By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

All states give titles, awards and medals to individuals who contribute exceptionally on the battlefield, in civilian life, and also in financing elections. The British House of Lords would be empty without soldiers who saved the monarch’s throne and businessmen who paid for the prime minister’s seat.

In Russia there is a special Kremlin medal for Russians who are also foreign country citizens. It’s called the Order of Friendship, and in the Kremlin decree of 2010 it was designed to honour  “special merit in strengthening peace, friendship, cooperation and mutual understanding between peoples.” Among President Vladimir Putin’s acqaintances from St. Petersburg days who have received this award, its blue and black ribbons and medal are the wife and daughter of Gennady Timchenko who were citizens of Finland at the time.   That was almost ten years ago; they have returned to live in Russia.

There is another Kremlin medal for Russians who prefer to be Russian citizens and live in Russia.  It is known as the Order of Merit for the Fatherland.  First created by President Boris Yeltsin in 1994, there are four classes of the order, one of which was reserved for military exploits. The citation declared that the award was for “citizens for particularly outstanding services related to the strengthening of the Russian statehood, the socio-economic development of the country, research activities, the development of culture and art, outstanding sporting achievements, strengthening peace, friendship and cooperation between peoples, for a significant contribution to strengthening the country’s defense capability.”   

In 1997 the French President Jacques Chirac was awarded the Fatherland medal, 1^st class, “for a great personal contribution to the development of cooperation and strengthening friendship between the peoples of Russia and France.”    But that award to a foreigner was exceptional. It was not legalized until November 2021, when Putin issued a decree allowing the medal to “foreign citizens and stateless persons”.  

A year later, on October 10, 2022, according to the Kremlin announcement, the Fatherland medal, 4^th  Class, was awarded to Vasily Anisimov (lead image, right) for his “contribution to the development of physical culture and popularization of domestic sports.”  On that day, Anisimov had been a Croatian citizen for more than four months, according to an official notice he filed with the British government on June 2. He had also been a resident of Switzerland for the same amount of time, although Anisimov didn’t tell the British government until September 26.  

On December 3 in London, the security of wealthy Russian businessmen living abroad with dual nationality was directly threatened by the arrest of Mikhail Fridman, the Alfa Bank, mobile telephone and supermarket oligarch.   Fridman holds Israeli citizenship as well as Russian, according to the Israeli press.  

In a response published Monday in Moscow, Vzglyad reported: “their real assets somehow keep them connected to their homeland…Those who are connected with the banking sector or retail have showed great inertia of thinking. Despite the fact that these people own billions, they do not always have time to keep track of the change in the goalposts of world politics…It is obvious that the so-called sacred right of private property does not exist in the West. On the example of Fridman, the rest will be arithmetic: their money needs to be invested in Russia and not withdrawn to who knows where. And in no case should one believe the ‘well-meaning’ people who, smiling, convince you that they consider you an equal. No, they don’t – and Fridman has just been given understand and feel this for himself.”

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by Editor - Tuesday, December 6th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

During the last German administration of Ukraine, the German military and their Ukrainian allies  murdered Jewish, Polish and Russian Ukrainian men, women,  and children in roughly equal numbers.

In this war, the Zelensky administration is depopulating the country of its women;  relocating  eastern city refugees to the west; leaving the lights on in Lvov; refusing the army at the front the options of medical evacuation, retreat or surrender; and letting thieves and marauders take over the resupply lines and the rear.  

The US policy of fighting the war against Russia to the last Ukrainian has this new meaning – to the last Ukrainian man.   

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by Editor - Monday, December 5th, 2022
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By Olga Samofalova, introduced and translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When Ursula von der Leyen (lead image) was nominated in 2019 to be Germany’s candidate to lead the European Commission, German politicians from her own party privately described her as too stupid and potentially too corrupt to be risked inside Germany during the political succession race to succeed Angela Merkel as Chancellor. German military sources say von der Leyen was the stupidest defence minister in German military memory.  

