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Women’s participation in aid delivery must continue
by the Principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee on Afghanistan
The decision by Afghanistan’s de facto authorities to ban women from working in humanitarian non-governmental organizations is a major blow for vulnerable communities, for women, for children, and for the entire country.
Female staff are key to every aspect of the humanitarian response in Afghanistan. They are teachers, nutrition experts, team leaders, community health workers, vaccinators, nurses, doctors, and heads of organizations. They have access to populations that their male colleagues cannot reach and are critical to safeguarding the communities we serve. They save lives. Their professional expertise is indispensable. Their participation in aid delivery is not negotiable and must continue.
Banning women from humanitarian work has immediate life-threatening consequences for all Afghans. Already, some time-critical programmes have had to stop temporarily due to lack of female staff. This comes at a time when more than 28 million people in Afghanistan, including millions of women and children, require assistance to survive as the country grapples with the risk of famine conditions, economic decline, entrenched poverty and a brutal winter.
While humanitarian organizations continue to engage the de facto authorities, we cannot ignore the operational constraints now facing us as a humanitarian community. We will endeavour to continue lifesaving, time-critical activities unless impeded while we better assess the scope, parameters and consequences of this directive for the people we serve. But we foresee that many activities will need to be paused as we cannot deliver principled humanitarian assistance without female aid workers.
We remain resolute in our commitment to deliver independent, principled, lifesaving assistance to all the women, men and children who need it.
We urge the de facto authorities to reconsider and reverse this directive, and all directives banning women from schools, universities and public life. No country can afford to exclude half of its population from contributing to society.
Signatories:
Mr. Martin Griffiths, Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
Mr. Qu Dongyu, Director-General, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Ms. Shahin Ashraf, Chair, International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) Board, (Islamic Relief)
Mr. Ignacio Packer, Executive Director, International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA)
Ms. Miriam Sapiro, President and Chief Executive Officer, InterAction
Ms. Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, Chief Eexcutive Officer, Mercy Corps
Ms. Janti Soerpinto, President and Chief Executive Officer, Save the Children US
Mr. António Vitorino, Director General, International Organization for Migration (IOM)
Mr. Volker Turk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
Mr. Andrew Morley, President and Chief Executive Officer, World Vision International
Ms. Sofia Sprechmann Sineiro, Secretary-General, CARE International
Ms. Paula Gaviria Betancur, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons (UN SR on HR of IDPs)
Mr. Achim Steiner, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Dr. Natalia Kanem, Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
Ms. Maimunah Mohd Sharif, Executive Director, United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat)
Mr. Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
Ms. Catherine Russell, Executive Director, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
Ms. Sima Bahous, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director (UN Women)
Mr. David Beasley, Executive Director, World Food Programme (WFP)
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO)
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First, the Pizza Hut outlets here were a property of Franquicias Panameñas SA, a company that has several different fast food franchise chains in its portfolio. They hold KFC and Dairy Queen here. They used to have the rights to Taco Bell here, but sold those in 2018.
Do we acknowledge what some people published back then, with furious denials and denunciations in response? You could tell by the empty billboards, by the empty storefronts, by the stalled construction projects, back during the run-up to the 2019 elections. The real question was who would eat the losses from an overextended, too indebted economy, with all this unsold inventory of so many sorts, from things on shelves to business locales without much or any business. Who would take the hit? Who would gobble up the bargains at reduced prices?
THEN, the epidemic hit us.
It will be the subject of business school studies and perhaps legal cases for years to come, but who got bailed out to what extent — and really, for what — are questions naturally asked and unlikely to be fully and candidly answered. Some of the more abusive schemes we have read about in publications whose editorial lines slant against the PRD. But it’s probably more realistic to look for and at things by examining families, old school friends and inter-generational business partnerships as much or more than in partisan terms.
Businesses big and small have taken big hits these past few years. Individuals rich and poor have also taken big hits. Some have received more, some less, in the way of rescues from public coffers or via public policies.
Overall, almost everybody in the private economy is hurting. On the public side, a few crooks have made out like bandits because they ARE bandits. But even the slimiest politicians are paying more for everything now, so more often than not have seen a reduction in their standard of living.
And so it has gone with the little fondas, the more formal sit-down restaurants, and the fast food chains.
THIS parent company says that it plans to expand KFC and put as many of the displaced Pizza Hut people to work as possible on that side of their business. How badly might that hurt Pio Pio or this or that little fonda? We shall see.
