#prosecutor general for Crimea

[niveditaabaidya]

Ukraine Investigating Dam Blast As War Crime. #nato #kherson #ukraine #e...

[ashitakaxsan]

✨ Embark on a journey into the world of manga art, where the real and the charming collide in the form of Natalia Poklonskaya! 🌸 

   Known for her grace, intelligence, and unwavering dedication, Natalia Poklonskaya captured the hearts of people worldwide with her captivating presence. Now, she comes to life in these stunning manga illustrations, where her beauty and strength are immortalized in every brushstroke. 

   Whether she's defending justice or exuding elegance, Natalia's magnetic charm shines through, leaving a lasting impression on all who encounter her. Join us as we celebrate the real-life heroine through the lens of manga art, where her legacy continues to inspire and enchant. 💫

  ✨ Отправьтесь в путешествие в мир искусства манги, где встречаются настоящее и очаровательное в образе Натальи Поклонской! 🌸

    Известная своей грацией, умом и непоколебимой преданностью делу, Наталья Поклонская покорила сердца людей во всем мире своим очаровательным внешним видом. Теперь она оживает в этих потрясающих иллюстрациях в манге, где ее красота и сила увековечены в каждом мазке кисти. 

   Защищает ли она справедливость или излучает элегантность, магнетическое обаяние Натальи сияет, оставляя неизгладимое впечатление на всех, кто с ней сталкивается. Присоединяйтесь к нам, и мы прославим настоящую героиню через призму искусства манги, где ее наследие продолжает вдохновлять и очаровывать.

Слишком много было ажиотажа вокруг Украины, Зеленского тоже. Так что это культивировало идею, чтобы мы забыли о Великолепной Вайфу Наталье Поклонской. Я храню ее в своем уме и сердце. Она мне нравится :)

[blueiscoool]

Moscow Auction House Sells a $1 Million Painting Stolen from a Ukrainian Museum

In Russia, Ukrainian artist Ivan Aivazovsky’s painting “Moonlit Night” has been put up for auction, according to Ukraine’s former Deputy Attorney General and Prosecutor of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Gyunduz Mamedov, who has reported the auction plans.

Russia’s looting and destruction of Ukrainian museums and cultural heritage sites have resulted in significant losses, with nearly 40 museums plundered and almost 700 heritage sites damaged or destroyed since the invasion began in February 2022, causing cultural losses estimated in the hundreds of millions of euros.

The first report that “Moonlit Night” will be the main lot of the auction, which will take place at the Moscow Auction House on 18 February, appeared on the Telegram channel by Russia’s state-funded news agency RIA Novosti, noting that the painting was estimated at 100 million rubles (approximately $1.09 million) before the sale.

‘In 2017, [Interpol], at the request of [Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Crimea], put the paintings on the international wanted list. Thus, Russia openly disregards [international law], as according to the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the export of cultural properties and transfer of ownership is prohibited,” Mamedov emphasized on X.

In 2014, during the early stages of Russia’s occupation of Crimea, Aivazovsky’s painting “Moonlit Night” was illegally transferred to the Simferopol Art Museum, along with 52 other artworks.

In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some of his works were destroyed in an airstrike on the Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol, and others were looted by Russian forces from Mariupol and Kherson museums, including “The Storm Subsides,” which was moved to the Central Taurida Museum in Simferopol, Crimea.

[mariacallous]

During the first months of the Russian invasion, in one of the frontline villages in the southern Kherson region, I met several firefighters – ordinary Ukrainian men in their 40s or 50s. Their prewar tasks involved putting out fires in the local wood or occasionally buildings.

Since the Russian invasion, they save houses burning from missiles and retrieve their dead neighbours. One of the men began to cry during our conversation. He left embarrassed, but shortly returned. I comforted the firefighters, explaining that even governors and mayors sometimes sob during interviews.

In the following months, I travelled from one frontline town to another. I met doctors, policemen, railway and communal workers, journalists, electricians, civil servants, government officials whose relatives are fighting and dying in the army. They escaped or are still living under Russian occupation, their houses and apartments destroyed. They acknowledged that they were emotional, often angry, horrified, but driven by a sense of duty. In the end this would help them move forward, and even be proud of what they did.

Russia invaded Donbas and Crimea in Ukraine in 2014; the country already knew what the war was. But since 5am on 24 February last year, all citizens have learned how to survive when a foreign army uses its might to destroy the peace. They have discovered how to act during an air-raid warning; how to live and work through blackouts; that they should not walk at night because of curfews. They have learned to forget about planes, as airports are closed, and how to be separated from family. People have adapted to many things, and also learned how to deal with emotions: that tears are nothing to be ashamed of. The initial shock and sadness have transformed into a bigger confidence and determination.

As for today – besides hope in victory, national pride, solidarity and compassion, which you see on the surface – one of the prevailing feelings among Ukrainians is guilt that we are not doing enough. In non-frontline towns and in Kyiv, life has returned to a kind of normal. We are preoccupied with thoughts of those who live under constant shelling or occupation. Those who are not in the army think of those who must fight daily; soldiers who survive think of the fallen. Those who left the country feel guilty about those who stayed.

I recently visited a standup comedy performance in a suburb of Kyiv. Self-depreciation is back following months when society was unable to joke about the war. One of the most popular gags is from a comedian comparing his efforts to those of soldiers and veterans. After Ukraine’s victory, he jokes, he would tell his children he spent the war sitting in an Odesa basement, tweeting that Nato should help by “closing the sky”.

Thousands of crimes have been committed by Russian soldiers on Ukrainian soil. The Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office says it has registered at least 71 000 violations of the customs of war. Since then it has become harder to talk to Russian colleagues. By colleagues I mean not propagandists, but just journalists who oppose the Russian invasion and Putin’s regime.

I still communicate with them, but many exchanges end with excuses about why Russian society can do nothing. They think that those who are against the war have nothing to do with the actions of their state. I do believe guilt is not collective, but shared responsibility exists.

Before Russia’s invasion I reported on totalitarian countries: Iran, Syria, China, Belarus. I understand how dangerous it is to protest in a state that is ready to kill its own citizens. The Ukrainians fought against this in revolutions in 2004 and 2014. In the end we built a government that defends its citizens.

It feels paradoxical that Ukrainians, who defend their homeland and are under attack, feel guilty for not doing more. Meanwhile, Russians who are opposed to war are uncomfortable speaking about personal responsibility, stressing that nothing depends on them. This can be explained not by a lack of empathy or bitterness, but by disempowerment and the detachment of Russian citizens. This is something the Kremlin wants from Russian society. Russians who oppose the war must transform their lack of empowerment into action, and find their strength.

Ukrainians have defended their country for 365 days without a break. They have saved many lives from Russian troops. Our task now is to transform a sense of guilt into a sense of duty. We need to preserve our strength.

[stele3]

[valeriankam]

The Uniform of Conservative Bimbo: Ekaterina Mizulina Case

One of my ideas for the Fashion and Philosophy essay was to write the second part for my Shaman essay: exploring the persona of Russian conservative activist and politician Ekaterina Mizulina.

I was thinking of exploring the (similar to Shaman) contradiction between her political agenda ("traditional" values, pro-Russia, pro-Putin, anti-LGBT, etc) and her style and appearance (expensive brand clothes with visible logo, plastic surgery, etc), which, as I argue, quite obviously performs Bimbo aesthetic.

I could not come up with the proper thesis around her (I guess she is not as interesting as a research object after all). Here, I will share some thoughts (and slides) that I came up with.

