Thread: How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

Originally Posted by OhOh

Or not having one at all.

You're correct. If one person can rewrite it as he wishes, you might as well not have one.

It is good that there are honest journalists in this world

He's right there, especially as they have a habit of killing them.

How ingenious, that on any situation somebody (please no names here) has got a clue...

Originally Posted by OhOh

THE LORD updated his lackies

FTFY.

Only in Putin's Russia: A respected information security analyst is charged with crimes to cover up the fact that Russian state intelligence routinely protects hackers so that it can use them and their TTPs. A key witness is a criminal who the analyst helped to convict and jail.

The top secret treason trial of a cybercrime analyst wrapped up this week after months of testimony behind the closed doors of a Moscow military court, with prosecutors reportedly demanding 20 years in a penal colony for the crime of allegedly snitching on Russian cybercriminals to American investigators. A verdict is expected on February 27.

Ruslan Stoyanov is a one-time cybercop who went on to head the computer incidents investigation team at the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab. He stood trial with Col. Sergei Mikhailov, who was second in command in the cybercrime division of Russia’s federal security service, the FSB, until December 2016, when his fellow agents ended an internal meeting by abruptly shoving a black bag over his head and dragging him off to prison.

The men are accused of passing confidential material from a 2010 cybercrime and spam investigation to an analyst at a U.S. security firm. But the trial ended without the court hearing from a key figure in the prosecution’s theory: the analyst herself, who says the Russian military appears to be on the verge of convicting Stoyanov for treason he didn’t commit.

“I formally requested to testify, and they said no,” said Kimberly Zenz, a veteran cybercrime threat analyst who was caught up in the Russian intrigue while working for Verisign’s iDefense threat intelligence division. “You’d think the opportunity to interrogate a ‘spy’ would be exciting for them, but they don’t even bother to pretend.”

The treason case has been closely watched, if seldom observed, since the high-profile arrests in the final days of 2016. The entire matter is considered a state secret in Russia, and with few hard details to go on initial speculation linked the arrests to Russia’s election interference campaign.

Over time, a clear and consistent account of the case has emerged from court leaks and people connected to the events. And it turns out the charges have nothing to do with election interference. Instead they’re uniquely a product of Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic justice system: the defendants are on trial because eight years ago they allegedly shared confidential documents about a convicted Russian cybercriminal with an American colleague.

Stoyanov’s arrest shocked the computer security community. The Kaspersky analyst is well respected internationally, and has no obvious connection to the swamp of corruption and backstabbing synonymous with Russia’s intelligence agencies. But in a country that routinely protects its criminal hackers, and sometimes conscripts them into state service, cross-border cooperation can evidently amount to high treason.

“Things are going very badly,” said Zenz, a longtime friend of Stoyanov. “Ruslan is an honest guy, he’s a good guy. He does not deserve this.”

The treason charges are rooted in allegations first leveled against Stoyanov and other defendants in 2010 by one of the Russian cybercriminals they were tracking: Pavel Vrublevsky, founder of the credit card payment processor ChronoPay.

Vrublevsky is notorious for, among other things, allegedly running a black market pharmaceutical business that hired hackers and spammers to send billions of marketing emails. His misadventures have been chronicled in some detail over the years by independent journalist Brian Krebs, who wrote a book about Vrublevsky called Spam Nation.

In 2013, a Russian court sentenced Vrublevsky to two and a half years in prison for ordering a sustained denial-of-service attack against a competing payment processor, an attack that shut down e-ticket sales for the airline Aeroflot for two weeks. Vrublevsky was granted early release after serving one and a half years.

To this day, Vrublevsky insists on his innocence. He blames his legal woes on the FSB officer who led the case, and says that same officer colluded for years with outside security researchers to smear and scapegoat him. In his account, it’s all part of an American conspiracy to paint Russia as a hotbed of global cybercrime. (Note: Russia is a hotbed of global cybercrime).

Today that conspiracy theory is at the root of the remarkable treason prosecution. In its broad strokes, Vrublevsky believes that defendant Sergey Mikhaylov, while serving as the deputy chief of the FSB’s anti-cybercrime unit, routinely passed confidential information from the FSB’s ChronoPay probe to the corporate cybercrime analyst Kimberly Zenz.

That’s where Ruslan Stoyanov enters the theory. Stoyanov worked in the Ministry of Interior's cybercrime unit from 2000 to 2006, when he left to begin a cybersecurity startup. He no longer had access to government secrets, but he was a mutual friend of both Zenz and Mikhaylov, the FSB colonel. Vrublevsky has a hunch that Stoyanov served as a middleman in the information transfer.

The information passed to Zenz, he said, informed a series of damning iDefense reports that Zenz wrote about the Russian cybercrime landscape in general, and ChronoPay and Vrublevsky in particular.

Acquired by Accenture in 2017, iDefense was an early player in what today is called the “threat intelligence” marketplace. The firm’s business model involved monitoring cybercrime groups and tracking security vulnerabilities, then producing detailed reports for its clients—largely Fortune 500 companies and the finance industry, as well as U.S. government agencies.

Zenz worked as an analyst at iDefense for a decade beginning in 2006, about a year after it was acquired by Verisign. She specialized in Russian hacker groups, and divided her time between her home in Northern Virginia, where iDefense was based, and a rented apartment in Moscow.

Zenz freely admits a longtime friendship with Stoyanov. “If you deal with Russian cybercrime he was the guy,” she said. “Everybody knows Ruslan.” She showed him around when he visited the States for a week, and, yes, she did frequently discuss Russian cybercriminals with him, including Vrublevsky. But he was out of government service and had no access to secret information, she said. In that respect Stoyanov was no different from any other smart, informed computer security analyst, except that he happened to be Russian. “I asked him all about it, but I didn’t ask him for any material, any secrets,” she told the Daily Beast.

She said it’s understandable that Vrublevsky would harbor some resentment for her. She considered him a significant figure in the world of Russian cybercrime, and made no secret of it. “I talked publicly about him in conferences, so he was very aware that I was out there,” she said. “I was publicly trying to get him arrested, so he’s not wrong. That’s what I wanted.”

But she’s dismayed that the case has swept in Stoyanov, who she’s known for over 10 years. On multiple occasions, she said, she tried to lure Stoyanov into taking a job with her at iDefense, and he always rebuffed her. “He turned down multiple opportunities to make much more money as an anti-cybercrime rockstar in the West because he wanted to serve his country,” she said. “And all of that is being used against him and it’s just wrong.”

