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Category: Russia

  • Listening in on Russia’s War in Ukraine

    In this week’s episode, produced in collaboration with the Associated Press, reporters on the front lines take us inside Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and share never-before-heard recordings of Russian soldiers. 

    The day President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, Feb. 24, 2022, Russia unleashed a brutal assault on the strategic port city of Mariupol. That same day, a team of AP reporters arrived in the city. Vasilisa Stepanenko, Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov kept their cameras and tape recorders rolling throughout the onslaught. Together, they captured some of the defining images of the war in Ukraine. Stepanenko and Maloletka talk with guest host Michael Montgomery about risking their lives to document blasted buildings, enormous bomb craters and the daily life of traumatized civilians. As Russian troops advanced on Mariupol, the journalists managed to escape with hours of their own material and recordings from the body camera of a noted Ukrainian medic, Yuliia Paievska. The powerful footage went viral and showed the world the brutalities of the war, as well as remarkable acts of courage by journalists, doctors and ordinary citizens.  

    Next, we listen to audio that’s never been publicly shared before: phone calls Russian soldiers made during the first weeks of the invasion, secretly recorded by the Ukrainian government. AP reporter Erika Kinetz obtained more than 2,000 of these calls. Using social media and other tools, she explores the lives of two soldiers whose calls home capture intimate moments with friends and family. The intercepted calls reveal the fear-mongering and patriotism that led some of the men to go from living regular lives as husbands, sons and fathers to talking about killing civilians. 

    In Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, Russian soldiers left streets strewn with the bodies of civilians killed during their brief occupation. Kinetz shares her experiences visiting Bucha and speaking with survivors soon after Russian troops retreated. In the secret intercepts, Russian soldiers speak of “cleansing operations.” One soldier tells his mother: “We don’t imprison them. We kill them all.” 

    Will Russian soldiers and political leaders be prosecuted for war crimes? Montgomery talks with Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights lawyer who received a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. She runs the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, which has been gathering evidence of human rights abuses and war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s first invasion in 2014. Matviichuk says it’s important for war crimes to be handled by Ukrainian courts, but the country’s legal system is overwhelmed and notoriously corrupt. She says there is an important role for the international community in creating a system that can bring justice for all Ukrainians.  

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Hungary Blocks Common EU Statement To Mark Second Anniversary Of Ukraine Invasion — Sources

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine “prevails” in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having “significantly changed” its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.

    Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it’s also “in our own security interests.”

    “We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies,” Stoltenberg said.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    “I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day,” he added.

    Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia’s unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.

    In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.

    The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances — authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family — adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

    “I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn’t win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said.

    Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, “to ensure that Russia doesn’t make further gains.”

    “We don’t believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation,” he said.

    “But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production.”

    Ukraine’s allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.

    “Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said in the interview.

    On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine’s allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.

    “So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

    Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.

    It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

    Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.

    Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.

    Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies — something that neither China nor Russia has.

    The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.

    But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.

    At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.

    “If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it’s actually 2 percent today,” he said. “That’s good, but it’s not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum.”


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • EU Announces 13th Russia Sanctions Package On Eve Of Second Anniversary Of Ukraine Invasion

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine “prevails” in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having “significantly changed” its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.

    Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it’s also “in our own security interests.”

    “We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies,” Stoltenberg said.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    “I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day,” he added.

    Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia’s unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.

    In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.

    The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances — authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family — adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

    “I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn’t win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said.

    Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, “to ensure that Russia doesn’t make further gains.”

    “We don’t believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation,” he said.

    “But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production.”

    Ukraine’s allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.

    “Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said in the interview.

    On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine’s allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.

    “So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

    Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.

    It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

    Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.

    Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.

    Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies — something that neither China nor Russia has.

    The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.

    But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.

    At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.

    “If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it’s actually 2 percent today,” he said. “That’s good, but it’s not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum.”


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Putin Fears Navalny Funeral Could Trigger Mass Demonstrations, Khodorkovsky Says

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine “prevails” in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having “significantly changed” its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.

    Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it’s also “in our own security interests.”

    “We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies,” Stoltenberg said.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    “I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day,” he added.

    Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia’s unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.

    In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.

    The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances — authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family — adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

    “I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn’t win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said.

    Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, “to ensure that Russia doesn’t make further gains.”

    “We don’t believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation,” he said.

    “But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production.”

    Ukraine’s allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.

    “Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said in the interview.

    On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine’s allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.

    “So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

    Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.

    It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

    Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.

    Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.

    Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies — something that neither China nor Russia has.

    The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.

    But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.

    At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.

    “If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it’s actually 2 percent today,” he said. “That’s good, but it’s not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum.”


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russian Appeal Against Olympic Suspension Rejected

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine “prevails” in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having “significantly changed” its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.

    Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it’s also “in our own security interests.”

    “We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies,” Stoltenberg said.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    “I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day,” he added.

    Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia’s unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.

    In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.

    The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances — authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family — adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

    “I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn’t win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said.

    Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, “to ensure that Russia doesn’t make further gains.”

    “We don’t believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation,” he said.

    “But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production.”

    Ukraine’s allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.

    “Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said in the interview.

    On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine’s allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.

    “So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

    Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.

    It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

    Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.

    Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.

    Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies — something that neither China nor Russia has.

    The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.

    But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.

    At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.

    “If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it’s actually 2 percent today,” he said. “That’s good, but it’s not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum.”


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Public Figures Urge Russia To Release Navalny’s Body To His Family

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine “prevails” in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having “significantly changed” its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.

    Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it’s also “in our own security interests.”

    “We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies,” Stoltenberg said.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    “I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day,” he added.

    Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia’s unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.

    In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.

    The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances — authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family — adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

    “I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn’t win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said.

    Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, “to ensure that Russia doesn’t make further gains.”

    “We don’t believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation,” he said.

    “But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production.”

    Ukraine’s allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.

    “Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said in the interview.

    On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine’s allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.

    “So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

    Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.

    It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

    Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.

    Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.

    Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies — something that neither China nor Russia has.

    The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.

    But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.

    At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.

    “If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it’s actually 2 percent today,” he said. “That’s good, but it’s not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum.”


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden Announces More Than 500 Fresh Russia Sanctions, Warns House ‘History Is Watching’

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine “prevails” in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having “significantly changed” its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.

    Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it’s also “in our own security interests.”

    “We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies,” Stoltenberg said.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    “I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day,” he added.

    Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia’s unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.

    In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.

    The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances — authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family — adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

    “I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn’t win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said.

    Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, “to ensure that Russia doesn’t make further gains.”

    “We don’t believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation,” he said.

    “But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production.”

    Ukraine’s allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.

    “Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said in the interview.

    On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine’s allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.

    “So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

    Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.

    It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

    Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.

    Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.

    Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies — something that neither China nor Russia has.

    The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.

    But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.

    At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.

    “If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it’s actually 2 percent today,” he said. “That’s good, but it’s not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum.”


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Pashinian Says Armenia Freezes Membership In Russian-Led Security Alliance

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine “prevails” in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having “significantly changed” its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.

    Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it’s also “in our own security interests.”

    “We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies,” Stoltenberg said.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    “I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day,” he added.

    Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia’s unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.

    In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.

    The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances — authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family — adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

    “I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn’t win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said.

    Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, “to ensure that Russia doesn’t make further gains.”

    “We don’t believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation,” he said.

    “But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production.”

    Ukraine’s allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.

    “Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said in the interview.

    On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine’s allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.

    “So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

    Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.

    It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

    Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.

    Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.

    Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies — something that neither China nor Russia has.

    The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.

    But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.

    At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.

    “If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it’s actually 2 percent today,” he said. “That’s good, but it’s not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum.”


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

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  • After Two Years of War in Ukraine, It’s Time for Peace

    The ruins of Avdiivka. Photo Credit: Russian Defense Ministry

    As we mark two full years since Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukrainian government forces have withdrawn from Avdiivka, a town they first captured from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in July 2014. Situated only 10 miles from Donetsk city, Avdiivka gave Ukrainian government forces a base from which their artillery bombarded Donetsk for nearly ten years. From a pre-war population of about 31,000, the town has been depopulated and left in ruins.

    The mass slaughter on both sides in this long battle was a measure of the strategic value of the city to both sides, but it is also emblematic of the shocking human cost of this war, which has degenerated into a brutal and bloody war of attrition along a nearly static front line. Neither side made significant territorial gains in the entire 2023 year of fighting, with a net gain to Russia of a mere 188 square miles, or 0.1% of Ukraine.

    And while it is the Ukrainians and Russians fighting and dying in this war of attrition with over half a million casualties, it is the United States, with some its Western allies, that has stood in the way of peace talks. This was true of talks between Russia and Ukraine that took place in March 2022, one month after the Russian invasion, and it is true of talks that Russia tried to initiate with the United States as recently as January 2024.

    In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine met in Turkey and negotiated a peace agreement that should have ended the war. Ukraine agreed to become a neutral country between east and west, on the model of Austria or Switzerland, giving up its controversial ambition for NATO membership. Territorial questions over Crimea and the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would be resolved peacefully, based on self-determination for the people of those regions.

    But then the U.S. and U.K. intervened to persuade Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelenskyy to abandon the neutrality agreement in favor of a long war to militarily drive Russia out of Ukraine and recover Crimea and Donbas by force. U.S. and U.K. leaders have never admitted to their own people what they did, nor tried to explain why they did it.

    So it has been left to everyone else involved to reveal details of the agreement and the U.S. and U.K.’s roles in torpedoing it: President Zelenskyy’s advisers; Ukrainian negotiators; Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Turkish diplomats; Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who was another mediator; and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who mediated with Russian President Vladimir Putin for Ukraine.

    The U.S. sabotage of peace talks should come as no surprise. So much of U.S. foreign policy follows what should by now be an easily recognizable and predictable pattern, in which our leaders systematically lie to us about their decisions and actions in crisis situations, and, by the time the truth is widely known, it is too late to reverse the catastrophic effects of those decisions. Thousands of people have paid with their lives, nobody is held accountable, and the world’s attention has moved on to the next crisis, the next series of lies and the next bloodbath, which in this case is Gaza.

    But the war grinds on in Ukraine, whether we pay attention to it or not. Once the U.S. and U.K. succeeded in killing peace talks and prolonging the war, it fell into an intractable pattern common to many wars, in which Ukraine, the United States and the leading members of the NATO military alliance were encouraged, or we might say deluded, by limited successes at different times into continually prolonging and escalating the war and rejecting diplomacy, in spite of ever-mounting, appalling human costs for the people of Ukraine.

    U.S. and NATO leaders have repeated ad nauseam that they are arming Ukraine to put it in a stronger position at the “negotiating table,” even as they keep rejecting negotiations. After Ukraine gained ground with its much celebrated offensives in the fall of 2022, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley went public with a call to “seize the moment” and get back to the negotiating table from the position of strength that NATO leaders said they were waiting for. French and German military leaders were reportedly even more adamant that that moment would be short-lived if they failed to seize it.

    They were right. President Biden rejected his military advisers’ calls for renewed diplomacy, and Ukraine’s failed 2023 offensive wasted its chance to negotiate from a position of strength, sacrificing many more lives to leave it weaker than before.

    On February 13, 2024, Reuters Moscow bureau broke the story that the United States had recently rejected a new Russian proposal to reopen peace negotiations. Multiple Russian sources involved in the initiative told Reuters that Russia proposed direct talks with the United States to call a ceasefire along the current front lines of the war.

    After Russia’s March 2022 peace agreement with Ukraine was vetoed by the U.S., this time Russia approached the United States directly before involving Ukraine. There was a meeting of intermediaries in Turkey, and a meeting between Secretary of State Blinken, CIA Director Burns and National Security Adviser Sullivan in Washington, but the result was a message from Sullivan that the U.S. was willing to discuss other aspects of U.S.-Russian relations, but not peace in Ukraine.

    And so the war grinds on. Russia is still firing 10,000 artillery shells per day along the front line, while Ukraine can only fire 2,000. In a microcosm of the larger war, some Ukrainian gunners told reporters they were only allowed to fire 3 shells per night. As Sam Cranny-Evans of the U.K.’s RUSI military think-tank told the Guardian, “What that means is that Ukrainians can’t suppress Russian artillery any more, and if the Ukrainians can’t fire back, all they can do is try to survive.”

    A March 2023 European initiative to produce a million shells for Ukraine in a year fell far short, only producing about 600,000. U.S. monthly shell production in October 2023 was 28,000 shells, with a target of 37,000 per month by April 2024. The United States plans to increase production to 100,000 shells per month, but that will take until October 2025.

    Meanwhile, Russia is already producing 4.5 million artillery shells per year. After spending less than one tenth of the Pentagon budget over the past 20 years, how is Russia able to produce 5 times more artillery shells than the United States and its NATO allies combined?

    RUSI’s Richard Connolly explained to the Guardian that, while Western countries privatized their weapons production and dismantled “surplus” productive capacity after the end of the Cold War in the interest of corporate profits, “The Russians have been… subsidizing the defense industry, and many would have said wasting money for the event that one day they need to be able to scale it up. So it was economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”

    President Biden has been anxious to send more money to Ukraine–a whopping $61 billion—but disagreements in the U.S. Congress between bipartisan Ukraine supporters and a Republican faction opposed to U.S. involvement have held up the funds. But even if Ukraine had endless infusions of Western weapons, it has a more serious problem: Many of the troops it recruited to fight this war in 2022 have been killed, wounded or captured, and its recruitment system has been plagued by corruption and a lack of enthusiasm for the war among most of its people.

