toomas ilves, ex-verif
@IlvesToomas
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Toomas Hendrik Ilves, (formerly v From Estonia. Where Digital is Native. And come in at #2 in the world in internet freedom. @toomas_ilves @mastodon .social
Estonia
Joined May 2012
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Accepting apologies now here for all the patronizing nonsense from Western Europeans I had to listen to for 31 years telling me we Estonians were "paranoid" about Russian behavior.
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There are a lot, really A LOT more Russians in Germany than Iranians. How come we don't see a 100K demonstration in Berlin protesting Putin's war?
Instead we see them harassing Ukrainians who fled to Germany from the atrocities and war crimes of the Russian army.
incredible gathering of iranians in berlin today to protest the brutality of the islamic republic
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“Great! No more tedious US lectures on rule of law, fair trials, evidence, equality before the law, transparency, corruption, free and fair elections” — some 130 governments around the world right now.
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So the new DNI, in releasing the sealed transcripts, seems to prove Flynn did worse just than lie to the FBI, and brings the whole issue of collusion back to the front burner. Somehow I don't think this was what the White House really wanted with its Friday post c.o.b. news drop
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Fox News sued for 'willfully and maliciously deceiving public' about the dangers of the coronavirus
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Every serious media outlet in the West tomorrow morning needs to ask what Scholz, Macron, Orban and Biden et al. have to say about the Bucha massacre.
And what they are going to do about it.
@nytimes
@washingtonpost
@faznet
@lemondefr
@hsfi
@SvD
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Yes, Switzerland, you are SO neutral.
Russia is firing ballistic missiles at civilian apartment houses today. Killing civilians.
But you are neutral. You don't take sides between rockets and children.
Disgusting.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
President of Estonia
2006-16
Switzerland has blocked the supply of Aspide air defense systems to Ukraine
The Swiss had NO problem selling air defence systems to Qatar to protect stadiums during the soccer World Cup
Even if 🇮🇪 wanted to send Mowag Ambulances it would be blocked
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I'm always amazed how people with lots of money think having a lot of money generalizes to thinking you're a genius in all other areas, in this case foreign and security policy.
This is the essence of Trumpism.
Ukraine-Russia Peace:
- Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.
- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).
- Water supply to Crimea assured.
- Ukraine remains neutral.
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Using precision-guided missiles to target residential areas tells you all you need to know about Russia.
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I made a bet with a friend that even though the entire staff of the US embassy in Baghdad was evacuated this morning, the compound breached and run over by Hezbollah, potus would start his morning tweeting about his impeachment. I won.
The Democrats will do anything to avoid a trial in the Senate in order to protect Sleepy Joe Biden, and expose the millions and millions of dollars that “Where’s” Hunter, & possibly Joe, were paid by companies and countries for doing NOTHING. Joe wants no part of this mess!
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A simple question for all NATO citizens:
If you were attacked by Russia, wouldn't you want to have Ukrainian troops -- the only ones ever to have successfully fought the Russians -- in the trench along side you?
You would, wouldn't you?
So tell that to your government.
Today.
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🤣😂🤡
Nah, we have freedom of speech and rule of law, and your banana republic has neither. Not even bananas.
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Now that Putin has said NATO had nothing to do with it and that it really is all about getting back what he considers “ancient Russian lands”, we can finally dismiss Mearsheimer forever and kick ourselves for ever wasting our time even arguing against his nonsense.
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The amazing Ukrainians.
40K out of 190 K Russian troops killed, wounded, taken prisoner or missing (deserted). More than 20%
If anyone has the military prowess NATO needs today, it's Ukraine.
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The Russians got sanctions lifted on their own grain exports and then proceeds to bomb Ukraine's primary grain export port.
You people really don't get it, do you.
Sanctions must be restored on Russian grain.
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I cannot imagine how Ukrainians will be able to negotiate with these creatures, things or whatever they are. Certainly nothing with any humanity.
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If Russia wins in Ukraine, Europe will have 35 million refugees -- people who don't want to suffer the genocide we all know takes place in Russian occupied areas.
