This decision was preceded by a "round table" with Russian officials and collaborators from the temporarily occupied territories, where supposedly the experience of countries in which private hospitals "voluntarily refused" to perform abortions was reviewed.
Quote: "The private clinics’ heads were asked to contribute to the demographic situation improvement by refusing to perform abortions. The colleagues positively evaluated this initiative, and today all private clinics in Crimea have officially informed the Crimean Ministry of Health of their voluntary refusal to provide abortion services," Skorupsky noted.
Officials in Russia-annexed Crimea say private clinics have stopped providing abortions
Over his more than two decades in power, Putin has forged a powerful alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church and has put “traditional family values,” as well as boosting the country's declining population, at the cornerstone of his policies.
As part of the effort, authorities in several Russian regions in recent months sought to convince private clinics to stop terminating pregnancies. In Tatarstan in central Russia, officials said about a third have agreed to stop offering abortions; in the Chelyabinsk region in the Ural mountains, several clinics did as well. In the westernmost region of Kaliningrad, local legislators said they were mulling a ban for private clinics.
A nationwide ban is also something lawmakers and Russia's Health Ministry are contemplating, alleging that private clinics frequently violate existing regulations restricting access to abortion.
State statistics show that private clinics in Russia, where free, state-funded health care is available to all citizens, accounted for about 20% of all abortions in recent years. Some women who shared their experiences in pro-abortion online communities said they preferred private clinics where they could get an appointment faster, conditions were better and doctors did not pressure them to continue the pregnancy.
Crimea's Russian-installed health minister, Konstantin Skorupsky, said in an online statement that private clinics on the peninsula some time ago "offered to contribute to improving the demographic situation by giving up providing abortions,” and as of Thursday, all of them had done so.
His statement did not mention the city of Sevastopol, which is administered separately, and it was unclear if private clinics there were still providing abortions.
Two chains of private clinics in Crimea contacted by The Associated Press on Thursday by phone confirmed they no longer provide abortions, citing orders from the management or the authorities. One said it's been about a month since they stopped offering the procedure to women.
[bolding my own]
the use of “demographic situation” is so vile & so clearly colonial
- Turkey and France jostle for Central Asia influence as Russia declines
- Serbia's pro-Russia intelligence chief sanctioned by the US has resigned
- White House says US sending smaller mil packages to Ukraine due to Congress inaction
- Russian state pipeline firm recruited employees for Ukraine war
- Meloni adviser steps down over Russian hoax call
- Ukrainian troops battle exhaustion as war drags into second winter
- Russian rouble set for steady decline back past 100 vs dollar in 2024
- EU’s diplomatic arm slams Russia over North Korea weapon deals
- Ukraine troops defend vital foothold on Russian-controlled Dnipro River
- Austria's RBI says Russian spin-off unlikely this year
--------------------------------------------
💬 My socials: https://linktr.ee/rvps2001
Went on reddit out of habit. I have seen what a dying town in a western looks like. The last shop trying to be open, the old timey people who dont leave... man Tumblr is just so much livelier with insanity
The blowing up of a Ukrainian dam echoes a traditional cycle of destruction and self-destruction marking the country’s history
11 June 2023
Beneath the veneer of Russian military “tactics”, you see the stupid leer of destruction for the sake of it. The Kremlin can’t create, so all that is left is to destroy. Not in some pseudo-glorious self-immolation, the people behind atrocities are petty cowards, but more like a loser smearing their faeces over life. In Russia’s wars the very senselessness seems to be the sense.
After the casual mass executions at Bucha; after the bombing of maternity wards in Mariupol; after the laying to waste of whole cities in Donbas; after the children’s torture chambers, the missiles aimed at freezing civilians to death in the dead of winter, we now have the apocalyptic sight of the waters of the vast Dnipro, a river that when you are on it can feel as wide as a sea, bursting through the destroyed dam at Kakhovka. The reservoir held as much water as the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Its destruction has already submerged settlements where more than 40,000 people live. It has already wiped out animal sanctuaries and nature reserves. It will decimate agriculture in the bread basket of Ukraine that feeds so much of the world, most notably in the Middle East and Africa. To Russian genocide add ecocide.
