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GROUND ZERO Photo Andrea Myers Broome January 4, 2023

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The Fitzroy River rages at record level as Kimberley towns are out off and bridges buckle in a flood disaster.

The once in a century weather event has been caused by ex cyclone Ellie which entered WA six days ago from the NT and has been slowly moving across central parts of the Kimberley, dumping vast amounts of rain, especially through the Richmond River catchment.

Flood levels peaked on Tuesday night with authorities bracing for the worst.

Over the weekend, wide spread rainfall totals of 200-500 mm have been recorded across the region.

On Tuesday, the Fitzroy River peaked at 15.29 metres- the highest level on record, passing the 2002 record of 23.95m.

Fir and Emergency Services Commissioner Darren Klemm, said it was a’an incredibly serious situation.”

“Fitzroy Crossing is completely isolated and the only way in and out of the town is by helicopter.” he said.

Andrea Myers’ photo of some fifteen kangeroos on an outcrop of land in a sea of water captures the seriousness of the situation not only for the kangaroos but for humanity. The weather is such an important part of our lives and extreme weather causes problems for so many people in so many countries of the world.

The World On Edge: The Menace of Vladimir Putin January 3, 2023

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Doctor Fiona Hill, former senior director for Europe and Russia at the US National Council  claims

Putin remains  as determined as ever to press ahead with the Ukrainian war, even if it costs the additional deaths of hundreds of thousands of conscripted Russian

soldiers who have been enlisted to backfill his depleted army.

Ukraine’s well organised and determined military. aided by the US and allies have stood their ground heroically in this battle. Ukraine was persuaded

at the end of the Cold War to give up their nuclear weapons and promised they would be internationally safe from their enemies. What’s happened since February 24,2022

is that they have been invaded. Crimea was annexed in 2014 and the appeasement of Russia has led to the most horrific land war in Europe since the  second World War.

Dr Hill has said: The battle over the future of  this is in fact, a battle over  European security …. The problem is, many countries are in denial. Putin is very capable of adapting and he can survive if we let

him survive in his information war in Ukraine.

The responsibility lies with all our governments to figure out a to end this war that doesn’t just give Vladimir Putin exactly what he wants.

 

 

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Historic speech from the United States Capitol December 26, 2022

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 — 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a historic speech from the United States Capitol Wednesday night, expressing gratitude for American support in fighting Russian aggression since the war began – and asking for more.

“I hope my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart,” Zelensky said during the joint meeting of Congress, later adding, “Against all odds, and doom and gloom scenarios, Ukraine didn’t fall. Ukraine is alive and kicking.”

But alongside Zelensky’s gratitude was a plea, emphasizing that his armed forces are outnumbered and outgunned by the Russian military even as they fight on. At one point, Zelensky drew laughs from the chamber when he said, “We have artillery, yes. Thank you. We have it. Is it enough? Honestly, not really.”

Zelensky’s visit to Washington marks his first trip outside his homeland since it was invaded 300 days ago, arriving Wednesday afternoon to set a course for the future of the war alongside a key Western ally.

On “the frontline of tyranny,” Zelensky argued during his speech to Congress, American support “is crucial not just to stand in such (a) fight but to get to the turning point to win on the battlefield.”

“The world is too interconnected and too interdependent to allow someone to stay aside and at the same time to feel safe when such a battle continues,” he added. “Our two nations are allies in this battle and next year will be a turning point, I know it – the point where Ukrainian courage and American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom, the freedom of people who stand for their values.”

Autocrats are weaponising the World: “There are no happy endings in Russia”. December 18, 2022

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has unbalanced the pivot of the world as we knew it. This war is a flashpoint in the great struggle of the 21st Century. Investigative journalists, environmental activists and digital rights campaigners, Bill Browder’s Sergei Magnitsky Act designed to avenge his lawyer’s murder at the hands of eight baton wielding policemen, all have a role to play in defeating Russian aggression against the free world.

