Ville Laakso 🇺🇦

PhD in #archaeology. Interested in #history #genealogy #turpo #ulpo Tuijottelee kuoppiin ja näkee niissä asioita, joita kaikki eivät näe. Arkeologi @MaanalaOy

[Hromadske Int. @Hromadske]

Overnight on June 15, a Russian drone hit the Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex. The site where it hit had already been blown up by the Soviet army in 1941 as it retreated from Kyiv, says Olesia Ostrovska-Lyuta, Director General of the Mystetskyi Arsenal.

Photo: Andrii Tsykota / Mystetskyi Arsenal / Facebook

[Tim White @TWMCLtd]

Russia has hit an art museum in Kharkiv.

Mayor Ihor Terekhov was among those trying to save exhibits as works of art were hastily removed as the building smouldered following a drone strike

Officials say there were no injuries, but several people suffered acute stress reactions

[Regina Bauer 🇪🇪🇺🇦 @petite_michelle]

Hey, western commie!
Nothing makes me laugh harder than a guy or a girl tweeting about "great communism" from a $1,400 phone, in a 3-bedroom suburban house, with a fridge full of food.
Comrade.
You would not survive week one.
And here is why.
In the USSR you couldn't just quit your job to "find yourself." Not working was a crime. Literally. They called it "social parasitism." They put the future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky on trial for it. Your podcast about late-stage capitalism would've gotten you five years.
You picture yourself as a commissar. You'd be in a queue. Three hours. For maybe bread. The commissars were a tiny elite with their own shops, their own hospitals, their own everything. You weren't invited. You'd be the guy informing on his neighbor for an extra ration.
That brave political take you posted today? In 1949 USSR deported 20,000+ people to Siberia in three days for a lot less - for just being LOCALS. Whole families. Children. Cattle cars. You'd have lasted until your first "actually Stalin was misunderstood" reply landed in front of the wrong person.
The gulag wasn't an edgy metaphor. Roughly 18 million people passed through it. Unpaid labor, -40°C, digging canals nobody needed. But please, tell me more about how you'd "organize the workers" from the group chat.
Things get bad and you want to leave? You can't. There's a wall. There are dogs. There are guards who shoot. The whole design was that you couldn't go.
The people romanticizing it from a comfortable suburb can always book a flight home. People in the USSR couldn't even move to the neighbouring city without permission.
So wear the Che shirt. Read rge Red Book by Mao. Enjoy the iPhone he'd have confiscated, the internet he'd have banned, and the free speech that lets you praise the exact system that would have shot you for using it.
Some of us actually remember how it went.

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

Thank you to Finland for the 33rd defense assistance package for Ukraine, worth €128 million. Strong, timely support is what strengthens our defense and ultimately compels Russia to realize it has to bring its war to an end.

Grateful to President @AlexStubb, Prime Minister @PetteriOrpo, and the Finnish people for their steadfast support. Everything must be done to ensure that Moscow finally takes steps toward peace — not toward expanding its aggression.

[Army Media 🇺🇦 @armyinformcomua]

⚠️ Russia strikes Ukraine’s memory

Russia’s overnight combined attack on Kyiv damaged two Ukrainian museums: the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the National Chornobyl Museum.

These are not military targets. NAMU preserves tens of thousands of works of Ukrainian art. The Chornobyl Museum keeps the memory of one of Europe’s defining disasters.

Russia strikes museums because museums hold identity, memory and proof that Ukraine existed long before Moscow tried to erase it.

The collections and staff at NAMU were not harmed. The damage is being documented.

Ukraine will restore the buildings. Russia’s crime will remain on record.

Source: the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, May 24, 2026

#Ukraine #Kyiv #UkrainianCulture #NAMU #Chornobyl @UNESCO #RussiaIsATerroristState

[Eduard Andryushchenko @kgb_files]

The National Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv was destroyed by Russia last night

[Sergej Sumlenny, LL.M @sumlenny]

Russia’s missiles have massively hit historic district of Podil in Kyiv, including museums and cultural heritage sites. Podil is historically the heart of Kyiv, with the first excavated remaining a of a Neolithic human settlement here dated back up to 5,000 years ago.

