#Russian soldiers looters

[sentimental-darkness]

You make a good point but as you've noticed, people largely don't care - once something turns political (or more strictly: "pro-justice" "anti-colonialism" and other "trendy" sentiments of those smart people behind their keyboards), all is forgotten, there is only The Cause, no matter the cost, regardless of original atrocity... only advocating for the current "trendy" cause matters. People are hypocrites like that, plus easily manipulated. No doubt Hamas and other such groups had their hand in the info campaign as well, to make use of that.

Regarding atrocities and intentional strikes at civilians, I'm going to be a little bit pessimistic here and say I'm afraid it's a natural state of things, to a degree (especially historically, since the beginning of time). Sure, there will be regimes with militaries where purposeful strikes at civilians may be somewhat encouraged amongst officers but even at the level of the foot soldiers - looting, rape and revenge/supremacy kills have always been integral part of every bloody conflict. In war these lines are easily blurred and when someone is lying in the mud waiting for the drone to blow him to pieces... well, the morals easily become forgotten, especially after a certain threshold is crossed. As you've said, everyone committed some atrocities to some extent, even the Allies (and there may be a lot of examples - like simple foot soldiers' actions - that we simply don't know about and will never know). Naturally, the allowance for greater violence and killing of innocents is only accelerated by rough regimes, but observing what's happening (and what was already happening outside of the "Western theatre") I believe The Geneva Conventions are a pipe dream, a house of cards, in name only. It's only as strong as alliances/strong interests between those who honor it and can easily fall apart as two parties come to blows and the hatred between them (or racial, religious and other tensions humanity is unable to stand above) increase. And then, there is a loop of revenge acts and revenge thinking, but also there is the fact in conflict there will always be those who approach it "rough" with loosened sense of morals, so acting completely goody-shoes-I-can-do-no-wrong would be a literal equivalent of a fool/giving up/letting them go away with everything or even loosing. That's where Izrael is right now, except yeah, they were not goody-goody and didn't just let it go. To be honest, nobody would, in a real world scenario.

I don't exactly search for that kind of info but makes me wonder how does it look like on the Ukrainian side. If they're still so considerate of all their prisoners and perfectly humane in all things, then I guess it might be motivated by propaganda needs. Plus, naturally, the West needs to think highly of them, so big incidents of bloody revenge acts are very undesirable, simply from strategic position. And it's not like they're pushing it to Russian cities of course, so there is that. But even then, if a random Western dude on Facebook can rant about Russians deserving death and misery coming towards them and it was already possible to find videos of Ukrainians violently bloodily lynching their own (looters or traitors) at the beginning of this war, am I to believe there are no violent/undignified incidents committed by Ukrainian side against Russians, mainly prisoners and defenseless undersupplied resigned (or sick) divisions of lowly recruits? Getting intel out of some? Torture? Makes me wonder. But I can only wonder, because even if there were instances, it's not like we would hear of it. They can't afford letting something like this slip up. And you can't exactly take any of the Russian stories at face value either.

"Deliberately targeting civilians is wrong" is remarkably good praxis for understanding state and interstate violence.

I'm not talking about attacks that miss their target, that have disproportionate collateral damage, or even have mistaken military strategic value (although all of these are also bad and should be avoided). All of these things are bad (because warfare is bad), although people can and will argue about the relative necessity of any given action.

But in modern times, "trying to hurt civilians specifically to make the state surrender" is not even arguable. We have decided that this is one of those acts of warfare that we should not allow, which is why we have collectively classified it as a war crime.

What Hamas has just done is flat-out terrorism. It went after civilians at a festival and committed horrible atrocities against people who had no means of defending themselves. It is doing that to terrorize the people into changing the policies of their government. Israel is by no means innocent of violating "targeting civilians is wrong"; what Israel has done in the past (and even in the present) is often reprehensible. But right now, it is Hamas targeting civilians to punish the entire state of Israel for its politics, and that is a thing that shouldn't be tolerated.

If Hamas had launched a surprise attack on an Israeli military establishment, or even the Israeli government, I would be saying something different right now. And if Israel retaliates in a way designed to hurt civilians in Gaza, I will call their actions wrong as well. "Two wrongs don't make a right" is especially true for war crimes.

It was wrong when the Axis murdered and pillaged their way across their conquered territories. It was wrong when the Allies firebombed cities of zero strategic importance. It is wrong when the Russians launch missiles at theaters and apartments in Ukraine. It is wrong that Assad is killing women and children specifically so the Syrian rebels surrender. It is wrong when Israel targets civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. And it is wrong that Hamas deliberately targeted, killed, and tortured Israeli civilians in their attack on Saturday.

Deliberately targeting civilians is wrong.

[drakonfire12]

Also “Ukraine war: Refugee from Popasna spots looted possessions on Russian tank” by Robert Greenall (BBC).

Alina Koreniuk says the box in the photo contains a new boiler she planned to install before the war started.

Apart from the boiler, other items on the tank include a tablecloth from the family's summer house, new Disney bedsheets for her children and a red blanket, she says.

[anastasiamaru]

russian soldier stole a CCTV street camera in Ukraine. And installed it in his home for some reason. Now a group of enthusiasts in Ukraine enjoys a 24/7 direct stream from some weird home

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This weekend, I watched a hacker jailbreak a John Deere tractor live on stage

Last Saturday, I sat in a crowded ballroom at Caesar’s Forum in Las Vegas and watched Sickcodes jailbreak a John Deere tractor’s control unit live, before an audience of cheering Defcon 30 attendees (and, possibly, a few undercover Deere execs, who often attend Sickcodes’s talks).

