Thousands march around the globe for LGBTQ+ rights and pride | Russia Has a Plan for Ukraine. It Looks Like Chechnya. posted at 11:10:12 UTC by Neil Hauer via Master Feed : The Atlantic
7:43 AM 6/19/2022 - Selected Articles - Michael Novakhov's favorite articles on Inoreader - The News And Times
Thousands marched around the world for LGBTQ+ rights. While 'Pink dot' gay rights rally held in Singapore, Greek and Turkish Cypriots celebrated Pride with dance.
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#ukrainian
image/jpeg wmrq88ym_s.jpgThe constant boom of artillery in the near distance is the defining feature of life in the Donbas today. As Russia presses its offensive to take the eastern part of Ukraine, the signs of conflict are everywhere: buildings smashed to ruins by cruise missiles, Ukrainian tanks and howitzers on the highway headed east. The Donbas region, encompassed by a front stretching hundreds of miles and currently the scene of the most extensive fighting in Europe since World War II, is in total war mode.
The Russian military machine, which has overwhelming superiority in artillery, is grinding forward slowly but surely, conquering an additional kilometer or two a day at immense cost to the defenders. Exhausted Ukrainian soldiers speak of weeks of fighting under relentless bombardment, heavily outgunned by an opposing force that has recovered from its initial blunders and is now fighting the sort of war it was designed for. Under Vladimir Putin’s leadership, Moscow is pushing on eastern Ukraine a fate much like the one it imposed on another unruly former vassal at the start of Putin’s reign: Chechnya.
The Russian plan for Ukraine is grimly apparent from that earlier template. In a years-long conflict, which began more than two decades ago, Putin destroyed a sovereign state and subjugated its people, creating in its place a land of ruin, chaos, and fear. For that same plan to proceed in Ukraine, a country with a population 40 times the size of Chechnya’s, would be exponentially more ruinous.
The plan unfolds in a few set phases. The first is pacification. This comes quickly where it can, and slowly, via obliteration, where it cannot. In Chechnya, the rapid part took place in most of the outlying areas, the towns and villages that dot the once-picturesque Terek River plain, where Russian forces rolled through in late 1999. In the case of Ukraine, the south was easily overrun; the open terrain and insufficient defenses offered little resistance to the Russian advance that swept through cities such as Melitopol and Kherson in the offensive’s first week.
[Read: How Ukraine is upending European politics]
In other areas, the more lightly armed defenders hold out en masse, especially when they are able to utilize the cover of major urban areas. This necessitates the other main Russian tactic. In the Chechen capital, Grozny—whose very name, chosen by a czarist general, means “terrible” in Russian—the level of bombardment rained down upon the defenders from late 1999 to early 2000 was so great as to gut nearly every building in the city. Its vacant shell was assessed by the United Nations as the “most destroyed city on Earth.” In Ukraine, this fate has been visited upon Mariupol: once a handsome and vibrant city reduced under three months of siege to a smoking ruin.
Russian Special Forces enter the village of Bamut, a rebel stronghold in western Chechnya, in May 1996. (Alexander Nemenov / AFP / Getty)Occasionally, of course, the defenders must be reminded that their failure to submit unconditionally entails the most severe consequences—not just for the fighters but for their families too. In Chechnya, Russian troops habitually lined up entire civilian populations of villages or neighborhoods for massacre; in the town of Novye Aldy, for example, at least 60 civilians were summarily executed in February 2000. In the suburbs of Kyiv, such as Bucha, Irpin, and Borodyanka, Russian soldiers similarly demonstrated the price to be exacted for resistance.
Once the Russian conquest is complete, a suitable satrap must be found and empowered to rule the natives. Even the Chechens, a people whose spirit of near-unbreakable resistance inspired Russian writers from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn, offered up a few candidates. Chief among them was Akhmad Kadyrov, the former grand mufti of Ichkeria, as the independent republic was known. His rule was brief, ended by assassination in 2004, but his remarkably brutal son Ramzan, himself a former rebel, proved an effective substitute. In Ukraine, there have been candidates enough in the already occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, and other, newly captured regions have put forward their own: a local thug who sees a chance for advancement under the new boss or a pliant councilwoman who is willing to provide an ersatz sense of normalcy while the occupiers go rooting out the holdouts.
Finally, the establishment of the new order. Of necessity for a time, the locals will be held down by occupation forces, but they must come to obey their own, to be self-sufficient in their repression. A new apparatus of domination will be constructed, one that sees the vanquished take responsibility for crushing the remaining indigenous resistance. Token incentives will be provided: some Potemkin redevelopment in the style of Grozny’s garish neon skyscrapers or its enormous mosque (for a time the largest in Europe).
