Dear Readers:
Today I have this human interest war story from LENTA. It has a happy ending (I think), and could be turned into a made-for-TV movie.
“There were nine of us…”
During the battle for Avdeevka, as the story begins on the Telegram Channel “Shot”, a Russian soldier named Sergei was fighting, in his unit of 9 men, in the ruins of a kindergarten. The unit managed to hold this position for about two days.
Sergei was seriously injured, incurring several wounds all at the same time: a knee, an arm, and one of his eyes got shot out. His comrades bandaged him up, but had to leave him behind when they withdrew, promising to send evacuation for him. They hid him in a safe place, but left him his rifle and one cartridge, just in case.
After a certain amount of time had passed, Sergei heard footsteps. He called out and demanded the password.
A voice replied: “Don’t shoot! I am unarmed, and I am not wearing an armored vest.” A man came into view, it was a Ukrainian soldier.
Sergei: “I called him over, and we got to know each other. His real name is Alexander, from the city of Nikolaev, but his call-sign is Kvas. [yalensis: kvas is a traditional Russian fermented beverage, weaker than beer but gives a mild buzz.] He’s a young, unspoiled guy, 25 years old. They took him out of his normal life, gave him some training, threw him into the front line, and then abandoned him, in his own words.”
After the two men had chatted a bit and got to know each other, Sergei proposed that Alexander surrender to him and be evacuated alongside. Alexander agreed.
Due to heavy fighting, it took three days for the Medical Evac to get to Sergei. During those three days, Alexander took care of his new buddy, brought him water to drink. To get water, he had to crawl through heavy fire, to the nearby pond and back. Which, by the way, proves that the man is no coward, even though he had no desire to fight in the Ukrainian army. Sergei: “I was so thirsty that my lips had peeled off. This Alexander helped me so much, he brought me water from the pond, and this is how he took care of me, for three whole days.”
Eventually the Evac arrived and removed the two soldiers. Despite his good deeds, Alexander was treated as a POW and carted away. But the seriously wounded Sergei did not forget his new friend. He told his comrades the story, and they in turn made sure their Junior Officers were informed that “this guy took care of one of ours, so go easy on him…”
Eventually [probably to authenticate the prisoner’s story] Sergei was brought into the interrogation room where he re-encountered his new friend.
Sergei: “I recognized his face, I said to him, I want to shake your hand. He extended his hand, and I shook it and I told him, thank you for what you did for me.”
The reporter ends by writing that we don’t know the fate of the POW Alexander. But one may hope that the Russian interrogators “went easy on him” and that this young man only has to wait out the end of the war in reasonably livable conditions, before returning home to his family.
Awful Avalanche 
One hopes that Alexander did not change his mind and asked to be swapped and thus ended up on that IL76 that got shot down.
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Given the timing, and that the IL-76 was apparently carrying used-up Azov from Mariupol, Alexander is probably doing quite well in captivity.
It’s noteworthy that individuals like him, who still retain their humanity despite every effort of the West, the Banderites and social pressure, are why the Russian approach has been so humane. Despite, yes, the desire of the West to remake the Russians “just like them” as soulless, lizard-brained meat machines.
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Yeah, they don’t give a timing, but I have a feeling this happened more recently, after that incident with the plane. My impression was that Alexander WANTED to be captured, so he probably does not want to go back and be sent to the front again.
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Yes, he was looking for some way to surrender, that’s why he was out in front of his own lines without a gun or body armour. This isn’t the first time that happened. I have a video of a Ukrainian soldier shouting through trees at Russian troops not to shoot, then walking to their trench and immediately telling them not just his name but his unit, which surprised the Russians a bit because it was located a long way away.
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Totally off-topic, but I saw a comment yesterday by one of your old nemeses, Raccoonblargle (real name Tim Somethingorother; I can’t be arsed to remember) on a site completely unrelated to the Ukraine war. It was on a Covid-themed Substack that I read sometimes. You’ll recall that he takes the horrible disease almost as seriously as he takes Holocaust denial. While he agreed with the woman who wrote the article (it was about why it still makes sense to wear masks at outdoor demonstrations) he had that snide, dismissive tone he had here. I think he had signed up as a subscriber to the ‘Stack, but he warned the writer “you had better keep having articles that I agree with if you want to retain me as a reader.” (not his exact wording, but that’s the gist of it.) He said “I have a blog too!” as a way of puffing up his importance factor, but he didn’t whore it with a link.
Since the Internet is so huge, with an incomprehensible number of people participating, It always strikes me as strange to see a nym I recognise in an unfamiliar setting. It’s one thing when I see Raghead commenting on a warblog like MOA or Larry Johnson, or Dr. Snekotron using a panel from one of his toons on the Doctor’s Twitter bio, because Rags is everywhere. Every once in a while, the unexpected “6 degrees of separation” thing makes it seem like a small world after all.
That said, I still wonder what happened to Colliemum. She was old, and she lives in the UK, which is full of Covid. When I don’t hear from somebody for a while (including my own kid) I don’t know whether they have keeled over dead. Which probably won’t happen to Raccoonazi, because he wears a mask.
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Yeah, that snide tone he had, really ticked me off. Like he was superior to everybody else, and just looking down on other people like they were ants who were put there to do his bidding and drink in his wisdom. A person like that, you might even agree with them on one random issue, but if you don’t agree on every single issue, then they go on a rant and try to bully you. I recall how he ordered me to “sit down and shut up.” On my own blog. How am I supposed to write a post? I usually write one sitting down, but “shutting up” is a contradiction in terms when you are composing a blogpost.
