#ukrainian military intelligence

[tomorrowusa]

Ukraine is said to have provided intelligence which led to deadly attacks by insurgents on Russian mercenaries in the West African nation of Mali. FYI: Tinzaouaten, the city closest to the attacks in Mali, is 2,440 miles/3,928 km from Ukraine's port city of Odesa.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has claimed it was involved in an ambush that killed fighters from Russia’s Wagner group in the west African nation of Mali, thousands of miles away from the frontline in Ukraine. A Telegram channel linked to the Wagner leadership on Monday admitted the group had suffered heavy losses during fighting in Mali last week. It said Wagner and the Malian armed forces had “fought fierce battles” over a five-day period against a coalition of Tuareg separatist forces and jihadi groups, who had used heavy weapons, drones and suicide bombers. Numerous Wagner fighters, including a commander, Sergei Shevchenko, were killed, the channel said. Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, said on Monday that “the rebels received necessary information, and not just information, which enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals”. Yusov did not say whether Ukrainian military personnel were involved in the fighting or were present in the country. He said the agency “won’t discuss the details at the moment, but there will be more to come”. The Mali government, which has been fighting various insurgencies in the north of the country for more than a decade, requested help from Wagner after a military junta took power in 2020.

The Wagner Group is still around but under new management since Putin killed off its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.

So why is Russia in Africa?

The group is also active across Africa, and continues to be so even after Prigozhin was disgraced following a failed coup attempt last summer. He later died after an explosion onboard his plane, widely believed to have been ordered by the Kremlin, but Wagner’s influence in Africa remains. “For Moscow, the African countries where Wagner is present is just a zone of interest that allows it to get hold of resources – gold, diamonds, gas and oil – and the money goes to finance Russian aggression,” said Serhii Kuzan, director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center in Kyiv, explaining why Ukraine might want to target Wagner in Africa. He added that the raids had additional benefits for Kyiv: “liquidating” some of the most experienced Wagner fighters and lowering the overall military potential of the group, and also exacting revenge for war crimes in Ukraine. “A significant part of the destroyed fighters got military experience in Ukraine, where they carried out hundreds or thousands of war crimes … these crimes should be punished, and Russian war criminals should know that they will never be safe,” said Kuzan.

Ukrainian intelligence has a long reach and Ukraine has a long memory for war crimes committed by the invaders.

On a linguistic note, GUR should realistically be written HUR. The full name of Ukrainian military intelligence is: Головне Управління Розвідки Міністерства Оборони України (Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine). For short, that's Головне Управління Розвідки.

In Russian, Г is pronounced like the English hard G. In Ukrainian, Г is pronounced like a regular English H. There's a separate letter in Ukrainian for English hard G written like this Ґ. But the Soviet Union tried to suppress this letter because its existence was another reminder that Ukrainian is not Russian. So there's been some lingering alphabetic confusion over the use of this letter. But I promise you that it is preferable to transliterate ГУР as HUR.

[workersolidarity]

🇺🇲🇺🇦 🚨

COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS REFUSES TO COMMENT ON THE ABDUCTION, IMPROSONMENT, TORTURE AND EXTORTION OF JOURNALIST GONZALO LIRA BY UKRAINIAN SBU

The United States' Committee to Protect Journalists, headquartered in New York, had no comment on the situation of American-Chilean journalist, Gonzalo Lira, who is being held by the Ukrainian Intelligence Services (SBU).

“We studied the incident and came to the conclusion that it goes beyond the mandate of the Committee to Protect Journalists,” the organization’s press service told Russian State-News organization, RIA Novosti.

When asked why, the press service employee indicated that “in our regional program they said that this is because what he does, according to our criteria, is not journalism."

According to the article, a RIA Novosti correspondent was shown these criteria indicated on the committee’s website. They say, in part, that the committee "defines journalists as people who report news or comment on public issues in print, in photographs, on radio, television or online."

By definition, this would certainly make Gonzalo Lira, a career journalist, qualify. However, no response was given when Ria Novosti journalists pointed this out, nor did they explain why the Committee does not consider Gonzalo Lira's reporting and commentary to be journalism.

