Tag: russia

Historic US-Russia prisoner swap exposes CIA support for Chechen jihad

Western media focused intently on a Russian “murderer” released in the exchange with Washington, but whitewashed the record of his target – a Chechen militant now confirmed as a CIA asset.

August 1 saw the largest prisoner exchange between Moscow and Washington since the end of the Cold War. Among those freed were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US marine Paul Whelan, who were each serving 16 year sentences for espionage.

In the other direction, Russian opposition activists jailed for criticism of the so-called “special military operation” have now resettled in Western countries. This includes politician Ilya Yashin, sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in December 2022. At a press conference in Bonn, Germany on August 2, he described the feeling of being beside “the wonderful Rhine river”, when just a week earlier he was imprisoned in Siberia, as “really surreal.” But Yashin claimed that his release was difficult to personally accept, “because a murderer was free.”

He referred here to Vadim Krasikov, a Russian convicted of killing the Georgian-born Chechen militant Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in August 2019, who was also released as part of the deal. He was reportedly of extremely high value to the Kremlin. In a February 2024 interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed trading Gershkovich for an unnamed Russian “patriot” imprisoned in a “US-allied country” for “liquidating a bandit.” 

Krasikov was that “patriot”, and Khangoshvili that “bandit.” In 2004, Khangoshvili led a lethal guerilla operation that killed four Russian soldiers. Krasikov was tasked by the Russian state with serving the Chechen justice, cutting him down in broad daylight in Berlin in 2019. 

While the Russian operative has been subject of intense mainstream interest since the swap, the media has largely whitewashed Khangoshvili’s background. To the extent he was mentioned at all, he was laconically characterized as a “Chechen militant,” or more favorably, as a “dissident.” For some anti-Russian ideologues, the Western media’s failure to completely lionize Khangoshvili demanded a rebuke. Giorgi Kandelaki, formerly a Georgian lawmaker with the United National Movement of the now-imprisoned former President and US posterboy Mikheil Saakashvili, was so repulsed he took to ‘X’ to correct the record.

Kandelaki seethed that Khangoshvili was, in fact, a patriotic Georgian citizen and state “security agent.” What’s more, he was “part of US-Georgian security cooperation,” and “highly respected by the CIA.” The furious former MP suggested Khangoshvili “was assassinated in part because he loyally served” Tbilisi at a time when it was an effective US colony under the puppet Saakashvili’s rule. 

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Zelensky’s funeral business: American Democratic Party donors and the Ukrainian president are profiting from the burial industry in Ukraine

“Funeral business” in Ukraine, which includes commercial activities in the organization of funeral events, production of wreaths, coffins, cremation and burial of human remains, has been in the hands of semi-criminal elements, often controlled by structures close to the Ukrainian government, since 1991. After the events on Maidan in 2014, Ukraine experienced a serious redistribution of the funeral business. Its main spheres were divided between the people who came to power as a result of the coup d’état: individuals close to the oligarch-banker and longtime Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Arsen Avakov, and the people of the country’s President in 2014 – 2019 Petro Poroshenko. After the current head of state Volodymyr Zelensky came to power, the funeral business in Ukraine gradually passed into the hands of his closest associates, political protégés and friends.

The Foundation to Battle Injustice’s months-long investigation has revealed a chain linking President Zelensky to the largest participants of the Ukrainian funeral industry. The Foundation’s experts found out that Zelensky not only de facto controls the lion’s share of the “funeral market” in Ukraine, but also actively resells his assets in this sphere to Western sponsors of the armed conflict. Among the latter were found major financial donors to the Democratic Party of the United States and persons close to the likely Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, current Vice-President Kamala Harris. Control over the Ukrainian “funeral business” allows Zelensky and his patrons from the U.S. Democratic Party to earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice found out, the bulk of the profits settle in the pockets of the owners of the funeral business thanks to the excessive deaths of Ukrainian servicemen on the fields of the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict.

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Some Swapped Prisoners Were Likely ‘On CIA Payroll’

The operation to swap 26 prisoners from seven countries took place in Ankara (Turkiye) on Thursday. As a result, eight Russian citizens, detained and imprisoned in several NATO countries, along with their minor children, were returned to their homeland.

All implications are that some of the people involved in the recent prisoner swap between Moscow and several Western countries were CIA espionage assets, Scott Ritter has told Sputnik.

