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smytherines · 2 months

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Oh my god this got so long. I swore to myself that I was going to be normal about this and not just dump all of my headcanon immediately but like

Do you ever think about the fact that in the 1950s & 1960s there just were not that many nuclear weapons blueprints out there (and most of the document stealing was done by long term plants, not high risk guys like Curt & Owen)

If you were a spy during the Cold War you were most likely doing regime change. You were arming, training, and supplying coups. You were helping set the stage for American or UK capital to set up shop and repress and enslave Indigenous populations and export every drop of wealth possible from the global south. You were fighting a proxy war against "communism" (which often just meant workers striking for better conditions, at least intially) all across the globe.

With that context I think a lot about the coup in Guatemala in 1954, where the CIA trained and armed the coup and overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala (Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán) at the behest of the United Fruit Company. Árbenz was left of center, and he had land reforms planned that would compensate UFCO for their land, appropriate it, and redistribute it to workers. Guatemala offered to pay the value listed on UFCO tax documents (1.2 million), but UFCO demanded 16 million

If I start talking about this I'll never stop, but long story short UFCO had spent 50+ years gobbling up all the land in Guatemala, grew Bananas and exported them for massive profits, and terrorized or outright massacred Indigenous workers to keep them in line. The 1954 coup and the subsequent I think its 36 years of civil war in Guatemala is all down to the CIA doing a coup because the head of the CIA (Allen Dulles) was on the board of United Fruit and they wanted that blood money baby. It was a genocide.

Hard swerve back into it here: I don't know about Owen, but at least Agent Curt Mega had a *very* good chance of participating in the 1954 coup. In creating a literal Banana Republic (a puppet government controlled by US interests). I tend to think Owen was there too because it's more interesting that way. I think it's a mistake to focus exclusively on the Russian cat vs mouse and ignore the larger geopolitical context of the cold war.

Owen "dies" because of Curt's hubris- not just the drinking and talking him into risks he isn't comfortable with, but with his job at A.S.S., because someone else points and Curt shoots. In my headcanon Curt helped to create a banana republic that harmed and killed an incredible number of people, and he is just as careless when he leaves his banana peel on the stairs and "kills" Owen. Curt is absolutely firm in the belief that he is one of the good guys. And I think Owen was prolly the same way- until his body got wrecked and he got abandoned by the man he loved and he had a long, long time to think about the foreign policy of his government and what he and Curt really *did* on their fun lil spy jaunts.

If Owen was in Honduras (where they staged the Guatemala coup), then he has to reckon with the fact that he "died" due to *his own* hubris as well. He has to process that he joined the intelligence game because he grew up during the Blitz, during WWII, but that post WWII Britain was doing the same imperialist bullshit the US was. That Owen wasn't saving the world, he was destroying it. He was crushing half the planet under the thumb of British power. He was enacting the very genocides he joined up to prevent. That's why he wants a world with "no more agencies, no more spies, no more secrets."

So when Chimera offers Owen the chance to undermine US & UK interests, to take the power out of their hands by using and discarding a ridiculous n*zi, Owen just goes for it. I don't subscribe to the Chimera brainwashing theory, I like to think Owen joined Chimera because post-banana he became ideologically aligned with Chimera.

I imagine Chimera pulled him out of the rubble and got him back on his feet, and whispered in his ear about US/UK imperialism. We can argue about whether the ends justify the means, whether he goes too far, whether Chimera has pure intentions (doubt), but Owen isn't just some nightmare monster. He tells Curt "you've been blind" and "no one's innocent." He calls Curt a "caveman" and what is it, an "arrogant brute?" He has a rationale. He believes he is right. He's kind of a dick about it, but he has radicalized in a way Curt hasn't.

I think Owen sees Curt as clinging to cool guy spy shit (and the macho straight guy facade) instead of seeing the world for what it is. I think he probably also thinks about Alan Turing, about the UK arresting gay men- men who had previously been considered national heroes- for doing what Owen does (loving a man). I think he thinks about the US doing an elaborate and very public witchhunt of communists and gay people and anyone else who doesn't conform to good ol American capitalism. I think he insults Curt because he has been through a lot of shit that has changed his perspective, and he cannot believe that Curt *still doesn't see it*

I know there's the whole "DMA killed 1147 people, mostly girls from ages 14 to 22" kickstarter joke, but I'm sorry as much as I love Cynthia it'll be a cold day in hell before I believe anything the US state department says.

I don't think Agent Curt Mega is a perfect adorable babygirl who has never done anything wrong, I don't think Owen is (and has always been) a cruel and sadistic comic book villain. I think these are two men who loved each other in a time where it was very difficult, in a profession where they are literally the property of their respective governments. Where they could be arrested and forced into conversion therapy if they were discovered.

I think they were flawed (Curt cocky and careless, Owen condescending) but loved and respected each other as best they could, and when a massive trauma hits them they break different ways. Curt remains the lawful good, but Owen reframes his sense of right and wrong. I tend to think he did legit torture a lot of people, and even enjoyed it, but I think it was people related to these proxy wars, people related to these coups. People who could advance Chimera's objectives

I think Owen tortures Curt because he hates him, and he doesn't kill Curt (despite having soooo many chances) because he loves him. Owen has so much hesitation in the staircase scene. When Curt brings up their relationship he wavers and his face softens and his gun drops. He brings the gun back up, but despite having Curt at gunpoint for like 3 minutes he doesn't kill him. He hates him, but he loves him. If Curt takes the chance to talk to Owen, then maybe...

But Curt is convinced he is the good guy, which makes Owen the bad guy. And bad guys get put down like dogs. The ideological split is something Curt can't handle, so he shoots and kills his unarmed ex-lover. He just needs a win. He needs it to be over.

I don't have anything against anyone else's headcanon, I think it's a testament to how good Spies Are Forever really is that nearly 8 years later so many people still spend so much time taking apart this comedy musical about gay spies. But for me, it's more compelling if Owen is traumatized and flawed and ideologically opposed to the heroes of our story. I think it's more interesting that Curt kills the man he spent 4 years pining for because he can't accept the possibility that he could be the baddie.

Oh god I have to stop this is too much. But yeah. I've got feelings.

#spies are forever #curtwen #agent curt mega #owen carvour #tin can bros #Hahaha anyone else have an audhd hyperfixation??

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aronarchy · 8 days

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The extent of Russia’s influence in Sudan goes beyond its involvement in the current war. It’s not only fueling war in Sudan but it’s the reason Russia is able to continue its war in Ukraine and other places despite being sanctioned by the West. Russia is surviving western sanctions by exploiting, smuggling gold and aiding the Sudanese Transitional Military Council (TMC) in the suppression of the pro-civilian led government movement.

In 2014, Putin was vocal about creating an economic plan to circumvent potential Western sanctions tied to the Ukraine war. By 2017, they began extending lifelines to autocrats, and unsurprisingly, former Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir joined Putin’s economic pipeline. After a meeting between the two presidents, Russian geologists and mineralogists employed by Meroe Gold arrived in Sudan.

The Russian companies, including Wagner, a private military company linked to Russia and frequently engaged in conflicts worldwide, began establishing a presence in Sudan. Notably, Wagner leader is under US sanctions, accused of meddling in the 2020 US elections. In 2020, under Trump administration, the group was sanctioned for its heavy exploitation of Sudan’s natural resources. The exploitation was so evident that they literally had to be sanctioned by Trump, which is quite surprising.

In 2019, following Al-Bashir’s overthrow, Wagner transitioned to striking deals with the Rapid Support Forces militia general, Hemeti. This militia, formerly known as Janjaweed and implicated in the Darfur genocide, received weapons and training. Wagner, in return, gained access to smuggled gold and devised plans to maintain control, ultimately contributing to today’s proxy war in Sudan.

The method of gold smuggling involved disguising it as flying cookies and concealing the smuggled gold beneath Russian cookie boxes. 🤣

In 2022, @/nimaelbagir a Sudanese journalist and CNN’s Chief International Investigative Correspondent went to a Russian owned gold mining facility in Sudan. Watch her report here ⬇️

Full report here:

In June 2022, the Darfur Bar Association (DBA) launched an investigation and confirmed Wagner mercenaries presence in South Darfur after its attack on gold miners in South Darfur. The investigation also revealed that the Transitional Military council (SAF+RSF) knew about the presence of Wagner in Sudan and in 2019 a copy of the report was actually sent to then prime minister Hamadok.

The DBA investigation also revealed how the UAE is involved in Sudan and its role in the current war. There’s also an extensive investigation report on the role of the UAE in Sudan by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that proves the UAE involvement in Sudan.

How are the UAE and Russia linked you might ask?

1) Most Sudanese gold passes through the United Arab Emirates. Unofficial data from the United Arab Emirates reported that over $1.7bn of Sudanese gold landed in Dubai in 2021, just under half the value of all the country’s exports. But there is little accurate data tracking it after it arrives in the UAE (arrives via Russia). Most industry exports reckon that official figures account for less than a quarter of total gold sales. Khartoum’s central bank recorded gold exports of 26.4 tonnes from January to September in 2021 but estimates over 100 tonnes would have been smuggled out during that period. (Africa Confidential)

Amdjarass, the Chadian town just across the Sudanese border, is the base from which the UAE is running an operation supposedly to help Sudanese refugees. But behind the façade of what the UAE maintains are humanitarian efforts, lies covert weapons, drones, and medical treatment to injured RSF fighters. (The Africa Report)

A U.S. Ally Promised to Send Aid to Sudan. It Sent Weapons Instead. (WSJ)

The New York Times report on how the UAE is further involved ⬇️

2) In April 2023, following the onset of the war in Sudan, the Wagner group was exposed by CNN for allegedly supplying missiles to the RSF in their conflict against the Sudanese armed forces (SAF). The arms came through the UAE under the guise of humanitarian aid for Sudanese refugees in Chad. These armaments were destined for the UAE’s local proxy, the RSF, in Sudan’s western region. In addition, CNN exposed that the shipments of surface-to-air missiles provided by Wagner were destined for the RSF via flights shuttling the hardware from Latakia, Syria, to Khadim, Libya, and then airdropped to northwestern Sudan, where the RSF enjoys a strong presence. This support from Wagner is considered a significant factor contributing to the RSF’s continuation of the war and their reported atrocities against Sudanese civilians, including killing, looting, sexual violence, and mass destruction of Sudan’s infrastructure.

The satellite images from CNN and the open-source group “All Eyes On Wagner,” provide evidence of an escalated Wagner presence at the bases of Khalifa Haftar, the leader of a Libyan militia supported by Wagner, in Libya. This heightened presence was purportedly in preparation to assist the RSF militia against the SAF.

Full report here:

3) There is evidence that the UAE has been funding Wagner in Libya to help reduce the financial burden on Russia for its Libyan operations and has been deploying these forces to prop up its ally, General Khalifa Haftar, who has been fighting the UN-recognized Government of National Accord in Tripoli. The report that the UAE is funding Wagner in Libya actually came from the US department of defense, which again is a surprise considering the close alliance of the US and the UAE.

