unz |But
the largest feather in Kholomoisky’s cap is no doubt President Zelensky
himself. Kholomoisky’s channel created and ran the “Servant of the
People” show that featured Zelensky as an honest and intrepid President
of Ukraine dedicated to fighting corruption and defending the Ukrainian
people. When the elections came around, Kholomoisky’s people and his
media resources went all out in campaigning for their man. My personal
favorite play was when they bribed Facebook fortune-tellers to spin
prophecies about the coming of the president-that-was-promised and
thereby secured the superstitious peasant granny vote. If any Western
politicians are reading this, put down Sun Tzu and try some of this
Kholomoisky fellow’s stratagems during the next election cycle instead.
Now,
Russia has declared that they are planning to do a thorough
“denazification” campaign, which almost certainly means a thorough purge
of the Galician faction from the positions that they have taken since
Yushenko let them into the government. As for what will happen to the
oligarchs who bankrolled this whole operation, well, that’s still
somewhat up in the air. It’s worth point out that Russia used to have
dealings with them right up until the events of Euromaidan. The
arrangement was simple: Russia paid them to behave and not ally against
Russia with the West. As we can see looking back, this was clearly a
catastrophic strategy, and what’s worse, I can only shake my head at how
uncreative and uninspired it was—a cardinal sin in my book. The worst
possible outcome for Ukraine at this point is if Russia comes to a
compromise with some element of the existing power structure in Ukraine
once they wrap up the military operation. We now know that no
negotiations with the Galician faction are possible, so we can cross
them off the list. That leaves the Eastern Mafia. Rumors of
Kholomoisky’s imminent surrender aside, I can’t help but hope that his
chutzpah has finally crossed the line and that he will be forced to
spend the rest of his days exiled in Israel along with his puppet
Zelensky. As for the rest of the oligarchs, well, both Petro Poroshenko
and Yulia Timoshenko held photo-ops in Kiev with Kalashnikovs in their
hands, so we can cross them off the list as well. Further than that and
we enter the realm of pure speculation.
Clearly,
the best outcome would be for a military man from Russia with no
history of doing politics or business in Ukraine to come in and take the
reins as a vizier or military governor of sorts for a time. This
solution may offend committed ideologists and apologists for Liberal
Democracy (read: Oligarchy), but the hard truth of the situation that
Ukraine finds itself in is one in which literally no one who was
anywhere near the reins of power in that country for the last three
decades has his hands clean. These people all looted, collaborated and
murdered with near impunity for 30 years. With Russia now performing a
political prison break from Liberal Oligarchic Occupation Government
right before our very eyes, we can only hope that Ukraine will be able
to follow suit and break free from the shackles as well.
mintpressnews |The Mega Group — a secretive group of
billionaires to which Lauder belongs — was formed in 1991 by Charles
Bronfman and Leslie Wexner, the latter of whom has received considerable
media scrutiny following the July arrest of his former protege Jeffrey
Epstein. Media profiles of
the group paint it as “a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s
wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen” focused on
“philanthropy and Jewishness,” with membership dues upwards of $30,000
per year. Yet several of its most prominent members have ties to
organized crime.
Mega Group members founded and/or are
closely associated with some of the most well-known pro-Israel
organizations. For instance, members Charles Bronfman and Michael
Steinhardt formed
Birthright Taglit with the backing of then- and current Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. Steinhardt, an atheist, has stated that his
motivation in helping to found the group was to advance his own belief that devotion to and faith in the state of Israel should serve as “a substitute for [Jewish] theology.”
Other well-known groups associated
with the Mega Group include the World Jewish Congress — whose past
president, Edgar Bronfman, and current president, Ronald Lauder, are
both Mega Group members — and B’nai B’rith, particularly its spin-off
known as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Bronfman brothers were
major donors to the ADL, with Edgar Bronfman serving as the ADL’s honorary national vice-chair for several years.
When Edgar Bronfman died in 2013, long-time ADL Director Abe Foxman said,
“Edgar was for many years Chair of our Liquor Industry Division, Chair
of our New York Appeal, and one of our most significant benefactors.”
Other Mega Group members that are donors and major supporters of the ADL
include Ronald Lauder, Michael Steinhardt and the late Max Fisher.
As previously mentioned, Roy Cohn’s father was a long-time leader of
B’nai B’rith’s influential New England-New York chapter and Cohn was
later a celebrated member of its banking and finance lodge.
In addition, Mega Group members have
also been key players in the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. For
instance, Max Fisher of the Mega Group founded the National Jewish Coalition, now known as the Republican Jewish Coalition — the main pro-Israel neoconservative political lobbying group,
known for its support of hawkish policies, and whose current chief
patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, are among Donald Trump’s
top donors.
Though the Mega Group has officially
existed only since 1991, the use of “philanthropy” to provide cover for
more unscrupulous lobbying or business activities was pioneered decades
earlier by Sam Bronfman, the father of Mega Group members Edgar and
Charles Bronfman. While other North American elites like J.D.
Rockefeller had previously used philanthropic giving as a means of
laundering their reputations, Bronfman’s approach to philanthropy was
unique because it was focused on giving specifically to other members of
his own ethno-religious background.
Sam Bronfman, as was detailed in Part I
of this series, had long-standing deep ties to organized crime,
specifically Meyer Lanksy’s organized crime syndicate. Yet, Bronfman’s
private ambition, according to those close to him, was to become a
respected member of high society. As a consequence, Bronfman worked hard
to remove the stain that his mob associations had left on his public
reputation in Canada and abroad. He accomplished this by becoming a
leader in Canada’s Zionist movement and, by the end of the 1930s, he was head of the Canadian Jewish Congress and had begun to make a name for himself as a philanthropist for Jewish causes.
Yet even some of Bronfman’s activism
and philanthropy had hints of the mobster-like reputation he tried so
hard to shake. For instance, Bronfman was actively involved in the
illegal shipping of arms to Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine prior to
1948, specifically as a co-founder of the National Conference for Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation that smuggled weapons to the paramilitary group Haganah.
At the same time Bronfman was
abetting the illegal smuggling of weapons to the Haganah, his associates
in the criminal underworld were doing the same. After World War II,
close aides of David Ben-Gurion, who would later become the first prime
minister of Israel and was instrumental in the founding of Mossad, forged tight-knit relationships
with Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Mickey Cohen and other
Jewish gangsters of the period. They used their clandestine networks to
establish a vast arms smuggling network between the United States and
Zionist settlements in Palestine, arming both the Haganah and the Irgun
paramilitary groups. As noted in Part I of this report, at the same time
these gangsters were aiding the illegal arming of ZIonsit
paramilitaries, they were strengthening their ties to U.S. intelligence
that had first been formally (though covertly) established in World War
II.
After Israel was founded, Sam Bronfmanworked with
future Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to negotiate the sale of
Canadian armaments at half-price to Israel and the bargain weapons
purchase was paid for entirely by a fundraising dinner hosted by
Bronfman and his wife. Many years later, Peres would go onto introduce another future prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, to Jeffrey Epstein.
The rest of the Bronfman family’s
march on “the road to respectability” was undertaken by Bronfman’s
children, who married into aristocratic families such as the European Rothschilds and the Wall Street “royalty” of the Lehmans and the Loebs.
The Bronfmans’ newfound
respectability did not mean that their association with the Lansky-led
criminal empire had dissolved. Indeed, prominent members of the Seagrams
dynasty came under fire in the 1960s and 1970s for their close association
with Willie “Obie” Obront, a major figure in Canadian organized crime,
whom Canadian professor Stephen Schneider has referred to as the Meyer
Lansky of Canada.
However, Edgar and Charles Bronfman
were hardly the only members of the Mega Group with deep and
long-standing ties to the Lansky-led National Crime Syndicate. Indeed,
one of the group’s prominent members, hedge fund manager Michael
Steinhardt, opened up about his own family ties to Lansky in his
autobiography No Bull: My Life in and out the Markets, where he noted that his father, Sol “Red McGee” Steinhardt, was Lansky’s jewel fence of choice and a major player
in New York’s criminal underworld. Sol Steinhardt was also his son’s
first client on Wall Street and helped him jumpstart his career in
finance.
The ties between the Mega Group and
the National Crime Syndicate don’t stop there. Another prominent member
of the Mega Group with ties to this same criminal network is Max Fisher,
who has been described as Wexner’s mentor and is also alleged to have worked
with Detroit’s “Purple Gang” during Prohibition and beyond. The Purple
Gang were part of the network that smuggled Bronfman liquor from Canada
into the United State during Prohibition, and one of its founders, Abe
Bernstein, was a close associate of both Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz. Fisher was a key adviser to several U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as to
unz |What
makes Browder so powerful? He invests in politicians. This is probably a
uniquely Jewish quality: Jews outspend everybody in contributions to
political figures. The Arabs will spend more on horses and jets, the
Russians prefer real estate, the Jews like politicians. The Russian NTV
channel reported that Browder lavishly financed the US lawmakers. Here
they present alleged evidence of money transfers: some hundred thousand
dollars was given by Browder’s structures officially to the senators
and congressmen in order to promote the Magnitsky Act.
Much
bigger sums were transferred via good services of Brothers Ziff,
mega-rich Jewish American businessmen, said the researchers in two
articles published on the Veteran News Network and in The Huffington Post.
These
two articles were taken off the sites very fast under pressure of
Browder’s lawyers, but they are available in the cache. They disclose
the chief beneficiary of Browder’s generosity. This is Senator Ben
Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was the engine behind Magnitsky Act
legislation to such an extent that the Act has been often called the Cardin List.
Cardin is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, also a cold warrior
of good standing. More to a point, Cardin is a prominent member of
Israel Lobby.
LinkBookmarkBrowder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime.
Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish, not only Browder,
Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin. Even his enemy, the beneficiary of the
scam that (according to Browder) took over his Russian assets is another
Jewish businessman Dennis Katsiv (he had been partly exonerated by a New York court as is well described in this thoughtful piece).
