Russia invades Ukraine: Specific Developments 2023

[Charlie_Jack]

From the article that @tempogain linked to, above:

This is what the Russians do everywhere they go. This is what they do to their own people inside Russia.

It is just one reason why the Ukrainians refuse to surrender. They know what will come if they do. They’ve seen it too many times already. The war raging in Ukraine is over not only national sovereignty, but also the very essence of decency — for the right to live unmolested and unabused. They can never stop fighting.

A little slice transcribed from a recent Chris Capelluto video on Ukrainian irregulars (from about 3:32 to about 5:11):

  It’s interesting to note that Ukraine has a long history of partisan operations against occupiers. And it’s possibly this very legacy that Putin tried to revive and use as justification for labeling Ukrainian leadership as Nazis, because Ukraine’s World War II resistance against the Soviet Union and the Poles was originally led by a group called the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which was a far-right group that had worked with the Germans and actually held on long enough to also receive support from the American CIA.
  This insurgency was able to successfully eliminate a huge number of 35,000 Soviet soldiers, police, and Communist Party officials during the postwar era, according to the CIA. The group once held 20,000 members, but today is completely defunct. Despite this, Putin still uses it as part of his justification for invading Ukraine.
  However, Ukrainian partisanship today against Putin and his invasion looks very different. A law passed two years ago in Ukraine authorized their special forces operators to train, arm, and even directly pay covert fighters on Ukrainian territory during wartime.
  Partisan resistance groups were established months before the invasion, and action began as early as a week after the initial invasion, when the pro-Russian mayor of the city of Kreminnaya in the Luhansk region was abducted and later killed. According to an adviser to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Ukraine, this action was done by “unknown patriots.”
  This fierce pushback is not what Putin expected, because by many accounts, Russia believed they would be welcomed into the Russian-speaking eastern part of the country, which of course was not the case.