Pain, ruins and graves

All you need to know early in the morning of December 21

Good morning!

On Tuesday in the morning, Putin's early morning colleagues on state security bodies on the Chekist's Day congratulated his former colleagues and called them to "quickly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs." Because the enemy does not sleep:

• On the 300th day of the war, the President of Ukraine visited the forefront in Bakhmut to award the defenders of the city. Today, according to American media, he will arrive in Washington.
• In the Bryansk region, the railway tracks were damaged as a result of shelling and power supply was violated.
• In Chuvashia, an explosion occurred at the Urengoy - Pomara - Uzhgorod gas pipeline, after which a fire began. Three people died.
• The Navalny team issued an investigation about the deputy Shoigu Timura Ivanov and his wife: to look at this densely -related glamor is quite scary.
• In Tyumen, nevertheless, a fine was assigned for the wobble, and the washed hearts of Mariupol and St. Petersburg were returned to the Palace Square.
• According to Bloomberg estimates, Russian oil exports fell by 54% in the first week after the introduction of the ceiling of prices.

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Presidential races

On the 300th day of the war, the President of Ukraine went to the front line to Bakhmut to give awards to the defenders of the city. He wished them health and added: “I would like to wish the light, but the situation is complex, that is, it is not. The main thing is that the light is inside.” Around this time, Putin in the Kremlin also distributed awards - “heads” of the annexed territories of Ukraine and Russian propagandists. The head of RT Margarita Simonyan in thanksgiving promised “to wet the cannibals” until Putin gives the end. Here are the video clips of both ceremonies.

When the news of Zelensky to the front line, the “Russian newspaper”, marked “Exclusive” published the news, published the news that Putin also went to the combat zone, and Peskov confirmed this, though that the president visited the headquarters. The independent publication “Agency”, in turn, clarified that the headquarters that Putin visited was in Rostov-on-Don. The “advanced positions” that Shoigu was also flying on a helicopter, also managed to geolocyes : they are in the annexed Crimea, in the Armyansk area, that is, 80 km from the front line. The owner of the PMC Vagner Evgeny Prigozhin could not stay away from this motion: in the Telegram channel “Prigozhin’s press service” there were several videos on which he orders people in camouflage and masks “beat off” the message to Vladimir Alexandrovich that he, Prigozhin, is nearby and ready to meet.

But Vladimir Alexandrovich, according to American media , has already flown to Washington, where his meeting with US President Joe Biden and (possibly) a speech in Congress is expected. It will probably be very serious to be discussed there, since Zelensky left Ukraine for the first time since the beginning of the war.

Military reports

According to the estimates of the American Institute for the Study of War, from October 1 to December 20, the Russian military in incessant battles were able to occupy a territory in 192 square meters in the vicinity of Bakhmut. km. The battles for Bakhmut continue - this is a new report from the outskirts of the city, which Ukrainian police go around in order to deliver the residents the necessary residents and convince them to evacuate. In other front -line cities of the Donetsk region, the situation is a little better - it is enough to see the shooting from Krasnogovka . The President of Zelensky, who also drove through several cities of Donbass on the way to Bakhmut, described what he saw there in three words: “Pain, ruins and graves”.

In the regions already left by the Russian army, people continue to live in the basements: and because the housing is destroyed, and because the shelling does not stop ( this is the story of one such basement in the village of Kutuzovka, Kharkov region). According to the head of the administration of the Kherson region, Russia fired at the region 42 times in a day, two people died, three were injured. 80% of the Kiev region on Tuesday morning remained without power supply after the attack of Iranian drones on Monday morning.

Olga Romanova, the head of the “sitting” Romanov, claims that the Ukrainian prisoners of war held in the colony in the occupied Gorlovka of the Donetsk region are sent to the front as part of the Russian departments. First, they are forced to sign a refusal of exchange, then they are given a Russian passport, and immediately after it - a mobilization agenda. They are trying to recruit both Ukrainian prisoners and Ukrainians who have not been filtered during evacuation from the war zone taken into Russia. This phenomenon, according to Romanova, has not yet become massive, but the statistics of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs inspires fears: only in November the department issued more than a hundred thousand passports to residents of the occupied territories of Ukraine.

