Hardship and hope: Winter, missile storms show Kyiv’s mettle
"Who is Russia’s new hard-line commander in Ukraine with a reputation for brutality? "Playing to Western Discord, Putin Says Russia Is Battling ‘Strange’ Elites "The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War For centuries, the country has lived in the shadow of empire. But its past also provides the key to its present. By Timothy Snyder April 28, 2022"""
Related: China Is Starting to Really Regret Its Friendship With Russia [...]The problem Beijing faced in 2022 was that in crucial areas, it was still too soon to make a break with the West. China remained dependent on the U.S. dollar system. For all the speculation about renminbi internationalization, Chinese payment systems, and its new digital currency, China was barely any closer to constructing a resilient alternative financial architecture than it had been in 2014. The technology story was equally problematic: despite the massive push to build its own semiconductor industry, Chinese firms were still painfully reliant on U.S. intellectual property. P - This left many of its companies exposed if they continued to do business in Russia, much like any other sanctioned entity. It was Huawei’s and ZTE’s sanctions-busting dealings in Iran that had risked decimating the two firms once the United States had the legal justification to go after them with full force. Now articles entitled “Is Russia the New Huawei?” were popping up, as the United States applied the same Foreign Direct Product Rule restrictions to the entire Russian tech sector that had been the final blow for Huawei’s 5G plans in the UK. P - Circumvent them, and those Chinese firms could kiss goodbye to their advanced semiconductors. The net effect was that from banks to telecoms, most of the companies that might have wished to take advantage of the newly opened vacuum in the Russian market instead faced even greater limitations on their activities. P - Almost as bad for China, the narrative about a West divided and in decline was becoming harder to sustain, to the extent that its propaganda outlets stopped trying to advance it at all. Beijing had been able to make considerable hay with Trump, COVID, Brexit, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and much else in recent years. But now it was confronted with a different picture. P - The sanctions put in place by the United States, Europe, Japan, and a healthy array of other states in Asia were not the thin gruel of 2014 but far more potent in their effect—and disturbingly replicable for China too. Central bank sanctions threatened China’s $3 trillion foreign reserves war chest, prompting emergency meetings between Chinese regulators and banks to discuss how to protect China’s overseas assets from comparable measures. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170546682
By JOHN LEICESTERyesterday
1 of 8 FILE - People walk through the city center which lost electrical power after yesterday's Russian rocket attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Nov. 24, 2022. The hard realities of Ukraine’s capital are that a once comfortably livable city of 3 million people is now becoming a tough place to live. But Kyiv has hope, resilience and defiance in abundance. And perhaps more so now than at any time since Russia invaded Ukraine nine months ago. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The play finishes. The actors take their bows. Then they let loose with wartime patriotic zeal. “Glory to Ukraine!” they shout. “Glory to the heroes!” the audience yells back, leaping to its feet.
The actors aren’t done. More yells follow, X-rated ones, cursing all things Russian and vowing that Ukraine will survive. More cheers, more applause.
Bundled up against the cold, everyone then troops out of the dark, unheated theater, barely lit with emergency generators. They head back to the hard realities of Ukraine’s capital .. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kyiv-europe-business-2b3c41d06740b6b3b5ad42497f7ebcae — a once comfortably livable city of 3 million, now beginning a winter increasingly shorn of power and sometimes water, too, by Russian bombardments.
But hope, resilience and defiance? Kyiv has all those in abundance. And perhaps more so now than at any time since Russia invaded Ukraine .. https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine .. nine months ago.
When Butch, her French bulldog, needs a walk and the electricity is out in the elevator of her Kyiv high-rise, Lesia Sazonenko and the dog take the stairs — all 17 flights, down and up. The maternity clinic executive tells herself the slog is for an essential cause: victory.
“You will not get us down,” she says. “We will prevail.”
When Paris was freed from Nazi occupation in World War II, Gen. Charles de Gaulle delivered eternal words that could now also apply to Kyiv. “Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!” the French leader said .. https://www.gouvernement.fr/partage/9406-Llib%C3%A9ration-de-Paris .
Outrageat Russia is everywhere in Kyiv. The audience and actors at the Theater on Podil .. https://theatreonpodol.com/en/theater/ .. made that crystal clear at the performance of “Girl with a teddy bear,” set in Soviet times and based on a book by 20th century Ukrainian author Viktor Domontovych. When pronouncing the word “Moscow,” the actors spat it out and added a curse in Ukrainian. The audience applauded.
A straw doll and a bowl of pins next to a framed photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Simona pizzeria in central Kyiv also speak of the city’s anger. Plenty of customers clearly felt the cathartic need to vent; the doll is pin-stuck from head nearly to toe.
Russia says its repeated salvoes of cruise missiles and exploding drones on energy facilities are aimed at reducing Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. But the civilian hardships .. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-putin-kyiv-martial-law-donetsk-4bca86846f073de6b1746adf9df13f14 .. they cause suggest the intention is also to martyrize minds, to torment Kyiv and other cities so Ukrainians surrender and sue for peace.
They had the opposite effect on 21-year-old Margina Daria.
The customer support worker and her boyfriend rode out the biggest Russian barrage yet, on Nov. 15, in a corridor in Kyiv. They figured that having walls on both sides would keep them safe from the more than 100 missiles and drones that Russia launched that day, knocking out power to 10 million people across the country. The lights in the corridor went out; the mobile network, too.
“There was no way to even tell our families that we were OK,” she says. Yet one of her first reactions after the all-clear sounded was to cough up money for the war effort.
“Anger turned into donations to charities to defeat the enemy as soon as possible,” she says. “I plan to stay in Kyiv, work, study and donate to the armed forces.”
And what of the last word De Gaulle used of Paris: liberated? How does that fit wartime, wintertime Kyiv?
Now the cold and the dark and Moscow’s bombing are turning winter into a weapon. And yet, even with the frost and the discomforts, there is also hope in the air. Kyiv feels liberated of some of its earlier anxieties.
Mandrygol, a Kherson customs officer, had fled the city’s Russian occupation in April. All the while, she worried whether the stress of her escape — through six Russian checkpoints and fields that had been mined — would impact her then-unborn baby girl.
“The birth of a girl,” says Mandrygol, “brings us peace and victory.”
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AP journalist Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv contributed. Paris-based correspondent John Leicester has reported for The Associated Press from more than two dozen countries since 1993.
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