The presentation was significant because Deere — along with Apple — are the vanguard of the war on repair, a company that has made wild and outlandish claims about the reason that farmers must pay the company hundreds of dollars every time they fix their own tractors, and then wait for days for an authorized technician to come to their farm and type an unlock code.

Deere’s claims have included the astounding statement that the farmers who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tractors don’t actually own those tractors, because the software that animates them is only licensed, not sold:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/04/22/john-deere-just-told-the-copyright-office-that-only-corporations-can-own-property-humans-can-only-license-it/

They’ve also claimed that locking farmers out of their tractors is for their own good, because otherwise hackers could take over those tractors and endanger the food supply. While it’s true that the John Deere tractor monopoly means that defects in the company’s products could affect farms all around the world, it’s also true that John Deere is very, very bad at information security:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

The company’s insistence that they are guardians of farmers and the agricultural sector is a paper-thin cover for monopolistic practices and rent-seeking. Monopolizing the repair and reconfiguration of Deere products gives the company all kinds of little gifts — for example, they can refuse to fix the tractors of dissatisfied customers unless they agree to gag-orders:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

And because so few of us understand information security, or monopoly, or agribusiness (let alone all three!) they can spin their dangerous, grossly unfair practices as features, not bugs. Remember when they trumpeted the fact that they’d remotely bricked some Ukrainian Deere products that had been looted by Russian soldiers?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

What they didn’t say — and what almost no one pointed out — was that this meant that anyone who could hack John Deere’s system could brick any tractor — including, say, the Russian military’s hacking squads. They also didn’t say that Ukrainian farmers had long chafed under Deere’s corporate control, and had developed illegal third-party tractor firmware that farmers all over the world had covertly installed:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware

And that means that the Russian looters who supposedly were foiled by Deere’s corporate remote killswitches can re-activate their tractors, by using the Ukrainian software developed in response to the company’s monopolistic practices.

Which brings me back to Sickcodes and his awesome presentation at Defcon 30 this weekend. I watched from the front row, sitting next to the repair champion Kyle Wiens, founder of Ifixit, who turned his notes into an excellent Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/kwiens/status/1558688970799648769

As Kyle points out, Deere has repeatedly told state and federal lawmakers and regulators that farmers can’t be trusted to repair or modify their own tractors. This is obviously nonsense: indeed, for decades, Deere product development consisted of sending engineers out to document the improvements farmers had made to their tractors so the company could copy them:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

Writing for Wired, Lily Hay Newman provides some great technical details on the hack, including how Sickcodes acquired (and accidentally broke!) several 2630 and 4240 touchscreen control units, eventually demounting the main controller and soldering it into a new board that he used to probe the system:

https://www.wired.com/story/john-deere-tractor-jailbreak-defcon-2022/

He discovered that the system was designed to send an extraordinary amount of data to John Deere — his control unit tried to exfiltrate 1.5GB worth of data once he brought it online. He also discovered that as soon as he was able to conjure up a terminal, he had root access to the system.

This was great news for Sickcodes, but it raises serious questions about Deere’s information security practices. As Kyle points out, this entire system ran on deprecated, unpatched, elderly GNU/Linux software and Windows CE, an operating system that was end-of-lifed in 2018, and which was so bad that people forced to use it typically called it “Wince.”

Sickcodes discovered all kinds of security worst-practices in John Deere’s security — even in the parts of its security that were intended to secure the company’s profits from its own customers’ best interests. For example, at one point Sickcodes put the control unit into maintenance mode by repeatedly rebooting it, so that it refused to allow him to do anything until he brought it to a dealer. He discovered that all it took to convince the computer that he was a dealer was to create an empty text file on its hard-drive whose filename was something like “IAmADealer.txt” (I didn’t write down the exact filename, alas, but that’s not far off!).

Another revelation from Sickcodes: the company made extensive use of free/open source software but seems to be gravely out-of-compliance with the license terms (I’m told that organizations that do legal enforcement of free/open licenses are now aware of this).

So to recap: the company says it has to block farmers from having the final say over their own tractors because they could create security risks and also threaten Deere’s copyrights (the company even claims that locking down tractors is necessary to preventing music infringement, as though a farmer would spend $600k on a tractor so they could streamrip Spotify tracks).

But in reality, the company itself is a dumpster-fire of information security worst practices, whose unpatched, badly configured, out-of-date tractors are a bonanza of vulnerabilities and unforced errors. What’s more, the company — which claims to be staunch defenders of copyright — use their copyright locks to hide the fact that they are committing serious breaches of software copyright.

In serious information security circles, it’s widely understood that “there is no security in obscurity” — that is, hiding how a system works doesn’t make it secure. Usually, this is understood to be grounded in the fact that if you hide your work, you might make mistakes that others would spot and point out to you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

But there’s another problem with security through obscurity: when you don’t have to show your work to others, you can be sloppy. Whereas, if your work is open to inspection, your own aversion to being seen as slapdash will impose a rigor on your process, which will make the whole thing better:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

With Deere’s security through obscurity, we see both pathologies on display. The company uses its opacity to commit sloppy security bugs, and also to cover up its violations of copyright law — and then, of course, it accuses its critics of being guilty of those two exact sins. Takes one to know one:

https://doctorow.medium.com/takes-one-to-know-one-104d7d749408

Sickcodes closed out by saying that while his hack required a lot of fiddling with the hardware, he was already scheming to build a little tool that could access and jailbreak a tractor without ripping chips off a board or doing a lot of soldering.

