When anyone tells you that Ukrainians should trade land for peace, remember: On that land, people have been subjected to arrest, torture and murder. To mark the war's 1st anniversary I wrote about that occupation, with @Nataliya Gumenyuk and @The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/russia-ukraine-war-potemkin-occupation-murder-torture/672841/…

Like their Soviet predecessors, the Red Army officers who occupied central Europe in 1944-45, the Russian army targeted local mayors and councillors, as well as volunteers. Anyone who is active, anyone who is dedicated, anyone who is public-spirited or civic-minded

Unlike the Red Army, the modern Russian soldiers don't understand why they are there. Failure and incompetence lead to violence; violence creates more resistance; and resistance, so hard for the invaders to comprehend, creates wider, broader, ever more random destruction

This is the logic of genocide, and it is unfolding right now, in our time, in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated, in the towns where torture chamber still exist and Russian soldiers still arrest people arbitrarily on the street

This is the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, still under occupation, describing what happened to him when the Russians came. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqe586dyNWM…

If mayors are a target, so are volunteers: Russian soldiers can't believe "ordinary people were spontaneously contributing to this common project, that information about it simply spread by word of mouth, on social media and on the radio, and not as the result of some dark plot"

"Anyone who conducts any independent activity—anyone who engages with civil society or who might be described as a social entrepreneur—is at risk in an occupation zone run by men who may have never encountered a genuine charity or a genuine volunteer organization before at all."