Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV
Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2022 10:50 pm
U.S. Considers Supplying Ukraine With Fighter Jets, White House Says
Potential move would expand U.S. involvement in war and risk significant escalation with Russia
John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, said the Pentagon would not be able to supply fighter jets to Ukraine right away.
PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By Nancy A. YoussefFollow
and Yaroslav TrofimovFollow
Updated July 22, 2022 6:13 pm ET
The Pentagon is considering providing Ukrainian forces with fighter jets, the White House said Friday, marking what would be a significant expansion of U.S. involvement in the war and carrying with it a risk of more direct confrontation with Moscow.
The Pentagon “is making some preliminary explorations into the feasibility of potentially providing fighter aircraft to the Ukrainians,” said John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications. “But it’s not something that they’re going to be able to execute immediately or even in the short term.”
(more, behind paywall...)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-consid ... 1658522096
They flap their jaws to make noise...totally irrelevant given the time it would take to train pilots on not only a different aircraft but one from a different design school.
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Shooting the messenger: Press TV correspondent in Ukraine put on 'kill list’
Friday, 22 July 2022 11:39 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 23 July 2022 2:00 PM ]
Press TV correspondent in Ukraine Johnny Miller says he has been placed on a “kill list” by Ukrainian ultranationalists following his revelations about Ukrainian atrocities against pro-Russian children and other civilians in the Donbas region.
Reporting from the war-torn country on Friday, Miller said that the neo-Nazi group wants him dead following his repeated reports about Ukrainian forces’ violence in the east of the country.
In an interview with Press TV, Miller said that he was placed on the kill list after he sent a journalistic inquiry to the website that had published a kill list of hundreds of people.
“Actually I contacted the website for a statement, which is normal in journalistic standards, but they didn’t reply to my statement… rather, they put me on the list,” the correspondent said.
“It’s clear that some parts of Ukrainian society [are] witnessing some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, when a journalist does a legitimate story about a kill list and they put him on the same list,” he added.
He warned that most of the people on the list, including a 13-year-old teenager who was interviewed by Miller, “have already been receiving threats of physical violence.”
“There is no doubt that this list does promote violence, and the killing of anybody on that list,” he noted, adding that there are “over 300 children” on that kill list right now.
Miller called on international organizations such as the UN to take down this list and said that it’s so shocking that there is no pressure from such organizations.
“There should be more pressure from western countries to take down this list, [which is] promoting violence against children and journalists through an extremist behavior and ideology.”
“The Ukrainian government has the power to take down this list; NATO countries have a huge influence over Ukraine, but it doesn’t seem to be any pressure to take down this list at the moment,” Miller said.
He said that in spite of Western media’s supposition, there is a considerable degree of “extremism” in Ukraine, which he has been trying to highlight through the years.
Journalists face threats if they criticize NATO, Ukrainian govt: Press TV’s correspondent
A Press TV correspondent says security situation inside Ukraine is too dangerous for journalists critical of the the US-led NATO Western military alliance.
The development comes as a number of journalists have been killed in Ukraine after being put on the list.
Miller is famous for his revealing reports in the east of Ukraine since the Russian offensive started on Feb. 26.
In a damning report last month, Miller revealed that the Ukrainian army has been shelling civilians in the areas surrounding the Donetsk region, while accusing the Russian army of atrocities.
“The uncomfortable truth is that Ukraine is killing civilians, indeed its own civilians, as it has been doing so for the last eight years,” said Miller, who traveled to the Petrovsky district near the frontline in Donetsk to investigate the incidents.
Back in May, the Russian army also confirmed that Ukraine’s shelling killed and injured its civilians in the southern region of Kherson, pounding southern and eastern areas with missile strikes.
According to Russia’s RIA news agency, Ukrainian missile strikes hit a school, kindergarten, and cemetery in the villages of Kyselivka and Shyroka Balka in the Kherson region in early May.
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/07/2 ... t%E2%80%99
Video at link.
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Solidarity rally in Galicia, Spain, in 2014.
Understanding Ukrainian Nazism
Originally published: Struggle-La Lucha on February 26, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz (more by Struggle-La Lucha) | (Posted Mar 05, 2022)
In the West, media outlets are claiming that Russia’s agenda to “denazify” Ukraine is unfounded. At the same time, public opinion in Western countries is totally alienated from the Ukrainian reality, tending to believe only what is reported by the hegemonic media. The result of this is strong disapproval of the Russian attitude based on the lie that there is no trace of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine. In this sense, it is urgent that quality information be disseminated to the Western audience to avoid the proliferation of lies about the Ukrainian reality.
On almost every TV channel and newspaper in the West, Ukrainian Nazism is questioned with the worst possible arguments: Zelensky is Jewish, and the Ukrainian state is democratic. This kind of superficial thinking prevents a detailed analysis of the catastrophic situation in Kiev since the Maidan, when, through a coup d’état, an anti-Russian junta took power and institutionalized a racist and anti-Russian ideology, which remains until the current days.
When we talk about “Ukrainian Nazism” we are not saying that Kiev is a contemporary copy of Hitler’s Berlin, but that the neo-Nazi element is a fundamental point of post-2014 Ukraine. The Maidan coup was openly supported and financed by NATO as a way of undermining any Russian influence in Moscow’s own strategic environment. The aim was to make Ukraine a puppet state, commanded from Washington, ending any link with Russia. There was not only the objective to annihilate political, economic, and diplomatic relations between Kiev and Moscow, but also to eliminate cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic ties between both nations.