The traumatized citizens will be taught a new version of their own history, one in which their absorption into Russian vassaldom was entirely voluntary and, in fact, a salvation from “radicals” and “terrorists” who had sought to destroy them. Eventually, the new generation will be brought up with the idea of service to the Russian motherland as a sacrosanct obligation, under the guidance of a leader who renames the capital’s main avenue after the Russian president and regularly declares himself Putin’s “foot soldier.” Military service in the next round of Russia’s imperial conquests will be not only expected but enforced, with conscription drives hauling off young men from these new territories for whatever the next war is.
[Stephen Wertheim: The one key word Biden needs to invoke on Ukraine]
Perhaps the most ominous aspect of this plan is the Russian willingness to wait years, if necessary, to enact it fully—even if a seemingly durable truce delays progress toward that goal with a prolonged pause in military operations. The First Chechen War, in the mid-1990s, did not end in Russian victory. That came later, and only after a debacle that saw Russian troops suffer a humiliating defeat in the second Battle of Grozny in August 1996, when groups of well-coordinated Chechen insurgents infiltrated the city and cut off Russian units trapped inside. The blunders of the first month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were strikingly similar to those of its initial two-year campaign in Chechnya. Back then, we saw the same absurd political expectations of no resistance—Russia’s then–defense minister, Pavel Grachev, famously claimed that he could take Grozny in two hours with a single airborne regiment—and the same phenomenon of confused, demoralized Russian soldiers deserting their vehicles.
The resulting cease-fire agreement, the Khasavyurt Accords, had Russian troops withdraw from most of the republic and even saw Moscow recognize Chechen sovereignty, in a seeming decisive victory for the separatist cause. But Moscow was patient, waiting and watching as the nascent but devastated Chechen state started to rend itself apart. With central authority destroyed by years of war, the republic’s president, Aslan Maskhadov, was unable to establish control over the various militias that had formed and grown in power throughout the war. In this atmosphere of chaos, poverty, and death, the secular nationalist forces that had provided the Ichkeria movement with its initial impetus were shoved aside by the growing influence of right-wing radicals—in this case, Salafist Islamist militants led by the infamous commander Shamil Basayev, as well as foreign ideologues such as the Saudi warlord Ibn al-Khattab.
Child refugees in the Soviet train sleeping car that has become their temporary shelter from the fighting in Chechnya, January 1995. (Peter Turnley / Corbis / Getty)In the meantime, Russia’s reconstituted army and government, under the direction of Prime Minister Putin (during a pro forma break between presidential terms), found a renewed casus belli: a series of bombings of Russian apartment buildings, atrocities widely suspected to have been conducted by Russia’s secret service, the FSB, in a cynical false-flag operation to justify a second invasion. This time, the Russian army used its overwhelming firepower to destroy any Chechen resistance before advancing into Grozny’s ruins.
In Chechnya today, the process is complete; the republic long ago reached the final stage of imperial integration. Behind this apparent settlement, a cosmetic, temporary peace reigns. Grozny’s seemingly prosperous streets and gaudy cafés front a republic of fear, in which militiamen and security officers, both plainclothes and uniformed, rule with impunity. The recent past can be discussed only in whispers: Even around a family dinner table, most Chechens will not risk the slightest criticism of Ramzan Kadyrov, for which they can be arrested, tortured, or worse.
Thirteen years after the declared end of the Second Chechen War and the insurgency that followed, the region continues to produce more refugees than anywhere else in Europe, as people flee the regime’s arbitrary repressions in numbers that have only lately been eclipsed by the movement of refugees from Ukraine. At the same time, a tangible anger bubbles beneath the surface everywhere, a burning hatred toward Kadyrov and his brutal ilk. Nearly all Chechens expect that a third war will one day erupt—with the implicit hope that, this time, Kadyrov will be dragged from his palace to meet a similar end to Muammar Gaddafi’s in Libya.
[Read: The war in Ukraine is just beginning]
Russia’s plan for Ukraine, in the south and the east, is still at an early stage. In the Kherson oblast, captured by Russia in May, plans for a referendum that will either establish a sham independence or join the region to Russia outright are afoot. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have been conquered or carted off into Russia are now being fed the same revisionist history lessons that students in Chechnya have received for two decades already. In another parallel, an insurgency is taking root against the occupiers in the country’s south.
