What a surprise, our policy of sanctions against Russia does not hurt Putin’s political standing among Russian citizens.
If anything, it improves his political positions, because hardships can be blamed on an aggressively overbearing United States.
Seriously, this sh%$ kept the Castros in power for 60 years (and counting) in Russia, why should we expect anything different this time?
In battleground states in the middle of the country, some Democrats watched with frustration as their party grabbed headlines last week with a splashy new lawsuit alleging a vast conspiracy between President Donald Trump and Russia.
The Democratic National Committee’s drumbeat of messaging on Trump and his relationship with Russia is wearing thin with some Democrats in purple states — particularly in the Midwest, where people on the ground say voters are uninterested and even turned off by the issue. The suit exposes a gap, they say, between the party’s strategy nationally and what Midwest Democrats believe will win elections in their state.
“The DNC is doing a good job of winning New York and California,” said David Betras, the Democratic county party chair in Mahoning County, Ohio, home to Youngstown. “I’m not saying it’s not important — of course it’s important — but do they honestly think that people that were just laid off another shift at the car plant in my home county give a shit about Russia when they don’t have a frickin’ job?”
Trump and Russia, Betras said, is the “only piece they’ve been doing since 2016. [Trump] keeps talking about jobs and the economy, and we talk about Russia.”
For some people working to elect Democrats in Midwestern swing states, the suit — which threads evidence of a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign, WikiLeaks, Russia, and Trump family members — prompted something akin to an eyeroll.
Same for me.
They aren’t talking real issues, Nancy Pelosi has gone full in on this, saying that it’s OK for the Dems to back anti-abortion candidates, they aren’t talking jobs, or trade, or racism, the corruption of high finance, or apologizing for their own incompetence and telling us how they might fix this, they are talking Russia, .
There is an internal logic to all of this: Admitting your incompetence can get you fired, going after high finance would turn off big dollar donors, which allow for big dollar consultancy fees, etc.
It’s simply too lucrative to actually address the real problems of people.
It appears that the latest Russian spies prevented from entering the United States include a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet:
Amid roiling relations between the US and Russia, two members of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet — including one of its prima ballerinas — have been refused visas to perform in New York City, Page Six has exclusively learned.
Organizers of a Lincoln Center gala where Olga Smirnova and Jacopo Tissi were due to dance on Monday believe the Department of Homeland Security’s decision may be motivated by the myriad tensions between the superpowers — and say that Smirnova is so revered in Moscow that her treatment could create a Russian backlash.
On Wednesday the department’s site read, “On April 10, 2018, we denied your… petition for a nonimmigrant worker.”
“I don’t understand it,” Linda K. Morse, chair of Youth America Grand Prix — which is hosting the gala — told Page Six. “One interpretation is that it’s political. That’s my knee-jerk reaction, but I can’t figure out why — other than that they’re Russian. But it doesn’t make any sense.”
The immigration service’s objection appears to be that the organizers applied for a visa usually granted to groups of entertainers, but since Smirnova and Tissi were planning to perform at the “Stars of Today Meets the Stars of Tomorrow” gala as individuals, rather than alongside the rest of the Bolshoi company, they’re not eligible for it.
But we’re told that YAGP has got the same visa for dancers — including Smirnova — in the past. Morse told us she “definitely” thinks the move could create political resentment in Russia. “Olga is considered the number one ballerina in the world right now,” said Morse, “and to refuse her visa is striking. It’s alarming.”
It’s also very, very, very stupid.
This is so stupid that I am left without words.
In fact this level of stupidity exceeds my capacity for profanity, which is a complete mind f%$#.
Seriously, how does this guy dress himself?
Lordie, it ain’t bright.
Viktoria Srkipal, Sergei Skripal’s niece, has been denied a visa to visit her uncle and cousin in the UK.
This is unbelievably paranoid and stupid on the part of the UK government. It makes them look like they have something to hide:
The niece of poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal has been denied a visa to come to Britain, the UK Home Office (interior ministry) said on Friday.
Viktoria Skripal had planned to travel to Britain to take Sergei’s daughter Yulia back to Russia.
This is literally the worst possible way that British authorities could have handled this.
Right now the British state security apparatus is more Mr. Bean than it is James Bond.
British scientists at the Porton Down defence research laboratory have not established that the nerve agent used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal was made in Russia, it has emerged.
Gary Aitkenhead, the chief executive of the government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), said the poison had been identified as a military-grade novichok nerve agent, which could probably be deployed only by a nation state.
Aitkenhead said the government had reached its conclusion that Russia was responsible for the Salisbury attack by combining the laboratory’s scientific findings with information from other sources.
The UK government moved quickly to make it clear that the prime minister, Theresa May, had always been clear the assessment from Porton Down was “only one part of the intelligence picture”. The comments came hours before an extraordinary meeting in The Hague of the executive council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), called by Russia.
Speaking to Sky News, Aitkenhead said it was not possible for scientists alone to say precisely where the novichok had been created.
He said: “It’s a military-grade nerve agent, which requires extremely sophisticated methods in order to create – something that’s probably only within the capabilities of a state actor.”
He denied Russian claims that the substance could have come from Porton Down, which is eight miles from Salisbury, saying: “There’s no way that anything like that would ever have come from us or leave the four walls of our facilities.”
Aitkenhead said: “We were able to identify it as novichok, to identify it was a military-grade nerve agent. We have not verified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific information to the government, who have then used a number of other sources to piece together the conclusions that they have come to.”
So, a downgrade from a certainty to a likelihood.
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that this was done just before Russia hosts the World Cup, and the fact that neither of the two alleged targets are dead from something that is supposed to be many times more toxic than VX.
I do not know what is going on, but it appears that whatever it is is weird.
Note that weird does not rule out the Russians, but it means that the path to this attack had to take a very strange route.
Saying that Russia has undermined American democracy is like me – middle-aged, five foot nine, and unblessed with jumping ability – saying that the Brooklyn Nets Russian-born center Timofy Mozgov undermined my potential career in the National Basketball Association.
—Paul Street on Counterpunch.
If we are really worried about our democratic process being compromised, we need to look at the corporate media, the entrenched elites, the feckless punditry, and the political consultant class first.
They’ve done a way better job at compromising democracy than Vladimir Putin.
Hell, they may very well have done a better job at compromising democracy than Benito Mussolini.
If Corbyn is such a Russian stooge, how come the Russian oligarchs give all their money to the Conservatives?~Andrew Neil
— Joseph Dickerson (@joekaren46) March 19, 2018
It’s a valid point: Putin is clearly a dedicated capitalist, and Jeremy Corbyn is not.
H/t naked capitalism
Russian to Judgement
He’s discussing the recent poisonings of a Russian double agent in Russia.
He’s skeptical of the current narrative, as we all should be in this world of “81mm Aluminum Tubes.”
I’d take his arguments at the link with a grain of salt, but I love the pun.
The Russians believe that US hostilities with them never ended, as Putin’s recent speech eloquently illustrates:
Russia has developed a new array of nuclear weapons that are invincible, according to President Vladimir Putin.
Mr Putin made the claims as he laid out his key policies for a fourth presidential term, ahead of an election he is expected to win in 17 days’ time.
The weapons he boasted of included a cruise missile that he said could “reach anywhere in the world”.
He said of the West: “They need to take account of a new reality and understand … [this]… is not a bluff.”
Giving his annual state of the nation speech, Mr Putin used video presentations to showcase the development of two new nuclear delivery systems that he said could evade detection. One video graphic appeared to show missiles raining down on the US state of Florida.
This speech appears directed more toward the Russian electorate, the next Presidential election is about 2 weeks away, but it is a rather unwelcome development.
Most of the weapons shown are unlikely to reach full deployment. I find the nuclear powered torpedo and drones to be rather fanciful.
On the other hand, I do believe that the R-28 Sarmat (NATO designation SS-X-30 Satan 2) will enter service, as well as the various hypersonic glide reentry vehicles, which should add significant complications to US missile defense systems.
It should be noted that the timing of these announcements does seem to be correspond to development being started when George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002.
I’m actually surprised I haven’t been indicted. I’m Russian, I was in the U.S. in 2016 and I published columns critical of both Clinton and Trump w/o registering as a foreign agent.— Leonid Bershidsky (@Bershidsky) February 17, 2018
Yeah, pretty much.
