A four day truce has come into effect in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Some people blame Hamas for starting the recent hostilities. But they need to be reminded of the words of the great Indian freedom fighter, Bal Gangadhar Tilak when India was under British rule.
In 1908, Indian revolutionaries launched a series of bomb attacks on British officials in Bengal, in which several Britishers were killed.
Soon thereafter Tilak, who was critical of the moderate approach to the fight for independence from British rule, wrote in his newspaper ‘Kesari’: “ Violence, however deplorable, becomes inevitable when the rulers, who have converted the entire nation into a prison, begin to overawe the people in an endeavour to create despondency among them by terrible oppression and unduly frightening them. Then the sound of the bomb is spontaneously produced to impart to the authorities the knowledge that the people have reached the limit of their tolerance of oppression ”.
The origin of the ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN dispute since 1948 has been explained by me in the video and articles below :
Israel had conquered and occupied Gaza and the West Bank after the Six Day War in 1967, and thereafter converted them into virtual prison camps. The Palestians there, many of whom were refugees or their descendants after the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, were living in hellish conditions, without proper food, water, electricity etc, and often with severe restrictions on their freedom of movement.
In the West Bank, Jewish settlers were often driving Palestinians from their land, though the UN had declared that illegal.
The PLO ( Palestine Liberation Organisation, which had assumed power in the West Bank, no doubt protested against this, but only in words. Consequently, its leaders, such as Mahmoud Abbas, were perceived by most Palestinians as being covertly hand in glove with Israel and the Western powers.
On the other hand, Hamas, which assumed power in Gaza, resorted to armed struggle against the Israeli oppression, launching two ‘intifadas‘.
But this resulted in no basic change of the situation. Matters came to a head, however, on October 7th 2023 when Hamas launched an attack, and its soldiers entered southern Israel, killing many Israelis and taking many hostages.
No doubt the Hamas soldiers committed some atrocities ( though the exact amount is unknown, since in war truth is the first casualty ), but the Israeli response was totally disproportionate. Its air force destroyed many apartment buildings and hospitals, and together with its army killed about 15,000 civilians, two third being women and children https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15503.doc.htm
The Israeli authorities ordered residents of northern Gaza to move to the south, and the Israeli army entered Gaza, a tiny strip of coastal land 25 miles long and 7 mile wide, with only about 2.2 million people, thus starting a Second Nakba
Despite the onslaught of the well armed Israeli armed forces, and despite suffering heavy casualties, Hamas has bravely continued fighting, thus making their soldiers heroes in the eyes of the Palestinians, as well as of many people in the world. The people of Gaza are overwhelmingly supporting Hamas, and most Palestinians in the West Bank, Jordan, etc have switched their loyalties from the PLO to Hamas.
Under the four day truce Hamas has last night released 24 hostages, and Israel has released 39 Palestinians
More are set to be released on both sides in the next 3 days. of the truce.
Whether the truce will hold beyond 4 days is uncertain. But one thing is clear. It is a significant victory for Hamas, as it bravely fought the powerful Israeli forces, armed by modern Western weapons ( including aircraft ), and has compelled it to declare a truce, however temporary. It has also bargained with Israel on equal terms for release of prisoners.
USA and the European Union have no doubt declared Hamas a terrorist organisation.
But in the eyes of the Palestinians, and many people throughout the world, they are freedom fighters and heroes
In 1908 Indian revolutionaries launched a series of bomb attacks on British officials in Bengal, in which several Britishers were killed.
As a result, the great Indian freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was critical of the moderate approach to the fight for independence from British rule, wrote in his newspaper ‘Kesari’ :
” Violence, however deplorable, becomes inevitable when the rulers, who have converted the entire nation into a prison, begin to overawe the people in an endeavour to create despondency among them by terrible oppression and unduly frightening them. Then the sound of the bomb is spontaneously produced to impart to the authorities the knowledge that the people have reached the limit of their tolerance of oppression ”.
This explains the Hamas attack on Israel on 7th October and the continuing war since then.
Many people have condemned the Hamas attack, but they overlook the 75 year long history of atrocities and oppression of the Palestinian Arabs.
