarding the power supply. But the neighborhood in front of us was miserable sometimes. There were cold, dark days when they had electricity for four or five hours a day, with very long breaks.

At some point, we even put forward an initiative to keep our apartment doors open for our neighbors to have a hot cup of tea or charge their gadgets and things like that. Solidarity rules!

Many here in Ukraine, including yours truly, however,
expected things to be much worse, down to spending at least weeks in the 19th century.

Nonetheless, thanks to our air defense and our grid repairers, Russia failed, as you know.

Even on the most difficult days, around Christmas time, life and economic activities were never genuinely paralyzed.

Restaurants, bars, hotels, offices, supermarkets, gyms, gas stations, even the smallest coffee shops, and shawarma kiosks — everything was generally working, either adapting to hours without electricity (who said you can’t work or have fun with friends by candlelight for 4 hours?) or invested in purchasing power generators, or batteries, or power stations.

Modern technology makes going through things of such a kind as easy as never before. Last year, if you were lucky to have a good EcoFlow station and LED lights at home, you were generally quite okay with daily power outages.

The problem, however, was that such energy equipment was either very expensive or hard to get due to extreme demand (or both!).

This year, it’s not cheap, but still, it is much more affordable than during the Missile Winter, so many more people will buy something from themselves to outlast yet another winter of Russia’s aspiration towards peace with Ukraine.

Either way, we all now have the experience, and everyone knows what he or she can do to make things easier in wartime winter. Not a new thing for us.

And, of course, businesses. Large and small. Here and there in Kyiv and beyond, one can already see large shopping malls or business centers rolling out and installing really huge power stations on their parking lots.

They’re also preparing to continue working as planned no matter what. Last winter, basically all large supermarket chains, for instance, would let anyone come and charge gadgets at their premises — the situation was not that critical, so not too many people adhered to that, but this was and is a good thing, of course.

And, of course, thanks to Western aid, Ukraine’s air defense is right now as strong as never before. I’d even take the courage to state that Ukraine, particularly Kyiv, is among the best-defended places in the world.

So… let’s see what’s coming our way. I think it’s going to be okay.

Either way, we have no choice other than to live on, fight on, and support our military. We don’t have another homeland to live in.

Support my work here: https://buymeacoffee.com/saintanger

And one update to his familial Holodomor recollection that posted after I did last night’s update:

For you logistics and acquisitions enthusiasts:

Here’s the full video:

Just a quick updated on the Israel-Hamas truce.

First, we now know that Hamas broke the truce before it even started: (emphasis mine)

Two stories from Israelis who were kidnapped and then returned home. One gives insights on Hamas, the other tells you something about the Israelis from the Kibbutzim who were taken.
The Israeli Health Minister shared that Adina Moshe, 72, whose husband Saeed was murdered by Hamas, argued with her Hamas kidnappers to allow her to stay in captivity – so that another woman, who she believed was in poor health, would be freed instead.
This happened after 50 days in Hamas underground tunnels. Imagine the courage and solidarity needed.
The second story tells you something about Hamas. Hilla Rotem Shoshani, just 13, was kidnapped with her mother, Raya. The deal with Hamas was to not separate families and release them together. However, only Hilla made it back to Israel. Hamas claimed to the negotiators that they lost track of her mom.
Back in Israel, Hilla told the IDF what really happened. She was with her mom the whole time, until two days before her release. Then, they were forcibly separated by the Hamas terrorists. Hamas intentionally did this *after* the agreement was in place, to break the deal by sending Hilla, 13, alone. Back without her mom.

Sinwar continues to stick his thumb in Joe Biden’s eye in order to demonstrate who is really in charge of this situation:

Under the terms of the truce, no Israeli men – of single or dual nationality – are to be released. Additionally, the only American-Israeli released today was Abigail Idan. The remaining eight, which is the current published estimate for American-Israelis being held, are still unaccounted for. I expect that Sinwar will claim that they cannot be located or will try to hold them as a final bargaining chip should all else fail. I do not expect they will be released.

