"this controversial case is raising many questions about the fairness of dragging through endless courts a man whose 90th birthday is just around the corner, a man who served his country in the bloodiest battle in Soviet history, and who has been accused of committing war crimes by Latvia’s government, after having earlier received several honorable orders by the Soviet government for his heroism in the war." I see no controversy. Age and decorations from an occupying force do not justify crimes committed. Dear commentators, do you REALLY see difference between murderer of women in nazi uniform and murderer of women in Soviet uniform? Murderer is a murderer. "In 1998, the now-88-year-old war veteran was arrested on charges of killing nine allegedly innocent people in 1944 during the Second World War." Allegedly innocent??? So there is no presumption of innocence here? In normal world, you are innocent until proven quilty. So called Partizan Tribunal, which decided the fate of those poor latvians, was not a legitimate court. Where Russian Foreign Ministry sees conspiracy, Europe sees justice. And justice it is. There ara thousands of victims of Stalin waiting for their executioners to be judged. If Russia is not willing to do that, other European nations will.

Some terrific and well-considered pieces can be found on this site. Sadly, this is not one of them. I'll leave it to Marzipan6 (who will surely join us before long) to point out the difference between "liberation" and "re-occupation", as he or she does it so well. I should also note that I'm not advocating the guilt or innocence of Kononov in the matter, as I haven't seen enough evidence (even after having read this article). There is so much wrong with the way this is written that one scarcely knows where to begin. I shall do my best. 1. It suggests that Montenegro and Moldova were the only ones (with the head of the panel, although we don't know where he's from) who saw reason and voted against the ruling. Is it not possible they were voting emotionally for the opposite reasons to the remainder of the panel? 11 people who can't think straight versus three. Oh, yes, that proves a conspiracy! 2. It uses florid and emotive language that is hardly conducive to objectivity. Not that it should be expected, but even FOX news might make an attempt to appear objective. 3. You should learn the difference between "sue" and "prosecute". This is not a civil matter, it's a criminal matter. 4. The bloodiest battle in Soviet (and indeed human) history was Stalingrad. There is no indication that this man fought there.

5. Just because he received honours from the Soviet Union doesn't make him innocent. So did Stalin. 6. With his "90th birthday just around the corner"... Does this mean all Nazis should stop being hunted as well. After all, they're pretty old by now too. Let's put a statute of limitations on prosecution for war crimes, everyone! 7. "The Latvian government didn’t want to settle for the ruling proclaiming Kononov’s innocence, and had appealed." Apart from an unnecessary use pf past perfect at the end, here you suggest that the earlier finding of the court (that he could not be tried for acts which were not classified as crimes at the time of being committed) somehow means he didn't commit them. That is NOT what the first court found. 8. Who has accused anyone here of genocide? Oh "SOME have accused". Who are the some? We don't know. The murders of a dozen or so people surely does not qualify as genocide, and the use of this term here is nothing but rubbish journalism. This article would be disqualified from a high school essay competition.

(PART 3) Presumably these “attacks” refer to the relocation of the Bronze Soldier memorial from downtown Tallinn to Estonia’s international war cemetery nearby. Any who have seen the monument in its beautiful and dignified new location, with the marked and named graves of the previously anonymous Soviet soldiers buried alongside, and who attended the Estonian dedication of the memorial with full military honours in its new location will know that talk of “attack” against it is nonsense. Just as it is nonsense to claim that the Red Army brought liberty to the Baltics instead of a pitiless nightmare of renewed Stalinist terror. The article makes the slanted claim, “Some ethnic Latvians view the Soviet Union as just another occupying power and see those who fought against it, even if they fought with the Nazis, as freedom fighters.” Not just some ethnic Latvians, but all serious historians the world over see the Soviet Union as just another occupying power. And no one at all sees Nazis as freedom fighters. But some Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians who fought and died trying to prevent the return of Stalinist horror to their homelands did so within the German military, because Russia had already dismantled and destroyed their own militaries. Some others fought in the Finnish army. Others simply fought as forest-based guerrillas. No Baltic freedom fighter was in the least bit interested in the war aims of the moustachioed maniac in Berlin because if he had won, the Baltics still wouldn’t have been free. The article concludes that the court case is an attempt to belittle the Soviets’ role in liberating Latvia. The Soviets had no role in liberating Latvia. Their role was to occupy and savage the Baltics in 19401-41, to then retreat before the new Nazi occupiers, and to reimpose their occupation and rule of terror in 1945 with the Nazis’ defeat. That was not a liberation. Nor is it a re-writing of history. It is history, and has always been written thus.

