Ukraine Invasion: Part 25

[MagicFox]

Hi all, another thread for supporting and sharing

I am sobbing over this. How can the world sit by and watch this?

Surely we can't? What kind of message does that send, that we will ignore war crimes being publicly planned? Makes any trials look like a joke.

We don't know what's going to happen yet.

Putin's messages recently have been a lot more subdued. He might make sure that they live - so so many of the great and famous have been working on their behalf.

Given the amount of utter shit that comes out of the Russian Duma's mouths ... we can't believe a word they say, so let's wait.

I just heard that on the news, that they are calling for the execution of the Azov fighters.
It's a bloody good job I'm not in charge of anything because I'd be bombing the Kremlin now. And I'm some kind of half-assed Buddhist.

I hate Putin with a deep passion. So much repair and healing is going to be needed. My only hope is that he's going so far that it'll be the end of his system soon, someone will take him out, something will happen to him, and then the rest of them will surrender and admit to it all being a horrible mistake driven by him.

Good advice.

Kevin Rothrock thread (continued frim RTB's first tweet)

twitter.com/KevinRothrock/status/1526536926370664448?t=R1YzILF7H0d51hwpk67Uug&s=19

The future looks grim for the Azov members among the 265 Azovstal factory POWs who surrendered in Mariupol yesterday. Three State Duma deputies, including Volodin & Slutsky, have said returning them to Ukraine is unfathomable. Slutsky wants them executed.

Vyacheslav Volodin is the speaker of the State Duma. Leonid Slutsky chairs the Duma’s International Affairs Committee. A third deputy, Anatoly Wasserman, says any prisoners with “fascist tattoos” shouldn’t be returned to Kyiv in any POW exchange.

Slutsky’s proposal would require an exception to Russia’s moratorium on capital punishment.

(Reviving the death penalty is an idea that’s reappeared frequently since the February invasion. It’s assumed that its application, if reinstated, would eventually/quickly be turned back on Russians themselves who protest/oppose the war.)

Given how fully committed Russia has been to treating Azov like a full-blown Nazi battalion (the group’s emblem and ideology don’t do it many favors here), it is hard to imagine Moscow ever releasing identifiable Azov combatants.

Finnish parliament has voted and approved NATO application 188 votes to 8!
yle.fi/news/3-12449487

Slutsky’s proposal would require an exception to Russia’s moratorium on capital punishment.

Surely that still wouldn't make it legal to kill POW though right?

Do we know the make up of the 265 POWs yet? Are they all injured and are there still defenders in the plant?

If the Russians execute the Azov fighters after agreeing to a prisoner exchange they are putting themselves on a dangerous footing.
They won't be trusted in the future so there will be no more prisoner exchanges, they will be fighting to the end.
I hope Ukraine gets all help needed to kick the bastards out and back to Moscow if those fighters are not returned.

I wouldn't object to Moscow being reduced to rubble in that case.

Execution

I thought they'd sunk as low as they could but my god Russians are savages

heldinadream - I agree with every word you said.

The trouble is that an army that shoots its own wounded rather than evacuate them isn’t going to care much about getting its own prisoners back so they don’t have much motivation for an exchange.
Bastards.

(on a more trivial note is anyone else finding that every time they refresh the page it jumps them back to yesterday’s posts so they then have to scroll all the way to the top again? It has only started doing this today.)

@saliwales2022 he - Putin - seems to me to be the apotheosis of toxic masculinity for the whole planet. And Zelensky his nemesis.
This is deeply archetypal stuff going on. Jaw-dropping. It has to go the right way.

Well put.
I am constantly brought up short by how his/Russia’s behaviour mirrors that of the small scale domestic abuser. And of course this is a country that is very soft on actual domestic violence.

From UkraineNOW

The Mariupol Garrison fulfilled their task, it was ordered to save their lives – General Headquarters.

🔺 The most important general task of Ukraine and all the world is to save lives of the Mariupol defenders. We will fight for you on all the fronts as devotedly as you are defending our country!

🔺 The defenders of Mariupol are the heroes of our time. They are in the history forever. These are the separate troop of special purpose “Azov”, the 12th brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine, the 36th separate brigade of the marines, the border guards, the police, the volunteers, the territory defense of Mariupol.

🔺 Holding positions on “Azovstal” they didn’t allow the enemy to transfer the divisions of up to 17 Battalion Tactical Groups (approximately 20,000 of personnel) to other directions.

🔺 Thus, they prevented the plan to occupy Zaporizhzhia quicky, to enter though the border of Donetsk and Zaropizhzhia regions and to surround the Joint Forces Operation divisions.

🔺 Blocking of the main forces of the enemy around Mariupol gave us possibility to prepare and create defensive lines where our military are situated and provide decent rebuff to the aggressor today.

---

Strategically this has to be their greatest achievement - keeping up to 17 BGs in Mariupol and the consequences of them not being free to join battle elsewhere.

There's an interview with an advisor to Zelensky on R4 World at One this lunchtime. He confirms that there are still fighters in the steelworks. It is a deeply depressing interview. Starts at 12.20 into the program.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0017cmb

Correct..but the attitude of at least some Russians to the handling of POWs isn’t new, really shouldn’t come as a surprise, and isn’t just down to Putin.

Apologies for a bit of a lesson from history but post the battle of Stalingrad the German 6th Army surrendered to the Russians en-masse…not many were executed but they were mostly left to starve of freeze to death

” Of the 91,000 men who surrendered, only some 5,000–6,000 ever returned to their homelands (the last of them a full decade after the end of the war in 1945); the rest died in Soviet prison and labour camps.”

www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Stalingrad

re Putin as being like a domestic abuser or bully, that's particularly the case when talking about the other Baltic countries.

If they try to arrange help to protect or defend themselves in the situation of being attacked / invaded, that is seen as a provocation giving him no choice but to threaten them with nuclear weapons.

Wakey will you or someone be able to summarise the gist? I cannot get in.

From UkraineNOW:

‼️The operation to rescue the Ukrainian military from "Azovstal" will continue until they return home.

Some Ukrainian defenders were evacuated from the Azovstal plant and are currently in the territory not controlled by Ukraine.

"The defenders of Mariupol are a number of units, they have fully completed their combat mission. Thanks to them, the enemy was incapable of moving of about 20 thousand personnel to the territory of Ukraine. By this, we managed to prevent the encirclement of the troops of the Armed Forces of Ukraine," - said Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar.

Hanna Malyar also stated that the allegations of the Russian State Duma that the fighters of the "Azov" Regiment are not subject to exchange are designed for internal propaganda and domestic political processes in the Russian Federation.

The Ukrainian government assures that the negotiation process is ongoing, and the rescue operation is ongoing.

(My bolding)

We don't know what's going to happen to them. But remember just how much hot air comes out the Duma's, Lavrov's and Putin's mouth. Wait and see before panicking.

DEVIATION:
MNHQ has solved my bolding problems and I can now see the thread properly again.
They have also issued a new App for those using IOS www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/4551139-formatting-issues-on-ios-app-important-message-from-mnhq

Deviation over. As you were.

I can’t find the comments anymore but on some tweet sites showing Russian State TV enraged by Ukraine winning the Eurovision Song Contest, I saw there were comments saying the Kalush Orchestra ‘Stefania’ lyrics are Nazi and that one of the group waving to the audience at the end was making a Nazi salute - that’s how far the obsessive projection of their own demented fascist minds go. Imagine finding nazism in those words!

What they are accusing Ukrainians of is actually a figment of their own fascist minds.

Android is still pretty useless. Links don't work. Can't copy and paste. Threads like this with lots of useful links are pretty unreadable.