As Trump fades, due to Mar A Lago controversy, Putin ups his game via elimination of dissidents, re defining "legitimate" and returns to Stalin
As Trump due to the Mar A Lago fall out over the FBI taking of documents fades as a hope for Putin to re control America, the older techniques are getting a fresh paint job
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Using a barrage of increasingly outlandish falsehoods, President Vladimir V. Putin has created an alternative reality, one in which Russia is at war not with Ukraine but with a larger, more pernicious enemy in the West. Even since the war began, the lies have gotten more and more bizarre, transforming from claims that “true sovereignty” for Ukraine was possible only under Russia, made before the attacks, to those about migratory birds carrying bioweapons.
Russia’s message has proved successful domestically, where the Kremlin’s claims go unchallenged. Surveys suggest a majority of Russians support the war effort. Internationally, the campaign has seeped into an information ecosystem that allows them to spread virulently,?reaching audiences ?that were once harder to reach.
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I among others have been blunting this online in facebook and LinkedIN. However, this has become more pressing as Trump grows less and less likely to reclaim primacy, i.e.
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Not surprisingly, Trump is having a particularly frazzled reaction to the release of the affidavit. He’s calling the search warrant a “break-in.” He’s dishonestly attacking the judge. He’s somehow dragging President Obama into it. And there are too many exclamation points to count.
Donald Trump appears to understand just how bad this is getting for him. Just the unredacted portions of the affidavit make clear that the DOJ has more than enough of a case to get Trump convicted. Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see whether the DOJ arrests Trump soon on these charges, or waits until it has other charges
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whereas murder incorporated, for taking out Putin critics has become a thing again
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The mysterious death last week of a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in Washington’s West End neighborhood is drawing fury from some of the Kremlin’s best-known global detractors — but scant notice in Washington, where police say they don’t suspect foul play was behind Dan Rapoport’s fall from a luxury apartment building on the night of Aug. 14.
“I think the circumstances of his death are extremely suspicious,” says Bill Browder, the formerly Moscow-based American financier who became a crusader for sanctions after the killing of his Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
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whereas the idea of "legitimacy " is one again being rebranded
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The word “legitimate” is suddenly hot — and it’s being increasingly used to justify the unjustifiable. In the recent rare and unified front of Republicans and Democrats, rushing to sanction Russia as it begins an invasion of Ukraine, it may be convenient to stop thinking about the Republican National Committee’s statement that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was?“legitimate political discourse.”
That’s the kind of language choice that appeals to Vladimir Putin, who recently gave an hourlong televised speech that rewrote history and redefined legitimacy. The speech made Putin’s views on the Ukraine clear. But it also did much more.
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Whereas we also see this, namely Russian security services are literally everywhere and highly militarized
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If you compare with some other recent wars, such as Afghanistan in the 1980s or Chechnya [in the 1990s and 2000s], we have seen far more significant changes [in Ukraine]. Before the war, only two departments inside of the?FSB?were involved in dealing with Ukraine. These were the 5th Service, which was in charge of collecting intelligence in Ukraine and then also the Counterintelligence Department, which [was] focused on hunting down Ukrainian spies and attacking journalists and?activists.
Now, you see, almost every major department of the?FSB?is involved in some way with this war effort…and they are getting more and more militarized, which isn’t something we’ve seen before, certainly not during the Chechen wars and certainly not on this scale.
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A. Murdering dissidents, CHECK
B. Re defining language, A LA 1984, CHECK
C. Hyper militarization of the Russian FSB CHECK
D. Last but not least the killing of Dugin's daughter, last Saturday, as a warning for dissidents to back off
All these trends are being accelerated as ":Putin's son" Donald Trump is being buried by a counter intelligence nightmare in MAR A LAGO
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A Putin Critic Fell from a Building in Washington. Was It Really a Suicide?
D.C. police say they don’t suspect foul play. Fellow activists are incensed. And the city where it happened is barely paying attention.
Police say they do not suspect foul play in the death of Putin critic Dan Rapoport, but some of his political allies aren’t so sure. | Wikimedia Commons
08/26/2022 04:30 AM EDT
The mysterious death last week of a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in Washington’s West End neighborhood is drawing fury from some of the Kremlin’s best-known global detractors — but scant notice in Washington, where police say they don’t suspect foul play was behind Dan Rapoport’s fall from a luxury apartment building on the night of Aug. 14.
