The Targets Are Civilians
We are witnesses to a deliberate strategy. What we have seen, what we are witnessing, what we have endured. And what drives us forward.
By:Giorgio Provinciali
Live from Ukraine ??
Describing the war from the field, and even surviving, is becoming increasingly difficult. If weve somehow managed to do so in these 1,622 days,WE ARE DEEPLY GRATEFUL TO THOSE WHO MADE THIS POSSIBLE BY SUPPORTING US.
Zaporizhzhia I keep a photo. In it is a twenty-year-old boy, standing on the path behind his house, among the leaves the explosion tore from the trees. There is blood on his shoulder and on his chest; one leg is bandaged as best it could be. But hes standing. Upright, strong, proud. His name is Mark.
The photo is from the day three missilesexplodedon Kapitanivka one right in the center, one a short distance away, and one in the woods, where two more fell without detonating the day of thedrone presentationin that suburb of Kyiv. A storm of shrapnel swept over houses, courtyards, people.
When we arrived, a few days ago, the air was still unbreathable. The huge open lot in front of his house had been razed to the ground: gutted houses, incinerated cars, torn sheet metal everywhere. People were forming a human chain to clear away the rubble. That is where I met his father, while he was repairing the house. He told me he had escaped the missile by barely ten seconds. When he had driven past it, that now-annihilated lot was packed with brand-new, high-end cars. He didnt stop for a closer look: he kept straight on to the intersection. That decision saved his life, because ten seconds after he passed, all that remained of the lot was a lunar landscape. The shock wave caught up with him, shaking his car. His house, which faces that lot, was raked with shrapnel: windows pulverized, gates turned into sieves. The shrapnel reached Mark too. He was a tall boy, fit, in the full health of his twenty years. His first thought, hit and bleeding, was not to overburden the ambulances and the rescuers: he believed the shrapnel hadnt penetrated deep, and he figured there were others worse off than he was. It was the doctors who insisted that he go get checked at the hospital, and there they saw that the cuts were deeper than they seemed: targeted surgeries would be needed to remove the consequences of that trauma. When I met his father, at that very moment, he told me he trusted he would have him home within a couple of days.
He never came back.
On July 28, Mark died in the hospital, from the complications that followed that trauma. He was twenty. His father wrote to us on day 1,621 of this war, with a message that ended like this:Please keep doing your job well so that less innocent bystanders die in this war.
Although I have a certain familiarity with words, that day I confessed to him that I struggled to find any. I replied that Alla and I were holding him in the warmest, saddest embrace we had; thatI would carry his message wherever anyone questions what drives us forward, and into these lines, without naming him, so that his grief does not become a spectacle; and that his having thought of us, on a day like that, is something I will not forget as long as I live. All our love goes to him and to his family.
The times the grip around our hearts has tightened no longer have a number. We too have lost the closest of family and the best of our friends. We too carry, on our skin and in our hearts,scars whose edges will never meet again: for those marks there is no surgeon, and we long ago stopped putting our trust even in the anesthesiologist. Theres no way around it: they resurface, and they change your DNA. Your being, down into the bone.
It is impossible to look away from a boy just riddled by the shrapnel of a missile who worries about leaving the ambulance free for someone worse off. This is who dies when Russian missiles fall on courtyards: a twenty-year-old who, in the depths of shock, finds the lucidity of kindness. The shrapnel did not stop killing him even when he seemed safe and was on his feet.
His fathers message reached us on the road. Shortly afterwardcame confirmationthat the smoke we had seen as we entered Kryvyi Rih was exactly what we feared: yet anothergas station destroyed. It was rising in a dense, black, sooty column from Shyroke. At first we were told of three victims, killed in the blast: one was just eight years old. Then the toll widened: six wounded, a great number of vehicles devastated, and the surrounding infrastructure destroyed. Eight years old. That little girl was born when this war was already four. She never lived a single day not one in a country at peace. She too died in the middle of the most ordinary act in the world: stopping for gas.
We had come to Kryvyi Rih because, in the meantime, the Russians hadbombedthe last remaining store of the Epitsenter chain in the city,wreaking carnage on yet more civilians. We stopped to eat in the very center of a normal European city like that one, and across the street from us stood a hotel torn open from top to bottom: destroyed while it was full of civilians. And it is byno means an isolated case: the Russian Federation has deliberatelystruckother hotels in Kryvyi Rih at the exact moment they were packed with innocent people.
