Tag Archives: Ukraine

We’ve long known Boris Johnson stopped Russia-Ukraine peace. Why is it news now?

Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin: it seems claims that Johnson flew to Kiev in April 2022, to scupper a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, were true. For how many deaths does that make Johnson responsible?

Why is this news?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given a television interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in which he claimed – well, here’s someone who puts it better than I could:

Here’s a report that puts a little more meat on the bones:

But there’s one problem with the reporting here: all this was known, around a year and a half ago!

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This Site published an article about it – that, of course, hardly anybody read. It included this video clip, which provided a source for the information:

Some of you might pooh-pooh Jimmy Dore as a poor source of information, even though he was quoting another journalist – but in any case it seems the story has been confirmed by Putin himself.

Call him a poor source of information if you like, but how many separate sources do you need before this claim becomes credible?

I think Boris Johnson has some serious questions to answer. Again.


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With all eyes on Gaza, what’s happening in Ukraine?

Airstrike: the smoking ruin in the middle of the image used to be the Russian landing ship Novocherkassk.

Has everybody forgotten the conflict between Russia and Ukraine?

The tide has turned badly against Ukraine in recent weeks, despite similar events to those occurring on the Mediterranean coast:

But Ukraine has just recorded a major strike back, destroying Russia’s Novocherkassk landing ship, meaning one-fifth of Russia’s Black Sea fleet has been sunk since the start of the war.

Russia’s ability to launch missile attacks from the sea is now seriously diminished, as is any possibility of an amphibious attack from the sea.

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Russian supply routes to the Crimean peninsula are disrupted, weakening Moscow’s grip there.

And with supply lines disrupted, Russia’s control over the front lines against Ukraine may also be disrupted.

But this is a long game, and Ukraine’s time is running out – because the western powers that have been funding its defence are getting impatient for a return on their investment, and may abandon their debtor.

With most eyes now fixed on Gaza, Ukraine may discover what we have already seen in Palestine – that western sympathy is provided only on the condition that it will provide a cash return, and has nothing to do with alleviating human suffering.


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False equivalence: why we should not applaud Nazis who say they defended Ukraine

The Azov Battalion’s flag: it features a Wolfsangel and a Black Sun – two symbols associated with Nazism. Is the contribution of organisations like this to Ukraine’s war effort against Russia the reason support for Nazis is being normalised in countries like Canada?

There was an astonishing scene in the Canadian Parliament last week.

Members of that country’s legislature – a country that fought the Nazis in World War II – gave a standing ovation to a former SS officer, just because he said he defended Ukraine against the Russians in the 1940s.

What a dangerous precedent to set.

Nazis like Yaroslav Hunk invaded Ukraine and committed atrocities against its people. Nobody should applaud that in the way the Canadian Parliament has.

And while it is true that the Russians turned out to be just another set of invaders, making Ukraine part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for almost half a century afterwards, it is false to claim – as the applause of the Canadian Parliament does – that what Russians are doing now is the same as what they did then:

What we’re seeing here is a horrifying attempt to pull the wool over our eyes with a ‘false equivalence’ argument.

Is it because we know that Nazis have been fighting on the side of Ukraine, and that Ukrainian authorities have apparently supported Nazis (think of the Azov Battalion)?

Is this an attempt to rehabilitate Nazis in the eyes of the public – to make us accept the abominable just because it helps us achieve a political goal against a current enemy that hasn’t been our ally since the 1940s?

That would make us, now, just as bad as the Nazis were then.


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Tory lies: car industry issues were due to Brexit, not the war in Ukraine

Kemi Badenoch: another Tory parrot, uttering whatever tripe she’s told to regurgitate at us?

Take a look at this video clip of Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch saying concerns faced by car makers were due to the war in Ukraine, not Brexit – coupled with a more recent news report saying the exact opposite:

The best we can say about this is that at least the lies are being debunked faster.

In fact, this one was debunked in the press as soon as it was uttered. The Guardian explained [boldings mine]:

She said:

“The issue that the automotive industries are talking about is around rules of origin. This is something that the EU are also worried about because the costs of the components have risen.

“This isn’t to do with Brexit, this is to do with supply chain issues following the pandemic and the war in Russia and Ukraine.

“I actually have had meetings with my EU trade counterpart, we are discussing these things and looking at how we can review them, especially as the TCA [trade and cooperation agreement – the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU] will be coming into review soon.”