This would seem to be good news:

Except we now know that Hamas DOES NOT have many more hostages to actually exchange! The Financial Times has the details:

Efforts to extend a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas depend on the militant group locating dozens of women and children held hostage in Gaza by civilians and gangs, Qatar’s prime minister has said.

But Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani told the Financial Times that more than 40 other women and children were being kept captive in Gaza who were not believed to be held by Hamas.

He said the truce could be extended if Hamas was able to use the pause in the conflict to locate those hostages.

“We don’t yet have any clear information how many they can find because . . . one of the purposes [of the pause] is they [Hamas] will have time to search for the rest of the missing people.”

The estimates have been that there are between 70 and 100 Israeli women and children being held hostage in Gaza. If more than 40 of them are not in Hamas’s custoday & Hamas doesn’t know where they are, then Hamas will run out of women and children hostages to exchange either tomorrow or Tuesday.

What happens then? The Israelis are going to go in hard. They are going to throw everything at Hamas. They are going flatten anything standing, bounce the rubble. The preferred course of action is to get as many of the women and children out first. But if Hamas cannot release any more after Tuesday, because they do not have them, cannot find them, or cannot get them from PIJ or the Gazan criminal gangs that have them, then they, like the men being held hostage, will be written off.

Now we wait and see how much longer this truce lasts.

That’s enough for today.

Your daily Patron!

There are no new Patron tweets or videos, but here’s something uplifting, though not animal related, from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

 

Here’s the history of the song from Ukrainska Pravda:

The fact that Ukrainians are an extremely singing people is recognized by all. Even Russians who do not recognize Ukrainians as a people. Much of the song folklore is Cossack, shooting, insurgent songs about the main – struggle for freedom.

Many new songs that appeared in the current war are dedicated to this topic.

But now is the time not only for the emergence of new ones, but also for the return of the forgotten, to which new circumstances give a new sound.

Such as “Oh in the meadow red viburnum”.

A song that first sounded in a new way Ukrainian, and then Georgian, English, German, French.

I first heard it in the late 1980s. In the wake of the national revival in Galicia, the song was performed by the band “Do not worry”, which included Vasyl Zhdankin, Victor Morozov, Taras Chubay and other later famous artists.

Sometime then, I discovered the work of a British band that became one of my favorite – Pink Floyd. Despite the chronological coincidence, in my mind these two manifestations of music existed in completely different, parallel planes.

When I tried to sing “Oh in the Meadow” or We don’t need no education, I couldn’t think that in thirty years “Oh in the Meadow” will be performed by Pink Floyd. The joint performance with Andriy Khlyvnyuk quickly flew to the top of the world charts, where the song was presented as a new composition by Pink Floyd, recorded for the first time after 30 years of silence of the band.

But the song is not new and older not only for Andriy Khlyvnyuk, but even for the far not young Pink Floyd. This story is over 100 years old, but the roots go back several centuries.

The song was first performed on the eve of the First World War in the winter of 1914 in Stepan Czarnetsky’s play “Sun of Ruins”. But Charnetsky actually created a remake of a folk song from Khmelnychyna, ie the middle of the 17th century. The ancient refrain was recorded and published in 1875 by famous collectors of Ukrainian heritage and figures of the Ukrainian national movement Vladimir Antonovich and Mykhailo Dragomanov.

Charnetsky’s treatment quickly gained popularity. And especially when at the beginning of the world war it was picked up by Ukrainian Sich shooters – soldiers of the first in the 20th century Ukrainian military formation, although not independent, but created in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian army. For the shooters, this song (still slightly reworked compared to Charnetsky’s version) became one of the hymns of their formation.

As early as 1921, USS veterans created the Red Viburnum Publishing House, which published memoirs of members of the struggle for independence, soldiers of the UPR and ZUNR armies, research on the Ukrainian revolution.

