“Ukraine – Russia”

“I think that I acted properly,” said Irina Gen, a 45-year-old English teacher from Penza, a Volga region city of about half a million people. “I don’t regret it. The only problem is that I didn’t manage to reach the minds of our students.”

Gen is under criminal prosecution for discussing Russia’s war in Ukraine with a group of eighth-graders on March 18. One of the students recorded the conversation and released it publicly, prompting prosecutors to file criminal charges that she disseminated “demonstrably false information about the armed forces of the Russian Federation.”

Specifically, Gen was charged for mentioning Russia’s March 9 air strike on a maternity hospital in the Azov Sea port of Mariupol — an incident that Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who questioned her claimed, without evidence, was “fake.”

A phone camera pans slowly across the portraits of 55 men, each wearing the dress uniform of Russia’s elite airborne units. Small candles have been placed by the photographs of the men, as have sky blue berets and the blue-and-white striped undershirts worn by the paratrooper units who led Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The video of the memorial for the soldiers of the 247th Guards Air Assault Regiment is unverified – it was first published by Russia’s iStories news outlet, which said it was submitted by a reader.

But the footage adds weight to a growing consensus that the numbers of Russian casualties – especially among elite units such as the Russian airborne – are far higher than officials have so far admitted.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world has come to the realization that it cannot rely on an autocratic regime for its supply of oil and gas. The European Union, and in particular Germany, now understands that a significant reliance on Russian oil and gas is unacceptable. With such exposure, the EU has found itself in the position of either being forced to make economically damaging reductions in these imports, or in effect continuing to finance Vladimir Putin’s brutal aggression against the people of Ukraine.

ATHENS, April 7 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s address to the Greek parliament on Thursday caused an outrage from opposition parties after a man who identified himself as an ethnic Greek member of Ukraine’s ultranationalist Azov battalion appeared on a video.

Zelenskiy spoke about the destruction of the Russian-besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol – home to thousands of ethnic Greeks – and appealed to Athens for help.

Dozens of people have died after rockets struck a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk that was being used to evacuate civilians to safer parts of the country, Ukrainian authorities have said.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region, said at least 39 people were killed and 87 wounded, many of them seriously, updating an earlier estimate of 30 dead.

Reporters at the scene saw at least 20 bodies grouped and lying under plastic sheets next to the station. Blood was pooling on the ground and packed bags were strewn outside the building.

A video has emerged which purports to show Ukrainian forces shooting and killing a captive Russian soldier.

It was filmed on a road to the west of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where Russian forces have been retreating.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Thursday that he was aware of the video and it would “definitely be investigated”.

The death, destruction, and displacement resulting from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine are gruesome enough to evoke a question that deserves to be asked: Could this have been avoided?

The navel-gazing, second-guessing, and blame peddling of recent weeks have centered on the late 1990s expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact states, and the alliance’s 2008 Bucharest “open door” declaration acknowledging Georgia and Ukraine’s aspirations to join it in the future. Vladimir Putin’s response? By late summer 2008, Russia had occupied disputed territories with Georgia, and in 2014 it infiltrated and seized Crimea from Ukraine. Now he has taken Ukraine’s ethnic Russian-populated Donbas region and a land bridge to Crimea along the Black Sea.

Even a truncated Russian Federation has four times the pre-war population of Ukraine. It enjoys well over 10 times the Ukrainian gross domestic product. Russia covers almost 30 times Ukraine’s area.

And how does Ukraine expel Russian troops from its borders when its Western allies must put particular restrictions on their life-giving military and financial aid?

#Ukraine: Footage from #Mariupol showing a Ukrainian BTR-4E APC attacking two Russian T-72 tanks from the rear with a 30mm cannon. Apparently, both tanks received serious damage. pic.twitter.com/7ecGv5AwkK

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 7, 2022

“It gave us all goosebumps” says Sebastian Zwiebel, as he describes the moment his team shut down Hydra, the world’s largest darknet marketplace.

The website was a bastion of cyber-crime, surviving for more than six years selling drugs and illegal goods.

But, after a tip-off, German police seized the site’s servers and confiscated €23m (£16.7m) in Bitcoin.

“We’ve been working on this for months and when it finally happened it felt big – really big,” adds Mr Zwiebel.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, has acquired gruesome new insights into the atrocities committed by Russian military forces. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the BND has new satellite images and has intercepted incriminating radio traffic from Russian military personnel in the region north of Kyiv, where Bucha is located. Some of the intercepted radio traffic could be linked to dead bodies that have been photographed in Bucha.

… The BND material also apparently provides evidence that members of the Russian mercenary unit called the Wagner Group played a leading role in the atrocities. The group is known to have perpetrated similar atrocities in Syria.

Eyewitnesses recently reported that the occupying force in Bucha was initially made up of “young soldiers.” Once they were replaced by other units, the witnesses said, the attacks on civilians grew more frequent. Some eyewitnesses have said that Chechen units were in the town. The accounts raise the question as to whether this progression was part of the occupation plan.

Wagner Group & Chechen Muslims. That’s some combo.

Russia has been suspended from the United Nations’s human rights council after its invasion of Ukraine provoked revulsion and outrage around the world.

At a meeting of the UN general assembly on Thursday, 93 members voted in favour of Russia’s suspension, while 24 were against and 58 abstained.

This met the required threshold of a two-thirds majority of the assembly members that vote yes or no, with abstentions not counting in the calculation.

Good propaganda.

Powerful war comms from Ukraine – what’s the price of Russian energy? pic.twitter.com/MvC0pWNJwO

— Bojan Pancevski (@bopanc) April 7, 2022

OTTAWA — The RCMP is launching a national investigation into allegations of war crimes in Ukraine, the Star has learned.

Beginning this week, the RCMP will begin seeking information from Ukrainians arriving in Canada who may have experienced or witnessed war crimes or crimes against humanity since Russia invaded in February, but also as far back as Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.

The investigation is being launched in the wake of reports of hundreds of what appear to be civilians being indiscriminately killed in the city of Bucha over the weekend.

On top of global revulsion, the videos and stories emerging from the town have sparked global calls for tougher sanctions on Russia, the end of diplomatic relations, and potentially Russia’s removal from the UN’s most senior human rights body, all as Russia vehemently denies it is targeting civilians.

HMA

‘It’s Fake,’ ‘It’s Horrible’: Mixed Reaction In Russia To Alleged War Crimes In Bucha