ERIC HOROWITZ
The New York Times has found another neo-Nazi militia to fawn over in Ukraine. The Bratstvo battalion “gave access to the New York Times to report on two recent riverine operations,” which culminated in a piece (11/21/22) headlined “On the River at Night, Ambushing Russians.”
Since the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, establishment media have either minimized the far-right ideology that guides many Ukrainian nationalist detachments or ignored it completely.
New York Times (11/21/22): “The Bratstvo battalion has undertaken some of the conflict’s most difficult missions, conducting forward spotting and sabotage along the front lines.”
Anti-war outlets, including FAIR (1/28/22, 3/22/22), have repeatedly highlighted this dynamic—particularly regarding corporate media’s lionization of the Azov battalion, once widely recognized by Western media as a fascist militia, now sold to the public as a reformed far-right group that gallantly defends the sovereignty of a democratic Ukraine (New York Times, 10/4/22; FAIR.org, 10/6/22).
That is when Azov’s political orientation is discussed at all, which has become less and less common since Russia launched its invasion in February.
‘Christian Taliban’
The lesser-known Bratstvo battalion, within which the Times embedded its reporters, is driven by several far-right currents—none of which are mentioned in the article.
“We need to create something like a Christian Taliban,” Dmytro Korchynsky told the Intercept (3/18/15). “The Christian Taliban can succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan.”
Bratstvo was founded as a political organization in 2004 by Dmytro Korchynsky, who previously led the far-right Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).
Korchynsky, who now fights in Bratstvo’s paramilitary wing, is a Holocaust denier who falsely blamed Jews for the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine, and peddled the lie that “120,000 Jews fought in the Wehrmacht.” He has stated that he sees Bratstvo as a “Christian Taliban” (Intercept, 3/18/15).
In the 1980s, the Times portrayed the religious extremists of the Afghan mujahideen—who were receiving US training and arms—as a heroic bulwark against Soviet expansionism. We all know how that worked out.
In an echo of that propaganda campaign, the Times neglected to tell its readers about the neo-Nazi and theocratic politics of the Bratstvo battalion. Why should anyone care who else Bratstvo members would like to see dead, so long as they’re operating in furtherance of US policymakers’ stated aim of weakening Russia?
Modern-day crusade
The article’s author, Carlotta Gall, recounted Bratstvo’s Russian-fighting exploits in quasi-religious terms. Indeed, the only instances in which the Times even hinted at the unit’s guiding ideology came in the form of mythologizing the unit’s Christian devotion.
Of Bratstvo fighters embarking on a mission, Gall wrote, “They recited a prayer together, then loaded up the narrow rubber dinghies and set out, hunched silent figures in the dark.” Referring to battalion commander Oleksiy Serediuk’s wife, who also fights with the unit, Gall extolled, “She has gained an almost mythical renown for surviving close combat with Russian troops.”
The piece even featured a photograph showing militia members gathered in prayer. Evoking the notion of pious soldiers rather than that of a “Christian Taliban,” the caption read, “Members of the Bratstvo battalion’s special forces unit prayed together before going on a night operation.”
The Times also gave voice to some of the loftier aims of Bratstvo’s crusade, quoting Serediuk’s musing that, “We all dream about going to Chechnya, and the Kremlin, and as far as the Ural Mountains.” Nazi racial ideologues have long been enamored by the prospect of reaching the Urals, which they view as the natural barrier separating European culture from the Asiatic hordes.
While plotting Operation Barbarossa, Hitler identified the Urals as the eastern extent of the Wehrmacht’s planned advance. In 1943, referring to the Nazi scheme that aimed to rid European Russia of Asiatic “untermenschen” so the land could be settled by hundreds of millions of white Europeans, Himmler declared, “We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals.”
‘Mindset of the 13th century’
The only two Bratstvo members named in the piece, meanwhile, are Serediuk and Vitaliy Chorny. While Chorny—who the Times identified as the battalion’s head of intelligence gathering—is quoted, his statements are limited to descriptions of the unit’s fighting strategy. Serediuk’s recorded utterances are similarly lacking in substance.
Bratstvo commander Oleksiy Serediuk explained to Al Jazeera (4/15/15): “I left the Azov because it was full of pagans. Committed Christians in the Azov were not allowed to stop to pray throughout the day.”