The dam has been controlled by Russia for more than a year. The Ukrainian government has been warning that Russia had plans to blast it since October.
Seismologists in Norway have confirmed that massive blasts, the type associated with explosives rather than an accidental breach, came from the reservoir the night of its destruction. Some – including the American pro-Putin media personality Tucker Carlson – argue Russia couldn’t be behind the devastation, given the damage has spread to Russian-controlled territories, potentially restricting water supply to Crimea. But if “Russia wouldn’t damage its own people” is your argument then it’s one that doesn’t hold, pardon the tactless pun, much water. One of the least accurate quotes about Russia is Winston Churchill’s line about it being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” This makes it sound as if Russia is driven by some theory of rational choice – when century after century the opposite appears to be the case.
Few have captured the Russian cycle of self-destruction and the destruction of others as well as the Ukrainian literary critic Tetyana Ogarkova. In her rewording of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Russian classic novel Crime and Punishment, a novel about a murderer who kills simply because he can, Ogarkova calls Russia a culture where you have “crime without punishment, and punishment without crime”. The powerful murder with impunity; the victims are punished for no reason.
When not bringing humanitarian aid to the front lines, Ogarkova presents a podcast together with her husband, the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko. It’s remarkable for showing two people thinking calmly while under daily bombardment. It reminds me of German-Jewish philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, who kept writing lucidly even as they fled the Nazis. As they try to make sense of the evil bearing down on their country, Ogarkova and Yermolenko note the difference between Hitler and Stalin: while Nazis had some rules about who they punished (non-Aryans; communists) in Stalin’s terror anyone could be a victim at any moment. Random violence runs through Russian history.Reacting to how Vladimir Putin’s Russia is constantly changing its reasons for invading Ukraine – from “denazification” to “reclaiming historic lands” to “Nato expansion” – Ogarkova and Yermolenko decide that the very brutal nature of the invasion is its essence: the war crimes are the point. Russia claims to be a powerful “pole” in the world to balance the west – but has failed to create a successful political model others would want to join. So it has nothing left to offer except to drag everyone down to its own depths.“How dare you live like this,” went a resentful piece of graffiti by Russian soldiers in Bucha. “What’s the point of the world when there is no place for Russia in it,” complains Putin. After the dam at Kakhovka was destroyed, a General Dobruzhinsky crowed on a popular Russian talkshow: “We should blow up the Kyiv water reservoir too.” “Why?” asked the host. “Just to show them.” But, as Ogarkova and Yermolenko explore, Russians also send their soldiers to die senselessly in the meat grinder of the Donbas, their bodies left uncollected on the battlefield, their relatives not informed of their death so as to avoid paying them. On TV, presenters praise how “no one knows how to die like us”. Meanwhile, villagers on the Russian-occupied side of the river are being abandoned by the authorities. Being “liberated” by Russia means joining its empire of humiliation.
Where does this drive to annihilation come from? In 1912 the Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein – who was murdered by the Nazis, while her three brothers were killed in Stalin’s terror -first put forward the idea that people were drawn to death as much as to life. She drew on themes from Russian literature and folklore for her theory of a death drive, but the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, first found her ideas too morbid. After the First World War, he came to agree with her. The desire for death was the desire to let go of responsibility, the burden of individuality, choice, freedom – and sink back into inorganic matter. To just give up. In a culture such as Russia’s, where avoiding facing up to the dark past with all its complex webs of guilt and responsibility is commonplace, such oblivion can be especially seductive.
But Russia is also sending out a similar message to Ukrainians and their allies with these acts of ultra-violent biblical destruction: give in to our immensity, surrender your struggle. And for all Russia’s military defeats and actual socio-economic fragility, this propaganda of the deed can still work.
The reaction in the west to the explosion of the dam has been weirdly muted. Ukrainians are mounting remarkable rescue operations, while Russia continues to shell semi-submerged cities, but they are doing it more or less alone. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been mystified by the “zero support” from international organisations such as the UN and Red Cross.
