Russia today

[blindpig]

Pavel Durov’s Naivete Was His Achilles’ Heel

Andrew Korybko
Aug 29, 2024


https://covertactionbulletin.podbean.co ... -arrested/

The founder and CEO of social media and communications app Telegram, Pavel Durov was arrested in France on August 24th. The country, one of the Nine Eyes intelligence partners along with the U.S., UK, Australia and others, claims that the social media app is a hotbed for illegal activity, and Western media coverage blasts it as a tool of the Russian government. But the attack on Telegram is actually a testing ground for future attacks on encrypted messaging platforms and alternative news sources.

Then later in the show, we discuss the invasion by Ukrainian forces funded with U.S. dollars and using British tanks into the Russian territory of Kursk. The incursion marked the first significant breach of the Russian border by Ukrainian ground forces in the nearly two-and-a-half years since the immediate conflict began and follows a pattern of missile strikes and minor raids into Kursk and neighboring Belgorod since February 2022. Is this the sequel to the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023 that was hyped up by Western media and governments but ultimately failed to make a significant difference? How do these developments figure into the longer history of the conflict, going back to 2014 and even further into history? And what prospects are there for peace rather than further escalation into a global conflict?

We’re joined by investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg to talk about all that and more.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... -arrested/

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Craig Murray: Pavel Durov & the Abuse of Law
August 29, 2024

After spending a day reading the EU Digital Services Act — a task he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy — Murray concludes it is not why the Telegram CEO is being detained.


Pavel Durov, CEO and co-founder of Telegram, in 2015. (TechCrunch, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk

The detention of Pavel Durov is being portrayed as a result of the EU Digital Services Act. But having spent my day reading the EU Services Act (a task I would not wish upon my worst enemy), it does not appear to me to say what it is being portrayed as saying.

EU Acts are horribly dense and complex, and are published as “Regulations” and “Articles.” Both cover precisely the same ground, but for purposes of enforcement the more detailed “Regulations” are the more important, and those are referred to below. The “Articles” are entirely consistent with this.

[Durov was formally charged on Wednesday and prevented from leaving France.]

So, for example, Regulation 20 makes the “intermediary service,” in this case Telegram, only responsible for illegal activity using its service if it has deliberately collaborated in the illegal activity.

Providing encryption or anonymity specifically does not qualify as deliberate collaboration in illegal activity.

“(20) Where a provider of intermediary services deliberately collaborates with a recipient of the services in order to undertake illegal activities, the services should not be deemed to have been provided neutrally and the provider should therefore not be able to benefit from the exemptions from liability provided for in this Regulation.

This should be the case, for instance, where the provider offers its service with the main purpose of facilitating illegal activities, for example by making explicit that its purpose is to facilitate illegal activities or that its services are suited for that purpose. The fact alone that a service offers encrypted transmissions or any other system that makes the identification of the user impossible should not in itself qualify as facilitating illegal activities.”

And at para 30, there is specifically no general monitoring obligation on the service provider to police the content. In fact it is very strong that Telegram is under no obligation to take proactive measures.

“(30) Providers of intermediary services should not be, neither de jure, nor de facto, subject to a monitoring obligation with respect to obligations of a general nature. This does not concern monitoring obligations in a specific case and, in particular, does not affect orders by national authorities in accordance with national legislation, in compliance with Union law, as interpreted by the Court of Justice of the European Union, and in accordance with the conditions established in this Regulation.

Nothing in this Regulation should be construed as an imposition of a general monitoring obligation or a general active fact-finding obligation, or as a general obligation for providers to take proactive measures in relation to illegal content.”


The Telegram app on a smartphone screen. (Focal Foto, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

However, Telegram is obliged to act against specified accounts in relation to an individual order from a national authority concerning specific content. So while it has no general tracking or censorship obligation, it does have to act at the instigation of national authorities over individual content.

[i[“(31) Depending on the legal system of each Member State and the field of law at issue, national judicial or administrative authorities, including law enforcement authorities, may order providers of intermediary services to act against one or more specific items of illegal content or to provide certain specific information. The national laws on the basis of which such orders are issued differ considerably and the orders are increasingly addressed in cross-border situations.

In order to ensure that those orders can be complied with in an effective and efficient manner, in particular in a cross-border context, so that the public authorities concerned can carry out their tasks and the providers are not subject to any disproportionate burdens, without unduly affecting the rights and legitimate interests of any third parties, it is necessary to set certain conditions that those orders should meet and certain complementary requirements relating to the processing of those orders.

Consequently, this Regulation should harmonise only certain specific minimum conditions that such orders should fulfil in order to give rise to the obligation of providers of intermediary services to inform the relevant authorities about the effect given to those orders. Therefore, this Regulation does not provide the legal basis for the issuing of such orders, nor does it regulate their territorial scope or cross-border enforcement.”[/i]

The national authorities can demand content is removed, but only for “specific items”:

“51) Having regard to the need to take due account of the fundamental rights guaranteed under the Charter of all parties concerned, any action taken by a provider of hosting services pursuant to receiving a notice should be strictly targeted, in the sense that it should serve to remove or disable access to the specific items of information considered to constitute illegal content, without unduly affecting the freedom of expression and of information of recipients of the service.

Notices should therefore, as a general rule, be directed to the providers of hosting services that can reasonably be expected to have the technical and operational ability to act against such specific items. The providers of hosting services who receive a notice for which they cannot, for technical or operational reasons, remove the specific item of information should inform the person or entity who submitted the notice.”

There are extra obligations for Very Large Online Platforms, which have over 45 million users within the EU. These are not extra monitoring obligations on content, but rather extra obligations to ensure safeguards in the design of their systems:

The Digital Services Act’s rules vary for different online entities to match their role, size and impact in the online system. (European Commission, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

“(79) Very large online platforms and very large online search engines can be used in a way that strongly influences safety online, the shaping of public opinion and discourse, as well as online trade. The way they design their services is generally optimised to benefit their often advertising-driven business models and can cause societal concerns.

Effective regulation and enforcement is necessary in order to effectively identify and mitigate the risks and the societal and economic harm that may arise.

Under this Regulation, providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines should therefore assess the systemic risks stemming from the design, functioning and use of their services, as well as from potential misuses by the recipients of the service, and should take appropriate mitigating measures in observance of fundamental rights.

In determining the significance of potential negative effects and impacts, providers should consider the severity of the potential impact and the probability of all such systemic risks. For example, they could assess whether the potential negative impact can affect a large number of persons, its potential irreversibility, or how difficult it is to remedy and restore the situation prevailing prior to the potential impact.

(80) Four categories of systemic risks should be assessed in-depth by the providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines. A first category concerns the risks associated with the dissemination of illegal content, such as the dissemination of child sexual abuse material or illegal hate speech or other types of misuse of their services for criminal offences, and the conduct of illegal activities, such as the sale of products or services prohibited by Union or national law, including dangerous or counterfeit products, or illegally-traded animals.

For example, such dissemination or activities may constitute a significant systemic risk where access to illegal content may spread rapidly and widely through accounts with a particularly wide reach or other means of amplification. Providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines should assess the risk of dissemination of illegal content irrespective of whether or not the information is also incompatible with their terms and conditions.

This assessment is without prejudice to the personal responsibility of the recipient of the service of very large online platforms or of the owners of websites indexed by very large online search engines for possible illegality of their activity under the applicable law.”


(LIBER Europe, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

“(81) A second category concerns the actual or foreseeable impact of the service on the exercise of fundamental rights, as protected by the Charter, including but not limited to human dignity, freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, the right to private life, data protection, the right to non-discrimination, the rights of the child and consumer protection.

Such risks may arise, for example, in relation to the design of the algorithmic systems used by the very large online platform or by the very large online search engine or the misuse of their service through the submission of abusive notices or other methods for silencing speech or hampering competition.

When assessing risks to the rights of the child, providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines should consider for example how easy it is for minors to understand the design and functioning of the service, as well as how minors can be exposed through their service to content that may impair minors’ health, physical, mental and moral development. Such risks may arise, for example, in relation to the design of online interfaces which intentionally or unintentionally exploit the weaknesses and inexperience of minors or which may cause addictive behaviour.

(82) A third category of risks concerns the actual or foreseeable negative effects on democratic processes, civic discourse and electoral processes, as well as public security.

(83) A fourth category of risks stems from similar concerns relating to the design, functioning or use, including through manipulation, of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines with an actual or foreseeable negative effect on the protection of public health, minors and serious negative consequences to a person’s physical and mental well-being, or on gender-based violence.

Such risks may also stem from coordinated disinformation campaigns related to public health, or from online interface design that may stimulate behavioural addictions of recipients of the service.

(84) When assessing such systemic risks, providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines should focus on the systems or other elements that may contribute to the risks, including all the algorithmic systems that may be relevant…”

This is very interesting. I would argue that under Article 81 and 84, for example, the blatant use of both algorithms limiting reach and plain blocking by Twitter and Facebook, to promote a pro-Israeli narrative and to limit pro-Palestinian content, was very plainly a breach of the EU Digital Services Directive by deliberate interference with “freedom of expression and information, including media freedom and pluralism.”

The legislation is very plainly drafted with the specific intent of outlawing the use of algorithms to interfere with freedom of speech and public discourse in this way.

But it is of course a great truth that the honesty and neutrality of prosecution services is much more important to what actually happens in any “justice” system than the actual provisions of legislation.

Only a fool would be surprised that the EU Digital Services Act is being shoehorned into use against Durov, apparently for lack of cooperation with Western intelligence services and being a bit Russian, and is not being used against either Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg for limiting the reach of pro-Palestinian content.

It is also worth noting that Telegram is not considered to be a very large online platform by the EU Commission who have to date accepted Telegram’s contention that it has less than 45 million users in the EU, so these extra obligations do not apply.



If we look at the charges against Durov in France, I therefore cannot see how they are in fact compatible with the EU Digital Services Act.

Unless he refused to remove or act over specific individual content specified by the French authorities, or unless he set up Telegram with the specific intent of facilitating organised crime, I do not see how Durov is not protected under Articles 20 and 30 and other safeguards found in the Digital Services Act.

The French charges appear however to be extremely general and not to relate to particular specified communications. This is an abuse.

What the Digital Services Act does not contain is a general obligation to hand over unspecified content or encryption keys to police forces or security agencies. It is also remarkably reticent on “misinformation.”

Regulations 82 or 83 above obviously provide some basis for “misinformation” policing, but the Act in general relies on the rather welcome assertion that regulations governing what speech and discourse is legal should be the same offline as online.

So in short, the arrest of Pavel Durov appears to be pretty blatant abuse and only very tenuously connected to the legal basis given as justification. This is simply a part of the current rising wave of authoritarianism in Western “democracies”.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/29/c ... se-of-law/

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The mysterious arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram
Aug 27, 2024 , 3:25 pm .


Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov during a speech in Spain (Photo: Reuters)

On August 24, French police arrested Pavel Durov, founder of the messaging app Telegram, after he landed at Paris-Le Bourget airport on a private plane from Azerbaijan. According to French media, an arrest warrant had been issued for the 39-year-old Russian businessman as part of a preliminary investigation.

The country accuses him of being an accomplice to drug trafficking, child abuse and fraud since there is "little moderation on Telegram" and Durov has not cooperated "sufficiently" with the police to investigate these cases. This Monday, August 26, his preventive detention was extended for 48 hours and, once the deadline has expired, the authorities must decide whether to release him or press charges against him.

The case was opened a month ago on 12 alleged criminal offences, including complicity in the sale of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, fraud, complicity in organised crime transactions and refusal to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.

France's anti-fraud and cybercrime offices are in charge of the investigation and, if sufficient evidence is found, he could face up to 20 years in prison. Durov is subject to French justice because he obtained citizenship in 2021. In addition to being Russian by birth, he is also a citizen of the United Arab Emirates and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

For French columnist and presenter Rachel Marsden, it is curious that the businessman obtained French nationality without even having lived in the country, since a minimum of five years of residence with payment of taxes included in that period is required.

The reactions
Durov's arrest has sparked a variety of reactions and interpretations. On the one hand, it is said that the messaging app has become a refuge for scum, terrorists, money launderers, drug traffickers, and pedophiles; on the other, it is a pretext for the Western establishment to eliminate a strong competitor of the large social media corporations with Russophobic overtones.

Russia demanded an explanation of the reasons for the businessman's detention and that his rights be guaranteed. As an Emirati citizen, the UAE demanded that France provide its citizen with urgent access to all necessary consular services.

"The Parisian officials are not showing contempt, but rather the elimination of the values ​​they once proclaimed, including freedom of expression," said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Former Russian President and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, said that he had warned Durov in a conversation that his refusal to cooperate with law enforcement in cases involving serious crimes would cause him problems in any country.

"For all our common enemies, he is Russian, and therefore unpredictable and dangerous, of different blood," he said, adding that Durov "must understand once and for all that the homeland, like the times, is not chosen."

French President Emmanuel Macron insisted that Durov's arrest was not a "political decision." "France is above all attached to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation and entrepreneurship," Macron wrote in X. The European Union (EU) has kept its distance, declaring that it is "a matter for the relevant member state."

Former National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA analyst Edward Snowden called the businessman's arrest an "attack on fundamental human rights" and freedom of expression. X's owner Elon Musk , American journalist Tucker Carlson and Silicon Valley investor David Sacks also expressed their opinions .

In the crosshairs of American intelligence
In April of this year, Telegram's CEO gave an interview to Carlson in which he stated that the company, and he personally, were facing pressure from different governments, as well as from Apple and Google.

He detailed that the FBI tried to convince one of its engineers to basically start installing Western-friendly backdoors that would allow intelligence services easy access to content. He added that they seemed particularly interested in infiltrating groups that opposed Covid mandates and vaccines.

The idea that is gaining traction is that Durov is being blackmailed into opening a back door to Telegram in exchange for his freedom, investigative journalist Lucy Komisar told Sputnik, in order to "strengthen control of internet platforms that allow opinions that challenge the collective West."

Following Durov's arrest, Telegram called it "absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the abuse of that platform," implying that they are somehow not responsible for the social network being used for other purposes. It also reaffirmed that the company complies with local laws, including the EU's Digital Rights Act (DSA), and even with sanctions against Russia.

It is not known what the final fate of the founder of Telegram will be because the judicial process is in full swing, but it is most likely that he will be strongly pressured to make the social network leave spaces open to Western intelligence services. These intentional backdoors are very common on platforms such as WhatsApp, which is why the Russian company stood out in security.

At a time when there is widespread censorship to silence coverage of the war in Ukraine by sources that do not follow the establishment line and denunciation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Telegram served as a space where the mechanisms of increasing prohibition that can be seen in practically all media and social media platforms did not operate.

Both Rachel Marsden and analyst Pepe Escobar maintain that the arrest warrant was written just as Durov's private Embraer jet landed, and it is under this same atmosphere of illegality and secrecy that the trial against the Russian will take place.

Le Canard Enchaîné , a well-known French investigative outlet, reported that Durov told interrogators that on the day of his arrest he had a dinner date with President Macron, which explains his surprise upon arrival in Paris. It makes no sense for him to seek entry into a country where he is under criminal investigation.

This arrest, with its numerous procedural inconsistencies, comes at the same time as Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, said it would block and suspend accounts and content that used the word "Zionism" because it considered it "hate speech." According to Haaretz , Durov ignored private requests from the Israeli government to "moderate" "pro-Palestinian" content on Telegram.

But this is happening in the same timeline as independent journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested at Heathrow Airport, London, where he lives, under anti-terrorist laws, and when New Zealand approves the extradition to the United States of technology entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, the creator of Megaupload, for violating intellectual property laws.

Taken together, all of these arrests and acts of extensive censorship describe a pattern at the center of which is the narrative control of the dramatic events that mark the world today, in an environment where media standards and conventions in the so-called "collective West" not only certify a notable decline but, through platforms such as Telegram, alternative statements are established that expose in the process the totalitarian drift and groupthink that mark the tragic existence of the transatlantic powers.

Other facts about Telegram and Durov
They call him the Russian Zuckerberg because in 2006 he created , together with his brother Nikolai, the social network VKontakte —now VK—, nicknamed the Russian Facebook.
In 2013, Pavel and his brother founded Telegram. The company's headquarters were initially located in Berlin, but in 2017 it was moved to Dubai (United Arab Emirates) due to the lack of taxes in the Emirates.
In April 2014, Durov left Russia and obtained citizenship of St. Kitts and Nevis, where he donated $250,000 to a local company.
The platform was blocked in Russia between 2018 and 2020 due to legislative complaints due to the technical parameters of the encryption system.
In 2015, Durov confirmed that the Islamic State uses Telegram, but noted that the jihadist movement will always find a way to do so, whether with this app or another means: "I still think we are doing the right thing by protecting users' privacy," he said in his defense.
Telegram has reached 950 million monthly active users worldwide. It is now projected to outperform its competitor WhatsApp due to the efficiency of its multi-platform offering.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... e-telegram

Google Translator

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Former Deputy Minister of Defense General Popov Detained
August 29, 3:14 p.m



Former Deputy Minister of Defense General Popov has been detained.

Another former head of the defense department, Pavel Popov, has been charged with a criminal offense. The Main Military Investigation Department suspects him of fraud under Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

According to the investigation, Popov, who was responsible for the development, maintenance and operation of the Patriot Park, could not resist the temptation to improve his quality of life a little.

He organized the construction, repair and delivery of various material assets to his suburban area in the Krasnogorsk District of the Moscow Region at the expense of the Patriot Park.

And in small things - through his subordinates, he forced the heads of commercial organizations that had contractual relations with the Patriot Park to perform construction and installation work in his suburban apartments. Free of charge, that is, for nothing.

And after the construction of the house and the improvement of the site, Popov continued to provide technical and economic maintenance of his site, an area of ​​only about 3 hectares, at the expense of the park.

In addition to this plot of land with houses, Popov and his family members own numerous properties in prestigious areas of Moscow, the Moscow region and the Krasnodar region.

The total value of these properties is more than 500 million rubles.

@sashakots - zinc

And it's only Thursday. And tomorrow is Friday. Scary, very scary.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9350725.html

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Father Lukashenko - 70
August 30, 13:18



Today is Father Lukashenko's anniversary, 70 years.

Four years ago, Belarusian zmagars and liberals tried to write him off, but Father, with the support of his senior comrades, stood firm and still holds the steering wheel of Belarus firmly in his calloused hands. No matter how much they try to call him a "stupid collective farmer", in fact, Lukashenko has proven throughout his career that he is a very cunning and dodgy politician who, with very limited resources, knows how to achieve results.

And in general, of all the post-Soviet figures, Lukashenko was and remains one of the brightest.

Father, happy birthday!

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9352073.html

(He ain't no 'Uncle Joe' but as we say '70% is a win! He did his people a great service saving them from the chaos Russia endured in the 90's and the madness of post-Soviet Ukraine.)

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Judging Freedom, 29 August edition: Lavrov means business! What is the bee presently in the Russian bonnet?

Today’s discussion with Judge Andrew Napolitano was far-ranging, though with U.S. responsibility for the Kursk invasion at its center. If the Russians perceive the Kursk operation as a U.S. invasion of their country, then for what eventualities are they now preparing? What does he mean when Sergei Lavrov suggests as he did a couple of days ago, that the U.S. is now playing with matches in a childish way, and may get its fingers burned? Are the Russians preparing for a direct nuclear strike on the Continental USA?



https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/08/29/ ... an-bonnet/

Doctorow can be insightful but one must alway keep in mind that he is a hidebound upper middle class clerk with his own agenda.

[blindpig]

Lavrov’s Comparison Of Israel & Ukraine As Regional Warmongers Isn’t As Clear-Cut As It Seems

Andrew Korybko
Sep 01, 2024



The key differences that he implied about Israeli and Ukrainian warmongering lead to vastly different conclusions about what should be done to prevent a major regional war in their parts of the world.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov’s latest interview with RT saw him claim that Israel and Ukraine are alike in that they both want to spark major regional wars. The English summary can be read here while his full comments in Russian can be read here. Many in the Alt-Media Community believe that Russia is secretly allied with the Iranian-led Resistance Axis against Israel and might thus interpret his latest remarks as lending credence to their theory, but the following analyses rely on facts to disprove that:

* 31 December 2023: “Clarifying Lavrov’s Comparison Of The Latest Israeli-Hamas War To Russia’s Special Operation”

* 22 April 2024: “Was Pepe Escobar Duped By A Foreign Spy Agency Into Spreading Fake News About Russia & Israel?”

* 3 July 2024: “Israel Should Think Twice Before Sending Some Of Its Patriots To Ukraine Via The US”

* 1 August 2024: “Medvedev’s Hawkish Tweet After Haniyeh’s Assassination Doesn’t Reflect Russian Policy”

* 4 August 2024: “There Might Be Some Truth To Reports Of Emergency Russian Military Assistance To Iran”

To oversimplify the insight shared above, Russia has consistently backed a two-state solution in line with relevant UNSC Resolutions. It also supports Israel’s UN-enshrined right to defend itself, including from terrorist attacks, but condemns its exploitation thereof to collectively punish the Palestinians. To this day, Russia never shot at attacking Israeli jets over Syria, nor let Syria use the S-300s to that end. It might have sent Iran emergency air defense systems for deterrence purposes, however, but no offensive arms.

Readers should also remember that Russia hasn’t even symbolically designated Israel as an “unfriendly country” despite comparatively less significant ones like Portugal being branded with this scarlet letter. Although Israel has voted against Russia at the UN and criticized it during that global body’s meetings, it still refuses to follow the West’s sanctions regime or arm Ukraine. Likewise, although Russia votes against Israel there and criticizes it too, it hasn’t transferred offensive arms to the Resistance Axis.

As can be seen, a modus vivendi remains in place between Israel and Russia whereby each has thus far agreed not to cross the other’s red lines since they fear the regional consequences of provoking their counterpart to do the same, but they nevertheless still publicly criticize each other. The point though is that their sharp rhetoric disguises this quid pro quo, which objectively exists to some of their respective supporters’ consternation, who want them to take a much harder line towards their counterpart.

Russia won’t be the first to do so since it sincerely wants peace in West Asia and envisages itself mediating the creation of a new regional order, no matter how unlikely that might seem at the moment, ergo why it continues balancing between Israel and the Resistance Axis as explained. Israel has also rebuffed immense American pressure upon it to arm Ukraine, thus suggesting that it sincerely fears Russia arming the Resistance Axis in response, which could greatly disrupt the balance of power.

The preceding paragraphs help observers understand the context of Lavrov’s comparison, which they should also know was shared in response to being asked about the possibility of a regional war, not as a preplanned point that he intended to make. Reviewing his full remarks, it becomes clear that he only sought to convey that some Israeli hardliners want to militarily resolve all their regional problems in a way that risks a larger conflict, but Iran and the Resistance Axis won’t succumb to these provocations.

Lavrov also implied that the West doesn’t want a regional war there either after adding that the US, France, and other EU countries called on Iran not to respond to Israel’s assassination of Hamas’ political leader Haniyeh in Tehran, thus suggesting that they too fear an uncontrollable escalation. He then called out their hypocrisy for denying Iran its UN-enshrined right to self-defense while always supporting Israel’s, which he said is aimed at getting Iran to accept even more egregious provocations in the future.

It was here where he then drew his comparison to Ukraine, which is carrying out similarly egregious provocations against Russia with the intent of provoking an overwhelming response that could in turn spark a major regional war, with its invasion of Kursk being the example there he used. Others that come to mind are its bombings of the Kremlin, strategic airfields, nuclear power plants, and the Crimean Bridge, all of which were intended to elicit a reaction that could then lead to a hot NATO-Russian war.

