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And one of the hardest challenges of her life was losing an adult child

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And one of the hardest challenges of her life was losing an adult child

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It was one of the happiest days in her life as the first girl in her family was born, her first granddaughter

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It was one of the happiest days in her life as the first girl in her family was born, her first granddaughter

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When she was a teenager she used to sing and loved Madame Butterfly

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When she was a teenager she used to sing and loved Madame Butterfly

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Madame Butterfly by Puccini - Love Duet (Opera Movie, 1995 - subtitled)

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My grandmother predicted the current war in Ukraine more than 5 years ago, now it is both a scary memory and a terrifying reality

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My grandmother predicted the current war in Ukraine more than 5 years ago, now it is both a scary memory and a terrifying reality

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The Russo-Ukrainian War is an ongoing international conflict between Russia, alongside Russian-backed separatists, and Ukraine, which began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and supported pro-Russian separatists fighting the Ukrainian military in the Donbas war. The first eight years of conflict also included naval incidents, cyberwarfare, and heightened political tensions. In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and began occupying more of the country.

In early 2014, the Euromaidan protests led to the Revolution of Dignity and the ousting of Ukraine's pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. Shortly after, pro-Russian unrest erupted in eastern and southern Ukraine. Simultaneously, unmarked Russian troops moved into Ukraine's Crimea and took over government buildings, strategic sites and infrastructure. Russia soon annexed Crimea after a highly-disputed referendum. In April 2014, armed pro-Russian separatists seized government buildings in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region and proclaimed the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) as independent states, starting the Donbas war. The separatists received considerable but covert support from Russia, and Ukrainian attempts to fully retake separatist-held areas failed. Although Russia denied involvement, Russian troops took part in the fighting. In February 2015, Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk II agreements to end the conflict, but they were never fully implemented in the years that followed. The Donbas war settled into a violent but static conflict between Ukraine and the Russian and separatist forces, with many brief ceasefires but no lasting peace and few changes in territorial control.

Beginning in 2021, Russia built up a large military presence near its border with Ukraine, including within neighbouring Belarus. Russian officials repeatedly denied plans to attack Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin criticized the enlargement of NATO and demanded that Ukraine be barred from ever joining the military alliance. He also expressed irredentist views and questioned Ukraine's right to exist. Russia recognized the DPR and LPR as independent states in February 2022. Putin announced a " special military operation" to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine, claiming Russia had no plans to occupy the country. Russian forces invaded Ukraine. The invasion was internationally condemned; many countries imposed sanctions against Russia and increased existing sanctions. Russia abandoned an attempt to take Kyiv in early April 2022 amid fierce resistance. From August, Ukrainian forces began recapturing territories in the north-east and south. In late September, Russia declared the annexation of four partially-occupied regions of Ukraine, which was internationally condemned. Russia spent the winter conducting inconclusive offensives in the Donbas, and in spring 2023 dug into positions ahead of another Ukrainian counteroffensive. The war has resulted in a refugee crisis and tens of thousands of deaths.

Background

Independent Ukraine and the Orange Revolution

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1991, Ukraine and Russia maintained close ties. In 1994, Ukraine agreed to accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon state. Former Soviet nuclear weapons in Ukraine were removed and dismantled. In return, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed to uphold the territorial integrity and political independence of Ukraine through the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. In 1999, Russia was one of the signatories of the Charter for European Security, which "reaffirmed the inherent right of each and every participating State to be free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance, as they evolve." In the years after the dissolution of the USSR, several former Eastern Bloc countries joined NATO, partly in response to regional security threats involving Russia such as the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, the War in Abkhazia (1992-1993) and the First Chechen War (1994-1996). Putin claimed Western powers broke promises not to let any Eastern European countries join.

The 2004 Ukrainian presidential election was controversial. During the election campaign, opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned by TCDD dioxin; he later accused Russia of involvement. In November, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was declared the winner, despite allegations of vote-rigging by election observers. During a two-month period which became known as the Orange Revolution, large peaceful protests successfully challenged the outcome. After the Supreme Court of Ukraine annulled the initial result due to widespread electoral fraud, a second round re-run was held, bringing to power Yushchenko as president and Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister, and leaving Yanukovych in opposition. The Orange Revolution is often grouped together with other early-21st century protest movements, particularly within the former USSR, known as colour revolutions. According to Anthony Cordesman, Russian military officers viewed such colour revolutions as attempts by the US and European states to destabilise neighbouring countries and undermine Russia's national security. Russian President Vladimir Putin accused organisers of the 2011-2013 Russian protests of being former advisors to Yushchenko, and described the protests as an attempt to transfer the Orange Revolution to Russia. Rallies in favour of Putin during this period were called " anti-Orange protests".

At the 2008 Bucharest summit, Ukraine and Georgia sought to join NATO. The response among NATO members was divided; Western European countries opposed offering Membership Action Plans (MAP) in order to avoid antagonising Russia, while US President George W. Bush pushed for their admission. NATO ultimately refused to offer Ukraine and Georgia MAPs, but also issued a statement agreeing that "these countries will become members of NATO" at some point. Putin voiced strong opposition to Georgia and Ukraine's NATO membership bids. By January 2022, the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO remained remote.

In 2009, Yanukovych announced his intent to again run for president in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election, which he subsequently won. In November 2013, a wave of large, pro- European Union (EU) protests erupted in response to Yanukovych's sudden decision not to sign the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. On 22 February 2013 the Ukrainian parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the agreement with the EU, subsequent to which Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it using the threat of sanctions, with Kremlin adviser Sergei Glazyev pronouncing that if the agreement was signed Russia could not guarantee Ukraine's status as a state.

Euromaidan, Revolution of Dignity, and pro-Russian unrest

Following months of protests as part of the Euromaidan movement, on 21 February 2014 Yanukovych and the leaders of the parliamentary opposition signed a settlement agreement that called for early elections. The following day, Yanukovych fled from the capital ahead of an impeachment vote that stripped him of his powers as president. On 23 February, the Rada adopted a bill to repeal the 2012 law which gave the Russian language an official status. The bill was not enacted; however, the proposal provoked negative reactions in the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, intensified by Russian media saying that the ethnic Russian population was in imminent danger.

On 27 February, an interim government was established and early presidential elections were scheduled. The following day, Yanukovych resurfaced in Russia and in a press conference declared that he remained the acting president of Ukraine, just as Russia was beginning its overt military campaign in Crimea. Leaders of Russian-speaking eastern regions of Ukraine declared continuing loyalty to Yanukovych, causing the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine.

Russian military bases in Crimea

At the onset of the conflict, Russia had roughly 12,000 military personnel in the Black Sea Fleet, in several locations in the Crimean peninsula like Sevastopol, Kacha, Hvardiiske, Simferopol Raion, Sarych, and others. In 2005 a dispute broke out over control of the Sarych cape lighthouse near Yalta, and a number of other beacons. Russian presence was allowed by the basing and transit agreement with Ukraine. Under the agreements the Russian military in Crimea was constrained to a maximum of 25,000 troops; they were required to: respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, honor its legislation, not interfere in the internal affairs of the country, and show their "military identification cards" when crossing the international border. Early in the conflict, the agreement's sizeable troop limit allowed Russia to significantly reinforce its military presence under the plausible guise of security concerns, deploy special forces and other required capabilities to conduct the operation in Crimea.

According to the original treaty on the division of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet signed in 1997, Russia was allowed to have its military bases in Crimea until 2017, after which it would evacuate all military units including its portion of the Black Sea Fleet out of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol. On 21 April 2010, former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych signed a new deal known as the Kharkiv Pact, to resolve the 2009 Russia-Ukraine gas dispute; it extended the stay to 2042 with an option to renew.

Legality and declaration of war

No formal declaration of war has been issued in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. When Putin announced the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he claimed to commence a " special military operation", side-stepping a formal declaration of war. The statement was, however, regarded as a declaration of war by the Ukrainian government and reported as such by many international news sources. While the Ukrainian parliament refers to Russia as a "terrorist state" in regard to its military actions in Ukraine, it has not issued a formal declaration of war on its behalf.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine violated international law (including the Charter of the United Nations). The invasion has also been called a crime of aggression under international criminal law and under some countries' domestic criminal codes - including those of Ukraine and Russia - although procedural obstacles exist to prosecutions under these laws.

Russian annexation of Crimea (2014)

On 20 February 2014, Russia began an annexation of Crimea. On 22 and 23 February, under the relative power vacuum immediately after the ousting of Yanukovych, Russian troops and special forces began moving into Crimea through Novorossiysk. On 27 February, Russian forces without insignias began their advance into the Crimean Peninsula. They took strategic positions and captured the Crimean Parliament, raising a Russian flag. Security checkpoints isolated the Crimean Peninsula from the rest of Ukraine and restricted movement within the territory.

In the following days, Russian soldiers secured key airports and a communications center. Russian cyberattacks shut down websites associated with the Ukrainian government, news media, and social media. Cyberattacks also enabled Russian access to the mobile phones of Ukrainian officials and members of parliament, further disrupting communications.

On 1 March, the Russian legislature approved the use of armed forces, leading to an influx of Russian troops and military hardware into the peninsula. In the following days, all remaining Ukrainian military bases and installations were surrounded and besieged, including the Southern Naval Base. After Russia formally annexed the peninsula on 18 March, Ukrainian military bases and ships were stormed by Russian forces. On 24 March, Ukraine ordered troops to withdraw; by 30 March, all Ukrainian forces had left the peninsula.

On 15 April, the Ukrainian parliament declared Crimea a territory temporarily occupied by Russia. After the annexation, the Russian government increased its military presence in the region and made nuclear threats. Putin said that a Russian military task force would be established in Crimea. In November, NATO stated that it believed Russia was deploying nuclear-capable weapons to Crimea. Since the annexation of Crimea, certain NATO members have been providing training for the Ukrainian army.

War in the Donbas (2014-2015)

Pro-Russia unrest

Beginning in late February 2014, demonstrations by pro-Russian and anti-government groups took place in major cities across the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine. The first protests across southern and eastern Ukraine were largely native expressions of discontent with the new Ukrainian government. Russian involvement at this stage was limited to voicing support for the demonstrations. Russia exploited this, however, launching a coordinated political and military campaign against Ukraine. Putin gave legitimacy to the separatists when he described the Donbas as part of " New Russia" ( Novorossiya), and expressed bewilderment as to how the region had ever become part of Ukraine.

In late March, Russia continued to gather forces near the Ukrainian eastern border, reaching 30-40,000 troops by April. The deployment was used to threaten escalation and disrupt Ukraine's response. This threat forced Ukraine to divert forces to its borders instead of the conflict zone.

Ukrainian authorities cracked down on the pro-Russian protests and arrested local separatist leaders in early March. Those leaders were replaced by people with ties to the Russian security services and interests in Russian businesses. By April 2014, Russian citizens had taken control of the separatist movement, supported by volunteers and materiel from Russia, including Chechen and Cossack fighters. According to Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) commander Igor Girkin, without this support in April, the movement would have dissipated, as it had in Kharkiv and Odesa. The separatist groups held disputed referendums in May which were not recognised by Ukraine or any other UN member state.

Armed conflict

In April, armed conflict began in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatist forces and Ukraine. The separatists declared the People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. From 6 April, militants occupied government buildings in many cities and took control of border crossings to Russia, transport hubs, a broadcasting center, and other strategic infrastructure. On 12 April several armed groups took cities of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and then Horlivka, Druzhkivka in subsequent days. They were led by people like retired Russian colonel Igor Girkin and lieutenant colonel Igor Bezler. Faced with continued expansion of separatist territorial control, on 15 April the interim Ukrainian government launched an " Anti-Terrorist Operation" (ATO); however, Ukrainian forces were poorly prepared and ill-positioned and the operation quickly stalled.

By the end of April, Ukraine announced it had lost control of the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. It claimed to be on "full combat alert" against a possible Russian invasion and reinstated conscription to its armed forces. Through May, the Ukrainian campaign focused on containing the separatists by securing key positions around the ATO zone to position the military for a decisive offensive once Ukraine's national mobilization had completed.

As conflict between the separatists and the Ukrainian government escalated in May, Russia began to employ a " hybrid approach", combining disinformation tactics, irregular fighters, regular Russian troops, and conventional military support. The First Battle of Donetsk Airport followed the Ukrainian presidential elections. It marked a turning point in conflict; it was the first battle between the separatists and the Ukrainian government that involved large numbers of Russian "volunteers". According to Ukraine, at the height of the conflict in the summer of 2014, Russian paramilitaries made up between 15% and 80% of the combatants. From June Russia trickled in arms, armor, and munitions.

On 17 July 2014, Russian-controlled forces shot down a passenger aircraft, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, as it was flying over eastern Ukraine. Investigations and the recovery of bodies began in the conflict zone as fighting continued.

By the end of July, Ukrainian forces were pushing into cities, to cut off supply routes between the two, isolating Donetsk and attempting to restore control of the Russo-Ukrainian border. By 28 July, the strategic heights of Savur-Mohyla were under Ukrainian control, along with the town of Debaltseve, an important railroad hub. These operational successes of Ukrainian forces threatened the existence of the DPR and LPR statelets, prompting Russian cross-border shelling targeted against Ukrainian troops on their own soil, from mid-July onwards.

August 2014 Russian invasion

After a series of military defeats and setbacks for the separatists, who united under the banner of " Novorossiya", Russia dispatched what it called a "humanitarian convoy" of trucks across the border in mid-August 2014. Ukraine called the move a "direct invasion". Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council reported that convoys were arriving almost daily in November (up to 9 convoys on 30 November) and that their contents were mainly arms and ammunition. Strelkov claimed that in early August, Russian servicemen, supposedly on "vacation" from the army, began to arrive in Donbas.

By August 2014, the Ukrainian "Anti-Terrorist Operation" shrank the territory under pro-Russian control, and approached the border. Igor Girkin urged Russian military intervention, and said that the combat inexperience of his irregular forces, along with recruitment difficulties amongst the local population, had caused the setbacks. He stated, "Losing this war on the territory that President Vladimir Putin personally named New Russia would threaten the Kremlin's power and, personally, the power of the president".

In response to the deteriorating situation, Russia abandoned its hybrid approach, and began a conventional invasion on 25 August 2014. On the following day, the Russian Defence Ministry said these soldiers had crossed the border "by accident". According to Nikolai Mitrokhin's estimates, by mid-August 2014 during the Battle of Ilovaisk, between 20,000 and 25,000 troops were fighting in the Donbas on the separatist side, and only 40-45% were "locals".

On 24 August 2014, Amvrosiivka was occupied by Russian paratroopers, supported by 250 armoured vehicles and artillery pieces. The same day, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko referred to the operation as Ukraine's "Patriotic War of 2014" and a war against external aggression. On 25 August, a column of Russian military vehicles was reported to have crossed into Ukraine near Novoazovsk on the Azov sea coast. It appeared headed towards Ukrainian-held Mariupol, in an area that had not seen pro-Russian presence for weeks. Russian forces captured Novoazovsk. and Russian soldiers began deporting Ukrainians who did not have an address registered within the town. Pro-Ukrainian anti-war protests took place in Mariupol. The UN Security Council called an emergency meeting.

The Pskov-based 76th Guards Air Assault Division allegedly entered Ukrainian territory in August and engaged in a skirmish near Luhansk, suffering 80 dead. The Ukrainian Defence Ministry said that they had seized two of the unit's armoured vehicles near Luhansk, and reported destroying another three tanks and two armoured vehicles in other regions. The Russian government denied the skirmish took place, but on 18 August, the 76th was awarded the Order of Suvorov, one of Russia's highest awards, by Russian minister of defence Sergey Shoigu for the "successful completion of military missions" and "courage and heroism".

The speaker of Russia's upper house of parliament and Russian state television channels acknowledged that Russian soldiers entered Ukraine, but referred to them as "volunteers". A reporter for Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper in Russia, stated that the Russian military leadership paid soldiers to resign their commissions and fight in Ukraine in the early summer of 2014, and then began ordering soldiers into Ukraine. Russian opposition MP Lev Shlosberg made similar statements, although he said combatants from his country are "regular Russian troops", disguised as units of the DPR and LPR.

In early September 2014, Russian state-owned television channels reported on the funerals of Russian soldiers who had died in Ukraine, but described them as "volunteers" fighting for the " Russian world". Valentina Matviyenko, a top United Russia politician, also praised "volunteers" fighting in "our fraternal nation". Russian state television for the first time showed the funeral of a soldier killed fighting in Ukraine.

