For you students of English

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Medics Are Listening part 1
Early on during my time in Bogoyavlenka, two Ukrainian medics decided to move into my house. BTW, Bogoyavlenka freely translated means "a glimpse of God". I put on a happy face, as if I were very happy to have them, but their presence was actually a very heavy burden to bear. Before they came I could freely watch Russian news, pray out loud for God to fight against Ukraine, to protect Russian troops. Now I had to be careful about my every word and facial expression. My Russian self had to die and be buried for a while. I even memorized The Lord's Prayer in Ukrainian so that I could lead Arkadii and Vasilii in prayer every evening. One night I recited the prayer exceptionally well, and Arkadii seemed to praise me, saying that I had become a real Ukrainian, but his eyes couldn't hide what he was really thinking. His face seemed ready to roar, "I know who you really are, you filthy Russian. How dare you try to decieve me with a prayer!"

Medics are listening Part 2

Do you understand why Russia had to fight this war? Some will say that the war between the separatists in Donbass and Ukraine was an internal problem that Russia had no right to meddle in. Let me draw an analogy that might help you understand better why that is not the case.

Imagine that you turn on the TV after work one evening and the news is exploding about an armed conflict between Canadian Indians and French Canadians in Eastern Canada, in Quebec and New Brunswick provinces.

For context, a few months earlier the Canadian parliment was stormed and taken over by French Canadians who protested against all military cooperation with the United States. Some armed protesters were responsible for killing and wounding police. The US military in response took control of the island Anticosti where their base and missile installations were located.

The Indian population on Anticosti welcomed the change because French-Canadian militias had been involved in mafia-style efforts to push the Indians off their island.

Canadian-Indians just across the border from Maine with support from Iroquois tribes from New York state, fearing repression from French- Canadian militias responded by voting to establish their part of Quebec and New Brunswick provinces as a separate province. They have taken control of government buildings in Campbelton and Fredricton and are reported to carry the stars and stripes as well as their own tribal coat of arms.

Now those same French-Canadian militias with support from the regular Canadian army have sent troops, armored vehicles and tanks to suppress what they are calling a terrorist rebellion. Canadian helicopters have started bombarding Campbelton and Frederickton.

Indian and British Canadians have banded together to defend their territory but they don't have sufficient armaments to fight for long. Many civilians have been killed and wounded by Canadian bombardments. Should the US military sit by and watch our neighbors be destroyed?

Medics Are Listening part 1

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Medics are listening part 2
One afternoon in late May or early June 2022 I was in my customary position sitting next to the entrance to my cellar. Day after day nothing seemed change. I could hardly find any news about the fighting near me, near Ugledar. All I knew was that the town Ugledar was under Ukrainian control and was regularly being hit. Being hit by who? Why? I wasn't sure yet. I was already convinced that Russia was in the right, but still I was interested in knowing the whole truth with all its nuances. I was lost in thought, searching for answers, or perhaps still searching for the right questions.

Out of the blue a tremendous double blast made the ground jump beneath me. I plunged into the cellar, expecting a second strike. It came almost immediately, even closer but not louder thanks to the cellar.

For some time I had been expecting a strike on the local school across the street from me. The school was teeming with soldiers from the very day when I had arrived. I had asked a soldier from the school for a house to stay in on my first day in town. Now that strike had come.

The next day Arkadii and Vasilii came to my house asking for a place to stay. Later Arkadii showed me a wound in his arm where a pellet from a cluster munition went straight through his tricep. He also recalled how the ceilings in the school had jumped when the second high explosive(HE) hurricane rocket struck just outside the school. He seemed to study my face extra closely when he said that a few soldiers had been killed and wounded. I suspect he was already testing to see what side I was really on.

Medics are listening part 3

Medics are listening part 2
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For my first few days in the village I did everything I could to figure out how far away the fighting was. My only indications were the distant sounds of explosions, sometimes barely audible, other times about as loud as a door being slammed shut. I had little to no idea what was making the noise. Tanks, howitzers, mortars, RPGs? I hadn't even thought about rockets, missiles, bombs, or anti-air and anti-missile systems.

Some days the explosions were a bit louder, giving me hope that I might not have to wait too much longer. On other days, a dead silence seemed to say, "You've got a long wait ahead".