“I think the circumstances of his death are extremely suspicious,” says Bill Browder, the formerly Moscow-based American financier who became a crusader for sanctions after the killing of his Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. Browder got to know Rapoport in Moscow years ago, before they both fell out of favor with the Russian regime. “Whenever someone who is in a negative view of the Putin regime dies suspiciously, one should rule out foul play, not rule it in.”
According to a Metropolitan Police Department incident report, officers responding to a call about a jumper found the 52-year-old Rapoport’s body on the sidewalk. He was wearing orange flip flops and a black hat and had a cracked phone, headphones and $2,620 in cash on him, but no wallet or credit cards. The police say the case remains open, even without a suspicion of foul play. As is standard for suspected suicides, a medical examiner’s report — which would typically reference medical or other records, include a toxicology screen and incorporate X-rays and other posthumous forensics to determine if there was a struggle before the fall — is pending.
The deceased was no mere exile. A Latvian-born U.S. citizen, Rapoport moved back to the U.S. in 2012 after making a fortune in Moscow but running afoul of the Russian government. Settling in Washington, he rubbed elbows with mover and shakers, living in a Kalorama manse that his family later sold for $5.5 million in 2016, when it became the home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. By then, Rapoport had relocated again, setting up shop in Kyiv, where he became a frequent contact of U.S. media.
In the eyes of Rapoport’s political allies, the history of untimely deaths of Kremlin critics makes the police’s initial no-foul-play conclusion seem naive. “He was a well-known critic of Putin in the West and had been an effective critic,” Browder says. “He was also an open supporter of [the jailed opposition leader] Alexei Navalny. And he had all these connections in the elite of Washington, D.C. The immediate response of the Washington, D.C. police, I think, is a premature and unhelpful conclusion.”
“Nothing adds up,” says David Satter, a longtime Moscow correspondent in Soviet and post-Soviet times who in 2013 became the first U.S. reporter?booted from Russia ?since the Cold War. Satter, now a frequent?Wall Street Journal?contributor and the author of several books about Putin’s Russia, had stayed with Rapoport in Kyiv. “This is why it has to be investigated. But everything we do know is very, very strange.”
Rapoport’s death has been the subject of?major ?coverage ?overseas , but is oddly off the radar in Washington, where there has been little major media attention. It’s a strange and possibly telling omission from our midterm-absorbed city’s water-cooler conversation: A number of high-profile figures are implying that a foreign government may have killed an American citizen in the capital of the United States. Even if their conjectures are overblown, it ought to be news.
The suspicions, Browder says, began when the news of Rapoport’s death first broke on the Telegram channel of a former editor of Russian Tattler, via a convoluted story that claimed Rapoport’s dog was let loose with a suicide note and cash attached to him. Because intelligence services often put out information through gossip sites, the location raised antennae. “How the hell did she [the ex-Tattler editor] learn about Dan’s alleged suicide?” asks Vlad Burlutsky, a Russian expat who met Rapoport through his work supporting Navalny.
In a?Russian media interview , Rapoport’s wife denied the story about the note — and the suicide, saying her husband had been making plans and that she expected to be in Washington to see him. (The police report also makes no mention of a note or a dog.)
“I’ve talked several times to Alyona, his widow, and she says she is absolutely certain that it’s not a suicide,” says close friend Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of the Russian Duma to vote against the annexation of Crimea and now a strident Putin critic also living in Kyiv.
Ponomarev says he’s less certain. But he fears a repeat of what happened in 2015, when Putin’s former media czar?died ?in odd circumstances in Washington and, in his view, U.S. authorities soft-pedaled the investigation. “I would not be surprised that it would be the same thing, that people don’t want to deal with some crazy Russians,” he says. (Alyona Rapoport did not respond to my messages, and has only been quoted in a single Russian media story since confirming his death on Facebook.)
The case for suspicion involves some more basic practical questions: What was up with the wad of cash? Why would Rapoport have been making plans for the next few days? Why was he wearing a hat?
But mainly the suspicion has to do with Russia. “There’s an old saying that anyone can commit a murder but it takes brains to commit a suicide,” says Satter. “The version of suicide is for the irrelevant people who will simply accept it and move on without raising questions.”