The free flow of money has enabled kleptocracy and corruption  to flourish. Dictatorships now have leverage over democracies. Russia invades a sovereign nation. China  punishes Australia when it dares to criticise Beijing’s abuse of human rights, Russia closes off Ukraine’s grain exports to the starving people of Africa in order to blackmail the world into  accepting its mission of genocide in Ukraine.

Transnational media in the global village was meant to bring mutual understanding across borders.  Russia exploits the free flow  of information  with its armies of bots and state media Channels  like RT and China sets up ‘Confucius Institutes’ in Universities  which limit what academics can say on China. Surveillance technologies can be purchased from China or Israel like Pegasus to monitor their citizens through social media. All this  affects the democratic world we live in. And there are razors inside the apple of globalisation that cuts us all.

Edited from a report in TIME Magazine by Peter Pomerantsev author of “This Is Not Propaganda”

Time Magazine has named Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and “the spirit of Ukraine” as its 2022 Person of the Year. December 8, 2022

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Time Magazine has named Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and “the spirit of Ukraine” as its 2022 Person of the Year. 

The award goes to an event or person deemed to have had the most influence on global events over the past 12 months.

Other finalists included protesters in Iran, China’s leader Xi Jinping and the US Supreme Court.

The magazine’s editor said the decision was “the most clear-cut in memory”. 

“In a world that had come to be defined by its divisiveness, there was a coming together around this cause, around this country,” Edward Felsenthal wrote.

He added that the “spirit of Ukraine” referred to Ukrainians around the world, including many who “fought behind the scenes”. This includes people like Ievgen Klopotenko, a chef who provided thousands of free meals to Ukrainians and medic Yuliia Payevska who was captured, then released after three months in Russian captivity.

The magazine said Mr Zelensky had inspired Ukrainians and was recognised internationally for his courage in resisting the Russian invasion.

“Zelensky’s success as a wartime leader has relied on the fact that courage is contagious,” it said.

British trauma surgeon David Nott, who went into Ukraine to help those injured in the war, is one of several others who feature on the magazine’s cover.

Women in Iran were Time’s 2022 Heroes of the year and the K-pop band Blackpink were recognised as Time’s Entertainer of the year.

American baseballer Aaron Judge has been recognised as the Athlete of the Year and Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh is the Icon of the Year.

Elon Musk, who was last year’s winner, was again listed as a finalist. In 2021, his electric car company, Tesla, became the most valuable carmaker in the world.

The tradition began in 1927 – although back then it was the Man of the Year.

Morenatti November 30, 2022

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AP photographer Emilio Morenatti lost  his left leg in an incident in Afghanistan in 2009.

“When a part of  your body is amputated you cross over into the disabled community. And a camaraderie

inevitably develops. The group is immediately above any kind of impediment. And that is why I am no longer interested

in covering the war from the front line but rather from behind the front line.

His awesome photo of Nastia Kuzyk undermines the bond between the two of them and exhibits the pain of the Ukrainian people and the senselessness of the Russian war against a peaceful nation.

It also  exhibits the power of photography. This photo made me cry  in anguish at the sight of Nastia’s pain  combined with her father’s anguish at his daughter’s  side. Thanks to  AP Photographer Emilio Morenatti for his perception  and his  insight into the humanity of the moment. ‘It is unforgettable.’Many thanks to AP for showing these powerful photos in a blog from Ukraine and the everyday work of working photographers.

 

 

 

Timothy Snyder YALE Historian on defending Ukraine November 28, 2022

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When the Yale historian Timothy Snyder was asked by Ukraine’s government to fundraise for the war effort, he considered a project to restore Chernihiv library. It would have been an obvious choice for the bestselling author, who has visited the ruined library – a gracious gothic terracotta structure that survived two world wars but was smashed to rubble in March by Russia’s 500kg bombs.

Yet he soon decided that a fundraiser for a library would be “kind of morally self indulgent”. When he asked his friends in Kyiv what was most urgently needed, nobody hesitated: anti-drone defence. “I thought I should do the thing which is most urgent now,” Snyder told the Guardian in a phone interview from the Yale campus. “The ruins of the library are going to be there. I can raise money for that later. But right now, what’s happening is that the Russians are trying to freeze millions of people out by destroying the power grid. And so what I should be trying to do is try to stop that.”