(PART 2) The article then lingers on the veteran’s personal circumstances that have nothing to do with the issue under judgment. The veteran is, of course, a veteran, which means that the reflected halo of Soviet self-justification also shines on him (can a person do no wrong if he is a Soviet veteran?). We are told he is age 90 (can 90 year-olds have committed no evil when they were 30?). He served in the bloodiest battles of Soviet history (and this gives him carte-blanche immunity in everything else?). He had received Soviet decorations for heroism (under the dictatorship of one Joseph Stalin?). And the Court’s decision coincides with Moscow’s 65th anniversary celebrations of the War (so what?). After these irrelevancies the article asks, “So why would the Baltic State sue the veteran?” Because he committed crimes, of course. And the European Court of Human Rights, by an overwhelming majority of judges across the entire spectrum of European countries, found no fault with that prosecution. Then, out of a clear blue sky, comes the old refrain: rewriting history! As usual, no example is given of a specific item of history, what it was changed from, what it was changed to, by whom and when. This issue is introduced abruptly and at full voice as if all the specifics have already been given, with the words, “Analysts (who are they?) say (on the basis of what evidence?) attempts to rewrite history (what attempts? what history?) have been on the increase coming out of the Baltic republics (specifics?) in the last couple of years (examples?).” The only substantiation which the article attempts for its sweeping allegations of re-written history is this: “Former Soviet Republics – such as Estonia and Latvia – have on a number of separate occasions become home to attacks on monuments of Soviet Soldiers, and similar episodes of attempts to present the Soviet liberation of their territories as occupation.” Hardly a re-writing of history. (CONTINUED)

Let’s analyze this article. The article alleges that the Court’s 14-3 decision was a political decision, and observes that judges from Moldova and Montenegro voted in favour of the “Russian veteran”. By highlighting the nationality of the veteran, it is the article that links him to a nationality and to the politics of a national (ie, Soviet Russian) cause. You may access the full text of the Court’s decision from its webpage. That decision makes no issue of the veteran’s nationality nor of the politics underpinning his wartime actions. Nor does it judge whether the veteran’s actions in killing the victims happened. No one, not even the veteran himself, disputes that. The Court merely concerned itself with the pivotal issue of whether the veteran’s actions constituted a criminal offense under national or international law at the time they were committed. And it concluded in the affirmative, ie, laws were in place at the time to forbid the actions that no one disputed happened. This was an entirely objective analysis of an objective reality. No politics was involved. Whereas the article points out the nationality of the two judges that decided in the negative, it failed to list the nationality of the 14 judges that decided in the positive. Their nationalities were France, Greece, the UK, Denmark, Belgium, Andorra, Portugal, Luxembourg, Germany, Norway, Serbia, Finland, Albania, Bulgaria and Latvia. The article fails to even suggest, let alone demonstrate, a political thread allegedly tying all these people together into a grand coalition of deliberate anti-Russian miscarriage of justice. (CONTINUED)

There are definitely axes to grind and points to be scored by all sides in this question. However the fact is that this man was one of those who did commit crimes against humanity. The fact he was awarded hero status by the Soviet Union is irrelevant and the fact he was fighting against the Nazis does not change him into some kind of untouchable angel of mercy who can do no wrong. Justice has been done and history has not been rewritten. I have spoken to a number of survivors of the Second World War in Latvia and Lithuania and the general verdict is that there were atrocities committed on all sides, Nazis, Nationists, Communists and Partizans. It's time to put these dreadful things behind us, while not deny that they happened and then find reconciliation. One point worth mentioning is that Soviet submarine commanders were also awarded hero status for torpedoing unarmed ships fleeing from the Baltic lands to Denmark and Sweden in 1945. They were full of refugees and perhaps only a few fleeing soldiers. All the same, it's hardly heroic to obliterate the lives of thousands of civilians and soldiers (who are humans too) but maybe the Soviet/Russian definition of heroism differs from the rest of the planet's.

That the German and Baltic Nazis commited attrocities as part of the criminal Nazi regime is well known. This decision has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with injustice, it is basically a politically motivated legal nonsense. There are finer legal points but there is a wider overarching principle. Laws do not exist in isolation, but exist as a system of law, many call it the law. Now lets’ look at the state of affairs around the Nazi regime; here was an evil illegal regime, not following military objectives but one following ideological objectives of a master race. It was not conducting a war, but genocidal actions alongside its committed axis supporters. Now what happens when a party steps outside a frame of reference of applicable law, must the other party remain within it e.g. if someone is trying to kill your family and momentarily loses the gun on the floor, can you take possession and kill the criminal, contravening a firearm possession law. Well, yes you can, through necessity, as long as your actions are proportional; you are even entitled to the benefit of the heat of the moment, as you are not sitting in a Strasbourg cafe sipping a latte at the time. So the legal trickery here by some of the judges was to try to restrict the allies to war codifications. Reality is that the allies were facing an illegal Nazi criminal regime, the allies needed to do anything they had to, to contain the Nazi criminal. With over 20 million dead, no one can level the fact that there was dispoportionality in the allies response in any way. So was the atomic bombings of Japan a war crime, well yes, in the legal framework of a war, however was it legal in the circumstances, well that is another question - based on necessity, proportionality and the heat of the moment. The world needs to stick to the historical truth of WW2 that the Nazis were criminals and the Allies legally defeated them through immense effort and courage.

CountCash argues that Nazis committed atrocities so we shouldn’t take too delicate a view of measures taken to defeat them. Ethicists may have serious reservations with the notion that ends justify means. But beyond even this, what if the “ends” here are not freedom, but more oppression – the dark night of Stalinist oppression, transporting of men, women and children into Siberian slavery, murdering outright thousands more, obliterating the sovereignty of some European nations and committing others to foreign oppression, destroying the prosperity, the freedom and the soul of half a continent for half a century, and locking it behind an iron curtain? What means would SUCH an end justify? Because that is what Stalin and the SU achieved. Since Putin’s rise, Russia has donned the mantle, well after the fact, of being the liberator of Europe. Yet at no time did thoughts of liberty exercise the mind of the monster Stalin. His Red Army brought no liberty to anywhere it controlled. All it did was replace one inhumane, oppressive totalitarian regime with another. Co-incidentally it weakened its Nazi counterpart sufficiently to enable Western Allies to bring genuine liberty to Western Europe. But that was an entirely unintended and unfortunate by-product as far as Soviet aims were concerned, and one which, with its precipitation of the Cold War, Russia quickly set about trying to remedy. As CountCash says, “The world needs to stick to the historical truth of WW2 that the Nazis were criminals and the Allies legally defeated them through immense effort and courage.” Leaving aside the “legally” bit, the world needs to stick to the entire historical truth, not just the bit that Russia loves to recount. The rest of the historical truth is that Soviet Communists were also criminals and brought no liberty to anywhere they trod. The world, of course, does stick to that truth. Only Russia, which is the home of the Soviet oppressors, dissembles.

No! the point is that legal ends need to be met with legal means, this is the whole tenet of law. The 'ends' were clear; the defeat of the Nazis, who were the criminals and instigators of WW2. There is no requirement that you should allow yourself to be exterminated by Balic or other Nazis, to stay within a scope of a law that would guarantee your destruction. It would be as absurd as someone going to attack you and you refusing to block or attack back, because physical contact, could amount to a breach of an assault or battery law. The law is not a single bar, where you must keep your head below the bar when the other raises their head above it. The law is instead a system of laws weaved together to regulate society as a whole. It is a hierachy of bars. So what was the law around that time; law that would be applicable to a opposing a Nazi genocidal regime - the use of gas chambers, throwing people into ovens, sieging their cities.... There was none, the state of law had effectively only defined the lower bars of conduct with facing armies on the battle field, not the escalation, proportionality... that would be applicable to facing Nazi genocidal killers. That is one reason this case is decided completely wrong, the case was a careful politically orchestarted manoever. It applied law that did not fit the ensuing situation, then it fixed the bars for both sides. It was a legal political contrivance. It amounted to punishing someone who was being attacked for responding, ignoring proportional escalation to thwart attack. Using the logic in this case would mean that should the US attack Russian cities with Nuclear weapons, Russia could not legally reply and vice versa. This is not the reality of the real world. It is an absurd outcome, demonstrating this absurd political judgement. The reality is that people can do anything legal to meet their ends of survival. What that anything legal is, will depend on laws,circumstances and reasonableness.

