Russia
Top Ukrainian ‘fact-checker’ arrested for assault on Grayzone contributor
Marko Suprun, an influential NATO state-funded Ukrainian ‘fact-checker’ with close ties to Nazi activists, was taken into police custody in Washington, DC, after assaulting a contributor to The Grayzone at an event hosted by a neocon Beltway think tank. The Ukrainian-Canadian host of a self-styled ‘anti-disinformation’ outfit — which receives thousands of dollars from the US and UK governments and works with Facebook to censor content — was arrested on Capitol Hill last week after assaulting a contributor to The […]
The post Top Ukrainian ‘fact-checker’ arrested for assault on Grayzone contributor first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Top Ukrainian ‘fact-checker’ arrested for assault on Grayzone contributor appeared first on The Grayzone.
Putin Hoped for a Swift Victory in Ukraine to Rebuild his Russian Empire — Instead he may Have Lost all Military Influence
When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Vladimir Putin believed his army would capture Kyiv in two days, and expected a decisive victory, expanding Russia’s borders. The Russian President assumed ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine would welcome his forces and believed a swift victory would strengthen his country's influence throughout Eurasia, and restore Russia to its imperial past.
Instead, the Russian invasion has been a massive failure. Twenty-six months since the invasion on 22 February 2022, Russia has suffered more than 50,000 deaths and the Russian Federation has reportedly lost "87% of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior" to the start of the invasion, “two-thirds of [Russia’s] pre-invasion tanks” have been destroyed, and a third if its naval fleet on the Black Sea has been destroyed or disabled. The destroyed war machines and military hardware have left Russia tens of billions of dollars out of pocket. Hundreds of billions of dollars have also been lost through international sanctions. The loss of life, firepower and money, has been catastrophic, but the impacts don't end there. Russia's influence in Eurasia have also waned. This has been most apparent with the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) - Russia's answer to NATO.
The Russian Federation created the intergovernmental military alliance in Eurasia in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and participants have grown to include countries in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Throughout its history, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have been members. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan were previously members, but later withdrew.
Since its conception, CSTO members have held military training exercises and defence
ministers and other political figures have met to strengthen relations between member countries. But recently, that has changed with one report calling it a "lifeless, shambling alliance".
Armenia's decades-long fight with Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabkah region is an example of Russia's crumbling influence. Both countries have staked claim over the territory and Russia has attempted to serve as an intermediary in the negotiation process, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has exposed the soft underbelly of its military capabilities. Once believed to have the second-strongest military in the world, Russia is now seen as having the second- strongest military in Ukraine. This has led Armenia to second guess its reliance on the Russian Federation. Azerbaijan recently launched a series of attacks and forcefully reclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh, and Russia was powerless to intervene on Armenia’s behalf. Russia has since confirmed it will completely withdraw its peacekeeping forces from the region.
Armenia has now determined it can no longer rely on the Russian Federation for assistance. Last year, the Armenians announced they will scale back their involvement in the CSTO. They refused to participate in CSTO training organisations and “renounced its right to take part in the [CSTO’s] leadership rotation”. Now, Armenia has frozen its participation in the organisation and opted to strengthen its relationship with Western organisations and is “considering seeking EU membership".
The EU is also collaborating with the Armenians on a new trade relationship and has pledged a $290 million financial package.
Kyrgyzstan has also previously had problems with the CSTO. In 2010, ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks clashed in southern Kyrgyzstan, resulting in over 400 deaths. Kyrgyzstan requested that the CSTO intervene to try and dissolve the situation, but the organisation chose not to.
Several years later, in a border clash between fellow CSTO members Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in 2021, the organisation also failed to intervene despite dozens of deaths. The Kyrgyz government noted the CSTO’s inaction over these two events. When it was Kyrgyzstan’s turn to host joint military exercises in October 2022, the Central Asian country opted to cancel the drills. This was seen as a slap to the face for the Russians.
Kyrgyzstan officials also met with the European Union during the Cooperation Committee and the Human Rights Dialogue and discussed “political and security issues,” economic development, and bilateral trade relations.
Kazakhstan has also toyed with its involvement in the CSTO. The shift in Russo-Kazakh relations first began in January 2022. At the time, thousands of Kazakhs had gathered to protest their government for raising the price of fuel. The CSTO, under the direction of Russia, intervened with thousands of soldiers sent to crush the protests. Many Kazakhs were unhappy with Russia’s interference.
