Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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They're having a conversation with themselves.
We can do that too.
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Russians hunt down and murder influential Ukrainians to neutralize resistance
'We will find you:' Russians hunt down Ukrainians on lists
By ERIKA KINETZ https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-3ae1bccfb0ef34dbe363f
7c289ce7934
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Three days after the first Russian bombs struck Ukraine, Andrii Kuprash, the head of a village north of Kyiv, walked into a forest near his home and began to dig. He didn’t stop until he had carved out a shallow pit, big enough for a man like him. It was his just-in-case, a place to lie low if he needed.
He covered it with branches and went back home.
A week later, Kuprash got a call around 8 a.m. from an unknown number. A man speaking Russian asked if he was the village head. Something was amiss.
“No, you’ve got the wrong number,” Kuprash lied. “We will find you anyway,” the man responded. “It’s better to cooperate with us.’” Kuprash grabbed some camping kit and his warmest coat and headed for his hole in the woods.
Kuprash — and others The Associated Press spoke with — had been quietly warned that they were targets for advancing Russian forces. Word went round in circles of influential Ukrainians: Don’t sleep in your own home. Get rid of your phone. Get out of Ukraine.
The hunt was on.
In a deliberate, widespread campaign, Russian forces systematically targeted influential Ukrainians, nationally and locally, to neutralize resistance through detention, torture and executions, an Associated Press investigation has found. The strategy appears to violate the laws of war and could help build a case for genocide.
Russian troops hunted Ukrainians by name, using lists prepared with the help of their intelligence services. In the crosshairs were government officials, journalists, activists, veterans, religious leaders and lawyers.
The AP documented a sample of 61 cases across Ukraine, drawing on Russian lists of names obtained by Ukrainian authorities, photographic evidence of abuse, Russian media accounts and interviews with dozens of victims, family and friends, and Ukrainian officials and activists.
Some victims were held at detention sites, where they were interrogated, beaten and subjected to electric shocks, survivors said. Some ended up in Russia. Others died.
In three cases, Russians tortured people into informing on others. In three other cases, Russians seized family members, including a child, to exert pressure. The pattern was similar across the country, according to testimonies AP collected from occupied and formerly occupied territories around Kyiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv and Donetsk regions.
“Clearly what you have here is the playbook of an authoritarian regime that wants to immediately decapitate the area and eliminate the leadership,” said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues who is advising Ukraine on prosecutions.
The lists are part of growing evidence that shows much of the violence in Ukraine was planned rather than random. Russia has used brutality as a strategy of war, conceived and implemented within the command structures of its military and intelligence services. The Associated Press has also documented patterns of violence against civilians, including lethal “cleansing operations” along a front of the war commanded by a Russian general implicated in war crimes in Syria.
Led by the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russian intelligence spent months compiling hit lists before the Feb. 24 invasion, according to leaked U.S. intelligence and U.K. national security analysts.
Ukrainian intelligence indicates that the division of Russia’s spy agency tasked with planning the subjugation and occupation of Ukraine — the Ninth Directorate of the FSB’s Fifth Service — scaled up sharply in the summer of 2021. Agents categorized influential Ukrainians as either potential collaborators or unreliable elements to be intimidated or killed, according to the Royal United Services Institute, a prominent defense think tank in London.
“This political stra
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For Andrei Soldatov and his friends, February 24 marked the end of Russia as they knew it.
Soldatov said he had begun to question his own identity. “The things we held dear, like the memory of the Second World War, for instance, became completely compromised,” he said, referring to Putin’s baseless claim that Russian forces are “denazifying” Ukraine.
“It’s part of the Russian national identity that the Russian army helped to win the war (against Hitler’s Germany) and now it feels absolutely wrong because this message was used by Putin. You start questioning the history,” he said, adding that the favorable reaction by some parts of the Russian society to the invasion prompted him to research pre-war rhetoric in Germany.
Speaking about Russians as “us” had begun to feel wrong because he deeply disagreed with Russia’s actions, he said. But saying “Russians” didn’t seem right either. “Because of course, I’m Russian, I also have some partial responsibility for what is going on and I do not want to hide from it.”
More at https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/europe/russian-opposition-ukraine-war-i
ntl-cmd/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Berzina said that the expectation of some in the West – that “once people start feeling as though their leaders are doing wrong, that there is an immediate wave of protests on the streets and call for government change that actually has an effect” – does not reflect the reality of life in Russia.
“The Putin regime has done a very good job of either forcing out or imprisoning all viable alternatives that are of the more democratic fashion and then on the other side you have fear of going out into the streets if there’s no clear path forward,” she said.
Olga, the woman who lives in Moscow and has regularly attended protests against the war, has also lost hope.
