

Stephen Koch: Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West
Bill Browder: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
Peter Pomerantsev: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
Edward Lucas: The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West
David Satter: It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past
Elif Batuman: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
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Posted at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Explanatory Statement - with identifying information blocked by the author in Ukraine's colours.
The detention in the metro of Asya Kazantseva, a Russian science journalist and author, as she was trying to get home, has been covered by the media, but she posted her own story on Facebook as there has been some mis-reporting.
The operative point is that facial recognition technology was used to make the detention of dozens of Russians. Kazantseva was not anywhere near a demonstration and was on her way home, although as she notes, she had been detained in the past.
Translation
A flood of insane sensations have been spreading through the news, taking on distortions along the way!
I was detained in the metro, after being recognized by the cameras; the metro police themselves couldn't explain the reason; then the police at the station explained that it was because I had gone into the metro on Russia Day, and accordingly, the point of the detention was so that I didn't go to the center of Moscow and didn't stage any anti-war protest. Since I was headed in a direction away from the center, and not the opposite, and it was already evening, I was held for a relatively short time (I was detained at 19:00 and was already released at 21:30). I was treated politely and with some embarrassment; I was released without a record of a misdemeanor, since none had taken place, but I did have to write an explanatory note.
Here is the explanatory note:
"On 12.06.22 at approximately 19:00 I was at the Fili Metro Station, waiting for the train, so as to go home, but police officers came up to me and asked me to follow them to the office. After a little while, police officers came and took me to the Filyovsky Park Police Precinct in Moscow. The reasons for being taken to the precinct are not known to me. I had not committed any illegal actions. I would also like to add that I am pregnant and the detention caused me stress, which is harmful for the baby, according to modern data in the science of neurobiology, a subject in which I am an expert with a degree. In addition I would like to explain that I was not headed in the direction of the center of Moscow. A prophylactic conversation was conducted with me about how people who have administrative detentions in their pasts ought not to go in the metro on Russia Day. This is a true copy of my statement."
Kazantseva added on her Instagram account:
Today Nikolai and I celebrate the 10th anniversary of our meeting.
This is how we spent our romantic evening: Nikolai snapped a photo of how the police escorted me to the toilet.
The thing is, today is Russia Day, and as it was explained to me by the keepers of the peace at the precinct, on this day, if someone is undesirable, they must not go in the metro. Such a person is preventatively detained so that they do not express their civic position.
Honestly, I had not in fact planned that today, but now that it has come to this, I will state that the war with Ukraine is criminal, and destructive even for Russia as well, and should be immediately halted.
There were 9,323 likes on this post, and many messages of encouragement, but also some nasty swipes at her personal life -- an example of what women who take public positions endure online, particularly in Russia.
Posted at 02:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
READ the closing statement of Alla Gutnikova, one of the editors of the Moscow student journal DOXA, who are all facing prison sentences for "inciting minors to take part in illegal opposition protests”. But the speech is about so much more. (The translation was adapted from that of Michelle Panchuk.) Listen to Alla’s original here: https://doxajournal.ru/lastword-alla
“I am not going to speak of the case, the search, the interrogations, the volumes, the trials. That is boring and pointless. These days I attend the school of fatigue and frustration. But before my arrest, I had time to enroll in the school of learning how to speak about truly important things.
I would like to talk about philosophy and literature. About Benjamin, Derrida, Kafka, Arendt, Sontag, Barthes, Foucault, Agamben, about Audre Lorde and bell hooks. About Timofeeva, Tlostanova and Rachmaninova.
I would like to speak about poetry, about how to read contemporary poetry. About Gronas, Dashevsky and Borodin.
But now is not the time nor the place. I will hide my small tender words on the tip of my tongue, in the back of my throat, between my stomach and my heart. I will say just a little.
I often feel like a little fish, a birdling, a schoolgirl, a baby. But recently, I discovered with surprise that Brodsky, too, was put on trial at 23. And, since I have also been counted among the human race, I will say this:
n the Kabbala there is the concept of tikkun olam - repairing the world. I see that the world is imperfect. I believe, as wrote Yehuda Amichai, that the world was created beautiful for goodness and for peace, like a bench in a courtyard (in a courtyard, not a court!). I believe that the world was created for tenderness, hope, love, solidarity, passion, joy.
