“Ukrainians Directing Soldiers From a Hidden Hub See Bakhmut Going Their Way“
“Ukrainian commanders say they have exhausted Russia’s relentless assaults on the eastern city, though soldiers say the cost in lives has been steep.”
“Hidden in the bowels of an unmarked building, set well back from the fighting, a command center directing operations in the city of Bakhmut was high-tech and humming. Soldiers monitored video screens with live feeds of destroyed buildings and a cratered battlefield.
Six weeks after coming to help defend Bakhmut, the men of the Adam Tactical Group, one of Ukraine’s most effective battle units, were quietly confident they had turned the tide against Russian troops trying to encircle and capture it.
“The enemy exhausted all its reserves,” the commander, Col. Yevhen Mezhevikin, 40, said on Tuesday, straddling a chair as artillery, air defense and intelligence-gathering teams worked around him.”
Purification of RuZZian society.
“‘Total distrust’: rise of the Russian informers”
“Teachers, neighbours and even family members are turning to Soviet-style denunciations in wartime Russia”
“Varya Galkina, a smart and studious 10-year-old, began getting into trouble with her schoolteachers in Moscow last September, a few weeks into the new academic year.
First, they noticed she was regularly skipping the new Russian patriotism classes that had just been added to the national curriculum. Then they spotted that she had set a pro-Ukraine symbol as her profile picture on WhatsApp.
Varya was a star pupil, so her mother, mathematician Elena Jolicoeur, thought little of the fuss — until one morning in October, when she received a sudden call from school: her daughter had been detained by the police.
Elena, reeling, jumped in her car and raced to find her daughter. The detention of a child seemed like nonsense. “It was as if I’d entered some sort of alternate reality,” Elena recalled. “Like we’d gone mad, in our corner of the world.””
https://www.ft.com/content/b1657ee3-eb9d-41c7-851e-5900c74bd934