This analysis here from late last month explained why nobody should expect a radical response from Russia to Ukraine’s NATO-backed invasion of its universally recognized territory, which boils down to Putin’s fear of inadvertently triggering the Third World War that he’s worked so hard to avoid till now. Ukraine’s intentions are described differently from Israel’s by Lavrov, though, since he says the first wants the Americans and other NATO members to fight for it but doesn’t claim the same about the second.

Rather, upon rereading his full remarks that were hyperlinked to in the introduction of this analysis, it compellingly appears as though he’s implying that Israel could spark a major regional war by miscalculation instead of design unlike Ukraine. This interpretation accounts for why he ended his answer to that question by mentioning the need to implement relevant UNSC Resolutions on Palestine, which reaffirms his belief that the two-state solution is still realistic and could avert a major regional war.

Lavrov is calling on Israel to exercise restraint after going too far defending itself from Gaza-emanating threats before tensions spiral out of control, while Ukraine is implied to have no restraint after becoming desperate to expand the conflict that its patrons provoked as a ploy to avoid military defeat. Accordingly, it’s suggested that Israel can prevent a major regional war if it finally behaves responsibly, while it’s up to Ukraine’s patrons to see to it that this is prevented in Europe after their proxy got too out of control.

All that being the case, only a superficial reading of Lavrov’s comparison of Israel and Ukraine as regional warmongers would lead one to conclude that Russia has either secretly been against Israel all along or might have just drastically changed its policy to that end. The reality is that Russia has never been against Israel in the sense that many in the Alt-Media Community imagine. Its Foreign Minister’s latest remarks also imply key differences between Israeli and Ukrainian warmongering.

For as sharp as his latest rhetoric about Israel is, observers shouldn’t be deceived into thinking that it’ll precede any change of policy like even just symbolically designating it as an “unfriendly country”. Whatever sharp rhetoric Israel might spew in response also shouldn’t deceive observers into thinking that it’ll precede any change of policy on its part either such as finally going through with arming Ukraine. The fact is that modus vivendi remains in their relations and is unlikely to end anytime soon.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/lavrovs- ... israel-and

(Dollar to a donut the Zionists are already helping the Nazis.)

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Anatol Lieven: How the Russian Establishment Really Sees the War Ending
August 31, 2024
By Anatol Lieven, Foreign Policy, 8/27/24

Discussions have been happening for some time among Western policymakers, experts, and the wider public about how the war in Ukraine ought to end. I can confirm that the same type of conversations are happening in Russia.

I recently had the opportunity to speak, on the basis of confidentiality, to a wide range of members of the Russian establishment, including former diplomats, members of think tanks, academics, and businesspeople, as well as a few members of the wider public. Their ideas about the war, and the shape of its eventual ending, deserve to be better understood in the West and in Ukraine itself.

Only a small minority believed that Russia should fight for complete victory in Ukraine, including the annexation of large new areas of Ukrainian territory or the creation of a client regime in Kyiv. A large majority wanted an early cease-fire roughly along the existing battle lines. There is high confidence that the Ukrainian military will never be able to break through and reconquer significant amounts of Ukraine’s lost territories.

Most of my conversations took place before the Ukrainian invasion of the Russian province of Kursk. As far as I can make out, however, this Ukrainian success has not changed basic Russian calculations and views—not least because, at the same time, the Russian army has continued to make significant progress farther east, in the Donbas, where the Russians are closing in on the key town of Pokrovsk. “The attack on Kursk may help Ukraine eventually to get rather better terms, but nothing like a real victory,” in the words of one Russian security expert. “They will sooner or later have to withdraw from Kursk, but we will never withdraw from Crimea and the Donbas.”

The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk has undoubtedly been a serious embarrassment to the Putin administration. It comes on top of a long row of other embarrassing failures, beginning with the appallingly bad planning of the initial invasion. And among the informed Russian elites, I get very little sense of genuine respect for Russian President Vladimir Putin as a military leader—though by contrast, there is much more widespread approval of the government’s economic record in resisting Western sanctions and rebuilding Russian industry for war.

Yet a key reason for my contacts’ desires for compromise was that they believed that Russia should not, and probably could not, attempt to capture major Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv by force of arms. They pointed to the length of time, the high casualties, and the huge destruction that have been involved in taking even small cities like Bakhmut in the face of strong Ukrainian resistance. Any areas of the countryside in Kharkiv province that can be taken should therefore be regarded not as prizes but as bargaining counters in future negotiations.

Underlying this attitude is the belief that to create a Russian army large enough to attempt such a complete victory would require a massive new round of conscription and mobilization—perhaps leading to the kind of popular resistance now seen in Ukraine. The government has been careful to avoid conscripting people from Moscow and St. Petersburg, and to pay large salaries to soldiers conscripted from poorer areas. Neither of these limits could be maintained in the context of full mobilization.

Partly for the same reason, the idea of going beyond Ukraine to launch a future attack on NATO was dismissed by everyone with derision. As I was told, “Look, the whole point of all these warnings to NATO has been to stop NATO from joining the fight against us in Ukraine, because of the horrible dangers involved. Why in the name of God would we ourselves attack NATO and bring these dangers on ourselves? What could we hope to gain? That’s absurd!”

On the other hand, every single person with whom I spoke stated that there could be no withdrawal from territory held by Russia in the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims to have annexed. A majority suggested that any territory in other provinces like Kharkiv could be returned to Ukraine in return for them being demilitarized. This would help guarantee a cease-fire and would also allow Putin to claim that he had ensured the safety of adjacent Russian provinces, which in recent months have been subject to Ukrainian bombardment. Some more optimistic Russians thought that it might be possible to exchange territory in Kharkiv for territory in the four provinces, none of which is currently fully occupied by Russia.

I found this balance of opinion among the people with whom I spoke to be fairly plausible as a wider picture, because on the whole it corresponds closely to the views of the wider Russian public, as expressed in opinion polls conducted by organizations that in the past have been found reliable. Thus in a poll last year by the Levada Center, sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, respondents were exactly equal (62 percent) in their desire for immediate peace talks and in their refusal to return the annexed territories to Ukraine.

Among my contacts, there were no differences on the subject of Ukrainian neutrality, which everyone declared essential. However, it would seem that serious thought is being given by sections of the Russian establishment to the vexed question of how a peace settlement could be secured without formal Western military guarantees and supplies to Ukraine. Hence the widely discussed ideas of a peace treaty ratified by the U.N. Security Council and the BRICS, and of broad demilitarized zones secured by a U.N. force.

As a leading Russian foreign-policy analyst told me, “In the West, you seem to think that only military guarantees are any good. But political factors are also critical. We have invested enormous diplomatic effort in building up our relations with the global south, which certainly would not want a new war. Do you think that if we could get a peace deal that met our basic requirements, we would throw all that away by starting one?”

Most said that if in negotiations the West agreed with key Russian demands, Russia would scale down others. Thus on the Russian demand for the “denazification” of Ukraine, a few said that Russia should still aim for a “friendly” government in Kyiv. This seems to be code for regime change, since it is very hard to imagine any freely elected Ukrainian government being friendly to Russia for a very long time to come.

A large majority, however, said that if Russian conditions in other areas were met, Russia should content itself with the passage of a law banning neo-Nazi parties and symbols, modeled on a clause of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. My Russian interlocutors referred here to the treaty’s provisions for restrictions on certain categories of Austrian arms and for minority rights—in the case of Ukraine, the linguistic and cultural rights of the Russian-speaking population.

On one important point, opinion was unanimous: that there is no chance whatsoever of any international formal and legal recognition of the Russian annexations of Ukrainian territory, and that Russia would not press for this. It was recognized that this would be rejected not just by Ukraine and the West, but by China, India, and South Africa, none of which recognized Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The hope is therefore that as part of a peace settlement, the issue of these territories’ status will be deferred for endless future negotiation (as the Ukrainian government proposed with regard to Crimea in March 2022), until eventually everyone forgets about it. The example of the (unrecognized but practically uncontested) Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was mentioned. This means that Ukraine would not be asked publicly to “give up” these territories; only to recognize the impossibility of reconquering them by force.

In the end, of course, Russia’s negotiating position will be decided by Putin—with whom I did not speak. His public position was set out in his “peace proposal” on the eve of the West’s “peace summit” in Switzerland in June. In this, he offered an immediate cease-fire if Ukraine withdrew its forces from the remainder of the Ukrainian provinces claimed by Russia and promised not to seek admission to NATO.

On the face of it, this is ridiculous. Ukraine is never going to voluntarily abandon the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. However, Putin did not say that Russia will then occupy these territories. This leaves open the possibility that Putin would accept a deal in which these areas would be demilitarized but under Ukrainian administration and that—like the Russian-occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces—their status would be subject to future negotiation.

Nobody I spoke to in Moscow claimed to know for sure what Putin is thinking. However, the consensus was that while he made terrible mistakes at the start of the war, he is a pragmatist capable of taking military advice and recognizing military reality. Thus when in November 2022 Russian generals advised him that to attempt to hold Kherson city risked military disaster, he ordered withdrawal —even though Kherson was in territory that Russia claimed to have annexed and was also Russia’s only bridgehead west of the Dnipro River. Its loss has vastly reduced Russian hopes of being able to capture Odessa and the rest of Ukraine’s coast.

But while Putin might accept what he would regard as a compromise now, everyone with whom I spoke in Moscow said that Russian demands will be determined by what happens on the battlefield. If the Ukrainians can hold roughly their existing line, then it will be along this line that an eventual cease-fire will run. But if the Ukrainians collapse, then in the words of one Russian ex-soldier, “Peter and Catherine are still waiting”; and Peter the Great and Catherine the Great between them conquered the whole of what is now eastern and southern Ukraine for Russia.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/08/ana ... ar-ending/


Moscow: Three villages seized in eastern Ukraine // Iran’s Press TV last night

I offer below the link to a two-man panel discussion on Press TV of Iran which I shared with John Bosnitch, a Canadian who seems to be undeterred by the authoritarian, heavy handed government in Ottawa and speaks his mind in a refreshing manner against the Washington narrative.

https://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/130630

August 31, 2024 1 Minute

Россия не белая и пушистая: Russia is not white and furry
Several times I have said on the Judging Freedom program that “Russians are not bunny rabbits.” By this I was reminding my peers and the audience at large that Russia is not a country of chumps, as for example Paul Craig Roberts has been saying for some time in his critiques of what he considers Mr. Putin’s excessive caution and turning the cheek when slapped by Washington. No, I insist that Mr. Putin and his government can bring to bear the mailed fist when so required. And while the Kremlin is not very capable of fighting the Information War externally, as for example via RT, they do pretty well at home with their own citizenry via state television.

If the Kremlin does well combating U.S. State Department propaganda and tendentious reporting by Western mainstream in its home ‘market,’ Russia is doing so without applying censorship. No, I insist that Russian media are freer than our own in Europe. I note parenthetically that the USA is a separate case precisely because of the Trump phenomenon and the split of voters into two roughly equal opposing camps which makes attempts at censorship unworkable or very difficult, however much the McCarthyites in power would wish for it.

Unlike France, Germany, Belgium, etc., the Russian government has much more confidence in the common sense and patriotism of its countrymen and what you find in Russian media, both official television and privately run news portals, is very extensive exposure of what major media in the West are saying. The most authoritative talk shows, the best news programs will daily give long citations from The Financial Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Foreign Affairs magazine for their viewers to digest. Video will be re-posted from CNN or Fox News, among others. What I see is not one-liners taken out of context, but a couple of pages of articles or several minutes of video that are a fair presentation of what the enemies of Russia are saying.

Now, to be sure, disproportionately high Russian news coverage of media and events in the USA and Europe compared to what the USA and European media have to say about Russia is purely in line with the balance of news coverage in the USA, foreign and domestic, versus the same balance in countries of the Rest of the World. The USA is, by definition, the center of the universe and has far less interest in the ROW than vice versa.

But Russia is in an Information War with the USA, so the rather fair-handed coverage of our major media is worth remarking here.

So much for Russian state coverage of Western major media. But what about Western alternative media? What I say here is based on the coverage of the two interview programs with large U.S. and global audiences in which I have been taking part for the past several months: Judging Freedom and Dialogue Works.

The best known of their interviewees, for example Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson, have long been shown in video clips from these and other Western interview programs posted on Sixty Minutes or Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, for example. Not on a daily basis, but from time to time.

As a newcomer to this media game, I have not been shown on Russian state television in any coverage of the Western interview shows. But I have received short newspaper and news portal coverage for isolated statements I have made on these shows which the media bosses in Russia found useful to reconfirm the Kremlin’s positions on things like U.S. direction of the Kursk invasions as a casus belli. Here we have a kind of closed loop: foreigner hears a position on Russian state news, foreigner repeats that position in a Western televised interview, foreigner is then featured in an article appearing in Russian media as proof of the validity of the Kremlin position.

With respect to my saying that the American close direction and supply of the Kursk invasion is a casus belli available to the Kremlin, this was picked up and presented as a self-standing article in the past two days by not one but by a dozen Russian major newspapers and portals, including that of the main carrier of all Russian state television programs on the internet, smotrim.ru

I am not being judgmental, just describing what is going on. Does this conform to the ‘useful idiot’ slander that Neocons have always applied to us, the Opposition? Of course, it does. HOWEVER, what those slanderers would miss in this case is that the closed loop was being used to make a programmatic statement or warning to Washington, which Messrs Blinken and Austin and Sullivan would do well to remark: “we Russians are ready to declare war on you.” To which side is this ‘useful idiot’ being more useful?

There is more to the story, and that is what I present to you now.

A Russian news portal has just posted a summary of my remarks on my latest chat with Nima Alkhorshid on Dialogue Works under the title given above, which is an appropriate translation into Russian of my remark that ‘Russians are not bunny rabbits.’

I post this article below in the Russian original for those readers with a command of the language, or to those who want to run the text through Google. You will find that they are repeating everything I said about American experts on Russia in universities keeping quiet lest they be fired, so that their expertise is not being brought to bear on the very important policy questions being decided now in Washington behind closed doors. Still more interesting, they repeat what I said about the Kremlin using my peers who are on youtube daily to disseminate false or deceptive information given them by their backchannel buddies in Russia. That last point is not at all flattering to the Kremlin, yet it is in internet portals there.

Moreover, complete broadcasts of Judging Freedom and of Dialogue Works are now being re-posted on rutube.ru and on dzen.ru, the Russian counterpart to Google, with Russian language voice over in what is often a very professional translation. This means that Russian internet users can access a very good sampling of what the Opposition to the Washington narrative is saying, regardless of whether compliments or brickbats are being sent to the doors of the Kremlin. I invite you to give this a try: both interviews from the last three days are up on the Russian internet.

With this I end my case that whatever Iron Curtain exists today between Russia and the West has been lowered on the Western side, not on the Russian side.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Website: https://www.9111.ru/questions/77777777724130983/

Гилберт Доктороу о вторжении Украины в Курск Первый истребитель F-16 Украины уничтожен

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/08/31/ ... ast-night/

*****

European Countries Are Cracking Down on Russian Tech Developers Under US Orders
August 30, 2024


Demonstrators hold a portrait of messaging app Telegram cofounder Pavel Durov in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 10, 2019. Photo: AP/file photo.

Several European countries have been cracking down on Russian tech personalities under US orders, revealed Russian lawyer Mikhail Zhukhovitsky. In a Telegram post on August 25, he reported several cases in which Russian tech entrepreneurs and developers were arrested in various EU countries at the behest of the United States.

The arrest of the cofounder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, in France on Saturday, August 24, is the latest in a series of allegedly weaponized judicial processes against Russian nationals associated with the tech industry.

Zhukhovitsky reported that in January 2023, Anatoly Legkodymov, administrator of the Telegram cryptocurrency bot BTC Banker, was arrested in the US. Within a few weeks, other members of the team, including Pavel Lerner, creator of the Exmo and UTORG exchanges, were arrested in France. Even after a year and a half, they remain in “preventive detention” in France, awaiting trial.

“Of the entire team, only Anton Shkurenko escaped imprisonment because he decided to stay in Moscow. Everyone who was outside the Russian Federation was arrested,” the lawyer added.

He went on to mention his “friends from Tornado Cash,” who were arrested two years ago. “Alexey [Pertsev] was given six years [of prison time] in the European Union,” he described. “Roman [Storm], thank God, was granted house arrest while awaiting trial in the US. Waiting for trial is very scary; nerves are severely frayed due to the uncertainty.”

On August 8, 2022, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Treasury Department blacklisted the cryptocurrency tumbler Tornado Cash for alleged “money laundering.” Two days later, developer Alexey Pertsev was arrested in Amsterdam, where he was charged with “involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralized Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash.” On May 14, 2024, Pertsev was sentenced to five years and four months in prison for his role in developing the service.

In August 2023, two other developers of the application, Roman Storm (a US national) and Roman Semenov, were charged by the US Treasury for “assisting in money laundering and sanctions violations.” Storm was later arrested in Washington, where he remains under house arrest. Semenov, who lives in Russia, remains free.

In this regard, Zhukhovitsky referred to an earlier case, that of the crypto exchange BTC-e and its operator Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national who was accused by the US Treasury in 2017 of money laundering, hacking, and conspiracy. Arrested in Greece in 2017 at the request of the United States, his extradition was fought over by France, Russia, and the US. After serving a prison sentence in France, he was extradited to the US in 2022, where, in May 2024, he finally pleaded guilty to “a restricted number of charges” for which he is expected to be handed less than 10 years in prison. Alexei Bilyuchenko, co-founder of BTC-e’s successor company, the WEX exchange, which collapsed in 2018, was later arrested in Russia and sentenced to three and a half years in prison in September 2023.

Zhukhovitsky also mentioned the case of Russian-Swedish crypto developer Roman Sterlingov, creator of the Bitcoin Fog mixer, who was recently convicted of “money laundering conspiracy” by a Washington federal jury that recommended a total of 50 years of imprisonment for the alleged crimes. On August 15, the developer’s defense filed a 37-page memorandum contesting the sentence, but in Zhukhovitsky’s opinion, “it is already useless.”

Interestingly, Sterlingov was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport in April 2021, reminiscent of Pavel Durov’s arrest at a Paris airport.

Zhukhovitsky listed another recent case involving Russian tech developers, but this took place outside the EU. “A month ago in the United Arab Emirates, a group of Russians—10 people—was arrested and immediately extradited to the US,” he wrote. “There is nothing about this in any media. The charge is bypassing US sanctions through crypto payments. The part of the team that was in Russia escaped this fate.”

Making a summary of the cases, the lawyer commented, “The charges in the above processes… were not prepared by Interpol and Europol. They were prepared by the USA. France is just a place of residence and waiting. Interpol headquarters is located there. And local authorities and law enforcement structures are just proxies for the US.”

“The chronology of the cases shows that after the first arrest, there are always, without exception, arrests of teams,” he continued. “Those team members who made the decision to urgently fly to the Russian Federation—their fate turned out well. Others who decided to defend themselves in the West—their fates turned out poorly.”

Therefore, following Pavel Durov’s arrest in France, the lawyer recommended that those who work for Telegram should “urgently fly to Russia.” “And don’t have illusions that the UAE is a neutral zone,” he warned.

Commenting on the Telegram CEO’s arrest in Paris for alleged “complicity” in a wide variety of crimes (none of which Durov committed but had allegedly been committed by certain users of Telegram), Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, said that in 2018, Durov had told him that he refused to cooperate with law enforcement in cases of major crime because that was his “principled position.”



In fact, it was because of this reason that Durov left his home country in 2018 to settle in Dubai and later acquired French citizenship as well. However, Telegram was never banned in Russia, nor was its founder ever accused of any crime. “He believed it was Russia where he had the biggest problems, so he left and later obtained citizenship/residence permits in other countries,” Medvedev wrote on his Telegram account. “He wanted to be a genius ‘person of the world’ who can live perfectly well without his Motherland … He miscalculated. To all our common enemies, he is Russian—and therefore unpredictable and dangerous. Someone of different blood. Certainly not like Musk or Zuckerberg (who, by the way, actively works with the FBI). Durov ought to finally realize that your Motherland, just like the times you live in, is not a matter of choice.”

Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs and research director of the Valdai Club, expressed similar sentiments regarding the Telegram founder’s arrest. According to him, the period of “liberal globalization” that allowed the internationalization of the information and communications industry is coming to an end in an increasingly multipolar world. “Structures that operate transnationally—understandably—immediately look suspect,” he wrote in an article entitled “Globalization Under Arrest” (in Russian). “The view is that they should be ‘nationalized,’ not through ownership but in terms of demonstrating loyalty to a particular state … And this time the possession of French nationality, along with a number of other things, promises to exacerbate rather than alleviate the predicament of the accused.”

Durov, a Russian national, also possesses the citizenship of France, UAE, and St. Kitts and Nevis. According to many political analysts as well as the Russian government, his French nationality makes it complicated for the Russian authorities to legally assist him. However, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov announced on Tuesday, August 27, that “taking into account his Russian nationality, we are ready to provide him with all necessary assistance.” He further stated that the charges against the tech personality are serious and should be backed by serious evidence, “otherwise it will be a direct attempt to restrict the freedom of expression and to directly intimidate the director of a large company, a policy the existence of which [French President] Mr. Macron has denied.”

https://orinocotribune.com/european-cou ... us-orders/

******

On the referendum on amending the Constitution of Armenia
August 30, 2024
Rybar

The Armenian Ministry of Justice told media representatives that a referendum on the new Constitution of the republic is planned to be held in 2027.

The Armenian government has come to the conclusion that a completely new Basic Law is needed, not amendments.

At the same time, Justice Minister Grigor Minasyan added that the working group on drafting the Constitution did not discuss the issues of changing the first three articles and did not consider the issue of removing the reference to the Declaration of Independence. According to him, the focus is now on the topic of a "stable parliamentary majority."

Let us recall that it is in Baku that they insist on amendments to the Constitution of Armenia and have claims specifically to the Declaration of Independence, which contains territorial claims.

Without amendments to the Armenian Constitution, the Azerbaijani side refuses to sign a peace treaty , which could be declared unconstitutional in the event of a change of power in Yerevan.

However, this does not mean that the working group on writing the new Constitution of Armenia will not consider these issues in the future.

Rather, such a statement can be regarded as a concession to public opinion , in which changing the Constitution is associated with fulfilling the demands of the Azerbaijanis.

Moreover, the opposition announced protests in September , which are based on the thesis of trampling on national interests and capitulation to Baku’s demands.

In general, delaying the Constitution issue until 2027 leads the negotiations between Yerevan and Baku to a dead end. Earlier, Azerbaijan agreed to exclude the unblocking of communications from the agreement, although this is a key issue for the region. The inability ( or rather the unwillingness agreed upon by both sides ) to reach an agreement could ultimately lead to new aggression on the part of Baku.

https://rybar.ru/o-referendume-po-izmen ... i-armenii/

How Americans are putting Armenian security forces under control
August 31, 2024
Rybar

The Americans continue to invade the law enforcement sphere of Armenia in order to directly participate in the management of security forces.

US Ambassador Christina Kvien attended training for the Armenian maritime patrol, which was conducted by US law enforcement agencies.

Quinn said Washington would continue to strengthen Armenia's law enforcement agencies and help ensure public safety .

Ambassador Quinn also met with the Prosecutor General of Armenia Anna Vardapetyan . The parties discussed cooperation in the area of ​​mutual legal assistance .

Vardapetyan stated that the US Embassy in Armenia is a reliable partner of the Prosecutor General's Office. At the same time, none of them, of course, will be confused by the obvious conflict of interest in such a formulation between the representative office of a foreign government and the executive branch of Armenia.

Earlier, US Deputy Secretary of State Uzra Zeya stated during a visit to Yerevan that the Americans had invested about $16 million in the formation of the Patrol Police in Armenia. The official then met with security officials and representatives of pro-Western NGOs and the media, the main pillars of American influence in Armenian society.

All this fully characterizes the loss of Armenia’s sovereignty and the gradual transfer of all levers of control in the country into the hands of the Americans, who intend to firmly establish themselves in the republic.