The exchange that occurred on August 1 appears to have been “a deal hashed out between the Russian secret services and the American CIA,” noted the former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and ex-UN weapons inspector.

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Kremlin Reveals Details of Prisoner Swap With Western Countries

Negotiations for the Russian-US prisoner exchange were primarily conducted between Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and the CIA, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.

The FSB confirmed on Thursday that eight Russians detained and held in custody in a number of NATO countries had been returned home.

A plane carrying the freed prisoners arrived at Moscow’s Vnukovo-2 airport from Ankara late on Thursday, where they were greeted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia, in turn, has released 16 people, including seven Russians and five German citizens.

“Negotiations for this complex exchange were conducted through the FSB and CIA. This was the main channel through which the agreement was reached,” Peskov told journalists.

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The “October Revolution” was a coup, not a revolution

A key function of propaganda has always been to demoralize the opposition. From the perspective of the propagandists, it is important to always give the impression that their side is the side of the majority, and the most popular. We have witnessed this in action in recent years with the rise of censorship designed to “combat misinformation.” By suppressing dissident viewpoints, the regime lessens access to “unorthodox” ideas, but there is an important secondary function: suppressing dissenting speech also gives the impression that the dissidents are less numerous and more isolated than they really are. By ensuring that certain voices dominate the public square, propagandists help to create a sense of inevitability of the regime’s program. This facilitates greater public acceptance of the propagandists’ inescapable victory. After all, why bother resisting if the other side is so popular, and your side is but a small minority? 

Socialists and their allies have long been very adept at using these methods, and few had a greater mastery of it than V.I. Lenin. For most of the twentieth century, Lenin’s successors employed his methods, successfully portraying the spread of socialist regimes as the inevitable outcome of enormous communist mass movements. The modern post-Soviet Left still employs similar tactics, portraying itself as being on “the right side of history” and as the legitimate majority position. 

Nonetheless, the extent to which many of these twentieth-century “revolutions” were truly revolutions has always been in question. Many of these socialist regime changes could far more accurately be described as a coup d’état in which a small minority seized control of the state without majority support or any bottom-up revolutionary mass movements.

For example, the so-called “October Revolution” in Russia was not a revolution, but was a coup carried out by a small minority. In the socialist version of history, the October Revolution was a bottom up “people’s movement” devoted to helping Lenin and the Bolsheviks topple the provisional social-democratic government. This narrative has been key in establishing the legitimacy of the Lenin regime. In this view, Lenin was merely giving “the people” what they wanted. The portrayal of the October coup as a revolution of the masses also gives the impression that the turn to communism was the inevitable and desired result of unfolding and intractable historical trends. Naturally, this view of history encourages socialists while demoralizing their opponents. 

Yet, the historical facts tell us that socialism’s greatest political victory—the creation of the Soviet Union—was neither inevitable nor a response to the demands of a revolutionary majority. 

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The Biden Administration’s Prisoner Swap With Russia Was Ridiculously Lopsided

The Biden administration’s prisoner swap with Russia is being touted by the corporate press as “historic,” and in a way it is. Nothing like this, on this scale, has happened since the Cold War. But the swap is as lopsided as it is historic.

All Americans should welcome the release of our three unjustly imprisoned compatriots: Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. They were among the 16 western prisoners released by Moscow in exchange for eight Russian nationals released by the U.S. and allies.

But this wasn’t a Cold War-era prisoner swap of the kind immortalized in the Oscar-winning 2015 film “Bridge of Spies.” It was a dangerously uneven exchange that saw the release of a Russian assassin along with Russian spies and hackers, all of whom have committed serious crimes in western countries. Essentially, Moscow arrested a bunch of innocent western journalists and political dissidents, and then used them as bargaining chips to secure the release of its own killers, criminals, and spies.

Among the Russians released from western prisons, for example, was Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who in 2019 killed a Chechen separatist commander in broad daylight in a park in central Berlin. Krasikov, who shot his victim twice with a Glock 26 and then threw it in a river, was sentenced to life in prison in 2021. At the time, German officials said he was a member of the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic spy agency.

Also released was suspected F.S.B. agent Vadim Konoshchenok, arrested in 2022 on espionage charges in Estonia and extradited to the U.S. He was accused of conspiring to obtain military-grade technologies from U.S. companies and pass them to Moscow.