Before the state of Israel was created ( on the pretext that the persecuted Jews of Europe needed a homeland, but really to ensure safety of Middle East oil supplies for Western industries ), about 90% people living there were Palestinian Arabs. In 1948 Israeli attacks began on them, many of them including women and children were killed, and most of the remaining fled from their homeland out of fear ( an exodus known as the Nakba )
As a result, today only about 20% people living in Israel are Palestinian Arabs, the remaining 70% having been driven out of their homeland, and still living in horrible conditions in neighbouring Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, often without employment, food, water, electricity, and medicines.
After the Six Day War of 1967 Israel conquered the West Bank, the territory west of the Jordan river, which was part of Jordan, and is still occupying most of it, and building Jewish settlements there, thus driving out more Palestinians from their homes.
This was bound to create a reaction one day, for, as the adage goes, ‘wherever there is oppression there is resistance’, and the Hamas attack of 7th October must be understood in this context. It was an outburst of long existing grievances of Palestinians
Of course Hamas committed some atrocities ( the true extent of which is still unknown, since in war truth is the first casualty ), but the Israeli response was horrific, and totally disproportionate
Upto 20,000 Gazans have been killed in Israeli air strikes ( including many on apartment buildings, hospitals, etc ) and the Israeli army has occupied north Gaza, driving out the people there to the southern part of this congested strip of land.
Many Israeli leaders say they will destroy Hamas, but they forget that most Palestinians are supporting it, and have identified themselves with it. Even in the West Bank, part of which is under the administration of the PLO ( Palestine Liberation Organisation, headed by Mahmoud Abbas ), most Palestinians have shifted their support to Hamas, giving up their earlier support to the PLO, whose leaders are perceived as Western puppets.
If the Israelis thought that with the enormous fire power of their military they would easily and swiftly destroy Hamas and the Palestinian resistance, as in the Six Day War, by now they must be having second thoughts. It is not six days but six weeks since the hostilities began, with no sign of abatement. It is going to be a long haul, as the Americans found in Vietnam, or the Russians in Afghanistan, and there is no ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, as Gen Westmoreland, the US commander in Vietnam, proclaimed.
This time it will not be a short war. It will not be another 1948 war, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur war, or the ‘intifadas’.
It will be a long drawn conflict with huge casualties, until justice is done to the long suffering Palestinians
Kiev: Ukraine has accused Russia of attacking the besieged city of Bakhmut with phosphorus munitions, a media report said.
In drone footage released by Ukraine’s military, Bakhmut can be seen ablaze as what appears to be white phosphorus rains down on the city, BBC reported.
White phosphorus weapons are not banned, but their use in civilian areas is considered a war crime. They create fast-spreading fires that are very difficult to put out. Russia has been accused of using them before as well.
Russia has been trying to capture Bakhmut for months, despite its questionable strategic value. Western officials have estimated that thousands of Moscow’s troops have died in the assault.
Taking to Twitter, Ukraine’s defence ministry said the phosphorus attack targeted “unoccupied areas of Bakhmut with incendiary ammunition”.
Kiev’s special forces command added that Moscow’s forces continued “to destroy the city”.
It is unclear when exactly the alleged attack took place. But the footage shared by Ukraine – seemingly captured by a surveillance drone – showed high-rise buildings engulfed in flames, BBC reported.
Other videos posted to social media showed fires raging on the ground and white clouds of phosphorus illuminating the night sky.
Russia has been accused of using white phosphorus several times since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, including during the siege of Mariupol at the beginning of the war.
Moscow has never publicly admitted to using white phosphorus, and last year Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov insisted that “Russia has never violated international conventions” after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said it had been used.
White phosphorus is a wax-like substance which ignites on contact with oxygen, creating bright plumes of smoke, BBC reported.
Jeddah: The fracturing of families underpins many stories of displacement in Sudan, where fighting has erupted in the capital Khartoum and elsewhere, due to a vicious power struggle within the country’s military leadership.
Some Indians including Hyderabadis tie the knots amidst the blue skies of the Nile delta in the African country. The conflicts and tensions in Sudan are not new for Indians, however, the ongoing conflict that erupted on April 15 is a matter of concern for them, not like before.
When Rafat Unissa married to a Sudanese national in Hyderabad some eight years ago she didn’t even imagine that one day she would return with her four children to her parent’s home back in India.
She is one among some Hyderabadi poverty ridden girls married to Sudanese and settled in African country. Though she is married to a Sudanese national yet she chose to remain as an Indian Citizen. Also, her four children – two sons and two daughters – also Indian nationals.
