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Category: Russia

  • Technology Executives Say All Evidence Points To Russia In Major Hack Of Computer Networks

    Executives of U.S. technology companies told lawmakers on February 23 that a recent breach of corporate and government networks was so sophisticated that a nation had to be behind it and said all the evidence points to Russia.

    The hearing was the first to examine the hack, which was discovered by private security company FireEye in December. It was later revealed that hackers slipped malicious code into updates of network management software made by the U.S. company SolarWinds, which was then downloaded by several branches of the U.S. government and several U.S. and European corporations.

    U.S. intelligence officials and industry sources had previously blamed the intrusion on Russian hackers. Moscow has denied any involvement.

    But the technology executives said that the evidence points to Russia as they described the precision, ambition, and scope of the attack.

    “We asked ourselves how many engineers do we believe had worked on this collective effort. And the answer we came to was…at least 1,000, very skilled, capable engineers,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

    “We’ve seen substantial evidence that points to the Russian foreign intelligence agency and we have found no evidence that leads us anywhere else,” Smith said.

    Smith told the committee that the true scope of the intrusions is still unknown because most victims are not legally required to disclose attacks unless they involve sensitive information about individuals.

    President Joe Biden’s administration is weighing punitive measures against Russia, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it would be “weeks not months” before the U.S. responds.

    “We have asked the intelligence community to do further work to sharpen the attribution that the previous administration made about precisely how the hack occurred, what the extent of the damage is, and what the scope and scale of the intrusion is,” Psaki said. “And we’re still in the process of working that through now.”

    At least nine government agencies and 100 private companies were breached, but what was taken has not been revealed. U.S. government agencies affected include the Treasury, Justice, and Commerce departments, but the full list has not been publicly released.

    Smith said there are victims around the world, including in Canada, Mexico, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates.

    Microsoft revealed in December that the hackers were able to gain access into its closely guarded source code but said they did not have permission to modify any code or engineering systems.

    FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia told the Senate committee that his company has nearly 100 people working to study and contain the breach.

    He said the hackers first installed malicious code in October 2019 but didn’t activate it immediately in order to see if they could remain undetected. They then returned in March and began to steal the log-in credentials of people who were authorized to be on the networks so they could have a “secret key” to move around at will, Mandia said.

    The Senate committee also heard from Sudhakar Ramakrishna, the CEO of SolarWinds, who took over the company after the hack occurred, and George Kurtz, the president and CEO of CrowdStrike, another leading security company.

    Ramakrishna said his company still has not found how the hackers managed to slip malware in the middle of the software supply chain at the point where completed code is tailored to users’ configurations.

    With reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Amnesty Pulls Navalny’s ‘Prisoner Of Conscience’ Status Over ‘Hate Speech’

    Amnesty International has reportedly withdrawn its recent designation of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s as a “prisoner of conscience” over his alleged advocacy of violence and discrimination and comments that included hate speech.

    Aleksandr Artemyev, the rights watchdog’s media manager for Russia and Eurasia, confirmed the decision to Mediazona on February 23 after the news was first reported by U.S. journalist Aaron Mate.

    RFE/RL was unable to independently confirm the reports.

    Artemyev wrote that Amnesty, which named Navalny a prisoner of conscience after his arrest in Moscow in January, decided to retract the designation “in light of new information” stemming from “old videos and social media posts in which Navalny made controversial pronouncements.”

    The comments attributed to Navalny in the mid-2000s were not specified, but Artemyev said they were made as Navalny’s activism and challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin was gaining momentum and that their reemergence “appears to be another tactic to delegitimize Navalny’s work and criticism and to weaken public outcry about his detention.”

    Artemyev told the independent Russian news outlet that while the rights watchdog had determined some of Navalny’s comments “rose to the level of hate speech,” according to Current Time, it was still calling for the anti-corruption activist’s “immediate release and for the Russian authorities to cease this politically motivated prosecution.”

    The 44-year-old Navalny was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport after he arrived on January 17 from Berlin, where he had been recovering from a poisoning with a Soviet-era nerve agent in August 2020 that Navalny says was ordered by Putin and carried out by Russian intelligence.

    Protests

    Navalny’s arrest for failing to report to the Moscow prison service — a violation of a suspended sentence related to a 2014 conviction for embezzlement that he and critics say was politically motivated — sparked anti-government protests in hundreds of cities and led to thousands of arrests.

    On February 2, Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence was converted to real jail time. His appeal was rejected on February 20, ensuring that Putin’s biggest political rival will spend about 2 1/2 years in prison, considering time already spent in detention.

    In a separate case heard the same day, Navalny was fined 850,000 rubles ($11,500) for slandering a World War II veteran who had participated in a Kremlin-organized promotional video.

    After Amnesty recognized Navalny as a prisoner of conscience on January 17, saying his arrest was “further evidence that Russian authorities are seeking to silence him,” the rights watchdog reportedly began receiving letters of complaint from unknown sources.

    Navalny’s anti-corruption organization has targeted many high-profile Russians, including high-ranking government officials.

    In the course of his political career, Navalny has also come under criticism for his association with ethnic Russian nationalists and about statements seen as racist and dangerously inflammatory.

    With reporting by Current Time, Meduza, and Mediazona

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Siberian Students Say They Were Offered Money, Benefits To Promote Ruling Party

    NIZHNEVARTOVSK, Russia — “Sign up quickly,” read an announcement that appeared on a closed social-media chat group for university students in this oil-rich Siberian city earlier this month. “11,000 rubles aren’t just lying around on the road. This is a good opportunity to earn references.”

    Several students studying at Nizhnevartovsk State University, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, have told RFE/RL they have been offered money and academic benefits in exchange for helping to promote the ruling United Russia party through scripted social-media posts and other activities.

    “It isn’t right,” one student said, “because they are influencing assessments. I study on my own, using my abilities, and suddenly someone makes some phone calls and not only do they get money but also good references. It is not fair.”

    The revelations come as the government of longtime authoritarian President Vladimir Putin prepares for national elections to the State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament, that must be held by September 19. United Russia, which maintains a stranglehold on all levels of political power, enters the campaign with its popularity rating depressed by the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, the party’s support for an unpopular pension reform in 2018, and the widespread perception that it is, as opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has branded it, “the party of crooks and thieves.”

    During a virtual chat on the social-media site VK among representatives of some 60 university groups on February 8, Kristina Chernopiskaya, the university’s deputy dean of educational work, made the announcement that United Russia was seeking student volunteers.

    Interested students were instructed to download an app called Agitator that distributes news about United Russia’s activities around the country. They were told that the app would also distribute texts that students could copy and post on their social-media accounts. After publication, students were told to send a report to Chernopiskaya in order to be remunerated.

    The instructions came in the form of a voice message posted under Chernopiskaya’s name to the university chat group. The students who spoke to RFE/RL said they recognized Chernopiskaya’s voice. “There is no doubt that this is a voice message from Kristina Aleksandrovna,” one student said, using Chernopiskaya’s first name and patronymic. “She has sent voice posts in the past and the voice is the same.”

    Yekaterina Dolgina, dean of the humanities faculty at the university, denied that any university employee was engaged in promoting United Russia. “It’s all a lie,” Dolgina told RFE/RL. “I do not know where you got this information from.”

    Chernopiskaya could not be reached for comment.

    In the message attributed by students to Chernopiskaya, students are given further details about how they might participate in the initiative.

    “I can give you this loophole,” the message states. “If you don’t want to publish these on your own accounts, you can open a separate account, add a few friends to it, and publish the messages there. But there is nothing to be worried about in them. Just notices of some amendments or new laws. It is all purely informational.”

    The post was accompanied by two “examples.” One directed readers to a December 14 report on state Channel One television that was headlined: “During A United Russia Virtual Social Forum, Vladimir Putin Spoke With Volunteers.” The second text described how a United Russia deputy in the regional legislature, Sergei Veliky, was distributing food parcels to doctors at a Nizhnevartovsk COVID-19 hospital. That text appeared widely in local social media in the first half of December.

    Students were promised an “analytical reference” for each time they posted one of United Russia’s texts.

    “An analytical reference is a sort of thank-you letter for participating in a university project,” one student explained. “Like welcoming first-year students or Science Day or attending various conferences. It gives students an advantage in getting stipend bonuses or when completing a term.”

    ‘Aggressive Party Promotion’

    “For example,” the student added, “if I have problems with my grades, but I have several analytical references, then I take them to the instructor and…they might give me a break. And for these promotional posts, they are promising a heap of references.”

    A second post to the same VK chat under Chernopiskaya’s name promises students 11,000 rubles ($150) and three “analytical references” for one day of work at a United Russia call center.

    The students who spoke to RFE/RL said they feared that the pressure could increase if not enough students volunteer to assist United Russia. Some said those who refuse could even face expulsion.

    “Of course, not everyone is willing, and people are complaining,” one student said. “I’m afraid that people like that could have academic problems. In the group, one girl made a negative comment along the lines of, ‘What has United Russia done for us?’ And, really, students are not really very eager to do this stuff.”

