Shared Links Review: Приднестровье - Transnistria and Georgia are the potential second and third fronts of the Russia - Ukraine War | NATO has additional options to pressure Putin | FBI is infiltrated by Russians
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Приднестровье - Transnistria and Georgia are the potential second and third fronts of the Russia - Ukraine War | NATO has additional options to pressure Putin | FBI is infiltrated by Russians
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been the target of several assassination attempts since the start of the Russian invasion. According to the New York Post , more than a dozen times mercenaries or soldiers tried to kill him. And according to information from NBC News , the Ukrainian president is still in office thanks in part to information from the CIA.
According to the American media, relayed by our colleagues from Le Parisien , the CIA devotes significant resources "to collecting intelligence in order to protect Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky."
important help
NBC News cites officials from the United States intelligence agency, but also former members. According to them, the CIA is "consulting with the Ukrainians to make sure that [Zelensky] is not on the same premises as his entire chain of command."
The American services affirm that never so much classified information will have been shared, in such a massive way with an allied country. And this while Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
The role of the American secret services has been major since the start of the war. On BFMTV, Jérôme Poirot, former assistant to the National Intelligence Coordination , explained that "the Americans have been observing what is happening in Russia for a long time (...) and have shown that they are often one step ahead."
Russia sought to turn the tables by accusing Ukraine and its allies of being the ones to widen the war, citing the supposed secret Polish-American plan to control western Ukraine and the recent attacks on targets inside Russia. Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, urged Kyiv and Western capitals to take seriously Russia’s statements “that further calls on Ukraine to strike Russian facilities would definitely lead to a tough response from Russia.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said Ukraine had a right to strike Russian military facilities and “will defend itself in any way.” Britain’s defense minister, Ben Wallace, also said Ukraine would be justified in using Western arms to attack military targets inside Russia, as he warned that the war could turn into a “slow-moving, frozen occupation, like a sort of cancerous growth in Ukraine.”
Speaking at the White House, Mr. Biden rejected Russian suggestions that the United States was waging a proxy war against Moscow. “It shows the desperation that Russia is feeling about their abject failure in being able to do what they set out to do in the first instance,” Mr. Biden said.
He likewise condemned Russian officials’ raising the specter of nuclear war. “No one should be making idle comments about the use of nuclear weapons or the possibility that they could use that,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s irresponsible.”
The massive aid package Mr. Biden unveiled on Thursday would eclipse all the spending by the United States so far on the war. There is widespread bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for more aid, but it remained uncertain whether the issue could get tied up in negotiations over ancillary issues like pandemic relief or immigration.
The request, more than twice the size of the $13.6 billion package lawmakers approved and Mr. Biden signed last month, was intended to last through the end of September, underscoring the expectations of a prolonged conflict.
It includes more than $20 billion for security and military assistance, including $11.4 billion to fund equipment and replenish stocks already provided to Ukraine, $2.6 billion to support the deployment of American troops and equipment to the region to safeguard NATO allies and $1.9 billion for cybersecurity and intelligence support.
LONDON — Britain's top diplomat says Western allies should send tanks, planes and other heavy weapons to Ukraine, saying "inaction would be the greatest provocation."
NATO nations have supplied Ukraine with military supplies including missiles and armored vehicles. But so far they have been reluctant to send fighter planes for fear of escalating the conflict.
U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said "this is a time for courage, not caution." Despite Truss' call for jets, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's spokesman said there were "no plans" for the U.K. to send planes to Ukraine.
Truss also said Russia's attack on Ukraine must be a wake-up call for international institutions. She called for a new focus on "military strength, economic security and deeper global alliances."
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KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:
— Russia cuts natural gas to 2 NATO nations in escalation
— European nations accuse Russia of natural gas 'blackmail'
— The AP Interview: UN nuclear chief wants Ukraine plant access
— EXPLAINER: What's behind Russia's natural gas cutoff?
Follow all AP stories on Russia's war on Ukraine at <a href="https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine" rel="nofollow">https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine</a>
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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:
BOSTON — Cyberattacks by state-backed Russian hackers have destroyed data across dozens of organizations in Ukraine and produced "a chaotic information environment," Microsoft says in a report released Wednesday.
Nearly half the destructive attacks were against critical infrastructure, many times simultaneous to physical attacks, the report notes.
A top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, told reporters in a news briefing on Wednesday that cyberattacks on telecommunications have sometimes coincided with artillery and other physical attacks.
Microsoft assessed that Russia-aligned threat groups were "pre-positioning for the conflict as early as March 2021," hacking into networks to obtain footholds they could later use to collect "strategic and battlefield intelligence or to facilitate future destructive attacks."
During the war, Russia's cyberattacks "have at times not only degraded the functions of the targeted organizations but sought to disrupt citizens' access to reliable information and critical life services, and to shake confidence in the country's leadership," the company's Digital Security Unit says in the 20-page report.
Kremlin cyber operations "have had an impact in terms of technical disruption of services and causing a chaotic information environment, but Microsoft is not able to evaluate their broader strategic impact," the report says.
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ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Wednesday that Russia's war on Ukraine "screams" that the world needs to stop importing oil and gas from Russia and instead move toward other forms of energy.
At an international forum on offshore wind energy in Atlantic City, Granholm said the U.S. as well as its energy industries "are on a war footing," and called for a rapid acceleration of renewable energy including offshore wind power.
Her comments were echoed by Kadri Simson, the European Commissioner for Energy, who noted that Europe recently committed itself to a large-scale move away from Russian fossil fuel imports, and considers wind energy an important part of that transition.
Their comments came as Russia cut off natural gas to NATO members Poland and Bulgaria on Wednesday and threatened to do the same to other countries, dramatically escalating its standoff with the West over the war in Ukraine. European leaders decried the move as "blackmail."
Germany and Italy are among Europe's biggest consumers of Russian natural gas but have already been taking steps to reduce their dependence on Moscow.
"Russia is waging a war in Ukraine and the imperative to move away from Russian oil and gas, for the world to move away from Russian oil and gas screams that there is an imperative that we electrify," said Granholm, the former Michigan governor. "Offshore wind is just a huge component in that."
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UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. says its humanitarian office is mobilizing an experienced team from around the world to coordinate the complex evacuation of civilians from the besieged steel plant in the battered Ukrainian city of Mariupol with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed in principle to U.N. and ICRC participation in the evacuation from the plant during a nearly two-hour, one-on-one meeting Tuesday. The sprawling Azovstal complex, which has been almost completely destroyed by Russian attacks, is the last pocket of organized Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol. An estimated 2,000 troops and 1,000 civilians are said to be holed up in bunkers underneath the wrecked structure.
U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters Wednesday that the U.N. is trying to translate the Guterres-Putin agreement in principle "into an agreement in detail and an agreement on the ground."
"And ultimately what we want is to make sure that a cease-fire would be respected that would allow us to move people safely," he said.
Haq said U.N. officials are having follow-on discussions Wednesday with authorities in Moscow and Kyiv "to develop the operational framework for the timely evacuation of civilians."
He said the exact timing depends on the outcome of discussions between the U.N. humanitarian office and Russia's Ministry of Defense in Moscow as well as between the U.N. crisis coordinator for Ukraine, Amin Awad, and the authorities in Kyiv, where Guterres will be meeting Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday.
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OTTAWA, Ontario — The Canadian government said Wednesday that it has imposed sanctions on more than 200 people who are loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
Russian forces have been backing separatist rebels in the Donbas area for eight years following Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
The Canadian sanctions are focused on the renewed Russian attempt to annex areas of the Donbas by targeting people attempting to support the next phase of the two-month-old Russian war on Ukraine.
"Canada will not stand idly by and watch President Putin and his accomplices attempt to redraw the borders of Ukraine with impunity," Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said in a statement. "International law must be respected."
Global Affairs Canada, the governmental department that manages the country's diplomatic relations, said the new measures target 11 senior officials and 192 other members of the People's Councils of the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk for supporting Putin's attack on the area.
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WASHINGTON — The White House says President Joe Biden will tour a Lockheed Martin facility that makes weapons systems, such as Javelin anti-tank missiles, that the administration is providing to Ukraine to defend itself against Russia's 2-month-old invasion.
Biden plans to visit the facility in Alabama on May 3.
A Javelin is a long-range guided anti-tank missile that can be carried by one person. The United States says it has provided several thousand of the systems to Ukraine.