Since the war began in February, von der Leyen did not say a true word until November 30, when she announced that Ukrainian military deaths had reached more than 100,000, and civilian fatalities more than 20,000. Within hours these numbers were removed from the published record of her speech.   Von der Leyen’s admission implied the war toll of Ukrainian wounded is more than 300,000, and that the sum of military and civilian casualties has already reached half a million. Von der Leyen was confirming Russian estimates and contradicting the Kiev regime’s propaganda.

In September von der Leyen announced her support for a price cap on the international trade in exports of Russian pipeline gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG).   Last month she said the European Union is “ready to go” with a price cap on Russian oil exports.

However, the European and Asian gas and oil trade is not only contradicting what von der Leyen is claiming; it is demonstrating they are profiting from her public lies. In the gas market there is new evidence that the French, Dutch and Belgian governments are allowing the purchase of record volumes of imported Russian LNG, and the re-export of this gas at a profit to other European states, including Germany. The arbitrage – that is, the profit from buying Russian LNG at the Russian selling price and then reselling it at a premium to European consumers – is so lucrative, the Chinese are diverting their contracted volumes of Russian LNG to Europe.

Olga Samofalova, the energy market analyst at Vzglyad , reported yesterday on how the markets are defeating the sanctions.

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by Editor - Friday, December 2nd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who is under British and European Union sanctions, is lobbying in Washington for an early peace deal with the Ukraine.

According to a document Abramovich has filed through the New York law firm of Kobre & Kim, Abramovich has told the US Department of Justice (DOJ) he is being “directed” and “supervised” by the Russian government to “interface with government agencies” with the “goal of finding a diplomatic solution to end the armed conflict.”

The lawyers have been meeting US government officials on Abramovich’s “mediation” since July.

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by Editor - Thursday, December 1st, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There were only two ways for Alexei Kudrin to become the president of Russia that he and the US government have always wanted.

The first was for him to become prime minister first, and for him to get the job through the back door, exactly as Vladimir Putin got it from Boris Yeltsin. The second was for him to take the job by a US-backed, regime-changing plot as Yeltsin ousted Mikhail Gorbachev.

However, after repeated attempts at the back-door option over the past decade have failed, Kudrin has come up with the second way. Last week,  in a secret meeting with Putin, it was agreed Kudrin would leave his official post as Accounting Chamber chairman and become the nominal head of the Yandex group’s restructuring into a combination of state-controlled internet operations and offshore commercial businesses controlled by the group’s founding oligarch and Israel exile, Arkady Volozh.

In this second role Kudrin will be paid a very large sum of money for himself – between $335 million and $1 billion,  depending on the terms of his deal with Volozh. Also, he will be free to bank large donations from wellwishers, all of whom aim to defeat Russia in the present war and replace Putin in the Kremlin.  

The terms of Putin’s agreement with Kudrin include approval for a new form of control over the most powerful media and internet platform in the country for influencing domestic political campaigns for the foreseeable future.  

The Kremlin has not disclosed last week’s meeting,  but on November 29 it sent an official notice of Kudrin’s exit to the Federation Council. Kudrin has published by Telegram this explanation of what he is doing. “In total, I have spent about 25 years in the public sector. Now I would like to focus on large projects that are related to the development of private initiatives in a broad sense, but at the same time have a significant effect on people. Therefore, I am leaving the post of Chairman of the Accounts Chamber, and I have submitted a corresponding application to the President of the Russian Federation in accordance with the established procedure.”  

No one in Russia believes that by “significant effect on people” Kudrin means to be kindlier than his rival for US sponsorship for the Kremlin job, Alexei Navalny. In all of Navalny’s years of exposing oligarch and official corruption in Russia, Kudrin has never been targeted or criticized.  He has reciprocated the favour towards Navalny.  

