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Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔  12-October-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Will Russia invade more of Europe?
⬤ Evidence of Russian torture.
⬤ Forcible transfer of civilians.
 ⬤ UN slams Russia’s attacks on civilians/ Militarisation of children.

News from the territories occupied by Russia

Tortured Ukrainian sportsman, five others get 19-27-year sentences for fake ‘plot’ against Russia-installed Crimean leader (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, October 9th)

Occupation ‘court’ demands addition of 'terrorism' charges in Russia’s persecution of abducted Ukrainian family (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, October 8th)

Weekly update on the situation in occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, October 8th)

Melitopol man with cerebral palsy sentenced by occupation 'court' to 12 years for helping Ukraine in 2022 (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, October 7th)

A Mariupol teen ends up in the Russian army (Facebook, October 7th)

Russia passes 12-year sentence against Luhansk student abducted two years ago when she was just 18 (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, October 6th)

Abducted and tortured Crimean Tatar lawyer sentenced to 16 years for ‘treason’ against Russian invaders (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, October 5th)

64-year-old from occupied Tokmak sentenced to 14 years for donating 25 euros to Ukraine’s armed forces (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, October 5th)

Progress of the war

Russia steps up assassination attempts on European defence company executives (ZN.Ua, Oct 11)

At least seven in Russian aerial attack on Sloviansk (Kyiv Independent, 11 October)

Death toll in Zaporizhzhia rises to 23 (Ukrainska Pravda, 11 October)

Trump slams Zelensky for attacking Russian refineries (Kyiv Independent, 10 October)

Ukraine strikes Russian tech giant Yandex for second day (Meduza, 9 October)

One strike took out 20 Russian officers in Donetsk (Meduza, 9 October)

Russians forcibly remove 25 Ukrainians from Kharkiv Oblast – Ukrainian human rights commissioner (Ukrainska Pravda, October 9th)

The GRU’s dud drone: How Russian intelligence botched airport sabotage plot (The Insider, Oct 8th)

Russia hits buses in Kramatorsk: 30 killed – photos (Ukrainska Pravda, October 8th)

Silence, delusions & robots: Ukraine’s eastern advances (Centre for European Policy Analysis, 8 Oct)

The FSB's sabotage campaign in Europe: Russia's war on Western arms makers – and what it means for Ukraine (Ukrainska Pravda, October 8th)

Death toll from Russian missile strike on Pryluky rises to 16, including 4 children – photo, video (Ukrainska Pravda, October 7th)

News from Ukraine

The Invisible Resistance of Lviv’s Industrial Workers (Commons.com, October 9th)

Russia is attacking Ukrainian grain and exporting its own abroad (Babel, October 7th)

Fifty shades of green at the Ukraine recovery conference 2026 (Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group, 5 October)

War-related news from Russia

Russian losses in the war, updated (Mediazona, 9 October)

Russian asylum seekers join US immigration detention facility hunger strike (Mediazona, 8 October)

Higher prices, simpler menus, and fewer customers: In year five of the war, Russia's restaurants and bars are finally struggling to survive (The Insider, October 8th)

“We Have Become Rank-and-File Bureaucrats” (Posle.Media, October 7th)

Hunting for cannon fodder: How Russia's private recruitment market for the war in Ukraine really works (The Insider, October 6th)

Comment and analysis

US Congress reminds Trump of Graham Act after his deal with Putin (Ukrainska Pravda, 11 October)

‘It felt like a trap’: how Trump Putin pivot blindsided Ukraine (Kyiv Independent, 10 October)

Is Putin going to attack Europe? (iStories, 9 October)

Comment by UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk on deadly strikes in Ukraine (UN commissioner for Human Rights, October 8th)

The Land of What If: Offline in the Suwałki Gap (Deep Baltic, October 4th)

Will Russia Invade More of Europe? (New Politics, October 4th)

International solidarity

Emergency winter aid appeal for £25,000 (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 8 October)

The Green party and solidarity with Ukraine: where next? (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 5 October)

Australian Green leader wants to strip Ukraine of ability to defend itself (Radical Civility, 3 October)

From the Labour Conference fringe on Ukraine (Labour Left Internationalists, October 1st)
🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.

