The European Court of Human Rights suspended all procedures that require action by or a response from the Ukrainian government.

First: Your article on Russia's vote to quit the ECHR was from June 7, over three months after Ukraine's request for suspension was granted in March.

Second: it appears I linked the wrong publication from ECHR. Here's the correct one: PDF link.

From the very first paragraph: "following a request received from the Ukrainian Government on 24 February 2022 to “suspend the examination of all applications against Ukraine until further notice”, the European Court of Human Rights has decided to take a number of measures which will now be applied in all cases concerning Ukraine until further notice."

So Ukraine's request was submitted to the ECHR the day the invasion literally began, but wasn't approved until the beginning of March.

Third: do you ever get tired of pulling up the 1938 Munich comparisons? The circumstances (the various attempts by Britain and France to normalize relations with pre-Hitler Germany as a counterbalance to the USSR via the Locarno Treaties in the '20s; their diplomatic attempts to prevent Germany and the USSR from becoming more intertwined; greater concern about Soviet expansion into Europe versus the potential unknown that was Hitler at that time) not to mention the ideologies and temperaments of the individuals involved (particularly Putin vs. Hitler, as war was utterly central to the latter's ideology; Hitler reportedly remarked that Chamberlain had "spoiled [his] entry into Prague", noted here) are very different. The Munich Agreement can't be characterized as mere "appeasement", because it was the continuation of British foreign policy to form a stable relationship with Germany so as to keep them from linking up with the Soviets; it was a rational attempt at keeping that policy viable, but was miscalculated in hindsight in light of Hitler's eccentric personality and single-minded frenzy in dragging the continent towards war.

Hitler's foreign policy was erratic and at times anarchistic, since war was central to his Nazi ideology; I don't think the same can be credited to Putin, seeing as how he and and his political party United Russia are actually less aggressive in foreign policy (at least in terms of rhetoric and official political statements) than the Communist Party to his left and the various ultra-nationalists to his right.

Not every authoritarian can be reduced to Adolf Hitler.

Tell you what: I’ll go one better.

Instead of pointing you to an ARTICLE exposing it - of which there are plenty, but inevitably none of them will be an acceptable source - I’ll just walk you through a very simple example of how to work out what Russian “news” is fake.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1516437860173467653 - this video clip (never mind who posted it) is a Russian report from a school in Mariupol that was allegedly reopened in mid-April. Yup - despite it being slap bang in the middle of a residential area that was under near-constant bombardment at the time. This school was packed to the rafters with kids acting as if absolutely nothing is happening. They’re extras. It’s utterly obvious that they’re busssed-in extras for an external crowd shoot. Not only has Ukraine been doing remote learning since March, no schools in Mariupol were anywhere near that close to being reopened, and certainly didn’t ALREADY have the new Russian curriculum and materials that early in.

If you’re not convinced by the obvious shuffling-around-pretending-to-be-talking behavior of the extras, note carefully the front of the building, 0:45 in. Note the windows. And the brickwork.

Okay, so maybe by some complete miracle the school escaped all the surrounding devastation, and literally hundreds of kids of all ages were nonchalantly rocking up to classes in clean clothes. We call that “chinny reckon” in England. But it could be true, I guess.

And then Russia kinda blew it with this propaganda video in May. https://twitter.com/i/status/1516437860173467653, 4:10 in. Exact same building.

Once you’ve got that, it’s pretty easy to do the rest of the analysis yourself. Just find photo and video footage of crowds, kids and mums being interviewed for news reports outside Ukrainian schools, and play spot the recycled extras.

Just by way of a bonus, here’s several examples of adult Russian actors being recycled for different news stories by Russian “reporters”.

On the use of professional actors to spin false narratives - right near the start of the Donbas conflict (when many conservatives in Europe were convinced by the DPR narrative) the Daily Mail broke ranks with this:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2574131/How-Russian-television-used-actress-pretend-five-different-people-opposed-revolution-reported-normal-Ukrainians-backed-Kremlin.html

And there’s this rather infamous one where Russia unusually retracted its fake news.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucified_boy

Russia tried to debunk a report by “exposing” Ukrainian “crisis actors” - only for independent analyis to confirm that Russia was half-right. It had simply picked out some clips from of a 2020 TV production, which did have actors, and transposed them into the conflict. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-tvfootage-notcrisisactors-idUSL2N2V61K1

Then there’s the example of the schoolgirl whose injuries were denounced as “fake news”. She’s now in Poland, and definitely has had her injuries examined. They are consistent with being caught in a blast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-61176372

Here’s a report from the Vilnius Institute for Policy Analysis (VIPA) back in 2019 - exposing a few professional actors that kept mysteriously appearing in different parts of Ukraine telling wild stories. So this isn’t even new stuff - it’s been going on for the duration of the Donbas conflict.

https://vilniusinstitute.lt/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/9-Same-Actors-1.pdf

If you want me to keep drilling for evidence of fakery either from the Ukraine side or the Russian side, I’m quite happy to do it. My consultancy charge rate for forensic audit and correlation work is $8000 per day pro-rata; this post’s on me but paying customers come first.

