Week 10: April 28 – May 4, 2022

Summary of the Week 10: April 28 – May 4, 2022

‘To Put the Red Button Down’ – Nuclear War Hysteria in Russia

Inna Rogatchi (C). After Guernica: 2022. War Pictures.. Original Art Panel. Mixed Media. 150 x 200 cm. 2022.

Towards the end of the USSR, that monstre that ruled the lives of millions like slaves, we were joking about obsession of the Soviet authorities with their false desire of ‘putting the red button down’. To everyone, just everyone, during the three decades passing from Khruschev’s idiocy at the UN and his hysterical Caribbean crisis ( for which he was really replaced by more reasonable comrades), it was perfectly clear that nuclear arsenal is the weapon of detente. 

In 1988, while working in a somewhat freed up cultural and intellectual atmosphere in Leningrad, my husband and I were the members of the theatre group which became well-known overnight. We presented our hit, based on my, in a partnership with three more friends, play,  with my husband’s set and costume design at many festivals, both domestic and international ones. Our 300-seats hall was hosting three times that capacity, with people sitting on all possible places, including the floor. Moreover, people were visiting our performance once and again, not only those who were living in Leningrad, but with steady stream of visitors from Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and all over the late Soviet Union, from as far as Sverdlovsk ( now Ekaterinburg) and Novosibirsk, all that in an unheard for that time trend of coming for specific performance from hundreds of thousands kilometres. Very quickly, it was established also a fan club was established for this performance specifically which was literally unheard of in Russia at the end of the 1980s. 

The performance and the play was called We Are Playing the King!.. , and it was the late Soviet homage to the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, referring to Soviet reality. Among the characters of the play, there was a crazy Colonel, symbolising the militarised to the insanity part of the Soviet Army and those who were supporting that futile , hilarious in its idiocy path. That Colonel was obsessed with the necessity to put the red button. He was treated as the other inhabitants of that madhouse which was our country, by different means. Everybody laughed at the poor Colonel. He, as the rest of the characters of the play, was all too recognisable in the late Soviet society. 

As I’ve said, We Are Playing the King!.. was a super-hit during several years. We have had a lot of VIP guests as well. Once, we had not that much of a VIP, but somebody to whom our theatre’s leadership was paying a measurable attention to. He was a person with  a small unremarkable figure, and his eyes were everywhere at the same time. He was also the person who made himself invisible while in a company of more than five people, but it was clear that he was registering everything said in the room. He was a pro in these matters. He was former – former? there is no such thing – KGB. At the time, he was a deputy mayor of Leningrad. His name was Mr P. 

Deputy mayor of Leningrad was showing his enthusiasm for our performance although we all understood quite well what kind of feeling it caused among the professionals from Lubjanka. The play presented the whole country as a madhouse where the male nurse was that KGB-kind of a person, with all its vocabulary, habits, gestures, aspirations, and what had been behind it all. We knew of course that Mr P would be mad at our performance, but at the time, he was not at liberty to show his genuine reactions. He was playing the King as well as it was played on the stage. He was applauding enthusiastically, he was laughing along with an overcrowded hall ( there were a lot of funny lines in the play),  he was greeting the actors many times  going wild after the end of the performance, as the whole audience did. He could not allow himself to stay apart. Those invisible people. 

Coming behind the stage to greet us all, the deputy mayor of Leningrad was super-friendly and super-enthusiastic. He was one of us, how else. But I noticed that he did ask in his soft voice and that special feline manner whenever a recorded version of the performance exists, if so, he would be so obliged to have it. I do not recall if Mr P was provided with the record of our legendary performance. Maybe he did. I hope that he has watched it a million times. 

I remembered that episode because everything that is going on in Russia today in real life, not on a stage, is a macabre accelerating nuclear war hysteria. They crossed the line of acceptable in their own heads first, as usual. They are speaking about the possibility and even necessity of a nuclear strike daily, via different media, all mainstream ones, on TV, radio and internet. They are calling it to happen. They are instigating it. What has started as a non-verbalised probability after that very same Mr P who did not like to stay invisible any longer, very much to the contrary, ordered his defence minister and the head of his General Staff to switch the mode of the nuclear forces of the Russian Federation into the Ready-to-Go mode just two months ago, has become agitated, articulated, instigated reality in that country daily. 

