Thread by @FranHirsch

Russian show trials in Donetsk will begin by targeting three foreign prisoners-of-war--two from Britain and one from Morocco.

https://twitter.com/pravda_eng/status/1533436956499234817

Russian news sources proclaim that "this public trial will be watched by the whole world." And that "it will be a kind of mini-Nuremberg. trial of Ukrainian and European Nazism."
svpressa.ru/war21/article/…

This is the start of what the Russian State Media is calling the "Mariupol Tribunal."

One Russian news source reports that there are "some 8,000 prisoners of war, including foreign mercenaries, and instructors from NATO countries" in Luhansk--and that the defendants will be selected from among them.

The world cannot just watch such a trial take place. International organizations and international lawyers must speak up. Journalists must call this out as the show trial that it is.

The Russian State Media has been running articles about the Kharkov Trial and the Krasnodar Trial of 1943 (Soviet war crimes trials from WWII) and presenting the "Mariupol Tribunal" as a successor. This of course, is all propaganda.

To understand what Russia is up to we should be looking at the Soviet show trials of the 1930s.

Or at postwar Soviet show trials like the June 1945 trial of sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State...

The trial of sixteen leaders of the Underground State--a network of anti-Nazi resistance organizations--turned reality upside down. The defendants—after being kidnapped and tortured by the NKVD—had confessed to collaborating with Nazi Germany.

This too was a large public trial. It was staged in Moscow before a large audience that included Western diplomats and journalists. The trial helped solidify the Soviet Union’s hold on Poland and from Stalin’s perspective had gone off brilliantly.

The trial of sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State was covered in the news at the time as if it was an ordinary trial. There were no official protests abroad.

We know much more now about how Soviet-style show trials work. We can and must learn from the past.

#PutinIsaWarCriminal #Russia #Ukraine #Azovstal #NurembergTrials #WarCrimes #HistoryMatters #twitterstorians