Browder
began his way to riches under the patronage of a very rich and very
crooked Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born Jewish businessman who assumed a
Scots name. Maxwell stole a few million dollars from his company pension
fund before dying in mysterious circumstances on board of his yacht in
the Atlantic. It was claimed by a member of Israeli Military
Intelligence, Ari Ben Menashe, that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent for
years, and he also said Maxwell tipped the Israelis about Israeli
whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu. Vanunu was kidnapped and spent many
years in Israeli jails.
Geoffrey Goodman
wrote Maxwell “was almost certainly being used as – and using himself
as – a two-way intelligence conduit [between East and West]. This
arrangement included passing intelligence to the Israeli secret forces
with whom he became increasingly involved towards the end of his life.”
After
Maxwell, Browder switched allegiance to Edmond Safra, a very rich
Jewish banker of Lebanese origin, who also played East vs West. Safra
provided him with working capital for his investment fund. Safra’s bank
has been the unlikely place where the IMF loan of four billion dollars
to Russia had been transferred—and disappeared. The Russian authorities
say that Browder has been involved in this “crime of the century,” next
to Safra. The banker’s name has been connected to Mossad: increasingly
fearful for his life, Safra surrounded himself by Mossad-trained gunmen.
This did not help him: he died a horrible death in his bathroom when
his villa was torched by one of the guards.
The
third Jewish oligarch on Browder’s way was Boris Berezovsky, the
king-maker of Yeltsin’s Russia. He also died in his bathroom (which
seems to be a constant feature); apparently he committed suicide.
Berezovsky had been a politically active man; he supported every
anti-Putin force in Russia. However, a few months before his death, he
asked for permission to return to Russia, and some negotiations went on
between him and Russian authorities.
His
chief of security Sergey Sokolov came to Russia and purportedly brought
with him some documents his late master prepared for his return. These
documents allege that Browder had been an agent of Western intelligence
services, of the CIA to begin with, and of MI6 in following years. He
was given a code name Solomon, as he worked for Salomon Brothers. His
financial activity was just a cover for his true intentions, that is to
collect political and economic data on Russia, and to carry out economic
war on Russia. This revelation has been made in the Russia-1 TV channel
documentary Browder Effect,
(broadcasted 13.04.2016), asserting that Browder was not after money at
all, and his activities in Russia, beside being very profitable, had a
political angle.
The documents had been doubted for some linguistic reasons discussed by Gilbert Doctorow
who comes to a reasonable conclusion: “Bill Browder[‘s]… intensity and
the time he was devoting to anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no
way comparable to the behaviour of a top level international
businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play. But at
the time, no one could stand up and suggest the man was a fraud, an
operative of the intelligence agencies. Whatever the final verdict may
be on the documents presented by the film “The Browder Effect,” it
raises questions about Browder that should have been asked years ago in
mainstream Western media if journalists were paying attention. Yevgeny
Popov deserves credit for highlighting those questions, even if his
documents demand further investigation before we come to definitive
answers”.
We
do not know whether Browder is, or had been, a spy. This should not
surprise us, as he was closely connected to Maxwell, Safra and
Berezovsky, the financiers with strong ties in the intelligence
community.
Perhaps
he outlived his usefulness, Mr Browder did. He started the Cold war,
now is the time to keep it in its healthy limits and to avoid a nuclear
disaster or rapid armaments race. This is the task we may hope will be
entertained by the next US President, Mr Donald Trump.
chesno | The financial statements from the Servant of the People indicate that the party collected 226 million hryvnias (~$8 million USD) in donations while Zelenskyy and his associates’ election accounts collected 200 million hryvnias (~$7 million USD).
These numbers themselves seem relatively unremarkable, but the sources and types of donations are much more interesting.
Chesno reported that from September 2018 to September 2019 only 94 people donated to Servant of the People. Of the 94 people, most of these were entrepreneurs or sole proprietors. Most of the donations came from Kyiv, followed by donations from Odessa and Dnipro.
Chesno also found that 44 legal entities donated to the Servant of the People and Zelenskyy, with 34 of these entities donating 3 million hryvnias ($105,000 USD), which is just under the 3.3 million hryvnia ($120,000) limit placed on donations. The majority of these donations came from either Kyiv or Odessa.
More than 99% of all donations were more than 100,000 hryvnias ($3,500 USD); only two donations of less than 10,000 hryvnias ($350) were received in this time period.
To contextualize these figures, the minimum wage in Ukraine is 6,000 hryvnias per month ($220 USD) and the median salary in Ukraine is around 21,000 hryvnias ($775 USD).
This means that the majority of donations received by Zelenskyy and Servant of the People were more than what most Ukrainians make over five or six months of full-time work.
Chesno also found that some of the 94 personal donations came from questionable sources. Chesno interviewed Tetyana Staneva, who lives in a village in Odessa and has no business registered in her name. She donated 1.5 million hryvnias ($52,000 USD) to the Servant of the People party, telling Chesno, “It’s not just my money, I just sent it. This is a group of like-minded people, we did it together.” It should be noted that this is against Ukrainian law, which says that individual citizen must make financial contributions to political groups personally, and not as a collective.