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MADRID — Russia announced Wednesday it was withdrawing from the United Nations World Tourism Organization just hours before the body's assembly voted to temporarily suspend the country's membership over the invasion of Ukraine, officials said.
UNWTO Secretary General Zurab Pololikashvili made the announcement on his official Twitter account. He said it was the first U.N. body to address Russia's membership.
The organization went ahead and approved the suspension at a special meeting in Madrid on Wednesday, where the organization has its headquarters.
"(Russian President Vladimir) Putin's military offensive is an attack on the founding principles of the United Nations and on the values that tourism represents, such as peace, prosperity and universal respect and the observance of human rights," Spanish Industry, Trade and Tourism Minister Reyes Maroto said in a statement following the decision.
The assembly resolution included a clause that said the suspension could be reversed if a change in the politics of the Russian Federation were noted.
Spain was one of 22 European nations that had promoted the motion.
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Norway's Energy Minister Terje Aasland said Wednesday that the Scandinavian country's position "as a stable, predictable and long-term supplier of energy to the European market is only becoming more important."
"It is underlined by what is now happening on the part of Gazprom," Aasland told Norwegian news agency NTB.
The state-controlled Russian giant said it was shutting off natural gas to NATO members Poland and Bulgaria on Wednesday because they refused to pay in Russian rubles, as President Vladimir Putin had demanded.
Russia threatened to do the same to other countries, dramatically escalating its standoff with the West over the war in Ukraine. European leaders decried the move as "blackmail."
Norway exports about 95% of its gas via an extensive subsea pipeline network linking it to terminals in Germany, Britain, France and Belgium. Last month, Denmark decided to resume the construction of the Danish part of Baltic Pipe, which will connect Poland to Norwegian gas fields.
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MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to Russia's parliament that the goals of the country's military operation in Ukraine will be achieved.
Putin said in an address on Wednesday to both houses of parliament: "I want to emphasize again that all the tasks of the special military operation we are conducting in the Donbas and Ukraine, launched on Feb. 24, will be unconditionally fulfilled."
That, he said, will "guarantee the security of the residents" of separatist regions in eastern Ukraine that Russia recognized as independent shortly before launching its military action in Ukraine, as well as Crimea — which Russia annexed in 2014 — "and our entire country in the historical perspective."
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BERLIN — Germany's economy minister says the government is considering "all scenarios" for a Russian-owned oil refinery that supplies much of the petroleum used in and around Berlin.
Robert Habeck told reporters Wednesday that the German government's goal is to ensure the country becomes independent of Russian energy supplies, and companies established to procure fossil fuels from Russia are "not helpful in that regard."
The refinery at Schwedt is controlled by Rosneft, a Russian state-controlled oil and gas company.
Asked whether Germany would go so far as to nationalize the refinery, an option foreseen in a regulatory change approved by Cabinet this week, Habeck said that "we are in a situation where the government must expect and prepare for all scenarios."
"There are likely to be some we haven't thought of," he said. "But we are considering everything conceivable and making political preparations."
Habeck said Russia's decision to stop supplies of gas to Poland and Bulgaria was an example of "the reality where energy is used as a weapon."
He acknowledged that Germany was and remains one of the biggest consumers of Russian fossil fuels worldwide, though it is making all efforts to diversify its supplies, reduce consumption and switch to renewable energy "so that we are not defenseless."
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KYIV, Ukraine — A Ukrainian presidential adviser has hinted that his country might be involved in a series of fires in border regions of Russia in recent days.
On Wednesday, the governor of the Belgorod region said an ammunition depot was burning after several explosions were heard. Earlier this week, there was a blaze at an oil storage facility in Bryansk.
Ukraine hasn't officially taken responsibility for those and other incidents, and Russian officials haven't publicly ascribed them to Ukrainian attacks.
But Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said in a Telegram post Wednesday that "karma (is) a harsh thing."
He said that Russian regions where the incidents happened "are now also actively studying the concept of 'demilitarization.'"
Without directly admitting any Ukrainian involvement, he said that "sooner or later the debts will have to be repaid."
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ROME — Premier Mario Draghi's office says the Italian leader will meet President Joe Biden in Washington on May 10.
Draghi's office said in a statement on Wednesday that Ukraine will be at the center of discussions, including coordinated measures "to support the Ukrainian population and to counter Russia's unjustified aggression."
The leaders will also discuss energy security. Italy is among European countries that get a large proportion of their natural gas from Russia. Draghi and his ministers have been working to get alternative sources.
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WARSAW, Poland — Security authorities in Poland say that a Russian and a Belarusian man have been arrested on allegations that they spied for Russian intelligence.
A spokesman for Poland's state security bodies, Stanislaw Zaryn, said Wednesday that material gathered by Polish military intelligence led to their arrest.
He said that they were gathering sensitive military information, including about Polish troops in the area near Poland's border with Belarus.
The men were arrested separately last week.
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SOFIA, Bulgaria — The Bulgarian government says the prime minister and defense minister will go to Ukraine to meet with that country's leaders.
The goverment press office said Prime Minister Kiril Petkov and Defense Minister Dragomir Zakov were being accompanied on Wednesday by members of Parliament.
In Kyiv, they will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, and with members of the 200,000-strong Bulgarian community in Ukraine.
They also will visit Borodyanka, Bucha and Irpin, in the Kyiv region, to see damage caused by the Russian invasion.
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BRUSSELS — The head of the European Union's executive Commission says energy companies in the 27-nation bloc that agree to Moscow's demands to pay for gas deliveries in Russian rubles will be breaching the sanctions imposed over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Ursula von der Leyen spoke after Polish and Bulgarian officials said Moscow was cutting off natural gas deliveries to their countries due to their refusal to pay in rubles, a demand made by President Vladimir Putin after sanctions were levied against his nation.
Von der Leyen said Wednesday that "our guidance here is very clear."
She said that "to pay in rubles, if this is not foreseen in the contract, is a breach of our sanctions. We have round about 97% of all contracts that explicitly stipulate payments in euros or dollars, so it's very clear. And the request from the Russian side to pay in rubles is a unilateral decision and not according to the contracts."
Von der Leyen said Russia's decision to cut off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria is another "provocation from the Kremlin" and an attempt to "blackmail" the EU.
She said that, following an urgent meeting of member states, both Poland and Bulgaria are now receiving gas from their EU neighbors.
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Russia has expelled three Norwegian diplomats following the expulsion from Norway earlier this month of three Russian diplomats.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfelt said Wednesday that the Norwegians being kicked out were doing "regular diplomatic work." She vowed that Norway "will continue to stand with our close allies and partners against Russia's aggression and in our support for Ukraine,"
Huitfeld told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that "like other European countries and allies, we have reduced contact with the Russian authorities to a minimum."
On Tuesday, Russia expelled four Swedish diplomats. The Foreign Ministry in Stockholm said they too were "engaged in normal diplomatic activities."
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The Russian Foreign Ministry has announced sanctions against 287 British lawmakers in response to the U.K. sanctioning 368 members of Russia's lower house of parliament.
The ministry on Wednesday released a list of both government and opposition lawmakers, and a few former lawmakers. They are now barred from entering Russia because they "took the most active part in the establishment of anti-Russian sanctions instruments in London (and) contribute to the groundless ramping-up of Russophobic hysteria in the U.K."
The ministry's statement said that "hostile rhetoric and far-fetched accusations coming from the mouths of British parliamentarians not only condone the hostile course of London aimed at demonizing our country and (at) its international isolation, but are also used by opponents of mutually respectful dialogue with Russia to undermine the foundation of bilateral cooperation."
Responding to the announcement, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that "those 287 should regard it as a badge of honor."
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MOSCOW — The Kremlin has criticized a statement by a Ukrainian presidential adviser holding the door open to possible military action in the separatist Trans-Dniester region of Moldova.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday described the statement by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's adviser Oleksiy Arestovych as "quite provocative." Asked in a video stream if Ukraine could send its forces into Trans-Dniester, Arestovych said it could do that but only if Moldova asks for it.
Trans-Dniester, a sliver of land with about 470,000 people, has been under the control of separatist authorities since a 1992 war with Moldova. Russia bases about 1,500 troops in the breakaway region, nominally as peacekeepers. Tensions in the region have escalated in recent days with a series of explosions, for which no one claimed responsibility, raising fears of broader hostilities.
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BERLIN — The German government has rejected criticism that it has been slow to provide Ukraine with weapons requested by Kyiv.
