For those who didn’t read the whole article, this link was in it.
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You could also tweet them.
The Guardian has long had an idiosyncratic style guide. Given the well-earned-in-the-past nickname of Grauniad it is surprising they did not get the letters in the wring odour.
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Alexei Venediktov, former editor of the now closed Echo of Moscow.
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This is good and I may have missed it if it was posted earlier…
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This is barbaric - akin to ethnic cleansing. Not dissimilar to what China did to Tibetans and Uighurs - cleansing an identity and a culture.
From The Guardian liveblog
Ukraine says Russia has taken 400,000 civilians hostage
Ukraine has accused Moscow of forcibly taking hundreds of thousands of civilians from shattered Ukrainian cities to Russia, where some may be used as “hostages” to pressure Kyiv to give up, Associated Press reports:
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s ombudsperson, said 402,000 people, including 84,000 children, have been taken against their will.
The Kremlin gave nearly identical numbers for those who have been relocated, but it said they wanted to go to Russia. Ukraine’s rebel-controlled eastern regions are predominantly Russian-speaking, and many people there have supported close ties to Moscow.
Kyiv and Moscow gave conflicting accounts about the people being relocated to Russia and whether they were being moved willingly or were being coerced or lied to.
Russian Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev on Thursday said that the roughly 400,000 people evacuated to Russia since the start of the military action were from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Moscow separatists have been fighting for control for nearly eight years.
Russian authorities said they are providing accommodations and dispensing payments to the evacuees.
But Donetsk Region Gov Pavlo Kyrylenko said that “people are being forcibly moved into the territory of the aggressor state”. Denisova said those removed by Russian troops included a 92-year-old woman in Mariupol who was forced to go to Taganrog in southern Russia.
Ukrainian officials said that the Russians are taking people’s passports and moving them to “filtration camps” in Ukraine’s separatist-controlled east before sending them to various distant, economically depressed areas in Russia.
Among those taken, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry charged, were 6,000 residents of Mariupol, the devastated port city in the country’s east. Moscow’s troops are confiscating identity documents from an additional 15,000 people in a section of Mariupol under Russian control, the ministry said.
Some could be sent as far as the Pacific island of Sakhalin, Ukrainian intelligence said, and are being offered jobs on condition they don’t leave for two years. The ministry said the Russians intend to “use them as hostages and put more political pressure on Ukraine”.
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The Soviets, Stalin in particular, were rather fond of using this tactic to destroy cultures and communities that were felt to be anti-Soviet in some way.
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Operative term: “in occupied”
Hot damn.
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Putin. Such a Machiavellian mastermind! Such a genius!
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Hostages, human shields, slave labour. Nazi-level war crimes.
It’s quite possible that the younger children will be separated from their parents and “adopted” by loyal families to be brought up as good Russian patriots. With no documents, it may be impossible to reunite families. Where have I heard of that before?
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Do Russian soldiers carry dog tags or other means of identifying bodies?
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The dog tags only carry numbers.
“It’s very difficult to identify the dead because normally they don’t have documents with them, normally the commanders take their documents and put them in some boxes. Normally they die in this fire, in shelling. And you cannot identify the metal ‘dog tags,’ where their number is written, it gives us no information about the person,” Andrusiv said.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/23/europe/ukraine-war-russian-soldiers-deaths-cmd-intl/index.html
(previously posted by @knoxblox )
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It was reported that they were taken away by officers before they moved over the border.
ETA I see @GagHalfrunt has the quote. But I thought I’d read that tags were taken too.
FETA - Yep - Kyiv Independent report
None of the assault’s participants had any identification documents with them.
“They simply take the IDs away from them before the attack,” Ukrainian soldiers say.
“No service cards, no dog tags, nothing. We don’t get it – did their commanders believe they would fight harder if left to die nameless?”
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The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are being told that the war with Ukraine has to be over by 9 May 2022. [9 May – Victory Day – is culturally very significant in Russia and is celebrated every year with a military parade, which in recent years has become more and more imposing and grand.]
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Even Canada…
… and, sickeningly worse…
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Given the reported low morale of the Russian forces, Putin’s required end-date may, to some extent, have an effect opposite of what he requires.
PS: Is the AFRF now calling it a war, i.e., not a special operation?
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Ah, I wonder if that’s a logistical / seasonal issue, or does it have to do with the financial situation in Russia, or…
Oh FFS.
Many of us have been told by upper management that we have to hit a particular deadline because of a scheduled dog-and-pony show. It’s annoying at best. Can’t picture this lifting morale.
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