Comments by "R Johansen" (@rjohansen9486) on "Putin Has The Last Laugh: NATO Nation Germany 'Clueless' About Weapons Sent To Ukraine | Report" video.
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THERE WAS NO GENOCIDE IN DONBAS.
From Iranian press: Vladimir Putin regularly drone on about the alleged “genocide of the Donbas population”. Today, this myth sits at the core of the Kremlin’s propaganda. Putin has used this myth to justify Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. " Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years” Putin said in his address announcing the war.
Both Ukraine and the occupied Donbas territories have suffered casualties because of the HOSTILITIES THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION has been conducting there since 2014. But Russia has insisted for these eight years and tried to convince the world that the actions of Ukraine’s Armed Forces in Donbas “are aimed at destroying the population of Donbas” and are not a struggle for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. And despite the UNTRUTHFULNESS of the argument, Russia’s propaganda machine has nevertheless managed to convince the Russian audience of this, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is “an act of retaliation for Donbas”.
As it happens, official United Nations data suggests that the 14,000 casualty figure that Putin has used does not only refer to civilians. During Russia’s 2014-2021 military operations against Ukraine, 14,500 people died in the Donbas war. Of that 14,000, 3,404 were civilians, 4,400 were Ukrainian servicemen and 6,500 were Russian militants. The figure Putin operates with, is the total number of casualties incurred in the Donbas war by both sides.
The Russian Federation both armed the separatists and sent unmarked soldiers. Russia initially denied that there were Russian military forces in Donbas, but on 17 April 2014 Vladimir Putin finally confirmed the presence of the Russian military. Alexander Borodai, Prime Minister of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, stated that 50,000 RUSSIAN citizens fought in the Donbas up to August 2015.
THESE SOLDIERS are the ones that the Ukranian government fought against, NOT “shelling of innocents in Donbas”, which Russian propaganda will tell you.
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However, Russia violates the Minsk agreements on a regular basis.
The Minsk Agreements are a basis for political resolution of the conflict in Donbas. They have been violated by the Russian Federation on a regular basis. Point 10, for example, calls for the withdrawal of all foreign armed formations and military equipment from the two disputed regions, Donetsk and Luhansk: Ukraine says this refers to forces from Russia, but Moscow denies it has any forces there. (Later Putin admitted there were russian forces.)
Signing of the first documents in September 2014 followed direct incursion of the Russian regular troops in Donbas and intense hostilities near the city of Ilovaysk — the place of one of the most shameful crimes, committed by the Russian Army in Donbas.
At least 366 Ukrainian servicemen were killed and 429 were wounded there while leaving the city in the so-called “green corridor” under the guarantees of commanders of Russian troops. In violation of the Minsk Memorandum, Russian troops and Russia-backed illegal armed formations seized 8 pieces of land 1696 km² in area, which had to be on the Ukrainian government-controlled territory according to the line of contact, defined by the Memorandum.
Debaltseve is one of the most telling examples of how Russia violates the Minsk Agreements. Combined Russian-terrorist forces attacked and seized the city and the outskirts on 16–18 February 2015, immediately after the Minsk Package of measures, establishing the comprehensive ceasefire since 15 February, had been signed.
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There wasn't any realistic deal in Turkey.
Johnson said this to his own parliament: There is absolutely no sign that Russia wants to reach a deal with Ukraine, and it could not be trusted even if one was on offer, Boris Johnson has told the Commons.
And he was right, Russia had broken all the agreements so far, including Minsk. The former prime minister warned against a "land for peace" deal, and said he doubted Volodymyr Zelensky or any Ukrainian government would agree to any such compromise.
- On 7 April 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Moscow rejected a draft peace deal from Ukraine, saying that it contained “unacceptable” elements that deviated from proposals that both sides’ negotiators had earlier agreed on.
- July 19 : Dmitry Medvedev said that “Russia will achieve all its goals. There will be peace – on our terms”
- On September 14, 2022, Reuters reported that Vladimir Putin rejected a provisional deal, in which Ukraine agreed to stay out of NATO. His own chief envoy on Ukraine, Dmitry Kozak, told him that the deal would remove the need for Russia to pursue a large-scale occupation of Ukraine, and recommended that Putin adopt the peace deal. However, PUTIN DECIDED TO REJECT the provisional peace agreement Kozak hammered out with the Ukrainians, and pressed ahead with his “special military operation”.
