President Vladimir Putin will send a “doomsday” warning to the West when he leads celebrations on Monday marking the 77th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, brandishing Russia’s vast firepower while its forces fight on in Ukraine. Defiant in the face of deep Western isolation since he ordered the invasion of Russia’s neighbors, Putin will speak on Red Square before a parade of troops, tanks, rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles. A fly-past over St Basil’s Cathedral will include supersonic fighters, Tu-160 strategic bombers and, for the first time since 2010, the Il-80 “doomsday” command plane, which would carry Russia’s top brass in the event of a nuclear war, the Defense Ministry said.
Can’t we just drop a bomb on the parade and be done with all this shit?
During a televised video conference, a lawmaker told Putin that the US embassy had hung a rainbow flag on its facade for the first time to celebrate Pride month in June.
‘Who works in this building?’ Putin asked the speaker, Senator Alexei Pushkov, to be told ‘Americans.’
‘Let them celebrate. They’ve shown a certain something about the people who work there,’ he added with a smile.
Members associated with Sorok Sorokov, a conventional Orthodox Christian group, videoed themselves wiping their feet and walking over a rainbow flag in front in the embassy building in protest.
Putin also on Friday signed amendments to the constitution backed by way of a national vote that include a clause on marriage being between a man and a woman, aimed at preventing legalisation of gay unions.
Shortly after Putin claimed that Russia does not discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation.
He said a law he signed in 2013 to a storm of international condemnation was aimed only to prevent the ‘foisting’ of LGBT information to children.
Filmmaker and conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone has made no secret of his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, but now he has taken it to a whole new level by trying to make him his 22-year-old daughter’s godfather. “Does she want to become an Orthodox Christian?” Putin asked when Stone floated the idea during a sit-down in the Kremlin.
Putin appeared to wriggle his way out of the proposal (“You have to ask her,” he said) before Stone went on to complain about “American culture,” taking particular issue with what he described as a focus on gender identity and people labeling themselves as “transgender” and “cisgender.”
Stone quickly steered the conversation toward a controversial 2013 Russian law banning “homosexual propaganda” among minors, a law which experts say has prompted a surge of homophobic violence in the country. “It seems like maybe that’s a sensible law,” Stone said.
Oliver Stone endorsed Jill Stein in 2016, take that conspiracy theory as you will.
A teenager has become the first minor to be prosecuted under Russia’s strict “gay propaganda” laws which were mandated by Vladimir Putin.
Maxim Neverov, a 16-year-old from the city of Biysk, was reportedly fined £50,000 rubles (£580) by a court, according to campaign group the Russian LGBT Network.
The organisation said a police report filed in July claimed the teenager had posted several images of “partly nude” men on the social network VKontakte.
“Maxim Neverov points to the absurdity of the fact that the proceedings for propaganda among minors were initiated against a minor, but he expected such a decision,” the network said in a statement.
“Maxim Neverov is 16 years old; he is a schoolchild.”
The teenager’s lawyer, Artem Lapov, said the decision by the court violated his client’s right to freedom of expression.
The Russian LGBT Network, who provided Maxim’s lawyer, said authorities may have pursued charges following the teenager’s involvement in an event called “Gays or Putin”.
He and other organizers reportedly submitted 12 applications to hold events around Biysk, all of which were rejected by the city.
Hate crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Russia have doubled in five years, researchers said on Tuesday, in the wake of a law banning “gay propaganda”.
Murders accounted for almost 200 out of 250 crimes analyzed, the Center for Independent Social Research said, attributing the surge to Russia’s 2013 ban on the spreading of “propaganda for non-traditional sexual relations” to minors.
“(Offenders) have become more aggressive and less fearful,” said Svetlana Zakharova, a board member with Russian LGBT Network, the country’s most prominent gay rights campaign group, which has noted the same trend. – Reuters
Russian activists are claiming that Chechen authorities have re-started the arrest and detention of gay and are following-up on a earlier “gay purge” this year.
The Russian LGBT Network and says it has received more calls from Chechnya in the last 72 hours. And it says they contained credible evidence that arrests are happening again.
Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has denied that the purges have taken place. A spokesperson claimed in April that reports were ‘absolute lies and disinformation’ and there were no gay men in Chechnya.
Former detainees gave harrowing accounts of their treatment in the report.
‘It was like a chain. They get one person, go through his phone, torture him, make him name some others… In the place where I was held, we were four [gay men] at first, but several days later we were already 20.’
Igor Kochetkov of the Russian LGBT Network describes how his network sees the ‘first hand the pain and suffering’ those who have survived the ‘horrors’ are facing.
