Mud, Ukraine’s friend

My Sunday evening movie was Port Authority. Paul is a white man of 20 from somewhere (he gives two different places as his home) and fleeing something arrives at the Port Authority bus terminal in New York. He ends up working for debt collectors who use his muscles. He becomes entranced by the ball scene and meets and falls in love with Wye. Then he finds out she is transgender. The ball scene is similar to what I saw when volunteering at the Ruth Ellis Center and watching the youth dance. So I’m familiar with the style of dancing and the concept of the houses LGBTQ people form to take care of each other. Paul is fascinated and clueless about what that all means (Paul seems clueless about a whole lot of things). One issue is he’s white and they’re black. Another is he tries to hide that he has little money and sleeps in a dormitory. After watching it I looked at the summaries of reviews from Meta Critic. That combined score was 61/100 (worthwhile but barely). The reviews range from great to worthy concept with some fine performances. IMDB featured a user review that noted the wooden acting and awkward dialog with little depth of story. I thought that seemed a reasonable assessment. Too many times I wanted someone to provide a clue for Paul and for him to figure out what he really wanted and to be honest with himself. Then again, I wasn’t any better at 20. When I last wrote on Saturday I mentioned a Ukrainian woman who downed a Russian drone by throwing a jar of cucumbers. I even titled the post with that. Katya Gorchinskaya tweeted a correction and filled in details. The woman, Olena, was smoking on the balcony of her Kyiv apartment and saw and heard the drone go by. She thought she didn’t have time to get a weapon, but did have preserves at her feet. So she grabbed a jar and threw it as hard as she could. Alas, it was her favorite recipe of pickled tomatoes and plums. I wonder, in Ukrainian, how close the words for tomatoes and plums are to cucumbers. On to other news of the region. This is one I forgot to mention last Friday. In a Ukriane update on Daily Kos Mark Sumner included a tweet from Market Sentiment that says the top three institutional holders in a collapsing Russian bank are the Kentucky teachers retirement system and two Kentucky businesses. That’s one reason why I’ve been calling the top Kentucky senator Moscow Mitch. In a Ukraine update from Saturday noon Sumner noted the US is no longer the top country in the number of COVID cases per day. We’re not even in the top ten. Alas, Russia is in the top ten and Ukraine is not in good shape – as of the last time anyone was lining up to take a COVID test. This is invasion plus pandemic. We don’t know yet what that means for Poland, who is receiving most of the refugees. Also in that update is a wall mural in Paris of a young woman with flowers in her hair and carrying the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag and stomping on tanks as she marches by. In a post from mid afternoon Saturday Kos of Kos wrote that ten days into the war the Russian Air Force is finally showing up – and getting shot down. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy addressed US senators by Zoom and told them not to share. Jamie Harrison, DNC chair tweeted that Senators Rubio and Daines shared screenshots of the call. Harrison complained to Moscow Mitch that his caucus was jeopardizing the safety of the Ukrainian president. In a late afternoon update Sumner discussed a Russian Cassandra. A Cassandra is a person who is cursed to accurately predict the future and be ignored. This time the Cassandra is Mikhail Khodarenok, a retired Russian colonel. Three weeks before the invasion he wrote an essay for the Russian Military site NVO. He first describes the Russian expectation that Ukraine will be easy pickings. Then he disputes that idea: Ukraine has no interest in being a part of Russia. Ukraine won’t be taken out by a first strike and its military is far stronger than Russia believes. The rest of the world will come to Ukraine’s aid. He concludes by saying conflict with Ukraine doesn’t meet Russia's national interest. Accurate. And ignored. In a post for late Saturday evening Kos wrote about mud, Ukraine’s friend. The ground is too warm and muddy for tanks. They can’t spread out across the countryside and do flank maneuvers. They’re confined to roads where they’re easily ambushed or easy targets for aircraft and drones. Napoleon and Hitler had the same problem. Jumping ahead to an update posted Sunday evening Hunter of Kos showed a map put out by UkraineWorld. In other posts Kos has shown maps showing the territory Russia controls. This map shows that Russia controls only major roads in those areas. And not many of those.