“I don’t think the same can be credited to Putin, seeing as how he and and his political party United Russia are actually less aggressive in foreign policy”

Given Putin went on TV basically saying he was emulating Peter the Great, within hours of the Duma putting forward a motion to de-recognize the independence of Lithuania, do you still think “less aggressive in foreign policy” still tracks? How far does Putin yet have to go to be AS aggressive, or MORE aggressive?

Three independent post-Soviet countries have already been invaded under Putin’s watch. Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya. Russia acquired the territories of Transnistria (Moldova), Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia), Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, not by diplomacy but by sowing internal conflicts and using military leverage.

How many more does he have on the roadmap? Three Baltic states, Poland, Moldova and Khazakstan. Finland and Sweden - or at least the islands - might be in his sights too.

Funnily enough, this roundup in 2019 basically warned this’d happen - that the Baltics, plus the islands of Finland and Sweden, might be next. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/15/russias-next-land-grab-wont-be-in-an-ex-soviet-state-it-will-be-in-europe-putin-saakashvili-sweden-finland-arctic-northern-sea-route-baltics-nato/

You might be right FOR NOW - but I don’t think Putin is very far off from matching Hitler when it comes to the specific charge of aggressive expansionism.

"How far does Putin yet have to go to be AS aggressive, or MORE aggressive?"

You missed my point by cutting off my quote. I do not deny, nor have I ever denied, that Putin has been aggressive.

What I stated was that between the Communists to his left (who want to re-establish the Soviet Union in full and usher in a modern form of socialism) and the nationalists to his right (who generally tend to be full-blown ethnic supremacists from my understanding, as compared to the relative plurality of ethnicities in Putin's Russia, as seen by the various racial groups present in the Russian armed forces, including even the Chechens that were steamrolled mere decades ago, yet now have a prominent position in their military), Putin is less aggressive than they are.

So with that understanding, what's the best way of stopping a nuclear power with a historically aggressive temperament at the lowest cost in terms of human lives? If war is not the solution (because if you're going to choose war, you have to go all-in; given the current standards of military throughout the West, would you trust them in a full-blown military engagement to do so successfully?), then the next best thing is to turn their strengths into weaknesses. In this case, it would have been done by going independent in terms of energy.

But Europe (and the US) are too enslaved by the environmentalists to even consider going full-bore on coal, oil, gas, and nuclear to the degree needed. For crying out loud, the EU classifies the burning of wood pellets as a source of renewable energy, even though it releases more CO2 than the burning of coal or gas, and actively reducing the volume of their carbon sink that is their forests!

Putin was open to joining NATO in 2000, if you'll recall. I can only imagine how history would have unfolded had NATO allowed Russia to join. Perhaps they would have been more amenable to an allowance to counter an ascendant China.

What if, what if...

Heh, I get where you’re coming from.

We definitely screwed things up with Russia between 1991 and 2006. Not just around NATO.

You’re also right; some of the people around Putin are far more scary than he is.

But ultimately none of that really alters the fact that Putin and his fellow travellers were gunning for Gorbachev and Yeltsin for allowing the Soviet Union to fragment, long before they got butt-hurt over NATO / EU / biolabs.

And, one has to admire the cognitive dissonance given that an awful lot of those seriously outraged loonies in Russia got very, very, VERY rich because they were robbing their own country left, right and center.

Putin and his oligarchs, together, had almost a trillion dollars in looted assets.

And for some reason we’re supposed to think they felt a massive inferiority complex because the West was keeping them down? C’mon! The West’s utter refusal to poke the Putin bear while reaping the benefits of the oligarchy’s vanity projects like yachts, soccer clubs and London mansions, is the main reason Putin and his chums, together, was the richest members-only club on the planet.

Putin could have pulled out some chump change from his back pocket and paid every last Ukrainian half a million dollars, invested in the country, and taken Ukraine the “soft power” way without firing a shot, and without making a dent in his personal fortune.