Born in the USSR, Rapoport came with his parents to the U.S. at age 11, settling in Texas. After graduating from college, he moved to Russia in the wild post-Soviet days, settling in Moscow after a stint in Siberia. He made his fortune there as a stockbroker, eventually opening Soho Rooms, one of the city’s top nightspots. But in 2012, he announced that he was leaving Russia, declaring on Facebook that life there had become “unbearable and disgusting.”
In Washington, Rapoport and his Russian-born wife settled into the exclusive Kalorama neighborhood, enrolling a child at Maret, a top local private school. Acquaintances here describe a frenetic, intense personality, someone with ups and downs. He dabbled in the dining industry here, too, says Winston Bao Lord, a tech entrepreneur whose investments are largely in the hospitality space. He met Rapoport, who at the time had some money invested in an Alexandria restaurant, to pitch an idea that never panned out. Lord says Rapoport was a jocular social presence. “He was a big partier when I knew him,” Lord says. “He was a confident guy that felt very strongly about his views.”
Rapoport appeared occasionally in the media with Kremlin-critical posts. In 2018, the open-source investigative platform?Bellingcat reported ?that Rapoport was behind the Facebook page of David Jewberg, purported to be a senior Pentagon analyst. The entirely made-up Lieutenant Colonel Jewberg was frequently quoted in Russian and Ukrainian media (and by some of Rapoport’s Washington friends) as a real U.S. defense insider. Mostly in Russian, the posts were critical of the Obama administration’s insufficiently aggressive stances toward Russia and Facebook’s alleged pro-Russia bias.
“Dan is likely the most intelligent person I’ve ever met,” says Yuri Somov, who struck up a friendship with Rapoport in Washington. “And I’ve met people like Kissinger and Greenspan. I’m a professional interpreter. He was incredibly intense and very much larger than life, but in a good way.” Somov describes himself as apolitical, but says his friend was different: “He was a romantic. He believed things could be changed and he believed he could be a part of those changes.”
Washington, Somov says, was probably not Rapoport’s natural milieu. In 2016, after divorcing, he left town, moving to Kyiv, where the tumultuous scene might have represented an opportunity for someone whose first experience was in crisis-racked post-Soviet Moscow. His ex-wife and kids stayed here. “He was too different from the world of U.S. business,” Somov says. “He probably felt closer to home in Ukraine than in the U.S.”
Somov, who says he’s been devastated by Rapoport’s death, is among those who thinks the suicide story is completely plausible.
“Not every unexplained death in Russia is the KGB or the GRU bumping someone off,” says Fiona Hill, the former senior Russia specialist at the White House, who met Rapoport through Somov.
Rapoport had remarried in Kyiv to a Ukrainian virologist; they’d started a new family. After the war began, Rapoport relocated his wife and child to Denmark but stayed in Ukraine — and then came to Washington this summer, shipping his dog as well. Missing them, friends say, left him distraught.
“He was having to start over again for the third time in 10 years,” Somov says. “We did not meet up, which I will regret for the rest of my life because he probably needed me. When he asked me, ‘lunch tomorrow?’ after not seeing each other for several years, I should have read between the lines. I must have asked him something, but I remember the answer, which is still in my phone: ‘It has been a very difficult three months.’ From him, particularly, that’s saying a lot. More than notable, it was extraordinary. No matter how things worked, he kept up appearances.”
Ponomarev also says Rapoport didn’t seem great when they barbecued in Washington during a visit this summer. He said Rapoport had cut way back on drinking after his second marriage, but was drinking heavily when they met up. “It was very clear he was depressed that he was not with his family,” he says. Still, it didn’t seem desperate. “I cannot exclude that it was a suicide, but in general nothing pointed in this direction when we met. If I would feel like something like this could happen, I would talk to him more.”
But for a number of people in Rapoport’s anxious political circles, it’s hard to put stock in coincidences. “He was making plans for the future. He had plans for the next week and the week after,” says Jason Jay Smart, a Kyiv-based American political consultant who says he spoke weekly with Rapoport over the past half-decade. “It’s not something someone who was planning on jumping off a building would do.”
And there’s history to make Russian skeptics suspicious of Washington authorities’ investigative chops. In 2015, Mikhail Lesin, a former media aide to the Russian president, died in Washington’s Dupont Circle Hotel. Initially reported as a heart attack, the medical examiner later?determined ?that he had died of blunt force trauma. But the report was later amended to say that the death had been an accident, the injuries sustained possibly from falling off a bed after he returned to his hotel room extremely drunk. Prosecutors closed the case. “That was outrageous,” Ponomarev says.
