#Deripaska

[head-post]

US pressures RBI to scrap Strabag share exchange deal with Deripaska

Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), the largest Western bank still operating in Russia is on the verge of abandoning a controversial €1.5bn share swap deal with sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska due to intense US pressure, IntelliNews reports.

The planned deal, which the bank had hoped to finalise this month, would have allowed RBI to repatriate about €1.5bn of its subsidiary’s earnings detained in Russia, but could also have allowed Deripaska to cash in a reportedly frozen 28% stake in Austrian construction company Strabag.

Russian authorities were expected to approve the swap deal. In February, at its 2003 results presentation, RBI said the deal should be finalised at the end of the first quarter and it would add 125 bps to its CET capital adequacy ratio. However, the deal is now likely to be cancelled, derailing one of the largest Western deals in Russia since the start of the military conflict in Ukraine.

If RBI does go ahead with the deal, Washington could impose penalties on the bank, the agency said.

Read more HERE

[nicklloydnow]

“Since Vladimir Putin launched the invasion in February 2022, emigration out of Russia has exploded, with some estimates putting the exodus at 1 million people. A recent analysis from the policy platform Re: Russia narrowed the number to 817,000-922,000.

That's contributed to a record labor shortage, with 42% of industrial firms unable to find enough workers in July, up from 35% in April.

(…)

Workers under the age of 35 now account for less than 30% of the labor force, the lowest on record going back 20 years.

And according to a report from the French Institute of International Relations, 86% of those who have left Russia are under the age of 45, and 80% have a college education. At least 100,000 IT professionals moved out of Russia in 2022, a Kremlin official estimated last year.

In addition, data also suggest the Russians who fled were significantly wealthier, as nearly 11.5% of personal savings that were in Russian banks at the end of 2021 were were transferred abroad in 2022, amounting to about 4 trillion rubles ($41.5 billion).

(…)

In fact, the Atlantic Council estimated that Russia's GDP, as measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), will fall behind Indonesia's in 2026, nearly two years earlier than would've been the case had Putin not launched his war on Ukraine. By then, they will switch places as the world's sixth and seventh largest economies by PPP.”

“Billionaire Oleg Deripaska said Russia could find its coffers empty already next year and needs investment from “friendly” countries to break the hold of sanctions on the economy.

“There will be no money already next year,” Deripaska said Thursday at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum in Siberia. “We will need foreign investors.”

(…)

Deripaska’s comments are among the most outspoken by a prominent business leader as the government looks to turn the screws on large companies after ending last year with a record fiscal deficit and the budget still deep in the red to start 2023.

Authorities are already planning to raise additional budget revenue with proposed changes to how they tax oil companies and may wrest more money from other commodity producers by means of a one-time levy.

(…)

Speaking on Thursday, Deripaska said building “state capitalism is not an option” and warned of “serious” pressure from sanctions.

“Russia should keep developing the market economy,” he said. “A foreign investor will look at how a Russian investor makes money, what conditions exist.”

(…)

Even with many of the world’s biggest economies arrayed against Russia, it still retains access to markets with a population of 4.5 billion and accounting for $30 trillion of global gross domestic product, he said.

“We thought we were a European country,” Deripaska said. “Now, for the next 25 years, we will think more about our Asian past.”

[originalleftist]

Johnny Depp is reportedly dating a new girlfriend- a 28 year old (Depp is 61) Russian beautician and model named Yulia Valasova (this is not the first time in recent years that Depp has dated a much younger Russian woman).

Now, I'm not saying that anyone from Russia is necessarily an agent of the Kremlin. But:

The Kremlin has been reported to use agents, posing as ordinary Russian citizens, to make friends with prominent Westerners and influence them.

It is also known to seek out powerful, influential Westerners with big egos and lots of baggage (ie, Kompromat) to groom as assets, the former President being the highest-profile example.

And Depp's chief fixer Adam Waldman* previously worked with/for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, Julian Assange, and Russian foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and was involved in efforts to cover up Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

Depp is a bit of a has-been now, but he has lots of powerful friends in Hollywood, and his cause is celebrated by the MRA/incel crowd on the right, while also having some crossover/fandom appeal to other demographics (a little-known fact is that polling around the trial showed Depp's support was strongest with women and youth).

And we already know Depp is friends with the ruler of Saudi Arabia, and that a lot of the online hate directed at Heard has been traced back to Saudi bots, so evidently a foreign government thought they could use the intense hype around the trial as part of an influence campaign.

So, from where I'm standing, it looks to me VERY much like Depp is being groomed as a Russian asset.

*Its a shame that Waldman is mostly known only for his involvement in Depp v Heard (and even there, he largely flew below the radar due to being kicked off the case early on by a judge for leaking information to the media, with Camille Vasquez getting most of the attention from Depp's legal team). Waldman is a DEEPLY shady and dangerous man who has been closely-involved in efforts by a foreign enemy to undermine the United States and install fascist government, and deserves far more rigorous scrutiny (and serious legal consequences, starting with disbarment, and ending in prison).

[cristianlisandru]

ANALIZĂ | RĂZBOIUL METALELOR. Rusia este strânsă în menghina sancțiunilor, oligarhii Oleg Deripaska și Vladimir Potanin vând aluminiu și nichel în China

La mijlocul lui aprilie 2024, Statele Unite și Marea Britanie au anunțat interzicerea importurilor de aluminiu, cupru și nichel din Rusia. Este vorba despre trei metale esențiale pentru producerea unei game largi de bunuri, de la cutii de băuturi la semiconductori și vehicule electrice (EV). Izolați din cauza interdicției, marii producătorii ruși de metale vor muta rapid, iar exporturile către…

[dostoyevsky-official]

Trump administration disbands taskforce targeting Russian oligarchs

A memo from the attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued during a wave of orders on her first day in office but not previously reported, said the effort, known as Task Force KleptoCapture, will end as part of a shift in focus and funding to combating drug cartels and international gangs. The taskforce brought indictments against the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska and TV tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev for alleged sanctions busting, and seized yachts belonging to the sanctioned oligarchs Suleiman Kerimov and Viktor Vekselberg. It also secured a guilty plea against a US lawyer who made $3.8m in payments to maintain properties owned by Vekselberg.

Trump Green-Lights Bribery and Corruption With New Executive Order

President Donald Trump has instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to pause prosecutions of companies that bribe foreign government officials to win business. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been “stretched beyond proper bounds and abused in a manner that harms the interests of the United States,” hurting American competitiveness, Trump wrote in an executive order signed Monday. [...] The order’s legality was not immediately clear. Generally, the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws” passed by Congress “be faithfully executed.” Presidents do have some enforcement discretion, but they cannot override laws, according to the ACLU. Major companies such as Goldman Sachs, Glencore and Walmart have all come under FCPA scrutiny, according to Reuters.

///

"It's going to mean a lot more business for America," Trump told reporters while signing the order in the Oval Office on Monday. Trump wanted to strike down FCPA during his first term in office. He has called it a "horrible law" and said "the world is laughing at us" for enforcing it. Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International said FCPA made the United States a leader in addressing global corruption. (x)

///

“It sounds good on paper, but in practicality, it's a disaster,” Trump said. “It means that if an American goes over to a foreign country and starts doing business over there, legally, legitimately or otherwise, it's almost a guaranteed investigation indictment, and nobody wants to do business with the Americans because of it.” [...] Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International U.S., said Trump’s order “diminishes—and could pave the way for completely eliminating—the crown jewel in the U.S.’s fight against global corruption.” [...] In one of its most significant victories, the Justice Department announced Oct. 16, three weeks before Trump’s election victory, that mega-defense contractor Raytheon Company of Virginia would pay over $950 million to settle foreign bribery and related charges in a scheme to help foreign governments purchase PATRIOT missile systems and operate and maintain a radar system. In one of the schemes, Raytheon engaged in a campaign from 2012 and 2016 “to bribe a high-level official” within the Qatar government’s military “in order to assist Raytheon in obtaining and retaining business” from it, the DOJ said, citing admissions and court documents filed in the Eastern District of New York. [...] Raytheon’s “criminal schemes to defraud the U.S. government in connection with” the contracts “erodes public trust and harms the DOD, businesses that play by the rules, and American taxpayers,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kevin Driscoll of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division also said at the time. (x)

