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Absolutely superb summing up of oligarch-led Russia by one of our better-informed commentators:-
The Russian Federation is a crime syndicate with a country attached.
wis
As far as language status goes it is nice to update the all too credulous Dattabase and leave him speechless.
Pompal and his pals will say Stalin did no such thing. No human being could do such a thing as take all the grain away Ukraine and starve millions to death. They would be right in one sense of course. Does Tim see much difference between him and Putin? Certainly their battlefield tactics are absolutely identical.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says Russian speakers in Ukraine are under attack, and he claims this invasion is to protect them. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley traveled across the country before the war to see whether that's true.
JUST TO PUT THE RECORD STRAIGHT for ill-informed Putin admirers:
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Oh, so you have three floors.
ANDRIY KONONENKO: Three floors. Come follow me.
BEARDSLEY: Andriy Kononenko opened his language school in Kyiv in 2001. Today he has branches across Ukraine. He says students come from around the world to study mostly Russian.
KONONENKO: Europe, U.S., Great Britain - also, we get quite a bit of people from Asia sometimes.
BEARDSLEY: OK. When I looked you up - I looked on the site. It said, come and learn Russian in Odesa and Kyiv. And I was thinking, oh, that's funny because Putin said there's a genocide against Russian speakers. So...
KONONENKO: Yeah (laughter). That's a big hoax. There's nothing of that going on. Kyiv is - by far and large is a Russian-speaking place.
BEARDSLEY: Kononenko says Ukrainian was suppressed during Soviet times, but since Russia launched a separatist war in the East eight years ago, it's enjoyed a resurgence. Ukraine's Parliament has made Ukrainian the country's official language, but the law does not prohibit the use of Russian, which the vast majority of the country speaks fluently. Russian is President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's mother tongue. Polls taken before the invasion show the law had majority support, even in the east of the country, which traditionally has been closer to Russia.
What would have happened if Ukraine had given a guarantee never to join NATO in December 2021? This is a question for all those who support Putin. I will unlock the green prison tomorrow for half an hour to see if there are any thoughtful replies that make sense.
Well, you do show yourself up with evasive replies like that. Navalny’s mother arrived at the prison this morning to see her son’s body. She was kept waiting for 2 hours, only then to be told that his body was not there. Tests had to be carried out to establish the cause of death.
Do you know if Lira’s relatives were treated like this? Could you explain where you learnt that Lira was tortured?
Just as I am sure Tim has every sympathy for an old lady seen being led away by the police after laying flowers at a memorial. These people, unprompted by Western agents or media, do the right thing at personal cost, we must all agree.
Lira was under house arrest for good reasons in Kharkiv. He denied Russian atrocities in the same forthright manner as those who stood on the railtracks outside Ausschwitz denying the Holocaust ever happened. He was almost unbelievably misogynist in his outlook, by the way.
He thought that Putin was the greatest but he would be alive today in all probability if he hadn’t tried to do a runner. Did Navalny do a runner? Even Tim has more respect for a man like Navalny, I would hope.
Right you are, James. Pompal and assorted crackpots (sickopaths and keyboards go hand in hand in chat rooms nowadays whereas it used to be pen and paper refused nothing) are lucky we just use green bin liners here to eliminate them - as I am doing right now.
Dattabase, I take it you have some respect for Navalny and his courage. Maybe you do not admire him for some reason. It would have been better to say nothing at all in that case. Money is not everything after all.
Offler, we do not have to read the wilful shameless vilification of a brave man who exposed the utter rottenness of Putin’s regime that has introduced poison of every imaginable sort into people’s daily lives, from polonium in teacups to military-grade nerve agents on door handles to vicious lying propaganda. You know what to. I have just done it.
What a brain-washed, malicious oaf is our Mr. Leningradskyj. You are a pathetic excuse for a normal human being, Sir.
From the 2013 trial of this fearless exposer of Putin’s corruption:
The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to five years in prison at the end of a trial that was seen as politically motivated.
Navalny was taken from the courtroom in handcuffs after the judge, Sergei Blinov, ended a three-hour verdict reading by finding him guilty of embezzlement. He hugged his wife, Yulia, and was led away by police.
On Thursday night, thousands of Russians flooded the main arteries leading to the Kremlin, demanding his freedom and calling for the ousting of the president, Vladimir Putin. Dozens were detained.
An anti-corruption activist who became the most popular figure to emerge from protests that erupted around Putin's return to the Kremlin last year, Navalny was accused of embezzlement, and a handful of other charges, after Putin unleashed a crackdown on the opposition in the wake of his inauguration.
"When I heard the verdict, it felt like it was happening to one of my relatives," said Yevgeny Zakharov, a 31-year-old lawyer for a state-run oil company. "My hands were shaking."
CS has blended over many years into the Russian background, their secretive culture and way of doing business to perfection. Why else do the authorities seem to lean in his direction all the time? Being an Irishman from a “friendly” country helps, I would imagine. You will thank him for all that in due course, I firmly believe.
B1ll is waking up real slow. The now defunct Mr YF lulled him into this comatose state, I think. Come on, B1ll, show a bit of entrepreneurial, not to say piratical, zeal. You are going to miss the boat - ahem - the good ship Eurasia.
LG’s argument is probably along the lines that considering recent developments with PRD and EOG the LU is in the bag at some later stage and that therefore LOGP stand more in need of him than vice-versa. Boldy needs to send him packing by proving he can get funding from another and more desirable source. Some one suggested a while ago that LOGP have a case for compensation of one kind or another, whether the LU is reinstated or not. Anyone else agree with that?
Quite so, Stonk, Icarus should consider that Putin’s demand that Ukraine should give guarantees that it would never join NATO in order to avoid invasion and war was simply unacceptable and indistinguishable from Hitler’s diplomacy. There was 65-75% popular support in the Baltic States to join NATO in 2002-4. Icarus probably thinks these people
were just paranoid without any good reason. Putin and the brutal Second Chechen War gave them every reason to want to join for their own security. Poland had already taken that step in 1999, hardly surprising if you know its history.
Another cave-in a la Nick Furlong? Surely not with very supportive shareholders?
I cannot see that happening here because we have a route that was not open to BEY. Surely all shareholders must support the ECT route and do everything necessary to see it happens through a placing. 6m from LG is, or ought to be, unthinkable. Time for Boldy to tell us now about funding - not on 19th March.
‘Carlson is a dangerous person, but I saw him off with a superb performance‘. Mizman, that is what Putin wants you and the world to believe. Has he succeeded?
Why didn’t Carlson present authenticated pictures of corpses in Bucha for comment? - that would have needed a sharp convincing response from Putin rather than banal half-hour replies to questions he found not demanding enough! Putin is mocking Carlson for being too afraid to ask real genuine questions!
This is perhaps the PUSU moment. This may be EUA undertaking agreed work at their own expense for the highest bidder so far, with a fixed time limit. No further bids - all yours, highest bidder!
This may be the situation I pointed to as a possibility before Christmas.