NATO waging ‘proxy war’ against Russia – Croatian president
RT | January 16, 2023
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic has claimed NATO, a military bloc of which Zagreb is a member, is waging a “proxy war” against Moscow in Ukraine. He also dismissed sanctions against Moscow as “nonsense,” adding that he does not want to be an “American slave.”
Speaking to Croatian reporters in the city of Vukovar on Sunday, Milanovic said, among other things: “Washington and NATO are waging a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine,” as quoted by media outlet Istra24.
He went on to argue that “The plan cannot be to remove Putin. The plan cannot be sanctions,” adding that such punitive measures are “nonsense and we will not achieve anything with them.”
“They go from war to war. And what should I be? An American slave?” Croatia’s president asked rhetorically.
Milanovic voiced his frustration with the US-led military bloc’s policies in the same interview in which he tore into Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenkovic, over his latest Ukraine-related remark.
Speaking to news channel France 24 on Saturday, Plenkovic said the Balkan nation’s lawmakers, who in mid-December didn’t support the EU’s program to train Ukrainian military personnel in member states, have “failed to be on the right side of history.”
Commenting on the remark, Milanovic, in turn, slammed the premier for bringing “disgrace” to his country “and to its democratic representatives in front of others.” The Croatian president argued that this kind of behavior reaches a low that is “the bottom of the bottom.”
As for the EU’s mission, the Croatian president warned that it effectively means that “for the first time in its history, the EU is participating in a war.” This, according to Milanovic, is “against the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU.”
In December 2022, Milanovic argued that having Ukrainian service members train on Croatian soil would “bring war” to the Balkan nation.
He also insisted at the time that “Ukraine is not an ally,” criticizing Brussels’ decision last June to grant Kiev candidate status as “cynical.”
Ukraine is Test Lab for Western Weapons ‘In Every Sense’, US Media Says
By Oleg Burunov – Samizdat – 16.01.2023
Ukraine has become a “testbed” for western weapons which do not always live up to expectations and may finally become a thing of the past, a US media outlet has reported.
The outlet claimed that the Ukrainian conflict “offered the United States and its allies a rare opportunity to study how their own weapons systems perform under intense use.”
An unnamed source familiar with western intelligence was cited by the outlet as saying Ukraine is “absolutely a weapons lab in every sense because none of this equipment has ever actually been used in a war between two industrially developed nations.” According to the source, “This is real-world battle testing.”
Another insider told the outlet that some sophisticated systems delivered to Kiev, including the Switchblade 300 drone and a missile designed to target enemy radar systems, have turned out to be less effective on the battlefield than anticipated.
The insider argued that one lesson that Washington may take from the Ukrainian conflict is that towed artillery – like the M777 howitzer system supplied to Kiev – may be never used in the future due to the fact that the system is “harder to move quickly to avoid return fire.”
Since the beginning of the year, the US and its allies have delivered more than $40 billion in military assistance to Kiev. Moscow has repeatedly warned against providing Kiev with arms, something that the Kremlin says contributes to further escalation of the Ukraine conflict.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, for his part, underlined that the Ukrainian conflict had become another pretext for the US and its allies to unleash an economic and information war against Moscow in order to deplete it strategically.
“Ukraine has been picked [by the West] as an instrument of a hybrid war against Russia,” Shoigu added, stressing that western arms supplies to Kiev add to prolonging the conflict and cause more casualties.
Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, following a request from the Donbass republics to protect them from Kiev attacks.
US Senator says training Ukrainian soldiers in Oklahoma poses risk to civilians
By Ahmed Adel | January 16, 2023
Nathan Dahm, a Republican Member of the Oklahoma Senate, has introduced a resolution for Ukrainian soldiers to not be trained in operating the Patriot air defence system in his state. There is a great concern that inexperienced Ukrainian soldiers will be responsible for killing innocent civilians by misfiring missiles.
“I just filed SCR2 to reject foreign soldiers on Oklahoma soil. The pentagon is planning on sending Ukrainian troops to Oklahoma to train on U.S. missile systems. The last thing we need is them misfiring a missile into Oklahoma…,” the senator wrote on Twitter.
Of particular concern is the fact that the Ukrainian soldiers will undergo training in an accelerated program that will reportedly only go on for two months instead of the minimum six. It is unrealistic to expect a soldier to learn this weapon system in such a short period of time, thus ensuring that the quality of the training will be substandard.