And then he played a custom, farm-themed version of Doom on his jailbroken tractor controller.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A vintage John Deere tractor whose wheel hubs have been replaced with HAL 9000 eyes, matted over a background of the cyber-waterfall image from The Matrix.]

[coochiequeens]

A Russian woman has been heard giving her soldier husband permission to rape Ukrainian women — reminding him only to use “protection” when committing the crimes, according to a shocking report. 

The Security Service of Ukraine intercepted the woman’s phone call with her husband and posted the audio of the purported conversation on its Telegram channel, according to the Ukrainian news platform Ukrinform.net.

The clip — titled “Wives of Russian invaders allow their men to rape Ukrainian women” — claims that it “reflects the moral values not only of the occupiers but also of their relatives, 80[%] of whom now support the war in Ukraine.”

“So yeah, do it over there … Ukrainian women there. Rape them, yeah,” the woman is heard saying, the Daily Mail reported.

“Don’t tell me anything, understand!?” she adds, laughingly.

“Uh-huh. So I should rape and not tell you anything,” the hubby inquires, clarifying that she was giving him the green light.

“Yes, so that I wouldn’t know anything. Why do you ask?” the woman says.

“Can I really?” he asks again, incredulously. 

“Yeah, I allow you — just use protection,” she tells him with a giggle.

“OK,” he finally says.

News of the alleged conversation comes after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russian soldiers of raping hundreds of women and also sexually assaulting children.

The harrowing accounts include one by a 50-year-old Ukrainian woman who told the BBC that she was at home with her husband when a Russian soldier barged in last month.

“At gunpoint, he took me to a house nearby. He ordered me: ��Take your clothes off or I’ll shoot you.’ He kept threatening to kill me if I didn’t do as he said. Then he started raping me,” the woman told the BBC, which identified her only as “Anna.”

The woman described her assailant as a Chechen fighter allied with Russia.

“While he was raping me, four more soldiers entered. I thought that I was done for. But they took him away. I never saw him again,” said Anna, who added that she believed Russian soldiers had apprehended their comrade. 

But Anna said she later found her husband shot in the stomach.

“He had tried to run after me to save me, but he was hit by a round of bullets,” she told the outlet.

Due to the fighting, the woman claimed, her husband could not be taken to a hospital and succumbed to his injury two days later.

Anna said the Russian soldiers who saved her from her assailant stayed for a few days in her house where they menaced her with their guns and demanded she give them her late husband’s belongings.

“When they left, I found drugs and Viagra. They would get high and they were often drunk. Most of them are killers, rapists and looters. Only a few are OK,” she said.

see rest of article

[ukrfeminism]

Shared at the request of a Ukrainian follower.

Warning: This report contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence

In a quiet, rural neighbourhood 70km (45miles) west of Kyiv, we spoke to Anna, who is 50. We have changed her name to protect her identity.

Anna told us that on 7 March she had been at home with her husband when a foreign soldier barged in.

"At gunpoint, he took me to a house nearby. He ordered me: 'Take your clothes off or I'll shoot you.' He kept threatening to kill me if I didn't do as he said. Then he started raping me," she said.

Anna described her attacker as a young, thin, Chechen fighter allied with Russia.

"While he was raping me, four more soldiers entered. I thought that I was done for. But they took him away. I never saw him again," she said. She believes she was saved by a separate unit of Russian soldiers.

Anna went back home and found her husband. He had been shot in the abdomen.

"He had tried to run after me to save me, but he was hit by a round of bullets," she said. They both sought shelter in a neighbour's house. They couldn't take her husband to hospital because of the fighting. He died of his injuries two days later.

Anna never stopped crying while telling us her story. She showed us where she and her neighbours buried her husband in the backyard of their home. A tall, wooden cross stands at the head of the grave. Anna told us that she is in contact with the local hospital and is receiving psychological support.

The soldiers who saved her stayed in her house for a few days. She says they would point their gun at her and ask her to give them her husband's belongings.

"When they left, I found drugs and Viagra. They would get high and they were often drunk. Most of them are killers, rapists and looters. Only a few are OK," she said.

Down the road from Anna's house, we heard another chilling story.

A woman was allegedly raped and killed, and neighbours say it was done by the same man who raped Anna, before he went to Anna's house.

The woman was in her 40s. She was taken out of her home, say neighbours, and held in the bedroom of a house nearby whose occupants had evacuated when the war began. The well-decorated room, with ornate wallpaper and a bed with a golden headboard, is now a disturbing crime scene. There are large bloodstains on the mattress and duvet.

In a corner is a mirror with a note written in lipstick, appearing to suggest where the victim was buried.

Oksana, a neighbour, told us it had been left there by Russian soldiers who found the woman's body and buried her. "They [Russian soldiers] told me she had been raped and that her throat was either slit or stabbed, and she bled to death. They said there was a lot of blood."

The woman was buried in a grave in the garden of the house.

A day after we visited, the police exhumed her body to investigate the case. The body was found without clothes, and with a deep, long, cut across the neck.

Andrii Nebytov, the police chief of the Kyiv region, told us about another case they're investigating in a village 50km (30 miles) to the west of Kyiv.

A family of three - a couple in their thirties and their young child - lived in a house on the edge of the village.