Since then, anti-Russian plans have been implemented. Ethnic Russians have been persecuted for the past eight years–even through systematic extermination in some regions. The Russian language has been criminalized in entire cities where the population does not speak Ukrainian. Schisms in the Orthodox Church have been supported to form a Ukrainian “national church” out of the Moscow Patriarchate. But the question remains: how has this been possible if Ukrainians and Russians are such close peoples? Many Ukrainians speak Russian and marry ethnic Russians, in addition to the fact that most of the country’s population follows the Orthodox Church. So how was it possible to initiate such a successful racist policy?
This was certainly one of the biggest concerns of the Maidan planners. And the answer lies in the Nazi element, which was very well worked out by Arsen Avakov, Minister of the Interior during the Poroshenko government. Avakov initiated a process of instrumentalizing neo-Nazi militias that had supported Maidan, making these extremist groups key points in the defense of the new Ukrainian regime. In the West, due to collective ignorance about Slavic history, many people think that Nazi racism was restricted to Jews, but in fact, anti-Russian hatred was one of the biggest locomotives of WWII, having led Hitler to the irrational decision to invade and try to annex the USSR. This sentiment is alive in these neo-Nazi militias, who are literally ready to do anything to annihilate the Russians, being much more fanatical in their racist convictions than the Ukrainian armed forces.
Groups such as the Azov Battalion, C14 and the armed militias of rightist parties such as Pravyy sektor and Svoboda operate freely in Ukraine and are most responsible for the extermination of ethnic Russians in the Donbass. These groups act with more violence and using more sophisticated equipment than the Ukrainian armed forces themselves, being the real face of Kiev’s anti-Russian brutality. As neo-Nazis, these militias have no obstacles in complying with the government’s objective of destroying any ties between Russians and Ukrainians, thus being the main allies of the Maidan era.
In a 2020 Freedom House’s report, “A new Eurasian far right rising”, it is said that the far right is one of the strongest and most influential elements in Ukrainian society today, being a sophisticated, highly professionalized, and visible political force. In other words, what would be violent and criminal urban groups elsewhere on the planet have been converted by Kiev into a pro-Maidan parallel armed force. The inspiration for this model of action comes from the original Nazism: the Schutzstaffel (SS) was one of the largest German armed political forces during the 1930s and 1940s, but the group was not part of the German Armed Forces, but a paramilitary militia instrumentalized by the government apart from the official troops. There was a major strategic objective with this: while the German military was commanded by the government, the SS fought for the Nazi Party and for Hitler–that is, if Germany surrendered, the SS would declare war on the German military. This type of “double-shielded” military system is the same one that Kiev has implemented: if one day a pro-Russian government is elected, the neo-Nazi militias will declare war on Kiev–and will be strong enough to defeat the official troops in the same way as the SS was stronger than the German armed forces.
It is necessary to note that these groups operate not only in the sphere of military force, but also in the cultural field, fomenting anti-Russian hatred among ordinary Ukrainians. The exaltation of Stepan Bandera (Ukrainian anti-Soviet nationalist leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany) is one of the symptoms of this. Before the Maidan, Bandera was a name like any other in Ukrainian history, but he came to be remembered and venerated as a national hero by neo-Nazis and anti-Russian politicians. In the same sense, these groups vandalize parishes and monasteries of the Russian Orthodox Church and are responsible for the consolidation of a Ukrainian mentality entirely hostile to Russia, which is gradually permeating the local population.
Ukraine is in fact ruled by a Jew and the country’s power structure is indeed publicly “democratic”, despite being internally authoritarian and corrupt. But the Nazi element is not in these aspects, but in the structure of protection of the post-Maidan Ukrainian state, which is supported by a national coalition of neo-Nazi militias whose objective is simply to persecute and kill Russians, regardless of who is in power in Kiev. It does not matter to these militias if the President of the Republic is a Jew–what matters is that Russians are dying, which favors both neo-Nazis and the pro-NATO politicians they protect. In other words, the Western media’s arguments to deny Putin’s claims about Ukrainian Nazism are weak and superficial.
Moscow is right in its concern to denazify Ukraine. It is a measure that should be taken in coalition by several countries. All over the world, Nazism is “condemned”, but only when it benefits the West. The closest political experience to Nazism in the present days has been seen and peacefully tolerated by liberal governments that claim to be defenders of human rights and democracy. Russia is simply no longer willing to put up with crimes being committed by neo-Nazis against its people and there is nothing wrong with that decision.
https://mronline.org/2022/03/05/underst ... an-nazism/
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Will US citizens be exchanged
July 23, 17:30
Will US citizens captured in Eastern Ukraine be exchanged?
This week, SouthFront published the appeals and stories of American mercenaries Alexander Dryuke and Andy Hinh, who were captured in June 2022 in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine.
At the same time, the American media began to raise the question - what are the ways to return US citizens to their homeland. Taking into account all the circumstances of the detention of Alexander Dryuke and Andy Hinha, this can only possibly arise as part of the exchange procedure.