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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 216

National Secular Society ★ Preacher at Hackney mosque condones death penalty for gay men and people accused of 'witchcraft'.


The National Secular Society has reported a religious charity to the regulator after uncovering videos which promote violence against women and condone the execution of gay people and accused 'witches'.

The NSS has referred Hackney Islamic Community Centre, a mosque in London, to the Charity Commission for England and Wales over three sermons which it warns could fuel misogyny, homophobia and 'witchcraft abuse'.

The videos were all published on the charity's YouTube account in 2023. At the time of recording, the charity was known as Masjid Imam an-Nawawi.

The commission's previous responses to charities promoting violence against women or homophobia has been to provide the charity's trustees "advice and guidance".

Hackney Islamic Community Centre is also known as Masjid Daar Al-Hadeeth. It has been a registered charity since 2006 but this April re-registered to become a Charitable Incorporated Organisation. Its charitable objects (purposes) include "the advancement of religion".

Charities are subject to considerable tax exemptions. The law requires charities to serve a public benefit and they must not promote extremism.

"Major sin" if woman "says no without any excuse" to "intimacy"

In one sermon on "major sins" in Islam, Islamic scholar Yasin Munye says it is a "major sin" for women not to obey their husbands.

He says husbands should "discipline them physically" by "lightly hitting them to show them who is in charge".

He includes "disobeying the husband when it comes to calling her to bed, when it comes to calling her for intimacy, she says no without any excuse" as an example of a disobedience.

Leaving the house without the husband's permission is also a form of disobedience, he says.

He adds: "If a person has multiple wives, then he doesn't have to stay with her; he can abandon her and stay with the other wife until she becomes obedient again".

Last year, the NSS published a report which found other examples of religious charities condoning violence against women, including for refusing sex. Former prime minister Keir Starmer said his government's strategy to tackle violence against women and girls would "make sure" to look into the issues raised the report.

Gay men "executed through the sword" or "thrown off a tall building"

In the same video, Munye says the punishment for people who commit 'sexual sin' is being "lashed 100 times" or, in some cases, "stoning to death".

Continue @ NSS.

Charity Sermon Says Men Can Hit Wives ‘To Show Who’s In Charge’

Merrion Press 🔖 has published a new book by Aaron Edwards.




Enemies Within
The Explosive True Story of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, Northern Ireland’s Most Infamous Paramilitary Godfather

Aaron Edwards


‘Three things come with taking a man’s life. The first one is the easy bit – going into a room and shooting somebody… The second is preparing yourself if you get caught coming or going and getting life in prison – could you do it? And the third and final and most important is can you live with it for the rest of your life? And that’s where a lot of people fail.’ With these chilling words we are afforded a glimpse into the mind of Northern Ireland’s most infamous paramilitary godfather, Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair.

Enemies Within explores Adair’s rise from neo-Nazi skinhead to leader of the notorious Ulster Freedom Fighters, a cover-name for the assassination wing of the Ulster Defence Association, a Protestant paramilitary group that killed hundreds of people during the Troubles.

With unprecedented access to Adair and his associates, critically acclaimed author and counter-terrorism expert Aaron Edwards paints a vivid picture of how the loyalist godfather built up an extensive terror network that was at one time responsible for more deaths than the IRA. Using his extensive contacts in the paramilitary underworld and security services, Edwards reveals for the first time the inside story of the race against time to bring down Adair in a bid to save the peace process, not once but three times. He also discovers startling new evidence of how attempts to remove Adair with informers inadvertently ushered in a return of UDA gangsterism that continues to pose serious challenges to peace and stability in Northern Ireland today.

Enemies Within is the gripping, no-holds-barred story of loyalty, murder and betrayal.

Paperback • €19.99|£18.99 • 304 pages • 226mm x 153mm • 9781785375811
Get your copy

About The Author
Aaron Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester. He is the author of several books, including Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA (2021). His work has featured in The Irish Times, Belfast Telegraph, Belfast News Letter and The Irish News.

Out Now 📚 Aaron Edwards

Right Wing Watch 👀Written by Peter Montgomery.