‘I can’t risk the life of my children in Sudan and decided to return to my home India’, she told this correspondent over the phone from Port Sudan while waiting to be airlifted by Indian Air Force aircraft.
The family of Mohammed Ziauddin of BHEL Ramachandrapuram is in more fractured. Settled in Sudan three decades ago, his two sons married African women. When war erupted they left for neighbouring Eretria with their wives as foreigners their African wives weren’t able to avail Operation Kaveri meant for Indians.
The father decided to return to Hyderabad along with their mother and his Hyderabad employees. He was operating an industrial pipes manufacturing plant family.
In another case, a man from the Lungar House area of Hyderabad (whose identity is withheld) has been living in Sudan for many years. A former resident of Dubai, he settled in Sudan and married a Sudanese woman.
His case is peculiar and more interesting, he is already married in India and his first wife is living in Hyderabad along with the children.
While working in Sudan, he fell in love with a local woman and married her. The Hyderabadi is not ready to depart from her Sudanese wife and return home. Neither can he bring his Sudanese wife to India.
Also, he is apprehensive of his Indian wife in case he brings his Sudanese wife to India, according to his friends.
All these Hyderabadis who are desperate to come to Hyderabad are full of praise for the Indian Government and its Operation Kaveri mission.
The move suggested a shifting dynamic in the contest: With DeSantis falling further behind Trump in national and early-state surveys, his allied super PAC is trying to ensure that the primary remains a two-way race and that other candidates vying to be the Trump alternative do not gain traction.
“This is the DeSantis team acknowledging that he is closer to the field than he is to President Trump,” said Justin Clark, a Republican strategist who was Trump’s 2020 deputy campaign manager but who isn’t involved in a 2024 presidential campaign.
The pro-DeSantis PAC’s anti-Haley offensive came after the former South Carolina governor took a shot at DeSantis during an interview on Fox News for his heavy-handed approach toward Disney and suggested the theme park relocate several hours north to her home state. Shortly after, Never Back Down began running a digital ad featuring clips of Disney employees touting the company’s promotion of pro-LGBTQ themes, and concluding with a silhouette image of Haley holding hands with Mickey Mouse.
It wasn’t a one-off, but part of a coordinated offensive. The group announced the spot would be included in a “six-figure” digital ad buy in South Carolina, a key early primary state. And it put out several tweets attacking Haley, including one saying she is “embracing woke corporations” and another with a poll asking if she should be nicknamed “Mickey Haley” or “Nikki Mouse.”
“It’s a bad strategy to defend Woke Disney when they decided to defend the sexualization of children,” Erin Perrine, a spokesperson for Never Back Down, said in a statement, when asked about the group’s recent attacks on Haley. ”It’s mind-boggling [that] any Republican would side with a massive corporation that has an unprecedented level of self-governance over protecting children and families, but I guess 2023 is a strange time.”
DeSantis’ allies may have no other choice than to go on the attack. While Trump has been the consistent polling leader, it’s DeSantis who has been taking fire from a number of would-be rivals, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, businessperson Vivek Ramaswamy and Haley.
A pro-Haley super PAC, SFA Fund Inc., (an abbreviation for “Stand For America”) regularly sends out news roundups to reporters highlighting unflattering coverage about DeSantis, something the group doesn’t do for Trump or Haley’s other primary rivals.
“Ron DeSantis’ No Good, Very Bad Week,” read the subject of one such email. “DeSantis’ Disastrous Journey to the Swamp,” read another.
This week, the group created a video mocking DeSantis’ suggestion that he might open a state prison next to Disney World. And after her Fox interview about DeSantis, Haley joked that South Carolina conservatives are “not sanctimonious” about their values — a nod to Trump’s “DeSanctimonious” nickname for the Florida governor.
DeSantis is comfortably in second place in most surveys, trailing Trump but well ahead of the other Republicans in the field. But in recent weeks, he has lost ground, with Trump picking up endorsements from several Republican Congress members in Florida and with some major donors expressing reservations about the Florida governor. Two recent polls of South Carolina GOP voters showed Trump far ahead of the pack and Haley only narrowly behind DeSantis. A survey conducted earlier this month by National Public Affairs, a Republican firm co-founded by Clark, found DeSantis at 21 percent, with Haley at 19 percent. A Winthrop University poll taken several weeks earlier showed similar results, with DeSantis at 20 percent and Haley at 18 percent.
