GDB wrote:
A lot more detail in that article compared to yesterday's links:
German investigators believe the attack on the pipelines was carried out by a team of six people, using a yacht that had been hired by a company registered in Poland and owned by two Ukrainian citizens, according to Die Zeit.
...
Six people were involved in the operation to transport explosives to the site, the yacht’s captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor. All six were understood to have used professionally faked passports, said Die Zeit, with their real identities still unclear.
The yacht set sail from the German port city of Rostock on 6 September. The equipment for the secret operation was previously transported to the port in a delivery truck, according to Die Zeit. After its return, investigators found traces of explosives on one of the tables inside the hired vessel.
The interesting thing is this rules no one in or no one out.
IMO the Rus FSB is more than capable of fielding such a team, or the US CIA, or UK, or Poland, or ...
GDB wrote:
Also a topic of interest to me:
Until last year Kyiv was largely a Russian-speaking city. A survey in January revealed that since Putin’s invasion a year ago, 33% of Kyivans have adopted the Ukrainian language. About 46% said they had been speaking Ukrainian for a long time. Another 13% remain Russian speakers.
Ukrainians are bilingual. Ukrainian has traditionally been spoken in the west of the country with Russian more prevalent in the south and east. The most prominent switcher is Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who grew up in the central Russophone metallurgical city of Kryvyi Rih.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what it means to be a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. The closest thing I can relate it with are Spanish-speaking Americans, but as the article says "We see it from the point of view of a post-colonial country" and the US wasn't colonized by a Spanish-speaking nation (despite what some people may suggest), if anything it was the other way around.
I watched
Ushanka Show: Am I Russian, Soviet Or Ukrainian? on u2b and it tried to address the issue from the point of view of the video's creator, who ends up describing himself as a Russian-Speaking Soviet-Era Ukrainian. He explains the laws of the 1950s or so pretty much banned teaching Ukrainian in schools, so the only way a kid of his generation would have learned Ukrainian is if their parents used it and/or taught it at home, which his did not. But he doesn't really explain how that transition happened, since I presume his parents were Ukrainian speakers. I guess the parents had to learn enough Russian to function in the Ukrainian society of the day, and used that to communicate with their kids? He says his own command of Ukrainian is not good.
My parents are immigrants. They were taught the "old country" language as kids at home in the "old country" and learned English in school in the USA. Their mother, my grandmother, learned enough English to communicate effectively with us grandkids, co-workers, etc. My grandfather did not learn more than a few words in English. So, the transition period really happened in my parent's lifetime. By the time we were born, English was the preferred language. But if my parents were a few years older they would not have learned English in school and chances are they would only have English as a second language, and me and my brothers would have been the ones to make the transition. I know some friends of the family that ended up being in this situation.
I recently met someone who was raised in one of the "colonized" parts of the USSR who was taught Russian in school, to the point where she now views Russian as her "native language". IMO it shows the cultural assimilation strategy is an effective one. Her points of view are definitely pro-Russian, to the point of her saying things like Ukrainians are Nazis, etc. It was very disappointing and even stunning for me to hear her thoughts on the matter. Her husband rapidly shifted the topic of conversation to something else. In retrospect part of me wished I had drilled deeper on the topic, but another part of me realizes we would have ended up in an ugly argument. Bottom line though is I no longer have much if any respect for her. I realize we're all raised with different influences and have different opinions, but IMO her opinions are totally wrong.
The decline of Russian among its native users in Ukraine is ironic. One of the reasons Putin gave for subjugating the country was to “save” its Russian speakers. Since February the Russian army has killed thousands of Russian-speaking civilians, destroying Mariupol entirely and pounding the southern city of Kherson since its liberation in November.
Yep, Putin's goals and his methods are in direct contradiction. His methods of making Ukraine closer to Russia are what is making Ukrainians want to be as far apart from being Russian as they can possibly be.
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