When Oligarchs Fight Ukrainians Get Destroyed (And Naftali Bennett Has To Intervene)

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 Bronfman worked 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 on to 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

 

The Untouchable Bill Browder REDUX (Originally Posted 7/23/18)

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.

 

Zelensky, Hunter Biden — and Their Sugar Daddy, Kolomoisky

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.

Illusion Warfare Report

 -Join me as i LARP my way onto the Hollywood movie set we know as Ukraine.

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.

Why Israel?

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.

Ukraine And The American Negroe

"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."

$14 Billion For Ukraine - While Americans Can't Afford Gas, Food, Or Medicine?

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.

John Robb Has Interesting Opinions About Karen vs. Russia

 

We've entered unprecedented times.

We're witnessing a global networked open source war against a nuclear state.

The network has no mortality, no morality, no proportionality, no sense of justice and is 100% maximalist.

It can not provide an off ramp for this conflict.

— Jack Murphy⚡️ (@jackmurphylive) March 7, 2022

All This Ukrainian Suffering Could Be Stopped With One Phone Call From The Comedian In Kiev

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.

1. Ukraine developing nuclear weapons. Zelensky himself hinted at it in the Munich Security Conference.
2. 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”. ”
3. 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.”

"Scientists Being Scientists" There Are Definitely Biological Weapons In The Ukraine Warzone

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.

Russia Bout To Find Biological Weapons In Those Biological Weapons Labs

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.”

 

Russia Thwarted A Large-Scale Ukrainian Military Operation Against Lugansk And Donetsk

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.

T-Shirt Churchill Damn Near As Gangsta As "The Big Guy" Brandon

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.

Former General David Petraeus Central European Media Mogul?

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.

 

Zelenskyy: The Servant Of The People

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.

Der Sonnenrand IS The Spirit Of The Ukrainian People...,

newsweek  |  An official of the U.S.-led NATO alliance has told Newsweek that the coalition did not notice what appeared to be a symbol associated with Nazism on the uniform of a Ukrainian soldier featured in a since-deleted photo on NATO's official Twitter account.

The image, posted Tuesday to commemorate International Women's Day, contained four images related to the current crisis in Ukraine, where a Russian military incursion was set to enter its third week.

"All women and girls must live free and equal. This international women's day we think of the remarkable women of #Ukraine," NATO tweeted alongside a Ukrainian flag emoji. "Their strength, bravery and resilience are symbolic of the spirit of their nation #IWD2022."

The first of the four images included what appeared to be a Ukrainian servicemember bearing a "Black Sun" on the chest area of her military fatigues. The symbol, also known in German as "Schwarze Sonne" or "Sonnenrad," is rooted in Nazi occultism and has been brandished by far-right elements across the globe, including in Ukraine, where it is featured on the official logo of the National Guard's Azov Regiment.

The image first appeared to be shared on social media on February 14 by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and was later syndicated by a number of outlets and agencies, and was featured prominently on the front page of The Guardian the following day. The symbol itself, however, is not readily visible, as it is nearly the same color as the green camouflage of the soldier's uniform.

Shortly after NATO shared the image, the symbol was noted by a number of social media users and then taken down swiftly.

 

A Russian Central Bank Digital Currency?

the-blindspot |  In the last few years, we can observe two very important technologies emerging in Russia:

• Every single shop till in Russia is now connected in real-time to the tax system. It is illegal for a shop to sell goods or services via a till which is not connected. Every receipt that you get has a cryptographic code evidencing that the transaction has been recorded for tax purposes in the central system. The man who delivered this project for the Federal Tax Service is now the deputy prime minister of Russia, Mikhail Mishustin.
• In the years since 2014, Russia has built its own internal clearing system called “Mir”. This has enabled Russian banks and commercial infrastructure to operate independently of the visa, mastercard and SWIFT as an internal matter.

Russia has already demonstrated the ability to roll technology out across the whole country in order to increase the control of the state. Russian citizens have not yet appreciated what this means – but the next step is now required and it is much bigger than before.

So why invade Ukraine?

Putin’s focus here is the manipulation of his own population.

He is going introduce a digital rouble and likely abolish cash. The technology to do this is already available. With this in place, he will be able to control his population through their wallets – monitoring everything that his people spend and deciding who should have access to money and who should not.

A software reset based around a new digital currency requires mass adoption and acceptance – and a population that is ready to accept a much higher level of centralised control.

In order to do this, he needs to isolate his country and ensure that his population is submissive and accepting of a significant change in how things work. This necessarily includes undermining confidence in the rouble as a cash-based currency and cutting Russia’s payment systems off from international markets. Then he can bring in a state-controlled digital alternative – something that the Chinese are already well on the path to implement for themselves.

This is the dictator’s dream – controlling the people via their wallets, absolutely and totally. As we have been saying ourselves: “banks not tanks”. How much he must be laughing when he hears this phrase. And we are willingly helping Putin here, we are his accomplices in this grand plan – not that there is much we can do about it.

And once the new system is in place and working, borders can come down, concessions of a kind can be made and maybe interactions with liberal western democracies resume – but now with control systems in place that can conserve his regime for the long term.

Why invade Ukraine so badly?

Putin may have overestimated the power of his forces, and underestimated the strength of resistance and vigor of international responses. But Putin probably does not need to win any war in Ukraine. He seems to be preserving his defence capabilities rather than needlessly wasting them. He is doing the invasion of Ukraine on the cheap because the invasion does not really have to succeed.

He has now achieved what may have been his objective all along – which is the financial and media isolation of Russia.

What he now needs to do is create a frozen conflict in Ukraine that he can maintain at minimum cost for as long as it takes for him to reset the control systems that he uses with his domestic population.  So that’s also why he is not sending in the expensive fighter jets, bombing Kiev or firing lots of hard-to-replace missiles. Of course, a land bridge to support his occupation of Crimea would be a useful by-product of the campaign – but this is not the main objective.

Putin has no actual interest in trying to wipe Ukraine off the map – only creating the conflict narrative needed to isolate his population for a period to get them to accept a new way of living day-to-day. And we should also note that he continues to sell his Ukrainian adventure to his local people as a “strategic operation” not as an invasion – which is because it might not be about an invasion (unless it has to be) and he has no intention of seeing it through.

If Putin is not mad?

So let’s assume that Putin is not actually mad. Plan A might not have worked – but he surely has plan B, whether or not he arrives there by design or accident.

He is a very clever and capable man – with enormous resources and he is focussed on maintaining control and absolute power over his Russian subjects. After more than 20 years in charge, he probably does not have any other choice.

Putin does not care about us. Putin does not care about the people of Ukraine. Perhaps we are all his useful fools. Whatever we might think, the agenda with Putin is always domestic. Perhaps the real targets and ultimate victims of the Ukrainian invasion are going to be Russian?