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3:04 AM 2/1/2021 – AP – The Day – 5,000 arrested at anti-Putin protests across Russia

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Police officers detain a woman during a protest against the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Khabarovsk, 3,800 miles east of Moscow, Russia, on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2021. Thousands of people took to the streets Sunday across Russia to demand the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, keeping up the wave of nationwide protests that have rattled the Kremlin. Hundreds were detained by police. (AP Photo/Igor Volkov)

The Day – 5,000 arrested at anti-Putin protests across Russia

MOSCOW (AP) — Chanting slogans against President Vladimir Putin, tens of thousands took to the streets Sunday across Russia to demand the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, keeping up nationwide protests that have rattled the Kremlin. More than 5,100 people were detained by police, according to a monitoring group, and some were beaten.

The massive protests came despite efforts by Russian authorities to stem the tide of demonstrations after tens of thousands rallied across the country last weekend in the largest, most widespread show of discontent that Russia had seen in years. Despite threats of jail terms, warnings to social media groups and tight police cordons, the protests again engulfed cities across Russia’s 11 time zones on Sunday.

Navalny’s team quickly called another protest in Moscow for Tuesday, when he is set to face a court hearing that could send him to prison for years.

The 44-year-old Navalny, an anti-corruption investigator who is Putin’s best-known critic, was arrested on Jan. 17 upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusations. He was arrested for allegedly violating his parole conditions by not reporting for meetings with law enforcement when he was recuperating in Germany.

The United States urged Russia to release Navalny and criticized the crackdown on protests.

“The U.S. condemns the persistent use of harsh tactics against peaceful protesters and journalists by Russian authorities for a second week straight,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Twitter.

The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected Blinken’s call as “crude interference in Russia’s internal affairs” and accused Washington of trying to destabilize the situation in the country by backing the protests.

On Sunday, police detained more than 5,100 people in cities nationwide, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests, surpassing some 4,000 detentions at the demonstrations across Russia on Jan. 23.

In Moscow, authorities introduced unprecedented security measures in the city center, closing subway stations near the Kremlin, cutting bus traffic and ordering restaurants and stores to stay closed.

Navalny’s team initially called for Sunday’s protest to be held on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, home to the main headquarters of the Federal Security Service, which Navalny contends was responsible for his poisoning. Facing police cordons around the square, the protest shifted to other central squares and streets.

Police were randomly picking up people and putting them into police buses, but thousands of protesters marched across the city center for hours, chanting “Putin, resign!” and “Putin, thief!” — a reference to an opulent Black Sea estate reportedly built for the Russian leader that was featured in a widely popular video released by Navalny’s team.

“I’m not afraid, because we are the majority,” said protester Leonid Martynov. “We mustn’t be scared by clubs because the truth is on our side.”

At one point, crowds of demonstrators walked toward the Matrosskaya Tishina prison where Navalny is being held. They were met by phalanxes of riot police who pushed the march back and chased protesters through courtyards.

Demonstrators continued to march around the Russian capital, zigzagging around police cordons. Officers broke them into smaller groups and detained scores, beating some with clubs and occasionally using tasers.

Over 1,600 people were detained in Moscow, including Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who was released after several hours pending a court hearing Monday on charges of taking part in an unsanctioned protest. “If we keep silent, they will come after any of us tomorrow,” she said on Instagram before turning out to protest.

Amnesty International said that authorities in Moscow have arrested so many people that the city’s detention facilities have run out of space. “The Kremlin is waging a war on the human rights of people in Russia, stifling protesters’ calls for freedom and change,” Natalia Zviagina, the group’s Moscow office head, said in a statement.

Several thousand people marched across Russia’s second-largest city of St. Petersburg, chanting “Down with the czar!” and occasional scuffles erupted as some demonstrators pushed back police who tried to make detentions. Over 1,100 were arrested.

Some of the biggest rallies were held in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk in eastern Siberia and Yekaterinburg in the Urals.

“I do not want my grandchildren to live in such a country,” said 55-year-old Vyacheslav Vorobyov, who turned out for a rally in Yekaterinburg. “I want them to live in a free country.”

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde, who currently chairs the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, condemned “the excessive use of force by authorities and mass detention of peaceful protesters and journalists” and urged Russia “to release all those unjustly detained, including Navalny.”

As part of a multipronged effort by authorities to block the protests, courts have jailed Navalny’s associates and activists across the country over the past week. His brother Oleg, top aide Lyubov Sobol and three other people were put under a two-month house arrest Friday on charges of allegedly violating coronavirus restrictions during last weekend’s protests.

Prosecutors also demanded that social media platforms block calls to join the protests.

The Interior Ministry issued stern warnings to the public, saying protesters could be charged with taking part in mass riots, which carries a prison sentence of up to eight years.

Protests were fueled by a two-hour YouTube video released by Navalny’s team after his arrest about the Black Sea residence purportedly built for Putin. The video has been viewed over 100 million times, inspiring a stream of sarcastic jokes on the internet amid an economic downturn.

Russia has seen extensive corruption during Putin’s time in office while poverty has remained widespread.

“All of us feel pinched financially, so people who take to the streets today feel angry,” said Vladimir Perminov who protested in Moscow. “The government’s rotation is necessary.”

Demonstrators in Moscow chanted “Aqua discotheque!” — a reference to one of the fancy amenities at the residence that also features a casino and a hookah lounge equipped for watching pole dances.

Putin says neither he nor any of his close relatives own the property. On Saturday, construction magnate Arkady Rotenberg, a longtime Putin confidant and his occasional judo sparring partner, claimed that he himself owned the property.

Navalny fell into a coma on Aug. 20 while on a flight from Siberia to Moscow and the pilot diverted the plane so he could be treated in the city of Omsk. He was transferred to a Berlin hospital two days later. Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to the Novichok nerve agent.

Russian authorities have refused to open a full-fledged criminal inquiry, claiming lack of evidence that he was poisoned.

Navalny was arrested immediately upon his return to Russia earlier this month and jailed for 30 days on the request of Russia’s prison service, which alleged he had violated the probation of his suspended sentence from a 2014 money-laundering conviction that he has rejected as political revenge.

On Thursday, a Moscow court rejected Navalny’s appeal to be released, and the hearing Tuesday could turn his 3 [1/2]-year suspended sentence into one he must serve in prison.

___________________________________


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Author Craig Unger makes the revelations in his new book, American Kompromat, How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery: How Russia began ‘grooming’ Donald Trump 40 years ago by saving him from financial ruin, book claims

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The author writes Trump was rescued multiple times from multiple bankruptcies by boatloads of Russian cash laundered through his real estate in the 80s and 90s as well as Russian money picking up the tab for buildings franchised under Trump's name

How Russia began ‘grooming’ Donald Trump 40 years ago by saving him from financial ruin, book claims

Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset more than 40 years ago which exploded into a decades-long ‘relationship’ of mutual benefit to both Russia and Trump, a shocking new book claims.  

Trump was rescued multiple times from multiple bankruptcies by boatloads of Russian cash laundered through his real estate in the 80s and 90s, the author asserts. Russian money also picked up the tab for buildings franchised under Trump’s name.

An invitation to Russia by a high-level KGB official in 1987 under the guise of a preliminary scouting trip to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, was in fact ‘deep development’ by KGB handlers that furthered creating secret back channels and allowed the Russians to influence and damage American democracy, the author claims.

When Trump became President, it was time to pay the piper and Trump gave Putin everything he wanted, the author writes.

Author Craig Unger makes the revelations in his new book, American Kompromat, How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery.  Unger is a journatist and author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers House of Bush, House of Saud, and House of Trump, House of Putin.