"On 9 March, several soldiers of the Russian army entered the house. The husband tried to protect his wife and child. So they shot him in the yard," said Mr Nebytov.

"After that, two soldiers repeatedly raped the wife. They would leave and then come back. They returned three times to rape her. They threatened that if she resisted they would harm her little boy. To protect her child she didn't resist."

When the soldiers left, they burnt down the house and shot the family's dogs.

The woman escaped with her son and then contacted the police. Mr Nebytov says his team has met her and recorded her testimony.

They have been gathering evidence at the family home - only its shell is now left. Just a few signs of a previous peaceful, ordinary life lie in the charred ruins. We saw a child's bicycle, a stuffed horse, a dog's leash and a man's fur lined winter shoe.

The husband was buried in the garden by neighbours. The police have now exhumed his body for examination. They plan to take the case to international courts.

Ukraine's ombudsman for human rights Lyudmyla Denisova says they're documenting several such cases.

"About 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant," she said. "Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn't want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children."

She says they are receiving several calls on support helplines - and also getting information through channels on the Telegram messaging app.

"A 25-year-old woman called to tell us her 16-year-old sister was raped in the street in front of her. She said they were screaming 'This will happen to every Nazi prostitute' as they raped her sister," Ms Denisova said.

We asked if it was possible to assess the scale of sexual crimes committed by Russian troops during the occupation.

"It is impossible at the moment because not everyone is willing to tell us what happened to them. The majority of them currently call for psychological support, so we cannot record those as crimes unless they give us their testimony," Ms Denisova said.

She says Ukraine wants a special tribunal to be set up by the United Nations to try Vladimir Putin personally for allegations of war crimes including rape.

"I want to ask Putin, why is this happening?" said Anna, the woman who told us she was raped. "I don't understand. We're not living in the Stone Age, why can't he negotiate? Why is he occupying and killing?"

[hjhb-the-hdgp]

There remains no doubt about the systemic nature of war crimes after the publication of the “genocide manifesto” in Ukraine by RIA Novosti, the Russian military command's confession as to shooting dozens of people in civilian clothes (dozens in Mariupol alone) and the publication of numerous radio intercepts. Yet, even ideological indoctrination and the Kremlin's deliberate policy of killing civilians do not in themselves explain why these crimes are made possible. After all, even the military has free will and, like all human beings, must have an understanding of the law and must be guided by ethical norms, both universal and professional. When we see that all these restraints stop working, we should pay attention not only to the political course, but also to the institutional and social peculiarities of the Russian armed forces.

[joachimnapoleon]

21 October 1757–Pierre Augereau, future Marshal of France, is born in Paris.

A soldier of misfortune who followed the wars across Europe or scraped a living as a fencing master. He would swear to service across the hills and as far away as Russia, but probabilities take him no farther than Prussia and Naples. He definitely learned Prussian drill and discipline.... Marbot remembered his powdered hair, long queue, and gleaming boots—so different from his slovenly fellow officers.... His men called him “the Big Prussian” because of the thoroughness with which he trained, disciplined, and looked after them. In Spain and Italy he proved a fine infantry tactician, with a swaggering courage equal to any danger.... He was an energetic but unskilled looter, having a weakness for the large and gaudy; his baggage wagon was famous as a mobile treasury.... As a marshal, he no longer looted. He served well through 1805-7, though his health was failing. At Eylau, sick and worn out, he strapped himself to his saddle and went forward into choking snow squalls, artillery crossfires, and surges of Russian cavalry.... When Napoleon abdicated, Augereau issued a proclamation abusing him. On Napoleon’s return, Augereau tried to turn his coat again, but the Emperor struck him from the list of marshals.... Augereau has been caricatured by many writers. He was a bundle of contradictions—heroic in combat but sometimes a moral coward; an ingrate to Napoleon but kindness itself to others; greedy but openhanded. He was a good comrade and sought to be a gentleman.

—John R. Elting, Swords Around a Throne: Napoleon’s Grande Armée

Napoleon said of him on Saint Helena:

He was incapable of behaving; he had no education, a narrow mind, few manners; but he maintained order and discipline amongst his soldiers, who loved him. He knew how to divide his columns, set up his reserves; he fought boldly; but it all never lasted longer than the day: victorious or defeated, he was most often discouraged in the evening, which was due either to his disposition or to his lack of calculation and penetration.

[libertariantaoist]

News Roundup 6/3/20

by Kyle Anzalone

US News

A security guard was shot and killed by looters at a St. Louis pawn shop. [Link]

The Department of Justice gave the DEA the authority to carry out covert surveillance of the George Floyd protest movement. [Link]

One thousand six hundred soldiers are on standby in DC in case the government wants to deploy them against protesters. [Link]

Rep Adam Schiff is blocking an amendment in the House that would prevent warrantless spying on internet search histories. [Link]

Asia

Russian President Putin signed a new nuclear warfare document saying Russia could respond to a conventional attack with nuclear weapons. [Link]

The Pentagon has accepted a South Korean proposal for South Korea to pay the salary of South Koreans working for the US. [Link]

The President of the Philippines has reversed course and will now keep an agreement with the US that allows for American soldiers to be in the Philippines. [Link]

Afghanistan

The Afghan government reports a significant drop in violence since a three-day ceasefire started last week. [Link]

Two people were killed in Afghanistan by a bomb planted at a mosque. The Taliban denied involvement. [Link]

Africa

The UN says warring parties in Libya have agreed to restart ceasefire talks. [Link]

Five civilians were killed in a Libyan park by mortar fire. [Link]

Twenty-five people were killed when militants attacked a market in Burkina Faso. [Link]

The Congo reports a new Ebola outbreak. [Link]

Read More

[anastasiamaru]

russian are crazy looters

We can buy new car,new washing machine,and blender but they stole smth really important for our culture and for our health!!!!👇

The russian occupiers stole and took to Donetsk more than 2,000 unique exhibits from the museums of Mariupol, according to the city council. Among them there are original works by Kuindzhi and Aivazovsky, ancient icons and a unique handwritten Torah scroll.

Also they stole artificial lungs ventilation machines

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson:

June 1, 2020 (Monday)

Trump began the day with a call to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Shortly after, he called American state governors. In the 55-minute call, he told them, “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate.” He told the governors, “You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.” “You know when other country’s watch this, they’re watching this, the next day wow, they’re really a push over. And we can’t be a push over. And we have all the resources—it’s not like we don’t have the resources. So, I don’t know what you’re doing.” “It’s a movement, if you don’t put it down it will get worse and worse…. The only time its successful is when you’re weak and most of you are weak.”

He said: “We will activate Bill Barr and activate him very strongly.” He said: “Washington [D.C.] was under very good control, but we’re going to have it under much more control. We’re going to pull in thousands of people.” Barr later directed the FBI to send riot teams to Miami and Washington.

Also on the call were Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Esper echoed Trump, telling the governors in a discussion of American protesters in American cities: “we need to dominate the battle space.”

On the call, Trump said he had put Milley in charge of managing the protests. Since by law Milley is an advisor, rather than part of the military chain of command, the Pentagon clarified that he could not lead any military response to the crisis. White House Press Secretary later said he would lead a “central command center in conjunction with the state and local governments.”

This call was recorded and leaked to the press almost immediately.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a former Army captain who now sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was on board with the sentiments in it. He called for Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which permits the president to override the restriction against using the military in domestic situations in extreme situations. Cotton tweeted: “Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight. If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division. We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction…. And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”

Readers pointed out that the concept of “no quarter,” that is, killing those who surrender in a battle, is a war crime. Trump tweeted that Cotton was “100% correct.” Cotton later tried to walk back the comments by resorting to a dictionary definition, but David A. French, a lawyer, military officer, Iraq veteran, and journalist, pointed out that Cotton graduated from Harvard Law School, and certainly knew that military ops defines “no quarter” very clearly, and prohibits it.

Florida Representative Matt Gaetz—the man who wore a gas mask on the floor of Congress to downplay the dangers of coronavirus—tweeted “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do in the Middle East?” Twitter hid the tweet—a tweet from a sitting congressman—as glorifying violence.

A reminder: we do not yet know who is behind the looting and violence, although a number of videos have shown white instigators. The political affiliation of those rioters is not clear, despite the statements of Trump and Attorney General Barr that they are “radical leftists.”

When a journalist today asked a senior White House official what Trump was doing, the official responded: “He’s not handling anything, just typing a bunch of shit on Twitter.” But things took an ominous turn later in the day.

Twenty-nine states have activated about 70,000 National Guard troops but have not deployed more than a few hundred of them, and no state governor has asked for federal intervention. Nonethless, Trump, who refused to help the states respond to the coronavirus pandemic, now wants federal troops in those same states. In the Rose Garden this afternoon, he said that if mayors and governors didn’t increase their troop presence, he would send in federal troops. He announced he was deploying “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” to stop the protests in Washington, D.C. and “to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.”

While he was talking, a massive police presence, including officers from the Customs and Border Protection, were clearing peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square with tear gas and flash-bang explosions.

The president concluded his remarks by saying “Now, I’m going to pay my respects to a very, very special place.” He walked out of the White House to the north side of it, into Lafayette Square, where the protests have been, along with Esper, Attorney General William Barr, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and other White House officials, including Hope Hicks, who apparently hatched the plan to calm Trump's anger at being made fun of for his stay in the White House bunker. They crossed the park to St. John’s Episcopal Church, a historic site that had briefly been set on fire last night. There, Trump held up a Bible and said: “We have a great country, that’s my thoughts, the greatest country in the world. We will make it even greater, it won’t take long. It’s coming back strong and it will be greater than ever before.”

Democratic Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania tweeted: “I want to be super clear about what happened tonight in Washington: The President of the United States deployed tear-gas, rubber bullets and military personnel on peaceful protesters so that he could cross the street for a photo op. There is no excuse.” Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon straight up said “the fascist speech Donald Trump just delivered verged on a declaration of war against American citizens. I fear for our country tonight and will not stop defending America against Trump’s assault.”

Esquire writer Charles Pierce notes that since 9-11, the federal government has equipped local police with $4.3 billion in military gear and prepared them for an all-out war on terrorists. In 2014, President Barack Obama tried to stop the transfer of military weapons and equipment to civilian police departments with an executive order, but Trump reversed it. This militarization of the police has created in America’s streets what a government commission in 1968 defined as a “police riot,” in which officers themselves instigate, escalate, or sustain violent confrontations. In addition to attacking protesters, today’s police are singling out journalists for attack. This development is significant because it is a key sign of authoritarian regimes, which try to silence journalists to silence information about their actions.