I began to ignore even the louder noises. It seemed to me that there wasn't any real danger, so when washing dishes one morning and another "door slammed" the spoon in my hand didn't even tremble. I didn't get to finish putting it down though. I darted into the next room and plastered myself against the wall as a series of blasts made the house shudder. It sounded like a car had just slammed into the house two or three times. A cluster type hurricane rocket had been shot at the school. It activated, bursting open and scattering it's bomblets right near me.

One of the bomblets had landed in the street right in front of my place. The pellets from the bomblet had filled my front fence with holes, and put pits in the brick facade of my house, but I was fine.

I learned later that a soldier had been in his car in front of my house and was injured. One of the pellets had put a whole right through his arm. His name was Arkadii, the medic who would later live in my house.

Safety tip. I did completely the wrong thing when I heard the blast. I should have dropped to the floor immediately, and after 10 to 20 seconds, ran to the cellar for cover.

To be continued...

Meet Ivan I. Tverdovsky, the film director of the Reverse project. I hope you'll find him and his work as interesting as I do. He is shooting a documentary film, "Reverse", about the war in Donbass, about Donbass and its people. He was nice enough to arrange a short interview featuring myself. It will be released next spring after the release of his film.

Medics are listening part 3
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Medics are listening part 4
Arkadii and Vasilii had a bad habit of telling me things that were useful for Russian intelligence. Even if I didn't pass the information to my Russian contact, it was still dangerous for me because, in theory, I might be responsible for the leak.

One evening I went to bed in the house, but couldn't go to sleep. I couldn't shake the feeling that we were in danger, that I should sleep in the cellar instead. I grabbed my pillow and headed for the cellar, but not without telling Arkadii about my feeling of foreboding. Vasilii was on his way out too. He had guard duty at the checkpoint down and across the bridge from the theater.

I was jolted awake sometime after midnight, and a couple minutes later Arkadii tumbled down the cellar stairs. A few minutes later everything shook again. It sounded like a train had slammed into the theater at full speed, but there is no railroad in Bogoyavlenka.

Vasilii came back in the morning unharmed but still shaking. He expressed his thanks for the warning, saying that he had seen one explosion with his own eyes. A few days earlier he had told me where their command and control center was located. Under the grocery store. That night it took a direct hit. Up to 20 soldiers were killed and went missing.

The command and control center was actually about 10 meters away from being under the grocery store. It was under the bar next door, the bar and grocery store all being part of one long building. Making the situation worse was the fact that the day before, Vasilii had taken me to the grocery store to buy catfood. I had bought all the catfood that they had as if I had known they there wouldn't be any more.

Later I could hear Vasilii and Arkadii arguing. It wasn't the first time that Vasilii stood up for me, but thankfully it was the last. A few days later the command came for their unit to leave the village. Arkadii left with a stiff handshake, but Vasilii with a hug and misty eyes. I haven't heard from them since. That was in late August, early September 2022.

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By December of 2022 I had become heavily involved in village life by helping my neighbors, helping unload and pass out humanitarian aid. The need for firewood had already begun to be felt, and the locals organized to cut and truck in logs from a nearby forest. My part was to help deliver the logs around the village.

This was my first chance to get familiar with the village as a whole, to see where people lived. I did my best to memorize every place where civilians lived and make sure that the Russian army was informed accordingly.

I rode on a two-wheeled tractor with a young local guy to make the deliveries. As we were riding together one day he couldn't help but satisfy his curiosity. His question shocked me. He asked If I had come to the area in 2014. There must be a misunderstanding, I thought. I reminded him that I was American. He confirmed that he remembered that I was American, and asked if I was former military. At first I didn't know what to say, but finally when I found my tongue, I couldn't help but make sure that I had heard him correctly, "You mean that American troops have been here since 2014"? "Sure", he said, "some of them stayed on after the fighting calmed down in 2015, found girlfriends, started families". Even if it hadn't been so cold outside, the smoke coming from my ears would have been visible. If I had been eager to get rid of my U.S. passport before, now it was burning a hole in my pocket.

Как обещал, Дэн Мартиндейл продолжает делиться своей историей об обретении России. Он написал очень искренний текст о том, как ему жилось в Богоявленке - одному, вынужденному все время притворяться кем-то другим, и при этом не терять надежды и не оставлять попыток добиться справедливости.

Читайте на сайте Реверса.

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As promised, Dan Martindale continues to share his story about finding Russia as his new homeland. He has written a heartfelt piece about his life in Bogoyavlenka — living alone, constantly forced to pretend to be someone else, yet never losing hope or giving up on his fight for justice.

