The News And Times

 Putin and Trump   Peter Baker Discovers that Russia Sows Partisan Antagonism and Then Helps Them Do So! posted at 09:20:48 UTC   via   emptywheel.net I laughed yesterday when Peter Baker  tweeted  about how “striking” it is that Vladimir Putin is adopting Trump’s perceived enemies as his own. But then Baker wrote up his laughably naive observation into  a NYT story . Baker, you’ll recall, is one of NYT’s crack journalists who  buried Trump’s admission  that he had spoken to Putin about adoptions before writing a false explanation about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting emphasizing adoptions. Baker and Maggie Haberman chose instead to emphasize Trump’s scripted attack on Jeff Sessions. The Mueller Report  showed  that NYT’s willingness to dumbly repeat Trump’s script proved even more useful to Trump’s efforts to undermine the Rule of Law than his covert effort to get Corey Lewandowski to ferry orders to Jeff Sessions. And here we are, almost five years later, and Baker still naively

  Putin, Pushkin and the decline of the Russian empire posted at 23:07:37 UTC   via   ft.com Receive free Life & Arts updates We’ll send you a  myFT Daily Digest  email rounding up the latest Life & Arts news every morning. A statue of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin being dismantled in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro in December 2022 © Mykola Myakshykov / UkrInform / Avalon Last month, I stood at the corner of what used to be Pushkin Street in Kyiv. Following Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has been renamed Yevhen Chykalenko Street, after a major figure of the early 20th-century Ukrainian independence movement. To lovers of literature and opera, cancelling Alexander Pushkin, poet and author of  Eugene Onegin,  might seem a bit over the top. Putin, yes, but why Pushkin? For Ukrainians, however, engaged in an existential struggle for their independence against Russia’s war of recolonisation, Pushkin is a symbol of the Russian imperialism that has long den

Post Link SBU chief reveals details of two operations to blow up Crimea Bridge posted at 19:48:04 UTC   via   ukrinform.net That’s according to the SBU chief, Vasyl Maliuk, who spoke in an interview with NV magazine, the SBU told Ukrinform. "It was an indescribable feeling. When the explosion happened, we screamed so loudly as the tension inside was huge," said Maliuk, who personally planned and supervised the special operation. According to the head of the security agency, in order to inconspicuously transport 21 tons of hexane to the bridge, the SBU operatives wrapped the explosives with packaging film, which the shipping papers said the truck was officially transporting.  Read also:  Maliuk: Drones that damaged Crimean Bridge in July are SBU’s invention The Security Service released unique photos showing the preparations for the operation. In addition, according to Maliuk, the SBU managed to bypass special jammers on the Crimea Bridge that alter GPS coordinates. "We w