Mariupol offensive and first Minsk ceasefire

On 3 September, Poroshenko said he and Putin had reached a "permanent ceasefire" agreement. Russia denied this, denying that it was a party to the conflict, adding that "they only discussed how to settle the conflict". Poroshenko then recanted. On 5 September Russia's Permanent OSCE Representative Andrey Kelin, said that it was natural that pro-Russian separatists "are going to liberate" Mariupol. Ukrainian forces stated that Russian intelligence groups had been spotted in the area. Kelin said 'there might be volunteers over there.' On 4 September 2014, a NATO officer said that several thousand regular Russian forces operating in Ukraine.

On 5 September 2014, the Minsk Protocol ceasefire agreement drew a line of demarcation between Ukraine and separatist-controlled portions of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.

End of 2014 and Minsk II agreement

On 7 and 12 November, NATO officials reconfirmed the Russian presence, citing 32 tanks, 16 howitzer cannons and 30 trucks of troops entering the country. US general Philip M. Breedlove said "Russian tanks, Russian artillery, Russian air defence systems and Russian combat troops" had been sighted. NATO said it had seen an increase in Russian tanks, artillery pieces and other heavy military equipment in Ukraine and renewed its call for Moscow to withdraw its forces. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs stated that Russian separatists enjoyed technical advantages over the Ukrainian army since the large inflow of advanced military systems in mid-2014: effective anti-aircraft weapons (" Buk", MANPADS) suppressed Ukrainian air strikes, Russian drones provided intelligence, and Russian secure communications system disrupted Ukrainian communications intelligence. The Russian side employed electronic warfare systems that Ukraine lacked. Similar conclusions about the technical advantage of the Russian separatists were voiced by the Conflict Studies Research Centre. In the 12 November United Nations Security Council meeting, the United Kingdom's representative accused Russia of intentionally constraining OSCE observation missions' capabilities, pointing out that the observers were allowed to monitor only two kilometers of border, and drones deployed to extend their capabilities were jammed or shot down.[non-primary source needed ]

Pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk in May 2015. Ukraine declared the Russian-backed separatist republics from eastern Ukraine to be terrorist organizations.[148]

In January 2015, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Mariupol represented the three battle fronts. Poroshenko described a dangerous escalation on 21 January amid reports of more than 2,000 additional Russian troops, 200 tanks and armed personnel carriers crossing the border. He abbreviated his visit to the World Economic Forum because of his concerns.

A new package of measures to end the conflict, known as Minsk II, was agreed on 15 February 2015. On 18 February, Ukrainian forces withdrew from Debatlseve, in the last high-intensity battle of the Donbas war until 2022. In September 2015 the United Nations Human Rights Office estimated that 8000 casualties had resulted from the conflict.

Line of conflict stabilizes (2015-2021)

After the Minsk agreements, the war settled into static trench warfare around the agreed line of contact, with few changes in territorial control. The conflict was marked by artillery duels, special forces operations, and trench warfare. Hostilities never ceased for a substantial period of time, but continued at a low level despite repeated attempts at ceasefire. In the months after the fall of Debaltseve, minor skirmishes continued along the line of contact, but no territorial changes occurred. Both sides began fortifying their position by building networks of trenches, bunkers and tunnels, turning the conflict into static trench warfare. The relatively static conflict was labelled a " frozen" by some, but Russia never achieved this as the fighting never stopped. Between 2014 and 2022 there were 29 ceasefires, each agreed to remain in force indefinitely. However, none of them lasted more than two weeks.

US and international officials continued to report the active presence of Russian military in eastern Ukraine, including in the Debaltseve area. In 2015, Russian separatist forces were estimated to number around 36,000 troops (compared to 34,000 Ukrainian), of whom 8,500-10,000 were Russian soldiers. Additionally, around 1,000 GRU troops were operating in the area. Another 2015 estimate held that Ukrainian forces outnumbered Russian forces 40,000 to 20,000. In 2017, on average one Ukrainian soldier died in combat every three days, with an estimated 6,000 Russian and 40,000 separatist troops in the region.

Cases of killed and wounded Russian soldiers were discussed in local Russian media. Recruiting for Donbas was performed openly via veteran and paramilitary organisations. Vladimir Yefimov, leader of one such organisation, explained how the process worked in the Ural area. The organisation recruited mostly army veterans, but also policemen, firefighters etc. with military experience. The cost of equipping one volunteer was estimated at 350,000 rubles (around $6500) plus salary of 60,000 to 240,000 rubles per month. The recruits received weapons only after arriving in the conflict zone. Often, Russian troops traveled disguised as Red Cross personnel. Igor Trunov, head of the Russian Red Cross in Moscow, condemned these convoys, saying they complicated humanitarian aid delivery. Russia refused to allow OSCE to expand its mission beyond two border crossings.

The volunteers were issued a document claiming that their participation was limited to "offering humanitarian help" to avoid Russian mercenary laws. Russia's anti-mercenary legislation defined a mercenary as someone who "takes part [in fighting] with aims counter to the interests of the Russian Federation".

In August 2016, the Ukrainian intelligence service, the SBU, published telephone intercepts from 2014 of Sergey Glazyev (Russian presidential adviser), Konstantin Zatulin, and other people in which they discussed covert funding of pro-Russian activists in Eastern Ukraine, the occupation of administration buildings and other actions that triggered the conflict. As early as February 2014, Glazyev gave direct instructions to various pro-Russian parties on how to take over local administration offices, what to do afterwards, how to formulate demands, and promised support from Russia, including "sending our guys".

2018 Kerch Strait incident

Russia gained de facto control of the Kerch Strait in 2014. In 2017, Ukraine appealed to a court of arbitration over the use of the strait. By 2018 Russia had built a bridge over the strait, limiting the size of ships that could pass through, imposed new regulations, and repeatedly detained Ukrainian vessels. On 25 November 2018, three Ukrainian boats traveling from Odesa to Mariupol were seized by Russian warships; 24 Ukrainian sailors were detained. A day later on 26 November 2018, the Ukrainian parliament overwhelmingly backed the imposition of martial law along Ukraine's coastal regions and those bordering Russia.

From left, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Paris, France, December 2019

More than 110 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the conflict in 2019. In May 2019, newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took office promising to end the war in Donbas. In December 2019, Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists began swapping prisoners of war. Around 200 prisoners were exchanged on 29 December 2019. According to Ukrainian authorities, 50 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in 2020. Since 2019, Russia has issued over 650,000 internal Russian passports to Ukrainians.

Russian military buildup around Ukraine (2021-2022)

From March to April 2021, Russia commenced a major military build-up near the border, followed by a second build-up between October 2021 to February 2022 in Russia and Belarus. Throughout, the Russian government repeatedly denied it had plans to attack Ukraine.

In early December 2021, following Russian denials, the US released intelligence of Russian invasion plans, including satellite photographs showing Russian troops and equipment near the border. The intelligence reported a Russian list of key sites and individuals to be killed or neutralized. The US released multiple reports that accurately predicted the invasion plans.

Russian accusations and demands

In the months preceding the invasion, Russian officials accused Ukraine of inciting tensions, Russophobia, and repressing Russian speakers. They made multiple security demands of Ukraine, NATO, and other EU countries. On 9 December 2021 Putin said that "Russophobia is a first step towards genocide". Putin's claims were dismissed by the international community, and Russian claims of genocide were rejected as baseless. In a 21 February speech, Putin questioned the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, repeating an inaccurate claim that "Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood". He incorrectly stated that Vladimir Lenin had created Ukraine, by carving a separate Soviet Republic out of what Putin said was Russian land, and that Nikita Khrushchev "took Crimea away from Russia for some reason and gave it to Ukraine" in 1954.

Putin falsely claimed that Ukrainian society and government were dominated by neo-Nazism, invoking the history of collaboration in German-occupied Ukraine during World War II, and echoing an antisemitic conspiracy theory that cast Russian Christians, rather than Jews, as the true victims of Nazi Germany. Ukraine does have a far-right fringe, including the neo-Nazi linked Azov Battalion and Right Sector. Analysts described Putin's rhetoric as greatly exaggerated. Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, stated that his grandfather served in the Soviet army fighting against the Nazis; three of his family members were killed in the Holocaust.

A U.S. intelligence assessment map and imagery on Russian military movement nearby the Ukrainian border, as on 3 December 2021. It assessed that Russia had deployed about 70,000 military personnel mostly about 100-200 kilometres (62-124 mi) from the Ukrainian border, with an assessment this could be increased to 175,000 personnel. Published by The Washington Post.[209]

During the second build-up, Russia demanded a treaty that would forbid Ukraine from ever joining NATO, and end all NATO activity in its Eastern European member states. These demands were rejected. A treaty to prevent Ukraine joining NATO would go against the alliance's " open door" policy and the principle of self-determination, although NATO made no efforts to comply with Ukraine's requests to join. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg replied that "Russia has no say" on whether Ukraine joins, and that "Russia has no right to establish a sphere of influence to try to control their neighbors". NATO offered to improve communications with Russia and discuss missile placements and military exercises, as long as Russia withdrew troops from Ukraine's borders, but Russia did not withdraw.

Prelude to full invasion

Fighting in Donbas escalated significantly from 17 February 2022 onwards. The Ukrainians and the pro-Russian separatists each accused the other of attacks. There was a sharp increase in artillery shelling by the Russian-led militants in Donbas, which was considered by Ukraine and its supporters to be an attempt to provoke the Ukrainian army or create a pretext for invasion. On 18 February, the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics ordered mandatory emergency evacuations of civilians from their respective capital cities, although observers noted that full evacuations would take months. The Russian government intensified its disinformation campaign, with Russian state media promoting fabricated videos ( false flags) on a nearly hourly basis purporting to show Ukrainian forces attacking Russia. Many of the disinformation videos were amateurish, and evidence showed that the claimed attacks, explosions, and evacuations in Donbas were staged by Russia.

Putin's address to the nation on 21 February (English subtitles available)

On 21 February at 22:35 (UTC+3), Putin announced that the Russian government would diplomatically recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics. The same evening, Putin directed that Russian troops deploy into Donbas, in what Russia referred to as a " peacekeeping mission". On 22 February, the Federation Council unanimously authorised Putin to use military force outside Russia. In response, Zelenskyy ordered the conscription of army reservists; The following day, Ukraine's parliament proclaimed a 30-day nationwide state of emergency and ordered the mobilisation of all reservists. Russia began to evacuate its embassy in Kyiv.

On the night of 23 February, Zelenskyy gave a speech in Russian in which he appealed to the citizens of Russia to prevent war. He rejected Russia's claims about neo-Nazis and stated that he had no intention of attacking the Donbas. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on 23 February that the separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk had sent a letter to Putin stating that Ukrainian shelling had caused civilian deaths and appealing for military support.

Full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022-present)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of 24 February 2022, when Putin announced a "special military operation" to " demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine. Minutes later, missiles and airstrikes hit across Ukraine, including Kyiv, shortly followed by a large ground invasion along multiple fronts. Zelenskyy declared martial law and a general mobilisation of all male Ukrainian citizens between 18 and 60, who were banned from leaving the country.

Russian attacks were initially launched on a northern front from Belarus towards Kyiv, a north-eastern front towards Kharkiv, a southern front from Crimea, and a south-eastern front from Luhansk and Donetsk. In the northern front, amidst heavy losses and strong Ukrainian resistance surrounding Kyiv, Russia's advance stalled in March, and by April its troops retreated. On 8 April, Russia placed its forces in southern and eastern Ukraine under the command of General Aleksandr Dvornikov, and some units withdrawn from the north were redeployed to the Donbas. On 19 April, Russia launched a renewed attack across a 500 kilometres (300 mi) long front extending from Kharkiv to Donetsk and Luhansk. By 13 May, a Ukraine counter-offensive had driven back Russian forces near Kharkiv. By 20 May, Mariupol fell to Russian troops following a prolonged siege of the Azovstal steel works. Russian forces continued to bomb both military and civilian targets far from the frontline. The war caused the largest refugee and humanitarian crisis within Europe since the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s; the UN described it as the fastest-growing such crisis since World War II. In the first week of the invasion, the UN reported over a million refugees had fled Ukraine; this subsequently rose to over 7,405,590 by 24 September, a reduction from over eight million due to some refugees' return.

Ukrainian forces launched counteroffensives in the south in August, and in the northeast in September. On 30 September, Russia annexed four oblasts of Ukraine which it had partially conquered during the invasion. This annexation was generally unrecognized and condemned by the countries of the world. After Putin announced that he would begin conscription drawn from the 300,000 citizens with military training and potentially the pool of about 25 million Russians who could be eligible for conscription, one-way tickets out of the country nearly or completely sold out. The Ukrainian offensive in the northeast successfully recaptured the majority of Kharkiv Oblast in September. In the course of the southern counteroffensive, Ukraine retook the city of Kherson in November and Russian forces withdrew to the east bank of the Dnieper River.[citation needed ]

The invasion was internationally condemned as a war of aggression. A United Nations General Assembly resolution demanded a full withdrawal of Russian forces, the International Court of Justice ordered Russia to suspend military operations and the Council of Europe expelled Russia. Many countries imposed new sanctions, which affected the economies of Russia and the world, and provided humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine. In September 2022, Putin signed a law that would punish anyone who resists conscription with a 10-year prison sentence resulting in an international push to allow asylum for Russians fleeing conscription.

According to an estimate published by The New York Times, as of February 2023, the "number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000."

Human rights violations

Violations of human rights and atrocity crimes have both occurred during the war. From 2014 to 2021, there were more than 3,000 civilian casualties, with most occurring in 2014 and 2015. The right of movement was impeded for the inhabitants of the conflict zone. Arbitrary detention was practiced by both sides in the first years of the conflict. It decreased after 2016 in government-held areas, while in the separatist-held ones it continued. Investigations into the abuses committed by both sides made little progress.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian authorities and armed forces have committed multiple war crimes in the form of deliberate attacks against civilian targets, massacres of civilians, torture and rape of women and children, and indiscriminate attacks in densely populated areas. After the Russian withdrawal from areas north of Kyiv, overwhelming evidence of war crimes by Russian forces was discovered. In particular, in the town of Bucha, evidence emerged of a massacre of civilians perpetrated by Russian troops, including torture, mutilation, rape, looting and deliberate killings of civilians. the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (OHCHR) has documented the murder of at least 73 civilians - mostly men, but also women and children - in Bucha. More than 1,200 bodies of civilians were found in the Kyiv region after Russian forces withdrew, some of them summarily executed. There were reports of forced deportations of thousands of civilians, including children, to Russia, mainly from Russian-occupied Mariupol, as well as sexual violence, including cases of rape, sexual assault and gang rape, and deliberate killing of Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces.

Ukrainian forces have also been accused of committing various war crimes, including mistreatment of detainees, though on a much smaller scale than Russian forces.

Related issues

Gas disputes

Until 2014 Ukraine was the main transit route for Russian natural gas sold to Europe, which earned Ukraine about US$3 billion a year in transit fees, making it the country's most lucrative export service. Following Russia's launch of the Nord Stream pipeline, which bypasses Ukraine, gas transit volumes steadily decreased. Following the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2014, severe tensions extended to the gas sector. The subsequent outbreak of war in the Donbas region forced the suspension of a project to develop Ukraine's own shale gas reserves at the Yuzivska gas field, which had been planned as a way to reduce Ukrainian dependence on Russian gas imports. Eventually, the EU commissioner for energy Günther Oettinger was called in to broker a deal securing supplies to Ukraine and transit to the EU.

An explosion damaged a Ukrainian portion of the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhhorod pipeline in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in May 2014. Ukrainian officials blamed Russian terrorists. Another section of the pipeline exploded in the Poltava Oblast on 17 June 2014, one day after Russia limited the supply of gas to Ukrainian customers due to non-payment. Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said the following day that the explosion had been caused by a bomb.

In 2015, Russian state media reported that Russia planned to completely abandon gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine after 2018. Russia's state-owned energy giant Gazprom had already substantially reduced the volumes of gas transited across Ukraine, and expressed its intention to reduce the level further by means of transit-diversification pipelines (Turkish Stream, Nord Stream, etc.). Gazprom and Ukraine agreed to a five-year deal on Russian gas transit to Europe at the end of 2019.

In 2020, the TurkStream natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Turkey changed the regional gas flows in South-East Europe by diverting the transit through Ukraine and the Trans Balkan Pipeline system.

In May 2021, the Biden administration waived Trump's CAATSA sanctions on the company behind Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said he was "surprised" and "disappointed" by Joe Biden's decision. In July 2021, the U.S. urged Ukraine not to criticise a forthcoming agreement with Germany over the pipeline.

In July 2021, Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel concluded a deal that the U.S. might trigger sanctions if Russia used Nord Stream as a "political weapon". The deal aimed to prevent Poland and Ukraine from being cut off from Russian gas supplies. Ukraine will get a $50 million loan for green technology until 2024 and Germany will set up a billion dollar fund to promote Ukraine's transition to green energy to compensate for the loss of the gas-transit fees. The contract for transiting Russian gas through Ukraine will be prolonged until 2034, if the Russian government agrees.

