Another case where journalism is a crime

Alina Lipp, an independent journalist reporting from Donbass, has had her assets frozen and her father’s assets frozen by the German government as punishment for reporting on Ukrainian misdeeds in Donbass.

She said she has been that she is under a criminal investigation on charges that potentially could result in a three-year prison sentence. She said she was told her own testimony was not wanted.

The video above shows her telling her story. Notice the monument with the children’s toys around it. This is a monument to children killed as a result of Ukrainian bombardment of Donbass, with their names and ages.

Although the video was put up recently, it evidently was made last summer, because that was when she received the notification.

Alina Lipp, who’s 29, is the daughter of a Russian father and a German mother.  She is a member of the Green Party and once hoped for a political career.

Lipp studied sustainable governance at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, focusing on environmental studies.  She hoped for a political career as a member of the Greens party.

But after the change of government in Ukraine, she went in 2016 to see for herself what was going on.  She said she found, among other things, that most of the residents of Crimea considered themselves Russians and were glad to be part of Russia.

I’m not sure of her exact comings and goings.  She has evidently gone back and forth between Germany and Crimea, and Germany and Donbass, a number of times, and also spent time in Russia.  Her dad has meanwhile moved to Crimea.

She set up her own Telegram channel to report from the region.  She said she was the only German journalist reporting from the region.  

Not only the German government, but also most of the German press condemned her reporting, she said, without anyone going to see for themselves.

She is being investigated by the Centre for Combating Internet Hate Crimes of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Lüneburg, Germany.

The Composite Eye newsletter reported she is formally charged with trying “to stir up a psychological climate, also among the population of the Federal Republic of Germany, to cause divisions in society and to destroy social cohesion due to at least distorted and sometimes false ideas.”

The prosecutor referred to Lipp’s statements on her Telegram channel, namely for saying the population of Donbass supported Russia’s “special operation,” and for speaking of a genocide in the Donbass region, where a civil war that has been ongoing for the past eight years.

Correctiv, a network of investigators, alleged that Lipp had ties with the Russian Foreign Ministry.  But she rejects the accusation, saying she reports on what she sees.

The truth about those Russian kids’ camps

[Update 04/05/2023]. It seems that some children are being evacuated from the Ukrainian war zone indefinitely and placed in Russian foster homes.  Some of them are orphans.  There is no evidence that this is being done against the will of parents.

Russia says ready to return children if parents ask for them by the South China Morning Post.

• The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a network of camps inside Russia. The warrant was based on a report by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab center, which is funded by the U.S.  State Department.
• U.S. journalist Jeremy Loffredo visited one of Russian government-sponsored camps in question.  At the Donbas Express, located just outside of Moscow, Loffredo met youth from war-torn regions who were flourishing thanks to free music instruction, and grateful to be in a secure environment.  
• A Grayzone review of the Yale HRL report found the paper’s content contradicted many claims contained in the ICC warrant.  It also undercut incendiary statements its director, Nathaniel Raymond, issued during media appearances.
• In an interview with Loffredo, Yale HRL’s Raymond further contradicted allegations he made in a CNN interview about a massive “hostage situation” underway in Russia, acknowledging that most of the camps he researched were “teddy bear”-like cultural programs.  He also disclosed his collaboration with U.S. intelligence.

ICC’s Putin arrest warrant based on State Dept. funded report that debunked itself by Jeffrey Loffredo and Max Blumenthal for The Grayzone.

∞∞∞

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, commissioner of children’s rights, have been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of kidnaping thousands of Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia to be Russianized.

An investigation by the Grayzone has shown this to be the opposite of the truth.  The children are from families in Ukraine who consider themselves Russian.  

They are fighting to prevent their children from being forcibly Ukrainianized – that is, forbidden to speak the Russian language, attend the Russian Orthodox Church and learn about Russian culture.

The children went to Russia temporarily, with their parents’ consent, to enjoy musical education and to be temporarily safe from life in a war zone.

Jeremy Loffredo, a journalist, was in Russia in November, 2022, and happened to visit one of these camps, the Donbass Expresss, not knowing it was to be the subject on an international criminal case.   He saw happy children, singing and learning to play musical instruments.  True, they sang Russian songs

Loffredo then checked the Yale HRL report, on which the charges are based.  The writers of the report never visited the youth camps, never attempted to contact parents and did all their research online.

Yet the report does not deny the basic truth of what Loffredo said – that at least many of the children went to the camps with their parents’ consent, took part in harmless “teddy bear”-like programs and returned home.

The real threat to the children is war – not just the 2022 Russian invasion, but the civil war that started in 2014 with Ukraine’s anti-Russia coup.  The way to protect the children is to end the war.   The indictment makes that harder to do.

Russia doesn’t recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC.  Neither does the USA.

[Update 04/25/2023.  Another view.  I don’t regard Foreign Policy magazine as an impartial source, but the facts seem more ambiguous than I had assumed.

Rescue Efforts Underway for Ukrainian Children Taken to Russia by Liz Cookman for Foreign Policy.]

Is there any possibility that Ukraine could win?

