Pablo Rodas-Martini

The new South African apartheid!

The total joke of today!

Finland (to become a NATO member) has a sophisticated military that runs complex operations to track Russian activity in the seas of Northern Europe and spends heavily on modern equipment. @nytimes

“The motherland, my friends, is not,” he said, a part of the president’s body “that you have to lick and kiss all the time. The motherland is a poor grandmother selling potatoes at the train station,” the Russian rock star said. @nytimes

Before a packed stadium in Ufa, Russia, Yuri Shevchuk, the frontman of the band DDT, said that people were dying as a result of “some kind of Napoleonic plans of our latest Caesar, yes?” @nytimes

A Russian rock musician who condemned the invasion of Ukraine at a concert on Wednesday and questioned why so many Russians and Ukrainians had died was charged with discrediting the army. @nytimes

In April, Elvira Nabiullina, the leader of the central bank, gave Russian lawmakers a far-reaching, negative assessment of sanctions, noting that “practically every product” manufactured in Russia relies on imported components. @nytimes

The Russian Central Bank has acknowledged that consumer demand and lending are on a downhill slide and that “businesses are experiencing considerable difficulties in production and logistics.” @nytimes

“Those sanctions that are presently imposed on the Russian Federation have practically broken all logistics in our country,” the minister, Vitaly Savelyev, said as he visited the city of Astrakhan in southern Russia. @nytimes

Russia’s transport minister said that international measures intended to cripple the Russian economy have “practically broken” logistics in the country, the state news agency Tass reported, in a rare acknowledgment by a Kremlin minister of the damage sanctions are doing. @nytimes

Russian forces threatened to open fire on Saturday on a cargo ship transiting through Ukrainian waters near Snake Island, the Ukrainian Navy said. The island, seized by Russia at the beginning of its invasion, is important to Moscow’s naval dominance of the Black Sea. @nytimes

Russian forces have destroyed 1,873 educational institutions in Ukraine since the invasion began, President Zelensky said. He described the loss as being on a “colossal scale.” @nytimes

A pocket of dug-in Ukrainian troops pushed back Russians attacking from four directions toward Sievierodonetsk, one of Ukraine’s main strongholds in the eastern Donbas region. @nytimes

Ukrainians who lost limbs grapple with new reality, @washingtonpost

Ukrainians who lost limbs grapple with new reality. @washingtonpost

The European Union offered more details Wednesday on its plan to wean itself off Russian energy, pledging to spend about $315 billon to speed up the transition. @washingtonpost

Russian forces tortured and summarily executed Ukrainian civilians in Kyiv and Chernihiv in late February and March and committed other “grave abuses,” Human Rights Watch concluded in a month-long investigation. @washingtonpost

Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, said the war had convinced his country, which shares an 810-mile-long eastern border with Russia, that it could not afford to remain on the sidelines. @nytimes

The Russian leader described NATO’s eastward expansion as one reason he felt compelled to send troops and tanks into Ukraine, but instead of fracturing the Western alliance, Russia’s aggression has strengthened it. @nytimes

In the past, Russia’s vast fields have generally been easy to tap, but after decades of pumping, the remaining petroleum will be harder to extract. “The longer Russia is shunned from the system, the greater the downside risk for production.” @nytimes