Posted on 09/23/2022 12:03:17 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s Election Day in parts of Ukraine — but only because Russia imposed it. Vladimir Putin ordered referenda on annexation held in the parts of the Donbas that Russia still controls — and some areas it no longer does — in order to justify the seizure of those areas. That seizure will allow Putin to claim that any further Ukrainian advances in those areas are an invasion of Russia, which will unlock his ability to order full mobilization … and potentially other options.
We’ll get to the full-mobilization issue in a moment, but let’s stick to the referenda first. Ukrainian authorities are pleading with those behind enemy lines to refuse to vote and expose the process as the sham it is. Cooperation, warned the mayor of Melitopol, is collaboration:
The Ukrainian-elected mayor of the city of Melitopol is urging those in Russian-occupied areas of the country not to partake in the so-called “referendums” being held by Russian authorities.
“We call on the residents of the occupied territories not to participate in the pseudo-referendum in any way,” Ivan Fedorov wrote via Telegram.
“Participation in it is to support the bloody plan to escalate the war against Ukraine, to voluntarily become part of a closed totalitarian society, to assume part of the responsibility for war crimes, to agree to the mobilization of men aged 16-55 to replenish the cannon fodder of the Russian Army, to commit a criminal offense.”
“Don’t open the door to agitators. Do not go to the polling stations. Completely ignore the entire election process. Stay as far as possible from Russian military and enemy equipment. Our heroic armed forces of Ukraine will definitely liberate all occupied territories from racism,” Federov said, adding, “most importantly, participation in a pseudo-referendum is the worst betrayal.”
On the other hand, Ukrainians trapped in Russian occupation may not have much choice in the matter. Good Morning America reports that Russian armed forces plan to go door-to-door and force residents to vote at gunpoint. That certainly blurs the line between collaboration and duress, but it also makes an even bigger mockery of the referenda results on the same basis. “Vote da or we kill you” is one hell of a campaign slogan, after all:
BREAKING NEWS: There is panic in Russia after Vladimir Putin orders new mobilization. ABC News' @TSoufiBurridge has more from Kharkiv, Ukraine. https://t.co/eoKvQ4n65a pic.twitter.com/EpNPLXwfXz
— Good Morning America (@GMA) September 23, 2022
Not that anyone outside of Russia and their stooges in the Donbas takes this seriously as a matter of law anyway. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a “violation of the UN Charter and international law.” The US and the EU nations have rejected it, as has Ukraine itself:
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink referred to the referendums, as well as increased military mobilization, as “signs of weakness, of Russian failure,” echoing many opinions that Russia is acting out under pressure in response to Ukrainian advances.
“The United States will never recognize Russia’s claim to purportedly annexed Ukrainian territory, and we will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” Brink tweeted Tuesday. …
“There is global consensus and international law,” Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the head of the office of the president posted on Twitter. “It is unambiguous: Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea are Ukraine. Any attempts to repaint flags are a fiction that will not change anything for us nor for our partners.”
The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that any referendum in Russian-occupied territories will not have any legal consequences.
“No matter how much the Russian Federation holds illegal votes in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, the result will be the same: all Ukrainian territories will be freed from Russian occupation, and the Russian leadership will be brought to the strictest responsibility for organized terror, war crimes and crimes against humanity on Ukrainian soil,” the statement said.
None of that matters to Putin, who isn’t seeking international recognition in the first place. He’s looking for an excuse to justify a wider mobilization and more spending on this lost cause in a desperate attempt to salvage some gain from what is right now looking like a total loss. He has to get his populace fired up for the fight, and the only way to do that now is to paint the heretofore tiny “Nazi clique” into a force that could do what Napoleon and Hitler could not — conquer Russia proper.
