Curious

@DopaminePlsMe This is sooooo true!

The cruelest ADHD realization is that planning the hobby gives me 100% of the dopamine, while doing the hobby gives me 0%. I didn't actually want to knit a scarf. I wanted to buy $80 of yarn, watch a tutorial, and fantasize about being a "knitter" for an afternoon. The fantasy was the finished product

Kyiv. Today in Shevchenko Park, a group of Kazakhs cooked free plov (a traditional rice dish) for Ukrainians 💪

So, say hello to our new Minister of Defense. He’s 34, and he’s held top-level positions in our government since he was 28. When I travel abroad for work, I sometimes joke and shock people by telling them that in Ukraine we have a single smartphone app — where you can keep your official passport, your driver’s license, your vehicle registration, your children’s birth certificates, your diploma (and under other digitalization programs, even things like your military ID) and where you can order many government services and documents online. Mykhailo Fedorov has done an enormous amount for the country’s unique modernization and for the military during the war. Now he’ll have to bring his character, his managerial talent, and his IT-startup vibe to the Ministry of Defense. I think no one will argue anymore that it makes no sense for us to try to compete with fascist Russia in sheer numbers of manpower and tanks. Our path is the continued development of our drone revolution and technology, and, above all, cleaning out the eternal Soviet chaos: bureaucracy, freeloading, and corruption that eats away at our defense from the inside. Wishing success to the young minister.

Greetings from Kyiv. To those who care (I know some of you do, thank you). The situation remains difficult. The latest attack, amid freezing temperatures (-12 °C now) caused severe power and heating outages. I’m feeling better and adapting (yesterday, we had electricity for five hours in total).

Ukrainian Defenders of the 15th Steel Border Mobile Border Guard Detachment, "Korea" and "Pastor," held positions in the Sumy region for 131 and 94 days without rotation, respectively. Together, they repelled six massive Russian assaults. In December, "Korea" sustained a gunshot wound but decided to remain at the position. The evacuation of the border guards became a separate special operation under fire and lasted two weeks. Glory! 📹: State Border Guard Service of Ukraine

So today, Russia’s full-scale invasion aimed at destroying Ukraine has reached the same duration as the Eastern Front of World War II. For 1,418 days, Russia has been unable to defeat Ukraine, unable to break through the front, unable to destroy its military, unable to seize its key major cities, unable to cause a Ukrainian collapse. During those same 1,418 days, history once passed from Hitler’s attack on his ally Stalin, through the total catastrophe of 1941, the formation of the Anti-Hitler Coalition, the monumental battles for Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sevastopol, Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk, the meat grinder at Rzhev, the Allied landings in Italy and Normandy, the siege of Leningrad, operations in Eastern and Central Europe, to the Battle of Berlin and the fall of Nazism. Putin’s Russia, meanwhile -- amid endless bravado and claims to global dominance -- is still smashing its head against a wall, trying to seize the ruined remnants of what was once a Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk in Donbas, just 45 km from the original 2022 front line. And don’t tell me about a “war of attrition.” Yes, there is a war of attrition -- at least since 2023, when the roughly 1,000-km front line fully stabilized and has since shifted only marginally and locally. But. If you are the “world's second strongest military,” with the third-largest military budget on the planet (around 40% of the entire annual state budget!), vast Soviet-era stockpiles of equipment, enormous revenues from oil sales, and ammunition supplied by your totalitarian allies -- and you still cannot defeat Ukraine after four years -- you are in deep trouble. If, because of this war, you were forced for the first time since WWI and WWII to conduct military mobilization and place your economy on a war footing at enormous cost -- you are in deep trouble. If, by the fourth year of the war, even your gigantic Soviet reserves of mothballed equipment are gradually running out, and you have long since been buying millions of shells from North Korea -- you are in deep trouble. If, over these 1,418 days, you have definitively lost the European gas market, lost influence in the Caucasus, Venezuela, and Syria, and fallen into complete vassal dependence on China -- you are in deep trouble. If, in the middle of this war of attrition against Ukraine, Ukraine manages to invade your own territory and occupy part of your region for more than half a year, forcing you to buy Kim Jong Un’s expendable combat slaves to push Ukrainian troops out of Kursk -- you are in deep trouble. If, after 1,418 days, Ukraine destroys your oil industry night after night and eliminates your generals in the center of Moscow, and at one point wipes out an entire fleet of strategic bombers on their airfields -- you are in deep trouble. If, after 1,418 days of full-scale war, your state TV propaganda is orgasming over the capture of yet another set of useless ruins of small, remote towns in the Donbas -- places you smashed your head against for months, sometimes years -- you are in deep trouble. If your confirmed and documented tank losses alone (over 4,300, according to Oryx) are already comparable to the entire actively used tank fleet of the U.S. Army -- you are in deep trouble. If global intelligence services estimate your losses at 1 million killed and wounded, and even after 1,418 days of war the capture of just one Donetsk region does not appear remotely achievable in the foreseeable future -- you are in deep trouble. Not to mention any “grand breakthroughs” toward Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv (where your blitzkrieg collapsed completely at the very beginning), or Lviv. If, after 1,418 days of full-scale war, you still have not captured a single major regional capital in Ukraine since the 2014 war -- and the one you did take in 2022 you later lost due to military defeat -- you are in deep trouble. If your vaunted Black Sea Fleet has been defeated at sea by a country without a navy, your flagship was sunk back in 2022, Ukraine regularly destroys port terminals and sinks your submarines, while successfully keeping its maritime routes to Odesa open -- you are in deep trouble. If, despite all the indecision and slowness of the West in providing military aid to Ukraine (and now, with the key ally, the United States, having almost completely withdrawn support and twisting Ukraine’s arm to force capitulation), you still cannot defeat exhausted fifty-year-old Ukrainian men -- and 2025 becomes your bloodiest year yet, with no end to the war even visible on the horizon — you are not “winning.” When you are unable to defeat Ukraine for longer than the entire duration of your so-called “Great Patriotic War,” around which you built a deranged, cannibalistic cult of violence, hatred, revanchism, and conquest -- you are “winning” only in the bravado of zombifying TV propaganda and in the imagination of useful idiots who mindlessly consume it. Once again in your history, you are rapidly driving your “empire” into the grave -- where it belongs -- and you have not yet suffered a resolute defeat only because of the extraordinary weakness, indecision, short-sightedness, and often outright corruption and intellectual limitation of those leading the countries of the free world.

It’s 4 am in Kyiv. Power is finally back after 21 hours. Once again, our energy workers are heroes. I want the world to know. No matter how hard or cold it gets, this city (this country) stands because of its people.

Kyiv after the Russian attack: The temperature is -9°C, dropping to -15°C overnight. Tens of thousands of people are without heating, water, electricity. Those who have gas are trying to keep warm by heating bricks on their stoves. This is what genocide looks like in the 21st century.

Today, Ukraine honours the memory of Vasyl Stus, an extraordinary Ukrainian poet, dissident, human rights defender, and a symbol of the resilience of the Ukrainian spirit. He lived only 47 years and 13 of them he spent in Soviet prisons and labour camps for refusing to stay silent about injustice. His works were banned, his manuscripts were destroyed, and he was constantly persecuted by the Soviet authorities. In the night of September 3–4, 1985, Vasyl Stus died in a punishment cell in a Soviet labour camp. He was killed just three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

🎄🎤 As we reflect on 2025, it was mainly a year of tears and toil. But in Ukraine, we see the human spirit thrive in the worst times. This was one of our most popular reels the past year: The inspiring Lviv choir Homin was performing in lovely seaside Odesa when the Russians began to attack. So the choir and the audience retreated to the undercroft of the concert hall and carried on. Here they sing a defiant, joyful Ukrainian folk song from the 1960s: Chervona Ruta. God bless this land and its free people.

A little girl is crying while listening to Zelensky's speech. 💔 Source: Surma Ukraine

St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kyiv right now. The ancient Ukrainian heart of Eastern Slavic Christianity is reviving — without Moscow priests and their chanting for tsars and wars on the peoples.

Russia attacked an eco-park near Kharkiv last night where a lot of animals live in a zoo. Most birds in the park were killed - the parrots, pheasants, and all the birds that require warm conditions, the park's founder shared. Tigers might be injured, as well. Their winter houses have been destroyed by the attack. A volunteer who works in the park was also injured.

❤️ A little boy send happy new year greetings from Kyiv. Video : olegcarbo

Greetings from Kyiv, and Happy New Year! I love reminding you of our spirit. May it inspire you and give you strength whenever you need it.

Happy New Year, planet Earth. Thank you to everyone who spent another year with Ukraine and remained faithful to basic human values and common sense. These are anxious and difficult times for the entire free world, but such is history. Let there be light and hope in 2026!

Kyiv, evening of December 31. Please don’t say, ‘It’s hard to believe there’s a war.’ It’s not night yet. And yes, our air defence is sooo good.

No one knows exactly what 2026 is going to look like but it's obviously not going to be an easy year. Still, it's not going to break us - Ukrainians and Ukraine. We'll work it out. We need to work towards peace every single day. There will come a time when I can share other aspects of my work with you. I do know that hundreds of thousands of people are set to fight for peace in Ukraine, for freedom and justice. I know that a lot of them are my followers here. Thank you to my followers, for caring about Ukraine and our future. My team and I work hard for you every day, often with no electricity and under Russian strikes. But we do our best to maintain the quality and the soul of this blog, and we're grateful to the readers who choose us and trust us. Deepest gratitude to Ukrainian Defense Forces, to each Defender. Ukraine owes our continued existence to you. Happy New Year, friends! The forces of good will win. Slava Ukraini!

On this New Year’s Eve, I want to thank all of our partners, friends, and people of goodwill across the globe, for every word and action of support this year. We end 2025 with a sense of profound gratitude for your solidarity and dedication to our shared cause: defending freedom, ensuring justice, and restoring peace. There is no greater wish for the next year than a lasting peace and guaranteed security for Ukraine, all of Europe, and the world. We will continue working tirelessly to achieve it. May the coming year bring peace, prosperity, and hope to every Ukrainian family at home and abroad, on all continents and time zones. Let it be a better year for every peace-loving nation in the world. Let truth, justice, and freedom prevail. Best wishes for the new year 2026!

Greetings from Kyiv, where generators are singing, St Nicholas drives by, and snow is falling. I love our spirit. May the world see it.