It has become much more personal:
I think you misspelled ‘disgusting’.
My eldest daughter (23) lives with her mother in Moscow. She does not agree with the war.
Still looking for ways to get her out.
Here’s the link to United24, the official Ukrainian government donation site (endorsed by Zelenskyy). You can specify that your donation is for humanitarian aid, rebuilding, or military aid. Apple Pay works, and Paypal is fee-free for non-miltary donations.
This is a SDMB thread on donating to Ukraine.
This is a link to Reddit r/ukraine, which has a list of approved charities.
The United24 site includes breakdowns of how much money is being donated each day, and what items are being purchased. A lot of helmets, shoes, underwear, and drones.
Military donations seem to be running about $200,000 per day, which is down, maybe 30%, from a few months back. And while foreign governments are chipping in billions in equipment, anyone who has worked for a charity knows how important non-earmarked funding is. Receiving ammunition is wonderful, but it’s nice to have money to buy toothpaste.
It saddens me that this shit can happen today. I said the same thing with our own adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is why we can’t have nice things - were not far enough removed from our inbred savage tendancies.
Anyway, I too, am much more aware of Ukraine’s geography and political history, and that of Russia’s. I have Russian ancestry, and a connection the the (now) Ukrainian city of Lviv. My life is not directly affected much, but I have been donating to Ukrainian releif, and locally there is a sizable Ukrainian/Slavic/Russian community, so we are donating material there. I am also on the lookout for kids and adult bicycles that are unwanted or discarded that I can fix-up and donate to displaced Ukrainian families in the area.
The oddity outweighed the disgusting part. Attitidudes across the political spectrum have shifted quite a bit, and at one time I could always count on the right to be anti-Russian as their form of government was anthetical to American values.
As a cold-war veteran it is a sore point for me especially since, being navy, the main focus was on countering our Soviet blue water counterparts. After the USSR collapsed there wasn’t much call for the direction-finding stations I worked at. They’re all gone but for one the Canadian navy has kept active. Two of the three I worked at have been erased entirely, the third still shows scars in Maine.
I wonder if, the Chinese causing tension on the South China Sea, the Pentagon wishes some of them were back.