Closer to Rapoport — but further from politics — his partner in Soho Rooms died in an apparent suicide after his own fall from a building, in Moscow in 2017. One Rapoport friend speculated that foul play could be business-related rather than political, though Satter says the two aren’t so easily separated. “Even if it was just business interests, that doesn’t mean the Russian intelligence service wasn’t involved,” he says. “They often use these disputes.”
The Russian embassy did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.
The FBI says it does not comment about whether it is investigating alongside the locals. And the medical examiner’s report, alas, may not be here to clear things up anytime soon: All “unnatural” deaths, even open-and-shut suicides, get sent for a report. They can take up to 90 days.
In the meantime, people who find the death fishy — as well as people who merely find it heartbreaking — can probably see evidence in Rapoport’s?final Facebook post , three days before his death. It was a photo of Marlon Brando’s?Apocalypse Now?character, accompanied by the character’s haunting last words: “The horror, the horror.”
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Whereas there is an abuse of language that should be noted
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How Putin and Trump loyalists are illegitimately redefining the word legitimate (and language itself)
Vladimir Putin at the Olympics?By gettyimages
By?Aviya Kushner February 23, 2022
The word “legitimate” is suddenly hot — and it’s being increasingly used to justify the unjustifiable. In the recent rare and unified front of Republicans and Democrats, rushing to sanction Russia as it begins an invasion of Ukraine, it may be convenient to stop thinking about the Republican National Committee’s statement that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was?“legitimate political discourse.”
That’s the kind of language choice that appeals to Vladimir Putin, who recently gave an hourlong televised speech that rewrote history and redefined legitimacy. The speech made Putin’s views on the Ukraine clear. But it also did much more.
“What he’s saying is something far wider: Ukraine is not a legitimate state. Ukraine is Russia. It should never have existed as anything else,” David Patrikarakos, a contributing writer at Politico Europe and the author of “War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in 21st Century,” told?Time.
“If you do not accept the idea of Ukraine, then you clearly by implication do not accept the idea of Georgia, the Baltic States, Moldova and everything else,” Patrikarakos said.
Now, China is chiming in with that same “legitimate” framing, this time with regard to Russia’s behavior toward Ukraine.
“China did not explicitly endorse Moscow’s latest moves toward Ukraine but still recognized Tuesday what it called Russia’s legitimate security concerns, in Beijing’s latest tightrope act over the crisis in Eastern Europe,” Lily Kuo?wrote ?in The Washington Post.
Let’s take a moment to consider what “legitimate” means.
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The first known use of the word “legitimate” was in the 15th century. It meant,?according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ?“accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements.”
In fact, “legitimate” is rooted in the Latin word for law.
“Legitimate” made its way to us via the Middle English?legitimat,?which came from the medieval Latin legitimates. The “past participle of?legitimare?to legitimate, from Latin?legitimus?legitimate, from?leg-, lex?law,” Merriam-Webster explains.
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“Legitimate” has been in the news as an adjective, but it’s possible to use “legitimate” as a verb, too.
While the?Cambridge Dictionary ?says that “legitimate” as an adjective means “allowed by law” and “reasonable and acceptable,” the?verb?“legitimate” means “to make something legal and acceptable.”
Let’s focus on “make” and all its sordid possibilities.
Language can easily be deployed to make the unacceptable acceptable. In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell warns about the dangers of “meaningless words” and — wait for it — words with “variable” meanings.
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” Orwell?wrote ?in that April 1946 essay, which increasingly feels like it was written this week.
“Political language,” Orwell?added, ?“is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
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Unsurprisingly, “legitimate” is currently in the top 1 percent of dictionary lookups at Merriam-Webster. But “legitimate” has been in Putin’s top 1 percent of framing choices for a while.
Scholars have been on alert to the potential misuse of this word and have responded to the “legitimacy” campaign by considering whether any law justifies Putin’s actions.
As you might expect, the answer is: “No.”
Dr. Bj?rn Alexander Düben, who teaches Conflict and Security Studies at King’s College London, wrote a post explicitly titled “The Legitimacy of Russia’s Actions in Ukraine” for the London School of Economics blog. Duben was commenting on Putin’s 2014 moves — but his remarks are even more relevant now, with an estimated 190,000 Russian troops ready to pounce on Ukraine.