More dangerously though, at the end of their extremely short training, real live fire exercises must be held. This poses a significant risk for Oklahoma’s citizens. American military instructors will obviously monitor the training of the Ukrainian soldiers, but this is not a guarantee of safety. Although the probability of an accident is small, it still exists, so-much-so that Dahm had to highlight it.
In his resolution, Dahm stressed: “Recent reports indicate the Ukrainian military launched a rocket that landed in Poland, killing innocent Polish citizens, and the citizens of Oklahoma need not be under threat of a similar failure impacting our people.”
None-the-less, Dahm’s desire to prevent the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Oklahoma is unlikely to succeed. Although there are many Republicans who are against supporting Ukraine, in essence, there are more who support the Ukrainian state.
Given his position as a state senator, it is unlikely that he will be able to reverse Washington’s foreign policy. In addition, all military training grounds and special centres in the US are subordinated directly to the Pentagon. The senator does not have any rights or powers in terms of limiting the performance of military exercises.
It is unlikely that the training will have a major impact on the battlefield as the Ukrainians will not be able to handle these systems properly without American or European instructors. This certainly carries the risk of further escalation. Therefore, for the Patriots to have an impact, they not only need to arrive safely in Ukraine, but American and European militaries will need to risk their instructors who will be facing Russian missile strikes.
It is recalled that Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper stated that the training of Ukrainian forces on the American air defence system will begin at the end of January and will last for several months. The training itself will take place at Fort Sill – a huge training ground to the southwest of Oklahoma City.
As for the actual incident in Poland mentioned by Dahm, Polish media reported on November 15 that two rockets fell in the Lublin Voivodeship on the border with Ukraine, killing two people. Although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially stated that he was certain that Kiev was not involved in the incident, he said shortly after that he was not 100 percent sure what happened. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US has not seen any evidence to dispute Warsaw’s preliminary report that the missile was Ukrainian.
It is this very scenario that Dahm is desperately trying to avoid in Oklahoma.
“We must put the people of Oklahoma first,” Dahm said. “We shouldn’t be allowing the unaccountable spending, corruption, and potential money laundering to now flow through Oklahoma with the presence of foreign troops on our land.”
The US announced it was sending Ukraine the Patriot in late December when Zelensky visited Washington to meet with President Joe Biden. Despite the Patriot being an advanced air defence system, Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, said that the Patriot is “not a game-changer” because it is “still only able to defend a relatively small piece of dirt.”
“These systems don’t pick up and move around the battlefield,” explained retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former commander of US Army Europe. “You put them in place somewhere that defends your most strategic target, like a city, like Kyiv. If anyone thinks this is going to be a system that is spread across a 500-mile border between Ukraine and Russia, they just don’t know how the system operates.”
In this way, the US is not only wasting taxpayers’ money by transferring Patriots to Ukraine and training its crew, but is also exposing American citizens to danger, all for the sake of a weapon that most experts unanimously agree will not change the course of the war in Ukraine’s favour.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
WHO Sneak Attack
CHD.TV: “This is the big one. They’re going for broke… I think we may only have potentially until May before one or both of these documents gets voted on” — Meryl Nass, M.D. and James Corbett continue their discussion on the WHO’s proposed International Health Regulation Amendments + potentially legally-binding ‘Zero Draft Treaty’ currently being drawn up in secret meetings behind closed doors. As the WHO touts the solution to worldly problems as possible through their ‘One Health’ approach — one wonders if a world in which humans, animals, agriculture, and weather are dominated by state depicted notions of the highest attainable standard of ‘health’ may secretly be a trojan horse to dominate as much of the sovereign world as possible — usurping power from individual countries and thrusting it into the hands of a mad-with-power agency which seeks to control Earth’s resources, ecosystems, food, animals, and plants.
VIDEO COURTESY Bitchute CHD.TV / RUMBLE
SHOW NOTES:
PREVIOUS TALK: The Weaponization of the WHO on CHD TV
WHO Member States Agree To Develop Zero Draft Of Legally Binding Pandemic Accord In Early 2023
Review Committee Regarding Amendments To The International Health Regulations (2005)
CDC’s One Health Office: What We Do
One Health Joint Plan Of Action Launched And Presented By WHO And The Quadripartite Partners
One Health Joint Plan Of Action Launched And Presented By WHO And The Quadripartite Partners
Please Stop The Ride To A Biotech Food Takeover – Transcript
James Roguski Substack — THE TOP 100 REASONS TO #StopTheTreaty, #StopTheAmendments, And #ExitTheWHO.