Meanwhile, the song hit the ocean. There, in 1925, her first recording was made by Ukrainian singer from the New York “Metropolitan Opera” Mykhailo Zozulyak, the same one who recorded the anthem “Not yet dead Ukraine” nine years earlier”.

In 1944, “Red Viburnum” reappeared on a record in the United States, in the arrangement of Alexander Košice, the same one who made the world famous Ukrainian “Shchedrik”.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine during the Second World War, the song became extremely popular among UPA soldiers.

In the film “Red”, which tells about the uprising of Ukrainians in the Gulag camps in the early 1950s, the heroes also sing “Red viburnum”, which, given its popularity among the Bandera, can be quite real.

And the real return of the song to Ukraine takes place in the late 1980s, when it began to sound openly at concert venues, stadiums and protest rallies. Interestingly, that’s when another version with words appeared

Don’t bend, red viburnum, you have a white color.

Don’t worry, glorious Ukraine, you have a good family.

The author of these lines was the famous figure of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1980s, Nadiya Svitlychny.

Today, “Red viburnum” sounds to the whole world in different languages. A song from the Cossack era of the 17th century, recorded in the era of national revival in the 19th, processed during the Ukrainian Revolution in the early 20th century and sung by freedom fighters in the middle of the same century. A song that makes us strong in the 21st century because it unites with our predecessors who fought for the will of Ukraine in previous centuries.

That’s all there is to it now. Until the next meetings in the cut of history.

Glory to Ukraine!

Here’s the lyrics: (Updated with full Ukrainian and English lyrics at 12:05 AM EST 27 NOV 2023)

Ой у лузі червона калина похилилася,
Чогось наша славна Україна зажурилася.
А ми тую червону калину підіймемо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!
А ми тую червону калину підіймемо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!
Не хилися, червона калино, маєш білий цвіт.
Не журися, славна Україно, маєш вільний рід.
А ми тую червону калину підіймемо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей, гей, розвеселимо!
А ми тую червону калину підіймемо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей, гей, розвеселимо!
Маршерують наші добровольці у кривавий тан,
Визволяти братів-українців з ворожих кайдан.
А ми наших братів-українців визволимо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!
А ми наших братів-українців визволимо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!
Ой у полі ярої пшенички золотистий лан,
Розпочали стрільці українські з ворогами тан,
А ми тую ярую пшеничку ізберемо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!
А ми тую ярую пшеничку ізберемо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!
Як повіє буйнесенький вітер з широких степів,
То прославить по всій Україні січових стрільців.
А ми тую стрілецькую славу збережемо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!
А ми тую стрілецькую славу збережемо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!

And in English:

Oh, in the meadow a red kalyna has bent down low,
For some reason, our glorious Ukraine is in sorrow.
And we’ll take that red kalyna and we will raise it up,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
And we’ll take that red kalyna and we will raise it up,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
Do not bend low, oh red kalyna, you have a white flower,
Do not worry, glorious Ukraine, you have a free people.
And we’ll take that red kalyna and will raise it up,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
And we’ll take that red kalyna and we will raise it up,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
Marching forward, our fellow volunteers, into a bloody fray,
For to free our brother Ukrainians from the shackles of Moscow.
And we, our brother Ukrainians, we will then liberate,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
And we’ll take that red kalyna and we will raise it up,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
Oh in the field of early spring wheat, there’s a golden furrow,
Then began the Ukrainian riflemen to engage the enemy.
And we’ll take that precious, early wheat and will gather it,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
And we’ll take that red kalyna and we will raise it up,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
When the stormy winds blow forth from the wide steppes,
They will glorify, throughout Ukraine, the Sich riflemen.
And we’ll take the glory of the riflemen preserving it,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!
And we’ll take that red kalyna and we will raise it up,
And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey, hey!

https://lyricstranslate.com

And here are a few different versions:

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

38Comments

  1. 1.