US officials report that they are in constant contact with their Ukrainian counterparts and are making every effort to include mercenaries on the next exchange list. Previously, the parties to the conflict have repeatedly carried out the exchange of prisoners of war. However,from the point of view of the Russian Federation and the DPR, these persons do not have the status of prisoners of war, since they are citizens of a third country who took part in an armed conflict for a monetary reward, in other words, they are considered criminals who are accused of committing crimes against citizens of the Russian Federation and the DPR. In particular, they were charged under Art. 430 of the Criminal Code of the DPR. This article is a complete analogue of Art. 359 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
In accordance with Art. 430 of the Criminal Code of the DPR and Art. 359 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, a mercenary is a person who acts in order to receive material reward and is not a citizen of a state participating in an armed conflict or hostilities, who does not permanently reside on its territory, and is also not a person sent to perform official duties.
An important circumstance is that legal actions against the detainees are carried out by law enforcement agencies of the DPR. Apparently, this is due to the fact that in July 2022 the DPR authorities lifted the ban on the use of the death penalty as capital punishment. Earlier, other 3 foreign mercenaries have already been sentenced to death and are awaiting execution. The only chance to save the lives of these convicts was an act of pardon by the head of the DNR, Denis Pushilin. It is likely that a similar verdict will be passed against Alexander Dryuke and Andy Hinh.
The exchange of mercenaries for military personnel of the DPR or the Russian Federation seems unlikely due to their legal status. Does this mean that the fate of the Americans is sealed. Definitely not. There are procedures for the political exchange of convicts, which have previously occurred repeatedly between the United States and the Russian Federation (USSR). The last such case took place on April 27, 2022, when US citizen Trevor Rowdy Reed, previously convicted in the Russian Federation, was exchanged for Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko, convicted in the USA. Legally, the procedure was formalized through acts of pardon.
Thus, it is possible for US citizens to avoid the death penalty and return home. About 400 citizens of the Russian Federation are kept in US prisons, a significant part of whom were convicted for political reasons. Probably the most notable example is Viktor Bout, who has already served half of his sentence in an American prison.
However, there are several pitfalls in the way of political dialogue on the exchange of convicts.
First, there are no even indirect contacts between the US and the DPR. It is hard to imagine that for the sake of individual citizens, Washington will go to establish even unofficial contacts with Donetsk, because this will mean the recognition of the DPR as an actor in international relations.
Contacts along the lines of the USA - Ukraine - Russia - DPR seem to be unproductive. As it was written above, Alexander and Andy do not have the status of prisoners of war. Through the Ukrainian side, it would be possible to carry out an exchange if the prisoners were officially US military personnel, were in Ukraine as instructors under an agreement between the US and Ukraine, and, of course, did not take a direct part in hostilities. The last condition is mandatory, since the United States does not recognize itself as a party to the conflict.
The US-RF-DPR channel remains. On this path, the main obstacle will be the public opinion of the residents of the DPR. For 8 years of aggression from Kyiv, almost every inhabitant of the republic lost relatives or close people killed. Residents of the DPR are hungry for retribution. In order for the exchange to take place, the leadership of the republic will need very weighty arguments why foreign mercenaries sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment are pardoned and transferred to the Russian side for a subsequent exchange.
At the same time, there are signals that the Russian Federation and part of the DPR leadership are still open to negotiations with the United States. The success of the negotiations will depend entirely on the political will of Washington. From what price the American establishment is ready to pay in order to demonstrate to its population the commitment to the principle of protecting its citizens abroad in all possible ways. At the moment , unfortunately for the prisoners, Biden did not come up with anything better than to announce some new sanctions against those involved in holding US citizens in captivity. How the "sanctions" should help Americans return home, the oldest US president did not say.The situation is also complicated by the emerging information that behind the recruitment and organization of the traffic of American mercenaries to the territory of Ukraine are official US structures, in particular USAID through intermediaries.
https://southfront.org/us-citizens-capt ... exchanged/ - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7755211.html
Attacks on the Odessa port
July 23, 16:31
Regarding strikes on the Odessa port. If you carefully study the published documents of the agreement on the export of grain, it is easy to see that:
1. There are no obligations of Russia not to strike at Odessa. There are only obligations not to attack the infrastructure necessary for the export of grain.
2. The destroyed boats in the port have nothing to do with the export of grain. These are military targets that can and should be destroyed as part of achieving the goals of the NMD, which have not disappeared anywhere.
3. This strike simply shows that the export of grain according to Istanbul-1 does not mean the cessation of hostilities and attacks on Odessa will continue.
4. How does it work? Take Hodeida in Yemen. In 2018, from June to November, as part of Operation Golden Victory, the Saudi coalition, with the support of Israel and the United States, fought intense battles against the Houthis, with missile and air strikes, with thousands of dead and hundreds of pieces of destroyed equipment (Saudi and co. raked). All this did not interfere with the process of implementing the agreements (although they were also thwarted) on the entry of ships with food for the starving population of Yemen into the port of Hodeidah. agreements under the auspices of the UN.
So the war is separate, the grain is separate.