“A New System” – Inside the Davos Summit 2023
WEF conference looks set to focus on what the globalist elite can learn from the failures of their “pandemic” narrative
OffGuardian | January 15, 2023
The World Economic Forum’s annual meet-up kicks off tomorrow. Politicians, corporate giants, “philanthropists” and all manner of elite monstrosities gather for a weekend of telling each other how smart they are and making the world generally worse.
But what’s on the menu this year?
Well, here are the five main items up for discussion, according to the WEF’s website:
See if you can notice a pattern:
- Addressing the Current Energy and Food Crises in the context of a New System for Energy, Climate and Nature
- Addressing the Current High Inflation, Low Growth, High Debt Economy in the context of a New System for Investment, Trade and Infrastructure
- Addressing the Current Industry Headwinds in the context of a New System for Harnessing Frontier Technologies for Private Sector Innovation and Resilience
- Addressing the Current Social Vulnerabilities in the context of a New System for Work, Skills and Care
- Addressing the Current Geopolitical Risks in the context of a New System for Dialogue and Cooperation in a Multipolar World
Now, none of this is news. A “new system” for energy is a “green new deal”, a “new system” for international cooperation is some type of global governance, and a “new system” for investment and trade covers a lot of topics, including digital currency.
Like I said, nothing new, but it’s always refreshing to see it in print, with no effort to hide it.
It’s also interesting that they don’t use the phrases “new normal”, “great reset” or “build back better” anywhere on the page, despite the fact it’s obviously what they’re talking about.
A little victory for the alternate media, who have clearly raised enough awareness that those phrases are now considered too tainted to use.
In fact, the WEF brotherhood is clearly concerned about losing control of the narrative, as this article from a few days ago highlights:
The world’s biggest problem solvers need to craft better narratives
It argues:
People are more persuaded by the information presented within a narrative because a good narrative helps to ease information processing. Those trying to solve the world’s most pressing challenges must take notice of this.
The whole article is essentially a very long-winded way of saying “we need to tell better lies”.
We must name the real antagonists: irresponsible politicians, bought scientists and some companies failing to live up to the needs of the transition to net-zero.
We must also stop pretending that there is a debate over the facts of climate change. A false balance is a phenomenon that occurs when a news organization or other media outlet presents an issue as being the subject of a debate, even when there is no actual debate or disagreement among experts on the matter.
The author is talking about climate change, but his points about shifting blame and shutting down debate apply across the board.
Look for a shift of narrative “villains” this year, as well as increased emphasis on positivity and “unity”. Unity likely means attempting to woo back some of the fringe-mainstream elements pushed further to the alternative by the Covid narrative (as they did with Ukraine).
Elsewhere – and on a related note – there is likely to be talk of censorship – or, sorry, “countering misinformation” – as discussed in this WEF article from 6 days ago, headlined:
Digital safety: Applying human rights in the digital world
The article details the “challenges” facing the WEF’s “Global Coalition for Digital Safety” in their efforts to tackle…
the likes of child sexual abuse and exploitation, terrorism and hate speech, misinformation and content related to self-harm and suicide.
Notice how “hate speech” and “misinformation” are thrown in there with the actual crimes? To quote Sesame Street, “one of these things is not like the other”. But that’s no surprise in the age of “legal but harmful”.
To be clear, these people do not care about any of those things. Not at all.
Their businesses exploit children, their state agencies fund terrorism, and their media outlets spit out misinformation at 50 words a minute.
They only really care about control. In this instance that means controlling the internet – more specifically, controlling what you are allowed to say and hear on the internet.
Another potential focus for discussion, highlighted in a couple of places, will be a push for more direct action. What they seem to be calling “tangible solutions”.
The head of Amnesty International – who will be in attendance – has called for Davos attendees to focus on:
tangible solutions that we already know work, rather than opting to protect the existing global economic system at any cost.
Underlining that “now is the time for action” not “empty gestures”, and simultaneously echoing the “new system” messaging.
The “tangible solutions” line is repeated in the “narratives” article mentioned earlier, by financial consultancy giant Mercer on their page about Davos, a WEF “expert panel”, and by Forbes in their article on young leaders at Davos.
Of course “solutions-based thinking” has been corporate talk for decades, and “now is the time for action” is a cliche which does the rounds at every meeting, summit or conference.
Nobody in history has ever said “now is not the time for action, now is the time for gestures”.
