WAR IN UKRAINE: December 30, 2022
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 310
Overnight, Russia staged another attack on Kyiv with Iranian-built drones. All five were shot down, according to region’s military administration chief. Some property damage was reported. Air defenses also destroyed 10 attack drones targeting Dnipropetrovsk & Zaporizhzhia regions
Almost half-a-million people in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa and surrounding region remain without power after the massive Thursday morning Russian missile attack. Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said that the situation is particularly “difficult” in Kyiv Oblast and the southern Odesa Oblast, as well as western Ukraine. In Odesa Thursday evening, much of the city centre was in darkness and the sound of generators could be widely heard.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba condemned Russia’s mass missile strike targeting energy infrastructure across Ukraine on Dec. 29 as a “senseless barbarism,” attacking “peaceful Ukrainian cities ahead of New Year” - Kyiv Independent
Belarus on December 29 summoned Ukraine's ambassador to lodge a protest over a Ukrainian air-defense missile that it says landed near the city of Brest in western Belarus.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy delivered his final speech of the year to parliament, telling lawmakers that Ukraine is recognized worldwide for its unity and courage in the face of the Russian invasion - RFE/RL
Required reading…
Along with hospitals, clinics especially maternity clinics, libraries are a major target for Russian missile attacks (and I’d add looting and arson).
This article, from the Guardian, entitled “ ‘Our Mission is Crucial’: Meet the Warrior Librarians of Ukraine,” describes the effort to save Ukraine’s cultural patrimony from Russian assaults based solely on its destruction. It is worth reading in it its entirety, but here are a few excerpts:
“As American forces learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you lose on the cultural front, military and economic dominance swiftly erode…….. But at its core, and from its origin, this Ukrainian conflict has been a war over language and identity. And Ukraine’s libraries are the key.”
“There has never been a war in which poetry has mattered more. In the earliest days of the invasion, the Russian film star Sergei Bezrukov gave a sensational reading of Alexander Pushkin’s 1831 masterpiece, To the Slanderers of Russia, on his Telegram channel. That great poem is a warning to foreigners about involving themselves in Eastern European wars. “Your eyes are all unable to read our history’s bloody table,” Pushkin warned two centuries ago. “Slavonic kin among themselves contending, an ancient household strife, oft judged but still unending.” In response, the Ukraine rapper Potap posted: “I understand that quote is a classic,” he rhymed. “You are not brothers but enemies.” Bezrukov was saying to the west: “You don’t understand.” Potap’s answer was to Russians: “No, you don’t understand.” “
“Most wars are fought over who will define the future. The Ukrainian war is a struggle over who will define the past. Is Ukrainian identity real or a fiction? That is the fundamental question of the conflict. The Ukrainians have given their answer.”
“Russians have destroyed more than 300 state and university libraries since the start of the war. In May, the National Library conducted an online survey on the state of its system. By then, 19 libraries were already completely destroyed, 115 partially destroyed and 124 permanently damaged. The Russians have destroyed libraries in Mariupol, Volnovakha, Chernihiv, Sievierodonetsk, Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin and Borodianka, along with the cities they served. They have destroyed several thousand school libraries at least.” NOTE – Kharkiv, Ukraine’s 2nd city, is a university town especially famous for its science and law faculties. Many scientific research projects taking place in Kharkiv’s universities that have been destroyed.
“Anna Kijas, a music librarian at Tufts University in the US, tweeted on 26 February her plans to hold a “data rescue event” for Ukrainian archives. Colleagues at Stanford and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage stepped up, and together they launched Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, or Sucho, on 1 March. By the end of the first week of that month, Sucho had more than 1,000 volunteers, many working 12-hour days on furlough from regular jobs. By the middle of March they were coordinating with the Ministry of Culture in Ukraine, the International Federation of Library Associations, the International Council of Museums and the Memory of the World division of Unesco.”
“Cat Buchatskiy, 21, an international security student at Stanford, founded the Shadows Project, which, before the war, worked to alter the historical record to support a Ukrainian rather than a Russian reading of cultural history, arguing, for instance, that museums should describe the suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich as a Ukrainian artist rather than a Soviet one. In February, she suspended her semester at Stanford and started raising money for bombproof cabinets and fireproof blankets. Ukraine libraries also need more basic supplies, like generators and cardboard boxes.” NOTE – The Journalism Faculty at Taras Shevchenko University has a collection of Ukrainian language newspapers from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Very little of it has been digitized; the newspapers themselves are in such poor condition that they are almost impossible to handle.
“Meanwhile, the business of libraries continues despite the physical destruction. They maintain the logistical network of Ukrainian culture. “The libraries follow their readers anywhere,” Bruy says. “So in Kharkiv, which is very often bombed, a lot of people live in the metro.” Librarians bring the books to them. People need to read in bomb shelters, too. That’s where they most need to read. “The library isn’t a building,” Bruy says. “The library is a community.” “ NOTE – This is a tradition that goes back at least as far as the Revolution of Dignity, where there were portable lending libraries set up for use by the protestors.
“Invaders never understand the cultural framework of the countries they invade. If they did, they wouldn’t invade. The US military’s official history of the Iraq war blamed the defeat there, in part, on “gaping holes in what the US military knew about Iraq. This ignorance included Iraqi politics, society and government – gaps that led the United States to make some deeply flawed assumptions about how the war was likely to unfold.” “
“In the war over meaning, the Russians lost on the first day. Their contention that Ukrainian identity doesn’t exist has been proven wrong no matter what happens now. The question that remains is not whether Ukrainian identity exists, but whether Russia can annihilate the Ukrainian identity it claims is nothing more than a distortion. Their assault on Ukrainian libraries has only increased as the war has developed into an act of the mass terrorisation of civilian populations.”
“In Kyiv on 10 October, the Russians bombed the Maksymovych Scientific Library of the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine and the Kyiv city youth library.”
“No one has done more for the development of Ukrainian culture than Vladimir Putin. He has proven, more than any other figure, that Ukrainian culture is distinct and vital.”
“Meanwhile, Anatolii Khromov is hiring. There’s a new position in the Transcarpathian library system. Reading rooms are starting to open. They are resuming the work of libraries, which is to build cultures day by day, room by room, book by book. Libraries exist because the precious things they shelter – words, meanings, communities of readers – need sheltering. The precariousness of culture does not mean weakness, though. Cultures flourish in peace but define themselves in resistance. In the 21st-century wars of meanings, you do not want to be up against the librarians. They keep meaning alive.”