Ukraine moves to ban church over alleged links to Moscow

 

 

 the article below is from here.

My comment: I really can't understand when journos present the facts that they choose to present, in accordance with their editor in chief, but they don't provide any of their views... I am puzzled... Don't they have any of their views?

 

 

An Orthodox priest collects religious objects as others clear up glass and debris inside the Holy Intercession Cathedral in Zaporizhzhia, after it was damaged by Russian missile strikes this week. Photograph: Andriy Andriyenko/AFP via Getty Images 

 

Russian-American journalist arrested in Russia under ‘foreign agent’ law

 

Daniel McLaughlin

Thu Oct 19 2023 - 16:58

 

 

Kyiv has moved towards banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) over its alleged ties to Moscow, as Ukraine’s forces reportedly launched raids on the occupied left bank of the Dnipro river and a Russian-American journalist was arrested in Russia.

Many people in Ukraine are deeply suspicious of the UOC, which until last year was officially subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, due to the latter’s loyalty to the Kremlin and support for Russia’s invasion of its neighbour.

Leaders of the UOC announced they were breaking ties with the Moscow Patriarchate last May, after the Kremlin shifted from eight years of localised conflict with Ukraine to full-scale war, but some UOC clerics have since been charged with treason and collaboration with Russia. An independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine was internationally recognised in 2019, and hundreds of UOC parishes switched allegiance to the new church.

Ukraine’s lower house of parliament passed a bill in the first of two required readings that would ban the operation of religious organisations that are affiliated with Russia or justify an invasion that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions.

 

Iryna Herashchenko of the European Solidarity party hailed the “historic” vote as “a first step to expelling Moscow’s priests from Ukrainian land”. She accused the UOC of being “not really a church but a branch of the FSB”, in reference to Russia’s domestic security service.

The bill was backed by 267 deputies and opposed by 15, and will become law if it passes a second reading and is signed by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Moscow describes Ukraine’s treatment of the UOC as religious persecution.

Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor for Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty who has US and Russian citizenship, was arrested on Wednesday in the city of Kazan for allegedly failing to register as a “foreign agent” under a law that is often used against Kremlin critics. She had returned home from Prague to deal with a family emergency and was then prevented from leaving Russia. US journalist Evan Gershkovich, who works for the Wall Street Journal, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in March on spying charges.

Ukraine shot down three of nine attack drones and one of eight missiles fired by Russia in the early hours of Thursday. Regional officials said on Thursday morning that five civilians had been killed and 11 hurt in shelling over the previous 24 hours.

Heavy fighting continued in parts of eastern and southeastern Ukraine, and officials in the industrial town of Avdiivka said Russian attacks were intensifying again after a lull of several days.

Ukraine’s military said Russia had bombed the village of Pishchanivka, which is on the occupied eastern bank of the Dnipro river in Kherson region, where Russian military bloggers have reported raids by Ukrainian forces in recent days.

“Russian sources claimed that likely company-sized elements of two Ukrainian naval infantry brigades conducted an assault across the Dnipro river … and framed these activities as part of a potential larger Ukrainian operation,” said the US-based Institute for the Study of War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why don’t many on the left see Russia as a colonial power?

the full article is behind a paywall but you can read it below.

My comment: Ms Naomi O'Leary hints that her question was answered indirectly but in my humble opinion, President Michael D Higgins was crystal clear. I would suggest to analysts to read a little bit more on the existence of Nazi groups in Eastern Ukraine and the agreement that NATO would NOT expand eastwards...

 

Russia carefully cultivates its inherited association with the ‘anti-colonial’ Soviet Union in its international relations

 

 

President Michael D Higgins: 'There is no doubt whatsoever that...the breaking up of the Soviet Union is there as an influence on the thinking of the Russian president.' Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA Wire; photo is from here: https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2023/10/19/why-dont-many-on-the-left-see-russia-as-a-colonial-power/ 

 

Naomi O’Leary

Thu Oct 19 2023 - 06:00

 

This week I had the opportunity to ask President Michael D Higgins a question I had been wanting to put to him for a long time: “In relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, do you see Russia as a colonial power?”

I wanted to ask because Higgins has forceful and considered views about the legacy of European colonialism in Africa but has not to my knowledge articulated a view that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an imperial venture.

That is certainly how Ukrainians themselves see the invasion.

“For 300 years, since middle-17th century, Ukraine was like a colony for Russia,” Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said last year as he explained the conflict to a group of African journalists. “They were suppressing our identity, our language. They insisted on the supremacy of Russian language, Russian culture...Russian civilisational supremacy. The official Russian narrative was even that Ukrainians are not able to govern themselves.”