The tantrums about the strikes are to try to provide cover for the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Odessa with grain export agreements. The worst thing that the Russian Federation could do is to stop strikes on the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Odessa and the Odessa region because of the tantrums of Kyiv and its sponsors. I hope the strikes continue. The best way to stop attacks on the port of Odessa is to withdraw the entire military infrastructure from there, while the city is not yet liberated.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7754782.html
"Alliance of Teachers" and its work for the SBU
July 23, 14:50
Trade Union "Alliance of Teachers" and its work for the SBU
It looks like an iron foundation for the closure of the trade union and the imprisonment of all those involved in the transfer of data to foreign intelligence agencies who did not have time to escape.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7754725.html
Google Translator
Too bad I can't read Russian...and it's too bad we no longer have access to the posts from 2014-2015. In the early 90's the Ukrainian so-called nationalists(Nazis) got their foot in the door of government and got one Ministry as a result of parliamentary elections. They chose Education, a reflection of long term planning. They immediately began stuffing education on all levels with their hateful propaganda and fanciful histories, and this is how a movement originally identified with the old Hapsburg province of Galacia became widespread throughout much of Ukraine.
"Russia send teachers to control what students learn" was the caption from the Washington Post that accompanied the image which refuses to show.
Damn straight, save the children.
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About new deliveries of MLRS to Ukraine
July 23, 23:56
About new deliveries of MLRS to Ukraine
In Washington, after the voyage of congressmen to Kyiv, they said that the United States should supply only 25-30 HIMARS MLRS (and identical systems from other countries) to Ukraine. That is, to the declared 20, of which 16 were officially transferred (and of which, according to the statement of the RF Ministry of Defense, 4 + 1, which was allegedly sold, but which was never shown), should be added another 5-10 pieces.
It is important to understand that in addition to issues related to the desire to intensify strikes against warehouses and command posts of the RF Armed Forces, these deliveries also hide a rather banal goal - to replenish the general fleet of heavy MLRS, which the RF Armed Forces have fairly thinned out by destroying a significant number of Hurricanes, etc. . systems. In addition, due to heavy use, there is a known problem with the resupply of ammunition for such systems. For Western heavy MLRS, there is no problem with BC, because deliveries, despite the known percentage of the RF Armed Forces destroyed by missile strikes, can go on for a long time.
Unlike Europe, in the United States, the stocks of missiles and shells are as voluminous as in the Russian Federation, which is why they are pledged for a long war, because from a resource point of view they can afford it (unlike Europe). The main thing is that Ukrainian cannon fodder stably fertilizes the fields of the left bank and maintains the conflict at a level convenient for the United States without freezing and dumping it into a direct conflict between the United States and Russia. This, in fact, is the essence of the rather unsophisticated American strategy.
PS. At the front today without significant progress, so tomorrow evening there will be a summary for 2 days. Well, yes, in Ukraine today they crookedly admitted that they messed up with the "environment of Vysokopolye". Big losses + zero result.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7756120.html
Google Translator
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From Cassad's Telegram account:
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forwarded from
WarJournal[Z]
Feedback on the work of Russian tankers in the area of Seversk, DPR.
American journalist "The Politico" Christopher Miller reported the destruction of four foreign mercenaries in the Seversk region during the week, he was told about this by the commander of this unit. The militants were reportedly ambushed by Russian tankers northwest of Seversk. Their group was tasked with stopping the possible forcing of the Seversky Donets by units of the RF Armed Forces.
Destroyed: 2 US citizens - Luc Lucishin (b. 1991) and Brian Young (b. 1971), Canadian citizen - Emily-Antoine Roy-Sirois (b. 1991), Swedish citizen - Edward Celander Patrignani 1994 (b. R). A few more unnamed “Russian safari” lovers escaped with injuries.
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Сolonelcassad
Wrote on this topic this afternoon https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7754782.html .
In the evening, the UN read the text of the agreement in Istanbul and began to suspect something.
The UN said that Russia may not have violated the agreement on the export of Ukrainian grain by shelling the port of Odessa. The words of an unnamed representative of the organization are quoted by The New York Times.
According to the official, "technically, Russia may not have violated the deal, since it did not commit to avoid attacks on those parts of Ukrainian ports that are not directly used for grain exports."
I repeat, anyone can open the text of Istanbul-1, read it, think (if there is something) and realize that in the text of the agreement there are no obligations of Russia not to strike at military targets in Odessa or the Odessa region. All agreements concern, roughly speaking, only merchant ships that export grain, mooring walls (roughly speaking, part of the Odessa port) and grain terminals. All.
Therefore, it is logical to expect that the Armed Forces of Ukraine, realizing the reality, will begin to hide ammunition and equipment as close as possible to the grain terminals or port facilities involved in Istanbul-1, so that in case of strikes, yell that "Russia is violating the deal", although it is Ukraine that violates it when it deploys military installations next to the structures that are involved in it. But as we know from the experience of Mariupol or Severodonetsk, this is standard practice, so if necessary, ammunition will be buried directly into the grain.
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Сolonelcassad
Today in Ukraine they began to declare that there is no encirclement of the RF Armed Forces near Potemkino and Vysokopolye. This was forced to broadcast, including Arestovich, who launched this duck. Since their flock spent the whole day eating this informational manure from a shovel and demanding evidence of "encirclement", the topic became too toxic and today they began to merge it so that it would not work out like with the "attack on Kherson".
In practice. As it was mentioned yesterday, the attempts to "encircle" the RF Armed Forces near Vysokopolie ended with the fact that 2 battalions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that rushed to organize the "Vysokopolie Cannes" came under concentrated artillery fire of the RF Armed Forces, suffered heavy losses in killed and wounded and rolled back to the original ones.