Yeah, pathetic demagogues are blaming President Cortizo. Ricky Martinelli is blaming lazy working people who took Monday off when Christmas was on a Sunday, and who plan to take next Monday off as well.
But you know, people who take that extra day in the Interior due to this holiday season’s calendar will by things on their days off. Mom and pop fondas, people who sell things on the streets, fast food chains owned by some rather wealthy people will register some additional sales. Even as foreign tourists from lands richer than ours trickle back and start to spend money here, it’s the “national tourism” — Panamanians taking breaks from their usual routines to travel, enjoy and consume in Panama — that has driven most of our tourism sector. Just because it’s so complicated and so much of it is off the books that it’s hard to quantify doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
Don’t spend money you don’t have, and don’t expect others to do so either. But be kind. Be understanding. Be generous. Be a good neighbor. The hard times aren’t over for very many people here. A bit of ordinary decency goes a long way toward getting us all past these hard years.
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To slow and reverse the fastest loss of Earth’s living things since the dinosaurs, almost 200 countries have signed an agreement in Montreal, Canada, promising to live in harmony with nature by 2050. The Kunming-Montreal agreement is not legally binding but it will require signatories to report their progress towards meeting targets such as the protection of 30% of Earth’s surface by 2030 and the restoration of degraded habitats.
Not everyone is happy with the settlement, or convinced enough has been promised to avert mass extinctions. Thankfully, research has revealed a lot about the best ways to revive and strengthen biodiversity – the variety of life forms, from microbes to whales, found on Earth.
Here are five suggestions:
1. Scrap subsidies
The first thing countries should do is stop paying for the destruction of ecosystems. The Montreal pact calls for reducing incentives for environmentally harmful practices by $500 billion (£410 billion) each year by 2030.
Research published in 2020 showed that ending fuel and maintenance subsidies would reduce excess fishing. Less fishing means more fish at sea and higher catches for the remaining fleet with less effort. The world’s fisheries could cut emissions and become more profitable.
Scrapping policies which subsidize overexploitation in all sorts of industries – fisheries, agriculture, forestry, and of course, fossil fuels – are in many cases the lowest fruit to be picked in order to save biodiversity.
2. Protect the high seas
Almost half of the surface of the Earth is outside national jurisdiction. The high seas belong to no one.
Most of the world’s oceans are owned by no one. (light blue = exclusive economic zones; dark blue = high seas) Graphic by B1mbo / wiki (data: VLIZ), CC BY-SA
In the twilight zone of the ocean, between 200 and 1,000 meters down, fish and krill migrate upwards to feed at night and downwards to digest and rest during the day. This is the ocean’s biological pump, which draws carbon from near the ocean’s surface to its depths, storing it far from the atmosphere and so reducing climate change.
The total mass of fish living in the open ocean is much greater than in overfished coastal seas. Though not exploited to any large extent yet, the high seas and the remote ocean around the Antarctic need binding international agreements to protect them and the important planetary function they serve, which ultimately benefits all life by helping maintain a stable climate.
3. Ban clear-cutting and bottom trawling
Certain methods of extracting natural resources, such as clear-cutting forests (chopping down all the trees) and bottom trawling (tugging a big fishing net close to the seafloor) devastate biodiversity and should be phased out.
Clear-cutting removes large quantities of living matter that will not be replenished before the forest has regenerated, which may take hundreds of years, particularly for forests in Earth’s higher latitudes. Many species which are adapted to live in fully grown forests are subsequently doomed by clear-cutting.
Bad for biodiversity. Photo by Richard Whitcombe / shutterstock
Bottom trawling catches fish and shellfish indiscriminately, disturbing or even eradicating animals which live on the seafloor, such as certain types of coral and oysters. It also throws plumes of sediment into the water above, emitting greenhouse gases which had been locked away. Seafloors that have been trawled continuously for a long time may appear to be devoid of life, or trivialized with fewer species and less complex ecosystems.
4. Empower indigenous land defenders
Indigenous people are the vanguard of many of the best-preserved ecosystems in the world. Their struggle to protect their land and waters and traditional ways of using ecosystems and biodiversity for livelihoods are often the primary reason such important environments still exist.
Many management practices will have to change, since they are based on unrealistic assumptions. Fisheries, for instance, target a maximum sustainable yield (MSY), a concept developed in the mid 20th century which means taking the largest catch from a fish stock without diminishing the stock in the future. Something similar is also used in forestry, though it involves more economic considerations.
