Bombing of Putin’s Most Feared Fighters Infuriates Russia
Allison Quinn – December 13, 2022
AFP via Getty
The Russian mercenaries hailed by their leader as the most skilled and experienced soldiers in the war against Ukraine have gotten themselves blown up over the weekend.
Pro-Kremlin Russian media channels were the first to reveal the strike Sunday on a hotel in the occupied Luhansk region, furiously noting that “the enemy used HIMARS to hit the hotel in Kadiivka where Wagner fighters were located.”
Photos showed the building, a hotel called “Zhdanov’s Guest House,” blown to smithereens, though no details were immediately given on how many Wagner fighters were killed. Russian state-run media was largely mum on the whole affair (with the exception of a Kremlin-friendly tabloid saying the site had been targeted because the U.S. knew Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin frequented the private army’s headquarters there.)
Ukrainian authorities say the Russian military is “carefully concealing” its losses in the strike. Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of Luhansk, confirmed the strike and quipped on Telegram that “many” Wagner mercenaries would undoubtedly be absent for their next roll call.
On Tuesday, Haidai issued a statement saying “hundreds” of Wagnerites have been killed before reaching the frontline in the last week and a half, either by “‘explosions’ caused by smoking in their headquarters or their barracks.”
Meanwhile, Bildreported Tuesday that a selfie taken in front of the hotel in Kadiivka may have alerted Ukraine’s military to the Wagner fighters’ whereabouts and sealed their fate. Russian media channels circulated the photo, speculating that the Russian soldier shown grinning in front of “Zhdanov’s Guest House” was none other than Pavel Prigozhin, the son of the Wagner founder, who previously said his son was serving in the ranks of the private army.
It was not immediately clear when the selfie was taken, and Prigozhin himself denied that his son had been impacted by the HIMARS strike. The Daily Beast has not independently verified the authenticity of the photo and its potential links to the bombing.
“Don’t worry, my son is fine,” the Putin-friendly businessman said in a statement Sunday.
Russia grinds on in eastern Ukraine; Bakhmut ‘destroyed’
Jamey Keaten – December 10, 2022
An aerial view of Bakhmut, the site of the heaviest battles with the Russian troops, in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS)Stretchers are seen outside a city hospital, where wounded Ukrainian soldiers are brought for treatment, in Bakhmut, the site of heavy battles with Russian troops, in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS)An emergency worker and his dog warm up in front of a wood-burning oven in a shelter in Bakhmut, the site of the heaviest battles with the Russian troops, in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces have turned the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut into ruins, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while Ukraine’s military on Saturday reported missile, rocket and air strikes in multiple parts of the country that Moscow is trying to conquer after months of resistance.
The latest battles of Russia’s 9 1/2 month war in Ukraine have centered on four provinces that Russian President Vladimir Putin triumphantly — and illegally — claimed to have annexed in late September. The fighting indicates Russia’s struggle to establish control of those regions and Ukraine’s persistence to reclaim them.
Zelenskyy said the situation “remains very difficult” in several frontline cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, an expansive industrial region bordering Russia that Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset and where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.
“Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, naming cities that have again found themselves in the crosshairs. “The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, another Donbas city that the Russian army turned into burnt ruins.”
Some buildings remain standing in Bakhmut, and the remaining residents still mill about the streets. But like Mariupol and other contested cities, it endured a long siege and spent weeks without water and power even before Moscow launched massive strikes to take out public utilities across Ukraine.
The Donetsk region’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, estimated seven weeks ago that 90% of the city’s prewar population of over 70,000 had fled in the months since Moscow focused on seizing the entire Donbas.
The Ukrainian military General Staff reported missile attacks, about 20 airstrikes and more than 60 rocket attacks across Ukraine between Friday and Saturday. Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun said the most active fighting was in the Bakhmut district, where more than 20 populated places came under fire. He said Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk.
Russia’s grinding eastern offensive succeeded in capturing almost all of Luhansk during the summer. Donetsk eluded the same fate, and the Russian military in recent weeks has poured manpower and resources around Bakhmut in an attempt to encircle the city, analysts and Ukrainian officials have said.
After Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson nearly a month ago, the battle heated up around Bakhmut, demonstrating Putin’s desire for visible gains following weeks of clear setbacks in Ukraine.
Taking Bakhmut would rupture Ukraine’s supply lines and open a route for Russian forces to press on toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk. Russia has battered Bakhmut with rockets for more than half of the year. A ground assault accelerated after its troops forced the Ukrainians to withdraw from Luhansk in July.
But some analysts have questioned Russia’s strategic logic in the relentless pursuit to take Bakhmut and surrounding areas that also came under intense shelling in the past weeks, and where Ukrainian officials reported that some residents were living in damp basements.
“The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around #Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the #Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, posted on its Twitter feed on Thursday.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russian troops also pressed their Donbas offensive in the direction of the Donetsk city of Lyman, which is 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of Bakhmut. According to the ministry, they “managed to take more advantageous positions for further advancement.”
Russia’s forces first occupied the city in May but withdrew in early October. Ukrainian authorities said at the time they found mines on the bodies of dead Russian soldiers that were set to explode when someone tried to clear the corpses, as well as the bodies of civilian residents killed by shelling or who had died from a lack of food and medicine.
On Friday, Putin lashed out at recent comments by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said a 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine negotiated by France and Germany had bought time for Ukraine to prepare for war with Russia this year.
That deal was aimed to cool tensions after pro-Russia separatists seized territory in the Donbas a year earlier, sparking a war with Ukrainian forces that ballooned into a war with Russia itself after the Feb. 24 full-scale invasion.
Ukraine’s military on Saturday also reported strikes in other provinces: Kharkiv and Sumy in the northeast, central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia in the southeast and Kherson in the south. The latter two, along with Donetsk and Luhansk, are the four regions Putin claims are now Russian territory.