Mikhail Delyagin, the influential economist and Duma deputy, has restricted himself to observing that at the Accounting Chamber Kudrin was no more than “an accountant who protected state corruption.” “Kudrin made the work of the Accounting Chamber more systematic, more client-oriented for other branches of government. It has been the most comfortable body for interaction inside public administration [and] has never been an influential body.  If the state considers corruption as a direct threat to its existence, then the Accounting Chamber will receive the order to investigate it. So far there have been no such signs.”  Delyagin is unready to say what he thinks on the Yandex appointment.

Kudrin’s opponents in domestic politics don’t doubt that in leaving the Accounting Chamber for Yandex, Kudrin is not exiting from the country nor retiring from Russian politics. Instead, as Sergei Stankevich, the veteran opponent of Yeltsin,  told Tsargrad yesterday:  “the Accounting Chamber was a politically neutral position. In the large IT corporation [Kudrin] will have more opportunities to influence political processes. And he will have more freedom in formulating his views in the public sphere. So he’s not leaving politics; instead, he’s making his comeback.”

So far not a single newspaper, television talk show, social media platform, or Duma deputy has asked why the President has agreed, and what Putin’s plan is for Yandex and for Kudrin.

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by Editor - Wednesday, November 30th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For the buffer zone to achieve the demilitarization of the Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned in July that military factors, not politics, will decide. “I see no reason to question what President Vladimir Putin announced on February 24, 2022, and reaffirmed a few days ago,” Lavrov said. “Our goals remain the same. And they will be met. There is a solution to this problem. The military know this.”  

In case the distinction Lavrov was making between political negotiations and military operations, between soldiers and civilians, wasn’t clear enough, Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, made it the target of her irony last Thursday.  In her regular briefing  for reporters, Zakharova was asked to comment on US weapons supplies to the Ukraine.  “Something is wrong with this world if two women are discussing Stingers, MANPADS, SAMS, and HARM anti-radar missiles,” she answered the journalist. “As a reminder, scaling up its military supplies to Kiev and directly controlling Ukrainian forces, including the provision of real-time recon data, Washington has, in fact, become a party to the conflict in Ukraine…As far as their internal dealings regarding how much money they give to whom, what particular supplies are underway, or what items they are running out of or have more of, this is not our concern. Let them decide what kind of games they want to play among themselves.”

The Kherson manoeuvre, announced  by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Sergei Surovikin on November 9; the electric war campaign  which has followed*; and the cutoff of troops, arms and supplies by train from Kiev to the eastern front, first announced by the Russian Defense Ministry on November 24,  foreshadow how the military are preparing to establish the Ukrainian Demilitarized Zone (UDZ), its depth to the west of the Dnieper River, and the cities to be included in Russian-controlled territory.

This is a future to be established by the Russian General Staff, negotiated and signed by military officers of the NATO-controlled commands in Kiev and Lvov. The outcome is an end to  hostilities with an armistice that is not a peace treaty.

The model is the armistice of Panmunjom of July 27, 1953, which ended the Korean War. The terms of the armistice took two years to negotiate by US, Korean and Chinese officers. The Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) which was the outcome was four kilometres in depth. The Ukrainian demilitarized zone (UDZ) will be up to one hundred kilometres in depth, depending on the range of the US and NATO missile and artillery weapons deployed on the Kiev side of the Dnieper.  On the ground inside the UDZ there may be no electricity, no people, nothing except for the means to monitor and enforce the terms of the armistice.

For avoidance of doubt, red on the map means Russia.

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by Editor - Monday, November 28th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Rupert Murdoch has been making money out of the combination of inflated female sex parts and puffed up Russia hatred for his entire life.  

He used to keep the two of them apart; there wasn’t as much money to be made out of the latter, at least not by the time the legal bills had been paid for libelously faking, Russia hating books Murdoch published, like Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People.   

However, with a woman nom-de-plumeously named Suleika Dawson – real name Sue Dawson  — Murdoch has now produced a breakthrough combination, a lady telling the story of her love affair with David Cornwell (lead image), aka John le Carré, and a chronicle through the bedroom peephole of British ingenuity in outsmarting the KGB.

