In 2015 when 2 year old Alan Kurdi drowned in the Aegean, there was a wave of global sympathy, in Nov 2020, when a 5 yr old drowned in a shipwreck off Samos, his father faces 10yrs in prison in Greece, charged with endangering his life. Trial is tomorrow. https://t.co/aEi96YQmDz
“This looks like a cover up and smells like a cover up because it is a cover up” - Downing Street refuses to release papers which show Boris Johnson overruled MI5 advice saying @mrevgenylebedev was a security risk
Back in the USSR: my piece on how Lenin statues have reappeared in Russian-occupied towns in Ukraine, together with NKVD-style intimidation and torture. The Putin regime thinks nothing new, does nothing original, stands for nothing. Thanks @anneapplebaum https://t.co/k1v0pWvCFN
Day 53 of Ukraine resistance. Russian missile strikes on Kyiv tonight, eastern regions shelled. Mariupol defenders, civilians need urgent help. A military doctor who made an emotional appeal from Mariupol, saying “we don’t want to be heroes and martyrs posthumously,” was killed
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John* and his girlfriend were victims of unspeakable violence in #Libya. The cycle of pushbacks to Libya, supported by the EU, is unacceptable and must be stopped immediately.
My latest: “No one counts the dead there. We buried people in our yard. There are cemeteries in every park. And how many people burned in their homes? How many died of natural causes and just lay in their flats? No one will find them.” https://t.co/s34DJ5lWrJ
Excl: Some of the UK’s most senior religious leaders - including former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams - have written to the PM urging him to ban trans as well as gay conversion therapy.
“To be trans is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole”.
Taras Shevchenko park in Kyiv today. Sculpture of the great Ukrainian poet is boarded up. I saw another Shevchenko monument yesterday in Borodyanka. Russian soldiers had shot him in the head. What’s happening here is an attempt to erase #Ukraine wholescale - its people & culture
I visited the towns outside Kyiv occupied by Russian forces. Here's one story, from one street in #Bucha, where a dozen civilians were murdered. “They made him kneel and shot him. His was a cold, pitiless extinction. In the cellar was a bloody mattress" https://t.co/Mn2MRQ4nov
#Russia accused of ‘monstrous’ war crime in Kramatorsk station attack - my report from Kyiv with @shaunwalker7 on another day of bloodshed and horror in #Ukraine https://t.co/vOjniSFw79
The right thing to do: Boris Johnson & Voldymyr Zelenskiy walking through the streets of #Kyiv, to Independence Square, like two old friends. And yet you can't help thinking this will be the centre-piece of the Conservative Party's campaign in 2024 for another Johnson term ..
#Ukraine urges civilians to flee from the east ahead of a major Russian military offensive and ‘while opportunity still exists’. My latest from Lviv with @dansabbagh https://t.co/8lqCIqgvF5
Your daily reminder of the stark split between the European rhetoric (war crimes, strong sanctions...) vs the reality (EU imports of Russian gas **via Ukraine** have climbed this morning to a fresh post-invasion high).
The chart below is Russian gas flow at the Velke station
One month before Russia invaded Ukraine, I stood trial at the High Court. And now I wait, in purgatory, to be judged.
But I believe this trial and the silence around it - & all the Kremlin's men - has revealed something profoundly rotten at the heart of the British state.
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