From the editor
Protests on Wednesday evening across Russia against Vladimir Putin’s “partial mobilisation” order were met largely with derision by Ukrainians, who understandably wonder why Russians have only become upset when there is a chance that they personally might have to fight in the war. This feeling has been heightened by the fact that in Iran thousands of people, led by women, have been risking their lives daily to protest against a brutal regime. Most of Russia’s cities could only muster a few dozen protesters, and there may have been a few thousand out in Moscow and St. Petersburg for a couple of hours. Many more Russians desperately bought up plane tickets to any neighbouring country they could enter without a visa.
Relatives say goodbye to men being mobilised for the war in Neryungri, Yakutia
There is no point in asking once again why Russians are so passive and accepting, since it is something that we have all got used to and Putin has exploited to the utmost. One day things might suddenly turn around and the country will descend into a bloodbath to rival Yugoslavia’s or Syria’s. In the meantime regional authorities are already packing men off on buses for their promised “training” before they head to the front lines in Ukraine. The mobilisation is supposed to apply at first to people who have already served in the military or have needed skills, but it looks like anyone and everyone is being rounded up to meet the quota of an additional 300,000 troops set by Sergei Shoigu. Arrested protesters may be among the first to find themselves in uniform. An unpublished clause in the mobilisation decree is rumoured to allow for up to a million people to be recruited.
Ukraine is not too worried about the mobilisation, as these clueless and reluctant soldiers are likely to meet the same fate as tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen who are already in their graves. Nor can the sham referendums that Putin has promised to hold in four occupied regions of Ukraine this weekend make much difference, as more “annexations” will go unrecognised by the rest of the world. Putin hopes that he can intimidate Ukraine to prevent attacks on these territories by calling them Russia and threatening nuclear war in retaliation. But this really is a last ditch stand by the dictator. His decisions since launching the war have been wrong in every possible way, including for Russia and for himself. His rant on Wednesday morning about neo-Nazis brutalising civilians in Ukraine, backed by a collective West that wants to destroy Russia, was unhinged. The writing is on the wall and sooner or later Russia’s defeat will be undeniable.
Another silent acknowledgement that Russia is under extreme pressure came in the form of a large POW exchange late Wednesday evening. Ukraine handed over Putin friend Viktor Medvedchuk and some high-ranking Russian officers in return for 215 people who had been in Russian captivity, according to Volodymyr Zelensky, including “188 defenders of Azovstal and Mariupol,” as well as 10 foreign citizens from the UK, the US, Morocco Sweden and Croatia. The UK Foreign Office confirmed that Aiden Aslin, Shaun Pinner, Andrew Harding, Dylan Healy and Andrew Hill were released. Aslin and Pinner had been sentenced to death by the “Donetsk People’s Republic”. US citizens Alexander Drueke and Andy Huynh were also released.
Putin has assured world leaders including Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi that he wants to end a war that is hurting all the big countries’ economies as well as those of the smaller ones, but instead he has ordered the opposite once again. While apologists claim the West is prolonging the war by supplying Ukraine with weapons, there is one person who can end the war instantaneously, and that is Putin. It seems he wants to end it the hard way, with further harm to Russia that the country will not quickly recover from, if at all.
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Navalny faces new criminal charges
Russian prosecutors have announced that Alexei Navalny will face new criminal charges of calling for unsanctioned protests against the “special military operation” in Ukraine and “attempting to overthrow the constitutional structure” of the country. The charges envisage a penalty of up to 15 years in prison. Navalny is already serving a nine-year prison sentence for alleged “fraud and contempt of court”. This week he appeared in court via video link for hearings on his complaints about his treatment in prison. He denounced the war in Ukraine and called for people to join the protests that took place on Wednesday. Navalny has been placed in a punishment cell on multiple occasions recently for supposed infringements of prison rules.
Singer Pugacheva speaks out against war
Russia’s most famous pop star, 73-year-old Alla Pugacheva, has issued a statement asking to be designated a foreign agent after authorities gave this label to her husband, 46-year-old entertainer Maxim Galkin, for criticising the war. The couple left the country following that but Pugacheva returned recently. In her statement Pugachev called for an end to “the deaths of our boys for illusory aims that make our country a pariah and weigh down the lives of its citizens.” Other Russian musicians who have opposed the war include the group Little Big that was supposed to represent the country at the cancelled 2020 Eurovision Song Contest; the band Nogu Svelo!, Yuri Shevchuk and his rock band DDT, and veteran rockers Boris Grebenshchikov and Andrei Makarevich.
Actor killed in crash trying to take vehicle to war zone
Actor Sergei Puskepalis, 56, who starred in the films Simple Things and How I Ended This Summer, has been killed in a crash with a lorry in Yaroslavl Oblast while trying to drive a home-made armoured minibus to Donbas to help the Russian war effort. Putin commented in a message of condolences: “Sergei Puskepalis remained faithful to noble moral and spiritual values and to the ideals of patriotism and justice.”
OSCE interpreters sentenced for treason
A court in the “Luhansk People’s Republic” has sentenced two former interpreters with the OSCE mission in Donbas, Dmitri Shabanov and Maxim Petrov, to 13 years in prison for “treason”. Many of the OSCE’s local staff were left behind in the occupied region when foreign staff were evacuated at the start of the invasion.
“Our colleagues remain OSCE staff members and had been performing official duties as mandated by all 57 participating states,” the organisation’s Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid said in a statement. “I call for their immediate and unconditional release, along with our other colleague who is also being detained.” OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau, said, “Our Mission members have been held unjustifiably for more than five months in unknown conditions for nothing but pure political theatre. It is inhumane and repugnant.”
Crimean Tatars get long sentences
Prominent activist Nariman Dzhelyal and two other Crimean Tatars have been given long prison sentences for allegedly planning to sabotage a gas pipeline in Crimea. Dzhelyal was sentenced to 17 years in a maximum-security prison, Asan Akhtemov to 15 years and his cousin Aziz Akhtemov to 13. The three men smiled as they were sentenced and wore T-shirts in the cage in court with blue and yellow writing on them in Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar, including the Ukrainian trident and words from the Ukrainian national anthem.
Dzhelyal, who is the first deputy chairman of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, believes his arrest was revenge for his participation in the inaugural Crimea Platform event in Kyiv in August 2021. In his final statement in court in August this year he told the panel of three judges, “It is not on us that you will pass sentence. This is your sentence. On Judgement Day you will not be helped by any falsification or false testimony. And when just punishment for your injustice comes, perhaps you will remember our three names. Though there will probably be far more names.”
Chelyabinsk anarchists jailed for anti-FSB banner
Chelyabinsk anarchists Dmitri Tsibukovsky and Anastasia Safonova have been sentenced to a year and nine months in prison on a charge of “hooliganism with a motivation of political enmity” for hanging a banner in front of the FSB building in the city that said “The FSB is the main terrorist” on February 15, 2018. Tsibukovsky also allegedly lit a flare and threw it at the fence around the building. Prosecutors said he used the flare as a weapon. The pair were caught by Russian police while trying to escape via the border with Kazakhstan in Orenburg Oblast.
Six Jehovah’s Witnesses sentenced
A court in Rostov Oblast has handed down prison sentences to six Jehovah’s Witnesses for belonging to the group, which is banned in Russia as extremist. Alexei Gorely and Oleg Shidlovsky were sentenced to 6 ½ years in prison, and Nikita Moiseyev, Alexei Dyadkin, Vladimir Popov and Yevgeny Razumov to seven years. According to the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Russian website, Gorely has a seven-year-old son, and Shidlovsky’s wife has had three strokes since her husband and the other men were arrested in August 2020 after their homes were searched.
I see little that is original here. It could have been written from a comfortable home office anywhere in the world. Readers want to know what’s going on in Russia from a non-Western perspective. Western media provides so little accurate reporting that one would be remiss not to consult RT or Sputnik News, where I believe the accuracy factor surpasses Western media. Those of us who are media-savvy can easily discern that which is fake, as opposed to one-sided.