    Devore

    Given all of death and destruction already dealt out by the Israelis. Any chance they might declare victory and back off?

  2. 2.

    Mike in NC

    New York Times: 1930s admirers of Mussolini and Hitler. The same great people that gave us Donald Fucking Trump. What will they think up next?

  3. 3.

    Alison Rose

    Being from the Bay Area, I can’t even imagine living through weather like that under the best of circumstances, let alone while trying to fight and survive a war.

    Hopefully the Ukrainians were able to get to him, take him into custody, and provide assistance.

    It’s certain that he would be far better treatment than a Ukrainian soldier experiencing similar distress of whatever kind would from the orcs. Because only one side has consciences.

    Thank you as always, Adam.

  6. 6.

    Gin & Tonic

    Thanks for highlighting the “Chervona Kalyna” song, Adam, but the English lyrics you give in the last text box are only of the first stanza. This Wikipedia article gives all (current) five. Note that it was originally four; the fifth, the “white color” one (actually sung as the second) was added recently.

    Note also that Khlyvnyuk, in the first video, just sings the first stanza over and over, missing the lyricism of the rest of the song.

  8. 8.

    Gin & Tonic

    Yesterday the Speaker of Finland’s Parliament, Jussi Halla-aho, addressed Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) in Kyiv – in absolutely flawless Ukrainian. Video is linked in the tweet below, but will likely not be impressive to non-speakers of Ukrainian.

    Учора спікер парламенту Фінляндії Юссі Халла-ахо виступив із промовою у Верховній Раді повністю українською мовою.Під час свого виступу він нагадав, що Фінляндія у 1939 році теж зіткнулася з імперською агресією СРСР, як зараз Україна, тому 24 лютого фіни добре пригадали це… pic.twitter.com/1iWQkMk4PQ— ҐРУНТ (@grntmedia) November 26, 2023

  13. 13.

    Adam L Silverman

    @devore: As I’ve written here before, there are four strategic objectives:

    1. Identifying the failures that led up to 7 OCT
    2. Creating solutions to those and implementing them
    3. Rescuing the hostages
    4. Degrading Hamas’s capabilities: capturing/killing the leadership and everyone involved with 7 OCT, destroying Hamas’s capacity and capabilities

    There’s a smart way to do that and there’s what Israel is doing.

  17. 17.

    JaySinWA

    @Adam L Silverman: I’m pretty sure there are more than those two ways to do that and I suspect we will see one or more of them as this goes on.

    ETA actually I hope to see different approaches. I doubt a perfectly smart one will prevail, but better ones would be helpful.

  19. 19.

    way2blue

    Adam.  Not sure if this is the query from yesterday’s comments you reference above.  But I was asking about Orban–who seems intend on thwarting Ukraine’s integration into the EU.  Specifically next month’s vote to initiate the process.  Just wondering how you see this political maneuvering playing out.  The prospects for suspending Hungary’s voting privilege owing to failure to adhere to EU principles…  [One can hope.]

    Adam, I also read today that Orban is attempting to block Ukraine’s next step in obtaining EU membership.

  20. 20.

    Adam L Silverman

    @JaySinWA: There are likely several ways to achieve those objectives in a smart and measured way. There’s what Israel is currently doing, which is not smart or measured. And there’s also several other ways to do it that is also not smart or measured.

  22. 22.

    Jay

    @Adam L Silverman:

    “There’s a smart way to do that and there’s what Israel is doing.” suggests that Israel is doing the “smart” thing, which they are not.

    Like you have said, they are “bouncing the rubble”

    BTW, I know what you meant. Others might not.

  23. 23.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jay: No “and that’s what Israel is doing” would imply that’s what Israel is doing. Which is why I did not write that.

  25. 25.