For the context, Ekaterina Mizulina is Russian politician and activist who mostly upholds pro-government, conservative views. Curious is that she is a daughter of another Russian politician: Yelena Mizulina. Her mother is mostly famous for drafting Internet Restriction Bill and Dima Yakovlev Law (denying American citizens adoption of Russian children), as well as for promoting "LGBT propaganda for children" ban and bill decriminalizing domestic violence.

Ekaterina is quite similar to her mother in her attempts of controlling the Internet, although the methods she employs are quite different. The young Mizulina is the head of The Safe Internet League, a state-affiliated organization that tracks and blocks "dangerous content" to "protect the children." The critera for the danger vary from child pornography and animal cruelty to "LGBT propaganda" and "Fakes" (whatever it is...).

What distinguishes Mizulina among other conservative politicians, trying to impose their order in the Internet, is that she acquires not only immense political power but also social capital. She is very popular on the Internet, both among her haters and supporters.

What is more important, Mizulina is beloved by her primary target audience: children and teenagers. There are thousands of fanart, which she posts on her Telegram channel. The art vary from cute and harmless to outright reiteration of her political points.

Interesting, that there was a similar instance of Russian female politician's rise to the Internet fame: Natalia Poklonskaya (or Nyash-Myash). The ex-Prosecutor General of Crimea, she was mostly known for the memes and anime fanart of her.

Although the cases are pretty similar, I find the important distinction: while Poklonskaya did not participate in her success on the Web, Mizulina is actively involved in creating and influencing her Internet meta-persona through her Telegram channel and interaction with audience.

In regards to her style and self-presentation, Mizulina resembles American female conservative politicians and influencers: soft feminine business-casual style combined with confident (borderline agressive) way of speaking.

However, Muzulina's femininity is more concentrated and hyperbolized. Her style is much more flashy and over the top, in comparison to her American collegues, mostly sticking to "quite luxury" looks.

As I already mentioned, I did not developed this project too much, although I hope to complete it in future.

I mostly think about the Bimbo and Bimbo aesthetic as a uniform, a conscious choice of style and a part of creation of meta-persona and what does this Bimbo meta-persona means in a political dimension.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

In battleground Arizona, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. draws Biden and Trump voters (AP) Some voted for Donald Trump, others for Joe Biden. A few had never wanted anything to do with politics before they heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a podcast or YouTube video. Lined up outside a Phoenix wedding hall tucked between a freeway, a railroad track and a U-Haul rental center, the hundreds of people who turned out Wednesday to hear Kennedy speak shared little in common ideologically. What united them was a deep-seated distrust of the media, of corporations and especially of the government and a belief that Kennedy is the only person in politics willing to tell them the truth. Voters are not enthusiastic about a Biden-Trump rematch, and alternatives like Kennedy or the No Labels third-party movement, which would typically be longshots, see an opening. Kennedy’s appearance in a 2024 battleground state highlights how he could influence the election in ways that are tough to predict. Allies of both Trump and Biden have expressed concerns that Kennedy’s independent bid could pull votes from their candidate in next year’s expected general election rematch.

Migrant caravan in southern Mexico marks Christmas Day by trudging onward (AP) Christmas Day meant the same as any other day for thousands of migrants walking through southern Mexico: more trudging under a hot sun. There were no presents, and Christmas Eve dinner was a sandwich, a bottle of water and a banana handed out by the Catholic church to some of the migrants in the town of Álvaro Obregón, in the southern state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala. Migrants spent Christmas night sleeping on a scrap of cardboard or plastic stretched out under an awning or tent, or the bare ground. At around 6,000 people, the migrant caravan that set out Sunday was the largest one since June 2022, when a similarly sized group departed Tapachula.

Police in Peru dress up as Santa for festive drugs bust (The Independent) Police in Peru have been spotted carrying out a drugs raid while dressed as Santa Claus. The undercover agents caught two men allegedly selling cocaine and cannabis in a house in Huaral, just north of Lima. ‘Santa’ could be seen using a sledgehammer to break down the door of the house, before removing his beard to cuff one of the suspects.

Plane passengers held pending human trafficking inquiry leave France for India (Reuters) A plane carrying 276 Indian passengers took off on Monday for Mumbai, the French interior ministry’s local office said, after it was grounded for four days pending investigation into possible human trafficking. The flight, carried out by Romanian charter company Legend Airlines, had departed from Dubai and landed at the small Vatry airport on Thursday for a technical stopover when police intervened. Bound for Nicaragua, the flight arrived in France with 303 Indian passengers onboard. After being interrogated by police, two people investigated for human trafficking have been placed under “assisted witness” status while the investigation continues, according to the prosecutor’s office. Another 25 people, including five minors, have stayed in France where they wish to seek asylum, authorities said.

Russian naval ship in Crimea damaged in airstrike by Ukrainian forces, Russian Defense Ministry says (AP) A Russian naval ship in Crimea was damaged in an airstrike by Ukrainian forces, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday. The landing ship Novocherkassk was hit at a base in the city of Feodosia by plane-launched guided missiles, the ministry said, adding that two Ukrainian fighter jets were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire during the attack. Over the past several months, Ukrainian forces have conducted attacks around Crimea, mostly with sea drones.

China expects searing heat, more weather extremes in 2024 (Reuters) China grappling with one of its coldest Decembers on record will likely have to brace for another round of scorching heat and an increase in extreme weather next year due to the El Nino weather phenomenon, a senior climate expert said. This year has seen China lurch from some of its hottest temperatures logged since 1850 to a harsh cold snap that froze many parts of the country for close to a fortnight earlier this month. This past summer saw Beijing bake in record heat while a remote township in the country’s arid northwest logged a day of 52 degrees Celsius (126 Fahrenheit) the hottest on record for China. Typhoons also brought record-breaking rainfall in China’s north, causing widespread flooding.

Israel’s Economy Expected to Shrink 2% as War Sidelines Workers (NYT) The Israeli economy is expected to shrink by 2 percent this quarter, according to a leading research center, with hundreds of thousands of workers displaced by the war with Hamas or called up as reservists. About 20 percent of the Israeli work force was missing from the labor market in October, up from 3 percent before the fighting began, according to a report from the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Israel. The spike in unemployment reflects the fact that about 900,000 people were called up to fight, stayed home to take care of children because schools had closed, evacuated from towns near the borders with Lebanon and Gaza or couldn’t work because of physical damage to their industries.

Lose a limb or risk death? Gaza’s wounded face hard choices (AP) The doctors gave Shaimaa Nabahin an impossible choice: lose your left leg or risk death. The 22-year-old had been hospitalized in Gaza for around a week, after her ankle was partially severed in an Israeli airstrike, when doctors told her she was suffering from blood poisoning. Nabahin chose to maximize her chances of survival, and agreed to have her leg amputated 15 centimeters (6 inches) below the knee. The decision upended life for the ambitious university student, as it has for untold others among the more than 54,500 war-wounded who faced similar gut-wrenching choices. Experts believe that in some cases, limbs could have been saved with proper treatment. But after weeks of Israel’s blistering air and ground offensive, only nine out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are still operational. They are greatly overcrowded, offer limited treatment and lack basic equipment to perform surgeries. Many wounded are unable to reach the remaining hospitals, pinned down by Israeli bombardment and ground combat.