The “rules of origin” requirements raised by car manufacturers are part of the TCA, and are therefore definitely related to Brexit. But Badenoch is right in the sense that all European car manufacturers are having problems because there is not enough battery supply in Europe, making them reliant on imports from Asia.

And wrong in the sense that there is no information here that links a car battery shortage with Ukraine. Any shortages in minerals that are used in these batteries may be overcome by obtaining them elsewhere.

The question now is: did Badenoch know she was not telling the truth, or was she just another Tory parrot, squawking out the words she had been told to say?

If so, who is telling Tory ministers to utter such tripe?


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‘They will kill me’ – the death of a war opponent tortured by security forces in Russia

Vladimir Putin: has he given orders for anti-Ukraine-war protesters to be silenced, no matter what it takes?

This Site was contacted with an unusual request: would I agree to publish articles from anti-war Russian websites?

Apparently, most people think everybody in Russia supports the war in Ukraine. In fact, it seems there are protests against Vladimir Putin and his aggression, but there is no information in the media outside Russia.

Russian anti-war activists are tortured and die in Russia as a result, but we don’t know about them.

Would This Site help to change that?

The answer is below – the first of what I hope will be a series.

This one is by Nikita Sologub, written on June 15 and  translated by Viana Tina.

It is a translation of the article ««Они меня убьют». Что известно о гибели противника войны, которого силовики пытали в Ростове‑на‑Дону» Никита Сологуб, 15 июня 2023, 22:50, Editor: Yegor Skovoroda

You can find the original here.

Anatoliy Berezikov, 40, was into noise music, liked cycling around Rostov-on-Don and spoke out against the war. In mid-May, Berezikov was detained by the security forces, and since then he has not been released from administrative detention – time after time new reports have been drawn up on him under invented pretexts. He told his lawyer that the operation officers tortured him and beat him with electric shocks, while the FSB investigator came to the detention center and threatened with treason charges. Berezikov never got out of detention and died on 14 June in the detention center. Police officers were quick to call his death a suicide, but his defenders believe that he could not withstand the new torture. “Mediazone” tells what is known about Anatoliy Berezikov and the circumstances of his death.

He came out of the detention centre and immediately started swearing (police version)

If the police records are to be believed, in the early hours of 11 May officers accidentally encountered a long-haired, bearded man with tattoos on his arms on the outskirts of Rostov-on-Don. They asked to see his documents, but the man refused, shoved one of the police officers and tried to escape. The fugitive, 40-year-old Anatoliy Berezikov, was caught, taken to Police Department No. 6 and a report drawn up for disobeying a police officer. Maria Kornienko, judge of the Pervomaisky district court in Rostov-on-Don, sent Berezikov to 10 days’ detention.

The arrest was due to expire on 21 May at 2.05 pm. At 2.20pm, barely out of the detention centre on Semashko Street in the city centre, Berezikov started swearing and harassing passers-by. Police officers asked him to stop, but the man did not respond and refused to get into the patrol car, pushing the officers and grabbing their uniforms. Rostov police officers, this time from Unit 4, had to detain him again and take him to court, now in the city’s Leninsky district. There, Judge Sergei Bychenko found Berezikov guilty of disorderly conduct and sent him back to a special detention centre, again for 10 days.

This time, however, Berezikov was able to send a message that he needed help. When lawyer Irina Gak came to see him, Anatoliy told her that what was described in the reports was a plain police lie.

Detention. “Beaten and threatened with rape, further torture, possible murder”

In fact, Berezikov wrote, on 11 May he was in a rented flat he had rented after moving to Rostov-on-Don from Shatura near Moscow several years ago. Around eight in the morning there was a loud knock on the door, someone shouting that it was the neighbours. While a sleepy Berezikov was figuring out how to react, the door had already been broken into. About six people in black balaclavas burst into the flat, ran into the room without any explanation, threw him on the floor and started kicking him, then dragged him into the kitchen. While some in the kitchen were beating the man, threatening him and asking questions, others were turning things upside down in the room.

It was only after this that he was brought to the sixth police department, and after drawing up a report, to the judge, which started the series of administrative arrests.

To inform him that the arrest would not be the last, an FSS (Federal Security Service) investigator came to the special detention centre in person, and no criminal case was opened against Berezikov. He not only told his lawyer about this visit, but he also repeated it in the notes he handed in during the meeting.

“I was told (in general terms) about the basement, torture and being sent to war”, he described his conversation with the investigator. Speaking about the end of his arrest, Berezikov feared: “I might be met with, like the last time, beatings and threats of rape, further torture, probable murder.”