this is the most relentlessly pro-corruption administration in american history. the guiding animus seems to be how much corruption can we do, how can we help others get away with corruption, how can we halt justice, etc

[mariacallous]

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has disbanded the KleptoCapture task force, a Treasury Department initiative launched in 2022 to target business figures with ties to the Kremlin, The Guardian reported on Thursday, citing an internal memo from Bondi.

The memo, dated February 5, states that the task force is being dissolved to reallocate resources toward efforts against drug cartels and international organized crime.

Prosecutors formerly assigned to the group are to return to their previous roles. The memo notes that the changes will remain in effect for at least 90 days, after which they may be extended or made permanent.

The Treasury Department created KleptoCapture following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to enforce sanctions and seize Russian business assets. During its operation, the task force brought sanctions violation charges against Russian billionaires Oleg Deripaska and Konstantin Malofeev and seized yachts believed to belong to Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire senator from Dagestan, and oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

In 2023, KleptoCapture secured the seizure of $5.4 million linked to Malofeev. The funds, which had been frozen back in 2014, were transferred to aid Ukraine — the first instance of frozen assets of Russian businessmen being redirected to Kyiv.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

On the eve of the 2016 election, the New York Times ran a sensational article stating that the FBI had told them that "none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government."

Now we learn that the NYT source for this story, FBI New York counterintelligence head Charles McGonigal, was on the take from Oleg Deripaska, a man assessed to be an influence agent of the Russian intelligence services. He has just entered a guilty plea on charges to that effect.

[Robert Scott Horton]

[eretzyisrael]

Archaeologists have unearthed a synagogue in Russia dating back to the Second Temple Period. The structure was part of the ancient Greek city of Phanagoria, located near the Black Sea.

Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Volnoe Delo Foundation is providing financial support for the excavation work, which has been taking place since 2004.

“The synagogue’s foundational structure and wall outlines, carefully preserved over time, were unearthed along the Black Sea’s picturesque Taman Peninsula,” Ruben Bunyatyan of the Foundation told Neos Kosmos, a Greek community newspaper based in Melbourne, Australia.

The archaeologists reported that the synagogue’s rectangular dimensions were 21 by 6 meters (69 by 20 feet). It was split into two chambers, each more than 60 square meters (645 square feet) in area.

Phanagoria was founded in 356 BCE by Greek colonists from Teos on the western coast of Anatolia who fled Asia Minor after their conflict with the Persian King Cyrus the Great. The city served as the capital of the Bosporan Kingdom and was an important trade hub connecting the southern Caucasus with the Maeotian Marshes.

The Second Temple was built upon the ruins of the First Temple and stood in Jerusalem from 516 BCE until 70 C.E. when it was destroyed by the Romans.

“All religious ceremonies were centered around the Temple, rendering synagogues a rarity. While the earliest synagogues date back to the third century [BCE], their construction proliferated notably during the third century [C.E.]. Thus, the Phanagoria synagogue stands as a pioneering example of these early centers of worship, casting light on an era of Jewish history rarely glimpsed,” said Bunyatyan.

[bushtruenews]

Trump partnered with mafia-linked Alex Shnaider

For Toronto Tower, Trump partnered with mafia-linked Alex Shnaider, who paid $100M to a Moscow fixer representing Kremlin-backed investors who funneled millions into the project. For financing, they used Firtash & Mogilevich's primary bank.

In 2007 Trump touted the financing for “our” Toronto project as “a testament to the strength of the Trump name." The $40M investment from his Russian-Canadian partner, Alex Shnaider, came from Kremlin-backed investors. Trump later denied any knowledge about the financing.