It’s not working, as the video above from GMA and this one from the Daily Mail shows. Russians do not want to go to the Ukrainian front, and Russian forces are impressing anti-war protesters into service instead:
The referenda could create another foreign-relations headache for Putin other than in the West, however. China has already cooled on its “friendship” with Russia over the brutality and failures in Ukraine, as has India. Both of those countries have active disputes over claimed territories over which they claim sovereignty: Taiwan for China, Kashmir for India. Cheering on referenda to determine national sovereignty could backfire for both nations, which might explain the very chilly reception Putin got from Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping earlier this month.
Even with that aside, the domestic gambit clearly isn’t working. ISW focused on that aspect in its daily briefing last night:
The Kremlin’s heavy-handed approach to partial mobilization may successfully meet the Kremlin’s internal quota of mobilized personnel but is unlikely to generate effective soldiers and is prompting significant domestic backlash for little gain. Russian authorities are forcibly recruiting Russian citizens to fight in Ukraine on flimsy pretexts, violating the Kremlin’s promise to recruit only those with military experience. Russian authorities are also demonstrably mobilizing personnel (such as protesters) who will enter the war in Ukraine with abysmal morale. The Kremlin’s heavy-handed approach to partial mobilization will likely exacerbate domestic resentment of a measure that would have been unpopular even if implemented without the harsh approaches observed in the last 24 hours.
The Kremlin is openly not adhering to its promised conditions for partial mobilization just 24 hours after its September 21 declaration. Russian officials previously claimed that partial mobilization will only impact 300,000 men and only those with previous military experience.[1] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on September 22 that the practice of administering mobilization notices to detained protesters does not contradict the September 21 mobilization law. Peskov’s threat contravenes the Kremlin’s claim that it will abstain from mobilizing men outside of composed reservist lists.
They also raise the possibility that the mobilization served as a distraction for a prisoner swap that milbloggers opposed:
The Kremlin likely attempted to downplay a prisoner swap with Ukraine that is deeply unpopular among Russian nationalists and milbloggers by undertaking the swap the same day Putin announced partial mobilization. The Kremlin exchanged 215 Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs), including captured foreign nationals and Azov Battalion leaders, for at least 55 Russian POWs and political prisoners, including Putin’s personal friend, Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Medvechuk, on September 21.[14] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on September 22 that Russian and DNR and LNR POWs were in “mortal danger” in Ukrainian custody.[15] Far-right Russian milbloggers criticized the exchange and asked if the Kremlin had given up on the ”de-Nazification” of Ukraine, one of the stated goals of the Russian invasion.[16] Kremlin propagandists had heavily publicized the capture and planned prosecution of Azov personnel, accusing them of being Ukrainian Nazis. Other milbloggers criticized the Kremlin for enabling what they called Ukrainian information operations and ”allowing Kyiv to manipulate the mood in Russia.”[17] Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov described the exchange as ”incomprehensible,” implied that Chechen forces tortured Azov prisoners in captivity, and implied that Russian forces who capture ”Nazis” should kill them rather than take them as POWs if they will be traded back to Ukraine.[18] Torturing or killing POWs is a war crime and violates the Geneva Conventions.
Peachy.
All of this does help us to appreciate our own elections and our ability to engage in a political system in which self-governance remains the rule rather than the exception. It’s not perfect, but it’s light-years away from what others experience … especially in the Donbas these days.
‘Based on International law’....my arse.
Force of arms dictated the results of a bogus ‘fake’ referendum.............just as Russian force of arms is going to do once this Referenda passes..............which Russia warned the US and NATO about when they split Serbia to create Kosovo.
‘Do you hear them laughing in Belgrade?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1jUHqTHkBc
Good old Gorgeous George, making it all about America.
He spends an entire career castigating American interference in democratic processes and screwing up his own... And every time Rusdia does the same thing it’s “Never mind that! What About America”.
He’s such w fan of free speech that questions and criticisms aren’t allowed on his YouTube channel.
I’ve got a lot of time for Galloway as he foes speak truth to (only western) Power, but he’s still a paid up, fully subscribed fan of the Russia/China regimes.