New torture and a third arrest. “The man who experienced a stun gun”

On 31 May Anatol Berezikov was to be released from custody. By that time lawyer Irina Gak, activist Tatiana Sporysheva and two other women arrived at the detention centre on Semashko Street. In order not to miss the moment of exit, they took positions at both exits of the detention centre. There was already a police UAZ at one of them, Sporysheva recalls, and a man without a uniform was walking nearby – she thought it was an FSS officer. When he saw the women, he called someone and another car arrived at the second exit. When it was time to be released, the officer on duty told the women that Berezikov had already been released. Believing this, the lawyer and activists packed up, leaving one of the exits unsupervised.

“Then we realised that we had been cheated, that is, while we were discussing, he was taken out through another entrance and immediately taken away. We realised this from the behaviour of the police officers, but we didn’t even know where they had taken him, whether he was being charged again with administrative or criminal offences. So we decided to follow the second police car and when it moved, we followed it,” Sporysheva said.

Following the car led them to Police Station 4, where Berezikov had had a report drawn up before his previous arrest. There, Sporysheva and Gak noticed the same man without a uniform. At the police station, the lawyer was told that Berezikov was not there. A few hours later Irina Gak thought that her client could have been secretly taken to the Leninski District Court – and then she actually met Berezikov in the corridor.

He was pale, the lawyer recalled, “extremely frightened” and generally looked like “a man who had experienced a stun gun at least”. Sporysheva says that when the lawyer asked Anatoliy to write an application to get acquainted with the case file, he was unable to do so himself.

“He was just like a cotton doll who didn’t react at all. He had absolutely cotton hands, his fingers hardly moved, he could not write this statement at all,” she claims. The guards at the time suggested that Berezikov should give up his lawyer. In the minute-long recording from the court corridor he is sitting unresponsive, with his hands folded and staring at the floor.

He was pale, the lawyer recalled, “extremely frightened” and generally looked like “a man who had experienced a stun gun at least”. Sporysheva says that when the lawyer asked Anatoliy to write an application to get acquainted with the case file, he was unable to do so himself.

“He was just like a cotton doll who didn’t react at all. He had absolutely cotton hands, his fingers hardly moved, he could not write this statement at all,” she claims. The guards at the time suggested that Berezikov should refuse his lawyer. In the minute-long recording from the court corridor he is sitting unresponsive, with his hands folded and staring at the floor.

When the guards were distracted and withdrawn, the women managed to talk to Berezikov. He managed to tell them that while they were looking for him in Department 4, the operatives had taken him out of town and tortured him there with a stun gun. The lawyer took a picture – on his back one could really see multiple red dots, characteristic of stun gun blows.

Because this time the hearing of the administrative report – again drawn up by police officers from the Fourth Department under the pretext of foul language – was attended by lawyer Irina Gak and Tatiana Sporysheva (as public defender), it lasted several hours. The defence demanded that an ambulance be called to the court; when they arrived, the medics gave Berezikov an injection of anaesthetic, but refused to assess his injuries and did not leave any documents.

Despite the defence’s accounts of a visit from an FSS investigator, threats to life, torture and illegal detention in a special detention centre, Judge Lada Evangelovskaya did not accede to requests. Instead, she sent Berezikov under arrest for another 15 days.

According to Sporysheva, after the hearing he managed to say: “I am afraid that I will disappear. I’m afraid that they will kill me and I won’t live till I get out of the special detention centre, that is, I won’t live till 15 June”.

After the trial, the police guards took Berezikov to the car to take him to the police station to fill out the paperwork for his transfer to a special detention centre. On the way to the car, the man managed to tell his defenders that all the things he had with him when he was arrested were missing: his flat keys, a wallet with 15,000 roubles and a bank card with money on it.

The video shows him finishing his cigarette and getting into his car, but he does not have time to throw away the cigarette butt.

– Don’t you have an ashtray here? Aren’t there any rubbish bins nearby? – The detainee asks with bewilderment.

– Just throw it under the car! – The policeman answers.

Berezikov doesn’t want to litter, so the lawyer has to throw the cigarette butt away.

Death in a detention centre

On 10 June, Sporysheva took a parcel to Berezikov. On 13 June the lawyer Irina Gak met him in the detention centre – he was active and, expecting that a criminal case would be brought against him, promised not to admit guilt despite torture.