Even taking Vrublevsky’s allegations as true, they sound less like espionage and more like the kind of cross-border information-sharing routinely practiced among national law enforcement agencies. But Vrublevsky has more. Much more. He feels strongly that Zenz’s iDefense position was just a cover story for her real job as an undercover spy. ”We investigated Kimberly and saw clear signs of CIA affiliation,” he said. That evidence of Zenz’s double life includes her home address in Virginia. “She lived in the same village where CIA is—McLean,” Vrublevsky noted.

Vrublevsky presumably said the same thing during the three hours of testimony he gave recently in the secret treason trial of Mikhaylov and Vrublevsky—he can’t confirm that because the details of his testimony are also considered a Russian state secret.

To that stew of alleged information-sharing and suspicious street addresses, prosecutors have sprinkled new specifics of their own atop Vrublevsky’s original claims, according to press reports and accounts of people involved in the trial. They charge that the defendants didn’t just share information with Zenz and possibly other Americans, but that they passed along government documents, for which they were collectively paid an astounding $10 million.

The key thread, as alleged by prosecutors, conveniently weaves through three of the defendants back in 2010. That’s when Mikhaylov allegedly loaded up a CD with confidential material from the ChronoPay probe, then gave that CD to his subordinate, Dmitry Dokuchaev, who in turn gave it to Ruslan Stoyanov. Stoyanov allegedly brought the disk with him when he attended Microsoft’s invitation-only Digital Crimes Consortium conference in Montreal, Canada, where he supposedly slipped the disk to Zenz.

Zenz calls this claim ludicrous, and late last year she made a bold offer to the panel of military judges overseeing the trial. From her new home in Germany—she took a new job and left Russia in 2016—she wrote a letter asking to testify at the treason trial. In the letter she affirmed that she didn’t receive documents, on CD or in any other fashion, from her friend Stoyanov, nor did she see him pass a disk to anyone else at the Montreal event. “I was literally with him all day at that conference,” she said. “I was with him all day every day and he didn’t give anyone a CD.”

Zenz wrote the court that she wanted to testify at the trial—a gutsy move for an American now regarded a cunning spymaster by the Russian government. “I requested the option to testify at the embassy here because it’s a lot safer and you’re allowed to do that in the court system there,” she said. “But if I had to, I’d go. I had a big fight with my husband over it.”

To her surprise, the military judges ignored the letter, and she says they also rejected a request from Stoyanov’s lawyer to call Zenz as a witness. “Instead, the main witness is a Russian criminal convicted of breaking Russian laws in Russia, and coincidentally the accused happen to be the people who put him in jail for those crimes,” she said.

Zenz thinks the entire case is a manifestation of infighting between different units of the FSB, and between the FSB and the Russian military intelligence unit, the GRU. Stoyanov himself has cast the prosecution as payback, because he’d been stirring up trouble by criticizing the FSB’s practice of granting effective immunity to hackers willing to do some espionage on the side. “The essence of the deal is that the state gets access to the technologies and information of ‘cyberthieves,’ in exchange for allowing them to steal abroad with impunity,” he wrote in a letterfrom jail made public in 2017.

Ironically, one of Stoyanov’s co-defendants, a black hat hacker turned FSB officer named Dmitry Dokuchaev, has been indicted in the U.S. for doing just that—allegedly letting a well-known hacker go free in exchange for a massive hack into Yahoo that was useful to the FSB’s domestic spying. Dokuchaev and another co-defendant have taken plea deals in the treason case.

Vrublevsky says he finds it “weird” that prosecutors want the 20 year maximum for Stoyanov. “While I am not aware of case details I find it hard to believe that Ruslan indeed was such a self-motivated betrayer,” he said. And he can’t explain why the conspiracy he’s been complaining about since 2010 is suddenly being taken so seriously by the Russian government.

“Nobody knows why they took so long,” Vrublevsky said. “It’s the biggest mystery of them all.”


https://www.thedailybeast.com/kremli...o-go-to-moscow

the US does the same, if you had any inside on security intelligence

so your point is?

Serbia greenlights expansion of Russia’s Turkish Stream gas pipeline




"The Serbian energy regulator has given final approval for the construction of a branch of the Turkish Stream pipeline that will deliver Russian natural gas into Turkey as well as southern and southeastern Europe.

“On March 5 the Energy Agency of the Republic of Serbia made the final decision and responded positively to the Gastrans [company] statement for the implementation of the project,” the Serbian minister of mining and energy, Aleksandar Antic, announced on Thursday. He added that works on the Turkish Stream project, also known as TurkStream, are set to start in April.

Gastrans is responsible for laying the gas transportation branch from Bulgaria to Hungary. The company is owned by Swiss-based South Stream Serbia, of which Russia’s Gazprom holds a 51-percent stake. Serbian gas company Srbijagas holds the remaining 49 percent.

Earlier in the day, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic noted the importance of implementing the gas pipeline project at a meeting with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov in Belgrade.

Russia and Turkey officially agreed on the Turkish Stream, which consists of two lines with annual capacity of 31.5 billion cubic meters, in October 2016. The first branch will deliver Russian natural gas directly to Turkey, while the second stretches to the Turkish-European border to reach European customers.

The project was created as an alternative to the South Stream route through Bulgaria, which ditched the pipeline project amid pressure from the EU and the US. On Thursday, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said he hopes the Turkish Stream will not share the fate of its predecessor.

“As far as we are concerned, the construction of the section from the Bulgarian border to the border with Serbia is being worked out at all levels, and we hope that it will not turn out as previously, and no country will withdraw from the project,” Dacic told reporters during a joint news conference with Borisov.

Another Russia-led energy project – the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea – has been under scrutiny from Washington and some European states. US President Donald Trump accused Berlin of being “captive to Russia,” and the US later threatened to sanction companies which participate in it, while pushing sales of its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe. Both Germany and Russia have repeatedly argued against the claims. Berlin has said it will not bow to pressure in determining its energy and security policies."

https://www.rt.com/business/453316-s...urkish-stream/

Another Russia-led energy project – the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea – has been under scrutiny from Washington and some European states. US President Donald Trump accused Berlin of being “captive to Russia,” and the US later threatened to sanction companies which participate in it, while pushing sales of its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe. Both Germany and Russia have repeatedly argued against the claims. Berlin has said it will not bow to pressure in determining its energy and security policies."

Lucky that we live in the globalization era with the Free Trade policy supported by WTO (with some minor exceptions )

Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports; it is the idea of the free market as applied to international trade. In government, free trade is predominately advocated by political parties that hold liberal economic positions, while economically left-wing and nationalist political parties generally support protectionism,[1][2][3][4] the opposite of free trade.

Most nations are today members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) multilateral trade agreements. Free trade is additionally exemplified by the European Economic Area and the Mercosur, which have established open markets. However, most governments still impose some protectionist policies that are intended to support local employment, such as applying tariffs to imports or subsidies to exports. Governments may also restrict free trade to limit exports of natural resources. Other barriers that may hinder trade include import quotas, taxes, and non-tariff barriers, such as regulatory legislation.

There is a broad consensus among economists that protectionism has a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare, while free trade and the reduction of trade barriers has a positive effect on economic growth.[5][6][7][8][9][10] However, liberalization of trade can cause significant and unequally distributed losses, and the economic dislocation of workers in import-competing sectors.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade

A reprint of an article from 2016, Has anything changed?

The Power of “Nyet”




First published on July 17, 2016

The way things are supposed to work on this planet is like this: in the United States, the power structures (public and private) decide what they want the rest of the world to do. They communicate their wishes through official and unofficial channels, expecting automatic cooperation. If cooperation is not immediately forthcoming, they apply political, financial and economic pressure. If that still doesn’t produce the intended effect, they attempt regime change through a color revolution or a military coup, or organize and finance an insurgency leading to terrorist attacks and civil war in the recalcitrant nation. If that still doesn’t work, they bomb the country back to the stone age. This is the way it worked in the 1990s and the 2000s, but as of late a new dynamic has emerged.

In the beginning it was centered on Russia, but the phenomenon has since spread around the world and is about to engulf the United States itself. It works like this: the United States decides what it wants Russia to do and communicates its wishes, expecting automatic cooperation. Russia says “Nyet.” The United States then runs through all of the above steps up to but not including the bombing campaign, from which it is deterred by Russia’s nuclear deterrent. The answer remains “Nyet.” One could perhaps imagine that some smart person within the US power structure would pipe up and say: “Based on the evidence before us, dictating our terms to Russia doesn’t work; let’s try negotiating with Russia in good faith as equals.” And then everybody else would slap their heads and say, "Wow! That's brilliant! Why didn't we think of that?" But instead that person would be fired that very same day because, you see, American global hegemony is nonnegotiable. And so what happens instead is that the Americans act baffled, regroup and try again, making for quite an amusing spectacle.

The whole Edward Snowden imbroglio was particularly fun to watch. The US demanded his extradition. The Russians said: “Nyet, our constitution forbids it.” And then, hilariously, some voices in the West demanded in response that Russia change its constitution! The response, requiring no translation, was “Xa-xa-xa-xa-xa!” Less funny is the impasse over Syria: the Americans have been continuously demanding that Russia go along with their plan to overthrow Bashar Assad. The unchanging Russian response has been: “Nyet, the Syrians get to decide on their leadership, not Russia, and not the US.” Each time they hear it, the Americans scratch their heads and… try again. John Kerry was just recently in Moscow, holding a marathon “negotiating session” with Putin and Lavrov. Above is a photo of Kerry talking to Putin and Lavrov in Moscow a week or so ago and their facial expressions are hard to misread. There’s Kerry, with his back to the camera, babbling away as per usual. Lavrov’s face says: “I can’t believe I have to sit here and listen to this nonsense again.” Putin’s face says: “Oh the poor idiot, he can’t bring himself to understand that we’re just going to say ‘nyet’ again.” Kerry flew home with yet another “nyet.”

What’s worse, other countries are now getting into the act. The Americans told the Brits exactly how to vote, and yet the Brits said “nyet” and voted for Brexit. The Americans told the Europeans to accept the horrendous corporate power grab that is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the French said “nyet, it shall not pass.” The US organized yet another military coup in Turkey to replace Erdoǧan with somebody who won’t try to play nice with Russia, and the Turks said “nyet” to that too. And now, horror of horrors, there is Donald Trump saying “nyet” to all sorts of things—NATO, offshoring American jobs, letting in a flood of migrants, globalization, weapons for Ukrainian Nazis, free trade…

The corrosive psychological effect of “nyet” on the American hegemonic psyche cannot be underestimated. If you are supposed to think and act like a hegemon, but only the thinking part still works, then the result is cognitive dissonance. If your job is to bully nations around, and the nations can no longer be bullied, then your job becomes a joke, and you turn into a mental patient. The resulting madness has recently produced quite an interesting symptom: some number of US State Department staffers signed a letter, which was promptly leaked, calling for a bombing campaign against Syria in order to overthrow Bashar Assad. These are diplomats. Diplomacy is the art of avoiding war by talking. Diplomats who call for war are not being exactly… diplomatic. You could say that they are incompetent diplomats, but that wouldn’t go far enough (most of the competent diplomats left the service during the second Bush administration, many of them in disgust over having to lie about the rationale for the Iraq war). The truth is, they are sick, deranged non-diplomatic warmongers. Such is the power of this one simple Russian word that they have quite literally lost their minds.

But it would be unfair to single out the State Department. It is as if the entire American body politic has been infected by a putrid miasma. It permeates all things and makes life miserable. In spite of the mounting problems, most other things in the US are still somewhat manageable, but this one thing—the draining away of the ability to bully the whole world—ruins everything. It’s mid-summer, the nation is at the beach. The beach blanket is moth-eaten and threadbare, the beach umbrella has holes in it, the soft drinks in the cooler are laced with nasty chemicals and the summer reading is boring… and then there is a dead whale decomposing nearby, whose name is “Nyet.” It just ruins the whole ambiance!