Again, the European court sticks its thumb in the eye of the Russians. Seems to me that Kononov did the right thing in executing colloborators. Remember that these nazi-sympathisers were armed, and I certainly don't buy the pathetic argument that the Nazis handed out arms so that villagers could "defend themselves". What a farce. To top it off, Marzipan6 uses this story as yet another flimsy excuse to peddle his/her historical revisionism, and subject us to yet another repetition of "Soviet-repression-occupation-poor innocent Balts" garbage. Face the facts - your lot sided with the #$%^ing Nazis, and they lost, and then paid the price for committing crimes against humanity. If I was a Soviet citizen whose nation had lost 20 million dead and been so utterly ravaged by the Nazi war machine, I don't think I would be very lenient when it came to punishing the guilty. In spite of all your moaning about Soviet "atrocities", there still seems to be plenty of Nazis left in LEL, so I can only conclude that Stalins' lads were no where near thorough enough.

It is indeed surprising that nobody has noted the unfair afiliation of Nebojsa Vucinic, the judge from Montenegro, with the dissenting opinion - the dissenting judges were Jean-Paul Costa from France, Zdravka Kalaydjieva from Bulgaria and Mihai Poalelungi from Moldova. Montenegro is nowhere near the dissenting opinion. To sum up my observations regarding the article - the article is really weak, extraordinarily lop-sided and biased. My explanation to this fact - an unfortunate inability of the corespondent to put on the veil of ignorance when looking at the judgement and arguments behind it. A not so good job the [very very few] pros and many cons of which have already been pointed at in several other comments below. To sum up my observations regarding the judgement itself - this is indeed a very important case from the point of view of bringing the morms of internationat the time of armed conflict have evolved with a very specific purpose of protecting certain groups of persons in certain situations and that those persons who act contrary to the humanitarian law should be punished for the acts they have committed and that the law should rule regardless of ideological and / or political background of the person that has committed crimes of war.

Max said - "the article is really weak, extraordinarily lop-sided and biased. My explanation to this fact - an unfortunate inability of the corespondent to put on the veil of ignorance when looking at the judgement and arguments behind it" Well, I don't think the correspondent would appologise for failing to put on the same veil of ignorance that is required to interpret this political judgement in any legitimate fashion. However you are certainly right - to treat this judgement as sensible, you would have to be ignorant of the nature of the conflict and suffering of WW2 and you would have to be ignorant of the law. Both prerequsites in the veil of ignorance used by this political court. Also there is no issue with punishing crimes against humanity, these are honourable aims, however you always need to do that within the framework of law and a just system. This requires precision legal accuracy, not political whims and desires. The central point in this case was applying retrospective law. The trickery here was to descope the facts so as to fit debateable notions of criminality at the time and ignore the very nature of the conflict. Finally this was never about one legitimate ideolgy facing another in a traditional battlefield scenario. This was about a criminal Nazi regime, threatening the very existence of civilisation and peoples. To claim that this conflict was one legitimate ideology versus another, is in line with neo Nazis desires today, however, it is truly perverse and an afront both to civilised concepts, and the people who endured huge suffering in WW2 due to the criminal Nazis.

CountCash writes, “To treat this judgement as sensible, you would have to be ignorant of the nature of the conflict and suffering of WW2 and you would have to be ignorant of the law. Both prerequisites in the veil of ignorance used by this political court.” I’ll leave aside the claim that 16 judges are ignorant of the law and that CC is here to teach them, especially as he has provided not one point of evidence supporting their alleged ignorance or his own superior legal competence. As regards “the nature of the conflict and suffering of WW2”, CC focuses on the sufferings of Russians at the hands of Germans, which are real enough. But he willingly overlooks the colossal, towering, barbaric sufferings Soviet Russians imposed upon their Baltic neighbours for a full year before a single German had laid as much as a finger against a Russian, and at a time when the Baltics were at war with nobody. Three peaceful nations destroyed, thousands murdered outright, tens of thousands, mostly women and children, deported to Siberian slavery where most of them died. That is also a part of the nature of the conflict and the suffering of WW2, CountCash. But to you it is a nothing. After your marauding countrymen were driven out of the Baltics by Nazis who were not much better, and Germans themselves then wilted before the onslaught of returning Russians on their way back to continue their atrocities, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians stepped up to fight those monsters in the only military organisation that was available to them – that of their soon-to-be defeated co-oppressors, the Germans. You have never forgiven Russia’s victims for resisting their tormentors, have you? And along with your country, are furious that the world dare call those who also wore a Russian uniform guilty of crimes. Every court in the world is declared wrong to try to make Stalin’s and your viewpoint right. Such a mind-set I cannot describe accurately – RT would never publish it.

Interesting to see the Baltic soundbite relates this case to happenings some four years before this soldiers case and also introduces Stalin once again, all of course while maintaining that this case has nothing to do with politics and is fully objective. When in fact, related to this, in terms of timing, politically persecuting this soldier, as has been done, would be a retrospective act In 1944 there is no doubt that the full horrors of the criminal Nazi regime were known of, the direction of a master race, the concentration camps.... Even in the context of the Baltics, well into 600,000 deaths were on their way to being inflicted by the Baltic Nazis alone, in a campaign of slowing the liberation of Europe, thus incurring many more deaths in concentration camps that continued to operate due to this Baltic support. It is a fact that the criminal Nazis were the initiators of WW2 and thus created the environment for which criminal liability should be adjudged. The Nazis were a criminal regime practising a genocidal crusade, they were not a government instructing its army to take back disputed territory, or any other 'legitimate' war aims. No the Nazis as shown in Nuremberg commiteed the illegal act of aggression and crimes against humanity. This was no war, where the oxford or any other field manual was totally authorative. Where were the manuals for the use of gas chambers? the method for herding woman and children into them, the method to deal with faeces and urine soaked patches under their steaming dead bodies, the method to clear their bodies and extract their teeth and hair. What military purposes in a manual could these serve, could I carry out an outflanking manouvere with a gas chamber, create a salient. When I visit a military model shop, I see no models of gas chambers I could deploy on a battle field. In this legal context the Allies actions were necessary and sufficient to deal with this criminal Nazi regime and liberate Europe from it.

PART 3 (5) Estonian men had no responsibility for what Germans were doing to others elsewhere. But they had all responsibility for preventing Russians from returning to murder more of their own families and loved ones at home. And this responsibility they fulfilled to the best of their ability. If Russians did not want Estonians to fight against them in 1944-45, they should not have committed mass atrocities against them in 1940-41 when they admitted Russians to their country freely and without a shot being fired in opposition. Had the Soviets not been an enemy to Estonians in the first place and not tried to destroy them and their country, Estonians would have been a valuable ally against Germany. (6) CountCash grandly concludes that given Nazi atrocities, the Allies were justified in doing whatever they could to stop those crimes. Unfortunately he isn’t he nearly as magnanimous towards Baltic people who, despite Soviet atrocities against them, were apparently not justified even in fighting against the Red Army on the battlefield. But moreover, his heroic talk of Soviets helping to liberate Europe from Nazi crimes quite overlooks the fact that in the Soviet-held half of Europe, Nazi gas chambers were replaced by Soviet firing squads and concentration camps were replaced by the GULAG. In some cases, not even replaced: promptly after “liberating” Auschwitz, Russians turned a part of it into an NKVD prison camp. A fitting metaphor of the nature of the liberty they brought to the rest of Eastern Europe. (7) None of which changes the reality that the European Court of Human Rights’ judgment leaves in place Soviet Hero Vasily Kononov’s conviction as a criminal.

