the only thing better than Russians telling me — who lives in Kyiv — that they know better what is going on here from their Moscows and Vladivostoks — is Americans telling me the same.

your post presents a lovely combination of ignorance, drivel and sheer misinformation, which does not warrant a serious answer. you might consider telling your drug dealer to stop selling you baking soda.

at first it was just mercenaries and veterans from Russia's other armed conflicts, who were wearing no military insignia on Russian uniforms and now they are sending over regular military.

Ukrainian news in English http://www.ukrinform.ua/eng/

Germans don't like us — they try to make us the uber-antisemites. everybody else just believes sll Ukrainians are either prostitutes or bandits or Russians.

did not understand your question about spetznaz.

alternative history (and Russian officers falling through to different time periods and settings) has been an extremely popular genre in Russian sci-fi community in the last 10 years — they have been re-fighting all armed and unarmed conflicts for the last 1000 years, with Russians kicking all kinds of ass and saving…

get your propaganda materials straight, comrade. They did not burn alive. they suffocated. some were shot, though.

what part of your comment was intended as sarcastic? Ukraine had elections. proper elections. no coups. no nazi ministers and the presidential candidates from formally nationalist parties (they are mostly populist left) gained fewer voices than a guy with a surname Rabinovich.

don't bother to present him facts or logic. he seems to be another one of those Russian sofa warriors who hate Ukraine and write their vitriolic comments mostly for pay.

the situation is even funnier than that. Avakov is a pretty rich man himself, and as a lover of sci-fi he used to sponsor sci-fi conventions called 'Star Bridge' in Kharkiv for about 7 years. and a whole bunch of the Russian sci-fi writers, including Sergei Lukianenko (the author of Night Watch) used to frequent them…

oh, did not think the 3 yuan commenters made it to io9...

as a matter of fact, Russia has. its military is now fighting the Ukrainian army without the poor guise of local separatists.

well, they can always use Ukrainian rockets.

had those posters at school. learned this stuff in lessons on civil defense. still remember a good deal of those lessons.

I am Maria Dmytriyeva. I am a translator / feminist blogger / linguist and all things sci-fi and fantasy afficionado. I live in Ukraine. I've been enjoying io9 (and generously sharing it with my friends) for about 4 years now.

still have some of these issues somewhere in my parents' house.

they were quite prolific. their early work is more about utopian future worlds, where Communism brought people to space, and how human fragility and heroism bring out the best (or the worst) in people. later works became bleaker and bleaker until the last novels written by Boris Strugatsky under a pen name read like…

that film has been in production (not production hell) for 15 years. we lost hope to ever see it long ago, and now it comes.