Putin

[bensherman]

Whereas the information you have is ,of course, impeccable. WAKE UP.

As for Hunter Biden, this has nothing to do with that. But it does remind us that Trump threatened Ukraine that he would stop military aid, unless they cooperated in creating dirt on Biden. In other words he used federal funds in pursuit of his political campaign- one of many examples.

To which Ukraine, admirably told him to stick it.

Would you like an example of how poor "alternative news sources" actually are.
For 2 hours the death of football agent Mino Raola had been reported on social media. Sky did not broadcast that , as THEY COULD NOT CONFIRM IT. Now the man himself has tweeted how amused he is at the reports.

That's what the "MSM" do. Check what they have been told. What a strange idea!

[local]

The Hunter Biden story is apposite, how he gets away with it I don't know.

Trump trying to find out what was/is going on is entirely understandable but his methods were sometimes very very wrong.

Corruption was and probably still is rife in Ukraine.

Biden for some reason is escaping the scrutiny that Trump is getting and often deserves.

Millions from Russia* and the old trick of distancing his firm Rosemont Seneca Advisors from Rosemont Seneca Thornton is to most objective observers a reason to look, especially as his History degree seems somewhat unlikely to be useful.


*Elena Baturina, a Russian businesswoman and the wife of late Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, sent $3.5 million in 2014 to a firm called Rosemont Seneca Thornton.

* C&P


Imagine if Trump had been the recipient.....

[bensherman]

The Hunter Biden story is apposite, how he gets away with it I don't know.

Trump trying to find out what was/is going on is entirely understandable but his methods were sometimes very very wrong.

Corruption was and probably still is rife in Ukraine.

Biden for some reason is escaping the scrutiny that Trump is getting and often deserves.

Millions from Russia* and the old trick of distancing his firm Rosemont Seneca Advisors from Rosemont Seneca Thornton is to most objective observers a reason to look, especially as his History degree seems somewhat unlikely to be useful.


*Elena Baturina, a Russian businesswoman and the wife of late Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, sent $3.5 million in 2014 to a firm called Rosemont Seneca Thornton.

* C&P


Imagine if Trump had been the recipient.....

Don't worry
There's plenty of effort going on.
The problem is that it's about the son, not the father.
But if we are comparing families , Kushner and Trump jnr make Biden look an amateur.

[silver fox]

Bashar Al Assad did indeed ask Russia to help with terrorist unrest in Syria - but only after asking the USA to intervene three times. There is a video published of the Syrian Ambassador at a meeting in Washington a year before Russia agreed to help.

Until such times as it is determined otherwise, Putin is justified in intervening in the Ukraine. Putin has not taken over the media that is obvious from the publications we receive in the UK. But Western media has been taken over by America and it is in Americas interests to condemn Russia at every opportunity.

As powers of the World go - Russia has always been a rival of the USA. Recently, Russia has overtaken the USA on all military weapons and has superior air defense and attack weapons. Russia is threatening the American currency. Putin is far more popular with leaders of strategically placed countries. Putin is a strong and decisive leader, popular among his people. Compared with the USA whose economy has been struggling over the past twenty years, for which there has been many military cutbacks, several ill advised wars in country's whose only sin is that they have oil. The USA has a very weak, but war mongering for profit leadership that has led to thousands of civilian deaths and lasting destruction. Several of the leaders in the USA Government have ties to Ukrainian businesses - hence the reason for sequesting Biden's computer. The Ukraine remember, is one of the most corrupt countries in the World.

"Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings owned by Ukrainian oligarch and former politician Mykola Zlochevsky, who was facing a money laundering investigation just after the Ukrainian revolution, in April 2014"

The information you are being given is one sided. It all comes from the USA - hence the reason to seek out independent news sources, particularly from investigative journalists.

You really are a nasty piece of work, there is NO justification whatsoever for Putin's thugs murdering thousands of civilians, destroying the lives of millions of others.

Putin claims to liberate and deNazify Ukraine, the trouble is that the only Nazis around are Putin and the rest of the criminals in the Kremlin. As far as Putin's "security" issues are concerned, just who has or is likely to threaten Russia? Ukraine did definitely NOT attack nor invade Russia.

The rest of your post is utter BS, the claims of corruption etc, if you wish to seek out corruption suggest you look much closer to home, the issue with Biden has been investigated by every means possible, to date nothing illegal has been uncovered, how the hell can you claim that our news and information comes from the USA? or do you prefer the twisted propaganda coming from Russia.

No-one claims that the US is perfect, far from it, but your irrational anti US campaign is obsessional, worrying really, but does give an insight into just how easily the gullible are fooled by controlled media.

[silver fox]

The Hunter Biden story is apposite, how he gets away with it I don't know.

Trump trying to find out what was/is going on is entirely understandable but his methods were sometimes very very wrong.

Corruption was and probably still is rife in Ukraine.

Biden for some reason is escaping the scrutiny that Trump is getting and often deserves.

Millions from Russia* and the old trick of distancing his firm Rosemont Seneca Advisors from Rosemont Seneca Thornton is to most objective observers a reason to look, especially as his History degree seems somewhat unlikely to be useful.


*Elena Baturina, a Russian businesswoman and the wife of late Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, sent $3.5 million in 2014 to a firm called Rosemont Seneca Thornton.

* C&P


Imagine if Trump had been the recipient.....

Hunter Biden has been investigated and cleared of illegal activity, probably not ethical but not illegal.

Trump was not trying to find out the truth, he was just seeking mud to sling, didn't matter if it was real or totally false, trying to pressure Ukraine into producing a story.

Keep seeing this claim of corruption in Ukraine, always from the same few, nothing to back it up of course, would suggest that looking much closer to home from our own government and acolytes would produce more than enough evidence of corruption, particularly with the privatisation and awarding government contracts is concerned.

Failed private contractors is now so common as to be almost expected and you don't need me to produce a list of those who have profited while failing to deliver.

[sandGroundZero]

A fascinating book published by Harper-Collins relates the last years of the Soviet Union with accounts from Soviet era officials including the KGB. Author, Catherine Belton, reveals that from the time of leader Yuri Andropov, himself coming to the premiership from the KGB, insiders realized that the USSR was falling behind the West; its economy and its technological innovation being no match. The book details the extent of corruption and the extensive efforts to undermine the US and other Western economies by attempting to subvert institutions. The process required constructing networks of companies and recruiting agents to assist in the smuggling inward of western technology and establishing a system of opaque export of (mostly) mineral, including energy resources through established companies some of which are 'household' names in the manufacturing and finance sectors. Belton casts doubt on accounts of Vladimir Putin's years as a KGB officer in Dresden, DDR. In contrast to the line that Putin was (among spies) a low-level nobody in an inconsequential backwater. She suggest that in fact, the Dresden KGB was active in the covert trading activities mentioned above. Working with the DDR's Stasi, Putin was in a position to understand both the USSR's illicit trading and its techniques for recruiting and for acquiring influence among western business and business people.

Reading this book, we learn that those tactics attributed to contemporary Putin's Russian government — the subversion and political interference, among others — were and are refinements on techniques employed in the Cold War.

It is worth noting that the author and publisher were subjected to harassment through the law courts, as individuals cited in the book are or have until recently been resident here in the UK, else inside and outside of Russia and using English law to harry and intimidate anyone who dares to dig into their secrets.

I'm still only about 20% of the way through this book!

[local]

Hunter Biden has been investigated and cleared of illegal activity, probably not ethical but not illegal.

Trump was not trying to find out the truth, he was just seeking mud to sling, didn't matter if it was real or totally false, trying to pressure Ukraine into producing a story.

Keep seeing this claim of corruption in Ukraine, always from the same few, nothing to back it up of course, would suggest that looking much closer to home from our own government and acolytes would produce more than enough evidence of corruption, particularly with the privatisation and awarding government contracts is concerned.