Dominionist Chuck Pierce Declares ‘Year of the Sword’ and Claims New Spiritual Authority for SCOTUS Warrior Phillip Jauregui

Dominionist New Apostolic Reformation leader Chuck Pierce was a keynote speaker at the National Consecration of our Courts event hosted by Phillip Jauregui’s Judicial Action Group Foundation at the National Museum of the Bible on Oct 5. Pierce told the activists “we are at war” and said the event would help decide who will rule the U.S. during the next 10 years.

As Right Wing Watch reported, another keynote speaker at the event was U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho, who Jauregui has endorsed as meeting the “biblical worldview” test he wants imposed on future Supreme Court nominees.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, Pierce and his NAR colleagues led spiritual warfare gatherings to pray that God would send angel armies against Trump’s “deep state” enemies and remove pro-choice Supreme Court justices so that Trump could replace them.

This month, Pierce told the assembled activists that this coming year would be “The Year of the Sword” in which they must wage spiritual warfare to determine “what sword will rule in our major cities.”

Continue @ RWW.

Year Of The Sword

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty Six

 

Pastords @ 66

 

A Morning Thought @ 3297

Michael Glackin ✍ I’m not surprised to hear the rumour that there were petrol bombs being kept on standby in car boots near Garvaghy Road, whether true or not.

The fact that nothing happened, the opportunity never arose and they were kept in their box is a credit to the residents, nationalist leaders, the PSNI and – in fairness – the Orange Order & loyalism.

It also speaks to the fact that they have no support within nationalism and republicanism. They are a tiny cabal of opportunistic anti-GFA puritan fanatics who lurk in the shadows while sending wee lads out to do the dirty work and the sentence that follows.

As a collective they may be the single worst element of our society.

Loyalism is more or less reduced to gangland criminality and factional infighting that are found in every city in the world, just under the guise of paramilitaries as a cloak of legitimacy within those communities.

The far-right anti-immigrant bigots are largely ugly, angry morons who lack the intellectual capability to separate reality from social media propaganda.

The Orange Order are fundamentally flawed, with the original sin of being an explicitly sectarian organisation, but they’re an old boys’ club now that has long lost its power, if not its usefulness to bad actors. Let them bate away where they’re welcome and mind their manners where they’re not.

Republican dissidents have a groupthink psychopathy that allows them to believe they are entitled – via their incredibly narrow interpretation of Irish history and bagful of clichés and quotations – to murder other members of our society. Imagine being so utterly convinced of your righteousness that you believe killing strangers is honourable in this age where Catholics have equality and a democratic path to constitutional change.

Now, as Newton Emerson’s piece in the Irish News today points out, mainstream republicanism – and Martin McGuinness in particular – looked this problem in the eye and put it in its place years ago. Unionism has never done this convincingly and now is being led down a shitty path by the extreme voices on that side.

Allister, Bryson, et al may not have gotten their march down the road and won’t be throwing any petrol bombs, but they’re having a cracking few weeks of creating their culture war, sowing division and throwing a grenade into our society, which was always the big prize in this episode. The dissident threat just underlines how things could quickly escalate.

Mainstream unionism, civic and political, needs to get that mentality under control and put it in its place instead of whataboutry and constantly pointing the finger at SF, SDLP and Alliance. Otherwise they risk letting this grow, fester and drag us back despite the vast, vast majority wanting to get on with our neighbours and make life here better for everyone.

⏩Michael Glackin  is an observer of events in North.

Petrol Bombs And Puritans

Geordie Morrow 🖌 with a painting from his collection of art work.


 Oil on canvas board 24”x20”, painted June 1977

⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

Milk Delivery

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

Green Party Inclusive Terminology Guidance Bars Women from Brighton

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

On Friday, as the largest conference in the Green Party’s history opened in Brighton, two of its members gave an interview from outside the building. Zoe Hatch and Jude English, directors of the Green Women’s Declaration, had been refused entry. Hatch said they had all been suspended or expelled, and that what they believed amounted to agreeing with the Supreme Court about single-sex provision for women, which she thought most of the British public did too. Saying it inside the Green Party, she said, is no longer allowed.

Shahrar Ali, the party’s former deputy leader, was outside as well, telling GB News he had been barred from attending and intended to go back to court. Inside, the party was holding what its own spokesperson had called, a fortnight earlier, the most democratic conference of any political party in Britain.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

You Cannot Protect What You Cannot Define 🪶The Green Party’s Language Ban

Frankie McKillen ✍Billy “ Blue” Kelly and Brendan “ The Dark” Hughes came from the same republican generation. 

Both were deeply involved in the Provisional IRA. Both went to prison. Both lived long enough to see the armed campaign end and Sinn Féin enter the political institutions it had once rejected. And both looked at where republicanism had arrived and asked, in different words, essentially the same question: Was this what we fought for? 

There is another connection between them. We heard some of the most important things they had to say only after they were dead. Brendan Hughes gave his extensive recorded testimony to Anthony McIntyre for the Boston College Belfast Project. His interviews were conducted on the understanding that they would remain confidential until his death. They subsequently became the centrepiece of Ed Moloney’s Voices From The Grave. Billy Kelly created his own, rather less formal, voice from the grave. 

Six months before his death, he contacted Sunday World journalist Hugh Jordan and offered him an interview. Kelly imposed one condition: it was not to be published until he was dead. His explanation was extraordinary. “ If you put this out now I’ll be in big trouble. You’ll need to hold on to it until after I’m gone.” Kelly said he had wanted to speak for a long time but believed that, had he done so, he would have been “castigated and pressurised into retracting it”. So Kelly spoke while alive but chose to be heard from the grave. And when the grave finally released his words, they sounded remarkably familiar. 

Big Houses 

 One passage in Kelly’s interview immediately brought Brendan Hughes to mind. Kelly said: “A number of republicans have ended up with big houses and cars and a load of money and property.” He then contrasted their circumstances with his own: “But people like me and others – who fought the war and went to jail – ended up with nothing.” 

Almost a quarter of a century earlier, Hughes was making a strikingly similar complaint. Interviewed by Anthony McIntyre in Fourthwrite , (issue 1--interview starts at page 6) , Hughes talked about former IRA volunteers struggling economically while others prospered. When McIntyre pointed out that some people believed the struggle had been worthwhile, Hughes replied that among them were people with “big houses and guaranteed incomes”. Hughes’s criticism was not merely jealousy over who owned what. His argument was political and social. He believed a movement rooted in working-class republican communities had changed character. In his view, some people had moved into comfortable political and economic positions while former volunteers and the communities from which they came remained behind. 

Kelly, speaking decades later from his New Lodge flat, sounded remarkably similar. Different man. Different interview. Different time. The same uncomfortable image: big houses on one side, former volunteers wondering what it had all been for on the other. 

“The Brits Won” 

 Kelly went considerably further. His assessment of the IRA campaign was brutally concise: “The Brits won. There’s no other way of saying it.” Kelly said that he and others had joined the IRA believing they were fighting for a united Ireland and to end British rule. Looking at Northern Ireland at the end of his life, he concluded that they had failed. “We fought to get the Brits out of Ireland, but we failed,” was his assessment. He pointed to the continuing British constitutional position and the provisions governing a border poll. He even ridiculed the black-taxi cavalcade which accompanied the IRA ceasefire, saying it created the impression that republicans had won something when, in his opinion, they had secured nothing. 

Again, Brendan Hughes had travelled much of this road before him. Hughes became deeply disillusioned with the direction taken by the republican leadership. He complained that the thirty-two-county democratic socialist republic for which he believed he had struggled was no longer even being discussed. He regarded the political direction taken under Gerry Adams’s leadership as a fundamental departure from what he believed the IRA campaign had been about. 

There is an important distinction here. These were the assessments of Hughes and Kelly. Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams presented the peace strategy very differently, arguing that it created a peaceful and democratic route towards republican objectives. Adams also publicly rejected some of Hughes’s allegations and described Hughes and other critics as opponents of Sinn Féin’s strategy. But whatever view one takes of that argument, Kelly’s words demonstrate that Hughes’s disillusionment was not unique. 

What was it all for? 