Tonight General Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, talked to reporters from the streets of Washington. National security specialist Tom Nichols noted: “There is absolutely no reason for the Chairman to be walking the streets right now. This is not even remotely in the tradition of U.S. civil-military relations.”

[intotheradius]

Pechorsk Radius 15 Years Later: Gone, And Yet Forgotten?

By Nikolay Yang

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the destruction of Pechorsk — an Eastern Europian mining town that has become synonymous with tragedy, loss, and mystery. On this day fifteen years ago almost forty thousand people lost their lives in a horrible catastrophic event. 

The nature of the Event remains unknown, and there is still no explanation as to how and why it happened. The families of those who perished received no explanation — they weren’t even allowed to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones. Today there is an exclusion zone around Pechorsk, and no one is allowed to enter aside from the UNPSC specialists. But even they, as far as the public knows, don’t dare to enter the Radius itself.

Fifteen years ago there was a worldwide effort to understand what happened to Pechorsk. For a while, it was the single most discussed topic in the media, scientific communities, and political establishments. However, as time passed with no answers to be found, our attention shifted to other, more pressing matters. The news cycle moved on. Today there is little mention of Pechorsk, with the exception of horror flick aficionados and conspiracy theorists. Everyone knows the name, but, just like with Chernobyl or Deepwater Horizon, there is no real awareness of what it really means. 

The question remains, however. What happened to the people of Pechorsk? While we have no answer, it is important to continue asking.

A Brief Summary of What We Know

About Pechorsk

Pechorsk was a relatively small Eastern European town. During the Soviet period of its history, large deposits of kimberlite rock were discovered and the town became a staging area for a large scale mining operation and quickly grew. Soon it was housing tens of thousands of people, most of whom worked in and around its open-pit diamond mine — one of the largest in the world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mine continued to operate and was active up to the day of the Radius event.

Timeline of the Radius Event

9:55 Geological observation stations across Europe and Russia detect a spike in seismic activity. All communications in and out of Pechorsk cease.

10:43 Ruslan Kalinin, a truck driver on his way back to Pechorsk, is first to encounter the Radius — he reports seeing “A strange, heavy fog surrounding the town.” During the next hour, more cars and trucks pile up on the roads leading to the town. Some drivers turn back; others, including Ruslan Kalinin, continue through.

11:30 Aerial reconnaissance helicopters reach the Radius zone.

11:31 All communication with the reconnaissance helicopters cease. They never return.

12:30 Local militia troops arrive at the border of the Pechorsk Radius zone and begin to secure the perimeter. There are reports of a number of vehicle collisions due to heavy fog conditions and communications systems in the area have been rendered inoperable.

14:49 Russian VDV paratroopers unlawfully arrive, engaging in sporadic firefights with the local militia. They detain a number of witnesses, confiscating their cameras and destroying all film.

An evacuation order for Pechorsk and the surrounding area is issued and all roads are closed.

15:25 News of the Pechorsk Radius begins to spread to local and national media.

15:38 Tensions escalate as NATO satellite reconnaissance is leaked to the international press and an emergency session of the UN is convened.

Unknown Several squads of soldiers are sent into the Pechorsk Radius.

15:47 After the Kremlin issues a statement implying that Pechorsk was struck by a nuclear device, the UN Security Council calls for international stock markets to be closed, sparking international panic over war breaking out.

16:00 NATO issues a statement denying any radioactive explosion around Pechorsk, calling the event “..possibly an asteroid strike or interplanetary object.” (This statement was later retracted.)

16:17 Ruslan Kalinin stumbles out of the Radius. He appears to be severely wounded and in shock. He is sent to the nearest hospital on a medical evacuation helicopter.

16:30 Ruslan Kalinin dies on the way to the hospital. The paramedics accompanying him report that his condition worsened the further away he got from the Radius.

17:00 The Kremlin and White House issue a rare joint statement calling for calm, stating that NATO and Russia do not consider the Pechorsk Radius event to be a provocation to war. They offer no theory about what happened other than calling it a ‘non-nuclear event’.

Unknown Three surviving soldiers return from the Radius in a state of physical and mental breakdown. Their deaths are slow and gruesome.

17:00 Locals interviewed about the Radius describe the event as a short earthquake, which caused a lot of dust to fill the sky, reducing visibility to almost nothing. After some of the dust settled, they stated seeing a huge dark reddish orb in the sky, with black ash floating around the area.

17:23 Two more soldiers return from the Radius. One dies in two to three hours, the other survives until the next day, but eventually commits suicide in the medical tent.

19:04 The last surviving soldier returns from the Radius. The time and details of his death are stricken from records.

19:35 A photograph purported to be smuggled out from the Pechorsk Radius zone is broadcast by the international media. This confirms earlier reports of an orb-like object seen by local witnesses.

20:00 The UN Security Council votes unanimously to put the entire region under UN peacekeeping protection, in addition to offering aid to the victims of Pechorsk and assisting with evacuations.

The order to restrict all access into the Radius to civilian and military personnel is signed. The first analysis of recordings brought back by the six soldiers is presented to the authorities.

22:18 Two looters caught fleeing the Pechorsk quarantine are apprehended. They succumb to their wounds soon after, but not before claiming to have found an object possessing miraculous powers. The object is never again mentioned in any official documents.

23:00 A final statement is issued by the UN, Russia and NATO, forbidding any further entry into Pechorsk, calling it perilous to human life. Stock markets were ordered to be gradually reopened and further study of the Pechorsk Radius zone would be undertaken by an international team of experts.