East Africa Counterterrorism Operation, North and West Africa Counterterrorism Operation Quarterly Report to Congress, July 1, 2020‒September 30, 2020

#repost of someone else’s content #twitter repost #sudan #keep eyes on sudan #sudanese genocide #uae #russia #putin #wagner #rsf #proxy war #genocide #free sudan #liberate sudan

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mariacallous · 2 months

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In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg. “They form the prerequisite of a viable democracy.” His country, having regained its independence from the Soviet Union three years earlier, believed in these values: “The Estonian people never abandoned their faith in this freedom during the decades of totalitarian oppression.”

But Meri had also come to deliver a warning: Freedom in Estonia, and in Europe, could soon be under threat. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the circles around him were returning to the language of imperialism, speaking of Russia as primus inter pares—the first among equals—in the former Soviet empire. In 1994, Moscow was already seething with the language of resentment, aggression, and imperial nostalgia; the Russian state was developing an illiberal vision of the world, and even then was preparing to enforce it. Meri called on the democratic world to push back: The West should “make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance.”

At that, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, got up and walked out of the hall.

Meri’s fears were at that time shared in all of the formerly captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and they were strong enough to persuade governments in Estonia, Poland, and elsewhere to campaign for admission to NATO. They succeeded because nobody in Washington, London, or Berlin believed that the new members mattered. The Soviet Union was gone, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg was not an important person, and Estonia would never need to be defended. That was why neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush made much attempt to arm or reinforce the new NATO members. Only in 2014 did the Obama administration finally place a small number of American troops in the region, largely in an effort to reassure allies after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Nobody else anywhere in the Western world felt any threat at all. For 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too, setting up systems to allow those same Russian kleptocrats to export their stolen money and keep it parked, anonymously, in Western property and banks. We convinced ourselves that there was no harm in enriching dictators and their cronies. Trade, we imagined, would transform our trading partners. Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy—and democracy would bring peace.

After all, it had happened before. Following the cataclysm of 1939–45, Europeans had indeed collectively abandoned wars of imperial, territorial conquest. They stopped dreaming of eliminating one another. Instead, the continent that had been the source of the two worst wars the world had ever known created the European Union, an organization designed to find negotiated solutions to conflicts and promote cooperation, commerce, and trade. Because of Europe’s metamorphosis—and especially because of the extraordinary transformation of Germany from a Nazi dictatorship into the engine of the continent’s integration and prosperity—Europeans and Americans alike believed that they had created a set of rules that would preserve peace not only on their own continents, but eventually in the whole world.

This liberal world order relied on the mantra of “Never again.” Never again would there be genocide. Never again would large nations erase smaller nations from the map. Never again would we be taken in by dictators who used the language of mass murder. At least in Europe, we would know how to react when we heard it.

But while we were happily living under the illusion that “Never again” meant something real, the leaders of Russia, owners of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, were reconstructing an army and a propaganda machine designed to facilitate mass murder, as well as a mafia state controlled by a tiny number of men and bearing no resemblance to Western capitalism. For a long time—too long—the custodians of the liberal world order refused to understand these changes. They looked away when Russia “pacified” Chechnya by murdering tens of thousands of people. When Russia bombed schools and hospitals in Syria, Western leaders decided that that wasn’t their problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, they found reasons not to worry. Surely Putin would be satisfied by the annexation of Crimea. When Russia invaded Ukraine the second time, occupying part of the Donbas, they were sure he would be sensible enough to stop.

Even when the Russians, having grown rich on the kleptocracy we facilitated, bought Western politicians, funded far-right extremist movements, and ran disinformation campaigns during American and European democratic elections, the leaders of America and Europe still refused to take them seriously. It was just some posts on Facebook; so what? We didn’t believe that we were at war with Russia. We believed, instead, that we were safe and free, protected by treaties, by border guarantees, and by the norms and rules of the liberal world order.

With the third, more brutal invasion of Ukraine, the vacuity of those beliefs was revealed. The Russian president openly denied the existence of a legitimate Ukrainian state: “Russians and Ukrainians,” he said, “were one people—a single whole.” His army targeted civilians, hospitals, and schools. His policies aimed to create refugees so as to destabilize Western Europe. “Never again” was exposed as an empty slogan while a genocidal plan took shape in front of our eyes, right along the European Union’s eastern border. Other autocracies watched to see what we would do about it, for Russia is not the only nation in the world that covets its neighbors’ territory, that seeks to destroy entire populations, that has no qualms about the use of mass violence. North Korea can attack South Korea at any time, and has nuclear weapons that can hit Japan. China seeks to eliminate the Uyghurs as a distinct ethnic group, and has imperial designs on Taiwan.

We can’t turn the clock back to 1994, to see what would have happened had we heeded Lennart Meri’s warning. But we can face the future with honesty. We can name the challenges and prepare to meet them.

There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.

This fight is not theoretical. It requires armies, strategies, weapons, and long-term plans. It requires much closer allied cooperation, not only in Europe but in the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. NATO can no longer operate as if it might someday be required to defend itself; it needs to start operating as it did during the Cold War, on the assumption that an invasion could happen at any time. Germany’s decision to raise defense spending by 100 billion euros is a good start; so is Denmark’s declaration that it too will boost defense spending. But deeper military and intelligence coordination might require new institutions—perhaps a voluntary European Legion, connected to the European Union, or a Baltic alliance that includes Sweden and Finland—and different thinking about where and how we invest in European and Pacific defense.

If we don’t have any means to deliver our messages to the autocratic world, then no one will hear them. Much as we assembled the Department of Homeland Security out of disparate agencies after 9/11, we now need to pull together the disparate parts of the U.S. government that think about communication, not to do propaganda but to reach more people around the world with better information and to stop autocracies from distorting that knowledge. Why haven’t we built a Russian-language television station to compete with Putin’s propaganda? Why can��t we produce more programming in Mandarin—or Uyghur? Our foreign-language broadcasters—Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí in Cuba—need not only money for programming but a major investment in research. We know very little about Russian audiences—what they read, what they might be eager to learn.

Funding for education and culture needs rethinking too. Shouldn’t there be a Russian-language university, in Vilnius or Warsaw, to house all the intellectuals and thinkers who have just left Moscow? Don’t we need to spend more on education in Arabic, Hindi, Persian? So much of what passes for cultural diplomacy runs on autopilot. Programs should be recast for a different era, one in which, though the world is more knowable than ever before, dictatorships seek to hide that knowledge from their citizens.

Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy. Congress has made some progress in recent months in the fight against global kleptocracy, and the Biden administration was right to put the fight against corruption at the heart of its political strategy. But we can go much further, because there is no reason for any company, property, or trust ever to be held anonymously. Every U.S. state, and every democratic country, should immediately make all ownership transparent. Tax havens should be illegal. The only people who need to keep their houses, businesses, and income secret are crooks and tax cheats.

We need a dramatic and profound shift in our energy consumption, and not only because of climate change. The billions of dollars we have sent to Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have promoted some of the worst and most corrupt dictators in the world. The transition from oil and gas to other energy sources needs to happen with far greater speed and decisiveness. Every dollar spent on Russian oil helps fund the artillery that fires on Ukrainian civilians.

Take democracy seriously. Teach it, debate it, improve it, defend it. Maybe there is no natural liberal world order, but there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect; our own has deep flaws, profound divisions, terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them. Few of them have existed across human history; many have existed for a time and then failed. They can be destroyed from the outside, but from the inside, too, by divisions and demagogues.

Perhaps, in the aftermath of this crisis, we can learn something from the Ukrainians. For decades now, we’ve been fighting a culture war between liberal values on the one hand and muscular forms of patriotism on the other. The Ukrainians are showing us a way to have both. As soon as the attacks began, they overcame their many political divisions, which are no less bitter than ours, and they picked up weapons to fight for their sovereignty and their democracy. They demonstrated that it is possible to be a patriot and a believer in an open society, that a democracy can be stronger and fiercer than its opponents. Precisely because there is no liberal world order, no norms and no rules, we must fight ferociously for the values and the hopes of liberalism if we want our open societies to continue to exist.

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apas-95 · 1 year

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Please bear in mind that I'm not disagreeing with you or anything like that, in fact I appreciate your views on Russia-Ukraine and this is why I just want to ask this. So, to simplify, you believe that the conflict is of two imperial powers, NATO vs Putin's Russia. Okay. What I struggle to understand is this, and um I myself am from Kazakhstan, so I guess bear that in mind. So if Russia is seeking new colonies (Crimea as the source of oil, famously), why wouldn't they rather colonize Kazakhstan? We are richer than Ukraine, our oil reserves are greater, we can mount no defense like Ukraine and obviously would not receive any help from NATO. In fact during January events we explicitly asked them to help us, their army entered, and then left (even though many claimed they would overturn our government). Idk how much you know about our country, so you might claim that Russia already has us as their colony, but I know for a fact that the most of oil reserves belong to Italian, German and American companies. Our president (Tokayev) while might seem like Putin's puppet, even during this war has gone against Putin - remained neutral about the conflict (like Belarus we technically could help), and also accepted the greatest number of refugees from Russia who refused to join the war (in my country many have argued that he's done more than the West to truly stop the conflict with this act). There are 14 Post-Soviet Republics, if not us, why not colonize any other country except the one that gets help from the States? (Armenia famously got their help during the whole Azerbaijan invasion) Also - you might say that Ukraine bc of their crimes against Russians gave a better reason, then we, too, have anti-Russia's movements that technically could provide a reason. Again, I'm not pro-Putin, obv, and mb this isn't important in the context, mb I shouldn't include such a narrow point of view, just, if you have anything to say about that, I would love to hear it, thanks!

I would say that there are a few main points that should be got across.

First: taking it as given that the Russian Federation is an imperialist country, in the Marxist sense of the term, we would have to conclude that it's a much weaker imperialist country than the USA.

From the start of the Russian Federation, it was a very impoverished country, one that survived mainly by selling off its natural resources and cannibalising the industrial base it took from the USSR. However, imperialism relies more on the wealth of the capitalist class than the country as a whole, and there was a lot of Soviet wealth and expertise to cannibalise. In Marxist terms, the key feature of imperialism is the export of capital, rather than resources or commodities, becoming the key part of the economy. The bourgeoisie of the Russian Federation has been able to build up enough capital to begin making this possible.

As it stands now, in the cases of CSTO countries, while the RF is often not even the largest investor, it is still a substantial investor, when looking at Foreign Direct Investment figures. Kazakhstan specifically has far more European investment (in part because of its resources compared to other countries), but it's undeniable that the RF is an influence - that we could describe the CSTO as, broadly, the RF's sphere of influence. While the US's sphere of influence is basically the entire world; and the EU's sphere of influence is all of Europe, most of Eurasia, and most of Africa; the Russian Federation would have a comparatively much smaller sphere of influence with a lot of overlap.