“The Russian government has consistently defended its startling moves in Ukraine, denying all accusations that its encroachments on the country’s sovereignty have been illegitimate. Does it have any valid grounds for doing so?” Duben?wrote.
“From a legal perspective, the answer is clear: Having forcibly occupied parts of a sovereign country’s territory, having formally annexed the occupied territory, and having flooded another part of the country with heavy weaponry and irregular combatants (‘volunteers’ who were permitted to cross the border in large numbers, as well as regular soldiers), Moscow has acted in violation of some of the most basic principles of international law.”
But let’s think beyond the law, for a moment.
“Legitimate” has other meanings besides “legal” that have become more popular since the 15th century and possibly most relevant to us right now.
I’ve been rereading Definition 2a in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in recent days — “being exactly as intended or presented: neither spurious nor false.”
Putin is trying hard to frame his claims as not false, which is not surprising for a former KGB agent. The problem is that we’re in an era where the false is presented as true.
This morning, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright wrote an Op-Ed in?The New York Times ?titled “Putin Is Making a Historic Mistake.”
Putin, she wrote, is “sure that Americans mirror both his cynicism and his lust for power and that in a world where everyone lies, he is under no obligation to tell the truth.”
Exactly. Our growing acceptance of lies has not gone unnoticed. Let’s hope this unified front of Republicans, Democrats, and NATO also moves to protect the greatest battleground — the truth.
Aviya Kushner is The Forward’s language columnist and the author of “Wolf Lamb Bomb” (Orison Books) and “The Grammar of God” (Spiegel & Grau). Follow her on Twitter @AviyaKushner
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Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War
The Kremlin has used a barrage of increasingly outlandish falsehoods to prop up its overarching claim that the invasion of Ukraine is justified.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has tried to create an alternative reality.?Credit...
Erin Schaff/The New York Times
By?Steven Lee Myers ?and?Stuart A. Thompson
In the tense weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian officials denied that it planned anything of the sort, denouncing the United States and its NATO allies for stoking panic and anti-Russian hatred. When it did invade, the officials denied it was at war.
Since then, the Kremlin has cycled through a torrent of lies to explain why it had to wage a “special military operation” against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addled neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters sheltering children.
Disinformation in wartime is as old as war itself, but today war unfolds in the age of social media and digital diplomacy. That has given Russia — and its allies in China and elsewhere — powerful means to prop up the claim that the invasion is justified, exploiting disinformation?to rally its citizens ?at home and to discredit its enemies abroad. Truth has simply become another front in Russia’s war.
Using a barrage of increasingly outlandish falsehoods, President Vladimir V. Putin has created an alternative reality, one in which Russia is at war not with Ukraine but with a larger, more pernicious enemy in the West. Even since the war began, the lies have gotten more and more bizarre, transforming from claims that “true sovereignty” for Ukraine was possible only under Russia, made before the attacks, to those about migratory birds carrying bioweapons.
Russia’s message has proved successful domestically, where the Kremlin’s claims go unchallenged. Surveys suggest a majority of Russians support the war effort. Internationally, the campaign has seeped into an information ecosystem that allows them to spread virulently,?reaching audiences ?that were once harder to reach.
“Previously, if you were sitting in Moscow and you wanted to reach audiences sitting in, say, Idaho, you would have to work really hard doing that,” said Elise Thomas, a researcher in Australia for the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, referring to?disinformation campaigns ?dating to the Soviet Union. “It would take you time to set up the systems, whereas now you can do it with the press of a button.”
The power of Russia’s claim that the invasion is justified comes not from the veracity of any individual falsehood meant to support it but from the broader argument. Individual lies about bioweapons labs or?crisis actors ?are advanced by Russia as swiftly as they are debunked, with little consistency or logic between them. But supporters stubbornly cling to the overarching belief that something is wrong in Ukraine and Russia will fix it. Those connections prove harder to shake, even as new evidence is introduced.
That mythology, and its resilience in the face of fact-checking and criticism, reflects “the ability of autocrats and malign actors to completely brainwash us to the point where we don’t see what’s in front of us,” said Laura Thornton, the director and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The Kremlin’s narratives today feed on pre-existing views of the war’s root causes, which Mr. Putin has nurtured for years — and restated in?increasingly strident language? last week.
