Today we review ‘20 Days in #Mariupol , #Moscow is struck overnight, and we visit a Ukrainian refugee center in #Poland.
It’s the screaming that gets me.
As a former #U.S. #Army combat medic, the blood and gore doesn’t affect me very much nowadays. I trained for that, studied it, and feel as comfortable as one can get, really, in its presence.
No, there’s nothing that troubles me more deeply, nothing that keeps me up at night longer, than the horrific agony laid out by a tormented woman or child.
I’ve often said that being a #war correspondent is like carrying a cup around.
You travel from place to place, and everywhere you go, people are having the worst day of their lives. And they trust you enough to pour a little bit of their grief in your cup.
@timkmak have always wondered - what's it like to visit places where people are having as bad days as you say, and then you presumably you return home to a less uncomfortable place. Do you find that contrasting experience jarring?
@gpollara it’s part of the privilege we have as reporters. We can leave any time. And there’s a long history of guilt and shame among correspondents who do leave.
The documentary ‘20 Days in #Mariupol,’ which was released this month, encapsulates that experience. It chronicles the frantic, desperate, fearful first twenty days of the #Russian full-scale invasion from an encircled #Ukrainian city.
An explosion erupting from the side of an apartment building surrounded by houses.
Caption: "An explosion is seen in an apartment building after a Russian tank fires in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 11, 2022. Srill from FRONTLINE PBS and AP'sfeature film '20 Days in Mariupol.'(AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)"
I can picture those first days well. The #AP team which filmed the #documentary endured far greater risk to stay behind and document the atrocities in #Mariupol. Meanwhile, I had joined the exodus of civilians – a mass of millions of people – leaving #Kyiv and its surroundings.
"Wars don't start with explosions, they start with silence,” the film begins.
And it’s true: the morning of February 24th, 2022, I left my hotel in search of a car to evacuate our team.
"I don't want to die," says a child captured in the #documentary. "I just woke up from bombings today."
The experience of war is first and foremost the suffering of those who are not fighting. #Civilians outnumber combatants, and these defenseless #people are scared and scarred.
"My baby, oh God!" cries out a mother as #emergency workers attempt CPR on a child.
The next shot is a child, naked except for a coat placed over her body.
I recommend this film for the same reason that I warn against it. It is searing.
It lacerates your soul in the same way that war does with its pointlessness and its travesty. But it is necessary.
"This is painful to watch,” says the narrator. “But it must be painful to watch."
Several times while watching the documentary, I wanted to pick up the laptop and hurl it across the room. Whether it was anger or unacknowledged sadness I am not sure.
But I did want it to stop. At other times, I found myself zoning out, disassociating from the film, before coming back to the screen. The documentary settles on the image of an 16 year old boy with his legs blown off. He was beyond saving. His father approaches the body and wails, producing a sound that can only emanate from the deepest point of the darkest pool of anguish. It's Biblical. Primal. Animalistic. (1/2)
Mstyslav Chernov, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Evgeniy Maloletka are the Associated Press #journalists who risked their lives to sneak this footage out of #Mariupol, narrowly escaping the encircled city and making it to #Ukrainian territory so that now-infamous images could be broadcast.
There is nothing that can really be described as combat in the film. And that too is the experience of #war.
Simply put, war for most is just the enduring. The suffering.
Tim here: I toured #Poland last month with members of the Kaplan Public Service Foundation, an organization dedicated to bridging the military-civilian divide.
Together, we visited a refugee center near #Warsaw, where those displaced from the war in #Ukraine were still living.
The conditions were spartan but clean. In a giant room that would have once been a warehouse, hundreds lived in an open space with plywood for walls and blankets for doors.
The goal is to educate the children there, but the center is viewed as a transitional space, one in which students could continue to learn, with the hope that they would eventually be placed in local Polish schools.
Children fleeing war still remain children, and the artwork they produced at the refugee center reflects that.
Ivanka, 13 years old, from Volyn Oblast, writes that she drew a hamster named Vasylka -- she painted him because "when I look at him, I feel happy."
This painting, drawn by Maja Tkachova, depicts a frog holding a bible, standing on a cloud in one of her dreams.
Finally, today’s Cat o’ Conflict was drawn by a fourteen year old at the center. She said she drew two cats flying to another planet –-- two because it showed that when you're not alone, and when you have support – you can overcome any difficulties, "even in space."
To read today's issue in its entirety and to see more artwork from the center, subscribe for free, or paid if you want to support our work! Here: http://counteroffensive.news
Speaking of outliers, do you know one country which has never joined the International Criminal Court: the US! If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. It is time for America to join the ICC. #Ukraine#Palestine
wow the international criminal court, i wonder why they've never charged GW Bush of anything since him and his ghouls lied to the entire world and did a war that led to the deaths of possibly over 2 million peple -- come to think about it i don't think they've ever charged any american ally, ever, it's almost like international is a giant farce that only applies to some countries but not others, hmm
@timkmak Why do we allow our world to be a world where this happens? Why do so many sit by, thinking, “I’m sure glad that’s not happening to me right now.” while our world continues to be a world where this can happen at all, and therefore conceivably COULD happen to any of us, at some point? Ugh…
Add comment