Introduction
Friday greetings, dear reader. I trust that you are well. Mrs. Appalachian Irishman and I are doing well enough.
The 2022 Slavic War is one of twenty topic sections on this website. The section contains five previous articles about the 2/24/2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This article, the sixth in that section, marks the first anniversary of the invasion. The five previous articles are as follows:
2022 SLAVIC WAR: THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE (published 3-8-2022; article #300)
2022 SLAVIC WAR: RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE: DAY 25 (published 3-20-2022; article #309)
I re-read each article yesterday. I would not change a word.
Two Tragedies
The national and international media have been providing relentless and countless details about the loss of life, destruction, devastation, and chaos that the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to spawn.
This section highlights only two tragedies, of many, that I know. I have online contact with brothers and sisters in Christ, who are from either Russia or Ukraine. A young sister in Christ, whose name and situation I know, has mentioned the following two tragedies.
First, on 10/18/2022, she stated, “My brother got call-up paper.” Her article included two photographs. One was her brother's draft notice for Russian military service. The other was her brother in a wheelchair. The tragedy is that the Russian military tried to draft a young man, who is confined to a wheelchair, due to his disabilities. The article was shocking.
Finally, on 2/17/2023, she referenced an article about a young man, only 20 years old, from Pechora in the Komi Republic of northern Russia. The young man had killed himself to avoid being drafted into the Russian army. The article states that his suicide was because “he did not want to go kill people in Ukraine.”
These are only two of countless tragedies that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused.
The Moscow Times
At 10:02 AM today, I received the usual Friday email from The Moscow Times, which began by stating:
One year ago, Russia sent troops across the border into Ukraine — an act that has led to countless military and civilian deaths, fundamentally altered life for millions, upturned the global economy, and shattered the post-Cold War security order.
The Ukraine War section of The Moscow Times includes a plethora of information about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That section includes “The Photos That Have Defined Russia's One-Year Invasion of Ukraine,” published 2/24/2023.
That article has twenty-one photographs with notations from 2/24/2022 to 2/16/2023. (The last two photographs, including the 2/16/2023 image, are dated in 2022, not 2023, probably by typographical error.)
The sixth photograph, of the twenty-one total, is dated 3/9/2022. The caption reads, with my emboldening added for emphasis:
A pregnant woman is carried from a maternity hospital in Mariupol after it was hit by shelling, sparking global outcry. The woman and her baby later died.
Russia denied striking civilians, claiming the maternity hospital was being used as a headquarters by Ukrainian far-right forces.
Of those twenty-one notated photographs, the sixth one disturbed me the most. The deaths of the mother and her unborn child are, sadly, only one snapshot of the countless and ongoing tragedies.
Conclusion
The March 8, 2022, article was the first in the 2022 Slavic War topic section on this website. It concluded with my written prayer.
This sixth article in that topic section concludes with the same prayer:
My written prayer now is, “Dear Lord, by your provident grace, stop Vladimir Putin and the soldiers that are under his direction. Some of those soldiers do not want to do what they are doing in Ukraine. Some do. Bring peace, by your grace, to Ukraine. I have the will, but not the power. You, Dear Lord, have the power. Please use your providential will. Through Jesus' name, I pray. Amen.”
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