A new book claims Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset more than 40 years ago and that exploded into a decades long 'relationship' of mutual benefit to both Russia and Trump. When Trump became President, it was time to pay the piper and Trump gave  Vladimir Putin everything he wanted, the author writes

A new book claims Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset more than 40 years ago and that exploded into a decades long ‘relationship’ of mutual benefit to both Russia and Trump. When Trump became President, it was time to pay the piper and Trump gave  Vladimir Putin everything he wanted, the author writes

The author writes Trump was rescued multiple times from multiple bankruptcies by boatloads of Russian cash laundered through his real estate in the 80s and 90s as well as Russian money picking up the tab for buildings franchised under Trump's name

The author writes Trump was rescued multiple times from multiple bankruptcies by boatloads of Russian cash laundered through his real estate in the 80s and 90s as well as Russian money picking up the tab for buildings franchised under Trump’s name

Asking if Trump was a Russian asset is the single most important question about the president, the author writes after extensive interviews with high-level sources, Soviets who defected, former CIA officers, FBI counter-intelligent agents, lawyers and more.

‘This is a story of dirty secrets and the most powerful people in the world’ and Unger reveals what went wrong in the numerous congressional investigations into Trump.

Trump and the Russians were also in bed together through Trump’s close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was supplying the Russians and Silicon Valley with underage girls, the author claims. 

American Kompromat How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery by Craig Unger is out January 26

American Kompromat How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery by Craig Unger is out January 26

Epstein claimed to have introduced Melania to Donald when Donald was partying with Epstein’s ‘girls’.

Epstein had made videotapes of sexual acts that he could use for blackmail or kompromat – compromising material – and photos of Trump with a bevy of young girls and girls giggling at the semen stains on Trump’s pants when in the company of the under eighteen-year olds and he couldn’t hold back his ‘excitement’.

Trump’s association with Russia began in 1976 when he decided to make his move from developing real estate in Queens to Manhattan.

Under the tutelage of the ‘Mafia lawyer and dark satanic prince of the McCarthy era’, Roy Cohn, who tutored Trump on how to find generous tax abatements, the brash real estate developer paid one thin dollar to buy the old decrepit Commodore Hotel that sat next to Grand Central Station on 42nd and Park Avenue.

The development of that decaying monstrosity into the Grand Hyatt New York offers the key to Trump’s first encounter with the Russians when he went downtown to Joy-Lud Electronics at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street to buy hundreds of television sets for his new hotel.

Store co-owner Semyon ‘Sam’ Kislin, was a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated to Manhattan from Odessa in 1972 and hung a sign on his store’s front door reading, ‘We speak Russian’.

Kislin co-owned the store with another Soviet émigré Tamir Sapir and sold electronic equipment to Soviet diplomats, KGB officers and Politburo members returning to the Soviet Union because it had all been adapted to PAL, technical standards used in Europe and Russia.

That stood Jud-Lud Electronics apart from the wildly popular 47th Street Photo and Crazy Eddie grabbing the airwaves with their big pitch, discount claims.

Jud-Lud was the only place to buy electronic equipment and consumer goods to take back to the Soviet Union.

Trump picked up the TVs on credit and paid Kislin back in 30 days, an unusual move for the man well known for stiffing his vendors.

Donald Trump and Tamir Sapir at the Trump Soho Launch on September 19, 2007 in New York City. Tamir Sapir owned a store and sold electronic equipment to Soviet diplomats, KGB officers and Politburo members returning to the Soviet Union

Donald Trump and Tamir Sapir at the Trump Soho Launch on September 19, 2007 in New York City. Tamir Sapir owned a store and sold electronic equipment to Soviet diplomats, KGB officers and Politburo members returning to the Soviet Union

Back in the 70s Trump picked up TVs on credit and paid Tussian Semyon Kislin (left) back in 30 days, an unusual move for the man well known for stiffing his vendors
A former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, informed the author that a Jewish guy running a fresh produce store back then would have had to have been recruited by the KGB

Back in the 70s Trump picked up TVs on credit and paid Ukrainian Semyon Kislin (left) back in 30 days, an unusual move for the man well known for stiffing his vendors. Kislin had run a highly celebrated fresh produce store back in Odessa where foodstuffs passed through the black market. A former KGB officer Yuri Shvets (right) said Kislin would have been recruited by the KGB

The author asks the question why the Grand Hyatt needed TVs with dual systems enabling them to receive broadcasts to the Soviet Union – but the answer is lost to the passage of time.

Kislin had run a highly celebrated fresh produce store back in Odessa where foodstuffs passed through the black market.

A former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, informed the author that a Jewish guy running a fresh produce store back then would have had to have been recruited by the KGB.

The deal was if Kislin wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union, he had to sign a pledge to cooperate with the KGB.

Back in the US, if anyone questioned letting in so many Soviet Jews, they faced being called anti-Semitic.

Kislin’s store, under the KGB seal of approval was ‘used by the KGB to initiate overtures to prospective assets’.

So Trump was under the watchful eye of the KGB. But that had begun years earlier when the ‘young, vain, narcissistic and ruthlessly ambitious real estate developer’ sold multimillion-dollar condos to the Russian Mafia laundering money by buying through anonymous shell companies.

The sale of these condos made Trump rich again after losing billions of dollars when his Atlantic City casinos went belly up.

Surveillance of Trump began even earlier in 1977 when he married Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech national from a district where the secret police force was in league with the KGB and Trump was already talking about wanting to be president one day. 

For sale! Exclusive look inside Trump’s Atlantic City casino in 2017

Trump sold multimillion-dollar condos to the Russian Mafia laundering money by buying through anonymous shell companies. The sale of these condos made Trump rich again after losing billions of dollars when his Atlantic City casinos went belly up

Trump sold multimillion-dollar condos to the Russian Mafia laundering money by buying through anonymous shell companies. The sale of these condos made Trump rich again after losing billions of dollars when his Atlantic City casinos went belly up

The author claims Trump's association with Russia began in 1976 when he decided to make his move from developing real estate in Queens to Manhattan

The author claims Trump’s association with Russia began in 1976 when he decided to make his move from developing real estate in Queens to Manhattan

Trump probably also appealed to the KGB because he was ‘vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery and greedy’.

‘With Trump it wasn’t just weakness. Everything was excessive. His vanity, excessive, Narcissism, excessive. Greed, excessive. Ignorance, excessive’, writes the author.

‘Deeply insecure intellectually, highly suggestible, exceedingly susceptible to flattery, Trump was anxious to acquire some real intellectual validation – and the KGB would be more than happy to humor him,’ the author added. 

Kislin denied any ties with the Russian Mafia years later but hung in close to Trump and donated more than $40,000 to Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 and 1997 New York mayoral campaigns. 

The file on Trump with the Soviet/Russian intelligence went from laundering money through Trump luxury condos, to partnering with wealthy Soviet émigrés in franchising scams, to becoming involved in countless financial irregularities, to creating secret back channels with the Russians, to partying with Jeffrey Epstein, and on and on,’ writes Unger.

Epstein, whose father had been a municipal parks department employee in Coney Island, amassed hundreds of millions of dollars, owned fabulous homes around the world and lived two short miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.

Within his house there were scores of women and young girls, dozens in their teens who were passed around like party favors by Epstein with the help of one time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell — to the world’s most powerful men.

‘All the while, he was secretly recording their activities, the tapes of which provided a hammerlock of kompromat, leverage, and influence’, Unger writes.

It was a world of unimaginable decadence – gorgeous young women, private planes, spectacular residences – and sex with young girls.

Billionaire oligarchs shipped in teenage girls from Russia and the Ukraine.

Russian models and beauty pageant contestants were flown in and manipulated for sexual favors by Epstein with Ghislaine as his fixer, the author claims.

Trump fit in and he reciprocated Jeffrey and Ghislaine’s invites.

The author claims surveillance on Trump began in 1977 when he married Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech national from a district where the secret police force was in league with the KGB and Trump was already talking about wanting to be president one day (pictured in Russia)

The author claims surveillance on Trump began in 1977 when he married Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech national from a district where the secret police force was in league with the KGB and Trump was already talking about wanting to be president one day (pictured in Russia) 

In 1987 Donald and Ivana Trump visited Palace Square in St.Petersburg, Russia. The author says the invitation to Russia by a high-level KGB official in 1987 under the guise of a preliminary scouting trip to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, was in fact 'deep development' by KGB handlers that furthered creating secret back channels and allowed the Russians to influence and damage American democracy

In 1987 Donald and Ivana Trump visited Palace Square in St.Petersburg, Russia. The author says the invitation to Russia by a high-level KGB official in 1987 under the guise of a preliminary scouting trip to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, was in fact ‘deep development’ by KGB handlers that furthered creating secret back channels and allowed the Russians to influence and damage American democracy

Twenty-eight young women were flown in to Mar-a-Lago for a calendar girl competition and the only two males guests were Trump and Epstein.

