Kernel Developer Dmitry Monakhov Arrested For Protesting Ukraine Invasion 205
sfcrazy (1542989) writes, based on a report from Ted T'so, that Kernel developer Dmitry Monakhov was detained for 15 days for disobeying a police officer. The debacle came about when Monakhov decided to protest the recent invasion into Ukraine by Russian armed forces.
Monakhov is using Twitter to keep people informed about his experience with the Russian judicial system; a human translator can probably do a better job than Google in this case.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:2, Informative)
My second purpose today is to provide you with additional information, to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as well as Iraq's involvement in terrorism, which is also the subject of resolution 1441 and other earlier resolutions.
Colin Powell, 4 Feb 2003. (Senior fucking guy in NATO)
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/05/iraq.usa
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:4, Informative)
You mean these satellite images [cnn.com]? The ones that have the following quotes attached to them?
This is an extremely misleading way to phrase things. Krasnodon is not just "in eastern Ukraine". It's right on the border. So being near it can also mean in Russia. The above comments from NATO mean nothing, assuming CNN is reporting them accurately. What about the others .... hmm let's see.
Image 2 is from inside Russia and they say so. Image 3 is also in Russia. Image 5 is captioned twice, once with "Russian self propelled artillery unit inside Ukraine" and again, but this time it's again "near Krasnodon", which is practically in Russia. If there's an obviously demarcated border in this area it's hard to see based on the Google satellite images. The last image doesn't even claim to be of anything in particular, the caption is merely summarising story in general.
Both Russian and Ukranian troops appear to regularly cross the border without realising it - there have been repeated reports of Ukrainian forces entering Russia and then being redirected back across the border, with no obvious blowback. Given these things, and the fact that western media is in full-blown propaganda mode and not even hiding it, I'm going to want way stronger evidence than this.
But honestly, even if Russia did invade, this would merely make it on par with the USA and UK, both countries that practically revel in invading other countries and wading into other countries civil wars. So a part of me couldn't get too excited even if it did happen. It's definitely NOT worth a serious, major conflict between Russia and the west.
Re:Which Invasion? (Score:5, Informative)
Russia had plausible deniability by only supplying things like T-64s to the rebels, but as the rebels were losing it seems Putin couldn't accept that and now there are numerous photos of T-72BMs in the Ukraine and the Russian military is the only military in the world to have access to and operate these:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl... [bbc.co.uk]
Similarly, Russian mothers are beginning to ask why their sons are coming back in coffins due to unexplained deaths from a "training exercise" on the Ukrainian border, and where reporters attending their funerals are attacked by mobs that have nothing to do with the funerals in question but magically turn up at them to keep journalists away all the same. Then of course there's the actual Russian soldiers who were outright captured in Ukraine:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com]
Of course, we have history, just this year too, where Crimea was filled with "rebels" who Putin eventually admitted were Russian soldiers, so it's obviously well within Putin's realm of willingness to pass of serving soldiers as civilians until their mission is complete, which, by the way, is a war crime for what it's worth - yes, that's right, admitting this tactic makes Putin a self-admitted war criminal.
When MH-17 was shot down, and it was just T-64s and modern machine guns the rebels had it seemed a bit of a stretch, yet still plausible that this was just a rag tag bunch of individuals fighting on behalf of Russia. Now, with more recent evidence you'd have to be exceptionally retarded to not recognise that Russia is very clearly in the Ukraine with full serving units (hell, the 10 captured soldiers prove that as an outright fact by itself whether you really believe they were lost or not, you don't just allow your soldiers to stumble into a war zone accidentally unless you want them to end up in a potential fight). This is why the tide of battle has changed too from being strongly in the Ukrainian military's favour to now being in the Russia's favour - the Ukrainians are no longer fighting relatively lightly armed insurgents, they're fighting full blown armoured battalions backed up by professionally precision launched artillery strikes all of a sudden - that doesn't just get organised out of nowhere by rebels in a couple of cut off towns with little remaining access to the outside world and dwindling numbers, that requires state level planning, implementation, and financing over an extended period of time to implement - i.e. it requires a professional army.
At this point the only hope is that enough Russian soldiers are killed such that Russians themselves start asking what the fuck they're doing in someone else's country that has done absolutely nothing wrong to Russia (other than hurting Putin's ego) when there's a simple solution of leaving that country the fuck alone and letting it get on with becoming a modern nation even if it does mean Putin's little big man syndrome takes a knock. Thankfully that already seems to be happening to some degree with the Russian soldier's rights institute that's compiled a list of the 400 dead Russian soldiers it believes have been killed in this war already - putting that into context that's very nearly as many lives as the British have lost in 13 years in Afghanistan so thankfully there is a high cost to Russia for this stupidity, and thankfully it is beginning to be noticed by ordinary Russians themselves.