The strategy to deceive, or at least confuse, international observers was used after the bombing of a maternity ward in Mariupol on March 9.
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Whereas
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INTELLIGENCE
After Six Months of War, Russia's Intelligence Agencies Have Adapted
By Reid Standish
Published 26 August 2022
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While the scale of Russia’s battlefield setbacks have taken center stage in recent months, it was Russia’s intelligence agencies — most notably the Federal Security Service (FSB) — that failed to bring down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government or incite any form of pro-Russian support as tanks pushed into Ukraine. How did Russia’s intelligence agencies get things so wrong and why did the networks they had cultivated for years in Ukraine fail to yield?results?
It was supposed to be a lightning strike that could see Russian forces in Kyiv after three days of fighting, but six months after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin instead finds itself locked in a grinding war that has left its military and intelligence services?humiliated.
While the scale of Russia’s battlefield setbacks have taken center stage in recent months, it was Russia’s intelligence agencies — most notably the Federal Security Service (FSB) — that failed to bring down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government or incite any form of pro-Russian support as tanks pushed into?Ukraine.
Instead, Russian forces came up against widespread resistance from the Ukrainian military and its citizens and the Kremlin has had to deal with a government in Kyiv that has held firm and rallied international?support.
But how did Russia’s intelligence agencies get things so wrong and why did the networks they had cultivated for years in Ukraine fail to yield?results?
To find out more about how the war has changed Russia’s intelligence services and how their misjudgments have shaped events on the ground,?RFE/RL?spoke with Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who has reported on Russia’s intelligence services for decades and is now a fellow in London with the Center for European Policy Analysis?(CEPA).
RFE/RL: Despite repeated failures, the?FSB?and leaders from other intelligence agencies remain in their positions and the agency has regrouped. What do you think these agencies have learned after six months of war in Ukraine?
Andrei Soldatov:?We can see after six months that the war has affected the Russian security services in a very significant?way.
If you compare with some other recent wars, such as Afghanistan in the 1980s or Chechnya [in the 1990s and 2000s], we have seen far more significant changes [in Ukraine]. Before the war, only two departments inside of the?FSB?were involved in dealing with Ukraine. These were the 5th Service, which was in charge of collecting intelligence in Ukraine and then also the Counterintelligence Department, which [was] focused on hunting down Ukrainian spies and attacking journalists and?activists.
Now, you see, almost every major department of the?FSB?is involved in some way with this war effort…and they are getting more and more militarized, which isn’t something we’ve seen before, certainly not during the Chechen wars and certainly not on this scale. You also now have lots of [intelligence officers] from Moscow going to occupied parts of Ukraine for three- month tours. That means that soon there will be lots [of officers] with Ukraine experience, which will change the mentality and the mindset of people who are serving in the Russian security?services.
RFE/RL: In the first few months of the war, there was reporting — including by yourself — that there was intense infighting among Russia’s intelligence agencies and that the leader of the?FSB’s Ukraine directorate, Sergei Beseda, was?placed under house arrest ?over early failures following the invasion. However,?U.S.?officials recently?told The Washington Post ?that they have seen no evidence that President Vladimir Putin has held any officials to account. What is your reading of things now and has there been any accountability for these costly misjudgments?
Soldatov:?I believe that’s the [narrative] that the?FSB?and the Kremlin wants to project. It’s a narrative they are promoting because officially everything is going according to plan, which has been a famous line coming from the Kremlin [over the last] six months. They can’t admit that they started punishing people or the Russian security services because it implies?failure.
The?FSB?has gone to some lengths to deny the whole thing [with Beseda] and tried to silence people who are raising questions and reporting about the problems [the?FSB] has been facing. For instance, that’s the reason why a criminal case was launched against?me.
Actually, Putin was initially so angry [following the invasion of Ukraine] that he attacked Beseda and his department and everyone in the?FSB?knew that. But after the story became so big, Putin did something unprecedented and actually released [Beseda] because he wanted to show that everything is still going according to?plan.
RFE/RL: What is the current status of Sergei Beseda then?
Soldatov:?As far as we can see, he’s out of prison. He still has his rank of general [but] he’s not in control of his department. He has been seen publicly and within the?FSB, essentially to send the message that he’s still there and that’s basically his role?now.
RFE/RL: Is he still doing his job as the head of the Ukraine directorate?