At the same time, for the Western protégé of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan , this is not the worst scenario, given that anti-government protests may begin again in the country . In this case, the support of the Americans and the security forces under their control will become a decisive factor in maintaining Pashinyan's power.

https://rybar.ru/kak-amerikanczy-stavya ... silovikov/

[blindpig]

RUSSIAN MERCENARY YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN’S FLASH IN THE PAN



by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

What can an employee of the Rupert Murdoch media machine and an employee of a George Soros think tank reveal in a new book about the evils of President Vladimir Putin which they and a foreign legion of thousands haven’t already said before – except that there is still money to be made out of repeating the story.

Mark Galeotti, a writer for The Times of London, has been trying to live down his Italian Communist boyhood which is the only part of his story he doesn’t reveal or repeat. Co-author Anna Arutunyan calls herself Russian-American, leaving out the Armenian connexion at birth in Moscow, the circumstances of her growing up in the US, and some of the US institutions which trained and employed her, including New York University, the Wilson Centre of the Smithsonian Institution, USA Today, and George Soros’s International Crisis Group. Americans who come to Russia as rookie journalists with backgrounds as blank as Arutunyan’s reveal they have something to hide.

Together, Galeotti and Arutunyan have just published what they call a history of the rise and fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin. Not that they know anything directly about him. Everything they report has been published before, most of it in US newspapers and by US-paid Russian opposition propaganda organs. The sole source for their $10 billion estimate of the Prigozhin’s businesses in 2019 turns out to be two unknown fronts called Current Time TV and Municipal Scanner. The first acknowledges it is based in Prague and is funded by the US government propaganda agency, Radio Free Europe. The second, renamed The Scanner Project, says it was “created with the participation of Boris Nemtsov in 2014”. That source of regime-change money appears to have run out a year ago, when the site stopped publishing.

As for Prigozhin’s time in criminal gangs; his hot-dog kiosks and restaurants in St. Petersburg; his Defense Ministry contracts; and his role in the formation and operation of the Wagner private military company, Galeotti and Arutunyan rely on second and third-hand hearsay; and the lack of ever having eaten in any of the top Soviet restaurants of Moscow and Leningrad, or their successors since 1991. Instead, the duo express contempt for everything Russian they have read about and have no direct experience of, including the Zhiguli car (“tacky duplicate of a 1960s Fiat design”), Soviet cuisine (“think of such delights as canned cod liver and meat in gelatine”), and the display of new (“obscenely rich”) Russian money — except for that of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, because “he continued to bankroll opposition politicians and speak out against corruption”.

They have just one direct source for the Wagner mercenaries. Arutunyan claims to have interviewed Marat Gabidullin, who has been selling stories of himself to qualify for asylum in France, where he moved in 2018 after serving in the Russian Army until 2015, and then in a Wagner unit in Syria for three years.

Gabidullin told National Public Radio of Washington, DC, in June 2022 that he left Wagner “because he became morally exhausted in Syria, fighting for a corrupt government that was hated by its own citizens. He says he was asked to fight in Ukraine but refused.” A Ukrainian publication of 2023 claims Gabidullin “had a criminal record for murder.”

From Gabidullin, Galeotti’s and Arutunyan’s book depends for insights and evidence like these he told Arutunyan: “It was like in that movie Casino. They come in, go to the closet, open it, load the money into bags, everyone else looks away”; “from the beginning , he had a vision of [Wagner] being a global structure”; “Wagner is a typical serf-landowner type of business, with a diligent overlord who takes care of his peasants”.

Like that runaway, Galeotti and Arutunyan want everyone to understand that Vladimir Putin is the evil autocrat running “an almost medieval court in which constantly competing factions and individuals are struggling for the most important currency of all – Putin’s favour”. Thirty-three pages further on, by contrast (contradiction), that turns out to be “the whims and decisions of an ageing autocrat who had too much on his plate to be particularly interested in forging a coherent Africa strategy”.

To reach this conclusion, Galeotti and Arutunyan were unable to speak with (or read) a single source from South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Senegal, Guinea, Ghana, and Ivory Coast where most Russian money and political priorities have been invested for the past thirty years. The duo also appear to have ignored the Russian oligarchs with the largest investments in those states, including Oleg Deripaska, Alexei Mordashov, Vagit Alekperov, Roman Abramovich, Alexander Abramov, and Vladimir Yevtushenkov.

Galeotti and Arutunyan also compare their idea of a “medieval court” to the gangsters in which “Putin’s system relies on unspoken understandings – much like the criminal world in which Prigozhin was raised.” Discreetly left out of mention is that Prigozhin was Jewish and that his rise, like Putin’s own, started and depended on street gangs of Jews and other non-Russian ethnic minorities and the capital he hustled out of them for their joint ventures. (For the common sociology of this phenomenon, think of the US equivalent — Meyer Lansky’s role in the Lucky Luciano gang.)

The Jewish and Israeli links of this story – Prigozhin’s, Putin’s – are camouflaged by Galeotti, Arutunyan and their reviewers by their christianizing references to medieval and Renaissance courts. In the Financial Times review of the book, for example, it is claimed that the authors “skilfully intertwine Prigozhin’s biography with Putin’s own rise to power. In their telling, the president is cast as the tsar presiding over myriad squabbling subordinates playing ‘games of court’, amid which Prigozhin emerged as a sort of ultra-violent court jester. It is only through understanding the nature of this system that it is possible to grasp how a caterer ended up controlling a sprawling private army based across there continents. The fact that Russian war machine came to rely [sic] on a man like Prigozhin, the authors write, ‘is, at its core ‘an admission of a moral and ideological vacuum at the heart of Putinism’.”*

Since that is the fundamental charge of US and NATO state ideology against Russia, and since Galeotti and Aryutunyan have been paid to publish this charge in Prigozhin’s story, a non-Jewish ethnic Russian source serving in the army, the intelligence services, the Kremlin administration, and the media, might have been sought for fact-check or comment. Instead, there is nothing. That’s the vacuum in Galeotti’s and Arutunyan’s book.


Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti and their book, published in mid-June.

Their account of alleged gold and diamond smuggling by Prigozhin out of Africa is footnoted, not to the well-known Russian and international gold and diamond miners in Africa, but to an academic paper published at the University of Exeter in August 2023. What that original reference reveals is that it was funded by the UK Foreign Office; the lead author, David Lewis, was an Exeter academic on secondment to the Foreign Office for several years. Lewis did no direct research of his own; at the university he also prevented experts on Russian gold and diamond mining in Africa from lecturing to his students. Instead, Lewis’s claims about Prigozhin in Africa are based on references to BBC and US State Department publications, as well as to the Polish government-funded Polish Institute of International Affairs and “the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime”, which is paid for by the Norwegian government.

Another of the book’s frequently cited sources, especially for Prigozhin’s military operations in the Ukraine, is The Dossier Centre. This is an outlet paid for by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his regime-changing organization in London.

Source blindness and keenness to repeat US and British Government propaganda lead Galeotti and Arutunyan to report the reason for Putin’s engagement of Prigozhin to interfere in the US presidential election campaign of 2016 was Putin’s hostility towards Hillary Clinton because she “had criticised the [Russian] parliamentary elections for voting irregularities”. Galeotti and Arutunyan reveal their ignorance of the large Russian bribe Clinton took through a family foundation in 2009 in exchange for her promise to support the sale of General Motors’ Opel division to a combination of the Russian state bank, Oleg Deripaska’s car company, and the German government. Clinton pocketed the cash and then reneged on her promise. For Putin’s reaction and the full story, read the book, chapter 6.

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY FROM PRIGOZHIN’S MUTINY TO HIS DEATH


June 23, 2024: https://johnhelmer.net/


June 28, 2023: https://johnhelmer.net/


July 5, 2023: https://johnhelmer.net/


Left: July 10, 2023 -- https://johnhelmer.net/
Right: September 5, 2023 -- https://johnhelmer.net/

Without a direct source in St Petersburg, Africa, Syria, or the Ukraine on the front, how do Galeotti and Arutunyan explain Prigozhin’s death, which is the climax and selling-point of their story?

They say their principal source is the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch platform in New York, whose version was supplied by “western intelligence officials and a former Russian intelligence officer”. Arutunyan and Galeotti conclude by saying “all of this is, of course, entirely speculative”. Of course — off course.


The English, French and US sources on which the book’s narrative depends: David Lewis, Anglo- Jewish; Gabidullin, a Muslim Bashkir; and Alan Cullison, a Christian New Yorker and Wall Street Journal reporter living in Washington. In the August 28 list of new Russian Foreign Ministry sanctions against US citizens, 13 members of the Wall Street Journal staff were banned; that’s a far larger number than for the New York Times and Washington Post. Cullison wasn’t on the list.

For their narrative of Prigozhin’s “taking the city of Voronezh”; throwing Moscow into “half in panic, half in business as usual”, and the “rapid exodus of oligarchs and senior officials” – an innuendo that Putin was fleeing the city — Galeotti and Arutunyan cite only one source – Meduza, the regime-changing internet publication, based in Riga, Latvia, funded from the US. Notwithstanding, “we know very little about the negotiations ending Prigozhin’s move to Moscow,” the intrepid biographers concede, “we know very little about quite how these arm’s length talks went…” Analysing Prigozhin’s death falling out of the sky on August 23, 2023, Galeotti and Arutunyan again crib from the Wall Street Journal, but at the same time acknowledge: “many explanations have been given for the delay between the mutiny [June 23-24, 2023] and the response [aircrash August 23] …It is at present impossible to know.”

In this world of impossibility-to-know never has the conviction-of-course been so persuasive, at least for the purpose of selling books to the already persuaded. “Prigozhin may be dead,” Galeotti and Arutunyan conclude, “but his rise, rebellion, and fall demonstrated, for all to see, a fundamental weakness of the Putin regime.” Here’s the political science — “central to [Putin’s] political system is the constant competition between rival factions, institutions, and individuals”.

Of course, this cannot be faulted, the evidence for it cannot be wrong, not in Moscow nor anywhere in the political world. That’s because it is a cliché.

And here’s the final one: “someday, democracy will be coming to Russia, and although he is hardly a suitable banner-bearer for reform, Prigozhin’s disruptive mutiny will have played its part in that process”. “Democracy”, “reform”, “part”, “process” in the final lines of the book you have paid £18 to reach can’t be faulted for lack of evidence or for an excess of propaganda.

[*] The reviewer Miles Johnson is the FT’s house expert on Prigozhin. He claimed in a report of February 2023 that “Prigozhin generated revenues of more than a quarter of a billion dollars from his global natural resources empire in the four years before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, according to corporate records.” In Johnson’s arithmetic, his sources added up to just $210 million in revenues, with just one Syrian company reportedly generating two-thirds of that total in a single year, before collapsing to $400,000 a year later.

https://johnhelmer.net/russian-mercenar ... more-90288

[blindpig]

PAVEL DUROV, PAUL DU ROVE – FREEDOM OF SPEECH TO PLAY FOOL, STOCK SPECULATOR, FRAUDSTER



by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

Pavel Durov (lead image) aka Paul du Rove (“vagabond” in French) doesn’t put his money where his mouth is.

This is because more than half the assets and almost half the revenues of Durov’s Telegram group of companies are digital units which Telegram itself programmes, stores, trades, values, and revalues, so the potential for concealment, deception and fraud is unaccountably large. This is the reason Durov has failed to secure the US regulator’s permission to sell shares in his $30 billion valuation of Telegram in a US initial public offering (IPO). In short, the freedom and privacy Durov claims his Telegram social media platform represents is not at all what the financial reports reveal of his money-making.

The first fraud flag was waved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in October 2019 after more than a year of Durov’s money-raising through digital tokens he called Grams which he offered to sell for $1.5 billion. At the time, cornerstone investors in Durov included the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and other oligarchs.

Durov — announced the SEC — “seeks to obtain the benefits of a public offering without complying with the long-established disclosure responsibilities designed to protect the investing public… the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams and Telegram’s business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require.”

In the five years since then, Durov claims to have sold another billion-dollar bond in 2021; $210 million in fresh securities in 2023; and $330 million in paper which Durov floated in March of this year. “The increased demand for our bonds shows that global financial institutions value Telegram’s growth in audience and monetization”, he said (telegrammed) at the time.

These investments weren’t exactly money for value, or vice versa. Durov has admitted he has been buying about a quarter of the debt issues himself. “Valuations are based on market inputs that are not observable,” reported a blockchain industry analyst.

When the investors have turned out to be governments – like Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi emirate wealth fund — the real value Durov promised to exchange is likely to be as much political and military as financial. Similar terms of exchange are likely to have been agreed when, in addition to his Russian passport in the name of Durov, he took passports from the United Arab Emirates (name unknown), France (name Paul du Rove), and St Kitts and Nevis.

Four months ago, Durov signed financial reports for his Telegram group prepared and audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC). He thought the details would remain secret. Instead, following his arrest and indictment in France last week, they were leaked to the Financial Times in London. The newspaper claims it “got its hands on the privately held company’s financials” but without explanation it is withholding them from full release. Durov’s signature is dated April 26, 2024.

In public defence of his countryman, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this week that Durov had been naïve about the “old system of globalization…P.V. Durov turned out to be too, too free, too slow or did not listen to Western advice about the so-called moderation of his brainchild.”

Naivety is not what Durov signed his name to in Telegram’s financial reports.

They reveal he is running a debt pyramid, replenishing the annual deficit between his expenditures and his income with new borrowings whose cost of servicing amounted in 2023 to 46% of his revenues. The leaked papers also disclose that his losses last year came to $259.3 million, although Durov managed to reduce that to $173.2 million by claiming offsetting digital assets had jumped in value. To support such valuation manipulations and his public claims of Telegram’s $30 billion market value, the small print of the auditor’s notes reveal that Durov uses his own digital money to boost the appearance of rising Telegram subscription numbers and demand for the company’s bonds — 15,000 subs and $64 million in bonds, to be precise.

As for protecting Telegram user privacy, Durov acknowledges that after subtracting $130 million in self-accounting “integrated wallet” value from his bottom-line revenue of $342.5 million, over the past year he sold “collectibles” for $17.8 million – almost 9%. This item is defined in the report as “usernames, virtual phone numbers…The related revenue is recognised at a point in time when the collectible is assigned to the user. The Group also enables the sale of collectibles between users and receives the fee for facilitating the sale.”

According to the public indictment of the French prosecutors, fraud is one of the charges against Durov, along with money laundering, concealment by cryptology, and “refusal to communicate, at the request of the authorized authorities, the information or documents necessary for the realization and exploitation of interceptions authorized by law.”

According to Russian and international sources, the recent history of each one of these charges involves Durov in dealings with the Azerbaijan government, with the Kanak rebellion in the French colony of New Caledonia, and in undertakings he gave to agents of the French foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), when they visited him recently in Dubai.

For a legal analysis of the Digital Services Act and regulations, the law applying to Telegram and to free speech in the social media in the European Union (EU), read this from Craig Murray. The analysis is made irrelevant by Murray’s acknowledgement that the indictment may be warranted if Durov “refused to remove or act over specific individual content specified by the French authorities, or unless he set up Telegram with the specific intent of facilitating organised crime”.

Specific content was what the DGSE told Durov it wanted him to provide when they last met. That they met has been confirmed by the official leaks in Libération’s report of September 1. The newspaper headline was “The man who was hiding too much”. That Durov reneged on his promise to the DGSE is what the Paris prosecutor’s statement of August 28 indicates.


Source: https://cloud.mail.ru/

Sources in Baku, Azerbaijan, and in Moscow believe the French agents were pressing Durov to reveal identities and a great many other details of the Kanak rebellion in New Caledonia who have been using Telegram, as well as their sources of outside financial and other support. Russian and Azeri sources believe there is a Telegram trail of support between New Caledonia and the Azerbaijan’s war against Armenia and its French government backers.

A Baku source adds that Durov is not as rich as he wants the world to think, and that he has been seeking, and getting, investments from sources close to the ruling Aliyev family in Baku, especially Leyla Aliyeva. When Durov was arrested at Le Bourget airport in Paris, he had just flown from Baku. “I doubt very much,” the source adds, “that Durov was there [Baku] for meeting a member of the family or even Leyla.” Leyla Aliyeva is the senior daughter of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev.

A Russian source adds: “We can conclude he was not there to meet Leyla, and thus no person from the Aliyev family, and so no meeting with [President Vladimir] Putin was on the cards.” Putin was in Baku to meet President Ilham Aliyev between August 18 and 20. Durov was in Baku after Putin had left; Durov then flew from Baku to Paris on August 24.


A Russian source believes that the former Russian, now US-based internet entrepreneur, Yuri Milner, (who bought Durov and his partners out of VKontakte in 2014 for a total of $2.1 billion, has been hostile towards Durov’s Telegram IPO plans in the US. The source comments speculatively. “The Yuri Milner story is also clouded. Durov’s IPO never happened because Milner would have first-hand knowledge that this guy was toxic.”

In May, Durov invited Tucker Carlson to his living-room in Dubai for an hour-long interview. Russian sources interpret the text in reverse – to Carlson Durov misrepresented his efforts to launch an IPO in the US and his contacts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Durov also made a telling slip of the tongue, one of the Russians notes. When Durov compared the “efficiency” of his management team at Telegram “like a Navy SEAL team” (Minute 39), he was trying to show how closely he was willing to cooperate with the Americans if they paid his price in share sales. “The naivety on display came from Carlson”, the source added.

“I think it makes sense to stay prudent… not travelling to weird places,” Durov told Carlson. “I travel to places where I have, ah, confidence that, you know, are consistent with what we do and our values. I don’t go to any of the big geopolitical powers, countries like China or Russia or the US…” (Min 45:20-45:53) Not once did Durov say he understands that the world is at war with Russia. The word war was not spoken in the 58 minutes of interview.

That in the propaganda war of the US and NATO allies against Russia, freedom of speech cannot be exercised on either side has been turned by Mikhail Zygar, a Russian oppositionist now in Berlin, into a defence of Durov’s money-making mythology.

According to Zygar, “a few years ago, [Durov] posted semi-nude photos of himself on Instagram, taken in the desert, evoking the unmistakable aesthetic of ‘Prince of Persia.’ Pavel saw himself as a mysterious prince, misunderstood and sought after by everyone. And soon, he said, thanks to his new crypto platform TON, he would become the richest person in the world…Durov always dressed in black: a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers. Even when he went for a walk, a car would follow him, carrying spare T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers—just in case his clothes got dirty and he needed to change. Over the past ten years, Pavel Durov has become a real idol for countless young Russians. A mystical hero who made himself, amassed a colossal fortune, built several tech businesses from scratch, and never bowed to government pressure—an ideal hero for many young Russians.”

“Durov never criticized Putin, but even the fact that he left Russia was a clear sign that he was against the regime…The arrest of Pavel Durov in France is a major moral blow for his followers. Russian propaganda is trying to turn this to its advantage. As usual, it broadcasts the message that everywhere is the same, and the rules in Europe are no different from those in Russia. There is no freedom of speech or fair trial anywhere—so if there’s no difference, why leave Russia? Here, at least, everything is familiar and our own. Over the past two years, this has become the most effective thesis of Russian propaganda within the country:”



“My number-1 priority in life is my freedom. Once you start buying things, first it will tie you down to a physical location…and the second reason is that I like to stay focused on what we do with Telegram…I’m an optimist… I do believe the world develops in cycles and that if things seem to go in one direction today doesn’t mean that tomorrow they will go in the same direction…things are starting to change, it seems…What X is trying to do, in line with what we are building, is innovation, you know, trying different things, trying to give power to the creators, trying to get the ecosystem economy going, those are all exciting things. And we need more companies like that.” Source: https://tuckercarlson.com


This week, in referring to Durov, Foreign Minister Lavrov repudiated everything Durov told Carlson’s American audience he stands for. “The globalization that the West has been actively promoting for many years has been adopted as a method of doing business between states in the field of economy, technology and finance. This model of globalization is now falling apart. The principles on which it was based, according to the beliefs of our Western colleagues – fair competition, inviolability of property, presumption of innocence, market forces – all this was thrown away by the West at one point in order to punish in this case the Russian Federation.”

THE DUROV GROUP


Left, Father, Professor Valery Durov, Latin and Roman literature academic at the St. Petersburg State University. Right, older brother, Dr Nikolai Durov, mathematics prodigy, currently in St Petersburg -- source: https://www.bbc.com/ Listen to Durov lecturing in English on mathematics.


Pavel Durov’s partner, Yulia Vavilova: https://www.instagram.com/

Cribbing from Russian social media and gossip sites, the London tabloid press has been amplifying Vavilova’s photo advertising of herself, and adding unsubstantiated allegations of her involvement with western intelligence agencies, including Israel.

Durov’s arrest, and the interest the French authorities have declared in obtaining the encryption keys to the Telegram operations, have accelerated the debate in Russia over the operational security of the Telegram app when it is used informally by Russian troops, in the reports published by Russian war correspondents in the combat zone and the military bloggers, as well as in more formal, operational uses by military organizations.

“Fierce disputes about the importance of the [Telegram] service for the army in Russia have already been conducted,” reports the oppositionist platform Meduza in Riga, “most recently, in July, when the State Duma passed a law on the appointment of a guardhouse for military personnel using ‘civilian’ gadgets. Then, under the pressure of criticism from ‘military commanders’ and pro-military bloggers — they feared that the ban would deprive the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of high-quality communications — the rule was relaxed…In fact, Telegram is actively used by the military, especially at the tactical level and in the rear. In this capacity, the message platform won a competition from Whatsapp at the beginning of the full-scale war, mainly due to rumours about the lack of security of the latter: the opinion quickly spread at the front that the US intelligence service has access to all chats on the platform owned by American Meta, which in turn shares data with Ukraine.”

Nikolai Kononov, author of a book entitled Код Дурова (Durov’s Code), was asked last week how he explains that Telegram appears to have responded more willingly to Russian government requests than to those of foreign governments. “Because for Pavel Durov,” Kononov replied, “the Russian market is especially important, because the company is from this country of origin. Secondly, because, of course, he is manoeuvering all the time. Pavel Durov constantly plays cat and mouse. One step forward, two back: he does not give out information on such-and-so, but he goes out of his way to block the Navalny group by formal signs. In fact, the same cat-and-mouse games occur with other countries. Maybe there are less of them. We do not know this, because we are focused on the Russian agenda — for us the story with Navalny’s team is loud and clear. And, let’s say, it’s the same story with the blocking of Telegram in Iran because Iran is categorically against Telegram — they even released such a statement. For us, that world is a little different, a quite different reality, so we know less about it.”


Asked about Durov’s last exit from Russia, “I think”, said Kononov, “that in the first years after 2014, when he left Russia, he traveled back simply because of family, property, and so on– his connections. Why he traveled [back to Russia] from the moment when the Russian authorities began to make claims against Telegram is a real question. I don’t have an answer to it. It is symptomatic that since the autumn of 2021, Durov has stopped traveling to Russia altogether. In my opinion, this is a sign that either he has super-developed instincts or, more likely, he received a sign from the authorities that a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine would begin, and he decided that he did not want to get himself
dirty in this, so he finally broke with Russia.”

Speaking for the Alexei Navalny group in exile abroad, Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s ex-chief of staff, has announced his support for Durov’s brother Nikolai, who is also the target of a French arrest warrant. “Hands off Kolya [Nikolai] Durov, what are you doing at all. He is a genius, a real one, not a criminal”, the BBC Russian service has reported Volkopv as saying.

On his own Telegram outlet, Volkov wrote on August 25: “The history of Telegram is a history of complex compromises and, often, very opaque censorship decisions (the [Navalny] Smart Voting bot sends greetings!), it is ridiculous and incorrect to consider Telegram a ray of freedom and a light of the uncensored Internet; Durov has been engaged in realpolitik for many years with varying success. The censorship requirements of the European countries are complex, not always clear, and many of them can and should be argued with; too often, legislators’ attempts to regulate the Internet lag behind the technological reality and the changing world. At the same time, law enforcement agencies often abuse the opportunities to prosecute those who work in the ‘gray zone’, interpreting the law literally and formalistically.”

“Telegram really has become a platform that is actively used by all kinds of crime, and opaque, weak policies for filtering illegal content have greatly stimulated this. It is completely unclear why the crimes of third parties on the site (financial, communication, whatever) should entail criminal prosecution against the creator of the site; in fact, there are fines, courts, licensing restrictions for this – for example, if a bank’s policies are not strict enough and someone launders money through the bank, then he is fined, then his license is revoked, but the owners are not imprisoned…How I envy (actually not) everyone who knows how to reduce this multidimensional, complex picture to one simple thesis (no matter what!). It seems to me that the detention of Durov by the French authorities is politically and humanly wrong. Durov is not an ‘accomplice’ to crimes committed by Telegram users. He must be released. And I think he will be. I think that the French authorities and the leadership of Telegram will reach (or have already reached) some kind of agreement on changing content-filtering policies, and this is just fine. It’s bad that such cinematic moves like airport detention are used.”

https://johnhelmer.net/pavel-durov-paul ... more-90299

******

Repressions in the Leningrad Military District
September 2, 17:16



And it's not Friday yet.

Deputy Commander of the Leningrad Military District, General Valery Mumindzhanov, who was responsible for the logistics of the district's troops, has been detained. I've seen a couple of stories that began exactly the same way.

Official from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation:

The Main Military Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has opened a criminal case against Deputy Commander of the Leningrad Military District for Logistics, Major General Valery Muminjanov, on charges of a crime under Part 6 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (accepting a bribe on an especially large scale).

According to the investigation, while previously holding the position of Head of the Department of Resource Provision of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and responsible for the supply of clothing to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Muminjanov facilitated the conclusion of contracts with commercial organizations for the supply of uniforms in the interests of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, including to the territory of the SVO, for a total of more than 1.5 billion rubles. For this assistance, he received a bribe on an especially large scale for a total of over 20 million rubles.

During the investigation it was established that Muminjanov and his family members own numerous properties in Moscow and Voronezh worth over 120 million rubles, the legality of which is being verified.

Muminjanov has currently been detained, and the issue of choosing a preventive measure for him is being decided.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9358426.html

Non-profit professions
September 3, 20:55



Non-profit professions

The authorities want to retrain 1.5 million Russians to cope with the personnel shortage, but what will the applicant choose: a highly paid job as a courier or a socially significant, but less profitable profession?

The government wants to retrain 1.5 million specialists by 2030 to reduce the shortage of personnel in priority sectors of the economy, the media write. Educational institutions will annually graduate ( https://t.me/suverenka/9794 ) 250 thousand "retrained" people, which is 25% more than now. In addition, the Cabinet of Ministers wants to increase another indicator. The employment of graduates in the first year after training will be equal to 77%, now these figures are more modest - about 73%. These parameters are spelled out in the updated national project "Personnel", which officials will present to the President in September.

Vladimir Putin said that in the coming years we will have an acute shortage of personnel and qualifications. He and experts see the solution to the problem in increasing ( https://t.me/suverenka/9307 ) labor productivity. And for this, it is necessary to retrain employees. Previously, the personnel shortage was estimated at 2.4 million employed by 2030. We do not have a single industry in which there would not be an acute shortage of hands. The share of unfilled vacancies has become "astronomical" - 8%, although before 2020 it did not exceed 4%. The authorities want to retrain young specialists, disabled people of the 3rd group, military reserves, participants of the Special Military Forces, women on maternity leave, and so on.

But companies are now investing ( https://t.me/suverenka/10473 ) in retraining employees. Only they show little interest in this. The question is not whether the state needs more turners or doctors, but whether these specialties will be attractive to applicants. Officials need to remember that even now many students go to work outside their profession only because it is interesting but poorly paid. And this issue needs to be addressed in this paradigm - offering not only the job itself, but also a decent salary, social benefits, and so on. As long as it is more honorable and profitable in our society to become a blogger than a specialist in a socially significant sphere, retraining programs will not be effective.

https://t.me/suverenka/11009 - zinc

It suddenly became clear that for the development of the state, a working person is needed, for which it is necessary to increase the prestige of blue-collar jobs and restore the system of mass training of blue-collar specialists, because their shortage frankly hinders the development of domestic industry in general and the military-industrial complex in particular.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9361362.html

Google Translator

******

Vast majority of Russians distrust each other – poll
September 3, 2024
RT, 8/24/24

Nearly 73% of Russians agreed it is necessary to be cautious in interactions with fellow citizens, the latest survey conducted by the long-established Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) has found.

Only about a quarter of respondents (24%) are ready to trust most people, as the remaining 3% are undecided, the poll indicated.

People in Russia, however, seem no less confident in each other than they were six years ago, the researchers noted; in 2018, a similar poll suggested that 74% of respondents demonstrated caution when engaging with others.

Trust in others directly depends on financial stability; the latest poll indicates that confidence was lowest among people with lower incomes. Respondents who assess their family’s financial situation as “very good” and “good” demonstrated a tendency to trust people more often (30%) than those who think that their finances are “bad” or “very bad” (15%).

Men tend to exhibit less trusting behavior toward others than women in social exchanges. Some 40% of male respondents said that they expect other people to deceive them when the occasion arises, while only 30% of females shared their trepidation. Meanwhile, 51% of women and 45% of men expect honest behavior from other people in any situation; 21% and 15%, respectively, were undecided.

The researchers added that responses were different in various age groups, with younger people being more anxious about others’ reliability: 45% of those aged 18–24 fear other people may to let them down at some point, while the share of older age cohorts giving the same answer ranged from 28% to 35%.

Commenting on the results of the latest poll, Valery Fedorov, the head of VCIOM, stated that the level of interpersonal trust between Russians hit its nadir during the 1990s, when the nation underwent a severe crisis and shortages of basic goods due to the rapid transition from a state-planned to a market-based economy.

The official added that the tendency towards the normalization of public life had boosted trust, but was interrupted due to new “traumas” in society, including an extension of the retirement age in 2018, the coronavirus pandemic, and the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict, among other things.

“The younger generation, on which sociologists rest their hopes when it comes to the potential waning of distrustful trends, turned out to be victims of new, difficult times,” Fedorov said.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/09/vas ... ther-poll/

Is this a resut of the return of capitalism to Russia after 70 years of socialism?

[blindpig]

THE WAR AND THE WORLD, ACCORDING TO SERGEI KIRIENKO IN THE KREMLIN



by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Sergei Kirienko, a former prime minister of Russia and currently the Number-2 man in charge of President Vladimir Putin’s staff, believes Russia can win the information war against the US and its allies.

In his meetings behind closed doors at the Kremlin, Kirienko has revealed that he thinks Americans are so trusting in their press like the Washington Post, CNN, and Fox News, that if fake Post, CNN, Fox, and other dummies of the US media can be created to report positive propaganda about Russia, instead of the negative propaganda these media usually run, Americans will be convinced to switch sides in the war to destroy the Russian army on the Ukrainian battlefield, and the war of US sanctions to destroy the Russian economy.

Kirienko also believes this can be achieved by spending less than $5 million of Kremlin money on an information war consultant named Ilya Gambashidze.

This is the evidence presented in a Philadelphia court this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in an indictment for money laundering and trademark counterfeiting alleged against Gambashidze and his associates. Without saying how the agency got hold of his records, the FBI has quoted at length from Kirienko’s remarks to Gambashidze “between April 2022 and April 2023…[in] notes relat[ing] to at least 20 Russian Presidential Administration meetings.”

During that time the FBI charges that Kirienko, Gambashidze and other Russian officials decided to implement “foreign malign influence campaigns…designed to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies, and influence voters in U.S. and foreign elections by posing as citizens of those countries, impersonating legitimate news outlets, and peddling Russian government propaganda under the guise of independent media brands.”

The records of Gambashidze’s notetaking may not be authentic. Gambashidze may have misquoted, misrepresented or exaggerated what Kirienko told him. Gambashidze himself is quoted by the FBI as saying the evidence against him “is not completely true.”

The Kremlin has so far not responded.

For the rise of 62-year old Kirienko – birth name Israitel — during the Yeltsin administration, his ill-fated prime ministry in 1998, and his career promotions in the Putin administration, read this 44-story archive. For a brief summary, click.


Left: Kirienko in the Donbass in May 2022, where he has taken over direction of Russian policy in the new regions from Dmitry Kozak and Vladislav Surkov. Although Kirienko’s Kremlin responsibilities have concentrated on domestic policy until the Special Military Operation began in February 2022, there have been reports since then that he has also taken charge of plans to develop a “post-war” image of Russia among conservative political parties in the US and Europe.
Right: source -- https://johnhelmer.net/
The donkey totem in Kirienko’s career was first reported on June 13, 1999.

Detailing allegations of Kirienko’s role in Russian propaganda operations in the US, and also in Germany, France, Israel, Mexico, and the UK, the FBI affidavit runs for 277 pages. It was dated August 30 and unsealed in US Federal District Court in Philadelphia on September 4; click to read here.

The FBI has called Kirienko’s and Gambashidze’s plan of US media fakes “Operation Doppelganger.” It is part of a larger Department of Justice prosecution of “Influence Operation [which] Relied on Influencers, AI-Generated Content, Paid Social Media Advertisements, and Social Media Accounts to Drive Internet Traffic to Cybersquatted and Other Domains”. This is aimed by Vice President Kamala Harris’s election campaign to persuade US voters that their foreign enemies, the Russians, are trying to manipulate their votes, and that the Russians are secretly backing Donald Trump to win on November 5.


Source: https://www.justice.gov


Source: https://www.justice.gov/


Source: https://www.justice.gov/

In the second indictment, also issued on September 4, the Justice Department has alleged that “the Russian state broadcaster RT orchestrated a massive scheme to influence the American public by secretly planting and financing a content creation company on U.S. soil [and] to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.”

According to the US court papers, the Russian government spent about $3 million on the Kirienko-Kambashidze operation; $10 million on the RT scheme. In money outlays and employees, these Russian government efforts are dwarfed by their counterparts in the US, the European Union, and the UK.

As the battles of the information and propaganda war by the US against Russia go, there is nothing exceptional in the latest operations. The new FBI affidavit and Justice Department papers resume the story where the Russiagate revelations first began in January 2017 with the Golden Showers dossier. Follow that story here.


Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

This is ““The Lie That Won’t Die”, according to former CIA analyst on Russia, Ray McGovern. “Most Americans… will believe this recycled drivel from top Justice Department and F.B.I. officials, whose predecessors promoted the same gambit. As we pointed out four weeks ago in “Decay, Decrepitude, Deceit in Journalism,” thanks to Establishment media, Russiagate continues to survive ‘like a science fiction monster resilient to bullets.’ This, even though the $32 million Robert Mueller investigation found no conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign — a main plank in the Russiagate tale. The other main plank, that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers, was also debunked.”

What is novel, that’s to say unique, in the FBI evidence of this week is the Gambashidze record of what Kirienko has been thinking and saying, and by implication what Kirienko has been telling Putin.

For background on Gambashidze, 47, read the French propaganda agency report of February 2024. Using French, European Union, British and Ukrainian sources, France 24 claimed Gambashidze was one of several ambitious successors to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s propaganda operations in the US. The French report on Gambashidze was followed in May by the US propaganda organ, Voice of America:



Here is what the FBI now reports Kirienko as having said and decided, according to eight separately dated records which Gambaridze prepared, titling them his meeting minutes.

“That note from April 16, 2022 details a meeting led by SVK [Sergei Vladilenovich Kirienko] at which ‘SVK was taking detailed notes’ to discuss bolstering support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The meeting participants discussed topics for propaganda, and SVK provided his opinion, with GAMBASHIDZE recording SVK’s response to the ideas as ‘well received’, ‘need to work’, or ‘the right thing to do.’ SVK told the group they must use two mechanisms ‘to be effective: 1. Creating of a nuclear psychosis. The USA have been prepping Europe for a big war with the Russian Federation. War for peace. 2. Exaggeration.’ While GAMBASHIDZE’s note contains passing references to other meeting participants, the most substantive details recorded were when SVK provided his opinion or instructions.”
“On July 13, 2022, GAMBASHIDZE wrote a note titled ‘Minutes of the Meeting at the AP [Presidential Administration] on July 13, 2022.’ The note listed meeting participants as ‘Stas, Sofia, Ilya, and Sergey.’ I assess that the Sofia referenced is likely Sofia Zakharova, a Russian Presidential Administration spokesperson. Zakharova is a Kremlin official who has also focused on information technology and communications infrastructure. Zakharova has regularly taken part in conferences and events dedicated to artificial intelligence. Based on my training, experience, and information gathered through this investigation, I assess that the Ilya referenced is Ilya GAMBASHIDZE and that the Sergey referenced is KIRIYENKO. GAMBASHIDZE’s note identifies KIRIYENKO, as ‘SVK’, telling the meeting participants, ‘it’s an impossible task,’ which I assess to be a reference to the difficulties in effectuating the Doppelganger campaign. GAMBASHIDZE notes that the participants had ‘initially talked him into five countries. Now he says no.’ Based on the context of the note and this investigation, I assess that ‘him’ and ‘he’ refers to KIRIYENKO. GAMBASHIDZE records that the group agreed ‘the Germans are more dependent than the French’ and decided to focus its efforts on the Germans. In particular, the group agreed that ‘first and foremost, we need to discredit the USA, Great Britain and NATO, and secondly, we need to convey the truth about the war in Ukraine’ and the need to convince Germans to oppose the ‘inefficient politics of sanctions.””
“According to a note titled ‘Meeting Minutes AP_25.07.22 – 11.00’ SVK and others again discussed targeting Germany. SVK suggested ‘in order to normalize relations, it is necessary to show who caused them to deteriorate,’ and directed the meeting participants to influence German-Russian relations. The notes indicate that Sofia, whom I assess to be Zakharova, instructed the creation of ‘websites to tell the Germans the truth!’ Another participant suggested using ‘real facts to complement fake facts.’ One suggestion included trying to ‘make a fake on an American soldier that raped a German woman. That would be great!’”
“Another note, titled ‘AP Meeting Minutes, Monday, January 16’ referenced another party as being ‘fully in charge of filling the content on the Ukraine Tribunal portal.’ That note also indicated a topic ‘for business-elites’ as ‘Bypassing sanctions: they don’t need to be lifted, they need to be bypassed.’”
“In a note titled ‘Minutes of the Meeting at the AP, August 1, 2022’, GAMBASHIDZE mentioned that articles would be submitted to SVK’s office and that ‘so far three were well received.’”
“Another note, ‘Minutes_-_ECC_AP_05.04.23’, included a discussion of resources, wherein a participant reported ‘SVK is not against including our influencers abroad.’ That note referenced a French businessman whom the participants believed could do an ‘interview’ for ‘RRN’.”
“A note titled ‘Meeting Minutes -_AP_01.18.23’ refers to SVK as ‘listening to no more than ten newsworthy events’ and notes that ‘we need to create our OWN concept based on Ukraine monitoring and Tabak’s concept.’ GAMBASHIDZE noted, ‘They are expecting fake news from us every day.’”

The FBI told the court that of the 20 Gambashidze meeting minutes the agency has obtained, five did not list Kirienko as a present, although the officials at the meetings discussed with Gambashidze materials for Kirienko’s subsequent review, with requests for his approval.


According to the FBI, at least 13 of the meeting notes listed Sofia Zakharova, a Kremlin official reporting to Kirienko, as present and presiding. The FBI agent says that “based on my training, experience, this investigation, and the context and content of the notes, I assess that Zakharova reported to KIRIYENKO and conveyed information regarding these meetings to and from KIRIYENKO for his approval and further direction.”

Zakharova is also reported as telling Gambashidze that she was also reporting on their work to President Putin directly. “One note of a January 13, 2023, meeting attended by GAMBASHIDZE, Zakharova and others mentioned they had ‘reported to the President about the project.’ I assess that ‘the President’ refers to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The note stated that the participants should not constrain themselves to specific countries; rather, ‘false stories spread could be initiated everywhere, in different countries, even launched through media.’ The note referenced specific campaigns, including the use of influencers, a ‘media cluster’ with ‘40-50 websites per country,’ which I assess refers to creating unique media brands led by ANO Dialog, and making ‘political animated movies.’ After mentioning ‘our fakes will be restored’, ‘the IAG team’ was specifically assigned to work on ‘analytical products and videos.’ I assess that IAG is a reference to GAMBASHIDZE.”

Attached to the FBI affidavit are samples in Russian of the planning papers prepared by one of Gambashidze’s companies, Social Design Agency (SDA). Undated, the excerpts illustrate how Gambashidze and his associates interpret US politics, and their belief that the Kremlin should support the Republican Party (“Party B) and Trump’s re-election campaign. Note the racial analysis in Exhibits 9A and 9B.



The affidavit exhibits do not include facsimiles of Gambashidze’s notes of his meetings with Kirienko, Zakharova, and others in the presidential administration.

https://johnhelmer.net/the-war-and-the- ... more-90315

******

RAY McGOVERN: Conditioning Americans for War With Russia
September 4, 2024

With new U.S. action today against Moscow, Russiagate remains like a vampire, with no one able to drive a wooden stake into its heart and keep it there.


Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in August during a video meeting with government members. (President of Russia)

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

As the drums beat louder and louder about alleged threats from Russia, the Biden administration today blew perilous new life into the debunked and disgraced Russiagate disinformation operation.

Russiagate seems too good of a weapon for the Democrats to give up. Its initial appearance, beginning in 2016, dangerously raised tensions with nuclear-armed Russia. But in the midst of today’s escalating crisis in Ukraine, a Russiagate repeat recklessly raises danger to insane heights.

Here’s how The New York Times reported it today:

“The United States on Wednesday announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the 2024 election, as it tries to curb the Kremlin’s use of state-run media and fake news sites to sway American voters.

The actions include sanctions, indictments and seizing of web domains that U.S. officials say the Kremlin uses to spread propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine, which Russia invaded more than two years ago.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland detailed the actions taken by the Justice Department. They include the indictment of two Russian employees of RT, the state-owned broadcaster, who used a company in Tennessee to spread content, and the takedown of a Russian malign influence campaign known as Doppelgänger.

‘The American people are entitled to know when a foreign power engages in political activities or seeks to influence public discourse,’ Mr. Garland said. …

The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information pertaining to foreign interference in an American election.”

Garland testified: “The effort in this case is to affect the preferred outcome of the presidential election. … the Director of National Intelligence has testified that Russia’s preferences have not changed from the preceding election.”

CNN’s Breaking News alert dredged up thoroughly disproven myths of “Russia’s 2016 activity, which included hacking the Democratic National Committee and leaking documents aimed at undercutting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

The Lie That Won’t Die

Most Americans (not attentive readers of Consortium News) will believe this recycled drivel from top Justice Department and F.B.I. officials, whose predecessors promoted the same gambit.

As we pointed out four weeks ago in “Decay, Decrepitude, Deceit in Journalism,” thanks to Establishment media, Russiagate continues to survive “like a science fiction monster resilient to bullets.” This, even though the $32 million Robert Mueller investigation found no conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign — a main plank in the Russiagate tale.

The other main plank, that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers, was also debunked, as we shall get to shortly.

The government’s actions today were preceded by more Russiagate drivel last Saturday from a repeat offender, Michael Isikoff (via Spy Talk). This time around, Russiagate is consequential drivel as it helps grease the skids for war.

In 2017 Isikoff wrote (with David Corn) Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump — “how American democracy was hacked by Moscow to help Trump” (Amazon); a “most thorough and riveting account” (The New York Times).

It was all, as the British say, bollocks! In fact, a year after the “riveting” book came out, Isikoff had to admit publicly that the “Steele Dossier” and infamous “pee-tape” were “likely false.” He confessed during an interview on Dec. 15, 2018, (with an unsuspecting — and somewhat shocked) admirer.

[See: Michael Isikoff Cuts His Losses at ‘Russian Roulette’]

The Timing of Isikoff’s Confession


Isikoff during the Collision tech conference in Toronto in June 2023. (Vaughn Ridley/Collision via Sportsfile, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

I wondered why Isikoff volunteered his confession at the time (I had thought prematurely). Perhaps there is a clue in what follows:

On Dec. 5, 2017, the House Intelligence Committee took closed-door sworn testimony from Shawn Henry, a top official of the cyber security firm CrowdStrike hired by the F.B.I. to do the forensics on the Democratic National Committee computers.

Henry testified, we only found out years later, that there was no technical evidence that those DNC emails, which were so embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton when published by WikiLeaks, had been hacked, by Russia or by anyone else.

Did someone privy to that testimony tip Isikoff off, so that he could do a pre-emptive “modified, limited hangout” just 10 days later?

Wait! You did not know about Henry’s sworn testimony? Here’s why. Adam Schiff, then chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and the Establishment media have been able to keep that testimony hidden from nearly everyone for almost seven years.

The indignities do not cease. The C.I.A. analyst who wrote the first draft of the meretricious “Intelligence Community Assessment” of Jan. 6, 2017, which was used far and wide to “prove” Russian hacking of the DNC and other offensives, is bragging about the role he played.

Now retired, Michael van Landingham has told his story to Rolling Stone. We dissected it in our last piece.

The unrepentant Isikoff, just a few months ago, in Jeff Stein’s SpyTalk pushed the (now thoroughly discredited) claim that Russia hacked the DNC emails.

To remind one: those emails showed that, because of DNC and Clinton campaign machinations, Bernie Sanders had as much chance of becoming the 2016 Democratic Party nominee as the proverbial snowball in hell.

The Vampire


Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with U.S. President Joe Biden in Kiev, Feb. 20, 2023. (White House/Adam Schultz)

“Russian hacking the DNC” is like a vampire, with no one able to drive a wooden stake into its heart and keep it there. President Barack Obama himself knew it was phony, yet he expelled 35 Russian diplomats for hacking and other alleged meddling in the 2016 election.

Is Isikoff’s latest redux in SpyTalk a harbinger of more Russophobic brainwashing as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepare a response to Russia prevailing in Ukraine?

In the piece, Isikoff peddles the dangerous fantasy that Russia is threatening Europe beyond Ukraine, while at the same time saying Russia can’t even win in the Ukrainian “stalemate.” Isikoff does this in an interview with John Sullivan, a former U.S. envoy to Moscow, who’s just published a new book about his time in the Russian capital.

He says:

“’This is all about Russian aggression,’ Sullivan continued. ‘It happens to be directed at Ukraine, which is why the point of the spear is sticking into Ukraine, but it won’t end there. And I draw the analogies, many analogies in the book, to the Second World War and the start of the war in the 1930s and the late 30s.’”

Former President Donald Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway coined the expression “alternative facts.” With folks like Isikoff and van Landingham back in the saddle — and outlets like Spy Talk and Rolling Stone willing to promote them — expect as many “alternative facts” from Donkeys as from Elephants.

What is important to bear in mind is that the “alternative facts” about Russia are more dangerous by far, given the extremely high tension between Washington and Moscow.

— Joe Lauria contributed to this story.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/04/r ... th-russia/

******

Pre-Friday repressions
September 5, 17:07



Pre-Friday repressions.

A criminal case of fraud has been opened against former Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Colonel General Baryshev.

Baryshev stole a three-room apartment worth at least 20 million rubles by making false documents about his right to be provided with housing.

Also.

The court arrested former employees of the Russian Defense Ministry in a case of a bribe of 7.7 million rubles.
One of those arrested is the former head of the department engaged in the development of weapons on new principles, Aleksey Chekmazov, and his second deputy, Dmitry Fomin. The bribe was received from one of the contractors of the Russian Defense Ministry, which was fulfilling a contract for 1.5 billion rubles.

