Dilip Simeon's blog

Two Russian journalists working for a popular pro-Kremlin website filled it with anti-war articles on Monday morning in a rare act of dissent as the country celebrated the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. The articles on Lenta.ru called President  Vladimir Putin  a “pitiful paranoid dictator” and accused him of waging “the bloodiest war of the 21st century”. “We had to do it today. We wanted to remind everyone what our grandfathers really fought for on this beautiful Victory Day – for peace,” said 30-year-old Egor Polyakov, one of the two journalists. During his annual speech in front of 11,000 soldiers in the Kremlin on Monday morning, Putin  sought to justify his invasion of Ukraine , tying the current fighting to the Soviet victory in the second world war. “This is not what Victory Day is about,” Polyakov told the Guardian in an interview. “Ordinary people are dying, peaceful women and children are dying in Ukraine. Given the rhetoric that we have seen, this...

On 7 October 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow. Ten years on, the battle to publish investigative journalism in Russia is still being lost. When Polikovskaya died, there was speculation of government involvement, an international outcry and various posthumous awards for her investigative work. Yet in Russia there was no scandal, no mass protests. She was mostly deemed a "crazy loner", one of a very rare breed of reporters who believed in press independence. Committee to Protect Journalists A decade later, we have a better understanding of Politkovskaya's significance for Russian journalism. Like many of her generation, she was a product of the perestroika years of 1985-91, and remained faithful to its ideals in the years that followed, when a majority of her colleagues "tired of freedom". In the twenty-five years after perestroika, neither freedom of speech nor other political freedoms have been much prized by the majority of c...

Navalny, who was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison earlier this week, said in a statement posted on his Instagram account that “iron doors slammed behind my back with a deafening sound, but I feel like a free man. Because I feel confident I'm right. Thanks to your support. Thanks to my family's support." Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption campaigner who is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most determined political foe, was arrested Jan. 17 upon returning from his five-month convalescence in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning, which he has blamed on the Kremlin. Russian authorities deny any involvement and claim they have no proof that he was poisoned despite tests by several European labs. A Moscow court on Tuesday sent Navalny to prison, finding that he violated the terms of his probation while recuperating in Germany. The sentence stems from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has rejected as fabricated and the European Court of Human Rights ...

NB : A lesson in bravery for some of our journalists - who, honourable exceptions aside - have chosen to keep silent in the face of the threats and blandishments of the ruling dispensation. Shamelessness   has plumbed new depths. The other day when I asked an economic journalist why, in his regular rantings about corruption, he always avoided mention of the Vyapam   scam, or was silent about the failure of the government to investigate the Kalikho Pul suicide note, he loudly declared that he was a BJP supporter, and hence was not going to raise issues that might undermine its prestige. When I said this was a case of partisan deceitfulness, "everyone does it" was his justification. Tanya's example shows that everyone does not. There remains such a thing as journalistic ethics.  DS Journalist Tanya Felgenhauer was known for her lively morning show on Echo of Moscow. Then she was stabbed. Then, her scars still visible, she went to Putin’s big press conference. ...

A decade after the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, news organisations increasingly avoid topics that could anger the Kremlin. Committee to Protect Journalists My mum and Anna Politkovskaya: women who died for the truth: Lana Estemirova No other reporter has been assigned Anna Politkovskaya’s desk in Novaya Gazeta’s newsroom. It remains as a memorial, alongside her photograph and those of other murdered journalists at the newspaper, and as a reminder of the danger of the work. Ten years after Politkovskaya was shot in the lobby of her apartment block in Moscow, Novaya Gazeta continues to be one of the few outlets for hard-hitting independent journalism in  Russia . Its reporters still work from the North Caucasus, one the most dangerous part of the region . In September, Elena Kostyuchenko, a reporter with Novaya, travelled to Beslan in North Ossetia to cover the 12th anniversary of the siege in which 334 people died, including 186 children. Politkovskaya ha...

NB : An excellent analysis by one of America's most forthright journalists. Hedges is also an upholder of human conscience: here's a review of one of his books on war; and here are titles of two other books (among others) written with courage and of relevance to our times: A merican Fascists - The Christian Right and the War on America ; Free Press; 2008; and  The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress; Nation Books; 2011 My caveat is this: Even as he exposes the corporate links of the Democratic establishment, why does he find it necessary to dismiss allegations of Trump's links to Russian political and financial interests? Thus, he writes:  A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit... critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily st...

The invasion of Ukraine is now forcing the world to face up to the unprecedented threat posed by Russian imperialism. In this op-ed article, Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel argues that what is needed is a surge of international solidarity to defend and help the Ukrainian people who are resisting that aggression. A new imperialism is threatening world peace and it is Russian. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is finally forcing us to face up to this reality. This truth has been staring us in the face for a decade, to be precise ever since March 2012 and the third presidential term of Vladimir Putin, who has held uninterrupted power in Moscow for what will soon be a quarter of a century. Doubling Down On Double Standards – The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz ‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, and condemnation, in just 24 hours than the US-Saudi war on Yemen has gotten since it started nearly 7 years ago… US-backed Saudi bombing now is the worst...