The "American Service-Members' Protection Act" that lets the US invade the Hague contravenes the Geneva Convention and international law, fuck off
I love how the trials Ukraine has conducted on Russian war criminals are legit and above board, but once you're prosecuting Our Guys, all of a sudden we're concerned about the procedure
Regardless of what Ukraine is doing the author's allegation that the Donetsk trials violate the Geneva Conventions seems pretty clear cut. He might be an asshole but it doesn't sound like he's wrong. Accusing them of being mercenaries is spurious since they're officially part of the Ukrainian military. Handing them over to Donetsk is a violation of Russia's obligations under the laws of war.
So honestly I don't really know anything about the laws of war and whatnot, but can Ukraine really just declare willy-nilly that random foreign nationals showing up are part of their military? What's to stop them from doing that for genuine, fight-for-cash mercenaries?
Yeah. Why not? You can induct anyone you want in to the military. As far as I know they're in regular military units, fighting with issued equipment, getting paid whatever the pay rate is, subject whatever Ukraine has for a military law code. The US has a lot of soldiers who aren't US citizens. The French have the Foreign Legion. I'm sure other nations have other examples.
Honestly not sure what Russia is even going for with these trials. Why these random dudes? If they had a bunch of Azov guys covered in swastikas it'd make sense and fit in to their narrative, but idk why they're bothering with rando brits and Moroccans. Is it to demonstrate that Russia views Donetsk as legitimate? Is it to discourage foreign fighters? Idk why you'd even bother to discourage foreign fighters, there's such a small group of them relative to Ukrainians fighting.
Maybe someone will right a book about it some day.
the author suggests meteing put these sentences will be used to do prisoner exchanges with the dudes Ukraine prosecuted for war crimes
That makes sense. Though I wonder how far out on a limb Ukraine will go for brits and Moroccans.
It's called sovreignity, but imperialists don't understand such concept applying to elsewhwere, their brain pan is too affected by corn syrup you see.
It goes something like this:
Catch a foreigner in your land doing something you collectivily don't like
Imprison them or worse, as long as most of your people is OK with it.
No. It's just their land, their rules. It applies to all states and societies, no matter how horrible they might be.
Oh no, won't somebody please do something to help protect those *checks notes* mercenaries who traveled into a warzone by choice in order to kill
Get fucked. Personally i would hope for DPR officials to suspend their death penalty and order them to help rebuild Mariupol for i dunno, like a decade or 2. Then they can have back the freedom they volunteered to abandon so they, again, could go kill people in another country
Then again, i didn't spend the last 8 years getting shelled and tortured and hunted for sport by the nazi fucks these guys joined up with so i won't judge the DPR too harshly if they just give em the wall. If the wall is good enough for billionaires (and it is) then it's good enough for foreign mercs who chose to fight with azov
The wild thing is that at least the brits have been in the ukrainian army for years.
Honestly that makes it worse in my eyes
That means that they didn't join up as a part of the recent hysteria to help save smol bean Ukraine from that mean ol bully Putler, they joined up to terrorize the people of Donbass for most likely ideological reasons
Yeah i know i'm just speculating and i'll admit to not being very charitable here, but why tf else would somebody have joined then? Unless it really was just pure bloodlust.
Whatever, live by the sword die by the sword. Fuck pedantic rules lawyering, esp when the enforcement of those rules is so one sided and punishment is pretty much nonexistent for all the worst war crimes in modern history
Yeah, obviously you'd have to do like work gangs with a bunch of prisoners with armed guards, and that would be a pain in the ass to manage and probably could wind up backfiring. Labor will be needed to rebuild tho. Tough call
I kinda expect there might wind up being prisoner swaps that will make this whole debate moot, but who knows?
Mercenaries = no protections. Sorry buddy, should have listened to the UK government's own statements, those war criminals aren't coming home
this whole affair is stupid and really exposes how impotent the sanctified rules of war really are.
