By: C. William Hanson Jr. When a young piano student came knocking at my door in 2010, my mental map for Ukraine was then not much better than my current mental map for Swaziland. Serving as president of a small foundation sponsored mostly by family and friends, I had contacted the international student office of…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. “You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. What mood is that? Last minute panic. – Bill Watterson Dear readers, In the month which has elapsed since we published the September 1st issue,  the battlefield position of Ukrainian forces has shown…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. Images from the front this month have strikingly varied.  On August 6th at 5am Ukrainian forces surprised both the free world and the Russians by launching an attack into Russia.   One of the reasons for Ukraine’s action is to secure a buffer zone to protect villages on the Ukrainian side…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. When I began writing in Kramatorsk last month, the Russians were at that moment overrunning the village of Chassiv Yar, several miles to the southeast.  On July 21st, the BBC reported, “Since dawn on Friday, Russia has made three attempts to approach troops near Chasiv Yar and Klishchiivka, Ukraine’s General…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. Please contact your Democratic Senators, Governors or Representatives as soon as possible. We have a database linked below to help find contact information. https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials The upcoming Presidential election outcome, which Biden‘s narcissistic perseverance will strongly negatively influence, scares the courageous and awe-inspiring people of Ukraine, as it does many in…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. With an air war continuing over Ukraine, visitors, including heads of state, travel by train. Passenger flights ceased when the war began.  Distances are huge, and there is no TGV.  The intercity trains, even the nonstop trains from Lviv to Kyiv, do not run much faster than Amtrak.  I draw…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. As promised for our June 1st issue, we shall this month tell you of another young Ukrainian hero, Dima, from Bucha, a city of 38,000 about 24 km (15 miles) from Kyiv. In Ukraine every soldier engaged in the war is termed a “герой,” in English “hero.”   In my…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. Better late than never.  Some surgeons may tend to delay operating, waiting until the patient has suffered sufficiently, enough to ensure ready acceptance of any comparatively mild discomforts or inconveniences associated with a procedure.  It seems that Speaker Johnson adopted a comparable tactic.  But at last more than sixty billion…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. Let us fast forward in this issue to springtime, 2024, with impressions drawn from my visit last week to Washington, D.C.  We hear almost every day now, at least in broadcasts by responsible news organizations such as NPR and the BBC which provide responsible coverage, a heart wrenching dissonance of…

By: C. William Hanson Jr. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” -attributed by President John F. Kennedy (some say mistakenly) to Edmund Burke Searching on June 28th, 2022 for a student to interview at the Taras Shevchenko National University, I gained entry thanks to a…