Russia Declares Open War on Ukraine And Launches Missles on Major Cities

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Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s mercenary Wagner group, has written to Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, to warn that the Ukrainian army is planning an imminent offensive aimed at cutting off his forces from the main body of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. In the letter published by his press service today, Prigozhin said the “large-scale attack” was planned for late March or the start of April. Separately, Prigozhin also intensified his attack on Shoigu, calling the minister’s son-in-law a “scumbag blogger”.

 

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A residential building damaged after a Russian missile strike in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on March 22. One person was killed and 32 injured.

 

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21st century version of Hitler and Mussolini, twin evil!

 

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Putin Planned ‘Total Cleansing’ of Ukraine with ‘house-to-house’ Terror and Victims Dragged off to Concentration Camps, Leaked FSB Documents Reveal​

Putin planned 'total cleansing' of Ukraine with 'house-to-house' terror & victims dragged off to camps, leaked docs show

VLADIMIR Putin wanted a “total cleansing” of Ukraine with “house-to-house terror” to subdue its people, leaked spy documents show. Chilling emails from within Russia’s FSB intelligence service talk…

www.thesun.co.uk

Putin wanted a “total cleansing” of Ukraine with “house-to-house terror” to subdue its people, leaked spy documents show.

Chilling emails from within Russia’s FSB intelligence service talk about orders “from the very top” for civilians to be taken to concentration camps in a bid to conquer Ukraine.

 

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Smoke rises from burning buildings in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on March 26.

 

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List of Suspicious Deaths of Russian Businesspeople (2022–2023)​

Suspicious deaths of Russian businesspeople (2022–2023) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

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Russian pro-war Military Blogger Killed in Blast at St Petersburg Cafe​

Full story and graphic aftermath video here.

 

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Ukranian soldier survived and returned to family after getting injured on Nov 30 last year. Dude was in a coma for two weeks both legs amputated, no eyes, broken hip, ribs and multiple shrapnel wounds throughout what remains of his body.

 

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A fuel tank is on fire in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, the Russian-backed governor of the annexed city, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said on Telegram early Saturday.

Razvozhaev said the fire has spread to around 1,000 square meters and that initial reports indicate it was caused by a drone.

The fuel tank is in the Cossack Bay neighborhood, he said, adding response teams are working on site.

 

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Smoke rises above Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Wednesday, April 26

 

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Putin’s Hitler-like tricks and tactics in Ukraine Exposed​

Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a speech in Red Square in central Moscow, Russia on May 9, 2023.

The glorification of violence and the disregard for law is central to the history of fascism. Taking law seriously and preventing senseless war was supposed to be the lesson learned from World War II.​

Vladimir Putin’s excuse for his senseless attack on Ukraine is “denazification.” With a straight face, the president of Russia claimed that he needs to replace a neighboring democracy with his own foreign tyranny in the name of World War II. He also referred, as he has several times, to an entirely imaginary “genocide” of those who speak Russian in Eastern Ukraine. In fact, speakers of Russian enjoy far greater freedoms in Ukraine than they do in Russia.

The very government that Putin has vowed to topple makes this clear enough. Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is himself a Russian speaker. Just before the Russian invasion began, he gave the best political speech given in Russian in many a year, turning directly to Russians and asking them if they really wanted war. He also referred to the grotesque Nazi charge, pointing out that Ukrainians had died by the millions in World War II fighting the Germans. “Tell it to my grandfather,” he said, “who fought in the infantry of the Red Army and died a colonel in independent Ukraine.”

What Zelensky did not say, but which is worth knowing, is that his grandfather’s family was murdered in the Holocaust. He is Jewish and won 73 percent of the vote in the last presidential election in Ukraine. For a while, both the president and the prime minister of Ukraine were Jewish, something that has never happened anywhere else, aside from Israel. This does not make them better or worse politicians than anyone else. It simply means that Putin’s claim about “denazification” is not only baseless and wrong, but also cruel and grotesque. It is hard to think of something darker than invading a democracy with a Jewish leader in the name of fighting Nazis.

Using the language of World War II in this way makes it meaningless, and that is part of the point. Putin perhaps imagines that Russians can be mobilized through references to historical trauma, even one that makes no sense. But he is also taking aim at the Holocaust itself. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum called Putin’s claims “groundless and egregious,” which they certainly are. They are also trivializing, and deliberately so. When a political leader invokes genocide and Nazis in a way that Putin has done, he is mocking people who actually care about history and insulting people who survived and remember.