The media chattering heads and the establishment politicos are at this point painfully aware of this problem, and their predictable reaction is to blame it on what they perceive as its ultimate source: Russia, conveniently personified by Putin. “If you aren’t voting for Clinton, you are voting for Putin” is one recently minted political trope. Another is that Trump is Putin’s agent. Any public figure that declines to take a pro-establishment stance is automatically labeled “Putin’s useful idiot.” Taken at face value, such claims are preposterous. But there is a deeper explanation for them: what ties them all together is the power of “nyet.” A vote for Sanders is a “nyet” vote: the Democratic establishment produced a candidate and told people to vote for her, and most of the young people said “nyet.” Same thing with Trump: the Republican establishment trotted out its Seven Dwarfs and told people to vote for any one of them, and yet most of the disenfranchised working-class white people said “nyet” and voted for Snow White the outsider.

It is a hopeful sign that people throughout the Washington-dominated world are discovering the power of “nyet.” The establishment may still look spiffy on the outside, but under the shiny new paint there hides a rotten hull, with water coming in though every open seam. A sufficiently resounding “nyet” will probably be enough to cause it to founder, suddenly making room for some very necessary changes. When that happens, please remember to thank Russia… or, if you insist, Putin.

https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2019/...er-of-nyet.htm

US Duplicity over Golan Demolishes Posturing on Crimea




"In a controversial snub to international law, the United States signaled last week that it is moving to officially recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israeli territory. If the US does so, then it forfeits any moral authority to sanction Russia over allegations of “annexing Crimea”.

In its annual US State Department report, the section dealing with the Golan Heights reportedly refers to the contested area as “Israeli-controlled”, not “Israeli-occupied”. The change in wording deviates from United Nations resolutions and international norm which use the term “Israeli-occupied” to designate the land Israel annexed from Syria following the 1967 Six Day War.

Israel has occupied the western part of the Golan since 1967 as a spoil from that war. In 1981, Tel Aviv formally annexed the Syrian territory. However, the UN Security Council in 1981, including the US, unanimously condemned the annexation as illegal. The resolution mandates Israel to return the land to Syria which has historical claim to the entire Golan. The area of 1,800 square kilometers is a strategic elevation overlooking the northern Jordan Valley.

If Washington confirms its recent indications of recognizing the Golan as officially part of Israel, the development would mark an egregious flouting of international law.
But what’s more, such a move totally prohibits Washington from posturing with presumed principle over the issue of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which since 2014 voluntarily became part of Russia.

Just last month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeated accusations against Russia of “annexing” Crimea. Pompeo insisted that US sanctions against Moscow would be maintained until Russia “returns Crimea to Ukraine”.

“The world has not forgotten the cynical lies Russia employed to justify its aggression and mask its attempted annexation of Ukrainian territory,” he said. “The United States will maintain respective sanctions against Russia until the Russian government returns control of Crimea to Ukraine.”

Last year, Pompeo’s State Department issued a ‘Crimea Declaration’ in which it was stated that, “Russia undermines a bedrock of international principle shared by democratic states: that no country can change the borders of another by force.” Claims by Washington and the European Union of “illegal annexation” of Crimea by Russia are the central basis for five years of economic sanctions imposed on Moscow. Those sanctions have contributed to ever-worsening tensions with Russia and the build-up of NATO forces along Russia’s borders.

Those claims are, however, highly contestable. The people of Crimea voted in a legally constituted referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and to join the Russian Federation. That referendum followed an illegal coup in Kiev in February 2014 backed by the US and Europe against a legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Historically, Crimea has centuries of shared cultural heritage with Russia. Its erstwhile position within the state of Ukraine was arguably an anomaly of the Cold War and subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union.

In any case, there is scant comparison between the Golan Heights and Crimea, save, that is, for the latest hypocrisy in Washington. While Crimea and its people are arguably historically part of Russia, the Golan Heights are indisputably a sovereign part of Syria which was forcibly annexed by Israeli military occupation.

The illegality of Israel’s occupation of Golan is a matter of record under international law as stipulated in UNSC Resolution 497. There is no such international mandate concerning Crimea. Claims of Russia’s “annexation” are simply a matter of dubious political assertion made by Washington and its European allies.

The latest move by Washington towards recognizing Golan as part of Israel – in defiance of international law – comes on the back of several other recent developments. US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham made a tour of Israeli-occupied Golan last week in the company of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pointedly transported by an IDF military helicopter. Graham said following his tour that he would recommend the Trump administration to officially recognize the area as under Israeli sovereignty.

Currently, there is legislation going through both the US Senate and House of Representatives which is aimed at declaring the entire Golan as Israeli territory. The stark shift in pro-Israeli bias in Washington under the Trump administration is consistent with the White House declaring at the end of 2017 that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Again, that move by President Trump overturned international consensus and UN resolutions which have stipulated Jerusalem to be a shared capital between Israel and a future Palestinian state, to be worked out by (defunct) peace negotiations.

Why Washington has taken up the Golan issue as a prize for Israel at this time is not precisely clear. It could be seen as the Trump administration giving a political boost to Netanyahu for next month’s elections.

There has been previous speculation that Trump is doing the bidding for a US-based oil company, Genie Oil, which is linked to his administration through his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s family investments. The New Jersey company has a subsidiary in Israel, is tied to the Netanyahu government, and has long been aiming to drill the Golan for its abundant oil resources.

The Golan move could also be retribution meted out to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over his country’s historic defeat of the US-backed covert war for regime change. The nearly eight-year war was also covertly backed by Israel which sponsored jihadist militia operating out of the Golan against the Syrian army. Having vanquished the US regime-change plot, thanks to crucial military support from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the payback could be Washington stepping up Israeli claims to annex the Golan.

But whatever the background explanation is, the initiative by Washington to legalize the annexation of Golan by Israel is a brazen violation of international law. In doing so, the US is officially sponsoring war crimes and theft of Syria’s sovereign territory. Or as the Crimea Declaration would put it: “changing the borders of another country by force” – supposedly a “bedrock principle” that Washington continually sermonizes about to Russia.

Crimea and Golan are different issues of territorial dispute, as noted already. Nevertheless, the duplicity of Washington over Golan makes its posturing on Crimea null and void. If the Europeans meekly go along with the US move on Golan, then they too should shut their mouths and their moralizing sanctions over Crimea."

https://www.strategic-culture.org/ne...on-crimea.html

Originally Posted by OhOh

It is a hopeful sign that people throughout the Washington-dominated world are discovering the power of “nyet.” The establishment may still look spiffy on the outside, but under the shiny new paint there hides a rotten hull, with water coming in though every open seam.