Following domestic and international pressure, Germany announced this week that it would allow the delivery of self-propelled armored anti-aircraft guns to Ukraine to help it fend off Russia's military attack, backing off earlier reluctance provide heavy weapons to the country.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz's spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, said that "the federal government and chancellor have looked with great seriousness at the difficult situation Ukraine, Europe and the entire world are in, and taken a very balanced decision."
He told reporters in Berlin: "I don't see a change of position on the part of the government, but continuity."
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KYIV, Ukraine — The International Atomic Energy Agency's director-general says the level of safety at Europe's largest nuclear plant, currently under Russian occupation in Ukraine, is like a "red light blinking" as his organization tries in vain to get access for work including repairs.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Rafael Grossi said that the IAEA needs access to the Zaporizhzhia plant in southern Ukraine so its inspectors can, among other things, reestablish connections with the Vienna-based headquarters of the U.N. agency. And for that, both Russia and Ukraine need to help.
The plant requires repairs, "and all of this is not happening. So the situation as I have described it, and I would repeat it today, is not sustainable as it is," Grossi said. "So this is a pending issue. This is a red light blinking."
He spoke in an interview Wednesday, a day after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the issue.
- US spies have helped Ukraine kill eight Russian generals and more than 300 officers since Putin's forces entered the country, US officials have revealed
- The US has been providing real-time intelligence to Ukrainian forces since Russia invaded the country in February, former and current U.S. officials said
- On Tuesday, an analysis by independent Russian outlet revealed that 317 officers of junior lieutenant rank and above have been killed in Putin's invasion
- A third of the casualties came from the most senior grades - major or above - including eight generals and the deputy commander of Russia's Black Sea fleet
- Last week, in one of the most recent blows to Russia's army, Moscow admitted another officer, Col. Mikhail Nagamov, had been killed in battle April 13
- His death was announced hours after the death of Alexander Chirva, captain of the Caesar Kunikov tank landing ship - which was blown up by a Ukraine air strike
- The steady stream of high-ranking soldier deaths comes as it's been estimated 22,000 Russian troops have been slain in combat by the Ukrainian army
- Major General Vladimir Frolov, meanwhile, one of Putin's most senior officers, was also killed earlier this month - the eighth general to die
- US officials say those deaths were only made possible by American intelligence, revealing Tuesday they have been in a partnership with Ukraine's government
- The US officials said the Ukraine is being feed the locations of where Russians are based, as well as where Russia is planning to bomb
By Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com
Published: | Updated:
In September 2011, two Chechens suspected of involvement in the January suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, which left 37 people dead, had just left an Istanbul mosque after Friday prayers when, along with a companion, they were shot dead.
According to an indictment cited in a major Turkish newspaper, prosecutors had identified two of the hitmen as Russian nationals working for the Kremlin’s Federal Security Service (FSB), which, prosecutors said, was fighting Chechen groups in Turkey, including those linked to Chechnya’s insurgency against Moscow.
But subsequent reporting by the BBC identified one of the suspects as a member of a Moscow crime gang; another Russian suspected of killing a Chechen militant in Turkey in 2015 likewise hailed from organized crime, according to the BBC, and was also accused by Turkish authorities of working for Russian intelligence.
Especially since 2014, there has been a steady trickle of cases suggesting that Moscow is using organized crime as a covert tool for the “dark aspects” of its foreign policy. Beyond the specific cases discussed in this article, to a considerable extent this assessment is based on discussions with Western officials, especially numerous semi-structured conversations with seven European security and law-enforcement officers.
Publicly available details are often scant, as organized crime investigations, and the consequent trials, tend to be lengthy and details are kept under wraps until court proceedings are over. Nonetheless, the consensus within the European security community is that there has been a definite uptick in the use of criminals to further Russia’s foreign policy goals.
While in Soviet times the Kremlin’s political police demonstrated a willingness to turn to criminals as assets or recruits when needed, the scale and approach seemingly adopted by President Vladimir Putin’s Russia has changed.
Following the post-EuroMaidan worsening of relations with the West, the Kremlin has increasingly adopted what has been called a “mobilisation state” approach. Aware of the West’s greater economic, military and soft power, Russia has been turning to any available alternative foreign policy levers, from nationalist oligarchs to disruptive media outlets.
The gangsters are no exception, and instead of simply identifying unacceptable behaviors, as it did in the past, the Kremlin — occasionally — makes specific demands of those gangsters susceptible to its pressure.
Russia’s practices in this area are also different from those of most other countries. Collaboration with criminals by governments in pursuing foreign-policy goals is certainly not unique to Moscow, and one could look at U.S. examples ranging from cooperation with the Mafia in the 1943 conquest of Sicily to the 1985-87 Iran-Contra deals with drug traffickers.
However, in fairness, these cases are extremely rare, singular and typically carried out in the context of wars, both open and undeclared. It is striking in contrast that Russia appears to be deploying organized-crime connections abroad in ostensible peacetime, reflecting that Moscow sees the current geopolitical clash with the West as an existential political struggle analogous to war.
‘Crimintern’
Some elements of Russian state cooperation with criminal networks can, like the American examples above, be seen in military conflicts, declared or not: In Ukraine, for example, local gangsters in Crimea allegedly provided muscle as so-called “self-defense volunteers” alongside the infamous “little green men,” and some of the forces fighting on the side of Russian-backed separatists in Donbas include organised crime figures.
Other cases involving alleged state-criminal linkages prop up Russia’s interests abroad more subtly. For instance, after the suspected paymasters of the notorious U.S.-based Russian “sleeper” spies disappeared from Cyprus following his arrest there in 2010, several U.S. and European counter-intelligence officials told me they believe Russian criminal groups involved in human trafficking quietly smuggled him to Russia, or else into Greece for subsequent exfiltration by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). As with all such allegations in this article, Russia denies cooperating with criminals.
However, the main activities criminal gangs are required to perform in the new Russian “Crimintern" tend to involve either intelligence missions or generating chernaya kassa (“black cash”)—money with no provable connection to the Russian state, but helpful in paying for some of its projects. The suspicion voiced by a number of European security services is that these funds then go toward bankrolling useful political figures or media outlets.
Criminal money-laundering networks can also be used to “clean” intelligence agencies’ operational funds. According to a specialist from the Italian Guardia di Finanza, or financial police, this tends to involve small-scale operations through individuals’ bank accounts, not huge, multi-beneficiary schemes like the 1998-99 Bank of New York money-laundering operation or the 2008-2014 “laundromat” documented recently 2008-2014 “laundromat” documented recently by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
For example, after Estonian security officer Eston Kohver was kidnapped across the border by an FSB commando team (Russia denies the charge despite compelling evidence from its own border guards), Estonian security services told me that the cigarette smuggling gang he had been investigating was being given a free pass to transport its goods across the Russian frontier.
In return, they said, the gang members conducted surveillance on areas and individuals of interest to Moscow (as have other smugglers) and kicked back a share of their profits into otherwise unremarkable bank accounts for the FSB’s use.
According to a Bulgarian security officer, a similar case, which appears to have stalled since 2017, involved smugglers working through the port of Varna, bringing in drugs and counterfeit consumer goods from Odessa. These were Ukrainians working for a Russia-based gang, and the working hypothesis was that they were not only feeding information on Odessa back to Moscow via contacts in the Russian expat community in Varna, but since 2016 also being “taxed” a share of their profits as chernaya kassa funds paid through the accounts of their contacts in Varna.. His belief, although it was just speculation, was that this was in return for a degree of impunity for the gang’s leaders in Moscow.
Among European security officials there is also a growing concern that criminal moneys are being spent to establish potential listening stations and staging posts for Russian intelligence. A German counter-intelligence officer told me that a series of other properties in Germany and elsewhere in Nordic Europe had been bought by criminals, yet seem to be only sporadically occupied.
The common denominator was that “they all are close to, sometimes even overlooking, strategic ports, bases and airfields.” His speculation was that the criminals bought them, but the Russian espionage services — especially military intelligence, formerly known as GRU — would use them for its own purposes. (Similar speculation concerning a recent Finnish raid near Turku, however, is likely unfounded.)
Likewise, the Kremlin has for some time employed hackers as adjuncts to its own internet campaigns of disruption and espionage. Increasingly, instead of so-called “patriotic hackers”—often more enthusiastic than skillful — they are employing cybercriminals, some of whom are directly recruited into government service, but more often deployed for pay or to avoid prison. They have been used to break into foreign systems and, according to some security experts, they may also be used for money-making ventures, again intended to raise chernaya kassa funds.
The Past
In Soviet times, the Kremlin actively used criminals to advance its interests. It was willing to bankroll, arm and shelter terrorists operating in the West, and the KGB cultivated black marketeers and hard-hard-currency speculators dealing with Western tourists as informants. Indeed, the Cheka, the Bolsheviks’ first political police, recruited bandits and gangsters for its needs, and later vory, members of the criminal subculture, became crucial to the running of the Gulag camps.
After the Soviet collapse, however, the Communist leadership’s centralized control over such activity disintegrated and a new blurring of the boundaries between the political, economic and criminal elites arose. This was especially evident in 1990s St. Petersburg where Putin served as deputy mayor. Part of his portfolio then seems to have been managing the authorities’ relationship with the city’s powerful underworld, and especially the dominant Tambovskaya grouping, something comprehensively explored by political scientist Karen Dawisha. Putin appears to have successfully bartered economic opportunities for the criminals’ cooperation.
When Putin first became the country’s elected president in 2000, he brought his lessons to bear on the national level. In effect, organized crime was offered a deal: Don’t challenge or embarrass the state and you won’t be treated as an enemy of the state. This did not mean absolute impunity: The police and the courts still continued their efforts against the gangsters, and even criminal kingpins faced arrest if they stepped out of line. However, it did represent a social contract that most of the gangs were happy to accept, having survived a decade of turf wars and amassed significant wealth that they wanted to keep.
The Future
The mobilization-state model assumes that all organizations and individuals can be yoked to national interests: It is not so much totalitarianism as conscription. Since there is little prospect of the current geopolitical clash with the West easing in any substantive way so long as Putin is in the Kremlin, or of his reinventing his model, this use of criminals as an instrument of statecraft—though it is a response to a specific challenge—is likely to be persistent.
So far the practice has apparently been confined to Europe, but the constraints of its further spread are likely situational rather than structural. “Eurasian organized crime” in the U.S., to use the FBI’s term, is typically multi-ethnic and as likely to be dominated by Armenians or Georgians or Uzbeks as Russians. It is also much less directly connected to Russian-based networks and thus less vulnerable to pressure from the Kremlin.
However, there are virtual worlds of criminality, from money laundering to cybercrime, in which geography is much less important. In May 2018, for example, a Kazakh-born Canadian hacker was convicted in California of working for the FSB. Furthermore, Russian gangs are more strongly connected to the underworlds of Latin America (where they swap cocaine for Afghan heroin) than to those of the U.S., and may make inroads into networks stretching northwards.
Even so, the threat must be kept in context. Gangsters make uncomfortable and often unreliable agents — deniability is bought at the expense of effectiveness. The Kremlin will still likely prefer to use its more conventional covert assets where it can, and the criminals will simply be an auxiliary asset used when their capabilities are especially appropriate or other resources are overstretched.
Besides which, whenever states think they can use criminals, they tend also to open themselves up to reciprocal exploitation. With corruption a serious problem for the Russian security and intelligence services, there has already been evidence of such blowback — from the use of state cyber assets for private gain to military intelligence assets being used to gather information on Russian gangsters abroad, according to Canadian police. Here and now, this crime-state nexus is clearly an additional security headache for the West, but in the longer term it may pose at least as serious a problem for Russia itself.
Mark Galeotti is a senior associate fellow of RUSI and senior non-resident fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, as well as a 2018-19 Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute. His most recent book is “The Very: Russia’s Super Mafia”. This article was originally published in Russia Matters. The views and opinions expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of The Moscow Times.
The madness of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has once again turned the spotlight on the creepy, enigmatic guru who has been called “Putin’s brain” or, irresistibly, “Putin’s Rasputin”: maverick “political philosopher” Aleksandr Dugin. And indeed, in many ways this is Dugin’s moment: For more than a quarter century, he has been talking about an eternal civilizational war between Russia and the West and about Russia’s destiny to build a vast Eurasian empire, beginning with a reconquista of Ukraine. Both the war in Ukraine and the new Cold War against the West can be said to represent the triumph—or the debacle—of Dugin’s vision.
The 60-year-old Dugin may or may not be Putin’s whisperer; there is no evidence that the two men have actually met. But his influence on the Putin-era ruling class in Russia is unquestionably real and scary. For one thing, much as the word “fascist” gets frivolously thrown around, Dugin is actually a onetime self-proclaimed fascist, albeit of the “real fascism has never been tried” variety. What’s more, there is every reason to think that while he dropped the label, his ideology has not changed much.
But even that understates the sheer weirdness of the man described in a 2017 book on the rise of Russia’s new nationalism as “a former dissident, pamphleteer, hipster and guitar-playing poet who emerged from the libertine era of pre-perestroika Muscovite bohemia to become a rabble-rousing intellectual, a lecturer at the military academy, and ultimately a Kremlin operative.” (The author, former Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Charles Clover, had extensive conversations with Dugin and still failed to crack the enigma.)
For instance: Dugin has had a lifelong obsession with the occult, ranging from the legacy of magician and huckster Aleister Crowley (a 1995 video shows him reciting a poem at a ceremony honoring Crowley in Moscow) to much more sinister Nazi occultism. His first appearance on Russian television, in 1992, was as an “expert commentator” in a shlocky documentary that explored the esoteric secrets of the Third Reich, which he claimed to have studied in KGB archives. Hе now rails against Ukrainian “Nazis” but once penned a poem in which the apocalyptic advent of an “avatar” culminates in a “radiant Himmler” rising from the grave. (While he later tried to disown this verse, it was posted on his website under a name he has elsewhere acknowledged as his pseudonym.) Dugin’s oeuvre also includes a 1997 essay proposing that the notorious Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who gruesomely murdered more than fifty young women and children between 1978 and 1990, should be regarded as a practitioner of Dionysian “sacraments” in which the killer/torturer and the victim transcend their “metaphysical dualism” and become one. He talks casually and cheerfully about living in the “end times.” He preaches national and religious revival but can also, according to Clover, make such quips as, “There are only two real things in Russia: Oil sales and theft. The rest is all a kind of theater.”
Many details of Dugin’s life are obscure, no doubt due to some extent to deliberate mystification on his part. It has been claimed, for instance, that his father was either a colonel or a lieutenant general in the GRU, the fearsome Soviet military intelligence agency, and used this position both to protect him and perhaps to facilitate his access to the military and intelligence elites. Extremism researcher Anton Shekhovtsov, who has delved into Dugin’s background, asserts that the reality is far more prosaic and that Dugin père was an officer in the Soviet, later Russian, customs service. According to Clover, Dugin has claimed that his rebellious youthful antics—which included involvement, at 19, in an underground circle that dabbled in mysticism with a neofascist slant—caused his father to be transferred from the GRU to the customs service; but Clover also quotes Dugin as saying that his father never supported him and that they barely had a relationship. (Dugin’s parents were divorced when he was 3 years old.)
Expelled from college for his unorthodox activities (which included the translation and samizdat publication of Pagan Imperialism by Italian far-right intellectual Julius Evola, another fascist with a mystical bent), Dugin made a living for a while as a language tutor and freelance translator. But he clearly wanted more, and the changes under Mikhail Gorbachev—which included a drastic relaxation of state control over intellectual and political life—opened up new avenues. In 1988, Dugin got involved in Pamyat (“Memory”), a “patriotic” and “anti-Zionist” movement notorious for its anti-Semitism, but was eventually expelled for murky reasons (Satanism, according to some). He also traveled to Europe and cultivated ties with far-right figures such as French counter-Enlightenment author Alain de Benoist. Interestingly, despite benefitting from the reforms, Dugin sympathized with the hardline coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 and reportedly even tried to get weapons so that he could volunteer to fight for the coup plotters’ “State Emergency Committee.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Dugin became involved in various marginal groups that lived the horseshoe theory by trying to synthesize far-left and far-right ideology, including the red-brown “National Bolshevik Party” which he co-founded with the eccentric poet Eduard Limonov. (A 1992 Dugin essay tried to reclaim the term “red-brown” as a positive thing, “the natural colors of our blood and our soil”; another piece, from 1997, hailed the dawn of a new Russian fascism, “boundless as our land and red as our blood.”)
