For years, survivors of Assad and Russia’s chemical attacks in Syria were silenced. Today, we uncovered shocking evidence that many of these witnesses were forcibly taken to Moscow and pressured to lie – part of an extensive cover-up by the Russian state.

Now, with Assad no longer in power, these survivors are free to speak. In this video, they reveal the horrific reality of the chemical attacks – scenes of unimaginable suffering, children foaming at the mouth, and entire families wiped out.

As someone living in Ukraine, I’ve witnessed Russia’s war crimes firsthand – from white phosphorus to targeted civilian attacks. The patterns of brutality are clear, stretching from Syria to Ukraine.

This story exposes the disinformation campaign that echoed globally, amplified by figures like Aaron Maté and platforms like RT. But the truth matters now more than ever.

Watch as the survivors share their experiences and shed light on the true scale of Russia’s actions – crimes that continue to affect lives across multiple continents.

Source: Caolan Robertson (YouTube), 5 January 2025. Thanks to Michael Karidjis for the heads-up.

Victimhood can be a tricky thing. Nobody doubts that ordinary Ukrainians are victims of this war. Russia’s political opposition, in exile, prison or dead, are also viewed as victims. But what of the country’s silent majority? What of the millions who stayed in Russia, kept their heads down and focused on living their ordinary lives, rather than the war and the online space it occupied?

Many things have changed in Russia since 2022. But one of the main constants has been the average Russian citizen’s desire for peace and ending the war. The majority have not been militantly opposed to or cheering the war effort on. Instead, they have been focused on living in the present, trying to salvage what remains of normality and longing for its imminent return – what some are calling the silent majority.

They are not happy with the war or satisfied with the current situation and have few ways of expressing that. Many do feel guilt on a certain (very private) level.

One thing hard not to notice in Russia throughout the conflict is how that silent majority has simply hunkered down and carried on. The war is very much in the background now. When I leave my building every morning, the same middle-aged man is defrosting his car, mothers are walking with strollers and children are heading to the local school.

When you eavesdrop on their conversations or stop to say hello, they sound normal – not like indoctrinated quasi-fascists, as some scholars are suggesting. They sound like any other school child whose teacher is just trying to get through the copious material thrown at them by the school director. The mothers just want their children to grow up in safety and comfort. Cheering on an expensive war pushing up the price of baby food is hardly a means of achieving that.

The war may come to an end in 2025. Negotiations are likelier than at any point since early 2022. And make no mistake, a peace agreement is inevitable. When the war ends, however, on whatever terms, Russia and its population of 146 million will still be there. It will not disappear or suddenly go away. The man defrosting his car as I write these words is not likely to have a huge epiphany when it does. His life has hardly changed since 2022. The increased number of women publicly wearing hijabs in our city is not doing so as a passive sign of resistance.

By living here, watching life unfold how it does, the more one cannot help but think something that many in the West will find unpopular. The war is not their fault. Tens of millions of innocent Russians are victims too. Their freedoms have been curtailed, their movements and opportunities restricted. Did they deserve that by virtue of where they were born? A classic liberal would argue not.

Like millions across the world, the average Russian is just trying to feed and raise their families, and get through the month. Many colleagues in academia have questioned from the comforts of the West, their tenured positions and with nothing to lose why many Russians do nothing to oppose the regime. What they neglect when arguing from their moral high ground is that those people I spoke of earlier do have a lot to lose being critical online. They have about as much power to topple the regime and change its course on the war, as the average Westerner does.

There will be blame to go around. Russian officials and the security apparatus, who carried out the decisions to invade Ukraine and suppress its own population, are obvious contenders. On the Ukrainian side, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals will have to answer for decisions they made. Kyiv’s Western allies clearly could have done more to support Ukraine, yet did not. 

Russia’s silent majority will not want to be blamed and they must not be. They personally did not harm anybody or choose the war. Unlike routine acts of everyday life, the war was not their personal fault or responsibility. Collective guilt is too controversial; thousands protested, millions left and staying silent was, in its own way, an act of defiance by refusing to enter the discourse. Guilt by association is also not a tenable position. Not every Soviet citizen was responsible for the Stalinist Terror. Not every Russian citizen can be responsible for the war, especially not on the basis that they refused to cheer on Ukraine and their own country’s defeat.

Blaming those who are faultless will only cause resentment where there was none to begin with. In the long term, it will not make the world safer or more peaceful. Then comes one of liberal democracy’s sore spots that Ukraine, Georgia and even Moldova will have to reckon with on its European journeys: those people in the silent majority will still have a right to have an opinion – as will the pro-Russian segments of their populations. Dismissing these views or people will not make them, nor those in power, more rational.