Perhaps the relative lack of support comes partly because people feel helpless in the face of something so immense, these Cecil B DeMille-like scenes of giant rivers exploding. It’s the same helplessness some feel when faced with the climate crisis. It’s apposite that the strongest response to Russia’s ecocide came not from governments but the climate activist Greta Thunberg, who clearly laid the blame of what happened on Russia and demanded it be held accountable. But there’s been barely a peep out of western governments or the UN.
Pushing the strange lure of death, oblivion and just giving up is the Russian gambit. How much life do we have left in us?
Peter Pomerantsev is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia
The blowing up of a Ukrainian dam echoes a traditional cycle of destruction and self-destruction marking the country’s history
11 June 2023
Beneath the veneer of Russian military “tactics”, you see the stupid leer of destruction for the sake of it. The Kremlin can’t create, so all that is left is to destroy. Not in some pseudo-glorious self-immolation, the people behind atrocities are petty cowards, but more like a loser smearing their faeces over life. In Russia’s wars the very senselessness seems to be the sense.
After the casual mass executions at Bucha; after the bombing of maternity wards in Mariupol; after the laying to waste of whole cities in Donbas; after the children’s torture chambers, the missiles aimed at freezing civilians to death in the dead of winter, we now have the apocalyptic sight of the waters of the vast Dnipro, a river that when you are on it can feel as wide as a sea, bursting through the destroyed dam at Kakhovka. The reservoir held as much water as the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Its destruction has already submerged settlements where more than 40,000 people live. It has already wiped out animal sanctuaries and nature reserves. It will decimate agriculture in the bread basket of Ukraine that feeds so much of the world, most notably in the Middle East and Africa. To Russian genocide add ecocide.
The dam has been controlled by Russia for more than a year. The Ukrainian government has been warning that Russia had plans to blast it since October.
Seismologists in Norway have confirmed that massive blasts, the type associated with explosives rather than an accidental breach, came from the reservoir the night of its destruction. Some – including the American pro-Putin media personality Tucker Carlson – argue Russia couldn’t be behind the devastation, given the damage has spread to Russian-controlled territories, potentially restricting water supply to Crimea. But if “Russia wouldn’t damage its own people” is your argument then it’s one that doesn’t hold, pardon the tactless pun, much water. One of the least accurate quotes about Russia is Winston Churchill’s line about it being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” This makes it sound as if Russia is driven by some theory of rational choice – when century after century the opposite appears to be the case.
Few have captured the Russian cycle of self-destruction and the destruction of others as well as the Ukrainian literary critic Tetyana Ogarkova. In her rewording of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Russian classic novel Crime and Punishment, a novel about a murderer who kills simply because he can, Ogarkova calls Russia a culture where you have “crime without punishment, and punishment without crime”. The powerful murder with impunity; the victims are punished for no reason.
When not bringing humanitarian aid to the front lines, Ogarkova presents a podcast together with her husband, the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko. It’s remarkable for showing two people thinking calmly while under daily bombardment. It reminds me of German-Jewish philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, who kept writing lucidly even as they fled the Nazis. As they try to make sense of the evil bearing down on their country, Ogarkova and Yermolenko note the difference between Hitler and Stalin: while Nazis had some rules about who they punished (non-Aryans; communists) in Stalin’s terror anyone could be a victim at any moment. Random violence runs through Russian history.Reacting to how Vladimir Putin’s Russia is constantly changing its reasons for invading Ukraine – from “denazification” to “reclaiming historic lands” to “Nato expansion” – Ogarkova and Yermolenko decide that the very brutal nature of the invasion is its essence: the war crimes are the point. Russia claims to be a powerful “pole” in the world to balance the west – but has failed to create a successful political model others would want to join. So it has nothing left to offer except to drag everyone down to its own depths.“How dare you live like this,” went a resentful piece of graffiti by Russian soldiers in Bucha. “What’s the point of the world when there is no place for Russia in it,” complains Putin. After the dam at Kakhovka was destroyed, a General Dobruzhinsky crowed on a popular Russian talkshow: “We should blow up the Kyiv water reservoir too.” “Why?” asked the host. “Just to show them.” But, as Ogarkova and Yermolenko explore, Russians also send their soldiers to die senselessly in the meat grinder of the Donbas, their bodies left uncollected on the battlefield, their relatives not informed of their death so as to avoid paying them. On TV, presenters praise how “no one knows how to die like us”. Meanwhile, villagers on the Russian-occupied side of the river are being abandoned by the authorities. Being “liberated” by Russia means joining its empire of humiliation.