“The fact that Ron DeSantis is attacking her is not surprising,” said Mark Harris, a Republican consultant who is running the pro-Haley super PAC. “It’s a clear indication that he’s losing ground.”
Nachama Soloveichik, a spokesperson for Haley, also took a swipe at DeSantis, contending that as governor Haley would have “avoided wasting taxpayer dollars on tit for tat battles.”
The presence of Haley and others in the race presents a challenge for DeSantis, who must take steps to consolidate the support of voters who are looking for someone other than Trump. Any traction that rival candidates gain could detract from DeSantis’ effort to overtake the former president.
The dynamic bears some similarities to the 2016 primary, when Trump prevailed over a splintered field of Republican rivals. The non-Trump candidates spent months relentlessly attacking one another while largely leaving Trump untouched. It ultimately paved the way for Trump to win the nomination.
Because DeSantis is not yet an announced candidate, it has fallen on Never Back Down to take the lead in promoting him and attacking his prospective rivals. The organization — which has also aired ads attacking Trump — is expected to be among the most well-funded entities in the primary. It has announced that it has already raised $30 million, about two-thirds of which came from Nevada hotel executive Robert Bigelow.
Some Republicans, however, have privately questioned the decision to go after Haley, arguing that in taking on a lower-polling rival, DeSantis appeared weak.
“Attacking candidates with no votes does not have the upside of gaining votes,” said Curt Anderson, a veteran Republican strategist who is not involved in the primary.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Sitapur: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Friday termed the upcoming urban body elections as the “Deva-Asura Sangram”, a battle between the gods and their enemies, and said it is necessary to teach the corrupt and the mafia a lesson.
Addressing an election meeting ahead of the state-wide civic polls on May 4 and 11, the chief minister assured the development of the sacred Naimisharanya site in Sitapur.
“Naimisharanya will undergo a facelift on the lines of Kashi, Ayodhya and Mathura. After Naimisharanya’s rejuvenation, religious tourism will create employment opportunities in every sector,” he said in Sitapur.
Adityanath also addressed meetings in Lakhimpur Kheri and Balrampur as part of the campaign.
He compared the civic polls to the war between the gods and the demons.
“In this land of Naimisharanya, Maharishi Dadhichi once donated his bones to make weapons for the victory of the divine forces,” he said, adding the elections provided an opportunity to teach a lesson to the corrupt and the criminals who flourished under the previous regimes in the state.
The BJP has been attacking the opposition Samajwadi Party for allegedly giving patronage to criminals when it was in power.
At another meeting, the CM said before 2017, when the BJP came to power in Uttar Pradesh, there was hooliganism in the state and a “goonda tax” collected from traders.
But now nobody has the courage to demand it, he said.
“Basic facilities will start to reach every home as soon as the ‘third engine’ joins the ‘double-engine government,” he said, referring to the BJP governments already in UP and at the Centre.
“The benefits of the government’s schemes will be made available to everyone without discrimination,” Adityanath added.
In Lakhimpur Kheri, he said along with facilities like four-lane roads, technical education, the area will soon have a medical college and its airstrip developed into an airport.
Lakhimpur will serve as a hub of ecotourism, which will open new avenues for the region’s development, he said.
He claimed only the BJP reached out to people during the Covid pandemic.
“We also provided a free ration facility. Whether it is welfare schemes for the poor or the infrastructure, we have taken care of everything,” he said.
Votes polled in the two-phase election will be counted on May 13. PTI
The U.K conducted its last evacuation flight from Sudan on Saturday, as the U.S. and France also brought groups of foreign nationals out of the conflict-torn African country.
The moves come amid a deteriorating security situation in Sudan, as fighting continues between the Sudanese Armed Forces and its rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The British government decided to end evacuation flights “because of a decline in demand by British nationals, and because the situation on ground continues to remain volatile,” the U.K. Foreign Office said in a statement.
“Focus will now turn to providing consular support to British nationals in Port Sudan and in neighboring countries in the region,” it said, noting that more than 1,888 people were evacuated on 21 flights during the operation.
A French plane arrived in Chad on Friday carrying staff from the United Nations and international humanitarian non-profit organizations. France has evacuated over a thousand people from Sudan since the outbreak of hostilities.