In August 2021, Zelenskyy warned that the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany was "a dangerous weapon, not only for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe." In September 2021, Ukraine's Naftogaz CEO Yuriy Vitrenko accused Russia of using natural gas as a "geopolitical weapon". Vitrenko stated that "A joint statement from the United States and Germany said that if the Kremlin used gas as a weapon, there would be an appropriate response. We are now waiting for the imposition of sanctions on a 100% subsidiary of Gazprom, the operator of Nord Stream 2."

Hybrid warfare

The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has also included elements of hybrid warfare using non-traditional means. Cyberwarfare has been used by Russia in operations including successful attacks on the Ukrainian power grid in December 2015 and in December 2016, which was the first successful cyber attack on a power grid, and the Mass hacker supply-chain attack in June 2017, which the US claimed was the largest known cyber attack. In retaliation, Ukrainian operations have included the Surkov Leaks in October 2016 which released 2,337 e-mails in relation to Russian plans for seizing Crimea from Ukraine and fomenting separatist unrest in Donbas. The Russian information war against Ukraine has been another front of hybrid warfare waged by Russia.

A Russian fifth column in Ukraine has also been claimed to exist among the Party of Regions, the Communist Party, the Progressive Socialist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns

Pro-Kremlin TV and radio host Vladimir Solovyov voiced support for his country's invasion of Ukraine.[325]

False stories have been used to provoke public outrage during the war. In April 2014, Russian news channels Russia-1 and NTV showed a man saying he was attacked by a fascist Ukrainian gang on one channel and on the other channel saying he was funding the training of right-wing anti-Russia radicals. A third segment portrayed the man as a neo-Nazi surgeon. In May 2014, Russia-1 aired a story about Ukrainian atrocities using footage of a 2012 Russian operation in North Caucasus. In the same month, the Russian news network Life presented a 2013 photograph of a wounded child in Syria as a victim of Ukrainian troops who had just retaken Donetsk International Airport.

In June 2014, several Russian state news outlets reported that Ukraine was using white phosphorus using 2004 footage of white phosphorus being used by the United States in Iraq. In July 2014, Channel One Russia broadcast an interview with a woman who said that a 3-year-old boy who spoke Russian was crucified by Ukrainian nationalists in a fictitious square in Sloviansk that turned out to be false.

In 2022, Russian state media told stories of genocide and mass graves full of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. One set of graves outside Luhansk was dug when intense fighting in 2014 cut off the electricity in the local morgue. Amnesty International investigated 2014 Russian claims of mass graves filled with hundreds of bodies and instead found isolated incidents of extrajudicial executions by both sides. The Russian censorship apparatusRoskomnadzor ordered the country's media to employ information only from Russian state sources or face fines and blocks, and ordered media and schools to describe the war as a "special military operation". On 4 March 2022, Putin signed into law a bill introducing prison sentences of up to 15 years for those who publish "fake news" about the Russian military and its operations, leading to some media outlets to stop reporting on Ukraine. Russia's opposition politician Alexei Navalny said the "monstrosity of lies" in the Russian state media "is unimaginable. And, unfortunately, so is its persuasiveness for those who have no access to alternative information." He tweeted that "warmongers" among Russian state media personalities "should be treated as war criminals. From the editors-in-chief to the talk show hosts to the news editors, [they] should be sanctioned now and tried someday."

Putin and Russian media have described the government of Ukraine as being led by neo-Nazis persecuting ethnic Russians who are in need of protection by Russia, despite Ukraine's President Zelenskyy being Jewish. According to journalist Natalia Antonova, "Russia's present-day war of aggression is refashioned by propaganda into a direct continuation of the legacy of the millions of Russian soldiers who died to stop" Nazi Germany in World War II. Ukraine's rejection of the adoption of Russia-initiated General Assembly resolutions on combating the glorification of Nazism, the latest iteration of which is General Assembly Resolution A/C.3/76/L.57/Rev.1 on Combating Glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism and other Practices that Contribute to Fueling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, serve to present Ukraine as a pro-Nazi state, and indeed likely forms the basis for Russia's claims, with the only other state rejecting the adoption of the resolution being the US. The Deputy US Representative for ECOSOC describes such resolutions as "thinly veiled attempts to legitimize Russian disinformation campaigns denigrating neighboring nations and promoting the distorted Soviet narrative of much of contemporary European history, using the cynical guise of halting Nazi glorification".

NAFO ('North Atlantic Fellas Organization'), a loose cadre of online ' shitposters' vowing to fight Russian disinformation generally identified by cartoon Shiba Inu dogs in social media, gained notoriety after June 2022, in the wake of a Twitter quarrel with Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov.

Russia-NATO relations

In his speech justifying the invasion of Ukraine, Putin falsely claimed that NATO military infrastructure was being built up inside Ukraine and was a threat to Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov characterized the conflict as a proxy war started by NATO. He said: "We don't think we're at war with NATO ... Unfortunately, NATO believes it is at war with Russia". NATO says it is not at war with Russia; its official policy is that it does not seek confrontation, but rather its members support Ukraine in "its right to self-defense, as enshrined in the UN Charter". NATO and Russia had co-operated until Russia annexed Crimea. Former CIA director Leon Panetta told the ABC that the U.S. is 'without question' involved in a proxy war with Russia.

Russian military aircraft flying over the Baltic and Black Seas often do not indicate their position or communicate with air traffic controllers, thus posing a potential risk to civilian airliners. NATO aircraft scrambled many times to track and intercept these aircraft near alliance airspace. The Russian aircraft intercepted never entered NATO airspace, and the interceptions were conducted in a safe and routine manner.

Reactions to the Russian annexation of Crimea

Ukrainian response

Following Russia's annexation of Crimea, Ukraine blocked the North Crimean Canal, which provided 85% of Crimea's drinking and irrigation water.[355]

Interim Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov accused Russia of "provoking a conflict" by backing the seizure of the Crimean parliament building and other government offices on the Crimean peninsula. He compared Russia's military actions to the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, when Russian troops occupied parts of the Republic of Georgia and the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were established under the control of Russian-backed administrations. He called on Putin to withdraw Russian troops from Crimea and stated that Ukraine will "preserve its territory" and "defend its independence". On 1 March, he warned, "Military intervention would be the beginning of war and the end of any relations between Ukraine and Russia." On 1 March, Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov placed the Armed Forces of Ukraine on full alert and combat readiness.

The Ministry of Temporarily Occupied Territories and IDPs was established by Ukrainian government on 20 April 2016 to manage occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea regions affected by Russian military intervention of 2014.

NATO and United States military response

A U.S. Army convoy in Vilseck, Germany during Operation Atlantic Resolve, NATO's efforts to reassert its military presence in central and eastern Europe that began in April 2014.

On 4 March 2014, the United States pledged $1 billion in aid to Ukraine. Russia's actions increased tensions in nearby countries historically within its sphere of influence, particularly the Baltic and Moldova. All have large Russian-speaking populations, and Russian troops are stationed in the breakaway Moldovan territory of Transnistria. Some devoted resources to increasing defensive capabilities, and many requested increased support from the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which they had joined in recent years. The conflict "reinvigorated" NATO, which had been created to face the Soviet Union, but had devoted more resources to "expeditionary missions" in recent years.

In addition to diplomatic support in its conflict with Russia, the U.S. provided Ukraine with US$1.5 billion in military aid during the 2010s. In 2018 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a provision blocking any training of Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard by American forces. In previous years, between 2014 and 2017, the U.S. House of Representatives passed amendments banning support of Azov, but due to pressure from the Pentagon, the amendments were quietly lifted.

Financial markets

Euro/RUB exchange rate

Inverted yield curves to tame inflation during their wars (Russo-Georgian War, Russo-Ukrainian War, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine)

The initial reaction to the escalation of tensions in Crimea caused the Russian and European stock market to tumble. The intervention caused the Swiss franc to climb to a 2-year high against the dollar and 1-year high against the Euro. The Euro and the US dollar both rose, as did the Australian dollar. The Russian stock market declined by more than 10 percent, while the Russian ruble hit all-time lows against the US dollar and the Euro. The Russian central bank hiked interest rates and intervened in the foreign exchange markets to the tune of $12 billion[clarification needed ] to try to stabilize its currency. Prices for wheat and grain rose, with Ukraine being a major exporter of both crops.

Later in March 2014, the reaction of the financial markets to the Crimea annexation was surprisingly mellow, with global financial markets rising immediately after the referendum held in Crimea, one explanation being that the sanctions were already priced in following the earlier Russian incursion. Other observers considered that the positive reaction of the global financial markets on Monday 17 March 2014, after the announcement of sanctions against Russia by the EU and the US, revealed that these sanctions were too weak to hurt Russia. In early August 2014, the German DAX was down by 6 percent for the year, and 11 percent since June, over concerns Russia, Germany's 13th biggest trade partner, would retaliate against sanctions.

Reactions to the war in Donbas

Ukrainian public opinion

A poll of the Ukrainian public, excluding Russian-annexed Crimea, was taken by the International Republican Institute from 12 to 25 September 2014. 89% of those polled opposed 2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine. As broken down by region, 78% of those polled from Eastern Ukraine (including Dnipropetrovsk Oblast) opposed said intervention, along with 89% in Southern Ukraine, 93% in Central Ukraine, and 99% in Western Ukraine. As broken down by native language, 79% of Russian speakers and 95% of Ukrainian speakers opposed the intervention. 80% of those polled said the country should remain a unitary country.

A poll of the Crimean public in Russian-annexed Crimea was taken by the Ukrainian branch of Germany's biggest market research organization, GfK, on 16-22 January 2015. According to its results: "Eighty-two percent of those polled said they fully supported Crimea's inclusion in Russia, and another 11 percent expressed partial support. Only 4 percent spoke out against it."

A joint poll conducted by Levada and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology from September to October 2020 found that in the breakaway regions controlled by the DPR/ LPR, just over half of the respondents wanted to join Russia (either with or without some autonomous status) while less than one-tenth wanted independence and 12% wanted reintegration into Ukraine. It contrasted with respondents in Kyiv-controlled Donbas, where a vast majority felt the separatist regions should be returned to Ukraine. According to results from Levada in January 2022, roughly 70% of those in the breakaway regions said their territories should become part of the Russian Federation.

Russian public opinion

An August 2014 survey by the Levada Centre reported that only 13% of those Russians polled would support the Russian government in an open war with Ukraine. Street protests against the war in Ukraine arose in Russia. Notable protests first occurred in March and large protests occurred in September when "tens of thousands" protested the war in Ukraine with a peace march in downtown Moscow on Sunday, 21 September 2014, "under heavy police supervision".

Reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Ukrainian public opinion

In March 2022, a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 98% of Ukrainians - including 82% of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine - said they did not believe that any part of Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia, according to Lord Ashcroft's polls which did not include Crimea and the separatist-controlled part of Donbas. 97% of Ukrainians said they had an unfavourable view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, with a further 94% saying they had an unfavourable view of the Russian Armed Forces.

At the end of 2021, 75% of Ukrainians said they had a positive attitude toward ordinary Russians, while in May 2022, 82% of Ukrainians said they had a negative attitude toward ordinary Russians.

Russian public opinion

Russia
Countries on Russia's "Unfriendly Countries List". The list includes countries that have imposed sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.[389]

An April 2022 survey by the Levada Centre reported that approximately 74% of the Russians polled supported the "special military operation" in Ukraine, suggesting that Russian public opinion has shifted considerably since 2014. According to some sources, a reason many Russians supported the "special military operation" has to do with the propaganda and disinformation. In addition, it has been suggested that some respondents did not want to answer pollsters' questions for fear of negative consequences. At the end of March, a poll conducted in Russia by the Levada Center concluded the following: When asked why they think the military operation is taking place, respondents said it was to protect and defend civilians, ethnic Russians or Russian speakers in Ukraine (43%), to prevent an attack on Russia (25%), to get rid of nationalists and "denazify" Ukraine (21%), and to incorporate Ukraine or the Donbas region into Russia (3%)." According to polls, the Russian President's rating rose from 71% on the eve of the invasion to 82% in March 2023.

United States

On 28 April 2022, US President Joe Biden asked Congress for an additional $33 billion to assist Ukraine, including $20 billion to provide weapons to Ukraine. On 5 May, Ukraine's Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced that Ukraine had received more than $12 billion worth of weapons and financial aid from Western countries since the start of Russia's invasion on 24 February. On 21 May 2022, the United States passed legislation providing $40 billion in new military and humanitarian foreign aid to Ukraine, marking a historically large commitment of funds. In August 2022, U.S. defense spending to counter the Russian war effort exceeded the first 5 years of war costs in Afghanistan. The Washington Post reported that new U.S. weapons delivered to the Ukrainian war front suggest a closer combat scenario with more casualties. The United States looks to build "enduring strength in Ukraine" with increased arms shipments and a record-breaking $3 billion military aid package.

Russian military suppliers

After expending large amounts of heavy weapons and munitions over months, the Russian Federation received combat drones, loitering munitions, and large amounts of artillery and from Iran, deliveries of tanks and other armoured vehicles from Belarus, and reportedly planned to trade for artillery ammunition from North Korea and ballistic missiles from Iran.

The U.S. has accused China of providing Russia with technology it needs for high-tech weapons, allegations which China has denied. The U.S. sanctioned a Chinese firm for providing satellite imagery to Russian mercenary forces fighting in Ukraine.

In March 2023, Western nations had pressed the United Arab Emirates to halt re-exports of goods to Russia which had military uses, amidst allegations that the Gulf country exported 158 drones to Russia in 2022. In May 2023, the U.S. accused South Africa of supplying arms to Russia in a covert naval operation, allegations which have been denied by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa.

References

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The Russo-Ukrainian War is an ongoing international conflict between Russia, alongside Russian-backed separatists, and Ukraine, which began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and supported pro-Russian separatists fighting the Ukrainian military in the Donbas war. The first eight years of conflict also included naval incidents, cyberwarfare, and heightened political tensions.

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On her flight from Moscow to Singapore in the 70s, one of the engines of the plane caught on fire, thankfully the pilot was able to land the plane

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On her flight from Moscow to Singapore in the 70s, one of the engines of the plane caught on fire, thankfully the pilot was able to land the plane

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She got married at 16, wasn't happy in her marriage, had two children and saved the family for the kids, being a woman in the USSR wasn't a pleasure

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She got married at 16, wasn't happy in her marriage, had two children and saved the family for the kids, being a woman in the USSR wasn't a pleasure

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In collecting and sharing their testimonies, the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich took on the role of "a witness to witnesses who usually go unheard."

Before stepping onto the stage, Svetlana Alexievich left me with her grayish-beige leather coat, as unfashionable as the rest of her. We had met by chance in March at a literary festival in Austria where the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in literature-a stocky woman in her late 60s, barely 5 feet tall-was being honored. "Hold it for me," she said, and there was something touchingly Soviet in the gesture: You trust your own to keep an eye out for you. I, too, am a former Soviet citizen; we share the experience of surviving in a world that was "making war all the time, or preparing for war," to quote from The Unwomanly Face of War. One of the saddest books you may ever read, it was the work that launched Alexievich's 30-plus-year career of "polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," as the Nobel citation put it.

"Historian of the soul" is the way Alexievich, writing in her journal, described her vocation as she worked on the collage of Soviet women's memories of World War II that first won her an audience, in 1985. "Listen," begins a former sniper (one of roughly 1 million women who served in the Soviet army, in every capacity). Alexievich does just that, and then records the tale, strewn with ellipses and distilled to its haunting essence-one fragment of testimony among many:

How long was the war? Four years. Very long ... I don't remember any birds or flowers. They were there, of course, but I don't remember them. Yes, yes ... Strange, isn't it? Can they make a color film about war? Everything was black. Only the blood was another color, the blood was red ...

Published at the dawn of perestroika, The Unwomanly Face of War was read by millions in the U.S.S.R.; an English-language version was issued in 1988 by the Moscow-based Progress Publishers (and recently could be found on Amazon for $400 and up). Now a wider non-Russian-speaking readership can welcome a timely new English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. They artfully render the slow flow of first-person narratives that fill the book, and that became Alexievich's signature approach in her accounts of the Russian Communist experience-a series that she calls "Voices From Big Utopia." (These books include Last Witnesses, stories of those who were children during the war-published the same year as The Unwomanly Face of War-and extend to Voices From Chernobyl in 1997 and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets in 2013.) Weaving an introductory section out of the author's journal excerpts and other material, this new edition also provides a chance to eavesdrop on Alexievich discovering her path.