Soldatov:?No, you have his deputies doing [his duties]. He’s just there to be present and show that he’s not in prison?[anymore].
RFE/RL: So how did Russian intelligence manage to get things so wrong? Was it simply wishful thinking or something else at play?
Soldatov:?It’s important to understand here that the?FSB?has never been a really good information service. Rather, they’ve been really good as an instrument [of repression]. They know how to suppress people, how to send them to jail, how to kill people, but to collect intelligence requires a different set of?skills.
You also need a slightly different system of government for that to work. You need to have a system of sharing of intelligence [and] you need to have generals who [are] trusted by the rank and file, which is not the case right?now.
For many years, there has been a crisis of generations inside the?FSB. Putin appointed the most important generals to run the?FSB?back in the early 2000s and some of them are still holding the same positions. That means you have ambitious colonels and majors and they do not understand how they can get into new?positions.
This also [breeds a culture] of distrust where even if they know something is not right — for instance, around public support for the invasion of Ukraine — they will tell their superiors what they expect to hear. That goes all the way up to the?Kremlin.
Generals like Beseda also understand that they need to please Putin and they also know that Putin introduced?selective repressions ?back in the fall of 2016, which means lots of people have been oppressed, including those inside the?FSB. There have been colonels and even generals punished by the Kremlin not for the failure to do their job, but for?economic crimes .
The outcome is that this creates a climate where no one is willing to risk their career for telling the?truth.
RFE/RL: So where does that leave us? Russian intelligence had extensive networks across Ukraine before the invasion. What do those look like today and moving forward?
Soldatov:?Before the war, the?FSB?relied mostly on bribing people and cultivating contacts in political parties [and government agencies] in Ukraine. Now this game [has] completely?changed.
What we see now is something?not seen since Chechnya ?or the end of the Second World War, which is the use of huge filtration?camps.
The reason to have these filtration camps is not only to process people and to identify potential Ukrainian spies, but also an opposite use. The?FSB?has always approached using filtration camps as a way to recruit people. These [are] huge facilities where you?process lots of civilians ?[and] it’s an opportunity to approach and apply physical or psychological pressure on them and recruit large numbers of new?contacts.
That’s what the?FSB?is trying to do right now and then potentially use this new network of agents on the ground. How successful it can be is a good question, but it’s a problem that Ukraine will have to deal with as large numbers of people who went through these camps come?back.
Reid Standish is an?RFE/RL?correspondent in Prague and author of the?China In Eurasia ?briefing.?This?interview ??is reprinted with permission of?Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ?(RFE/RL).
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whereas
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/donald-trump-goes-berserk-after-doj-releases-affidavit-and-reveals-just-how-guilty-he-is/46837/
quote
Donald Trump goes berserk after DOJ releases affidavit and reveals just how guilty he is
Bill Palmer ?|?5:04 pm EDT August 26, 2022
Donald Trump demanded that the DOJ publicly release the search warrant affidavit used at his home, so he could find out who within his orbit might be secretly cooperating against him. The DOJ objected to this, and the courts of course agreed. But then the media separately asked for a redacted version of the affidavit, so it could report on it, and the judge agreed. So the DOJ submitted a redacted version, which the judge approved, and has been released today.
If Trump’s failed attempt at getting the full affidavit released ended up steering the judge toward ordering the DOJ to release the redacted version to the media, then Trump has made a huge mistake.
The affidavit, though heavily redacted, nonetheless goes into great detail about how sensitive the documents were that Donald Trump stole, including state secrets and overseas wiretap intel. It also makes clear that Trump was breaking the law simply by being in possession of many of these documents, regardless of whether or not they might have been declassified at any point. And the affidavit crushes Trump’s argument that he and his legal team were trying to cooperate with the Feds at the time the surprise warrant was carried out.
Not surprisingly, Trump is having a particularly frazzled reaction to the release of the affidavit. He’s calling the search warrant a “break-in.” He’s dishonestly attacking the judge. He’s somehow dragging President Obama into it. And there are too many exclamation points to count.
Donald Trump appears to understand just how bad this is getting for him. Just the unredacted portions of the affidavit make clear that the DOJ has more than enough of a case to get Trump convicted. Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see whether the DOJ arrests Trump soon on these charges, or waits until it has other charges such as election tampering and seditious conspiracy ready to go against Trump as well.
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD