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More on Ukrainian oligarchs here. I expect they would like to have their description changed to plain billionaire in case their yachts, luxury apartments and private jets get seized by mistake. They are the people who Western politicians, from their armchairs, are asking Ukrainian workers to fight and die for.
I wonder if the ICC (not them, the one in The Hague) will be investigating possible war crimes by the Ukrainian authorities like parading captured soldiers on TV for propaganda purposes. Or have they, too, like all the world’s sporting bodies, been enrolled in the NATO anti-Russia campaign?
I knew it was coming. The next will be babies on bayonets.
An interesting article on what a peace deal might look like — Ukraine can join the EU but not NATO. But why was this not put on the table before? Why did NATO choose to call Russia’s bluff? I suppose the answer is that what decides what happens is not logic but ‘might is right’. The West thought it was mightier and was therefore right and Russia had to try to show that it was.
It is very hard to know who is telling the truth
The answer will be that neither is. As Russia is saying less about how their war is going it is telling less lies. Ukraine is saying so much that it is the bigger liar if only by default. Personally I don’t believe a word that the Ukrainian authorities say. Even tame and biased Western war correspondents have had to take saying that something is ‘claimed’ or ‘reported’. Everything that the Ukrainian authorities turn out is either a fabrication or an exaggeration. Russia is out to erase all Ukrainians. Russia is out to blow up all Europe. I am just waiting for them claim that Russian troops are bayoneting babies.
It would be nice to think that Russian troops were mutinying and refusing to kill their fellow workers but the sources you give don’t seem too reliable. One is a report of a report of a report. The other is reported as a “claim” and is attributed to a retired Ukrainian diplomat. These claims seem more like Ukrainian propaganda lies.
The population of Kharkov are mostly Russians, as are those on the Ukrainian side of the eastern border.
Are you sure about that? According to the Wikipedia entry on “Kharkiv” (as we have to spell it now), only 33% of the population of Kharkov classified themselves as Russian in the 2001 Ukrainian census. The figure for the whole of Ukraine was 17% which, at one out of every six inhabitants, is quite high.
More hypocrisy, double standards and lack of historical knowledge, this time over the vote today in the UN General Assembly to condemn the Russian invasion.
The media were emphasising how rare such emergency sessions are, this being only the 11th since the UN was set up in 1946. No mention that the two previous ones were aimed at Israel following its occupation and virtual annexation of the Golan Heights in 1982 and East Jerusalem in 1998. These sessions were held following the USA using its veto in the Security Council.
Politicians have been saying that the Russian annexation of Crimea marked the end of the principle of the UN that no member state should annex the territory of another. Israel did this in annexing the Golan heights from Syria. Not only did Israel use the resolution condemning this as toilet paper but the US ignored it too; in fact defied it in 2019 when it recognised this annexation.
The UN (Security Council and General Assembly) is a talking shop incapable of preventing wars as it was was intended to. It is also a producer of toilet paper and Russia can add the latest resolution to its stock.
Amid the talk of war crimes in Ukraine, a reminder of what happened when NATO bombed cities in Yugoslavia in from March to June 1999:
“The NATO bombing killed about 1,000 members of the Yugoslav security forces in addition to between 489 and 528 civilians. It destroyed or damaged bridges, industrial plants, hospitals, schools, cultural monuments, private businesses as well as barracks and military installations.”
“‘Dual-use’ targets, used by civilians and military, were attacked, including bridges across the Danube, factories, power stations, telecommunications facilities, the headquarters of Yugoslav Leftists, a political party led by Milošević’s wife, and the Avala TV Tower. Some protested that these actions were violations of international law and the Geneva Conventions. NATO argued these facilities were potentially useful to the Yugoslav military and thus their bombing was justified.”
And got away with it.
It looks as if it is rather Zeletsky who is cracking up. Here he is claiming that Russia’s aim to kill all 44 million Ukrainians:
“they all have orders to erase our history, erase our country, erase us all.”
Completely irrational.
Putin was (re-)elected president in elections in 2018. He was first elected in 2000.
The elections would have been far from ideal by democratic standards (certain candidates were banned, no equal access to publicity) but there is no evidence that the end result would have been different.
In other words, he didn’t seize power illegally or unconstitutionally. And he wouldn’t have been able to exercise the full powers of president without the support of an elected Parliament (even if the elections there were fully democratic either). So he is more like Erdogan of Turkey than a straightforward dictator like Hitler or Stalin.
Just heard the Ukrainian President say that God is on his side. Of course he is. But he is also on the Russian side. He seems to love inciting wars so he can support both sides and enjoy seeing them slaughter each other.
Here’s another, ridiculous piece of war propaganda from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. How could anyone believe that a group of bearded Muslims speaking Russian with a foreign accent would be able to get anywhere near the Ukrainian President? Or perhaps they were supposed to be suicide bombers?
But there is a more sinister aspect. In the USSR people from the Caucasus were internal migrants doing the sort of shitty jobs that immigrants do in Britain, discriminated against and regarded as the lowest of the low, as this article from 2017 pointed out. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence evidently thought that it was a good idea to evoke the spectre of savage Muslim fanatics in order to consolidate Ukrainian nationalism amongst the population.
While we hear a lot about Russian oligarchs and their “ill-gotten gains” we hear rather less about Ukrainian oligarchs and theirs.
“In total, the top 100 wealthiest business people in Ukraine control around $44,5 billion, according to Forbes, which accounts for 27% of Ukrainian GDP in September, 2021.”
