Kiev Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Kiev. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Solovey will take me to the ends of the earth if I ask it. I am going into the world, Alyosha. I will be no one's bride, neither of man nor of God. I am going to Kiev and Sarai and Tsargrad, and I will look upon the sun on the sea.
Katherine Arden (The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy, #1))
You can't judge people and touch their souls at the same time.
Tama Kieves (Inspired and Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in your life's work)
I know that when a door closes, it can feel like all doors are closing. A rejection letter can feel like everyone will reject us. But a closed door leads to clarity. It's really an arrow. Because we cannot go through that door, we will go somewhere else. That somewhere else is your true life.
Tama J. Kieves
snow, the Dnieper … there’s no more beautiful city in the world than Kiev.
Mikhail Bulgakov (A Country Doctor's Notebook)
During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration.
Rosa Luxemburg
These is nothing divine about deprecating your gifts and talents or diminishing their worth in any way. Shining is sharing an abundance with us all.
Tama Kieves
We don't choose our wildest dreams. They choose us.
Tama Kieves (Inspired and Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in your life's work)
Can an actor ever truly become the part he plays?
Bella Forrest (A Shade of Kiev (A Shade of Kiev, #1))
We live in a world that worships limitations
Tama J. Kieves (This Time I Dance!: Creating the Work You Love)
Am I a Stalinist? A Capitalist? A Bourgeois Stinker? A rotten Red? No I’m a fairy with purple wings and white halo translucent as an onion ring in the transsexual fluorescent light of Kiev Restaurant after a hard day’s work
Allen Ginsberg (Collected Poems, 1947-1997)
Numbness was what I craved. It was the rope I used to climb out of the black hole I’d otherwise be trapped in. Numbness was my savior, not my fear.
Bella Forrest (A Shade of Kiev (A Shade of Kiev, #1))
He walked then with the same heart as those peasants who walk to Kiev after their faith has run dry and their life has turned into simply living it out.
Andrei Platonov (Chevengur (English and Russian Edition))
Physical pain comes and goes,” he said. “It’s inconsequential. A means to an end. But the mental pain you experienced will remain with you forever.
Bella Forrest (A Shade of Kiev 3 (A Shade of Kiev, #3))
No need to go to the dolphins,” interjected Max Brailovsky. “One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. And he’d won a gold medal for designing space-stations. What a waste!
Arthur C. Clarke (2010: Odyssey Two (Space Odyssey, #2))
The White Guard, written in the twenties and dealing with the nearly contemporary events of the Russian civil war in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sighted portrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions of war in all of literature.
Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)
Kiev, you understand, is a medieval city full of wild superstition and mysticism. It has always been the heart of Russian reaction. The Black Hundreds, may they sink into their graves, have aroused against you the most ignorant and brutal of the masses. They are deathly afraid of Jews and at the same time frighten them to death. This reveals to you something about the human condition. Rich or poor, those of our brethren who can run out of here are running. Some who can’t are already mourning.
Bernard Malamud (The Fixer)
No one tape her deepest gifts through shame, guilt or anger. In fact, if you come from obligation, others smell the sadness in your blood and they will run the other way,
Tama Kieves (Inspired and Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in your life's work)
You let go of fear by focusing on love. Love is the answer to fear.
Tama Kieves (A Year Without Fear: 365 Days of Magnificence)
eyes blacker than midnight paralyzed her. A draconian was in fact sitting in the church waiting for her, but it wasn’t Kiev. It wasn’t even Raum. It was Ash.
Annette Marie (Reap the Shadows (Steel & Stone, #4))
Transport a German to Kiev, and he remains a perfect German,” Hitler said. “But transport him to Miami, and you make a degenerate out of him.”9 Late
Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
You are so serious, as if a glacier spoke in your ear or you had to walk through the great gate of Kiev to get to the living room.
Frank O'Hara
A Shade of Kiev
Bella Forrest (The Girl Who Dared to Descend (The Girl Who Dared, #3))
Kiev became a linchpin of the medieval world, evidenced by the marriage ties of the ruling house in the second half of the eleventh century. Daughters of Yaroslav the Wise, who reigned as Grand Prince of Kiev until 1054, married the King of Norway, the King of Hungary, the King of Sweden and the King of France. One son married the daughter of the King of Poland, while another took as his wife a member of the imperial family of Constantinople. The marriages made in the next generation were even more impressive. Rus’ princesses were married to the King of Hungary, the King of Poland and the powerful German Emperor, Henry IV. Among other illustrious matches was Gytha, the wife of Vladimir II Monomakh, the Grand Prince of Kiev: she was the daughter of Harold II, King of England, who was killed at the battle of Hastings in 1066. The ruling family in Kiev was the best-connected dynasty in Europe.
Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World)
V. R. Lang You are so serious, as if a glacier spoke in your ear or you had to walk through the great gate of Kiev to get to the living room. I worry about this because I love you. As if it weren't grotesque enough that we live in hydrogen and breathe like atomizers, you have to think I'm a great architect! and you float regally by on your incessant escalator, calm, a jungle queen. Thinking it a steam shovel. Looking a little uneasy. But you are yourself again, yanking silver beads off your neck. Remember, the Russian Easter Overture is full of bunnies. Be always high, full of regard and honor and lanolin. Oh ride horseback in pink linen, be happy! and ride with your beads on, because it rains.
Frank O'Hara
The Empire would love to rip Ukraine from Moscow’s bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia’s border. Kiev’s membership of the European Union would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neoconservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family; but perhaps no price is too great to pay to for being part of glorious Europe and the West!