In Ukraine, they preferred to inform the audience about the beginning of the "offensive", and not about its outcome.
https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin
Google Translator
Potential move would expand U.S. involvement in war and risk significant escalation with Russia
John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, said the Pentagon would not be able to supply fighter jets to Ukraine right away.
PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By Nancy A. YoussefFollow
and Yaroslav TrofimovFollow
Updated July 22, 2022 6:13 pm ET
The Pentagon is considering providing Ukrainian forces with fighter jets, the White House said Friday, marking what would be a significant expansion of U.S. involvement in the war and carrying with it a risk of more direct confrontation with Moscow.
The Pentagon “is making some preliminary explorations into the feasibility of potentially providing fighter aircraft to the Ukrainians,” said John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications. “But it’s not something that they’re going to be able to execute immediately or even in the short term.”
(more, behind paywall...)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-consid ... 1658522096
They flap their jaws to make noise...totally irrelevant given the time it would take to train pilots on not only a different aircraft but one from a different design school.
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Shooting the messenger: Press TV correspondent in Ukraine put on 'kill list’
Friday, 22 July 2022 11:39 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 23 July 2022 2:00 PM ]
Press TV correspondent in Ukraine Johnny Miller says he has been placed on a “kill list” by Ukrainian ultranationalists following his revelations about Ukrainian atrocities against pro-Russian children and other civilians in the Donbas region.
Reporting from the war-torn country on Friday, Miller said that the neo-Nazi group wants him dead following his repeated reports about Ukrainian forces’ violence in the east of the country.
In an interview with Press TV, Miller said that he was placed on the kill list after he sent a journalistic inquiry to the website that had published a kill list of hundreds of people.
“Actually I contacted the website for a statement, which is normal in journalistic standards, but they didn’t reply to my statement… rather, they put me on the list,” the correspondent said.
“It’s clear that some parts of Ukrainian society [are] witnessing some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, when a journalist does a legitimate story about a kill list and they put him on the same list,” he added.
He warned that most of the people on the list, including a 13-year-old teenager who was interviewed by Miller, “have already been receiving threats of physical violence.”
“There is no doubt that this list does promote violence, and the killing of anybody on that list,” he noted, adding that there are “over 300 children” on that kill list right now.
Miller called on international organizations such as the UN to take down this list and said that it’s so shocking that there is no pressure from such organizations.
“There should be more pressure from western countries to take down this list, [which is] promoting violence against children and journalists through an extremist behavior and ideology.”
“The Ukrainian government has the power to take down this list; NATO countries have a huge influence over Ukraine, but it doesn’t seem to be any pressure to take down this list at the moment,” Miller said.
He said that in spite of Western media’s supposition, there is a considerable degree of “extremism” in Ukraine, which he has been trying to highlight through the years.
Journalists face threats if they criticize NATO, Ukrainian govt: Press TV’s correspondent
A Press TV correspondent says security situation inside Ukraine is too dangerous for journalists critical of the the US-led NATO Western military alliance.
The development comes as a number of journalists have been killed in Ukraine after being put on the list.
Miller is famous for his revealing reports in the east of Ukraine since the Russian offensive started on Feb. 26.
In a damning report last month, Miller revealed that the Ukrainian army has been shelling civilians in the areas surrounding the Donetsk region, while accusing the Russian army of atrocities.
“The uncomfortable truth is that Ukraine is killing civilians, indeed its own civilians, as it has been doing so for the last eight years,” said Miller, who traveled to the Petrovsky district near the frontline in Donetsk to investigate the incidents.
Back in May, the Russian army also confirmed that Ukraine’s shelling killed and injured its civilians in the southern region of Kherson, pounding southern and eastern areas with missile strikes.
According to Russia’s RIA news agency, Ukrainian missile strikes hit a school, kindergarten, and cemetery in the villages of Kyselivka and Shyroka Balka in the Kherson region in early May.
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/07/2 ... t%E2%80%99
Video at link.
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Solidarity rally in Galicia, Spain, in 2014.
Understanding Ukrainian Nazism
Originally published: Struggle-La Lucha on February 26, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz (more by Struggle-La Lucha) | (Posted Mar 05, 2022)
In the West, media outlets are claiming that Russia’s agenda to “denazify” Ukraine is unfounded. At the same time, public opinion in Western countries is totally alienated from the Ukrainian reality, tending to believe only what is reported by the hegemonic media. The result of this is strong disapproval of the Russian attitude based on the lie that there is no trace of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine. In this sense, it is urgent that quality information be disseminated to the Western audience to avoid the proliferation of lies about the Ukrainian reality.
On almost every TV channel and newspaper in the West, Ukrainian Nazism is questioned with the worst possible arguments: Zelensky is Jewish, and the Ukrainian state is democratic. This kind of superficial thinking prevents a detailed analysis of the catastrophic situation in Kiev since the Maidan, when, through a coup d’état, an anti-Russian junta took power and institutionalized a racist and anti-Russian ideology, which remains until the current days.
When we talk about “Ukrainian Nazism” we are not saying that Kiev is a contemporary copy of Hitler’s Berlin, but that the neo-Nazi element is a fundamental point of post-2014 Ukraine. The Maidan coup was openly supported and financed by NATO as a way of undermining any Russian influence in Moscow’s own strategic environment. The aim was to make Ukraine a puppet state, commanded from Washington, ending any link with Russia. There was not only the objective to annihilate political, economic, and diplomatic relations between Kiev and Moscow, but also to eliminate cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic ties between both nations.
