What won’t be long?
Id say it wont be long before theres serious pressure put on NATO to put boots on the ground in Ukraine. Then itll kick off good and proper.
Till the civilised west spanks the Orc army
You’re a narcissistic sociopath now, bro? When did this happen?
There’s a few lads here who would have lapped this shit up.
Probably still will, actually.
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Slava Ukraini comrade.
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Has the threat of chemical weapons passed? It was a huge concern a fortnight ago.
Timothy Snyder
Russia has just issued a genocide handbook for its war on Ukraine. The Russian official press agency “RIA Novosti” published last Sunday an explicit program for the complete elimination of the Ukrainian nation as such. It is still available for viewing, and has now been translated several times into English.
As I have been saying since the war began, “denazification” in official Russian usage just means the destruction of the Ukrainian state and nation. A “Nazi,” as the genocide manual explains, is simply a human being who self-identifies as Ukrainian. According to the handbook, the establishment of a Ukrainian state thirty years ago was the “nazification of Ukraine.” Indeed “any attempt to build such a state” has to be a “Nazi” act. Ukrainians are “Nazis” because they fail to accept “the necessity that the people support Russia.” Ukrainians should suffer for believing that they exist as a separate people; only this can lead to the “redemption of guilt.”
For anyone still out there who believes that Putin’s Russia opposes the extreme right in Ukraine or anywhere else, the genocide program is a chance to reconsider. Putin’s Russian regime talks of “Nazis” not because it opposes the extreme right, which it most certainly does not, but as a rhetorical device to justify unprovoked war and genocidal policies. Putin’s regime is the extreme right. It is the world center of fascism. It supports fascists and extreme-right authoritarians around the world. In traducing the meaning of words like “Nazi,” Putin and his propagandists are creating more rhetorical and political space for fascists in Russia and elsewhere.
The genocide handbook explains that the Russian policy of “denazification” is not directed against Nazis in the sense that the word is normally used. The handbook grants, with no hesitation, that there is no evidence that Nazism, as generally understood, is important in Ukraine. It operates within the special Russian definition of “Nazi”: a Nazi is a Ukrainian who refuses to admit being a Russian. The “Nazism” in question is “amorphous and ambivalent”; one must, for example, be able to see beneath the world of appearance and decode the affinity for Ukrainian culture or for the European Union as “Nazism.”
The actual history of actual Nazis and their actual crimes in the 1930s and 1940s is thus totally irrelevant and completely cast aside. This is perfectly consistent with Russian warfighting in Ukraine. No tears are shed in the Kremlin over Russian killing of Holocaust survivors or Russian destruction of Holocaust memorials, because Jews and the Holocaust have nothing to do with the Russian definition of “Nazi.” This explains why Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, although a democratically-elected president, and a Jew with family members who fought in the Red Army and died in the Holocaust, can be called a Nazi. Zelens’kyi is a Ukrainian, and that is all that “Nazi” means.
On this absurd definition, where Nazis have to be Ukrainians and Ukrainians have to be Nazis, Russia cannot be fascist, no matter what Russians do. This is very convenient. If “Nazi” has been assigned the meaning “Ukrainian who refuses to be Russian” then it follows that no Russian can be a Nazi. Since for the Kremlin being a Nazi has nothing to do with fascist ideology, swastika-like symbols, big lies, rallies, rhetoric of cleansings, aggressive wars, abductions of elites, mass deportations, and the mass killing of civilians, Russians can do all of these things without ever having to ask if they themselves on the wrong side of the historical ledger. And so we find Russians implementing fascist policies in the name of “denazification.”
The Russian handbook is one of the most openly genocidal documents I have ever seen. It calls for the liquidation of the Ukrainian state, and for abolition of any organization that has any association with Ukraine. It postulates that the “majority of the population” of Ukraine are “Nazis,” which is to say Ukrainians. (This is clearly a reaction to Ukrainian resistance; at war’s beginning the assumption was that there were only a few Ukrainians and that they would be easily eliminated. This was clear in another text published in RIA Novosti, the victory declaration of 26 February.) Such people, “the majority of the population,” so more than twenty million people, are to be killed or sent to work in “labor camps” to expurgate their guilt for not loving Russia. Survivors are to be subject to “re-education.” Children will be raised to be Russian. The name “Ukraine” will disappear.
Had this genocide handbook appeared at some other time and in a more obscure outlet, it might have escaped notice. But it was published right in the middle of the Russian media landscape during a Russian war of destruction explicitly legitimated by the Russian head of state’s claim that a neighboring nation did not exist. It was published on a day when the world was learning of a mass murder of Ukrainians committed by Russians.
Russia’s genocide handbook was published on April 3, two days after the first revelation that Russian servicemen in Ukraine had murdered hundreds of people in Bucha, and just as the story was reaching major newspapers. The Bucha massacre was one of several cases of mass killing that emerged as Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv region. This means that the genocide program was knowingly published even as the physical evidence of genocide was emerging. The writer and the editors chose this particular moment to make public a program for the elimination of the Ukrainian nation as such.
As a historian of mass killing, I am hard pressed to think of many examples where states explicitly advertise the genocidal character of their own actions right at at the moment those actions become public knowledge. From a legal perspective, the existence of such a text (in the larger context of similar statements and Vladimir Putin’s repeated denial that Ukraine exists) makes the charge of genocide far easier to make. Legally, genocide means both actions that destroy a group in whole or in part, combined with some intention to do so. Russia has done the deed and confessed to the intention.
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A fast track to joining the EU looks like the only option.
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Von Der Leyen’s visit to Kyiv was symbolically very important for Ukraine. It would be great if Biden would visit too.
Though actions, specifically Germany implementing a total Russian energy embargo immediately, have to follow.