And this is only Thursday.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9364780.html

"Lada" and China. The future of the Russian auto industry
September 6, 11:16



The Russian car market continues to grow only thanks to the Chinese and Lada

In August 2024, new passenger car sales in Russia increased by 35.1% compared to the same period last year, reaching 148 thousand units. This indicates that the Russian car market continues to recover after the slump in 2022.

Lada dominates the market: AvtoVAZ sold 38.5 thousand Lada cars, increasing sales by 34.3%.
Among foreign brands, Chinese brands are in the foreground: The Belarusian brand Belgee took seventh place with sales of 3.5 thousand units.
Over the eight months of 2024, new car sales in Russia increased by 65.3%, exceeding 1 million cars.

Accents experts cite the following reasons for the growth.

Reduction of import duties: In Russia, import duties were reduced on some types of cars, which made them more affordable for consumers.

Active government policy. The Russian government provides subsidies and support programs for car buyers, which stimulates demand.

Development of the domestic auto industry. Russian manufacturers such as AvtoVAZ and Evolyut are actively developing and releasing new car models, which increases competition in the market.

It is expected that the Russian car market will continue to grow in the coming years.
Increased demand for new cars will stimulate further development of the domestic auto industry and attract investment. Moreover, some of the closed factories have not yet been launched, for example, the Circassian Derways ( https://t.me/emphasises/6676 ) (it was the first in Russia to start assembling Chinese cars).

https://t.me/suverenka/11069 - zinc

With China, everything was just clear (with each arrival in Moscow, there are more and more Chinese cars on the streets, they are flooding), it is absorbing the market abandoned by Western and Japanese companies, but the success of Lada was, frankly speaking, unexpected.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9366060.html

"Project deleted."
September 6, 9:14



The project to regulate bloggers with over 10,000 subscribers, which caused a fair amount of burning of the butts, has been postponed for now. Apparently for revision.
Once again we have a situation with extremely crude and undeveloped proposals being made, followed by a scandal and future revision.

In fact.

1. The state will strive to strengthen the regulation of the blogosphere.
2. In the form in which it was proposed to do it today, it is trash, frenzy and sodomy, which does not solve the problems facing the state.
3. Finding a balance between the desire of the state to strengthen control and the desire of the blogosphere to preserve some space for semi-autonomous discussions is still ahead.

I believe that by the end of the 20s, the issue of mandatory authorization and deanonymization of Internet users will be posed point-blank. The desire of the state to control its segment of the Internet (this applies not only to the Russian Federation) will face the problem of flooding social networks and comments on any resources with a wave of neural network users and comments imitating people (this is already a noticeable percentage and it will only get worse) and statements, which will make conventional methods of struggle and control weakly effective and will lead to the introduction of technical restrictions on access to social networks and comments through authorization using real personal data. Jokes about "Internet with a passport", in my opinion, in the foreseeable future will cease to be just jokes.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9365966.html

Google Translator

*****

On the results of parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan
September 5, 2024
Rybar

While the Central Election Commission of Azerbaijan counts the final results (it has a maximum of 20 days to do this) and transfers them to the Constitutional Court for final verification and approval (it has a maximum of 10 more days to do this), we can sum up the main political results of the voting that took place on Sunday .

Firstly, it is becoming a trend to reduce voter turnout in parliamentary elections. At the same time, ¾ of voters and more come to the presidential elections. Thus, it is emphasized that Azerbaijan is not an "oil sultanate" but a democratic state, and, secondly, the legislative power is clearly shown its place in relation to the President.

Regarding the new composition of the parliament, it can be clearly said that “the same old guys are on the stage,” with the clarification that some new figures have appeared, for example, the famous Soviet actor and experienced Azerbaijani ambassador to Moscow Polad Bulbul oglu, who was elected from Karabakh.

Sagiba Gafarova will most likely remain at the head of parliament and continue her international activities, essentially being the second Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan (a minister with a female face) .

The new parliament will have 10 opposition parties instead of 8, and most of them, as in 2020, will be represented only by the party leader. That is, the formal opposition will be 13 instead of 10 deputies. The ruling New Azerbaijan Party will have 68 mandates instead of 70.

According to the Central Election Commission, about 50,000 people could vote in Karabakh (in February, just over 20,000) . The electorate in Karabakh was made up of “refugees from the occupied territories” and “forced migrants” who were specially brought there.

Predictably, the elections were not recognized by the opposition and were characterized skeptically by the West . But both look toothless. The opposition National Council of Azerbaijan, in particular, considers the elections illegitimate, since "the authorities did not allow the PACE delegation to conduct an observation mission at the elections and banned 76 members of the assembly from entering Azerbaijan."

And the OSCE/ODIHR, in its preliminary statement, notes that “the elections took place in a restrictive political and legal environment that did not promote genuine pluralism and resulted in a non-competitive contest.”

At the same time, all international organizations friendly to Azerbaijan, such as the CIS, SCO, Organization of Turkic States, Non-Aligned Movement ( which has been living on Azerbaijan’s money in recent years ), Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation and others, recognized the elections as practically flawless.

To sum it up, we can say that the Azerbaijani authorities successfully held their first parliamentary elections throughout the country, and received members of parliament who will now legally represent the interests of not the refugees from Karabakh as before, but the population of Karabakh ( even if they were brought in ), which is a significant trump card in the negotiation process.

https://rybar.ru/ob-itogah-parlamentski ... bajdzhane/

Google Translator

******

Far Eastern Economic Forum: perhaps the least covered international event by Western major media this week

Vladimir Putin’s state visit to Mongolia at the start of this week drew the attention of U.S. and European media. The BBC and, I assume, other broadcasters put on screen video clips of the honor guard reception for the Russian President. However, nearly all coverage was directed at one very specific aspect of the visit: that it was Vladimir Putin’s first visit to a member state of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had issued a year ago an international arrest warrant following the Court’s determination of his responsibility for what Ukrainian authorities called a deportation of Ukrainian children to children from their homes in occupied Ukraine to the Russian interior.

I won’t go into the details of the allegations against Putin other than to say that the charges were false and defamatory, since the children involved, whether orphans or otherwise, were left without parental supervision in areas of combat. They were temporarily moved away for their own safety. The entire proceedings of the ICC were a textbook case of manipulation and abuse of international organizations by the United States and could only serve to discredit such institutions and limit their effectiveness in pursuing justice in other cases that fall within their remit.

What happened in Mongolia, which is a member of the ICC and has a judge in its ranks, is that Ulan Bator refused to execute the arrest warrant and proceeded to give Mr. Putin a very warm welcome indeed, to the dismay of the United States which, with France and other allies (see the visit of Emmanuel Macron not long ago), had in advance applied all possible pressure on the Mongol leadership, shall we say by the usual extortionate methods, to prevent the visit of the Russian president.

From the Russian perspective, Putin’s visit to Ulan Bator was timed to coincide with the September 2-3 observance of the end of WWII in the Pacific, thereby providing an opportunity to recall the time when Mongolia and Soviet Russia worked very closely together to combat Japanese occupiers of nearby Chinese Manchuria. The visit featured wide-ranging discussions of possible new joint Russian-Mongolian infrastructure projects, including the long-delayed construction of a Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline across Mongolia to facilitate deliveries of natural gas to China’s western regions.

For Mongolia, Putin’s visit provided an opportunity to assert its sovereignty and independence of Western meddling after a long period as a would-be American protectorate that began in the early 1990s when the Russian Federation slashed ties with Soviet dependencies like Mongolia and Cuba for which it no longer had the personnel or money to continue. Indeed, today Mongolia is both economically and diplomatically walking a tightrope between East and West very much in the same way as India. Commercial ties with Russia in particular are going strong, inasmuch as Russia provides one third or more of the country’s refined oil and other hydrocarbon imports.

None of these consequential elements of Mr. Putin’s visit to Mongolia were reflected in Western media accounts. No matter! What followed, when the Russian president proceeded on his way to the final destination of his trip, Vladivostok for the just opening Far Eastern Economic Forum was a still more complete news blackout by the West.

Well, not quite complete. I understand that the online editions of several British newspapers did serve up to their subscribers live coverage of Mr. Putin’s keynote address to the plenary session of the Forum yesterday.

Nonetheless, you likely have very little inkling of what has been going on in Vladivostok, and in the brief remarks that follow I will try to fill in the gaps.

*****

This was the 9th edition of the Far Eastern Forum in Vladivostok which is a counterpoint to the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum that takes place in the spring. As in Petersburg, the Vladivostok event brings in commercial and diplomatic missions from all over the world and it also has very important foreign statesmen who appear on the dais with Vladimir Putin during the plenary session. They deliver speeches and participate in a Q&A. This time there were more than 70 countries represented at the Forum and the VIP foreign guests were the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, and the Chinese Vice President, Han Zheng.

The presence of Mr. Ibrahim was particularly relevant and also shocking for the Collective West, which is one reason you did not see his face on the BBC this week. Just a reminder that Britain was the former colonial overlord in what is now Malaysia.

Malaysia has formally requested to join BRICS and Russia will be the sponsor of their candidacy. They will participate in the BRICS summit that will be held in Kazan on 26 October and their admittance to the club as full members is a foregone conclusion.

Malaysia will be the first member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to join BRICS, but we may well expect others to join soon after, starting perhaps with Vietnam. Their joining BRICS represents a significant departure from Malaysia’s hitherto close ties with the United States. There may be many explanations for this change of direction, but one standout is the country’s religious orientation. Malaysia’s population of 35 million is predominantly Muslim and they have watched with horror the Israeli genocide in Gaza which is enabled by Washington.

Russian commentators on Mr. Ibrahim’s address to the plenary session last night directed attention to his remarks on what sets Russia apart from other nations. Yes, he said, it is a major military power and economic power, but it is also a country with significant Soft Power attractiveness thanks to its cultural heritage. Ibrahim said that he was first drawn to the power of Russian literature through the books of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but then moved on to Chekhov and even the poetess Akhmatova. No doubt he said this with sincerity, but if he had been looking for a key to win over the sympathies of Russians for his country apart from the fine beaches which each year bring in 150,000 Russian tourists, then he could do no better than by highlighting Russian culture. We do not yet know what commercial deals were signed off between Malaysian and Russian companies during the Forum, but surely there were some successes at the level of mutual investments in manufacturing and software among other domains.

PRC Vice President Han Zheng was smiling and satisfied with the proceedings even when the moderator posed a rather provocative question about why the Chinese government seemed to be holding back Chinese companies from setting up shop across the border in Russia. Mr. Putin jumped in to soften the blow, explaining that Russia is doing everything possible now to make such moves more attractive to their prospective Chinese partners.

As regards China, Orientalist experts appearing on the Russian talk shows in the evening explained that there are ever closer relations being established between the northeast region of China and the Russian Far East region. Indeed, while the South of China is oriented to doing business with the United States and Europe, the Northeast is integrating with Russia. To add momentum to this trend, a number of the key infrastructure projects that President Putin mentioned in his address to the plenary session are precisely directed at improving logistics of trade across the Amur River, meaning additional bridges and improved customs posts so that waiting time for trucks can be reduced to 10 minutes or less.

What little reporting on Putin’s remarks at the Forum that we see in Western media have cherry picked his answers to some questions following his speech, so as to produce the impression that he spoke about the Ukraine conflict and was in one way or another threatening the West with nuclear attack. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This year’s Economic Forum was dedicated to the theme of the Far Eastern region in 2030. Accordingly, Mr. Putin’s speech dealt exclusively with Russia’s plans for accelerated development of the region through two parallel sets of initiatives: building infrastructure to attract companies to the region and ensuring living conditions for the local population that are highly attractive. The idea is to offer career growth to Russians under the age of 35 who will settle there for a good long time, raise families and provide a pool of skilled manpower to drive economic expansion that far outstrips that of other Russian regions.

The infrastructure investments by the government will focus first on logistics and transportation. This means doubling or more the freight capacity of the mainline railroads serving the region, namely the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal-Amur railway (BAM in Russian). In the time period under discussion, Russia will complete construction of a major highway extending from Petersburg in the West to Vladivostok in the East. It means expanding airports, expanding seaports and the like in the Maritime region and in the adjacent Far Eastern regions as far west as Eastern Siberia and as far north as the arctic coast where further investment is needed to accommodate growing use of the Northern Sea Route and to serve the centers of extractive industries. Some of the regional infrastructure will be done in joint government-private business ventures, with which Russia has many years of fruitful experience now.

With regard to incentives to encourage migration to the Far East, the existing preferential 2% mortgage rate for settlers under the age of 35, for veterans of the SMO, for doctors, school teachers and other professions in great demand will be continued and expanded to take in still more categories of applicants. New housing developments will be endowed with medical clinics, high quality schools and other essentials of comfortable family life. The days of dormitory accommodations for workers attached to factories built in vast empty lands typical of the Soviet days are recognized as having inhibited long term settlement of the region, and will not be repeated.

Particular efforts will be made to improve higher education with establishment of additional university centers and expansion of existing ones, as in Vladivostok itself. Where possible, commercial research centers will be attached to these universities.

In fact, the guiding principles of the master plan for the period to 2030 have been in place for nearly a decade, though they were financed much more modestly. Nonetheless, they achieved results that Vladimir Putin could read off to the audience: namely positive demographic trends, especially as regards young settlers aged 20-22 and the higher rate of economic growth. As Putin said in the conclusion of his speech, the Far Eastern region is the leader in Russia’s outreach to the world, being situated among the world’s most dynamic countries that outpace the West by more than 2:1.

To be sure, Vladimir Putin allowed himself to be drawn into discussion of world events outside the framework of the Forum. It is in this context that he spoke of the dire situation of the Ukrainian military in the Donbas, who have exhausted their human reserves and lost their armor. He also allowed himself to reply to a question about whom Russia favors as winner of the November presidential elections in the USA. With a wry smile, he acknowledged that Russia’s choice is Kamala because of her ‘contagious smile.’ He said he does not believe that a person with such a smile could be truly hostile. To this, I will quote from Verdi’s Rigoletto: ‘le prince s’amuse.’

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/09/06/ ... this-week/

[blindpig]

Mikhail Mishustin chairs strategic session on national projects for 2025-2030 (Prime Minister of the Russian Federation)
September 9, 2024 Leave a comment
Russian government website, 8/27/24

Mikhail Mishustin: “The tasks are significant and complex, requiring substantial resources. To keep the budget balanced, careful planning is essential to ensure funds are used efficiently and yield specific results.”

Mikhail Mishustin’s opening remarks:

Good afternoon, colleagues.

Today, we are finalising the creation of a new portfolio of national projects for the next six years. The initial concepts emerged at the end of last year, immediately following the meeting of the Council for Strategic Development and National Projects. The process of defining specific areas of activity for the future documents began in accordance with the objectives set out in the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly and the May executive order.

In this process, not only the heads of relevant departments were involved, but also a diverse group of experts, including representatives from the business sector, scientific and expert communities, the Federal Assembly, and the regions.

As a result, 19 projects were developed, each with ambitious goals for our country’s development through the end of the current decade, along with a detailed list of those responsible and project overseers.

The President also addressed key approaches in this area during yesterday’s meeting. He stressed the importance of evaluating how each decision, event, and legal amendment contributes to achieving the national development goals.

I will highlight the most crucial projects that deserve our focused attention. These include Family, Infrastructure for Life, Long and Active Life, and, of course, Youth and Children. These projects encompass essential decisions aimed at enhancing the lives of our citizens. They are designed to improve the quality of the environment in communities, address demographic challenges, and provide support for motherhood and childhood, as well as improve the healthcare and education systems, and housing availability.

Implementing these projects will enable the construction of thousands of new schools, kindergartens, and sports facilities, as well as major renovations of cultural and higher education institutions. It will also support the ongoing modernisation of housing and utility services, improve public transportation, road conditions, and advance the landscaping of various areas.

A priority was given to achieving technological leadership, which is of vast importance in the current situation, where a number of states are still a source of external challenges and unfriendly actions.

There are nine national projects aimed at reaching this goal. Within the next few years, Russia must continue to work pro-actively to create a technological and production base of its own. In the chemical industry, for example, dozens of new technological chains should emerge before the end of this decade. In the composites, over 15 production facilities and 60 products are expected to be added. The output of drones should be increased five-fold.

As for the transport sector, it should provide people with extensive opportunities for wayfaring and business and private travel in a comfortable environment and at affordable prices. Businesses, at the same time, should have enough funds for effective freight transportation. For this purpose, the share of Russian-made aircraft in the national fleet should constitute no less than 50 percent by the end of the current decade.

We will do this within the framework of national projects, including Means of Production and Automation, New Materials and Chemistry, Transport Mobility, New Health-Saving Technologies, Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems, and others.

These solutions should help our country both to meet the existing challenges and continue the in-depth transformation of the Russian economy, primarily with an eye to shaping a supply-side economy, with its non-resource component on the upgrade. By 2030, we will have to increase the share of gross value-added in real terms and the manufacturing industry’s production index by no less than 40 percent on 2022. Yet another goal is to ensure that Russia is one of the top ten world leaders in R&D and to increase the domestic spending on these purposes to no less than 2 percent of the GDP.

It is also necessary to increase the share of domestically produced hi-tech goods and services created on the basis of Russian innovations in the overall volume of their consumption by 50 percent and the earnings of small-sized technological companies – by no less than 600 percent as compared with last year’s level. Economic growth should be accompanied with a rise in people’s wellbeing and increased industrial earnings, a build-up in private investment, definitive solution of the personnel shortage problem, and introduction of a modern governance model based on Big Data. The Effective and Competitive Economy, Personnel, Data Economics and Digital Transformation of the State, and Tourism and Hospitality Industry national projects are aimed at reaching these objectives.

In this area, by the end of the decade, 40 percent of medium-sized and large enterprises in basic non-resource industries, as well as all state and municipal social sphere organisations will need to be involved in the implementation of projects aimed at increasing labour productivity. This is in order to create favourable conditions for small and medium-sized businesses to develop tourist infrastructure, build new federal year-round resorts and adopt state-of-the-art platform solutions and services for public administration, benefiting people and businesses.

Colleagues,

The tasks are significant and complex, requiring substantial resources. To keep the budget balanced, careful planning is essential to ensure funds are used efficiently and yield specific results.

Today, we will discuss in detail our priorities and the financial component because we have little time for adjustments.

I want to remind you of what the President said during yesterday’s meeting. National projects should not include insignificant, non-working items that serve only bureaucratic purposes, but should instead focus on producing real results and practical, positive changes in people’s lives.

As early as in September the entire portfolio of new national projects should be submitted to the Presidential Council for Strategic Development. Please, keep this in mind as we proceed.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/09/mik ... ederation/

(And now from the Russian liberals at the other Bell who see a dark cloud in every sliver lining.)

The Bell: Russian Central bank forecasts suggest higher inflation for longer
September 10, 2024
The Bell, 8/30/24

Russia’s mid-term future: high interest rates and high inflation
Russia’s Central Bank published Thursday a document laying out its vision for the economy over the coming three years. Titled the “Main Directions of Monetary Policy 2025-27,” it examines four different scenarios (the worst of which would see Russia plunge into a deeper crisis than 2008). Taken together, the scenarios appear to confirm that Russia will continue to increase spending on the war in Ukraine, and that the country is likely to face persistent high inflation and several years of double-digit interest rates.

Four scenarios
This is an annual report, and the Central Bank always reviews several different scenarios for economic development. Last year, there were three such scenarios, this time (“due to complex internal and external circumstances”) there were four: one baseline, two pessimistic (persistent inflation and high-inflation) and one optimistic (low-inflation).



The bank’s baseline scenario assumes that inflation will slow to 4-4.5% next year, and will continue to hover around 4% in the longer term. To achieve this, monetary policy will remain tight. GDP would grow by 3.5-4% in 2024, before slowing in 2025 and 2026.



The baseline scenario is the one considered most plausible. However, one of the biggest variables is the level of state spending and state subsidies in the coming years, Central Bank deputy chairman Aleksei Zabotkin told journalists at a press conference.

Both pessimistic scenarios (persistent inflation and high-inflation) assume that interest rates will remain in double digits. In the persistent inflation scenario, the labor market would remain tight and inflation would be driven by high domestic demand (which, in turn, would be supported by state spending), as well as increased wages. In this scenario, average interest rates would have to stay one or two percentage points higher than in the baseline. But even under such tight monetary conditions, inflation was not predicted to fall to 4-4.5% until 2026.



The high-inflation scenario is even more dire. In this eventuality, the problems in the Russian economy are amplified by a serious deterioration in external circumstances: disbalance on the financial markets leading to a global financial crisis and recession. While the Russian economy is internationally isolated, falling demand for Russian products was still assumed to cause significant damage. This scenario also envisaged more Western sanctions on Russia. If this comes to pass, the prediction is that the Russian economy would enter recession, inflation hit 13-15% and interest rates soar to 22%.



There is also an optimistic scenario – low-inflation. This assumes significant increases in investment, and growth in productivity. In this case, inflation would fall faster than in the baseline scenario, economic potential would increase, and GDP would rise.



However, with the Kremlin’s current economic policies and existing structural restrictions, the chances of this scenario occurring are not great.

Inflation is here to stay
Under current circumstances the persistent inflation scenario is the most likely of the four. It assumes that the high demand we witnessed in the second half of 2023 will be sustainable, and will continue through 2025. In other words, the state will maintain high levels of spending in order to fund the war in Ukraine.

The persistent inflation model also assumes stronger protectionist policies, as well as the imposition of import tariffs to stimulate import substitution. Winegrowers and winemakers, domestic electronics assemblers, polymer and plastic processors, manufactures of Russian trucks and automobiles and many other sectors are already urging the government to impose import tariffs. Of course, any new foreign trade tariffs are, by definition, pro-inflationary. They make imported goods more expensive and push up demand for domestic goods, which translates to increased prices.

However, government spending is the biggest inflation driver. The Central Bank estimates that the cost of fulfilling all of the goals set by President Vladimir Putin in this year’s state-of-the-nation address will be 18 trillion rubles ($199 billion) between now and 2030. This includes new social spending, loan write-offs, tax breaks and more. In its reports, the Central Bank highlighted Putin’s promises to increase the minimum wage by an annual average of 10.5% through 2023; index pensions at 8.8-14.7% every year; resume indexed pensions for working pensioners from 2025; and increase payments for children. In addition, Putin announced major spending on road building, housing and communal services. Of course, the government can always postpone these spending plans, and use alternative sources of income to fund its war (read more about this here).

State spending has a huge impact on demand and inflation, according to the Central Bank. It results in organizations and the public demanding more credit to expand production and consumption, including real estate purchases – and increases in interest rates are unable to fully keep pace with these pro-inflationary factors. Moreover, in this scenario, businesses and households will focus more on past cases of high inflation when making purchasing decisions, which risks fixing inflationary expectations at a higher level.

The Central Bank has already alerted the Kremlin to the risk of increasing inflation. At a meeting on Aug. 26, Putin urged the government to assist the bank in curbing rising prices, Vedomosti reported. The discussion focused on measures to reduce subsidized lending.

Why the world should care
The most likely economic scenario for Russia’s economy over the next three years appears to be one of accelerating inflation and high interest rates. The Central Bank’s latest three-year forecasts assume increases in state spending (far outstripping what will be collected via higher taxes). This would be yet another major boost to inflation.

EU imports to Russia in June hit lowest monthly level for 20 years
The volume of imports from the European Union to Russia in June reached its lowest level for more than 20 years, according to Eurostat figures. Total exports from the EU to Russia in June were worth €2.472 billion – the lowest figure since Jan. 2003.

