Look at the cute Ukranian kitty postcards I got today at the Warsaw Pride event!

the famous Ukrainian propagandist, M. de Voltaire

L’Ukraine a toujours aspiré à être libre.

Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Volume 5, Part 1

The joke of the edition:

- Give us your rifle and we'll guarantee your safety!

by Volodymyr Zaiets

24.07.1993

In the 1990s, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and long-range missiles in return for the safety guarantees from a number of countries, including russia

Ivan Marchuk, born 1936, a Ukrainian painter. In 2007 he was included in The Daily Telegraph’s “100 Contemporary Geniuses” list.

He died together with his cat😔

shot + chaser

(and it wasn't ukraine's strike to begin with. as admitted by russian govt themselves)

and another one for the collection

One year since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Recommending four groups to donate to: 1. https://www.comebackalive.in.ua/home Come Back Alive or Back and Alive, a well-known and reliable group providing equipment to soldiers. They have been working for many years, before the scale of the war increased and the international community started paying attention.

2. https://voices.org.ua/en/ Voices of Children provides psychological and other aid to children affected by war. They have likewise been working with kids from war-affected Donbas even before 2022. They have a Patreon if you'd like to set up a monthly donation.

3. https://u24.gov.ua/ United 24, the official government platform raising funds for specific projects around the categories of military, medical, and reconstruction. Currently raffling off five signed Star Wars posters by Mark Hamill to donors until March 24th, in case you needed more incentive.

4. https://kyivpride.org/en/ Kyiv Pride fights for the rights of Ukrainian LGBTQ+ people, and if there's anything that annoys Putin more than Ukrainians or LGBTQ+ people, it's Ukrainian LGBTQ+ people. Included on the basis of both queer solidarity and annoying the hell out of that homophobic warmonger.

I am adding Save Ukraine which has run successful missions to rescue kidnapped children who were deported to Russia. Many remain in captivity and it is so important to bring these kids, many of whom have family searching for them, home.

US tax deductible donations here. I recommend using that tax deductible link as PayPal appears to be not working well on May 24, 2023.

❗Consequences of the morning Russian missile attack in Kyiv

Kyiv is on fire as a result of the morning Russian missile attack

What do these 3 cities have in common?

Grozny - Chechnya 1995.

Aleppo - Syria 2012.

Mariupol - Ukraine 2022.

Answer: Russia destroyed them all.

What Ukrainians ate to survive Holodomor

(translated excerpts from an Історична Правда article): + images source

The villagers would dig up the holes of the polecats to find at least a handful of grain hidden by these animals. They pounded it in a mortar, added a handful of oilcake (from hemp seed), beetroot, potato peelings, and baked something from this mixture.

Those who managed to hide at least a little grain would grind it in iron mills made from wheel axles and cook "zatyrukha" (a concoction made from a small amount of flour ground from ears of grain).

Acacia flowers were boiled and eaten raw, and green quinoa was mixed with crushed corn cobs. Those who could - and this was considered lucky - added a handful of bran. This food made their feet swell and their skin crack.

The peasants dried the husked ears of corn and millet husks, pounded them, ground them with weeds, and cooked soups and baked pancakes. Such dishes were impossible to chew, the body could not digest them, so people had stomach aches. Pancakes, the so-called "matorzhenyky", were made from oilcake and nettle or plantain.

It went so far that peasants would crumble straw into small chips and pound it in a mortar together with millet and buckwheat chaff, and tree bark. All this was mixed with potato peelings, which were very poisonous, and this mixture was used to bake "bread", the consumption of which caused severe stomach diseases.

There were cases when village activists took away and broke millstones, mortars, poured water on the heat in their ovens. After all, anything found or saved from the food had to be cooked on fire, and matches could only be purchased by bartering for their own belongings or by buying them in the city, which was impossible from villagers that were on "black lists".

Chestnuts, aspen and birch bark, buds, reed roots, hawthorn and rose hips, which were the most delicious, were used as food substitutes; various berries, even poisonous ones, were picked; grass seeds were ground into flour; "honey" from sugar beets was cooked, and water brewed with cherry branches was drunk. They also ate the kernels of sunflower seeds.

Newborns had the worst of it, because their mothers had no breast milk. According to testimonies, a mother would let her child suck the drink from the top of the poppy head, and the child would fall asleep for three days.

In early spring, the villagers began to dig up old potato fields. They would bake dumplings from frozen potatoes, grind rotten potatoes in a mash and make pancakes, greasing the frying pan with wheel grease. They also baked "blyuvaly" (transl. "vomities") from such potatoes and oatmeal mixed with water, which was so called because they were very smelly.

They ate mice, rats, frogs, hedgehogs, snakes, beetles, ants, worms, i.e. things that weren't a part of food bans and had never been eaten by people before. The horror of the famine is also evidenced by the consumption of spiders, which are forbidden to kill in Ukrainian society for ritual reasons.

In some areas, slugs were boiled into a soup, and the cartilaginous meat was chopped and mixed with leaves. This prevented swelling of the body and contributed to survival. People caught tadpoles, frogs, lizards, turtles, and mollusks. They boiled them, adding a little salt if there was salt. The starving people caught cranes, storks, and herons, which have been protected in Ukraine for centuries, and their nests were never destroyed. According to folk beliefs, eating stork meat was equated with cannibalism.

The consumption of horse meat began in 1931, before the mass famine. People used to take dead horsemeat from the cemeteries at night, make jelly out of it and salt it for future use.

Dead horses were poured with carbolic acid to prevent people from taking their meat, but it hardly stopped anybody. Dead collective farm pigs were also doused with kerosene to prevent people from dismantling them for food, but this did not help either.

After long periods of starvatiom, the process of digestion is very costing for the human body, and many people who would eat anything would drop dead immediately out of exhaustion.

If a family had a cow hidden somewhere in the forest, they had a chance to survive. People living near forests could hunt/seek out berries and mushrooms, but during winter this wouldn't save them. People living near rivers could fish in secret, but it was banned and punishable by imprisonment/death.

This war brought me, as a Ukrainian, a rethinking of some persistent stereotypes in my head. Most of my conscious life, I was sure that people of art are capable of infinite compassion, humanity of conscience in the end. But I was wrong. We live in a world where humanity on the pages of books is more important than in real life, where letters on paper are more important than feelings, reflection and justice. So many people are offended by the disdain for russian culture, while Ukrainian culture is being destroyed. So many people are ready, foaming at the mouth, to prove to Ukrainians that they are savages, emotional when Ukrainian artists are killed. Ask yourself what my values ​​are worth, if the righteous hatred of the invader's literature is perceived more acutely than the murder of Ukrainian artists.

The full comic is finally over!!! Thank you for following it ~

On 17th of September 1939 Soviet Union invaded Poland, breaking the provisions of their 1932 non-agression pact in favor of a new pact with nazi Germany (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). Oh, but now they so love to posture as „fighters against nazism”, don’t they?