The U.S. State Department said on Saturday that a convoy of U.S. citizens, locally-employed staff and citizens of partner countries arrived in Port Sudan and that it is assisting those eligible to travel onward to Saudi Arabia.
“Intensive negotiations by the United States with the support of our regional and international partners enabled the security conditions that have allowed the departure of thousands of foreign and U.S. citizens,” the State Department said.
“We continue,” it added, “to call on the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces to end the fighting that is endangering civilians.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
If there were a silver lining in her son being convicted of high treason, it was that Yelena Gordon would have a rare chance to see him.
But when she tried to enter the courtroom, she was told it was already full. But those packed in weren’t press or his supporters, since the hearing was closed.
“I recognized just one face there, the rest were all strangers,” she later recounted, exasperated, outside the Moscow City Court. “I felt like I had woken up in a Kafka novel.”
Eventually, after copious cajoling, Gordon was able to stand beside Vladimir Kara-Murza, a glass wall between her and her son, as the sentence was delivered.
Kara-Murza was handed 25 years in prison, a sky-high figure previously reserved for major homicide cases, and the highest sentence for an opposition politician to date.
The bulk — 18 years — was given on account of treason, for speeches he gave last year in the United States, Finland and Portugal.
For a man who had lobbied the West for anti-Russia sanctions such as on the Magnitsky Act against human rights abusers — long before Russia invaded Ukraine — those speeches were wholly unremarkable.
But the prosecution cast Kara-Murza’s words as an existential threat to Russia’s safety.
“This is the enemy and he should be punished,” prosecutor Boris Loktionov stated during the trial, according to Kara-Murza’s lawyer.
The judge, whose own name features on the Magnitsky list as a human rights abuser, agreed. And so did Russia’s Foreign Ministry, saying: “Traitors and betrayers, hailed by the West, will get what they deserve.”
Redefining the enemy
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of Russians have received fines or jail sentences of several years under new military censorship laws.
But never before has the nuclear charge of treason been used to convict someone for public statements containing publicly available information.
A screen set up in a hall at Moscow City Court shows the verdict in the case against Vladimir Kara-Murza | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
The verdict came a day after an appeal hearing at the same court for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich who, in a move unseen since the end of the Cold War, is being charged with spying “for the American side.”
Taken together, the two cases set a historic precedent for modern Russia, broadening and formalizing its hunt for internal enemies.
“The state, the [Kremlin], has decided to sharply expand the ‘list of targets’ for charges of treason and espionage,” Andrei Soldatov, an expert in Russia’s security services, told POLITICO.
Up until now, the worst the foreign press corps feared was having their accreditation revoked by Russia’s Foreign Ministry. This is now changing.
For Kremlin critics, the gloves have of course been off for far longer — before his jailing, Kara-Murza survived two poisonings. He had been a close ally of Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015 within sight of the Kremlin.
But such reprisals were reserved for only a handful of prominent dissidents, and enacted by anonymous hitmen and undercover agents.
After Putin last week signed into law extending the punishment for treason from 20 years to life, anyone could be eliminated from public life with the stamp of legitimacy from a judge in robes.
“Broach the topic of political repression over a coffee with a foreigner, and that could already be considered treason,” Oleg Orlov, chair of the disbanded rights group Memorial, said outside the courthouse.
Like many, he saw a parallel with Soviet times, when tens of thousands of “enemies of the state” were accused of spying for foreign governments and sent to far-flung labor camps or simply executed, and foreigners were by definition suspect.
Treason as catch-all
Instead of the usual Investigative Committee, treason cases fall under the remit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, making them uniquely secretive.
In court, hearings are held behind closed doors — sheltered from the public and press — and defense lawyers are all but gagged.
But they used to be relatively rare: Between 2009 and 2013, a total of 25 people were tried for espionage or treason, according to Russian court statistics. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, that number fluctuated from a handful to a maximum of 17.
Former defense journalist Ivan Safronov in court, April 2022 | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Involving academics, Crimean Tatars and military accused of passing on sensitive information to foreign parties, they generally drew little attention.
The jailing of Ivan Safronov — a former defense journalist accused of sharing state secrets with a Czech acquaintance — formed an important exception in 2020. It triggered a massive outcry among his peers and cast a spotlight on the treason law. Apparently, even sharing information gleaned from public sources could result in a conviction.
Combined with an amendment introduced after anti-Kremlin protests in 2012 that labeled any help to a “foreign organization which aimed to undermine Russian security” as treason, it turned the law into a powder keg.