PART 2 (3) CC tells of over 600,000 deaths attributed to his alleged Baltic Nazis. Only a very small handful of Estonians have ever been identified as guilty of war crimes, and their victims are absolutely nowhere near that figure. CC deliberately misrepresents battlefield deaths of Red Army soldiers in their re-conquest of Estonia as being war crimes. Given the atrocities which Soviet occupation had already worked on Estonian civilians, and which it was on its way to commit again (which crimes, by the way, CC has not denied), Estonians were absolutely justified to fight as hard as they possibly could against the re-imposition of this horror. But even then, since Estonians comprised only a minority of troops facing the Red Army’s onslaught at their country’s eastern border, it is doubly dishonest to 600,000 Soviet battle deaths to Estonians. (4) Yes, Estonians’ contribution to delaying the Soviets’ re-occupation of their country did delay the end of the War, and an unintended by-product was that Germans therefore had more time to kill more people in their concentration camps. Utterly tragic as this is, it brings up an interesting moral equation: should Russians have been given more time to murder, enslave and savage Estonians by giving them unresisted access to the people, or should Germans have been given more time to murder, enslave and savage people of other nationalities in their concentration camps? How do you value human life in terms of nationality? (CONTINUED)

Once again CountCash ducks and weaves to avoid accepting the Court’s decision. Let’s see if we can keep up with tracing his manoeuvres. Given RT’s word count limitation, this will take several posts. (1) CC writes that I “relate this case to happenings some four years before this soldier’s case and also introduces Stalin once again, all of course while maintaining that this case has nothing to do with politics and is fully objective.” No, I did not relate the case to this, and indeed the Court’s judgment was clearly decided, expressed and published in terms of relevant laws and relevant actions, not in terms of politics or of previous events. It was CC himself, and not the Court at all, who introduced in his May 22 15:51 post consideration of “the nature of the conflict and suffering of WW2” and he, not the Court, claimed that a sensible judgment was not possible without this consideration. So since he introduced it, I commented on it. If he thinks my comments are irrelevant to the Court’s judgment (and they are) then so is his introduction of those considerations in the first place, and he should criticise his own post, not my response to it. (2) CC speaks of “Baltic Nazis.” Not everyone who fought in the Red Army was a Communist, and not everyone of whatever nationality who fought in the German military, was a Nazi. I actually don’t know of, and have never heard of, a single Estonian soldier or politician who was a member of the Nazi Party, and neither has CC. (CONTINUED)

Nelson Mandella was also a convicted criminal, coincidentally by an apartheid regime. I respect him as a great person, just like the soldiers who gave their lives to liberate Europe. A Ukrainian political approach is laughable.. Th Nuremberg trials found the Nazi regime guilty of the crime of initiating a war of aggression, The Baltic Nazis were part of this regime, even protecting Hitlers bunker, therefore their actions were part of this continuing criminal act. The Baltic atrocity of the killing of 600,000 Soviet soldiers was therefore a structural part of this war of aggression, There was no requirement to be a member of the Nazi party, this is Baltic mythology and a diversion. There were Allied proposals to kill a certain amount of officers of the remaining Nazi forces to punish them for the crime of aggression, however in the end, it was decided that only the controlling hands be punished in terms of the general Nazi activities. However, individuals were still persued for Nazi actvities, where they had played an instrumental part in the operation of concentration camps. Now in terms of the Baltic Nazis delaying the liberation of Europe, then it would have been interesting to postulate, what would have been the legal state of affairs, had the Soviet union suddenly possessed modern theatre nuclear weapons circa 1944. Could they have used them on the Baltic Nazis to save soldiers lives and shorten the war. In terms of the huge losses sustained and being sustained, it is doubtful that even using Nuclear weapons on the Baltics would be sufficient to cross the threshold to amount to disproportionality, as this use is analagous to the use of nuclear weapons on Japan. Therefore we would have a farsical situation where using a nuclear weapon to kill complete innocents and undoubtedly pregnant woman would be not a war crime, but attacking in an individual fashion as this soldier did would be. This is the rediculous nature of this ECHR judgement.