Investigators identified one of the 44 entities that donated as Yaroslava Reklama, LLC, registered to a 22-year old cook named Yaroslav Kuzka who works at one of Kyiv’s restaurants. Yaroslava Reklama LLC, transferred the maximum donation of 3.3 million hryvnias ($120,000 USD) to Servant of the People. Upon investigating the address to which Yaroslava Reklama LLC was registered, journalists found that tenants in the area had never heard of the company.
Another company, Prom Import LLC, was registered to a woman named Juliana Kuku. She complained on her social media accounts that business was “not going well”, but at roughly the same time, made a 500,000 hryvnia ($16,000 USD) donation to Servant of the People.
Chesno also found that of the 44 entities that donated to Servant of the People, four of them changed their addresses within two days of one another in December 2018, leading investigators to conclude that many of the donors were likely linked.
It is perhaps remarkable to consider that although only 94 persons and 44 legal entities donated to Servant of the People, that it grew to controlling 254 of 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada despite not existing less than six months before.
Will the matrix allow me to peak behind the curtains of a manufactured and manipulated world staged event?
The Journey begins…
On the 3/3 I took a flight from Luton, England to Krakow, Poland.
Via Poland seemed the easiest way into the Ukraine.
Note: all the 33’s.
Evan tho unvaxxed, I entered Poland with ease on the condition I left within 24 hours.
So I wasted no time, and took a train from Krakow to Przemysl.
The only sign of WAR was the name of the cafe’
Lights, Camera….ACTION!!!
Przemysl Train Station (the Refugee movie set)
A well planned stage managed route ensures the Ukrainians arriving are
bottled necked and compressed into the ticket hall so the media can
create the illusion of ‘hell on Earth’.
Visual effects are key!
Outside the Refugee train station, police vehicles leave the lights flashing.
Every 20 minutes, the sirens turn on and vehicle does a loop around the block.
Stage Management …
The ‘Video Village’ of Przemysl.
Here we find the director and producer of the refugee movie.
All staged photos need good lighting.
I am unable to find a hostel or hotel,
full of refugees you ask?
No! All the hotels in this town are taken up by the press
Whilst these scumbags sleep in luxury, poor Ukrainians are left to sleep at the railway station.
dailybeast | Intimations of pressure on Israel to provide Ukraine military support, including from the Israeli public,
which largely identifies with Ukraine, are met with explanations about
Israel’s unique situation vis-à-vis Russia, and the blank wall of
realpolitik.
“Israel is stuck between its interest in ongoing
military coordination with Russia, and, on the other side, Israel is
small nation allied with the West, particularly with the United States,
to whom we owe a lot,” Professor Gideon Rahat, a Hebrew University
expert on Israeli politics and public opinion, told The Daily Beast.
“Israeli
leaders have to maneuver between those two. Of course, public opinion
is untethered from these interests. With ex-Ukrainians pretty dominant
in the public sphere, worried for their families, and when you see how
the dictator Putin is about to take over another country, most of Israel
see themselves as part of what we used to call, in Cold War days, the
free world.”
Bennett was accompanied to Moscow by Ze’ev Elkin, his Ukrainian-born minister of housing and infrastructure, whose brother fled their native city of Kharkiv,
under Russian bombardment, at the same moment the Israeli and Russian
leaders sat in Moscow discussing the war, with Elkin translating.
Israel
has also demurred from imposing sanctions on Russian oligarchs, some of
whom are dual citizens. After praising Israel's willingness to help
mediation efforts, a U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem said on Wednesday that "we would like to see our allies and partners imposing strong sanctions, Israel falls into the category of our allies and partners."
“We
didn’t invite Putin into this region,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired
Israeli army major general who served as former prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu's national security adviser, alluding to the collapse of then-President Barack Obama’s
“red line” regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria, just across
Israel’s border. Israel, Amidror said, in an interview, is as vulnerable
as Ukraine is, to no less tenacious an enemy than Putin— Iran, whose
leaders regularly promise to eliminate Israel.