In that nuclear war hysteria are involved today senior so-called journalists, professional arrogant propagandists, mini-Goebbelses of all kinds and sorts. There also are still until recently normal professional military journalists who have become somebody else, afflicting monsters. There are also all kinds of experts – and ‘experts’ , former officers, present officers, scientists, and so -called scientists. Writers  – and ‘writers’, even some of the clergy. Not to mention MPs, and all the range of officials. The very idea of using nuclear weapons is getting enrooted into Russian society at a crazy speed. It is imposed on the society in full consciousness. It is as true as it is unbelievable. 

This is not only wrong. This is sick. Deeply sick. 

Never in our life had we thought that our innocent play with that crazy Colonel trying so hard to put the red button under any circumstances and everywhere would become a hard-porn reality of that country stuffed with nukes. And that small invisible character who was smiling so friendly at our performance, who was laughing his head off at the madness of our Colonel, how come that the most ridiculous idea has come into his head in such a monstrously serious way? 

I wish I knew then. Maybe, we would write something entirely different. Cinderella’s awful step-mother turning Mother Teresa, Sleeping Beauty turning rock-star. Something innocent, something harmless, something totally undoable. 

Let’s hope that amidst all the ghastly rhetoric , their instinct of survival would wake up. There is  no point to refer to any reasonability there. But instincts may still work. I hope so. Just am thinking: where the hell are all those people who were so unique in their healthy reaction at our performances? What has happened to them? And why?

Day 70: May 4, 2022, Wednesday

NOW SWEDES ARE THE NAZIS: The New Age of Russian Racism

Well, I would not say that it is inventive. First of all, the large posters mushroomed in Moscow, with one of them next to the Sweden Embassy there is the response to the originally Swedish giant posters in Russian just opposite the Russian Embassy in Stockholm which were a good tasted and ironical, inviting staff of the Russian Embassy which is obviously left with a very little to do after the start of the Mean War, for a cup of coffee. It was nice, light and measured. 

The copy-cat response all over Moscow, and probably some more places in turned hysterical Russia is rude and idiotic. As usual. To enlighten those without Russian language command, the template reads: “We Are against the Nazism, But They Are Not”. “We’ are coloured in Russia’s national flag colours, ‘They’ are in Swedish one. The message is as simple as an axe. Russian style of conversation. 

Under the template, there are varieties of anti-heroes from ‘Them’-category. In the photo in my poster, there are actually three people condemned by Russian public propaganda: writer Astrid Lindgren, the author of Karlsson and Peppi the LongSock; cinema giant Ingmar Bergman, incredibly; and IKEA’s founder Ingvar Kamprad.  On the other version of the poster, there is also Sweden King during the WWII Gustav V who is branded as a Nazi supporter. 

As is is widely known, Kamprad was a self-identified and self-confirmed Nazi supporter who later publicly denounced his own choice in his youth. The other two giants of Swedish and world culture has nothing to do with the Nazis whatsoever. Lindgren indeed did not like Soviets, Bergman had his encounter with the pro-Nazi people who were hosting him during his student exchange short trip when he was 16. In fact, he took the facts and pictures from the Nazi concentration and death camps after the war very badly, and it haunted him for decades. King Gustav V had his input into persuading his government to agree to provide the logistics to the Hitler regime. It is a fact. But it is also a fact that it was Gustav V  who intervened personally with true Nazi Horti in Hungary on behlaf of Raoul Wallenberg and his mission. 

Very diligently, the new Russian posters are marked with the organisation who has produced them. It is the ‘Moscow branch of the “Our Victory” organisation’.  Now, Our Victory is a project conceived and runned by the main Russian political party, United Russia. This is their joint project with yet another baby of United Russia, Russian Historical Society, a pathetic anti-scientific revisionist pseudo-historical organisation run by the same bunch of officials who are in the leading positions in the country today. I think, to name them is to give an extra-advertisement to those unworthy individuals. 

The point is that an idiotic, third-class in thinking and executing anti-Swedish campaign comes right from the top of the Russia’s power. As if they have nothing better or more important to be busy with at the moment. 

Judging on the design of the prepared template for the posters accusing the entire Sweden as a country in pro-Nazi sympaties, the campaign will be continued and will target the other countries. It is very easy to put the colour of any country’s flag over those “They” word, to indicate any given country, and to place the photos of that country’s leading historical personalities, to blame via them the whole country in the alleged Nazi sympathies. 