23:59 From that point forward, all unaccounted citizens of Pechorsk are officially presumed dead

.

After the Event

During the months following the Pechorsk Radius event, international political powers struggled to come to an agreement on who, and how, to deal with the Pechorsk Radius. In the end, a special political body was formed — the United Nations Pechorsk Special Committee, which was entrusted with studying the Radius and dealing with the social fallout of the Event. The UNPSC spearheaded research as well as providing all necessary bureaucratic services, such as financial compensations to the families of the deceased, as well as compiling material for press coverage and answering questions of the public. They promised to operate with the principles of transparency, caution and utmost respect to the memory of those who perished.

Now

Did UNPSC deliver on their promises?

We know very little, but it’s a resounding no.

Not only have they achieved zero success in trying to identify the reasons behind the Pechorsk Radius event, but over time the reports of their operations also became increasingly convoluted, to the point of being misleading and secretive.

Did we know more about the Radius than we did fifteen years ago? No.

Do we pay as much attention to the Radius as a completely unexplained phenomenon that took the lives of forty thousand people deserves? No.

And the last question I want to leave you with, the Reader, is this… Why is that?

[mariacallous]

Standing in the ruins of his niece’s house in eastern Ukraine, Mykola Myroneko, an upbeat 58-year-old man with a trim white beard, seemed oddly at peace with the devastation caused by months of fighting after Russia’s invasion.

It wasn’t clear which army had destroyed the house. It could have been Ukrainian soldiers, battling to push out any Russians who had gained a foothold there. But Myroneko didn’t have harsh words for the Ukrainian soldiers who may have shelled it. “If I was a soldier, I would have done the same,” he said on a gray day in October. “If there had been Russians in my home, I would have said let’s bomb it.”

Myroneko had come back to visit his home of Dolyna, a tiny village in eastern Donetsk, after taking refuge for months in western Ukraine. A sweeping Ukrainian counteroffensive in September had finally made it safe for Myroneko and his nieces, Maryna Snizhinska and Nina Karpets, to return. The village was in ruins. Maryna’s home had been hit by direct artillery fire at least 12 times. In the garden, the tailfin of a Grad rocket stuck up like a flower.

Ukraine’s battlefield victories have electrified Ukrainian society. Beginning in early September, Ukrainian forces punched through Russian lines near the eastern city of Kharkiv and swept south to the Donetsk region to liberate over 3,000 square kilometers of territory. Ukrainian forces are now pushing to take back more territory in the country’s south and east. On Nov. 11, they recaptured the entire Kherson region after Russian forces pulled out of Kherson city, the only regional capital Russia had taken in nearly nine months of grinding warfare.

Yet in villages and towns secured by Ukraine’s army, the toll of Russia’s invasion cannot be rolled back by Ukrainian advances. The economic situation is dire. But more than that, destruction is rampant. More than 11,000 buildings have been partially or completely destroyed in the Kharkiv region alone, according to Ukrainian officials. For some Ukrainians, there is no home to return to. Others now find themselves facing winter in cities devastated by war. For many people in Ukraine’s east, the lives they led before Russia’s invasion are a distant dream.

Myroneko’s nieces, both in their 40s, had not expected the war to touch their village of 400 people. Standing amid the rubble of Snizhinska’s house, they recounted how refugees from the neighboring village, and then Ukrainian soldiers, streamed into town soon after Russia’s invasion in February. “It’s going to be hell,” one soldier told the sisters.

Even then, they didn’t realize the scale of the war. It wasn’t until they first sought shelter in March in a nearby monastery, and Snizhinska and her son were wounded in a shelling attack there, that they realized how bad the situation would get. The family then left for western Ukraine, where they stayed first for three months with a volunteer and then with relatives.

Over the next few months, Dolyna was gradually destroyed by fighting, even as Ukrainian troops held the village. The basement in Myroneko’s general store became a base for Ukrainian soldiers, Myroneko said, its concrete walls sheltering them even as the store crumbled from successive strikes. Walking around its basement, he pointed out the scraps of food, clothing, and other detritus left by the Ukrainian soldiers.

Myroneko and his nieces had returned to salvage what little was left. Snizhinska had never actually moved into her house, a large red-brick building with a garden. Its interior was still being finished when the war broke out. Snizhinska showed me a photo on her phone of an orderly kitchen with gleaming appliances. The same room had now been stripped by looters, the roof above it half blown away.

Myroneko and his family have no plans to return for good. “There’s no electricity, no water, no gas—and no houses,” Karpets said. Other frontline villages suffered the same fate, they said, listing out village after village.

One of those villages is Ruski Tyshky, which sits about 160 kilometers away from Dolyna. Although it was liberated in May, the village only became safe to visit after the recent counteroffensive. Nearly every building in Ruski Tyshky has faced significant damage. In October, only 300 people remained out of a prewar population of 1,000 residents, said Anatoly, a 62-year-old man cooking outside of his ruined apartment block who declined to give his surname. Many residents left for Europe, passing through Russia.

It’s hard to say if anyone will ever return to Ruski Tyshky, since the Russian border is just about 20 kilometers away. One man visiting his old home, who declined to give his name, said he would never move back given the risk of attacks from Russian artillery, whose operating range from behind the border easily covers the village. Russian artillery continues to target villages just a few kilometers up the road.

Anatoly, however, was certain the village wouldn’t be shelled again, though his reasoning was hardly reassuring. “There’s no reason to shell it again,” he said. “It’s already destroyed.”

