“Abducted Ukrainian shares story of survival in Austin”
“At just 16 years old, Ivan Matkosvsyi has endured two years of war.
He fled on foot from his war-torn hometown of Mariupol — one of the cities most ravaged by the Russian invasion — after a month often spent in a bomb shelter. But on that long walk to safety, he was taken by Russian troops.
“I came across the Russian checkpoint, and they forced me to take almost all my clothes off,” Ivan recounted in Ukrainian. “I didn’t want to separate from my older brother. We decided to just escape. But they caught us and started threatening us with weapons. Thankfully, my brother was released and he was able to go to Ukraine, but I was sent to Donetsk.””
https://www.kxan.com/news/abducted-ukrainian-shares-story-of-survival-in-austin/
1/3 Gone. Gone With the Wind.
“Ukraine Has No Navy. But It’s Hammering Russia In The Black Sea.”
“The grainy black-and-white video showed what appeared to be a fast-moving speedboat bobbing on the nighttime waves, swerving back and forth as it approaches a much larger warship. The ship then explodes spectacularly, and the nearly 3-minute video ends with a vessel seen rolling onto its port side just before it sinks.
The speedboat was in fact a Ukrainian-designed unmanned maritime drone packed with explosives, known as the MAGURA-V. The warship purportedly was the Tsezar Kunikov, one of just a handful of heavy landing ships in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It sank off the southern coast of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Russia seized 10 years ago. The fate of the ship’s crew, estimated at around 70, is unclear.
One day after, the admiral in charge of the Black Sea Fleet was reportedly stripped of his command.
The Tsezar Kunikov is one of nearly two dozen Russian warships that Ukraine has seriously damaged or outright sunk since Russia began its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
Prior to its sinking, Oryx, a Dutch open-source website known for verified tallies of Russian and Ukrainian equipment losses, put the figure at 21 warships and one submarine. Ukraine’s general staff has a slightly higher count: 24 Russian ships and one submarine.
That works out to approximately a third of the entire fleet, which numbers around 74. Those figures do not include smaller craft such as shallow-draft coastal patrol boats or auxiliary vessels.”
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-navy-black-sea-russia/32826343.html
OT:
Elon said they are targeting the second week of march for the Starship Flight 3 launch.
Also SpaceX asked permission to make 9 Starship launches this year.