The past week has been hot. I thought that by May 9 the enemy will have exhausted all reserves, but it seems he has the opportunity to replenish the troops. Ours are also replenished and saturated with new weapons, as evidenced by the intensity of the cannonade. In the middle of the week, the occupiers broke through the defenses around Popasnaya and advanced in all directions at once. In the north, they seek to encircle Severodonetsk and Lisichansk, and in the west they want to capture Bakhmut, from which they can attack any city in the Donbass. Several days have passed, and so far Ukrainian troops are holding them back on the new line of defense. Fighting was fierce on Friday and Saturday. They were shooting very close to us. It looks like everything was involved - aviation, howitzers, hailstones and other rocket launchers. The planes are flying very low above us, I think they’re ours, otherwise they’d be shot at by stingers. Today again, disturbing news comes from Liman and Mironovsky. The enemy is advancing, and it is not yet clear at what lines it can be stopped.
Yesterday I rode my bike to Good News Church. Most of its members have already evacuated. I thought there would be no one, but there were a lot of people, more than two hundred. It's already new ones coming in. At least a fifth of those present were at the meeting for the first time. The city is alive, but people and cars are three times less than usual. I think that only a third of the inhabitants remained in the city. In stores, the range of goods has been greatly reduced, prices are twice as high as before the war.
The adherents of the rashism are upset that there was no blitzkrieg, nevertheless they rejoice at the advancement of their troops, albeit slow. They are indifferent about losses, they believe that they have unlimited reserves of old equipment and conscripts, which means that sooner or later they will squeeze. First they will surround the Donbass group, then they will finish off the remaining military units. We see the situation differently. The invaders are being held back even with the forces that were initially available. And while the enemy is expending his last forces in an attempt to break through our defenses, we are preparing new reserves, equipped with Western weapons.
This is how it looks in a broad panorama, but here in the Donbas everything is perceived differently, more concretely. In the first weeks of the war, the enemy attacked in five directions at once, and the Ukrainian army withstood the onslaught on the limit of its possibilities. Now the enemy has concentrated half of all his forces in just one area from Izyum to Popasnaya, and is pressing with all this power. He destroyed Mariupol, Volnovakha, Popasnaya, and Rubezhnoye to the ground, and now he is destroying Liman. Ukrainians fight desperately, professionally and creatively. But it is impossible to fight without mistakes, and any mistake can be fatal. However, there is no choice but to hold back the enemy's advance while our reserves are slowly being saturated with Western weapons.
This morning I saw a video that Alexander Reshetnik posted on his Facebook. I met him back in 2015, during a trip to the frontline zone. This is a real hero of Donbass, a volunteer of the Good News Church. Since 2014, he has been taking people out of the shelling zone, he was captured. This morning he went to Liman. The murderous naivety of ordinary people is astounding: they posted information about the place and time of evacuation. Did they seriously think that the rashists would not shoot at the refugees? Of course, the evacuation point was bombed and then they tried to hit Alexander's car as he drove back. In this connection, I collected all short videos about his trips to Liman, combined them and named "Liman under siege - May 2022. Alexander Reshetnik" posted on my YouTube channel.
The refugees should return, and their homes must be rebuilt. But this is only possible through the complete defeat of the invading army. Neither through negotiations, nor through a peace agreement, nor through a gradual military displacement beyond the state borders, namely, the defeat of the enemy with encirclements and his mass surrenders. No peace agreements with the ruling regime in Russia are possible.
As a schoolboy, back in Soviet times, on the instructions of a teacher, I read a book in which it was argued that once Hitler occupied Austria, he thereby abolished Germany's right to exist. Whoever agrees with this will have to agree with the fact that Putin has abolished Russia’s right to exist. At least formally, since in fact he destroyed the state long ago, replacing it with a mafia-Chekist anti-state hierarchy. But here is a question: don't the inhabitants of Russia have the right to their own state? I am not disputing the right itself, but I will respond with this analogy. Suppose the tenants, through negligence, let criminals into their house who keep them in fear, the house was torn to the ground, and then the neighbors were attacked. But the neighbors turned out to be stronger, and the criminals were dealt with. Do tenants have a right to their home? Of course they do. Only this house does not exist. And there is no power to rebuild it. But the bandits can come back to terrorize the tenants again. You can't do without outside help, but there;s no one who is obliged to help. And if help comes, then not the tenants themselves, but others will decide what and how to rebuild. This is exactly what happened with Nazi Germany, in the footsteps of which Putin's Russia is following.
