#sanctions against russia

[minnesotafollower]

At U.N., Cuban President Says Nothing About Russia and Ukraine While Condemning U.S. Sanctions    

On September 19, Cuba’s President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, addressed the U.N. General Assembly. He said, ““For 60 years Cuba has suffered a suffocating economic blockade,” an “inhumane policy” he blamed for the shortages of food and medicines on the island. He also said Cuba was not a national security threat to the U.S, and that the American government lied when it concluded that Cuba sponsors…

[thiscatiscreepy]

Oh good there are ways to pirate Game Changers I wanted to check it out.

[hazamacore]

with bds calling for an official boycott of eurovision, one of the things they have asked is for “supporters to launch creative, strategic initiatives that can pressure broadcasters to withdraw” and so i encourage all those whose countries are participating in eurovision to find out how to contact your national broadcaster to make a complaint. for those living in countries who dont broadcast eurovision i know u can still send a complaint to the bbc if ur outside the uk for one

this is the message i have been sending, feel free to translate it/use it as a template/improve it/etc:

Dear sir/ma'am,

In 2022, following the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine, pressure was applied to the Eurovision Song Contest to bar Russia from competing that year and all years since. It was widely rightfully agreed that the invasion was worthy of strong condemnation and that Russia should be given no avenues to rehabilitate its public image.

In October 2023, the state of Israel began a military campaign against the people of the already occupied Gaza Strip in Palestine. In a disproportionate, atrocious response to the Hamas attack on the 7th of October 2023, Israeli forces have murdered over 30,000 Palestinians and displaced almost 2 million from their homes. Palestinian civilians (journalists and doctors included), entirely unaffiliated with the Hamas party Israel claims to target, have been targeted and killed indiscriminately. Stripped of basic necessities like food, water and electricity by Israel, with intent vocalised by multiple Israeli forces to eliminate Gaza and the Palestinian people, this is no less than a genocide.

Thus Israel, much like Russia, should not be permitted to compete in a contest that has been used repeatedly to maintain its pristine public image while it brutally oppresses Palestine. Especially when it has been charged with genocide explicitly by South Africa, a case that took place in the ICJ, thoroughly elucidating the crimes committed by the Israeli state, a charge agreed upon by several countries and genocide scholars alike.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement has called for a complete boycott of Eurovision by broadcasters, artists and viewers and I ask that the BBC comply with this - abstain from broadcasting the Eurovision Song Contest and withdraw this years entry to the contest.

Thank you.

[jeintalu]

A PUBLIC APPEAL TO CHESS ORGANISATIONS ON THE BOMBING OF THE GAZA STRIP

I call on all chess organisations to either immediately lift the restrictions imposed on Russia and Belarus or to impose the same restrictions on Israel

[simcardiac-arrested]

i think what pisses me off the most is that last year, nobody had trouble going against russia. companies dropped everything so they could keep russians off their sites, to block them from their news articles and to sanction in other ways. eurovision kicked it out. even steam, discord, any fucking western apps or websites have been so willing to perform in ‘activism’. musicians and celebrities speaking out and country-blocking their work, and so much more. but now what? where is all of that now for israel? where are all the brands leaving the country to ‘protest’? where is anything? what pisses me off the most is that none of them have actually really cared about ukraine, ever, and none of them care about palestine now.

[russianreader]

Vexations

Igor Levit performing Erik Satie’s “Vexations” (short edit) On 30 May 2020, Igor Levit performed all 840 repetitions of Vexations at the B-sharp Studio, Berlin. The performance streamed on Periscope, Twitter and other platforms, including on The New Yorker‘s website. Levit said the recital was in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, his reaction to which he characterised as a “silent scream”…

[niveditaabaidya]

Japan Further Sanctions Russia. #ukraine #japan #asia #china #russia #ne...

[tomorrowusa]

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, one of the world's least intellectually gifted leaders, is basically a pawn of Vladimir Putin.

Lukashenko (or Lukashenka if you use the Belarusian transliteration of his surname) is telling the world, "join Belarus and Russia and we'll give you nukes!"

President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that nations who are willing “to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus” will be given nuclear weapons, days after confirming the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Moscow to Minsk had begun.

Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, made the comments in an on-camera interview released Sunday on the state-run Russia 1 channel.

During the interview, Lukashenko said, “no one minds Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation.”

“It’s very simple,” he added. “Join the Union State of Belarus and Russia. That’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”

It gets more obvious with each passing day why Ukraine wants to have absolutely nothing to do with Lukashenko and Putin.

So far I am unaware of any country willing to take Lukashenko up on his offer.

Most movement internationally has been away from the Lukashenko régime in Belarus. In fact, Poland has imposed new sanctions against Belarus.

Poland suspends freight traffic on border with Belarus from June 1

If the régime in Moscow begins to collapse, Lukashenko will be gone before the collapse is complete.