"Putin's not posing apartheid for Ukrainians. There's not going to be a big land grab like we just kind of gave the Palestinians' land to Israel and now support Israel in securing that land and growing and securing that land. No, it's not like that. These are Ukrainians and they're going to be Ukrainians/Russians at the end of this, too. "There's no ethnic difference, there's no big religious difference. We don't have to worry about concentration camps and apartheid because there's no real difference (ethnically or racially), and this is a real empire, which means that Russia's not going to take anything except they're going to just redirect where they pay their taxes. And so this idea that there's a human rights violation going on in Ukraine . . . well, no, there's a political rights violation going on, but political rights are fickle things, which means that you might not be a sovereign nation if you're right next to Russia. "One of the conditions of sovereignty is not being next to a bigger power that wants to eat you. So like you don't get to be a sovereign nation (in that case). For example, when the Civil War happened and South Carolina wanted to fight against Mr. Lincoln's army, I'm glad that the rest of the nation didn't come in and save South Carolina. There was a human rights violation because one of the reasons they were fighting was to enslave black people, but the conditions in sovereignty in real life are really, actually kind of tricky. And part of it means being able to defend your borders. And I don't want to be stuck in a forever war in Ukraine if it can't defend its borders, and they are Russian."So there's no reason to believe that there are going to be mass human rights abuses after the Ukraine's taken over. Because it'll be like what they're doing in Chernobyl. "So right now in Chernobyl there's a big worry that like, 'Oh, no. If the Russians bomb Chernobyl then it could be the case that there's a nuclear fallout and there's going to be all this delays and all that stuff.' What they did was the Russians took over Chernobyl and then put the Ukrainian engineers back to work, so like, nothing changed except who the boss is, right? " . . . you saw a little bit of this before 2008 where in the U.S. you talked to people - every now and then they'd get a letter in the mail saying that they used to pay their mortgage to this bank, but now they pay their mortgage to this bank. There's the same mortgage, just to a different bank. That's kind of what, for most of the Ukrainian people, that's going to be their life under Russia. "And that's non-ideal, but it's not something you go to war and threaten world extinction over, right? It's one of the facts of having nation states with asymmetrical power and no world government. To protect borders as is. " . . . from time to time there are going to be skirmishes, and the bigger power is going to win. And when the bigger power is Russia sometimes you've just got to negotiate a surrender. So I wish we would be all for let's negotiate a surrender. Forget the sanctions, let's negotiate surrender and let's stop pretending . . . . because what I don't want at the end of this - a war zone's an awful place - I don't want Kiev after two years of war. That's unnecessary. "And I don't think we should be giving weapons to the Ukrainians. I don't think that's necessary. I think we should be all about telling (Ukrainian president) Zelensky 'All right, well, we can't get you back, we will help you surrender and give you political asylum so you don't have to worry about getting disappeared. But pretty much that's a wrap. We're not going to support you. Which means you should surrender, because they're bigger, stronger, and have just more resources than you do, right? "But instead we're going to give weapons for a ground war, that the Russians are going to win because they're a superior force, speaking the same language, and aren't that foreign to Ukraine. I say that there's not going to be pogroms or genocide because there's not really a difference in the church, either. Like they're all Eastern Orthodox . . . . it's cousins fighting, belligerent cousins fighting, and it's a place we shouldn't get involved. "And now with these sanctions in Russia everyone's prices are going to go up, which is de facto a regressive tax. We don't have to put these sanctions on, right? Instead of just trying to negotiate full-bore surrender, we've launched economic war against Russia. There are going to be sanctions, these sanctions are going to tax everyone, everyone's going to take a hit, and so pretty much we are now paying the price and subsidizing Ukrainians, the Ukrainian war, and I don't think that we should do that, I think we should encourage him (President Zelensky) to surrender and work out favorable terms. . . . ."I don't understand why suddenly we take national borders so seriously when we were so casual about them before. We need to deal with the fact of this kind of politics. If you actually care about the war and the suffering, you want this to end. You just want it to end, right? So this is different than like the Civil War when the issue was slavery. This is just a territorial dispute between one power and another power."
Paying higher gas prices is simply the cost of freedom – this according to elite liberals ranging from former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to actor George Takei. Both of these millionaires feel strongly that we should all – including those who AREN’T millionaires – be happy to pay more at the pump if it means keeping our petro dollars out of Vladimir Putin’s grubby Russian hands.
Jimmy and American comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the elite consensus about how poor people need to dig deep into their wallets for freedom.
The Russian invasion may be devastating Ukraine and bringing untold harm to the citizens of both Ukraine and Russia, but the crisis has nevertheless created an opportunity – an opportunity for some members of Congress to line their pockets. It appears that a number of Congressional representatives have used the “inside” information gained from their positions to trade in energy stocks just as the price of fossil fuels was about to skyrocket.
Jimmy and American comedian Kurt Metzger discuss just how profitable it can be to serve – and serve oneself – in Congress.
thesaker |The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything.
By now what we may call a Triple Threat has been established as the catalyst anticipating the launch of Operation Z.
Ukraine developing nuclear weapons. Zelensky himself hinted at it in the Munich Security Conference.
U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Confirmed, tersely, by none other
than the Sinister Cookie Distributor neocon wife in the uber-neocon
Kaganate of Nulands, who described them as “biological research
facilities”. ”
An imminent attack on Donbass with massive civilian deaths. It could
have been in March, according to documents seized by the Russian
Ministry of Defense. Or even in late February, according to SVR
intelligence, which was monitoring the line of contact on a
minute-by-minute basis. This is what eventually prompted Operation Z as a
Russian version of R2P (“Responsibility to Protect”).
So after years of CIA-instigated shouts of “conspiracy theory!” and
less than zero “fact checkers” activity, it turns out “it was all
happening in Ukraine”, as divine messenger Maria Zakharova once again
pointed out: “We have found your own products. We have found your
biological material.”
The first-class investigative work of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva on Pentagon bioweapons was fully vindicated.
Based on documents received from Ukrainian biolab employees, the
Russian ModD revealed that research with samples of bat coronavirus,
among other experiments, were conducted in a Pentagon-funded biolab.
The purpose of all this research – which included another Pentagon
project to study the transfer of pathogens by wild birds migrating
between Ukraine and Russia and other neighboring countries – was “to
create a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens.”
In trademark pysop mode, everything was turned upside down by the
United States government: those evil Russkies could take control of
biological samples, so any “accident” involving biological and chemical
weapons in Ukraine would have to be blamed on Russia.
