TIG Post

Tag: Soviet Union

  • Released Russian arms dealer Bout now an ultranationalist party member

    Viktor Bout was released from a 25-year US prison sentence last week in exchange for basketball star Brittney Griner.

    According to the party’s leader, a Kremlin loyalist, Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was released from US custody last week in a prisoner swap for American basketball star Brittney Griner, has joined the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR).

    On Monday, LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky said on Telegram that “the Liberal Democratic Party’s party card” had been “personally handed” to Bout.

    “I am sure that Viktor Bout – a strong-willed and courageous person – will take a worthy place in it. Welcome to our ranks!,” he wrote in a post that included a picture of the two men.

    Founded in 1991, the LDPR espouses a hardline, ultranationalist ideology that demands Russia reconquer the countries of the former Soviet Union.

    It has been one of the most vehement supporters of the invasion of Ukraine, often calling for a more severe approach from Moscow.

    In recent years, the party has assumed a subordinate role in Russia’s political system but provides token opposition to the ruling United Russia bloc while remaining aligned with the Kremlin on most issues.

    Bout returned to Russia on December 8 after being released from a 25-year prison term in exchange for Griner, who was arrested in mid-February after officials at Moscow airport when cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage.

    Griner, who the US State Department has said was “wrongfully detained”, was sentenced to nine years in prison in August.

    Bout had been arrested by US authorities in Thailand in 2008, with prosecutors charging that his extensive arms smuggling in hotspots across the world amounted to material support of “terrorism”. The Kremlin has maintained the arrest was politically motivated.

    Dubbed the “merchant of death”, Bout has also been implicated in violating or contributing to violating UN arms embargoes in Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

    The prisoner swap came during the ninth month of Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, a conflict that tanked already strained ties between Washington and Moscow and complicated release negotiations.

    In Russia, Bout’s release was viewed as a victory for Moscow.

    Meanwhile, the administration of US President Joe Biden faced criticism for agreeing to the exchange, with detractors citing the disparity in the severity of charges against Bout and Griner.

    Biden critics were particularly upset that US officials were unable to secure the release of Paul Whelan, a former marine serving a 16-year sentence for alleged espionage in Russia, in the deal.

    The LDPR has a history of recruiting controversial personalities into Russian politics, with its founder and long-time leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky gaining a reputation as a political showman for his outrageous stunts and eccentric behaviour before his death in April.

    In 2007, Andrey Lugovoy a former KGB agent wanted in Britain for the murder the previous year of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, was elected to parliament for the LDPR.

    In his first interview since his release, Bout told the state-run Russia Today channel that the West sought to “destroy and divide Russia” in the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

  • In the midst of a war crisis, Putin prays for his health as he turns 70

    On Friday, President Vladimir Putin celebrated his 70th birthday with the adoring greetings of his subordinates and a request from Orthodox Patriarch Kirill for everyone to pray for the well-being of the most powerful man in Russia since Josef Stalin.

    Putin is facing the biggest challenge of his rule after the invasion of Ukraine triggered the gravest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. His army there is reeling from a series of defeats in the past month.

    Officials hailed Putin as the saviour of modern Russia while the patriarch of Moscow and all of Russia implored the country to say two days of special prayers so that God grants Putin “health and longevity”.

    “We pray to you, our Lord God, for the head of the Russian state, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and ask you to give him your rich mercy and generosity, grant him health and longevity, and deliver him from all the resistances of visible and invisible enemies, confirm him in wisdom and spiritual strength, for all, Lord hear and have mercy,” Kirill said.

    Putin, who promised to end the chaos which gripped Russia after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, is facing the most serious military crisis any Kremlin chief has faced for at least a generation since the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979-89.

    Opponents such as jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny say that Putin has led Russia down a dead end towards ruin, building a brittle system of incompetent sycophants that will ultimately collapse and bequeath chaos.

    Supporters say Putin saved Russia from destruction by an arrogant and aggressive West.

    “Today, our national leader, one of the most influential and outstanding personalities of our time, the number one patriot in the world, president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, turns 70 years old,” Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said.

    “Putin has changed the global position of Russia and forced the world to reckon with the position of our great state.”

    More than seven months into the invasion, Russia has suffered huge losses in men and equipment and been beaten back on several fronts within the past month as Putin’s army has lurched from one humiliation to the next.

    Putin has resorted to proclaiming the annexation of territories only partly under Russian control – and whose borders the Kremlin has said are yet to be defined – and threatening to defend them with nuclear weapons.