Where does this drive to annihilation come from? In 1912 the Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein – who was murdered by the Nazis, while her three brothers were killed in Stalin’s terror -first put forward the idea that people were drawn to death as much as to life. She drew on themes from Russian literature and folklore for her theory of a death drive, but the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, first found her ideas too morbid. After the First World War, he came to agree with her. The desire for death was the desire to let go of responsibility, the burden of individuality, choice, freedom – and sink back into inorganic matter. To just give up. In a culture such as Russia’s, where avoiding facing up to the dark past with all its complex webs of guilt and responsibility is commonplace, such oblivion can be especially seductive.
But Russia is also sending out a similar message to Ukrainians and their allies with these acts of ultra-violent biblical destruction: give in to our immensity, surrender your struggle. And for all Russia’s military defeats and actual socio-economic fragility, this propaganda of the deed can still work.
The reaction in the west to the explosion of the dam has been weirdly muted. Ukrainians are mounting remarkable rescue operations, while Russia continues to shell semi-submerged cities, but they are doing it more or less alone. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been mystified by the “zero support” from international organisations such as the UN and Red Cross.
Perhaps the relative lack of support comes partly because people feel helpless in the face of something so immense, these Cecil B DeMille-like scenes of giant rivers exploding. It’s the same helplessness some feel when faced with the climate crisis. It’s apposite that the strongest response to Russia’s ecocide came not from governments but the climate activist Greta Thunberg, who clearly laid the blame of what happened on Russia and demanded it be held accountable. But there’s been barely a peep out of western governments or the UN.
Pushing the strange lure of death, oblivion and just giving up is the Russian gambit. How much life do we have left in us?
Peter Pomerantsev is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia
We all know about the Twitter immigrants, but there seems to be radio silence on what's happening now with Reddit users from certain subreddits doing a similar thing.
What's happening?
Reddit is restricting their API later this month and killing off third-party apps. An AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the CEO Steve Hoffman was held and it was clear that he would continue with the changes.
In protest, thousands of subreddits across the site are planning to go dark for 48 hours on June 12th. Some are planning to continue indefinitely until the changes are reversed.
Okay, so how does this affect Tumblr?
Some subreddits (mainly queer and left-leaning meme ones, don't worry too much about Reddit Atheists™ overrunning us) are encouraging their users to jump ship to our beloved - and beloathed - hellsite. There will be another influx of new users and many will be unfamiliar with how the site works.
What do us Tumblr users do?
Show them how to use the site; introduce them to the site's culture, tell them to reblog shit and curate their dashboard. Sorta like how we welcomed Twitter users back when they flocked here. Kungpowpenising optional.
I'm new from Reddit, what do I do here?
CHANGE YOUR PROFILE PICTURE AND BANNER TO SOMETHING OTHER THAN DEFAULT BECAUSE THIS SITE IS FILLED WITH BOTS AND YOU MIGHT BE MISTAKEN FOR ONE. This is the FIRST thing you should do after getting a blog.
Other folks can help you with stuff like curating your dashboard or creating sideblogs (or you can look shit up) but please, PLEASE just give yourself an icon and reblog some stuff so people don't mistake you for a bot
This entire thread is 🔥. She's right and she should say it. (This is the PM of Estonia.)
Full text below: (all bolding mine, not in the original)
In my speech "The Battle of Our Time"
I asked: Do we grasp the magnitude of what's happening in #Ukraine? And what would be the price of failure? This war isn't just about Ukraine but the rules-based world order and future security architecture of Europe.
Atrocities that were memories of the past have become nightmares of today. We witness state-orchestrated war crimes. Incitement to commit genocide is a distinct crime whether or not genocide actually follows. And we see from the deeds of Russian soldiers these calls work.