Europe is not ready for that. Its leaders worry instead about sending Tauruses and the cost of producing shells. 1/n
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Disgusting. This woman should be hauled before the Hague if she ever sets foot in Europe.
Russia's children's rights commissioner on Wednesday said that Ukrainian children taken to Russia from Mariupol initially showed negative attitudes toward Russia, but now don't wish to return home.
Kyiv has called the forced relocations of Ukrainian children a war crime.
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Some PR advice for Russian liberals: (a thread)
1. Stop being so self-absorbed. Don’t talk about a “Marshall Plan” for Russia when those who would pay for it read daily accounts of new atrocities in Ukraine
2. Don’t call Westerners Nazis when they do want Russians to travel 1/n
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People ask why Estonian, Latvians Lithuanians and Poles are at the lead helping Ukrainians.
We get it. We’ve been there.
While for decades smug, patronizing Western Europeans dismissed us.
We are no longer poor, more often than not we’re better educated than they are 1/n
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China and Iran, two authoritarian governments have protests.
Russia none.
Pitiful.
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Russian tourists in Spain beat up a bartender who said “Slava Ukraïna”.
It really is time to banish the thugs and war criminal nation from Europe. Do what you want in your own borders but stay away from civilization.
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The Russians killed more people in Mariupol than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
And then are offended at being called Orcs or by a mild tightening of visa policy.
Some Western European leaders might also contemplate the first sentence above.
This photo shows Mariupol in January 2022. Within weeks, the invading Russian army would transform this Ukrainian winter wonderland into a city of the dead. Putin’s troops killed tens of thousands of civilians in Mariupol, making it one of the worst war crimes of the 21st century
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It's not "war propaganda", it's not disinformation when the second largest military in the world invades a far smaller country, rapes, tortures and kills civilians indiscriminately and the desperate victim tries to defend itself.
You are a disgrace. I regret ever supporting you.
Ukrainian and Russian social media mobs and trolls: they are all at it today attacking
@amnesty
investigations. This is called war propaganda, disinformation, misinformation. This wont dent our impartiality and wont change the facts.
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A breathtakingly brilliant yet devastating essay on Russia's war on Ukraine, by Eliot Cohen, one of America's best thinkers and writers on foreign and security matters.
Head and shoulders above almost everything written on the West's response to the war.
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Russians executing civilians. Surprised, anyone?
But we must not humiliate Putin, right?
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This is magnificent Westsplaining from a country that has been neutral for 100 years.
This video shows why Eastern Europeans have been so frustrated for years with Western Europeans who just don’t understand what Russia is & how it works.
Irish MEP tells a Bulgarian MEP in the European Parliament that peace can only come through diplomacy.
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And some people are upset Russians are unwanted in Europe.
BREAKING:
German Federal Police has raided the apartment of Yulia Prokhorova in Landshut, Germany.
The Russian woman has previously harassed Ukrainian refugees on the streets of Germany and Austria.
Lately, she’s been mocking Ukrainian missile victims.
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Everyone RT this.
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I am not sure people get the enormity of the ranking member of HSIC secretly flying off in between congresses (hence untraceable) to meet a former prosecutor both the US *and* the EU pressured Ukraine to fire for blatant and massive corruption... to get dirt on an American.
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The ballistic response -- from the top of the Kremlin leadership to opposition figures -- just to the *idea* of ending tourist visas for Russian passports, suggests there is finally something the EU can do that actually bothers the regime.
Visas are a privilege. Not a right.
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Putin, the strategic genius.
In less than a 6 weeks accomplishing what has been impossible since NATO's founding in 1949
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EU Visa ban gathering steam.
“It’s not right that at the same time as Russia is waging an aggressive, brutal war of aggression in Europe, Russians can live a normal life, travel in Europe, be tourists. It's not right,”
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OTD, 14 June 1941 tens of thousands of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were rounded up by the NKVD, stuffed into cattle cars and deported to Siberia. Tens of thousands, mainly women and children died and never returned
You still wonder why the Baltic States support Ukraine?
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Media neglects getting the shark’s position on this.