‘Russia is failing in its responsibility to allow its own citizens to live in safety and has also failed to hold anyone to account for the appalling abuses that have already taken place.
French president Emmanuel Macron says he has urged Vladimir Putin to ensure that the rights of LGBT people are protected following allegations of a crackdown on gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya.
The Russian president was in France for talks with Macron, two weeks after his election victory. Macron’s call comes after widespread reports of a brutal campaign by the authorities against gay men in Chechnya, including assaults, torture and murder.
“I emphasized to President Putin…how important it is for France to respect all people, all minorities,” Macron said during a news conference with the Russian leader.
France welcomed its first gay refugee from Chechnya on Monday. The refugee’s arrival was confirmed by Joël Deumier, president of French gay right’s group SOS Homophobie, who said more may follow in the coming days
The United States has reportedly been denying visas from gay Chechen men and women seeking escape from the anti-gay country and its current barbaric regime.
Americans should vote for Donald Trump as president next month or risk being dragged into a nuclear war, according to a Russian ultra-nationalist ally of President Vladimir Putin who likes to compare himself to the U.S. Republican candidate.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a flamboyant veteran lawmaker known for his fiery rhetoric, told Reuters in an interview that Trump was the only person able to de-escalate dangerous tensions between Moscow and Washington.
By contrast, Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton could spark World War Three, said Zhirinovsky, who received a top state award from Putin after his pro-Kremlin Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) came third in Russia’s parliamentary election last month.
Many Russians regard Zhirinovsky as a clownish figure who makes outspoken statements to grab attention but he is also widely viewed as a faithful servant of Kremlin policy, sometimes used to float radical opinions to test public reaction.
Zhirinovsky, who said he met Trump in New York in 2002, revels in his similarities with the American businessman – they are the same age, favor coarse, sometimes misogynistic language and boast about putting their own country first. Zhirinovsky has even said he wants a DNA test to see if he is related to Trump.
But unlike Trump, a billionaire real estate developer who casts himself as the anti-establishment candidate in the U.S. presidential race with no past political experience, Zhirinovsky is a consummate political insider who has sat in the Duma for more than two decades.
In the past Zhirinovsky had made strong verbal threats against a pregnant journalist during a press conference in the Duma, ordering his aide to rape the journalist, who had the nerve to ask Zhirinovsky about possible sanctions against Ukraine and, in 2015, after the incident of a Russian jet plane being shot down by a Turkish F-16’s during an air-space violation, demanded that Russia detonate a nuclear bomb on the Bosphorus to create a 10 meters high tsunami wave that would wipe out millions of Istanbul residents.
A court in Kostroma, Russia this week awarded embattled, longtime gay activist Nikolai Alexeyev a whopping 3000 roubles ($56.09) in ‘moral damages’ after a Pride event he organized was forcibly cancelled.
The same court ordered authorities to pay Mr Alexeyev over 8000 roubles ($115.13) in October as pecuniary damages and legal fees – bringing the grand total to just $171.22 that comes no where near recovering the costs of the event and the attorney fees.
“It is a label attached to the Russian Federation by other countries, especially by those which have criminal responsibility for people of non-traditional sexual orientation.
Earlier this week Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted the country’s abuse against its LGBT community was made up and totally untrue stating:
“Russia recognizes and does not infringe on the rights of non-traditional sexual orientation. [Homosexuality] is not the choice of our society, but those are people whose rights are not cut. We are not punishing anyone, but traditional family, healthy nation — those are our choices.”
The gay Nazis label was simultaneously an attempt to tie the new pro-Europe camp in Kiev to the hated German Third Reich while also taking advantage of the growing acceptance of gay marriage in the West, particularly in the United States. “Putin has said homosexuality is not our values, and that sense of tolerance of homosexuality is not part of Euroasia,” said Schmidt, who will be in Ukraine monitoring the May 25 elections that are being overseen by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Euroasia is the name for the empire Schmidt believes Putin is trying to construct. Schmidt says Putin is driven by the goal of rebuilding a Euroasian empire with Moscow as its capital. Putin also has written extensively on the subject of Euroasia, which would generally follow the geography of the former Soviet Union. Bringing Ukraine into Moscow’s camp would be crucial to seeing that dream come to reality. Russian media also have called the Maidan square, where protests led to the demise of former pro-Russian Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, the “Gayeuromaidan,” thus tying together Europe and the gay rights movement, writes Yale history professor and author Timothy Snyder in The New York Review of Books.
Pretty rich coming from a murderous dictator who has Neo Nazi gangs roaming the country and beating up foreigners and gays for him.
