Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 02, 2017 12:49 pm

Off Putin’s Information War?

Helsinki has emerged as a resilient front against Kremlin spin. But can its successes be translated to the rest of Europe?


BY REID STANDISH
MARCH 1, 2017
With elections coming up this year in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and perhaps Italy, European intelligence services across the Continent have been sounding the alarm about Russian attempts to influence the outcome though targeted disinformation and propaganda, as they appeared to do in the U.S. presidential election.

That brand of information war can range from pushing fake news stories and conspiracy theories to fanning the flames of existing problems — all serving to undermine public confidence in governments and institutions. Elsewhere in the Baltics and former Soviet Union, Russian-linked disinformation has worked to stoke panic and force local governments into knee-jerk, counterproductive responses that have boosted Kremlin goals across the region.

But in the face of this mounting pressure, one of Russia’s neighbors has emerged unusually resistant to the wider information war waged by Moscow across Europe: Finland.

Like other countries along the Baltic Sea or in Eastern Europe, Finland has seen a notable increase in fake news stories and propaganda targeted against it that can be linked back to Russia since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. These attacks have sought to undermine the government and often coincided with military shows of force along the Russian border.

But unlike its neighbors, Helsinki reckons it has the tools to effectively resist any information attack from its eastern neighbor. Finnish officials believe their country’s strong public education system, long history of balancing Russia, and a comprehensive government strategy allow it to deflect coordinated propaganda and disinformation.

“The best way to respond is less by correcting the information, and more about having your own positive narrative and sticking to it,” Jed Willard, director of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Center for Global Engagement at Harvard, told Foreign Policy. Willard, who is currently working for the Swedish government, was hired by Finnish officials to help them develop a public diplomacy program to understand and identify why false information goes viral and how to counter propaganda.

That initiative started at the top. In October 2015, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto took the first step, when he acknowledged that information warfare is real for Finland, and said that it was the duty of every citizen to combat it. In January 2016, the prime minister’s office enrolled 100 officials in a program across several levels of the Finnish government to identify and understand the spread of disinformation based on Willard’s advice.

Lots of governments in the West don’t have the same kind of narrative to respond with as does Helsinki.
.

A homogeneous country of 5.4 million people, Finland routinely ranks at the top of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s quality of life metrics and, in addition to strong social welfare programs, the country’s education system is the best in the world, according to the World Economic Forum.

Willard says this combination of widespread critical thinking skills among the Finnish population and a coherent government response makes a strong defense against concerted outside efforts to skew reality and undermine faith in institutions.

“This stuff is real. It is as real as war,” said Willard. “But the Finns very quickly realized this and got out in front of the problem.”

René Nyberg, a former Finnish ambassador to Moscow, says Finland has a couple of key advantages when it comes to parrying Russian disinformation. Helsinki is painfully well-versed in dealing with Russia, as it has had to do through war and annexation, and most recently the decades-long staring match of the Cold War. That left Finland with a sober understanding of the Kremlin’s real motives. Plus, it helps that Finland is not Russia’s main target when it comes to undermining European unity.

“The real intensity is Germany … Merkel is the main course,” Nyberg told FP. “We’re just a side dish.”

The case of the false “Lisa story” in Germany from January 2016 is often cited as a textbook example of Moscow’s modern information capabilities. Russian-language media reported allegations that a 13-yearold Russian-German girl had been raped by migrants in Berlin before local authorities had time to verify the information; those Russian reports were then picked up by mainstream news media in Germany and elsewhere. When the story was finally debunked, subsequent accusations of a cover-up by Berlin were reported by Channel One, Russia’s prime state TV station, and were even hinted at by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who said the incident “was hushed up for a long time for some reason” during a press conference. The spread of the false story also prompted protests across the country by anti-immigrant groups and Russian Germans.

Experts say it’s nearly impossible to track the extent to which these pro-Russian positions are directly shaped by the Kremlin. Indeed, to be most effective, Moscow does not invent issues out of whole cloth, they say. Instead, disinformation attacks seek to inflame existing tensions by putting out viral web stories that would then be republished by local news outlets and on social media to distort political debates about wedge issues like the European Union, immigration, and NATO.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Finnish President Sauli Niinnisto during a working visit to Finland on July 1, 2016. (Photo by Juhani Kandell/ Office of the President of Finland)
Weaponizing information has a long history in Russia, and the Kremlin ran an extensive operation to subvert the West in Soviet times. In an age of social media where news can quickly spread around the globe, Russia deployed its arsenal of trolls, propaganda, and false information to a new level that has allowed Moscow to perfect its techniques over the last decade. These techniques have even become enshrined in official Kremlin doctrine.

But responding to such tactics can often backfire and risks replicating the Kremlin-backed narrative. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — as well as other former Soviet countries like Ukraine and Georgia — have been less successful in pushing back against Russian disinformation.

Pro-Russian media, including the state-owned Channel One, already reach huge numbers of homes across the former Soviet Union. In the Baltic states, which have large Russian-speaking minorities, attempts to restrict or ban Russian broadcasters, websites, or journalists have often polarized relations with the local Russian community and given more material for Kremlin-backed propaganda and disinformation. In Ukraine and Georgia, Russian propaganda often amplifies and distorts the very real problem of state corruption, seeking to destroy confidence in pro-Western political parties.

In contrast, Finland, which ranks as the world’s third-least corrupt country according to Transparency International, and which has only a tiny Russian-speaking population, has fewer obvious targets to be exploited. In March 2016, the Finnish-language bureau for Sputnik, the state-funded Russian media outlet, closed after it failed to attract enough readers.

“Nothing has been very harmful for the public so far,” Markku Mantila, director general for government communications at the Finnish prime minister’s office, told FP. “Finns are well-educated and because of that, we are very resilient to such attempts.”

But Finland does have one thing that drives the Kremlin to distraction: an 830-mile border with Russia. Fears over NATO’s eastward expansion — including, potentially, to Finland — are behind much of Russia’s aggressive posture toward the West.

Finnish officials claim to have documented 20 disinformation campaigns against their country that have come directly from the Kremlin. Those attempts tend to focus on a narrow but sensitive topic: Helsinki’s carefully balanced relations with Moscow.

After two wars with Russia in two years in the 1940s, Finland during the Cold War followed a carefully crafted policy of neutrality, allowing it to balance integration with Europe while maintaining good relations with the Soviet giant next door. The country refrained from joining NATO and often bowed to Moscow’s wishes to preserve its independence, a stance that some Western detractors condemned as too accommodating to the Soviets. Cold Warriors even dubbed it, derisively, “Finlandization.”

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Helsinki quickly distanced itself from its Cold War legacy, but the country’s policymakers still walk a tightrope with Russia.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Helsinki quickly distanced itself from its Cold War legacy, but the country’s policymakers still walk a tightrope with Russia.

Public opinion on NATO membership is strongly divided, making Finland an important target for Russia as it seeks to influence the public discourse of its neighbors and sow divisions in Europe.

Russian disinformation campaigns have spun a narrative of the Finnish government discriminating against ethnic Russians. In February, reports of dual Russian-Finnish citizens being rejected from military and foreign service jobs became a talking point in pro-Kremlin media in Russia. A measure discussed in Finnish parliament to prevent Russian citizens from owning land near military sites also rallied the pro-Kremlin propaganda machine. A similar line of attack, which has involved doctored photos, saw Kremlin outlets accuse Finnish authorities of child abduction in disputes arising over child welfare and custody battles for Finnish-Russian marriages. The accusations, which Finnish officials deny, first materialized in 2012, but continue to flare up — giving Russian lawmakers more opportunity to make inflammatory statements about their neighbor.

“It’s not just about Finland’s relationship with Russia,” Saara Jantunen, the author of Info-War, a book about Russian disinformation in Finland, told FP. “It’s about showing what kind of rhetoric in Finnish society and the media is acceptable.”

Left: Finnish investigative journalist Jessikka Aro. (Photo courtesy of Jessikka Aro). Right: Johan Backman during a television appearance on the Russian-state network RT in 2014. (Photo by YouTube/RT)
One noticeable aspect of the Kremlin’s approach in other parts of Europe is to support anti-establishment forces, which often parrot pro-Russian positions. A similar dynamic is at play in the case of Jessikka Aro, an investigative journalist for the social media division of Finland’s state broadcaster, Yle Kioski.

In 2014, Aro followed up on reports of a Russian “troll factory” in St. Petersburg that was seeking to influence public opinion in the West about Kremlin maneuvers abroad. After she published her initial investigation, which documented how pro-Russian voices were attempted to shape the public discourse on Ukraine, her name appeared on Russian nationalist websites where she was derided as a Western intelligence agent, bombarded with anonymous abusive messages on social media, and labeled a drug dealer.

The man who became the main voice targeting Aro was Johan Backman. An outspoken supporter of the Kremlin who is fluent in Russian, Backman — a Finn — was responsible for the bulk of the derisive commentary that appeared about Aro. Backman serves as the representative in Northern Europe for the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a state-funded research group known for its Kremlin connections during the Cold War and currently led by a Soviet-era intelligence officer. Backman has defended his commentary as free speech.

MV-lehti — a Finnish-language news site hosted abroad that is known for its right-wing, anti-immigrant, and anti-EU views — also produced some of the false information about Aro. Ilja Janitskin, the news site’s founder and head who lives in Spain, told the New York Times in 2016 that he had no connections to Moscow. Still, both men are currently being investigated by Finnish police for harassment and hate speech for targeting Aro.
Finnish authorities have been trying to extradite Janitskin from Spain, but he is currently on the run.
Finnish authorities have been trying to extradite Janitskin from Spain, but he is currently on the run.


