“Denazification”:
Russian independent media noted that the officer who apparently cut off the ear of the suspect was wearing patches that indicated his support for neo-Nazi groups and appeared to have contact with the far-right Rusich paramilitary group, which is active in Ukraine. The patches included a black sun and a symbol resembling the Totenkopf, or death’s head, worn by several Nazi divisions.
Putin did not name the Islamist terror group during his public statements on the attack, while directly accusing the “Ukrainian side” of involvement
its just…they going full blown bs, its…its just ridiculous beyond absurd, I…
On Sunday, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, disregarded the US intelligence reports that IS was behind the attacks. “I wish they could have solved the assassination of their own President Kennedy so quickly,” she wrote on Telegram. “But no, for more than 60 years they have not been able to find out who killed him after all. Or maybe that was Isis too?”
the fuck?!?
Hunter Biden makes a guest appearance too:
“Until the investigation into the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall is completed, any phrase from Washington exonerating Kyiv should be considered as evidence,” she added. “After all, the financing of terrorist activities of the Kyiv organised criminal group by the American liberal democrats and participation in the corrupt schemes of the Biden family have been going on for many years.”
Shades of the Bush Administration’s ”we must attack Iraq to avenge the Americans killed by Saudis working out of Afghanistan!” argument, yet somehow even more unhinged.
[Picnic (band) - Wikipedia]
[Piknik, a Longtime Russian Rock Band, is Now at the Center of a Tragedy - The New York Times (nytimes.com)]
ETA
Mr Jones’ first reaction it was Nato. Second reaction it was Ukrainians. Cohost blames Biden. Then nuclear war then not. Then muslims… Wet cement party.
We know that “war on terror” doesn’t make sense because you can’t fight a war against a tactic. But this attack in Russia offers a glimpse of how terrorism as a tactic can be neutralized through irrelevance. Everybody is so preoccupied constructing conspiratorial narratives that the reality of the bloodiest terrorist attack in decades by a new adversary basically fails to register. Looking at how things have developed so far, the overall response is probably going to be “we should just keep doing what we’ve already been doing”. And so the core goal of terrorism - to provoke some kind or response - fails.
We’ll see whether insulating the regime from reality will work as “well” for Russia as it did for the USSR.
I do kind of fear that the terrorists (ISIS not Putin) will get pissed off and escalate until Russia acknowledges that they are responsible.
See, trying to flee into Belarus at least makes some kind of sense. Fleeing to Ukraine through the ongoing warzone? Ridiculous.
From Timothy Snyder’s “Putin’s paranoia”:
The suspects were in a car near the west Russian city of Bryansk. This much seems to be true. The first version of the story was that they were headed for Belarus, which would make more sense, given the route. Anyone with local knowledge would make a still more telling point. Because of the special relationship between Russia and Belarus, the Russian-Belarusian border is porous. Once inside Belarus, it is relatively easy to pass into the European Union, because the Belarusian regime enables human smuggling into Lithuania and Poland. Four Tadjiks in a Renault would have been, in this sense, welcome in Belarus. They would have had a decent chance to pay a smuggler to get them into the Schengen zone and thereby escape.
I don’t know how Russia lauding torture is unthinkable when the US and Israel have for decades.
Why hold Russia to a higher standard than the world’s cop ™ and The Only Democracy in the Middle East ™?
Nobody thought that Russia was not torturing people, but openly celebrating torture and rewarding torturers was thought to be contrary to Russia’s political culture. The only “higher standard” here is the Russian government’s own standard of pretending not to practise torture.
As the saying goes, “this is not who were are”, meaning “this is who we are but we want to believe that we’re better than that”.
Human rights researchers said that it was no revelation that Russian security services employ torture against terror suspects. In 2017, after an IS bombing of a St Petersburg Metro station, Human Rights Watch found that one suspect during his detention was threatened with rape with a stick; two were given electric shocks to their genitals.
But those facts were uncovered via testimony to researchers, and not released as videos by the torturers themselves.
Real, actual war in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Yemen, Gaza and other places has killed a lot more people with a lot more social and infrastructure damage, than all the worldwide Islamist terror attacks of the 21st century combined.
Yes? Not sure how that relates to my post though.