For now, Ukraine’s fate remains in the balance. The nation is much larger than Chechnya, and its people are committed to the struggle. The flow of military aid to Kyiv from the West far outstrips anything the beleaguered rebels of the North Caucasus could count on. Yet the logic of attritional conflict is now on Russia’s side, and Putin’s strategic patience is based on sound precedent. Moscow knows what it wants the outcome of the war in eastern Ukraine to look like, because it will look like Chechnya. Should the West abandon a ravaged Ukraine to a similar fate—a flawed cease-fire leading to a failing state that is prey to a refocused Russian assault—this will be the scenario.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has visited troops on the southern front line. While his army battles a Russsian onslaught in the Donbas region, Ukrainian forces have also been fighting off attempts by Russia to seize more territory near the southern cities of Mykolaiv and Odesa. With little change to front line positions in recent days, the head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, says the war could go on for years.
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#Ukraine #Zelenskyy #Russia
We've known about torture cellars in #Russia-occupied regions since Putin's 2014 invasion of #Ukraine.
8 years of #warcrimes later, Russian re-education camps—in Europe!—torture people for being Ukrainian bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…
WASHINGTON — In a challenge to the FBI’s discriminatory surveillance of three Muslim American men, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the government may assert the state secrets privilege in cases alleging that it engaged in unlawful surveillance.
However, the court took pains to leave open whether the state secrets privilege allows courts to throw out cases alleging unlawful surveillance simply because the government invokes national security. The case will now go back to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to address that question.
“The Supreme Court today refused the government’s invitation to extinguish our clients' religious discrimination claims simply because the government invokes ‘state secrets,’” said Peter Bibring, senior counsel with ACLU of Southern California. “The decision allows our clients to continue to fight in lower courts for their right to hold the FBI accountable for its discriminatory surveillance of Muslim Americans.”
The case stems from an FBI operation in 2006 and 2007 in which agents sent a paid informant to some of the largest, most diverse mosques in Orange County, California and instructed him to pose as a convert to Islam.
The FBI informant indiscriminately gathered names, telephone numbers, and email addresses, as well as information on the religious and political beliefs of hundreds of Muslim Americans who were exercising their constitutional right to religious freedom. Community members became increasingly concerned about the informant’s behavior, and ultimately reported him to the FBI.
After the plaintiffs — Sheik Yassir Fazaga and community members Ali Malik and Yasser AbdelRahim — filed suit, the district court held that it could not consider claims that the FBI unlawfully targeted Muslim community members for surveillance because the FBI argued that further proceedings could disclose “state secrets.” The court of appeals disagreed, instructing the district court to consider the plaintiffs’ religious discrimination and surveillance claims under procedures mandated by Congress in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which specifies how courts should handle sensitive evidence in cases involving surveillance conducted for national security purposes.
The Supreme Court’s ruling today held that Congress did not displace the state secrets privilege when it enacted FISA, leaving the government free to invoke the privilege to withhold surveillance evidence from courts altogether, rather than submitting that evidence for courts to review behind closed doors.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling is a dangerous sign for religious freedom and government accountability in spying cases,” said Patrick Toomey, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “Decades ago, Congress established protections for people challenging abusive spying in court, but today’s decision puts a critical safeguard out of reach. Though it is not the end of the road, the ruling makes it harder for those who have had their rights and privacy violated by discriminatory surveillance in the two decades since 9/11 to prove their claims in court.”
Plaintiffs in the case are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Southern California, the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy, the Council on American-Islamic Relations California, and the law firm of Hadsell Stormer Renick & Dai LLP. FBI v. Fazaga is part of the ACLU’s Joan and Irwin Jacobs Supreme Court Docket.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this month in FBI v. Fazaga, a case challenging FBI surveillance, will make it significantly harder for people to pursue surveillance cases, and for U.S. and European Union (EU) negotiators to secure a lasting agreement for transatlantic transfers of private data.
The justices gave the U.S. government more latitude to invoke “state secrets” in spying cases. But ironically, that victory undercuts the Biden administration’s efforts to show that the United States has sufficiently strong privacy protections to sustain a new Privacy Shield agreement — unless Congress steps in now.
In July 2020, the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) struck down the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, a legal framework used by thousands of U.S. companies to facilitate data transfers, because the U.S. failed to provide adequate protection for data belonging to people from the EU. Specifically, the court found that U.S. surveillance authorities, including Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Executive Order 12333, permit unjustifiably broad government surveillance. The court also found that the Privacy Shield failed to provide adequate redress mechanisms for Europeans whose data is transferred to the U.S. — namely, the ability to be heard by an independent court that can order binding remedies.
In striking down Privacy Shield, the CJEU was clear: no EU-U.S. data-transfer agreement will survive the court’s scrutiny until the U.S. narrows the scope of its surveillance and ensures that individuals subject to potentially illegal surveillance have a real, meaningful way to pursue accountability.