At first, Dugin’s efforts to enter public life did not get him very far; when he ran for the Duma in 1995 on a National Bolshevik platform in a St. Petersburg district, he got less than 1 percent of the vote, despite a tantalizing campaign poster promising that “the secrets will be unveiled.” Yet he was helped by mysterious connections to the Russian military: At some point during the 1990s, he became a lecturer at the senior staff college of the Russian military, the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia. Considering that we’re talking about a neofascist crank with a fixation on the occult, this raises eyebrows.
Dugin’s true breakthrough was the 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, a 600-page treatise that not only sold well but made its author a respectable pundit. It also quickly became part of the curriculum at the General Staff Academy, other military and police academies, and some elite institutions of higher learning. Writing in the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies in early 2004 (the issue is dated spring 2001 but was obviously published later, since the article refers to events from late 2003), Hoover Institution scholar John B. Dunlop concluded: “There has perhaps not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period that has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites comparable to that of . . . Foundations of Geopolitics.”
A prolific scribbler, Dugin had published seven other books between 1990 and 1997, but Foundations of Geopolitics was his first effort to go mainstream. The earlier books had been heavy on occult lore about numerology and other mystical sciences, the lost and magical Hyperborean race, and esoteric orders such as the Freemasons, the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians. Dugin’s 1992 book Conspirology, for example, had framed the historical conflicts between reason and faith as a literal struggle between two secret organizations, the rationalist Order of the Dead Head and the faith-and-love-based Order of the Living Heart—and that’s the condensed and coherent version.
Foundations of Geopolitics, on which Clover believes Dugin may have had help from faculty members at the General Staff Academy, offered a much more sober analysis and steered clear of mysticism and occult metaphysics. Yet the theme of a cosmic battle between good and evil was still very much a part of Dugin’s thesis. Foundations of Geopolitics posits a fundamental antagonism between “land-based” and “seafaring” civilizations, or “Eurasianism” and “Atlanticism”—the latter represented primarily by the United States and England, the former by Russia. While the idea of conflict between “land-based” and “seafaring” powers was borrowed from the fairly obscure Edwardian British geographer Halford Mackinder, Dugin reconceptualized this rivalry as a spiritual struggle, in terms drawn largely from twentieth-century German anti-liberal philosopher and prominent Nazi Carl Schmitt (with additional borrowings from earlier “Eurasianist” intellectual Lev Gumilev, son of two celebrated poets, who thought that ethnicity derived from space radiation).
In Dugin’s scheme, the values of land-based civilizations are those of traditionalism (“The hardness of the land is culturally embodied in the hardness and stability of social traditions”), community, faith, service, and the subordination of the individual to the group and to authority, while the values of seafaring civilization are mobility, trade, innovation, rationality, political freedom, and individualism. Also: Eurasian good, Atlanticist bad.
The other central message of the book is that, for Russia, it’s empire or bust. Dugin asserted that Russian nationalism has a “global scope,” associated more with “space” than with blood ties: “Outside of empire, Russians lose their identity and disappear as a nation.” In his vision, Russia’s destiny is to lead a Eurasian empire that stretches “from Dublin to Vladivostok.”
In a country reeling from a botched transition to a market-based democracy and coping with the abrupt loss of superpower status, this call to imperial greatness fell on fertile soil—especially after the devastating economic crisis of 1998 seemed to be the death knell of liberal hopes. It was particularly welcome to the military and political elites.
In short order, Dugin, only yesterday a marginal crank, became a pundit with close proximity to power. By 2001, wrote Dunlop, he had “formed close ties with individuals in the presidential administration, the secret services, the Russian military, and the leadership of the Duma”; among other things, he had become a consultant to Russian State Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznev and to top Putin adviser Sergei Glazyev. The Russian media, then still relatively free, began to talk of “Dugin’s Eurasianism” as a new state-favored ideology. The “Eurasia movement,” which Dugin launched the same year to promote the Eurasianist agenda and resist “Atlanticist” influences, attracted government officials, members of the establishment media, and retired and current members of intelligence and state security agencies. In 2003, the movement went international, claiming to have a presence in 29 countries in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, including 36 chapters in the former Soviet republics. Its most active wing was the Eurasian Youth Union, heavily focused on pro-Kremlin activism in Ukraine; among the group’s more notable exploits was a 2007 attack vandalizing a Moscow exhibition on the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Stalin-era terror-famine.
Toward the end of the 2000s, Dugin—armed with a hastily acquired doctorate—also completed his ascent to academic respectability. In 2009, he was appointed chair of the international relations section of the sociology department at Moscow State University (despite being a guest lecturer rather than a full-time faculty member). He also founded and oversaw a Center for Conservative Studies within the sociology department, intended to train an “academic and government elite” of “conservative ideologues.”
Should Dugin be treated as a “real” philosopher? In a recent long essay in Haaretz, Dr. Armit Vazhirsky, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues that, despite his (to put it mildly) eccentric history, his critique of liberalism in such works as his book The Fourth Political Theory (2009), needs to be seriously engaged.
I’m not convinced.
Dugin is a gifted man and a very erudite autodidact—unquestionably smart enough to offer a convincing simulacrum of intellectual discourse. Yet detractors such as Russian political scientist Victor Shnirelman point out that he has repeatedly and opportunistically adjusted and overhauled his arguments—for instance, transferring much of his analysis of the “Eurasian” vs. “Atlanticist” clash of civilizations from earlier writings in which the opposing forces were “Aryan” (good) vs. “Semitic” (bad). The only constant is hatred of liberalism and modernity.
As befits a practitioner of the horseshoe theory, Dugin can capably mimic and channel anti-liberal broadsides from both the left and the right. Some passages in his writings could have come straight from Jacobin magazine, arguing that liberal capitalism is responsible for the slave trade, Native American genocide, and environmental catastrophe, or that liberalism seeks to assimilate everyone to the standards of the “rich, rational white male”; other passages could have been penned by Sohrab Ahmari, such as the warning in Fourth Political Theory that liberalism’s rejection of tradition and constraints on individual freedom logically leads to “not only loss of national and cultural identity, but even of sexual identity and, eventually, human identity as well” (my translation). Then, just when you expect Dugin to defend sexual traditionalism, he invokes a gender-norm-smashing paradigm that has one left-wing commentator wondering if he is an “undercover queer theorist.”
But keep reading, and you will find text that sounds more like the musings of a genocidal maniac. For instance, the comments about the evils of unchecked liberalism in Fourth Political Theory are followed, a few paragraphs down, by this discussion of the coming battle that will happen when “the metaphysical significance of liberalism and its fatal victory” is fully understood: “This evil can be vanquished only by tearing it out root and branch, and I do not rule out the possibility that such a victory will require wiping off the face of the earth those spiritual and physical territories where the global heresy which insists that ‘man is the measure of all things’ first emerged.” In case the location of those “physical territories” is unclear, the next line urges a “world crusade against the USA and the West.”
There is little reason to think that Dugin has discarded his flirtations with Nazism (it is perhaps revealing that, in Foundations of Geopolitics, he urges Russia to form an “axis” with Germany and Japan as the core of its strategy). Nor has he moved on from his occult obsessions, despite a nominal conversion to Russian Orthodoxy—which he has tried to syncretize with various neopagan and esoteric teachings (including the work of Aleister Crowley, a reputed Satanist). A lengthy two-part essay he wrote in 2019 for the Izborsk Club, a “socially conservative” website he cofounded, returns to his old favorite Julius Evola and then segues into an abstruse discussion of Hindu and Zoroastrian eschatology.
Which brings us to another startling aspect of the Dugin persona: his fascination with the apocalyptic. The Fourth Political Theory at one point flatly states that the new theory and practice the book seeks to formulate is “invalid” if it doesn’t “bring about the End of Time.” A video of a 2012 Dugin lecture at Moscow’s New University shows him offering an eclectic stew of ideas—the Christian apocalypse, the dark Kali Yuga cycle from Hindu mysticism, the French metaphysician René Guénon, global warming—to make the case we are “obviously” living in the end times and that the end of the world is something we should actively desire. For one thing, isn’t it great to know how the story ends? For another, isn’t it terrible to be alive and know that you will never be God? And isn’t this world an illusion anyway?