But he cocked it up by trying to do it on the cheap, by only bribing one guy - Yanukovych.

In that way, China has shown that they’re much more willing to play the long game than most other countries in terms of securing their national interests (as seen with how they’re securing numerous African nations into debt traps), “taking over the world without firing a shot” as the great Mark Steyn often puts it.

Putin is decidedly more old-school when it comes to projecting a sphere of influence geopolitically; to what degree the general temperament of Russians play into this (because I think that, over time, the ethos and intrinsic philosophies by which a nation chooses to guide itself will influence the overall character of that nation’s people, to the point of becoming a stereotype after a long enough period of time), I can only speculate.

But as it stands, even in spite of the condemnation and sanctions by the West, I think Russia is better poised to gain on a civilizational scale than the West is at the moment; after all, we have a not insignificant part of our populace that believes sex is mutable; that children should be sexualized from infancy; that you can import people from different cultures without assimilation with no problems; and that their host nations are responsible for all the evils of the world, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Even worse, the cultural institutions of the West (between government and media) are seemingly hellbent on catering to these lunatics.

Putin, for all his evils, would certainly have no difficulty telling you what a woman is, for example.

Unless there is a resurgence in virtue and a rebuke of vice in the West, I think what awaits these nations is national suicide...and I can only guess what will come in the aftermath.

An American Caesar? A full blown Communist revolution? Complete balkanization? I can only wonder.

RT, Channel 1 and other Russian sources pulled the story after Novaya Gazeta did a full analysis of the accusation and concluded it was somewhat problematic.

Galina Pyshnyak was the partner of a prominent separatist with links to the far right Sparta Batallion (the DPR’s equivalent of Azov). They both knew Mororola, a senior figure in the Sparta who boasted of killing 15 POWs at Donetsk Airport.

Here’s her account.

https://slavyangrad.org/2014/07/13/slavyansk-refugee-remembers-brutal-execution/

Note the first paragraph in this article:

“This is an eyewitness account, and, as such, is considered to be direct evidence, which, if accepted by a court, would be sufficient for a finding of criminal liability in the absence of any corroborating documentary, video or audio evidence whatsoever.”

Not one single other person has been found to cooborate her account of a public crucifixion of a child in front of a crowd. The only evidence it happened at all is her word. She’s an unreliable withness. She’s a woman who’s been disowned by her own family for siding with the Sparta Nazis, who themselves admitted to committing war crimes.

Every agency except the DPR fake justice system - set up basically to legitimise the ex judicial killings by the separatist militias - is wary of this story.

It could be true. It could be false. But many Donbas separatists would have us believe that despite her bias, despite her unreliability, and despite the complete lack of cooborative evidence, she’s got a watertight case.

Those same fake justice assessors didn’t apply that same reasoning standard when they handed an expat Brit a death sentence. They decided he’s not a regular POW despite them having seen, and even watched watched, independent video confirmation that he had lived in Ukraine for dome time, worked there, was married there, and had joined the regular army.

Bit inconsistent, that. A separatist can make any old shit up and they can treat it as hard evidence, a loyalist can provide concrete proof of legal combatant status and they an just ignore it.

“look at the Nazis in Ukraine — these are on the Russian side

Pavel Gubarev is a Ukrainian pro-Russian activist who proclaimed himself the “People’s Governor” of the Donetsk Region at the Regional Assembly on 3 March 2014, after separatists seized the building. Gubarev had earlier declared himself leader of the Donbas People’s Militia.

Putin’s fascists: The Russian state’s long history of cultivating homegrown neo-Nazis

or better yet, here’s an article from 2017,

Russian Nazi “volunteers” in Donbas”

+=====+++++++++++++++++++

Actually, if you read the history, Putin seems to have completely and thoroughly squashed his self-appointed career in politics. He completely disappeared from the scene for many years until he joined the army as a private a few months ago. Is he still alive?

Sorry, but even if true, that’s a poor example of intentional fake news. There was an eyewitness and no evidence that her story was instigated by the reporter.
The fact that the Ukrainian propagandists are grasping for it after 9 years is telling.
Once again, they produce such stories by several every day and never retract it. So are their Western colleagues.

Regarding Aslin and Pinner, the DNR definition of mercenary is a person who isn’t a citizen of a warring party and gets money for his involvement.
What is wrong with their conviction? Ukraine, by the way, used the same definition until amendment, making foreigners who joined their military exempt.

As for Sparta and Motorola, they are rebel militia for Lord’s sake! You can’t hold them to the same standard as regular military.

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