Born in 1948 in Soviet Ukraine to a Belarusian Ukrainian family, Alexievich was one of what she called "the children of Victory," the generation that missed the horrors of the 1930s and '40s. Her family soon moved to Soviet southern Belarus. She grew up hearing local tales about the Great Patriotic War (in villages like hers, where every fourth person perished in the fight, it was impossible not to). But "military books ... the favorite reading of everybody," she recalled, held little interest for her. She worked for a newspaper in a formerly Polish region of southern Belarus and then went to Minsk, the capital, to study journalism. She resumed her journalistic writing during the '70s and early '80s, a period when "official Soviet nostalgia ... slowly replaced Marxist ideology," as the historian Timothy Snyder wrote in a tribute to Alexievich in 2015 in The New York Review of Books. For her generation, he explained, that meant being "nourished on the quasi-Marxist idea that all the suffering had a purpose, and the neo-provincial idea that this purpose was the continuation of the exemplary Soviet state in which they happened to have been born."
Alexievich had known since she was a girl that "women's stories are different."
Yet for Alexievich, there is nothing provincial about suffering. In March, after she had fielded questions from the audience (and reclaimed her coat), she told me, "No book about Soviet sacrifice was as strong as the women's stories I heard as a child." Her journal entries show her intent on continuing to avoid the prolific patriotic canon she had always skirted-"men writing about men ... Everything we know about war we know with 'a man's voice.' " Still, she was "a bookish person, both frightened and attracted by reality," and it was a book, by men, that inspired her mission, or perhaps more accurately, her method. The two are inseparable. In I Am From a Burning Village, an account of the Nazis' path of destruction through Belarus, written by the Belarusian Ales Adamovich, along with his compatriots Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik, she found a "novel ... composed from the voices of life itself, from what I had heard in childhood, from what can be heard now in the street, at home, in a café, on a bus."

Alexievich had known since she was a girl, questioning her grandmother, that "women's stories are different," as she wrote in her journal. "There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things." She also knew the obstacles before her. Her first collection of essays, about people's difficult journeys from the village to the city in the increasingly industrialized U.S.S.R., was pulled from the printing press by Communist Party officials. Today she is eager to put that unpublished volume behind her. "I was just trying to find myself, just like those who got resettled," she told me. Undaunted and barely 30, she then set off to "discover for myself the world of war." Alexievich took dozens of trips, recording hundreds of cassettes as she spoke with more than 500 women; she received letters from scores more. Her goal was not modest: to listen to "specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events," while remaining ever alert to "the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all times."

Her enterprise, Alexievich has emphasized, shouldn't be confused with journalism, or considered a fictional hybrid of some sort. When she attempted to rework her material as fiction, the stories came out flat. Winnowed from hours of conversation, the accounts belong to an evolving form of literary nonfiction that allows her to showcase figures quite different from developed characters. Her pages, as Alexievich put it to me, present witnesses whose testimony conveys the truth that "war is a curse on everyone," even as their stories also affirm that, in the words of one section heading, "a human being is greater than war."

Women eagerly seized the chance to talk to her. "There were quite a few girl tankmen of medium size tanks," a former first lieutenant explained, "but I was the only one who worked on a heavy tank. I sometimes think it would be good if some writer wrote about my life. I do not know how to do it myself." A telephone operator got in touch by letter to say, "I have no big declarations, only medals. I don't know whether you would be interested in my life, but I would like to tell it to somebody."

Yet telling-and having told-was a struggle for women warriors who, back home after heroic service, found themselves viewed as "frontline girls" defiled by grim years among men. While male former comrades were celebrated for their battle scars, the women were supposed to bake and sew, and forget harrowing things. A former sniper covered her face with her hands and said to Alexievich, "Do you really want to know that? I ask you like a daughter." And then the woman proceeded, pulled onward by an attentive listener: "I need your eyes in order to tell about it." Alexievich heard things that had never before been aired. "The baby cried," recounted another woman, remembering a radio operator in her unit who was forced to silence her hungry newborn as they hid from the Germans. "If the dogs heard it, we'd all be killed ... She lowers the swaddled baby into the water and holds it there for a long time ... The baby doesn't cry anymore ... And we can't raise our eyes. Neither to the mother nor to each other." A sergeant major, on receiving the transcript of her interview, decided that Alexievich's ears had heard too much as she spoke "from the heart." "What is he going to think of me after this?" she asked, thinking of her son, who considered her "a deity." She crossed out most of her own vivid words about being a small, untrained girl boldly serving as a medical assistant to a tank battalion, sending back official clippings instead.

"Two truths," Alexievich came to see, "live in the same human being: one's own truth driven underground, and the common one, filled with the spirit of the time. The smell of the newspapers. The first was rarely able to resist the massive onslaught of the second." Indeed, while glasnost had made public a lot of information about the tragic Soviet past, not all readers in the U.S.S.R., women or men, were ready for the revelations of unheroic humanity in pages that transcribed memories of everyday concerns (periods, hairstyles) alongside wartime horrors:

We didn't shoot [prisoners], that was too easy a death for them; we struck them with ramrods like pigs, we cut them to pieces. I went to look at it ... I waited for a long time for the moment when their eyes would begin to burst from pain.

I admitted to Alexievich that I, too-just entering my 20s when her book came out-had found the record of our gruesome survival too hard to bear. I read through to its end only as a graduate student in the gender-conscious 1990s, after I had moved to the United States. "I myself didn't always believe that I was strong enough for this path," Alexievich told me. She had faced outraged censors. "Who will go fight after such books?" they demanded, as she duly noted down after her encounter with them. "You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism ... You make our Victory terrible." Her book "might never have gotten published if it weren't for one man," she said to me, and paused-"Gorbachev."
Putin's nationalistic politics made me cry over Alexievich's first book.
Alexievich does not consider herself a dissident, despite her years of exile (she tried out Italy, Germany, France, and Sweden before returning to Minsk six years ago) and her testy relationship with power. (As a human-rights activist since the collapse of the Soviet Union, she has often been at odds with the autocratic Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenka, who has never personally congratulated her on her Nobel. Neither has Russian President Vladimir Putin; though he allegedly liked the book, he must have been annoyed by her repeated references to the war in eastern Ukraine as an occupation by Russian-affiliated forces.) Nor does she think of herself as a feminist.

Instead, Alexievich has forged her own distinctive identity: as a witness to witnesses who usually go unheard. Her quest to write "a history of feelings," as she put it in her first book-"of small human beings, thrown out of ordinary life into the epic depths of an enormous event"-has proved to have lasting power. "After Nikita Khrushchev's post-Stalin opening in the 1950s and '60s," she explained to me, "we in the Soviet Union wanted to explore humanity, and not just Soviet humanity. When I spoke to women, the heroic clichés and the state-propaganda banalities about the great nation went away." She kept on seeking out more voices, with more to lay bare-among them, Soviet veterans of the war in Afghanistan-in her subsequent books.

It was Putin's nationalistic politics, beginning with his expansionist advances in Georgia in 2008, that finally made me cry over Alexievich's first book. I could no longer keep her work at arm's length, but was inspired to undertake my own exploration of war-ravaged Soviet political life and its toll-on my family. I wanted to know why, when, and how a public story had come to be spread about my grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev's son, a fighter pilot who had been shot down and decorated. After he then went missing in 1943, accusations of treason were leveled against him. My search for answers taught me lessons that would not surprise Alexievich: Tales of wartime heroism, or ignominy, have a way of serving some interest other than truth. And women who revisit the fraught past should expect to have their authority challenged. My grandmother, my mother, and I were repeatedly told, You weren't there, you weren't involved, you don't understand, you can't remember.

In a "post-truth" era when journalism is under pressure-susceptible to propaganda, sensationalism, and "alternative facts"-the power of documentary literature stands out more clearly than ever. An "autopsy on the revolutionary century that turned a country into a graveyard, yet didn't destroy our soul, is important to all because communism isn't dead," Alexievich said in Austria. "It will come back in some form." The Unwomanly Face of War won't stop people from fighting wars, but with the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution in view, this book, along with its sui generis successors, is a reminder of a higher purpose that suffering can serve. Rather than propping up an inhuman system, it can goad us to continue holding one another's coats and carrying on. Listen to Alexievich as she absorbs the wisdom of keeping her ears out for her own:

Sometimes I come home after these meetings with the thought that suffering is solitude. Total isolation. At other times it seems to me that suffering is a special kind of knowledge. There is something in human life that it is impossible to convey and preserve in any other way, especially among us. That is how the world is made; that is how we are made.

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In collecting and sharing their testimonies, the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich took on the role of "a witness to witnesses who usually go unheard."

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My grandma believed that love is the most powerful force in life

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My grandma believed that love is the most powerful force in life

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Love Or Money: What's More Important To You And Why? | BetterHelp

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Which is more important in the long term - love or money? Both have their places in our lives, and should be balanced.

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Philosophy: The Love of Wisdom | A Guide to Life

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Numerorum mysteria (1591), a treatise on numerology by Pietro Bongo and his most influential work in Europe

Numerology (known before the 20th century as arithmancy) is the belief in an occult, divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events. It is also the study of the numerical value, via an alphanumeric system, of the letters in words and names. When numerology is applied to a person's name, it is a form of onomancy. It is often associated with astrology and other divinatory arts.

The term numerologist can be used for those who place faith in numerical patterns and draw inferences from them, even if those people do not practice traditional numerology. For example, in his 1997 book Numerology: Or What Pythagoras Wrought ( Dudley 1997), mathematician Underwood Dudley uses the term to discuss practitioners of the Elliott wave principle of stock market analysis.

The term arithmancy is derived from two Greek words - arithmos (meaning number) and manteia (meaning divination). "Αριθμομαντεία" Arithmancy is thus the study of divination through numbers. Although the word "arithmancy" dates to the 1570s, the word "numerology" is not recorded in English before c. 1907.

The practice of gematria, assigning numerical values to words and names and imputing those values with religious meaning, dates back to antiquity. An Assyrian inscription from the 8th century BC, commissioned by Sargon II declares "the king built the wall of Khorsabad 16,283 cubits long to correspond with the numerical value of his name." Rabbinic literature used gematria to interpret passages in the Hebrew Bible.

The practice of using alphabetic letters to represent numbers developed in the Greek city of Miletus, and is thus known as the Milesian system. Early examples include vase graffiti dating to the 6th century BCE. Aristotle wrote that the Pythgoraean tradition, founded in the 6th century by Pythagoras of Samos, practiced isopsephy, the Greek predecessor of Hebrew gematria. Pythagoras was a contemporary of the philosophers Anaximander, Anaximenes, and the historian Hecataeus, all of whom lived in Miletus, across the sea from Samos. The Milesian system was in common use by the reign of Alexander the Great (336-323 BCE) and was adopted by other cultures during the subsequent Hellenistic period. It was officially adopted in Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (284-246 BCE).

In 325 AD, following the First Council of Nicaea, departures from the beliefs of the state church were classified as civil violations within the Roman Empire. Numerology, referred to as isopsephy, remained in use in conservative Greek Orthodox circles.[citation needed ]

Some alchemical theories were closely related to numerology. For example, Arab alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (died c. 806−816) framed his experiments in an elaborate numerology based on the names of substances in the Arabic language.

Numerology is prominent in Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 literary discourse The Garden of Cyrus. Throughout its pages, the author attempts to demonstrate that the number five and the related quincunx pattern can be found throughout the arts, in design, and in nature - particularly botany.[citation needed ]

There are various numerology systems which assign numerical value to the letters of an alphabet. Examples include the Abjad numerals in Arabic, Hebrew numerals, Armenian numerals, and Greek numerals. The practice within Jewish tradition of assigning mystical meaning to words based on their numerical values, and on connections between words of equal value, is known as gematria.

The Mandaean number alphasyllabary is also used for numerology ( Mandaic: gmaṭ aria). The Book of the Zodiac is an important Mandaean text on numerology.

In the Pythagorean method (which uses a kind of place-value for number-letter attributions, as does the ancient Hebrew and Greek systems), the letters of the modern Latin alphabet are assigned numerical values 1 through 9.

Agrippa's numerology table as published in Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa applied the concept of arithmancy to the classical Latin alphabet in the 16th century in Three Books of Occult Philosophy. He mapped the letters as follows (in accordance with the Latin alphabet's place-value at that time):

Note that the letters U, J, and W were not commonly considered part of the Latin alphabet at the time.

A lesser known method, more popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, is the Chaldean method; in this context, "Chaldean" is an old-fashioned name for the Aramaic languages. In the Chaldean method number 9 is not used in the calculations, at least in practice. It is left out because it is thought to be divine and sacred, and therefore unassignable.

This method is radically different from the Pythagorean (as well as both the ancient Greek and Hebrew systems) as letters are assigned values based on equating Latin letters with letters of the Hebrew alphabet in accordance with sound equivalents (then number associations being derived via its gematria) rather than applying the ancient system of place-value used by the Hebrew and Greek gematria (although 'place-value' is almost universally interpreted in the ancient world according to units, tens and hundreds, which nonetheless have the same digital root as place value); in consequence of this there are several slightly different versions, there being disagreements over some of the letter-sound equivalents.

Angel numbers, as defined by Doreen Virtue and Lynnette Brown in 2005, are numbers consisting of repeating digits, such as 111 or 444. As of 2023, a number of popular media publications have published articles suggesting that these numbers have numerological significance.

There are various systems of English numerology, sometimes referred to as English Qabalah, that are related to Hermetic Qabalah. These systems interpret the letters of the Roman script or English alphabet via an assigned set of numerological significances. The spelling " English Qaballa", on the other hand, refers specifically to a Qabalah supported by a system discovered by James Lees in 1976.

The first system of English gematria was used by the poet John Skelton in 1523 in his poem "The Garland of Laurel".

The next reference to an English gematria found in the literature was made by Willis F. Whitehead in 1899 in his book, The Mystic Thesaurus, in which he describes a system he called "English Cabala".

In 1904, Aleister Crowley wrote out the text of the foundational document of his world-view, known as Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law. In this text was the injunction found at verse 2:55; "Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet, thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto" which was understood by Crowley as referring to an English Qabalah yet to be developed or revealed. In one of the Holy Books of Thelema written by Aleister Crowley in 1907, called Liber Trigrammaton, sub figura XXVII -- Being the Book of the Mutations of the Tao with the Yin and the Yang, are 27 three-line diagrams known as 'trigrams', which are composed of a solid line for the Yang, a broken line for the Yin, and a point for the Tao. By attributing 26 Roman script letters to the trigrams of this work, Crowley felt that he had fulfilled the injunction to "obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet", as noted in his 'Old Comment' to The Book of the Law.

In 1952, John P. L. Hughes published The Hidden Numerical Significance of the English Language, or, Suggestive Gematria, based on his lecture delivered at Holden Research Circle on July 4, 1952.

English Qaballa (EQ) refers to a system of Hermetic Qabalah that interprets the letters of the English alphabet via an assigned set of values discovered by James Lees in 1976. Like many of the English systems developed since the death of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), it was created with the intent of gaining a better understanding of the mysteries elaborated in his inspired works, especially those in Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law. According to Jake Stratton-Kent, "the English Qaballa is a qabalah and not a system of numerology. A qabalah is specifically related to three factors: one, a language; two, a 'holy' text or texts; three, mathematical laws at work in these two."

A system related to the Spiritualist Agasha Temple of Wisdom was described by William Eisen in his two volume The English Cabalah (1980-82).

William G. Gray proposes another system in his 1984 book, Concepts of Qabalah, more recently republished as Qabalistic Concepts. This system includes correspondence attributions of the English letters to the positions on the Tree of Life.

Michael Bertiaux described a system called Angelic Gematria in his The Voudon Gnostic Workbook (1989).

Another system for English known as Trigrammaton Qabalah (TQ) was first published by R. Leo Gillis in 1996, and subsequently released as The Book of Mutations in 2002. This system is based on one of the Holy Books of Thelema written by Aleister Crowley in 1907, called Liber Trigrammaton, sub figura XXVII -- Being the Book of the Mutations of the Tao with the Yin and the Yang. Liber Trigrammaton (aka Liber XXVII) was called by Crowley "the ultimate foundation of the highest theoretical qabalah". Correspondences are created with some of the major forms of divination such as the , Tarot and runes, as well as Greek and Hebrew alphabets, the Tree of Life, Western and Vedic astrology, magic squares, and the Platonic solids. A primary feature of this qabalah is a new understanding of the Cube of Space and its 26 components of edges, faces, and vertices, which equal the number of letters in the English alphabet.

David Rankine described a system of English gematria using prime numbers which he calls Prime Qabalah in his book Becoming Magick (2004).

