"the actual numbers": Ian Rons has the numbers, but you choose not to believe them, preferring Baud's Trump-style accounting fraud:
"I looked up Jacques Baud online and discovered that in 2020 he went on Russian state TV to say there is “no history of poisoning by the Russian secret services”, that the Skripals simply had a bad case of “food poisoning” and that Alexei Navalny was poisoned not by the state but by some “mafia” people around him. He wasn’t challenged on any of these controversial claims and, regrettably, the Delingpod interview is in a similar vein.
A key claim made by Baud, both to Delingpole and elsewhere, is that Ukraine’s armed forces have been thoroughly infiltrated by ‘far-right’ ultra-nationalists, and consequently that Russian ‘denazification’ was and is a legitimate Russian goal. Baud cites Reuters as having said there are 102,000 ‘far-right extremists’ in the Ukrainian armed forces, a figure that he appears to have considered ‘too good to check’. The Reuters article in fact says there were 102,000 ‘paramilitary’ soldiers in 2022, which isn’t quite the same as ‘far-right extremists’. The ultimate source for this number, of which Baud is seemingly unaware, is the 2022 edition of IISS’s Military Balance, which makes an estimate of 102,000 troops in the Ukrainian ‘Gendarmerie and Paramilitary’ forces, which consist of the National Guard (60,000) and the Border Guard (42,000).
The National Guard was formed from a core of 33,000 Internal Troops personnel in 2014 and was later expanded to include some volunteer battalions, including the Azov Battalion (with pre-war numbers perhaps approaching 2,500 troops) and the Donbas Battalion (~900), although not the ‘Right Sector’ (~5,000 strong). Of course we know that some members of Azov (at least) are far-right or neo-Nazi, but Baud is essentially making the ludicrous claim that everyone in every unit of the National and Border Guard has ultra-nationalistic, far-right political beliefs.
To smear everyone in the Ukrainian National Guard in this way is like the BBC’s smearing of UKIP as a ‘far-right’ organisation. Even if we just consider the so-called volunteer battalions (perhaps a few thousand in total), the notion that anyone volunteering to defend their country must be ‘far-right’ or ‘ultra-nationalist’ (rather than just patriotic or nationalist) isn’t credible, and it’s notable that James in particular has railed against ginned-up fears of the so-called ‘far-right’ plenty of times in the past – even making reference to this in the same London Calling podcast.
However, let’s try to establish the true extent of far-right ‘infiltration’ of the armed forces of Ukraine. We can do no better than by digging up the only other source that Baud makes reference to, which is a Jerusalem Post article that itself references a George Washington University report focusing on a far-right group called ‘Centuria’ that has supposedly infiltrated the Ukrainian armed forces. Baud calls this ‘disturbing’, but I have to admit I didn’t read the full 93 pages because I was disturbed by a spontaneous fit of giggles halfway down the first page. Perhaps I can illustrate my misgivings with some quotes:
[Centuria …] has attracted multiple members, including [some] now serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine
That’s multiple members – more than one. And some are in the military.
One apparent member of the group […] attended an 11-month Officer Training Course at […] Sandhurst […]. Another apparent member […] attended the 30th International Week held by the German Army Officers’ Academy […] in Dresden
That’s exactly two with a military background."
Baud is a systemic Russian crime denier, as with the Skripal case and the mass graves of Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol. This is, of course, a rerun of the Katyn and Molotov-Ribbentrop pact denial in Russia--airbrushed history at its worst. Nobody in the West with any sense denies the facts and the moral bankruptcy of the OSS/CIA hiring German war criminal scientists and the Catholic Church protecting Nazi war criminals after WWII.
"no good guys"--as on June 23, 1941, the choice is usually between bad vs worse. Remember Churchill's "If Hitler invaded hell, I'd have a good word to say about the devil." In Mariupol in 2014 I echoed Harry Truman's "it's a shame both sides can't lose". In 2022, better Azov than the bombers of the theater with 600 children inside with "dyeti" written on the roof.
Trump's overvaluations: valuing rent controlled apts the same as non-controlled apts and Mar-a-Lago without the restricted development covenant is fraud, full stop. Read what the judge wrote.
"Ukraine has a Nazi problem": then Putin should invade Germany, France, Italy and the USA, all of which have a bigger Nazi problem than Ukraine.
Russia is Muscovy's trojan horse commodity extraction kleptocracy built on five centuries of genocidal conquest of 100+ subjugated indigenous peoples. Deimperializing it with a new parade of sovereignties to finish the job left half done in 1991 is a geopolitical and moral imperative. I speak Russian, am married to a half Russian Latvian citizen, have studied Russian history since 1972 and been there four times. So you can't accuse me of being a Russophobe. My UCLA classmate Michael Gelb, whose PhD research was done in Soviet archives in Leningrad in 1983 about the Stalin party purges' national operations there, has reached the same conclusion. A new parade of sovereignties including Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Kalmykia, Yakutia, Komy, Karelia, Tuva, Buryatia, etc. + Vladivostok and Khabarovsk in an EU style economic union with South Korea and Japan is the best solution for Russia. Ironically it's the Mongol-Turkic part of Russia's hybrid Slavo-Turkic empire that's most oppressed by this resource-cursed Golden Horde tributary governance model that funnels all the revenue to macrocephalic Moscow.
https://www.hudson.org/events/1363-the-kleptocracy-curse102016