Perhaps Kelly’s most powerful words were not “The Brits won”. They were these: “What was the point of the IRA campaign in the first place? What was it all for?” That question could almost have come from Hughes. Hughes had spent his later years wrestling with much the same issue. Men had died. Men had spent decades in prison. Hughes himself endured the blanket protest and hunger strike. Families and communities had lived through enormous suffering. What, Hughes wanted to know, had justified it? Kelly’s conclusion was even harsher. He said the IRA campaign had not been worth the loss of a single life and described the Troubles as a waste of human life, explicitly including violence beyond that committed by the IRA. Whatever anyone thinks of that conclusion, it is difficult to dismiss the significance of who was saying it. 

Kelly was not an academic analysing the IRA from a university office. He had been an IRA gunman and prisoner. He admitted killing British soldiers. He travelled to Libya as part of the delegation which sought weapons from Colonel Gaddafi. This was a man who had helped acquire the means to continue the war eventually asking: What was the war for? 

Adams And The Destination Of The Struggle 

Hughes’s criticism became deeply personal because of his former closeness to Gerry Adams. The two had been comrades and friends. Hughes subsequently came to believe that the political strategy associated with Adams had taken republicanism somewhere fundamentally different from the destination for which volunteers such as himself believed they had fought. 

Kelly’s final interview approached the issue from his own direction. “Sinn Féin led the people up the garden path,” he said. He contrasted republican rhetoric with the political reality he saw around him and complained that some republicans had prospered while people like himself had not. 

It would be too simple to say that Hughes and Kelly held identical views on every question. There is no evidence for that. But on several fundamental points their criticisms converge. They believed the IRA had fought to end British rule. They did not believe that objective had been achieved. They questioned what decades of armed struggle had accomplished. They believed some people associated with the republican movement had prospered while former volunteers and working-class republican communities had been left behind. And both expressed deep dissatisfaction with the political direction taken by Sinn Féin under Adams’s leadership. 

The difference Was When They Spoke 

There is one fascinating difference. Hughes became publicly outspoken while he was still alive. As early as 2000 he was telling Fourthwrite that he felt “no satisfaction whatsoever” with how things had turned out and urging republicans who disagreed with the leadership to speak out. But his most extensive historical testimony was preserved under the Boston College arrangement for release after his death. 

Kelly went further in protecting himself. He specifically instructed Hugh Jordan not to publish until he was gone. And he told us why. He feared being “in big trouble”. He feared being castigated. He feared being pressured into retracting his words. That ought to interest anyone concerned with republican oral history. 

How Many More? 

 Kelly said something else in his final interview which deserves attention. He felt qualified to speak not only for former prisoners but also for dead comrades who could no longer speak for themselves. There is a strange irony in that. Kelly wanted to speak for the dead, yet apparently believed he needed to become one of them before he could speak freely himself. Brendan Hughes became a Voice from the Grave through Boston College. Billy Kelly became one through Hugh Jordan and the Sunday World. Which raises the question: How many more Blue Kellys are there? 

How many former IRA volunteers have already recorded interviews with journalists or historians on the condition that they remain unpublished until death? How many have left tapes with their families? How many have written accounts sitting unopened in drawers? And how many hold views similar to those expressed by Hughes and Kelly but have decided that saying them publicly while alive simply isn’t worth the consequences? We don’t know. 

Nor should we assume that any future testimony will agree with Hughes or Kelly. Other veterans may leave behind accounts defending Sinn Féin’s strategy and reaching completely different conclusions. That is the point of oral history. You record the voices first and argue about what they mean afterwards.

Voices From The Grave 

There is something almost eerie about reading Kelly’s final interview alongside Hughes’s words from a quarter of a century earlier. Hughes talked about republicans with “big houses and guaranteed incomes.” Kelly talked about republicans with “big houses and cars and a load of money and property.” Hughes wondered what had become of the republican objectives for which his generation had fought. Kelly asked: “What was it all for?” Hughes believed the political direction of republicanism represented a departure from what he had fought for. Kelly’s final verdict was: “We lost and the Brits won.” 

Two veteran IRA men. Two different lives. Two different recordings. Two voices from the grave. And, separated by more than two decades, two remarkably similar questions about where Irish republicanism ended up and who benefited from the journey. Perhaps the most important question now is not whether Hughes and Kelly were right or wrong. It is how many more voices are still waiting for the grave before telling us what they really think.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

Voices From The Grave 2.0

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