A month ago, Russian troops withdrew from the western side of the Dniper River where it cuts through Kherson province, allowing Ukrainians forces to declare the region’s capital city liberated. But the Russians still occupy a majority of the province and have continued to attack from their news positions across the river.
Writing on Telegram, the deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said two civilians died and another eight were wounded during dozens of mortar, rocket and artillery attacks over the previous day. Residential areas, a hospital, shops, warehouses and critical infrastructure in the Kherson region were damaged, he said.
To the west, drone attacks overnight left much of Odesa province, including its namesake Black Sea port city, without electricity, regional Gov. Maxim Marchenko said. Several energy facilities were destroyed at once, leaving all customers except hospitals, maternity homes, boiler plants and pumping stations were without power, electric company DTEK said Saturday.
The Odesa regional administration’s energy department said late Saturday that fully restoring electricity could take as long as three months and it urged families whose homes are without power to leave the region if possible.
Spat Over Patriot Missiles Reveals Deepening Rifts in Europe Over Ukraine
Steven Erlanger – December 10, 2022
The facility where the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline emerges from the Baltic Sea in Lubmin, Germany, Sept. 30, 2022. (Laetitia Vancon/The New York Times)
BRUSSELS — A bitter political and diplomatic rift between Germany and Poland, both important members of the European Union and NATO, has worsened as Russia’s war in Ukraine has ground on, undermining cohesion and solidarity in both organizations.
The toxic nature of the relationship was underscored recently by a German offer to provide two batteries of scarce and expensive Patriot air defense missiles to Poland, after a Ukrainian missile strayed off course and killed two Poles last month in the little town of Przewodow.
Poland initially accepted the offer of the Patriots, then rejected it. They then insisted that the batteries be put in Ukraine, a nonstarter for NATO, since the missile systems would be operated by NATO personnel. After considerable allied concern and public criticism, the Poles now seem to have accepted the missiles again.
“This whole story is like an X-ray of miserable Polish-German relations,” said Michal Baranowski, the regional managing director of the German Marshall Fund in Warsaw. “It’s worse than I thought, and I’ve watched it a long time.”
Poland has long been wary of Germany; Hitler’s invasion in 1939 was the start of World War II. It was also critical of Germany’s policy of Ostpolitik, the Cold War effort at rapprochement with Moscow and the countries of Eastern and Central Europe occupied by the Soviet Union.
Democratic Poland consistently criticized German dependency on Russian energy and the two Nord Stream pipelines that were designed to take cheap Russian gas directly to Germany and bypass Poland and Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has only intensified the view in Poland that Germany’s close relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin were not just naive but selfish and, possibly, just on hold rather than permanently sundered.
Both sides have made mistakes in the current dispute, said Jana Puglierin, the Berlin director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The relationship has been deteriorating for years, but it’s peaking now and doing real damage,” she said. “There is a gap emerging between Europe’s east and west, old Europe and new Europe, and that’s beneficial only for Vladimir Putin.”
Germany thought this gesture of military help would be “an offer that was too good to be refused,” and would help convince Poles that Germany is a reliable ally, said a senior German diplomat, who would speak only anonymously in accordance with diplomatic practice. After all, he said, the Poles themselves are trying to buy Patriots, a surface-to-air anti-missile system, “so we wanted to make this government’s caricature of Germany more hollow.”
But after the Polish defense minister and president quickly accepted the offer, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the powerful 73-year-old leader of Poland’s governing Law and Justice party, rejected it just two days later.
Not only did he insist that the Patriots go to Ukraine, but he suggested that Germany, which he regularly attacks as siding with Russia over Poland, and whose soldiers would be operating the Patriots, would not dare to confront Russia. “Germany’s attitude so far gives no reason to believe that they will decide to shoot at Russian missiles,” Kaczynski said.
Kaczynski has no formal role in the Polish government, but the defense minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, fell into line within hours. Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, from the same party, and who is also Poland’s commander in chief, was embarrassed by the painfully obvious display of his powerlessness.
NATO allies were quietly furious, precisely because the Patriots would be operated by German soldiers and the defense bloc has made it clear that it will not deploy troops to Ukraine and risk a NATO-Russian war. Any decision to send Patriots to Ukraine, Germany said, would have to be a NATO decision, not a bilateral one.
“Kaczynski knew this and was being totally cynical,” said Piotr Buras, the Warsaw director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Everyone knew the Germans would not and could not send Patriots to Ukraine. And, of course, there are no Polish soldiers in Ukraine, either.”
The only explanation for Kaczynski’s response is political, Baranowski of the German Marshall fund said, since Poland is in an electoral campaign and the party’s support has been slipping. With elections scheduled for next autumn, Law and Justice is reinforcing its base, and “criticism of Germany is a constant party line,” he said.
Some analysts detected a political motive on the German side as well. The offer by Berlin, so soon after the deaths of the Poles, was “clearly a German effort to have a win in the bitter, toxic Polish-German diplomatic war,” said Wojciech Przybylski, chief editor of Visegrad Insight and president of the Warsaw-based Res Publica Foundation, a research institution. “And it also harms Kaczynski’s electoral strategy.”
Even so, “for Poland’s leading politician, and head of the ruling coalition, to say that he has no trust in Germany as an ally was shocking,” Baranowski said. “If mismanaged this can hurt alliance unity, beyond the two countries — I’ve never seen security instrumentalized in this way, in this toxic mixture.”
But Germany decided to keep the offer open, the German diplomat said, and opinion polls showed that a large percentage of Poles thought that having German Patriots in Poland was a good idea.
