True Left

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the U.K. of seeking to entrench "fake" allegations against Russian soldiers over the massacre of civilians in Bucha, a town near Ukraine's capital of Kyiv.

Lavrov hit out at the U.K. for refusing to convene the United Nations Security Council.

Russia had called for an urgent meeting of the Council, but the U.K., which currently chairs it, refused to convene it.

The U.K. mission to the United Nations said the Council would hold a discussion on Tuesday instead.

Russia similarly rejected previous allegations of atrocities as fabrications on Ukraine's part.

Lavrov also rebuked U.S. President Joe Biden for suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be tried for war crimes.

He said the U.S. had no right to make this call, after American politicians had used "known excuses" for invading Iraq.

The minister was speaking after meeting an Arab League delegation that traveled to Moscow for talks on Ukraine.

The delegation included the foreign ministers of Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan and Sudan.

Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the secretary-general of the Arab League, also joined the meeting.

The pan-Arab organisation said the ministers would travel to Poland on Tuesday for talks with Ukraine's foreign minister.

RUSSIAN Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday (April 4) that Ukraine's version of what happened in the town of Bucha was a "fake attack" aimed at undermining Moscow.

Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday they were investigating possible crimes by Russian forces after finding hundreds of bodies strewn around towns like Bucha outside the capital Kyiv after the Russian withdrawal from the area.

Lavrov said the dead bodies were "staged" and that images of them and what he said was Ukraine's false version of events had been spread on social media by Western countries and Ukraine.

Russia's top diplomat also called on Britain, which holds the presidency of the U.N. Security Council for April, to fulfill its responsibilities in that role after it rejected a Russian request to convene a meeting over Bucha.

The UN general assembly has voted to suspend Russia from its leading human rights body over allegations of horrific rights violations by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, which the United States and Ukraine have called tantamount to war crimes. Speaking after the vote, Russia's deputy UN ambassador Gennady Kuzmin described the move as an 'illegitimate and politically motivated step' and then announced that Russia had decided to quit the human rights council altogether. Under Thursday's resolution, the General Assembly could have later agreed to end the suspension, but that cannot happen now Russia has quit the council.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Kyiv on Friday presented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with paperwork for his country to join the European Union.

Handing over a document at a joint press conference, she said: "This is where your path towards the European Union begins."

Von der Leyen said she intended to, "present Ukraine's application to the [European] Council this summer."

During the joint press conference von der Leyen said: "Russia will descend in economic, financial and technological decay while Ukraine is marching towards a European future."

Von der Leyen traveled to Ukraine with her deputy Josep Borrell, who is also the bloc's commissioner for foreign and security affairs. During the trip, the first by high-ranking EU officials since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, von der Leyen traveled to the city of Bucha.

The Daily Beast's Noor Ibrahim on dubious #Kremlim 🇷🇺 data over the numbers of soldiers lost in the #war in #Ukraine 🇺🇦.

"This is nothing new for the Russian Army," a U.S. congressman tells ABC News.

A new front in the fight against Putin regime.
Now russian soldiers themselves are ready to fight against war criminals
Here is why 👆

Shocking intercepted audio reveals conversation between Russian soldiers

#CNN #News

More allegations of ****, torture and indiscriminate murder come to light as Russia repositions forces in Ukraine.

Tim Sebastian asks former Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Fedorov whether President Vladimir Putin understands that he is losing his war of aggression with each new outrage. Fedorov who still works a consultant for the Kremlin says he believes Putin will "not step back" until he achieves his goal of a neutral Ukraine and regime change in Kyiv.

Fedorov told Sebastian from Moscow that some in the Kremlin had miscalculated about what was happening in Ukraine, but called the butchery of Bucha and towns ravaged by Russian forces a tragedy of war. The former diplomat said the United Nations General Assembly vote to suspend Russia from Human Rights Council was from a body that Moscow did not care much about.

The Mayor of Mariupol said he believes his city is not being "liberated" but punished for their resistance when Crimea was annexed.

It comes after the Kremlin's spokesman told Sky News, "Mariupol is going to be liberated from nationalistic battalions and we hope it will happen sooner than later."

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby called the deadly attack on a Ukrainian railway station “Russian brutality.” He dismissed Russian claims that it was not behind the attack in Kramatorsk.

