Nebenzia walked out, giving Russia’s seat to another diplomat. Russia’s deputy UN ambassador Dmitry Polyansky said later on Telegram’s Russian channel that Michel’s comments were “so rude” that the Russian ambassador left the security council chamber.
Some of Putin’s most enthusiastic supporters since the start of the war have been pan-Africanists – advocates of the doctrine of African unity and anti-imperialism.
Putin just “wants to get his country back,” Kémi Séba, a prominent Franco-Beninese pan-Africanist, said in early March. “He doesn’t have the blood of slavery and colonisation on his hands. He is not my messiah, but I prefer him to all the western presidents.”
Similarly, a leader of the Nigerian community in Moscow told the Guardian that most Nigerians there were sympathetic to Russia. “The issue is complicated, but the west pushed Russia to do this,” he said.
Thursday 9th June (I can’t post three times in succession.)
And today’s “unfortunately we must accept that Russia will keep the territory it has taken” thinkpiece.
I’m guessing that is supposed to put pressure on the international volunteers, but honestly that also looks like having a chance of backfiring spectacularly: as in “if russia doesn’t respect the geneva conventions, why should we?”
ETA: considering that Russia insists this a special operation, and not a war, they could suddenly find them that special operations are not covered by the geneva convention either.
The article says:
Russia is believed to be using the process in part to put pressure on the UK and may seek a prisoner exchange for Russian soldiers convicted of murder and other war crimes during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yeah, read the article; was going to post it as I saw no updates (then saw you edited your post with new ones 
). I still think is counterproductive: if the answer to russia doing war crimes is fabricating war crimes…
But well, Russia has been a lot into fabricating lies during this war so I guess is in line with all else.
As many predicted, this is going to be a long and bloody slog that will only end early if the kleptocrat who now openly fancies himself a latter-day Peter the Great dies.
We must continue to support Ukraine and we must not let this story fall out of the news cycle.
Didn’t Russia run out of fuel and tires in March? Or April? Or was it May?
I don’t think anybody argued that Russia would run out of fuel. They did have pretty obvious fuel logistics issues, which was probably one of the things that caused offensive on Kyiv to fail so badly.
We’ve been hearing about “two weeks left of fuel” for 100 days now.
If there’s one thing that the world’s biggest backwoods gas station doesn’t lack, it’s fuel. Their management of its distribution, on the other hand…