On Tuesday night, the Polish government shifted its position again. Blaszczak, the defense minister, announced that after further talks with Berlin, he “disappointedly” accepted that the missiles would not go to Ukraine, adding, “We are beginning working arrangements on deploying the launchers in Poland and making them part of our command system.”
But the bitterness will persist, and few expect Kaczynski and his party to stop questioning German sincerity. Only in October, for instance, Warsaw suddenly demanded Germany pay reparations for World War II, calculating $1.3 trillion in wartime losses, an issue that Berlin said had been settled in 1990.
But the criticism of German hesitancy toward helping Ukraine, and of France’s early willingness to push for peace talks at Ukraine’s expense, is not limited to Poland but is also prevalent in central, eastern and northern Europe, although less charged.
“There is a lot of talk about Western and EU unity and cooperation on Ukraine, but at the same time this war has triggered a significant wave of criticism of Western Europe in Poland and the Baltics,” said Buras of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It deepened the skepticism and criticism, especially of Germany and France, and fed a sense of moral superiority toward them, that we’re on the right side and they were on the wrong side,” he said. “And it has deepened mistrust about security cooperation with them, that we can’t rely on them, but only on the U.S. and the U.K.”
The Polish debate mixes two things, he said. First, there is a “ruthless political instrumentalization of Germany by Law and Justice — it’s incredible how they portray Germany as an enemy and Berlin as dangerous to Poland as Moscow, that Berlin wants Russia to win and is not really helping Ukraine at all.”
But beyond the crude propaganda, Buras said, there is a failure in Poland to recognize that there is a post-invasion realization in Berlin that war has come back to Europe, that Germany needs to rearm and has become far too dependent on Russian energy and Chinese trade.
Poland may not be the only country criticizing Germany over Ukraine, Puglierin said, but on another level, “it’s the political layer in Poland, toxic and nasty.” Law and Justice “jump on this German hesitation and use it for domestic political reasons, and I think it will only get worse before the elections, at the very time when unity is useful.”
There is one brighter spot of cooperation. Earlier this month, the two countries signed an agreement to work to ensure the future of the giant Schwedt refinery, a German facility that had processed Russian oil, now under sanctions.
Sophia Besch, a German analyst with the Carnegie Endowment, insisted that Germany had changed since the Russian invasion. She pointed to the sharp change in policy toward a stronger military and more economic resilience, the “Zeitenwende,” or historical turning point, announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “Scholz is much more committed to listening to Central European countries,” she said. “I believe our romance with Russia is over.”
Kremlin appears to scale back its ambitions in Ukraine
Kevin Liffey – December 8, 2022
Ukrainian servicemen fire with a BM21 Grad multiple launch rocket system in a frontline on the border of Kharkiv and Luhansk regions
LONDON (Reuters) – Russia said on Thursday that it was still set on securing at least the bulk of the parts of east and south Ukraine that it has claimed as its own, but appeared to give up on seizing other areas in the west and northeast that Ukraine has recaptured.
The Kremlin has never fully defined the goals of its invasion, which it said was partly intended to protect Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine. But it no longer speaks of trying to force a change of government in Kyiv as Ukraine has steadily reversed early Russian territorial gains.
Moscow’s troops were driven back from a lightning advance on the capital at the start of the invasion, launched on Feb. 24, and have successively been forced out of the adjacent Sumy and Kharkiv regions, and areas near Mykolaiv in the south.
Kyiv denies persecuting Ukraine’s Russian-speakers and has vowed to retake all lands seized by Moscow since 2014, when Russia captured Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and backed armed separatists who took control of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk.
On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov appeared to limit the Ukrainian territory that Russia now sought to incorporate to the four provinces that it has unilaterally declared as its own: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
None of these are fully under Russian control, and Peskov implied that in Zaporizhzhia’s case, Russia had given up on capturing the remainder.
Asked whether Moscow planned to incorporate any more regions beyond those four, Peskov said:
“There is no question of that. At least, there have been no statements in this regard. But there is nevertheless a lot of work ahead to liberate the territories; in a number of new regions of the Russian Federation there are occupied territories that have to be liberated.”
He then issued a further qualification:
“I mean part of the Donetsk Republic, as well as what became part of the Russian Federation [through annexation], and then was re-occupied by Ukrainian troops.”
‘NEW TERRITORIES’
Moscow proclaimed in October that it had annexed the four provinces – which it calls the “new territories” – shortly after holding so-called referendums that were rejected as bogus and illegal by Kyiv, the West and a majority of countries at the United Nations.
While Moscow made clear it wanted to take full control of Donetsk and Luhansk – two largely Russian-speaking regions collectively known as the Donbas – it left unclear how much of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson it was annexing.
If Russia were to seek to secure only the parts of Zaporizhzhia that it held at the time of the referendums – behind a section of the front line that has hardly moved in months – it would be renouncing any ambition to take the northern third of the province, as well as the industrial provincial capital of the same name, which straddles the Dnipro.
Last month, Russia’s army was forced to quit all the parts of Kherson province that it had controlled on the west bank of the Dnipro River, including the provincial capital, the city of Kherson.
Ukrainian forces control around 40% of Donetsk province and have retaken a sliver of Luhansk.
Who is Viktor Bout? Infamous arms dealer swapped for Brittney Griner
Michael Weiss, Sr. Correspondent – December 8, 2022
Alleged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout sits in a temporary cell ahead of a hearing at the Criminal Court in Bangkok on Aug. 20, 2010. (Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images)
“She’s on her way home after months of being unjustly detained in Russia, held in intolerable circumstances.” So President Biden announced today from the Roosevelt Room of the White House, alerting the press to the news that Brittney Griner has finally been released from a Mordovian penal colony. Biden spoke next to Cherelle Griner, the American WNBA basketball player’s visibly affected wife.