Saudis Keep Low Profile in Red Sea Conflict (NYT) After rebels took over the capital of Yemen in 2014, a 30-year-old Saudi prince named Mohammed bin Salman spearheaded a military intervention to rout them. With American assistance and weapons, Saudi pilots embarked on a bombing campaign called Operation Decisive Storm inside Yemen, the mountainous nation on their southern border. Officials expected to swiftly defeat the rebels, a ragtag tribal militia known as the Houthis. Instead, the prince’s forces spent years mired in a conflict that splintered into fighting between multiple armed groups, drained billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s coffers and helped plunge Yemen into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Hundreds of thousands of people died from violence, hunger and unchecked disease. Saudi Arabia and its main partner, the United Arab Emirates, eventually scaled back their military involvement, and Saudi officials entered peace talks with the Houthis, who secured control of northern Yemen. Now, the war in Gaza has thrust the Houthis whose ideology is driven by hostility toward the United States and Israel and support for the Palestinian cause into an unlikely global spotlight. Saudi Arabia, however, would rather watch these latest developments from the sidelines, with the prospect of peace on its southern border a more appealing goal than joining an effort to stop attacks that the Houthis say are directed at Israel a state the kingdom does not officially recognize and which is widely reviled by its people.

Attack in Nigeria (Foreign Policy) At least 160 people were killed and 300 people wounded in attacks on villages in central Nigeria, local officials said Monday. Monday Kassah, head of the local government in Bokkos, Plateau State, told the AFP that armed groups locally known as bandits launched attacks on at least 20 communities. Plateau State Gov. Caleb Mutfwang condemned the violence as “barbaric, brutal, and unjustified,” and governor’s office spokesperson Gyang Bere vowed to take proactive measures to protect civilians. However, Amnesty International criticized the government following the attacks, writing on X that “the Nigerian authorities have been failing to end frequent deadly attacks on rural communities of Plateau State.”

A Thriving Border Town Undercuts South Africa’s Anti-Immigrant Mood (NYT) By 7 a.m., lines of customers snake down the block outside stores on the main commercial strip in Musina, a bustling South African border town where thousands of people arrive daily from neighboring Zimbabwe to buy food, clothes and other necessities that are hard to get back home. A few miles away, at the border, pickup trucks bearing the seal of South Africa’s newly formed border patrol inspect the razor-wire fence, looking to arrest people who cross illegally braving bandits, crocodiles and the rushing Limpopo River. The border force represents an effort by the government, months ahead of crucial national elections, to respond to popular demand and clamp down on migrants sneaking into the country. Musina, surrounded by farms and a copper mine, is where the government’s muscular immigration policy collides with a tricky reality that many South Africans are loath to concede: that even people who cross the border illegally may be good for the country. Like politicians in the United States, Europe and elsewhere who score points by promising hardened borders and mass deportation, their South African counterparts are pitching a sweeping crackdown on foreigners to appeal to voters, playing on similar, often-unfounded fears that immigrants fuel crime and steal jobs.

Pope Francis blasts the weapons industry as he makes a Christmas appeal for peace in the world (AP) Pope Francis on Monday blasted the weapons industry and its “instruments of death” that fuel wars as he made a Christmas Day appeal for peace in the world and in particular between Israel and the Palestinians. Speaking from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica to the throngs of people below, Francis said he grieved the “abominable attack” of Hamas against southern Israel on Oct. 7 and called for the release of hostages. And he begged for an end to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the “appalling harvest of innocent civilians” as he called for humanitarian aid to reach those in need. Francis devoted his Christmas Day blessing to a call for peace in the world, noting that the biblical story of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem sent a message of peace. But he said that Bethlehem “is a place of sorrow and silence” this year. He took particular aim at the weapons industry, which he said was fueling the conflicts around the globe with scarcely anyone paying attention. “It should be talked about and written about, so as to bring to light the interests and the profits that move the puppet strings of war,” he said. “And how can we even speak of peace, when arms production, sales and trade are on the rise?” Francis has frequently blasted the weapons industry as “merchants of death” and has said that wars today, in Ukraine, in particular, are being used to try out new weapons or use up old stockpiles.

[beardedmrbean]

All elections including the presidential vote set to take place next spring are technically cancelled under martial law that has been in effect since the conflict began last year.

"We must decide that now is the time of defence, the time of battle, on which the fate of the state and people depends," Zelensky said in his daily address.

He said it was a time for the country to be united, not divided, adding: "I believe that now is not the (right) time for elections."

The frontline between the warring sides has remained mostly static for almost a year despite a much-touted Ukrainian counter-offensive, with Russian forces entrenched in southern and eastern Ukraine.

Officials from the United States and Europe -- Kyiv's key allies -- are reported to have suggested holding negotiations to end the grinding 20-month-old conflict.

But Zelensky has fiercely denied that Ukraine's counter-offensive has hit a stalemate, or that Western countries were leaning on Kyiv to enter talks.

The United States and other supporters have publicly maintained they are ready to back Kyiv with military and financial aid for as long as it takes to defeat Russia.

Global attention has turned to the Middle East since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel -- and Zelensky has come under increasing pressure.

Art museum hit in Odesa 

Russian strikes overnight in the southern Ukrainian region of Odesa left eight people wounded and damaged a historic art museum, Ukrainian officials said, in the latest barrage of drones and missiles.

Three more were injured in a Russian shelling attack on the southern city of Kherson on Monday, as Kyiv doubled down on its warnings that Russia was planning to pummel Ukraine's energy infrastructure ahead of the winter.

Images released by officials from inside the Odesa Fine Arts Museum showed art ripped from the walls of the 19th-century building and windows blown out by the aerial bombardment.

UNESCO said it "strongly condemns the attack" and that "cultural sites must be protected".

On Monday, Zelensky said that Ukrainian forces had successfully destroyed a major Russian ship in the Kerch shipyard in annexed Crimea.

The president, who was elected in 2019, said in September that he was ready to hold national elections next year if necessary, and was in favour of allowing international observers.

Voting could be logistically difficult due to the large number of Ukrainians abroad and soldiers fighting on the front.

Zelensky's approval rating skyrocketed after the war began, but the country's political landscape has been fractious despite the unifying force of the war.

Former presidential aide Oleksiy Arestovych has announced that he would run against his former boss, after criticising Zelensky over the slow pace of the counter-offensive.

Also on Monday, a close advisor to the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, General Valery Zaluzhny, was killed by an explosive hidden inside a birthday gift.

"Under tragic circumstances, my assistant and close friend, Major Gennadiy Chastiakov, was killed," Zaluzhny wrote on Telegram, saying an investigation had been launched.

Ukrainian prosecutors meanwhile said they had formally notified two senior defence officials that they are suspects in a large-scale fraud case involving the purchase of military uniforms.

Ukraine has been fighting an uphill battle against systemic corruption as part of reforms urged by the West for membership to institutions like the European Union.

[mightyflamethrower]

About half of America sympathizes with Ukraine’s plight and wishes to arm it.

After all, Kyiv was attacked preemptively by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, in an effort to decapitate its government and turn the country into a Russian satellite, perhaps similar to the status of a Belarus or Chechnya.

The heroic ability of the Ukrainians to save Kyiv and to stop the Russian assault beyond the occupied Donbas and Crimea has hinged on Western weapons deliveries, specifically from European NATO countries and, to a far greater extent, the United States.

But now, after a reported 1 million combined dead, wounded, or missing Ukrainians and Russians (the actual figure is probably far higher), the war remains deadlocked with no end in sight.

Putin serially threatens to break the static front with tactical nuclear weapons. The Europeans are tiring. And no one in the United States has come up with a strategy to push back the Russians from either their February 2022 demarcation points or their post-2014 occupation of Ukrainian borderlands.

The result is a lot of disconnects, paradoxes, and mysteries about the war, the Biden administration’s role in it, and the general geostrategic landscape surrounding the conflict.