But the world is atrociously, unbearably full of violence. And I don’t want violence. In any form. No teacher’s hands in schoolgirls’ underwear, no drunken father’s fists on the bodies of wives and children. If I decided to list all the violence around us, a day wouldn’t be enough, nor a week, nor a year. My eyes are wide open. I see violence, and I don’t want violence. The more violence there is, the stronger I don’t want it. And more than anything, I don’t want the biggest and the most frightening violence.
I really love reading. I will now speak with the voices of others.
At school, in history class, I learned the phrases “You crucify freedom, but the soul of man knows no bounds” and “For your, and for our, freedom”.
In high school, I read “Requiem” by Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, “The Steep Path” by Evgeniya Solomonovna Ginzburg, “The Closed Theater” by Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava, “The Children of Arbat” by Anatoliy Naumovich Rybakov. Of Okudzhava’s poems I loved most of all:
Conscience, honor and dignity,
There’s our spiritual army.
\
Posted at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
An important new Buryat anti-war movement has begun that deserves attention.
Free Russia reports, with relevant background:
Since the Donbas war, ethnic Buryats from Siberia have been dubbed as the “Putin’s Buryat warriors.” It all began with the Donbas war, where the Kremlin, advancing its Novorossiya project sent Russian armed forces posing as local Donetsk separatists. And while a soldier from Pskov was visually difficult to discern from a Donetsk miner, Buryats with their clearly Asian appearance, really stood out from the local population. This is when these Buryats were humorously called the Donbass Indians.
In Spring 2015, a 20-year-old Buryat tank crew member Dorzhi Batomunkuev, who had been severely burnt in combat in Logvinovo, gave an interview to the Russian Novaya Gazeta newspaper, in which he characterized Russian President Vladimir Putin as an insidious man who asserts to the entire world that “our military is not there,” and in reality, is pulling a fast one on the sly. Dorzhi confirmed that there are, in fact, Russian soldiers in the Donbas.
In Summer 2015, a Kremlin-backed project “The Net” released a video on behalf of “Putin’s Buryat warriors,” featuring several young men and women who attempted to contest reports in the media that Buryat soldiers participate in the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The crude video address is perhaps most memorable with its assertion that “the Ukrainian economy is free falling into the European pubic area of Concita Wurst,”—amplifying the Kremlin’s narratives tying European values to its supposed moral decay as manifested in acceptance of LGBTQ+ communities.
Members of the Kyiv Buryat community published a civilized counter, but lacking the hype, it did not go viral.
Then:
Buryats who are not thrilled with being appropriated as “the Russian World” mascots, launched a campaign, releasing a new video each week, featuring Buryats who demand for the war to stop.
Due to the absurd new Russian laws, according to which even uttering “No to War” is interpreted as “discrediting the activities of the Russian military”— a transgression that comes with a real and lengthy prison sentence, the videos mainly feature Buryats who live outside of Russia.
Dozens of Buryats have already recorded videos, including Buryats born or living in Ukraine. The campaign’s authors have collected enough materials for a series of videos.
At this point, Buryats are the only ethnic minority of Russia who has initiated this type of campaign.
Read the full piece here.
The Interpreter reported on the pro-Moscow Buryats fighting with the DNR and LNR, one of whom, Dorzhi Batomunkuev, was severely burned in a tank battle at Debaltsevo, and another who raised the LNR flag after the Russian victory at Debaltsevo. It's vital to see there are also anti-war Buryats.
"Local coal miner and tractor driver raise the Novorossiya flag over Debaltsevo" https://t.co/1hNz1czsoI @SputnikATO pic.twitter.com/FiGitIlQCy
— The Interpreter (@Interpreter_Mag) February 18, 2015
A Buryat editor who reported critically on a variety of topics, including the war in Ukraine, was beaten and hospitalized.
Posted at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
An essay by Elena Sannikova posted on Facebook today which I hope to translate.
You can watch Chekist in full here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ksEVb2Vhcw
Posted at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 06:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 07:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
I had meant to publish this before but set it aside when so many people discouraged me, but now that Konstantin Rykov is being discussed again for his Facebook "revelations," I'll put this out there.