[umormalik61]

Eight bombs exploded six, and top investigative reporters found out the details of the US bombing of "Nord Stream"

[jr0vj0t3if]

[gme-news]

Ukraine We will retake Mariupol this year

via IFTTT

[justacynicalromantic]

Elon Musk was forced to reveal who financed his purchase of Twitter. Amongst owners are two Russian oligarchs close to Putin and sanctioned over the Russian invasion of Ukraine: Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich.

Petr Aven is a Russian billionaire, founder of Alfa Group, which is one of the main wallets for Putin. Aven also attended a meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 to mark the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

Vadim Moshkovich owns Russia's largest agricultural holding Rusagro. Naturally, he also attended the meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 and, like Aven, did not protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

[5h4d]

Boycotts and sanctions have limited effect. They're especially useless against countries, that have built their economies around being mostly independent from foreign investment (e.g. Russia).

Where they do work though, is when they're leveraged against our allies - countries whose economies are very much tied to the west. This is how apartheid South Africa fell and it's how apartheid Israel might fall.

We probably won't see any sanctions coming from the west any time soon. At least not without putting pressure on our representatives. In the mean time here's a list of companies that have the highest stake in the suffering of Palestinians. Please refrain from purchasing products of Israel and especially products from these companies.

Don't be neutral in the face of fascism. Don't be neutral in the face of 75 years of oppression, settler colonialism and genocide. Fight for Palestine and fight for human rights in any way you can.

[afloweroutofstone]

"A New Washington Influence Industry is Making Millions from Sanctions," Jeff Stein, Federica Cocco and Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post, October 25, 2024:

Some sanctions lobbying isn’t about a company trying to avoid sanctions, but trying to get them imposed on competitors. In 2015, [Tom] Coleman, the ex-senator, registered with other former U.S. officials at his law firm to lobby on behalf of Intrepid Potash, a domestic fertilizer company. The firm’s lobbyists asked State Department officials to tighten sanctions against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russia who was accused of human rights abuses. Inside government, some officials thought the lobbyists for the Denver-based firm were less concerned about human rights than about business competition; their goal was clearly to cut Belarusian potash producers out of international markets, said three former administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings. (The officials did not recall if Coleman was part of these conversations, although records show he was part of the lobbying team.) “You had these potash industry lobbyists trying to give us lessons on the intricacies of Belarusian politics,” said one former State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interactions. “It was very odd — and very thinly veiled.” After a years-long lobbying campaign and another crackdown by Lukashenko on civilian protesters, the U.S. sanctioned Belarusian potash firms in 2021, pushing global potash prices to a 13-year high. A State Department spokeswoman said the potash sanctions were imposed because the industry generates revenue for the Belarusian regime. Intrepid Potash paid Coleman and his colleagues $1.5 million between 2015 and 2019. Coleman’s law firm declined to comment... Other U.S. firms have pushed for sanctions against their competitors, too. In 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Alcoa Corporation, a major U.S. aluminum producer, pushed the White House to sanction Russian aluminum companies, while spending more than $1 million on a team of lobbyists, according to Senate disclosures. As economic hostilities have deepened with China, U.S. companies have significantly ramped up spending on lobbying aimed at pushing Chinese competitors out of Western markets. Over the past six years, U.S. entities — primarily companies — have spent more than $1 billion on contracts with lobbyists that mention “China” and “sanctions” as specific targets, although these contracts also often include other goals as well, according to The Post’s analysis of Justice Department records.

[ukraineblr]

This is seriously a new level of being a douchebag.

- You directly undermine Ukraine's defense effort by turning Starlinks off for the Ukrainian military right in the middle of important operations and letting the Russian military use it despite U.S. sanctions

- You spread the most idiotic "nuclear war" takes whispered to you in the ear by the Russian ambassador in the U.S. and even Putin himself

- You give voice and listen to the most insane conspiracy theorists talking about "proxy war", "biolabs", "deep state", and "money laundering", as well as blowhard demagogues and media con artists openly praising Putin and his regime

- You use your multimillion-stong global audience to directly propagate the Ukrainian surrender to Russia's war of aggression and publicly ridicule Ukraine's calls for international defense aid in its war against one of the world's largest military powers

- You directly undermined U.S. aid to Ukraine and publicly called for "killing" a long-belated aid at the U.S. Congress despite Ukraine running critically low on air defense and munitions because you and your arrogant yes-men had decided that "Putin just can't lose"

And when the situation deteriorates, particularly due to months-long delays in the most essential and urgent defense aid, this shameless douche says "I did predict it" (while again completely ignoring the fact that POLITICO makes it perfectly clear that Ukraine is 'heading for defeat' due to the West's failure to send weapons to Kyiv).

No, Elmo, you did not 'predict' anything.

You precipitated this.

This war started with Ukrainians praising you as the free world's techno hero and naming streets after you.

Now you have degraded yourself to being one of Russia's key useful idiots amid the most terrible and the largest European war of aggression since Adolf Hitler.