Ukrainian Election Interference?

Americans are demonized by the Uniparty elites for having doubts about their blank-check support for Ukraine. And while the American people are mostly anti-Putin, they are not always pro-Ukraine.

But why is that so?

For one, we know that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.

Even leftwing Politico reported that Ukrainians in the U.S. gathered opposition research on Trump campaign officials and passed it to the Clinton campaign and thus likely her appendages in government.

In August 2016, at the height of that Trump-Clinton presidential race, Ukrainian ambassador Valeriy Chaly himself wrote an op-ed in the Hill attacking then-candidate Donald Trump for his comments about Crimea.

Ukrainian expatriate and U.S. citizen Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was the catalyst and likely source behind the “whistleblower’s” allegations that led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Yet in retrospect, given subsequent disclosures about the Biden family‘s quid pro quo enrichment, Trump likely had reason to worry about feeding the ongoing Biden family Burisma corruption and collusion with Ukrainian oligarchs.

Via Hunter and Joe Biden, the Bidens really were receiving money from Ukraine in exchange for selling their influence. Joe Biden really did leverage $1 billion in congressionally approved U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. He thereby sought to have fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was looking into the extravagant sums Hunter Biden was receiving from Ukrainian interests. And we know this because Biden later publicly bragged about how he threatened to cut off U.S. assistance unless Shokin was fired.

Vindman himself really was an anti-Trump partisan—and later cut a campaign commercial for the Lincoln Project. He likely had leaked a classified presidential phone call to the so-called whistleblower in order to prompt a third-party induced impeachment of a perceived anti-Ukraine Donald Trump.

He refused to disclose all the parties to whom he leaked the call. (Note that Joe Biden himself in May 2004 put a hold on congressionally approved 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, likely due to concerns of losing the Arab-American vote in key swing state Michigan—a better example of a president subordinating the national interest for his own political reelection agenda.)

Vindman was reportedly involved in a family company (as CEO of Trident Support) trying to facilitate repairs of U.S.-supplied military equipment to Ukraine. His wife recently and callously tweeted of the second assassination attempt on Trump, “No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.”

Ukraine’s efforts to compromise prominent Americans, interfere in U.S. elections, and use their American contacts to facilitate arms transfers still continue in outrageous fashion.

On September 23, just 43 days before Election Day, the Biden-Harris administration flew in, at taxpayer expense, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and accorded him secret service protection as he visited the critical swing state of Pennsylvania—where the deadlocked election will likely be decided.

Zelensky and Democrat politicos (no Republican counterparts were invited) toured a Pennsylvania munitions plant making artillery shells likely destined for his Ukraine. One subtext of the visit was that Biden-Harris aid for Ukraine—to be continued or increased by a President Harris—results in jobs for Pennsylvania voters.

In an interview with the left-wing, pro-Biden-Harris New Yorker magazine, Zelensky—who himself has canceled both 11 Ukrainian opposition political parties and scheduled elections, suspended habeas corpus, and censored the media—regrettably went further in his \efforts at U.S. election interference. Zelensky trashed Harris’s rival candidate Donald Trump as someone who “doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.”

The Ukrainian president attacked even harder Trump’s running mate and vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, as “dangerous” and “too radical.”

Too radical for what or whom? The people of the United States or the Ukrainian hierarchy? Amid a firestorm, Zelensky later hurriedly met with Trump, which unfortunately only further highlighted his poor election timing.

One reason why many Americans are skeptical of helping Ukraine is, well, Ukraine itself—specifically its graft and corruption, its oligarchs’ disturbing history of bribing U.S. influential figures, its interference in U.S. elections, and its dictatorial suspension of human rights, political parties, and elections.

On to Moscow?

Strategically, it is understandable why Ukraine wishes to use European and American planes and missiles to strike depots and supply centers deep inside Russia, given Russia does the same to Ukraine—and focuses far more on civilian targets.

But to equip a proxy to attack far inside a nuclear rival’s homeland was always taboo in the Cold War—and for good reason, given the resulting lowered bar of nuclear escalation.

So, the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the wars in the Middle East all respected our ancestors’ Cold War rule: neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. in their numerous proxy wars ever used their clients to attack the homeland of their nuclear opponents with either nuclear or conventional weapons.

When Nikita Khrushchev came close to doing just that by equipping Castro’s Cuba with missiles capable of becoming nuclear-tipped, along with nuclear-carrying strategic bombers that could hit the U.S. homeland, the Kennedy Administration went to Def Con 2.

It quickly blockaded the island. Kennedy further warned the Soviet Union that in case of any Cuban-based attack by missile or plane (conventional or nuclear) against the American homeland, the U.S. would retaliate against Russia itself.

So, we are caught in a very dangerous cycle.

Almost weekly, Putin himself, his generals, Russian politicians, or the Russian state media threaten to respond to attacks inside Russia by resorting either to tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine or strategic nuclear strikes against its suppliers.

In response, our retired generals and intelligence authorities, along with pundits and diplomats—and our de facto commander-in-chief at the press room dais, Kamala Harris—discount these threats as empty bombast. They offer no consideration that what has been mere Russian braggadocio in 2022-2023 (when casualties were in the few hundred thousand and no Ukrainians were fighting inside Russia) might not be so vacuous in late 2024 or 2025. Now casualties have soared by over a million. And Ukrainian forces, equipped with a new arsenal of jets and missiles, currently occupy 500 square miles of conquered Russian territory.

In truth, the West and the U.S. have no strategy for a Ukrainian victory over Russia. Much less do they worry much that a quarter of the Ukrainian population has fled the country, and the military is running out of recruits. The default assumption is to keep fueling the 1 million-man meat grinder to the last Ukrainian and hope that Russia tires first—the sort of non-strategy that the left used to lecture was amoral and senseless in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Why the Ukraine-Israeli asymmetry?

Israel, in many ways, is America’s closest ally. It is a constitutional state and the only nation in the Middle East that respects human rights. Its enemies are our enemies. And it is the target over the last half century of nonstop Arab and Iranian attacks.

Not so Ukraine that separated from Russia in August 1991, and yet still has a checkered history of corruption and authoritarianism.

In the present war, Ukraine has likely become the target of some 8,000-10,000 missiles launched from Russia. Yet that number is still smaller than the some 20,000 projectiles sent into Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. Israel, like Ukraine, was surprise attacked by its neighbor. And like Russia, Hamas started the war without concern for civilians. Or rather, in efforts well beyond Russian brutality, Hamas deliberately targeted civilians for Dark Age-style murder, torture, mass rape, incineration, beheading, and hostage-taking.

It is hard to outdo Russian wartime savagery, but Hezbollah has accomplished that easily. And unlike post-Soviet Russia, it has blatantly murdered lots of American diplomats and soldiers. Hamas still holds American hostages.

So why does the Biden-Harris administration, and many elites in Washington, treat the two wars so differently? Or more specifically, why do they deify Zelensky and Ukraine but demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel?

Note that Biden-Harris demand Israeli “proportionality” in responding to Hamas terror. But they encourage “disproportionality” for Ukraine to win the war. (Does America believe Russia is eviler than Hamas?)

They call for ceasefires nonstop in Gaza and the Hezbollah war. Yet do they ever commensurately instruct Ukraine to stop the war and negotiate with Putin?

Biden-Harris insist that Israel text or otherwise notify Gazans or Beirut civilians of any impending Israel attack. Do they demand the same of Ukraine when it shoots off missiles, shells, and drones into Russian-occupied civilian areas?

