Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[brewer bob]

Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators have probably been victims of poisoning.

Source: The Independent

[Strongpoint]

Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators have probably been victims of poisoning.

Source: The Independent

If this won't convenience people that there is no more room for diplomacy with Putin in 2022 than for diplomacy with Hitler in 1941, I don't know what will

[martinuzz]

Crazy

[brewer bob]

If this won't convenience people that there is no more room for diplomacy with Putin in 2022 than for diplomacy with Hitler in 1941, I don't know what will

Yeah, I really hope people will very soon realize that Putin and his lackeys have to be taken down. We can't sacrifice Ukrainians to a school-yard bully who doesn't want to stop.

[Il Palazzo]

Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators have probably been victims of poisoning.

Source: The Independent

1. That supposedly happened four weeks ago.
2.

Mr Zelensky’s spokesman said he had no information about the suspected incident.

Ukrainian officials poured cold water on the report. Asked about the suspected poisoning, Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said "there is a lot of speculation, various conspiracy theories". Rustem Umerov, another member of the negotiating team, urged people not to trust "unverified information".

[brewer bob]

1. That supposedly happened four weeks ago.
2.

Mr Zelensky’s spokesman said he had no information about the suspected incident.

I somehow missed this important part. Thanks for the correction!

(Note to self: read articles twice before posting)

[anewaname]

The idea that this poisoning was meant as a warning reminds me of when Putin met with Merkel and brought his dog to meet her.

But, because nobody dropped dead, I also consider it possible this poisoning was a political stunt to promote a "good guy" narrative. One of those narratives built on anti-other-guy news and followed by a "just war" declaration and conscription and wealth built on war.

I liked the Mar 28th, nypost article because it gave these details:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the symptoms gradually subsided. A fourth member of the Ukrainian delegation who was exposed to the same chemical agents did not experience any symptoms, according to Bellingcat.

Chemical weapons experts said the symptoms seemed to suggest that the officials were targeted with porphyrin, organophosphates, or bicyclic substances. The experts believe that the dosage used in the attack was deliberately low and that the intent was merely to frighten the targets rather than to cause permanent, irreversible damage, Bellingcat is reporting.

[Starver]

I'm not sure that's making it a less bad state of affairs, though. It could be an entirely unrelated thing, blown up out of all proportion. But one state[1] has form on this/related 'disruptions'.

Unless it never happened at all. Possible, but then makes you wonder what prompted this 'leak' without being a concerted fake-news push for propoganda purposes. I haven't seen anything more than what I read on that Independant page, before it started pestering me about cookies, bringing up various ads, trying to open a 'TV' panel, etc, and I quit it fairly promptly, so there's doubtless subtleties that I'm missing. I didn't get as far as the quotes you quoted, Il, but there's obvious reasons why they said those things even if it did happen.



[1] The sheer persistence in the belief about the existence of Havana Syndrome, and who is ultimately responsible, goes beyond general suspicion. From 'special blend coffee' or pellet-injecting umbrellas, intended to incapacitate 'with extreme prejudice', to Theramin's Great Seal bug, a surprising amount of fantastical systems seem to get deployed, and certainly not all of them are inoffensive by design or collateral effects. I presume there are non-zero things done to Russia, too, but you don't hear much about anything, and nothing much more dangerous than a 'wifi rock', clumsily deployed in a park for (presumably) dead-drop purposes.

[brewer bob]

Here's a link to the tweets about the alleged poisonings by Bellingcat:
https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1508463513013997580

And a copy-pasta of the tweets:

Spoiler: Bellingcat tweets (click to show/hide)

Bellingcat can confirm that three members of the delegation attending the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on the night of 3 to 4 March 2022 experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning with chemical weapons. One of victims was Russian entrepreneur Roman Abramovich.

Three members of the negotiating team retreated to an apartment in Kyiv later that night and felt initial symptoms - including eye and skin inflammation and piercing pain in the eyes - later that night. The symptoms did not abate until the morning.

The next day the group of negotiators drove from Kyiv to Lviv on the way to Poland and then Istanbul, to continue informal negotiations with the Russian side. A Bellingcat investigator was asked to help provide an examination by chemical weapons specialists.

Based on remote and on-site examinations, the experts concluded that the symptoms are most likely the result of international poisoning with an undefined chemical weapon.

An alternative less likely hypothesis was use of microwave irradiation. The symptoms gradually subsided in the course of the following week.

The three men experiencing the symptoms consumed only chocolate and water in the hours before the symptoms appeared. A fourth member of the team who also consumed these did not experience symptoms.

According to two consulted CW experts and a doctor, the symptoms were most consistent with variants of porphyrin, organophosphates, or bicyclic substances. A definitive determination was not possible due to the absence of specialized laboratory equipment near the victims.

The experts said the dosage and type of toxin used was likely insufficient to cause life-threatening damage, and most likely was intended to scare the victims as opposed to cause permanent damage. The victims said they were not aware of who might have had an interest in an attack.

Bellingcat chose not to report this story earlier due to concern about the safety of the victims. Given the choice of the targeted individuals to speak up, Bellingcat and its investigative partner @the_ins_ru
 intend to publish an investigation into the presumed poisonings.

[martinuzz]

Russian judge overturned the ban of Facebook and Instagram.
According to the judge, many Russians use the platforms for their livelihood, and should be allowed to keep using the platforms despite the government having banned Meta as an extremist organisation.

