The Russian Putic critic Vladimir Kara-Murza (41) has been sentenced to 25 years in jail in Russia for charges linked to his criticism of the war in Ukraine. He was found guilty of treason, spreading "false" information about the Russian army and being affiliated with an "undesirable organisation."
The "outrageously harsh court decision clearly demonstrates yet again the political misuse of the judiciary in order to pressure activists, human rights defenders and any voices opposing Russia's illegitimate war of aggression against Ukraine," the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell said in a statement.
Putin's Federal Security Service, or FSB (the successor to Putin's KGB), tried to kill Kara-Murza by poisoning in 2015 and 2017.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (46) was poisoned with novichok by FSB agents in August 2020. Bellingcat, the investigations group, identified the team that was authorised by Putin to kill Navalny.
After treatment in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia and is now serving 11-1/2 years in the IK-6 penal colony, and may also face another charge with a sentence of 5 years.
Navalny is allowed only four visits by relatives per year instead of the usual six visits and there can be no communication with other prisoners. His lawyers believe that he is being slowly poisoned. “Our theory is that they are gradually killing him, using slow-acting poison which is applied through food."
Kara-Murza wrote this for The Washington Post before the court hearing: "There is hardly a practice of the Soviet repression of dissent that has not been revived by Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia. A host of draconian new laws has criminalized public criticism of the government and of its actions — especially regarding the war on Ukraine. Political opposition is now officially equated with treason. Opponents of the Kremlin have been murdered, poisoned and imprisoned. Today’s Russia counts more known political prisoners than the Soviet Union did in its later years. Even the forced psychiatric “treatment” of dissenters has made a comeback — in only a few cases, so far. None of this is surprising. After all, Putin not only served in the Soviet KGB but, according to new archival research, personally participated in searches and interrogations of dissidents in 1970s Leningrad."
But there is one repressive Soviet practice that is yet to return — and it looks like this oversight will soon be corrected. One after another, senior Russian lawmakers have called for stripping those they deem traitors — that is, Russians who oppose Putin and the war — of their citizenship. The speaker of Russia’s parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, recently lamented the lack of a procedure for doing this. “But I think there ought to be one,” he added.
What Putin fears most
In a paper, Robert Person, associate professor of international relations at the US Military Academy, and Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia (2012-2014) and White House aide, and now professor of political science at Stanford University, said in an abstract of their 2022 paper: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.
Putin has a docile lapdog in Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, and the authors' case is that the Russian dictator wanted to install another lapdog in an annexed Ukraine.
Finland, the 31st member of NATO in 2023, shares a 1,340 km (832-mile) eastern frontier with Russia. After the war in Ukraine began Helsinki opted for the protection of NATO's Article Five, which says an attack on one member is an attack on all.
Finnish public opinion towards joining NATO was at 78% last November.
The Gulags returns
Vladimir Lenin began the slave labour camps in 1919 and in the 1930s they were filled with victims of Stalin's reign of terror.
Solzhenitsyn returned home from the United States in 1994.
Since the dictator's war started in February 2022 at least 500,000 Russians have fled and 20,000 people have been detained for political and antiwar protests last year, according to human rights group OVD-Info. A second arrest risks being in prison for at least 5 years.
In 2021 alone, the country’s population dropped by 693,000, or about 0.5% according to The Economist.
It's a crime in the Putin dictatorship to mention the 1939-41 Nazi-Soviet pact when Stalin and Hitler agreed to carve up Eastern Europe. Stalin invaded six independent countries — Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania — compared to Hitler’s conquest of nine (or 10 if one counts the Channel Islands.)
The Financial Times reports "that at least 440 people — artists, priests, teachers, students and doctors — have had criminal cases opened against them, according to OVD-Info. Many are awaiting trial in jail, and some face sentences of up to 15 years. Others have fled the country."
Today there is no independent press and Putin, the war criminal and killer of his own people, can bask in public polls that apparently show support for the invasion of Ukraine. The dictator of course is popular!
In 2021 The Moscow Times reported that "Around 500 super-rich Russians control more wealth than the poorest 99.8% of Russians, according to a new report into Russia’s inequality problem.
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that Russia’s financial elite — the approximately 500 individuals with a net worth of more than $100mn — controlled 40% of the country’s entire household wealth."
Putin's Kleptocracy has the 1% controlling 58% of the wealth according to a Swiss bank.
Last year the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) told Reuters that the country's banks held between 150bn and 200bn Swiss francs ($160bon to $214bn) of Russian money.
Russians are fewer, poorer and more miserable than a decade ago
The average nominal household income of a Russian in 2021 was 57,000 roubles or $700 per month.
World Bank data for 2021 show that GDP (gross domestic product) per capita for Russia was at $12,200 (US current $). It coincided with the average for the World. In 2013 the level was $16,000.
$48,200 (High Income countries); Ireland $47,000; Denmark $68,000; Italy 35,700; Germany $51,200; Poland $18,000; Euro Area $42,450; EU $38,400 and Central Europe + the Baltics $18,700.
President Barack Obama, explaining in December 2016 why he didn’t do more to stop Kremlin-directed hacks of US political institutions, mocked Russia as a sad, declining power:
“They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country, their economy doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” he said. “They don’t innovate.”
The useful idiots
Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, each consisting of two pipes, were built by Russia's state-controlled Gazprom to pump 110bn cubic metres (bcm), while close to the Danish economic zone, were blown up last September. It's not known which country or countries were involved.
I have previously noted that the term "useful idiot," for a naive or unwitting person, was believed to be first recorded in 1864 in 'The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art,' a London periodical. The context was politics in France.