Netanyahu has formed a bipartisan war cabinet and will adhere to regularly scheduled elections. And yet he is still demonized as an authoritarian by Biden-Harris. Neither showed up for his recent congressional speech. In fact, in 1950s-Latin-American-coup-style, the U.S. government has been trying under the radar to remove the elected Israeli government.

Most certainly, Netanyahu would not be flown, Zelensky-style, by U.S. military transport to tour a Patriot battery facility in Pennsylvania or in any other election-year battleground state.

And if he was used by Republicans in such overtly partisan fashion, Netanyahu would be asked by the left to leave immediately—especially if he gave an interview from a swing state and, say, on Fox News, in which he trashed the Harris-Walz ticket.

We are warned by Biden-Harris that the Gaza/Hezbollah war should stop now, lest it ignite a theater war in which a possible nuclear Iran and a nuclear Israel would exchange missiles and blow up the region.

Yet, Russia is no putative nuclear power. It possesses somewhere between 6,000-7,000 deliverable nuclear weapons. And it has threatened to use them far more often than Iran has.

Ukraine is on the doorstep of NATO and any regional war would endanger America’s NATO allies far more than an Israel-Iranian conflict.

Is the Iran-Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis Axis that has emerged from the war more dangerous than the new nuclear Russia/China/North Korea/Iran symbiosis that is fallout from our massive support for Ukraine?

So why are we lectured nonstop about the dangers of Israeli brinksmanship but almost encourage it on the part of Ukraine?

Do we believe that Putin is more rational and restrained and less likely to go medieval than Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei?

Again, what explains the vast difference in the way we oversee our ally Israel’s war and Ukraine’s conflict with Russia?

Is the explanation anti-Semitism?

Hundreds of thousands of Muslim-American voters in Michigan?

The airbrushing of Middle East terrorists unthinkable of Russian thugs?

The sheer hatred of Russia and Russians, but the pass given to Middle Eastern autocrats?

The absence of a large expatriate community of Russians in the U.S.?

Hating Russians?

The left’s hatred of Putin’s Russia is understandable given Putin’s 2022 aggression, but it’s generic nature is now also becoming obsessive. The loathing of all things Russian helps to explain the above paradoxes and obsessions—even in the trivial sense of Joe Biden in his recent The View appearance wearing a U.S./Ukraine flag lapel in a way he would likely not a U.S./Israel flag counterpart.

There is also the shame and embarrassment of left-wing past naiveté about Putin.

After all, it was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who in 2009 gave us the performance art, red jacuzzi button, mistranslated Russian “reset.” All that hoopla was a direct partisan rebuke for the supposedly too-tough prior Bush administration response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia.

Recall that in 2013, Obama and John Kerry stupidly invited Putin back into the Middle East, supposedly to help corral Syria’s WMDs, after a near-35-year absence from the region.

It was also Obama, who, in a hot mic exchange in Seoul in 2012, promised that he would give up critical missile defense in Eastern Europe if Putin would just give him space during his last election. (Again, was that gambit impeachable under our new rules, given Obama clearly sacrificed America’s strategic interests to win temporary calm from an aggressive Russia to help his reelection?)

Both fulfilled their bargains: Putin waited until Obama was safely reelected and then invaded Ukraine in 2014, while Obama happily surrendered the nascent air defense project to protect eastern Europe from enemy missiles.

In contrast to Clinton-Obama appeasement of Russia, Trump killed Russian Wagner mercenaries in Syria. He gave previously Obama-banned offensive weapons to Ukraine. He opposed the Nord Stream 2 German-Putin pipeline. He got the U.S. out of an asymmetrical Russian-American missile deal. He jawboned NATO nations to up their collective defense expenditures by some $100 billion.

Trump also nearly bankrupted Russia by releasing oceans of cheap American oil and increased sanctions on Russian oligarchs. He made it clear to Putin that unfortunate things would follow from an invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s was the only administration of the last four when Putin stayed put within his borders.

As far as the 2016 Russian-Trump collusion, even Mr. Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-star” partisan “hunter-killer” cadre of lawyers found no such thing—as compared to the Russian-fed Steele dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton to smear Trump.

There was no “Russian disinformation” either in 2020 when team Biden rounded up corrupt ex-intelligence authorities to lie that Hunter’s genuine laptop was likely Russian fabricated.

So why the left’s hatred of Russians—other than the classic projection of blaming others for its own very disastrous appeasement of Putin that the left itself had inaugurated?

One other reason was that Trump endlessly rubbed left-wing noses in their Russian paranoias, joking that Putin might find Hillary’s missing emails, destroyed while in her custody and under subpoena.

When he was accused by Clinton partisans and hacks of being a “Russian asset” or “Russian poodle,” he deliberately bragged about his “deals” with Putin to inflame his critics even more.

In a larger context, Russians have replaced South African or Iranian villains in Hollywood action movies and popular entertainment. The new big-screen bogeyman is now nearly always a large brute with a shaved head, his torso dotted by orthodox Christian cross tattoos, gap-toothed, an exaggerated Russian accent, surrounded by creepy black-suited mafiosi—and full of racist and sexist hatred for liberal America.

In sum, there is an argument to help Ukraine survive Russian attacks.

But that consensus is daily being eroded by the present beltway messianic crusade for Ukraine, in a manner quite unlike our lukewarm and vacillating support for our far closer ally Israel.

The near-hysterical official Ukrainian narrative requires denying or ignoring the escalating dangers of our sophisticated weapons hitting deep inside Mother Russia, the Somme/Verdun-like endless wastage of over a million youths and counting, and the increasingly anti-democratic and election-interfering nature of President Zelensky and his Ukrainian entourage.

[deepartnature]

Justice Dept. Embraces Supporting Role in Pursuing War Crimes in Ukraine

“Attorney General Merrick B. Garland makes a point of refusing to discuss active investigations, but during a recent trip to Ukraine he broke form, revealing that U.S. prosecutors had identified ‘several specific’ Russians suspected of war crimes against one or more Americans. Despite Mr. Garland’s assessment, the possibility of identifying Russians who targeted Americans in a war zone and bringing them to justice in the United States — rather than charging them in absentia — appears remote for now. As a result, the Justice Department is increasingly focused on a supporting role: providing Ukraine’s overburdened prosecutors and police with logistical help, training and direct assistance in bringing charges of war crimes by Russians in Ukraine’s courts. ...”

NY Times

Vox: The Wagner Group, Russia’s maybe-private army in Ukraine, explained (Video)

NBC News: Ukraine hints it blew up Russian missiles in occupied Crimea (Video)

What Happens When Russia’s Criminal Soldiers Come Home

Guardian: Russian missiles destroyed in Crimea blast, Ukraine says (Video)

[nataliapoklonskaya80]

Natalia Poklonskaya was awarded the Order of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. by Natalia Poklonskaya Via Flickr: On May 19 2015 she was awarded the Order of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna.

[odinsblog]

The crime first came to light last week, when Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said in a Facebook post that a Russian soldier had killed an unarmed civilian and then repeatedly raped his wife. Days later, the White House said it was concerned about emerging reports of sexual violence in Ukraine.

Then on Monday night, The Times of London published the woman’s chilling account. Using the pseudonym Natalya, she told a reporter she had been in her home in a village near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, when she heard footsteps and a shot rang out. Moments later her husband lay dead outside her front door, and two Russian soldiers were at her side, one holding a gun to her head.

“I shot your husband because he was a Nazi,” the gunman told her, before he and the other soldier raped her, as her 4-year-old son sobbed in a boiler room next door, according to the Times. She said she was later raped a second time by the soldiers, and eventually managed to flee to western Ukraine with her son.

“I could have been silent, but when we got to the police, my husband’s sister made me speak up, and there was no going back,” she was quoted saying in the Times. “I understand that many people who have been hurt would stay silent because they are afraid. Lots of people don’t believe terrible things like this happen.”

A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, rejected Ms. Venediktova’s allegation, telling reporters in Moscow last week that “we don’t believe it at all.”

“It is a lie,” Mr. Peskov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

Ms. Venediktova said a Russian soldier is wanted for arrest “on suspicion of violation of the laws and customs of war.”

Ukrainian officials contend that numerous cases of rape and sexual violence have occurred in the country since Russia’s invasion began on Feb. 24.

Maria Mezentseva, a Ukrainian member of parliament, detailed the woman’s account to Sky News on Sunday and said there were “many more victims.” She did not provide further details or say how she learned of other assaults, but said that she expected them to come to light once the victims were “ready to talk.”

“We will definitely not be silent,” she said.

Rape and other forms of sexual violence, which have accompanied armed conflicts throughout history, can constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Russian forces and Moscow-backed armed groups have been accused of perpetrating sexual violence in other conflicts — most recently involving detainees in eastern Ukraine.

This month, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that he had little confidence that international organizations, like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, would hold Russian soldiers to account. “When Russian soldiers rape women in Ukrainian cities — it’s difficult of course to speak about the efficiency of international law,” he said via videolink during an event at Chatham House, a think tank in London.

Accounts of rape and sexual violence began to emerge almost immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine, according to Kateryna Busol, an associate with Chatham House and a Ukrainian lawyer who documented allegations of sexual violence following Russia’s seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

“These accounts are growing, and we are hearing that they are much more widespread than the one account raised by the inspector general,” Ms. Busol said in a phone interview from Regensburg, Germany, where she fled from Kyiv in the days following the invasion.

“What we are hearing by word of mouth, from acquaintances of survivors in the country, is horrific,” she added. “I have had described to me incidents of gang rape, rape in front of children and sexual violence following the killing of family members.”

Most of the accounts, she said, involved female victims and were coming from cities in Ukraine’s east and the south occupied by Russian forces.

👉🏿 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/world/europe/russian-soldiers-sexual-violence-ukraine.html

[ukrainenews]

Daily Wrap Up July 17, 2022

Under the cut:

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has fired the head of Ukraine’s powerful domestic security agency, the SBU, and the state prosecutor general, citing dozens of cases of collaboration with Russia by officials in their agencies

An Antonov An-12 cargo plane owned by Ukrainian company Meridian crashed near Kavala, Greece, late on July 16. All eight Ukrainian crew members on board were killed in the crash

A Russian attack on the Bakhmut district in the Donetsk obalst has injured six people, including 3 children

The Vinnytsia concert hall Officer’s House struck by Russian forces will not be completely demolished, only damaged structures will be dismantled, said regional authorities

1,346 civilians found dead in the Kyiv region after Russian retreat, 300 still missing

“Volodymyr Zelenskiy has fired the head of Ukraine’s powerful domestic security agency, the SBU, and the state prosecutor general, citing dozens of cases of collaboration with Russia by officials in their agencies.

Sunday’s abrupt sackings of SBU chief Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend of Zelenskiy, and the prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, who played a key role in the prosecution of Russian war crimes, were announced in executive orders on the president’s website.

In a Telegram post, Zelenskiy said he had fired the top officials because it had come to light that many members of their agencies had collaborated with Russia, a problem that he said had touched other agencies as well.

He said 651 cases of alleged treason and collaboration had been opened against prosecutorial and law enforcement officials, and that more than 60 officials from Bakanov and Venediktova’s agencies were now working against Ukraine in Russian-occupied territories.

The sheer number of treason cases lays bare the huge challenge of Russian infiltration faced by Ukraine as it battles Moscow in what it says is a fight for survival.

“Such an array of crimes against the foundations of the national security of the state … pose very serious questions to the relevant leaders,” Zelenskiy said. “Each of these questions will receive a proper answer.”

Russian troops have captured swaths of Ukraine’s south and east during an invasion that has killed thousands, displaced millions and destroyed cities.

It remains unclear how the southern, Russian-occupied region of Kherson fell so quickly, in contrast to the fierce resistance around Kyiv that forced Russia eventually to withdraw to focus on capturing the industrial Donbas heartland in the east.

In his nightly speech to the nation, Zelenskiy noted the recent arrest on suspicion of treason of the SBU’s former head overseeing the region of Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 that Kyiv and the west still view as Ukrainian land.”-via The Guardian

~

“An Antonov An-12 cargo plane owned by Ukrainian company Meridian crashed near Kavala, Greece, late on July 16. All eight Ukrainian crew members on board were killed in the crash.

The head of Meridian, Denys Bohdanovych, confirmed the crash to the Deutsche Welle. The plane was reportedly flying from Serbia to Jordan.

The names of the crew members have not been reported. Bohdanovych said that all of them were Ukrainian citizens.

Bohdanovych also did not provide any information about the plane’s cargo, saying that the “details are being clarified,” Deutsche Welle reported. However, the Greek broadcaster ERT News reported, citing its sources in the fire department, that the crashed plane was carrying some 12 tons of “hazardous cargo,” the type of which “has not yet been specified, although the first indications are of ammunition.”

Later on July 17, Serbian Defense Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said that the plane was carrying some “Serbian-made defense products.”

The plane took off at about 8:40 p.m. from the Serbian city Nis, carrying nearly 11.5 tons of “products of Serbian defense industry” to the customer — the Defense Ministry of Bangladesh, Stefanovic said at a press briefing, as quoted by European Pravda.

The cause of the crash is being determined. According to The Guardian, Greece’s Civil Aviation authority said that the pilot “managed to alert authorities about a problem in one of the plane’s engines.” The pilot was given the choice to land in either the Thessaloniki or Kavala airports. He reportedly tried to make an emergency landing at the Kavala Airport, which was closer. However, the connection with the plane “ceased almost immediately afterward.”

According to the ERT, the plane’s pilot reported that the aircraft had suffered engine failure, and requested permission for an emergency landing “but was unable to reach an airport as one engine caught fire.” The plane crashed nearly 40 kilometers west of the airport.

ERT also reported a strong “smell of burnt fuel” and a “dense cloud of smoke” at the site of the crash. According to the media, the fire department requested the “immediate withdrawal of all the fire department forces, as well as all those who are near the area where the aircraft crashed as the toxicity of the cargo carried by aircraft is not known.””-via Kyiv Independent

~

“A Russian attack on the Bakhmut district in the Donetsk obalst has injured six people, including 3 children, the Kyiv Independent reports.

On Sunday, Russian forces shelled the city of Soledar and the Yahidne village, according to the Donetsk oblast prosecutor’s office. The three injured children have shrapnel wounds, the office said.”-via The Guardian

~

“The Vinnytsia concert hall Officer’s House struck by Russian forces will not be completely demolished, only damaged structures will be dismantled, said regional authorities.

In a Telegram post, Vinnytsia regional governor Serhiy Borzov said, “After being hit by a missile, the building is in a state of emergency,” referring to the midday attack on Thursday that left at least 23 people dead and scores more hospitalized.

“After examination by specialists, a decision was made to dismantle the debris. We are not talking about the demolition of the entire facility, but about the dismantling of emergency structures where it is dangerous,” he added.

“The Officer’s House survived the Second World War. It endured this one too - it has already become a symbol of Vinnytsia’s resilience.””-via The Guardian

~

“Kyiv Oblast Police Chief: 1,346 civilians found dead in the region after Russian retreat.

Kyiv Oblast Police Chief Andriy Nebytov said that about 300 people are still missing. The official added that 700 of those killed were shot with small arms, such as a handgun.”-Kyiv Independent Twitter

[mariacallous]

Russia is nearing the end of its latest gubernatorial and regional elections — voting that offers virtually no political competition but nevertheless tests the Kremlin’s elaborate management of public office. While early voting necessitated by Ukrainian military operations has been underway in the Kursk region and parts of Crimea since August 28, the rest of Russia’s elections are being held this weekend, September 6–8: races for 21 gubernatorial posts and seats in 13 regional parliaments. To learn more about the Kremlin’s plans for this voting, Meduza spoke to two sources close to the Putin administration’s political policy team, two regional officials, and a political consultant currently working on a regional campaign.

Three races to watch

Meduza has already reported on Russia’s three most noteworthy gubernatorial campaigns: St. Petersburg, Khabarovsk, and the Altai Republic. 

St. Petersburg

In St. Petersburg, Kremlin spin doctors and election officials have ensured Alexander Beglov’s victory by limiting his opponents to little-known politicians with deeply unpopular campaign platforms. The only political party with State Duma representation to nominate a candidate in St. Petersburg is LDPR, and two smaller “opposition” parties are fielding their own politicians. All of these rival candidates have endorsed policies that alienate voters who might otherwise cast ballots for anyone but the incumbent Governor Beglov: Pavel Bragin (“Green Alternative”) advocates banning gasoline and diesel cars from entering the city’s center (even for local residents), and he proposes narrowing the roads; Maxim Yakovlev (LDPR) wants to ban foreign music; and Sergey Malinkovich (“Communists of Russia”) suggests renaming the city to Leningrad, dissolving all food delivery services, and reviving the USSR’s Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization.

Sources close to the St. Petersburg regional government and the Putin administration acknowledged to Meduza that fielding such weak opponents could knock voter turnout lower even than the last election’s pitiful 30.8 percent. A source close to the Kremlin told Meduza that officials abandoned an initial plan to suppress turnout by keeping the campaign mostly “invisible” to the public, deciding instead “out of an abundance of caution” to pack the ballot with absurd competitors. Beglov’s actual popularity rating is thought to be between 30 and 40 percent, said Meduza’s source.

Khabarovsk

There’s been no such change in tactics in Khabarovsk or the Altai Republic. In Khabarovsk, former Deputy Prosecutor General Dmitry Demeshin has served as acting governor since May. The United Russia member has tried to replicate the appeal of his imprisoned predecessor Sergey Furgal, an LDPR politician whose arrest in 2020 sparked some of the region’s biggest and best-sustained protests in recent memory. A local state official told Meduza that Demeshin has run into trouble with his act, which relies on criticizing the region’s lower officials to demonstrate his commitment to the people. “People have started to realize that Demeshin is overdoing it and just playing the Furgal role,” said Meduza’s source, explaining that Demeshin’s constant attacks on municipal authorities have become too “annoying and exaggerated.”

The Altai Republic

In the Altai Republic, Acting Governor Andrey Turchak is fighting for his political life after showing too much ambition in angling for Beglov’s job in St. Petersburg and growing too close to the late mercenary leader and insurrectionist Yevgeny Prigozhin. As Meduza previously reported, Turchak is now committed to winning his way back into President Putin’s good graces by demonstrating his readiness to take on whatever assignment is handed to him. He’s traveled the Altai Republic more extensively than incumbent candidates in most other regions, and he’ll also face off against just two opponents, making it perhaps the least competitive race in the whole country.

Regional parliamentary elections

According to Meduza’s sources, the Kremlin views this weekend’s gubernatorial races as “just an extra test of turnout.” The authorities have had years to finetune candidacy filtration, genuine political competition is kaput, and the only surprises left are exactly how individual governors and their subordinates scheme to mobilize voters.

At the same time, the Kremlin’s political team questions the “vitality” of Russia’s existing party system, a source close to the administration told Meduza. Just Russia is in danger of slipping below the State Duma’s five-percent threshold for representation, LDPR performs inconsistently in the absence of its late founder, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) has been losing voters for years. “All the established parties are in decline,” said Meduza’s source.

The Kremlin has tried to accelerate KPRF’s deterioration by promoting whichever “opposition” parties poll best in various regions, lifting rivals to unseat the Communists as Russia’s entrenched number two party. (In some places, this means New People, in others, it’s LDPR, and so on.) The Putin administration successfully pursued this same strategy in last year’s elections, and KPRF lost its spot as the top “opposition” party in half the regions where voting was held. 

Meduza’s sources say the reason for cracking down on KPRF is simple: The Communists still criticize the government (albeit moderately and while publicly supporting the invasion of Ukraine).

With such an ailing party system, this year’s voter turnout is expected to be dangerously low. “The lower the turnout, the more skewed the results will be,” said a political consultant who works with the presidential administration. If turnout is too low, even the authorities’ ballot fraud and other manipulations will make it hard to conceal United Russia’s implausible results. The Kremlin will observe voter participation this weekend to gauge its plans for at least 50-percent turnout in the 2026 State Duma elections.

If turnout this weekend is too low and if the established “opposition” parties perform too poorly, the presidential administration will have to decide between boosting one of Russia’s smaller parties (for example, the socially conservative Pensioners’ Party), creating a new one (like the Kremlin did in late 2020), or rebranding KPRF’s most viable rival. (Parties in Russia with seats in just a single regional parliament can field candidates in federal legislative elections without needing to collect public signatures.) Whatever the administration decides to do, the target will be leftist voters, said Meduza’s source. The authorities already have United Russia for loyalists and parties like New People for moderates, but KPRF and Just Russia are dying thanks to demographics and the regime’s own machinations. “If there are changes in the party system, they’ll come from the left,” a source close to the administration told Meduza.

The Kremlin reportedly plans to test what it learns from this weekend’s races in next year's regional campaigns — before Russia’s more consequential 2026 State Duma elections. 

[bonyas]

Crimea's Prosecutor General Natalia Poklonskaya 36 PHOTOS.

... In the beginning of 2015 Natalia shortened the hair and began to use a darker lipstick, so now she looks older and stricter.

http://poklonskaya.info/Details.aspx?id=77&who=1&ctgry=1

[phroyd]

Idiot-Moron Republicans defending Trump are trying to use a defense that has already been debunked ... by Republicans!  - Phroyd

With the impeachment inquiry charging forward, President Donald Trump’s allies have defended his demand for political investigations from Ukraine by claiming that the government in Kyiv tried to sabotage his candidacy and boost Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“Russia was very aggressive and they're much more sophisticated, but the fact that Russia was so aggressive does not exclude the fact that President Poroshenko actively worked for Secretary Clinton,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy claimed on Sunday in an interview with NBC, referring to the former Ukrainian president.

But the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee thoroughly investigated that theory, according to people with direct knowledge of the inquiry, and found no evidence that Ukraine waged a top-down interference campaign akin to the Kremlin’s efforts to help Trump win in 2016.

The committee’s Republican chairman, Richard Burr of North Carolina, said in October 2017 that the panel would be examining “collusion by either campaign during the 2016 elections."

But an interview that fall with the Democratic consultant at the heart of the accusation that Kyiv meddled, Alexandra Chalupa, was fruitless, a committee source said, and Republicans didn’t follow up or request any more witnesses related to the issue.

The Senate interview largely focused on a POLITICO article published in January 2017, according to a person with direct knowledge of the closed-door hearing, in which Chalupa was quoted as saying officials at the Ukrainian Embassy were "helpful" to her effort to raise the alarm about Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort in 2016.

“If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with," she said at the time. She cautioned, however, that the embassy was “very careful” not to get involved politically because of the bipartisan support Ukraine has traditionally enjoyed from U.S. lawmakers. As the POLITICO article noted, there was “little evidence” of a “top-down effort” by the Ukraianian government to sabotage Trump’s campaign. And the article did not allege that Poroshenko “actively worked” for Clinton, as Kennedy claimed.

In her Senate testimony, Chalupa denied serving as an intermediary between the Ukrainian embassy and the DNC and said she had been targeted by a Russian active measures campaign. Intelligence officials have since briefed senators on Russia’s attempts to pin blame for the 2016 interference on Kyiv as part of a disinformation operation, according to a source familiar with the briefings, which were first reported by the New York Times.

Chalupa confirmed to POLITICO that she was questioned by the panel. A spokesperson for Burr declined to comment. A spokesperson for the ranking member, Mark Warner, pointed to Warner’s recent comments to PBS.

“I take very seriously the responsibility of, what I hear in classified settings needs to stay classified,” Warner told the outlet. “But I think it is very clear to me, and this has been testified to by every leader of law enforcement, [and the] intelligence community, that there’s been absolutely no validity to this crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine was behind the 2016 intervention.”

Senate Intelligence Committee member Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, declined to comment on what the committee has or hasn’t investigated.

But he said in an interview that he’s “probably been to between 20-30 briefings and hearings on this subject of election interference in 2016, and I have never heard one word about any culpability on the part of Ukraine.”

“It has never been mentioned in any of the briefings I’ve had on the Intelligence Committee,” King said. He called the claims about Ukraine’s interference in 2016 “unfortunate” because “it muddies the waters,” and noted that Russia’s attempts to blame Ukraine are not inconsistent with its standard disinformation tactics.

Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American activist who served as co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Ethnic Council, has never been to Ukraine, and the DNC has said she conducted the Manafort research and outreach to the embassy on her own.

But she has been at the heart of efforts by Trump’s allies to draw parallels between Russia's large-scale hacking and propaganda operation with the scattershot actions of a small cadre of Ukrainian bureaucrats who tried to expose Manafort’s ties to Russia during the election.

Republicans have also pointed to an op-ed written by Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, in August 2016 that criticized Trump’s remark days earlier that he would be “looking into” recognizing Crimea as Russian territory.

In her testimony, Trump’s former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill acknowledged Chaly’s comments, but said she knew of “an awful lot of senior officials in many governments, including our allied governments” who had criticized Trump in 2016. And she called it “a fiction that the Ukrainian government was launching an effort to upend our election, upend our election to mess with our Democratic systems.”

Asked whether a Ukrainian-American might have been interested in “injecting” negative information about Manafort into the press, Hill retorted that the same could be said of the Ukrainian-American operatives Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two associates of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani “who were also trying to subvert our democracy and who managed to get one of our ambassadors sacked.” (Parnas and Fruman helped launch a smear campaign that culminated last spring in the early recall of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.)

“I’ve learned in the last few days that there were some individual people in Ukraine who preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump,” King said in the interview, adding that that was “not surprising” given Trump’s comments about Crimea. “But as near as I can tell, it was simply individuals expressing a preference,” King said. “Not in any way, shape or form the kind of influence operation we saw from Russia in 2016.”

GOP lawmakers have invoked Chalupa’s name repeatedly throughout the impeachment inquiry—the House Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, Devin Nunes, alone has mentioned her nearly a dozen times in his opening statements and questioning—to show that it was not unreasonable for Trump to demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announce an investigation into the unsubstantiated allegations of Ukraine’s interference in 2016. Trump also asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Those requests, which Hill described as “a political errand” at odds with official U.S. policy, are at the center of the ongoing impeachment inquiry.

Republicans have also pointed to the publication of the so-called black ledger outlining off-the-books payments Manafort received from Ukraine’s pro-Russia Party of Regions as evidence of a Ukrainian interference plot. The revelation led Manafort to resign from the Trump campaign, which was already under scrutiny for its Russia ties.

But the ledger was released by an independent Ukrainian government agency, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, and publicized by Sergii Leshchenko—a Ukrainian member of Parliament who, despite Senator Kennedy’s claims that Poroshenko “worked” with Clinton in 2016, grew to oppose Poroshenko and accused him of launching a politically motivated investigation into the ledger’s release to curry favor with Trump. That investigation was spearheaded by ousted Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.

Leshchenko recently described his motivations in publicizing the black ledger in an article for the Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper in Ukraine. “On May 31, 2016, I gave a press conference and released the 22 pages [of the ledger] that I had,” Leshchenko wrote. “Manafort was not mentioned there. His role became known only three months later, in August 2016, when the New York Times reported about it.”

“In Ukraine, it was no secret to anyone that Manafort worked for Yanukovych and was generously paid,” he continued. “And since Manafort at that time became the head of Trump’s campaign, it was predictable enough that American journalists would dig for Manafort’s name in Yanukovych’s black ledger.”

Ukraine’s Sixth Administrative Court of Appeals canceled a court ruling in July that said Leshchenko and the head of NABU, Artem Sytnyk, had unlawfully interfered in the 2016 election by publicizing the fact that Manafort’s name and signature appeared on the ledger, according to the Kyiv Post.

The Ukrainian lawmaker who initiated the court case alleging interference in the U.S., Boryslav Rozenblat, was himself under investigation on corruption charges when he filed the suit, raising questions about its legitimacy.

Trump’s request to Zelensky to investigate Ukraine’s election interference, however, invoked a debunked conspiracy theory that few Republicans have entertained—that the Democratic National Committee gave its server to a “Ukrainian company” to examine after it had been hacked, ostensibly in an effort to frame Russia for the attack.

In reality, the DNC hired CrowdStrike—a cybersecurity firm used by Democrats and Republicans that was co-founded by a Russian—to investigate, and the company shared the forensic evidence, which demonstrated Russia’s involvement, with the FBI.

Trump’s own former homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, has described his fruitless attempts to convince the president that the Crowdstrike theory was bogus. "It’s not only a conspiracy, it is completely debunked," Bossert told ABC in September. “And at this point I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again and for clarity here ... let me just again repeat that it has no validity.”

Asked about CrowdStrike’s work with the DNC and coordination with the FBI, Adam Hickey, the deputy assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s National Security Division, told the House Judiciary Committee in October that “it’s pretty common for us to work with a security vendor in connection with an investigation of a computer intrusion.”

Asked by Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) “what other countries had shown an interest or tried to interfere in the 2016 election,” Hickey replied, “based on what I’ve read, both from what the IC has put out and also investigations by Congress, what I’ve seen only refers to Russia, that I’m aware of.”

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The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report—after conducting “interviews of key individuals who have provided additional insights into these incidents—that Russia hacked the DNC, and agreed with the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”

Two volumes of the committee’s final report, entitled “Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election,” have been released so far, and neither address the theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.

In Volume 2, however, which focuses on Russia’s use of social media to wage disinformation campaigns, the committee flagged another episode in which Russia sought to blame Ukraine for its own misconduct: specifically, the “menu of conspiracy theories and false narratives” Russia introduced in 2014 to account for the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.

Russia has repeatedly pointed the finger at Kyiv, despite the conclusion by a team of international investigators that the plane was destroyed by Russia-backed Ukrainian separatists—aided by three Russians close to Russian intelligence services—operating in separatist territory using Russia-provided weapons systems.

Phroyd