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Unborking the [Ukraine] discussion
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Different curators probably to blame: DPR was FSB pet project, LPR - GRU (military) project. They even managed to have minor "civil war"\"supported coup attempts" with each other in between Donbass War and current invasion
Actually hunted down old article of Russian lawyer studying law codex of LPR and DPR and being shocked by his discoveries. You would expect it be just simple lazy copy paste of either local Ukrainian law or Russian law with references ti Ukraine\Russia crossed out and replaced with name of separatist republic.
Well, LPR law was indeed carbon copy of current day Russian law. DPR o the other hand... First it had familiar law sections contained different number of articles, but often even those present had not simply familiar text with few edits, but rather talked about completely different things - so clearly it was brand new law system, somebody felt inspired to create, rather then lazy work. More of reflection of how this somebody wished to "fix" modern laws in Russia if I have to guess.
TL;DR:
- No presumption of innocence
- No privacy of correspondence (with attorney or anybody)
- No need for search warrants (well, more like you can sign off warrant and perform search yourself)
- Can put accused under arrest if court feels like it, no other reason needed
- Police and prosecution can replace or outright deny accused defense attorney for disagreeing with them
- Hell, you are actually not guaranteed to even have defense attorney to represent you
Source: Article in Russian lawyer association newspaperhttps://advstreet.ru/columns/v-advokature-dnr-tsarit-yadernaya-zima/
So yeah, not surprised at all, that LPR is just plain old "boring" region under martial law and DPR is magnet for violence and power abuse - this is exact sort of society somebody was building there
Oh did anybody post already that Russia got its own Baghdad Bob? Because Alaudinov. commander of Chechen spetcnaz Tik-Tok Forces, is throwing temper tantrum on social mediaabout "traitorous pro-american military bloggers" mocking him by reposting news from western jouranlists in Ukraini occupied parts of Kursk, while Alaudinov was posting about "failed Ukranina invasion in Kursk" and "Russian Army having everything under control".
Funny how he was reporting about succesful defence by Russian military and the same time as governors of Belgorod and Kursk were ordering evacuation...
Soirce: independent Russian news, with links to social media posts
https://meduza.io/feature/2024/08/16/komandir-spetsnaza-ahmat-apti-alaudinov-chasche-vseh-kommentiruet-ukrainskoe-nastuplenie-v-kurskoy-oblasti
Ah favorite quips from dude rants:
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
So DPR is Putin's 'Project 2025' testbed?
And, as predicted, it went straight to murdercamps.
https://x.com/prestonstew_/status/1824838568860061923
That would infer that it's Fascism in service of the people. it would be more accurate to name it "Russia but shittier; That's apparently a thing
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I figure the "People's Republic" bit generally implies the "Fascist" bit, so that might be redundant.
In that vein, it is incredibly depressing when I've had to point out to people I know that when a country has "People", "Republic", "Democratic", or "Socialist" in the name, that doesn't necessarily mean it is any of those things. In fact, there's a decent chance that it's the exact opposite.
"People" in particular is a pretty big red flag, given that list consists of:
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Lao People’s Democratic Republic
People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria
People’s Republic of Bangladesh
People’s Republic of China
So that's basically 1 out of 5 (Bangladesh) which could conceivably be called a democracy, and even then it's a bit shaky, being considered "Partly Free" by Freedom House.
TV Tropes has this as "People's Republic of Tyranny".
Bangladesh was a pseudo-democracy that was effectively a dictatorship up until a bunch of angry students and army soldiers chased out the entire ruling government about a week ago (after 300 were killed in a police response to student protests, the government called in the army, then the government high tailed it to India once they heard those magic words “the generals are refusing to give orders to fire on civilians and the soldiers are joining the protests”)
I don’t know if anyone even knows what it is now, all the interim government positions are occupied by people who up until a few weeks ago were in college, and the interim president is an 84 year old economics professor.
I think the general rule is if there are 2 or more of your above list in the name, then it becomes opposite town.
Wow, that is... certainly camouflaged.
Country names are just silly in general.
I suspect half as often as not everyone else uses the wrong name for your country because that's not what it said on their old maps (Germany, Egypt, China, Finland, Greece, Japan in English alone etc) and we're loathe to change the names of places without a lot of bloodshed specifically about that. And even then, if it's a really good map...
