Professor Roman Sheremeta
July 12, 2026
There was a 96% chance Pavlo Holchenko would die. A surgeon rated his odds after an aortic rupture on the front.
He survived. Seven wounds in three years of war. “We had plenty of concussions, but we don’t count those as wounds,” — UkrPravda.
Call sign “Artist.” On the front since February 2022. Before the war — a miner at the Zasiadko mine, where gas explosions in the early 2000s killed over 300 people.
There he took first-aid courses that later saved his life, just not in a mine.
His first battle came near Lysychansk in June 2022. The convoy came under fire from a Russian tank.
“Paratroopers, down!” — soldiers jumped off the armored vehicles. Friends from the 110th Brigade drove off the tank with their anti-tank weapons.
That same month, near the Lysychansk oil refinery, Pavlo heard voices approaching. His platoon commander said it was their own scouts. It was Russians.
Pavlo spotted red tape on their sleeves and opened fire first. A grenade fragment hit his leg. He applied his own tourniquet and crawled back to the trench.
In December 2024, near Zahryzove in Kharkiv region, his assault group captured 15 Russian soldiers. In close combat Pavlo posed as a Russian — shouted at them in Russian to surrender.
The captives later admitted they didn’t believe his accent, but surrendered anyway because his group had already encircled them.
His sixth wound was the worst. A kamikaze drone hit his buggy during a combat mission. The vehicle flipped, and Pavlo suffered severe injuries to his neck and chest.
Massive blood loss — doctors put him in a medically induced coma. He woke up in Kharkiv, at the Institute of Vascular Surgery. He now carries an artificial aorta from his neck to his heart.
He turned down an offer to become an officer and platoon commander. He believes he’s more useful as a sergeant and a reconnaissance team leader.
“What keeps me going is that I can still teach and train more people. And I want to live long enough to see robots fully take over the fighting.”
Source: text of Tymofiy Milovanov
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Two years ago, russians hit a children’s hospital in Kyiv. It was one of the worst evils done by russians – to take away the lives of children with cancer who are already dying.
This russian evil must be stopped at any cost.
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June was one of the deadliest months for Ukrainian civilians since the start of the full-scale war, the UN reported.
According to data, at least 265 civilians were killed in russian attacks in June, with another 1,816 wounded. The UN noted that the number of casualties continues to rise in July. Following the strikes on Kyiv on July 2 and 6 alone, 50 people were killed.
In total, the UN has confirmed at least 16,402 civilian deaths since the start of the full-scale invasion, including 802 children. A total of 48,428 people have been wounded.
The UN also emphasized that the actual number of casualties is likely significantly higher.
Source: Live Ukraine
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This is crazy!
The Polish Institute of National Remembrance is commemorating General Lucjan Żeligowski – a war criminal, who, on Józef Piłsudski’s orders, occupied Vilnius and established the puppet state of Central Lithuania, which was later annexed by Poland.
And they are proud of this?! How is this morally different from what russia is doing today in Ukraine?
I never paid much attention to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance until the recent anti-Ukrainian actions by Polish president and ultranationalists.
Then I started looking at some of the Institute’s “heroes.” A number of them are war criminals and bandits – including Piłsudski, Żeligowski, Rydz-Śmigły, and others.
And these are the same people who think they have the moral authority to dictate which heroes Ukraine should or should not honor.
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Sorry Lindsey, I personally met you several time, but I don’t believe you anymore.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham announced that an agreement has been reached with the White House on a version of the sanctions bill against Russia.
Specifically, he said: “I am pleased to report that approximately 30 minutes ago, we reached an agreement with the White House on a version of the sanctions bill against Russia that they will support. This means it will become law.”
The problem is that Lindsey has been saying this for years and did nothing. Moreover, instead of confronting Trump, he became the chief defender of his moral bankruptcy.
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Russia has caused an estimated $24 billion in direct and indirect damage to Ukraine’s cultural sector since the start of its full-scale invasion, according to World Bank estimates, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for Humanitarian Policy and Minister of Culture Tetiana Berezhna said on July 9.
“We are documenting every crime Russia commits against Ukraine’s cultural heritage. We are documenting the scale of the damage Russia has inflicted on our country. As of today, according to the World Bank, the direct and indirect damage to Ukrainian culture alone amounts to $24 billion,” Berezhna said.
The minister added that Ukraine will continue working to ensure Russia is held financially accountable for the destruction.
Source: United 24
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Russia has started placing portable toilets alongside the miles-long fuel lines. Russian citizens are waiting days for five gallons of gasoline. Some are searching online for how to make gasoline at home.
This is what happens when a country builds its entire war economy on oil, and then loses control of its refineries.
I wrote about how Ukraine turned russia’s greatest economic asset into its biggest liability – one refinery at a time, with drones that cost less than the toilets.
Full article: https://economicsofpower.substack.com/p/russias-oil-curse
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Heroes of Ukraine: Stepan Chubenko
Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine.
JUN 25, 2026
He was sixteen years old.
Stepan Chubenko was a goalkeeper. He played for the youth team of FC Kramatorsk. He dreamed of being a professional footballer. He took care of the children at the local orphanage with his friends, bringing them toys and books and sweets. He had a girlfriend. They had talked about getting married someday.
In the summer of 2014, three russian-backed militants tortured him for a week and shot him three times in the head in a village near Donetsk.
His killers offered to spare his life if he would side with the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic.”
He refused.
Stepan was born on November 11, 1997, in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine. He was the only child of Viktor and Stalina Chubenko. His mother’s name – Stalina – was given to her by her own parents. She is a russian citizen who had moved to Ukraine in the 1990s. This is a detail that matters, because russia has spent eleven years claiming it invaded Ukraine to protect ethnic russians and russian speakers like Stalina’s family.
The first minor child killed in Putin’s war on Ukraine was the son of a russian woman, in a russian-speaking city, raised in a russian-speaking home. Russia killed him for being Ukrainian.
When the war began in April 2014 and pro-russian forces seized Kramatorsk, Stepan was already an activist. He had been at Maidan with his friends. He had taken part in rallies for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. He brought water and food to Ukrainian soldiers when they arrived in the city. During shelling, he helped the elderly down into the shelters. He carried buckets of water to them when the city’s water supply was cut. He went into the central square and tore down the flag of the “DPR.”
His father drove him across the border to russia to keep him safe.
A month later, Stepan came back. He told his mother he refused to “hide like a rat” in times that were difficult for his country.
In late June 2014, Stepan traveled to Kyiv to see a friend. On July 23, he boarded a train to come home to Kramatorsk. He could have routed through Kharkiv, which was still under Ukrainian control. He went through Donetsk instead. We do not know why.
At the Donetsk train station, men from a russian-backed militia called the “Kerch” battalion stopped him. They saw the blue and yellow ribbon tied to his backpack. They saw the scarf of a Ukrainian football club. They arrested him.
For a week they held him. They beat him. They strangled him with a towel. One of them, even among themselves, said “let’s hurry up so he doesn’t suffer.” They told him they would let him go if he would publicly side with the “DPR” and renounce Ukraine.
He was sixteen years old. He refused.
On July 27, 2014, they took him to the village of Horbachevo-Mykhailivka, on the outskirts of Donetsk. They made him dig. Then they shot him three times in the head.
His mother spent months searching for his body. She forced the leaders of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” to admit what had happened. She forced an investigation. In 2017, a Ukrainian court sentenced all three of his killers – Vadim Pogodin, Yuriy Moskalyov, and Maksym Sukhomlynov – to life in prison, in absentia. They had fled to russia.
Russia has protected them ever since.
In 2024, Vadim Pogodin – the man who shot Stepan three times in the head – joined the russian army and was sent to fight in Ukraine again. He was wounded last summer near Bakhmut.
On October 1, 2025, eleven years after his murder, President Zelenskyy posthumously awarded Stepan Chubenko the title Hero of Ukraine. He is the youngest Hero of Ukraine in the country’s history.
Stepan kept a notebook. He called it Euromaidan With My Eyes. In it, while he was still alive, he wrote a passage that reads now as if he had known what was coming for him:
For you, I will always remain young, because I will live in the short word “memory.” The war will pass, this black smoke will dissipate, but I will no longer be physically with you. I’ll be where the blue sky begins. I will be where the sun is during the day, where the star is at night. Everything in the world is quickly forgotten – but I live as long as someone remembers me.
His mother once said that Stepan believed there were three sacred things in a person’s life: God, parents, and the Motherland. And none of them can be betrayed.
A sixteen-year-old boy. A goalkeeper. A son. A boyfriend. A volunteer for an orphanage. A child who wrote his own elegy before russia murdered him for a blue and yellow ribbon.
He asked only to be remembered.
So we remember him.
Stepan Chubenko was the first child russia killed in this war.
He was not the last.
Glory to Stepan Chubenko.
Glory to all the children russia has taken from us.
Glory to Ukraine.
Heroes of Ukraine is a series profiling the men and women who have given their lives or their freedom to defend Ukraine. Read the others here.
© 2026 Roman Sheremeta
“Stepan was born on November 11, 1997, in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine. He was the only child of Viktor and Stalina Chubenko. His mother’s name – Stalina – was given to her by her own parents. She is a russian citizen who had moved to Ukraine in the 1990s. This is a detail that matters, because russia has spent eleven years claiming it invaded Ukraine to protect ethnic russians and russian speakers like Stalina’s family.”
The evil and hypocrisy of the putinaZis in a nutshell.
“On July 27, 2014, they took him to the village of Horbachevo-Mykhailivka, on the outskirts of Donetsk. They made him dig. Then they shot him three times in the head.”
Child-murdering scum.
That’s the putinaZis.
Let us remember that Ukraine’s most lethal enemy in the democratic world is Krasnov, who broadcast his hatred of Ukrainian people many times, culminating in :
“Some terrible things have been done by other political leaders. The scene in the Oval Office in February last year, in which the president and vice-president of the United States publicly bullied President Zelensky was the most degrading moment in Western diplomacy since 1945. The withdrawal of American aid has unnecessarily lost many lives and prolonged the conflict.”
Charles Moore in The Telegraph.
It is Krasnov who built his political career and won his second election on Ukraine hatred.
Because of him, millions of Americans now think like him.
“For you, I will always remain young, because I will live in the short word “memory.” The war will pass, this black smoke will dissipate, but I will no longer be physically with you. I’ll be where the blue sky begins. I will be where the sun is during the day, where the star is at night. Everything in the world is quickly forgotten – but I live as long as someone remembers me.”
Amen.
“What keeps me going is that I can still teach and train more people. And I want to live long enough to see robots fully take over the fighting.”
I hope you live a lot longer than that, hero.
“Specifically, he said: “I am pleased to report that approximately 30 minutes ago, we reached an agreement with the White House on a version of the sanctions bill against Russia that they will support. This means it will become law.”
The problem is that Lindsey has been saying this for years and did nothing. Moreover, instead of confronting Trump, he became the chief defender of his moral bankruptcy.”
Roman told how he met Graham at an event in the US. He promised his full support to his face.
Days later he endorsed Krasnov’s total block on Ukraine aid.
He’s flip-flopped back and forth ever since.
As a fellow southerner remarked of him :
“He’s a Southern ass-kisser, but with no substance.”
The sanctions bill proposed and agreed by Trump looks to be complete bullshit. It gives Trump the levers to impose the sanctions, in which case, you can forget about it.
From Politico : –
KYIV — “China warned Russia against using nuclear weapons in response to Ukrainian strikes on its territory, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters Thursday.
“I think you heard such voices in Russian media: ‘What if we respond to Ukrainian strikes with nuclear weapons?’ And it seems to me that this was the first time China … directly responded in an ultimatum-like form — that there can be no thought whatsoever of using nuclear weapons,” Zelenskyy said.
The Ukrainian president said he learned of Beijing’s intervention from European leaders at the NATO summit in Ankara, where they talked over “China’s role in ending the war [in Ukraine].” Zelenskyy added that he also discussed the topic with U.S. President Donald Trump, but he would prefer to keep the contents of that conversation private.”
I don’t think any “reassurance” from the chicoms is worth jackshit.
Same as Krasnov.
China continues to import ruSSian oil and keeps financing putler’s war machine.
Yes Mike.
The two most populous shitholes in the world; China and India, keep putlerstan running.
“This russian evil must be stopped at any cost.”
Develop a deadly virus that kills only ruskies.