Notices by Kristian Kiehling (kristian_kiehling@mastodon.social)

Latvia again increases its defence budget to 4% of GDP in 2026, aiming for 5%

https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/02/18/latvia-eyes-4-nato-spending-in-2026-on-track-to-5/

By abandoning Ukraine and inviting Moscow to further expand its territory into Europe, Trump is proving that it was far easier for Russia to take over the Republican Party than it was for them to take over Ukraine.

https://www.channel4.com/news/trump-shocks-europe-with-avalanche-of-concessions-to-putin-over-ukraine

"I don't think they realize that the Hitler-Stalin pact is no longer in force: it's not the Germans and the Russians who are agreeing over the heads of the Eastern Europeans or decreeing things. I find it strange that Germans are talking about Russian security interests and sensitivities, and not focusing on the victim, the attacked Ukraine. For me, this is basically still a mental aftershock of the Nazi era, namely the more or less hidden affinity with the aggressor".
https://www1.wdr.de/mediathek/audio/wdr3/wdr3-mosaik/audio-schriftsteller-marko-martin-westen-laesst-ukraine-im-stich-100.html

Four years ago, Pope Francis opened the archives on his predecessor, who was called Hitler's pope because Pope Pius XII wouldn't take sides during the Holocaust. What an irony that today Pope Francis is already known as Putin's Pope, for he too knows no better and fails to condemn the russian campaign of terror and genocide in Ukraine, taking every opportunity to blame the Ukrainian victims for resisting the russian aggressors' attempts to exterminate them. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2020-03/holy-see-archives-pope-pius-xii-world-war-ii.html

Legal success for the civil society organization "Democracy Reporting International" (DRI): In summary proceedings, the Berlin Regional Court has ordered Platform X to grant the organization unrestricted access to all publicly available data from X until shortly after the Bundestag elections Experts from DRI want to investigate whether the social network is being used to influence elections in the run-up to the ballot on February 23. https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-x-german-court-election-data-2028262

Some serious Hitler vibes in the Kremlin:
"To further advance international cultural and humanitarian cooperation, the President has mandated that the Intervision International Music Contest be held in Moscow and the Moscow Region in 2025."
http://en.kremlin.ru/acts/news/76203

Berlin police said 3,000 people were expected, but 80,000 turned up to fill the streets and march on the CDU party headquarters to protest against its chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz's collaboration with the far-right extremist AFD party. Meanwhile, Merz himself was heard on television doubling down on his position to continue collaborating with the far-right extremist AFD party even after the upcoming elections, saying "Yes, I would do it again!".

A russian woman has fled her country only to collect money for drones to kill Ukrainians while working as a tour guide at the Paris Louvre:
https://bsky.app/profile/stratcomcentre.bsky.social/post/3lgphcekio22b

@Robbe_Duesseldorf Ja, und trotzdem hat Popper eine wichtige Sache übersehen, nämlich, dass unsere Demokratie eine Freiheit vorraussetzt, die sie ihren Bürgern nur bedingt garantieren kann, denn ein jeder muss nach seinem eigenen moralischen Kompass handeln und die Mehrheit soll wiederum das Ganze-möglichst homogen- regulieren. Aber was ist, wenn sich die moralischen Werte der Mehrheit nach rechts verschieben, so wie es in den USA geschehen ist, oder in Italien und bald vielleicht auch bei uns?

@Robbe_Duesseldorf Ich kann Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuks Buch FREIHEITSSCHOCK sehr empfehlen. Dort schreibt er: "Dem 'Paradox der Demokratie' hingegen, dass sich eine Mehrheit zur Herrschaft eines Tyrannen entschließt, wusste Popper nichts als den Rationalismus der Aufklährung entgegenzusetzen"

If you are Russian and wanted to escape your responsibility for supporting a war of annihilation by going on a yoga retreat in Bali - your luck has just run out.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-23/bali-authorities-shut-down-russian-village-parq-ubud-villa/104849746

When even Russian fascist television blurs their friend and ally's Nazi salute for fear it contradicts their carefully crafted Nazi antagonist narrative, you know what's up.

Sergei Losnitza is a controversial figure in Ukraine, but this cycle of 28 short films about life in Ukraine during the invasion is a masterpiece. I bet these cinematic vignettes, shot without commentary in Ukrainian with French / German subtitles, could even make a Vatnik turn into a human being again.
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/112563-000-A/die-invasion/

Nico Lange delivers one of the most thorough trashings of German foreign policy, which has been dominated by social democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz's infamous "Besonnenheit" or 'level-headedness' idiom. (whatever that might actually mean - we will have to ask Timothy Garton Ash)
https://internationalepolitik.de/de/leitlinien-fuer-eine-neue-deutsche-aussenpolitik

Recommended reading: In the wake of the 'Russians at War' documentary scandal, which saw Russian RT employee and propagandist Anastasia Trofimova's film premiered at TIFF after receiving $340,000 from the Canada Media Fund despite Canada's ban on RT, this is an informative follow-up on how Moscow influences Canadian media.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/11/26/who-spreads-the-ukrainian-nazi-myth-in-canada-kgb-files-point-to-agent-stuart/

Gints Zilbalodis is the first Latvian director in history to receive a Golden Globe. Fingers crossed his animated feature film FLOW will win an Oscar.

To help combat the Kremlin's disinformation and make the world a safer place, Freeonis' animated shorts should be dubbed into all the world's languages and included in school curricula. In addition, it would not hurt to have them shown to some world leaders on a regular basis - just to be sure.
https://bsky.app/profile/freeonis.bsky.social/post/3lewlfqlv322p

With the Yi Peng 3 sailing on to Port Said, Beijing has shrugged off investigations into its cargo ship's role in sabotaging NATO countries' infrastructure. But the Ukrainians teach us every day: left unchecked, chaos will only spread!
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20241221-chinese-ship-linked-to-severed-baltic-sea-cables-sets-sail

I really admire the naivete of people who sincerely believe Russia's nuclear threats, but fail to see how the Kremlin hides every terrorist act it ever commits behind a mountain of lies and deceit for fear of being discovered and punished for its actions.
https://caliber.az/en/post/preliminary-investigation-azal-aircraft-shot-down-by-russian-air-defence

There's this weird feeling in between the years where you don't really like where you've come from and you have a certain apprehension about what the future holds. I think the perfect film for this time of year would be Hal Ashby's 1979 political satire BEING THERE.