Read it on the Revers website.

War isn't fair, never has been, never will be, and the good guys often lose. Washington is pushing every button it can to make the Russian people angry. They want internal pressure in Russia to force Putin's hand. Russia has already been shooting down these ATACAMS missiles for many months with relatively good success.

Russia's military is ready, but is the everyday Ivan ready to follow Putin's lead? If Russia hadn't stood up for Donbass in 2022, Putin would have faced a very harsh backlash from his own voters. It may very well have ended up toppling Russia from within. Today political stability in Russia faces a new challenge.

Believe me, the fact that a man as cool and collected as Putin has control of Russia's nuclear arsenal is a very good thing for the U.S. and for Europe. If Russia falls into chaos, somebody like Prigozhin(deceased head of the Wagner group) could smash that red button. Even if none of Putin's rivals did try to gain popularity in Russia by satisfying the people's need for revenge, the world's financial markets would be reeling with uncertainty if not collapse entirely. Nobody is ready for that! Just look at the tremors that were felt on Wall Street when Putin re-wrote a couple lines in his published guidelines for nuclear determent!

World war 3 is not the logical conclusion to Russians standing up for their friends and relatives in Donbass! It IS the logical ending of senseless escalation on the part of Washington D.C.!

A couple days after I learned about American soldiers being in the area since 2014, I mentioned it to another neighbor, expressing my disgust at the double standard that it revealed to me. It would seem logical to me that if Kiev allowed American soldiers to fight on their side, what business did they have criticizing Russia for giving similar support to the Donetsk People's Republic. All the more since the so called separatists were actually trying to preserve what was left of the Ukraine that they knew and loved, while Kiev had been overrun by a bellicose minority.

My neighbor seemed to think I had missed the headline, focusing instead on some trivial detail. She explained that she and her relatives in a nearby city had been witnesses to how Ukrainian troops had bombarded their own territory, a suburb of Donetsk, using GRAD rockets. They witnessed that same Ukrainian army then proceed to haul away truckload after truckload of loot from that suburb after its residents began to flee. She couldn't understand how Ukrainians could commit such crimes against their fellow countrymen.

Then she revealed to me the most heinous crime perpetrated by Ukrainian news media. They had provided the pretext, the justification for their army's shooting and looting. They had labeled all Ukrainians in this region as separatists, and Moscow lovers, the people who supposedly were to blame for all alleged Ukrainian suffering during the Soviet Union and up until the current day.

In that way many people in eastern Ukraine who would have gone along with life in the new Ukraine post-2014 realized that they weren't welcome, that they were hated by their own, condemned to be oppressed and destroyed for imagined crimes, for having the wrong heritage. Many of them likely changed their loyalty from Ukraine to Russia because of this betrayal.

Fresh troops in our village seemed to become more and more numerous through January 2023 until practically every vacant house was filled with them. I commented to my neighbors that our village had disappeared, and in its place now stood a military base. I also made the point to them that these Ukrainian troops were running a big risk. They were running the risk of being struck by Russian artillery.

In the end of January when Russian troops attempted to storm Ugledar, my apprehensions proved justified. For about four or five days the village was regularly hit with GRAD missiles. Until about mid-March Bogoyavlenka was hit fairly regularly with artillery. By the end of February almost all of the 68th brigade that had moved in, in January, had moved back out or had been killed or wounded. A portion of my neighbors also left, some for other cities in the Ukraine, others traveled the long journey through Poland to Russia.

Some of the 68th brigade's casualties happened in Bogoyavlenka. A few rounds landed around my house too, but I always happened to be away from home when it was dangerous. I was quite active helping neighbors around the village.

One day, probably in February, I went to a friend's house to help them run an errand and it probably saved my life. I had just left my friend's house to go fetch them milk, when a soldier they knew drove up and jumped out acting rather agitated. He jumped out of his car with his rifle demanding to know, "Where is Dan?!" He had been trying to find me for five days with no success, even though he knew where I lived. My friends calmed him down and convinced him to put his rifle back in his car. A couple minutes later I ride up with the milk, and this guy starts questioning me. His first words were that "We've been getting hit a lot, we have dead and wounded". He didn't like my answers, and bolted for his car. I thought he had finished questioning me, but my friend stood between the soldier and his car, holding the door shut. I didn't have any idea what was going on. My friend succeeded in keeping the car door shut, saving my life.