Most of these facts were first collected by Russian investigators from Navalny fund several years ago. But since then the world has received even more evidence that something is wrong with the health of Russian leadership. Both physical and mental.
The war against Ukraine added "hormonal rage" to diagnosis.

of equal concern, the activists said, are revelations that Black students and residents have been the targets of racism and discrimination even as more than a million people have fled the approaching Russian military juggernaut.

“I found out about this a couple of days ago, but I knew well in advance that there were Black migrants and students from around the world there. Was I surprised? No, of course not,” said Gassama, UndocuBlack’s national director of policy and advocacy. “It’s so unfortunate, so disappointing, but Black people tend to bear the brunt of cruelty. I have heard that it’s not Polish border guards but Ukrainian border patrols doing this.”

“People are fleeing a war but still find time to be racist,” Gassama said.
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under the hashtag #AfricansinUkraine, social media sites, news outlets and other entities have been deluged with personal stories via videos, cellphone footage and interviews with Black Africans, Black Ukrainians and international students from Nigeria, Ghana, India, Morocco showing the racism, discrimination and hostility they’ve faced. They spoke of the double standard of white Ukrainians getting preference over Black, South Asian and Mediterranean people and their studied pushback against the perpetrators.

Black and brown men and women have been forced off trains and buses, others have been verbally and physically abused and still more have been refused entry in Poland by Ukrainian security forces and border guards.

Foreign students tell of having walked scores and sometimes hundreds of miles from where they were living to try to reach the border after being turned away at train stations, bus depots checkpoints and at border crossings. Some say they were forced either out of lines or told to go to the back after being told that only white Ukrainians would be accommodated.

There are also scattered stories of Black people being beaten and threatened with weapons and refused entry into Poland by border guards. And all of this has been playing out in the midst, not just of a bloody conflict, but also freezing winter weather with the Black students and residents enduring winter temperatures with little or no food, water or blankets.

Representatives of civil rights organizations, civil society, professionals and others disgusted with what they’ve seen have been vocal in their opposition and have responded by starting crowdfunding projects on Instagram and other social media to support beleaguered students. Students are stranded in Ukraine because flights out of the country are grounded, leaving African governments unable to fly students from their countries out of the war zone.

France, 24, said some Africans have left Ukraine. A reporter spoke to several students last month at Lviv train station in western Ukraine who explained that they were turned back by Ukrainian border guards while attempting to cross into Poland.

“They stopped us at the border and told us that Blacks were not allowed. But we could see white people going through,” said Moustapha Bagui Sylla, a student from Guinea.
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“I was so disheartened as I watched the newsreel and heard the voice of one young woman saying that they came into Ukraine, accepted and were granted homes and jobs. But since the conflict started, they noticed a marked difference such as having to wait in tough, stressful and demanding conditions,” said Turner, a pastor at Victory of Praise Church in Stockton, California. “Darker complected people have been treated differently. When the person being interviewed explained what was going on, the interviewer just said thanks and didn’t pursue it.”

“It’s a worldwide crisis but we always seem to be the underdog, are expendable, Turner continued. “We can’t just be myopic about what’s going on here. We have to avoid distractions and turn this into a fight of Black bodies globally.”

The issue is so concerning that the African Union, the NAACP, a coalition of Black lawyers led by Ben Crump and the United Nations have each commented on and condemned the treatment meted out to these international students. Crump and his colleagues filed an urgent appeal to the United Nations last month on behalf of African refugees facing racial discrimination in Ukraine and Poland.

Meanwhile, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said on Twitter that his organization is working with the Congressional Black Caucus, civil rights organizations, and international partner organizations “to ensure the safety of Africans seeking refuge amid the crisis in Ukraine.”

A wide cross-section of critics has vociferously condemned the blatant racism, demanding that border guards and security forces respect the human rights of Black and brown people be respected and give students safe passage without the specter of a racist double standard determining who gets into another country hanging over the process.

Ukraine and Russia have agreed on humanitarian corridors to evacuate thousands of civilians. Ukrainians are fleeing the eastern Donbas region, which has been partially controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. Satellite images show a convoy of hundreds of Russian military vehicles heading for Donbas - making the evacuation of civilians more urgent.

Eastern regions of Ukraine are bracing for a new Russian offensive, as Ukrainian officials say Russia has fired rockets that destroyed the airport in Dnipro, the country's fourth largest city. On Telegram, the governor of Dnipropetrovsk, Valentyn Reznichenko, said that the airport itself was destroyed, as well as nearby infrastructure.

More than 100 thousand people are believed trapped in the city of Mariupol, which has been under intense bombardment for weeks. Local officials have said as many as 5,000 civilians may have been killed.