Since then, anti-Russian plans have been implemented. Ethnic Russians have been persecuted for the past eight years–even through systematic extermination in some regions. The Russian language has been criminalized in entire cities where the population does not speak Ukrainian. Schisms in the Orthodox Church have been supported to form a Ukrainian “national church” out of the Moscow Patriarchate. But the question remains: how has this been possible if Ukrainians and Russians are such close peoples? Many Ukrainians speak Russian and marry ethnic Russians, in addition to the fact that most of the country’s population follows the Orthodox Church. So how was it possible to initiate such a successful racist policy?
This was certainly one of the biggest concerns of the Maidan planners. And the answer lies in the Nazi element, which was very well worked out by Arsen Avakov, Minister of the Interior during the Poroshenko government. Avakov initiated a process of instrumentalizing neo-Nazi militias that had supported Maidan, making these extremist groups key points in the defense of the new Ukrainian regime. In the West, due to collective ignorance about Slavic history, many people think that Nazi racism was restricted to Jews, but in fact, anti-Russian hatred was one of the biggest locomotives of WWII, having led Hitler to the irrational decision to invade and try to annex the USSR. This sentiment is alive in these neo-Nazi militias, who are literally ready to do anything to annihilate the Russians, being much more fanatical in their racist convictions than the Ukrainian armed forces.
Groups such as the Azov Battalion, C14 and the armed militias of rightist parties such as Pravyy sektor and Svoboda operate freely in Ukraine and are most responsible for the extermination of ethnic Russians in the Donbass. These groups act with more violence and using more sophisticated equipment than the Ukrainian armed forces themselves, being the real face of Kiev’s anti-Russian brutality. As neo-Nazis, these militias have no obstacles in complying with the government’s objective of destroying any ties between Russians and Ukrainians, thus being the main allies of the Maidan era.
In a 2020 Freedom House’s report, “A new Eurasian far right rising”, it is said that the far right is one of the strongest and most influential elements in Ukrainian society today, being a sophisticated, highly professionalized, and visible political force. In other words, what would be violent and criminal urban groups elsewhere on the planet have been converted by Kiev into a pro-Maidan parallel armed force. The inspiration for this model of action comes from the original Nazism: the Schutzstaffel (SS) was one of the largest German armed political forces during the 1930s and 1940s, but the group was not part of the German Armed Forces, but a paramilitary militia instrumentalized by the government apart from the official troops. There was a major strategic objective with this: while the German military was commanded by the government, the SS fought for the Nazi Party and for Hitler–that is, if Germany surrendered, the SS would declare war on the German military. This type of “double-shielded” military system is the same one that Kiev has implemented: if one day a pro-Russian government is elected, the neo-Nazi militias will declare war on Kiev–and will be strong enough to defeat the official troops in the same way as the SS was stronger than the German armed forces.
It is necessary to note that these groups operate not only in the sphere of military force, but also in the cultural field, fomenting anti-Russian hatred among ordinary Ukrainians. The exaltation of Stepan Bandera (Ukrainian anti-Soviet nationalist leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany) is one of the symptoms of this. Before the Maidan, Bandera was a name like any other in Ukrainian history, but he came to be remembered and venerated as a national hero by neo-Nazis and anti-Russian politicians. In the same sense, these groups vandalize parishes and monasteries of the Russian Orthodox Church and are responsible for the consolidation of a Ukrainian mentality entirely hostile to Russia, which is gradually permeating the local population.
Ukraine is in fact ruled by a Jew and the country’s power structure is indeed publicly “democratic”, despite being internally authoritarian and corrupt. But the Nazi element is not in these aspects, but in the structure of protection of the post-Maidan Ukrainian state, which is supported by a national coalition of neo-Nazi militias whose objective is simply to persecute and kill Russians, regardless of who is in power in Kiev. It does not matter to these militias if the President of the Republic is a Jew–what matters is that Russians are dying, which favors both neo-Nazis and the pro-NATO politicians they protect. In other words, the Western media’s arguments to deny Putin’s claims about Ukrainian Nazism are weak and superficial.
Moscow is right in its concern to denazify Ukraine. It is a measure that should be taken in coalition by several countries. All over the world, Nazism is “condemned”, but only when it benefits the West. The closest political experience to Nazism in the present days has been seen and peacefully tolerated by liberal governments that claim to be defenders of human rights and democracy. Russia is simply no longer willing to put up with crimes being committed by neo-Nazis against its people and there is nothing wrong with that decision.
https://mronline.org/2022/03/05/underst ... an-nazism/
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Will US citizens be exchanged
July 23, 17:30
Will US citizens captured in Eastern Ukraine be exchanged?
This week, SouthFront published the appeals and stories of American mercenaries Alexander Dryuke and Andy Hinh, who were captured in June 2022 in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine.
At the same time, the American media began to raise the question - what are the ways to return US citizens to their homeland. Taking into account all the circumstances of the detention of Alexander Dryuke and Andy Hinha, this can only possibly arise as part of the exchange procedure.