I really can't disagree with any of the following...

Empire of Absurdity: Recycled Neocons, Recycled Enemies
by Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.) Posted on March 19, 2019
https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_S...ycled-enemies/

There are times when I wish that the United States would just drop the charade and declare itself a global empire. As a veteran of two imperial wars, a witness to the dark underside of America’s empire-denial, I’ve grown tired of the equivocation and denials from senior policymakers. The U.S. can’t be an empire, we’re told, because – unlike the Brits and Romans – America doesn’t annex territories outright, and our school children don’t color its colonies in red-white-and-blue on cute educational maps.

But this distinction, at root, is rather superficial. Conquest, colonization, and annexation are so 19th century – Washington has moved beyond the overt and engages in the (not-so) subtle modern form of imperialism. America’s empire over the last two decades – under Democrats and Republicans – has used a range of tools: economic, military, political, to topple regimes, instigate coups, and starve "enemy" civilians. Heck, it didn’t even start with 9/11 – bullying foreigners and overturning uncooperative regimes is as American as apple pie.

Still, observing post-9/11, post-Iraq/Afghanistan defeat, Washington play imperialism these days is tragicomically absurd. The emperor has no clothes, folks. Sure, America (for a few more fleeting years) boasts the world’s dominant economy, sure its dotted the globe with a few hundred military bases, and sure it’s military still outspends the next seven competitors combined. Nonetheless, what’s remarkable, what constitutes the real story of 2019, is this: the US empire can’t seem to accomplish anything anymore, can’t seem to bend anybody to its will. It’s almost sad to watch. America, the big-hulking has-been on the block, still struts its stuff, but most of the world simply ignores it.

Make no mistake, Washington isn’t done trying; it’s happy to keep throwing good money (and blood) at bad: to the tune of a cool $6 trillion, 7,000 troop deaths, and 500,000 foreign deaths – including maybe 240,000 civilians. But what’s it all been for? The world is no safer, global terror attacks have only increased, and Uncle Sam just can’t seem to achieve any of its preferred policy goals.

Think on it for a second: Russia and Iran "won" in Syria; the Taliban and Pakistan are about ready to "win" in Afghanistan; Iran is more influential than ever in Iraq; the Houthis won’t quit in Yemen; Moscow is keeping Crimea; Libya remains unstable; North Korea ain’t giving up its nukes; and China’s power continues to grow in its version of the Caribbean – the South China Sea. No amount of American cash, no volume of our soldiers’ blood, no escalation in drone strikes or the conventional bombing of brown folks, has favorably changed the calculus in any of these regional conflicts.

What does this tell us? Quite a lot, I’d argue – but not what the neoliberal/neoconservative alliance of pundits and policymakers are selling. See for these unrepentant militarists the problem is always the same: Washington didn’t use enough force, didn’t spend enough blood and treasure. So is the solution: more defense spending, more CIA operations, more saber-rattling, and more global military interventions.

No, the inconvenient truth is as simple as it is disturbing to red-blooded patriots. To wit, the United States – or any wannabe hegemon – simply doesn’t possess the capability to shape the world in its own image. See those pesky locals – Arabs, Asians, Muslims, Slavs – don’t know what’s good for them, don’t understand that (obviously) there is a secret American zipped inside each of their very bodies, ready to burst out if given a little push!

It turns out that low-tech, cheap insurgent tactics, when combined with impassioned nationalism, can bog down the "world’s best military" indefinitely. It seems, too, that other regional heavyweights – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – stand ready to call America’s nuclear bluff. That they know the US all-volunteer military and consumerist economy can’t ultimately absorb the potential losses a conventional war would demand. Even scarier for the military-industrial-congressional-media establishment is the logical extension of all this accumulated failure: the questionable efficacy of military force in the 21st century.

Rather than recognize the limits of American military, economic, and political power, Bush II, Obama, and now Trump, have simply dusted off the old playbook. It’s reached the level of absurdity under the unhinged regime of Mr. Trump. Proverbially blasting Springsteen’s "Glory Days," as its foreign policy soundtrack, the Donald and company have doubled down. Heck, if Washington can’t get its way in Africa, Europe, Asia, or the Mideast, well why not clamp down in our own hemisphere, our traditional sphere of influence – South and Central America.

Enter the lunacy of the current Venezuela controversy. Trump’s team saw a golden opportunity in this socialist, backwater petrostate. Surely here, in nearby Monroe Doctrine country, Uncle Sam could get his way, topple the Maduro regime, and coronate the insurgent (though questionably legitimate) Juan Guaido. It’s early 20th century Yankee imperialism reborn. Everything seemed perfect. Trump could recall the specter of America’s tried and true enemy – "evil" socialism – cynically (and absurdly) equating Venezuelan populism with some absurd Cold-War-era existential threat to the nation. The idea that Venezuela presents a challenge on the scale of Soviet Russia is actually farcical. What’s more, and this is my favorite bit of irrationality, we were all recently treated to a game of "I know you are but what am I?" from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who (with a straight face) claimed Cuba, tiny island Cuba, was the real "imperialist" in Venezuela.

Next, in a move reminiscent of some sort of macabre 1980’s theme party, Trump resuscitated Elliot Abrams – you know, the convicted felon of Iran-Contra infamy, to serve as Washington’s special envoy to embattled Venezuela. Who better to act as "fair arbiter" in that country than a war-criminal with the blood of a few hundred thousand Central Americans (remember the Contras?!?) on his hands back in the the good old (Reagan) days.

Despite all this: America’s military threats, bellicose speechifying, brutal sanctions, and Cold War-style conflict-framing, the incumbent Maduro seems firmly in control. This isn’t to say that Venezuelans don’t have genuine grievances with the Maduro government (they do), but for now at least, it appears the military is staying loyal to the president, Russia/China are filling in the humanitarian aid gaps, and Uncle Sam is about to chalk up another loss on the world scene. Ultimately, whatever the outcome, the crisis will only end with a Venezuelan solution.

America’s impotence would almost be sad to watch, if, and only if, it wasn’t all so tragic for the Venezuelan people.

So Trump and his recycled neocons will continue to rant and rave and threaten Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and so on and so forth. America will still flex its aging, sagging muscles – a reflexive habit at this point.

Only now it’ll seem sad. Because no one is paying attention anymore.