The day before the end of the arrest, on 14 June, the lawyer, expecting that this arrest might not be the last one, came again to the detention centre. But there she was told that Anatoliy Berezikov was dead.

“At the same time, the cause was not given exactly, they said: either he had a heart attack or committed suicide,” recalls Tatiana Sporysheva, who was next to her. – That is, it was unclear. We called an ambulance, phoned and told the police. We couldn’t believe it, we thought that maybe he was ill, maybe he was still alive, maybe he could still be helped, but they were lying to us.

But soon an ambulance arrived at the detention centre and took away the corpse. The next day Berezikov was identified by his close friend.

The staff at the detention centre claim that Anatoliy Berezikov committed suicide. His defenders are certain that he died after being tortured.

High treason for the enemy of the war. “They torture brutally.”

While he was alive, Anatoliy Berezikov was never charged with any criminal offence. Even the visit to his flat was not formalised as a search within the framework of the investigation, but as an operative investigative measure “inspection of the premises”.

Lawyer Yevgeniy Smirnov from the human rights project “First Department”, who was aware of Berezikov’s misadventures, is convinced that the Rostov FSS Department needed a series of arrests in order to coordinate the criminal case of treason with the Moscow one.

“The decision to launch treason proceedings is agreed in Moscow. They cannot initiate it on their own initiative,” Smirnov explains. – The bureaucratic machine works and it takes time. Some take 15 days, some take two or three months. All this time they tried to prepare him for the case, to make him confess when it happens and not try to defend himself, being without a lawyer under the agreement. So that he would behave obediently and not interfere with the quiet investigation of the case”.

However, Berezikov did not yield to the threats and did not refuse a lawyer, which probably led to the situation in which the detainee died – most likely after more torture.

“There is no forensic report at the moment. There may even be a case, in which a lawyer will be involved as a representative of the victim’s family. Then we will know what he died of. It could be in a month or two,” says Smirnov. – They torture brutally. The lawyer had seen him just shortly before his death and of course he was not going to commit suicide, on the contrary he said that he was going to defend himself, saying that he feared for his life and health. Electricity is such a thing. A little too much, and even the healthiest person’s heart can stop.

The reason why the FSS was interested in Berezikov is unknown to Smirnov, but he knows that from the beginning of the war he “took an anti-war stance, non-violent, he did not hide his views in personal conversations”.

In public social networks Berezikov did not talk about the war. He worked as a repair mechanic. According to his VKontakte (Russian Facebook equivalent) page, his only sphere of interest, far from political, was noise music. He made noise synths together with the legend of the Rostov experimental scene Papa Srapa (Eduard Srapionov) and gave concerts under the pseudonym Anatoliy Ryk.

On 14 June, Anatoliy Ryk was supposed to perform at the festival Noise and Fury in Moscow. But on that day he died in a special detention centre in Rostov-on-Don.

Berezikov’s hobby associates interviewed by Mediazona said that he was not sociable, “kept away from the party”, “was a loner”, and “gave the impression of a person excessively eager to draw attention to his person”.

Berezikov himself was repeatedly in the Rostov news because of his habit of riding his bicycle in only shorts even in the harshest of winters. He has observed elections, helped Navalny’s headquarters, and participated in protests, including in support of Alexei Navalny, who was arrested in January 2021 – and was fined for doing so.

Translation of tweet of Vadim Kobzev:

It turned out that I knew Anatoliy personally. He was an activist in our Navalny office in Rostov, participated in rallies and was an election observer. Many people in Rostov had seen him on a bicycle without a T-shirt with a sign saying “Putin is a thief”.

The scum who tortured and murdered him will pay the price

Translation of OVD Info (Transl.- Account in English: @ovdinfo_en Advocacy & monitoring for human rights in Russia. Track repressions & provide legal aid to unjustly persecuted)

Anatoliy Berezikov, a 40-year-old activist, died in a detention centre in Rostov-on-Don. His lawyer, Irina Gak, suspects the man may have been killed in the process of torture

“I cannot name specific names of the people he spoke to, but I know of cases where he vividly expressed his anti-war stance in conversations in public space.

He always took part in actions, and not just came, but showed some kind of activity, handed out materials. That is, he is a long-time activist,” said Tatiana Sporysheva.

According to her, after her arrest Berezikov said that “for months he had been putting up anti-war leaflets, actively doing that while riding his bicycle. Evgeny Smirnov of the First Department does not confirm this, but does not deny it either; lawyer Irina Gak refused to comment.

