Tag: ukraine

Jon Stewart and the Pentagon honor Ukrainian Nazi at Disney World

Defense Department-sponsored “Warrior Games” featured liberal comedian Jon Stewart awarding a member of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion at Disney World. The Pentagon refused to tell The Grayzone whether US taxpayers funded the foreign competitors’ travel.

This August, during the Department of Defense’s annual Warrior Games at Disney World in Orlando, Florida this August 19-28, liberal comedian Jon Stewart awarded a Ukrainian military veteran named Ihor Halushka the “Heart of the Team” award for “inspiring his team” with his “personal example.”

Halushka happens to have been a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has been armed by the US and integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. The award-winning ultra-nationalist wore a sleeve over his left arm as he accepted the prize, presumably to cover up his tattoo of the Nazi Sonnenrad, or Black Sun.

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German Foreign Minister Says Support For Ukraine Will Continue “No Matter What Voters Think”

Despite soaring energy prices that threaten the stability of the country, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said she would continue to support Ukraine “no matter what German voters think.”

Baerbock made the remarkable comments during an event in Prague yesterday organized by the NGO Forum 2000.

“If I give the promise to people in Ukraine – ‘We stand with you, as long as you need us’ – then I want to deliver. No matter what my German voters think, but I want to deliver to the people of Ukraine,” she said.

The German official said that such an approach would not change even if large numbers of people were out in the streets protesting against crippling energy bills.

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Ukrainian politician suspected of collaborating with Russia found murdered in home

A Ukrainian politician who was working with the Russian occupation government was found murdered in his home over the weekend.

Oleksiy Kovalev, a former member of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political party, was found dead in his home near Kherson Sunday with a gunshot wound to the head, the Kyiv Post reported Monday.

His wife was also reportedly stabbed in the neck, and initial reports indicated she succumbed to her wounds.

Kovalev was found beside a shotgun registered in his name.

Kovalev had served in the Russian occupation government in Kherson as the deputy head of the occupation government since July.

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Roger Waters Added to Ukrainian Hit List

Ihave written about the Ukrainian hit list known as Mirotvorets, or “Peacekeeper,” twice before. The first time was in an article about internet censorship, and the second time was when a 13-year-old Ukrainian girl, Faina Savenkova, was added to the list for publicly speaking out against Kyiv’s bloody war on Russian-speaking civilians in the eastern part of Ukraine, a region known as the Donbas.

Myrotvorets is a database which lists thousands of journalists, activists, and anyone else who is declared an “Enemy of Ukraine.” Their personal information is published, such as the addresses of their homes, phone numbers and bank account numbers; anything that can help them be easily located. When the people on this list are murdered, like Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli was, the word ЛИКВИДИРОВАН, “LIQUIDATED,” written in Ukrainian, is stamped across their picture in big red letters.

And, as of today, Darya Dugina, who was killed in a car bomb explosion in Moscow on Saturday, appears as “liquidated” on the website, adding more credibility to Russia’s assertion that she was assassinated by a Ukrainian nationalist who rented an apartment in the building where Darya lived in order to surveil her prior to her killing. It is believed that she was killed because her father, Alexander Dugin, was referred to as “Putin’s brain” and “Putin’s spiritual guide” in Western media, though these claims are really just more speculation.

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NATO Abandons Diplomacy, Says No Longer ‘At Peace’

At the end of its annual summit in Madrid in late June, NATO adopted a new strategic concept. The guidance document is the eighth of its kind since the founding of the alliance in 1949. It radically breaks with the three previous post-Cold War security briefs, however, which observed that “the Euro-Atlantic area is at peace” because “the threat of a conventional attack against NATO territory is low.” In the eyes of NATO, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed that calculus, claiming that the military organization can no longer discount the possibility of an assault on sovereign NATO states. Continuing the same cryptic language, the new strategic concept concludes that the Euro-Atlantic area now is “not at peace,” in spite of no NATO member being in a state of war with Russia.

Behind this word play, a more dangerous policy change has been codified in the document. Since the adoption of the Harmel Report in 1967, NATO has always officially included diplomacy in one form or another (with political dialogue and strategic partnership being interchangeable labels) as one of its “core” or “fundamental” tasks. The “NATO 2030” report from November 2020, for instance, unequivocally stated that “NATO should continue the dual-track approach of deterrence and dialogue with Russia.”

In the new strategic concept, the core tasks have been purged of the need for diplomacy, except for one or two throw-away lines about “meaningful and reciprocal political dialogue” about arms control issues buried in the middle of the text. Rather, in addition to its original function of deterrence and defense, NATO now fully embraces “crisis prevention and management,” which it has spearheaded since the 1990s with its legally dubious and morally questionable interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya; and “cooperative security,” referring to NATO’s enlargement in Eastern Europe and its Partnership for Peace cooperation with countries in ever further-away regions, including the Black Sea, the Middle East, North Africa, and even the Indo-Pacific, which the British have been pushing to include in a “global NATO.”

Russia was the first country to sign up for the Partnership for Peace program back in 1994. The new NATO doctrine, however, states that Russia can no longer be considered a partner “in light of its hostile policies and actions.” The strategic concept ignores the fact that NATO’s enlargement and new core tasks, which the alliance adopted after the Cold War in an effort to justify its continued existence, have likewise long been seen as hostile in Moscow, nor does it offer any reflection on how the new policies might have contributed to the current unpeaceful “strategic environment.” Instead, it hails the “historic success” of NATO’s expansion in terms of space and substance and insists that the alliance “does not seek confrontation and poses no threat to the Russian federation.”

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Intelligence Expert Believes CIA Behind Car Bomb Assassination of Daughter of Alexander Dugin

CIA expert Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), believes that the CIA was behind the car bomb that killed Darya Dugina, a journalist and daughter of well-known Russian intellectual Alexander Dugin.

Ms. Dugina, 29, was killed on Saturday night when a bomb blew up the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving in a suburb of Moscow. She was the intended target along with her father, whose promotion of a Eurasian Union has influenced the thinking of Vladimir Putin and members of his inner circle.

Russia’s Federal Security Services (FSB) blamed the Ukrainian intelligence services for the killing, specifying that the attack was carried out by a woman named Natalya Vovk (AKA Natalya Shaban), a member of the Azov Battalion along with her brother who arrived in Russia last month with her teenage daughter.[1]

Vovk allegedly rented an apartment from where she researched Ms. Dugina, attended “The Tradition” celebration where her father gave a speech and Ms. Dugina was killed, and after planting the bomb, fled to Estonia via Pskov.

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Russia releases video of suspected Moscow car bomber

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has made public a video of Ukrainian national Natalya Vovk, identified as the prime suspect in Saturday’s car bombing that killed journalist Darya Dugina in Moscow. The footage published Monday shows Vovk and her teenage daughter entering Russia, inside the building where Dugina lived, and leaving the country in haste. 

Vovk, 43, was named by the FSB on Monday as the prime suspect in the assassination of Dugina. The Ukrainian national arrived in Russia on July 23, using Donetsk People’s Republic license plates to avoid scrutiny. While in Moscow, she swapped the plates on her Mini Cooper to those of Kazakhstan, a friendly former Soviet republic. On Sunday, after the bombing, Vovk drove to Estonia with Ukrainian plates, the FSB said.

Photos of the different license plates were included as part of the video presentation.

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Ukrainian regional security chief commits suicide – media

The head of Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, in Kirovograd Region was found dead in his home on Saturday evening, with sources telling local media that it was likely a suicide.

The body of Aleksandr Nakonechny was discovered by his wife at their apartment in Krapivnitsky, the website Obozrevatel explained.

The SBU has confirmed the security chief’s death, saying that the incident is being investigated.

Obozrevatel added that Nakonechny died of a “penetrating gunshot wound to the body.” 

According to preliminary data, he “committed suicide” with the firearm that he had been previously awarded for excellent service, a source told the outlet.

Lieutenant-colonel Nakonechny had been in charge of the region’s department of the SBU since January 2021.

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Pentagon announces extra $775M in weapons to Ukraine

The United States will send another $775 million in missiles, drones, vehicles and mine clearing equipment to Ukraine to help in its war with Russia as the conflict enters a near standstill, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The new assistance package will include 16 howitzers and ammunition, AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARM), ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, 15 Scan Eagle reconnaissance drones, and armored vehicles, among other armaments, a senior Defense official told reporters. 

The package comes at a critical time as Ukraine and Russia battle for control of the eastern part of Ukraine.  

Nearly six months into the war, the two sides are locked in a near operational standstill, with neither Kyiv nor Moscow able to drum up enough ground troops and weapons to turn the course of the conflict, Western officials assess.  

The extra shot of lethal aid could help Ukrainian forces gain the upper hand as Russian troops struggle with losses inflicted by U.S.-made missile systems.  

“I would say that you are seeing a complete and total lack of progress by the Russians on the battlefield,” the senior Defense official said, adding that it’s important to both sustain Ukrainian battlefield successes and enable them to be make gains as the conflict shifts.   

“We want to make sure that Ukraine has a steady stream of ammunition to meet its needs, and that’s what we’re doing with this package.” 

The latest lethal aid follows the $1 billion in weapons and equipment given to the embattled country earlier this month, the largest such tranche pledged since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. 

The package also pushes the United States past the $10 billion mark for military assistance for Ukraine under the Biden administration, spread out over 19 packages since August 2021. 

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