When even Jeremy Corbyn thinks someone’s too far gone to be a member of the pro-Putin wing of the Labour party.
Can’t keep using Kosovo as a double standard forever.
If it was wrong in principle to partition Kosovo no matter what the “genocide of Kosovo’s Albanians” reality was, then what Vladimir Putin is doing is equally wrong - there simply wasn’t enough justification for the Special Military Operation.
Alternatively, if Putin’s justification is okay on such flimsy evidence as <100 vaguely conflict-connected deaths in a country as big as Ukraine during the entire calendar year of 2021, then so was the forced separation of Kosovo.
“Do you hear them laughs om Belgrade?” No, because I hear them saying that Putin’s fake referenda as just as illegitimate as the Kosovo separation.
Good old Gorgeous George. Even a mechanically perfect clock has to be corrected twice a year to account for daylight saving.
Sort of like voting MAGA in a BLM precinct.
“5 years in prison for voting”
In a sham referendum where the only people even being canvassed for their vote are doing so under armed occupation with Russian armed forces watching how they vote, who on the Ukrainian side cares about that?
Over 70% of the local population of the occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia Oblast have already fled into the Ukrainian held north and beyond.
A referendum involving only the 30% of the population of the 60% of the Oblast that is occupied is unenforceable. And even Russia is concerned that this one will create too many problems.
Serbia, hardly a pro NATO country, has already said it won’t recognise any of these referenda. It’s saying that primarily because the Zaporizhzhia referendum is so egregiously bogus that there’s no way even Serbia could countenance its result being legitimate.
Realistically, Russia can’t control that city any other way than declaring all its population to be an illegal occupation of Russia, and performing a repeat of the razing of Mariupol.
The alternative being whispered at in diplomatic circles is, Russia could declare a total win in Donetsk and Luhansk but declare a split vote in Zaporizhzhia.
Annexe the Donbas but pitch partition of the other two Oblasts. Ukraine may keep Kherson and Zaporizhzhia cities, if it concedes the coast.
If Ukraine doesn’t accept that deal, then it’s all out war.
The FBI has always been sketchy. J.Edgar Hoover was a closeted cross-dressing gay, and he figured that everyone else had as much to hide as he did, so he spied on everyone.
He built the FBI, created the culture and the structure and the rules and procedures. He's never been repudiated, hell the big concrete bunker-building in D.C. is still named after him.
They covered up for him, and he was never punished.
And because they always do that, they misdeeds continue and escalate.
The very same HRT ambushed and killed Levoy Finnicum in the Mahler Wildlife Refuge standoff, after he was enticed to go meet with a local sheriff. The HRT members were put on trial, but the two of them (along with two of the Oregon State Patrol who participated in the ambush) refused to identify which of them fired the killing shots, so they both walked. Incredible! Is that now in the FBI manuals on "how to assassinate dissidents and maintain plausible deniability"?
Report: FBI system can chill potential whistleblowers
Note that almost all these links are from left-of-center outlets like Slate, The New York Times, and the Washington Post -- albeit from the era when the Left used to care about civil liberties and American's civil rights.
Previously we had a strong left-leaning press and institutionally leftist Legislative branch carefully watching and criticizing a slightly Right-of-Center FBI. The abuses were there, but there was outrage (from the press) and attempts to reform and reign in the FBI (from Congress, in various committee hearing and resulting legislation).
Now, that's all over. The FBI have moved decisively to be
part of the Leftist establishment. There are zero checks on their behavior, in fact that are the beloved sectret-police enforcers that all totalitarian governments always rely on. The KGB of the Soviet era Russia, the Checka of East Germany, they all had them.
A behind-the-scenes look at the Eastern bloc’s secret police under communism
Planting evidence, on assumes, is an old trick of all these organizations. It's sick to see them trying to pull it on journalists, but we are a degraded people with a degraded and repulsive political system now.
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