Although U.S. federal courts have the power and independence to provide remedies for illegal government spying, the Fazaga decision means that Americans and Europeans alike will face more arduous odds if they try to challenge secret U.S. government surveillance in U.S. courts. It also makes it less likely that the U.S. will meet these minimum privacy safeguards going forward.
FBI v. Fazaga stems from an FBI operation in 2006 and 2007, in which agents sent a paid informant into some of the largest mosques in Orange County, Calif., and instructed him to pose as a convert to Islam. The FBI informant indiscriminately gathered names, telephone numbers and email addresses, as well as information on the religious and political beliefs of hundreds of Muslim Americans who were exercising their constitutional right to religious freedom.
After the plaintiffs — an imam and two congregants — filed suit, the government argued that the “state secrets privilege” required the court to dismiss claims the FBI had unlawfully targeted Muslim community members for surveillance because of their religion. The court of appeals rejected that argument, holding that the plaintiffs’ claims should go forward using special procedures mandated by Congress decades ago, which require courts to review sensitive evidence behind closed doors in spying cases.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that Congress did not eliminate the state secrets privilege for spying cases when it enacted watershed surveillance reforms in FISA, after an earlier era of abuses. Though the opinion left open the possibility that people such as the Fazaga plaintiffs nonetheless could pursue claims based on public information about the government’s surveillance, most people need sensitive information from the government to help prove that its surveillance was illegal. The decision could make it easier for the government to shield such information from judges, and therefore harder for most people challenging surveillance to prove their claims and obtain justice in court.
Thus, Fazaga adds to the evidence that safeguards in the U.S. are inadequate — and showcases why they fail to satisfy the EU’s privacy rules. Only Congress can put in place the privacy reforms needed to deliver a durable EU-U.S. agreement.
The Biden administration has been attempting to negotiate a new data-transfer deal with the European Commission. But the issues the CJEU identified — especially the inability to pursue remedies for unlawful surveillance — can’t be fixed by executive branch action alone. That’s because, as we noted, EU law requires that people must be able to seek redress before an independent decision-maker; the remedies must be binding; and people must be able to raise fundamental legal challenges to the surveillance, not just question whether the government followed its surveillance procedures.
If the Biden administration and the European Commission reach an agreement without legislative reforms, that agreement almost certainly will be struck down again — and thousands of U.S. companies once again could face enormous costs and legal risks associated with data transfers. The companies most affected likely will be the small- and medium-sized businesses that depend heavily on data they transfer from Europe but often lack the financial resources to hire lawyers to fashion a stopgap solution.
Congress can ensure this doesn’t happen. By establishing clear procedures for judges to examine secret evidence in lawsuits that challenge illegal spying, Congress would prevent the executive branch from using the state secrets privilege to frustrate court review in cases going forward. Reforms such as this will benefit U.S. companies by helping to put the next Privacy Shield on a stronger legal footing, and also help ensure that ordinary Americans harmed by unlawful surveillance can have their day in court.
Patrick Toomey and Ashley Gorski are senior staff attorneys with the ACLU’s National Security Project. They were co-counsel for the plaintiffs in FBI v. Fazaga.
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Paul Goble
Staunton, June 1 – When Leonid Vasyukevich and Gennady Shulga, two KPRF deputies in the Primorsky Kray parliament, last week called on Vladimir Putin to end his “special military operation” in Ukraine, some observers felt this might be a sign that popular opposition to the war in Ukraine was about to spread through Russia’s legislative assemblies at least in the regions.
But if there is popular support for such opposition, the so-called systemic parties apparently aren’t prepared to sacrifice any of their privileges as allies of the regime; and now the KPRF deputies in the Primorsky Kray assembly have expelled the two from their caucus (interfax.ru/russia/843994).
They did so in the best Soviet-era traditions of the Communist Party: those who wanted to crack the whip held a meeting to which the victims were not invited, voted unanimously to exclude them from their ranks, and, for good measure, censured two other deputies who knew about the plans of Vasyukevich and Shulga in advance but didn’t report them.
The Putin regime thus blocked such expressions by deputies of popular unhappiness about his war. But this case is important because it shows that at least some deputies are listening to their constituents and would be speaking out if for not the certainty that they would be excluded or otherwise punished for doing do.
And thus what some will now see as an indication of the absence of opposition to Putin on the war in fact highlights its existence because the two deputies involved certainly knew in advance what would happen to them but went ahead anyway, apparently on the assumption that their future in politics would be better served by doing so.
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