The White House, in yet another flagrant display of unredeemable
stupidity, accused Russia of “false claims” and China of “endorsing this
propaganda”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came up with the adult perspective:
“The whole world will be interested to know what exactly the American
bio-laboratories in Ukraine were doing.”
Down on the ground
Meanwhile, defying the fog of war while being targeted by Kiev’s free
distribution of weapons without any measure of control, civilians on
the path of Operation Z confirmed over and over again that Azov
neo-Nazis prevent them from escaping encircled towns and villages. These
Banderastan fanatics are the shock troops transforming Ukraine into a
large Idlib – according to His Master’s Voice’s plan.
Neo-Nazis are doing exactly what ISIS/Daesh did in Syria: hiding
behind civilians taken as hostages. Azov are the white clones of
ISIS/Daesh. After all they learned their tactics from the same masters.
They will be bolstered by a fresh contingent of 450 fighters just
arrived from – where else – Idlib, including lots of non-Syrians from
Europe and the Maghreb. Most though are al-Qaedites and members of the
Syrian branch of the Turkestan Islamic Party. Their transit point: the
Syria-Turkish border, a smuggling free-for-all.
As it stands, the most detailed macro-view of how strategic Operation Z is developing has been outlined here. The inestimable Andrei Martyanov describes
it as a “combined arms police operation”: a delicate crossover between
formation-level warfare (“combined arms”) and a police operation to
arrest and/or destroy criminals (the full extent of “demilitarization”
and “denazification”).
For an undiluted, down and dirty, eye to the ground perspective
(translated into English), it’s hard to beat Russian military man
Alexander Dubrovsky.
He stresses how the objectives of the operation are “strategy and
tactics”; and proceeding with haste is out of the question in this
“completely new page in the art of war.”
thebulletin | “There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure
for researching or producing biological weapons,” Pope said. “Scientists
being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain
collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains
that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”
The program is encouraging host countries to reduce the scope of
their pathogen holdings to as small of a collection as necessary for
legitimate scientific research, Pope said.
“What we have today and what these countries maintain are small
amounts of various pathogens that by and large are things that are
collected out of their environment that they need for research to be
able to legitimately surveil disease and develop vaccines against,” he
said.
This work, Pope said, continued in Ukraine until recently. “They have
more pathogens in more places than we recommend,” he said. The program
had been helping Ukrainian researchers sift through their frozen
pathogen collections, with the goal of persuading the Ukrainians to
preserve their genetic information of samples via sequencing before
destroying the live samples.
Pope said his program had been close to an agreement with the
Ukrainians on consolidating samples, but the invasion has now made that
project uncertain. “All of that, obviously, has been derailed here with
the recent events,” he said.
The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Pope said Thursday, has not
had contact with biosafety staff at the labs in Ukraine since the
Russian invasion. Phone lines have been jammed in Ukraine, he said, and
“I don’t know what kind of contact we will have in these labs in the
near future.”
Some Ukrainian labs, like the Ukrainian Ministry of Health’s Public
Health Center, Pope said, are major facilities, others small. Some are
new, while others date back to the Soviet-era and the country’s
bioweapons program.
The US government has worked with 26 facilities in Ukraine. Before
the invasion, the program provided direct material support to six
Ukrainian labs. The program also provides biosafety and scientific
mentorship training to Ministry of Health personnel throughout the
country.
greenwald | The neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine
testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and
strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true.
Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL),
hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in
Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological
weapons?”
Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland,
thus providing further "proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake
News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did
something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for
senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a
version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as
he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by
telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm
that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100%
sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland
told Rubio he was right.
But Rubio's clean-up act came too late.
When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,”
Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable
pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her
normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department
officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research
facilities.” Any hope to depict such "facilities” as benign or banal was
immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in
fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking
to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the
Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research
materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they
approach” — [interruption by Sen. Rubio]:
Nuland's bizarre admission that “Ukraine has biological research
facilities” that are dangerous enough to warrant concern that they could
fall into Russian hands ironically constituted more decisive evidence
of the existence of such programs in Ukraine than what was offered in
2002 and 2003 to corroborate U.S. allegations about Saddam's chemical
and biological programs in Iraq. An actual against-interest confession
from a top U.S. official under oath is clearly more significant than
Colin Powell's holding up some test tube with an unknown substance
inside while he pointed to grainy satellite images that nobody could
decipher.
It should go without saying that the existence of a
Ukrainian biological “research” program does not justify an invasion by
Russia, let alone an attack as comprehensive and devastating as the one
unfolding: no more than the existence of a similar biological program
under Saddam would have rendered the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq
justifiable. But Nuland's confession does shed critical light on several
important issues and raises vital questions that deserve answers.
Any
attempt to claim that Ukraine's biological facilities are just benign
and standard medical labs is negated by Nuland's explicitly grave
concern that “Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of” those
facilities and that the U.S. Government therefore is, right this minute,
“working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those
research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.”
thesaker | During special military operation, classified documents (https://function.mil.ru/files/morf/dokumentynua.pdf)of the command of the National Guard of Ukraine ended up in the hands of the Russian servicemen. These documents confirm the covert preparation by the Kiev regime of an offensive operation in the Donbass in March 2022.