Adding another layer to the case, the Helsinki police department announced in October 2016 that an employee from Yle, the Finnish broadcaster for whom Aro works, is suspected of providing the information that was later used to defame her. The case is awaiting a date in court.

Aro told FP that she became a target because her reporting brought into question Helsinki’s traditionally measured line with Moscow.

“NATO is at the core of everything,” Aro said. “The goal of these campaigns is to discredit the voices in Finland that are critical of Russia.”
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/01/why ... ation-war/
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Nordic » Fri Mar 03, 2017 3:26 am

And now the Dems are so stupid and corrupt they're even trotting out GWB like he's some kind of hero and cheering him on as some sort of wise sage and truth-teller.

Can't believe I was ever in that party.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:42 am

wake up and smell the kekc


Russian Hackers May Now Be Mucking With European Elections

France, Germany, and the Netherlands could be vulnerable.

AJ VICENSFEB. 27, 2017 6:00 AM

When the US intelligence community released a report in early January laying out the evidence for Russian meddling in the US election, US officials warned that this wasn't a one-off attack, and that Russia could soon set its hacker corps loose to disrupt elections in other countries. "Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future efforts worldwide," the report said, "including against US allies and their election processes."

Putin didn't wait long to fulfill that prediction. On February 22, the Moscow Times reported that the Russian government had "created a new military unit to conduct 'information operations' against Russia's foes." Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said, when announcing the unit, that "propaganda should be smart, competent and effective." There's no concrete evidence yet, but it appears that Russia may be now attempting to weaken NATO and to divide Europe by destabilizing elections in France and Germany, two of the EU's strongest members.

"This form of interference in French democratic life is unacceptable and I denounce it," Jean-Marc Ayrault, France's minister of foreign affairs, said on February 19 in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche, a French newspaper. "The French will not accept that their choices are dictated to them," he said while discussing Russian actions in Europe and attempts to weaken non pro-Russian candidates ahead of the country's presidential election in May.

Ayrault was responding to reports that the Russian government may have been targeting the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, a centrist "pro-liberal and pro-Europe" candidate who has a chance of defeating Marine Le Pen, a right-wing nationalist, in the hotly contested French presidential elections this May. Le Pen has promised to pull France out of the European Union, and, much like Donald Trump, has advocated a better relationship with the Russian government. Macron's campaign has said its computer systems have been attacked, and that "fake news"—that include allegations of a homosexual affair and attempts to connect Macron with American financial interests and Hillary Clinton—has been spread throughout France by Russian-owned media, such as Sputnik and RT.

Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at UCLA and an expert on Russian politics, says "it certainly seems plausible" that the Russian government would attempt to interfere in the European elections, as it's alleged to have done in the US.

"[Putin] is quite skeptical about the possibility of building strong friendships or cooperation in the future with the elites of western Europe," Treisman tells Mother Jones. "He feels that they've taken a very anti-Russian line, so he's reaching out to other forces who are also opposed to the European elites." Among those so-called Western European elites, are German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and Macron in France. Part of Putin's plan could be to keep the west distracted "with its own problems" so it is "less able to cohesively oppose what he's done in Ukraine," Treisman says.

The French government's top figures reportedly had internal discussions about cyber threats to its presidential election, and earlier this year the official in charge of security for the nation's ruling party told Politico that the country's leading politicians and political campaigns "have received no awareness training at all about espionage and hacking," and that "we are not at all up to the level of the potential threat." The Russian government has denied that it is working to meddle in the French elections, just as it denied meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

"We didn't have, and do not have, any intention of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries," Kremlin spokesman Dmirtry Peskov told reporters on February 14. "That there is a hysterical anti-[President Vladimir] Putin campaign in certain countries abroad is an obvious fact."

Worries aren't limited to the French elections, which will be held in April and May. The head of the German foreign intelligence service said in November that its next election cycle could be buffeted with the same sort of misinformation and cyber-attacks that plagued the US elections. "We have evidence that cyber-attacks are taking place that have no purpose other than to elicit political uncertainty," said Bruno Kahl, the president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (the German foreign intelligence service), according to the Guardian. Angela Merkel said at the time that "such cyber-attacks, or hybrid conflicts as they are known in Russian doctrine, are now part of daily life and we must learn to cope with them." Merkel's hard line against Putin in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and strong support of the European Union are among the reasons that she could be targeted by Russia before her reelection vote in September.

And in the Netherlands, Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders told Politico on January 12 that he didn't have "concrete evidence" interference had taken place, but he wasn't "naive" to the fact that it could happen at some point ahead of that country's March 15 election, wherein Rutte is being challenged by Geert Wilders. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Russian government, among other countries, had "tried hundreds of times in recent months to penetrate the computers of Dutch government agencies and businesses."

Far-right MP Wilders—a vehement opponent of Islam and a strong contender to be the Netherlands next prime minister—has also called for leaving the EU, but he may not be as pro-Putin as Le Pen and Trump. Nevertheless, Dutch officials have said they will count all election ballots by hand due to worries about manipulation of electronic vote counting machines.

Treisman says what happens next in terms of Russia and the European elections is "all up in the air, in part because we don't know what the US administration is going to end up doing" with regard to its policy toward Russia.

Trump has repeatedly said that he's hoping for a good working relationship with Putin, but offered mixed and confusing signals during the campaign about what he thought about Putin's actions in the Ukraine and his annexing of Crimea in 2014. During her first full day on the job, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley condemned Russian violence in eastern Ukraine and called for "an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea." Trump has rattled European allies by praising Brexit and calling NATO "obsolete," but members of his cabinet have reaffirmed the US commitment to a strong NATO, which is one of Putin's main points of contention with the west.

While it makes sense to watch all of this and try to discern a pattern in Putin's strategy, Treisman says, "I don't think he has this clear over-arching agenda, that he's out to expand Russia's borders or achieve anything very concrete. I think he's just looking for ways to resist pressures he sees coming from the west and increase his influence, and his options, and his friends worldwide."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -elections
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 25, 2017 8:14 am

Russian Cyberspies Hacked Us For Two Years: Danish Defense Minister
Danish Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen said it’s a “constant battle” to keep hackers away.
By Kim Bellware
A Russian cyberespionage group hacked into the emails of Danish Defense Ministry employees for two years, the country’s defense minister says.

In an interview on Sunday with the Danish paper Berlingske, Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen said the Russian hacker group ATP28 accessed department employees’ emails in 2015 and 2016. While no classified information was breached, Frederiksen characterized the hack as serious.

“It is linked to the intelligence services or central elements in the Russian government, and it is a constant battle to keep them away,” Frederiksen said in the interview.

U.S. Intelligence officials consider ATP28 ― also known as “Fancy Bear” ― to be linked to the Russian government, if not an outright agent of the Kremlin. Officials believe the same group hacked the Democratic National Committee and tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Denmark, a NATO member, is the latest in a line of nations ― including the U.S., Ukraine, Georgia and Germany ― to accuse Russian hackers of cyberespionage.

The Danish Defense Ministry confirmed to Reuters that Frederiksen was accurately quoted, but didn’t provide further details. The Kremlin didn’t respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza, a spokeswoman for the Department of Defense, deferred to Frederiksen’s remarks but added: “[The] DoD supports the U.S. interagency consensus that Russia has been interfering in Western democratic processes, and we have no reason to believe that Russia will discontinue such activities.”

Frederiksen had warned of the likelihood of a Russian cyberattack in January, after the Danish Defense Intelligence Service issued a 2016 national risk assessment report. Though the report did not specifically single out Russia, it indicated that Denmark was at high risk of cybercrime and a cyberattack by a “foreign government.”

The Russian government was likely to “get involved in our democratic processes” the same way it allegedly did in the U.S., Frederiksen told Berlingske earlier this year.

Frederiksen said the defense ministry must strengthen its email and other cyberprotections in response to the hacking.

This story has been updated with a comment from the U.S. Department of Defense.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rus ... 9cb917ae7b



French election: Russian hackers ‘targeted Emmanuel Macron camp’
'Serious' attempt made to snoop on private campaign correspondence, say researchers from Japanese anti-virus firm Trend Micro

Raphael Satter Tuesday 25 April 2017 10:30

Emmanuel Macron wins First round of French presidential elections Rex
Researchers with the Japanese anti-virus firm Trend Micro say the campaign of French presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron has been targeted by Russia-linked hackers, adding a little more detail to previous suggestions that the centrist politician was being singled out for electronic eavesdropping by the Kremlin.

The campaign's digital chief, Mounir Mahjoubi, confirmed the attempted intrusions in a telephone interview late Monday but said they had all been thwarted.

“It's serious, but nothing was compromised,” he said.

The attempts to penetrate the Macron campaign date back to December, Mahjoubi said. The campaign previously complained of being targeted by electronic spying operations that it hinted had their origins in Russia but offered little evidence to back the assertion at the time. Trend Micro's report, which was produced independently of the Macron campaign and lists 160 attempts at electronic espionage across a series of targets, adds a measure of evidence to the claim, saying hackers set up a bogus website to harvest the passwords of Macron campaign staffers.

​Mahjoubi confirmed that the bogus site was one of several emailed to campaign workers over the past few months.

Trend Micro attributed the online spying campaign to an extremely prolific group it calls Pawn Storm, which American spy agencies have in turn accused of acting as an arm of Russia's intelligence apparatus. TrendMicro itself stopped short of saying who was behind the group, in line with common practice among security firms. French officials have also tended to be more circumspect than their American counterparts, repeatedly declining to tie Pawn Storm to any specific actor.