Given the direction of the thought of the near-Kremlin geniuses , Finland could be the next, given Swedish and Finnish intention to join NATO, with all the enemies of Russia to follow, starting from their beloved enemies the UK and the USA, and to the rest of their long enemy list. 

Swedish authorities have already mentioned that they are not going to discuss at the level of Our Victory organisation. They are right. Our Victory, who?

But if there would be a proper opportunity to remind those fierce ‘anti-Nazis’ as Russian nasty propaganda, military, political elite and anyone else position themselves nowadays, to remind them about at least some from a very long list of their country’s servility before Hitler and Nazis all the time from his seizing the power in 1933 and until that ‘so unexpected’ for Stalin beginning of the Germany war against the USSR, and even after that, importantly, perhaps, it should be done to dress them down a bit. First of all, they should face their own history which they still hide all the years after WWII. Till today, their archives are closed regarding many essential documents revealing very telling episodes and facts. This is additionally to their treaty with Hitler in August 1939. Additionally to their training the Reich officers. Additionally to taking off millions of square metres of fertile black soil from Ukraine, by the way, and sending it by endless trains to whom? To Nazi Germany. Additionally to sending thousands of trains full of equipment to where? To Nazi Germany. One of my favourite documents of this sort is Stalin’s extremely nervous  telegram to his emissaries  in the West in which he commanded, or rather uncharacteristically kindly asked them to try by all means to establish the channel of communications with the Germans, as high as possible, and to try to ask Herr Adolf personally ‘would he be satisfied with having Kiev, please’? I saw this document from the Russian archives. I was later told that it has been classified back. No wonder. 

But there are extremely many facts about scandalous behaviour of the USSR’s leadership in their collaboration with the Nazi Germany from 1933 onward and with their incredible appeasing of it, plus their supplying the terrible Nazi regime by wide variety of essential resources and training their military personnel. Even from the open sources, there is more than enough material for launching an efficient educational program on who did what and who was against whom with regard to the Nazis. But of course, the geniuses who run Our Victory or whatever else of the kind are immune to the truth of history. They and the country in which they are turning Russia now is a ghost only. A ghost of truth, ghost of decency, ghost of dignity, ghost of humanity. A ghost of life. Shadows. 

Day 69: May 3, 2022, Tuesday

TORTURES OF POWS IN THE XXI CENTURY: RUSSIA’S PRACTICES

Inna Rogagtchi (C). Frost. War Pictures. 2022.

What one needs to shock an ombudsman, the person who supposedly had been used to all kinds of injustices? One needs to narrate to an ombudsman the chronicles of Russian tortures of the Ukrainian prisoners of war, as it happened recently when Ukrainian ombudsman Ljudmila Denisova was provided the information from the Ukrainian prisoners of war who were recently returned to Russia in an exchange between the side. Ljudmila Denisova, a Russian woman  from Arkhangelsk by her origin, and experienced Ukrainian politician and official, goes through gruesome experiences daily during all the time of the 69 days of the Mean War. Still, the ombudsman stated officially that she was shocked after getting the latest information from the tortured Ukrainian soldiers. The young boys were returned home, after repeated and uneasy efforts of the Ukrainian side, without limbs, with amputated legs. What has happened? 

They were forcibly taken off their boots, which the Russians filled with an icy water ordering the prisoners to put the boots on. With those boots filled with ice water, young men were placed face down on the ground, outside, in chilly weather, and forced to stay in this position for three-four days. 

It is happening now, in Europe, just next to us. The prisoners were kept blindfolded for days, they were moved blindfolded. Prior to the exchange, they were moved in cargo railway tracks, for hours. Chillingly familiar, isn’t it? Prior to the exchange, those people with amputated limbs were left by their captors on stretches just in the middle of the road, before being picked up by those who were responsible for actual exchange. 

I am  reading it and I still force myself to believe it. It is not just that the Russians treat prisoners badly. It is all another story altogether. It is that they are instructed and commanded to commit tortures, on a regular basis. It is that somebody teaches them how to do it and what to do. It is that they enjoy doing it. It is that nobody stops them , but instead, instigates them. 

It is that evil is created, added and applied on a large scale in front of our eyes. I do not even talk about the Geneva Convention and other legalities. Those who are ordered, commanded and instigate to torture openly in the way the Russia so-called army does, and who order this feast of evil give no damn about any conventions. They are living in another world. The world beyond humanity. But they are harming our world, the lives of many normal people, for now and forever. This must be stopped. And there are ways to stop it, if the body which is responsible for obliging the Geneva Convention would wake up, at last, and start to act as it should. 

Day 68: May 2, 2022, Monday

HITLER THE JEW: RACIAL THEORY IN ITS RUSSIAN INTERPRETATION, 2022 

Michael Rogatchi (C). Living Shadow. Oil on canvas. 90 x 60 cm. 1993. The Rogatchi Art Collection.

Officialdom of Russia in the face of its current Foreign Minister Lavrov has managed to stunned the world again. Importantly, Lavrov used the opportunity provided to him willingly by the Berlusconi’s owned Italian  Mediaset corporation to relay his views and statements in a lengthy interview aired on Sunday, May 1st. 

One needs to know the Italian media landscape in a closer detail, to get the full picture. Mediaset, privately owned by the long-standing P’s special and close  friend, too close one to keep a moral sanitary normality with this regard, is in a permanent rivalry with the state-owned RAI television. The Mediaset program with Lavrov aired on Sunday May 1, was simply disgusting. My Italian journalist colleagues, many of them, independently from each other, have called it, both privately and publicly, as ‘the one of the lowest, most shameful episodes in the history of Italian journalism and television’. “ It was basically Lavrov’s monologue, with servile nods and ‘understanding’ smiles by the program’s author, Giuseppe Brindici, who was literally on his knees before Lavrov”, – said by a distinguished colleague with a long career at Italian television. 

So, in that comfy atmosphere willingly created for that Russian  propaganda offensive, a senior representative of the Russian leadership aired to the world, knowingly precisely well what he was doing, that statement about supposedly Jewish blood in Hitler, comparing him with the president of Ukraine, and most importantly, about ‘worst anti-Semites to be found among the Jews’ themselves. 

Official Israel went ballistic, the passage was reported world-wide promptly, people were gaping in disgust, and even normally ready for response president Zelensky had to say that he had no words for that outrage. Our friends started to write and call us. And I? I was enraged, but not surprised, not for a bit. The same as my husband who said that he was expecting something like that to happen for a while by now. 

One needs to know the history and tradition of anti-Semitism in Russia , or perhaps live through this experience, not to be surprised by their top minister referring to possible Jewish blood in Hitler and to call Jews the worst anti-Semites. It is as sick, as cynical, and if someone is a master of cynicism in the P’s government, it is his foreign minister Lavrov who opted to use his mother’s maiden name, or the name of his step-father, there are two versions of its origin,  to smooth in his own diplomatic  career rejecting his father’s Armenian surname from the rich and prosperous family in pre-revolutionary Tiflis, current Georgia’s capital Tbilisi. 

Senior international diplomats who know Lavrov personally have told me privately that they ‘never met a more cynical person’. Dubious legacy. 

The real  message of his insulting and outrageous statement is not the one which he hoped for in their helpless fiasco on all possible fronts, military, morally, politically, etc. They, on top of Russia’s power, are very angry due to that total fiasco, and being boiling angry, they are losing control of expressing themselves. It is a known behavioural pattern. To get this low as Lavrov allowed  himself to shame his country and himself in that relaxed sympathetic towards them Italian unchallenging interview-monologue, one has to be beyond despair. And he obviously is. He got older by ten years during the last two months of constant frustration. 

Quite similar to the psychological tests on what one’s smile tells about a person, what one’s behaviour being drunk tells about a character, people’s behaviour in rage and frustration also reveals a lot about their personality. Lavrov’s behaviour being angry shows very well what kind of person he is: low anti-Semite and arrogant, cheap, unsophisticated racist. Period. 

It also shows Russia’s leadership, not just their foreign minister’s attitude towards Hitler and Hitlerism. He is an experienced fox, cautious towards reflecting the correct line correlated with the policy and views of his boss, and general outlines of the state policy. Whatever he might think and feel personally, he would never allow himself to air anything which does not reflect the mainstream of the Kremlin policy. With his – and Mediaset’s – assistance, the world now knows that Russia is back to its traditional utter anti-Semitism, updating it to the new low, version for XXI century, with refering to the Jewish blood of Hitler and insisting that the worst anti-Semites are to be found among the Jews themselves. 

If president of Ukraine Zelensky did not happen to be Jewish, the world, most likely, would be kept out of this educating knowledge.  So now we know. And the world must not only react to that, but to treat Russia’s leadership, at all levels and in all dimensions of politics, economy, and whatever else,  for who they are: anti-Semitic racists of the XXI century. 