Fishing for herring near Norway. Alessandro De Maddalena / Shutterstock
These models were heavily criticized in the subsequent decades for oversimplifying how nature works. For instance species often contain several local populations which live separately and reproduce only with each other, yet some of these “substocks” could still become overfished if just one production target was applied for all of them. However, the idea of a maximum sustainable yield has come back into fashion this century as a means to curtail overfishing.
Herring is a good example here. The species forms many different substocks across the North Atlantic, yet one maximum yield was adopted over vast areas. In the Baltic Sea for instance, Swedish fishing rights were given to the largest shipowners as a part of a neoliberal economic policy to achieve a more effective fishing fleet. Local stocks of herring are now declining, and with them local adaptations (genetic diversity) could eventually disappear.
Heading for more robust strategies than elusive optimal targets for extracting the most fish or trees while maintaining the stock or the forest may lead to a more resilient pathway regarding biodiversity and climate mitigation. It could involve lower fishing quotas, but also change from industrial fishing to more local fishing with smaller fishing vessels.
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Civil Bench magistrate Ángela Russo de Cedeño, a Varela appointee.
A case about the Comptroller General’s powers is mostly about a crisis in public trust
The National Assembly passed, and President Cortizo signed, a law that expanded the discretion of the Comptroller General, who is appointed by the legislature, to open or close audits and investigations of public agencies and their projects. It exempts the comptroller from having to state any reason for undertaking such actions. It also gives people who work in the Comptroller General’s office immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.
Nito says it’s about the “modernization of the state.”
Attorney and anti-corruption activist Ernesto Cedeño has sued to overturn the new law. He says that it violates a number of other laws, most especially the one that created and gave some exclusive jurisdictions to the tax tribunal. He says that the constitution specifies the powers and duties of the Comptroller General, and that this law would purport to amend those without amending the constitution itself. Cedeño and a number of other critics blast the new law as just another barrier to defend impunity for public corruption.
The legislature is widely perceived as a bunch of thugs, public officials who maintain themselves in power through the abusive appropriation and use of public funds to bolster their political organizations and campaigns. Former tourism minister Rubén Blades isn’t the only one to dismiss the ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) as a mere “political patronage party” in its present incarnation. In arguments among members of the PRD’s junior partner in government, the Liberal Nationalist Republican Movement (MOLIRENA) the patronage motive is even more explicit than that.
Does the new law conflict with previous statutes? Perhaps, but in those cases the later legislation tends to prevail to modify the earlier. If the changes are not specified at the time, there might be a question as to their propriety.
Does the new law conflict with the present Panamanian constitution? A third rail of Panamanian jurisprudence that judges, prosecutors and magistrates have avoided touching is that part of the “equal in the eyes of the law” Article 19 that provides that “There will be no immunities or privileges, nor discrimination, on the basis of… social class….” Is Panama political caste a “social class?” In practice it is, and notwithstanding the constitution it enjoys all manner of special privileges and immunities.
However, the basic premise of the 1972 constitution was the creation of a political patronage system that divides spoils among those who play along with it.
Cedeño’s complaint has ended up on the desk of magistrate Ángela Russo de Cedeño, with her decision on whether the court should take the case the sort of recommendation that’s traditionally upheld by colleagues.
As we get past the 10-year terms of those magistrates appointed by presidents Torrijos and Martinelli, the sordid reputation of Panamanian justice does seem to matter with the Supreme Court. The usual ethical stand that “I rule on the basis of the law, given the facts at hand, and ignore the hues and cries of the demagogues and also the public opinions and passions that might be aroused” may be admirable, but its historical abuse as a cover for outrageously partisan decisions makes a public perception of impropriety a danger to the court and to the whole of Panamanian society.
The better approach might be, as to conflicts with other laws, to defer to the legislative and executive branches, but to touch the hot third rail and call the immunity for those working in the comptroller’s office unconstitutional. We don’t have a legal order built around case law like in the USA, the UK and other Common Law jurisdictions, so the “Where might this lead?” question can be overblown. However, an Article 19 warning might do much to bolster public confidence in the courts, whereas a summary rejection of Cedeño’s complaint would widen a serious credibility gap under which our courts must work.
It's Christmas Eve and about 50 migrants were dropped off in front of Kamala Harris' residence with the temperature in the teens. Another stunt by Greg Abbott. pic.twitter.com/wUjkxplYmB
Putin attacks the Ukrainians by rocketing their electricity and water systems as winter sets in. Abbott abandons Latin American migrants in front of Vice President Harris’s home on a frigid Christmas Eve. Both the Restore Russian Imperial Grandeur and White Supremacy USA crowds weaponized the cold weather of Christmas time.
The principal bad guys need to be held to account – perhaps both of them before criminal courts in The Hague, but probably there are more practical comeuppances in each case.
If the invocation of US law against the transportation of migrants as a political stunt is thwarted by the vicious legal terrorists of the Federalist Society, that might ultimately lead to a readjustment of the American courts against the power of the mean spirited and arrogant rich and in favor of justice for all.
Putin’s creepy Christmas present has already elicited more fierce resistance to his invading forces, which may ultimately show him to be a weakling in a Russian political culture that does not tolerate such leaders.
Rosa Parks under arrest. Photo by the Montgomery, Alabama, Police Department.
I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.
Rosa Parks
Bear in mind…
The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
Confucius
The Russians will stand a chance to be free only when they defeat the Kremlin in their minds.
Volodymyr Zelensky
In the beginning especially, we won’t realize we’re changing.
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(from a Christmas Day subscription pitch for his publication The Lever, but not just your banal ad copy)
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“Sadly, the algorithms don’t support a Lever business model.”
My good friend said this to me a few days ago, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it — because it’s true, and after more than two years building this news organization, there are days when I do wonder if we can overcome The Algorithm.
That term is shorthand for the opaque formulas social media platforms use to preference, throttle, and shadowban content. In practice, though, it’s more than merely a technological invisible hand. It is also a corporate media-driven discourse that has inculcated Americans to assess reporting’s value and shareability based on whether it is seen as helping or hurting the reader’s preferred political party, favorite politician, or news-cycle cause of the day.
This is a brave new world beyond even the warnings of Citizen Kane or 1984, a world in which billionaires, corporations, and the two parties have throngs of adoring fans and discourse enforcers to drown out facts that are inconvenient to those same billionaires, corporations, and political parties.
Social media platforms and corporate media learn from that feedback system, shaping their content preferences to exploit it for ever more clicks, retweets, recommendations, and ratings. Hence, the ascendant business model in media is clicky hot takes about divisive cultural issues, content “presented by” corporations looking to shape public policy outcomes, or quite literally “the newsletter for the mogul set.”
Trapped inside this filter bubble, The Lever has chosen a different path — one that hasn’t really existed, at least not in modern times. We do not report Washington news of, by, and for Washington insiders and wonks — we write for everyone else. We do not deliver partisan talking points — we report things both parties want to keep secret. We do not repackage press releases as news — we interrogate corporate propaganda. And we do not rely on corporations to fund our work — we rely on our readers to fund our journalism.
In short: We scrutinize, question, and challenge corporate power and political corruption — the topics that The Algorithm and its owners loathe. As such, every day for us is an uphill battle not only to do the reporting, but to distribute the revelations so that they can inform the political conversation, prompt action, and make change.
Every now and again, we find a glitch in The Algorithm and our stories travel far, which is how our small outlet has racked up more than 33 million impressions over the last year, and why our own social media and podcast followership continues to grow. And when we find those glitches, we can create leverage and make a real impact — which is the whole point of what we do.
There was Julia Rock’s reporting on student debt cases that prompted a big reversal from the Biden administration. There was Andrew Perez’s reporting that uncovered the largest known dark money donation in American history. There was Matthew Cunningham-Cook’s reporting on railroad executives paying themselves $200 million before they tried to crush their employees. And there was Rebecca Burns’ exposé on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ property insurance industry giveaway in hurricane-ravaged Florida.
But for every story of ours that manages to survive in The Algorithm, others of equal import get trapped in the filter.
There was the story of the Biden administration refusing to end an illegal $50 billion tax loophole that mostly benefits the rich. There were the stories about a Republican congressman and now senator-elect pressuring regulators to let his donors circumvent his own state’s predatory lending laws. There was the story of the world’s largest asset management firm trying to help companies hide their carbon emissions during the climate crisis. And most recently, there were our two reports about Wall Street lobbyists trying to preserve a lawless financial system that routinely fleeces retirees.