If the West were serious, it would try to reach out to Russia’s silent majority, who can be won over. The Russian population at large do not hold the same positions as those in and around the Kremlin currently. Most of the population wants Russia to be an open, peaceful country, especially to the West. Make no mistake, westerners, their companies, money and popular culture will be welcomed back with open arms one day. Moreover, this part of Russian society will want to be welcomed back, too. Not doing so only will push the Kremlin into a closer alliance with the likes of China and North Korea.  

Moreover, it is absolutely naive to assume that Russia’s social and economic problems will be fixed automatically by the sudden absence of Putin and the return of democracy. Although it stands a much better chance, we have been here before and there is no guarantee of success. Democracy will need to involve this silent majority beyond Moscow and the big cities – felt on the local level – seen to be actually working and fixing the people’s problems. If not, that silent majority will simply resign themselves, remaining disillusioned and ambivalent.

Gleb Pavlovsky once predicted what the end of the Putin regime would look like: it would collapse in a day and be replaced by something exactly the same. He may be proven right. If he is, that is the fault of those in power, not Russian society.

Source: Anonymous, “Russia’s Silent Majority Are Victims Too,” Moscow Times, 1 January 2025. This is not a parody, apparently, although it reads like one. ||| TRR

Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in Taganrog (Rostov Region) was a place where, until 2022, minors, women, and mothers with children were detained. After the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine, Russian security forces cleared the detention center to make room for Ukrainian army soldiers and other prisoners of war, including the defenders of the Azovstal steel plant.

Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 gained a reputation as a gruesome torture camp for Ukrainian detainees. Many POWs in other detention centers are threatened with being sent to Taganrog and so forced not to oppose the prosecution. Few people have come forward to talk about the torture.

The story of Ukrainian Dmytro Lisovets was one of the first indications that the detention center in Taganrog had been turned into a torture camp. Lisovets had tried to flee with his family from occupied Mariupol, but failed to get through a filtration point in the Rostov Region. A former member of Ukrainian volunteer units, Lisovets was sent to the Taganrog detention center without being assigned any procedural status.

Lisovets’s lawyer told Mediazona that the Russian authorities “don’t pull any punches with the Ukrainians in this detention center”: “They burst into the cells in masks and beat everyone indiscriminately.” His client was also beaten and tortured in order to force him to admit that he had been involved in the hostilities. Consequently, Lisovets was sentenced to sixteen years in prison.

Once they were detained at Taganrog pretrial detention center, the Ukrainians were completely cut off from the outside world. According to one of the lawyers defending the prisoners, they were not allowed to talk to their clients in private, only in the presence of a police investigator. Moreover, the detention center staff forced the detainees to sign papers waiving their right to communicate with their defense lawyers.

The detainees were able to talk about the torture only after they had been transferred to other pretrial detention facilities.

“We were thrown from the back of KamAZ trucks—our hands tied and eyes blindfolded—and forced to line up against the wall under a hail of blows, where the beatings continued with hands, feet, batons and electric shockers,” one of the captured Ukrainians told his lawyers.

He also said that “at the offices” (that is, during interrogations) he would be bound with a leather belt, placed on the floor, and have a sandbag placed on his chest to make it harder for him to breathe. He would then be beaten with a rubber truncheon and tortured with a stun gun. “It was during such ‘procedures’ that [the Russians] extracted confessions of ‘war crimes,'” the Ukrainian wrote.

There were also mass beatings, including during rare walks outside in the yard. “At every turn of the walking route, a special forces soldier was stationed and was obliged to hit [the prisoners] with a stick,” said one of the convicts. Some officers were “humane” and did not beat wounded prisoners ands prisoners ofter fifty. “The attitude toward us in captivity depended on who was on duty in the prison. There were wardens who would beat all the prisoners,” said Yuriy Hulchuk, an Ukrainiian marine who spent time in Pretrial Detention Center No. 2.

There was no decent food in the detention center either. One of the defense lawyers of the Ukrainian prisoners, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that once a day the wardens “would feed them cabbage broth and quarters of black or white bread.” Ukrainian military officer Artem Serednyak was detained at the Taganrog detention center from September 2022 to the summer of 2023, during which time he lost twenty-two kilograms.

