Putin, the man who murders journalists

Screenshot from video below.

Although it has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt that Putin murders journalist in 2006, I refuse to say that murder of Anna Politkovskaya by Putin is an allegation. He has murdered so many detractors that we in the West have lost count. The murders are never investigated. And she was criticising him well before his invasion of Ukraine. She would have had more ammunition to criticise him if she had lived to report on the Ukraine war.

She was killed 2 days after writing these words, on 7th October 2006, taken from a Twitter feed:

"This is what she thought of Putin, based on her long-term observations of the Russian dictator. What reasons do I have to dislike Putin? 

There are many. 

• First, his artlessness, which is worse than theft. 
• His cynicism and racism. 
• His endless war and lies. 
• The gassing at “Nord-Ost.” 
• The corpses of innocent victims, accompanying his entire first term. Those are corpses which could have been avoided. 

I often wonder if Putin is human at all, or a frozen or iron statue. I wonder and can’t find confirmation that he is a human being. 

Putin, having accidentally received enormous power into his hands, administered it to catastrophic consequences for Russia. And I do not like him, because he does not like people. He can’t stand us. He despises us. He believes that we are a means for him only, a means to achieve his own personal power goals. 

Therefore, he can do anything he wishes to us, plays with us as he pleases, destroys us, if he wishes. For him, we are nobody. And he, having accidentally scrambled to the top, is now a king and a god, whom everybody should worship and fear. 

Putin has propped up his rule solely on the clay struts of the oligarchy – ordinary people did not find a place for themselves in this scheme. He is friends with some oligarchs, and fights with others, and it is this that we call supreme State Administration, when billionaires who have divided oil and gas reserves among themselves, have ultimate importance. 

Why do I dislike Putin? For the years that pass by. This summer it will be five years since the second Chechen war was initiated for the sake of Putin’s first ascension to presidency, and it is still ongoing. Putin’s style of politics displays deep personal resentment. 

Putin has many times publicly demonstrated that he fundamentally does not understand the purpose of a debate, especially a political debate. According to Putin, a discussion between a superior and his subordinates should not be possible."

17 years ago, on 7th October, the Kremlin boss silenced Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist, writer and activist, on his birthday.

This is what she thought of Putin, based on her long-term observations of the Russian dictator.

What reasons do I have to dislike Putin? There are… pic.twitter.com/44iPYmqaDa

— Yasmina (@yasminalombaert) October 6, 2023

RIP this brave lady. Great courage. She must have known that it was likely that she'd be murdered. But it did not stop her. She was probably tired of living a country managed by a murdering, warmongering, psychopathic tyrant.

"Since 1992, since CPJ began compiling the Global Impunity Index, 58 Russian journalists have died, 38 of them killed as a direct result of their professional activities."

'CPJ' refers to the Committee to Protect Journalists

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Russian fencer uses F-word multiple times against Ukrainian opponent

This is the European Fencing Championships in Basel. Olena Kryvytska, the Ukrainian, won the bout with a score of 15:9. But in the video you can see how badly behaved the Russian was after Olena refused to salute her at the end of the bout which I presume is part of the etiquette in fencing competitions. 

Screenshot from the video.

To me it shows us how many Russians 'just don't get it'. They don't understand what is going on in the war in Ukraine thanks to Putin's incessant television propaganda and news blackouts because he terrorises independent newspapers in Russia. 

And therefore this Russian fencer competing under the Georgian flag (why!?) becomes enraged when her Ukrainian opponent - who beat her - does not do the polite thing at the end. 

And the Ukrainian fencer was correct. How could she salute and be polite to a Russian who is a citizen of  country bent on destroying Ukraine in an illegal war? This problem is the same for tennis players. Ukrainian tennis professionals have refused to shake hands with their Russian competitors at the end of the match.

There is a strong argument that all Russian athletes should be banned from all competitions during this war but I understand that they are sometimes entirely innocent and victims of Putin themselves.

Here is the video:

"F*ck, why do they act like that? F*ckers. Why the f*ck are they allowed to do anything? Have they lost their f*cking minds?" - Russian fencer Maya Guchmazova (competing under the Georgian flag) when the Ukrainian fencer Olena Kryvytska refused to salute her.

The incident took… pic.twitter.com/5FEGw3bT8f

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 18, 2024

Of course this has nothing to do with cats! Directly. But indirectly it has everything to do with cats and other animals. Hundreds of thousands as you probably know by now have been killed by Putin's forces. He has also killed many thousands of wild animals. It is Armageddon for animals in Ukraine thanks to that terrorist, tyrant Putin who professes to be an animal lover. We must think of the animals as well as the human victims.