So this is how the professor came to be leading a crowdfunding campaign to raise $1.25m to fund a “Shahed hunter”, an anti-drone system to detect enemy devices and jam signals, with the aim of destroying the weapons in the sky. For months, Russia’s Iranian-made Shahed drones have sown terror in Ukrainian towns and cities, killing civilians, destroying homes and power plants.

Snyder joins celebrities such as the Star Wars actor Mark Hamill and the singer superstar Barbra Streisand, who have embarked on separate crowdfunding campaigns for drones and medical aid respectively, via the Ukrainian government-backed group, United24. By 22 November, around one eighth of the money for the Shahed-hunter had been raised, through “lots and lots and lots of small donations”, Snyder said.

A firefighter works to put out a fire at energy facilities damaged by a Russian strike in Kyiv region.
A firefighter works to put out a fire at energy facilities damaged by a Russian strike in Kyiv region. Photograph: State Emergency Service Of Ukraine/Reuters

Ukrainians struggling with blackouts and bombardment are also helping, including with a fundraising run on Sunday in Kyiv – a race anyone can do in their own country. “They’re the ones who have no electricity. They’re the ones have no water. And yet, they’re organising a race.” Thinking of Ukrainians’ extraordinary “physical courage and ethical commitment”, Snyder recalls the definition of an ethical act proposed by the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski as “something which is more than anyone could have expected of you. And I think about that with respect to the Ukrainians over and over.”

Snyder met Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in September during Ukraine’s stunning counteroffensive in Kharkiv. “He didn’t feel any need to boast about what was happening,” recalls the historian. Instead the pair talked mostly about philosophy, specifically the meaning of freedom.

Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’

As Snyder recollects, Zelenskiy said that freedom and security go together, a view that differs from the Anglo-Saxon sense of these two values often in conflict. The Ukrainian leader also said that freedom sometimes means having no choice, when he reflected on his own decision to stay in Kyiv when the invasion began in February 2022. Zelenskiy said that if he had left, “‘I wouldn’t be able to respect myself any more, I wouldn’t be the same person,’” recounted Snyder.

Before the war, Snyder was well known in Ukraine for his books on eastern Europe, including Bloodlands, which charts how 14 million innocent men, women and children were murdered between 1930 and 1945, in the territory between the Baltic and Black seas, where Hitler and Stalin’s regimes overlapped. More recently he has brought the history of Ukraine to a broad public, by making a lecture course for Yale undergraduates available online. The series, The Making of Modern Ukraine, has had more than 4.6m views on YouTube from nearly 70 countries, with more than 921,000 people having watched the first lecture.

The course was devised after the February invasion, “because I had this idea that there just isn’t enough broad knowledge of Ukrainian history”.

Years before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin had dismissed Ukraine’s existence as a real country. The Russian president has long been rewriting history, culminating in a 5,000 word essay published last July that was described by one commentator as “one step short of a declaration of war”. Riddled with myths and inaccuracies, Putin’s article said there was “no historical basis” for a Ukrainian people and that Russia had been “robbed” of people and territory.

People may have a sense that the Kremlin narrative is not quite right, suggests Snyder, but “they don’t really know how to answer it”. His lecture series is not a direct answer to Putin’s “ridiculous fantasies”. “When you directly answer propaganda – sometimes you have to – but you get into a kind of unpleasant dance with the propagandists. It’s much better to just fill up the space with the history, because the history of Ukraine is actually so much more interesting than the propaganda about it.”

A man walks past a damaged residential building in Kherson, southern Ukraine.
A man walks past a damaged residential building in Kherson, southern Ukraine. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA

Rather than start with the Euromaidan protests in 2013, Snyder winds the clock back to when the lands of modern-day southern Ukraine were the breadbasket of ancient Athens, moving forward with the Vikings, Byzantium and forgotten kingdoms such as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, once Europe’s largest state.