The opposite of love isn’t hate – it’s indifference.

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Is a rainbow forming in the stormy sky?

Ukraine’s presidential hopeful calls for talks with Russia on lifting sanctions
World
March 22, 18:28 UTC+3

On March 22, Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev met with Ukrainian presidential candidate Yuri Boyko and chairman of the Political Council of the Opposition Platform For Life party Viktor Medvedchuk






Ukrainian presidential candidate Yuri Boyko

© Yekaterina Shtukina/Russian Government Press Offcie/TASS

MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/. Ukraine and Russia need to work their way of lifting mutual sanctions to ensure normal bilateral trade, Ukrainian presidential candidate Yuri Boyko told reporters after his meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Friday.

"We are satisfied by the start of the talks, because we need to go all the way of lifting mutual restrictions in trade and allowing our goods into Russia’s market. That’s because this concerns our jobs and the work of our enterprises, and this is very important for our country’s economy," Boyko said.

On Friday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev met in his Gorki residence near Moscow with Boyko and chairman of the Political Council of the Opposition Platform - For Life party Viktor Medvedchuk. The meeting was also attended by Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller.

TASS: World - Ukraine?s presidential hopeful calls for talks with Russia on lifting sanctions

Originally Posted by OhOh

Is a rainbow forming in the stormy sky?

Do you mean "Is Ukraine going to elect a Putin brown noser?".

No.

^Why not to re-elect the current govt?
After all, and after 5 years, and after so many injections, the country has been flourishing, hasn't it?

That's why so many millions has left for good and/or working abroad on low-class jobs to be able to support their families...

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Do you mean "Is Ukraine going to elect a Putin brown noser?".

No.

The fact that somebody is publicising the option, in Ukraine, says nothing?

Originally Posted by OhOh

The fact that somebody is publicising the option, in Ukraine, says nothing?

Yeah, it says Ukraine is a democracy and Russia isn't.

Just business: British & US investors gobble up Russian government bonds



"Most Russian state-issued bonds were purchased by investors from Britain, the US and the European Union, according to Andrey Solovyev, global head of debt and capital markets at VTB Capital which ran the placement.

Russia’s Finance Ministry raised €750 million in a top-up issue of an existing euro-denominated Eurobond and $3 billion in a new dollar-denominated Eurobond.
Dollar-denominated obligations are set to be paid off in 2035 with a yield of 5.1 percent, while a yield for euro-denominated papers were set at 2.375 percent with final maturity in 7 years.

“British investors purchased 40 percent of the euro-denominated bonds, while European financiers bought 18 percent. Businessmen from the US accounted for 17 percent of the issuance,” Solovyev said, adding that 18 percent were purchased by Russians.

The economist noted that the share of Swiss investors totaled five percent, while two percent of the issuance were bought by financiers from Asia and other countries.
Britain also became the major buyer of dollar-denominated bonds, accounting for 55 percent of the issuance.

“American investors purchased 21 percent with 11 percent were bought by Russian financiers, while the share of Europe amounted to eight percent,” he said, stressing that four percent of the issuance were bought by Asian businessmen and one percent by Switzerland.

According to Solovyev, the latest bond placement was the biggest in nearly five years.

In November Russia raised a billion euros ($1.14 billion) via the first sale of euro-denominated Eurobonds in five years, paying a yield of 3.0 percent.
The latest issuance came months after US-based rating agency Moody’s upgraded Russia’s sovereign rating.

Russia opted to tap the Eurobond market amid a “burgeoning appetite for riskier assets which eclipses the continued threat of US sanctions,” according analysts at Alfa Bank, as quoted by Reuters."

https://www.rt.com/business/454485-r...onds-us-uk-eu/

You make it sound like that's something unusual. Russia is sitting on a shitload of oil, they can issue tens of billions of bonds without any problem and people will buy them.

Fuck, they could back them with all the Venezuelan oil they own.

Grandmaster Putin’s Western trap or why Russia sells energy for physical gold?

So, after realizing their failure in Ukraine, the West, led by the United States, set a goal to destroy the Russian economy by lowering the price of oil and gas, respectively, as the main budget-forming sources of Russia's export earnings and the main sources of replenishing Russian gold reserves. It should be noted here that the main failure of the West in Ukraine is not at all military or political. And in the actual refusal of Putin to finance this western project of Ukraine, at the expense of the budget of the Russian Federation. What makes this project of the West a priori non-viable, in the near and inevitable future.

Last time, under Reagan, similar actions by the West to lower oil prices led to the success and collapse of the USSR. But the story does not repeat. This time, for the West, everything turns out differently. What Putin answered to the West seems to be both chess and judo at the same time. Where the forces expended by the enemy to attack, is used against him, but with minimal expenditure of his own forces and means of the defender. Putin’s real policy is not public. Therefore, the real policy of Putin, to a greater extent, is always directed not so much at the effect as at efficiency.

Very few people understand what Putin is doing at the moment. And almost no one understands what he will do in the future.

However strange it may seem, right now, Putin is selling Russian oil and gas, only for physical gold.

Putin does not shout about it to the whole world in the style of intrusive advertising. And of course, he still accepts US dollars as an intermediate means of payment. But he immediately exchanges all those USD from the sale of oil and gas for physical gold!

To understand this, it is enough to look at the dynamics of the growth of gold in the structure of the gold reserves of Russia and compare these data with the currency earnings of the Russian Federation from the sale of oil and gas over the same period.

Moreover, in the third quarter, Russia's purchases of physical gold were at unprecedentedly high, record levels. In the third quarter of 2018, Russia bought an incredible amount of gold. This is more than purchased according to official data, Central Banks of all countries of the world, taken together!

Not so long ago, British scientists successfully came to the same conclusion, which, a few years ago, was published in the Conclusion of the US Geological Survey. Namely: Europe will not be able to survive without energy supplies from Russia. What is translated from English to any other language in the world means: “The world cannot survive if we deduct supplies of oil and gas from Russia from the global balance of energy supplies”

Thus, the entire Western world, built on the hegemony of the petrodollar, was in a catastrophic situation. In which, the West cannot survive without oil and gas supplies from Russia, and Russia is now ready to sell its oil and gas to the West, only in exchange for physical gold! The piquancy of the current situation in Putin’s party is that the mechanism for selling Russian energy to the West only for gold is now working, regardless of whether the West agrees to pay for Russian oil and gas, with its artificially cheap gold, or not.