So, of course, it could be empty words designed to make the speakers (and their meeting) feel important.
But it could be something else, perhaps a sign that the propaganda stage of the “great reset” is over, and now we transition to the next stage. Signalling a move away from passive manipulation and psychology-driven control mechanisms and toward more direct enforcement.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Either way, you can broadly define the Davos agenda as four main themes:
- “A new system”: Reforming the global systems of politics and finance
- “controlling the narrative”: Telling more believable lies & limiting public debate
- “countering misinformation”: Censorship, especially of the internet
- “tangible solutions”: Taking more direct action via enforcement and policy.
The Davos talking points, it seems, will be a retrospective focusing on what they can learn from the shortcomings of their “pandemic” narrative.
One final thought, an (unconfirmed) story doing the rounds is both hilarious and telling…if true:
Apparently, DAVOS attendees are deliberately seeking out unvaccinated pilots. Make of that what you will.
Stranded Assets
By Don Dears | Power For USA | January 10, 2023
There has been considerable conjecture that billions of dollars worth of assets in the fossil fuel industry will be stranded when fossil fuels are no longer needed because of the energy transition.
But what about the billions being spent by the automobile industry to build factories for the manufacture of batteries and battery-powered vehicles (BEVs)?
What if the market for BEVs doesn’t materialize?
The battery factories and factories to build BEVs won’t be needed. They will become stranded assets.
According to the WSJ, the automobile industry has committed, over the past two years, to invest $70 billion in factories to build batteries and BEVs.
According to the Center for Automotive Research, over half of this investment will be for battery factories.
Here is a chart from the Center of Automotive Research that provides another view of the investments being made for manufacturing BEVs.

It’s also been reported that the automobile industry worldwide will spend $526 billion on factories to build batteries and BEVs.
As noted in the WSJ article:
The capital outlays amount to a collective bet by the car industry that buyers will embrace battery-powered models in numbers large enough to support these investments.
What happens if the market for BEVs in the United States is only one-third the size being predicted?
Or, if it’s even less, say 10% of the predicted market size?
How will the automobile companies pay off their debt? Will they have losses?
Will these factories be stranded investments, unable to pay for themselves?
There is a herd mentality that’s gripped the automobile industry. As one CFO said,
You have to invest now, or you’re going to be left behind in the transition.
Toyota isn’t so sure.
Could Toyota have been right all along?
When anyone considers the volume of materials that must be mined and processed it must raise doubts about the stampede to build these factories.
The book, Clean Energy Crisis has estimated the number of new mines that must be developed to support the worldwide BEV market. One look at this aspect of the BEV market should give anyone pause.
The stranded assets may be in the automobile industry, not the fossil fuel industry.
The Lancet has become a laughing stock

By Norman Fenton and Martin Neil | Where are the numbers? | January 14, 2023
In summary:
- On 6 May 2021 The Lancet published a blatantly flawed study of the effectiveness of the Pfizer covid vaccine on the population of Israel, claiming it was 95% effective.
- On 17 May 2021 we submitted a rapid response 250 word letter explaining why the study was flawed.
- After an initial response saying they would ask the authors for a response to our letter we heard nothing until 20 months later.
- On 8 January 2023 we got an email out of the blue from The Lancet Senior Editor Josefine Gibson apologising for never having got back to us about the letter, saying that they had asked the lead author Dr Sharon Alroy-Preis (SA-P) to respond to our letter but, because she did not provide any formal response, they have decided not to publish our letter.
- We tweeted The Lancet’s response and within 24 hours it got over one million impressions. We also published a substack article highlighting the fact we were now aware of additional problems with the paper relating to SA-P’s relationship with Pfizer.
- On 10 January 2023 we got an unsolicited email from Josefine Gibson (which we can only assume was a result of the reputation hit they got from our tweet) saying “Thank you for bringing your letter from May 2021 back to our attention. We are looking into next steps and will get back to you as soon as we can.”
- On 11 January 2023 (at 10:58) we sent an email to The Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton directing him to our substack article (which highlighted these new problems relating to SA-P’s relationship with Pfizer) stating that The Lancet was clearly taking a credibility hit surrounding the publication of the Israel-Pfizer study and its response to criticisms of it.
- On 11 January 2023 (at 11:21) we got an email from Josefine Gibson apologising for the ‘sub standard experience’ we had with The Lancet. She said that, after discussing it with Horton, they were now inviting us to publish the original letter or an update to it, suggesting the update ‘reflect more current experience with the vaccine’.
