Ukrainians aren’t backing down from their defense of their country against the invasion that Russian President Vladimir Putin recently launched. In Ukrainian areas that have temporarily fallen under the control of Russian forces, Ukrainian civilians have continued flooding the streets in protest of the Russian military’s presence, and these protests have continued even through violent attempts by Russian personnel to tamp down the demonstrations. Protests were recorded this weekend in occupied cities including Kherson and Berdyansk; in Kherson, the Ukrainian outlet known as Euromaidan Press said that “locals keep taking to the streets every day despite Russia’s arrests of activists in occupied southern areas of Ukraine.” In Berdyansk, Russian troops took to “laying the activists on the ground, smashing and confiscating their phones during the rally,” Euromaidan Press explains, and shots into the air were heard. There were also protests in a Kherson-area town called Nova Kahovka, local footage reveals. Check out protest videos below:
#Ukraine In occupied Kherson, people went out to a peaceful rally. They are chanting, "Away! Away!" to the Russian army in the city.
Brave! pic.twitter.com/vDKZmB3phj
— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) March 20, 2022
⚡️Nova Kahovka protests too
Also, residents of Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast, continued their protests against the Russian occupation today.
📹@Liveuamappic.twitter.com/oLa017SPIR— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) March 20, 2022
In Berdyansk, people went on a peaceful protest against Russians – they began to detain and beat them. Shots were also heard in the air.
The video was sent by a local resident#StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/7SW1tcMkpI— Oleksandra Matviichuk (@avalaina) March 20, 2022
As for the progression of the war, the expanding atrocities suffered by Uktaine are immense. In one example of many, Russian forces fired on a nursing home in the Luhansk region, killing 56 people. Russian personnel forcibly moved survivors of the attack elsewhere. In another horror out of the besieged city of Mariupol, Russian invaders struck a school where hundreds of people had been sheltering, not long after they struck a theater where hundreds had also been sheltering. The Russian word for “children” was written in large letters on the ground outside of the theater in an attempt to keep invaders from striking it. As of this past Friday, hundreds of people were believed to remain trapped beneath the theater wreckage. Mariupol — the residents of which number in the hundreds of thousands — has suffered losses of access to utilities such as running water and supplies like medicines because of Russian attacks.
⚡️ Ukrainian journalist released from Russian captivity.
Oleh Baturin, a journalist from Russian-occupied Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast, went missing on March 12.
“I was beaten, humiliated, threatened. They said they would kill me. They wanted to break me,” said Baturin.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 20, 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy indicated in a recent appearance on CNN that he’s “ready for negotiations with [Putin]. I was ready for the last two years. And I think that without negotiations, we cannot end this war” — but he insisted that there are certain lines he will not cross. As the Ukrainian president explained things, “There are compromises for which we cannot be ready as an independent state… Any compromises related to our territorial integrity and our sovereignty and the Ukrainian people have spoken about it, they have not greeted Russian soldiers with a bunch of flowers, they have greeted them with bravery, they have greeted them with weapons in their hands… [Russia] cannot curry favor with the citizens of another country forcibly… You cannot just make a president of another country to recognize anything by the use of force.”
⚡️ Zelensky: 'Ukraine cannot compromise on its territorial integrity.'
President Zelensky told CNN that Ukrainians won’t accept any deal involving the loss of territory or sovereignty.
“There are compromises for which we cannot be ready as an independent state,” said Zelensky.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 20, 2022