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So glad my country is now led by this bold, smart and outspoken woman. Estonia today has picked up and taken the baton, speaking of values, rule of law and liberty when others speak of gas prices and argue for appeasement of aggression.
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Happy 28th anniversary of the Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia "guaranteed" Ukraine's security and territorial integrity in perpetuity.
Now we hear that *Russia*, after invading Ukraine, killing tens of thousands, raping and torturing Ukrainians, 1/2
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A good question. How did he even get a visa?
The Russian MP Vladimir Plotnikov is currently enjoying his vacation in Venice, Italy.
Why do we still allow Russia’s warmongering Putin-allies to enter and enjoy they beauty of the European continent?
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If the proudest moment of your life is hesitantly to crawl up to a piece of cloth and set it on fire, you should go back to your mother's basement and think about paying her some rent for a change.
One of the proudest moments in my political life. Over the moon that the Young Communist League have reaffirmed our rejection of NATO.
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Wow. Bravo Slovakia
BREAKING:
Slovakia has announced that they will ground their MiG-29 fighter jets next month and donate them to Ukraine.
🇸🇰🇺🇦
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Four Star General:
I would never have believed America could end up in this rogue Trump regime. Our Constitution simply wasn’t designed to deal with a lawless President. The fault lines in the nation have hardened. Biden will spend 4 years trying to regain normality.
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A longer thread on Russian visas, taxes and how we Estonians are:
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Russia shut down
@Twitter
. So why does twitter keep hosting these war criminal accounts?
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I really don't get it.
1. Daily stories about the most horrific atrocities by Russians in Ukraine.
2. Boorish, sometimes even murderous behavior by Russian tourists in Europe.
...and then these whingy takes on "poor Russians, if they don't get visas they will suffer."
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This is the voice of Finland I've been waiting to hear in public my entire life.
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The idea of giving Ukraine "security guarantees" if they cave to Russia is quite funny after the Budapest Memorandum.
Perhaps you can give it a rest.
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I was just sent this with no attributable authorship but it is a fact for the history books.
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Russki Mir, folks. This is it in all its glory.
This apparently has been done to hundreds of Ukrainian POWs
And some whinge about “Russophobia”
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Macron, Scholtz and Draghi going to Kyiv to talk to Zelensky without taking Duda is probably the dumbest political misstep by Western EU leaders since Merkel and Macron decided in 2021 to hold a summit with Putin and didn't bother to consult with EU states bordering Russia first.
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Everyone seems to have an idea on how Ukraine should proceed.
Ukraine is the only one to decide what to do with their own home, invaded and defiled by a criminal gang of thugs and rapists.
Kibitzers would do better to help Ukraine, not offer unsolicited and uninformed advice.
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Germans meanwhile talk about "Ukrainian corruption"
-- As Gazprom pumps nearly 200 million Euros into a shill German NGO in nine months in 2021.
200 million.
And you want anyone to take you seriously?
.
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"Germany will continue, shamefully, to be the weakest link in the democratic world’s response to Russian aggression."
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“Israel is secretly controlled by Jews“
-- Dima Medvedev
I am flabbergasted by the incredibly sophisticated intellectual contributions we lose by restricting access of Russians to the European Union.
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In other words when the US pushed Ukraine to give up nukes, strategic bombers and rockets because of US "assurances" it would guarantee Ukraine's territorial integrity was just a big fat lie.
The United States will not help Ukraine shoot down air targets similar to the conflict in Israel - Pentagon spokesman John Kirby
“Different conflicts, different airspace, different threat picture ,” Kirby
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Already 3 articles this AM on the woes of the poor Russian men who "fled the war". How hard it is not knowing the language or to find a job.
No equivalent stories on Ukrainian women who fled in far greater numbers (the men stayed) from genocide and rape.
Orchestrated much?
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I know it's hard to accept but Latvia is no longer your colony. It's a foreign country. If you repeatedly treat its laws and its culture with imperial contempt, it will backfire.
Calling oneself a liberal or anti-putin gets no special dispensation or entitlements.