Many Ukrainians have no choice but to continue living in the ruins. In Saltivka, a suburb of Kharkiv, 57-year-old Larissa Glukhova was moving back to her flat in October after taking refuge in central Ukraine. As a cat lover, she noted that of the five cats that had lived in the yard outside the apartment, only one remained. Across the street from Glukhova’s, a towering Soviet-era apartment building was blackened by fire.

Saltivka, which was directly on Russia’s route to invade Kharkiv early this year, became known internationally for the heavy damage it sustained from Russian fire. Now, the suburb is coming back to life, echoing with the whir of passing cars rather than booming Russian shellfire.

At first glance, Glukhova’s apartment appeared unscathed, the living room’s pink wallpaper casting a rosy glow in the afternoon sunlight. But examining the space more carefully revealed small shrapnel holes in the walls and sofa, and one gaping hole punched through a wall.

“I’m sad and happy at the same time,” said Glukhova, who was seeing her flat for the first time since she fled. She didn’t have another place to live, so she would have to make repairs. As she looked at her cracked windows, she wondered if she should use plastic film to insulate them.

Even Ukrainians whose homes are untouched face challenges as winter sets in. Conditions are so bad in Izyum, a nearby city, that officials have started to offer voluntary evacuations to some residents. The city is also trying to heal from the horrors perpetrated there by Russian forces, including torture, disappearances, and executions, with some 440 people found at one mass grave site. In other places, such as Lyman—a recently liberated city in eastern Ukraine—officials have said mines and unexploded ordnance have made it difficult to fix gas lines.

On a side street in Lyman, Volodymr Kutsevych, who is retired, was stacking logs cut from a tree splintered by shellfire with his wife. With the gas and electricity cut off, they would use the wood for heating and cooking. “I’ll describe the occupation in one word,” Kutsevych said, with a wry smile: “Not good.”

Lyman is unlikely to be reconnected to a gas supply soon due to the destruction, regional gas official Vadym Battii told Ukrainian media in mid-October. The city is planning to supply residents with firewood and buy stoves for those who do not have them. But it’s also encouraging residents living elsewhere not to return. Surviving the winter will be “extremely difficult,” the Lyman city administration said in a social media post.

Older people are often most at risk. “I’m alone here,” said 83-year-old Lyuba Savchenko in Lyman’s main square. Her daughter was killed by Russian artillery fire, and her son and granddaughter fled. “I have nowhere to go,” she said. “My relatives elsewhere aren’t inviting me, and I don’t have the money.”

Not every town has faced this much damage. Balakliya, a major center of Russian occupation in the region, was liberated on Sept. 7 with relatively little destruction. One of the few physical traces of war is in a school, whose gym sports two enormous holes in the ceiling, shining daylight onto a cheery mural that exhorts students to go “Farther! Faster! Deeper!”

Within days of Balakliya’s liberation, a small two-car passenger train was running to the town from Kharkiv, its two-and-a-half-hour journey passing briefly over a bridge partially destroyed by fighting. By Sept. 20, local media cited the Kharkiv regional government as saying that all but 10 percent of homes in the town had access to gas.

Many residents of places like Balakliya, after months of living abroad or elsewhere in Ukraine, are now returning, despite the uncertain economic future and the risk of Russian soldiers reoccupying their community. On a late September morning, the Kharkiv-Balakliya train was crammed with people young and old finally going home.

Irina, a woman on the train who did not provide her surname, was heading back to Balakliya after living in Poland. A former worker in a local artillery shell factory during the Soviet Union, she once made ammunition that likely ended up stored in Russia and used in Russian cannons. She pondered her small role in creating the kinds of shells that caused so much damage in the region.

“For what did we make them? For ourselves,” she said. “If we had only known then.”

[pettania]

Putin's Guards Butchers

On April 18, 2022, Vladimir Putin awarded the rank of "Guards" to the 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Russian Army. On March 28, a similar name was awarded to the 155th Marine Brigade. Both these Russian military units operated in Bucha. This suggests that Russia began a new count of cynicism at the highest state level. Just this spring.

Traditionally, the most capable, victorious units which have demonstrated courage and victory on the battlefield are given the Guards title. However, this time we are talking about completely different actions.

In March 2022, both so-called "Guard" units resided in the town of Bucha in the suburbs of Kyiv. Bucha became known throughout the world as a symbol of the war crimes of the occupiers. Civilians were killed, women and juvenile girls were raped, and houses were destroyed. 85% of the bodies of the victims have traces of bullet wounds. More than 400 Bucha residents fell victim during the several weeks of occupation.

Why did the Bucha occupiers become guardsmen? Russia's president has been awarding Russian soldiers since the first days of the war. However, the situation is quite different with the 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade and the 155th Marine Brigade.

Last week, the Kremlin master compared the allegations of war crimes in Bucha to "fakes of a chemical attack in Syria." Like, these are phenomena of the same order. Against this background, it is not surprising that Alexander Dvornikov, known as the "Syrian butcher", has been appointed commander of Russian troops in Ukraine. He has Putin's indulgence in any actions that allow him to achieve his goals.

The new "guards" became another Russian symbol. Putin and his allies are spitting on the world around them. the president of Russia rewarded executioners, rapists and looters. The Russian government does not hide its desire to destroy Ukrainians as a nation and Ukraine as a state. They need to be stopped by joint efforts. There are no alternatives.

(с) Yevhen Mahda