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When Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina left Russia in April this year, she went to Iceland, essentially a political refugee. She had been repeatedly arrested since early 2021, on specious charges – “violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules”, social media activity, attending a demonstration in support of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
She is no longer in Iceland, and speaks to me, as her fellow Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova did earlier this year, from an unnamed location. But she resists any phrases that dramatise her situation – persecution, flight, exile, escape – preferring a hard-boiled statement of the facts. “I was arrested, many times – and not just arrests. I was under a travel ban, I had a red flag on the border for two years, I had to find a way to tour. The heads of the political Moscow police were quite often trying to go to my house, speak with my mother, catch me there.” She describes the trigger event for her departure: the news that she was about to be moved from house arrest to a prison.
So she hasn’t fled; she has found a way to go on tour, living in a van, raising money any which way, through spoken word, performance art, merchandise, NFTs. “I understand there was a big noise about my so-called escape, but I don’t have any plans for emigration. I just want to help Ukraine and that’s it.” She made €10,000 selling T-shirts and sent the money to a Ukrainian children’s hospital. Alyokhina and her girlfriend, Lucy Shtein, also from Pussy Riot, have made an NFT using the ankle tags from their house arrest, melted and turned into digital art: “They’re our trophies from the fight with the Russian government. We believe those fetters will be gone.”
She is absolutely trenchant on one point, which she returns to often and has said on stage, in interviews, online: Putin must be tried as a war criminal. “Without an international trial for Putin, it is just unfair to pretend that Russia can exist like before. There has to be an international judgment for this. Without the understanding that Putin is a terrorist and a criminal, it will just be more blood. More dead bodies. More raped women.”
Ukraine plans a "million-strong army" equipped with Nato weapons to retake the south of the country from occupying Russians, the defence minister says.
Retaking the areas around the Black Sea coast was vital to the country's economy, Oleksii Reznikov said.
However, the comments are more of a rallying cry than a concrete plan, says the BBC's Joe Inwood in Kyiv.
In his interview with The Times newspaper, Mr Reznikov praised the UK for being "key" in the transition from providing Ukraine with Soviet-era weapons to Nato-standard air defence systems and ammunition.
He said weapons deliveries needed to be sped up.
"We need more, quickly, to save the lives of our soldiers. Each day we're waiting for howitzers, we can lose a hundred soldiers," he said.
"We have approximately 700,000 in the armed forces and when you add the national guard, police, border guard, we are around a million strong," the defence minister said.
Senior-level Ukrainian officers have been studying in the US state of Kansas, thousands of miles from Russia's invasion and the battlefields of Donbas.
Outside the Fort Leavenworth army base, wheat fields are starting to turn. Wide, open prairie land, with softly rolling hills, stretches for miles, and the sky is huge.
This quintessentially Kansas landscape has become the backdrop for generations of international soldiers, who head to the US base to receive strategic training.
Ukraine's deputy interior minister, Anton Herashchenko, has remarked on its similarities to the landscape of Donbas, in the country's heavily-contested east.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby says the same: "That part of Ukraine is a bit like Kansas, so it's a little bit flatter, it's a little bit more open," he told media during a press briefing.
Fort Leavenworth has proved to be a valuable training ground for dozens of Ukrainian soldiers over the past several decades, who spend a year studying at the base's US Army Command and General Staff College.
Today, experts say, the knowledge they gain there is helping Ukrainians mount a fierce defence of their country - in part because of the contrast between the flexibility of American military coursework and the rigid Soviet-style education given to Russian soldiers.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, international training for the Ukrainian troops has been stepped up. Some of them have gone to the UK for driving lessons for armoured vehicles. Others are in Poland, learning how to operate weapons systems provided by the US. But their numbers at Leavenworth have remained consistent with years in the past, Mr Fain said.
The training they receive at Fort Leavenworth focuses on war theory, ethics and other aspects of the modern military, in sharp contrast to the Soviet-style training that has been used in Russia, according to experts.