Russian government officials have repeatedly denied claims of state-sanctioned hacking.

The French election, the first round of which Macron won Sunday with just over 24 percent of the vote, has been closely watched for signs of digital interference of any kind. Many observers feared a repeat of the U.S. electoral contest in 2016, when hackers allegedly backed by Moscow broke into the email inboxes of the Democratic National Committee and other political operatives. Pilfered documents subsequently appeared on WikiLeaks and other more mysterious websites, putting the Democrats on the defensive during their losing campaign against Donald Trump.

Some feared that Macron, a centrist politician facing off against several pro-Russia candidates, would suffer the same treatment. Nothing of the sort seems to have happened so far, but the second round of France's presidential contest pitting Macron against Kremlin-friendly far right leader Marine Le Pen is still two weeks away.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 00721.html


Cyber spies target German party think-tanks ahead of election

By Eric Auchard | FRANKFURT
Two foundations tied to Germany’s ruling coalition parties were attacked by the same cyber spy group that targeted the campaign of French presidential favorite Emmanuel Macron, a leading cyber security expert said on Tuesday.

The group, dubbed "Pawn Storm" by security firm Trend Micro, used email phishing tricks and attempted to install malware at think tanks tied to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Feike Hacquebord said.

Hacquebord and other experts said the attacks, which took place in March and April, suggest Pawn Storm is seeking to influence the national elections in the two European Union powerhouses.

"I am not sure whether those foundations are the actual target. It could be that they used it as a stepping stone to target, for example, the CDU or the SPD," Hacquebord said.

The mysterious cyber spying group, also known as Fancy Bear and APT 28, was behind data breaches of U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Merkel’s party last year, Hacquebord said.

Other security experts and former U.S. government officials link it to the Russian military intelligence directorate GRU. Hacquebord and Trend Micro have stopped short of making that connection.

Russia has denied any involvement in the cyber attacks.

Since 2014, Merkel has pushed the European Union to maintain sanctions on Russia over its actions in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Her coalition partners, the Social Democrats, back a more conciliatory stance towards Moscow.

"What we are seeing is kind of a replication of what happened in the United States," David Grout, a Paris-based technical director of U.S. cyber security firm FireEye, said of technical attacks and efforts to spread fake news in Europe.

Hacquebord said on Monday he had found new evidence that Macron's campaign was targeted by Pawn Storm. (goo.gl/8Ja2Bq)

FAKE SERVERS

German officials have told Reuters that politicians fear sensitive emails stolen from senior lawmakers by Russian hackers in 2015 could be released before the election to damage Merkel, who is seeking a fourth term, and her conservative party.

Trend Micro uncovered efforts to break into the accounts of CDU politicians in April and May, 2016. The BSI, Germany's federal cyber security agency confirmed these attempts but said they were unsuccessful. New attacks in 2017 suggest renewed efforts to gain comprising data is underway, Hacquebord said.

Pawn Storm set up a fake computer server located based in Germany at kasapp.de to mount email phishing attacks against the CDU party's Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and a server located in the Ukraine at intern-fes.de to target the SPD's Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES).

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A KAS spokesman said BSI warned KAS in early March of "peculiarities" but that a subsequent network scan by the government cyber security agency found "nothing suspicious".

The BSI declined to comment, as did the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed allegations of Russian involvement.

"We would be pleased if this investigative group sent us the information, and then we could check it," Peskov told reporters on Tuesday. "Because for now it does not go beyond the boundaries of some anonymous people."

Trend Micro published a 41-page report charting Pawn Storm attacks over the past two years, building on a dozen previous technical reports (goo.gl/WvjuLv). A timeline can be downloaded here (goo.gl/npY0OJ).

(Additional reporting by Peter Maushagen in Frankfurt, Andreas Rinke and Andrea Shalal in Berlin and Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow; Editing by Richard Lough)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-germa ... SKBN17R273
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 22, 2017 4:17 pm

LETTER FROM RUSSIA
MAY 29, 2017 ISSUE
PUTIN’S SHADOW CABINET AND THE BRIDGE TO CRIMEA
Why the Russian President’s childhood judo partner is leading the country’s most ambitious construction project.
By Joshua Yaffa

The Crimean bridge, which is being built by Arkady Rotenberg, spans twelve miles and will cost billions of dollars. Putin sees the project as a key marker of Russia’s resurgence on the global stage.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDER GRONSKY FOR THE NEW YORKER

In the spring of 2014, President Vladimir Putin delivered an address in St. George Hall, a chandeliered ballroom in the Kremlin, to celebrate the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. “Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of our people,” he declared, to a standing ovation. Despite Putin’s triumphal language, the annexation presented Russia with a formidable logistical challenge: Crimea’s physical isolation. Crimea, which is roughly the size of Massachusetts, is a landscape of sandy beaches and verdant mountains that juts into the Black Sea. It’s connected to Ukraine by a narrow isthmus to the north but is separated from Russia by a stretch of water called the Kerch Strait. Ukraine, to which Crimea had belonged, viewed Russia’s occupation as illegal, and had sealed off access to the peninsula, closing the single road to commercial traffic and shutting down the rail lines.

In response, Putin convened a council of engineers, construction experts, and government officials to look at options for connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland. They considered more than ninety possibilities, including an undersea tunnel, before deciding to build a bridge. The Russian state is notoriously inefficient at following through on the quotidian details of government administration; its more natural mode is building projects of tremendous scale. In keeping with this tradition of expanse, and expense, the bridge would span nearly twelve miles, making it the longest in the country, and would cost more than three billion dollars. When completed, it would symbolically cement Russia’s control over the territory and demonstrate the country’s reëmergence as a geopolitical power willing to challenge the post-Cold War order.

The bridge would be a demanding and technically complex project, however, and at first there were doubts about who would be willing to undertake it. Then, in January, 2015, the Russian government announced that Arkady Rotenberg, a sixty-three-year-old magnate with interests in construction, banking, transportation, and energy, would direct the project. In retrospect, the choice was obvious, almost inevitable. Rotenberg’s personal wealth is estimated at more than two and a half billion dollars, and the bulk of his income derives from state contracts, mostly to build thousands of miles of roads and natural-gas pipelines and other infrastructure projects. Last year, the Russian edition of Forbes dubbed Rotenberg “the king of state orders” for winning nine billion dollars’ worth of government contracts in 2015 alone, more than any other Russian businessman. But perhaps the most salient detail in Rotenberg’s biography dates from childhood: in 1963, at the age of twelve, he joined the same judo club as Putin. The two became sparring partners and friends, and have remained close ever since.

Rotenberg’s success is a prime example of a political and economic restructuring that has taken place during Putin’s seventeen years in office: the de-fanging of one oligarchic class and the creation of another. In the nineties, a coterie of business figures built corporate empires that had little loyalty to the state. Under Putin, they were co-opted, marginalized, or strong-armed into obedience. The 2003 arrest, and subsequent conviction, of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the Yukos oil company, brought home the point. At the same time, a new caste of oligarchs emerged, many with close personal ties to Putin. These oligarchs have been allowed to extract vast wealth from the state, often through lucrative government contracts, while understanding that their ultimate duty is to serve the President and shore up the system over which he rules.

The Crimean bridge is different from many of Rotenberg’s other state ventures, in that he is not expected to make much money from it. “This project is not about profits,” one banker in Moscow, who specializes in transportation and infrastructure, told me. He was matter-of-fact about how Rotenberg ended up in charge: “The bridge had to be built, and everyone else was refusing. It was the only possible solution.”

Construction began last year. Rotenberg, who has a reputation as an informed, hands-on manager, visits every few months, passing above the site in his helicopter before inspecting the project with a retinue of engineers and road-building specialists. Last fall, a correspondent from Russian state television filmed a fawning news segment about the bridge. Strolling with Rotenberg along one of the few completed sections, the host invoked the bridge’s reputation as “the construction project of the century.” The two put on hard hats and surveyed the jumble of cranes and excavators and drills in motion around them.

Rotenberg has the squat and powerful frame of a wrestler, and a round, impish face. His speech is clipped and straightforward, and he does not appear to enjoy introspection. But, when the television host pressed him to offer up platitudes on the bridge, Rotenberg did his best to oblige. “Besides financial profit—which, for a business, is a sign of success, of course—I also want the project to mean something for future generations,” he said. What Russians make of the bridge will be clear soon enough; the first cars will pass over it later this year. But its significance for Rotenberg already seems apparent. It is a totem of his service to the state and to its leader, Putin—and of their friendship, which has thrived at the intersection of state politics and big business.

Rotenberg was born in 1951 in Leningrad, a city deeply scarred by the Nazis’ two-and-a-half-year blockade during the Second World War. Rotenberg’s father, Roman, was a deputy director at the Red Dawn telephone factory, and his position gave the family a measure of stability and comfort. They lived in their own apartment, not a communal apartment like many families, including Putin’s. When Arkady was twelve, against his initial protests, his father took him to train with Anatoly Rakhlin, one of Leningrad’s better-known practitioners of sambo, a Soviet martial art that borrows from judo and was developed by Red Army officers in the nineteen-twenties. In a chaotic city, Rakhlin’s class offered teen-agers a redoubt of discipline. Putin, who was also in the class, said, in “First Person,” a book-length interview published during his first Presidential campaign, in 2000, that the training played a decisive role in his life. “Judo is not just a sport,” Putin said. “It’s a philosophy. It’s respect for your elders and for your opponent. It’s not for weaklings. . . . You come out onto the mat, you bow to one another, you follow ritual.”