The man is destroying Russia as well, in small steps compared to Ukraine where he likes to shell grandmothers with their cat companions in one-bed flats at night.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Russian woman lists Putin's achievements

I hope she does not live in Russia because if she does she is as good as dead. She'll have an accident and fall from a tower block somewhere. Or have a heart attack or die of unexplained natural causes. Putin likes to murder detractors. He is a mass murder and it is astonishing that he is still in power. I think it is the power of indoctrination which I have written about today: https://pictures-of-cats.org/how-vulnerable-the-human-psyche-is-to-indoctrination.html

"Volodya, as always, beat everyone."

A Russian woman lists Putin's "achievements".

What would you add to her list? pic.twitter.com/zOx5ktMF9b

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 17, 2024

Czar Putin's destiny is the restoration of the USSR

I am doing my best to understand Vladimir Putin and what motivates him. Clearly he doesn't care much about his soldiers dying in such large numbers or the killing of countless tens of thousands of innocent Ukrainians and their companion animals by the way. Tens of thousands of domestic cats and dogs have been killed because of Putin's invasion. What motivates him? That's the question I want to try and answer today.

Christianity and traditions are vital to Putin. He wants to restore Russia's old way of life to the USSR.

I am not an expert on Russia or President Putin (far from it) but I have been reading the newspapers about him. For me, he clearly has sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies but he seems to be able to put in a box all the killing as subservient to the ultimate goal which it seems to me now is the restoration of the old USSR. 

He wants the satellite states to come back into the fold and be part of the great Soviet Union again as it was in 19222. And also when Czar Nicholas III was on the throne in the days of the Russian Empire.

It seems to me that Putin sees himself as a modern-day Russian czar. He wants to go back in time to that moment when the Russian czar had ultimate power over the country and the awesome empire which was dismantled by Gorbachev under perestroyka.

And I think he sees it as his destiny to restore the USSR. I take this from the fact that is very religious and very connected to orthodox Christianity and has a very good relationship with the Moscow patriarch Kirill of Moscow. Kirill or Cyril is a Russian Orthodox bishop. He became Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church on 1 February 2009.

I've seen them together on television. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow supports the Ukraine invasion. He supports the killing of all these people. And he supports the death of the Russian soldiers, regarding them as martyrs and he absolves them of all their sins and in effect anoints them as if they are Christian crusaders going to a holy war.

And there we have the alignment between patriarch Kirill and President Putin. They are both on a holy crusade to restore the mighty USSR. He sees himself as the modern Czar of Russia. Not the president.

Putin is imbued with the concept of Orthodox Christianity. He recently used the story of Jesus going to Galilee in the parable about the fishermen. He was talking to a meeting of Russian officials. He said that he wanted to defend "our traditional values, our culture, our traditions and our history. This is very important for the future of the country."

You can see that he is very keen on Russian traditions and the Russian way of life and I believe this extends to before the revolution and the old Russian way of life under Czar Nicholas and the rulers before him. He sees that as the way things should be.

And his belief in Orthodox Christianity probably makes him believe that the West is decadent. Sloppy and ill disciplined lacking in traditions and a formal way of life. I think that's why he calls them Nazis. Anybody who is not falling into place behind the strictures of orthodox religion become Nazis. People with bad thoughts and a bad way of life.

He calls Ukrainians who want to be independent and free 'Nazis' because they work against the old ideas of the USSR. He believes Ukraine is Russian and anybody who fights against that is a Nazi. A bad thinker. A miscreant. A criminal. Somebody who wants to undermine the Russian state.

Putin has ordered the establishment of youth centres across Russia in a move which is reminiscent of the Soviet-era camps where children were indoctrinated in Communist Party values. From the age of six, primary schoolchildren in the Soviet Union could join the Little Octobrists, before advancing to the Young Pioneers when aged nine. They progressed to the Komsomol at the age of 14.

Putin is very interested in indoctrinating the masses which I suspect is the way the masses behaved before the ending of the USSR. The true Soviet way of life in which the citizens were robotically dedicated to their great leader, somewhat like but not as extreme as happens in North Korea.

Putin has betrayed himself as a defender of Orthodox Christianity and a warrior against the satanic West. Part of that mentality goes to extending Russia to the old USSR boundaries both to protect Russia for the indefinite future and to maintain that traditional way of life in which he so resolutely believes.

That's why he will move on to Kazakhstan and invade that country when he has succeeded in bringing Ukraine to heel.

