My very close friend from Kharkov has not responded to my letters for 4 days, and I began to worry a lot.
Today I received this letter from him:

In Kharkov, everything is the same, only even more complicated and difficult.
Our life is like walking on a tightrope - high above the ground you go forward, swing, stagger, every step can be your last, but you go. Not knowing whether you will get there and where you are going at all.
There are more schools with bomb shelters, some children went to school on September 1. But not all, many children have never sat at a desk, since first there was covid, and then almost immediately the War.

From the book I'm reading:
"The Times of London unexpectedly sided with Hitler, recommending that the Sudeten territories be officially returned to Germany. On September 9, during the annual Nuremberg Congress, the British ambassador took a similar position in a private conversation."
[this is before the West's disgrace in Munich]

All of us who think with excitement and sympathy about Ukraine have been following the course of the War with a high degree of anxiety – especially during the last two months.
It is very difficult for Ukrainians. Damn hard. Against them they have a monster state that literally overwhelms them with corpses on the battlefields.
This is how Russia has fought and is still fighting now – it does not value human life at all, whether it is its own or of the others. But if once (or at least sometimes) there were causes that somehow justified such brutal disregard for people's lives and such cruel treatment of the individual, now everything is more ugly and nasty, barbaric and inhumane.
Putin's Russia is a sick country with a sick public psyche, with a sick people and, most nightmarishly, with a sick dictator. Putin is mentally ill; he is a bloodthirsty and antediluvian combination of psychopath and sociopath at the same time.

The brave and steadfast Russian dissident and human rights activist Sergei Kovalev (1930 - 2021) said:
- The quality of democracy depends on the quality of the democrats.

After the exchange of Russian political prisoners for raягist scumbags and murderers, the people who support Ukraine drank another cup of bitterness.
Absurd, sometimes chauvinistic, even Great Russian statements of the exchanged political prisoners!

With the beginning of the barbaric and absolutely unprovoked War against Ukraine, Putin's Russia exists under the conditions of an absolutely wrong and, if not in the short term, certainly in the medium term, absurd economic, financial, industrial and social logic.
All management theories, as well as all economic theories, are at odds - irreconcilably at that - with the way processes work in this monster state!