Following months of intense negotiations, the United States managed to secure Briner’s freedom in a one-to-one swap for Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer. Not included in the deal was another American prisoner of the Kremlin, Paul Whelan, who had been rumored to have been included in the high-profile negotiations over Griner.
Whelan, a former U.S. Marine and Michigan police officer, was arrested in Russia in December 2018 on espionage charges, which he denied; he was sentenced to 16 years in June 2020. Griner, an Olympic gold medalist, was detained in February at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, exactly one week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on charges that she was trafficking cannabis oil — a banned substance in Russia — inside vape canisters. She pleaded guilty on July 7 and was sentenced to 9 years in prison.
US Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) basketball player Brittney Griner, who was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport and later charged with illegal possession of cannabis, leaves the courtroom after the court’s verdict in Khimki outside Moscow, on August 4, 2022. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
Few U.S. officials take the Russian prosecutors’ allegations at face value; the prevailing view is that both Whelan and Griner were snatched as hostages for exactly the kind of swap now under consideration, or as bargaining chips for lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia. “The Russian security services watched Griner closely and knew they could compromise her,” a former U.S. intelligence officer told Yahoo News earlier this year. “She’s a Black gay woman who could be portrayed as carrying drugs, and they waited until she departed. This was not legitimate law enforcement but cynical power games by the Kremlin.” John Sipher, the former deputy head of “Russia House” at the CIA, said Whelan would have been unlikely to be recruited by any U.S. intelligence service owing to his compromised history: He was given a bad-conduct discharge from the Marine Corps after being court-martialed on larceny-related offenses in 2008.
Even by the Kremlin’s suspect characterization of Whelan and Griner, the allegations against Bout are far worse.
“In the late 1990s,” Jonathan Winer, a senior official in the State Department during the Clinton administration who tracked Bout’s movements, told Yahoo News, “Bout was the No. 2 target for the United States, after Osama bin Laden.” In fact, the infamous arms dealer, widely known as the “merchant of death,” has even been accused of arming al-Qaida.
Paul Whelan, a former US marine accused of espionage and arrested in Russia in December 2018, stands inside a defendants’ cage as he waits to hear his verdict in Moscow on June 15, 2020. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union until his capture in a 2008 Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation in Bangkok, Bout supplied a rogue’s gallery of governments and militias with guns, ammunition and aircraft. Nicolas Cage played a thinly veiled version of him in the 2005 film “Lord of War,” although the real-life version’s antics were more cinematically uncanny. Even Bout’s aliases — “Viktor Budd,” “Viktor Butt” and, simply, “Boris” —might have stretched credulity for a Bond villain.
Bout was chummy with a succession of African dictators, including Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the latter of whom paid him in conflict diamonds and whose child soldiers operated the antique Antonov cargo planes that Bout sold him. Warlord Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie committed crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone with Bout-proffered weapons. Some of these clients would object to Bout’s apparent racism and peremptory behavior: a pushy Russian in the midst of anticolonial (or postcolonial) leaders. But that hardly affected his bottom line or their willingness to enrich it.
The Tajikistan-born weapons merchant could play both sides of any war to his advantage. He equipped the Taliban with an air force before 9/11 and also sent weapons to their mortal enemy, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance and onetime Afghan defense minister, with whom he liked to hunt the finely horned Marco Polo sheep of the Pamir Mountains. Both the Taliban and Massoud evidently knew their broker was double-dealing, but they put up with it because they had no choice, as one Bout associate later recounted to his biographers: “No one else would deliver the packages.”
Ahmad Massoud, leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, speaks to journalists at Concordia Press Club, on the occasion of the intra-Afghanistan conference, in Vienna, Austria, on September 16, 2022. (Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images)
Astonishingly, even after being hunted by the U.S. government for years, Bout’s flagship company Irbis (“snow leopard” in Russian) even secretly acted as a private airlift courier for supplies intended for the U.S. military and contractors in occupied Iraq in 2004.
For all Bout’s blood-boltered infamy, some former national security officials think the Biden administration made the right call. “It’s a trade that has to be made, despite all the pitfalls,” according to Marc Polymeropoulos, who oversaw the CIA’s clandestine operations in Europe and Eurasia. “The pressure from the families on the White House is immense.” Polymeropoulos acknowledged that the trade would amount to “rewarding terrible Russian behavior” — equating an international arms trafficker with Whelan and Griner — but that the cost would be worth it. “Make no mistake, the Americans have no hope of release save for this swap. Also, let’s not forget that the Israelis have for decades swapped Palestinian terrorists for their imprisoned soldiers, and sometimes just their remains.”
Sipher agrees. “First, it’s a hard policy call, and I’m glad that Americans that were wrongly held as hostages will be freed. I understand why an American president makes such a deal. However, we should admit that we played Vladimir Putin’s game. He got what he wanted in his typical bullying manner. He knows he can push the West around and will do it until he is stopped.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) speaks with Delovaya Rossiya Public Organisation’s President, during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, on December 6, 2022. (Mikhail Metzel/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)
The U.S. sanctioned Bout in 2004 due to his gunrunning to Liberia; a year later, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned four of his associates and 30 of his companies.
According to the 2008 sealed indictment against Bout, filed in the Southern District of New York, he agreed to provide advanced weapons systems to FARC, the Colombian terrorist organization, knowing that they would be used to target Americans and U.S. military personnel.
The Russian “assembled a fleet of cargo airplanes capable of transporting weapons and military equipment to various parts of the world, including Africa, South America and the Middle East,” the indictment read. Everything from AK-47s to attack helicopters wound up in the holds of Bout’s cargo planes, of which there were scores, under different national flaggings. He maintained the largest private fleet of post-Soviet cargo aircraft in the world at one point, administering it under a veneer of legitimacy by transporting food, medicine and other licit goods along with lethal contraband.