What else we did not know about the war:

• “Important stories” studied how the Russian military kill each other at the front and in the rear (the main reasons are negligence, drunkenness and “friendly fire”);
• “Mediazona” talked with volunteers who went to the front to “help the country”, and recreated their typical path: from signing a contract, trenches, destructive orders of the command to a conclusion in a pit for refuseniks;
• Radio correspondent Freedom talked with a Russian who worked at a construction site in Mariupol for a month and a half, about the situation and moods in the city;
• Navalny's associations have published an investigation about a person who is engaged in the restoration of Mariupol - the deputy minister of defense of Russia Timur Ivanov. The construction in the destroyed city is now being carried out by the same companies that, in the order of rollbacks, built a mansion in the center of Moscow and the suburban residence for Ivanov and his wife and probably finance their breathtaking leave, trips and purchases. Timur Ivanov and his wife recently divorced - probably to protect her from EU sanctions. All adult children of this couple live abroad; When Russian aviation bombed Mariupol, Ivanov’s wife bought jewelry in Paris.

War, view from Russia

The Governor of the Bryansk region announced damage to the railway tracks and violation of energy supply as a result of shelling; The Belgorod governor again reported on the shelling of Shebekino, where there is also no light. The authorities of the Kursk region also wrote about shelling.

What exactly was she fired in the Kursk region, especially interesting, because there is a gas pipeline of Urengoy - Pomara - Uzhgorod, on the Chuvash site of which on Tuesday during the day , there was a powerful explosion that claimed the lives of three people. The explosion was followed by a fire. The Russian authorities explained what happened to the repair work. The explanation, in general, of course, is believable.

Putin created a working group on the mobilization and social support of the warring and their families. The group was headed by the leader of United Russia, Turchak, and it included deputies and telegram-warriors, including the recently deanonymized creator of Rybar Mikhail Zvinchuk. They will engage in “monitoring”, “consideration of issues” and explanatory work. Why is this group needed if mobilization, as Putin claims, ended, remained without explanation.

The territories of Ukraine annexed by Russia appointed their representatives in the Federation Council, and the Russian State Duma continued work on “military laws”: in the third reading, fines of five million or five years were approved for “desecration” of the St. George ribbon, in the first reading they were recognized as “extremist” maps of Russia without annexed territories (a fine of a million of rubles).

The head of the Ministry of Cyphra, Maksut Shadaev, calculated that from the beginning of this year, about one hundred thousand ITishnikov left and did not return from Russia-these are 10% of all specialists of Russian IT companies. The British Financial Times connected the arrest of Russian assets of Oleg Deripaska for a billion dollars with his criticism of war in Ukraine.

Other military repressions:

• In Tyumen, the court of appeal nevertheless fined 30 thousand rubles under the article on “discrediting” by a local resident Alice Klimenta, who wrote a chalk on the asphalt: “no in *** e”. The court of first instance did not fine her, satisfied with the explanation that the inscription means “no wobble”.
• The interweaving hearts of Mariupol and Petersburg were returned to Palace Square in St. Petersburg, washing them from the inscription “The killer, you yourself bombed it. Judas”. For applying this inscription to a 17-year-old schoolgirl, a protocol was drawn up on the “discredit” of the Russian army.
• Here is a conversation with a meteorologist from Karelia Antonina Nikulina, on which three protocols on “discrediting” have already been drawn up. Today, in her case, a court will be held in Kostomuksha, to which Nikulina is from the village where she lives, to go 120 km.
• Here is the story of the family of Richard and Maria Rose from Kirov, who are accused under a criminal article on fakes. Richard is sitting in a pre -trial detention center (he was added to the “fakes” of “justification of terrorism” for the wish of death to Putin), and Mary, who was banned by certain actions, managed to escape from Russia with the child. (The apparent name by Richard Rose is actually a family joke: he is a Russian citizen, a native of Kirov, his father was also called Richard, and Rose is a distorted Moldavian surname).
• The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia put on the federal wanted list of Marat Gelman - a manager of cultural projects, a former political technologist. According to which article, it is not written, but he himself believes that “fakes”, here is his comment .