    A partial mobilisation declared by the president on September 21 has unfolded so chaotically that even Putin has been forced to admit mistakes and order changes. Hundreds of thousands of men have fled abroad to avoid being called up.

    Even normally loyal Kremlin allies have denounced the failings of the military – though they have stopped short, so far, of criticising the president.

    Putin finds himself confronted with a resurgent, united, and expanding NATO despite his insistence that the “special operation” in Ukraine was aimed at enforcing Russian “red lines” and preventing the alliance from moving closer to Russia’s borders.

    Signs of disquiet have emerged from China and India, on which Russia is increasingly reliant as geopolitical and economic partners in the wake of successive waves of Western sanctions.

    Reflecting on Putin’s birthday, former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov said: “On an anniversary, it’s customary, to sum up, results, but the results are so deplorable that it would be better not to draw too much attention to the anniversary.”

     

    History lessons

    Putin has dominated Russia for nearly 23 years since being handpicked by President Boris Yeltsin as his preferred successor in a surprise announcement on New Year’s Eve 1999.

    Changes adopted to the constitution in 2020 paved the way for him to rule potentially until 2036, and there is no obvious frontrunner to succeed him.

    He maintains a full schedule of meetings and public events and invariably appears in control of his brief, holding forth at length in video conferences on topics ranging from energy to education. The Kremlin has denied recurrent speculation about alleged health problems.

    As he has grown older, Putin has appeared increasingly preoccupied with his legacy. In June he compared his actions in Ukraine with the campaigns of Tsar Peter the Great, suggesting both of them were engaged in historic quests to win back Russian lands.

    Putin has become increasingly fond of quoting Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who argued that Russia had an exceptional mystical and holy path to follow that would ultimately restore order to an imperfect world.

    In a televised encounter with teachers this week, Putin showed a keen interest in another episode from history – an 18th-century peasant revolt against Empress Catherine the Great – that he blamed on “the weakness of central authority in the country”.

    From the man who has dominated Russia for more than two decades, it sounded as though a lesson had been taken to heart: faced with the possibility of rebellion, the ruler needs to be both strong and vigilant.

     

  • Who are the Novel Peace Prize winners?

    We reported earlier that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to the jailed Belarus human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian group Memorial and the Ukrainian organisation, Centre for Civil Liberties.

    The honour will be widely seen as a rebuke to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who is celebrating his 70th birthday, and his Moscow ally Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko.

    Here, we take a look at the winners:

    Jailed Belarus human rights activist Ales Bialiatski

    Mr Bialiatski, 60, was one of the leaders of the democracy movement in Belarus in the mid-1980s and has continued to campaign for human rights and civil liberties in the authoritarian country.

    He founded the non-governmental organisation, Human Rights Centre Viasna, and won the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes referred to as the “Alternative Nobel”, in 2020.

    The human rights activist was sentenced to three years in prison in 2011 after being convicted on tax evasion charges – accusations which he denies.

    He was detained again in 2020 following anti-government protests that year and remains in jail without trial.

    The Russian group Memorial

    Memorial was founded in the Soviet Union in 1987 to ensure the victims of communist repression would be remembered and was initially led by the famous Soviet dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov.

    For over 30 years, the group exposed human rights abuses in the country at the hands of the government.

    It has continued to compile information on human rights abuses in Russia and tracked the fate of political prisoners in the country.

    Tatyana Glushkova, a board member of the Memorial human rights defence Centre, noted that the award was handed to the group on the day when it once again had to appear in court in Moscow — this time on a case related to its office building in central Moscow.

    International Memorial owned the building, but after the group was shut down, it gave the building to one of its affiliate organisations.

    Russian authorities are contesting the deal in court, and the prosecutor general’s office filed a motion to invalidate it.

    Memorial considers the move an attempt to seize the building and hinder the organisation’s operation.

    Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties 

    The group was founded in 2007 to promote human rights and democracy in Ukraine during a period of turmoil in the country.

    It has played a pioneering role in holding guilty parties accountable for their crimes.

    Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the group has worked to document Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians.

    It has continued to play a pioneering role in holding guilty parties accountable for their crimes.

    Following the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, a representative of the group, Volodymyr Yavorskyi, said the award was important for the organisation because “for many years we worked in a country that was invisible”.

    DISCLAIMER: Independentghana.com will not be liable for any inaccuracies contained in this article. The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author’s and do not reflect those of The Independent Ghana

    Source: Skynews