 

Ukrainian writers have made great efforts since the invasion to explain why they view it in colonial terms, summed up in a book by Maksym Eristavi entitled Russian Colonialism 101.

In the past academia tended to exclude land empires from colonial studies and to accept the self-presentation of the Soviet Union as an anti-colonial force even as it suppressed national movements within its borders. As the historian Botakoz Kassymbekova wrote earlier this year: “Western academia too often overlooked the fact that Stalin was obsessed with maintaining Russian imperial borders and had adopted the same toolkit – ethnic cleansing, crushing dissent, destroying national movements, privileging Russian ethnicity and culture – that tsarist Russia used to maintain them.”

 

The long legacy of this arguably blinded western Europe for a long time towards the expansionist ambitions of Russia under president Vladimir Putin. It meant that when Russia invaded Ukraine some people on the left who would otherwise consider themselves anti-imperialists expressed sympathy with the Russian viewpoint, deeming it to be reacting to encroachment by western powers. In their view it was Ukrainian resistance that was the “Western imperial” force.

Russia carefully cultivates its inherited association with the “anti-colonial” Soviet Union in its international relations, particularly in the developing world.

Before his death in August the mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin promoted his Wagner paramilitary group as helping African nations throw off their old colonial masters. “They have got rid of the colonisers,” Prigozhin said in a Telegram message in which he offered Wagner’s services following a coup in Niger this summer.

“What happened in Niger is nothing other than the struggle of the people of Niger with their colonisers. With colonisers who are trying to foist their rules of life on them and their conditions and keep them in the state that Africa was in hundreds of years ago.”

The irony was that Wagner’s offer of militarily propping up African rulers came in exchange for logging rights, mining permits and permission to extract oil and gas, repeating the playbook of the old imperial resource-extraction model of the past.

Some of Higgins’s previously-expressed views on international relations led me to suspect that he might not include Ukraine within his conception of the colonised world. When I put my query to him, he began by replying “I don’t want to avoid any question”.

 

He continued by saying that “inherited imperialist tendencies and colonising tendencies” had “impeded” the ability of many European countries “to construct new positive partnerships with parts of Africa”.

“There is no doubt whatsoever that...the breaking up of the Soviet Union is there as an influence on the thinking of the Russian president,” he went on.

Passion then came into the President’s voice as he began to denounce the “hubris” of the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when capitalism was assumed to have become a “single hegemonic force”.

“It was announced that everything was now changed, and that we had a new single system, and a single civilisation, and that it was driven by the marketplace. And therefore it was only a matter of time into which every form of alternative collapsed,” he said.

The “quality of diplomacy” deteriorated, he continued, harming co-operation in everything from arms reduction, nuclear disposal, to the protection of the oceans. If we had more time to discuss it, he concluded, we should speak about how young people need to hear there can be a peaceful future, and that “war is not the natural condition of the species”.

I was left with the impression that my question had not been answered. Though perhaps, indirectly, it had.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yannis Behrakis and the war...

 Three years ago, on the day, Yannis Behrakis died.

He dedicated his life in taking powerful photos in conflict zones around the world.

It's worth remembering his words: “My mission is to tell you the story and then you decide what you want to do. My mission is to make sure that nobody can say: ‘I didn’t know’.”

Here are some of his moving photos...

Today, let's remember his work and let's send a message to all the leaders involved (Russia and EU and NATO) to Stop the War in Ukraine, to stop the killings of innocent civilians! 

Money for weapons is a waste of money! The world spent 2trillion $ in 2020 only for weapons. At the same time, people have no access to food, to drinking water, to basic education, to covid-19 vaccines... 

This weapon gathering madness leads only to conflicts and more human pain... 

the war atrocities and the innocent people

Today, it is a very sad day...

It's the day that a new war has started in Europe...a war that will cause deaths and immeasurable pain to millions of innocent civilians.

I was born in Greece...a country that has suffered in WWII, the subsequent civil war, the Dictatorship for 7 seven years (1967-1974) and a country where thousands refugees come from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria...

The photo of the body of this innocent Syrian boy...washed ashore in Turkey is still so vivid...

The memories of the war in former Yugoslavia in the 90's under the hospices of NATO and EU are coming back to mind.

Atrocities, deaths, immigration, uncounted pain caused to innocent people.

NATO was instrumental in that war...

NATO is watching today...

I do not know which is more painful...

All I know is that the EU leaders have a very soft approach to today's war...

Who is going to help millions of innocent people in Ukraine, today?

Who?

How?

When?

So many questions...

With no answers...

p.s. This film comes to mind today...  

p.s.2. energy prices and food supplies are going to be impacted greatly by the war, but this is not a topic to discuss today... 

p.s.3. bitter ironic fact: UN security council is chaired by ...Russia!