The stroke of marketing genius at Harper Collins, Murdoch’s publishing house, was to think that the only exaggerated sex parts which would make a bestseller  were not those of the tall blonde Miss Dawson, but those of the tall ginger-pubic Le Carré’s.

Dawson gives the reader an introductory peep when the first thing she describes of Le Carré in clothes was his “enormous desert boots”.   Then with another discreet correlation, Dawson reveals Le Carré’s “huge workman’s hands”. Dawson’s introduces balls at page 21; they make a double-entendre at which she and he both laugh.  She then introduces the real thing – er, things – at page 87 (250 pages still to go) when Dawson says she “ducked down behind him and put an ice cube on his scrotum. Everything [sic] was just hanging there in free suspension… but he still didn’t flinch, though his testicles had definitely decided to come in from the cold.”

That was pre-coital in 1983. In 1999, post-coital, Le Carré says to Dawson on the living-room rug: “I remembered you liked big balls.”

In between there are years of full-frontal displays of the man’s pride in his parts. Once at a restaurant which Dawson is careful to name, along with its address, he says he can’t get up from their table because, he confides to her: “I have an erection”.

This is shortly after Dawson, who drops almost as many people’s names as restaurant, hotel and resort names, says she knows that Christopher Hitchens,  the deceased English writer, got “a third”. This isn’t a reference to Hitchens’s minuscule hands and feet, or their correlate inside his pants, but to his degree at Oxford. By comparison, Dawson reports bantering at a recording studio with Le Carré about “extra length” and “thickness.”

This is the foreplay, though. There’s a much longer, thicker secret which the book and Le Carré reveal about his spymasters at MI5 and MI6, and about the capacity of British intelligence compared to its rival, the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) and Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). This  secret explains for the first time why the British services fabricate stories like the Novichok attack against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018, and operations like the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines and the Crimean Bridge.

If you can hold yourself in for longer than Le Carré managed with Dawson, and also put on spectacles,  the secret will be exposed in a moment.  “I do worry sometimes,” he once said to her, “that you can’t properly see the full extent of my manhood when we are in bed.”

“I’m short sighted,” Dawson claims she said to reassure him.  

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by Editor - Thursday, November 24th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a telephone conversation on November 15, shortly after the Ukrainian missile explosion at Przewodów, Polish President Andrzej Duda (lead image, left) said in a secret telephone call with French President Emmanuel Macron: “Believe me, I’m very careful, I don’t blame the Russians. Emmanuel, this is war. I think both sides will blame each other for this war…Do you think I need a war with Russia? No, I don’t want that. I don’t want a war with Russia, I’m extremely careful, believe me. I am extremely careful.”

Duda was implying he did not believe the Ukrainian President, Vladimir Zelensky’s claim, which he also repeated to Macron, that the missile attack had been launched by Russia.

The telephone call lasted for 7 minutes 31 seconds and was conducted in English.  Duda did not realise he was not talking to Macron until later. The Polish president took a week before revealing publicly that there had been a telephone call. That disclosure on the Chancellery’s twitter account did not disclose what had been said, and misrepresented how the conversation ended. This was triggered only after Vovan and Lexus, the two skilled Russian spoof artists,  had published their tape-recording in Moscow.

The tape-recording can be listened to here; it was first aired on Tuesday, November 22, between 8 and 8:30 in the morning, Moscow time,  with Russian subtitles and voiceover.   Listen to the original English-language version here.  The first Russian press report was published at 12:36 pm Moscow time.   Duda’s office posted two tweets in succession at 1:52 pm, Moscow time.

Polish sources in Warsaw say the telephone call, and the week-long delay between Duda’s conversation and his disclosure tweets, raise grave questions about Poland’s national security and sovereignty.  Duda, comments one of the sources, “seems to be lying. The Rutube tape shows a complete conversation, with goodbyes, and not an abrupt ‘end of the call’.”