The second thing is: the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine is not, principally, an attempt at simple economic expansion, but motivated primarily by competition with the US imperialist bloc.

You are right - if the RF was looking to just invade and directly take control of whatever country it wished, it wouldn't choose Ukraine, it would choose somewhere closer to home. However, direct colonisation isn't how modern imperialism operates. Financial control with the threat of military action is far easier to maintain, once you've built up the capital. Being an imperialist country is exactly what makes 'primitive accumulation' through seizing territory no longer necessary. The reason the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine in 2022, and began military action against the country in 2014, is specifically because the prior neutral government was overthrown in a US-backed coup which installed a right-wing, nationalist government, which was explicitly hostile to Russia.

This isn't fueled by a simple, moral justification of 'well they hate Russians, so we should invade them' - it's a political move based on the fact that this new government was explicitly allied with the USA. From the USA's side, it was a move specifically to split the EU and RF blocs. The EU was becoming less interested in the alliance with the USA, and more interested with closer ties with the Russian Federation - the USA provoking a war both weakens the RF, as well as demonstrates its military dominance to the EU. Had the Kazakh government instead called for NATO to assist it, the Russian response may have been different. Imperialism is fine with nominal independence - it wants influence, not direct control - but when that influence is threatened, when a country takes a hard, military stance against it, then it acts violently.

So, again, I'd say the character of this conflict is inter-imperialist competition, instigated mainly by the US imperialist bloc, in order to weaken ties between the RF and EU imperialist blocs. The war is fought between the capitalists of each nation over which group of them gets market access to which territories, and the working people gain nothing either way. The workers, once united under a socialist state, now kill each other, so that the oligarchs that keep them poor can get richer. Neither side of this conflict fights for the workers.

Hope this helps explain my position! Also, for what it's worth, I lived in Kazakhstan for a time as a child, in Almaty.

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fatehbaz · 1 year

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Caribbean cruise vacations have a long violent history. Earlier today, I came across one of the early print advertisement illustrations for the Caribbean cruise ship vacations offered by “the Great White Fleet.” And I pondered bananas.

Just as uncomfortable as it sounds. The story of the origin of the Caribbean cruise industry is, after all, also the story of the origin of the term “Banana Republic.”

In 1914, the Great War began as the planet’s powerful empires of old were collapsing, as British, French, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and Qing/Chinese powers were marred by internal revolt and global warfare. But in 1914, the United States completed their Panama Canal and consolidated power in Latin America and the Caribbean, celebrating the ascent of a “new” empire made strong, in part, by bananas.

As of 2022, bananas generate 12 billion dollars per year, with 75% of bananas exported from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The planet’s single biggest banana-producing company is Chiquita. The Chiquita brand was previously known as United Fruit Company, which had essentially monopolized the banana industry in Latin America. United Fruit Company has a bit of an image problem, following its theft of Indigenous land across Central America in the early 20th century; its role in provoking the killing of tens of hundreds/thousands of plantation laborers during the Banana Massacre of 1928; the company’s direct role in the CIA-backed toppling of the Guatemala government in the 1950s; and the company’s role in paying to harass and intimidate labor organizers in Colombia in recent decades.

But what of the “romance” and “adventure” of the Caribbean?

So it’s 1915 or 1916.

Middle of the Great War. Classic empires are disintegrating: Spanish empire, British empire, Austro-Hungarian empire, Russian empire, Ottoman empire, remnants of the Qing/Chinese state, etc. And whose empire is rising? United States, an empire expanding in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. After the 1898 Spanish-US war, as Teddy Roosevelt’s cartoon cavalry conquered Cuba, the Spanish Main belongs to the US of A. The US Navy controlled the Caribbean Sea, and was aiming to expand across the Pacific Ocean, to Hawai’i and beyond.

But the official US Navy isn’t the only fleet upholding the empire. The United Fruit Company had its own fleet.

The text of one of these Great White Fleet ads, from 1916, adorned with imagery of a blue-and-gold macaw and an aerial map of the Caribbean, reads:

“[W]here winter never comes and where the soft trade winds bring renewed health. [W]ith all the comforts and all the luxuries of life you enjoy aboard the palatial ships of the GREAT WHITE FLEET. Delicious meals a la carte [...]. Dainty staterooms, perfectly ventilated [...]. [A]mid the scenes of romance and history in the Caribbean. And with it the opportunity to win for yourself a treasure of health and happiness, of greater benefit than the fabled fountain of youth, sought by Spanish adventurers in the tropic isles of the Spanish Main.”

Who’s leading the charge?

The United Fruit Company!

From the May 1916 issue of Red Book. Image source, from Archive dot org:

Another:

Image source, from Archive dot org:

“There the Pirates hid their Gold -- and every voyage, every port, every route of the Great White Fleet through the Golden Caribbean has the romance of buried treasure, pirate ships an deeds of adventure [...].”

The Golden Caribbean.

The same region where Columbus murdered Indigenous people, where the US and France had just spent 100 years punishing Haiti with unending economic warfare afters slaves rebelled against colonization, and where the United Fruit Company would now set up shop.

The company’s plantations would expand across Central America, establishing brutal racial hierarchies and essentially controlling federal governments of Central American nations.

In 1928, over 30,000 laborers were on strike at banana plantations in Colombia. They demanded payment of actual wages, rather than the credits they were given which were mostly only redeemable at company-owned stores in company towns. The US government threatened to send the Marine Corps to intervene if the “subversive” workers would not return to UFC’s plantations. In December 1928, after martial law had been declared, General Cortes Vargas entered the town square of Cienaga (Magdalena) during Sunday gatherings, with machine guns, opening fire on the crowds, and killing perhaps 3,000 people.

In the late 1940s, the United Fruit Company intensified its ad campaigns led by propagandist Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud???), who also practiced his skill at manipulative advertising when working to popularize the American Tobacco Company by showing women smoking “torches of freedom” and linking “women’s rights” to cigarette iconography.

Bernays, who explicitly wrote about his “counter-Communist” intention in the ads, was “drafted” in the war to topple ascendant leftist governments. After 1944 and after Arevalo’s labor reforms, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman took control of Guatemala in 1951, and took over 200,000 acres from United Fruit Company and returned them to poor families. Bernays launched propaganda attacks against Guatemala, helping to plant stories about Guatemala eventually carried in the Saturday Evening Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Reader’s Digest. In January 1952, Bernays personally led a tour of Central America, accompanying publishers and editors of Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Cincinnati Enquirer, Scripps-Howard, and Time magazine. When the CIA-trained military force led by Carlos Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala, with CIA aerial support, installing Castillo Armas as president, Bernays called them an “army of liberation.”

Bananas and Caribbean cruises aren’t the only culprits in expanding imperial power in Latin America, the tropics, and the Global South.

In 1914, the same year that the United States finished the Panama Canal and consolidated power in Latin America and the Caribbean, Richard Strong was a newly appointed director of Harvard’s new Department of Tropical Medicine. Strong was also appointed director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work at United Fruit Company. Strong toured the company’s plantations in Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Cuba. In the coming years, Strong would also personally approach Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the Firestone company, which owned and brutally operated rubber plantations in tropical West Africa. Research in tropical medicine was thus inaugurated by and dependent on colonial/imperial plantations and racial/social hierarchies at United Fruit Company and Firestone sites across the tropical regions, planetwide. Strong is just one character that demonstrates the interconnectedness of academia, fruit plantations, rubber supplies, food distribution, motor vehicle industries, strike-breakers, military forces, imperial expansion, and other tendrils of violently-enforced racist power.

Today, in 2022, Chiquita maintains twenty thousand employees across 70 countries.

I think about this as I eat a banana for lunchtime. I think about this when I see the Edenic portrayal of a Caribbean shore, a landscape baked not so much by the tropical sun but instead scarred by centuries of genocide, slavery, and plantation labor, where government officials gleefully report “with honor” on the massacre of thousands.

“Just a banana, it ain’t.”

Agreed.

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herukapadmajungiansworld · 9 months

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Switzerland has for years been the destination of choice for Russian oligarchs and corrupt officials to hide their stolen money. Swiss banks are estimated to hold over $200 billion in stashed Russian cash.

The United States recently opened an investigation into Swiss banks helping #Russia to evade sanctions, subpoenaing the two largest Swiss banks at the time. Switzerland is also key to Russian #evasion of export controls meant to ensure Russia cannot resupply its military and continue its war.

Russian-induced corruption within the Swiss law enforcement system led to the resignation of the former top prosecutor of Switzerland and the conviction of a senior Swiss law enforcement official on bribery charges. Switzerland is now primed to send millions in frozen Russian dirty money related to the revelations of Sergei Magnitsky to the Russians who stole it.

This hearing will examine Switzerland’s key role in laundering Russian money. Witnesses will discuss how Switzerland came to be a favorite destination for Russian dirty money, how Russian corruption in Switzerland endangers U.S. national security and the ability of Ukraine to defend itself, and possible policy responses. This hearing builds on years of work by the #Commission to hold Switzerland to account for its role in Russian money laundering and corruption.

The following witnesses are scheduled to testify:

1Bill Browder, Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign

2Drew Sullivan, Co-Founder, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)

3Olena Tregub, Secretary General, Independent Defense Anti-Corruption Committee (NAKO)

HEARING

Russia’s Alpine Assets: Money Laundering and Sanctions Evasion in Switzerland

July 18, 2023

1:00 p.m.

Senate Dirksen Building G50

Live stream:

youtube.com/watch?v=dxX98X…

#switerland #russian oligarchs #swiss banks #russian induced corruption #bribery charges against senior swiss law enforcement official #us national security #ukraine resistance #stop russian invasion #stop russian money laundering #give russian money in switerland to ukraine #ukraine war #help ukraine #give weapons to ukraine #i stand with ukraine #slava ukraini

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usafphantom2 · 3 months

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With temperatures on the SR-71’s leading edges exceeding 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, dealing with the heat raised a host of seemingly insurmountable design and material challenges. Titanium alloy was the only option for the airframe —providing the strength of stainless steel, a relatively light weight, and durability at the excessive temperatures.

Kirchoff’s law of thermal radiation this basically states that a good absorber is a good emitter , and a good absorber of heat is a black body.

Black paint generated, and Emissivity value of 0.93 compared with 0.38 for bare titanium resulting in a reduction in surface temperature of 15 to 30 degrees celsius. This was well worth this 60 pounds in additional weight of paint.

In Ben Riches Book “Skunk Works,” it was himself who suggested this idea to Kelly Johnson. Ben was the second man in control of the Skunk Works after Kelly’s retirement..

Titanium, however, proved to be a particularly sensitive material from which to build an airplane. The brittle alloy shattered if mishandled, which meant great frustration on the Skunk Works assembly line, and new training classes for Lockheed’s machinists. Conventional cadmium-plated steel tools, it was soon learned, embrittled the titanium on contact; so new tools were designed and fabricated—out of titanium.

But most important the US did not have the necessary ore. The world’s largest supplier of it was the Soviet Union, America’s enemy during the Cold War.

Titanium procurement during the Cold War was so vital to the US’ goal of defeating the Soviet Union that it had to secretly buy the metal from the very country it sought to vanquish. It was 1960 and Washington needed spy planes that could avoid detection in Soviet airspace by flying to the heavens. To make what would become the vaunted SR-71 Blackbird, Lockheed knew it had to build a light plane, but one that was strong enough to hold extra fuel to give it expansive range. The only metal that would do the job was titanium. The only place to get titanium in the needed quantities was the Soviet Union.

The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US to build the SR-71.

“The airplane is 92% titanium inside and out. Back when they were building the airplane the United States didn’t have the ore supplies – an ore called rutile ore. It’s a very sandy soil and it’s only found in very few parts of the world. The major supplier of the ore was the USSR. Working through Third World countries and bogus operations, they were able to get the rutile ore shipped to the United States to build the SR-71,” famous former SR-71 pilot Colonel Rich Graham said in an interesting article appeared on BBC. According to the following video, one of the bogus operations mentioned by Graham saw the US asking Soviets for titanium because they needed it for pizza ovens youtu.be/9mVXdo0QmPo

And Russians easily believed that the US needed titanium for thousands of pizza ovens. After all, they fraudulently possibly told their comrades that the United States was a lazy country that probably couldn’t even cook for itself. They need it to go out to buy pizza…

Ultimately, through third parties and fake companies, the US, “managed to unobtrusively purchase the base metal from one of the world’s leading exporters – the Soviet Union,” according to the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich, a Lockheed Martin engineer who worked on the SR-71. “The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.”

Andriy Brodskyy contributed to this article. Written by~Linda Sheffield for Aviation Geek Club

Be sure to check out Linda Sheffield Miller (Col Richard (Butch) Sheffield’s daughter, Col. Sheffield was an SR-71 Reconnaissance Systems Officer) Facebook Pages Habubrats SR-71 and Born into the Wilde Blue Yonder for awesome Blackbird’s photos and stories.

@Habubrats71 via X

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rollsrocker · 1 year

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Kremlin's Plan for Moldova

Greetings everyone.

The RISE investigative journalism agency published a highly detailed account of the Russian efforts to infiltrate Moldovan politics with a comprehensive strategy to integrate the country firmly in the Russian sphere of influence by 2023, with the side effect of completely alienating Moldova from Romania, the EU, NATO and the wider west.

Bellow I took the liberty of translating it into English, and the hyperlink of the Investigation in Romanian.

If you are Moldovan/Romanian, or if you take interest in the regional geo-politics, I highly recommend this read.

Thank you for your attention and time!

A document leaked from behind the scenes of the Kremlin presidential administration reveals Russia's plan to bring Moldova under its own umbrella by 2030.

The document, which has not been made public, is called "Strategic Objectives of the Russian Federation in the Republic of Moldova" and was created in 2021. Several key points of Moscow's strategy have also appeared over the years on the public platforms of pro-Russian parties and in speeches by politicians.

"The document is an interesting one, but it shows that they are one step behind the general situation because of the war in Ukraine and because of the regional capacity of EU countries and other international organisations to mobilise and face Russia's intentions to achieve this," Sergiu Diaconu, head of the Moldovan Prime Minister's Office, told us after we showed him the resulting strategy.

Against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the government in Chisinau is increasingly promoting Moldova's rapprochement with the European Union. The head of state recently set a deadline for this goal. The year 2030.

This year - 2030, is also included in Russia's strategy as the deadline for gaining control over the Republic of Moldova and moving it away from the EU, NATO and other partners.

The document detailing Moscow's strategy was obtained by RISE Moldova together with an international consortium of journalists including Yahoo News, Delfi Estonia, the London-based Dossier Centre, the Swedish newspaper Exane Westdeutscher, Rundfunk and Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the Polish investigative station Frontstory, the Belarusian Investigative Centre and the Central European news website VSquare.

The document comes from the same Presidential Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation that produced a similar strategy on Russia's plans to annex the Republic of Belarus. The strategy was drafted in autumn 2021, as was the Belarus strategy, with input from the Russian General Staff and Moscow's special services: the FSB, SVR and GRU. "There is zero percent [chance that] these documents are fake," according to the source who provided us with the documents.

The strategy was built on three spheres of influence: political and military, economic and humanitarian.

PRO-RUSSIAN POLITICAL AND BUSINESS INFLUENCE GROUPS

Strategic objectives in the political, military, military-technical and security spheres

In the short term (until 2022), Russia has set out to open a consulate in ATU Gagauzia, but this has not happened. The idea of opening a Russian consulate in Comrat has been promoted by former head of state Igor Dodon since 2012. At the time, Dodon was a member of parliament.

In 2021, an initiative group started collecting signatures in support of the idea, arguing that "many Gagauz residents have Russian citizenship and go to this country to earn money. Many citizens of the autonomy got married in Russia, have businesses there. We are linked to Russia by many threads".

Mihail Vlah is the chairman of the supervisory board of the public company Teleradio Gagauzia (GRT) and one of the organisers of the rally against price increases in the summer of 2022. His wife, Tatiana Vlah, owns 67% of Bakayan, which is on the list of Moldovan companies that Rosselkhoznadzor allowed to export to Russia in December 2022, after imposing an embargo on all agricultural producers on the right bank of the Dniester in August. Vlah denied at the time any link between obtaining the right to export to Russia and the organisation of the protest.

Mihail VLAH, civic activist from Gagauzia: I think Russia is generally not interested in Moldova. What is happening in the Transnistrian region is very important for Russia, because about 50% of the population there is Russian, they keep their weapons there and there are peacekeepers there.

As far as Moldova as a whole is concerned, I think Russia would naturally like to see Moldova in its sphere of influence. Just as Europe and America would like to see Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia in their sphere of influence.

And from Gagauzia, Russia wants nothing. We live as badly as the whole of Moldova. We pay 30 lei each for gas and electricity. Our products do not reach Russia. We, like our Moldovan brothers, suffer from the fact that there is war in Ukraine and from this relationship between the authorities of the Republic of Moldova and the authorities of the Russian Federation.

Another objective of the Russian Federation is 'Countering Moldova's collaboration with NATO', which it has set itself to achieve by 2025. And in the long term, i.e. by 2030, Russia wants to "form a negative attitude towards NATO in Moldovan society and political circles". This was one of the "10 priority objectives" promoted by the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM) in the February 2019 parliamentary elections: "We will not allow NATO membership and we will achieve the closure of the NATO office in Chisinau".

"Countering Romania's expansionist policy in Moldova" - Russia's medium-term goal - by 2025. In the same 2019 elections, the PSRM claimed that if it had a parliamentary majority, it would ban "unionist parties and movements". At the same time, the socialists promised that Moldova would "achieve full membership of the Eurasian Economic Union" (EEU). The objective is also reflected in the Russian Federation's strategy.

Also in the political, military, military-technical and security spheres, Russia wants to "broaden the electoral base of political forces in Moldova that advocate constructive relations with the RF", "create stable pro-Russian groups of influence among the Moldovan political and economic elite", 'developing cooperation in the politico-military sphere, including intensifying Russian-Moldovan contacts between the armed forces and law enforcement institutions' and 'increasing the level of Moldova's participation in CIS activities, including restoring the participation of Moldovan representatives in all Community formats as well as through the EEU'.

Dorin RECEAN, Prime Minister: From a military point of view, at the moment, they do not have the resources and circumstances to do much. They cannot advance on the Transnistrian side. They are not aligned enough.

But in terms of increasing insecurity and fear and anxiety and funding protests and different kinds of destabilization, that's what they're trying to do. And that coincides with the agenda of these groups that normally should be in jail, and their money - recovered by the government, because they stole money from the people.

"Russia sees the Shor Party as a reliable partner"

One party that satisfies the Russian Federation's agenda in Chisinau is Shor. The party led by fugitive Ilan Shor has openly shown sympathy for Moscow.

Alongside socialists and communists, Șor has not once spoken out against NATO, even threatening that our country's rapprochement with the military alliance could lead to war with Russia.

"As if it is not clear how our traditional partners in the East will react to our giving up our neutral status and joining NATO. [...] Do we want war? Maybe we should tell this witch (Maia Sandu - ed.) to stop bringing NATO trouble to our peaceful land," Ilan Shor said in early 2023.

Amid the large-scale war unleashed by Russia, Șor has shown his support for the aggressor state, campaigning against the sanctions imposed by the EU. "In the case of support for sanctions against Russia (by the authorities in Chisinau - ed.), I reserve the right to call people to the streets," Șor said in a Facebook video.

Moreover, back in 2021, the parliamentary party claimed that it aimed to establish cooperation relations with "Edinaia Rossia" (United Russia), the party that has been governing in Russia for more than a decade. A statement published by the Shor Party said that the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Russian State Duma, Leonid Slutsky, said that "in recent years, the big problem has been that we have not had a reliable and long-term partner in Moldova for all our big companies. Today, however, we have found this partner in the person of Ilan Shor and the 'Shor' Party."

Ilan Shor and his party have been included on the US sanctions list for representing Russian interests in Moldova.

"Before the 2021 parliamentary elections, Russia was planning [...] to bring Moldova back into its sphere of influence. To support this effort, it worked with Russian citizens to create a political alliance designed to control Moldova's parliament and then support the adoption of a series of legislative acts in the interests of the Russian Federation," a document issued by the US State Treasury in October 2022 said.

We interviewed Marina Tauber in front of the government during the Sunday, 12 March 2023 protest organised by the Shor Party. Tauber denied that she was financed by Russia in any way.

Marina TAUBER, member of the Shor Party: No, we are not financed by Russia in any way. I declare this officially. And when people say or affirm this, please ask them to prove it to you and show you the concrete evidence. Otherwise, sorry, blah, blah, blah. I can't answer for all the people in the world. If they hired some of their employees, they have to answer. Mr Chernăuțan (Viorel Chernăuțeanu, head of the General Inspectorate of Police), as far as I heard from his briefing, said nothing about the Shor political party. If there are provocateurs here, what can I say? How can I tell you? I show you people who came from the district at our invitation. What the others are doing, I can't answer for the whole world.

PRO-RUSSIAN NGOS, CHURCH SUPPORT AND SPECIAL STATUS FOR THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

Strategic objectives in the humanitarian sphere

By 2025, Russia aims to create a network of "NGOs promoting the development of Russian-Moldovan relations" in Moldova and to provide "organisational, financial, legal and informational support for Russian-friendly NGOs". Igor Dodon founded such an NGO in 2021.