Has Puckie even noticed? The huge death and injury toll on Russian soldiers.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Why does the world put up with Putin?

OPINION: President Putin is, according to me, a bit like a cancerous growth inside someone's body. He is a cancer on the planet. When there is cancer inside the body a surgeon cuts it out. The same sort of thing should happen to Putin. We need to take proactive steps to stop this man.

Everything we do is reactive. We allow him to perpetrate his crimes against humanity. We allow him to kill tens of thousands of people in Ukraine, innocent people, hundreds of thousands of animals and a thousand children. We allow it. This can't be right.

Note: this post is not politically correct (PC).  It is direct. To the point. It needs to be said but PC stuff prevents it. You know AI will not create an image of Putin as the devil incarnate. Refused to do it. AI is too PC.

Putin is an inveterate liar. He is a sociopathic liar. He knows that he is lying but he sees it as normal behaviour. This assessment has been reinforced by his reaction to the recent terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall concert.

Immediately after the attack, he blamed Ukrainian terrorists. He said that they were seen trying to go across the border into Ukraine. He knew very well that this was all mumbo-jumbo and lies. He wants to find a reason to escalate the bombing of Ukraine.

Now that it's quite clear that it was Islamic terrorists who carried out the attack he has changed his lies.

Apparently, America had intelligence to say that it was going to happen and I believe they warned the Kremlin about this foreseeable Islamic terrorist attack. And since the attack, the Islamic State has stated that they carried out.

Belarus' strongman dictator Alexander Lukashenko said that the terrorists tried to cross into Belarus undermining Putin's earlier statement.

And I'm sure in the videos of the attack made by TikTok influencers who stayed within the auditorium in order to get their video material (quite mad) the terrorist can be seen to be from the Islamic race of people. They look like Pakistanis or people from the East, not Ukrainians.

And immediately Putin changes his lies as mentioned. He has just stated that "This atrocity may be only [another] link in a whole series of attempts by those who have been fighting our country since 2014 through the hands of the neo-Nazi Kiev regime. We know who carried out the attack. We want to know who the mastermind was."

Putin is saying indirectly that the West is to blame for this terror attack. He is always finding reasons to blame the West. He is paranoid about the West wishing to destroy Russia. He firmly believes that he has enemies all around him trying to steal his lands and destroy Russia. Paranoia comes to mind.

If Putin lived in the West, he would be treated for mental illness. It be under the doctor with medication to alter his mental state. He is paranoid as mentioned. He is irrational. He lies sociopathically. He doesn't feel the consequences of his lying and murderous behaviour. These are the marks of a sociopath or psychopath.

He needs to be stopped. I'm not advocating assassination. I'm advocating some way to actually stop him; to take proactive steps because he is destroying the world. He is poisoning the world. Why do we accept it?

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Russian 'corpse' in body bag smoking. More Russian propaganda.

Putin lies so much I don't think he knows the difference between fact and fiction. Here's a video from Russia of a bunch or 'corpses' in black body bags with one of them dragging on a fag 😎🤢. We are not told what is happening but my imagination tells me Putin's cronies were setting up some sort of scammy propaganda news feed to further pull the wool over the eyes of naive Russian citizens (usually the died in the wool elderly who love the man). It is all Kremlin pantomime. The Kremlin is a theatre of lies.

Update! The Full Fact website claims that "The clip was filmed during the production of a music video for a Russian rapper, in at least 2020." Fine. This sounds reasonable but it does not change the fact that Putin is an inveterate liar on a gargantuan scale and is constantly involved in spreading propaganda to pull the wool over the eyes of Russian citizens.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Cat-liking journalist killed by Russian missile when covering the Ukraine war

The tweet is very sad. Arman Soldin was an AFP journalist. And it would appear that he was an ailurophile - a cat lover or at least a cat liker. According to the Defense of Ukraine tweet (a great Twitterer by the way) he was killed by a Russian missile attack on Chasiv Yar, Donetsk region of Ukraine. 

Arman Soldin an AFP journo was killed by the Russians in Ukraine. Image: Twitter.

The Defense of Ukraine tweeting authors always spell 'Russia' without capitalising it. I believe this is a deliberate sign of disrespect and I agree with them. No one should respect Russia anymore. 

Putin says that the West wants to destroy Russia and that the West has started the war. It is complete mumbo-jumbo. He is constantly feeding misinformation to the citizens of Russia. He calls black, white and white, black. He is a consummate liar and I think that he believes his lies. If he could have made friends with the West it would have protected Russia. His actions are jeopardising Russia; making it more vulnerable

The Defense of Ukraine tweet concludes: "Our heartfelt condolences go out to his family and coworkers. He dedicated his life to informing the world about the truth. His legacy, as well as his cause, will live on."

