RUSSIA ~ UKRAINE ~

"Don't think yourselves better because you burn up

friends and enemies with long range missiles

without ever seeing what you have done."

THOMAS MERTON 

____________________________________

It is unconscionable that while Ukrainians are being slaughtered, NATO members still send hundreds of millions of euros every day to Mr. Putin’s coffers to buy oil and gas. Political leaders who oppose a total halt to transfers to Russia are complicit in Mr. Putin’s war crimes. They are indirectly paying the wages of those who committed atrocities in Bucha. Ending all imports of Russian oil and gas would come at a significant price, but it would be small compared to the continued destruction in Ukraine. Here too, Finland is moving in the right direction, promising to end the country’s reliance on Russian energy imports in a matter of “weeks or months.”

By Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Mr. Rasmussen is a former secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a former prime minister of Denmark.

New York Times, April 25, 2022

RENE CHAR

 

The Resourceful Bulrush

I hear rain even when it's not the rain,

Just nightfall;

I rejoice in dawn even when it's not the dawn,

But my own white pulp stirring among the mud.

A child's mouth ruffles me with its teeth.

Love of the silent waters!

The hawthorn has the nightingale.

I have the spells that bind.

__________________________

Rene Char

The Inventors

translated by Mark Hutchinson

Seagull Books, 2015