These were original, time- and cost-intensive stories about some of the most important issues facing humanity — but they went into a black hole on social media and were completely ignored by a chattering class obsessing over everything except what’s actually important. And as we’ve experienced in a difficult second half of 2022 for The Lever and other subscription-based news outlets, when that happens, the sustainability of our newsroom is jeopardized — fewer people see our stories, fewer people subscribe to our email list, fewer people pitch in to fund our journalism.
Of course, this is a world where Congress keeping 4 million kids in poverty gets quite literally a tiny fraction of the attention as Elon Musk’s antics on Twitter — so I don’t take this problem personally, even if it keeps me up at night.
This is a systemic challenge and, as Hyman Roth says in The Godfather, “this is the business we’ve chosen” — so I’m hardly surprised by the turbulence we face. I knew what I was getting into when I launched The Lever from scratch a little more than two years ago. I knew that every single day would be a slog inside an information echo chamber whose owners and apparatchiks despise me and — more importantly — hate the kind of reporting that our team chooses to do.
In addition, I acknowledge that many of the challenges we face reflect the limitations of our model.
For instance: We put as much of our limited resources as possible into reporting, so we do not have a massive advertising budget of promoted tweets and podcast ads and other sponsored content.
Similarly, because we are not bankrolled by huge corporations, we do not have limitless resources to cover every single story in every news cycle, which means we miss opportunities.
There are also larger societal forces at play. Example: We are a reader-supported news outlet in a country where people are conditioned to spend huge sums on media products like cable TV and movies, but where the idea of pitching in a little bit to support public-interest journalism is not part of the culture.
Meanwhile, we do not have insider media connections to pitch Washington and New York reporters on glowing puff pieces about our unlikely success bootstrapping our way to a small-but-growing newsroom — and without that, we cannot get our own Wikipedia page and until very recently couldn’t even get our original reporting to show up on Google News.
And yet all of those shortcomings aside, our biggest obstacle to building out a more robust independent media outlet is the one my friend articulated: The reporting we do does not have a built-in, ready-to-click audience, because our journalism does not fit neatly into what The Algorithm rewards, and what the red-versus-blue news consumer has been conditioned to consume.
That is a problem not just for The Lever, but for democracy. If a society can only accept and promote reporting that serves a particular party, corporation, politician or cause — and if a social and corporate media machine is effectively suppressing facts that contradict conventional wisdom — then that society probably will not make good, constructive, or humane decisions.
To be sure, some media folks have been arguing that scoops alone generate attention, audience, and revenue in a virtuous cycle of sustainable journalism. The idea is that if you just generate more scoopy stuff, an ever bigger audience is there for the taking. It sounds great, but after decades of journalism, I’ve seen that this axiom only really holds for certain kinds of scoops — namely, scoops that don’t surface truths that are inconvenient to economic power, don’t scramble the red-team/blue-team view of politics, and thus don’t offend The Algorithm.
Facing this challenge, The Lever could change what we do. We could follow others’ path and become an outlet that focuses only on Republicans’ latest outrage of the day, or on boosting Democratic politicians, or on mass producing hot takes and YouTube rants about whatever fake controversy is currently generating clicks in the content mines. The Algorithm has made that a reliably lucrative path for Internet traffic, cable TV news bookings, and subscribership.
But at age 47, I find myself more and more aware of how finite time is. I refuse to spend whatever time I have left on this planet worshiping The Algorithm that is distracting this country from its fixable problems, and worse, intensifying so many of the existential crises imperiling our world. The Lever has made it this far against the odds, growing our audience, expanding our newsroom amid mass media layoffs, and breaking big stories every year. And so we’re not going to change.
In 2023, we will continue following the money, exposing the corruption, and reporting the unreported stories. Whether our content is suppressed by social media or ignored by corporate media, we know we will be competing on an uneven playing field. But as long as enough subscribers continue pitching in to fund our newsroom, we will keep holding the powerful accountable, even if The Algorithm is designed to silence us.
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These days, millions of people in Ukraine and the world celebrate Christmas. The appearance of the Son of God gave people hope for salvation, faith in the victory of goodness and mercy.
Unfortunately, all the holidays have a bitter aftertaste for us this year. And we can feel the traditional Spirit of Christmas differently. Dinner at the family table cannot be so tasty and warm. There may be empty chairs around it. And our houses and streets can’t be so bright. And Christmas bells can ring not so loudly and inspiringly.