US officials report that they are in constant contact with their Ukrainian counterparts and are making every effort to include mercenaries on the next exchange list. Previously, the parties to the conflict have repeatedly carried out the exchange of prisoners of war. However,from the point of view of the Russian Federation and the DPR, these persons do not have the status of prisoners of war, since they are citizens of a third country who took part in an armed conflict for a monetary reward, in other words, they are considered criminals who are accused of committing crimes against citizens of the Russian Federation and the DPR. In particular, they were charged under Art. 430 of the Criminal Code of the DPR. This article is a complete analogue of Art. 359 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
In accordance with Art. 430 of the Criminal Code of the DPR and Art. 359 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, a mercenary is a person who acts in order to receive material reward and is not a citizen of a state participating in an armed conflict or hostilities, who does not permanently reside on its territory, and is also not a person sent to perform official duties.
An important circumstance is that legal actions against the detainees are carried out by law enforcement agencies of the DPR. Apparently, this is due to the fact that in July 2022 the DPR authorities lifted the ban on the use of the death penalty as capital punishment. Earlier, other 3 foreign mercenaries have already been sentenced to death and are awaiting execution. The only chance to save the lives of these convicts was an act of pardon by the head of the DNR, Denis Pushilin. It is likely that a similar verdict will be passed against Alexander Dryuke and Andy Hinh.
The exchange of mercenaries for military personnel of the DPR or the Russian Federation seems unlikely due to their legal status. Does this mean that the fate of the Americans is sealed. Definitely not. There are procedures for the political exchange of convicts, which have previously occurred repeatedly between the United States and the Russian Federation (USSR). The last such case took place on April 27, 2022, when US citizen Trevor Rowdy Reed, previously convicted in the Russian Federation, was exchanged for Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko, convicted in the USA. Legally, the procedure was formalized through acts of pardon.
Thus, it is possible for US citizens to avoid the death penalty and return home. About 400 citizens of the Russian Federation are kept in US prisons, a significant part of whom were convicted for political reasons. Probably the most notable example is Viktor Bout, who has already served half of his sentence in an American prison.
However, there are several pitfalls in the way of political dialogue on the exchange of convicts.
First, there are no even indirect contacts between the US and the DPR. It is hard to imagine that for the sake of individual citizens, Washington will go to establish even unofficial contacts with Donetsk, because this will mean the recognition of the DPR as an actor in international relations.
Contacts along the lines of the USA - Ukraine - Russia - DPR seem to be unproductive. As it was written above, Alexander and Andy do not have the status of prisoners of war. Through the Ukrainian side, it would be possible to carry out an exchange if the prisoners were officially US military personnel, were in Ukraine as instructors under an agreement between the US and Ukraine, and, of course, did not take a direct part in hostilities. The last condition is mandatory, since the United States does not recognize itself as a party to the conflict.
The US-RF-DPR channel remains. On this path, the main obstacle will be the public opinion of the residents of the DPR. For 8 years of aggression from Kyiv, almost every inhabitant of the republic lost relatives or close people killed. Residents of the DPR are hungry for retribution. In order for the exchange to take place, the leadership of the republic will need very weighty arguments why foreign mercenaries sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment are pardoned and transferred to the Russian side for a subsequent exchange.
At the same time, there are signals that the Russian Federation and part of the DPR leadership are still open to negotiations with the United States. The success of the negotiations will depend entirely on the political will of Washington. From what price the American establishment is ready to pay in order to demonstrate to its population the commitment to the principle of protecting its citizens abroad in all possible ways. At the moment , unfortunately for the prisoners, Biden did not come up with anything better than to announce some new sanctions against those involved in holding US citizens in captivity. How the "sanctions" should help Americans return home, the oldest US president did not say.The situation is also complicated by the emerging information that behind the recruitment and organization of the traffic of American mercenaries to the territory of Ukraine are official US structures, in particular USAID through intermediaries.
https://southfront.org/us-citizens-capt ... exchanged/ - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7755211.html
Attacks on the Odessa port
July 23, 16:31
Regarding strikes on the Odessa port. If you carefully study the published documents of the agreement on the export of grain, it is easy to see that:
1. There are no obligations of Russia not to strike at Odessa. There are only obligations not to attack the infrastructure necessary for the export of grain.
2. The destroyed boats in the port have nothing to do with the export of grain. These are military targets that can and should be destroyed as part of achieving the goals of the NMD, which have not disappeared anywhere.
3. This strike simply shows that the export of grain according to Istanbul-1 does not mean the cessation of hostilities and attacks on Odessa will continue.
4. How does it work? Take Hodeida in Yemen. In 2018, from June to November, as part of Operation Golden Victory, the Saudi coalition, with the support of Israel and the United States, fought intense battles against the Houthis, with missile and air strikes, with thousands of dead and hundreds of pieces of destroyed equipment (Saudi and co. raked). All this did not interfere with the process of implementing the agreements (although they were also thwarted) on the entry of ships with food for the starving population of Yemen into the port of Hodeidah. agreements under the auspices of the UN.
So the war is separate, the grain is separate.