Yet the Russian imperial idea that “Ukraine is not quite real” had permeated into western thinking, Snyder suggested, which helps explain why so many expected Ukraine to collapse within days after Russian tanks rolled in. “Things which seem the most technical and objective, like the evaluation of a war, can often depend upon the things which are most subjective, like do we really believe that a country deep down is real,” he said.

Probably as a result of these lectures, Snyder found himself among 200 Americans banned from visiting Russia, under sanctions announced by the Russian government earlier this month. He feels sad, not in the mood for sarcastic jokes. “The standard answer is ‘there goes my vacation in Siberia’, but I don’t feel that way.” He hopes one day to visit again, to study the archives, to be in a different Russia.

That only happens if Russia loses the war. “Russia wins by losing. Russia really needs to lose this war, and to lose it decisively,” he said. “The whole colonial move towards Ukraine is a distraction, a substitute for the internal changes which Russia really has to make.”

It would also be good for world peace if Russia lost, he said, sending a signal to other powers with imperial ambitions. “Russia losing this war makes it much less likely that China will try something adventurous in Taiwan.”

“What European history really shows, and quite powerfully, is that in order to become, quote unquote, a ‘normal’ European country, you have to become post-imperial [meaning] you have to lose your wars.”

For this reason, he thinks meaningful negotiations can only take place once Ukraine has won the war. Russians are already signalling that negotiations are only a means “to regroup and attack again. And so I think we should probably listen to them when they say that.”

Negotiations after a Ukrainian victory is the “common sense” position, he said. “If you want negotiations quicker, then you have to help the Ukrainians win more quickly, by, for example, giving them longer-range weapons.” While he does not want to comment on reports about the White House apparently urging Zelenskiy to signal openness to talks with Moscow, he thinks the US government position is not so different from his own. “It’s not like you’re sitting in a restaurant and you can either order more war or more negotiations,” he said.

So the fundraising goes on. People, he said, are “pleased they can do something directly to respond to what’s obviously an atrocious action on the part of Russia”.

A very successful Fremantle Charity Concert for Ukraine was held in the Fremantle Town Hall yesterday 20 November and organised by Diana Tepla November 21, 2022

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Violinist Paul Wright and accordion player Myroslav Gutej (the Kashtany Duo) start with Ukrainian and Eastern European gypsy tunes.

 An amazing cellist, 17-year-old Max Wung, performed the Prelude of Bach’s 6th Solo Suite.  Fremantle Chamber Orchestra presented some of Mozart’s most loved and uplifting tunes as well as Bach’s Air on G. 

Astounding 12-year-old Ellie Malonzo played the Prelude of Bach’s 3rd Partita.  Ellie then brought the magic Romance by Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko to life. 

Continuing with Ukrainian tunes, Irina Buevska-Cowell and Anastasiya Dudar, the Duo Brillante, played the touching and gentle Melodia by Skoryk and Romance by Kos-Anatolsky. 

This year’s brilliant WAAPA graduates mezzo-soprano Ruth Burke and baritone Benjamin Del Borrello accompanied by pianist Lydia Lai, presented Non ti scordar di me (one of Pavarotti’s favourites) and O Holy Night. To finish, The Echoes of Ukraine Singers, many of whom are recently arrived displaced persons,  performed two Ukrainian Christmas carols. The concert evoked the Ukrainian spirit and soul with a wish for peace for the Ukrainian nation.
The concert patrons stood at the end for the Ukrainian National anthem in a touching and a fitting moment of support against an illegal and criminal war by Russia.

Daryna Zadvirna West Australian Journalist of the Year At the Media Awards November 16, 2022

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The West Australian’s Daryna Zadvirna named WA Journalist of the Year for My Ukraine: Inside the Warzone

PerthNow

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Daryna Zadvirna’s eye-opening documentary in her war-torn homeland of Ukraine has seen the The West Australian journalist named WA Journalist of the Year at the State Media Awards.

Risking her life to capture untold stories of the people on the ground in a gripping first-hand account formed the winning documentary “My Ukraine: Inside the Warzone”.

Her aim was to document Russia’s war crimes and capture the remarkably resilient spirit of the Ukrainian people.

