Jan Šinágl angažovaný občan, nezávislý publicista

The embattled president asks why Western allies haven’t already imposed sanctions

“If we are going to protect ourselves against one of the most powerful armies in the world, then this will be war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says in a new interview with The Washington Post. “If this will be war, it’s going to be a very strong war, and everyone will lose. Hundreds of thousands of lives will be lost.

Q. Do you admire Reagan?

A. I like him. I didn’t know him personally. I respect very much people who fight and who get the result they desire.

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Václav Havel: „One inherited disadvantage of democracy is that to those who are devoted to it places limit of action, but those that disrespect it are able to do almost anything.”      

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Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State: "The lesson of recent history is that once the Russians enter your house, it's sometimes very hard to get them out."

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I attach for discussion the opinion of a Ukrainian journalist in Kiev on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus gave up their nuclear weapons to the RF in 1996. The Budapest Memorandum of December 5, 1994 is the only agreement in which Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus - the 3rd former nuclear powers - gave up their nuclear weapons in exchange for their security back in 1996. This anniversary took place without any media coverage. The memorandum could be a model for other states such as Iran, North Korea, etc.

However, a letter from a journalist in Kiev shows that the Memorandum is not, at the moment, a topic in Ukraine. The Budapest Memorandum, as a guarantee of the territorial integrity of states in return for the abolition of nuclear weapons, should be a topic not only for NATO, including the US, but for Swiss diplomacy and also a solution for Iran and North Korea.

Why is the Budapest Memorandum not a topic if there is nothing better?

Change in Russia is possible in Putin's lifetime. His popularity is already down to 30%. He can be removed (like Yelzin ended up), by his own people, sent to his billion dollar mansion, with a guarantee of security and material security. This will be conditional on mass demonstrations by a disaffected Russian population. It will also be a hope for Russia, Europe and the world. Already 40% of young Russians are considering emigration. Millions of its inhabitants have left Russia in recent years. J.Š.

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"The SVR and GRU carry out political murders, recruit informants and agents, and are, by definition, 100-percent hostile to Nato and the EU," the diplomat said.

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A lieutenant colonel with top-level Kremlin links, a spy-catcher, and a Big Data specialist - the identities of eight Russians recently expelled by Nato from Brussels give clues to why Moscow reacted so harshly and what its operatives were doing.

The eight people who Russia said were "diplomats" at its embassy to the Nato HQ in Brussels were in fact "undeclared intelligence officers" conducting "activities not in line with their accreditation", Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said while announcing the expulsions last October. Read more>

"If Trump had become president, the Ukraine conflict would not have happened."

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"I don't know if you saw, I wrote a few weeks ago, for a friend. Maybe a lot of people won't like it, but it is what it is." J.M. 16.5.2022

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I have asked Josef Mašín to answer a few questions about the current situation in Ukraine. He has summarised his views in the following text, for which I thank him warmly.

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Putin has never accepted the collapse of the Soviet Union. The paranoia inherent in Putin was the driving force behind the KGB, for which Putin worked and which prepared him for his future career. His first attempt to return Russia to its former glory took place in Georgia in 2008. Putin is not the first and will not be the last to try to exercise his ambitions in the way he is now demonstrating in Ukraine. Not only Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Mao, Pol Pot, the Ayatollahs, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping and others have preceded him or will follow him. It is the task of the leaders of the civilised world to prevent or counter their actions. The present ones have failed in this task.

ČRoPlus 26.11.2021 – Alexandr Mitrofanov (from 13:50:40)

The new film "At the Petrovs' the flu is raging"- the film is a must-see, any narration is only a faint approximation. About the hopelessness, cruelty and senselessness of Russian life, rooted in Soviet life, it comes as a shock. It shows the savage, animalistic rage that lives in Russians precisely because their lives lack any higher justification.

The brilliant columnist Mikhail Fishman: "Not only the citizens of the Russian Federation who behaved badly in life will fall back into the Russian Federation after death, but the Russian Federation itself will fall back into the USSR after death."

The great Russian poet Alexander Blokin 1912: "Night, street, lamp, apathy. The foolish world's illumination. You can breathe for a quarter of a century, but everything will be the same. There is no end, you die and start again. Where to go now? Where to? The night has frozen the moon in a new moon, the apathetic, the street, the lamp."