    In August 2023, the government fired the heads of military recruitment in all 24 regions of the country after it became widely known that they were systematically soliciting bribes to allow men to avoid recruitment and gain safe passage out of the country. The Open Ukraine Telegram channel reported, “The military registration and enlistment offices have never seen such money before, and the revenues are being evenly distributed vertically to the top.”

    The Ukrainian parliament is debating a new conscription law, with an online registration system that includes people living abroad and with penalties for failure to register or enlist. Parliament already voted down a previous bill that members found too draconian, and many fear that forced conscription will lead to more widespread draft resistance, or even bring down the government.

    Oleksiy Arestovych, President Zelenskyy’s former spokesman, told the Unherd website that the root of Ukraine’s recruitment problem is that only 20% of Ukrainians believe in the anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism that has controlled Ukrainian governments since the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in 2014. “What about the remaining 80%?” the interviewer asked.

    “I think for most of them, their idea is of a multinational and poly-cultural country,” Arestovych replied. “And when Zelenskyy came into power in 2019, they voted for this idea. He did not articulate it specifically but it was what he meant when he said, ‘I don’t see a difference in the Ukrainian-Russian language conflict, we are all Ukrainians even if we speak different languages.’”

    “And you know,” Arestovych continued, “my great criticism of what has happened in Ukraine over the last years, during the emotional trauma of the war, is this idea of Ukrainian nationalism which has divided Ukraine into different people: the Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers as a second class of people. It’s the main dangerous idea and a worse danger than Russian military aggression, because nobody from this 80% of people wants to die for a system in which they are people of a second class.”

    If Ukrainians are reluctant to fight, imagine how Americans would resist being shipped off to fight in Ukraine. A 2023 U.S. Army War College study of “Lessons from Ukraine” found that the U.S. ground war with Russia that the United States ispreparing to fight would involve an estimated 3,600 U.S. casualties per day, killing and maiming as many U.S. troops every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in twenty years. Echoing Ukraine’s military recruitment crisis, the authors concluded, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

    U.S. war policy in Ukraine is predicated on just such a gradual escalation from proxy war to full-scale war between Russia and the United States, which is unavoidably overshadowed by the risk of nuclear war. This has not changed in two years, and it will not change unless and until our leaders take a radically different approach. That would involve serious diplomacy to end the war on terms on which Russia and Ukraine can agree, as they did on the March 2022 neutrality agreement.

    The post After Two Years of War in Ukraine, It’s Time for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Russia Declares RFE/RL ‘Undesirable Organization,’ Threatening Prosecution For Reporters, Sources


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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  • Stoltenberg: Best Way To Honor Navalny Is To Make Sure Russia Does Not Win In Ukraine


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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  • Alexei Navalny’s Death and Curious Well-Timed Coincidences

    There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial.

    That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been condemned throughout the world for the genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Biden and Netanyahu’s political lives are at serious risk. And so they have just rolled out a full-court propaganda press effort aimed at covering their losses. It should be crystal clear to anyone who can use logic to see the timing involved.

    The great French scholar of propaganda and technology, Jacques Ellul, wrote years ago that propaganda “is not the touch of a magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition.”

    However, once this groundwork has been laid over time – as it has been with the continuous anti-Russia Putin hysteria and support for Israel’s Zionist policies – it can be intensely ratcheted up in exigent circumstances when the long-serving narrative is in jeopardy, such as it is now.

    Once the death in a Russian prison of the Western backed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was announced on Friday, February 16, 2024, it was immediately followed by a cascade of anti-Russia pronouncements whose aim was to not only continue the demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin but to serve other purposes as well.

    With one fell stroke, the calm history lesson about Ukraine, Russia, and U.S./NATO that Putin had just delivered to the world via Tucker Carlson disappeared down the memory hole, as Biden, without any evidence, declared that “Putin and his thugs” and Putin’s “brutality” are responsible for Navalny’s death. This, of course, is a replay of the false charges sans evidence waged against Russia for an earlier poisoning of Navalny, the Skripals (since disappeared by the British government), Alexander Litvinenko, et al.

    Shortly after, Zelensky, performing his puppet routine while coincidently appearing at the Munich Security Conference – on Saturday, February 17, a day after Navalny’s death was announced – with Navalny’s then widow, said it was “obvious” that Putin had killed Navalny, while Biden pushed for more money for Ukraine’s doomed war against Russia, a U.S./NATO war created by the U.S. from the start with its aggressive military push to Russia’s borders and its 2015 Ukrainian coup d’état that ousted the pro-Russian leader, setting the stage for Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in February 2022. That Putin told Carlson these obvious facts, while slyly mentioning to Carlson that he understood that Carlson once tried to join the CIA, is now for most people in the West history lost behind the headlines, if it ever were anything more.

    All this happened while Russia pushed through Ukraine’s defenses and took the city of Avdeevka, which had long been contested. With each day that passes, it is obvious that Biden’s Ukraine war strategy is that of a desperate politician on the ropes and that Putin has completely outfoxed the American desperados and their NATO European stooges. The MSM prefer to suggest otherwise, that hope is just around the corner if we send billions more dollars and weapons, and if with the help of our British friends, we take the war further into Russian territory and risk a nuclear confrontation. But we are in a propaganda war for the minds of the Western public.

    Much of the rest of the world has seen through the risible MSM headlines used to delude the public that Russia is the great threat to world peace and stability. Like the previous Russia-gate lies, this ongoing one, coinciding with Navalny’s death, is timed to divert the public’s attention from key ongoing matters.

    Tomorrow and Wednesday, Julian Assange will have his final appeal in a British court to prevent his extradition to the United States. Biden wants this journalist prosecuted for doing the job that the MSM have failed to do: Exposing the facts about the ruthless U.S. killing machine. But the bruhaha about Navalny has rendered the absolute hypocrisy over the torture and imprisonment of the innocent and brave Assange secondary and “inconsequential.” As intended, this has now become an afterthought as the mainstream media’s Russia-obsessed headlines flow uninterruptedly. The New York Times, the key propaganda organ for the Biden administration and the deep-state, reports just today that “The gravity of President Putin’s threats is now dawning on Europe” and “Navalny’s Widow Promises to Carry on Opposition Leader’s Work.”  These are typical Times’ rants.  As is its Magazine article headline from yesterday “Marilyn Robinson [the writer and friend of Barack Obama] Considers Biden a Gift of God.”

    I don’t think the Palestinians would agree, but then too, their slaughter by Israel with U.S. assistance – more than 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone have been killed so far – and the coming IDF invasion of Rafah, have also been pushed to the back pages or to nowhere by the propaganda about Navalny and Russia.

    I won’t mention the Russian election in mid-March that might possibly factor into all this since we all will be dutifully and timely told that the evil killer Putin is a dictator, ignorant, ruthless – add your own adjectives – and is no doubt trying to rig the fair-and-square U.S. November presidential election – for someone, just as he did in 2016.

    Nor mention The NY Times article of February 17 by David Sanger and Julian Barnes that the “U.S Fears Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space.”

    Everyone knows that the Russians are coming to get us, as they always have. They probably killed JFK, right?

    It’s easy to follow along as this propaganda eruption circles the Internet like painted ponies on a carousel. There will be no time to stop and think, to pause; to ask what the hell is going on? The ponies will dip and bob and make you dizzy.

    For more corroboration of these matters, read the political analyst Gilbert Doctorow’s astute piece on how the Turkish broadcaster TRT World refused to post the interview that they did with him. Doctorow claims British intelligence killed Navalny. For some reason this should not be broached, according to TRT.

    Whether Doctorow is right or not, only a very dimwitted person would think that Putin would have Navalny killed. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. Yet the MSM and their government overlords consider most people very stupid and so are trying to blitz them with obvious propaganda through commission and omission. We have heard this story before.

    The post Alexei Navalny’s Death and Curious Well-Timed Coincidences first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Ukrainian Air Defense Repels Fresh Russian Drone Attack, Says Military

    European Union foreign ministers in Brussels provided strong public backing to the exiled widow of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, vowing additional sanctions against Moscow to hold it responsible for the death of her husband in a remote Arctic prison.

    “The EU will spare no efforts to hold Russia’s political leadership and authorities to account, in close coordination with our partners; and impose further costs for their actions, including through sanctions,” the EU’s top diplomats said in a joint statement following their meeting with Yulia Navalnaya on February 19.

    Navalnaya, who has become a vocal Kremlin critic in her own right over recent years, vowed to “continue our fight for our country” as she traveled to Brussels to seek backing from the 27-member bloc, whose leaders have expressed outrage over Navalny’s death in custody last week and Russian authorities’ refusal to allow his mother and lawyers to see his body.

    “Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed my husband, Aleksei Navalny,” Yulia Navalnaya said in a two-minute video post on X, formerly Twitter.

    Navalnaya, who along with their two children lives abroad, was already in Munich for a major international security conference when reports emerged on February 16 that Navalny had died at a harsh Arctic prison known as Polar Wolf, where he was serving a 19-year sentence for alleged extremism that Navalny and Kremlin critics say was heaped atop other convictions to punish him for his anti-corruption and political activities.

    “I will continue the work of Aleksei Navalny,” Navalnaya said. “Continue to fight for our country. And I invite you to stand beside me.”

    She called for supporters to battle the Kremlin with “more fury than ever before” and said she longed to live in “a free Russia.”

    EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell emerged from that meeting expressing “the EU’s deepest condolences” and confidence that Russian President “Vladimir Putin & his regime will be held accountable for the death of [Aleksei Navalny].”

    “As [Navalnaya] said, Putin is not Russia. Russia is not Putin,” Borrell said, adding that the bloc’s support is assured “to Russia’s civil society & independent media.”

    An ally of Navalny, Ivan Zhdanov, said in a post on Telegram that an investigator had stated that tests on Navalny’s body will take 14 days to complete.

    Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis insisted earlier that the EU must “at least” sharpen sanctions against Russia following Navalny’s death.

    The EU has already passed 12 rounds of Russian sanctions and is working on a 13th with the two-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaching later this week, with member Germany pressing for more.

    German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had said Berlin would propose new sanctions on Moscow at the meeting with Navalnaya, but the outcome remained unclear.

    The German Foreign Office said it was summoning the Russian ambassador over Navalny’s death to “condemn this in the strongest possible terms and expressly call for the release of all those imprisoned in Russia for political reasons.”

    Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s office called separately for clarification on the circumstances and for Russian authorities to release Navalny’s body to the family.

    The Kremlin — which for years avoided mention of Navalny by name — broke its official silence on February 19 by saying an investigation was ongoing and would be carried out according to Russian law. It said the question of when his body would be handed over was not for the Kremlin to decide.

    It called Western outcry over the February 16 announcement of Navalny’s death “absolutely unacceptable.”

    The Latvia-based Novaya Gazeta Europe said on February 18 that police were securing a local morgue in the Siberian city of Salekhard as speculation swirled around the location of the 47-year-old Navalny’s body and whether it showed signs of abuse.

    Navalny is the latest on a significant list of Putin foes who have ended up dead under suspicious circumstances abroad or at home, where the Kremlin has clamped down ruthlessly on dissent and free speech since the Ukraine invasion began.

    Political analyst Yekaterina Shulman told Current Time that Navalny “possessed incomparable moral capital” in Russia but also well beyond its borders.

    “He possessed fame — all Russian and worldwide,” Shulman said. “He had moral authority [and] he had a long political biography. These are all things that cannot be handed down to anyone and cannot be acquired quickly.”

    She cited Navalny’s crucial credibility and “political capital” built up through years of investigations of corruption, campaigning for elections, and organizing politically.

    “Perhaps this apparent political assassination will become a rallying point not for the opposition — the opposition is people who run for office to acquire mandates [and] we are not in that situation — but for the anti-war community…inside Russia,” Shulman said.

    Navalny’s family and close associates have confirmed his death in prison and have demanded his body be handed over, but authorities have refused to release it pending an investigation.

    Mediazona and Novaya.gazeta Europe said Navalny’s body was being held at the district morgue in Salekhard, although officials reportedly told Navalny’s mother otherwise after she traveled to the remote prison on February 17 and was denied access.

    A former spokeswoman for Navalny, Kira Yarmysh, claimed Navalny’s mother had been turned away again early on February 19.

    Yarmysh tweeted that Russia’s federal Investigative Committee had told his mother and lawyers that “the investigation into Navalny’s death had been extended. How much longer she will go is unknown. The cause of death is still ‘undetermined.’”

    “They lie, stall for time, and don’t even hide it,” she added.

    The OVD-Info human rights group website showed more than 57,000 signatories demanding that the Investigative Committee return Navalny’s body to his family.

    WATCH: Court documents examined by RFE/RL reveal that medical care was repeatedly denied to inmates at the prison where Aleksei Navalny was held. In one case, this resulted in the death of an inmate. The revelation comes amid questions over how Navalny died and as his body has still not been handed over to his family.

    The group noted that a procedural review process could allow authorities to keep the body for at least 30 days, or longer if a criminal case was opened.

    Since the announcement of his death on February 16, Russian police have cordoned off memorial sites where people were laying flowers and candles to honor Navalny, and dispersed and arrested more than 430 suspected violators in dozens of locations.

    Closely watched by police, mourners on February 19 continued to leave flowers at tributes in Moscow to honor Navalny. Initial reports suggested police in the capital did not intervene in the latest actions.

    The Western response has been to condemn Putin and his administration, with U.S. President Joe Biden saying there is “no doubt” that Putin is to blame for Navalny’s death.