Bout was found guilty in 2011 on all four counts of the indictment: conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, conspiracy to kill officers and employees of the U.S., conspiracy to acquire and use antiaircraft missiles, and conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a terrorist organization. He is now in the 10th year of a 25-year sentence.
Thai commandos escort back hand-cuffed Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout (C), known as the “Merchant of Death” for his role arming rebels from Africa to South America, after a press conference at Thai police headquarters in Bangkok on March 7, 2008. (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)
Peter Hain, the former minister of state for Africa at the British Foreign Office, told the London Sunday Telegraph in 2002 that Bout was “supplying the Taliban and al-Qaida,” an allegation that Bout always denied, portraying himself as an honest businessman toting innocent wares such as textiles and furniture to places like Afghanistan. (It was Hain who coined Bout’s unshakable moniker, the “merchant of death.”)
Bout has for years also loudly denied any connection to the Russian government or its military intelligence service, still known by its Soviet-era acronym, the GRU.
However, in “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possibile,” a 2007 chronicle of Bout’s malign activities, authors Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun quote one of his associates: “The GRU gave him three airplanes to start the business. The planes, countless numbers of them, were sitting there doing nothing. They decided, let’s make this commercial. They gave Viktor the aircraft and in exchange collected a part of the charter money. It was a setup from the beginning.” An unnamed analyst who worked with British intelligence also told the authors that MI6, the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service, “never had any doubt Bout was GRU material.”
U.N. officials placed Bout’s earlier career as that of an interpreter for Russian peacekeepers in Angola; he had trained at the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, a favored stalking ground for GRU recruitment. Military translators are often GRU officers stationed under diplomatic cover owing to the spy service’s polyglot job requirement. Bout has said he speaks six languages. His bodyguards in his heyday were also reportedly all veterans from GRU Spetsnaz, or special forces.
Russian Spetsnaz march during the military parade at Red Square, on May 9,2021, in Moscow, Russia. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
Russia’s military intelligence agency has come under international scrutiny in the last several years, particularly after U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that a team of now-indicted GRU officers in Moscow were responsible for the hack-and-leak operation against the Democratic Party email servers in 2016, with the express intent of influencing the outcome of that year’s presidential contest.
GRU operatives have been busy outside the digital domain too.
Operatives attached to an elite assassination-and-sabotage cell known as Unit 29155 were sent to Salisbury, England, in 2018 to poison a GRU defector, Sergei Skripal, along with his daughter, Yulia, with a Russian-manufactured nerve agent.
Unit 29155 has also lately been linked to a string of earlier mysterious poisonings over the last decade, including that of another arms dealer, the Bulgarian Emilian Gebrev, who succumbed to Skripal-like symptoms in 2015 along with his son and his factory manager near his office in central Sofia. A series of explosions of factories and depots elsewhere in Bulgaria and also the Czech Republic, both of them NATO and EU member states, have been attributed to Unit 29155 operatives, leading to expulsions of Russian intelligence officers from embassies in both countries. Tellingly, these sites are believed to have contained Soviet-era ammunition bound for Ukraine.
Given the unprecedented access Bout had to surplus weapons and ammunition stocks, not to mention the enormous Antonov freighters scattered like metal carcasses across airfields of the fallen Soviet empire, it beggars belief that he was not in some way linked to Russian intelligence.
A Russian Antonov 124 condor freighter, one of the worlds largest aircraft on the tarmac at RAF Kinloss, today (Fri) where it is being prepared to fly one of the three Nimord fusealages to Bournemouth, where they will undergo a major re-fit and modification. (Chris Bacon/PA Images via Getty Images)
That would certainly account for why Vladimir Putin’s regime has so desperately sought for his repatriation to Russia and why the U.S. side apparently believes Bout would be a tempting trade amid caustic tensions between the two countries. The Kremlin, said Winer, the former State Department official, “moved heaven and earth” to first prevent Bout’s extradition to the U.S. from Thailand and then to secure his release from prison. The Russian Foreign Ministry has classed him as a political prisoner and, for more than a decade after his capture, serially raised his release with Washington in some kind of exchange. “The big question was whether he was basically state-sponsored or a rogue operator whom the Russian government found useful,” Winer told Yahoo News. “Was he an agent of the GRU when we caught him?”
Given Bout’s conviction in a U.S. court for aiding and abetting FARC, it’s a slightly awkward question for the Biden administration, now facing a mounting chorus to label Russia itself a state sponsor of terrorism. On Thursday, the Senate unanimously adopted a nonbinding resolution urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to designate Moscow as such.
US President Joe Biden, with (L-R) Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris and Cherelle Griner, spouse of US women’s basketball player Brittney Griner, speaks about the release of Brittney Griner, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on December 8, 2022. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
The text of the resolution not only cites Russian military atrocities against civilians in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Ukraine but also names the Wagner Group, a U.S. sanctioned Russian mercenary outfit. Financed by the U.S.- and EU-sanctioned oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin — a catering magnate and architect of the St. Petersburg “troll farm” implicated by Mueller in the 2016 U.S. election interference scheme — the Wagner Group has committed “serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mozambique,” according to the European Union. The allegations include torture and extrajudicial killings. The Senate also accuses the group of having tried to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the start of Russia’s invasion in February.
The Treasury Department sanctioned the Wagner Group as a “Russian Ministry of Defense proxy force.” The mercenaries maintain a camp in the Russian region of Krasnodar, right next door to a well-guarded training facility for GRU Spetsnaz, of whichWagner’s leader, Dmitry Utkin, was once a brigade commander. According to Polymeropoulos, the former CIA officer, “there was never any doubt that Wagner functions as an arm of the GRU.”