In the absence of mainstream Polish media coverage, Stanislas Balcerac, an independent Warsaw analyst, says the Polish intelligence services are revealed as incompetent for failing to detect the impersonation before Duda began talking – or for allowing the president to be fooled into making his admissions in reaction to the Przewodów attack, particularly the dependence Duda acknowledged on US “experts” for knowing what had happened.

 “The question arises,” Balcerac reported last August,    “whether it is really impossible to find competent and intelligent people in Poland. Or is the problem deeper and lies in the assumptions of the Third Polish Republic, a country which, having ‘regained its independence’, was to be independent in theory, but in fact is played by the special services of stronger neighbours?” Balcerac was implying that the German BND and US CIA are running their own factions inside the Polish services.

A NATO military veteran comments that Duda was “definitely nervous. You’d think he’s worried that he’s talking to someone faking for Moscow or for someone else, or that that the CIA or someone else is listening in.”

Moscow sources have commented on the week-long delay before Vovan and Lexus made the tape public. Long enough, they suspect, for the Russian Stavka  to analyse Duda’s remarks;  decide if the president is being kept in the dark by the Polish military and security services; and arrange secret messages to Warsaw for as long as Duda was capable of keeping the secret.

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by Editor - Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There isn’t a Russian over the age of forty-five – 40 million people — who doesn’t know by heart Vladimir Lenin’s report on the work of the Council of People’s Commissars of December 22, 1920.

“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country”, Lenin said. “Our best men,” he went on, “have accomplished the task we set them of drawing up a plan for the electrification of Russia and the restoration of her economy… We must see to it that every factory and every electric power station becomes a centre of enlightenment; if Russia is covered with a dense network of electric power stations and powerful technical installations, our communist economic development will become a model for a future socialist Europe and Asia. (Stormy and prolonged applause.)”

With money and media from London to Washington and Wall Street, the regime of Boris Yeltsin generated its alternative to Lenin’s electrification. This privatised Russia’s generating plants and distribution grid; subsidised electricity supplies to London Stock Exchange-listed mines and smelters; stole retail consumer payments; and converted collateralised bank loans into London and New York mansions and bank accounts. The prolonged and stormy applause for all of that was in the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

The Russians profiting included Anatoly Chubais,  Mikhail Prokhorov,  Leonid Lebedev,  Valentin Zavadnikov,   Vadim Belyaev,  and  Mikhail Abyzov. None of them is sanctioned;  most are offshore – except for Abyzov who’s the only one of the electrification gang who is in a Russian prison for his crimes.   

But there’s another electrification weapon Russia is using to wage its defence against the US and NATO war.  It was first anticipated and reported by the little known Moscow writer, Sigizmund Khrzhizhanovsky (1887-1950). In 1939 he called the weapon “yellow coal” and “kinetic spite”.

The weaponising would start at Harvard University, Khrzhizhanovsky said. First the Americans, then the Germans would convert human hatred into a new source of energy powering everything which had been dependent until then on coal, gas, and oil. / 

The Stavka has just reversed the direction of the weapon. Not only are the lights out in Lvov,  Kiev, Dniepropetrovsk, and Odessa,  but there’s no electricity to pump water for them to flush Russia hatred down their toilets.

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by Editor - Sunday, November 20th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A former Dutch tax inspector, currently a judge of a district court at The Hague has ruled to convict three men of forming a criminal association for killing 298 passengers and crew of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, on the orders of the Russian military command and government in Moscow. The judge, Hendrik Steenhuis (lead image, right), has ruled admissible the evidence of the crime supplied by Dutch and Ukrainian state organisations and their military officers, intelligence agents,  and police.   They testified in secret that “no traces of tampering [with evidence] were found”. Steenhuis concluded that “all [telephone tapes and photographic images] were authentic and have not been manipulated.”

He has ruled inadmissible and dismissed all the evidence supplied by Russian organisations because, he said, they are state agencies and “not clear, transparent, entirely unconvincing.”