In the evening we arrived in Zaporizhzhia, where we learned that the local METRO cash-and-carry has decided to close. How could anyone blame them: the Kryvyi Rih branch, adjacent to the devastated Epitsenter we had just seen, was completely destroyed. We went there too. And to get there, we crossed the citypassing beneath the anti-drone corridors. Yes: because in Zaporizhzhia toothe Russians practice theirhuman safari, deliberately targeting civilians, as in Kharkiv, Sumy, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Chernihiv. From beneath those netswe filmed their targets: children playing in the park, elderly people drinking coffee at the little kiosks, passersby walking along while feverishly scanning the sky and the ground. The sky, because that is where the remote killers hired by the Russian Federation come from. The ground, because those vultures also drop explosive devices and mines hidden even inside packs of wet wipes, in toys, and in curiously shaped objects designed precisely to entice the next unlucky person to pick them up.
In doing so,the Russians have deliberately mined every form of social vitality. Curiosity itself, and the semblance of serenity these people managed to impose on themselves. They have turned the smallest gestures of everyday life into traps: getting gas, buying groceries, drinking a coffee, sleeping in a hotel, picking up a toy.
This is not a war Moscow fights only at the front, but a manhunt it conducts sidewalk by sidewalk, courtyard by courtyard.
The latest little kiosk destroyed this way in flames wedocumentedlive from Oleksandrivka, Donetsk, barely ten meters away from us. Shortly before closing this article, welearnedthat Belgium which hosts in Brussels the second working seat of the European Parliament and the headquarters of NATO has become, after the war unleashed by the USA in the Middle East, totally dependent on Russian gas.Twelve years after the Russian invasion of Crimea that is, since the beginning of the De Profundis of international law the main decision-making center of international politics in Europe, that of the EU and of NATO, has yet to find a solution tothe financing of Russian terrorism.
To those questioning what drives us forward, after all this, we answer with an ordinary day like this one. And with the words of a father who, at the very moment his world was collapsing on top of him, found the strength to think of others just like his son and to ask us to keep doing our job well so that fewer innocents die. You will well understand whythat request, from our very first day here, is no longer merely our mission, still less a job: it is a mandate.
We know that he too will read these lines. We want him to know that in the photo we keep, his son is standing: wounded, but upright; strong and proud; worried about others before himself. That is how we will keep him, and that is how we will tell of him for as long as we have a voice.
Standing. Like Ukraine.
?? This is Ukraine, on day 1,622 since the world took notice of a war that began at least twelve years ago.
In 1.622 days of war, we recorded over 300 videos from ground zero and wrote more than 3,000 articles at least 1,600 in English, and over 1,400 in Italian.
Were doing our best to provide genuine, first-hand reports from zones where almost no press dares to go. This means living in a kill zone constantly. We take the risk, but without your invaluable support, our voices would remain unheard and silent. Without brave people sharing our articles from afar, they would remain unread. Our reports would go unseen, and our efforts would be lost. Theres still a lot of work to do here, as the people around us are also in no better situation.
Were renewing our fundraising campaign and thanking everyone who joins us in helping to restore what Russia is destroying. Moving forward, not even with a small reimbursement for each article we write, is extremely challenging. Thats why we are grateful to all the kind people who support us and trust in our mission.
Even a small donation helps.
Well keep you updated on developments.
Thank you all, dear friends ??
平民才是目标
我们亲眼见证着一种蓄意实施的战略。我们所看到的、正在目睹的、亲身承受的一切，以及推动我们继续前行的力量。
作者：Giorgio Provinciali
翻译：旺财球球
乌克兰前线报道??