Might the same be said of the man now sitting in a medium-security penitentiary in Marion, Ill., awaiting his plane back to Moscow?
“They will try to lock me up for life,” the then-45-year-old Bout told the New Yorker before his sentencing. “But I’ll get back to Russia. I don’t know when. But I’m still young. Your empire will collapse and I’ll get out of here.”
Biden says Brittney Griner is ‘safe’ after release from Russia in prisoner swap
Dylan Stableford, Senior Writer – December 8, 2022
President Biden on Thursday said Brittney Griner is “safe” and on her way home after being freed from Russian custody in a prisoner exchange for convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout.
“She’s safe, she’s on a plane, she’s on her way home,” Biden said in brief remarks at the White House, where he was joined by Griner’s wife, Cherelle, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “After months of being detained in Russia, held under intolerable circumstances, Brittney will soon be back in the arms of her loved ones, and she should’ve been there all along.”
Biden said he spoke with Griner and that she is in “good spirits.”
President Biden speaks to reporters about the release of WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner on Thursday. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
“The fact remains that she’s lost months of her life, experienced needless trauma,” he said. “She deserves space, privacy and time with her loved ones to recover and heal from her time being wrongfully detained.”
Griner has been held in Russia since February, when she was detained in Moscow after being found carrying vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
“This is a day we’ve worked toward for a long time,” Biden said. “We never stopped pushing for her release. It took painstakingly intense negotiations.”
Biden said Griner was “unjustly detained” in Russia before she was released in a prisoner swap with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. (Alexander Zemlianichenko, File/AP)
The president thanked those in his administration who worked to secure her release as well as the United Arab Emirates, where a plane transporting Griner back to the United States landed.
“These past few months have been hell for Brittney and Cherelle and her entire family,” Biden said. “People across the country have learned about Brittney’s story, advocated for her release throughout this terrible ordeal. And I know that support meant a lot to her family.”
The president also said the U.S. has not given up on Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive who has been jailed in Russia since 2018 on espionage charges.
“We did not forget about Brittney, and we have not forgotten about Paul Whelan, who has been unjustly detained in Russia for years,” Biden said. “This was not a choice of which American to bring home.”
The White House released this image of Biden and Griner’s wife, Cherelle, speaking to the WNBA star after she was released from Russia. (The White House/Handout via Reuters)
Biden pointed to Trevor Reed, a 30-year-old U.S. Marine veteran who was released in a prisoner swap with Russia in April.
“We brought home Trevor Reed when we had a chance earlier this year,” the president said. “Sadly, for illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s. And while we have not yet succeeded in securing Paul’s release, we are not giving up. We will never give up.”
In a statement, the Whelan family said the Biden administration “made the right decision” in securing Griner’s release and “to make the deal that was possible, rather than waiting for one that wasn’t going to [happen].”
In brief remarks, Cherelle Griner thanked Biden for helping secure Brittney’s release.
“Today my family is whole,” Cherelle Griner said. “But as you all are aware, there’s so many other families who are not whole.”
She added: “Brittney and I will remain committed to the work of getting every American home, including Paul, whose family is in our hearts today.”
Paul Whelan ‘greatly disappointed’ Biden administration has not done more to free him
Dylan Stableford, Senior Writer – December 8, 2022
Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan has been jailed in Russia since 2018 on espionage charges. (Sofia Sandurskaya, Moscow News Agency photo via AP, File)
Detained American Paul Whelan says he is happy that the Biden administration was able to secure WNBA player Brittney Griner’s release from Russia in a prisoner swap but is “greatly disappointed” that it hasn’t been able to secure his.
“I am greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure my release, especially as the four-year anniversary of my arrest is coming up,” Whelan said in a phone interview with CNN from the penal colony where he is being held in a remote part of Russia. “I don’t understand why I’m still sitting here.”
Whelan said he “was led to believe that things were moving in the right direction, and that the governments were negotiating and that something would happen fairly soon.”
The Biden administration announced Thursday that Griner was freed in exchange for Viktor Bout, a convicted arms dealer who had been serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States.
Brittney Griner was released from Russian custody on Thursday in a prisoner exchange with convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout. (Rick Scuteri/AP File)
Whelan’s brother, David, said Thursday that the Biden administration “made the right decision” in agreeing to the prisoner swap that freed Griner.
“I am so glad that Brittney Griner is on her way home,” David Whelan said in a lengthy statement. “As the family member of a Russian hostage, I can literally only imagine the joy she will have, being reunited with her loved ones, and in time for the holidays.
“There is no greater success than for a wrongful detainee to be freed and for them to go home,” David Whelan continued. “The Biden Administration made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home, and to make the deal that was possible, rather than waiting for one that wasn’t going to happen.”
Earlier this year, the White House reportedly offered to exchange Bout as part of a potential deal to secure the release of Griner and Whelan.
Griner was detained in Moscow on drug-related charges in February and later sentenced to nine years in prison. Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive and former U.S. Marine, has been jailed in Russia since 2018 on espionage charges.
David Whelan said that U.S. officials let the family know in advance that Paul would not be part of the Griner-Bout swap.
President Biden announced Griner’s release on Thursday morning, saying the WNBA player is in “good spirits.” (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“That early warning meant that our family has been able to mentally prepare for what is now a public disappointment for us,” David Whelan said. “And a catastrophe for Paul.”
Griner is the second American to be released in a prisoner swap with Russia this year. Trevor Reed, a 30-year-old U.S. Marine veteran, was released in a prisoner swap with Moscow in April.
“We did not forget about Brittney, and we have not forgotten about Paul,” Biden said. “This was not a choice of which American to bring home.”
“We brought home Trevor Reed when we had a chance earlier this year,” the president continued. “Sadly, for illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s. And while we have not yet succeeded in securing Paul’s release, we are not giving up.”