The Russian Ministry of Defence publishes the original secret order of the commander of the National Guard of Ukraine, Colonel-General Nikolai Balan, dated January 22, 2022.
Order “On organizing the training of a battalion tactical group of the 4th operational brigade to perform combat (special) tasks in the joint forces operation as part of a brigade of the armed forces of Ukraine.”
The document is addressed to the heads of the northern Kiev, southern Odessa and western territorial departments of the National Guard of Ukraine.
The order, brought to the command of the National Guard of Ukraine, explains the plan for preparing one of the shock groups for offensive operations in the so-called “Joint Forces Operation” zone in Donbass.
The document approves the organizational structure of the battalion-tactical group of the 4th operational brigade of the National Guard, the organization of its comprehensive support and reassignment to the 80th separate air assault brigade of Ukraine.
I would like to emphasize that since 2016, this formation of the air assault troops of Ukraine has been trained by American and British instructors under the “NATO standard” training programs in Lvov.
In accordance with the order, the Deputy Commander of the National Guard was tasked with organizing joint combat training of the battalion-tactical group of the National Guard as part of the 80th separate air assault brigade of the armed forces of Ukraine from February 7 to February 28, 2022.
I draw your attention that as many as five paragraphs of 4th paragraph are devoted to the issues of careful selection of personnel, psychologists examination and ensuring their high motivation.
For this reason, the National Guard servicemen are provided with “visual agitation, information and propaganda materials, flags, and printing products.”
The deputy commander of the National Guard for Staffing (personnel) was ordered to organize “an effective system of moral and psychological support for the battalion tactical group of the 4th operational brigade, internal communications of commanders with subordinates, informing.”
At the same time, it is important to provide “an explanation to the personnel of command decisions and the importance of upcoming tasks.”
I draw special attention to the fact that the 12th paragraph of the order prohibits sending National Guard servicemen who showed “unsatisfactory” results of psychological testing according to the criterion of “risk appetite” to the area of joint command training and to the place of “combat special tasks”.
All events of joint combat training of the nationalists are ordered to be completed by February 28 in order to further ensure the fulfillment of combat missions as part of the Ukrainian “Joint Forces Operation” in Donbass.
The document contains the original signatures of the officials of the command of the National Guard of Ukraine responsible for the tasks.
We remember the statements by the leadership of the Kiev regime replicated by the Western media in February, that there were no plans for an armed seizure of Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics. About their desire to resolve all issues in “political and diplomatic way.”
However, the originals of the secret military documents of the National Guard of Ukraine clearly prove the falsity of these statements.
A special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces, conducted since February 24, thwarted a large-scale offensive operation of Ukrainian troops on the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics in March of this year.
Thus, only one question remains unclear so far: how deeply the US leadership and its NATO allies were involved in the planning and preparation of the operation to storm the Donbass by the Ukrainian joint force grouping in early March. All those who care so much about peace in Ukraine today.
occrp |Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky rode to power on pledges to clean up the Eastern European
country, but the Pandora Papers reveal he and his close circle were the
beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, including some that
owned expensive London property.
Key Findings
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in
comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their
business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.
Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the
head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore
network.
Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.
Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his
shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to
have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving
money from the offshore.
Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in
2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class,
including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their
wealth overseas.
Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have
had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the
president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.
The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions
of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around
the world including OCCRP.
The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television
production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms
dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular
content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by
allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used
by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the
center of London.
The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted
his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin
Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner —
soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his
shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would
allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now
belongs to his wife.
A comedian and actor who had been famous since the 2000s, Zelensky
began his political rise a few years after taking on a starring role in
the political satire “Servant of the People,” which began airing on the
oligarch’s network in 2015. The show starred Zelensky as a humble
history teacher whose anti-corruption rant in class is filmed by a
student, goes viral online, and wins him national office.
In a case of life imitating art, Zelensky ended up winning the
real-world Ukrainian presidency just three-and-a-half years after the
show’s launch, with more than 73 percent of the vote.
Zelensky capitalized on widespread public anger at corruption, but
his 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his anti-graft bona fides,
given that his campaign was boosted by media belonging to Kolomoisky —
who is accused of stealing US$5.5 billion from his own bank and funneling it offshore in concert with his partner, Hennadiy Boholiubov.
In the heat of the campaign, a political ally of incumbent President
Petro Poroshenko published a chart on Facebook purporting to show that
Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a
web of offshore firms that allegedly received $41 million in funds from
Kolomoisky’s Privatbank.
ojim | All his life,
Petraeus has built up his career by courting those highest in power. His
passage from the summits of military and intelligence fields to the
ranks of financiers is typically seen as one of retirement or
resignation. We are inclined to see it as a promotion.
The career of David Howell Petraeus follows the same ascending line
and the same red thread: the manipulation of perceptions. His case
illustrates a radical change in the world of media. Before him, no one
could have imagined a former chief of intelligence at the head of the
media, especially not in a country he had helped to destroy. An enemy
general, head of the secret service, and a propaganda specialist, he has
imposed himself on the media of a bombed nation, under the pretext of
bringing objective information to it – a real tour de force. But nothing
shocks hearts and minds already conquered.
