Analysis: A Cornered Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever - posted at 12:49:34 UTC via nytimes.com
Analysis: A Cornered Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever
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- Sept. 21, 2022, 8:25 a.m. ET
PARIS — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in a speech on Wednesday that was a reminder of how easily the war in Ukraine could spread, doubled down on his nuclear threat, accused the West of seeking to “destroy” his country, and suggested that Ukrainians are mere pawns of the “military machine of the collective West.”
In a videotaped address to the nation, he effectively conceded that the war he started on Feb. 24 has not gone as he wished. By calling up roughly 300,000 reservists to fight on what he called a 620-mile front, and abandoning the original objective of demilitarizing and “de-Nazifying” all of Ukraine, he acknowledged something he had consistently denied: the reality and growing resistance of a unified Ukrainian nation.
But Mr. Putin cornered is Mr. Putin at his most dangerous. That was one of the core lessons of his hardscrabble youth that he took from the furious reaction of a rat he cornered on a stairwell in what was then Leningrad.
His speech at once inverted a war of aggression against a neighbor into one of defense of the “motherland,” a theme that resonates with Russians, and warned the West in unmistakable terms — “this is not a bluff” — that the attempt to weaken or defeat Russia could provoke nuclear cataclysm.
“Russia won its defensive wars against Napoleon and Hitler, and the most important thing Putin did here from a psychological perspective was to claim this, too, is a defensive war,” said Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin.” “It was an aggressive war. Now it’s the defense of the Russian world against the Western attempt at dismemberment.”
That “Russkiy Mir,” or imagined world imbued with some inalienable Russian essence, grew in size as Mr. Putin suggested in the speech that the country’s nuclear arsenal could be used to defend eastern and southern areas of Ukraine captured since the war began.
Mr. Putin said Russia would support imminent referendums on the future of four regions in Ukraine. This method, described this week by President Emmanuel Macron of France as “simulacra” of referendums, was used in Crimea in 2014 to justify Russian annexation.
It seems likely that the referendums in Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south — which the United States and Western allies have denounced as “sham” votes — would also lead to Russian annexation. At that point, a Ukrainian attack next month on the city of Kherson in the south, captured by Russia at the start of the war, could, in Russia’s view, be viewed as an attack on Russian soil, justifying a nuclear riposte.
A Ukrainian counteroffensive is now underway in the Kherson region, and senior Ukrainian officials have vowed to recapture the city.
“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will of course use all means at our disposal to defend Russia and our people,” Mr. Putin said.
His speech, which may of course be a bluff despite his denial, nevertheless placed before the West a dilemma that has been inherent in its policy from the start of the war: How far can intense military and logistical support of Ukraine — effectively everything short of NATO troops on the ground — go without setting off nuclear confrontation?
It was also an attempt to divide the West ahead of a winter that promises to be hard, with inflation and energy costs rising. While the Biden administration has little apparent interest in diplomacy at this stage, France, Germany and Italy still seek the “dialogue” with Russia that Mr. Macron mentioned in his speech on Tuesday to the United Nations, a dialogue judged necessary, he said, because “we seek peace.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin called a “partial mobilization” and vowed to annex territories his forces are occupying. In a televised address, he described the moves as “urgent, necessary steps to defend the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Russia.”
Bridget Brink, the US ambassador to Ukraine, said in a tweet that “sham referenda and mobilization are signs of weakness, of Russian failure.” Treasuries, gold and the dollar led gains in haven assets after Putin rattled markets that were already bracing for a super-sized rate hike from the Federal Reserve. Russian stocks tumbled to their lowest since the country invaded.
Russian forces continue to degrade their force generation capabilities by cannibalizing training elements to fight in combat formations in #Ukraine.
isw.pub/RusCampaignSep…
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) released a redacted, bipartisan assessment of foreign intelligence threats facing our country. The redacted report, based upon two years of independent research conducted by non-partisan committee staff, identifies challenges facing the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), and offers a range of solutions to ensure that the NCSC is positioned to respond to today’s foreign intelligence threats. The investigation assessed the mission, duties and authorities, resources, and structure of the NCSC.