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
An update on the war in the Ukraine, for example, coming from an anonymous user, versus an update from a Blue Checked reporter from Reuters, with a bio that put him or her on the ground in Kiev, could be read differently.
Ben Mezrich (Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History)
Vladimir Shevchenko, a filmmaker from Kiev, died within a year of filming harrowing roof-top footage of the ruined reactor and Bio-robots entirely without protection. His cameras became so radioactive they had to be buried.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
The Empire would love to rip Ukraine from Moscow’s bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia’s border. Kiev’s membership of the European Union would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neoconservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family;
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
The telegram read: Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarchs’ Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz. Maximilian Andreyevich was known, and deservedly so, as one of the cleverest men in Kiev. But even the cleverest man would be baffled by such a telegram. If a man could wire that he had been run over, he obviously was not dead. Then what was this about the funeral? Or was he hurt so badly that he knew he would die? That was possible, but how could he know with such precision the day and hour of his funeral? An amazing telegram!
Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)
They had just started their first scheduled air service. Planes went from Vienna to Kiev and back like railway trains. There would be a network of flights all over Europe after Germany won the war. And Walter and Maud would raise their children in a peaceful and well-ordered world.
Ken Follett (Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy #1))
Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No
Steven Lee Myers (The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin)
Chissà se la luna di Kiev è bella come la luna di Roma, chissà se è la stessa o soltanto sua sorella… “Ma son sempre quella! – la luna protesta – non sono mica un berretto da notte sulla tua testa! Viaggiando quassù faccio lume a tutti quanti, dall’India al Perù, dal Tevere al Mar Morto, e i miei raggi viaggiano senza passaporto”.
Gianni Rodari
When she left the store, emboldened, receipt tucked into her purse, folded twice, Janet thought of all the chicken dishes she had not sent back even though they were either half-raw or not what she had ordered. Chicken Kiev instead of chicken Marsala, chicken with mushrooms instead of chicken a la king: her body was made up of the wrong chickens.
Aimee Bender (The Color Master: Stories)
suggested elegance, as if the Romans didn’t have enough on their own. Yet
Noel Hynd (Conspiracy in Kiev)
No one taps her deepest gifts through shame, guilt or anger. In fact, if you come from obligation, others smell the sadness in your blood and they will run the other way,
Tama Kieves (Inspired and Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in your life's work)
We live in a world that worships limitations.
Tama Kieves (This Time I Dance!: Creating the Work You Love)
Our culture obsesses over image. But our hearts crave reality. What will you live for? What you look like to others or what you feel like to yourself? Appearance or experience?
Tama Kieves (This Time I Dance!: Creating the Work You Love)
Of creatures who inhabit the darkness, there are two types. Those who revel in it, and those who fight to escape it.
Bella Forrest (A Shade of Kiev 3 (A Shade of Kiev, #3))
The fact is that the buildings here were not made to speak to the world as we know it, but to the citizens of the USSR. Visible from afar and unfailingly spectacular, they are effectively monuments, ideological markers endowed with an almost mystical aura by their positioning in space and expressive power. "By its incongruity, by its inhuman stature" writes the philosopher Jacques Derrida, "the monumental dimension serves to emphasize the non-representable nature of the very concept that it evokes." This concept, whether in Grodno, Kiev or Dushanbe, is might. The might of power. A power that would soon become illusory and whose crumbling is indeed manifested by the growing stylistic diversity of this architecture.
Frédéric Chaubin
It was the beauty of the liturgy in St. Sophia that converted Russia to Orthodoxy after a fact-finding mission from Kiev in the tenth century experienced the service and reported back: “we knew not whether we were in Heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour and beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that there God dwells among men.
Roger Crowley (1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West)
At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only.
Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way)
The tsar twice went to visit Stolypin again, but on both occasions Stolypin’s wife Olga, blaming him for the attack, refused to allow Nicholas to see him.45 On 5 September Stolypin died of sepsis and Olga Stolypina declined to accept the tsar’s condolences. With martial law declared in Kiev and 30,000 troops on alert, fears spread of an anti-Jewish pogrom in retaliation, prompting many of the Jewish residents to flee the city.
Helen Rappaport (The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra (The Romanov Sisters #2))
May Day festivities were held throughout the country on May 1st. Countless people marched through Kiev’s streets celebrating, just as the radiation intensity reached its peak. There had been no public warning; they were all contaminated. Who knows how many people developed health problems from being out on that day and those that followed. On May 15th, far too late, the city of 2.5 million people was evacuated of its children, their mothers, and pregnant women for four months.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
Rus’ had been Christian ever since Vladimir baptized all of Kiev in the Dneiper and dragged the old gods through the streets. Still, the land was vast and changed slowly. Five hundred years after the monks came to Kiev, Rus’ still teemed with unknown powers, and some of them had lain reflected in the strange princess’s knowing eyes. The Church did not like it. At the bishops’ insistence, Marina, her only child, was married off to a boyar in the howling wilderness, many days’ travel from Moscow.
Katherine Arden (The Bear and the Nightingale (Winternight Trilogy, #1))
Out here in the forests, in the mountains, in the villages, they are supposed to be pulling up disorder by the root. The total entropy of any system, said Dr. Hauptmann, will decrease only if the entropy of another system will increase. Nature demands symmetry. Ordnung muss sein. And yet what order are they making out here? The suitcases, the queues, the wailing babies, the soldiers pouring back into the cities with eternity in their eyes–in what system is order increasing? Surely not in Kiev, or Lvov, or Warsaw. It’s all Hades.
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
Candies Available for Civilian Consumption: Masha and Bear / Bear in the North / Little Bear / Clumsy Bear / Stratosphere / Strike! / Brighter! / Little Squirrel / Thumbelina / Moscow in Evening / Kiev in Evening / Fantastic Bird / Little Lemon / Little Lenin / Snowflake / Jelly / Fuzzy / Iris / Fudgy Cow / Little Red Hat / Alyonka / Little Miracle / Solidarity / Leningrad / Bird’s Milk / Red Poppy / Mask / Meteorite / Vizit / Red Moscow / Dream / Caramel Crab Necks / Goose Feet / Duck Beaks / Kiss Kiss / Golden Key / Snow / Crazy Bee…And So Many More!
Maria Reva (Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories)
The run-down test was originally scheduled for the afternoon of the 25th, but Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin was asked by Kiev’s national grid controller to delay it until after the evening peak electricity consumption period had ended.94 The afternoon staff had been briefed on the test and knew exactly what to do, but their shift ended and they went home. Evening staff took over, but then they too left, leaving the relatively inexperienced night crew - who had never conducted a test before - the responsibility of starting a test they were not prepared for and had not anticipated doing.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
By the end of 1986, the Liquidators had decontaminated more than 600 villages and towns. Army troops travelling in armoured vehicles washed Kiev’s buildings continually throughout May and June, and it became a crime to own a personal dosimeter in the city for more than two years after the accident. The government placed strict controls on the sale of fresh food; open-air stalls were banned. These restrictions lead the Head of the Central Sanitary and Epidemiological Service of the Ukraine to remark that, “thousands of ice cream, cake and soft drink stalls have vanished from the streets of Kiev.228
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
In a meeting, the Estonian president, Toomas Ilves, insisted to Obama that we had to take Putin at his word if he said he would take Kiev. Ilves had an academic manner, and he described methodically how Russia was using fake news and disinformation to turn Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority against Europe. Speaking in paragraphs, he tied together Putin, the emergence of right-wing political parties in Europe, and ISIL. These are people, he said, who fundamentally reject the legitimacy of the liberal order. They are looking for another form of legitimacy—one that is counter to our notion of progress. After the meeting, I joined Obama for lunch and told him I thought Ilves did the best job I’d heard of tying these disparate threads together, explaining a theory of the forces at work in the world without having to rely on a construct that roots them all in American foreign policy. Without missing a beat, Obama said, “That’s the same dynamic as with the Tea Party. I know those forces because my presidency has bumped up against them.” He paused. “It’s obviously manifest in different ways, but people always look to tear down an ‘other’ when they need legitimacy—immigrants, gays, minorities, other countries.
Ben Rhodes (The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House)
Chomsky was born and raised in Philadelphia, but his parents were among tens of thousands of Ashkenazic Jews who fled Russia following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881.110 Jewish anarchists were singled out (falsely) as the assassins, setting off waves of the bloodiest pogroms in history. On top of that, thousands of Jews were forcibly removed from their homes in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and adjoining regions and led off, some in chains, to the so-called Pale of Settlement, a geographical ghetto along Russia’s western frontier. They risked severe punishment if they ventured beyond the Pale…pale, as in the pales of a fence. Even inside the Pale they were restricted from entering cities such as Kiev and Nikolaev, from owning or even leasing property, receiving a college education, or engaging in certain professions. By 1910, 90 percent of Russia’s Jews—5.6 million in all—were confined to the Pale.111 Anarchism had been a logical enough reaction. The word “anarchy” literally means “without rulers.” The Jewish refugees from Russian racial hatred translated that as not merely no more czars…but no more authorities of any sort…no public officials, no police, no army, no courts of law, no judges, no jailers, no banks—no money—no financial
Tom Wolfe (The Kingdom of Speech)
Berta, like so many Great Russians, thought of Kiev and the surrounding provinces as a Russian outpost: provincial, backward, but Russified to some extent. She had a respect for both the Polish and German influences there, but agreed with the authorities that the Ukrainian culture and language had little to offer. It was banned in the schools and in the government institutions and was thought to be the purlieu of reprobates, lazy slum dwellers, and rustics. Berta was born in Little Russia, a small fact that she never bothered to share with anyone of consequence. She was a Great Russian, as anyone could see by her fierce accomplishments, tasteful dress, and overall refinement.
Susan Sherman (The Little Russian)
Where normally it would take one man an hour to do a job, on Chernobyl’s rooftop it took 60 men. The work took two and a half weeks, and in most cases each man only went up once - though some went up to five times, and the scouts many more times even than that. Only around 10% of the clean up on the roof was accomplished by actual machines. The rest was done by 5,000 men who absorbed a combined 130,000 roentgens, according to Yuri Semiolenko, the Soviet official responsible for decontamination of the plant.236 Vladimir Shevchenko, a filmmaker from Kiev, died within a year of filming harrowing roof-top footage of the ruined reactor and Bio-robots entirely without protection. His cameras became so radioactive they had to be buried.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner. Hang-gliding," I said, "accident." Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser." I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did. I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep. I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser. I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler' s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn't love money, in and of itself , not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn't work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing. So he made do with women. When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn't know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler's time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move's proved right and a sweet lump of someone else's credit clicks into your own account.
William Gibson (Burning Chrome (Sprawl, #0))
To celebrate the Russian/Ukrainian partnership, in 1954 the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty was marked throughout the Soviet Union in an unusually grandiose manner. In addition to numerous festivities, myriad publications, and countless speeches, the Central Committee of the all-union party even issued thirteen "thesis", which argued the irreversibility of the "everlasting union" of the Ukrainians and the Russians: "The experience of history has shown that the way of fraternal union and alliance chosen by the Russians and Ukrainians was the only true way. The union of two great Slavic peoples multiplied their strength in the common struggle against all external foes, against serf owners and the bourgeoisie, again tsarism and capitalist slavery. The unshakeable friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples has grown and strengthened in this struggle." To emphasize the point that the union with Moscow brought the Ukrainians great benefits, the Pereiaslav anniversary was crowned by the Russian republic's ceding of Crimea to Ukraine "as a token of friendship of the Russian people." But the "gift" of the Crimea was far less altruistic than it seemed. First, because the peninsula was the historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars whom Stalin had expelled during the Second World War, the Russians did not have the moral right to give it away nor did the Ukrainians have the right to accept it. Second, because of its proximity and economic dependence on Ukraine, the Crimea's links with Ukraine were naturally greater than with Russia. Finally, the annexation of the Crimea saddled Ukraine with economic and political problems. The deportation of the Tatars in 1944 had created economic chaos in the region and it was Kiev's budget that had to make up loses. More important was the fact that, according to the 1959 census, about 860,000 Russians and only 260,000 Ukrainians lived in the Crimea. Although Kiev attempted to bring more Ukrainians into the region after 1954, the Russians, many of whom were especially adamant in rejecting any form of Ukrainization, remained the overwhelming majority. As a result, the Crimean "gift" increased considerably the number of Russians in the Ukrainian republic. In this regard, it certainly was an appropriate way of marking the Pereiaslav Treaty.
Orest Subtelny (Ukraine: A History)
The Russians had long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests. Similarly, Putin’s hatred of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (limiting the number and location of Russian and NATO nonnuclear military forces in Europe) was understandable.
Robert M. Gates (Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War)
Having resisted repeated requests to evacuate Pripyat and the surrounding area by Legasov since his arrival, Scherbina relinquished on the evening of the 26th, and agreed that the population within 10km of the plant should be moved to a safe distance. However, even this decision was tainted. While the scientists favoured immediate compulsory evacuation, Scherbina decided not to inform the city’s residents until late the following morning, leaving them unaware of the perils faced by venturing outside for another night and almost no time to prepare for the evacuation. 1,100 buses in a convoy drove overnight from Kiev to transport the evacuees out of the area. Officials forbade residents from leaving in their personal cars out of concern that they would cause traffic jams and prevent a steady departure.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
On the 22nd of June, a door opened before us, and we didn't know what was behind it. We could look out for gas warfare, bacteriological warfare. The heavy uncertainty took me by the throat. Here we were faced by beings who are complete strangers to us. Everything that resembles civilisation, the Bolsheviks have suppressed it, and I have no feelings about the idea of wiping out Kiev, Moscow or St. Petersburg. What our troops are doing is positively unimaginable. Not knowing the great news, how will our soldiers—who are at present on the way home—feel when they're once more on German soil? In comparison with Russia, even Poland looked like a civilised country. If time were to blot out our soldiers' deeds, the monuments I shall have set up in Berlin will continue to proclaim their glory a thousand years from to-day. The Arc de Triomphe, the Pantheon of the Army, the Pantheon of the German people....
Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
Remember, the mind likes to window shop. It fancies the life in this boutique, then wants to try on the boots in another. But the soul invests all of itself. It's not as casual or as distracted by fashion, sales, promises or ease of acquisition. It's not interested in possibility. It pitches toward destiny. That's why you will never know a sense of ease, even when you come up with answers, unless you choose to listen to the answer that will take away all questions.
Tama Kieves (This Time I Dance!: Creating the Work You Love)
In Ukraine’s cities—Kharkiv, Kiev, Stalino, Dnipropetrovsk—hundreds of thousands of people waited each day for a simple loaf of bread. In Kharkiv, the republic’s capital, Jones saw a new sort of misery. People appeared at two o’clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until seven. On an average day forty thousand people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. Some were so weak from hunger that they could not stand without the ballast of strangers. The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. Pregnant women and maimed war veterans had lost their right to buy out of turn, and had to wait in line with the rest if they wanted to eat. Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear.
Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin)
The brave talk from Moscow notwithstanding, the Russian elite itself is probably well aware of the real costs and benefits of its military adventures, which is why it has so far been very careful not to escalate them. Russia has been following the schoolyard-bully principle: pick on the weakest kid, and don’t beat him up too much, lest the teacher intervene. If Putin had conducted his wars in the spirit of Stalin, Peter the Great, or Genghis Khan, then Russian tanks would have long ago made a dash for Tbilisi and Kiev, if not for Warsaw and Berlin. But Putin is neither Genghis nor Stalin. He seems to know better than anyone else that military power cannot go far in the twenty-first century, and that waging a successful war means waging a limited war. Even in Syria, despite the ruthlessness of Russian aerial bombardments, Putin has been careful to minimize the Russian footprint, to let others do all the serious fighting, and to prevent the war from spilling over into neighboring countries.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Non ho scritto questo libro per raccontare storie di ieri. È un discorso che faccio OGGI basandomi sul materiale dell’occupazione di Kiev, di cui casualmente sono stato testimone. Ma fenomeni analoghi accadono sulla Terra anche oggi, e non c’è nessunissima garanzia che non si ripresentino in forme ancor più sinistre domani. Non c’è la minima garanzia. Vogliamo contare quanta parte della popolazione della Terra vive oggi sotto sistemi basati sulla violenza? Il mondo non ha imparato niente. Il mondo è diventato più cupo. Si sta riempiendo di marionette ingannate, di automi programmati che con occhi estatici sono pronti a sparare contro qualsiasi bersaglio indichino i loro leader, a calpestare qualsiasi paese dove li mandino, ed è terrificante pensare alle armi che hanno in mano oggi. Se si grida loro in faccia: “Vi hanno ingannati, siete solo carne da macello e strumenti nelle mani di farabutti”, non sentono. Dicono: “Malevole calunnie”. Se si portano loro i fatti, semplicemente non ci credono. Dicono: “Non c’è mai stato nulla del genere”.
Anatolij Kuznyecov (Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel)
Then suddenly he wrenched himself away from under the witch, and sprang on her back in his turn. She began to run, with short, trembling steps indeed, but so rapidly that he could hardly breathe. So swiftly did she run that she hardly seemed to touch the ground. . . . He seized a stick that was lying on the ground, and began to belabor the hag with all his might. She uttered a wild cry, which at first sounded raging and threatening; then it became gradually weaker and more gentle, till at last it sounded quite low like the pleasant tones of a silver bell, so that it penetrated his innermost soul. Involuntarily the thought passed through his mind:“Is she really an old woman?” “Ah! I can go no farther,” she said in a faint voice, and sank to the earth. He knelt beside her, and looked in her eyes. The dawn was red in the sky, and in the distance glimmered the gilt domes of the churches of Kiev. Before him lay a beautiful maiden with thick, dishevelled hair and long eyelashes. Unconsciously she had stretched out her white, bare arms, and her tear-filled eyes gazed at the sky.
Nikolai Gogol (Вий)
Captain Sergei Volodin was an Air Force helicopter pilot who often flew a specially equipped Mi-8 transport helicopter around Ukraine. The aircraft was fitted with a dosimeter that Captain Volodin had used in the past to test radiation levels around Chernobyl out of his own personal curiosity. Prior to the 26th it had never even flickered. On the night of the accident, he and his crew were on standby for the Emergency Rescue shift covering the wider Kiev area, making his the first aircraft to arrive on the scene. As he flew around Pripyat, an Army Major in the rear measured radiation from a personal dosimeter. Neither wore any protective clothing. Volodin’s equipment went haywire as he cycled through its measurement ranges: 10, 100, 250, 500 roentgens. All were off the scale. “Above 500, the equipment - and human beings - aren’t supposed to work,” he remembers. Just as he was seeing his own readings, the Major burst into the cockpit screaming, “You murderer! You’ve killed us all!” The air was emitting 1,500 roentgens-per-hour. “We’d taken such a high dose,” the pilot says, “he thought we were already dead.”161
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
It is our policy not to negotiate with terrorists." I stared at the phone, my eyes wide. I was speechless and very, very angry. "Are you still there?" The voice belonged to an unnamed official in the NSA. Perston‐Smythe introduced him as one of Cox's supervisors. "What the fuck do you mean by that?" "It is the policy of this government not to negotiate with terrorists." "Do you mean to tell me that you consider me a terrorist?" He sounded almost prim. "Certainly. You've taken a hostage." "Terrorists," I said, gritting my teeth, "attack the innocent to achieve their goals. If you're about to tell me that you consider Cox an innocent bystander, then this conversation is over." "Terrorists are—" "Oh, fuck it! You want a terrorist action so you can consider me a terrorist? There's no way you can keep me out of your nuclear arsenals. Where do you want the first one to go off? The Pentagon? The White House? The Capitol building? How about Moscow or Kiev? Wouldn't that be interesting? Do you think they'd launch?" His voice was a lot less prim. "You wouldn't do that." "Well, as a matter of fact, I wouldn't. BECAUSE I'M NOT A TERRORIST!" I slammed the phone down on the hook and jumped.
Steven Gould
In the present situation of the overt Russian Orthodox Church in the U.S.S.R., which has the bishops and patriarchs and metropolitans, the leadership has to make concessions to the Soviet government. On the other hand, through making those concessions, certain churches in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev remain open. Beautiful services are made available, the very beautiful words of the Gospels are read aloud. In these matters you have to weigh the relative advantages and disadvantages. You can't take a definitive position about it. The solace of those services is so great, the importance of those words being kept alive and in circulation is so important, that the sacrifices, the compromises that are made must be accepted. But it's a very difficult equation to work out. It's the equation with which our Lord himself left us, that we must render unto God the things that are God's and unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. He neglected to tell us what proportion we owed, so that of course people like myself can hope to get by with offering Caesar very little. [...] The cleverness of that reply was of course that it didn't specify exactly how much was due to Caesar and how much to God. He left us to work out.
Malcolm Muggeridge (The End of Christendom)
The choice of 'eastern Europe' as a frame of reference requires a word of explanation. The term is used here in a provisional manner and indeed a rather arbitrary one, with the lower-case form intended to underline this. The travellers set out from places that stretch from Kiev to Rijeka, and from Gdansk to Crete. The eastern Europe that they represent includes the lands that lie between the Baltic in the north and the Mediterranean in the south; between Russia in the east and Italy, Austria and Germany in the west. These boundaries were set in part by the limits of the possible: had resources permitted, accounts by travellers from the Baltic countries or by Austrian Germans, among others, might equally well have been included here. My aim has been to assemble a representative selection of travel writings from this region: the anthology includes accounts from some twenty languages, by more than one hundred authors, written over a period of more than 450 years, beginning in the sixteenth century and finishing with a book published in 2004. The writers travel to Ireland in the west, to Istanbul in the east—and any number of places in between. But why group these particular east European travels through Europe together, in a single volume? The answer lies partly in eastern Europe's relationship to the idea of Europe itself.
Wendy Bracewell (Orientations: An Anthology of European Travel Writing on Europe (East Looks West))
Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the
Sheelah Kolhatkar (Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street)
A lawless place and a lawless people, the Italians said. A true frontier of civilization. Dangerous. FIFTY-FIVE The Stanhope Hotel was on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-third Street, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was
Noel Hynd (Conspiracy in Kiev)
Given how carefully choreographed Mr Putin’s public appearances are, the question itself touched a nerve in Kazakhstan. The country’s single greatest uncertainty is what will happen after Mr Nazarbayev, who has ruled since the break-up of the Soviet Union, stands aside or dies. Mr Putin praised the Kazakh president’s intelligence before asserting that “the Kazakhs never had statehood” before 1991. He was convinced that Kazakhstan would remain in the EEU, he added, because its people recognised that it was “good for them to remain in the sphere of the so-called greater Russian world, which is a part of global civilisation”. The comment was taken as part threat, part insult in Kazakhstan which, like Ukraine, has regions with a majority ethnic Russian population, fuelling fears it might share Kiev’s fate.
Anonymous
We, Russia, cannot talk about any ceasefire conditions whatsoever, or possible agreements between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. We can only facilitate the creation of an environment of trust in the course of this possible and much needed, in my opinion, negotiation process," Mr Putin said on Tuesday.
Anonymous
Ukraine — The embattled government in Kiev said Monday night that Russian forces had dramatically escalated the standoff
Anonymous
Nixon urged Clinton to maintain his relationship with Yeltsin but make contact with other democrats in Russia. He warned Clinton away from some ultranationalists and toward those interested in liberty and reform. He pressed Clinton to replace his ambassador in Kiev and concentrate future U.S. economic aid on Ukraine, where it would matter most.
Nancy Gibbs (The Presidents Club)
In the end, what it boils down to is that a great teacher will help you carve years off your practice time by showing you strategies and techniques that you probably won’t discover on your own, like the breathing trick tuba legend Arnold Jacobs used to avoid passing out. When Jacobs had to move a lot of air, he’d take CO2-rich breaths near the mouthpiece or breathe back through the tuba. He said, “When I get into these huge, massive blowing episodes, like The Great Gate of Kiev at the end of Pictures at an Exhibition, I will deliberately take the air back through the instrument to forestall hyperventilation.”[8]
Jonathan Harnum (The Practice of Practice)
I will have to pay more attention to Russian weather forecasts in future, to check that Kiev, Warsaw, Riga and Vilnius are not included in their maps.
Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine Diaries)
three major cities, Kiev, Novgorod, and Smolensk. The land in the southern regions of the principality was very fertile; so rich, in fact, that after one ploughing it produced excellent harvests for a number of years without any further tilling. The ax was the main agricultural tool, but ploughs were also widely used for the production of spelt, wheat, buckwheat, oats, and barley. Apple and cherry orchards were widespread in what is today Ukraine. Kievans also engaged in horse and cattle breeding.
Abraham Ascher (Russia: A Short History (Short Histories))
How and why Kiev came to adopt Christianity remains unclear. Legend has it that Prince Vladimir sent an emissary to the leaders of the main faiths to examine the beliefs of each. In the end, he allegedly rejected Islam because it forbade alcohol, which ‘is the joy of the Russian’, and Judaism, because it was the religion of a dispersed people without a state. More likely, political considerations prompted Vladimir to opt for Christianity.
Abraham Ascher (Russia: A Short History (Short Histories))
November 15th, 2012 0930 hours Podilskyi District Kiev, Ukraine   Boris Volkov brought the cleaver down on the talocrural joint, hard and with purpose, severing the anterior and posterior ankle ligaments before slicing clean through the Achilles tendon. He did the same to the left foot, tossing aside both feet into a steel drum lined with thick plastic, filled with his own concoction of lye and sulfuric acid. The result was a bone stripped clean of flesh, muscle and sinew. The bones would then be collected and fed to stray dogs roaming the back alleys of Podilskyi. He moved onto
Vincent Pauletti (The Bounty Hunters (Omega Sector))
Anton looked away, staring at the passing traffic as they drove through Kiev’s quiet back streets. “I don’t know. Ah, it is hard for me to ask these questions. If Dostiger finds out, he won’t just kill me. He’ll fucking torture me.” “Come on, Anton, he’s not going to torture you,” Saneh said. “Yes, yes, he will! He’s got a special room for it at the club. I’m serious. If he finds out, then I’m fucked.” “I understand,” Saneh said,
Jack Silkstone (PRIMAL Unleashed (PRIMAL #2))
The serviced apartment was advertised as a luxury penthouse, but the reality was very different; it looked like the set of a bad eighties TV show. White leather couches and lime-green linoleum tiles may have been fashionable thirty years ago, but now they were about as stylish as disco. For five hundred US a week, the place was a dump, but Bishop didn’t care. The apartment had the one redeeming feature the team needed: From the full-length balcony it offered a 270-degree panorama of downtown Kiev and perfect views of the Dostiger residence. Discreetly positioned
Jack Silkstone (PRIMAL Unleashed (PRIMAL #2))
What cannot help but astound us is that Hasidim remained Hasidim inside the ghetto walls, inside the death camps. In the shadow of the executioner, they celebrated life. Startled Germans whispered to each other of Jews dancing in the cattle cars rolling toward Birkenau: Hasidim ushering in Simhat Torah. And there were those who in Block 57 at Auschwitz tried to make me join in their fervent singing. Were these miracles? Some of those that failed? Perhaps. Yet there is something else. There is the spark lit in the Carpathian Mountains which has refused to go out. On the contrary, it rekindles our own wavering flame. Consolidated in Jerusalem, Hasidism reappears in the Diaspora everywhere. It would be difficult to imagine a more curious phenomenon: with almost the totality of its followers lost in the Holocaust, Hasidism today is throbbing with newly found vigor. At the Lubavitcher court in Brooklyn, you can see hundreds of youths from every corner of the land. I met Hasidim in Leningrad, Kiev and Moscow, and I was deeply moved by their hidden faith.
Elie Wiesel (Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters)
On September 29, 1941, the Germans shot 33,700 Kiev Jews in the Babi Yar ravine near the city.
Saul Friedländer (The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945)
The call of Constantinople echoed loudly around all of Europe in the eleventh century. Documents record that in the eleventh century it was home to men from Britain, Italy, France and Germany—as well as from Kiev, Scandinavia and Iceland. Traders
Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World)
И не іудеискы хулимъ, нъ христіаньскы благословимъ
Hilarion of Kyiv (Слово о законѣ и благодѣти)
Come on guys, let's be serious. If you really want to do something, don't just 'like' this post. Write that you are ready, and we can try to start something" [Mustafa Nayyem quoted in Chrystia Freeland, "Euromaidan, Kiev: A Place Becomes A Movement"].
Catie Marron (City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World)
Among the Dunshane staff, the young Ukrainian was the person he had struck up the closest friendship with. His chats with Anastasia revealed that she, like so many of her countrymen and women, had come to Ireland in search of a better life. Conor was surprised when she told him that she had, in fact, worked as a teacher in Kiev, but the money she made waitressing in Ireland was twice what she could earn at home. Two weeks earlier, in between departing and arriving tour groups, one of the receptionists had told him it was Anastasia’s birthday, so he had taken her out for a meal to cheer her up; she had seemed a bit lonely for home
Jean Grainger (The Tour)
A museum in Kiev has a mock-up of a piece of graphite the size of an army cap. The description states that, if it were real graphite, it would weigh sixteen kilos. That’s how heavy, how dense it is.
Svetlana Alexievich (Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics))
Well, I’ve been here since thirty-eight. I was at Elgen first. I did thirty childbirths there; before Elgen I hadn’t done any. Then came the war. My husband died in Kiev. So did my two children. Boys. A bomb. More people have died around me than in any battle in war. They died when there was no war, before there was a war. All the same. Grief is like happiness: it comes in all forms.
Varlam Shalamov (Kolyma Stories (New York Review Books Classics))
The historical core of Lenin’s following was a little group of political émigrés in Geneva who became known as the “Bolshevik colony.” A vivid picture of this group and of Lenin as its central figure comes from Valentinov. Having been won to Lenin’s views from afar by his reading of What Is to Be Done? this young revolutionary made his way to Geneva in early 1904, after escaping from a Kiev jail, and was received into the Bolshevik colony. It proved to be a group of people who regarded themselves as Lenin’s disciples and were worshipful in their attitude towards him. Although he was then only thirty-three years old, they habitually referred to him as the “Old Man” (starik), thereby expressing profound respect for his Marxist erudition and his wisdom in all matters pertaining to revolution.
Robert C. Tucker (Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929)
But it was Ireland’s mercurial folklore that supplied Bax with the dominant voice in his compositions. Beginning with Cathaleen-na-Hoolihan (1905), written three years after encountering Yeats, the list of his tone poems (spanning the years 1909–31) reads like the contents of an Arts and Crafts compendium of decadent fairy tales: In the Faery Hills, Rosc-catha, Spring Fire, Nympholept, The Garden of Fand, November Woods, Tintagel, The Happy Forest, The Tale the Pine Trees Knew. A sensualist and erotic adventurer (in 1910 he pursued a ukrainian girl he was infatuated with from St Petersburg to Kiev), Bax created lush, richly foliated sound-forests that attempted to conjure up a sense of narcotic abandon and the intoxicating conjunction of myth and landscape. In the Faery Hills (1909) takes its cue from a section in Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin in which the Sídhe force a troubadour to sing them a song. Aware of their reputation as festive types, Oisin launches into his most joyous ditty. To the Sídhe, it still sounds like the most depressing dirge they’ve ever heard, so they toss his harp into a pool and whisk him away to show him how to party like it’s AD 99. Bax claimed to have been ‘possessed by Kerry’s self’5 while writing it.
Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
including 600,000 soldiers at Minsk and Smolensk and another 665,000 at Kiev.
Captivating History (World War 2: A Captivating Guide from Beginning to End (The Second World War))
On the Friday morning the Spurs party left Moscow and flew south to Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. After the disappointing weather in the Russian capital they were more than happy to arrive on a wonderful sunny day. The players were confidently told that the good weather would last throughout their stay and the visit to Kiev turned out to be the highlight of the tour. The people in the sun-drenched city seemed more relaxed than those in Moscow and the extensive beaches stretching along the banks of the River Dnieper were crowded with sunbathers. ‘They were a different sort of people,’ recalls Medwin. ‘They weren’t near Moscow and so didn’t feel the same pressure. It was a different way of life there. They enjoyed themselves and it looked a bit more glamorous.
Ken Ferris (The Double: The Inside Story of Spurs' Triumphant 1960-61 Season)
In fact, Mackay had mixed feelings about the whole trip. ‘As a tour it was neither an education nor an adventure, but as a special occasion it was a tremendous success and in Kiev, Moscow and other parts behind the Iron Curtain, I shall always believe we laid the foundation of the team spirit and genuine friendship which has since played a notable part in the success of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.
Ken Ferris (The Double: The Inside Story of Spurs' Triumphant 1960-61 Season)
I greatly respect my colleagues from Kiev and their massive integrity, even if they do occasionally poison the shit out of one another as part of the natural flow of democratic give-and-take.
Nick Harkaway (Tigerman)
You are not missing out on anything in life, unless you're missing out on this moment
Tama Kieves
This was the first inkling of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near Kiev. It happened two days before, when I was in the Soviet Union - in Baikal, cursing the Soviets for never bothering to fix leaky pipes.
Paul Theroux (Riding the Iron Rooster)
On August 29, I flew from Kiev to Moldova and Belarus, continuing my travels in the former republics of the USSR. I wanted to show Russia we had a sustained focus on its periphery and were not content simply to leave these struggling states to contend with Moscow alone. Had I stayed in the White House longer, I had more substantive plans for US relations with the former Soviet states, but that was not to be. Particularly in Minsk, despite Alexander Lukashenko’s less-than-stellar human-rights record, I wanted to prove the US would not simply watch Belarus be reabsorbed by Russia, which Putin seemed to be seriously considering. One aspect of my strategy was a meeting the Poles arranged in Warsaw on Saturday, August 31, among the national security advisors of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the United States. Let the Kremlin think about that one for a while. I obviously had much more in mind than just having additional meetings, but this was one that would signal other former Soviet republics that neither we nor they had to be passive when faced with Russian belligerence or threats to their internal governance. There was plenty we could all do diplomatically as well as militarily. After I resigned, the Administration and others seemed to be moving in a similar direction.18
John R. Bolton (The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir)
—On February 23, one day after the Winter Olympics ended, Putin unveiled his surprise, but in a way so oblique and startling that not everyone could quickly recognize its importance. Crimea was about to change ownership. Eastern Ukraine was about to descend into civil war. The Rada, in Kiev, seemed
Marvin Kalb (Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War)
... Lies and lies... lies ... not understanding properly ... Dexter always keep's a distance... always he lies... soona.... that's how it follows “It’s simple human nature to keep little secrets about ourselves. We all do it.” – Dexter “I have to keep my secret safe otherwise my life – her life – will never be the same.” “She’s not as comfortable lying to the world as I am.” – Dexter “Even if I’ve put Deb in the uncomfortable position of lying for me, at least I’ve kept the bigger truth from her.” – Dexter “When you’re losing control of your entire life it helps to focus on what you’re good at – my little secret.” – Dexter “I shouldn’t be doing a kill now. The irony is that’s the only way I can maintain control, the only way I can keep this from Deb.” – Dexter “How careless were you? One first class, one-way ticket to Kiev, Ukraine, leaving in less than two hours? Very careless.” – Dexter “We do everything by the book. We’re cops, not killers.” – Deb “Being a killer would feel so very good right about now.” – Dexter “When will she believe me? What happens if she never does?” – Dexter “If you think she’s upset now, that’s nothing compared to how she’d feel if she learned what you are. She’d be terrified.” – Harry “Dex, she loves who she thinks you are. If she ever saw the real you, she’d never get over it.” – Harry “I need control. I’m trying to make things go back to the way they were.” – Dexter “Oh my God! An employee and a pervert. I don’t know which wall you go to.” – Quinn
Deyth Banger
Le président Porochenko affirme que Poutine lui aurait déclaré en septembre 2014 que “si [il] le voulait, les troupes russes pourraient arriver en deux jours, non seulement à Kiev, mais aussi à Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Varsovie et Bucarest”, dans des États membres de l’Union européenne et de l’Otan.
Michel Eltchaninoff (Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine)
Jan was born in a small town outside of Kiev, Ukraine. He was an only child. His mother was a housewife, his father a construction manager. When Koum was sixteen, he and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, California, mainly to escape the anti-semitic environment of their homeland. Unfortunately, Jan’s father never made the trip. He got stuck in the Ukraine, where he eventually died years later. His mother swept the floors of a grocery store to make ends meet, but she was soon diagnosed with cancer. They barely survived off her disability insurance. It certainly wasn’t the most glamorous childhood, but he made it through. After college, Jan applied to work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He spent nine years building his skills at Yahoo, and then applied to work at Facebook. Unfortunately, he was rejected. In 2009, Jan bought an iPhone and realized there was an opportunity to build something on top of Apple’s burgeoning mobile platform. He began building an app that could send status updates between devices. It didn’t do very well at first, but then Apple released push notifications. All of the sudden, people started getting pinged when statuses were updated. And then people began pinging back and forth. Jan realized he had inadvertently created a messaging service. The app continued to grow, but Jan kept quiet. He didn’t care about headlines or marketing buzz. He just wanted to build something valuable, and do it well. By early 2011, his app had reached the top twenty in the U.S. app store. Two years later, in 2013, the app had 200 million users. And then it happened: In 2014, Jan’s company, WhatsApp, was acquired by Facebook―the company who had rejected him years earlier―for $19 billion. I’m not telling this story to insinuate that you should go build a billion-dollar company. The remarkable part of the story isn’t the payday, but the relentless hustle Jan demonstrated throughout his entire life. After surviving a tumultuous childhood, he practiced his craft and built iteratively. When had had a product that was working, he stayed quiet, which takes extreme discipline. More often than not, hustling isn’t fast or showy. Most of the time it’s slow and unglamorous―until it’s not. 
Jesse Tevelow (Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion)