It seems that Crimeans were not in a hurry to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship. Faced with the prospect of embarrassing queues from Jan 1, 2016 when Crimeans will have 60 days to inform of dual citizenship or face criminal liability, Russia has made a complete turnaround

After invading and annexing Crimea and banning Crimean Tatar leader Refat Chubarov from his homeland, Russia now wants to remand him in custody – after ‘extraditing’ him, of course. It accuses him of – wait for it – “encroaching on Russia’s territorial integrity” by insisting that Crimea is Ukraine. .

One of the two Russian spetsnaz officers captured in Donbas is now denying that he was a serving Russian officer, and the other has just been persuaded to change his lawyer and may be planning to do the same. Claims that they had been pressured into giving certain evidence cannot explain why they repeated the same story to OSCE representatives, a Russian journalist and a member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Human Rights Council.

Almost exactly a month after the so-called ‘Luhansk people’s republic’ [‘LNR’] ordered all but one western aid organization to leave the Luhansk oblast, the self-proclaimed ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ [‘DNR’] has thrown out Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and refused to allow UN agencies such as the World Food Programme to work on ‘DNR’-controlled territory

Less than two weeks after Russia began airstrikes in Syria, a large percentage of Russians have now changed their opinion and support the military intervention. How could they not when all mainstream television channels are presenting Russia as the saviour and only country willing to properly fight the Islamic State?

The de facto authorities in Russian-occupied Crimea have publicly claimed via Russia’s official RIA Novosti that Mustafa Dzhemilev and other leaders are recruiting Crimean Tatars to become Islamic State fighters. The allegations are especially ominous given Russia’s current military involvement in Syria which Moscow asserts, in the face of considerable evidence, is directed against the Islamic State.

Initial concern over the involvement of the ultranationalist Right Sector in the Crimean Tatar-initiated Blockade of Russian-occupied Crimea has been compounded by a report from the Crimean Human Rights Group finding multiple infringements

Full amnesty for people who have killed or tortured is simply impossible

Serhiy Rudyk, one of the men facing charges over the May 2, 2014 disturbances in Odesa, is in no doubt that the anti-Maidan protests on Kulikovo Pole in the Spring of 2014 were paid for “by Moscow”*. Rudyk, who cannot be suspected of anti-Russian bias, names the specific amounts paid for living at the anti-Maidan camp, and mentions rumours that Moscow paid 2 million dollars for the entire ‘Kulikovo Pole project’.

BBC journalist John Simpson has ‘uncovered Crimea’s charms’ and a quite staggering degree of contempt for international law and human rights. In a travel piece for the Telegraph, he encourages people to do as he did: break the law, effectively whitewash Russia’s invasion and forced annexation of Crimea and wax lyrical about the charms of Crimea, while ignoring extremely serious human rights concerns under Russian occupation.

There has been talk of the men being part of an exchange and it is probably no accident that the preliminary hearing into the charges against the two Russian intelligence officers Aleksander Aleksandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev coincided with the resumption of the universally condemned trial of Nadiya Savchenko.

The militants’ current anti-Western line and their decision to drive international organizations out of militant-controlled areas will certainly reduce interference in the pseudo-elections that both so-called ‘people’s republics’ have announced. Such behaviour must, however, make it even less likely that western countries would accept ‘elections’ which are so flagrantly in breach of the Minsk Accord.

Khaiser Dzhemiliev, the son of exiled Crimean Tatar leader and Ukrainian MP Mustafa Dzhemiliev, has been moved to a distant prison colony in the Astrakhan region of Russia

The West has done next to nothing to counter Russia’s state-controlled propaganda machine with its vicious warmongering and lies. Zhanna Nemtsova’s call for sanctions against those whose incitement to hatred and violence led to her father’s murder outside the Kremlin were heard, reported - and ignored.

(Update) Russia is now using schoolkids to create the pretence of legitimacy for its illegal occupation of Crimea, and may have deceived the schools involved, claiming that the teenagers would be visiting St Petersburg.  Instead, they were taken to Crimea with their visit eagerly reported by such pro-Kremlin TV channels as Life News.

A paid protest in Odesa, designed to provide photos for a more grandiose fake, was nipped in the bud on September 19. The planned event in Odesa was modest, unlike the totally fictitious 500-strong protest in Kyiv purportedly in support of the ‘People’s Council of Bessarabia’ and claiming that the authorities are persecuting national minorities in the Odesa oblast.

At midday on Sunday, Sept 20 Crimean Tatars and various Ukrainian civic organizations, including Right Sector, began an indefinite blockade of the ‘border’ between mainland Ukraine and Crimea. All three crossings into Crimea were blocked to trucks, though cars and individuals on foot were allowed through

On Sept 11, the so-called ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ [‘DNR’] reported a ‘significant increase’ in support for ‘DNR’ with this now reaching over a quarter of the population under Kremlin-backed militant control. It later tried to doctor the records to indicate support on a par with that which Russian surveys keep suggesting that Vladimir Putin enjoys

Since Crimean Field Mission members, as well as those who help them, now face criminal prosecution in Russian-occupied Crimea, this vital voice reporting grave rights violations has announced a ‘reformatting’ of its work and the emergence of new human rights organizations.

Crimean Tatar leaders have called on Ukrainians to join a civil blockade of Russian-occupied Crimea. The blockade will continue until Russia releases its Ukrainian political prisoners, stops blocking free media in Crimea and committing other rights offences