Rafael Behr There is a Russian proverb: don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked. I first came across it as the epigraph to The Government Inspector, Gogol’s 1836 masterpiece satirising corruption and hypocrisy in the provinces of the tsar’s empire. The phrase sprang to mind last week when I learned that a 21st-century… Read More By sanctioning journalists, the Kremlin admits how much the truth hurts
Extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and forced labour among accusations upheld by court in judgment Haroon Siddique Legal affairs correspondent Russia has committed flagrant and unprecedented abuses of human rights since it invaded Ukraine in 2014, including extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and forced labour, the European court of human rights has found. The court’s grand chamber unanimously held that… Read More Russia has committed flagrant human rights abuses in Ukraine since 2014, rules ECHR
As territories shift and divide families, desperate parents are travelling to Russia to find their children, many of whom have been moved into military camps or orphanages Ruchi Kumar Ukrainian children from a Donetsk orphanage at a camp in Zolotaya Kosa, Russia. Up to 35,000 Ukrainian children may be held in Russia, with many feared… Read More ‘Basically impossible to get them back’: Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children is a war crime
At least 12 killed including three children after Kremlin launches 298 drones and 69 missile strikes against neighbour Peter Beaumont in Kyiv Ukraine has condemned US “silence” after Russia carried out its largest air raid in three years of war, with a second straight night of massive drone and ballistic missile strikes killing at least 12… Read More Ukraine condemns US ‘silence’ after Russia’s biggest air raid of war
NB: Whereas I agree with Professor Mehta’s arguments about the sinister significance of Trump’s treatment of President Zelenskyy; the following is where I disagree. He says the Russian invasion of Ukraine was only the second time since World War II that one country had claimed an entire other country… It was a war to erase… Read More The Mask is Off. After Ukraine, imperialism is now the norm
NB: A very useful appraisal. The sentence “I believe that during the unipolar moment, we were deeply committed to spreading democracy”, is jarring however. American foreign policy has never been committed to democracy but to its strategic interests of global dominance. It would announce its grand intentions only in so far as the ideology (as… Read More The USA’s role in the Ukraine crisis (2022)
I want to share my understanding of the events that have befallen Europe, and I’ll include not only the Ukraine crisis, but also Serbia 1999, the wars in the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, the wars in Africa, including Sudan, Somalia, Libya. These are to a very significant extent the result of deeply misguided US… Read More The Geopolitics of Peace: Jeffrey Sachs in the European Parliament
The West has set itself on a path of collective suicide — both moral and economic. NB: The ideological dissolution of Western imperialism began with the League of Nations illegal mandate system at the end of the Great War of 1914-1918. This system enabled the colonial occupation of Palestine and other territories of the defeated… Read More Michael Brenner: The West’s Reckoning?
Signing up for jobs in Russia, Germany or Dubai, young men have been ‘made to join the Russian military’, their families say When Hemil Mangukiya left his small village in the Indian state of Gujarat last December, he told his family he was off to Russia to make a better living than was possible at home in… Read More ‘He had no idea he was being sent to a war zone’: the Indian and Nepalese men on frontlines in Ukraine
By Lucas Leiroz | February 29, 2024 The disastrous actions of American intelligence in Ukraine have been a fact known by analysts since the beginning of the conflict. However, now the Americans themselves are admitting this. Being deceived by Russian pranksters, US mercenaries commented on the CIA’s tactical errors in Ukraine and how […] The… Read More CIA behind Ukrainian disaster
After the truth-shower 