Russia and Ukraine flashpoint

[SecondWar]

Ryuu96 said:

Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within, enabled by new laws that criminalize dissent. There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on neighbors and even diners at the next table. https://t.co/u3nLCEw1e5

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 9, 2022

Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.”

After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views.

“Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them.

“No longer,” one of the girls shot back.

A few days later, the police came to her school in the port town of Korsakov. In court, she heard a recording of that conversation, apparently made by one of the students. The judge handed down a $400 fine for “publicly discrediting” Russia’s Armed Forces. The school fired her, she said, for “amoral behavior.”

NEW: Russia is sending an 8-mi long convoy of 100s of vehicles, including armored vehicles and artillery southbound through the Ukrainian town of Velykyi Burluk.

The convoy is moving about 60 mi east of Ukraine’s 2nd-largest city of Kharkiv, as 🇷🇺 focuses on Donbas.

📷:@Maxar pic.twitter.com/4EJRHSQZvk

— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) April 10, 2022

 That bit about the students turning in the teacher could literally be from 1930s Germany. Also that someone from from Sakhalin feels they can declare Ukraine no longer a separate  country is unfathomable - they are literally on the other side of the world. For those who don’t know, Sakhalin is an island in Russia’s far east, sitting just north of Japan.

And that convoy, well I’m hoping Ukraine have the capability and capacity to do to it what they did to the on that assembled outside of Kyiv.