#steve rosenberg

[admin-censored-103]

Steve Rosenberg

[tomorrowusa]

Fall of Assad is a blow to Russia's prestige

Russian firepower helped keep the Syrian president in power - but in a matter of days, Moscow's Syria project unravelled.

Remember Putin's two-day "special operation" to capture Ukraine? It is now into Day 1,020 if I counted correctly. And that has involved Russia suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Putin's adventure in Syria over the past decade has yielded another failure. Instead of making Russia look like a superpower, these engagements show that it is merely a miserable muddled meddler.

For nearly a decade it was Russian firepower that had kept Bashar al-Assad in power. Until the extraordinary events of the last 24 hours. Damascus has fallen, Syria's president has been toppled and has, reportedly, flown to Moscow. Quoting a source in the Kremlin, Russian news agencies and state TV reported that Russia has granted Assad and his family asylum "on humanitarian grounds". In a matter of days, the Kremlin's Syria project has unravelled in the most dramatic circumstances, with Moscow powerless to prevent it. [ ... ] The fall of the Assad regime is a blow to Russia's prestige. By sending thousands of troops in 2015 to shore up President Assad, one of Russia's key objectives had been to assert itself as a global power. It was Vladimir Putin's first major challenge to the power and dominance of the West, away from the former Soviet space.

Russia left behind an air base at Khmeimim and a naval base at Tartus. And in the near future we are likely to hear of smaller cantonments.

We may also be hearing how deeply Russia was involved in internal repression by Syria's al-Assad régime.

Russia looks decreasingly like a place other countries would wish to emulate.

Bashar al-Assad was the sort of person Putin likes to do business with – a mass-murdering autocrat. This report from Amnesty International is from 2017.

Syria: Human slaughterhouse: Mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria

[indizombie]

Earlier this month St Petersburg artist Sasha Skochilenko was arrested and charged with spreading fake news about the Russian armed forces. She is accused of replacing price tags in a supermarket with anti-war messages. Sasha is being held in pre-trial detention. "This shows that free speech in our country is being stamped out," Sasha Skochilenko's partner, Sonia Subbotina, tells me. "It shows that political repression is getting worse and that people with anti-war views are being persecuted and put in prison." "There was protest activity in Russia. People were coming out to protest. But each protest is a major risk. You can be arrested, you can be beaten, you can be put in jail. Right now I feel completely lost. I don't know if anything can be done." Those in power in Russia are demanding unflinching support from the Russian people: for the direction in which the Kremlin is taking Russia, away from Europe; for the anti-Western rhetoric emanating from Moscow; and for Russia's military offensive in Ukraine - no matter what the consequences here at home.

Steve Rosenberg, ‘Mysterious Zamestim artwork in St Petersburg signals Russia's anti-West defiance’, BBC

[tomorrowusa]

Steve Rosenberg: Ukraine's incursion shows Russia's war is not going to plan

The attack on Kursk has led some Russians to call for a deeper military push into Ukraine.

Ukraine is conducting a ground operation inside Russia in neighboring Kursk oblast (region) which is north of Kharkiv – Ukraine's second largest city.

Over the last 29 months, so often we’ve heard senior Russian officials claiming that the operation is going “according to plan.” President Vladimir Putin last said that in May, despite everything that had happened in the preceding two years: the heavy Russian casualties on the battlefield, the destruction of multiple Russian warships in the Black Sea, drone attacks deep inside Russia (even on the Kremlin itself), the shelling of Russian towns and villages near the Ukrainian border, the mutiny by Wagner mercenary fighters who had marched on Moscow. Now there is a new addition to the list: this week’s cross-border Ukrainian assault on Russia’s Kursk region. [ ... ] It’s evident that what is unfolding in Kursk region is further evidence that Russia’s war in Ukraine has not gone "according to plan". Events appear to have taken Russia’s political and military leadership completely by surprise. Don’t expect Moscow to admit that.

The Kremlin is typically hypocritical about what is going on in Kursk oblast. It's fine for Russia to illegally annex Crimea in 2014 and then initiate a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But Putin squeals like a pig when Ukraine conducts a counter operation on Russian territory.