In February 2022, that was set alight.
Angered by the war but too afraid to protest publicly, some Russians sought to support Ukraine in less visible ways such as through donations to aid organizations.
The response was swift: Only three days after Putin announced his special military operation, Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office warned it would check “every case of financial or other help” for signs of treason.
Thousands of Russians were plunged into a legal abyss. “I transferred 100 rubles to a Ukrainian NGO. Is this the end?” read a Q&A card shared on social media by the legal aid group Pervy Otdel.
“The current situation is such that this [treason] article will likely be applied more broadly,” warned Senator Andrei Klimov, head of the defense committee of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament.
Inventing traitors
Last summer, the law was revised once more to define defectors as traitors as well.
Ivan Pavlov, who oversees Pervy Otdel from exile after being forced to flee Russia for defending Safronov, estimates some 70 treason cases have already been launched since the start of the war — twice the maximum in pre-war years. And the tempo seems to be picking up.
Regional media headlines reporting arrests for treason are becoming almost commonplace. Sometimes they include high-octane video footage of FSB teams storming people’s homes and securing supposed confessions on camera.
Yet from what can be gleaned about the cases from media leaks, their evidence is shaky.
Instead of the usual Investigative Committee, treason cases fall under the remit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, making them uniquely secretive | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
In December last year, 21-year-old Savely Frolov became the first to be charged with conspiring to defect. Among the reported incriminating evidence is that he attempted to cross into neighboring Georgia with a pair of camouflage trousers in the trunk of his car.
In early April this year, a married couple was arrested in the industrial city of Nizhny Tagil for supposedly collaborating with Ukrainian intelligence. The two worked at a nearby defense plant, but acquaintances cited by independent Russian media Holod deny they had access to secret information.
“It is a reaction to the war: There’s a demand from up top for traitors. And if they can’t find real ones, they’ll make them up, invent them,” said Pavlov.
Although official statistics are only published with a two-year lag time, he has little doubt a flood of guilty verdicts is coming.
“The first and last time a treason suspect was acquitted in Russia was in 1999.”
No sign of slowing
If precedent is anything to go by, Gershkovich will likely eventually be subject to a prisoner swap.
That is what happened with Brittney Griner, a U.S. basketball star jailed for drug smuggling when she entered Russia carrying hashish vape cartridges.
And it is also what happened with the last foreign journalist detained, in 1986 when the American Nicholas Daniloff was supposedly caught “red-handed” spying, like Gershkovich.
Back then, several others were released with him — among them Yury Orlov, a human rights activist sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet activity.”
Some now harbor hope that a deal involving Gershkovich could also help Kara-Murza, who is well-known in Washington circles and suffers from severe health problems.
For ordinary Russians, any glimmers of hope that the traitor push will slow down are even less tangible.
Those POLITICO spoke to say a Soviet-era mass campaign against traitors is unlikely, if only because the Kremlin has a fine line to walk: arrest too many traitors and it risks shattering the image that Russians unanimously support the war.
Some harbor hope that a deal involving Gershkovich could also help Kara-Murza, who is well-known in Washington circles | Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE
And in the era of modern technology, there are easier ways to convey a message to a large audience. “If Stalin had had a television channel, there would’ve likely not been a need for mass repression,” reflected Pavlov.
Yet the repressive state apparatus does seem to have a momentum of its own, as those involved in investigating and prosecuting treason and espionage cases are rewarded with bonuses and promotions.
In a first, the treason case against Kara-Murza was led by the Investigative Committee, opening the door for the FSB to massively increase its work capacity by offloading work on others, says Soldatov.
“If the FSB can’t handle it, the Investigative Committee will jump in.”
In the public sphere, patriotic officials at all levels are clamoring for an even harder line, going so far as to volunteer the names of apparently unpatriotic political rivals and celebrities to be investigated.
There have been calls for “traitors” to be stripped of their citizenship and to reintroduce the death penalty.
And in a telling sign, Kara-Murza’s veteran lawyer Vadim Prokhorov has fled Russia, fearing he might be targeted next.
Аs Orlov, the dissident who was part of the 1986 swap and who went on to become an early critic of Putin, wrote in the early days of Putin’s reign in 2004: “Russia is flying back in time.”
Nearly two decades on, the question in Moscow nowadays is a simple one: how far back?
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
