AVK

Citizen of planet Earth

[AVK @alinavik]

So accurate!

[Stephen Spaulding @SteveESpaulding]

10 years ago, former Justice Souter made a prediction that keeps me up at night. It is spot on.

[UNITED24 Media @United24media]

🔴 Russian prison guards are torturing Ukrainian journalist Iryna Danylovych with 12 hours of blasting noise every single day.

Abducted in occupied Crimea and sentenced on sham charges, she was already left nearly deaf due to medical neglect.

Rights groups report that international appeals to the UN yielded no relief, only prompting Russian prison staff to conduct aggressive new searches of her belongings.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨MAJOR BREAKING: A massive report exposes that Trump purchased $100,000,000 in bonds tied to companies DIRECTLY impacted by his policies. That is slam dunk insider trading and is IMPEACHABLE.

Overall, Trump has made an estimated $3.4 BILLION in just one year and 6 months.

[Taras Kuzio🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇦🇮🇹 @TarasKuzio]

Vance has never asked Russia to halt its attacks on Ukrainian civilians.
JD Vance asked Ukraine to halt strikes on tankers using Russian port
https://t.co/OnkwYpmTWc

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

SNYDER: What’s interesting is Trump always sounds weird when he talks about leaders in North Korea, China, or Russia.

Trump has always been submissive vis-à-vis actual dictators. But he’s like a child in his submissiveness toward them.

He sounds like a child who’s trying for the first time to express his love for other people when he talks about dictators.

And that’s one of 100,000 things that are humiliating about him actually being the head of the state.

Even when these people are leaders of much weaker countries, Trump still looks up to them in this embarrassing way.

Because they have more relative power inside their own systems, they do things that Trump wants to be able to do but can’t.

It’s like he recognizes that he would like to be in that movie, but he can’t be in that movie. And he feels sort of sadness about this.

[@IsraelVive @IsraelVive1948]

Este niño judío e israelí fue secuestrado el 7/10 por terroristas árabes que se hacen llamar palestinos

Este video fue difundido en las primeras semanas de la guerra en el que se ve a “inocentes” niños palestinos abusando de él que claramente no entiende ni a dónde está ni qué peligro está corriendo

La izquierda y el woikismo internacional después de ver esto dijo que el pueblo del niño era el agresor y que los abusadores las víctimas

Lo único bueno de esto es que uno sabe que siempre se paro del lado de la víctima real y sobre lo que apoyaron los otros sólo asco

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

So i guess the GOP is cool with ICE using electric shock gloves?

That feels a bit…. Hmmm…. Communist?

[Michael McFaul @McFaul]

Just awful , and also not surprising.

I hope Americans will someday become as upset about corruption as other societies. We are not there yet.

[UNITED24 Media @United24media]

Sexual violence has become a systematic weapon in Russia's war against Ukraine.

🧵 1/8 ⬇️

[JOSH DUNLAP @JDunlap1974]

Bill Maher ask pro Palestine commentator Ana Kasparian which middle eastern city she would be able to live in while wearing her short dress

[UAVoyager🇺🇦 @CrimeanVoyager]

Kherson. Today, simply being Ukrainian is enough to become a target for russian terrorists.

The world still doesn’t hate russia enough.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸 Mamdani’s wife was set to get an NYPD escort for a personal trip to Syria and Lebanon until the police department said no.

City Hall first claimed it was at the NYPD’s “strong recommendation.” The department quickly shut that down, saying they don’t send officers to Do Not Travel countries for personal travel.

Now Mamdani says it was just a staff miscommunication and she’ll go without any NYPD detail.

From “the police recommended it” to “blame the staff” in under 24 hours.

Source: NY Post

[Oscar Buta 💟🇬🇪🇺🇦💛🇮🇱💙 @OscarButa80012]

@MusafirNafar

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

🚨 JUST IN: Trump hints he could declare a national emergency for the midterms

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

What a joke.

Imagine the GOP temper tantrum when a Democratic POTUS claims executive privilege over communications with a private citizen.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

The 1947 UN Partition Plan offered the Arabs a state.

