Norway condemns Russia’s planned referendums in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt (AP) said on Tuesday.
“Illegal referendums will escalate the situation and be a serious breach of international law. We will not recognize a potential Russian annexation,” Huitfeldt noted.
The separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as occupied areas in Kherson and Zaporizhzhya, claimed on Tuesday that they would hold referendums on September 23-27 to become a part of Russia.
Source: © NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today / #NorwayTodayNews
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My assessment, Referendums vs. Reality, just posted on my members only political discussion forum:
A referendum requires occupied territory to hold it on and TIME to hold it, and the Russians are quickly losing both, instead. Russia could instead simply declare the Crimea, East Ukraine, and its other occupied territory to be Russian, and that would be enough to justify nuclear retaliation in defense of “Russian territory,” but Putin instead seems determined to take/lose the time for a political show.
As to any referendum being legitimate, all the “free elections” in Ukraine haven’t been so since our 2014 coup anyway, so any need for a pretense of legitimacy is nonexistent.
A “partial mobilization” is just more gradual escalation with which we defeated ourselves in Vietnam, only this time pulling men away from their positions in manufacturing and the economy and away from their families, with devastating national effects like when GW Bush illegitimately if not illegally ordered our National Guard into their business- and family-destroying bogus War On Terror over-deployments.
Additionally, we so out-class Russia in conventional war now, the guys “partially mobilized” are just senselessly more meat for our grinder anyway.
(Russia Today is claiming there are 150 NATO officers in Kyiv actually running Kyiv’s war. We should remember here that after the assassination of Russian military intelligence chief Igor Segun – well-regarded by Western as well as Eastern intelligence services – the Russians Kalibr-ed (3) our anti-Assad command bunker in Aleppo, killing 30 intelligence officers running that battle (most of whom were Israeli) resulting in Syria finally retaking the town.)
Putin is an internal control-freak security police apparatchik. He’s not a war leader like Stalin, Roosevelt, or Churchill. He could have instead ended this dangerous war at the outset using Russia’s Nuclear Ultimatum.
We are being “gradually” sleep-walked into a nuclear holocaust World War 3 by imbeciles.
There is a critical number in Russia who know this and who are capable of overthrowing him … and getting serious with us in time to avert that. We shall see if they feel they need to act – or if he will, strategically, finally.
U.S. Secretary of State General Alexander Haig( USMA 1947)’s 1981 suggestion of a credibility-establishing and world war averting “nuclear warning shot” has never been more desirable, even if by the other side.