From i24 News:
‘My departure from Syria was neither planned nor did it occur during the final hours of the battles, as some have claimed,’ former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said in a statement released on Telegram Monday.
Who among us has not at least once found ourselves evacuating Syria aboard a Russian military plane after having not once previously entertained the possibility of engaging in such course of action?
Russian law neither provides for the possession of dual citizenship nor recognizes the foreign citizenship of its nationals. (Law on Citizenship art. 6.) Under this law, all individuals are treated as Russian citizens regardless of whether they have citizenship of a foreign country. An exception is made for the citizens of Tajikistan, the only country that has a relevant treaty with Russia. (Treaty Between the Russian Federation and Republic of Tajikistan on Regulating Dual Citizenship Issues, Sept. 7, 1995.) A similar treaty with Turkmenistan was terminated in 2015.
A May 1, 2020 report by Peter Roudik for the Law Library of Congress titled Russia: New Law Eliminates Requirement to Renounce Foreign Citizenship is a useful resource for legal issues involving dual citizens of Tajikistan and Russia. Toward the end of the report, it notes that Russia neither provides for nor prohibits dual citizenship. Instead, it treats Russian citizens as citizens of Russia and no other country. However, “[a]n exception is made for the citizens of Tajikistan, the only country that has a relevant treaty with Russia.” The relevant treaty took effect in 1997. This is a good starting source for establishing that Tajik citizens who are naturalized as Russian citizens do not lose their Tajik citizenship as a result of Russian naturalization. The article also links to the relevant Russian-language treaty.
Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia is his first to a member of the International Criminal Court. That’s not a coincidence.
I have read several articles about Russian President Vladimir Putin using a visit to Russia’s small, once-mighty, land-locked neighbor, Mongolia, to poke the International Criminal Court (“ICC”). Mongolia is an ICC member, but being a country of 3,000,000 people which is sandwiched between and largely dependent on Russia and China, it is hardly in a position to do what the ICC cannot, even if it were so inclined. One headline from CEPA caught my attention: Putin Uses Mongolia to Mock the ICC. My take: Wholly gratuitous move by Russia. The ICC is more than capable of making a mockery of itself without any acts of diplomatic aggression from the always self-aware Russian government.
(Aside: Many foreign policy commentators who are into concern trolling about the “global south’s” views of supporting Israel are oddly unconcerned about how the “global south” may view big, wealthy, powerful countries trying to pressure Mongolia into picking a fight with one of the two nuclear powers it shares a border with.)
I subscribe to the AlternativeTo.net RSS feed. A new feed update appeared in my reader a couple of days ago: Google Shuts Down Adsense Accounts in Russia Impacting Youtubers and Content Creators. I have two questions. First, what is the difference between a Youtuber and content creator in the context of someone who is trying to make money posting videos on Youtube? Second, this didn’t already happen? I thought that that all of this stuff was shut downn two years ago between the big tech companies and the actions of the Russian government. Go figure. (PS: AlternativeTo’s speculation that Google’s decision was prompted by one of Russia’s myriad new foreign agent laws seems to be over the target to me.)
I occasionally check Ahrefs’ backlinks resource (the free version) to see if my articles received any fun new backlinks. One of my favorite backlinks was when a the Russian-language Wikipedia article (archived) cited to my early review of Pixelfed. We may have a better Russian-language backlink this time. Last year, I wrote an article about Thanksgiving in Grenada. Thanks to Ahrefs, I now know that it is footnote 32 in an article about Thanksgiving on a Russian wiki site (archived) I had never heard of. While I cannot read Russian (I don’t even know the alphabet), it seems like a good cite from what I gleaned from a machine translation. I am glad to see someone found the Grenada article informative because that was one of my more time-intensive articles of 2023.
Pro-Hamas protesters spent January 15, 2024 loudly protesting outside of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, yelling that the cancer hospital is complicit in the so-called “genocide” in Gaza, or even “supporting” it. Far be it from me to offer any sort of advice to supporters of a foreign terrorist organization, but in light of the fact that Hamas uses hospietals as command centers and many of the so-called or actual doctors are Hamas members or at least complicit in Hamas’s activities, you have to wonder whether choosing this line of argument is part of the kink for Team Hamas, much like their fellow travelers in Beijing and Moscow make similar claims about the war.
Israel has no right to self-defense against Hamas militants in Gaza as an occupying power in Palestine, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations said Wednesday.
The Russian government is appropriating Soviet humor. (I dare say that this is a better example of Russia’s questionable Iran-coddling commentary than the one I used for an October 14 article at The New Leaf Journal.)