从前线报道这场战争，甚至仅仅是活下来，正变得愈发艰难。如果说在过去这1,622天里，我们还能坚持做到这一点，那么我们由衷感谢所有通过支持我们而让这一切成为可能的人。
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扎波罗热我保存着一张照片。照片里是一个二十岁的男孩，站在他家后院的小路上，周围是爆炸从树上撕下的树叶。他的肩膀和胸口有血；一条腿被尽可能地包扎着。但他依然站着，站得笔直、坚强、自豪。他的名字叫马克。
照片拍摄于三枚导弹袭击卡皮塔尼夫卡的那天，一枚正中市中心、另一枚落在不远处、还有一枚落在树林里，那里另外两枚则没有爆炸，那天是基辅郊区正在举行无人机展示活动，无数弹片风暴般掠过房屋、院落和人群。
几天前我们到达时，空气仍然无法呼吸。他家前面的那片大空地已被夷为平地：房屋被掏空，汽车被烧毁，四处是撕裂的金属板。人们正排成人链清理废墟。正是在那里，我遇见了他的父亲，自己与那枚导弹擦肩而过，当他开车路过那片如今被毁的空地时，那里停满了崭新、高档的汽车。他没有停车仔细查看，而是继续开往路口。正是这个决定救了他的命，因为就在他通过后的十秒钟，空地剩下的只是月球表面般的景象。
冲击波追上了他，猛烈摇晃着他的车。他那面向那片空地的房子被弹片扫过：窗户被击粉碎，门栅变得像筛子一样。弹片也击中了马克。马克个头高、体格好，正值二十岁的康健年华。他受伤流血时的第一个念头并不是为自己，而是不想给救护车和救援人员增加负担：他以为弹片并未穿透很深，他觉得有其他人比他可能更需要帮助。是医生坚持要他去医院检查，在那里医生发现伤口远比看上去更深：需要有针对性的手术来清除那次创伤的后果。当时，我遇到他父亲时，他还告诉我，他相信会在几天内把儿子接回家。
他再也没有回来。
7月28日，马克因那次创伤引发的并发症在医院去世，年仅二十岁。他的父亲在这场战争的第1,621天给我们写信，信末这样写道：请继续做好你们的工作，这样战争中就会少死些无辜的旁观者。
尽管我自认与文字为伴已久，那天我向他坦白我很难找到任何词句。我回复说，阿拉和我以最温暖、最悲痛的拥抱与他同在；我会把他的这段话带到任何质疑我们前进动力的人面前，并把它写进这些文章里，但不提及他的名字，以免他的悲痛成为一场展示；他在那样的一天想到我们，这一份情谊我终生不忘。我们把我们所有的爱都献给他和他的家人。
（图：我在乌克兰基辅卡皮塔尼夫卡报道。照片前方是马克父亲的房子版权所有，Giorgio Provinciali）
让我们心头收紧的时刻早已经数不清了。我们同样失去了至亲和最好的朋友。我们也在表皮和内心同样留下了再也无法抚平的伤痕：这些创伤没有外科医生能医治，我们早已不再把希望寄托在麻醉师身上。无可回避的是：它们会再次浮现，并改变你的基因。你的存在，深入骨髓。
无法视而不见的是：一个被导弹打得遍体鳞伤的男孩竟然还挂念着让救护车空出来给更需要的人。当俄罗斯导弹落入居民庭院时，死去的正是这样的人。一个在深度震惊中仍然保持善良的清醒的二十岁少年。即便他看似安全、还能站立，弹片也没有停止对他的杀害。
（图：本文中描述的加油站是在被俄方袭击后被毁现场。我在去乌克兰克里维里赫路上拍下了这张照片??版权所有，Giorgio Provinciali）
我们在路上收到他父亲的信息。不久之后我们确认了进入克里维里赫时所见的浓烟正是我们所担忧的：又一座加油站被炸毁。从希羅克附近冒起一柱浓黑、夹杂煤灰的烟尘。起初我们得知爆炸中有三名遇难者：其中一人仅八岁。随后伤亡人数扩大：六人受伤，众多车辆被毁，周边基础设施受损。八岁。那名小女孩生于这场战争已经进行四年之时。她从未有，哪怕一天，生活在一个和平的国家。她也死在世上最平常的行事情之中：去加油。
（图：在乌克兰克里维里赫METRO批发超市现场报道。照片背景是被俄国炸毁的Epitsenter连锁店版权所有，Giorgio Provinciali）