In 2010, Alex Shnaider authorized a $100M bribe to a Moscow fixer representing Kremlin-backed investors to facilitate the sale of his Ukraine steel mill for $850M, a deal financed by Russian-state bank VEB [chaired by Putin at the time], proceeds of which flowed to Trump.

Alex Shnaider's father-in-law, Boris Birshtein, is a longtime friend and business partner of Sergei Mikhailov, known as Mikhas the leader of Moscow’s most powerful organised crime syndicate: the Solntsevskaya Bratva [linked to Mogilevich]. Shnaider also knows Mikhailov.

Birshtein & Mikhailov co-founded laundering front Seabeco [where Shnaider worked]. In 1996, after Mikhailov's arrest [and a witness shot dead], Belgian police raided Birshtein & Shnaider’s Antwerp houses, prompting Shnaider to move back to Toronto.

Another close associate of Shnaider father-in-law Boris Birshtein is Russian mafia boss Alexander Mashkevich [ran Seabeco’s Moscow office], who, along with his Eurasia Group partners, financed several Trump-Bayrock projects, including Trump Soho.

ICYMI: According the the Sep 11 Commission Report, Alexander Mashkevich & his 2 Kazakh billionaire partners [AKA" the Trio"], are Russian/Israeli Mafia & Mashkevich [who attended Trump's inaugural & private inauguration dinner] is a mafia boss.

Birshtein [father-in-law & business assoc of Trump's Toronto partner Alex Shnaider] is also a friend of Oleg Deripaska, and in 2009, brokered a deal for the CIA to recruit Deripaska to 'rescue' Bob Levinson [missing in Iran] in exchange for a VISA.

Shnaider's mafia-linked father-in-law, Birshtein, claimed “no involvement in Trump Toronto either directly or indirectly,” however, a Cypriot company controlled by the director of Birshtein companies, was listed in 2016 as a Trump Toronto creditor.

In addition to Alex Shnaider's Kremlin-linked funds, financing for Trump's Toronto project came from Austria's Raiffeisen Bank [$243M]. According to diplomatic cables, Russian mafia boss Semion Mogilevich is a partner in Raiffeisen [the primary bank of Dmitry Firtash].

[notanecromancer]

--It's a deliberate attempt to crash the economy to allow billionaires to buy up the pieces at fire sale prices. First targets: Amtrak, USPS, NOAA, VA

"When the Cold War ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, those Americans who had come to define the world as a fight between the dark forces of communism and the good forces of capitalism believed their ideology of radical individualism had triumphed. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukayama famously concluded that the victory of liberal democracy over communism meant “the end of history” as all nations gravitated toward the liberal democracy that time had proven was fundamentally a better system of government than any other.

Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand in hand.

But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.” By the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on “political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available.

Russian “political technologists” used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate.

This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

In 2004, Putin tried to extend his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, and the Ukrainian government voided the election.

To resurrect his political career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort, who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about $17 million but had no way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help. Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign but immediately let Deripaska know about his new position.

Russian operatives told Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected. They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin took control of eastern Ukraine through a “peace” plan that would end the war in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove U.S. sanctions from Russian entities.

According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”

That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”

In other words, they used “political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.

Last night, President Donald Trump illustrated the power of virtual politics when he talked for an hour and forty minutes to a joint session of Congress. He lied repeatedly, starting with the lie that he had a historic mandate—in fact, more people voted for someone else than voted for him—and moving on to the idea his first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation,” saying that the first president, George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world.

Trump’s speech was valuable not as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered supporters a shared worldview that reinforced their allegiance to the MAGA movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mourtoupalas, and Hannah Dormido of the Washington Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never before heard in a similar address to Congress: “left-wing,” “weaponized,” “lunatics,” “ideologues,” and “deepfake.” Right-wing media reinforces that virtual reality: Today on the Fox News Channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro nonsensically claimed that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”

Russian leaders created a false narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public enterprises and monopolize the country’s wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump said last night is in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” despite what the administration has told courts, told a technology conference that the government should privatize “as much as possible” and suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak and the United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also appear to be a prelude to privatization.