    The students also said instructors had been warning students orally not to participate in unsanctioned opposition demonstrations or they might face problems with the university.

    “Inside the university, the election campaign is already going full steam,” one student said. “I have never seen a political party before that was promoting itself so aggressively.”

    According to Russian law, “the creation or activity of organized structures of political parties” is illegal at any state educational institution.

    Chernopiskaya is also a co-founder of the Project Center for Youth Initiatives, which applies for grants from the regional government of the Khanty-Mansi region. Last year, the organization submitted an unsuccessful application for a grant to hold a shooting competition for schoolchildren. According to the application, the project was “aimed at working out a complex approach to working with children and teenagers that is oriented toward patriotic upbringing by means of developing physical fitness and the practice of safe use of weaponry.”

    Nizhevartovsk, a city of about 250,000 over 3,000 kilometers east of Moscow, made headlines earlier this month when it was reported that a group of riot police demonstrated to schoolchildren how to detain protesters during a riot. In a video posted to social media, students pelted officers with balls as they huddled behind riot shields. The February 16 event came in the wake of a series of mass demonstrations across the country during which the authorities detained — often brutally — more than 11,000 people.

    In 2018, a journalist in Nizhnevartovsk was fired after she complained on social media about a kindergarten program in which 4- and 5-year-old children sang a song expressing fealty to Putin. Called Uncle Vova, We Are With You — Vova is a diminutive of Vladimir — the song contains lyrics such as: “While there should be peace on Earth, if the commander in chief calls us to the final battle, Uncle Vova, we are with you!”

    Written by Robert Coalson based on reporting from Nizhnevartovsk by Nadezhda Trubitsyna of the Siberia Desk of RFE/RL’s Russian Service

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. NHL Team Says Star Russian Player Target Of ‘Intimidation Tactic’ For Supporting Navalny

    New York’s professional ice hockey team says star forward Artemi Panarin has been targeted for his support of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny in what the team called a “fabricated story” in a Russian tabloid alleging he assaulted a woman almost a decade ago.

    The New York Rangers announced on February 22 that Panarin, 29, one of several Russians playing in the National Hockey League (NHL), is taking a leave of absence because of the report.

    Panarin, who has spoken out against Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past, “vehemently and unequivocally” denies the allegations, according to a statement from the team.

    “This is clearly an intimidation tactic being used against him for being outspoken on recent political events,” the statement said. “Artemi is obviously shaken and concerned and will take some time away from the team.”

    The Rangers fully support Panarin and will work with him to identify the source of “these unfounded allegations,” the statement said.

    The source of the story, Andrei Nazarov, is a former NHL player who briefly coached Panarin in Russia. Nazarov told Komsomolskaya Pravda in a story published February 20 that Panarin knocked the woman to the floor with “several powerful blows” in a hotel bar in Riga, Latvia, following a game in December 2011.

    Nazarov added that he later heard that Latvian authorities took no action after “authoritative” locals negotiated with the police not to pursue the case, alleging that money changed hands.

    Nazarov said he was motivated to speak out because he disagreed with Panarin’s criticism of the Russian government. Panarin played for Nazarov with Vityaz Chekhov of the Kontinental Hockey League from 2010-12.

    Panarin’s most recent comment on the political situation in Russia came last month in a social media post showing support for Navalny, who has been jailed in Russia.

    Last week Navalny’s prison sentence was upheld by a Moscow court but reduced to a little more than two years and six months. Navalny also was fined a large sum of money in an unrelated case for allegedly insulting a World War II veteran. The opposition politician has called the charges politically motivated.

    Navalny was detained last month upon his returned from Germany where he had been recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he and supporters say Putin ordered. Russian authorities said he violated the terms of his probation in an embezzlement case while he was outside the country.

    Panarin has played in the NHL since 2015 and leads the Rangers with 18 points on five goals and 13 assists. He signed an $81.5 million, seven-year contract with the New York team in 2019.

    In an interview that year with the Russian-language Vsemu Golovin YouTube channel, Panarin criticized Putin and lawlessness in Russia.

    “I think [Putin] no longer understands what’s right and what’s wrong,” Panarin said. “Psychologically, it’s not easy for him to soberly judge the situation.”

    He added that it disturbed him that Russia has “no agencies that would regulate big companies” and “everything is bought,” causing suffering among regular Russians.

    “I am Russian and I am used to [the United States]…but, again, lawlessness is very painful for me. No freedom of speech. You can’t point out any negatives. This is what I don’t like.”

    With reporting by AP and Reuters

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire

    The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.

    The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to  police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

    The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”

    The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.

    Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”

    Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented,  by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.

    While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”

    The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”

    The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.

    Who were the Trump voters

    Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020.  A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.

    In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket.  In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs  the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.

    The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.

    The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party

    Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of  voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.

    Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:

    Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.

    Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy.  No such problem here.

    This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.

    While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.

    A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers

    The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.

    Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.

    Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.

    Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.

    The post The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire

    The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.

    The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to  police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

    The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”

    The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.

    Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”

    Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented,  by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.

    While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”

    The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”

    The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.

    Who were the Trump voters

    Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020.  A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.

    In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket.  In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs  the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.

    The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.

    The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party

    Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of  voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.

    Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:

    Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.

    Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy.  No such problem here.

    This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.

    While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.

    A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers

    The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.

    Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.

    Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.

    Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.

    Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity, is a long time Latin America solidarity activist, and presently puts out the AFGJ Venezuela Weekly. He is also the Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Read other articles by Stansfield.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2021 at 3:34pm and is filed under Coup, Democrats, Disinformation, Donald Trump, Elections, Electoral College, Hillary Clinton, Hypocrisy, Joe Biden, Lesser Evilism, Media, Neoliberalism, Politics, President Vladimir Putin, Propaganda, Protests, Racism, Republicans, Russia, The “Left”, US Congress, US Corporations, Vote.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • When Mucha Went To Moscow

    Fascinating photographs made by the Czech art nouveau master Alphonse Mucha capture Russia on the cusp of revolution.

    Alphonse Mucha sketches in his notepad on Moscow’s Red Square in 1913.

    Alphonse Mucha sketches in his notepad on Moscow’s Red Square in 1913.

    This photo is one of a handful that survive from Mucha’s trip to Russia as part of his research into his painting series the Slav Epic.

    Russians with banners in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square.

    Russians with banners in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square.

    Mucha, who is best known for his elegant art nouveau advertisements, was also a skilled photographer who based many of his paintings on studio photo portraits.

    A man holding a religious icon surrounded by peasant women at the Kremlin.

    A man holding a religious icon surrounded by peasant women at the Kremlin.

    Russia in 1913 was widely discussed after the ruling Romanov family celebrated their 300th year in power in February that year.

    Russians congregate inside the Kremlin. Four years after Mucha took this photo, Russia’s tsar was overthrown.

    Russians congregate inside the Kremlin. Four years after Mucha took this photo, Russia’s tsar was overthrown.

    During his research visit, Mucha met with people who remembered the moment serfs were freed. The abolition of serfdom took place under Tsar Alexander II in 1861, more than half a century before Mucha’s Russia visit.

    One of the most significant images made during Mucha’s trip is this scene of a beggar at an unknown location. In his famous painting Woman In The Wilderness, Mucha depicted a strikingly similar old woman.

    Woman In The Wilderness, a 1923 painting by Mucha

    Woman In The Wilderness, a 1923 painting by Mucha

    The model for the painting was the artist’s wife, Maruska, but it is likely that the original inspiration for the character is the elderly Russian beggar Mucha photographed in 1913.

    According to the Mucha Foundation, the painting “may have been Mucha’s response to the terrible sufferings endured by the Russian people after the Bolshevik Revolution, which culminated in the Great Famine of 1921. In this painting, a Russian peasant woman, [symbolizing] the suffering of the nation, sits quietly with a gesture of acceptance of her inevitable fate. But the star shining above her indicates hope and spiritual salvation.”

    A carriage horse in Sergiyev Posad, north of Moscow

    A carriage horse in Sergiyev Posad, north of Moscow

    Mucha’s work was already well-known in Russia when he arrived. In 1907, an exhibition of his work was held in the country.

    The tsar bell inside the Kremlin

    The tsar bell inside the Kremlin

    Horse-drawn carriages riding on Red Square.

    Horse-drawn carriages riding on Red Square.

    The resulting painting from Mucha’s trip to Russia features St. Basil’s Cathedral seen from exactly the same angle as in this photo.

    The Abolition Of Serfdom In Russia, painted by Mucha in 1914.

    The Abolition Of Serfdom In Russia, painted by Mucha in 1914.

    The painting is described as showing “a subdued crowd of Russian peasants looking on anxiously as the official reads the edict for the abolition of the serfs. St. Basil’s [Cathedral] and the Kremlin beyond are barely discernible through the thick shroud of fog which captures the uncertainty of the moment.”

    Russians relaxing on Red Square.

    Russians relaxing on Red Square.