“Foreign adversarial governments, including the People’s Republic of China, are now targeting all sectors of U.S. society. This Committee aims to ensure that the American public, industry, and academia are aware of this, and also to ensure that the Intelligence Community has the authorities and resources necessary to effectively confront these new counterintelligence threats.” — Vice Chairman Rubio
“The United States faces a dramatically different threat landscape today than it did just a couple of decades ago. New threats and new technology mean that we have to make substantial adjustments to our counterintelligence posture if we are going to protect our country’s national and economic security.” — Chairman Warner
- The United States faces threats from a wide variety of adversaries, including powerful state actors such as China and Russia, regional adversaries, minor states aligned with U.S. adversaries, ideologically motivated entities, and transnational criminal organizations;
- Foreign intelligence entities are targeting the public and private sectors alike, including the financial sector, the U.S. industrial base, academic entities, U.S. government departments and agencies that are not part of the intelligence community, and national laboratories;
- Today’s adversaries have access to a much wider variety of tools for stealing information, influencing U.S. officials or inflaming social and political tensions than in the past, including nontraditional human, cyber, advanced technical, and open source intelligence operations to collect against U.S. plans and policies, sensitive technology, personally identifiable information, and intellectual property, as well as to influence U.S. decision-making and public opinion;
- The U.S. counterintelligence efforts are not postured to most effectively confront the whole-of-society threat landscape facing the country today, with the NCSC lacking a clear mission, sufficient and well-defined authorities, and adequate resources to do so;
- The report recommends that Congress, in conjunction with the Executive Branch and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, develop a consistent U.S. government-wide definition of counterintelligence that reflects today’s threat landscape, and enact reforms to clarify NCSC's mission, structure and responsibilities and determine what role it should play in traditional, strategic, and offensive counterintelligence operations.
Click here to read the full report.
As the trial for an FBI agent accused of selling out his country by funneling secrets to underworld figures is set to open this week in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, his attorney made startling allegations against the government’s star witness, a phony Beverly Hills lawyer and admitted mobster who he says stole a private jet from one of his clients, the reputed boss of the Armenian crime family, schmoozed with Arnold Schwarzenegger and donated to Gavin Newsom and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns.
Babak Broumand, a 20-year FBI veteran who retired in 2018 shortly after fellow agents raided his business, home, and Lake Tahoe vacation house—which prosecutors say he bought with bribe money from the Armenians after it was laundered through his unlicensed lice removal companies called Love Bugs. Broumand is accused of “doing a little something on the side,” for the powerful Armenian mob since 2015, which is when he met the star witness in his trial, “lawyer” Edgar Sargsyan, at the Grand Havana Room, a members-only cigar lounge in Beverly Hills.
Broumand, a supervisory agent for the San Francisco field office assigned to HUMINT, a squad that develops human sources to combat terrorism, ran checks on Sargsyan’s associates, offered up the location of secret boxes of cash the UN believes Muhomar Gaddafi squirreled out of his country before the Arab Spring reached Libya and offered to take Iranians off the no-fly list for a price.
In return, Sargsyan says he gave Broumand $10,000 in cash, took him on pricy Las Vegas “boys trips”— with “party buses filled with girls,” paid for boozy dinners, and took him on vacation on a private jet. To hide his side job, Broumand tried to register Sargsyan as a confidential informant for the FBI, prosecutors say.
Now, Sargsyan is cooperating with the government against his former friend and intelligence source. Sargsyan already helped federal prosecutors convict Homeland Security Investigations agent Felix Cisneros and a Glendale narcotics detective John Saro Balian on federal corruption charges with testimony that came before he recently confessed to his handlers that he paid his law partner, Henrik Mosei, $20,000 a month to study for the California Bar; when Mosei passed it in Sacramento using a fake ID and smeared fingerprints, his hard studying was rewarded with a Rolex.
Mosei, who said he will plead the fifth if called in Broumand’s trial—told Steven Gruel, who is defending the former FBI agent, that Sargsyan also scammed millions in an elaborate fraud scheme where he was “busting out people’s credit cards.” The victims were “usually elderly, Armenian, or immigrants,” Gruel wrote in a court filing this week, quoting Sargsyan’s former colleague.
Some of the stolen cash made its way into campaign coffers, Gruel said, including $250,000 donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign at a private fundraiser held in Beverly Hills. He also donated to Governor Gavin Newsom at another Beverly Hills event where President Barack Obama made an appearance, Gruel wrote.