    The British and U.S. ambassadors laid tributes over the weekend at the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to repression that has emerged as a site to honor Navalny.

    U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy said she was honoring “Navalny and other victims of political repression in Russia,” adding, “His strength is an inspiring example. We honor his memory.”

    The French ambassador also visited one of the memorials.

    With reporting by Reuters


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

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  • Horror and hypocrisy in the wake of Alexei Navalny’s death | Letters

    Bringing the Russian authorities to international justice over the death of the opposition leader is difficult, but not impossible, says Prof Philip Leach, while Robert Frazer wonders what gives the west the right to judge Putin

    The news of Alexei Navalny’s sudden death in an Arctic penal colony has led to numerous calls for the authorities in Russia to be held responsible (Western leaders point finger at Putin after Alexei Navalny’s death in jail, 16 February). They are certainly answerable according to human rights law, but achieving accountability against Russia has become even harder since its expulsion from the Council of Europe in 2022, as a consequence of the invasion of Ukraine. As a result, Navalny’s family cannot now petition the European court of human rights to get to the truth about his death.

    Nevertheless, UN bodies such as the human rights committee still have jurisdiction over Russia, and cases already in the European court pipeline will be heard. Just last month, the court decided that the Russian government had a case to answer in a lawsuit brought by myself and others on behalf of Navalny, his Anti-Corruption Foundation and supporters in response to the punitive steps taken against them in 2019, including absurd criminal prosecutions on charges of money laundering, their designation as “foreign agents”, raids on their homes and offices, and the freezing of bank accounts.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Hostage Nation

    In his Moscow interview, Tucker Carlson also asked the president of the Russian Federation to release a young American citizen convicted of espionage in Russia from imprisonment. Vladimir Putin replied that the man was arrested, tried and convicted by a Russian court of a crime under Russian law, espionage, by secretly receiving classified documents from someone in Russia.

    Carlson’s plea was based not on respect for Russian law — or understanding of the crime of espionage — but on a widely held prejudice in the West. Namely there is a presumption that Westerners, in particular Americans, if arrested in countries listed as enemies of the West or the US, are never incarcerated for their acts but taken as hostages. Thus Carlson’s appeal was phrased in terms of a plea for mercy to an outlaw. President Putin rejected that implication and explained both the specifics of the crime committed and the customary practice for reciprocal release of agents caught by opposing special (secret) services. While not ruling a release out, the Russian president made clear that this was not a case for executive clemency.

    Why, one might ask, did Carlson not grasp that fact? The obvious and superficial reason is that the request was gratuitous and theatrical. The “hostage release” mission is a typical form of quasi-diplomatic grandstanding. However there is a deeper level at which this segment can and ought to be understood. There is an ancient tradition — prior to 7 October — of states at war taking leaders of the opposing side as hostages to induce and guarantee negotiations to end hostilities or to enforce the conditions to which belligerents subsequently agreed. Medieval warfare is full of such incidents. Also other cultures have availed themselves of these in personam guarantees for treaties between warring parties. These guarantees have continued in the rituals of prisoner exchanges during truces.

    The late 20th century was accompanied by proliferation in the West of a new kind of hostage taking. Whereas the ancient mode usually involved the capture or surrender of belligerents (soldiers and officers) or high officials and dignitaries, modern Western warfare focussed on holding civilians, especially non-combatants, as hostage. This became a central tactic of counter-insurgency warfare. This was condemned in the treaties after World War 2 as a form of collective punishment and prohibited under the Geneva Conventions (or protocols to the Hague Convention on the Laws of Land Warfare).

    The practice of the French in Algeria was one of the most notorious post-war examples. Although almost universally condemned (at least beyond the West) it found its way into the annals of counter-insurgency doctrine through Roger Trinquier. His book Modern Warfare formed the core of CIA-US military strategy in Vietnam. The conduct of war Trinquier proposed based on his service in Indochina and Algeria was fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. By arguing that there was no more distinction between combatants and civilians he provided the example and the theory upon which all modern wars are waged by the West. World War 2 was the first modern war in which non-combatant casualties and death exceeded those of the armed forces. That was the reason for the Geneva protocols. Triquier circumvented this essentially by claiming that the organized self-defense and armed struggle against colonial occupation was not protected by the laws of land warfare since they protected states and their regular armed forces, while colonies were not states and could therefore not field armies in terms of international law.

    While it is true that Trinquier insisted that treatment of civilians should distinguish between criminals to be tried and sentenced by the regular courts and “terrorists”, this distinction was no more than academic in the CI context. The CIA’s Phoenix Program extended to forcing the RVN legislature to criminalize political opinions and activities so that they could be punished as “civilian” crimes. As then CIA station chief William Colby explained, the Phoenix directorate in Saigon also insisted that political crimes be handled by the special branch of the national police so as to keep the military “clean” for regular warfare. However in Algeria, as in Vietnam, there was almost no contact between the regular forces of the two sides until the CI was virtually at an end. Moreover the personnel overlap between military and police in the colonies made the distinction more a question of clothes than substance.

    The use of hostages in counter-insurgency expanded throughout the era of wars against national independence movements regardless of the prohibitions under international law. There was also a major innovation in 1972.

    The conventional story is that a group of activists desiring to call attention to the ongoing occupation of Palestine by European settler-colonialists plotted to take the Olympic competition squad sent by the State of Israel to Munich hostage. Presumably this surprising move would compel the international community (as the US calls itself) to listen to the pleas of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, pleas for just treatment to resolve the conflict in compliance with international law.

    The immediate result was dramatic and has been repeatedly dramatized. A special paramilitary squad from the German national police, GSG 9, stormed the rooms where the hostages were held and killed everyone, hostages and alleged hostage-takers. After that international air travel to and from Palestine was subjected to security measures that would then be standardized for all air travel in 2001. The immediate result was not the opening of international venues to the Palestinian cause but the opposite. The PLO became a certified “terrorist organization” and its members were declared outlaws. One should recall here what the term “outlaw” actually means. The naive understanding is misleading. Since the days of the Medieval Inquisition there has been a clear legal distinction between criminal and outlaw. A criminal is someone accused and convicted of violating the law. Nonetheless he is also governed by the law and enjoys its protection. Only the authorities have the right to seize and punish a criminal. An outlaw however is deemed literally beyond the law, enjoying neither rights nor protection. Hence an act of violence, even killing, against an outlaw is no offense. Anyone is free to treat an outlaw as he likes. An outlaw has no claims whatsoever.

    One of the principles by which counter-insurgency is waged is by creating outlaws and removing them from the sight or oversight of the regular government and social infrastructure. This has also been done through what is now called “disappearing”. However hostage taking by the counter-insurgency agencies and their operatives has the perfidious effect of creating outlaws in the public perception by staging hostage incidents that appear to be perpetrated by the so-called “terrorists”. Thus the mythic propaganda of the deed is turned against those engaged in struggle — whether or not armed — to elicit the revulsion among the target population commensurate with this violation of the Geneva protocols.

    Leaving aside the plethora of staged hijackings in the 1970s, there are two high jacking-hostage incidents that bear consideration. Indeed they too relate to Palestine. The first is the Entebbe incident in which Israeli military force was applied to near universal acclaim to the recovery of a passenger liner taken there by “terrorists”.

    In June 1976, an Air France flight to Tel Aviv carrying some 248 passengers was diverted to Uganda’s capital. (Ironically Uganda had been one of Britain’s proposed sites for a future Zionist state.) Israel special forces attacked the airport and liberated the aircraft, killing some Ugandan soldiers and apparently violating Ugandan sovereignty to perform the raid. The ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin, apparently supported seizure of the airliner. In the course of the action practically all non-Israelis were released. The Israeli forces shot their way in and recovered all those passengers except for some collateral damage. Amin had been receiving and continued to receive exceptionally bad press. The review of his years in Uganda is only relevant to show that whatever domestic political struggles were underway in Britain’s former colony, Amin was one of several African leaders punished for supporting the citizens of Palestine in their armed struggle.

    The second incident involved a TWA flight from Athens to San Diego that was diverted to Beirut in June 1986. In the course of this action a US Navy diver was killed. While this death is treated as a civilian casualty, since it was not a military flight, the reported actions of a man trained in what is essentially a special forces MOS may have led to his death as combat-induced. Nonetheless the remarkable aspect of this hostage incident was not only the negotiated exchange of 19 hostages unharmed in return for fuel. Eventually all the hostages were released. In this case the Israeli government released prisoners it held while denying that the incident had forced them to do so.

    One of the hostages released was a Texas original, a businessman from that archconservative oil and ranching state. He was actually interviewed on network television just after he reached the tarmac. (The man disappeared from public view shortly thereafter.) He told assembled reporters that he was not only treated well but that they had made a case for their political objectives that he found very reasonable. He practically asked the governments concerned to listen and take his captors seriously. That was the last time he spoke in public- at least where cameras could record it.

    The case of TWA flight 847 ended with the released passengers being flown by USAF transporter to Frankfurt am Main, the center of US intelligence services in Germany, for “debriefing” before a quasi-heroic reception in the US. That Texas businessman who had spoken soberly to journalists asking why no one was listening to the people in Palestine, was declared to have incurred “Stockholm syndrome”.

    Stockholm syndrome is a pseudo-medical term invented in the early 1970s as a faux psychiatric disorder whereby captives allegedly become bonded with their captors and sympathetic to them. It has become a term of trade for discrediting anyone who by virtue of a politically motivated hostage-taking exhibits a sympathetic response to the political issue at hand, no matter how rational that sympathy may be articulated. To confuse matters the “syndrome” is sometimes compared with the established “attractions” in abusive relationships, e.g. wife-beating, child-beating, rape, etc. While there are plausible explanations for the persistence of abusive relationships the elements of time and social/ familial status are very different from those of temporary hostage situations.

    The purpose of Stockholm syndrome is to pathologize the responses of people caught in political conflict who begin to consider rationally or even humanely the terms of those conflicts in officially prohibited ways. The origin of the term “brainwashing” was similar. When US POWs were released after the Armistice in Korea, many were forced to retract statements made in captivity about war crimes they had been ordered to commit. To explain these retractions and conceal the threats made to extract them, the returning prisoners were alleged to have been victims of Korean brainwashing. This also served as convenient cover for what is now known as MKUltra, the CIA psychological warfare program which included the mass marketing of LSD.

    Throughout the so-called Cold War the Soviet Union was accused of conducting all the psychological and pharmament operations against its dissidents that the CIA was performing in the US, Canada and other countries under its control. The battlefield “mind” predates the Internet- in fact it has been the main battlespace since 1913.

    The history of modern hostage taking for political purposes could bear far more examination than this space permits. However to return to the Carlson-Putin interview and Carlson’s plea for a “hostage release” we should ask from what position Carlson’s request is actually addressed?

    That is most simply revealed in his opening questions.

    On February 22, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?

    Tucker Carlson, consciously or not, was speaking with the voice of the real “hostage-taker”. The US, in NATO extended, began to take the world hostage no later than August 1945. It held for a brief period the absolute atomic monopoly, until the Soviet Union followed by China acquired a deterrent. Then until 1990 the US claimed to be the hostage of a country half its population and subjected to more than twenty years of US-supported war mainly against its civilian population. In addition it held the world hostage while it carpet-bombed Korea and Vietnam (plus Laos and Cambodia), murdering over six million people from the air. At the same time it held as much of Africa, Latin America and the Pacific archipelagos hostage through military dictatorships, with or without civilian faces. Then through brain drain and strategic immigration policy it created an international hostage pool paying ransom in return for a chance to send money to impoverished families at home. Ultimately the psychological and economic warfare to which all inhabitants of the US are subjected is calculated to create a strong emotional bond with their captors, the real but unnamed hostage-takers who rule the Anglo-American Empire.

    Vladimir Putin responded to Tucker Carlson’s plea in the manner appropriate to a traditional statesman, schooled in statecraft from an age before the US was even conceived as a place, let alone as a nation. Also that point eluded the American journalist. President Putin’s repeated injunction that Tucker Carlson should ask the actors themselves (in the US) why they act as they do? was also a polite indication that for all his curiosity, sincerity and goodwill, Carlson was himself a captive, a hostage. He remains a captive of a hostage nation.

    The post Hostage Nation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Wars on Terrorism

    Domestic and international terrorism have caused havoc in several nations. Each nation exhibits a unique approach to combatting terrorism; each nation exhibits a unique outcome from its approach. Examining types, causes, approaches, and outcomes of wars on terrorism in four nations — United States, Israel, China, and Russia — discloses successful strategies, self-destructive strategies, and strategies that deceive the public and terrorize others with impunity. The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” are not always allied; terrorist actions are not always due to terrorists.

    Depending on perspective, the word “terrorism” ─ the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government ─ can be falsely labeled and falsely applied. Those who exhaust peaceful protests against oppression and provocation lash out at their oppressor and inflict damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. Not understanding the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed have unfavorably skewed the responses and led to more terrorism.

    United States

    United States administrations exhibited a strange method for repelling terrorists — let them enter an area, establish themselves, become strong, and commit atrocities, and then attack them — the spider approach. Muhammad Atta and his eighteen partners freely entered the United States, studied how to go up and not come down, and did their dirty deeds.

    After facing several terrorist situations during the 1990s, the September 11, 2001 bombings compelled the United States government to wage a War on Terrorism. The U.S. government used one strategy to respond to terrorism ─ brute force.

    Twenty-three years after the 9/11 attack the U.S. breathes easier, no terrorism on its mainland, and the major terrorist organizations — al Qaeda and ISIS — decimated. From appearances, the U.S. applied an effective counter-terrorism strategy and contained terrorism. Not quite. U.S. strategy expanded terrorism and moved terrorism into parts of Africa. The reduction in terrorism came mainly from the efforts of other nations.

