Russia has occupied less than 1 per cent of Ukraine's territory since November 2022.

'[Making "territorial concessions" would mean handing over] a region the Russians have been unable to capture fully since 2014, thanks largely to the powerful system of fortifications there. At the current pace of the Russian army’s advance, it would take them many years to seize full control.

Giving this defense belt up would enable unhindered, rapid advances of Russian equipment and threaten Ukraine’s very existence as a state. And despite breakthroughs in the Donetsk region, they still have not managed to capture cities protected by fortifications. According to a recent report by the Institute for the Study of War, capturing the cities in the fortress belt would likely take several years and cost Russia significant human lives and material losses.'

In other words, anyone presenting the current state of Russia's invasion as a stunningly overwhelming military force is either ill-informed, or presenting a false picture in order to push a particular agenda. This is not to say that life as a soldier or civilian in Ukraine is particularly easy right now, but it's important to keep these facts in mind.

'Territory' is not lines on a map, on an empty piece of paper: it is the people who live there, and 'territorial concessions' is a conveniently bloodless euphemism for condemning hundreds of thousands of people to totalitarianism and human rights abuses without justice.

This has been a pretty standard weekend: exercise, Saturday lunchtime in the market, a little bit of wandering with Matthias, Saturday film night, some reading, some cooking, some pottering about in the garden. I feel stretched but relaxed, which is exactly what I wanted.

Due to all the travel (and being sick), my exercise regime has been very irregular for the past couple of months, and for various reasons, yesterday was my first time doing my two hours of Saturday fitness classes for about six weeks. It was tough going, but I made it through, though my muscles are very angry at me today. After struggling my way through the classes, I met Matthias at the market, and we did the week's grocery shopping (mainly vegetables, of which there are many, and all are splendid), collected library books, and ate woodfired pizza from a food truck in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar, which was filled with excitable dogs. I also impulse-bought a secondhand Le Creuset lidded skillet in extremely good condition, for half price, which was an unexpected bonus.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon lying around on the couch, alternating between reading and watching cooking videos on Youtube, apart from half an hour doing stretchy yoga in an attempt to stave off the inevitable muscle soreness. Then I cooked a lazy dinner (vegetable frittata — other than chopping the vegetables for roasting, you just stick things in the oven and leave them alone), and we settled in for our selected Saturday night film: Mountainhead, a direct-to-TV satire about a quartet of terrible American tech billionaires holing up in a mountain retreat to get away from the fallout from a disastrous rollout of new features on one billionaire's social media platform, and plot and scheme about the future. This is possibly too on the nose for US politics reasons (two characters are really obvious fictionalised versions of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; the others feel more like amalgams of various horrible tech elites), and it's not exactly subtle, but if you want to spend an hour and a half watching the antics of a quartet of terrible, oblivious, and pathetic people, this will serve you very well. The dialogue is absolutely word perfect.

Sunday dawned sunny and bright, and I headed off to the pool to swim my laps through liquid sunshine (again difficult, as my swimming routine has been as erratic as my fitness class attendance), and then walk home, where I passed a house in which three different cats were all lying contentedly in various patches of sunlight, looking thoroughly pleased with their life choices. The morning was mostly eaten up with cooking crepes and doing household chores, but Matthias and I did venture out briefly after lunch to get gelato (a good life choice on our part). I've been spending the afternoon doing yoga and catching up on Dreamwidth, and in a bit I'll get started on dinner, which will be a stuffed capsicum recipe from the Ottolenghi/Tamimi Jerusalem cookbook, using some of the giant tomatoes from our garden.

This week's reading has had a bit more genre variety than normal, which made me happy.

( Books behind the cut )

And that's pretty much it, although earlier in the week, Matthias and I also met up with friends from our former department, who now live in Germany and have a ten-month-old baby. It was a hot night, and we sat out under the trees in a lovely Cambridge beer garden, catching up and delighting in the antics of their very cute baby. I hadn't seen them since their wedding, which now feels like an age ago.

I'll close out this post with the news that one of my friends from undergrad, who is now a children's book author, won the Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year. (Hers isn't the book that gets discussed in depth in the article, but I was struggling to find any publication other than paywalled material that focused on hers.) On top of winning the juried vote, her book also won the shadow award voted on by a panel of children, which is fantastic, and very well deserved.