Transfers to the Moldovan-Russian Business Union

About the former president's "Moldovan-Russian Business Union", RISE Moldova wrote in the "Rubles for Dodon" investigation, in which we showed how from October 2021 to April 2022, i.e. in just seven months, more than 20 million Russian rubles (about five million lei) entered the association's Moldovan account. The money came from the "Delovaia Rossia" organisation in the Russian Federation, financed by businessmen close to the Kremlin and represented in Moldova by Igor Chaika, younger son of Yurii Chaika, Russia's Prosecutor General in 2006-2020.

Also on the humanitarian track, the authors of the plan set as their objectives "ensuring that the Moldovan authorities give up the idea of abolishing the study of Russian in schools" and "reconfirming the status of the Russian language as a language of inter-ethnic communication". The issue of the status of the Russian language on the territory of the Republic of Moldova is also reflected in the political programmes of the Socialist and Communist parties. In the latest political programme, approved in 2021, the PSRM "advocates strengthening the legislative framework on the status of the Russian language as a language of interethnic communication throughout the Republic of Moldova". And the PCRM notes in its electoral programme that "the state authorities will strictly observe the rules stipulating that Russian is the language of interethnic communication on the territory of our country". At the end of 2020, the parliamentary majority made up of socialists and the "For Moldova" Platform (made up of Shor Party MPs and defected MPs) passed a law in Parliament giving the Russian language special status. A month later, the law was declared unconstitutional and subsequently repealed.

Young people are also on the Russian Federation's radar. Russia aims to "expand opportunities for Moldovan students to receive distance education in Russian", to increase the quota allocated by the "Russian government to Moldovan students for studies at Russian universities with budget funding", and to create consortia between "higher education institutions of the two countries", open branches of Russian universities and develop an academic exchange programme.

Sergiu DIACONU, Head of the Prime Minister's Office: Interesting in this document, what we know exactly, but it is just a confirmation that they will put a lot of pressure on the so-called humanitarian and social zone. And here they can really cause some damage, because they are using institutions, including the Russian Cultural Institute here in Moldova, where you can see the permanent presence of the young generation, especially from the socialist side. It's a kind of enclave for the exchange of anything but cultural issues.

And the most interesting thing in the humanitarian sphere is that they want to increase the number of student organizations and the growing presence of the Russian language. They want to increase their media capacity.

The Russians' strategy also targets the church. According to the plan, by 2030 they aim to support "the Russian Orthodox Church in defending the interests of canonical Orthodoxy in the Republic of Moldova".

Mihail VLAH, civic activist from Gagauzia: The European Union is a very big and friendly family. It is like an intellectual, brain, technology. And Russia is Orthodoxy, a shared history of centuries that you cannot break with a pickaxe.

MAINTAINING DEPENDENCE ON RUSSIAN GAS

Strategic objectives in the commercial and economic sphere

"Maintaining the volume and legal framework for Russian natural gas supplies" is the objective with which the plan for the commercial and economic sphere begins.

Sergiu DIACONU, Head of the Prime Minister's Office: I would be very happy if people in Moldova could see this strategy. Because in the second point, in the economic sphere, they set out in the short term that they want to maintain the volume of gas deliveries to Moldova, which they did in 2021. But in this year, 2022, they have cut the supply by 40% and they are keeping us permanently under the prospect of the permanent cessation of gas imports from Russia. Every month we have this problem, that they say we're going to cut gas across the country. So how does what they say here stack up against what they do?

The goal of expanding "Russian-Moldovan cooperation in trade, economic and interregional relations" is similar to the mission of Igor Dodon's organisation. The "Moldovan-Russian Business Union" advocates the development of bilateral relations in the business environment of Moldova and the Russian Federation.

A Moldovan-Russian investment project is also AgroHub Moldova, a business started in Hincesti, which RISE Moldova wrote about last March. Specifically, the investment involved the creation of an agro-industrial and logistics centre, which aims to facilitate the export and import of agri-food and wine products. Worth $55 million, the project was also included in the protocol of the Moldovan-Russian Intergovernmental Commission meeting of 2 October 2020 and, according to the document, the agrohub was "aimed at improving trade relations between the Republic of Moldova and the Russian Federation". Except that, a few months after the publication of the RISE investigation, the lease contract for the public land on which the agrohub was to be built was terminated. Details, HERE

RISE Moldova sent requests for information to the Party of Socialists and the Party of Communists in which we asked them if there is any connection between the political and humanitarian objectives in the parties' programmes of activities and the exact same objectives found in the Russian Strategy. At the time of going to press, I had not received any reply.

Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova: A multitude of subversive strategies, scenarios or plans with direct or indirect reference to the Republic of Moldova are circulating in the public space, elaborated by various experts or pseudo-experts. However, in most cases, these have little prospect of materialisation, as they are launched either to attract generous financial resources from sponsors or to manipulate public opinion.

"THE KREMLIN'S 'MOLDOVAN DIVISION

The document "Strategic Objectives of the Russian Federation in the Republic of Moldova" was reportedly drafted under the leadership of Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Colonel Igor Maslov, who headed the Kremlin's so-called "Moldovan Division" until 2021. We talked about this subdivision in the #Kremlinovich series of investigations.

Our partners' sources report that Andrei Vavilov, an employee of the "Moldovan branch", was among the authors of the strategy. Our sources in special services in several countries claim that Vavilov's superior is Victor Lisenko.

Vavilov and Lisenko are not just officials of Putin's administration. They also communicate with FSB General Dmitry Miliutin, who is in charge of the Moldovan-Transnistrian intelligence network. We talked about how Miliutin influences Moldovan politics in the investigation "FSB agents in charge of Moldova".

According to data obtained by RISE Moldova together with the Dossier Centre, from November 2021 to May 2022, Vavilov called Miliutin at least three times, and Lisenco is one of the most frequent phone contacts of the FSB Moldova coordinator. During the period mentioned, Lisenko called the general at least ten times, being surpassed in terms of calls only by Miliutin's wife - Natalia.

If Miliutin came to Moldova in 2016 when Igor Dodon took office as Moldova's president, then Lisenko paid a visit to Chisinau relatively recently. In June 2019, an official Russian government delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak arrived in Moldova. Kozak was also accompanied by Viktor Lisenko, only his presence in the delegation was not made public.

Viktor Lisenko at the meeting between representatives of the Moscow and Chisinau governments. 24 June 2019. Photo:gov.md

In Chisinau, the Russian guests met with Maia Sandu, newly appointed prime minister in a coalition government with the socialists. The incumbent president at the time, Igor Dodon, also met with the Russian delegation. The parties discussed bilateral trade and Moldova's gas supplies, which later became the focus of Russia's ten-year strategy.

RISE Moldova contacted Vavilov on one of his phone numbers just a day before this story was published. As soon as he heard his last name, the man asked:

Andrei Vavilov

- But who is calling?

- This is Vladimir Thorik calling from Moldova.

- About what?

- I'm a journalist with RISE Moldova. I have a question about a document concerning Moldova. We have a document: "Strategic Objectives of the Russian Federation..."

- You... you got the wrong number... Then he hung up.

We sent an official request to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Republic of Moldova to find out which of Russia's strategic objectives had been achieved, but until the inquiry was published we had not received a reply.

#politics #moldova #romania #russia #nato #ukraine #maia sandu #putin #political science #kremlin #ukraine war #unionism

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agentnico · 2 years

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Elvis (2022) Review

Don’t know what to make of this, but for some reason the go-to way of showing emotion in this film was to have characters stare through windows. The amount of window glaring shots in this movie was redonculous!

Plot: From his rise to fame to his unprecedented superstardom, rock 'n' roll icon Elvis Presley maintains a complicated relationship with his enigmatic manager, Colonel Tom Parker, over the course of 20 years. Central to Presley's journey and happiness is one of the most influential people in his life - Priscilla.

Elvis Presley is arguably one of the most significant musical icons of the last century, and his songs have been played and enjoyed until this day and onward. Personally I didn’t grow up listening to Elvis. Instead being a Russian born kid, my family played the Soviet version of Elvis - this chap with the easy-to-pronounce name Muslim Magomaev who’s voice did resemble Elvis’ quite a bit. Worth a YouTube search if interested. Anyway, enough unnecessary Soviet promotion. Back on topic, seeing as music biopics have been made cool in recent years thanks to the successes of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman respectively, now the King gets his due. This comes to us from director Baz Luhrmann for better or worse, as what we get is a visually popping motion picture that really captures the colourful flair of Elvis’ shows and costumes, however this is very much an example of style over substance. Especially the first half of the movie rushes through Elvis’ earlier life and plays out like a montage with quick cuts and transitions, so much so that in prior to hearing of Austin Butler’s incredible transformation into the role I felt like I was being deceived, as there were hardly any scenes that played fully and allowed the actors to freely show off their acting chops. Instead we were being treated to a best-of playlist of Elvis’ greatest hits (not complaining though, listening to those was great) and a bunch of intercut sequences that were ticking off points off of Elvis’ Wikipedia biography section, and it was difficult to get engaged in the proceedings. Well, minus Elvis’ first performance in front of an audience where I feel Baz Luhrmann got inspired by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story where women began getting so horned up by the singer they began undressing themselves. Okay, that version was only in Walk Hard and what we get in Elvis is a PG version of that where women simply bit their lips and screamed in collective horniness over Elvis’ twitching leg dances.

It is not only till the second half of the film however when we reach the Las Vegas stage (pardon the pun) of Elvis’ life that the movie pulls the brakes and actually finds a narrative purpose by unravelling the controlling relationship between the singer and his manager. During these points Austin Butler’s performance really does shine, as you see the pain and inner turmoil he feels from being a humongous success, but not having any real freedom or personal choice. He was simply used as a pawn on a chess board played by businessmen who wanted to export him for all his worth. And Butler also dabs well with the musical sequences, dancing and singing his way to Presley glory.

The main issue however with Elvis minus the lack of narrative direction and too much focus on the visuals over anything else, is that it does the questionable choice of being narrated and told from the perspective of the villain. Colonel Tom Parker, played here by Tom Hanks in a fat suit and a head-scratching accent, was the manager who exploited and used Elvis for his own gain. And the movie proves how despicable of a being he is, however with him narrating the story one has to question - why? Is the movie trying to redeem this persona? Cause the story told still paints him as the bad guy. It just seems like a directorial choice that doesn’t make much sense stylistically or narratively. Okay, put it simply, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

Overall Elvis is an enjoyable and fascinating look at the life of the famous icon, with a solid performance from Austin Butler and a grandiose visual palette from Baz Luhrmann, but similar to the director’s previous works, he puts too much focus on the style and as such loses the focus or the narrative substance. Though this is redeemed in the second half. That being said, this makes me keen on seeing more biopics of popular music stars, as its always fascinating discovering the personal life of people we only see as celebrities. Maybe David Bowie? One for David Grohl and the Foo Fighters? Heck, my inner child is screaming for an ABBA biopic! Make it happen!! Then again there is that Madonna biopic coming out made by Madonna herself, which is one of the most obnoxious things I’ve ever heard, even from Madonna!

Overall score: 6/10

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ukrainenews · 1 year

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Daily Wrap Up April 21-24, 2023

Under the cut:

A Russian Sukhoi-34 fighter-jet has accidentally bombed the Russian city of Belgorod, around 40km (25 miles) from the border with Ukraine on Friday. The bomb left a 20m (60ft) crater and caused an explosion so large it blew a car on to the roof of a nearby shop. Three people were injured and several buildings were damaged.

Ukrainian authorities say Russian forces are “forcibly evacuating” civilians in the area of the Kherson region that they still occupy, a day after it was claimed Ukrainian forces had established a bridgehead on the east bank of the Dnipro River.

Ukraine’s military have set up positions on the eastern side of Dnipro river near Kherson city, the Institute for the Study of War reported, citing Russian military bloggers.

Russia on Sunday said its forces had advanced in Bakhmut while a top Ukrainian commander said his troops were holding the frontline through the city, all but destroyed in some of the bloodiest combat of the 14-month war. The Russian defence ministry said its forces had secured two blocks in western districts and airborne units were providing reinforcements to the north and south. Russia sees Bakhmut as a stepping stone to more advances in eastern Ukraine.

Moscow is threatening to terminate the Black Sea grain deal, viewed as critical to addressing the world hunger crisis, if the Group of Seven nations ban exports to Russia.

Russian troops shelled the village of Shakhtarske in Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast on the morning of April 24, reported the regional prosecutor's office. Two men aged 43 and 66 were killed in a house's yard, and their neighbor suffered shrapnel injuries, according to the prosecutors.

A Russian Sukhoi-34 fighter-jet has accidentally bombed the Russian city of Belgorod, around 40km (25 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

The bomb left a 20m (60ft) crater and caused an explosion so large it blew a car on to the roof of a nearby shop.

Regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said authorities had ordered the evacuation of a damaged nine-storey block of flats as a precaution.

Three people were injured and several buildings were damaged, he said.

Video posted on social media showed the impact of the blast, lifting a vehicle on to the roof of a supermarket as traffic streamed along Prospekt Vatutina, close to the centre of the city.

In a brief statement, the Russian defence ministry admitted that one of its Su-34 fighter bombers had "accidentally discharged aircraft ordnance" at 22:15 local time (19:15 GMT) on Thursday.

It was a bureaucratic way of saying that the jet had mistakenly fired a weapon. It didn't specify which one.

The bomb landed at an intersection of two roads not far from the city centre and next to residential buildings.

Two women were taken to hospital for treatment, according to the governor. But with a Russian bomber hitting a busy residential district the consequences could have been far worse.

"Thank God no one was killed," he said on social media.

-via BBC

“I have information that the evacuation starts today [Sunday] with an excuse of protecting civilians from the consequences of heavy fighting in the area,” Oleksandr Samoylenko, the Ukrainian head of Kherson’s regional council, said. Russian troops were “trying to steal as much as they can” as they withdrew, he added.

The claim cannot be verified, but it comes amid an apparent increase in Ukrainian military activity in the south of the country which some analysts have interpreted as a potential precursor to Kyiv’s long anticipated counter-offensive.

Serhiy Khlan, another Ukrainian official in Kherson, said over the weekend that Wagner group fighters were helping Russian occupation officials impose control over the civilian population on the east bank of the Dnipro.

Ukraine’s southern military command meanwhile reported airstrikes in Kherson region by four Russian Su-35 jets. Ukraine said buildings were hit with guided bombs, but did not specify the location of the strikes.

Attention has focused on Ukraine’s southern front around the key city of Kherson since Sunday’s report from the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based thinktank, which suggested Ukrainian forces had established positions on the east bank of the Dnipro, opposite Kherson in the area of a settlement called Dachy. The ISW made the claim after geolocating reports from Russian sources.

Analysts at the thinktank came to the conclusion after examining text messages and photos posted by “Russian military bloggers”.

The ISW also suggested Russian forces may no longer control islands in the Kinka and Chaika rivers, less than 500 metres north of Dachy.

The apparent Ukrainian progress follows months of low-level conflict in the Dnipro delta and along the Kinburn spit, a narrow sandy peninsula. Both sides have deployed crews in rigid inflatable boats in often unreported fights over the small islands that dot the river mouth and surrounding marshes.

The handful of reports that have emerged since the beginning of the year about the delta have painted a picture of bitter fighting for small and mainly uninhabited islands, some of which have changed hands several times. With the islands and the river threatened by artillery strikes from both sides, Russian and Ukrainian forces have lost boats in the fighting.

The Ukrainian military has asked for “patience” on reports of a possible offensive. A large-scale advance over the wide river under the threat of Russian strikes would be a large and difficult undertaking.

“The conditions of a military operation require silence until it is safe enough for our military,” a Ukrainian military spokesperson said, adding she could not confirm or deny the ISW’s report.

The reports of a potential Ukrainian advance in the south come nearly six months after Ukraine liberated Kherson city and the west bank of the Dnipro in November 2022.

According to the ISW’s most recent update, Kherson may be the most vulnerable area of Russian occupation along the long frontline.

“The Russian grouping in Kherson oblast is likely the most disorganised and undermanned in the entire theatre, highly likely mainly comprised of badly under-strength remnants of mainly mobilised units,” the thinktank said.

Speculation over Ukrainian advances in the south came as Russian authorities said they had repelled a drone attack on the port of Sevastopol in Moscow-annexed Crimea, adding that there was no damage or casualties.

It also came as audio emerged of the head of the Wagner mercenary group threatening to kill Ukrainian prisoners of war. Yevgeny Prigozhin was reacting to a Wagner-affiliated Telegram channel posting of an alleged recording of what it said were two Ukrainians deciding to shoot a Russian prisoner of war.

The channel did not say where the recording came from and there is no way of verifying its authenticity.

“We will kill everyone on the battlefield. Take no more prisoners of war!” Prigozhin said in an audio recording on Sunday “We don’t know the name of our guy shot by Ukrainians,” Prigozhin said, adding that under international law his group was obliged to “take care, treat, not hurt” any prisoners of war.

-via The Guardian

Ukraine’s military have set up positions on the eastern side of Dnipro river near Kherson city, the Institute for the Study of War reported, citing Russian military bloggers.

Infiltrating the area could be a first step towards trying to dislodge Russians from positions they are using to shell and shoot at Kherson.

The constant attacks have made it impossible for residents to return to normal life, months after Ukrainan troops liberated the city from Russian occupation.

Ukrainian military forays across the river could also mark the first tentative steps towards launching a long-awaited spring offensive.

The think tank said in an update on the war:

This is the first time ISW has observed reliable geolocated imagery of Ukrainian positions on the east bank along with multi-sourced Russian reports of an enduring Ukrainian presence there.

The Russian military bloggers said Ukrainian forces had established stable supply lines to their positions and “regularly conduct sorties in the area”, the ISW said.

The reported positions were in marshy territory of islets and tributaries, near the settlements of Oleshky and Dachi, the report said. Russia still holds the settlements.

A Ukrainian military spokeswoman for the southern region declined to comment on the reports that Ukrainan troops had achieved a foothold across the river.

Natalia Humenyuk told TV channel 24:

There is an ongoing military operation that requires informational silence. And when it is allowed we will be sure to notify you.

Government officials and Ukrainian commanders have signalled for months that when the weather and troops are ready, they will try to dislodge Russian forces from the south.

An autumn campaign liberated swathes of northeastern Kharkiv and pushed Russian troops out of Kherson, at the time their last stronghold on the western banks of the Dnipro.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday he is “confident” Ukraine is prepared to retake more of its territory in the next offensive.

-via The Guardian

The Russian defence ministry said its forces had secured two blocks in western districts and airborne units were providing reinforcements to the north and south. Russia sees Bakhmut as a stepping stone to more advances in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi shared images on the Telegram messaging app of him poring over a map with three other uniformed men, with the caption "Bakhmut frontline. Our defence continues."

"We hit the enemy, often unexpectedly for him, and continue to hold strategic lines," he wrote.

Reuters was unable to verify battlefield reports.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the private Wagner military force which is leading the Bakhmut assault, has claimed 80% control of the city. Kyiv has repeatedly denied claims its troops are poised to withdraw.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy vowed to keep defending the city.

"It is impossible for us to give up on Bakhmut because this will [help] expand the battle front and will give the Russian forces and Wagner chances to seize more of our lands," Zelenskiy said in an interview with Al Arabiya news channel published on Sunday.

Also on Sunday, the Russian-installed head of Ukraine's southern Kherson region denied a report by a U.S. think tank that Ukrainian forces had taken up positions on the Dnipro river's eastern bank.

"There is no enemy foothold on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnipro river … our military completely controls that territory," Vladimir Saldo wrote on his Telegram channel.

Citing Russian military bloggers embedded with Moscow's forces, the Institute for the Study of War said Ukraine had "established positions" on the eastern bank, though it was not clear "at what scale or with what intentions".

Russia withdrew forces from the western bank last year as part of a series of withdrawals that signified a shift in momentum in Kyiv's favour.

Natalia Humeniuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine's southern command, neither confirmed nor denied the report, which she told Ukrainian television foreshadowed "very powerful shelling" in districts around the west bank cities of Kherson and Beryslav.

"Reacting to such information, the enemy has significantly intensified its attacks on the opposite bank," she said. Civilians had been injured and about 30 buildings destroyed, including a school, she said.

-via Reuters

Moscow is threatening to terminate the Black Sea grain deal, viewed as critical to addressing the world hunger crisis, if the Group of Seven nations ban exports to Russia.

Such a ban could be part of the ever-evolving set of sanctions the allies have leveled against Moscow for its war in Ukraine.

Ukraine normally supplies about 45 million metric tons of grain to the global market every year and is the world’s top exporter of sunflower oil. Together with Russia, it accounted for about one-quarter of global wheat exports in 2019.

On Sunday, Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and deputy chair of Russia's security council, implied in a Telegram post that Moscow would answer a new G7 export ban by halting the flow of "goods that are the most sensitive for G7."

Alliance response: The G7 called for the “extension, full implementation and expansion” of the Black Sea grain deal in a statement published by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan on Sunday.

Moscow has pulled out of the deal before: Russia had suspended its participation in the UN-brokered agreement in October 2022 after drone attacks on the Crimean city of Sevastopol, Ukraine.

Shipments have been stop-and-start during the deal, with each side accusing the other of sabotaging the operation at times.

Origins of the deal and impact: Turkey, alongside the United Nations, helped broker the deal in July 2022. The agreement established a procedure that guaranteed the safety of ships carrying Ukrainian grain, fertilizer and other foodstuff through a humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea.