The main reasons for the ongoing collapse in these figures are EU sanctions and the threat of secondary U.S. sanctions, plus the voluntary withdrawal of European companies from trade with Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The decline is visible in all sectors—from automobiles and alcohol to microchips and machine tools. However, the same Eurostat data indicates that Russia is meeting its need for European goods with the help of “friendly” nations.
This is illustrated by one of Russia’s key defense sectors: machinery and transport. Here, the drop in European exports to Russia has been matched by a sudden increase in exports to some ex-Soviet nations, the UAE, and Turkey. This growth cannot be explained by surging demand in those countries and strongly suggests that the buyers are simply re-exporting EU goods to Russia.



Evidence of re-export is also visible in microchips (the EU has almost completely banned microchip exports to Russia). Direct trade in these crucial parts between the EU and Russia plummeted from being worth €56 million in June 2021 to just €2,500 in June 2024. However, at the same time, Russia’s neighbours actively started importing microchips from Europe: for example, Turkey bought €14 million worth in June 2021 and €24 million worth in June 2024. The growth is even more steep in countries like Armenia in the South Caucasus and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, although the volumes are smaller.
This can also be seen in the market for ship propellers and blades. Before the war, Russia imported €2.5 billion worth a year of these products. Now, they are classed as dual-usage goods and cannot be delivered directly. However, countries like Turkey, the UAE and even landlocked states such as Armenia and Kyrgyzstan have significantly increased their orders of European propellers.
It’s difficult to gauge China’s role in re-exporting to Russia from these statistics as the volumes are too big to pick out tell-tale anomalies. Nevertheless, many believe that Beijing is the biggest re-exporter of EU goods to Russia.
Western countries have long been concerned about the re-export of sanctioned goods to Russia, especially dual-use goods. The recent 14th package of EU sanctions addresses the issue by requiring exporters to check the final purchaser. The U.S. also threatens to impose secondary sanctions in case of re-exporting the sanctioned goods. The effect of these measures will take some time to materialise in full.
Why the world should care
It’s unlikely that the recent anti-circumvention measures will completely stop or greatly reduce re-exports to Russia. However, the more barriers are put in place, the more expensive it will be for Russian companies to obtain the Western goods they require. This pushes up inflation inside Russia and limits productivity.

Figures of the week
Inflation is falling. Between Aug. 20 and Aug. 26, weekly inflation was 0.03% (last week, it was 0.04%), according to the Economic Development Ministry. Annual inflation slowed from 9.04% to 9.01%. Despite the seasonal fall in fruit and vegetable prices, food prices continue to rise. Only regulated prices, as well as the costs of household and tourist services, are falling.

In the first half of this year, state-owned gas giant Gazprom increased its net profits 3.5 times year on year to 1.04 trillion rubles, according to the company’s financial statement. The growth is primarily due to increased gas exports following last year’s catastrophic fall, plus rising oil exports. In the first six months of 2024, gas exports to the EU were up by a quarter, from 14.8 billion cubic meters to 18.3 billion cubic meters. Over 2024 as a whole, Gazprom expects deliveries to China to increase by a third, from 22.7 billion cubic meters to 30 billion cubic meters, rising to 38 billion cubic meters next year. However, the price of selling gas to China is lower than to Europe, and exports are limited because there is only a single pipeline connecting the two countries. For the moment, the Chinese market is not enough for Gazprom to replace the losses it has suffered from the war and Western sanctions.

After a slight slowdown in June, industrial output in July returned to growth, according to Russia’s State Statistics Service. The industrial production index was up 3.3% in July, driven by the manufacturing sector. The four sectors with the biggest growth are all related to the war in Ukraine: computers and optics, finished metal products, medicine and healthcare, and transport.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/09/the ... or-longer/

*******

Russia’s Prosecution of the War in Ukraine: Can It Square the Circle of Probable Boundary Conditions?
Posted on September 9, 2024 by Yves Smith

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Although this perspective is absent from mainstream Western media, the not-Russia hostile map-watchers and independent commentators, particularly those with some military or intel expertise, are increasingly arguing that Ukraine has no hope of prevailing in the war. That means Russia will decide how far to take the conflict, in terms of territorial conquest.

Most further posit that Russia in the end will impose terms. The fact that Ukraine committed its last reserves to its Kursk gamble strengthens their position. Despite that incursion being a huge embarrassment to Russia as well harming the citizens in the area, strategically, Douglas Macgregor deemed the terrain to be as valuable as New Jersey’s pine barrens. And rather than requiring Russia to pull troops from the extended line of contact to contain the Kursk invasion, Ukraine instead has wound up thinning its forces there to bolster its Kursk operation.

As we will unpack, it remains an open question as to whether Russia being able to take all of Ukraine is a high-class problem or risks becoming the dog catching the car. What Putin’s critics see as undue slow-walking of the campaign may not simply reflect his characteristic caution but bona fide concerns.

We’ll work though how some likely Russian boundary conditions in fact make it tricky for Russia to come to fully satisfactory outcomes.

Back to a high-level review of the current state of play. The result on the battlefield has been that Ukrainian lines are stretched even further than before, with Russia’s grinding through naturally well-fortified (and often further fortified) towns and small cities much faster than before. Even the Anglosphere press occasionally registers that Ukraine is now very much on the back foot.

Add in that Russia resumed attacks on the electrical grid, after a bit of a lull, turning out the lights over much of Ukraine. Three days ago, the Kyiv Post reported that the best case winter scenario was 12 hours of power a day, the worst only four. Note that the latter estimate does assume additional Russian attacks.

To state what should be obvious: a country with barely any power is not able to operate. Think of all the essentials that are crippled, from elevators to sewage plants to refrigeration to banking and payments systems. As John Helmer pointed out early on, this is Russia’s easiest way to prostrate Ukraine. And with Ukraine’s air defenses severely diminished, Russia can readily take this decisive step.

However, one constraint on Russia may be not wanting to create a large-scale humanitarian crisis. Despite the US regularly engaging in nation-breaking (for instance, in the aftermath of the Iraq War, the media in Australia reported power was barely operating in Baghdad and hospitals were looted), it gets a free pass. Putin, who while this war is on is also trying to play midwife to a multipolar world order, is attempting to present Russia as a responsible superpower.

Yet Helmer has also reported on the considerable impatience in the General Staff with Putin not accelerating the tempo of the war anywhere nearly as much as he could. One countervailing force, as we have discussed, is Russia’s need to keep the good will and economic (as opposed to military) support of key allies, particularly China, India, and Turkiye. They have stood up to Western sanctions despite persistent US and EU efforts to make them more stringent. But more and more companies are being blacklisted, and in some cases, that does entail costs to them, if not so much to the broader economy.

These backers, on the whole, appear to suffering from cognitive dissonance. They do seem to accept Putin’s argument that the Collective West actions after breaking up the Istanbul peace talks particularly their dogged insistence that Ukraine will indeed eventually become part of NATO, leaves Russia with no choice but carrying on until the other side recognizes its position is untenable. They understand that having a hostile military organization on a border is unacceptable.

Yet these major powers (ironically save perhaps Turkiye, which likely does have a keen appreciation of Russia’s predicament but has other issues to navigate) don’t like the fact of Russia’s invasion and don’t like the trade and other economic costs imposed on them by the conflict. China ought to want Russia to continue to bleed the Collective West so as to save China the trouble, so it is likely more supportive of Putin’s position privately than publicly, where it continues to present itself as wanting peace and positioning itself as a potential negotiator.

As an aside, even as India and China talking up negotiations, as in signaling that is their preferred outcome, yours truly also has contacts who bizarrely maintain that they are confident Russia will enter into negotiations after the US elections. The wee problem here is that Russia is not seeking negotiations. Putin has simply maintained the door is open, even after Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has recently declared US-Russia relations to be at an all time low.1 That level of distrust and hostility does not make for having successful talks.

Since Russia is not actively seeking a deal, the US would have to make an offer that will seen both attractive and credible to Russia. The credible part alone is a bridge too far, given that Russia even before the war the US to be not agreement capable.2 And even if a current Administration were to experience a Damascene conversion and make Russia a shockingly meaningful offer (say releasing the frozen $300 billion and unwinding the sanctions over a protracted timetable, in return for Russia meeting certain conditions for each phase of the rollback), how could Russia trust that it would not be reversed with a new President, as in as soon as four years later?

On top of that, even if the Collective West were to swallow its considerable pride, and make a proposal that reflected current realities, there are huge procedural hurdles. The US/NATO combine will feel compelled to maintain the fiction that Ukraine has agency. But Putin took to pointing out not long after Zelensky stayed as President after the Presidential election date came and went, that the reading of his experts of the Ukraine constitution was that executive power should pass to the head of the Rada. Obviously, nothing of the kind has occurred. Russia could entirely reasonably refuse to negotiate with Zelensky and insist Ukraine offer up a legitimate negotiating counterparty and watch that rattle around the Western political and press pinball machine. Putin more recently has reminded listeners that Zelensky signed a decree barring negotiations with Russia if Putin was president, and that would have to be rescinded before Russia could entertain any peace offers.

Another Russian requirement would be a solid commitment that Ukraine would not join NATO. Again, Putin has pointed out that not only did Ukraine agree to that in Istanbul in March-April 2022, but an official in Ukraine’s Rada initialed the draft terms. So having established decisively that Ukraine is not in the drivers’ seat, Russia would need more than Ukraine’s say-so that it was really renouncing NATO.

Even though the US is the not-so-secret NATO decider, the US could not be seen to be forcing NATO to commit to “No Ukraine as member, evah” or making its own deal outside NATO (Well, take that back, Trump has so little respect for NATO he could try, but then NATO would have a hissy and refuse to go along). So NATO would somehow have to agree never to admit Ukraine (you can see how far we have gone into alternative universe land to come up with a pact that might satisfy Russia).

But that is pretty much structurally impossible for NATO. Aurelien, in one of his extensively detailed posts, described how NATO formally is a weak alliance (as in not asking for much in the way of impingement on national sovereignity) to get more countries to join. For instance, even the much-vaunted Article 5 is not much of an obligation. Each state decides on its own if and how much to defend an attacked NATO member.3 So NATO cannot impose additional obligations on NATO members without going through a lot of hoops (an amendment to the charter). This problem is now in focus as Turkiye has petitioned to join BRICS. Some NATO officials and former national leaders re objecting to the idea. Yet NATO has no mechanism for kicking Turkiye out (there is a material breach provision, but using that would be a stretch, aside from the other wee problem that the exclusion of Turkiye would considerably weaken NATO).

The impediments to creating a permanent bar to Ukraine entry would appear to be even greater, given that that blocking a prospective member is not contemplated in the treaty. There’s the additional issue that the Baltic states and probably the UK and Poland would be opposed. So would bi-lateral treaties with most NATO members do for Russia? And pray tell, how long would that take?

So shorter: the US/NATO doubling down on its position that Ukraine will someday be part of NATO leaves Russia with no option other than to subjugate Ukraine.

But what does “subjugate” amount to? The dog-catching-the-car problem that Russia faces is that it seems vanishingly unlikely that Russia ever thought it might have to occupy nearly all of Ukraine (We are skipping over the idea of creating a puppet state since that would presuppose occupation).

Recall that Ukraine is very big, the second largest European nation after Russia. That would almost certainly require an even larger military, including service members tasked to administration.5 Putin remarked a few months ago, in what seemed to be a planned aside, that Russia didn’t need to mobilize further unless it decided to take Kiev.

A big and basic conflict is that the need to subjugate Ukraine is at odds with a major Putin boundary condition of not wanting to do much more in the way of mobilization, or otherwise put Russia on more of a war footing.

One good part of this picture from the Russian vantage is that it has greatly ramped up the level and caliber of its arms production without impinging much on the consumer economy. But there are some complaints that the high military pay is pulling some men out of civil jobs. This problem will get worse if Russia needs to beef up force levels.

The more bloody-minded, which includes Deputy Security Council chairman Medvedev and the General Staff, think that amounts to occupying most of Ukraine, save probably the area around Lvov.4 We’ve repeatedly commented on one solution that John Helmer published very early on, that of creating a big DMZ in the form of a large de-electrified zone.

I do not even remotely buy the idea of Russia taking Ukraine east of the Dnieper only. First, as we have explained, Russia will take all of Kherson and Zaporzhizhia oblast since Russia deems them to be part of Russia. Both of them straddle the Dnieper. Russia will thus need to secure pretty much all of the Dnieper watershed to protect those territories.6 The division of Berlin is not a precedent for Ukraine; Berlin is on marshy land and its river is not a major tributary.

If one very optimistically assumes a military and/or no-power-induced economic collapse resulting from Donbass operations plus additional grid-pounding, so that Russia does not have to greatly increase force levels to conquer major cities, the levels conventionally assumed for occupation (10 soldiers for every 1000) does not seem impossibly high given an ex-Ukraine Prime Minster’s estimate of late last year that only 19 million remained in the Ukraine controlled by the government in Kiev. That would work out to 190,000.

But if thing do not break Russia’s way, it will have to conquer major cities. Again it is over my pay grade, but given that Russia has declared all of Zaporzhizhia and Kherson oblasts to part of Russia, securing control of their capital cities would seem to be a priority. Russia occupied Kherson city, including west of the Dnieper, but famously pulled out. Russia has heavily shelled that part of the city, and it’s reportedly largely emptied out. Nevertheless, Kherson had a population of 290,000 before the war, so it is smaller than Mariupol, but still pretty hefty. Zaporzhizhia’s population was nearly 750,000, so it will be bigger than any city Russia has taken so far.

In other words, Russia already has a lot of work cut out unless and until the Ukraine military obligingly falls apart. Recall that other cities on the minimal “subjugate Ukraine” list are even bigger: Odessa at just shy of a million, Kharkiv city at 1.4 million, and Kiev at 2.9 million.

But Russia also has the “you broke it, you own it” problem. It already faces the need to rebuild huge swathes of the Donbass that have been reduced to rubble. That is particularly important to keep some level of good will with the ethnic Russians who have been suffering since 2014 and whose interests served as a major justification for this conflict.

Even if Russia can subdue most of the rest of Ukraine via the destruction of the power system, it will take a very long time to restore it unless the damage has been very surgical. In the Iraq War, the US took out over 90% of Iraq’s electrical system in mere hours at the start of the conflict. Three years later and after billions in expenditure, according to Western sources, Baghdad had only about six hours of power a day. Of course, the Russians would likely be more serious about trying to get things back to some semblance of normalcy, but this gives an idea of the magnitude of the task.

We have skipped over the wee problem of denazification. It appears that a lot of the Banderite soldiers have gotten themselves assigned to role of stiffeners, which means among other things being just behind the front lines so as to shoot anyone who tries to retreat or surrender. That of course means their survival rates are vastly higher than those of other battle forces. Presumably they won’t be able to continue to (significantly) hide from actual fighting as the Ukraine manpower situation gets even more desperate.

But will neo-Nazis continue to be advantaged if the military collapse scenario takes place? Will they be afforded routes to Lvov or out of Ukraine not available to others save perhaps top officials? Russia can hope that continued prosecution of the war will thin the Banderite ranks, but how much is very uncertain.

The point of this somewhat long-winded discussion is that the security needs of Russia are at odds with its domestic economic priorities. Russia has managed through good luck and even better management to finesse this problem so far, but that looks likely to become more difficult soon.

Putin has repeatedly stated his intent to invest more in communities in the hinterlands, to reduce the gap in their amenities as compared to bigger cities in Western Russia. Making a commitment to rebuild in Ukraine, even if merely to the level of stabilizing the Russian-dominated parts of Ukraine, is a tall order. The demands increase the more Russia feels it has to occupy.

Perhaps Russia will succeed in precipitating the much-anticipated Ukraine collapse soon. But what might it do then to secure and stabilize the country? What happens when state and local officials are no longer being paid, let alone have no or almost no funds to pay for outside services? How about when the country descends into hyperinflation? Do government entities continue to operate on some sort of chits? Do many decamp to the countryside to go survivalist or head to Poland? And does Russia let these swathes of Ukraine descend into chaos and desperation in the hope that at least some communities seek to have Russia take over to provide minimal services? Alternatively, what does Russia do if the West instead uses the disintegration as a pretext to move its own peacekeepers in, allegedly to restore order? That risk would argue strongly against Russia letting Ukraine fall apart without a large-scale intervention to forestall that move.

So my guess, and this is a guess, as opposed to a prediction, is that even if the Ukraine military starts cracking up soon in a big way, Russia won’t make a bold move. Some of this posture would be to build up very good supply lines before doing anything. But it would seem to be in Russia’s interest to continue to kill Ukrainian men, further deplete NATO weapon stocks, and (via intermittent power as the cold kicks in) get more Ukrainians to leave Ukraine before determining how to proceed beyond the four oblasts. Russia has very complex and difficult decisions in store. Diminishing Ukraine as much as it can without advancing all that much further will give Russia more information and could allow it to rule out at least a few options.

____

1 US/Russia relations appear to be a cratering stock. A search showe Russia has been saying its dealings with the US are at new lows since at least 2017.

2 Remember the Western parties did not honor the Ukraine grain deal. Russia was to allow seaborne shipments along side a second and equally important part of the deal, which the Anglosphere media bizarrely or predictably, depending on your degree of cynicism, never mentions. The sanctions on the Russian agricultural bank were to be lifted so as to allow Global South countries, particularly in Africa, to purchase Russian fertilizer. This key element was never honored. Putin bent over backwards to try to be fair, agreeing to a renewal of the pact (IIRC subject to 90 day renewals, otherwise it expired) despite the US and EU being out of compliance. To add insult to injury, Ukraine also used the presumed safe shipping corridor to launch an attack on Sevastopol. The Western press inaccurately depicts Russia as withdrawing from the agreement as opposed to failing to renew it.

3 You can see this is pretty thin gruel. From NATO:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .

4 Medvedev has published a map showing how Western Ukraine could be partitioned among neighboring states like Poland, Romania, and Hungary, with a tiny Greater Kiev as the remaining Ukraine. But that was some time ago and the thinking among the hawks has moved on.

5 This was a problem for the US after World War II. The US wanted to purge Nazis from the administration of Germany. Patton argued publicly and privately against that, arguing that most Nazis had been camp followers as opposed to enthusiasts. Some of this unduly charitable view was based on a belief that they were needed to run the defeated state; another was that they would be valuable in fighting the Soviets. Keep in mind, with far less fanfare, the US kept many officials from Imperial Japan in place, partly out of bureaucratic convenience, partly out of seeing them as less bad than the socialists that were filling the power vacuum.

6 We have to keep re-hoisting this explanation from PlutoniumKun, apparently due to widespread reluctance to accept its implications:

Another reason that Russia will in some form have to control a significant part of Western Ukraine is the Dnieper watershed. Recall Russia by its own law now deems all of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporzhizhia oblasts to be part of Russia:



Note that Kherson (in particular the city of Kherson) and Zaporzhizhia (including the city of Zaporzhizhia) both straddle the Dnieper. We hoisted this comment from PlutoniumKun last month, and it bears repeating:

PlutoniumKun noted recently in comments:

I’m glad for once to see someone mention water and sewerage, something often overlooked in all the high level military/geostrategic theorising. Ukraine is topographically flat, which means that nearly all its water services require active pumping.

This has clear strategic implications (nevermind the hardships this will cause for millions of Ukrainians). There is a good reason why most uncontentious national boundaries follow watersheds, not the obvious boundary of rivers – because once a river is shared, you need intensive co-operation on a wide range of issues, from fishing to bridges and dams and flood controls and… water quality. This is obviously unlikely for many years after whatever resolves the war.

Since Russia needs to control the mouth of the Dnieper for strategic purposes, and needs to control the lower dams and canals for water supply, the obvious question is what happens if a rump Ukraine state is either unwilling or unable to maintain infrastructure upriver. Not just dams – what happens if they pump all of Kiev’s sewerage into the Dnieper? Russia can hardly complain if its crippled Ukraines infrastructure.

So Russia has three choices – seek complete control over most of the Dnieper watershed (which is most of Ukraine), or accept that it has no control over it becoming a sewer and construct alternative infrastructure, or it can try to ensure that whatever deal finally finishes the war includes a comprehensive watershed management. The latter seems very convoluted and unlikely, not least because Russia might then have no choice but to pay for a lot of Ukraines infrastructure repair. So this may well be a major factor in Russias calculations – maybe even more so than the more obvious military calculations. Water infrastructure is very, very expensive, i’ts not something that can be overlooked.

The Dnieper watershed map:


By Francis McLloyd, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1729444



Legacy of the Japanese Empire
September 8, 19:19



Mikado's Cause Fighters Resent Stalin's Cunning Attack on Japan.

The Legacy of the Japanese Empire

Just a few days after the country celebrated (admittedly very modestly) Victory Day over militarist Japan and the end of World War II, the "Heritage of the Empire" supervised by General L.P. Reshetnikov accused the USSR and Stalin personally of a "treacherous" attack on Japan, which (it turns out) "very strictly" abiding by the Neutrality Treaty, refused to attack the Soviet Union from the East at Hitler's request. And "how did Stalin respond?" With black ingratitude - he routed the Kwantung Army and took away South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. What an indescribable atrocity!

"Few people know, but the same Non-Aggression Pact as with Germany was signed by the USSR with Japan in 1939. Incidentally, Japan followed it very strictly. How did Stalin respond? At the request (or order, take your pick) of the USA, Stalin (treacherously!) violated the pact and defeated the Kwantung Army, thereby forcing Japan to capitulate, although the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no effect on the Japanese."

It is useful to remember that it was under the guise of accusing the USSR of "treacherously" attacking Japan in violation of the Neutrality Treaty (which was terminated by Moscow in strict accordance with the norms of international law) that the "foreign minister of foreign affairs" of the Russian Federation Kozyrev (now living in the USA) sought to "return" the Southern Kuril Islands to Japan, which had suffered so innocently.

It did not work. A powerful wave of protests prevented it.

The only thing that succeeded was that when the law "On Days of Military Glory and Memorable Dates of Russia" was adopted in 1995, the mention of Victory Day over Japan was deleted from it.

Under the same rhetoric about Stalin's "treachery", the successors of Kozyrev's cause (already dressed as statists and patriots), in 2010, in order not to irritate Tokyo with a reminder of the capitulation, came up with a new holiday instead of Victory Day over Japan - "Day of the End of World War II (1945)".

Only in 2023 was it possible to restore historical justice in relation to the feat of our fathers and grandfathers - September 3 was again officially recognized as Victory Day over militaristic Japan (with the addition of a mention of the end of World War II).

However, Kozyrev's cause lives on.

Now "The Heritage of the Empire" has started a barrel organ about Stalin's "treacherous" attack on poor peace-loving Japan, which sacredly observed the Neutrality Treaty.

Yes, "Heritage of the Empire" does not yet demand that the Kuril Islands and South Sakhalin, taken from them as a result of such "treachery", be returned to the Japanese. But a bad beginning is a bad beginning.

It turns out to be an interesting picture.

The interregional public movement "Heritage of the Empire", whose declared goal is "the revival and preservation of historical traditions", together with liberals and the West, is throwing mud at the memory of the Victory. Moreover, not long ago it even surpassed its "partners" by accusing Stalin of provoking (in fact, forcing) Hitler to attack the Soviet Union: "He provokes Hitler in every possible way, shows him the weakness of the Red Army, disrupts negotiations in Berlin in 1940, executes aviation and air defense generals, "does not trust" intelligence and the military. ... The provocation succeeds: Hitler attacks, the Patriotic War is declared."

"Heritage of the Empire", together with the Kiev regime and the West, accuses the USSR of "Holodomor" and calls on Russia to follow the example of Banderovites: "Banderovites honor the memory of their tortured ancestors, and in Russia, due to the neo-Soviet Sharikovshchina, they prefer not to know about them."

Now, "Heritage of the Empire", together with liberals and Japan, accuses the Soviet Union of the treacherous attack on Japan in 1945.

Isn't it time to ask the question - who is "Heritage of the Empire" working for?