"Soviet education was all about subordination, and it discouraged independent thinking," said Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. "At Leavenworth, the emphasis is on an analytical approach. It creates military specialists who are true intellectuals".
Professors at Leavenworth describe the Soviet model of military training as rigid and authoritarian. One of them, Mahir Ibrahimov, 66, knows first-hand: He studied at a Soviet military school in the 1970s.
Soviet instructors "would stand next to you until you learned," he said - and if you didn't, "they would just hit the desk," he added, making a hard, swiping motion with his arm. "Sometimes you would be hit".
Eiköhän noi kyrvät päätä jostain siviilikohteen pommituksesta. Lastentarha tai vastaava.Duuma kokoontumassa ylimääräiseen istuntoon, mitäköhän jännää keksineet?
The lower house of parliament said the council was to meet on Monday due to "issues that require urgent solutions" and the need to consider "government initiatives". It gave no further details.
At the scheduled start of the council meeting, there was no public live translation on the meeting and no agenda was published, Reuters reporters said.
Russian parliament mulls extraordinary meeting
The Russian parliament's organising council was due to meet on Monday to decide on calling an extraordinary meeting of parliament on July 15, but it was not immediately clear what was to be discussed.www.reuters.com
Jutussa sanotaan että siellä päätetään 15. päivän tapaamisesta, eli ei vielä varmaan mitään.Duuma kokoontumassa ylimääräiseen istuntoon, mitäköhän jännää keksineet?
The lower house of parliament said the council was to meet on Monday due to "issues that require urgent solutions" and the need to consider "government initiatives". It gave no further details.
At the scheduled start of the council meeting, there was no public live translation on the meeting and no agenda was published, Reuters reporters said.
Russian parliament mulls extraordinary meeting
The Russian parliament's organising council was due to meet on Monday to decide on calling an extraordinary meeting of parliament on July 15, but it was not immediately clear what was to be discussed.www.reuters.com
Varmasti ymmärrän tämän. Nyt olisikin hyvä aloittaa viestintäkampanja myös niiden maiden suuntaan, mistä on eniten sitä tunkua luvassa. Ettei Eurooppa siis näyttäytyisi heille enää aivan niin houkuttelevana vaihtoehtona. Tyyliin: Onko nälkä? Onko lämmin? Jos vastasit molempiin kyllä, säästä rahasi ja mieti vielä matkaan lähtöä, sillä Euroopassa luvassa on, kiitos paskan naapurimme, parhaassakin tapauksessa ehkä minimiannos yksinkertaista ruokaa, mutta tulevina talvina tulee olemaan KYLMÄ (kiitos taas paskan naapurimme). Haluatko siis riskeerata terveytesi, varallisuutesi ja kaiken, mitä sinulla nyt on, vain palellaksesi vieraassa maassa nälissäsi ilman kunnon tulevaisuutta.Tässä pitää nyt ymmärtää että niillä alueilla, joihin Ukrainan viljantulon tyrehtyminen iskee kovimmin, on sellainenkin asia kuin juokseva vesi noituuteen verrattava ihme. Täällä huuhdellaan vessanpöntöt juomavedellä. Ei sieltä tulijat lopu jos olot kurjistuvat. Nyt olisi aikaa vielä ehkäistä nälkä mutta tiedän etteivät kansalaisjärjestöt ryhdy toimiin ennen kuin nälkä julistetaan. Ja sitten on jo myöhäistä. Siinä taas vähän YK:ta...
Sitten pitää yhä muistuttaa että makrotasolla Afrikka ruokkii kyllä edelleen itsensä ja nälkätilanteet ovat verrattain paikallisia ja usein, kuten nyt Etiopiassa, muutenkin man made.
Ilmeisesti se SU-35 pudotus oli ankka. Yhtään konetta ei olla pudotettu nyt useampaan viikkoon.