Far more illuminating is an Al Jazeera article (4/15/15) titled “‘Christian Taliban’s’ Crusade on Ukraine’s Front Lines,” which quotes both Serediuk and Chorny extensively. Serediuk, Al Jazeera reported, “revels in the Christian Taliban label.” In reference to his decision to leave the Azov battalion, the piece went on to say:
Serediuk didn’t leave the Azov because of the neo-Nazi connections, however—extreme-right ideology doesn’t bother him. What does irk him, however, is being around fighters who are not zealous in their religious convictions.
In the same piece, Chorny invoked the violently antisemitic Crusades of the Middle Ages to describe Bratstvo’s ideological foundation:
The enemy—the forces of darkness—they have all the weapons, they have greater numbers, they have money. But our soldiers are the bringers of European traditions and the Christian mindset of the 13th century.
To circumvent the Times’ exultant narrative, one has to do a certain amount of supplementary research and analysis. But even the most basic inquiry—searching “Bratstvo battalion” on Google—reveals the far-right underpinnings of the unit with which the Times embedded its reporters.
The seventh search result is a June 2022 study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which reported, “Another such far-right entity is the so-called Brotherhood (Bratstvo) ‘battalion,’ which includes Belarusian, Danish, Irish and Canadian members.”
The ninth result is an article from the Washington Free Beacon (4/6/22), which quoted a far-right Canadian volunteer as saying on Telegram that he was “fighting in the neo-Nazi ‘Bratstvo’ Battalion in Kyiv.”
SS memorabilia
In a world where journalists actually practiced what they preached, someone at the paper of record surely would have noticed the Nazi insignia appearing in two photos in the piece. In this world, however, the Times either forgot how to use the zoom function—though the paper made extensive use of this capability when reporting on China’s Communist Party Congress the month before (FAIR.org, 11/11/22)—or they simply did not want to report on this ugly and inconvenient discovery.
The New York Times (11/21/22) captioned this photo, “Members of the Bratstvo battalion’s special forces unit prayed together before going on a night operation.”
Totenkopf insignia worn by Bratstvo member in photo above.
One soldier is seen wearing an emblem known as a “Totenkopf” in a photo of Bratstvo’s prayer circle. The Totenkopf, which means “death’s head” in German, was used as an insignia by the Totenkopfverbande—an SS unit that participated in Hitler’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, and guarded the concentration camps where Nazi Germany condemned millions of Jewish men, women and children to death.
Totenkopf emblem on eBay.
Individuals donning the Totenkopf also took part in the murder of millions of others in these camps, including Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, trade unionists, persons with disabilities, homosexuals and Romani people.
In September, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted—and then quietly deleted—a picture on social media of himself with a number of soldiers, one of whom was wearing a Totenkopf patch similar to that seen in the Times’ photo of Bratstvo’s prayer meeting. One can easily find this particular iteration on Amazon or eBay.
The New York Times described this photo as “Russian volunteer fighters preparing to go on a joint night operation with the Ukrainian Bratstvo battalion.“
The Totenkopf insignia can also be seen in this photo.
Later in the Times article, another photograph of a soldier wearing a slightly different version of the insignia appeared. Here, bathed in the light of an interior room and staring out from the very center of the image, the Totenkopf is even harder to miss. Amazon’s product description for this specific variant reads, “This gorgeous replica piece takes you back to World War II.”
Amazon promises that “this gorgeous replica piece takes you back to World War II.”
If the Times simply failed to identify the Totenkopf in two separate photos—both of which were taken by a Times photographer while he was embedded with Bratstvo, and were then featured prominently in the article—that would certainly amount to a journalistic failure.
The alternative scenario is that the Times did recognize the SS memorabilia worn by the soldiers they chose to embed with, and decided to publish the images anyway without commenting on the matter.
https://fair.org/home/action-alert-nyt- ... n-ukraine/
A historian might note that the totenkopf badge was used by Prussian Uhlans(light cavalry) in the 19th century but these clowns know nothing of this.
(but an apologist might try...)
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It Was Never About Ukraine
by Ted Snider Posted onNovember 23, 2022
In his March 21 press briefing, State Department spokesman Ned Price told the gathered reporters that “President Zelenskyy has also made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.” A reporter asked Price, “What are you saying about your support for a negotiated settlement à la Zelenskyy, but on whose principles?” In what still may be the most remarkable statement of the war, Price responded, “this is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine.”
