Couple of interesting Ukrainian-influenced news items — seemingly scenes from an action movie, but cast in real-time with real people playing out special–effects shit, creating huge fright reflected off tiny screens.
Even an abrupt ambush:
Sky News crew under fire from death squad in Ukraine.
Somehow they all survived. Crazy shit pic.twitter.com/4O0nuYhDCD
— ?oin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) March 4, 2022
War-zone, near-miss must read: Terrifying dangerous drama divulged of journalist Stuart Ramsay and his team under attack outside the Ukrainian town of Bucha, near Kyiv, last Monday — the story this afternoon at Sky News. A small taste of the scary action:
We set off, but it was deadly quiet, and it’s fair to say we were concerned. But we travelled slowly forwards towards an intersection. There was rubble in the road, but that’s normal now. There were no soldiers, it all seemed deserted.
And then out of nowhere a small explosion and I saw something hit the car and a tyre burst. We rolled to a stop.
And then our world turned upside down.
The first round cracked the windscreen. Camera operator Richie Mockler huddled into the front passenger footwell. Then we were under full attack.
Bullets cascaded through the whole of the car, tracers, bullet flashes, windscreen glass, plastic seats, the steering wheel, and dashboard had disintegrated.
Whole, harrowing story is well-worth the time — they all make it back to Kyiv, and it illustrates the deteriorating situation with Ramsay concluding: ‘The point is we were very lucky. But thousands of Ukrainians are dying, and families are being targeted by Russian hit squads just as we were, driving along in a family saloon and attacked. This war gets worse by the day.‘
Another top read I found this afternoon — Maureen Orth at Vanity Fair has a quick, excellent profile on Putin. Orth, writer and widow of Tim Russert, has covered Russian affairs for nearly 30 years, met Putin more than 20 years ago, and paints a picture of a longtime mean-ass, and violently ruthless, power ladder-climbing nationalist.
You need to read the whole piece, but this might be key to our future:
Obviously, appearances have always counted greatly to Putin and to Russia itself, to assuage its nagging sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West.
During the darkest days of Communism and the Cold War, no matter how many millions were suffering or starving inside the USSR, the Soviet Union always prized and promoted enterprises it could show off on the world stage: classical music and ballet, the circus, chess, the space program, Olympic athletes, stamps. All were part of the country’s first line of propaganda, side by side with its nuclear power and weaponry.
So today, for Russia to once again be shunned as a pariah state, stripped of its ability to show its stuff on a global scale, not even able to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest, the ruble in free fall, its economy soon to be in tatters from sanctions, one wonders if Putin, who has been personally stripped of his own international judo honors, is too far gone now to even wonder if it was a mistake to move so precipitously on Ukraine.
On top of mad-man’s mountain, the shit gets deep:
Just when I worry things can’t get stupider https://t.co/6DVd4vrzes
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) March 4, 2022
We’re in a weird-ass Twilight Zone episode, right? If can just hold on until a commercial break, all will be just fine, bewitched or not:
Yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: ‘Tower of Babel,’ 1928 woodcut by MC Escher, and found here).