Posted to YouTube on February 19, 2023, this has seemed to me an extraordinary retrospective for this one-year anniversary–and may there not be another with the conflict ongoing–of Russia’s entirely surreal and unwarranted invasion of Ukraine.
I have been relaying the following URLs for some time and have no longer the patience for typing, retyping, copying or pasting the same damning set of excellent independent research–>
I think that’s enough to tie Russia’s abysmal purposes in Ukraine to its government’s criminal character at home. Russians have proven weak or bereft of power at home–more the latter, but they have nonetheless painted themselves before the world–and have made themselves ugly worldwide.
The scrapes here are dated but cogent. Ukraine has long maintained surrender hotlines for Russian troops intent on surviving Putin’s catastrophe. For defectors, Vladimir Osechkin has been a go-to via his gulagu site–I’d include the .net extension but haven’t been able to reach it myself (related in Wikipedia). What follows: scraped quotes (in no particular order) and additional reference. For philosophy: life is full of leavings, some sad and sweet, some sudden and wrenching.
Note: in the Blogosphere, “scraping” refers to a part of my method, which distills to “Collect, Select, and Opine”–but when one doesn’t “opine” very much, the work amounts to relay with a minimum of commentary, i.e., “scraping”.
So done.
With the Russia v. Ukraine War and Putin’s willful churning of young Russians into fertilizer for Ukrainian soil, Russian motivation for turning against Putin should be powerful in its latency. Indeed, Putin has made his world that of political, practical, and unconscionable criminals making themselves legend for their brutality, dishonesty, greed, ruthlessness, and, ultimately, essential worthlessness.
Caesar said Legion fighters are ideologically diverse but share in fierce anti-Putinism. “Our people hold different views, but we are united in our rejection of the Kremlin dictatorship and the desire to reformat Russia,” he said.
“Our country must become a democratic power, but for this, a reboot of the entire political and social system, lustration, decolonization, de-imperialization and a complete constitutional re-establishment of the state must be carried out.”
Senior Lieutenant at Russian FSB Counterintelligence defected to Europe. Emran #Navruzbekov was to be sent to Turkey & Syria for an operation against Russian citizens wanted by Putin. Instead, he used the opportunity to flee to Europe with a goldmine of intelligence & asked for political asylum.
Emran says the 2nd Service of the FSB essentially controls all criminal activities in Dagestan and Chechnya.
The FSB kidnaps, tortures, & extorts successful businessmen & others who can pay a ransom. The FSB has their own torture chambers across the region for this purpose.
“The last 10 years I do a lot of things to protect the human rights and other people. But in this moment, I understood that my mission to help other people created a very high risk to my family,” Osechkin told CNN from France, where he’s lived since 2015 after he fled Russia and claimed asylum. He now has full-time police protection.
He’s become the champion of a growing number of high-level Russian officials defecting to the West, emboldened and disgruntled by the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. He says ex-generals and intelligence agents are among their number.
Igor Volobuyev spent two decades working in the heart of the Russian business establishment, first for Gazprom and then for its affiliate Gazprombank, where until February this year he was vice-president.
Then Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine in late February, and Volobuyev decided he could no longer stand living in Russia. He packed a small rucksack of possessions and a stack of cash, and flew out of the country on 2 March, pretending he was going on holiday.
A few days later, he crossed from Poland into Ukraine, where he spent his childhood years. Now, he spends his days trying to convince officials to provide him with Ukrainian documents and allow him to sign up for military service.
The history of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras is rife with elaborate, almost implausible tales of defectors and double agents, sometimes even triple agents, spies who worked for one or more governments simultaneously for love or money or for the simple thrill of leading a hidden life. There are those with access to state secrets, some immeasurably valuable, who betrayed their country for ideological reasons or, as they often rationalize the treachery to themselves, perfectly pragmatic ones.
And now there is a historic first: the enemy spy who came back to the people who caught and released him.
Racecar driver Igor Sushko has a small history with compiling and relaying Russian FSB documents through his eponymous blog and related Substack. Sans backers myself, I’m feeling a little poor about the requisite spending on curiosity, but I believe he’s on track as regards Putin confidant and Wagner Group commander Yevgeny Prigozhin. This is from The New York Times two days ago (February 11, 2023).
Even the Kremlin appears to be trying to keep Mr. Prigozhin’s political rise in check. Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin political analyst and former Kremlin adviser who appears frequently on Russian state television, said that officials had been transmitting an unusual directive to Moscow’s talking heads in recent weeks: “Don’t excessively promote Prigozhin and Wagner.”
Integrity is derived from the Latin word “integer,” meaning whole. A person of integrity is complete, undivided. Sincerity, decency, trustworthy are synonyms of integrity. It’s on our shield because it is the quality that makes possible all the good that we do. Because everything we do requires that we be believed, whether that’s promising a source that we will protect her, telling a jury what we saw or heard, or telling a congressional oversight committee or the American people what we are doing with our power and our authorities. We must be believed.
Confidence in modern governance and its ability to sustain its political coherence, cohesion, and power, within and without, may be rooted in the credibility, integrity, and trustworthiness of the same.
For cause, I believe the Federal government of the United States of America better than supposed by a constituency often less educated, sophisticated, and specialized–or broadly elevated–for understanding its departments, duties, missions, and relationships. Few Americans have privilege and time, much less specific ambition and curiosity, for personally exploring the administrative machinery of the nation in the advancement and defense of the same.
NordStream II
What if Seymour Hersh’s report and analyses prove true?
The truth won’t change the barbaric, criminal, and untrustworthy character of Putin’s regime.
The truth won’t weaken the strength of America’s defenses nor the argument for inclusive, liberal, open democracies and related rule of law as the much better alternative to the ways of capricious tyrants and totalitarian systems.
The truth may force Germany and the German People to revisit the sordid and twisted political discourse of the 1930s and 1940s just to check the conclusions–and then measure the strides made by modern Germany against the feudal and primitive forces and ideas of a deeply defeated generation followed by an as astonishingly renewed and powerful German state.
The truth may be a fait accomplis, and here we are.
Whatever the truth may be, it’s too late with Russia in Ukraine–and positioned elsewhere for assault or heightened threat–for either the invention of or leveraging of a supposed casus belli. It has already in its surreal and psychopathic fashion picked its fight with NATO. However, Tsar #PutinFullTonto may be as ill in body as he appears to be sick in the head, and how far his madness takes his whole circle remains unknown.
The simpletons, including those in the Kremlin, will scream casus belli over the alleged September sapping of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline laid out by Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh in his Substack blog, but the big picture will not have changed: on February 24, Russia invaded a peaceful and sovereign Ukraine taking its business westward away from Moscow’s criminal corrupt and plundering character, and it did not take long for the invader to overtly frame NATO as its admitted true target. With the what-ifs of national security floating ahead of an ever-unfolding present, the Biden Administration appears to have at least developed a plan to secure the functional and political coherence, cohesion, and defense of NATO.
Biden’s Administration, however, will remain well in the right in relation to post-Soviet Russia as a criminal and implacable force that has repeatedly bloodied the world’s stage with its support for barbarism, corruption, terrorism, and transnational crime. Moscow appears to have taken on the role of Evil in a religious play it believes must seek an ambivalent balance between the Devil and God. Well . . . that’s bunk, but it’s also signal of Putin’s own medieval and malign narcissistic (messianic, delusional, grandiose) mentality.
Support may be found for each claim I have made regarding Putin’s Russia, but those who follow know, or all those simply curious, independent, and possessed of integrity in their own OSINT (or better) adventures, will find in every examination of Putin’s tenure in power a damned regime, and one still godless and smarmy even before God, an ignominious little show put on by ruthless small and violent men.