Ukraine decided to prosecute Russians while the war is on, this is a direct reprisal. in real terms the legality is irrelevant.
but lets talk about the law. Mercenaries aren't allowed on paper but are immune to prosecution. they put on a flag patch and they're 'party' to one of the sides. they dont even need that if theyre yankees Uncle Sam just says fuck off hague.
its all fucking bullshit to launder militarism through liberal moral lenses "oh we're murdering thousands of people but don't worry, we're doing it right". its all a joke, you offer up the odd enlisted shlub for sacrifice on the altar of liberal civility, but it never fucking matters if you 'accidentally' bomb innocents, if your war creates the conditions to murder innocents by neglect, if your war's refugees die in some hellish camp a thousand miles away
its all fucking bullshit to launder militarism through liberal moral lenses “oh we’re murdering thousands of people but don’t worry, we’re doing it right”. its all a joke, you offer up the odd enlisted shlub for sacrifice on the altar of liberal civility, but it never fucking matters if you ‘accidentally’ bomb innocents, if your war creates the conditions to murder innocents by neglect, if your war’s refugees die in some hellish camp a thousand miles away
wont sombdy plz thenk uv th bludthersty mercs tho
:powercry-1:
I read that one of the br*ts on trial has been fighting in ukraine for over four years. Which to me means he went there to kill the people of the donbass based on ideological (read: fascist) grounds. This was waaaay before the frothing from the mouth bazinga brigades were formed after the Russians entered the scene and the subsequent propaganda efforts by western media which assumably got so many of these nerds so riled up. Fuck that guy. You don't get to bomb people with azov for four years and get away with it by saying sowwy.
(IIRC) It's the same guy who had his video confession posted a month or so ago and he basically described himself as a meathead merc in Syria until a (nazi) buddy of his told him he could get a better paying job in a nicer climate. How true is not for me to say, that's what he said into a camera under custody.
Damn that sucks, Alexa how many captured Russian soldiers had their genitals cut off without trial, and how many weepy articles ran in the western press about it?
elections & trials...
always fraudulent and "for show" when done by them
always a legitimate expression of democracy when done by us
I was tempted to say that these processes are worthless due to the above futility but I think it really just goes to show that they aren't really worth international commentary (by state/corporate media) and are much more an exercise of domestic political expression; the verdicts of trials and the results of elections are fairly meaningless as a gauge of "is X nation has democratic values" but are a good indication of the current state of the internal class struggle.
yeah killing POWs isn't very cash money tbf, even if they're br*ts
Sounds pretty clear cut. All other bullshit aside Russia is violating the Geneva Conventions. Whether that matters is a different question,.
Plenty of war crimes to go around in Ukraine when all of these show trials are going to just end up in prisoner exchanges with no justice for anyone.
I think the realization that in a few months - or at most a year - most prisoners will be exchanged has made the war more brutal on both sides.
Russia’s war crimes: kills foreign combatants
NATO adjacent war crimes:
Other torture methods used by the Ukrainian armed forces and security forces include bone-crashing, stabbing and cutting with a knife, branding with red-hot objects, shooting different body parts with small arms.
The prisoners taken captive by the Ukrainian armed forces and security forces are kept for days at freezing temperatures, with no access to food or medical assistance, and are often forced to take psychotropic substances that cause agony. An absolute majority of prisoners are put through mock firing squads and suffer death and rape threats to their families. Many of those tortured are not members of the self-defense forces of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR)1
Here is for example an account by German Mandrikov, ‘I am just a civilian, I had not participated in the military actions but the SBU investigators forced me to incriminate myself through torture. In early October I went to see my mother and was arrested by unknown men. They took me to the airport of Mariupol where for three days in a row I suffered beastly torture. They used both psychological and physical abuse: they gave me electric shock, suffocated me with a plastic bag, beat on the feet with a tire iron, poured freezing water on me, etc. The torturers had an Azov insignia on their sleeves. They threatened to rape my mother and bride. I could not bear the torment any longer and signed some documents without even reading them.’
https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf
NATO war crimes: Others have revived these claims more recently.[6] In March 2010, the allegations were investigated by the Al Jazeera English news programme People & Power.[7] In this program, Professor Mori Masataka investigated historical artifacts in the form of bomb casings from US biological weapons, contemporary documentary evidence and eye witness testimonies. [7] From the evidence he collected, Professor Mori concluded that the United States did in fact test biological weapons on North Korea during the Korean War. [7]
