Happy Defender of the Fatherland Day From Crimea!

Hello everyone, I have a big surprise for you. Maria and I are now back at our dacha in Crimea, and this time we brought the pets. The trip was quite a hassle but we did it and everyone is here safe and sound.

Spazz immediately fell in love with the big yard, he has never had one this large before, and spent hours playing and foraging.

The catwas stressed out a little at first but today found the upstairs loft, and looked down at us inferiors.

As I mentioned in the title, today is Defender of the Fatherland Day in Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Abkhazia, Transnistria and South Ossetia. Defender of the Fatherland Day commemorates the mobilization of the Red Army to resist German attacks seeking to exploit Russian internal weakness after the revolution.

To celebrate, I cooked us some steak on our authentic wood stove.

We plan to be here year-round this time, and I hope to reach a new level of writing, both with my Russian translations and other writings.

You can read the translations here. I currently am working on Konstantin Rokossovsky’s WWII memoir and a 1947 biography of Joseph Stalin. There will be more coming soon.

As for my Russia News Reports, for now, I will be releasing them once a week (I think Friday), with special issues for holidays and particularly noteworthy events. You can also follow me on X for updates from Russian language media.

That’s all for now, I’ll have longer updates tomorrow, which I will be sharing daily here. 🙂

Ian Kummer

I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.

Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).

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