Scientific theories are sometimes labeled "numerology" if their primary inspiration appears to be a set of patterns rather than scientific observations. This colloquial use of the term is quite common within the scientific community and it is mostly used to dismiss a theory as questionable science.[citation needed ]

The best known example of "numerology" in science involves the coincidental resemblance of certain large numbers that intrigued mathematical physicist Paul Dirac, mathematician Hermann Weyl and astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington. These numerical coincidences refer to such quantities as the ratio of the age of the universe to the atomic unit of time, the number of electrons in the universe, and the difference in strengths between gravity and the electric force for the electron and proton. (See also Fine-tuned universe).

Wolfgang Pauli was also fascinated by the appearance of certain numbers, including 137 (a prime number), in physics.

British mathematician I. J. Good wrote:

There have been a few examples of numerology that have led to theories that transformed society: see the mention of Kirchhoff and Balmer in Good (1962), p. 316 [...] and one can well include Kepler on account of his third law. It would be fair enough to say that numerology was the origin of the theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation. [...] So I intend no disparagement when I describe a formula as numerological.

When a numerological formula is proposed, then we may ask whether it is correct. [...] I think an appropriate definition of correctness is that the formula has a good explanation, in a Platonic sense, that is, the explanation could be based on a good theory that is not yet known but 'exists' in the universe of possible reasonable ideas.

Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius (1651) [1533]. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Vol. 2. Translated by John French. London: Gregory Moule. pp. 235-236.

Carroll, Robert Todd (2003). "Numerology". The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. Archived from the original on 5 June 2023.

Dudley, Underwood (1997). Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought. Mathematical Association of America. eBook edition (2019) ISBN 978-1470452834.

Falk, Dan (24 April 2009). "Cosmic numbers: Pauli and Jung's love of numerology". New Scientist (2705).

Gamow, George (1 February 1968). "Numerology of the Constants of Nature". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 59 (2): 313-318. Bibcode:1968PNAS...59..313G. doi:10.1073/pnas.59.2.313. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC . PMID 16591598.

Good, Irving John (1962). The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly-Baked Ideas. Heinemann & Basic Books.

Good, I. J. (1990). "A Quantal Hypothesis for Hadrons and the Judging of Physical Numerology". In G. R. Grimmett; D. J. A. Welsh (eds.). Disorder in Physical Systems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198532156.

Häberl, Charles G. (2023). "Binding the Lion: Numerology in the Mandaean Tradition". SSRN Electronic Journal. Elsevier BV. doi:10.2139/ssrn.4502834. ISSN 1556-5068. S2CID 259863711. SSRN 4502834.

Hughes, John P. L. (1952). The Hidden Numerical Significance of the English Language, or, Suggestive Gematria. Holden Research Circle.

Halsey, W., ed. (1967). "Numerals and systems of numeration". Collier's Encyclopedia.

Luckenbill, Daniel (1927). Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. Vol. 2. University of Chicago Press.

Newman, William R. (n.d.). "Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān". Encyclopedia Britannica.

Somer, E.; Cardeña, E.; Catelan, R. F.; Soffer-Dudek, N. (2023). "Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture". Current Psychology. 42 (14): 11415-11427. doi:10.1007/s12144-021-02439-3. PMC . PMID 34744401.

Stenger, Victor (2004). "Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Us?" (PDF). In Young, Matt; Edis, Taner (eds.). Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. Rutgers University Press. pp. 172-184. ISBN 978-0813538723. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 July 2012 - via University of Colorado.

Stratton-Kent, Jake (March 1988). "The English Qaballa". The Equinox: British Journal of Thelema. VII (1): 17-25. ISSN 0953-7015.

Stratton-Kent, Jake (May 1988b). "What is a Qabalah?". The Equinox: British Journal of Thelema. VII (2): 59-61. ISSN 0953-7015.

Valeri, Valerio (1971). "BONGO, Pietro in "Dizionario Biografico"". www.treccani.it (in Italian).

Weiser Antiquarian Books (n.d.). "GILLIS, Rama L. (AKA R. Leo Gillis) [ Aleister Crowley: related works ]: The Book of Mutations, Part I: The Standard Model and Part II: Divination". Weiserantiquarian.com.

Whitehead, Willis F. (1899). The Mystic Thesaurus, Or Initiation in the Theoretical and Practical Secrets of Astral Truth, and Occult Art: The Symbol of the Cross. Chicago: Willis F. Whitehead.

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Numerology (known before the 20th century as arithmancy) is the belief in an occult, divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events. It is also the study of the numerical value, via an alphanumeric system, of the letters in words and names.

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She used to read under the blankets at night and once the blanket caught on fire from the lamp

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She used to read under the blankets at night and once the blanket caught on fire from the lamp

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Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman's destructive " March to the Sea". This historical novel features a coming-of-age story, with the title taken from the poem "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae", written by Ernest Dowson.

Gone with the Wind was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.

Gone with the Wind is a controversial reference point for subsequent writers of the South, both black and white. Scholars at American universities refer to, interpret, and study it in their writings. The novel has been absorbed into American popular culture.

Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. It was adapted into the 1939 film of the same name, which is considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made and also received the Academy Award for Best Picture during the 12th annual Academy Awards ceremony. Gone with the Wind is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.

On April 15, 1861, it is the eve of a rebellion in which seven southern states declare their secession from the United States (the " Union") over a desire to continue the institution of slavery, which was the economic engine of the South. In one of those states, Georgia, the family of wealthy Irish immigrant Gerald O'Hara owns a plantation ( Tara).

The oldest of the three O'Hara daughters, 16-year-old Scarlett, is dismayed to learn that the man she secretly loves, her county neighbor Ashley Wilkes, is set to announce his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. The next day, the Wilkeses throw an all-day party at their estate (" Twelve Oaks") where Scarlett notices someone leering at her. He turns out to be Rhett Butler, who has a reputation for seducing young women. Throughout the day, Scarlett attempts to turn Ashley's head by flirting with every man present, including Melanie's brother Charles Hamilton. In the afternoon, Scarlett gets Ashley alone and confesses her love for him, convinced he will return it. However, he says only that he cares for her as a friend and intends to marry Melanie. Stung, Scarlett pelts Ashley with insults and accuses him of being too cowardly to submit to his real feelings for her. As Ashley departs, Rhett reveals he has overheard their whole exchange. Scarlett feels humiliated.

Later, war is declared, and the men are going to enlist. Feeling petty and vengeful, Scarlett accepts a marriage proposal from Charles. They marry, and two weeks later, Charles goes to war, where he promptly dies of measles two months later. Scarlett gives birth to his child, Wade Hampton Hamilton. As a widow, she is bound to dye her dresses black, wear a veil in public, and avoid conversations with young men. Scarlett mourns the loss of her youth, not the husband she barely knew.

Scarlett's mother, mistaking Scarlett's depression for grief, suggests that living with Melanie might lift her spirits. Melanie is living in Atlanta with her Aunt Sarah Jane, who is called by her childhood nickname "Pittypat". After moving there, Scarlett's spirit is revived by the excitement of living in a growing city. She busies herself with hospital work and sewing circles for the Confederate Army, although her heart is not in it - she does it mostly to avoid being gossiped about by the other women of Atlanta society. Additionally, she believes her efforts may aid Ashley, with whom she still loves.

Scarlett is mortified when she runs into Rhett while manning a sales stall at a public dance benefiting the troops. Rhett believes the war is a lost cause but is becoming rich as a blockade runner for profit. He sees through Scarlett's "lady in mourning" disguise and recognizes her longing to dance with the other young people, so he bids a lot of gold to win the honor of leading the first dance and chooses her as his partner. Scarlett scandalizes everyone by dancing joyfully while still dressed in widow's mourning. Her reputation is saved by Melanie, who is now her sister-in-law and highly respected in Atlanta; she argues that Scarlett is supporting the Confederate cause. Scarlett continues to act recklessly, flirting and dating while still in widow's clothes, always protected by Melanie's endorsement. She spends much of her time with Rhett, whose sexual attraction to Scarlett is ever-present. At one point, he enrages her with a silky proposition she become his mistress. Still, she appreciates Rhett for his money, his sophistication, and their shared irritation with the hypocrisy of Atlanta society.

At Christmas (1863), Ashley is granted a furlough from the army and goes to Atlanta. Scarlett struggles to restrain her feelings for him. She remains convinced that he is secretly in love with her and is still married to Melanie out of duty. Scarlett is heartbroken when Melanie becomes pregnant with Ashley's child.

The war is going badly for the Confederacy. By September 1864, Atlanta is besieged from three sides. The city becomes desperate as hundreds of wounded Confederate soldiers pour in. Melanie goes into labor with only the inexperienced Scarlett and a young slave named Prissy to assist, as all the trained doctors are attending to the soldiers. The tattered Confederate States Army sets flame to Atlanta before they abandon it to the Union Army. Amidst the chaos, Melanie gives birth to a boy, Beau.

Scarlett tracks down Rhett and begs him to take her, Wade, Melanie, Beau, and Prissy to Tara. Rhett laughs at this idea, explaining that Tara has likely been burned by the Yankees. Still, he steals an emaciated horse and a wagon and begins driving them out of Atlanta. At the edge of the city, Rhett has a change of heart and abandons Scarlett to join the army in their final, doomed push. Scarlett drives the wagon to Tara, which has avoided being burned like so many of her neighbors' homes. However, the situation is bleak: Scarlett's mother is dead, her father has lost his mind with grief, her sisters are sick with typhoid fever, the field slaves have left, the Yankees have burned all the cotton, and there is no food.

A long struggle for survival begins, with Scarlett working in the fields. There are several hungry people and animals, along with an ever-present threat from Yankees who steal or burn what little they can find. At one point, Scarlett kills a Yankee soldier who attempts to invade her home and buries his body in the garden. A long post-war succession of Confederate soldiers returning home stop at Tara to find food and rest. Eventually, Ashley returns from the war, with his idealistic view of the world shattered. Finding themselves alone one day, he and Scarlett share a kiss. Unable to trust himself with her nearby, Ashley says he will take his family and move away. Scarlett says she can not let them leave when they have nowhere to go and promises to not throw herself at him again.

Life at Tara begins to recover, but exorbitant taxes are levied on the plantation. Scarlett knows only one man with enough money to help her - Rhett. She puts on her only pretty dress (made from the velvet curtains at Tara) and finds him in a jailhouse in Atlanta. He is being held on a murder charge and likely to hang. Although she nearly wins him over with a southern belle routine, he declines to help after realizing her sweetness is an act meant to use his money. Leaving the jailhouse in a snit, Scarlett meets Frank Kennedy, a middle-aged storeowner who is betrothed to her sister, Suellen. Realizing that Frank also has money and that Suellen will turn her back on Tara once she is married, Scarlett hatches a plot to marry Frank. She lies to Frank that Suellen has changed her mind about marrying him. Dazed, Frank succumbs to Scarlett's charms and marries her two weeks later. Wanting to keep his wife happy, Frank gives Scarlett the money to pay the taxes.

While Frank has a cold and is pampered by Aunt Pittypat, Scarlett goes over the accounts at Frank's store and finds that many owe him money. Terrified of the possibility of more taxes and irritated with Frank's poor business sense, she takes control of the store; her business practices emasculate Frank and leave many Atlantans resentful of her. With a loan from Rhett, she also buys and runs a small sawmill, which is viewed as even more scandalous conduct. To Frank's relief and Scarlett's dismay, she gets pregnant, which temporarily curtails her business activities. She convinces Ashley to come to Atlanta and manage her mill, all the while still in love with him. At Melanie's urging, Ashley reluctantly accepts. Melanie becomes the center of Atlanta society, and Scarlett gives birth to baby Ella Lorena.

Georgia is under martial law, and life has taken on a more frightening tone. For protection, Scarlett keeps Frank's pistol tucked in the upholstery of his buggy. Her lone trips to and from the mill take her past a shanty town where criminals live. While on her way home one evening, she is accosted by two men who try to rob her. However, she escapes with the help of Big Sam, a black former foreman from Tara. Attempting to avenge his wife, Frank and the Ku Klux Klan raid the shanty town, where Frank is shot dead in the fracas. Rhett puts on a charade to keep the raiders from being arrested. He enters the Wilkeses' home with Hugh Elsing and Ashley, singing and pretending to be drunk. Yankee officers outside question Rhett, who says he and the other men had been at Belle Watling's brothel that evening, a story Belle later confirms to the officers. The men are indebted to Rhett, and his reputation among them improves. Meanwhile, the men's wives - except Melanie - are livid at owing their husbands' lives to the town madam. At Frank's funeral, Rhett asks Scarlett to marry him. She refuses at first, but after a little repartee, he kisses her passionately, and in the heat of the moment, she accepts. One year later, Scarlett and Rhett announce their engagement, which becomes the talk of the town.

The Bonnie Blue Flag is an 1861 marching song that refers to the first unofficial flag of the Confederacy.

Mr. and Mrs. Butler honeymoon in New Orleans, spending lavishly. Upon returning to Atlanta, they build a gaudy mansion on Peachtree Street. Rhett happily pays for the house to be built to Scarlett's specifications, but describes it as an "architectural horror". Shortly after moving into the house, the sardonic jabs between them turn into quarrels. Scarlett wonders why Rhett married her and then, "with real hate in her eyes", tells Rhett she is going to have a baby, which she does not want. Wade is seven years old in 1869 when his half-sister Eugenie Victoria, is born. She has blue eyes, and Melanie nicknames her "Bonnie Blue" in reference to the Bonnie Blue Flag of the Confederacy. After feeling well again, Scarlett makes a trip to the mill and talks to Ashley. In their conversation, she comes away believing Ashley still loves her and is jealous of Rhett. She returns home and tells Rhett she does not want more children. From then on, they sleep separately, and when Bonnie is two years old, she sleeps in a little bed beside Rhett. Rhett turns his attention completely toward Bonnie, pampering her and working to ensure her a good reputation for when she enters society.

Meanwhile, Melanie plans a surprise birthday party for Ashley. Scarlett goes to the mill to stall him until the celebration - a rare opportunity to be alone together. The two reminisce about the old days and how far their lives have departed from what they imagined for themselves. They share an innocent embrace but are spotted in the moment by Ashley's sister, India. Before the party has even begun, a rumor of an affair between Ashley and Scarlett explodes across Atlanta, eventually reaching Rhett and Melanie. Melanie refuses to accept any criticism of Scarlett, and India is expelled from the Wilkes home. Rhett, drunker than Scarlett has ever seen him, returns home late from the party. Acting more violent than ever, he enjoins Scarlett to drink with him. However, she declines with deliberate rudeness. Rhett pins her to the wall and tells her they could have been happy together. He then takes her in his arms and carries her to her bedroom, where they engage in an intercourse. The next morning, a chagrined Rhett leaves town with Bonnie and Prissy for three months. Scarlett is uncertain about her feelings surrounding Rhett, for whom she feels a mixture of desire and revulsion. She then learns she is pregnant with her fourth child.

When Rhett returns, he comments on Scarlett's paleness, and she reveals her pregnancy. Rhett sarcastically asks if the father is Ashley; Scarlett calls him a cad and says that no woman would want his baby, to which he replies, "Cheer up, maybe you'll have a miscarriage." She lunges at him, but misses and tumbles down the stairs. She is seriously ill for the first time in her life, having lost the baby and broken her ribs. Rhett is remorseful and fears Scarlett will die. Sobbing and drunk, he seeks consolation from Melanie and confesses he acted out of jealousy. Scarlett goes to Tara with Wade and Ella, seeking to regain her strength and vitality from there. She returns healthy to Atlanta and sells the mills to Ashley. Bonnie is four years old in 1873, and Atlanta society is charmed by Rhett's transformation into a doting father. Rhett buys Bonnie a Shetland pony, teaching her to ride sidesaddle and paying a trainer to teach the pony to jump. One day, Bonnie makes her father raise the bar to one-and-a-half feet. During the jump, she falls and dies of a broken neck.

In the months following Bonnie's death, Rhett is often drunk and disheveled, while Scarlett, though equally bereaved, is more presentable. Melanie conceives a second child but loses the baby and soon dies due to complications. As she comforts the widowed Ashley, Scarlett realizes she stopped loving him long ago and perhaps she never did. She is shocked to realize that she has always loved Rhett, and he has loved her in return. She returns home, brimming with her new love and determined to begin anew with him. She discovers him packing his bags. In the wake of Melanie's death, Rhett has decided he wants to rediscover the calm Southern dignity he once knew in his youth and is leaving Atlanta to find it. Scarlett tries to persuade Rhett to either stay or take her with him, but he explains that while he once loved Scarlett, the years of hurt and neglect have killed that love. He leaves and does not look back. In the midst of her grief, Scarlett consoles herself with the knowledge that she still has Tara. She plans to return there with the certainty that she can recover and win Rhett back, because "tomorrow is another day."

Katie Scarlett Hamilton-Kennedy-Butler née O'Hara: is the oldest O'Hara daughter. Scarlett's forthright Irish blood is always at variance with the French teachings of style from her mother. Scarlett marries Charles Hamilton, Frank Kennedy, and Rhett Butler, all the while wishing she were married instead to Ashley Wilkes. She has three children, one from each husband: Wade Hampton Hamilton (son to Charles Hamilton), Ella Lorena Kennedy (daughter to Frank Kennedy), and Eugenie Victoria "Bonnie Blue" Butler (daughter to Rhett Butler). She miscarries a fourth child during a quarrel with Rhett when she accidentally falls down the stairs. Scarlett is secretly scornful of Melanie Wilkes, wife to Ashley. Melanie shows nothing but love and devotion toward Scarlett and considers her a sister throughout her life because Scarlett married Melanie's brother Charles. Scarlett is unaware of the extent of Rhett's love for her or that she might love him.

Captain Rhett K. Butler: is Scarlett's admirer and her third husband. He is often publicly shunned for his scandalous behavior and sometimes accepted for his charm. Rhett declares he is not a marrying man and propositions Scarlett to be his mistress, but marries her after the death of Frank Kennedy. He says he won't risk losing her to someone else, since it is unlikely she will ever need money again. At the end of the novel, Rhett confesses to Scarlett, "I loved you but I couldn't let you know it. You're so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett." Mitchell took the character's name from the prominent Rhett family of South Carolina.

Major George Ashley Wilkes: The gallant Ashley marries his cousin, Melanie, because, "Like must marry like or there'll be no happiness." A man of honor, Ashley enlists in the Confederate States Army though he says he would have freed his slaves after his father's death if the war hasn't done it first. Although many of his friends and relations are killed in the Civil War, Ashley survives to see its brutal aftermath. Ashley is "the Perfect Knight", in the mind of Scarlett, even throughout her three marriages. "She loved him and wanted him and did not understand him."

Melanie Wilkes née Hamilton: is Ashley's wife and cousin. Melanie is a humble, serene and gracious Southern woman. As the story unfolds, Melanie becomes progressively physically weaker, first by childbirth, then "the hard work she had done at Tara", and she dies after a miscarriage. As Rhett Butler says, "She never had any strength. She's never had anything but heart."

Scarlett's immediate family

Gerald O'Hara: is Scarlett's Irish father. An excellent horseman, Gerald likes to jump fences on horseback while intoxicated, which eventually leads to his death. Gerald's mind becomes addled after the death of his wife, Ellen.

Wade Hampton Hamilton: is the son of Scarlett and Charles, born in early 1862. He was named for his father's commanding officer, Wade Hampton III.

Frank Kennedy: is Suellen O'Hara's former fiancé and Scarlett's second husband. Frank is an unattractive older man. He originally proposes to Suellen but instead, Scarlett marries him for his money to pay the taxes on Tara. Frank is unable to comprehend Scarlett's fears and her desperate struggle for survival after the war. He is unwilling to be as ruthless in business as Scarlett is. Unknown to Scarlett, Frank is involved in the Ku Klux Klan. He is "shot through the head", according to Rhett Butler, while attempting to defend Scarlett's honor after she is attacked.

I made Tara up, just as I made up every character in the book. But nobody will believe me.

Mammy: is Scarlett's nurse. A slave, she originally was owned by Scarlett's grandmother and raised her mother, Ellen O'Hara. Mammy is "head woman of the plantation".

Will Benteen: is a "South Georgia cracker", Confederate soldier, and patient listener to the troubles of all. Will lost part of his leg in the war and walks with the aid of a wooden stump. He is taken in by the O'Haras on his journey home from the war; after his recovery, he stays on to manage the farm. Fond of Carreen O'Hara, he is disappointed when she decides to enter a convent. He later marries Suellen and has at least one child, Susie, with her.

Tarleton Boys: Boyd, Tom, and the twins, Brent and Stuart: The red-headed Tarleton boys were in frequent scrapes, loved practical jokes and gossip, and "were worse than the plagues of Egypt", according to their mother. The inseparable twins, Brent and Stuart, at 19 years old were six feet two inches tall. All four boys were killed in the war, the twins just moments apart at the Battle of Gettysburg. Boyd was buried somewhere in Virginia.

Calvert Family: Raiford, Cade, and Cathleen: are the O'Haras' Clayton County neighbors from another plantation, "Pine Bloom". Cathleen Calvert was Scarlett's friend. Their widowed father Hugh married a Yankee governess. Raiford is killed at Gettysburg. Next to Scarlett, Cathleen "had had more beaux than any girl in the County", but eventually married their former Yankee overseer, Mr. Hilton.

Fontaine Family: Joe, Tony and Alex are known for their hot tempers. Joe is killed at Gettysburg, while Tony murders Jonas Wilkerson in a barroom and flees to Texas, leaving Alex to tend to their plantation. Grandma Fontaine, also known as "Old Miss", is the wife of old Doc Fontaine, the boys' grandfather. "Young Miss" and young Dr. Fontaine, the boys' parents, and Sally Fontaine née Munroe, wife to Joe, make up the remaining family of the "Mimosa" plantation.

Sarah Jane "Pittypat" Hamilton: acquired the nickname "Pittypat" in childhood because of the way she walked on her tiny feet. Aunt "Pittypat" is a spinster who lives in the red-brick house at the quiet end of Peachtree Street in Atlanta. The house is half-owned by Scarlett (after the death of Charles Hamilton). Her finances are managed by her brother, Henry, whom she doesn't especially care for. Aunt Pittypat raised Melanie and Charles Hamilton after the death of their father, with considerable help from her slave, "Uncle" Peter.

Meade Family: Atlanta society considers Dr. Meade to be "the root of all strength and all wisdom". He looks after injured soldiers during the siege with assistance from Melanie and Scarlett. Mrs. Meade is on the bandage-rolling committee. Their two sons are killed in the war.

Merriwether Family: Mrs. Dolly Merriwether is an Atlanta dowager along with Mrs. Elsing and Mrs. Whiting. Post-war she sells homemade pies to survive, eventually opening her own bakery. Her father-in-law Grandpa Merriwether fights in the Home Guard and survives the war. Her daughter Maybelle marries René Picard, a Louisiana Zouave.

Belle Watling: is a prostitute and brothel madam who is portrayed as a loyal Confederate. Melanie declares she will acknowledge Belle when she passes her in the street, but Belle tells her not to.

Pierre Robillard: is the father of Ellen O'Hara. He was staunchly Presbyterian even though his family was Roman Catholic. The thought of his daughter becoming a nun was worse than her marrying Gerald O'Hara.

Eulalie and Pauline Robillard: are the married sisters of Ellen O'Hara who live in Charleston.

Born in 1900 in Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and writer throughout her life. She grew up hearing stories about the American Civil War and the Reconstruction from her Irish-American grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, who had endured its suffering while living on the family plantation, Rural Home. Her forceful and intellectual mother, Maybelle Stephens Mitchell, was a suffragist who fought for the rights of women to vote.

As a young woman, Mitchell found love with an army lieutenant. He was killed in World War I, and she would carry his memory for the remainder of her life. After studying at Smith College for a year during which time her mother died from the 1918 pandemic flu, Mitchell returned to Atlanta. She married, but her husband was an abusive bootlegger. Mitchell took a job writing feature articles for the Atlanta Journal at a time when Atlanta debutantes of her class did not work. After divorcing her first husband, she married again to a man who shared her interest in writing and literature. He had been the best man at her first wedding.

Margaret Mitchell began writing Gone with the Wind in 1926 to pass the time while recovering from a slow-healing injury from an auto crash. In April 1935, Harold Latham of Macmillan, an editor looking for new fiction, read her manuscript and saw that it could be a best-seller. After Latham agreed to publish the book, Mitchell worked for another six months checking the historical references and rewriting the opening chapter several times. Mitchell and her husband John Marsh, a copy editor by trade, edited the final version of the novel. Mitchell wrote the book's final moments first and then wrote the events that led to them. Gone with the Wind was published in June 1936.

The author tentatively titled the novel Tomorrow Is Another Day, from its last line. Other proposed titles included Bugles Sang True, Not in Our Stars, and Tote the Weary Load. The title Mitchell finally chose is from the first line of the third stanza of the poem "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae" by Ernest Dowson:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind ...

Scarlett O'Hara uses the title phrase when she wonders if her home on a plantation called " Tara" is still standing, or if it had "gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia". In a general sense, the title is a metaphor for the demise of a way of life in the South before the Civil War. When taken in the context of Dowson's poem about "Cynara", the phrase "gone with the wind" alludes to erotic loss. The poem expresses the regrets of someone who has lost his feelings for his "old passion", Cynara. Dowson's Cynara, a name that comes from the Greek word for artichoke, represents a lost love.

It is also possible that the author was influenced by the connection of the phrase "Gone with the wind" with Tara in a line of James Joyce's Ulysses in the chapter "Aeolus".[citation needed ]

Margaret Mitchell arranged Gone with the Wind chronologically, focusing it on the life and experiences of the main character, Scarlett O'Hara, as she grew from adolescence into adulthood. During the time span of the novel, from 1861 to 1873, Scarlett ages from sixteen to twenty-eight years. This is a type of Bildungsroman, a novel concerned with the moral and psychological growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming-of-age story). Scarlett's development is affected by the events of her time. Mitchell used a smooth linear narrative structure. The novel is known for its exceptional "readability". The plot is rich with vivid characters.

Gone with the Wind is often placed in the literary subgenre of the historical romance novel. Pamela Regis has argued that is more appropriately classified as a historical novel, as it does not contain all of the elements of the romance genre. The novel has been described as an early classic of the erotic historical genre because it is thought to contain some degree of pornography.

Slavery in Gone with the Wind is a backdrop to a story that is essentially about other things. Southern plantation fiction (also known as Anti-Tom literature, in reference to reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin of 1852) from the mid-19th century, culminating in Gone with the Wind, is written from the perspective and values of the slaveholder and tends to present slaves as docile and happy.

The characters in the novel are organized into two basic groups along class lines: the white planter class, such as Scarlett and Ashley, and the black house servant class. The slaves depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork, Prissy, and Uncle Peter. House servants are the highest " caste" of slaves in Mitchell's caste system. They choose to stay with their masters after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and subsequent Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 sets them free. Of the servants who stayed at Tara, Scarlett thinks, "There were qualities of loyalty and tirelessness and love in them that no strain could break, no money could buy."

The field slaves make up the lower class in Mitchell's caste system. The field slaves from the Tara plantation and the foreman, Big Sam, are taken away by Confederate soldiers to dig ditches and never return to the plantation. Mitchell wrote that other field slaves were "loyal" and "refused to avail themselves of the new freedom", but the novel has no field slaves who stay on the plantation to work after they have been emancipated.

American William Wells Brown escaped from slavery and published his memoir, or slave narrative, in 1847. He wrote of the disparity in conditions between the house servant and the field hand:

Way back in the dark days of the Early Sixties, regrettable tho it was - men fought, bled, and died for the freedom of the negro - her freedom! - and she stood by and did her duty to the last ditch -

It was and is her life to serve, and she has done it well.

While shot and shell thundered to release the shackles of slavery from her body and her soul - she loved, fought for, and protected - Us who held her in bondage, her "Marster" and her "Missus!"

-Excerpt from My Old Black Mammy by James W. Elliott, 1914.

Although the novel is more than 1,000 pages long, the character of Mammy never considers what her life might be like away from Tara. She recognizes her freedom to come and go as she pleases, saying, "Ah is free, Miss Scarlett. You kain sen' me nowhar Ah doan wanter go", but Mammy remains duty-bound to "Miss Ellen's chile". (No other name for Mammy is given in the novel.)

Eighteen years before the publication of Gone with the Wind, an article titled, "The Old Black Mammy", written in the Confederate Veteran in 1918, discussed the romanticized view of the mammy character persisting in Southern literature:

for her faithfulness and devotion, she has been immortalized in the literature of the South; so the memory of her will never pass, but live on in the tales that are told of those "dear dead days beyond recall".

Micki McElya, in her book Clinging to Mammy, suggests the myth of the faithful slave, in the figure of Mammy, lingered because white Americans wished to live in a world in which African Americans were not angry over the injustice of slavery.

The best-selling anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852, is mentioned briefly in Gone with the Wind as being accepted by the Yankees as "revelation second only to the Bible". The enduring interest of both Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone with the Wind has resulted in lingering stereotypes of 19th-century black slaves. Gone with the Wind has become a reference point for subsequent writers about the South, both black and white alike.

Young misses whut frowns an' pushes out dey chins an' says 'Ah will' an' 'Ah woan' mos' gener'ly doan ketch husbands.

The southern belle is an archetype for a young woman of the antebellum American South upper class. The southern belle was believed to be physically attractive but, more importantly, personally charming with sophisticated social skills. She is subject to the correct code of female behavior. The novel's heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, charming though not beautiful, is a classic southern belle.

For young Scarlett, the ideal southern belle is represented by her mother, Ellen O'Hara. In "A Study in Scarlett", published in The New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote:

However, Scarlett is not always willing to conform. Kathryn Lee Seidel, in her book, The Southern Belle in the American Novel, wrote:

The figure of a pampered southern belle, Scarlett lives through an extreme reversal of fortune and wealth and survives to rebuild Tara and her self-esteem. Her bad belle traits (Scarlett's deceitfulness, shrewdness, manipulation, and superficiality), in contrast to Melanie's good belle traits (trust, self-sacrifice, and loyalty), enable her to survive in the post-war South and pursue her main interest, which is to make enough money to survive and prosper. Although Scarlett was "born" around 1845, she is portrayed to appeal to modern-day readers for her passionate and independent spirit, determination, and obstinate refusal to feel defeated.

Marriage was supposed to be the goal of all southern belles, as women's status was largely determined by that of their husbands. All social and educational pursuits were directed towards it. Despite the Civil War and the loss of a generation of eligible men, young ladies were still expected to marry. By law and Southern social convention, household heads were adult, white propertied males, and all white women and all African Americans were thought to require protection and guidance because they lacked the capacity for reason and self-control.

The Atlanta Historical Society has produced a number of Gone with the Wind exhibits, among them a 1994 exhibit titled, "Disputed Territories: Gone with the Wind and Southern Myths". The exhibit asked, "Was Scarlett a Lady?", finding that historically most women of the period were not involved in business activities as Scarlett was during Reconstruction when she ran a sawmill. White women performed traditional jobs such as teaching and sewing, and generally disliked work outside the home.

During the Civil War, Southern women played a major role as volunteer nurses working in makeshift hospitals. Many were middle- and upper-class women who had never worked for wages or seen the inside of a hospital. One such nurse was Ada W. Bacot, a young widow who had lost two children. Bacot came from a wealthy South Carolina plantation family that owned 87 slaves.

In the fall of 1862, Confederate laws were changed to permit women to be employed in hospitals as members of the Confederate Medical Department. Twenty-seven-year-old nurse Kate Cumming from Mobile, Alabama, described the primitive hospital conditions in her journal:

Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, June 27, 1864.

The Civil War came to an end on April 26, 1865, when Confederate General Johnston surrendered his armies in the Carolinas Campaign to Union General Sherman. Several battles are mentioned or depicted in Gone with the Wind.

Ashley Wilkes is stationed on the Rapidan River, Virginia, in the winter of 1863,[86] later captured and sent to a Union prison camp, Rock Island.[87]

Sherman's Atlanta Campaign

The Atlanta Campaign (May-September 1864) took place in northwest Georgia and the area around Atlanta.

Confederate General Johnston fights and retreats from Dalton (May 7-13) to Resaca (May 13-15) to Kennesaw Mountain (June 27). Union General Sherman suffers heavy losses to the entrenched Confederate army. Unable to pass through Kennesaw, Sherman swings his men around to the Chattahoochee River where the Confederate army is waiting on the opposite side of the river. Once again, General Sherman flanks the Confederate army, forcing Johnston to retreat to Peachtree Creek (July 20), five miles northeast of Atlanta.

Battle of Atlanta, July 22, 1864, just southeast of Atlanta. The city would not fall until September 2, 1864. Heavy losses for Confederate General Hood.

Battle of Ezra Church, July 28, 1864, Sherman's failed attack west of Atlanta where the railroad entered the city.

Battle of Utoy Creek, August 5-7, 1864, Sherman's failed attempt to break the railroad line at East Point, into Atlanta from the west, heavy Union losses.

Battle of Jonesborough, August 31 - September 1, 1864, Sherman successfully cut the railroad lines from the south into Atlanta. The city of Atlanta was abandoned by General Hood and then occupied by Union troops for the rest of the war.

The Savannah Campaign was conducted in Georgia during November and December 1864.

President Lincoln's murder

Although Abraham Lincoln is mentioned in the novel 14 times, no reference is made to his assassination on April 14, 1865.

Somebody's darling! so young and so brave! Wearing still on his pale, sweet face - Soon to be hid by the dust of the grave - The lingering light of his boyhood's grace!

Ashley Wilkes is the beau ideal of Southern manhood in Scarlett's eyes. A planter by inheritance, Ashley knew the Confederate cause had died. However Ashley's name signifies paleness. His "pallid skin literalizes the idea of Confederate death".

Ashley contemplates leaving Georgia for New York City. Had he gone North, he would have joined numerous other ex-Confederate transplants there. Ashley, embittered by war, tells Scarlett he has been "in a state of suspended animation" since the surrender. He feels he is not "shouldering a man's burden" at Tara and believes he is "much less than a man - much less, indeed, than a woman".

A "young girl's dream of the Perfect Knight", Ashley is like a young girl himself. With his "poet's eye", Ashley has a "feminine sensitivity". Scarlett is angered by the "slur of effeminacy flung at Ashley" when her father tells her the Wilkes family was "born queer". (Mitchell's use of the word "queer" is for its sexual connotation because queer, in the 1930s, was associated with homosexuality.) Ashley's effeminacy is associated with his appearance, his lack of forcefulness and sexual impotency. He rides, plays poker, and drinks like "proper men", but his heart is not in it, Gerald claims. The embodiment of castration, Ashley wears the head of Medusa on his cravat pin.

Scarlett's love interest, Ashley Wilkes, lacks manliness, and her husbands - the "calf-like" Charles Hamilton, and the "old-maid in britches", Frank Kennedy - are unmanly as well. Mitchell is critiquing masculinity in southern society since Reconstruction. Even Rhett Butler, the well-groomed dandy, is effeminate or "gay-coded". Charles, Frank and Ashley represent the impotence of the post-war white South. Its power and influence have been diminished.

The word "scallawag" is defined as a loafer, a vagabond, or a rogue. Scallawag had a special meaning after the Civil War as an epithet for a white Southerner who accepted and supported Republican reforms. Mitchell defines scallawags as "Southerners who had turned Republican very profitably." Rhett Butler is accused of being a "damned Scallawag". In addition to scallawags, Mitchell portrays other types of scoundrels in the novel: Yankees, carpetbaggers, Republicans, prostitutes, and overseers. In the early years of the Civil War, Rhett is called a "scoundrel" for his "selfish gains" profiteering as a blockade-runner.

As a scallawag, Rhett is despised. He is the "dark, mysterious, and slightly malevolent hero loose in the world". Literary scholars have identified elements of Mitchell's first husband, Berrien "Red" Upshaw, in the character of Rhett. Another sees the image of Italian actor Rudolph Valentino, whom Margaret Mitchell interviewed as a young reporter for The Atlanta Journal. Fictional hero Rhett Butler has a "swarthy face, flashing teeth and dark alert eyes". He is a "scamp, blackguard, without scruple or honor".

If Gone with the Wind has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality "gumption." So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't.
- Margaret Mitchell, 1936

The sales of Margaret Mitchell's novel in the summer of 1936, as the nation was recovering from the Great Depression and at the virtually unprecedented high price of three dollars, reached about 1 million by the end of December. The book was a bestseller by the time reviews began to appear in national magazines. Herschel Brickell, a critic for the New York Evening Post, lauded Mitchell for the way she "tosses out the window all the thousands of technical tricks our novelists have been playing with for the past twenty years."

Ralph Thompson, a book reviewer for The New York Times, was critical of the length of the novel, and wrote in June 1936:

Some reviewers compared the book to William Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Mitchell claimed Charles Dickens as an inspiration and called Gone with the Wind a "' Victorian' type novel."

Mitchell worried the high $3.00 price would ruin its chance for success. By the time Mary Louise received this copy from Mother and Dad in December 1937, the novel was the top American fiction bestseller for the second year in a row.[110]

Helen Keller, whose father had owned slaves and fought as a Confederate captain and who had later supported the NAACP and the ACLU, read the 12-volume Braille edition. The book brought her fond memories of her southern infancy but she also felt sadness comparing that with what she knew about the South.

Scholarship: Racial, ethnicity and social issues

Gone with the Wind has been criticized for its stereotypical and derogatory portrayal of African Americans in the 19th century South. Former field hands during the early days of Reconstruction are described behaving "as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild - either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance."

Commenting on this passage of the novel, Jabari Asim, author of The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why, says it is "one of the more charitable passages in Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell hesitated to blame black 'insolence' during Reconstruction solely on 'mean niggers', of which, she said, there were few even in slavery days."

Critics say that Mitchell downplayed the violent role of the Ku Klux Klan and their abuse of freedmen. Author Pat Conroy, in his preface to a later edition of the novel, describes Mitchell's portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as having "the same romanticized role it had in The Birth of a Nation and appears to be a benign combination of the Elks Club and a men's equestrian society".

Regarding the historical inaccuracies of the novel, historian Richard N. Current points out:

No doubt it is indeed unfortunate that Gone with the Wind perpetuates many myths about Reconstruction, particularly with respect to blacks. Margaret Mitchell did not originate them and a young novelist can scarcely be faulted for not knowing what the majority of mature, professional historians did not know until many years later.

In Gone with the Wind, Mitchell explores some complexities in racial issues. Scarlett was asked by a Yankee woman for advice on whom to appoint as a nurse for her children; Scarlett suggested a "darky", much to the disgust of the Yankee woman who was seeking an Irish maid, a "Bridget". African Americans and Irish Americans are treated "in precisely the same way" in Gone with the Wind, writes David O'Connell in his 1996 book, The Irish Roots of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Ethnic slurs on the Irish and Irish stereotypes pervade the novel, O'Connell claims, and Scarlett is not an exception to the terminology. Irish scholar Geraldine Higgins notes that Jonas Wilkerson labels Scarlett: "you highflying, bogtrotting Irish". Higgins says that, as the Irish American O'Haras were slaveholders and African Americans were held in bondage, the two ethnic groups are not equivalent in the ethnic hierarchy of the novel.

The novel has been criticized for promoting plantation values and romanticizing the white supremacy of the antebellum south. Mitchell biographer Marianne Walker, author of Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind, believes that those who attack the book on these grounds have not read it. She said that the popular 1939 film "promotes a false notion of the Old South". Mitchell was not involved in the screenplay or film production.

James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, says this novel is "profoundly racist and profoundly wrong". In 1984, an alderman in Waukegan, Illinois, challenged the book's inclusion on the reading list of the Waukegan School District on the grounds of "racism" and "unacceptable language". He objected to the frequent use of the racial slur . He also objected to several other books: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the same reason.

Mitchell's use of color in the novel is symbolic and open to interpretation. Red, green, and a variety of hues of each of these colors, are the predominant palette of colors related to Scarlett.

The novel came under intense criticism for alleged racist and white supremacist themes in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, and the ensuing protests and focus on systemic racism in the United States.

In 1937, Margaret Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone with the Wind and the second annual National Book Award for Fiction from the American Booksellers Association. It is ranked as the second favorite book by American readers, just behind the Bible, according to a 2008 Harris poll. The poll found the novel has its strongest following among women, those aged 44 or more, both Southerners and Midwesterners, both whites and Hispanics, and those who have not attended college. In a 2014 Harris poll, Mitchell's novel ranked again as second, after the Bible. The novel is on the list of best-selling books. As of 2010, more than 30 million copies have been printed in the United States and abroad. More than 24 editions of Gone with the Wind have been issued in China. magazine critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo included the novel on their list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. In 2003, the book was listed at number 21 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novel".

Gone with the Wind frequently has been the center of controversy.

In 1978, the book was banned from English classrooms in the Anaheim Union High School District in Anaheim, California.

Gone with the Wind has been adapted several times for stage and screen:

The novel was the basis of the classic Academy Award-winning 1939 film of the same name. The film has been considered one of the greatest Hollywood movies ever made, and upon release, was immensely popular in its own right. It was produced by David O. Selznick and stars Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland.[131]

The book was adapted into a musical, Scarlett, which opened in Tokyo in 1970 (in 1966 it was produced as a nine-hour play without music), and in London in 1972, where it was reduced to four hours. The London production opened in 1973 in Los Angeles, and again in Dallas in 1976.[132]

The Japanese Takarazuka Revue produced a musical adaptation of the novel, Kaze to Tomo ni Sarinu, which was performed by the all-female Moon Troupe in 1977.[133][134] The most recent performance was in January 2014 by the Moon Troupe, with Todoroki Yuu as Rhett Butler and Ryu Masaki as Scarlett O'Hara.[135][136]

A 2003 French musical adaptation was produced by Gérard Presgurvic, Autant en emporte le vent.[137]

The book was adapted into a British musical, Gone with the Wind, and opened in 2008 in the U.K. at the New London Theatre.[138]

A full-length three-act classical ballet version, with a score arranged from the works of Antonín Dvořák and choreographed by Lilla Pártay, premiered in 2007 as performed by the Hungarian National Ballet. It was revived in their 2013 season.[139]

A new stage adaptation by Niki Landau premiered at the Manitoba Theatre Center in Winnipeg, Canada in January 2013.[140]

1940 Women's Press Club skit in which Mammy Congress puts Scarlett O'Budgett into her corset before going to a 'lection party.

Gone with the Wind has appeared in many places and forms in popular culture:

Books, television and more

A 1945 cartoon by World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin shows an American soldier lying on the ground with Margaret Mitchell's bullet-riddled book. The caption reads: "Dear, Dear Miss Mitchell, You will probably think this is an awful funny letter to get from a soldier, but I was carrying your big book, Gone with the Wind, under my shirt and a ..."[141]

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov considered Gone with the Wind to be a "cheap novel" and in his Bend Sinister a book meant to resemble it is used as toilet paper.[142][143]

In the season 3 episode of I Love Lucy, "Lucy Writes a Novel", which aired on April 5, 1954, "Lucy" (Lucille Ball) reads about a housewife who makes a fortune writing a novel in her spare time. Lucy writes her own novel, which she titles Real Gone with the Wind.[144]

Gone with the Wind is the book that S. E. Hinton's runaway teenage characters, Ponyboy and Johnny, read while hiding from the law in the young adult novel The Outsiders (1967).[145]

A film parody titled "Went with the Wind!" aired in a 1976 episode of The Carol Burnett Show.[146] Burnett as Starlett descends a long staircase wearing a green curtain complete with hanging rod. The outfit, designed by Bob Mackie, is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution.[147]

Mad magazine created a parody of the novel "Groan with the Wind" (1991),[148] in which Ashley was renamed Ashtray and Rhett became Rhetch. It ends with Rhetch and Ashtray running off together.[91]

A pictorial parody in which the slaves are white and the protagonists are black appeared in a 1995 issue of Vanity Fair titled "Scarlett 'n the Hood".[149]

In a MADtv comedy sketch (2007),[150] "Slave Girl #8" introduces three alternative endings to the film. In one ending, Scarlett pursues Rhett wearing a jet pack.[151]

The "Curtain Dress" from The Carol Burnett Show on display at the Smithsonian Institution in 2009

On June 30, 1986, the 50th anniversary of the day Gone with the Wind went on sale, the U.S. Post Office issued a 1-cent stamp showing an image of Margaret Mitchell. The stamp was designed by Ronald Adair and was part of the U.S. Postal Service's Great Americans series.

On September 10, 1998, the U.S. Post Office issued a 32-cent stamp as part of its Celebrate the Century series recalling various important events in the 20th century. The stamp, designed by Howard Paine, displays the book with its original dust jacket, a white Magnolia blossom, and a hilt placed against a background of green velvet.

One story of the legacy of Gone with the Wind is that people worldwide incorrectly think it was the "true story" of the Old South and how it was changed by the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The film adaptation of the novel "amplified this effect". The plantation legend was "burned" into the mind of the public. Moreover, her fictional account of the war and its aftermath has influenced how the world has viewed the city of Atlanta for successive generations.

Some readers of the novel have seen the film first and read the novel afterward. One difference between the film and the novel is the staircase scene, in which Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs. In the film, Scarlett weakly struggles and does not scream as Rhett starts up the stairs. In the novel, "he hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened."

Earlier in the novel, in an intended rape at Shantytown (Chapter 44), Scarlett is attacked by a black man who rips open her dress while a white man grabs hold of the horse's bridle. She is rescued by another black man, Big Sam. In the film, she is attacked by a white man, while a black man grabs the horse's bridle.

The Library of Congress began a multiyear "Celebration of the Book" in July 2012 with an exhibition on Books That Shaped America, and an initial list of 88 books by American authors that have influenced American lives. Gone with the Wind was included in the Library's list. Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington said:

Among books on the list considered to be the Great American Novel were , Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Throughout the world, the novel appeals due to its universal themes: war, love, death, racial conflict, class, gender and generation, which speak especially to women. In North Korea, readers relate to the novel's theme of survival, finding it to be "the most compelling message of the novel". Margaret Mitchell's personal collection of nearly 70 foreign language translations of her novel was given to the Atlanta Public Library after her death.

On August 16, 2012, the Archdiocese of Atlanta announced that it had been bequeathed a 50% stake in the trademarks and literary rights to Gone With the Wind from the estate of Margaret Mitchell's deceased nephew, Joseph Mitchell. Margaret Mitchell had separated from the Catholic Church. However, one of Mitchell's biographers, Darden Asbury Pyron, stated that Margaret Mitchell had "an intense relationship" with her mother, who was a Roman Catholic.

The Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, Georgia, where Margaret Mitchell wrote her novel, is now operated as the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum.

Although some of Mitchell's papers and documents related to the writing of Gone with the Wind were burned after her death, many documents, including assorted draft chapters, were preserved. The last four chapters of the novel are held by the Pequot Library of Southport, Connecticut.

Publication and reprintings (1936 - US)

Although Mitchell refused to write a sequel to Gone with the Wind, Mitchell's estate authorized Alexandra Ripley to write a sequel, which was titled . The book was subsequently adapted into a television mini-series in 1994. A second sequel was authorized by Mitchell's estate titled Rhett Butler's People, by Donald McCaig. The novel parallels Gone with the Wind from Rhett Butler's perspective. In 2010, Mitchell's estate authorized McCaig to write a prequel, which follows the life of the house servant Mammy, whom McCaig names "Ruth". The novel, Ruth's Journey, was released in 2014.

The copyright holders of Gone with the Wind attempted to suppress publication of The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, which retold the story from the perspective of the slaves. A federal appeals court denied the plaintiffs an injunction (Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin) against publication on the basis that the book was a parody and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The parties subsequently settled out of court and the book went on to become a New York Times Best Seller.

Numerous unauthorized sequels to Gone with the Wind have been published in Russia, mostly under the pseudonym Yuliya Hilpatrik, a cover for a consortium of writers. The New York Times states that most of these have a "Slavic" flavor.

Gone with the Wind has been in the public domain in Australia since 1999 (50 years after Margaret Mitchell's death). On January 1, 2020, the book entered the public domain in the European Union ( 70 years after the author's death). Under an extension of copyright law, Gone with the Wind will not enter the public domain in the United States until 2031.

1. Part 1, chapter 1

2. Part 1, chapter 7

3. Part 4, chapter 41

4. Part 2, chapter 8

5. ^ Edwards, Anne (1983). Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell. New Haven, Connecticut: Ticknor & Fields. pp. 17-18. ISBN 9780899191690.

6. Gavin Lambert, "The Making of Gone With the Wind", Atlantic Monthly, (February 1973). Retrieved May 14, 2011.

7. ^ "Gone with the Wind". Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Encyclopaedia Britannica.

8. "A Critic at Large: A Study in Scarlett" Claudia Roth Pierpont, (August 31, 1992) The New Yorker, p. 87. Retrieved May 15, 2011.

9. ^ Why we love - and hate - 'Gone with the Wind'. Todd Leopold (December 31, 2014) CNN. Retrieved February 26, 2015.

10. ^ "Books of the Times: Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell" Archived June 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Ralph Thompson, (June 30, 1936) The New York Times. Retrieved May 13, 2011.

11. James Loewen "Debunking History", US History transcript from May 12, 2000. Retrieved April 2, 2011.

12. "5 Honors Awarded on the Year's Books:", ^ The New York Times, February 26, 1937, page 23. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2007)

13. ^ The Bible is America's Favorite Book Followed by Gone With the Wind, (April 8, 2008) Business Wire. Retrieved May 10, 2011.

14. ^ "The Bible Remains America's Favorite Book" Archived September 24, 2015, at the Wayback Machine, Harris Interactive; Retrieved April 29, 2014.

15. ^ Gone With the Wind Dvorak, A. / Pártay L. Archived February 4, 2013, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved November 6, 2012

16. ^ Reading Gone With the Wind in Pyongyang Archived October 29, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, Tim Sullivan, (October 25, 2012) Time magazine. Retrieved November 4, 2012.

