Dear Mr. Musk, Can Ukraine Use Starlinks To Win?
... or only to Tweet?
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by Joe Lindsley
Elon Musk says that Starlink, which has enabled Ukrainians to connect to the internet in the most difficult of circumstances, cannot be used in operations that involve actual warfare.
As is so often the case with "support for Ukraine," Ukrainians are somehow expected to defeat Russia without k*lling the Russian invaders.
So: Did Elon let Ukraine use Starlink simply to tweet—or to win?
My daily Ukraine report on Chicago’s WGN Radio, from Thursday 9 February 2023
Plus: In London, President Zelenskiy makes the case for a new way of life in which the free world doesn't have to live in fear of tyrants.
Meanwhile, it feels like Groundhog Day in Kharkiv: so many alarms, and it is still hard to shake the sound of Tuesday's massive missile strike here.
Stories, Sounds, and Facts of War: Every weekday, Ukrainian Freedom News’s Joe Lindsley, an American in Ukraine since the pandemic started, gives a live war report on Chicago’s WGN Radio. You can listen and watch below. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel to catch all our stories.
From The Spectator—the world’s oldest magazine, formerly edited by Boris Johnson:
Zelensky touches off a revolution in London
We don’t have to live in Chinese balloon-land, forever terrorized.
by Joe Lindsley
KHARKIV, UKRAINE—Wednesday, the morning after Russia sent six long-range missiles into the center of Ukraine’s second city, I went for a run in snow-covered Gorky Park listening to the music of the German band Scorpions: “Down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind of change.”
Scorpions were singing about a park of the same name in Moscow but I wanted to hear that song here in Kharkiv. When that song was released in 1990, the Soviet Union was breaking up. There was so much hope. Ukraine and other nations that had lived under the Iron Curtain began the process of finding freedom, happiness, possibility. But Russia? Ah, I thought as I ran past the fresh crater of a Russian missile in Kharkiv’s Gorky Park, what happened to Russia? What happened to that “wind of change”?
Then a new alarm sounded — and I ran like hell for a hopefully safer place. That burning question lingered: for how long do the people of the world have to live in fear of tyranny?
A few hours later, speaking in London at the Palace of Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, that birthplace of the modern democratic process, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky asked the same question.
And he boldly proposed an answer: Zelensky articulated a new theory for the world security structure, one based not on fear and control but on confidence and democracy. In essence: we don’t have to live in Chinese balloon-land, forever terrorized.
“We know freedom will win. We know Russia will lose and we really know that victory will change the world, and this will be a change that world has long needed,” Zelenskiy said.
This was no absentminded beauty pageant wish for world peace but rather an urgent, reasonable, and radical declaration. Zelensky’s vision, as articulated at Westminster, stands against the timid, bureaucratic worldview favored by the powerful people who have so long managed our global affairs. Many in global elite circles — the Neville Chamberlains, the appeasers — think that tyrannical powers are somehow necessary in the matrix of life on earth.
One of the clearest representatives of that worldview is Henry Kissinger …
Read the full story here, at The Spectator. If you enter your email address, you can read for free.
More videos:
Kharkiv: A Brave City Under the Russian Gun
US Support for Ukraine: Not What It Seems
Amid the Snowy Ruins, Here are Scenes Both Tragic and Hopeful from Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine
Singers, Medics, Soldiers Cry ... and Sing—in a café at the edge of the free world
ABOUT US: Ukrainian Freedom News: The wild story—so far—of free people standing for democracy, faith, dignity
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American journalist Joe Lindsley, in Ukraine since 2020, leads the Ukrainian Freedom News team of Ukrainians and foreigners on a mission to share real talk and real life in war-time with the world. Every weekday since late February 2022, he has reported live from Ukraine on Chicago’s WGN Radio with host Bob Sirott. You can listen to all episodes at UkrainianFreedomNews.com or via our YouTube channel.
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UKRAINIAN FREEDOM NEWS
Truth to the World | Supplies to Ukraine
Joe Lindsley, Editor-in-chief
Pavlo Vitenko, Chief Reporter
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Luka Oleschyuk, Video Editor
Jean-Baptiste Besson, Field Editor
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