In the 20th century, it was linked to Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Bolshevik Revolution but in the West the useful idiot expected Soviet communism to usher in a system of government that would outlast capitalism.
In 1917 Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), the British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic, saw it as “one of the great heroic events of the world’s history.” However by 1920, he understood that the new rulers were facing huge challenges but the problem was not communism in itself, he questioned the wisdom of holding a creed such as Marxism so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.
George Bernard Shaw, the Anglo-Irish writer, excused mass murder as others did.
Useful idiots from Bernard Shaw to President Michael D Higgins
What has been extraordinary in the past decade is that Putin has won admirers in the West from contemporary useful idiots of the far right and far left.
The Kremlin has also bankrolled European populist parties.
Trump has been an admirer including his followers and Fox News presenters.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was travelling over conflict-hit Ukraine on 17 July 2014 when it disappeared from radar. A total of 298 were on board. There are “strong indications” the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, personally signed off on a decision to supply the missile that downed flight MH17 in 2014, a team of international investigators has said. The Netherlands and Australia said in 2018 that Russia was responsible for the disaster.
In France, the radical right-wing leader Marine Le Pen and the wealthy radical-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon both support Putin.
Mélenchon wants to destroy the EU, lead France out of NATO and deprive Europe of its own defence capabilities. The craven politician confirmed his useful idiot status when he commented on Putin’s barbaric war in Syria “I congratulate Russia on its actions in Syria.”He was also an admirer of the late Hugo Chávez, the populist leader of Venezuela.
The recent US intelligence leak showed that Kremlin documents recorded meetings between its officials and Russian political strategists about how to unite elements in the German Left Party and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), behind a common, pro-Moscow cause. "The documents basically show that Kremlin officials gave orders to a group of political strategists working with the Kremlin to focus on Germany as the base for efforts to weaken support in Europe for Ukraine and to try and sap support for weapons deliveries," according to The Washington Post.
Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, said in March, that "Putin’s war in Ukraine is unsettling many in Germany. A new peace movement is forming in the country, but it is stirring up the ghosts of German history – and has an open flank to the extreme right."
"I can fully understand the emotional response. Everyone wants peace," says Jamila Schäfer, a 29-year-old Green Party member of parliament. "But some people confuse the pacifist objective with the pacifist method." Schäfer also considers herself to be a pacifist. "But I am not going to resign myself to falling into a state of desperate helplessness as soon as an aggressor starts a war."
Sinn Féin, the Irish political party, had a love affair with the Kremlin tyrant. The funny thing was that when Crimea was annexed, SF would not criticise the dictator.
In 2015, Sinn Féin abstained from a European Parliament resolution which condemned human rights abuses in Russia and slammed the dictator's annexation of Crimea in Ukraine. When Putin in 2018 sent his goons to the UK to kill a former intelligence and his daughter, Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Féin, criticised the condemnation of Leo Varadker, the taoiseach, as “a flagrant disregard for Irish neutrality.”
McDonald suggested that any abuse of human rights should be ignored by an Irish leader.
In 2019, then Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan accused the EU of being “overly confrontational” towards Russia and defended voting against plans to block a Russian gas line.
In December 2021 the party’s MEP, Chris MacManus, voted against a landmark resolution that supported Ukraine’s independence, which stressed that Putin’s military build-up at Ukraine’s borders represented a threat to Europe’s peace, and called on Russia to respect its international obligations.
Three other Irish MEPs (members of the European Parliament), Clare Daly, Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan, and Mick Wallace, gave speeches in the European Parliament condemning the EU, the US and NATO while praising the regimes in Russia, China, Syria and elsewhere.
United Nations: The assessment finds that the scale of the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity. 31 Oct 2022
Some foreign Kremlin apologists may be gobshites but it’s likely that most of them know what's going on. These despicable heartless people trade on getting the proverbial 15 minutes of fame while the dictator murders Ukrainian civilians in their homes.
Serhii Plokhy author of the book 'Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation' noted in 2017 "When Putin pushes the idea that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, he doesn't mean that Russians are Ukrainians. The underlying argument is that Ukrainians are really Russians."
The Kremlin website in English July 12, 2021: Article by Vladimir Putin "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians"
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe...The throne of Kiev held a dominant position in Ancient Rus. This had been the custom since the late 9th century.
...Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.
Today, these words may be perceived by some people with hostility. They can be interpreted in many possible ways. Yet, many people will hear me. And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be ”anti-Ukraine." And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.
In 2014 Russia seized control of Eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, followed by a limited international backlash.
In 2022 Putin assumed that the capture of the rest of Ukraine would be easy and the whole of the country would have been annexed. Last September Putin unilaterally declared the annexation of areas in and around four Ukrainian oblasts – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
The Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires annexed Ukraine in the late 1700s while Poland disappeared from the map.
A referendum on the Act of Declaration of Independence was held in Ukraine on December 1, 1991. An overwhelming majority of 92.3% of voters approved it. International observers attended and over 84% of eligible voters turned out.
The day after the referendum was held, Poland and Canada recognised Ukraine’s independence. By the end of December 1991, the number of such countries increased to 74 – 25 days after the Ukrainian independence referendum was held, the Soviet Union collapsed.
Putin's versions of history are myths
The Big Lie from Hitler to Putin and Versailles
Ukraine, George Orwell and emergence of state sovereignty
Putin follows Peter the Great as Russia's 1% own 59% of the wealth
Putin's Irish useful idiots vote down the European Parliament resolution on Russia