Zadvirna took personal leave in February, bought a camera and independently travelled to Ukraine to tell shocking stories from the war zone.

The Female Ukrainian Soldier Behind Iconic Invasion Photos Iryna Rybakova’s photographs have been published throughout the world’s media, yet using her camera is only one part of her job as a junior lieutenant and press officer in the Ukrainian military. November 16, 2022

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Iryna Rybakova’s photographs have been published throughout the world’s media, yet using her camera is only one part of her job as a junior lieutenant and press officer in the Ukrainian military.While explaining the circumstances of her most famous photo, Iryna Rybakova interjects a detail that highlights her personal proximity to the Ukrainian war effort.

 

The above image of a skull-like turret from a destroyed Russian tank, the 38-year-old explains, was made with a drone in March after Ukrainian troops had recaptured the village of Husarivka, in the Kharkiv region, after a bitter fight.

“I just ask you to remember,” Rybakova says, “many of my comrades died in that battle.”

The photographer then names the soldiers, Yulian Stupak and Oleksandr Garbuz, who were posthumously awarded Ukraine’s highest honor for their actions during the recapture.

Rybakova is one of several press officers in the Ukrainian military whose job is to facilitate visits by journalists to frontline positions. The junior lieutenant in the 93rd Mechanized Brigade stands out for repeatedly capturing her own imagery that has become iconic of the war and earned her brigade a massive social media following.

After the tank turret “skull” photo appeared on the cover of The Economist, Rybakova says the image “began to gain wild popularity. It was made into a tattoo, placed on album covers, and made into T-shirts.”

More recently, an image Rybakova published in October of an explosion’s crater inside a cemetery in Bakhmut was widely shared across social media as an example of the unbounded physical destruction wrought by the Russian invasion. Such frontline aerial images are now rare due to a ban on the civilian use of drones and the high chance that an unidentified quadcopter could be shot out of the sky.

Even with her position in the military, she says she has to take multiple steps before she can fly her DJI Mavic Air 2.

“I inform the battalion leadership that I am going to raise a drone in a certain area, and they warn the positions: At a certain time, in a certain place, our ‘bird’ is flying,” she says.

Rybakova told RFE/RL she began taking pictures in high school when she used her bathroom as a makeshift darkroom. During the 10 years she spent working as a journalist in Ukraine, she maintained photography as a hobby, using a range of devices, including medium-format film cameras that shoot crisp, cracker-sized negatives.

In 2015, when the journalist joined Carpathian Sich, which at the time was a volunteer paramilitary group with links to an ultranationalist political party, Rybakova says her photography skills immediately became useful. She now serves in Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade as a press officer and junior lieutenant.

Rybakova says after eight years of low-level conflict in eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s full-throated invasion in February came as a shock.

“To be honest, we in the army thought that we would simply go to the borders in place of the border guards, prepare a defensive line, and hold our position for several months,” she says. “[We thought] perhaps there would be provocations with shooting from automatic weapons, but nothing more.”

The photographer and soldier has felt the full fury of war. On February 26, within minutes of arriving in the newly recaptured town of Okhtyrka in the Sumy region, Rybakova says she dove onto the asphalt as a Russian aircraft dropped what she says was an FAB-3000 bomb on a nearby Ukrainian military position, killing many people.

The 3-ton unguided bomb exploded with such force, she says, it was “as if it was an earthquake or some pit in hell” had opened up. A photo of the aftermath of that explosion shows a water-filled crater the size of a large swimming pool.

When asked about her most vivid experience documenting the war, the photographer’s answer illustrates the pitiless new outlook of many Ukrainians who have watched their country ravaged by the invasion.

“In Okhtyrka on the 24th, the boys met an enemy column and completely destroyed it,” Rybakova recalls. “They took me to see dead Russians. One of them was officer Ilyasov, a Buryat by nationality. He was killed by a 19-year-old [Ukrainian] soldier. The corpse was thrown off the road and covered with grass.”

“That night I finally slept normally,” Rybakova says of seeing the dead officer. “The sight of enemy corpses calmed me down.”