There's this thread:https://www.facebook.com/konstantin.rykov/posts/10210621124674610
(THREAD) This is the most stunning revelation in the Trump/Russia investigation yet. My brother Brian @krassenstein predicted something like this was coming very soon, just days ago & here it is! Konstantin Rykov who is known as a Kremlin Propagandist with close ties to Putin (1)
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) November 25, 2017
FWIW, I don't think it's the most stunning revelation, but a problem with all the Trump/Russia stuff is that there are such masses of stuff that it is hard to get the whole picture. Of course, I trust Mueller to get this whole picture more than I do Twitter sleuths. We'll see.
These notes are from November 2, 2016. I showed this to three different techies, they all dismissed it with varying degrees of scorn as such people always do. This was done in the course of researching this four-part series of articles in which we went through all of Trump's Russia connections -- and we were hardly the only journalists to do this. The story of his connection to the Agalarovs, although some are just discovering this on Twitter now, has been known for years.
BEGIN
Look up Trump2016.ru to see what it's IP address is in numerical terms.
So here:
2. That gives you 87.242.78.131
So look up 87.242.78.131 to see what else it might host.
3. Go here:
Then plug in 87.242.78.131
And you get this:
IP Address |
87.242.78.131 |
IP Reverse |
- |
Websites |
We found 2 websites attached to this IP address.
|
So if Rykov.ru has 87.242.78.131 AND Trump2016.ru turns out ALSO to be hosted on 87.242.78.131, they are likely related.
Why? Because he's likely to use the same hosting company.
To be sure, if there were 10 or 100 things on that same server, all kinds of shopping sites and such, you could say, oh, that may only be a coincidence since all of those sites are using the same service to mask their identities.
Except read what Hosting Compass says -- rykov.ru and rykov.media are ATTACHED to 87.242.78.131 -- exactly.
The dozen shopping sites are only in the RANGE close to that number.
So let's say Rykov has gone to the trouble to contract a web host. According to this site, he could create sub-domains on his main domain. Whether or not it's a good practice it's still something he could do.
In any event, the question to ask is whether it is possible for 87.242.78.131, the Trump site, to also be the same IP address for other completely unrelated sites.
And given that Hosting Compass tells us no, it's only two Rykov sites, that suggests they are related.
Yes, I totally realize that one server could host multiple things. For example, in Second Life, where I rent servers, this is a big annoyance. They have dynamically rotating servers. So you never know if some days you are sharing a server, say, with a furry club, with a shoutcast stream and 40 avatars lagging the server then. There were even some nerds who published this information about your "secret sharers" so that you could complain to the company if you got stuck with a club.
But in this case, if Hosting Compass repeatedly shows only 2 other sites attached to that address that we know to be the Trump2016 address, it seems likely it's Rykov.
The other site has a trail like that as well, only a bit more complicated, leading to NOD.
Posted at 04:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Babchenko's photo on a memorial board of slain journalists before his "resurrection" is known. Photo by CNN.
By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Before I critique this statement from the Community to Protect journalists “asking the hard questions” about the SBU sting and “resurrection” of journalist Arkady Babchenko, let me make two genuflections, without which one gets endlessly trolled.
Number one, Nina Ognianova, head of the CPJ Europe desk, is a long-time colleague in this field. She came after me (I worked at CPJ from 1996-1997) and I have interacted with her for years. She is a dedicated, smart, innovative professional in this NGO. Interestingly, she's also going to be leaving CPJ soon to go over the National Endowment for Democracy -- to which I can only say good! Because you can only stay in the grim business of documenting endless violations of press freedom -- especially the murder of journalists -- for so long. I worked on 200 cases when I was at CPJ, and I estimate that only 20% had a successful outcome, in which my intervention had some part. It's a futile and frustrating business. Critiquing this statement isn't a slam on Nina at all. What she's authored here is part of a corporate mindset in general in the human rights NGO business, and likely other hands worked this text or at least approved it. She may ardently believe it -- most people who stay working in these groups do. But it's more than fine to challenge it without undermining the good work Nina has done and will do. In the NGO world, there is what is known as “the 11th commandment” – “Thou shalt never criticize another NGO.” I worked in these NGOs for most of my adult life and still work in some of them, and I fail to endorse “the 11th commandment.” These groups need to get way more criticism than they do because they do not have internal processes for debate in often what are rigidly board-controlled or executive-director controlled mandates and policies.
