“Ukraine – Russia”

“It gave us all goosebumps” says Sebastian Zwiebel, as he describes the moment his team shut down Hydra, the world’s largest darknet marketplace.

The website was a bastion of cyber-crime, surviving for more than six years selling drugs and illegal goods.

But, after a tip-off, German police seized the site’s servers and confiscated €23m (£16.7m) in Bitcoin.

“We’ve been working on this for months and when it finally happened it felt big – really big,” adds Mr Zwiebel.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, has acquired gruesome new insights into the atrocities committed by Russian military forces. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the BND has new satellite images and has intercepted incriminating radio traffic from Russian military personnel in the region north of Kyiv, where Bucha is located. Some of the intercepted radio traffic could be linked to dead bodies that have been photographed in Bucha.

… The BND material also apparently provides evidence that members of the Russian mercenary unit called the Wagner Group played a leading role in the atrocities. The group is known to have perpetrated similar atrocities in Syria.

Eyewitnesses recently reported that the occupying force in Bucha was initially made up of “young soldiers.” Once they were replaced by other units, the witnesses said, the attacks on civilians grew more frequent. Some eyewitnesses have said that Chechen units were in the town. The accounts raise the question as to whether this progression was part of the occupation plan.

Wagner Group & Chechen Muslims. That’s some combo.

Russia has been suspended from the United Nations’s human rights council after its invasion of Ukraine provoked revulsion and outrage around the world.

At a meeting of the UN general assembly on Thursday, 93 members voted in favour of Russia’s suspension, while 24 were against and 58 abstained.

This met the required threshold of a two-thirds majority of the assembly members that vote yes or no, with abstentions not counting in the calculation.

Good propaganda.

Powerful war comms from Ukraine – what’s the price of Russian energy? pic.twitter.com/MvC0pWNJwO

— Bojan Pancevski (@bopanc) April 7, 2022

OTTAWA — The RCMP is launching a national investigation into allegations of war crimes in Ukraine, the Star has learned.

Beginning this week, the RCMP will begin seeking information from Ukrainians arriving in Canada who may have experienced or witnessed war crimes or crimes against humanity since Russia invaded in February, but also as far back as Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.

The investigation is being launched in the wake of reports of hundreds of what appear to be civilians being indiscriminately killed in the city of Bucha over the weekend.

On top of global revulsion, the videos and stories emerging from the town have sparked global calls for tougher sanctions on Russia, the end of diplomatic relations, and potentially Russia’s removal from the UN’s most senior human rights body, all as Russia vehemently denies it is targeting civilians.

HMA

‘It’s Fake,’ ‘It’s Horrible’: Mixed Reaction In Russia To Alleged War Crimes In Bucha

Britain, Canada and Australia have all so far declined to expel Russian diplomats, putting themselves at odds with 15 EU nations that have now evicted more than 200 in response to the pictures of war crimes committed in Ukraine.

A further 100 Russian diplomats had been expelled in the preceding two months.

The British reticence to act came despite an effective warning from the UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, that the west’s relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia were over.

Meanwhile the Trudeau Government starts sucking up to Russia’s biggest Ally – Communist China

Canada’s and China’s frigid relationship shows slight sign of thaw with first call between foreign ministers since 2020

Over the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the latter has received an outpouring of support from Western nations. Many in the (mostly terminally online) contrarian class, those individuals who are either openly pro-Russia or are anti-anti-Russia have responded to this newfound support for Ukraine in two ways. They have either derided Ukraine as a woke Western satellite led by equally woke puppet comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, or peculiarly, have made the opposite argument: Ukraine is plagued by neo-Nazis. Both dramatically misunderstand the situation, in terms of both how woke Ukraine truly is and why Ukraine is receiving support.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists from the United States and Europe have traveled to Ukraine to fight on both sides of the war with Russia, providing these extremists with valuable battlefield experience as they seek to increase their violent operations domestically, according to a report from a watchdog group monitoring the situation.

Foreign fighters from at least 35 neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and ultranationalist groups based in the United States, Canada, and Europe “have members fighting on both sides in [the] Russia-Ukraine conflict,” according to an analysis from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which has been tracking the flow of extremist groups into the region.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Kyiv was a Russian defeat for the ages. The fight started poorly for the invaders and went downhill from there.

When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraine’s borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos — the best of the best of Russia’s “spetsnaz” special forces soldiers — to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyiv’s doorstep.

Other Russian forces struck elsewhere across Ukraine, including toward the eastern city of Kharkiv as well as in the contested Donbas region and along the Black Sea coast. But as the seat of national power, Kyiv was the main prize. Thus the thrust by elite airborne forces in the war’s opening hours.

The West has decided the price of countering atrocities is simply too high.

Putting a stop to war crimes is not in the interest of the United States — at least not if it means going to war with Russia, according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

Preventing atrocities like the murder of civilians in Ukraine is not in the interests of the EU — at least not if it means higher gas prices or colder homes in winter, according to Austrian Finance Minister Magnus Brunner.

The evidence of brutal killings and torture by Russian forces in Bucha, a town on the outskirts of Kyiv, has drawn gasping proclamations of outrage and dismay at the highest levels of government in the world’s most powerful nations — from Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin to President Emmanuel Macron in Paris to Prime Minister Boris Johnson in London and across the ocean to President Joe Biden in Washington.

The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky’s plea for help.

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, howitzer artillery pieces and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television showed.

The delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the trans-Atlantic bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month.

#Ukraine: A Russian tank was destroyed by the 34th Separate Motorized Infantry Battalion using, as claimed, a NLAW anti-tank missile. pic.twitter.com/KeWRKoWn7E

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 6, 2022

The US has imposed sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, including his daughters.

The list also includes the family of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and major banks.

The measures follow new revelations of atrocities by Russian troops in Ukraine, including images of bodies of civilians scattered on the streets of Bucha, near the capital Kyiv.

Russia says, without evidence, the images are staged by Kyiv officials.

On March 22, Defence Minister Anita Anand received a proposal from a group of industry executives aimed at helping Ukraine defend the Odessa region from a Russian amphibious assault.

The plan, laid out in a briefing note obtained by the National Post, advocated giving Ukraine Harpoon Block 11 anti-ship missiles from the Royal Canadian Navy’s inventory to help with coastal defence. The executives urged the minister to move quickly so the missiles could be sent “in days, not weeks.”

The delay is because the missiles haven’t been programmed for proper pro-noun usage yet.

The EU has given €35bn (£29.1bn) to Vladimir Putin for energy supplies since the start of his war and €1bn to fund Ukraine’s defence, the union’s top diplomat said.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, made the comparison in a characteristically blunt speech to the European parliament as he urged Europe to send more arms to Ukraine to help end the war.

“We have to continue arming Ukraine. We need less rounds of applause and more assistance,” he said. The EU had pledged €1bn in military aid for Ukraine, he said, which “might seem a lot” but “€1bn is what we pay Putin every day for the energy he provides us. Since the beginning of the war we have given him €35bn. Compare that to the €1bn we have given to Ukraine in arms and weapons.”