我们之所以来到克里维里赫，是因为与此同时，俄方炸毁了该市最后一家仍在营业的Epitsenter连锁店门店，造成更多平民伤亡。我们在这样一个普通的欧洲城市中心停下来吃饭，对街上有一家旅馆从上到下被撕开：它是在住满了平民时被炸毁的。而这绝非孤例：俄罗斯联邦还曾故意在人满为患之时，轰炸位于克里维里赫的其他旅馆。
（图：在乌克兰扎波罗热几乎空无一人的METRO批发超市现场报道??。照片前方是一个反无人机走廊版权所有，Giorgio Provinciali）
傍晚我们抵达扎波罗热，得知当地METRO仓储超市已决定关闭。谁又能责怪他们呢：我们刚看到的、毗邻被毁的Epitsenter的克里维里赫METRO分店本身也被彻底摧毁。我们也去了那里。为了抵达那里，我们穿过城市，在反无人机走廊下经过。是的：在扎波罗热，俄罗斯人也在进行他们的人类狩猎，蓄意瞄准平民为目标，就像在哈尔科夫、苏梅、顿涅茨克、第聂伯罗彼得罗夫斯克和切尔尼戈夫那样。从这些防护网下我们拍摄了他们的目标：公园里玩耍的孩子、在小亭子喝咖啡的老人、边走边疯狂扫视天空和地面的人们。
他们看天空，是因为俄罗斯雇佣的远程杀手操控的无人机从那里而来；他们看地面，是因为那些兀鹰还会投掷爆炸装置和地雷，甚至把它们藏在湿巾包里、玩具里，或做成奇怪的形状，专门诱使下一个不幸的人去捡拾。
（图：在乌克兰扎波罗热城市的反无人机走廊现场报道??版权所有，Giorgio Provinciali）
由此，俄罗斯人故意摧毁社会生活的每一种活力。好奇心本身，以及这些人勉强为自己维持的那点平静假象，都被俄罗斯埋进了雷区。俄罗斯人把日常生活中最微小的举动变成陷阱：加油、买菜、喝咖啡、住旅馆、捡起一个玩具。
这并不仅仅是莫斯科只在前线发动的战争，而是它一场沿着一个个人行道、一个个院落里进行的人类狩猎。
我们在顿涅茨克的奥列克桑德里夫卡最近一次记录的这种袭击，是被这样毁掉的一个街边咖啡亭，现场火光冲天，距离我们不足十米。在本文即将截稿时，我们获悉，在其布鲁塞尔拥有欧洲议会重要机构和北约总部的比利时，在美国在中东挑起战争之后，如今已完全依赖俄罗斯天然气。自从俄罗斯入侵克里米亚的十二年后，也就是自国际法的挽歌开始，欧洲政治的主要决策中心，无论欧盟与北约，仍未找到阻止对俄罗斯恐怖主义资助的解决办法。
（图：马克父亲发给我的信息版权所有，Giorgio Provinciali）
对于那些质疑在经历这一切之后，是什么推动我们继续前行的人，我们以这样一个普通的日子作答。也会以一位父亲的话来回答。就在他自己的世界彻底崩塌那一刻，他仍有力量想到别人，就像他的儿子那样。这位父亲请求我们继续做好工作，以减少无辜者的死亡。你们会明白，从我们来到这里的第一天起，这一请求，已不再仅仅是我们的使命，更不只是份工作：它是一种托付。
我们知道他也会读到这些文字。我们希望他知道，在我们保存的那张照片里，他的儿子仍然站着：受了伤，但仍站的笔直；坚强且骄傲；把别人的安危放在自己之前。我们会永远记住他这样的形象，只要我们还有发声的能力，我们就会如此讲述他的故事。
站得笔直。像乌克兰一样。
这就是乌克兰，在世界注意到这场至少已持续十二年的战争后的第1,622天。
（图：在乌克兰克里维里赫被俄罗斯联邦摧毁的Epitsenter现场的报道??版权所有，Giorgio Provinciali）
***
在1622天的战争中，我们从前线录制了300多段视频，并撰写了3000多篇文章其中至少1600篇为英文，1400篇为意大利文。
我们尽最大努力从几乎没有媒体敢进入的地带进行真实的一手报道，这意味着我们长期生活在杀伤区。我们承担风险，但若没有你们宝贵的支持，我们的声音将无从传出。若没有远方的勇敢的人们转发分享我们的文章，它们将无人问津。我们的报道会被忽视，我们的努力将付诸流水。这里还有大量工作要做，周围的人们境况同样艰难。
我们正在更新筹款活动，感谢每一位加入我们、帮助修复俄罗斯破坏的人们。仅靠一家勇敢的报纸为我们每篇文章支付微薄稿酬以维持前线报道极为困难。因此，我们感激所有支持并信任我们使命的善良人们。
哪怕是小小的捐助也有助益。
我们会持续为你们更新事态进展。
谢谢大家，亲爱的朋友们??