One of the prisoners calls Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 “hell with all its demons,” where it is scary to return: “Even the definition of ‘concentration camp’ would be too mild for Pretrial Detention Center No. 2,” he said. Human rights activists say that there was also sexualized violence against prisoners at the detention center: for example, prisoners had rubber truncheons shoved up their anus.

It was not only military personnel who were locked up in the detention center. For example, Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who was detained by the Russians in the occupied part of Donetsk Region, was sent to the Taganrog pretrial detention center for a year. She died last year: presumably, she was about to be exchanged for Russian prisoners. She did not have time to provide details about her life in the detention center. It is only known that Roshchyna was held in solitary confinement from May to September 2024.

The Russian authorities have not reacted in any way to the reports of torture. Russian human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova visited the pretrial detention facilities where Ukrainian prisoners are held, but she did not report poor detention conditions either. Human rights activists say that the administrators of the detention centers would get ready for such inspections. “[T]hey prepared for this day: everyone was given new clothes, the grass was painted, the lawns were trimmed, and so on. They even gave them [the Ukrainian prisoners] biscuits, which they were extremely happy about, because the usual diet was very meagre,” [Irina Soboleva], one of the lawyers defending Ukrainian prisoners, says.

Source: “There is a torture prison for Ukrainians in Taganrog,” WTF? newsletter (Mediazona), 9 January 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

In the age of forever war, the use of mercenaries, paramilitary forces, and irregular troops have become increasingly common on the battlefield. But now Russia is resorting to luring unwitting civilians from Yemen and other countries across Asia with little to no military experience to fight alongside its troops in the war in Ukraine.

As reported by Ali Younes, a recruitment network run by a high-ranking Yemeni political and military official with ties to the Houthi government is tricking young Yemeni men desperate for jobs into signing employment contracts for work in Russia, only for them to find once they arrive that they cannot leave and are forced into military training camps and sent to the frontlines.

As the war in Ukraine approaches its fourth year with no end in sight, Russia has turned to recruiting unwitting young men from Yemen and other Arab countries to fight alongside its troops on the front lines. The men are lured under false pretenses, they tell Drop Site News, with promises of lucrative jobs and opportunities for migration, unaware that they are being forcibly recruited as mercenaries to fight in a foreign war despite having little to no military experience.

Two men who fell victim to the scheme told Drop Site they found out they were being sent to fight with the Russian army in the Ukraine war only once they had landed in Russia. Drop Site obtained a copy of an employment contract, corroborating photos and video, and spoke with a human rights organization that has documented the practice.

Mohamad, a Yemeni national who declined to give his last name for security reasons, said he was working in a restaurant in Oman in July when he was approached by Abdul Wali Al Jabri, a high-ranking Yemeni political and military official. Mohamad said they told him about job opportunities in Russia with a good salary and a hefty signing bonus and that he would be working for a civilian company according to his skills. He was eventually convinced to sign up through a company that recruits laborers in Yemen and Oman owned by Al Jabri, who is a general in the Yemeni armed forces of the Houthi government and a member of parliament in Sanaa.

Mohamad said the agreement between the Yemeni recruits and Al Jabri was a monthly salary of $2,500 with a signing bonus of $20,000. A copy of an employment contract written in both Arabic and English obtained by Drop Site lists the Al Jabri General Trading & Investment Co. SPC and Abdul Wali Al Jabri as the company representative. The contract outlines the company’s role in arranging for jobs in Russia “in the military, security, or civil field, based on…qualifications, experience, and capabilities” and says the contract ends after the signee “obtains Russian citizenship.” Mohamad said he was never told that he would be sent to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine and there is no indication in the contract.

Al Jabri has a fee built into the contract, whereby the signee is obliged to pay him $3,000 upon getting employed in Russia. Al-Jabri did not respond to repeated messages of inquiry from Drop Site for this story. However, Al Jabri did respond to questions posed by Tawfik Alhamidi, a Yemeni lawyer and human rights defender based in Geneva, Switzerland who runs the SAM Organization for Rights and Freedoms, and has documented the forced recruitment of poor young Yemeni men into Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Al-Jabri defended the practice to Alhamidi, saying he owns a “travel company” and that people in Yemen have asked him to “arrange for them to travel to Russia and join the army in order to obtain Russian citizenship and earn money to spend on their families back in Yemen.”

He dismissed criticism, adding that “he obtained a Russian approval for the Yemeni men to travel to Russia with good salaries but some political parties in Yemen who are currently fighting Ansar Allah [the Houthis] became worried that they might lose their soldiers to go fight with Russia and therefore created a social media storm over this issue.”

