Maria Zakharova's Assange Answer at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum

The St. Petersburg International Legal Forum is an annual event that is presented in part by Russia’s MFA that Maria Zakharova has traditionally attended and given her Weekly Briefing from. This year the Ukraine update is massive, longer than any I’ve read before, much of it having to do with the prosecution of war crimes wherein the recent attack on Crimean civilians was discussed. Many of the Qs were related to the Forum, which is actually unusual but was clearly welcomed. And since it involved many questions of international law, the Assange case was mentioned in the briefing and followed up with a longer statement by Maria in response to a question. But before I provide that portion, here’s a very small portion of her Ukraine update that IMO is related to the aggression Assange faced:

In recent years, representatives of the Kiev regime have made thousands of statements of varying degrees of monstrosity, cynicism and inhumanity. But what Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the President's Office, said, is moving into a different category. This is a statement that only a mentally ill person or who has a distorted idea of our planet and civilization can afford. He called all residents of Crimea "civilian occupiers" and the territory of the peninsula "a large military camp and warehouse with hundreds of direct military targets," thereby acknowledging the planned nature of the terrorist attack. He bluntly stated that for the Kiev regime, military targets are everything that is on the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol. And the people who, in Vladimir Zelensky's opinion, continue to be citizens of Ukraine (although they do not consider themselves as such) are occupiers for this entire gang. This is either a dichotomy, a psychiatric case, or a desire to confuse the situation so much that no one understands anything.

None of the Westerners even dared to pull back their puppets, "dancing" for money and without love. The number of monstrous statements that have flooded the public space suggests that global processes of dehumanization are taking place in Ukraine.

Against this background, we have taken note of the statement by US Congresswoman Margaret Taylor Greene, who said on June 23 that the reaction overseas would have been completely different if "Russia, using a Russian satellite, had fired cluster munitions at a beach in Florida." Perhaps the American congresswoman does not know what her compatriots in the US State Department have said.

First, American diplomats said that not all UN Security Council resolutions need to be implemented. In other words: what is beneficial to America and its allies, they will fulfill, and everything that is not beneficial will not. If this is beneficial to someone else, then for the United States it will not be a reason to comply with internationally binding documents.

Secondly, is it possible that the US Congress is not aware of the statements of its officials regarding the actions of the "International Criminal Court". Let me remind you that they clearly formulated Washington's attitude to this structure: if the ICC makes decisions that contradict the interests of US allies, then the Americans will take measures against this organisation. And if the "International Criminal Court" dares to take steps against the United States itself, it will probably fire a couple of missiles at it. This is not double standards. This is the primacy of permissiveness and a derogatory attitude to any manifestation of legality. [My Emphasis]

And now the portion related to Assange’s release:

Question: How would you comment on the recent release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from a London prison and the information that he made a deal with the investigation?

Maria Zakharova: I have already touched on this topic today. I can honestly say that I was extremely frightened that Julian Assange did not say a single word after leaving the courtroom. It seemed strange to me. I don't want to draw any conclusions now. There is not enough information for this.

We know him as a man who put his life "on the line" for the sake of truth and justice. We know that all measures of influence were applied to him. The UN special rapporteurs described the situation around Julian Assange in a British prison as torture. Accordingly, I believe that it is necessary to wait for his comments and only after that draw any conclusions based on the current situation.

As for the situation around Julian Assange in general. This is a story that will form the basis of many feature films and documentaries, memoirs, and literary works. It will really become the prototype for a large number of works of all genres. In it, as in a spectrum, all the problems of liberal democracy converged. The problems of the universe are obvious. A person was bullied so much and in such a way that I'm not sure that anyone else would have endured the same. I know from the example of our citizens (Maria Butina, Viktor Bout, Konstantin Yaroshenko and many others), from their stories, memoirs, and personal communication with them, what they went through when they found themselves in the clutches of American, liberal democracy. Not everyone would have endured it.

In Julian Assange, all the degenerative features of Western liberal democracy converged on the spectrum. Hypocrisy, the use of law for illegal purposes, absolute disregard for both the law and the obligations assumed for its implementation, morality, ethics. Freedom of speech, respect for the journalist's point of view, which is different from anyone else representing certain structures, were trampled underfoot. The journalist's safety was destroyed. As much as has been done in relation to it, there is no doubt that the West treats human rights exclusively as a tool.

If at least some of what the Americans and the British say about human rights from high rostrums had been put into practice by Julian Assange, he probably would not have spent many years in a small room without sun and light in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Probably, British interrogators would have been allowed to see him, who so needed to find out the true truth. The Ecuadorian side gave them the opportunity to talk to him on the territory of the embassy. Probably, they would think about his health. There are a lot of these "probably", but none of this has been done. Everything that they endlessly repeat at international venues was forgotten in a second. The desire to take revenge on the man who provided the world community with documents about the illegal, despicable actions and deeds of Western regimes, primarily the United States, came to the fore. Revenge literally overshadowed the consciousness of everyone who spoke in public about being a champion of democracy with the desire to deal with Julian Assange. In an instant, everything reset to zero and disappeared.

It seems to me that we need to proceed from these two messages. The first is to wait for his reaction to everything that is happening. At the same time, remember that he was a victim of harassment, bullying and lawlessness that lasted more than 14 years. What they did to the man, we do not know. We can only rely on the facts voiced by human rights structures with a corresponding mandate, which equated his stay (only at the last stage) in a British prison with torture. [My Emphasis]

There’s a certain level of infuriation that when reached is very hard to contain, and much is easy to dismiss when it doesn’t happen directly to us. But then there’s the Truth contained in the adage that begins “First they came for the…” and ends with them coming for us. I write historical truths here at this platform that comment upon the crimes of the Outlaw US Empire and some of its politicos that are well beyond what Assange revealed. Perhaps it’s because my writings reach only a few hundred readers within the Empire that I’m not seen as a threat like Assange was and probably is still. (Two-thirds of my subscribers are international.) I write to keep my infuriation level from becoming too great and to help myself and others to understand the Global Big Picture since most media won’t. I hope Julian recovers from his confinement and its debilitations to live a very long life. On the flip-side, I hope to see the prosecution of at least one American War Criminal before I pass.

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