Through air raid sirens, or even worse – gunshots and explosions. And all this together can pose a bigger threat. It is a disappointment. Of the higher forces and their power, of goodness and justice in the world. Loss of hope. Loss of love. Loss of myself…
But isn’t this what evil and darkness, which have taken up arms against us, want in their essence?
We have been resisting them for more than three hundred days and eight years. And will we allow them to achieve what they want?
In this battle, we have another powerful and effective weapon. The hammer and sword of our spirit and consciousness. The wisdom of God. Courage and bravery. Virtues that incline us to do good and overcome evil.
The main act of courage is endurance and completion of one’s work to the end, despite everything. The truth illuminates our path. We know it. We defend it. Our truth is a struggle for freedom. Freedom comes at a high price. But slavery has an even higher price.
Our path is illuminated by faith and patience. Patience and faith. These are twin forces. As it was said, “he who rules and controls his own spirit, is better than he who captures a city.” To endure does not mean to accept the circumstances. Patience is watching to make sure that we don’t let any doubt or fear into our minds. It is faith in one’s own strength.
Evil has no weapon stronger than the armor given to us by God. Evil smashes against this armor like a stone wall. We have seen this more than once. We endured at the beginning of the war. We endured attacks, threats, nuclear blackmail, terror, missile strikes. Let’s endure this winter because we know what we are fighting for.
We go forward through the thorns to the stars, knowing what awaits us at the end of the road. God is a just Judge who rewards good and punishes evil. Which side we are on is obvious. Who is who in this battle is obvious.
There are at least seven proofs of this – they are known – “A proud look, a lying tongue, And hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, Feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, And he that soweth discord among brethren.”
We oppose all this. Being a role model for others. The faithful, that is, those who really believe, must be a light to the rest of the world. For more than three hundred days, Ukrainians have been striving for this, proving it, serving as an example to others. We are not righteous, not holy, but we are definitely fighting for good and fighting for the light, with faith in Bible prophecy:
“Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. The people who walk in darkness will see a bright light. The light will shine on those who live in the land of death’s shadow. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given!”
We believe that tears will be replaced by joy, hope will come after despair, and death will be defeated by life.
Dear Ukrainian people!
Today and all future winter holidays we meet in difficult circumstances. Someone will see the first star in the sky over Bakhmut, Rubizhne, and Kreminna today. Along thousands of kilometers of the front line. Someone is on the road, on the way – from the Ukrainian-Polish border to Kherson region or Zaporizhzhia. Someone will see it through the bullet holes of his or her own home. Someone will celebrate the holiday in other people’s homes, but strange people’s homes – homes of Ukrainians who gave shelter to Ukrainians.
In Zakarpattia, Bukovyna, Lviv region, Ivano-Frankivsk region and many other regions. Someone will hear Shchedryk in another language – in Warsaw, Berlin, London, New York, Toronto and many other cities and countries. And someone will meet this Christmas in captivity, but let them remember that we are also coming for our people, we will return freedom to all Ukrainian men and women.
Wherever we are, we will be together today. And together we will look at the evening sky. And together we will remember the morning of February 24. Let’s remember how much we have passed. Let’s remember Azovstal, Irpin, Bucha, Kramatorsk, Snake Island, Chornobayivka, Izium, Kherson. We make a wish. One for all. And we will feel joy. One for all. And we will understand the truth. One for all.
About the fact that no kamikaze drones are capable of extinguishing the Christmas Dawn. We will see its glow even underground in a bomb shelter. We will fill our hearts with warmth and light. No Kinzhal missile can hurt them. They will break against our steel spirit. And our struggle will continue without stopping. It is not threatened by planned or emergency blackouts. And we will never feel a shortage of courage and indomitability.
We have experienced a lot of bitter news and will deservedly receive good news. We will sing Christmas carols – cheerier than ever – louder than the sound of a generator. We will hear the voices and greetings of relatives – in our hearts – even if communication service and the Internet are down. And even in total darkness – we will find each other – to hug each other tightly. And if there is no heat, we will give a big hug to warm each other.
We will celebrate our holidays! As always. We will smile and be happy. As always. The difference is one. We will not wait for a miracle. After all, we create it ourselves.
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Sensitive stuff: From graphic depictions of war to lewdness, this Russian feminist punk rock song is sure to offend or shock a lot of people. If you are one to be offended or sickened by such material, you should probably not watch this.
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