Terror Tactics

It says a lot about the current trajectory of Putin's Russia ....

Memorial Closed

 ..... that alongside of the expulsion of Western journalists, and the branding of some Non Government Organisations (NGO's) as 'agents of a foreign government', Russia's Supreme Court ordered the closure of 'Memorial', Russia's oldest Non Government Organisation, which was devoted to uncovering examples Soviet-era oppression.

They accused the group of portraying the former USSR as a "terrorist" state, instead of taking "pride in our glorious past" .... a judgement which rings very hollow, as Russia threatens more of the Ukraine, than the three areas that it, or its Russian nationalist surrogates, have already taken over. 

A threat that has brought Europe to the brink of warfare, and involved the only Western super power in a form of brinkmanship that could easily escalate in to a world war.

The Holodomor Is Etched Into Ukrainian Memories

Its also ironic that the threat is primarily to the Ukraine, where every November the Ukrainians light a candle in remembrance of the Holodomor - the killing by starvation - of an estimated four million Ukrainian people in the famine of 1932-33, which occurred on the orders of Stalin, when Communist officials seized food and prevented peasants from leaving their villages to search for supplies. They were being collectively punished for resisting the forced collectivisation of farms in the name of Communism.

Now, in the face of the terror of a Russian invasion, intended to reconstitute a form of the USSR, the memories of what Ukrainians suffered at the hands of the KGB under orders from the Kremlin, fuels the Ukrainian resentment of Moscow, and what they see as the terrorist state it controls.