The Trump administration today announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs in what Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) calls a plan to gut the agency and “then push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires.”

Jess Piper of The View From Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”

In mid-February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the defense secretaries of European allies that the U.S. could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values and warned that Europe’s true threat was “the threat from within.” Two weeks later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.

Today, United States officials said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables Ukraine to target Russian positions.

In a nationally televised speech today, French president Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare to stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the United States. “The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries, affecting us,” Macron said. “I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our side, but we have to be ready if they don’t.” Yesterday, politicians in the United Kingdom angrily interpreted Vice President Vance’s dismissal of “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” as a dig at the U.K. after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the U.K. has stood alongside the U.S. repeatedly since World War II.

“We were at war with a dictator,” said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”

--Heather Cox Richardson 3/5/25

[pscottm]

February 19, 2025 - by Heather Cox Richardson

The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.

In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.

To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.

Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.

Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.

But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.

When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.

When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.

Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”

This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed." Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.

[mariacallous]

American historian Amy Knight has been studying Russian elites for decades. She spent 18 years at the U.S. Library of Congress as a specialist in Russian and Soviet affairs and has written multiple books on the Cold War, the KGB, its post-Soviet ideological successors, and the Kremlin. Some of her most recent work focuses on the culture of political assassinations under Vladimir Putin. Meduza spoke with Knight about the trials, tribulations, and transformations of Russia’s elites since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The costly invasion of Ukraine and the muted response from many of Moscow’s most influential and affluent make it tempting to dismiss Russian elites outright. But that would be a mistake, says historian Amy Knight, who told Meduza that Vladimir Putin is forced to share power with these people, whether he likes it or not. “He depends on the entire elite,” Knight explained, adding that Russian elites in the so-called “power ministries” and elsewhere also communicate with each other, making it possible to talk about the group as a kind of class.

War weariness

Knight acknowledges that predicting Russian elites’ behavior is difficult, but she told Meduza that the fighting in Ukraine is making everyone “very war weary.” She cited oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s willingness to criticize the invasion publicly as evidence that “he too is aware that there is a lot of discontent” (even if he’s not actually a government official). “[It] makes me wonder whether there aren't some other reasons to speculate that Putin isn't completely secure,” Knight said. 

Western sanctions have “laid the groundwork for gradual and real dissatisfaction with Putin” even though “nothing has happened yet,” Knight told Meduza. She drew special attention to how the war has limited the prospects of future generations of elites, rendering children and grandchildren “captive[s] in this shell of Russia.” “It takes away any hope for the future for the younger generation — the younger generation of these government officials and law enforcement.”

Knight said she’s suspicious of the Kremlin’s capacity to buy the support of Russian elites or a new middle class. Asked if surging defense spending has won the loyalty and self-interest of a new generation of Russians, Knight told Meduza that the government’s swollen military budget still isn’t enough "to actually produce a groundswell of support for Putin.” “I think it's interesting that he's doing this, and it shows how desperate he is,” she explained, arguing that Russia’s higher defense spending is unsustainable.

Loyalty among cutthroats

What is Vladimir Putin’s recourse without broad support? According to Knight, it boils down to personal loyalty. “Without a doubt, Putin values loyalty over effectiveness,” Knight told Meduza, saying that the president’s need for faithful allies explains his reluctance to replace officials like former Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu despite failures on the job and rampant corruption. 

At the same time, Putin did fire Shoigu, and prosecutors are now waging a full-blown crackdown on many of the crooked generals who enriched themselves while the invasion of Ukraine was underway. These anti-corruption cases, said Knight, are one of the president’s key means of maintaining loyalty. After all, “he can't go around having top members of his elite shot or pushed out of windows or poisoned,” she added. Putin also keeps Russia’s elites in line by “changing the rules of the game” at various times, subjecting officials to political musical chairs. For example, he recently (and surprisingly) demoted Nikolai Patrushev from the National Security Council. (To complicate matters, Patrushev’s son joined the federal government’s cabinet as a kind of consolation prize — though months earlier, Putin pinned Russia’s spike in egg prices on the same man.)