    Despite Mucha’s love for Russia, the country is conspicuously absent from his final painting in the Slav Epic. The painting, which depicts a triumphant and free Slavic people stepping into the future, was made in 1926 after Russia had already suffered under Vladimir Lenin and his communist revolutionaries, and the despotic rule of Josef Stalin was about to begun.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ukrainian, Polish Foreign Ministers Call On U.S. To Help Stop Nord Stream 2

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau have appealed to U.S. President Joe Biden to prevent the completion of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, which they called a “dangerous, divisive project.”

    The pipeline would affect Ukraine by depriving it of transit fees from existing pipelines that transverse its territory.

    The U.S. Congress last year passed the Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Clarification Act (PEESCA) to widen the list of sanctionable services against the project to include providing insurance, reinsurance, pipeline testing, inspection, and certification services. PEESCA became law on January 1.

    “Poland and Ukraine have long warned against the dangers associated with the construction of Nord Stream 2. Our calls for vigilance and boldness were heard in the U.S. Congress, which pressed on with measures designed to stop this dangerous, divisive project,” Kuleba and Rau said in a joint article published in Politico on February 22.

    “We call on U.S. President Joe Biden to use all means at his disposal to prevent the project from completion,” the two ministers said.

    Some 150 kilometers of pipe under Danish and German waters in the Baltic Sea must be laid to complete the pipeline, controlled by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. It is expected to carry 100 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year from Russia to Germany.

    “On this issue, the U.S. continues to be critically important. It needs to dismiss claims that Nord Stream 2 has become ‘too big to fail’ and that it simply needs to be finished,” they wrote in the article.

    “If the project is successful, Russia could try to convince the Ukrainian public that the West doesn’t care about its own principles, and ultimately, about the security and prosperity of Ukraine.”

    Nord Stream 2 is “not about the energy security of Germany, our close ally and partner,” Kuleba and Rau said.

    “We respect Germany’s right to express their point of view. But we also strongly believe that these kinds of projects cannot be viewed narrowly through the lens of bilateral relations, but should instead be approached from a broader perspective of Europe’s interests and security as a whole,” they said.

    The Biden administration on February 19 imposed additional sanctions on a Russian vessel and the ship’s owner for their work on the pipeline.

    However, the move was immediately criticized as inadequate by Republican lawmakers, who denounced the administration for failing to impose sanctions on additional targets and demanded the administration explain what it is doing to oppose the completion of the pipeline.

    The two foreign ministers warned that “a lot remains at stake” in the project.

    “Autocratic rulers in the Kremlin and elsewhere can and should be held accountable. The West, led by the United States, cannot afford to cower in the face of blackmail that runs counter to everything that we stand for,” they concluded.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • EU must be ‘united and determined’ on Russia sanctions, says Borrell

    Member states agree to impose measures under so-called Magnitsky act over arrest of opposition leader

    Russians responsible for the “arrest, sentencing and persecution” of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny will be hit by EU sanctions in the first use of the so-called European Magnitsky act.

    Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, said the 27 member states had agreed to impose “restrictive measures” under powers adopted by the bloc earlier to target people behind human rights abuses.

    Related: EU chief’s Moscow humiliation is sign of bloc disunity on Russia, say experts

    Continue reading…

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

  • Belarusian, Russian Leaders Set To Meet As West Prepares To Ramp Up Pressure

    Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka will hold talks in Sochi on February 22 as the duo emerge from mass protests at home to face mounting pressure from the West.

    The two leaders will meet in the Black Sea city to discuss economic ties, energy, security, and integration, among other issues, the Kremlin said last week.

    The meeting comes the same day the European Union is expected to adopt fresh sanctions against Russia and possibly Belarus, ramping up pressure over a host of issues that have drawn the two neighbors closer in recent months.

    The EU has progressively slapped sanctions on Belarus in response to the violent repression of peaceful protesters, the opposition, and media since an August 2020 election the bloc considers fraudulent that extended Lukashenka’s 26-year authoritarian rule.

    Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who claims to have won the vote, is calling for the EU to take a tougher stance against Lukashenka’s regime.

    The last time Putin and Lukashenka met face to face was in mid-September 2020 in Sochi, when Belarus secured a $1.5 billion loan for its battered economy. Since then, mass protests in Belarus have lost some of their steam during the frigid winter months amid a sweeping crackdown.

    In recent years, Russia has pressured Belarus to take steps toward integration in order to cement a 20-year-old agreement to form a union state, only to be rebuffed by Lukashenka’s defense of the nation’s sovereignty.

    However, the situation began to change after Russia helped prop up Lukashenka in the wake of the August presidential election, bringing the two sides closer over common threat perceptions.

    “Minsk understands perfectly how important it is now to be on the right side of the Kremlin,” political analyst Artyom Shraibman wrote in an analysis for the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Lukashenka has tried many times to show that he and Putin are in the same boat against the collective West, and that the recent protests in Russia are a continuation of those in Belarus.”

    Putin comes to Sochi with the threat of new Russia sanctions from the EU and Washington over the detention of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and evidence the anti-corruption crusader was poisoned with a nerve agent he blames on Putin and FSB security agents.

    Navalny’s detention in January upon his return from life-saving treatment in Germany and subsequent crackdown on some of the largest anti-government protests in a decade prompted international outrage.

    With reporting by dpa and TASS

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • EU Set To Sanction Russia Over Navalny Jailing

    EU foreign ministers are expected on February 22 to approve fresh sanctions on Russia over the jailing of opposition politician Alexsei Navalny and a crackdown on his allies.

    Top diplomats from the EU’s 27 members gathering in Brussels are likely to use targeted measures against Russian individuals and institutions, such as asset freezes and visa bans, under the bloc’s newly created sanctions instrument to punish human rights violators.

    The step follows weeks of internal EU debate since Navalny was detained last month upon his returned from Germany where he had been recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he and supporters say was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In October, the EU placed six Russia officials on a blacklist over the poisoning of Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok.

    Over the weekend, a Moscow court upheld a 2 ½ year prison sentence imposed on Navalny earlier in February for a parole violation related to a previous embezzlement conviction. In another case, the Kremlin critic was fined for allegedly insulting a World War II veteran. Both trials were decried as politically motivated.

    The move to further sanction Russia comes nearly two weeks after EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was embarrassed during a visit to Moscow and the expulsion of three European diplomats from Russia.

    Borrell noted on February 21 that Russia continues to ignore a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) demanding Navalny be set free.

    EU member states, led by Poland and the Baltic countries, are calling for a hardline against Russia, including additional economic sanctions.

    On the eve of the meeting in Brussels, two of Navalny’s closest allies met in the Belgian capital with eight EU foreign ministers and several EU ambassadors.

    One of the allies, Leonid Volkov, told AFP they “talked about targeted personal sanctions against Putin’s closest allies and people who are guilty of major human rights violations.”

    Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis organized the meeting.

    Another group of EU members, including influential France and Germany, are calling for a more targeted approach and ruling out economic sanctions.

    Unanimity among all the bloc’s members is normally required to impose sanctions.

    Ahead of the Brussels meeting, Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said he expects the EU to adopt new sanctions against Russia over Navalny’s case.

    The Austrian diplomat told Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper that he expects “a broad majority of support” for targeted sanctions among EU members, but added the sanctions “have to be politically smart and legally watertight.”

    A decision to impose fresh measures against Russia will only result in the foreign ministers instructing the EU’s diplomatic service to draw up a list of sanctions with individuals who are responsible for the conviction of Navalny and possibly also for the assassination attempt against him.

    The United States, EU, Britain, and Canada have already hit Russia with a number of sanctions over the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Moscow’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

    With reporting by AFP, dpa, and Die Welt

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Top Biden Adviser Suggests Russia Could See U.S. Response To SolarWinds Hack Within ‘Weeks’

    U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan has warned that the United States will respond within “weeks, not months” to a suspected Russian cyberattack, discovered in December, that targeted branches of the U.S. government and other key institutions.

    Sullivan was talking about the breach — which began with malicious code slipped into updates of the SolarWinds software used by the government and thousands of businesses — on CBS’s Face The Nation program on February 21.

    He said the response was likely to include “a mix of tools seen and unseen” and “it will not simply be sanctions.”

    “We’re in the process of working through that, and we will ensure that Russia understands where the United States draws the line on this kind of activity,” Sullivan said.

    Experts have called the so-called SolarWinds breach one of the biggest and most sophisticated cyberattacks in history and suggested it could only have been pulled off by a state actor.

    It targeted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for border security and protecting the country from online attacks, as well as the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments, in addition to thousands of other entities.

    What I have said is that it will be weeks, not months, before we have a response prepared.”

    It was traced back to infiltrated network management software dating back to at least June.

    Intelligence and industry sources have blamed it on Russian hackers.

    Moscow has denied any involvement, saying in a statement on December 14 that Russia “does not conduct offensive operations in the cyberdomain.”

    “First of all, we have asked the intelligence community to do further work to sharpen the attribution that the last administration made about precisely how this hack occurred, what the extent of the damage is, what the scope and scale of the intrusion is, and we are in the process of working through that now,” Sullivan told CBS. “And then what I have said is that it will be weeks, not months, before we have a response prepared.”