(While in 2014-2017 the implementation of the Minsk Accords could have led to a negotiated reintegration of Donbas into Ukraine under international supervision, the international situation and Russia’s intentions have changed. In fact, by late 2021 Russian authorities had all but integrated the breakaway republics into the Russian political, military and economic space, precluding any meaningful possibility of the region’s peaceful reintegration into Ukraine. Whilst the Ukrainian leadership pursued a ceasefire in Donbas from the summer of 2020, the Kremlin used it as a bargaining chip to put pressure on Zelensky’s government and to create a flimsy pretext for an invasion. Zelensky’s last-ditch attempts to return to the negotiations in late 2021 were rejected by Putin, who tore up the Minsk Accords by recognising the independence of the breakaway regions. Thus, instead of a roadmap to future peace, the Minsk Accords had largely become a military-diplomatic tool in the hands of Russian leadership to legitimise regime change and the dismemberment of Ukraine.)
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Ever since the early years of his reign, Putin has made no secret of his bitterness over the Soviet collapse, which he has always viewed as a Russian defeat.
In 2005, when he famously referred to the disintegration of the USSR as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” he stressed that it was a tragedy for “the Russian people” and the millions of Russians who suddenly found themselves living beyond Russia’s borders in newly independent countries such as Ukraine.
Putin went even further in 2021, lamenting the fall of the USSR as “the collapse of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union.” In other words, he regards the entire Soviet era as a continuation of the Czarist Russian Empire, and sees the settlement of 1991 as anything but final. Putin’s sense of historical injustice has led to an unhealthy obsession with Ukraine, which he insists is an inherent part of historical Russia that has been subjected to artificial separation. He is fond of claiming that Ukrainians are in fact Russians (“one people”), and took the unusual but revealing step in July 2021 of publishing a lengthy essay arguing against the legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood.
This fixation has been further fueled by fears that the emergence of a democratic Ukraine could serve as a catalyst for similar changes inside Russia itself. Putin remains haunted by the pro-democracy uprisings that swept Central Europe in the late 1980s while he was a young KGB officer in East Germany, and views modern Ukraine’s embrace of democracy as a direct threat to his own authoritarian regime. It is no coincidence that in the buildup to last year’s invasion, Putin began referring to Ukraine as an intolerable “anti-Russia.”
Over the past 13 months of full-scale war, Putin’s imperial objectives in Ukraine have become increasingly evident. He has compared his invasion to the eighteenth century imperial conquests of Russian Czar Peter the Great, and has repeatedly spoken of returning historical Russian lands while attempting to annex four partially occupied Ukrainian regions representing almost 20% of the war-torn country. Meanwhile, his army has imposed brutal policies of russification throughout occupied Ukraine, complete with summary executions, forced deportations, the suppression of Ukrainian national symbols, and widespread use of torture against anyone deemed a potential opponent of Russian rule.
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All opposition in Russia are either killed or in prison on false charges.
Russia arrests priests:
- "Brothers and sisters in Christ are now killing Christians. It is impossible to live with this fact." For this statement, made in a sermon in the church, the Russian priest Ioann Burdin was arrested.
Zona Media reports that Burdin is one of the first to suffer under a new law, which criminalised calls for the end of the war. The Russian priest says that he finds it irreconcilable that Russian Christians are killing Ukrainian Christians. "For me, this is about the same as if I would come to our Church and stab someone who is praying because I did not like what he was saying. We cannot break the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" so easily."
Burdin is a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Russian village of Karabanovo in the Kostroma region. During one of his sermons, he announced that he would pray for the war's end. According to him, however, that was not the point of his sermon. "It is a deeper call to people to retain humanity in their hearts; so that they do not feel hatred for either Ukrainians, Russians or the Americans."
Burdin's statements, however, led to his arrest. He was summoned to the police station, heard and charged with "discrediting" Russia's war in Ukraine, Dagen reports. The new law made it illegal to question the Russian invasion. Violating this legislation can lead to imprisonment or a fine.
- A Russian priest now faces up to 10 years behind bars for declaring that troops waging war on Ukraine are going to hell.
The charges against Ioann Kurmoyarov, a former priestmonk of the Russian Orthodox Church and doctor of theology, come as the Kremlin seeks to stifle dissent over the war, with numerous high-profile musicians and writers recently charged under a new law against spreading “false information” about the Russian military.
The charges against him stem from a video he posted on social media in March responding to Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s claim that even if the war in Ukraine leads to a nuclear strike, Russians will “go to heaven.”
“I would like to disappoint everyone who believes in this ‘fake,’” Kuromaryov said, adding that those who “unleash aggression” do not wind up in heaven. “Ukraine did not attack Russia,” he said. “You will not be in any heaven, you’ll be in hell.”
Russia 2016: Christians in Russia are now banned from discussing their faith outside of churches and other designated places under new anti-terror laws.
