Wimbledon.com:

…it would be unacceptable for the Russian regime to derive any benefits from the involvement of Russian or Belarusian players with The Championships.

It is therefore our intention, with deep regret, to decline entries from Russian and Belarusian players to The Championships 2022.

Gilbert Doctorow:

An overthrow of Putin would lead to chaos, and very likely to genuine radicals assuming power.  Their aggressive inclinations for policy to the West would be underpinned by the vast majority of the Russian population, which, in Shakhnazarov’s view, is now overcome with pure hatred for the West brought on by the sanctions, by the rampant Russophobia that is now public policy in Europe and the USA.

Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch:

In short, the West has seized a few yachts from Putin’s cronies, stopped serving Big Macs in Red Square, and slapped sanctions on everything except the one thing that really matters. With Russia supplying 40% of its gas and collecting an estimated $850 million daily, Europe is, in effect, funding its own invasion.

Delfi.lt:

Anyone defying the ban will face fines.

The parliament on Tuesday passed the respective amendments to the Law on Administrative Offences and the Law on Assemblies in a vote of 124 to one with two abstentions.

The new legislation has yet to be signed into law by President Gitanas Nauseda.

It prohibits the use of „symbols of totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, which were used or are being used by those regimes for their past or present military aggression and/or propaganda of crimes against humanity and war crimes that were committed or are being committed“.

The amendments specify in particular that „the two-color (black and orange) St George’s Ribbon shall be deemed” such a symbol „in all cases“.

The ban also covers the letters „Z“ and „V“, which have become the symbols of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The dreaded Georgian Ribbon of Doom

I for one hope those three miscreants who failed to vote for this measure face the consequences.

Akhmatova, like the spouses and relations of thousands of Leningraders sent to the camps, began the awful and tedious process of making the rounds of the various police offices and prisons, trying desperately to lobby the ‘organs’ – or the Kremlin in Moscow – to intervene. Like thousands of other Leningraders, she spent days and nights with her loved ones on her conscience, feeling the dreaded urgency that if only she could make one more plea, find the right official and deliver proof of innocence, or pay the right bribe to the right person, she could free her loved one from almost certain death. The truth is that the terror was not, as many believed, a miscarriage of the Soviet justice system which could be rectified by correcting a mistake. It was a preposterous human phenomenon beyond all comprehension: the combination of a mutated strain of cruelty and perversion of impersonal bureaucracy on a monstrous scale, paralleled only by the Holocaust. As Gumilev wrote:

Mama, the innocent soul, like many other pure-hearted people, thought that the sentence passed on me was the result of the court’s mistake, an accidental oversight. She could not at first imagine how far the court system had fallen.

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 96.

It often occurs to me that passages like this say much more about the observer than about the phenomenon observed. The Great Purge is „preposterous“, „beyond all comprehension“. Killing and imprisoning millions is not something I would describe as preposterous, as silly. Saying the terror is beyond comprehension seems an easy out, a way to avoid having to examine it.

Similarly Lev Gumilyov is here quoted as saying his mother „could not at first imagine how far the court system had fallen“. To fall, of course, something must first have existed at height — „this is not who we are“.

This seems to be something Giorgio Agamben addresses in State of Exception.

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‚picked me out‘. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) – ‚Could one ever describe this?‘ And I answered – ‚I can.‘ It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

Ω Ω Ω

For seventeen months I have been screaming,
Calling you home.
I’ve thrown myself at the feet of butchers
For you, my son and my horror.
Everything has become muddled forever –
I can no longer distinguish
Who is an animal, who a person, and how long
The wait can be for an execution.
There are now only dusty flowers,
The chinking of the thurible,
Tracks from somewhere into nowhere
And, staring me in the face
And threatening me with swift annihilation,
An enormous star.
[1939]

—Anna Akhmatova

full text

FAZ:

Polizei und Staatsanwaltschaften in mehreren Bundesländern haben einem Bericht zufolge mehr als 140 Ermittlungsverfahren wegen der Befürwortung des russischen Angriffskriegs eingeleitet. In der Mehrheit der Fälle geht es um die Verwendung des „Z“-Symbols, mit dem die russische Armee in der Ukraine unter anderem ihre Panzer und Fahrzeuge kennzeichnet, berichteten die Zeitungen des Redaktions­netzwerks Deutschland.

Allein in Sachsen-Anhalt wurden seit dem Beginn der russischen Invasion in der Ukraine am 24. Februar mindestens 19 Verstöße gegen Paragraf 140 des Strafgesetz­buchs erfasst, der das Belohnen und Billigen von Straftaten unter Strafe stellt. In 17 dieser Fälle ging es laut Angaben des Landes­innenministeriums um die Verwendung des „Z“-Symbols.

…

Auch in Hamburg wurden bereits mindestens 17 Verfahren wegen der Billigung des Angriffskriegs eingeleitet, in 16 davon ging es ebenfalls um die Verwendung des „Z“-Symbols.

In Nordrhein-Westfalen sind dem Landes­innenministerium 37 Ermittlungs­verfahren bekannt. „Davon hatten 22 Ermittlungs­vorgänge das ‚Z-Symbol‘ als Zeichen der Solidarität mit den russischen Militärbefehlshabern zum Inhalt“, teilte eine Ministeriumssprecherin dem RND mit. Darüber hinaus wurden in Nordrhein-Westfalen seit Kriegsbeginn mehr als hundert Sach­beschädigungen festgestellt, die in einem Zusammenhang mit dem Krieg stehen. Auch dabei habe das „Z“ in etlichen Fällen eine Rolle gespielt, erklärte die Sprecherin.

Every other major émigré party had announced its utter rejection of the revolution, and its desire to turn back the political clock: some to 1861, before the accession to the throne of Nicholas II; some to before February 1917, when Nicholas abdicated; and some to various points between February and October 1917, when Russia was ruled by a liberal (if extremely disorganized) provisional government. The Eurasianists were alone in their neutral attitude towards the revolution, which they saw as a half-finished ‘Eurasian revolution’ against the West. While it was indeed biblical in its savagery and bloodiness, they saw the religious, eschatological echoes of 1917 as a catastrophic culmination of the two-century-long westernizing trend of Russian intellectual history and its simultaneous exculpation.

Ω Ω Ω

While Russian historiography had mourned the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion as a historical tragedy severing Old Russia from the European and Byzantine culture of which it had formed a part, the Eurasianists celebrated it as a redemptive event in which ‘the Tatars purged and sanctified’ Russia. There was no contradiction in celebrating both Mongol heritage and the Orthodox Church as unique essences of Russian civilization: Bolshevism, like the Golden Horde, was a purge which foreclosed a Western future for Russia and established a separate civilization.

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 52.