(c) Igor Shishkin

https://zavtra.ru/blogs/na_kogo_rabotae ... ie_imperii - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9370858.html

Google Translator

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The prosecutor's office will deal with illegal rehabilitation of victims of Stalin's repressions
September 10, 23:32



The Prosecutor General's Office will begin reviewing cases of rehabilitation of victims of political repression.

The Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation plans to review previously adopted decisions on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression. The draft departmental order was published on the portal of draft regulatory legal acts.

The document states that on June 20, 2024, amendments were made to the Concept of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Perpetuating the Memory of Victims of Political Repression concerning the inadmissibility of rehabilitation and acquittal of persons who committed grave and especially grave crimes, war crimes, crimes against peace and humanity. The Prosecutor General's Office proposes "to organize work on identifying and canceling such decisions on an ongoing basis."

If the cancellation of rehabilitation decisions concerns foreign citizens, information about this will be transmitted to the relevant states through the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The order of the Prosecutor General's Office "On the organization of the activities of the prosecutor's office for the implementation and supervision of the implementation of the RF Law "On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression" will be supplemented by a provision that the materials on the decisions made, sent to the authorities, are intended not only to restore the rights of persons who suffered from political repression, but also to restore historical justice. At the same time, it is emphasized that the justification of "accomplices of the Nazis and traitors to the Motherland" should not be allowed.

It is high time. Just as during the repressions, along with enemies of the people, random people were caught in the crossfire, just as during the rehabilitation of the unjustifiably repressed, many different scum were rehabilitated under Khrushchev and Gorbachev, including various collaborators.

P.S., I would be interested in watching the review of the cases of the participants in the Tukhachevsky conspiracy, who were indiscriminately rehabilitated under Khrushchev.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9375366.html

Iron Felix's Birthday
September 11, 17:08



Today is the birthday of the creator of our beloved Bloody KGB, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky.
The war in Ukraine has opened the eyes of many to the need for a decisive fight against internal sabotage, subversive activity and treason. Felix Edmundovich was a great master in this matter, and for this reason, among other things, his popularity in society continues to grow.

Quite soon, the city of Toretsk in Donbass will regain its name of Dzerzhinsk.
And sooner or later, the legendary monument will return to Lubyanka.

Happy holiday, comrades, happy birthday to Iron Felix.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9376717.html

Google Translator

I think our capitalist bosses really fucked up...

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How Russian is gradually being removed from the Armenian school curriculum
September 11, 2024
Rybar

The study of the Russian language has been significantly reduced in the Armenian school curriculum .

The Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of Armenia issued a circular according to which, starting from the new academic year, the Russian language subject is no longer mandatory for schoolchildren who have studied it for all 12 years of study.

Now Russian will be taught on a compulsory basis for only four years (in grades 4 and 9, 10-11), the rest of the time it will be reduced to one of the foreign languages ​​of choice.

For now, schools have a choice in creating their own curriculum, but Armenian Russianists already believe that the innovation will contribute to the gradual exclusion of the Russian language from the school curriculum in the future.

The Ministry of Education, headed by Zhanna Andreasyan , has recently been involved in constant scandals.

The school subject “Armenian History” was renamed “History of Armenia”, which has a fundamental difference for the Armenian context and has caused a public outcry.

A separate subject on the history of the Armenian Apostolic Church, which the current authorities are depriving of political influence, has been excluded from the school curriculum .

New history textbooks were allowed into schools, in which Russia was accused of annexing Armenia. Only after a public outcry did they promise to correct the text.

In other history textbooks, Armenian toponyms have been replaced with Turkic ones, and even pickets outside the Ministry of Education did not influence their removal.

Such trends in school education in Armenia are not surprising, because Minister Andreasyan, like many members of Nikol Pashinyan's team , came from the cohort of experts of the Soros Open Society Foundation.

Even before 2018, Andreasyan participated in educational projects that told Armenians about LGBT and religious minorities. Now, figures with dubious experience have headed entire departments that are destroying Armenian sovereignty.

The attempt to “resolve” the language issue is a traditional practice of Western agents in the post-Soviet space to sever cultural ties between the former Soviet republics and Russia.

However, the Armenian economy is heavily dependent on the Russian Federation, so a decrease in the level of knowledge of the Russian language will have a negative impact on the welfare of the republic in the long term.

https://rybar.ru/kak-russkij-yazyk-post ... y-armenii/

Google Translator

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Memorializing ‘Iron Felix’ New monuments to Soviet secret police founder unveiled in Simferopol and Krasnodar
12:12 pm, September 13, 2021Source: Meduza


The unveiling of the new Dzerzhinsky monument in the courtyard of Secondary School Number 32 in Krasnodar. September 11, 2021.
Krasnodar territory Administration

The Crimean city of Simferopol and the Russian city of Krasnodar both unveiled monuments to Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky on September 11, the 144th anniversary of his birth. Both monuments drew criticism from representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, who condemned memorializing one of the architects of the Red Terror as an insult to its victims. The monument in Krasnodar was erected outside of a secondary school that was named after Dzerzhinsky in 2017, at the request of the school’s staff and the local FSB. In total, there are more than 40 monuments to Dzerzhinsky located across Russia.

Russian authorities in Simferopol (a city on the annexed Crimean Peninsula) unveiled a “restored” monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky in the city center on September 11, reported the Russian state-owned television network Crimea 24. Veterans of state security agencies took part in the ceremony, as well as school-age cadets. In photographs from the event, two young boys in cadet uniforms can be seen saluting the bust of Dzerzhinsky.

Nicknamed “Iron Felix,” Dzerzhinsky founded the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK) — the early Soviet secret-police force commonly known as the Cheka. He was also one of the architects of the Red Terror that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Commenting on the restoration of the monument in Simferopol, Russia’s Federal Security Service (the FSB) said that “‘Iron Felix’ not only fought against counter-revolutionaries, but also raised the country out of ruin and poverty.” The FSB underscored that under Dzerzhinsky, “two thousands bridges were restored, [and] nearly three thousand steam locomotives and more than 10 thousand kilometers of railway track were repaired.”


The monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky in Simferopol
Press Service of the Russian FSB’s Crimean branch

In turn, Archpriest Leonid Kalinin, a member of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Patriarchal Council for Culture, condemned the new monument. “Personally, I’m categorically against the appearance of such monuments in any public spaces in Russia. This insults the memory of millions of innocent victims of terror, famine, cold, torment, torture, prison, camps, and the devastation of the Fatherland,” he told the radio station Govorit Moskva. The archpriest speculated that residents of Crimea would demolish the statue.

Meanwhile, in Krasnodar, another monument to the Cheka founder was unveiled outside of Felix Dzerzhinsky School Number 32, a secondary school under the patronage of the Russian FSB. The school was named after Dzerzhinsky in 2017, at the request of its leadership and the local FSB. In the spring of 2021, the school’s staff and veterans of the state security service asked city deputies to construct a monument to Dzerzhinsky in the school yard. In turn, Metropolitan of Yekaterinodar and Kuban Grigory urged local authorities to “be careful” about memorializing the names of “controversial” figures, reported the television station Tsargrad.


The monument to Dzerzhinsky outside of Secondary School No. 32 in Krasnodar. September 11, 2021.
Secondary School No. 32

The unveiling ceremony was attended by the deputy head of the FSB’s Krasnodar bureau, Gennady Kudryavtsev, as well as Felix Dzerzhinsky’s great-grandson Vladimir Dzerzhinsky, among others. “The bust turned out to be a very beautiful and expressive replica of Felix Edmundovich,” Vladimir Dzerzhinsky said. “Today’s opening is a landmark event for the Dzerzhinsky family, veterans of the security agencies, and the staff of this school.” Vladimir Dzerzhinsky also said he wished people would study his great-grandfather’s legacy “as much as possible and learn from his works.”

Russia’s most well-known Dzerzhinsky monument stood outside of the FSB headquarters on Lubyanka Square from 1958 until August 22, 1991, when it was torn down at the request of Muscovites after an unsuccessful coup attempt. The statue was moved to the Muzeon Park of Arts. Calls to return the monument to Lubyanka Square were raised repeatedly in the years that followed, in particular, by representatives of the Communist Party (KPRF) and former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. In 2015, the KPRF gathered 150,000 signatures in support of holding a referendum among Moscow residents on returning the statue to its original place, but the party never organized the vote.

A vote on erecting a statue to either Felix Dzerzhinsky or medieval Prince Alexander Nevsky on Lubyanka Square was organized in Moscow in February 2021. Mayor Sergey Sobyanin shut down the plebiscite on the second day of voting, saying that it was turning into a “confrontation between people holding different views.”


There are more than 40 statues and busts of Felix Dzerzhinsky across Russia. According to a study conducted by Yandex, Dzerzhinsky statutes take sixth place among memorial monuments in Russia — outranking the number of monuments dedicated to Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov and German philosopher Karl Marx. One of the most recent monuments to Dzerzhinsky was unveiled in Kirov in 2017, at the initiative of FSB veterans.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/09/13 ... iron-felix

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Putin Calls for Sanctions Revenge, Threatens to Cap Uranium Exports
Posted on September 12, 2024 by Yves Smith

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 818 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, PayPal, Clover, or Wise. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser, what we’ve accomplished in the last year, and our current goal, karōshi prevention.

Yves here. We had flagged early on that Russia has significant market share in many key commodities and supplies, such as neon, and that Russia could restrict supplies to obtain leverage. In keeping, there was some (depending on the writer) worried or angry commentary on the fact that the US is reliant on Russian uranium at the start of the Special Military Operation. This article recaps a Bloomberg report on some remarks by Putin, which indicate he’s asked his bureaucrats to study the question and see if bans or restrictions on Western buys would be a net plus for Russia. From Bloomberg:

Russian President Vladimir Putin asked the government to consider if it makes sense to limit exports of some commodities like nickel, titanium and uranium in retaliation for western sanctions.

“Russia is the leader in strategic raw materials reserves like uranium, titanium, nickel,” Putin said during the meeting with the government, shown on TV. Since western sanctions limit exports of some Russian commodities like diamonds, “maybe we should also think about restrictions,” he said. Such limits should not harm Russia, he said….

While the London Metal Exchange in April banned delivery of new Russian nickel and aluminum following sanctions imposed by the US and UK, Russia sells most of its output to end users. The US this year also banned imports of Russian uranium and newly produced nickel, copper and aluminum.

“I am not saying that this needs to be done tomorrow, but we could think about certain restrictions on supplies to the foreign market not only of the goods I mentioned, but also of some others,” Putin said.

The US passed legislation that implemented a ban that became effective on August 11, 2024, making the Putin musing look like trying to close the barn door after the horse is in the next county. (As an aside, note the hyperbolic spin in the headline, with Putin signaling that he’s considering the idea and the move depicted as emotional, “revenge,” as opposed to retaliation). But the law has a loophole through which you can drive a truck. From the Department of Energy:

Recognizing that in the near term, implementing the ban could disrupt the operations of nuclear reactors, the law authorizes the Secretary of Energy, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce, to waive the prohibition and permit the import of Russian uranium if an applicant can show that it has no alternative viable source of uranium or that such imports are in the national interest. Any waiver by the Secretary of Energy is subject to annual aggregate limits and will terminate on or before January 1, 2028.

An article at Heritage explained that the real issue is enrichment capacity, and that weaning the US off Russian supplies depends on private investors stepping up and funding the increase of capacity. From Heritage:

The U.S. gets about 19% of its electricity from 93 commercial nuclear power reactors, which are powered by uranium….

Although uranium is an abundant mineral worldwide, the ability to enrich it for use in nuclear power plants is far more limited. Russia controls around 46% of global enrichment capacity, while the U.S. controls only 9.5%.

But America is the largest consumer of fuel-grade uranium, known as low-enriched uranium, or LEU. That means the United States can produce only around 20% of its LEU requirements domestically. The remaining requirements come from enrichment facilities in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands. Around 25% comes from Russia….

Promptly after the invasion, Mr. Biden stopped oil imports from Russia. Now, Washington has acted to ban uranium imports. The legislation has three key parts. It bans the import of LEU from Russia or any Russian entity, prevents black market imports by banning LEU that “is determined to have been exchanged with, swapped for, or otherwise obtained” to circumvent the ban, and lasts until 2040.

A long-term ban is critical because expanding enrichment is time-consuming and expensive. Investors won’t expand capacity to make up for Russian supply if the ban may be terminated or waived, making low-cost Russian LEU available again to U.S. buyers.

While growing demand for non-Russian uranium fuel had already prompted America’s sole domestically located commercial enricher to expand capacity, a long-term ban on Russian imports is necessary to provide the market certainty required to justify investment in a broader expansion in the sector.

Heritage then calls out two problems with the bill. One is the waiver we flagged, which it contends will undermine certainty about domestic demand. The second is that the authorities need to “get out of the way” and be as permissive as possible as far as approvals for enrichment and uranium mining are concerned.

Even though nuclear power is more important to France’s energy mix than for the US (France exports electricity), it makes much less use of Russian uranium. EDF uses about 8,000 tons of uranium a year, and from what I can tell, only 153 tons comes from Russia. A chart in a 2023 article in Le Monde on France’s uranium sources in Africa doesn’t include Russia as a material source:



Having said that, for reasons of space, your humble blogger will not attempt to profile what countries might be squeezed if Russia restricts exports to Collective West members for some or all of the other commodities where Russia is a major supplier. If Russia does move ahead, one can expect to see analyses using more current data than what we published in 2022.

By Alex Kimani, a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com. Originally published at OilPrice

Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked Moscow to consider limiting exports of some commodities such as uranium, nickel, and titanium in retaliation for Western sanctions, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

“Russia is the leader in strategic raw materials reserves like uranium, titanium, nickel,” Putin said during a televised meeting with the government. Since Western sanctions limit exports of some Russian commodities like diamonds, “maybe we should also think about restrictions,” he said, adding that such limits should not harm Russia

The U.S. and its Western allies have imposed numerous sanctions on Russia’s economy as punishment for its war in Ukraine. However, many vital commodities– including nickel, palladium, and uranium– are not under any restrictions and continue to flow to Western nations.

Back in June, the EU approved sanctions on Russian gas, the first time it has done so. According to the Belgian EU presidency, the EU will hit Russia with unprecedented sanctions against its lucrative gas sector–a move that could potentially drain hundreds of millions from Moscow’s war chest.

However, the proposed penalties won’t hit the majority of Russia’s liquid natural gas (LNG) exports to the EU; instead, the sanctions would prevent EU countries from re-exporting Russian LNG after receiving it and also ban EU involvement in upcoming LNG projects in Russia. The sanctions will also prohibit the use of EU ports, finance and services to re-export Russian LNG, essentially meaning that Russia would have to overhaul its LNG export model. Currently, Russia supplies LNG to Asia through Europe, with Belgium, Spain and France being major hubs.

“If they can’t transship in Europe, they might have to take their ice-class tankers on longer journeys,” Laura Page, a gas expert at the Kpler data analytics firm, has told Politico, adding that Russia “may not be able to get out as many loadings from Yamal because their vessels can’t get back as quickly.”

Norway and the U.S. have replaced Russia as Europe’s biggest gas supplier: Last year, Norway supplied 87.8 bcm (billion cubic meters) of gas to Europe, good for 30.3% of total imports while the U.S. supplied 56.2 bcm, accounting for 19.4% of total.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09 ... ports.html

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Korybko To Karaganov: Russia’s Nuclear Doctrine Shouldn’t Apply To Any Territorial Encroachment

Andrew Korybko
Sep 12, 2024



His proposal is well-intentioned but ill-advised for the reasons that’ll be explained.

The respected Russian intellectual Sergey Karaganov, who serves as the honorary chairman of Russia’s influential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and is also an academic supervisor at the Higher School of Economics’ School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs, is once again talking about nukes. He made global headlines last year after he proposed a nuclear first strike against Europe, which was responded to here, and just gave an interview to Kommersant about updating Russia’s nuclear doctrine.

Although the preceding hyperlinked response supported this proposal at the time, upon further reflection, it’s clear that it won’t deter the West for the reasons that’ll now be explained. The current doctrine enumerates four scenarios in which nukes can be used, which include threats to the existence of the state and large-scale conventional aggression. Karaganov believes that they should be used “in the event of any encroachment on our territory and our citizens” in a nod to Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk.

While he’s sure to have his share of supporters among the hawks at home and Russia’s most passionate supporters abroad, they’re all overlooking a few “inconvenient facts”. First, any encroachment of Russian territory can be framed as threatening the existence of the state if the Commander-in-Chief truly wants to use nukes in response, but the current one won’t resort to radical measures as explained here. Basically, Putin has worked hard to avoid World War III by miscalculation, and he won’t get careless now.

The second point is that the aforementioned calculations are already in force for a reason regardless of however anyone feels about this since dropping nukes in response to what the government officially considers to be an act of terrorism in Kursk is grossly disproportionate. Not only that, but it would suggest that Russia can’t conventionally respond to territorial incursions due to presumed weakness, which isn’t the case seeing as how it just launched a counteroffensive to expel Ukraine from that region.

Third, even if the doctrine was changed according to Karaganov’s vision, it’s unlikely to specify the targets and scale of Russia’s nuclear response since the exact circumstances can’t be known in advance. If decisionmakers were legally compelled by a revised doctrine to use nukes no matter what, then they might opt to drop them on their own territory or just across the border in order to avoid escalating. This observation segues into the fourth point about why their hands shouldn’t be tied in the first place.

Mandating a nuclear response to any cross-border encroachment whatsoever can lead to Russia’s adversaries manipulating it into using such weapons exactly as Lukashenko warned last month that Ukraine sought to do through its invasion of Kursk. It was explained here that “China and India would be under immense pressure to distance themselves from Russia, not just by the West, but also for appearance’s sake since they wouldn’t want to legitimize the use of nuclear weapons by their rivals.”

And finally, Russia can already employ discreet channels to convey its intent to use nuclear weapons in circumstances other than its publicly stated ones (or per a novel interpretation thereof as was touched upon in the first point), so updating its nuclear doctrine is pretty much only a soft power exercise. All that it would do is send a strong message of intent, albeit one which ties decisionmakers’ hands in arguably counterproductive ways and which could be easily manipulated as explained.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/korybko- ... as-nuclear

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Russia, China, ASEAN Weave Their Eastern Magic
Posted by Internationalist 360° on September 10, 2024
Pepe Escobar



Something quite extraordinary happened at the plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last week – very much in tune with the forum’s main theme: “Far Eastern 2030. Combining Strengths to Create New Potential.”



The stage was shared by President Putin; Vice-President of China Han Zheng; and Prime Minister of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim.

That translates as Russia-China-ASEAN: a key interlocking partnership, constantly being strengthened, on the road to explore all the potential towards a new, equitable, fair, multi-nodal (italics mine) world.

In his address, President Putin focused on what is arguably the most ambitious national development project of the 21st century: the Russian Conquest of the East – a mirror image of the Chinese Conquest of the West that started in earnest in 1999, via the “Go West” campaign.

Putin detailed how the Russian Far East is fast developing, with more than 3,500 techno-industrial projects. He expanded on the Northern Sea Route (NSR) – the Chinese call it the Arctic Silk Road – with building of new nuclear icebreakers and the development of the port of Murmansk included. The NSR’s turnover, Putin remarked, is already a record five times bigger, and counting, when compared to the USSR times.

All the numbers concerning the Far East and the Arctic are staggering. The Far East is a strategic macro-region occupying no less than 41% of the territory of the Russian Federation. The Arctic, an immense natural resource treasure, linked to the NSR potential, occupies 28% – accounting for 17% of Russian oil production, 83% of gas production and holding immense deposits of gold, coal, nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum group metals and diamonds.

So it’s no wonder the recurrent Western colonialist dream of attacking, dismembering and plundering Russia – whose latest iteration is the obsession on inflicting a “strategic defeat” of Russia in Ukraine – is directly linked to grabbing and exploiting the infinite wealth of the Far East/Arctic.

Putin once again described how the two regions are “the future of Russia” – and a federal priority for the entire 21st century: in fact, a matter of national security. Investment growth in starting capital is already up by 20% – twice the Russian average; and each ruble of state funding is matched by 34 rubles of private investment. Key industries include energy, petrochemicals, mining, timber, logistics, aircraft/machinery/shipbuilding, agriculture and fisheries.

Anwar: “Where is the Humanity?”

Malaysia’s Anwar, a first-class orator, expanded on ASEAN as a crossroads of Asia-Pacific and weaved an elegant analysis of soft power, complete with Russian literature (it’s his first time on Russian soil), stressing contributions at the “very fabric of human history and thought” and how Russia is “pointing the boundaries of possibility”.

In parallel he praised the rise of the Global South (40% of global GDP, over 85% of the population); the appeal of BRICS (Malaysia officially applied to join BRICS+); and how Russia should be attracting increasing “investment from Muslim-majority nations.” Playing on his culturally vibrant land, he reiterated, with a smile, the national motto: “Malaysia, truly Asia”.

Anwar particularly struck a nerve with the business/technocrat audience while commenting on the Gaza tragedy. He said that he always asks his colleagues, “even in the West”, where is “the humanity”; how do they dare to “speak of justice”; and how do they dare to predicate “human rights and democracy.”

Vice President Han Zheng stressed recent high-level meetings in Beijing and Astana strengthening the Russia-China strategic partnership; the increasing trade turnover; China’s status as the leading trade partner and investor in the Russian Far East; the drive to modernize trans-border structures; and President Xi’s Global Security Initiative – which is like a sort of more ambitious version of the Russian concept of Greater Eurasian Partnership.

Han Zheng made it quite clear how China takes a new comprehensive security format seriously, to “combat the mentality of the Cold War”. And it all comes back to the overarching Chinese concept for the whole 21st century: the attempt to build a “community of shared future for mankind.”

Asia-Pacific: All About Technology and Science

In practical terms, the forum – attended by 7,000 guests from 75 nations (very few from the West) – clinched 258 deals worth a significant 5.4 trillion rubles (over $59.7 billion).

A delightful highlight, just like last year, was an open-air exhibition, by the sea, featuring the culture, customs, cuisine and spectacular natural beauty of a wealth of regions, from Primorsky to Sakhalin, from Kamchatka to Sakha/Yakutia, from Buryatia to Krasnoyarsk.

All that soft power is integrated into the geopolitical and geoeconomic drive towards non-stop, sustainable economic growth – from Russia’s East to the entire Asia-Pacific; and addressed, for instance, at the evolving Russian-ASEAN business dialogue.

Indonesian military/security analyst Connie Bakrie, also a professor with the Faculty of International Relations at St. Petersburg State University, summed it all up: “The most important thing for Asia-Pacific is technology and science (…) President Putin underlined that Russia will play a very big part in building science and technology together [across Asia], especially in the nuclear aspect of energy security.”

Several sessions spread out across the forum were prodigies of integration. It’s not always that on a discussion about education systems in APEC economies, it’s possible to have Evgeny Vlasov, vice-rector of the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) – on which sprawling, ultra-modern campus the forum takes place – debating with Yu Miaojie, rector of the first-class Liaoning University in Hong Kong.

On the so-called Eastern Polygon the debate, attended by top Putin adviser Igor Levitin, was on geoeconomics shifting to Asia-Pacific, with the Far East becoming an absolutely key gateway for foreign trade.

On the Russian-ASEAN session, including a minister from the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), much was elaborated on the five years since the start of the Russia-ASEAN strategic partnership, and how Moscow regards the Asia-Pacific, and particularly ASEAN, as a top priority.

A counterpart session examined cooperation across Greater Eurasia – centered on the development of production chains integrating EAEU, SCO and BRICS.

Karin Kneissl, head of the GORKI Center (Geopolitical Observatory on Key Issues of Russia) at the St. Petersburg State University and former Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, represented once again the (few) remaining voices of sanity in Europe: she stressed how “the rule of law is disappearing in Europe” and how “trust in the traditional system is gone.”

Hence the importance of the BRICS forum: “What is needed is a new normative foundation.”