Despite Putin’s favoritism for proven loyalists, the ties that bind Russia’s elites to the regime are fundamentally based on naked interest, argued Knight: “You can never speak of loyalty because these people can change on a dime if it means their own political survival. […] Nowadays, I think it's cynical. It's about money. It's about position. It's about getting on.” This is true regardless of the Kremlin’s outward commitment to patriotic ideology, she said, reasoning that officers in the security services and even the foreign intelligence are not likely motivated by “this whole business that Putin keeps spouting for his domestic audience about special Russian values and the church and all this.” (She pointed out that KGB officers stationed abroad in the late Soviet era demonstrated the same mercantile philosophy by starting businesses and building ties with oligarchs.)

In an environment driven by “money, political survival, and security,” elites are averse to anything that might constitute “a real rumble within the Kremlin and some sort of obvious public infighting.” “All of [Putin’s] elite are in it together in the sense that they certainly don't want to appeal to the broader population,” Knight told Meduza.

The elites’ red lines

While Knight doesn’t predict an imminent uprising against Vladimir Putin, she noted that there were likely “quite a few sympathizers with [insurrectionist Yevgeny] Prigozhin among the people who were really unhappy with the way the military was conducting the war in Ukraine.” Additionally, she told Meduza that “it's not inconceivable that some members of the elite would form a coalition, go to Putin, and pressure him to make concessions to end the war” (assuming they could recruit people who had “some control over Russia’s mechanisms of force and coercion”). “It's possible that the elite could at least pressure him and even say, look, you've got to resign. We've got to have somebody new.”

But this scenario only becomes plausible if the war in Ukraine goes sideways for Russia in a major way, and much depends on continued (and expanded) Western military support, which Knight vigorously endorses. She also told Meduza that she believes Russia’s elites would likely intervene to prevent another major escalation from Putin — namely, the use of tactical nuclear weapons (“I personally think that this is a threat, and it's an empty threat”) or the invasion of a NATO member (“they don't have the troops or the means, and there would definitely be opposition”). 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jack Ohman, Sacramento Bee

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 18, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 19, 2024

Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention yesterday illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators. 

Manafort first advised and then managed Trump’s 2016 campaign. A long-time Republican political operative, he came to the job after the Ukrainian people threw his client,Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine’s presidency in 2014. Yanukovych was backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was determined to prevent Ukraine from turning toward Europe and to install a puppet government that would extend his power over the neighboring country. Beginning in 2004, Manafort had worked to install and then keep Yanukovych and his party in power. His efforts won him a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Then in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. 

Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Putin invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort stepped in to remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking Kilimnik how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and he made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained at least one answer: Manafort and Kilimnick “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych…elected to head that republic.” The report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”

This policy was the exact opposite of official U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine. Russia worked to help Trump win the White House, and immediately after his election, according to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnick wrote that "[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process. The email went on to say that once then–Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko understood this “message” from the United States, the process “will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”

The investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia slowed the consummation of this plan, and strong bipartisan support for Ukraine threw a monkey wrench into the works, prompting Trump’s cronies to try to smear Ukraine as the country that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, a story that began to come out during Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Biden’s election meant an abrupt end to Russia’s quiet absorption of Ukraine’s eastern region, and in February 2022, Putin simply invaded the country and then claimed that the people there had voted to join Russia. 

Trump seemed to bring this back up at a CNN event in June in which, referring to Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, he said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.” Trump has said he has a plan for “peace” in Ukraine that will stop the war in a day. 

Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance is wildly inexperienced for such a position, but he has been staunchly in favor of ending U.S. assistance to Ukraine and was the pick of that party faction. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov cheered Vance’s nomination, saying: “He’s in favor of peace, he’s in favor of ending the assistance that’s being provided and we can only welcome that because that’s what we need—to stop pumping Ukraine full of weapons and then the war will end” Russia needs this sort of help, for just this week Ukraine forced it to remove its last remaining patrol ship from occupied Crimea (when the 2022 invasion began, it held most of its 74 Black Sea Fleet warships at ports there). 

Manafort was convicted of a slew of criminal charges for his work with Ukraine and obstruction of the investigation into the connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and was serving a seven-year sentence when Trump pardoned him in December 2020. Now he is back at the center of Trump’s MAGA Party. 

Before 2016 the Republican Party stood staunchly against Russia, and getting Republican voters to forget that history required adopting the argument of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is aligned with Putin and Trump, that democracy has ruined the United States. In this argument, the central principle of democracy—that all people must be equal before the law, and have a right to a say in their government—destroys a country by making women, people of color, immigrants, members of religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals equal to heteronormative white men and permitting them to influence government. In place of democracy, they want to impose their version of Christianity on the nation, banning abortion, rejecting immigrants, and curtailing the rights of gender, religious, and ethnic minorities.

Josh Kovensky and John Light of Talking Points Memo picked up that in his speech at the Republican convention last night, Vance pushed back against President Joe Biden’s traditional idea that America is an idea, tying it instead to a place and a people. As Kovensky and Light note, this is “a somewhat-quiet, somewhat-obvious dog whistle, gesturing toward the idea there are, as some on the far-right contend, ‘heritage Americans,’” native-born Americans who have a deeper understanding than newcomers of what this country means. That view of nationhood is commonplace elsewhere, Kovensky and Light note, but its absence in the U.S. “has long made our country exceptional.” 

This nationalist concept is at the heart of MAGA attacks on immigrants, which were in full display at the convention yesterday. From the podium yesterday, Thomas Homan, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for Trump’s first two years in office, told undocumented immigrants: “You better start packing to go home.” Trump has promised to round up 11 million migrants (although he claims there are 18 million) currently living in the U.S., put them in camps, and deport them. There were actually preprinted signs at the convention for attendees to wave, which they did with apparent enthusiasm. The signs said: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” 

The convention has also emphasized its opposition to women’s rights. Trump, who has proudly claimed responsibility for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, walked out last night to the song “It’s a Man’s World.” By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to enforce it, as the protector of “Life,” the Republican platform covertly endorses a national abortion ban. 

Their rejection of democracy requires a strongman at the head of the government, and in Milwaukee that man is Trump, who will be the first convicted criminal nominated for president by a major party. He was convicted for trying to tip the 2016 election by hiding payments to an adult-film actress after they had sex, in order to keep the story from voters. 

Conference attendees are honoring Trump with large bandages on their right ear as a tribute to an injury he sustained in a shooting attempt on Saturday, although—and this is very weird—there has been no information about that injury aside from his own comments and those of his inner circle, a lack the press seems willing to ignore despite their deep interest in every piece of medical information from President Biden. As he did at his criminal trial in Manhattan, Trump keeps nodding off to sleep at the convention. 

The theme of the party has been unity, but that unity depends on everyone lauding Trump. Gone are the establishment Republicans that ran the party before 2016; even longer gone are the traditional Republicans who were chased out of the party in the 1990s as “Republicans in Name Only” because they believed government had a role to play in the economy and did not see tax cuts as the solution to everything. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch wrote: “Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for—unity—and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown,” where a cult leader took the lives of his followers in 1978.

In 1959, veteran Robert Biggs wrote to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, asking the president to make “direct statements” that would give people the confidence to “back him completely.” Americans needed “more of the attitude of a commanding officer who knows the goal and the mission and states, without evasion, the way it is to be done.” 

Eisenhower answered that “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,” Eisenhower wrote. “But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well—from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress…. While complete success will always elude us, still it is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mysowa]

O Cud Gospodarczy w Polsce, o nowy Krem Nivea

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