Trump was known for nonstop groping as well as putting his hands up the skirt of the girlfriend of the organizer of the calendar girl competition – all the way to her crotch.

Christina Oxenberg, daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and sister of Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg, met Ghislaine when Ghislane was knitting together a social network that introduced Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew to Epstein.

Christina said her mother had an affair with JFK in 1962 and suggested she was President Kennedy’s love child.

‘Ghislaine was the woman behind the world’s greatest Rolodex – and all about power and money’, stated Oxenberg.

When the FBI raided Epstein’s homes, ‘they found video recording equipment, hard disks and evidence of kompromat – videos of billionaires in the act of pedophilia, raping underage girls, committing crimes that could lead to hard time’.

Trump’s name was in Epstein’s black book with no fewer than 16 phone numbers.

‘Trump Model Management was very much a part of Epstein’s picture and allegedly indulged in many of the dubious practices – violating immigration laws and illegally employing young foreign girls,’ the author writes. 

Epstein took the fifth when asked if he ever socialized with Trump in the presence of females under eighteen.

Epstein claimed he was the one who introduced Melania to Trump.

‘Jeffrey and Ghislaine knew Trump’s secrets, and he knew theirs – secrets were the ultimate currency in the decadent and highly transactional world they lived in,’ the author writes. 

After 17 years of friendship, the close friends permanently fell out in 2004 when Epstein told Trump that he was keen on buying a spectacular mansion in Palm Beach being sold out of a bankruptcy auction.

With his heart set on the property, he wanted to make one change – move the swimming pool. So he brought his pal Trump to the property for advice.

In financial straits with his bankruptcies in Atlantic City, Trump outbid his friend with an offer of more than $41 million.

Trump put the house up for sale shortly thereafter for $125 million.

The author claims Trump was connected to Russians through friend Jeffrey Epstein, who was supplying the Russians and Silicon Valley with underage girls

The author claims Trump was connected to Russians through friend Jeffrey Epstein, who was supplying the Russians and Silicon Valley with underage girls

Trump appealed to the KGB because he was 'vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery and greedy,' the author writes. Trump and Putin pictured in 2017

Trump appealed to the KGB because he was ‘vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery and greedy,’ the author writes. Trump and Putin pictured in 2017 

Trump in 2017: What I say to Putin is ‘none of your business’

Enraged, Epstein never spoke to Trump again but showed around photos of Trump with topless young girls and one photo with semen stained pants.

After three years into Trump’s presidency, the curtain was pulled back and revealed ‘Trump was a sociopath who had given false or misleading statements more than 20,000 times while in office and created false narratives that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.’

When it came to 2020 and the president’s daily briefings on the rapidly expanding Covid-19 pandemic as early as January that Trump never read, ‘He did next to nothing when it came to stopping the spread of the virus’, writes Unger who calls it ‘a death cult’.

He just didn’t care if Americans died.

Deceit was the new norm with Trump’s lies that were anti-science and free of reason – ‘that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans’.

‘The pandemic was being handled by a superstitious, science-defying authoritarian leader who had decided to let the people fend for themselves – and die accordingly,’ the author writes. 

The nation was now in free-fall – thanks to the ‘vulgar and vile, misogynistic, racist firebrand’ – who had mesmerized tens of millions with ‘anti-science based policies that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans’.

‘The Russians had undermined the US elections in 2016 and Trump had collaborated with them’, writes Unger. And now thanks to the virus, everything wrong with the United States – sex trafficking, racism and greed –  was visible. 

American Kompromat by Craig Unger: 9780593182536 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books


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Audio – As Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm

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As Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm – NYTimes

On Election Day, General Paul M. Nakasone, the nation’s top cyberwarrior, reported that the battle against Russian interference in the presidential campaign had posted major successes and exposed the other side’s online weapons, tools and tradecraft.

“We’ve broadened our operations and feel very good where we’re at right now,” he told journalists.

Eight weeks later, General Nakasone and other American officials responsible for cybersecurity are now consumed by what they missed for at least nine months: a hacking, now believed to have affected upward of 250 federal agencies and businesses, that Russia aimed not at the election system but at the rest of the United States government and many large American corporations.

Three weeks after the intrusion came to light, American officials are still trying to understand whether what the Russians pulled off was simply an espionage operation inside the systems of the American bureaucracy or something more sinister, inserting “backdoor” access into government agencies, major corporations, the electric grid and laboratories developing and transporting new generations of nuclear weapons.

At a minimum it has set off alarms about the vulnerability of government and private sector networks in the United States to attack and raised questions about how and why the nation’s cyberdefenses failed so spectacularly.

Those questions have taken on particular urgency given that the breach was not detected by any of the government agencies that share responsibility for cyberdefense — the military’s Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, both of which are run by General Nakasone, and the Department of Homeland Security — but by a private cybersecurity company, FireEye.

“This is looking much, much worse than I first feared,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The size of it keeps expanding. It’s clear the United States government missed it.”

“And if FireEye had not come forward,” he added, “I’m not sure we would be fully aware of it to this day.”

Interviews with key players investigating what intelligence agencies believe to be an operation by Russia’s S.V.R. intelligence service revealed these points:

  • The breach is far broader than first believed. Initial estimates were that Russia sent its probes only into a few dozen of the 18,000 government and private networks they gained access to when they inserted code into network management software made by a Texas company named SolarWinds. But as businesses like Amazon and Microsoft that provide cloud services dig deeper for evidence, it now appears Russia exploited multiple layers of the supply chain to gain access to as many as 250 networks.
  • The hackers managed their intrusion from servers inside the United States, exploiting legal prohibitions on the National Security Agency from engaging in domestic surveillance and eluding cyberdefenses deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.
  • “Early warning” sensors placed by Cyber Command and the National Security Agency deep inside foreign networks to detect brewing attacks clearly failed. There is also no indication yet that any human intelligence alerted the United States to the hacking.
  • The government’s emphasis on election defense, while critical in 2020, may have diverted resources and attention from long-brewing problems like protecting the “supply chain” of software. In the private sector, too, companies that were focused on election security, like FireEye and Microsoft, are now revealing that they were breached as part of the larger supply chain attack.
  • SolarWinds, the company that the hackers used as a conduit for their attacks, had a history of lackluster security for its products, making it an easy target, according to current and former employees and government investigators. Its chief executive, Kevin B. Thompson, who is leaving his job after 11 years, has sidestepped the question of whether his company should have detected the intrusion.
  • Some of the compromised SolarWinds software was engineered in Eastern Europe, and American investigators are now examining whether the incursion originated there, where Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted.

The intentions behind the attack remain shrouded. But with a new administration taking office in three weeks, some analysts say the Russians may be trying to shake Washington’s confidence in the security of its communications and demonstrate their cyberarsenal to gain leverage against President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. before nuclear arms talks.

“We still don’t know what Russia’s strategic objectives were,” said Suzanne Spaulding, who was the senior cyberofficial at the Homeland Security Department during the Obama administration. “But we should be concerned that part of this may go beyond reconnaissance. Their goal may be to put themselves in a position to have leverage over the new administration, like holding a gun to our head to deter us from acting to counter Putin.”

Growing Hit List

The U.S. government was clearly the main focus of the attack, with the Treasury Department, the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Energy Department and parts of the Pentagon among the agencies confirmed to have been infiltrated. (The Defense Department insists the attacks on its systems were unsuccessful, though it has offered no evidence.)

But the hacking also breached large numbers of corporations, many of which have yet to step forward. SolarWinds is believed to be one of several supply chain vendors Russia used in the hacking. Microsoft, which had tallied 40 victims as of Dec. 17, initially said that it had not been breached, only to discover this week that it had been — and that resellers of its software had been, too. A previously unreported assessment by Amazon’s intelligence team found the number of victims may have been five times greater, though officials warn some of those may be double counted.

