Europe Proposes Russian Coal Ban in Face of Atrocities
April 5, 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the U.N. Security Council to seek “full accountability” for the actions of Russian forces in Ukraine, which he described as the “most terrible war crimes” since World War II. In a video address, he accused Russia of mass atrocities across the country, including killing unarmed civilians and crushing people with tanks.
“This undermines the whole architecture of global security,” Zelensky said. “They are destroying everything.”
Prior to those remarks, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the alleged actions in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha were a “deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said earlier the E.U. will impose an import ban on coal worth more than 4 billion dollars per year as part of new sanctions against Moscow in response to the mounting evidence of atrocities in the city northwest of the Ukrainian capital, saying the violence “can not and will not be left unanswered.” The new measures will need approval from all 27 member states.
On the way to banning coal from everywhere, I hope, but its a start.
Disempowering the Petro dictators should have been done long ago. So terribly sad that the world waited for the fossil-fueled violence that has been part of life in the Middle East for decades to come to Europe.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
April 5, 2022 at 1:02 pm
A sad correction to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba’s statement:
The Bucha Massacre was the most outrageous atrocity in Europe of the 21st century.
The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in 2016 was objectively more horrific, with babies and toddlers deliberately being burned alive on top of all of the other destruction, rape and killing.
In Europe, the Balkan Wars of the 1990s included much larger and more organized massacres, but of course they ran over several years.
[It may seem unfeeling or pedantic, but I think it’s important to remain aware of the horrors that repeatedly pop up in human societies, whether or not they get a lot of news or social media coverage.]
April 5, 2022 at 5:56 pm
Indeed, this is why the media is accused by some of double standards, the atrocities committed by Russia in Syria, attracted far less media attention.
Russia got away with their gross misconduct and so called democratic and peaceful countries turned a blind eye and continued to support Russia’s hydrocarbon export industry.
This blind-eye attitude to war crimes and the like seems to echo our extreme reluctance to act against Anthropogenic climate change.
“A UN investigation into atrocities committed in Syria has for the first time accused Russia of direct involvement in war crimes for indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/russia-committed-war-crimes-in-syria-finds-un-report
April 5, 2022 at 6:05 pm
“This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/27/western-media-coverage-ukraine-russia-invasion-criticism