The deeper one goes down the Dugin rabbit hole, the more one starts to wonder whether he believes anything he says and whether his entire career is a long, elaborate mystification. As Clover puts it, he is, “in equal parts, a monomaniacal nineteenth-century Slavophile conservative and a smug twenty-first-century postmodernist who expertly deconstructs his arguments as rapidly as he makes them.” Or perhaps, in even bigger part, he’s a charlatan. The only relevant question is whether his proximity to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum is such that his talk about the end times could be something more serious than a crazy prophet’s rantings or a postmodernist’s word games.
Whether Dugin ever actually was Putin’s éminence grise is also far from settled. Some scholars such as Finnish political scientist Jussi Backman have strongly disputed these claims, pointing out that there is no evidence of closeness between the two men. Putin, at any rate, has never mentioned Dugin in public; his acknowledged quasi-fascist guru is twentieth-century Russian nationalist Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), whom he has quoted in several speeches and whose collection of essays, Our Tasks, he sent to Russian regional governors and senior officials for as a Christmas gift in 2013.
Dugin, on his part, has had a love/hate relationship with Putin over the years, admiring him as the leader who reclaimed Russia’s sovereignty and routed the Western-style liberals but deploring his pro-capitalist tendencies and his alliances with the West, particularly his participation in George W. Bush’s War on Terror. (The rabidly anti-American Dugin was an early 9/11 “truther,” asserting in an interview in October 2001 that the United States itself was probably behind the attacks and was using them to shore up American hegemony.) Still displaying his penchant for mystical terminology, he has spoken of the conflict between the “solar Putin,” the heroic fighter against Western evil and for Russia’s messianic destiny, and the “lunar Putin,” the pragmatic rationalist who wants a thriving economy and a partnership with the West.
He has been coy on whether or not he knows Putin personally, claiming to be “in contact” with him in a 2012 interview on the American white-nationalist website Countercurrents but flatly denying it in conversations with Clover. Most recently, when asked whether he communicates with Putin in an interview in the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, he replied, “That’s a question I never answer.”
In November 2007, several months after Putin’s famous “Munich speech“ signaling a sharp anti-Western turn and challenging the U.S.-led international world order, Dugin made a curious comment in an interview with the Eurazia TV web channel:
In my opinion, Putin is becoming more and more like Dugin, or at least implementing the program I have been building my entire life.. . . The closer he comes to us, the more he becomes himself. When he becomes 100 percent Dugin, he will become 100 percent Putin.
And indeed, many aspects of Kremlin strategy in the Putin years reflect, to a startling extent, Dugin’s proposals going back to the late 1990s. That includes the “hybrid warfare” of subverting democracies from within and exploiting their internal divisions, something Dugin advocated in Foundations of Geopolitics. It includes cultivating both far-right and far-left movements and groups as antiliberal allies. It includes the focus on homosexuality as the ultimate symbol of Western decadence: In a 2003 interview with the Ukrainian website Glavred.info, Dugin warned that embracing a pro-Western “Atlanticist model” would expose Ukraine to the menace of “gays, and homosexual and lesbian marriage.” (Dugin’s homophobic crusade has some ironic personal twists: His former National Bolshevik associate Eduard Limonov was the openly bisexual author of an autobiographical novel that often borders on gay porn, while Dugin’s first wife and the mother of his son, Evgeniya Debryanskaya, is an out lesbian who started Russia’s first gay-rights group in 1990.)
Even the Putin regime’s preoccupation with Ukraine is anticipated by Foundations of Geopolitics, where Ukraine occupies a central place in the clash-of-civilizations scheme as laid out by Dugin. The book stresses, again and again, that Ukrainian sovereignty is an intolerable threat to the Eurasian project. “The existence of Ukraine within its present borders and with its present status of a ‘sovereign state,’” Dugin warns, “is equivalent to the delivering of a monstrous blow to the geopolitical security of Russia; it represents the same thing as the invasion of Russia’s territory.” Remarkably, this passage is from twenty-five years ago—eight years before Ukraine turned westward during the Orange Revolution and ten years before there was any talk of Ukraine joining NATO.
Clover reports that it was Dugin who revived the term “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” as the preferred designation for Eastern Ukraine, using it three years before Putin did. Did he inspire Putin, or merely (as he has often claimed) intuit which way things were going? Or was he floating a trial balloon at his Kremlin patrons’ behest? Nobody knows. However, it’s a fact that in 2014, Dugin was not merely cheering for the Kremlin’s “Novorossiya Project” of building pro-Russian enclaves in Eastern Ukraine but actively helping: There is a video in which he strategizes with a separatist activist on Skype. The foreign “observers” who were invited to monitor Crimea’s referendum on joining Russia were mainly drawn from Dugin’s network of “Eurasianist” political figures, running the gamut from Stalinist to fascist. Moskovsky Komsomolets reports that two of the main founders of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” businessman and politician Aleksandr Borodai and retired military officer and possible KGB/FSB veteran Igor Girkin-Strelkov, were both Dugin acolytes.
Yet, oddly enough, the events of 2014 also led Novorossiya’s prophet to something of a fall from favor. After some overly bloodthirsty comments that urged the wholesale killing of Ukrainians who supported the “Nazi junta” and of Russians who had joined the “fifth column,” Dugin became the target of a petition urging his removal as section chair at Moscow State University. (It didn’t help that Dugin’s exhortation to “Kill, kill, kill!” on Donetsk television was followed by the claim that he was “speaking as a professor.”) Surprisingly, the university did in fact boot him, having suddenly discovered that his appointment in 2009 had been a “technical error” due to his guest-lecturer status. Dugin, on his part, took his dismissal as a sign that liberals and Satanists were winning and that the “lunar Putin” had prevailed. In subsequent months, he was harshly critical of Putin for scaling down the war in Ukraine and “abandoning” the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Now, after nearly eight years of lying low, Dugin should be the man of the hour. There seems to be very little daylight left between Putinism and Duginism, and one might say that Putin has indeed become “100 percent Dugin.” In his interview in Moskovsky Komsomolets on March 30, Dugin declared, “The solar Putin has won.”
And yet Dugin himself does not sound like a winner. Moskovsky Komsomolets may toe the government line on the “special operation” in Ukraine, but he still had to fend off uncomfortable questions about what to tell mothers who have lost their children in war zones. (His reply: “We’ll explain it all once we have liberated Ukraine.”) In the same interview, Dugin describes the “special operation” as an apocalyptic battle of good against evil, but also ruefully admits that “the Russian people are not yet fully involved” in this battle. While he suggests that a call from Putin would be enough to mobilize the entire nation, popular enthusiasm for the war is distinctly lacking so far.
In his latest piece for the Izborsk Club website, Dugin sounds a little dispirited. He worries that Russia’s leadership thinks it can declare victory after keeping Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson, or maybe after taking all of “Novorossiya” while leaving the rest of Ukraine “in the power of Nazis and globalists.” Dugin insists that, at this point, Russia can no longer settle for anything other than total control of all Ukraine, because “Christ needs it” and because to leave would mean the “death, torture, and genocide” of millions of Orthodox believers. Invoking his familiar eschatological themes, he asserts that “we have become not merely spectators but participants in the Apocalypse.”
Somehow, it sounds less like a passionate call to action than the words of a man who is watching his fantasies play out and go terribly wrong—and is desperately trying to stay relevant.
"Урегулирование приднестровского вопроса может быть достигнуто политическим путем и только на основе мирного решения, исключая военные и другие силовые действия, а также на основе принципов демократизации и демилитаризации региона, уважения суверенитета и территориальной целостности Молдавии, в пределах ее международно признанных границ", — говорится в комментарии.
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- 12:01 PM 4/23/2022 - Tweets by @mikenov: Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism: mass, including school killings, various performance crimes - accidents, cyberattacks, subversion propaganda, elections interference ...
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Приднестровье - Transnistria and Georgia are the potential second and third fronts of the Russia - Ukraine War - Google Search https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8C%D0%B5+-+Transnistria+and+Georgia+are+the+potential+second+and+third+fronts+of+the+Russia+-+Ukraine+War&source=lmns&bih=714&biw=1536&rlz=1C1ONGR_enUS949US949&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiftvmYiLT3AhUZEVkFHUC6DYwQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA …
- Michael Novakhov Retweeted
Am ammo depot was burning in Belgorod region near Ukraine this morning after air defenses were firing at something in the neighboring Kursk region. The authorities won't say what. Bryansk oil depot was on fire Monday. Has the war crossed into Russia?