Publicly, officials have said they do not believe the hackers from Russia’s S.V.R. pierced classified systems containing sensitive communications and plans. But privately, officials say they still do not have a clear picture of what might have been stolen.

They said they worried about delicate but unclassified data the hackers might have taken from victims like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, including Black Start, the detailed technical blueprints for how the United States plans to restore power in the event of a cataclysmic blackout.

The plans would give Russia a hit list of systems to target to keep power from being restored in an attack like the one it pulled off in Ukraine in 2015, shutting off power for six hours in the dead of winter. Moscow long ago implanted malware in the American electric grid, and the United States has done the same to Russia as a deterrent.

A Supply Chain Compromised

One main focus of the investigation so far has been SolarWinds, the company based in Austin whose software updates the hackers compromised.

But the cybersecurity arm of the Department of Homeland Security concluded the hackers worked through other channels, too. And last week, CrowdStrike, another security company, revealed that it was also targeted, unsuccessfully, by the same hackers, but through a company that resells Microsoft software.

Dealbook: An examination of the major business and policy headlines and the power brokers who shape them.

Because resellers are often entrusted to set up clients’ software, they — like SolarWinds — have broad access to Microsoft customers’ networks. As a result, they can be an ideal Trojan horse for Russia’s hackers. Intelligence officials have expressed anger that Microsoft did not detect the attack earlier; the company, which said Thursday that the hackers viewed its source code, has not disclosed which of its products were affected or for how long hackers were inside its network.

“They targeted the weakest points in the supply chain and through our most trusted relationships,” said Glenn Chisholm, a founder of Obsidian Security.

Interviews with current and former employees of SolarWinds suggest it was slow to make security a priority, even as its software was adopted by America’s premier cybersecurity company and federal agencies.

Employees say that under Mr. Thompson, an accountant by training and a former chief financial officer, every part of the business was examined for cost savings and common security practices were eschewed because of their expense. His approach helped almost triple SolarWinds’ annual profit margins to more than $453 million in 2019 from $152 million in 2010.

But some of those measures may have put the company and its customers at greater risk for attack. SolarWinds moved much of its engineering to satellite offices in the Czech Republic, Poland and Belarus, where engineers had broad access to the Orion network management software that Russia’s agents compromised.

The company has said only that the manipulation of its software was the work of human hackers rather than of a computer program. It has not publicly addressed the possibility of an insider being involved in the breach.

None of the SolarWinds customers contacted by The New York Times in recent weeks were aware they were reliant on software that was maintained in Eastern Europe. Many said they did not even know they were using SolarWinds software until recently.

Even with its software installed throughout federal networks, employees said SolarWinds tacked on security only in 2017, under threat of penalty from a new European privacy law. Only then, employees say, did SolarWinds hire its first chief information officer and install a vice president of “security architecture.”

Ian Thornton-Trump, a former cybersecurity adviser at SolarWinds, said he warned management that year that unless it took a more proactive approach to its internal security, a cybersecurity episode would be “catastrophic.” After his basic recommendations were ignored, Mr. Thornton-Trump left the company.

SolarWinds declined to address questions about the adequacy of its security. In a statement, it said it was a “victim of a highly-sophisticated, complex and targeted cyberattack” and was collaborating closely with law enforcement, intelligence agencies and security experts to investigate.

But security experts note that it took days after the Russian attack was discovered before SolarWinds’ websites stopped offering clients compromised code.

Offense Over Defense

Billions of dollars in cybersecurity budgets have flowed in recent years to offensive espionage and pre-emptive action programs, what General Nakasone calls the need to “defend forward” by hacking into adversaries’ networks to get an early look at their operations and to counteract them inside their own networks, before they can attack, if required.

But that approach, while hailed as a long-overdue strategy to pre-empt attacks, missed the Russian breach.

By staging their attacks from servers inside the United States, in some cases using computers in the same town or city as their victims, according to FireEye, the Russians took advantage of limits on the National Security Agency’s authority. Congress has not given the agency or homeland security any authority to enter or defend private sector networks. It was on these networks that S.V.R. operatives were less careful, leaving clues about their intrusions that FireEye was ultimately able to find.

By inserting themselves into the SolarWinds’ Orion update and using custom tools, they also avoided tripping the alarms of the “Einstein” detection system that homeland security deployed across government agencies to catch known malware, and the so-called C.D.M. program that was explicitly devised to alert agencies to suspicious activity.

Some intelligence officials are questioning whether the government was so focused on election interference that it created openings elsewhere.

Intelligence agencies concluded months ago that Russia had determined it could not infiltrate enough election systems to affect the outcome of elections, and instead shifted its attention to deflecting ransomware attacks that could disenfranchise voters, and influence operations aimed at sowing discord, stoking doubt about the system’s integrity and changing voters’ minds.

The SolarWinds hacking, which began as early as October 2019, and the intrusion into Microsoft’s resellers, gave Russia a chance to attack the most vulnerable, least defended networks across multiple federal agencies.

General Nakasone declined to be interviewed. But a spokesman for the National Security Agency, Charles K. Stadtlander, said: “We don’t consider this as an ‘either/or’ trade-off. The actions, insights and new frameworks constructed during election security efforts have broad positive impacts for the cybersecurity posture of the nation and the U.S. government.”

In fact, the United States appears to have succeeded in persuading Russia that an attack aimed at changing votes would prompt a costly retaliation. But as the scale of the intrusion comes into focus, it is clear the American government failed to convince Russia there would be a comparable consequence to executing a broad hacking on federal government and corporate networks.

Getting the Hackers Out

Intelligence officials say it could be months, years even, before they have a full understanding of the hacking.

Since the extraction of a top Kremlin informant in 2017, the C.I.A.’s knowledge of Russian operations has been diminished. And the S.V.R. has remained one of the world’s most capable intelligence services by avoiding electronic communications that could expose its secrets to the National Security Agency, intelligence officials say.

The best assessments of the S.V.R. have come from the Dutch. In 2014, hackers working for the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service pierced the computers used by the group, watching them for at least a year, and at one point catching them on camera.

It was the Dutch who helped alert the White House and State Department to an S.V.R. hacking of their systems in 2014 and 2015. And while the group is not known to be destructive, it is notoriously difficult to evict from computer systems it has infiltrated.

When the S.V.R. broke into the unclassified systems at the State Department and White House, Richard Ledgett, then the deputy director of the National Security Agency, said the agency engaged in the digital equivalent of “hand-to-hand combat.” At one point, the S.V.R. gained access to the NetWitness Investigator tool that investigators use to uproot Russian back doors, manipulating it in such a way that the hackers continued to evade detection.

Investigators said they would assume they had kicked out the S.V.R., only to discover the group had crawled in through another door.

Some security experts said that ridding so many sprawling federal agencies of the S.V.R. may be futile and that the only way forward may be to shut systems down and start anew. Others said doing so in the middle of a pandemic would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, and the new administration would have to work to identify and contain every compromised system before it could calibrate a response.

“The S.V.R. is deliberate, they are sophisticated, and they don’t have the same legal restraints as we do here in the West,” said Adam Darrah, a former government intelligence analyst who is now director of intelligence at Vigilante, a security firm.

Sanctions, indictments and other measures, he added, have failed to deter the S.V.R., which has shown it can adapt quickly.

“They are watching us very closely right now,” Mr. Darrah said. “And they will pivot accordingly.”


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Audio – US Congress authorizes new Nord Stream 2 sanctions

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The US Congress has authorized the White House to impose sanctions against companies constructing the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, with lawmakers overriding President Donald Trump’s veto of a broader Defense Department spending authorization bill.

The sanctions aim to derail construction of the remaining offshore portion of Russian state-controlled Gazprom’s near-complete 55bn m³/yr Nord Stream 2. The measure allows the administration to impose sanctions against any entity that is involved in construction, provides underwriting and insurance to pipe-laying vessels or facilitates ship retrofitting and upgrading.