Price, who a month earlier had discouraged talks between Russia and Ukraine, rejected Kiev negotiating an end to the war with Ukraine’s interests addressed because US core interests had not been addressed. The war was not about Ukraine’s interests: it was bigger than Ukraine.
A month later, in April, when a settlement seemed to be within reach at the Istanbul talks, the US and UK again pressured Ukraine not to pursue their own goals and sign an agreement that could have ended the war. They again pressured Ukraine to continue to fight in pursuit of the larger goals of the US and its allies. Then British prime minister Boris Johnson scolded Zelensky that Putin "should be pressured, not negotiated with." He added that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, the West was not.”
Once again, the war was not about Ukraine’s interests: it was bigger than Ukraine.
At every opportunity, Biden and his highest ranking officials have insisted “that it's up to Ukraine to decide how and when or if they negotiate with the Russians” and that the US won’t dictate terms: “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” But that has never been true. The US wouldn’t allow Ukraine to negotiate on their terms when they wanted to. The US stopped Ukraine from negotiating in March and April when they wanted to; they pushed them to negotiate in November when they did not want to.
The war in Ukraine has always been about larger US goals. It has always been about the American ambition to maintain a unipolar world in which they were the sole polar power at the center and top of the world.
Ukraine became the focus of that ambition in 2014 when Russia for the first time stood up to American hegemony. Alexander Lukin, who is Head of Department of International Relations at National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and an authority on Russian politics and international relations, says that since the end of the Cold War Russia had been considered a subordinate partner of the West. In all disagreements between Russia and the US up to then, Russia had compromised, and the disagreements were resolved rather quickly.
But when, in 2014, the US set up and supported a coup in Ukraine that was intended to pull Ukraine closer into the NATO and European security sphere Russia responded by annexing Crimea, Russia broke out of its post Cold War policy of compliance and pushed back against US hegemony. The 2014 “crisis in Ukraine and Russia’s reaction to it have fundamentally changed this consensus," Lukin says. "Russia refused to play by the rules."
Events in Ukraine in 2014 marked the end of the unipolar world of American hegemony. Russia drew the line and asserted itself as a new pole in a multipolar world order. That is why the war is “bigger than Ukraine,” in the words of the State Department. It is bigger than Ukraine because, in the eyes of Washington, it is the battle for US hegemony.
That is why US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on November 13 that some of the sanctions on Russia could remain in place even after any eventual peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. The war has never just been about Ukraine: it is about US foreign policy aspirations that are bigger than Ukraine. Yellen said, “I suppose in the context of some peace agreement, adjustment of sanctions is possible and could be appropriate.” Sanctions could be adjusted when negotiations end the war, but, Yellen added, “We would probably feel, given what’s happened, that probably some sanctions should stay in place.”
That is also why the US announced a new army headquarters in Germany “to carry out what is expected to be a long-term mission” while it simultaneous began pushing Ukraine toward peace talks. The military pressure on Russia and support for Ukraine will survive the war.
It is also why on June 29, the US announced the establishment of a permanent headquarters for US forces in Poland that Biden boasted would be “the first permanent U.S. forces on NATO’s eastern flank."
It is again why, on November 9, the State Department approved the sale of nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of High Mobility Artillery Rocket System to Lithuania. They are not to be used by NATO in the Ukraine war. But they will, according to the State Department, “support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by helping to improve the military capability of a NATO Ally that is an important force for ensuring political stability and economic progress within Eastern Europe.” At the same time, the State Department approved the potential sale of guided multiple launch rocket systems to Finland to bolster “the land and air defense capabilities in Europe's northern flank.”
Presumably, the delivery of upgraded B61-12 air-dropped gravity nuclear bombs to NATO bases in Europe is also not in the service of current US goals in Ukraine.
Though to the US, the war in Ukraine is “bigger than Ukraine,” it is also “in many ways bigger than Russia.” Although the recently released 2022 National Defense Strategy identifies Russia as the current “acute threat,” it “focuses on the PRC,” or the People’s Republic of China. The Strategy consistently identifies China as the “pacing challenge.” The long-term focus is on, not Russia, but China.
The National Defense Strategy clearly states that “The most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security is the PRC’s coercive and increasingly aggressive endeavor to refashion the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to suit its interests and authoritarian preferences.”
If Ukraine is about Russia, Russia is about China. The “Russia Problem” has always been that it is impossible to confront China if China has Russia: it is not desirable to fight both superpowers at once. So, if the long-term goal is to prevent a challenge to the US led unipolar world from China, Russia first needs to be weakened.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently said that "China will firmly support the Russian side, with the leadership of President Putin . . . to further reinforce the status of Russia as a major power."
According to Lyle Goldstein, a visiting professor at Brown University and author of Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry, an analysis of the war in Ukraine published in a Chinese academic journal concludes that “In order to maintain its hegemonic position, the US supports Ukraine to wage hybrid warfare against Russia…The purpose is to hit Russia, contain Europe, kidnap ‘allies,’ and threaten China.”
The war in Ukraine has never been just about Ukraine. It has always been “bigger than Ukraine” and about US principles that are bigger than Ukraine and “in many ways bigger than Russia.” Ukraine is where Russia drew the line on the US led unipolar world and where the US chose to fight the battle for hegemony. That battle is acutely about Russia but, in the long-term, it is about China, “the most comprehensive and serious challenge” to US hegemony.
https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider ... t-ukraine/
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NATO Exists To Solve The Problems Created By NATO’s Existence
NATO has doubled down on its determination to eventually add Ukraine to its membership, renewing its 2008 commitment to that goal in a meeting between the foreign ministers of the alliance in Bucharest, Romania this past Tuesday.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:
The Romanian city was where NATO initially made the promise to Ukraine back in 2008, and at the time, US officials acknowledged that attempting to bring the country into the alliance could spark a war in the region.
“We made the decision in Bucharest in 2008 at the summit,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday. “I was there … representing Norway as Prime Minister. I remember very well the decisions. We stand by those decisions. NATO’s door is open.”
In a joint statement, the NATO foreign ministers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said that they “reaffirm” the decisions that were made at the 2008 Bucharest summit.
It has become fashionable among the mainstream western commentariat to claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansion, but as recently explained by Philippe Lemoine for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that’s a completely false narrative that requires snipping past comments made by Putin out of the context in which they were made. Many western experts warned for years in advance that NATO expansion would lead to a conflict like the one we’re seeing today, and they were of course correct.
The recent push to expand NATO in Ukraine along with nations like Finland and Sweden as justified by “Russian aggression” is a good example of what professor Richard Sakwa has called the “fateful geographical paradox: that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.” As the late scholar on US-Russia relations Stephen Cohen explained years before the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2014, Moscow sees NATO as an “American sphere of influence,” and the expansion of NATO and NATO influence as expansion of that sphere. It reacts to this with hostility just as the US would react to China or Russia building up aggressive military alliances on its borders, and arguably with vastly more restraint than the US would.
Other future examples of Sakwa’s fateful geographical paradox are likely to include the push to reconfigure NATO into an alliance dedicated to “restraining” China, which of course means halting China’s rise on the world stage and working to constrict, balkanize and usurp it. A recent Financial Times article titled “Washington steps up pressure on European allies to harden China stance” gives new detail to this agenda:
The US is pushing European allies to take a harder stance towards Beijing as it tries to leverage its leadership on Ukraine to gain more support from Nato countries for its efforts to counter China in the Indo-Pacific.
According to people briefed on conversations between the US and its Nato allies, Washington has in recent weeks lobbied members of the transatlantic alliance to toughen up their language on China and to start working on concrete action to restrain Beijing.
US president Joe Biden identified countering China as his main foreign policy goal at the start of his administration, but his efforts have been complicated by the focus on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
But with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion in its 10th month, Washington was making a concerted effort to push China back up Nato’s agenda, the people said.
The “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization added China to its security concerns for the very first time this past June, and ever since it’s seen a mad push from Washington to ramp up aggressions against Beijing. Another Financial Times article titled “Nato holds first dedicated talks on China threat to Taiwan” details a meeting between alliance members this past September:
They also discussed how Nato should make Beijing aware of the potential ramifications of any military action — a debate that has gained significance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amid questions about whether the west was tough enough in its warnings to Moscow.
The US has been urging allies, particularly in Europe, to focus more on the threat to Taiwan, as concerns mount that Chinese president Xi Jinping may order the use of force against the island.
Senior US military officers and officials have floated several possible timelines for military action, with some eager to increase the sense of urgency to ensure Washington and its allies are prepared.
