I’m starting to dislike this Putin fellow. I don’t think he is very nice.
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/brittne...152534083.htmlYuval Weber, an expert in Russian military and political strategy, told Yahoo Sports last week that he expected Griner to receive the maximum possible sentence or close to it. The way Weber saw it, Russian government officials would dictate the length of Griner’s punishment based on what would allow them to extract the most out of the U.S. in negotiations for a prisoner swap or some other concession.
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“The political calculus, which the Kremlin knows, is that Biden cannot let her sit in a Russian prison for that long,” Partlett said.
The one thing unanimously agreed on by experts is that Griner’s punishment wasn’t the judge’s decision alone. Former State Department foreign services officer David Salvo said high-ranking Russian officials likely dictated Griner’s sentence based on objectives that Russia was seeking to achieve.
Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."
I’m starting to dislike this Putin fellow. I don’t think he is very nice.
Since this thread previously condemned Russian attacks on civilian areas, I found this interesting - though not surprising in the least. Link
Not every Russian attack documented by Amnesty has followed this pattern. In certain locations in which Amnesty concluded that Russia had committed war crimes - including in some areas of the city of Kharkiv - Amnesty did not find evidence of Ukrainian forces located in civilian areas unlawfully targeted by the Russian military.
Between April and July, Amnesty researchers spent several weeks investigating Russian strikes in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions. Amnesty inspected strike sites, interviewed survivors, witnesses and relatives of victims of attacks, and carried out remote-sensing and weapons analysis. Throughout these investigations, Amnesty found evidence of Ukrainian forces launching strikes from within residential areas as well as basing themselves in civilian buildings in 19 towns and villages in the regions. Amnesty’s Crisis Evidence Lab analysed satellite imagery to further corroborate some of these incidents.
Judges have discretion in sentencing for many drug related offenses.
Prosecutors exercise discretion in who and how to prosecute all the time, it is part of the job.
Police officers also exercise discretion on when and who to cite.
This is an awful argument (although I certainly agree that changing the laws is important).
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/05/europ...ntl/index.html
The Russians have arrested their top hypersonic weapons guy, and several others, one of whom allegedly spied for China. This is Vlad's pet project...no new dacha on the Black Sea for these chaps.
I understand what you are saying. But having large numbers of people incarcerated for something that has decreasing penalties in today's world seems incredibly inconsistent.
I'll say no more on the topic, because it is absolutely PPB material. But I'll happily discuss over PMs if you want.
Nobody is doing serious time in this country for possession of a small amount of cannabis. It has long been a misdemeanor in all jurisdictions that I’ve ever heard about , or even less, like an infraction. And now of course completely legal in many places. Sales or possession with intent to sell/distribute can be a different story but those typically involve larger amounts. The point is nobody in this country is doing time for what Griner did. What she did may be a big deal in Russia (although I’d bet dollars to donuts that few people in Russia caught with such small amounts are doing 9 years in prison - this is clearly political) but it isn’t here, and hasn’t been for a long time.
The bar for "intent to distribute" is laughably low to begin with and can be invoked in some cases even with small amounts that are obviously personal use to anyone with a brain (and I'm not suggesting the law enforcement officials involved are stupid, so feel free to extrapolate the rest of my position from there).
This story asks lots more questions than it answers. The biggest one is why the almost wholesale attempt (or success?) to reveal the hypersonic missile secrets to foreign powers. Was it just to China for money? Was it to Western countries as a protest against the Ukraine invasion? Or is this just a sign of Putin's paranoia, who like Stalin, is seeing disloyalty behind every bush?
If it had been just one person selling secrets, I could believe a financial motivation, but three members of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (conveniently in Siberia, I'm sure right next to a gulag) apparently working together seems to be something more complicated. I wonder what it was? The Hunt for Red October has been on TV a lot lately, and I confess that watching it is a guilty pleasure. Do you suppose that these three scientists were trying to defect with a top Russian military secret to avoid a world war?
Just one ping please...