[Lomm 🇪🇪 @VoticEmo]

vadjakeelsed saarenimed soome lahes

[Verkkouutiset @Verkkouutiset]

Paikallishallinnon tavoitteena on estää arkeologisten löytöjen ryöstely.

#matkailu

https://t.co/qyMHq0KNtt

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

It’s time to start calling places by their real names.

[Maanala @MaanalaOy]

Uusia asioita on tapahtumassa vanhoilla paikoilla. #arkeologia

[Verkkouutiset @Verkkouutiset]

Suurin osa suomalaisista ei edes tiedä kuinka politisoitunutta ja vasemmistolaista media-, kulttuuri- ja yliopistoväki on, @jarkkotontti sanoo näkökulmassaan. #vasemmisto #vappu #politiikka #media #oikeisto
https://t.co/DebnI3Ztga

[Sergej Sumlenny, LL.M @sumlenny]

russian Butyagin who organized looting of Ukrainian archeological sites in russia-occupied Crimea, and was exchanged for two intelligence officers (he was a really high rank looter) gave his first interview to russian propaganda TV RT, and said he would continue looting Crimea.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

In 1944, Königsberg was one of Europe's great cities. 700 years old, the coronation seat of the Prussian kings, home of Kant.

By 1968, it didn't exist anymore.

It was killed three times.

First by the RAF. On the night of August 29, 1944, 189 Lancasters dropped 480 tons of incendiaries on the medieval core. The cathedral burned. The castle burned. Around 5,000 civilians died in a firestorm that consumed Altstadt, Löbenicht, and Kneiphof, the three towns founded in the 1200s that made up the old city.

Second by the Red Army. April 1945. Four days of artillery preparation, four days of urban assault. By the surrender, roughly 80% of the city was rubble. Of the ~120,000 Germans still inside, only 24,000 were alive when deportations began two years later. The rest died in the storm, in the famine that followed, or were expelled to Germany in 1947 and 1948 and replaced with 400,000 Soviet citizens trucked in from across the USSR.

The city was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 after a Soviet politician with no connection to it. He'd been dead three weeks.

Third, and strangest, by Brezhnev. The castle had actually survived. Burned, roofless, but its walls were still standing into the 1960s, restorable. In 1967 Brezhnev personally signed the order to dynamite it, calling it "a hornet's nest of militarism and fascism." Architects begged him not to. The ruins were blasted in stages between 1967 and 1969 and the stone carted away as construction material.

In its place rose the House of Soviets, a 21-story brutalist block that was never finished, stood empty for fifty years, and was itself demolished in 2024.

The Amber Room, looted from Catherine the Great's palace and stored in the castle, burned somewhere in those events. Probably April 1945. Probably in the castle. No one knows.

What survived: Kant's tomb. It sat under the cathedral's spire as the spire collapsed in 1944. It sat through the Soviet shelling in 1945. It sat through seventy years of Soviet erasure. The mausoleum is essentially untouched.

A city with seven centuries of continuous history was physically erased in twenty-five years, by three different actors, for three different reasons, and replaced with a city that has almost nothing to do with the place it occupies.

[Pauli Aalto-Setälä @PauliAS]

Hyvästi järjetön YEL.

https://t.co/L6CwYxt5VB

[Johnny @j00ny369T]

How maps were made in the ‘60s.

[Jarkko Tontti @jarkkotontti]

Suomen kielen päivän kunniaksi muistutettakoon Mikael Agricolan sanoista:

"Ele polghe Kiria quin Sica waicka henes on wehe wica."

(Terveisin, kaikki kirjailijat)

[toomas hendrik ilves @IlvesToomas]

This is what awaits Europe if its member states continue to dither.

[Maanala @MaanalaOy]

Maastotyökausi 2026 on jo täydessä vauhdissa. Kuvassa roudantorjuntaosastoamme valmistautuneena kevään koitoksiin. (Oikeasti SA-kuva, Viipuri 13.3.1940.)

[Jarkko Tontti @jarkkotontti]

"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."

-Salman Rushdie

#justsaying