Number two, when you criticize what an NGO like CPJ says, you challenge the "halo effect" and a common response especially on the left is to accuse you of "telling them to shut up" or "advocating that they not do their jobs" or "denying their right to free speech". This is, of course, a totally bogus line, but you'd be surprised how often people who should know better use it as "defense". Yes, CPJ gets to have First Amendment protections; yes, they get to "do their job"; and yes, they get to "hold feet to the fire" and all the rest. But who will watch the watchers? I get to have my free speech and challenge them, too. Such people confuse the *criticism* of an individual or organization as somehow a *demand to shut them up*. This is intellectually dishonest and I call it out in advance.
CPJ's stance on the case of Pavel Sheremet and other issues in Ukraine has tended toward what the pack of NGOs and journalists around the war in Ukraine and domestic issues in Ukraine espouse: that the Poroshenko Administration is corrupt and soft on corruption; that they don't do enough or even cover up attacks on journalists and don't solve murders; that they are even in collusion on this issue with the murders. I reject this take on Ukraine, which I also have followed very closely. I’m not uncritical of Ukraine, as the Ukrainians in the diaspora in particular know as they often harass me, just as much as Kremlin trolls. No matter. I know which side I’m on here, a luxury NGOs don’t feel they have, but one in which they indulge in and inevitably end up taking the wrong side as a result of the fiction of impartiality – also still so common to the press.
Illegitimate Demand for Radical Transparency
When CPJ says there were "no names" given, and makes other points about how the Ukrainian law-enforcers are not forthcoming, there is a very important counterpoint: why should law-enforcers who have JUST opened up a very high-profile and sensitive case tell YOU everything they have? This is the main point to make about so many human rights "interventions". There is no sense of limit or proportion EVER. There is always (especially with figures like Julian Assange, about whom too many journalists are uncritical) this demand for MAXIMUM transparency. PS -- names were given at the outside -- and now people are picking apart the "list of 30" or the "list of 47". No matter. Police and intelligence in a liberal democracy (that would not be Russia but it is what Ukraine aspires to be) get to have secrecy, lack of publicity, and even slowness in their work. The age of Snowden and social media forget this.
And that's just crazy. Police cannot do their jobs with a bunch of reporters and NGOs on their backs questioning their every move, not because they are devious and corrupt, but because they have to check leads, find facts, vet facts, try hypotheses, and this very important work cannot be done in a fishbowl. I shouldn't have to explain this. But every time I do. Your lack of confidence in the SBU; your hatred, even, of the Ukrainian government isn't entirely merited and wouldn't justify second-guessing Babchenko in any event.
From Defense to Prosecution
There is a deeper problem here, and that is the way in which in the last 20 years, the human rights movement, which began in the 1970s as documenters and defenders, have switched to investigators and prosecutors. This is not their job, they don't have training for it often, and more to the point, they often have no real-life experience that would enable them to perform their prosecutorial roles with skill and sensitivity.
(No, Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, clerking for Rudy Giuliani in his youth doesn’t bestow those skills on him. How do we know this is true that Ken Roth worked for Giuliani, respected after 9/11 but now much maligned? Wikipedia will tell you that in 1987, Ken worked for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. But who was that US Attorney in 1987? It was Rudi Giuliani, something that Ken used to tell us when I worked at Human Rights Watch (for 10 years), and it's not a secret).
The NGO involvement in the formation of the International Criminal Court – Ken was among the most ardent campaigners – has caused this shift and enormous amount of hubris: NGOs now feel they are helpers and accessories to the ICC and other international justice courts; they feel no sense of endangerment of their mission or more importantly, their clients in doing this (although they should, given such awful developments as the expulsion of all the relief NGOs from Sudan for a time over this allegation – which in fact was true, as several humanitarian NGOs *did* supply information to the ICC.)
NGOs today feel no need to have any separation of powers, if you will. This is a longer and more intricate discussion which I won't bore you with now, but it's crucial to understanding the emotional stance of constant exasperation, and the constant mission-creep and overreach of NGOs in our time -- they think they are the world's litigators and even prosecutors, and they are not particularly good at this job.