Rotenberg and Putin grew close travelling around Leningrad, and soon around the whole of the Soviet Union, for competitions. Nikolay Vaschilin, a retired K.G.B. officer who trained with them, remembers that the two were fond of pranks. (Putin later described himself during those years as “a troublemaker.”) One time, Vaschilin told me, the boys ran out of an alleyway during a May Day parade and threw wire pellets at balloons carried by the marchers, surprising them with a fusillade of pops. Another friend from that time recalled that he and Rotenberg would pilfer candy and other food from younger children at sports camps by sneaking up on them in the toilets, where kids would go to hide their treats from other boys: “They were immediately frightened and would give us a little something,” he said.

For fun, and a bit of spare cash, many of the young men in Rakhlin’s class worked as extras for a film studio in Leningrad, where they could earn ten rubles reënacting battle scenes in patriotic Soviet films about the Second World War. “Arkady showed himself to be a real brigadier,” Vaschilin recalled. “He was walking around and giving commands to everyone, even guys older than him. He was cocky, insolent, and mischievous—seventeen years old and already in charge.”

Putin had his eye on the K.G.B.—as he was later fond of recounting, he first volunteered his services when he was in ninth grade—but Rotenberg’s ambitions were in sports. He enrolled in the Lesgaft National State University of Physical Education, Sport, and Health, and graduated in 1978, after which he found work as a judo trainer. In 1990, Putin, after a K.G.B. posting in Dresden, took a job at the mayor’s office in Leningrad, which, a year later, after the Soviet collapse, was renamed St. Petersburg. Putin and Rotenberg, along with a handful of others from Rakhlin’s class, got together a few times a week to practice moves and stay in shape.

For Putin, who both by nature and by K.G.B. training is mistrustful of others, these early friendships seem to have been his only genuine, unguarded bonds. He would soon be surrounded by people who had something to offer, or something to ask. Rakhlin, who died in 2013, explained Putin’s affection for his former judo partners to the state-run newspaper Izvestia. “They are friends, and Putin’s character has maintained that healthy camaraderie,” Rakhlin said. “He doesn’t work with the St. Petersburg boys because they have pretty eyes, but because he trusts people who are proven.” In “First Person,” Putin said, “I have a lot of friends, but only a few people are really close to me. They have never gone away. They have never betrayed me, and I haven’t betrayed them, either. In my view, that’s what counts most.”

Trying to earn money in the nineteen-nineties, which were lean years in Russia, Rotenberg started a coöperative that organized sporting competitions with Vasily Shestakov, another boyhood friend from Rakhlin’s class. “We had worked in sports our whole lives,” Shestakov told me. “And then, all of a sudden, just like that: ‘perestroika,’ ‘business,’ all these unfamiliar words.” Neither had a talent for running a company. “Each of us thought the other one would do something,” Shestakov said. “And, as a result, no one did anything, and our coöperative fell apart.” Later that decade, Arkady’s younger brother, Boris, moved with his wife, Irina, to Finland. Before long, thanks to connections of Irina’s in the Russian gas industry, the brothers were trading in petroleum products. Irina and Boris separated in 2001, but she remains fond of the Rotenberg family. (She now goes by the name Irène Lamber.) “They have a natural intellect, a reasonable relation to everything, with a deep study of questions,” she told me. “All this was instilled in childhood.” Lamber suggested that business was not a true calling for them but an accident of fate. “Where would they be if the Soviet Union had never collapsed?” Lamber asked. “Arkady would be in charge of a state sports organization. He is a natural manager. And Boris would be a successful trainer.”

In the mid-nineties, Shestakov and a few others approached Putin, who was then the vice-mayor of St. Petersburg, with the idea of creating a professional judo club in the city. Putin gave his approval, and a number of wealthy businessmen—including the oil trader Gennady Timchenko, who knew Putin from city government—provided the funds. Rotenberg was named general director of the club, which was called Yavara-Neva. In the club’s second year, it came in second at the European Cup; the next year, in the German city of Abensberg, it won outright. On the judo mat, Rotenberg seized the championship trophy and gave it a kiss. “It left a good impression,” Shestakov told me. “I think that, of course, Putin was pleased.”

Since then, Yavara-Neva has won nine Euro Cups and produced four Olympic champions. Rotenberg remains the club’s general director. It is now building a new campus, which, in addition to a thousand-seat arena, will include a housing complex and a yacht club. Its cost is estimated at a hundred and eighty million dollars, paid for, in part, out of the St. Petersburg and federal budgets. When I met Alexey Zbruyev, the club’s athletic director, I asked whether Yavara-Neva might enjoy preferential treatment because of its connection to the President—for example, in financial donations from businessmen or in zoning approvals from bureaucrats. “We don’t brag about it anywhere,” Zbruyev said. “Everyone knows this perfectly well—why bring it up yet again? They know what Yavara-Neva is and who the club’s leaders are. Beyond that, no one asks any questions.”

In 2000, President Boris Yeltsin named Putin his successor, setting in motion a reorganization of the country’s political life. Putin believed that Russia had grown weak and ineffectual in the nineties, and during the first year of his Presidency he and a council of economic advisers carried out reforms meant to bolster the authority and the competency of the state. Some of those early reforms, such as the introduction of a flat tax, hewed to a pro-market, neoliberal framework. But one day Andrei Illarionov, a liberal-minded economist who was working closely with Putin, came across a Presidential order to create a state monopoly by combining more than a hundred liquor factories. No one had mentioned this new body, Rosspirtprom, at council meetings. Illarionov asked other Putin advisers if they knew about the plan, and none did.

“We had been discussing every issue related to the economy, so to come across a decree no one had heard of was quite a shock,” Illarionov told me. At best, Rosspirtprom would create another clunky bureaucracy at a time when Putin had promised to pursue the opposite course; at worst, Illarionov feared, it would be an opaque company that would allow for favoritism and corruption. “It was clear that there were other people, besides our economic council, from whom Putin was taking advice, and that he was making decisions for their benefit.”

In the case of Rosspirtprom, that person was Rotenberg. He had suggested that Sergey Zivenko, with whom he had done business in the nineties, be put in charge of the company. When I met Zivenko, last fall, he called the creation of Rosspirtprom “a joint initiative” with Rotenberg—“a business project with a political tinge.” Rosspirtprom eventually controlled thirty per cent of the country’s vodka market, making it a key source of income for the state in the years before global oil prices skyrocketed. The company was an early test of Putin’s model of state capitalism, and, because it returned financial resources, and thus political power, to the Kremlin, Putin considered it a success.

Rotenberg also profited from the centralization, likely with Putin’s blessing. According to the logic of the Putin era, corruption is stealing without actually doing anything. Personal enrichment is seen as the proper reward for a completed project. “A lot of people tried to use their closeness with Putin to make a lot of promises they never carried out,” Zivenko said. “But not Rotenberg. He used this trust and delivered tangible accomplishments.” Rotenberg began using the success of Rosspirtprom “like his business card,” Zivenko said. Russian officials, and other businessmen, “saw that he was able to lobby his interests with the President, and must really be close to him, and so we have to be friends with him, too. Arkady was able to capitalize on—monetize, really—this image.”

In 2001, just before oil prices began a historic surge, Putin replaced the top executives of Gazprom, the major Russian gas company, with close associates, effectively bringing the company under the Kremlin’s direct control. Mikhail Krutikhin, a partner at RusEnergy, a consultancy in Moscow, told me that Gazprom began functioning as “the personal company of the President—all decisions regarding Gazprom, whether launching big investment projects or naming top corporate officials, were made by the President’s office.” Around this time, Arkady and his brother, Boris, began investing in companies that serviced Gazprom. They founded SMP Bank in 2001, and used it to acquire stakes in construction, gas, and pipe companies; by the mid-aughts, the brothers had become one of Russia’s main suppliers of large-diameter gas pipes.

At nearly every turn, Gazprom spent more than seemed necessary or appropriate—and, in many cases, the Rotenberg brothers stood to benefit. To take just one example, in 2007, when Gazprom needed to deliver gas from a new field above the Arctic Circle, it decided against a plan, which had been circulating for years, that called for building a short link to an existing network three hundred and fifty miles away. Instead, it built a brand-new pipeline fifteen hundred miles to the south, with a final price tag of forty-four billion dollars—three times what a pipeline of that length usually costs. “The only explanation was that this was a chance for contractors to make a lot of money,” Krutikhin said.

When Gazprom built pipelines inside Russia during the next decade, they were two to three times more expensive than equivalent projects in Europe, even when they were in temperate, accessible areas in southern Russia. Perhaps the most striking example of inefficiency occurred in 2013, when Gazprom announced that the cost of a pipeline that Rotenberg was building in Krasnodar—a warm, flat region near the Black Sea—had risen by forty-five per cent. No explanation was given; wages were relatively stable, as was the price of steel. That stretch of pipeline was meant to feed into a larger pipeline going through Bulgaria. After the Russian government suspended construction on the Bulgarian pipeline, Rotenberg’s project miraculously went on for another year. Mikhail Korchemkin, the head of East European Gas Analysis, said that it became clear that Gazprom had “switched from a principle of maximizing shareholder profits to one of maximizing contractor profits.” The company’s projects, he said, presented a “way of minting new billionaires in Russia: overpay for services and make them rich.”

