Fascists -- Timothy Snyder

[erronis]

https://snyder.substack.com/p/fascists

Notes from a frontline factory in eastern Ukraine

Today I visited a factory in southeastern Ukraine. Tonight, with a moment to myself during an air raid, I want to give voice to a worker I met, A.

The factory is an impressive tube-rolling mill in Nikopol, on the Dnipro River. The Russians are on the other side of the river. The factory makes pipes for export and employs about three thousand people. The Russians try to destroy it.

. . .

The invasion of Ukraine was the decision of a man with hundreds of billions of dollars, Vladimir Putin, whose oligarchical fantasy is that Ukraine does not exist.

After walking through the factory, I sat in the canteen and talked with workers coming off the shop floor. They spoke about war crimes they had witnessed, and about colleagues on the front who they talked to regularly, “just to be human.”

When asked who was attacking them — is it Putin? Russia? — the answer came right away, from A.:

“Fascists.”