- On 12 January 2023 we submitted our updated letter (of an agreed 350 words).
- On 13 January 2023 we got a response from Josefine Gibson saying they had decided against publishing the letter.
Here is the full narrative and January 2023 correspondence in date order (personal details redacted)… continue
State of emergency declared in Peru amid deadly protests
RT | January 15, 2023
The Peruvian government has introduced a state of emergency in a number of provinces in a bid to tackle violent anti-government protests. The South American country has been gripped by unrest since early December 2022, when President Pedro Castillo was removed from office and arrested over accusations of corruption.
The former president’s supporters, who claim the ouster was a coup, have been taking to the streets and clashing with security forces ever since. Castillo has denied any wrongdoing, insisting that his removal was orchestrated by his political opponents.
The decree introducing the state of emergency was published in Peru’s official daily newspaper, Diario Oficial El Peruano, late on Sunday.
The decree took effect on January 15 and will last for thirty days. It covers three regions, three provinces, and one district, mostly in the south of the country. The capital city of Lima and surrounding areas are among them. Five major highways were also included in the measure.
Where the state of emergency is in effect, Peru’s National Police has been charged with maintaining order with the support of the military.
Under the decree, local residents are prohibited from gathering in groups, while security forces can detain them if they deem it necessary, and can also enter and search homes.
Moreover, a curfew has been imposed from 8:00 pm to 4:00 am for ten days in the southern department of Puno. The restrictions were imposed after violent clashes left 18 people dead in the region. Certain exceptions are envisaged for the purchase of food or to seek medical care, while workers in a number of critical professions are also allowed to move about freely.
On Friday, President Dina Boluarte apologized to the nation for the violence that has so far claimed 47 lives.
She insisted, however, that she will not resign, and claimed “foreign provocateurs and infiltrators” may have played a role in the deadly unrest.
Ukraine Humiliated Western Propagandists After Its Defense Minister Admitted It’s A NATO Proxy
By Andrew Korybko | January 7, 2023
Defense Minister Alexei Reznikov’s description of the Ukrainian-NATO relationship perfectly aligns with Merriam-Webster’s definition of a proxy. Their official website informs readers that “A proxy may refer to a person who is authorized to act for another or it may designate the function or authority of serving in another’s stead.” The objectively existing military-strategic dynamics of the Ukrainian Conflict coupled with Reznikov’s candid admission therefore leave no doubt about the fact that Ukraine is a NATO proxy by definition.
The US-led West’s Mainstream Media (MSM) has insisted over the past 10,5 months that President Putin is supposedly insane for considering Ukraine a NATO proxy whose close military ties with that explicitly anti-Russian bloc pose a serious threat to his country’s national security red lines. Their perception managers subsequently expanded upon their gaslighting operation to discredit Russia’s special operation on the false basis that it’s driven by so-called “imperialism” and not self-defense.
Every single one of the countless information warfare products that they’ve since created was just exposed as fraudulent by none other than Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexei Reznikov, who admitted during an appearance on national TV on Thursday that their country is indeed a NATO proxy. In his own words, “Today, Ukraine is addressing [the] threat (of Russia). We’re carrying out NATO’s mission today, without shedding their blood. We shed our blood, so we expect them to provide weapons.”
Reznikov’s description of the Ukrainian-NATO relationship perfectly aligns with Merriam-Webster’s definition of a proxy. Their official website informs readers that “A proxy may refer to a person who is authorized to act for another or it may designate the function or authority of serving in another’s stead.” The objectively existing military-strategic dynamics of the Ukrainian Conflict coupled with Reznikov’s candid admission therefore leave no doubt about the fact that Ukraine is a NATO proxy by definition.
This senior official likely didn’t intend to discredit his patrons’ “official narrative” for redistributing approximately $100 billion of their taxpayer-provided wealth to Ukraine and thus vindicate everything that President Putin said about why he commenced Russia’s special operation. What appears to have happened is that Reznikov lost his cool after becoming frustrated that NATO isn’t giving Kiev all the weapons that it demands, hence why he spilled the beans in an attempt to put pressure on them.
This emotional reaction to the pressure that’s being put upon his side by NATO’s military-industrial limitations, which the New York Times reported upon in late November and therefore can no longer be denied by the MSM, caused him to finally crack. Had he remained calm like senior officials are supposed to do, especially those leading their country’s military like he does, then he would never have admitted that Ukraine is a NATO proxy out of desperation to guilt it into giving Kiev all that it demands.
