Russia

Outside the town of Yalta, Crimea today, the Speaker of Russia's lower parliament calls for today's global powers to remember the lessons of Yalta. Really I have to ask: What could those be? Does anyone have any idea?

The rehabilitation of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin continues as the Russians don't waste any time in putting up a huge monument to reinforce their claim to a disputed land mass.

Today, Russians unveiled a 10-ton monument of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to mark the 70th Anniversary of their so-called "Big Three" summit from Feb. 4-11, 1945 in the town of Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula.

The 300,000 native Crimean Taters, who are Muslim and boycotted last year's referendum, have been against the installation of the sculpture because they were persecuted under Josef Stalin's rule--accused of collaborating with National Socialist Germany and deported to Central Asia. Many died of disease and starvation.

A pro-Putin rally in Moscow. Are we back to the Stalinist days?

Excerpted from http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/putins-luegen-glaubt-russlands-praesident-die-eigene-propaganda-a-1015309.html; in Russian, at https://openrussia.org/post/view/2370/

During his first and second terms as Russian president, Putin impressed many Western leaders with his knowledge of details and as “a difficult but all the same reliable partner in negotiations.” But those times are now “long past”

Since returning for his third term, Putin has made dishonesty and lies “practically a daily element of Russian policy,” employing “the big lie” as part of a conscious effort to define situations and “small lies” in speeches which raise the question: “Is he only poorly informed or does he believe his own propaganda?”

In the summer of 2012, Putin tried to convince German Chancellor Angela Merkel that protests against him in Moscow were “manifestations of ‘the sexually deformed’” and that those involved in the Pussy Riot actions were “anti-Semites,” statements so at variance with reality and so unnecessary that his German audience was shocked.

Above and below: Vladimir Putin speaks in front of a giant screen at Moscow's Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center during a ceremony to mark the 70th Anniversary of the takeover by the Red Army of the Auschwitz Complex facility where 7000 hospitalized inmates and a few hundred children remained with their caregivers.

Russian President Putin, bypassing the ceremonies in Poland on Tuesday, Jan. 27th, created his own Russian commemoration at the Moscow Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. 

Attended by Russia's Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar and the orthodox Hasidic male community, Putin said just what Israel wants to hear and decried in a speech what he called "attempts to rewrite history," which is more than ironic considering all the false "history" put out by the Soviet Union--the very "history" Putin stands by as the "truth."

Main points of his speech:

• Nazi Germany's crimes (including the holocaust) can be neither forgiven nor forgotten;

• "Any attempts to hush up these events, to distort, re-write history are unacceptable and immoral";

Are the Russians accusing Poland of "holocaust denial?"

Just a few days before the Jan. 27th commemoration billed as the 70th Anniversary of the liberation of the World War II Auschwitz-Birkenau internment camps in Poland, top Russian and Polish officials are trading angry charges over "who liberated Auschwitz."

It began over the Russian's complaint that President Putin was not invited in a way that properly honored his majesty's exalted position as representing the Soviet Union's glorious "Red Army Liberators." A Polish diplomat, in turn, said Putin made a decision not to attend, and anyway it was the Ukrainians who liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945.

It's very LOL, with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov  accusing Poland's Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna (pictured above right) of "sacrilege." Remember we're dealing with a religion here, so passions do flare as articles of faith are questioned or denied.

This is casting a pall over this year's ceremonies, which have been planned to be the biggest ever at the former camp. Read the full story [fourth item down] on this page at http://jan27.org.

I would think the high level in Canada is due to the large indigenous Amerindian population, but I don't have any data. The Islamic countries consume the least alcohol. Enlarge

New Year's Eve march to honour the 106th birthday of second world war revolutionary fighter Stepan Bandera, who Russian President Vladimir Putin has called " Hitler's accomplice”

Thousands of Ukrainian nationalists held a torchlight procession across Kiev on Thursday in honour of a 1940s anti-Soviet insurgent branded by Moscow as a Nazi collaborator whom Europe must reject.

The march on what would have been Stepan Bandera’s 106th birthday moved along the same streets on which hundreds of thousands rallied for three months last winter before ousting a Moscow-backed president.

Some wore second world war-era army uniforms while others draped themselves in the red and black nationalist flags and chanted “Ukraine belongs to Ukrainians” and “Bandera will return and restore order”.

“The Kremlin is afraid of Bandera because he symbolises the very idea of a completely independent Ukraine,” Lidia Ushiy said while holding up a portrait of the far-right icon at the head of the march.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin addresses the Federal Assembly, including State Duma deputies, members of the Federation Council, the heads of the Constitutional and Supreme courts, regional governors, heads of Russia's traditional religious faiths and public figures, at the Kremlin in Moscow, December 4, 2014. Vasily Maximov/AFP via Getty Images

In a major speech from the Kremlin today, Putin gave something of a "state-of-the-Union" report to members of the government and religious leaders that reveals Putin's own state-of-denial. He continues to praise and identify with the Soviet Union and its communist allies such as Yugoslavia, while never mentioning the mass murder they carried out. Some mind-bending quotes from the speech follow:

“Hitler, with his humanity hating ideas, was going to destroy Russia and throw us back behind the Urals. Everyone should remember how this ended."

"Next year we will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War. Our army overcame the enemy, freed Europe.”

A woman collapses over one of the 17 zinc coffins that arrived last week in the far Eastern Russian city of Ussuriysk marked as "Cargo 200".

The local population of the city of Ussuriysk is expressing shock at the large number of coffins containing the remains of Russian soldiers who died in the Donbas fighting.

Despite all the efforts of Russian officials to keep the funerals and information about where these men met their deaths from becoming known, a former Russian soldier said by telephone from Ussuriysk that it appears they were professional soldiers ("kontrakniki") from the 14th brigade of the GRU Special Forces of the Russian General Staff.

In September, people in the city learned that about 500 members of that brigade had been flown to Rostov oblast, as it's said "to the West." Until June 2012, this brigade was based in Ussuriysk, a city of 167,000, before it moved to the larger city of Khabarovsk.

According to this source, these men being buried now met their deaths in one of the battles for the Donetsk airport, thousands of miles away.

Sources for this story here and here. 

ALSO

Update on 73-year old Lyudmila Bogantenkova who was arrested on Friday, Oct. 17 in Stavropol:

She remains in jail, a month and a half later, charged with "fraud" and "failing to repay a debt." Both charges are connected with her efforts to find out about Russian combat losses in Ukraine and to commuicate this to others. She is well-known as the president of the Prikumya Mothers of Soldiers Committee that seeks to protect soldiers from inhumane treatment, including torture [extreme "hazing"] of new conscripts.

Dec. 1, 2014

Seventy-five years ago, on Nov. 30, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, thinking it could overwhelm a much smaller country by its size. But the Soviets were in for a surprise. What lessons does this short but brutal war have for us today? Included are:

• Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and secret protocol;
• How intelligence and motivation aided the Finns;
• Losses -26,000 Finnish dead or missing vs 127,000 Soviet Russian dead or missing;
• Can the Ukrainians hold off the Russians as well as the Finns did?

Plus, a closer look at Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and his arrest and incarceration at Sachsenhausen near Berlin. Included :

• Bandera's fanatical movement veered away from sharing the same objectives as N-S Germany;
• Bandera's death in 1959 ordered by the KGB head Alexander Shelepin and Nikita Khrushchev;
• Ukrainian nationalists have been the most persevering of all, and most hated by the Russians. [1hr51min]
  

Image: Lieutenant Aarne Juutilainen became a national hero for his defence of Finland during the Battle of Kollaa.