17. ^ Brown, E.F.; et al. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood. p. 278.

18. ^ "Mammy Revealed, and Not Just Her Red Petticoat Gone With the Wind Prequel Coming in October" Julie Bosman (March 26, 2014) The New York Times. Retrieved March 26, 2014.

Adams, Amanda. "'Painfully Southern': Gone with the Wind, the Agrarians, and the Battle for the New South", Southern Literary Journal (2007) 40:58-75.

Bevilacqua, Kathryne. "History Lessons from Gone With the Wind", Mississippi Quarterly, 67 (Winter 2014), 99-125.

Bonner, Peter. "Lost In Yesterday: Commemorating The 70th Anniversary of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind ". Marietta, GA: First Works Publishing Co., Inc., 2006.

Brown, Ellen F. and John Wiley, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade, 2011.

Dickey, Jennifer W. A Tough Little Patch of History: Gone with the Wind and the Politics of Memory. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2014.

Farr, Finis. Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of Gone with the Wind. New York: Morrow, 1965.

Gomez-Galisteo, M. Carmen The Wind Is Never Gone Sequels, Parodies and Rewritings of Gone with the Wind. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

Haag, John. "Gone With the Wind in Nazi Germany", Georgia Historical Quarterly 73#2 (1989): 278-304. in JSTOR

Harwell, Richard, ed. Gone with the Wind as Book and Film Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1983.

Harwell, Richard, ed. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936-1949. New York: Macmillan, 1976.

Haskell, Molly. Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Pyron, Darden Asbury, ed. Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture. Florida International University Press, 1983.

Pyron, Darden Asbury. Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell and the Making of Gone with the Wind. Athens, GA: Hill Street Press, 1991.

Rubin, Anne Sarah. "Revisiting Classic Civil War Books: 'Why Gone with the Wind Still Matters; or, Why I Still Love Gone with the Wind'", Civil War History (March 2013) 59#1 pp 93-98 online

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Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era.

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Even though it was almost impossible to travel outside of the Soviet Union, my grandmother went to the Singapore in the 70s

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Even though it was almost impossible to travel outside of the Soviet Union, my grandmother went to the Singapore in the 70s

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My grandmother was in Kyiv when the Battle of Kyiv happened, she was 6 years old

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My grandmother was in Kyiv when the Battle of Kyiv happened, she was 6 years old

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Battle of Kiev (1941)

Part of Operation Barbarossa on the Eastern Front of World War II

Explosion of a Soviet radio-mine in Kiev (September 1941)

Belligerents

Germany

Soviet Union

Commanders and leaders

Strength

25 infantry divisions
9 armoured divisions
544,000[1]

Initial 627,000

Casualties and losses

Total: 61,239[3]
12,728 killed
46,480 wounded
2,085 missing

700,544 men

485,000-665,000 captured (incl. civilians)

84,240 wounded and sick

411 tanks and SPGs destroyed
343 aircraft destroyed
28,419 guns and mortars lost

The First Battle of Kiev was the German name for the operation that resulted in a huge encirclement of Soviet troops in the vicinity of Kiev during World War II. This encirclement is considered the largest encirclement in the history of warfare (by number of troops). The operation ran from 7 July to 26 September 1941, as part of Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union.

Much of the Southwestern Front of the Red Army (commanded by Mikhail Kirponos) was encircled, but small groups of Red Army troops managed to escape the pocket days after the German panzers met east of the city, including the headquarters of Marshal Semyon Budyonny, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Commissar Nikita Khrushchev. Kirponos was trapped behind German lines and was killed while trying to break out.

The battle was an unprecedented defeat for the Red Army, exceeding even the Battle of Białystok-Minsk of June-July 1941. The encirclement trapped 452,700 soldiers, 2,642 guns and mortars, and 64 tanks, of which scarcely 15,000 soldiers had escaped from the encirclement by 2 October. The Southwestern Front suffered 700,544 casualties, including 616,304 killed, captured, or missing during the battle. The 5th, 37th, 26th, 21st, and 38th armies, consisting of 43 divisions, were almost annihilated and the 40th Army suffered many losses. Like the Western Front before it, the Southwestern Front had to be recreated almost from scratch.

After the rapid progress of Army Group Centre through the central sector of the Eastern Front, a huge salient developed around its junction with Army Group South by late July 1941. On 7-8 July 1941, the German forces managed to break through the fortified Stalin Line, in the southeast portion of Zhytomyr Oblast, which ran along the 1939 Soviet border. By 11 July 1941, the Axis ground forces reached the Dnieper tributary Irpin River (15-20 km (9.3-12.4 mi) to the west of Kiev). The initial attempt to enter the city was thwarted by troops of the Kiev ukrep-raion (KUR, Kiev fortified district) and the counteroffensive of the Soviet 5th and 6th armies. The advance on Kiev was halted and the main German effort then shifted towards the Korosten ukrep-raion, where the Soviet 5th Army was concentrated. At the same time, the 1st Panzer Army was forced to transition to defense due to a counteroffensive of the Soviet 26th Army. A substantial Soviet force, nearly the entire Southwestern Front, was positioned in and around Kiev, in the salient. By the end of July, the Soviet front lost some of its units due to the critical situation of the Southern Front (the 6th and 12th armies) caused by the German 17th army.

While lacking mobility and armor, due to high losses in tanks at the Battle of Uman, on 3 August 1941, they nonetheless posed a significant threat to the German advance and were the largest single concentration of Soviet troops on the Eastern Front at that time.[citation needed ] Both the Soviet 6th and 12th armies were encircled at Uman, where some 102,000 Red Army soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. On 30 July 1941, the German forces resumed their advance onto Kiev, with the German 6th army attacking positions between the Soviet 26th army and the Kiev ukrep-raion troops.

On 7 August 1941, their advance was halted again by the Soviet 5th, 37th, and 26th armies, supported by the Pinsk Naval Flotilla. With the help of the local population around the city of Kiev, anti-tank ditches were dug and other obstacles were installed, including the establishment of 750 pillboxes and 100,000 mines planted along the 45 km (28 mi) frontline segment. Some 35,000 soldiers were mobilized from local population along with some partisan detachments and two armored trains.

On 19 July, Adolf Hitler had issued Directive No. 33, which cancelled the assault on Moscow in favor of driving south to complete the encirclement of Soviet forces surrounded in Kiev. On 12 August 1941, Supplement to Directive No. 34 was issued. This directive represented a compromise between Hitler, who was convinced the correct strategy was to clear the salient occupied by Soviet forces on right flank of Army Group Center, in the vicinity of Kiev, before resuming the drive to Moscow, and Franz Halder, Fedor von Bock and Heinz Guderian, who advocated an advance on Moscow, as soon as possible. The compromise required 2nd and 3rd Panzer Groups of Army Group Centre, which were redeploying in order to aid Army Group North and Army Group South respectively, be returned to Army Group Centre, together with the 4th Panzer Group of Army Group North, once their objectives were achieved. Then the three Panzer Groups, under the control of Army Group Center, would lead the advance on Moscow. Initially, Halder, chief of staff of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), and Bock, commander of Army Group Center, were satisfied by the compromise, but soon their optimism faded as the operational realities of the plan proved too challenging.

On 18 August, the OKH submitted a strategic survey ( Denkschrift) to Hitler, regarding the continuation of operations in the East. The paper made the case for the drive to Moscow, arguing once again that Army Groups North and South were strong enough to accomplish their objectives without any assistance from Army Group Center. It pointed out that there was enough time left before winter to conduct only a single decisive operation against Moscow.

On 20 August, Hitler rejected the proposal based on the idea that the most important objective was to deprive the Soviet Union of its industrial areas. On 21 August, Alfred Jodl of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) issued a directive, which summarized Hitler's instructions, to Walther von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the Army. The paper reiterated that the capture of Moscow, before the onset of winter, was not a primary objective. Rather, that the most important missions before the onset of winter were to seize the Crimea, and the industrial and coal region of the Don River; isolate the oil-producing regions of the Caucasus from the rest of the Soviet Union, and in the north, to encircle Leningrad, and link up with the Finns. Among other instructions, it also instructed that Army Group Center is to allocate sufficient forces to ensure the destruction of the "Russian 5th Army" and, at the same time, to prepare to repel enemy counterattacks in the central sector of its front. Hitler referred to the Soviet forces in the salient collectively as the "Russian 5th Army". Halder was dismayed, and later described Hitler's plan as "utopian and unacceptable", concluding that the orders were contradictory and Hitler alone must bear the responsibility for inconsistency of his orders and that the OKH can no longer assume responsibility for what was occurring; however, Hitler's instructions still accurately reflected the original intent of the Barbarossa directive of which the OKH was aware all along. Gerhard Engel, in his diary for 21 August 1941, simply summarized it as, "it was a black day for the Army". Halder offered his own resignation and advised Brauchitsch to do the same. Brauchitsch declined, stating Hitler would not accept the gesture, and nothing would change anyhow. Halder withdrew his offer of resignation.[citation needed ]

On 23 August, Halder convened with Bock and Guderian, in Borisov, in Belorussia, and afterwards flew with Guderian to Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. During a meeting between Guderian and Hitler, with neither Halder nor Brauchitsch present, Hitler allowed Guderian to make the case for advancing on to Moscow, and then rejected his argument. Hitler claimed his decision to secure the northern and southern sectors of western Soviet Union were "tasks which stripped the Moscow problem of much of its significance" and was "not a new proposition, but a fact I have clearly and unequivocally stated since the beginning of the operation." Hitler also argued that the situation was even more critical because the opportunity to encircle the Soviet forces in the salient was "an unexpected opportunity, and a reprieve from past failures to trap the Soviet armies in the south." Hitler also declared, "the objections that time will be lost and the offensive on Moscow might be undertaken too late, or that the armoured units might no longer be technically able to fulfil their mission, are not valid." Hitler reiterated that once the flanks of Army Group Center were cleared, especially the salient in the south, then he would allow the army to resume its drive on Moscow; an offensive, he concluded, which "must not fail". Guderian returned to the 2nd Panzer Group and began the southern thrust in an effort to encircle the Soviet forces in the salient.

Men from a German forward detachment attack a Soviet village west of Kiev, in August 1941

The bulk of the 2nd Panzer Group and the 2nd Army were detached from Army Group Centre and sent south. Its mission was to encircle the Southwestern Front, commanded by Semyon Budyonny, in conjunction with the 1st Panzer Group, of Army Group South, under Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, which was advancing from a southeasterly direction.

Following the crossing of the Dnieper river by German forces on 22 August 1941, the city of Kiev came under threat of encirclement. The command of the Southwestern Front appealed to the Stavka to allow for a withdrawal of forces from Kiev.

The Red Army Chief of Staff, Boris Shaposhnikov, wrote a letter to the Southwestern Front on September 17, authorising a withdraw from Kiev, when the encirclement was already completed at Lokhvytsia, in Poltava region.

A large salient around Kiev had formed in August 1941

Guderian at a forward command post for one of his panzer regiments, 1941

The Panzer armies made rapid progress. On 12 September, Ewald von Kleist's 1st Panzer Group, which had by now turned north and crossed the Dnieper river, emerged from its bridgeheads at Cherkassy and Kremenchuk. Continuing north, it cut across the rear of Semyon Budyonny's Southwestern Front. On 16 September, it made contact with Guderian's 2nd Panzer Group, advancing south, at the town of Lokhvitsa, 120 mi (190 km) east of Kiev. Budyonny was now trapped and soon relieved by Joseph Stalin's order of 13 September, and Budyonny was replaced by Semyon Timoshenko, in command of the Southwestern Direction.

After that, the fate of the encircled Soviet armies was sealed. With no mobile forces or supreme commander left, there was no possibility to effect a breakout. The infantry of the German 17th and 6th Armies, of Army Group South, soon arrived, along with the 2nd Army, also on loan from Army Group Center, and marching behind Guderian's tanks. They systematically began to reduce the pocket, assisted by the two Panzer armies. The encircled Soviet armies at Kiev did not give up easily. A savage battle in which the Soviets were bombarded by artillery, tanks, and aircraft had to be fought before the pocket had finally fallen.

By 19 September, Kiev had fallen, but the encirclement battle continued. After 10 days of heavy fighting, the last remnants of troops east of Kiev surrendered on 26 September. Several Soviet armies, namely the 5th, 37th, and 26th, were now encircled, as well as separate detachments of 38th and 21st armies. The Germans claimed to have captured 600,000 Red Army soldiers (up to 665,000), although these claims have included a large number of civilians suspected of evading capture.

During withdrawal from Kiev, on 20-22 September 1941, at Shumeikove Hai, near Dryukivshchyna, (today in Lokhvytsia Raion) several members of headquarters staff were killed, including Mikhail Kirponos (commander), Mykhailo Burmystenko (a member of military council), and Vasiliy Tupikov (chief of staff). Some 15,000 Soviet troops managed to break through the encirclement.

German sentry in the citadel of Kiev, on 19 September.

By virtue of Guderian's southward turn, the Wehrmacht destroyed the entire Southwestern Front east of Kiev during September. It inflicted nearly 700,544 casualties on the Red Army, while Soviet forces west of Moscow conducted many attacks on Army Group Centre. Although most of these attacks failed, the Soviet attacks in the Yelnya Offensive succeeded with the German forces abandoning the town, and resulted in the first major defeat for the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa. With its southern flank secured, Army Group Center launched Operation Typhoon, in the direction of Vyazma, in October.[citation needed ]

Over the objections of Gerd von Rundstedt, Army Group South was ordered to resume the offensive and overran nearly all of the Crimea and Left-bank Ukraine before reaching the edges of the Donbas industrial region. However, after four months of continuous operations, his forces were at the brink of exhaustion, and suffered a major defeat in the Battle of Rostov. Army Group South's infantry fared little better and failed to capture the vital city of Kharkov, before nearly all of its factories, skilled laborers, and equipment were evacuated east of the Ural Mountains.[citation needed ]

Despite the order for wholesale destruction of Kiev issued in the Supplement to Directive 34 from 12 August, the city was spared, to Hitler's fury, as there had been no fighting within. The German troops, who occupied Kiev on 19 September, were surprised by a series of explosions from Soviet radio-mines in the city centre from 24 September onwards, the first of which also killed a number of local civilians reporting at the German Field Command to surrender outlawed items. The resulting fire, which was not put out until 29 September, offered the Nazi authorities a pretext to commence the mass murder of Jews in Babi Yar on the same day. As the city had not been razed, the German leadership launched the plan to starve it while officially attributing the food shortages to the consequences of Soviet economic policies. Ultimately the implementation of the Hunger Plan in occupied Kiev was restrained by the fears of an uprising behind the lines, and the city was only forcibly evacuated and subjected to widespread looting and burning during the German withdrawal in September-November 1943.

German anti-tank gun overlooking the Dnieper river after the fall of Kiev

107,540 Soviet personnel were awarded the Medal "For the Defence of Kiev" from 21 June 1961.

Immediately after World War II ended, prominent German commanders argued that had operations at Kiev been delayed, and had Operation Typhoon been launched in September, rather than October, the German Army would have reached and captured Moscow before the onset of winter.

David Glantz argued that had Operation Typhoon been launched in September, it would have met greater resistance due to Soviet forces not having been weakened by their offensives east of Smolensk. The offensive would have also been launched with an extended right flank. Glantz also claims that regardless of the final position of German troops when winter came, they would have still faced a counteroffensive by the 10 reserve armies raised by the Soviets toward the end of the year, who would also be better equipped by the vast industrial resources in the area of Kiev. Glantz asserts that had Kiev not been taken before the Battle of Moscow, the entire operation would have ended in a disaster for the Germans.

Glantz, David (2001). The Soviet-German War 1941-1945: Myths and Realities: A Survey Essay. Archived from the original on 22 July 2017.

Clark, Alan (1965). Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45. London: William Morrow and Company.

Glantz, David (1995). When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-0899-7.

Blau, George (1955), The German Campaign in Russia: Planning and Operations (1940-1942) (PDF), Washington, DC: Department of the Army

Berkhoff, Karel C. (2004), Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, ISBN 978-0-674-01313-1

Freier, Thomas (2009). "10-Day Medical Casualty Reports". Human Losses in World War II. Archived from the original on 25 October 2012.

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Battle of Kiev (1941) Part of Operation Barbarossa on the Eastern Front of World War II Explosion of a Soviet radio-mine in Kiev (September 1941) Belligerents Germany Soviet Union Commanders and leaders Strength 25 infantry divisions9 armoured divisions544,000[1] Initial 627,000 Casualties and losses Total: 61,239[3] 12,728 killed46,480 wounded2,085 missing 700,544 men 485,000-665,000 captured (incl.