Butterfly weed

I’m going to have dinner with a friend tonight so I thought I’d avoid last night’s goof up by posting early today.

This is a butterfly weed. It is native. I bought when I was being irrational and buying plants despite a heat wave and knowing that this is just a dumb time of year to plant even w/o it being the hottest year on earth. I chose this one over the type right next to it because there was a bee that kept choosing this kind. It’s not dead yet so far so good. 

One of the things I was trying to post about is that we had the largest prisoner exchange we’ve ever had with Russia. A number of countries got people back. The US got back a former marine now businessman and a reporter. 

Business Insider has an article that says Ukraine has been able to hit surprisingly deep inside Russia because Russia’s air defenses are stretched. Ukraine is hugely disadvantaged in terms of air forces but they’ve still held back Russia’s much larger Air Force. Ukraine went after Russia’s air defense systems and now is able to reach areas they couldn’t before. 

Russia is facing a huge desertion problem. Idite Lesom, a Georgia based group that aids troops trying to desert told The Moscow Times that it had an 89% increase in requests for assistance in the past few months. The group’s name means “go through the forest” but is used as a curse phrase on what you can do to yourself. That is what the article said. I tried to find out and Wikipedia has “Get Lost” as the sanitized name in English. I found another article that says the curse phrase is a message to Russian authorities and the second message  is, “Hide in the forest” which is what they tell people who don’t want to go to Ukraine. It is a big risk, 15 years in jjail if it goes awry, and no help from the West, but they don’t want to die and they don’t want to commit atrocities.