The convicted men – Colonel Igor Girkin (lead image, left), Colonel Sergei Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko – formed their organisation to commit crimes in the conflict in eastern Ukraine in which the Russian state was engaged on one side, but the judge found no other foreign state was engaged on the other side. He also ruled that the laws of war and combatant immunity for the deployment and operation of arms legally protected the Kiev forces but did not apply to the Donbass army.  Accordingly, Steenhuis declared, “due to the lack of combat immunity, the suspects, like any other civilian, were not entitled to shoot at any aircraft, including a military aircraft, and thereby kill the military occupants. The realized criminal act of downing a plane and killing the occupants was therefore already included in the original plan.”

“The court is of the opinion that it appears that although the Buk missile was deliberately fired, it was thought that it was a military aircraft and not a civilian aircraft. To that extent, it must have been a mistake. However, such a mistake does not detract from the intention and the premeditated advice.”

By implication, the Dutch court has ruled that Ukrainian and Russian resistance to the regime change in Kiev of February 2014, the armed struggle for self-determination which followed, and self-defence from Ukrainian air and ground attack was and remains illegal – a Russian state crime because, Steenhuis said, “the Russian Federation had overall control of the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] in 2014.”

Steenhuis identified “artillery shelling on Ukrainian territory, which would have been carried out from the Russian Federation from the beginning of July 2014. Witnesses have also testified about Russian equipment with Russian soldiers, which crossed the border, carried out shelling and then drove back.” He makes no reference to shelling or air bombardment by the Kiev forces.

In 16,000 words of Steenhuis’s ruling, Kiev is not mentioned at all; nor Washington; nor the Ukrainian President at the time, Petro Poroshenko (lead image, rear centre); nor US government financing, arms and other aid to the military operations in the Donbass.

By contrast, President Vladimir Putin, his advisor Vladislav Surkov (picture on table), and other “high-ranking persons in the Russian Federation”,  are named by the judge as having “provided for financing of the DPR, the supply and training of men and the supply of weapons and goods.  In addition, since mid-May 2014, the Russian Federation has had a decisive influence on the filling of high positions within the DPR and has interfered in the coordination of military actions and also taken military actions on Ukrainian territory.”

For evidence of the murder weapon, the judge announced that he accepts a single piece of warhead shrapnel shaped like a bow tie (centre of table), which he said had been recovered from the body of a cockpit crew member. That discovery by Ukrainian and Dutch state investigators has remained undocumented and the chain of custody of the fragment unverified.  Steenhuis had no explanation for the disappearance of all 2,600 other pieces of bow-tie shrapnel in the missile warhead alleged to have exploded against the MH17 cockpit.

According to the Dutch Criminal Procedure Code at Section 344a : “[a judge] may not find that there is evidence the defendant committed the offence as charged in the indictment exclusively or to a decisive extent on the basis of written materials containing statements of persons whose identity is concealed.”    

As the law to warrant the three convictions, the acquittal of Lieutenant-Colonel Oleg Pulatov, three life prison sentences, and award of €16 million in compensation, Steenhuis introduced a Dutch Supreme Court concept called “functional co-perpetration”. Dutch and international lawyers acknowledge this is guilt by association. They note that in international, North American and British law, this cannot be proven with a witness testifying in secret; with evidence gathered by a secret chain of custody and tested in secret; without cross-examination of experts in open court; and by hearsay of one judge referring to another investigating judge whose identity and proceedings have also remained secret.

There is “no possibility of reasonable doubt whatsoever”, Judge Steenhuis declared in his summing-up.

“Joint criminal responsibility is an idea the Americans tried to use at the Yugoslav and Rwanda war crimes tribunals thirty years ago  — it’s bogus law”, commented Christopher Black, a Canadian attorney who represented defendants accused in those proceedings.

“By acquitting Pulatov, the only defendant to be represented in court,” comments Dutch jurisprudence expert Alfred Vierling, “the court has done its best to hinder the convicted defendants from taking higher court proceedings to challenge the law and the convictions in the Court of Appeal.”

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by Editor - Friday, November 18th, 2022
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