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Novaya Gazeta Europe said Putin received at least 31.6 million fraudulent votes, out of about 75 million votes cast. Important Stories, meanwhile, concluded that around 22 million bad votes were given to Putin. Important Stories explained its lower estimate by saying it excluded Moscow's vote tallies because officials combined in-person votes with electronic online voting, and that may have distorted the analysis.

"Never before have we seen a presidential campaign that fell so far short of constitutional standards," Golos, a now-banned election watchdog organization, wrote in its summary report.

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"This was the most filthily falsified presidential election in the country's history," Shukshin wrote.

The United States has so far provided military aid to Ukraine that amounts to roughly a tenth of its total annual defense budget. In return, one of America’s most dangerous enemies has sacrificed almost all of its existing soldiers and the bulk of its armor. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the valor of their armed forces have accomplished all of this without a single American soldier being ordered into battle. And yet Republicans want to depict this astonishing achievement as a budgetary strain that makes America less safe.

Det går därför inte att generellt hävda att en förhandlingslösning alltid är att föredra framför fortsatt krig. Det går heller inte att påstå att varje fred är att föredra framför krig. Kostnaden för freden måste vägas mot kostnaden för fortsatt krig. Det finns många exempel på historiska fall där lidandet, också kostnaden i människoliv, varit större på grund av fiendens brutalitet efter att striderna upphört än under själva kriget. Den fred som uppkommer kan råda mycket länge, och effekten av sådant som förlorad demokrati och nedtrampade mänskliga rättigheter kan då komma att påverka många generationer, vilket gör att kostnaden med en dålig fred växer när det långa tidsperspektivet beaktas.

Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that NATO is responsible for his February 24 invasion of Ukraine—that rounds of NATO enlargement made Russia insecure, forcing Putin to lash out. This argument has two key flaws. First, NATO has been a variable and not a constant source of tension between Russia and the West. Moscow has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO; the Kremlin’s complaints about the alliance spike in a clear pattern after democratic breakthroughs in the post-Soviet space. This highlights a second flaw: Since Putin fears democracy and the threat that it poses to his regime, and not expanded NATO membership, taking the latter off the table will not quell his insecurity. His declared goal of the invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine, is a code for his real aim: antidemocratic regime change.

There were around 200 graves at the site on the outskirts of Bakinskaya village in Krasnodar region when Reuters visited in late January. The news agency matched the names of at least 39 of the dead here and at three other nearby cemeteries to Russian court records, publicly available databases and social media accounts. Reuters also spoke to family, friends and lawyers of some of the dead.

Many of the men buried at Bakinskaya were convicts who were recruited by Wagner last year after its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, promised a pardon if prisoners survived six months at the front, this reporting showed. They included a contract killer, murderers, career criminals and people with alcohol problems.

Summing up the economic results of the year, many Russian economists say that “everything is not so bad”, referring to the usual indicators, such as GDP of the rates of unemployment, inflation or exchange of the ruble. Judging by these, “GDP has declined less than expected,” unemployment and inflation are virtually nonexistent, and the ruble has “stabilized,” but does this really mean that the country is not in economic crisis? Vladimir Milov explains why these indicators are irrelevant at a time of war, the crisis is already in full swing (even if the average citizen cannot see it yet), and the payback for Putin's military ambitions will be dire for Russians.

Parliament calls on the European Union to further isolate Russia internationally, including when it comes to Russia’s membership of international organisations and bodies such as the United Nations Security Council. MEPs also want diplomatic ties with Russia to be reduced, EU contacts with official Russian representatives to be kept to the absolute minimum and Russian state-affiliated institutions in the EU spreading propaganda around the world to be closed and banned.

Against the backdrop of the Kremlin’s escalating acts of terror against Ukrainian civilians, the resolution further calls on EU member states in the Council to swiftly complete its work on a ninth sanctions package against Moscow.

The reality is that right now, an enormous amount of essentially fascist and in some cases downright Nazi-like rhetoric is emanating from the Kremlin propaganda mill—and, in even more extreme form, from Russian nationalists and war hawks who think the current leadership is too soft.

The Russian President’s Office regularly sends detailed written instructions to state-controlled media, telling them exactly how to cover daily events in the country. Over the past six months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s publicity efforts were increasingly criticized by people who supposedly take their cues from those memos — the propagandists themselves. The Russian media are, of course, prohibited from calling the war a “war” and must instead always minimize it as merely a “special military operation.” But there is a lot more to how the Kremlin strives to limit and shape the information that reaches mass audiences. Meduza’s special correspondent Andrey Pertsev has pored over six months’ worth of the close-to-daily instructions — the so-called “metodichkas” — sent by the Kremlin to propagandist journalists, editors, and bloggers. It turned out that these documents speak volumes about current events — and Vladimir Putin’s attempts to maintain a grip on public opinion.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine could start the painful process of decolonizing Russia. Much depends on whether Russian intellectuals let go of the ideals of a great Russian people and the friendship of “brotherly” nations. This requires accepting the sovereignty and equality of other countries and cultures and admitting responsibility for the Soviet genocidal colonial past. Decolonizing Russian political discourse and culture will debunk the myth of Russian imperial innocence and victimhood and restore the dignity of the colonized.

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