I'd also be curious to see if the number of democratic Kingdoms with merely constitutional monarchies outnumbers the authoritarian People's Republics.
Ah, so it's a countdown until the military takes over.
More that probably the most significant labels we put on groups of people very rarely match what others call those people let alone what those people call themselves, and if we try and be descriptive of their method of government whilst doing so there's probably more that are completely wrong than accurate.
I mean it's a full on tangent, but case in point where the bit between the Dominion of Canada and the United Mexican States on the continent of North America clearly doesn't include all the states within it and isn't even the only union of them.
That is a pretty big fear right now, yes.
Definitely at that stage of a revolution where idealists have suddenly kicked out the old bad actors but the new bad actors haven’t quite got their shit together enough to take over yet.
The military isn’t exactly popular with the people and seems to be split ideologically so who knows though.
In many cases it feels like it's more the idealists never really coming to terms with the fact that winning the revolution means that they have to stop trying to kill the people who oppose them.
No, it implies "Commies".
Greater Republic implies Fascist.
The DPR has that name because it implies a popular support instead of Astro-turfed puppet state. It also harkens back to the Soviet Era when Russia was one of the big two empires that carved the world in half aka the good old days for Putin and Pals.
Always great to watch the greatest power point presenter of our times at work.
This video gave me a thought.
You know how we have thought that Ukraine has infiltrated sabotage, demo and other types of intel special forces group into Russia before? Because shit gets sabotaged even hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the front.
And how Ukrainians look like Russians, can speak exactly like Russians and know enough Russian cultural cues to blend in.
If I was running the Ukrainian version of the OSS, I'd have leapt onto this offensive as the ideal time to slip infiltrators in.
Chaos and people fleeing deeper into Russia. The cover provides itself.
Or am I being overly optimistic?
That feels like the kind of thing that happens when there's a lot of panicking going on on the defending side, at least if they aren't using them that pinpointedly in the rest of the war.
I had thought along similar lines, but then remembered that those people are then spies rather than soldiers and this is the crime of Perfidy.
Ukraine has skirted this in the past recently by just turning up and bitching about Russian superiors which led to them being assumed to be Russian soldiers, but without getting changed out of their uniforms I don't think this counts.
Kinda funny, if true. I wonder what the long-term effects of something like that would be, given we live in the digital age and centralized databases should be a thing...
The FSB, being fully aware of how vulnerable digital systems are, are big fans of paper only for classified information. So it depends on how sensitive they consider those papers.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Anders Puck Nielsen makes the claim that ultimately, Putin may decide to respond to the Ukrainian invasion near Kursk by actually using the conscript force that Russia has in the war, instead of keeping them separate from the fighting force in Ukraine.
And as a related point, if that's the case then the slow Russian response might not be paralysis or bad leadership in the Russian Command structure, but rather Putin feeling out the internal political ramifications of using the conscript force to fight.
Feels like a useful insight to me, but we'll see what happens.
1 air defence system IRIS-T SLS
14,000 rounds 155mm ammunition
10 unmanned surface vessels
24 reconnaissance drones VECTOR with spare parts
material for explosive ordnance disposal
6 High Mobility Engineer Excavators
1 armoured recovery vehicle Bergepanzer 2 with spare parts
55,000 first aid kits
700 assault rifles MK 556
10 precision rifles HLR 338
50 rifles CR 308
Also due to ongoing budget problems/disputes in the gov coalition and the constitutional balanced budget amendment any further requests for new support packages for 2024 and 2025 by the defence ministry will not be granted. Only the already allocated 7 billion for 2024 and 4 billion € for 2025 will be delivered.
Any further new orders are to be financed grom the planned G7 50 billion € package financed by out of Russian assets (which might not actually happen, at least it's not quite sure yet)
So this is what Ukraine might expect from Germany for now:
https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/military-support-ukraine-2054992
In April it was 500 HL338 rifles. Since each batch includes in average of 10-25 rifles it's probably still "Less than 600".
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
the CR308 is just a regular assault rifle
I'm sure they've sent multiple batches by now? I remember remarking on them a while ago
Aren't the CR308s sent to Ukraine the HMR variant (ie optimized as sharpshooters/designated marksman's rifle)? Ie not a sniper rifle, but not a "regular assault rifle" either.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden