The Swiss Vatnik Party initiative was strongly rejected today. A yes would have greatly reduced Switzerland's ability to sanction belligerent states, such as russia.

Putin: Historically, Russia developed as an area of cooperation among peoples and respect for their distinctive identities. The Russian Empire was a bloody expansionist project that killed, expelled, deported, and imprisoned millions of people. Only the Chinese communists murdered more of their own citizens than the Soviet communists. Per capita, only the communist Khmer Rouge exceeded the Soviets, although even in that grim comparison the Soviets could win with the atrocities in Ukraine in 1933 and Kazakhstan in 1931-33. Both the Russian and Soviet empires suppressed, violently and repeatedly, non-Russian languages, cultures, traditions, and literature. Russification was the durable policy. Initially, the communists believed that encouraging local cultures would help instill Soviet identity but when this produced actual national cultures, the regime killed the people who made them.

People in the international community, if they know about Oleshky at all, might wonder why fascist Russia indulges in such obvious evil against a seemingly random Ukrainian town under occupation by its army. But there is method in fascist Russia's evil, and Ukrainians understand it well. Oleshky is a message to them from Putin. First, why Oleshky? Why such savagery against this particular town - perhaps the worst case of a long-lasting siege seen yet during the full-scale war? The town is the closest one to liberated Kherson on the other side of the Dnipro, and is a base for the Russian army to carry out its barbaric "human safari" of drone attacks on residents of the city. Largely bordered by marshland, the town is easy to cut off physically. The civilians there are being used as human shields for the Russian drone operators. But the evil being done against Oleshky serves a more sinister purpose: Similar to the broader pattern of attacks across the southern front, the creation of unlivable conditions - cutting off electricity, gas, and running water while allowing critical infrastructure to stay ruined - is a form of psychological pressure. The resulting humanitarian catastrophe is a strategy of attrition aimed at breaking local resistance through isolation and deprivation. But weaponizing starvation and extreme deprivation also carries a uniquely dark, historical resonance in Ukraine, which in the 1930s was subjected, under the psychopathical Soviet dictator Stalin, to the Holodomor artificial famine - an earlier attempt by Russia to erase the Ukrainian nation. By cutting off Oleshky and turning it into a zone of slow attrition, the occupying forces are thus deliberately tapping into generational trauma. It is a calculated message of total subjugation: submit entirely, or face absolute erasure and, pointedly, starvation. It is a message from the old imperialist master, intended for the whole of Ukraine to hear. This strategy of engineered humanitarian catastrophe isn't just a byproduct of fascist Russia's occupation; it is a primary instrument of control. It aims to break the collective will of the population by trying to convince them that further resistance will carry a cost impossible to bear.

🥴 Kremlin: Providing Starlink data for strikes deep inside Russia would be a very harmful, potentially dangerous and reckless step.