Because Russia, having at its disposal regular receipts of dollars, from the sale of oil and gas, in any case will be able to buy gold for them. At current gold prices, suppressed by hook or by crook, by the West itself.

That is, at those prices of gold that were artificially and carefully lowered by the Fed and ESF by several times, against the artificially inflated with the help of market manipulations, the purchasing power of the US dollar. Interesting fact: The suppression of gold prices by a special section of the US Government - ESF (Exchange Stabilization Fund), in order to stabilize the US dollar, was elevated to the United States in the rank of the Law.

In the financial world, the postulate that gold is an antidollar is accepted as an axiom.

- In 1971, US President Richard Nixon, closed the "golden window", stopping the free exchange of dollars for gold, guaranteed by the US earlier, in 1944, in Bretton Wood.

- In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin opened this “golden window”, not paying attention to what they think and say about this in Washington.

Right now, the West is spending a lot of its forces and funds to suppress the prices of gold and oil. So that, on the one hand, distort the existing economic reality, in favor of the US dollar. On the other hand, in order to destroy the economy of Russia, which refuses to play the role of a submissive vassal of the West.

Right now, assets such as gold and oil look proportionally weakened and overvalued against the US dollar. As a result of colossal economic efforts on the part of the West.

And right now, Putin is selling Russian energy resources, in exchange for these artificially strengthened by the efforts of the West, US dollars. For which, he immediately buys gold - artificially humiliated against the US dollar, through the efforts of the West itself!

Another interesting moment in Putin’s party is Russian uranium. Due to the supply of which, every sixth light bulb is currently operating in the USA. And which Russia is selling the US for dollars too.

Thus, in exchange for Russian oil, gas and uranium, the West pays Russia with US dollars, the purchasing power of which is artificially inflated against oil and gold, through the efforts of the West itself. But Putin uses these US dollars only to withdraw his physical gold in exchange for them from the West, at the artificially lowered by the West itself gold prices expressed in US dollars.

This truly brilliant economic combination of Putin puts the West, led by the United States, in the position of a snake, aggressively and devoutly devouring its own tail.

The idea of ​​this economic gold trap for the West, most likely, originally did not belong to Putin himself. Most likely, this was the idea of ​​Putin’s Economic Advisor, Academician Glazyev. Otherwise, why, it would seem, the state official Glazyev, who was not involved in the business, along with many Russian businessmen, was personally included by Washington in the sanctions lists of the West? The idea of ​​the economist Academician Glazyev, Putin brilliantly realized, having previously obtained full support from his colleague from China, Xi Jinping.

Of particular interest in this context is the November statement by the First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, Xenia Yudaeva. Which emphasized that the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, can use gold from the reserves, for payment of import, - if it is necessary. Obviously, in the conditions of sanctions from the Western world, this statement is addressed to the BRICS countries and, above all, to China. For China, Russia's readiness to pay for goods with western gold is very much the way it is. And that's why: as stated in one of the previous materials,

China has recently announced that it is ceasing to increase its gold reserves, denominated in US dollars. If we take into account the ever-growing trade balance deficit between the US and China (the current difference is five times in favor of China), this statement translated from a financial language reads as follows: "China stops selling its goods for dollars." The world's media, this is the grandest event in the latest monetary history, chose not to notice. And the question is not at all that China literally refuses to sell their goods for US dollars. China, of course, will still accept US dollars as an intermediate means of payment for its goods. But by accepting dollars, China will immediately get rid of them and replace the dollars in the structure of its gold reserves with something else. Otherwise, it makes no sense, the statement made by the monetary authorities of the PRC: “We stop building up our gold reserves, denominated in US dollars. " That is, China will no longer buy for the proceeds from trade with any countries dollars, treasures - US government bonds, as they did it all the time before.

Thus, China will replace all the dollars that it will receive for its goods not only from the United States, but also in general from any countries of the world, for something else - in order “not to increase its gold reserves denominated in US dollars”. And here, the most interesting question arises: what exactly will China replace all of its dollars from trade? What currency or asset? Analysis of the current monetary policy of the PRC shows that, most likely, the dollars coming from trade, or a significant part of them, China will quietly replace and de facto replace with Gold.

In this aspect, the solitaire of Russian-Chinese relations is extremely successful for both Moscow and Beijing. Russia buys goods from China directly for gold, at its current prices. And China, buys for gold at its current prices, Russian energy. At this Russian-Chinese celebration of life, there is a place for everything: Chinese goods, Russian energy resources, and gold as a means of mutual settlements. There is no place for this celebration of life, only one who wishes - the US dollar. And this is not surprising. Because the US dollar is neither a Chinese product, nor a Russian energy resource. It is only an interim financial instrument of mutual settlements - an unnecessary intermediary. And it is accepted to exclude unnecessary intermediaries from the scheme of interaction of two independent business partners.

It should be noted separately that the world market for physical gold is negligible in relation to the world market for physical supply of oil. And even more so, the world market for physical gold is microscopic, relative to the totality of the world markets for the physical supply of oil, gas, uranium and goods.

The emphasis on the phrase “physical gold” is made because in exchange for its physical, rather than paper, energy resources, Russia now withdraws gold from the West, only in the form of its physical, not paper, supply. The same thing makes China, withdrawing from the West at current artificially low prices at times, it is real physical gold - as a means of paying for physical supplies to the West, its real goods.

Hope of the West that Russia and China will accept as payment for their energy resources and goods of various kinds of Shitcoin or so-called "Paper gold", too, did not materialize. Russia and China, as a final means of payment, are only interested in gold and only as a physical metal.

For reference: Turnover in the paper gold market, only in the form of gold futures, is estimated at about $ 360 billion per month. But for only $ 280 million a month, a physical supply of gold is made. What constitutes at the auction of paper gold versus physical gold, the ratio is 1000 to 1.