When you libel James Clapper and John Brennan you libel America. The desperate attack on men who have given over 90 years of dedicated service to our country is clear evidence of a conscientiousness of guilt.— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) February 5, 2018
Dead from the neck up
Well, now I understand how Rob Reiner produced and directed the fiasco that was North.
Rob Reiner seems to think that criticizing a man who lied to Congress about warrantless wiretaps (Clapper), and another who has spent most of his career sucking up to the House of Saud with a detour excusing torture?
The only word that I can think that describes his neo-McCarthyite bullsh%$ is Deplorable.
The final word on this tweet is:
I hated this tweet. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this tweet. Hated it.
Steve Bannon has been subpoenaed by Robert Mueller:
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, was subpoenaed last week by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to testify before a grand jury as part of the investigation into possible links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
The move marked the first time Mr. Mueller is known to have used a grand jury subpoena to seek information from a member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle. The special counsel’s office has used subpoenas before to seek information on Mr. Trump’s associates and their possible ties to Russia or other foreign governments.
A second subpoena for Mr. Bannon to testify came from a House panel on Tuesday.
The Mueller subpoena could be a negotiating tactic. Mr. Mueller is likely to allow Mr. Bannon to forgo the grand jury appearance if he agrees to instead be questioned by investigators in the less formal setting of the special counsel’s offices about ties between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia and about the president’s conduct in office, according to the person, who would not be named discussing the case. But it was not clear why Mr. Mueller treated Mr. Bannon differently from the dozen administration officials who were interviewed in the final months of last year and were never served with a subpoena.
Here’s a thought: When one is compelled to testify by subpoena, you are indemnified from libel and defamation lawsuits.
If investigators were to want me to testify about someone as litigious as Donald Trump, I would insist on a subpoena to protect myself from vexatious litigation.
One caveat here though, I am an engineer, not a lawyer dammit,* so talk to your lawyer before ever talking with cops or prosecutors.
*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
I had an interesting talk with my Dad this weekend.
He recalled that in the mid 80s, my grandma went on cruise that included a stop in Leningrad.
Turkey has officially signed a deal with Russia to buy S-400 Triumf surface to air missiles:
Turkey has finalized a deal with Russia to purchase the S-400 Triumph (SA-21 Growler) missile defense system, in a move that is likely to irritate NATO allies. The deal was signed by Ankara on Friday, Dec. 29. ………
NATO in general, and the US military in particular are freaking out over this, because, as I have noted before, the Pentagon sees NATO as a sales vehicle for American weapons.
The Russian system is more capable, and cheaper, and given its origin, it is probably easier to maintain, but none of this matters to NATO leadership, because it doesn’t support the western arms manufacturers.
So basically, you have the military industrial complex on one side, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the other.
I’m just hoping that there is a way that they can both lose.
Recently, the Washington Post had a “major” expose revealing that one “Alice Donovan” was a Russian plant feeding to the online publication CounterPunch, and some other largely unnamed publications.
Strongly implied in the Post story is that CounterPunch was a willing tool of the Russian state security apparatus.
After being fielding inquiries from the Post, CounterPunch decided to look at her work for them.
What they determined is that the reality, for them at least, was pretty anodyne:
Their conclusion is pretty spot on:
In sum, we published five stories by Donovan. One was apolitical. Four could be considered critiques of US foreign policy during the Trump administration. None mentioned Hillary Clinton (or Vladimir Putin for that matter).
Based solely on what we’d just reviewed was there any reason at the time to suspect that Alice Donovan was anything other than what she appeared to be: an occasional contributor of topical stories? Not as far as we could tell. The stories weren’t pro-Russian polemics and they didn’t read like awkward Google-translations of the Russian language. The most controversial thing that could be said about them was that some stories attempted to present a particular Syrian view of the war, a perspective rarely heard in the US media.………
None of this, however, is an exculpation for our own blunders. Somewhere along the line we blew it. We let a plagiarist and a possible troll onto CounterPunch. Were there warning signs that we missed? Sure. Should we have been alert to the awkward phrases in some of the articles on Syria that didn’t read like the original Donovan piece? No doubt. But recall that we had published more than 5,000 articles between the first and second Donovan stories. We should have picked up on the lifted passages in the “Escalation in Syria” story because there was a link that took us directly to the piece that was plagiarized. We should have become suspicious about Donovan after the New York Times story ran in September. Those are on us.
I agree with that conclusion: they need to drop some coin on editors, because her plagiarism, and by that I mean straight cut and paste, should have been easy to spot after a few submissions.
They need some copy editors.
As to the Post, if this does seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill.
The final word goes to CounterPunch though, “If Donovan’s intent was to destroy ‘our democratic values’ by committing crimes against journalism, she’ll need to swing a lot harder to surpass the damage done by Judith Miller.”
As a result of some newly declassified documents, we now know that the promises made to Gorbachev about NATO expansion were far more explicit and absolute than has previously been represented.
I would note that this is not a surprise.
Promises by the US government, even when secured by a formal treaty, have generally only been more honored in the breach than in the observance. Just ask any student of American Indian history:
The U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time it broke up and many other experts have said that the West promised Gorbachev that – if the USSR allowed German re-unification – NATO wouldn’t move “one inch closer” to Russia.
While Western leaders have long denied the promise, newly-declassified documents now prove this.
The National Security Archive at George Washington University reported Tuesday:U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
***
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.
This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
The “Tutzing formula” immediately became the center of a flurry of important diplomatic discussions over the next 10 days in 1990, leading to the crucial February 10, 1990, meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when the West German leader achieved Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east.
***
The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)
Having met with Genscher on his way into discussions with the Soviets, Baker repeated exactly the Genscher formulation in his meeting with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on February 9, 1990, (see Document 4); and even more importantly, face to face with Gorbachev.
Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” (See Document 6).
(emphasis original)
If you wonder why Putin, and most of the Russian establishment believe that the cold war never really ended, and that the US will continue to prosecute a war against Russia, you don’t have to look any further than this.
The Russians made an offer to stop trying to effect US elections.
It was rejected out of hand, because the US was unwilling to promise not to meddle in Russian elections:
The Trump administration has rejected a sweeping Russian proposal seeking a mutual ban on foreign political interference, three senior US administration officials tell BuzzFeed News.
Russia first broached the subject in July, when one of Vladimir Putin’s top diplomats arrived in Washington with a sheet of proposals aimed at addressing a top concern of the US government: A resurgence of Russian meddling in the 2018 elections.
………
To test the possibility of a mutual agreement, Putin dispatched Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov to Washington for a July 17 meeting with Under Secretary Tom Shannon, the No. 3 official at the State Department. The official US account of the meeting offered only a bland summary of conversations on “areas of mutual concern.” But three US administration officials, including one inside the meeting, said Ryabkov handed over a document containing a bold proposal: A sweeping noninterference agreement between Moscow and Washington that would prohibit both governments from meddling in the other’s domestic politics.
After examining the proposal, which has not previously been reported, US officials told Moscow there would be no deal.
“We said ‘thank you very much but now is not the time for this,’” said a senior State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic discussions.
………
The US official described the Russian proposal in historic terms, likening it to the 1933 accord between President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov that ended 16 years of American nonrecognition of the Soviet Union in exchange for a pledge not to interfere in US politics.
Ryabkov proposed “that we come to terms and agree not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs,” said the senior US official. “Historically, it relates back to the agreements that were done at the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration when we were establishing a relationship with the Soviet Union for the very first time,” said the senior official.
………
When asked if the president weighed in on the proposal, a spokesman for the National Security Council said only that the White House and State Department “coordinated closely on the United States’ response.” The spokesman was quick to point out that deliberations over the noninterference agreement never advanced to the stage of formal bilateral negotiations.
………
A second senior State Department official said any potential gains would come at too high a cost. “We would have to give up democracy promotion in Russia, which we’re not willing to do,” said the official.
………
Advocates of a deal point to President Barack Obama’s 2015 accord with China aimed at reducing commercial cyber espionage as an instructive case study.
“While Obama was criticized at the time for what looked to some like capitulation, experts now agree that the deal had at least some positive benefit,” said Kimberly Marten, the director of Columbia University’s program on US-Russia relations. Martin cited a 2016 report by the network-security firm FireEye finding that Chinese hackers had carried out fewer attacks on US targets.