Short man syndrome really is a thing, scientists say
Joe Pinkstone – December 7, 2022
Russian president Vladimir Putin is reported to be 5 foot 7 inches tall – AP
Short man syndrome is a real thing and the hot tempers of small men may actually be evolutionarily hard-wired into them to make up for their lack of inches, scientists believe.
Polish researchers investigating the so-called Napoleon complex — where vertically challenged men are angrier and more confrontational than their lengthier peers — found the myth was grounded in truth.
Short men have often sought power, from the reportedly 5’ 2” Napoleon through to the UK’s current diminutive Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who stands just 5’ 5” tall.
Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are all world leaders who are reported to be 5 foot 7 inches tall, significantly below the average height for a man in the modern world.
Scientists investigating short man syndrome surveyed 367 people and looked for evidence of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism which make up the Dark Triad personality traits and are associated with more confrontational behaviour.
Link between rowdy behavior and height only seen in men
Data revealed that shorter men are more likely to behave in an antagonistic manner towards others.
The researchers theorise that when a person is not physically formidable and does not have an intimidating presence then they have to impose themselves in other ways.
This, they say, has led to men employing this tactic to “acquire resources and impress romantic partners”, in what modern pop culture calls the “short king” phenomenon.
“Shorter women,” the scientists add, “can use deception to appear more desirable or to gain protection and resources”.
But in the study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the link between rowdy behaviour and height was only seen for men, and not for women.
‘They may become psychologically formidable instead’
Lead author Monika Kozłowska, from the University of Wrocław in Poland, said: “When people cannot be physically formidable, they may become psychologically formidable instead.
“Appearing more powerful may in turn make other people perceive them as taller than they really are.”
The team looked at the impact of actual height and of how a person felt about their height and found that both played a role.
They believe shorter people are not only angry that they are short, but are evolutionarily wired to be angry to compensate for being disadvantaged by being small.
“Our study provides the first assessment (we know of) of how the Dark Triad traits relate to height and height attitudes,” the scientists write.
“We showed that not only are people high on the Dark Triad traits less satisfied with their height, but this may be because they are actually shorter.
“This leads us to believe that the behavioral syndromes of the Dark Triad traits may be part of a suite of psychological systems designed by natural selection to better enable those of shorter stature a way to still compete in life’s great challenges.”
Volodymyr Zelensky and ‘the spirit of Ukraine’ named Time’s 2022 ‘Person of the Year’
Rebecca Corey, Writer and Reporter – December 7, 2022
Illustration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by Neil Jamieson on the cover of Time magazine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and “the spirit of Ukraine” have been named Time’s 2022 “Person of the Year,” the magazine announced Wednesday.
The 44-year-old leader became a symbol of Ukrainian resiliency and resistance in the weeks and months after Russia began bombing the former Soviet country, on Feb. 24
“This year’s choice was the most clear-cut in memory. Whether the battle for Ukraine fills one with hope or with fear, the world marched to Volodymyr Zelensky’s beat in 2022,” Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal wrote.
“For proving that courage can be as contagious as fear, for stirring people and nations to come together in defense of freedom, for reminding the world of the fragility of democracy — and of peace, Volodymyr Zelensky and the spirit of Ukraine are Time’s 2022 Person of the Year.”
Zelensky speaks to the U.S. Congress by video to plead for support as his country is besieged by Russian forces in March 2022. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo/Pool)
Contenders for this year’s Person of the Year included several people or entities who have made waves in U.S. politics this year, including outgoing Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision this summer, and possible 2024 presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Zelensky became a household name in 2022 following a meteoric rise from comedian to president in 2019 to global icon in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early this year. With his regularly broadcast messages to everyone from global leaders to regular people — from videos on Twitter to a remote appearance at the Grammys — Zelensky defied Western expectations, holding Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv from Russian forces and inspiring earnest interest in a country that, as Felsenthal says, some people “might not be able to find on a map.”
Time’s cover story by Simon Shuster, who spent nine months reporting on Zelensky and the invasion while being granted “unparalleled access” to the presidential compound, features an exclusive interview with Zelensky on his private train en route to the newly liberated city of Kherson. During the interview, Zelensky described how the only way to defeat Russia is to convince the rest of the free world to pull Ukraine in the other direction toward sovereignty.
“I don’t want to weigh who has more tanks and armies. … We are dealing with a powerful state that is pathologically unwilling to let Ukraine go,” Zelensky said. “They see the democracy and freedom of Ukraine as a question of their own survival.”
Zelensky visits service members at a hospital on the Day of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Kharkiv on Tuesday. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via Reuters)
Reflecting on his time covering Zelensky, Shuster described how Russia’s invasion and the weight of Zelensky’s new role as a defender of democracy has changed the president.
“In April, less than two months into the invasion, Zelensky told me he had aged and changed ‘from all this wisdom that I never wanted,’” Shuster said. “Now, half a year later, the transformation was starker. Aides who once saw him as a lightweight now praise his toughness. Slights that might once have upset him now elicit no more than a shrug. Some of his allies miss the old Zelensky, the practical joker with the boyish smile. But they realize he needs to be different now, much harder and deaf to distractions, or else his country might not survive.”
Previous Time Persons of the Year include Elon Musk in 2021, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2016. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is currently leading the country’s military assault against Ukraine, was named Time Person of the Year in 2007.
Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize winner calls for war crimes tribunal for Putin and Russian military leaders
Michael Isikoff, Chief Investigative Correspondent – December 7, 2022
WASHINGTON — A Ukrainian human rights activist set to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo next week says in a new interview that world leaders must create a special international tribunal to place Russian President Vladimir Putin and large numbers of his military on trial for war crimes.