    By blending its battles against terrorism with preservation of American global interests, the U.S. initially expanded terrorism. The battles to overcome terrorism evolved into conflagrations in Afghanistan and Iraq; the former beginning and ending with undefined meaning and the latter having no relation to terrorism.

    U.S. assistance to Pakistan intelligence during the Soviet/Afghan war indirectly supplied weapons to Osama bin Laden, financed his activities, and helped create the al-Qaeda network.

    U.S. manufacture of terrorists continued during Clinton’s administration. Battles between U.S. and Somali forces weakened Somali leadership. From an imposed anarchy in Somalia, al-Shabaab eventually emerged. In 2023, the militant group continues its violent insurgency in Somalia.

    The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in moving bin Laden from a grim and arduous perch in a rugged and isolated mountain to a comfortable villa in Pakistan, from where he was eventually captured and killed. Other than that accomplishment, the 20-year incursion into Taliban territory accomplished nothing positive — the Taliban returned to power and, thanks to the U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, other terrorist groups operate within its boundaries. In August 2022, the U.S. government located al-Qaeda leader Aimen al-Zawahiri residing in Kabul and killed him in a drone strike.

    By invading and occupying Iraq, the U.S. extended the battle against terrorism rather than confining it. Except for Ansar al-Islam, a northern radical Islamic group close to the Iran border, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq contained no Al-Qaeda affiliated elements. After the U.S. invasion destroyed the Iraqi armed forces and policing functions, Al Qaeda members moved into Iraq from Pakistan and formed ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (AQI ).

    AQI was responsible for its downfall. Sunni tribes revolted at al-Qaeda’s indiscriminate violence and the “Iraqi surge,” with assistance from U.S. troops, inflicted heavy losses on the al-Qaeda organization. Stability returned to Iraq until the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerged from the remnants of AQI, and took advantage of growing resistance to U.S. troops in Iraq and discontent with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Baghdadi formed a force that captured about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq, including the cities of Raqqa and Mosul.

    Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

    Contributed by Sémhur, Flappiefh – Own work from Near East topographic map-blank.svg by Sémhur ; data from the New York Times.

    President Barack Obama and his administration share blame for the creation of ISIS, allowing its recruitment throughout the world, not preventing recruits from entering Syria, its rapid capture of territory, and expansion into a caliphate. Former President Donald Trump exaggerated the claim that his administration was the primary force in defeating ISIS. U.S. airpower, which killed too many civilians and was not always welcome, helped; other groups liberated the ISIS dominated areas.

    ·         Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), mainly composed of Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) militia, backed by U.S. airpower, liberated Raqqa.

    ·         Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russian airpower, recaptured Aleppo.

    ·         Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Sunni Arab tribesmen, and Shia militiamen, assisted by US-led coalition warplanes, drove ISIS from Mosul.

    Amnesty international lists 1,600+ civilians dead from the war in Raqqa and between 9,000 to 11,000 civilians killed in the battle for Mosul, mostly from U.S. air attacks. Foreign Policy estimates that “8,000 buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged in Mosul’s Old City. Include other parts of the city where the battle raged and the estimates of buildings damaged or destroyed are as high as 138,000.”

    The irony of Trump’s Trumpism is his assassination of a person responsible for ISIS’ defeat, Iranian Major General Qassim Soleimani. The U.S. contributed to ISIS’ initial successes by training an inept Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left the city to a small contingent of ISIS forces that equipped itself with captured weapons. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. The disasters energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Force (PMF). With cooperation from Iran and leadership from Major General Qassim Soleimani, the PMF recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and eventually played a role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Instead of receiving praise for his efforts, Major General Qassim Soleimani, who was never responsible for any terrorist activity, was eliminated as an arch-terrorist. Who committed the terrorism in his death? Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu dropped out of the joint assassination plan at the last minute and left President Chump holding the bag.

    NATO, with the U.S. providing air force and ballistic missile support, played the decisive role in overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi, a leader who constrained Radical Islam and its terrorist activities. Militants from Libya flowed east, through friendly Turkey into Syria and Iraq, and added to ISIS ranks. Weapons captured from Gadhafi’s stockpiles flowed west to equip al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AQIM led the 2013 attack on a gas facility in southern Algeria; individuals trained in Libya attacked tourists at beaches and museums in Tunisia; and Boko Haram spread havoc throughout northern Nigeria.

    Another defect in U.S. strategy ─ Osama bin Laden left no doubt that America’s unqualified support of Israel provided terrorists with a reason to augment its ranks.

    During the 1990s, two documents,”Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and the “Declaration of the World Islamic Front,” retrieved from Osama bin Laden, jihad, and the sources of international terrorism, J. M. B. Porter, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, provide additional information on bin-Laden’s attachment of his terrorist responses to Zionist activities.

    [T]he people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist/Crusader alliance … Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory.

    So now they come to annihilate . . . this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. … if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula

    From Pakistan, through Egypt to North Africa and Nigeria, and South to Somalia and Kenya, al-Qaeda, Daish, and a multitude of terrorist organizations perform daily bombings, killings, and insurrections, a result of policies of all U.S. administrations since the “gipper” assumed the presidential office.

    Israel

    Israelis have been victims of many terrorist attacks; few of these attacks have been performed by terrorists. The great magnitude has been done by Palestinians who had exhausted the means to overcome their oppression. To express their oppression and popularize their cause, they have lashed out at their oppressor and inflicted damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. The terrorist actions are mostly revenge attacks due to provocations, succeeding Israeli military and civilian terror attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians.

    Depicting Israel as a nation that has suffered excessive terrorism is a mischaracterization. More correct is that by magnitudes more than any nation, not even close, Israel is the major terrorist nation in the world. Look at the record. In almost every country of the world, apartheid Israel has committed terrorist actions.

    Begin with the 1948-49 war against the Palestinians. From Wikipedia:

    According to several historians, between 10 and 70 massacres occurred during the 1948 war. According to Benny Morris the Yishuv (or later Israeli) soldiers killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war in 24 massacres. Aryeh Yizthaki lists 10 major massacres with more than 50 victims each.

    The newly established Israeli government continued its aggression against the Palestinians by terrorizing Palestinian communities, ethnically cleansing 1.1 million Palestinians, and forcing them into displaced persons and refugee camps.

    Israel followed the ethnic cleansing by instituting apartheid and continually terrorizing West Bank and Gazan Palestinians with provocative terror attacks.

     

    Gaza before Oct. 7-Courtesy of ABC News

    Gaza after Oct. 7-Courtesy of Aljazeera

    Going beyond its borders, Israel drove the PLO out of Lebanon and used terror attacks on the Lebanese population.

    Going worldwide, Israel uses its intelligence service, Mossad, to assassinate foreign scientists, military hardware suppliers, Palestinian activists, and those who harmed Israelis.

    Israel displays a dual strategy in the war on terrorism. Building walls to separate Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, restricting travel between Israel and its occupied territories, scrutinizing entry at checkpoints, and cleverly surveilling all Palestinians have prevented terrorism within Israel. Provoking Palestinians into committing terrorist acts and stimulating settlers to make revenge “price tag” attacks against Palestinian communities and the military to wage war against the terrorists is the other side of the coin.

    The violence committed against the Palestinians emits a backlash from worldwide supporters of the Palestinians and causes harm to Jews. The backlash is converted into spurious charges of anti-Semitism and used to justify Israel’s actions.

    Add it up and Israel is an apartheid country, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people, a triple combination that no nation in all history has been able to equal. The Israeli government and its worldwide public relations machine convince the world it is an innocent victim of Hezbollah terrorists, Hamas terrorists, anti-Semites, surviving Nazis, liberal misfits, and disoriented people who cannot get out of the way of bullets and bombs. Western governments pay no heed to the triple play.

    Russian Federation

    A reported 1,312 terrorist attacks caused 1,179 Russian deaths between 2007 and 2021 and gripped the Russian Federation. After peaking in 2009, attacks and deaths in Russia consistently declined to only one attack and two deaths in 2021. Three of the major attacks happened when Chechen insurgents attacked apartment buildings in Moscow in September 1999, killing 200 people and injuring several hundred; on October 23, 2002, when Chechen insurgents attacked the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and an estimated 129 people were killed during the rescue operation, and during September 1–3, 2004, when Chechen and Ingush insurgents attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and held more than 1,100 hostages. A careless rescue operation caused more than 300 deaths, including 186 children.

    Terrorism arose from a combination of extremist ethno-nationalist and Islamist militants from North Caucasus’s republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkariya. The dual nature of terrorism ─ people seeking more autonomy and extremists seeking more Islam complicated the Kremlin’s strategy to combat terrorism.

    In retaliation for Chechnya terrorist attacks in Moscow, Russian troops invaded the Republic of Chechnya, a name whose roll from the lips has an endearing quality. Massive and indiscriminate bombings of cities and villages that caused high civilian casualties, herding of people into camps, extra-judicial killings, torture, and disappearances occurred from both sides and made it difficult to ascertain, who were the ‘good guys’ and who were the ‘bad guys.’ Which side was more guilty of terrorism?

    Vladimir Putin registered his name, ruthlessness, pragmatism, and authority by resolving the Chechnya terror crisis. He followed Abraham Lincoln’s pattern of using force and making friends with the enemy. Putin convinced Akhmad Kadyrov, Chief Mufti of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the 1990s, to switch sides. Kadyrov later became the President of the Chechen Republic. Grozny has been rebuilt and Chechnya exists on multi-billion-dollar subsidies from Moscow.

    Grozny

    Recognizing that Islamist insurgents in the North Caucasus were loosely allied with al-Qaeda’s network and many traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, the Russian president realized that joining Syria in its civil war against ISIS was a means of preventing the Islamic extremists from extending their reach. Decimating the central authorities of the terrorist campaigns would subdue the morale and incentives of the al-Qaeda “look-alikes” on Russian soil. Without having to use Russian ground troops, and air force pilots not facing challenges in the sky, support of the be-sieged al-Assad regime was a “win-win proposition for Moscow. Putin’s strategy to combat terrorism has been successful — ISIS and al-Qaeda are mostly gone from the Arab lands of the Middle East (still in Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa) and the Russian Federation has had no terrorist attacks in the last two years.

    China

    A shadowy and shifting group of Uyghur separatists is responsible for terrorism committed against Chinese authorities and citizens. Incomplete statistics from The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China show that “from 1990 to the end of 2016, separatist, terrorist, and extremist forces launched thousands of attacks in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers, and causing immeasurable damage to property.” From 1990 to 2001 the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which proposes the establishment of a fundamentalist Muslim state, “was responsible for over 200 acts of terrorism, resulting in at least 162 deaths and 440 injuries.”

    Two of the reported and more serious terrorist attacks.

    On May 22, 2014, five terrorists drove two SUVs through the fence of the morning fair of North Park Road of Saybagh District, Urumqi, into the crowd and detonated a bomb that claimed the lives of 39 and left 94 injured.

    On 1 March 2014, a group of 8 knife-wielding terrorists attacked passengers in the Kunming Railway Station in Kunming, Yunnan, China, killing 31 people, and wounding 143 others. The attackers pulled out long-bladed knives and stabbed and slashed passengers at random.

    A more complete description of the terrorist attacks is available in an article by The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China.

    As the terrorist attacks rose, Beijing had one strategy ─ ruthlessly seek out the perpetrators. “In the period 2013–2017 police arrested 330,918 in the province, 7.3 percent of total arrests in China. This compares to 81,443 arrests in the previous five years. In March 2019, Chinese officials said that they had arrested more than 13,000 militants in Xinjiang since 2014.”

    Realizing their strategy had developed into a “tit-for-tat” operation, where each blow against the terrorist apparatus was countered by a blow against Chinese, the Chinese government changed its strategy. In 2014, China launched the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism in Xinjiang and combined the use of force with initiatives that integrated the Uyghur populations into Chinese society and improved their standard of living. The new strategy has been successful — no reported terror attacks in recent years, the GDP of a stagnant Xinjiang province increased from 963 billion yuan in 2016 to 1,774  billion yuan in 2022, and the unemployment rate decreased from 2.48 percent to 2.04 percent during the same interval.

    While Western media accuses China of destroying mosques, the Xinjiang Islamic Association states, “There are some 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang. Many in the region were built in the 1980s and 1990s or earlier, but some of these mud-and-brick structures (ED: the demolished Kargilik’s Grand Mosque was a mud-and-brick structure) or small buildings were not well maintained or repaired. They became unsafe for religious activities and posed a serious threat in the event of an earthquake. The mosques were also inadequately designed, making worship difficult.”

    Kashgar’s Id Kah Mosque

    Before Renovation

    After Renovation

    Conclusion

    Terrorism’s principal strategy is to inflict pain, pain, and more pain on a civilian population until the civilian population’s government agrees to their demands. Governments may care but always place national interests above that of the local population. The struggle to overcome terrorism has had two principal strategies

    (1)    Give ‘em nothing and fight them until the death, and

    (2)    Use force to keep terrorism contained and offer benefits that will satisfy some grievances and lower the temperature until the heat becomes normal.

    The United States pursued the ‘fight until death’ strategy. After excessive deaths from the ongoing terrorism and civilians caught in the battles, the U.S. appears to have won the war; terrorism in the Middle East has declined to an acceptable level.

    Israel has pursued a strategy of “we can outdo all terrorist attacks by being more terrorist than the terrorists.” Pushing the oppressed Palestinians into terrorist attacks enables Israel to respond tenfold to the attack on its populace. Terrorizing opposition in other nations is neatly performed by false charges of anti-Semitism, cyber attacks, and, when necessary, Mossad hitmen.

    Russia went from ‘fight until death’ to offering the leaders of domestic terrorism a good bribe and letting them take care of it. Total force was used against international terrorism. Both strategies have been successful.

    China departed from brute force to a more conciliatory strategy that recognized the wants of the Uyghurs and devised plans to satisfy the population. Most successful of all of the strategies.

    Each nation that confronts terrorism may have unique characteristics that shape the terrorism and the response to it. This investigation shows that Chinese President Xi-Jinping eventually realized the exact nature of the terrorism his country was experiencing and accepted a plan that quickly solved the problem. Russian President Vladimir Putin also was pragmatic and changed his stance as events unfolded. Soon afterward, Russia had no more terrorism.

    For Israel, terrorism is part of the daily diet. Israel commits terrorism, Israel invites terrorism, Israel commits terrorism, Invites terrorism, on and on until there will be none.

    The United States invited terrorism by helping Pakistan’s intelligence fortify Osama bin Laden, not listening to the al-Qaeda leader’s grievances, and invading Iraq. In 1998, bin Laden demanded the expulsion of all American soldiers from the Arabian Peninsula and voiced objections to a U.S. foreign policy that armed Israel. Did U.S. troops need a base in Saudi Arabia? Why has the U.S. had close ties with the apartheid country, which is the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people? Assuredly, the date 9/11 would just be another day on the calendar if U.S. administrations understood the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed.

    The post Wars on Terrorism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Germany to propose new sanctions against Russia after death of Alexei Navalny

    Death of Russian opposition leader imbues EU summit with renewed nervousness over war in Ukraine

    Germany is to propose a new batch of sanctions against Russia over the death of Alexei Navalny as EU ministers meet his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, in Brussels.

    “We have seen the brutal force with which the Russian president represses his own citizens who take to the streets to demonstrate for freedom or write about it in newspapers,” the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said on Monday. “We will propose new sanctions in light of the death of Alexei Navalny.”

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Family Of Four Feared Dead In Russian Missile Strike On Kramatorsk, Ukrainian Officials Say

    Aleksei Navalny’s family and close associates have confirmed the Russian opposition politician’s death in an Arctic prison and have demanded his body be handed over, but officials have refused to release it, telling his lawyers and mother that an “investigation” of the causes would only be completed next week.

    “Aleksei’s lawyer and his mother have arrived at the morgue in Salekhard,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on X, referring to the capital of the region of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny’s prison is located.

    “It’s closed. However, the [prison] has assured them it’s working and Navalny’s body is there. The lawyer called the phone number which was on the door. He was told he was the seventh caller today. Aleksei’s body is not in the morgue,” she added.

    Yarmysh then said in a new message: “An hour ago, the lawyers were told that the check was completed and no crime had been found. They literally lie every time, drive in circles and cover their tracks.”

    But in a third message, she said, “Now the Investigative Committee directly says that until the check is completed, Aleksei’s body will not be given to relatives.”

    Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov, who currently resides abroad, said that Navalny’s mother was told her son had died of a cardiac-arrest illness.

    “When the lawyer and Aleksei’s mother arrived at the colony this morning, they were told that the cause of Navalny’s death was sudden death syndrome,” Zhdanov said.

    Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, who traveled to the Yamalo-Nenets region some 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, was earlier informed that the Kremlin critic died at the “Arctic Wolf” prison on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to Yarmish.

    Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer who has represented Russian human rights activists, told Current Time that “what is happening is not accidental.”

    “The Russian authorities will do everything not to turn over the body in time or certainly not to conduct a forensic medical examination,” Prokhorov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

    The penitentiary service said in a statement on February 16 that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and subsequently lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him but he died, the statement added.

    Navalny, a longtime anti-corruption fighter and Russia’s most-prominent opposition politician for over a decade, was 47.

    His death sparked an immediate outpouring of grief among many Russians, while leaders around the world condenmed the death of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest critic, blaming the Russian president directly for the death.

    Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers meeting in Munich on the sidelines of a security conference held a minute’s silence for Navalny on February 17. The G7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

    In a joint statement released by Italy, the ministers expressed their “outrage at the death in detention of Aleksei Navalny, unjustly sentenced for legitimate political activities and his fight against corruption.”

    Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that “for his ideas and his fight for freedom and against corruption in Russia, Navalny was in fact led to his death.”

    “Russia must shed light on his death and stop the unacceptable repression of political dissent,” he added.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the death of Navalny showed that it is impossible to see Putin as a legitimate leader.

    “Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone who seems like a target to him,” Zelenskiy told the Munich Security Conference on February 17.

    Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, told RFE/RL in Munich that Navalny will be remembered as someone who sacrificed his life for his country.

    “Putin wants to be remembered as a ruler of Russia. But Navalny will be remembered in a different way because Navalny died for his country rather than for killing other people.”

    “He tried to show that other things are possible [in Russia] and we’ll never know what kind of leader he would have been,” he added.

    Navalny’s vision for change in Russia will be kept alive by his team, his spokeswoman Yarmysh said. “We lost our leader, but we didn’t lose our ideas and our beliefs,” Yarmysh told Reuters via Zoom, speaking from an undisclosed location.

    Navalny’s death was a “very sad day” for Russia, and must lead to international action, the wife of a former Russian agent killed by radiation poisoning said on February 17.

    Marina Litvinenko, whose husband Aleksandr died of radiation poisoning in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium at a meeting with Russian agents at a London hotel, told AFP she had sympathy for Navalny’s wife, Yulia.

    The Kremlin, which Navalny said was behind a poison attack that almost killed him in 2020, has angrily denied it played any role in Navalny’s death and rejected the “absolutely rabid” reaction of Western leaders.

    Inside Russia, people continued to mourn the death of the anti-corruption crusader despite official media paying little attention to his death and efforts to remove any tributes to him.

    At least 340 people have been detained in 30 cities and towns in Russia on February 16 and 17 after they came to pay tribute, include laying flowers, to the memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia.

    On February 17, police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people there as well as in another Siberian city, Surgut, OVD-Info said.

    In Moscow, people came to lay flowers at the “Wall of Sorrow” memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov on February 17. Riot police immediately moved in and more than 15 people were arrested, the Sota news outlet reported.

    In St. Petersburg, an Orthodox priest was detained on February 17 after he announced he would hold a memorial service for Navalny.

    Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko was detained near his home as he was going to the Solovetsky Stone memorial dedicated to Soviet victims of political repression.

    He was remanded in custody and was to be presented to a judge on February 19, the site 24liveblog.com reported.

    However, a memorial service was performed by a different Orthodox priest at the site, in the presence of several people, some of whom were detained after the service was completed.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ukraine Warns Of Border Crossing Shutdown Amid Polish Farmers’ Protest

    Aleksei Navalny’s family and close associates have confirmed the Russian opposition politician’s death in an Arctic prison and have demanded his body be handed over, but officials have refused to release it, telling his lawyers and mother that an “investigation” of the causes would only be completed next week.

    “Aleksei’s lawyer and his mother have arrived at the morgue in Salekhard,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on X, referring to the capital of the region of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny’s prison is located.

    “It’s closed. However, the [prison] has assured them it’s working and Navalny’s body is there. The lawyer called the phone number which was on the door. He was told he was the seventh caller today. Aleksei’s body is not in the morgue,” she added.

    Yarmysh then said in a new message: “An hour ago, the lawyers were told that the check was completed and no crime had been found. They literally lie every time, drive in circles and cover their tracks.”

    But in a third message, she said, “Now the Investigative Committee directly says that until the check is completed, Aleksei’s body will not be given to relatives.”

    Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov, who currently resides abroad, said that Navalny’s mother was told her son had died of a cardiac-arrest illness.

    “When the lawyer and Aleksei’s mother arrived at the colony this morning, they were told that the cause of Navalny’s death was sudden death syndrome,” Zhdanov said.

    Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, who traveled to the Yamalo-Nenets region some 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, was earlier informed that the Kremlin critic died at the “Arctic Wolf” prison on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to Yarmish.

    Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer who has represented Russian human rights activists, told Current Time that “what is happening is not accidental.”

    “The Russian authorities will do everything not to turn over the body in time or certainly not to conduct a forensic medical examination,” Prokhorov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

    The penitentiary service said in a statement on February 16 that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and subsequently lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him but he died, the statement added.

    Navalny, a longtime anti-corruption fighter and Russia’s most-prominent opposition politician for over a decade, was 47.

    His death sparked an immediate outpouring of grief among many Russians, while leaders around the world condenmed the death of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest critic, blaming the Russian president directly for the death.

    Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers meeting in Munich on the sidelines of a security conference held a minute’s silence for Navalny on February 17. The G7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

    In a joint statement released by Italy, the ministers expressed their “outrage at the death in detention of Aleksei Navalny, unjustly sentenced for legitimate political activities and his fight against corruption.”

    Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that “for his ideas and his fight for freedom and against corruption in Russia, Navalny was in fact led to his death.”

    “Russia must shed light on his death and stop the unacceptable repression of political dissent,” he added.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the death of Navalny showed that it is impossible to see Putin as a legitimate leader.

    “Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone who seems like a target to him,” Zelenskiy told the Munich Security Conference on February 17.

    Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, told RFE/RL in Munich that Navalny will be remembered as someone who sacrificed his life for his country.

    “Putin wants to be remembered as a ruler of Russia. But Navalny will be remembered in a different way because Navalny died for his country rather than for killing other people.”

    “He tried to show that other things are possible [in Russia] and we’ll never know what kind of leader he would have been,” he added.

    Navalny’s vision for change in Russia will be kept alive by his team, his spokeswoman Yarmysh said. “We lost our leader, but we didn’t lose our ideas and our beliefs,” Yarmysh told Reuters via Zoom, speaking from an undisclosed location.

    Navalny’s death was a “very sad day” for Russia, and must lead to international action, the wife of a former Russian agent killed by radiation poisoning said on February 17.

    Marina Litvinenko, whose husband Aleksandr died of radiation poisoning in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium at a meeting with Russian agents at a London hotel, told AFP she had sympathy for Navalny’s wife, Yulia.

    The Kremlin, which Navalny said was behind a poison attack that almost killed him in 2020, has angrily denied it played any role in Navalny’s death and rejected the “absolutely rabid” reaction of Western leaders.

    Inside Russia, people continued to mourn the death of the anti-corruption crusader despite official media paying little attention to his death and efforts to remove any tributes to him.

    At least 340 people have been detained in 30 cities and towns in Russia on February 16 and 17 after they came to pay tribute, include laying flowers, to the memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia.

    On February 17, police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people there as well as in another Siberian city, Surgut, OVD-Info said.

    In Moscow, people came to lay flowers at the “Wall of Sorrow” memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov on February 17. Riot police immediately moved in and more than 15 people were arrested, the Sota news outlet reported.

    In St. Petersburg, an Orthodox priest was detained on February 17 after he announced he would hold a memorial service for Navalny.

    Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko was detained near his home as he was going to the Solovetsky Stone memorial dedicated to Soviet victims of political repression.

    He was remanded in custody and was to be presented to a judge on February 19, the site 24liveblog.com reported.

    However, a memorial service was performed by a different Orthodox priest at the site, in the presence of several people, some of whom were detained after the service was completed.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Journalism and Entertainment

    This week former Fox News commentator, now self-employed audio-visual journalist, Tucker Carlson interviewed the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. According to his own account, it was a mission opposed—secretly by the agencies of the “Vatican on the Potomac” and with it the hierarchy of the American Church. A summary of the sermons and homilies published by its national and international propaganda organs indicates concerted efforts to spin this encounter in ways that profess the faith and confirm the purported apostasy of the successor to that patriarch of the beloved if short-lived Russian-American Church, Boris Yeltsin.

    Carlson has acquired a wide and varied following not only because of the topics he began to cover but by some things conspicuously absent from the broadcasting and cable genre in which he made his career—a robust sense of humor and allowing the people to whom he talks to speak without rude interruptions. Throughout the illegal and unconstitutional mass incarcerations starting in 2020 he insisted without reservation that Americans have rights that are being violated. George Carlin would have said their temporary privileges had been suspended or revoked. As a personally wealthy individual from an establishment background, Carlson is essentially a believer in the status quo or at least the status quo of the era in which he grew up. As a media professional he is sensitive to the way the business works and the role people like him play in it. He does not pretend to identify with everyone he meets. Despite his clearly conservative position he has acquired a reputation for sincerity throughout what is called “alternative journalism”. There was an age, long forgotten by many, when a journalist of reputation or representing a major media outlet did not have to explain publicly why he chose to report on something or talk to somebody. The fact that Tucker Carlson felt compelled to give several introductory explanations for speaking to the elected leader of a major nation with whom his country has been at war (unofficially since 1917) reflects the dismal state of affairs even in a profession subject to corruption since its institutionalization by magnates like Pulitzer, Hearst, Rothermere and Beaverbrook.

    By his own admission, Carlson was surprised at among other things the history lesson he was given in the first third of the interview. One might ask if in the course of his preparation he had viewed Oliver Stone’s extensive interviews with the Russian president in 2017? Anyone who watched them would not have been surprised by Vladimir Putin’s style or substance. Stone, who had much more time, asked many of the same questions Carlson asked. In those interviews President Putin was very detailed in his answers with frequent historical explanations given as context. Perhaps that is what most surprised Carlson since the absence of context is the primary characteristic of what passes for journalism in the West. However Tucker Carlson, began no later than the 22 February 2022 Russian intervention, to add context and history to his own reporting. What is more logic acquired a greater role than dogma. So what role was Tucker Carlson performing?

    Perhaps his questions were formulated to simulate the kind of bar, living room and dinner table discussions his viewers are likely to have when the subjects of Putin or Russia are raised. If one wants to inform a notoriously isolated and ignorant population one has to start with their knowledge base and the things they are likely to ask. President Putin asked Carlson after the first question, was this a talk show or a serious conversation? By surrendering to a serious conversation he was breaching the unstated barrier of all domestic political gossip and chatter. Yet it was too late to change either his style or his pattern of questions. Without diminishing the value of the interview as a whole, it is worth considering the role model upon which Carlson explicitly drew. He has mentioned Barbara Walters. Those who can still recall her career in American television will remember how she became the first woman to co-anchor that TV slot for the nightly news. She replaced Chet Huntley after he died to share the NBC show with David Brinkley. Then she went on to conduct “star” interviews with world leaders. Those performances raised the TV presenter to a certain mutual celebrity in the penumbra of the personality interviewed. It also created a new platform for selected leaders to be displayed to a mass television audience, not unlike the 1969 broadcast of the putative moon landings. Political leaders obtained a new kind of pulpit with this precursor to the ubiquitous talk show. Performers from the news theater genre were able to enhance their credibility as conduits for official views presented in living room conversation format. David Frost was the master of this format- although even his famous Nixon interviews were just a bit too English for an average US audience (unless sedated by Masterpiece Theater episodes). Barbara Walters in contrast was the Maria Callas of the grand interview. At least Maria Callas knew she was only a performer and used her own voice. Tucker Carlson can be forgiven for avoiding the David Frost style. However had he learned something from Oliver Stone he might have transcended the living room TV style and focussed on things Americans and Westerners really need to understand.

    Repeated questions to Vladimir Putin were couched in phrases like “why do you think America does something?” From the Stone interviews he would have learned that the Russian president does not try to guess why other people act as they do. He merely describes the actions as he sees them and what he thinks they mean for Russia. Carlson’s approach indirectly reflects the absence (or impossibility) of any serious questioning by Americans as to why their government acts as it does? Vladimir Putin pointed both Stone and Carlson toward home saying essentially- Ask the people who act for their reasons. I can only tell you why we act as we do. The critical viewer will immediately recognize that Western policy is never honestly explained. Hence while the whole world (except the citizens of NATO countries) can know why the Russian Federation acts, no one has an honest answer from those in the West who drive US actions.

    Another curious aspect of the interview is Carlson’s questions about diplomacy and the implied question about the “special services”. Tucker Carlson’s father was a journalist working with the American “special services” or other government agencies. The level of passive and active cooperation between the corporate media and the CIA (or FBI) is a matter of record. Originally discrete, they even operate overtly today. As a former intelligence officer (like George H W Bush), the Russian president respects the rules by which those services operate. In contrast to the legions of CIA assets in the US and the West as a whole, Vladimir Putin neither denies this stage in his career nor does he trivialize the functions these services perform. Yet he comes just short of suggesting that the lead Western services drive policy. In contrast one hears little to indicate that the Russian president is run by his country’s covert action branch. Does Carlson appreciate this difference? Vladimir Putin answers Carlson with the rhetorical question, who is Boris Johnson? To which Carlson seemed to have no answer. Again a critical viewer could understand the insinuation. Boris Johnson, who was no longer British prime minister was in Kiev on someone’s behalf. Johnson himself, unlike a member of the Biden family, had no obvious personal interest in Ukraine. Yet his words were apparently enough to destroy the Istanbul format where Russia and Ukraine had initialed accords that according to President Putin would have ended the war. So on whose behalf was the backbencher sent? What did he offer or threaten to persuade Kiev to renounce what they had already accepted? Even if Tucker Carlson did not know the answer the question was hard to overlook.

    Already before FOX sacked him Tucker Carlson had begun to question the appearances of government in the US. However little attention has been paid to the “secret team”, the term Prouty used to describe the permanent government, and how it rules and disseminates propaganda. So little critical attention is given to covert government because it also transcends the political and social categories in which the mass and sacraments of the American Church are celebrated. Carlson ended his interview with questions couched in the language of Christian catechism. He asked the Russian president, as a Christian, if he would not act in accordance with a platitude of that same Sunday school version of Christianity characteristic of the West: “why don’t you turn the other cheek?” Sensibly Vladimir Putin responded as a head of state and not a pupil summoned to the principal’s office for fighting on the playground. He said with calm neutrality that the West was more “pragmatic” than Russia. Without demeaning the West, Vladimir Putin answered in a way deeply consistent with the Orthodox Christianity overthrown by Rome in the Fourth Crusade. His conviction was that Russians had a life and soul that were indivisible. The implication was that the West in its pragmatism could dispense with one or the other.

    Certainly the enormous viewer numbers Tucker Carlson reaches will uniquely benefit if they really listen to the conversation. Nonetheless the legacy of Walters will be hard to transcend. Carlson as the celebrity interviewer risks not just being unheard. There is still the opportunity for a new news entertainment brand to emerge by which the medium remains the message. Tucker Carlson then would join the pantheon of celebrity with surprising but increasingly superficial product. The Church has always known how to absorb divergence into entertainment (if it could not be suppressed) and its grand corporate successors, who Putin correctly identified as directly or indirectly controlling almost all the world‘s mass media, have refined those methods using both natural and artificial intelligence.

    The post Journalism and Entertainment first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Word Like Peace Is Faster Than the Bullet of War


    Erik Bulatov (USSR), Horizon, 1971–72.

    On 26 January, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) announced the start of a massive military exercise called Steadfast Defender 2024 that will continue until the end of May. Over 90,000 troops from NATO countries (and one partner country, Sweden), including fifty naval groups and more than eighty air platforms, will deploy in thirteen countries to demonstrate the alliance’s capacity and ‘send a robust message about its readiness to protect all Allies in the face of emerging threats’. Of the thirty-one NATO member states, six share borders with Russia (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Norway). This NATO exercise comes just as the European Union announced that it will provide Ukraine with €50 billion in financial support between now and 2027, a reduction compared to the North Atlantic support over the past two years. As public support for the war in Ukraine declines in the Global North states, governments have decided to ramp up tensions along the Russian border through NATO.

    Following the announcement of the Steadfast Defender 2024 exercise, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg travelled to the United States and met US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon. Interestingly, their public comments did not express a shred of concern for the Ukrainian people. Stoltenberg referred instead to the Global North’s anxiety about Russia and China, saying that support for Ukraine is ‘an investment in our own security because the world will become more dangerous if President Putin wins in Ukraine’, warning that the result of this conflict ‘is also closely watched in China’. So, it is not the Ukrainians and their wellbeing that matters but the geostrategic necessity for the Global North to see Russia (and by implication, China) ‘weakened’, as Austin said in Kyiv two years earlier.

    To shed light on this conflict, its global implications, and the possibility of peace, the rest of this newsletter is dedicated to No Cold War’s briefing no. 12: The War in Ukraine Must End.

    Two years ago, on 24 February 2022, Russian forces entered Ukraine. This act was not the start of the war in Ukraine. Rather, it was the acceleration of a conflict that dates back to at least 2014. That year, at the behest of the United States, a new government was imposed on Ukraine, aiming to bring the country closer to the European Union. This initiated the sustained persecution of the country’s Russian-speaking population. The conflict moved swiftly, with Crimea de facto becoming part of Russia once again and the Donbass region of Ukraine becoming a frontline in the conflict between Ukrainian far-right nationalists and Russian speakers. In May 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took office and pledged to end the battle in the Donbass. Instead, due to pressure from NATO, the conflict intensified, eventually leading to the Russian intervention three years later. It is imperative for the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the world that the war be halted and that the issues be transferred from the battlefield to the negotiating table.


    Tuyo (Germany), Elephant, 2021.

    What has been the impact of the war?

    In any conflict, casualty figures become a matter of dispute. However, there is little disagreement that over 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have died or been injured in this war, that over six million Ukrainians have fled the country, and that over seven million Ukrainians have been internally displaced (out of a pre-war population of nearly 44 million). If the war is not brought to a halt, tens of thousands more will be killed and tens of millions more will suffer.

    Ukraine’s economy has been devastated, shrinking by 29% in 2022 alone, according to the World Bank. The impact of the war ricocheted across the globe, causing wheat prices to rise by 21% and some fertilisers to rise by 40% within the first month of the conflict. Global South countries were hit particularly hard by sharp increases in food and energy prices in many regions while the European economy inches towards a recession. In other countries, astronomic amounts of resources have been diverted to the war which instead could have been used for social and economic spending. The US and Europe have already spent well over $200 billion on the war. In December 2023, the head of the Ukrainian armed forces asked US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin for a further $350–400 billion to pursue ‘victory’.

    In reality, no amount of money will lead to a military triumph. It is clear, particularly after the failure of the Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive’, that there has been no significant change in the military situation, nor is there a credible prospect of one. The continued payment of such huge human and economic costs would be purposeless.


    Alexey Kryukov (Russia), Безмолвие. Саур-Могила (‘Silence – Saur-Mogila’), 2017.

    What issues need to be resolved?

    1) The position of Ukraine regarding military blocs. At the end of the Cold War, Europe had an opportunity to pursue peaceful economic development. A coherent and balanced economy with enormous potential could have been formed by reducing military spending while combining Western Europe’s high value-added manufacturing and service industries with the former Soviet Union’s energy, raw materials, agriculture, and high-technology industries such as space. In East Asia, which overcame a period of even greater Cold War division and conflict (as seen in the Korean and successive Vietnam and Indochina wars), a focus on mutually beneficial economic development and an avoidance of military and political blocs led it to become the world’s most rapidly growing economic region. This is evidenced by the fact that, since 1990, the GDP of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has grown by more than 400%. However, in Europe, the US insisted that such policies not be followed and that, instead, the region was to expand the NATO military bloc into Eastern Europe, breaking the commitment it had made at the time of German reunification that NATO would not advance ‘one inch eastward’ towards Russia. The US was fully aware that NATO’s expansion would greatly inflame tensions with Russia and across Europe. Of particular sensitivity was the possibility of Ukraine’s entry into NATO, which would bring the nuclear-armed bloc within immediate striking range of Moscow. Numerous experts on Eastern Europe and Russia strongly and repeatedly advised against such expansion of NATO. Most famously, George Kennan, the original architect of US Cold War policy, predicted in 1997 that, ‘expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. In December 2021, Russia proposed an agreement that Ukraine would not become a NATO member. In negotiations in March 2022, Ukraine proposed adopting a neutral status in exchange for security guarantees, inspired by NATO’s collective defence clause, which could have involved Poland, Israel, Turkey, and Canada as guarantors. This was blocked by NATO, directly conveyed by way of an urgent visit from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Ukraine in May 2022, thereby preventing a rapid end of the war.

    2) The position of the Russian-speaking minority in the territory of the Ukrainian state (as it was formed in 1991). A 2001 census found that nearly 30% of Ukraine’s population considered Russian to be their native language. States with large linguistic and ethnic minority populations can only maintain their unity if the rights of such minorities are respected. The policies of the Ukrainian government after 2014, which included suppressing the official use of the Russian language in numerous spheres, were therefore bound to lead to an explosive crisis within the Ukrainian state. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which certainly cannot be accused of being pro-Russian, stated: ‘the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019’. There are only two ways to resolve this situation: restoration of the full linguistic and other rights of the Russian-speaking minority within the borders of the old Ukrainian state or the secession of these regions from Ukraine. Which outcome is realised will be a key subject of the negotiations. Nonetheless, it is clear that any attempt to maintain the Russian-speaking minority within the Ukrainian state while continuing to deprive them of their rights will not succeed, nor will any attempt by Russia to impose another state on the Ukrainian-speaking population of western and northern Ukraine.

    All efforts to resolve these issues by military means will continue to be futile and will only result in further intense suffering, above all for the Ukrainian people. These realities will become increasingly obvious if the war continues – which is why it must be brought to a halt as rapidly as possible and negotiations must commence.


    Mahamoudou Zinkone ‘Babs’ (Burkina Faso), Maquis Las Palmas, 2015.

    In 1961, the Soviet poet Volodymyr Mikolayovich Sosiura wrote a song on the power of words. Sosiura was born in Debaltseve (which is today in Donetsk) in 1898 within the Tsarist empire and died as a member of the communist party in Kyiv in 1965. He wrote several poems that oscillated between his patriotic love for Ukraine and his commitment to the Soviet Union and to the communist struggle. Above all else, Sosiura – who fought in World War I in Bakhmut and then later joined the Red Army – had a great disdain for war. He recognised the importance of the war against the Nazis, but – like many of his generation – bemoaned the terrible loss of life incurred by this war, such as the 27 million Soviet citizens who died in the fight to defeat the Nazi armies, amongst them 19 million civilians. This was the context of Sosiura’s beautiful poem about words:

    I know the power of the word.
    It is sharper than a bayonet
    and faster than even a bullet,
    Faster than an airplane.

    …

    Oh, weapon of happiness: word!
    I am used to living beside you.
    You are a flower in love,
    you are a bayonet in hate.

    The post A Word Like Peace Is Faster Than the Bullet of War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • They’re Lying about Alexei Navalny “Putin’s Enemy”

    Was Alexei Navalny really Putin’s main opponent? Was he poisoned by the Russian government who then killed him in prison? Was he even popular in Russia? Well, no to all of those things and we show you what the West will not tell you while they mourn their favorite media darling.

    The post They’re Lying about Alexei Navalny “Putin’s Enemy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Germany Says Helped U.S. Shut Down Russian Computer Spy Network

    Aleksei Navalny’s family and close associates have confirmed the Russian opposition politician’s death in an Arctic prison and have demanded his body be handed over, but officials have refused to release it, telling his lawyers and mother that an “investigation” of the causes would only be completed next week.

    “Aleksei’s lawyer and his mother have arrived at the morgue in Salekhard,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on X, referring to the capital of the region of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny’s prison is located.

    “It’s closed. However, the [prison] has assured them it’s working and Navalny’s body is there. The lawyer called the phone number which was on the door. He was told he was the seventh caller today. Aleksei’s body is not in the morgue,” she added.

    Yarmysh then said in a new message: “An hour ago, the lawyers were told that the check was completed and no crime had been found. They literally lie every time, drive in circles and cover their tracks.”

    But in a third message, she said, “Now the Investigative Committee directly says that until the check is completed, Aleksei’s body will not be given to relatives.”

    Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov, who currently resides abroad, said that Navalny’s mother was told her son had died of a cardiac-arrest illness.

    “When the lawyer and Aleksei’s mother arrived at the colony this morning, they were told that the cause of Navalny’s death was sudden death syndrome,” Zhdanov said.

    Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, who traveled to the Yamalo-Nenets region some 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, was earlier informed that the Kremlin critic died at the “Arctic Wolf” prison on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to Yarmish.

    Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer who has represented Russian human rights activists, told Current Time that “what is happening is not accidental.”

    “The Russian authorities will do everything not to turn over the body in time or certainly not to conduct a forensic medical examination,” Prokhorov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

    The penitentiary service said in a statement on February 16 that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and subsequently lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him but he died, the statement added.

    Navalny, a longtime anti-corruption fighter and Russia’s most-prominent opposition politician for over a decade, was 47.

    His death sparked an immediate outpouring of grief among many Russians, while leaders around the world condenmed the death of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest critic, blaming the Russian president directly for the death.

    Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers meeting in Munich on the sidelines of a security conference held a minute’s silence for Navalny on February 17. The G7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

    In a joint statement released by Italy, the ministers expressed their “outrage at the death in detention of Aleksei Navalny, unjustly sentenced for legitimate political activities and his fight against corruption.”

    Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that “for his ideas and his fight for freedom and against corruption in Russia, Navalny was in fact led to his death.”

    “Russia must shed light on his death and stop the unacceptable repression of political dissent,” he added.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the death of Navalny showed that it is impossible to see Putin as a legitimate leader.

    “Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone who seems like a target to him,” Zelenskiy told the Munich Security Conference on February 17.

    Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, told RFE/RL in Munich that Navalny will be remembered as someone who sacrificed his life for his country.

    “Putin wants to be remembered as a ruler of Russia. But Navalny will be remembered in a different way because Navalny died for his country rather than for killing other people.”

    “He tried to show that other things are possible [in Russia] and we’ll never know what kind of leader he would have been,” he added.

    Navalny’s vision for change in Russia will be kept alive by his team, his spokeswoman Yarmysh said. “We lost our leader, but we didn’t lose our ideas and our beliefs,” Yarmysh told Reuters via Zoom, speaking from an undisclosed location.

    Navalny’s death was a “very sad day” for Russia, and must lead to international action, the wife of a former Russian agent killed by radiation poisoning said on February 17.

    Marina Litvinenko, whose husband Aleksandr died of radiation poisoning in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium at a meeting with Russian agents at a London hotel, told AFP she had sympathy for Navalny’s wife, Yulia.

    The Kremlin, which Navalny said was behind a poison attack that almost killed him in 2020, has angrily denied it played any role in Navalny’s death and rejected the “absolutely rabid” reaction of Western leaders.

    Inside Russia, people continued to mourn the death of the anti-corruption crusader despite official media paying little attention to his death and efforts to remove any tributes to him.

    At least 340 people have been detained in 30 cities and towns in Russia on February 16 and 17 after they came to pay tribute, include laying flowers, to the memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia.

    On February 17, police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people there as well as in another Siberian city, Surgut, OVD-Info said.

    In Moscow, people came to lay flowers at the “Wall of Sorrow” memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov on February 17. Riot police immediately moved in and more than 15 people were arrested, the Sota news outlet reported.

    In St. Petersburg, an Orthodox priest was detained on February 17 after he announced he would hold a memorial service for Navalny.

    Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko was detained near his home as he was going to the Solovetsky Stone memorial dedicated to Soviet victims of political repression.

    He was remanded in custody and was to be presented to a judge on February 19, the site 24liveblog.com reported.

    However, a memorial service was performed by a different Orthodox priest at the site, in the presence of several people, some of whom were detained after the service was completed.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Hungary Can Soon Ratify Sweden’s NATO Bid, Orban Says

    Aleksei Navalny’s family and close associates have confirmed the Russian opposition politician’s death in an Arctic prison and have demanded his body be handed over, but officials have refused to release it, telling his lawyers and mother that an “investigation” of the causes would only be completed next week.

    “Aleksei’s lawyer and his mother have arrived at the morgue in Salekhard,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on X, referring to the capital of the region of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny’s prison is located.

    “It’s closed. However, the [prison] has assured them it’s working and Navalny’s body is there. The lawyer called the phone number which was on the door. He was told he was the seventh caller today. Aleksei’s body is not in the morgue,” she added.

    Yarmysh then said in a new message: “An hour ago, the lawyers were told that the check was completed and no crime had been found. They literally lie every time, drive in circles and cover their tracks.”

    But in a third message, she said, “Now the Investigative Committee directly says that until the check is completed, Aleksei’s body will not be given to relatives.”

    Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov, who currently resides abroad, said that Navalny’s mother was told her son had died of a cardiac-arrest illness.

    “When the lawyer and Aleksei’s mother arrived at the colony this morning, they were told that the cause of Navalny’s death was sudden death syndrome,” Zhdanov said.

    Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, who traveled to the Yamalo-Nenets region some 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, was earlier informed that the Kremlin critic died at the “Arctic Wolf” prison on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to Yarmish.

    Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer who has represented Russian human rights activists, told Current Time that “what is happening is not accidental.”

    “The Russian authorities will do everything not to turn over the body in time or certainly not to conduct a forensic medical examination,” Prokhorov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

    The penitentiary service said in a statement on February 16 that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and subsequently lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him but he died, the statement added.

    Navalny, a longtime anti-corruption fighter and Russia’s most-prominent opposition politician for over a decade, was 47.

    His death sparked an immediate outpouring of grief among many Russians, while leaders around the world condenmed the death of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest critic, blaming the Russian president directly for the death.

    Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers meeting in Munich on the sidelines of a security conference held a minute’s silence for Navalny on February 17. The G7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

    In a joint statement released by Italy, the ministers expressed their “outrage at the death in detention of Aleksei Navalny, unjustly sentenced for legitimate political activities and his fight against corruption.”

    Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that “for his ideas and his fight for freedom and against corruption in Russia, Navalny was in fact led to his death.”

    “Russia must shed light on his death and stop the unacceptable repression of political dissent,” he added.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the death of Navalny showed that it is impossible to see Putin as a legitimate leader.

    “Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone who seems like a target to him,” Zelenskiy told the Munich Security Conference on February 17.

    Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, told RFE/RL in Munich that Navalny will be remembered as someone who sacrificed his life for his country.

    “Putin wants to be remembered as a ruler of Russia. But Navalny will be remembered in a different way because Navalny died for his country rather than for killing other people.”

    “He tried to show that other things are possible [in Russia] and we’ll never know what kind of leader he would have been,” he added.

    Navalny’s vision for change in Russia will be kept alive by his team, his spokeswoman Yarmysh said. “We lost our leader, but we didn’t lose our ideas and our beliefs,” Yarmysh told Reuters via Zoom, speaking from an undisclosed location.

    Navalny’s death was a “very sad day” for Russia, and must lead to international action, the wife of a former Russian agent killed by radiation poisoning said on February 17.

    Marina Litvinenko, whose husband Aleksandr died of radiation poisoning in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium at a meeting with Russian agents at a London hotel, told AFP she had sympathy for Navalny’s wife, Yulia.

    The Kremlin, which Navalny said was behind a poison attack that almost killed him in 2020, has angrily denied it played any role in Navalny’s death and rejected the “absolutely rabid” reaction of Western leaders.

    Inside Russia, people continued to mourn the death of the anti-corruption crusader despite official media paying little attention to his death and efforts to remove any tributes to him.

    At least 340 people have been detained in 30 cities and towns in Russia on February 16 and 17 after they came to pay tribute, include laying flowers, to the memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia.

    On February 17, police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people there as well as in another Siberian city, Surgut, OVD-Info said.

    In Moscow, people came to lay flowers at the “Wall of Sorrow” memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov on February 17. Riot police immediately moved in and more than 15 people were arrested, the Sota news outlet reported.

    In St. Petersburg, an Orthodox priest was detained on February 17 after he announced he would hold a memorial service for Navalny.

    Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko was detained near his home as he was going to the Solovetsky Stone memorial dedicated to Soviet victims of political repression.

    He was remanded in custody and was to be presented to a judge on February 19, the site 24liveblog.com reported.

    However, a memorial service was performed by a different Orthodox priest at the site, in the presence of several people, some of whom were detained after the service was completed.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Dutch PM ‘Cautiously Optimistic’ Military Aid For Ukraine Coming ‘Soon’

    Aleksei Navalny’s family and close associates have confirmed the Russian opposition politician’s death in an Arctic prison and have demanded his body be handed over, but officials have refused to release it, telling his lawyers and mother that an “investigation” of the causes would only be completed next week.

    “Aleksei’s lawyer and his mother have arrived at the morgue in Salekhard,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on X, referring to the capital of the region of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny’s prison is located.

    “It’s closed. However, the [prison] has assured them it’s working and Navalny’s body is there. The lawyer called the phone number which was on the door. He was told he was the seventh caller today. Aleksei’s body is not in the morgue,” she added.

    Yarmysh then said in a new message: “An hour ago, the lawyers were told that the check was completed and no crime had been found. They literally lie every time, drive in circles and cover their tracks.”

    But in a third message, she said, “Now the Investigative Committee directly says that until the check is completed, Aleksei’s body will not be given to relatives.”

    Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov, who currently resides abroad, said that Navalny’s mother was told her son had died of a cardiac-arrest illness.

    “When the lawyer and Aleksei’s mother arrived at the colony this morning, they were told that the cause of Navalny’s death was sudden death syndrome,” Zhdanov said.

    Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, who traveled to the Yamalo-Nenets region some 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, was earlier informed that the Kremlin critic died at the “Arctic Wolf” prison on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to Yarmish.

    Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer who has represented Russian human rights activists, told Current Time that “what is happening is not accidental.”

    “The Russian authorities will do everything not to turn over the body in time or certainly not to conduct a forensic medical examination,” Prokhorov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

    The penitentiary service said in a statement on February 16 that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and subsequently lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him but he died, the statement added.

    Navalny, a longtime anti-corruption fighter and Russia’s most-prominent opposition politician for over a decade, was 47.

    His death sparked an immediate outpouring of grief among many Russians, while leaders around the world condenmed the death of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest critic, blaming the Russian president directly for the death.

    Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers meeting in Munich on the sidelines of a security conference held a minute’s silence for Navalny on February 17. The G7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

    In a joint statement released by Italy, the ministers expressed their “outrage at the death in detention of Aleksei Navalny, unjustly sentenced for legitimate political activities and his fight against corruption.”

    Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that “for his ideas and his fight for freedom and against corruption in Russia, Navalny was in fact led to his death.”

    “Russia must shed light on his death and stop the unacceptable repression of political dissent,” he added.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the death of Navalny showed that it is impossible to see Putin as a legitimate leader.

    “Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone who seems like a target to him,” Zelenskiy told the Munich Security Conference on February 17.

    Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, told RFE/RL in Munich that Navalny will be remembered as someone who sacrificed his life for his country.

    “Putin wants to be remembered as a ruler of Russia. But Navalny will be remembered in a different way because Navalny died for his country rather than for killing other people.”

    “He tried to show that other things are possible [in Russia] and we’ll never know what kind of leader he would have been,” he added.

    Navalny’s vision for change in Russia will be kept alive by his team, his spokeswoman Yarmysh said. “We lost our leader, but we didn’t lose our ideas and our beliefs,” Yarmysh told Reuters via Zoom, speaking from an undisclosed location.

    Navalny’s death was a “very sad day” for Russia, and must lead to international action, the wife of a former Russian agent killed by radiation poisoning said on February 17.

    Marina Litvinenko, whose husband Aleksandr died of radiation poisoning in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium at a meeting with Russian agents at a London hotel, told AFP she had sympathy for Navalny’s wife, Yulia.

    The Kremlin, which Navalny said was behind a poison attack that almost killed him in 2020, has angrily denied it played any role in Navalny’s death and rejected the “absolutely rabid” reaction of Western leaders.

    Inside Russia, people continued to mourn the death of the anti-corruption crusader despite official media paying little attention to his death and efforts to remove any tributes to him.

    At least 340 people have been detained in 30 cities and towns in Russia on February 16 and 17 after they came to pay tribute, include laying flowers, to the memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia.

    On February 17, police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people there as well as in another Siberian city, Surgut, OVD-Info said.

    In Moscow, people came to lay flowers at the “Wall of Sorrow” memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov on February 17. Riot police immediately moved in and more than 15 people were arrested, the Sota news outlet reported.

    In St. Petersburg, an Orthodox priest was detained on February 17 after he announced he would hold a memorial service for Navalny.

    Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko was detained near his home as he was going to the Solovetsky Stone memorial dedicated to Soviet victims of political repression.

    He was remanded in custody and was to be presented to a judge on February 19, the site 24liveblog.com reported.

    However, a memorial service was performed by a different Orthodox priest at the site, in the presence of several people, some of whom were detained after the service was completed.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Former U.S. Ambassador To Russia ‘In Shock’ With His Friend Navalny’s Death In Prison


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia bans freedom of expression group Article 19 as ‘undesirable’

    New York, February 16, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges Russian authorities to reconsider designating international freedom of expression group Article 19 as “undesirable” and cease using the country’s “undesirable” law to intimidate organizations that report on press freedom violations in the country.

    On January 23, the Russian general prosecutor’s office outlawed Article 19 by designating it an undesirable organization, according to the register of “undesirable” organizations published by the Russian Ministry of Justice and a Thursday statement by Article 19.

    The Ministry of Justice added Article 19 to its register on February 8, and local media reported about the designation on February 12.

    Organizations that receive the undesirable classification are banned from operating in Russia, and anyone who participates in them or works to organize their activities faces up to six years in prison and administrative fines. The designation also makes it a crime to distribute the outlet’s content or donate to it from inside or outside Russia.

    “CPJ stands with Article 19 and condemns its designation as an ‘undesirable organization’—a decision which only underscores how much Russian authorities fear being held to account for their repeated and long-standing violations of press freedom,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Authorities should immediately repeal the legislation on undesirable organizations instead of using it to stifle information they deem uncomfortable.”

    Founded in 1987, Article 19 defends freedom of speech and information around the world. It is named after Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

    “The new designation for Article 19 means that any Russian who dares to hold a relationship with us, through partnership or programme work, or access materials we produce through media and the internet, is considered a threat to national security,” the organization said in its statement.

    Since 2021, Russian authorities have labeled dozens of media organizations “undesirable,” including exiled broadcaster Dozhd TV (TV Rain), independent news outlets Meduza, Novaya Gazeta Europe, as well as investigative outlets iStories, The Insider, Bellingcat, and Proekt.

    CPJ emailed the Russian Ministry of Justice for comment but did not receive a response.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine Has Probably Cost Up To $211 Billion, U.S. Official Says

    Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has died while in prison, according to a statement from the local department of the Federal Penitentiary Service, triggering outrage and condemnation from world leaders who said the Kremlin critic paid the “ultimate price” for his courage to speak out against the country’s leadership.

    “On February 16, 2024, in penal colony No. 3, convict Aleksei Navalny felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness. The medical staff of the institution arrived immediately, and an ambulance team was called,” the statement said.

    “All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not yield positive results. Doctors from the ambulance declared the convict dead. The causes of death are being established.”

    Russian state-controlled media also quoted the statement as saying Navalny, 47, had died.

    There was no immediate confirmation of Navalny’s death from his team. According to Russian law, family must be notified within 24 hours if a prisoner dies.


    “I don’t know if we should believe the terrible news, the news we get only from official media because for many years we have been in the situation where we cannot believe Putin and his government as they are lying constantly,” his wife, Yulia, said in a brief statement from Germany where she was attending the Munich Security Conference.

    “But if it is the truth, Putin and all his staff and everyone around him need to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our patriot, with my family, and with my husband. They will be brought to justice and this day will come soon,” she added.

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying President Vladimir Putin had been informed of the report of Navalny’s death but that he has no official information on the cause of death.

    “It’s very complicated to confirm the news that comes from a country like Russia,” Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte also told RFE/RL as she attended the Munich Security Conference. “But, if you asked me whether I would be surprised if that’s true, of course I would not, unfortunately, because we know that the regime in the Kremlin is an assassin regime, basically, who would go after their enemies as they understand it, after people with different opinions on the development of Russia and their relations to the rest of the world.”

    A day earlier, Navalny did not appear to have any health issues when speaking by video link to a court hearing.

    Navalny spokeswoman Kyra Yarmysh said on X, formerly Twitter, that “we don’t have any confirmation of [his death] yet.” She added that Navalny’s lawyer is now flying to the prison.

    “Most likely it is true. Navalny was murdered,” said Ivan Zhdanov, blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It is a political murder which will for sure be investigated.”

    As the reports reverberated around the country and around the world, some people laid flowers at the buildings where Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) was headquartered before the government shut it down after labeling the organization “extremist.”

    Others gathered in front of Russian embassies in countries such as Georgia and Armenia, while vigils were being planned in many cities across Europe.

    “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power, to not give up, to remember we are an enormous power that is being oppressed by these bad people. We don’t realize how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive,” Navalny said at the end of the Oscar-winning documentary that carried his name.

    U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan told NPR in an interview just after the news broke that, if confirmed, Navalny’s death would be a “terrible tragedy.”

    “The Russian government’s long and sordid history of doing harm to its opponents raises real and obvious questions here…. We are actively seeking confirmation,” he added.

    German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Navalny “paid for his courage with his life,” while French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne said in a post on X that the Kremlin critic’s “death in a penal colony reminds us of the reality of Vladimir Putin’s regime.”

    European Council President Charles Michel said Navalny had made the ultimate sacrifice while fighting for the “values of freedom and democracy.”

    Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told RFE/RL that Navalny’s only crime was to root out “the corruption [and] the thievery of the current Russian elite” and to have a dream of a better Russia that abides by the rule of law, lives in peace with its neighbors, and invests in its people.

    “That proved to be an unforgivable crime,” Sikorski said, speaking with RFE/RL at the Munich Security Conference. He said the Russian state was responsible for Navalny’s life and welfare “and therefore his death is the legal responsibility of the Russian state.”

    Navalny, who last month marked the third anniversary of his incarceration on charges widely believed to be politically motivated, nearly died from a poisoning with a Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020, which he blamed on Russian security operatives acting at the behest of Putin.

    The man who once blasted Putin as “corrupt, cynical” in an interview with RFE/RL was detained on January 17, 2021, at a Moscow airport upon his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for the poisoning.

    He was then handed a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for violating the terms of an earlier parole during his convalescence abroad. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in Navalny’s poisoning.

    In March 2022, Navalny was handed a nine-year prison term on charges of contempt and embezzlement through fraud that he and his supporters have repeatedly rejected as politically motivated.

    Later, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and his network of regional offices were designated “extremist” organizations and banned after his arrest, which led to another probe against him on extremism charges.

    In August last year, a court extended Navalny’s prison term to 19 years and sent him to a harsher “special regime” facility from the maximum-security prison where he was held.

    Last month, Navalny was transferred to Polar Wolf, which is a “special regime” prison in Russia’s Arctic region.

    Navalny’s death, if confirmed, comes as Putin, who publicly has long refused to actually say Navalny’s name, runs for another term facing no real opposition as those who were expected to be his main challengers — including Navalny — currently are either incarcerated or have fled the country, fearing for their safety.

    Russian elections are tightly controlled by the Kremlin and are neither free nor fair but are viewed by the government as necessary to convey a sense of legitimacy.

    They are mangled by the exclusion of opposition candidates, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and other means of manipulation.

    Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s tight grip on politics, media, law enforcement, and other levers means Putin, who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 1999, is certain to win, barring a very big, unexpected development.

    Navalny married his wife, Yulia, in 2000. The couple has a son and a daughter.

    With reporting by Rikard Jozwiak and Vazha Tavberidze in Munich


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Munich Security Conference Opens With Europe On Edge Over War In Ukraine, Trump’s View Of NATO

    The Munich Security Conference kicks off on February 16 at a critical time, as the U.S. presidential election campaign heats up with a rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden looking likely and with a major U.S. military aid package bogged down in Congress.

    U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to address the conference on its opening day to be followed on February 17 by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who will make his first in-person appearance at the conference since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    He addressed the 2023 conference virtually.

    An estimated 50 world leaders are expected to attend the annual event that bills itself as the world’s leading forum for debating international security policy. The governments of Russia and Iran have not been invited.

    It will be an encore for Harris, who spoke at the conference in 2022 and 2023, but the stakes are different this year.

    She faces the task of reassuring allies that Washington remains committed to defending their security after Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, questioned defending NATO allies who failed to spend enough on defense from a potential Russia invasion.

    Harris plans to pledge that the United States will never retreat from its NATO obligations, and contrast Biden’s commitment to global engagement with Trump’s isolationist views, a White House official was quoted by Reuters as saying.

    “The vice president will recommit to defeat the failed ideologies of isolationism, authoritarianism, and unilateralism…[and] denounce these approaches to foreign policy as short-sighted, dangerous, and destabilizing,” the official said.

    Harris is expected to meet with Zelenskiy during the conference, according to the White House.

    She will be joined by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who just completed a visit to Albania, where he reinforced what he called an “extraordinary partnership” between Washington and Tirana.

    The U.S. vice president will also express confidence that the American people will continue to support the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine.

    Ukraine, which is heavily dependent on economic and military aid from its Western allies, has been facing a shortage of ammunition and military equipment on the battlefield and is now facing intense fighting for the eastern city of Avdiyivka.

    Kyiv also is desperate for a replenishment of supplies of air-defense systems to protect its civilians and infrastructure, which are hit almost daily by Russian shelling and drone attacks.

    Harris is certain to be asked about a $95.34 billion military-aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that the Senate, led by Democrats, approved on February 13 but that may never be put up for a vote in the Republican-controlled House of Representative because of Trump’s opposition to it.

    Meanwhile, Ukraine’s European allies have begun increasing their support for Ukraine.

    Ahead of his arrival in Munich, Zelenskiy was scheduled to travel on February 16 first to Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and then to Paris to sign a security pact with French President Emmanuel Macron, his office in Kyiv and the Elysee Palace in Paris said.

    Berlin did not release any details about Zelenskiy’s meeting with Scholz, but Germany is also negotiating a security agreement with Kyiv.

    With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and dpa


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Chairman Of U.S. House Intelligence Committee Warns Of ‘Serious National Security Threat’

    Russian troops in Ukraine increasingly have access to Starlink, the private satellite Internet network owned by Elon Musk that Ukraine’s military relies on heavily for battlefield communications.

    The findings from RFE/RL’s Russian Service corroborate earlier statements from Ukrainian military officials, underscoring how Kyiv’s ability to secure its command communications is potentially threatened.

    It comes as Ukrainian forces grapple with depleted weaponry and ammunition, and overall exhaustion, with Russian forces pressing localized offensives in several locations along the 1,200-kilometer front line. The industrial city of Avdiyivka, in particular, is under severe strain with Russian forces making steady advances, threatening to encircle Ukrainian defenses there.

    Ukraine has relied heavily on Starlink, a network for low-orbit satellites that provide high-speed Internet access. The network is owned by SpaceX, the private space company that is in turn owned by Musk, the American billionaire entrepreneur.

    They are used on the front line primarily for stable communications between units, medics, and commanders. Ukrainian troops have also experimented with installing Starlink antennas on large attack drones, which are an essential tool for Ukrainian troops but are frequently jammed by Russian electronic-warfare systems.

    However, a growing number of Ukrainian military sources and civilian activists have pointed to evidence that Russian troops are using the network, either for their own communications or to potentially monitor Ukraine’s.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    On February 11, Ukraine’s military intelligence service, known as HUR, said Russian forces were not only using Starlink terminals but also doing it in a “systemic” way. HUR also published an audio excerpt of what it said was an intercepted exchange between two Russian soldiers discussing how to set up the terminals.

    Units like Russia’s 83rd Air Assault Brigade, which is fighting in the partially occupied eastern region of Donetsk, are reportedly using the system, HUR spokesman Andriy Yusov was quoted as saying.

    Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said on February 13 that Russia was acquiring Starlink terminals from unnamed Arab countries.

    Starlink has said that it does not do business with Russia’s government or its military, and Musk himself published a statement on his social-media company X, formerly Twitter, in response to the Ukrainian assertions.

    “A number of false news reports claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia. This is categorically false. To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia,” Musk wrote on February 11.

    Russian troops may have acquired Starlink terminals from one of potentially dozens of companies within Russia that claim to sell them alongside household products, RFE/RL found.

    One Russian website, called Topmachines.ru, advertised a Starlink set for 220,000 rubles (about $2,200), and a $100 monthly subscription fee.

    Starlink appears to have lax oversight on the type of personal data used by new Starlink clients when they register for the first time, as well.

    One Moscow-based reseller told RFE/RL that new accounts were registered with random European first and last names and that there is no need to enter a valid European passport. The only important thing, the vendor said, is to have a valid bank card that uses one of the main international payment systems.

    Another vendor told RFE/RL that the terminals he sold were brought in from Europe, though he declined to specify which country. The vendor said a terminal costs 250,000 rubles (about $2,400), and the monthly fee was 14,000 rubles.

    Ukraine relies heavily on the Starlink network.
    Ukraine relies heavily on the Starlink network.

    Additionally, Starlink’s technology appears to be incapable of precisely restricting signal access; independent researchers say Starlink’s system only knows the approximate location of its terminals, meaning it would have to restrict access for Ukrainian frontline positions in order to limit Russian battlefield use.

    IStories, an independent Russian news outlet, also identified at least three vendors in Moscow who claim to sell Starlink terminals.

    Asked by reporters whether Russian troops might be using Starlink terminals, Peskov said: “This is not a certified system with us, therefore, it cannot be supplied and is not supplied officially. Accordingly, we cannot use it officially in any way.”


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.