RIP Arman. God speed. And I love the ginger tabby cat on your shoulder. I hope the cat was not with you when the missile struck. I wonder what happened to this cat?

UPDATE from CBS: "The French judiciary has launched a war crime investigation into the death of AFP reporter Arman Soldin who was killed in Ukraine, anti-terror prosecutors said Wednesday."

Soldin, 32, died when he and his AFP colleagues came under fire by Grad rockets on Tuesday while they were with Ukrainian troops near Chasiv Yar, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. According to the AFP, other reporters with Soldin were not injured in the attack.

 
Hundreds of thousands of animals have been 'murdered' by Putin's forces during this illegal invasion. It is horrible and tragic. Not enough has been mentioned about them.

And many thousands of domestic cats have become feral. They've become homeless as their owners have been killed in their flats. There is a girl who looks after them where she lives. Heroic.

Here she is: 11-year-old girl feeds abandoned cats in devastated Ukraine. The girl's name is Veronika Krasevych. Such an adult character and approach to animal welfare from such a young girl. She sounds like an adult when she talks about cats.

Video screenshot.

Some Ukrainian refugees to the UK smuggled in cats and dogs

Under the UK's Homes for Ukraine scheme which started not soon after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many of the refugees were women. Some were with children and many were from the capital, Kyiv. They had managed to leave the country fairly early during the war by firstly crossing into Poland.

Some Ukrainian refugees to the UK smuggled in pets. Image: Reddit.com

I can recall at that time, that there was a hugely bureaucratic system for getting companion animals into the UK as they accompanied their refugee owners. There are some real difficulties in that scheme because they had to overcome the usual barriers of importing pets into the UK. There's rabies in Ukraine but there's no rabies in the UK. That probably is the number one difficulty requiring caution by the UK authorities.

I'm told today by a social worker who was helping arrivals into the country that some female Ukrainian refugees smuggled pets through immigration. The social worker tells me that:

"One young woman arrived with her son and a cat and a large dog, to find her hosts were expecting her to sleep in an unheated garden shed. She eventually returned to Ukraine, having decided her quality of life would be better there."

There are two things about that quote. Firstly, the Homes for Ukraine scheme although hugely beneficial to more than 120,000 refugees was not faultless. There was some abuse and some exploitation and, in some cases, the British hosts were not really in a position to provide temporary housing for their refugee guests. Some Ukrainians decided to take the risk of living in their own home in their own surroundings are went back.

The second point is that some refugees smuggled their pets into the country understandably I would say because of the huge amount of bureaucracy and delay that was occurring at the time.

Perhaps the most important point to make about the Homes for Ukraine scheme was that it demonstrated the generosity of the vast majority of UK citizens both in terms of general charitable donations and in helping out the refugees.

It should be added by the way that not all of them were desperate and in a dire state. After the initial influx of female refugees, some men followed. Some were of a fighting age and therefore they should not have been allowed to have left Ukraine under that country's current legislation which demands that they fight the Russians.

And they were all given benefits to help live despite some of them being well off as the social worker mentions that one couple were in the process of buying a BMW!

Putin's troops are shooting up and shelling animal shelters in Ukraine

NEWS AND COMMENT: The madman (actually he's not mad but behaves as if he is) Putin is allowing his troops to shoot up and shell animal shelters in Ukraine on a rampage of destruction with no rhyme or reason behind it. Except perhaps just to terrorise the civilians and to kill and maim wantonly. Putin is rapidly catching up with Hitler as the world's worst mass murderer. The problem is that the West is fighting with one arm behind their back because they are walking on egg shells as Putin has nukes and the big fear is that he may actually use them.

Medical student in Ukraine flees with his two cats in his arms. Image: Reuters.

In a better world, NATO would go in and defend Ukraine but if they do that, they may start a nuclear war. NATO is also walking on egg shells. Everything that is being done in support of Ukraine is one step removed from the real support that they need to beat Putin which is to fight and I fully understand but it is frustrating. And in the meantime, the three major animal shelters in Ukraine are being attacked by Russian soldiers.

One of them was shelled and another was shot up by invading Russians. Many cats and dogs have been killed. There are many animal lovers who are assisting as best they can by running pop-up animal shelters of their own. They are rescuing cats and dogs as best they can. These are great people under severe stress is are the animals that they rescue. They are fighting against the odds, insurmountable odds and seeing animals injured and destroyed.

