Historians and Housewives Are Keeping Putin on His Toes from buzai232's blog

Historians and Housewives Are Keeping Putin on His Toes

With tourniquets, there is no way of doing things on the cheap. These lifesaving devices, used to stop blood loss from a wounded limb and prevent death from bleeding, need to be 100 percent reliable: a solid, wide Velcro band sufficiently long to be put around a thigh and a tough crank to pull it tight, with a sturdy locking mechanism. A good tourniquet costs $20 to $30 and the best ones are made in the United States. As with many other products, Chinese vendors sell a variety of fakes — something as simple as a rope on a rod is an invitation to counterfeit. Worse than useless, the Chinese knockoffs are a liability when they snap in the trembling, slippery hands of a bleeding person.To get more news about bulletproof vest camo, you can visit bulletproofboxs.com official website.

Tourniquets are probably not spoken about much at the high-level meetings where military officials and politicians discuss deliveries of HIMARS, Bradleys and Patriots, but the nature of the warfare in Ukraine makes tourniquets absolutely essential: This war is fought at a distance, with missiles fired from land, sea or air, and bombs dropped from planes or drones. Injuries from shrapnel or debris are increasingly more frequent than direct bullet hits.

In the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tourniquets were hard to come by. The Ukrainian troops defending their country often had to make do with the black inner tubes of bicycle tires or similar devices. Now most have the imported high-quality “combat application tourniquet,” or C.A.T. However, for many other items required for their country’s defense, Ukrainians have found local solutions. This has largely been thanks to an army of civilians who call themselves “volonteri” — volunteers. These people may or not be part of some local nongovernmental organization, but they know that their country needs them, and they have answered the call.

A barbaric feature of this war is that Russia attacks civilian buildings like hospitals, schools, kindergartens, theaters and cultural centers. Recently, the Russian onslaught has concentrated on Ukraine’s power grid and the rest of the country’s infrastructure. So it is only natural that civilians participate so widely in the defense of their homeland. These patriots — a vital support for the dedicated and courageous army — were the biggest surprise for Vladimir Putin, who thought his takeover would be easy, if not welcomed. They annoy him as much as the Patriot missile systems the United States announced it would send to Ukraine. Both patriots and Patriots will defend Ukraine, although the president of Russia says that both constitute a threat to his country. But the president of Russia says many things.
At the very beginning of the conflict, volonteri focused on stopping the Russian advance and protecting Ukraine’s towns. This happened in Odesa and throughout the country: Train tracks were cut into pieces and welded together to make anti-tank barriers known as hedgehogs. Entire parts of towns were covered by these; now they are less prevalent and often are painted blue and yellow after the Ukrainian flag.

In the first week after the invasion, civilians prepared themselves to directly face the assailants, and there was a frenzy of Molotov cocktail production among Ukrainians of all walks of life. Those improvised incendiary weapons did not serve much use, though, in a war in which the Russian aggressors are rarely close enough to hit with a Molotov cocktail.
The volunteers learned on the go, by trial and error. Take the body armor: Ukrainian soldiers now wear flak jackets, but they didn’t always. Soon after the invasion, the business community of Odesa started purchasing bulletproof vests online, mostly from Turkey and China, but — with no previous experience of land war — these ad hoc army suppliers went for the more easily available type of vest usually worn by the police, which protects against shotguns but not against heavier weapons.

On the night before Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, Nikolay Viknyanski, a furniture maker from Odesa, called a meeting of local businessmen to enlist them in civilian support for the military effort. As a result, a maritime logistics operator named Oleksandr Yakovenko joined forces with a few others — a bank manager, a contractor for the Azovstal metallurgy company, an owner of a restaurant chain — and soon “Made in Ukraine” flak jackets appeared.