Tag: ukraine

SECRET PAKISTAN CABLE DOCUMENTS U.S. PRESSURE TO REMOVE IMRAN KHAN

THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a classified Pakistani government document obtained by The Intercept.

The meeting, between the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half, as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power. The political struggle escalated on August 5 when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster. Khan’s defenders dismiss the charges as baseless. The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.

One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.

The text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the ambassador and transmitted to Pakistan, has not previously been published. The cable, known internally as a “cypher,” reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.

The document, labeled “Secret,” includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

The document was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military who said that they had no ties to Imran Khan or Khan’s party. The Intercept is publishing the body of the cable below, correcting minor typos in the text because such details can be used to watermark documents and track their dissemination.

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20,000-50,000 Ukrainians Have Lost Limbs Since Russia Invaded

Between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians have lost one or more limbs since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The figure is based on estimates made by prosthetics firms, doctors, and charities. The number could be higher as it takes time to register amputees after they undergo surgery, and fighting has intensified since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in June.

The higher-end estimate of 50,000 came from the German prosthetics manufacturer Ottobock, which cited data from the government and medical partners. The estimate of 20,000 was based on data from the Kyiv-based charity Health of the Ukrainian People ICF. The charity estimates the number of serious injuries in the war is at 200,000 and says about 10% of serious injuries typically require amputations.

The number of Ukrainian amputations puts the war on the scale of World War I. According to the report, some 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had to have amputations during the four-year war. Less than 2,000 Americans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century have had amputations.

Ukraine has kept its casualty rates a secret throughout the war for propaganda purposes, but the staggering number of Ukrainians who lost limbs gives an idea of the human cost of the war.

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When Our Weapons Go Missing

Fears of loose weapons in Ukraine have become reality: Once American weapons arrive, Ukrainian criminals steal them. If U.S. arms transfer policies are not changed, Washington will inevitably accidentally arm groups that actively want to harm the United States.

In June, two separate Department of Defense inspector general reports revealed poor monitoring when U.S. weapons are transferred to Ukraine. Challenges in Ukraine’s war zone have made it nearly impossible to track the weapons.

The first report found that the personnel responsible for ensuring accountability were given no “training or guidance.” It concluded that the Pentagon does “not have accountability controls sufficient enough to provide reasonable assurance that its inventory of defense items transferred to [Ukraine] via the air hub in Jasionka was accurate or complete.”

The second report discovered that the Office of Defense Cooperation–Kyiv was unable to monitor how American military equipment was put to use. Indeed, monitors could not “visit areas where equipment provided to Ukraine was being used or stored.”

Such problems are not unique to Ukraine, but the Biden administration has been open to accepting the possibility of weapons dispersion when it comes to Ukraine’s war. Yet discounting these perils comes with four long-term security risks.

First, larger weapons systems have a high value on the black arms market. In Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban has been able to continue funding itself through its already existing smuggling networks by selling U.S. weapons left behind in the withdrawal. These weapons are now used in attacks in Pakistan, Kashmir, and the Gaza Strip.

Even before the war, Ukraine had one of the largest illegally trafficked arms markets in Europe, according to the 2021 Global Organized Crime Index. This has only intensified since the Russian invasion. For example, in August 2022 a criminal organization in Ukraine stole and intended to sell 60 rifles and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

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Joe Biden to ask Congress to fund Taiwan arms via Ukraine budget

The White House will ask Congress to fund arms for Taiwan as part of a supplemental budget request for Ukraine, in an effort to speed up the supply of weapons to the country amid the rising threat from China. The Office of Management and Budget will include funding for Taiwan in the supplemental request as part of an effort to accelerate the provision of weapons, according to two people familiar with the plan. If passed by Congress, Taiwan would get arms through a US taxpayer-funded system known as “foreign military financing” for the first time. The White House is expected to submit the request this month. The request comes on the heels of a White House announcement that the US would supply Taiwan with $345mn in weapons from stockpiles for the first time, under a system known as “presidential drawdown authority” that has been used to send weapons to Ukraine. The decision to include Taiwan funding in the supplemental budget and use PDA to supply weapons underscores a rising urgency to help Taipei. Critics of the current Taiwan strategy have urged Washington to supply weapons more quickly as China increases military activity around the country. “This would be a monumental step that signals how far the US government is now willing to go to accelerate deterrence across the Taiwan Strait,” said Eric Sayers, managing director at Beacon Global Strategies, a Washington consultancy. “For decades we have chosen to only sell Taiwan military equipment but now . . . we are seeing both the tools of drawdown authority and foreign military financing be deployed, just as they have been so successful in Ukraine,” Sayers added.

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Ukraine’s baby factories rake in record profits amid chaos of war

Ihor Pechonoha of the Swiss-based BioTexCom says the business model that has helped him build one of the most profitable surrogacy companies in the world is simple exploitation: “We are looking for women in the former Soviet republics because, logically, [the women] have to be from poorer places than our clients.”

It is no surprise then that BioTexCom has turned to Ukraine for an almost endless pool of young women willing to sell their wombs to ease their financial distress. Eight years of civil war followed by a proxy war between NATO nations and Russia has plunged Ukraine into economic disaster. As its citizens sank into poverty, the country swiftly emerged as the international epicenter for surrogacy, and now controls at least a quarter of the global market. With the rise of the burgeoning industry, a seedy medical underworld filled with patient abuse and corruption has taken root as well.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team have actively encouraged the Western plunder of their war-torn country, inking an investment partnership with the global asset management firm Blackrock, stripping workers of labor protections, and handing state owned companies over to private firms.

But less attention has been paid to Ukraine’s surrogacy industry, which brought over $1.5 billion into the country’s economy in 2018 alone. Since then, the global market for surrogate babies has more than doubled. The industry was valued at over $14 billion last year, and it’s projected to grow by around 25% every year going forward, according to an analysis by Global Market Insights.

As more countries slam the door on the surrogacy industry, Western officials appear to be turning a blind eye to the abuse-ridden business flourishing in a deregulated, politically unstable Ukraine.

Emma Lamberton is a Master of International Development candidate at the University of Pittsburgh who published a paper in Princeton’s Journal of Public and International Affairs on the risks posed to Ukrainian women by the country’s surrogacy industry. 

“The main concern of advocates on the ground in Ukraine is that legislators and even news organizations aren’t looking at this as a human rights violation,” Lamberton told The Grayzone.

“A government would never see human rights violations like child abuse as something to simply be regulated,” she explained. “They’d never say ‘you should only be able to beat your children on Wednesdays’ — that would be incredibly ridiculous. And so from the perspective of advocates on the ground in Ukraine, this is an abuse issue and therefore, it should not be regulated and instead it should be outlawed.”

Long before the escalation of hostilities in Ukraine in early 2022, the country was known as a fertile hunting ground for shady characters and agencies seeking to prey on desperate Ukrainian women.

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US Was Behind Both Crimean Bridge Attacks: Seymour Hersh

Legendary national security journalist Seymour Hersh has published a report this week alleging US intelligence helped the Ukrainians blow up the Kerch Bridge (or also, Crimean Bridge), which happened earlier this month and corresponded to President Putin refusing to renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative deal.

What’s more is that Hersh’s sources described that the US assisted in the initial, larger Kerch Bridge explosion which had initially temporarily disabled it in October 2022. “The Biden administration’s role in both attacks was vital,” he wrote in a Thursday Substack investigative article.  

“Of course it was our technology,” an unnamed US official told Hersh, referring to the sea drone which detonated under the vital bridge on July 17. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged–like a torpedo.”

The source cited is said to be a US intelligence official who is speaking out anonymously “from the point of view of those in the American intelligence community who don’t feel they have the ear of President Joe Biden but should.”

“Our national strategy is that Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision,” the US official complained.

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Some US arms shipments to Ukraine ending up in hands of criminal gangs, arms traffickers, watchdog says

U.S. Defense Department arms shipments to Ukraine have come with very little oversight, and at times end up in the hands of criminal gangs and weapons traffickers.

Criminal gangs within Ukraine have gotten their hands on some U.S. shipments of grenade launchers, machine guns, rifles, bulletproof vests, and thousands of rounds of ammunition since the U.S. began supplying the Ukrainian military with arms, according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report obtained by the Heritage Foundation.

The 19-page report, which was issued last October and only became public after a Heritage Foundation Freedom of Information Act request, details specific instances in which U.S. shipments were intercepted by criminal actors in Ukraine. In one example, Ukraine’s security services, Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrainy (SBU), disrupted a plot by gangs to pose “as members of a humanitarian aid organization who distributed bulletproof vests.”

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New York Times admits, then covers up, massive Ukraine casualties

Since January of this year, the New York Times has published dozens of articles claiming that Ukraine’s “spring offensive” would be a decisive turning point in the war with Russia. But this offensive, now six weeks old, has turned into a debacle. While Ukrainian forces have nowhere breached Russia’s main defensive line, tens of thousands of troops have died.

This is the context in which the New York Times published and quickly edited an article presenting a realistic, and therefore nightmarish, depiction of the Ukrainian troops as little more than cannon fodder, “forced into action” to face almost certain death.

Buried on page A9 and not referenced on the front page of the print edition, the extensive and detailed report on Ukraine’s offensive was titled, “Depleted Troops, Unreliable Munitions: Kyiv’s Obstacles in the East.” It included a sub-headline describing the offensive as a “grisly stalemate.”

With equally little notice, that article had been published online the day before under the title, “Weary Soldiers, Unreliable Munitions: Ukraine’s Many Challenges.”

The article presented Ukraine’s offensive as a bloody debacle, in which Ukrainian forces have suffered massive casualties, who are then replaced with older recruits who are “forced” to fight.

The article documented three new, previously undisclosed revelations:

  • There exists a unit in Ukraine with a “200 percent” casualty rate, meaning that all of its members were killed or injured, then replaced with recruits, all of whom were killed or injured.
  • The munitions provided to Ukraine are often so old that they regularly misfire or accidentally detonate, injuring soldiers.
  • After young troops are killed in combat, they are typically replaced with much older people, a sign that Ukraine is running out of fighting-age troops.

Typically, a journalist who uncovered these facts based on firsthand reporting would proclaim each of them a “scoop” and take to Twitter to publicize them.

But the method of the New York Times is that of the buried lede, to take these potentially explosive revelations and stick them in an article on the inside pages, which is quickly removed from the newspaper’s online front page.

In this case, however, merely burying these revelations was insufficient. It was necessary to erase them.

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DoD IG: American Weapons in Ukraine Funneled to Arms Traffickers, Criminals

The Pentagon inspector general found the arms Washington sent to Kiev did not undergo the required inspections. A report from the inspector general found weapons the US sent to Ukraine in the hands of criminals and on the black market. 

The Arms Control Act requires the White House to establish an inspection system for weapons the US sells or gifts to third countries. The law mandates the monitoring continues to the end-use of the weapon. In Ukraine, the embassy in Kiev has been assigned responsibility for monitoring the weapons transfers. 

The Department of Defense inspector general report on American weapons transfers to Ukraine from February to September of last year found that legally required monitoring was not taking place. “The DoD is unable to conduct [End Use Monitoring] in Ukraine because completing [End Use Monitoring] in accordance with DoD policy requires in-person access to the defense equipment provided,” it said. “Intelligence methods provide some accountability for observable platforms, such as missiles and helicopters, but smaller items, such as night vision devices, have limited accountability.”

“The DoD OIG found deficiencies in the DoD’s transfer of military equipment to the Government of Ukraine requiring [End Use Monitoring], including Javelin missiles, Javelin Command Launch Units, and night vision devices; and in Ukraine’s security and accountability of US.-provided military equipment requiring [End Use Monitoring],” the report added. 

In a section of the report that is heavily redacted, the inspector general listed some cases of American weapons not making it to their intended recipient. The cases that remained unredacted in the report include: a Moscow-influenced criminal organization that procured grenade launchers and machine guns, a pro-Kev militia that tried to sell dozens of rifles on the black market, and a group of arms traffickers who were selling weapons and ammunition stolen from the front lines.

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Zelensky Blames Failing Counteroffensive On Lack Of Munitions From West, Delayed Training

Despite the row at this month’s NATO summit in Vilnius caused by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s angry tweet, for which he was accused by Western powers (especially the US and UK) of showing ‘ingratitude’, the Ukrainian leader is once again lashing out at his backers. This time, he’s blaming the failing counteroffensive on lack of munitions and delayed training from the West.

“We did have plans to start it in spring. But we didn’t, because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough brigades properly trained in these weapons,” Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria via a translator in an interview which aired Sunday.

He also complained about training programs set up for Ukrainians to operate advanced systems, which are being sponsored and hosted in European countries under NATO guidance. Kiev has long pressed for a more expedited timeline on receiving US F-16 jets as well, but training has been “delayed” for this as well, set to begin next month.

“Still, more” – he continued of the problem – “that the training missions were held outside Ukraine. But, still, we started. And this is important.” Zelensky said these factors have been key to the stalled counteroffensive, especially that Ukraine’s forces are blowing through munitions at a very high pace to keep up with superior Russian fire.

“And because we started it a bit later on, it can be said, and it will be shared truth understood by all the experts that it provided Russia with time to mine all our lands and build several lines of defense. And, definitely, they had even more time than they needed,” he explained.

“Because of that, they built more of those lines. And, really, they had a lot of mines in our fields. Because of that, a slower pace of our counteroffensive actions,” Zelensky added. “We didn’t want to lose our people, our personnel. And our servicemen didn’t want to lose equipment because of that.”

Very early in the counteroffensive in June, he had acknowledged a “slower than expected” advance. And in recent days and weeks, US mainstream media has increasingly featured pessimistic headlines for the first time in the conflict, suggesting the counter offensive is doomed, especially the longer it drags on without delivering a significant punch to Russian front lines.

Zelensky continued in his remarks to CNN, “Yes, I do understand that it’s always better to see victory come sooner. This is what we also want. But the question is the price … of this victory. So, let us not throw people under tanks literally. Let us plan our counteroffensive as our analysts, our intelligence suggests. And some of our residential areas have been liberated already. So, I do believe in our victory.”

The consistent messaging from Kiev forces has been that Western aid is always insufficient – no matter the tens of billions poured in…

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