In September, Mohamad traveled to the Russian city of Nizhny [sic] via Dubai. He shared a video of himself with Drop Site on the plane, holding his boarding passes. He and a group of around 20 Yemeni men stayed in Nizhny for 24 hours before being shipped to the city of Rostov, a command base for the Russian army near the frontlines with Ukraine. They also discovered that their salaries were just $300 a month with a meager signing bonus.

Mohamad said that in both Nizhny and Rostov the Yemeni men were met by Russian soldiers. Mohamad said that they were forced to sign another contract, written in Russian, that obliged them to serve in the Russian military. “We were forced to sign contracts in the Russian language that we didn’t understand to serve in the Russian military,” Mohamad said. “We were very afraid.”

He said that in Rostov his group protested to the Russian officers that they didn’t want to fight in the war and demanded to go back to Yemen but they were prevented and ended up being forced to stay in Russia for months where they were forced into military training camps. Mohamed also shared a photo of a Yemeni recruit in full military fatigues and combat gear holding an assault rifle and another of a dog tag written in Cyrillic.

“We were trained by an Arabic-speaking Egyptian Russian military officer who told us that we are in Russia to fight for the Russian army and that we will be deployed to the front lines and not working as civilians,” Mohamad said. He said in the camp he met many men from Iraq, Syria, and Sudan and elsewhere receiving military training. Mohamed was finally able to return to Yemen at the end of October and he spoke to Drop Site from Sanaa.

Another video shared by Mohamed [sic] with Drop Site shows a group of about 10 Yemeni men inside a tent with wooden bunk beds in Nizhny. In the video, one man says, “We came from the sultanate of Oman for civilian work, everyone according their skills,” pointing to each one in turn, he adds, “This man is a metalworker, this man works with hydraulics, this man is an electrician, this man is a driver, this man works with electrical equipment. We are all civilians who work civilian jobs.” He goes on to say they were taken from the airport to Nizhny and they were “terrorized by armed soldiers and forced to sign contracts.” Pointing to a pile of camo backpacks on the floor, he says they were being taken to a training camp. “We are civilians and we know nothing of this,” he says in the video and calls on the Yemeni government to help them. “We are sons of Yemen and we fell into a trap.”

Drop Site also communicated via WhatsApp messages with Jalal, another Yemeni man recruited by the same network who is currently deployed as a soldier fighting for Russia in Ukraine. He told Drop Site he was lured into coming to Russia to escape poverty with the promise of a large salary and signing bonus as well as Russian citizenship. He said he ultimately decided to stay and fight in the war in the hope that he could earn enough money to be able to return to Yemen with savings as well as to possibly obtain Russian citizenship.

Alhamidi characterizes the recruitment practice as exploitative and a human rights violation.

“Dire poverty conditions in Yemen enabled human trafficking and recruitment networks to proliferate and lure young men to go to Russia under false promises of civilian work and high salaries,” Alhamidi told Drop Site, adding that Yemen’s laws contain many loopholes that [allow] Yemeni nationals to join foreign armies as mercenaries without being criminalized. “This has enabled powerful men in Yemen with connections to the Houthi government and Russia to mislead hundreds of young men into traveling to Russia to fight in Ukraine.”

A report by SAM published in November based on interviews with several Yemeni nationals who who were recruited by Al-Jabri and traveled to Russia titled, “With False Promises of Jobs and Attractive Salaries: Recruitment Networks Force Yemeni Youth into the Russia-Ukraine War,” found that: “The forced recruitment of Yemeni youth into the Russian-Ukrainian war through coercive networks constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law and human rights and rises to the level of human trafficking… The organization reported that once recruits arrive in Russia, they are subjected to severe abuses, including being forced to fight under harsh and inhumane conditions, being deprived of food and medical care, and suffering injuries or death from indiscriminate shelling on the battlefronts.”

According to Alhamidi, Al Jabri has traveled to Russia numerous times and has obtained visas to Russia for thousands of Yemenis to lure them into traveling there and forcing them into military training camps, though it is unclear how many have actually made the trip.

Similar recruitment networks in other countries have lured unwitting civilians to Russia with promises of work or other opportunities and then forced them to serve in the Russian army. One human trafficking network in India sent dozens of Indian nationals to Russia for combat training before being deployed to the front. Citizens of Nepal and Sri Lanka have also been illegally recruited in similar ways to fight for Russia in Ukraine.

Source: Ali Younes, “Russia is luring unwitting Yemeni civilians to fight in Ukraine,” Drop Site, 10 January 2025