#Russia #Ukraine #War

Sunday’s attack on Ukraine’s Dnipro airport is part of Russia’s new war tactics, FRANCE 24’s Foreign Affairs Editor Rob Parsons reports from Kyiv, noting also that Moscow’s recent appointment of Alexander Dvornikov as its new war general, underscores Russia’s ambitions to concentrate its command and avoid confusion.
#Ukraine #Russia #war

Many Russians are being fed a daily media diet of Kremlin propaganda that hides the terrible destruction and human cost of their country's invasion of Ukraine. So how did ordinary Russians in Perm and Vladivostok react when Current Time reporters showed them some images?

Putin isn’t going anywhere. Least of all back to Moscow with his tail between his legs. He’s going to stay exactly where he is. Unless he is militarily defeated, which is unlikely. After all, he has the world’s biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons at hand. Right now NATO and Putin are playing a game of chicken. The problem is Putin has no eyelids to blink with. He’ll win.
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Part of the policy is simply out-waiting the other. Sooner or later they will give in. They all do. For example, Crimea. Was the plebiscite real or not? It doesn’t matter. Given the outcome, of course it was rigged. 96.77% is not realistic. So what happened? Nothing. It’s still Russian.

Putin simply out-waited sanctions. He got what he wanted, and took it from there.
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Public discontent is something Putin does not have to worry about for a long time to come. Did the Russians ever protest against losses in a war? Rarely. The losses in the Winter War were much greater. Not a peep. Losing the Crimean War didn’t create big protests. The defeat in the Japanese-Russo War did, but they could be squelched.

So at home Putin has nothing to fear. All he has to do now is outwait his foreign opponents. He has very little to lose. What are the options?

1. Complete withdrawal from all occupied Ukrainian territories, plus war reparations, EU and NATO membership.

Yeah, if pigs have wings they can fly. Not going to happen. He much rather let the nukes fly high. That would be a humiliation far beyond what Russians (never mind Putin) would tolerate. Besides, he doesn’t have the money for war reparations.

2. Partial withdrawal from some occupied Ukrainian territories, with some war reparations, EU membership and perpetual neutrality.

Withdraw from areas he can’t conquer at the moment. Keep everything he has, plus the entire Luhansk and Donbas regions. If Ukraine is willing to unite with Russia, limited war reparations are negotiable. Otherwise, though, good luck. Ask the EU to rebuild Ukraine. We’re not wasting good rubles on your rubble.

That’s a limited victory. Not for Ukraine; for Putin. He gets to keep everything he wanted plus more, and most of his goals are achieved. All he has to do now is wait for the next opportunity.

3. Withdrawal to pre-21 February positions, without war reparations, no EU or NATO membership.

Crimea, Luhansk and Donbas remain occupied by Russia, but will still be considered Ukrainian territories (by NATO, that is). Russia doesn’t have to pay any kind of war reparations, as they are — or will be soon — flat broke. Ukraine becomes a neutral country, without ties to the EU or NATO.

That’s also a limited victory for Putin. Zelensky staying in power is irrelevant for Putin. He’ll be gone soon enough. Keeping Ukraine out of NATO (goal no. 1) and the EU (goal no. 2) is far more important. I0t would be painful to give up the newly occupied territories, but that is something for the army to cry over. After they’ve dried their tears, they can get busy rebuilding the army into something that works. The few generals that survive the coming cleanup, that is. All he has to do now is wait for the next opportunity.

Apart from the first option, it’s a win-win for Putin. He’ll get everything he wants, solidify his claim on Crimea (simply by holding on) and extend Russia with Luhansk and Donbas. He’ll keep Ukraine outside NATO and probably the EU. Which means he can do whatever he wants, in the future. We also know that Russian promises are worth their weight in kopeks.
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A compromise is a win for Putin, no matter what the compromise might be.

Ukraine have never invaded Syria but now syrians invade Ukraine

Despite government efforts and UNHCR support in the sphere of RSD capacity building, the general recognition rate in Ukraine has dropped in 2015, including in Syrian cases. The State Migration Service granted status to 63 Syrians (5 refugee status and 58 complementary protection), but 134 Syrians were rejected following substantial consideration. Thus, the recognition rate in Syrian cases decreased to 32 per cent (compare to 46 per cent in 2013 and 76 per cent in 2014), with the very small percentage of applicants granted refugee status compared to complementary protection.