I have only to think of the recent AWFUL debacle of the coalition of NGOs who attempted to take Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash to court. It doesn't take any persuasion to understand why that job might be necessary, but you do have to make the case and find the facts. Coalitions can be unwieldy and quality control can be poor. One of the members of the coalition did research that was faulty; it was presented in the court, and easily refuted by Firtash's lawyers, and the judge dismissed the case. The moral of the story isn't that NGOs should become better prosecutors; the moral is that they should not get out of their league and attempt cases like this that verge away from human right into crime and corruption (not unrelated, but different fields both in content and methodology). They should stop undermining the criminal justice system in the US and in fledgling democracies like Ukraine – which they do not only with legitimate human rights criticism without context but their support of felonious hackers like Manning, Assange, and Snowden. Criminal justice systems work best in liberal democracies where they are elected or appointed by the people, and kept honest not only by the courts and Congress but the judicial system itself. Those conditions don't pertain in NGOs. It's ok to be undemocratic, unelected, unappointed, self-appointed and even secretive in a defense mission; in a prosecutorial mission where you deprive others of rights it is not.
By osmosis in this climate among NGOs, free press groups have become prosecutors as well. And even the nominal defense mission and "corporate solidarity" mission that CPJ rightfully has segues easily into the role of public scold. CPJ feels with great self-importance and sense of righteousness that they have "a right to know" answers to questions about prosecutions -- and they do as any civic group that has a right to form and press governments anywhere does. But we have the right also to challenge them because they begin to needlessly undermine liberal democracy itself, at home and abroad. CPJ's own defense of Snowden and their blundering off into the world of hacker ideology is part of what undermines their case now.
So to the specifics:
To be sure, figures like the dramatic Anton Gerashchenko (who is still important and worth listening to) have somewhat devalued the concept of assassination attempts by repeatedly referring to them, and referring to their resolution, with scant facts. But see point one. Law-enforcers (he is an MP and adviser to the police) aren't required to tell you everything they know to do their work; indeed, they must have protection of privacy, if you will, and classified information to succeed against overwhelmingly more powerful enemies -- the same enemies of journalists.
Case of Pavel Sheremet
Why the hate of the SBU? If the answer is "because they did nothing on Sheremet" I would beg to disagree strenuously (and that should also be a separate post). The fact is, the journalistic corps made allegations about Ukrainian government or para-military involvement in Sheremet's murder that didn't hold up to scrutiny even by desk researchers like me, and which was refuted with facts by the SBU and National Police.
They claimed an SBU agent who showed up in the story was somehow tethered to the right-wing or pro-Kiev forces in the country, when in fact he was more likely tethered to the pro-Moscow forces, and in any event was no longer working for the SBU. The case of a rogue Ukrainian agent allied with Poroshenko just didn't wash. It's like the allegation that this bodyguard found in the area, who was supposedly related to right-wing groups was somehow indication of government involvement in Sheremet's death -- when he had an alibi (he was there to guard somebody else in that area) that really couldn't be refuted. It's always been strange to me that the journalists so agitated to find "the hand of Kiev" in Sheremet's murder think this is about free-thinking and open-mindedness and going against the tide, when the real free-thinking would be if these moral equivocators could for a second entertain that the Kremlin is most likely to have the means and motive for Sheremet's killing, not Poroshenko -- who Sheremet covered generally positively and was about to cover again -- or the Right Sector and related groups -- which Sheremet also covered, even with some implied criticism, for which these groups were actually grateful as their concerns were aired. The troubling thing here is that now OCCPR has been given an award for doing a film with these allegations, it will be impossible for them to climb down from them or for anyone else to criticize them without being accused of either collusion with Moscow or infidelity to press freedom.
Why Doesn’t the NGO Adversarial Role Include Questioning of Moscow’s Role?
Nina/CPJ then tell you their bottom line on this:
At the same time, this extreme action by the Ukrainian authorities has the potential to undermine public trust in journalists and to mute outrage when they are killed. CPJ takes a dim view of law enforcement impersonating the media, but the parallels in this case are not yet fully known.
What is known is that the Ukrainian government has damaged its own credibility. And given the SBU is an intelligence agency, which engages in deception, obfuscation, and propaganda, determining the truth will be very difficult.
