Amid the Challenges and Terrors

Think of this: 5 million Ukrainians uprooted. And why? So the dictator in the Kremlin can satisfy his fantasies and soothe his fears.

• Something else to think about (difficult as it is): “Separate cells to rape young women, medieval torture instruments, and burning prisoners alive: After one year in captivity, a Ukrainian medic who treated torture victims details the horrors in Russian prisons.”

That is the subheading of an article by Christine Chraibi in the Euromaidan Press, here.

There are deniers, of course — there are always deniers, in every time, place, and circumstance. There are deniers of Hamas atrocities against Israelis. But it is important to be aware of reality.

• Yet another thing:

“The most mined country in the world.” There are people in America — at think tanks, at publications — who will tell you that Putin’s love of Ukraine made him do it, you see. Ukraine is his, and Russia’s, “spiritual space.”

See how lovingly the Russians treat their spiritual space, and those in it!

• The title of this article, by Asami Terajima in the Kyiv Independent, is “Under deadly attacks, Kherson fights to keep life going 1 year after liberation.” The perseverance of these people is astounding. Terajima’s article begins as follows:

Sitting in a pitch-dark kitchen with just the flashlight on, 70-year-old Viacheslav Bezprozvanyi warned of an incoming shelling as soon as he heard a swish over him.

Split seconds later, a thick thud of shelling hit the ground a few hundred meters away. The house shook, knocking off a photo frame on the window sill.

“It’s a greeting from Russia,” Bezprozvanyi joked about the blast with an eerie smile, expecting yet another long night ahead.

How would you and I handle this assault by Russia if we were Ukrainian? How would we be holding up? Would we be holding up? Something to ponder, in idle moments.

• Winter is coming. (I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense, as in the title of Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book. I mean it literally.)

Volodymyr Zelensky has one of the hardest jobs on earth. He is leading a nation that is fighting for its survival. A nation that has been invaded by a monstrous neighbor, which seeks to subjugate it, wiping out its independence. The likes of Vivek Ramaswamy sneer at Zelensky. In the recent Republican presidential debate, Ramaswamy called him a “comedian in cargo pants.”

I wonder: How would Ramaswamy be doing, in Zelensky’s shoes? What would he have done when the missiles started flying in February 2022? Run? How would he be coping with the challenges and terrors now?

In my estimation, Ramaswamy and his like barely reach up to Zelensky’s ankles.

• For the Dispatch, Alex Demas has written an article headed “Assessing Vivek Ramaswamy’s Claims About Ukraine.” A service. Gratifying.

• Journalism, goes an old saying, is “the first draft of history.” I am grateful for a team of reporters from the New York Times, which has produced this: “They Trudge From Russia Into Ukraine, Fleeing Life Under Occupation.” Here is how the report begins:

The Russian soldiers turned up at her home close to midnight with an ominous message.

“They said, ‘If in two weeks you don’t have a Russian passport, we will talk to you in a different way,’” recalled Evelina, a social worker who until this month lived under Russian occupation in southeastern Ukraine.

She didn’t wait to have that conversation. Instead, she bundled a few possessions into a suitcase and left with her teenage daughter, heading for territory controlled by Ukraine.

In the Russian-governed lands, she said, it has become so tense that “you are afraid to look out your own window.”

Again, what would you do? What would I do?

• During the decades of the Soviet Union, some of the bravest people in the world were Russian. So it is today. Remember the name of Sasha Skochilenko.

A Russian court on Thursday convicted an artist and musician for swapping supermarket price tags with antiwar messages, sentencing her to seven years in prison in one of the highest-profile cases involving the recent crackdown on free speech.

Sasha Skochilenko was arrested in her native St. Petersburg in April 2022 and charged with spreading false information about the military after replacing price tags with ones that decried Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The Russian army bombed an arts schools in Mariupol. Some 400 people were hiding in it from the shelling,” one read. Another said, “Russian conscripts are being sent to Ukraine. Lives of our children are the price of this war.”

A customer at the supermarket who found the slogans reported them to authorities.

Oh, I bet. (For that report in full, from the Associated Press, go here.)

• Vladimir Kara-Murza is definitely one of the bravest people in the world — a great man. I have written about him, and podcasted with him, many times over the years. I am amazed, and honored, to call him a friend.

A report from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty:

The wife of imprisoned Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza has expressed concern over his health, saying he is being kept in punitive solitary confinement in a Siberian prison despite having a serious medical condition resulting from when he was poisoned in 2015 and again in 2017.

Speaking at the House of Lords in London on November 15, where she accepted Liberal International’s 2023 Prize for Freedom on her spouse’s behalf, Yevgenia Kara-Murza said her husband has been held since September in a 1.5-meter-by-3-meter cell equipped with only a bed and a stool, while he needs permanent medical assistance and special physical exercise on a daily basis because of his diagnosis of polyneuropathy — a serious disease affecting peripheral nerves.

Yevgenia Kara-Murza called her husband’s placement in solitary confinement “torture,” adding that he may face another assassination attempt while in custody.

“Because they have kept him isolated, it makes me very much concerned for his life,” she said.

A great man, Vladimir Kara-Murza. A conscience of Russia, a hero of freedom. (For the RFE/RL article in full, go here.)

• Have you seen this report, from the Guardian? “Top German journalist received €600,000 from Putin ally, leak reveals.” (Article here.) And to think that so many do it for free . . .

• For many years — since about 2010 — I have been chronicling the rehabilitation of Stalin in Russia. Putin and his men have re-Sovietized their country; the rehabilitation, or re-elevation, of Stalin is a natural consequence of this. So is the obverse.

What do I mean by “obverse”? I mean what this article, from the BBC, explains: “Russian memorials to victims of Stalin vanish.”

In a recent conversation, Eliot A. Cohen told me that he has been thinking about the title of a book by Zara Steiner — a book about the 1930s: “The Triumph of the Dark.” We who don’t want such a triumph, must work against it.