'The situation was “probably the largest instance of state-sponsored kidnapping of children in history of our modern world”.' Fortunately there are some decent Russians who don't support Putin stepping up to help. Russian volunteers risking their safety to return kidnapped children to Ukraine https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/worl...ed-children-to-ukraine/ar-AA18waPg?li=BBoPWjQ
Exclusive-Ukraine accuses Russian snipers of abusing child, gang raping mother https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...-abusing-child-gang-raping-mother-2023-03-14/
‘Morality Shouldn’t Get in the Way’ — Russia’s Genocidal State Media It occasionally occurs to Putin’s mouthpieces that they may one day face charges in a war crimes tribunal. The case for the prosecution is in their own words. https://cepa.org/article/morality-shouldnt-get-in-the-way-russias-genocidal-state-media/ When Russia invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s elite propagandists wanted to drink champagne in the studio to properly celebrate the moment. Head of state propaganda agency, RT, Margarita Simonyan, expressed “an overwhelming sense of euphoria” and added: “I’ve been waiting eight years for this . . . it finally happened. This is true happiness.” With the bloody all-out invasion now in its second year, the euphoria has been replaced by a lingering sense of dread, with Putin’s mouthpieces routinely fretting about the possibility of war crimes tribunals. The issue is playing on their minds. Appearing on the state TV show, Evening With Vladimir Solovyov in November, Simonyan said: “Let me tell you that if we manage to lose, the Hague — whether real or hypothetical — will even come for the street cleaner sweeping the cobblestones behind the Kremlin.” The same month, Olga Skabeeva, the host of the state TV show 60 Minutes, likewise predicted that if Russia loses its war against Ukraine, every Russian will be considered guilty. She argued that a resounding victory was the only way “to avoid tribunals at the Hague, criminal cases, and having to pay reparations.” As the months go by, these concerns have not subsided. During Solovyov’s show on March 6, Vitaly Tretyakov, dean of Moscow State University’s Higher School of Television, worried out loud about the statements from “significant” Western figures expressing the demand that Putin and other Russians face war crimes tribunals. The Kremlin’s propagandists have plenty of reasons to be concerned; street sweepers and other average citizens rather less so. The agitation for war crimes against Ukrainians (described as animals and worse), the descriptions of them as Nazis, and the delight at the attacks on their homes and civilian energy grid have, after all, not been broadcast by people on the street. From the lowliest pawns on Putin’s chess board to the queens of propaganda like Simonyan and Skabeeva, the state-controlled media has played a central part in prompting, encouraging, rationalizing, and normalizing the Kremlin’s massacre of its next-door neighbors. It may be tempting to interpret such lurid language as silliness designed for a domestic audience. But the outpourings of the propaganda machine have often foreshadowed or justified serious acts of state violence against Ukraine, including the mass murder of civilians, the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian citizens, the weaponization of migrant flows, and the evisceration of the Ukrainian polity. Examples of such talk are easy to find. They proliferate nightly on live TV. Before the full-fledged invasion, Russian state media favored the description of pro-independence Ukrainians as “pigs,” with corresponding cartoons featured on state television, where Ukraine’s language, food, and traditions were routinely mocked. Since February 2022, the descriptions have descended into the realm of open dehumanization. During his show in July, Solovyov said: “When a doctor is deworming a cat — for the doctor, it’s a special operation, for the worms, it’s a war, and for the cat, it’s a cleansing.” In October, RT’s director of broadcasting, Anton Krasovsky, suggested drowning Ukrainian children, setting Ukrainian homes on fire — with the inhabitants inside — and alleged that Ukrainian grandmothers would gladly pay to be raped by Russian soldiers. He insisted that Ukraine should end in its current form, with its only surviving sliver zoned for pig rearing. Krasovsky felt the need to clarify that when he said “pigs,” he did not mean Ukrainian women. In October, Pavel Gubarev, a Russian political figure who proclaimed himself the “People’s Governor” of the Donetsk Region in 2014 and later as leader of the Donbas People’s Militia, explained that Ukrainians were, “Russian people, possessed by the devil,” and that Russia’s aim was to “convince them” that they are not Ukrainian. He added: “But if you don’t want us to change your minds, then we will kill you. We will kill as many of you as we have to. We will kill 1 million or 5 million, we can exterminate all of you.” (Article has video)
Putin is now officially a WAR CRIMINAL. ICC judges issue arrest warrant for Putin over war crimes in Ukraine https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...nst-putin-over-alleged-war-crimes-2023-03-17/ The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant on Friday against Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of being responsible for war crimes committed in Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly denied accusations that its forces have committed atrocities during its one-year invasion of its neighbour. The ICC issued the warrant for Putin's arrest on suspicion of unlawful deportation of children and unlawful transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. Earlier this week Reuters reported that the court was expected to issue warrants, the first in its investigation into the Ukraine conflict. Separately the court issued warrants for Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Russia's Commissioner for Children’s Rights, on the same charges.