Some are noticing that Washington’s eagerness to “increase the sense of urgency” on this front can easily wind up having a provocative effect which serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Bloomberg a month ago that Washington’s haste to prepare everyone for another major conflict could “end up provoking the war that we seek to deter.”
“NATO should be renamed ASFP: the Alliance for Self Fulfilling Prophecies,” tweeted commentator Arnaud Bertrand of the alliance’s discussions about Taiwan.
“A defensive alliance doesn’t look to pick fights with a country on a different continent,” tweeted Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “This is some classic mission creep from NATO – or, more accurately, Washington.”
When you ignore all the empty narrative fluff and really boil it down to the raw language of actual behavior, NATO’s existence really does seem to be premised on the circular reasoning that without NATO there’d be nobody to protect the world from the consequences of NATO’s actions. It goes out of its way to threaten powerful nations and then justifies its existence by their responses to those threats. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone, or, if you prefer, a self-licking boot.
And this is all happening as news comes out that European nations are beginning to notice they’re bearing a lot more of the cost of Washington’s proxy warfare in Ukraine than the US is, while the US reaps all the profits. In an article titled “Europe accuses US of profiting from war,” Politico reports:
Top European officials are furious with Joe Biden’s administration and now accuse the Americans of making a fortune from the war, while EU countries suffer.
“The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,” one senior official told POLITICO.
The explosive comments — backed in public and private by officials, diplomats and ministers elsewhere — follow mounting anger in Europe over American subsidies that threaten to wreck European industry.
Washington is taking extreme risks and angering allies at this time because it’s getting to do-or-die time as far as preserving US unipolar hegemony is concerned. As Antiwar’s Ted Snider explains in a recent article, the US proxy war in Ukraine has never really been about Ukraine, and hasn’t even ultimately been about Russia. In the long run this standoff has always been about China, and about the desperate campaign of the US empire to preserve its unrivaled domination of this planet.
“The war in Ukraine has always been about larger US goals,” writes Snider. “It has always been about the American ambition to maintain a unipolar world in which they were the sole polar power at the center and top of the world.”
“Events in Ukraine in 2014 marked the end of the unipolar world of American hegemony,” Snider says. “Russia drew the line and asserted itself as a new pole in a multipolar world order. That is why the war is ‘bigger than Ukraine,’ in the words of the State Department. It is bigger than Ukraine because, in the eyes of Washington, it is the battle for US hegemony.”
“If Ukraine is about Russia, Russia is about China,” Snider writes. “The ‘Russia Problem’ has always been that it is impossible to confront China if China has Russia: it is not desirable to fight both superpowers at once. So, if the long-term goal is to prevent a challenge to the US led unipolar world from China, Russia first needs to be weakened.”
Snider quotes Lyle Goldstein, a visiting professor at Brown University, who says that “In order to maintain its hegemonic position, the US supports Ukraine to wage hybrid warfare against Russia…The purpose is to hit Russia, contain Europe, kidnap ‘allies,’ and threaten China.”
As the world becomes more multipolar and securing total control looks less and less likely, the empire is fighting more and more like a boxer in the later rounds who’s been down on the scorecards the entire fight: taking more risks, throwing wild haymakers, preferring the possibility of a knockout loss over the certainty of losing a decision.
We’re at the most dangerous point in humanity’s abusive relationship with US unipolar domination, for the same reason the most dangerous point in a battered wife’s life is right when she’s trying to escape. The empire is willing to do terrible and risky things to retain control. “If I can’t have you no one can” is a line that can be said to a wife, or to the world.
The importance of opposing these megalomaniacs, and their games of nuclear chicken, has never been higher.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/12/01 ... existence/
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ROMAN ABRAMOVICH REVEALS HE IS LOBBYING THE US GOVERNMENT FOR THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT TO END THE UKRAINE WAR
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who is under British and European Union sanctions, is lobbying in Washington for an early peace deal with the Ukraine.
According to a document Abramovich has filed through the New York law firm of Kobre & Kim, Abramovich has told the US Department of Justice (DOJ) he is being “directed” and “supervised” by the Russian government to “interface with government agencies” with the “goal of finding a diplomatic solution to end the armed conflict.”
The lawyers have been meeting US government officials on Abramovich’s “mediation” since July.