It was difficult for Sporysheva to say which leaflets had attracted the attention of the FSS. The OVD-Info project mentioned that it could presumably have been leaflets with instructions on how to use the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live” (which accepts requests from Russian servicemen to surrender).

Ukrainian telegraph channels and bloggers have regularly posted calls for Russians to participate in a “flash mob” to post these leaflets on the streets of their cities since at least last autumn, posting layouts for printing them out. On May 10, on the eve of the law enforcers’ visit to Berezikov’s flat, Ukrainian telegraph channel «Оперативний ЗСУ» (Operative ZSU) wrote that “in the flash mob for distributing leaflets over the past few days, Rostov-on-Don, the unchallenged champion St. Petersburg and the unexpectedly small town of Novotroitsk stood out.” “But a separate place in this company is held by Rostov, where flyers of the ‘I Want to Live’ project were posted directly on victory posters,” the channel noted.

Whatever really drew the FSS’s attention, after the search the law enforcers found confirmation of their suspicions in Berezikov’s seized gadgets, lawyer Smirnov believes. “Naturally, he was subscribed to various telegrams to receive information from both sides. Next, they began to get him to admit that he was helping Ukraine, that’s one, and two – why they tortured him was to take out some of their anger. “Traitor to the motherland. You are our enemy, we will do with you what we want.” Some kind of animal feelings,” Yevgeny Smirnov is sure.

There is no record of the “inspection of the premises”, but Tatyana Sporysheva says that in addition to electronic devices, one of the two bicycles was also taken from the flat.

She believes that initially the FSS officers wanted to make Berezikov one of those defendants under the article on state treason, whose detention becomes known only after the court decision is made – without any details of the case. But Berezikov found the strength to resist, sought help from the people outside and thus ruined the law enforcers’ plan.

“This is a very convenient target: Anatoliy has no wife, no children, he has no Rostov registration, and he only has an elderly mother in the Moscow suburbs. He came to Rostov and he has no one here, no one will worry about him, no one will look for him, hence the treason,” she reasoned.

Yevgeniy Smirnov from the First Department agrees with her: “From his words – he was talking about threats under the article, for which life imprisonment is envisaged. Knowing the practice that we have all over the country now – and I know many such cases already – it was, of course, treason.

That’s the end of the article: an anti-war activist was arrested multiple times and did not survive the experience. Make of it what you will – but please let me know what you think of the article and if you’ll read more.


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Jacob Rees-Mogg reckons Brexit saved Ukraine from Russian invasion. What?

Funny how Tories try to rewrite history, isn’t it?

Years ago, Michael Gove wanted to change the way history was taught, to whitewash Britain’s harsh colonial past. This Site ran an article about it.

Now, it seems Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks the UK being separate from Europe meant the Tory government was able to offer more help to Ukraine, when it was invaded by Russia, than if we were still a part of the European Union.

The facts say otherwise and that is why Maximilien Robespierre named Rees-Mogg “Fool of the Week”:


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Rishi Sunak is giving Ukraine long-range air weapons. What will Vladimir Putin do?

Rishi Sunak is taking a huge gamble.

He has promised to give Ukraine long-range air defence weapons, along with jet fighter planes, to allow that country to better defend itself from Russian aggression.

And he wants Russia’s warlords to face justice after peace is brought about.

But what kind of peace will we get?

Sunak is gambling that Russian leader Vladimir Putin will not dare to use his nuclear arsenal.

But the easiest way to stop the UK from providing anything to Ukraine is to wipe the UK off the map.

It would be a suicidal strategy for Putin as well, because the UK’s allies would respond. But that would be scant consolation.

And, if you believe Boris Johnson (ha ha!), Putin has already threatened the UK with nuclear reprisals.

So one has to question whether sabre-rattling of the kind that Sunak is doing is really a sane way forward.

Here’s his speech to the Munich Security Conference:

What do you think?

The warmonger: Keir Starmer visits Ukraine to stir up hostility against Russia

Warmonger Starmer: this is a mock-up, of course – don’t expect him to climb into a uniform and get his own hands dirty. He’ll just talk about it.

Keir Starmer has visited Ukraine, where he made clear his desire for the war between that country and Russia to continue.

He prefaced a tweeted video of his comments with what I understand to be a fascist slogan associated with Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust:

Notice that he actually said, on behalf of the Labour Party, that he was “showing our support for the conflict“.