Day 67: May 1, 2022, Sunday

 ARRESTS FOR ‘INVISIBLE SLOGANS’ IN RUSSIA

When I saw the photo which is on my work from the War Posters series, initially I thought that some of my journalist friends  working in Moscow were tired, understandably, being under such permanent pressure, and posted a senseless photo, by chance. ‘Hmm, what did they mean, really, with those kids just staying there with some dance-like gesture and nothing happening around? People get tired there, surely”, I thought. But in a minute, I was reading that what I took for a dance-like gesture was actually a gesture of a person who was holding a poster. As if. I was also reading in total misbelief that actually a lot was going on around those kids in the Red Square in Moscow. They all were arrested. In a few hours, I’ve got the quote from the police protocol of the kids’ arrest. In an official police document, it is written, black on white:” detained people were holding in their hands invisible posters with anti-government slogans’”. This is an indisputable champion in a very long top list of the causes of arrests of people in Russia  today. 

After the arrest of youngsters in Moscow for their pantomime, there is no reason, actually, to be surprised because of the series of previous multiple arrests made in many Russian cities of the people who were keeping in their hands empty A4 sheets. It quickly has become ‘a norm’ there. Orange is the new black, what a cliche. Surreality is a new reality there in Russia, and it is a mere fact. 

Critically thinking people there are thoroughly enjoying another recent arrest. It happened in Yakutsk, in the far North.  A young man who was masked all over up to his eyes, came next to the local morgue, with A4 sheet in his hands as well. His A4 was not empty. It was a photo of a bier, with a sign in Russian ‘Zhenich Prijehal’, A Groom  Has Arrived. Normal Russian black humour. But the police in Yakutsk did not get it. The youngster was promptly arrested. 

 According to several human rights watch organisations, today there have been more than 40 surreal arrests in Russia with regard to the  not obvious protests of the people, or not protests at all but people’s opinions expressed. Nine of these cases concern journalists who were supposed to conduct their duties. One of these cases is simply outrageous. Journalist Maria Ponomarenko has posted one post in her Telegram channel describing and referring to the tragedy of bombing of theater in Mariupol. She has been arrested, recently was imprisoned for two months awaiting a trial. ‘A trial’. Kafkian one. She was imprisoned for ‘violating’ Russia’s recently adopted new article in their criminal code imposing imprisonment for 10 years for ‘discreditation of the Russian army’.  Ten years of imprisonment in the Russian prison for one post in social media referring to extensively  reported all over the world world crime. 

The same 10-year imprisonment is looming for the elected politician in one of the Moscow municipal administrations, Alexey Gorshkov. He did not post anything. He just aired his doubts regarding planned celebrations for children in a conversation with colleague deputies, some of them were for his opinion, some against it. The dialogue was posted to YouTube. The deputy who in a perfectly civilised way doubted possibility and necessity to organise rosy celebrations for Moscow kids while ‘children are killed in Ukraine’, had been reported, arrested and also imprisoned for two months, with a very real prospect to get ten years of prison for the ‘violation’ of the same new article of the criminal code. His other colleague who sided with him, managed to get out of Russia before being arrested. The prosecutors are using against elected deputies such quasi-Stalinist terms as ‘motivation by political hatred’, ‘expression of negative attitude’, and alike. So, expression of negative attitude is criminally punishable in Russia today. This should be well understood by everyone. 

I have read with my own eyes, otherwise, I would not believe it, fresh  legal documents from the ongoing trial in Russia against a well-known journalist. There, in black on white is written the following: “According to the prosecutor, the Signal App installed in the journalist’s phone is a proof of his espionage activities”. Not the content of the messages in his phone, but a mere fact of installing Signal App. The fact that Signal App is used by 100% world diplomats, including their own, and the fact that Signal is used today by 40 million people worldwide does not make any difference for those prosecutors, obviously. It probably convinces them more firmly that there are 40 million spies around. 

No wonder that Russia’s general prosecutor is so busy. Poor man is as busy as ever. For example, a few days ago he in full seriousness proposed, officially, to ban ‘any symbol that could be used for the purposes of extremism. The ban should  include all memes as well”. This is a direct quote. This is what Russia’s top prosecutor is busy with nowadays. And this is for real in their vast Through-the-Glass place. 