“Almost all opposition leaders and opinion leaders are now either in prison or abroad. People have a huge potential for political action, but there is no leader and no power base,” she said, adding that civilians will not come out against the armed police, the National Guard, and other security forces.
“It is probably difficult for people from democratic countries to understand the realities of life in a powerful autocracy,” she said. “It’s a terrifying feeling of one’s own insignificance and helplessness in front of a gigantic machine of death and madness.”
More at https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/europe/russian-opposition-ukraine-war-i
ntl-cmd/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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*yawn*
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Key Takeaways DECEMBER 27
• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that the Kremlin will continue to pursue a military solution to the war until the US accepts its demands and forces Ukraine to do the same.
• Lavrov stated that Russia is unable to work on any agreements with the West due to its supposed provocative actions.
• The Kremlin will likely continue information operations to seek to compel the West to offer preemptive concessions and pressure Ukraine to negotiate.
• The Kremlin is increasingly integrating select milbloggers into its information campaigns, likely in an effort to regain a dominant narrative within the information space.
• Ukrainian forces have likely made more gains in northeast Ukraine than ISW has previously assessed.
• Russian forces may be nearing culmination in the Bakhmut area amid continuing Russian offensive operations there and in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.
• Russian forces are maintaining their fortification efforts in southern Ukraine.
• The Kremlin is continuing its efforts to publicly punish deserters and saboteurs.
• Russian officials are intensifying efforts to deport children from occupied territories to Russia.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-december-27
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Sure they are. 
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:Ukrainian children have undergone medical examinations by Russia. 70 percent were told they are in need of "special medical care" and need to be relocated to Russia for treatment. These deportations lure children's families to Russia to take their children back home after medical treatment. But Russian officials prevent families returning to Ukraine, forcing them to stay in Russia. Russian officials are conducting a deliberate depopulation campaign in occupied Ukrainian territories.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Sure they are.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-deporting-ukraine-children-deliberate-
depopulation-effort-isw-1762550
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Man. I wish Mexico would do that to Mexicans.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Henry Kissinger is Wrong About Preserving Russia Post War
A recent essay by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger expressing trepidation about an "impotent" Russia on a global scale continues to draw condemnation.
The essay, titled "How to Avoid Another World War" and published earlier this month in The Spectator, compares the current Russia-Ukraine conflict to World War I. Kissinger argues that Russia's "historical role should not be degraded" even with its "propensity for violence," adding that peace should be achieved through negotiation. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-push-for-peace/
Kissinger's words drew a response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said the former Cabinet member in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations is looking at the wrong calendar and not taking Ukraine's interests into proper consideration.
On Wednesday, advisor, author and political science professor Julian Lindley-French issued a rebuke to Kissinger's essay—notably how Russia as it currently stands must be maintained for the "global equilibrium."
"What I do not understand is Kissinger's implication that we need to maintain THIS radically, revisionist, wrecker-ball Russia because if not the worsening disequilibrium in the international system will only get worse," Lindley-French wrote in a blog post. "That begs a question Kissinger fails to answer: how can an over-armed failing state the very ethos of which is the exploitation and undermining of the rules-based system be convinced to become a pillar of said system?"
While Kissinger related the current war to pre-1917 Europe, Lindley-French calls his comparison a "paradox," arguing that it "was the last time that Russia made any pretense to be a paragon of a rules-based order."
Kissinger called that war "cultural suicide" in his essay. Lindley-French said the consequences of said war "were more strategic and political than cultural."
And while Kissinger said former President Woodrow Wilson delayed peace talks that cost millions of lives in the process, Lindley-French said Wilson and his aides never really made a genuine attempt at all — comparing such alleged olive branches to recent ones made by Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov, referred to by the author as "the cynicism of the ploy."
"Serious negotiations over Ukraine can only begin when Russia acknowledges its errors and its failure and Moscow is convinced of both Western unity and power," Lindley-French said.
Lindley-French's post was praised by retired U.S. Army Commanding General Ben Hodges, who said Kissinger's assessment "got it mostly wrong."
"We must see Putin's Russia for what it is...and preserve the international rules-based order Russia wants to destroy," Hodges tweeted.
Kissinger is right to believe Russia will eventually come to its senses and that nobody should seek to "dismember" the nation, Lindley-French added, but that time hasn't arrived.
"Kissinger is simply wrong to believe that Putin's Russia or any Russia like it can ever be a partner in preserving global equilibrium when it is so determined to destroy it," Lindley-French said.
In May while speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kissinger said that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia.
https://www.newsweek.com/henry-kissinger-wrong-preserving-russia-post-
war-1770041
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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