I’m not an expert on military matters. I don’t speak Russian or Ukrainian. I’m not in touch with anybody in Russia or Ukraine or the higher circles in Washington, D.C.

I’m a retiree with time on his hands, an Internet connection and a willingness to go outside official sources and consensus opinion in order to figure out what’s going on.

I’ve explained why I think Russia is winning its proxy war against the U.S.-led Western alliance.  I haven’t changed my mind, but that’s not to deny that Russia has weaknesses.

A Russian dissident pointed out that Vladimir Putin’s announced objectives in launching the war are not being achieved.

Putin wanted to push back NATO from its borders, but Sweden and Finland are de facto members of NATO.  He wanted to demilitarize Ukraine, but Ukraine is a heavily-armed military dictatorship.  He wanted to denazify Ukraine, but the neo-Nazi Banderite nationalists, previously a fringe group, are more powerful and popular than they have ever been.

Public opinion polls say Putin is more popular in Russia than Joe Biden is in the USA. But a strong minority opposes the war despite the risk of 15-year prison sentences.

The actual fighting in Ukraine is being done disproportionately by Russian-speaking militias raised in Ukraine itself, the Wagner Group private mercenary company and Chechens recruited by Putin’s warlord friend Ramzan Kadyrov.  The Russian government has tried to keep Russian draftees out of the fighting.

Russians as a group don’t seem to have anything against Ukrainians or any desire to go fight in Ukraine.  Large number of what you could call the professional-managerial class have left Russia to avoid the draft.

Also, while the cutoff of Russian oil and gas supplies has hurt the Western alliance, Europeans and we Americans have got through the winter better than I thought they would.

But taking all these things into account, I don’t think any of these things change the big picture.  Ukrainians, according to the military analysts I trust, are suffering much greater casualty rates than the Russian forces, and they are a smaller country to begin with.  Germans, French, Britons and Americans have even less desire to join. the fighting themselves than Russians do.

Although there doesn’t seem to be any great anti-war sentiment in the USA or Europe, there do seem to be rising protests against the economic hardships that are a byproduct of the sanctions war.  Cutting ourselves off from cheap Russian oil, gas and other raw materials has hurt us much more than it has hurt them.

Victory in a war of attrition is a product of two things – the degree of hardship suffered and the degree of will to endure the hardship.  If it is to be a war of attrition, Russia is in a better position to endure than the Western allies.  The Russians have more at stake, more of the resources needed to survive and the backing of China, the world’s leading industrial power.

Time is running out for Ukraine

Source: Russia Matters.

Ukraine’s armed forces are outnumbered and outgunned.  Its Western allies are unwilling to supply troops in large numbers and are running out of guns to supply.  So it’s hard to see how the Ukrainians, however brave they may be, can keep up the fight.

Alex Vershinin, in an update of his earlier article for the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, explained:

The Ukrainians’ terrain-focused war of maneuver is constrained by two factors: limited artillery ammunition and equipment production, and coalition considerations.

Ukraine started the war with 1,800 artillery pieces of Soviet caliber.  These allowed firing rates of 6,000 to 7,000 rounds a day against 40,000 to 50,000 Russian daily rounds.  By now this artillery is mostly out of ammunition, and in its place Ukraine is using 350 Western caliber artillery pieces, many of which are destroyed or breaking down from overuse.

Meanwhile, Western nations are themselves running out of ammunition; the U.S. is estimated to produce only 15,000 155mm shells a month.  This constraint has forced Ukraine to adopt mass infantry formations focused on regaining territory at any cost.  Ukraine simply cannot go toe to toe with Russia in artillery battles…[snip]

Ukraine’s second constraint is the coalition nature of its warfare.  Since running out of its own stocks, Ukraine is increasingly reliant on Western weaponry.  Maintaining the Western coalition is crucial to the Ukrainian war effort.

Without a constant string of victories, domestic economic concern may cause coalition members to defect.

If Western support dries up due to depletion of stock or of political will, Ukraine’s war effort collapses for lack of supplies.

In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost…[snip]

The Achilles heel of this strategy is manpower. Ukraine started the war with 43 million citizens and 5 million military-aged males, but according to the U.N., 14.3 million Ukrainians have fled the war, and a further 9 million are in Crimea or other Russian-occupied territories.

This means Ukraine is down to about 20 million to 27 million people.  At this ratio, it has less than 3 million draftable men.

A million have been drafted already, and many of the rest are either not physically fit to serve or occupy a vital position in the nation’s economy.  In short, Ukraine might be running out of men, in my view.

This is not the accepted view in the West.  Ukrainians claim it is the Russians that are suffering the greatest casualties and equipment losses and that, in fact, the Russians soon will run out of weapons.  I can’t prove these claims are wrong, but, if they are, the Russians are excellent bluffers.  

Moreover, as Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism explained, Ukraine is short of cash as well as men and weapons.

Ukraine is dependent on the West to fund its government, giving new meaning to the expression “client state”.  Ukraine’s GDP contraction is estimated to be on the order of 35-40 percent for 2022.  Ukraine in November projected its 2023 budget deficit to be $38 billion.