Other Russian

• The Ministry of Justice of Russia filed a lawsuit against the liquidation of the Moscow Helsinki group - the oldest human rights organization in Russia, which has been working since 1976. The basis for liquidation was invented formal: the MHG supposedly illegally acted in different regions of Russia, despite its purely Moscow status. Here is the commentary of the Executive Director of MHG Svetlana Astrakantseva.
• The State Duma approved in the third reading a single article of the Administrative Code for “foreign agents” and increased fines to them.
• The court in Rostov-on-Don in absentia replaced a suspended term with the real former coordinator of Open Russia in the Rostov Region Anastasia Shevchenko (in August she left Russia). Shevchenko is the first in Russia convicted under an article on cooperation with an “unwanted organization”. In 2021, the court gave her four years conditionally, later the term was reduced to three years. Before the court’s decision, Shevchenko spent more than two years under house arrest; During the investigation, she died a 17-year-old daughter who lived in a boarding school for children with developmental features.
• In a schizo to Navalny, the “unwashed convict” was returned , with which he had previously served 15 days. Two days after the end of the first term, the “unwashed convict” received new 15 days in the schizo for “smoking in the wrong place”. Alexei is trying to explain to the cellmate that the only thing that will break this vicious schizo-krug will be to break into the “cleanest convict in the zone”.
• The court in Irkutsk sentenced to six years and eight months the colony of the former Minister of Health of the region Natalia Ledyaev in the fraud case in the purchase of medical masks during the pandemic. Her son Ilya Belousov received eight and a half years of the colony, four suppliers were punished by a shorter time.

International Echo of War

• The United States accused the UN Secretary General Antoniu Gutherrish of "yielding to Russian threats" and did not send officials to Ukraine to verify the drones used by Russia, who, according to Washington and other countries, supplied Iran. Bloomberg writes that Kiev managed to reach an agreement with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Ilona Mask on the supply of more than ten thousand additional Starlink antennas to counteract Russian air attacks. Several EU countries will help with paying for these supplies.
• According to Bloomberg, in the first full week of the European oil embargo, sea export of oil from Russia fell by 54%. Partially, the collapse of such a depth is explained by the repair in the key export Baltic port of Primorsk, but in the find, export also declined. Against this background, the Russian ruble was somewhat fell in price (69 rubles per dollar and 74 per euro). How can this be related to sanctions and what will happen next, Russian economists explain here .
• It seems from this that sanctions work if they are observed. What does not always happen: as the Belarusian Investigation Center writes , since the European Union introduced the ban on the import of Belarusian wood, its export from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to the EU countries has grown by thousands of times. The investigators called the companies through which re -export is produced and the main buyers of Belarusian wood bypassing sanctions: these are Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Germany and the Netherlands. To fight such practices, from January 1, a special representative of sanctions appears in the EU from January 1.
• The State Security Service of Latvia issued the warning of the party "Stability!" Due to the fact that its members gave interviews to the Russian and Belarusian media (including publications that are controlled by people under the EU sanctions).
• The authorities of Great Britain obliged the Letterone investment fund, founded by Russian billionaires Mikhail Friedman and Peter Aven, to sell a share in the Internet provider. This found a threat to national security.
• In Ukraine, 115 real estate objects of the Russian Tatneft were arrested (oil depot, gas stations, non -residential buildings, land plots, etc.). Russia terminated the agreement with Ukraine on the mutual recognition of diplomas and academic degrees.
• The story with an explosion in the Polish police of a gift brought from Ukraine led to the removal of the deputy head of the State Emergency Situations of Ukraine Dmitry Bondar and the initiation of a criminal case.
• The Supreme Court of Sweden refused to extradite to Turkey an opposition Turkish journalist Bulet Kenesh, whom Erdogan accuses of involvement in an attempt by the 2016 coup. The issuance of Kenesh was one of the conditions for the consent of Turkey to join Sweden to NATO. In total, Ankara requires the issuance of 73 people. At least one of them, the Swedish authorities have already issued. What will happen next is not yet clear. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sweden adhered to neutrality and did not plan to join military unions.
• And to the issue of retaliation: the court in Germany recognized the 97-year-old Irmgard Fuurhner on the accomplice of more than 10.5 thousand murders in the Nazi concentration camp Stuttgof. She worked in him by the commandant’s driver. Fürhner sentenced to two years conditionally.

Six links

• Philosophical. The analysis of the concepts of power, domination and violence by Hannah Arendt and other thinkers of the 20th century. Or an attempt to see Heidegger philosophy through the eyes of a Marxist.
• Architectural. Two fragments from the book of Architecture historian Katherine Zubovich “Moscow Monumental. High-altitude and city life in the era of Stalinism” (Publishing House of Corpus): The first , about mass resettlements caused by the construction of skyscrapers, and the second about the design of the Palace of Soviets, which was never built.
• From Persian. Two stories of modern Iranian writers- “Samovar” by Khushanga Moradi-Kermani and “Gray Friday” Monira Ravanipur.

Sincerely yours,
Seven forty

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