Thread: 23 May 2022: Day 89 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine
#Britain's intel: #Russia has lost more men in three months in #Ukraine than the Soviets did in nine years in Afghanistan b/c of "poor low-level tactics, limited air cover ... and a command approach ... [that] reinforce[s] failure and repeat[s] mistakes"
#Russian soldier ranting about the war on #Ukraine being for the "future of the white nation ... We are all that's left". The West, he says, is lost to Arabs, blacks, Asians, and homosexuals (he uses different words).
#pt: Original [unsubtitled] video of a #Russian soldier explaining that the war on #Ukraine is really for the "white nation" and to preserve its "genetics", to re-export "civilisation" to the West, which has been lost to Arabs, blacks, and Asians.
#Russian commentator Sergey Mikheyev says he is "absolutely convinced" #Ukraine is "our land", and only "misunderstandings of treachery" led to separation. The "Ukraine question" must not be left for future generations.
Final Solution rhetoric for a "denazification operation".
#New_Zealand is to send 30 NZDF soldiers to #Britain "to help train #Ukrainian military personnel in operating L119 105mm light field guns", Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced at a press conference today. nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/pr…
Without #Britain being able to run an independent track that the #Baltics and #Poland could join - and the #US could back - which shamed #Germany and #France into upping their game over #Ukraine, their policies would have been even worse.
Boris Bondarev, #Russia's Counsellor to the UN in Geneva, resigns, says the war on #Ukraine is a terrible crime targeted at the "entire Western world" and ultimately Russians, too, who now suffer under a system infused with the spirit of the 1930s USSR.
The #US Defense Department says twenty countries are offering new arms packages to #Ukraine - @AFP
Unfortunate: (a) the #US has no reason to be telling #Russia what it will not do; and (b) breaking the naval blockade on #Ukraine is an important near-term priority
As #Turkey is involved in a tussle with NATO over the admission of Sweden and Finland, a separate front is opened with #Greece as President Erdogan says he will have nothing further to do with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis
Starbucks, which suspended trading in #Russia in March, is now leaving entirely after 15 years. Starbucks began in Russia in 2007 and had grown to 130 coffee shops. Starbucks will continue paying it's 2,000 employees for six months. bbc.com/news/business-…
#Ukraine's President Zelensky also gave a speech when #Poland's President Andrzej Duda was at the Rada yesterday, thanked the Poles and said victory over #Russia's invasion would be a "joint victory", since "without a free Ukraine, there can be no free Poland."
The three #Baltic states and #Slovakia will present a letter to the #EU calling for sanctioned #Russian assets to be given to #Ukraine to pay for repairs and reconstruction necessitated by the damage the Russians have done with the invasion.
#Russia launching indiscriminate thermobaric attacks on Lyman in the Donetsk Oblast in #Ukraine
As expected: #Russia's puppet polity in eastern #Ukraine, the "Donetsk People's Republic", will stage a show trial for the final Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol, who had been in the Azovstal steel plant until their defeat last week reuters.com/world/europe/a…
#Poland further uncoupling from energy dependence on #Russia
"With Russians banned from [the World Economic Forum in] Davos, their den in the Swiss mountain resort was taken over by Ukraine and given a new name: 'Russian War Crimes House'." news.yahoo.com/davos-ukrainia…
The reaction will clarify who was sincerely worried the #US/Alliance wasn't devoting enough resources to #China because of the situation in Europe, and who raised the CCP issue as the least-disgraceful public argument for letting #Russia conquer #Ukraine
Mark Lane, who wrote the first of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory books, was in contact with the KGB, through an officer at the UN delegation, Boris Orekhov. The CIA was told of this by an informant (SHAMROCK) in the KGB itself. eu.usatoday.com/story/news/pol…
This occurred in a context where the CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton thought, encouraged in this belief by Anatoly Golitsyn, that a lot of the Soviet defectors and sources were dangles, including SHAMROCK and (most (in)famously) Yuri Nosenko.
The Nosenko case remains very interesting. The CIA came to believe he was a genuine defector - and Angleton's "mishandling" of him was the proximate cause of his downfall at the Agency - and the KGB files are suggestive along the same lines. BUT ...
Thread: 25 May 2022: Day 91 of #Russia's invasion of #Ukraine
Head of RT, Margarita Simonyan, says "Either this [war in #Ukraine] ends badly for all humanity, or we win. There's no third option." #Russians to celebrate this "brave new world" where their children can't study in the West: "you ought to be rejoicing".
Difficult to feel sorry for Yevgeny Primakov, but heading up a "Russian soft power" organisation is a tough gig right now
BBC reports on some of the "Xinjiang Police Files", hacked police records in #China handed to @adrianzenz, recording the detention of thousands of Uyghurs in "re-education" camps. The effort by Peking is clearly to erase the cultural and Islamic identity. bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85q…
#China directly describes its intent in consigning Uyghur Muslims to their GULAG as being to "break their roots, break their lineage, break their connections, break their origins."
#China arrests Uyghur Muslims for signs of religiosity: growing a long beard, for example. The records for individual counties show an incarceration rate of about 10-12%, suggesting a total GULAG population of over a million people.
Leaked documents show that in one county of a quarter-million people, Konasheher, in southern Xinjiang, nearly 5% of the Uyghur Muslim population has been imprisoned by #CCP for "terrorism" and "extremism" charges. The rate is 30 times the norm in #China. abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireS…
#pt: Pure notably Stalinism: China sets "arrest quotas for local police [in the Muslim areas], in some cases resulting in the men from entire villages being rounded up and whole families uprooted ... [C]amp detainees were forced to confess their 'crimes' in group sham trials"
#pt: "Although China makes legal records easily accessible otherwise, almost 90% of criminal records in Xinjiang are not public."