Nuremberg for Putin’s heroes of war

People claiming to be Russian journalists are fueling the war in Ukraine. They are its ideologues. They justify crimes and incite them. After the war, they should be judged and forever excluded from the circles of the civilized world.

Please take what I write here as a journalist’s remorse. I know what times we live in, and how many accusations can be made against the media. How biased they can be, how tainted by politics or commercialism. How much fake news can proliferate in them. How much do we have to do to maintain the trust of our audience.

No less here, in democratic countries, at least, for the most part, we still know what truth and journalism mean. It’s different in the east. The war with Ukraine has turned off professional decency in Russia. Real journalists have fallen silent, and those left to speak have begun to serve the murderous propaganda. We perceive this with surprise and dismay. People claiming to be journalists not only justify this brutal war, concede moral rightness to the Kremlin criminals, and fuel the machine of hatred and contempt for human life. When one listens and reads them, one is reminded of the worst patterns of the days of German Nazism. They are racing against the genocidal tone of Hitler’s Der Stürmer. They are the cynical successors of Goebbels and Streicher. They are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.

What puzzles me is their sense of impunity. After all, they must understand that the Kremlin regime – like all of them – will one day fall and new times will come. Maybe they think that what they are doing will be forgiven, that people will forget. Well, they won’t forget. Because evil leaves traces. The great Polish poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “Who harmed a simple man, Laughing over his injustice, Bursting out with laughter over his injustice, A cluster of jesters beside you For confusion of good and evil (…) Don’t be safe. The poet remembers (…) Deeds and conversations will be written down.”

Yes, words are not forgotten. The words stay. And they will be remembered once the nightmare of war is over. And then the free world – including free Russia – must bring them to justice. Because their crime is as grave as those who invented the war and who directly pull the trigger. There can be no place for them in the free world. They must live through their Nuremberg like Streicher. They have to experience their criminal trials like the genocide-inciting announcers of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda. The precedents are already in place. All that remains is just retribution.

Let’s remember their names. The names of Vladimir Solovyov, Olga Skabeeva, Margarita Simonian, Dmitry Kiselyov and many others. Let it stick in our memory what they said. And let them know that the propaganda they serve during this war forever excludes them from the world of our values. They must learn to live with this stigma.

Boguslaw Chrabota, an Editor in Chief of the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita

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Vladimir Solovyov: Threatening Russia with more sanctions? Shove them up your ass. Wrap them in a tube. (…) If you think that we will stop in Ukraine, think three hundred times. I will remind you that Ukraine, is only in a transitional stage in ensuring the strategic security of the Russian Federation.

Olga Skabeyeva: Fascist terror is unfolding not only in Ukraine but also in Europe. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki declared that the “russkij mir” carries a threat to all of Europe. Thanks to similar self-satisfied and arrogant idiots, Poland has already ceased to exist several times.

Margarita Simonian: They say that we will lose and the West will win. They don’t understand that this is simply not possible. It’s not going to happen. Either it will end very badly for all humanity, or we will win. The third option does not exist

Dmitry Kiselyov: Russia is the only country in the world that can factually turn the United States into irradiated ash. This island (Great Britain-red.) is so tiny that it only takes one “Sarmat” missile to drown it once and for all.”