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.
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.
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?
strategic-culture | In its triple strike of sanctions on Russia, the EU initially was not looking to collapse the Russian financial system. Far from it: Its first instinct
was to find the means to continue purchasing its energy needs (made all
there more vital by the state of the European gas reserves hovering
close to zero). Purchases of energy, special metals, rare earths (all
needed for high tech manufacture) and agricultural products were to be
exempted. In short, at first brush, the sinews of the global financial
system were intended to remain intact.
The main target rather, was to block the core to the Russian
financial system’s ability to raise capital – supplemented by specific
sanctions on Alrosa, a major player in the diamond market, and Sovcomflot, a tanker fleet operator.
Then, last Saturday morning (26 February) everything changed. It
became a blitzkrieg: “We’re waging an all-out economic and financial war
on Russia. We will cause the collapse of the Russian economy”, said the
French Finance Minister, Le Maire (words, he later said, he regretted).
That Saturday, the EU, the U.S. and some allies acted to freeze the
Russian Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves held overseas. And
certain Russian banks (in the end seven) were to be expelled from SWIFT
financial messaging service. The intent was openly admitted in an U.S.
unattributable briefing: It was to trigger a ‘bear raid’ (ie. an
orchestrated mass selling) of the Rouble on the following Monday that
would collapse the value of the currency.
The purpose to freezing the Central Bank’s reserves was two-fold:
First, to prevent the Bank from supporting the Rouble. And secondly, to
create a commercial bank liquidity scarcity inside Russia to feed into a
concerted campaign over that weekend to scare Russians into believing
that some domestic banks might fail – thus prompting a rush at the ATMs,
and start a bank-run, in other words.
More than two decades ago, in August 1998, Russia defaulted on its
debt and devalued the Rouble, sparking a political crisis that
culminated with Vladimir Putin replacing Boris Yeltsin. In 2014, there
was a similar U.S. attempt to crash the Rouble through sanctions and by
engineering (with Saudi Arabian help) a 41% drop in oil prices by
January 2015.
Plainly, last Saturday morning when Ursula von der Leyen announced
that ‘selected’ Russian banks would be expelled from SWIFT and the
international financial messaging system; and spelled out the near
unprecedented Russian Central Bank reserve freeze, we were witnessing
the repeat of 1998. The collapse of the economy (as Le Maire said), a
run on the domestic banks and the prospect of soaring inflation. This
combination was expected to conflate into a political crisis – albeit
one intended, this time, to see Putin replaced, vice Yeltsin – aka regime change in Russia, as a senior U.S. think-tanker proposed this week.
In the end, the Rouble fell, but it did not collapse. The Russian
currency rather, after an initial drop, recovered about half its early
fall. Russians did queue at their ATMs on Monday, but a full run on the
retail banks did not materialise. It was ‘managed’ by Moscow.
What occurred on that Saturday which prompted the EU switch from
moderate sanctions to become a full participant in a financial war à outrance on
Russia is not clear: It may have resulted from intense U.S. pressure,
or it came from within, as Germany seized an opportune alibi to put
itself back on the path of militarisation for the third time in the past
several decades: To re-configure Germany as a major military power, a
forceful participant in global politics.
And that – very simply – could not have been possible without tacit U.S. encouragement.
Ambassador Bhadrakumar notes
that the underlying shifts made manifest by von der Leyen on Saturday
“herald a profound shift in European politics. It is tempting, but
ultimately futile, to contextually place this shift as a reaction to the
Russian decision to launch military operations in Ukraine. The pretext
only provides the alibi, whilst the shift is anchored on power play and
has a dynamic of its own”. He continues,
“Without doubt, the three developments — Germany’s decision to
step up its militarisation [spending an additional euro100 billion]; the
EU decision to finance arms supplies to Ukraine, and Germany’s historic
decision to reverse its policy not to supply weapons to conflict zones —
mark a radical departure in European politics since World War II. The
thinking toward a military build-up, the need for Germany to be a
“forceful” participant in global politics and the jettisoning of its
guilt complex and get “combat ready” — all these by far predate the
current situation around Ukraine”.
The von der Leyen intervention may have been opportunism, driven by a
resurgence of SPD German ambition (and perhaps by her own animus
towards Russia, stemming from her family connection to the SS German capture of Kiev), yet its consequences are likely profound.
Just to be clear, on one Saturday, von der Leyen pulled the switch to
turn off principal parts to Global financial functioning: blocking
interbank messaging, confiscating foreign exchange reserves and the
cutting the sinews of trade. Ostensibly this ‘burning’ of global
structures is being done (like the burning of villages in Vietnam) to
‘save’ the liberal Order.
However, this must be taken in tandem with Germany’s and the EU
decision to supply weapons (to not just any old ‘conflict zone’) but
specifically to forces fighting Russian troops in Ukraine. The ‘Kick Ass’ parts to those Ukrainian forces ‘resisting’ Russia are neo-Nazi forces with a long history of committing atrocities against the Russian-speaking Ukrainian peoples. Germany will be joining with the U.S. in training these Nazi elements in Poland. The CIA has been doing such
since 2015. (So, as Russia tries to de-Nazify Ukraine, Germany and the
EU are encouraging European volunteers to join in a U.S.-led effort to
use Nazi elements to resist Russia, just as in the way Jihadists were trained to resist Russia in Syria).
