Call sign Rusin

 

I grabbed a digital subscription to the New York Times on February 25, so I'd have up-to-date news on a war I thought would last a week or two at most. It's now in its third month and looking like it might go on for another three or more. After the humiliating rout of his army outside Kyiv, Putin has settled for a war of attrition in eastern Ukraine, where the landscape and the supply lines favor the invaders. Today, two NYT reporters file a story from the front line in which they quote a soldier whose call sign is "Rusin" (that's him in the photo above). He's 30 and had a business in western Ukraine selling bathtubs; when the Russians invaded, he married his girlfriend and joined the army.

“We understand that this is not a war between Ukraine and Russia,” he told the reporters. “This is a war of the pure and the light that exists on this earth, and darkness. Either we stop this horde and the world gets better, or the world is filled with the anarchy that occurs wherever there is war.”