"Same old boss": You're lost in Russified Whataboutistan. If you see little difference between living in the rule of law West in Vienna and its authoritarian enemies, you might visit Soros-founded Central European University in Vienna and ask why it had to relocate from kleptocrat Orban's Budapest. https://medium.com/extra-extra/tiki-torcherer-tuckers-hungarian-rhapsody-8ffdd7c4e81c
You might also try living six months in a small town in North Korea and then its equivalent in South Korea, assuming you don't die of starvation or get deported to a labor camp. Or try six months in Venezuela and then six months in Colombia, or six months in Cuba (without your $ or euros) and then six months in Panama or Costa Rica.
"Putin is not Hitler": True, but not yet. Hitler wasn't fully Hitler until after December 1941. That Putin isn't Hitler doesn't mean his war isn't genocidal by Raphael Lemkin's legal definition. Hitler didn't have to give direct orders for the Wannsee Conference to lay out the regime's genocidal plans for the Jews. So your requirement that a document with a direct order be produced to prove genocidal war crimes--like the mass deportation of children--is nonsense under the law. https://snyder.substack.com/p/russias-eugenic-war
If you don't support Ukraine, you support Russia's Ukraine erasure project--its non-existence, which defines you as a genocide apologist like NYT correspondent Walter Duranty in the Holodomor. I'm with Gareth Jones.
The Russians translated on Russia Media Monitor: Mardan, Simonyan, Solovyev, Kiselyev, Medvedev and the rest of the Russia channel 1 crowd whose ventriloquist is Putin. Anyone else is sampling error. In turning Russia into a gigantic North Korea, Putin has made Russia monolithic. Interpret yesterday's arrest of Boris Kagarlitsky in this light. Russia is transitioning from merely authoritarian to totalitarian--Putin's neo-Stalinist wet dream.
Here's why Prigozhin's troll farm staff were popping champagne corks the day after the 2016 election. This is from Jane Mayer's 2018 NYer article with the data on microtargeting and the fake intelligence that was the source of Comey's reopening the Clinton emails investigation ten days before the election that swung it to Trump:
"Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory....
"if you take Comey at his word that the fake intelligence drove his decision to publicly censor Clinton in the first place—there are skeptics who suspect that Comey’s grandstanding moralism was a bigger factor—then “it probably was the most measurable” and “the most significant way in which the Russians may have impacted the outcome of the election.”
Polls suggest the likely impact. According to the Web site FiveThirtyEight, at midnight on October 28, 2016, the day Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation, Clinton was ahead of Trump by 5.9 per cent. A week later, her lead had shrunk to 2.9 per cent. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, has noted that, during this time, coverage of the Clinton e-mail investigation dominated the news, “drowning out other headlines.” According to researchers at Microsoft, the Times ran as many front-page stories on the e-mails that week as it ran front-page stories about the candidates’ policy proposals in the final few months of the campaign. Silver concluded that all the talk about Clinton’s e-mails may have shifted the race by as much as four points, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida to Trump, and possibly North Carolina and Arizona, too.
Jamieson, ever the social scientist, emphasizes in her book that there is much that Americans still don’t know about the campaign, including the detailed targeting information that would clarify exactly whom the Russian disinformation was aimed at, and when it was sent. She told me, “We need to know the extent to which the Russians targeted the three key states, and which citizens’ voting patterns differed substantially from the ones you would have predicted in the past.”
Philip Howard, the Oxford professor, believes that Facebook possesses this data, down to the location of a user’s computer, and that such information could conceivably reveal whether an undecided voter was swayed after viewing certain content. He also thinks that, if there was any collusion between the St. Petersburg trolls and the Trump campaign, Facebook’s internal data could document it, by revealing coördination on political posts. But, he says, Facebook has so far resisted divulging such data to researchers, claiming that doing so would be a breach of its user agreement.
Even if this targeting information were released, though, questions would remain. Jamieson notes that postelection interviews are often unhelpful, since few voters are able to accurately recount what influenced their decision. Scholars know even less about nonvoters. As a result, she writes in “Cyberwar,” efforts to make an “ironclad” case will be “thwarted by unknowns.” Nevertheless, her book concludes that “Russian trolls and hackers helped elect a US president.”
Watching Russia closely: I took my first Russian history course at Georgetown in 1972 with Prof. David Goldfrank, later president of the Slavic and Eastern European Studies Association. I've been to Moscow and St Petersburg four times from 2015-17 and speak conversational Russian. I learned about the Soviet regime from my UCLA classmate Michael Gelb who studied the Stalin party purges' national operations in Soviet archives in Leningrad in 1983 and the Russian wife he came home with.
Clear evidence: https://www.thereckoningproject.com/
Why the mass graves and eyewitness testimony in Bucha, Irpin, Izyum and Mariupol aren't good enough evidence
for you is beyond my understanding. Why the looted art museums of Kherson and Melitopol aren't sufficient evidence of Russia's ambition to erase Ukrainians culture is also a mystery to me. Why the mass deportations and Russification of unorphaned Ukrainian children is insufficient proof of Russia's Ukraine erasure intentions is also a mystery to me. Why the huge mass of evidence on justsecurity.org's Russia's eliminationist rhetoric link isn't sufficient proof is also a mystery. Read what their entire leadership says. They're more open about it than the Germans were 80 years ago.
But this war will generate its David Irvings just like WWII did.
Obama calling Ukraine not a strategic interest of the US was a product of the neo-colonial prejudice that assumed that Ukraine's existence was contingent and negotiable, while Russia and its sphere of influence in its near abroad was permanent. Tim Snyder has done an effective vivisection of where this comes from.