    Suspected Russian government hackers behind the massive intrusion of government and private company networks discovered in December were able to gain access into Microsoft’s source code, a key building block for software or operating systems, the tech giant said on December 31.

    Microsoft President Brad Smith in mid-February said the attack was “probably the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen.”

    A rise in U.S.-Russian tensions greeted the new U.S. presidency of Joe Biden but did not prevent his administration and Moscow from successfully negotiating a five-year extension of the New START arms-control treaty, their last remaining arms-control pact.

    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier this month that he had warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a phone call that the new U.S. administration will respond “firmly in defense of U.S. interests in response to actions by Russia that harm us or our allies.”

    Blinken cited Russia’s ongoing detention of two former U.S. Marines, Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, but the so-called SolarWinds cyberattack has also cast a long shadow over U.S.-Russian relations amid signals that a state actor like Russia was behind it.

    But a State Department statement said Blinken also raised “Russian interference” in last year’s presidential election that brought Biden to the White House, Moscow’s “military aggression” in Ukraine and Georgia, the poisoning of jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, and the SolarWinds hack of U.S. government systems.

    FireEye, a prominent cybersecurity company that was breached in connection with the SolarWinds incident, said targets included government, technology, and telecommunications companies in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

    France’s cybersecurity watchdog said this month that it had discovered a hack of French organizations that bore similarities to other attacks by a group linked to Russian intelligence.

    In a report released on February 15, the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) said the hackers had taken advantage of a vulnerability in monitoring software sold by the Paris-based company Centreon.

    The ANSSI said it discovered intrusions dating back to late 2017 and stretching into 2020.

    It stopped short of identifying the hackers but said they had a similar modus operandi as the Russian cyberespionage group often nicknamed Sandworm and thought to have links with Russian military intelligence.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Austria Expects ‘Broad Support’ For New Russia Sanctions In Response To Navalny’s Jailing

    Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg expects the European Union to adopt new sanctions against Russia over the case of opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

    A step likely could be taken when European foreign ministers meet on February 22, he said in an interview with Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

    “We will discuss at the Foreign Affairs Council appropriate reactions to the case of Navalny,” Schallenberg said.

    This would likely include targeted measures against individuals and organizations under the bloc’s newly created sanctions instrument to punish human rights violators.

    Schallenberg said he expects “a broad majority of support” for sanctions among the EU’s 27 members, but added the sanctions “have to be politically smart and legally watertight.”

    EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Twitter on February 21 that “EU actions” will be discussed at the Foreign Affairs Council meeting on February 22.

    Borrell said the courts in Russia continue to ignore a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) asking the Russian government to free him.

    A Moscow court on February 20 upheld Navalny’s prison sentence relating to his embezzlement conviction, but reduced the sentence by about 50 days considering time served. Later in the day, Navalny was fined a large sum on charges of insulting a World War II veteran.

    Both trials were decried as politically motivated.

    Navalny was arrested last month on his return from Germany where he was recovering from nerve-agent poisoning that he and supporters say was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Based on reporting by dpa and Reuters

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Reports First Case Of Bird Flu Strain In Humans

    Russia has reported the first case of a bird flu strain, H5N8, being passed from birds to humans.

    Officials said seven workers at a poultry farm in southern Russia had been infected following an outbreak in December.

    They are believed to have caught the virus from poultry on the farm.

    Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, said on February 20 that authorities had alerted the World Health Organization (WHO).

    Popova said all seven people infected by H5N8 were “now feeling better.”

    She added that there was no sign of transmission between humans.

    The WHO confirmed that it had been notified by Russia about the infections.

    “We are in discussion with national authorities to gather more information and assess the public health impact of this event,” a spokesperson said. “If confirmed, this would be the first time H5N8 infects people.”

    Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Reports First Case Of Bird Flu Strain In Humans

    Russia has reported the first case of a bird flu strain, H5N8, being passed from birds to humans.

    Officials said seven workers at a poultry farm in southern Russia had been infected following an outbreak in December.

    They are believed to have caught the virus from poultry on the farm.

    Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, said on February 20 that authorities had alerted the World Health Organization (WHO).

    Popova said all seven people infected by H5N8 were “now feeling better.”

    She added that there was no sign of transmission between humans.

    The WHO confirmed that it had been notified by Russia about the infections.

    “We are in discussion with national authorities to gather more information and assess the public health impact of this event,” a spokesperson said. “If confirmed, this would be the first time H5N8 infects people.”

    Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Navalny Fined, Prison Sentence Upheld In Two Legal Losses

    Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was fined on charges of defamation on February 20 after an earlier sentence on embezzlement charges was upheld by a Moscow court. He now faces more than 2 1/2 years in prison. Navalny was arrested in January as he returned from Germany, where he spent months recuperating from a near-deadly poisoning.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ukraine Marks Seventh Anniversary Of Euromaidan Bloodshed

    KYIV — Ukrainians have marked the seventh anniversary of the shooting deaths of dozens of participants in the Euromaidan anti-government protests that toppled the country’s Russia-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.

    The commemorations honored those who were killed in the capital, Kyiv, during clashes with Yanukovych’s security forces on February 18-20, 2014.

    President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his wife, Olena, laid flowers at the so-called Monument of the Heavenly Hundred in Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) on February 20.

    “Eternal memory to all those who died for the future of Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said at the ceremony.

    Gatherings were held across Ukraine on February 20 to commemorate those killed during the Euromaidan protests.

    Ukrainians Mark Anniversary Of Deadly Shootings Of Euromaidan Protesters

    Ukrainians Mark Anniversary Of Deadly Shootings Of Euromaidan Protesters Photo Gallery:

    Ukrainians Mark Anniversary Of Deadly Shootings Of Euromaidan Protesters

    Ukraine is marking the seventh anniversary of the bloody end of the mass street protests that ousted Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych and in which some 100 people were killed, most of them between February 18-20, 2014.

    Some parts of Ukraine began honoring the slain demonstrators two days earlier, on the day when the shootings started.

    The Euromaidan movement began in November 2013 when protesters gathered on the central square in Kyiv to protest Yanukovych’s decision not to sign a crucial trade accord with the European Union. Instead, he sought closer economic ties with Russia.

    Ukrainian prosecutors say 104 people were killed and 2,500 injured as a result of violent crackdowns by authorities against protesters.

    Shunning a deal backed by the West and Russia to end the standoff, Yanukovych abandoned power and fled Kyiv on February 21, 2014.

    The former president, who was secretly flown to Russia and remains there, denies that he ordered police to fire on protesters, saying that the violence was the result of a “planned operation” to overthrow his government.

    In March 2014, shortly after Yanukovych’s downfall, Russian military forces seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula — a precursor to the Kremlin’s illegal annexation of the territory through a hastily organized and widely discredited referendum.

    Russia also has supported pro-Russia separatists who are fighting Ukrainian government forces in eastern Ukraine.

    More than 13,200 people have been killed in that conflict since April 2014.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russian Sentenced To Four Years In Prison For Role In Alleged Plot To Kill Georgian Journalist

    TBILISI — A court in Georgia has sentenced a Russian citizen to four years in prison for involvement in an alleged plot to kill a Georgian journalist.

    The Tbilisi City Court on February 20 found Magomed Gutsiyev, a native of Russia’s North Caucasus region, guilty of illegal border-crossing, forgery, and the illegal surveillance of journalist Giorgi Gabunia.

    Gutsiyev was arrested by Georgian authorities in June with documents identifying him as Vasambek Bokov.

    Georgia’s Service for State Security (SUS) said at the time that they had arrested a Russian citizen, identified as V.B., who they suspected of planning to kill Gabunia.

    In July 2019, Gabunia crudely insulted Russian President Vladimir Putin live on air amid worsening ties between Georgia and Russia.

    The reporter called Putin a “stinking occupier” and used a string of obscenities to curse the Russian president, as well as Putin’s mother and father — and vowed to defecate on Putin’s grave.

    Gabunia’s controversial comments were condemned by Russian and Georgian authorities.

    The Moscow-backed leader of Russia’s North Caucasus region of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, publicly vowed to “punish” Gabunia at the time.

    In recent years, several Kadyrov critics have been killed outside Russia, and many believe that either Kadyrov himself or Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) were behind the apparent assassinations.

    Rights groups say Kadyrov, who has ruled Chechnya since 2007, uses repressive measures and has created a climate of impunity for security forces in the volatile region.

    They allege Kadyrov is ultimately responsible for the violence and intimidation of political opponents by Chechen authorities, including kidnappings, forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Moscow Court Rejects Navalny Appeal, But Reduces Sentence Slightly

    A Moscow court has upheld opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s prison sentence relating to his embezzlement conviction, but reduced the sentence by about 50 days considering time served. Navalny was in court on February 20 to appeal the sentence handed down earlier this month in relation to the 2014 embezzlement case, which he has said is politically motivated. The prominent anti-corruption activist and Kremlin critic was scheduled to face a second court hearing later in the day relating to charges of defaming a World War II veteran.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘People Just Disappear’: Family Of Missing Russian Man Fears He Was Abducted Into Slavery

    KALININGRAD, Russia — Life fell apart for Sergei Rozhkov, a 41-year-old construction worker from the capital of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, in the first half of 2020.

    “Everything changed in May when Sergei and his wife divorced,” said Rozhkov’s younger brother, Vladimir. “He took the breakup very hard. Before, he had been cheerful and sociable, but now he closed up. He began drinking.”

    In the autumn, Sergei packed up a few things and left his home.

    “It took us a while to notice,” another brother, Aleksandr Rozhkov, told RFE/RL. “We all have our own lives and families. We talk on the phone once a week or so and get together even less often. But after he didn’t return our calls a few times, we got concerned.”

    Rozhkov’s family has not seen Sergei since. The authorities have been unable to find out anything about his disappearance, but the family’s own investigation has convinced them Sergei was abducted and is likely being forced to work on a farm in the predominantly agricultural Chernyakhovsky district in the heart of the Baltic Sea region.

    “They exploit unpaid labor,” Vladimir said. “We believe Sergei has ended up there.”

    The suspicion is not as outlandish as it might seem at first glance.

    In 2014, law enforcement authorities liberated 36 men who had been listed as “missing” from Kaliningrad from a farm in the Guryevsky district. Most of the men had been homeless or “lived an antisocial lifestyle,” a police spokesman was quoted as saying at the time.

    The enslaved men told police they had been held in primitive conditions against their will and had been beaten frequently.

    “The most common forms of enslavement in the country are for agricultural and construction work,” said Oleg Melnikov, director of the Moscow-based NGO Alternativa, which investigates cases of human trafficking and slave labor in Russia. “Every year, between 80,000 and 100,000 people go missing in Russia. Of them, about 5 to 7 percent end up in some form of slavery — sexual or for physical labor. That would be about 5,000 to 10,000 people a year.”

    Aleksandr and Vladimir Rozhkov: "We talk on the phone once a week or so and get together even less often," Aleksandr said. "But after he didn’t return our calls a few times, we got concerned.”

    Aleksandr and Vladimir Rozhkov: “We talk on the phone once a week or so and get together even less often,” Aleksandr said. “But after he didn’t return our calls a few times, we got concerned.”

    Melnikov added that since 2011, only about 150 criminal cases have been brought under Russia’s laws against labor exploitation.

    “That is because the laws are extremely poorly written,” he said. “They don’t even include a definition of who is the victim in such cases.”

    Elusive Justice

    In Kaliningrad Oblast, Yekaterina Presnyakova of the NGO Zapad, which searches for missing people, said her organization received over 220 appeals for help in 2020, including the Rozhkov case.

    When the Rozhkov brothers began their search for Sergei, they quickly learned that he had spent a lot of time over the summer with a friend named Leonid Artyukh, who is an official with the Association of Evangelical Churches of Kaliningrad Oblast.

    “I met Sergei back in 2003 when he did some construction work at my house,” Artyukh told RFE/RL. “[Last summer] Sergei began having problems with alcohol. I invited him to talk with some of our parishioners. He came only once.

    “Then I decided to try to help him, so I suggested that he go to a monastery for spiritual renewal. It is located in the Chernyakhovsky district. Sergei agreed, and I took him there,” Artyukh said.”

    Artyukh told the Rozhkovs where the monastery was located on October 22 and, the following day, they made the trip there.

    They found a two-story building in the middle of a remote field. It had about 10 bedrooms, each housing three or four men.

    “We were able to enter freely,” Aleksandr said. “No one chased us out. People were friendly. But Sergei was not there.”

    A man who introduced himself as Viktor and said he was the elder at the facility said that Sergei had been there for only two days.

    Sergei Rozhkov has been missing since October.

    Sergei Rozhkov has been missing since October.

    Viktor said Sergei left during the night, leaving his possessions and his mobile phone behind. He added that Sergei had been calm and had not had any conflicts while he was there.

    During this trip, the Rozhkov brothers also learned about the alleged use of slave labor on farms in the district, they said.

    “We believe Sergei ended up there,” Vladimir Rozhkov said, adding that the family suspects he was abducted at some point after leaving what he referred to as the “church shelter.”

    Abductions, the Rozhkovs said they learned, are something of an open secret in the Chernyakovsky district.

    “After 8 p.m., you see almost no one on the streets there,” Aleksandr Rozhkov said. “They are simply afraid to appear outside. There have been very many cases when people walking from one settlement to another just vanished. And no one there is surprised.”

    “I have lived here for 30 years,” says local resident Nikolai Semyonov. “Even before, it was dangerous to walk around in the dark. But now it is even more dangerous."

    “I have lived here for 30 years,” says local resident Nikolai Semyonov. “Even before, it was dangerous to walk around in the dark. But now it is even more dangerous.”

    Local resident Nikolai Semyonov told RFE/RL a similar story.

    “I have lived here for 30 years,” he said. “Even before, it was dangerous to walk around in the dark. But now it is even more dangerous. I haven’t been out at night myself for a long time now. People just disappear.”

    ‘Great Danger’

    Facing a dead end after visiting the monastery, the Rozhkov brothers returned to Kaliningrad the same day. And on that very evening, Sergei suddenly called from an unknown telephone number.

    “Sergei said he’d borrowed the telephone from some woman,” Aleksandr recalled. “He said that he was at a bus stop in a settlement in the Chernyakhovsky district. He said he was lost and asked me to come and get him. He confirmed that he had left the monastery of his own volition. The call came at 19:15. His voice was calm.

    “We had no idea that he was in great danger,” he added.

    Aleksandr arrived at the bus stop in the settlement of Svoboda about three hours later. But Sergei was not there.

    “I asked around whether anyone had seen such a man,” he recalled. “They said that they had. They told me that he was sitting for a long time at the stop. Then two minivans pulled up and stopped in front of him. After a small altercation, they dragged my brother into one of the vans and drove off. I missed him by just 20 minutes.”

    The next day, the Rozhkovs filed a missing-person report with the police.

    “For a long time, the police didn’t give us any information at all,” Aleksandr said. “Now they tell us that they are looking but haven’t found anything.”

    Zapad, the NGO, has also been looking, activist Presnyakova told RFE/RL.

    “Our volunteers searched the whole Svoboda settlement,” she said. “We have gone over the entire area with drones, but without result. The police have checked all the farms in Kaliningrad Oblast. The search for Sergei Rozkhov continues.”

    Rozhkov is now officially listed as missing, and police have opened a murder investigation. His family has hired a lawyer. The prosecutor’s office told RFE/RL that a criminal investigation is ongoing, and the authorities continue to search for the missing man.

    The family’s lawyer, who asked not to be identified out of safety concerns because of her investigation into the alleged use of forced labor, said she has gotten the cold shoulder from farms she has visited seeking information.

    “You show up and the owner comes out and says, ‘I swear by my mother there is no one here.’ But it is impossible to verify what is really going on there.”

    Beatings, No Pay

    After the Rozhkovs went public with their search, other locals came forward with similar stories. One of them, 27-year-old Vladislav Feshchak, even believes he may have seen Sergei.

    In September 2020, Feshchak was searching for work when he was approached by a “foreign-looking” man in a minivan.

    “I told him I was looking for work and he offered a job on a farm,” Feshchak told RFE/RL. “I was a little drunk and I agreed. When we arrived, he suggested that I get some sleep and start working in the morning. But it turned out they had no intention of paying me or letting me leave.

    “There were five other guys there in the same situation. All of them worked without getting paid. I ran off almost immediately, but they caught me after about two hours. They told me that they would make a cripple out of me if I tried it again. I saw them beat several people being held there.”

    Vladislav Feshchak believes he may have seen Rozhkov before he himself escaped captivity.

    Vladislav Feshchak believes he may have seen Rozhkov before he himself escaped captivity.

    Feshchak escaped captivity in December but has been living in hiding with relatives ever since. He said he fears for his life. When he filed a statement with the police, he said, he was told “there are quite a few cases” like his.

    “They took my statement, but it is unlikely they will do anything,” he said.

    While he was in captivity, Feshchak believes he might have seen Sergei Rozhkov.

    “I can’t say for sure, but he looked a lot like the photographs [of Rozhkov],” Feshchak said. “When I was on the farm, some guys came to us from another farm. They took away about 400 rams. The guy in charge had four other guys helping him load the animals. And one of them looked a lot like Sergei.”

    Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Kaliningrad by correspondent Anna Krylova of the North Desk of RFE/RL’s Russian Service

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden Administration’s Additional Sanctions Over Nord Stream 2 ‘Inadequate,’ Republicans Say

    The United States imposed additional sanctions on a Russian vessel and the ship’s owner for their work on the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, but the move was immediately criticized as inadequate by Republican lawmakers.

    The sanctions were announced in a report submitted to Congress by the State Department late on February 19.

    Two Republican lawmakers immediately denounced the administration for failing to impose sanctions on additional targets and demanded the administration explain what it is doing to oppose the completion of the pipeline.

    Representative Michael McCaul (Republican-Texas) said that simply adding a layer of sanctions to previously sanctioned targets was “wholly inadequate” and does not meet lawmakers’ intent to stop the pipeline.

    “Allowing this pipeline to be completed would be nothing short of a victory for Vladimir Putin,” McCaul said.

    Senator Jim Risch (Republican-Idaho) echoed McCaul’s concerns, saying in a statement that Congress has passed multiple bipartisan laws regarding the construction of the pipeline.

    Congress specifically broadened the mandatory sanctions to include the types of pipe-laying activities occurring now, Risch said. But the State Department report ignores these activities, which “demands an immediate explanation.”

    The lawmakers also said the new sanctions duplicate existing penalties that the Trump administration imposed on the pipe-laying ship Fortuna and its owner KVT-RUS in January.

    The United States and several European countries oppose the pipeline, which will reroute Russian natural gas exports under the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine. They say this will deprive Kyiv of billions of dollars in much needed transportation fees while strengthening the Kremlin’s grip on the European energy market.

    “We’ve been clear for some time that Nord Stream 2 is a bad deal and that companies risk sanctions if they are involved,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters just hours before the report was transmitted to Congress.

    “We’ll continue to work with our allies and partners to ensure that Europe has a reliable, diversified energy supply network that doesn’t undermine our collective security. Our goal in all of this is to reinforce European energy security and safeguard against predatory behavior,” he said.

    But Risch and McCaul were unimpressed that the administration failed to impose any sanctions on additional targets, notably people and firms in Germany, which is a strong Nord Stream 2 proponent.

    Opposition to the pipeline in Congress has increased since the poisoning and arrest of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and a crackdown against demonstrators who have protested in his support.

    A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on February 17 called on the Biden administration to brief Congress on its steps to stop the controversial pipeline, which is believed to be around 90 percent complete.

    The lawmakers also said they wanted to know if Germany had made any proposal to halt or water down U.S. sanctions targeting the pipeline amid news reports that it had.

    A first round of U.S. sanctions specifically targeting vessels laying the pipeline forced a European contractor to halt work, delaying the launch of Nord Stream 2 by at least a year.

    Congress last year passed the Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Clarification Act (PEESCA) to widen the list of sanctionable services against the project to include providing insurance, reinsurance, pipeline testing, inspection, and certification services. PEESCA became law on January 1.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Moscow Court To Consider Navalny’s Appeal Of Prison Term, Defamation Case On Same Day

    A hearing on Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s appeal of his sentence for violating terms of his probation while recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning in Germany is scheduled to take place in a Moscow court on February 20.

    After the hearing on the appeal of his sentence, scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. Prague time, Navanly will face court proceedings in a separate case on charges of defaming a World War II veteran.

    Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption investigator and President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, was arrested last month upon returning from Germany and found guilty of guilty of violating the terms of his parole related to an embezzlement case that Navalny has called politically motivated.

    Navalny’s detention triggered international condemnation and protests across Russia on January 23 and January 31 during which more than 10,000 people were rounded up by police.

    RUSSIA -- Riot police block an area protecting against demonstrators during a protest against the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Jan. 31, 2021

    RUSSIA — Riot police block an area protecting against demonstrators during a protest against the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Jan. 31, 2021

    A Moscow court on February 2 converted the sentence to three and a half years in prison. Given credit for time already spent in detention, the sentence was set at two years and eight months, which Navalny will have to serve behind bars unless the ruling is changed on appeal.

    Navalny was in Germany recovering from the poisoning, which he and supporters say was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in the poisoning.

    The Strasbourg-based ECHR on February 16 called for the “immediate” release of Navalny, and demand rejected by the Kremlin as “unlawful” and “inadmissible” meddling in Russia’s affairs.

    Moscow has remained defiant about Western criticism over its jailing of the opposition politician and the crackdown on his supporters, calling it foreign interference in its internal affairs.

    In the defamation case prosecutors demanded on February 16 that Navalny be fined 950,000 rubles ($13,000).

    The judge in Moscow’s Babushkinsky district court did not immediately rule on the prosecutors’ demand and adjourned the trial until February 20.

    Officials accuse Navalny of defaming a war veteran who took part in a Kremlin-organized promotional video. Navalny mocked the people in the video, calling them “corrupt lackeys and traitors.” Navalny’s allies have called the trial a politically motivated sham and Navalny has accused Russian officials of “fabricating” the case against him.

    World War II veterans are revered by most Russians and criticism of them is generally regarded as socially unacceptable.

    With reporting by RFE/RL’s Russian Service

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Five Things To Know About Georgia And The Political Crisis It’s Slipping Toward

    The warning lights were blinking after October’s parliamentary elections.

    The political party founded by Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili cemented its grip on power, building on electoral gains from a year earlier despite an undercurrent of discontent dating back at least that long.

    Opposition groups, however, cried foul and refused to even take their seats in the legislature, even though many international observers said the vote was more or less fair and free.

    Now the leader of the country’s main opposition bloc has been ordered arrested, accused of violating bail on charges stemming from one of those protests. That arrest, in turn, has prompted the surprise resignation of the prime minister, who heads the government of Ivanishvili allies.

    Confused?

    Here are five things to know about the latest political crisis to consume the South Caucasus nation of nearly 4 million people.

    So What’s Going On Exactly?

    Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia surprised the country on February 18 when he announced his resignation.

    More unexpected was the rationale: to spare the country political “polarization” following an order by a Tbilisi city court to jail Nika Melia, the chairman of the United National Movement (ENM), the country’s main opposition party.

    Gakharia appeared to have lost an internal debate within the ruling party over the signals that it would send to jail a leading opposition voice like Melia in a fragile post-Soviet democracy.

    Melia has been accused of organizing violent protests that erupted outside parliament nearly two years ago, in the summer of 2019. That unrest was ignited by, among other things, a visiting Russian lawmaker’s decision to sit in the speaker’s chair of the Georgian Parliament during a meeting of politicians from predominantly Eastern Orthodox countries.

    (More on Russia later.)

    But underlying the protests were also opposition accusations that the electoral system was rigged in favor of Georgian Dream, which Ivanishvili founded in 2012.

    And before that, there were other protests

    In March 2020, after months of on-again, off-again negotiations in Tbilisi that included U.S. and EU representatives, Georgian Dream, the United National Movement, and other parties agreed to a deal to reform the system.

    On October 31, saddled with the additional burden of the COVID-19 health crisis and signs of growing political fractiousness, the country held its first national parliamentary elections under the reformed system.

    Again, Georgian Dream won a majority of the 150 seats.

    International observers said the vote was “competitive and, overall, fundamental freedoms were respected” but cited pervasive allegations of pressure on voters.

    Still, the United National Movement and the other, smaller parties cried foul. Since then, they have boycotted parliament, refusing to take part and ratcheting up tensions.

    In announcing his resignation, Gakharia cited the threat of political polarization.
    https://www.rferl.org/a/georgian-opposition-announces-new-election-protests-despite-ongoing-talks/30948925.html

    “Of course, I believe and want to believe that this step will help reduce polarization in the political space of our country, because I am convinced that polarization and confrontation between us is the greatest risk for the future of our country, its economic development, and overcoming all types of crises,” he said.

    A Georgian Dream lawmaker, Nikoloz Samkharadze, then claimed that “as far as I know,” Gakharia had “not only resigned but also left the Georgian Dream” party. https://agenda.ge/en/news/2021/442

    After Gakharia’s announcement, the Interior Ministry said it was postponing Melia’s arrest.

    A few hours later, Georgian Dream announced that it had chosen his replacement: Irakli Garibashvili, a former prime and defense minister who is considered a close confidant of Ivanishvili.

    Why Should I Care?

    In the West, Georgia has been seen as a potential role model for democracy — vibrant and messy — in a region where democracy is sometimes an afterthought or worse. (Armenia’s democracy is definitely vibrant and definitely messy. Azerbaijan is anything but democratic. Turkey’s is an open question. Russia’s is “managed.”)

    That sentiment dates in part back to 2003, when a brash, U.S.-educated lawyer named Mikheil Saakashvili led a popular protest that ousted a long-serving former Soviet apparatchik, Eduard Shevardnadze.

    Heavy on drama and sometimes criticized as lighter on substantive, far-reaching reforms, Saakashvili’s presidency hit a nadir in 2008 when Russia invaded, occupying two breakaway regions and humiliating the NATO-trained units of Georgia’s military in a five-day conflict.

    Saakashvili and his United National Movement held on for another four years until 2012, when Ivanishvili’s newfound party won elections and Saakashvili conceded.

    So far, Georgia hasn’t completely established itself as a full democracy. Politically charged criminal prosecutions of the exiled Saakashvili didn’t help burnish perceptions. But even more recently, Freedom House said Georgia had slipped in its democracy rankings in recent years, and now qualifies as a “transitional or hybrid regime.”
    https://freedomhouse.org/country/georgia/nations-transit/2020

    The instability has undermined Western proponents of fully embracing Georgia and encouraging it on the course toward the EU or even NATO footing that Saakashvili, and many Georgians, desire. Some Western planners still view Georgia as a candidate to be bumped out of Russia’s orbit.

    “Nowhere else in the region do so many aspire to the Western-led, rules-based, liberal world order that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin abhors,” Salome Samadashvili, an opposition lawmaker, wrote in a 2019 opinion article.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/12/georgians-are-taking-stand-against-vladimir-putin-where-is-west/

    Then there are the economic considerations: Georgia sits astride several major trading routes and is crisscrossed with railways and an important pipeline that brings oil from Azerbaijan to Tbilisi then to world markets, via the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

    The political instability has tamped down outsiders’ appetite for investing in the country.

    So What About This Billionaire Guy?

    With a net worth now estimated at nearly $5 billion by Forbes, Ivanishvili made his fortune in the 1990s, in Russia, with investments in metals, real estate, and banking.
    https://www.forbes.com/profile/bidzina-ivanishvili/?sh=4e3a5ef45989

    A Russian citizen, Ivanishvili returned to Tbilisi around the time of the 2003 Rose Revolution, built a palatial mountain-side compound outside the capital, and then, in 2011, hatched a plan to launch his own political party.

    https://gdb.rferl.org/8C86536C-850B-497E-BD02-45C71B8D9258.jpg
    https://gdb.rferl.org/8C86536C-850B-497E-BD02-45C71B8D9258.jpg

    After his Georgian Dream’s electoral victory in 2012, Ivanishvili served as prime minister for just over a year before returning to the private sector, though most believe he still is the godfather of Georgian politics, pulling the strings from offstage.

    In 2018, he returned as chairman of the party, and the following year the party helped spearhead changes to how lawmakers are elected to parliament, a move largely backed by opposition parties.

    Last month, Ivanishvili again announced his retirement from politics, though many Georgians say they doubt his real intentions.

    Ivanishvili, who gives few interviews, is known as an avid art collector: with works by Picasso and Monet among his possessions.

    And he’s built a private zoo.

    His most quixotic endeavor? Uprooting hundreds of massive, century-old trees and moving them, over land and over sea, to a new ecological park owned by his family.

    VIDEO:

    “It’s my hobby and I really love big trees. Giant trees are my entertainment,” he said in one interview.
    https://oc-media.org/features/ivanishvilis-tree-collecting-hobby/

    OK. So Russia’s To Blame, Right?

    Actually, no. At least not directly.

    Many Georgians resent Russia. Or more precisely, they appear to resent Putin’s Kremlin.
    https://gdb.rferl.org/C48E8938-BC28-47A0-AC31-1FD6C56807A7_w1023_r1_s.jpg

    A 2018 survey conducted by the Center for Insights in Survey Research found that 85 percent of Georgians consider Russia to be a “political threat.”
    https://www.iri.org/sites/default/files/2018-5-29_georgia_poll_presentation.pdf

    That attitude stems mostly from the 2008 war, which ended with Russian troops occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia — two regions that already had considerable autonomy dating back to the early 1990s.

    Russia maintains a substantial military presence in both regions; in South Ossetia, the administrative line dividing the region has been shifted several times by Russian forces, resulting in a loss of territory for Georgia proper.
    https://www.rferl.org/a/daily-vertical-georgia-ossetia-border-moved-russian-troops/28609829.html

    In all, one-fifth of Georgia’s territory is now under the control of Russia and the separatist groups it supports.

    Still, Georgia has long been reliant on Russia as its largest export market for things like agriculture products and its famed wines and mineral waters. Moscow has squeezed Tbilisi in the past to block some exports, citing spurious claims of poor quality.

    A ban on wines and mineral waters imposed in 2006, under Saakashvili, lasted until 2013, after Ivanishvili was in power. Getting Russia to lift that ban was a key goal for Georgian Dream.

    The bigger question for some Georgians surrounds Ivanishvili’s loyalties. Opposition groups regularly insinuate that the Russian roots of his business empire make him beholden to interests there: industrial or intelligence. Gakharia himself was a businessman in Moscow before being pulled into Georgian politics by Ivanishvili.

    For his part, Ivanishvili has repeatedly denied any suggestion that he was ever compromised or took orders from Russian interests.

    What Happens Next?

    Gakharia’s resignation, the suspension of Melia’s arrest order, opposition parties calling for snap elections — all point to new turmoil and uncertainty in Georgian politics.

    So it’s anyone’s guess.

    The first step might be parliamentary approval for Georgian Dream’s choice of a successor as prime minister.

    The 39-year-old Garibashvili was defense minister in Gakharia’s cabinet before the latter’s abrupt exit on February 18.

    Paris-educated, Garibashvili’s previous, two-year stint as prime minister could provide some reassurance to Georgians and the international community.

    But the EU’s envoy to Georgia, Carl Hartzell, has warned that the circumstances of Melia’s prosecution are a “dangerous trajectory for Georgia and for Georgian democracy.”

    Washington quickly tried to soothe the diplomatic waters but also warned that there did not appear to be a quick fix to decades of Georgian “problems.”

    “The current dangerous situation following the Melia ruling stems from decades-long problems with the electoral system and the judicial system,” the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi said in a statement. “The way to address the important issues at stake is through peaceful negotiation. We urge all involved to remain calm and avoid violence.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. Ambassador Says Navalny Poisoning, Jailing Is Not Just An Internal Russian Matter

    The U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Sullivan, has rejected Moscow’s assertion that last year’s nerve-agent poisoning of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and protests prompted by his recent jailing is a strictly internal Russian affair.

    In an interview with Current Time on February 16 via video link from Moscow, Sullivan said the “United States has no interest in fomenting dispute within Russia or encouraging protests.”

    The envoy also criticized the targeting of media organizations inside Russia, including RFE/RL, under the country’s controversial “foreign agent” law, saying the United States is considering an “appropriate” response.

    A Moscow court on February 2 found Navalny, 44, guilty of violating the terms of his parole while in Germany, where he was recovering from nerve-agent poisoning that he and supporters say was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    The Kremlin has denied any role in the poisoning.

    Navalny’s suspended sentence was related to an embezzlement case that he has called politically motivated. The court converted the sentence to 3 1/2 years in prison. Given credit for time already spent in detention, the Kremlin critic would have to serve two years and eight months behind bars, the court said.

    The court’s ruling triggered international condemnation and protests across Russia that were violently dispersed by security forces.

    More than 10,000 people were rounded up by police during rallies in more than 100 Russian cities and towns on January 23 and January 31. Many of Navalny’s political aides and allies were detained, fined, or placed under house arrest for violating sanitary and epidemiological safety precautions during a pandemic.

    Moscow has remained defiant about Western criticism over its jailing of the opposition politician and the crackdown on his supporters, calling it foreign interference in its internal affairs.

    During his interview with Current Time, Sullivan noted that “first, the use of a chemical weapon — which is yet to be explained; a banned chemical weapon prohibited by a treaty to which Russia is a party — that is not a domestic legal issue.”

    “Second, even the case itself that has been continued against Navalny last month — that caused his arrest — is something that the European Court of Human Rights [ECHR] has found an invalid basis for any further judicial action against Navalny. This is a court to which Russia is a party, so I don’t see this as a domestic political issue,” the U.S. ambassador said.

    On February 16, the Strasbourg-based ECHR called for the “immediate” release of Navalny, a demand rejected by the Kremlin as “unlawful” and “inadmissible” meddling in Russia’s affairs.

    ‘An Important Fundamental Right’

    In an interview last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denounced what he called a broader course “coordinated by the entire collective West, which goes beyond mere deterrence of Russia and evolves into an aggressive deterrence of Russia.”

    “They don’t like us because we have our own idea of what’s going on in the world,” he said.

    Sullivan said he and the United States will continue voicing support for the “fundamental right for people [in any country] to be allowed to express their opinions and to petition the government for redress, and to gather peacefully, to assemble peacefully.”

    “It is something that is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution and something that we believe is an important fundamental right for all individuals,” he added.

    In the United States, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced legislation to impose fresh targeted sanctions on Russian officials found to be complicit in Navalny’s poisoning.

    The European Union and Britain have already imposed travel bans and asset freezes against senior Russian officials believed to be responsible for the “attempted assassination.”

    Sullivan’s interview with Current Time also touched upon the “foreign agent” law, which rights group say has been used by Russian authorities to silence dissent and muzzle organizations that have a diverging view from the authorities.

    Russian regulators have hit RFE/RL, one of three foreign news organizations to be labeled as a “foreign agent,” with a series of fines in recent weeks.

    Last month, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers called for new sanctions against Moscow if the Kremlin moves to enforce the fines.

    “I think this is an issue that is under intense scrutiny back home in Washington about how media entities are being treated here in Russia, and I think you will see an appropriate response by the U.S. government to that,” Sullivan said.

    ‘Kafkaesque’ Amendments

    First passed in 2012 and expanded several times since, the “foreign agent” law gives authorities the power to brand nongovernmental organizations, human rights groups, and news media deemed to receive foreign funding for political activity as “foreign agents.”

    The law subjects these organizations to bureaucratic scrutiny and spot checks and requires them to attach the “foreign agent” label to their publications. They must also report on their spending and funding.

    Among other things, the law requires certain news organizations that receive foreign funding to label content inside Russia as being produced by a “foreign agent.”

    “More than objectionable, [the law] is a real disservice to the Russian people, to the extent that media entities like Radio Free Europe or Radio Liberty are burdened by these laws, by — for example — the disclaimer requirements which interfere with content, and subsequent fines which are going to impose reportedly large financial penalties on a media organization that is not controlled by the U.S. government,” Sullivan said.

    On February 16, the Russian Duma, the parliament’s lower house, passed what Reporters Without Borders called “Kafkaesque” amendments to the “foreign agents” law.

    The “nonsensical and incomprehensible” amendments, which include heavier fines, aim to intimidate journalists and get them to censor themselves, the Paris-based media freedom watchdog said in a statement.

    Based on an interview conducted by Current Time’s Egor Maximov

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Kyiv Begins Marking Anniversary Of Deadly Shootings During Euromaidan Protests

    KYIV — Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko has marked the seventh anniversary of the shooting deaths of dozens of participants in the Euromaidan anti-government protests that toppled Ukraine’s Russia-friendly former president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.

    Klitschko laid flowers on February 18 at the sites where the deadly shootings occurred seven years ago and at the so-called Monument of the Heavenly Hundred on Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti).

    “Every day of the fight — from autumn 2013 to February 2014 — was important. No matter how difficult it is now, we will not disown or betray the ideals and principles we fought for at Maidan,” Klitschko said.

    While the official day of nationwide commemorations to honor those who were killed in Kyiv during clashes with Yanukovych’s security forces is February 20, some parts of Ukraine begin honoring the slain protesters two days earlier, on the day when the shootings started.

    The Euromaidan movement began in November 2013 when protesters gathered on the central square in Kyiv to protest Yanukovych’s decision not to sign a crucial trade accord with the European Union. Instead, he sought closer economic ties with Russia.

    Ukrainian prosecutors say 104 people were killed and 2,500 injured as a result of violent crackdowns by authorities against protesters from February 18-20, 2014.

    Shunning a deal backed by the West and Russia to end the standoff, Yanukovych abandoned power and fled Kyiv on February 21, 2014.

    The former president, who was secretly flown to Russia and remains there, denies that he ordered police to fire on protesters, saying that the violence was the result of a “planned operation” to overthrow his government.

    In March 2014, shortly after Yanukovych’s downfall, Russian military forces seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula — a precursor to the Kremlin’s illegal annexation of the territory through a hastily organized and widely discredited referendum.

    Russia also has supported pro-Russia separatists who are fighting Ukrainian government forces in eastern Ukraine.

    More than 13,200 people have been killed in that conflict since April 2014.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • NATO-Linked Think Tank Proposes Biden Adopt Venezuela-Style ‘Regime Change’ Policies Towards Belarus

    The Biden administration should be massively boosting its funding to opposition groups in Belarus while increasing sanctions on the country in order to force out the current government, according to a discussion hosted by the highly influential Atlantic Council.

    Kayla Popuchet is minoring in Slavic studies as part of her education in Latin American and Eastern European politics at City University of New York. Popuchet, who is also a regular contributor to Anticonquista and a New York City Housing Court Specialist, recently attended an online meeting about Belarus organised by the Atlantic Council, widely regarded as NATO’s unofficial think tank.

    The post NATO-Linked Think Tank Proposes Biden Adopt Venezuela-Style ‘Regime Change’ Policies Towards Belarus appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • U.S. Lawmakers Call On Biden Administration To Update Congress On Nord Stream 2 Sanctions

    WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has called on the Biden administration to brief Congress on its steps to stop a controversial Russian natural-gas pipeline to Europe amid concerns it is nearing completion.

    In a February 17 letter addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, four members of the House of Representatives requested information on the status of the Nord Stream 2 project, which is believed to be around 90 percent complete.

    The lawmakers also said they wanted to know if Germany had made any proposal to halt or water down U.S. sanctions targeting the pipeline. The U.S. sanctions against Nord Stream have become a thorn in the side of American-German relations, with Berlin continuing to back the project.

    The Financial Times reported on February 16 that German ministers were considering a proposal under which the United States would drop sanctions and permit the project to be completed in exchange for a snapback mechanism that would allow Berlin to shut off Nord Stream 2 if Russia put pressure on Ukraine.

    The United States and several European countries oppose the pipeline — which will reroute Russian natural-gas exports under the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine — on the grounds that it strengthens the Kremlin’s grip on the European energy market and deprives Kyiv of billions of dollars in much needed transportation fees.

    A first round of U.S. sanctions specifically targeting vessels laying the pipeline forced a European contractor to halt work, delaying the launch of Nord Stream 2 by at least a year.

    Congress last year passed the Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Clarification Act (PEESCA) to widen the list of sanctionable services against the project to include providing insurance, reinsurance, pipeline testing, inspection, and certification services.

    PEESCA became law on January 1 and its implementation could force more companies out of the $11 billion project and further delay its completion.

    “In light of these requirements, we write to request a briefing from the State Department on the Biden administration’s efforts to implement PEESCA,” the lawmakers wrote, pointing out that the administration failed to meet a February 16 deadline to deliver a mandatory report on any sanctionable activity related to Nord Stream 2.

    The letter named 15 Russian companies that may be involved in sanctionable work.

    It was signed by Mike McCall (California), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Adam Kinzinger (Republican-Illinois), Ruben Gallego (Democrat-Arizona), and Marcy Kaptur (Democrat-Ohio).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ECHR tells Russia to free Alexei Navalny on safety grounds

    Russia says it will ignore ruling, which it calls a ‘blatant and gross interference’ in its affairs

    The European court of human rights has told Russia to free Alexei Navalny, prompting a new standoff between Europe and Moscow over the fate of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest critic.

    Russia has said it will ignore the ruling despite a requirement to comply as a member of the Council of Europe, calling the court’s decision “blatant and gross interference in the judicial affairs of a sovereign state”.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Russian Duma OKs Bill To Fine Violators Of Controversial ‘Foreign Agents’ Law

    Russian parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma, has approved in the last reading a bill that envisages fines for those violating the country’s controversial law on “foreign agents.”

    First passed in 2012 and expanded several times since, the law gives authorities the power to brand nongovernmental organizations, human rights groups, news media, and individuals working for organizations deemed to receive foreign funding for political activity as a “foreign agent,” a label that carries pejorative Soviet-era connotations.

    The law subjects these organizations and individuals to bureaucratic scrutiny and spot checks and requires them to attach the “foreign agent” label to their publications. They must also report on their spending and funding.

    According to the bill approved by lawmakers on February 16, failure to attach the “foreign agent” label could lead to fines of up to 2,500 rubles ($34) for individuals and up to 500,000 rubles ($6,800) for entities.

    In addition, organizations branded as “foreign agents” and working without being registered as such could face fines of up to 5 million rubles ($68,000).

    The bill will come into force after parliament’s upper chamber, the Federation Council, approves it and President Vladimir Putin signs it into law.

    The law, among other things, requires certain news organizations that receive foreign funding, including RFE/RL, to label content within Russia as being produced by a “foreign agent.”

    Since early in Vladimir Putin’s presidency, the Kremlin has steadily tightened the screws on independent media. The country is ranked 149th out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Iran, Russia Start Naval Drill In Indian Ocean

    Iran and Russia have embarked on a joint naval drill in the northern part of the Indian Ocean that they say has been designed to “enhance the security” of maritime trade in the region, Iranian state media reported.

    State television said on February 16 that the exercise dubbed Maritime Security Belt will cover an area of about 17,000 square kilometers and include units from the Iranian Navy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) Navy, and the Russian Navy.

    Iranian Rear Admiral Gholamreza Tahani said its purpose was to “enhance the security of international maritime trade, confront maritime piracy and terrorism, and exchange information.”

    The Indian Navy will also join the exercise, in a message of “peace and friendship for neighboring and regional countries,” Tahani said.

    Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported that the drill was scheduled to last three days.

    This is the second joint Russian-Iranian naval exercise since December 2019, when the two countries plus China held a drill in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Oman.

    Iran and China also participated in military exercises held in Russia in September 2020.

    Tehran has been seeking to step up military cooperation with Beijing and Moscow amid tensions with the United States.

    Iran has also increased its military drills in recent weeks as tensions built during the final days of the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

    Tehran is now trying to pressure U.S. President Joe Biden’s new administration to reenter a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.

    Last week, the IRGC conducted a ground forces drill in the southwest of Iran near the Iraqi border.

    Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear pact in 2018 and reimposed crushing sanctions on Iran.

    In response to the U.S. moves, which were accompanied by increased tensions between Iran, the United States, and its allies, Tehran has gradually breached parts of the pact saying it is no longer bound by it.

    The Biden administration has expressed willingness to return to compliance with the accord if Iran does, and then work with U.S. allies and partners on a “longer and stronger” agreement, including other issues such as Iran’s missile program and its support for regional proxy forces.

    Iranian officials insist that the United States should make the first move by returning to the agreement, which eased international sanctions in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s disputed nuclear program.

    They also say that the country’s missile program and regional policies are off the table.

    With reporting by AFP, AP, and Reuters

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.