A while ago I was told a story; somebody's grandma, who lived in Donetsk, went to Volnovakha to pick up her Ukrainian pension in February 2022 (cash-only), and got caught up in the beginning of the SMO. She decided to go to Mariupol "until things calm down". A relative of hers was living at a dormitory adjacent to Azovstal, so she went there (terrible luck on that woman). The dorm was taken over by Azov fighters, who kept everyone who was still there as hostages. Absolute minimum of food and water, and no food at all after a week or so. At some point, they realized the Ukrainian soldiers would run into the basement anytime a Russian drone was close enough to be heard, and used that to flee. The old woman and her relative dashed through the kill zone and managed to avoid drones, bombs and snipers, and safely reached the Russian lines. It's a crazy story, the chain of bad luck and picking the worst possible new place to go at every spot, but after listening to the story what stuck with me was: oh yeah, she was kidnapped and taken hostage by Azov and used as a human shield. That's a thing that happened. And it registers to me as "normal" because that's just a thing they did and still do and despite constituting the worst series of war crimes Europe has seen since the Balkans, comparable only to ISIS in Syria, it's not even "shocking" to me anymore because of how much exposure to this terrible sort of thing I had and how nobody outside of Russia cares *at all*