Even as Putin was busy with his own absurd historical propaganda, his former political partner, Dmitry Medvedev, was characterizing Ukraine in a way that was clearly antisemitic. His view was that the presence of Jewish leaders meant that Ukraine is not a real country. Medvedev weds this antisemitic canard to the perverse insult that if Zelenky is not a Nazi himself, he serves Nazis. All of these senseless and painful exploitations of history that people rightly take seriously serve a purpose: to make it harder for anyone to do so in the future.

Adolf Hitler had some public relations advice: Tell a lie so big that people will not believe that you would ever try to deceive them on such a grand scale. The Putin regime does something similar. Call it not the Big Lie, as with Hitler, but the Big Mock. Russia’s leaders mock symbols that are so important that people just cannot believe that they would do such a thing. Surely Putin must mean something by denazification? But he doesn’t. The Holocaust is just a button to push, and if pounding that button wears out the reference to actual history, so much the better. Mockery of the Holocaust is so shocking that people do not wish to believe that it is happening. But it is happening. Right now. In addition to the other more palpable horrors of Putin’s unprovoked and cruel war, he is assaulting the history that decent people hold dear.

With his “denazification” talk, Putin is also distracting us, preventing us from making what might be otherwise obvious connections. If we take his claim to be fighting Nazis even a little bit seriously, we will not think to ask what he himself has learned from fascism. Our thoughts are directed away from his own debts to Russian fascist tradition. We might forget that Putin is regarded as a leader by white supremacists all around the world. We might overlook that his regime’s cheerleaders include contemporary Russian fascists who are given prominence in Russian media.

We might fail to notice that, in Putin’s speech justifying the invasion, he spoke of the need to protect “people bound by blood” from a “virus.” We might not take in that all of his utterances this week rely on Hitlerian tricks and tactics. The idea that a neighboring democracy is the artificial creation of the international order? Entirely false atrocity talk about compatriots over the border who need military assistance? These were Hitler’s moves in 1938, just as they are Putin’s now. And of course the glorification of violence and the disregard for law is central to the history of fascism. Taking law seriously and preventing senseless war was supposed to be the lesson learned from World War II.

Denazification should really begin at home.

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Originally published in the Boston Globe by Timothy Snyder - an author of a half-dozen books on Russia and Ukraine, including “The Road to Unfreedom” and “Bloodlands.” He is a professor of history at Yale University and writes the newsletter “Thinking About. . . .”.

Putin’s Hitler-like tricks and tactics in Ukraine - The Boston Globe

The glorification of violence and the disregard for law is central to the history of fascism. Taking law seriously and preventing senseless war was supposed to be the lesson learned from World War II.

www.bostonglobe.com

 

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‘It’s like the USSR’: Residents on Life in Mariupol a Year Since Russian Occupation​

The mood in Mariupol has “changed dramatically”, according to residents who thought Russia would stay forever but are now expecting a swift Ukrainian military offensive to recapture the city.

In a series of anonymous interviews with the Guardian, people said Mariupol had been transformed into a gloomy version of the Soviet Union since the last Ukrainian defenders holed up in the Azovstal steelworks surrendered to Russian troops a year ago.


“I feel as if I’ve fallen into some terrible submerged and downtrodden collective farm. The shops are primitive and the prices astronomical,” one said. “The city isn’t the one I knew. The people are not the same. Everything is changed. I have a permanent feeling of wanting to go home.”

They said Russian flags flew above municipal buildings, soldiers were visible on the streets, and portraits of Vladimir Putin and the leader of the self-proclaimed republic in Donetsk, Denis Pushilin, hung on the walls of offices and schools.

The occupying authorities pulled down more than 300 blocks of flats which were destroyed when Russian forces besieged and pulverised the city. The centre was now an “empty wasteland”, a resident said. “To me it looks awful. There are craters. Everything is mutilated.”

‘It’s like the USSR’: residents on life in Mariupol a year since Russian occupation

People tell Guardian of ‘primitive’ living standards, propaganda in schools and constant risk of arrest

www.theguardian.com

 

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Wagner Chief Warns of Revolution and Says 20,000 Fighters Killed in Bakhmut​

The head of the Wagner mercenary force has said that 20,000 of its fighters have been killed in the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and warned that Russia could face another revolution if its leadership does not improve its handling of the war.

Yevgeny Prigozhin said 20% of the 50,000 convicts Wagner had recruited, and a similar number of its regular troops, had been killed over several months in the fight for Bakhmut.

Prigozhin pointed to the social disparity underlined by the war, with the sons of the poor being sent back from the front in zinc coffins while the children of the elite “shook their arses” in the sun.

Wagner chief warns of revolution and says 20,000 fighters killed in Bakhmut

Yevgeny Prigozhin says children of Russian elite ‘shook their arses’ in sun while sons of poor returned in coffins

www.theguardian.com