Mary Bonkins

This is what russia keeps doing over and over. This is what russia has done now with the recent ”peace plan”. Make ridiculous demands, yet end up getting something that wasn’t yours.

People are being admitted to the hospital with starvation faints and severe exhaustion. There are still a lot of children in the city. Against this background, there was a real recent incident: the ZSU / volunteers dropped 15 boxes of humanitarian aid from drones across the entire city — three drops, two boxes with food and one with medicine each. One of the drops was right near the hospital. The security had to push people back and disperse the crowd because they were afraid it might be an explosion and someone could get hurt.

A typical night for millions of Ukrainian children because the russian army came to “liberate” them.

“Why are the russians doing this to Ukraine? Because they can, because the world has allowed them to.” Testimony of Taira (Yuliya Payevska) to the US Helsinki Commission. She was captured and imprisoned by russians on March 16, 2022 and released on June 17, 2022. ▪️ Taira about herself: "My name is Yuliya Payevska. By profession, I am a graphic designer, as well as the president of one of the Aikido federations of Ukraine. Russians call me a Nazi. This is what they call everyone who opposes them, or simply does not want to see russia in Ukraine. I spent the first 20 days of this war in Mariupol, which turned into hell. After that, I spent 3 months in russian captivity. And it was hell too." ▪️ About the proposal to commit suicide: "When my executioners suggested that I commit suicide, I said no. I wanted to see what would happen tomorrow, I wondered how far they would go in their madness and malice. And then one day, when it seemed that there was no hope, someone looked into the window and called my name. "Take your things and go out" — that's how my path to freedom began. ▪️About those who remained in russian captivity: "Pregnant prisoners whose fate is unknown neither to their families nor to the state. A soldier who was beaten for three hours and then thrown into the basement like a sack, and only a day later someone came to him." ▪️ About horrors in Mariupol: "A dead child in his mother's arms, a seven-year-old boy with a gunshot wound dying in my arms because I cannot stop his death. Prisoners screaming for weeks in their cells, dying of torture in hellish agony. I remember my friend's eyes, which I closed before his body went cold, and another friend, and another, and another... I saw half a million people dying under air strikes. Air strikes on hospitals and residential areas. A hospital full of wounded people, with no medicine. Surgeons and medical staff sleeping for three hours a day as operations followed one after another. Medical evacuation vehicles arriving every 5 to 10 minutes, with the living and the dead lying on top of each other. Cars that are on fire with people inside. Police officers pulling women and children from the rubble, mutilated beyond recognition. People collecting water from puddles. Dogs that were once pets dragging human limbs around the city." ▪️About questions from the executioner: "One of my executioners asked me: "Do you know why I do this to you?" I answered: "Because you can." He did not expect such an answer. But it is true. They do it because they can. Because their leaders told them they had the right to do so. Because once they were allowed to. Because the world gave them such permission. The world was silent, watching the crimes of the russians in Georgia, Syria and so on."

Hegseth: "We're still dealing with the environment Joe Biden created—depleting our stockpiles and sending them to Ukraine instead of our own military. Every time we face a challenge, it traces back to 'Well, sent it to Ukraine.'" It looks like they’re just going to blame Ukraine whenever anything goes wrong now, doesn’t it? It’s depressing to watch because while this administration will eventually leave office, a segment of Americans will keep hating Ukraine without even remembering why.

Someone called ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine and told them to leave or face violence. The calls came from Ukrainian-looking numbers. The voices claimed to be Ukrainian police. Ukraine's SBU ran technical analysis and traced every call to Russia. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the operation feeds directly into Viktor Orbán's re-election campaign — which is built on the claim that Ukraine threatens Hungarians — and that coordination with the Orbán campaign cannot be ruled out. 🔗 euromaidanpress.com/2026/03/19/rus…

@BiankaB12 Excellent essay! Haven’t heard the term donut empire before, but it is indeed very fitting! Signed up to your Substack now

And what did russia provide? The KGB oppressive apparatus. Russia is, by every meaningful developmental metric outside of hydrocarbon extraction, is a third-world country. What makes me genuinely furious is when Western commentators lazily brand all “Slavs” or all “Eastern Europeans” as backward, corrupt, culturally inferior, they are thinking of Russia specifically, yet smearing the rest of us with a reputation we neither earned nor deserve.