Imperialism and colonialism are the Kremlin’s long-term ideologies. They did not emerge on 24 February this year. The warning signs and deeds were long there. History matters. Although the Soviet Union collapsed, its imperialist ideology never did.
We had the Tokyo and Nuremberg tribunals, but there was never a Moscow tribunal. If people’s minds and eyes are shut before past atrocities, there are no limits to committing new ones in the future. This is exactly what we see Russian soldiers doing right now in Ukraine.
The Russian strategy vis-à-vis Euro-Atlantic community is built around three weapons: pain, fear, and hope. 1. The pain of starving Europe from energy. 2. Fear of nuclear war. 3. Hope to pressure Ukraine into a peace agreement granting Russia parts of conquered territory.
Regarding pain inflicted on us with the energy weapon – we'll survive, and we'll prosper. Russian aggression has demonstrated what happens when you connect to partners who weaponise trust. There's been a sharp move away in Europe from dependence on Russian fossil fuels.
Regarding fear – let’s remember what Roosevelt said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” If we allow nuclear blackmail to work even just once, we will wake up in a much, much more dangerous world.
Regarding peace – unless Kremlin gives up on its goal of conquering new territories in Ukraine, it's hard to believe in prospect of real peace talks. I hope Europe's learnt that appeasement only strengthens the aggressor. The aggressor will never stop unless he is stopped.
The pillars of our response to Russia must be: supporting Ukraine; increasing the price of aggression and ending impunity for Russia; strengthening our own security. All these strands of work must continue for the long term.
In this part of Europe, we remember the face of Russian occupation painfully well. Large countries can make mistakes and survive. For small ones, the margin of error is much smaller – the policy to stop Russian aggression in Ukraine is an existential matter to us.
I pay tribute to Finland who decided to fight in 1939. Finland lost a lot but you retained something sacred – your statehood. Estonia lost everything. For 50 years we were forced behind the Iron Curtain. We lost a fifth of our population to Soviet terror.
The lesson: you need to fight for your freedom. Not fighting is worse. Today Ukrainian bravery is proving the same to the entire world. The other lesson: we decided to be Never Alone Again. That's why we are in the EU and NATO.
Why Are People Happy (or like, at least Not Freaking Out) About the USA Midterm Results?
(or in my case exhaling a held breath as I slightly lift my finger off the “oh fuck me and my spouse should worry for our future survival if we stay in the country” button for now)
So for newer voters there is the very valid question: why the hell are people acting like this is a victory for progressives/Democrats when they’ll likely lose the House and barely hold on to the Senate?
Short Answer: because by historical pattern and all the usual indicators, anyone who even slightly caucused with Dems should have been trounced, and the fact that they weren’t trounced has the far hardline right shaking.
To borrow from a great Reddit comment I saw; the GOP is freaking out because this was like a pro boxer went up against a sick six year old, and the boxer may have scored higher in the end but the six year old beat the shit out of them in the process.
For decades the pattern has been that the president’s party loses at LEAST 20-40 seats in the midterms. Add in that Republicans tend to turn out more for midterms, gerrymandering, and the fact that in the past swing voters are swayed by inflation and gas prices and…it should have been so much worse. With how everything was stacked up this ended up being a historic turnout for an incumbent executive branch, the career politicians pay attention to shit like that.
And yeah with how things are, “holy shit it could have been so much worse” is worth something.
So I’m not like, popping bottles and cheering, but this to me is a great example of Voting as Harm Reduction in Action.
Voting did not Fix It. It can’t. Voting will not stop fascism, strike that expectation from your mind and also really see that that is not what voting’s role is in an action plan. Voting is the Minimum. Meaning if you can’t do anything else you vote, but you don’t rely on voting and expect it alone to fix problems.
(long post with more of a breakdown below. Tho this isn’t a breakdown where I pulled sources and exact numbers. It’s more of a General Take Away.)
I was talking to a bunch of people and when I asked one girl for her name, everyone went really silent, then she whipped out her phone and explained how she’d sold it online for bitcoins, like an NFT.