As surreal and wild as it is, it is deadly serious. The authorities are spreading a real terror in Russia nowadays, in a preventive way, in order to silence anyone with slightest protest, and more, simply with own opinion. Or with an empty A4 sheet. Or no empty sheet is needed any longer for prompting those hilarious lines in a police protocol about ‘invisible anti-government slogans’. 

Russia, due to its perpetual irrationality and upside down surreality as a norm of life, had a chain of great sardonic writers, masters of dizzy metaphors who would be understood only by the inhabitants of that place, great Evgeny Schwartz, fantastic Daniil Kharms,  our contemporary late Grigory Gorin. They all have created eternal masterpieces stuffed with bitter-sweet metaphors of the sort of ‘invisible slogans’. But all of them, in their wildest dreams could not imagine that their masterly metaphors would be processed to such extreme, and will become reality. It is beyond any extravaganza. It is terror of imbeciles. The most scary terror of all. 

  Day 66: April 30, 2022, Saturday

SPECIAL OPERATION ON RUSSIAN TERRITORY : A WAR AGAINST BLUE & YELLOW

Inna Rogatchi (C). Life of Light. 2019.

There is only one hospital functioning in a very limited way today in once big and thriving Mariupol city. That hospital is under control of the Russian ‘liberators’ who send a doctor from Donetsk to lead it, with some of the hospital’s own personnel and some other doctors working there voluntarily – because people need help. That doctor turned out to be an honest and decent man, and without crossing the lines of endangering his own and his personnel position under the occupation, told the truth of what was going on there. And why. 

That doctor, who is trying to be calm and professional, told that under the Russian siege, people in Mariupol had to eat raw potatoes. For a long time. Which has caused a lot of sickness among a large number of people. He also said that many people had not even that. 

At that hospital, currently working there doctors and medical personnel can treat only easy cases, the head doctor said. For anything beyond it, they had to transfer the patients to Donetsk. But. The problem is that the prevailing number of people feeling sick in Mariupol, exhausted, seriously under-nourished people who are surviving the Russian siege, are refusing to be transferred to Donetsk even for a temporary treatment, even for an operation. “I keep saying to those people: please please let us transfer you to Donetsk, there is light, there is warm inside any premises, there is normal water, normal food and adequate medical services. You will be treated well. And you do need an operation. But people are refusing to go en masse. I can only guess on their motivation to refuse the treatment there ( in Donetsk”, – sighs honest doctor and seemingly a good man. 

I also can guess why stoic people from Mariupol are refusing to go to Donetsk which is under Russian and local militant gangs control even for urgent operations. They were seeing the Russian treatment in general enough to stay as far away from it as possible. 

In this hospital, the only one functioning in Mariupol partially so, there is a severe, acute shortage of practically everything. The hospital relies on volunteers, and humanitarian relief organisations largely in everything, from food to any kind of medicine. What kind of governing power is it which abandons even the hospitals in the zone under their occupation and control?  This kind of power, that conducts the Mean War. Mean Power. 

According to the official data WHO, by  March 24, 2022, there were as many as 64 hospitals in Ukraine attacked and damaged. In three weeks time, by April 14, 2022, the figure rose up to 120. Meaning almost 60 hospitals were hit in three weeks, almost twenty per week. Isn’t it too barbarian even by barbarian standards? 

Day 65: April 29, 2022,  Friday

MARIUPOL’s ONLY HOSPITAL: IN, OUT and AROUND

There is only one hospital functioning in a very limited way today in once big and thriving Mariupol city. That hospital is under control of the Russian ‘liberators’ who send a doctor from Donetsk to lead it, with some of the hospital’s own personnel and some other doctors working there voluntarily – because people need help. That doctor turned out to be an honest and decent man, and without crossing the lines of endangering his own and his personnel position under the occupation, told the truth of what was going on there. And why. 

That doctor, who is trying to be calm and professional, told that under the Russian siege, people in Mariupol had to eat raw potatoes. For a long time. Which has caused a lot of sickness among a large number of people. He also said that many people had not even that. 

At that hospital, currently working there doctors and medical personnel can treat only easy cases, the head doctor said. For anything beyond it, they had to transfer the patients to Donetsk. But. The problem is that the prevailing number of people feeling sick in Mariupol, exhausted, seriously under-nourished people who are surviving the Russian siege, are refusing to be transferred to Donetsk even for a temporary treatment, even for an operation. “I keep saying to those people: please please let us transfer you to Donetsk, there is light, there is warm inside any premises, there is normal water, normal food and adequate medical services. You will be treated well. And you do need an operation. But people are refusing to go en masse. I can only guess on their motivation to refuse the treatment there ( in Donetsk”, – sighs honest doctor and seemingly a good man. 

