Russian Embassy In Washington Becomes The ‘Battle Ground’ As Ukraine Supporters, Putin’s Officials Engage In ‘Laser War’

By
Tanmay Kadam
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A group of activists in the US projected images of the Ukrainian flag across the Russian Embassy in Washington on March 13, which was not appreciated by the Russian officials inside.

The video has gone viral on the Ukraine social media which was originally posted by Benjamin Wittes, an American legal journalist and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

In the video, a projection of the Ukrainian flag can be seen moving onto a wall of the Russian embassy. While the Russian embassy staff appeared to be trying to counter the projected blue and yellow colours of the Ukrainian flag with a bright white spotlight of their own, basically to drown out the colours with white light.

The projected Ukrainian flag moved onto the Russian embassy wall from nearby trees and this was quickly followed by a spotlight from somewhere close to the base of the building beaming upwards and following the flag around.

“We lit up the Russian embassy in blue and yellow but the guards inside had a surprise for us. They are using their spotlights to wash us out,” said Wittes.

The image of the flag was beamed from across the street using a bank of 14 theatre stage lights. Wittes said that the effort was weeks in the making to secure donations of the lights and determine the specifications necessary to project the image from such a distance.

Man shoots Ukraine flag projection at DC Russian Embassy in wild video 55 | TweakTown.com
The image of the Ukrainian flag is chased around by the bright white spotlight of the Russian Embassy Staff. (TweakTown)

“It was the most invasive, obtrusive, obnoxious thing that I could do to Russian diplomats that do not molest or do violence to their prerogatives as diplomats in the United States,” Wittes said during one of several live feeds of the event. “I don’t want to make it comfortable to be a Russian diplomat in the United States right now.”

Wittes also said that the gesture was aimed at showing solidarity with refugees who lost their homes in Ukraine and those who have been killed during the war.

The ongoing Ukraine crisis has triggered a mass exodus that has become Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War 2. While the refugee crisis worsens with each passing day, the support for the refugees also seems to be growing.

Latest estimates suggest, that more than 4.6 million refugees have fled Ukraine and a further 7.1 million people have been internally displaced within Ukraine which means about 11.7 million people have been forced to flee their homes – more than a quarter of the population of Ukraine – in less than seven weeks.

russian-embassy
Russian Embassy Washington DC

Most of them are fleeing to neighboring countries such as Poland and Romania. Not all of these governments were open to refugees in the past but to accommodate this influx, European leaders have been forging political consensus and working towards fast-tracking the asylum-seeking process.

Even Japan which has historically been unwelcoming to asylum seekers has reportedly welcomed more than 400 Ukrainian people, as of early April.

Meanwhile, some 13 million people appear to be stranded in affected areas, as they are unable to leave because of security risks, destruction of bridges and roads, as well as lack of resources or information about where to find safety and accommodation.

Many of them are unable to meet their basic needs including food, water and medicines. The delivery of life-saving aid remains challenging, with a lack of safe humanitarian access.

The most devastating fate has befallen the country’s 7.5 million children, as many of them continue to be killed, wounded and deeply traumatized by the violence all around them.

The animals in Ukraine who are caught in the chaos of violence are also facing the worst horrors. By one estimate, Ukraine was home to some 750,000 dogs and 5.5 million cats as of 2014 and many of those animals have been left behind by their owners because of war, especially the larger dogs.

As war rages on, several organisations and even civilians who continue to stay in Ukraine have been working to provide food and shelter to the animals left behind in the war-torn nation.

Meanwhile, nine humanitarian corridors in the east and south of the country including one in the besieged city of Mariupol have been opened according to the announcement by the Ukrainian government on Thursday, March 14th.

“Humanitarian corridors in the Lugansk region will be run under the condition of cessation of shelling by the occupying forces,” Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a statement on social media.

Ukrainian authorities have been urging people in the southeastern Donbas area to quickly move west in advance of a feared, large-scale Russian offensive to capture its composite regions, Donetsk and Lugansk.

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