Sargsyan spread his attention around to both the Democrat and Republican parties. A slew of celebrities maintain pricy humidors at the Grand Havana Room, including former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2014, Gruel says in the court filing, Sargsyan sent the Terminator star a $1500 glass of Macallan 25. The former governor thanked him and “complimented his ring.” Sargsyan “took it off and gave it to him,” Gruel wrote in the filing. A friendship was born.
In return, Schwarzenegger gave Sargsyan a ring with the California seal and “a large metal watch made from the metal of a tank in Austria or Germany,” Gruel wrote in the filing.
Sargsyan’s mover-shaker days driving to his Rodeo Drive offices in his Rolls Royce Phantom ended when he agreed to cooperate with the government in the investigation of a sprawling $1 billion biofuel scam pulled off by members of the Kingston clan, a polygamist cult in Utah better known as The Order; not to mention the reputed Armenian Mafia boss he ripped off, Levon Termendzhyan, a Bel Air gas station tycoon now imprisoned in a Salt Lake City lockup.
Sargsyan was an attorney for a company owned by Termendzhyan— who is better known in L.A. crime circles as The Lion—when he registered a private jet his boss purchased in his own name and even changed the tail number.
Sargsyan was with a woman Gruel called his mistress when he got a call that The Lion had discovered he had embezzled millions of dollars and stolen the jet. He panicked and called his office screeching, “I’m a dead man, my life is over.” Then he “stopped coming to the office and hid in a hotel room,” Gruel wrote.
Which, Sargsyan’s colleagues told Gruel, was a smart move. At some point, The Lion “and his “goons” came to the office trying to find him, declaring “war,”’ Gruel wrote.
Today Sargsyan remains a free man. He is expected to take the stand in Broumand’s trial over the next fortnight.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — A new Senate study warns that U.S. spy agencies’ efforts to stop China and other adversaries from stealing secrets are hampered by miscommunication and a lack of money and staff at the office intended to coordinate those efforts.
The report comes amid warnings that Chinese and Russian attempts to obtain sensitive data and meddle in elections are on the rise.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday says the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which is supposed to coordinate efforts by the U.S. government, doesn’t have a clear mission and is limited in its authority. NCSC cannot fund or mandate programs for many government agencies or private companies that hold secrets prized by foreign spy services.
There’s also disagreement among intelligence officials about who should lead responses to cyberattacks and campaigns trying to influence Americans — and whether those efforts should be categorized as counterintelligence, the report says.
Washington has long accused Beijing in particular of sanctioning wide-ranging campaigns to steal secrets through spying, cyberattacks, and corporate espionage, as well as spreading disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and considering efforts to influence American democracy. The FBI has said it opens a new counterintelligence investigation involving China every 10 hours on average.
“The Chinese government is set on stealing your technology — whatever it is that makes your industry tick — and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told business leaders in a recent speech in London. “And they’re set on using every tool at their disposal to do it.”
The Senate report primarily focuses on NCSC, an element of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. ODNI was created in the 2004 reforms following the Sept. 11 attacks and revelations that agencies did not share information about some of the hijackers involved.
ODNI was intended to coordinate priorities across the rest of the 18-member U.S. intelligence community and ensure better information sharing through centers like NCSC, which would coordinate the counterintelligence work done by the FBI, CIA, and other spy agencies.
But the counterintelligence center is itself hamstrung by bureaucracy, the report argues. Among its hurdles is an inability to hire new employees quickly; not having the authority to implement national strategies; and not being able to fund counterintelligence programs outside of the spy agencies, either elsewhere in the U.S. government or in the private sector.
President Joe Biden also still hasn’t nominated a director for NCSC, which is currently led by acting director Michael Orlando. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the lack of a nomination.
“The United States faces a dramatically different threat landscape today than it did just a couple of decades ago,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement. “New threats and new technology mean that we have to make substantial adjustments to our counterintelligence posture if we are going to protect our country’s national and economic security.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is the committee’s vice chairman, noted that China and other adversaries are “targeting all sectors of society.” The committee wants to make sure intelligence agencies have “the authorities and resources necessary to effectively confront these new counterintelligence threats,” he said.
A spokesperson for NCSC said the center appreciates the committee “identifying multiple recommendations to improve NCSC’s ability to lead the counterintelligence mission.”
The report notes experts don’t agree on a solution. Some want the U.S. to have its own counterintelligence agency that would take some of the responsibilities held by the FBI, CIA, and other spy agencies.