Kazakhstan is arguably the most dramatic case of imperial extraction. Between 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear weapons tests at a site in the Kazakh steppe. The country provided uranium for the nuclear arsenal, grain for the Soviet breadbasket, coal for the industrial base, and oil for the economy.

Poland contributed Silesian coal, Gdańsk shipbuilding, copper, machinery, and the rolling stock that kept Soviet railways running. Hungary provided pharmaceuticals through Gedeon Richter, Ikarus buses that appeared in cities across the Soviet Union, and food processing capacity. Romania, the most independent-minded of the satellites, still supplied Ploiești oil - from Europe’s oldest oil fields - along with grain, timber, and chemicals.

Czechoslovakia was equally indispensable - Škoda provided heavy industry, aircraft engines, arms exports that generated hard currency for the bloc. And critically, nuclear reactor engineering - the Soviet VVER reactor designs were built in Czechoslovakia, a legacy of the engineering culture that dated back to the Austro-Hungarian industrial core.

Bulgaria supplied around 47% of all computer hardware produced within the COMECON economic bloc - from Berlin to Vladivostok. By the late 1980s, Bulgarian-made computers flew on the Soviet space station Mir, equipped nuclear research facilities in India, and ran statistical offices in Mozambique. Add to the computers: canned goods, wine, tobacco, rose oil (Bulgaria still holds a near-monopoly on attar of roses, the essential ingredient in high-end perfumery), and a growing pharmaceutical sector.

The Baltics had the highest living standards in the Soviet Union. They had the most sophisticated consumer goods, the strongest design culture, the most advanced electronics manufacturing. The precision engineering, radio technology, and electronics production that came out of the Baltic republics represented a qualitative tier of output that the RSFSR simply could not match.

Ukraine alone produced ~25% of Soviet industrial output. Steel, coal, grain, nuclear engineers, ICBMs. The entire Soviet weapons program drew talent predominately from Ukrainian universities and research institutes. In Dnipro sat Yuzhnoye Design Bureau and its manufacturing partner Yuzhmash. Together, they constituted the single most important missile production complex in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was the only empire in history where the colonies were richer, more advanced, educated and productive than the coloniser. The center was hollow, the productive periphery did all the work. New analysis ➡️ tinyurl.com/j9fxxdp4 🧵👇

"My father survived Russian captivity, but his heart gave out." Ukrainian marine Oleksandr Savov died eight months after surviving nearly three years of Russian torture. Today marks one year since the release he did not live to commemorate.

Heartbreaking. Little Ukrainian boy lost his father who was protecting him and his country from the murderous Russian invaders. Kids shouldn't experience such horrors. Never forget. Never forgive.

@AdamJSchwarz He has no idea what he's done.

Stealing kids. Reeducating them. Resettling stolen lands with their own scum. Do you know how people call it?

Holy shit.. Trump just opened up the Russian war machine to cash flows from the US. Putin's puppet state of Belarus, a nation with a GDP the size of Vermont will now be a conduit for Russia to/from the US. Trump is Putin's whore.

During his briefing, @SpoxUkraineMFA Heorhii Tykhyi stated that Ukraine has not heard any condemnation from Hungary over the fact that a Russian strike damaged the Druzhba pipeline. He added that instead of explaining to Hungarian citizens why the country has failed to diversify its energy supply, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is focusing on Ukraine in his rhetoric. 💬 "So Hungary politicises this issue, makes it a political point, and puts forward demands to Ukraine, which is absurd in our view. Ukraine faces large-scale terror, air terror from Russia. Our infrastructure is being damaged every day. And even since the damage done to the Druzhba pipeline, there have already been other damages to other Ukrainian pipelines, other infrastructure, for example, the Odesa-Brody pipeline. Ukraine repairs all of that. But we do not have unlimited resources. We are in a full-scale war, which Hungary decides to ignore for some reason," Heorhii Tykhyi has stated.