There’s clearly a big difference in language. When Russia poured its troops across the border into Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin called this a "special military operation" and claimed that Russia was “liberating” towns and villages. Moscow has described Ukrainian troops pushing into Russia as “a terrorist attack” and “a provocation.”

Today is day 896 of Russia's 3-day "special operation". Russia's goal of subjugating Ukraine has failed but Putin irrationally continues wasting vast amounts of money and hundreds of thousands of Russian lives on his goal of restoring the decrepit Soviet Union in all but name.

Putin is just as weird as Trump – albeit in a different way. Only a clear defeat of Putin in this war will restore normalcy to Eastern Europe.

[tomorrowusa]

^^^ from Steve Rosenberg of the BBC.

One of the few things Russian officials are good for is their unintentionally hilarious irony.

As far as popularity of languages goes... 

Mother Tongue: The Story of a Ukrainian Language Convert How one Ukrainian woman made the switch from her native Russian tongue to Ukrainian 

My mother tongue tastes like ashes. Things scorched by enemy fire, then soaked with rain, touched with rot, smelling of death. I felt the taste of my mother tongue most acutely while driving through Borodianka, Bucha, and Irpin two months after these Ukrainian towns in the Kyiv region were liberated by the Ukrainian army from the Russians’ “brotherly” embrace.

Russian is my mother tongue and liberation means ripping it out of my throat.

[ ... ]

Today, I savor the cacophony of Ukrainian proper, Ukrainian broken like my mother’s, and the hybridized form of Ukrainian-Russian called “surzhyk” when I’m walking down the streets in Kyiv and Lviv. The mass displacement caused by Russia‘s war has made Ukrainians from all parts of the country listen to each other and pick up new linguistic tricks. It is by pronouncing the Ukrainian word for a loaf of bread, “palianytsia,” that a friend is now distinguished from a foe at the military checkpoints around the country. Perfectly pronounced by Russophone Ukrainians, the combination of vowels and consonants makes Russians choke on the word connoting hospitality in the country they invaded.

There are reasons to believe the eastern Ukrainians most immediately affected by the war will choose to disentangle themselves from the invaders’ language, regardless of the difficulty. With the emptiness and openness of the Ukrainian steppe in the east comes the nomadic aspect of the easterner’s identity and the freedom to reinvent oneself. Maik Yohansen comes to mind, alongside Olena Stiazhkina and Volodymyr Rafeienko, contemporary writers who became linguistic converts to Ukrainian after Russia occupied their native city of Donetsk. For decades, Ukrainian identity in the east has been not a default setting but a choice, often made against the grain of one’s upbringing. Today, this choice is existential. Even those Ukrainians who are still unable to sever the linguistic cord which ties them to the enemy are unwilling to pass the Russian language to their children. The next generation will speak Ukrainian across the country.

Go ahead and learn a handful of Ukrainian words. The first thing you’ll notice is that the Ukrainian words for YES and NO are not the same as the Russian words.

Free Ukrainian Course

[wherepond]

Sergey Karaganov Ukraine total capitulation

Sergey Karaganov told Steve Rosenberg 'best possible outcome is Ukraine's total capitulation'

The BBC’s Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg has been speaking to political scientist and former Kremlin advisor Sergey Karaganov.

While US President Donald Trump pushes Russia and Ukraine for a ceasefire, influential voices in Moscow are calling on the Russian authorities to adopt a hard line. Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested he is ready for a halt in fighting but says "there are nuances" - which he laid out talks with US envoy Steve Witkoff at the Kremlin on Thursday. From the start of this war, Putin has demanded the "demilitarisation" of Ukraine, which is anathema to Kyiv and its allies.

[albertcamuesli]

Reading Russia, 5 august 2024, Steve Rosenberg

[indizombie]

The Orlov trial has sparked international condemnation. The Council of Europe, Europe's oldest political organisation which aims to uphold democracy and human rights across the continent, denounced the case as "a travesty of justice". "The [Russian] government wants to control the thoughts of people. It wishes to have only opinions that are in agreement with their policies, even when it comes to deciding to start a war," the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic tells me. "It's important that the messages coming from all of us who are monitoring what is going on in Russia are strong and clear that this is unacceptable."

Steve Rosenberg, ‘Ukraine war: Oleg Orlov faces jail time for criticising Putin's war’, BBC