The average person in the US-led West’s Golden Billion probably won’t ever be informed of what he said since it’s in the MSM’s obvious interests to suppress all reporting about this embarrassing incident, but those who rely on Alternative Media will almost certainly come across it sooner or later. What they should then do is pass this “politically inconvenient” news along to as many people as possible in order to prove to them that they’ve been lied to by their government and media this entire time.
Approximately $100 billion worth of their hard-earned tax dollars weren’t diverted from domestic socio-economic projects to “protect Ukraine from Russian aggression”, but for NATO to aggressively exploit Ukraine as a literal proxy for waging Hybrid War on Russia. Its Defense Minister, who can’t realistically be described as a so-called “Russian agent/propagandist” or even “Russian-friendly”, wouldn’t have admitted that Ukraine is a NATO proxy if this truly wasn’t the case.
With that in mind, everything that everyone’s been told about this conflict by the MSM is built upon the “Big Lie” that Ukraine is a “fiercely independent state” that was “randomly victimized” by “Russian aggression”. The reality is that it’s Russia that’s the fiercely independent state that was victimized by NATO’s proxy war aggression via Ukraine, though this wasn’t done randomly, but as punishment for its leading role in accelerating the global systemic transition to multiplexity away from US-led unipolarity.
The New Cold War isn’t between “democracies and dictatorships” like Western propagandists falsely claim, but between the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the jointly BRICS– & SCO-led Global South of which Russia is a part over the direction of that aforesaid systemic transition. The top proxy war between these de facto blocs is the Ukrainian Conflict, the outcome of which will determine whether the US can reverse its declining unipolar hegemony or if the Multipolar World Order is inevitable.
These unprecedented stakes explain why such an astronomical sum of taxpayer funds has already been expended on perpetuating this proxy war that otherwise would have ended sometime last spring had NATO not rushed to its proxy’s rescue. The approximately $100 billion spent so far obviously hasn’t been sufficient for dislodging Russia from the territory that Ukraine claims as its own, which suggests that the West might accept the fait accompli of Moscow’s victory and thus explains why Reznikov is panicking.
He and his ilk from that US-installed fascist regime know that they probably won’t politically survive the scenario of Kiev de facto acknowledging Russia’s control over its former regions, hence why he desperately sought to put maximum pressure on NATO to finally give them all that they’ve demanded. To that end, he publicly admitted that Ukraine is a NATO proxy in the hopes of guilting his patrons into complying, but he also unwittingly humiliated its propagandists and discredited their “official narrative”.
Families of Russian Soldiers in Ukrainian Captivity Report Cases of ‘Extortion’: Ombudswoman
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Samizdat – 15.01.2023
Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova has denounced alleged instances of extortion against relatives of Russian soldiers taken prisoner by Ukraine’s Armed Forces.
“I received this chilling footage on January 14 from the relatives of captured Russian servicemen Vladislav Kovalenko and Piotr Krikunov. Using unknown accounts, anonymous non-humans show mothers scenes of their sons being tortured, and threaten to kill them if they do not receive a ransom. Yet more evidence for the future tribunal over the Nazis!” wrote Moskalkova on her Telegram messaging app on January 14.
The Russian official accompanied her post with video footage allegedly showing proof of such extortion taking place.
The ombudswoman said that family members of Russian soldiers had reported cases when they were sent horrifying scenes of violence used against the prisoners. Such materials were allegedly accompanied by threats that the captives would be killed unless their relatives paid a ransom sum.
The ombudswoman underscored that such instances were proof that “fascism” is not some horrifying page of history, but that it is “here and now, among us.”
Tatyana Moskalkova added:
“I urge the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Committee against Torture, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the International Committee of the Red Cross to demand that the Ukrainian side immediately comply with the Geneva Convention of 1949, which prohibits torture, violence and acts degrading to human dignity.”
Moskalkova concluded by saying that she was working on an appeal to the Russian Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin on the reported cases, and voiced confidence that the captured soldiers would be successfully released, as has been the case before, in joint efforts by the Russian Defense Ministry and Russian Federal Security Service.
On Sunday, January 8, as a result of an exchange of prisoners, 50 Russian soldiers were released, the Ministry of Defense reported. The prisoner swap was the first in 2023. The previous such exchange, according to the MOD, took place on December 31, 2022, when 82 Russian servicemen returned from Ukrainian captivity.