Speaking of Holocaust Deniers, I have recently stopped reading the comment section at MOA, it was always bad but occasionally somebody would post a useful link to something else. Now it’s just complete garbage, infested with Unzies, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Hitler fanboys, and various other species of cockroaches. Wow, the whole Palestine genocide thing has caused these insects to crawl out from whatever rock they were hiding under for 80 years. With their crocodile tears, as if they give a flying fuck about Palestinians. These are Jew-haters who hated Jews even before hating Jews was cool. Who needs AI “Machine Language Learning”? The moment I see a sentence with the words “Jew” and “Bolshevik” in the same sentence, then I know exactly who I’m dealing with. Well, except for the sentence I just wrote. That’s why AI doesn’t work, because it doesn’t understand context and irony!
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I tend to quick-read a few, like the first dozen, as a way of “taking the temperature” of the discourse. Ditto at Larry Johnson’s site and one or two others. Sometimes I’m looking for familiar nyms like Raghead’s or other commenters whose perspective I recognise. In the “parasocial relationships” of the online world, it’s like eavesdropping on an acquaintance. It’s even enjoyable when I see something from someone I DON’T like, as with that comment from Rakunk I mentioned the other day. (I recently finished reading the dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood. A rakunk was a genetically engineered cross between a ‘coon and a de-scented skunk. There were also pigoons, porkers which could grow human hearts and other organs for transplanting. That would be more appropriate for that wanker, but I went with the chimera whose name started with “rac” in the interest of understandability.)
Even though anything on the Internet can be fake, it’s instructive for me to see the “flavour” of that day’s comment stream. Similar to the way I view mainstream news from a “meta” sense of “what are we being fed, and why?” Are there LOTS of Nazibots compared to the average? That must mean that bad news has scared the monkeys out of the castles and their paymasters are screeching “Fly, my pretties!”
(Have you dug into your own psyche to contemplate whether a childhood exposure to the flying monkey scene in “The Wizard of Oz” had anything to do with your simianimosity? It was pretty damned creepy, especially when you noticed the dark cloud of them filling the sky at the horizon. One of the reasons why Russians scared me as a kid was because I envisioned them as the Gogs who were marching and chanting in their scary deep voices. “Oh we love, the olllld one!” In my yoof, when there were only three television networks and no such thing as videocassettes, “Wizard” was a big thing. It would only be shown once a year, usually around Halloween. The movie played a large part in childrens’ imaginations because there weren’t so many other distractions then. Perhaps you grew up in a more media-babbling era, though.)
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Well fark! I cut off half my comment by mistake:
Ya gotta love Bernhard because he allows dissenting voices the way you do. Although UN-like you, he’ll sometimes censor comments that are too naff. Which is another part of the fun for me, seeing if I can decipher what’s missing by reading the responses to something that’s no longer there — “hey you idiot at Comment #5!” then going up to where it used to be. It’s like being a bot detective.
Every once in a while, I’ll learn something from a comment at Moon or elsewhere. “Southfront” is good, but unless they pop up high in the thread, I don’t see their stuff. Coz I only have X number of hours a day to scan the ‘Net — admittedly, as a permanently unemployed bludger, my X is a higher digit than most — so why waste too much of it on wastrels?
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“Oh we love, the ollld one!” Oh! Is that what the gogs are singing, I could never make the actual lyrics. First time I saw Wiz, I don’t think it was even the flying monkey scene that scared me. I was more scared in that scene where the witch turns over the hourglass, and Dorothy can see exactly how much time she has left to live!
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I didn’t know that either, until I went on an Oz-related book-reading jag in the mid-1990s. “Wicked” had recently been written and was getting some literary buzz, so I checked it out from the library in the Florida town where I was living. It was an excellent re-imagining of events in the Emerald City. That motivated me to borrow the original “Wizard” which had the words of the chant, and why the Gogs were saying that. Around that time, I also read up on the (probably mythical) interpretation of why L. Frank Baum had written “Oz” as a parable about William Jennings Bryan and the Populist political movement of the 1890s. History is so cool if you dig in deep!
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That’s marvelous. Some day, when I have time, I should read the original book, it’s quite a story. I didn’t know about the William Jennings Bryant connection either. American history is actually pretty fascinating, until you get to the modern era, then it’s just depressing…
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Again, sorry to junk up your comments with something NOT Ukraine-related, but since you asked — here’s a link to an explainer on how “Oz” was (supposedly) about bi-metallism:
https://www.ranker.com/list/hidden-symbols-in-wizard-of-oz/genevieve-carlton
Now there’s a word you don’t often see! Unless you’re a gold bug like me. Even then it doesn’t make much sense without getting into the weeds of econogeekery. Used to be a big thing when money was actual pieces of metal.
The link here is not the BEST on the topic. It only tells half the story, the part about the “hidden meaning” theory. Which is a cool history lesson, and this link has lots of nice pictures. There was another I read a few years ago that demolished the theory though. I think it was in Smithsonian magazine but I can’t find it on a cursory Yandex search and I don’t want to spend too much time on a throw-away comment. Gist of THAT article was that Baum had no political inclinations in any of his writing, and to the extent that his politics were known (not much) he was kinda right-wing, not populist. It made a convincing case to me that the Oz allegory was a case of connecting dots to make a picture that isn’t really there.
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Wow! still an interesting read, even if debunked. I didn’t know that Baum had advocated for genocide of Native Americans. That wasn’t very nice of him.
My favorite character has always been the Cowardly Lion, because I can relate to his phobias and panic attacks!
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