Atrocious Joe posted:

Hopefully this release is a sign that the US is willing to moderate their concentration camp system.

Majorian posted:

Right, but the crime that she allegedly went to jail for wasn't domestic abuse, it was carrying vapes with hashish oil into Russia.

She was detained in a pretty notoriously awful prison, and had to sew uniforms under what sounds like sweatshop conditions. Admittedly that probably skirts the definition of "hard labor," at least when it comes to Russia's history of it. If she hadn't been in the pipeline to be traded, however, who knows? Maybe she would have ended up out in the Far East.

Vomik posted:

because in america many people are in prison for life sentences for weed.

Vomik posted:

what i mean is: an american can't just say "oh it was weed vs arms dealing" because in america many people are in prison for life sentences for weed. so now that the american and russian legal systems have both established that all 3 people are equal in villainy we're forced to approach this trade from an alternative lens and shift the rhetorical focus

mlmp08 posted:

Wait, how many? Sounds bad if true. Are these all part of those incredibly loving dumb "three strikes" or "habitual offender" sentencing guidelines?

Vomik posted:

i'd guess most of them are three strikes laws. there was the one just recently in mississippi where for a third strike a guy was given life in prison and the sentence affirmed by the state supreme court for having as much weed as the daily purchase limit in half the states in the US lol

Majorian posted:

I agree, and I'm not speaking to the evenness/unevenness of this trade. I'm just pointing out that Griner's history of domestic abuse doesn't enter into the case.

Vomik posted:

well technically in american jurisprudence a person's character and behaviors can be used in sentencing, pardoning, and parole decisions.

mlmp08 posted:

Do you think this is why she was sentenced as she was in Russia? If so, why?

Vomik posted:

well technically in american jurisprudence a person's character and behaviors can be used in sentencing, pardoning, and parole decisions.

mlmp08 posted:

Do you think this is why she was sentenced as she was in Russia? If so, why?

E: huh, she pled to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in 2015 and attended counseling. Seems weird to think that means a weed charge should land someone in years of labor.

Vomik posted:

I was (mostly jokingly) just pointing out that when discussion of freeing a prisoner comes up its acceptable by us standards to use prior behavior as a reason to release someone or not.

iCe-CuBe. posted:

Zelensky is my favorite Marvel superhero

AnimeIsTrash posted:

drat thats interesting

BrotherJayne posted:

I feel like mlp is clumsily probing around some issue that is obvious to him, but I'm not getting

Vomik posted:

. I was (mostly jokingly) just pointing out that when discussion of freeing a prisoner comes up its acceptable by us standards to use prior behavior as a reason to release someone or not.

Slavvy posted:

He's clumsily probing around for something to have an incredibly tedious and disingenuous debate about for several pages

Slavvy posted:

Lol literally a double post to keep the tedium on a roll

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/1601651754826813441?s=20&t=7XJHQeykCpMliOfmSM5vnQ

quote:

Officials in Washington began to see Bout as the quintessential figure of transnational crime. He was distinguished not by cruelty or ruthlessness but by cunning amorality. “If he wasn’t doing arms and all the vile stuff, he would be a drat good businessman,” Andreas Morgner, a sanctions expert at the Treasury Department, said.

Bout’s trade gave him an outsized role in matters of war and peace. He neither shied from the pressure nor took sides. He flew Belgian peacekeepers into Somalia, and after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, he says, he brought French troops into eastern Congo. Not long after, with the help of Mirchev and others, he was transporting arms from Russia, Bulgaria, and Iran into conflict zones.

In the fall of 1998, four years after the Rwandan genocide, Bout began transporting arms to Rwanda. Mirchev contracted with the Rwandan government to supply arms, and Bout ferried them from Burgas to Kigali. (Employees passing through Kigali stayed at the InterContinental hotel, where Bout had rented all the rooms on the top two floors.) But not all the arms stayed in Rwanda. The country’s Tutsi-led government was backing Tutsi militias next door, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, against Congo’s President, Laurent Kabila. Some of the weapons were being diverted, aboard Bout’s airplanes, into the hands of rebels in Congo. At the time, Congo was not under sanctions; nevertheless, Bout and Mirchev contributed to a conflict that ultimately entangled eight African nations.

James Roberts, a pilot who worked for Bout, has said that he witnessed ammunition boxes, Russian rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and Japanese pickup trucks with mounted machine guns being “driven up onto the ramp” of an Ilyushin-76, along with Rwandan soldiers marching “three abreast, double-time.” Bout, he said, sometimes stood on the tarmac as the cargo was loaded. The flights landed in either Goma or Kisangani, eastern Congolese cities where Rwandan-backed militias were strong. According to a 2008 International Rescue Committee report, Congo’s civil war caused several million deaths—more than any other conflict since the Second World War.

quote:

The ups and downs
Before the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, the country fell within France’s sphere of influence. Washington did not view Rwanda as a strategic partner.

But the US’s relations with Rwanda changed after the genocide, based on a desire to help support the new post-genocide government. The result was the forging of close diplomatic relations, a process described by Robert Gribbin, a former American ambassador to Rwanda (1996-1999), in his book, In the Aftermath of Genocide: The US Role in Rwanda.

Gribbin sets out how the US developed close relations with the post-genocide government and the victorious Rwanda Patriotic Front. This included providing military training for soldiers and commanders, which still continues.

Thanks to the efforts of former assistant secretary of state for African affairs Susan Rice (1997-2001) under the Clinton administration, the US became a close ally of Rwanda.

Gresh posted:

gently caress this war and every rear end in a top hat against negotiations

Isizzlehorn posted:

cruise missiles into Moscow uwu

AnimeIsTrash posted:

sum posted:

Seems like the electricity grid in Odes(s)a has completely collapsed, authorities are recommending that civilians evacuate the oblast completely.
https://twitter.com/I_Katchanovski/status/1601685832414691329