- Michael Novakhov Retweeted
The Russians occupied the village of Velykyi Bobryk for only ten days. Now, as in many places across Ukraine, local men are missing, taken across the border. “We have no idea where he is, what happened to him, is he alive, is he dead. Nothing.” Our latest. https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-liberated-ukrainian-villages-fears-grow-for-men-taken-to-russia-11650981966?st=xt7mk9nwex9q2yo&reflink=share_mobilewebshare …
- Michael Novakhov Retweeted
Let Sweden and Finland into NATO the minute they ask. Ideally, June 30 https://trib.al/eFBiueh
Georgia is the potential third front in the Russia - Ukraine war - Google Search https://www.google.com/search?q=Georgia+is+the+potential+third+front+in+the+Russia+-+Ukraine+war&source=lmns&bih=714&biw=1536&rlz=1C1ONGR_enUS949US949&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiNrMe2hrT3AhXTGFkFHeeSAhcQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA …
Приднестровье - Transnistria is the second front in the Russia - Ukraine war - Google Search https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8C%D0%B5+-+Transnistria+is+the+second+front+in+the+Russia+-+Ukraine+war&source=lmns&bih=714&biw=1536&rlz=1C1ONGR_enUS949US949&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi6uOrohbT3AhW2F1kFHYg5C3AQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA …
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All Articles - The News And Times Review - http://TheNewsAndTimes.Blogspot.com https://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1006407045/tag/all-articles/view/html?t=%20All%20Articles%20-%20The%20News%20And%20Times%20Review%20-%20TheNewsAndTimes.Blogspot.com&l=https%3A%2F%2Fblogger.googleusercontent.com%2Fimg%2Fa%2FAVvXsEhG518O_gZJEp6VBUGkU3Qd8NHqBm69pOoLoTWgladipQiMKYZuDEn7Pp3e6VhKcgohWrmtowOg4HV-K2hbKqed5HPDb9TtAujQtG3bT7Y1h6u4LJiVVooqBAEakeuku9XnHRLLBYMlStrJ5zslQfVqxbEnY2EsEWaYlcgrfw-kgCaGU8EKzNVFMgYM%3Ds267&lw=400&cs=m&lh=200&n=100&sb=y … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfd_5mDy2N0 …
[Note to journalists: You may quote from this text, provided you mention the name of the author and reference it as a new Strategic Assessment Memo (SAM) published by the Global Ideas Center in Berlin on The Globalist.]
Vladimir Putin is the first genocidal murderer in history to embark on a second genocide – witness his previous actions in Chechnya from 1999 to 2009.
Underscoring the full extent of his egregiousness, Putin is committing genocide against Ukrainians under the pretext of stopping an alleged genocide against Russians in eastern Ukraine.
Why Putin doesn’t refer to “war”
Putin, himself a lawyer by training, had asked his Kremlin lawyers whether there is a legal justification for a war of aggression in Ukraine. They did not know any.
Only the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 could possibly be interpreted as an exception. In its Article 1, it obliges the signatory states – including Russia, there are 147 – to “prevent” genocide, not just punish it.
Hence the bizarre seeming claim of Putin that a genocide is perpetrated on ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
In contrast, even for the prevention of, say, a conventional civil war, there is no right of invasion.
Putin’s claim that Ukraine is perpetrating genocide is what requires him to strictly avoid the terms “war” or “invasion”.
It is a maneuver that is less designed to dupe domestic audiences than that it is a desperate search for an acceptable pseudo-legal pretext for his murderous endeavor.
Genocide: The legal close-up
Genocide, like any murder, requires intent and planning. An unplanned massacre can kill 1,000 people, but legally it is mass manslaughter.
By comparison, a planned genocide can be stopped after “only” 100 dead – and yet these 100 are genocide victims.
Victims of an ordinary massacre find no comfort in the fact that at least they are not killed in a genocide, but legally the difference is important.
Genocide exists even if only a part of the target group is marked for murder. Rafael Lemkin, a Pole of Jewish origin and author of the Genocide Convention, deliberately put the word “part” into the international law because he is the witness of two examples of genocidal slaughter.
Germany’s and Russia’s joint genocidal slaughter
The first example is the murder by Germans of Poland’s educated class through the so-called “Intelligenzaktion”, starting in September 1939.
The second example is the mass murder of Polish officers and officials by Soviet Russians in 1940 in Katyn and other places.
Both massacres are intended to destroy Polish culture so the remaining population could be more easily enslaved or Germanized (or Russified). As a result, Polishness would have disappeared.
Shame on the SPD
Given that Germany shares this terrible history with Russia in committing genocidal slaughter in Poland in the early part of WWII, it is truly unfathomable how on earth today’s SPD-led German government could still protect Putin’s Russia.
All the more so as one of the signatories of the Katyn murder order, Mikhail Kalinin, is honored by Russia to this very day in a very special manner. He is the namesake of the once German town of Königsberg, now Kaliningrad.
For all their reflexive love of Russia, the SPD must have no historians around to remind the party’s leadership today of that dark history.
Why Putin relishes being a mass murderer
Putin has his own reasons for engaging in mass murder. In his mind, he wants to spare the Russian Empire the fate of the Western empires – Spaniards, Dutch, Belgians, Portuguese, French and British.
These former grand powers had tried to preserve their spheres of power by force but lost all their colonial wars after 1945.
A man with a deadly vision
It should not be overlooked in this context that in 1998, a year before he became Russian prime minister, Putin – in his capacity as director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) – set up a special department for the preservation of the empire. According to the order, the agents of this Fifth Service are to create conditions in the former Soviet republics for their retention under Moscow’s power.
Overcoming dark history…
No question, to defend their colonial “possessions”, Western Europe’s empires, too, committed massacres and destroyed cultural assets of native populations. But it was to no avail.
In 1974, with the fall of the Portuguese Empire, the last outpost of western territorial ambition collapsed.
As part of that process of decolonization, it is worth remembering that even France came close to civil war in 1961/62. President de Gaulle survived two assassination attempts by rebellious generals who hoped to save the remnants of imperial France.
Algeria and Ukraine: The parallels
After years of bloodshed, de Gaulle ultimately released Algeria into independence. Indeed, the North African territory could then be seen as a “Gallic Ukraine”, given that every sixth citizen was French and its language dominated the huge province of 920,000 square miles.
In the end, the expelled French responded to the loss of their homeland by burning down schools and theaters. Even the largest library – it belonged to the University of Algiers – went up in flames.
What motivated these failed attempts to preserve failing empires? Today, few people understand why European nations were able to subjugate 90% of the earth – and why those nations lost.
Message to Putin: Imperialism needs population surpluses
It all began when, over a period of 450 years, the clergy and nobility of Europe persecuted the practice of birth control. As a result, European countries began having six to eight children per a woman’s lifetime.
This massive population boom provided a huge number of explorers, soldiers and settlers. Thanks to this demographic explosion, the empires of Europe could easily replace any losses they suffered during the conquest and colonization of other continents.
However, with the return of birth control to Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, birth rates there fell dramatically. From the 1960s on, women in Europe have only two children on average, while women in the (still) subjugated colonies have six to eight children.
After 1970 – with Germany leading the decline – Europe fell below two children per woman. In other words, below what is called the replacement level.
The futile idea of a Russian Empire
The message behind those numbers is still entirely lost on Putin. He does not comprehend the – quite literally – umbilical connection between birth rates and empires.
Quite stunningly, Putin in 2022 is mimicking the emotional path of France six decades ago in desperately clinging to empire.
After the dissolution of their empire in December 1991, many Russians were feeling the way French people felt in
1962. The French simply did not want to accept the path of history. Neither does Putin.
Russia and the inescapable law of the numbers
It would help Putin and the many Russians who support him if they knew a few key numbers. For example, this one: Until 1914, the tsars commanded more than 100 of every 1,000 men of military age worldwide.
Therefore, despite all their losses through the wars they launched and the exodus of settlers, Russians were becoming more numerous.
Because Russians do not understand the demographic dynamism of imperial expansion up to the 19th century and the decline due to falling birth rates in the 20th century, they are repeating the mistakes of the post-1945 West.
Chechnya and imperial decline
In 1994, Boris Yeltsin, then the President of Russia, commanded only 15 out of 1,000 able-bodied men globally. To his surprise, in 1996 he very quickly lost about 6,000 soldiers – and also the war in Chechnya.
The law of the birth rate clearly advantaged Chechnya. Chechen women, with 3 to 4 sons each, could lose at least two in battle without endangering the continuity of their Muslim families.