A fascinating, timely discussion developed under the theme “Instruments of Sovereign Development in the Context of the Destabilization of the World Order”, with an incisive input by Albert Bakhtizin, the director of Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

A group of Russian scientists, with input from the Chinese, has developed a National Strength Index, which takes into account variables such as population size, natural resource reserves, military power, the strength of the economy, the solidity of government, business, and society when it comes to achieving national development goals.

It’s all, of course, about sovereignty.

Cool, Calm, Collected Civilizational-States

The multipolar debate was one of the highlights of the forum.

Host Alexander Dugin was adamant: Russia is a Pacific nation. On stage, among others, there was the irrepressible Maria Zakharova; the Indian ambassador to Russia, Vinay Kumar; the author of the concept of civilization-state, Professor Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University; Indonesian analyst Connie Bakrie; former Prime Minister of Nepal, Madzav Kumar; top-class French geopolitician Aymeric Chauprade; plus several ASEAN scholars and analysts in the audience.

The consensus was that the unilateral international “order” based on “rules” that the collective West changes at will should be on the way out. That is directly connected to the geopolitical center of gravity moving to the Asia-Pacific.

Prof. Zhang Weiwei offered a concise explanation of the Chinese way, based on “three structures”.

On the political structure, “China is fiercely independent. And ASEAN is constantly autonomous, refusing to take sides.”

On the economic structure, improving people’s living standards – or “people’s livelihood first”, in Chinese – is Beijing’s top priority.

ASEAN, meanwhile, is China’s largest trading partner. By its geographical structure, “it’s very vulnerable, sometimes called the Balkans of Asia.” But it shines as a model of integration.

On the cultural structure, Prof. Weiwei stressed “the Asian way.”

That is, “we can afford to agree to disagree.” That’s how China “supports ASEAN’s independence”.

The Eastern Economic Forum once again showed, in spades, how Russia and a collection of Asian civilizational-states remain cool, calm and collected, resolutely striding forward, even as a hybrid Totalen Krieg which can escalate in a flash to nuclear war is being waged by the Hegemon and its vassals against Russia and ultimately, against the BRICS.

Even as US Think Tankland ceaselessly comes up with warmongering schemes – the latest is the advent of a NATO “Arctic Sparta” to try to contain “the end of American Exceptionalism” in the High North – the new socioeconomic connections explored at the forum,and the consequential new stability and resilience, are even more significant game-changers than the military-moral debacles in Gaza and in the black soil of Novorossiya.

It’s no wonder that the Hegemon plutocracy and its lowly vassals froth in unmitigated hate at being totally outclassed and outwitted by Russia, China, Asia and Eurasia, eventually destined to wallow in the gutters of irrelevancy.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/09/ ... ern-magic/

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Are you a Russian agent? Take the test
Originally published: A Vaccine Against the Pandemic of Lies on September 9, 2024 by John Varoli (more by A Vaccine Against the Pandemic of Lies) (Posted Sep 11, 2024)

With less than two months until the U.S. presidential election on Nov 5, the ruling Party in the White House is stepping up its witch hunt for ‘Russian agents’ who toil around-the-clock on behalf of the Kremlin and its ‘candidate’, Donald Trump, who seek to subvert U.S. ‘democracy’ and inflict havoc on our trembling nation.

Last week, the U.S. government’s so-called ‘Justice Department’ unveiled official accusations against a number of Russian media companies whose content are deemed a threat to national security. (The Truth is indeed dangerous to those in power in Washington DC).

Singled out as the main threat to U.S. ‘democracy’ is the Moscow media company, RT, which for over a decade has been the bogeyman stalking the nightmares of the American ruling class.

Also, last week Dmitri Simes, an American citizen and a leading U.S. foreign policy expert, was officially accused of acting as a Russian agent and violating sanctions. His house in Virginia was ransacked by the Gestapo FBI and valuable art works were stolen. What was Simes’ crime? He hosts a talk show in Moscow where global affairs and U.S. foreign policy are discussed freely, without censorship. Dangerous!

This follows the Gestapo FBI ransacking Scott Ritter’s house in New York State on Aug 7 as payback for his criticizing U.S. foreign policy and calling for friendship with Russia and other dangerous ideas. An investigation is ongoing, and focuses on Ritter’s recent travel to Russia and allegedly serving the Kremlin for the $300 he received while writing articles for RT.

How fortunate for us Americans that the White House is vigilant, protecting us from dangerous information, saving us the anguish of thinking for ourselves. Today’s ‘progressives’ certainly know better than those ‘far-right’ Founding Fathers who were obsessed with extremist notions of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press”.

Those devious Russians are so sneaky that they can seize control of your mind and turn you into one of their agents without you ever suspecting a thing. The minds of most Americans are fragile–for example, one witty meme on social media planted by Russian agents can turn many of us into Kremlin bots.

Apparently, President Putin is building an army of Kremlin stooges inside the Land of the Free, and it could soon be marching across the American heartland to the sound of balalaika music, dancing the kazachok, vodka bottles in hand and calling for world peace. What horror!

Therefore, to lend a hand to the Gestapo FBI, I’ve compiled a Russian Agent Test. Take it and see whose side you’re on in this epic battle between Good and Evil.

(1)Do you want world peace?
(2)Are you against nuclear war?
(3)Do you think it’s wrong to dominate other countries, steal their natural resources and carpet bomb them into submission?
(4)Do you think friendship with Russia is in the interests of the American people?
(5)Do you believe in justice and freedom for the people of Donbass?
(6)Do you think that Ukraine is a dangerous totalitarian state?
(7)Are you against sending more weapons and cash to Zelensky’s corrupt regime?
(8)Do you think Russians are human and have human rights?
(9)Do you believe in Freedom of Speech?
(10)Do you believe in Freedom of the Press?
(11)Are you capable of thinking for yourself?
(12)Have you ever read or watched RT content or any Russian media?
(13)Do you like memes that mock Biden, Clinton, Harris, or Obama, and then share them with friends?

If you answered “Yes” to even one of these questions, then certainly you’re a ‘Russian agent.’ And you’re likely to be a person of interest to the Gestapo FBI.

Remember–the most important task before the American nation is to ‘protect our democracy’, and this demands zero tolerance toward anyone who thinks freely and critically. We will save ‘Democracy’ by seeking out and mercilessly destroying anyone who disagrees with our ruling class.

https://mronline.org/2024/09/11/are-you ... -the-test/

[blindpig]

(Liberals complaining about liberals...)

The Bell: How Telegram’s hands-off approach backfired
September 12, 2024

It sounds like the west figured out that Telegram was financially vulnerable and that arresting/convicting its founder and CEO would be likely to destroy the company, thereby eliminating a non-western controlled information source. As the Kim Iversen video at the bottom shows, they are seeking to do the same to Twitter/X. This, combined with reports of anti-war/anti-establishment journalists being harassed and arrested by the British government and regular British citizens being arrested for social media posts, these are dark days for freedom of speech in the west. – Natylie

The Bell, 9/3/24

Pavel Durov opposed strict moderation — it could cost him his freedom, and his company

Telegram founder and Russian tech icon Pavel Durov spent just 96 hours in a French jail. Released on house arrest, the case is far from over, and will have repercussions way beyond him and his platform. The saga looks set to go a long way towards shaping the future relationship between Western democratic governments and internet platforms in general.

Pavel Durov’s four-day detention came to an end on Aug. 28, when a Paris judge granted him bail. Durov was officially indicted on a string of charges — all related to Telegram’s “complicity” in crimes plotted, planned and executed over the platform. Although out of jail, Durov is obliged to report to the police twice a week and cannot leave France. The substance of the allegations against him can be summed up in a single phrase: Telegram has consistently failed to cooperate with French police in its attempts to investigate crimes committed with the help or, or explicitly enabled by, the platform.
The Bell spoke with people close to Telegram’s leadership and those working for the platform about how Telegram moderates content and typically doesn’t cooperate with Western law enforcement bodies — and how this set Durov on a collision course with French authorities.
Telegram has just 50 employees — 30 of which are developers, Durov said in an interview with Tucker Carlson this spring. He contrasted his company’s lean approach with rival big-tech companies that, he said, had bloated headquarters and inefficient processes. The company has no HR department or many other divisions that would be mandatory for a large business. It’s reasonable to conclude from this that there has never been a significant number of people working on content moderation for the service. Everything that can possibly be automated is automated, one source told The Bell.
Telegram has three levels of moderation, said Fedor Skuratov, creator of the Combot moderation service. The first is in chats, communities and channel comments. These are moderated by admins, using outsourced solutions. Level two is a complaints system. Any user can report any public post (though not private ones) using a “Report” button in the app. Users can do this to highlight pirated content, threats, pornography or child abuse. External contractors moderate these complaints — but nobody knows who they are or how many are involved. The third level of moderation is an algorithm that is mostly used to filter spam in private messages based on suspicious patterns of behavior associated with bots. Automated moderation can be used in group chats, but it tends to be unpredictable and therefore the feature is rarely activated.
The weakness of this moderation framework is partly explained by an approach purposefully adopted by Telegram’s creators. Moderation options exist on a spectrum. At one extreme is Meta, which blocks or suspends users for even minor infringements. At the other end is Telegram, which argues that censorship benefits nobody and it should staff as hands-off as possible. “Durov believes that the platform should not interfere with what people write to one another in private messages on Telegram,” one of his acquaintances explained. For example, as long as pornography is not published on public channels, leave it alone. “The most important thing for moderation on Telegram is user comfort, so that they don’t receive unwanted messages. There are essentially no restrictions on users being able to find something on Telegram for themselves,” explained Skuratov.
A second reason behind the approach is more of a business factor: Telegram’s aversion to hiring more staff. The company believes this would strip them of their advantages of being a small, flexible business, as well as threaten security. “Hiring human moderators is a one-way street — there will never be enough of them,” Skuratov said. “And there is a high risk of leaks: the more people with access to data, the worse it is for security,” he added. When Telegram was just starting out, this approach worked. But the problem has grown as it became a service with hundreds of millions of users — making it impossible to comply with even its own small set of rules. As a result, specific content began to leak into the public parts of Telegram and due to a lack of people and money, Telegram could not cope.
There’s another important business factor. Almost from day one, Telegram wanted to act not just as a messenger, social network and blog platform, but also as a marketplace. Back in 2015, Telegram introduced the opportunity to create bots that made it easy to set up a simple online store inside the app. But unlike the Apple or Google stores, Telegram had no moderation of these mini-apps, meaning developers could release anything they wanted without any meaningful checks. This lowered the entry threshold, paving the way for a plethora of different businesses to flock to the platform — including those operating in the black, or gray market. For instance, the platform became famous years ago in Russia as a hotbed for the trade of personal data — with people able to buy gigabytes of information, hacked or leaked, for next to nothing.
What next for Telegram?

Telegram’s financial position was already uncertain before Durov’s arrest. From launch, the company struggled to monetize the platform. At first it was financed by Durov’s personal funds from the sale of VKontakte. Then the company tried to launch its own crypto token, which was successful with some of the world’s most well-heeled investment funds — but was ultimately blocked by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Over the last three years, Telegram has turned to loans, having placed bonds worth more than $2.3 billion.
Durov’s arrest could tip the company into a financial crisis, the Financial Times wrote after analyzing the company’s previously secret financial statements for 2023. Telegram has no money of its own and is massively unprofitable, the FT found. In 2023, the platform had revenues of $342 million, posting an operating loss of $108 million and a post-tax loss of $173 million. The company partially covered those losses by increasing the value of crypto assets on its balance sheet, which were valued at almost $400 million.
The debt on the Telegram’s bond-issuing spree is due to be paid off by March 2026. If the company conducts an IPO before then, the bonds are converted into shares at a discount — a good deal for Telegram. If not, the platform must repay bondholders with interest (at a rate of 7% per year). With Durov facing a lengthy legal saga that could end in years of prison time, it’s unclear whether a stock market launch is still on the table. The FT suggests not: the case against Durov is already causing too much damage to an already unprofitable business.
Investors are nervous. Telegram bonds fell below 90 cents on the dollar after Durov was arrested. And Telegram is in no rush to reassure its backers. According to one bond holder, there has been no contact from the company’s representatives in the past week.
Why the world should care

For the first 10 years of Telegram’s existence, Pavel Durov managed to strike a balance between privacy and public safety. If Telegram had found a more reliable means of monetization, it might well have had the funds to pay more attention to security and moderation, as its bigger competitors do. We will soon find out whether the service will get a second chance. In post-Soviet countries, it’s worth remembering, this is not just about the survival of gray businesses and shady online marketplaces, but of one of the last major platforms for free speech.



https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/09/the ... backfired/

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Putin to reporter Pavel Zarubin: ‘NATO will then be at war with us…’

Yesterday Putin had a very full day in St Petersburg as reported extensively on Russian state television news programs.

In the morning, at the Konstantinovsky Palace on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, he met in the round with the national security directors of the BRICS countries to discuss preparations for the October summit in Kazan. At this group session, Putin announced that the summit is expected to approve a new category of relationship designated as ‘partnership’ with those 34 countries which have expressed an interest in joining the club. This session was followed by side meetings with the representatives from India, Iran and China.

With India the chief topic was the planned one-on-one with Prime Minister Modi in Kazan to review the implementation of mutual undertakings they had agreed during Modi’s visit to Moscow a couple of months ago. With Iran, Putin heard reassurances that the policy of former prime minister Raisi is continuing in full under his successor, Masoud Pezeshkian. They surely discussed the planned signing in Kazan of a comprehensive agreement on strategic partnership. China was represented by their Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi, who assured Putin that President Xi will be coming to Kazan and looks forward to side meetings there with ‘his good friend’ Vladimir Vladimirovich. Yi reported to Putin on his recent trip to Kiev and talks with Zelensky.

The Russian president next was busy with Russian Orthodox church matters. He joined Patriarch Kirill at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra (monastery) to light a candle at the tomb of the legendary medieval prince who defended the Rus’ from German invaders as a warrior and who by his diplomatic talents established an acceptable modus vivendi with the Mongol conquerors of that age. Yesterday was the day commemorating Alexander Nevsky in the city for whom he is the patron saint. A well attended and colorful march of clergy and laymen started from the Lavra and proceeded down the city’s principal thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt.

Putin’s afternoon was then spent at the opening ceremony of this year’s Cultural Forum which is always a big event in St Petersburg of national and international importance, combining both musical and other performances for the general public and dozens if not hundreds of separate themed talks and seminars by experts on topics relating to the year’s central theme.

This year, as in the past several years, the central venue for the Forum is the former General Staff building of tsarist Russia, now part of the Hermitage art museum complex. The grand staircase inside is occasionally, like yesterday fitted with cushions directly on the stairs, creating an august three story high open space that seats several hundred.

The theme of the Forum this year is United Cultures and in his lengthy address to participants, among whom were many foreign invitees, Putin spoke of culture in terms of the new multipolar world that is open to diverse national cultural traditions and in which no one country or group of countries impose their ‘values’ on others. Yes, Russia’s ideological battle against the U.S. global hegemony is being fought on many fronts, including Soft Power.

In between these various activities, all of which demanded great concentration, the Russian president found the time to give an interview, on the fly, so to speak. He was standing just outside the General Staff building on a side street where it joins Palace Square, on the other side of which stands the main body of the Hermitage in the former Winter Palace of the tsars. Pavel Zarubin, a journalist who seems to follow Vladimir Vladimirovich everywhere to gather material for his weekly Sunday evening show ‘Moscow, the Kremlin, Putin’ put to him the question that is as much on the minds of Russians as it is on the mind of us here in the West: how will Russia respond to the expected American and British go-ahead to Zelensky for use of their missiles to attack the heartland of Russia. Putin gave his answer speaking in a calm and deliberate tone. What he said has been picked up by global media, many of which have presented it to world audiences as being bellicose. It was not bellicose but it was open to various interpretations because its essence is that Russia’s response will be calibrated to the level of threat to itself that it sees in any coming attacks from Ukraine.

But before getting to the ‘punch line’ that everyone awaited, President Putin explained Russia’s understanding that what is at issue goes far beyond mere permission for Ukraine to use Western supplied long-range offensive weapons as it sees fit. Per Russian military evaluation, Ukraine by itself does not possess the satellite reconnaissance capability necessary to program the NATO-supplied missiles to target. For this it is totally dependent on NATO countries. More important still, Ukraine does not have the training, the skills to maintain and launch these missiles on its own. Two or three weeks training is utterly inadequate to manage these highly sophisticated weapons systems. Accordingly all of those functions must necessarily be carried out by technical people from the NATO country manufacturers of the weapons. For these reasons, Russia concludes that the missiles effectively represent NATO’s direct involvement in the conflict. The status of the conflict moves on from a proxy war to a full-blown war by NATO countries on Russia. That change in the nature of the war requires a change in the way Russia conducts itself. As Putin said, Russia will calibrate its response to any attack to the level of threat it perceives. Period.

I add to this briefing what Russian talk shows on state television were saying last night about this whole question of the level of threat posed by Zelensky’s right to use the missiles as he sees fit. The fact is that Russia is mentally prepared for anything that the West can throw at it today via Ukraine, up to and including, for example, a missile attack on the Kursk nuclear power plant. Due to its unprotected outer structure, a strike there could result in a leakage of radioactivity similar to the Chernobyl catastrophe. We should not doubt that a Russian response to such an incident will be memorable if any of us survives it.

Accordingly, we must hope that Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and other demented leading personalities in the Biden administration will be shunted aside by Pentagon generals who necessarily have a more sober understanding of the means of retaliation at Moscow’s disposal today.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/09/13/ ... r-with-us/

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Why’s Russia Re-Engaging With The IMF?

Andrew Korybko
Sep 13, 2024



The relationship between Russia, the IMF, and BRICS isn’t what most folks have been led to believe.

IMF Communications Director Julie Kozack confirmed during a press briefing on Thursday that the first Article IV consultations with Russia since 2021 will take place next week. She also praised BRICS expansion. Both of these caught multipolar enthusiasts off guard since they assumed that Russia wouldn’t ever re-engage with the IMF, which they consider to be BRICS’ rival. What follows are the exact words that she said, which will then be analyzed in the larger context of Russia’s financial grand strategy:

“The IMF and all of our member countries have a mutual obligation to conduct Article IV Consultations. It's in our articles of agreement. Actually, in the case of Russia, since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the economic situation has been exceptionally unsettled, which has made it difficult to anchor Article IV Consultations, especially thinking about the outlook and policy frameworks for both the near- and the medium-term.

Now that the economic situation is more settled, Article IV Consultations with Russia are resuming, as I said at the beginning, in line with the obligations of both the Fund and the member country.

As part of the upcoming Article IV Consultation, the team will hold bilateral discussions with the Russian authorities. It will hold both virtual discussions from September 16th, and then the team will travel to the country for in person meetings. As is the case for all Article IV Consultations, the team will meet with a number of different stakeholders to discuss the country's economic developments, prospects, and policies. And I think that I'll leave it at that.

…

With respect to the BRICS or any other groups of countries, our view is that improved and expanding international cooperation and deepening trade and investment ties among groups of countries should be welcomed and encouraged, provided that they aim at reducing fragmentation and reducing trade and investment costs among members. The decision to join such initiatives is a sovereign decision of each member country. And I'll leave it at that.”

Readers should also be aware that Russia appointed a new Executive Director to the organization earlier this month, Ksenia Yudaeva. She’s an advisor to the Bank of Russia’s chief but also under US sanctions. Kozack declined to comment when asked whether Yudaeva would be allowed to serve at the IMF’s headquarters in DC upon taking over her new role in November. In any case, the importance is that Russia is actively re-engaging with the IMF, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently hinted at why.

He told students earlier this month that “[the G7] are trying to retain their preferential and undeservedly privileged positions at the IMF and the WTO. They stall the reforms of these institutions in order to maintain their domineering influence. But this process cannot be stopped, and it will continue.” Russia believes that reforms at both global bodies are integral to speeding up financial multipolarity processes, with Lavrov implying that Russia should contribute to this inevitable trend instead of self-isolate from it.

Likewise, the IMF also realized that such reforms must be carried out sooner than later so as to not self-isolate from the Global South, ergo Kozack’s praise of BRICS expansion. Observers shouldn’t forget that all BRICS members are also part of the IMF, and as shocking as it sounds, the BRICS Bank confirmed last summer that they comply with Western sanctions against Russia. Readers can learn more “politically inconvenient” facts about BRICS here, which enumerates nearly a dozen associated analyses at the end.

What’s sufficient for the average reader to know is that BRICS is a network of countries that voluntarily coordinate their financial policies in order to accelerate that dimension of multipolarity. Nearly all of its members with the exception of co-founder Russia and new addition Iran are in direct relationships of complex economic-financial interdependence with the West, especially the US. This limits their freedom of action in this regard and is why financial multipolarity will be a gradual process, not a fast one.

Any sudden systemic shocks, such as coordinating the dollar’s collapse (which is a lot more difficult to achieve than some have made it seem), would deeply affect their own economies due to this interdependence. Even Putin acknowledged during a Q&A earlier this month that “we are not conducting a policy of de-dollarisation. We did not renounce settlements in dollars; they denied us such settlements, and we were simply forced to look for other options; this is it.”

Russia isn’t in a direct relationship of complex economic-financial interdependence with the West anymore after that bloc’s US leader forced the EU to largely “decouple” from it, but he’s well aware of how destabilizing sudden systemic shocks can be for its top trade partners and thus wants to avoid that. Although Russia is self-sufficient in raw materials, it still relies on foreign trade as an important source of revenue and a means of obtaining spare aircraft parts, high-tech products, and other goods.

Inflicting sudden systemic shocks on the West could therefore shock the Chinese and Indian economies too, thus leading to less energy sales to them as well as less high-tech and other product imports. This explains why Russia still accounts for nearly a fifth of the EU’s gas needs despite the bloc’s participation in NATO’s proxy war on it through Ukraine. The same goes for why Russia still sells critical minerals to them and the US too, although Putin just suggested restrictions on this “if this does not harm us”.

That’s a significant caveat since the insight shared in this analysis illustrated the relationship of complex interdependence that Russia has with China, India, and others, who themselves are also in their own such relationships with the West, thus making Russia and the West indirectly dependent on one another. Considering this, completely cutting the West off from all Russian resources would also risk plunging China and India into recessions too, thus provoking their ire and boomeranging back against Russia.

It could also be considered an act of war by NATO and exploited to justify escalating the bloc’s involvement in their proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. If those countries could manage on their own without Russian resources, then they obviously wouldn’t be financing their geopolitical rival to this day. Likewise, Russia wouldn’t be supplying its geopolitical rivals to this day either if it felt comfortable managing the far-reaching systemic shocks brought about by completely cutting them off.

All of this circles back to why Russia is re-engaging with the IMF, namely to play a role in gradually reforming this global body alongside China, India, and others in order to advance their shared goal of accelerating financial multipolarity processes. The IMF praised BRICS expansion precisely because all members apart from Russia and Iran are in direct relationships of complex economic-financial interdependence with the West, thus enabling each to keep the other in check to an extent.

IMF membership and the aforesaid interdependence with the West that it brings impede the pace of BRICS’ financial multipolarity plans, while BRICS works from within the IMF to still keep these plans moving in the desired direction. With the exception of Russia and Iran, BRICS therefore has a symbiotic relationship with the IMF, and this in turn deters Russia from catalyzing a series of sudden systemic shocks against the West by cutting off its resource sales (both critical minerals and energy) to them.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/whys-rus ... g-with-the

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New Senators from Crimea
September 13, 15:10



Finally, Crimea will have normal senators in the Federation Council.
They approved Hero of the Russian Federation Yuri Nimchenko (he fought in the 126th Brigade) and Grandmaster Sergey Karyakin.



You know my attitude towards Sergey Karjakin - a chess player and a patriot of a healthy person.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9380511.html

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