Under the deal, all vessels coming to and from Ukraine’s ports were inspected and monitored by international teams made up of officials from Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the UN.

-via CNN

Russian troops shelled the village of Shakhtarske in Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast on the morning of April 24, reported the regional prosecutor's office.

Two men aged 43 and 66 were killed in a house's yard, and their neighbor suffered shrapnel injuries, according to the prosecutors.

Shakhtarske is located in the Volnovakha district, about 75 kilometers from the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk.

Earlier the same day, Donetsk Oblast Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said that Russian attacks had killed two civilians in the region and wounded two more over the previous 24 hours.

Ukraine's eastern Donetsk Oblast bordering Russia is the site of the war's fiercest fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces as Moscow seeks to occupy the entire region.

-via Kyiv Independent

#Daily Update #Ukraine #Russia #War in Ukraine #bakhmut #Donetsk #Black Sea #Kherson #belgorod

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centrally-unplanned · 2 years

Text

I got a few comments on my previous post on Russia’s strategic blunder that “of course Russia didn't think the west would do anything, the west didn’t do anything in 2014!” which is well some real historical revisionism. After the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the US pledged immediate, expansive military support to Ukraine. From 2014 to 2021, the US spent ~$2.5 billion on military aid to Ukraine - including weapon transfers, military training, intelligence equipment, and logistics support, aka “full stack” support intended for combat operations, not like antiterrorism stuff. Figures for how much Ukraine spent on its military seem to be a bit vague, but I would say this was ~10% of Ukraine’s net military spending, and of course it was for technology far above their previous capabilities.

Meanwhile the United States & EU+ implemented a comprehensive sanction regime targeting key Russian industries; restricting overseas financing for state own companies, blocking high-tech exports of military-adjacent technologies to Russia, and blocking oil exploration & other related technology exports as well to deprive the state of revenue. Now its fine to critique these, I personally think they did not go far enough. But they absolutely made a difference; something not understood about how quickly Russian military production has collapsed during the war is that it was *already* collapsing before the war began under the weight of import controls. Key production of straight-up gunpowder was pre-2014 dependent on imports from Germany+, and productivity collapsed down to estimates of 1/10 the productivity rates comparable western facilities. Declines sharpened during the war of course, but the reason they declined so suddenly is that reserves of key parts, resources, even human capital was already limited because they had been burning through them in the interwar period, unable to import replacements.

And of course, in the end the annexation of Crimea was a masterful coup d'état, with virtually no casualties and no possible response on the part of Ukraine. It did not result in a war, and as such insane levels of military aid just weren’t logical, there wasn’t a shooting war to support with such aid. I personally think sanctions could have been harsher but the military aid provided to Ukraine was definitely proportional - as the results right now show, pretty objectively.

Finally I know some people are going to say “but the EU kept importing Russia oil & gas”, and yes, they did. But they are still doing that now!! That is like the entire crux of the whole European energy debate, they have made some reductions but as of May 2022 Germany for example was still getting 35% of its natural gas from Russia. Russian revenue from oil & gas exports has actually increased due to the price spikes through the war. The point being, they are still in this disastrous economic & military situation even with no actual blockade of their energy exports. So you can’t turn around now and say “2014 taught Putin we wouldn’t blockade the oil, so the west’s response took him off guard” - Putin was right, we still haven’t done that.

You quibble about the numbers but if any analyst in Russia expected that, *in the scenario of a long war*, western support for Ukraine wasn’t going to look more or less like it does now, they were smoking crack. 2014 taught them exactly what it was going to look like. Which is part of why it was so foolhardy not to pay any price to avoid the Long War scenario.

#russia-ukraine war

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libertariantaoist · 5 months

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News Roundup 12/6/2023 | The Libertarian Institute

Here is your daily roundup of today's news:

News Roundup 12/6/2023

by Kyle Anzalone

US News

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has hit out at Americans who prefer a less interventionist foreign policy, smearing them as isolationists who want to see the US “retreat from responsibility.” AWC

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has scheduled a vote for Wednesday to advance President Biden’s massive $106 billion emergency spending request that includes military aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, as well as additional funding for the border, POLITICO reported. AWC

Adm. Christopher Grady: US Can Handle Middle East, Russia and China All at Once. YouTubeThe Institute

China

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called for tighter export controls on advanced technologies going to China and labeled Beijing “the biggest threat we’ve ever had.” AWC

Russia

White House Will Run Out of Funds to Arm Ukraine By the End of the Year. FTAWC

US Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt explained that Washington was plotting a decade-long economic war targeting Moscow. The US has maintained sanctions on Russia since the 2014 Washington-backed coup in Ukraine sparked Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the economic war on the Russian economy was significantly intensified. The Institute

Bulgarian President Blocks Weapons Transfer to Ukraine. Newsweek

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is turning Ukraine into an authoritarian state as public criticism of Ukrainian leadership is becoming more common. AWC

Zelensky Cancels Address to US Senate. Forbes

Israel

Biden Admin Says US Intel Had No Knowledge of Hamas Battle Plans for October 7. Axios

The UK announced on Saturday that it would begin surveillance flights in the skies above Gaza in search of captives held by Hamas. Over the past month, the US has conducted drone operations seeking hostages. Both Washington and London have engaged in a military buildup in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea in support of Tel Aviv. The Institute

UN Warns Israel Against Exacerbating the Already Catastrophic Humanitarian Situation in Gaza. VOA

Israel Hayom reported last week that some members of Congress have reviewed a plan to condition US aid to Arab countries on their willingness to accept refugees from Gaza, which would facilitate the Israeli goal of cleansing the territory of Palestinians. AWC

Israel intensified airstrikes in southern Gaza on Monday and bombed areas where it told Palestinians to seek shelter, Reuters reported. AWC

Amnesty International: “US-made Weapons Facilitated the Mass Killings of Extended Families” in Gaza. Press ReleaseThe Institute

Polling continues to show that the majority of Americans favor a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, a position the Biden administration has rejected. AWC

The IDF Ignored Warnings Hours Before October 7 Hamas Attack. Haaretz

The House on Tuesday passed a resolution that says “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” the chamber’s latest piece of legislation conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. AWC

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed on Tuesday that he wants Israel’s military to maintain an open-ended occupation of the Gaza Strip after the current war. AWC

Middle East

Officials Tell Politico that US Ships Under Threat in Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Politico

The US Approves Arms Sales to UAE and Saudi Arabia. MEE

US officials are considering forming a Red Sea task force with other nations after a series of attacks by Yemen’s Houthis against commercial shipping that’s come in response to the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. AWC

#kyle anzalone #libertarian institute #news roundup

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mariacallous · 2 months

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Shortly before noon on Aug. 19, 2023, a Russian cruise missile sliced past the golden onion domes and squat apartment blocks of the Chernihiv skyline in northern Ukraine. The Iskander-K missile slammed into its target: the city’s drama theater, which was hosting a meeting of drone manufacturers at the time of the attack. More than 140 people were injured and seven killed. The youngest, 6-year-old Sofia Golynska, had been playing in a nearby park.

Fragments of the missile recovered by the Ukrainian armed forces and analyzed by Ukrainian researchers found numerous components made by U.S. manufacturers in the missile’s onboard navigation system, which enabled it to reach its target with devastating precision. In December, Ukraine’s state anti-corruption agency released an online database of the thousands of foreign-made components recovered from Russian weapons so far.

Russia’s struggle to produce the advanced semiconductors, electrical components, and machine tools needed to fuel its defense industrial base predates the current war and has left it reliant on imports even amid its estrangement from the West. So when Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, major manufacturing countries from North America, Europe, and East Asia swiftly imposed export controls on a broad swath of items deemed critical for the Russian arms industry.

Russia quickly became the world’s most sanctioned country: Some 16,000 people and companies were subject to a patchwork of international sanctions and export control orders imposed by a coalition of 39 countries. Export restrictions were painted with such a broad brush that sunglasses, contact lenses, and false teeth were also swept up in the prohibitions. Even items manufactured overseas by foreign companies are prohibited from being sold to Russia if they are made with U.S. tools or software, under a regulation known as the foreign direct product rule.

But as the war reaches its two-year anniversary, export controls have failed to stem the flow of advanced electronics and machinery making their way into Russia as new and convoluted supply chains have been forged through third countries such as Kazakhstan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, which are not party to the export control efforts. An investigation by Nikkei Asia found a tenfold increase in the export of semiconductors from China and Hong Kong to Russia in the immediate aftermath of the war—the majority of them from U.S. manufacturers.

“Life finds a way,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official, quoting the movie Jurassic Park. The official spoke on background to discuss Russia’s evasion of export controls.

Some of the weapons and components analyzed by investigators were likely stockpiled before the war. But widely available Russian trade data reveals a brisk business in imports. More than $1 billion worth of advanced semiconductors from U.S. and European manufacturers made their way into the country last year, according to classified Russian customs service data obtained by Bloomberg. A recent report by the Kyiv School of Economics found that imports of components considered critical for the battlefield had dipped by just 10 percent during the first 10 months of 2023, compared with prewar levels.

This has created a Kafkaesque scenario, the report notes, in which the Ukrainian army is doing battle with Western weapons against a Russian arsenal that also runs on Western components.

It is an obvious problem, well documented by numerous think tank and media reports, but one without an easy solution. Tracking illicit trade in items such as semiconductors is an exponentially greater challenge than monitoring shipments of conventional weapons. Around 1 trillion chips are produced every year. Found in credit cards, toasters, tanks, missile systems, and much, much more, they power the global economy as well as the Russian military. Cutting Russia out of the global supply chain for semiconductors is easier said than done.

“Both Russia and China, and basically all militaries, are using a large number of consumer electronic components in their systems,” said Chris Miller, the author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. “All of the world’s militaries rely on the same supply chain, which is the supply chain that primarily services consumer electronics.”

Export controls were once neatly tailored to keep specific items, such as nuclear technology, out of the hands of rogue states and terrorist groups. But as Washington vies for technological supremacy with Beijing while also seeking to contain Russia and Iran, it has increasingly used these trade restrictions to advance broader U.S. strategic objectives. For instance, the Biden administration has placed wide-ranging prohibitions on the export of advanced chips to China.

“At no point in history have export controls been more central to our collective security than right now,” Matthew Axelrod, the assistant secretary for export enforcement at the U.S. Commerce Department, said in a speech last September. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has described export controls as “a new strategic asset in the U.S. and allied toolkit.”

Russia’s ability to defy these restrictions doesn’t just have implications for the war in Ukraine. It also raises significant questions about the challenge ahead vis-à-vis China.