On July 5, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) unit of the Justice Department received a filing from Roman Abramovich who gave his address as Ulitsa Lipovaya Alleya (“Linden Alley”), Nemchinovo Village (“Speechless Village”), Odintsovo District, Moscow Region, Russia 143025. This is an elite dacha area thirty kilometres west of the centre of Moscow.
Abramovich describes himself in the file as “a citizen of Russia, Israel and Portugal. He is a recognized businessman and philanthropist and is primarily known as the former owner of the football club Chelsea FC. He is also the Chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, and a trustee of the Moscow Jewish Museum. In 2018 Mr Abramovich was recognized with an award by the Federation of Jewish Communities to commend the contribution of over $500 million that he has donated to Jewish causes around the world over the past 15 years. Mr Abramovich’s primary industrial business interest is his shareholding in EVRAZ plc (a Russian steel and mining corporation) (investor); Mr Abramovich is also the owner of Fordstam Ltd. (A UK company, former owner of Chelsea Football Club, which was sold during 2022. All sale proceeds from the sale currently held by Fordstam are due to be donated to charitable foundations, subject to license approvals from appropriate Governments and authorities).”
Under the foreign agents registration statute, non-American individuals, companies and governments are required to register ahead of making contacts with US government officials if their purpose is lobbying. Following registration, which includes terms of payment, the law requires six-monthly reports of how much money has been spent, what officials of the US government or Congress have been contacted, and what related lobbying activities and press promotions have been carried out. The first of Abramovich’s reports isn’t due to be filed and then published until January.
Read the Abramovich file here. https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6604-Exhibi ... 0705-4.pdf
Source: https://efile.fara.gov/
The Justice Department requires the foreign principal and the lobbyist he has hired to say what relationship he has with “a foreign government, foreign political party, or other foreign principal.” Abramovich ticked two of the yes boxes indicating his acknowledgement that he is “supervised” and “directed” by a foreign government.
Source: https://efile.fara.gov/
At the same time, further down the dossier, Abramovich explained what his answers mean. He claims that by “supervised” and “directed”, he means that “since February 2022, Mr Abramovich is acting as a mediator in the peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, with the goal of finding a diplomatic solution to end the armed conflict. Mr Abramovich is acting in an independent capacity within these negotiations and was approved by both countries to take on the role as a mediator. In addition to his involvement in the negotiations, Mr Abramovich has been heavily involved in advocating for, and coordinating the establishment of humanitarian corridors and other humanitarian rescue missions. Mr Abramovich is not a Government official and he has not held any political office in Russia for more than a decade, with his last official government duty terminating in 2008, where he served as Governor of Chukotka Region, Russia (2000-2008).”
Between “independent capacity” and “approved by both countries” there is state secrecy in the initiation of what Abramovich has been doing, and ambiguity in his process. The story of the Istanbul negotiations of March 29-30 revealed that Abramovich was ranked by the Turkish hosts as higher than the Russian government officials at the negotiating table with the Ukrainians. The outcome, however, was refusal of the terms under discussion by both governments. Read that story here.
Since then Abramovich has told US officials he’s still engaged in his “mediator” role; he isn’t saying in the file whether for his Washington lobbying he is still being “directed” and “supervised” by the Ukrainian government in Kiev – not by the Kremlin.
Source: http://johnhelmer.net/
In Moscow there is discreet but categorical opposition to any role Abramovich claims to be playing on the Russian side from the Stavka and the General Staff. No comparable disclaimers have been detected from Kiev or Lvov.
The FARA dossier was signed by Brian Murphy. He is a junior lawyer in the New York office of Kobre & Kim. Murphy is not one of the law firm’s experts on US government lobbying, sanctions, and the Justice Department’s National Security Division, which runs the FARA registration unit. The experts are Sean Buckley in the New York office of Kobre & Kim and Wade Weems in the Washington, DC, office.
As they explain themselves, both have worked for the Justice Department in the past. Buckley has “an extensive background in national security law, Mr. Buckley also advocates for clients affected by sanctions issued by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Commerce, and handles other issues relating to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and Title III of the Helms-Burton Act. Before joining Kobre & Kim, Mr. Buckley served as a DOJ prosecutor, most recently as co-chief of the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. In that capacity, he was responsible for overseeing complex international and cross-border investigations relating to international terrorism and terrorism financing across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, as well as economic espionage, U.S. sanctions and violations of anti-money laundering laws.” Next week in New York, Buckley will be lecturing on sanctions.