When the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, there was a belief within Russia that
Kazakhstan would assist - but that never happened. The Kazakhs, instead, sent millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Finally, like Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan has sought to enhance its relationship with the West. Last year, senior Kazakh and European officials discussed reform and modernisation in Kazakhstan. More recently, Kazakh and European dignitaries met to focus on Kazak-EU trade relations. To date, the European Union accounts for 40% of Kazakhstan’s external trade.
Three of the CSTO’s final six members are pursuing stronger relations with Western organisations, choosing not to participate in CSTO events and programs, and taking steps to diminish their interactions with the Russian Federation. It has become apparent that Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan are now seeking alternative economic and security relationships with other organisations to find ways that would guarantee their safety. This will lead to a greater decline in the CSTO, and Russia’s influence in the region.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin had hoped to rebuild his Russian Empire. Instead, he has caused the demise of the CSTO.
Buy tickets to watch Byline Media's documentary, The Battle for Kyiv, which premiers on Monday. Tickets are available here. It will soon be available on Byline.TV
UK insurers refuse to pay Nord Stream because blasts were ‘government’ backed
The legal team representing high-powered insurers Lloyd’s and Arch says that since the Nord Stream explosions were “more likely than not to have been inflicted by… a government,” they have no responsibility to pay for damages to the pipelines. To succeed with that defense, the companies will presumably be compelled to prove, in court, who carried out those attacks. British insurers are arguing that they have no obligation to honor their coverage of the Nord Stream pipelines, which were blown […]
The post UK insurers refuse to pay Nord Stream because blasts were ‘government’ backed first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post UK insurers refuse to pay Nord Stream because blasts were ‘government’ backed appeared first on The Grayzone.
Vid: Mason’s deranged Corbyn smear – ‘He’s disarming Ukraine and tolerating antisemitism’
Corbyn apparently travelling the length and breadth of Europe to stop the neo-Nazi Ukrainians from ‘fighting fascism’…
Paul Mason was caught last month in a full-blown meltdown of deranged accusations, at a woman who dared to challenge Israel’s mass slaughter of innocent civilians and the unhealthy influence of pro-Israel lobby groups in British politics – and also caught misrepresenting what she had said, when a recording of her comments and his diatribe was revealed.
And he was caught on the same evening in another deranged rant, when he accused Jeremy Corbyn of ‘touring’ Europe ‘tolerating antisemitism’ and ‘disarming the Ukrainian people in their struggle against fascism’:
Audio capture by @UrbanDandyLDN, subtitles by Skwawkbox
As ‘Urban Dandy’, who recorded Mason’s ramblings, commented:
Mason’s suggestion that Jeremy Corbyn tolerates antisemitism is false, just as the widespread, mainstream claims that there was a serious antisemitism problem in Labour under Corbyn’s leadership were false, and have been debunked repeatedly. The MP for Islington North is taking legal action against Nigel Farage for similar defamatory statements, while another political commentator favoured in the mainstream media recently had to make a humiliating public apology for his baseless allegations against Corbyn.
Screengrab from X / johnmcternan
Disarming the Ukrainians
Paul Mason’s second allegation against Corbyn, that the MP has been on a European tour aimed at disarming the Ukrainian people, is also false. Corbyn has never called for the disarming of Ukraine. The anti-war veteran who fronts the Peace & Justice Project has spoken in many European cities since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, mainly at events organised by peace campaigners. Corbyn has called for diplomacy instead of escalation, and expressed skepticism about the relentless arms sales by western companies.
Mason’s claim that the left wants to somehow stop Ukrainians ‘fighting fascism’ is also bizarre enough to verge on the delusional. Ukraine is well known, despite the best efforts of the UK media to rewrite history, to be rife with actual nazis, some of whom are in influential positions in the Zelenskiy regime. Zelenskiy himself has seized control of Ukraine’s media, stripped workers of their rights and shut down opposition groups, all key identifiers of fascism.
Mason’s reputation, already falling apart because of his support for Keir Starmer, was shredded in 2022 when The Grayzone revealed his emails plotting with security-state figures to take down left-wing news outlets, accompanied by a notorious, sprawling chart showing the links he imagined among left groups Russia and China – and boasting of ‘cauteris[ing] Corbyn and Stop the War’ so that ‘no MP will touch them:
Mason’s support for Starmer despite the so-called ‘Labour leader’s backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has left him a risible figure, yet he keeps spouting his nonsense despite the inevitable backfiring and mockery.
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Putin and Patriarch Kirill’s Promise of Universal Liberation
Vladimir Putin is on track to be the longest reigning Russian leader since Catherine the Great. The two resilient despots have more in common than one might imagine. ...
Russia’s Recklessness with Zaporizhzhia – Europe’s Largest Nuclear Power Plant
On 7 April, Russia launched a drone attack on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the attacks on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant were reckless.
“No nuclear power plant in the world is designed to withstand [such incidents],” a recent IAEA statement read. “Shelling of [the] Zaporizhzhia NPP and its infrastructure is unacceptable.” If the attacks continue, such incidents would “significantly increase the risk of a major nuclear accident,” the IAEA added.
The incident impacted one of the power plant’s six reactors, and the events were a “serious incident with [the] potential to undermine [the] integrity of the reactor’s containment system.” The statement concluded that the attack was a “serious incident that endangered [the] nuclear safety and security [of Ukraine].”
This is not the first time the Russians have attacked the ZNPP. Since the beginning of the war, Russia has occupied territory around the power plant. When the Russian invasion began, the Russians shelled the facility with their artillery as they took over the area in March 2022. Several months later, Russian forces attacked the facility again in November 2022. This prompted a statement from the United Nations urging the Russians to stop their attacks on the area. The Russians ignored these pleas, and instead, they turned the installation into an army base. This further jeopardized the area.
By 2023, matters became worse. Throughout the year, the power plant lost power, thus risking the safety and security of the facility. Power is necessary for the plant to function. The longer the facility is without power, the “higher the chance of a possible nuclear meltdown.”
To make matters worse, the IAEA reported that Russian forces had placed “mines along the perimeter” of the ZNPP. The Ukrainian government also made its own assessments, stating that objects resembling explosives had been placed on the “roof of the power plant.” If any of these explosives were to detonate, this would seriously jeopardize the facility and its surroundings.
Finally, during the summer of 2023, the Russians destroyed the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine. The structure contained the Kakhovka Reservoir on the Dnipro River, which supplied the ZNPP. The dam’s destruction not only destroyed “more than one million hectares of [farm] land,” but it also impacted water levels around the ZNPP. Russian forces further tampered with the cooling process of the ZNPP by mining the plant’s cooling pond.
In other words, shelling the power plant, placing explosives in and around the perimeter, tampering with water supplies to the plant, and mining the plant’s cooling pond have all negatively impacted the area around the ZNPP. Should this recklessness continue, the Russians could jeopardize millions of lives.
Recent Russian strikes on the ZNPP have increased concerns about a potential nuclear event in the area. If such an incident were to occur, the impact would be “10 times larger” than the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense estimates that the blast radius of a destroyed ZNPP would be 150 kilometers (93 miles). Such devastation would have multiple consequences. First, millions of citizens within the blast radius would be killed or injured by the tragedy. Nuclear fallout would span much further, impacting areas on the Black Sea, and several of Ukraine’s neighboring countries.
Furthermore, millions of hectares of farmland would be destroyed, several facilities and factories would contaminate Ukrainian waterways, and much of Ukraine’s agriculture in central, southern, and eastern Ukraine would be destroyed. This would impact the price of food globally. In other words, the destruction of the ZNPP would be costly.
Overall, the situation at the ZNPP is dire. The recent Russian drone strikes on the facility have once again highlighted the gravity of the situation.
For two years, the Ukrainian government and the IAEA have continued to raise the alarm about Russia’s mistreatment of the area, but their concerns have gone largely ignored. Given the recent attacks, the international community must try to force an end to Russia’s war. Otherwise, if the Russians continue to conduct these attacks without consequence, then this could result in a major catastrophe for the globe. At that point, it would be too late for the world to intervene.
A potential tragedy at the ZNPP is avoidable. The international community, however, must determine if it is willing to prevent Russia from conducting such a devastating atrocity.
The US and ISIS: It’s Complicated
While ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for the Moscow shooting, Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that the United States might have been behind the attack.
Although he provided no evidence for his claim, it is true that ISIS and the United States government have a long and complicated relationship, with Washington using the group for its own geopolitical purposes and that former ISIS fighters are active in Ukraine, as MintPress News explores.
A Brutal Attack
On March 22, gunmen opened fire at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, killing at least 143 people. Authorities apprehended four suspects who they claim were fleeing towards Ukraine. The attack was only one of a number planned. After receiving international tip-offs, Russian police foiled several other operations.
ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s Afghanistan and Pakistan division, immediately took responsibility for the shooting, with Western powers – especially the United States – treating the matter as an open and shut case. Vladimir Putin, however, felt differently, implying that Ukraine or even the United States might have been somehow involved. “We know who carried out the attack. But we are interested in knowing who ordered the attack,” he said, adding: “The question immediately arises: who benefits from this?”
Moscow has long accused Ukrainian intelligence services of recruiting ISIS fighters to join forces against their common enemy. Far-right paramilitary group Right Sektor is believed to have trained and absorbed a number of ex-ISIS soldiers from the Caucuses region, and Ukrainian militias have been seen sporting ISIS patches. However, there are no clear and official links between the Ukrainian government and ISIS, and the suspects – all Tajiks – have no publicly known connections to Ukraine.
Last Year, Ukrainian militants wearing ISIS patches were pictured on camera by the press – probably unintentionally. pic.twitter.com/5SvfLD6pKJ
— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) March 26, 2024
This is not the first time that ISIS has targeted Russia. In 2015, the group took responsibility for the attack on Metrojet Flight 9268, which killed 224 people. It was also reportedly behind the January 2024 attacks on Iran that killed more than 100 people, commemorating the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general responsible for crushing ISIS as a force in Iraq and Syria.
Giving Birth To A Monster
A host of U.S. adversaries have claimed that ISIS enjoys an extremely close working relationship with the U.S. government, sometimes acting as a virtual cat’s-paw of Washington. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, for instance, has accused the U.S. of ferrying ISIS fighters around the Middle East, from battle zone to battle zone. Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai stated that he considers ISIS to be a “tool” of the United States, saying:
I do not differentiate at all between ISIS and America.”
And just this week, the Syrian Foreign Ministry demanded:
the U.S. should end its illegitimate presence on Syrian territory, and end its open support and fund for Daesh [ISIS] and other terrorist organizations.”
It was in Syria that the goals of ISIS and the United States most closely aligned. In 2015, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), lamented that ISIS arose out of a “willful decision” by the U.S. government. A declassified D.I.A. report says as much, noting that the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” were ISIS and Al-Qaeda. “There is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria,” the report noted excitedly, adding that “[T]his is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition [i.e., the U.S. and its allies] want.”
A now-declassified DoD document shows US military officials believed backing AQ and ISIS in Syria could help defeat Assad
Throughout the 2010s, images of ISIS’ brutality consistently went viral and led to news bulletins around the world, providing the United States with a convenient enemy to justify keeping its troops in Iraq and Syria. And yet, throughout the decade, the U.S. and its allies were also using ISIS to weaken the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. As then-Vice President Joe Biden said, Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were:
[S]o determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tonnes of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.”
This included ISIS, Biden said. He later apologized for his remarks after they went viral. Nevertheless, the U.S. also supported a wide range of radical groups against Assad. Operation Timber Sycamore was the most extensive and most expensive C.I.A. project in the agency’s history. Costing more than $1 billion, the agency attempted to raise, train, equip and pay for a standing army of rebels to overthrow the government.
It is now widely acknowledged that large numbers of those trained by the C.I.A. were radical extremists. As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an email published by WikiLeaks:
AQ [Al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”
Clinton herself was well aware of the situation in Syria, noting that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were:
providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
While ISIS regularly attacked a wide range of enemies in the Middle East, it actually apologized to Israel in 2017 after its fighters mistakenly launched a mortar attack on the IDF in the occupied Golan Heights region of Syria.
That same year, the United States launched a significant attack on ISIS-K in Afghanistan, dropping the GBU-43/B MOAB bomb on a network of tunnels in Nangarhar Province. The bomb was the largest non-nuclear strike ever recorded and reportedly killed at least 96 ISIS operatives. Yet ISIS did not appear particularly interested in striking back at the U.S. Instead, it waited until the American departure from Afghanistan to launch a series of devastating attacks on the new Taliban government. This included a bombing at Kabul International Airport, killing more than 180 people, and the Kunduz Mosque Bombing two months later. The Taliban accused ISIS of carrying out a U.S.-ordered campaign of destabilization.
Global Terror Network
While the precise relationship between ISIS and the United States will surely never be known, what is clear is that, for decades, Washington has armed and trained terrorist groups around the world. In Libya, the U.S. joined forces with jihadist militias to topple the secular leader Muammar Gaddafi. Not only was Libya transformed from North Africa’s most prosperous country into a political and economic basket case, but the fighting unleashed a wave of destabilization across the entire region – something which continues to this day.
In Nicaragua, the U.S. sponsored far-right death squads in an attempt to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas. Those forces killed and tortured vast numbers of men, women and children; U.S.-trained groups are thought to have killed around 2% of the Nicaraguan population. The Reagan administration justified their intervention in Nicaragua by stating that the country represented a “mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States.” Oxfam retorted that the real “threat” Nicaragua posed was that it was a “good example” for other nations to follow.
Meanwhile, in Colombia, successive administrations helped to arm and train conservative paramilitary forces that prosecuted a brutal war against not only leftist guerilla forces but the civilian population as a whole. The extraordinary violence led to the internal displacement of more than 7.4 million Colombians.
Donald Trump once quipped that Barack Obama was “the founder of ISIS.” While this is not true, there is no doubt that the United States did indeed nurture the group, watching it expand into the force it is today. It has, at the very least, turned a blind eye to its operations and abetted it in its attack against their common enemies. In this sense, at least, with every ISIS attack, there is some blood on Washington’s hands.
Feature photo | A US-backed anti-government fighter mans a heavy machine gun next to a US soldier in al Tanf. Hammurabi’s Justice News | AP | Modification: MintPress News
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
The post The US and ISIS: It’s Complicated appeared first on MintPress News.
‘In the Wake of the Massacre Near Moscow, Russian Anti-Migrant Policies Could Backfire’
The Crocus City Hall terror attack, in which 133 people were killed by Islamic extremists, has unleashed a wave of xenophobia all over Russia. While the Kremlin blames Ukraine and the West for the massacre, public anger over the tragedy appears to have been directed at the millions of Central Asian migrant workers living in the Russian Federation.
Moscow is using its war on Ukraine to profoundly transform Russian society. Anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western rhetoric in the Russian media has already become a norm. Army recruitment advertisements plastered on billboards and shop windows can be seen on the streets of almost every Russian city. The Kremlin is investing significantly in militarizing children and youth.
But after the Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) terrorist attack on a sold-out concert on the outskirts of Moscow on 22 March, certain factions within the Russian ruling elite seem to have launched a campaign against migrants from Central Asia. Tajiks have become their major target, given that four suspects in the Moscow terror attacks are citizens of Tajikistan.
Sergey Mironov – the leader of A Just Russia Party, which is part of Russia's state-authorized opposition – proposed the introduction of a visa regime for Central Asian countries to “tackle the growing threat”. He sees such a measure as a “step to strengthen security and cooperation throughout the Eurasian space.”
But the Kremlin is unlikely to accept Mironov’s proposal. Some Central Asian nations are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) – a Russia-dominated entity that has developed a common labour market for citizens of Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. A visa regime for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would have a serious impact on the very future of the EAEU. That is why Moscow will try to use other methods to control the influx of migrants.
The Russian government plans to introduce “digital profiles” for all migrants, aiming to “better track the movement of foreign workers and ensure security”. Critics, however, argue that the authorities seek to create a “digital Gulag” for migrants. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, there are around 10 million labour migrants in Russia. It is believed that 80% of them are from Central Asia, namely from countries such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
In the Russian labour force, migrants occupy vital roles. They mostly work as taxi drivers, truck drivers, or supermarket workers. There are reports suggesting that the Kremlin is forcefully recruiting some foreign workers to fight in Ukraine. Thousands of them have reportedly been brought to the Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory – mostly to the city of Maripuol in the Donbas – to work on various construction projects. Ukrainian authorities believe that Russia aims to change the demographic composition of the temporarily occupied territories.
Russian nationalists, on the other hand, indirectly accuse the Kremlin of having the same plans for the Russian Federation itself. In their view, the Russian ruling elite allegedly aims to replace ethnic Russians with migrants from Central Asia. Even the Russian Orthodox Church insists that the authorities must “stop non-Russian migration from Central Asia”, and attract “millions of highly qualified cadres, presumably from the West or from among Russian expatriates” instead.
Despite the fact that he has been relatively successfully balancing the interests of various oligarchic groups for the past two decades, Vladimir Putin suddenly found himself in a rather difficult position. While Konstantin Malofeev, the so-called Russia’s “Orthodox Oligarch, took a strong anti-migrant stance, Aras Agalarov, the Russian-Azerbaijani oligarch who is also the owner of the Crocus City Hall, claims that “Russia cannot do without migrants”. Which faction does Putin support?
Opinion polls show that the majority of Russians want their leader to limit immigration into the Russian Federation. That is why the Kremlin allows certain political figures to criticize the current government’s migration policy. Even the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny supported anti-migrant measures. But Putin knows that Russia is facing a huge demographic crisis and that nearly one million young, educated Russians have fled the country over the past two years as they did not want to be mobilized to participate in his war in Ukraine. As a result, Russia is now short of around 4.8 million workers.
That is why Putin can unlikely afford himself to radically change the country’s migration policy. While in 2003 he called “idiots and provocateurs” all those who supported the “Russia for Russians” political slogan and nationalist doctrine, he now insists that such ideas could “lead to the breakup of the Russian Federation”.
Putin, therefore, seems to back the “pro-migrant faction” within the ruling elite, although he likely decided to indirectly support the ongoing wave of repression against migrant workers from Central Asia.
Following the Crocus City Hall attack, Russian authorities started conducting raids on dormitories and apartments known to house Central Asian migrants and carrying out mass deportations. Taxi drivers in Moscow and other parts of Russia have reportedly been asked by clients to state that they were not Tajiks. As a result, the Ministry of Labor of Tajikistan reported that a rising number of Tajik migrant workers wish to leave Russia out of fear for their safety.
However, the ongoing anti-migrant campaign could have a serious impact on Russian oligarchs who need migrants as cheap labour. It can also affect the so-called siloviki faction that can use Central Asians as cannon fodder in Ukraine. But Russian nationalists, and the Russian Orthodox Church, want them out of the country.
Putin will, therefore, have a hard time finding a delicate balance that will allow him to avoid serious social and political turbulence in Russia.
‘The Joe Biden Impeachment Hearing Says Everything About Republicans and Nothing About the President’
When former US President Donald Trump was impeached, for the first time, the cry from the (far) right was that this was all an act of political theatre. This, of course, was not true, but it may be that Republicans in Congress have come to believe their own lies and see impeachment as simply a political tool to tarnish an opponent. What they have overlooked is that like any other kind of trial against an accused person, getting to conviction requires evidence. The testimony of Lev Parnas at the impeachment hearing related to President Joe Biden on Wednesday brutally exposed the fact that the Republicans leading this charge have absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by either Biden or his son Hunter.
That the bombshell testimony from Parnas has exposed the GOP scam is all the more ironic for the fact that he, a former associate of disgraced former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, had been on the side of those who were responsible for fabricating the whole story in the first place.
The concocted tale revolves around an energy company in Ukraine called Burisma. In short, Hunter Biden had served on its Board while his father was the Vice President and point man for the Obama White House. Ukraine was already at war at that time after Russia created the hot war in the Donbas as well as illegally seizing Crimea in 2014. Biden’s remit related to those hostilities.
The allegations against the Bidens were that they had each received a $5 million bribe from Burisma, and got the then Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, fired for sniffing around Burisma too closely. The big problem here is that not a single part of that story is true. The bigger problem is that, according to Parnas, Fox News host Sean Hannity and several members of Congress were engaged in “knowingly” pushing disinformation from Russia.
It is with alarming regularity that the acts of the Republican Party and the Russian state align. The Russians have several motivations behind their troublemaking. Most glaringly, it would be thrilled by a Trump presidency because another tenure in the White House will certainly lead to chaos in the United States at a time when Russia is involved in a full-scale war against Ukraine. A war that saw 31 missiles fired at the capital city of Kyiv just the night before last. Another reason is that this story deepens the belief that Ukraine is a thoroughly corrupt country, one of the chief issues put forward by those who argue against the provision of further military aid.
The story of Burisma first entered the American body politic in 2020, as I wrote for Byline Times back then it was an attempt to distract from the facts of what Trump was then being impeached for. This is a disinformation tactic called ‘whataboutism’, there’s an allegation from one side, and so the other side screams “what about….?” Whataboutism is one of the standard tools of Russian dis- and misinformation operations, frequently employed by their armies of online trolls and useful idiots, and now the GOP.
The impeachment of Trump and the attempt to find grounds for the impeachment of President Biden could not be more different. The former was based on the “prefect phone call” between the Presidents of the US and Ukraine, in which Trump threatened to withhold a military aid package unless President Volodymyr Zelensky did him “a favour” by announcing an investigation into his political rival. The latter was based on Russian lies readily taken up and believed to be fact by large numbers of people in the US, both in and out of political circles.
As an outsider, and as a person directly affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is astonishing that there are so many American minds polluted by Russian propaganda. Some are genuinely duped, others are engaging in and embracing it for reasons of political expediency. Whatever the reason behind it, toeing the Russian line is something that would have horrified the old school of the Republican Party, who realised full well the danger that Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, represented.
Trump was impeached because he attempted to use a package of weapons destined for an ally at war with an adversary as a tool of leverage for his personal political benefit. As Parnas testified, he was instructed by the personal lawyer to Trump, Giuliani, to deliver a message that “unless Zelensky announced an investigation into the Bidens by Monday, that there would be no cooperation, no aid to Ukraine from the United States.” This was a President who not only believed that manipulating the assets of the nation for his personal benefit was perfectly fine, but who also, being unable to deny the charge because there were witnesses to this crime, insisted instead that the call was “perfect”.
Had the Republicans followed the evidence at that first impeachment (or for that matter at the second one) the inescapable conclusion would have been that Trump was guilty as charged and ruling such, the world would not be facing the theoretical possibility of this man, a convicted fraudster and rapist, reassuming the role of the most powerful man in the world.
The evidence in the hearings trying to establish grounds to impeach President Biden is just not there on the other hand. Again, according to Parnas, “I found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens corruption in Ukraine. No credible source has ever provided proof of criminal activity, not the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA. No respected Ukrainian official has ever said that the Bidens did anything criminal in Ukraine.” And “the only information ever pushed on the Bidens on Ukraine has come from one source and one source only, Russia and Russian agents.”
There was no $5 million bribe. Shokin, the Prosecutor General, was not fired because he was getting too close to finding wrongdoing in his investigation of Burisma, because he was not in fact investigating Burisma. Shokin was fired because he was acorrupt man who would look the other way for the right price. His belated dismissal was greeted with applause by Ambassadors to Ukraine from a great number of countries when it happened.
As for the underlying (Russian/GOP) message that Ukraine is a fundamentally corrupt country and therefore undeserving of US aid, the clear Russian goal is to leave Ukraine defenceless so that they can prosecute their war even more ruthlessly. But the fact is that a decade ago millions of brave Ukrainians across the country decided to stand up to the corrupt rule of the Yanukovych regime, and much has changed since then in terms of anti-corruption developments in the country.
At the insistence of civil society, under the watchful eye of allies such as the United States and the European Union, a great number of anti-corruption programs have been successfully implemented. Ukraine, as a nation that fights corruption, has created a new national police force from scratch and developed an award-winning app through which pretty much all government services are delivered, efficiently and transparently. In fact, just one month before the beginning of the big war, as it is called here, I wrote for Byline Times that it is precisely because Ukraine is a model for fighting corruption (and a democracy) that war was inevitably coming.
Sweden closing Nordsteam investigation a shocking coverup -investigator
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal interviews Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the first independent investigation to the site of the Nordstream pipelines blast sites, on the Swedish government’s sudden closing of the investigation into the terror attack on the eve of joining NATO. Andersson also addresses US meddling in Swedish politics, and the potential consequences of Stockholm surrendering its traditional neutrality to the anti-Russian alliance.
The post Sweden closing Nordsteam investigation a shocking coverup -investigator first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Sweden closing Nordsteam investigation a shocking coverup -investigator appeared first on The Grayzone.