The sanctions also can apply to any entity that “provided services for the testing, inspection or certification” of the pipeline.

The bill grants the White House flexibility to waive sanctions on national security grounds, while also exempting European government entities from sanctions and requiring consultations with those governments before sanctions are applied.

Lawmakers included the sanctions provision in a bill they passed in early December. Trump vetoed the legislation on 23 December, citing reasons unrelated to Nord Stream 2. The House of Representatives voted 322-87 on 28 December to override Trump’s veto. The Senate then followed today, voting 81-13 today in favor of overriding the veto.

Potentially targeted companies will have until 31 January to wind down participation in the pipeline project to avoid sanctions.

A similar sanctions bill enacted late in 2019 forced a Swiss company involved in pipelaying to walk away from the project, and the authors of the most recent measure hope it will have a similar effect.

Around 16.5km on each of the project’s two strings need to be installed in German waters, and a total of 127km in Danish waters before pipe-laying is complete.

The key difference now is that the vessels involved in construction are Russian-owned and Russian-flagged, even though they still require support and certification from entities in Germany and Denmark.

The Fortuna pipe-laying barge restarted pipe-laying in German waters in early December and is to restart works in Danish waters from mid-January, with support from the Baltic Explorer and Murman, as well as other supply vessels. Ongoing construction activities are likely to enable the project to be completed soon, Russian deputy prime minister Alexander Novak said on 28 December.

Implementing the legislation is likely to straddle the final weeks of Trump’s term in office, which ends on 20 January, and the incoming administration led by president-elect Joe Biden.

Opponents of the Nord Stream 2 project in Congress hope that the State Department will take immediate action to enforce its previous guidance that threatened sanctions against foreign companies providing goods and services for pipe-laying vessels and against financial backers of the pipeline.

The Biden team has vowed a tougher approach to Russia but has not promised to target Nord Stream 2 specifically.

Implementing sanctions against the project would contradict the president-elect’s pledge to improve relations with the EU, which opposes penalties against the pipeline project.

But political opinion in Washington is again turning against Russia, this time over an alleged cyberattack against computer networks run by the US government.

By Haik Gugarats


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Audio – What′s next for NATO after Donald Trump? | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW

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Last December, NATO was marking its 70th birthday in a rather somber mood. Instead of toasting the alliance’s longevity in high spirits with the pomp and circumstance of a regal summit in London, heads of state and government gathered for what was, instead, termed a modest “leaders’ meeting” with minimal fanfare.

After years of careful choreography gone wrong, NATO had quietly dimmed the spotlight on gatherings with US President Donald Trump due to his tendency to hijack high-level events with fits of pique or to use them to target allies, undercutting efforts to display stability and solidarity.

Biden time

But after the November elections, studiously neutral Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg could hardly disguise his eagerness in inviting President-elect Joe Biden, whom he called a “strong supporter of NATO and the transatlantic relationship” to visit Brussels for what he unmistakeably called a “summit,” to be held as soon as the new administration can possibly manage it.

Having a less unpredictable partner in Washington is hugely important, as NATO is in the process of improving its recognition of and response to serious challenges facing the 30 governments. “It’s been a wild roller-coaster ride,” Paul Taylor, senior fellow at Friends of Europe, tells DW. “At the end of it, NATO has survived Donald Trump — not unscathed and not unchanged.”

Will NATO miss Donald Trump?

 

For better, for worse

Some of those changes have been at least partially positive, even if they left scars on the alliance’s psyche. For example, while Trump did not, as he frequently misstates, prompt a reversal of allies’ decline in defense spending — that already happened in 2014 — it is credible that nations boosted their military budgets faster toward the NATO goal of 2% of GDP in an effort to avoid his public haranguing.

“He also got [allies] talking about China,” Taylor notes. “That’s something that was never on NATO’s agenda. And whether it would have come anyway, I don’t know, but it happened on his watch and it happened at his insistence.”

But it would be hard, if not impossible, to find an upside to the uncoordinated and abrupt withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, where NATO service members are helping train local forces to eventually manage their own security. Trump’s surprise announcements were unsettling to both NATO, which was not consulted, and to governments with personnel on the ground that will now be in a more vulnerable position without added American backup.

Angela Merkel and Donald Trump

Donald Trump has repeatedly taken aim at NATO allies, including Germany, who he accused of profiting off of US troops.

Now what?

This is the fraught environment Biden inherits at NATO, where allies are counting on him to bolster collective efforts to address these and other near- and long-term security concerns. Stoltenberg is currently prioritizing them, given the fact that NATO’s “Strategic Concept” outlining threats and capabilities to counter them hasn’t been revised since 2010.

That’s recommendation #1 from the “NATO Reflection Group,” advisors Stoltenberg appointed last year, co-led by former German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere and former US State Department official Wess Mitchell, to help improve political cohesion and innovation after French President Emmanuel Macron accused the alliance of having suffered “brain death.”

NATO at 70: ‘Brain dead’ or fighting fit?

 

The “China challenge”

Their new report, “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” concludes a “persistently aggressive” Russia will continue to be the biggest military threat to the alliance over the next decade, but China definitely steals the thunder as an up-and-comer.

“It was manifestly clear from our consultations with experts and with allies,” Mitchell told a Carnegie Europe briefing on the report. “The rise of China is is the single biggest, most consequential change in NATO’s strategic environment and one that the alliance really has to reckon with.”

US soldiers in Afghanistan

The US in October said it would pull out most of its troops in Afghanistan

Afghan alarm

But in the very short term, the alliance has hotter wars to handle. With peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban stuttering along but making progress only at a snail’s pace, Stoltenberg says NATO will nonetheless decide in February whether to continue its train, advise and assist mission — or call it quits after almost two decades of investment.

NATO had pledged to stay in the country until conditions on the ground are such that local security could maintain stability. But even Trump’s ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of what’s happening now.

“I don’t think the conditions have been met,” she tells DW. “We want to see progress on the peace front with the Afghan government and the Taliban talking together about how the people of Afghanistan can see a long-standing, peaceful existence. And that’s not happening right now.”

Hutchison stops short of criticizing Trump for pulling out, punting to the Biden team. “It is one of the first things that this new administration will have to deal with,” she says.

How will Joe Biden shape US foreign policy?

 

Disagreements without digression

The issue that invoked the worst divisiveness over the last four years will not disappear. There will certainly still be tension about the infamous “2%.” Thomas de Maiziere said at the Center for European Policy Analysis that “the Biden administration will be tougher for us because the tone is more friendly.” He said with Trump’s hostile attitude, the discussion never went into substance. “This makes it for us, in Europe and Germany, more difficult [now],” de Maiziere said, “But I welcome this.”

Paul Taylor agrees no one should believe everything will be perfectly smooth despite a Biden rapprochement, but what allies can expect is that a tough negotiation won’t necessarily mean a fight. “It will be based on the same facts,” he says. “And certainly it will be based on the same fundamental assumption that we’re in this together, that we’re stronger together, that America is stronger with allies than on its own, and that the allies are also stronger with America than on their own.”

NATO warns against hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan – Teri Schultz reports

 


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Audio – ‘Moscow continues to weaponize space’ — US Military condemns Russia’s latest anti-satellite missile test

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Space is no longer the battlefield of the future — it’s already a contested “warfighting domain,” within which the US, Russia, and China are all jockeying for advantage.

Russia recently tested another Earth-launched anti-satellite missile, US Space Command reported on Wednesday, underscoring what US officials say is Moscow’s continued militarization of space — one factor that spurred the US to create a dedicated Space Force in 2019.

“Russia has made space a warfighting domain by testing space-based and ground-based weapons intended to target and destroy satellites,” said US Army Gen. James Dickinson, US Space Command commander, in a release. “This fact is inconsistent with Moscow’s public claims that Russia seeks to prevent conflict in space.”

While Moscow has publicly declared that it opposes the weaponization of space, this week’s launch marked Russia’s third anti-satellite test this year, using a so-called direct-ascent anti-satellite missile (DA-ASAT).