Left: Sean Buckley; centre, Wade Weems; right, Steven Kobre, the firm’s co-founder. In the record of client engagements and case outcomes, the law firm does not indicate past involvement with Russian or Ukrainian clients.
Weems is a China specialist. After leaving the Justice Department his initial appointment at Kobre & Kim was in the firm’s Shanghai office “subject to approval by the Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China.” That was in mid-2018. It is not known if Weems was permitted to work in China. He is currently listed by his firm in the Washington office where he has been reporting on Chinese counter-sanctions. According to Weems, he was “a prosecutor and trial lawyer with the DOJ in the National Security Division in the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.”
Another US federal court lawyer who has dealt with Kobre & Kim in the past says “it is the modus operandi of the firm to hire former prosecutors. They were federal prosecutors who formed a firm to do bank collection work relating to international fraud and became successful. All they do is litigation to my knowledge, a lot of it offshore and in England.”
The firm’s contract with Abramovich, which has been revealed in the Justice Department filing, explicitly rules out any litigation or court work. “For the avoidance of doubt, this engagement does not include conducting court litigation or the Firm being on the court record, which may be the subject of a further agreed engagement letter and budget.” The contract says the lawyers will be charging up to $1,900 per hour.
Another US attorney source says Kobre & Kim isn’t known as a lobbyist in Washington. The FARA unit files reveals, however, that in 2021 the firm was retained by the EN+ aluminium group controlled by Oleg Deripaska.
For the time being Abramovich has not been sanctioned by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC):
Source: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
He is sanctioned by the British Government, which announced its measure on March 10, when Elizabeth Truss was Foreign Secretary. Two of his co-shareholders in the Evraz steelmaking group were added to the UK sanctions list on November 2. The European Union (EU) followed London by sanctioning Abramovich on March 15; he then issued a law suit challenging this in the European Court at the end of May. His partner, Alexander Abramov, is suing in an Australian court to lift his sanction in that country.
Kobre & Kim reported that after its contract went to Abramovich on June 15 “we are legally required to obtain a license from the UK Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation and other government authorities before we can receive any fees or disbursements for the Covered Services, or receive any on account payment. We shall therefore be making license applications to those authorities, and in the form we deem necessary.”
By July 5, when the firm filed its registration in Washington, it is unclear whether it had received its permit from London and started receiving Abramovich’s money.
A Washington lawyer believes that with Buckley’s and Weems’s experience in sanctions, “that fits with Roman Abramovich’s needs.” This implies lobbying to persuade OFAC not to follow the British and EU lead in attacking Abramovich or his assets in the US. According to the July 5 document, Abramovich has hired the lawyers to give him “government relations strategy” and “interface with other government agencies”. This wording is vague enough to cover US government sanctions decisions as well as those of the governments in London, Brussels, and Lisbon.
Source: https://efile.fara.gov/
Abramovich has considerable assets in the US, including personal residences in New York and Colorado, and through his stake in Evraz, steel and pipemaking assets in Delaware, Colorado, Oregon, and two Canadian provinces. One of the Russian-owned US steelmills produces steel plate for US tanks. The US assets were the target of special US government investigation in 2006 before Evraz was permitted to acquire them. Follow Abramovich’s US establishment here. When that article was being prepared in January 2015, Abramovich was asked through his spokesman: “In the present war does Mr Abramovich indicate which side he prefers his assets to be on?” The spokesman replied: “Last I checked, Russia was not at war!”
Since August of this year, Abramovich and his partners in Evraz have been trying to sell their North American assets. In 2015 they sold the Claymont steelmill in Delaware.
For the record that Abramovich has been stripping Evraz’s Russian steel assets of revenue and capital to support his lossmaking offshore operations, click to read.
The Abramovich file’s emphasis on his role as a government-approved mediator between Russia and the Ukraine, in “finding a diplomatic solution to end the armed conflict”, and “advocating for, and coordinating the establishment of humanitarian corridors and other humanitarian rescue missions” represents his lobbying pitch to government officials. “Perhaps the package”, one source speculates, “is that Roman helps resolve the war and avoids sanctions in the US. Good luck on that first one.”
http://johnhelmer.net/roman-abramovich- ... more-70302
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LEAKED DOCUMENTS CONFIRM NATO PLANS TO DESTROY KAKHOVSKAYA DAM IN KHERSON REGION
Leaked Documents Confirm NATO Plans To Destroy Kakhovskaya Dam In Kherson Region
The Russian military has been constantly warning of the terrorist warfare of the Ukrainian military, which threatened the civilians of their own country as well as the entire Europe. The claims of the Russian top military officials are always ignored by the mainstream media as well as by the so-called international community, including, the UN Security Council.