According to the Committee's website, "The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom around the world. We defend the right of journalists to report news safely and without fear of reprisal."

The SBU, for its part, claims that the American-Chilean journalist tried to flee from justice, and say his imprisonment took place "within the framework of the Law."

As for the claims of Lira's attempts to "escape justice", these are almost certainly true as shortly prior to his re-imprisonment, Lira uploaded a video to the video streaming platform YouTube stating his intention of going over the border to Hungary just before his court date.

However, Lira also told a harrowing account of his time in SBU custody, accusing the Ukrainian State Intelligence Services of abuse and torture, and even claimed the he was extorted for tens of thousands of dollars by the SBU through beatings from fellow inmates and corrections officers.

Previously, the U.S. State Department admitted to being aware of Lira's imprisonment, but declined to comment on any steps being taken by the White House to help free the detained American-Chilean journalist.

The White House Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, also refused to comment on Lira's situation.

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[madstronaut]

had to do a double take because this showed in my news instafeed instead of tumblr and i was like wtf? IRL ghost mask on a ukrainian soldier

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Saint Javelin (@saintjavelin)

My first thought was “he must have 3D-printed and handpainted and sewn it himself?!”

[memecucker]

Imagine if one of Russia’s biggest talking points was alleging that the Ukrainian military was engaging in mass rape and beheaded babies in Donbas and never gave evidence of it and a major US newspaper published an article wholly endorsing that narrative still without evidence and it turned out the author was not only a Russian ultranationalist who liked tweets calling for Kiev to be made into “a slaughterhouse” but also worked for Russian intelligence agencies.

That’s what’s going on with the Anat Schwartz and NYTimes shit right now

[she-is-ovarit]

Ukrainian saboteurs who are alleged to have poisoned and killed 46 Russian soldiers are on the run in annexed Crimea after a shoot-out with police, a local report says. Two young saboteurs who had poisoned members of the Russian military in Simferopol and Bakhchisarai fled when authorities attempted to detain them in Crimea, Telegram channel Kremlin Snuffbox said on Tuesday. The police went to apprehend the female suspects at a private house in Yalta but were surprised to find them "well armed" and "well prepared," the post said.

The saboteurs opened fire and fled the scene in a car, and authorities do not know their current whereabouts. Three officers were killed and two were wounded in the shoot-out, a source in Russia's Federal Security Service told the Telegram channel. It was reported in December that members of a Ukrainian partisan group called Crimean Combat Seagulls poisoned and killed 24 Russian soldiers after lacing their vodka with arsenic and strychnine. At the time, Snuffbox quoted unnamed sources as saying that "two nice girls" tricked the unit in Simferopol, Crimea, into drinking the vodka, per the Kyiv Post translation. In another incident, saboteurs killed 18 and hospitalized 14 Russian personnel in Bakhchisarai, Crimea, by putting arsenic and rat poison in pies and beer, Kremlin Snuffbox previously reported. Russian military personnel stationed in Crimea have been asked not to take any food or any drinks from strangers and to detain any suspicious young women who approach them to prevent further incidents of poisoning. Business Insider could not independently verify the report. There were also been reports of two mass poisonings of Russian troops in Mariupol in 2023. Acts of sabotage by Ukrainian resistance and partisan groups are used to harass Russian soldiers in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula occupied by Russia since 2014, and other occupied territories, and supply intelligence for Ukrainian strikes on military installations.

[apas-95]

“American officials are worried that Ukraine’s adjustments will race through precious ammunition supplies, which could benefit President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and disadvantage Ukraine in a war of attrition. But Ukrainian commanders decided the pivot reduced casualties and preserved their frontline fighting force.

“American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive. Almost any big push against dug-in Russian defenders protected by minefields would result in huge numbers of losses.” …

In an article published Thursday titled “U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal,” The Washington Post cited anonymous “U.S. and Western officials” to report that the massive losses Ukraine has been suffering in this counteroffensive had been “anticipated” in war games ahead of time, but that they had “envisioned Kyiv accepting the casualties as the cost of piercing through Russia’s main defensive line.” …

In an article published last month titled “U.S. Cluster Munitions Arrive in Ukraine, but Impact on Battlefield Remains Unclear,” The New York Times reported unnamed senior US officials had “privately expressed frustration” that Ukrainian commanders “fearing increased casualties among their ranks” were switching to artillery barrages, “rather than sticking with the Western tactics and pressing harder to breach the Russian defenses.”

“Why don’t they come and do it themselves?” a former Ukrainian defense minister told The New York Times in response to the American criticism.

The Wall Street Journal reported that unnamed western military officials “knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons” needed to dislodge Russia, but that they had “hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day” anyway. …

In the same article, The Wall Street Journal cited a US Army War College professor named John Nagle admitting that the US itself would never attempt the kind of counteroffensive it’s been pushing Ukrainians into attempting.

“America would never attempt to defeat a prepared defense without air superiority, but they [Ukrainians] don’t have air superiority,” Nagl said, adding, “It’s impossible to overstate how important air superiority is for fighting a ground fight at a reasonable cost in casualties.” …

Last month The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote an article explaining why westerners shouldn’t “feel gloomy” about how things are going in Ukraine, writing the following about how much this war is doing to benefit US interests overseas:

“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”

“Other than for the Ukrainians” he says, as a parenthetical aside.

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[thelostdreamsthings]

{Why is Telegram a big headache for the Jews, USA and France?

Why did they decide to literally kidnap the owner Pavel Durov at the Paris Airport?

Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested today in France, there are different charges against him.

Telegram is the main source of information about the Israeli genocide and massacre in Gaza.

Thousands of videos of Jews massacring children have been posted on Telegram channels by journalists living in Gaza.

Israel is trying to stop that flow of information and that is why it has killed over 100 journalists in Gaza alone.

The most accurate information about the situation on the ground in Ukraine comes out on Telegram, and NATO can't control it.

Many people use Telegram as their source of information because the information comes directly from the field.

Many dead NATO soldiers appear on Telegram and the CIA and NATO command can no longer hide their direct involvement in the war broke out in Russia.

Telegram did a lot of damage to the French army in Africa.

The Africans organized all their protests, resistance and everything else against the French occupation forces through Telegram.

Russian mercenaries, obviously, use different platforms, but Telegram played for them an important role in accelerating the deterioration of France's military posture, especially in Africa.

This is a famous photo of Telegram founder Pavel Durov giving Putin his middle finger.

In 2011, Durov said that the Russian government had requested him to cancel the accounts of anti-government figures on his social media platform.

Durov not only did not follow, but also publicly released this photo of "raising the middle finger to Putin" in the media, which received cheers from the West.

After the 2014 Ukrainian coup, Durov refused to provide the Russian government with information on users involved in the Ukrainian colorful revolution.

In the same year, he left Russia, claiming that Russia was "unable to keep up with the information age". Shortly after, he acquired French and UAE citizenship and stated that he had no plans to return to Russia.

Today, Durov was arrested by France on charges of using the platform to "support terrorist activities" and "pedophilia" after refusing to provide user information to the United States and Israel, facing 20 years of imprisonment.

Durov helped Ukrainians stage a coup d'état in 2014.

Then the whole West glorified him.

He also trolled the Russian FSB and sent them the “encryption keys” to telegram in 2017.

Back then the west cheered his fight on.

The founder of Telegram has been detained by French intelligence services at Le Bourget Airport in Paris while exiting a private jet.

He is expected to be presented to a judge later this evening, facing multiple charges, according to TF1.

Potential charges include terrorism, drug-related offenses, complicity, fraud, money laundering, concealment, and possession of child exploitation content.

The main concern of EU authorities regarding Telegram is its encrypted messaging, as reported by TF1}

{And despite Durlov helped NATO in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, Russia is working to free Telegram founder Pavel Durov after he was arrested in France.}

If Pavel Durov could be arrested on these charges, then any country can arrest the leaders of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft… any tech company that helps people communicate!

France is a 🤡 puppet of USA and Israel, who are mad at not having backdoor to Telegram.

Regarding Pavel Durov, Julian Assange, TikTok, Scott Ritter etc. etc. ⬇️

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." Frank Zappa

[justacynicalromantic]

We, Ukrainians, are famous for making memes. We love memes. So much so it reflects in others areas of our lives.

Symbol of Russia's main military intelligence agency - a bat. Their slogan: "Only stars are above us".

Ukraine' military agency's symbol was created much later. It is an owl. Holding a sword pointing at Russia on the map. It's slogan? "Sapiens dominabitur astris" - "The wise rule the stars"

Want more? Here you can see a picture hanging on the wall of Budanov's (the Chief of UA Intelligence Agency) Office - that is nothing BUT pure meme🤣

[tomorrowusa]

F-16 fighter jets are apparently now in Ukraine and under Ukrainian command. 🇺🇦

Ukraine has received the first batch of fourth-generation U.S.-made F-16 jets, Bloomberg reported on July 31, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The news comes a year after the allied "fighter jet coalition" took shape at the Vilnius NATO summit under the Danish and Dutch leadership. The deadline for the transfer of F-16s was late July, the sources told Bloomberg. Ukraine received "a small number" of the planes, the sources said. Ukraine is expected to receive at least 79 F-16s from the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway, with the deliveries to continue in the coming years. The fighter jet coalition also pledged to help train Ukrainian pilots and technical staff to operate the jets. It is unclear whether the trained Ukrainian pilots will be able to use combat aircraft immediately or the process will take longer, unnamed people told Bloomberg. Kyiv is yet to confirm these reports. The General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon is an American air superiority fighter that Kyiv has begged for since the start of the full-scale invasion. Although some defense experts do not expect F-16s to become game-changers in the war, the jets may strengthen Ukraine's air defense capabilities and shield the country's population centers from Russia's daily bombardments.

Earlier this week we heard that Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) was involved in successful attacks on Russian mercenaries in the West African nation of Mali. Now there's news that Ukraine was behind an attack on a Russian base in Syria – a Putin client state.

Ukrainian special forces strike Russian base in Syria after Putin-Assad meeting

The military intelligence's special unit Khimik struck Russian military equipment at the Kuweires airfield, located east of Aleppo and occupied by Russian forces, NV's sources in the HUR confirmed. The Kyiv Post published a video showing a Russian electronic warfare mobile complex being destroyed, followed by drones attacking Russian military facilities at the airfield. [ ... ] The Defense Intelligence conducted the attack a day after Russian dictator Vladimir Putin met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on July 24. The Kuweires airfield has been controlled and used by Russian forces for military purposes since 2015.

Putin helped Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad crush the Arab Spring uprising early in the 2010s. There are still Russian forces in Syria. Apparently Russia is recruiting mercenaries in the country to fight in Ukraine.

Ukraine is putting Putin on notice that Russian military activity anywhere on the planet is a valid target for Ukrainian forces.

[democratthatlovesguns]

Putin's Folly

For all his intelligence and military training, Putin has misunderstood his strength. He believed, erroneously, that a small demonstration of violence would convince a free and sovereign nation to submit to his will. He believes himself an exception (an anomaly); that is, he believes he will be the first strongman/dictator in the history of the world to abuse his power freely and not be undone by it.

Everyone has the power to take life; yet no one has the power to give life. It is a lesson every dictator eventually has to learn.

Putin, like many before him (including Hitler), believes he alone can give life to a people zealously loyal to his vision of a free and happy society. He believes he has the answer to the meaning of life - and by it, that he is given the right to tell any other human being how to live his or her life (they/them) purposefully.

He has created so much bad blood, that in his absence (not that many years from now) Russia will fragment itself even more than any other time in history. All his fellow Russian strongmen will feel equally entitled to the throne - many of them will die tragic deaths trying to consolidate power - and none will succeed.

The result will be a full restoration of the Ukrainian territory and Russia partitioned into north and south, east and west.

The world will know yet again, that this story is as old as time - just ask the Romans, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Mayan, the Spanish, the British, etc.

[blueiscoool]

Ukraine Destroys Russia’s Brand-New $65 Million Warship Sergei Kotov

Ukraine has destroyed the newest patrol ship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the $65 million Sergei Kotov, and left pro-Kremlin war reporters sulking.

“As a result of a strike by Magura V5 maritime drones, the Russian Project 22160 ship Sergei Kotov received damage to the stern, starboard and left sides,” Ukrainian military intelligence said in a statement.

“The fewer such ships, the fewer anti-aircraft missile systems will be deployed on them, meaning more opportunities for Ukrainian security and defense forces,” spokesman Andriy Yusov told local media, adding that more than 10 ambulances were spotted rushing to help the evacuated crew members. At least seven crew members were killed, Ukrainian authorities said.

Audio of what Ukraine described as an intercepted radio communication also appeared to capture a Russian commander reporting on the “tragic event” and destruction of the ship, lamenting that a helicopter had also been obliterated in the nighttime attack near the Kerch Strait.

The 308-foot, 1,700-ton ship entered the Black Sea Fleet in July 2022.

Russia’s Defense Ministry has yet to comment on the incident, though pro-Kremlin military bloggers begrudgingly admitted that Ukraine had pulled off the attack.

“If it continues like this, the Black Sea Fleet will have only catamarans and rubber banana boats for vacationers. It’s fucked,” wrote one popular pro-war Telegram channel.

The Sergei Kotov had been targeted in three previous attacks by Ukrainian forces before finally being taken out this time around. Noting that Russia had plenty of defenses in place to protect the ship, pro-war propagandist Alexander Kots said that “unfortunately, the enemy is also evolving.”

“The crew fought heroically until the end. … But this time it is a story without a happy ending,” he wrote on social media.

“The ship ‘Sergei Kotov’ sunk,” wrote former Vladimir Putin adviser Sergei Markov, calling it part of a “new type of war” in which “what matters most are the multitude of drones, space reconnaissance, and electronic warfare.”

“This is where we need to overtake the West,” he said.

By Allison Quinn.

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration ordered a group of Russian political strategists to use social media and fake news articles to push the theme that Zelensky “is hysterical and weak. … He fears that he will be pushed aside, therefore he is getting rid of the dangerous ones.”

The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”(..)

The documents show how in January 2023 the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, tasked a team of officials and political strategists with establishing a presence on Ukrainian social media to distribute disinformation.

The effort built on an earlier project that Kiriyenko, a longtime Putin aide, had been running to subvert Western support for Ukraine, including in France and Germany, previous reporting by The Post shows. The European propaganda group was overseen by one of Kiriyenko’s deputies, Tatyana Matveeva, head of the Kremlin’s department for developing information and communication technologies, the documents show.(..)

At a Jan. 16, 2023, meeting, Kiriyenko laid out four key objectives for the Ukraine propaganda team: discrediting Kyiv’s military and political leadership, splitting the Ukrainian elite, demoralizing Ukrainian troops and disorienting the Ukrainian population, the documents show.(..)

By early March, dozens of hired trolls were pumping out more than 1,300 texts and 37,000 comments on Ukrainian social media each week, according to one of the dashboard presentations. Records show that employees at troll farms earned 60,000 rubles a month, or $660, for writing 100 comments a day.(..)

The strategists advised developing “a network of Telegram channels in combination with Twitter and Facebook/Instagram” as the most effective way of penetrating Ukraine’s media space, noting that the Telegram audience in Ukraine had grown 600 percent over the previous year. (..)

By the first week of May,a post the Kremlin strategists had planted on Facebook, saying that “Valery Zaluzhny can become the next president of Ukraine,” had garnered 4.3 million views, one of the dashboard presentations shows. The Kremlin then issued orders to create similar posts or “additional reality” — a term used by Russian officials for fake news — including reports that Western leaders were looking for a replacement for Zelensky and that Zaluzhny intended to halt the counteroffensive.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said in a statement referring to the Russian posts about Zaluzhny and the alleged lack of state aid for the fallen soldier that it had been “monitoring and blocking accounts, Pages and websites run by this campaign” since 2022, “including these two Pages that were quickly detected and disabled by our security team.”

Undeterred, the strategists planted a plethora of articles in Ukraine via social media, with one in May headlined “Zelensky is holding on to the throne. In Ukraine democracy is being liquidated,” the documents show. Another in June sought to play up what it claimed was the prolonged disappearance of Zaluzhny from public view, with bloggers instructed to post comments declaring: “This is why Zaluzhny disappeared: Because he could have and should have taken Zelensky’s place.”

The strategists also sought to exploit Kiriyenko’s campaign in Western Europe by recycling its disinformation for use in Ukraine. The tactics in the European campaign included cloning and usurping media and government websites, such as those for Le Monde and the French Foreign Ministry, and then posting fake content on them denigrating the Ukrainian government, in an operation dubbed Doppelgänger by European Union officials. They also included creating fake accounts on X, or Twitter, for prominent figures including German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. The strategists sought to place stories or posts from those websites or accounts on Ukrainian social media as genuine European reporting or commentary.

After the fake Baerbock account declared in September that “the war in Ukraine will be over in 3 months,” the German authorities launched an investigation and found more than 50,000 fake user accounts coordinating pro-Russian propaganda, including those promoting the tweet. Officials believe the fake accounts were an extension of the Doppelgänger campaign, Der Spiegel reported.

The Doppelgänger operation was first exposed by Meta in September 2022 and then by French authoritieslast summer and tied to Reliable Recent News, a fake news site traced back to two Russian companies, the Social Design Agency and Structura National Technologies. The Kremlin documents show that the heads of Social Design Agency and Structura — Ilya Gambashidze and Nikolai Tupikin — worked directly with Kiriyenko and another Kremlin official, Sofiya Zakharova, who coordinated efforts in Europe and Ukraine.“She is the brain,” a European security official said.

The E.U. imposed sanctions in July on Gambashidze, Structura National Technologies and Social Design Agency for what it said was their role in creating fake webpages and social media accounts “usurping the identity of national media outlets and government websites” as part of “a hybrid campaign by Russia against the EU and member states.” Gambashidze and Tupikin were named by the U.S. State Department in November for their role in Kremlin efforts to spread disinformation in Latin America(..)

Gambashidze, Tupikin and their colleagues proposed narratives they hoped would destroy Zelensky’s image in the West as “the hero of a small country fighting a global evil,” one of the documents sent in April shows. They suggested portraying Zelensky as an actor only capable of following a script written for him by the United States and NATO,and his Western backers as tiring of him. They proposed distributing fake Ukrainian government documents as evidence of corrupt military procurement schemes, and suggesting that Zelensky and his family had Western bank accounts, the document shows.

The plans led to hundreds of articles and thousands of social media posts translated into French, German and English that targeted Zelensky, the document trove shows.

One article, for a French audience, was headlined: “The conductor has gotten bored of Zelensky’s concerts: the actions of the U.S. in Ukraine lead one to believe that Washington soon intends to get rid of Zelensky, without discussing this with Paris.”

On the basis of this article, one of the strategists ordered a troll farm employee to prepare social media posts in French saying, “Washington will replace Zelensky with a more capable president. And France will have to silently continue arming and financing Ukraine.”

Another article described how Zelensky had pushed for Ukrainian forces to defend Bakhmut against Zaluzhny’s wishes, leading, it said, to the deaths of 250,000 Ukrainian troops, a wildly exaggerated death toll in what was nonetheless a brutal battle for the city. The troll farm employees were asked to write comments such as “Why do Ukrainian generals hate Zelensky? PR out of the blood of fighters” and “To shoot the exhausted president? In Ukraine, a generals’ conspiracy is brewing.”

One of the strategists’ aims, European security officials said, was to ensure that the themes placed in European social media filtered back into Ukraine, through reposts and amplification,or by being picked up by Ukrainian politicians keen to boost their profiles with provocative posts.(..)

The strategists also had price lists for planting pro-Russian commentary in prominent Western media and for paying social media “influencers” in the United States and Europe “willing to work with Russian clients.” The documents say the Russians were willing to pay up to $39,000 for the planting of pro-Russian commentary in major media outlets in the West.

“Practically everywhere this will be columnists, leaders of public opinion, former diplomats, officials, professors and so on,” a note attached to the price list states.”

Catherine Belton, “Kremlin runs disinformation campaign to undermine Zelensky, documents show”

[mariacallous]

US President Joe Biden confirmed on Thursday evening that a 24-person prisoner swap had taken place with Russia, in what would be the largest such exchange since the end of the Cold War.

Among the most notable of the 16 returnees to the West – four Americans, five Germans and seven Russian political prisoners – are Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Whelan, opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, a dual Russian-British citizen, and RFE/RL journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual US-Russian citizen.

Going in the other direction were eight prisoners, excluding two minors, most notably Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, who has been held in a German prison since 2019 for the murder of a Chechen exile in Berlin, and Pablo Rubtsov, also known as “Pablo Gonzalez”, who is believed to have been a GRU military intelligence agent posing as a Spanish journalist working in Poland, Ukraine and other former Soviet countries.

The prisoner exchange, which took place at Ankara airport, had been in the works for many months, according to multiple analysts. Indications that the swap was in the final stages came with reports that some of those released had been moved from where they were being incarcerated, as well as the speeding up of trials in Russia and Slovenia.

In Slovenia on Wednesday, two Russian deep-cover spies arrested in 2022, whose real names are thought to be Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, pleaded guilty to charges of spying and falsifying documents in a court case held in private. The Ljubljana court sentenced them to time served in prison and ordered their immediate expulsion. The two minors in the exchange are thought to be their children.

Key to the swap was Germany’s reluctant agreement to release the hitman Krasikov, who was serving life for the killing of Georgian citizen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin, a crime the judge called an act of “state terrorism”. The western prisoners, on the other hand, were widely seen as being sentenced in show trials on trumped-up charges.

On February 27, 2022, Polish authorities detained Rubtsov on the Polish-Ukrainian border and later charged him with spying for Russia. He had been detained in Poland ever since, reportedly spending time in solitary confinement.

ABW, the Polish internal security agency, claimed the man was carrying out operations to benefit Russia while posing as a journalist and was on his way to Ukraine when detained.

The man was a dual Russian-Spanish citizen, and, under the name of Pablo Gonzalez, he was working as a reporter for several Spanish media, including online newspaper Publico and TV station La Sexta. The fact he was arrested by the ultra-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government lent some weight to arguments by his lawyer and wife back in Spain that he was arrested because of his “inconvenient” reporting. A campaign demanding his release was organised by international media groups such as Reporters without Borders, to no effect.

Christo Grozev, former lead Russia investigator for Bellingcat, had reported for The Insider in 2023 how Rubtsov allegedly gathered intelligence for Russia and tried to gain the trust of Russian opposition activists so he could report back on them. Grozev’s reporting was based on investigative work by a Russian independent outlet, The Agency. Among others, he had allegedly gotten close to and reported on Zhanna Nemtsova, Boris Nemtsov’s daughter, and people from her circle.

Donald Tusk, the ABW or any other Polish authorities had not made any public statement by the time of publication.

Until today, the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War was in 2010 and involved a total of 14 people, including Anna Chapman and Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer convicted of spying for Britain, who was later poisoned by Russian agents in Salisbury.

[suratan-zir]

How to make any territories "originally Russian" in 4 ✨easy steps✨:

First, you need to take the indigenous population of these territories (eg Crimean Tatars or Ukrainians) and deport them to remote areas like Siberia or Kolyma, killing thousands of men, women and children in the process. This way, if years later some of the people come back to their homeland, the number of indigenous population will never return to the previous level.

In the meantime, relocate many Russian families to the now vacant territories. You might also want to build several military bases in those areas, thus resettling many of your military men along with their families. In just a couple of generations, these territories will be populated largely by the descendants of your soldiers (and your new soldiers, of course!).

Establish language control in these territories. You can do this either by banning the local language entirely (i.e. making teaching, literature and songs in that language illegal), or simply by creating such an environment in which it will be possible to achieve any success in any specialty only by using the Russian language. You can mix these two techniques together.

If you still want to reduce the native population, try starting a war and using that population as cannon fodder. Highly effective!

If you did everything right, congratulations! Now the true experts, such as Elon Musk and many other "very intelligent'" people, will call these territories "originally Russian" and will urge the people there to surrender to you so that you can continue to torture, repress and kill them👍 Also you will always have a neat casus belli on your hands!