[TASS] The remains of Napoleon’s close friend General Charles-Etienne Gudin, killed during the Russian campaign of 1812, were delivered to Paris on Tuesday in the run-up to France’s national holiday, a TASS correspondent reported.
The ceremony in Le Bourget Airport was attended by the general’s descendants, French government members and military commanders, as well as Russian diplomats.
The general will be honored on December 2, during a ceremony at Hotel des Invalides, a complex of museums and monuments devoted to the military history of France.
Cesar Charles Etienne Gudin de la Sablonniere was born on February 13, 1768. He studied at the Brienne military school (France) together with Napoleon Bonaparte. During the Russian campaign of 1812 he was hit by a cannonball in the battle of Valutino near Smolensk and lost both legs. Gudin was evacuated to Smolensk, where he died a short while later. His grave was considered to have been lost.
In November 2019, DNA tests in France confirmed that Gudin’s remains were unearthed in the process of archeological excavation near Smolensk.
Archeological excavation in Smolensk has been underway since May 2019 under the aegis of the Franco-Russian forum Trianon Dialogue, founded at the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron. The expedition’s organizers are the Foundation for the Development of Russian-French Historical Initiatives, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Russian Military-Historical Society.
In July 2019, General Gudin’s direct descendant, Alberic d’Orleans, informed that he had asked the French authorities for reburying the remains of his ancestor at the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, which alongside museums contains a cemetery of senior military officers and Napoleon’s tomb.
[Kremlin.ru] Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin wrote an article posted on the Kremlin website, that he considers the separation between Russia and Ukraine "as a great common misfortune, as a tragedy."
In the article Putin points out:
The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as an inexhaustible material for social experiments. They dreamed of a world revolution, which, in their opinion, would abolish nation-states altogether. Therefore, borders were arbitrarily cut, and generous territorial "gifts" were handed out. Ultimately, what exactly were the leaders of the Bolsheviks guided by, cutting the country, no longer matters. You can argue about the details, the background and logic of certain decisions. One thing is clear: Russia was actually robbed.
Putin writes that modern Ukraine was a creation of Soviet Bolsheviks under Lenin: "We know and remember that to a large extent it was created at the expense of historical Russia. Suffice it to compare which lands were reunited with the Russian state in the 17th century and with which territories the Ukrainian SSR left the Soviet Union."
He goes on to characterize the Declaration on the Formation of the USSR, and then in the Constitution of the USSR in 1924 to ne a "dangerous time bomb," in its requirement that allows signatories of the Declaration to opt out of the Soviet Union.
Putin writes:
The "parade of sovereignties" began. On December 8, 1991, the so-called Belovezhskaya Agreement was signed on the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, in which it was announced that that "the USSR as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality ceases to exist." By the way, Ukraine has not signed or ratified the CIS Charter, adopted back in 1993.
Concerning Crimea, Putin write, "In 1954, the Crimean region of the RSFSR was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR - in gross violation of the legal norms in force at that time."
About pre 2014 Ukraine, Putin writes:
Until 2014, hundreds of agreements and joint projects worked to develop our economies, business and cultural ties, to strengthen security, and to address common social and environmental problems. They brought tangible benefits to people - both in Russia and in Ukraine. This is what we considered the main thing. And that is why we fruitfully interacted with everyone, I emphasize, with all the leaders of Ukraine.
Even after the well-known events in Kiev in 2014, they instructed the Russian Government to think over the options for contacts through the relevant ministries and departments in terms of preserving and supporting our economic ties. However, there was no counter desire, so there is still no one.
Nevertheless, Russia is still one of the three main trade partners of Ukraine, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians come to us to work and are welcomed here with cordiality and support. This is how the "aggressor country" turns out.
An Introduction
In 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. The primary victims of the Holodomor (literally "death inflicted by starvation") were rural farmers and villagers, who made up roughly 80 percent of Ukraine's population in the 1930s. While it is impossible to determine the precise number of victims of the Ukrainian genocide, most estimates by scholars range from roughly 3.5 million to 7 million (with some estimates going higher). The most detailed demographic studies estimate the death toll at 3.9 million. Historians agree that, as with other genocides, the precise number will never be known.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
