Ukraine

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (AP) — In a city where damaged buildings are everywhere, a destroyed pizzeria stands out as a painful reminder of lives and livelihoods dashed in an instant.

A Russian ballistic missile struck the popular eatery in eastern Ukraine in June, killing 13 people including an award-winning Ukrainian writer and several teenagers. Seven of the victims were staff.

Today, fresh flowers and notes have been placed where the entrance once was. A T-shirt, part of the waitstaff’s uniform, hangs near the makeshift memorial with the inscription “We will never forget.”

“As an entrepreneur, of course, I regret the loss of property, but there’s something that cannot be returned: human lives,” said Dmytro Ihnatenko, the owner of RIA Pizza.

The bombed-out building in Kramatorsk underscores the massive risks for businesses in this front-line city in the Donetsk region. But that has not deterred many other business owners who have reopened their doors to customers in the past year.

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The city council estimates there are 50 restaurants and 228 shops now open in Kramatorsk, three times the number open at the same period last year. Most are believed to be existing business that closed in the early days of the war and have reopened.

“We understand that this is a risk, and we are taking it because this is our life,” said Olena Ziabina, chief administrator of the White Burger restaurant in Kramatorsk. “Wherever we are, we need to work. We work here. This is our conscious choice.”

The White Burger chain operated mainly in Donetsk and Luhansk regions before the war. But after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it could reopen only in Kramatorsk. It launched two new restaurants in the capital, Kyiv, and Dnipro to keep the chain alive.

Kramatorsk’s restaurant is the chain's top performer in profitability, even though prices are 20% lower than in the capital’s restaurant.

After the attack on RIA Pizza, White Burger's operators didn’t consider closing the Kramatorsk restaurant, Ziabina said. “I cried a lot,” she said, recalling the day she heard about the attack.

Kramatorsk's economy has adapted to war. The city houses the Ukrainian army’s regional headquarters, and many cafes and restaurants are frequented mainly by soldiers as well as journalists and aid workers.

Ukrainian women often travel there to reunite for few days with husbands and boyfriends.

Soldiers joke that Kramatorsk is their Las Vegas, providing all the “luxuries” they need like good food or coffee. But restaurants offer only non-alcoholic beer due to the city's proximity to the battlefield.

The city streets are mostly empty except for military cars. The residents who stayed avoid big gatherings and crowded places.

Still, it is a far cry from the war’s early days, when Kramatorsk's shops, restaurants and cafes were shuttered. Tens of thousands of people were left without jobs, and factories were closed.

“Probably, thanks to the military, we can still come back to this city,” said Oleksandr, who asked to be identified only by his first name because of security concerns.

He is a co-founder of one of the numerous military shops in Kramatorsk serving soldiers. Oleksandr said he marks up prices by only 1 hryvnia (2 cents) above the manufacturer’s price. He said the aim isn’t to earn money but to provide the military with the necessary equipment.

Many residents cherish new work opportunities brought by the reopening of shops and restaurants.

But there are fewer options for older people, said Tetiana Podosionova, 54. She worked at the Kramatorsk Machinebuilding Plant for 32 years, but the plant closed due to security risks when the war started.

“I had hoped to work at the factory until retirement,” Podosionova said. Most jobs are now in restaurants and shops, where she had no experience.

Finally, she found a job at Amazing Fish Aquarium, which resumed operations months after the war began. The aquarium has hundreds of exotic fish and dozens of parrots and remains open to entertain residents, who are often stressed from missile strikes.

But every reopened business carries risk. Ihnatenko, the pizzeria owner, still comes to his destroyed restaurant every day when he's in Kramatorsk. He doesn't know why. He looks tired. His voice is hardly above a whisper.

He, like many business owners, saw Ukraine's successful counteroffensive in the neighboring Kharkiv region last year as a sign that life could return to Kramatorsk.

“It seemed safer here,” he explained, standing in the rubble of his restaurant.

He has no plans to rebuild and reopen yet again.

His tragic experience shows the challenges that business owners face while keeping their doors open.

“A missile can come at any moment,” he said.

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Volodymyr Yurchuk contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

mickeyrat · October 2023

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1717583817148424520?t=BZdpd7aeal1W3Xr1jnX2kg&s=19

mickeyrat · October 2023

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1718254881536979029?t=9VKy1Xz0t88bPyYHifL3Gg&s=19

mickeyrat · October 2023

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1718346551985066172?t=RqswmXKDNo5KMhjvy6cfYA&s=19

mickeyrat · October 2023

https://twitter.com/secretsqrl123/status/1718686562597109782?t=0CNjM2_rs1ruwtLeE_-TnQ&s=19

Halifax2TheMax · October 2023

What repubs and POOTWH are for, these days.

Opinion Murder, torture, rape: Russia’s crimes are a long-running horror show

The reports pile up like desiccated bones in a mass grave, each brimming with a ghoul’s gallery of horrors, each bearing a dreary title and, often, the imprimatur of the United Nations:

“Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine.”

“Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine.”

“Detention of Civilians in the Context of the Armed Attack by the Russian Federation Against Ukraine.”

There have been dozens of such reports — fastidious, documented, footnoted — weighing in collectively at who-knows-how-many pages. Their heft alone, along with their repetitive sameness, exerts a numbing effect. Who can absorb such an endless litany of crushing cruelty?

Yet the evidence attesting to Russia atrocities in Ukraine also obscures an essential fact: It represents a small fraction measured against the likely scale of atrocities carried out by President Vladimir Putin’s forces.

We know that because we know this: Notwithstanding the lurid accounts detailing systematic torture, rape, execution and other forms of abuse deployed by Moscow’s troops, independent investigators are denied access to territory seized by Russian forces.

That matters in what has become a static war, with front lines barely budging for months. It means the Kremlin’s commanders have time to eliminate traces of physical evidence as well as civilians who might bear witness to crimes. And it means that testimony gathered so far by international monitors comes mainly from survivors who manage to leave after Russian troops occupied their towns and villages. Those caught behind the lines are beyond reach.

Yet even from a limited sampling, and in the dry lexicon of U.N. commission reports, the abominations perpetrated by Russian security services and soldiers are plain.

In its latest report, released Oct. 20, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, established by the U.N. Human Rights Council, recounted what it called evidence of war crimes. It includes details of electric shocks routinely used to torture detained Ukrainian civilians, a form of torture that Russian forces term “a call to Putin.”

“Victims reported that perpetrators connected wires or clamps to earlobes, ankles, hands, toes, or genitals,” the report says. “According to victims, in some cases water was poured on them or otherwise used to amplify the effect of electric shocks. A woman who endured the electric shocks stated: ‘It was so painful that I could not stop screaming like crazy, I was crying.’ ”

That report and others include chilling testimony about murders, rapes and other forms of sexual violence, as well as the removal of Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia — nearly 20,000 of them, according to Ukrainian authorities. Based on those abductions, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin. The Kremlin’s response was to use the children for photo ops in Red Square and to continue the kidnappings.

The latest commission report outlines an array of abuses in Kherson Province, a target of Russian invading forces last year. It describes a married couple in their 50s assaulted by three Russian troops, who beat the husband and took turns raping his wife. When the couple filed a report with a Russian commander, the commission found, three different soldiers returned and killed them both, according to neighbors.

Many of the atrocities are acts of terrorism. They occur amid the quotidian backdrop of Russian air and artillery strikes against Ukrainian apartment buildings, cafes and other civilian targets — attacks with no military rationale.

The world was shocked at the outset of Putin’s full-scale invasion by the killing spree in Bucha, near Kyiv, where Russian soldiers murdered several hundred unarmed civilians, shooting them in streets and cellars. To me it looked all too familiar.

Nearly 30 years ago, I covered Russia’s first war in Chechnya, the southern Russian region that fought to free itself of Moscow’s rule. There, torture, rape and indiscriminate killing of noncombatants by Russian forces were routine. So was impunity; virtually no Russian soldiers were prosecuted.

As a reporter in that war zone, I often listened to Chechen civilians recount the abuse they had suffered and the atrocities they had witnessed. Back then, Russian human rights organizations also bore witness — groups now banned and silenced by Putin.

One report by Memorial, a respected human rights group dissolved in 2021, was based on interviews with hundreds of victims in Chechnya in 1995. It featured a man named Iziev, whose agonies are reminiscent of those meted out now in Ukraine. “They attached wires to the detainee’s neck, someone shouted ‘Turn!’ and an electric shock followed,” according to the report. “Once, the wire was placed into his mouth. He lost consciousness several times during the interrogations.”

Russia’s subjugation of Chechnya, a little-known place, got scant attention. But in the military’s viciousness and brutality, it was a prelude to Putin’s current campaign. It’s a further reminder that Ukraine is fighting not only for its right to live as a democratic, pluralist and independent country, free of Russia’s yoke. It is also fighting for its life.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/31/russian-war-crimes-ukraine/

JB16057 · October 2023

Halifax2TheMax said:

What repubs and POOTWH are for, these days.

Biden is asking for money to give to Israel to kill more people. Democrats are far from innocent yet all you do is blame Republicans.

Halifax2TheMax · November 2023

JB16057 said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

What repubs and POOTWH are for, these days.

Biden is asking for money to give to Israel to kill more people. Democrats are far from innocent yet all you do is blame Republicans.

Too bad you didn't read the headline and are in the Ukraine thread. Not surprising.

Ukraine

Comments

What repubs and POOTWH are for, these days.

Opinion Murder, torture, rape: Russia’s crimes are a long-running horror show

What repubs and POOTWH are for, these days.

What repubs and POOTWH are for, these days.