They rejected it and launched a war to destroy the Jewish one instead.

They controlled the “West Bank” and Gaza for 19 years and never created a Palestinian state.

The demand only became urgent after Jews controlled the land.

That is not a people denied statehood.

That is a people who preferred no Jewish state to having one of their own.

[Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze]

This one

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

BREAKING:

Man yelling “Allahu Akbar attacked 2 female and 1 male police officers in Toulouse, France today.

2 officers were stabbed. The male police officer managed to tackle the attacker before he managed to kill anyone.

[🇺🇦Julia Pod 🇺🇦 @Jpod_art]

My beautiful Odesa. My heart is broken 😔

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen below 300 million barrels for the first time since it was fully filled, per Reuters

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

Her torturer asked her one question:

“Do you know why I’m doing this to you?”

Ukrainian medic Yuliia “Taira” Paievska answered:

“Because you can.”

That may be one of the most important explanations of Russia’s war against Ukraine ever given.

Taira spent the first 20 days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in Mariupol, treating the wounded as the city was being destroyed around her.

Then the Russians captured her.

She spent three months in captivity.

Later, testifying before the U.S. Helsinki Commission, she described what she had witnessed.

“My name is Yuliia Paievska. My brothers-in-arms call me Taira.

By profession, I am a graphic designer and president of one of Ukraine’s aikido federations.

The Russians call me a Nazi. That is what they call everyone who resists them or simply does not want Russia in Ukraine.

I spent the first 20 days of this war in Mariupol, which turned into hell.

Then I spent three months in Russian captivity.

That was hell too.”

What followed was testimony that is difficult to read.

A dead child in his mother’s arms.

A seven-year-old boy with a gunshot wound dying in Taira’s arms because there was nothing she could do to save him.

Hospitals overflowing with wounded soldiers and civilians.

Painkillers disappearing.

Antibiotics running out.

Doctors and nurses sleeping three hours a day while operations continued almost without interruption.

Medical evacuation vehicles arriving every five or ten minutes, carrying the living and the dead piled together.

Cars burning with people trapped inside.

Police officers pulling mutilated women and children from ruins.

People drinking water from puddles.

Former pets wandering the destroyed city carrying human remains.

And then came Russian captivity.

Taira described prisoners being stripped before being slowly killed.

Rooms specifically equipped for torture.

Case files copied almost word for word, with only prisoners’ names changed — sometimes, she said, interrogators did not even bother changing the sex of the detainee.

There was no real investigation.

Confessions and “evidence” were extracted through torture.

One Ukrainian soldier was dying in a nearby cell.

He screamed for six days.

Nobody helped him.

On the seventh day, his cellmates placed his body on a stretcher so the guards could remove what remained of him.

Another soldier died quietly after torture.

He received no medical assistance either.

Pregnant prisoners disappeared into captivity while their families had no idea what had happened to them.

Taira herself was encouraged by her captors to commit suicide.

She refused.

She wanted to survive long enough to see how far their cruelty would go.

Then, one day, someone looked through the peephole of her cell and called her name:

“Take your things. Get out.”

Her road back to freedom had begun.

But perhaps the most chilling moment of her testimony was her explanation of why all of this happens.

One of her torturers asked:

“Do you know why I’m doing this to you?”

She answered:

“Because you can.”

He apparently did not expect that answer.

But she understood the mechanism perfectly.

They do it because they believe they can.

Because their leaders told them they have the right.

Because they were allowed to believe there would be no consequences.

Because the world watched Russian crimes elsewhere and repeatedly convinced itself that accommodation was safer than confrontation.

Taira called Russia a “colossus with feet of clay.”

Her demand to the free world was simple: do not merely express sympathy.

Act.

Demand international access to Ukrainian military and civilian prisoners.

Force the issue of prisoner exchanges.

Investigate torture and war crimes.

Treat survivors.

Fight Russian propaganda.

Hold perpetrators accountable.

And continue helping Ukraine defend itself.

Because the lesson of her testimony extends far beyond Mariupol: