Boston Herald

From Ukraine: Making a Molotov

One way a civilian can protect themselves from invaders

- By Tatyana Kislaya shatolamat@gmail.com

Tatyana Kislaya is a journalist based in Kyiv. She writes for ABO Local Media Developmen­t Agency, a collaborat­ion between 45 newspapers and 300 journalist­s spread across Ukraine. They are linked by a common website — Svoi. global — and now the Boston Herald.

It is not difficult to diagnose a society in shock, there are a number of symptoms: queues everywhere — at ATMs, in shops, at gas stations, in pharmacies.

Compulsive following of the news is all around me. We check the news every 30 seconds. In the early days of the war, we could neither sleep nor eat, chained to the screens of smartphone­s, we endlessly read the news, checked the Facebook feed, etc.

And so various ideas began to appear on social networks on the topic of how to protect yourself from the invaders. The first item on the new list of life during wartime was the Molotov cocktail. You take a glass bottle, add a flammable liquid to it and plug it with a rag. Then the rag can be set on fire and thrown into a tank.

The first time such a weapon was used was in Cuba in 1895, and then it was widely used by the Finns during the war with the USSR in 1939. In those years, this combustibl­e mixture was dubbed a “Molotov Cocktail” after Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs at the time.

And in 2022, the recipe for this simple, but not very effective, weapon again became popular in Ukraine. Today, Ukrainian women and children are busy collecting bottles and pouring in flammable substances. Some decide to throw them at the Russian armored vehicles, but this often leads to the clothes of the thrower catching fire.

The second item in the fight against the occupier was also a cocktail, but of a different kind that I had never heard of before the war. In a bottle of water, you dissolve 10 tablets of Kaptopres, a medication for high blood pressure. The tablets are said to be odorless and tasteless. If a soldier asks a Ukrainian civilian for water, then you can slip in this medical cocktail and in a few hours, the enemy is guaranteed to die. I don’t really know if this is true, however, because I have never tried it.

But I do know that the flip side of the panic and the populariza­tion of Kaptopres cocktail is that there is a colossal shortage of this medicine. In general, it is difficult to find all medicines in Ukraine now. Sedatives were the first to disappear from the shelves of pharmacies, then hormonal and cardiac drugs.

Kaptopres is an emergency medicine to control blood pressure, and if it is not taken in time the blood pressure can rise to very high levels and cause a stroke.

I wonder how many other people could not find Kaptopres and died? War has a million ways to take a life.

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 ?? AP FILE ?? FIRE: A local resident prepares to use a Molotov cocktail against a wall during an allUkraini­an training campaign ‘Don’t panic! Get ready!’ close to Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 6.
AP FILE FIRE: A local resident prepares to use a Molotov cocktail against a wall during an allUkraini­an training campaign ‘Don’t panic! Get ready!’ close to Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 6.

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