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David Corn: A Message from an American Fighting in Ukraine
21 hours ago
A Message from an American Fighting in Ukraine
Send helmets, gloves, bullet-proof vests, and medical supplies.
David Corn
Washington, DC, Bureau ChiefBio | Follow
A week or so ago, Sergey Nevstruyev, a 59-year-old father of four and grandfather of three who owns construction and remodeling businesses in North Carolina, was in his home in Charlotte, watching the horrific images of Vladimir Putin’s illegal attack on Ukraine. Today he is in Kyiv, serving as a major in a Ukrainian brigade commanded by Serhiy Melnychuk, a well-known former member of the Ukrainian parliament and onetime military commander who led a volunteer militia that fought Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
On Friday, Nevstruyev, whom I met through a mutual acquaintance, and Mila Melnychuk, the wife of his commander, called me from Kyiv. They had a simple message: we need help. They didn’t ask for direct military support. They didn’t call for the United States and Europe to impose a no fly zone over Ukraine. They requested basic supplies for Ukrainian fighters: helmets, gloves, body armor, and medical supplies. “We don’t need NATO troops,” Nevstruyev said. “We don’t need people to die for us. We will fight for our own country, whatever the price we will have to pay. But to do that we need help. It’s very important this help comes as soon as possible. We don’t need it tomorrow. We need it today.”
While her husband, who now serves on the general staff of the Ukraine army, helps oversee the war against the Russian invaders, Mila, a European democracy activist, remains in their eighth-floor Kyiv apartment with their two children. (One is twenty months old, the other almost three years old.) “I can’t leave,” she said, because each day might be the last one her husband sees their children. Like other residents who have not fled, she contends with daily hardships. Food is difficult to find. When it can be purchased, only cash is accepted. But ATMs have stopped working. Banks are closed. Residents fear that electricity will be cut off. Those who rely on stoves for heating cannot find wood. There are children as young as one or two years old, she said, who have been orphaned and have no one to care for them. Noting the Russian bombing of civilian targets in cities, she said of the Russians, “they want to do a second Aleppo.”
“Seeing on TV how my brothers and sisters, children and women are being killed [by] Russian Federation military forces, I could not sit in the US and watch on TV how a typical extermination of civilians takes place.”
more...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/a-message-from-an-american-fighting-in-ukraine/
17 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I would encourage every Ukrainian living in high rise apartments to move to single floor buildings wherever
possible if they can, or at least the lower floors. Have a gut feeling Putler is going to instruct his troops to
level towns. Safer ground level away from tall buildings.
His maternal Grandmother was born in Odessa.