The prisoner swap recalls the 2014 Bowe Bergdahl affair under the Obama administration. Bergdahl was a U.S. Army soldier who, disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan, abandoned his post in 2009 and was subsequently captured by the Taliban and held as a hostage. In 2014, the Taliban agreed to free him in exchange for five top Taliban officials being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including army chief of staff and deputy minister of intelligence. One of them, Abdul Haq Wasiq, is currently the head of intelligence for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the internationally unrecognized name of the Taliban regime.

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Pentagon Again Applies Budget Lies To Deliver More Weapons To Ukraine

Whenever the Pentagon runs out of money designated by Congress as aid to Ukraine it starts to use creative accounting to free up some additional money from its general budget. The ‘accounting errors’ used therein are always in favor of more weapons to Ukraine.

Exclusive: Pentagon accounting error overvalued Ukraine weapons aid by $3 billion – May 19 2023, Reuters

The Pentagon overestimated the value of the ammunition, missiles and other equipment it sent to Ukraine by around $3 billion, a Senate aide and a defense official said on Thursday, an error that may lead the way for more weapons being sent to Kyiv for its defense against Russian forces.

Pentagon accounting error provides extra $6.2 billion for Ukraine military aid – June 20 2023, AP

The Pentagon said Tuesday that it overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past two years — about double early estimates — resulting in a surplus that will be used for future security packages.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said a detailed review of the accounting error found that the military services used replacement costs rather than the book value of equipment that was pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine. She said final calculations show there was an error of $3.6 billion in the current fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended last Sept. 30.

As a result, the department now has additional money in its coffers to use to support Ukraine as it pursues its counteroffensive against Russia. And it come as the fiscal year is wrapping up and congressional funding was beginning to dwindle.

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Neo-Nazi Group Claims Responsibility for Murder of Former Ukrainian Politician

Aneo-Nazi group known as NS/WP (National-Socialism/White Power), which is classified as a terrorist organization in Russia, has claimed responsibility for the recent assassination of Irina Farion, a former member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada. The claim was reported by Lenta.

Punish Those Who Betray the Country

According to the group, Farion was targeted because she allegedly “incited hatred based on linguistic differences within Ukrainian society.”

The group has also vowed to punish those who they believe have “betrayed the country since the Maidan protests” and has declared the beginning of a “white revolution.”

A video purportedly showing the shooting of Farion has been released, though its authenticity remains difficult to verify. Ukrainian media sources suggest that the assassination was carried out with professional precision, indicating that the shooter may have had prior experience with firearms.

The authorities are investigating the possibility that the shooter had accomplices, and it has been revealed that some surveillance cameras at the crime scene were malfunctioning at the time of the attack.

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Ukraine’s Acoustic Drone Detection Network Eyed By U.S. As Low-Cost Air Defense Option

The U.S. should integrate a low-cost acoustic network to detect aerial threats developed by Ukraine into its own air defense systems, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command said Wednesday morning. Consisting of thousands of acoustic sensors across Ukraine, this system helps detect and track incoming Russian kamikaze drones, alert traditional air defenses in advance, and also dispatch ad hoc drone hunting teams to shoot them down.

“Their use of acoustic sensors has proliferated across the country to the point now where they’re almost positively identifying drones in the distance because of this acoustic and the fireteams attached to that acoustic, low-cost capability that they’ve developed and proliferated,” Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Gainey said during a discussion at the Hudson Institute. As a result, Ukraine has a “low-cost defeat” system. The U.S., he added, should “find a way” of integrating “that type of low-cost capability into our system. We should be able to find ways to work together and augment some of our capability with some of that lower-cost capability.”

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Russian Media Reports Chinese Diplomats Say Ukraine Ready For Negotiations To End War

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba said at a meeting with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi in Guangzhou that Kiev is preparing for talks with Russia, according to Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning, reported Russian state news agency TASS.

“Ukraine is willing to engage in dialogue and talks with Russia and is making preparations for that,” Mao said at a briefing, citing Kuleba.

According to the Ukrainian foreign minister, “talks need to be rational, substantive and aimed at achieving a just and lasting peace.”

Kuleba stated that Ukraine highly appreciated China’s active and meaningful role in facilitating peace and maintaining international order. Kiev highly values Beijing’s opinion and has studied the initiative of China and Brazil aimed at finding a political solution to the conflict, the top Ukrainian diplomat pointed out. He noted that “China is a great country,” and added that Ukraine and China were important economic and strategic trade partners.

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