[bloop_bleep]

I would like to say that I am sick of hearing about how the Russian people are all apparently innocent victims and how we shouldn't hurt them with sanctions boo hoo  .

There was a recording of a Russian soldier calling home to his wife, saying how he looted a bunch of gold and perfume from a civilian's flat. What I'm concerned most about is not this obvious asswipe's statements. It's how his wife responded to it. She didn't ask him why he would do something like that, what's wrong with him. She immediately started gleefully asking what kind of perfume it was, whether it was men's or women's. Can you imagine if an American soldier had this conversation with his wife?

"It's just Putin(R)(C)" my ass. Putin didn't vote in a KGB fuck. Putin didn't support and cheer on a fascist as he brutally suppressed opposition. I am done being so super sensitive and tolerant to their feelings after watching outrage after outrage. How many Russians have relatives in Ukraine who can show them directly what is happening? Imperialism and fascism are in their culture. The Russian people are culpable. The sanctions are their just desserts. I've seen people (probably Russian trolls) acting like Russians are going to starve because of the sanctions, as if Russia isn't a net grain exporter. Russians seem so concerned with them being victims of a lack of iPhones and Big Macs while their army flattens cities. They have a collective massive victim complex and a collective desire for subjugation of others. They're so afraid of their police with rubber batons and their two-day jail stays. 100 people died in Ukraine protesting a corrupt government. There are crowds of people in Ukraine who are willing to protest and rebuff and resist armed soldiers with tanks and military vehicles. Major protests in Armenia, in Belarus against their corrupt governments. What about Russia? Couple weak sauce thousand-people protests in millions-of-people cities? Where a police officer occasionally pulls a guy away and releases him the next day? I've been to bigger protests about the war in SAN FRANCISCO, AN 800,000 PEOPLE CITY THAT IS TEN THOUSAND KILOMETERS AWAY. Russia is not pulling its weight in this matter. Russia is an embarassment of a country.

[Random_Dragon]

There are people there who deserve everything they get, and there are people there who are getting caught up in this. It's the same in basically every country, there are going to be good people, awful people, people who just want to keep their heads down and stay out of this shit, etc.

The main thing that makes the sanctions unfortunate is that, while even the strongest authoritarian still needs some amount of people who can enable their regime, the moral weight of executive decisions still falls more on those making the decisions, and they're still going to suffer far less from sanctions than the people underneath them. Even if there are common people out there who have played a part in everything leading up to this mess, they'll suffer far less than the oligarchs and others who're responsible for wiedling the power they've been given.

But that's war in a nutshell, to be honest. No matter how just it is, whether it be through bombs and invasion or sanctions and embargoes, even when it catches the right people in the crossfire the impact is going to be disproportionately weighted towards those whose individual part in the mess they've created is the smallest, while those who've profited the most from the evil they've created rarely suffer anything resembling justice for it.

Not to mention, in war someone's going to suffer for it. One can feel pity for some Russian conscripts being led into a meat-grinder, even as one acknowledges that in in war someone dies either way, and better it be those of the aggressor than that of one who's in the battlefield because their home and family are at stake.

So too can one also still regret that things have to end this way for those conscripts who are actually in over their heads, while still regarding the war criminals and their enablers with the contempt they deserve. The unfortunate reality is, no matter how sympathetic any individual soldier on the aggressor's side may be, no matter how big or small their part in this atrocity is, their lives are being spent all the same, and it still ends up boiling down to a Russian soldier's life vs. the life of whoever they end up against on the battlefield.

As this is the DF forum, "it was inevitable" would be fitting here.

EDIT: Typofix and forgot to finish a sentence, derp.

[Lord Shonus]

You can't fight a war without hurting the innocent. Lots of Russian civilians were killed in the great counterattacks on the Eastern Front because the Germans had dug into towns and villages. The Allied Forces killed a fair number of French civilians digging the Germans out on the Western Front for the same reason. Now Ukranians are going to have to kill Ukranians to kick the Russians out, never mind that Russia is killing Ukranians for sport. If Russian civilians having to go hungry and cold for a while hastens the end of the killing by even a single hour, it is worth it.


This MASH exchange sums it up all too well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUeBMwn_eYc

[heydude6]

I'm happy that you admit that the alternative to sanctions is full-blown war, not simply allowing Russians to do as they please. These sanctions are not really about forcing Russians to rebel and create regime change, it's about depriving the Russian war machine of the resources it needs to function. Tanks need fuel, they need metal, they need to be manufactured in factories by workers, they need rations to feed the drivers.

Russia is capable of producing all of these, but it needs money to do so. Miners won't mine, manufacturers won't manufacture, and farmers won't farm unless someone is paying them.

Actually, upon typing this out, I feel a little foolish. The economy of Hitler's Germany was one that was absolutely crippled by foreign powers. The only part of it that wasn't crippled was the war economy. Sanctions have never worked in all of history and it seems like the reason why has been staring us in the face this whole time!

Oh God...

[Lord Shonus]

The sanctions are working to cripple the Russian war machine. Their tanks use a lot of imported components, and there are reliable reports that the factories have stopped working entirely because of the lack of those components. They announced the other day that they were about to restart production of a truck that hasn't been made in decades without admitting that this was probably because they can't get modern truck parts. Even their railcars are reliant on bearings made with imported components.


But you can't hit those without hitting everybody no matter what weapon you use, and it is better to use a weapon that makes you cold and miserable than one that makes you dead.