Every Russian energy purchase is blood money.
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Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War
Citizens are denouncing one another, illustrating how the war is feeding paranoia and polarization in Russian society.
April 9, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.”
After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views.
“Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them.
“No longer,” one of the girls shot back.
A few days later, the police came to her school in the port town of Korsakov. In court, she heard a recording of that conversation, apparently made by one of the students. The judge handed down a $400 fine for “publicly discrediting” Russia’s Armed Forces. The school fired her, she said, for “amoral behavior.”
“It’s as though they’ve all plunged into some kind of madness,” Ms. Dubrova said in a phone interview, reflecting on the pro-war mood around her.
With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.
The incidents are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.
There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.
In the western region of Kaliningrad, the authorities sent residents text messages urging them to provide phone numbers and email addresses of “provocateurs” in connection with the “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian newspapers reported; they can do so conveniently through a specialized account in the Telegram messaging app. A nationalist political party launched a website urging Russians to report “pests” in the elite.
“I am absolutely sure that a cleansing will begin,” Dmitri Kuznetsov, the member of Parliament behind the website, said in an interview, predicting that the process would accelerate after the “active phase” of the war ended. He then clarified: “We don’t want anyone to be shot, and we don’t even want people to go to prison.”
But it is the history of mass execution and political imprisonment in the Soviet era, and the denunciation of fellow citizens encouraged by the state, that now looms over Russia’s deepening climate of repression. Mr. Putin set the tone in a speech on March 16, declaring that Russian society needed a “self-purification” in which people would “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.”
In the Soviet logic, those who choose not to report their fellow citizens could be viewed as being suspect themselves.
“In these conditions, fear is settling into people again,” said Nikita Petrov, a leading scholar of the Soviet secret police. “And that fear dictates that you report.”
In March, Mr. Putin signed a law that punishes public statements contradicting the government line on what the Kremlin terms its “special military operation” in Ukraine with as much as 15 years in prison. It was a harsh but necessary measure, the Kremlin said, given the West’s “information war” against Russia.
Prosecutors have already used the law against more than 400 people, according to the OVD-Info rights group, including a man who held up a piece of paper with eight asterisks on it. “No to war” in Russian has eight letters.
“This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Gayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens.
“Repressions are not just done by the hands of the state authorities,” she said. “They are also done by the hands of regular citizens.”
In most cases, the punishments related to war criticism have been limited to fines; for the more than 15,000 antiwar protesters arrested since the invasion began on Feb. 24, fines are the most common penalty, though some were sentenced to as many as 30 days in jail, Ms. Gayeva said. But some people are being threatened with longer prison terms.
In the western city of Penza, another English teacher, Irina Gen, arrived in class one day and found a giant “Z” scrawled on the chalkboard. The Russian government has been promoting the letter as a symbol of support for the war, after it was seen painted as an identifying marker on Russian military vehicles in Ukraine.
Ms. Gen told her students it looked like half a swastika.
Later, an eighth-grader asked her why Russia was being banned from sports competitions in Europe.
“I think that’s the right thing to do,” Ms. Gen responded. “Until Russia starts behaving in a civilized manner, this will continue forever.”
“But we don’t know all the details,” a girl said, referring to the war.
“That’s right, you don’t know anything at all,” Ms. Gen said.
A recording of that exchange appeared on a popular account on Telegram that often posts inside information about criminal cases. The Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., called her in and warned that her words blaming Russia for the bombing of a maternity hospital Mariupol last month were “100 percent a criminal case.”
She is now being investigated for causing “grave consequences” under last month’s censorship law, punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison.
Ms. Gen, 45, said she found little support among her students or from her school, and quit her job this month. When she talked in class about her opposition to the war, she said she felt “hatred” toward her radiating from some of her students.
“My point of view did not resonate in the hearts and minds of basically anyone,” she said in an interview.
But others who have been the targets of denunciation by fellow citizens drew more hopeful lessons from the experience. On Sakhalin Island, after local news outlets reported on Ms. Dubrova’s case, one of her former students raised $150 in a day for her, before Ms. Dubrova told her to stop and said she would pay the fine herself. On Friday, Ms. Dubrova handed the money over to a local dog shelter.
In Moscow, Mr. Grachev, the computer repair store owner, said he found it remarkable that not one of his hundreds of customers threatened to turn him in for the “no to war” text that he prominently displayed on a screen behind the counter for several weeks after the invasion. After all, he noted, he was forced to double the price of some services because of Western sanctions, surely angering some of his customers. Instead, many thanked him.
The man who apparently turned in Mr. Grachev was a passer-by he refers to as a “grandpa” who, he said, twice warned his employees in late March that they were violating the law. Mr. Grachev, 35, said he believed the man was convinced he was doing his civic duty by reporting the store to the police, and most likely did not have access to information beyond state propaganda.
Mr. Grachev was fined 100,000 rubles, more than $1,200. A Moscow politician wrote about the case on social media, including Mr. Grachev’s bank details for anyone who wanted to help. Enough money to cover the fine arrived within two hours, Mr. Grachev said.
He received 250,000 rubles in total, he said, from about 250 separate donations, and he plans to donate the surplus to OVD-Info, which provided him with legal aid.
“In practice, we see that not everything is so bad,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Grachev is now pondering how to replace his “no to war” sign. He is considering: “There was a sign here for which a 100,000 ruble fine was imposed.”
It has to be part of the solution. Where do you draw the border though?
This is the beginning of the end of Russia.
Careful now
this thing is petering out now, and will be forgotten about in a month. What will be the next big social media outrage thing?
Hard to tell with Davy taking a back seat this year.
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Nah man. The Ruskies are about to launch a massive offensive in the east within the next couple of days. Our lads must hold off the orc-ish horde.
Slava Ukriani