An update on a nasty, infuriating case: “Ksenia Karelina, a dual American-Russian citizen, was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in a Russian penal colony on treason charges.” (To read this report, go here.) You may recall her crime: to have contributed $51.80 to a group helping Ukrainians under siege, Razom. (The name means “together.”)
• Do you know about Pablo González, a.k.a. Pavel Rubtsov? A GRU spy. Remarkable story. He was one of the eight returned to Putin in the recent prisoner swap. (Putin released 16.) When he arrived in Moscow, to be greeted by Putin, Rubtsov wore a T-shirt showing a Star Wars stormtrooper and the words “Your Empire Needs You.”
(For an Associated Press article, go here. For a long, engrossing investigative report from VSquare, go here.)
• Meduza, the Russian news organization in exile — as all independent Russian news organizations are — has published a story headed “Toy Soldiers.” The subheading reads, “Fresh out of high school, Russian teens are joining the army and heading to the front lines in Ukraine. Many are dying on their first mission.”
What a waste. These young men are sent by Putin to die in no small part so that he can distract Russia from the problems — the internal problems — that beset it.
Dictators have been doing this for ages.
(If people asked, “Hey, how are our own lives going?” instead of being inflamed to attack and subjugate their neighbors, dictators would be in even bigger trouble than they are.)
• For the Christian Science Monitor, Scott Peterson has written a piece with the heading “Russian POWs recount horrific cost of battling dug-in Ukrainians.” It begins,
Nothing prepared the Russian soldier for the violent, brutal reality of combat he experienced this summer in eastern Ukraine — nor for the “meat assault” he was ordered to lead.
The soldier, who gives the name Sergei, arrived at the front in late June, in a town freshly occupied by Russia. He recalls being shocked by the visibly high cost of small battlefield gains: dead Russian and Ukrainian soldiers littering the streets.
The apocalyptic scene was a far cry, he says, from the promise of his army recruiter that he would be assigned a safe job inside Russia, on border patrol.
Some more:
Instead, wearing a uniform with sewn-in knee pads that he had to purchase himself — and with little training and an abusive commander — he was ordered to lead a squad across open ground against Ukrainian troops entrenched in a forest line.
His commander told him, “If you come back, I will kill you myself.”
• In 2017, I wrote a piece about Yuri Dmitriev, a political prisoner in Russia. He worked for the Memorial society, whose purpose is to discover the truth about the past and to promote democracy in the present. Needless to say, it has been banned by the Kremlin. (Memorial shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.)
Dmitriev, I wrote,
played a major role in discovering the site known as Sandarmokh, outside the town of Medvezhyegorsk, in Karelia. At Sandarmokh, more than 9,000 people were buried. They were murdered in 1937 and 1938. Some 1,100 of the 9,000 came from the Solovki prison camp, which Alexander Solzhenitsyn would dub “the mother of the Gulag.” Among the 9,000 were some 60 nationalities.
Meduza reports that a recent ceremony at Sandarmokh was disrupted by the usual brutes, some of whom chanted “The Jews sponsored Hitler!”
• An article in Foreign Affairs by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan: “Putin’s New Agents of Chaos: How Russia’s Growing Squad of Saboteurs and Assassins Threatens the West.” If the West keeps its head in the sand, it, we, will be very sorry indeed.
Our enemies don’t think we will defend ourselves. Too often, they are right.
• There are such good people in the world. What prompts this observation, this platitude, from me? A story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty: “Refusing ‘to Morally Justify Evil’: How Anti-War Russian Orthodox Priests Adapt to Survive.” Imagine being a priest in Russia and saying: “This war is wrong.” These men are phenomenally brave, and I wish I could give them a medal.