Life is tough
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It pains me to point this out:
The US once pressured Ukraine to give up its nukes, rockets and bombers in exchange for "assurances" to protect its territorial integrity...
Today: now that you have given up your means to defend yourself, you need to respect the integrity of…
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A stunning, gobsmacking article: it's all far worse than even I, with my preternatural pessimism, could ever have imagined. The US is in genuinely serious, serious security trouble. As are we, America's allies.
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After this is over, no one, I repeat *no one* who has been an officer of the criminal and genocidal Russian armed forces, nor any member of *any rank* in the VDV should ever be allowed into Europe or the US.
The Russian army is the SS of the 21st Century.
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awful
24 kidnapped Ukrainian children from
#Russia
-occupied Donetsk region are passed to adoptive families in Novosibirsk, 3600 km away from home
Secrecy of adoption will never let them learn were their parents killed, sent to concentration camps or deported
#russiaisateroriststate
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So yesterday a grown Russian man physically attacked Ukrainian refugee children in Germany for speaking Ukrainian, throwing one over a bridge.
In reply to my comment that criminals like that need to be deported, a self-proclaimed liberal
@meduza_en
journalist attacked me, 1/n
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Europeans need to read this thread. This is why you shouldn't preach kumbaya or moralize.
A. It is not Putin. Or even the Kremlin. It is Russian society.
B. reconciliation will take generations.
C. it is not up to Ukrainians to reconcile. It is up to Russians to apologize
In the first days of the full-scale invasion, I was probably contacted by more people than I knew. And up until today, I’m stunned by the kindness, understanding, and support I get from almost everyone around. Everyone, except my Russian relatives. They never reached out. 1/
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It's starting. And without a fight. Voluntary surrender.
The Russian Occupiers in the Kherson direction began to surrender together with military equipment
Part one 1/1
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This is not just an article, this is a truly good essay. Rarely have I read anything this well written from any politician. Do read it. It puts all the usual boilerplate, happy talk and empty clichés to shame.
I am genuinely impressed. I rarely am.
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"Brotherly nations" is strictly a Soviet cliché.
Period.
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Russian commander 'killed himself after learning 90% of reserve tanks are unusable' | Metro News
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For some thirty years I have been waiting for this piece.
@Anneapplebaum
finally wrote it.
East Europeans have been saying this for thirty years. Just that Western Europeans, chastening us, "knew better".
So, here we are.
And yes, read this. Now.
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Of course these young people will return to Russia imbued with European values and a genuine appreciation of democracy.
This is why we can't let those CEE countries keep Russian guests from using their border crossings to come to the rest of Europe.
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What IS the matter with Russian windows?
Senior executive of steel plant in Russia, Bruno Charles de Kooman, falls out of window in Moscow
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How much did you beat these poor children you kidnapped from their homes and trafficked?
You are such sick people. This woman needs to be placed on the Interpol Red List.
Russia's children's rights commissioner on Wednesday said that Ukrainian children taken to Russia from Mariupol initially showed negative attitudes toward Russia, but now don't wish to return home.
Kyiv has called the forced relocations of Ukrainian children a war crime.
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Superb interview with Estonian PM
@kajakallas
, the woman who towers over so many Western leaders in courage as well as intelligence.
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A suggestion for the overworked Finnish border police:
If you see a car with traces of a quickly torn off tape “Z”,
Don’t Let Them Enter, visa or no.
You’ll only have problems.
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I don’t know about others but to me the last seven days seem the most epoch-transforming since August 1991.
It’s a changed game.
The Post Cold War era is over.
This ain’t no Mud Club, nor CBGBs
Things are different now.
One era finally ended.
A new one quickly was born.
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No. France will not mediate anything. Not when you start out from the outset standing up for the aggressors “feelings”
Can you please keep your visionary ego within your own national borders where at least you have a mandate
Interviewed by AFP today, Macron repeated “Russia must not be humiliated because we need to leave a window for diplomacy”.
He also stated that France will mediate in the relations between Russia and Western countries once the war is over.
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@DrRadchenko
Estonia is not a social welfare agency for solving Russia’s problems.