Regarding Putin’s inverted worldview, Germany, and “RusNazis”, having Nord Stream 2 offline and Germany all in with NATO fairly halts the further development of Putin’s backward-moving and upside-down ambitions in Ukraine and the rest of Europe. He has done his damage to British and European spirit, and when he’s gone–and he will be gone, one way or another–greater western and liberal repair will ensue.
Janus, the god of the gate looking in and looking out, might suit the passage made by former President Donald John Trump in relation to his appointing as his first campaign manager the world’s most notorious flack for dictators–and then or now–as his legal troubles mount beyond his managing–a lead lawyer for his team (for a short term) with a clientele in Venezuela.
Russia Paid Off European Politicians In Relation to Ukraine and Violence Elsewhere
Since Russia launched its brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s overseas aggression has reached a fever pitch. Yet Russia can still rely on the occasional friendly voice in Europe: Last November, for example, far-right Italian local legislator Stefano Valdegamberi penned an op-ed decrying the EU’s decision to designate Russia a terrorist state as “a serious mistake” that “foments conflict by denying historical truth.”
But what Valdegamberi didn’t mention was that he had long been collaborating with a secretive Russian lobbying group with a direct link to the Kremlin. Since at least 2014, that group had designed plans to channel cash to European politicians to help it legitimize Russia’s occupation of Crimea and promote pro-Moscow policies inside EU countries.
Greg Olear’s 2018 investigation of how the world works between Donald J. Trump, Russia’s political interests, and related mafia and ill-gotten wealth.
America Has Lost Its Objectivity Over “Spy Balloon”, Says Chinese Pundit–And He’s Right
Influential commentator Hu Xijin blamed American “politicization” and “hype” for preventing the incident from escalating, saying that competition to look tough on China meant that the United States “has already lost its objectivity.”
In the normal course attending diplomatic incidents, investigations ensue, and with “spy data” presumed already transmitted, there would seem not much point in destroying the technology involved in the overflight. Of course, there was Gary Powers too, so Biden did what ranting Republicans appeared to expect in the way of “tough” leadership. It was not a good decision nor display of national air and space defense–the object should have been addressed and turned or interdicted on or just past arrival in American air space.
China has already apologized for the incident–“On Friday, China’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that the balloon was theirs, but called it a “civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological purposes,” that had gone off course. And the ministry expressed rare “regret” for the incident.” Beijing should now follow up with details regarding the research mission and its technology, in general, while the U.S. Navy attempts retrieval of the drowned payload.
The Silencing by Removal of Ilhan Omar From the Foreign Affairs Committee
The angry header displayed this morning in The Jerusalem Post: “Decision to remove Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs Committee was overdue -editorial: What makes Omar particularly dangerous is that while she spews blatant antisemitism, she pretends not to be an antisemite.”
Omar herself had asked (same article), “‘Why is it OK for me to talk about the influence of the (National Rifle Association), or fossil fuel industries or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing policy?'”
Conservative and liberal Americans have now to ask this question: what else is off the table?
Who hasn’t an ox?
Our American system relies on compassion, education, intelligence, open discourse, earnest problem-solving abilities, and respect, not religious or tribal hate.
Apparently, some Jews–not this one although I have become with experience very much an American of Jewish descent–believe Ilhan Omar’s election and voice should be nullified where it most counts, and suspicion, for that is what is expressed by, “. . . pretends not to be an antisemite”, put in place of of argument, education, and reason. The only lesson imparted: don’t mess with the Jews, even if and when they are wrong.
Here, Anna From Ukraine in her daily broadcast lets the world know how war with Russia has been experienced and weathered in her nation.
My view: for those who believe in human dignity and freedom–especially freedom from autocrats, dictators, tyrants, perhaps as well deeply impersonal bureaucracies and systems, and one might also add for Moscow corrupt and criminal systems–courage, endurance, faith, and resilience matter. In the realpolitik between states, alliance, commitment, determination, and ferocity seen as well as off-stage matter too.
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