London’s Polish Club has created a new cocktail.
The Zelenskyy
50ml Kavka Vodka
20ml blue curaçao
20 lemon juice
20ml apricot brandy
10ml sugar syrup

HT: Rafal Heydel-Mankoo.

The Eastern Slavic state started with Kiev, and the Eastern Slavs became part of Western Civilization when Saint Vladimir the ruler of Kievian Rus’ converted to Christianity.

Moscow was founded as just another city/state of Kievian Rus’.

The city-states of White and Black Russia were referred to as Rus’ [Roosh]. Moscow was called Rossiya.

The history of the Eastern Slavs diverged in the 1240s as the result of the Great Mongol Invasion. Kievian Rus’ was swept away. Kiev resisted and was destroyed. Moscow surrendered to the Horde, and the dukes of Moscow (the ancestors of later self-styled “Caesars,” the first of whom bestowed that title on himself following his marriage in 1472 to a princess of defunct Byzantium, fallen to the Turks in 1453) served as tax collectors to the Horde and knocked their foreheads on the ground in submission to the Khan at Sarai.

White and Black Russia (today’s Belarus) sought the protection of the mLithuanian princes and joined Lithuania and consequently were never taken by the Mongols. Ukraine was liberated via a Reconquista by the Lithuanians piece by piece with Grand Duke Vytautas finishing standing by the Black Sea in 1399.

The Cossacks, referred to in Ace’s history, began as escaped Lithuanian serfs who fled to the uninhabited steppe borderlands, intermarried with the Tartars, and lived as outlaw brigands, preying on the Turks.

Ilya Repin, Запорожцы пишут письмо турецкому султану, [Cossacks write a letter to the Turkish sultan], 1880-1891, State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

In 1569, the Lithuanian dynasty ruling the combined state of Poland-Lithuania (formed in 1386, when the Lithuanian Grand Duke married the Polish Queen, converted to Christianity from Paganism, and became King of Poland, was doomed to expire because Sigismund Augustus refused to remarry when Barbara Radziwill, the love of his life died suddenly. “He left no heir but Liberty,” was the saying.

Jósef Simmler, Śmierć Barbary Radziwiłłówny [Death of Barbara Radziwill].
1860. National Musem, Warsaw.

Via the Union of Lublin, ties between Poland-Lithuania were strengthened, two parliaments were merged into one, and “The Union of Both Nations” became a Republic with an elective monarchy. In the course of the manueverings toward Union, Sigismund Augustus twisted the arms of reluctant Lithuanian magnates by transferring Ukraine from Lithuanian Administration to Poland.

Jan Matejko, Unia Lubelska [The Union of Lublin]. 1869. Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie. Depozyt w Muzeum Okregowym w Lublinie.

This transfer of authority was not terribly successful. A great Cossack Rebellion, 1648-1657, was a bloodbath which led to the acquisition of Eastern Ukraine by Muscovy in 1654, and which marked the beginning of “the gathering of the Russian lands” by the despots of Moscow.

The rest of Ukraine was acquired by Moscow via the three Partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. The Russian Occupation of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine was resisted 1793-1795 under Kosciuszko, 1795-1815 in the Napoleonic Wars, 1831-1832 in the November Insurrection, 1863-1864 in the January Insurrection, and so on.

It’s the Edmonton Ukrainian Mens Choir performing a traditional Ukrainian Christmas Carol (Kolady).

BREAKING: The whistleblower is a registered Democrat & CIA analyst who was detailed before the 2016 election to the Obama White House,where he worked on the NSC's Ukraine desk & met w anti-Trump Ukrainian officials before being sent packing by the Trump NSC & becoming disgruntled

— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) October 4, 2019

He’s a Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major).

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Defense Blog:

Satellite imagery from Google Earth taken on November shows hundreds of Russian main battle tanks at a new military base on the outskirts of the Kamensk-Shakhtinsky.

The large-scale military base only 18 kilometers away from the border with toward rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine. Images show hundreds of main battle tank like as T-64 and also T-62M, while a thousand military trucks, artillery systems and tankers are located slightly higher.

Russia has been ramping up its forces near the border with Ukraine since August and now poses the greatest military threat since 2014, the year Moscow annexed Crimea, the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

Muzhenko said Russian troop levels were at “the highest” since 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and then deployed forces to eastern Ukraine.

“In front of us is an aggressor who has no legal, moral or any other limits,” he said. “It is very difficult to predict when it will occur to him to begin active combat actions against Ukraine.”

photo: Viktor Macha.

After

A local sculptor, Alexander Milov, in the Ukrainian city of Yuzhne, outside Odessa, converted a statue of Lenin which was scheduled for demolition as the result of de-Communization legislation requiring the removal and demolition of all Soviet-era monuments into a statue of a figure more popular in today’s Ukraine: Darth Vader.

The Vader statue contains a router in its head, broadcasting WiFi locally.

Meduza

Before

Alexey Kondakov, an artist based in Kiev, Ukraine, has created a series of Photoshopped images demonstrating how the gods and characters of antiquity portrayed in classical paintings would look if they appeared alongside us in contemporary settings. leenks