The reason why the West does not hear Russia is clear: the US and NATO militaries are preparing and orchestrating all operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, including those that threaten the world with catastrophes or, at least, can claim the lives of hundreds of civilians at once.
Before the recent withdrawal of Russian troops from the western bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson region, Moscow together with the local officials claimed that the Ukrainian military was preparing attacks on the Kakhovskaya dam which could destroy dozens of settlements located along the large Dnieper River. This was one of the main reasons for the timely evacuation of civilians from the western bank region, including from the large city of Kherson.
The newly leaked documents of the NATO military confirmed that the Kakhovskaya dam, which was secured by Russian forces, was considered as one of the military targets for the Ukrainian and NATO military.
An anonymous team of hackers “Joker DPR” has recently published a new batch of secret NATO documents which they achieved after having hacked the notorious US DELTA military command and control system.
You may read the newly released documents HERE. You may also read the first part of the leaked documents HERE.
The publication was provided with the following sarcastic comments by the Joker:
Here is another batch of secret NATO documents that my hackers pulled out of the Ukrainian-American DELTA command and control program. In general, it is very interesting. NATO gives Ukrainians almost all intelligence data and targets to defeat, not to mention weapons, equipment and soldiers. Without the participation of NATO, the Ukrainian army would have ceased to exist long ago. So don’t be surprised that they are praying for NATO. But it would be better to pray for the Joker, then there would be a chance to stay alive.
The leaked documents confirmed that the Kakhovskaya dam was among the targets to destroy. The satellite imagery and the targets in the area were provided by the US intelligence back in summer.
With the active support of NATO, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been constantly shelling the dam, threatening the lives of thousands of civilians in the region. The damage of the dam would also disrupt the work of the Zaporozhskaya nuclear power plant, which would affect the security of the entire Europe.
In its turn, the Russian side has all means to devide Ukraine in two parts by several missile strikes on the bridges and dams on the Dnieper River. Such attacks would leave the Ukrainian military without possibility to transfer any military equipment and personnel to the war-torn regions in the East. Such attacks would immediately bring Russia victory in the war in Ukraine and would save lives of Russian servicemen. However, the destruction of Ukrainian dams would also claim lives of hundreds of civilians. That’s why the Russian military does not launch its missiles on such facilities.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has already shown that Russia is fighting to protect people, while the United States and NATO pay no attention to the cost of human lives in the war they have ignited in Ukraine.
https://southfront.org/leaked-documents ... on-region/
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"Ready to Negotiate"
December 1, 22:49
"Ready to Negotiate"
“Putin must leave Ukraine, this is number one. So far, he is not going to do this, ”Biden made a number of statements following a meeting with Macron
. The Presidents of the United States and France held talks in the White House. After the meeting with Macron, the head of the United States made a number of statements, including on issues of contacts with Russia:
- Biden, commenting on the issue of peace negotiations, indicated that Putin should leave Ukraine, this is number one;
- Possible contacts with Putin will take place only in consultations with NATO, not on an independent basis;
- Biden said he does not plan contacts with Putin in the near future;
- Biden said that he was ready to negotiate with Putin on the completion of the special operation in Ukraine, if the President of the Russian Federation makes such a decision;
- The United States will do everything to call to account those who are responsible for the violation of human rights in Iran, support Russia's military actions.
In addition, the heads of the two countries prepared joint statements regarding assistance to Ukraine - France and the United States intend to intensify the supply of air defense systems and equipment necessary to restore the power system of the Kyiv regime.
Biden's statements about "Readiness to negotiate with Putin" are, in fact, ordinary calls to "surrender, or else ...". There are no fundamental changes since spring. Like, give up 4 or 5 regions, and then we will kind of communicate with you. There is nothing interesting in these proposals, so we must continue to methodically destroy the Ukrainian infrastructure and increase the rate of utilization of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, so that von der Leyen in one of her speeches could complain about 200,000+ killed APU soldiers.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin/71730 - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8006516.html
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