Every bit of this needs a pushback. It's hard to accept that law-enforcement making a deceptive statement to the media is "impersonating the media." This may in fact be a garble in this statement. No "impersonation" has taken place, i.e. planted SBU operatives posing as reporters. Instead, a story has been planted that seemed credible and was later revealed -- within 24 hours! -- by the SBU and prosecutors themselves -- to have been deceptive. Extreme dangers -- an invaded country, numerous acts of violence and terrorism, and murder of journalists -- requires such an extreme action. They aren't stupid and no doubt weighed the pros and cons and argued among themselves. Can CPJ accept that this is war? In UN human rights treaties, states cannot derogate from their obligations to protect human rights -- but when you cannot protect human rights as basic as life, why is this "hybrid" method more despicable than the murder itself? Journalists should have chuckled at the wily SBU, and reminded themselves to check statements and photos when claims of assassinations are made (which is routine in any event in every singe one of these cases); their indignant and shrill second-guessing and impugning of the victim are disgraceful.
Does CPJ get it that public trust in journalists is ALREADY tremendously eroded? This is why we have Trump. Look at this thread as I pointed out -- readers are outraged at the take that this professional Channel 4 journalist has on Babchenko's case and the sting. Perhaps readers have more common sense than elites are willing to concede. As for outrage, as with school killings, each new murder is what lessens outrage as it becomes numbing and routine. Blame the murderers for that, not the police trying to catch them.
The SBU hasn't damaged its credibility -- a credibility that the journalist corps didn't share even before all this, or even four years ago. The press corps is cynical and indignant as they always are; the Ukrainian government has been flat-footed and wrong on some issues (like Myrotvorets’ exposure of contact information). There are topics like the expulsion of Russian state journalists -- which in my view is warranted given their disinformation and incitement of imminent violence! -- which the press corps is never going to concede, as it is outside the "club rules". They're wrong. They and institutions like OSCE keep applying rigid ideological rules and solutions to situations that they have no other solutions for. They haven't cured disinformation as they have pointedly shied away from ostracizing any of their number who engages in it and refuse to make rules to live by for themselves or their profession in a public and binding self-government system (like "let's not show pictures of the war in Syria to make claims about Ukraine's military in the Donbass, shall we?) Free speech absolutism is demanded for Russian propagandists, but it is denied to their enemies, and allowed to trump freedom of association (as in the US) for the parliament which wishes to control Russian disinformation. Liberals hate the anti-communist laws and the anti-Russian journalist activities but they themselves have no solution for this enduring and deep problem -- when they don't even cover the war in Ukraine anymore, and if they do, it is from a biased anti-Kiev position.
Intelligence agencies in democratic societies, and even under liberal democratic governments constantly challenged by anti-government groups and the press -- which is natural and needed in such societies -- get to have programs to obfuscate and even deceive when they have to deal with far worse disinformers and liars. There is always the cliché about "not becoming like them". Except to not act and never to use these methods assure that there is no escape from being crushed by them, either. It's a balance. It is a balance Ukraine is still finding as a society. The nasty and even malicious approach to the Kiev government that so many NGOs and journalists bring to this topic is not in keeping with their supposed mission to uphold the values of democracy and human rights. Their hostility to Ukraine -- because it is accessible, because it responds, because they *can* -- is all out of proportion to their critique and challenge to Russia and its oligarchs -- which they avoid, and fail at doing dramatically in the rare cases they attempt it. That should tell us something.
The sad thing is that as the weeks go by, answers to these CPJ questions are going to be forthcoming regardless of whether CPJ asked them in any event, as the police and public in Ukraine have a vested interest in this. CPJ will unlikely come back and say, "Oh, you answered that, thanks." Instead, we will see another round of indignation and raising of the bar of hostility. It's never enough. If the SBU nailed their man and provided ample proof of his guilt and his ties to the FSB (as the Ukrainian government has done in cases such as the captured GRU agents), there will be endless second-guessing by many on the "mad" list as I've indicated.
"We are relieved that Arkady Babchenko is alive," said Nina Ognianova, CPJ's Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. "Ukrainian authorities must now disclose what necessitated the extreme measure of staging news of the Russian journalist's murder." Why? To do so could undermine this delicate mission. If you're not persuaded now that the extraordinary discovery of plans to murder a journalist was urgent enough reason for this "staging news" -- what will convince you? Likely NOTHING.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter. A hugely well-funded American group with aspirations of playing the role of unelected world prosecutor can't trump the democratically-elected government of a real country. And that's a good thing, at home as well as abroad.
Posted at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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