Others think a new agency would simply impose a new layer of bureaucracy and undermine the original goals of creating it. A new agency would also likely face opposition across the intelligence community and supporters of those agencies in Congress.
Frank Montoya, a retired former chief counterintelligence executive and FBI agent, said he was most successful through establishing personal relationships with other officials and persuading businesses to be proactive in their security programs. Creating new requirements would end up being counterproductive, he said, because “people will do everything they can to do the minimum required and not the maximum.”
“It’s the simple, on the ground reality that you can’t mandate everything,” he said. “And even if you did, people would find their way around it.”
Mar-a-Lago special master Raymond Dearie's work on the bungled Carter Page surveillance case may have soured him on the FBI, Trump advisors hope.
20 September 2022
Liz Truss has given her “full support” to chief of staff Mark Fullbrook after it emerged he was questioned as a witness as part of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquiry into alleged bribery in Puerto Rico.
Mr Fullbrook has not travelled to the United Nations summit in New York with the Prime Minister, but No 10 insisted it is because he was working on government business, which this week includes announcements on help for businesses with their energy costs and a mini budget.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said the Prime Minister stands 100% behind Mr Fullbrook and “he has her full support”.
The FBI probe relates to allegations that financier and Tory donor Julio Herrera Velutini promised to help the former governor of Puerto Rico get re-elected if she dismissed an official investigating a bank he owned there.
He has denied the charges against him.
Downing Street chief of staff Mark Fullbrook (PA)Mr Velutini is alleged to have paid CT Group, a political consultancy firm in which Mr Fullbrook was a senior figure, 300,000 US dollars (almost £263,000) for work intended to help Wanda Vazquez Garced’s ultimately unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2020.
A spokesman for Mr Fullbrook said: “As has been made repeatedly clear, Mr Fullbrook is committed to and complies with all laws and regulations in any jurisdiction in which he works and is confident that he has done so in this matter.
“Indeed, Mark Fullbrook is a witness in this matter and has fully, completely and voluntarily engaged with the US authorities in this matter, as he would always do in any circumstance in which his assistance is sought by authorities.
“The work was engaged only by Mr Herrera and only to conduct opinion research for him and no one else.
“Mr Fullbrook never did any work for, nor presented any research findings to, the governor or her campaign. There has been no engagement since.
“Mr Fullbrook understands that there are active legal proceedings against other individuals and entities. It would therefore be inappropriate to comment further.”
Hurricane Fiona unleashed more rain on Puerto Rico on Monday, a day after the storm knocked out power and water to most of the island, and National Guard troops rescued hundreds of people who got stranded.
The post Fiona Dumps More Rain on Puerto Rico, Hundreds Rescued appeared first on Latino Rebels.
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This article links to a state controlled Russian media. Read more. Количество людей в мире, оказавшихся за чертой бедности в результате роста цен на продовольствие и энергию, увеличилось за последние полгода на 70 млн человек, заявил председатель 77-й сессии Генассамблеи ООН Чаба Кёрёши, открывая неделю высокого уровня Российская газета 1. Russian Press from Michael_Novakhov (80 […]
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Russian Separatists in Donbas Accuse Ukraine of Shelling Civilians Democracy Now!
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Man stabbed during cell phone robbery on Brooklyn train 1010 WINS
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A man was stabbed early Tuesday morning during a robbery on a Brooklyn train. According to police, at 5:12 a.m. on Sept. 20 a 45-year-old man was riding a southbound 2 train towards the Winthrop St station when was approached by two unknown males. The suspects proceeded to steal the victim’s cellphone, and during the […]
The post Man stabbed during cellphone robbery on 2 train in Brooklyn first appeared on The Brooklyn Guide.
In Opinion This summer, The New York Times spoke to readers who’d started going to therapy in the past two years: Why had they taken that step? What had they gotten out of it? Here’s what they said. nyti.ms/3qTdBfk Posted by The New York Times (nytimes) on Tuesday, September 20th, 2022 2:30pm 67 likes, 8 […]
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Michael Novakhov retweeted: It’s Time for Us To Awaken – We The Sleeping Giant – And Take Control From The Usurpers #biden #constitution #fbi #fbiraid #SupremeCourt #trump cliffordribner.com/?p=342944&wpwa…
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