She also said Putin’s paranoia about US meddling in Russia’s upcoming election could produce serious negotiations with Moscow. Putin “will almost certainly win another six-year term, unless the United States disrupts things by, say, releasing a cache of compromising material that turns the Russian population against him,” she wrote in a recent article. “To avoid that possibility, Putin might just find an anti-doxing agreement to be useful.”
(emphasis mine)
Apart from the misuse of the term “Doxing,” these reports place allegations of meddling in elections in a different light: The US openly, and aggressively, meddling in foreign elections.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who follows history.
It looks like it will remain largely a technology demonstrator for the next 10 years as its intended engines are developed:The Kremlin’s new state armament plan, which will run from 2018-2027, will continue modernization of the Russian Aerospace Forces. However, while Russia will continue to buy modern combat aircraft such as the Sukhoi Su-35S Flanker-E air superiority fighter and the Su-34 Fullback bomber, Moscow is not likely to make large purchases of the fifth-generation Su-57 PAK-FA stealth fighter until after 2027.
“The Su-57 is not expected to enter into serial production until upgraded engines are ready, which is unlikely to happen until 2027,” Center for Naval Analyses senior research scientist Dmitry Gorenburg wrote in a new PONARS Policy Memo. “Over the next eight years, Russia will continue to purchase small numbers of these planes for testing.”
………
During the coming years, the Russian air force is likely to focus on addressing support aircraft such strategic airlifters and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance planes. Moreover, the Russians will also have to address persistent problem with their aerial refueling capabilities.
“Transport and refueling aircraft, long an area of weakness for the Russian air force, will be one area of focus,” Gorenburg wrote. “Serial production of the long-troubled Ilyushin Il-76-MD90A is expected to start in 2019, and the Russian military is expecting to receive 10-12 such aircraft per year thereafter. A light transport aircraft is under development, with prototypes expected to be completed in 2024.”
Obviously, this is not an official announcement by Russia, but it makes sense.
Refueling, transport, and AEW are significant weaknesses in the current Russian aviation forces, and their fighter force is largely recapitalized, so it’s a case of focusing resources on the most obvious weaknesses.
Their evidence is a leak from someone in the FBI saying that they surveilled transfers to the embassy with “2016 election” in the memo field.
It turns out that if you ignore the headline, and the over the top tweets, and make it down 7 paragraphs, (Well, not any more, they rewrote the article) you discover that the money was to cover the expenses of setting up polling places for the 2016 Russian parliamentary elections: (Wapo link because I don’t want to raise their Google rank, and because of the rewrite)
There is a persistent belief among many Americans that there exists a piece of evidence that will, once and for all, prove that President Trump was aware that the Russian government hoped that he would win the presidency and, further, that he or his campaign encouraged and aided that Russian effort. That belief is informed by two things: the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the election and the surfeit of revelations that, looked at through the proper lens, indicate an awful lot of smoke masking an as-yet-unseen fire.
The result is that a lot of people are eager for any new bread crumbs that seem as though they might lead to clear proof of Trump’s collusion. And that, in turn, means stories that might serve as those bread crumbs tend to see a lot of traffic for the news outlets that write them.
On Tuesday afternoon, a new story at BuzzFeed seemed like it might find a place in the picture of Russian meddling. “Secret Finding,” the headline proclaimed, “60 Russian Payments ‘To Finance Election Campaign Of 2016.’ ” The quoted section of the headline referred to the memo fields of a wire transfer sent by the Russian government to the embassy in Washington. It was Aug. 3, and the embassy was being sent $30,000 earmarked for the “election campaign of 2016.”
………
There was just one detail that didn’t warrant mentioning in the blurb or the alert . . . or even the story until the seventh paragraph: Russia, too, had an election last year, for its own legislative body. That election was held in mid-September, six weeks or so after the payment to the embassy in Washington.
BuzzFeed noted that it wasn’t only the U.S. Embassy that had received money. So, too, did embassies in countries as widespread as Afghanistan and Nigeria, with the last payments being sent two days after the election. After the Russian election, that is.
Someone got their journalism degree out of a Cracker Jack box.