We have no obligations to help a country that for 31 years has threatened us and now commits genocide in Ukraine.
It’s been 31 years. We fixed our country. We owe the country that ruined ours nothing.
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To look at twitter in the past few days, this is the most accurate picture of Russian behavior in the West and especially Europe, that I have yet encountered.
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Clarification: Your "culture" consists of murder, rape, torture and constant mendacity,
@mfa_russia
.
Pretty good reasons to keep you out.
💬
#Nechaev
: We are surprised that Moldovan authorities banned entry for a Russian cultural delegation that arrived in Moldova to organise cultural events.
☝️ We do not understand this decision, to put it mildly, and expect that Moldova will clarify its reasons.
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In my 15 years as foreign minister and prez, after a meeting the Russians would lie about what we had talked about even *with* ample note-takers and staff present.
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When GRU agents come to your country on a tourist visa, blow up an armory, killing two Czech citizens and the EU does *absolutely nothing* except tut-tut Russia...
... you might have "feelings" too about what Scholz's "it's just Putin's war"
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The missile attacks on civilians, the assassination threats, the promise to ethnically cleanse Ukraine, all on my twitter feed this AM:
Russians say these things because they believe in impunity, that they will never be held responsible, that Russia will never give them up. 1/
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Now why on earth would the president go after a justice dept official who investigates Russian organized crime ????
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For the first 34 years of my life (still more than half), anyone who said my country, Estonia, would ever be free again was considered a nut job. We have been independent again for 30 years, a member of the EU and NATO, and one of most digitally advanced countries in the world.
With regard to Scottish independence and Irish unification my biggest shift is that a previous view I would never see them in my lifetime has been reversed, now it feels like a matter of time. That isn't necessarily my choice (and it won't be anyway) just what I observe.
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All other EU countries bordering Russia have stopped issuing tourist visa to Russians. Finland dithers.
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Peskov's son, a criminal convicted for assault in the UK enjoys the high life but won't be doing his patriotic duty to the motherland because... he's Peskov's son.
I wonder how many Russians are OK with this?
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Every Duma member who votes to recognize the "DNR" and "LNR" needs to be put on a blacklist, their current visas to the EU and NATO countries cancelled.
Only those who do not vote should be allowed in the West.
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My compatriots are absolutely brilliant. Aitäh!
In front of the Russian Embassy in Old Town Tallinn this morning.
Ping:
@IlvesToomas
Source:
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If Germany won’t help arm Ukraine the absolute least it could do is send expertise and assistance to house all the Russian POWs, a mounting problem these days for the victim of Russian aggression.
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Should be 1940 for the Baltic countries
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.
@amnesty
's completely neutral, apolitical chief researcher who doesn't have an opinion on countries:
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Thread. No apologies ever from Russia. And you wonder why the Baltic states are all in on Ukraine. We know exactly what they are going through.
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This could just be the clearest, most straightforward foreign policy position on Russia from a European Social Democrat since Ernest Bevin. Directly to a Russian TV audience. No namby-pamby kumbaya. From Estonian MP
@PRB_Raimond
Thank you,
@PRB_Raimond
, for voicing your position so clearly! Grateful to Estonia for support!
I believe this is the position of all civilized countries who have realized what Russia really is.
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Estonia is an🇪🇺member state already 18 years.
A living permit cancelled in🇪🇪 -- if you're not an🇪🇺citizen -- cancels living in all of 🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺
The EU Arrest Order Directive was passed long ago. It means if you commit a crime in one🇪🇺country, you will arrested anywhere in the🇪🇺
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This is true.
Population of Estonia: 1.3 million,
…now up to €250 million military assistance to Ukraine
So basically tiny Estonia supplied Ukraine with *twice* as much military assistance as France, the EU’s strongest military power and one calling for European strategic autonomy.
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Hey
@amnesty
! They're hugging each other.
Because the Russians are no longer torturing and killing them.
Residents of Balakliia in Ukraine's Kharkiv province spoke of months of horror under Russian occupation after their city was freed by Ukrainian troops
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