    YY_Sima Qian

    It seems that 155 mm howitzer shells is not the only type of shells that Ukraine is running short of (videos of the interviews in the link to the Twitter thread:

    Guillaume Ptak @guillaume_ptak

    Spent the day with soldiers of the 56th Brigade operating a 120mm mortar in the Bakhmut direction. When asked how many shells they fire a day, 24 y.o “Fritz” answered: “It would be easier to tell you how many we fire in a month. On average, about 2 or 3 a day.”

    …

  27. 27.

    Hangö Kex

    @YY_Sima Qian: I understand he delivered the whole address in fluent Ukrainian; the background is that before entering politics he was a  linguist specializing in ancient Church Slavonic and to do this properly needed to be skilled in Ukrainian.

  28. 28.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Hangö Kex: That makes sense! Thanks. I was thinking he would have to be a world historical language savant to be able to deliver an entire address in fluent Ukrainian if only after a few weeks of learning.

    I have heard that Russian has some of the most challenging syntax among all languages, up there w/ Arabic. Does that also apply to Ukrainian? Maybe this is a questioner G&T.

  29. 29.

    daveNYC

    @Adam L Silverman: Those would be the strategic goals of a normal country.  Unfortunately any examination of point one would show that the government messed up, and that’s a non-starter for Bibi and his coalition.  And unfortunately the government seems much more interested in wiping out Hamas, broadly defined by the nuttier members of the government as ‘everyone in Gaza’ than actually rescuing any hostages.

  30. 30.

    zhena gogolia

    I know I’m late, but — a friend was saying last week that the Gaza civilian casualties dwarf the Ukrainian ones, and I did not have any statistics at my fingertips. I went online, and the UN statistics were only about 3,000 Ukrainian civilian casualties since 2014, which surprised me, but I’m bad with numbers. I concluded that my friend was right. Is that wrong? What is the number? What is a reliable source?

  31. 31.

    daveNYC

    @zhena gogolia: https://ukraine.un.org/en/253322-civilian-deaths-ukraine-war-top-10000-un-says#:~:text=At%20least%2010%2C000%20civilians%2C%20including,Ukraine%20(HRMMU)%20said%20today.

    At least 10,000 civilians, including more than 560 children, have been killed and over 18,500 have been injured since Russia launched its a full-scale armed attack against Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) said today.

    And that’s a conservative estimate.

  33. 33.

    dr. luba

    @daveNYC @zhena gogolia: It’s hard to say what the actual Ukrainian casualties have been, because many have been in russian controlled areas, where there are many mass graves.

    From the Wikipedia article on the siege of Mariupol:  Ukrainian officials reported that approximately 25,000 civilians had been killed and that at least 95% of the city had been destroyed during the fighting, primarily by large-scale Russian bombardments.

  34. 34.

    zhena gogolia

    Thanks, all.

    There’s probably no point in going back to this person now, but if it comes up again, I’ll know what to say.

    I’m not big on counting and comparing deaths, so I wasn’t prepared.

  35. 35.

    Origuy

    @YY_Sima Qian: Paul at the Langfocus YouTube channel has a video covering the differences. Note that he posted it four years ago, some of the statistics may be different.

    I studied Russian for several years. It’s got six noun case endings, two simple verb tenses plus verb aspect, meaning different verbs for completed and continuing action. According to Wikipedia, Ukranian is similar, except for one more noun case and one more tense, so it is at the same level of complexity.

  36. 36.

    dr. luba

    @Origuy: Ukrainian is still simpler than English because it has rules and follows them.  Not many irregular verbs, and the current orthography was set  IIRC in the late 1800s, so the language is still mostly phonetic (no silent letters, no letters with multiple pronunciations).

    Ukrainian seems harder to native English speakers because they’re used to the disorder of English, but also to its lack of declensions.

  37. 37.

    dr. luba

    @YY_Sima Qian: Ukrainian is a truly phonetic language, so it would be simple for someone who knows its basic elements to read it aloud.  The only difficulty I have is with accents on syllables–there are no set rules on this.

    That being said, much as I love Timothy Snyder, his accent in Ukrainian is……painful to listen to.

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