These great people are going to suffer trauma in the months and perhaps years to come because of what they've seen and experienced. The International Fund for Animal Welfare has stepped in and are doing their best to help these charities and the rescued cats and dogs.

RELATED: Russians shell and shoot up Ukraine animal shelters. This linked post has some more details on the shelters concerned.

Note: These are posts from FB which are 'embedded' here. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

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Separately, cats and dogs are on occasions at least being abandoned which is wrong but can you blame the owners? They are terrified. In contrast, there are many Ukrainians who are struggling to flee with their cats and dogs in carriers or they simply carry them in their arms. The sight of that gives me the heebie-jeebies because what chance have they of carrying their cats to the west of Ukraine and then over the border to Poland? 

Is there not a huge possibility that they will lose their cats in the process. The noise and the strangeness and the fear that will be instilled in those animals is going to almost force them to leap out of their arms and run to their deaths.

Some Ukrainians are staying, hiding in shelters for long hours while bombs and shells destroy their homes above. Imagine what it is like in those shelters. Look at the practicalities. What about going to the toilet for both humans and cats and dogs? How does it work? It seems all but impossible to manage that kind of situation while maintaining sanity and health.

And if and when they try and flee along a safe corridor the Russians continue to shell. Recently the Russians offered safe passage along a protected corridor which ended up either in Belarus or Russia! The cynicism is beyond belief.

And as Putin realises that he is losing this war, which is remarkable considering the overwhelming force against the Ukrainians, he may do something desperate like push that red button or instruct his generals to push it on his behalf. This is the real problem behind this: the West is walking on egg shells because he has nukes and he has threatened to use them on two occasions. The brutal truth is that he needs to be stopped although we are not allowed to say that. For the life of me I don't know why because the solution is in the removal of Mr Putin.

To hear about animals being killed and injured and terrified in this way is heartrending. You can't even say the war is just or good if ever a war can be just and good. It is just the desire of one person who believes that Ukraine should be part of Russia. It's his dream and he will achieve it in any way possible with a complete disregard for the lives of both animals and people.

He will lose in the end because he cannot control a country of about 40 million people of this geographic size even if and when he does win this war. Ukrainians will resist permanently. And the country will have to be rebuilt. Who is going to pay for that when and if Russia governs the country? Russia can't afford to pay for it. They will be running a broken country with no economy and broken infrastructure and a populace who hate Russia and this madman Putin.

It is a total humankind f**k-up and it is the innocents who suffer.

Were recent terrorist bombs in America organised by Russia's foreign military intelligence agency?

There has been a spate of terrorist activity in America, most recently the pressure cooker bomb exploding in New York City's Chelsea district wounding 29 people.

Law enforcement is trying to find out who is behind it and the reason for it. It occurred to me that the reason for it could be to ensure that Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States of America. If that is the reason and it might sound far-fetched then the organisation behind these bombs could be Russian intelligence as directed by Vladimir Putin. This is because Putin believes that if Donald Trump becomes president there will be a rapprochement between the two nations which will lead to the lifting of financial sanctions against Russia.

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Sorry for temporarily putting on hold posts about cats. I only do this very rarely.

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Russia is in dire need of financial assistance. They are burning through their reserves very quickly. There is no likelihood of a price rise in oil in the near or medium-term future. Russia is dependent upon all revenues for its balance of payments. There is increased poverty in Russia. Putin remains popular but his popularity is waning due to the financial crisis.

Donald Trump has made it known to the world that he admires Putin. They could readily enter into a dialogue on the lifting of sanctions and even the acceptance by America of Russia's invasion of Crimea.

The Russian state has a history of criminal activity including assassinations and murders in other countries and in Russia. Dissidents who emigrate from Russia and settle in other countries such the UK sometimes end up dead at the hands of highly skilled assassins employed by Russia's foreign military intelligence main agency which is commonly called the GRU.

I'm simply putting out this suggestion as an idea because law enforcement in America is struggling to find the reason for the recent bombings. The likely suspect would be Muslim extremists inspired by ISIS but bearing in mind the imminent election of the new president of the USA in 49 days it is timely to create chaos with terrorism in order to make Donald Trump more popular and therefore more likely to win because he has consistently presented to his supporters a hard line towards law and order, immigration and terrorism.

Only recently, in fact shortly after the New York pressure cooker bomb, he said that terrorism must stop giving a clear signal that if he became president he would do all could to heighten and make more rigourous the fight against terrorism in United States of America.

Terrorism now will make it more likely that Donald Trump makes it to the White House and Putin wants him there.