Keep listening to the likes of Ian Miles Cheong and David Sacks and dive deeper into your delusions and absolute moral bankruptcy.

We in Ukriane have seen our share of smartasses giving us between 48 and 72 hours two years ago.

In this war, we've been through so many impossible things that you can't even imagine, let alone "predict".

We will overcome this too -- and will get the aid, will survive as an independent nation and a democracy, and will bring peace back to Europe by derailing Russian aggression.

(c) Illia Ponomarenko

[komsomolka]

The Ukrainian state is US/Western controlled and, in its alliance and arming, is effectively NATO-like. Washington, according to coup-happy Victoria Nuland in 2014, pumped some $5 billion into Ukraine since the Western-intelligence induced “Orange” revolution in 2004; an additional $15-$18 billion in arms, loans, and grants (from the US and EU) were poured into Ukraine since the 2013-2014 CIA-backed, far-right enforced regime change of the democratically elected Ukrainian government and until before the war began.

With on-the-ground CIA direction, power in Ukraine was consolidated among a small sociopolitical base of venal Russophobes, political pluralism representing genuinely alternative visions to the essentially nationalist, ultranationalist, pro-NATO parties disbanded. The Ukraine army, neo-fascist death squads, and small, Nazi-throwback extreme right-wing parties, celebrated by the new leaders and incorporated into the Ukrainian state, went on a repression spree, a terror campaign, to crush protests and dissent against those who were unhappy with what transpired and to erase all things Russian, including an eight-year shelling and sniping war on civilians designed to create terror and ethnic cleansing in eastern Donbass. This was not a democracy but a monopoly on power to consolidate a vociferously, fanatically anti-Russian state.

Ukraine is (or now, was) merely a platform for a Western proxy war against Russia, a forward operations base, a front line state, its “foreign policy” directed by the American proconsul, its institutions “advised” by American/Western intelligence functionaries and embassy officials, whose job since 2014 was to ensure continuing aggravation and antagonism in Donbass to elicit, in fact, a Russian response justifying long-prepared sanctions, escalation and pretext for “confronting” Russia. [...]

The Russian offensive, therefore, occurred for a much more ominous reason than the Ukrainian state terrorism visited upon eastern Donbass: the US/West’s wordless wish is no less than demoralizing, weakening, bankrupting, and territorially fragmenting the Russian Federation, controlling its markets and resources, indebting its people and rendering them dependent on US-dominated financial institutions, and bringing Russia under American dependency.

A pivotal principle of American hegemony is to obstruct and destroy friendly, normal ties, much less integration, between Russia and Europe, Germany being the fulcrum.

More simply, the strategic US/CIA goal is to ensnare Russia in a protracted war, deplete it, damage it, regime-change it, install a supine leader—all as a prelude to the big fantasy: bringing down China.

The multifaceted war on Russia has been ongoing since at least the late 1990s, but really, it never stopped with the Soviet state’s disappearance. This veiled hostility and aggression certainly existed when Boris Yeltsin was in power (a good vassal according to Washington, this silly and funny man that made Bill Clinton laugh) but took off around 2005, after Washington understood that Vladimir Putin was putting Russia on an independent course, reversing the conditions overseen under the preceding, deplorable Yeltsin era, including steep economic, social, military, and developmental decline and the immiseration of the vast majority of the population, looting oligarchs, and economic “liberalization” designed in Washington. [...]

Russia has literally allowed itself to be cornered since 2014, though it needed time to achieve a conventional and nuclear deterrent. It’s not hard to see reality: Russia is given no quarter, no voice, its real concerns and grievances dismissed, its leader demonized, its marginalization doggedly pursued at every level of international and bilateral social and cultural interactions. No appeal to reason, to international law, to security, to evidence will do for the West, no amount of patient legal argument, explanation of Russian concerns, appeals, professional warnings, consummate diplomacy and transparency of Russian interests made an impression. Instead, the Western response was and is always to double down. [...]

Finance capitalism, the system of speculative bubbles, derivatives, debt, declining standards of living, and hyperinflation, is ruining Western economies, states and societies, destroying the middle classes. The US cannot tolerate Eurasian integration and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, determined to stop any alternative development model to hyper-capitalism enriching the few, cannibalizing the many; that reduces the US to one of a handful of important multipolar players.

Washington’s grave mismanagement of international relations, its self-defeating policies, has actually weakened genuine American interests and national security and the well-being and safety of the American people, a phenomenon that cannot be naively attributed to Democrats or Republicans, this or that president. Instead, the war-state is deeply embedded in the American political economy, in factions such as the “intelligence community,” the military-industrial complex, influential establishment neo-cons, and liberal interventionists, all living in a world of yesterday.

We are rushing headlong into extremely dangerous times in which facts are a threat to the state narrative and any dissent or differing opinion is treachery. Fascism does not come from below, always from the top.