@amnesty brandishes the idea of impartiality to justify its report which claims the 🇺🇦army is endangering civilians by using residential areas as bases. This idea creates a false equivalence, implying that 🇺🇦defensive tactics make them accomplices to Russian aggressors' crimes /1 @amnesty's suggestion that Ukrainian servicemen should not engage in urban warfare but rather find 'viable alternatives' such as fighting from 'densely wooded areas nearby' is laughable and does not take into consideration the military situation on the ground. /2

We must scrutinise the imperial discourse and romanticisation of territorial conquest embedded in Russian literature through a post-colonial lens, the same way it’s being done with regards to the literary traditions of Western former colonial powers.🧵1/

foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/25/rus… Our failure to apply a post-colonial lens to the study of 🇷🇺 literature, to call out the imperialist rhetoric coming from🇷🇺 elites over the past decades vis-à-vis 🇺🇦, are partly responsible for our unpreparedness in the face of 🇷🇺's territorial revisionism under Putin’s regime 2/

@ECFR conducted an opinion poll. These results will not shock anyone who regularly monitors Italy's media coverage of the war in Ukraine. Longer 🧵1/ In Italy, Russian propagandists are regularly invited under the pretext of providing 'both' interpretations of the war (note that Ukrainian voices are invited way less regularly). Common narratives include: 2/

We must talk about 🇷🇺nationalism. I watched a 2020 interview with Aleksei Milchakov, commander of the Rusich neo-Nazi militia of 🇷🇺 mercenaries fighting in🇺🇦 Dressed as a Peaky Blinder, he admits his favourite activity is ‘killing people for 🇷🇺’, while sipping American whiskey 1/ Recent reports at @derspiegel @thetimes @guardian indicate the presence of neo-Nazi groups – Russian Imperial Legion and Rusich – returning to fight in 🇺🇦 now after 2014-15, thus revealing the absurdity and cynicism of Moscow’s claims of the need to “denazify” Ukraine. 2/

🇺🇦human rights ombudsman:“About25 girls&women aged 14-24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of a house in Bucha..🇷🇺soldiers told them they’d rape them to the point they wouldn't want sexual contact with any man,to prevent them from having🇺🇦children”/1 🇷🇺 is committing genocide in 🇺🇦 It reminds me of the systematic sexual abuse on Muslim women by Serbian militiamen during the Bosnian war:“Look at how many children you can have. Now you are going to have our children…our little Chetniks” [Serbian nationalist movement in WW2] /2

In an interview for 🇮🇹 audiences, Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian journalist who showed an anti-war placard live on TV, qualified Western sanctions as Russophobia & equated the impact of the war on Ukrainians with that of sanctions on ordinary Russians /1
raiplay.it/video/2022/03/… 'Today there are many Russians who suffer alongside Ukrainians'. Putting the tragedy of Ukrainians on the same footing as Russians' economic difficulties is an attempt to soften sanctions by portraying the invasion as Putin's pet project and de-responsibilising Russian society /2