Help Iranian People In Their Fight Against Religious Fundamentalists By Spreading The News.

“Here’s where things get intellectually very interesting. They are swept up by Catherine’s idea of a new Russia. 

So Catherine has this idea, which is very elegant. It’s also a classically colonial idea: that these lands that have just been conquered, these are virgin territories.

So the place is renamed. What’s now Southern Ukraine, where the Cossacks had had power, and the Crimean Peninsula, where the Crimean Khanate had had power, these places are renamed “New Russia”.

Now that word “new” is magical, right? Like with New England, or New South Wales, or New Caledonia. 

More than 200 years later, 300 years later, people are gonna be still drawn by this notion of New Russia. 

But when you say something is new, you’re not saying it’s yours, you’re saying that we want it to be ours, right? That’s the whole point. 

So Novorossiya does not mean something which is Russian, it means something that we’re gonna make Russia, we’re gonna pretend that nothing else is there. 

And how do you do that? 

Well, you send multiple expeditions of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences to Crimea to name everything, find all the species, map everything. 

Because science is one of the tools by which you gather imperial knowledge.

And then the naming — I mean, one has to admit this is quite brilliant on Catherine’s part. They rename everything. 

So all the Turkic names, the Muslim names, the Crimean Tatar names, are replaced. 

And what are they replaced with? Greek names or names that sound Greek. 

Like Kherson, that city that’s being fought over right now. Mariupol, sounds Greek sorta, right? That’s the whole idea.

They took the old names and then they replaced them with Greek names. And when they founded new places, they gave them Greek, or Greek-ish, Greek sounding, Greco whatever names.

And the point of this is to say that Russia is connected with the classical world. And in that we’re European. We’re in the enlightenment. 

Connecting Russia with the classical world, going back all the way 2000 years, means that you obliviate everything that happens in between.

So the Crimeans don’t matter, the Ukrainians don’t matter, it’s Russia here alone with its historical destiny, which goes all the way back to Greece. 

And so it’s New Russia, but it’s justified by this connection to the classical world.”

Source: Timothy Snyder: Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 11.Ottoman Retreat, Russian Power,Ukrainian Populism

Was a city

The same place in 2021:

It’s so ironic how people who pride themselves on living in “the land of the free and home of the brave” turn into spineless cowards who support a brutal occupation by a genocidal regime as soon as they lose interest in a cause, don’t want to hear about it anymore, and become tired. I am specifically referring to the people who insist Ukraine negotiates for peace, and then proceed to complain that the war is getting shoved down their throats. The moral inconsistency gets to me. The words and the actions aren’t matching up.

Ukrainians are also exhausted from Russia’s invasion, more than you can ever imagine. The difference is that Ukrainians don’t have the privilege of becoming disinterested and looking away. The threat of death is always looming over the country. People can’t even go to a recreation center on a spring Sunday morning without getting hit by ballistic missiles TWICE, just like yesterday in Cherkas’ka Lozova in the Kharkiv region.

“Just negotiate and get it over with”

For anyone insisting that Ukraine negotiates with Russia, we’ve tried. Please read this long list of how Russia uses treaties and negotiations to their advantage and violates them rapidly. Not including the 400 international treaties that have been violated since 2014. Negotiating will do nothing if one party isn’t willing to honor the terms.

May all the invaders in my homeland carry sunflower seeds in their pockets. May their corpses fertilize our soil so the fields can grow again in a free, peaceful, and safe Ukraine. May the pain they cause return to them and their loved ones tenfold.

Russia is a terrorist state.

Слава Україні. Glory to Ukraine.

Героям слава. Glory to the heroes. 🇺🇦

Paloma Elsesser by Zhong Lin for Perfect Magazine FW 22

Morning in Ukraine is as always started randomly at whatever time russians decide to try to kill us. Explosion after explosion, and you stare at the information that there is so much shit flying to kill you. Thank you air defence for being here, so i can drink my coffee and listen quietly how you work, still being startled at the sound, but recognising that its not certain death yet

Dnipro City