By applying the mechanism of actively withdrawing from the market one financial asset artificially lowered by the West (gold), in exchange for another financial asset artificially inflated by the West (US dollars), Putin thereby included a countdown for the global hegemony of the petrodollar. Thus, Putin confounded the West in the absence of any positive economic outlook. The West can spend as much as it wants on the artificial increase in the purchasing power of the dollar, the decline in oil prices and the artificial decrease in the purchasing power of gold. The problem of the West is only that the reserves of physical gold at the disposal of the West are not unlimited. Therefore, the more the West devalues ​​oil and gold against the US dollar, the more rapidly it loses the declining Gold, from its far from infinite reserves. In this economic combination, brilliantly played by Putin, physical gold from the reserves of the West is rapidly flowing to Russia, China, Brazil, Kazakhstan and India - to the BRICS countries. With such a rate of decline in reserves of physical gold as it is now, the West simply does not have time to do anything against Putin’s Russia, until the collapse of the entire Western construction of the petrodollar world. In chess, the situation in which Putin put the West, led by the United States, is called "Time Tote".

The Western world has never faced such economic events and phenomena that are happening right now. The USSR, in the face of falling oil prices, was rapidly selling gold. Russia, in the face of falling oil prices, is rapidly buying gold. Thus, Russia creates a real threat to the existence of the American model of petrodollar world domination.

The main principle of the petro-dollar world model, which allows Western countries led by the United States to live at the expense of labor and resources of other countries and peoples, is based on the role of the national currency of the United States (world currency system). The role of the US dollar in MIF is that it is the ultimate means of payment. This means that the national currency of the United States in the structure of the AIM, is the final asset of accumulation, which does not make sense to change it to any other asset. What the BRICS countries are now doing, led by Russia and China, is actually changing the role and status of the US dollar in the global monetary system. From the final means of payment and the asset of accumulation, the national currency of the United States, by joint actions of Moscow and Beijing, is transformed only into a kind of intermediate means of payment. Intended only to in order to exchange this intermediate means of payment, for another and truly final financial asset is gold. Thereby, the US dollar actually loses its role as an ultimate means of payment and an accumulation asset, yielding both of these roles to another generally accepted, denationalized and depoliticized monetary asset — gold.

Traditionally, the West used two ways to eliminate the threats to the hegemony of the petrodollar model of the world and the exorbitant privileges that flow from it to the West.

One of these methods is color revolutions. The second method, which is usually used by the West, if the first method does not work, is military aggression and bombardment.

But in the case of Russia, both of these methods turn out to be either impossible or unacceptable for the West.

Because, firstly, the population of Russia, unlike the population of many other countries, stubbornly does not want to exchange their freedom and the future of their children for Western sausage, which can be obtained right now. This is becoming obvious, according to Putin’s record high ratings, regularly published by leading Western rating agencies. The personal friendship of Washington's Navalny's protege, with Senator McCain, played a very negative role for him and Washington. Having learned about this fact from the media, 98% of the population of Russia now perceive Navalny, exclusively as a vassal of Washington and a traitor to Russia's national interests. Therefore, about any color revolution in Russia, Western professionals, thinking the realities, while not even dream of.

As for the second, traditional for the West method - direct military aggression, then Russia is certainly not Yugoslavia, not Iraq and not Libya. With any non-nuclear military operation against Russia, on the territory of Russia itself, the West, led by the United States, is doomed to a crushing defeat. And the generals at the Pentagon, who exercise the real leadership of the NATO forces, understand this well. Similarly, the nuclear war against Russia is unpromising, including the concept of the so-called. "Preventive disarming nuclear strike". NATO simply does not have the technical ability to deliver such a blow, which could completely disarm Russia's nuclear potential, in all its many manifestations. A retaliatory, massive nuclear retaliation against the enemy or the pool of opponents will be inevitable in this case. And its total capacity will be enough to so that the survivors envy the dead. That is, the exchange of nuclear strikes with a country like Russia is not, in principle, a solution to the emerging problem of the collapse of the petro-dollar world. This is, at best, the final chord and the last point in the history of its existence. In the worst case, this is a nuclear winter and the cessation of the existence of all life on the planet, with the exception of bacteria mutated by radiation.

In the Western economic establishment, they see and well understand the essence of the occurring phenomena.

Leading Western economists are certainly aware of the depth of the tragedy and hopelessness of the situation in which the Western world found itself, having fallen into Putin’s economic golden trap. After all, since the time of the Bretton Woods Agreements, the golden rule is well known to all: " Whoever has the most gold sets the rules . " But about this in the West, everyone is silent. They are silent because no one knows how to find a way out of this situation.

And because if we explain to the western public all the details of the ongoing economic catastrophe, then this public will begin to ask the most terrible questions for the supporters of the petrodollar world.

That will sound like this:

- How long will the West be able to buy oil and gas from Russia, in exchange for physical gold?

“And what will happen to the US petrodollar after the West has run out of physical gold, to pay for Russian oil, gas and uranium, and also to pay for Chinese goods?”

In the West today no one can answer these seemingly simple questions.

https://cont.ws/@severro/1260219

Originally Posted by Klondyke

“And what will happen to the US petrodollar after the West has run out of physical gold, to pay for Russian oil, gas and uranium, and also to pay for Chinese goods?”

In the West today no one can answer these seemingly simple questions.

I think we can rely on history repeating itself.

^^Thanks for the article, where was the English version published.

^ Thanks for the video.

Originally Posted by OhOh

^^Thanks for the article, where was the English version published.

I have used a web translator.

U.S. halts F-35 equipment to Turkey, protests its plans to buy from Russia

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey, marking the first concrete U.S. step to block delivery of the jet to the NATO ally in light of Ankara’s planned purchase of a Russian missile defense system.

U.S. officials told their Turkish counterparts they will not receive further shipments of F-35 related equipment needed to prepare for the arrival of the stealthy jet, two sources familiar with the situation told Reuters on Monday.

“Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey’s F-35 operational capability have been suspended,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mike Andrews, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has refused to back down from Ankara’s planned purchase of a Russian S-400 missile defense system that the United States has said would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft.The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest of a series of diplomatic disputes between the United States and Turkey including Turkish demands that the United States extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria, and sanctions on Iran.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the next shipment of training equipment, and all subsequent shipments of F-35 related material, had been canceled. The aircraft is built by Lockheed Martin Corp.

A Pentagon official had told Reuters in March that the United States had a number of items it could withhold in order to send Turkey a signal that the United States was serious about Ankara dropping its ambition to own the S-400.

Turkish officials in Ankara were not immediately available for comment. Turkey has said it will take delivery of the S-400s in July.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1RD316