I can only agree with Chris Williamson, below: the correct approach to a conflict between other nations is to offer to act as a mediator between the two and seem a negotiated end to hostilities through diplomacy.

It has been suggested that the two countries almost reached such a negotiated cessation of conflict – in April 2022 – until Boris Johnson flew to Ukraine and talked President Zelenskyy out of it. With Johnson out of power in the UK, it seems to me that renewed talks might bring about peace.

But it seems Starmer also wants the bloodshed to continue:

So there you have it. The leader of the UK’s Labour Party mouths platitudes about the suffering of the Ukrainian people but supports ongoing war in that country and quotes Holocaust perpetrators for good (bad?) measure.

He is a dangerous warmonger and deserves nothing from you but contempt.


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Rishi Sunak fails to answer why he helped a sanctioned Russian warlord

Rishi Sunak at PMQs: This is a stock pic – he’s not usually this animated.

Rishi Sunak is coming under pressure to explain why he apparently helped Russian oligarch and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin dodge sanctions against him in order to sue a UK journalist for libel (the case later collapsed but left the journalist owing £70,000 in legal fees).

Prigozhin is the founder of Wagner, a private army that is currently understood to be committing atrocities in Ukraine.

Challenged on it in Prime Minister’s Questions, Sunak had the nerve to say he was proud of the UK’s sanction system – a system over which he appears to have run roughshod.

And he copped out of answering the question by saying there’s a government organisation that deals with such matters.

This Writer was watching the exchange via the BBC’s Politics Live programme, and was hoping the panel would discuss this matter afterwards, as my tweets showed.

No such luck. I wonder why?

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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Did Rishi Sunak help a Russian oligarch dodge sanctions to sue a UK journalist? Will it finish him?

Rishi Sunak: yes, this image again. He looks shifty in it – as he should, if he authorised the activities described below.

This is what happens when celebrities get to sue UK journalists like me – the government ends up giving financial support to a Russian oligarch whose private army is currently rampaging through Ukraine.

It seems the UK Treasury helped a close ally of Vladimir Putin to evade sanctions imposed against him personally (this was before the Ukraine-Russia war) in order to sue a UK journalist.

Rishi Sunak was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. The Russian oligarch was Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Wagner, a private army that is currently understood to be committing atrocities in Ukraine.

In the light of the Ukraine-Russia war, the UK’s apparent support for Ukraine in that conflict (while actually having supported a Russian through this case) makes it seem clear that both Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson before him are hypocrites.

Some say it should bring down the UK government. Here’s Phil Moorhouse of A Different Bias:

He took his information from the website Open Democracy, whose article can be found here.

Here’s where this story intersects with my own legal case, in which I was sued by a certain TV celebrity (I’m currently appealing against the judgment):

Revelations about Wagner and Prigozhin were exposed by Bellingcat in 2020, leading to the notorious libel case against Higgins.

Higgins was targeted individually, rather than as part of a legal case against Bellingcat. This meant that, instead of claiming Bellingcat’s investigations into Wagner were defamatory, the lawyers instead relied on tweets Higgins had sent to promote the investigations on social media.

The approach allowed Prigozhin to launch his legal attack in the UK – where Higgins lives, and where libel laws are more punishing for journalists – rather than in the Netherlands, where Bellingcat is headquartered.

The case collapsed when the lawyers from Discreet withdrew their services in March last year, a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and was eventually struck out in May. Higgins was left with estimated costs of £70,000.

The case has been highlighted as an example of a SLAPP action (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), an abuse of the legal process designed to intimidate and close down legitimate scrutiny.

You see, the idea is to intimidate the victim (Eliot Higgins in this case, or myself) by threatening them with huge damages to pay and/or huge legal bills.

Higgins told openDemocracy… it was clear that “wealthy individuals abuse the UK legal system to attack legitimate journalists with the assistance of British lawyers” and said the case demonstrated the need for “robust anti-SLAPP legislation” to protect journalists from similar actions in the future.

On a national level – and therefore more serious (even) than what happened to Mr Higgins or myself – is the allegation that the current UK government, and a department headed at the time by the current UK prime minister, deliberately evaded sanctions it had itself imposed, in order to help someone whose private army is currently attacking a country with which the UK has ostensibly allied itself.

How many other times has the Tory government done this? Is it still doing this? Why does Parliament not know about it?

This should be enough to bring Sunak down – along with his government. Please share – and ask your favourite national media outlets (newspapers, TV, whoever) to cover it.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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The Livingstone Presumption is now available
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