“Russia publicly claims it is working to prevent the transformation of outer space into a battlefield, yet at the same time Moscow continues to weaponize space by developing and fielding on-orbit and ground-based capabilities that seek to exploit U.S. reliance on space-based systems,” Dickinson said. “Russia’s persistent testing of these systems demonstrates threats to U.S. and allied space systems are rapidly advancing.”

As recently as April, Russia has previously tested direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles. This type of weapon launches from Earth to destroy low-Earth-orbit satellites with a kinetic warhead — meaning that the weapon’s destructive capacity depends on its velocity at impact rather than an explosive charge.

The danger of testing such a weapon on an orbital target, US military officials say, is that once a target satellite is destroyed, even in testing, it can create an orbiting debris field that could potentially damage other satellites — or, even worse, such a debris field could pose a mortal danger to manned spacecraft.

Russia is also developing “co-orbital,” space-based kinetic weapon systems, which can be launched from satellites already in orbit. Russia has reportedly tested this type of anti-satellite weapon in both 2017 and 2020.

According to a Space Force statement, on July 15 a Russian satellite released an object that moved “in proximity” to another Russian satellite. Based on the object’s trajectory, Space Force officials said it was likely a weapon rather than an inspection satellite, as Moscow claimed. That test was “another example that the threats to U.S. and Allied space systems are real, serious and increasing,” the Space Force said in a release at the time.

“This is further evidence of Russia’s continuing efforts to develop and test space-based systems, and consistent with the Kremlin’s published military doctrine to employ weapons that hold U.S. and allied space assets at risk,” said Gen. John Raymond, then commander of US Space Command and current US Space Force chief of space operations, in the release.

Russia is also testing an anti-satellite laser weapon, the US military says. And according to some scientific journal reports, Russia may be resurrecting some Soviet-era anti-satellite missile programs, particularly one missile known as Kontakt, which was meant to be fired from a MiG-31D fighter.

Whereas the Soviet-era Kontakt system comprised a kinetic weapon intended to literally smash into US satellites to destroy them, the contemporary Russian program will likely carry a payload of micro “interceptor” satellites that can effectively ambush enemy satellites (a concept not unlike that of atmospheric “drone swarms”).

Created in 2019, the US Space Force is the US military’s first new branch in more than 70 years. The Space Force falls under the purview of the Department of the Air Force — a relationship roughly analogous to that of the Marine Corps’ falling under the Department of the Navy.

“I would simply say we are building the United States Space Force to protect the free and benevolent use of that ultimate frontier, the ultimate high ground — space,” Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said during a Nov. 16 speech.

Protecting America’s satellites is a vital national security interest, upon which much of our modern world depends. Thus, with America’s contemporary adversaries, such as China and Russia, developing their own novel military capacities in space, US military leaders say it’s important to field a military branch solely devoted to waging war in this increasingly contested combat domain.

Underscoring Beijing’s increased interest in its space program, China successfully launched an unmanned probe bound for Mars in June. And on Thursday, a Chinese probe returned to Earth after recovering rock samples from the surface of the moon.

“The establishment of U.S. Space Command as the nation’s unified combatant command for space and U.S. Space Force as the primary branch of the U.S. Armed Forces that presents space combat and combat support capabilities to U.S. Space Command could not have been timelier,” said Dickinson, the commander of US Space Command, in Wednesday’s release. “We stand ready and committed to deter aggression and defend our Nation and our allies from hostile acts in space.”

This article originally appeared on Coffee or Die. Follow @CoffeeOrDieMag on Twitter.


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Audio – In Russia, tough new laws and stepped-up defiance abroad mark Putin’s shift toward unfettered control

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Russian-U.S. relations are going “from bad to worse,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Wednesday, adding that Russia doesn’t expect “anything good” from President-elect Joe Biden and suggesting it adopt a policy of “total deterrence” toward Washington, with minimal dialogue.

In addition to signs that Biden will pursue a tough line with Moscow, Putin has seen his popularity slowly decline even as parliamentary elections loom in 2021. The move to double down against both the West and opponents at home reflects a perception of them as enemies working hand in hand to undermine Russia.

In this view, critical journalists and bloggers are potential terrorists, extremists or spies, and civic activists and nongovernment organizations may be labeled foreign agents. The Russian heroes Putin extols are spies who hack into U.S. agencies and domestic intelligence agents whose main role, like that of Stalin’s secret police, is the repression of dissent.

A raft of new, repressive laws sees Russia moving from partial to all-out authoritarianism, said Andrei Kolesnikov, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center.

“There is an open war with civil society,” he said, noting the Kremlin’s concern that Putin — who could legally stay in stay in power until 2036 — may someday face protests like those in Belarus, where the August presidential election was condemned as rigged by the opposition and Western nations.

“This is the same regime, but it is tougher and more intransigent to the demands from society and civil society, and it’s ready to fight,” he said. “They must be ready for anything, and this is something new.”

Putin has always been a pugnacious, risk-taking leader, thumbing his nose at Western liberalism, but he is sending more strident signals to Biden and a team he sees as stuffed with Russophobes.

In recent weeks, Russia has launched a flurry of missile tests, while Putin boasted Monday of a “cosmic” rate of change in Russia’s advanced weaponry, vowing to stay ahead of rivals in the development of hypersonic and other advanced weapons.

He laid flowers Sunday at a monument to Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, calling its work “extremely important,” days after the agency was accused of unprecedented hacking of U.S. agencies. Marking its 100th anniversary and Security Services Workers’ Day, he had high praise for the “the difficult professional operations that have been conducted” by Russian security agencies.

A blizzard of recent legislation in the State Duma has made it harder to protest, easier to target opposition figures and activists and has given authorities broad scope to brand individuals as “foreign agents,” with five-year jail penalties for failure to meet reporting requirements. The government is also moving to curb foreign Internet sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Under new laws, Putin has immunity from prosecution for life, and information about the financial and personal affairs of millions of members of Russian intelligence bodies, security agencies, the judiciary, law-enforcement and regulatory agencies and the military — and their relatives — is classified.

This elite, central to Putin’s power, has been targeted for corruption investigations by Alexei Navalny, Russia’s main opposition figure and Putin’s only political rival. Some of the new laws appear aimed at him and his colleagues at his Anti-Corruption Foundation.

“It’s a captured state. Putin is forever. He will not step down,” said Vladislav Inozemtsev, a political analyst with the Moscow-based Centre for Research on Post-Industrial Societies and an associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you’re staying another 15 or 20 years in the Kremlin, you should tighten everything, because protests are definitely not declining. And therefore this turn to authoritarianism was absolutely obvious, and it will go further and further.”

Putin maintains his grip by allowing loyalists in the military, intelligence, bureaucracy and law enforcement to guzzle Russia’s resources, Inozemtsev said. “This is a situation where this elite gang owns the country like private property and actually uses it for its enrichment.”

No event in 2020 encapsulated Putin’s alienation from the West as much as the Kremlin-directed poisoning of Navalny, apparently by the application of the deadly Novichok nerve agent to his underwear. The crime, and the government’s lies about the incident, shocked Western leaders and conveyed the new rules of the game in Russia.

“We’re seeing a shift to a more authoritarian stance, and obviously the poisoning of Navalny reflects that with a shift in the ground rules of how this regime works,” said Mark Galeotti, a London-based analyst and director of the Mayak Intelligence consultancy. “For a long time, it was a rather soft authoritarianism. It actually allowed a considerable amount of opposition activity, as long as it didn’t become threatening. I think they have decided to move the boundaries back of what is acceptable opposition activity.

“This is increasingly an aging leadership that feels increasingly beleaguered, increasingly uncertain,” he said.

The Kremlin ratcheted up its defiance after embarrassing evidence surfaced this month strongly suggesting that Russia’s domestic security agency, the FSB, had tracked Navalny from 2017, after he decided to run for president, poisoning him in August. On Tuesday, Moscow summoned the ambassadors of Germany, France and Spain to complain about European Union sanctions on Russia over Navalny and imposing tit-for-tat bans against European diplomats.

It has accused Germany of responsibility for the poisoning and demanded proof of Russian involvement in the use of Novichok, even though FSB agents in Russia destroyed the evidence left on Navalny’s clothing.

Putin did not deny that Navalny was “looked after,” apparently meaning he was followed by intelligence agents, and accusing him of collaborating with the CIA, although he added that did not mean he should be killed.

The message, analysts say, is that Navalny will not be allowed to operate as before.

“I think they won’t let him come back to Russia, or else he will pretty much be arrested on the tarmac,” Galeotti said.

Evidence of the underwear poisoning emerged when Navalny phoned a member of the FSB team involved in the attack pretending to be a senior Security Council official. Quizzed about the operation’s failure to kill Navalny, Konstantin Kudryatsev, an FSB chemical weapons expert, said it would have ended differently if the plane on which Navalny was flying had not diverted and he had not gotten timely medical care. Asked whether the poison dose had been miscalculated, he said operatives had “added a bit more” to be sure.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov retorted that Navalny had delusions of grandeur, paranoia and a “Freudian fixation” on his underwear.

Russia’s bellicose response suggests there can be no reset with NATO. But Putin last week blamed NATO for the increasingly chilly relations. Compared to the West, Russia was “white and fluffy,” a Russian idiom meaning harmless and squeaky clean, he said, accusing NATO of breaking a promise not to expand after the fall of the USSR and slamming Washington for leaving several key arms control treaties. (The United States argued Russia had been cheating.)

“Why do you think we are idiots? Why do you think we cannot see some obvious things?” Putin said at his marathon annual end-of-year news conference, addressing a BBC reporter. “We are forced to react to them.”

Putin’s rhetoric, escalating warnings of internal and external enemies, resembles an old Soviet ploy to justify internal repression and a hard-line military approach.

“As a KGB officer, he’s trying to simplify events and show that we are still under attack from the West,” Kolesnikov said.

But Moscow is leaving the door open a crack for arms control talks, if little else.

“The Biden team are not really giving signals that they’re likely to be particularly receptive to Russia, and therefore I think what the Russians are doing is to try to put a tough line on arms control, which is one of the areas where actually it looks like the Biden administration will want to make progress,” Galeotti said. “It’s fair to say it’s tough, but they’re keeping the door open for discussions.”


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Audio – New realities in Caucasus may lead to inclusive, efficient regional platform: Experts

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New realities have emerged as a result of the recent Karabakh conflict and the following cease-fire deal can result in the formation of a more productive, efficient and cooperative regional platform. It will be beneficial for all actors in the Caucasus region while the Minsk group and its western co-chairs are being left out of the new equation, experts say.

By the end of the 44-day armed conflict that started in late September, Azerbaijan recaptured many settlements in the Nagorno-Karabakh region and surrounding areas from the nearly three-decade occupation of Armenia. Turkey and Russia have also taken the role of peacekeepers by deploying troops to the region following the cease-fire deal signed on Nov. 10.

Tutku Dilaver, an analyst at the Ankara-based Eurasian Studies Center (AVIM), said given the new realities in the Caucasus region, a more inclusive platform with the participation of regional actors rather than the existing Minsk Group would create much more positive results.

“Under the light of recent developments, it can be easily said the Minsk Group has been excluded from the process due to its failure to produce solutions or perspectives,” she added.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group, co-chaired by France, Russia and the U.S., was formed in 1992 to find a peaceful solution to the conflict but to no avail.

While Azerbaijan won on the field, all regional actors can be counted as winners when analyzing from a wider perspective, Elnur Ismayil, a Caucasus expert, said while singling out Western countries as the losers.

It was proven that most Western parties aimed to preserve the status quo in favor of Armenia, and the Minsk group’s co-chairs, France and the U.S., were completely ineffective in creating a solution for the latest crisis, he explained. “Disturbed by the involvement of the Western countries in the region, Russia favors Turkey’s proposal that regional issues should be resolved by regional actors.”

“I think, the losers of this agreement are Armenia, Iran and the West while the winners of this agreement are Azerbaijan, Turkey and mostly Russia,” said Ümit Nazmi Hazır, a political scientist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Earlier this month during a visit to Azerbaijan’s capital Baku, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan proposed a six-country regional cooperation platform including Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Georgia and Armenia, saying it could be a win-win initiative for all regional actors in the Caucasus.

Another point Dilaver highlighted was that the West has lost its sphere of influence in Armenia due to the changing balances of power in the region.

“Within this context, Russia’s worry that it had been surrounded by the West in the Caucasus has been relieved for a while. Going forward, the U.S. and France’s place in the new format that will be established for a permanent peace deal is unclear. But we can say the necessity of the Minsk Group co-chairs was completely abolished after it became clear that France had lost its neutrality.”

The Minsk Group was supposed to be neutral on the issue but Paris fiercely supported Yerevan during the conflict. Earlier this month, France’s National Assembly approved a resolution calling on the government to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh under the control of separatist Armenian forces as a “republic.”

Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan but was under Armenian occupation since a separatist war there ended in 1994. That conflict left the predominantly Armenian populated Nagorno-Karabakh region and substantial surrounding territories in Yerevan’s hands. Heavy fighting erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan in late September in the biggest escalation of the decades-old conflict, killing more than 5,600 people on both sides.

The Russia-brokered agreement ended the recent fighting in which the Azerbaijani army routed Armenia’s forces. The cease-fire deal stipulated that Yerevan hand over some areas it held outside Nagorno-Karabakh’s borders. Baku also retained control over the areas of Nagorno-Karabakh that it had taken during the armed conflict.

Regional projects

Another point that experts agreed on was the possibility of new opportunities for joint projects with the participation of all regional actors.

Hazır said the new status quo paves the way for building relations with Armenia.

“Both Turkey and Azerbaijan can benefit from the normalization of their relations with Armenia. This also can change the status quo in favor of Turkey in the long-run. Moreover, it is important for Turkey to maintain good relations with Ukraine and Georgia to be more effective over Eurasia, even though some authors in Russia do not enjoy Turkey’s improving relations with Ukraine,” he said.

Ismayıl also underlined that new realities in the region have opened the door for Armenia to join new regional and international projects in the following period. “If they do not choose the wrong policies again, Armenia’s reopening borders with Turkey in the near future can be an important development for the Armenian economy,” he said.

Like others, Dilaver highlighted future opportunities for joint regional projects that can be beneficial for all actors with the participation of Armenia. She warned, however, that such projects can be put into action in the long-term.

Turkey’s new role

Regarding Turkey’s role in the new equation, Dilaver added that these new developments would shape the new realpolitik in the region and Ankara will become an important actor by taking a major role in the establishment of a permanent peace thanks to its bilateral cooperations with both Russia and Azerbaijan.

Turkey’s recent proactive policies in the region led to positive results in the Karabakh conflict, Ismayil said, while underlining Ankara’s diplomatic, military and psychological support to Azerbaijan since the beginning of the war.

“As you know, Turkey explicitly expressed its support for Azerbaijan as soon as the war began. This was important in terms of the rising motivation of the Azerbaijani nation and army. Turkey’s attitude has brought Azerbaijan and Turkey closer. What’s more, Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan bears importance for Iranian Turks. Turkey is a historical and significant actor in the Caucasus,” Hazır also said.

Ankara-Moscow cooperation

While Turkey expanded its role in the Caucasus, Russia will be its main partner for the implementation of stability and security in the region, experts say.

Around 2,000 Russian peacekeepers have been deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh under the terms of the deal and are expected to stay in the region for at least five years. The Turkish Parliament also last month overwhelmingly approved the deployment of Turkish peacekeeping troops to Azerbaijan after Turkey and Russia signed an agreement for establishing a joint center to monitor the cease-fire in the region. The mandate allows Turkish forces to be stationed at a security center for one year. Azerbaijan has been pushing for its close ally Turkey to play a central role in the implementation of the agreement, as Ankara pledged full support for Baku during fighting in the region.

Ismayil noted that the agreement between the Defense Ministries of Turkey and Russia determined the main functions of this center to jointly monitor the implementation of the Karabakh cease-fire deal.