In the 1970s and
1980s, KKR was the pioneer of LBO, or the “leveraged buyout” – leverage
here signifying massive debt. The architect of this concept, Jerome
Kohlberg, soon worried by the “overpowering greed that pervades our business life,”
would leave the fund he had created, leaving only his K at the head of
the acronym. Following his departure, it was the second K, Henry Kravis,
who would lead these LBOs to skyrocket, thus earning KKR the
unflattering nickname of the “Barbarians of Wall Street” (the best-seller and film
“Barbarians at the Gate” are dedicated to their historical LBO on RJR
Nabisco). They would remain the champions of this method, despite the
practice often resulting in the dismemberment or even bankruptcy of the
companies bought, as was the case with their other historical LBO: Energy Future Holdings. The same method is now practiced by Patrick Drahi, who built his media empire on colossal debt.
At the end of 2016, Donald Trump was considering Petraeus for head of
US diplomacy, but he would remain with KKR, henceforth as a partner.
Kravis and Petraeus are also members of the Council on Foreign Relations and regular participants in Bilderberg meetings. Kravis was ranked 38th on the list of the richest Jews by the Jerusalem Post.
The “financial
barbarians” spearheaded by Petraeus have erected a true media empire,
but they have done so very discreetly, shying away from public
scrutiny. Rare, reluctant, and belated investigations have, however,
eventually revealed some details.
In 2015, a “Report on Ownership Structure and Control over Media in Serbia” by
the Serbian Anti-Corruption Council identified the lack of transparency
of media ownership as its priority issue. The following year, the
ownership structure of United Group was investigated by the Slovenian
newspaper Delo in cooperation with the Organized Crime and Corruption
Reporting Project (OCCRP). Their article “On the Dark Side of Telemach” finally
allowed the people of the region a behind-the-scenes look at their
prime source of information. What they found in their probe was a
labyrinth of ghost offshore companies, mushrooming in tax havens in
order to hide the original owners and their financial networks.
chesno | The financial statements from the Servant of the People indicate that the party collected 226 million hryvnias (~$8 million USD) in donations while Zelenskyy and his associates’ election accounts collected 200 million hryvnias (~$7 million USD).
These numbers themselves seem relatively unremarkable, but the sources and types of donations are much more interesting.
Chesno reported that from September 2018 to September 2019 only 94 people donated to Servant of the People. Of the 94 people, most of these were entrepreneurs or sole proprietors. Most of the donations came from Kyiv, followed by donations from Odessa and Dnipro.
Chesno also found that 44 legal entities donated to the Servant of the People and Zelenskyy, with 34 of these entities donating 3 million hryvnias ($105,000 USD), which is just under the 3.3 million hryvnia ($120,000) limit placed on donations. The majority of these donations came from either Kyiv or Odessa.
More than 99% of all donations were more than 100,000 hryvnias ($3,500 USD); only two donations of less than 10,000 hryvnias ($350) were received in this time period.
To contextualize these figures, the minimum wage in Ukraine is 6,000 hryvnias per month ($220 USD) and the median salary in Ukraine is around 21,000 hryvnias ($775 USD).
This means that the majority of donations received by Zelenskyy and Servant of the People were more than what most Ukrainians make over five or six months of full-time work.
Chesno also found that some of the 94 personal donations came from questionable sources. Chesno interviewed Tetyana Staneva, who lives in a village in Odessa and has no business registered in her name. She donated 1.5 million hryvnias ($52,000 USD) to the Servant of the People party, telling Chesno, “It’s not just my money, I just sent it. This is a group of like-minded people, we did it together.” It should be noted that this is against Ukrainian law, which says that individual citizen must make financial contributions to political groups personally, and not as a collective.
Investigators identified one of the 44 entities that donated as Yaroslava Reklama, LLC, registered to a 22-year old cook named Yaroslav Kuzka who works at one of Kyiv’s restaurants. Yaroslava Reklama LLC, transferred the maximum donation of 3.3 million hryvnias ($120,000 USD) to Servant of the People. Upon investigating the address to which Yaroslava Reklama LLC was registered, journalists found that tenants in the area had never heard of the company.
Another company, Prom Import LLC, was registered to a woman named Juliana Kuku. She complained on her social media accounts that business was “not going well”, but at roughly the same time, made a 500,000 hryvnia ($16,000 USD) donation to Servant of the People.
Chesno also found that of the 44 entities that donated to Servant of the People, four of them changed their addresses within two days of one another in December 2018, leading investigators to conclude that many of the donors were likely linked.
It is perhaps remarkable to consider that although only 94 persons and 44 legal entities donated to Servant of the People, that it grew to controlling 254 of 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada despite not existing less than six months before.
Celebrating 113 years of Mama Rosa McCauley Parks
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*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
*Some notes: The life of the courageous activist Mama Rosa McCauley Parks*
Mama Rosa's grandfather Sylvester Ed...
Monsters are people too
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus,
and ...
Remembering the Spanish Civil War
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This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
War, an epoch-defining event for the international working class, whose
close study...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