Failed private contractors is now so common as to be almost expected and you don't need me to produce a list of those who have profited while failing to deliver.

No Hunter is very much still on the hook, his father I leave out as I have said repeatedly he is off-limits due to his frailties.

[said]

No Hunter is very much still on the hook, his father I leave out as I have said repeatedly he is off-limits due to his frailties.

China and Russia are working together. Now they have upset the South Koreans - but since the SK are supported by Biden, the truth gets converted to suit the purpose.

[silver fox]

China and Russia are working together. Now they have upset the South Koreans - but since the SK are supported by Biden, the truth gets converted to suit the purpose.

They have also upset Japan, playing the usual stupid tricks of infringing on territorial airspace, Russian and Chinese planes combining to try intimidation tactics.

As long as Putin gets away with his taking territory by force, totalitarian governments will continue to push against any democracy, it isn't Capitalism that Communists and totalitarian governments fear, it's democracy.

[local]

Interesting Prof that you keep telling us about the superiority of Russian equipment is that some special source because you could let Putin know.


Russia is reduced to deploying old T62's as the Ukrainians keep destroying their fundamentally flawed T72's

The fault is related to the way many Russian tanks hold and load ammunition. In these tanks, including the T-72, the Soviet-designed vehicle that has seen wide use in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, shells are all placed in a ring within the turret. When an enemy shot hits the right spot, the ring of ammunition can quickly “cook off” and ignite a chain reaction, blasting the turret off the tank’s hull in a lethal blow.

Washington Post .

You can of course go on youtube and see for yourself.

These old tanks are something the Russian Dad's Army would normally practice in.

Now they send their cannon fodder to die in them.

At the moment they are emptying their stockpiles of munitions with scant regard for anyone or anything in a desperate attempt to gain a strip of Ukraine.

Problem is they won't be able to keep it.

The Ukrainians will just keep attacking them with the far superior weapons we and others have sent them.

And the Moggy Minors of the tank world will run out.

[Lamparilla]

I think it's only a matter of time before the Russian public start to wonder why these thousands of boys aren't coming home. It's difficult to know what they can do about it, but sooner or later Putin's facade will start to crack.

[silver fox]

I think it's only a matter of time before the Russian public start to wonder why these thousands of boys aren't coming home. It's difficult to know what they can do about it, but sooner or later Putin's facade will start to crack.

In Putin's Russia all those deaths will be down to terrorists and Nazis, not the responsibility of Putin's invasion and war on a neighbouring country.

[sandGroundZero]

Let's be clear.
He is not some master strategist, playing one off against another.
…
He has done enormous harm to the west through other means. Trump, Brexit and the corruption at the heart of our government all down to his network and the massive amounts of money stolen from the Russian people years ago.
I don't know how he will be stopped,

Wealthy thug yes, but I think Putin does have a strategy. Not sure what it is but he has the west and Nato guessing.
…

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Please pay attention – the Kremlin does

Explain the significance of the 1634 Treaty of Polyanovka. What happened in Narva in 1704? And who signed a peace treaty in Moscow in 1920 and why does that matter now?

These are not questions for a history exam. They are burning national security issues that affect peace and war in Europe. They show that Kremlin imperialist thinking goes far beyond Ukraine. Russia is bent on rebuilding its sphere of influence, based on a semi-mystical historical mandate. Everyone in Russia’s neighborhood should worry about that. So should their allies.

Speaking to students in Moscow on June 9th — the 350th anniversary of the birthday of Peter the Great — Vladimir Putin said, with a near smirk, that his “destiny” was to “return” and “fortify” territories conquered by Russia’s first emperor. He specifically mentioned the (now-Estonian) city of Narva, which Peter I took from the Swedes in 1704. That prompted an immediate diplomatic protest from the Estonian government.

In other news: a motion submitted to the Russian Duma would cancel its Soviet predecessor’s recognition of Lithuanian independence in 1991. The clear threat is to Lithuania’s legal status and state borders. (Note to fact-checkers: Lithuania’s pre-war independence was in fact recognized by Soviet Russia in the Moscow treaty of 1920.)

Swapping ancient historical claims is a game without limits. A Lithuanian MP responded to Putin’s remarks by citing (not wholly accurately) the Polyanovka treaty of 1634 to claim that the Russian city of Smolensk was in fact Lithuanian.
More recent history is burning a hole in the map too. The Latvian authorities last month decided to demolish a memorial to Soviet “liberators” in a Riga park. Featuring a 79-meter-high obelisk and huge bronze sculptures, it is hardly a historic landmark — it was erected only in 1985. But its removal is potentially divisive and arouses memories of the “Bronze Soldier”, a Soviet-era war memorial in Tallinn. Citing public order problems, the Estonian authorities moved it in 2007, prompting a national security crisis: riots, a blockade of the embassy in Moscow, and a disabling cyber-attack.

I’m just back from Riga. Latvians are, for now, sanguine about the risks of demolishing the monument. The Kremlin “doesn’t have the bandwidth” to exploit the issue says an official. Local Russians do not want to be seen as Kremlin proxies. The authorities keep a keen eye on mischief-makers. Backing down would be politically impossible: elections are looming, and the erasure of the physical signs of Soviet occupation is a tangible way to express disgust at Putin’s war in Ukraine, and at the blow, it has dealt with living standards through higher fuel and food prices.

We have learned, belatedly and painfully in many cases, to see finance, economics, energy security, the legal system, social cohesion, the media environment, and other parts of modern society through a national security lens. Instead of making choices based on cost and convenience, we now think about resilience and risk.
That should include history: in the ahistorical la-la lands of western Europe, many have come to think that dusty dates and long-ago battles are none of their business. But if our adversaries are using history to justify territorial claims and war, it is our business. We need a new discipline of national-security history: we need to understand the past better than our adversaries. Knowing who did what to whom, when, and why, will help our decision-makers understand the significance of tendentious, selective interpretations of the past. It will also help these issues to the voters, and work out countermeasures.

The more we know of past centuries, the better our chances of shaping this one.

— Edward Lucas | Center for European Policy Analysis
©2020 by the Center for European Policy Analysis, All Rights Reserved

[Toodles McGinty]

Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia - all NATO countries if I'm not mistaken.

If rumours are true, and he's on his last legs, I suppose he might want to go out in a blaze of glory, as he sees it. But taking on the might of NATO when he's frankly struggling against Ukraine's citizen army seems a bit ambitious.

Unless he starts hurling nukes around, tactical or otherwise, I don't see how he can achieve this return to Imperial Russia. Or, again if rumours have any substance, how he'll live to see it.

The situation that makes me most nervous, apart from the possibility of 4 minute warnings, is the mish-mash of silovarchs that will potentially succeed him. He's already put paid to any 'normal' politicians that the west could work with. What remains could be even worse than Mad Vlad.

I suppose we can hope they'll be too occupied with internal disruption and power struggles to look westward.

[sandGroundZero]

…We need another Boris Yeltsin to sort him out!

As happens, Boris Yeltsin [Russian President 1991-1999] does not escape a large share of responsibility for the rise of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. History in never a simple, linear narrative of events. Yeltsin had a grandstanding, probably bipolar personality. It appears that though the end of Communism was part of his ideology, the end of Russia's dominant position vis-à-vis the USSR's captive republics was not. Yeltsin's dislodging of Mikhail Gorbachev was rash. The dismantling of Soviet era institutions was an unrecognized and far greater difficulty. Suspected by US President George H W Bush, but embraced by Pres. Bill Clinton, Yeltsin and most observers were comprehensively outmanoeuvred by faceless revanchist elements within the USSR's vast security apparatus. A combination of foresight, luck and criminal determination enabled Putin's KGB collaborators to ultimately regain control of Russia.