From Wednesday onwards it is illegal to preach, teach or share faith outside state-controlled set-tings.
Senior Protestant church leader in Russia, Sergei Ryakhovsky, said the law 'creates the basis for the mass persecution of believers'.
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- The "Bucha massacre" was the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war by the Russian Armed Forces during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photographic and video evidence of the massacre emerged on 1 April 2022 after Russian forces withdrew from the city.
According to local authorities, 458 bodies have been recovered from the town, including 9 children under the age of 18; among the victims, 419 people were killed with weapons and 39 appeared to have died of natural causes.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented the unlawful killings, including summary executions, of at least 73 civilians in Bucha. Photos showed corpses of civilians, lined up with their hands bound behind their backs, shot at point-blank range, which ostensibly gave proof that summary executions had taken place.
An inquiry by Radio Free Europe reported the use of a basement beneath a campground as a torture chamber. Many bodies were found mutilated and burnt, and girls as young as fourteen reported being raped by Russian soldiers. Ukraine has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate what happened in Bucha as part of its ongoing investigation of the invasion to determine whether a series of Russian war crimes or crimes against humanity were committed.
Russian authorities have denied responsibility and instead claimed that Ukraine faked footage of the event or staged the killings itself as a false flag operation,] and have claimed that the footage and photographs of dead bodies were "fake news". These assertions by Russian authorities have been debunked as false by various groups and media organizations. Eyewitness accounts from residents of Bucha said that the Russian Armed Forces carried out the killings.
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Lies: Petro Poroshenko Promised that Children from Donbas would be Sitting in Cellars
On November 14, Russian Channel One informed in its evening news broadcast that, while officially speaking about peaceful settlement of the Donbas problem, in fact the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko was going to strangle Donbas economically and to put Donbas children into cellars. This is not true, and proofs of it were obtained by the Channel One by means of taking Poroshenko’s words out of context and falsely interpreting them from Ukrainian.
In his full speech Poroshenko does not say that Ukraine will put residents of Donbas under pressure, but that the occupation of Donbas by pro-Russian militants makes the locals, who have to live without pensions and to hide in cellars, suffer.
“This war can’t be won with weapons. Every bullet produces two enemies. And every peaceful day Ukrainian state demonstrates on the liberated territories that citizens, who sang praises to false separatist regime a month ago, receive heat, electricity, at last they can send their children to school, they started to receive pensions, survivorship and disablement payments, they have jobs, they have salaries.
“My dear people of Odesa! This is what we avoided thanks to your wisdom, your solidarity. And thanks to – now we all are confident about this – your pro-Ukrainian position. I was full of joy, when after visiting Odesa the delegation of the OSCE made a conclusion that Odesa is a city of harmony, the city of peace. There can’t be a better compliment. I was very happy about it. Thank you for your wisdom, people of Odesa!
“And we win together by means of peace! Because we have jobs, and they have not. We have pensions, and they have not. We have support of children and pensioners, they have not. Our children would go to kindergartens and schools, theirs would be sitting in cellars. Because they do not know anything how to do! That’s how we are going to win this war. Because wars are won in minds, and not on the combat fields! They do not know this, but I know. And I have your support, I need it very much in order we win this war without perished Ukrainians, without perished inhabitants of Odesa.”
It should be pointed out that Poroshenko speaks about the present situation in Donbas, not about situation possible in future. He describes it using the present tense, not the future one used by Russian journalists in their interpretation of his words. That’s why the Channel One not only took his words out of context, but also falsely interpreted them in order to produce wrong impression as if the President says that the residents of the Donbas will not receive pensions in future.
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"Zelensky, Poroshenko, Merkel and Hollande admitted that Ukraine had no intention to honor the Minsk agreements." You are lying again, is it a habit of yours?
Russiapost/republicru: In December 2022, Angela Merkel, in an interview with Die Zeit, said that the Minsk agreements “bought time” for Ukraine to strengthen its army: “it was obvious to us that the conflict would only be frozen without the problem being solved,” though thanks to the agreements Ukraine won “precious time.” Later, the former chancellor was echoed by former French President François Hollande, who noted the strength of the Ukrainian army and attributed that to the Minsk agreements.
Moscow was predictably delighted by these comments, DISTORTING them to make it seem that Merkel and Hollande had perfidiously been preparing Ukraine for a new war with Russia, even though they had only been talking about a well-used window of opportunity by Kyiv. The resurgent topic of the Minsk agreements demonstrates the cognitive chasm separating today’s Russia and the West, which calls into question the durability of any future peace negotiations. Nevertheless, Putin broke the Minsk agreements right after it was signed
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