The tantrums about the strikes are to try to provide cover for the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Odessa with grain export agreements. The worst thing that the Russian Federation could do is to stop strikes on the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Odessa and the Odessa region because of the tantrums of Kyiv and its sponsors. I hope the strikes continue. The best way to stop attacks on the port of Odessa is to withdraw the entire military infrastructure from there, while the city is not yet liberated.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7754782.html
"Alliance of Teachers" and its work for the SBU
July 23, 14:50
Trade Union "Alliance of Teachers" and its work for the SBU
It looks like an iron foundation for the closure of the trade union and the imprisonment of all those involved in the transfer of data to foreign intelligence agencies who did not have time to escape.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7754725.html
Google Translator
Too bad I can't read Russian...and it's too bad we no longer have access to the posts from 2014-2015. In the early 90's the Ukrainian so-called nationalists(Nazis) got their foot in the door of government and got one Ministry as a result of parliamentary elections. They chose Education, a reflection of long term planning. They immediately began stuffing education on all levels with their hateful propaganda and fanciful histories, and this is how a movement originally identified with the old Hapsburg province of Galacia became widespread throughout much of Ukraine.
"Russia send teachers to control what students learn" was the caption from the Washington Post that accompanied the image which refuses to show.
Damn straight, save the children.
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About new deliveries of MLRS to Ukraine
July 23, 23:56
About new deliveries of MLRS to Ukraine
In Washington, after the voyage of congressmen to Kyiv, they said that the United States should supply only 25-30 HIMARS MLRS (and identical systems from other countries) to Ukraine. That is, to the declared 20, of which 16 were officially transferred (and of which, according to the statement of the RF Ministry of Defense, 4 + 1, which was allegedly sold, but which was never shown), should be added another 5-10 pieces.
It is important to understand that in addition to issues related to the desire to intensify strikes against warehouses and command posts of the RF Armed Forces, these deliveries also hide a rather banal goal - to replenish the general fleet of heavy MLRS, which the RF Armed Forces have fairly thinned out by destroying a significant number of Hurricanes, etc. . systems. In addition, due to heavy use, there is a known problem with the resupply of ammunition for such systems. For Western heavy MLRS, there is no problem with BC, because deliveries, despite the known percentage of the RF Armed Forces destroyed by missile strikes, can go on for a long time.
Unlike Europe, in the United States, the stocks of missiles and shells are as voluminous as in the Russian Federation, which is why they are pledged for a long war, because from a resource point of view they can afford it (unlike Europe). The main thing is that Ukrainian cannon fodder stably fertilizes the fields of the left bank and maintains the conflict at a level convenient for the United States without freezing and dumping it into a direct conflict between the United States and Russia. This, in fact, is the essence of the rather unsophisticated American strategy.
PS. At the front today without significant progress, so tomorrow evening there will be a summary for 2 days. Well, yes, in Ukraine today they crookedly admitted that they messed up with the "environment of Vysokopolye". Big losses + zero result.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7756120.html
Google Translator
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From Cassad's Telegram account:
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forwarded from
WarJournal[Z]
Feedback on the work of Russian tankers in the area of Seversk, DPR.
American journalist "The Politico" Christopher Miller reported the destruction of four foreign mercenaries in the Seversk region during the week, he was told about this by the commander of this unit. The militants were reportedly ambushed by Russian tankers northwest of Seversk. Their group was tasked with stopping the possible forcing of the Seversky Donets by units of the RF Armed Forces.
Destroyed: 2 US citizens - Luc Lucishin (b. 1991) and Brian Young (b. 1971), Canadian citizen - Emily-Antoine Roy-Sirois (b. 1991), Swedish citizen - Edward Celander Patrignani 1994 (b. R). A few more unnamed “Russian safari” lovers escaped with injuries.
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Сolonelcassad
Wrote on this topic this afternoon https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7754782.html .
In the evening, the UN read the text of the agreement in Istanbul and began to suspect something.
The UN said that Russia may not have violated the agreement on the export of Ukrainian grain by shelling the port of Odessa. The words of an unnamed representative of the organization are quoted by The New York Times.
According to the official, "technically, Russia may not have violated the deal, since it did not commit to avoid attacks on those parts of Ukrainian ports that are not directly used for grain exports."
I repeat, anyone can open the text of Istanbul-1, read it, think (if there is something) and realize that in the text of the agreement there are no obligations of Russia not to strike at military targets in Odessa or the Odessa region. All agreements concern, roughly speaking, only merchant ships that export grain, mooring walls (roughly speaking, part of the Odessa port) and grain terminals. All.
Therefore, it is logical to expect that the Armed Forces of Ukraine, realizing the reality, will begin to hide ammunition and equipment as close as possible to the grain terminals or port facilities involved in Istanbul-1, so that in case of strikes, yell that "Russia is violating the deal", although it is Ukraine that violates it when it deploys military installations next to the structures that are involved in it. But as we know from the experience of Mariupol or Severodonetsk, this is standard practice, so if necessary, ammunition will be buried directly into the grain.
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Сolonelcassad
Today in Ukraine they began to declare that there is no encirclement of the RF Armed Forces near Potemkino and Vysokopolye. This was forced to broadcast, including Arestovich, who launched this duck. Since their flock spent the whole day eating this informational manure from a shovel and demanding evidence of "encirclement", the topic became too toxic and today they began to merge it so that it would not work out like with the "attack on Kherson".
In practice. As it was mentioned yesterday, the attempts to "encircle" the RF Armed Forces near Vysokopolie ended with the fact that 2 battalions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that rushed to organize the "Vysokopolie Cannes" came under concentrated artillery fire of the RF Armed Forces, suffered heavy losses in killed and wounded and rolled back to the original ones.
In Ukraine, they preferred to inform the audience about the beginning of the "offensive", and not about its outcome.
https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin
Google Translator