What a paradox! Effectively von der Leyen is overseeing the building
of an EU ‘Berlin Wall’ – albeit with its purpose inverted now – to
separate the EU from Russia. And to complete the parallel, she even
announced that Russia Today and Sputnik broadcasts
would be banned across the EU. Europeans can be allowed only to hear
authorised EU messaging – (however, a week into the Russian invasion,
cracks are appearing in this tightly-controlled western narrative – “Putin is NOT crazy and the Russian invasion is NOT failing”, warns a leading U.S. military analyst in the Daily Mail. Simply
“[b]elieving Russia’s assault is going poorly may make us feel better
but is at odds with the facts”, Roggio writes. “We cannot help Ukraine
if we cannot be honest about its predicament”).
So Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is
walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian
market. It has sanctioned itself from ‘dependency’ on Russian natural
gas (without prospect of any immediate alternatives) and it has thrown
itself in with the Biden project. Next up, the EU pivot to sanctioning
China?
Kolomoyskyi is one of the oligarchs charged with holding down the Eastern provinces of Ukraine[3],
and recently mocked Putin, reputedly sensitive about his height, as a
“schizophrenic shortarse” (apologies for the English intonation:
American alternatives are invited); definitely a bridge-burning moment.
Putin, meanwhile, shut down as much of Kolomoyskyi ’s bank as he could,
in Crimea and Moscow. I’m not sure who started it, but we can certainly mark it down as a first-rate spat.
While that was brewing up, Kolomoyskyi might well have wanted
something that looked an American protector, and got it, in the form of
the VP’s son[, Hunter Biden]. Another guess: Kolomoyskyi is far too
ebulliently Jewish to look like a neo-Nazi. A US connection with
Kolomoyskyi might play well in circles keen to counter Russian
complaints that the interim Kiev regime is dominated by “Fascists”.
Kolomoyskyi and Bogolyubo]fostered strong reputations as
corporate raiders in the mid-2000s, becoming notorious for a series of
hostile takeovers. Hostile takeovers Ukrainian style, that is, which
often included the active involvement of Privat’s quasi-military teams.
These schemes included, among others, a literal raid on the Kremenchuk
steel plant in 2006, in which hundreds of hired rowdies armed with
baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws
forcibly took over the plant.
As of this writing, Kolomoyskyi was #1750 on the Forbes billionaires
list, with a real time net worth (assuming Forbes didn’t outsource the
data gathering to CDC) of $1.8 billion. Kolomoyskyi has also fallen out with the United States, amusingly including the Atlantic Council,
but I assume all these tiresome bureaucratic obstacles will at some
point be swept away, so that’s another rathole I’m not going down.
Suffice to say that Kolomoyskyi still has his billions, which I expect
go farther in Ukraine than they would here, and isn’t at all shy about
funding thugs. Kolomoyskyi, like any billionaire, holds a portfolio of
projects in the political field. I don’t know how many he has in toto,
but there are at least two. Let’s look at them.
thesaker | So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this
U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of
just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has
been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has
channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving
Dollar Diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be
led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to
avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on
the United States.[2]
But U.S. officials are forcing Russia, China and other nations not
locked into the U.S. orbit to see the writing on the wall and overcome
whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.
I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would
come about by other countries breaking away. But that is not what has
happened. U.S. diplomats themselves have chosen to end international
dollarization, while helping Russia build up its own means of
self-reliant agricultural and industrial production. This global
fracture process actually has been going on for some years, starting
with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic
satellites from trading with Russia. For Russia, these sanctions had the
same effect that protective tariffs would have had.
Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market neoliberal ideology
to take steps to protect its own agriculture and industry. The United
States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic
self-reliance on Russia. When the Baltic states obeyed American
sanctions and lost the Russian market for their cheese and other farm
products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while
becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.
Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it
does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its
central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and
finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations of its dollar and euro
reserves may finally lead Russia to end its adherence to neoliberal
monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating, in
favor of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
The same dynamic of undercutting ostensible U.S aims has occurred
with U.S. sanctions against the leading Russian billionaires. The
neoliberal shock therapy and privatizations of the 1990s left Russian
kleptocrats with only one way to cash out on the assets they had grabbed
from the public domain. That was to incorporate their takings and sell
their shares in London and New York. Domestic savings had been wiped
out, and U.S. advisors persuaded Russia’s central bank not to create its
own ruble money.
The result was that Russia’s national oil, gas and mineral patrimony
was not used to finance a rationalization of Russian industry and
housing. Instead of the revenue from privatization being invested to
create new Russian means of protection, it was burned up on nouveau-riche
acquisitions of luxury British real estate, yachts and other global
flight-capital assets. But the effect of sanctions making the dollar,
sterling and euro holdings of Russian billionaires hostage has been to
make the City of London too risky a venue in which to hold their assets –
and for the wealthy of any other nation potentially subject to U.S.
sanctions. By imposing sanctions on the richest Russians closest to
Putin, U.S. officials hoped to induce them to oppose his breakaway from
the West, and thus to serve effectively as NATO agents-of-influence. But
for Russian billionaires, their own country is starting to look safest.
For many decades now, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury have
fought against gold recovering its role in international reserves. But
how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and
Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based
order” instead of their own national self-interest? The recent U.S.
dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own
political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as
an asset free from political liability of being held hostage to the
increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.
U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by
telling its governments to have their companies dump their Russian
assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were
blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged. Blackstone, Goldman Sachs
and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and
other foreign companies were unloading.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
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...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
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 ...