I also can guess why stoic people from Mariupol are refusing to go to Donetsk which is under Russian and local militant gangs control even for urgent operations. They were seeing the Russian treatment in general enough to stay as far away from it as possible. 

In this hospital, the only one functioning in Mariupol partially so, there is a severe, acute shortage of practically everything. The hospital relies on volunteers, and humanitarian relief organisations largely in everything, from food to any kind of medicine. What kind of governing power is it which abandons even the hospitals in the zone under their occupation and control?  This kind of power, that conducts the Mean War. Mean Power. 

According to the official data WHO, by  March 24, 2022, there were as many as 64 hospitals in Ukraine attacked and damaged. In three weeks time, by April 14, 2022, the figure rose up to 120. Meaning almost 60 hospitals were hit in three weeks, almost twenty per week. Isn’t it too barbarian even by barbarian standards? 

Day 64: April  28, 2022, Thursday

‘THANK  YOU FOR NOT  KILLING US’

CHECHEN TREATMENT AT the MENTAL CLINIC IN 

BORODYANKA

Inna Rogatchi (C). Tear Rain. 2022.

It happened in March. But people needed some breath to be able to tell about that. In early March, Russian ‘liberators’ seized a large mental hospital in Borodyanka, 80 km from Kyiv. Terror started, with patients got agitated, some of them on the run, three of whom were never found any longer; many in panic resorted to under their or anyone’s beds and hided inside the small closets for days. In a week of so, Chechens arrived, to a total terror of doctors, medical personnel and all the patients. Borodyanka hosted a large mental hospital, with around 700 patients there, a hundred of them bed-ridden. 

The nice Chechen squad was in a good mood. They were laughing while taking over a mental hospital from their Russian so-called brothers in so-called arms. Being obsessed with social media uploads day and night, Chechens had a working professional camera with them. They are keen journalists if you did not know. 

They commanded all patients of the mental hospital to gather in the courtyard in front of the building. It had been done. They commanded everyone to smile. ‘Smile! Smile! Smile!’ – they screamed at the frightened to death mentally ill people. People cried. And cried. And cried. Camera worked. The Chechens were unhappy. Then they tried to improve their video. Otherwise, what would they upload to TikTok? 

Then they commanded the hospital director, a woman, to start to praise on camera V.V.P. ‘Say: “Thank you, dear Vladimir Vladimirovich!” Say it now! Say it loud! Now!”  They were all with gun-machines turned towards a crowd of crying mental patients, doctors and nurses in the front of the hospital’s building. 

The hospital’s director who actually started to work there a couple of months ago, being a director of a school before, tried to think on what she must do, very quickly. “ If I refuse, they will kill us all on the spot. But I’d rather die than to thank that criminal. Yes, it is fine with me, but all those people right here and now. What to do? What to do?” Chechens were screaming: “Loud! Now! Loud!” Director said on the Chechen camera dropping the name: “Thank you for not killing us” – and fainted. Chechens were laughing like babies with gun-machines. 

By a miracle, they controlled that large mental hospital in Borodyanka for only one day. Or maybe, it was not that much of a miracle as it is known now that Ukrainian high military command was doing everything they could in that tragic situation appealing to ‘the liberators’ and sending them messages explaining who those patients are and trying to appeal to the remnants of humanity among ‘the liberators’ command. They obviously succeeded as the Chechens were replaced the next day by the regular savages. 

And the savages they all are. ‘The “ liberators” controlled the mental hospital in Borodyanka for several weeks. All those weeks there was no electricity, no water, and no heating in the hospital. The temperature there was -7C. People had to drink the technical water and they all fell ill. Twelve patients died. The personnel had to prepare some very scarce food for them on an open fire. “The Liberators’ looted everything possible and impossible. Leaving, they left most vomiting, literally, as well, absolutely sick graffiti all over the hospital’s walls. They made it in their excrements. And sick people and medical personnel exhausted during the weeks of the Russian siege, had to clean it. 

This ‘army’ is going to parade on their Red Square and may other squares in their cities soon, celebrating a 77-year old victory which they all did defaced with the excrements of their soldiers today, on the high command of a pygmies, all over it.