“When we analyze the issue in-depth, it was said following the signing of the deal that the Russian and Turkish troops would come to the region as peacekeepers under equal circumstances, but this has not been put into practice yet. Turkey and Russia will also cooperate for the solution of other regional problems in addition to the Caucasus. This experience was expected to be applied in the Caucasus. During the period following the end of the war, this cooperation will evolve into different dimensions,” he said.

Regarding the cooperation between Turkey, Russia and Azerbaijan in the region, Dilaver said it will open doors for other partnerships.

“A relationship based on realpolitik has been established between Russia and Turkey. As (Russia’s President) Vladimir Putin stated, the two countries have the potential to have discussions at the negotiation table and take steps together, even though they do not share the same opinions on every issue. It can be said this cooperation platform is very important for the resolution of regional issues.”

Turkey and Russia demonstrated they are capable of meeting on common ground and cooperating even in competing regions, Hazır said, adding: “On the other hand, I would like to underline that since the Nagorno-Karabakh war began in 2020, many experts and authors in Russia’s media have discussed Turkey’s rising influence over the region by way of its good relations with Azerbaijan and Ukraine. They have argued that the rising influence of Turkey could undermine Russia’s influence over the region in the long-run.”

“Now, Turkey and Russia are the most significant actors in Southern Caucasus. However, I’d like to underline that Russia is still a hegemonic power in the Caucasus. At his annual press conference this year, Putin underlined that the status of Karabakh should remain unchanged. This means that Russia does not want to change the current status-quo in Karabakh and Russian troops will remain in Karabakh for many years. Russia may want to stay permanently in Karabakh,” he added.

Ismayil also underlined the fact that although Russia seems to be in cooperation with Turkey, it also aims to use this opportunity for its own interests and Moscow is disturbed by the presence of Ankara as a rival actor in the region.

“Countries must determine their strategies accordingly. The fact that Turkey is an emerging power and Russia is a country facing more problems must also be remembered,” he said.


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Time for Moscow to Move on and Stop Thinking so Much About Washington

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Time for Moscow to Move on and Stop Thinking so Much About Washington

As we shoulder our way through the avalanche of “what will Biden mean for Russia” speculation, it is striking that these come as often from Russian as Western sources. And of course, the future of this relationship is important but the tone of Russian commentary says as much about the problematic way the country it views itself as what may happen in the U.S.

Of course, American discussions of Russia are often hyperbolic and blinkered — for too long, to talk about Russia inside the Washington Beltway was as much as anything else to be talking about Donald Trump, and whether you believed he was a Moscow-installed puppet or the victim of ‘Russiagate’ slander. But Russian discussion of America has its own blinkers.

In the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, for example, Sergei Karaganov, one of Moscow’s heavyweight foreign policy experts, has just delivered an ode to Russia’s need, in his words, to stop being on the defensive and “offer ourselves to Eurasia and everyone as the leader of what is normal, national, sovereign, peaceful.” 

After all, Russia, in his view, not only stands for all this, but has historically been the country which, “through military-political containment, blocks the road to those who unleash the wars’ that so blight the world.”

It is a full-throated call for this “nation of victors” to assert itself in the world, but what is interesting is against whom it is pushing back. It is “against hegemonism in politics”, it is against the “transnationalists,” the “liberals”, although their form of liberalism is instead an attempt to “impose a semi-totalitarian, unified ideology.”

Although there is an obvious nod to the debauched decadence of “Gayropa,” this is clearly about resisting the hegemonic pressure of the United States, and its European proxies and minions. And this is a struggle which Russia must not just join, but lead.

At a time when other Russian experts are advocating caution, it is striking to encounter such determination – desperation — to be an equal to the United States, to regain its position as the other pole of the world. 

Russia has not just past glories, but present strengths and future prospects. 

However, the thought of being able to attain such comparability with a country with an economy twelve times as large (and even in terms of GDP per capita, more than five times the size), Even allowing for Russia’s ‘hidden’ spending and greater relative purchasing power, the U.S. still has a defense budget outstripping it by leagues, and despite its recent travails, more soft power at that.

But the real point is not whether Russia could seek to equate itself to the U.S. so much as should it. Recall the fury when Barack Obama — clumsily — called Russia a “regional power.” There is nothing wrong with being a significant nation, with some global interests and more regional ones, yet no claims to more than that.

The Soviet Union spent itself into the grave trying to keep up with the Americans in the arms race (the United States pretty much bankrupted itself too, but could afford to). Why would post-Soviet Russia want to engage in a new ideological race?

Empire, hegemony, global leadership, call it what you will, this is a ridiculously expensive and intrinsically uneconomic pursuit. It is not one Russia can afford, and there is little evidence Russia – as opposed to the Kremlin and certain members of the commentariat – is interested, either.

There is a reason why Moscow relied on hirelings and adventurers in the Donbass, mercenaries and airpower in Syria. 

Russians applauded the annexation of Crimea, a piece of land they felt had always rightfully been theirs, but that does not scale up. The evidence from polls and vox pops alike is that they have no enthusiasm for a grand global mission which means boys coming home in zinc boxes and money that could be building roads in Rostov and clinics in Kamchatka spent instead on foreign bases and ideological outreach.

Surveyed, 71% of Russians think their country is mainly or definitely a “great power.” And they are right, but their terms of reference may not be the Kremlin’s. After all, 47% express positive feelings towards the U.S. and only 41% negative. This is not the stuff of global crusades.

Just get over it

Attempts to match America — especially at a time when China is rising fast as another geopolitical power and national model — is a terrible act of self-harm. 

It distracts attention and resources from urgently-needed domestic reform and reconstruction. It plays to the conspiracy-minded silovik mindset that seeks to divide the country between loyalists and traitors and in the process poisons the scope for genuine debate.

And it is doomed to fail. Arguably, America’s global status is itself on the wane. 

Whether the Biden presidency can do more than repair some of the worst damage to its international standing from four years of Trumpish dilettantism remains to be seen, but this is not just a one-term malaise. Washington’s capacity to shape the world, always over-hyped, is increasingly open to question.

This obsession with the United States, with the need to challenge a mythical ideological offensive, is little more than a mirror-image of the Washington perspective that sees itself locked in a normative struggle with Moscow, the white-Stetson champion of freedom and democracy against the black-hat authoritarians.

But the big difference is – especially as Trump sulks his way towards the exit — Moscow matters much less to Washington than vice versa. A rising China, restoring transatlantic ties, rebuilding the State Department — frankly, all these are likely to have a greater priority for the Biden administration.

To Moscow, though, like a jilted lover obsessively stalking an old flame, everything is still about America. Even when embracing China, for all the talk of strategic partnership, it is peeking round to see if Washington has noticed.

On one level, this is understandable: even for the Soviet Union, the “Main Enemy” was also the yardstick by which it measured itself.

A Russia that is happy being what it is, would be no bad thing. This not only makes it easier to adopt the more pragmatic and moderate foreign policy so many have advocated, it also avoids wasting scarce resources on prestige projects and risky adventures. 

It’s also healthier for the national psyche. It’s time to move on.

The views expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of The Moscow Times.


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Ex-journalist Safronov charged with treason to remain detained until March

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Ex-journalist Safronov charged with treason to remain detained until March

13:27 30/11/2020

MOSCOW, November 30 (RAPSI) – Moscow’s Lefortovsky District Court on Monday extended detention of ex-newspaper journalist Ivan Safronov charged with treason until March 7 upon an investigator’s motion, the court’s press service told RAPSI.

Safronov was arrested and detained in early July 2020. According to the Roscosmos press service, his arrest was not connected with the work in the company. Treason charges were brought against him on July 13.

Investigators claim Safronov has transmitted secret military information to the Czech intelligence services which, as it known, are linked to the U.S. security agencies. The defendant pleads not guilty.

The former reporter of Kommersant and Vedomosti newspapers was appointed as advisor of Dmitry Rogozin in May 2020 after a scandal related to the publication of an explosive article about possible resignation of the Federation Council head Valentina Matviyenko.


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