Chechnya and the rise of Putin
The significance of Yeltsin’s loss in Chechnya cannot be overstated. To the Russian security establishment, it became the prime cause to replace him.
When Putin – whom the Yeltsin people had deluded themselves to be able to steer and control – ultimately took over the reins, the current path of events in Ukraine was set in motion.
Putin had no qualms about launching a genocide in Chechnya. Along with state-led acts of false flag domestic
terrorism (presumably committed by Chechen terrorists), Putin won in Chechnya and firmly established his rule.
In a way, that one victory made him feel like Superman. And he was hell-bent to execute his own FSB decree for the preservation of empire.
Even so, Putin must realize that he finds himself in an even worse situation than Yeltsin at the time. His reservoir of fighting men in 2020 is down to only 10 of 1,000 potential fighters globally (Yeltsin still had 15 per 1,000 a quarter of a century earlier).
Putin’s two genocidal methods in Chechnya
In order not to repeat Yeltsin’s failure, Putin thus combined two genocidal methods. He focused on killing Chechnya’s educated class, thus following the Soviet Russian and Hitlerian model for exterminating the cultural and military elites of Poland.
At the same time, he borrowed tactics from Operation Condor of the Argentine junta from 1976 to 1983. Condor abducted at least 9,000 activists of the left-wing revolt and killed them. This murder campaign ends the militant student movement.
In Chechnya, which had a total population of around one million, Putin kidnapped up to 5,000 Chechen youths that were still civilians but who might have soon joined their elder brothers in the fighting units. He had them murdered and buried untraceably.
Converted to the demographics of the United States, for example, that death toll would be the equivalent of murdering 1.5 million Americans.
Putin understands that Western Europe was defeated by soaring birthrates in the colonies, as was Yeltsin in Chechnya. With his extermination of the Chechens’ offspring, Putin hopes to eliminate Chechnya’s demographic advantage.
Chechnya and the West
Such a clearly thought-out and executed genocide as he executed in Chechnya is unique in the annals of modern genocide infamy. It makes Putin the first European victor in the wars of decolonization after 1945.
To Putin’s advantage, the narrative prevailing about Chechnya in the West essentially follows the Russian narrative. Chechnya is seen as a region torn apart by Muslim terrorists.
It is hence regarded as a Russian domestic affair. That there is a long and brutal history of imperial oppression of the legitimate rights of the Chechen people is widely unknown.
The country was absorbed into the Russian empire in 1859. To break their fierce resistance, Tsar Alexander II immediately started the deportation of at least 100,000 Chechens to Siberia. Of around 1.5 million Chechens in the North Caucasus in 1847, only 140,000 remained in 1861.
Putin, the disinformation agent
It is remarkable to see just how much Putin still utilizes his craft as a spy and deliberate disinformation agent.
Consider, as the most pertinent current example, Putin’s claims of alleged “NATO threats” or “Slavic brothers to be saved.” While so many in the West fall for them, inside Russia they are all understood as mere pretexts.
There, it is all about the violent retention of tsarist conquests. And that, in turn, explains why the level of public support for Putin remains so high.
The utter naivete of the West
After Putin successfully executed the genocidal double strike in the Caucasus in the 1999 to 2009 period, virtually all Western politicians of rank – ignoramuses of Russian history all – competed for the favor of the dictator in the Kremlin.
Warnings from Baltic or Polish long-suffering victims and experts of Moscow’s methods were – and, more shamefully, even today — are condemned as evidence of a reactionary or revanchist mentality.
From their point of view, the Russians are pursuing only legitimate national aspirations. That this Western naivete – and whitewashing of Putin – has vitally contributed to a national feeling in Russia not only of invincibility, but also of being unpunishable, is self-evident.
Ukraine and Russia
As to the law of the birth rate numbers, there is no question about it: Ukraine, like Russia, is a fading nation. It has a median age way above 40.
From Putin’s end, his genocidal plan in this case gives priority not to massacres or rapes by his soldateska – even though they are perpetrated as a matter of intimidation.
Putin’s main targets in Ukraine are the educated classes. That is why Ukrainian mayors and their families are being abducted and killed.
Now, there will be those in the west who, even under current circumstances, want to belittle the number of the murdered as not so significant. As if that would make Putin less of a genocidal murderer.
Apart from the fact that, under the Genocide Convention, this still establishes the criterion for genocide, Putin’s declared intention remains the elimination of Ukrainian culture in order to subject the rest of the people to Russification and control.
No time for any illusions
Let us also be clear about this: Even if, as Moscow had counted on and as Washington was prepared for, Kiev had capitulated after two days and the war had ceased, Putin’s genocidal operation against Ukraine’s elite would have gone ahead.
Let us also realize, because Putin’s genocidal murder program was known in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State
Tony Blinken offered President Zelensky and other elected representatives of the Ukrainian nation help to save their lives.
Conclusion: Germany’s utter irresponsibility
Given that Vladimir Putin, as outlined above, is repeating the Hitler-Stalin genocide variants of 1939 and 1940, it is utterly incomprehensible why German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his SPD party have their collective head so much in the sand that they don’t act with great determination.
By ignoring the facts and historical contexts about Mr. Putin’s devious genocidal schemes, they are indeed creating a new episode of German war guilt. They can’t claim they haven’t been told.
NATO faces a historic opportunity to defeat the last imperial power threatening European security. A strategic victory over a revanchist Russia can be achieved even without direct military confrontation. In addition to supplying Ukraine with all the necessary weapons to reclaim its occupied territories, NATO has several options to weaken Russia’s overstretched multi-regional capabilities.
Russia’s armed forces simply do not have the domestic manpower or functional weaponry to defend its entire western and southern flanks. From the Arctic to the Caspian, a sustained diplomatic, economic, and security campaign led by Washington will severely undermine Russia’s resources, divert its attention from Ukraine, and enable Ukrainian forces to defeat Moscow’s enfeebled military.
Along the Arctic and North European fronts, Finland and Sweden need the fastest possible track toward NATO entry. Both Helsinki and Stockholm have overwhelming public support for NATO membership, and Finland, in particular, has significant military capabilities, a border of over 800 miles with Russia, and direct experience in resisting and defeating Russia’s aggression.
All along the eastern front, from Estonia to Bulgaria, NATO needs to organize more frequent military exercises to help synchronize allied defenses, provide more sophisticated weaponry, and ensure a more robust and permanent international troop presence close to Russia’s frontiers. This would send a powerful signal that an attack on any NATO member would result in a multinational response on various parts of Russian territory that would stretch and destroy its military.
The vulnerable state of Moldova needs political and military assistance to protect itself from a Moscow-engineered conflict. The Kremlin has been threatening to open another military front from the separatist entity of Transnistria against Ukraine. NATO must signal that any such attempt will result in Moldova being afforded every means to retake its occupied territories.
Along the Balkan front, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been targeted by Moscow to destabilize the region through a partition, should be placed on a fast track for NATO membership. Simultaneously, Kosovo must be assisted to qualify for NATO entry. This would undercut attempts by the pro-Kremlin government in Serbia to generate conflicts in order to deflect attention from Moscow’s expansionist war in Ukraine.
Along the Caucasus front, NATO troops need to be dispatched to Georgia to help protect vital energy pipelines between the Caspian Basin and Europe from potential Russian attacks. Georgia itself needs to be brought swiftly into NATO, having met all requirements for membership. Such moves would increase pressure on Georgia’s occupied territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, from where Moscow has been withdrawing troops to fight in Ukraine. At the same time, a North Caucasus front can be opened by directly assisting free Chechens and other national units fighting for Ukraine and against Russia. This will increase fear in the Kremlin over the growth of armed independence movements within the Russian Federation itself.
The Russian regime must also be strangled with economic sanctions that precipitate elite power struggles, public revolts, and regional separatism. Sanctions should not be eased or lifted until at least four conditions are met: the withdrawal of all Russian troops and proxy structures from Ukraine, including Crimea; the payment of war reparations, including all Russian state assets frozen in Western banks, to rebuild Ukraine’s devastated infrastructure; the resignation or ouster of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime; and the surrender to an international tribunal of all officials charged with war crimes and potential genocide. Without such conditions, the West would simply allow Putin to restore the economy, rebuild the military, and launch another offensive.
Janusz Bugajski is a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, DC. He is the co-author of Eurasian Disunion: Russia’s Vulnerable Flanks with Margarita Assenova. His new book, Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture, will be published in May.
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