Russia has kidnapped 400,000 children from Ukraine and sent them to foster families in Russia to be transformed into Russians. This is the greatest number of kidnapped children during a conflict in the past 100 years -- even more than the Nazis in Germany during WW2. Ukrainian children taken to Russia brings back fear, memories of a similar Nazi effort https://news.yahoo.com/ukrainian-children-taken-russia-brings-100010093.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
Russia is a country eating its own entrails For now – and the forseeable future – Russia’s prospects look very dark https://inews.co.uk/opinion/russia-country-eating-own-entrails-2229313 Not content with committing war crimes as it tries to erase Ukraine from the map, the Putin regime is now trying to snuff out hopes of Russia coming to terms with the shame and horror of its own past. The regime has stepped up its witch-hunt against the country’s most respected human rights group, Memorial, an organisation pledged to protect human rights in Russia as well as document the crimes against humanity committed during the Stalin era. Memorial was shut down in 2021. But on Tuesday this week President Vladimir Putin’s security forces raided the homes of nine members of the organisaton, including its chairman, Yan Rachinsky, anyway. “They view Memorial’s work … as a threat to their power,” says Natalia Zviagina, Amnesty International’s Russia director. As a pretext for raiding the homes of members of Memorial, the Russian authorities accused them of “rehabilitating Nazism”, “which is manifestly absurd”, says Zviagina. But with every passing day, Russia starts to resemble its historical nemesis, the Third Reich, a little bit more. I know Russian political scientist in exile who now refers to her country as a “klepto‑fascist” state. Despite the appalling sacrifices Russians made in fighting the Third Reich, just a few years earlier, Joseph Stalin, the tyrant that Putin increasingly resembles, had been on friendly terms with Adolf Hitler – until, the German mass-murderer turned on the Russian mass-murderer. But these are not issues many Russians discuss in public. Some members of Memorial have tried – but look what has happened to them. A daft and sclerotic nostalgia for a Soviet utopia that never was, and knee-jerk hatred for the West and the US in particular, means many on the hard-left continue to cut Putin some slack. This persists no matter how, oppressive – how obscene – his actions become. In the process, they do ordinary Russians – including the brave members of Memorial, no favours. To paraphrase Tolstoy: Happy countries are all alike; every unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. Russia is by far the world’s biggest country, but an economic also-ran (and who knows how far it will fall because of the Western sanctions ). It has been a beacon for art, literature and science, but can’t escape constant cycles of revolution and oppression – and an unjustified sense of entitlement that matches its vast geography but is completely out of proportion to its economic contribution to the modern world. Now the Ukraine war has hastened its moral collapse into totalitarian police state. Totalitarian states need outsiders and other countries to blame for their failings. Never has that been truer than in Russia today. Campaigners at Memorial, are dubbed foreign agents. Ukraine is the Trojan horse through which Nato will launch an attack. Dehumanising – Nazi-like – denigration of Ukrainians on state media is the norm. The collective guilt or otherwise of the Russian population in the ongoing destruction of Ukraine remains a vexed issue. In a lacerating essay on the state – and possible fate – of her country, the Russian historian Anastasia Edel writes in Foreign Policy: “Many Russians likely share some psychological propensity to justify the war because if what they believe – that their country is engaged in a righteous war against forces of evil – is untrue, then the alternative is being complicit in, and thus culpable for, its crimes.” Other Russian academics point to research that suggests many of their compatriots might appear to support Putin in public but oppose the war in private and don’t believe the West is a threat to their country. How would you or I react to life in a police state? Let’s hope we never find out. The regime’s barbarism has caused an epochal brain drain. The best and brightest are leaving in droves. This week, Olesya Krivtsova, a 20-year-old university student in northern Russia, who was facing a decade in prison for her political posts on social media, joined hundreds of thousands fleeing their homeland. Russia’s long-term economic prospects look dire. The all-important oil majors have completely pulled out of the country; as a result Russia will not be able to develop the next generation of projects in hydrogen and LNG when the world weans itself off fossil fuels. This week Russia’s “friend without limits”, China, conspicuously failed to agree to a new Siberia gas pipeline Moscow will need to keep its economy alive in the interim. Putin’s corrupt regime is lying about the country’s past, consuming and wasting its most valuable assets and, of course, destroying its future. Russia is on a road to economic and moral ruin: a country feasting on its own entrails. Its theatre – regarded as among the most vibrant in the world – is dying as artists and intellectuals are replaced with apparatchiks. With the pitch-black humour of Gogol or Bulgakov, one Russia journalist Arkady Babchenko, who staged his own death to thwart an alleged assassination plot by Russian security services, noted that “anyone showing dissent will simply fall out of the window”. In a supposedly post-colonial world, Russia is an anachronism. Most of Russia’s oil and gas comes from two autonomous ethnic regions in Siberia, from where it is – or was – piped to Europe; the hundreds of billions of dollars of profit, of course, go to Moscow and into the pockets of oligarchs. This has led pundits and politicians, including opposition leader Alexei Navalny, to say that Russia’s federal structure of republics, krais, oblasts and cities will need a radical shake-up before it can be dragged into the 21th century. But for the process to even begin, some, like Edel, say Russia will probably have to lose the war in Ukraine. For now – and the forseeable future – Russia’s prospects look very dark. “So deep is the country’s malaise that even Russian President Vladimir Putin’s exit from the Russian political stage, whenever it occurs, is unlikely to change the country’s current trajectory,” writes Edel. “Too many red lines have been crossed, too many points of no return passed. Increasingly lawless, economically doomed and morally bankrupt, Russia is running out of good endings.”