Rotenberg’s greatest business achievement came in 2008, when Gazprom sold him five construction and maintenance companies, for which he paid three hundred and forty-eight million dollars. He merged the firms into a single company, Stroigazmontazh (or S.G.M.), which immediately became one of the chief contractors for Gazprom. In the company’s first year of operations, it earned more than two billion dollars in revenue, an amount that suggested that the sale price was many times lower than market value. A short time later, the Rotenberg brothers bought a brokerage firm called Northern European Pipe Project. The normal profit margin for such companies is around ten to fifteen per cent, but several people with knowledge of the industry said that, during the boom years, N.E.P.P. earned as much as thirty per cent. At the height of its operations, it supplied ninety per cent of all large-diameter pipes purchased by Gazprom.

Before the Crimean bridge, no construction project was as personally important to Putin as the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics, in Sochi. The city of Sochi, which is on the far-western edge of Russia, overlooking the Black Sea, was developed as a resort area under the tsars, and later became a favorite retreat of Soviet workers, but it had little in terms of modern athletic infrastructure. Nearly everything, from ski resorts to the mountain roads leading up to them, had to be built from scratch, and before long the 2014 Games had become the most expensive in history, with an estimated budget of fifty-one billion dollars. One company controlled by Rotenberg built a nearly two-billion-dollar highway along the coast. Another built an underwater gas pipeline leading to Sochi at a price well over three times the European average. In all, companies controlled by Rotenberg received contracts worth seven billion dollars—equivalent to the entire cost of the previous Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, in 2010.

It is impossible to identify the line between where the Rotenberg brothers have, thanks to their name and connections, pocketed outsized profits from state contracts and where they’ve merely had a knack for finding opportunities to make money. When I asked Irène Lamber, Boris’s ex-wife, whether Putin actively assisted the Rotenberg brothers, she told me that she wouldn’t rule it out. “They were friendly in childhood, and those relationships were never broken, so logically you can presume some sort of advice was given, at a minimum, and perhaps help here and there,” she said. As Konstantin Simonov, the director of the National Energy Fund, put it to me, “The story is simple: with a company like Gazprom, not just anybody can show up off the street and say, ‘I want to build a giant gas pipe.’ It’s clear that Rotenberg needed a serious degree of political support on the first step.” But personal favors alone didn’t make Rotenberg successful. “Rotenberg proved himself to be a very tenacious guy, with real organizational skills and a willingness to take risks,” Simonov said.

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When I spoke with Bogdan Budzulyak, a former Gazprom board member, he was full of praise for the Rotenbergs, and told me that the ties between the brothers and Putin “were not raised or spoken about. But we understood, it goes without saying, that they had earned the trust they were given.” Rotenberg has directly addressed the friendship in a few interviews. “I would never go to the President and ask him for something,” he told one reporter. “That would mean depriving myself of the pleasure I get from our conversations.” In the Russian edition of Forbes, he acknowledged that “knowing someone at that level has never hurt anyone,” but argued that the bond only makes things harder for him. “Unlike a lot of other people, I don’t have the right to make a mistake,” he said. “Because it’s not a question of just my reputation.”

In the nineties, Russia’s oligarchs appropriated state assets—industrial production, mining, and oil and gas deposits—and did what they wanted with them. The oligarchs of the Putin era, on the other hand, are themselves assets of the state, administering business fiefdoms that also happen to pay handsomely. Many have a long-standing relationship with the President, and a particular sphere of responsibility. Rotenberg’s is infrastructure. Gennady Timchenko, one of the initial supporters of Yavara-Neva, came to preside over the oil trade; at one point, a firm he controlled sold as much as thirty per cent of the country’s oil exports. Yury Kovalchuk is the Kremlin’s unofficial cashier and media minister; the U.S. Treasury Department called him “the personal banker for senior officials of the Russian Federation, including Putin.” Bank Rossiya, which he chairs, is worth ten billion dollars, and Kovalchuk’s personal wealth is estimated at one billion dollars.

“If oligarchy 1.0 tried to grab pieces of the economy from the state, and use them for themselves, then oligarchy 2.0 tries to build themselves into the state system, in order to gain access to state contracts and budget money,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and noted analyst of the Russian political system, explained. As Clifford Gaddy, an economist who studies Putin’s economic strategy, put it, “His vision of the country’s entire economy is ‘Russia, Inc.,’ where he personally works as the executive director” and the owners of nominally private firms are “mere divisional managers, operational managers of the big, real corporation.”

A source close to the Kremlin insisted that the rise of Rotenberg and similar Putin-era nouveau oligarchs was not the result of a purposeful plan: “It wasn’t Putin’s strategy to create these people. That’s a fantasy. He may have agreed to help them, and at a certain point, once they became large and successful, he realized that they might be useful, that it’s not so bad to have a caste of very wealthy people who are obligated to you.” In effect, Putin’s oligarchs form a shadow cabinet. Evgeny Minchenko, a political scientist in Moscow, told me, “These are trusted people, who will stick with Putin until the end, to whom he can assign certain tasks, who won’t get frightened by external pressure.” They can take on projects the Kremlin doesn’t want to fund or manage, such as sports teams, media programs, and political initiatives.

A well-connected banker told me that many oligarchs finance the “black ledger,” which, as the banker explained, is “money that does not go through the budget but is needed by the state, to finance elections and support local political figures, for example.” Funds leave the state budget as procurement orders, and come back as off-the-books cash, to be spent however the Kremlin sees fit. The Panama Papers, leaked last April, revealed that, between 2007 and 2013, nearly two billion dollars had been funnelled through offshore accounts linked to Putin associates. In 2013, companies affiliated with Rotenberg sent two hundred and thirty-one million dollars in loans, with no repayment schedule, to a company based in the British Virgin Islands. What happened to that money is a mystery. A spokesperson for Rotenberg said it was transferred for “specific transactions under commercial terms,” without clarifying the nature of the deal. Separately, tens of millions of dollars passed through offshore companies registered to Sergey Roldugin, a cellist who befriended Putin in the seventies and who is the godfather of Putin’s eldest daughter, Maria. Addressing the transactions last April, Putin said of Roldugin: “He spent almost all the money he earned acquiring musical instruments from abroad and bringing them to Russia.” (Roldugin has denied any wrongdoing.) Putin’s thinking seems to be that there is no need to own anything himself, at least on paper, when trusted allies can do it for him.

Putin’s Russia has been given many labels, from kleptocracy to Mafia state, but the most analytically helpful may be among the oldest: feudalism. “It is not a metaphor but a very exact definition of the system,” Andrey Movchan, a banker and finance expert in Moscow, said. If in the Middle Ages the chief feudal currency was land, in today’s Russia it is hydrocarbon wealth. Movchan explained how, in the Middle Ages, feudal lords were often “one handshake away from the king: their post, and the size of the resource, was decided by the king alone.” The land ultimately belonged to the king, and was awarded to feudal lords on a provisional basis. The same is true in Russia today, he said.

The system that Putin has established suggests a degree of weakness, insecurity, and even fear. Putin has little faith in the effectiveness of his rule, which is why true responsibility in his state is shared by only a handful of intimately connected people. Schulmann told me that in Russia’s political system “there are no such things as qualifications, talent, skill, experience. None of that is important.” What is important, she said, parroting Putin, “is that I’m not afraid. And the only way I won’t be afraid is if I see a familiar face next to me.” She continued, “How can I protect myself? I grab my friend Arkady, one of the few people I can trust.”

In November, 2013, a wave of protests swept through the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. Initially sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign a trade deal with the European Union, they quickly grew to include objections to the corruption of Yanukovych’s administration and its violent response to the demonstrations. The movement reached a chaotic end in February, 2014, when Yanukovych fled the capital in the middle of the night. Putin, fearing that Ukraine was turning toward Europe, secretly ordered Russian forces to enter the Crimean Peninsula. Crimea had been a part of the Russian Empire from the eighteenth century until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev gave it to Soviet Ukraine as a gesture of friendship. Much of the Crimean population still had great affection for and close cultural ties to Russia, which many locals call their “big brother.” It wasn’t difficult for Putin to whip up a pro-Moscow campaign, fuelled by propaganda and backed by Russian special forces. In a stage-managed referendum, ninety-seven per cent of Crimeans voted to join Russia. Russian-backed separatists were soon battling the Ukrainian military in Eastern Ukraine; at several key points, Russian forces intervened to shift the momentum in the fighting.

In March, 2014, the Obama Administration imposed sanctions on Russia for its interference in Ukraine; it included Arkady and Boris Rotenberg on its list of sanctioned individuals. The Treasury Department identified the brothers as “members of the Russian leadership’s inner circle,” who “provided support to Putin’s pet projects by receiving and executing high-price contracts for the Sochi Olympic Games and state-controlled Gazprom.” (Arkady, but not Boris, was added to the E.U.’s sanctions list that July.) It is unclear what role, if any, Arkady played in the Kremlin’s Ukraine policy, but that wasn’t the point. “We wanted to make clear to the inner circle that Putin can’t protect them, that he can’t shield his cronies,” Daniel Fried, who was in charge of the sanctions policy in the State Department during the Obama Administration, told me. The theory was that sanctions would make the lives of rich and powerful individuals close to Putin more difficult, and certainly less profitable, and that their material suffering might deter further aggression.

Rotenberg did experience some inconveniences. Visa and MasterCard stopped servicing cards issued by SMP Bank, but the bank is as much a hub for Rotenberg’s personal businesses as it is a commercial project. In September, 2014, Italian authorities seized a number of Rotenberg’s properties in Italy: among them, three villas on the island of Sardinia, one in the city of Tarquinia, and a luxury hotel in Rome. The newspaper Corriere della Sera estimated the combined value of the real estate at thirty million euros. Rotenberg admitted that the sanctions have forced some adjustments in his life: “Before, I used to wonder whether I should go to France or Italy—I loved to vacation in Italy—but now there is no such question. There are plenty of beautiful places in Russia.” After Rotenberg’s properties in Italy were taken, Russia’s parliament considered what came to be known as “the Rotenberg law,” which proposed that the state compensate Russian citizens for assets seized by foreign governments. (The bill was never passed; Rotenberg said that he had nothing to do with it.)

Contrary to the Obama Administration’s hopes, however, Rotenberg drew even closer to Putin. So did Timchenko and Kovalchuk, who were also on the sanctions list. Their response was partly about personal loyalty. “I have great respect for Putin and I consider him sent to our country from God,” Rotenberg told the Financial Times. But it also made rational sense: the Russian state is Rotenberg’s main client and source of wealth, so it would be far costlier to turn against Putin than to bear the burden of sanctions.

In fact, Western sanctions may have been a boon for Rotenberg, giving him a chance to show Putin that he had suffered for the country and was owed some payback. “It’s now quite obvious that whoever ended up under sanctions found himself in a more privileged position,” Minchenko, the political scientist, said. In a roundabout way, he told me, the United States and the E.U. “made a contribution to the increased influence of these people.” Indeed, after the sanctions, Rotenberg’s state orders grew: in 2015, he received nine billion dollars in government contracts, compared with three and a half billion dollars the year before.

In November, 2015, Russia began charging long-distance truck drivers a per-kilometre toll for travelling on federal roads. One of the co-owners of the company awarded the contract for the toll system was Igor Rotenberg, Arkady’s forty-two-year-old son, who has taken over major shares in several businesses once held by his father. Documents later showed that Igor’s company, which had no competition for the contract, would be paid a hundred and fifty million dollars each year until 2027, according to the exchange rate at the time. In a rare flash of unrest, hundreds of truck drivers protested the measure, blocking highways leading into Moscow and posting signs in their windshields that read “Russia Without Rotenberg” and “Rotenberg Is Worse Than isis.” When, this spring, the toll was further increased, demonstrations erupted again, especially in the North Caucasus, where drivers formed protest encampments.

Any enterprise to which Rotenberg lends his name now seems to succeed. In 2014, as the Times reported, after Rotenberg became the chairman of a Russian textbook publisher, Enlightenment, the Ministry of Education and Science eliminated more than half the titles in the country’s schools, often for flimsy technical reasons. Enlightenment, whose books were largely untouched, was left with an outsized share of a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This past winter, the Moscow city government decorated the center of town for the New Year; as an investigation by the independent Russian news site Meduza found, a company affiliated with the Rotenberg brothers was awarded a contract to install the decorations. According to Meduza, the company charged the city nearly five times the actual cost for dozens of illuminated garlands in the shape of champagne flutes: about thirty-seven thousand dollars instead of eight thousand dollars for each light fixture. (A spokesperson for Rotenberg denied any affiliation with the firm.)

Ilya Shumanov, the deputy director of the Moscow office of Transparency International, said that, although many of these deals seem suspect, it would be difficult to catch Rotenberg “red-handed breaking the law,” not only because of his robust legal staff, but because the various arms of the Russian state, from parliament to government auditors, work together to create a “legal window” for his business. For example, although Russian law requires that state procurement contracts be awarded through open bidding, it also allows them to be granted in a closed, no-bid process if the projects are deemed strategically important—a category that the state itself determines, and doesn’t have to explain or justify. A 2015 report prepared for the Russian government showed that ninety-five per cent of state purchases were uncompetitive, and forty per cent were made with a single supplier. Many of Rotenberg’s largest and most lucrative orders have been awarded without open bidding. One gas-industry expert told me that in some cases fake companies were even set up to pose as bidders. As Shumanov put it, “You could call it an imitation of legality. The letter of the law is observed, even if it is broken in spirit.”

The idea of building a bridge to Crimea was first raised by a British imperial consortium in the late nineteenth century, when engineers briefly considered a rail line that would run from London to New Delhi, via the peninsula. In the nineteen-thirties, under Stalin, Soviet railway planners revived the proposal as part of the country’s industrialization drive, but the project went nowhere. During the Nazi campaign to seize the Caucasus, in 1942, German soldiers took the first steps to construct a bridge. Before they could complete the project, Soviet soldiers captured the area. Within a few months, Red Army engineers had built a one-track rail bridge, but in February, 1945, four months after the first freight train passed over it, an ice floe hit the bridge and it collapsed.

Soviet officials returned to the idea of a bridge from time to time in the following decades, but the proposals were always rejected as too expensive. The Kerch Strait is a challenging place to build, with complicated geology, high seismic activity, and stormy weather. The seafloor is covered in a layer of crumbly silt that reaches as deep as two hundred feet. Freshwater from the Don River flows into the sea, which means that the surface often freezes in winter; high winds create cracks in the ice, and as the ice floes break apart they put pressure on anything standing in the water.

Oleg Skvortsov, an engineer with a long career overseeing bridge construction, was the chairman of the council of experts that advised the Russian government on the Crimea project. He said that, in the nineties, when it was a kind of fantasy, he opposed the idea of a bridge. “But the situation changed,” he said, with Ukraine’s blockade. Crimea has to find a way to transport its fish, wine, fruit, and other goods to Russia. “I love Crimean peaches, for example,” he said. “You can only find such peaches in Italy.” Skvortsov told me that he “wouldn’t consider Rotenberg a builder,” and then began to talk about his father, an engineer who worked under Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the chief commissar for railway construction in the twenties—and also a notorious and feared Bolshevik and the founding head of the Soviet secret police, which later became the K.G.B. “He rebuilt all the rail lines in a ruined country,” Skvortsov said of Dzerzhinsky. “My father said he was a brilliant supervisor, largely because he never got too involved in technical details. I think Rotenberg is the same way.”

Like most economic activity connected to Crimea, the bridge is a target of U.S. sanctions. Fried, the former State Department official, told me, “We never thought we could prevent the bridge, but we could try and make it massively costly and radioactive, so that Crimea never pays for itself, that it turns out not to be a war prize but a liability.” The sanctions do not seem to have affected construction or greatly raised costs, but they have created a few complications. It initially proved impossible to find an established insurance company to underwrite the project, and so an obscure insurance company in Crimea took on more than three billion dollars in potential risk.

As Russia began to slide into recession, the bridge started to look more and more like an extravagance. In the past several years, the Kremlin has cut budget expenditures in nearly every category. In February, an official with Russia’s roadways agency let slip, perhaps accidentally, how many resources the bridge was using. “On account of this bridge, the building of new automobile roads in Russia has been practically suspended,” he said. “The country does not have enough money. Therefore, we cannot implement everything we want.”

Still, if the Kremlin considers a project a priority, it can successfully mobilize the country’s resources. Mikhail Blinkin, the director of the transportation institute at the Higher School of Economics, in Moscow, told me that big infrastructure projects in Russia are often held up by piecemeal financing and bureaucratic roadblocks. “But in the Kerch case,” Blinkin said, “the funding was sufficient, and all the usual obstacles were eliminated on the political level.” It now appears likely that the bridge will be fully operational, to train and car traffic, a year ahead of schedule—in time for the next Presidential election, Putin’s fourth. In an attempt to boost turnout by appealing to patriotic sentiment, the vote may be held on the anniversary of Crimea’s annexation.

Blinkin told me that the bridge wasn’t strictly necessary; Crimea could accommodate travellers to and from the peninsula by simply increasing the number of ferries between the city of Kerch and the Russian mainland. He noted that far more passengers travel between Helsinki and Stockholm, for example, exclusively by ferry. But an expansion in ferry service is not as grand as a bridge, and doesn’t send a message about Russia’s status as a world power. “Is that worth such gigantic expense?” Blinkin asked. “In a strict economic sense, no. But, if you factor in the political component, then yes.”

I visited the bridge in January. It is being built not in a line, from one end to the other, but in eight separate parts at once, and for the moment it resembles a concrete-and-steel archipelago rising from the sea. On the mainland side, construction is centered in the town of Taman, which was settled by Cossacks in the eighteenth century, and which Mikhail Lermontov, in his novel “A Hero of Our Time,” called “the nastiest little hole of all the seaports of Russia.” When I arrived in Taman, the streets, quiet save for a few construction workers, were covered in a dusting of snow, and a freezing wind snapped through town.

At the bridge site, teams of workers watched over drills the size of redwood trees, which rammed steel piles into the seafloor. The scale of construction was almost too immense to comprehend. As the foundation of the bridge curved toward Crimea, it disappeared on the horizon. In a trailer, I sat down with Leonid Ryzhenkin, an official from Rotenberg’s construction company who is in charge of the site and its five thousand workers. Ryzhenkin’s wife’s family is from Sevastopol, a storied naval port in Crimea, and in the tense days before the referendum, one of his in-laws joined a pro-Russian militia. He told me about spending five hours taking a ferry and then a taxi to visit his in-laws. “My elderly mother-in-law calls all the time and asks, ‘So, Lenya, how’s it going? When are we going to drive across the bridge?’ ” he said. “And I tell her not to worry, we’ll make it in time.” He told me that Crimea is home to “native Russian people,” and that the bridge will “allow us all to be reunited.”

Roman Novikov, an official from Russia’s state road agency, joined us, and when I asked his assessment of Rotenberg he was eager to respond with praise. “I have the sense that he is deeply immersed in the project,” Novikov said. He offered an explanation for Rotenberg’s interest. “It’s no secret that he talks with his childhood friend, from when they were young, who is also interested, of course, in this object,” he said. Just in case there was any confusion, Novikov clarified: “I am speaking of the President of the Russian Federation.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/ ... -to-crimea


OPINION
The West Is Pushing Back on Kremlin Lies—Without America
Putin’s Fake News offensive has generated resistance... but not in Washington
By John R. Schindler • 05/22/17 12:45pm

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin after Putin spoke during the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum at the China National Convention Center (CNCC) in Beijing, Sunday, May 14, 2017. Mark Schiefelbein-Pool/Getty Images

Last week I was in Prague, participating in the STRATCOM 2017 summit—and it was a week very well spent. Sponsored by the European Values think-tank, a top-notch Czech NGO devoted to defending liberal democracies, it brought together 330 experts from 29 countries to discuss the threat to all our societies presented by Russian propaganda and disinformation.

Fittingly hosted in Prague, which as I recently explained has a serious problem with Kremlin espionage and subversion, STRATCOM 2017 is unique in its size and scope, bringing together a diverse group of security practitioners, politicians, think-tankers, journalists, and related experts from across the Western world. In Prague, they meet and speak frankly under Chatham House rules, sharing ideas and best practices. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else—and certainly nothing remotely comparable in the United States.

That’s because America is several years behind Europe in grappling with the corrosive effects of Kremlin-pushed Fake News on our societies. As the summit made abundantly clear, this is a necessary fight if we want to protect Western democracy and civil society from Vladimir Putin’s disinformation machine and his helpers in our midst. However, it’s painful to admit that Washington really isn’t in this fight at all, more than three years after Putin seized Crimea, invaded Ukraine, and initiated Cold War 2.0. This, notwithstanding that Kremlin lies in recent years have played a noxious role in misshaping American politics and elections

It’s worth looking at what is going on elsewhere before we castigate our own government. At the national level, several European countries have established units to examine Russian Active Measures, to use the proper Chekist term. In some cases, they are engaged in counter-propaganda, debunking noxious lies emanating from Moscow which aim to dissolve the bonds of democratic societies. Having just witnessed France’s successful effort to defeat Russian spy-games designed to manipulate their presidential election, European eyes have now turned to Germany, which has national elections in September. Whether Berlin will be as adept as Paris at blunting Putin’s lie machine remains an open and very important question.

In some countries, citizens have taken it upon themselves to fight Kremlin trolls and bots online, pointing out their blatant social media falsehoods and deceptions, often with mockery. In the Baltic states, on the frontline of NATO’s efforts to deter Russia in all arenas, from military to information, patriots amusingly calling themselves “elves” have taken the fight to Twitter, Facebook, and VKontake (Russia’s version of Facebook). Self-starting Baltic elves, without government backing, have made a serious dent in Kremlin efforts to destabilize their small countries through disinformation.

Even the European Union has joined the fight against Moscow’s Fake News. The EU established a small analysis unit in the fall of 2015 to combat Kremlin disinformation. Although its tiny size—only a dozen or so personnel—and budget limit its effectiveness, the EU effort at least exists, even if it cannot make much of an impression on the Russians, given that they spend more than $1 billion annually on propaganda aimed at destabilizing the West and its institutions.

That’s still more than America is doing in this crucial struggle to defend democracy. It speaks volumes that the EU, perhaps the world’s slowest-moving, most arteriosclerotic bureaucracy, can create an effort to fight back against Putin’s online disinformation mob. Washington cannot—even years after the Kremlin has made its intentions abundantly clear.

It would be tempting to place this debacle at the feet of President Donald Trump, who can’t seem to criticize anything his Russian counterpart does, even when Putin threatens the West, but that’s hardly the full story. In truth, this rot in Washington, a basic unwillingness to fight Russian Active Measures, traces back to Trump’s predecessor, who allowed the Kremlin to run roughshod over American democracy.

Why Barack Obama remained so timid in his reactions to Russia’s weaponized lies is an important question which historians must answer—not least because Kremlin espionage and propaganda played a role in defeating President Obama’s designated Democratic successor at the polls last November. However, it cannot be fairly disputed that Obama was negligent regarding Russian propaganda, nor that his refusal to take this rising threat seriously contributed to the mess our country’s in right now.

Specifically, in mid-2015, more than a year after Cold War 2.0 commenced, when it was glaringly obvious that Moscow was aggressively employing disinformation to distract, deter, and defame Western democracies, bureaucrats in Washington began to ponder what might be done about this new problem. Which wasn’t actually new—Russian Active Measures today are much like their predecessors from the last Cold War, just with the Internet added—but since there’s practically nobody left in the Federal bureaucracy from that era, it was new to Beltway functionaries.

It was determined that the State Department should establish a small effort, a test-bed, to study Kremlin lies and start pushing back against them. In other words, Washington was going to do what the EU was doing in the autumn of 2015. However, without warning, the White House quashed the tiny State Department counter-propaganda effort before it got off the ground. As I reported in detail at the time, orders came down from the White House “not to upset the Russians,” no matter how outrageously they behaved. By refusing to resist Putin’s Fake News, President Obama got more of it, with fateful consequences in 2016 which we all know.

In the messy aftermath of our last presidential election, Congress finally had enough of Obama’s egregious passivity, and with bipartisan support it placed a mandate to push back against “state propaganda” in the end-of-2016 National Defense Authorization Act. Although the NDAA didn’t use the word Russia, there’s no doubt who was the intended target of this belated effort at counter-propaganda.

Specifically, thanks to a strong push by Sen. John McCain, who has urged Washington to get serious about Russian threats for many years, the NDAA gave the State Department not less than $60 million in 2017 to engage in counter-propaganda work—in other words, debunking Fake News aimed at undermining Western democracies. According to the NDAA, the Pentagon is supposed to transfer the funds to Foggy Bottom, which is perennially short of cash; for the Defense Department, $60 million barely constitutes a rounding error. When Congress passed and President Obama signed the NDAA on December 23 of last year, it became law.

However, five months have passed and nothing has happened in Washington that’s worth mentioning in the fight against Kremlin disinformation. The State Department has established a tiny office inside its Global Engagement Center, which is charged with pushing back against jihadist propaganda; the effort against Russian lies is supposed to be an add-on for the GEC. However, to date nobody has been hired, and the State Department has only a small handful of experts in Russian disinformation on the payroll, nowhere near enough to implement the law.

There’s plenty of blame to go around here, though none of it belongs to the overworked GEC. The Trump White House’s hiring freeze has made it impossible to bring qualified personnel into the State Department. Neither does it help matters that the Trump administration has decided it doesn’t need its own officials to implement its policies. To date, of the 557 jobs that require Senate approval, President Trump has nominated 49, announced the nomination of 19, while only 29 people have been confirmed; 460 jobs have no nominees at all. No previous White House has ever been this slow to get its own people into top positions in Washington.

The impact of this on implementing the NDAA—and countless other laws—is cancerous. Most of the staff work that goes into making the Federal bureaucracy function is approved at the level of assistant secretaries and their deputies. And those critical jobs are almost entirely unfilled at both the State Department and the Pentagon. When closely examined, there’s really no mystery why the will of Congress regarding Russian Fake News isn’t being followed: there’s nobody to make decisions, sign paperwork, transfer funds, and hire staff.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t explain why Congress isn’t asking questions. Several of its senior members have been passionate about getting our government in the fight against Putin’s noxious lie machine. While it’s no surprise that Team Trump isn’t excited about pushing back against Russian propaganda, why patriots on Capitol Hill don’t have pointed questions about the law not being followed is something of mystery. Until senators and representatives start asking what’s going on here, the struggle against Kremlin Active Measures will be fought by our European allies on our behalf.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
http://observer.com/2017/05/stratcom-20 ... formation/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Sounder » Mon May 22, 2017 8:11 pm

In the 'western democracy's' the politicians serve the oligarchs, whereas in Russia they must serve the state. Sounds better to me, and bridges are more useful than bombs, well at least until they get bombed because liars false pretenses and an ignorant public that takes Madam Secretary more seriously than actual human lives.


Rotenberg’s success is a prime example of a political and economic restructuring that has taken place during Putin’s seventeen years in office: the de-fanging of one oligarchic class and the creation of another. In the nineties, a coterie of business figures built corporate empires that had little loyalty to the state. Under Putin, they were co-opted, marginalized, or strong-armed into obedience. The 2003 arrest, and subsequent conviction, of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the Yukos oil company, brought home the point. At the same time, a new caste of oligarchs emerged, many with close personal ties to Putin. These oligarchs have been allowed to extract vast wealth from the state, often through lucrative government contracts, while understanding that their ultimate duty is to serve the President and shore up the system over which he rules.


The last article belongs in the onion thread.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Elvis » Tue May 23, 2017 12:25 am

I was going over the Wasserman/DNC/Team Hillary screwing of Bernie Sanders, and it's so much worse than what Russia appears to have done in terms of "undermining our democracy"—the favorite phrase of MSM when it comes to Russian meddling.

It's a fact, if you will, that the DNC and the Clinton campaign successfully conspired to undermine Bernie Sanders' candidacy and undermine U.S. democracy (such as it is). One official resigned. That kind of severe punishment ought to deter future cheating! Right?

Meanwhile, before the facts of Russia's influence are even known, the MSM and establishment think-tankers issue thinly veiled calls for war. For now, "sanctions" will have to do.

Where are the sanctions on the DNC and Team Hillary?

It's ironic that fear of Russia is being used to cover up and distract from the U.S. Democratic party's voter suppression and general undermining of the will of the voters.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby tapitsbo » Tue May 23, 2017 12:48 am

Russia is still run by oligarchs, and it's a society with serious issues. Still, Western rapprochement with Russia would have had many, many benefits.

But the US government appears to be gearing up to take a more radically anti-Russian line than it did during the Obama administration.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 23, 2017 1:37 am

Last edited by seemslikeadream on Tue May 23, 2017 1:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Tue May 23, 2017 1:45 am

This is a link to a tv panel discussion show home page with a transcript from last night.

Its got Mikhail Zygar on it and is very interesting if you can be bothered scrolling thru the whole show to find the bits where they talk about Putin.

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s4651256.htm
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 23, 2017 1:50 am

I don't see the transcript and don't see how to watch the show
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Grizzly » Tue May 23, 2017 1:53 am

Why do people apologize for the hill?
https://archive.fo/7EWP9
Report: Girl in Weiner sexting case lied to damage Clinton
:wallhead: :wallhead: :wallhead:
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 23, 2017 1:55 am

yep but you can read WND and listen to Fox News if you want to...I hear they are all the rage around here lately

btw Russ Baker is fantastic .....not at all like World Nut Dailey or Faux News

MEDIA FAIL
MAY 22, 2017 | MATTHEW HARVEY, MICHAEL DWYER, JONATHAN Z. LARSEN AND RUSS BAKER
EXCLUSIVE: WEINER’S “UNDERAGE” SEXTING GIRL LIED TO DAMAGE CLINTON

https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/05/22/exclu ... e-clinton/


The Anatomy of a Takedown - RUSS BAKER
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40526


BUT you would rather believe this guy

seemslikeadream » Tue May 16, 2017 3:24 pm wrote:
Meet The Private Detective Who Ignited A Clinton Conspiracy Theory
Seth Rich's bereaved family rejected a Fox News report and told BuzzFeed News through a spokesman that Wheeler had been "paid for by a third party."

Posted on May 16, 2017, at 2:26 p.m.
Joseph Bernstein
Joseph Bernstein
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Image
Fox News
A Washington, DC Fox affiliate report Tuesday night that a deceased DNC staffer had been in contact with Wikileaks prior to his murder set conservative media ablaze.

The story poured fresh fuel on a long-simmering wild conspiracy theory — for which there is no evidence — that the Clintons had the staffer, Seth Rich, murdered for leaking DNC emails to Julian Assange's organization. It was based on an interview with a single source, a private investigator named Rod Wheeler who, the article said, had been hired by the Rich family to investigate the crime.

This morning, though, the Rich family rejected the report and told BuzzFeed News through a spokesman that Wheeler had been "paid for by a third party" and was contractually "barred from speaking to press" without permission from the family.

So who is Rod Wheeler, what do we know about him, and what is his relationship to the Riches?

Wheeler is a former homicide detective for the DC Metropolitan Police Department, who, per his LinkedIn, has been a contributor to Fox News since 2002. And it was through his television appearances that he was ultimately put in contact with the Rich family, through a fellow Fox News contributor named Ed Butowsky.

Butowsky, a prominent wealth manager from Dallas and a contributor to Bretibart News who attended President Trump's inauguration, told BuzzFeed News that he reached out to the Rich family after hearing about the Clinton-Rich conspiracy theory from a friend.

"They said they didn’t feel they were getting any answers," Butowsky said. "The investigation wasn’t going anywhere. I said 'why don’t you hire a private detective?' They said they didn’t have any money."

Butowsky said he offered to pay for a private investigator, and called Wheeler. There, he said, his involvement ended.

"They negotiated something," Butowsky said. "In their contract it said, any money Rod is going to bill, Butowsky is going to pay. But Rod Wheeler has never billed me a penny. Nobody has ever paid anybody anything."

Beyond his involvement in the Rich case, Wheeler is mostly known for saying outrageous things on air. In 2007, in reference to a controversy over racial profiling and policing, Wheeler pulled his eyes back on air to demonstrate what "a Chinese male" looks like. And in the same year, on the Bill O'Reilly show, Wheeler said that a "national underground network" of armed lesbians were raping girls.

In addition to his private detective business, Capital Investigations, Wheeler is also, according to his LinkedIn, the CEO and founder of the Global Food Defense Institute. ("Food defense," per the website of the FDA, focuses on "the risk of criminal or terrorist actions on the food supply.")


But it's Wheeler's experience in the DC police department that seems to have qualified him to investigate the Rich case. In the Fox story, Wheeler said that a source within the department told him that they were ordered to "stand down" on the Rich investigation, and that it was "confirmed" that Rich was in contact with Wikileaks.

Calling Wheeler's allegations "unfounded," a spokesperson for the MPD said that Wheeler had been employed by the department from 1990 to 1995 and that he was "dismissed from the agency."

It's unclear what prompted Wheeler to speak to Fox, but earlier today, the Rich family denied having seeing the investigator's report in a statement:

"We see no facts, we have seen no evidence, we have been approached with no emails and only learned about this when contacted by the press."

BuzzFeed News called a cell phone number appearing to belong to Wheeler and the number of the Global Food Defense Institute, which both had full mailboxes.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstei ... .ocw2OYRjq


No worries Hannity is on it

Sean Hannity: I’m ‘Looking Into’ Seth Rich’s ‘Suspicious’ Death
Read more: http://forward.com/fast-forward/372104/ ... ous-death/
[/quote]



SonicG » Thu May 18, 2017 9:37 pm wrote:Rod Wheeler:
Wheeler, a Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officer-turned-paid Fox News commentator, launched right in: "Well, you know, there is this national underground network, if you will, Bill, of women that's lesbians and also some men groups that's actually recruiting kids as young as 10 years old in a lot of the schools in the communities all across the country," he reported. "And they actually carry a number of weapons. And they commit a number of crimes."

Wheeler asserted that "we've actually counted, just in the Washington, D.C., area alone, that's Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, well over 150 of these crews. … And they — like I said, they recruit these kids to be members of these gangs."

O'Reilly asked, "Now, when they recruit the kids, are they indoctrinating them into homosexuality?"

"Yes," Wheeler answered. "As a matter of fact, some of the kids have actually reported that they were forced into, you know, performing sex acts and doing sex acts with some of these people."

"Now, the other thing, too, that our viewers are going to find very, very interesting, is the fact that they actually carry—some of these groups carry pink pistols," Wheeler said. "They call themselves the pink-pistol-packing group. And these are lesbians that actually carry pistols. That's 9-millimeter Glocks. They use these. They commit crimes, and they cause a lot of hurt to a lot of people."

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate ... mg00000313
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 23, 2017 2:18 am

Mikhail Zygar no match for that fine journalist Sean Hannity or World Nut Daily :lol:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnlvrTQT5T8
Published on Nov 26, 2014
Four international journalists were honored with the Committee to Protect Journalists' 2014 International Press Freedom Awards. The awardees are Aung Zaw, founder and editor-in-chief of Burma's The Irrawaddy, which was branded an "enemy of the state"; Siamak Ghaderi, an Iranian freelance journalist released in July from a four-year prison term; Mikhail Zygar, editor-in-chief of the Russian independent TV channel Dozhd; and Ferial Haffajee, editor-in-chief of City Press in South Africa, who has been threatened with violence over critical stories. CPJ presented Jorge Ramos with the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in the cause of press freedom. Nguyen Van Hai, who was imprisoned when his award was presented in 2013, has been released and attended this year to receive his award.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2LyKUmfP2w

The book was described as a 'Cluster Bomb' in The Economist, that also wrote: "Refreshingly, Mr Zygar chooses to focus not on the president himself, but on the courtiers who have shaped and shepherded him. He tells an insider’s tale, drawing on material collected over many years, latterly as editor-in-chief of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent television network (Mr Zygar stepped down last December, not long after this book was published in Russia). He brings fresh insight to characters such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the ex-boss of Yukos who was convicted of underpaying taxes, and Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister. And he pulls back the curtain on several key figures whom Western readers may not know, such as Viktor Medvedchuk, the chief-of-staff of the former Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, and Vyacheslav Volodin, a political strategist who engineered Mr Putin’s conservative turn in his third term."

The account is an ambitious gallop through Putin's presidency that throws light on the evolution of his foreign policy, revealing his initial admiration for Blair, and how he came to feel betrayed by the West. Zygar believes that decision making by the US as well as events in Georgia and Ukraine set Russia on the course that it is on today, and gives an insider's view on this.

Mikhail Zygar is a leading Russian journalist, writer and filmmaker. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the only Russian independent news TV-channel, Dozhd. Dozhd provides an alternative to state-run TV channels by focusing on news content and giving a platform to opposition voices.




Dr Sam Greene is the founding Director of the Russia Institute at King`s College London and senior lecturer in Russian politics. Prior to moving to London in 2012, he lived and worked in Moscow for 13 years, most recently as director of the Centre for the Study of New Media & Society at the New Economic School, and as deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. His book,Moscow in Movement: Power & Opposition in Putin`s Russia, was published in August 2014 by Stanford University Press. He holds a PhD in political sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Sam is a Trustee of Pushkin House
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Tue May 23, 2017 2:26 am, edited 2 times in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Tue May 23, 2017 2:25 am

seemslikeadream » 23 May 2017 15:50 wrote:I don't see the transcript and don't see how to watch the show


That's weird. It isn't working now for me either.

Do you get a still image and a big blank space underneath?
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