“By the very edge of the blue sea
lived an old man and his old woman.
For three and thirty years they had lived
in a tumbledown hut made of mud”

This is the beginning of the famous poem, The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in 1833. It seems with all the love Russians have for Pushkin, with approximately 300 monuments dedicated to the poet in Russia, Vladimir Putin should have known the tale by heart. They teach it in schools … and yet, here we are: moral not understood, lesson not learned.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a story about a fisherman and his wife who once had everything, but because of her immeasurable and unbridled greed were eventually left with nothing.

Putin also had it all in Russia and there are heaps of investigations about his corrupt wealth to prove that. If you haven’t yet watched Putin’s palace: History of world’s largest bribe on the Alexei Navalny YouTube channel, I urge you to do so. It already has 125 million views.

Putin really had it all. But, Putin decided it was not enough and started war after war after war annexing territories, mass killing and torturing civilians, destroying homes, schools and hospitals. The immense loss and suffering of the people of Moldova, Georgia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Syria, Central African Republic and Ukraine are all the result of Putin’s deplorable greed.

But this plague definitely stops in Ukraine with Putin losing it all and, in the very best scenario for him and his terroristic regime, standing trial in The Hague. All of them are going to reap the consequences of their terrorist actions. They should really give The Tale of the Fisherman and a Fish another go, while they still have a chance.

Russian war criminals are now in big trouble in Kherson: there is very little doubt that the territory that was annexed by Putin just a few months ago will soon be under the control of Ukrainian armed forces.

As we all know, “soldiers win battles, logistics win wars”. And now there isn’t a way for Russia to arrange any sort of logistics to and from Kherson. The Ukrainian army has destroyed any means for them to operate in Kherson effectively. Thus, they have been retreating for the past two weeks and Russian marauders cleaned out the city in an attempt to make it fully uninhabitable.

They’ve emptied out all of the hospitals, they’ve stolen all of the equipment and ambulances. They took all of the city machinery and city transport. They’ve robbed schools, homes, and private businesses of computers, equipment, cars, money, documentation, and even medicine and food. They’ve cleaned out grocery stores and pharmacies. They’ve cleaned out archives and transported them to Russia.

It doesn’t stop there; information about the looting committed by Russians is overwhelming. They’ve emptied out all of the museums and art galleries. They’ve robbed galleries of tens of thousands of pieces of art. All of the exhibitions, paintings, sculptures – all loaded up on trucks and transported to Russia.

Local authorities have stated that “this act of looting is a part of the continuous robbing of cultural, medical and other institutions of the city of Kherson and Kherson Oblast by the Russian occupiers after the occupying administration announced the evacuation of civilians due to a probable counter-offensive by the Armed Forces of Ukraine”.

And finally, so you would understand Putin’s insanity: on top of his orders to the Russian army to loot, rob, destroy, kill and deport as many Ukrainians as possible, making them go through filtration camps, he’s also ordered them to rob our graveyards. The remains of Grigory Potemkin have been stolen from a crypt in St Catherine’s Cathedral. They are seriously sick and depraved.

Unfortunately, we don’t know much about how many people are left in Kherson right now. We are 100% certain that we are going to uncover horrifying sights there. There were tens of thousands of Ukrainian patriots coming out to protest every day at the beginning of the spring and we don’t know what happened to most of them under occupation.

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We do know that Putin’s killers were torturing and murdering civilians, absolutely anyone who wasn’t in support of Russia. We know there are torture chambers, we know they were publicly hanging women and men for their patriotism, and we know they murdered a lot of our citizens. Just a short while ago Russian troops killed our beloved and very talented Conductor Yurii Kerpatenko. Russian killers shot him dead in his own home because Yurii refused to participate in a concert in occupied Kherson.

Unfortunately, we don’t know how many people are still in Kherson, many of them are not evacuating because they fear they won’t make it through Russian filtration camps. A lot of people didn’t. We know that Russia mined many buildings in Kherson and has already blown up a few in the city centre, probably trying to destroy the evidence of their war crimes.

Furthermore, Russian terrorists have mined a huge hydroelectric dam near Kherson that they plan to blow up as they flee the city. Multiple experts have stated that blowing up this dam would be equivalent to dropping an atomic bomb. Unfortunately, we cannot predict what these terrorists will do.

We have informants stating that they’ve witnessed multiple Russian soldiers dressing up as civilians and hiding in the houses and apartments of deported Ukrainians. Some locals say that they think if Russia is ousted from the city, they will probably shell Kherson until there’s nothing left, just as they did in Mariupol, killing tens of thousands of civilians.

But right now, we just don’t know.

What we do know for sure is that we will win. We believe in our armed forces. We will do anything possible and impossible to save our people. And we are all looking forward to Russian terrorists finally ending up with nothing, as predicted by their most popular fairytale. DM