“The technological question becomes a key part of this story and whether or not we can restrict it from our adversaries,” said James Byrne, the director of open-source intelligence and analysis at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

In the Russian city of Izhevsk, home to the factory that manufactures Kalashnikov rifles, shopping malls are being converted into drone factories amid a surge in defense spending that has helped the country’s economy weather its Western estrangement. Arms manufacturers have been urged to work around the clock to feed the Russian war machine, while defense is set to account for one-third of the state budget this year.

“We have developed a concept to convert shopping centers—which, before the start of the SMO [special military operation], sold mainly the products of Western brands—to factories for assembly lines of types of domestic drones,” Alexander Zakharov, the chief designer of the Zala Aero drone company, said at a closed event in August 2022, according to the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. “Special military operation” is what the Russian government calls its war on Ukraine. Zala Aero is a subsidiary of the Kalashnikov Concern that, along with Zakharov, was sanctioned by the United States last November.

Defense companies have bought at least three shopping malls in Izhevsk to be repurposed for the manufacture of drones, according to local media, including Lancet attack drones, which the British defense ministry described as one of the most effective new weapons that Russia introduced to the battlefield last year. Lancets, which cost about $35,000 to produce, wreaked havoc during Ukraine’s offensive last year and have been captured on video striking valuable Ukrainian tanks and parked MiG fighter jets.

Like a lot of Russia’s weapons systems, Lancets are filled with Western components. An analysis of images of the drones published in December by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security found that they contained several parts from U.S., Swiss, and Czech manufacturers, including image processing and analytical components that play a pivotal role in enabling the drones to reach their targets on the battlefield.

“The recurring appearance of these Western products in Russian drone systems shows a keen dependence on them for key capabilities in the drone systems,” the report notes. Lancets are not the only drones found to contain Western components. Almost all of the electronic components in the Iranian Shahed-136 drones, which Russia is now manufacturing with Iranian help to use in Ukraine, are of Western origin, a separate analysis published in November concluded.

Early in the war, the Royal United Services Institute analyzed 27 Russian military systems, including cruise missiles, electronic warfare complexes, and communications systems, and found that they contained at least 450 foreign-made components, revealing Russia’s dependence on imports.

One of the principal ways that Russia has evaded Western export controls has been through transshipment via third countries such as Turkey, the UAE, and neighboring states once part of the Soviet Union. Bloomberg reported last November that amid mounting Western pressure, the UAE had agreed to restrict the export of sensitive goods to Russia and that Turkey was considering a similar move. Kazakh officials announced a ban on the export of certain battlefield goods to Russia in October.

Suspected transshipment is often revealed by striking changes in trade patterns before and after the invasion. The Maldives, an island chain in the Indian Ocean that has no domestic semiconductor industry, shipped almost $54 million worth of U.S.-made semiconductors to Russia in the year after the invasion of Ukraine, Nikkei Asia reported last July.

Semiconductor supply chains often span several countries, with chips designed in one country and manufactured in another before being sold to a series of downstream distributors around the world. That makes it difficult for companies to know the ultimate end user of their products. This may seem odd—until you realize that this is the case for many everyday products that are sold around the world. “When Coca-Cola sells Coca-Cola, it doesn’t know where every bottle goes, and they don’t have systems to track where every bottle goes,” said Kevin Wolf, a former assistant secretary for export administration at the U.S. Commerce Department.

While a coalition of 39 countries, including the world’s major manufacturers of advanced electronics, imposed export restrictions on Russia, much of the rest of the world continues to trade freely with Moscow. Components manufactured in coalition countries will often begin their journey to Moscow’s weapons factories through a series of entirely legal transactions before ending up with a final distributor that takes them across the border into Russia. “It starts off as licit trade and ends up as illicit trade,” said a second senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The further items move down the supply chain, the less insight governments and companies have into their ultimate destination, although sudden changes in behavior of importers can offer a red flag. In his speech last September, Axelrod, the assistant secretary, used the example of a beauty salon that suddenly starts to import electronic components.

But the Grand Canyon of loopholes is China, which has stood by Moscow since the invasion. In the first days of the war, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned that Washington could shut down Chinese companies that ignored semiconductor export controls placed on Russia. Last October, 42 Chinese companies were added to export control lists—severely undercutting their ability to do business with U.S. companies—for supplying Russian defense manufacturers with U.S. chips.

But as the Biden administration carefully calibrates its China policy in a bid to keep a lid on escalating tensions, it has held off from taking Beijing to task. “I think the biggest issue is that we—the West—have been unwilling to put pressure on China that would get China to start enforcing some of these rules itself,” said Miller, the author of Chip Wars.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) said: “Due to the restrictions imposed by the United States and key allies and partners, Russia has been left with no choice but to spend more, lower its ambitions for high-tech weaponry, build alliances with other international pariah states, and develop nefarious trade networks to covertly obtain the technologies it needs.

“We are deeply concerned regarding [Chinese] support for Russia’s defense industrial base. BIS has acted to add over 100 [China]-based entities to the Entity List for supporting Russia’s military industrial base and related activities.”

Export controls have typically focused on keeping specific U.S.-made goods out of the hands of adversaries, while economic and financial sanctions have served broader foreign-policy objectives of isolating rogue states and cauterizing the financing of terrorist groups and drug cartels. The use of sanctions as a national security tool grew in wake of the 9/11 attacks; in the intervening decades, companies, government agencies, and financial institutions have built up a wealth of experience in sanctions compliance. By contrast, the use of export controls for strategic ends is relatively novel, and compliance expertise is still in its infancy.

“It used to be that people like me could keep export controls and sanctions in one person’s head. The level of complexity for each area of law is so intense. I don’t know anyone who is truly an export control and sanctions expert,” Wolf said.

Export controls, experts say, are at best speed bumps designed to make it harder for Russia’s defense industrial base to procure Western components. They create “extra friction and pressure on the Russian economy,” said Daniel Fried, who as the State Department coordinator for sanctions policy helped craft U.S. sanctions on Russia after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia is now paying 80 percent more to import semiconductors than it did before the war, according to forthcoming research by Miller, and the components it is able to acquire are often of dubious quality.

But although it may be more cumbersome and expensive, it’s a cost that Moscow has been willing to bear in its war on Ukraine.

Western components—and lots of them—will continue to be found in the weapons Russia uses on Ukraine’s battlefields for the duration of the war. “This problem is as old as export controls are,” said Jasper Helder, an expert on export controls and sanctions with the law firm Akin Gump. But there are ways to further plug the gaps.

Steeper penalties could incentivize U.S. companies to take a more proactive role in ensuring their products don’t wind up in the hands of the Russian military, said Elina Ribakova, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “At the moment, they’re not truly motivated,” she said.

Companies that run afoul of sanctions and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. federal law that prohibits the payment of bribes, have been fined billions of dollars. Settlements of export control violations are often an order of magnitude smaller, according to recently published research.

In a speech last month, Axelrod said the United States would begin issuing steeper penalties for export control violations. “Build one case against one of the companies extremely well, put out a multibillion-dollar fine negotiation, and watch everybody else fall in line,” Ribakova said.

And then there’s the question of resources. BIS has an annual budget of just $200 million. “That’s like the cost of a few fighter jets. Come on,” said Raimondo, speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum last December.

The agency’s core budget for export control has, adjusted for inflation, remained flat since 2010, while its workload has surged. Between 2014 and 2022, the volume of U.S. exports subject to licensing scrutiny increased by 126 percent, according to an agency spokesperson. A 2022 study of export control enforcement by the Center for Strategic and International Studies recommended a budget increase of $45 million annually, describing it as “one of the best opportunities available anywhere in U.S. national security.”

When it comes to enforcement, the bureau has about 150 officers across the country who work with law enforcement and conduct outreach to companies. The Commerce Department has also established a task force with the Justice Department to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of Russia, China, and Iran. “The U.S. has the most robust export enforcement on the planet,” Wolf said.

But compared with other law enforcement and national security agencies, the bureau’s budgets have not kept pace with its expanding mission. The Department of Homeland Security has more investigators in the city of Tampa, Florida, than BIS does across the entire country, Axelrod noted in his January speech.

On the other side, you have Russia, which is extremely motivated to acquire the critical technologies it needs to continue to prosecute its war. The Kremlin has tasked its intelligence agencies with finding ways around sanctions and export controls, U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Brian Nelson said in a speech last year. “We are not talking about a profit-seeking firm looking for efficiencies,” the second senior U.S. intelligence official said. “There will be supply if there is sufficient demand.”

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tomorrowusa · 10 months

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Fossil fuels are not just terrible for the planet, they are bad for democracy. A disproportionate number of major oil and gas exporters are autocracies such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.

Russia in particular uses fossil fuel sales to fund repression at home and imperialism abroad.

Putin appears weaker than ever – and for a ruler who relies on projecting strength, that’s a bad look. To further dull Putin’s fading aura of invincibility, and to ultimately lead to a reversal of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we need to undermine the pillars his strongman myth is based on: colonial conquest, unregulated capitalism and climate abuse. As questions are raised about his ability to rule, Putin will claim that despite the efforts of the nefarious “collective west”, the Russian economy can stabilise because the world needs Russian fossil fuels; that the need of western companies to make money in Russia means it will never be truly isolated; that for all his blunders on the battlefield, he can still hold on to swathes of Ukraine and its resources, which he will dole out between the Russian system’s stakeholders for whom the risk of sticking with Putin will thus still be smaller than the risk of going against him.

No matter what the source of the oil or gas we consume, we push up the international price of those commodities whenever we use them. It's supply and demand; when we reduce our demand, the price goes down and dictators/theocrats get lower profits.

We need to recognise the fact that human rights, security and economic ties are deeply intertwined, and to alter our behaviour accordingly. Let’s stop selling dictators the rope with which they hang people: our neighbours – and ultimately us. And if there’s one base element that powers Putin’s claims to invincibility, it’s reliance on fossil fuels. The battle against Putin is also the battle against climate crisis. As Prof Alexander Etkind lays out in his new book, Russia Against Modernity, Putin’s economy has been up to two-thirds dependent on oil and gas exports, largely to Europe, and crucially through pipelines that cross Ukraine. Etkind argues that Putin launched his invasion in part to control this flow. Moreover, he wanted to destabilise Europe, flooding it with refugees and instilling so much chaos and fear that Europe would be forced to abandon plans for net zero carbon emissions by 2050. As so often in the course of this war, Putin’s aims have backfired. The invasion has led to a decrease in dependence on Russian energy. Putin’s aura of fossil-fuelled invincibility has been shaken, but we are only part of the way there. Faster decarbonisation is the most sustainable way to not only undermine Putin, but also to limit the opportunity for future Russian leaders and other resource-rich authoritarians to wage aggressive wars.

Decarbonization is also de-Putinization. We contribute to peace and stability when we lessen the amount of fossil fuels we consume. And, of course, we slow down and eventually halt the warming of our planet.

Using these late 19th century sources of energy encourages despotic autocracies while making Earth less livable. It's time to say до свидания to fossil fuels.

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