“We cannot wait. We must establish an international tribunal now,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, the chief of the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, which will be honored with the peace prize for its work documenting 27,000 war crimes and other atrocities committed by Russian troops since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February.
Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk. (Roselle Chen/Reuters)
Speaking to Yahoo News during a brief trip to Washington, Matviichuk said the current system of trying world leaders through the International Criminal Court in the Hague is simply inadequate to deal with the magnitude of Russian offenses. She called instead for a specially created tribunal akin to the Nuremberg trials for Nazi leaders after World War II.
“I’ve asked myself, ‘For whom did we document all these crimes? Who will provide justice for the hundreds of thousands of victims?’ Because we speak not only about Putin and the rest of senior political leadership and high military command, we speak about all the Russians who committed these crimes by their own hands. … We don’t need revenge. We need justice.”
As for the Russian leader himself, “Yes, it’s a question of how to physically arrest Vladimir Putin,” she said. “But look to history. There are a lot of successful and very convincing examples, when people who see themselves as untouchable suddenly appeared in court and when the whole regime — which thinks that they will [last] for ages — collapsed.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and damaged power lines in Ukraine. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Matviichuk came to Washington this week to receive a “trailblazer” award — along with several other Ukrainian women, including the country’s first lady, Olena Zelenska — from Hillary Clinton at Georgetown University. At the same time, the war in Ukraine is once again heating up, with Ukrainian drones hitting a Russian airfield 300 miles inside that country’s borders and the Russians responding with a new series of devastating cruise missile strikes.
What follows is an edited transcript of the interview with Matviichuk.
Michael Isikoff: You live in Kyiv. You’ve posted some dramatic photos on your Twitter handle, showing young children hovering by candlelight at night, trying to do schoolwork. Give us a sense of what it’s like to be living in Kyiv right now under these Russian missile attacks.
Oleksandra Matviichuk: It’s rather cold. I have no heat. Ukrainians now are not able to plan even for several hours because you never know when the light will disappear, and the internet connection as well. When you have no light, you can’t plan when you go to shop, or when you go to the postal office, or when you will meet with your partners to discuss some work, because you have no idea when the air alarm will start.
The Russians are attacking the electric grid to cut off power for citizens. How worried are you about just getting through what could be a harsh winter?
It will be a difficult winter. But I’m thinking how the civilized world will have to respond to this. Because now we’re reaching a point at which the Russians publicly discussed on Russian TV how to better liquidate the whole civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and freeze millions of Ukrainians during the winter. I will remind you that each hit on a civilian object is a war crime. And now Russia discussed publicly how they will do these war crimes better. So they really think they can do whatever they want. And this is dangerous, not only for Ukrainians. Such behavior, it’s dangerous for the whole world.
What message do you have for the West right now?
For decades, Russia systematically violated their own human rights obligations. But the civilized world continued to do business as usual with Russia. They closed their eyes while Russia liquidated their own civil society. They closed their eyes while Russia, for decades, committed war crimes in Chechnya, in Moldova, in Georgia, in Mali, in Syria, in other countries of the world. And all this hell, which we now face in Ukraine, is a result of total impunity, which Russia enjoyed for decades.
I assume this is the message you are going to convey when you accept the Nobel Prize next week?
I will mention the importance of human rights for peace in the world for sure. But there is also the second part, because there is an illusion to think that Putin will stop if he obtains something. Putin will stop only when he will be stopped. And this means that we have to oppose and to resist Putin jointly. Because if we will not be able to stop Putin in Ukraine, he will go further.
One message you have is that Ukraine needs more weapons from the West. And you have said that consistently: “We really need weapons. We need fighter planes. We need air defense systems in order to protect Ukrainian skies.” Do you have a specific checklist of the weapons that you want the United States and other NATO countries to provide to Ukraine that they are not providing right now?
I’m not a military expert, and this is not my field of expertise. But I know that Ukraine still is not getting the weapons which we need. I have one example that I mentioned during the award ceremony at Georgetown University. I have a friend in Andriana Susak. She’s a courageous woman. She had stopped her commercial career in 2014 and joined Ukrainian armed forces when the war started. When the large-scale invasion started, she left her 6-year-old son and continued to fight for his peaceful future. And she was among those Ukrainian defenders who liberated people, who took part in the battle for her son. She informed me about Russian atrocities and the needs of the Ukrainian army in order to stop them. She asked for armored vehicles, because she witnessed a lot of accidents when the Ukrainian military used civilian cars, because they have no armored vehicles. And they were exploded on mines.
Several days ago her car was exploded. And now doctors are fighting for the life of my friend Andriana Susak. So this is not a theoretical discussion. It’s a real discussion. We need military support in order to save the lives of Ukrainians, of defenders.
You are going to receive the Nobel Peace Prize next week. Some might say it’s a bit odd for a Nobel Peace Prize winner to be talking about trying to obtain more weapons of war. That does seem a contradiction on its face.
I can understand this. It’s a really weird situation. And I’m angry that I’m in a situation where I have no legal instrument to stop Russian atrocities. Like when the whole U.N. system can do nothing with it. It’s not OK that a human rights lawyer says that only weapons can save the life of people in the occupied territories. It’s a very dangerous world to live in. But for the current moment, it’s true. We need not only to investigate crimes and to bring perpetrators to justice. We need to prevent new crimes to emerge.
Is there no hope for diplomacy?
Putin sees civilized dialogue as a sign of weakness. This is a very important point. But the problem is that this war is supported by the majority of Russians, because Putin governs Russia not only with repression and censorship, but with a special social contract between the Kremlin elite and Russian people. And this social contract is based on so-called Russian glory. And unfortunately, a majority of Russian people see their glory in restoring the Russian Empire. This means that Russian people will tolerate war criminals in power. But they will not tolerate loser criminals.
